WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER: Tori sells "painkillers" to some youths. I never actually name them, but I imagine this might be upsetting to some readers? There's also mentions of underaged drinking and smoking.
xxx
The town was all wide, tree-line roads and well-kept row houses with stone fronts. There was a public fountain in the main square, where Tori refilled her canteen. She took a few sips as she people-watched and tried to think of what to do next.
She needed money, first and foremost, because she only had a few ration bars and lacked the skills to forage or steal more food. Eventually she'd need other things as well, like proper shelter and access to a shower and laundry and pads and tampons, oh god –
And transport. She needed to get as far away from here as fast as she could.
And then… and then she didn't know what she'd do but she'd find a quiet place to stay and be safe away from crazy ninja.
She felt her eyes go hot. Even if she got away, she'd never be home . This was her life now, homeless and penniless and with no friends or family.
She didn't cry, didn't let herself cry. She just sat on a bench in the square, miserably watching people pass. No one seemed to notice her.
Eventually she got up and wandered the town a bit more, eyeing a cart selling cold drinks and fried street food enviously. She dug around in the trash can next to the cart, found no edible looking left overs but several plastic cups, and then went back to the main square and placed a cup in front of her on the cobbled ground. By the time the sun went down, she'd eaten two more ration bars and three people had dropped coins into her cup.
She squinted at the coffee shop across the street. She barely had enough for their cheapest pastry.
She dumped the coins into her pocket. She needed to sell her pilfered painkillers.
xxx
Tori stood in the bathroom of a convenience store and frowned at her reflection in the mirror above the sink.
She'd forgotten how hideous her Oto uniform was compared to what normal people got to wear. Walking around in matching grey shirt and grey pants definitely made her look like an escaped prisoner. She switched out the shirt for the one she'd grabbed from a locker. It was navy blue with armpit sweat stains and was way too big on her.
She pulled it back and tied the excess fabric into a knock at the base of her back. Now it just looked like a weird fashion statement on a very dirty person.
Her hair was wild, her curls reduced entirely to frizz with inches of dead ends at the bottom, so she braided it to the side, hiding the scar on her neck from when Haruka stabbed her. Then she painted on a generous amount of eyeliner and lip gloss, and transformed herself from a prisoner into…
...someone who definitely had gone through some serious shit, was very dirty, and had no money.
Well. She was trying to sell drugs, she supposed.
The man working the counter of the store didn't say anything when she walked out. This was her second time using the store bathroom without buying anything, and the man had yet to acknowledge her presence.
xxx
Tori walked the now dark town, peering down alleys and looking for the type of shady people who might want to buy drugs from a very dirty person. Not for the first time, she wished Suigetsu was with her.
Suigetsu would have at least thought he knew what to do, and any sort of guidance would be comforting, even if it was the guidance of an obnoxious and murder-happy teenaged boy. Having Suigetsu around as muscle would also make her feel better approaching someone to make a deal– what was to stop anyone from just making her give them the pills without paying her? She wasn't a fighter; anyone could just hurt her and do what they wanted.
That's how it would be in Oto, anyway.
On the edge of town, she did find a road of mostly abandoned houses, where a group of loud people had built a bonfire in the street. It smelled like weed. It seemed like it was worth it to at least approach them.
She walked right by them twice, too cowardly to say anything. Suigetsu would be really useful right now.
She paced the streets, thinking furiously about what to say, what to do.
The town was designed so all roads lead back to the main square, where she inevitably ended up. It was filled with teengaers now, divided up into little groups around benches, passing around soda bottles that Tori would bet her cloned heart were watered down with alcohol.
The town had quieted down for the night, making the teenagers seem incredibly loud and boisterous, and Tori hovered at the edge of the square.
She had thinking about this all wrong. She wasn't in Oto anymore; she was in a normal town with normal people and their normal teenaged children. Tori could totally handle civilian teens. She'd spent a good portion of her life being a civilian teen, after all.
Besides, hadn't the drug scene at her university been mostly rich kids buying pot and each other's prescription drugs?
Tori strolled up to the closest group of teens as casually as she possibly could and said, "Friday night, huh?"
She pitched her voice as low and husky as she should could, trying to make herself seem older and world weary.
The group went silent, staring at her like she was some sort of novelty. One of the boys, crouched on the ground, had a cigarette in his mouth. Tori leaned over him and asked, "Yo, got any spares?"
The boy just stared at her. Someone to her left said, "It's Saturday…?"
