A hypothetical future meeting between Maddie and Deidara, featuring Hidan (⁠人⁠ ⁠•͈⁠ᴗ⁠•͈⁠)

[tozette]

"You're supposed to be dead!" Deidara yelled. He was getting closer by the second.

Hidan glanced over his shoulder at his approach, but he didn't actually turn to face Deidara.

Maddie made a valiant effort to shrink into Hidan's shadow, even though she was nearly the same height as him now.

"Can you please just stay between us?" she hissed.

"You aren't seriously scared of Deidara," Hidan said in half-offended bafflement, turning again as though another look at Deidara's baby-faced, short, featherweight person would reveal a more intimidating appearance if he only looked again and squinted harder. Evidently it didn't, because he just looked back at Maddie again. "You're not even scared of me!"

"He wants to kill me!"

"If he wanted to kill you this whole property would be on fire." Hidan rolled his eyes. "That's the only thing he's good for."

"He left me vomiting through a hole in my oesophagus!" she cried, high and aggrieved. And since her voice had never recovered, it cracked into a hoarse growl halfway through the sentence. "And he didn't pay me!"

"Ooh. Ouch," said Hidan, but he was smiling widely. He totally ignored that Deidara had tried to screw her out of scores of thousands of ryo and instead addressed the part that interested him: "That's a bad one. That bubbling where the open wound meets the acid. It's like it never ends."

That was exactly what it had been like, too. The bubbling had made thin watery bile go a lot further, and the acid washing over her cut throat had felt like it was going to keep going forever.

Maddie clenched her jaw. She had to figure out how to make Hidan see why she was upset — even though she knew it was kind of a lost cause, because Hidan really only cared about stuff he cared about, and was constitutionally incapable of the intellectual empathy that would permit him to understand that his closest people cared about other things.

Her eyes narrowed. She switched tactics. "But they just left me there! They didn't even watch. It didn't matter to him at all. Isn't that cruel?"

...And so now she sounded like a jilted one night stand who felt they'd had something special, which wasn't really how Maddie aspired to sound about getting her throat cut while she vomited and cried in the dirt. This did get through to Hidan a lot better than any of her preceding comments, though.

Unfortunately, the way in which it got through to him was not particularly agreeable to Maddie. Hidan still didn't turn to look at Deidara. His eyes were wide and intense and his lips shone wetly when he licked them.

"Do you want me to do it properly?" he crooned. "I promise I'll take good care of you. Hey, hey, you have more than one heart right now, don't you? We could..."

Blessedly, this train of conversation was cut short by Deidara actually arriving within conversational distance, a blur of fluttering gold and red and black, which forestalled any absolutely horrifying realisations Maddie might have been forced to face about how far she'd go for human contact right now.

Exactly as Hidan had predicted, Deidara didn't immediately try to hurt anyone. But he did look absolutely incandescent with fury.

"I knew there was something going on, hm! What the hell is it?" Deidara at last came to a stop, scowling fiercely at both of them. "Why's she so important? Is she another one? Like you? What? Your — sister or something?"

Hidan finally pulled a face and turned away from Maddie.

"Sister?" He looked at himself, and then looked at Maddie. "Seriously? You think she looks like me?"

Unlike Hidan, Deidara had at least two brain cells to rub together, and Maddie got to watch them working in real time as the weird emphasis on the word 'me' made him squint harder at her.

"Are you... related to Kakuzu?" he said finally. "Kakuzu has a family? What, a grand... niece?" He rubbed his chin. "I did think it was weird that Kakuzu knew a girl, hm!"

"No," Maddie said repressively, even as Hidan crowed, "A kid, even!"

Annoyed, she leaned in and tugged on his hair. "Hidan!"

"Ow! Madeline, that hurts, you know!" He twisted and pulled her hair back.

She put up with it stoically. It was just hair. "If he'd wanted him to know he'd have told him."

Deidara looked like, firstly, all his questions had been answered, and secondly, like he had many more, worse questions. It took him a second to compute.

"How can Kakuzu have a kid!" he bellowed, at a volume that made it hard to imagine why he'd come so close to them to talk. "There are things that are and aren't possible in this world!"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Maddie said defensively, even though she herself had had some pretty incredulous thoughts about Murakami Ami's taste in men.

Maddie felt sure she would never fall prey to any such longing: personally, she liked seeing other people vulnerable, and to feel perfectly in control. If someone like Kakuzu had shown the slightest sexual interest in Maddie, she'd have fled the fucking country.

Hidan made an interested little hum in his throat, watching Deidara's face just as closely as Maddie was.

Deidara stared at her, aghast. "It's Kakuzu! What kind of person would...?"

Silently, Maddie pointed at Hidan.

Deidara's big blue eyes followed her gesture. For a split second, his face froze. Then his eyes narrowed. He lifted his chin sharply, sending his long pale hair bouncing around his face. Offered this opportunity of a graceful retreat, Deidara saw it, assessed it, and then totally rejected it in favour of a doomed frontal assault: "Nobody would — do that — with Kakuzu!"

"Ha," said Hidan, a great big huff of laughter. "Sure they would. And maybe if you survive 'til your balls drop, you'll get it."

"Don't be disgusting," hissed Deidara, reddening. He blushed easier than Hidan, despite not being quite as pale. He probably had more shame. Wouldn't have been hard. "Besides, you can't tell me Kakuzu's a... a family type! Hm!" He spat the words 'family type,' as if they'd personally offended him.

"He's not," said Maddie flatly.

"Aw, lucky you have an affectionate uncle," Hidan said smoothly, hooking her in with the pole of his scythe, so she had to either submit to the crushing one-armed hug coming her way or get sliced in half. Knowing Hidan, he probably considered both options great fun. "Someone has to teach kids about the important stuff."

She submitted to the hug. At least Hidan was large and warm. She could feel his heart beating through his ribcage. It was slow and steady, unconcerned. Her hearts, on the other hand, beat off-cycle, fast, little rabbits thumping away in the soft cage of her lungs.

She breathed slowly out, watching Deidara with wary eyes.

"The important stuff. And that's... Hidan," he repeated slowly. Maddie could almost see him processing this. At length, he pulled a disgusted face. "Wow. I'm almost sorry I asked."