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"What. The fuck?"
Pain sighed. "You recall your and Kakuzu's recent mission in the Land of Vegetables?"
"The one with the cursed shrine? The one that I basically soloed because Kakuzu wouldn't recognise a vengeful ghost if it was chewing his face off, which it nearly did, for the record? You're lucky you had me to send on that mission or you'd have been down a team and probably dealing with their ghosts into the bargain." Hidan stood proudly, fingers toying with his Jashinkyō amulet as he basked in the rare glow of proven superiority over his partner. "What's that got to do with a pile of pumpkins higher than my head?"
"It turns out that the Land of Vegetables decided to pay us in vegetables," Kakuzu growled. "As you can see, the exchange rate wasn't in our favour."
"Are you kidding me - I nearly got my soul shredded out of my body dealing with that fucking onryō and all they gave us for it was, like, four hundred pumpkins?" Hidan stared, and then burst out laughing. "No, you know what, I don't mind. Freeing trapped spirits counts as Jashin-sama's work so actually it's good if we didn't get money for it. I feel better about that." He turned to Kakuzu. "And you're pissed off about it, and that also makes me feel better."
"Of course I'm pissed off." Kakuzu glared at his teammate. "I'm the one who has to work out how to turn four hundred pumpkins back into money."
"I dunno, sell them?"
"Hidan-"
Hidan grinned to himself. Kakuzu was far too easy to wind up. "Well I assume it's either that or we'll have to eat them, and I'm not eating them."
"Pumpkin pie is nice." Deidara wandered up beside them and looked curiously at the mound of brightly coloured fruit. "Although that'd be a lot of pie, un. Why do we have so many pumpkins?"
"We were defrauded," Kakuzu muttered, entirely drowned out by Hidan's gleeful "I cleansed a shrine for some heathen fuckers in the Land of Vegetables and they gave us these. Fuck knows what they thought we were going to do with them, mind you."
"There's a festival at this time of year in Iwa where you make lanterns from them," Deidara said. "We could grab some of them and do that, un."
"Lanterns?" Hidan repeated.
"Un, you hollow them out and cut creepy faces or pictures or whatever into the side, and put a candle inside them to make them glow. And then you carry them round from house to house and ask people for candy, and if they don't give you candy you're allowed to prank them. It's a pretty good time, un."
"So in other words it's a seasonal extortion racket," Kakuzu said, visibly cheering up and nodding in approval.
"That's not - it's not a racket, un! It's just meant to be for fun!"
"Very well," Pain said, heading off the burgeoning argument. "If you want to make pumpkin lanterns, Deidara, we'll do that. It's good for the members of an organisation to have some social time together."
"...did you just take my cool artistic suggestion and turn it into a team building exercise?"
Hidan huffed and rolled his eyes. "Ugh. Take all the fun right out of it, why don't you?"
***
As the night closed in the members of Akatsuki sat on the engawa of their safehouse, with a charcoal brazier for warmth and pumpkins piled around them. For a brief moment, the scene was almost tranquil.
"Ouch!" Hidan exclaimed, stopping to suck his finger as the knife he was using slipped and sliced him. "Ow, son of a bitch-"
"Stop whining, it'll heal in a minute," Kakuzu told him.
"I know, but it still hurts when it happens - ugh, you know what, that's the third time I've done that now, I give up. Clearly Jashin-sama doesn't want me to spend my evening pulling the guts out of vegetables. You can't sacrifice a pumpkin, it doesn't even have blood." He threw up his hands in frustration.
"Pumpkins are fruit, not vegetables, aren't they?" Kisame offered helpfully.
"They're gourds," Itachi corrected him, barely looking round.
"Are they? Well, fine, gourd riddance." Hidan rose to his feet and punted his abandoned pumpkin off the engawa and into the garden, where it landed with a muffled thud, and then his eyes brightened. "Ne, I'll tell you what's round and orange and totally does need its insides scooped out, though. Oi, Tobi!"
