Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
Deidara gripped the ends of his freshly cut—if you could call what extreme measures his comrades had reached that—hair, looking as if he were conflicted on whether or not he should burst into tears or drag his comrades back into their graves.
No one else looked all that affected.
"Childish," Itachi muttered, and the rest of the Akatsuki members enthusiastically agreed.
For all the effort they had put in, Deidara had miraculously saved most of his mane. Konan's chakra infused, razor-sharp papers couldn't do the job, and Kisame's Samehada had barely grazed the ends of it. Sasori's puppets' efforts proved futile, and Itachi had been unable to place Deidara under a genjutsu strong enough to force him to chop off his own tresses. Even the ever so powerful Nagato failed to do the impossible task and was left playing a futile game of tag with the blond instead.
In the end, they had cut a grand total of five inches—a real feat when the blond's passion for his locks was taken into account. The tips of it still reached down far enough to stretch past his shoulders, yet he still seemed furious enough to kill.
"Let's shave his head next time," Kisame suggested, grinning at his comrade in faintly obscured annoyance. He was not a man who was easily aggravated—especially after spending such a long period of time inactive—but Deidara's baffling resilience to the haircut proved to be even more annoying than all of the hurdles in Kisame's (previous) life combined.
"You've cut enough, un! This is good enough for me to pass as Seidara or whatever the stupid name you guys thought up of was! I'm telling you, this idea is fuckin' dumb, un," Deidara snapped after hearing Kisame's threat to his precious hair.
"We wouldn't have had to stoop to such idiotic methods if you weren't so much of an idiot yourself, Deidara," Sasori spat, brushing suspiciously bloodied blond strands of hair off of his hands. They had really, really done the most to accomplish such a menial task.
"Sasori, you too," Nagato spoke suddenly, earning a confused glance from the puppet master and a gleeful exclamation from Deidara.
"What?"
"Suna's forces saw your appearance too. Get rid of the puppet, Sasori."
"No." Before he had even thought through a proper response, he had already refused his leader's order.
Nagato narrowed his eyes at the redhead. For someone who was usually easy to reason with, Sasori was being uncharacteristically stubborn about this matter. "Sasori, you can either do it yourself, or we can go through the exact same struggle we just had with your partner."
"Go ahead." Sasori gave Nagato a sharp look back—or at least, as sharp of a look as he could muster through a puppet's face. Abandoning one of his precious works of art was where he drew the line for what orders he would and wouldn't obey. He was making it evident that nothing short of Armageddon would persuade him to change his stance.
And Armageddon, he got.
Before he could ready himself for the inevitable struggle, a flock of paper birds flew towards him at neck breaking speed. Barely dodging that attack from Konan, an unavoidable one came from Nagato via his six paths, tossing Sasori right into the very same wall that had nearly done the Kazekage in. Hiruko's shell cracked at the impact, but remained mostly intact for a remarkable eight seconds before the real wave of attacks came for him. Between Kisame's terrifyingly strong water release, Itachi's flamethrower-worthy-substitute mouth, four of Kakuzu's elemental techniques, and a few dozen bombs tossed in by Deidara, Sasori hadn't stood a chance.
(He swore if they had put the same amount of effort into getting things done the first time around, they probably wouldn't have been decimated by a handful of brats.)
Mirroring his partner's disgruntled expression from other, Sasori seethed as he was forcefully ridden of his puppet armor. Like Deidara, his hair, too, had suffered under the hands of the Akatsuki—now singed at the ends.
"Is this the Akatsuki, or a hair salon?" Sasori muttered, now absentmindedly rubbing the damaged, smoldering ends of his hair between his wooden fingers.
He had forgotten that he had become a puppet again.
"Sasori, you're… on fire," Deidara coughed nervously as he informed his partner of the newest misfortune to fall upon them.
"Though I may not feel the heat from it, I'm fully aware that my hair was burned by the Uchiha," Sasori spoke blandly, refusing to acknowledge the smoke that was actually rising from his painstakingly crafted fingertips.
"I'll take care of this." Kisame gave the surrounding members a flashy grin—an unintended signal for all of them to run for their lives.
Though Sasori's lit hand required little more than perhaps a glass of water to put out, what came for him put even the greatest of tsunamis to shame. Kisame had grabbed Samehada and nearly drained half of the collected chakra contained in it—a damn lot considering the fact that most of chakra came from all the tailed beasts. With one swing, a tidal wave crashed against Sasori, washing away both him and the entire cave wall behind him.
The lair that they had so meticulously built for their evil schemes was completely demolished.
Once the Akatsuki had gotten over the new lake that was now where their lair had once been, the more immature members—Deidara and, well, Deidara—began to giggle.
"Good thing you're made of wood, Sasori. You might've drowned if you weren't," Deidara mocked, bursting into fits of maniacal laughter as his partner helplessly floated by.
Sasori shot daggers at Deidara, but could do little more than that. He was unable to find footing on the floor, and continued to move about the ruined room like driftwood. Eventually, once Nagato had grown tired of listening to Deidara's psychotic laughs, Sasori was plucked out of the water and placed onto solid ground.
This would, unfortunately, be the least embarrassing one of all the situations he'd later find himself in during this try at life, but as of now, he was blissfully unaware of the fate that awaited all of them. Therefore, due to his pride still being somewhat intact as of that moment, he looked righteously pissed.
