Yeah, here's the next one. Eris is an OC, too. She's the Goddess of Chaos and Destruction, but the other gods banished her to earth (for doing what she does best) and she ended up bound to the forest in which the Akatsuki's base is situated. Go figure. She and Sasori sort of clicked, seeing as they're both immortal (supposedly). (There's is more of a physical relationship since neither are very capable of tender affection.) And yes, technically he should be dead by now if Deidara already has his arms back, but for the sake of this little spin-off he's still alive. (Actually it's a bit more complicated than that, but the full story involves Eris' brother, Ripowal, the God of Death, and it's a bit too confusing to be explained right here, right now...)

The Happy Story that Sasori Stole from Dei

"Please deign to tell me once again exactly why Iam out here with you when I have so many other, much more important activities in which I could be investing my time," Sasori asked with acid civility, choosing not to attempt keeping pace with Michiko's longer strides. His voice was almost lost to the wind and snow shooting past them horizontally.

"How should I know?" she snapped back at him. "Maybe the Leader hates me. Maybe he hates us both and only hopes we'll end up killing each other before we finish this, this stupid job." With that she turned forward once more and angled herself steeply against the wind, aiming for the thick trees at the edge of the clearing that surrounded the base.

Sasori hop-skipped directly behind her and effectively reduced the drag pulling desperately at the loose folds of his cloak. "Maybe it is because I'm the only other member who is completely immune to the cold," he muttered loudly over the howl of the wind, hunching his shoulders and allowing it to send blobs of snow right over his head. "Or maybe it's because we're both rather, mm, immortal, so it does not matter how long we're out here looking. Besides; I seem to be one of the few members who don't give a damn about you," he added quietly, narrowing his eyes. "Coincidentally, Michiko," he went on in a more conversational tone, "do you even know the meaning of the word 'rhetorical'?"

She told him exactly where he could shove the meaning of the word 'rhetorical'.

Sasori smirked slightly, the first thing with the semblance of a smile on his face since Sir Leader had decided the safest precaution would be moving away from the forest entirely when Itachi and Michiko had taken such a ridiculously long time to find and dispose of Osanai. Sir Leader had not cared that Eris was bound to the forest and therefore could not come with them. Sasori was glad they were finally back, even though Eris had not yet made her presence known again.

In fact, there had been some grand "returning" dinner thing planned that Michiko had got landed with, but that meal had never fully materialized. Probably because Deidara had taken it upon himself to assist Michiko; he was horrible whenever food came into the picture. Not to mention Deidara was liable to get sidetracked and somehow divert peoples' attention from what they were trying so hard to get done.

That had been several days ago. And now he was stuck outside with this leech.

Sasori laughed silently as the image of how he had last seen Deidara suddenly floated into his head; distressed and torn between his hatred for the cold and his desire to follow Michiko like a love struck shadow. It made Sasori wonder exactly how Deidara had kept Michiko from making dinner…

After what seemed like far too long for Sasori's liking they broke into the limited cover offered by the first layer of trees, giving him the opportunity to brush off the increasingly tall pile of snow gathering on top of his head with his already soaked, tumescent fingers. Michiko straightened rigidly, strode away and asked what was taking his lazy ass so long to catch up.

Not dignifying her suck-ish attitude with a response, Sasori followed at his own leisurely pace, waving his hands as discreetly as possible through the air in an attempt to dry them out. "I don't see why we have to be out here anyway," he grumbled, as much to fill the silence as anything else; Deidara usually filled the silence for him, against his wishes. "Itachi's a big boy now; he can take care of himself. It's not our fault he just up and left. Besides, there's no way he'd hang around out here with weather like this to bite at him. He didn't even take his cloak."

At the silence he received, Sasori grouched again for a while, put out by the fact that Michiko didn't respond; Deidara at least argued back. Then, a thought struck him like a brick to the head. "It isn't any of our faults that he left…. Right, Michiko?" he asked slowly, prodding her to respond with his choice of words.

After a brief pause Michiko snapped at him again; she really needed to do something about that. "Of course it's not any of our faults; if Itachi wants to leave, that's his choice and his alone. He's big enough to decide for himself what he does. It's not anyone's fault but his own what he ends up doing."

She's jumped straight to the defensive, Sasori thought wryly. She did something… And then another thought tried to hit him, but he was on his guard this time and ducked to avoid the brick flying overhead. Something in the kitchen.

Something with Deidara.

Still, not wanting to get his head bitten off, Sasori kept these ideas to himself and stewed over what Michiko (plus Deidara) could have possibly done that would goad Itachi out of his slump and into action. He did not have to think at it very long.