Tobi promptly bolted up and fled, limbs flailing and coat flapping, into the night. Hidan charged in pursuit, scythe in hand. A shriek echoed in the darkness, followed by a maniacal whoop and then a blistering string of profanity. "Do you need any help, Hidan?" Deidara called.
"Leave them to it," Sasori advised wearily. He had emerged from Hiruko and curled the battle-puppet up like a monstrous floor cushion, leaning back comfortably on its flank. A hollowed-out pumpkin rested in his lap, and he was carefully rubbing its remaining interior flesh with what looked like a palmful of salt crystals.
"What are you doing to that pumpkin, Sasori no danna?"
"Preserving it," Sasori said, in tones of don't ask stupid questions. "I'm not wasting my time and talents on something that's going to rot inside a week. If I have to do this, I'm going to do it properly."
"That's puppeteer's natron blend, isn't it?"
"Correct. If I dessicate it thoroughly now, I can seal it away after this farce is over and keep using it for years."
"Danna..."
"What now?"
"Are those legs?"
"Yes, and?"
"Is that a tail?"
"Yes, and?"
"Is it poisoned?"
Sasori finally looked up from his work and gave his partner a quelling stare. "Of course it is. Do you need a demonstration?"
Deidara raised his hands and hastily sat back. "I was just asking!"
"That's the equivalent of me asking if yours is going to explode, Deidara."
"...fair, un."
Quiet fell for a while, broken only by the intermittent sounds of Hidan and Tobi chasing each other around in the distance. Deidara finished his pumpkin and started another one. They were easy to prepare once you had the trick of scooping the insides out, and the boldly simple, stylised faces he was cutting in them looked good but were still quick to complete. He could make these all day.
If his left hand was quietly chewing clay while his right was wielding the paring knife he'd singled out as his tool of choice for this particular medium, that was nobody's business but his - yet.
***
Hidan reappeared some twenty minutes later, still swearing; Tobi didn't, having seemingly decided for once in his life that discretion was the better part of valour. Zetsu too was conspicuous by his absence, presumably having realised before Tobi did that this would be a bad night to resemble any sort of vegetable.
"Lost him," Hidan announced with a huff, flopping down on a cushion and dumping his scythe beside him. "Fucking cheating teleporting little shit. Did I miss anything?"
"Not much," Deidara told him. "We found out Samehada doesn't like pumpkins." He gestured to the giant shark-sword, which was currently out of its wrappings and lying with its mouth-end hanging queasily off the edge of the engawa while Kisame worriedly patted its scales. "Also Konan got tired of all the mess and started folding paper lanterns instead, un."
"Can't blame her," Hidan said. "Has Itachi even done anything yet except drink tea?" he added. The Uchiha sat huddled in his coat, a steaming bowl clutched between his hands, red eyes staring off into the dark.
"He said he doesn't need a lantern because he can just use his sharingan to make people give him candy. I told him that's not the point but I don't think he cares, un."
"Ne, how come he gets to sit out the compulsory team building?" Hidan leaned closer to see what Deidara was doing. "Wow, you were serious about these, weren't you?"
Deidara patted the topmost lantern on the stack of half a dozen now piled at his elbow. "I've been making them since I was three, un. It's easy."
"Yeah, maybe for you it is." Hidan was apparently still bitter at his own lack of success. "But do you really need that many?"
"I do if everyone else isn't going to make their own, un." Deidara shrugged.
"Yeah, yeah, rub it in why don't you. Oi, Kakuzu, how are you getting on?"
Kakuzu, lurking back in the shadows against the wall, raised his head and held out his carved pumpkin for inspection. It had a horrific, snaggle-toothed snarl and narrowed eyes, and was clearly designed with the sole intention of scaring the pants off anyone who encountered it.
"That's actually not bad," Hidan acknowledged, grudgingly impressed.
"Yeah, that's pretty classic. Nice, un."
