Found

J is for Jubilee

O O O

"So how many months along are you?"

And then Sakura wanted to punch this man, however nice he may have been.

Very, very badly.

"I'm not pregnant," she grit through her teeth, hand squeezing Deidara's to the point where he grunted and winced.

"But we're thinking about it, yeah," Deidara said, and the pain in his voice wasn't exactly well-hidden.

"Ah, I see," the man said, leading them to their respective cabin. "My apologies. But I'm sure that when you do have children, they'll be very beautiful."

Sakura scoffed, glaring sideways at Deidara, who was doing the same. "Have kids? With him? He'd probably eat his own offspring."

"Hey!" Deidara shouted, pulling his hand out of hers to point an accusing finger in her face. "You're the one going on about wanting to have my baby and staying with me forever and all this other…other romantic shit!"

Sakura laughed in disbelief. "Are you kidding me? Were you not able to comprehend that I was playing up the image?" She shook her head. "Hello? Why would I want to have your kid? If I had anything that ugly growing inside me I'd probably just save you the trouble and blow myself up!"

And then his hand—heavy and harder than she could remember—slapped across her face, leaving a searing pain in her skin and making her eyes water.

The actual force of the strike turned her head sideways, and when she turned back to face him, there was a surprised look in Deidara's visible eye. Something like regret?

Kisame was already stepping forward, a looming presence over her shoulder.

Oh, no. She'd been waiting far too long for this.

In one deft movement, she pulled her fist back and struck it across Deidara's jaw, forcing him backwards and into a wall. He caught his balance just fine, and she hadn't exerted enough force to be life-threatening, but damn had it felt good.

He held his whole chin in two hands, winced, and then made a noise that wasn't quite a grunt and wasn't quite a whimper. Somewhere in the middle, if Sakura had to make a guess.

"I think you broke it," he managed through a half open mouth, rubbing his face and turning up his brow. "You broke my jaw!"

The porter had miraculously disappeared, leaving the keys to their quarters in Kisame's hand.

"Well," Sakura sniffed, crossing her arms, "you shouldn't have slapped me!"

Deidara glared at her, unable to do much more than that, picking himself off of the wall. He winced when an apparent lance of pain shot through him.

Kisame led the way down the hall to their room. "You have to heal him," he said to Sakura, who just furrowed her brow and turned away.

"Yeah, I know. But he deserved it."

"And the child comment," Kisame continued sternly, and Sakura mused that he appeared to be in a bit of a bad mood, "was unnecessary." She pretended the light burn of shame in her cheeks was from anger.

The room was fairly large, but one thing stuck out immediately for Sakura: There were only two beds.

She immediately claimed the one nearest the window. "I call this one." She glared at Kisame, who was busy closing the door and locking it, and then at Deidara, who immediately rushed to the mirror hanging above a dresser to inspect the damage to his face. "And you two have to share the other one."

Kisame placed the keys on a hook on the wall, and then scratched some place near his temple. "I'm not sharing a bed with Deidara."

Deidara snorted where he stood at the dresser, pulling down his bottom lip and looking at his teeth and then proceeding to the same with his upper lip. "Not with Kisame," he managed the murmur, though carefully.

"If you can talk," Sakura hissed, "then you're obviously not in that much pain, are you?"

"Look," he cried, and visibly grimaced upon doing so, turning around and pointing to his teeth with the hand that wasn't pulling his lips away.

Sakura sighed angrily and stood, marching to him. She took his jaw in her hands as his fell away, and tried not to look at his expression. Because she adamantly refused to admit that he looked kind of cute—like a lost child—when he was confused.

"Just a malocclusion," she muttered to herself, tilting his head up a little bit.

"Mollusk-lesion?" he asked dubiously, lifting his arms only slightly so that his hands hovered over her shoulders.

"When I hit you," she explained, guiding him over to sit on the bed nearest them and farthest from the porthole, "the impact misaligned your teeth."

He made a noise that might have been utter horror.

"I need to examine it," she reasoned, keeping surprisingly calm. Then again, she did feel a mite bad.

He might have been on the verge of tears. Sakura didn't know because, once again, she refused to look up. "It hurts!"

"Stop talking and it won't hurt as bad!"

"Stop poking!"

"Deidara, shut up. Thank you. Now lift your tongue for me, if you can."

He did as asked, frowning and looking away.

"I'm going to take a shower," Kisame announced, heading for the bathroom.

