Homemade Dynamite

by Misfit McCoward

Deidara agrees to help Itachi exactly once, and it ends with both of them being shot back in time. Now Deidara is ten again, Itachi wants help with even MORE mysterious plans, and Deidara honestly does not understand one thing anyone in Konoha has ever done. ItaDei, fix-it-ish.

7. Chapter 7

I honestly don't understand how this chapter ended up this way. My original plan was to have Deidara breeze through the first two stages of the exam in about a paragraph, because they're not plot relevant. Instead I wrote a chapter twice as long as all the rest describing the actual contents of the exam.

If you are here for just the ItaDei content and aren't feeling the OCs, I am so sorry because Itachi is barely in this one and you can probably skip it because it contributes very little to the overall plot and romance. If you ARE feeling the OCs... Enjoy, LOL.

(Also as a heads up for semi mood-whiplash: this chapter has a pretty big bummer of an ending.)

xXx

Deidara sleeps wedged between Itachi and Daisuke on the hard cots in their dorm room. The building is cooler than the outside, but the rooms don't have their own AC units and with five people crammed together, it's too hot.

Occasionally sleeping uncomfortably close to a sweaty teammate is just a fact of ninja life, but also it was a fact he'd mostly avoided since going missing-nin. He hates this, and he starts an internal mantra of all the things he can gain by being a chunin as he forces himself to sleep: the paycheck and working his way to getting his own place to live. The chance to get more artistic missions. Flexibility to do more of what he wants. Freedom.

It's all Itachi's fault that Deidara is stuck in the shinobi system again. The mantra peters out as he fantasizes about doing all sorts of violent things to Itachi, sound asleep at his elbow because stupid Konoha ninja all seem to like the heat. Deidara dozes off.

In the morning, Deidara subtly scans the mess hall at breakfast, taking in the other genin. Daisuke does the same, but much less subtly.

"There's a lot of Kiri teams," he observes.

"We're in Kiri," Deidara mutters back. The hosting village is always overrepresented at these things.

The only other foreigners at breakfast are a clump of two teams from Kumo. They stay hunched together and away from the Kiri-nin mulling around the mess hell and swearing at each other. The median age of the genin is several years older than Team Kakashi, which seems typical to Deidara. Iwa kept him far away from the Exams they hosted for reasons Deidara never really understood, because he's friendly and good with meeting new people and excellent at making the silly death traps you see in these exams, but he's pretty sure the average age of chunin promotion was around fifteen.

Neither Daisuke nor Shiori eat very much out of nerves, but if they learned one thing from Kakashi's confusing bell test, it's to go into missions on a full stomach. A few mandarins and a banana disappear into Shiori's coat.

"Well, I suppose I should say a few words," Kakashi says when they get up to go find Building C. His eye trails between them, a grim look on his face. Daisuke gulps, and then Kakashi's face relaxes into something light and lazy and he says cheerfully, "Don't screw up!"

"Sensei," Shiori chides.

"You'll be fine," Kakashi says. "Don't take any risks, and stick to your team." Kakashi directs this last part entirely at Deidara, who rolls his eyes. Like Deidara can't handle a bunch of dumb tests! "Shiori, Daisuke, remember what we talked about."

They leave, and once they're out in the yard, following the trail of genin heading to Building C, Deidara asks, "What did he mean? What did he tell you?"

"Kakashi had a private talk with us before we left Konoha," Shiori answers. "Why? To remind us that we are here to support your promotion, and there's no shame in failure."

Deidara thinks, if he were twelve and kind of a shitty, inexperienced ninja, having his sensei tell him that would piss him off. Neither Shiori nor Daisuke look bothered, like it's fine to waste their time and risk getting injured for Deidara.

"Also we're supposed to keep you from starting an international incident," Daisuke says, shooting Deidara a sly smirk.

"I'm not-" Deidara squawks.

"You tried to blow up a Kiri jounin yesterday," Shiori accuses, very serious.

"I was defending you-"

They stop at the edge of a gaggle of people at the door to Building C. Deidara spies the team from Suna again, their maroon and sand colored uniforms sticking out like a sore thumb among all the Kiri-nin in blues and greens and greys, and there's also a team from Taki.

"Are we not going in?" Deidara asks, standing on tip-toes to try and see over the crowd. He hates being short. He wasn't exactly tall as an adult, but at least he could see over children. He's so ready for puberty.

"The instructions were unclear," Shiori states. "Next time we should ask for clarification."

"Well, I'm going in," Deidara decides, and then elbows his way into the crowd. He gets some hisses and snide remarks, but no one actively tries to stop him, and Shiori and Daisuke hurry to follow in his wake.

There's a two-column list posted on the door. One column says TEAM with a list of names beneath, and the other column says ROOM. Deidara skims it and notes that several people are taking the team as individuals or in pairs, which is proof he could have totally just come alone and Kakashi is just insane. Shiori also leans in to read, her chin practically on his shoulder.

"So they're room assignments…?" Daisuke ponders out loud. Then he turns to the closest Kiri-nin and asks, "Are you not going in?"

The Kiri genin shrugs. "Door's locked."

Deidara sighs exaggeratedly. "So dumb. We're ninja. Doors aren't locked for us, yeah."

Another Kiri genin, this one a girl with inky black hair pulled back into a high ponytail, steps forward, one hand on a cocked hip. The hilts of twin swords peak up from behind her shoulders.

"It's locked and sealed," she says, and her voice is snooty. "Even I couldn't open it."

The boy Daisuke had talked to snorts derisively. "Just because you're Ringo-sama's apprentice doesn't make you as good as her, Sumomo. You're always so fucking arrogant."

An argument breaks out, with Daisuke standing between them, looking confused. More Kiri-nin get involved, shoving at each other.

Deidara ignores them and slaps a hand coated with chakra to the door. A seal does in fact light up. It's a very standard one that an experienced ninja like Deidara could easily either blow up or deactivate, but he's also experienced enough to know that showing off advanced skills like that before the test has even started is likely to paint a target on his back.

Deidara can handle being targeted by overzealous genin, obviously. But Daisuke and Shiori can't, and both Itachi and Kakashi have harped to him about not letting them embarrass themselves or get murdered. Casually showing off is off the table… for now.

Instead, Deidara grabs a confused looking Daisuke from the mess of Kiri genin slapping each other around and hops onto the wall. Shiori follows without prompting, and Deidara casually walks up to the second floor. Their room is 207, so…

"It's that one, actually," Shiori says, pointing at a window on the third and highest story. She has the map in her hands. "The rooms are numbered at random."

"Nice," Deidara tells her, and then kicks in the window, bars and glass and all. It's not at all enforced like a prison complex window should be, so Deidara concludes they've found a correct solution to whatever dumb test that was.

Other genin are copying them, climbing the walls and peering into windows. Deidara lets Daisuke and Shiori into the room first, eyeing the copycat genin in case a team decides to get cute and attack. That Sumomo chick is sauntering between windows like she owns the building.

The room is even more obviously a holding cell than their dorm room. There's another, even more uncomfortable looking bamboo cot in one corner, a seatless toilet and sink combo unit, and a desk and chair made of cheap, light-colored wood. Over the desk hangs a small mirror and a digital clock. The whole desk set-up is clearly new, and Deidara suspects whoever they were keeping imprisoned here didn't get that luxury.

There's two manila envelopes on the desk, along with three pencils and a loose leaf piece of paper.

"Oh good, instructions," Shiori says, picking up the paper while Daisuke steps out of the room into the hall outside. Another genin team runs past as he double checks the room number.

"Oh, Daisuke, come inside immediately," Shiori suddenly says, and Daisuke obediently steps back in.

"This says we may not open the envelopes until the exam starts at exactly 7AM," Shiori says, angling the paper so Deidara can read it too at her side, "at which time all the doors will close and lock."

As soon as the words leave her mouth, the door slams shut on its own, making Daisuke jump. There's a mechanical grinding from the window, and a black sheet raises from the sill, slowly blocking off the window.

Deidara grabs the thicker of the manila envelopes immediately, even as Shiori reads the instructions aloud for Daisuke's benefit. There's not much else after the rules about starting, except an explanation that each portion of the exam is meant to simulate the types of missions one might get as a chunin, and that it will be over either when they complete their mission (a pass), or at 7PM (a fail).

(There's also a handwritten note from a proctor that the plumbing on their floor is faulty and if anyone actually shits in the toilet, the proctor will personally find them and kill them. Lovely.)

The manila envelope has a whole stack of pages of shinobi profiles, the types of basic datasheets anyone in a ninja village could look up in public records. They include things like name, rank, known skills, and mission completion rates. These sheets include further information like height and weight, hair and eye color, speech patterns and eating habits.