"Ah," Tori said. "You know, time…"
And then she decided that this wasn't going well at all and moved on to the next group without saying anything further.
"Well, they were boring," she announced to group number two, and that received a round of drunken laughs. "Who's got a cigarette?"
A guy passed her one, and then one of only two girls in group flicked a lighter on for her. Tori placed the cigarette in her mouth and leaned in to light it, cupping one hand around the flame to protect it from the wind and holding her hair back with her other hand, the way she'd seen cool people in movies do.
Then she inhaled and it took every ounce of herself control not to cough from whatever demonic ritual she'd just exposed her lungs to. She kept her face smooth even as her lungs burned with Satan's revenge, and then she exhaled.
Tori had never smoked in her life and she didn't think she would ever again. Her lungs hurt.
"Who are you?" the boy who'd given her a cigarette asked.
To delay having to answer, Tori took another long drag. It was an equally bad idea the second time.
"Just a traveler passing through," she said, her voice now deep and gritty without any acting on her part. She desperately wanted to cough. "Is there anything to do in this town? Seems boring as shit."
The teenagers agreed, whining about how there was nothing to do but hang out here or with the potheads Tori had found earlier. They complained about how the town had started locking up a park they preferred to drink in at night, as if drinking in a park were somehow so much cooler and more exciting than drinking in the street.
"A fence…?" Tori repeated thoughtfully. She'd smoked half the cigarette. She didn't know how far she had to go through it before she could call it quits. Did she smoke it all the way to the butt? Or was it like eating an apple, and it was perfectly acceptable to toss it when there was still a bit left? "No of- fence , but why don't you just climb it?"
The pun went over everyone's heads.
"We'd get in trouble…" one of the girls said.
"Pfft," Tori sniffed. "Who cares? Here, I'll give you something good."
She fished the painkillers out of her bag. They were in a foil roll in a thin cardboard sleeve, just like they came back in her world, if with fewer warnings on them.
"What's it do?" a boy asked.
Tori raised her eyebrows at him as if he were a bit dumb. "Takes you where you need to go," she said. "Makes you feel real good."
Tori actually had no idea what the side effects were. She hoped they were good.
The girl with the lighter recognized the drug name, let out a cry out excitement, and reached for them. Tori yanked them out of her reach.
"Uh-uh," she said. "Unfortunately I'm not quite generous to just give them to you."
There was a bit of an argument then, but eventually two of the teens went off to get their pot money and Tori finished her cigarette. She made a show of counting the wad of bills they gave her. She'd never even seen bills in this world before, and they felt like monopoly money.
"You're a little short," she said, glancing around.
They gave her a bottle of spiked soda to make up the difference. Tori passed them the pills, and swaggered out of the square as casual as she could. That had been easy.
She made a beeline for a hotel she'd seen earlier. It was cheap, and the mattress was lumpy, but it was a real bed. The room came with packets of fruity smelling shampoo, and she stayed in the hot shower for as long as she wanted.
She slept in until the cleaning lady kicked her out, then spent a few hours wandering the town and buying supplies– a hairbrush, toiletries, some clothes from a second-hand store. She bought some cheap canned tuna, two bags of something marked PROTEIN BITS, and some dried fruit. She dumped the soda to make room.
She changed clothes in the bathroom of a cute cafe and bakery, shoving her Oto clothes in the trash. She walked out of the bathroom in much more reasonable clothes and with a spring in her step. She bought a pastry, the woman behind the counter was friendly to her, and for the first time in ages, Tori felt like her life was finally going to be alright.
Yes, she thought as she walked out of the café, muffin in hand– things were looking up for Tori Mendoza.
The only warning she got was a shadow suddenly appearing over her.
Tori screamed and dropped her muffin. The ground disappeared beneath her and she went up, up, up over the roofs of the houses, something pulling her up by the shoulders.
"WHAT THE FUCK," she yelled, futilely kicking her legs in the air. She was flying– she was fucking flying over the town .
"Don't struggle too much, yeah," a voice called from above. "Wouldn't want to drop you from this high up."
Tori craned her head around as much as she could. She was attached– or being held, more accurately– to some sort of white, stone… statue.
She stared down at her shoulder. A bird's talon was wrapped around her upper arm. A clay bird was carrying her over a forest.
"Oh no," she moaned.
xxx
The bird jerked to the right and dove, and Tori barely registered Sasori's form waiting for them as the ground rushed forward. The bird dropped her some three feet from the ground and she face-planted at full force. Deidara jumped off the bird and landed lightly next to her, and the clay creature poofed out of existence.