"I'm not finished," Kakuzu demurred.
"No? What next, giving it some stitches?"
Kakuzu gave Hidan a look. "Not quite." He put the pumpkin down, and pulled the front of his coat open.
"Oi, no, you're not seriously going to-"
There was a slithering rustle of unravelling threads, and a squelch as Kakuzu thrust his fingers into the seam across the right side of his chest. A moment later he withdrew his hand, holding a clump of Earth Grudge Fear wrapped around something that pulsated in his grip, dark blood dripping down his fingers in the firelight.
"Come on Kakuzu, this is not a good idea-"
Ignoring Hidan, as usual, Kakuzu lifted the top off his pumpkin and dropped the heart into it.
There was a moment when nothing happened.
"That's really disgusting, I'm just saying-"
A reddish glow bloomed within the pumpkin's hollow head, illuminating the malevolent carved face. Black threads swarmed out of the hole Kakuzu had cut in its base, twisting and writhing into the form of a spindly body that forked and forked again into wriggling, sinuous arms and legs. The pumpkin-creature stood, swayed for a moment, then swivelled around and fixed Hidan with a malignant glare.
"Oh for Jashin's sake Kakuzu you fucking heretic!"
And then Sasori, seemingly unwilling to be outdone, wordlessly sat up and set his own pumpkin in front of him. Blue light flickered at his fingertips as he attached chakra strings to the articulated claws, legs and tail he'd fitted to its hardened, polished hull.
The resulting creature was still clearly part pumpkin but mostly resembled a fat little chibi scorpion, its wide-eyed face glowing from the chakra-spark of a light jutsu inside its round body. It scuttled forward, tail curled over and twitching above the stalk on its back, and stared up at Kakuzu's horrible creation as though in challenge.
"Oh my fucking Jashin," Hidan exclaimed. He leaned forward to look closer. "What the fuck. It's a... scorpumpkin?"
"Scuttlekin?" Deidara suggested. "I didn't know you could make anything that cute, Sasori no danna."
"I bet it'll beat Kakuzu's if they fight," Hidan enthused. He reached out to the scuttlekin and made to pet it.
The iron tip of its tail, glistening purple with Sasori's dreaded three-day poison, wavered above his hand; but Sasori restrained himself and allowed Hidan to stroke the pumpkin puppet's glossy shell. Kakuzu looked on in disgust. "It's a puppet, Hidan. It's not even alive."
"Ne, puppets can be people too, right, Sasori? Or, you know, pumpkin scorpion... things." His tone was uncharacteristically gentle. "Whoozagood scorpumpkin..."
Sasori, with a tiny smile and a suspiciously soft shine in his eyes, promptly made the scuttlekin climb into Hidan's lap. Hidan's face lit up and he carefully gathered it up and held it, heedless of the tail waving dangerously close to his nose. "Lucky I'm immortal because this thing is so cute I think I'd die if I wasn't," he announced.
"You might die anyway if it stings you," Kakuzu warned him.
"How many times, Kakuzu, I literally can't - and anyway, Sasori's not going to sting me while I'm being nice about his art, is he?" Hidan argued, scritching the scuttlekin behind its stalk. "You're the one who kills people just for trying to get along with you-"
Kakuzu glared. "Shut up, Hidan."
A distraction of some kind was clearly called for, before the team-building element of the evening could be compromised even further. Deidara stealthily spat a little clay pumpkin into one of his carved ones, put the lid back on, and rose to his feet with a gleam in his eye. "And now, to turn my creation into art!" he announced loudly, holding the pumpkin aloft to get everyone's attention. "Because true art is an explosion, un! Watch this, Sasori no danna - katsu!"
Sasori flicked Hiruko's tail up and over his own head with the absent-minded ease of practice, neatly deflecting the sudden rain of puréed pumpkin. Everyone else, less used to working with the bomber, got generously covered. "Oi, Deidara-chan!" Hidan yelled. "What the fuck, these pants were clean on!"
