Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I do not own Naruto or any of its affiliations…I am merely borrowing its characters and settings to indulge my own fantasies and then share said fantasies with other people who equally do not own Naruto. I am not making any profit off this. I have lost hours of my life on this shit though. Days. Nights. Months.
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o o o
Stranded on the ocean, drowning there at best, so I came unto your desert
o o o
With the order to "take the little seedling and plant her elsewhere," Sakura and her new sensei had been promptly booted out of the Tsuchikage Tower after their rather short introduction.
"So, I guess you'll want something to eat and then to go to sleep," Deidara said, rubbing absently at the back of his neck.
Sakura, who was standing a few steps behind him outside the building, tossed her book at the back of his head. "Don't just say that so casually! All we got to was, 'Deidara-sensei, at your service, Sprout,' and then we were kicked outside!"
He met her aggression with an unimpressed look. "We'll have to work on your basic strength first, I guess."
"So you're not a guard, then? How old are you? Does the Tsuchikage even like you? Are you a jounin? How old are you, again?"
With each question, Deidara's expression soured. "Stop asking me things so quickly!"
She closed her mouth, as she'd opened it for another rapid-fire round, and gave him an expectant look.
Deidara sighed and drew a hand down his face as if he was suffering terribly. "No. Fifteen. Of course, who doesn't? Yes, definitely. And again, I'm fifteen, yeah."
Sakura hopped down the last few steps to catch up to Deidara, and thus discovered, to her worsening dismay, that her teacher was only fix or six centimetres taller than her. "You are...about three years older than me, then. When were you promoted? Have you taught any students before? Do I have team mates?"
The hand previously pulling at Deidara's eyes was suddenly pressed over Sakura's lips, preventing her from speaking. "Okay, I get that you're curious, yeah. But can't you at least spread these questions throughout the night?"
Supposing that she was being a bit demanding to someone who was meant to be in some sort of superior position, Sakura nodded her head. The hand was quickly withdrawn.
"Right. We've got a bit of a walk, yeah, so I'll just talk as we go."
"How far?" The question was purely reflexive, but she smiled apologetically at Deidara's exhausted grimace any way. "Sorry, habit. Whenever you're ready, then."
Not quite sure if he was willing to trust her yet, Deidara gave her one last wary appraisal. Finally he took off down one of the many streets that lead to and from the tower.
He slipped into guide-mode seamlessly.
"Where to start? That ramen stand there looks good, but really it's crap. The best place for underground Shougi is down that alley, third stoop, Fuji's place. Hmm, don't buy anything from this corner shop, the guy's a crook. The weapons here are all second hand, so you have to be careful when buying something. I think I bought a cursed kunai set there and I swear the spirit still haunts the boiler room. I like the dango at Matsui's, down that street –she has her own recipe for the sauce. It's pretty good. This is one of the nicer bath houses."
Sakura followed where Deidara pointed, trying to decide whether any of the information he was giving her was actually useful. Everything he pointed out seemed somewhat irrelevant, and a lot of it had to do with food. She sighed when he mentioned the third "terrible" ramen shop.
She didn't even like ramen.
Her sensei caught the noise, though she hadn't really meant to be ostentatious. "All right, all right. So tell me bookworm, how much do you know about Iwagakure?"
"Nothing about restaurants, but I have learned a fair amount from the books I've read."
"The ones your Leaf superiors assigned?" He teased, doubting her objectivity.
Sakura sneered, a little smug. "No, from the ones I've independently decided to read, thank you very much. I don't just think what people tell me to."
If there was one thing Sakura liked, it was dashing preconceptions others had about her intelligence and knowledge.
Since Deidara was foreign, and from a previously hostile country no less, she wasn't surprised by his scepticism, but she was so going to enjoy beating it down. As they walked, she listed the clan names that had formed Iwagakure in its infancy, the name of the first Earth Daimyou, the contracts and treaties the two bodies had agreed upon, the social and economical situations that stipulated those agreements. Battles and incidents that helped bolster Iwagakure's strength and reputation.
And she had plenty more to share except her sensei covered his ears and moaned at her to stop. "Okay, okay, I don't care! Kami, I get it, yeah, you know some stuff. So pretentious."
"Not pretentious. You asked and I just happened to be informed." Okay, so she had been showing off a little. Sakura smiled at his pout as he kicked at a loose rock in the road.
"I didn't even know copies of Tetsuhaza's texts existed outside of Earth Country..." he remarked, going back to sources she had referenced while talking.
Sakura had actually never considered how her father had acquired it. "It's pretty rare, I guess."
