For Nobara

Chapter 4: Vessel

The statue is a sleeping giant with nine sleeping eyes, a decaying humanoid body whose mouth is gagged and its hands bound by shackles. It rests in one of the biggest spaces in the hideout near the Land of Wind, where all of the few members of Akatsuki rarely meet each other.

And at the sight of the beast, Kigura hides behind Kakuzu's cloak, only glancing at the other figures within the eerie place. Amidst them, there is only one woman who has a paper flower in her blue hair that Kigura stares at.

"Finally!" the youngest of the cloaked figures announces, looking no older than fifteen with blue eyes. "You. Kigura, un?"

She observes him strangely, looking at his shockingly blond hair pulled over in a lazy half ponytail.

"What's up with the oversized kasa, yeah?" the boy asks curiously, tilting his head and trying to look beneath the paper curtain obscuring her face from sight. The darkness doesn't help either. "Hiding from us, are you?"

"Deidara."

Almost reluctantly, the boy backs up and raises his hands when the puppet armor stares at him seriously. "I was only curious, Sasori-danna, hm."

But his gaze draws away from him before he glances at Kakuzu from the corner of his eye, just wondering who wouldn't be curious about his new partner, when all the previous ones have always ended up dead within the next few days. It isn't a secret Kakuzu has murderous tendencies.

For the past year Deidara has been a member, there's been multiple replacements that he has already lost count on how many that have gone. But they have all been miserly-looking men, and now it's a malnourished child looking no older than seven.

Is the brat really that worthy?

"Hm." He frowns, glancing at the ripple-eyed man, Pain, wondering too if the new member is some sort of secret weapon, an adult in a child's body or some other circus freak. Kami knows each and everyone of them isn't exactly... normal.

"A horned child will be in Akatsuki," he remembers his danna saying to him one day.

"A horned child, un?"

He has heard about them, the halflings of the great Kira clan of Koori, fragments of a horned monster almost equal to the tailed beasts. They were weapons of war, but with Koori's main capital in ruins now became hunted down by those in search for their power.

And so the villages with tailed beasts killed them. It was how they thought they could balance the power distributed among them. But to Deidara, it only seems vicious to kill those who have been deprived of their lives.

"We're late, aren't we?"

At the voice, Deidara looks at the new presence with an unconscious body up his shoulder.

He is an oddly-hued man that, even in the darkness, his blue skin is hardly something you will miss. A semblance of a shark with beady white eyes and jagged pointed teeth, and behind him is a boy with strange red eyes.

Itachi.

"Just a heads up," the blue man says, cocking his head to the side, "genjutsu won't hold this guy for long."

"Just get on with it, Kisame," Sasori says impatiently. "We need to extract the Gobi now."

Kigura peeks from Kakuzu's cloak as the blue man named Kisame drops the body from his shoulder. And even in the lack of light, it's clear as day the captive has been beaten before he was taken, from the blood dripping down his forehead to his bruised eyelids hardly open enough to reveal his light brown eyes.