"You get through five clean outfits in a day anyway, un! And it'll wash out easier than blood!"
"Not the fucking point!"
"Deidara, exploding a pumpkin does not qualify it as art," Sasori said with a sigh. "Sit down."
"Everyone's a critic, un." Deidara huffed, but he obeyed. "Especially you, danna."
"As the only person here with enough understanding of art to give you meaningful critique-"
"You just don't appreciate my vision, un!"
"Brat," Kakuzu growled, glaring at Deidara with pumpkin splattered down his coat. "You and Hidan are as bad as each other."
"Hey-"
"Oi!"
Deidara and Hidan both stopped and looked at each other, their own dispute instantly forgotten in the face of a shared slight. "We are not!" Hidan protested.
Kakuzu's expression remained impassive behind his mask. "I concede Deidara may be slightly preferable."
"Oi!"
Deidara turned to Hidan, hands flung up in disgust. "Why did Leader have to pair both of us with grumpy old men, un?!"
"Less of the old, Deidara," Sasori warned.
"I notice you're not denying the grumpy part, danna!"
"That's because putting up with you and your incessant explosions would make anyone grumpy," Sasori retorted mercilessly. "Hidan, give me back my pumpkin."
"Aww, do I have to?" Hidan let go of the puppet nonetheless and allowed it to climb out of his lap and scuttle back to its master. "Ehn, fine, whatever. Go ahead, deprive me of cute things when I'm already having to put up with people insulting me and spraying me with pumpkin goop and I haven't even gotten to sacrifice anyone all day-"
"Hidan, shut up."
"Fuck you, Kakuzu! Ne, Sasori, do you want to swap partners with me? You can put up with Kakuzu's grumping and I'll deal with Deidara-chan exploding things-"
"Nobody is swapping partners," Pain decreed, manifesting from the shadows to intervene before the debate could escalate any further. "Have you all finished your lanterns?" He looked down as something brushed his leg, and recoiled slightly at the sight of Kakuzu's animated heart-pumpkin poking around by his feet.
"I haven't," Hidan said. "I'm not doing your team building bullshit. Don't think Itachi has either."
"Here," Deidara offered, holding out a small pumpkin with a fanged skull face to Hidan. "This is why I made spares, un."
Hidan shrugged and took it. "What about Itachi?"
"Screw Itachi, un."
"I was about to say that Deidara has understood the point of this exercise," Pain said wearily. "But apparently only to a limited extent."
Hidan snickered. Deidara glared. Itachi sipped his tea and said nothing, and Hidan rolled his eyes at the Uchiha's refusal to be baited. "Sometimes I think," he said confidentially, leaning closer to Deidara and gesturing at Itachi, "that if you could read his mind all you'd see would be a row of fucking dots."
Deidara spluttered laughter.
***
"So," Pain said. "What have you all achieved?"
The six field members of Akatsuki had been sent out under Deidara's temporary command to go and test their candy-extorting tactics on the nearest small town, leaving significantly more terror in their wake than could be justified by a mere few pumpkin lanterns. Now, gathered back at the safehouse, they presented their spoils.
"I did pretty good, un." Deidara rummaged in the bag he was holding. "Chocolate, couple of boxes of pocky - ooh, pineapple hard candy - a bag of cheap mochi, and..." He held up a final plastic packet with a gleeful grin. "Exploding candy, un!"
"You do realise it'll just be fizzy?" Sasori said.
"Not when I'm done with it, it won't," Deidara told him, visible eye gleaming. "What did you end up with, Sasori no danna?"
Sasori gestured to Hiruko, who crouched beside him with three unconscious, bound and gagged bodies draped over his broad back. "Raw materials," he said. "It hadn't occurred to me before that making puppets people would want to pet was a good way to collect supplies, but here we are."
"I feel like you missed the point, danna!"
"Why? It's not as though I can eat candy."