Sakura looked back at him and nodded. "Okay. When you're done, I'll go ahead and check you over."

And then he was gone and Sakura was back to looking at the floor of Deidara's mouth, checking for bleeding or bruising and most definitely swelling.

"Some swelling and bruising, but that's normal." She felt out his jawbone, careful not to make him whine again, though she noticed that he visibly flinched. She pulled away and sighed. Such a pain. She wondered if it was even worth it now. "What would you prefer, Deidara? Being numbed or going under?"

He gave her a questioning, surprised look.

"I have to do one of those two," she said. "It's too painful otherwise."

He didn't answer.

"Okay. I'll put you under." She instructed him to swing his legs up onto the bed, relax, and try not to fight it.

He stared at her as she worked, chakra filling in through his pores, doing its job and making him drowsy. His mouth hung half open, and though his brow was still creased in pain, Sakura could see the sleep slowly making its way across his features.

She took this time to smile. "I can't believe you're not worried."

He blinked lazily at her, and she pushed back that long strip of blond carefully. She took off his scope, as well, setting it on the nightstand beside them.

"You know…I could kill you." Her words surprised even her. "Make your body so relaxed that it forgets to breathe."

His blue eyes stayed fixed on her, occasionally drooping or closing, every movement sluggish, until finally it seemed he stopped fighting it.

She frowned at him, suddenly feeling awfully tired, herself. "But I won't."

He tried to smile, but the immediate wince gave an indication of still-lingering pain. "Role-reversal," he managed to murmur, and then his entire body fell lax.

She watched the hard diagonal lines of his shoulders sink into the mattress, as well as his facial expression fall into one of content.

Wordlessly, listening only to the shower still running in the bathroom, she set up a cushion of chakra behind his jaw.

It had been ages since she'd ever done any major healing, and she'd enjoy this while she could. It wasn't that she took pleasure in people's pain or the actual healing itself, but she enjoyed the way her mind blanked when she healed. It was a sort of automatic thing, especially with something she'd done multiple times. And heaven knew she needed some time to just drift.

The "operation," if it could even be called that, took less time than Sakura expected, and she was checking over everything else on Deidara when Kisame finally emerged, dressed in one of the bathrobes they offered.

Sakura barely glanced at him. "Where're your clothes?"

He pointed a thumb behind him and sat on the opposite bed. "They're soaking in the tub. I don't think this boat offers facilities for that."

"After I heal Deidara, would you mind helping me undress him? We should probably wash his clothes, too."

She didn't look, but she sensed that he nodded and continued.

"This is a cruise ship," he said after a while.

Sakura nodded. "I figured as much." She healed a superficial cut on Deidara's ankle. "The accommodations are too nice to just be a passenger ship."

"The tickets say that it will dock at a port in northern Earth Country, stay for three days, and then begin the return trip."

This time she did look at him. "Is that your ultimate destination? Earth Country?"

He was silent for a moment, and she occupied herself by brushing Deidara's hair back, keeping it away from his face and newly healed jaw. She feared that if she turned around or stood to complete some other task, Kisame would stop talking altogether. She wanted more information. She wanted to learn everything she could, because despite him and Deidara being complete idiots sometimes, they were intelligent idiots, if that made any sense. She had to know them to be able to properly escape. And even though she was starting to warm up to them—just a little bit, and there was definitely still piles and piles of hatred in that "warm up to them" tidbit—she had no intentions of staying with them.

Hell, she didn't know why they'd kidnapped her in the first place. They had to have some sort of ulterior motive besides wanting a personal medic. That was for sure.

"No. Not mine," he finally admitted, and the telltale squeak of the mattress indicated that he'd lain back, probably with his hands behind his head. "I don't intend on staying long."

"Don't agree with Deidara's plans? Whatever they may be, anyway."

He snorted. "I don't think even Deidara agrees with his plans. They're faulty and ridiculous, and he knows it."

The mechanic movements of Sakura brushing aside Deidara's hair became a little more absent-minded, and they turned into something that was almost akin to comfort. Her fingers brushed through it, undoing tangles, smoothing it out, clearing any stray strands from his forehead. "What are his plans?"

"You're not being underhanded," Kisame said, a bit of amusement tingeing his tone. "I wouldn't be telling you this if I didn't want you to know; trust me on that one, little girl."

Sakura exhaled deeply through her nose, pouting. "Yeah, I know. So what are they? It's not like it would hurt if I knew."

"Probably not," he conceded. "Deidara planned to revive the Akatsuki."