Usually, if you looked up a shinobi's public datasheet, there'd be a photo of them unless their appearance was classified. These pages don't have any photos, or even have most of the information filled in. There are names at the tops of the sheet, but all the information is blank.

Deidara pauses on a sheet with his own name printed at the top. He knows he's officially registered as Diedara of the Leaf, but seeing it on paper is still weird. The section immediately below it reads:

VILLAGE AFFILIATION:
RANK:
AGE:
HEIGHT:
WEIGHT (APPROX):

This all seems like trick questions, in his particular case.

The blanks spaces are marked with dashed lines, and some of the dashes have dots under them.

"What's in the other envelope?" Deidara asks.

Daisuke is glaring down at a single sheet of paper. "It looks like… a code?"

It is, indeed, a long series of random numbers.

Deidara carefully spreads all the datasheets over the floor, preserving the order they were in the envelope, and sticking them in place with clay. The actual mechanism of the cypher isn't hard to figure out: they just need to fill out the pages and pages of datasheets, one character per dash, and the characters marked with a dot likely corresponds to one of the numbers on the sheet.

The cypher isn't the problem. The problem is that solving it requires them to know what to put on the datasheets, which seem to coordinate with the registered examinees, and they didn't know diddly-squat about other examinees, and now they're locked in an isolated room.

"It would have been nice to know we were supposed to be gathering information ahead of time," Daisuke gripes as he fills out the WATANABE DAISUKE sheet. "How is this supposed to simulate a mission?"

Daisuke, like Deidara, is only filling in the blanks on the DEIDARA OF THE LEAF sheet where a character has been marked important. Shiori is dutifully filling out the entire ABURAME SHIORI sheet.

"This seems like something Kakashi-sensei would make us do," Daisuke continues. "Then he'd be like, 'oh, a shinobi should always be snooping on other people, look beneath the beneath and blah blah blah.'"

Deidara stifles a mean giggle at Daisuke's Kakashi impression. It's not even funny.

Shiori pauses her writing and looks up at Daisuke.

"Daisuke," she says, very seriously, "you love snooping. You're a bit of a gossip."

Daisuke huffs, then picks up the datasheet marked KAWAGUCHI SUMOMO. "Yeah, I matched some names to faces during that fight. I can fill some of these out. But it's still annoying."

While his teammates work on filling out what they can- they know everyone's rank is GENIN and some people have names like SANA OF THE SAND, which makes village affiliation obvious- Deidara starts poking around the room for anything that might help. The goal of this portion of the exam is obviously to assess their spying and information gathering skills, which isn't strictly Deidara's strong suit, but he's more competent than a chunin.

There's a gap between the solid piece of metal covering the window and the top of the window. The door to the room, upon closer inspection, has another seal on it to prevent genin from just wandering out, but has been modified so the gap between the bottom of the door and floor is wider than a normal. There are vents in both walls that likely lead to the neighboring rooms. There are plenty of avenues for a clever ninja to send out an information gathering summons or some sort of spy jutsu or to eavesdrop on their neighbors.

And if you're Deidara, you could just knock out a wall and go grab and interrogate all the little genin you need.

Deidara steps back from inspecting the mirror and thinks over this option. It seems against the spirit of the test, but also Deidara has never been interested in following what authority figures want him to do. Then again, it's probably advantageous to keep his abilities on the down-low until he really needs to use them…

"This seems awfully biased to favor Kiri's own entrants," Daisuke complains. "They have most of the marked characters."

...then again, it's a fucking Chunin Exam. Deidara doesn't need this advantage, and he hasn't blown up anything all day.

"Hey, Shiori, is there anyone in the other room?" Deidara asks, pointing at the wall.

Shiori cocks her head for a moment, and a couple of her kikaichu buzz around Deidara's head.

"Yes," she confirms, "there's one person. But, Deidara-"

He takes the mirror off the wall, slaps a clay millipede to it, and sets it off.

"WHY," Daisuke yells, although neither he nor Shiori look even remotely surprised.

To the credit of the genin on the other side of the wall, she only lets out the one, singular scream of surprise and terror, then immediately hops to her feet from where she'd been kneeling over the toilet.

It's that Sumomo girl, apparently taking the exam alone. She draws both her swords and gnashes her teeth at Deidara.

"Hey," Deidara greets, and then steps forward and knocks her swords out of her hands with the exact move he's been pulling on Daisuke almost every spar. It involves ducking under her swing and grabbing both her arms, which he twists around behind her back. It's as easy as… well, as disarming a genin.

"I am the apprentice of Ringo Ameyuri, the Witch in the Mist," Sumomo hisses in outrage, even as Deidara shoves her forward into their room, "second in command of the Seven Swordsmen-"

"Uh huh," Deidara interrupts her, "and do you see how all those titles belong to someone who's actually good, and not you?"

Sumomo tries to bite him while he ties her to their chair, and he bites her back on her arm with one of his mouth-hands. The look of shock that passes over her face makes Deidara let out a mean snicker.

Daisuke and Shiori watch Deidara do all this with mild apprehension. Daisuke is rubbing his temples like Deidara is giving him a headache instead of solving their information problem.

"Deidara, I don't think this is a good idea," Shiori says. "Why? Because positive inter-village rapport-"

"It's the Bloody Mist!" Deidara snaps back.

"No, she's right," Daisuke defends. "There's absolutely no reason we can't just trade answers. Us passing doesn't rely on other people failing. We should work together."

"Mandarin?" Shiori says, offering one of the fruits she stole at breakfast to Sumomo.

Sumomo stares at the mandarin for a good moment, and then breathes out, "What the fuck is wrong with all of you?"

Sumomo then refuses to talk to them, fuming silently in her chair, and Deidara fails to get her to say anything useful because it occurs to him that torturing a thirteen year old girl in front of his cute teammates might freak them out.

Instead, he tries to get Shiori to come to the conclusion that should become the Sasori to his Deidara all on her own.

What spiders did you bring? He signs at her, angled away from Sumomo so she can't see. It's unlikely that Sumomo has enough training to know Konoha Standard, even under the tutelage of a big-name like Ameyuri, but there's enough overlap between all the sign languages she might pick some of it up. Or that arboreal scorpion?

I don't see how they'd be useful, Shiori signs back, and Deidara genuinely does not see the appeal of collecting nightmare bugs if Shiori isn't going to sic them on people.

Meanwhile, Daisuke sits on the toilet so he's across from Sumomo, and attempts to start a conversation.

"You must be really good if you're taking the exam all on your own, huh," he says. "Nice swords, by the way."

"I was top of my class," Sumomo says, sticking her nose in the air.

"Yeah, I was toward the middle," Daisuke says, scratching at an ear. "But my class was really strong overall, so I think my ranking was actually pretty good. There's no shame in being beat by Deidara."

He smiles, and Sumomo scowls deeply.

"I doubt your class was any good," she sneers, despite the recent demonstration that Deidara was, in fact, better than her. "In Kiri we make sure only the best become ninja. That's what puts us above all the rest. That's why we must make sacrifices to graduate."

"I don't know…" Daisuke says, wincing at the mention of Kiri's infamous academy graduation. "If your class is overall weak, and you make them kill each other, you get rid of the worst ones but still end up with a mediocre batch of ninja."

"We are not-" Sumomo screeches, and then proceeds to give Daisuke an in-depth, ranting description of the strengths of all her classmates. Several of the names Deidara recognizes from the datasheets.

Deidara can't believe that worked. He can't believe it was Daisuke who got it to work. He keeps signing to Shiori to try and trick her into realizing she can torure people, but Daisuke expertly gets Sumomo to explain to him why she's better than all the other Chunin Exam entrants next.

Was this… the power of the class gossip…?

And then, the absolute stupidest thing that could happen happens. It's stupid to the point where Deidara has no idea how he could have even prepared for it. He doesn't know if even Itachi could have foreseen something this deeply, horribly stupid happening.

An army of eels bursts from the toilet, right from underneath Daisuke.

"YES!" Sumomo screams in delight as slimy eels flop across Daisuke, who also screams in horror, flinging himself off the toilet. A cloud of at least two dozen eels bite at him with needle-like teeth. Gross-smelling toilet water comes up with them, sloshing over the floor.

With a panic waving of his swords, Daisuke has killed several eels before Shiori can rush over to help, a cloud of kikaichu emerging from her sleeves. The eels aren't that big, only the length of Deidara's forearm, and they can't actually do much but flop around in the thin layer of now bloody water on the floor and bite at the genin's ankles.

Deidara, being the cool experienced S-rank missing-nin, takes care of all the things Shiori and Daisuke have missed in the panic of the sudden explosion of eels, which admittedly, is not really something anyone is prepared for. He drops his own army of tiny spiders to rescue their datasheets from the flood. Then he double-checks all the restraints on Sumomo, who is yelling for the eels to shock Daisuke and Shiori.