"Oi, Danna," Deidara called, "I brought her, yeah."
Tori groaned and pushed herself into a sitting position. Her nose was bleeding, causing tears to well up in her eyes, and everything hurt.
"Next time get it right on the first try," Sasori rasped as Hiruko's hulking shadow fell over her.
"Next time give me a better description, yeah!"
Tori leaned her head back and pinched her nose to the stop the bleeding as they argued. She needed to run. Running away would be good.
Tori started scooting slowly away from them, and next thing she knew, Hiruko's tail was stabbed into the ground next to her and Sasori was looming over her.
"Search her," Sasori commanded.
Deidara rolled his eyes but manhandled Tori's backpack off and tossed it aside. He then pulled her to her feet and started patting her down.
" Hey, " Tori complained, and then Sasori cut her off with, "Why did Kabuto have you with him?"
"What?" Tori said as she watched Deidara grab her braid and examine it. Being manhandled was very distracting.
Deidara, apparently finished with his his search, yanked her hair hard enough to make her yelp and stagger to the side. "Go on, answer him."
"You're no ninja," Sasori continued. "Why would Kabuto bring you along?"
Tori's upper lip was wet with blood. She pinched her nose again and answered in a nasally voice, "I was running away from Oto and he bumped into me and recaptured me."
Sasori called bullshit immediately. "You're a civilian. You'd be easy to catch after our meeting. Why did he bring you along?"
Tori started to say, still in her nasally Mickey Mouse, "I had another ninja helping me–"
And then Sasori slammed her face into the ground, Hiruko's giant hand covering her entire skull as he held her there. "Kabuto is not stupid enough to bring a civilian to a fight without reason. Why did he bring you along? "
Why do you all hate my face? Tori thought back at him, her brain swimming. Outloud she said, muffled into the dirt, "He wanted my opinion on you."
Much to her dismay, Sasori pressed her head further into the ground. "Why?"
"Mrrph," Tori said, barely able to breathe.
"What's that?" Deidara asked, and then stepped on her right between the shoulder blades.
Like an asshole.
Tori raised her arm to make some sort of gesture to indicate compliance, rolled her wrist, couldn't think of one, and somehow ended up extending her middle finger.
Deidara laughed. He shifted his weight so he was standing fully on her, and then used his free leg to kick her hand.
"Stop fooling around and search her bag," Sasori snapped.
"What's she going to have on her, yeah?" Deidara asked. "Camping supplies?"
Still, he got off of her, and Sasori let go of her head. Tori rolled over onto her knees, cradling her hand, and he leaned his face into hers.
"I am not a patient man," he hissed.
"I know, " Tori hissed right back.
"Oh!" Deidara cried from several feet away, having just flipped open Tori's bag. " Not camping supplies."
Before Sasori could decide she was being disrespectful and smash her face into something again, Tori continued, "Kabuto wanted my opinion because I can sometimes see the future."
"What the hell?" Deidara asked, looking up from her backpack. Sasori continued to stare her down with his creepy puppet eyes.
"Demonstrate," Sasori demanded.
"Um, well," Tori said, making a big show of looking Hiruko up and down. "If I were you, I wouldn't get too cocky around your Granny Chiyo."
"What the hell does that mean, yeah?" Deidara called. "Hey, girlie, if you know so much, what's Danna's hair color?"
"Red," Tori answered. She opened and closed the hand he'd kicked experimentally. It might bruise, but it was mostly fine.
"That's how you knew my jutsu had been removed," Sasori concluded, which was probably better evidence than beware your grouchy grandma. Sasori didn't dwell on this revelation very long and asked, "In what capacity were you affiliated with Oto?"
"Lab experiment…" Tori said as Deidara pulled her heart out of her bag and waggled his eyebrows at her. "...and then lab tech."
"How long were you there?" Sasori said, pointedly ignoring Deidara pretending to be horrified by the heart, then pressing his ear against the glass to listen to it beat.
"Since May," Tori said.
"Did Orochimaru or Kabuto or any high ranking shinobi ever confide in you?"
It occured to Tori then, that if things kept going like this, Sasori would get everything he wanted out of her, and then he'd probably kill her. That was, after all, more or less the mistake she'd made with Suigetsu.
She didn't want to be killed, and she certainly didn't want to die curled up in the dirt and sobbing at Sasori's feet. She sat up fully and crossed her legs.
