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It started because Hidan was an overall horrible person that pretty much everyone hated, and yet at the same time was somehow valuable enough to Leader that having him just quite and run off one day was considered to be an actual problem. Deidara was just unfortunate enough to be in the area when Leader found out that the lunatic priest had gone missing.
("Bring him back," Pein said coldly, staring at Deidara with his honestly very creepy eyes. Some things just weren't worth even pretending to argue over, and when Leader was in that kind of mood, it was best to just do as he was told, even if he really didn't want to.
He had really thought that this kind of thing would stop happening after he ditched Iwa.)
And it wasn’t even an outside hired mission, and as Akatsuki was still laying low and making an effort to not gain too much attention, he didn’t have any excuses to create some art. Or at least, he wasn’t allowed to until he caught up with Hidan and was on his way back with the bastard, and he still wasn’t supposed to after that, but what happened would happen.
First, though, he had to find him in the first place.
Leader may have chosen Deidara to go after Hidan because he was pretty much the fastest distance traveler in the Akatsuki, but in all honesty, his actual tracking skills weren’t great. Probably because his preferred method of transportation was his clay birds, which didn’t allow for much up close tracking experience.
Fortunately for everyone involved, Hidan wasn’t exactly trying to be stealthy, so with his scope, Deidara could track his path just fine from the air. Deidara focused a little harder on that trail, somewhat unable to believe what he was seeing.
And here he had been thinking that Hidan hated his old village and the country in its entirety, with the sole exception of the rest of the creepy religion that the freak followed—and never shut up about. But the guy also claimed that he didn’t ever need to interact with other members of his ‘order’ as it were.
So why was he heading straight for the Land of Hot Springs? Deidara couldn’t figure it out, but technically he didn’t have to, so he didn’t worry about it for long, instead spending his effort trying to hurry his pace.
It wasn’t like there was anything left of the place anyway, after that explosion a few weeks ago destroyed the entire country.
Deidara was still torn on if he wanted to meet whoever was responsible for that and learn their secrets, or just kill the competition before they got too far ahead of him.
Both options were very tempting, because the work of art that was left after they were finished was so unspeakably amazing that Deidara still got chills thinking about it.
Of course, now that he was thinking about it, Hidan had been in a terrible mood ever since the explosion in his home country. It had come off as a more personal issue though, and not so much as though the immortal was angry about what happened to Hot Springs but rather something else.
Deidara didn’t have a lot of time to consider the matter further, because instead of heading towards Hot Springs, Hidan took a sharp turn into Fire country, apparently heading straight for Hidden Leaf.
What. What.
Deidara had no idea what is going on anymore.
***
As it turns out, Deidara isn’t the one to catch up with Hidan first, and from where he is hidden up a tree a good half mile away, he’s actually quite pleased about that.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know that Hidden Leaf’s Jounin Commander was terrifying—no one could be named to that position and not be frightening enough to control the rest of the shinobi under their control, after all.. But apparently there was a difference between objectively understanding that the man was a force to be reckoned with and watching him—with some help from his teammates—systematically carve Hidan into pieces, bury the pieces separately, and then pick Hidan’s head up and put it in a bag without so much as changing expression.
Yeaahhh. Deidara knew perfectly well that he was S-Ranked for a reason, but...there was something viscerally terrible in the way that the shadows of the trees had come alive to tear the Priest apart alive.
It was almost seemed like it was personal—on both ends of that fight. Hidan had spent the whole thing screaming about some heathen bitch that he was going to kill, and while Nara’s face hadn’t changed, Deidara was more than enough of a shinobi to sense his anger even from this distance.
The blond missing-nin stayed in the tree for a while after the three Leaf-nin left with the pieces of Hidan, thinking things over. He certainly wasn’t going to go after them into Hidden Leaf alone, no matter what Leader wanted.
He also wanted to figure out what that whole thing had been about, and that meant that he needed to do some research into Hidden Leaf, which he hadn’t been bothering with before because they weren’t scheduled to go after the Kyuubi until they already had all the others, so it hadn’t seemed as important as, say, looking at Hidden Sand or Hidden Cloud, who were going to be the first big targets on the Bijuu hunt.
Summoning another bird, Deidara headed back to base. Time to report back what happened to Hidan and find out why.
***
It didn’t take long for Deidara to come to some conclusions, once he started looking into things. All he really had to do was find a couple of Bingo Books and look for females connected to Nara Shikaku, and from there it only took a second to find Nara Shikako, his daughter. That certainly explained the 'personal', at least on the Hidden Leaf's side of that fight.
...And this was a daughter who specialized in explosions. A quick check with Sasori’s spy network told him that the girl—Special Jounin, apparently, and at 13 no less, that showed promise—had been out on a mission when Hot Springs had been destroyed. Officially she had been in Rice Country...but, well. Sasori, who had a spy in Orochimaru's confidence, could tell him with some level of certainty that no matter what Hidden Leaf was trying to sell, the girl in question had not in fact been anywhere near the rouge Sannin.
She was also, according to all the latest gossip: the new Seal Master for Hidden Leaf, the teammate of the Kyuubi’s container, known as the Shikabane-hime, and key to more than a few of Hidden Leaf’s new alliances. And a movie star on top of that, which was so bizarre that Deidara felt it required its own statement.
Deidara was...impressed. The more he dug into this girl, the more interested he was. When he was thirteen years old, he didn’t have anywhere near the reputation that this girl had already gathered. In all honesty, very few people had actually made that kind of name for themselves at that age, at least not since the villages had been truly formed.
This girl was...the new genius child—and everyone knew how the Hidden Villages treated genius children these days. Look at him. Look at Itachi, the jerk. Actually, considering that Itachi was also from Hidden Leaf, there was potential there, because clearly the 'Peaceful Village' had some deep seated problems.
A brilliant girl who clearly followed his philosophy of art. A genius who had already destroyed an entire village on her own, even if it wasn’t a Hidden Village. And someone who knew the Kyuubi’s container personally, which would make her interesting to Leader, considering Akatsuki's goals. Someone who knew an Uchiha, was on the same team as an Uchiha, would probably know some counters to the Sharigan. And according to Kisame, she had also had a run in with Itachi, and had come out on top. (The bastard still took her down, but she had prevented him solidly from completing his objective, which absolutely counted as a win.)
Deidara wandered out of his rooms to go find Leader and report his findings.
Akatsuki had a lot of dirt on Hidden Leaf.
How hard could it be to recruit someone who was clearly just so perfect for this? And if he managed it right—perfect for him?