There was a pause and they both walked silently. Then, "you're a weird kid, Haruno."
"Yeah, I've been told..."
After that, they went back to Deidara pointing out things about his home town and giving advice on food, and Sakura discovered, to her dismay, that Iwagakure was a very uneven city. Geographically, in this case. There were a lot of dips and climbs, unlike Konoha, which was mostly flat.
"So anyhow, yeah, I live past the city limits. Privacy, you know?" Deidara announced, interrupting his own narration. "We're getting sort of close now."
Sakura didn't quite follow him, because out of nowhere the stone blocks and narrow streets had given way to a steep, cliffed drop off into a forest. It had been building crammed against building for the past hour of walking, then down one alley – BAM – forest. Sakura looked to her left and right, seeing that the tree line extended a great distance in each direction.
Then she realised what she was looking at. "This is...this is the First Hokage's Mokuton jutsu. The gift he offered Iwagakure at its founding. This takes up the city's entire northern front!"
Deidara smirked, looking out into the dense trees, the canopy at their eye level. "The very same, yeah. And those mountains," he nodded to the peaks in the distance, "are where we're heading."
"You live all the way out there?" Sakura repeated, groaning internally for the sake of her sore calf muscles.
The blond grinned down at her. "I practice some...hazardous jutsu, so I need the distance from vital locations, yeah. Besides, this way we'll be able to train there without too many people hassling us."
At that moment Sakura knew why Deidara was her sensei; the Tsuchikage had placed her with him with the sole intention of keeping her as far away from Iwagakure's shinobi operations as possible. Tricky man, she thought. How very ninja-like of him. "So I guess this means I don't have any team mates?"
"Nope. Lucky, right? Exciting, yeah?" Deidara goaded.
Sakura pretended not to hear her sensei, whistling as she looked anywhere but at him.
"Ehn, fine, fine. Be that way," he dismissed her, tagging something suspiciously like 'leaf brat' under his breath, but still loud enough for her to hear.
Secretly, she smiled, liking that he understood when she was teasing him and that he was easy going enough to play along.
He perked up. "Last one to the house makes dinner, yeah!"
Sakura gave him an exasperated look, about to explain how unfair that was considering his familiarity with the area –only to find that he was gone.
"Sakura-chan's going to loo-oose!" Deidara called back from where he was already hopping down over the side of the rock face.
"Cheater!" she yelled, quickly starting off after him.
"Nope! Shinobi," he corrected.
Descending a cliff was tricky, even for an academy graduate. After a couple of minutes, Sakura heard Deidara's voice from the forest floor below. "Come on, Sprout! Tell me you're faster than that, yeah!"
Sakura groaned as she dropped onto a little ledge and saw that she'd only made about twenty metres of progress, with three-quarters left to go. There was a pom of smoke at her side as Deidara appeared on the ledge with a shunshin jutsu.
"First lesson, Sakura-chan," he said, bringing his hands in front of his chest to make a Ram hand seal. "If you concentrate chakra to your feet, you can use it as a means of sticking onto surfaces against the pull of gravity. See?"
He demonstrated this by walking up the rocks until his head was perpendicular to her own.
"Your turn. Don't worry, I'll wait 'til you've got it, yeah. I understand that you're a Leaf and that this could take a while."
Sakura rolled her eyes at the jab, but then closed them nonetheless, trying to envision her chakra pathways. The image was clear in her mind, and she felt the energy circulating her body in kind. Okay, just...go to my feet, Chakra.
There was a satisfying, silent hum along the bottom of each foot almost immediately. Sakura withheld a gasp at the feeling of her stance becoming almost suction-like on the stone.
A thought came to mind as soon as she assured herself she had perfect control of the technique; she plastered an excited smile onto her face. "I think I have it Deidara-sensei! Look!"
Sakura stepped over to the edge – making as if to walk over it, when she lost her hold and started to fall. She shrieked, twisting in mid air to stare, shocked for a split second at Deidara's paling face before he was out of sight.
Careful to keep her toes attached to the rock's surface, she allowed her body to fall, continuing the motion into a backwards handstand until her hands had cemented onto the underside of the ledge and her legs had fallen under her again.
"Shit! Sakura–"
She had just barely managed to sneak her entire body under the ledge when Sakura saw Deidara's blurry form stream by.
"Made you jump!" She yelled after him, laughing.
Deidara had the grace to twist around to look at her as he fell, panic replaced by his middle finger and the words "fuckin' Leaf" floating up to her.
With the skill of a high-level ninja, he summoned a rock arm out of the cliff with a douton jutsu and landed on it nimbly.
