Small WARNING for this chapter: The kids get pretty drunk. This includes the actual twelve year olds and not just adults-in-child-bodies. Also some drunk adults wander off screen for implied sexy times (all parties are equally inebriated; otherwise completely consensual).
xXx
Destroying an entire island, it turns out, counts as an international incident.
They have to get themselves back to the village before they all get dragged off by Kiri ANBU.
"You can't just take a soldier pill every time you have chakra exhaustion," Shisui gripes at Itachi even as he digs one out of his weapons pack. "It's not good for your body."
Shisui's soldier pills come in a reusable pack of four. Standard Iwa pill packs only hold two, to discourage overuse. Shisui offers one to Deidara as well, and he refuses it.
"I'm good to run back, yeah," he tells Shisui. His tiny child body doesn't have enough chakra to feel safe making another bird, but they're not actually that far from the village. He can still run, and he can still fight.
Shisui just blinks slowly at him.
"How are you still conscious, after a jutsu like that?" he asks. His eyes flicker red for a few seconds. His voice hitches. "Where is all this chakra even coming from-"
"Calm down," Deidara answers, tapping a finger to the bottom lip of his mouth-chest. His shirt is gone and vaporized, along with the island. "I just undid a seal, yeah. I'm fine."
"Is that what that is?" Itachi says, reaching out a hand and brushing his own fingers over the seal on Deidara's chest. Deidara smacks it away.
"Hands to yourself," he says, bearing his teeth in both his mouth and chest-mouth at Itachi. "My eyes are up here, yeah."
Shisui carries Itachi on his back, with Itachi slumped over and boneless, his face pressed into the nape of Shisui's neck. It's the first time Deidara has ever seen him look like he's actually in a thirteen year old's body. Usually, Itachi just gives off the impression of being a small adult.
"Just like old times," Shisui sighs. He cracks a grin at Deidara and says, "My cousin is always overdoing it."
It's obviously meant to be a joke, but right now Shisui just sounds exhausted.
They walk back to the village, and it takes a few hours. As they go, Deidara works on sewing up his mouth again and redoing the seal. Iwa originally installed the whole apparatus to prevent Deidara from accidentally blowing himself up while he trained his chakra control as a kiddie ninja, but honestly Deidara has had good enough control over himself for long enough that he probably doesn't strictly need it.
Still, it's more comfortable for him to have the chest-mouth sealed. It drools when unsealed, for one thing.
An hour or so into the walk, Itachi straightens up and blinks around dully. He must have been really out of it for the soldier pill to take this long to kick in.
"I don't think Madara will be back for a while," he says.
Madara-slash-Tobi escaped because he could- teleport, or some bullshit. Itachi doesn't think he would have lived through the fight otherwise, not with Deidara bombing the place like that.
Had Tobi always been able to do that? Why the fuck had they spent so many nights ruffing it in the woods if Tobi could have teleported them somewhere nice?
"He doesn't like caves," Itachi mumbles. "He made the most mistakes when I used a cave-related genjutsu. Cutting off vision. The feeling of being boxed in. The smell of earth."
"Uh, okay," Shisui says. "The Uchiha Madara is claustrophobic, sure."
"The time limit for intangibility is five minutes," Itachi says. He does not elaborate on how he figured that out.
"Hey," Deidara says, dropping back a pace so he's even with Itachi instead of Shisui. He licks his dry lips. "What did my art look like from the inside, yeah?"
Itachi stares at him for a few moments, face and body lax.
"Bright," he says finally. "Loud. Like being inside an erupting volcano."
Deidara beams. He's sort of envious of Itachi, getting to see it from the inside.
"Itachi, where did you find this kid?" Shisui moans.
Kisame meets them outside the village walls. It's after sunset, and Kisame appears from the shadows, looming and huge and intimidating. Kisame is tense, even as he still grins down at them, his teeth glinting in the light of the rising moon. Itachi slides off of Shisui's back to talk to him.
"Failing to kill him is disappointing, but he'll be too paranoid to infiltrate Kiri again any time soon," Itachi tells Kisame. "Not when he knows people will be looking out for him. Stay vigilant."
"Better than nothing," Kisame answers. "Although he left Mizukage-sama in a coma."
Itachi frowns slightly, his eyes bleeding red. "Do you want me to wake him?"
"What, so a different Uchiha can have him as a puppet?" Kiame asks, raising his eyebrows. "No thanks. This is a Kiri problem."
