Deidara rolled over and groaned, thoroughly sick of this phantom pain bullshit and tedious revivals. “I have died twice,” he complained to management. “This is unacceptable, yeah. I earned my culmination.”
Why was he back again? No one was commanding him into battle-- and he didn't feel dead, anyway. Aside from a buzzing in his bones he just felt alive. Regular. Total bullshit.
That was weird but he didn’t have the emotional energy to devote to wondering why he had woken up again, after dissolving into dust at the end of that asinine battle for the continuation of humanity with all those Konoha chucklefucks and the zombies. He sulked in the dirt. Ugh. What the hell was it now? Some magical goddamn last-chance heroes quest to clear his soul’s debt and make it into the pure lands? Barf. It was highway robbery to steal his right to leave a final and dramatic mark on the world.
Someone grunted. It was low, dismissive, and very familiar.
Deidara rocketed up, bracing himself with– holy shit, his arms were working. He spent a moment staring dumbly at his gaping palms before he remembered that he had heard someone fucking awful in his vicinity.
Kakuzu gave him a look of pitiless disdain and went back to his work, stitching the lips shut on Hidan’s severed head. An arm flailed angrily from where it was pinned to a tree. The other arm was inching towards the other body parts, but the legs kept drunkenly ambling away from it. Hidan’s legs were still attached to his hips and they were trying to walk over to what was left of his lower torso, a few yards over yonder. This looked like Kakuzu’s work.
That didn't explain anything that he cared about, yeah.
Deidara used all of his years of training to interpret the subliminal message that he should shut the fuck up now. Instead he scowled at the old man. “The fuck is this?” he hissed, and gestured with his working arm, holy shit, that was wild. Some civilian-donated arms had been sewn back on after that buttcrack Hatake wiped his arms from existence, but they hadn’t worked that well for him. These moved like his own arms and they didn’t even smell like human rot. That had been bad enough, to be some weirdo clinging to the past like Sasori-senpai, but to have perfect new arms happen to him again was an unforgivable affront. He squinted at the mouths in his palms. No chipped teeth. They were perfect and undamaged.
He was sort of offended. Deidara waved the arms around a little more to gauge their utility. “Did you do this to me?” Deidara hissed suspiciously. He glanced down at the seam where his stumps ought to end. He frowned. He didn’t even see scarring… There was a tan line. His stump was a little darker than the arms. Ew. He contemplated this perversion. “Looking back on the past with nostalgia is for hacks, yeah,” Deidara said vehemently. “I can make clay with my ass if I have to-”
“Shut up.” Kakuzu’s green and black nightmare eyes flashed with barely repressed rage.
He shut up. Just for a moment.
And then he noticed something weird. “That is an extinct mushroom.” Deidara pointed accusatively at the fungal sack of shit in question. “This is a lame genjutsu.” He huffed. “And that– fucksake, has whoever made this not heard about the post war one land management programs?” He scowled at a growth of mugwort, which had been eradicated in the wild like 30 years ago by the medical industry to ensure patient supply stayed level and no one did any folksy self care. “This is someone’s idiot botanical fantasy,” he complained. “Either that or we’ve traveled back in time.”
Both of the old men were staring at him now. Hidan and Kakuzu exchanged a meaningful look, like they didn’t think he would have noticed the flaws in the landscape.
Deidara rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said disdainfully. He shook his long hair out and ran a hand through it–wow, okay, he had missed that. He twisted a section together to enjoy how soft and strong the strands were. Maybe having hands again was worth it. He forgave them for being a throwback.
There was a wet sound as Hidan tore his lips apart in an attempt to break the thread keeping them shut. “We’re in the past, ass bucket,” he sneered wetly. The effect was ruined by how weak and weedy his voice always came out when he didn’t have two lungs attached. His left arm finally reached his torso and started pulling it to his legs.
“Shut up, uggo,” Deidara said immediately. And then he had to run from his life because Kakuzu retaliated. He used his new hands to blow up a section of the forest, which brought down an angry nature-freak clan of proof that he was, in fact, in the ancient past.
“Those are fuckin’ Senju?” Deidara accused, three sweaty hours later of chasing around increasingly desperate survivors from a patrol squad. He kicked the closest body. It squelched. It almost sounded like a voice protesting, through the mess he had made of the face. He knelt down to pull at the corpse’s face to confirm it really was dead. Huh. Musta been air trapped in the gut or something. It moved when he touched it, like human skin and fat tissue and not like something Sasori or Orochimaru would have kept around mummified or pickled. He made a sound of disgust. “This is savage,” Deidara complained. “The only good thing about coming back to life is that I was gonna have a chance to see the new Fuyumi movie, yeah.” He kicked the body again for good measure, hard enough that it rolled over. It grunted again.