"Speaking of Kabuto," she said, "you wouldn't have happened to have killed him, would you?"
"Answer my question," Sasori insisted, grabbing her around the neck.
Tori's heart rate shot up immediately, but she forced her voice to be calm as she answered. "No one in Oto confides in other people. But, you know, I'm pretty observant."
"Why do you have zero weapons?" called Deidara, who had emptied her bag completely and scattered its contents around himself.
Tori pressed on, "There's a lot one can learn from old lab records and medical reports. And I'm sure you want to know all the lies Kabuto told you." Sasori's grip tightened ever so slightly on her neck, and without thinking she grabbed Hiruko's wrist. Her hand didn't even come close to fitting all the way around. "And I'm sure you leader wants to know more about Orochimaru–"
"What do you know about our leader, yeah?" Deidara asked, having abandoned all of Tori's possessions in a pile some ten feet away and come to stand behind her.
Right. The Akatsuki was supposed to be super secret. That was fine, though, because if she could convince them she really was some sort of seer, she might have some sort of way to bargain for her life.
"He calls himself 'Pein'–" Tori began, and then Sasori's fingers twitched against her neck.
"Orochimaru could have easily told you all of that," he said.
"Do you really think Orochimaru would tell his lab tech a single detail about his past–" Sasori's fingers twitched against her neck. "Could you let go of me, please?"
Sasori dropped her. "I'm going to contact Leader-sama," he stated and then walked off into the woods.
Tori rubbed her neck, blinking at his retreating back in confusion.
"Ooh, you convinced him, yeah," Deidara said, grinning meanly at her. He was shorter than she would have anticipated– which was still at least five inches taller than her– and his dark blond hair was brassy in the warm sunlight. "Tell me, did you just find a half-packed survival kit and fill it up with random things?"
"No," Tori muttered, even though it was an embarrassingly accurate summation of what she'd done. "I filled it up with things I wanted to keep."
"Like a human heart," Deidara said, crossing to poke at the jar with his foot.
"It's my heart," Tori defended, scuttling over to pick it up herself. The glass was scuffed and there were a handful of hairline cracks, but the jar was miraculously in tact. The liquid inside must have absorbed most of the shock, because the heart inside also looked relatively undamaged.
"Like, you took it out of yourself, or like you took it from someone and now its yours…?" Deidara squinted down at the heart in her arms, interest obviously piqued.
"It's a clone," Tori specified.
"Is that what's in those notebooks?" Deidara asked. He'd flipped through them and thrown them all around before shuffling them back together in a messy pile. "How to clone?"
"Well– yeah, partly," Tori said. It occurred to her that running around with a good chunk of Orochimaru's research on her back was a stupid idea, mostly because now other S-ranked criminals had their hands on it.
Oops?
"Would they contain why Danna is convinced Orochimaru didn't die, even though we found his body?" Deidara asked, eyebrows raised at the pile he'd made.
Tori thought about it. There had been some ideas about cursed seals and transferring chakra networks scribbled here and there, but she didn't think Orochimaru had written out annotated directions on how to store parts of yourself in other people, the way she knew he'd done with Anko's cursed seal.
But maybe it would be bad to tell Deidara she couldn't answer questions for him; she did, after all, want to seem useful. Instead of answering outright, she said, "The possibility of Orochimaru coming back is why it's really important you should've killed Kabuto."
Deidara snorted. "Nope, slipped away like the snake he is."
Deidara had met Kabuto exactly once for about three minutes, and Kabuto had not made a good impression. Deidara told Tori all about it– without actually mention the circumstances under which he and Kabuto had met, or anything that had actually been said– and then ended his rant with an expectant, "Well? What can you see of my future?"
Tori said something vague about red eyes and lightning, and when Sasori returned, she and Deidara were having a shouting match.
"It's not my fault if you are going to make impressively bad decisions–"
"–and why should I believe you, yeah? You're so full of bullshit–"
"Deidara," Sasori chided, and Deidara made a rude hand gesture at Tori before turning to his partner.
"Yeah, what did Leader-sama say? We dumping her in a river?"
" Hey– " Tori squawked.
"He was interested in her information and ability," Sasori said, Hiruko's tail waving lazily behind him. "We're taking her back to headquarters for interrogation."
Tori dropped her heart, and it rolled across the grass.
"Aw, Danna," Deidara quipped. "You're going to break her heart, yeah."