Kisame had done them the favor of reporting to Deidara's team and the Chunin Exam Committee that Deidara and Itachi had run off to spar. It didn't explain why they were gone until well after sundown, but at least now the suspicions are more "went to do something dumb and childish in the village" and less "this is definitely connected to the Mizukage suddenly going into a coma."
Shisui flickers off to rejoin his team at whatever fancy hotel Daimyo's sons stay at, and Deidara is left to support Itachi limping home. There's more Kiri ANBU lurking around the apartment complex than ever before, but no one intercepts them.
Kakashi opens the door to the apartment looking very tired.
"Do I even want to know?" he asks dully. Deidara's shirtless, and Itachi can't walk on his own and has lost his ANBU mask. They're both beat up and dirty.
"Not really," Itachi tells him.
Shiori and Daisuke are already asleep- probably exhausted from their exam, bless their dumb little baby-ninja hearts- and Kakashi points them at leftovers from some take-out that was proabbly part of a celebratory dinner. The cardboard containers hold all of Kakashi's favorite foods.
How kind of sensei.
Itachi and Deidara eat in silence, and then right before they go to bed, Itachi graces Kakashi with the information: "If anyone asks about a missing island, tell them it was Deidara's missing-nin clone."
Kakashi drops his book.
xXx
They get dragged in for questioning just after 5AM, woken up without preamble or warning. Shiori and Daisuke are bleary eyed and terrified, while Kakashi is tense and twitchy. He mutters some very hollow reassurances at them as a platoon of eight ANBU box them in and march them through the village.
Itachi just looks sleepy. He's put an illusionary ANBU uniform on over his pajamas, since he went and fucked up his actual uniform. Deidara thinks he could get his genjutsu claws into the minds of all eight ANBU, take them out, and barely break a sweat. It's sort of an exciting thought.
Deidara, for his part, is just annoyed. He'd been sleeping very soundly, thank you very much.
Kakashi starts getting openly antsy when they're led into a dark, windowless building and the Kiri-nin start separating them. They pull Itachi away first, and he goes without argument, looking bored.
"It'll be fine," he assures Team Kakashi as he's led away.
Kakashi starts muttering advice to his students on being interrogated very quickly and urgently under his breath. They drag Deidara away next, so Deidara doesn't get to hear very many tips, although his genin teammates look like they might wet themselves.
They make Deidara sit alone in a room for a very long time. The air is on high and the room is freezing, and Deidara presumes this is to prevent him from sleeping. Deidara has never minded the cold, and he dozes off anyway.
Finally, an ancient kunoichi shuffles into the room and sits across the table from Deidara.
"Okay," she says. "Let's make this quick: what the fuck?"
Deidara yawns. "You're going to have to be more specific."
She asks about the entire island that's now just gone, and he plays dumb.
"Someone matching your exact profile was seen fleeing the scene," the kunoichi says, slapping a bingo book on the table. It's open to Deidara's page. His own photo stres up at him accusingly. "It fits your listed MO."
"No, see," Deidara says, pointing to the name at the top of the page. "That's Iwa no Deidara. I'm Konoha no Deidara." He taps his forehead, although he wasn't given time to dress or grab his hitai-ate when they were all rudely pulled out of bed. "It's a common mistake."
The kunoichi looks like she might scream. Instead, she gets up and leaves the room.
Hours later, she comes back, lips pulled back in a smug smile.
"Your fellow saboteurs sold you out," she says. "We caught the freedom fighters you were working with."
Well, that's certainly news to Deidara. What was this, another part of Itachi's million-step planning? A lie used as an interrogation tactic?
Whatever it was, it doesn't make a difference to Deidara.
Deidara leans back in his chair, going all the way back so the chair is balanced on only two legs. "You mean Iwa no Deidara was working with freedom fighters," he says. "Not me. We're different."
"You are not," the kunoichi insists.
"I mean, he's my clone," Deidara says. "So we have the same DNA, but rest assured most bioethicists think-"
He talks out his ass about bioethics for about five minutes, and the kunoichi just stares at him, utterly flummoxed.
"Besides," he says, pulling a strand of hair in front of his face and fanning it out to check for deadends, "do you really think a genin could do all that and still be up and walking around like it was nothing?"
The woman just glares at him for what Deidara thinks must be a full minute. Then another shinobi sticks his head in and calls her out of the room.
"What do you mean, Konoha corroborates it?" Kunoichi shrieks as the door swings closed behind her.
