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“If your genjutsu had worked, we wouldn’t be having this problem, yeah,” Deidara hissed, so quietly it was almost inaudible.
Footsteps clattered in the dark, a rapid slap slap slap, as the thoroughly alerted jounin-level guards raced around, shouting and responding to orders. Below, through the grate, Deidara could see lantern light flickering where it was streaked across the floors.
Deidara was perched across several support beams, peering down through a metal grate into the corridor, and trying hard not to inhale insulation. Itachi was pretty much on top of him – his knee was bruising his hamstring, and his left hand was braced against the beam beneath Deidara’s left shoulder. Every time he breathed, Deidara could feel it beneath his collar, damp and a little too fast. It made his skin prickle.
“‘I’m Uchiha Itachi’,” Deidara mocked savagely in the softest possible whisper, “‘my genjutsu is unbeatable’.”
“…The disruption seals were not anticipated,” Itachi said, quietly and stiffly.
His underfed body was crammed in right next to Deidara’s in the tiny crawlspace above the corridor. They were lucky that neither one of them was a tall, muscular powerhouse like Kisame – the space was in reality big enough for one and a half people, and which translated to about 1.15 Kisames.
Itachi didn’t sound nearly as mortified as Deidara thought he should, but Itachi was a stone-faced bastard so it was hard to tell from his deep voice.
Deidara had also seen the sealing arrays Itachi was talking about, flashing to life just the second before chaos had broken out, and it was true that they didn’t exactly come standard. They were huge seals, scrawled in bloody ink across the walls, and when the chakra for a genjutsu was injected into any other signature in the area, they fired random blasts of disrupting chakra for the express purpose of dispelling the illusion.
They were ugly, clunky, graceless – and they’d worked.
The whole point was to get past the guards with no casualties, access the vault – Deidara’s specialty, of course – and leave with the objective. Itachi’s technique had swept like a curtain, precise and elegant and beautifully executed, over the whole area, blanketing the chakra circulatory systems of every one of the guards within so delicately that they hadn’t even felt it.
But the seals had triggered the moment it was executed. Their brute-force method had been immediately effective.
So now Deidara was hiding in the ceiling, breathing as quietly as he knew how when his heart was thumping away in his throat, with Itachi shoved up next to him. There was a cut on his calf, a souvenir from their quick retreat.
If Sasori had been here, they’d have just gassed the whole base. Sasori, who would not have needed to breathe, would have been able to walk slowly in with Hiruko’s tail scraping away behind him on the floors, acquire the objective – Deidara was sure he’d have some kind of acid for the vault, which would do the job even if it wasn’t, you know, artistic – and leave. Deidara could have waited at a thousand feet, enjoying the fresh air, forming cute, wriggly little clay spiders between his hands.
But Sasori was off doing intelligence gathering ‘vital to our organisation’, as Pein announced it. Whatever that meant.
“Clearly, a broad scope genjutsu… is not the correct approach,” Itachi murmured.
“You don’t say.” How could he stand being so calm and obvious? Furious, Deidara elbowed him in the side. He knew it was a mistake the second he felt Itachi tense in response.
Itachi grunted. One of his feet went thump against another beam, and his breath came out in a rush and blew hard against the back of Deidara’s neck. Deidara shuddered to feel it in such a sensitive area.
“Did you hear that?” somebody asked below.
They both stilled in their ceiling hidey-hole, barely daring to breathe, chakra tamped down hard, but they knew that the disturbed dust would make even the unwariest genin certain that someone had gone up into the roof space –
Footsteps, louder. Approaching.
Deidara swore.
“This is all your fault, yeah,” he hissed again, completely ignoring that he had been the one to ram his elbow into Itachi’s ribs while they were precariously balanced and supposedly hiding. He reached for the grate.
He pulled it up very quietly, wincing at the soft scrape of metal on metal, during the investigating ninja’s approach. He ground his teeth – all of them, in his hands and his face and his chest, twitching with tension – while Itachi slowly and silently crawled over him, taking the opportunity to knee him in the kidney.
The investigator squinted into the dark hole with its missing grate.
There was a soft squeak, the flutter of dark fabric, and then Itachi landed very gently upon the floor, just in time to catch the ninja’s falling body before it made a sound.
With Itachi’s back in the way, Deidara hadn’t even been able to see clearly how he’d fallen – his chest was rising and falling, though, so he wasn’t dead. He guessed, from the swiftness and the sudden strings-cut fall of the body, some kind of sharingan-based genjutsu.
“You can’t do that to the whole place,” he predicted, landing lightly beside him.
“No,” Itachi agreed, flat and stoic.
“If we have to kill someone and fail the stupid mission, it’s going to be your fault, yeah,” Deidara informed him.
Itachi’s red eye flicked sideways toward him, softly backlit in the dim light, multiple pupils whirling unsettlingly.
