A/N: Yea, Bo.

Clabber Girl is sacred. Everyone should use it. USE IT.

One more thing. I KNOW IT IS SO LATE, I AM SO, SO SORRY! School would absolutely not let me write hardly anything. January has to be the busiest month of the year so far. I almost died. But enough excuses. On with the show.

"Hmmm…I like it!"

Deidara silently groaned. Not only did he have to degrade his morale by putting on the skin of his most hated enemy, but the girl just had to go and support the outfit. Whose side was she on, anyway?

"Button up the damn shirt all the way. And tuck the shirt in. You look like riffraff."

Oh, yeah. His side. With his stupid little cigarette and his stupid little colonel outfit that the stupid—

"Quit making faces at me, you little shit! Don't think I don't see that."

Sakura giggled. She obviously had no idea what Kakuzu was even saying. Or maybe she secretly did, and she was only… God, he needed to get laid. Even if it meant picking a girl up with the poofy pants Nazis were wont to wear on formal military occasions.

…Did Sakura like poofy pants?

Damn alcohol.

Drunk before noon, and now Sakura was walking off to the clearing with the rest of his German "buddies." Well, at least German opinion on Americans is low. I'd better get the hell out of this dumb suit before someone else sees.

He undid snaps, buttons, and zippers in record time, and had his German-American hybrid uniform back on, the comfort finally returning to his body. Those boots were so tight.

"Come on, Deidara!" her little voice called from outside. "Tell me what they're saying!"

The offending boots were placed in neat alignment beside the bed as he calmly walked outside and around to the other side of the tent, where he promptly bent over to throw up. A soft hand rubbed soothingly on his back, and he slowly rolled his eyes to the side in attempt to look the girl in the face. What was her name again?

"Oh, Deidara," she cooed. "I told you, you shouldn't be drinking anything alcoholic right now. When you drink alcohol it lowers your body temperature, and that's the last thing you need. That we need." She paused, fastened her arms around his waist, and began hauling him over to the campfire that the men had started up again.

"We need you to be in good shape to fly, you know," she continued primly, then paused a second time. "The Colonel…he wants us to fly out. Tonight. He said the less time we wait the better."

Suddenly all the alcohol in the world couldn't have made Deidara feel any less sober as he did right at that moment.

"Now? Tonight?" He stumbled over the thick metal cord holding the tent corner down and nearly sent both of them into a drift. "But—I do not understand. Tonight?"

Sakura sighed mournfully. "Yes, Deidara. We have to go tonight. Look, he already ordered the Germans to pull the plane out of the woods. He did it this morning." She pointed to the plane sneaking into their field of vision as they ambled back around the tent. "And by the fire are a few cans of high-protein foods, some water canteens, and other stuff. I think there's even a couple blankets."

Released from her hold when they approached the fire—all men in the camp stopping to stare at them, as usual—all he could do for a few minutes was sit and stare at the plane and the supplies like an idiot, barely registering when Sakura walked back into the tent, probably to change.

"So…what about her?"

Deidara blinked and turned around. "Huh?"

A dozen pairs of eyes watched his own expectantly from their places on the logs around the fire. Why did they want to know about Sakura? Right, that was her name.

"The girl, shitbag," Hidan drawled as he jerked his head towards the tent. "Tell us about the damn girl. She might be American, but I say, she has quite a package."

A sigh escaped from Deidara's weary lips and he closed his eyes, not quite ready to talk about the situation. Maybe he'd be ready if they came back in five hundred years or so, something like that.

"Eh, I dunno. She's all right, I guess."

Quite expectedly, a cry of teasing dismay resounded around the fire, the sound catching the attention of a few more Germans who had been prowling around the plane, poking the metal body with guns and gloved hands.

"Come on, come on!"

"Does she scream when you fuck her?"

"How big are her tits?"

"Did she give in easy or did you have to fight with her?"

"Does she have pink hair on her pussy?"

"Was she a virgin?"

"Don't tell me you got her pregnant or any shit like that, 'cause that's not cool, man."

"I know, what's up with bitches these days? It's their fault for having the kid, and then they want you to have to get off your ass and take care of—"

"All right, all right!" Deidara finally shouted. "But I'm gonna give you the bear minimum, okay? I'm kinda pissed right now, yeah," he ended on a mumble.