Deidara is led into some sort of holding cell soon after. Daisuke is already inside, sitting on a bench and eating some soup out of a styrofoam bowl.
"They gave you soup?" Deidara asks.
Daisuke blinks up at him. "Well, yeah," he says. "I've been in here for hours. They didn't feed you?"
Kakashi shows up next, and his posture is all slouched and lazy even though Deidara can see his hands are shaking, even as he shoves them into his pockets.
"...did they give you soup?" he asks Daisuke dully.
"Why?" Deidara stresses.
"I dunno, I just chatted with them," Daisuke answers.
"What did you say?" Kakashi demands, right on the brink of losing his cool.
Daisuke, now looking properly freaked out, relates how his interrogation went. Counter to Kakashi's worst fears, it sounds like Daisuke did not get tricked into selling out village secrets with a cup of instant soup. He'd made it very clear in about five minutes he didn't know shit, and then he and his interrogator had fanboyed about swords for an hour.
And then they'd given him fruit and crackers and then, later, some soup. Kakashi smells the soup cup suspiciously, but nothing seems off.
It's just soup.
What the fuck.
Shiori shows up next, looking tired and annoyed.
"They think I'm a seductress," she says, and Daisuke chokes on his soup. "That doesn't even make sense. Why not? Because I haven't gotten any training for seduction."
"Shiori…" Kakashi starts, and then turns to the cell wall and lets his forehead smack against it.
After Kakashi gets his grip together again, and now that it's clear the cover-up story about Deidara's clone committing his crimes is somehow working, Kakashi gathers his students in front of him and looks each of them in the eyes.
"Thank you very much," he says very tightly, "for listening to my instructions and not actually starting an international incident."
His eye bores into Deidara, accusing.
"Yeah," Daisuke says cluelessly, slurping up more soup. "What's this about Deidara having an evil clone?"
Itachi walks up to the holding cell an hour later. He is unaccompanied by any Kiri-nin, and the two that have been left to guard the cell leap into action to open it up and let them out.
"Sorry about the delay," Itachi says, not even acknowledging the Kiri-nin rushing to do his bidding. "I had to talk to a lot of people."
Deidara cannot see through Itachi's genjutsu mask to know if his sharingan is active, but he'd bet his entire first chunin pay check that it was. Next to him, Kakashi twitches.
Do you see what I have to put up with? Deidara wants to ask him. Did the supposed freedom fighters Deidara's imaginary evil clone was working with even exist? Or had Itachi just taken advantage of some happening to have been captured that day when he was off making everyone think "evil clone" was an acceptable explanation? Or had he just force-rushed the story into interrogators' brains, as far up into the chain of command as he had to go?
Whatever he did, they're let go without so much as an apology for the disruption.
A smaller team of ANBU- only five this time- leads them back to their apartment, and so Deidara is unable to demand answers. It's hot and bright outside, now mid-afternoon. Everyone but Daisuke is tired and hungry and grumpy. Ameyuri is standing in their apartment with a bottle of shochu.
"What's up?" she asks. "The Exam Committee is annoyed you weren't there for your student's review, Hatake."
She smirks, knowing full well where they were.
"Is that mine?" Deidara says, pointing at the bottle.
"I swung by to deliver your results," Ameyuri continues, ignoring him. She points at some envelopes on their dining table. "Also: I'm inviting you to a party, where you can pick up your shochu, little genin. Apparently it'll be good for positive inter-village rapport."
She cackles at her own joke, then makes like she's going to slap Kakashi's ass as she sashays out of the apartment. He doesn't stop her or move, although he still looks exhausted, and her fingers graze the fabric of pants as she grins wickedly at him.
Then she's gone and they all stand around in confused, tired silence for a long moment.
"Everyone here," Daisuke finally blurts out, "is insane."
"You're the one accepting soup from them, yeah!" Deidara yells back.
Kakashi flops down at the table, picking up the nearest envelope, and doesn't even try to stop the argument that breaks out.
Deidara has, predictably, been selected for promotion by the Chunin Exam Committee. He has a whole letter from them, listing his amazing attributes like being highly skilled in combat and creative problem-solving, and all he has to do is present it at whatever office in Konoha for his official on-paper promotion.
And his increased paycheck!
Shiori and Daisuke have both failed. Neither of them seem particularly disappointed. The results of a test probably don't seem very important in the wake of being interrogated for hours by a foreign village.
