Chapter 10: Demonstrations

Deidara

As he had done many times before in a very different area of the earth, Deidara paused in midstep. One leg remained bent off the floor, only beginning to slowly lower after no more was heard for several seconds. Sasori had stopped too and was looking up. Dei did not notice. His mind was too busy racing.

Calm down Dei, calm down, yeah. This is not a place where you have a reason to be freaking out. That couldn't have been what it sounded like. Everyone here's peaceful. Well, everyone except Konan. Did she head upstairs? What could she be doing up there? Are we in trouble? Where's the enemy? Where's the danger? Do we need to get out of here or stay and fight? I'm unarmed! Shit, shit shi-

"Deidara?" That and a violent jerk on his elbow broke off this less than helpful train of thought. Deidara realized he had tensed up everywhere and failed to notice Sasori moving directly in front of him. The track of his thoughts must have been very visible. He forced himself to take a deep breath and relax. Sasori watched him carefully as his breathing slowed down and returned to normal. His complexion did too. And yet, Deidara could not get his muscles to fully untense, and he discovered a sudden desire not to continue the way they had been going.

Sasori sighed lightly, patiently, and pulled on Dei's elbow again. "Nothing to be gained standing here. Let's go see what that was." Deidara nodded vigorously at this course of action, and motioned down the long hallways to where he guessed the stairs had to be. They set off.

Upon climbing the stairs and retracing their steps through the second floor (which proved to have nearly the same layout as the lower floor, except it had more living spaces where the lower floor had functional rooms), they came to the exact spot they had just been standing below. That was where the sound seemed to have come from as far as either of them could tell. Deidara had been sitting on the bed, thinking of Konan's words and wondering if he really wanted to stay when Sasori showed up. Sasori had seemed as close to resentful, angry and yet confused that Deidara had ever seen him. They had sat together on the bed, and Sasori had asked Deidara a single question. After talking in low solemn voices about the meanings and consequences of Deidara's answer, Sasori seemed to be mostly resolved. At that point they had left the room and Sasori had mentioned that he would prefer to leave this place and think some more somewhere else. So they had been heading toward the front lobby not far from Deidara's room when the sound happened.

Deidara stopped almost immediately upon seeing the ruined doorway in the cross hallway. Sasori followed his gaze and froze. Deidara quickly and silently raised his hand and gestured forward. They approached the door, Sasori following as quietly as he could. Dei looked into the room beyond the doorway, which was still relatively dark even with the door to the roof open at the other end. Nobody was in there. He guessed somebody had been going up to the roof, and he could think of no reason to expect it was anyone bad since the only people in the building at the moment were friendly.

Sasori was lightly tracing his hand along the splintered edge of the door, looking between it and the remains of the frame. His mouth was slightly open. He moved the hinges aside, saw the perfectly fitting dents in the door beneath them. His mouth fell even more open and he shifted the hunks of metal and wood to one hand so he could trace the dents with his other, make sure they were real. His light, cautious fingers rubbed against some fractured wood fibers that could easily have become splinters if he'd pressed harder. It was real. Sasori looked up at Deidara and shook his head. He had no idea what was going on here.

Deidara turned to the frame he was standing next to. "It looks like those might have been ripped out of here maybe." Before he even finished speaking Sasori was next to him, carefully holding one rusty, splintery chunk as he pressed the other into the top gap in the frame. It didn't quite fit there, but it perfectly matched the bottom. Sasori nodded his head, still unable to speak. If he had been able to, he would have congratulated Deidara on his use of the word "ripped". That was the only kind of force he could imagine causing damage like this. But what kind of anything could possibly rip a door out of its frame, never mind the hinges themselves? He turned around quick enough to make Dei jump back several steps, glanced around all edges of the door. But no, there was no sign of crushing like there should have been if someone or something of unusual strength had gripped it. His mouth starting to get very dry now, he made some effort to close it. Still it dried. What the hell had happened here?

Steps sounded behind them. There had been little to say after recognizing Itachi's wisdom, and no one had been so much as scuffling their feet along the carpeted floor at the time of the screeching. The clay-animator and the puppetmaster stepped back against the side of the door to make room as the hallway filled with curious and wary ninjas.