And then he looked around—they all looked around.
After spending such a long period of time inactive, their overpowered jutsus had turned against them.
Deidara's sloppy haircut made him look completely miserable after becoming a casualty of Kisame's jutsu, and Kisame looked just as dejected as Samehada wilted to a fraction of its original size after wasting so much chakra. The water had rendered all of Konan's papers unusable, and her wings had begun to look more like a paper mache project gone horribly wrong. Nagato, being effectively immobile, had bore the brunt of the attacks, somehow getting singed, soaked, and sliced all at once. His six paths, however, had somehow even dragged the ever so serious Uchiha into their amateurish mess; repulsing all the jutsus had resulted in Itachi's flames being thrown right back into his face, and now he, too, had joined the singed-hair club. The finishing touch was done courtesy of Kakuzu, whose four elements had mixed disastrously with all the other active jutsus in the room, eventually leading to mutually assured destruction for all parties involved.
The Akatsuki—for all their devilish crimes and atrocious personalities—looked absolutely, positively ridiculous.
It was Konan who did it first.
Trying and failing at hiding the noise, a soft giggle tumbled out from behind her hand, sparking another chain reaction. Kisame joined in with a ferocious roar of a laugh, and Nagato followed suit. Deidara resumed the cackling he was doing earlier, and this time Sasori joined him. Behind his mask, Kakuzu chortled at the odd predicament that they were in, and even Itachi found it hard to not let a small chuckle escape his lips.
Then it grew—from a light, joyous sound to one of absolute hysteria as they were overcome with the sheer absurdity of it all.
"We-We're like children." Deidara barely managed to speak as he gasped for air. "We look like children, un."
"You are a child," Itachi pointed out, though his voice lacked the disregarding tone it once had whenever he had addressed the organization's loudmouthed blond.
"Itachi's telling jokes." Kisame plopped down on the ground, sitting cross-legged as he slammed his fist on the floor to contain his crazed guffawing. He wiped a laughter-induced tear from the corner of his eye. "Itachi's telling jokes."
Sasori squeezed the water out of his cloak. "We've really lost our edge, huh?"
"I suppose we have, though that doesn't exactly tell us why we've been brought back to this time. Perhaps it was To—" Nagato stopped in his tracks as each Akatsuki member gave him a faux beam and pulled out what was left of their respective weapons. Regardless of how light the mood had gotten, saying his name—in fear of accidentally summoning him through a power that transcended all forms of reason—was still taboo. Nagato gave them a small smile and pretended as if he hadn't almost uttered the cursed name.
"Maybe it's Fate," he joked. "Perhaps we've been revived for the greater good."
"So we're supposed to be, what—good guys this time around, un?" Deidara added onto Nagato's sarcastic suggestion. All of them were still laughing at however the hell their lives had turned out the way they did.
Then their side-splitting roars faded into nervous chuckles.
"Nagato, why does Deidara's suggestion sound somewhat probable?" Konan asked with a sickly sweet, closed-eye smile.
"Ridiculous," Itachi scoffed at the idea, making it seem as if it were foolish, but the lone bead of sweat rolling down his face suggested he really thought otherwise.
"Does anyone here want to continue with the plan we had once had now that we have subsequent knowledge of how most actions will turn out?" Nagato asked suspiciously, gauging all of the members to see how they would react to the idea of returning to their villainous ways.
Crickets chirped, and not a single person looked all too eager to screw the world over again.
"So the only thing we have in common," Sasori started, "is that all of us are opposed to doing bad in the world this time?"
"There's no way we'd be revived for such a stupid reason," Kisame dismissed the new theory, but all further rational thought pointed to its validness. "Absolutely not."
"Is this some kind of strange way to atone for last time?" Kakuzu asked, already sounding exhausted.
"Good guys," Deidara snorted. "Good guys! Does Kami know who the fuck we are, un?"
Kami didn't give a reply, prompting the blond to go on yet another tirade.
"All of our respective villages hate us, un! I'm a goddamn bomber, and Sasori kills people and desecrates their corpses! Don't even get me started on the rest of you guys," he warned, but continued anyways. "I'm pretty sure Kakuzu had to do something satanic to get four hearts, and we all know Kisame is just as bloodthirsty as an actual damned shark would be! Do you know how fucked the world would be if we were the good guys?"
Once again, the ex-criminal organization broke into hysterical laughter. This time, however, it was more for the sake of keeping their sanity in the midst of an insane situation, rather than them finding their circumstances particularly funny.
And it was in that desperate state—with the Akatsuki derangedly giggling out of pure denial for how preposterous their situation was—that Konoha's reinforcements found the nationally feared criminal organization.
Naruto Uzumaki—both the bane of their existence and the savior of their humanity—blinked at their psychotic break.
"Did I knock on the wrong cave?"
This took a little longer than usual to update, but I still made it in under a week. :D Konoha has finally joined the mix, and the Akatsuki are not sure that they've lost their marbles.
Did you guys like the chapter? I've read all your reviews over and over again, and I'm so glad you guys have enjoyed this parody-ish fanfic!
If you did enjoy the chapter, please review! It helps a lot with motivating me to persevere through writer's block!
Have a great day! ~