A/N: Summary: Something is messing with time and space in the Akatsuki lair, and Sasori is finally realized to be missing. On another note, Pein's origami collection is back from Ch. 1! –insert joyous fanfare here-
Speaking of Chapter One, you may be wondering how the Jashin it's related to anything. The answer is that its main purpose was setting the mood in which Sasori left his partners in crime. So he's royally pissed at all of them.
Deidara yawned and scratched himself, rolling out of bed as he did so. Normally, the blonde slept on the lower of the bunk beds, but seeing as he had somehow gotten into Sasori's bed, he landed on the shining wooden floor with a very loud, very painful FWHUMP.
"Oww, un..." he moaned, rubbing his head in pain. After the aching had subsided a bit, Dei looked back up at the two-layer sleeping arrangement he'd just fallen out of. Why was his bed suddenly on top, and for that matter, why was the bottom bunk bedecked with a bright blue, marine-animal-covered, squishy-looking down blanket? The pillow had morphed into a blindingly sky blue thing shaped something like a fish. And Kisame was snoozing happily in it, oblivious to the fact that Deidara had just fallen out of bed.
Being quite careful not to wake up the shark-man in La-La Land, the blonde scooted up the chilly metal ladder, and looked into his bed. Yes, it looked the same. His pillow and blanket were still scorched from recent and not-so-recent explosions, and smudged with bits of terracotta.
Quiet as a shinobi mouse, Dei slid back down the ladder and jabbed Kisame in the shoulder, whispering, "Kisame! Wake up, un!" Of course, the whispering was unnecessary, because fish are very light sleepers. Kisame whipped Samehada out of seemingly nowhere (like he always does) and lunged at him. Only when the weird sharky sword had Deidara pinned to the wall by the collar of his pajamas did Kisame notice that it was not, in fact, another cliché attempt at his own life by numerous unnamed ninja.
"Uh...Kisame? When did we switch beds, un?" Deidara asked timidly. The blue-skinned man blinked twice. "What?" He turned and realized that the missing Rock nin spoke the truth, just as Pein bashed the door open with a loud bang.
"HEY!" he bellowed angrily, all six of him. "WHAT DID YOU –expletive- DO WITH MY –expletive- ORIGAMI COLLECTION?" Kisame peeked over the fat Pein's rather chunky shoulder and saw all of the other Akatsuki – minus Sasori – running about and shouting in a crazed fashion.
Konan pretty much didn't even know that anything had changed, and was busy throwing paper kunai and such at anyone who came within range. Since she was in the middle of all the action, this meant that everybody was getting papercuts that would scar them for years. Poor Kakuzu was never the same.
Hidan was running from his normal room to the room where he'd somehow had his bed teleported (which was Konan's, incidentally), swearing at the top of his lungs as usual, and throwing random junk around. Somehow, quite a lot of this stuff kept hitting Tobi in the head. He swore it was a coincidence. The world may never know.
Tobi, everybody's favorite idiot, kept trying to cartwheel through the hall for some reason. Since Hidan kept bashing him in the skull with lamps and picture frames and such, Tobi eventually crawled under a desk and hoped that it would all be over soon.
Itachi was quite characteristically standing around and trying to catch somebody in his Mangekyo so he could beat the crap out of them. Let's face it, he's already under a lot of stress on a daily basis, and having his bed teleported into the bathroom didn't help.
Zetsu, because he slept in the backyard, and – although he didn't know this – his little grassy nest was well away from the effects of the dimensional fissure, had a grand old time sitting there, half-merged into the wall, and watching all the idiots run around screaming. Occasionally he'd toss a rock or something into the squabbling crowd, just to provoke them. Life was fun.
Kakuzu was busy hiding all his money. When he came out of the little money-stashing hidey-hole he'd found somewhere (which would later morph into the main hallway) the poor old geezer all but had a heart attack from seeing all the expensive and not-so-expensive things that everyone was smashing up.
Deidara really didn't help with Kakuzu's impending heart failure. Completely forgetting that he was now bunking with a fish for the time being, the blonde went racing into the madness and immediately set off several bombs he'd strewn about the house for just this purpose. Why he was prepared for this sort of thing, nobody knows.
Pein made several unsuccessful attempts to calm everybody down, but after watching Hidan smash a metal chair over Konan's head and realizing that Konan was so aggravated that she didn't even notice, Pein pulled a Tobi and ran terrified to the attic, hoping to God that he didn't run out of bottled water and batteries before this was over.