"You guys have any idea what happened?" Kisame asked.

Sasori decided to buck up, explain it himself. "W-well, I have no idea what exactly happened here. Whatever it was ripped out the door and the hinges. Hinges don't pull off nearly as easily as a door would, so that's probably what splintered it. Somehow, the hinges slammed into the door. They ripped out chunks of the frame too. I'm a little afraid to ask what, why or how this happened."

Deidara mentioned, "The hinges look gunked up to me, hm, and the other door's open. The why is probably just so they could get to the roof."

Kakuzu raised an eyebrow. "I don't think the two of us" - he motioned to Kisame - "combined could pull a door out of a wall. Let's not even talk about those things." Itachi nodded and turned to Sasori, asked to look at the hinges. Sasori handed them to him. Itachi looked at them very carefully, trying to imagine the scene as he did so. The motion of the door, the wood splintering… He narrowed his eyes and tried to focus even more. Suddenly something happened. It was like a pulse of blood raced to his face, only it wasn't blood but rather pure warmth. He suddenly found himself imagining the door being pulled out of its frame in very vivid detail, so much so he could almost literally see it. Sasori's explanation was correct. He looked up at the other men in the hallway and had to stop his mouth from falling open. Kakuzu's body shifted just a little, and Itachi saw him turn and look in his direction before it happened. He could make out every little movement, even the little twitches that most of them suppressed at the sight of him. He lost focus and it disappeared, the amount of detail he could make out from them returning to normal. The hinges dangled from his arms limp at his sides, forgotten.

Kisame remained tense even after whatever it was went away, the shark-man's eyes staying wide. "Itachi, your eyes… They turned red, with a little black circle around your pupil, and the circle looked like it had 3 commas in it."

Itachi tried to imagine this, for once silenced not by his own choice. He raise a hand to his eyes, traced the skin under them. He looked around at everyone, this time looking for something. Deidara guessed what it was and handed him a small mirror. Itachi looked into the mirror and imagined the feeling of the warmth around his eyes, focused again. It worked. He gaped at eyes that matched exactly what Kisame described. Somehow his perfectly normal eyes had turned red, with the black line appearing and the 3 commas spinning into place. It felt… He looked up at everyone else, maintaining his focus this time. It felt good.

He let it go willingly for everyone else's comfort. Kakuzu narrowed his own seriously abnormal eyes. So it seemed the Uchiha, unlike himself and Nagato, could bring out his abnormal eyes and send them away anytime he wished. Kakuzu wondered what mechanism could possibly be responsible for that. People didn't just spontaneously change eye color, and red wasn't on the list of possible human eye colors in the first place. To say nothing of such a precise pattern. What kind of mechanism could make that possible? Did his eyes have the color changing cells of squid or octopus? But what purpose would that serve?

Before he could ask Itachi exactly what those eyes did the sound of footsteps echoed from the doorway. They were soft footsteps, and several of the group who had first encountered her in a loud place or with her standing still realized for the first time just how silent Konan's way of walking was. Only the enclosed space of the stairs made the sound noticeable. Deidara shuffled aside to leave room between himself and Sasori. He would have shuffled even farther aside, had he not felt reluctant to leave everyone else's company. The air around Konan seemed to be filled with rotating blades, a heated and forceful mass of air that frightened almost everyone there. Nobody needed any indicators to know she was not in the mood for putting up with anyone else's concerns.

She stopped in the doorway between Deidara and Sasori. Her face wore no expression in particular and she looked down at the door with its splintered edge and dented wood, then sideways at the masses of metal and wood that Itachi still held. She moved as if to step over it and continue on her way, then stopped. After a quick glance and a twitch of her ear found nothing behind her, Konan sighed and lifted the unsplintered edge of the door. She appeared to be checking how thick it was. After a moment she continued to lift that edge all the way up, put her other hand carefully on the splintered edge, and lifted the entire thing easily. It was wide enough she needed one hand on the bottom and one on the top to carry it, but otherwise there were no signs of difficulty in the way she moved and carried it down the hallway. Her steps were still very quiet as she disappeared around the corner.

