Chapter Text
Itachi, predictably, loses his fucking shit. His sharingan blazes in the darkness, morphing its shape, and Deidara has never seen so much rage and hurt on his face at once.
It’s the most beautiful thing Deidara has ever seen, and Deidara watches, transfixed, as Itachi rips through the house, searching for Sasuke. His chakra crackles through the air, ramping up for a genjutsu but not finding a target for it.
There’s dozen of mundane explanations for where Sasuke might have gone. They could even come up with boring reasons why a ninja household would have a patch of burnt grass in the garden and kunai dug into the outer wall. None of them also account for why Mikoto is sprawled out on the veranda.
That’s a message, Deidara thinks, not sparing her a glance as he’s fixated on Itachi’s freak out. Whoever took Sasuke wants Itachi to put the pieces together.
Itachi is going to be such an asshole about Sasuke moving forward. Unless they don’t find Sasuke, in which case Deidara might get to see the greatest art of all time… which he definitely wants, because he doesn’t care about Sasuke and the blood pumping in his head is just from watching Itachi…
When Sasuke fails to materialize in the house, Itachi makes to leave the property all together. Deidara has to tackle and then wrestle him to the ground to prevent him from running off.
Deidara is forced to recognize, to his upmost chagrin, that Deidara is primarily a long-range fighter, and Itachi’s taijutsu chops do surpass his, especially if Itachi is currently very desperate to do… something.
“Where the fuck are you going?” Deidara yells at him, and then wheezes when Itachi hits him directly in the stomach.
“I’m getting Sasuke,” Itachi replies, voice tight and dangerous and so, so beautiful. “And I’m going to kill Madara.”
“You don’t know where he is,” Deidara yells. “Do you even know if he’s involved? Think!”
“Obviously Madara is involved,” Itachi hisses back, and then easily catches Deidara’s elbow aimed at his face. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to…”
Itachi cuts himself off, nostrils flaring, and steps back from Deidara. He runs through some hand signs, and a flock of crows appear and scatter into the night.
“We’ll ask my mother if she knows anything,” Itachi decides. His sharingan goes back to its normal shape. He’s still twitchy and tense beyond reason, and he moves with very tight movements back to where she’s sprawled out across the veranda.
Itachi rolls over Mikoto’s unconscious body and doesn’t use any of the care Deidara would expect from a son handling his unconscious mother. He does it like Deidara would roll over an enemy he wants to interrogate.
Mikoto doesn’t look great. Deidara has never seen her with even a hair out of place, but now she has blood in it from a shoulder wound, and her dress has vomit down the front. Itachi kneels over her and attempts to wake her by slapping her.
Deidara almost grimaces. He knows Itachi has some deeply fucked up feelings about his parents, but Deidara has never seen him be even slightly hostile to Mikoto.
(But, maybe he had been once, when he’d done whatever the fuck he did to Fugaku and made her agree to it.)
It doesn’t wake her. Slapping someone usually doesn’t, in Deidara’s experience. Luckily, Shisui shows up about ninety seconds later, his own sharingan blood red.
“What happened?” he asks, voice urgent, and Itachi basically shoves him at Mikoto.
Unlike Itachi and Deidara, Shisui has some medical training, and it only takes him a couple of very tense minutes to wake her.
Mikoto blinks into the darkness, and then her sharingan is also on, and Shisui is raising his hands to her in a placating motion.
“Where is he?” Mikoto demands, her hand gropes for one of the kunai scattered around the floor. “Where’s the masked man? Where’s Sasuke?”
“You let him get away,” Itachi tells her, voice all barely contained fury. “And you let him take Sasuke.”
Mikoto freezes, her eyes widening in horror.
“We need to stay calm,” Shisui says in what Deidara would imagine is his ANBU captain voice. “Mikoto-sama, did the masked man say anything to you? Do you know where he went?”
Deidara still doesn’t know what the true nature of the connection between Itachi and Madara-slash-Tobi is, but he knows Madara-slash-Tobi is… stalking Itachi, or something. It would make sense he’d make a move while Itachi is distracted. Fuck, if he’s really secretly involved in Akatsuki or whatever, maybe he’d even sent Orochimaru into Fire Country as a distraction himself… although Deidara has no idea why Madara-slash-Tobi would even know Itachi is out for Orochimaru, since there’s been no confrontation between them in this timeline. The only connection this time around is that Itachi has preemptively decided to kill him.
Mikoto’s story makes it seem as if Madara-slash-Tobi wanted to take Sasuke without anyone noticing. Mikoto hadn’t seen the start of the abduction, but apparently he’d tried grabbing Sasuke while he was in the backyard, and Mikoto can only assume Sasuke had fought back. If Deidara had to guess, he’d say Sasuke electrified himself— with a move like that, even a little kiddy ninja could get a badass to drop him out of surprise. This had given Sasuke just enough time to scream and summon Mikoto.
She’d engaged Madara-slash-Tobi, obviously, and lost. He hadn’t said anything to her, besides some very mean jibes about Mikoto’s poor mothering skills, because apparently Madara-slash-Tobi likes running his mouth. They have no leads about where he took Sasuke, or if Sasuke is even alive.
“No, Sasuke’s definitely alive,” Deidara says as quickly as he possibly can. Even he doesn’t want to see Itachi’s reaction to the thought of his little brother being murdered. “He loses his bargaining chip if Sasuke dies, yeah.”
Whatever Madara-slash-Tobi’s goal is here, killing Sasuke means all bets are off with Itachi’s behavior. There’d be no more… manipulating him, or whatever had been going on in the other timeline. There’d just be Itachi’s murderous rage.
(Unless Madara-slash-Tobi wants Itachi to burn down everything in his path. Although if that was the goal, he’d kill Sasuke in front of him for maximum burning. Deidara doesn’t voice this thought aloud.)
Itachi doesn’t look any more calm, but he also doesn’t freak out more. So that’s good… probably.
“We’re going after him,” Itachi declares.
“I am all for that,” Shisui counters, his voice a serious, forced calm that one gets from a lifetime of life-or-death missions. “But we need to figure out how to find him first, Itachi.”
Shisui suggests informing the Hokage. This will get them assistance from all sorts of other ninja, even if it risks unveiling some of the shadier things the Uchiha main family has been up to.
“That will take too long,” Itachi hisses.
Madara-slash-Tobi might not kill Sasuke, but leaving Sasuke with him for one second longer than necessary is obviously unacceptable to Itachi. There’s all sort of fucked up things he could do without killing Sasuke.
“Kakashi,” Deidara suggests, feeling almost embarrassed over it. “Send one of your crows after Kakashi.”
Itachi twitches, clearly not liking the idea of bringing in someone from outside the family.
“He’s in-village, and his insane feelings about teamwork mean he’ll feel obligated to come help his cute student, yeah,” Deidara explains.
“And he’s an expert tracker,” Shisui concludes. “Itachi, it’s a good idea. The four of us can’t do anything quickly without at least pulling in a tracker.”
“I agree,” Mikoto says, getting unsteadily to her feet. She hadn’t stood a chance against Madara-slash-Tobi, but some combination of him being a rush to get out of the village, the possibility that he’d decided he wanted a witness, and her own skills as a shinobi had prevented him from fucking her up too -too much. She’s still fighting fit.
“I don’t want to hear your opinion,” Itachi tells her, even as he makes the hand signs to send a crow to summon Kakashi.
