Drabble: Hidan vs The Pit (Despair not version)
My aspiration to write more this year was being neglected until recently, like most well intentioned things it started out in a moment of strength, but without consistent work... and then I pulled out a half-written piece and finished it. And then some more fic with Kakuzu and Hidan content showed up, and then I somehow stumbled on more fic as a challenge drabble with Hidan as the centerpiece, and eventually made my way to an anon-meme and dropped a few lines as I got pulled in with some of the prompts. And then today I saw that there was a challenge for 'despair' in a totally unrelated comm.
First, I thought about writing Kakuzu and how he might have initially felt despair when his village betrayed him and served him up some blame, but I already wrote about that situation, and as much as I want to explore that event, what I really wanted to write was Hidan. But my I just couldn't get my mind-canon Hidan to go there! He didn't do it, he just wasn't in that headspace. And I've never really been satisfied with Kishimoto's 'dying of starvation' position so I took those pieces and thought kind of outside the box (or the pit, hurhurhur) and came up with the following...
~~~
Hidan was dying. No, not like ‘that’, never like that. He would never die die, but he could forever be dying. A continual event, that kind of dying. A process. Forever brushing up against it, pushing down into it, making it warp inward from where he strained to punch through. The asymptotic approach to infinity, never quite crossing the line. Hidan died of a lot of things. Getting his head taken off. Putting a pike through his chest. Bleeding out in hot red torrents, gasping and grinning and finally laughing again. When the dying part was over and he went back to being Hidan; the next step in his march to death, an endless journey.
Currently, he was dying of starvation. It was worse than drowning- drowning was faster. Suffocating was too; that one had come and gone. After he had died from being blown apart. He’d snapped back from that one quickly enough, had the wits enough to watch that stupid fuck of a leaf ninja rain down a flood of rocks on top of him. The bad thing about starving to death was that it took such a long fucking time. Several months of systematic starvation would do it for most people, but hey, Hidan was not in a system of complete order. Each piece of him had to die in turn. The smallest to the biggest. A million million little deaths. It was exhausting. And infuriating.
Starving was worse in a lot of ways. The lessening, weakening, diminishing of his body. Someone else in his situation would perhaps have felt helplessness, or despair, loneliness. For Hidan it was all very boring. The inability to interact with the world was frustrating bordering on hysteria. The only good thing was that death was close and intimate. His God was bigger somehow, possibly because he had become smaller. He didn’t want to disappoint his God, never, that was the only thing that ever mattered, did matter, would matter. Endless atonements, he spent his time in prayer, words of praise, vows of revenge, susurrations of regret.
He was like a flickering switch now, a faulty connection. Fading in and out.
He vaguely wondered what it would be like to exist as an unbound soul- a living ghost unattached to a body, what that would be like. Uncontained in a body. Maybe it wouldn’t be so very different from life (if it could be named such) in the pit. So, Hidan was actively dying. He felt each and every miniscule, minute, infinitesimal piece of himself waste in this tomb. It might be temping to think of his state as being motionless, at first consideration you might think that being unable to voluntarily control your body would render you in a state of motionlessness, of passivity. And hell, Hidan didn’t even consist of a whole body right now, just scattered about like a gory jigsaw puzzle. There was constant falling, disappearing, disintegration of the parts of a whole. Dispersing. The entity named Hidan was making no repair or maintenance to its status and would be ravaged by time just the same as anyone else. Without the continuous renewal and maintaining of the body, some laws of nature would stay the same. And so he died.
When he got out of here it would be a long and tiring struggle to get back to what he had been before. Stronger. It would take time to reintegrate. For the pieces that once were a whole to find their way back and to begin the long process of ‘becoming’ Hidan again. Returning to himself. Thoughts of Kakuzu ran across his mind on occasion; but the feeling they brought with them felt a great deal like one of his many missing pieces. He didn’t know how to repair it, just trusted that it would happen. Knew that it was important enough to him that it would come back together in the end. He could feel it around him, the particles drawing inward to the center, like the inescapable gravity of a black hole, and on the other side he would rise again.
Time moved forward. So did Hidan.
A/N Postscript:
I envision Hidan kind of like a black hole- none of his parts will ever be able to escape! I think they are definitely capable of being changed, like he consumes food and air and transforms energy with his muscles etc. but I think he can’t be destroyed. As far as what I imagine would happen if his parts got all scrambled? I envision him as being ‘drawn’ back together from whatever insult is rendered. Like little magnets snapping back into place, the forces growing stronger the bigger the mass. The gravitating mass at the core…I guess would be the central piece. You decide if you want that to be the brain or the heart or wherever you think the ‘seat of the soul’ is. If there is even a specific physical location in which the soul resides. Anyhow, hope you enjoyed!