"Damn, what happened?" Deidara murmured. "What?" he asked again as he saw Sasori look at him. "There's definitely something going on with her, yeah. She kinda hinted when we talked that she's seen some things, yeah." Sasori turned away and shook his head, unwilling and unprepared to vocalize his thoughts about her just yet.

More footsteps echoed from the door to the roof. Nagato, Yahiko and Hidan seemed a strange mixture of downcast and hopeful when they came through. Yahiko smiled as he usually did when he saw everyone else gathered. Nagato and Hidan appeared to have been discussing something of importance, but stopped midway behind Yahiko. Hidan rushed forward into the hallway, looking puzzled as he walked through the space where the door had been. Nagato stood by Yahiko's side as they both grinned, an example of genuine overwhelming joy rapidly growing in intensity on Nagato's face. He nodded at Yahiko.

Yahiko was similarly unable to restrain his smile. This only worsened his problems with figuring out how to start speaking, but he didn't mind. "Hey guys. So, uh, where did the door go?"

Kakuzu snorted. "Konan took it. She checked its thickness first; it's almost definitely going to a training room. It's not useful as a door anymore, now it's just convenient wood."

Yahiko nodded. "That's good, that it'll still be around to look at. I don't mean to be too sentimental, but it is the first real thing that shows that we really are ninja and can do the magic things she talked about." He turned to Nagato. "Come on, tell us what it was like!"

"Oh, shit yeah," Hidan piped up. "All I've got for ninja stuff is things that aren't magic, so I don't get to know for myself. I need to hear this shit."

"Okay, okay," Nagato managed to force out through a smile that wouldn't go away. "It was...amazing. So we couldn't get through this door when it was here because it was too jammed to open, and Hidan suggested…"

As Nagato described the entire incident, going into special detail about the feeling of energy running within him suddenly flowing in a new way, he seemed to glow with the discovery of what he was really capable of. More than a few mouths hung open, their owners enraptured. Itachi's own flow of chakra shifted, unconsciously activating his eyes. He saw every detail, every twitch of every facial muscle, every pulse of Nagato's neck as his heart beat fast with the feeling of being alive. The combined strength was nearly enough to lift Hidan from his own body. As was, he stayed put but forgot he had a body, forgot his own identity. The pink in his eyes faded to transparency.

Nagato finished the story with them going up onto the roof to look for Konan. A disappointed Deidara asked if that was all, yeah, and Nagato said firmly that what happened on the roof was nobody's business but theirs. He looked around for agreement, and Yahiko and Hidan gave it instantly. Konan seemed unwilling to talk about anything in that general area, so they all knew she would appreciate discretion without having to ask.

Itachi noticed a minor twitch of the eye, little movements of the hand, in some case barely visible jumps of the muscle beneath the skin that no one else could possibly have seen. Most of them indicated Yahiko. The smiling man's face seemed just a little strained, shaken. Actually with his eyes activated Itachi could see that none of the three were precisely as cheerful as they seemed to be. The joy was genuine in the moment, but even Nagato was unsettled now. Something important was going on. Itachi's eyes took in everything, but his mouth stayed shut.

Kisame figured they were probably doing the right thing in not speaking of it and nodded his agreement. He then looked to Itachi and several fingers on his left hand jerked. "Uh, Itachi…"

The three looked and got their first look at Itachi's activated eyes. Nagato wondered why he got eyes that could be turned on and off where Nagato did not. Perhaps it had something to do with the redness and little commas taking up much less of the eyeball than his own eyes? Nagato's eyes didn't really have an iris or anything else, after all. Probably it was easy enough for chakra to change the color of an iris but it couldn't just add and subtract entire structures of the eye. That made some sense. He sighed.

Hidan scratched his head. "That looks frickin' awesome," he admitted, "but isn't there anything more?"

Itachi wrinkled his eyebrows. Why would Hidan guess that there was more? He focused more chakra into his eyes and winced as a painful image of his best friend's limp remains being dragged from a river flashed before his eyes. The world seemed to deepen and a large concentration of chakra gathered behind his eyes, as if it wanted to be released. Could his eyes alone have their own abilities? Deidara handed over the mirror without question, and Itachi looked. His eyes now looked like some kind of three-pointed shuriken. He handed it back and attempted to drain the chakra away. As soon as he made the effort it worked, and his eyes went back to the first level of activation, then to normal.