Mikoto only looks slightly taken about by the vitriol in his words.
“Itachi, she did the best she could,” Shisui defends.
“No, he’s…” Mikoto says, running her hands through her bloody hair to tie it back. “I failed to defend my family.”
Shisui shifts uncomfortably, and Itachi bites out, “Do you even care about Sasuke? Did you and father ever think even once about him, when you tried to destroy everything—”
Deidara’s eyes dart back and forth between Itachi and Mikoto. What the fuck were they talking about?
“Itachi,” Shisui yelps. “This isn’t the time—”
“Everything I have ever done,” Mikoto counters, eyes sharp, “was for this family.”
“It was for your ego,” Itachi replies, shoulders so tense they’re shaking. “Maybe if you hadn’t been so focused on sabotaging everyone from the Uchiha elders to the jounin council for some vanity project, Sasuke would still be here.”
“Vanity project?” Mikoto repeats, her voice matching Itachi’s in steely anger. “I am supporting you, just like I said I would—”
The argument is abruptly interrupted by Kakashi’s arrival. Both Itachi and Mikoto immediately go silent, too private to hash out their disagreements in front of him. They’re so private Deidara isn’t even sure what either of them are talking about, and he lived here.
Kakashi asks surprisingly few questions. His eyes linger on Deidara for a while, and Deidara attempts to look particularly helpless. A sensei is supposed to help students, right?
“Sempai,” is all Itachi says, and his voice cracks.
Kakashi just asks where the last place Mikoto saw Sasuke was, and she leads him out further into the garden, next to where they’d buried their koi pond. Kakashi summons a little pug Deidara is pretty sure is named Pakkun. They kind of wander around the garden for a while before Pakkun’s ears perk up. Besides Deidara, Itachi manages to stiffen even more.
“Boss,” Pakkun says, sounding unsure. “Isn’t this—?”
“It’s close to him,” Kakashi says, his own voice suddenly oddly tight.
“What?” Itachi interjects, flash stepping right across the garden. “What’s close?”
“It’s probably nothing,” Kakashi says. Then to Pakkun he says, “We’ll worry about it later.”
“Worry about what later?” Itachi demands, because apparently he’s allowed to be as vague and secretive as he wants, but no one else is.
“We’ve got a scent trail,” Kakashi says, and Itachi obediently closes his mouth. “Are we heading out immediately?”
“Yes,” Mikoto says, stepping off the veranda into the garden proper. Sometime in the last few minutes, she’s gained a sword and bandaged up her shoulder.
“You’re not coming,” Itachi tells her, something approaching hate in his voice. “It’s your fault this happened.”
“Itachi,” Mikoto snaps back at him in a strict mother-voice Deidara has never heard her use. Her tone then shifts to something a little more hurt and vulnerable. “He’s my son.”
Itachi opens his mouth to argue, and Deidara is fed up with him being this bitchy.
“Oi, let her, yeah,” Deidara interrupts. “Why are you trying to turn down more help? Are you stupid?”
Itachi’s jaw clicks shut. He turns back to Kakashi. “Fine. How fast can we go?”
(“Is Deidara-kun coming?” Mikoto asks as they move. She sounds confused. “He’s a new chunin. Are you sure—”
“You don’t even want to know what that kid is capable of,” Shisui tells her. “No, we definitely want him coming.”
At least someone appreciates Deidara!)
The answer to how fast they can go with Pakkun tracking is pretty fast, but not even remotely close to anyone's top speed. It makes Itachi frustrated and antsy and mean, and he goes so far as to even insult Pakkun, even though Pakkun is a cute little dog. Pakkun makes an offended, snide comment back, but no one else moves to check Itachi’s words. He’s clearly having some sort of time of the whole situation, and him lashing out verbally is easier to deal with than him lashing out physically. Or, god forbid, lashing out with his fucking genjutsu.
In hindsight, Deidara is glad he never targeted Sasuke with anything but slightly dangerous training to get a raise out of Itachi. This is just an ugly, unfun look for him.
Remembering his purposefully unsafe training with Sasuke makes Deidara feel antsy himself for some reason. The kid better be perfectly fine when they find him.
It’s technically illegal to leave Konoha by jumping the wall instead of using the gates (excepting shinobi with explicit permission for their mission), but Kakashi is ex-ANBU and keeping track of the scent trail and dodging patrols barely slows him down at all. Deidara doesn’t think he’s previously fully appreciated Kakashi’s weird philosophy about never leaving people behind. Apparently it means Kakashi is even more okay with playing fast and loose with the rules than Deidara thought.
They speed up a little once they’re out of Konoha’s perimeter, but Kakashi and Pakkun soon lose the scent all together and he has to summon more dogs to fan out and relocate it.
“The masked man has minor teleportation abilities,” Itachi reports, tapping his foot impatiently as six dogs shoot off into the night.
“Minor teleportation?” Kakashi repeats, as if all teleportation should be major. Which… yeah, Deidara would agree.
“He probably can’t go too far,” Itachi explains. “You’ll find his scent again.”
Itachi is rather obviously just saying this to calm himself down, and Shisui immediately moves to put a hand on his shoulder. Mikoto also makes an aborted motion, clearly hesitant to approach him while he’s still mad at her.
A little over thirty minutes later, a dog does report back that they relocated Sasuke’s scent. They move again, but have to repeat the whole process not twenty minutes later.
“They’re moving in a straight line,” Kakashi observes when they get moving again. “Do you know anywhere in this direction the masked man might take Sasuke?”
Itachi thinks about it for a few moments.
“Yes,” he says, eyes lighting up with some sort of recollection. “Keep following the scent trail, but we’ll move ahead and scope it out. Deidara.”
“Don’t order me around, yeah!” Deidara yells back, but he makes a clay bird anyway. Shisui and Itachi might both be faster than him over short distances, but Deidara has never met someone who could move long distances faster than him.
He hops on the bird, Itachi close behind him.
“I’ll send a crow if we find them,” Itachi says as the bird raises into the air.
Kakashi eyes the clay bird with a look of sure, he might as well be able to do that but doesn’t comment. “Roger,” he tells Itachi.
Itachi directs Deidara over the forest, to a huge stone structure. It’s made of concentric rings, stacked on top of each other in a sort of cone. The building is so old that there are full-sized trees growing out of the terraces formed by the rings, along with every type of moss growing up and down the walls. It towers over the forest trees in the distance.
“It’s an old Uchiha hideout, from before Konoha’s founding,” Itachi tells him, eyes straining as he stares out over the bird’s wing, like he might be able to see Sasuke from this distance. “Land out of sight. I want to approach as stealthily as possible.”
Now that he might actually be close to Sasuke, Itachi seems to be thinking slightly more rationally. As much as he might want to go in swinging a sword and blowing fireballs everywhere, he won’t risk Sasuke’s safety.
Deidara lands the bird, and then grabs the back of Itachi’s shirt to prevent him from speeding off immediately.
“Let me go run reconnaissance first, yeah,” Deidara says.
“I’m more suited to—” Itachi starts, shoving his hand away, and Deidara rolls his eyes.
“You’re going to do something stupid the second you see Sasuke, and you know it, yeah,” Deidara says.
“Not staying with Sasuke was the stupid move—” Itachi starts.
“That could have happened even if you were there, yeah,” Deidara cuts him off. “This is why I don’t believe in eternity. You’re obsessing over the past instead of focusing on not acting insane now, and if you don’t rely on other people, that’s going to make you fuck everything up, yeah.”
