Sculpting for Dummies:
AN: well, I'm back from my vacation, and relaxing more now than I did then. My mom is a complete vacation-nazi, and the weather rules of summer apparently don't apply to northern California. It's the middle of August and I've got a cold now. 'Bring a jacket' they said. They never said anything about a winter coat, hat, and gloves. Bleh. Now I have the sniffles. But whenever I got too stressed or cold, I just started mentally writing the next chapters of my fic and found my happy place.
Chapter 5
As the sun sank into the horizon, the light in the forest began to fade. Tobi and Deidara had stopped running hours ago. Tobi kept a little ahead with a brisk walk and Deidara lagged slightly, as he traveled without chakra.
Behind the brunet, Deidara's steps sounded a little bit lopsided. Stealing a quick glance backwards, Tobi saw his sempai's legs shaking with exertion, and his steps had become a limping gait. The taller man almost kicked himself for not stopping to rest sooner. He'd asked his companion once if he needed a break, but the touchy blond refused to admit he was tired. The escape from Sasuke's hideout had been easy on Tobi; any break would be for Deidara's benefit only, and the artist didn't take charity. Still, Tobi felt he should have tried harder, should have insisted on a brief rest at the least.
"Why are you stopping, idiot? I thought we were in a hurry, un," Deidara huffed.
Tobi turned around and looked closer at Deidara. The blond's feet were covered with dirt and blood. 'I wish I could've found you some shoes, sempai,' he thought to himself. 'I'm sorry.' Tobi ignored his own bare, bleeding feet and flopped down on the ground.
"I don't know about you, sempai, but I'm beat!" Tobi lied. "I don't think I could move another inch. We'll rest here for the night."
Almost predictably, Deidara stayed on his feet just long enough to suggest he was still good to go for miles before he sat down on a log and began rubbing his feet.
"Fine," he said, the annoyance clear in his voice, "we'll set up camp here."
By 'we', the artist obviously meant 'Tobi', but Tobi was a good boy who didn't mind doing all the chores while his sempai rested. He tossed the blond one of the water bottles he'd pilfered from Hebi headquarters and started gathering wood for a fire. Deidara didn't comment on the enthusiasm with which the beat, couldn't-move-another-inch ninja set about his work.
Tobi skipped around his newly started fire and warmed up the borrowed food, courtesy of Sasuke's kitchen. While it heated, he laid out blankets for the two to sleep on.
"Should we really be stopping for the night, dumbass?" Deidara asked as Tobi smoothed out the wrinkles on the blankets. "I'm surprised we haven't been caught yet, at the pace we were going, un."
Tobi froze, and his half-remembered life started to flash before his eyes.
"Umm…about that, sempai…we…we need to talk," he stuttered nervously.
"Damn it, Tobi, what the hell did you do now?"
With lightning speed, Tobi changed the conversation. "Oh, look at that! Dinner's ready, sempai! Wouldn't want it to get cold, now would we?" He placed the food right in front of his partner and let the smell waft enticingly up at him. Neither man had eaten since before the escape, and the meal smelled and looked a hundred times better than those last bowls of soup.
Deidara took his portion gingerly. "You'd better tell me what the hell you did after we eat, you bastard. And take care of this jutsu, too, if you value your miserable little life."
The fire crackled and popped. Crickets chirped. Deidara chewed his food lazily, trying to keep his eyelids from drooping too heavily. Tobi watched and waited for a moment when his sempai might be slightly less homicidal.
Choosing to act when the artist was three quarters done with his food and swaying with fatigue, he stepped forward and kneeled by his partner's feet. Deidara let his right eye open slightly to look at the man in front of him.
"Why aren't you eating? You'd better not be stalling," he half-growled, half-yawned.
"I'll eat in a minute, sempai," Tobi murmured. He took a second water bottle out of the pack he'd procured and uncorked it. The water inside was luke-warm, but clean. Tilting the bottle over, the ninja let the liquid pour out on his sempai's bloodied feet. He cleaned them up the best he could with only water and his hands to work with, and healed the blisters and cuts up with his chakra.
When he glanced up, Deidara was looking at him, stunned. Tobi grinned at him. Then his stomach growled.
"Time for that food!" he proclaimed. He used a little bit of water to wash the grime off his hands and began shoveling food into his mouth.
Deidara continued staring. "Aren't you…don't you need to take care of that?" he pointed to Tobi's bleeding soles. Tobi looked down at them and made a dismissing wave with his hand.
"I can take care of it later. It's not as bad as it looks," he said between bites.