(The shocks don't appear to be doing much, but both Daisuke and Shiori look deeply annoyed.)

It's obvious the eels are Sumomo's fault somehow, even though Deidara tied her hands back-to-back to prevent her from making hand signs and the bindings haven't slipped. Was that what she was doing, when he found her kneeling at the toilet? Sending her eel summons out to spy on people, only to call them back to defend her?

It was so fucking stupid. This is the type of shit Tobi would fling himself into, just to cause a scene. Deidara sends some of his spiders to make the eels into art out of spite for his memories of Tobi.

"Deidara," Daisuke whines, now covered in eel guts.

Sumomo sobers.

"You killed my summons," she accuses. Her tone is flat and furious.

Daisuke looks completely scandalized by her words. "You-!" he says, brandishing a sword at her. Eel blood drips from it. "You're the one-! Who-! You-!"

Daisuke spends a few more moments failing to articulate any sort of sentence. Whatever mojo he had going for him before is gone. Deidara hopes they got enough out her to solve the cypher enough to figure out the message.

And then, something clicks.

"Oh," he says, stepping into Sumomo's original room. "We're stupid."

Sumomo has her own datasheets strewn across the desk in her room. Prior to sending twenty or so eels into the toilet, she'd filled out all the datasheets for the Kiri-nin she knew. The cypher she has is the same length as theirs and probably the same message, but the numbers are different and the majority of characters marked for the cypher are on datasheets of non-Kiri ninja.

Deidara gathers up all the papers and hands them over to Shiori, who diligently goes to copy them onto their own datasheets, now hanging from the wall by tiny explosive clay spiders.

A single, tiny eel has escaped Daisuke and Shiori's massacre and is currently gnawing through the restraints at Sumomo's hands.

"You," Deidara tells her as he picks her up, chair and eel and all, "are a nightmare, and not in a good way, yeah."

With some grunts of effort and some extra chakra in his muscles- twelve year old Deidara is frequently not as strong as he thinks he should be- he heaves her through the hole in the wall and dumps her in her room, still tied to the chair.

"You will regret this," Sumomo promises him. Her voice is hilariously convicted and dangerous, given she just demonstrated how severely she overestimates her skill as a shinobi. "I'm going to kill all of you."

"Okay," Deidara says. "Bye!"

He uses an earth jutsu to put the wall back together, with some clay added in to fill in the gaps.

"That was a really impressive jutsu," Shiori says, eyeing the newly formed wall.

Deidara helps her put the cypher together while Daisuke sits on the cot and bandages his many, many bites from the eel attack. "'Expect the unexpected,' my ass," he mutters under his breath. Louder he says, "That girl was completely unhinged. Just totally nuts."

"Kiri does that to people, yeah," Deidara agrees.

They're still missing parts of the cypher, which might not be a big deal if the message were straight forward, but no. It's some sort of poem or riddle or something, and whole lines are missing. Why. Why.

During Deidara's first Chunin Exam, in the other timeline, he'd just had to swipe some notes from a protector disguised as an entrant and then turn in a coded report based on them. Why did this one involve poetry? Why did it involve dozens of electric eels?

Now that they've belatedly figured out the easiest way to get information, though, all Deidara has to do is send out some clay roaches to steal more datasheets. Or maybe Shiori's kikaichu would be less noticeable…?

His thoughts are interrupted by a knock at the vent to the room that doesn't contain Sumomo. Underneath it on the cot, Daisuke starts with surprise.

"Hello?" a squeaky feminine voice calls from the vent. "Crazy Konoha Team?"

"Uh," Daisuke says, then stands on the cot and peers into the vent. "Hello?"

"I couldn't see all that," the voice says, "but boy I wish I did, because it sounded insane."

"...right," Daisuke agrees, shooting Deidara and Shiori a What the hell is this? look.

"Anyway," the voice continues, "we liked what you said about one team passing not meaning another one fails. Wanna team up?"

The three of them have a short, rushed conversation in hand signs. Deidara is still skeptical of other teams willingly trading information with them, but Shiori and Daisuke both like the idea.

What's the worst that could happen? Shiori signs, and Deidara points emphatically at the toilet and pile of dead eels.

"Well…" Shiori says.

Deidara relents after a few more minutes of debate. He supposes the worst already did happen. What was one more fiasco in Deidara life of ongoing fiascos started by stupid Konoha ninja?

Daisuke pries the grate off the vent, and a tiny dolly tumbles out. It's as tall as Deidara's hand is long, wearing a dark pink kimono, and has a porcelain face. It stands on the bamboo cot and bows politely at them.

"Oh...!" Shiori gasps, rushing over to get a closer look. "It's cute!"

Deidara's eyes follow the barely visible, blue lines of chakra string up to where they're coming from the vent. He recognizes the doll as a training puppet, more for practicing fine movement than battle, and not subtle enough for espionage. It's pretty enough, and control through an air duct is a nice piece of puppetry, especially for a genin. Deidara thinks Sasori would approve.

"My name is Seiji of the Sand," the puppet introduces itself. "It's nice to meet you, Crazy Konoha Team."

xXx

The Suna team is nice, which is weird, because Deidara has met Suna-nin before and they're all overwhelmingly grumpy. This theory about getting to eat mangoes making a person better is definitely correct.

(Shiori sends some mandarins and a banana into the vent as a sign of friendship. Deidara approves.)

The Suna team gives them data on themselves, as well as a team from Taki and the teams from Kumo, collected by a combination of a mouse puppet from Seiji and another person on her team, a boy named Sana, just being really noisy. Team Kakashi offers up their own bios and fills in some of the gaps in their info on Kiri-nin.

There were also expected to be a team from Kusa and a team from Ame, but neither had shown up. Their datasheets, however, are still part of the cypher.

"That's the rumor," Sana the noisy teammate says through the grate. "I heard some proctors talking about it."

It's not the end of the world, because both teams have different cyphers to the same message, and together with the cypher Deidara grabbed from Sumomo, they piece together a very long, very boring poem about a moon reflected in the lake and a leafing falling in and causing ripples.

"You know about art," Daisuke says, looking at Deidara expectantly.

"Not bad art, yeah," Deidara says dismissively.

"They say puppetry is the great expression of art in battle," Seiji's puppet offers up happily.

"Shut up," Deidara tells it and reaches forward to flick it, but aborts the action because he realizes what the stupid secret message is amount. "God, it's the fucking mirror."

"The mirror?" Seiji repeats, and there's muffled conversation on the other side of the wall.

Deidara chucks the mirror at the floor, where it shatters with a satisfying crashing noise. The smoke of a summoning seeps out from the broken glass, and a proctor in a standard Kiri chunin uniform appears.

"Congratulations," he drawls at them. "You somehow managed to be the only team to a fight during the spy portion of the exam so far. Good job, hilarious work."

"But we passed, right?" Deidara asks.

"But you passed," the proctor confirms.

Daisuke offers Deidara a high-five, which he ignores. The sounds of mirrors shattering and more proctors appearing comes from both neighboring rooms, meaning Sumomo got free and had been eavesdropping. Deidara supposes just waiting for someone else to complete the puzzle and stealing the answer is perfectly acceptable spy work.

Deidara doesn't care about the stealing, except as the proctors heard them out of the building, Sumomo makes a lot of violent gestures at Team Kakashi. The groups are left in the front room of Building A, where the mumbling clipboard kunoichi looks absolutely baffled that Daisuke needs medical attention.

"It was an information gathering test," she says. "How did that even happen?"

"How did that even happen?" Kakashi asks when he's called to escort his genin to an infirmary in Building B. Daisuke is not so injured he necessarily needs a medic, but some of the eel bites are deep, and a medic-nin can help prevent infection.

"I…" Daisuke clenches and unclenches his fists at his side. "I don't even know how to begin to explain."

Itachi, at Kakashi's side like a horrible shadow, looks Daisuke up and down. His face remains hidden by the weasel mask, but his entire body language oozes judgment.

"You can't even explain?" Itachi repeats. "Seems like sloppy work, especially for a written test. How did you pass?"

Daisuke looks down right offended. Kakashi sighs and shoos him forward, leading him off to go find Building B.

"That was entirely your fault," Shiori tells Deidara as they head to their room to freshen up, Itachi following. Shiori's pants are covered in toilet water and eel blood, and Deidara has dust all over himself from exploding a wall. "Daisuke was doing a really good job until the eels attacked."

Itachi twitches and makes a very strange noise. If Deidara didn't know any better, he'd think he was laughing.

xXx

When Daisuke shows back up again, covered in bandages and looking very put upon, they go to the mess hall for a late lunch. The Suna team is just finishing up, and the only girl brightens and hops up to greet them. She's a couple years older than them, tall but skinny with dark skin and rusty brown hair pulled back in a neat braid.