Deidara sighed. "Kisame?"
"Samehada ate everything I got already," Kisame said with a cheerful shrug. He was still carrying a lantern that had been carved with a surprisingly artistic portrait of a shark wearing a Kirigakure hitai-ate. "I had fun, though."
"Uchiha?"
"Dango." Itachi barely looked up, mouth full and all his attention focused on the sticky paper bag in his hands.
"Yeah, I saw that, he genjutsu'd the guy who runs the dango stand into opening up and making all that for him," Hidan chimed in. "At eleven o'clock at night. Rude if you ask me."
Deidara groaned. "Why am I not surprised, un. What did you get?"
"Four sacrifices, one conversion, and a box of autumn namagashi," Hidan reported happily. "I fucking love these things, I haven't had them since I was like twelve - here, you want one?"
Deidara accepted on autopilot as Hidan held the box of dainty candy leaves out to him. "What do you mean, one conversion?"
"I asked the woman who gave me these if she wanted to hear about Jashin-sama and we had a nice chat. Turned out her husband's a drunken cheating piece of shit and she said she's going to sacrifice him when he gets back from the hostess club later." Hidan's expression was positively beatific. "I'm so proud. Starting with your husband is a huge commitment, you know? Jashin-sama's going to love her."
"...un. Kakuzu?"
"Eighty-four ryō and it's all in chocolate coins," Kakuzu said in disgust. "And a packet of chestnut yōkan, which I hate."
"I'll have it if you don't want it," Hidan volunteered eagerly.
Kakuzu snatched the candy out of his reach. "No you won't."
"Come on, you said yourself you don't like it, you're literally just saying no because it's me who's asking-"
"Enough," Pain said heavily. "I'm ending this exercise here. You're all dismissed."
"Whaaat, really? You're just going to tell us all to fuck off at this time of night?"
"You may stay in the safehouse until tomorrow if you wish." Pain's violet-ringed eyes narrowed. "Do not kill each other."
"Tchyeah, tell that to Kakuzu, not me! Oi, Deidara-chan, can I crash with you tonight then since your partner doesn't sleep anyway and mine has nightmares and wakes me up?"
"If you want, sure-" He stopped and blinked at Hidan. "Nightmares?"
"Yeah, turns out being as old as balls means you end up with so many horrible memories in your brain that they fall out of it while other people are trying to sleep - oi!" Hidan ducked as Kakuzu launched a hand at his throat. "Ne, you embarrass me in front of everyone all the time, Kakuzu, don't get pissy just because I pay you back one fucking time-"
"You embarrass both of us constantly by existing, Hidan," Kakuzu growled. "One of these days I'll-"
"No you won't!"
***
Deep in the night, blissful quiet reigned over the safehouse. Sitting cross-legged with a lantern at his knee and Hiruko curled snugly against his back, puppet parts spread across the tatami mats around him, Sasori worked in peaceful silence save for the quiet click and scrape of his tools. His attention was all for the tiny, complex mechanism in his hands, barely a thought spared for the junior Akatsuki members who had finally stopped whispering and laughing together and fallen asleep on the room's two futons. For all their gratingly extroverted ways when awake, Deidara and even Hidan were surprisingly tolerable once they were safely unconscious-
"Gyaaaaaah!"
It took a lot to startle a living puppet, but Sasori jumped as his heart abruptly sped up in its containment canister. Deidara bolted upright in a tangle of hair, two fingers already raised in his detonation seal and a clay bug bomb in his other hand, as Hidan shrieked like a creature possessed. "Un?!"
"There's something-" Hidan scuffled wildly with his bedclothes, and then abruptly launched something dark and thrashing across the room - before letting out another yell of outrage. "Oh for Jashin's sake!"
"Is that - is that Kakuzu's pumpkin heart thing, un?!"