He glowered for a while. He could feel Hidan and Kakuzu moving his way, probably to whine about his lack of subtlety like the old married farts they were. Well, they could go fuck themselves, he decided, standing and bracing his hands on his hips to lean back and crack his back.
Hidan came crashing into view. “You!” He screamed. His eyes were wild as he pointed at Deidara.
He raised a blonde eyebrow in disdain. “Yeah?” Deidara drawled.
‘Might have to fly away from this. The two of them are a nightmare.’
Ah. Haha. Shit. He hadn’t prepped any sculptures to blow up. Deidara resisted the urge to giggle when he realized he might be in danger.
“You’re immortal now,” Hidan breathed. He got waaay too close, wafting the stink of metallic blood and rot. “You’re one of us, you were worthy enough to be rejected from the pure lands. It’s a sign.”
Deidara was too busy plugging his nose to listen to the idiot’s words for a moment. When it landed, he laughed.
Him? Immortal? That was stupid. “I would never,” Deidra drawled. “Immortality is for hacks. Life has no meaning if it never ends— your end is the only meaning!” He declared loudly and proudly to the forest, and was promptly ignored.
“I can feel it!! Hidan grabbed him by the forearms and brought their faces close together. “Repent and convert,” he breathed, and then kissed Deidara’s forehead. “You have been baptized with death and now speak his tongue.”
Ugh!
Deidara shrieked and blasted a hole in the creep. “Hands off!” He put some space in between them and huffed, outraged. “That’s nasty, yeah, when was the last time you washed the blood off of your- off of your anything?” He spluttered in outrage and shuddered.
Hidan ignored that very good point to start off on one of his religious scriptures. Deidara watched from a safe distance, appalled but willing to take the moment to scoop up some shitty dirt and chakra-treat it to work as makeshift clay. He stuffed it to satiation with explosion release chakra and hurriedly molded it into a shitty fat clay bird. As he worked he tracked Kakuzu’s location. He was probably interested in the bodies that Deidara had left– he seemed to veer towards all of them on his way to intercept Deidara and Hidan’s eventual conflict.
“-have the blessing of our Lord and Savior to see and hear beyond death,” Hidan took a moment to breathe. “Join the holy crusade to convert the filthy fucking nonbelievers and use their blood to paint his will upon the damned canvas of this sinful goddamn world-”
Deidara let it go in and out of his ears until he felt sufficiently armed and his bird’s beak didn’t look so stupid. “You’re cracked, yeah,” he said flatly. “I’m not buying what you’re selling. So you can fuck off.” He gestured for Hidan to leave, shoo.
Hidan stopped talking at least and stared at him, red eyes glittering with malice and something that wasn’t very sane. Kakuzu was close now. He had spent a few minutes with a corpse and picked up speed in a way that implied he was pissed off.
Deidara sensed, in his heart, that it was time to leave. “Don’t call,” he said with a wink, and blew his shitty little sculpture up into the safest size he could manage with such shitty material. He hopped on and lifted directly up.
The impulse was to use the sculpture as a barrier between his body and whatever it was that Hidan was throwing at him– but that would be stupid, yeah, because if this got ruined he would be back on the ground with that asshole, so Deidara leaned over the side to spit shitty clay balls out of his hands. He released them midair in time to redirect Hidan’s scythe. By the time the weirdo had his staff back, Deidara was out of range.
He picked a direction at random, given that he didn’t know what time it was so the sun wasn’t useful for orienting. The geography clued him in before long that he was heading for Suna– oh, shit, for the lands that would one day be unified into Suna.
Deidara considered the soil quality there, hissed, and adjusted his heading to the vague direction of Iwa.
He didn’t know why he was here, or what he would do. But every situation was enhanced with a large quantity of high-quality clay.
I cannot access the discord today so I am left wondering in my solitude if there will be any discussion to develop a full Akatsuki themed menu. I am thinking of throwing a really terrible dinner party and not telling my friends the theme/ reason for selection.
[references this]
Going present your RL friends and family with delicious looking soap, roasted iceberg lettuce and "extremely complicated water" like: "What? No? No, it's always like this at my house."
