XXX

Deidara

Somewhere inside the border of Sunagakure, Sasori told them to come to a halt. They unceremoniously dumped the body of the jinchuuriki in a deep pit, which Sasori quickly placed under a barrier and had a creaky puppet stand guard over it.

The rest of the installation was enough to make Deidara forget his earlier rage.

It was a sandstone mountain with a building carved into its hard features. Four pillars and a small door in between the middle gave the only signs of there being an artificial presence. Countless years of weathering had created the mountain and the caves inside, and yet as Deidara walked inside the cavernous workshop, he came to have a heightened respect for Sasori's ability to warp it in only a few years.

"This was my first workshop after I left the village," Sasori explained as he sat behind a massive iron table laden with limbs. Behind him, six enormous cabinets with countless drawers big and small filled the wall. "We won't draw the Leaf here for fear of them damaging it somehow, but I needed time to rebuild my army-"

He drifted off. "And?"

"And time to think." He shrugged his wooden limbs in an exhausted way. "There seems to be a lot to think about all of a sudden." He gestured widely around the workshop. "I don't care if you touch anything, just don't break it. Or if you'd rather have a go at trying to blow something up outside, it doesn't matter to me."

"How long will we be here, hmm?" This place gives me the chills.

"The sunrise tomorrow. We'll lead them to the Valley of the Lost, and crush them there."

"The name sounds fun."

Sasori began tinkering with two puppet limbs, breaking open little wooden pallets and prodding what was beneath. The arms jiggled with near-human like appearance. "It was where those who had gone mad from the Second Shinobi War were sent to, when the warfare was at its most barbaric. The village thought they were weak-minded, so they sent them there to die. Little did they know it's just the frailty of the human mind at play."

Deidara sat back in a wooden chair, folding his arms behind his long blonde hair. "You know, you're technically human still. You can't just talk like that because your flesh is wooden now."

The puppet master didn't reply, and Deidara knew why. He was lost in thought, his full attention given to the suddenly shaping puppet. More bits of wooden were being put together, making a leg, and then two gears were stuffed inside its upper thigh where it connected to a torso. His arms were moving rapidly, so much Deidara closed his eyes to relieve himself. He heard the clicking and clacking of the wood being placed and held together, and then those sounds were replaced by the gentle strokes of a paint brush.

He opened his eye suddenly. This is what he thinks of art, this is his passion. As a fellow artist, I must be attentive. He leaned forward and watched as Sasori painted the fingers of his puppet a dark brown hue, and then laid white and black across a set of three eyes. A few seconds later, a tall and lean puppet was complete, strewn across the table.

Gingerly, Sasori placed a hand on its chest. "And now..." he breathed. His fingertips glowed blue, and he raised his hand. Chakra cables ran from them and into the puppet. He twitched his finger perhaps a centimeter, and the whole puppet jolted upright, standing upon the table. It looked over blankly at Deidara, making him draw back apprehensively.

"Do you like it?" the red haired outlaw asked, his voice full of satisfaction. "Why am I asking, of course you do. What's not to like about it?"

Deidara shrugged. "It looks fine, hmm."

"Fine, fine?" Sasori was seemingly outraged. "Go outside, clay boy. It's not like you understand the art of longevity to begin with. Go study a bomb or something."

He shrugged, deciding not to work up the normally calm puppet master. "Fine. Have fun playing with your dolls."

"What did you say?" A puppet arm flew within a hairs breath above his head and shattered against the wall. Deidera looked over in surprise, suddenly feeling the air grow tense. Sasori was standing up behind his table, his new puppet falling back lifelessly across the table. "Listen here you little clay shaper, your art is nothing special, anyone could do it. If you hadn't been selfish and taken your village's scroll, you would be nothing, and you know it!"

The anger was so alien Deidara couldn't quite find a retort. He stood up and held an arm in front of him hesitantly to ward off anymore flying limbs. "What the hell is wrong with you, hmm?" he finally shouted when he found his tongue. "You're always so quiet, and now you're just all over the place! Your gears out of place or what, hmm?"

For a moment, it appeared Sasori was going to shout again, or maybe even activate his puppet. But no, instead his eyes seemed to widen a fraction of an inch, and he fell back into his chair. "It's nothing," he said heavily but calmly. "It's just the nerves of battle."

That s even worse. He was never nervous about battle. Sasori never seemed to care much for Deidara or his well being, but Deidara had grown to respect his colleagues skill and his personality as well.

And right now, there was something very off about him.

XXX

Sasori

He tinkered with thee puppets over and over again. Each drawer behind him possessed endless supplies, precious wood from the Hurtgen Forest, hand crafted ceramics from only the most selected makers. Puppet limbs that had been disassembled and recycled. The cave was his main base, his real home. Granny Chiyo and the girl had done devastating damage to his elite hundred puppets, a feat that still astounded him.