"I'm going to kill him! How fucking petty can you get, he had to sneak it in here and wake me up just to piss me off when we're not even in the same room-"
"Hidan, un," Deidara interrupted him urgently, pointing at the pumpkin creature where it stood on the far side of the room, swaying from side to side in a disturbingly serpentine fashion and glaring malevolence at them from its glowing hollow eyes. "Do you know how to get rid of it?"
Hidan shuddered. "How is it even creepier than his regular ones? Usually I just tell them to piss off but I'm not sure-"
A quiet, aggrieved huff broke in on their discussion. Sasori's fingers flicked, and his pumpkin scorpion puppet scuttled from where it had lain curled up amid his other project pieces. Tail twitching over its back, it darted towards the heart-pumpkin.
Black threads whipped out in reply, but the scuttlekin dodged with a puppet's swooping grace. The two tiny monsters circled warily for a moment, and then lunged at each other. Dark tendrils slashed at shining blue strings; steel-edged wooden claws snapped on pumpkin flesh, and it looked for a moment like a nearly even match. The scorpion puppet was faster, but the heart-pumpkin's tentacles would negate that advantage if they could grapple it.
"Can that thing even hurt a puppet?" Deidara asked, low-voiced, looking at Hidan.
"Depends if it can pull any of the bits off-" Hidan began, then let out a yelp of alarm as the heart-pumpkin's fanged mouth belched a miniature fireball that dissipated as it was blocked by a darting turn of the scuttlekin's tail. "Oi! Kakuzu, I know you can hear me - no fucking katon indoors, dumbass!"
Sasori hissed in near-silent fury. The twitching of his fingers was barely perceptible, but his eyes, unblinking, burned like embers and his teeth were bared behind tensed lips; and then, in a blur of speed that even shinobi eyes could barely follow, the scuttlekin leapt up and struck with a lightning stab of its poison-dripping tail.
The iron point plunged through tough orange skin. The pumpkin heart-beast shuddered and fell, its thread-woven limbs and body unravelling and puddling into tangled darkness on the tatami. It twitched pathetically, the light in its eyes slowly fading away, as the scuttlekin withdrew from combat with an impressively disdainful flick of its tail.
The three of them, and the scuttlekin, stared for a long, silent moment at the slowly shrivelling heap on the mat.
"Sweet fucking Jashin," Hidan said at last, his voice unusually quiet with awe. "Did you seriously just take out one of Kakuzu's hearts in about ten seconds?"
"It was weak in a body as small as that one," Sasori said dismissively. "And Kakuzu knows I hate to be disturbed when I'm working. It's his own fault."
Hidan gazed at him in disbelief. "Yeah? I mean it was me who-"
"You were being surprisingly unobjectionable until Kakuzu provoked you," Sasori told him. "I know who I blame." He gestured and sent the scorpumpkin scuttling over to Hidan, who reached out delightedly to pet it. "If he complains about the heart, tell him I'll owe him a spare."
Deidara relaxed, allowed his left hand-mouth to eat the bomb he'd been holding, and drew up his knees to wrap his arms around them. "I'm surprised he's never tried to take yours, un," he remarked to Hidan.
"Tch, he did when we were first teamed up. Ripped it right out, then took one look at it and gave it back." Hidan snorted. "My heart belongs to Jashin-sama, it wouldn't do a thing for Kakuzu even if he dared try it." He pressed his free hand piously over the pendant in the centre of his chest.
"Really?" Sasori asked.
"Oh, yeah. I don't completely understand the theory and shit because fūinjutsu is hard but basically my sacrifice jutsu works like a curse mark, yeah? So it has to be anchored by a seal somewhere, and when Jashin-sama granted it to me he sealed it onto my heart. I didn't actually know how it looked myself until Kakuzu pulled it out, but turns out my heart is literally black with Jashin-sama's handprint on it in white." His gaze drifted for a moment, unfocused and dreamy. "It's beautiful but Kakuzu didn't fucking appreciate it, obviously."