The real question (to me) is if you think your friends would politely nibble on the Akatsuki themed menu from hell.
Once Anko agreed that it wasn’t a bomb, she hit the ground running with the new technology. “This is a translator, and this is secured end to end messaging.” She confirmed, indicating one icon at a time. The mystified ship worker nodded along as she scrolled through all the languages she could translate to. “There’s hundreds of local languages on this land mass but the government language–” she squinted at listings and took a guess. “The locals on this island speak- American English?”
“Close enough,” he said, “it sounds basically the same.”
Anko hummed acknowledgment. “Am En it is.” She picked the setting and began downloading keyboards. “And the civilian who wants to contact me?”
“He claims to be popularly known as the snake master. He wishes to inquire as to your mission with the hopes of advising you.”
Her whole face twitched.
“His name is-” the man checked a note. “Hay Roser.”
“Right,” Anko said, wrestling down extremely normal feelings about serpentine mentorship. “So, how would I do a little bit of background checking on this guy before I meet him?”
The answer turned out to be that you could just search his name and there was information publicly available. Fascinated and aghast, Anko tried searching famous people back home to see what kind of leak they had. There was very little… What existed was almost exclusively the work of some fisherman who had gotten blown far off course and wound up stranded in the outer countries. He had been from Kumo and he had shared, frankly, an unpatriotic amount of information. Anko mentally tallied up what Kumo would pay to have this man dead and congratulated herself on her new garden shed. She kicked her feet and giggled a little bit with glee as she figured out where the ship would dock closest to him.
‘I can get him on the way back, maybe put him in my luggage so I can waive him around Kumo’s face and threaten to release him back where I got his ass if they don’t pay up. Ho ho ho, I’m going to get an in-ground pond.’
Oh, right. The whole reason she had started using the fiery fox was to look at the snake man, Hay. She searched him up. It was nothing like Yamamoto-san’s Tanglr blog of national secrets, strange posts about bone-stealing-witches, and tastefully homoerotic images of bearded pirates. Hay’s online presence was obviously meant as a sort of resume.
That was not to say that Hay-san gave an immediate first impression that conveyed reassurance.
The website was obviously self-promotion and made inexpertly by someone who liked neon. Anko read it judgmentally, and then again with an open mind. It was full of bombastic language and fantastic claims about the long list of people dying for the wisdom of the snake master. It was hard to judge, but there were photos of him handling snakes that added a bit of credibility.
“He says he’s been bitten by lots of venomous snakes,” she told the tank by her bedside. A black-banded sea krate undulated conversationally to show he was listening. Since he was paying attention Anko turned and told him, “He probably knows what he’s doing if he has the most exciting snake shows in the country.” She showed him the screen.
They both looked at a cut-out image of the man himself holding a writhing armful of various snakes. He was wearing a bowling outfit for some reason. There were fake flames behind him and also a cartoon lightning bolt coming from the mouth of a brown snake.
The krate pursed his face up and didn't comment.
Fair enough. Aiko had her own thoughts. For example, what the hell was a snake show? Anko was dying to know.
So she contacted Hay Roser. He must have been waiting for her response, because his replies were instantaneous and about as modest as his website.
“A snake show is an unrivaled spectacle fit for all ages.”
That didn’t really answer what she wanted to know, but it was incredibly intriguing. She asked for clarification.
“Snakes are fit for audiences of all ages! Children especially love snakes.”
Anko felt her eyebrows go up. “Really?” she replied. That lined up with her personal experience being a child, but the chuunin exams had not engendered much surety in the serpentine receptability of children. “Is it younger the better?”
“Yes, before someone teaches them to fear snakes.”
She hummed. That made sense. It was probably a lot easier to love snakes before you were menaced by Orochimaru. You needed a foundation of trust. She needed access to small children, got it.
“I have one tomorrow. Please come. You don’t need a ticket. I want to speak with you in person, about a collaboration. I also want to know what you plan to do about the petition.”
“...The what?” Anko said, to the snakes in her room. A few loose grass snakes lifted their heads to see what she was talking about. “I think I need to find out what he’s talking about.” Who was petitioning her? Or was it a petition about her?
It was time to research herself and see what the locals thought was going on with her, apparently.
From this chapter of Vapors, by @electraposts. How I envisioned one of the many great, humorous scenes I’ve read in this fic.