Kisame, being at this point the only person anything close to sane, quickly restrained Itachi with a mirror –Itachi had nightmares about the Uchiha coming back to life for weeks- and pinned Hidan to the wall with a swift jab of Samehada. Deidara had already run out of bombs and was sitting in a chair looking sad. Kakuzu was almost in a coma, and Tobi and Pein were hiding. That left the stone-chucking Zetsu and one very pissed kunoichi. By now Konan had already chopped off several bits of Zetsu's flytrap with origami butterflies of DEATH. He was running out of rocks, so the plant man hastily retreated back to the backyard. Now terrified to return to the house, Zetsu occupied himself for the next week or so by arguing between his halves about major issues in the U.S. like abortion.
After everyone had either calmed down or gotten themselves fastened to the wall, Pein clambered down from the attic and held a meeting.
"Okay, let's get all the new sleeping arrangements straight, first of all. Itachi, you're sleeping in the bathroom now?"
Silence.
"Right. Kisame and Deidara, you're bunking together now."
"But I don't want to sleep in a room with a fish, un!"
Ignoring Deidara's complaints, Pein continued, "Konan, Hidan, you're sharing a room now. Hidan, right now I don't give a damn about the amount of papercuts you're going to get on a daily basis," he added before the albino could open his mouth. Konan sat there looking as irritated as Naruto when he has discovered that ramen isn't on the menu.
"Kakuzu, Tobi, you're paired up now. Congratulations." Tobi bounced in his seat and cheered happily. Kakuzu attempted to jam a few threads through the idiot's eye-hole, but the masked wonder was hopping around in his seat so much that Kakuzu's elderly-man aim only succeeded in poking Tobi in the ear.
Pein let out a deep sigh, as if what he was about to say meant many days of squeezing into small spaces to sleep. "When I was...taking...refuge...in the attic, I discovered Sasori's puppets and bed where mine would usually be, and my things in the kitchen. So, I'll be siesta-ing in the kitchen from now on until we get things sorted out. Sasori, you're going to sleep in the attic."
No response.
"Sasori?"
Still no response.
Sudden realization dawned on Hidan, who was still stuck to the drywall for some reason, even though Kisame had removed Samehada. "Oh my God, I know what happened!" he screeched suddenly. As he had just yelled straight into Konan's ear, he got a paper plane in the eye for his trouble. Pein turned his head, for once in his life interested in what Hidan had to say.
"I read about this in the Bible of Jashin once! There's a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum, and..." Kakuzu suddenly cut him off. "Why does your holy book cover what to do in case of a tear in the dimensions?" Hidan gave Kakuzu his best death stare. "Why do you think it's so –expletive- thick, you –expletive- -expletive-?"
"Anyway, it says that sometimes, when the balance of the universe is upset or some kind of crap like that, a dimensional rift opens up. Symptoms include sudden teleportation of bedrooms, flying toilets, and missing group members. Oh, and if the hole doesn't close up, anything in a 100-yard radius of the hole will...great. The page is all ripped up here," Hidan declared, reading out of his handy-dandy pocket bible. "Now will someone get me down from here?"
Deidara could be heard calling down the hallway, "Daaa-nnaaaa! Where are you, un?"
One of Pein's bodies muttered, "Well, looks like the rift's claimed its first victim."
Tobi quietly sat there, not saying anything for once. His single Sharingan swirled menacingly as he pondered everything. Slowly, calmly, he stood up and went into Deidara and Kisame's room. Pushing cushions, stuffed fish, and sacks full of exploding ceramics out from underneath the bed, Tobi eventually had enough junk out of the way so that he could see the tiny, purpley-blue, swirling hole in space and time. The gleaming red of Sharingan reflected the bright colors that danced within the gap. He scooted a little farther under the bed. If Tobi laid his ear on it just right, he could hear things. A dog barked, a happy, excited bark. The crunch of someone eating a snack. Then, he heard what he'd been waiting for. Sasori's voice. It wasn't much, but Tobi caught snatches of him muttering to himself. In between mutters there was the distinctive sound of an aerosol can being sprayed. It was him, all right. No doubt Sasori was neurotically cleaning wherever the vortex had landed him. Tobi hoped it was somewhere far away.
"Tobi? What're you doing?" Itachi, Kakuzu, and Pein all asked at once. Startled, the Uchiha shot out from under Kisame's bed, bashing his head as he did so. But as Tobi jumpily explained that he was a good boy and that he'd been looking for dust bunnies, one of Deidara's clay birds tumbled, unbeknownst to the masked man, into the portal. Perhaps it would become a reminder to someone that the Akatsuki really did exist.
I think this story is looking more and more like a crack/not crack hybrid by the paragraph. But whatever. And yes, Tobi wants Sasori out of the picture because he hates redheads. It runs in the family. (Sasuke hates Karin)
Or because Deidara is always following Danna around and Tobi wants Deimuffin to himself. -shot- No, I'm kidding. I can't stand DeiTobi.
R&R! :D