Since Of the Red Sand and the Desert was going nowhere fast for me, I decided I would have to delete it. But as consolation to everyone who liked it, I wrote this instead.
Please don't balk because of the length. I promise you'll like it.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
For many weeks, the investigation into the disappearance of the Sandaime Kazekage had been focusing on a young Sunagakure puppeteer named Akasuna no Sasori, on the grounds that he had briefly disappeared from Suna on the same night as the Sandaime two years ago, that he had behaved strangely for several weeks following the Sandaime's disappearance, and that he had been behaving with equal strangeness once the investigation started taking an uncomfortably close look at him.
Discounting, of course, the fact that people being investigated on suspicion of regicide all tend to act strangely under scrutiny.
.x.X.x.
What happened next wasn't a trial so much as it was an inquiry by the jonin council whether or not the case should go to trial.
The people, however, acted as though it was. Supporters of the Akasuna clan decried the fact that one of their strongest shinobi, the heir to the second-most-powerful clan in Kaze no Kuni and the most promising child that had come about in decades, had fallen under the shadow of such suspicion.
Naysayers didn't care about that, nor about the fact that Sasori was considered by many as being far too young, despite his talent, to be capable of defeating a kage in battle (At fifteen, Sasori looked like a well-grown thirteen. His teammates could sympathize; eighteen-year-old Karura looked more like a fifteen-year-old, and Yashamaru was getting tired of being mistaken for a fourteen-year-old girl). They began crying for blood.
.x.X.x.
It didn't help that the council was composed as it was.
The jonin council in Sunagakure was, and is, composed of a dozen members; four from the Sabaku (as the Sandaime had been the head of that clan, they favored taking Sasori to stand before a panel of military judges), three from the Akasuna (who naturally favored dropping the case, as Sasori was the clan matriarch's only direct heir; Chiyo had originally been born to one of the branch families, but had risen to the position of heiress and later matriarch thanks to a number of untimely deaths), two from the Yuuhi (a rather unworldly lot who preferred to stay out of matters such as this as a matter of course), and three from non-clan families (Who tended to support a particular clan depending on who had afforded them backing).
The council became hopelessly deadlocked. The Sabaku and the Akasuna were at each other's throats, and the threat of civil war loomed menacingly on the horizon.
.x.X.x.
After two weeks of no result, the Sabaku and Akasuna agreed to negotiations, mediated by the Yuuhi.
The Sabaku's initial terms were that in exchange for the dropping of the investigation against Sasori, the Akasuna councilmen were to vacate their seats and Chiyo was to give up her posts as head of the hospital and head of the Sunagakure Puppet Corp.
Chiyo spat in the Sabaku representative's face.
.x.X.x.
Finally, terms were reached that wouldn't result in bloody fighting in the streets.
In exchange for the investigation against him being dropped, Sasori was never to be allowed to rise above his present rank of Tokubetsu jonin. Sasori, who quite frankly didn't give a damn about rank, agreed readily, ignoring the protestations of his grandmother; if he had had half a mind, he could have risen to the office of Kazekage (despite the fact that no puppeteer had ever become Kazekage; they preferred to be the proverbial "power behind the throne") before hitting twenty, and they all knew it.
Afterwards, when the investigation was formally dismissed, and his grandmother, great-uncle, and teammates took him home to celebrate, Sasori allowed himself an utterly foolish grin.
He had just gotten away with regicide.
.x.X.x.
Sasori somehow managed to get himself embroiled in controversy almost as soon as he was cleared.
The issue of the "jinchūriki project" had arisen since Chiyo had been called upon to extract the Ichibi from its second host.
While many lauded the project as a means to protect the village, others were dissatisfied with it, the issue being thus: the sealing process used to seal the Ichibi into a host made the jinchūriki mentally and emotionally unstable, as well as almost impossible to control, and made the jinchūriki a danger to the village, as the second one had proved to be.
There were two sects who put petitions before the council: one petitioning that the sealing be used on another child again, and soon; the other petitioned that the seal used to seal the Shukaku into a host be declared a forbidden jutsu.
The pro-sealing faction was led by the Sabaku and Akasuna clans, who had temporarily adopted the "love thine enemy" state of mind.
The against-sealing faction was led by non-clan members, and backed by the Yuuhi (the third-most-powerful clan in Suna, after the Sabaku and the Akasuna) and the Takeshi (a fairly small clan, but full of skilled warriors) clans.
Sasori found himself torn between these two factions. His grandmother led the pro-sealing faction, and his teammate Karura, who after a few assassinations had risen to a position of leadership in the against-sealing faction.
Eventually, Sasori cast in his lot with the against-sealing faction, not because of any political or security-related beliefs, but because of a more…personal matter (Sasori had the misfortune of falling in love with his teammate, who, while she cared for him, did not feel the same way).
The council's decision was that the sealing jutsu would not be declared a kinjutsu, but that it would be used only in a time of dire need.
Karura and Chiyo were never so friendly again, but Sasori preferred to behave as though it never happened.
.x.X.x.
Sabaku no Takeo was not a happy man to discover that the heir to a rival clan, and the very young man who was suspected in the death of his uncle, was in love with a woman who he had been doggedly pursuing for months (Even though at the time of his discovery, Karura had already turned down his first marriage proposal).
When Takeo was confirmed as the Yondaime Kazekage a few months after he and Karura were married (Sasori's absence at the wedding ceremony was resounding), he took steps. Uncaring of the fact that Sasori had decided to respect Karura's wishes and kept a respectful distance after she and her new husband were married, went to Sasori and subtly hinted that if didn't start accepting long term missions that would take him out of the village for months at a time, he would reopen the investigation into the disappearance of the Sandaime.
Sasori, for his part, not-so-subtly hinted that if he even tried it, the servants would find Takeo's severed head nailed to his desk, with the words 'Akasuna no Sasori was here' swirled on the limestone wall in blood.
Nevertheless, Sasori began to accept many long term missions.
.x.X.x.
Despite his long absences from the village, Sasori always came back to stand in as godfather to Karura's first two children.
Temari and Kankuro were both very fond of him, even though Sasori felt like a stranger in their lives, and suddenly found himself being called 'jisan' by two small children.
Takeo was a dark shadow in his life during his infrequent visits home, standing in doorways whenever Sasori visited with Karura or Yashamaru or the formers children.
.x.X.x.
Sasori had thought that no one other than Takeo and Karura herself had known that he was in love with her. And after she died, through the blinding, dizzying haze of grief, he thought that no one else would ever know now.
But evidently, someone else had discovered it as well. Someone no one had expected.
"Sasori-jisan?" A small, sad voice sounded at Sasori's shoulder, sitting where he was on a low couch in a pale, quiet room. He looked down, and Temari's huge green eyes met his.
"It's alright if you loved Okaasan," the toddler murmured sadly. "We all did."
For the first time in a very long time, Sasori broke into a bout of unreasonable and uncontrollable weeping.
Later, when Yashamaru told him that Karura had wanted him to be godfather to her last child as well, he was just barely able to muster up the strength to smile.
Karura was given a burial before Sasori returned to the village, and for the life of him he could never find her grave.
"She named him Gaara," Yashamaru announced flatly from the doorway, not striding into the room and scanning the baby with a coldly blank stare that would have been chilling if Sasori had noticed it.
