A/N: Gaara and Deidara are so totally BFF.
"So then the frog says, 'That's not a horse, that's a pickle!'"
Uproarious laughter reverberated throughout the teahouse, accompanied by Deidara's nervous chuckle. He stiffly sat back in his chair, quite disturbed when Temari gave him a sultry stare. Didn't that woman swear to rip his throat out not so long ago? And what was with her brother?
Yes, he was asleep on the table, but hadn't he promised vengeance for his brother's death? That reminded him. The Kazekage.
Slowly turning his head, Deidara glanced at the man to his right, who currently had an arm slung over his shoulders, the other arm occupied with heartily punching Deidara's bicep. Gaara beamed and held up a glass of sake while Temari and Baki did the same. Kankuro snored.
"A toast!" Gaara slurred. "To the man who changed our lives!"
The three drank while the old women cheered from within the kitchen. Deidara stared at his own sake. Maybe it was poisoned…
Gaara slapped Deidara on the back. "So we're best friends now, right?"
Blink. "Uh…sure, yeah."
"And best friends do stuff together, right?"
"I…suppose they do."
"Well, let's do something!"
Deidara coughed and tried to cover his shock while simultaneously planning the best routes of escape. "So…what were you planning on doing, um, Kazekage?"
"Gaara, it's Gaara, Fred."
"…Deidara."
"Whatever, man. Whatever."
Another round of sake was passed around, and this time Baki drifted off to join Kankuro. Thank the powers that be for sleepy drunks.
So now, all that was left was an overly friendly Gaara and a seductive Temari. Oh, joy. I've got to get out of here, yeah.
Carefully extracting himself from the booth, Deidara stood and bowed slightly to the four.
"It was…nice talking to you, I guess…" He trailed off, deciding it wasn't really helping things to stand there and find something more eloquent to say. Two seconds later and he was out the door, panting, looking a lot like a very relieved man, which he certainly was.
And then it happened.
"Ah! My fleeting rival from days gone by! But there seems to be something wrong? Could it be that you are no longer in the springtime of your youth? Alas!"
Well, not anymore.
Shit.
Gai sauntered over to the door of the teahouse and snatched Deidara up into an enormous bear hug.
"Ever since we thought you died, I was distraught," Gai wept.
Deidara felt slightly sick. This man was a total crackhead, no doubt about it.
"Oh…really?"
Why me? Why today? Why? WHY?
Shaking the poor blond back and forth, Gai dealt out his sobbing reply. "I just felt some sort of—of connection with you, one that I rarely find in a man. I…need you. Especially now, my friend."
Frozen with mortification and a fear for his masculinity, Deidara went through his list of options in his head. C-4 or C-3? Hmmm…
"I need a man like you…to shop for green jumpsuits with me." Deidara went limp. Dear, sweet God. That was even worse.
Shaking himself off the…was he even human? Anyhow, finding himself free of a disturbingly strong grip, Deidara prepared to dash away, only to have his cloak caught in the back by Gai's monstrous hand. The man beamed, blinding everyone in the whole town with his radiant, Colgate smile.
"Now, now, my friend," he reasoned with a squirming Deidara. "We'll run laps after we shop. No sense getting all sweaty and then going in to try on all those nice, clean clothes."
He threw Deidara, who had given up at this point, over his youthful shoulder and skipped into the nearest mini-mall.
Kakuzu plucked the golden kunai out of the garbage can behind the Akatsuki base.
"Well, that was easy."
Meanwhile, Tobi sat cross-legged in a vast field of clover, making flower necklaces. Currently he was on his nine hundredth one.
Much to his pleasure, he had found all the correct herbs in one place, right in the field where he found all the clover surrounding it. With the herbs arranged in neat piles beside him, there wasn't much else to do but—
"Hey! You, there!"
Tobi looked up, startled. A strange red-haired man and a blonde girl were slowly moving his way, dragging two ungainly lumps behind them. Recognizing the redhead and his sister with a jolt of apprehension, he grabbed the herbs and darted off, only to have his leg grabbed by an arm of sand.
The two approached him and stared down at his prone frame silently. Tobi held his breath, waiting for Gaara to crush him with a wide assortment of tiny rock fragments. Maybe even some fossilized seashell if he was lucky. Seashells were awesome.
He didn't expect the sand to form a chair for him to sit in. And he certainly didn't expect Gaara and Temari to use Baki and Kankuro as alternative chairs to sit in. And he really didn't expect them to start plucking clovers up from the ground and braid them into bracelets and rings and necklaces and crowns.