He laughed at his own joke.
xxx
They let her hastily shove all her things back into her bag while Deidara made another clay bird. He practically threw her onto it, then sank her feet into the clay up to her ankles.
"Wouldn't want you falling off, yeah," he said with a smile that was in equal parts charming and ominous.
They took off, and Tori immediately regretted dumping her thick-fabriced Oto uniform for a short-sleeved dress and leggings. The wind was cold, and she clutched her backpack to her chest as she shivered. Deidara and Sasori didn't seem to notice, as they immediately started arguing over the true meaning of art, or something equally ridiculous.
This was bad. This was so heinously, hideously bad. She'd meant to use her fake ability to make a deal for her life, but she'd meant something short term, with just Sasori. She was not going to survive Akatsuki headquarters. This was a fact, plain and simple: she would tell them everything, because she wasn't strong enough to withstand any of the many horrible things they could do, and then they would kill her. They couldn't have some girl who knew all their secrets running around. If she was being optimistic, maybe they would keep her imprisoned until their organization inevitably crumbled.
And… and what if she ran into Hidan and Kakuzu again?
"Oh no," Tori whispered to herself, and both her captors ignored her.
She had to escape, and she had to escape now, except how could she escape from a tiny aircraft hundreds of feet off the ground? How could she escape from two Akatsuki in general?
"Oh no, oh fuck ," Tori said.
"What does your intent have to do with mindless destruction?" Sasori snapped at Deidara. They'd been talking about how Deidara's art differed from regular explosions, which Sasori maintained it didn't.
"Of course intent matters," Deidara said. Then he waved at Tori and continued, "Would it be art if she stuck some sticks to a corpse and made it dance around?"
Tori had a brief vision of a floppy, bloated corpse as a puppet on Sesame Street, which was unfortunately sort of funny. She had to work not to giggle.
"Of course not," Sasori growled back. "Who in their right minds would judge that as art?"
"Children might," Tori said without thinking. Sasori gave her an absolutely murderous look.
" Children might, " Deidara repeated gleefully, and Tori instantly regretted inserting herself into their conversation. "Please, Oto girl, tell us more about how you think children would enjoy Danna's art."
"My name is Tori," she supplied, and then Sasori cut her off with, "What does a lab experiment know about art?"
Tori decided she needed to immediately extract herself from this interaction, so she very cleverly said, "It's not like science and art are completely discrete subjects. You think Deidara got clay to fly on sheer artistic merit?"
"The application of scientific principles to art does not necessitate an understanding of art to a scientist," Sasori snapped back, and Tori really was going to stop engaging in this. ..
"The scientific method requires creativity," she said, like a moron.
"Creativity doesn't equal art through, yeah," Deidara cut in.
"No, but both science and art are about applying creative methods to understand the world–"
"What kind of a definition of art is that –"
Tori, unfortunately, had a long history of failing to disengage herself from things that interested her. Her throat still hurt from smoking, and she was hoarse in an impressively short amount of time spent arguing. The topic finally shifted to if art required a certain level of skill to be art, and Tori was able to shut her damn mouth.
At some point, the heavens opened up and it started to pour, cold rain smacking into them.
"God," Deidara swore, "I fucking hate Rain Country, yeah."
"We're still over Grass," Sasori pointed out.
" Ugh," Deidara said, and that segued into an argument over stopping for the night.
Deidara managed to win that one with a reminder about a time when he'd crashed while flying at night through bad whether, and then they switched to if getting a hotel was worth it or not. Deidara said he was sick of sleeping outside, while Sasori pointed that, "You'll be in your own bed tomorrow night. What's the difference?"
"You'd understand if you actually slept, Danna," Deidara sighed. Then he jabbed a thumb at Tori and said, "Are you gonna make a lady sleep outside, Danna?"
"How chivalrous," Tori deadpanned.
"What difference does being a woman make?" Sasori asked, and Tori was glad to know that Sasori was equal opportunity when it came to making people miserable.
They landed outside a small town anyway, because it was Deidara's bird and he did what he wanted. Neither of them bothered to get Tori down from the bird before it disappeared, and Tori landed in an undignified mess on the wet grass.
The rain had lessened to a light mist, but Tori was still shivering and miserable. Deidara looked less bothered, even as he rung water out of his hair. Either that cloak was impressively water resistant, or he was just used to being drenched and cold.
Tori eyed him enviously. Yes, she could see water droplets pooled on the cloak, not being absorbed into the material at all. She really should have thought of getting more weather resistant clothes.