Sasori stared down at the baby. He had a fuzz of dark crimson hair coating his head (a throwback to Karura's redheaded ancestors), no eyebrows, and pale green eyes whose shadows almost looked like kohl marks. He stared up at him with a surprisingly calm gaze.
She knew, Sasori thought. She knew that he would only be able to truly rely on himself.
It didn't occur to him to fear that someone might be willing to twist and pervert the meaning of that name.
.x.X.x.
Over the years, Sasori somehow maintained an insanely young appearance, never rising above five feet and four inches in height and never looking older than fifteen, sixteen at the most. Everyone wanted to know how he did it, but Sasori was definitely not telling.
.x.X.x.
Sasori would find a reason to curse his absence in Sunagakure when six years after Karura's death, Yashamaru attempted to assassinate Gaara.
He returned to Sunagakure to find a Temari who was distrustful of all adults, including himself, a Kankuro who was frightened and confused, and a Gaara who was no longer the sweet, melancholy child he remembered, but a fledgling monster finally beginning to live up to the terrible reputation of a Shukaku jinchūriki.
Sasori ticked this off as one more reason to want to kill the Yondaime, and began to take a slightly more active role in the children's lives.
Temari he gave some training in genjutsu, though she was already receiving training with her fan at the hands of a fellow fan-bearer, Hiryuu Ryoko (Who had been a contemporary and passing acquaintance of Karura's). Though Sasori was still away from the village quite often, he also took over Kankuro's puppet training when he was there; Chiyo handled it when he wasn't. Most importantly (at least in Sasori's eyes), Temari and Kankuro learned to fight as a team in the same way that Sasori and Karura had.
As for Gaara… There wasn't a great deal that could be done for Gaara. The Yondaime would train him to use his sand, and nothing Sasori said or did got through to the fellow redhead. So instead, he made it a matter of personal interest to look for ways to reinforce Gaara's seal and make the Shukaku a less dominating presence in the boy's life while he was on missions.
He never found one.
.x.X.x.
Sasori found hiding in the Hiruko puppet to be impossibly uncomfortable, and left him with unbearable back pain after he removed himself from it, but he found it necessary on some of the missions he went on, as his face was well-known on the continent.
If the Yondaime ever noticed that the puppet Sasori hid himself in bore a striking resemblance to a shinobi who had disappeared during the Third War, he didn't comment.
.x.X.x.
Three years after Yashamaru tried to kill Gaara, Sasori returned home from a mission with a child in tow. Said child was a roughly thirteen-year-old boy with long blond hair and pale blue eyes, kohl smudged around them, bearing a slashed-through Iwa hitai-ate, a speech affectation and three extra mouths.
His name was Saiseki Deidara, a Tokubetsu jonin of the Rock, and a missing nin for approximately a year. He never stated why he had defected from the village of his birth. Sasori had found him in one of the minor countries while on a mission, and just decided to take him in.
No one ever questioned it. When the Yondaime gave him a new registration number, he told Deidara to ditch his surname (enough citizens of the Sand didn't have one to begin with that that wouldn't be considered an oddity), and that he would have to go through the process of rising through the ranks all over again—Iwa hunter nin would be looking for a teenaged special jonin, not a teenaged Sand genin with no surname.
Since earth was the second-most-common elemental affinity in Suna, Sasori found someone to teach Deidara Suna's earth jutsus. And thus the integration of Deidara into Suna life began.
.x.X.x.
The integration started in earnest with Deidara's first sunburn. His skin came out several shades darker than before, and despite his fair coloring, unusual among the Sand ninja, he began to look more like a Sunagakure villager.
The arguments about art that Sasori and Deidara shared soon became legendary in the village. Debates about the beauty of puppets over exploding clay figurines spawned small explosions and screaming matches that most of Suna (and anyone within a five-mile radius) who wasn't hard of hearing could hear.
The only time Sasori ever got angrier was the first time Deidara jokingly asked if Gaara was his illegitimate child. The way the Yondaime's head shot up sharply when he heard that made Sasori sure that he was going to hurt in the morning.
Everyone might have feared for their lives if it wasn't for the sound of Deidara laughing afterwards. It was the first time a grown shinobi had ever respected Deidara's art enough to argue about it, and, by extension, it was the only time an older shinobi had ever shown Deidara that sort of respect.
Kankuro and Deidara got along swimmingly; Temari treated him with derisive amusement; Gaara only blankly stared at him in what might have been bemusement.
The first time Deidara ever saw Sasori out of the Hiruko puppet, he burst into fits of hysterical, unflattering laughter about how pretty his danna was. They were in Chiyo's home at the time, and Chiyo and Kankuro's heads both shot up at that.
Chiyo looked up and asked Sasori "why the hell" Deidara was calling him that. Sasori answered that he didn't have a clue; Deidara had just suddenly started calling him that out of the blue.
Chiyo smiled suggestively and replied, "Well, I'd be worried if I were you."
Kankuro, who even at his young age understood the nature of sexual innuendoes, snorted and snickered while he was at his work.
Sasori only understood it several hours later. When he did, it was the second time in his life that he blushed scarlet to the roots of his equally scarlet hair.
.x.X.x.
When Deidara decided to name his suicide bombing clones after Karura (1), Sasori smiled, and thought that she probably would have appreciated that.
.x.X.x.
When Sasori saw the Sand siblings' official sensei, he bit back a laugh. Sure as the sky was blue it was Takeshi Baki, jonin commander of Suna and Karura's former student.
"I didn't know runts could get so tall."
Baki's training regimens were notoriously harsh, but he had learned it from Karura (who was never a fan of "spare the student"), so Sasori wasn't too worried. Besides, Baki could teach them (or Temari and Kankuro at least) much needed taijutsu techniques that Sasori, Chiyo and Hiryuu Ryoko could not.
Finally, Baki was one of the few shinobi that Sasori even partially trusted to train Karura's children, and one of only a handful who would treat the much-feared and much-despised Yondaime's children with a measure of dignity and respect.
Sasori was a little surprised that the Sabaku siblings had all been put on the same team, but he supposed it made sense. Deep down, Gaara probably would have objected to working with anyone else.
.x.X.x.
Temari retained her faint memories about the way Sasori had looked at her mother and the way he behaved around her (went slightly paler, and his hands tended to start shaking, Temari always remembered that quite clearly), stayed with her all her life.
When she was thirteen, she finally managed to corner the puppet master about it while he was home from a mission.
Sasori disabled her with a single word.
"Yes."
.x.X.x.
When Takeo told him that they were going to invade and destroy Konoha, Sasori laughed in his face, because he was quite sure that the Yondaime Kazekage, soldier of Suna and murderer of his own wife and brother-in-law, had finally lost his demented mind.
When Takeo told him exactly who he had allied with in order to destroy the Leaf, and just who was going to turn the tide against their enemies, he stopped laughing.
"You might look at him as though he's a weapon to be used and cast aside, but the point is, he's an ill-nourished, mentally unstable twelve-year-old who wouldn't know what companionship and strategy was if it slapped him in the face!" Sasori shouted at the unblinking man. "All thanks to you, I might add."
"You can't do this to him. Gaara has never fought an opponent close to his own level; he wouldn't have the first idea how to. Konoha has its own jinchūriki, I hear. For God's sake, Sabaku, can't you at least wait a few years; wait until Gaara's a little more grown and our forces are built up more!"