"Hello, Crazy Konoha Team!" she greets, her voice significantly less squeak when it's not coming from a puppet. She doesn't bound right up to them- Deidara imagines Kakashi and Itachi's presences are a deterrent- but she does take several steps away from her team and towards them. "Would you like to sit with us?"

Kakashi eyes the Suna team's Jounin, an older man with the traditional Suna head wrappings. The man shrugs, and a dorky look boy with curly hair waves at them.

"I think it's a good idea," Kakashi says. "Go foster some of that positive rapport."

Deidara was vaguely interested in asking Seiji about her puppets, but he doesn't like the idea that he needed Kakashi's permission to do that. He frowns, opens his mouth to protest, and Daisuke elbows directly in the ribs.

"Stop being so contrarian," he says. 'Contrarian' is definitely a Shiori word and not a Daisuke word. Did they talk about Deidara? Brats!

Itachi sighs and starts pushing Deidara towards the table. Deidara protests, grabbing clay from his side, but then the Suna girl points directly at his face and says, "Let me guess. You're the whackjob who blew their room up."

"Yes, this is Deidara," Shiori says, taking a seat. "Seiji, I presume?"

Seiji sits directly across from Deidara and places her chin in her hand.

"Please," she says. "Please tell me what the hell the three of you were doing."

Shiori does most of the talking, because despite being sort of socially awkward, Shiori likes talking and explaining things. When she gets to Deidara deciding to just break into the neighboring room, Kakashi slaps a hand over his face and Itachi knocks his knee against Deidara's under the table. The Suna jounin frowns deeply.

"What?" Deidara demands. "It worked, didn't it?"

"You can't just solve all your problems with explosions," Itachi says, although there's a strange fondness in his voice.

"And you can't solve all your problems with genjutsu, yeah," Deidara snaps back.

"Hmm," Itachi replies.

When Shiori is done with her story, Kakashi shares that the eel summoning contract is infamous and has some downright deadly eels contracted (although clearly you wouldn't send those down a toilet). The curly haired boy, Sana the Noisy Suna-nin, shares that he chatted up the Clipboard Kunoichi and found out they'd finished first out of all the entrants.

"See?" Deidara says smugly. "My methods work, yeah."

"I have thirty-seven eel bites," Daisuke stresses.

"You'll be fine, yeah."

They talk. They foster disgustingly positive inter-village rapport. Sana goes to slink off and snoop on what other teams passed, and Daisuke and Shiori follow. The third Suna ninja, who barely spoke during the exam and has barely spoken since, mumbles something about taking a nap and their jounin goes with him. Kakashi makes a vague excuse and also disappears.

Deidara eyes Seiji up and down. Her eyes are bright with mischief in a way that reminds him of Kurotsuchi.

"Wanna check out what's outside?" he asks.

Itachi grabs a plastic cup of mango slices as they head out, because of course he does.

The "training facilities" they're allowed to use are a series of packed-dirt fields with training dummies and some target posts scattered around. There's a couple of gross, muddy ponds that give off a foul odor. They walk around for a bit, but there's really not much to see, and it's too fucking hot.

"Ugh, right?" Seiji agrees when Deidara complains. "I mean, Suna is hotter most days, but there's no humidity. This is like walking through soup." She pauses, giving Deidara a strange look. "Isn't Konoha in basically the same climate?"

"We get a short winter," Itachi replies. He's tilted his mask to the side enough to reveal his mouth so he can eat his mango. Deidara snags his own slice out of the container and offers it to Seiji.

"Got any more puppets?"

Seiji accepts the mango and smirks at him. "Trying to steal my secrets?" she teases.

Deidara grins back. "Show you mine if you show me yours?"

Seiji thinks it over for a few moments, then moves away from them and pulls one of several scrolls from her belt.

The puppet she summons is clearly unfinished, which is probably why she chose that one to show off. She's not going to be using it in battle any time soon, so Deidara can't plot against her for the next stages of the tournament or whatever she thinks he might do. It's long and six-legged and close to the ground, and it reminds Deidara of a lizard. Seiji attaches some chakra strings, which takes way longer than it should, and then she makes the thing run around with strange zig-zagging movements until one of the legs unhinges and falls off.

"Oh, crap," she says. "Guess I didn't attach that right."

"That's a standard model, right?" Deidara asks, squatting over the body while Seiji picks up the broken leg for a forlorn expression.

It's not commonly used because the weird way it moves makes it unwieldy to less skillful puppeteers, but Deidara recognizes it as one of the standardized puppets Sasori helped design for the Puppet Corps. It was one of the ones Sasori was less disdainful of, probably simply because no one used it.

"Uh, yeah," Seiji says, a note of surprise in her voice. "You know your stuff, huh."

Deidara feels oddly disappointed to see that Seiji uses standard model puppets, but he's not really sure what he expected. She's just a genin, and most Suna puppeteers use standard models. The lack of creativity and art in the Puppet Corps is a fact Sasori complained endlessly about.

Seiji keeps talking, "I've been trying to mod it to make it more personal."

"I like the paint, yeah," Deidara says after a beat, for a lack of anything else to say. Seiji has added a complex, colorful geometric pattern to the top half of the puppet's back. "It's a good use of colors."

"Thanks," Seiji replies, grinning cheekily at him. "Show me yours?"

Deidara figures Seiji is worthy of a real art lesson, so he takes the extra time to mold a very intricate chameleon, complete with textures skin for the scales, and Seiji looks impressed. He lets her run her fingers over the delicate bumps, and he has it rotate its eyes in the creepy way chameleons do and wrap its tail around Seiji's wrist.

She's charmed. She tells Deidara it's wonderful, because of course it is.

Then Deidara uses the chameleon to completely vaporize one of the ponds, and Seiji lets out a shriek she's knocked completely off her feet by the blast, and her terrified face looks truly impressed.

"I.. I don't…" Seiji gapes at the hole where the pond once was, mouth moving like a fish. She rubs a hand around the wrist the chameleon had touched.

"This is ART, yeah!" Deidara beams, raising his arms above his head emphatically. Mist from the vaporized water gently rains down on them. "The destruction! The complete change of the status quo in only an instance!"

Seiji boggles.

"Deidara has that effect on most people," Itachi tells her.

"I don't know what I expected," Seiji answers hollowly, getting back to her feet.

Seiji leaves them very quickly after that, packing up her puppet and giving some excuse about also wanting a nap, and Deidara isn't really sure why she's in such a rush to get away. He would have given her another demonstration, if she'd wanted.

"You were nicer than you usually are," Itachi observes when she's gone. "I thought you were going to make her cry."

"Why would I make her cry?" Deidara asks, starting a slow walk around the edge of his beautiful new crater. "That's your thing, yeah. I'm the nice one."

"Did you really think her art was good?" Itachi asks, following him.

Deidara frowns, grabbing the second to last mango slice from Itachi. Seiji's art was… well, giving someone else's design a cute paint job wasn't even art in Deidara's opinion, but it wasn't like she was without potential. She could definitely grow into an artist who did interesting stuff.

And, like, okay, Deidara doesn't think puppets are true art, but she could at least be approaching art.

"I mean, no, not really," Deidara admits. "But she's a kid, and it's not like it was bad, yeah."

"Very mature of you," Itachi says, then offers him the now empty plastic cup the mango slices came in. "Do you want to get rid of this?"

"Absolute waste of my talents," Deidara sneers.

He blows it up anyway.

xXx

After dinner, Team Kakashi finds a note stuck to their dorm room door with a kunai.

"Wow," Kakashi says, pulling it free. "Barely a ninja for four months, and you're already getting death threats. I thought I told you not to start any international incidents?"

The note explains, in very neat handwriting, that Sumomo feels her honor as an apprentice of one of the Seven Swordsmen was impugned upon, and that she was going to violently murder all of the Konoha genin in the exam.

"This isn't…" Daisuke starts and then takes a deep breath. "This isn't normal behavior."

Deidara hopes that Daisuke never has to meet anyone else from Akatsuki, because poor little Daisuke will lose his mind.

(...And also probably be murdered. That was always a risk in Akatsuki, and Daisuke has a very murderable face.)

"Every shinobi, at some point in their life," Kakashi says very seriously, "has an unhinged foreign ninja fixate on their demise."

"I don't think that's true," Shiori says.

"I have had many," Kakashi assures her.

Shiori purses her lips. "Sensei," she says in a flat tone that's definitely meant to convey, That is because you are the most infuriating shinobi I have ever met.

"Maa, kouhai, back me up."

"It's not a trait I would recommend inheriting from your sensei," Itachi drawls.

"So mean, kouhai. This is why we can't foster positive inter-village rapport."

"Sensei!"

They're meant to meet outside of Building A at 7AM again, so they pre-pack their supplies and go to bed early. Before they head out the next day, Kakashi gives them a much more serious talk.