“Do I look like a damsel in distress? I don't fucking think so. I'm an independent lady. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I missed my check up and I'm going to go take a nap.”
SUMMARY: The winning poll option for the Naruto character who would be a good celebrity was Anko. I am keeping the title a secret until the meaning of FM is revealed in part 3, but just know that Anko is hot, irreverent, and under investigation by at least one government.
Elemental Nations, post Chuunin Exams disaster.
“Congratulations on surviving a traumatizing encounter with the man who experimented on you and left you for dead as a child,” said the new Hokage. She stamped another paper and glanced up. “Is that why you’re in my office?”
Ugh. People always thought it was about him.
“Actually,” said Anko, “I have 4 months of leave saved up and I want to take it now. I was thinking I’d get on a ship and go to the Outer Countries for a while.”
Tsunade paused and truly looked at her then. “Are you going to wander the world indulging in some sort of sick coping mechanism that makes you worse in every way?” She asked. It was firm, but not cold. “Because that doesn’t solve anything. I checked.”
Anko rolled her eyes. “No,” she said scornfully. “I’m going to go meet international snakes and bring them back here to work with me.”
She was sick to death of working with snakes who still hung out with that jerk. She needed to meet new snakes, snakes with integrity and taste.
“…why the hell not,” decided the Hokage. “I’ll approve your leave.” She cracked her neck. “Have a nice trip. I need a weekly report, and try to stay out of the goddamn news. If you fail, send me a copy so I know what to do.” She ticked off her orders on her fingers one by one, then paused. “If you make us look bad in front of the other continents, I’ll blow up your ship before you can return. Got it?”
“Yeah, all the standard shit,” Anko dismissed. She gave her Hokage a tight salute. “I’ll be a good girl.”
Tsunade visibly shuddered.
Japan. first stop of a cruise ship that departed from the Western coast of the Elemental Nations
Not a week later, Anko was on a slow-moving cruise ship with three large shipping containers, a bunch of silly tourists, and a strict personal schedule. She had prepared a whole shelf of international language resources for this self-assigned mission. The first week of her cruise was spent preparing a massive personal language resource with what she would need. It was grim, necessary work to achieve her ambitions.
The first stop was in some island chain called Okinawa.
Anko got off the ship for the 32 hours of stopover, ready to work. She vaulted off the side of the ship and easily passed the slow moving line of sunburnt civilians in large hats and swimming wear who also wanted off the ship. It sucked to suck! She beelined her way to the hotel and was the first one to get helped.
“いらっしゃいませ.” The clerk greeted her and bowed.
Anko cut them off with a hand gesture. “蛇下さい。” she held out cupped hands, as if the hotel staff might have a snake on hand to give her.
She received a baffled look in return. Fair enough. Most people wanted to go to some dumb beach.
Anko cupped a hand over her eyes and made a show of searching. “蛇？蛇！”
“ああ、” said the clerk. She pointed outside. Then she gestured with her hands to indicate water. “蛇は….” The rest of what she said was indecipherable gibberish, because Anko had only learnt how to say, “Snake, please,” in each of the 10 languages she was studying. She gave the clerk a nod and a grin. “Thanks.” Anko strode back outside to the water, fiddling with the net in her coat pocket. Did she need that? Eh, whatever. She would use her hands. Anko licked her lips in anticipation.
She got back to the shoreline, thrust her coat off (ignoring some surprised sounds) and dove into the water to get herself a black-banded whatever. Krate? Sea krate? The important thing was that it was cute as hell and she needed 5.
When Anko emerged from the seat, soaking wet and satisfied, there was an audience waiting. A man in lurid orange underpants blathered at her in his foreign language, trying to get into her personal space with some sort of over sized plastic donut. He had huge pecs, with a whistle bouncing on them. She noted how nice they were, appreciated them, and then thrust her own chest out in a dominance display.
"Stay back," Anko warned. "And look!" She thrust a sea serpent at him, beaming. "Look at his cute little snoot!"
The serpent struck, bare millimeters from skin. The half-naked man screamed and fell back, scrambling away. He shouted in his language as he fled.
The beach erupted in screams. Everyone else ran away. Within seconds the beach was clearing up.
"...Huh," Anko said, baffled, and stuffed her snake into a sack from her coat pocket. She tied it up and slung it over her shoulder. "Weird."
It took her a few hours to get her fill of sea snakes. She stored them safely away on the ship in a tank and then went back to the tourist center. The same woman was trembling behind the counter, a customer service smile frozen in place.