So he worked endlessly. He did not sleep, there was no need to. His false eyes glazed over the sixtieth puppet while Deidara's snores echoes from somewhere. Not one of his puppets possessed an imperfection. Before the night ended, he would decide which ones got what weapons, and would then douse all of them in the vat of his special poison. His army would not be falling next time.

But on the eighty-third puppet, he found his fingers dancing erratically, and he froze in shock as his wooden finger scraped along the torso of the being on his table. He fumbled for a blemish remover, but as his fingers closed around the bottle, it slipped out of his trembling grasp and splattered on the ground.

He stood up and flipped the 500-pound steel worktable, sending the puppet and components flying. Deidara gave a particularly loud snore in recognition, but carried on sleeping regardless.

What's wrong with me? He thought furiously as he looked at his wooden palms. These emotions... never before have they been so pronounced. I had them tucked away for so long, why are they emerged? My invincibility is slipping away, my humanity returning, I can feel it!

He began to pace around the cave chamber, listening to the rustling wind howl outside. A sandstorm was brewing, but the jinchuuriki would be relatively safe under the guard puppet's gaze in his pit.

Could it have been his friend, the girl? And Granny Chiyo? Some sort of curse mark they left on me to disrupt my focus? No, she couldn't have touched my Core, I would have seen it! Or some strange medical ninjutsu cast from afar that struck my body? No, it doesn't make sense. What is it then?

The answer was already in front of him though. There was no way to deny, not even logic was a sound reasoning here.

The past, when she brought them out. It's always the past.

When his parents had been killed by Sakumo Hatake, he had been a boy. Their deaths had shocked him into a a depressed, crying boy until Granny Chiyo had showed him the art of puppetry. It had then transformed him into a cold, calculating master of others. Humans were fragile, his parent's deaths had told him that much. He thought he had removed them from his mind.

The Mother and Father puppets. She kept them and used them on me...

Seeing their remarkably similar faces had frightened him, though he had not shown it, had given no sign of caring. But the old wounds had been opened, deep in his Core that relayed his last shreds of humanity.

And now it was relaying those emotions of when he was the hopeless child. Rage, confusion, and revenge, and he couldn't contain them like the past.

We are the next generation. Kakashi and I. Both victims of what our parents left behind, even if they had no control over what happened. Sakumo followed orders, and my parents fell victim to them. Yet, their blood calls inside us, I can feel it still. A rematch must be had-

He turned around and turned an old, dusty oak wood cabinet. He didn't bother with the lock; he ripped it from it's hinges. Inside were four scrolls and one pure black, ebony wood puppet arm. In one swift movement, he had removed his left arm and dropped it unceremoniously to the ground. Delicately, he took the ebony arm from it's stand and clicked it into place on himself. Though he could not feel any of it happening, a rush of satisfaction and eagerness rushed through him.

In another quick movement, he snatched Blade out of the compartment on his right arm and grasped it tightly with his new arm. This one was twice as flexible with a near 360 degree rotation, meaning his sword arm could strike anywhere at anytime. It was crafted from a lone ebony tree that had grown out in the desert miraculously, probably fallen from some long merchant's pouch over a coincidental underground aquifer.

Sasori did not believe in luck, as it was to unreliable and defied logic. However, his desire for rare and unique objects was a great sense of satisfaction for himself, as evidenced by Blade.

With his foot, he kicked his old arm into the air and swung Blade around twenty-seven times in six seconds, slicing up the arm into multiple wooden pieces that clattered in a funeral march on the floor. He set his weapon back in it's slot, and carefully took each of the scrolls and placed them in the slots on his spine compartments. The fourth he kept in his hand, for the last act.

I have to do this now, I have to relieve myself of the past now or I can't return. These feelings have to be killed now, by taking out Kakashi. The unspoken blood feud ends today.

Deidara snored again, his throat vibrating throughout the caverns. Sasori narrowed his eyes in the direction. And clumsy clay boy has no meaning to be here or be apart of our feud. He stretched out with his chakra to one of his puppets and attached it to its head. He puppet moved silently into a guard position in the middle of the hallway, and he set it in place.

He looked out over towards the rest of the puppets placed neatly around the workshop, gesturing wildly with the fourth scroll in his black hand. "Now for the rest of you..."

XXX

Deidara

He stretched his arms, yawning. Through a little slit in the cave, sunshine bathed the rough cave floor. He got off his hastily made cot of his own clothes and got dressed quickly. He noticed a mirror in a corner and gave himself a wink.

"The group may suck, but I really do look good in these robes, hmm."

He went to go into the hallway-

And jumped back as a volley of darts shot past his face by an inch. His reflexes saved him from moving forward anymore. The darts hot past him as he fell back on him bum.

