Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or any of its characters. (I wish I owned Itachi, but sadly, I don't.)
Warning: Contains spoilers for the manga. Rated T because Hidan has a line.
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Body and Soul
They had sent a squad of ANBU to retrieve Sasori's body, as well as all of his and Chiyo's puppets. Those bodies had contained secrets they didn't want anyone outside of Sand to know. But the squad had never returned, and so a larger team was sent to investigate. In the cave where Chiyo and the Leaf-nin Haruno Sakura had battled Sasori, they found the dead bodies of the ANBU squad they had previously sent. Temari knelt beside one of the corpses and examined its wounds.
"These wounds look like they were made by a katana, but there are foreign chakra traces around the edges. I would say that their attacker used a chakra blade."
"You mean a weapon made entirely of the user's chakra?"
"Yes. Such a weapon can be very powerful, because the user can change its shape and size as needed. Plus, a skilled user can add chakra nature manipulation to the weapon, allowing it to channel any of the five elements."
"Sir!" A member of the Sand's ANBU force hurried up to Temari and Kankuro. "We've found these." He held out his cupped hands, revealing a few strands of blue hair and a crushed white flower.
A nearby medical ninja rushed over and knocked the items out of the ANBU's hands. "Baka, don't touch that! That flower, when crushed, emits a poisonous gas that causes anyone nearby to become dizzy and disoriented. The user would need to have slowly acclimated himself to it over a period of years in order to become immune. The gas will have dissipated by now, but touching the flower itself with your bare hands is dangerous."
"What I don't understand," Kankurou said, "is why the Akatsuki would want his body in the first place. It's not like they can bring him back."
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"What the hell did he make himself out of, lead?" A slim figure slipped the inert body off her shoulders and placed it on a table. Rummaging in a pocket, she then laid a scroll beside it. "All his puppets are sealed within that scroll. Most of them are broken, though, and I haven't got a clue how to fix them. What's the point of this, anyway? His biological core has been damaged beyond repair. He's dead."
"Not quite," came a voice from a shadowy corner of the room. "You'll notice that there are two scrolls he didn't use during the battle. Take a look at them."
Slender fingers reached out and plucked the first scroll from a holder on Sasori's back. "This is…" The voice trailed off into silence, and then resumed in a tone of awe. "Sealing a corpse or an inanimate object inside a scroll is child's play. Sealing a living body can be done, but it's harder because you have to keep the body alive while it's sealed. Sealing only chakra, without a physical body at all, is thought to be impossible."
"So Sasori sealed his chakra into a scroll right before the old hag kicked his ass. What fucking good is that if we can't get it out?"
"That, Hidan-san, is what the second scroll is for," replied the voice from the shadows.
The blue-haired woman unrolled the second scroll, and whistled in admiration. "This scroll describes the jutsu that allows the chakra sealed within the first scroll to be transferred back into the body. We'll have to heal the biological core first with medical ninjutsu, of course, but that's simple. The problem is…this jutsu is so sophisticated that even I can't perform it."
"Let me see." A hand was extended across the table, and a ring bearing the kanji "Scarlet" glinted in the dim light. Crimson eyes perused the scroll. "I can do this, but it will take some time."
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Sasori drifted, wondering how long it had been since his body was destroyed. He couldn't see or hear anything. There were no physical sensations at all, except for the sense of his chakra swirling around within the medium it had been sealed into. Without any physical senses, the passage of time became distorted. And for all that time, all he could do was think.
Ever since turning himself into a puppet, he had taken it for granted that he would live forever. A puppet body did not decay with the passage of time, after all, and was not subject to disease. Any damage done to it could be easily repaired. His only weakness was the biological core that housed his chakra, and no one—not even the other Akatsuki members—knew about it. With so many overlapping protections against death, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, he'd gotten an answer to that, hadn't he?
At first, his defeat at the hands of Sakura and Chiyo hadn't bothered him all that much. It was a bit annoying to be beaten by a chuunin and his grandmother (his grandmother, of all people!), but he hadn't been really worried. After all, his comrades in the Akatsuki would retrieve him. They wouldn't want anyone else to find his body and decipher its secrets. And once they had his body, they wouldn't be able to resist examining the two remaining scrolls, and then they would discover that he wasn't really dead. They would bring him back.
But as more time went on, he began to wonder. Each day that passed (or was it really a minute? An hour? A week?) eroded his confidence in his eventual rescue. He knew that, given enough time, the jutsu that held his chakra within the scroll would dissipate, and he would truly die. The thought absolutely terrified him. He had been so sure that he would live forever, and now, death seemed to be just around the corner.
His worry grew into outright fear, and then into a state approaching panic. He felt as though he had to do something, but what could he do with no body? The prospect of floating here, disembodied, waiting to die, was intolerable, but he had no choice. Why did they leave me here? Why has no one come for me? What's going to happen? Will death be painful? Will it happen all at once, or will it be a slow process as my chakra gradually detaches from the physical medium it's currently bound to? Just as these questions threatened to overwhelm him, he felt a familiar chakra signature approaching. The Akatsuki kunoichi's chakra brushed against his own as she lifted his body. Other chakra signatures appeared—Sand ANBU, if he wasn't mistaken—but they flickered and died one by one as they fought Sasori's rescuer.
If Sasori had a body, he would have smiled. Once again, death had failed to claim him.
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Having his consciousness split between two locations was an odd sensation. As Itachi channeled his chakra from the scroll back into his body, he gradually regained the physical sensations he was used to. Voices ebbed and flowed around him while images shifted in and out of focus. He could feel hands and tools mending his puppet body, and had impressions of various chakra signatures coming and going from the room where he rested.
All these sensations became more concrete as more and more of his chakra was poured back into the healed biological core of his puppet body. Finally, he felt his chakra spreading through his limbs, and knew that he could move if he wanted to. The voices of his comrades rang in his ears as Itachi calmly announced, "The jutsu is complete." He opened his eyes, and found himself looking down at the stone floor a room in the Akatsuki base.
"See, Deidara-senpai? I told you I could fix Sasori-san's body!" Tobi's enthusiastic voice sounded like it was coming from about an inch away from his ear.
"Yeah, Tobi, you did a really good job. Everything is absolutely perfect, except for this one tiny little thing, yeah."
"What tiny little thing is that, Deidara-senpai?"
"You screwed his head on backwards, you baka!" This was followed by the sound of a small explosion.
Sasori laughed, and everyone turned to stare at him. Laughter was not a sound that anyone associated with the stoic puppetmaster. They all looked flabbergasted, but Sasori didn't care. He had cheated death one more time. He was alive.
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A/N: So, I started the second chapter of "Two Seals" and was planning to finish that, but my muse started beating me over the head with the idea for this story. I've got another Akatsuki one-shot in the works too, as well as the remainder of "Two Seals." Reviews would be much appreciated!