"Jeeze."
It hurt her feelings a little.
Anko pretended not to see the manager duck under a table to avoid meeting her eyes. "Snake, please," she said again, in the local language., head up high. This sea snake was kickass, but they had to have more than one kind.
The receptionist trembled. She reached over and pulled out a brochure. She got out a red pen and circled several areas, which were currently marked with ... hm, at a guess, they were normally meant to be off-limits.
"Ha-bu," the woman said. She pointed at each area. "habu, habu, habu, habu."
"Neat." Anko took the brochure with a flourish. She tossed off a salute on the way out. She saw the white flash of a photo being taken, but she didn't pay it any mind. She was on a snake quest.
PART 2
If you liked this intro, join us over on my discord server and maybe vote for the next short story concept. But Anko isn't done cruising for serpents yet, she'll have at least 4 parts.
I have written a fic for the Akatsuki OC challenge.... I am eager to deploy it... but the hour is not yet nigh. it's pretty far away, actually. Days away.
Deidara spent about two blissful weeks in perfect solitude, making a decent kiln and digging out clay. He really took the time to process it nicely, achieving the best ratio of chakra and clay for his work, and created a few types of clay to work with using varying levels of local minerals.
Basically, it was what he had tried to do before Itchia shithead Uchiha had come by and kidnapped him into bringing the average intelligence and competency of the Akatsuki up a few percentage points. It had been a total waste of him that he could have been spending studying animals for his art, obviously.
Deidra took advantage of it now, on his stomach and staring with narrowed eyes at a lizard. The reptile moved once, jerkily, then froze again. He committed its proportions to memory. The movement… He could replicate that. Deidara prodded it with a finger to see the reaction. He crossed his legs at the ankle and let his bare feet sway and extend into the air.
When he wasn’t studying live models, he used all the free time to contemplate his life and his mistakes. He had lived through a lot of life and mistakes in 17 short years. What could he do better, going forward? Where had he gone wrong?
His real regret, Deidara decided, was that he hadn’t stomped the miserable remnants of the Uchiha out. What was the lesson to be learnt there? He had certainly tried, so it certainly wasn’t any shit about lacking passion and intention.
Did it mean he should spend more time preparing and thinking through his goals? Maybe he hadn’t had enough TNT. Maybe he had made a mistake by engaging before detonation so that his enemies would know who had killed them– that was a little cocky, he had to admit it, but it just felt so much better than assassinating some bingus with clay that looked like a boring rock underfoot. Deidara sighed, woefully weighing his artistic values and pleasure against his professional development.
“How would I feel,” he mused to himself, “if those fuckers were dead, but they hadn’t known it was me? Would I be more satisfied?”
It was, overall, just what he had wanted when he had run away from Iwa at age 14, although at that time he had expected to watch a lot more movies and eat in restaurants to save time hunting and cooking. Before that Uchiha dickhead had come and folded Deidara up into the Akatsuki, Deidata had been looking for an opportunity for artistic solitude and intellectual growth.
This brief time was probably the lifelong peak of his mental health. So of course those dickweeds came to ruin it for him. Deidara sensed them kilometers away, but he was busy with some fiddly detailing on a frilled lizard sculpture that was going to be able to eat humans and blow up with them inside its distended belly, so he sighed and waited. He didn’t want to have to outrun them. There wasn’t a world in which those two freaks gave up without having the conversation they wanted, so he might as well get it over with.
“Don’t care what they want, yeah,” he mumbled rebelliously to himself. Deidara wiped clay off of his face and scowled. “I’m never going to be tricked into misusing my art for a stupid quest for someone else again. I am only winning from now. I am self realized, yeah. I know myself and with that I cannot be led astray from my purpose and benefit.”
With that pep talk, he was a little more ready to talk with those assholes.
Kakuzu hummed, low, when he entered the makeshift studio clearing. Deidara had been using his cloak to keep water off his workspace and sleeping in the mine where he’d been digging out clay. “This is a lot,” he commented, with no opinion on the art visible. His gaze swept dispassionately over labeled mounds of clay in the process of curing, and the smoke from the kiln that Deidara was heating for the day. A lot of work and technical expertise was on display here. He itched for someone to talk about it intelligently.
Hidan snorted contemptuously. “But what’s it for?” he complained. He scuffed his feet on the ground, clearly considering giving a sculpture a good kick. Deidra silently hoped that the fuck would do it. It would probably take him a week to reform from that.
