Naruto : Hidan/Sakura Haruno : Gamma
Next Time
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
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#01 - Ring
The day Hidan asked Sakura to marry him, he didn’t present a ring; instead, he tackled her to the overstuffed Akatsuki lobby couch, laughed in that deep, rumbling, happy manner, and politely informed her between kisses that Jashin had informed him she would make a fine wife.
#02 - Hero
It was Shikamaru and Ino’s five year anniversary when she noticed a strange presence beneath the ground of the Nara courtyard; when she dug it up, pretty little party dress and pearl-white slippers and all, she was more than a little surprised to learn she’d played hero to a severed arm.
#03 - Memory
The clearest, best, most precise memory that Hidan had of Sakura was of the first time they’d had sex; it sounded so shallow and ridiculous, but in all honesty, the way she arched and gasped and raked her nails down his back and moaned his name was a large part of the reason why he found himself panting and clutching at anything solid for purchase when he thought of her.
#04 - Box
Whenever she visited the Akastuki “lair”-and he said “lair” with disdain because it was more of a nursery with the way that Tobi decorated-Sakura would bring a small box of things to do, because she normally stayed for days at a time; when Hidan found this box that she’d forgotten once, he smiled at the “Me and Hidan” scrapbook lying inside.
#05 - Run
It wasn’t often that Hidan allowed Sakura to be put in harm’s way, but when she was, he never told her to run off; he refused to let her depart alone and leave her to her own defenses, so he would escape with her, no matter how much it hurt his pride later.
#06 - Hurricane
It had been revealed one night during a storm that Sakura was deathly afraid of any sort of natural disasters, having lived in a country that was more or less devoid of such things all her life; in learning this, Hidan had invited her into his bed for the night, reveled in the way she curled up against him and the warmth of her body, and silently prayed to Jashin that He’d grace them with a small hurricane every night thereafter.
#07 - Wings
The first time she kissed him was comparable to the moment that Jashin had graced him with immortality: lightness spread through his chest, an immediate calm fell over his mind, and he felt as if he had sprouted wings and was floating a few significant inches above the ground.
#08 - Cold
He never enjoyed the coldness of her designated “room” at the Akatsuki base when she was absent-it seemed far too unnatural and empty for his tastes, and he needed to force himself to accept this; Hidan’s ingenious solution was to have Sakura sleep in his bed every time she visited so that he could get used to having no one in the guest room, and even though he admitted that this was a little fucking counterproductive, he loved the feel of someone’s warm body beside him.
#09 - Red
The first dot of red that appeared on Sakura’s finger intrigued Hidan, and when he realized it was blood from a glass cut, his heart jumped in his chest; he didn’t think he’d ever seen her so surprised as when he leaned down, purposefully drew her finger into his mouth, and groaned her name on a shiver.
#10 - Drink
They went out drinking on many an occasion with one or more of the Akatsuki boys, usually incognito as a young couple-which Hidan enjoyed far too much-or as brother and sister-which Hidan didn’t really enjoy at all except for the occasional brotherly hug; Deidara was especially fun to drink with, because when he got drunk he got sentimental, and when he got sentimental he liked to play a little game called “How Fast Can I Get Hidan and Sakura to Fuck?”
#11 - Midnight
It was near midnight when Hidan made his grand reappearance to the Akatsuki, being held around the shoulders by a very grudging pink-haired medic-nin, and the only people who had really seemed to care were Tobi and Kisame, who hollered in triumph and helped him to the couch; Deidara and Zetsu had taken far more interest in Sakura than him, poking and prodding at her, wrapping a vine around her wrist, or tugging at her odd-colored hair, which she did not appreciate.
#12 - Temptation
At one time, he’d had no intention of marrying her at all, and sex without marriage was a sin in the eyes of Jashin; he couldn’t count the times he’d cursed her temptation and performed that thirty-minute long ritual, imagining she was touching him in ways that would make any holy man blush.
#13 - View
She didn’t really share his views on religion and all the like; in fact, she didn’t even have a religion, and even though he highly disapproved of this, he couldn’t find any real reason to honestly argue with her about it.
#14 - Music
The only one that knew how to play any musical instruments in the Akatsuki had been Sasori, and he’d passed on a bit of what he knew to Deidara, who played as often as he could; upon hearing that Sakura absolutely adored the wonderful notes that came from Deidara’s little guitar, Hidan immediately demanded that the blonde give him lessons as often as fucking possible.
#15 - Silk
He hadn’t realized that she was the only one not privy to his little rituals, so when she stumbled upon him one time, saw him sprawled out in that holy circle with a stake through his chest and screamed, he’d been surprised out of his meditation; she’d fallen onto him and tried to heal him for the first time, and he opened his eyes and commented that her chakra felt like silk with an amused grin.