Even if they gave you soup.
"Congratulations," Itachi murmurs to Deidara.
Deidara just grins. It was basically a given he was going to pass, but it still feels good.
xXx
The 'party' is in a private room of one of the run-down restaurants in their neighborhood. They go mostly because they've been promised free food made by someone else, and Deidara is determined to collect on his bottle of shochu.
"Do you really drink?" Shiori asks him as they walk over, sounding confused.
Genin are technically allowed to drink because they're technically adults… but, no, now that he thinks about it, all the younger shinobi were strongly discouraged from drinking.
"I'll drink it," Kakashi mutters. There's a deep bag under his visible eye that could rival Itachi's. "You're all lucky my hair is already grey."
When they're shown into the private room, Ameyuri and Zabuza are both standing and arguing over something dumb. Nibe watches them with a vaguely interested look on his face, and Sumomo is staring at a plate of appetizers like she wishes she were anywhere else but here.
"Yo," Kakashi says, waving at the other adults. "We've had a very long day, so I would appreciate some peace and quiet."
"You think you've had a hard day?" Zabuza asks, voice rough. "If you saw even a hint of this bullshit from the other side-"
He has a point, Deidara supposes. They're in the middle of a civil war and an island is missing and the Mizukage is in a coma and the village made a bunch of international promises that their domestic problems wouldn't affect the Chunin Exam. Deidara would also prefer drinking with children over having to deal with all that.
Ameyuri slams the bottle of shochu down in front of Deidara, then sticks her head out of the room to yell for more alcohol and food.
Shiori slides into the seat next to Nibe, despite being held prisoner and accused of being a seductress just that morning. Kakashi gives this one look and then turns to demand a shot of some Water Country liquor from a bottle in Zabuza's hand.
Another Kiri jounin shows up, and Deidara pieces together from the conversation that he's the sensei of the kid Nibe humiliated with his lies about spores. The genin- who failed- is not with him, and the jounin complains loudly to Ameyuri and Zabuza, does four shots in one go, grabs a fistful of chili garlic shrimp like a weirdo, and then leaves.
("Why would he believe an isopod emits spores?" Shiori asks, sounding genuinely confused. "That doesn't make sense.")
The three jounin- Ameyuri, Zabuza, and Kakashi- get in the cups almost immediately, and it's sort of embarrassing. Shiori and Nibe are lost in their own world, and the rest of them sit mostly in silence, watching their jounin make fools of themselves.
The food is greasy, but it's very satisfying after a day of being interrogated and not fed. Itachi picks a piece of fried vegetable off of Deidara's plate and passes it right through his genjutsu mask into his mouth.
Deidara is, suddenly and violently, reminded of Tobi pulling the exact same fucking trick one day when Deidara was giving him a particularly hard time about the mask.
Uchiha.
"Are you still in your pajamas?" Deidara asks. Sumomo gives him a very strange look.
Itachi nods, and the look on her face gets more weirded out.
"It's more comfortable," he says. "I might try this more often."
He steals more food from Deidara's plate.
Seiji shows up eventually, without her teammate or jounin. The "adults" are busy in a corner getting shit faced and shoving each other and laughing, and Seiji stands across the table from the students.
"I'm not staying long," she says quietly. "But I wanted to thank you, Shiori. I wouldn't have passed if you hadn't given me your senbon."
Sumomo's eyebrows shoot up. "You just gave her your tools?" she asks, flabbergasted.
"Well, I'd already lost," Shiori replies, like it was obvious. "I wasn't going to use them. And members of a community help each other. It's what makes us strong."
Sumomo snorts. Seiji shifts on her feet slightly.
"I wanted to talk to you about that," she says. "Shiori, we are not friends. We're not part of the same community. Even within your own team, you need to learn to look out for your own interests more."
This speech is obviously meant for Shiori, but Seiji's eyes move over to Deidara. They're dull and defeated, but when she makes eye contact with him, a flicker of hate and anger and fear flares.
"Saboten still hasn't woken up," she says tightly. "And we're all getting kicked out of the village tomorrow. We don't know if he'll make the trip back to Suna."
There's a long, awkward silence.
"Anyway," Seiji finishes. "That's all I wanted to say."
She leaves. Her posture is slumped and boring.
It's very unartistic of her.
"Wow," Sumomo says loudly, breaking the silence. "I can't believe they passed a glob of seaweed like that. Can we open this?"
She reaches for the shochu, and Deidara snatches it away from her.