"Be careful of that Sumomo girl," he says. "I know she seems… too full of herself to be a real threat, but she's dangerous. You don't get apprenticed to someone like Ringo Ameyuri without some serious talent as a fighter."

Kakashi shoots Deidara a meaningful look. Deidara clicks his tongue.

"She should be more worried about me, yeah," he says.

"Well, good luck and do your best," Kakashi finishes lamely. "Break some legs, preferably other people's."

The outside yard is covered in mist the rising sun has not quite yet burned off, and it's refreshingly cool on Deidara's skin. Shiori and Daisuke head right for the Suna team, and Sana greets them brightly and gives them the run-down on what's happening. Seiji shoots Deidara a nervous look and isn't as talkative as she was yesterday.

"Overall, a little over half of the entrants passed the first test," Sana is saying, licking his lips in anticipation. "Pretty sure all of the foreign teams made it. Makes sense; you don't send an iffy team into the Bloody Mist."

The second portion of the Chunin Exam is always a survival test, usually with some item you had to get to show off various shinobi skills. Deidara's first exam in Kumo had featured all the genin being dumped at the foot of a mountain and being told to make it to the top to present a special kunai they had to find.

He can't tell his team this, of course, and he barely listens to Sana explain the survival test thing. Daisuke and Shiori spend the next ten or so minutes discussing with Sana what type of terrain they might encounter, and then making plans for Shiori to track down the Suna team so they can work together again.

Children, Deidara thinks.

At exactly 7:00, the mist mysteriously parts and Zabuza appears flanked by two other jounin and what looks like a whole platoon of chunin.

"What's up, dipshits," he greets. "Welcome to phase two of your exam. This is the part where you could actually die- although I heard some of you tried on your last test-"

Daisuke shoots Deidara an accusing look.

"-so we've got some waivers you've gotta sign for our international committee."

The chunin start fanning out, passing out papers to the exam entrants. Deidara remembers, vaguely, having to sign one the last time around too. The idea was that if one of the genin died in a foreign village taking the exam, the genin's home village couldn't use that as a reason to declare war or something.

It was still kind of a funny concept, having ninja sign a waiver that they were okay with dying for a mission. Imagine if the Bloody Mist Academy students had to sign one before taking their graduation exam. Hilarious.

"Alright, listen up," Zabuza calls when the forms have been signed and collected. He projects his voice with such authority despite the informal speech that everyone immediately shuts up. "The next phase of the exam is a three day mission simulation. You're going to be released onto an island. Your objective is to make it to the island's safe house by sunset on the third day. Your mission's purpose is head-hunting. To pass, you must bring another entrant's head with you to the safe house. Any questions?"

Shiori's hand shoots into the air. Zabuza eyes her for a few moments and then completely ignores her.

"A proctor will escort you to the island," Zabuza states, then disappears into a poof of smoke.

"I don't think he likes this job very much," Sana says. "One of the proctors said he doesn't show up to any meetings or anything."

The chunin proctors, still scattered around the yard, start calling captain names and leading teams away. Seiji pulls out of her fugue long enough to manage a dazzling smile and friendly wave as the Suna team follows after their proctor.

The proctor that leads Team Kakashi into the jungle behind the compound is a heavyset chunin who moves so fast that Daisuke and Shiori struggle to keep up. He takes them to a river, gets them on a boat, and then rows them into a cove dotted with small islands that look like they're entirely made of trees. Other teams led by other proctors form a line of boats down the river, but once they're in the cove, the boats spread out, forming a loose ring around one of the larger islands.

"We're supposed to let you onto the island in reverse order of when you completed the first phase," the proctor says with a yawn. "So we'll be waiting a while."

They talk strategy while they're waiting for their signal to enter, ignoring the bored chuunin manning their boat.

"So we just have to beat up one team and take them hostage," Daisuke says, because he's a cute little Konoha ninja who interpreted the instructions in the nicest way possible. "This one's 'pass by making other teams fail.'"

"I should be able to locate other teams easily," Shiori says. "Right after we find the Suna team."

"It's going to be more complicated than that, yeah," Deidara explains with a dramatic sigh, leaning back against the side of the boat so it rocks. "Most of the teams are going to turn on each other, I bet. Seiji and them might even turn on us."

Daisuke and Shiori, bless their little Konoha hearts, both look outright confused.

"This is the Bloody Mist," Deidara continues. "It's every man for themselves, and it's easier to go for teammates whose fighting styles you know and who already happen to be right there next to you when the test starts."

Daisuke blanches, and Shiori's nose wrinkles up in disgust. The Kiri chunin lets out a single snort of laughter.

Deidara continues with his own predictions, watching his teammates' increasingly comedic reactions. Most of the teams are Kiri-nin who went through Kiri's horrifying graduation process, and they've been trained to think of their village's tests as tests of their willingness to sacrifice each other. If they don't actively attack their own teammates, they're all likely to split up. The other villages, once they realize they won't be able to easily find other full teams to capture, may also turn on each other. They're definitely not to be trusted for a team-up.

The current generation of Kiri ninja aside, all villages harp on teamwork, but none to the degree Konoha does. Deidara thinks it's sort of cutely pathetic that the idea of betrayal as a viable strategy never even occurred to Daisuke and Shiori.

"Of course," Deidara drawls on while his teammates continue to look more and more horrified, "I think only the worst of the Kiri-nin will go through with the whole beheading thing-"

"What!" Daisuke yelps.

"Ah," says Shiori, going very pale. "Deidara, I believe the comment about heads was a turn of phrase-"

"Oh, it's absolutely not," the Kiri chuunin cuts in, grinning meanly at them. His teeth, like many Kiri-nin, are filed into fine points. "As a rule clarification: cut off as many heads as you like."

Both genin give Deidara alarmed looks, and he's not sure why they're looking at him for reassurance.

"It'd be easier to carry heads around than bodies," he says. When they both look ready to scream at him, he quickly adds, "But we don't have to do that, yeah." He turns to the chunin. "Right?"

Deidara is very willing to cut off a random enemy genin's head if it gets him what he wants. The chunin, however, confirms that as long as they get another genin's head over the finish line, it doesn't matter if it's attached to a body or not. Shiori and Daisuke relax slightly.

A half-hour later, the chunin tells them they're ready to go, and the three of them hop onto the water and make a beeline for the tangle of mangrove roots that makes up the shore. Deidara takes lead and takes them up into the branches of the trees. They're not as broad or sturdy as the Hashirama trees in Konoha, but the three of them are able to move about fine.

They don't find any land, just mats of tree roots with seawater beneath. A mangrove island, Deidara thinks, is probably hellish terrain for anyone not from Kiri or Konoha. He knows that, if he were an actual genin from Iwa and not an extremely worldly missing-nin who'd been all over, he'd find trying to spend his entire mission in treetops incredibly frustrating. Daisuke and Shiori don't even seem to realize they have an advantage, expertly finding footholes and stable branches without shaking free leaves or breaking branches.

So. That's good, at least, even if Deidara is going to have to coordinate them carting around live hostages because his teammates are babies.

Deidara stops them when they're far enough from the drop-off point, and the three of them stand around in ridiculous positions in the maze of spindly branches. Crabs crawl over the roots below them, and Deidara sees the shadow of a fish swim through a gap in the roots. Shiori's kikaichu buzz around them, chasing off mosquitoes, and several of the bugs zip off to scout the area. Deidara is hopeful they'll find one of the teams from Kumo or Taki, and then he can just take them out by himself and they can finish up this part of the exam without complications.

He shifts where he's stuck himself to a tree trunk, feeling impatient. He could also just hop onto a clay bird and grab whatever genin team he sees first. He's pretty sure no one in Konoha knows about that particular trick, though, and he kind of wants to keep it in reserve in case he suddenly has to go missing-nin.

"What if I just blew something up," he says, "to attract people?"

He can't see Shiori's eyes, but she definitely gives him a stink eye. Daisuke scowls at him.

"And what if you attract a lot of people?" Daisuke asks.

Deidara crosses his arms. "I can take a lot of people, yeah."

"Mangroves are an important ecosystem for-" Shiori starts and then pauses. "Ah, I found someone."

Deidara still wants to blow something up, but he supposes he can wait until they actually find other genin.

"We told Seiji and Sana and Saboten we'd find them first," Shiori says instead of immediately leading the way. Deidara hadn't even known the third Suna genin's name before just now.

"You made that plan before we knew the mission was headhunting," Deidara snaps. "Right now they're enemy ninja, not friends."

"But," Shiori starts, and Daisuke shifts uncomfortably.

"It is better if we finish faster," he says slowly. "Maybe if we find extra genin, we can bring them to the Suna team? Then there's no conflict."

That is, in fact, a horrible and stupidly optimistic plan, but it is technically agreeing with Deidara, so he doesn't point out that Daisuke is a moron. Shiori's shoulders droop, but she relents.

