Title: Diplomacy, Part 22
Fandom: Naruto, post time-slip
Rating: R/Mish
Archive: No archives unless I put them there myself, no MSTings.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters I write about in fanfiction. I'm only a little bitter about it.
Diplomacy, Part 22
As awkward as a meet-and-greet at the front gates with the Kazekage might have been, Deidara would have preferred it to his current situation.
Trapped in a room with the hidden village's council was not high on his enjoyable things to do while in Konoha list.
Sai, who slipped into their bedroom to tap Sakura on a shoulder, had roused them just before dawn. Since both the occupants slept with weapons, the ink user promptly had to deflect a plethora of kunai. While very irritated at the invasion of privacy, Deidara was a little relieved that his girl did have some shinobi instincts upon a sudden awakening. When Sai informed her tersely that "Root" was there to escort the two of them to a meeting, Sakura's demeanor changed from exasperated to focused. Sai was also — not tense, exactly, but aware in a way that was unusual for him, his face devoid of its usual attempt at social conformity, as smooth and expressionless as the masks of the ANBU who awaited them in the living room.
Although Deidara had never heard of Root and the guards looked and behaved with the same professional efficiency as other ANBU he had met, he had been raised in a clan and he recognized factional infighting when confronted with it. One of Konoha's cliques was using Tsunade's preoccupation with Gaara's arrival to make a move, and neither his girl nor his girl's teammate was happy about it.
Nor did either one appear particularly appeased when it became evident that their destination was the Hokage's tower. They were ushered into a large circular room on a lower floor rather than Tsunade's office. "Council," Sakura whispered to him as they entered. Deidara fought to keep his expression bland. He doubted there had been enough time for Tsuande to consult with the elders as she promised. Someone was trying to preempt the Hokage's authority under her very nose.
Sai tried to enter the council rooms with them but was denied by the ANBU at the door, who seemed to take a peculiar pleasure in informing the ink user that his clearance level wasn't high enough for this meeting. "I'm assigned to the ambassador," Sai said, not a protest but a bland factual statement.
"She's his guard," said the ANBU, the intonation he used on the pronoun implying something vile. Deidara stiffened, hands clenching with the urge to gnaw on clay. "You go guard the other ambassador."
Sakura looped her hand into Deidara's elbow to forestall violence as Sai's gaze slid to her. There was a shifting of fingers against his arm. Deidara looked down, at first thinking she was forming seals before realizing she was flashing signals at her teammate, using what would appear to be a comforting grip on Deidara as a shield.
Appearing to respond to the ANBU's directive, "I will do as you say," Sai said, and was gone.
Inclining his head to the side, Deidara glanced at Sakura. His girl met his eyes with a steady gaze and a slight smile. Squeezing his arm, she nodded once. Together they turned to face whatever awaited them in the room.
It was packed. Masked ANBU stood at attention against the walls; the chairs (all but two) were completely occupied.
Deidara doubted the Hokage knew about this gathering. She was conspicuously absent, as she had to be with Gaara about to arrive. Tsunade had promised to talk to his girl first, and his girl was as surprised as he was by the summons. Glancing under his bangs at Sakura, he saw his girl's mouth tighten with tension.
Okay, that confirmed it; they were in a bad situation.
So was the Council. He was Akatsuki, he was a kage-level power, Kakashi hadn't magically appeared to relieve him of his clay, and they'd better not upset his girl or there wouldn't be anything left for the next-of-kin to identify.
Two chairs were set up in the center of the room, facing a raised dais. That was ominous; this wasn't about him but about them, the two of them together. Casually surveying the faces staring down at them, Deidara recognized Koharu Utatane and Homura Mitokado, the two council members from his initial meeting, and also identified one white-eyed male that had to be a Hyuuga. A man sitting to the side caught his gaze. Bandaged old injuries gave him a mummy-like appearance. Deidara didn't know him, although evidently his girl did. She bowed to the council upon reaching the chairs, her body angled in such a way he was excluded. Deidara mimicked her, watching the unknown man from the corner of his eyes. There was no visible reaction to the deliberate slight.
He didn't sit until his girl did, and first he pulled the chair so close to hers the wooden legs rubbed together. Crossing his hands over this midsection so that his fingertips brushed the pouch containing his clay, Deidara smiled brightly at the glowering faces. "Something I can help you with?" he asked.
Halfway between Konoha's gate and the shrine near the hot springs, Temari cited compelling family business and pulled her brothers away from the coterie of Suna and Konoha guards. Naruto started to automatically follow, looking briefly hurt when Gaara minutely shook his head at him.
"We'll tell you later," Kankuro told him, although he knew they wouldn't. Even among hardened shinobi, when Naruto got that look on his face reassuring him was an automatic response.