He then occupied the time peering ahead through the thinning snowfall for any sign of Itachi - which was totally ridiculous, according to both parties - by wondering how Itachi possibly could have reacted. Obviously he hadn't killed them both like Sasori would have assumed, but recently Itachi had reminded him more of a rabid jellyfish than anything else, anyways. Itachi had run off. He had run off like a child with no one to comfort him.

Sasori felt a pang in his head and winced, suffering a brief memory a small child with no parents to love him.

Sasori was no longer even trying to look for the Itachi that undoubtedly would not be there and had stopped paying attention to where he was going, bumping into Michiko. "And you're the one calling me slow," he muttered ungraciously, scrabbling away from her unmoving form.

It took him several moments to realize that she was staring at something. He dusted some more snow off his cloak and walked around her through the half-foot layer of snow, not noticing the least bit of irony in the situation when he froze just as completely as Michiko.

They had found Itachi.

Now, Sasori was no expert, but he didn't need Zetsu to tell him that that shade of purple was unhealthy.

If it weren't for Itachi's stark black hair and the purpling tips of his fingers (which Sasori noticed appeared eerily similar to the color of his nail polish) they might have missed him entirely; his skin was the color of the snow beginning to pile around him. Michiko had almost tripped, it seemed, over one of the large roots of the tree at whose base he was sitting, and then again over the katana hilt sticking out of his chest. A copious amount of blood had leaked out of the deep wound before freezing a dark, rusty stain onto the front of Itachi's grey-blue shirt, also leaving some on the hilt of the blade he had always carried.

Sasori leaned to one side and dispassionately looked again from a different angle; he could see Itachi's katana had gone straight through him and been lodged deeply into the tree trunk with considerable force; hardly a sliver of the blade was visible. Itachi had slumped forward ever so slightly but not fallen over because the hilt caught him, too big to fit back through the vertical hole in his chest.

Itachi looked almost normal, with one of his paper-white hands resting precariously on the hilt of the sword driven through him, the other hanging limply at his side, slightly bent and buried in snow. His elbow rested at a relaxed angle on one of his knees, which were both drawn up near his chest. He could have been pondering something except for the expression on his face; one of fanatical… smugness… and something like… satisfaction. The lopsided grin looked terribly out of place on his face, like it should be the main attraction in a museum for the paranormal things that make shivers slither up your spine and seep into your mind.

The lack of any life in Itachi's flat, cold eyes did not come as much of a surprise to Sasori. He remembered Itachi's eyes always looking dead and lifeless. Although, Sasori did notice that there was something else completely looming behind them; pain. And not a physical pain, either; more of a soul pain. The kind of pain that eats away your core.

Sasori tore his own half-closed eyes away from the scene and glanced up at Michiko warily to find she hadn't moved since the sighting. Her face was as frozen as the landscape around them; frozen into a crooked smile frightfully identical to the one pasted on Itachi. He heard the slight, breezy laughs blowing past her lips, disturbing him and the fall of light snowflakes drifting listlessly toward the ground. He cocked his head to one side and took a step back when the laughter grew louder, worrying that the demon/girl/bat/vampire/thing had finally snapped.

However, Sasori was not so far gone that his powers of observation had deserted him - indeed, his powers of observation might as well have never existed he was so absorbed. Something small alighted on his shoulder briefly, startling him, before he looked up. He watched curiously as the midnight magpie flapped up to the high branch of a nearby tree and landed with a flutter of its wings. There was nothing small, however, about the wolf-sized black cat suddenly glaring down at him from the treetop where the magpie had previously perched, which leapt gracefully down onto the gradually thickening layer of snow without making a sound.

It growled deeply at him and stole forward on padded paws, but stopped when he shook his head and gestured at Michiko, who by now was laughing harder than Sasori had ever heard before and splitting her face in a wild grin, mussing up Itachi's hair before laughing again.

Eris stood… floated… before him with her arms crossed and a dark look. Casting an odd look at Michiko over her shoulder first, she then floated a ways away, beckoning him to follow. Follow Sasori did, and when Eris finally stopped and turned to face him he opened his mouth.

"No," Eris ordered. "Don't say a word. I need a favor from you."

Wary, Sasori watched as she floated closer to him and turned again, glowering at him over her shoulder. "Would you take the knife out of my back?" she sneered.

After a moment Sasori realized Eris was referring to something he had done. "I didn't do anything-" he started.

"Why did you leave?" Eris demanded imperiously. "I told you I could not come with you, and you left anyway!" She was whispering viciously so as not to disturb Michiko, whose raucous laughter was distinguishable even from a distance, but Sasori could hear the hurt in her tone.

"We settled this before I left," he insisted, not unkindly. "I even told you about the possibility that we would never be back, and you accepted it. And Sir Leader wasn't too happy about the dents left in the floor."