Takeo only cast an ice-cold gaze over him. "Are you sure that these are the only reasons that make you so ill-disposed to this matter?"
Takeo ordered him to be one of the shinobi infiltrating Konoha, bringing Deidara to compete in the Chunin exams.
Takeo, it seemed, would never forgive Sasori for falling in love with his late wife.
.x.X.x.
When Sasori first met Orochimaru's guards, he made sure they knew exactly what he thought of them, with a single, sweeping, dismissing glance. He made it absolutely clear that he thought they were trash, and he was satisfied with the thought that maybe he made them feel like trash too.
Orochimaru and Sasori had met before, and Sasori made it absolutely clear how unimpressed and unintimidated he was when they crossed paths. Orochimaru only laughed his throaty, dry, rattling laugh, and Sasori was irresistibly reminded of a cobra before it struck.
Sasori found it a little odd and slightly alarming that Gaara and the multiple-armed Sound shinobi seemed to find common ground, if only momentarily. He was able to get a good laugh out of Deidara whispering in his ear that Kabuto strongly resembled his father's long-dead ANBU partner.
.x.X.x.
From the moment Sasori first laid eyes on Uzumaki Naruto, he knew two things about the boy.
The first, was that Naruto was the Kyuubi's jinchūriki. He had the same ill-fed look about him that Gaara had (Sasori hadn't thought that it was possible that there was a twelve-year-old boy smaller than Gaara, but Naruto certainly was), and the whisker marks and slightly elongated canines were a dead giveaway (Gaara himself had been born with a mouth of small, sharp teeth).
The second was that he was Namikaze Minato's son. True, Naruto bore the surname Uzumaki, but Sasori had met the Yondaime Hokage before. Apart from the shape of his eyes and the marks on his cheeks, he was Namikaze down to the life. It was obvious Naruto himself didn't know that though, and Sasori couldn't be bothered to tell him.
What else he noticed was that he looked like a smaller, sharper-featured, shorter-haired, bewhiskered version of Deidara. When he jokingly pointed it out to the former Rock nin artist, Deidara got such a look on his face that Sasori knew that he would never bother him about the resemblance between him and Gaara again.
.x.X.x.
Sasori had always known that Gaara was broken, and ruthless, and utterly without mercy (Hell, Gaara probably wouldn't have known what the word meant if someone had asked him). He didn't accept it, but he had grown resigned to it. He hadn't realized just how much he took it for granted until he watched Gaara fight the young taijutsu specialist.
When Sasori saw the way Gaara fought Lee, he saw the ghost of the second host coming back. The sand was just as deadly; the brutality just a little more measured and deliberate, the cruelty just a little more calculated. He saw the past coming back.
He joined Maito Gai in intervening, even though he was officially Deidara's sensei and not Gaara's, because they were the only people in the stadium who weren't at least wary of Gaara, and Sasori felt he owed it to the boy he was sure Gaara had crippled.
Sasori was sure that Lee's agonized screams would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life.
.x.X.x.
Deidara blew the opposition (a Rock genin) into the ground during the second exam, literally.
The victory was resounding, but it was the start of some trouble for Deidara.
The Rock nin competing in the Chunin exams noticed that he bore a certain resemblance to a missing nin from their village. Deidara had become considerably more tanned and had, due to the heat, hacked off his hair so it barely fell past his shoulders, but he still looked a lot like the picture in the bingo book.
What was worse, he had run into a thirteen-year-old girl competing, who looked just like him apart from her coal-black hair. Sasori was amazed to learn that Deidara had a cousin, and more amazed that Deidara and Kurotsuchi had such an emotional reunion.
That was when the trouble started in earnest.
A Rock jonin took a close look at Deidara while the blond wasn't looking, and, after watching him perform his jutsus, put two and two together.
Said Rock jonin approached Sasori and Baki later in the day, in the presence of Deidara, and demanded that Deidara, as a missing nin of the Rock, be turned over to him to be arrested and punished "as the law saw fit". Deidara's face waxed white.
Sasori knew that "punishment as the law saw fit" meant that Deidara would be shipped off to Iwa, arrested, and ultimately blindfolded and trotted out in front of an executioner's squad of archers. No one was doing that to his brat.
Sasori asked that he and all of the Rock jonin continue this discussion in private. The Rock jonin, being the idiots that they were, agreed.
In the end, four Rock jonin were hospitalized, one was killed, and the last refused to tell who had attacked them (much to the medics' frustration), because of Sasori's quiet, morbid promise that if he ever did, Sasori would find him, and no one would ever find his scattered remains.
At Kurotsuchi's insistence, Deidara wrote a letter for her to take to his father (Kurotsuchi's paternal uncle), to let him know he was alright.
.x.X.x.
Sasori also had a strange misadventure with a newly-discovered family member.
During the second exam, he noticed that the sole female Leaf jonin sensei standing on the landing looked a great deal like him. She seemed to notice the same thing (Sasori wasn't in the Hiruko puppet at the time), and kept flicking disquieted glances at him the whole time.
Afterwards, they approached each other, and Sasori learned her name, Yuuhi Kurenai. The name stuck out, because Yuuhi was the name of one of the oldest clans in Suna.
After a bit of cooperative digging, they discovered that Sasori's mother and Kurenai's father had been siblings.
.x.X.x.
Sasori wore the Hiruko puppet to the third exam because he knew he was going to need it. He sat at the very top of the stands so as not to be noticed, and watched the matches with great interest.
He was one of the few unsurprised when Uzumaki Naruto beat the Hyuuga prodigy. He was the Kyuubi's host after all, and Namikaze's son, so something was bound to be passed on. However, throughout the match, Sasori wondered if the Kage Bunshin was the only jutsu the blond brat knew.
Kankuro and Deidara had both been advised to forfeit so no one would see the full range of their jutsus, so Sasori wasn't surprised, though he would have liked to see them fight.
He was however, speechless at the way Temari's match went.
Sasori had honestly expected her to beat the Nara into the ground from the outset, but apparently the Nara was a genius in hiding. Temari won, but everyone knew she had lost.
Temari's pride had taken a huge blow (more because the boy had let her win rather than because he had beat her), and Sasori knew that she was going to be absolutely unbearable to deal with later.
Gaara started to lose control. That was not part of the plan, and Sasori knew it could ruin everything if he transformed too soon. But he could hardly blame Gaara for giving in to that dark, terrible voice that tormented him without fail.
That day was the first, though not the last, time he heard Gaara scream. The young Uchiha (who looked ridiculously young to Sasori's eyes; all other Uchiha he had ever met were grizzled veterans who had been intent on severing his head from his body) pulled a jutsu he recognized as belonging to Hatake Kakashi, and went straight Gaara's sand defense and into his shoulder.
Sasori suddenly felt a strong urge to finish what Uchiha Itachi had started.
"I'm gonna kill that kid, I'm gonna kill that kid, I'm gonna kill that kid…" Sasori repeated to himself over and over again inside of the Hiruko shell.
A hand lit on the Hiruko puppet, and Sasori looked back to see a black-cloaked ANBU wearing a neko mask.
"Oh, no you're not," Kabuto hissed venomously. (2)
.x.X.x.
