Whoa! Your responses have left me baffled! Hope you guys enjoy this chapter!

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto

Sasori looked at Deidara.

Deidara looked at Sasori.

They blinked, then turned in unison towards the other redhead that had unwillingly accompanied them.

Sasori spoke first, stating the obvious. "You kidnapped the Kazekage."

"I kidnapped the Kazekage," Deidara repeated, momentarily struggling to grasp what it was that he had just done. It took a few seconds for the words to settle down in his own mind, but when it finally did, his reaction did not disappoint.

"Oh shit. I kidnapped the Kazekage." He paused, forgetting a small detail. Then he gasped. "Again!"

While sighing in exasperation, Sasori pinched the bridge of his nose as if it would do something to ease the infinitely growing amount of stress he often experienced while around the slow blond. (Whatever he had said about missing the kid, he was taking all of it back now.) During his time in wherever the hell that dimension was, he had grown accustomed to finally feeling things again, and now it felt strange to have that ability stripped away once more.

"Yes, you did, indeed, kidnap the Kazekage again, and now we're going to have to deal with his companions. Again," Sasori drawled, looking at his partner with as much disdain as he could muster (which was surprisingly a lot for a man who had already found inner peace). "So why, for the love of Kami, did you do that again?"

Deidara vehemently waved his hands to deny the fact that he had (somewhat) willingly re-dug graves for the two of them.

"I didn't mean to, un! One minute I'm in this weird, white world, and the next minute I'm dodging a huge ball of sand being hurled towards me. I fought the kid 'cause the kid wouldn't stop attacking me, but I couldn't exactly let him fall out of the sky after I knocked him out. Then we'd really have an issue with Suna."

"Are you vapid?"

"I spent a decade dead, Sasori, not being given vocabulary tests. What do you mean?"

Sasori was convinced he was gonna go straight back to the White Room via a Deidara-induced aneurysm. "I'm asking you if you're dumb. They're shinobi, Deidara, they could've caught him themselves."

Deidara's mouth formed a perfect 'o' shape. "Crap."

Sasori resisted the urge to bury his head in his hands. They didn't have time for him to pick apart Deidara's flawed logic. If he remembered things correctly, they'd end up in a minor confrontation right about—

"Return Gaara to me!"

Now.

"Sasori… we have some company," Deidara laughed nervously as Kankuro came into view. "So do you want me to go ahead of you this time too?"

"I don't think the pink-haired brat that killed me off last time is going to appreciate it very much if I poisoned the kid this time around too, so no." Sasori weighed his options; the majority of his decisions during this new life seemed to boil down to a fight or flight response.

He'd choose flight—quite literally—each time.

"Can your bird handle another person?"

Deidara answered him with a cheeky grin. "Of course."

"Don't think you two can get away!" Kankuro growled, whipping out his scrolls to summon his puppets, but it was far too late. Before the first few chakra strings could attach themselves to the puppets' appendages, the panicking duo had made their exit, leaving the puppeteer bewildered by the conversation he had just overheard.

Once they were a solid distance away from Suna, Deidara became aware of small conundrum.

"Sasori, er, where do I head to?"

"What's this? You've only finally decided to follow my orders after we've died twice?" Sasori remarked wryly.

"Either tell me where to go, or shut up and get off my bird!" Deidara snapped.

"Isn't it obvious? Go to the old lair."

"The lair? You mean the place where you died the first time around? I thought the goal this time was to stay alive a little longer than we did during our other two attempts at life. No offense, Sasori, but I think that's a bit counterproductive. I mean, if we want to keep our lives, shouldn't keep the kid away from Pein?"

As Deidara's rambling registered in his mind, Sasori was positive that the not-so bright blond's lack of common sense was going to be what landed both of them back in their graves.

"What makes you think we're the only ones who got brought back? The only thing we ever had in common was the fact that we were partners. We died at different times and in completely different ways. It's hard to imagine that we'd be thrown into the past solely because we worked together for a brief amount of time, and if that were the criteria for time travel, wouldn't we have been accompanied by Orochimaru and whoever your new partner was after me?" Sasori paused to recall the boy's name. "Toni? Tori? Tob—"

Deidara swivelled around and roughly grabbed Sasori's shoulders, effectively stopping the redhead from completing the cursed name. He seemed absurdly paranoid—even for a notorious missing-nin—as his eyes scanned for something in the empty skies that surrounded them. He brought a raised finger to his lips and made a shushing sound.

"Don't say his name, Sasori. I swear the kid gets summoned when someone even thinks of him."

Sasori gave his ex-partner an incredulous look, suddenly thankful that he had been the first one to die. Going off of Deidara's exaggerated reaction to the mere possibility of his former comrade showing up, the Akatsuki had gone to shambles after his demise. After all, not many things made the pyromaniac so jumpy—Deidara hadn't even flinched when he'd first figured out Sasori's puppets were composed of corpses.

"Got it. I won't say his name," Sasori promised, brushing Deidara's hands off of him. "Could you turn around and continue to fly the bird, though? Suna's already upset over us abducting their Kage, I don't think they'd like it if we took him down with us in a fiery crash."