Itachi scowls but doesn’t say more. Good. Deidara is an expert in past grudges making him make stupid mistakes, like talking to Uchiha Itachi at all. Better to just let it all go up in flames.
“I’ll go in, confirm if he’s there or not, and then I’ll come back and support whatever insane plan you come up with to get him back, yeah,” Deidara finishes.
Itachi looks like he’s going to argue, but then he takes a deep breath and says, “Okay. But if you’re not out in thirty minutes, I’m coming in.”
Deidara shoves a fistful of clay into Itachi’s hands. “Play with that instead of being stupid, yeah,” he tells him. It’s what they used to tell him at the Academy, with kiddie modeling clay. Itachi seems to currently be at the level of mature decision-making as a child.
Deidara slinks off into the forest, as fast as he can go and stay silent. Deidara, admittedly, is more of a “show up and break as many things as loudly as possible” kind of ninja than anything else, but it’s not like he can’t be stealthy. He even knows a basic camouflage genjutsu!
He doesn’t actually use it until he’s out of range of Itachi, because using his mediocre genjutsu in front of him just seems… humiliating.
He knows it won’t fool a sharingan, but he also knows from months of living in the Uchiha compound that Uchiha don’t usually have theirs on unless they’re actively fighting or looking for genjutsu or trying to memorize something. The chakra drain just makes having it on constantly kind of a pointless move. Deidara’s genjutsu might be fine for preventing Madara-slash-Tobi from noticing anything out of the corner of his eye. On the other hand, Madara-slash-Tobi has, of course, done something he knows will make the Uchiha Itachi hunt him down as quickly as possible, so it’s entirely possible he is keeping his sharingan on even if he doesn’t need it to control Sasuke. So it might also be pointless.
The main entrance to the hideout is a big, dramatic entryway where a wooden door has rotted away to a couple of planks dangling from rusted hinges. There’s a stone pathway leading up to it that has been long overgrown by weeds, and Deidara notes there's a few places where the blades have been packed down the way it would from human footprints. That’s a pretty good sign, he thinks. Nevermind the cockiness it takes for a ninja to not even try covering up their steps.
Then again, maybe this whole thing is a game to lure Itachi out, and Madara-slash-Tobi wants to be found…
Deidara does not go in the main entrance, instead opting to investigate windows first. He tosses a pebble at the wall to check for traps, and then sends a few clay butterflies. Nothing happens, so Deidara climbs the wall himself, moving around the round outer wall and peering into every window he comes across. He pays attention to the sun, making sure his shadow never passes over a window as he carefully climbs.
The insides of the hideout are mostly bare. Any signs of furniture or little human comforts are long gone. A handful of painted Uchiha fans and the occasional three-tomoe pattern are still up, but the whole place has an eerie quietness.
Deidara works his way up the concentric rings, and slowly starts to worry he might have to go calm down another Itachi freak out over his missing little brother.
Then he sees him.
The top story of the hideout is one grand meeting room, with a fucking stone throne at the back of it. Sasuke sits slumped over in it, tied to the throne’s high back. He has no obvious injuries as far as Deidara can tell. He’s gagged, but his eyes are open, staring dejectedly at the arm of the throne. The size of the throne makes him look absolutely tiny.
So where’s Tobi? Deidara thinks. There’s no sign of him inside the room. Had he run off to do something else? Should Deidara go grab Sasuke now, or report back to Itachi first?
He’s debating the merits of entering the room through the window when suddenly every hair on the back of his neck stands up. He jumps, backflipping into the terrace of the ring below this one, and narrowly avoids a kunai.
“Boo!” Madara-slash-Tobi cries, popping directly out of the ground like fucking Zetsu. “Nice genjutsu, mystery kid! Could Itachi-kun not come?”
Deidara doesn’t reply, eyeing him up and down. He’s got a similar stupid orange mask to the one he had as Tobi, but the posture isn’t quite right. He stands confidently with one hand on a hip. Tobi would flail his arms or wiggle his butt or something.
Deidara is due back with Itachi in three minutes. All he has to do is distract this guy, and then when Itachi shows up, one of them can grab Sasuke.
Or, they just fight him together. The good thing about Sasuke being tied to a chair is that he’s not going anywhere. They just have to avoid destroying that particular piece of the hideout.
Deidara straightens, cockily putting both hands on his hips. “Mystery kid? I have a name, yeah.”
Madara-slash-Tobi tilts his head to the side in a way that simultaneously something Tobi would do, but also not at all how Tobi would do it. It’s menacing, almost. How the fuck could Tobi be menacing?
“Ah, that’s right,” Madara-slash-Tobi says, and his voice is pitched way deeper than Tobi’s normal cadence. “Deidara-kun, was it? The clone of the other Deidara-kun?”
He says this entirely seriously, like he believes it. Deidara cannot believe he or anyone else would actually believe it. What the fuck.
“Actually, I’m the original, yeah,” Deidara replies, plastering a grin across his face.
“I’ll admit I was impressed with your work,” Madara-slash-Tobi drawls. “When I convince Itachi he should join me, you should come with us. I’ve heard you’re a troublemaker in Konoha. Akatsuki would be a better fit for someone like you. I’ll even let you keep working with Itachi.”
Deidara cannot fucking believe he’s getting recruited again. He cannot believe this pitch probably would have worked on thirteen-year-old him, in the other timeline. He would have jumped at the chance to leave Iwa to hang out with a shady guy who promised him more freedom.
Of course, Akatsuki had timed their recruitment wrong, and newly minted missing-nin fourteen-year-old Deidara already had his freedom. Then they’d sent the biggest asshole in the world to make a fool of him and insult his art.
And now he was here, talking to a weird menacing Tobi in defense of that asshole.
“Convince Itachi?” Deidara wonders. “You messed with his little brother. He’s going to kill you, yeah.”
Madara-slash-Tobi actually tsks, wagging a finger at Deidara in a deeply condescending way.
“He’ll try, and then he’ll fail, and he’ll understand that Sasuke is only safe as long as Itachi remains obedient.”
“Wow,” Deidara replies. “You’re a fucking asshole, yeah.”
Madara-slash-Tobi lets out one, mean bark of laughter.
“I’m an asshole? Did Itachi not tell you? Before Danzo blew himself up, Konoha was going to make him murder his whole family.”
Deidara opens his mouth to object that he was the one who blew Danzo up, but then what Madara-slash-Tobi is saying catches up with his brain. Konoha was going to make him murder his family.
What.
The.
Fuck.
Despite wearing gloves, Madara-slash-Tobi examines his nails as if bored with the entire situation.
“Hidden villages are all the same. Everyone is just waiting to throw each other away, to climb to the top on the corpses of their comrades. The only real solution is to throw the whole system out. Destroy it. Make a new world. Don’t you agree?”
The Uchiha Massacre was on Konoha’s orders, orders to an Uchiha? That’s… not even Iwa would do something like that. That’s on the level of Kiri’s genocide of certain bloodline limits. That’s beyond despicable. And then they’d, just, what? Tossed Itachi out? Made him kill almost everyone he cared about and then banished him to the shit life of a missing-nin?
Deidara’s mind is wheeling so poorly he doesn’t even notice the genjutsu. One minute he’s staring down Madara-slash-Tobi, and the next his world has gone sideways and he’s falling off the side of the hideout—
Except no, he’s not. This guy’s genjutsu is good, but it’s not at Itachi’s level. Deidara breaks out in time to duck under a blow to his head. He shoves both hands into his clay pouches and spins out of the way of another blow.