The invasion was an absolute failure. During the fighting, the Hiruko puppet was damaged beyond repair, and Sasori, despite himself, was more than happy to shed it permanently. He considered whipping out the Sandaime puppet just to scare his enemies, though he doubted that any of the striplings would have recognized it for what it was, and it just would have made more trouble for him back home.
Deidara spent most of his time blowing up sundry buildings, with no pattern whatsoever to his behaviors. He was in his element, and Sasori had no doubt that he was cackling insanely up in the sky.
Gaara was too injured to even fight; Baki had to order Kankuro and Temari to take him south to where reinforcements waited, to have him treated and to wait for further instruction.
While Sasori fought, he looked up at the huge, black wall on the top of the building where the Hokage and his teammate's widower fought, and he hoped beyond hope that the Hokage would kill him.
Eventually, they had to fall back, and ultimately retreat. Sasori, Baki and Deidara turned tail and ran, and what they found was a trio of badly beaten up Sand genin. Temari's face was white and strained because she had seen the Shukaku emerge ("I know," Baki told them somberly. "I could hear it from the arena."), Kankuro was suffering a mild allergic reaction due to dozens upon dozens of bug bites, and Gaara was passed out, his head resting on his sister's shoulder (If he'd been awake, Sasori was sure Gaara would be sitting isolated and as far away from his siblings as he could).
The six set up camp for the night, and moved in the morning, at a painfully slow rate. Thanks to Deidara's giant bird (transporting Gaara and Kankuro as they all traveled), they still made it back before many of the other teams sent to invade the Leaf.
.x.X.x.
One person, however, did not return to the Sand village. Sasori found himself hoping insanely that Takeo had found his end at the hands of the Hokage, or even that he had expired on the desert wastes.
Needless to say, the reason he went out with the search party was that he wanted to be the very first to see the body.
It was Deidara who first noticed something strange, flying high as he was. He directed the search party to a small depression in the ground, the result of a bomb blast during the Second War.
It became clear then that the Yondaime Kazekage had been dead long before the Chunin exams. His body, and those of his bodyguards, had been picked clean by vulture, jackals and other desert ilk; the bodies were only recognizable thanks to the conical hat that still remained near Takeo's head.
Sasori supposed he should have noticed something off when Takeo started being so much more polite to him than usual. But apart from the fact that they had been led into attacking the Leaf village by an impostor, Sasori personally thought that however Orochimaru had chosen to kill him then shamelessly abuse his corpse, it was more than fitting.
His only regret was that he didn't get to kill the man himself.
And he wasn't the only one who felt that way.
It had been to the amazement of all when all of the Kazekage's children showed up to his funeral. They were all suitably quiet and somber (apart from Kankuro, who wore his face paint and a slightly insane grin), dressed in deepest mourning black after the western tradition.
However, they showed a distinctive lack of anything even remotely resembling regret that he was gone. Deidara, who hadn't known the Kazekage as well as the others, was a little confused, but Sasori understood exactly what was going on.
Baki held all of the children in his glare, and told them that he could understand if they didn't grieve, but he wanted them to act suitably solemn for the next few days at least, to show respect for the dead if nothing else.
The moment he was out of the room, Sasori moved in front of them, and looked them all dead in the eye.
"It's alright if you hated your father. Because so did I."
To their credit, none of them were surprised.
.x.X.x.
Baki and Sasori were now the Sand Siblings' joint legal guardians. Sasori, as their godfather, automatically assumed guardianship after the death of both of their parents, but in the Sand, a sensei has some right to guardianship over his students as well. They agreed to share guardianship; Sasori and Deidara moved in with the children almost immediately (and stopped accepting so many long term missions), and Baki moved in after his soon-to-be-former wife kicked him out of the house.
Sasori's close proximity allowed him to play witness to a startling change in Gaara. He was quite frankly amazed at how different the boy had become. He was still unstable at the best of times, but he was quieter, milder, and the sand didn't come out nearly as much as it used to, and Sasori could see hints of the melancholy little child that Gaara had been coming back.
Gaara actually wanted to form bonds with humanity now. Admittedly, Temari and Kankuro were still a little wary over being in the same room alone with him, but all that meant was that the three started spending more time together as a family.
When he asked them about it, Temari, almost shamefacedly, chalked it up to the loud blond genin from the Leaf, Uzumaki Naruto. Sasori was dubious to that explanation, to say the least. He didn't think that one person alone was capable of bringing about so much change in anyone, let alone Gaara, so he attributed it to a mixture of Naruto, and, to a larger extent, their father's death.
Because Temari and Kankuro were changing too. Both were more relaxed around their brother, and the individual changes were at least as startling as Gaara's.
Temari had shed her masks of cruelty and derision, and her face softened considerably. She wasn't so constantly on her guard anymore, closed off and insecure, and for the first time Sasori noticed how much she really did look like her mother.
Kankuro, too, was considerably more relaxed. He wasn't so contemptuous of small children anymore, though he still avoided them like the plague, and he wasn't inclined to play the bully any more.
They were coming out from under the oppressive shadow that their father had cast. Sure enough, the children were growing into their own, and for the better as well.
.x.X.x.
The word that Uchiha Sasuke had defected from Konoha to join forces with Orochimaru raised some eyebrows, not least of all Sasori's. He personally wondered why Itachi had bothered to spare his brother if said brother was enough of an imbecile to join up with a man who probably either wanted to usurp his body or just abuse it in as many ways possible.
Tsunade's request (Chiyo, still very much alive, even if she was a veritable hermit now, had had a conniption fit when she found out who the new Hokage was; deep down, Sasori mused, she probably would have had a fit of hysterical laughter if Jiraiya had been made Hokage) that the Sand Siblings come to the aid of the pursuers was shocking.
For one thing, it was incredibly unpractical. The Sound Country, Orochimaru's stronghold, was north of the Fire Country, and the Wind Country was south of the Fire Country. At normal speeds it would take the three several days to catch up with the team of pursuers.
More shocking was the level of trust the request implied. Tsunade, Sasori mused, was showing herself to be quite shrewd in extending such an overture. If none of the Sand Siblings were killed tracking the idiot down, it would undoubtedly strengthen relations between the Leaf and Sand villages.
It was decided that Sasori and Deidara would accompany Team Baki as far as Konoha. Gaara fixed the problem of getting there quickly by somehow managing to transport them all to a forest just outside Konoha's gates; Baki stayed behind to hold down the fort. After Sasori and Temari were done reliving every meal for the past three days, they marched into Konohagakure; the guards had evidently been prewarned of their arrival, because they let them in without protest.
After Temari, Kankuro and Gaara received their marching orders from Tsunade and took off like greased lightning north, Sasori glowered at the Godaime Hokage and told her, in no uncertain terms, that if any of them came back seriously injured or in a body bag, he would be personally responsible for starting the fourth war between Konoha and Suna.
What he didn't tell her was that it would have been the second war he personally started.
.x.X.x.
Sasori and Deidara soon found themselves going out with the teams pursuing the pursuers. And thus was Sasori exposed to the "joys" of flying.
Deidara whipped out one of his larger birds, and proposed that they use it to look for the team, since they'd be able to move much more quickly that way. Sasori, in his ignorance, agreed.
So began one of the most terrifying experiences of Sasori's life.