First, I thought about writing Kakuzu and how he might have initially felt despair when his village betrayed him and served him up some blame, but I already wrote about that situation, and as much as I want to explore that event, what I really wanted to write was Hidan. But my I just couldn't get my mind-canon Hidan to go there! He didn't do it, he just wasn't in that headspace. And I've never really been satisfied with Kishimoto's 'dying of starvation' position so I took those pieces and thought kind of outside the box (or the pit, hurhurhur) and came up with the following...
~~~
Hidan was dying. No, not like ‘that’, never like that. He would never die die, but he could forever be dying. A continual event, that kind of dying. A process. Forever brushing up against it, pushing down into it, making it warp inward from where he strained to punch through. The asymptotic approach to infinity, never quite crossing the line. Hidan died of a lot of things. Getting his head taken off. Putting a pike through his chest. Bleeding out in hot red torrents, gasping and grinning and finally laughing again. When the dying part was over and he went back to being Hidan; the next step in his march to death, an endless journey.
Currently, he was dying of starvation. It was worse than drowning- drowning was faster. Suffocating was too; that one had come and gone. After he had died from being blown apart. He’d snapped back from that one quickly enough, had the wits enough to watch that stupid fuck of a leaf ninja rain down a flood of rocks on top of him. The bad thing about starving to death was that it took such a long fucking time. Several months of systematic starvation would do it for most people, but hey, Hidan was not in a system of complete order. Each piece of him had to die in turn. The smallest to the biggest. A million million little deaths. It was exhausting. And infuriating.
Starving was worse in a lot of ways. The lessening, weakening, diminishing of his body. Someone else in his situation would perhaps have felt helplessness, or despair, loneliness. For Hidan it was all very boring. The inability to interact with the world was frustrating bordering on hysteria. The only good thing was that death was close and intimate. His God was bigger somehow, possibly because he had become smaller. He didn’t want to disappoint his God, never, that was the only thing that ever mattered, did matter, would matter. Endless atonements, he spent his time in prayer, words of praise, vows of revenge, susurrations of regret.
He was like a flickering switch now, a faulty connection. Fading in and out.
He vaguely wondered what it would be like to exist as an unbound soul- a living ghost unattached to a body, what that would be like. Uncontained in a body. Maybe it wouldn’t be so very different from life (if it could be named such) in the pit. So, Hidan was actively dying. He felt each and every miniscule, minute, infinitesimal piece of himself waste in this tomb. It might be temping to think of his state as being motionless, at first consideration you might think that being unable to voluntarily control your body would render you in a state of motionlessness, of passivity. And hell, Hidan didn’t even consist of a whole body right now, just scattered about like a gory jigsaw puzzle. There was constant falling, disappearing, disintegration of the parts of a whole. Dispersing. The entity named Hidan was making no repair or maintenance to its status and would be ravaged by time just the same as anyone else. Without the continuous renewal and maintaining of the body, some laws of nature would stay the same. And so he died.
When he got out of here it would be a long and tiring struggle to get back to what he had been before. Stronger. It would take time to reintegrate. For the pieces that once were a whole to find their way back and to begin the long process of ‘becoming’ Hidan again. Returning to himself. Thoughts of Kakuzu ran across his mind on occasion; but the feeling they brought with them felt a great deal like one of his many missing pieces. He didn’t know how to repair it, just trusted that it would happen. Knew that it was important enough to him that it would come back together in the end. He could feel it around him, the particles drawing inward to the center, like the inescapable gravity of a black hole, and on the other side he would rise again.
Time moved forward. So did Hidan.
A/N Postscript:
I envision Hidan kind of like a black hole- none of his parts will ever be able to escape! I think they are definitely capable of being changed, like he consumes food and air and transforms energy with his muscles etc. but I think he can’t be destroyed. As far as what I imagine would happen if his parts got all scrambled? I envision him as being ‘drawn’ back together from whatever insult is rendered. Like little magnets snapping back into place, the forces growing stronger the bigger the mass. The gravitating mass at the core…I guess would be the central piece. You decide if you want that to be the brain or the heart or wherever you think the ‘seat of the soul’ is. If there is even a specific physical location in which the soul resides. Anyhow, hope you enjoyed!