“It’s for my art, yeah,” Deidara said through his teeth. It was such a simple concept. He talked about his interests enough. He seethed in polite resentment for his shithead former coworkers. He knew about their interests, he thought. Kakuzu liked money and control, and Hidan liked tying up intestines and making people beg for Jashin at the end. The both of them stank, of course, like offal and human rot. Deidara eyed them for signs– Hidan’s fingernails still had blood under them, yeah, and Kakuzu had what was probably a body on his back. It was wrapped in bandages like it had come from a grave. Hm. Deidara eyed it. He was hearing some kind of faint sound from it, like whispers.
‘Surely it’s not alive, is it?’ he wondered dubiously. ‘Not like Kakuzu at all.’
“What a dumb way to use the time,” Hidan said blithely, poking a sculpture. Deidara tried to kill him. Kakuzu stopped him with a tentacle and wide, crazy eyes that said something like “hands off my boyfriend.”
“Ugh,” Deidara said, but backed off for the moment. He glowered. “What are you bothering me for? We aren’t friends and we don’t work together anymore,” he challenged sulkily. The whispers were getting louder.
“We could,” Kakuzu said. His tone might have been idle, coming from another old man. Coming from him, it was a subtle threat.
“...We could?” Deidara repeated, as neutrally as possible. He wasn’t really interested, yeah.
‘On the other hand, he might be able to point me in the direction of someone who would be worthy of my art. A stockpile like this shouldn’t go to waste.’
Kakuzu grunted. “There is an opportunity here,” he said, and then stopped like that was sufficient. Deidara let his eyebrows raise up to their limit and waited for more words to struggle out of that steel trap. “...I have eliminated our most likely competition.”
“--despicable low born sellswords, grave robbers and infidels…”
Ugh. The body was definitely talking. Behind Kakuzu, Hidan began to laugh like a hyena. It put the hair up on the back of Deidara’s neck. His eyes were wide and crazy as he reached over and patted the prisoner. The smell got even worse, somehow.
“What’s that mean, yeah?” Deidara asked suspiciously. “What’s funny?”
Kakuzu rebuffed him with a sneer. “None of your concern.” His face twitched, once, before he smoothed his expression out. “You can make accurate clones from your clay, sustained for days independently of you.”
“...If I care to, yeah,” Deidara admitted. “I don’t like to work with color, but I can mix pigments and paint them onto a sculpture that I animate-”
Hidan cut him off with a fart noise. Highly offended, Deidara started thinking that it might be worth detonating everything here, take them all back to hell, wouldn’t that be funny–
“curse from my ancestors–”
Kakuzu grunted, ignoring the complaints from his back as if he didn’t even hear them. He shouldered off the prisoner on his back. He hit the ground with a wet squelch that told Deidara he was wrong– that was a dead guy. What the hell? He reeled in confusion. What the hell was he hearing a third voice for, then?
“Recreate this man,” Kakuzu said. “It will lead to havoc.”
“Havoc?” Deidara asked, intrigued despite himself. He took a glance down at the body and immediately decided he didn’t care to know how it was talking. It was not fresh. He wrinkled his nose. “You dug that up?” Deidara said judgmentally. “Gross, yeah.” He knelt to examine the body, using a stick to poke at the features. The skin was grey and beginning to slip, but that nose… Deidara felt a sneer wrap across his face. “Looks like that Sasuke guy.” He ignored the offended sounds that the corpse issued somehow without moving its mouth. Some kinda kinjutsu, probably, he didn’t care. He jabbed it in the side with a stick. Heh. Stupid fucking Uchiha. He was dead and Deidara wasn’t, so who was the winner here? It wasn’t as nice as seeing Itachi’s body would have been, but it wasn’t half bad. Deidara smiled viciously as he tore into the soft flesh with his stick. Take that, loser. He jabbed the stick in the throat almost absentmindedly and left it– maybe that would shut it up, yeah.
“I don’t like Senju Hashirama,” Kakuzu said. It was as close to serenity as Deidara had ever heard from him. It was creepy, yeah. Deidara gave the old man an alarmed glance, but Kakuzu was clearly lost in his thoughts. “No one has a higher bounty. After his clan formally subsumed their rivals, there are many people who will pay for his death and the failure of his ambition.” The corpse grunted once, as if to say it agreed.