"Been hearing that a lot lately," Naruto muttered, but he fell back into the group and was soon energetically talking about techniques with some of the Suna shinobi (although not with Gaara's bodyguard, who remained silently at the back of the pack).
Temari, Gaara and Kankuro walked a little ahead of their erstwhile escorts. Speaking privately was always tricky in a village full of ninjas, but the siblings had been raised in a household where the head might kill any of them at any time for political gain, and the youngest might do it just because. They were rather good at speaking quietly around eavesdropping shinobi.
Which didn't take any of the bite out of Temari's words when she snarled angrily at her youngest brother. "Are you crazy bringing him here?!"
Kankuro winced. Crazy was always a loaded term to use around the Kazekage.
"It was his payment," said Gaara mildly. "That, and getting Kakashi out of Konoha."
"His—" Temari started to repeat blankly before her eyes widened in realization. She stared straight ahead, fighting to mask the shock that threatened to take over her expression.
Although he had realized it at dawn when an emergency message brought from the aerie instructed him to do anything necessary to get Kakashi out of town, Kankuro still felt compelled to confirm his knowledge. "It's done, then?" he soberly asked.
"So I am told."
For an instance Kankuro flashed back to the moment when he realized Gaara was deadly serious about taking a path that would change Suna forever:
Kisame left moments earlier, presumably doing just as he said he would, intimidating genins down the hall from the Kazekage's office. Within the office, the tension following Garza's curt announcement of his intentions was almost visible. Disbelief radiated from Temari, who couldn't immediately reconcile her indoctrinated need to protect Lord and council with Gaara's murderous decision. Kankuro could, he had no illusions about either and a hard-edged disgust with the council after it tried to throw Gaara to the Akatsuki, but he was a pragmatic individual and pitfalls were everywhere. He spoke the first one that came to mind, which was Gaara's weapon of choice. "The Uchiha will never work with us. He hates clans."
His younger brother remained at the window, gazing over the village's rooftops as he spoke in unemotional tones. "Although all three of us are stronger than the average jounin, there is no heritable 'clan' trait. That makes us a family rather than a clan, in a village composed of families rather than ruled by clans. He will not object."
Kankuro tilted his head, pondering the merits as well as wondering if he had ever heard so many words at one time from the Kazekage.
"Considering he killed off his entire family, I don't think that distinction has any merit," protested Temari.
"Not his entire family," Kankuro pointed out.
"Yet," Tamari snapped, but her brow creased in thought as she fell into a contemplative silence.
"I think," Gaara remarked coolly, "the way we run the shinobi villages is wrong. The civilian population shouldn't have to cater to shinobi, no matter how powerful the shinobi are. I also believe there should be a better criterion for Kage than 'strongest ninja gets the hat'."
A brief silence ruled as Gaara's elder siblings regarded him with amazement. "I had no idea you felt that way," Temari finally ventured in a subdued voice. Since Gaara occasionally used him as a sounding board Kankuro knew that the Kazekage considered the current system fatally flawed, so he wasn't as astonished. The extent of his younger brother's antipathy to Wind's traditional form of government, however, did surprise him.
Gaara finally turned away from the window, leaning back against the sill as he folded his arms, regarding his siblings with intent eyes. "Before, my thoughts didn't matter. Now, Rice's revolution has made me aware of other possible paths. I have vowed to protect Suna." Impossibly that cold gaze hardened further, reminding the other two that, even though he was no longer randomly homicidal, Gaara was still capable of calculated ruthlessness. "That includes protecting it from the possibility of another despot like my father, or another exploiter like the Lord. The only way to ensure that is to find a new path."
"But a democracy—" Temari was trying to wrap her mind around the concept. "No one here wants a democracy. Do they?" She appealed to Kankuro, her tone uncertain. "Isn't it a hard thing to force onto an entire population?"
Not if that population is ruthlessly pruned, thought Kankuro, but he didn't say as much out loud. The leaders of Rice were fanatics, exterminating all possible opposition. Gaara was attempting a different approach, a military coup rather than wholesale social re-engineering, where the shinobi would set up a representative government and then protect it without interfering with it. While Kankuro didn't object in principle, he did feel obligated to venture a warning. "This will bring chaos, Gaara."
"I don't mind a little chaos, if freedom results," was Gaara's unemotional response.
There was little point arguing in the face of Gaara's implacable resolve. Temari ceased objecting, although her expression remained uncertain; Kankuro reminded himself that this was all hypothetical since it depended so much upon Uchiha Itachi's participation and the Uchiha was heavily involved in Rice's rebuilding. But Itachi surprised him by responding to Gaara's oblique invitation, and now it was too late to turn away from the path begun by Rice's revolution.