Deidara gripped her roughly by the elbow and dragged her along behind him.
"This is coming out of your paycheck," Sasori said as he followed.
"Shut up, Danna," Deidara yelled over his shoulder. "You always make me pay, and then you set up a damn workshop and take up the whole room–"
The town was similar in design to the one Tori had previously been in, if not less well maintained. The cobblestone roads had cracked and missing stones, where muddy puddles had formed. Wooden structures with corrugated metal roofs were crammed in between old stone buildings, and the town felt more crowded– more people on the streets, busy and loud.
Tori was still shivering, her clothes and hair heavy and cold with water. The air was getting colder as the sun set.
"Hey, uh," Tori said interrupting whatever dumb argument her captors were having now. "Would you mind if I got, um, a coat…?"
They both stared at her. Tori slouched her posture and exaggerated her shivering in an attempt to make herself as pathetic and sad looking as possible.
"Do you realize," Deidara said after a beat, "that we're KIDNAPPING you, yeah?"
He said this very loudly, and a pair of women passing paused and gave them a very funny look. Starting a scene would not help Tori get what she wanted, so she laughed and smacked Deidara's bicep affectionately. The women seemed relieved and continued on their way.
"Then it would be a shame," Tori send through her overly friendly smile, "if you did all that work and I got pneumonia and died."
Deidara glanced down at his arm where she'd hit him, then back up at her with an incredibly scandalized looked.
"You–" he started, looking increasingly outraged with every passing second, and Tori worried she'd crossed some sort of line.
"She's right," Sasori said from behind her. "Deidara, if she gets sick, you have to deal with it."
"Why do I have to do all of the work–" Deidara started, rounding on Sasori.
The argument actually turned into a scuffle, right in the middle of the street, which Sasori ended by grabbing Deidara's entire face with Hiruko's giant hand.
"I'm losing my patience," Sasori said simply, then left them.
Deidara scowled and turned back to Tori. "I'm not buying anything for you, yeah," he said, "and I'm not going to the trouble of stealing for you either, so–"
"It's okay," Tori said, "I've got money."
"No," Deidara said, "You don't. I searched you."
Tori fished a bill out of her bra. It was as wet as the rest of her, and another bill was stuck to it. Deidara's mouth formed into a thin line.
"At the airport, when they search you," Tori said helpfully, "they kind of go around your boobs with the sides of their hands–"
She held up her hands to demonstrate, and Deidara smacked them out of the air.
"Shut up," he said. Then after a pause he added, "What the hell is an airport?"
Instead of answering, Tori turned on her heel and walked into the nearest store. It turned out to be entirely designer dresses, and they walked back out ten seconds later.
Deidara seemed to be bothered by the awkward silence as they wandered down the street, because he said, "Oto wasn't actually paying you, were they?"
"No, I–" Tori frowned. Well, it wasn't like Deidara was going to judge her for morally questionable behavior. "I sold drugs to rich teenagers."
Deidara snorted with laughter. It was a good laugh, friendly and inviting, which was unfortunate because Deidara was an objectively evil person who was taking Tori to meet with more objectively evil people.
At the next store, Tori flipped over the price tag on the first coat she saw and asked, "Is this a fair price?"
Deidara looked down at it, then said as if he were telling a great joke, "Please tell me if you think that's a good price."
Tori stared back down at the tag. There were a lot of zeros. All the prices here were in the hundreds and thousands. She didn't know how to convert them to her own native currency, and she didn't know if that would help even if she did.
"...I don't know," she said slowly. "We have different money where I'm from."
Deidara's eyes lit up like she'd said something especially outrageous, and Tori was left to conclude that different currencies were not common to the Elemental Nations. However, before Deidara could say anything, a salesperson inserted himself into their conversation.
"I assure you, miss," he said, "we never overcharge for our top-quality–"
"So then this is way overpriced," Tori concluded, dropping the tag.
The salesperson looked taken aback. That was perhaps a ruder thing than Tori might have said before she'd lived with a bunch of mean ninja underground, but she couldn't say she cared.
The next store was of the variety that sold clothes out of unorganized bins, and the coats and jackets had significantly fewer zeros. She immediately pulled a bubblegum pink one off the rack.
"That is the ugliest thing I've ever seen," Deidara said.
"It has fringes," Tori said, delighted.
"It suits you," Deidara replied. "You and your dumb face."