“...I don’t really care, yeah,” Deidara pointed out, wiping his hands off. He cocked his head to the side. “What’s in it for me?”
Hidan laughed again and barreled over to cling to Deidara’s side, an arm carelessly thrown over his shoulder. Deidara tried to squirm away but it was fruitless. The smell of rot was hot in Hidan’s breath when he crooned, “Wouldn’t you like to blow up the Senju and Uchiha clan heads? All that power and potential, gone!” He threw his hands up for emphasis.
“Curs!” the corpse shrieked.
Deidara took the chance to step away. He could have run– but he bit his lip. The Senju… They were dregs by his lifetime, yeah, but that Tsunade… She was a very impressive woman. What must her forefathers be like? And how would they react to his art– to a life model of what must be an Uchiha noble defeated in battle, returned from the dead? He felt a rictus smile pull across his features at the thought. It would be exquisite, yeah…
“What if I blew myself up?” he asked wistfully. “I want to see them, yeah.”
Hidan made another lunge for him, but this time Kakuzu grabbed the idiot and restrained him. The old man’s creepy green eyes glittered as he made eye contact. “That’s the idea,” he said. “You watch. When the Uchiha arrive and see that Senju Tobirama has defiled their beloved dead’s grave, imagine the scene.”
Deidara staggered. “Havoc,” he agreed worshipfully. “Blood, yeah, blood and fire and guts.” The first village founding was a historical event. How cool would it be to blow that up, yeah?
“Blow up Hashirama,” Kakuzu proposed, “and then Madara will murder Tobirama.” He looked… happy. “No hidden villages, no competition and no international regulation and cooperation.”
The corpse was silent now. Perhaps this was too horrific for it to contemplate.
“That’s not interesting to me, yeah,” Deidara managed. He was still a little breathless. “Yeah, alright.” He swallowed down a grin. “I just need to start making paints.”
“How long will that take?” Hidan asked. He picked up the hem of his robe and squeezed. “I have red.”
Kakuzu sneered. “Time is of the essence,” he said suspiciously.
Deidara waved him off. “I’m an expert, yeah. I just need primary colors and white. I can make it today if you go get the materials.”
“Can we not–”
“We are not purchasing art supplies for my creative climax, shithead. Start gathering herbs or just kill me.” Deidara crossed his arms, ready to die on this hill.
There was a long moment where Kakuzu clearly considered it. His lips flattened. The light went out of his eyes, leaving them cold and pitiless. He grunted. “Begin the sculpture,” he commanded, as if he was someone’s boss. His cloak flared behind him when he turned. “Hidan!” Kakuzu barked. “Find oak acorns.”
“What is this preschool quest bullshi- fuck!” Hidan bellowed, steam coming out of his ears in outrage that Kakuzu had pushed him through a tree. His ribs were flattened out, every one of them clearly broken. “Fine, fuck.” He plugged his bleeding nose. “I’ll find duh stubid fuggin acorns. Bitch.” Kakuzu stalked away without acknowledging any of that.
“I want kariyasu grass and suoh wood,” Deidara called out absentmindedly. He was already crouched over to give the corpse a good investigation. Height, musculature… “Yeah, I can use one of my clones as a basis, you’re about my height,” he muttered to the body. He gave the poofy hair a companionable pat. “We are gonna do great things together, yeah. Gonna get rid of all the Senju.”
The corpse said nothing, of course, but he couldn’t help but grin wildly at the idea that he was going to use an Uchiha to kill both the Senju. The bastard was probably shrieking up at him from hell now in outrage for his precious alliance. How angry would he be that his clan head was manipulated into attacking Senju Hashirama?
Haha. It wasn’t that different from the bullshit Itachi was always doing, confusing people about who was their friend and what way was up. But this time, it would be Deidara, yeah!
Deidara felt much cheerier now.
‘It’ll be my big victory against the Uchiha,’ he thought, already feeling vindication. ‘They would hate this so much.’
The body of Uchiha Izuna had nothing to say about this. He didn’t want to ruin it.
I LOVE Officer Not Down. The Sandaime is such a funny little guy, I love him in this fic. It should also be said that I think about the final battle with Pein in VAPORS at least once a week and have for several years. Your writing is imprinted on my brain
THANK YOU SO MUCH. I was thinking about that one recently, actually, for reasons related to what I'm writing now. it is honestly so exciting that what I write can touch people and affect them and I dont even know about itttttt. until they tell me. I appreciate that. (Heart Emoji)