A cloud of clay crows erupts from his hands, forcing Madara-slash-Tobi to hop away from him.
“Aw, how cute,” Madara-slash-Tobi comments. “You two match.”
Then he very expertly parries a barrage of kunai from Itachi, who has joined the fight. One of the clay crows alights on Itachi’s shoulders, although Deidara can’t detonate anything without risking blowing Itachi up too. That’s fine, because the crow is there to tap code into Itachi’s shoulder and tell him where Sasuke is.
They can’t do any major jutsu with Sasuke nearby, so Deidara makes a hand sign and his flock of crows swoop down on Madara-slash-Tobi, attempting to push him off the side of the terrace. It doesn’t work, but it gets him far enough away from Itachi that Itachi makes two clones and one tackles him off the edge.
The minute he’s over, there’s enough cover to not send shrapnel into the throne room or something, and Deidara detonates some of the crows. Madara-slash-Tobi shrieks, and Deidara and the other Itachi clone hop over the side of the terrace after him while the real Itachi retreats back towards the throne room.
“This is so annoying!” Madara-slash-Tobi cries at him, looking no worse for wear. The Itachi clone rushes him, sword drawn, and Madara-slash-Tobi has to do some incredibly fancy footwork to dodge several rapid fire blows. Deidara sends the last clay crow at him, forcing him down yet another terrace level.
Deidara doesn’t follow quickly enough to see what happens, but Madara-slash-Tobi pops the Itachi clone, which explodes.
Exploding clones? What the fuck? Since when could Itachi do something cool?
“Ugh!” Madara-slash-Tobi says, sounding more annoyed than anything. “Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing.”
Then he fucking… dissolves into a vortex or something. It’s actually alarmingly similar to what Kakashi did to Deidara’s elbow in the other timeline. Could all sharingan do that? Itachi made it seem like that was a unique ability, but clearly it isn’t.
Also, Deidara knows exactly where Madara-slash-Tobi teleported to, because there’s only one real option. He sprints up the side of the terrace walls and throws himself through the glassless window of the throne room.
Itachi and Madara-slash-Tobi are both inside, staring each other down in what must be a genjutsu fight. This is, in Deidara’s opinion, a stupid move on Madara-slash-Tobi’s behalf. He knows Madara is supposed to be the best sharingan guy or whatever, but his genjutsu is like most genjutsu’s masters— excellent, but still not as good as Itachi’s.
Sasuke is sitting upright on the throne now, eyes bulging at the sight before him. Deidara carefully scoots around the genjutsu stare-off to get to him. He doesn’t even get as far as untying the kid before an arm suddenly shoots out of the back of the throne, grabbing Deidara around the forearm.
“Don’t think so!” Madara-slash-Tobi cries, his face emerging from the throne. He’s inches away from Sasuke, who’s shaking now.
Deidara has no problem blowing himself up to get at an enemy. Regrettably, he doesn’t want to blow up Sasuke. Instead, he twists his arm and uses a hand mouth to bite Madara-slash-Tobi. His mouth and then his entire arm go right through, and then Madara-slash-Tobi is spitting a fireball at him point blank.
Deidara barely manages to twist up an earth wall from the throne, and he feels Itachi’s chakra slam into his, attempting to reinforce the wall even though Deidara is the superior earth jutsu user. Sasuke lets out several sobs through his gag, the wall inches from his shoulder, even as Itachi throws his body over his. The air is hot and uncomfortable.
The following scuffle is confusing and painful and a little embarrassing for both Deidara and Itachi. Madara-slash-Tobi teleports behind them, chucking kunai and senbon. He obviously doesn’t want to kill Sasuke, but unlike Itachi or Deidara, he doesn’t care if Sasuke gets hurt by an errant weapon. He doesn’t even give Itachi time to cut through more than one of the ropes tying Sasuke before they’re stuck defending the dumb kid.
Even though they’re close enough to Sasuke to touch him, they need to get Madara-slash-Tobi away from him before they can do anything with that.
How the fuck can’t one of them just handle him for a little bit by themselves? Why isn’t the two of them together enough to crush literally anyone else, from Uchiha Madara to the fucking Sage of Six Paths? Deidara has never had an opponent like this.
Then again, he’s never fought with the goal of protecting someone else. If he didn’t sort of care about stupid little Sasuke, he’d have blown up the building or at least taken out a few walls by now. Annoying.
It does take the both of them to force Madara-slash-Tobi back. Deidara blows up the wall furthest from Sasuke, and they get Madara-slash-Tobi outside again. It’s still not far enough that Deidara feels comfortable using a major justu on him, although Itachi whips out his own fireball.
The fight has been long and intense enough that Deidara has nearly forgotten he sent a crow with instructions carved on its wings to the other people in their party. One minute Madara-slash-Tobi is making the hand signs for some new fire jutsu, and then the next Shisui is plunging a kunai into his skull.
It doesn’t work, of course, but Shisui is so fast that he manages to crack the mask before his kunai uselessly goes through Madara-slash-Tobi’s intangible head.
“Holy crap!” Madara-slash-Tobi proclaims. “There’s more? Wow, Itachi-kun, you have more friends than I thought!”
Shisui makes a comically surprised face that stabbing a guy in his face doesn't shut him up, but he does manage to flash step out of the way of Madara-slash-Tobi’s own kunai.
“Does this mean there’s even more?” Madara-slash-Tobi asks. “No way, Itachi-kun. You know everyone’s just going to let you down in the end.”
“What—” Shisui starts, but then Madara-slash-Tobi is disappearing again.
“Better go check!”
Shit, Deidara thinks, turning to flash step after Shisui and Itachi up the hideout walls again. This is literally the second time they’ve done this. They really, really need to get Sasuke out of here. They’re never gaining control of the fight as long as Sasuke is close enough to teleport to.
Deidara gets back to the throne room in time to watch Madara-slash-Tobi kick Mikoto across the room, Sasuke tucked under one of his arms. Mikoto rights herself to correct her body’s skid across the room, wincing as she rolls into a crouch.
“Wow, Mother too, Itachi-kun?” Madara-slash-Tobi mocks. “After all she tried to put you through? Haven’t you noticed, Itachi-kun? It doesn’t matter who you trust— your family, your clan, your village. All of them just see you as a tool, and that’s all you are.”
Itachi’s face is completely unreadable. Is this the crap he was being taunted with in the other timeline too, when he’d actually been fourteen? No wonder he’d lost it and murdered everyone.
“Put Sasuke down,” Itachi says, quietly but firmly.
“Hmm,” Madara-slash-Tobi answers. “No, I don’t think so. Not until you swear allegiance to me by killing these two bonus Uchiha here. Can’t you see that I’m the only one offering you a way out?”
Deidara can’t believe Madara-slash-Tobi is, somehow, more insane than just Tobi.
“Sasuke,” Itachi repeats, dead calm, his eyes dropping to his terrified little brother. “Trust me.”
Madara-slash-Tobi starts on another mocking tirade, but Sasuke squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates. A wave of electric sparks explode from his body, and Madara-slash-Tobi yelps and drops him. Itachi is in motion before Madara-slash-Tobi even realizes he’s being shocked, and Itachi tackles Sasuke right out of the air, rolling them both across the floor to Mikoto. She grabs Sasuke, fleeing through the doorway and down to lower levels.