Hidan giggled with glee. Itachi tried not to make his decision to keep an eye on the shirtless man from now on too obvious. Yahiko whispered, "That is spectacular." He somehow managed to brighten even more as he announced, "That's it. I have to find out what I can do and try it, at least once, before I say a word about making a decision. All of us should. This is a part of us we've never explored before. It wouldn't be right not to. We should allow her at least that much."

After seeing the utterly trashed remains of the door and listening to Nagato's story, everyone else instinctively agreed with him. Even so Kisame wondered if the joy of using these abilities would wear off after a while, and would the cost of living with her be too great then. Kakuzu wrinkled his face in disgust underneath the mask at the mental image of himself skipping with glee like Nagato had. He glanced sharply to his left. Hidan stopped poking his shoulder stitches and looked up, the picture of innocence. Then he looked back down at them and seemed to get a great mental image. Kakuzu had no idea how the idea of tentacles could make anyone so happy. Hidan rubbed his hands together with a sinister expression and an evil chuckle. That could not be a good sign.

Sasori sighed. "Fine. Being able to use strings to control things would be good, even if I never step foot in here again. Where do I have to go to get this over with?"

That was when everyone realized they actually had no idea where the training rooms were. Konan had evidently decided where these rooms were to be on her own. Hidan announced, "Well, let's get going them!" and jumped into the middle of the group where the door had lain. His smile faltered. "Owwww. Fuck. It feels fucking awful to be around her." He gestured toward the back of the hotel in the direction of the stairs.

"You can tell where she was going from a trail?" Kakuzu asked.

"No. The only reason I'm following one is to confirm it. I already know where the training rooms should be."

"How?"

"If you'd done the smart thing and looked around at the layout and shit of the entire place like I did, you would know there's only one fucking place they could be, asshole!" Hidan snapped. And like that he was gone, almost etching a path in the air around the corner. Nagato wondered how close Hidan came to becoming the people he sensed. How much of the bubbly man who occasionally felt the need to hug the nearest someone was special? He shook his head and reminded himself that Konan seemed to have very strong forces beneath the surface. Most of the time Hidan was probably exactly as unique a person as he appeared to be. But around her… Nagato reminded himself that his new friend could make his own stupidly dangerous decisions. That didn't stop him from being the first to follow.

After a frenzied chase which left him wondering just how much energy Konan had to spare since this seemed to be her main way of moving, Nagato found himself placing a hand on the banister and jumping over the side of the stairs when he stopped thinking for a moment to catch his breath. Luckily freefall from any height is the leading cause of temporary mindlessness in humans, or else he might not have completed the motion smoothly and continued on as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Nagato looked around quickly to either side as footsteps came down the stairs behind him in a more normal fashion. What else were his thoughts keeping from him?

This was the end. There were no more steps, no sign of any presence at all. Nagato's breathing slowed as Yahiko came down next to him and looked around. "Hm," Yahiko muttered. "He said something about only one place where they could be. Where…" He looked behind the stairs. "Oh, I think I found them. Hey Nagato?"

"What?"

"The back yard is out here."

"Where are they?"

"The back yard's too close. The rooms next to the stairs have to either be a little small for someone to live in, or not rooms where someone's supposed to live."

Nagato looked around a little more carefully and it finally registered that there were two rooms on either side of the stairs. He felt very stupid. "Thanks for being less of an idiot than I am. I'll check the one on my side, you get the other one."

"Hey, don't call my best friend an idiot," Yahiko chided as he went to the room to his left.

Nagato checked the one to his right. Hey, there were bars on the ceiling. Nothing else though. He left and checked out the other one. The one to the right of the stairs (the left of anyone coming down the stairwell) did not have any bars crossing the ceiling. What it did have was Konan deciding how the former door should be cut, into pieces what size, and how those pieces would be distributed with Hidan in low voices. As he neared where Yahiko stood, they were just barely able to hear Konan argue that there should be at least two pieces each for the floor and ceiling. Hidan asked exactly how big the targets should be. Konan replied that they should vary in size, no smaller than a couple centimeters in diameter and no larger than half a meter the same way. Hidan shook his head and said that was a really bad idea for wall, ceiling and floor targets. The smallest ones should be painted on person-shaped targets, ideally moving, which meant that the door should be cut in pieces no smaller than three-quarters of a foot in diameter. Konan paused and asked how much a foot was.