"Oh, about the 'fly away into the open skies with the lady' shit? That's sucks, man. It's fucked up." Hidan nodded sympathetically while Deidara stiffened slightly, wondering what exactly Kakuzu had told them.

"So Colonel told you about it, huh?"

"Yeah," the silver-haired man yawned, "he did. He told us all about the mission you had to take that girl to a concentration camp somewhere 'cause she's wanted for…some fucked-up thing, I dunno. And that she won't know until too late and all that dramatic shit."

"Oh." So the Colonel didn't tell them everything…interesting.

"So…what was it like fucking the bitch, anyway?"

Fifteen eager faces leaned in towards the hassled blond expectantly.

"I wanted to, she didn't, we found middle ground, we fucked for a while and she screamed a lot. Happy?"

Fifteen crestfallen faces stared at Deidara wistfully.

"That's it?"

"You suck."

"Does she fucking have pink hair on her pussy?"

"Hey, it's none of your business anyway," Deidara stuttered. "Plus it wasn't that exciting, anyway. Honest. Nothing really—"

"That's enough of that, all of you," Kakuzu thundered from over by the plane. "And whoever pissed in the snow right here is subject to any punishment I choose to receive." The Colonel pointed straight down to the snow under his feet, stained a light yellow. "You all know the importance of preventing the spread of malicious disease. And the bastard who chose to regard that owes me a new pair of shoes. As none of you will fess up, however, every one of you will suffer a six-hour lecture of the importance of cleanliness."

Deidara grimaced with sympathy, remembering for himself those stupid health meetings. I mean sure, disease was bad and stuff, but did you really have to go to the trouble of burying your shit every time you had to go? Honestly.

"And you!" The old soldier called over his shoulder in English at the head peeking out from the tent flaps, "Mind your own fucking business or I'll tie you to a tree and leave you there!"

Sakura made a face at the soldier—he smiled gleefully at this—and whipped back inside the protective barrier, no doubt fuming and brooding.

"The lecture will be in a half hour," Kakuzu continued in German. "Until then, do whatever you want, you sons of bitches."

The men stared at him as he walked back behind the plane. Several minutes of silenced ensued, permeated occasionally with a cough or a shiver. It really was cold out there, and the temperature dropped steadily with the sun. Deidara wondered what he and Sakura would do up in the air, where the high altitude made the icy weather almost unbearable.

Well, he ticked off mentally, there are blankets, we have jackets, and she'll be on my lap for most of the trip to the camp. I think we're good, I just hope she doesn't resist being so close together.

Something warm on his shoulder alerted him to a presence from behind, and he turned slightly, seeing whom he expected.

"Deidara," Sakura whispered. "I need your help with something in the tent." She released his shoulder and trudged back through the snow to the tent while he followed closely behind.

Inside, he trailed her as far as the first supporting pole before stopping to wait, watching for whatever she wanted him to do. Sakura looked back at him before he heard the sound of a zipper being undone, and she blushed before turning around, allowing the coat she wore to slip from her back, revealing the top of an unbuttoned nurse uniform.

"Could you do it up for me? It's hard to reach, and I always had the girls do it for me before."

Removing his hands from his pockets, Deidara stepped up behind her and methodically began to close up the dress, tiny button after tiny button. When he was about halfway done, she spoke.

"Thank you so much."

"For the dress? It is nothing."

"No, no," she shot back, seemingly irritated. "For not just handing me over to those guys when they got here. I mean, you could've done any number of things, and you didn't."

Deidara was silent, still buttoning although concentrating on Sakura's words, trying not to miss anything. Fluency was still a bit off for him.

"Well, what I'm trying to say is—Kakuzu told me what he told the men, earlier. About you taking me to the camp and I didn't know. He made sure I was aware it was for your sake and not mine, of course," here she laughed bitterly, "but I'm just glad I'm going with you, and not with—with him, I guess."

The last button fastened and Deidara pulled the sides of the coat back up where they were before and clutched her shoulders, and, turning her around zipped the zipper back up with a pat of finality to settle the affair. He released her and looked back in her eyes, not entirely startled to see tears forming there, but a little bemused when she launched herself at him and threw her arms around his waist for an entirely different reason than the last time the oddity occurred.