"But…you did mine." Deidara still looked bewildered. Tobi wondered how long it had been since someone had done something nice for the artist for Tobi's actions to baffle him so much.
"Yeah, but that was for you. You're special," Tobi explained. "I don't mind getting a little dirty if it's to help you, Deidara-sempai." He was smiling at his sempai, but inside he thought it was one of the saddest things he'd ever encountered, the fact that he needed to explain kindness at all.
……………………………………………………………………..
Deidara waited until his partner was finished eating before he pressed his questions again. It wasn't because he was extending any courtesy; he just didn't want the barbarian spitting food on him or anything. Inexplicable gestures of goodwill were Tobi's idiotic specialty, not his.
"So, tell me again why we aren't running right now, Tobi?" he asked. He should have put more hostility in his voice (it was the only way to get a point across to an organism with as small a brain as Tobi's), but he was too exhausted to make the effort.
Tobi looked away sheepishly. "Because we aren't being chased," the pale man admitted.
Deidara snorted. "Tobi, you honestly expect me to believe you took care of that Uchiha bastard and his group? You couldn't even take out a half-dead puppy, un."
Tobi's brow wrinkled as he spoke. "I didn't say I killed them. I just said we aren't going to be chased."
The idiot couldn't really be that dense…ok, he could. How the hell had Tobi survived those years before Zetsu and Deidara had been there to tell him how to function?
"Tobi, Sasuke isn't going to just let us walk away when we know where his brother is. I hope you aren't counting on his goodwill, un."
Fidgeting nervously, Tobi said, "It's not his goodwill I'm counting on, sempai. It's his impatience to find his brother. If he already knows where Itachi is, we aren't worth his time to pursue."
He couldn't have. No one, no one could possibly be that stupid, not even a ninja who wore an orange, depth-perception killing mask and bounded around like a drunken lamb.
"Tobi," Deidara said slowly, in that voice normal people reserve for small children caught misbehaving, "Sasuke doesn't have that information, does he?"
The other ninja squirmed and looked away. "He does."
Continuing with the calm, firm voice, the blond asked, "And where exactly did he get that information?"
Deidara wasn't sure if Tobi's quiet answer was a 'me' or just a terrified 'meep!', but it made that temper that Deidara hadn't had the energy for before flare up with a new intensity.
"You fucking moron!" Deidara's hands trembled with uncontrolled rage as he gripped Tobi's shirt collar and hauled him up close. Their noses were almost touching, and their breaths mingled. "Do you even realize what you've done? You just betrayed the strongest group of missing ninja in the world! Now we can't go back! Fuck!"
The sight of Tobi's face disgusted him. He shoved the dark haired man away. "Damn it, now where am I supposed to go? How am I supposed to perfect my art? Tobi, you asshole, you've stolen everything I had, and it didn't even take you a week. I hope you're fucking happy, un!"
"Sempai," Tobi pleaded, "sempai, please listen. I had to tell him, otherwise we couldn't have escaped. I would've told him eventually anyways; I'll protect you before I protect the Akatsuki."
"Maybe if I bring them back your head, they'll let me back in," Deidara muttered to himself.
Tobi drew up near the artist again and looked into his sky-blue eyes. "Do you really want back in, sempai?" he asked.
"Of course I do," the blond hissed. "They're a group of master artists, and they find me opponents worthy of my jutsu. They offer me everything I want," making sure Tobi could hear the contrast between himself and their organization. Tobi offered him nothing but faked sentiment and obscurity.
"Akatsuki is falling apart, sempai. Can't you understand?" Tobi begged. "We used to think we were invincible. Now three of our members are dead, and you almost died, and the shinobi responsible are still coming after us to finish the job."
"The rest of us are stronger than those idiots who got themselves killed. And don't group me with them. I didn't lose. I was ending the battle on my own terms, un."
Tobi ignored him and continued talking. "We're losing members faster than we can replace them. Itachi is almost completely blind, so he won't be able to fight much longer, and we'll be at half our original number. If we go back to them, we'll just end up dead."
Deidara decided not to point out that that was his intention. He tried to imagine how spectacular those final battles would be. His explosions would elevate those epic skirmishes to perfection.
"Do you even care about Akatsuki's goals, sempai? The biju, world domination? You don't seem interested in things like that."
"What I'm interested in is my art. To reach my full potential, I need Akatsuki. I'll go back alone if I have to, but I am going back, un" the blond said.
Tobi shook his head. "If you walk into headquarters without your chakra, they'll eat you alive, sempai." Deidara hoped Tobi wasn't saying that literally, but with Zetsu there was always a question.