Shiori takes lead, and they follow her for about twenty minutes until they get to a gap in the trees. Deidara notes that her range has improved since the last time Kakashi made them try and hunt him down in the village as a "tracking exercise," and it makes his chest feel weird.

Is this… heartburn? Pride? What the fuck?

The realization almost makes Deidara foothold slip, and it's just enough of a distraction that he doesn't just barrel into the gap in the trees. The gap forms a sort of pond in the island, where there are no tree roots to cover the water, and Team Kakashi positions themselves just out of sight of the three genin on the open water.

"You were right," Daisuke breathes.

"Of course I was," Deidara replies before he's even figured out what's going on.

The three genin on the pond all have Kiri headbands, and one has his hands and feet bound, sitting between the other two on the water and looking resigned to his fate. The two genin on their feet are both girls, and they're arguing and shoving at each other.

"...which is why I should just take Nibe," the girl with dark purple hair is saying, "and you can either get your ass kicked or find another one!"

Nibe, Deidara assumes, is the tied-up genin's silly Water Country name.

"This is really convenient, though, one already being tied up," Daisuke continues to prattle, and he is very lucky the two girls are too busy trying to stab each other to notice him. Deidara smacks his forearm and gestures for him to sign. Daisuke blinks back at him and signs, What's the plan?

You stay here, Deidara signs back. Don't get in my way.

Daisuke starts to angrily sign something about wanting to do stuff too, but Deidara ignores him in favor of turning to confirm his brilliant plan with Shiori.

"Ah," she says. "I made a mistake."

Then she collapses, falling out of her tree and into the water.

"Shiori!" Daisuke cries and is by her side in a second, pulling her out of the water. The two Kiri girls whip around, and Deidara resists the urge to smack his own forehead.

"What the fuck happened?" Deidara demands, flipping himself over his idiot teammates to stand between them and the Kiri genin.

"Spiderbite," Shiori croaks.

"What the fuck, Shiori," Deidara repeats, tossing clay hummingbirds into the air. He was the one who told her to bring her spider collection this time, but still! "I'm going to kill you after I take care of these idiots, yeah!"

Two of the clay birds detonate and there's a lot of screaming and smoke. Deidara charges into the middle of the lake.

"Deidara!" Daisuke yells, sounding panicked. "She's having a seizure!"

Are you fucking kidding me? Deidara thinks, casually grabbing a kunai right out of the air and throwing it back at the genin who threw it. She looks comically horrified.

"What do you expect me to do about it?" Deidara yells back. The two Kiri girls are retreating into the trees, leaving their bound teammate to try and sort of lamely roll away. Deidara moves to follow them-

"Deidara!" Daisuke screams again.

Godammit, Deidara thinks. He's fast and strong enough to catch up to the genin, incapacitate them, and drag them back in only a couple minutes, but a couple minutes are enough for Shiori to hurt herself if Daisuke doesn't know how to care for her. He could send bombs after the genin, but if he accidentally kills them, then both of his stupid teammates will be upset and Deidara is stuck working with them for the foreseeable future. The situation is stupid, and frustrating, and Deidara swears under his breath.

He lets the Kiri girls go, turning to make sure Daisuke is dealing with their seizing teammate properly.

Daisuke has pulled Shiori onto the 'shore' of tangled roots and slimy seaweed so she doesn't sink. Deidara thinks about pulling off his shirt to give her a cushion for her head, but Shiori's seizing has already stopped by the time Deidara is leaning over them.

"'M 'kay," Shiori says. Her speech is slurred.

"Turn her on her side, yeah," Deidara commands. "Maybe give her something to rest her head on in case she seizes again."

"Kikaichu are supposed to make Aburame resistant to venoms and poisons," Daisuke frets, shrugging off his own shirt to reveal his armored mesh underneath. He folds it and tucks it gently under Shiori's head.

"It probably takes a moment for the bugs to break it down, yeah," Deidara says, watching Daisuke carefully roll Shiori over. She mumbles something else nonsensical.

Deidara waits approximately three minutes to see if Shiori seizes again before he gets restless and goes to grab the boy Kiri-nin that got left behind. He's managed to roll, gagged and bound, across the water to the treeline. Deidara finds him trying to use a tree branch to pull the binds on his hands off.

"I don't suppose a nice Konoha-nin like you would go for an alliance?" the boy says languidly.

"Cute," Deidara snears back. He drags him back over to Shiori and Daisuke by the back of his shirt.

Shiori is sitting up now, despite Daisuke fretting and urging her to lay back down. She says something that Deidara thinks is met to be a reassurance that she's fine now, except the words come out out-of-order and it just makes Daisuke fret more.

"Can you babysit both of them while I go find two more genin?" Deidara asks, when Daisuke takes a breath from describing all his anxieties to Deidara.

"What?" Daisuke asks, staring at Deidara incredulously. "No, we need to find shelter until Shiori is okay."

Deidara stretches his arms out, indicating all the spindly trees with no cover. "Shelter where?" he asks. "Just sit tight for an hour, and then I'll-"

"Kakashi-sensei said-" Daisuke tries. "What if Sumomo-"

They argue, with Shiori giving nonsensical, slurred input that just makes Daisuke argue harder. Deidara is internally debating the merits of forcing Daisuke to conform to his plan by simply leaving him, even if Kakashi made him promise to not abandon his team and Itachi made him promise to get the genin through this round, but then the Kiri-nin says:

"The stereotypes are true. Fascinating."

"No one asked you, yeah," Deidara snaps.

The boy just blinks at him. He has sandy, shaggy hair and droopy blue eyes that Deidara feels make him look just a little bit absent-minded.

The boy keeps talking anyway. "You two could just bring me and your ailing teammate to the endpoint and pass, and yet you do not."

Deidara thinks this a rather transparent manipulation tactic, but it still makes him want to stick with Shiori to spite the Kiri-nin. It's honestly better motivation than any stupid promise to Kakashi-sensei.

"Daisuke, do you have anything to gag him with?" Deidara asks.

"I know of shelter you can use," the Kiri-nin says. Daisuke perks up, and Deidara actually smacks his forehead this time, even though it jars the teeth in his hand.

"We are not taking advice from a captive enemy, yeah," Deidara tells his idiot teammate.

"I'm injured and bound and will probably not survive if a team from another village finds me," the Kiri-nin says, blinking slowly. "Therefore, it is in my best interest to help you."

Shiori takes this moment to lean over and vomit up her breakfast.

"Oh," she says. "Okay maybe I am not."

Deidara groans. He supposes they can take advice from a captive enemy just this once.

xXx

Nibe, the Kiri-nin, verbally directs them to a sort of… cave made out of roots. Apparently they're common on mangrove islands in the area, made by generations of ninja carefully coaxing the roots to grow in unnatural ways. The cave is not tall enough to stand in, but the three boys can sit comfortably with Shiori laid out between them.

Without any tasks to distract him, Deidara becomes acutely aware of how hot and sweaty he is. He starts up his mantra about a better paycheck and more freedom again.

"Why was she playing with venomous spiders?" Nibe asks.

"Shut up," Deidara tells him.

"Do you want to see?" Shiori asks, reaching into her coat. Her cheeks are pink from fever.

"Yes," Nibe answers immediately.

"No!" Daisuke shrieks, grabbing Shiori's wrists. "No more spiders!"

"Protocol says we should induce a captive into liking us to steal their secrets," Shiori says.

"Shiori," Deidara warns, burying his face in his hands. He regrets all the promises he made about sticking with these two idiots. He regrets letting himself sort of like these two idiots.

"Ah, I said that outloud, didn't I?"

"You're recovering quickly," Nibe observes. "Usually a victim of a red-kneed tarantula would be having seizures for hours."

Shiori starts to tell him about her kikaichu, and now even Daisuke buries his face in his hands.

"I've heard of that," Nibe says brightly. "I have something similar."

Nibe proceeds to open his mouth and stick out his tongue, revealing the weirdest fucking thing Deidara has ever seeen. Instead of a proper tongue, Nibe has some sort of horrible bug-creature. It's white and has armored scales, a flat body, and ten horrible little legs that kick the air as Nibe waves his "tongue" out at them.

"Oh, wow," Shiori says, turns on her side to face him. Daisuke looks like he might hurl.

"Don't be impressed, yeah," Deidara half-screeches at Shiori.

"It's a tongue-eating louse," Nibe says brightly, as if that's not the most fucked-up thing Deidara has ever heard.

(Deidara used to be partnered with Sasori, who used to be partnered with Orochimaru. Deidara has heard a lot of fucked-up things.)

"My family breeds them," Nibe continues. "It stores extra chakra for me and helps keep blood oxygenation levels up when diving."

"It doesn't interfere with your speech at all," Shiori marvels.