"Do you know who else passed?" Daisuke asks. He sends a slightly unconfident smirk her way and adds, "Since your mentor is so important and all."
"As a matter of fact," Sumomo says, sticking her nose in the air, "I know all about that."
She flags down a waiter to bring them a couple bottles of sake while she talks. Both Seiji and the sawshark sword genin passed, on the basis of their two fights being acceptable and their performance in the previous stages of the exam being good. Deidara thinks that Seiji, in the throws of emotional turmoil, made enough mistakes with puppetry that her own village might not have passed her, but Kiri found it impressive she could still fight after she'd knocked out both her legs.
Nibe had also passed, although it was controversial. Ironically for a village of shinobi, the committee had been torn on if his general underhandedness was a real skill or just him getting lucky. Shiori squeezes his knee in congratulations.
"And so?" Deidara says, eyeing Sumomo meanly. "Did you pass, yeah?"
Sumomo scowls, even as she pours a round of sake for them.
"With probation," she mutters. "Ameyuri-sensei already lectured me on respecting my opponents, even if they're annoying cockroaches."
She shoots Daisuke a mean look, then shoves a cup of sake at him.
"Now, do you annoying cockroach babies know how to drink or not?"
None of them, including Sumomo, have had more than a single drink at holidays. Deidara watches, fascinated, at the trainwreck his team rapidly turns into under the influence of alcohol.
"I am a symbiosis," Shiori insists.
"She is," Nibe agrees. "We all are."
"Okay," Daisuke says, pulling out his wallet. He drops it on the floor and picking it up looks like a real struggle for him. Sumomo giggles. "Okay. Bets on who Kakashi-sensei is going home with tonight."
On the other side of the room, Kakashi appears to be examining Zabuza's teeth while Ameyuri's hand is firmly on his ass. All three of them are blushed pink from alcohol. What the fuck.
"Wouldn't he just go home with us?" Shiori asks.
"Ha!" Sumomo replies. "You poor baby, clearly my sensei is seducing your sensei. He doesn't have a chance!"
She slaps several bills down on top of Daisuke's wallet.
("Seduction…." Shiori repeats, suddenly very interested in the way Ameyuri's hand tightens as she leans in to whisper something in Kakashi's ear.
"Nope, no," Niba says, gently turning Shiori's head away. "Please keep listing your favorite mutualisms. Tell me about the frogs and the spiders.")
"Uh-uh," Daisuke hiccups, pulling bills out of his wallet. "Kakashi-sensei's been joking with Zabuza all month. They have the rapport, and he clearly swings both ways. I've read what's in those books."
Kakashi does, indeed, carefully pour a bottle shot into Zabuza's mouth, giggling the whole time.
"Don't lose our deposit, yeah," Deidara warns. "Also, how could you possibly have read those stupid books and not seen what's obviously going to happen?" Deidara drops his own bills on the table. "They're all going home together."
"This is really embarrassing for Kakashi-sempai," Itachi murmurs as Sumomo and Daisuke start trying to bully Shiori into formalizing her bet that Kakashi will go home with his team at the end of the night.
"Yeah," Deidara agrees. He's drunk before, obviously, but not in a body this small, and the sake makes him warmer and woozier than he'd anticipated. He lets his head loll onto Itachi's shoulder. "You have your sharingan on, right? Someone needs to remember every last embarrassing detail."
"Hmm," Itachi says. "Do you want to step outside?"
("Why would you have one sword if you have two hands?" Daisuke is yelling.
Sumomo bangs the table so hard their plates all rattle. "THAT'S WHAT I'M SAYING!")
Deidara lets Itachi lead him by the hand outside. He grabs his bottle of shochu as he goes. Itachi takes him down to the canal and doesn't even twitch when Deidara drunkenly tries licking and then biting his hand.
The market is closed, and the stalls are all packed away and covered in plastic tarps, leaving the area quiet and empty. They find a bench overlooking the canal, and Deidara opens the shochu.
The moon is just shy of being full, and it's reflected perfectly on the water below. Deidara recites what he remembers of the bad poem from the first stage of the exam as Itachi takes a swig of the shochu.
It is, indeed, nice shochu. It doesn't burn at all as Deidara takes his own drink.
"Man," he says, kicking his legs in the air. "No one here knows anything about art."