She found a more practical coat– dark gray, hooded, mid-thigh, and proven waterproof by Deidara spitting on it in an amazing act of maturity. At check out, Deidara dropped a heather grey scarf on top. She smiled at him.
As soon as they were out of the store, Tori pulled on the coat and Deidara took the scarf right out of her hands and put it on himself. At the disappointed look on her face, he said, "What? Did you think this was for you?"
She rolled her eyes.
Deidara announced she was treating him to dinner since he'd just been so accommodating, and he dragged her between different cheap take-away restaurants.
"Yaki -tori," Tori read off a menu, and beamed at Deidara. Deidara seemed to weigh how much he wanted this food versus the apparent joy it would bring Tori, and moved on to a place specializing in dumplings.
As she followed Deidara through the town, Tori realized that now would be the best time to escape. Getting away from just Deidara would be easier than getting away from Deidara and Sasori. Despite the petty meanness, he was in a fairly good mood.
Currently, Deidara was arguing with a man because the hole-in-the-wall restaurant was out of bakudan for the evening. Tori didn't even know what bakudan was. She wandered over to a stack of menus by the door and started flipping through one. Deidara did not seem to notice or care.
Could she just slip into a crowd? How did ninja track people? How had Deidara found her before?
She fantasized, briefly, about just walking out of the restaurant and away to freedom.
"Some people are just so rude," Deidara grumbled from directly behind her, and she jumped. "This was the only place with bakudan, too."
"What's bakudan?" Tori asked, and Deidara cocked his head at her.
"I honestly can't tell," Deidara said, grabbing her arm, "if you've actually lived under a rock your whole life or you're just stupid, yeah."
Bakudan was some sort of deep fried egg, and also Deidara's favorite food. After he'd whined about it being hard to find in Rain Country, Deidara settled for deep fried chicken instead, watching intently as the old woman serving them fried the meat right in front of them. He did not let go of Tori's arm, and she wondered if he'd been more aware of her planning an escape than she'd thought.
"What about her?" the woman asked, jutting her chin at Tori.
"She'll have the same," Deidara said immediately. Tori was briefly offended that they were talking about her like she was not capable of ordering her own food, but then she realized she was probably lucky Deidara was feeding her at all.
While they were waiting for the woman to make a second entree, Deidara sniffed his own box and let an audible, pleased sigh. He looked down at Tori in a sort of indulgent, half-lidded way and said, "Yeah, you can treat me to breakfast too."
"My pleasure," Tori drawled back at him.
Deidara made her carry the food. He led her on zigzagging pattern, eventually stopping at a dilapidated looking building. It was a crumbling zombie of an older stone structure patched up and expanded with wood, and the sign overhead read COMFORT INN.
Tori barely held back a laugh at the name. She was almost disappointed it didn't have the same logo has the Comfort Inn hotel franchise back in her world.
"This is probably it," Deidara said.
"How could you possibly know that?" Tori asked.
But sure enough, when Deidara asked if a "big, ugly guy" had checked in recently, the concierge nodded and said they were expected. He handed over a single key.
Deidara smirked at her pouting face all the to the end of the hall and into the room. Sasori barely glanced up when they entered.
"I knew," Deidara said, dramatically, letting the door slam behind him, "because I'm a fucking ninja."
Sasori had, much to Deidara's predictions, spread a bunch of miscellaneous tools and body parts around the room. He'd shed Hiruko, too, examining the giant puppet's arm with the blank expression of his actual body.
"Hope you don't mind sleeping in a room with a bunch of dismembered people," Deidara said cheerfully, and kicked a bundle of what looked like ribs out of the way to sit on the floor.
Sleeping in a room with the remains of several dismembered people was, quite unfortunately, not a new concept to Tori. Sasori's spare parts, thankfully, did not smell quite as bad.
Tori sat gingerly, moving some type of serrated blade and a spool of wires out of the way. She wondered how Sasori preserved his puppets, then, if there was no chemical smell?
She wanted to ask him. It was the sort of weird fascination Orochimaru would indulge a person in, and then tease her about, and then leave her to hollow out a rotting corpse by herself. She didn't know enough about Sasori yet to guess if he'd be flattered by her curiosity, or annoyed that she had the audacity to speak to him, or just annoyed at both her and Deidara in general for needing to eat and sleep.
