Author's note: yes, we've been away FOREVER!! we're so very sorry for that, we promise. however, while we might not have a good reason, we have any number of good excuses, the most pertinent of which can be summed up in these two letters: IB. yes, we are in the first year of IB (which should tell you what grade we're in) and it has consumed our lives. we hate that part of it, but we wouldn't drop out for anything. unfortunately, that means cutting back writing time, which is a shame, but we'll figure something out eventually. until then, updates won't be very regular. we're very sorry, but that's how it's going to have to work.
Disclaimer: too lazy to find out who wrote naruto, which should prove we're not him. one can usually spell one's own name...
--kyra

Why me?

"Why me?" Sasori demanded sullenly. He knew he was acting like a small child, but he really didn't care. Honestly, what had Pein been thinking? It was bad enough that he'd taken a liking to Deidara and invited him to sit with them, but then he assigned Sasori to the post of babysitter-extraordinaire. It wasn't fair.

"Because you know him, because he knows you, and because you have more classes with him than any of the rest of us."

"That's just an excuse!"

Pein scowled warningly. "I'm not going to argue about this anymore," he said coldly. "This is how it will work."

Sasori growled, but didn't argue any more. He recognized the dangerous tone of Pein's voice: the older boy had reached the end of his patience, and if Sasori continued to object, it would be blows, not words, that would be employed to convince him.

"At least tell me what you expect me to do," he grumbled. "I'm not a mind reader, in case you've forgotten."

"Just answer questions," Pein assured him. "He'll probably have many. And I'll thank you to be honest. I don't want him under any false impressions. If I hear you've been deliberately misleading him, I will be… most displeased."

Sasori grimaced. "Don't worry," he growled. "I'll tell the truth."

"Good," Pein answered. "Now, the bell's about to ring. You have history now, right?"

Sasori's scowl of hate-filled disgust was all the answer Pein needed.

"Good. You can start now."

The bell rang just as Pein was finishing, and Sasori stalked away without a backwards glance at the boy whose mission in life this year seemed to be to make his life living hell. Honestly, spending a whole year looking after Deidara!? He doubted he would be able to come out of this with his sanity, such as it was, completely intact.

He flopped into his seat moments before the last bell rang. A quick glance around the room showed that he wasn't the last one. Deidara hadn't arrived yet. Good. Maybe he was sick today. That would be the first stroke of luck Sasori had had all year.

It wasn't to be. Deidara ambled in five minutes after class started, looking as though this were a perfectly normal occurrence. Mrs. Cummings paused in her lecture to scowl at him. "Do you have a pass from the office?" she demanded.

Deidara shrugged. "No."

"Why were you late?"

Shrug. "It's too early in the morning. I don't do mornings, yeah."

"So you chose to come late instead?"

"Basically."

She sighed. "I'll let you off this time, but next time you're tardy, it will be a detention. Do you understand?"

Shrug. "Sure."

"Then take a seat and take out your history notebook."

Deidara glanced around the room, looking for a seat. With a sinking feeling, Sasori realized that the only empty seat was the one next to him. He sighed and told himself that there was no way Pein could have engineered this. It wasn't possible. Really, it wasn't.

Deidara sat down and took his notebook out, staring despondently down at the desk as he did so. Mrs. Cummings, after eyeing him suspiciously for a moment, turned back to the rest of the class and got on with her lecture. Sasori wasn't paying attention. He hadn't been paying attention earlier and now, with Deidara sitting right next to him, he couldn't concentrate at all.

"What are you staring at, yeah?" Deidara demanded, glancing up into Sasori's eyes and then away again.

He'd been staring? Shit! "I was wondering whether you were going to make a habit of disrupting class," he invented quickly.

Deidara's visible eyebrow rose up to vanish into his hairline. "Since when do you care about that, yeah?"

Sasori scowled. "If you're going to slack off in class, it's best that the teacher not be paying attention," he hissed. "If something happens, say, someone comes in late, then the teacher is once more concentrating on the class and not her lecture, and you have to at least pretend to pay attention. Got it?"

Deidara grinned. "Wow, you really think this out, don't you?"

"I've never gotten caught."

"Neither have I."

Sasori shook his head in wonder. "No, and I will forever wonder how. Maybe Hidan's right and God does exist. Though, if that's the case, why He would choose to help you is beyond me. Presumably He has His own reasons."

Deidara snorted. "I doubt it. And I resent your implying that I can't look after myself, yeah."

"Says the person who blew up Pein's basement," Sasori muttered.

"You guys attacked me, yeah!" Deidara retorted.

"You didn't come peacefully."

"Are you boys paying attention?"

It took Sasori a moment to internalize the fact that Mrs. Cummings, not Deidara, was speaking. He looked up into her irate features. "No."

Like his woodshop teacher, she seemed a bit taken aback by the bluntness of his reply. "Why not?"

He shrugged. "I'm not interested in history. I'm only taking it because I have to."

Her face darkened. "Well you can at least do the rest of the class the courtesy of being silent while they learn the things that will be on their final. They want to pass their classes."

"I didn't say I didn't want to pass, I said I wasn't interested in history."

"Well, if you want to pass the class, you'll have to start paying attention," she snapped.

He shrugged. "Sure."

She eyed him suspiciously, then, with a slightly defeated sigh, turned away once again to address the rest of the class, all of whom were laughing at him under their breath.

"Never gotten caught?" Deidara hissed mockingly.

"Shut up!"

"You're fucking serious?! Damn, that's hilarious!"

"So glad you're entertained," Sasori retorted acidly. He was beginning to regret confiding in Hidan. Not that he'd had much choice. After all, when Hidan demanded to know something, it wasn't really feasible to resist him for long. He might not carry a knife on him, but he certainly had other ways of causing pain, and he wouldn't stop, even after you told him what he wanted to know. Sasori wasn't a wimp, but he wasn't a masochist either. Best just to tell the blond boy and get it over with.