He wants to brag about his art demonstration, the good one that blew away an island, but there are undoubtedly Kiri-nin listening in somewhere, and Deeidara is drunk but not stupid. Instead he complains about how unartistic all the other exam entrants were, and Itachi nods along, occasionally stealing the bottle for more shochu.
"That Seiji girl had potential though," Deidara bemoans. "Too bad she's all upset her teammates died or whatever, yeah."
"Mm," Itachi agrees. "I think you scared her."
"What? Me?" Deidara asks. "I should have inspired her, yeah."
"It doesn't matter, anyway," Itachi says. "Her spirit was broken either way. Despite being promoted, she's not mentally prepared for shinobi life."
Itachi goes on to explain, for reasons that Deidara's drunk brain does not really understand, that Daisuke is also destined for failure, and Deidara should stop trying to recruit him as a roommate.
"Hey," Deidara interrupts. "What if- what if we tracked down Danna?"
Itachi pauses, rolling his neck. "Okay," he says after a beat. "Do you want something from him?"
"I'm just…" Deidara's head is spinning. The stars above him whirl around and around. It's pretty. "Art, yeah."
"Art?"
"If Seiji wants inspiration," Deidara presses on. "Danna is very inspiring. We should, hm, introduce them. He could fix her."
"Deidara," Itachi says slowly, and it sounds like he is trying very hard not to laugh. "I'm not an artist, but… I do not think that would help."
Deidara pouts. Why wouldn't a young aspiring artist want to meet Sasori of the Red Sand, the greatest puppeteer of all time?
"He's very scary," Itachi says dryly, as if reading Deidara's mind.
"So?" Deidara answers. "You're very scary and everyone's obsessed with you- you and your- your pretty eyes."
"My pretty eyes?" Itachi asks, and then the genjutsu is bleeding away from face, the mask disappearing.
The part of Deidara that's still clinging to logic and sobriety- the ninja part- has a moment where he's surprised that Itachi would unmask just to tease him, right in the middle of a foreign village. But, no, Itachi is one of the most skilled genjutsu users of all time. He can pull away the illusion just for Deidara, if he wants.
Itachi blinks at him, his face just for Deidara, and a smirk is pulling at his lips. His sharingan is red as blood in the moonlight, the tomoe spinning lazily, studying Deidara, and Deidara likes this Itachi so much, the one that's only looking at him.
"Your eyelashes," Deidara tells him matter-of-factly. "They're very long and I hate them."
Itachi laughs. He sounds free, the stupid anxieties over Madara-slash-Tobi banished just for the night. It's a good look for him.
"I'm cold," Itachi tells him, picking up Deidara's arm and wrapping it around him. "Genjutsu over pajamas was a bad idea."
"You're such a baby," Deidara tells him, shoving the shochu bottle into his arms. "Get your liquid blanket on."
"That's not how that works," Itachi murmurs, but uncaps the bottle anyway.
"It's like 25 degrees celsius," Deidara says. "You're not going to die of exposure if you pass out."
Itachi hums and snuggles up to him even more. Deidara complains, but he lets him.
Deidara absolutely does not remember how they get home that night.
xXx
In the morning, Shiori and Daisuke also seem confused about how they got home.
"Deeply irresponsible of you," Itachi says, even as he obediently fries several eggs for Deidara's hangover. "No wonder you failed your exam."
Kakashi finally stumbles in at 11 AM. They are technically supposed to be out by 9 AM, but Kakashi assures them that Zabuza is perfectly okay with the tardy departure. He rubs his jaw. Deidara finds himself unable to eat more eggs.
"Here," Kakashi says, and then drops a package with a loud thud that makes everyone in front of Daisuke on the table. "Got you a gift. Itachi, did you fry an entire dozen eggs?"
"They weren't acceptable," Itachi defends.
Daisuke's gift is a pair of dual swords, which were the ones Ameyuri used to train to be one of the Seven Swordsmen. They'll need to be patched up, but it's nothing a Konoha weaponsmith can't do. Daisuke handles them with a look of awe, even as he passes Deidara the pot from their bet.
Kakashi proceeds to lie down on the floor.
"Sensei," Shiori says, leaning over him. "I don't understand why it's okay to have sex with ninja from other villages, but discouraged to date them."
Kakashi stares up at her.
The difference, of course, is that Kakashi can write off his threesome as stress release and information-gathering with minimal risk, because he's a badass jounin who's been to all the dumb seminars and classes on sexual encounters with other shinobi. Shiori hasn't had that training or life experience, and a full-on romantic relationship can lead to all sorts of emotional involvements that could end poorly for her and for Konoha.