"Fascinating," Sasori said, giving Hidan an intent look. "I have expertise in fūinjutsu, it's a core discipline for a puppeteer. I'd like to study that."
"Danna, you can't turn Hidan into a puppet, un," Deidara cautioned.
"I don't need to," Sasori pointed out. "He appears to be eternal and imperishable already. I'm just curious about this curse seal, since Orochimaru had an obsession with them and I'd be interested to see how the two techniques compare."
"Well, you did fuck Kakuzu up for my sake," Hidan said. "And you're letting me pet the scorpumpkin - yes, you, whoozagood puppet thing - so I guess I could let you look at my heart if you really want to..."
Deidara groaned. "On your own body parts be it if you let Sasori no danna poke around inside you, un."
"Damn, that sounded dirtier than I think you meant it to, Deidara-chan-"
"Shut up!"
"Both of you shut up," Sasori said with a sigh. "It's late. Go back to sleep."
***
The wind shifted during the night, swinging north, bringing with it a rain that washed the snap of autumn out of the air and left behind the clinging chill of encroaching winter. The morning after the pumpkin escapade arrived sullen, grey and miserable.
And that, as Hidan couldn't resist pointing out over breakfast, was just Kakuzu, let alone the weather. The eldest Akatsuki huddled over his morning coffee with a look of thunderous ill-humour that was somewhat undercut by the way his hands were shaking. His eyes would probably have been bloodshot, were it possible to tell, and he was staring into the middle distance; or possibly just at Zetsu, who had reappeared overnight and was currently sticking halfway out of the garden like a wet weed.
When all the members of Akatsuki gathered together, it was a little disturbing how few of them actually participated in meals, Hidan thought. Pain never ate in front of his subordinates; well, Hidan assumed he never ate at all, but if Asshole-sama wanted to pretend he wasn't technically undead then Hidan wasn't going to mention that he'd noticed the first time they ever met. Sasori didn't eat because he was a puppet, Zetsu didn't eat because he ate people and therefore was under orders to keep his meals away from everyone else, Tobi didn't eat and never explained why not, and Itachi didn't eat because he'd invariably filled up on sweets at some inconvenient point just before actual mealtimes. And Konan ate like a kunoichi, which was to say with the delicate self-restraint of a woman planning to make up her calorie deficit later when nobody was watching.
Which meant the only members of the entire organisation who would openly put away what Hidan considered sensible amounts of food were himself, Deidara, Kisame and Kakuzu; and today Kakuzu was skipping breakfast too, because apparently getting hit with Sasori's poison even at one remove was hell on your digestion. Kisame at least was munching his way through a heaped bowl of fish and rice. Deidara was stuffing himself with pastries in between wandering around to clear up the soggy remains of abandoned pumpkins, occasionally glancing to the north and sniffing at the wet air.
Maybe he could smell home from here, Hidan thought. They were close enough to the mountains that the wind might be carrying a bit of nostalgia on it for an Iwa-nin. "Ne, Deidara-chan," he said, as the bomber flopped down beside him and reached for another pastry. "Got any more Earth Country traditions we should try? Last night was pretty good fun in the end."
He'd spoken deliberately loud enough to be overheard, and grinned to himself at the way Kakuzu's eyes pinched at the corners. Deidara must have seen as well, because he smirked at Hidan and gleefully rose to the challenge. "Sure," he began. "We have firework shows every year for midwinter-"
"Really?" Sasori said, giving Deidara a suspicious look out of Hiruko's beady eyes.
"Yes, really! My clan have been firework-makers for generations, I didn't just take up explosive art out of nowhere, un! I know how to do them without even needing chakra, we could-"
"No," Pain said firmly. Kakuzu and Sasori looked relieved. Deidara's visible eyebrow drew down in a mutinous frown, and Hidan muffled a laugh. "In the interests of fairness, the next team building activity will be suggested by someone else."
"Sasori no danna?" Deidara prompted. "What's Suna's idea of a good time?"
