I've always wanted to write a long-ish SI/OC, so here goes. I'm a little bit nervous because I wrote this a few years ago and decided a lot of it needed to be completely rewritten but... welp! You gotta post things eventually.

This is meant to be fun and self-indulgent. There is no planned romance.

As far as Tori Mendoza could tell, she'd been rummaging around in someone's else's bathroom closet one moment, then a split second later found herself curled up in a wooden barrel.

It took her a few moments to figure out she was in a barrel, of course. She wasn't sure if her brain had registered the sudden darkness or that her knees had been folded up to her chin first, but either way she tried to stand and hit her head on the lid. She fell back and a liquid that pooled in the bottom of the barrel sloshed around her.

It smelled foul, leaving a coppery aftertaste on the back of her tongue.

Leaning back against the wall of the container, which was oddly wet, Tori blinked into darkness and tried numbly to comprehend what the fuck was going on.

She'd been at a party. A dumb college party, celebrating 'half-o-ween' just before exams. She'd been dressed as a vampire and had been lugging around a Nalgene bottle full of fake blood.

The bottle was tucked neatly between her feet, so at least that had travelled with her to… whatever this place was. She'd been upset about losing her plastic vampire teeth earlier, but that seemed silly now.

She stretch out her hands and ran them along the walls of the container. The wood— or at least it was textured like unsanded wood, and slick with the foul-smelling liquid— was arranged in a cylinder around her. It was just wide enough to sit cross-legged with her admittedly short legs.

She'd been— she'd just been trying to find toilet paper, not even thirty seconds ago. She'd waited in line for the bathroom, and when she finally got in, she'd zoomed in on the fact that the toilet paper roll was empty. Nalgene bottle in hand, she'd gone right for the closet door, and then…

And then she was here. She managed to scramble into a squat, her knees banging against the walls, and pushed upwards on the lid. It didn't budge.

The key to this, Tori thought even as she hiccuped on the stale air, was to stay calm. She pushed harder. The lid did not give, and it was dripping .

The liquid, which was definitely not water, was slowly but steadily seeping in through the seal of the barrel or container or whatever contraption she was trapped in. The fluid dynamics were such that not only did it cling to and coat the walls, but also adhesive forces were strong enough it travelled across the top, pooled, and then dripped down onto to Tori's face and hair.

She discovered this running her fingers along the seal, desperately grasping for any crack or opening. Her hands were shaking. The nail of her left ring finger caught and ripped. She kept going.

Was this a joke? Some kind of prank? She hadn't known anyone at the party very well, but they'd seemed nice, and one of the hosts had invited her to a screening of Carrie …

She paused. The liquid seeping in smelled less rank and more like pennies. Her breath hitched.

Oh god, she thought. It's blood.

It was up past her ankles.

If she died like this, trapped in absolute darkness and drowning in blood, if she had to struggle against the immovable lid and rake at the wood until all her nails were gone and her own blood ran, if she swallowed , if she inhaled the sticky blood into her lungs , if it went in her nose and eyes and ears–

Tori abruptly extended her legs, ducking her head so her forehead smacked the walls and her shoulders hit the lid. Putting everything she could into it, she pushed upwards.

She meant to scream for help, to demand to be let out. It came out wordless and furious.

It did nothing.

"OUT!" she screamed, pushing until her legs cramped. "OUT! OUT!"

This was so stupid. If she was going to die a stupid, senseless death, she at least wanted to know who was responsible.

She grabbed her Nalgene bottle and rammed it into the lid as hard as she could. Vibrations ran down her arm.

"LET ME OUT," she yelled.

The blood was up to her waist. She needed to calm herself and think rationally. She stopped, panting, back still against the underside of the lid and legs still cramped from the weird position. Her entire body was trembling, but she forced herself to take a deep breath.

The air tasted like stale blood and carbon dioxide. The surface of the blood brushed her chin.

She screamed with a renewed panic, banging her fist and bottle against the walls. The blood rose to her mouth and in her panicked fury she did end up inhaling a mouthful, spluttering and coughing as she floundered to rearrange her body so her face was pressed against the roof, giving her a few more inches of air.