#16 - Cover
When she’d had all of his limbs gathered in that burlap sack and began to drag him back to the Akatsuki base, ignoring his curses and keeping a straight face, she insisted on keeping a plastic cover over his head; it wasn’t enough that she had to drag his ass back to the enemy, she’d said, but she didn’t want to do it while he was sneezing all over her, either.
#17 - Promise
In the decaying heat of the after battle, kneeling where she lay broken and bruised and half-dead: “Promise me you won’t die, Sakura-promise me that you’ll live forever and you’ll marry me and you’ll convert and become immortal or I’ll revert to mortality and we’ll have tons of little…little pink-haired, purple-eyed babies with sadomasochistic tendencies; just promise me that you’ll live.”
#18 - Dream
It was inescapable that she should leave him one day for her life back in that place with the boy who’d dismembered him in the first place and the blonde girl who’d sat back and watched; it was absolutely inevitable that he would dream of her return, and that when he awoke early that morning, she’d be sobbing apologies in the Akatsuki lobby, Deidara’s consoling arm draped around her shoulders.
#19 - Candle
She never approved of his affinity for candles and gothic architecture, especially not when the flame of one caught the hem of his cloak and burned a path up to his hip; it’d taken him a good five minutes to notice that the pants underneath were on fire, as well.
#20 - Talent
During those first restless nights of mortality-right after he’d pleaded Jashin to take away his demigod status and the God had actually accepted while keeping him a Jashinist-Sakura had a talent of calming Hidan’s restless nerves; he was still so nervous and paranoid, because before he had wanted death and now he did not, but she managed to quell his anxiety by asking what his favorite boy’s name was.
#21 - Silence
The silence between them was never uncomfortable or awkward at all; actually, Hidan loved those little moments when they could simply sit in each other’s presence and go about their own business without ever acknowledging the other’s existence.
#22 - Journey
It was an epic journey in itself the first time that Hidan had tried to maneuver his way around the truth of the matter; finally, he had settled on blunt honesty: “Sakura, you see, since we’re going to get married, abstinence isn’t a law anymore, and-oh, to hell with this; I really, really want to fuck you blind right now.”
#23 - Fire
Fire was the only word to describe the feeling of her lips grazing over his navel, hands smoothing over his lower abdomen until he thought he was going to die on the spot; and then fire graduated to burning inferno when she closed her mouth over his length and mumbled some mindless thing around him.
#24 - Strength
Don’t get him wrong, Hidan was more or less immune to pain, but it took real fucking strength for what Sakura went through to give birth to the first child he’d ever had the privilege of fathering; she reminded him of this constantly through the eighteen hours of labor, Zetsu acting as a nursemaid as he smoothed her hair back and alternated between biting comments toward Hidan-compliments of his “dark” side, such as, “If you hurt her any more, you sadistic bastard, I am going to tear your limbs off and eat them,”-and encouragement toward Sakura, such as, “This is a simple task that women throughout the ages have completed; I am most certain that you will be able to complete it, as well,” courtesy of his “light” side.
#25 - Mask
Everyone knew that Tobi was a bit overprotective of his orange spiral mask-everyone but Sakura, apparently, because she tore it off of him one day in a playful gesture, and he turned on her and attempted to deliver a well-placed punch to the jaw; Hidan was crushing the youngest member’s fist in his palm so fast that it seemed to make the world spin on its axis.
#26 - Ice
He required her medical attention after his immortality was so graciously stripped of him often, and he learned to tell by the feel of her chakra how he was affecting her; when it was silken, she was worried; when it was warm, she was proud; when it was insufferably hot, she wanted him to bend her over the table and fuck her so hard she couldn’t see straight; when it was like ice collecting in his veins, he knew that she’d been on the verge of a nervous breakdown because of his actions, and he vowed to inflict her with this feeling as little as possible.
#27 - Fall
The first time their child-Taro-had taken a nasty fall, Hidan had been absolutely enraged at the prospect of Sakura coddling him; he needed to learn to handle pain, he’d said, and it had been the first real “married” fight he and Sakura had been in.
#28 - Forgotten
Konoha was more or less forgotten after the first five years, much to Hidan’s pleasure, and although they rarely ever kept secrets, he completely refused to tell her how many ANBU corpses were piling in the woods outside the Akatsuki lair; after all, the Akatsuki was more or less just a fancy name for a complex now, with only a few remaining members and virtually no threat left, and she would figure out that Konoha hadn’t forgotten her if she ever found out the truth.