Madara-slash-Tobi likely would have just melted through the floor to follow her, except something no one expects happens. Kakashi leaps from the floor, hidden by that stupid earth jutsu he loves and definitely stole from an Iwa-nin, and slams a raikiri into Madara-slash-Tobi’s chest.
This is not the part no one expected. Deidara had, personally, been waiting impatiently for him to make an appearance. Kakashi is Deidara’s sensei and Itachi’s friendly sempai, but he’s not an Uchiha and therefore not a predictable addition to their rescue team, and so in his note, Deidara had suggested he hang back for a fun little surprise.
One half of Madara-slash-Tobi's cracked mask slips from his face. He stares at Kakashi, his hand still through his intangible chest, in shock and fascination.
Kakashi stares back in an equal amount of shock.
And then, Madara-slash-Tobi loses his shit on Kakashi, all thoughts of Sasuke apparently gone from his mind.
“You!” he shrieks. “How dare you—!”
Deidara has no idea what the deal is. But Kakashi’s face says he knows exactly what the deal is, and that it’s pretty bad. He looks completely stunned and does nothing as Madara-slash-Tobi screams some more and wraps his fingers around his neck.
“Sempai,” Itachi calls, frustrated, jumping into the fray.
Going to cover allies, Shisui signs at Deidara. Send signal if necessary.
He gives the confusing brawl of Kakashi, Itachi, and Madara-slash-Tobi one last look before flash stepping away, off to cover Mikoto.
Well, good. Mikoto and Sasuke are probably long gone from his hideout by now. This means they can all get a lot more serious.
Deidara blows up the ceiling and also the remaining walls, leaving them suddenly in the open air and covered in debris. The sound and heat of the explosion hype him up, make his heart beat faster.
Itachi and Kakashi barely react to the sudden explosion, but Madara-slash-Tobi isn’t used to Deidara. He goes intangible again, slipping through their fingers and backing off. He then stands before them, livid and maskless.
“Ask him, Itachi-kun,” Madara-slash-Tobi demands, sounding more insane than ever. “Ask Friend Killer Kakashi why even he will betray you eventually.”
“We don’t have to do this,” Kakashi says, sounding incredibly tired.
“Oh, I think you know we do,” Madara-slash-Tobi retorts, sounding borderline hysterical. “Can’t go another day without putting your fist through a comrade’s heart, can you?”
Kakashi looks like he slapped him in the face, then his expression hardens. Electricity sparks at his fingers.
“What the fuck is going on, yeah?” Deidara asks.
Neither of them answer him, and instead lunge at each other with such determination and ferocity that even Itachi steps back, flickering into existence next to Deidara.
“I think they have… history, somehow,” Itachi says. He sounds way more calculating now that Sasuke is out of harm’s way.
“How?” Deidara demands. That doesn’t make any fucking sense!
“I don’t know,” Itachi replies, not taking his eyes from the fight. Kakashi is secretly kind of badass, now that Deidara sees him in action. “How do you and I have history? Sometimes strange things just happen.”
Deidara wouldn’t call Itachi intentionally using a forbidden chakra nexus-powered time travel jutsu to enact a two thousand step plan of madness “just happening,” but Deidara gets his point. Sometimes ninja get up to weird, impossible things, and they can worry about it after they kill Madara-slash-Tobi.
Kakashi is maybe a badass, but apparently he only has so many raikiri in him, and eventually he collapses.
“See?!” Madara-slash-Tobi shrieks at Kakashi, waving his arm at him the way Tobi would, except now it’s a madman gesticulating to his evil monologue or whatever. “Not even the great Hatake Kakashi can escape his mistakes! No ninja can! That’s why I’m going to burn this whole world down, starting with you—”
Madara-slash-Tobi makes to stomp on Kakashi’s head, and Kakashi is just together enough to roll away from him. It doesn’t matter though, because Deidara propels himself at Madara-slash-Tobi with arm outstretched, clotheslining him.
He goes through him, of course, but intangibility has the inconvenient effect of making Madara-slash-Tobi’s own blows useless.
“Oi, that’s my sensei,” Deidara quips, and Madara-slash-Tobi whirls on him, face furious and fuming.
“Sensei? A useless title—” Madara-slash-Tobi starts on one of his insane rants, in full meltdown now, and then a black flame engulfs his arm. “UGH!”
“Sempai,” Itachi says, putting himself firmly between Kakashi and Madara-slash-Tobi. His sharingan is that weird shape again, the “mangekyou” or whatever. “Are you able to vacate the premises under your own power?”
Madara-slash-Tobi is currently shrieking insults and promises about destroying every shinobi alive, all while waving his on-fire arm around. The black flames don’t react to air like normal– they neither recede nor grow. It’s surprisingly compelling, and Deidara watches in fascination. He doesn’t know what kind of technique that is, and he hopes Itachi shows it off some more for him.
“If you keep him busy,” Kakashi says, getting unsteadily to his feet. “I take it I should get out of your range?”
Madara-slash-Tobi starts shrugging off his outer armor, and the flames go with it.
“You should get out of my range, yeah!” Deidar proclaims, and a clay centipede erupts from the ground and envelopes Madara-slash-Tobi.
It explodes. It doesn’t do anything because Madara-slash-Tobi just goes intangible again, but it’s enough distraction that Kakashi disappears over the edge of the terrace.
“Don’t touch the black flames,” Itachi informs Deidara, and then more bloom around Madara-slash-Tobi, who dodges and then disappears in another vortex only to reappear and send a wall of normal fire at them. The black flames affix themselves to the floor and remnants of the walls, burning on stone with equal intensity to burning on fabric.
Huh, Deidara thinks. He does kind of want to touch one.
“Amaterasu,” Madara-slash-Tobi screeches in a voice that sounds similar to his Tobi voice in the most unhinged way possible, “is very annoying, Itachi-kun!”
Itachi goes hand-to-hand with Madara-slash-Tobi again, both orange and black flames flying as he goes, and Deidara takes the opportunity to pull off his shirt and then start undoing the seal on his chest and feeding the mouth clay. If Itachi wants an inescapable explosion lasting five minutes or ten minutes or even a whole half hour, Deidara will fucking give it to him.
Except, Deidara isn’t sure what the plan is for pinning Madara-slash-Tobi down long enough to make that happen without him having to blow up himself and Itachi in the process. This whole thing went sideways enough that most of their plans don’t seem applicable. This is why Itachi’s obsessive planning was dumb.
Not that Deidara wouldn’t blow up Itachi and also himself in the name of art. It just seems a shame to waste it on a screaming maniac like Madara-slash-Tobi. Itachi had been right about one thing, at least: mental stability was his greatest weakness. Itachi can move more freely without having to worry about Sasuke being caught in friendly fire, but Madara-slash-Tobi has also suddenly gotten slopper. Deidara just isn’t sure why Kakashi specifically triggered this.
Maybe he showed up four hours late for him too, Deidara thinks, chewing away at clay in both his chest-mouth and his hand-mouths in anticipation.
Deidara is primarily a long distance fighter, and the sort of assistance he can give Itachi in a hand-to-hand fight is annoyingly little. Clay flies buzz around them, and he has them land on and crawl under Madara-slash-Tobi’s skin whenever he can. The explosions aren’t very big, because he doesn’t want to slow down Itachi, and Madara-slash-Tobi seems oddly resistant to damage even when tangible. They just sort of irritate him and make him scream more nonsense.