The container filled, and Tori contemplated that the human soul better be real, because she was coming back and haunting the shit out of whoever sealed her in whatever the fuck this was.

The lid opened.

She burst from the surface, gasping for air and standing and grasping at the edges of the container for support. There was light, finally, but it was dim and she was seeing black spots.

"Ho," said a man's voice, sounding incredibly pleased.

Tori's chest expanded and contracted, her body eagerly gulping in air. She blinked rapidly, clearing blood– and it was indeed red, sticky blood– and the spots from her eyes.

She was in a wooded area. The trees were bigger and older than the ones marking the property line of the house she'd just been in. There was a man towering over her, all pale with moon-silver hair.

She staggered back. She didn't want a man towering over her right now.

Her back hit the edge of the barrel, which came to the bottom of her ribcage when standing. She didn't want to be in the barrel any more. Turning, she got one knee over onto the rim, heaved forward, and then toppled out of the barrel and into the dirt.

"Oh," said the man, sounding incredibly disappointed.

Tori rolled across the the packed dirt and managed to get to her knees and stand. Her limbs felt light and shaky.

The man was towering over her again, but now he was frowning. He was conventionally handsome, with clear skin and dark red eyes. He was also, unfortunately, opening his mouth and snarling something rude and accusatory at her.

"-and who the fuck are you?" he demanded, reaching out and grabbing her shirt with no concern for the slick blood.

Tori stared dimly down at his hand, then squinted up at his face in disbelief.

"Hidan," she croaked. She'd meant for it to be a question, high-pitched at the end in her normal speaking voice, but she'd ruined her voice screaming and it came out as a flat statement of fact.

The glare slipped from Hidan's face and he eyed her calculatingly.

This made no sense. Hidan was a cartoon character. There was no place near her college town like this. It was impossible and it didn't make sense. This was just one of her weird lucid dreams, and she'd wake up soon wanting to vomit but otherwise in perfect health.

"Right," Tori decided, feeling vaguely like someone watching her and not like the one piloting her own body. She watched her herself untangle Hidan's hand from her shirt and drop it.

She was still wearing her stupid thrift-shop vampire costume, and her top was a black fishnet over a black camisole. That was a nice attention to detail, for an anxiety dream from hell.

"You know my name," Hidan said, sounding delighted and leaning in.

"Yes, of course," she said, and then backed up from him and walked around the other side of the barrel to get a better look at wherever she was. Her boots, now filled with blood, made squelching noises.

The clearing was a perfect circle, all uniform packed dirt. There were other people scattered around, four or five kneeling at strategic positions in a weird pagan-looking symbol painted into the dirt with what was probably even more blood.

There were also bodies, at least ten, all contained in their own weird pagan symbols. They were all contorted into unnatural shapes, faces caught up in horrific death masks. Trails of blood flowed from their open wounds, then spider webbed their way across the ground and to the wooden container. The blood trickled up the side of the container even as it overflowed and dripped blood back out.

"Oh," she said. "Hmm."

This was pretty weird. Like, really weird, even for a dream.

One of the living people stood and hurried over to her.

"Oh vessel of Jashin-sama," he crowed, "oh angel of death!"

"Um," Tori said.

She still had to pee. She'd forgotten it somewhere in the middle of panicking, but there it was again. She really hoped this wasn't one of those dreams where she spent the whole time desperately looking for a bathroom.

The man in front of her was rambling about laying waste to heathens and nonbelievers. Having grown up in the American south, violent religious rambling was par for the course for Tori, and she bobbed her head along as she tried to get her brain to piece together where the fuck she was .

Hidan stomped over, spun her around and jabbed her in the chest with his finger with enough force to cause her to stumble back half a step. It hurt.

"Why the fuck do you look like that?" he demanded.

Tori blinked up at him and he jabbed her again. He was big and aggressive and a little bit scary.

"Oi, Haruaki," Hidan said, turning to the other man. "You fucked up your summoning. There's no way a shinigami–"

The air was hot and humid. Tori rubbed the spot on her chest where Hidan had poked her, right under her collar bone. It was sore. Her socks were wet and uncomfortable and disgusting liquids filled the gaps between her toes. Her hair was heavy and clumped as the blood dried and snagged on her fishnet shirt. Her fingertips smarted from where she'd ripped off nails. It all seemed very realistic.