The movements of the bird were so unsteady that Sasori fully expected to fall off with every wing beat; the flight pattern was so erratic, and it was much too fast. It was on this flight that Sasori discovered a previously unknown fear of heights.
When they finally found someone and touched down, Sasori was practically kissing the ground.
"Never again! Never, ever, again!" Sasori pointed a shaky, accusing finger at Deidara, who was all innocence. "We're walking back!"
The only time Sasori was ever on one of Deidara's birds again was in an other-than-conscious state.
Gaara, it seemed, had caught up with the very boy whom he had supposedly crippled (He sure doesn't look like an invalid to me) and tried to kill at the Chunin exams. Deidara burst out laughing at the delicious irony; Sasori only rolled his eyes at the way the boy praised Gaara's fighting prowess and sense of timing.
Deidara was a fan of irony. Sasori, it should be noted, was not.
.x.X.x.
Maybe the Kyuubi's brat was the one who changed him, Sasori mused as he watched Naruto and Gaara at the ramen stand.
As soon as Gaara got back and was treated for chakra exhaustion, he had been straight off to Naruto's room, and soon joined in the fight to make the blond eat something. Eventually, the combined forces of Gaara, Tsunade's assistant and a little pink-haired girl whom Sasori vaguely remembered as being the weakest link of Team 7 prevailed over Naruto's stubbornness. The fact that the Uchiha had not been brought back to Konoha barely registered on Sasori's radar; he didn't pretend to give a damn about some stuck-up clan on the edge of extinction.
And, strangely, Gaara rarely left Naruto's side for his duration in the hospital. Sasori supposed that both Naruto and Gaara being jinchūriki made them brothers in arms of a sort. It certainly gave Gaara a great deal more to talk about with Naruto than with anyone else; if Sasori didn't know better, he would have said that Kankuro was getting jealous.
Gaara also seemed to get along relatively well with Naruto's other regular visitor, whom he delightedly referred to as "Iruka-sensei!", a chunin with a long scar across the bridge of his nose. He had been a bit put off by Gaara at first (who wouldn't be?), but the moment he discovered that Gaara had the same "issues" as Naruto, his eyes softened considerably, and taking in Naruto and Gaara's equally malnourished frames, dragged them both off to a ramen stand the moment Naruto was well enough to leave the hospital.
Iruka later confided in Sasori that one of the main reasons he took Naruto to get ramen so much was that he knew he wasn't getting enough to eat.
He also confided that he had attempted to adopt Naruto on several occasions, only to find his attempts thwarted by the fact that he was only eleven years older than the boy, and that an academy teacher's salary was so measly. He never told Naruto because he was afraid to get his hopes up.
"There's nothing worse," Sasori agreed, "then raising someone's hopes just to tear them back down."
Sasori had had plenty of experience with that when Chiyo had lied to him and told him that his parents were still alive, when in reality their mangled corpses were scattered on the northern wastes.
Gaara sipped out of his ramen bowl cautiously, as Naruto went through bowl after bowl with reckless abandon, while Iruka slurped with equal enthusiasm, albeit more slowly. Gaara had never had ramen before; it wasn't made in Suna. As he ate, he seemed to grow to like it. Gaara had never had a particularly large appetite; the Shukaku's presence had made his body well-adapted for long periods of time alone in the desert. In the end, Gaara consumed two bowls to Iruka's three and Naruto's eight.
Naruto, it seemed, had drawn the attention of his father's old sensei. Jiraiya was taking him out of the village for two years to train (Though Sasori was quite sure that the real reason they couldn't "train" in the village was because of the disturbing news concerning the movements of the Akatsuki).
Team Baki, Sasori and Deidara left only after Naruto and Jiraiya did.
.x.X.x.
Sasori would never let it be said that he was outwitted by Leaf nin.
The Leaf and the Sand engaged in an "exchange" program to exchange technology, techniques, et cetera, and the Leaf somehow discovered that the Sand enjoyed a much greater wealth of knowledge concerning poisons and herbal remedies than they did (3). They requested that "for the sake of international cooperation", the texts containing this medical knowledge be turned over to the Leaf.
Sasori and Chiyo knew exactly what the Leaf were talking about.
Yashamaru had been a medical genius in his own right who, if he'd had a mind to, could have outshone both Chiyo and Tsunade (Tsunade was unaware of this and wouldn't have believed if she had been told); the only reason he never rose above chunin was that, like Sasori, he didn't care about rank. Upon his death he left behind more than two dozen and half again journal.
Chiyo had discovered the journals shortly after Yashamaru's death and converted Yashamaru's flowing but barely legible script and beautifully complex illustrations into textbooks to be distributed to Suna hospitals.
It was agreed that Sasori should take the journals to Konoha instead of the textbook, making it clear that the journals were on loan only.
In another universe, it was Baki who transported the journals to Konoha, and he took all of them, negating what small medical advantage Suna had over Konoha. Sasori and Chiyo, however, would not be so outsmarted.
Several of the journals "mysteriously went missing" in the delivery.
Tsunade instantly redirected Sasori to Shizune, who gaped at what Sasori dumped on the table in front of her.
"What is this?" Shizune, usually so polite, demanded.
"Yashamaru's notes," Sasori informed her. Seeing her incredulous look, he added, "Yashamaru wrote everything down."
"Obviously!"
Yashamaru's thirty-one leather-bound, two-inch-thick journals did not just contain medical notes. They also contained sixteen years (from the time Yashamaru was eleven to his death at the age of twenty-seven) of stories of battles, the account of Sasori's close brush with the law, accounts of day-to-day life, jealous rantings about Takeo and psychotic rantings about "the little demon brat" (Sasori found it interesting that Yashamaru never referred to Gaara by name), all written in obsessive compulsive fashion. The five Sasori had "lost" were the ones in which medical notes featured most prominently. They also contained the secret of Chiyo's reanimation jutsu, something Chiyo didn't want falling into Tsunade's hands.
Chiyo had needed several months to copy the medical notes into a text book. And she had had much more spare time on her hands than most shinobi. Shizune, and whoever decided to help her, did not.
It would probably take her at least two years to get any length of useful information out of it.
.x.X.x.
Sasori never failed to be bemused by Gaara's shy, timid little student.
He, Baki and Deidara had been watching the Sand Siblings teach from an empty classroom in the Academy.
Baki had pointed out Matsuri as the timidest of the lot, so three sets of eyebrows moved into three separate hairlines when she marched straight up to Gaara. Sasori tried to think up a retort, but Deidara beat him to it.
"Timid?" Deidara snorted. "The girl's about as timid as a lion, un! I didn't want to walk up to him when I first met him!"
Since Matsuri was Gaara's only student, he was able to dedicate far more of his time to her. Sasori noticed something odd; when Gaara put a rope dart into Matsuri's hand, the girl's skin crawled as though he'd given her a live rattlesnake.
When Gaara was asked about it later, he related Matsuri's tale. She was a girl born in the River Country, who had been taken in by the village at a young age after witnessing the murder of her parents by enemy nin, and had been struck by a paralyzing fear of weapons ever since. Everyone agreed that the rope dart had probably been the best choice for her, but until Gaara could help her with her fear, it would be best to train her in something that didn't involve weapons, namely Wind ninjutsu.