"That won't be a problem because you're going to release this seal, un." Deidara stated.
Tobi didn't say anything.
Deidara stared open-mouthed for a moment. "You bastard!" he said at last. "You lying, scheming spawn of a bitch! You lied to me!"
The reply Tobi made sounded like an angry snort. "You lied to me too, sempai. You said you were going to come back from that jutsu."
The artist's anger was alive in him now, a tangible entity just waiting to loose itself on Tobi. Deidara had been partners with the other ninja for months, and by now he knew what words would hurt him the most.
"I was actually starting to like you, Tobi. I didn't want to upset you, because I thought it was kind of nice having someone looking up to me. I almost enjoyed being your partner, un." Deidara paused for a moment, letting the look of surprise play across Tobi's usually masked face. As soon as the pure shock faded and a smile began to creep on his lips, Deidara struck.
"But you ruined it, Tobi. You showed me how stupid it was to trust you. And you know what? I don't need your help, un." The blond stood up and steadied himself as his legs shook with the strain. When he was sure he wouldn't fall, he hobbled away from Tobi's hastily pitched camp.
Tobi ran after him. "Sempai, where are you going?" he wailed.
"You think you're the only ninja in the world who can undo a Five Elemental Seal, dumbass?" Deidara asked, smirking at his own genius. "There are thousands of shinobi out there with enough chakra training to take care of this," he gestured at his stomach.
Tobi ducked in front of him and drew himself up to full height. He was taller than Deidara by a few inches, if one didn't count the blond's ponytail, or at times like the present, when his hair hung down unrestrained. Deidara always hated being shorter.
"Out of my way, un," he ordered. The dark-haired man didn't move.
"It won't work, sempai. You aren't going to be able to just walk into a hidden village and ask them to help you. You're wanted as an S-ranked criminal in every country, and anyone with enough training to remove the seal will be able to recognize you. You'd be caught in an instant, and you can't even defend yourself right now."
Even more than he hated him being tall, Deidara hated Tobi being right.
"That doesn't mean I can't find a rogue ninja to help me. They'll do anything for a price, un."
Deidara didn't mention that he knew that from experience.
………………………………………………………………………….
Tobi knew he was losing control of the situation, so he grabbed his sempai by the wrists and escorted him firmly back into the camp. Even after Deidara grudgingly seated himself on a blanket, Tobi hovered nearby, making sure he didn't try to venture out again.
"So, you're my jailor now?" the blond hissed.
"I said I would protect you sempai, and I didn't just mean from this," he jabbed his finger at the artist's chest, where he knew the sealed-up mouth to be. "It's not safe to walk through woods at night if you can't defend yourself."
Deidara huffed. "What, are there bad men that are going to snatch me away, Tobi?" he asked sarcastically.
"No. But there are wolves." Tobi didn't think Earth Country, where Deidara had grown up, had many wolves, and he hoped that the other man hadn't become familiar with their habits since then. Apparently he hadn't, because instead of protesting that wolves didn't usually attack people, he went a little pale.
"We'll stay here tonight," Tobi told his sempai, "and tomorrow we'll head for the merchant's village. After I've gotten us there safely and we get our money from our accounts, you can leave."
Deidara didn't look happy about the plan, and he muttered something about 'manipulative liars', but he settled down into the blankets anyways. Most ninja foreign to the forest had strange views of wolves, Tobi had learned. Something about the stories they had been told made them unreasonably convinced that the animals were bloodthirsty fiends. Tobi was pretty sure his sempai wouldn't try to sneak away in the night.
"Sempai, I'm giving you first watch," he said. Just because he was pretty sure didn't mean he was going to take chances. It was better for him to sleep while Deidara was still too exhausted to leave. Tobi lay down on his own blankets and wrapped them around himself like a cocoon.
The trip hadn't been hard on him, at least not physically, so sleep was elusive for the dark haired ninja. He wanted to know where Deidara would go when they parted ways. He wanted to know how to make his sempai stay. He wanted Deidara.
Maybe if he had some sort of clue about Deidara's past, he could find a way to convince him to stay. Even though they had been partners for months, he didn't know anything about his colleague before he'd joined Akatsuki.
"I'm sorry I couldn't get your hitai-ate back for you, sempai," he said, hoping to spark a conversation.
"Didn't care about it, un," the blond replied in clipped words.
"But it must have been important to you. It's a symbol of your village," Tobi reasoned. He didn't have a hitai-ate of his own, but he'd always noticed that others seemed to treat theirs with a certain reverence, even long after they'd abandoned the villages themselves.
"It kept my hair up. That's all. My scope would've been more useful to retrieve, un."