Deidara shivered. "You're as morbid as ever."

"Death changes a lot of things. My sense of humor is not one of them," Sasori replied dryly.

Deidara refrained from a verbal reply and, surprisingly, did as Sasori said without further objections. The silence was a bit off-putting—especially for a pair whose favorite hobby prior to their deaths appeared to be bickering—but Sasori wasn't going to push it. Though it wasn't their first time being placed in such a bizarre situation, getting cheated out of eternal peace was still something rather disconcerting.

With his focus now wholly concentrated on maneuvering the clay model, Deidara got them to the base in a record amount of time.

"And you used to always hate flying," Deidara commented on their speedy arrival smugly, evidently proud of his quick mode of transportation.

Sasori rolled his eyes at Deidara's confidence, unwilling to feed the kid's ego regardless of how effective the fowl was at taking them from place to place. "Just unload the Kazekage and carry him inside. I'm going to get Itachi or Kisame to open the cave for us." Sasori gave his presumably-distant cousin a onceover. "If he wakes up prematurely, just knock him out again. "

"Knock him out again? Isn't the point to not anger Suna anymore than we already have?"

"Another bruise on him isn't going to be what sends an army to our doorstep," Sasori quelled his partner's worries dryly. "If anything, considering we've captured their Kazekage and knocked out their forces, we already have Armageddon on its way regardless of what we do from this moment on."

"You… have a point."

"I always have a point. You just never listen."

"Hey!" Deidara cried out in indignation. "I'm listening now, aren't I?"

"Yeah, it only took a decade of you being in complete isolation to learn the value of collaboration."

"Just go and open the damn door," the blond grumbled.

Sasori promptly did as asked. Unlike his ever so easily agitated acquaintance, he didn't mind following orders that were somewhat logical. As much as his appearance suggested otherwise, he wasn't a child, nor a readily provoked teen.

He had partially lied to Deidara—he didn't actually know whether or not the entire Akatsuki had become victims of unwarranted time-travel too, but if they didn't have their memories back and proceeded with the Sanbi's extraction, then he'd much rather do it with Itachi and Kisame around as reinforcements.

Fortunately, it would never come down to that.

Unfortunately, what Sasori found when he entered their hideout was quite possibly worse than fighting Suna and Konoha for a Kazekage they had accidentally snatched.

Since its creation, the Akatsuki had rarely gathered together in person. Even when extracting a bijuu, they had settled for doing it via their projections; though it was a slower process, it prevented skirmishes from happening between the more rowdy members of their organization.

So when Sasori walked into a room with almost all their members physically present, he nearly turned around and walked right out.

Before he could, though, Pein's booming voice anchored him in place. "Sasori, you and Deidara are the last ones to arrive." The man was no longer using his orange-haired friend's corpse as a liaison, and instead was attending the impromptu meeting as a malnourished redhead. Despite this drastic change in appearance, he was still as intimidating as ever.

Nevertheless, Sasori ignored his leader's comment about their punctuality. He didn't really care about whether or not he was on time in Pein's eyes—at least, not in this case. They weren't the ones who just had accidentally grabbed the goddamn Kazekage. "Since we're all here… Is it safe to presume that we all are in the same predicament?" Sasori chose his wording carefully, making an effort to speak in a way that gave room for ambiguity just in case his assumption wasn't right.

"How was the Fourth Great Shinobi War?" Itachi asked before Pein could answer, narrowing his eyes at the redhead.

"Not pleasant. I was sealed away during the first wave of combatants," Sasori answered swiftly, not missing a beat.

"Well I'll be damned, I guess we are all in the same boat," Kisame muttered. "Where's blondy at?"

"He's out—"

"Sasori, where should I put the Kazekage, un?" Deidara chose to make his entrance while asking the worst possible question, earning the attention of all those in the room.

"Kazekage?" Konan repeated, and based on the slight twitch of her eye, Sasori was certain a vein was going to burst in her head. She turned to their leader for dreaded confirmation. "Nagato, did he just say Kazekage?"

The walls of the cave seemed to quiver with the force of everyone's alarmed shouts as their eyes fell onto the unconscious redhead being carried by Deidara's clay figure. Varying in only the loudness of their voices, each member spit out Deidara's name as if it were a curse.

The only one to take the knowledge of their newest guest somewhat well was Kakuzu, which wasn't saying much. "Kazekage, huh? I wonder how much his village is willing to pay for his return."

Pein—Nagato—stared at their uninvited visitor. "Deidara, Sasori… I thought we were all in the same predicament."

Deidara blinked, not understanding the comment. "We are in the same predicament."

Nagato was seriously beginning to regret his decision to recruit teenagers into the Akatsuki. "Then why on this God-forsaken earth is the Kazekage in this cave?"

Sasori sighed. This was going to be a tough one to explain.

"So Deidara…"

The rest(most of them, at least) of the Akatsuki has joined the mix! Are you guys still enjoying this fanfic? I'm so flattered by the support I received for the first chapter! I'm trying to keep the members in-character with just a little dash of more human-like personality in them.

Tell me if you guys want more with a review! I'd really appreciate it.

And, as always, have a great day!~