Close Quarters

"Mm, it doesn't rain like this in Iwagakure, un." Deidara wrinkles his nose against the downpour and immediately sneezes water. Rolling his eyes upwards, he gives the wide-brimmed straw hat he's wearing a look of disgust: the last fight left half of it burned away and charcoal-black in places – it had still been smoking lightly before the rain had started. Now he's got the choice of positioning the gaping hole in it towards the front, where the rain gets in his eyes and up his nose, or towards the back, wetting his hair and dumping buckets of rainwater down his back every time the tree they're trying to shelter under tosses its branches in the wind. He's trying to cover all his bases by moving the hole around from the front to the back every ten minutes or so. It doesn't seem to be working.

"Probably because the Iwa-nin would never stop bitching and moaning if it did." Hiruko's voice grates from underneath its own sheltering hat (which is completely intact and doing a lot better job keeping the rain off than his is, Deidara can't help but notice. It's not like Sasori even needs it, either…) "I've never known anyone whine as much as you, whelp."

"I'm not whining," he growls back, trying to keep his temper by sheer force of will. "I'm cold, un. And wet. And you wouldn't let me make us a shelter, so we're sitting in the middle of nowhere with no fire and soaking clothes. Un."

"A shelter," Deidara could swear he can see Sasori's ice-cold gaze lancing through Hiruko's glass eyes and piercing him to the bone just as easily as if the man was nose-to-nose with him directly. "Made of your damned exploding clay. If you really need me to explain to you again why that's a bad idea, then you're stupid as well as suicidal. I'm not spending the night inside something made of that, and neither are you."

"It doesn't explode unless I want it to," Deidara sniffs and rubs his nose with the back of his hand. He can feel the teeth in his palms chattering from cold, and that's never a pleasant sensation. "I'm not stupid, Danna, and I know what I'm doing. And if you trusted me for once then we'd both be dry and out of the wind right now, un."

"Moan moan moan," Sasori grumbles peevishly, tapping Hiruko's clawed fingers together. Deidara can tell that he's getting annoyed – 'good, that makes two of us, un,' he thinks. "Just shut up and deal with it, Deidara: are you a shinobi or are you a little girl? I'm having trouble telling the difference right now."

"Says the shinobi hiding from the weather in his oversized doll, un," Deidara mutters under his breath, not too concerned about Sasori overhearing him. Perhaps a round of dodging another of Sasori's attempts to hack off one of his limbs will chase the chill from his bones, he thinks - who says he can't be an optimist?

Hiruko's neck clicks around to look at him with a sound like ball bearings running over one another, and Deidara feels his breath still as he waits for Sasori to make his move. Usually he's thrown something sharp or sent his scorpion-tail scything through the air in the direction of Deidara's neck by now, so his stillness probably means that something bad is coming.

Something very bad indeed.

Expecting a projectile as he is, the last thing Deidara is ready for is for Hiruko's huge bulk to lunge at him, and he propels himself back in a move that's more 'fall over' than it is 'evasion', landing on his backside in a rapidly-forming pool of mud and ice-cold rainwater with a sound of disgust. He doesn't have time to react in any other way, however: with an almost silent sound, a hatch in Hiruko's side slides open and a skinny arm shoots out, grabs the collar of Deidara's Akatsuki coat and hauls him bodily inside the large puppet, the hatch sliding closed again with a click as Deidara's abandoned hat floats upside-down in the puddle for a moment and then sinks.

Inside Hiruko – 'Oh gods, it's like being buried alive in here, un, inside your very own coffin and everything' – Deidara finds himself pressed up against a curving wooden surface, splinters at his back and Sasori's fist still bunched in his collar and pressing hard into his throat. His partner's other hand clamps over Deidara's mouth and nose, and he finds himself looking into glassy brown eyes that somehow still manage to show off Sasori's very obvious desire to hurt him right now. "Shut up shut up shut up…" Almost nose to nose – not like they have any choice in here – Sasori's voice bounces off the enclosing space and somehow sounds almost as deep as it does from outside when he speaks through Hiruko. 'How does he do that anyway,' Deidara wonders, 'it's not like there's a microphone in here or even anywhere to see out of, and if you don't let go of me Danna then I'm going to pass out.' He rather wonders if that's the idea.