"Are you," Tori asked, her voice hoarse and deep. Hidan and the other man stopped arguing. "The one who brought me here?"

Hidan scowled, grabbed her buy the arm and dragged her up and towards him, so her toes dragged on the ground. His face filled her vision.

"This fucker made me waste a entire week setting this up to get you," Hidan said, and his breath was hot on her face. "So you'd better tell me you can reap the whole damn village, or we're going to find out what happens when you kill a shinigami."

Tori was beginning to suspect she was not in a dream. She was also beginning to suspect she was going to die.

She didn't want to die.

"Alright," she said slowly. Then because he'd cheered up when she'd said it before, she added, "Hidan."

Hidan stared at her, eyes wild, for several seconds. She held eye contact, doing her best to ignore the rising panic in the back of her brain. She had excellent facial control and was good at keeping a straight face in stressful situations– she could do this much, at least. Hidan finally dropped her.

"Jashin wouldn't put a girl in a coffin without a reason," he reasoned. He sounded like he was convincing himself as much as he was convincing his comrade. "Even if she looks like a drowned rat."

Rude .

Tori opened her mouth to– to play along, she guessed, and tell him in a mystic otherworldly being voice not to mock a shinigami. Instead she said:

"Then find me a bath."

She was starting to smell, and she had to pee.

There was a small lake nearby, which Hidan was very happy to hurl her into, clothes and all. She did her best to rinse her hair out. The sun had started to set, and she hoped she looked like a proper death god as she ran her fingers through her dark hair in the twilight. She had very long, thick hair– it might look very dramatic.

It probably didn't. She peed her pants while standing waist-deep in the water. She didn't think shinigami got bathroom breaks, so she might as well do it now.

Hidan sat on the edge of the lake and glared at her the whole time. Some of the other Jashinists had crowded off to the side and were muttering to each and looking at her doubtfully.

A bunch of murderers had unknowingly watched her pee in a lake. Her mind had gone blank. She couldn't handle this. She couldn't even get the blood out of her clothes and hair properly.

She very much wanted to curl up somewhere and cry. She'd have to save that for later, though, when she was free or, more likely, dead.

Tori considered just swimming to the other side of the lake and running away. There was literally no way she could have prepared for or anticipated this situation, and she was at an absolute loss for what she could do to get out of it.

They wanted her to 'reap the village.' What did that mean?

Swimming away wouldn't work, anyway. Hidan could literally walk on water. Even if she did get away– which she couldn't physically do because she wasn't a cartoon ninja– where would she go? They were in the middle of the woods at night.

She'd have to get to this village, then. She didn't know where it was, so she'd go along with this… shinigami… Jashinist summoning… thing until they got there. Then she'd figure out a way to get away.

She briefly thought about how she still had no plan for after that, and momentarily considered that they seemed to be going to the village with the aim of murdering everyone, but… well, if she thought about that too long she was going to lose hope and shut down. The short term goal of getting to the village was much easier to focus on.

Okay. Yes. She could do this. She waded back to the edge of the lake.

"Hidan," she said, because he liked that she knew his name. He leaned back on his arms, cocked his head, and gave her a disparaging look.

If she was going to get him to take her safely to the village, she needed to convince him she was a true otherworldly entity. Which, now that she thought about it, she technically was. How did she make him believe that?

She eyed him. She tilted her head back to look down her nose at him– she was a god, wasn't she? Isn't that how they'd expect her behave?

The little huddle of Jashinists kept whispering, giving her odd flashbacks to middle school clique drama. She supposed the effect of looking down on them was ruined by her being covered in a thin film of diluted blood and lake scum… and also being five feet tall and ankle-deep in muddy water.

She stepped up onto shore. Her movements were shaky and less graceful than she'd like, and Hidan raised his eyebrows at her. The bank of the lake was grassy, and he had his legs sprawled out in front of him, his Akatsuki cloak unbuttoned and pooling around him.

"Where's Kakuzu?" she asked.

Hidan leaned further back on his hands and crossed his legs at the ankles. "Who the fuck is Kakuzu?"