With time, Gaara, with Temari's help, managed to gently wheedle Matsuri away from her fears, though it was clear that her strength would always be in ninjutsu. Sasori drew infinite amusement out of how the girl doggedly referred to a fellow genin barely a year and a half older than her as "Gaara-sensei".
Sasori wasn't entirely sure when Matsuri suddenly became part of the family. Temari, upon seeing Matsuri's lonely, painfully empty little apartment, had insisted on having her share her room. Sasori got the impression that it had more to do with Temari's loneliness; Temari, like her mother, had few female friends.
Matsuri moved in, and all of a sudden it was as though she had always been there.
Sasori did, however, have to take exception with the looks she shot at her sensei when she thought no one was looking.
.x.X.x.
The Sand Siblings' second try with the Chunin exams went much better than their first.
Baki, Sasori, and Chiyo had bulked up the five (Matsuri would be joining them this time) with extra training as best they could, and it paid off spectacularly.
During the third exam, Temari finally began to utilize the genjutsu training Sasori had given her, the "secret moves" Sasori taught Kankuro came into play, Deidara and Matsuri benefited greatly from Baki's taijutsu training, and Chiyo's medical training (Chiyo had earmarked Gaara as being a prime candidate for medical training, despite the fact that as far as anyone knew, Gaara had absolutely no inclination to learn, and promptly dragged him off to her "lair" to teach him at least the basics of medical ninjutsu; and that was as far as they got) helped Gaara too.
Sasori, much to his chagrin, was appointed to stand in the place of the Kazekage until such time as a new one was appointed. He sat up in the top with Tsunade and the newly appointed Godaime Mizukage, Terumi Mei, who was helping to host the Exams; Sasori thought it was just a little dangerous how well the two legendary femme fatale's got along.
Tsunade started trying to place bets on the outcome of the matches. The Mizukage politely declined (the Water Country was always experiencing some sort of economic hardship, and if she dipped into the treasury she'd have had an open insurrection on her hands), but Sasori, knowing Tsunade's infamous reputation with gambling, grinned evilly and threw in for everything he had. Sasori went home considerably wealthier than before, and when he told Tsunade that Deidara had actually been a Tokubetsu jonin since age twelve, she forgot her newfound bad mood enough to bust out laughing.
Matsuri was not made a chunin; Tsunade and Sasori put their heads together and decided that it would probably have been too much of a burden for her. She was promoted the next time she attended the Exams.
Temari, Kankuro, Gaara and Deidara were all promoted to chunin. They made jonin within two months.
.x.X.x.
Soon after the Sand Siblings and Deidara made jonin, the question of who was to become Kazekage was raised again.
It was a foregone conclusion that the future Godaime would be chosen from the Sabaku clan; the only Kazekage who had not hailed from that clan was the Shodai, and his daughter married the future Nidaime, a Sabaku.
Since Temari, Gaara and Kankuro were of the direct line of descent, the eyes of the council lit on them. The first, natural choice was Temari. As the eldest and the heiress to the Sabaku clan, she was the one who would inherit upon turning eighteen, and that she had a natural knack for politics and diplomacy certainly didn't hurt. But Temari declined, instead choosing to serve as ambassador to Konoha; the post had been vacant since the days of the Nidaime.
No one ever looked too closely at Kankuro. He had made it plain that he didn't want the post, and there was a good reason no puppeteer ever became Kazekage.
The council didn't look at Gaara for obvious reasons.
The council fell to rooting around the assorted Sabaku cousins until Kankuro came to his sister, sensei and puppetry master with a startling revelation: Gaara had expressed a desire to become Kazekage.
It was an interesting proposal. Gaara was definitely intelligent enough for the job, he was diligent with his work, he (despite what everyone believed) had a clear grasp of politics if not diplomacy, and he had been showing real improvement. True, he was very young, too young, some would say, for the position. But if they waited, he might never get it. And Kankuro was hell-bent and determined to do this for his little brother.
But if they left it to him, he'd never get the post; Gaara, truly, wasn't the most diplomatic boy on the face of the earth, and too many people still looked at him like he was a monster.
"Kankuro, you and I are going to have a lot of work to do," Sasori rasped. "Baki, we may need your help too; you have even more clout than I do. Deidara, I don't trust you to be subtle. Temari, as ambassador to Konoha, you know absolutely nothing about this; you need to keep your hands clean if we want to keep our village's credibility from falling through the floor. Just leave everything to us."
Sasori and Kankuro compiled a mental laundry list of who to pay off, who to blackmail, who to threaten, who to send to remote outposts (Baki helped on that score), who was supposed to fall mysteriously ill, who to outright kill…
"You know?" Kankuro grinned, "I think I may actually grow to like politics."
Then, it fell to investigations. Kankuro inserted himself into the ranks, trying to root out any signs of disloyalty, and ruthlessly cornered anyone and everyone whom he thought might pose a threat; for the most part, he didn't have to kill anyone…
That left the council at the mercy of Akasuna no Sasori. A man who was renowned for his lack of mercy. He mercilessly grilled the council to the point that most of them needed to be admitted to the hospital for nervous attacks, and to that day, none of them could have told you who they feared more: Gaara or Sasori.
Before the council really knew what was happening, Kankuro and Sasori secured the position of kage for Kankuro's little brother.
Gaara would be Kazekage, and he would never have any idea what had been going on right under his nose.
.x.X.x.
While out of the village on a mission, Sasori and Deidara ran into Jiraiya and Naruto. It was the depths of winter, though one wouldn't have known it in the blazing little town in the northwestern mountains of the Wind Country.
Sasori raised an eyebrow. "The runt's grown." Naruto now capped at just barely five feet tall, almost exactly the same height as Gaara.
Jiraiya snorted. "You're telling me. He keeps outgrowing his clothes."
Naruto and Deidara got along surprisingly well; they were of similar, easy-going, less than organized personalities, and they chattered almost incessantly.
The moment Sasori and Jiraiya started to form a friendship was when Deidara and Naruto spotted a stand that sold bakudan and ramen.
"NO!!!" Jiraiya and Sasori screamed at the same time.
"He can eat bakudan and breathe at the same time," Sasori complained.
"It's the same with him and ramen!"
They started to have lengthy, involved conversations about sealing jutsus, how to strengthen sealing jutsus, and the effects of sealing jutsus.
It was one night when Jiraiya started to talk about Naruto's seal in particular, that Sasori learned that the boy had recently lost control. Jiraiya showed Sasori a huge, branched, still-healing welt that stretched out across his chest (Sasori was sure that it was much more wicked-looking in full light), revealing that he and Naruto had both been hospitalized with chakra poisoning for two weeks.
Naruto had slipped into the Four-tail transformation.
Sasori was not as shocked by this as Jiraiya perhaps would have liked. Gaara, after all, had been doing things like that, whether intentionally or not, since he was about four years old. Sasori was only surprised that this was the first incident of such magnitude.
"Such is the lot of a jinchūriki, Jiraiya. Accept it."
The toad sage glared at him. "Gaara's seal may be weak, but Naruto's is not!" He pointed to the sleeping boy; the four of them were holed up in the attic of a hotel. "His seal was designed with fail-safes. The Kyuubi should not have been able to take control like that. I don't know what's going on just yet, but it's not anything good."
"What happens if the Kyuubi takes control completely?"