"With who? You and him? That's ridiculous."

"You, as well," Kisame said, and this shocked Sakura into momentary stillness. "But Deidara's not a leader, and neither am I. And you'd never stay. You'd fight it and fight it until you eventually either escaped or we had to kill you."

She nodded. "True."

"He's not stupid. He knows his reasoning is ridiculous." He paused for a moment. "But he had some emotional attachment to the organization. I'm guessing because he didn't really have that many friends."

"So what…what happened to the Akatsuki?" She looked down at Deidara, then, watched him breathe, watched his lower lip twitch out of agitation at the fading numbness. "I mean…you know."

"You didn't hear about it?"

"No, not at all. But we…I mean…my country…" She fiddled with a strand of his hair nervously, twirling it around her finger. "My country was too preoccupied with the war to really look into it. You guys hadn't made an appearance in so long…" And it was so odd referring to the Akatsuki as "you guys," still so odd to be speaking to an ex-Akatsuki. She'd never thought it possible. Not in a thousand years.

"There weren't many of us left. Myself, Deidara, Tobi, Zetsu, Itachi, Leader, and that blue-haired one…"

But it only took the span of eight or nine years for Sakura to completely change her outlook on someone.

"Zetsu had eventually been able to locate Hidan, and he'd dug him up. It took him a year or so to fully recover and find all of his limbs. And even then he was missing some things."

It only took eight or nine years for her to accept that the bad guys were human—that the bad guys had emotions and underlying reasons for becoming bad.

"We'd found another of the jinchuuriki, though it wasn't easy. Took us another couple of years to collect it. And then we'd tried to extract it, and it just hadn't worked. There weren't enough of us left."

Eight or nine years for Sakura to think about an evil organization with anything other than disdain; eight or nine years for her to disassociate Deidara and Kisame and Itachi and all of the others that she hadn't seen yet—or maybe she had and just didn't know it—with those black cloaks with the red-stitched clouds that she'd always secretly thought were pretty.

He sighed. "Leader insisted, though. He was certain that the war would distract the countries long enough, but that we needed to get this done immediately. Well, it didn't work."

Eight or nine years for—

"It…it exploded," he said, as if still in disbelief. "Deidara knew it would explode, and he told Leader. But Leader didn't listen, so eventually Deidara figured that it was either his life or some organization that acted as a substitute for a friend. He tried to get everyone to leave, but no one would move." He laughed darkly—a bittersweet tone. "So he ran."

For—

"By the time I realized that Deidara was a demolitions expert and knew better than anyone when something was and wasn't going to explode, it was already too late," he continued nonchalantly. "The explosion was strong. It knocked the sandals off of my feet and Samehada from my back."

For her to not immediately think of death when the name "Akatsuki" was brought up. Sakura bit her bottom lip, her hand stilling where it lay shivering against Deidara's forehead. All those years just to…

"I was already a considerable distance away when it finally blew up, but I still thought I was going to die." He stopped to take a deep breath. "Samehada made a barrier of some sort and protected me until the blast subsided. And then it disintegrated right along with the barrier."

Just to acknowledge their place. And it wasn't that they were justified in her eyes…

"I tried to find survivors, but there was no one. The first person I found was Itachi. He'd been far enough away that he didn't sustain too much damage, but he didn't make it."

…but they were humans, too. And criminals. And maybe some of them were fathers. And she knew they had to have been lovers to someone at one time.

"And then I found Zetsu. Or what was left of him. Then blue-hair, a piece of Hidan's leg, and Leader."

She was so engrossed with Kisame's story that she didn't notice Deidara begin to speak.

"I found Tobi later," he said in a whisper-soft tone, eyes still closed, barely moving his mouth at all. "I found him. I—I found him…"

Sakura refused to look at him, closing here eyes, as well. He was groggy and disoriented and she couldn't stand the look on his face, criminal that he was.

"Found him…he was…he was found. And he was so happy," he moaned gently. "He was so happy that someone had found him, yeah. 'Thank you, Deidara, you found me. Thank you, Deidara, for being the last person that Tobi sees.'"

She felt her nose tingle and her eyes water and she pushed all of that back. No crying for the criminals. No mercy for those who have never given.

"He was half gone. I couldn't—his body was—there was barely anything left of him, and there was blood everywhere, and he was never even mad at me for not taking him with me. But he…he should have been."

She finally opened her eyes to look at him, surprised to find the two fine lines left in the wake of a few tears running down the sides of his face. He arched into the pillow, eyes still tightly closed, hands fisted against the blanket.