Careful to keep his expression bland so as not alarm the Konoha shinobi following close behind them, "Do you anticipate war?" Kankuro asked his brother.
"Possibly."
"In that case, I'm glad Temari is settling here. It will offer her some protection from whatever happens."
Temari, who after all was right next to them, forgot her misgivings as she rolled her eyes at this misplaced brotherly concern, and what was left of the short journey was spent squabbling over who was best able to take care of whom.
If this so-called "meeting" confirmed anything, it was that he wasn't cut out to be a diplomat.
Deidara was reasonably certain that real diplomats didn't fantasize about blowing up the people they were supposed to be negotiating with.
Or maybe they did, and that was how they kept their temper.
It was working for him. Barely.
He responded to the same accusations phrased as questions over and over again, his answers becoming more clipped as his temper frayed. Yeah, he'd undergone training that permitted him to withstand interrogations, but the enforced politeness he had to maintain was far worse than any physical torture he could imagine.
As someone who had lost limbs in the course of a mission, he could imagine truly horrendous physical torture.
The presence of his girl proved only minor consolation. The Council was acting as hostile to her as to him, which in turn made him angry and defensive. She sat in front of them as he did, sporting her jounin vest with the village symbol (a symbol they had bestowed upon her) set high in her hair. He didn't really care that they called into question his motives, but one more snide remark either about his girl's loyalty or a veiled sneer regarding their relationship, and he was going to lose it.
Sakura was holding up well, considering. She wasn't exhibiting her own temper at the moment, which was impressive because he knew hers matched his at times.
If this had been one of those perverted romance novels Kakashi liked to read, everything would have fallen into place after they had sex the first time. Konoha would have welcomed them. The Council would have paid for the wedding. Koharu and Homura would have fought to the death to determine who gave Sakura away at the ceremony. (Not, he mentally added, that either of them would be invited even if this had been a romance novel. Suspension of belief only went so far).
Real life didn't work that way. They had had sex often enough for him to either develop techniques or get into a rut (he wasn't sure how to tell one from the other, although his girl hadn't voiced any complaints and he certainly wasn't going to ask her if she was bored rather than turned on), Konoha's general populace remained ignorant of the true details of their complex relationship, and he was forced to sit in hostile, brooding, seething silence as Sakura defended the Hokage's decision to offer a S-class missing-nin and Kage-killer sanctuary.
The absolute worst moment came when Koharu fixed him with that beady-eyed stare of hers (gods, that harridan had lived too long, someone should do the cosmic universe a favor and put her out of its misery) and said that all the assurances of the Hokage and (sneer) the Hokage's apprentice couldn't compensate for someone who had broken oaths of allegiance not once but twice, and was willing to sever ties with yet another nation for reasons that appeared shaky at best. "There's no way to guarantee your loyalty to Konoha," she stated in a manner that bordered on triumphant.
Deidara felt the very last thread of his temper snap as if it were a physical thing. He half-rose from his chair, a dangerous spark in his eyes. His girl's hand on his arm forestalled him. She was looking straight at Koharu with a smile that reminded Deidara of Kisame's battle grimace.
"Oh, yes there is," said his girl.
Their relationship had been one-sided for so long. It developed unevenly and under such artificial circumstances Sakura wasn't willing to even call it a relationship for a very long time.
Since Deidara's arrival in Konoha, every step forward had been almost involuntary, whether it was realizing he could realistically be called her boyfriend or deciding she needed to take the relationship to a more physical level. Her subconscious acted while her conscious mind fought against it.
This was the moment where she would have to consciously choose her future path.
Sitting in front of the Council without her usual support system (Kakashi, Naruto, Tsunade, even Sai) listening to them disparage Deidara's character, motives (not that they shouldn't, on his best days Deidara was amoral and they were largely right to be suspicious), Sakura came to an important realization.
Aspects of her life were orderly. Life as a medical professional required that. Injuries had to be systematically analyzed and just-as-systematically treated.
Aspects of her life were chaotic. He was chaotic. She couldn't analyze him, couldn't categorize him, couldn't do anything other than react.
It brought a certain symmetry, a symmetry that would be equally destroyed whether he was incarcerated or whether he returned to Rice.
More important, life without him was something she could no longer envision.
It wasn't how she ever imagined love to be.
But it was love.
And it was real.
For one of the few times in her young life, Sakura chose to believe in the reality.
"I'm marrying him," his girl said flatly. She smiled again, this time her cool expression eerily reminiscent of Itachi's at his most smug as she flexed one hand. "He won't dare betray me."
Apparently Deidara had been correct in his surmise that the Hokage hadn't yet approached the Council with her conditions for allowing him to remain in Konoha. Jaws dropped throughout the room. His was among them.