Nagato and Yahiko turned to each other and nodded in unison. These two were completely insane and absolutely perfect for each other. Kakuzu had arrived in time to hear what the lower limit was, and pretended to ring imaginary bells.

Sasori walked in and made it quite clear he didn't give a damn about ludicrously small targets by walking up and tapping Konan on the shoulder. She made it quite clear that nobody had gone unnoticed by dodging and turning to face him just as his finger brushed her cloak. She said nothing, only waited for him to explain such forward actions.

"Teach me that puppet-string jutsu."

Konan narrowed her eyes. "That's a rather rude way of asking. You're quite confrontational, aren't you?"

"Yes, yes I am."

"Good. Shinobi need to be confrontational. I was worried that none of you would have the appropriate character," she said, while grabbing his wrist and holding it out toward the splintered door. "The strings were projected from his fingers, so I believe the technique is mainly shaping your chakra and projecting it from your body in the right direction. It is probably changed in some way to attach to its target as well. Hidan, you were right about making dummies for the smaller target practice. We shall only need about...8 larger targets. Cut this door in uneven eighths from the size you mentioned up to the upper limit."

Hidan practiced the new motion he would need to retrieve his scythe. The previous night he hadn't thought about reaching over his shoulder to place it on his back, blades down. Muscle memory, he supposed. After having his idea, he'd tried something new, and spun the stem in his fingers while reaching down to place it on his back blades up. This movement still felt quite unnatural, which hampered his enjoyment of his orders somewhat. But his fingers still did the job, and it swung in a wide arc away from his body until coming up in the proper position. "Aw yeah, let's cut up this shit! Watch out for splinters."

Somehow he could see what the uneven eighths she asked for would look like without any real effort. Swinging it around to catch the opposite edge of the door then pulling it back towards himself, the top little more than a foot and a half came off easily. Hidan found himself grinning without any memory of having done so, and found to his joy that he now felt about a third of the same elation Nagato had felt. So he could have the same feeling! The remaining part of the door was quickly cut in three, then all four lined up on the floor. Paper clamps appeared to hold down the boards from each end. With a long, victorious slice, all of them were cut into perfect halves. Hidan swung the scythe up to rest on his shoulder as he raised his head to the ceiling and laughed. When he turned towards Konan after a good, long session of this, his eyes and mouth were open, teeth and tongue visibly urging him to bite down on something. His eyes glinted ferociously. Konan had never been with him in battle to see this before. Her face settled into familiar lines that only Nagato's enemies had ever seen deep in the depths of Amegakure. The world fell away as they regarded each other, two predators on a hunt.

Sasori could not help but be fascinated. However, there was a certain tact he exercised whenever such a scene occurred in real life as opposed to the movies. He turned his eyes away and, saying nothing, imagined the feeling of some warm energy like Nagato had described building behind his fingers. He made sure every detail in his imagining of a coil of wire was accurate, then sprung out his fingers. From each one a link projected and attached to a board. He pulled his fingers back and watched as five newly cut boards sprung up from the ground and hovered in midair. They were fascinating. So...fascinating. Like magic they rearranged themselves in the air. Only the peanut gallery noticed his fingers move in well-practised ways. Then they rearranged themselves again. Then one by one they were lowered to the ground, into the exact same places they had been cut. Sasori stared down, helpless to move his eyes from this even if he had wanted to. It was as if they had never been moved.

Deidara came up and looked over his shoulder. "Wow. Hm, I really need to get my hands on some clay…"

Two proud carnivorous pairs of eyes looked at the resident skeptic. "Sasori…"

He blinked away the shock and amazement. "I'm staying."

Deidara grinned. I knew even a grump like you couldn't resist amazing things like this, yeah! We're going to have so much fun together, and nobody's getting in the way, yeah! Nobody messes with the Akatsuki! As he was shaken back and forth by the excited hands on his shoulders, Sasori smiled.

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