For less than a second, Tori felt a wave of hot panic. Had he not met Kakuzu yet? No, he was wearing the cloak– he had to have.

Tori twitched, then very purposefully curled her lip into a sneer. "Your partner, Hidan. Don't play games with me."

"Ah," said Hidan, then got to his feet. He grinned at her. "Yeah, I guess you're legit."

Then he hit her approvingly on the shoulder hard enough to nearly knock her over. He didn't seem to notice though, as he started yelling at his comrades to start moving out. Tori watched them carefully. They followed Hidan's commands, but they didn't seem particularly happy about it.

Hmm.

One of the Jashinists approached her. There were five others besides Hidan, including the one that had greeted her as an angel of death. They all wore the same pendant with the symbol of Jashin.

"You dropped this," the Jashinist said, holding out her Nalgene bottle.

"Oh," she said, and took it. Her first instinct was to thank the man. Did shinigami thank people?

It didn't matter; he turned away from her immediately.

What Tori managed to learn from their conversation, as they marched through the woods towards the village, was this:

Haruaki– the man who'd announced her as a servant of Jashin– was some type of fuuinjutsu user who'd set up the… sealing array or whatever it was to summon her. He'd also gathered fifteen other Jashinists.

Ten of them had ended up sacrifices. Apparently not every follower of Jashin got up again after death.

In fact, she'd be willing to bet Hidan was the only one here who could. Everyone treated him with fear and respect and as the de facto leader, even though Haruaki had done most of the organizing and it was clear no one actually liked Hidan.

Hidan didn't seem to like anyone else either, and at one point snapped at Haruaki and called him a "snivelling dog begging at Jashin-sama's feet." Haruaki had just squared his shoulders and taken it.

So… there was that.

Hidan and Haruaki must have a history, though, since they both wore headbands from Yugakure. Yugakure, incidentally, was also the village they were traveling to 'reap.'

There was a lot to unpack there.

At least she didn't have to pee anymore.

Hidan took the lead of their little party, putting several yards between himself and the rest, and Tori scrambled to keep up with him. He walked faster than she liked, but he was obviously more accepting of the idea she might be a god than the others.

They were following a poorly maintained path. It was wide enough for a car to pass, so Tori assumed it was once used for carts or herding mules or whatever they used for transport in this world. Now it was covered in tree roots and upturned rocks and weird holes. There had been a faded sign nailed to a tree a while back that claimed that Yugakure was four hours away. Tori liked hiking, and the walk wasn't particularly strenuous, so under normal circumstances a four hour walk across relatively flat terrain would be fairly easy. 'Normal circumstances' being the key phrase there, of course. Trying to keep up with Hidan– who was at least a foot taller than her, and infinitely more in shape– was not easy, especially when it was dark and they were marching to the light of fancy ninja glowsticks.

No one had given her a glowstick. She had to work to keep at Hidan's side to even be able to see, which was easier said than done. She was quickly reduced to a sweaty, winded mess. It didn't help that the knee-high boots she was wearing were obviously designed for fashion statements and not hiking.

When she inevitably tripped and fell, Haruaki leaned over her and suggested that they had, perhaps, made a mistake with the summoning.

He didn't even offer to help her up. Rude.

She supposed she did look ridiculous; she was still damp from her dip in the lake, and her clothes were uncomfortably heavy in the humid evening. At least she had been dressed like a gothic edgelord instead of in a cute sundress when she'd emerged from a blood-filled coffin. She looked at least slightly more the part.

She sat up. Hidan was yelling profanities at Haruaki. "Did you heed the call of Jashin or not–"

She stood up, grabbing her Nalgene bottle and unscrewing the lid. Her fake blood was mostly chocolate syrup, with some corn starch for viscosity and red food dye for color. She unscrewed the top and took a sizeable gulp, since she was hungry and could use an energy boost. Some of it dribbled down her chin and she wiped it away.

"You know," she said, interrupting their argument because she would really rather not have this Haruaki person convince Hidan she was a fake. "You only get as much out of a summoning as you put in. You think ten sacrifices were enough to get a shinigami at full power?"