"I didn't want to find him," he said, despite the obvious pain of doing so. "I didn't want me to be the last person to see before he died. I didn't want to have to watch him jerk and throw up all that blood and have to take off his mask for him and see his face, but there was nothing left of his face."

"Deidara," Sakura soothed, quiet, so much so that she could barely hear herself over Deidara's deluded speech.

"You don't understand. There was nothing there. It was…he was…" He sat up straight then, bringing his fists to cover his face, drawing his knees up. "The mask broke and cut into his eyes and scraped off half of his nose, and how could he see me if he had no eyes, Sakura?"

"Deidara, stop it. You're going to hurt yourself."

He pulled his hands away to stare up at her, mouth set tight, his hair still all pushed back, and he looked more threatening without that piece of hair obscuring his left eye, somehow. "I killed him."

"Enough!" Sakura yelled, rushing to try and pin him down. "You're going to dislocate your jaw or re-break it! It hasn't had enough time to heal!"

Deidara fought back, though, and two arms came around her shoulders, pushing at Deidara at the same time she was. She stepped back and allowed Kisame to take over, moving to put her hands at the sides of Deidara's face again, numbing his mouth and jaw before he could think to speak anymore.

After a few moments he was sedated again, and Sakura released him in favor of stepping back against the wall, leaning near the porthole. She looked out it, watching the water move past. There was no land visible anywhere, and the sun had already set. There were no stars that she could see. Nothing was there to lighten her mood.

Kisame sat back on the opposite bunk, rubbing his hands over his face. "It's been years since that happened. Five years, actually."

"It looks like he's still subconsciously guilty about it." She sniffled. "Did he really kill him?"

"He put him out of his misery," Kisame said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "From the bits and pieces he's told me, Tobi was crushed by a big piece of the mechanism we used to extract jinchuuriki. He was alive for the time being, but—"

"—if he moved the piece off of Tobi, Tobi would die instantly, but the object pinning him kept him alive for a little longer," Sakura finished for him, still staring out the porthole.

"Right. Tobi was in so much pain that Deidara just decided to kill him and get it over with quickly."

"It was the right thing to do, though."

"But can't you understand where he's coming from?"

She could understand exactly where. Gai came into her mind, in the hospital back at Konoha, dying but still laughing, going on and on about youth and pretty little things that made him happy.

And then he was gone. Just like so many others.

She didn't know how she was able to connect Deidara's internal grief with her own, but she did, and she took a deep, shaky breath. "They won't come looking for me."

"No."

"They know I'm dead."

"We wouldn't have been able to kidnap you and keep you away if there wasn't a war."

She moved back to Deidara, needing something to keep her mind busy. She pulled the blankets out from under him and then around him, tucking it to him closely, numbing his jaw a little bit more just in case. He'd exercised it too much too soon.

And then she made her way slowly to the bed where Kisame sat, and he scooted over to the opposite side, allowing her room. She ignored the fact that it was a waterbed and pulled off her sandals, outer tunic that they forced her to wear in public, and slid in between the sheets, rolling onto her side.

"So you're not making me sleep on the floor?" Kisame asked—rumbled—and Sakura shook her head.

"No. There's no need."

He nodded his assent and pulled the blankets over himself, as well, rubbing his head lazily for a moment before laying his head on the pillow and closing his eyes.

Silence ensued before Sakura, about to drop off to sleep, called out to Kisame gently.

He opened one eye.

"When are you leaving?"

He sighed deeply. "Soon."

"Please don't go." She heard his breathing stutter a little.

"Why?"

"I don't want to be alone." She moved closer to him, basking in the warmth, half-delirious from lack of sleep and sheer exhaustion.

"You're not."

"Not now."

"Why," he asked slowly, and she could hear the rumble in his chest as he spoke, "would my leaving affect you at all?"

"Because I have no one else."

"And back at Leaf?"

Her voice cracked. "They're dead."

"You have your blond friend. The kyuubi vessel."

She tapped her forehead against his collarbone. The robe he wore was soft. "You don't understand."

He laughed bitterly. "That sounds familiar."

"…But it's true."

"I'll stay," he finally allowed, "for as long as I can."

She wasn't satisfied, but she was also incredibly tired. She was drained. Everything was going fuzzy.

And the thought that an S-class criminal—an ex-Akatsuki member—a shark man—a killer—was comforting her never crossed her mind.