"Shut up," Sasori tells him again, just in case he hadn't gotten the message the last three times, then lets go of Deidara's throat and mouth and sits back… as far as the limited space inside Hiruko will allow, anyway. "Take off your wet coat and sit there, and if I hear you complain again then I will kill you. Pain will just have to deal with it."

"…What?"

"I haven't said anything, Danna," Deidara protests, screwing his eyes up as best he can to try and get a better view of the man sitting opposite him. Even without figuring in the pressing gloom inside the puppet it's no easy task: Sasori might be able to fit in here quite comfortably all by himself, but Deidara has a few inches on the other man, not to mention living human muscles that still ache and seize up if he's forced to, say, sit with his neck at a 45-degree angle for two hours without moving it. "It's too low in here to sit up straight, that's all."

"Tch. And here I thought I was going to have some peace for once." Precisely what Sasori needs the peace for Deidara isn't sure: for the last two hours the other man has sat unmoving and lifeless against the opposite wall, like having a department store mannequin sitting less than a foot away from him. The effect is eerie, and he's secretly rather glad to see Sasori moving and hear him speaking again, even if he's glaring at him now. It's still better than the unblinking doll-eyes from before.

Sasori heaves a sigh, and Deidara wonders again why he built that capability into his puppet body in the first place. 'It's not like he needs air to breathe, un.' Then he shifts to the side slightly and taps one finger against Hiruko's floor, producing a hollow wooden sound. "Lie down."

"What?"

"Lie down," Sasori says again, as though talking to a child. "Hiruko's wider than it is tall, idiot: curl up on your side and put your head in my lap."

"I-in your lap, Danna?" Deidara's face probably gives away exactly what he's thinking, judging from the look of pure disgust Sasori shoots him in turn.

"I'm not having your muddy feet in my lap instead, Deidara," The warning tone is back in his voice, and stronger than it was before. "You can do as you're told, or you can go back outside in the rain. It sounds like it's getting worse out there." Deidara can read Sasori's tone well enough to know that he'd be thrown back outside with a shot of poison burning its way through his veins to keep him warm, so he swallows hard and crawls forward until he's able to lie down and hesitantly place his head in Sasori's lap. It's every bit as uncomfortable and awkward as he'd expected. 'Like using a rock as a pillow, un. I bet he hasn't even got anything down there anymore anyway: just a blank space like a kid's doll when you take its pants off, and-'

"Settle down." Just as if he knew what his partner was thinking, Sasori's voice comes from somewhere above Deidara's head, sounding distinctly unamused. "There's nowhere to go until morning, so you might as well get some sleep and leave me alone for a few hours."

'Mm, try sleeping yourself in this position, Danna, or sleeping at all come to think of it… when's the last time I saw you do anything but your creepy doll impression, un? Or maybe you sleep here inside Hiruko, but that's even creepier. Would love to blow this thing wide open to the sky, get some fresh air in here…' As his eyes close and he starts to slip into a boneless sprawl on the edge of sleep, the tiniest smile flits across Deidara's face. 'Not the C2; that would just leave a crater and for Hiruko we'd need some artfully smoking wreckage to truly make the piece. The C1, then, maybe a little scorpion to fit thematically, un, and-'

"Stop that." Sasori pokes him in the ribs with his finger: it feels like being jabbed with a stick. "You're thinking about blowing Hiruko up with your good-for-nothing bombs."

'How does he-' "No I'm not!" Deidara protests, fully awake again and only prevented from sitting up by the sight of Sasori's upside-down face leaning over him. If his head and Sasori's make contact, the human one is going to be on the losing side. "I was going to sleep, un."

"So go to sleep." Sasori says with a curl of his lip, "and leave myself and Hiruko out of whatever little fantasies are running through your head while you do."