"You were supposed to be watching out for him, not getting yourself into trouble." Oh, great. Pein had heard too. Sasori managed to scowl at him without looking in his direction.

"I didn't do it on purpose, you know."

"That doesn't matter. I would have thought you were clever enough to avoid getting caught."

"I'm not having a good day."

"Really?" Konan too? What, were they all spying on him now?

"Really," he answered.

"What's wrong?"

Sasori jerked his head towards Pein. "Why don't you ask him? It's his fault!"

Konan turned away and began to grill Pein. Sasori ignored them, hoping that Hidan would take the hint and leave him alone. The bell hadn't rung yet, and he dearly wished he could just stand up and leave. It couldn't only be second hour… could it?

It was. As the bell rang and the teacher set them free to do what they wanted with their time, the enormity of the time he still had left in school today settled onto Sasori's shoulders, and he slumped. God, he wasn't sure he'd make it.

Abruptly, he stood and shoved himself away from the desk, stalking away from the desk and settling himself in the back corner of the large room. He ignored the armchair next to him and scrunched into the corner, pulling his knees up too his chest and resting his head on them for a moment. He had to breathe. Just calm down. It would be okay. He would make it. All he had to do was keep his head and it would all be good. Deidara would fade away, would become just one of the ripples in the pond that was his life, and he would get on with it.

He lifted his head once again, taking out his sketchpad and opening it to a new page. He started at it blankly for a long moment, then made a decision. He stood abruptly, shoving the sketchbook back into his backpack. He wasn't in the mood for sketching. He was in the mood for splatter pain and rock music. One of those was even available. He crossed the room to where the paints were standing, neatly lined up in a row, and found that there was something even better than splatter pain available: spray paint. His face lit up in the first real grin of the day as he took three cans and a canvas back to his corner. Hidan, who'd followed him, took one look at his manic expression and began to inch away.

"Be careful where you fling that shit," he warned. "Remember what happened last time…"

Sasori remembered, but he didn't care. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that he finally had a good way of working off the stress that had been building for the last week. He uncapped one of the cans.

Twenty minutes later, he came back to this world only to discover that he was no longer alone in it. The teacher, Mr. Kashi, stood next to him, examining his masterpiece with a critical eye. When he noticed Sasori watching, he grinned crookedly. "Welcome back."

Sasori nodded without speaking.

"You looked like you needed that."

"You have no idea," Sasori muttered, glancing around the room to where Pein was sitting, carefully cutting out paper figures to glue into his premade background. On the other side of the room, Deidara happily created clay sculpture after clay sculpture, as oblivious to the world as Sasori had been.

Mr. Kashi caught the direction of his gaze, and his eyebrows rose slightly. "Social trouble?"

"You could say that," Sasori conceded. He wished Mr. Kashi would just go away. He'd worked off the worst of the frustration, but he still wasn't in any kind of mood to listen to sympathy from his art teacher.

"What are you going to do with that?" Mr. Kashi nodded at Sasori's picture.

"Take it home." What else was there to do with a piece of art? You brought it home, you framed it, and you kept it forever. That was just how it worked. He still had all the things he'd created back in preschool. They were pretty awful, but they were still there, and would still be there forever. That was the whole point of art, after all.

Mr. Kashi nodded. "If you want. But, I was thinking, if you wouldn't mind, I wouldn't mind it at all if you wanted to leave it here."

Sasori glanced at him. "Why?"

"It occurs to me that it's a very good example of abstract art. I could use it as a model to my Art 1 kids. They need to know what real abstract art is."

Sasori looked at his painting in surprise. Abstract art? Really? Looking at it with a more critical eye, he could see how Mr. Kashi would arrive at that conclusion, but he didn't like it. He shook his head. "It's not abstract, and I don't want other people seeing it."

He looked away, hoping that Mr. Kashi wouldn't ask him why. Thankfully, the teacher seemed to have finally figured out that Sasori didn't want to talk about it. He shrugged. "If you say so." He glanced at the clock on the wall. "The period's almost over. I'll leave you to clean up, shall I?"

"Thank you." Sasori turned away from the teacher, doing his best to forget the man was standing right next to him. He turned back to his paining, wondering how best to go about bringing it home. He realized too late that he'd picked far too big a canvas for his exercise in stress relief. He sighed. Apparently his punishment for letting loose would be to have to take it home.

The bell rang. Sasori scowled and moved back to where he'd left his backpack. Hidan was waiting for him, examining his corner. "You didn't even get it on the fucking walls," he commented. "It can't fucking have been as bad as it looked."

Sasori grimaced. "It was bad enough," he muttered. "Is the day over?"

Hidan snorted. "You wish. Wake up. It's only third fucking period, you know."

Sasori moaned slightly and slumped over his backpack. "Great. I am so not in the mood for math class right now."

Hidan snickered. "Sucks for you, doesn't it?"

Sasori scowled. "Well, what do you have, then?"

"English," Hidan admitted.

"And you think that's better?"

Hidan's face contorted into a wicked grin. "What the hell makes you think I'm going?"

Sasori rolled his eyes. "Should have guessed. What'll you do, go off and terrorize middle schoolers again? You do realize that they'll catch on eventually."

Hidan shrugged. "So? It's not like they can actually do anything to me."

"They can tell your dad."

Hidan scowled. "I'm not afraid of that fucker," he snarled.

Even in his current state, Sasori recognized the danger signals. He shrugged, not in the mood for a confrontation. "Never said you were."

Hidan eyed him for a long moment, then backed away and muttered something derogatory under his breath. Sasori ignored him, concentrating on maneuvering to the door and out into the hallway. It was going to be a very long year.