Sighing, he resumed his own chain of flowers. What the hell. Just—what the hell.
"So…" Gaara drawled. "You're in the Akatsuki."
"Yes, Tobi is. And Tobi likes it."
"Tobi?" Temari questioned.
"That's right, miss."
"…You're hot."
"Um…thank you."
"Take off the mask."
"Tobi doesn't want to."
"Take it off! How else can we make out?"
"Temari!" Gaara thundered, then turned to Tobi, who was clutching his clover crown for dear life. "I'm very sorry. She's still drunk from earlier."
"I—Tobi sees. That's too bad, sir."
"Call me Fred."
"Okay, Fred."
Temari kicked Kankuro for snoring. A bird flew by Gaara's head. Somewhere off in the distance, a dog barked. The three sat and weaved.
Suddenly, like most of the things that seemed to happen recently, a figure came running towards the group from off in the distance. A few seconds later he stood before them, hand on hip, the other hand gripping his sword and holding the weapon menacingly before them.
"Sasuke?" Temari peered up at the man, but it was kind of hard since the sun was in her eyes.
"That's right," the man replied. "I'm here to finish what I started."
Gaara and Tobi tensed. Temari swayed. Baki mumbled something about border protection.
"And…what would that entail?" Gaara responded cautiously.
Sasuke raised his sword and pointed it at Tobi, who readied a kunai under his cloak.
"It's around here somewhere." Sasuke abruptly dropped to his knees and began rooting through the clover patch; Gaara, Tobi, and Temari watched curiously.
"Here it is!" Sasuke broke out into a brilliant grin and motioned for Temari to scoot over on Baki. Sasuke took a seat on the sleeping man, brandishing the end of a chain of clovers. He looked at the surprised expressions of the group, then at his flowers in hand.
"Oh! Well, you see," Sasuke explained, "I was out looking for Itachi when I came across this clover patch. The flowers were so damn pretty I just had to stop and pick some. Then I got an idea, and I started to tie them together. I count them as I go. I still stop here pretty often to tie more on when I'm not off killing innocent children or raping married women. Hey, could you hand me that one over there with the long stem?"
Tobi blinked, then released the kunai and plucked the flower from its home near his booted feet and handed it to the strange man. Sasuke accepted it with a smile. A very sadistic, perverted, gleeful, enigmatic, happy-sad sort of smile.
"Thanks. So anyway, you guys wanna help?"
Temari and Gaara beamed. "Sure! We'd love to help," Temari gushed.
"…Okay," Tobi mumbled.
Several hours and fifty feet of flower chain later and Tobi was at the end of his emotional rope. I mean, it just wasn't enough that the Sand trio (and some other weird guy with them) and Sasuke had to drop out of the oblivion onto his peaceful afternoon, but Kimimaro and Haku just had to come along as well, didn't they?
He turned to Sasuke, who was occupied with showing Haku how to apply the correct amount of pressure to the flower stem in the last stage of attachment. Not enough pressure and it would fall apart, too much and it would break.
"Sasuke."
"Yeah, Tobi?"
"Do you know who I am?"
"Tobi…Akatsuki Tobi?"
"No, no…who I really am."
"Yeah, I know."
"You…do?"
"You're Madara Uchiha. Itachi told me all about it."
"And…you're not mad?"
"Nah. I already revived the clan anyways. And it's seventy-five percent better than before! A soda fountain in every hallway."
Tobi fell silent. Why was everyone insane these days? Including himself. I mean, half the time he was a spazzed-out kid and the rest of the time, he was an ancient megalomaniac with weird hair and a fetish for vulpine quadrupeds. Truth was, Tobi really didn't know who he was these days.
He looked down at his flower chain, which Sasuke promptly snatched and demonstrated to Kimimaro how one went about attaching two longer strands together.
Oh, to hell with it.
"Well, we're screwed," Sakura sighed mournfully, clinging to Kisame's arm like a barnacle. "No one is doing their job right except for Kakuzu, and I'm sure he's planning to go out and sell it. You know how he is."
"It'll be all right," Kisame consoled the annoying woman, caressing her hair like a rock that a barnacle attaches itself to. Sakura scowled and punched his arm.
"It won't either! My mom knew this would happen!"
"What a bitch."
"Tell me about it. And watch your mouth. Only I'm allowed to swear around here."
Kisame huffed. "So what do you want to do?"
"You know what we should do," Sakura murmured sneakily, "is what we should've done all along."
Kisame's eyes widened. "Do you mean—?"
"I do."
"Where?"
"Nicaragua."
And so they went.
