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The guy is huge.
Mizuko has seen plenty of huge guys before. She's seen huge missing-nin, too. Their village is the only town of any size before the border to River Country that wasn't blown out of existence by the war, so it's the only good place to stock up for miles and miles, even if it is a muddy, boring hole in the ground.
So this guy isn't the first huge missing-nin Mizuko has seen, but he's the first who really has her wishing she'd taken her lunch break and left the customers to her uncle.
His face is covered, except for his eyes, and they look upon everything around him with the bloodshot gaze of a dude whose brain is on fire and whose temper is dangling perilously by a thread.
He has another guy with him, a second missing-nin, usually the kind Mizuko would notice, with his slicked back hair and absentee shirt and overconfident swagger. But she only notices him because he's antagonising the first guy.
"Kakuzuuu... Isn't this a waste of time?"
Mizuko very accidentlly catches a flash of green when the big guy turns to say something—lower, quieter, in a voice like the quiet growl of distant thunder—to his friend, and she jerks her eyes down to the bench instead.
"Ugh, you're so worried about money... as expected for Kakuzu. That's a sin, you know," the pale one complains. But he doesn't leave: he follows Kakuzu, strolling past the shelves with his hands linked behind his neck. "This is such a boring chore."
The big guy turns again. He grabs his follower by the collar of his cloak.
There's a frozen moment in which both missing-nin are perfectly still, eyes connected, bodies tense. Mizuko's heart thumps loudly in her ears. For that second, she is certain that there will be a fight.
If there is, she knows she must duck and run, and then come back and clean up once it's over. If it's over. If there's anything left.
"Hidan," rumbles the big guy. "Just... go bother someone else. I won't be long."
Hidan, as he is apparently known, bares his teeth.
Kakuzu shakes him just a little, and then he releases the cloak, shoving him away—surprisingly gently, actually.
Mizuko exhales, soft and shaky. No fight. Okay. Alright. Fine.
"He's always like that, you know," drawls Hidan, and it takes Mizuko a moment to realise, with dawning horror, that he's talking to her.
"O-oh?" she says faintly. "That's, erm, that's..." It's certainly a thing he's telling her. "How's your day?" she says instead, too loudly.
"It's looking up," he says. He's pale enough she almost expects his eyes to be red, but instead they're... purplish. Soft. Strange.
His smile is friendly. His chakra really, really isn't, and Mizuko knows how to tell. Her stomach clamps, unsettled. His breath is sweet and metallic.
"You religious?" he asks, still smiling, still weighing down the air with killing intent. He nods to the butsudan in the corner, where her uncle burnt incense that morning. There's a bell, too, and a candlestick, and the platform where they leave fruit for her mum in summer.
Incense still lingers in the air of the shop.
They don't have room for the little altar in the back room where her and her uncle sleep. But she's never had anyone care before.
"Er... my uncle is," she says, shifting uncertainly.
Kakuzu is barely an afterthought now, even though he seems like the kind of person who'll snap and kill everyone if a black cat crosses his path or something. Mizuko's attention is all focused on Hidan. She wants to leave, right now, immediately, just leave her own shop—but she knows she must remain here, keeping an eye on the money, helping customers buy things. Best case scenario: her uncle will be mad if she leaves.
When she looks back from the butsudan and at Hidan again, he's not smiling anymore.
Her heart does something incredibly acrobatic and probably very unhealthy.
"Is... that a problem...?" she squeaks.
"I dunno." He tugs on his necklace, thumb looped through the chain, like an irritated tic. "You tell me."
Oh, good. That's just what she wants to hear.
"I..."
"Stop it," says Kakuzu, looming up out of nowhere.
"We're just talking," Hidan says pleasantly. "A friendly chat. Ne, Kakuzu, do you know what that is?"
Kakuzu ignores him. His arms are full of a pretty random assortment of items.
Mizuko has never been so grateful to see a giant missing-nin glowering at her before.
"Let me ring all this up for you," she says brightly, reaching for the instant dashi powder.
"Hang on," says Kakuzu, and so she hangs on. It's probably more than her life's worth to do anything else.
He produces a battered bingo book, heavily personalised and annotated, from beneath a fold of his cloak.
Mizuko blinks politely. Hidan makes a noise like a dying steer.
"Fuck. Here we go."
"Shut up," says Kakuzu, uninflected, like it's a reflex that didn't even make it past his spine all the way to his brain. He pages past pictures, several crossed out—crossed off she thinks—until he finds where he's jammed a bunch of other slips of paper between the pages.
"Here," Kakuzu goes on. He looks up again, meeting Mizuko's eyes with a gaze that seems to pack whole lifetimes of raging mental instability into a couple of seconds of eye contact. "I have," he announces, "these coupons."
Mizuko looks at the crumpled papers.
He does have coupons.
Mizuko's eyes flick from Kakuzu—huge, apparently three seconds away from violence, smoothing his coupons on her bench—to Hidan, who has wandered off already to stare into the batsudan like it's personally responsible for whatever happened to his shirt.
"Okay," Mizuko says.
Five of Kakuzu's coupons are expired.
She suspects he knows this. He seems like a detail oriented kind of crazy person.
Mizuko accepts them anyway.