Jiraiya's face darkened. "The seal devised by the priestess and later used by an elder of the Akasuna clan and your grandmother, to seal the Shukaku into a host, was always meant to turn the host into a weapon of war. That is why Gaara was able to survive the Shukaku taking control completely. Naruto's was never meant to turn him into a weapon. If the Kyuubi takes over entirely, he will not survive it, and the nine-tailed Fox will be free again."
After Sasori and Deidara's mission was completed, Sasori asked Naruto and Jiraiya to come back with them to Suna.
"Something's going on there soon that you're not going to want to miss."
.x.X.x.
That 'something' was Gaara being confirmed as the Godaime Kazekage. He was confirmed a week before his fifteenth birthday, though for ever after, people would say that he had already been fifteen when he was confirmed.
The four arrived just in time to see him give his acceptance speech. At barely five feet tall, the ceremonial robes (new ones had had to be made for him; even if he had worn his father's, they would have had to be fitted considerably, as Gaara was nearly a foot shorter than Takeo had been when he was confirmed) hung off of his slight frame; Sasori hoped that hat wasn't the same one Gaara's father had rotted in.
Gaara's soft, raspy voice just barely carried to the crowd below. He kept his speech short, and too the point, but it was well-received. The people seemed much more fond of him than they had been of any Kazekage since the Shodai.
Naruto, Sasori had been afraid, might have been jealous of Gaara achieving this rank, judging by the way Naruto had gone on and on about wanting to be Hokage. But soon, it became pretty clear that that was not going to be a problem.
Naruto and Gaara stared at each other from across the room. Then, abruptly, Naruto burst into laughter.
"Oh, man! This is so cool!" Naruto bounded across the room and pulled Gaara into a rib-cracking hug. Gaara's face went absolutely white.
"Well," Tsunade, standing at Sasori and Jiraiya's shoulders, looked on in some bewilderment, "that was unexpected."
Jiraiya smiled. "Naruto's happy for him. Gaara's achieved his dream, and Naruto's isn't quite so far away anymore."
Sasori cocked his head in bemusement. "You know, I think that's the first time anyone's ever hugged him."
.x.X.x.
A few months later, Sasori saw Naruto again, though under much less happy circumstances.
Orochimaru, it seemed, had lived up to Sasori's expectations and had usurped Uchiha Sasuke's body, no doubt abusing it as much as he pleased up to the point of usurpation.
Naruto, to say the least, had not taken it well.
As far as Sasori and Gaara (because it was to Gaara that Naruto had come, looking for comfort) could tell, Naruto had slipped away from the village on his own to try and track his erstwhile teammate down.
What he had found was a demented Sannin wearing the Uchiha's skin.
According to Naruto, if Sasori traveled north, he would find a huge crater where the Sound Country had once been, everything living in it destroyed.
He had gone to Gaara because he was bewildered, confused and frightened. The Kyuubi was trying to take over, and he needed someone to talk to who he knew would understand.
As soon as Naruto was fit to be seen by someone other than Gaara and he was somewhat calm again, Sasori penned a terse note north.
'We have your errant Leaf nin. Please come pick him up.'
Jiraiya came for Naruto three days later. He had a grim look on his face ("I've been north"), and a few words for Sasori.
"I think I understand what's going on now."
It was the last three words, however, that made Sasori's blood run cold.
"It's getting weaker."
.x.X.x.
And that wasn't the only thing Sasori had to worry about.
The movements of the Akatsuki were giving him cause to lose sleep, horribly, because knowing what they wanted, he could be sure they would come to the gates of Sunagakure, and even if they did manage to take Gaara, Sasori highly doubted that they would spare the village from their wrath.
He wasn't surprised when scouts sent back messages that a large force of Ame nin, lead by members of the Akatsuki, were moving south on Suna.
And he wasn't surprised when those scouts didn't return.
.x.X.x.
It began with small raiding parties on outer villages in the Wind country. Reports said that they bore the hitai-ate of Amegakure.
Then, suddenly, they were camped in eyesight of Sunagakure.
Sasori got to the top of the wall, surveying with grim, darkened eyes, the Ame forces.
"You shouldn't be out in the open like this, Gaara," Sasori snapped. "If they see you, and recognize you—"
Gaara waved a hand to quiet him. "They won't. The wind's too strong."
Sasori moved to stand beside him (he was still amazed to discover that his sixteen-year-old godson was now slightly taller than him), getting a closer look at the forces. "I've sent Deidara up high in the air; his scope should be able to see the enemy up close."
Gaara nodded, saying nothing.
"I've heard that you were contemplating giving yourself up. Is that true?"
Gaara sighed. "My councilors were the ones who first suggested it. Apart from Baki, they're all out to get me in their own ways."
"I didn't grill them hard enough," Sasori muttered. "But are you thinking of it?"
The young man smiled wistfully. "The only way I would consider it would be if I knew that the Akatsuki and the Ame forces would leave Suna alone if I did. But I know they won't.
"I've sent the civilians into the underground passages on the East end. It will take them to the nearest village. I've sent a few jonin with them to tell anyone who asks what has happened."
A small cloud of dust started to kick up from the Ame camp. Gaara licked his lips. "It's time, Sasori. We should go down there."
The battle had begun.
.x.X.x.
Once the battle with the Ame forces (the Akatsuki members fell back and let their lackeys do the fighting for them) began, Sasori soon lost sight of Gaara, and almost as soon found himself fighting alongside his grandmother.
"Just like old times, don't you think, Sasori?"
Sasori was exhilarated by the fight and the way all the enemies fell. Until, that is, he watched his grandmother fall as well.
There was no time to grieve. Chiyo had died putting the fear of God back into her enemies, and Sasori could be glad of that. He focused instead on finding Gaara.
He got to the village walls, and saw a sandstorm. That was when Sasori was hit by flying rubble, and knew no more.
.x.X.x.
When Sasori woke up, the battle was over, and there was a chunin waiting to take him to the Kazekage.
Sasori would only later learn what was transpiring in the Kazekage's office as they spoke.
The Ame nin had suddenly broken off mid-battle, without any reason why, but only with the promise that they would be back. Gaara, it seemed knew where they were going.
Gaara was hell-bent on going to Konoha to warn them and help them protect their village when the Akatsuki came; namely, he wanted to keep Naruto safe. The council was trying to roadblock him.
Gaara's council, like Tsunade's, labored under the delusion that they ran their kage and not the other way around. Gaara, unlike Tsunade, finally got impatient enough to brutally disabuse them of that.
After a few screamed threats and sand lashing around, Gaara dropped the clincher. If the council didn't let him have his way, he would resign his post and give the hat and all it entailed to Sasori.
For the first time in his life, Gaara had the council begging him to stay as Kazekage.
When Sasori got to the office, he was met by Gaara stepping out, his face white with ill-concealed anger. The councilmen followed him, equally white, but for a different reason.
"Find Deidara and Kankuro, then wait at the gate for me. We're going to Konoha."
.x.X.x.
Gaara chose thirty chunin and jonin to join him, Sasori, Deidara and Kankuro to go to Konoha, and moving as quickly as they could split the wind getting there, making it to Konoha in a less than a day.