#29 - Dance
The wedding had been completed two ways: traditional Jashinist style and in the style that Sakura preferred, and both had involved a dance of some sort; while Sakura’s version of the dance had been purely innocent, with her laughing and moving with practically everyone attending, Hidan’s had been quite private and intimate, never really moving from against the wall, hips flush against each other and rolling into her until her nails left little red marks on the skin of his shoulders.
#30 - Body
When he saw the shadowy outline of a foreign body forcing Sakura’s to the floor, he deliberately threw a punch at the man, licked the blood off of his knuckles, and drew blood from himself; he would have continued to stab himself in the chest after standing in that circumscribed blood triangle had Sakura not threw herself at him, transformation into some Grim Reaper-esque beast be damned, and pleaded with him to stop hurting himself-literally-for something like this.
#31 - Sacred
Sure, his rosary was something sacred and meaningful and should never, ever be defiled, but he couldn’t help it if he sometimes forgot to take it off during sex; he was lying, of course, because he loved the feel of it pressing into his chest, burning, branding, as she pressed into him.
#32 - Farewells
The only farewells Hidan ever had to make was to those he killed-and even then it was in a half-assed, delighted sentiment-and to Kakuzu; it had been hard enough to come up with one for his previous partner, no matter how much the man had gotten on his nerves, and he didn’t plan on conjuring one up for Sakura anytime soon, either.
#33 - World
The harsh, well-known truth about the world was that it was very unfair and very unpredictable, throwing curves and angles that seem to lead to nowhere; if anybody knows this it’s Hidan and Sakura, and they thank the heavens that it is.
#34 - Formal
Hidan was never formal, and this was something that everybody just accepted-it was a fact of life that was as set in stone as the sky being blue and the grass being green; even on his wedding day, Hidan had mumbled a grinning, “I fucking love you, seriously.”
#35 - Fever
It confused Hidan when, in the beginning months of Sakura’s pregnancy, she began to get sick-not sick as in a cold or a flu, but as in she would vomit in the morning and sleep the rest of the day without any signs of a fever; the only person in the complex who could offer an explanation was Kisame, who laughed himself half to death and patted Hidan hard on the back, saying, “I’d like to introduce you to something called paternal instincts, Hidan, because apparently you have none,” in a sarcastic, mocking tone that actually made Sakura laugh.
#36 - Laugh
There were always pangs of jealousy here and there with Hidan, particularly when Sakura would completely ditch him and his newly-stitched limbs to visit with Deidara; the two of them grew close in a way that was utterly and completely different from the way she grew close to Hidan-she would laugh differently around Deidara than with him, and it wasn’t a bad sort of different, just…unusual.
#37 - Lies
Lies, lies, nothing irked Hidan more than lies, but only when they were coming from Sakura’s mouth; she could skirt around the subject and make up all the little fibs she wanted about why she cried at night, but Hidan could always see right through her, and she didn’t have to keep it to herself that she felt unwanted, because for fuck’s sake, she wasn’t.
#38 - Forever
There were little moments, random times throughout the day, like when she was working on a garden out back with Zetsu or when she was helping Deidara paint the day room or when she was accepting Tobi’s frantic, sobbing apology with his masked face buried in her stomach, arms tight around her waist and gripping at the back of her shirt, when Hidan felt like forever was too long a time to wait to reunite with Sakura again when she inevitably passed away; it was sometime after he saw Sakura healing Kisame’s half dead, malnourished fishes that he knew he couldn’t deal with forever.
#39 - Overwhelmed
He found himself overwhelmed with Sakura more and more often when they’d finally established that yes, touching was okay, but no, they probably should fuck just yet-something he was dearly, dearly regretting, especially when she rubbed her hands up and down his stomach like she was doing now and brushing over something particularly sensitive, and ohhhh- “Please, Sakura, please touch me there again.”
#40 - Whisper
Hidan often had insomnia, because all kidding and joking aside, he didn’t like to sleep; so when Sakura suffered from the same thing, they’d stay up until all hours of the morning, until the sun came up over that hill in the back courtyard and drowned the kitchen where they sat in yellowish light; they’d keep their voices down to barely-audible whispers, their sleeplessness fueling them to laugh at stupid things and be deliriously joyful about the fucked up, hopelessly irreparable world.
#41 - Wait
“So you’re fucking sitting here and telling me that you feel bad for that piece of shit?” Hidan would ask, arms crossed and secretly boiling with jealousy inside, and Sakura would answer, “Well, yes, I do, I mean, he went crazy with power because of Orochimaru, and now he’s in jail for it,” to which Hidan would just growl and shake his head; “That bastard made you wait for years and fucking years, and you still are able to feel bad for him, Sakura; I think you just might be a Goddamned saint.”