Confident with her new ability, Sakura caught up to him easily, running and jumping as she descended.
"First lesson!" she mimicked as she cartwheeled into a stop at his side, "never doubt a Leaf Kunoichi!"
For a few seconds, all her sensei did was pout, making her feel a bit guilty about the prank.
"Hey, Sakura-chan!" Deidara said, though the person in front of her didn't move. "You can sit there all night talking to that dummy if you'd like, yeah, but a real kunoichi would be following me!"
Sakura whipped her head around to see a waving Deidara standing in the woods. She'd never seen him use a technique to sneak off.
"Catch me if you can!" He barked before turning and jumping to another tree. His form bounced between the ground, roots, and trunks as he steadily moved away.
"Th-that's not fair!"
It was dark by the time their game of chase had ended, and Sakura was barely able to stand when she came to a stop just a few paces behind her still completely energized teacher. He had teased her the entire journey, always lingering just out of reach and egging her on with insults.
"Hey there, Sprout. Grow any roots while I left you in the dust?"
Sakura had the dignity to stick her tongue out at him between gasps of air.
He ignored it, instead focusing on something ahead of them. They had slowly but surely been increasing in elevation again as they had gone through the forest, and finally come to the base of a mountain. Several hundred feet above their heads, she could see lights glowing and the shadow of a large building constructed into the rocks.
"That looks like a temple," Sakura said, squinting to see better.
Deidara smirked at her, clearly proud. "Not exactly, yeah. It's my studio. Slash home."
"That's wonderful, but why does it have to be so far away..." She was at the point where her body was overtaxed and cooling rapidly with the sudden lack of motion. Against her will, her muscles were starting to shake.
With the aid of evening shadows, Sakura didn't see his smile falter before Deidara schooled his expression. "Ha! Looks like we have a lot of work to do, yeah. Shinobi. They must hand those hitai-ate out like candy in your village."
Sakura rubbed at the metal plate holding back her hair. "That's not true..."
Deidara watched her quietly for a moment, his teasing smile loosening. He pat her shoulder then, in something of a reassuring fashion.
"I know, Sprout," he said, almost gently.
Sakura blamed the resulting flush of her cheeks on the recent run.
Her sensei saw this and quickly snatched his arm back to his side, pivoting awkwardly to walk up steps carved into the ground. He talked while he moved away, mechanically motioning for her to follow. "Still have to get you something to eat, yeah."
She felt the corners of her mouth pull upwards as she followed after him.
From the base of the mountain, the structure had looked imposing. Up close it was simply amazing.
The style was unlike anything she had seen in Konoha, constructed out of slabs of stone, some of the blocks nearly as tall as she. It was huge and labyrinthine in the way it seemed to coil around the slope and crags. Every few metres along the top of the wall, there were steadily burning torches and little banners waving in the breeze.
"It's like a castle," she murmured, impressed. "Do Iwa knights live here or something? Samurai?"
Deidara snorted . "We're not in Iron Country, yeah. This used to be a fort though, sure. Back before the ninja clans had settled here. 'Course you must have read about that?"
He winked.
Sakura frowned at his little spur.
"You mentioned something about dinner?" She asked, purposefully redirecting the conversation.
A meal, as she had guessed, was a topic Deidara was all to happy to pursue. He went on about proper nutrition and how it correlated to muscle development and brain functions. Sakura was half listening to her sensei and otherwise caught up in looking around at her new "home." After leading her inside the fort, through a wrought iron gate and then a second wooden set of doors, Deidara cut across the interior courtyard to another building.
Sakura followed him, carefully picking her way between flowers bushes, potholes, and statues.
"Quite an interesting place," she commented when at her sensei's side again.
He grinned. "That's nothing, yeah. Bet there's nothing in your town like this."
Her shoulders rose as she shrugged. "The Hyuuga compound, I guess. Maybe Sasuke's place. That part of the city is pretty traditional. Pretty big, too, I think."
Deidara's eyebrows had wriggled at Sasuke's name, however, and Sakura got the impression he had stop listening to what she was saying. "Eh? Who's that, yeah? Is this Sakura-chan's crush?"
A blush lit across her cheeks. Chiding, "don't be prying."
"Don't be so obvious," Deidara responded, the playful tone reappearing. "I bet it must be hard, travelling all the way to Iwa without your boy."
They had entered another building, this one sporting a more traditional architecture and design. It was old-fashioned, with wooden floors and screened walls.
"Your home has two different personalities," Sakura observed, poking her head into what looked like a training room.