From the other side of the room, Sasori didn't look particularly strange, just young and indifferent in his expression. The longer she watched him pick at the contraption embedded in Hiruko's forearm, though, the more it became apparent that there was definitely something vaguely inhuman about him. Something in the way he moved wasn't quite right– there was no fidgeting, no hesitation in movement, no rise and fall of the chest to indicate breath.
Deidara must have misinterpreted the look on her face, because he leaned over to jeer at her and say, "I know Danna has a pretty face, but have you noticed he doesn't blink yet?"
"I'll be sure to avoid staring contests with him," Tori said, and reached for her own take out box.
It was silly to wonder about Sasori's social skills, anyway. She needed to refocus on escape. Deidara said he wanted breakfast, so she might have another chance to isolate them from Sasori. Unless Sasori came with them? But then, maybe it was easier to distract them with each other. She was sure she could bait them into an argument with each other if she played her cards right.
Tori's thoughts came to a complete stop once she opened the styrofoam take-out box and the smell of delicious, savory food hit her. The box was half filled with rice, layered with steamed vegetables and slices of fried chicken on top, and a dark sauce drizzled over it. Tori pushed aside the meat to pull out an actual, honest to god slice of carrot. Not mystery green mush. Not some sort of sad wilted leaf. A real, solid vegetable!
She nearly cried eating it.
"Fascinating, yeah," Deidara said, sounding exactly as if watching Tori struggle not to cry over vegetables wasn't fascinating at all.
"The food in Oto was shit," Tori explained, and shoved a snap pea in her mouth. It was so good, and she didn't even like peas.
"Was Oto as weird and creepy as I think it was?" Deidara asked, staring at her hopefully.
"Hmm," Tori said. "Yeah, probably."
Deidara had probably not wanted to hear about how bad the food was in Oto, but that's what was on Tori's mind and what she told him about. He leaned over twice to steal strips of chicken from her food.
"...and then we must have chopped up the only cook who knew how to make rice, because at some point I swear we were eating rocks–"
"Wait," Deidara interrupted, "'Chopped up' the cook?"
"Yeah," Tori said. "Everyone in Oto was an experiment."
Deidara looked downright eager. Tori told him about one of Keizo's experiments on regeneration– enough to keep Deidara happy, and enough to make it sound like she could help Sasori figure out how to kill Orochimaru or whatever he wanted to do.
When she was done, she stood and look around the room. It was almost completely bare of furniture, with a couple of futons folded up neatly against a wall. There was a single, large window in one wall.
"There's no bathroom," Tori observed.
"Nope," Deidara agreed, and then took the last piece of chicken from her box.
"...what if I have to go to the bathroom?" Tori asked.
Deidara shrugged. "Sucks for you, yeah."
"I will pee on your bed," Tori said flatly.
Deidara glowered at her, but Sasori cut in, "Deidara, just take her."
"Danna," Deidara yelled, head whipping around to glare at Sasori, "I am not a goddamn babysitter–"
They argued. Tori shifted in place a few times. Was there no bathroom because the bathrooms were communal? She'd never stayed in a place like that, but she knew they existed. A hotel couldn't just not have bathrooms, right?
"Ugh, you know what– you know what–" Deidara shoved a hand in the bags of clay at his side, and then half-heartedly threw two fat spiders at her.
Tori had enough sense in her to jump out of the way of the spiders' trajectory, but then they crawled after her. She made several embarrassing squeaks trying to dance away from from them while not stepping on Sasori's random equipment lying around.
"Based on your reaction," Deidara said, watching Tori comically try to avoid the spiders, "I'm guessing you know what my art does, yeah."
One of the spiders managed to get onto her foot. Tori stared down at it in horror.
"If you leave the hotel, that one is going to explode," Deidara said. The other spider climbed onto her other foot. "And that one is going to come get me, so you better not run off, because I will be pissed, yeah."
Deidara then turned away from her and started rolling out a futon for himself. Tori wiggled her toes. The spiders stayed in place, sitting cutely on top of her feet.
"...then can I shower too?" she asked.
"Whatever," Deidara answered. Sasori said nothing, continuing to blatantly ignore them in favor of picking at a puppet.
Tori grabbed her backpack and made it to the door before she turned back around and said, "You can't listen in through the spiders, right? You won't hear me pee?"
"Oh my god, no, " Deidara yelled and chucked a pillow at her.
Tori hurried out of the room and followed the signs for the communal baths.
That had been pretty good, she thought. Now she was alone, and all she had to do was figure out how to escape without having a clay spider blow off her leg or summon evil missing-nin to capture her.
I'm going to die, she concluded.