Deidara likes watching Itachi fight, though. It’s not as good as Itachi directing all his attention at Deidara, but he goes after Madara-slash-Tobi with a ruthless efficiency paired with perfect form. It’s mesmerizing, watching a genius of violence at work.
Deidara gets a clay sculpture on the ground to wrap around Madara-slash-Tobi’s ankle, and Madara-slash-Tobi loses his footing just enough that Itachi manages to overpower him for a second. He throws him forward, over the side of the wall, and then Itachi flash steps backward to Deidara’s side.
His chest is heaving.
“Kakashi-sempai should be out of range by now,” Itachi says, grasping for Deidara’s hand even as he keeps his eyes ahead, focusing on where Madara-slash-Tobi flew off the edge. “Don’t hold back.”
Itachi’s hand wraps around Deidara’s hand, and Deidara opens his mouth to snidely tell Itachi he needs to let go if he wants Deidara to join the fight.
A wall of orange, fiery chakra blossoms around them. Itachi is panting hard, obviously exerting himself. Shapes form in the wall, and Deidara recognizes this as the Susanoo technique.
“Oh,” Deidara says, realizing what Itachi means to do.
“Keep up,” Itachi tells him. He sprints forward, launching himself over the terrace after Madara-slash-Tobi, Deidara at his heels. Itachi doesn’t drop his hand.
Deidara doesn’t hesitate to spit clay out of his chest-mouth. He got the idea for extending the explosion from Sasuke’s weird fears: an egg-shaped bomb inserted into a larger wasp-shaped bomb. The wasp’s fat abdomen curls forward, bloated with its clay parasitoid, and Deidara spits out more clay to encase it in a fruit. The fruit grows its own wings, catching the air and slowing its fall. The whole thing grows as it descends, fed with Deidara’s chakra.
Madara-slash-Tobi is in a tree below, bellowing nonsense threats at them. Deidara doesn’t listen, eyes transfixed on the wasp as it blips through the wall of Susanoo, taking most of Deidara’s chakra with it.
There is one single moment where everything seems to go silent. Madara-slash-Tobi lifts his head to glare at the winged fruit in front of him. Deidara’s feet meet solid ground. Itachi tenses beside him, his hand tightening around his for some reason.
And then, the whole world changes.
The explosion is so loud it knocks the wind out of Deidara. The force is enough that both he and Itachi are bowled over by it, even with the protection of Susanoo. It’s pure, burning light and the scream of nature itself being undone. Deidara falls flat on his back, stars in his eyes as he watches pieces of trees and stone be flung up and vaporized. The ground crumbles beneath him. Itachi’s nails dig into his skin.
The explosion is big. So big that that hideout will be no more. So big that Deidara knows Madara-slash-Tobi can’t run.
And it doesn’t stop. Not for at least ten minutes.
And boy, is it a glorious ten minutes.
When it does stop, everything feels oppressively quiet. There’s no rustle of wind in leaves, because the leaves are gone. There’s no chirping of birds, because the birds are gone. There’s only Deidara, Itachi, and the massive hole he blew in the ground.
Somehow, Itachi stands. He staggers forward as Susanoo flickers away.
It takes him a few moments, but Deidara manages to scramble to his feet and then after Itachi. They’re in a crater, every sign of the hideout now gone. In the distance, the dark shape of a battered human body moves.
Izanagi, Itachi had called this technique. A way to undo reality at the cost of losing sight in one eye. What a fucking cheat!
Well, however bullshit the technique, between using it for ten minutes and having to fight multiple highly dangerous ninja, Madara-slash-Tobi isn’t doing so well. He manages to get to his feet to try and fend Itachi off, but Itachi has him pinned to the wall of the crater thirty seconds later. He leans in, face close to Madara-slash-Tobi’s.
Madara-slash-Tobi gurgles, and then collapses. Itachi takes his sword and beheads him.
“Well, that was anticlimactic, yeah,” Deidara complains, even as Itachi collapses back onto his ass.
Itachi sits there, staring at Madara-slash-Tobi’s corpse in wonder, as if he expects him to get back up again, popping his head back into place like he’s Hidan or something.
“Stab his heart for good measure, yeah,” Deidara suggests, and Itachi picks up his sword and casually impales it through Madara-slash-Tobi’s chest. There’s not even a twitch of movement.
Itachi leaves the sword in Madara-slash-Tobi’s chest and remains seated where he is. Deidara can’t blame him. He’s exhausted too, and he plops down on the ground next to him. He won’t be able to move for a while.
“That was…” Deidara breathes out. “Amazing, yeah.”
“Yes,” Itachi agrees after a moment, a tiny smile creeping over his face. “Artistic, even.”
xXx
They sit there for a very long time, because they had both just used a shit ton of chakra and all Deidara’s muscles start to ache as the rush of adrenaline fades. There’s no danger here anymore. They can afford to rest. Eventually, Deidara digs soldier pills out of his pack and Itachi produces a black scroll for carrying corpses.
“You’re going to keep the body?” Deidara asks, offering a pill to Itachi.
Itachi frowns ever so slightly.
“I want to burn the body,” he says, “but…”
The reason the last moments of the fight had seemed so anticlimactic is that Itachi had pulled Madara-slash-Tobi into a technique he calls Tsukuyomi, which is some sort of super ultra unbreakable genjutsu where Itachi can just do whatever he wants to you.
Don’t like that, Deidara thinks, his insides twisting at the thought. Itachi should focus more on those black flames.
In the midst of whatever horrific personal justice Itachi extracted during the entire week of genjutsu he’d made Madara-slash-Tobi endure, he’d managed to extract some information. Madara-slash-Tobi was not Madara at all, but some other Uchiha that the real Madara had done freaky body modifications to before dying.
“His name was Obito,” Itachi says much more calmly than Deidara thinks Itachi should be taking this.
“Is that the guy Kakashi got his eye from?” Deidara asks.
Itachi tilts his head ever so slightly. “You know that story?”
Deidara doesn’t give a shit about Kakasi’s personal life, and also, Kakashi wouldn’t tell anyone shit. So he answers, “They have the same powers, yeah.”
Itachi hums. “You always surprise me when you make astute observations.”
Deidara regrets being too tired to punch him in his stupid mouth.
While Obito was with Madara, Madara had done his weird body modifications, and at some point Obito had obtained another sharingan from somewhere to replace the one now in Kakashi’s head. He’d burned through this extra eye to use Izanagi, but he’d been unwilling or unable to use the technique a second time and sacrifice his own eye. Itachi had then used it to drag him into Tsukuyomi.
Itachi sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I pushed him for more, but he wasn’t making a lot of sense. The point is, I think there’s more going on here. We need to analyze his body.”
Oh goodie, Deidara thinks, sarcastic in his own mind, as Itachi laboriously gets up to pack Obito away in the black scroll.
“Do you have enough chakra for a bird?” Itachi asks.
Deidara snorts and gestures at himself. “What do you think, magic eyes?”
Deidara is basically running on empty, and Itachi knows it, as he would have seen it with sharingan. Well, he would have seen it when Deidara blew it all on his awesome art. Itachi’s eyes are dark now; he himself probably doesn’t have enough chakra for his sharingan.
He pouts at Deidara anyway.