Miles away, Hidan was hard at work trying to find a pregnant goat, but so far the only thing he'd managed to find at all was a swarm of vacationing killer bees, a herd of angry water buffalo, and an anaconda.
"This is a bunch of shit," he muttered. "Killer bees aren't even native to this damn country. Damn bees."
Walking with all of your limbs spread out as wide as they could go was a difficult manner in which to get places, but at least the pain of even the slightest movement was somewhat dulled.
"When I find that stupid goat and get back to the damn house, Sakura will take care of all of it. She'd better, anyways. I'm starting to think there won't even be a wedding after all and this is a big fucking joke to us so they can have some time alone at the house to screw each other's brains out."
Little did Hidan know, but Kisame and Sakura were currently doing that very thing.
"You know what? I don't care. I just don't care anymore. I don't fucking care."
He walked to the nearest town and into a clothing mall. After all of that walking and searching and getting mortally wounded, his clothes tended to get a bit ratty.
"Hmm…Abercrombie...Charlotte Russe…Lacoste…Zara...wait, what's that place?"
The store in question was painted shamrock green on the outside, and everywhere you looked inside had something green on it. Even the hangers were a lovely pastel spring green.
"Fuck. What's this, the fucking leprechaun store? Hey, lady!" Hidan waved his arms and shouted at the women at the counter (who had green hair and was wearing a green thong), since actually walking in the store would taint His Holiness with the sheer tackiness of the outlet.
The woman started and glanced up at the haggard man. "…Yes, how can I help you?"
"What kind of store is this? Are you people—AUGH! AUGH! OH, SWEET JASHIN, MY EYES!"
There was Deidara and that fucking Leaf shinobi Gai at the checkout counter, peering out at Hidan with confused looks on their faces.
And they were both wearing jumpsuits.
Green jumpsuits.
Dear God.
Hidan continued screaming bloody murder, too absorbed in the act to notice when Gai and Deidara walked up to him to pat him lovingly on the back.
"It's okay, yeah. They're actually more comfortable than they look, okay?"
"My youthful friend is right, yeah. He has awakened the feeling of true and eternal youthfulness in his body and he has been reborn into a wave of new and exciting fashion! Yeah!"
"Oh, my fucking God. You two are the most fucked-up crackheads in the whole damn world. I—don't touch me, you heathens!"
Deidara and Gai smiled at one another, unperturbed at the Jashinist's raucous display, as Deidara had already told his best friend Gai all about 'that damn Hidan who was not nearly as youthful as he should be but a good companion in a weird sort of way.'
They picked Hidan up, an arm to each green-clad man, and dragged Hidan screaming into the store, where they forced him into the tightest green jumpsuit in humanity.
The girls went wild.
Hidan cried.
In the end, only Kisame and Sakura got what they wanted, which was each other. They moved to Nicaragua within the week and got a bungalow on a private island where they raise cows and goats. They have a hammock and a lookout tower, just in case Sakura's mom is ever on the prowl.
As for Deidara, Gai, and Hidan, they broke off from their respective affiliations to form an entirely new shinobi group notorious for their speeches on youth and religious demonstrations, the Youthfully Artful Green Jashin Worshippers. Their services can be attended on Monday and Thursday from nine to eleven pm in front of Charlotte Russe and Zara, and all new converts receive a green Speedo as a door prize. Also some hair mousse.
Kakuzu ended up selling the golden kunai about ten seconds after he found it to a traveling caravan of one hundred fifty three gypsy girls. A few days back, they informed him, a group of shinobi had attacked their caravan and had taken all the men as slaves. Extremely moved by the girls' situation, Kakuzu offered to come along with the caravan on its way to Romania and to this day he still leads the whole bunch. He currently has one hundred fifty two children with one on the way.
Tobi ended up making the longest flower chain in the whole world, and the money he and his entourage received from the Guinness Book of World Records was used towards the creation of a new shinobi nation, Country of the Flower Children. Their main exports are flower-based, and all of their imports are organic and approved by the Animal Protection Society and the Environmental Protection Society. Several years after becoming the leader of this prosperous country, Tobi wed one Ino Yamanaka in the spring, when the Scarlet Pimpernels and the Common Mallows were blooming beautifully in the greenhouse.
Itachi was never seen again, but on nights when the wind is still and the moon is full, you can hear a lone voice screaming out Linkin Park's "Numb" in the dark, perfectly in tune. Sometimes you can hear a second voice doing the backup that sounds suspiciously like an entirely different Uchiha, but only on nights when the Flower Children are on holiday.