"Ohh," she moaned. "What are we going to do? The chance of us surviving any of this is almost nothing, Deidara! And what if we get—get shot down, or starve to death, or freeze in the night, or we run out of fuel in a no man's zone or something? When I signed up for this job I thought I'd never have to worry about any of it, and here it is staring me in the face, and I didn't even know it was coming…oh, I wish I could stop making a fuss all the time!"

He held her while she cried. There was nothing else to do.

Presently, Kakuzu strode into the tent like a tomcat on the prowl and stalked over to the hugging pair, an impassive look on his face. Already, Deidara knew something was terribly wrong, and the Colonel seemed at ease to deliver the news, in English, no less.

"To hell with the health speech, you'll have to hear one of mine some other time, I suppose." He locked eyes with Deidara. "There are many troops coming. You must fly out now."

Of all the things that Sakura imagined happening to her in the course of the war, sitting on the lap of a German in an American plane bound for a Death Camp certainly wasn't among them.

Dressed in his hybrid uniform with the filched set behind the seat—for later use—Deidara spent a few minutes flipping switches on and off, gently tugging the yoke this way and that, straining over her shoulder to eyeball the low switches and pedals, and finally to accept a parting offering from Hidan, who said it was 'the best he could fucking do.'

During one of the German supply raids, Hidan had apparently come across a large storage of baking powder, which was totally useless. Fortunately, the wrapper around the metal container featured a pretty girl in an apron, so, many ripping noises later, Clabber Girl made the rounds throughout the Bulge soldiers.

Personally, Hidan was hard to part with Clabber Girl Serial Number Seven Thousand, but alas, he eloquently bemoaned, a man must some day let his woman go. Miss Thousand was given the full pilot's wife's place of honor by an amused Deidara, slipped in between a slit where metal met buttons and knobs, and where both he and Sakura could look at her when they needed a reality check, or just something to brighten their senses.

The plane's engines were flipped on, Deidara tested flaps, rudders, life raft (maybe he was joking about that one), and messed around with a cornucopia of buttons and brightly colored switches. He drove the plane around to find the level ground away from the river that the squadron had cleared of snow, and then waited. Sakura shivered from the cold, still freezing even with a jacket and a live heat source underneath her.

"The blanket is behind the chair," Deidara piped in while fiddling with the canopy windows. "Pull it tightly around you so it does not bother my feet." Sakura did so silently, feeling entirely too overwhelmed by the situation to say much. Everything was going by so fast, and not a lot made sense. Sakura looked out the window to see Kakuzu approaching, and leaned back against Deidara when the man climbed on the wing and tapped on the cockpit glass.

The windows opened, a few words in German and an envelope were exchanged, a point given in the right direction, and then the plane was moving rapidly along the ground. Sakura held on tightly to the harness keeping her and Deidara in the seat and tried to keep her breathing as normal as possible. As of now, there was no oxygen tank to connect to the central unit, so she'd have to be extra careful. Out the front window, she could see the tent approaching and bit her lip hard, the iron taste of blood trickling throughout her mouth.

"Up now," Deidara commented idly.

"Wha—? Augh! Oh! Oh, no!" Sakura squealed as a hidden force reached up and grabbed her stomach, making her feel like she weighed five hundred pounds. What she could see out of the corner of her eyes, before she screwed them shut tightly, was a white forest quickly shrinking underneath them. She faintly registered the grinding noise indicating…what?

"I have put the wheels up now. We are not going to die. That is good," Deidara sighed.

Sakura gasped and tried to calm her breaths into something that didn't resemble the early stages of hyperventilation. Behind her, Deidara chortled merrily.

"Do you not like flying?"

Sakura whimpered and clutched the harness tighter.

"It is different, being in a jet and not an airplane. It is not as bumpy. But then there's no fun."

Sniffing, Sakura imagined herself on the ground, searching for some sort of anchor to earth. This was certainly a change from being ferried in on a big, fancy jet! Eventually, though, she gained the courage to look beyond the cockpit controls and peer out the window on both sides to get a wonderful view of the wings and external engines.

Great, Sakura lamented. This is going to be such an exciting trip.

Her sigh alerted Deidara, who asked if she was hungry, which of course she was. Starving, really. He held the controls with one hand, just for a minute (Sakura screamed anyway) and snatched a bag of dried apples, something that miraculously hadn't been eaten back at camp.