She crossed her arms and popped a hip in a show of false confidence and waited expectantly.

"I fucking told you," Hidan said finally, turning back to Haruaki. "Jashin-sama wouldn't let me down."

That wording, Tori thought, was telling, and she decided to gamble. "Ten might have been enough," she said, "if you'd gotten proper followers. I don't even know who you are."

She gestured vaguely at all the people who weren't Hidan. Haruaki looked offended. Hidan's eyes lit up.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that makes sense. So what can you do, chibigami?"

Tori opened her mouth only to realize she had not thought that far through her charade. "I don't appreciate your nickname," she said instead.

"What can you do ?" Haruaki growled out.

Tori glanced at him, trying to be as dismissive as possible, and then took another long drink from her Nalgene.

Having wasted plenty of time, she still hadn't thought of a good lie and said the first thing that came to mind. "I can see people's fates."

"Hidan-san," Haruaki practically whined, but Hidan ignored him, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Oh yeah?" he said. "How's that gonna help us, chibigami?"

She cocked her head in a play for seeming cool. It reminded her that her hair had formed into one giant tangle. "I suppose I could cut their fates as well."

After she said it, she realized any rational person would question that meant and she didn't have an answer.

Hidan, thankfully, was not a particularly rational person and nodded seriously. Haruaki, however, looked like he'd just swallowed a lemon.

"What does that mean? " he asked. "You can't honestly expect us to believe you're some kind of-"

"Shut up ," Hidan yelled. He grabbed his scythe off his back, and before Tori or Haruaki could properly register was happening, two of the scythe's blades were embedded in Haruaki's chest. Blood splattered everywhere and Haruaki let out a sad sort of wheeze.

Hidan shook the blade a couple times, then dislodged Haruaki's body with his foot.

"Don't you dare," Hidan growled, setting his foot right over Haruaki's wounds and pressing down, "question the will of Jashin-sama. We asked Jashin-sama for a messenger of death, and so that's what we got."

Haruaki, who was quite clearly dead, did not answer.

Hidan turned his fury on the rest of the Jashinists. "Anyone else got a problem with chibigami?"

Tori certainly had a problem with what was going on, and she was glad Hidan was distracted enough not to notice her working her way through several breathing exercises. She could have her panic attack when she had escaped, she reminded herself. She could have her panic attack when she escaped.

She didn't catch what the replies were, but Hidan eventually turned to keep going down the path, and one of the Jashinists knelt in front of her and offered to carry her the rest of the way.

Riding on the back of a ninja made the rest of the of the trip take less than an hour.

They stopped just short of the tree line. Yugakure– a former ninja village with no currently active shinobi and no ninja academy– had dismantled most of their protective walls, leaving a few observational turrets and a symbolic wooden archway at its entrance. The writing above the arch declared Yugakure's new name for itself: The Village That Has Forgotten War .

The violence-loving Jashinists hated Yugakure and would wipe it off the earth for this sin.

Or… something like that. Hidan went on a very long tirade about it in what Tori guessed was supposed to be some sort of pep talk. She ignored it mostly in favor of chanting to herself to stay cool stay calm stay cool stay calm.

"Well?" Hidan finally asked, looking at her expectantly. "Do your thing."

Tori blinked at him. Her ears were ringing and she could barely remember what her 'thing' was. "I'll go in alone first," she heard herself say. "You'll know when to follow."

Then, feeling incredibly lightheaded, she walked out of the trees and into Yugakure.

Yugakure was pretty, she thought. It was all narrow cobblestone streets lined with lights. The buildings were cramped but elegant with dark, slanting roofs. People decorated their windows with potted plants.

The narrow streets were the part she liked most. She ducked into an alley, squatted down behind a dumpster, and let herself cry.

Eventually she heard a rustling over her, and looked up to see a woman rummaging in the dumpster. She'd balanced herself on the edge and was poking through it with a crowbar. Tori watched for a few minutes before the women seemed to notice her.

"You okay?" the woman asked.

"Yes," Tori answered automatically, even though it was embarrassingly obvious she was overwhelmingly not okay.

"Here," the woman said, and tossed down a bundle of newspapers she'd fished out of the dumpster. "That'll cheer you up."