#42 - Talk
She cried sometimes when they talked late at night, alone in his bedroom, draped over his bed and side by side or sitting at opposite sides of the room; and he didn’t understand it, because he never talked about anything to make her cry beside his past and what he did and didn’t do.
#43 - Search
She’d gotten lost once, and when Deidara had announced it to him, all calamity and chaos hiding behind grace and poise, the shogi game he’d set up to play with Zetsu was immediately forgotten in favor of every able-bodied Akatsuki member going out into the surrounding forestry and searching diligently into night; when they all returned, scratched, bruised, empty-handed and dejected, each of them were surprised into varying degrees of anger, relief, and joy when Sakura appeared to them in the doorway of the complex, yawning and asking where everyone had gone.
#44 - Hope
Hidan wasn’t known for clinging to hope where hope wasn’t readily available, or even clinging to hope at all, for that matter, but he couldn’t help it with Sakura when she touched him gently while they were speaking or she seemed just a little more clumsy than usual; damned be him if he didn’t take advantage of her “crush,” because hell, he’d had a crush since she’d dug him up and laughed at the ridiculousness of his predicament.
#45 - Eclipse
“Romantic poetry!” Tobi had readily announced when Hidan had asked what he thought was sure to woo Sakura, and so Hidan had tried, honestly: “When you smile/ I feel like I’ve had a total eclipse of the heart,” and hadn’t gotten past that point for the life of him (which was considerably long); he’d showed it to Kisame, who had proceeded to die laughing right before taking the unfinished poem from Hidan, crumpling it, eating it, and then muttering, “For the good of humanity,” jovially under his breath.
#46 - Gravity
Gravity was what forced him to stay on this earth, he reminded himself, gravity and Jashin, of course, though he worshipped the latter much more than the former, and he thanked everything that they did; he didn’t know what he would do if he’d ever have to leave Sakura and Taro, and even though he watched them like a hawk, he was only human, after all.
#47 - Highway
There did eventually come a day, a little bit farther into their marriage, when the first tragedy shook them: Taro died from a disease-something that Sakura explained to Hidan through sobs and gasps and hiccups was called Tay-Sachs disease; and though they both knew it was coming-Jashin knew Sakura had tried any- and everything to prevent it, but it just wasn’t enough-they really could only treasured whatever time they had left with their son; it was Kisame and Zetsu, the uncle and the impromptu doctor, the mentor and the playmate, who carried the small casket, so small that Hidan could easily fit it in his arms, down the dirt highway and toward a shaded, gentle area that the trees kept hidden and the butterflies kept company.
#48 - Unknown
It was unknown what had prompted Hidan to drag Sakura underneath him and demand she kiss him right fucking there and right fucking now, but it was even more unknown why Sakura had actually agreed; they’d only known each other for a half a year, but that didn’t stop them, and it would never stop them again, Hidan decided, even as he sucked on her lower lip and pushed his tongue past hers.
#49 - Lock
“My heart’s locked up and I threw away the key,” Sakura said with a playful smile, mimicking the action of tossing a key behind her; and Hidan had smiled back, took her hand, and licked the finger that held the ring safe, sucking at the tip and laving down one side, then back up the other, humming deviously when her face flushed pink and she licked her lips; “Then it’s a good thing,” he answered, pulling away from her hand to pull her against him, and then the both of them right onto the grassy floor, curious onlookers be damned, “that I have a pair of fucking bolt cutters.”
#50 - Breathe
And he’d finally been stripped of his immortality, finally been set free, finally been able to live or die or fuck or fight or do all four at the same motherfucking time, because Goddamn it, he was human now, and it felt…it felt…tiring; he slumped to the ground, and Sakura immediately was at his side, pushing back pieces of silver that fell into his eyes, kissing him and crying tears that he hoped were joy, because he’d probably fucking kill her if she regretted him doing this, and she whispered, “I love you so much, Hidan, and yes, I’ll have your little pink-haired, purple-eyed babies with the sadomasochistic tendencies and all,” to which he grunted in satisfaction at; after a while, when the shuddering stopped and the vertigo had mostly ebbed, he turned to her, still rubbing her thumbs over his cheekbones and tucking strands of hair behind his ears that didn’t very well need any more tucking, for fuck’s sake, and muttered, “Seriously, so what do we do now?” while she held back another fit of tears; she answered with another kiss, slower and more deliberate this time, and he would have known the answer even if she hadn’t mouthed it against his lips: “We breathe.”