The bag was opened mournfully by a gloomy Sakura, who was beginning to think that she wouldn't mind being shot down right then and there. The first couple of chips gave her a momentary nostalgia, though, and she lost herself in their crunchy goodness—containing natural and artificial ingredients—lulled into drowsiness by the gentle hum of the Lockheed-grade motors.

The pilot was just as hungry, however. Sakura could feel him watching the bag over her shoulder, and huffed before snatching a large chip from the bag and holding it up over her shoulder for him to grab in his teeth.

"Those are good."

"Hmm."

The rest of their afternoon was encompassed in an array of silence, permeated occasionally by the crunch of Red Delicious.

The next exciting thing that happened was finding a place to land, which both the occupants of the plane took to with vigor. Sakura succeeded eventually, pointing out a small farmhouse and a barn on the edge of a large field. Despite Deidara's concerns—there was a possibility of Nazi soldiers waiting inside, resting after a pillage—Sakura pointed out that the farmhouse was terribly burnt, and judging by its weathered state, it wasn't a recent affair.

They landed in the field with little hassle, though it was difficult pulling the plane into hiding inside the barn, even with Kakuzu's ropes. After closing the barn doors, all the two could manage for a moment was bending over double and panting heavily.

"Okay," Deidara heaved, resting a leaden hand on Sakura's back. "We go inside now into the house." Deidara pointed to the quaint, brick house, its long, angled roof and squatting side panels typical of the French countryside.

"It's too bad it's all burnt up. I bet it was really pretty in its prime," Sakura commented, walking cautiously towards the porch. She turned to Deidara, who had already caught up and advanced to the front door. Pausing at the opening, the German quietly fingered a symbol hammered into the red oak, 'Juif.'

Sakura stopped on the stairs to shake the snow off her boots, then, joined Deidara to stare at the horrible symbol. There was no need to say anything else about the occupants of the house; this surely meant they were dead, victims of Nazi occupation of Vichy France.

"Deidara…"

He put his palm against the door and slowly pushed the door end, a high-powered pistol appearing in his hand from nowhere. Sakura drew in a breath, feeling the tension in the air and not liking it one bit. The smell of death wafted in from inside, a different smell than any she ever smelt as a nurse, even from patients too far gone to save. This smell held an aura of terror, of a family being forced out of their house into the snow to be shot by the SS one by one, dropping into the snow like so many felled before.

"Deidara!" Sakura's voice had a note of panic.

"Quiet, woman!" he hissed back. "Get behind me and do not make a sound."

Creaks from the weathered house moaned throughout the house with each step they took crossing the kitchen from the front door, and Sakura thought that if there were anyone hiding in the house still, they would surely know someone else was inside with them now. Trying to take her mind off the actual situation, the nurse instead studied the inside of the house, having never been inside a French farmhouse, besides.

The kitchen was fairly ordinary; she suspected that anything unordinary had already been filched from the domain, but her curiosity was in no way lessened. The dining table was large and solid, and at the end of it a small baby chair lay broken underneath the legs, enticing a pang of sorrow from Sakura's heart. It was so strange, walking through this house behind a suspicious blond with a gun. Once, a family had lived there, and once, a baby had cooed for its morning milk from that chair.

Suddenly she felt like an intruder, and shrunk closer to Deidara as they moved out of the kitchen and into the living room. There was nothing to see in there, the room was entirely bare, and even the socket covers had been torn from the wall to make a profit, leaving brightly colored wires hanging out of the rectangular hole, mocking the lack of color in the home.

The single point of interest here was the far west wall; it had completely crumbled down under the force of stick grenades or other such weapon, leaving nothing but insulation to wisp from the remaining standing structures. A chill wind blew from the barren space, and Sakura tensed her muscles trying not to shiver as she followed Deidara into two other adjoining rooms, both empty. By the size of all, and the house as a whole, she concluded the past owners were very wealthy. The house looked very old, and had probably been in the family many years.

Next came upstairs, and Sakura dreaded it. Darn those scary movies she watched at the nursing school! Stairs always meant death, especially for girls. Then again, those girls were alone and didn't have wild-eyed people with guns guarding them and glancing at them over their shoulder every two seconds.