The headline read SEVENTEEN MORE CONFIRMED DEATHS FROM DEAD WATER FEVER! WILL HOT WATER COUNTRY BE NEXT? so she wasn't exactly sure how that was supposed to cheer her up.

She read the article, anyway. It was calming– she was a biology major and liked learning about new diseases and the spread. Then she read the rest of the newspaper. The woman filled the knapsack on her back with some items from the dumpster and dropped two magazines at Tori's feet.

"Could be worse, you know," the woman said, toeing the headline of one of the magazines. "In Water Country they've got people dying all over."

Tori nodded dully. She didn't really care that much about an epidemic in another country right now, but it had been an interesting read.

"Thanks," Tori said. "Have a good evening."

The woman shrugged and bustled off.

Tori wrapped the strap of her Nalgene around her wrist and gathered the magazines and one of the newspapers in her arms. These were the only things she had in this world, and she felt compelled to keep them.

She wandered out of the alley. There were more people walking around the village than she would expect for this time of night, and they were mostly heading in the same direction. She decided to follow.

No one paid her any mind. She was filthy and gross looking, yes, but she was also very good at shrinking her presence, hunching over her new reading material. It probably helped that Yugakure seemed to have a sizeable homeless population– including the woman who'd helped her– and its residents were practiced at ignoring them.

She followed the flow of people to a huge open square, which was lit up and lined with various vendors in wooden stalls. Most of them sold food, but there were some crafts and games. Tori wondered if this was always here or part of some special event.

The smell of something savory and fried hit her nose. Her stomach groaned. Without even thinking it through, she let her legs wobble as she approached a stall, willing her entire presence to screaming misery.

It wasn't hard– she was a miserable mess.

"Um, excuse me," she said to the man throwing onions and mushrooms onto the grill between them. She tried not to blink so the smoke would get in her eyes and make her tear up again. "I was robbed on my way into town and–" she hiccupped, let her face tremble like she was on the verge of tears.

"Move along," the man snapped. "If you don't have any money, you can starve for all I care."

She turned to the woman at the stall next to him, tears welling in her eyes, but the woman avoided eye contact. So did the man on the other side. A couple holding hands pointedly ignored her as they discussed their food order.

"Oh for crying out loud," said a voice behind her. She turned to see a takoyaki salesman wavering her towards his booth. She approached timidly.

"I swear, people can be disgusting," he said, ladling sauce onto a double-helping of the takoyaki for her.

"Thank you so much," Tori said, looking for all the world like she was about to cry. The man smiled kindly at her.

Tori took her food to a bench on the opposite end of the square, feeling smug at her deception. She set her possessions down next to her and happily licked a fleck of sauce from her fingers. After an entire day of feeling on-edge with Hidan, this particular charade had been a breeze.

It was calming to have warm food in front of her, and a tiny bit of optimism crept in her mind. Yes. She could definitely hide somewhere and wait out Hidan's massacre, or sneak out and avoid it all together, or–

A family of four walked by, laughing as they ate little barbecued squids off of sticks. One parent affectionately ruffled the hair of the younger child.

The food turned to chalk in Tori's mouth. She put the paper container down and wanted to vomit. These people were going to die. In all her posturing in front of Hidan– flippantly talking about human sacrifices– she'd been thinking of the people of this world as fictional background characters. They weren't.

This world was real and had real problems. She didn't want to be one of them.

She felt panic and tears well in her again, which was not going to help her. To distract herself, she grabbed one of the magazines and flipped through it. There was gossip on celebrities she didn't recognize and an article on the possible spread of this dead water fever into other countries.

It was a hemorrhagic disease that turned your organs to mush and made you bleed out your nose and ears. That woman had been right. This was a much worse fate than being sacrificed to the god of suffering.

Tori tried to focus on the article over the overwhelming panic in the back of her mind. Calm down, she commanded herself. Think.

Dead water fever got its name from the fact that it thrived in places with plenty of warm, still water, which Hot Water Country happened to be filled with. There was a lot of fear-mongering in the articles she read– a lot of travelers moved through Hot Water Country, and people were terrified of those travelers bringing in the deadly disease.