The conversation dives directly into Nibe and Shiori comparing the pros and cons of weird creepy-crawlies living inside of you. Deidara searches his person for something he can use as a gag. Usually he just uses clay and jeers at his captive about blowing their head off, but Daisuke is looking increasingly queasy as the nightmare conversation continues, so Deidara feels this might not be the best move.

"Well, all symbioses have some element of conflict," Shiori is saying. "If I don't provide enough nutrients, my kikaichu will eat me."

"My louse lives off my blood," Nibe says, nodding. "I sort of miss being able to taste things…"

Shiori turns her face to Deidara. "What about you?" she asks. "Can your extra tongues taste things?"

Nibe shoots him a curious look with his dumb droopy eyes.

"Shiori," Deidara says, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Shut up, yeah."

Since they're not doing anything anyway, Deidara commands them to start napping in shifts. He reasons that, if Shiori can recover as quickly as she's expecting too, they can try ambushing some teams at night. Shiori looks bummed he's trying to shut down her attempts to make a new and very creepy friend in lieu of being allowed to meet up with the Suna team, but she's still running a low fever and passes out as soon as she closes her eyes.

Shiori only sleeps for a few hours before she sits up and announces there are people outside of their cave. Her kikaichu buzz around her, and Deidara holds back a mean comment about how it would have been nice if she'd kept it together enough to survey further than two meters outside their shelter.

"Hmm," says Nibe. "Yes, I suppose attacking the root-caves is the obvious move."

"Very clever of you," Deidara snears. If this is a trap, it's a bad one. Now the enemy genin have just come to Deidara, instead of Deidara having to track them down. "Daisuke, watch Shiori."

Deidara crawls out of the cave and immediately has to roll to avoid three kunai. Their attackers are well-hidden, but they're still genin and Deidara has years of experience on them. He can pick out their little hiding spots.

"Well! Only sending one out, huh?" a voice yells, and then three genin, all with Kumo hitai-ate, drop out of their hiding spots in the trees. They're all in their mid-teens, and none of them look nervous about taking on pre-growth spurt Deidara.

The interesting thing is that, even if he's not a sensor, Deidara is pretty sure there are more genin in hiding. Even in the gloom of the mangrove forest, he can see the places where the trees are not quite right. So either he's looking at some sort of solid clones (possible, since these genin are on the more experienced side), or two teams have made an alliance.

He really wasn't expecting the second option, but he supposes if Shiori can make friends with Suna-nin and the weirdest kid in Kiri, then maybe some Kumo-nin can make friends too.

The loudmouthed Kumo-nin starts giving Deidara an ultimatum- turn himself over or watch his teammates get beaten to death, blah blah blah- and Deidara drops a bunch of clay locusts. A handful hover around Deidara, and the rest head right for the three hiding spots Deidara can see, and then several things happen at once.

First, Shiori and Daisuke both crawl out of the cave, because they are idiots. Second, a genin hiding in the tree-tops over the cave leaps down onto the top of the root-cave. Third, one of the Kumo-nin in front of Deidara draws a sword and attacks.

"Oh, shit," Daisuke says, and Deidara's gut response, perversely, is to snarl at him that his grandmother wouldn't approve of that language.

Deidara doesn't detonate the locusts now swarming the Kumo genin behind him, because Shiori and Daisuke might get caught in the blast. He does very easily duck around the charging Kumo genin, grabbing at his arms as he passes and making him drop his sword. Deidara also sets his other locusts off, knocking two additional genin from the trees and inducing a lot of screaming.

While Deidara takes out five genin in one go, then sixth one- the one that decided to drop out of the tree onto their shelter- smacks a lightning jutsu into the top of the root-cave, and the entire structure crumbles. Shiori, for some god-forsaken reason, dives into the rubble.

"Why," Daisuke moans, reflecting Deidara's exact opinion.

Deidara does not get a good look at the tussle both Daisuke and Shiori proceed to have with the lighting jutsu-user, because he's too busy kicking everyone else's asses. By the time he's sure no one is getting up anytime soon, he turns around to find Daisuke pinning the Kumo-nin to the ground, sword to his throat and hair standing on-end from the fading crackle of electricity, while Shiori brushes root fragments from Nibe's shoulders.

Somehow, in the mess, Nibe has lost his restraints.

"Shiori!" Deidara yells, stomping forward.

"Ah," Shiori says, pausing. "More people are coming."

The two genin that eventually come bursting out of the foliage, ready to take on what Deidara assumes they think will be other genin exhausted from a loud fight, are Nibe's teammates.

There is a very tense moment where everyone stares at each other. The two girls stumble backward a bit, as they take in the sight of six incapacitated genin, five of which are in various states of being on fire.

"Good news," Nibe says, an absolutely wicked smile spreading across his face. "Instead of betraying you, Konoha-genin, I have decided to team up with you."

The two girls flee. Nibe darts after them, and Shiori yelps and follows.

"What is she doing?" Daisuke, still pinning a Kumo-nin down, asks.

"I…" Deidara starts. This is a total shitshow. This test would have been a breeze for Deidara working alone, and yet all of this is happening. Usually he'd like watching a shitshow, but somehow everything has just arranged itself to be as annoying as possible. "Wait here."

Deidara follows Shiori and the three Kiri-nin. By the time he's caught up, there's not much he really needs to do, because Shiori is back in fighting condition and the Kiri genin are caught in a swarm of kikaichu. Deidara watches, bored, as Nibe knocks one teammate unconscious and then stabs the other until she drops. Shiori frowns.

"They were your teammates," Shiori says over the buzz of her insects, disapproval evident.

"They attacked me first," Nibe says, like this is an obvious explanation. "Here, I'll take the more injured one to the safe house so she gets medical treatment first."

Nibe pulls one of the girls over his shoulders in a rescue carry, and Deidara snaps, "What makes you think we're letting you come to the safe house? Shiori could suck you dry of chakra right now, yeah."

"She's been trying, actually," Nibe replies, then wags his freaky bug-tongue at them. "I have an extra source, you see."

"I have been trying," Shiori says wearily. "But not as hard as I could."

Nibe pauses, then smiles at her. "Diplomacy, then. I haven't attacked you, have I? Did I not help you find more captives?" His smile broadens. He looks like a cat that's caught a fat mouse. "Do not all symbioses have some element of conflict?"

"I can just blow him up, yeah," Deidara tells Shiori.

Shiori bites her bottom lip. "But…" she starts. "There's no need. Why? We all have a captive genin now, so there's no conflict. And we're supposed to foster positive inter-village rapport, Deidara."

She says this completely sincerely, even after everyone's teasing.

Deidara opens his mouth to argue with her, or maybe just blow Nibe up anyway, but then he reconsiders. The third part of every chunin exam is always a tournament, and there's some strategy in being able to pick the other genin in your bracket. Deidara is confident he can beat any random genin, but it might help Shiori or Daisuke if they already know what Nibe is capable of. Besides, they're going to be easy targets with their hands full moving one unconscious captive each, and it'd be better to have a larger group, especially if Shiori and Daisuke are going to be idiots who don't listen to Deidara.

Plus, it's not like it hurts Deidara to let freaky tongue-boy come along.

"Fine," Deidara finally agrees. "But I'm sticking a bomb to him, yeah."

Nibe doesn't seem particularly put off by Deidara slapping a clay wasp to the back of his head, although Shiori sends it a worrisome look. That will definitely kill Nibe if it goes off.

(Deidara isn't actually going to kill Nibe, because then Shiori will lose her shit. But he doesn't want Nibe to know that.)

When they get back to their destroyed root-cave, Daisuke has figured out how to knock out the Kumo-nin he was pinning down. He's lined up all six unconscious bodies, and it looks like the two teams from Kumo had teamed up.

"I tried to get them in order of weight," Daisuke says. "I figured we'd just take the easiest ones to carry- why is he here?"

"We're fostering inter-village rapport," Nibe says helpfully.

"It's better to travel in numbers, yeah," Deidara says. He does not say it enthusiastically.

"Now we can learn more about tongue-eating lice," Shiori adds. She does say it with much more enthusiasm than it warrants.

"...alright," Daisuke agrees after a beat. He does not sound alright.

Deidara is afraid either Shiori or Daisuke are going to bring up the Suna thing again and he'll have to argue and say- he doesn't even know. That they could risk running into Sumomo the murderous genin, against Kakashi's orders to be careful? That carrying that many captives around is way about Shiori and Daisuke's paygrade to do safely? That Deidara just wants to sit somewhere cool and mold some clay and not worry about dumb genin?

However, with the prospect of carrying genin older and larger than them around, neither Daisuke nor Shiori bring up the "plan" to bring spare genin to their friends to help them. That's good, because at this point Deidara is only agreeing to do something that dumb if his teammates grow the nerves to chop off some heads.