"SASORI!"

No reply. However, this time he heard a distant clacking of a puppet.

"Sasori, very funny, but put it away, that nearly got me you idiot!"

Still no reply, just the distant clicking of components in a puppet. "Sasori?"

A full minute passed, and he came to an infuriating conclusion.

"You son of a bitch... YOU LEFT WITHOUT ME?"

His shout echoed eerily to himself, resounding against the rough stone walls. How long it had taken for weathering was an unimaginable process that bored him -it was to slow. Now-

He stuck his left hand in it's pouch, felt it take a bite of the soft clay. Crunch, crunch...

He thinks I can't do anything, he has to go do it by himself. He doesn't trust me, just like the Tsuchikage didn't. Nobody trusts me to do it right,, doubting my strength, hmm...

The second hand spat out a clay figurine, an odd looking creature with only distant human features of eyes and appendages. It ambled into the hallway and was greeted by multiple darts. Deidara's lips curled angrily as he guided his masterpiece forward towards the shooting puppet. He kept it moving until it got to Sasori's own art. He stepped into the hallway, unable to resist his own power.

Sasori's puppet was shooting still, perhaps a little more desperately somehow. But his own figurine was wrapping itself around the puppet, absorbing it bit by bit, until after just a few seconds, there was a large white ball of clay.

"KATSU!"

The clay ball exploded in a blinding orange haze, and the whole mountain trembled from the C2 detonation. When Deidara opened his eyes, large chunks of the wall were either torn away or blackened.

He ran down the hall and outside into the morning. The pit was of course empty, but still seeing the evidence that Sasori had actually left infuriated him even more. For a moment, he even considered blowing up the entire installation, just to show the puppet master he wasn't someone to be cast aside...

"Hey, Deidara, heyyyyyyy!"

His fury turned into disbelief. "Uh... you again?"

"Deidara," Tobi breathed extraordinarily hard. He doubled over, still choking for oxygen. The orange mask heaved up and down.

"Tobi, how did you find-"

The wannabe Akatsuki member held up a finger, stopping Deidara mid-sentence as he collected himself. Deidara shut his mouth for some reason, and his face reddened as familiar anger returned. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I came to... ask you where... Sasori was..." The orange mask abruptly straightened up, and Deidara looked intently into the single eye hole there. "He's not here, is he?"

"No, he left, the stupid, idiotic, self-centered little-"

"Oh man, oh man!"

"WHAT!"

"Deidara sensei, he's in grave danger!"

For some reason, hearing the man call him "sensei" gave him gratification, and he found himself tolerating the oddball failure of a shinobi a little more. "Danger? From what, hmm? He's a capable guy."

"Zetsu scouted ahead- there's a large Konoha-force waiting for Sasori, it's not just Kakashi Hatake! When he announces his location, he'll be heavily outnumbered, and it might be the end of him!"

Tobi's perfectly concerned and almost tearful voice was beginning to win Deidara over from his earlier assumptions. "It's a trap, then. The self-centered idiot, he had to do this alone. I knew there was something wrong with him, and look where it's led! He'll die if we don't find him." Another thought struck him, a slightly less warm one. "Wait, where did you find out we were going after Kakashi?"

"Zetsu," Tobi said gleefully. "He has spores on all of you to keep track of you, remember? Safety reasons I'm sure."

"Right, hmm. Just slipped my mind."

"Yes." Tobi watched him, seemingly waiting for something. Deidara was likewise waiting for him to say where Sasori had gone.

"Tobi!"

"Yes?"

"You said Zetsu has spores on all of us, then bring him here to find out where Sasori's gone!"

Tobi scratched his ruffled hair in a frustrated way. "Well, you see Sasori's spore was on his left arm, and for some reason he left that behind in the shop here..."

Deidara sighed. "Right when I thought you were getting useful."

"Wait! I think I know how we can find him!"

"How? Tell me, you idiot, instead of just making dramatic delays!"

Tobi put his hands forward and mimicked a puppet master playing on stage by controlling puppets with strings. "You still have that little puppet Sasori gave you to act as a distress beacon?, dontcha?"

"Yes, but that won't help, he won't acknowledge it if we use it."

"But I can trace his chakra! Watch, give me it."

Deidara handed it, interested in how this seemingly abymissal failure would prove to track Sasori over countless miles. To his disappointment, Tobi turned around to do something to the puppet. A few seconds later, he pointed eastward. "He's taken off over there. Some sort of valley that I passed earlier."

"The Valley of the Lost," Deidara remembered. "That's what Sasori called it. Let's hurry over, before he gets lost in there too."

"Oh, we'll find him, I'll make sure of it," Tobi said almost too cheerfully. "It's just what happens after that that remains to be seen!"