They got to Konoha at sunset, but there seemed to be some sort of mix-up. The guards couldn't tell whether or not they were supposed to let them in. Tsunade's council had also decided to behave unreasonably, and had given orders not to let the Sand nin in; the orders were currently being countermanded by Tsunade.
When they finally were let in, Temari and Jiraiya were waiting on the other side.
Temari strode over to her brothers, her face white as salt. "Are you both alright?" she demanded.
Sasori looked at Jiraiya. "Are we agreed that whoever first had the idea of sealing a bijū into a child should be dug up, brought back to life then killed in the most inhumane way possible?"
"Agreed."
Gaara's first stop was Tsunade's office.
"You have absolutely no idea how glad I am to see you." That was the first thing to come out of Tsunade's mouth when she saw Gaara. "Thank you for warning us." She gulped, the motion barely perceptible. "And for coming to our aid."
Gaara nodded. "I would do no less for my ally." There was another reason as well, one that hung in the air.
Tsunade's eyes brightened somewhat, though not in cheer. It had to mean something to her that the Kazekage, the leader of a village that had been at war with her own off and on for decades, a boy that she had never done anything to endear herself to him, had thrown his lot in with her without a second thought.
"I'm sorry Tsunade—" it was a testament to the urgency of the time that he didn't affix the honorific –sama "—but the Akatsuki and the Amegakure forces will be here by morning."
She nodded, swallowing. "I know."
Sasori, Tsunade and Jiraiya stood on the wall throughout the night, Naruto and Gaara standing off to the side.
"What are they talking about?" Tsunade asked with a modicum of inquisitiveness.
Jiraiya smiled slightly. "Naruto and Gaara. Oh, they're talking about all the things they've done, all the things they wanted to do and probably aren't going to get a chance to do now."
Sasori wrinkled his nose. "How very poetic."
"It's the truth."
They fell silent for a few moments. Then Sasori began to speak again, addressing Tsunade. "Gaara evacuated the civilians in Suna before the attack began."
"It's already done."
In the twilight before sunrise, the Akatsuki came.
"Coming with the dawn, just as they always do."
.x.X.x.
The Akatsuki themselves would be fighting this time. Their ranks had been thinned in the past few months; as far as Jiraiya had discerned, they still consisted of Hoshigaki Kisame, Zetsu, the strange man named Tobi, and two shadowy figures from Ame named Pein and Konan. Uchiha Itachi, it seemed, was no longer with the organization; no one knew if he had defected, been killed or had just died, but Sasori strongly suspected that some day someone would find a blind hermit living in a cave somewhere.
Deidara was a perfect fit to take on Kisame since he wouldn't have to get close. Zetsu would be handled by a jonin from the Leaf named Yamato, with help from other members of the ANBU, and Tsunade and Gaara would team up (strangely enough, they seemed to like the idea of working together) to take on the bulk of the Ame forces. Pein, Konan and Tobi didn't seem to be partaking in the fighting. Everyone else would fight where they could.
The final battle in the desperate war against the Akatsuki had begun.
.x.X.x.
Sasori, at first, found himself fighting wherever he could. Gaara and Tsunade were doing just fine, Kankuro and Temari and Deidara as well, and he was just trying to take out as many Rain nin as he could.
It was more of a fair fight than he had thought it would be. The Leaf and Rain forces were evenly matched, and each fought in the street with equal ferocity.
Then somehow, he found himself in a forest, with Jiraiya, fighting Konan.
.x.X.x.
The jutsus employed by Pein's second were…interesting, to say the least. She had somehow managed to turn her body into paper, or so it seemed. She was able to construct weapons out of paper, and she was very, very fast.
It was when Sasori just barely avoided being impaled by a spear made out of paper that he decided it was time to unleash the Sandaime.
"I'm sure I don't want to know why you have a puppet that looks just like the Sandaime Kazekage, with the Sandaime Kazekage's iron sand."
"I'm sure you don't!"
Konan began to go on the defensive in earnest, as she had to avoid poisoned iron sand now, not just puppets and jutsus. But they still fought.
And as they fought, Jiraiya and the woman seemed to recognize eachother.
"Okay, Jiraiya…who is this woman—exactly—and why on earth is she calling you sensei?"
"Long story! I'll tell you later!"
What they didn't know was that while they fought, Naruto was talking to—and fighting—the Akatsuki leader Pein.
.x.X.x.
Konan eventually seemed to grow tired, at about the same time that Sasori and Jiraiya did. They gasped and panted, and glared at each other from opposite sides of the—now much larger—clearing.
Then, the man named Tobi appeared out of thin air.
Konan looked up and snarled. "You," she whispered, her face twisted with almost inhuman hate. "You're the one who set this hell into motion."
The man named Tobi had only three words for her. "Pein is dead."
No one was more surprised than Tsunade when Konan suddenly called a cease-fire.
.x.X.x.
Sasori grunted, his knees buckling under Jiraiya's bulk. He hoped they would find the kid soon.
They didn't have to wait long. Naruto was sitting in the middle of a clearing, two bodies—two, not one—nearby him.
"Brat!" Sasori barked. Naruto looked up. "Help me with your sensei, will you? He's a load of dead weight I wanna get rid of really quick."
Naruto frowned. "You alright, Jiraiya-sensei?"
Jiraiya grinned. "I'm fine. I've just broke my leg. Help, please?"
Naruto smiled, strangely, because there was no spirit in his smile, and helped Sasori shift Jiraiya's weight. At a painfully slow rate, they made their way back to the village.
"You're awfully quiet, Naruto," Jiraiya grunted. "Mind telling me what's up?"
Naruto shook his head. "It's nothing. It's just that… Well, when I was fighting this guy, I was prepared to lose everything. I forgot everything, all my hopes and dreams, even becoming the Hokage, so I could beat him."
"And that's when you became worthy of being Hokage," Sasori rasped.
Naruto and Jiraiya looked at him in confusion. "Brat, in order to rise, you have to lose it all, or at least be willing to. There's no other way to grow."
Naruto smiled; he seemed to like this answer. "Oh, and, I saw my dad too."
"WHAT???!!!"
.x.X.x.
Within two years, Tsunade would gleefully—gleefully because she would no longer have to deal with paperwork or councilmen trying to pry into her affairs—hand the Hokage hat over to Naruto, entrusting the future to him as Suna had to Gaara.
But on the sunset after their victory, Sasori and Jiraiya, godfathers of two jinchūriki kages, sat at an open-air bar, watched their godsons as they celebrated.
"Gaara threatened to give me the hat if the council didn't let him come here," Sasori muttered gloomily.
Jiraiya shuddered. "Tsunade-hime did the same thing, when the council tried to keep you all from getting in."
"Well, we've won, we're still alive, and we're definitely not kages. I think that's worth drinking to."
"Agreed." They took deep draughts out of their sake glasses. Then they looked at Naruto and Gaara, surrounded as they were by friends and loved ones.
"I think they've done well."
"Quite well."
1: I saw the suicide bombing clone be named "Karura" somewhere.
2: Personally, if Sasori had never had need for a spy, I don't see how Kabuto and Orochimaru would have ever even laid eyes on each other, let alone known each other, but for the sake of the story, let's say that that much is unchanged by Sasori not needing a spy.
3: In my world, the Leaf does not have the best of everything.
This took me two days to write; I hope you liked it.
Reviews are received with love.