"Ah-ha," Deidara rubbed at his neck. "I had to do some remodelling, yeah, so I rebuilt it to my taste."
Admittedly, it was sort of pleasing to the eye.
"Why did you come to Iwa, Haruno?" He asked her as he redirected Sakura to a kitchen.
Her bag fell from her shoulders onto a chair as she rolled her stiff muscles. "Because it seemed interesting."
A sly smile spread across Deidara's face. "Wanted to impress someone, yeah?"
Sakura had no one to impress.
When she didn't answer, he laughed but it was light and friendly.
Despite wanting to be upset, she found his mood somehow contagious.
o o o
After he had treated her to steamed meat, vegetables and some sort of spicy sauce served over rice, Deidara showed her more of the complex, and finally, to her room. It was rectangular and simply accommodated; it had a set of drawers, a changing screen, a futon, some ornamentation, and oil lamps.
"This is perfect," Sakura breathed, almost delirious with the promise of sleep. Deidara had wandered down the hall for the moment, and she took the time to slip her shoes off and poke at her blisters. She was nearly purring with the lack of confinement.
A cough from the doorway alerted her to Deidara's return. She startled, about to tell him off for spying, when he tossed a towel at her face.
"Wash room's to the right. The bath water is hot." He was apparently amused at her less than elegant state.
Appropriately, she stuck her tongue out at him, pulling at her eye for good measure.
"Nice look, yeah," Deidara waved her off, leaving her alone again.
But a soak did sound impossibly nice...
Much later, Sakura fell onto her futon, grateful for its feathery goodness, and inhaled deeply. It smelled surprisingly fresh and she had a mental image of Deidara airing it out the day before, cleaning the dust off with a broom as his long hair flopped from side to side with his movements.
A laugh escaped her at the vivid picture.
"What is it, yeah?" Deidara asked, making her jump.
Her futon was positioned near the wall, which was a shouji screen, and she was immediately concerned if it was actually some sort of door. On the other side of which, Deidara was literally a few feet away, judging by his silhouette. If they both reached out, their fingers would meet on either side of the thin barrier.
"Ah, nothing," Sakura said quickly, burying herself in her covers. For a few minutes, she stared idly at the moving shadow in front of her as Deidara crossed the room back and forth. It took a couple of seconds for her to realise he had started undressing at some point. She cursed inaudibly and ducked her head under the blanket embarrassedly. Stupid backlight.
When it had become distinctly uncomfortable to breathe the hot air under her futon, she re-emerged with a stifled huff. A hasty sideways glance proved that her sensei had finally settled down for the night, a book of some sort propped open on his chest.
"Are you still awake?" Sakura asked, playing dumb about being able to see him. Deidara "hmm"ed in what she guessed was a confirmation.
They had skipped talk during dinner, but suddenly Sakura found that she was impossibly curious about her new teacher. "When were you promoted?"
The silhouette sighed and placed the book aside. "Back to the questions, yeah... To jounin, then?"
She shrugged, though he couldn't see it. "Sure, I guess. All of it, maybe? When did you leave the academy?"
"I never went. I started developing my own jutsu by the time I was six, yeah. When the Tsuchikage found that out, he placed me with a private tutor until I was a chuunin. Probably took about a year..."
Sakura felt how her mouth was open, amazed, and snapped it shut. "Six? Why were doing that sort of thing at six? Did your parents teach you?"
There was an undignified snort. "I told you I developed them myself, yeah? I never knew my parents. But I like art, always have. I used chakra because it helped me express myself better and that kind of became my style. And I guess it helped it fights too, yeah."
He snickered, gleefully reminiscing, before continuing. "So now most of my work has to do with sabotage and shi– stuff."
When friends with someone like Ino and fond of someone like Sasuke, Sakura had always found her non-existent ninja background to be a huge disadvantage. But hearing about Deidara was possibly the most frustrating thing ever. In that moment, she was incredibly angry with her own lack of ambition and resourcefulness. Utterly useless.
Her sensei was perceptive of her sharp dive in mood. "You okay, Sprout?"
"I'm fine," she said quickly, peeking again at her sensei's shadow. In a way, Deidara reminded her of Naruto. She had never considered such an obnoxious attitude to be enviable, but it was easy to tell that the jounin on the other side of the divide was a person who had prospered in the wake of adversity. Without proper training, he had learned combat skills from necessity, and was now clearly successful for it.
Sakura had chosen the scholarly route of improving herself because she had never felt pressured to be a fighter. She had become a shinobi because...
"What about you, yeah?" Deidara's vaguely interested voice cut through her train of thought.
"What do you mean by that?"