Deidara lifted his chin. A part of him – and not necessarily a small one – wanted Itachi to start something very badly, no matter how impractical that would have been, and that part simmered, low in his belly, like the beginnings of dragon fire. His fists clenched, teeth digging into his palms
“Hmm,” Itachi said then. He turned his burning gaze away, and then crouched to go through the guard’s pockets.
‘Hmm’. Right. Fine. Yeah. Deidara’s shoulders relaxed.
Ass.
In the nearest corridor, footsteps came again, racing past. The voices were still ongoing, muddled and confused, but it seemed as though the commotion was dying down. That was bad, actually – once people stopped racing around to check that certain security measures were undisturbed, they’d get right onto the business of conducting a search, probably in groups, for intruders.
“So?” Deidara snapped after a few seconds.
“He has a security pass,” Itachi murmured.
“I meant, did you have a plan, since you couldn’t follow the first one.”
Itachi rose to his feet, a dark and heavily-cloaked shadow spilling upward into place. The security pass dangled from his fingers. When he spoke, his voice was unhurried. “Deidara. …From the way you are asking, you clearly do.”
Deidara made the single most derisive, disgusted noise he could muster at such low volume. “Of course I do.” He had not, in fact, come up with a plan – but it wasn’t like it was that hard. “First principles: make a sound in the east –”
“– And attack in the west,” Itachi finished the familiar quote.
“Right.” Deidara knocked the unconscious guard with the toe of his shoe. “If you’ve got his pass, you won’t need me in here to get into the vault, yeah.”
His mood immediately started to look up at that. He would be able to operate outside of Itachi’s suffocating, distracting, smug influence, and he’d get to put on a little performance. Sure, it probably wouldn’t be his best work, but practising was important. All forms of art, like ninja skills, required diligent, frequent practice, and not every rough sketch could be a masterpiece. It was one thing that he and Sasori actually agreed upon.
It would be nice to get to – stretch himself, a little. He felt the mouths in his hands curve into delighted, anticipatory little smiles, much like the one on his face.
Itachi paused for a long moment, then inclined his head, bowing to the fact that Deidara was naturally the best of them to cause a distraction.
“Remember not to kill anybody,” he reminded him.
Deidara bristled, and shot a glare in his direction. Like he needed Itachi to remind him about their mission parameters? “Which of us messed this up in the first place?”
Itachi’s face showed nothing when he turned toward Deidara again. He twirled the pass between his fingers, painted nails flickering into and out of view between his sleeve and the low light, and made it disappear somewhere.
“A shinobi should be flexible,” he said placidly – apparently because he couldn’t handle not having the last word somehow.
Deidara made a face. “That’s just a dumb excuse.”
A clatter, growing, from down the corridor attracted his attention then. The noises were back, but the footsteps seemed to be in larger groups now. They were running out of time.
“Try not to mess it up again, yeah,” he drawled, rubbing it in – even though he definitely knew that neither of them could have foreseen the trick with the seals or the ineffectiveness of broad-scale genjutsu. It didn’t matter. Itachi had screwed up, for once, and Deidara was going to grind his nose in it for as long as he possibly could. Probably until one of them was dead.
If it bothered Itachi, though, it was irritatingly hard to say – his face was expressionless, his voice low and slow and unmoved as always. His chakra was scrunched up into a tiny, easily-overlooked ball inside him, and even that was unreadable.
Irritated, and annoyed with himself for being irritated, somehow, by Itachi’s lack of irritation, Deidara leapt back up into the crawlspace. It would be relatively straightforward to get out that way – as long as he didn’t try to get any closer to the vault, probably.
Itachi’s reminder of their mission parameters was perhaps a little bit timely, since he’d already been working up plans in his head – for example, the nearby granary had, briefly, seemed like an amazing site for a distraction. There was something about all the flour dust in the air… he was a little giddy to think about what kind of boom he could cause with all that extra, mmm, texture. But no. Probably not the granary, then… take out too many people…
It was such a shame. People were quite often Deidara’s favourite medium for explosions. Blowing up people, so that they were burnt and thick in the air and when you walked through you knew exactly, inescapably what you were breathing, so viscous and rusty on your tongues – that was such an effective way to double down on the core message of transience he was bringing people in his art.
But missions were missions, he guessed. Until they weren’t, anyway. (Deidara didn’t like to limit himself with too many rules about that sort of thing, yeah.)
Deidara had no doubt that he’d be able to bring most of the guards running – everybody wanted to help when a village was on fire, because fire was a really special kind of contagious, and it was always catastrophically destructive. Nobody wanted his own stuff burning to ash.
He dropped soundlessly down outside the facility with its seal-scrawled walls and nasty surprises, and breathed a soft, free breath.
It was maybe a little disappointing that he wouldn’t be able to make Itachi watch his “distraction” – an urge he chose not to examine too deeply, torn between wanting to show him up and wanting to force him to understand.
…But there was something to be said, he’d admit, for the kind of teamwork that required absolutely no contact with Uchiha-better-than-you-Itachi for the rest of the mission.