"Hmm," Sasori mused, keeping Hiruko's face carefully blank with only a glint in his eyes to betray him. "There's always the New Year puppet festival-"
"No," Kakuzu said - loudly, and directly over Hidan's "That sounds fun!" The two of them glared at each other.
"Itachi-san?" Kisame asked hopefully. "Do you have any ideas?"
"Such frivolities are beneath true shinobi," Itachi said coldly, peering at them over his tea with red eyes hazed by rising steam. Kisame drooped, visibly forlorn at the reproof.
"Tchyeah, but apparently cleaning a whole town out of dango in one night isn't," Hidan scoffed. "Oi Kisame, what about Kiri, then? You've got to have some fun customs there, right?"
"Kiri festivals are all fighting or fishing," Kisame said. "Or both, you know?"
"What, do you have to fight the fish?"
Kisame chuckled and patted Samehada, which wagged its hilt happily at the attention. "Sometimes you fight each other with fish."
"Tobi doesn't want to be hit with a fish!"
"Note to self: exploding fish, un," Deidara whispered to Hidan. Hidan clapped his hand over his mouth to suppress a laugh that would've cost him a mouthful of his tamagoyaki.
"Hitting each other with fish is not an appropriate team building activity," Pain said, still somehow impressively deadpan. "No."
Hidan frowned. "Well we're running out of ideas now! No point asking Zetsu, he's so bad at teamwork he can lose an argument with himself... no point asking Kakuzu either, for obvious fucking reasons... I dread to think what Tobi would suggest-"
"Tobi thinks we should have a fancy dress party!"
"Why, are you hoping to get Deidara-chan in a schoolgirl outfit or something? Fuck that, although it might've been a good idea if it wasn't yours... meh." His shoulders slumped. "I dunno. Maybe Konan can teach us all to fold paper shuriken."
"Come on, Hidan-san, don't you have any ideas?" Kisame asked, with a teasing and quite literally pointed grin. "Surely the shinobi from the Village That Forgot War has to know something about how to get along nicely?"
"Oh, don't fucking go there!" Hidan erupted, glaring at the Kiri-nin as Kisame chortled and Kakuzu's eyes creased in amusement for the first time all morning. "I am not doing Yugakure training shit with you, even if it'd serve you right because you'd hate it-"
"Yugakure training?" Kakuzu asked, voice gravelled with malice as he finally joined in the conversation. "That's mostly hospitality work and gift shop staffing, isn't it?"
There was a singularly awkward silence. Deidara winced and made an effort not to catch Hidan's eye. Kisame manfully stifled his laughter. Tobi made a high-pitched wheezing noise.
And Hidan bristled, eyes wide as his hand gripped the haft of his scythe. "Wha- fuck you, Kakuzu! Why d'you think I left?!"
"Then there's your team building exercise," Kakuzu said to Pain, unmoved. "Yugakure trains its shinobi to persuade tourists to part with their ryō in exchange for junk. Put Hidan in charge of coming up with a plan," and he gestured across the garden, "to recoup as much money as we can on all the rest of those damned pumpkins."
Everyone turned to look at the looming heap of gourds that still towered beside the house. In the excitement of the previous night, nobody had quite realised how little of a dent their efforts were making in it, but in the cold light of day, there were still entirely too many pumpkins.
For a moment, there was a collective silence.
"We do," Pain said slowly, "need the money."
Everyone looked at Hidan.
"I swear to Jashin-sama I'm going to tear the rest of your fucking hearts out, Kakuzu!"
While everyone else's attention was on the shouting, Deidara gave the pumpkin mound a thoughtful look and sneaked a bite of clay out of one of his hip pouches. Leader wouldn't be happy if the whole heap went up in a glorious explosion, but...
On the other hand, he couldn't be unhappier than everyone else would be about spending who-knew-how-long shilling pumpkins to civilians, so all things considered, it would probably still be worth it.