Or at least that's what these articles claimed. Tori wanted more facts than ominous warnings. Was the fever spreading a real threat? Did local authorities have plans in place in case an infection broke out? Was it really as deadly as the gossip magazine claimed? What was the exact mechanism of the disease? How was it being transmitted– mosquitoes? Was anyone working on a vaccine or treatment?

She got up, gathered her things, and went to go find someone who might know.

Tori found the woman who'd given her the magazines, yelling at man as he poked through another dumpster.

"What do you know about this?" Tori asked, holding up the newspaper with the fever on the front page.

Her reasoning in approaching the woman had been that the woman was both open to talking to her and also presumably read the local news. Any conversation would be a great distraction from having a panic attack about Hidan.

The woman snorted and answered, "I know if it shows up here I'm getting out ." Then she eyed the leftover takoyaki in Tori's other hand. "You gonna eat that?"

In that moment, Tori had a monumentally stupid idea.

She handed the woman her food and the man jumped down from the dumpster to join them.

It was a stupid idea, but Tori was probably going to die anyway. The Jashinists were no doubt watching the village, so she couldn't leave. Eventually Hidan would get bored and barge in, signal from her or not. She might as well die making a dramatic stand.

A little past eleven, the party in town was still going strong, but the hospital was quiet. There was a single receptionist at the front desk of the hospital when Tori wandered in.

Tori stood in the center of the room, swayed, and then collapsed.

Tori heard the scrape of the receptionist's chair and then her hurried footsteps over. The noise stopped, there was a long pause, and the receptionist said, "Ohshit. "

She hurried off. Tori continued to lay on the floor, as still as possible. She'd filled her ears and nose and mouth with fake blood from her Nalgene. Somewhere else in the village, the two homeless people she'd shared her dinner with would be doing something similar.

Her immensely stupid idea was this: if there was an outbreak of a fatal disease, people would flee. If people fled, Hidan couldn't kill all of them.

There were a lot of ways this could go wrong and not a lot of ways it could actually work. She refused to think about that though, and instead focused on looking as ill as possible as medical personnel showed up to talk about what to do with her.

"We can't just leave her here," one of the medics was saying. They were all standing as far away from her as possible.

"Well we can't treat her here either," another voice snapped back. "We're not equipped for quarantine. We don't even have the proper equipment to handle something like this since the post-war decommission."

"Are we sure it's dead water fever?" another voice asked.

Tori keep her body completely limp and prayed none of them actually examined her. She had absolutely no idea how to fake a fever, or the signature rash, and she was certain a trained medical professional would be able to tell the blood was actually chocolate syrup up close.

"She's bleeding from every visible orifice," the first voice said. "I think it's safest to assume she does have it until we've got a safe way to diagnose and treat her."

"And how are we supposed to do that? The closest place with the proper equipment is Oto, and they're not likely to help us."

"Maybe they will," a fourth voice said idly. "Their head medic is pretty shady, maybe he'll want to study her."

A snort of derision.

They started arguing about whether or not to approach her again. She had not seen any of their faces, but Tori was fairly certain they were all quite young, probably not much older than she herself. The homeless woman had told her most of the senior staff in the hospital had been shinobi, and when the village started dismantling their military, most of them had left, leaving the hospital understaffed by less experienced healers.

Both the homeless woman and man were shinobi who'd been left jobless by the decommission. They knew all about it.

Suddenly, there was screaming from outside. The sound of running filled the hospital.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" one of the medics yelled. " Another one?"

The woman had loved the idea of vomiting fake blood in public and causing chaos in the village. So had the man.

There were shouts for evacuations. Slamming doors– commands to lock her in the reception area. The hospital filled with the sounds of chaos. But the reception area was left an oasis of calm.

Tori cracked an eyelid. She was alone. Cautiously, she stood. There were two sets of glass doors leading outside, and the outer set was barricaded from the outside with a dumpster. She watched house lights flicker on and people run by. No one looked at her. She could hear movement form above– upper floors of the hospital evacuating patients through other exits.

Her plan had worked. People were evacuating, and in the chaos she could hopefully sneak away from the village without anyone noticing.

At least, she thought it had worked, until she realized she was locked in the hospital.