Creaking like mad, the trip up the stairs was definitely the worst part of Sakura's day so far, and to hell with the plane ride. Every step—and subsequent creak—baited her to imagine a large, black-bearded man with red eyes haunting her on the way up, holding a large butcher knife, and disappeared as soon as you turned to look him in his pallid face. Stop it! Don't think about that!

The staircase ended at the end of the house, with hallways running parallel to the stairwell on both sides, each hallway having three doors each. Deidara made a sharp u-turn and walked the left hallway to the beginning, and the first door.

This room, oddly enough, was filled with quilts. They hung from every rafter and beam, were pinned to the wall, and a couple spread out on the floor. Obvious talent and many hours had gone into these quilts, layers of dust aside; the embroidery was unorthodox and seemed to make a complex story with the thread rather than a simply caricature or pattern. Sakura imagined a mother and daughter sitting serenely in the living room in separate chairs embroidering the quilt together, frequent pauses as the elder gently corrected a rogue stitch.

She would have liked to kneel down and study the quilts, perhaps they would give insight on the family who lived here. So far, the only thing evident was that they were Jewish. Deidara had become a meticulous, calculating soldier upon the discovery of the house, however, and would let her do no such thing, at least, not until he had scoured the dwelling's every square centimeter for signs of life. He left the room after a sharp glance about and left it, closing the door behind Sakura after she scurried out.

The second and third doors were empty and barren of even a loose nail. The pair passed beyond the stairwell to the opposite side, starting again at the first door on the end of the right hallway.

This room contained what was once a bedroom, and a quick check of other connecting doors revealed a large walk-in closet and a luxurious bathroom with a marble tub inlaid with gold leaf. The polish had worn off with trials and tribulations, but the marble seemed unharmed, though the initial invaders had scratched much of the gold out, probably. Sakura ran a hand over the cool, hard marble and envisioned herself sinking into a hot bath with—Sakura blinked. Well, with her own self, of course. Who else would—?

Glass bottles clattered together and tipped over as Deidara rummaged through all the cabinets, and Sakura blushed watching him, feeling betrayed by this stray emotion. Well, it was war, anyway. Weird things were bound to happen between people, and he certainly wasn't the worst man she ever came across.

A second skim of the bedroom's closet ended the excavation of the fourth room, and Sakura trotted to keep up with her current protector as he closed this door behind them like all the others and entered into the middle room. The biggest of all, this room beheld many children-sized beds, six in all, and four of them smashed to pieces. Broken dolls and half-finished, crude pictures littered the ground beneath their feet, and Sakura felt the same pang from the kitchen as she gazed sullenly at the near-remains of happy brothers and sisters.

Once again, there was no time to gaze any longer than it took the German to scan the room for recent inhabitants. The last room, like so many others, was empty, although in the center of the floor a three-legged stool sat vigil, and at long last the exhausted runaways fell back to regroup in the kitchen. Sakura sat well away from the baby chair as she watched Deidara check his gun with a melancholy irony filling her senses.

With the gun back in his pocket, Deidara decided the next most important thing was to bring inside what needed to be brought in from the plane, and arrange baths and a suitable sleeping area. Though not satiated, food could wait to be prepared until the morning; the sun already touched the ancient trees lining the far recesses of the emaciated field, and the later it got, the colder it would be.

The trek out to the plane and back repeated five times until a cornucopia of small items covered the kitchen table, including Deidara's carefully folded SA-Obergruppenführer uniform, the letter, and a series of maps. Sakura sighed and picked up the uniform, fingering its cheap, light brown fabric with distaste, and plucking the shirt from the table with her thumbs and forefingers. The creases were nearly ingrained in the fabric from so many weeks of being hauled around by the Colonel, but if Deidara would help her heat some water, maybe she could find an iron somewhere and get them out.

"Are you going to put this on now, or later?" Sakura inquired of the stolid blond. "I think you should put it on, at least after I clean it up a bit. If you'll help me, I think there's some wood in the barn. Then we could heat water for an iron if I find one, and we can take baths." She gently replaced the uniform on the table. "I don't think the water will be working."

She looked up at Deidara, who had moved away from the table and stood looking out the window over the sink, hands clasped behind his back. She tilted her head to the side and watched him, wondering if he knew at all how much he looked like an authority figure. He'd fit the SA rank nicely as far as acting; any picture of the Nazis Sakura saw in the slideshows during her "mission" debriefing showed all of them holding their hands like that. It gave them character, but also a visual sign of dominance.