Their trek to the safehouse isn't particularly interesting. The sun sets, and although the moon is bright and full, they have to slow down their pace to navigate in the dark. There's a tense moment when Shiori's kikaichu pick up a team nearby, but she's back in fighting order and notices from enough distance away that they easily avoid them with an annoying detour.

"Very impressive," Nibe whispers to her when she signals they're out of danger. Shiori blushes.

No, Deidara thinks in horror, taking in her flustered expression, and several things about Shiori's motivation suddenly clicking into place. No fucking way.

It's not just the desire for positive inter-village rapport. She likes the freaky tongue boy.

Shiori, why?

The safehouse is on the one stretch of sand on the island. It's a big, wooden building up on stilts, and there's a person sprawled across the front steps, obviously stargazing.

"Oh, hey!" the person calls, and Deidara nearly trips on the beach.

It's Hoshigaki Kisame.

He's wearing a standard Kiri jounin uniform, and it looks weird on him. Or- more like it looks completely normal, which is weird for Deidara. A sword that is not Samehada is propped up next to him on the stairs.

"They have another of the Seven Swordsmen proctoring…?" Daisuke wonders as they approach. He doesn't say it quietly enough because Kisame answers:

"They like to show us off." He's grinning at them, and now it's Daisuke's turn blush. Deidara wonders if Kisame's smile seems friendly if you don't know he'll plaster the exact same one on to murder you. "But I volunteered for the nightshift." He points up. "Best view in Kiri, out here."

The other genin obediently look up at the stars. The view is nice, Deidara supposes.

"Now, let's see," Kisame continues, ambling over to them. "Which ones are still alive?"

Kisame seems mildly surprised that all their captives are all alive, even if several of them have awful burns and one has been stabbed multiple times. He also seems confused that Nibe is with a bunch of Konoha-nin.

"They captured me at first," Nibe says truthfully. "But then we decided to team up."

"Sure," Kisame says, his grin still in place.

Kisame leads them inside. The building is mostly one big room, with more of the awful bamboo cots set up along the walls. Three of them are occupied by other sleeping genin, one of which is definitely Kawaguchi Sumomo. Kisame leads them into a smaller backroom, where two bored medics take their captives. Kisame also points them at a small kitchen and tells them they're welcome to whatever food is in there.

"You're stuck here until this portion of the exam ends," Kisame tells them. "Feel free to socialize with the other genin-" and here he raises an eyebrow at Nibe- "but fighting is strictly prohibited. I recommend you spend your time resting."

He leaves them, going back outside to stargaze and wait for more genin.

They haven't eaten all day, so they kind of awkwardly try and organize a meal out of what's in the pantry. Shiori and Daisuke don't know what to do with half the ingredients, and Nibe calmly steps in and starts putting together a curry.

"Man," Daisuke says in a low whisper, fighting back a yawn. "Sucks we have to hang out here for two more days. What do you think Kakashi and Weasel-san do without us?"

"I think they're friends," Shiori says. "Maybe they… reminisce? About old missions?"

"Reminisce?" Daisuke repeats. "Weasel-san has got to be, what, fifteen? There's no way he's been in ANBU long enough to reminisce."

Deidara watches Nibe's hands while Daisuke hypothesizes Itachi might be a closet Icha Icha fan, and he and Kakashi talk about it when the genin aren't around. It's really a bad look for Daisuke to be revealing the personal details of his jounin sensei and a Konoha ANBU, but he's wrong about Itachi's age and time in ANBU anyway, and Deidara likes the idea of Itachi reading Kakashi's stupid porn. He'd probably criticize the prose or characterization and not get the point of the books at all.

Nibe does not poison their dinner, as far as Deidara sees. Deidara does not know why he would now that he's passed, but sometimes Kiri-nin are just nuts.

When they pick out cots to sleep on, Deidara makes sure to place himself between Tsumono and his teammates. He realizes, pulling the thin cotton sheet that had come with the cot over him, that he should probably to a one-eye-open half sleep, just in case.

Remember the paycheck, Deidara reminds himself to keep him from having a fit right then and there. With the paycheck you can get your own space, and you can do all the art you want.

xXx

Shiori and Nibe… bond. It's disgusting.

The genin are allowed to wander the immediate area of the safehouse, and Shiori and Nibe sit on the roof and swap fun facts about weird animals Deidara never wanted to know about.

A non-Kisame proctor bans Deidara from setting off his art almost immediately, so Deidara spends most of the next two days splashing around in the shallows and sketching the hermit crabs that dot the beach. All of their shells are unique, and Deidara likes that.

Daisuke follows him around and rotates between practicing with his swords on the water, or just being annoying.

"Did you really bring your sketchbook with you?" he asks.

Deidara had brought his smaller one, but yes. He brought it with him everywhere, same as his clay. He was an artist.

Sumomo sends them an acidic look every once in a while, but she doesn't approach them and they give her a wide berth. She only speaks to them once, standing on the porch of the safehouse and delivering a harsh critique of Daisuke's kenjutsu form.

"Kiri would eat you alive," she declares, then turns on her heel and marches back inside.

Only one more genin, a Kiri-nin, shows up on the second day. Deidara thinks this is because all the particularly strong fighters have already brought their heads in, and the people left are mostly ones that will struggle more. This one has the body of one of the Taki genin and brags loudly about how the other three are at the bottom of the sea.

"Where's the rest of your team?" one of the Kiri genin asks.

The teammates are also at the bottom of the sea, and no one seems to particularly care.

("A community relies on all its members functioning together," Shiori frets. "For example, my kikaichu-"

"Would your kikaichu not sacrifice themselves for their community?" Nibe asks. "For you?")

In the afternoon of the last day, two more Kiri-nin and what's left of the Suna team stagger in.

"Where are Sana and Saboten?" Shiori asks when Seiji slumps down into the empty cot next to her.

"Sabo's with the medic," Seiji says dully.

"And Sana?"

Seiji lets out a sad, pathetic little sob.

"Oh," says Shiori.

Deidara watches, awkwardly, as Shiori pets Seiji's hair. The newly arrived Kiri-nin, who walked up carrying the heads off some other Kiri-nin and made Daisuke retreat to the other side of the room, eye the scene with a certain amount of disgust. If he's honest with himself, Deidara feels kind of the same way. Sometimes ninja die. Sometimes ninja you've been partnered with for years die, and wasting tears on them is pointless. He doesn't like watching Shiori comfort Seiji and seeing all their weaknesses on display like that.

Even if he feels the same way, he still doesn't like some Kiri weirdos judging his teammate. The sun is basically set and the test is over, and they're mostly just waiting around for the proctors to get it together enough to close up shop. He grabs a fistful of clay.

"DEIDARA!" Daisuke yells, and Deidara has never seen him move faster than he does to hurl himself across the room to try and stop the inevitable.

Kisame sticks his head into the room to see what the yelling is all about just in time to watch a flock of clay doves emerge from Deidara's sleeves, even as Daisuke tackles him.

The roof goes up in flames and a giant BOOM echoes through the room and shakes the whole building. It's beautiful. Several genin scream, just adding to the beauty.

"What…?" Kisame says, standing at the doorway in wonder while genin fleeing the building dodge around him. Deidara has always liked Kisame.

"Explosives accident, I'm sure," Nibe provides for Kisame. "Come on, Shiori-chan, you and your friend need to evacuate."

"What is your problem?" Daisuke hisses in Deidara's ear as he drags him out of the building. Behind them, Kisame blinks the stars out of his eyes and summons up a small tsunami to put out the flames. "What's wrong with you? That was completely unnecessary!"

"I'm restless, okay?" Deidara snaps back, ripping his arm out of Daisuke's grip. "My art is being stymied."

Seiji, standing with Shiori and Nibe in the sand, is just crying harder, but at least now no one is looking.

xXx

END NOTES:

Nibe's tongue-louse is based on the fish parasite Cymothia exigua. They're isopods that latch onto fish tongues until the tongue atrophies and falls off, and then they essentially replace the fish's tongue. We all know Naruto has a lot of eye-based body horror, but I felt we should also spend some time on the various types of tongue-base body horror it also has! The name "Nibe" comes from the Japanese name of a type of fish that, if my wikipedia skills served me well, is one of the species Cymothia exigua infects. (But also I did not actually save any notes on how I came to this conclusion, so I can't tell you the exact type of fish fhdsjkf)

I tried to hit a balance between the exam tasks being way below Deidara's pay grade but also him having to babysit children making bad decisions (and also Deidara is prone to make his own bad decisions). I think if he were taking the Exam by himself or cared less about his teammates, he'd blow through the tasks super fast (no pun intended)... but unfortunately he's accustomed to working with Shiori and Daisuke enough that he ends up taking their preferences into consideration. Gross.

Next chapter will have more ItaDei interactions.