"Don't ask your hungover sensei about his sex life," Kakashi says finally.
"Did you break up with Nibe, then?" Daisuke asks, snagging one of the fried eggs Itachi rejected. "That happened, right?"
"Yes," Shiori says, not sounding at all upset. "He also got a warning about forming romantic bonds with a foreign shinobi. It can't be helped."
It's… suspicious how well Shiori is taking this. She was a weirdo, sure, so maybe she'd just filed the break up away in her overly logical Shiori-brain. But she'd also been upset when Seiji had stopped wanting to talk to her, and they'd been friends for a day. Something was off.
Kakashi, on the floor, doesn't seem to notice anything off with his genin at all. He barely seems conscious.
At around 3PM, Itachi finally makes Kakashi get up and pack up, and they finally leave Kiri behind for good. The one who sees them off from the gates is Kisame, and he sends them a tiny wave.
Itachi waves back. Everyone else is too hungover.
xXx
"NII-SAN!" Sasuke shrieks, bowling into Itachi before he's even through the front door. "I missed you!"
"I missed you too," Itachi tells him, returning the hug and rudely blocking Deidara from getting into the house.
"Itachi, welcome home," Mikoto calls, sticking her head out from the kitchen. "You too, Deidara. Itachi's note said you passed. Congratulations."
"Yeah!" Sasuke says, pulling back from Itachi. "Mother said that Nii-san said that you won a whole tournament-"
Sasuke babbles about how cool Deidara must have been, complete with theorizing about how he bet Deidara's art knocked his opponents right off his feet. It's endearing, and Deidara suddenly feels guilty he didn't get Sasuke a souvenir.
Just… just a little bit guilty. The brat was still a brat.
"Sasuke, what have you been up to?" Itachi asks, shuffling his little brother into their living room. "For example, how did you get this?"
Sasuke has a black eye, or at least he did- its color has faded to a light brown around his eye. Itachi carefully runs the pad of his thumb over the bruise. Sasuke looks annoyed by the motion, but he doesn't pull away.
"Ino got me in taijutsu practice," he says. After a beat he adds, "I still won though! I'm top of my class for taijutsu."
"That's good," Itachi tells him. "You're doing a very good job. Do you want to see the present I got you?"
Itachi had gotten him a set of shadow puppets. They're beautifully painted on paper, hinged together with wooden dowels to control each part. Most of them are characters from Water Country's mythology, including a ferocious looking three-tailed beast. Itachi sits on the floor with Sasuke, identifying characters for him and helping him figure out how to make them move.
"Sasuke, do you want to sleep in my room tonight?" Itachi asks.
"I guess," Sasuke says with a shrug, examining a puppet of a man with a horse's head.
Mikoto gestures Deidara into the kitchen.
"Did something happen?" she asks, darting her eyes in her sons' direction.
What didn't happen? Deidara thinks.
"I think Itachi just gets worried about Sasuke's safety, yeah," he says eventually. "Especially when he has to leave the village."
"Mm, that happens to shinobi," Mikoto agrees, turning to the fridge. "Why don't you pick what we have for dinner, chunin-san? We have…"
xXx
In the month that they've been gone, several Uchiha elders have passed away.
One committed suicide, citing verified financial problems in her note. One's wife accidentally gave him too much medication one night. Another fell and hit his head. One passed away in her sleep, her cause of death listed as natural causes.
They're all old, and their deaths are not considered suspicious.
Deidara gets roped into going to two of the funerals, borrowing an uncomfortable kimono from Itachi for the occasions.
Shisui looks very, very stressed at both events, and Deidara chooses not to analyse it, because now he's a chunin and he can focus on picking his own missions.
He runs one, all by himself in the Hellpit, blasting obstacles out of the way for new construction. It's fun, he doesn't have to babysit any dumb children, and the paycheck is good… and then somehow he ends up getting lunch with Shiori and Daisuke anyway.
"Here," Shiori says, carefully setting a small succulent plant in a pudding cup full of dirt in front of him. She'd picked some Water Country plant cuttings up on their trip back to Konoha, to decorate her new terrariums filled with terrifying spiders.
Shiori looks… tired. More tired than she should, with days of no missions or training to recover from their trip.
Deidara knows they've had no missions, because the day before a dog had shown up to inform him Kakashi still expected him to show up for group training. This was by order of a commanding officer, and Deidara did not have the authority or clout to overrule it.