There was a hum from behind the screen. "You know, what are your parents like and all. Why you became a kunoichi... that kind of stuff, yeah."
Sakura hesitated a bit. Saying that she had entered the ninja academy to follow after her crush seemed ridiculous in comparison to Deidara's story.
"To serve my village," she offered instead.
His answer was another bark of laughter. "There it is! There's the textbook answer your teachers fed you, yeah!"
Ah, shoot. There went sounding objective and independent.
"Okay, okay..." Thinking quickly, Sakura said, "I used to be teased a lot when I was younger. I was lonely. I guess...I wanted to go to the academy in order to get stronger..."
She grimaced, she sounded like such a – a –
A moment passed before a reply came. Deidara was contemplative for a beat. "That's not so bad a reason..."
Which he ruined with the following. "...but I don't want to know what you were like before if this is the 'stronger you,' yeah."
He laughed at his own joke and Sakura rolled her eyes; she probably should have expected that.
"So, what were you teased about? Your hair? Your poor choice in wardrobe?"
"Hardly! My hair is lovely, thank you very much. And my clothes are cute." Subconsciously, she copied Deidara's pout. It was difficult to admit normally, but Sakura found herself speaking openly with the shadow on her wall. "I was made fun of for my forehead since it's so wide."
She closed her eyes, waiting for her teacher's jibe.
"That's it? Seriously? Kids teased you for your forehead? And you believed them?"
The rooms were quiet again. Sakura was taken aback; she had never considered not believing those who had teased her. Not until Ino had told her otherwise. Even then she had still just accepted the truth that she had a particularly displeasing face. "I...of course I did. ...It was really isolating."
"I thought you said you 'don't allow people to tell you what to think?'" Deidara asked, and she could hear the frown in his voice.
"Well, yeah, I know – but that's hard to do when everyone around you is telling you something over and over again."
Deidara scoffed. "Doesn't make it true, yeah. Your forehead may not be perfectly proportioned, but it works well with your face. It's not like you're terribly asymmetrical or something. Those other kids were probably jealous."
For some unnamed reason, Sakura felt her chest swell and her toes curl, kind of like she was giddy. She turned her head a little to look at the screen separating them and the feeling increased. This was the first time anyone other than her best friend turned love rival had ever complimented her. "Do you really think that?"
There was the tiniest hesitation before he answered, and Sakura worried that he was rethinking what he had just told her. "I guess you're all right. I'm saying this strictly as an artist, yeah."
"So do you think there's a chance he likes me?" She pushed, knowing that a boy's was a very trustworthy opinion.
"What? That kid again?" Dismay in the question. Deidara coughed. "I don't know...how's he acted around you?"
And then she heard something like skin clapping skin, not knowing that on the other side of the divide, her new sensei had just slapped a hand against his forehead.
"I've tried talking to him... He's never really said much of anything to me," Sakura confessed, feeling gloomier upon that realisation. "He never responds to me."
There was a very no-nonsense edge to Deidara's voice in his answer. "Look, Haruno, what he thinks doesn't even matter. You're just who you are. Can't do anything about that. Be happy that you're actually smart and you know, symmetrical looking and all that. You've got stuff going for you, yeah."
Sakura liked Sasuke, and had for a long time, but hearing someone stick up for her was kind of nice. The last person to do as much had been Ino, but being that Sasuke had been the wedge in their relationship, Ino had never come to Sakura's rescue when the boy was particularly cold to her. She supposed she had only herself to thank for that.
"Anyway," Deidara offered, "kid sounds like a dick."
"You don't know him."
"Being dismissive like that – he's arrogant, you know?"
"That's not – Sasuke is –"
Deidara yawned again, not allowing her to finish. "New rule. No more talking about your Konoha classmates, yeah."
Sakura huffed loudly and rolled over in her mattress. She wanted to tell him that Sasuke was cold because he had been hurt somehow – that was all. He was an exceptionally lonely kid, working to prove something, she thought.
But perhaps Deidara wouldn't get that any way; when he'd been alone and insecure, Deidara had become extroverted as opposed to introverted. He probably couldn't relate to how Sasuke had decided to deal with his circumstances.
"Now goodnight, Sprout," Deidara said, unaware of her thoughts. Carefree and confident. "Get some rest. You'll need it, yeah."
Her brows drew together. Just when Sakura began to like the guy, he went and spoiled things. She had no idea what to make of the man – boy.
...Except that he was certainly one to offer a fresh view of things.
Did she like that about him or not?
She turned over in her futon once more, trying to quiet her musings. "Goodnight."
o o o