"Do you have any family in your village?" Tobi asked a few minutes later.
"No, un."
"So, you're an orphan…?" Tobi prompted. Deidara didn't take the bait. He only nodded his head.
"What about-"
"Shouldn't you be sleeping?" Deidara interrupted. "If you're going to stay awake, idiot, you can have first watch."
Tobi quieted down and tried to sleep. He wanted to ask Deidara how old he'd been when his parents had died, what it had been like growing up, but his eyelids began to droop and his breathing became heavier and he dreamt of his sempai instead.
…………………………………………………………….
Long after Tobi had curled up and nodded off, Deidara stayed awake, thinking about the last few days. He didn't really understand what Tobi was up to, and he didn't believe for a second that he planned on letting Deidara leave. It would take a few days to reach the village, so maybe he was stalling.
Long, slender artists' fingers traced the invisible lines of the chakra seal. He really should have killed Tobi for putting it on him. He'd made threats, of course, but he hadn't attempted to go through with them, which confused him a little. Sure, there had been a few half-hearted attempts at strangulation, but no serious efforts. If it had been any one but Tobi, he'd have found a way to kill them by now, chakra-less or not.
He guessed there was some truth in what he'd told Tobi. He had grown a little fond of the guy as his partner. When he'd been fighting with Sasuke, he'd been sincere about hoping Tobi would escape. He had known Tobi wasn't ready for death like he was, and he'd made sure to create an opening for Tobi to run away from the battle.
It had been nice to have someone follow him around and respect him. He wondered if that was how Sasori-no-danna had felt about him.
The lingering remnant of that teacher-student relationship was the only reason Deidara could think of that Tobi was still breathing. The artist shook his head to expel the thought. Being soft was getting him nowhere. Tobi had quite clearly violated the bond they'd had when he ruined Deidara's final jutsu. If he wanted his chakra and his artistic dream back, he'd have to stop letting Tobi lead him around and take things into his own hands.
……………………………………………………..
Tobi whirled around and saw Deidara. The blond looked up at him mournfully from beneath his bangs. Without his hair tie and his hitai-ate, the rebellious strands framed his face with gold.
"I'm sorry about those things I said earlier, Tobi," Deidara whispered. "I didn't mean them."
Tobi reached out boldly and tucked a lock of Deidara's hair behind his ear. "I know, sempai," he breathed.
"I know that you're only taking care of me." The artist's lips curled into an exquisite smile. Tobi nodded and let one of his fingers trace the curve of Deidara's cheek.
The smile became larger, more predatory. "But why don't you let me take care of you tonight?"
……………………………………………………..
As Tobi slumbered with a huge grin plastered on his goofy face, Deidara searched carefully through the supplies the taller man had stolen. He fumbled around quietly until he found what he was looking for. Then, he crept over to Tobi's blanket cocoon and leaned over him.
He whispered something in Tobi's ear.
………………………………………………………….
"Mmmh, Tobi, put your hands up, un." Deidara whispered. Tobi gulped.
"Like this, sempai?" he asked, raising his hands above his head.
Deidara stood on his tiptoes and reached up. He pinned Tobi's wrists together and held them with one hand. "No, like this," he said.
Tobi blushed, but couldn't help but grin. He had been standing, but suddenly he was flat on his back, with Deidara straddling him. Oh, Deidara was a bad boy. It drove Tobi wild.
"Tobi," Deidara breathed hot into his ear. "It's time to wake up now."
'No, I like this dream,' his mind protested, but his body was already starting to wake up. He groaned and opened his eyes, and wondered if he was having one of those dreams-within-a-dream. Deidara was above him, straddling him and pinning his wrists to the ground, hair cascading down and eyes shining wildly.
Only, in his normal dreams, Deidara usually didn't hold a kunai to his throat…
………………………………………………………………………..
AN: Uh-oh, cliffie! That's what Tobi gets for having pervy dreams (that bad boy!!).
And I promise that there's more action in the next chapter. I didn't mean for this one to be so dialogue-centric, but it had to be done.
Oh, an announcement. As soon as I post this chapter, I'm going to get started on the side story for this story, 'What Deidara didn't tell Tobi'. I need to tell my version of Deidara's past to explain some of his reactions and motivations, but the guy just won't share them in this story (it's too 'Tobi-centric', he insists), so he'd gotta have his own little story. It's kinda darker than this one, and might not appear in full on but I'll make more announcements about it after I get the first chapter written. I don't think you'll have to have read one to read the other, but reading both will get you the full experience. Sorry for any inconvenience.