Deidara is, in a word, pissed about it. He's going to take the jounin exams as soon as possible.
Still, he wanted a gift for Sasuke, so he agreed to the lunch meet-up. He pulls the little plant towards himself.
"What's up with you?" Daisuke asks, peering into Shiori's sunglasses. "Still upset about your boyfriend?"
"Oh, no," she says, shaking her head. "Nibe and I are going to exchange letters. I'm tired because my cousin died."
"Oh, that sucks," Daisuke says. "Were you close?"
Shiori and her cousin were not close at all, but Aburame funerary rituals were rough. She's been sitting watch all night with her family, watching the cousin's kikaichu colony slowly eat the body from the inside out.
"They laid eggs this morning," she says. "We'll keep the eggs dormant until a new baby that can use them is born."
"O-oh," says Daisuke, no longer very interested in his food.
"It's alright," Shiori says. "We always say: the death of a host is just a way for the colony to live on in another. Although I never much liked my cousin." She gives Deidara a look. "He said a lot of very rude things about other clans, especially the Uchiha. He wasn't very pro-community."
Something about her statement bothers Deidara, and he mulls it over all through the rest of lunch, only half listening to Shiori's instructions on how to take care of the plant.
At the end of the meal, Shiori hands him an index card with said instructions written out, and he asks, "Hey, your cousin. Did he die on a mission?"
Shiori cocks her head. "No," she says. "He broke his neck in a training accident. He went to practice something acrobatic and came down wrong."
This isn't an uncommon way for shinobi to go, stupid as it sounded. Deidara knew perfectly capable shinobi who'd tried some wild trick on a bad day and then injured themselves horribly.
But still, something was… off.
How many people had suddenly died seemingly unsuspicious deaths in the village in the last month?
At the Uchiha residence, Deidara makes a cute planter in the shape of one of the canal turtles he's sketched in Kiri, and then dumps the plant and some dirt from the garden in it. He presents it to Sasuke when he comes home from the Academy.
"Oh, cool!" Sasuke says, grinning up at him. "I can put it in my window!"
Sasuke immediately becomes suspicious when Deidara gives him the instructions card, which is signed by Shiori.
"This is that bug girl," Sasuke accuses, holding the plant from him at arm's length. "This isn't going to eat me, is it?"
"Nope," Deidara says, resisting the urge to laugh in Sasuke's ridiculous face.
"Poison me?" Sasuke glares up at him, affronted and betrayed, and it's frankly adorable. "Shoot bees at me?"
"Kid, what are they teaching you about plants in the Academy, yeah?"
The plants ends up in the kitchen window instead, right over the sink.
"It's very cute," Mikoto says, smiling sweetly at the clay turtle and then sweetly down at Deidara. "It can keep us company while we do the dishes. Do you want to wash or dry?"
Deidara takes a dish towel from her, and Mikoto pulls rubber gloves on, the perfect picture of a demure housewife. Deidara doesn't think that, seeing her like this, he'd ever guess she was jounin.
He's just like his mother, Shisui had said of Itachi, and Deidara thinks about all the convenient Uchiha elder deaths, and the death of the Aburame who'd been anti-Uchiha. He thinks about Fugaku, holed up in his study writing away and clueless to the world, and how Mikoto was just blithely going along with it.
Holy shit,Deidara thinks, and a wet plate slips from his hands. Mikoto's hand snatches it out of the air without even looking up.
"Careful, dear," she says.
xXx
END NOTE:
Me writing Kakashi: I just think... everyone wants to do him...?
Itachi: I tricked you into caring about my brother.
Deidara: You didn't do SHIT, yeah.
Itachi: I tricked you.
Actual notes: I don't think the Kakashi we see in the manga would make these Bad Adult Decisions in front of his team, but I was trying to show that this Kakashi is younger and less mature and even less prepared for a genin team, and also I thought it was funny. u_u Additionally, I'm hoping to back off the OC stuff going forward, but Daisuke-as-a-roommate and Shiori's forbidden romance will stay as subplots.
This chapter's fun fact: Some tarantulas will form partnerships with tiny frogs. I don't think it's been researched enough to definitively say what each partner gets out of the relationship, if anything... but there's theory that the spiders protect the frogs from predators and maybe also provide food, and the frogs eat pests for the spiders, such as ants that will eat spider eggs. There's also evidence that the spiders can recognize their frog partner's chemical "scent." Cute!