Prompt received from tumblr user thriceandonce. Two sittings, still no editing. Content note: fic contains vomiting.
For about three minutes Deidara considered just leaving Itachi.
Taking him would be a pain in the ass if he didn't stop vomiting up his lungs anyway. Nobody would know that Deidara had made the executive decision to cut their collective losses. And Deidara'd sleep better with the knowledge that he'd left Itachi to die in the thick, sticky mud of Time Country.
Time Country had sounded cool from the name - and from the tourism board's advertisements, procured by Tobi (who enjoyed being as aggravatingly irrelevant as he could get away with) - but actually it was a hotbed of boring, interpersonal chaos and paranoia. And clocks. There were eighty eight princes behind Time's closed and heavily enforced borders, and each was trying to slaughter his way to the throne.
If it had been up to Deidara, he'd have just picked out the least inbred one and propped him up on the fancy chair.
(It was not up to Deidara.)
The scenery wasn't even any good. The air was humid and it rained all the time, and everything was mud. Trees? Secretly mud. Rain? Sometimes muddy. Ground? Do not even get Deidara started.
Time Country was a lot less cool than it had sounded in the brochures.
There was a part of Deidara champing at the bit to take this opportunity to turn Itachi into a beautiful work of art - he'd like to see his face, pale and confused as it was right now, fill with the dawning realisation of what was about to befall him. And then, oh, and then, to see the pillar of flame for miles, putting the sun in the sky to shame, when he went up in smoke. His heart raced at the very thought.
It'd draw too much attention to set him on fire, probably. If Deidara wanted to survive anyway, which he did. For now. But despite that, Deidara was, briefly, very excited about the prospect of just ...leaving Itachi there.
It wasn't artistic, but it was pragmatic.
On the other hand, he was really going to need Itachi's genjutsu to get back across the border if he wanted to cross it undetected. Deidara could go just about anywhere, physically speaking, but getting there in absolute stealth was moderately more difficult for a man whose idea of 'regular transport' was giant exploding birds.
He tapped his fingers on his arm pensively.
If he blew their mission and came back without Itachi... Deidara didn't think they'd kill him. He had the longest range of any of them, with the possible exception of Konan. They'd need Deidara for capturing the bijuu more than they'd need the cash they'd get for turning in his bounty. So... Pein would glower. It would be months of confinement, probably with Tobi as an ongoing punishment - and then all, 'do not disappoint us again' and looming eyes in the dark. That was probably a fair price to get rid of Itachi, honestly, but it wasn't the only consideration he had to make.
It was Kakuzu who arranged missions and took payments. He wouldn't be pleased with a mission failure. Especially since this would not be just a 'we scouted, and we need a new plan' kind of setback, but rather a 'we were discovered and now the entirety of Time Country is on fire' kind of deal.
Needing Deidara's skills might not help if Kakuzu lost his temper. (Deidara was still kind of waiting to see Kakuzu find his temper in the first place. Just once, yeah?)
Was it worth it to kill Itachi if he'd also have to come up with a plan to kill Kakuzu?
Deidara could definitely (...probably) make it look like someone else had set the country on fire, which was almost as good as going undetected. He hated not getting credit for his own work, of course - Deidara wasn't one of these meek anonymous modern artists, frightened of their own infamy. Assigning credit for his work to someone else felt a lot like being plagiarised. He still felt flashes of seething jealousy for those upon whom he'd had to bestow credit for some of his earlier works.
The idea left a bitter taste in his mouth.
The other issue, of course, was that Hoshigaki Kisame had managed to bring Itachi back from every single mission they'd ever gone on. Then they send him out with Deidara, and he mysteriously dies in a ditch in Time Country? Deidara would consider that a pretty thin story, too, yeah.
Which was saying nothing about how Hoshigaki himself might react.
He glanced over again.
In sum, letting Itachi die here meant fighting with Kakuzu and possibly Kisame, not to mention whatever Pein ended up doing about it.
A few feet away, Itachi braced one hand against the trunk of a muddy tree and threw up yet more blood.
Deidara considered it.
Letting Itachi die here also meant that at no later point could Deidara blow him up. He'd be sacrificing art for convenience.
That was the thought that really decided him. Ugh.
Itachi retched almost silently - most ninja had the habit - but the blood and bile made a thick, wet slapping noise hitting the dirt. The endless drizzling rain couldn't quite cover it.
He was clutching the mission objective like a good boy, of course, but now it had bonus blood splattered all over the box. The blood, Deidara reflected, was probably diseased.
"Do you have, like, TB or something?" Deidara asked warily.
"No," said Itachi. It came out just as flat and expressionless as normal - Uchiha would rather drink hemlock than have an expression, as usual - but now it sounded like he'd been gargling broken glass. "We can continue."
They very plainly could not continue. Itachi had to stop at least every two miles to barf, and at this point he was bringing up so much blood that they should probably be worried about, like, actual circulatory shock.
Well, Itachi should be, anyway.
If Itachi really did die of natural causes out here Deidara could bring his body back in a scroll and he'd be in the clear... But again, that was a missed opportunity to blow him up.
He'd still have to frame someone else for the mess he'd make crossing the border...
Deidara flexed his hands and licked their teeth restlessly.
So Itachi needed to survive this mission, which meant they were going to have to find shelter and wait out this little sickness of Itachi's, however long it took.
He recalled a cave, right before this charming patch of swamp.
He recalled thinking it was a likely-looking shelter, and then thinking how nice it was that they weren't going to have to stay in it because this was a fast in-and-out and they just needed to cross the border again -
Deidara really hated Itachi.
And because Itachi could barely be trusted to walk in a straight line right now, Deidara was going to have to - he was going to be the one getting firewood and digging latrine trenches and hunting because like hell he was eating ration bars and-
"I hate you," he hissed, gritting all four sets of teeth as he stalked forward, grabbed Itachi's arm and heaved it over his own shoulder. Uchiha 'We Can Continue' Itachi immediately leaned half his weight on Deidara with a sound somewhere between surprise and, like, thick slurping death.
It was not very much weight, which gave Deidara the sneaking suspicion that he'd already been sick when he'd come on this mission - with no consideration for the convenience and health of his mission partner. Of course.
His lanky, too-light body convulsed again, and he gave a viscous-sounding gluurgh, and then Deidara could feel the new, body-temperature blood sliding across his bare toes.
"I hate you," he repeated, impotently but with savage emphasis, and began to haul Itachi across the swamp.
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