"Like I'm going to be able to do that now, un…" With a grumble, Deidara wriggles as best he can – Sasori's lap really does make an awful pillow – and forces himself to relax again. Despite his partner's warning just now, he can't help picturing the beautiful bang that Hiruko would make as it blew out from the inside with just a little bit of C1, and how he's ever going to get to sleep when he's expecting another poke from Sasori's twiggy finger any second he doesn't know…

The first thing that Deidara is aware of is the silence all around him. The rain drumming on Hiruko's shell had been a constant companion all through the night, but as he drifts back to consciousness he can't hear anything at all, and a foggy part of his brain wonders where he is. He half-turns over, knocking his heels painfully into a wall that's way too close and feeling the ache in his neck at almost the same instant. "Damnit…!" Not bothering to sit up, he curls into a ball and punches the pillow he's lying on with his fist a few times in the vain hope that it'll somehow soften and become more comfortable.

"If I still had a human body I'd be very unhappy with you for that." He hears Sasori's dry monotone above him at the same time as his knuckles register contact with something wooden and hollow, and with a sudden jolt of horror he realises who he's punching and where.

"Sasori-danna!"

It's a scramble for Deidara to go from horizontal to vertical in the cramped space in less than a second flat, but he's not a member of the Akatsuki for nothing and a moment later his wide and slightly panicked blue eyes are looking into Sasori's flat brown ones… or he would be, if there weren't a blonde curtain hanging in his way. Reaching out, he gathers handfuls of his loose hair and pushes it behind his back, wondering vaguely what happened while he was asleep. Surely he'd been dreaming when he thought he felt hands moving through his hair in the middle of the night, or…?

"…Your top-knot was pressing into my stomach," Sasori explains blandly. "I was worried you were going to move and trigger one of my traps in your sleep."

"Worried, Danna?" Oh, he's cramped and aching and he's been awake for all of a minute, and yet he still can't help himself from baiting his older and much more irritable partner in a confined space with no escape-routes. Maybe Sasori's onto something when he says that Deidara is going to die young. "Worried… about me?"

"About Hiruko." Sasori's tone says he's about one good push away from spitting fire – literally – by Deidara's estimation. "If you die in an enclosed space like this I'm never going to get the stink out of the wood. Hiruko will be useless as camouflage if it reeks of dead Iwa-nin."

"Right." A smirk crosses Deidara's face as he reaches up to touch the bare skin where his forehead-protector should be: no wonder his hair is all over the place. "And that's why you took my forehead protector off too, un? Nothing to do with being able to stroke my hair in the night, then. While you thought I was sleeping."

The hatch in Hiruko's side springs open again, and out pops Deidara like a Jack-in-the-box, helped along his way by Sasori's small foot planted squarely on his backside. He hits the wet grass and rolls, not even needing to hear the telltale whistling in the air to know that a wickedly sharp scorpion tail is aimed straight for him. He darts behind a tree, leaps behind another when the first is reduced to a shower of damp sawdust by a swing of Hiruko's arm, and slips his right hand into the bag of clay belted to his hip. A few moments later a tiny bird flutters away and swells as it climbs into the air, doubling back and swooping low enough for Deidara to leap onto its back.

From his vantage point above the trees, he sees Sasori's arm flash out of the hatch again before it closes, tossing the Akatsuki coat Deidara had taken off before he fell asleep out onto the grass. Even without his scope, Deidara can see just how much damage a cranky ex-Suna-nin with a kunai can do to a defenceless piece of clothing in a matter of seconds - as the mutilated fabric flutters on the ground there's more green to be seen against the black background than red; raindrop-studded blades of grass poking up through dozens of fresh slits slashed into the material. Hiruko treads it deeper into the mud as its huge bulk passes over it as Sasori heads off to continue their journey. The coat is done for, Deidara decides, leaving it behind as the shadow of his bird wheels over and around the lumbering puppet on the ground below, keeping watch from on high where he's out of reach both of Sasori and any dangers that might suddenly leap out on him without warning. More and more often these days, Deidara thinks those two things are one and the same. He snickers to himself, gripping his bird's back with his knees and balancing as he uses both hands to refasten his top-knot.

"I don't know about your 'art', Danna, but you're a real piece of work, un."