"You look like a real soldier," she called to him softly from her chair, laying her head down upon crossed arms. At the window, Deidara raised his chin slightly, enough for her to notice the change in demeanor.

"I never wanted to be this."

"I know."

He shook his head slowly. "No, you do not. You have no thoughts of it, mein Frau."

The sun blinked one last time over the horizon before immersing the farmhouse kitchen in darkness, save for the eerie light from the moon, bathing the snow with a blue shimmer. Sakura produced a candle and matches from her coat pocket and lit the gnarly stick with a flare of the tiny flame, shaking the match out and setting it on the table next to the uniform.

Pointedly glancing at Deidara, who had turned to witness the lighting affair with blank interest, she began walking slowly towards the stairs, rather relieved after Deidara pushed past her hurriedly and grasped her empty hand as he swept by, pulling her up the staircase behind him.

At the end of one of the hallways, Deidara pushed open the door to reveal the bedroom from earlier, and Sakura felt a sick feeling in her stomach. She couldn't sleep in there. It just wasn't…right, for some reason. She knew almost without a doubt that a Nazi death squad had killed the occupants of the house, along with all of the couple's children, and she felt a thick despair in this room that she cared not to exploit further.

"Deidara, I don't want to sleep here."

Already drawing back the covers from the bed, he glanced back at her, genuinely surprised.

"Why not? It is a bed and it is drawn up, almost like waiting for us to come and sleep in it, okay?"

Sakura bit her lip and squinted at him through the flickering of the candle. A drop of hot wax landed between her fingers and she hissed quietly, waiting for his response. He dropped the covers he was holding and eyed her incredulously.

"Ghosts do not haunt this house, Liebchen. I have not felt it. They will not care if we use their bed, for they are not here to care, ja?"

"Oh, Deidara," she gently reproved. "That's so terrible. And I do feel it."

The man continued eying her, warily this time, and waited.

"There's an evil presence in this room. I can just feel it. I don't want to stay in here at all. I could never sleep, and I'd always think there was something around the corner to kill me, or something. I just can't, all right?" She drew a shuddering breath while Deidara replaced the sheets, never breaking eye contact. "On the other side of the stairs is a room with quilts in it. We can make a pallet there and wake up early in the morning to make breakfast and take baths, and you can put on your uniform and stuff. Just—I don't want to stay in here, please."

By the end of her speech, Deidara had already returned to her side, surprising Sakura in his sudden lack of argumentativeness.

"Okay," he huffed good-naturedly. "We go to the quilt room now, yes."

He started down the hall and Sakura smiled quietly, following him to the doorway and inside, where the quixotic quilts from before still lay there, placid and dusty. A French-style window adorned the wall opposite the door, which Sakura pried open to dangle the quilts from and shake the daylights out of them, repulsed by the sheer amount of dust that drifted into the snow with a single shake.

Five quilts would do the job, she calculated. It was all too bad that they weren't in possession of a veritable sleeping bag or pillow, but she was rather an expert at pallet making. Two quilts folded in half at the width mark would make the base, which she positioned over the rug for extra protection against the chilly floor. One quilt folded lengthy several times would make a suitable pillow for now, and the last two they would cover up with to battle the cold, Ardennes air permeating the old house.

In the end, Sakura decided to take off her jacket for a simple comfort cause; the buttons and odd ends dug into her back when she lay down. For the most part, however, the general, unspoken consensus was to sleep in one's clothes. It wasn't like they had a shift and long underwear readily available, and not only would it keep things warmer (and decent, a scandalous thought suggested), it would relieve the tension of having to get out of bed in the freezing morning air to put clothes on.

They lay down on the quilts and shuffled close together, closer still when a particularly violent gale struck the south side of the house. The two cover-up quilts were clumsily groped for in the shallow light and drawn up to chin level. Sakura squirmed upward and craned her neck to blow out the candle standing upright on the hardwood, supported by its own melted wax, and then shuffled back down into the heat.

Deidara sighed, a drowsy sort of sigh, and wrapped an arm around Sakura's waist, which she promptly removed. The second sigh was significantly more disappointed than the former. Closing her eyes, Sakura was asleep in a matter of seconds, too tired to even register the offending arm's return right back into no man's land, in which it rested, quite innocently, for the remainder of the night.