A small smile flashed across Eris' face before she resumed her expression of wounded anger. "I was happy about the dents in the floor. So were you, as I recall," she added slyly.

"Yes," Sasori sighed. "That was good. That was really good. …But that's not the point!" he continued, shaking his head to wake himself from his dreamlike state of remembrance of the last night they spent together.

"Oh?" Eris replied archly, anger seeping back into her tone quickly. "And what is?"

Sasori reached out for her slowly with one hand, and she fumbled at the gesture before stretching to grasp it in her own hand. He pulled her closer, and while her attention was diverted swept his other arm around her kissed her before she had time react. Her arm was curled between them, but still she compulsively tightened her grip on his hand. Just when she was warming to it, he released her and pulled away.

"The point is that I missed you," he stated bluntly. "And I need you. And I do not want to be separated from you ever, ever again."

Eris' expression flickered briefly, as if unsure how to take this news. It wasn't really news; he was sure she had known that all along. His mistake had been not saying so.

"I'll have to incarcerate you for that one," Eris informed him over a light chuckle.

"For what?" Sasori asked with a wary smile.

"For stealing the words right out of my mouth," she replied, dead serious now. "And I am going to steal them back." And Eris set her mouth against his, as softly as the flutter of moth wings, quietly opening and closing against his lips.

Sasori got a little lost in the moment that followed, if something so prolonged could be called a moment. After gods know how long he noticed that he could no longer hear a sign of Michiko's guffaws. "Crap," he muttered, his voice coming out muffled through two pairs of lips. Catching hold of Eris' hand again, he dragged her along quickly as fast as possible through the deepening snow back to where they had left Michiko.

"Why are we going back there?" she asked testily, as if interrupted in the middle of something important. "It's not like Michiko can't take care of herself."
"Yes, but if she does something stupid Deidara is going to go into withdrawal and Sir Leader will blame me for sure."

"Oh."

Eris floated up higher and lifted Sasori up until he barely touched the snow when he relaxed his feet. "That works too, I suppose…" he muttered reluctantly.

"Unless you have a better way to avoid the snow, you baby, I suggest you enjoy the ride while you can."

"What…?" he asked suspiciously, glancing up at her. Eris was leering back down at him, and before he got the opportunity to ask why she was eyeing him so mischievously she promptly let go of his hand.

Sasori didn't fall very far, and the snow cushioned the impact, but he got nearly buried. When he finally emerged he was newly waterlogged from the melting snow, making his cloak cling to him like a fearful child to parent. He found Eris smirking victoriously from halfway up a tree, and was about to snap at her when he finally recognized where she had dropped him.

They had arrived back at the scene of Itachi's suicide, but Sasori was unable to see Michiko at first. After a brief search of the area he relocated Itachi and was about to search for Michiko from there he noticed the new hollow in the snow around Itachi. Slogging closer through the snow, he peered portentously into the cavity. And he found her.

Michiko was sitting with her legs curled up to her chest and her back to Itachi's corpse, leaning against him slightly to the right of the sword in his chest. She held Itachi's hands and used them to keep his arms hugged around her knees, a sad, sad smile on her face.

"I know," she whispered warmly, tilting her head so she could give Itachi a kiss on his pale, dead lips before snuggling closer to him. "I love you, too."

Sasori's thought were crippled by another memory flashing through his mind of the same small child, being hugged by the shells of his former parents in an attempt to feel loved like the other children.

Before he recovered Eris had drifted over to Michiko and laid her hand gently on the delusional girl's arm. Michiko's head lolled slightly, and Eris rolled her prone form up onto her back and turned back into a black cat that could probably fright a bear not only with its size but also its expansive, leathery wings, Michiko asleep, curled, on her back. Sasori leaned against Eris' high shoulder for a few moments, holding his head in his hand until the panging stopped.

They began walking back together until they eventually reached the edge of the clearing that surrounded the base and Sasori was confronted with a wall of snow at least as tall as himself. He stared at it blankly for a few moments and turned to Eris when he noticed with a shock the she had simply increased her size and continued through the snow. He hurried to catch up and grabbed hold of her silky tail, asking her to stop.

"You wouldn't mind if I hitched a ride with you, too, would you?" he asked wryly.

Eris leered at him again and replied, "Like you've ever needed to ask for permission to ride me before."

Sasori grinned and poofed onto the furry expanse of Eris' back as she plodded through the snow at a gracefully languorous pace; Eris was back. His elevated mood was disrupted when Michiko twitched in her induced sleep and muttered something obviously meant for someone else.

He did not look forward to telling Sir Leader about Itachi.