They limp back towards Konoha.
xXx
They only get a few hours of pathetic, slow walking before Kakashi reappears with Pakkun, looking incredibly stressed.
“You’re alive,” he says, placing both hands on Deidara’s shoulders like he might be some sort of ghost. “How are you alive?”
“How—” Deidara starts, annoyed. “We’re alive because we won, yeah.”
“We saw the explosion,” Kakashi says, sounding incredibly stressed. “The whole world might have seen that. That’s not… you don’t live through that.”
Deidara preens.
“The masked man is dead,” Itachi says flatly. “You recognized him, didn’t you? By scent, and then by sight.”
Kakashi has to go sit down by himself for a while. He declines Itachi’s offer to say any final words to the body. He has a lot to process, Deidara imagines.
“We need to press forward,” Itachi insists, eyeing Kakashi as he leans against a tree. “Or do you mind being left behind?”
Kakashi eyes him with his one lazy eye. Deidara imagines offering to leave Kakashi behind is exactly the wrong thing to say to Kakashi at a time like this.
“Sasuke’s fine,” Pakkun speaks up. “I saw him myself with your mom. What a rude mouth on you, kid.”
Itachi relaxes only a little. “I want to see him,” he murmurs.
Tired and stumbling, it takes the three of them and Pakkun a lot longer to get back to Konoha than it did to run out here. Deep into the night, Shisui shows up to confirm Sasuke and Mikoto are safe and sound back in the village.
“I made them hurry when I saw the explosion,” Shisui says. “I figured either that meant you won, or you were both dead and he was after us next. I tried to not say much in front of Sasuke, but he’s… he’s pretty freaked out.”
“I’ll bet, yeah,” Deidara gripes. “How far away were you when you saw it, yeah?”
Itachi makes them book it, despite clearly being on the brink of collapse himself. Deidara has always been a chakra powerhouse, and so while he’s still not up to making a bird yet, he finds himself much more fit to travel at Itachi’s preferred pace than Itachi is. Or Kakashi, for that matter, who seems to be dead on his feet and only keeping up out of the habit of too many long missions. Both of them look pathetic.
The point is, it’s well into the next day when Deidara finally gets to lie the fuck down on the Uchiha family couch.
“NII-SAN!” Sasuke shrieks, hurling himself into Itachi’s arms. Itachi holds him tight, burying his face in Sasuke’s hair and sinking right down to the floor.
“Are you crying?” Deidara demands, sitting up on his elbows. Itachi ignores him, clutching Sasuke tighter.
“You beat him, right?” Sasuke asks, pulling back to look Itachi in his eyes. “You beat the scary man?”
“Yes,” Itachi tells him. “Of course. I’d never let someone hurt you.”
The rest of the day goes slowly. Both Shisui and Kakashi stick around, sitting around the Uchiha kitchen and staring into space, because at some point the four of them need to discuss what the fuck just happened, and if they should inform the village.
Mikoto also seems exhausted, with bags under her eyes and her hair not as shiny as usual, but she’s also had more down time to physically rest. She fetches first aid kits and procures takeout from a soba place down the street. She reports on how she’s covered up their sudden absence from the village: her cover story is that Deidara, Shisui, and Itachi were idiots that gave themselves food poisoning after cooking in her kitchen, and she was caring for them.
Deidara is too tired to even complain that even if Itachi might give himself food poisoning, Deidara certainly wouldn’t.
“I don’t know your social circles enough to cover for you, though,” she tells Kakashi.
“I think my cool and elusive personality will be enough,” Kakashi says, turning a page in his stupid book he’s been “reading” since he got back. His one exposed eye doesn’t move as he stares down at the pages.
Itachi spends a very long time sitting on the floor with Sasuke on his lap, petting his hair. Sasuke fidgets a few times, and eventually asks Itachi to play instead. Their solution is to make Deidara sit up on the couch so they can watch TV together. Deidara supposes this is sort of like play, except it’s play where Itachi doesn’t have to let go of his little brother.
Eventually, Sasuke starts to nod off, sagging into Itachi’s side.
“I’m sorry I caused a mess and got Mother hurt, Nii-san,” Sasuke murmurs.
“It’s okay,” Itachi tells him. “You did a good job, electrifying yourself so he had to drop you. You should work on your jutsu more so you can fight enemies yourself. But until then, I will always come save you.”
When Sasuke is good and dozed off, sagged into Itachi’s side like a ragdoll, Deidara tells Itachi, “That’s kind of fucked up, you know.”
“What is?” Itachi asks. “It’s the truth. Sasuke will be safer if he gets stronger.”
“Yeah, but…” Deidara trails off. Actually, why the hell is this his problem? “Nevermind. Be a lunatic if you want.”
“Okay,” Shisui announces, standing from where he’s been flopped over an armchair. “I think we need to have a debriefing meeting.”
They move into the kitchen, Itachi carefully carrying a passed out Sasuke with him like a living security blanket. Deidara wonders how long that clinginess will last. If Itachi still expects to meet with Deidara with Sasuke under his arm, Deidara is going to flip.
They compare notes on what happened first. Shisui and Mikoto had successfully made good time with Sasuke, and once Kakashi had retreated far enough he thought he was safe from whatever Deidara was going to do, he’d pulled together just enough energy to send Pakkun off to confirm they were also out of range.
“I’m glad I kept going,” Kakashi says, slumped back in his chair and his usual lazy drawl sounding exhausted. “I was expecting an island-sized explosion, not… whatever that was.”
Deidara beams despite himself. His explosion had been the best thing he’d ever done, hadn’t it? Even his future self had never had a good reason to push himself that far! He can’t wait to get the rest of the way through puberty and have even more chakra to try something like that with.
“Yes,” Kakashi continues, eyeing Deidara’s face, “much better than that Iwa no Deidara’s art.”
Deidara chokes on his own spit.
“Speaking of which,” Kakashi goes on, turning to Itachi. “What the hell is going on? Was the island fiasco related to this one? Why would Obito kidnap Sasuke?”
Oh, so Kakashi did know they’d gone off and done that. Oops.
Itachi stares right back at him and deadpans, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Shisui buries his face in his hands. “No, Itachi. No, I can’t do this anymore. Everyone here is going to come clean of whatever the fuck is going on.”
Itachi debates this for a very long time, his hand cupped against the back of Sasuke’s head.
“It’s a family matter,” he finally decides. “Kakashi-sempai doesn’t need to be here for it.”
“Then neither does Deidara,” Shisui counters. Itachi stiffens. “Look, Itachi, no one else in Konoha is going to have answers about…” Shisui pauses, like he can’t believe what he’s about to say. “About Cousin Obito.”
Itachi’s lips thin. Kakashi continues to look like he’s aging at the speed of sound.
“Okay,” Itachi says finally. To Kakashi, he says, “Uchiha Obito was brainwashing the Mizukage. We confronted him on that island and framed Deidara’s clone.”
Kakashi stares back at him. Kakashi has actually reached a level of exhaustion that he has become impossible to read beyond “extremely tired adult male.” Deidara isn’t even sure what part of this story is getting to Kakashi: the absurdity of brainwashing a Kage, or that Itachi is sticking to the clone story to explain Deidara’s bingo book entry.
“Okay,” Kakashi replies finally. “Let’s say I believe he did that. Why would Obito go after Sasuke? Revenge?”
Itachi doesn’t answer for a good moment, and Mikoto speaks up. “Itachi. I would also like to know why my son was taken.”