In the back of his mind he knew his girl might agree to marry him because it was in Konoha's best interests, or even because she was ordered to, but if Tsunade hadn't yet spoken to her then she didn't know it was a condition the Hokage set for him remaining, which in turn had to mean …
Well. The story was somewhat romantic after all.
Although aggressive was his natural state when fighting, he was more circumspect when dealing with his girl. Between being afraid of scaring her off and worried about accidentally hurting her with his bloodline limit he wasn't usually aggressive with her. At her statement, however, a predatory light shone in his eyes. He finished his half-aborted attempt to rise to his feet in spite of her restraining grip, turning towards her instead of the council. Slapping his palms against the wooden armrests of her chair, he leaned down until they were eye-to-eye.
"Not propinquity?" he growled
She pulled back a little, or tried to, attempting to get a good look at him. The back of the chair stopped her retreat, and he followed until their noses nearly touched. "Not entirely," she acknowledged, sounding a little wary.
Deidara kissed her.
It wasn't a peck.
And it quickly became awkward leaning over her, so he grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her up and molded himself against her, mouth slanting to find new angles and hands gripping waist and back to bring her even closer.
Because, goddammit, it wasn't every day a guy found out he was getting married to the only other person in the world that mattered.
There was stark silence in the room, or at least there was once Sakura stopped squeaking in either protest or embarrassment. Just like the time in her apartment, his girl suddenly melted into him and after that he really didn't care who was watching or what they were thinking as they watched.
After a very, very long pause, a throat was cleared. When Deidara ignored the sound, it was cleared again. Louder.
He wanted it to be Koharu. Better than you ever got, you dried-up prune.
Yeah, PDA's weren't normally his thing, and his girl would probably pound him into the ground for doing this in front of the Council once she got over the whole being limp and pliant thing, but right now this felt like the right thing to do.
And he really hoped someone told both Naruto and Sasuke about it. In detail.
"I think," said an amused deep voice that definitely didn't belong to Koharu, "the Council gets the point."
Although Deidara couldn't place the person attached to the voice, his girl gave another squeak that bordered on alarm, and that interesting thing she had been doing to his tongue stopped. Deidara raised his head, prepared to snarl at whatever suicidal idiot had interrupted them, and promptly choked back everything he almost said.
Whatever Root was, they were still nominally members of ANBU and therefore the council room guards couldn't deny entrance to the head of ANBU.
And judging from how huge her eyes were, whomever Sakura sent Sai for, Morino Ibiki wasn't the one she was expecting Sai to fetch in response to the signals she sent him.
Deidara gave her a little distance when she tried to pull away but kept a hand curved possessively over her shoulder, his gaze following Ibiki's movements as the other shinobi brushed past them to stand in front of the Council.
His expression stern, Ibiki folded his arms and coldly inquired, "Why are you interrogating one of my recruits without my presence?"
"Haruno isn't ANBU," protested Koharu as Homura stated at the same time, "This isn't a matter for ANBU."
"If it doesn't involve ANBU, why are so many of my operatives present?" asked Ibiki with a distinct lack of emphasis that was somehow more harrowing than any direct threat.
"Obviously with someone of this young man's power we have to take precautions," the Hyuuga said, but his voice was amused. "Although I suppose if he is as powerful as we are told, none of your current operatives could hope to contain him."
Deidara smirked. "You know it." Sakura pinched him, hard, but he managed not to flinch.
"If they are loyal, none of my operative have anything to fear from one of their own," said Ibiki flatly. "So I must ask again: why is the recruit known as Deidara here being interrogated without my presence?"
Suddenly it got very noisy in the council chambers.
The squabbling between Ibiki and the Council completely shifted the tone of the debate. Deidara stole another glance through his bangs at the mummy-like man to the side, the one Sakura had refused to acknowledge when she entered. Yeah, he looked moderately annoyed now that the focus was off whether or not Deidara should remain. Instead, Ibiki was insisting the Council had overstepped its authority, and from the looks of it with this additional information several council members were inclined to agree.
Tsunade hadn't the time to do much since their meeting the night before, but apparently the first thing she had done was clear Deidara's demand to join ANBU. Ibiki's appearance at the Council indicated acceptance of that demand.
One thing was for sure, thought Deidara. He wasn't going to be wearing the Rice headband for much longer.
And he was getting married, which would free him from the Uchiha.
Grinning, he shot a sideways glance at his girl. It was a good day.
At least, it would be until she got him on the practice field and exorcised her ire and embarrassment by beating him black and blue.
Somehow, that thought didn't make the day any less good.
A/N: Cherry306 made an icon for me based on what seems to be folks' favorite line from "Diplomacy." I've uploaded it to my livejournal (riikitikitavi dot livejournal dot com) for all to see.