Shisui sighs. “He’s been stalking Itachi for a while.” Itachi shoots him a glare, right over Sasuke’s head. Shisui continues on without hesitation. “He talked to me a few times too, but I think he thought Itachi would be easier to manipulate because he’s younger, and he has fewer social connections. Basically, he wanted to start a civil war in Konoha. He must have taken Sasuke to try and regain control over Itachi.”
Mikoto tenses ever so slightly at the mention of war, but Shisui doesn’t elaborate further and she doesn’t ask any follow-up questions. Clearly Mikoto knows more about this civil war, somehow. Deidara’s brain buzzes. He feels like he has all the puzzle pieces, but he’s not sure what sort of picture he’s meant to make with them.
Kakashi just slumps back into his chair, staring at his hands.
“I don’t know why Obito would want that,” he says finally. “He was… he was one of the best of us.”
Sure, Deidara thinks.
“I have a question,” Mikoto says. “I understand he is… more talented than one would assume, but why, exactly, is Deidara here?”
Deidara is almost offended.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Shisui asks, rolling his eyes. “Itachi lets him in on all his little secrets because he’s Itachi’s boyfriend.”
Deidara finds himself across the table and hitting Shisui in the face before he really has time to think about it. Shisui gets his arms up to block, obviously, and his chair is knocked over. Deidara realizes while rolling across the floor with him, that he definitely expected someone to stop him before he got this far. Everyone, it seems, is too tired.
“Stop that,” Kakashi says dully. “Sensei says no.”
Deidara stops, and Shisui shoves him off.
“You don’t have any guesses why Obito would do this?” Itachi asks Kakashi, as if Shisui’s comment and Deidara’s pathetic attempt at a fight didn’t happen at all.
“No, I…” Kakashi leans forward, mashing the meat of his palms into his eyes. “I don’t know. I think he… based on what he was yelling… he must have known what happened to Rin.”
Kakashi refuses to explain what actually happened to Rin, aside from that she was his teammate and implying she died tragically. It’s Mikoto who has to explain most of the details of Obito’s story to them: Obito had been on the Yondaime Hokage’s genin team, along with Kakashi, and had died on a mission. In his last actions as a Konoha shinobi, he’d gifted one of his eyes to Kakashi. She knows all this, as she’s married to the clan head, and the eye gift had caused a huge scandal.
“Gifting eyes is a very old Uchiha tradition,” Mikoto says, tucking hair behind an ear primly. “Usually they’d be gifted to family members, but… well, we decided it was Obito’s right, and that we should respect the wishes of the dead.”
“He lived though,” Itachi says. He’s patting Sasuke back now, keeping the kid asleep even through their conversation, possibly with the help of genjutsu. “He wasn’t making a lot of sense, so I’m unsure if this is accurate. But he said he fell into a cave and met Uchiha Madara.”
“The Kannabi Bridge area has lots of caves,” Kakashi confirms. “But we… we didn’t just leave him. We searched the area.”
Kakashi looks shaken. The expression makes Deidara feel uncomfortable, like he’s seeing something he shouldn’t. Deidara decides to change the topic. He turns to Itachi.
“Hey, why did fake Madara tell me that Konoha wanted you to kill all the Uchiha?”
Kakashi’s eyes widen, all his grief over Obito evaporating immediately, just like Deidara wanted. Unfortunately, all the Uchiha also immediately freak out. Mikoto immediately sucks a bunch of air up through her teeth. Shisui tenses, reaching for a weapon but not quite getting there. Itachi’s eyes narrow slightly at Deidara.
“Thank you for announcing that to Kakashi-sempai,” Itachi says sharply. He turns to Kakashi. “It’s not a problem any more. I fixed it.”
“There was a problem?” Kakashi asks, voice strangled.
“Kakashi-san,” Mikoto cuts in immediately. She licks her lips, looking slightly unsure of herself. She speaks in calm, moderate tones. “Itachi is right. It’s not a problem any more. We Uchiha… there had been some disagreements between us and the village, as all clans have from time to time. Some elders wanted to escalate it, but we have dealt with it. Please, for the sake of our family, do not go spreading rumors.”
Oh my god, Deidara thinks, the pieces finally falling into place. The genjutsu and the mysterious deaths… Mikoto had been taking out people who badmouthed the Uchiha, sure, but she’d also been taking out the Uchiha elders who’d wanted this “escalation.” She’d been dismantling the conflict from both sides.
So why had Itachi been so viciously angry with her, if she was doing exactly what he wanted? Was he still mad about whatever happened in the other timeline? Had this “escalation” not been shut down? Was that the civil war Uchiha Obito wanted, and why Itachi had killed his family?
“I wouldn’t lower myself to rumors, per se,” Kakashi drawls. “But I have noticed some interesting genjutsu around Hokage Tower, on important people, even. I haven’t said anything yet, because it seemed like my cute kouhai just wanted his little evil clone boyfriend who also happens to be my adorable student, but…” Kakashi raises his one exposed eyebrow, expectant. “Now I know maybe there were problems.”
“Am I not enough of a problem?” Deidara asks, offended. He just blow up their main bad guy for them! Kakashi should be more worried about him!
Mikoto’s gaze hardens, and Deidara watches her shift seamlessly into her schmoozing clan leader persona.
“The Uchiha clan will not escalate our conflict,” she says. “But surely you, as a veteran jounin and protegé of the Yondaime Hokage, have noticed flaws in Konoha’s administration. The incident with the Hellpit and the uncovering of a secret branch of ANBU has only proven how corrupt Konoha leadership has become since Yondaime-sama’s tragic passing. Many clan leaders agree with me. We need newer, younger leadership, and I have been spearheading our movement towards that.”
“With genjutsu and lies,” Kakashi clarifies.
“The administration is corrupt,” Mikoto repeats, back straight and prim and proper. Her words are practiced and confident now. “Ask Shiori-chan what happened to her cousin under Danzo-sama’s care, or ask Daisuke-kun how he lost his parents. Ask Inoichi-san what nightmares he’s been deconditioning from those poor children. Ask Deidara what horrors he’s seen.”
Huh? Deidara thinks briefly, before remembering he’s supposed to pretend to be from ROOT.
Mikoto finishes, “I will admit I’ve made some… slightly illegal behavioral tweaks. But I have consulted with various clans about it, and it was in the name of moving our village forward, to electing a new Hokage.”
Kakashi stares at her for a good, long moment.
“Alright,” he says finally. He stands and stretches, his back popping. “I’m heading home for the night, and one of you three—” he gestures at Itachi, Shisui, and Deidara— “can come ask me later about digging up this cave Madara was supposedly hiding in. But I will be monitoring what all of you are doing in Hokage Tower.”
He leaves. Mikoto’s shoulders slump ever so slightly with relief.
“Forgive me for not securing him to our side earlier,” she says, clearly aiming this apology at Itachi. “Kakashi-san is politically important but socially reclusive and difficult to read. I had been holding off until I had a better idea of our path forward.”
“Wait,” Deidara says, still feeling like something is missing. “So you two have been coordinating?”
“Not particularly,” Itachi says flatly. “Who are you angling to install as Hokage, Mother? Kakashi himself, perhaps? You know I would sooner kill Father than let him.”
Shisui tenses again, and Mikoto frowns slightly at Itachi.
“I thought this is what you wanted,” she says slowly. “I’m going to make you Hokage, Itachi.”