They pass through the forests of Fire with silent grace, travelling far from the influence of the Hidden Village nestling within the heart of the country. Sasori is silent, placid, running his hands over the bark of the trees and picking up fallen branches from beneath the tangle of undergrowth. It pleases him to be here amongst the forests that supply his finest puppets with their wooden shells.

Deidara watches him brush down a length of broken wood, wooden fingertips peeling off the bark and caressing the grain beneath. He examines his partner’s outer face, tracing the fierce silhouette of Hiruko’s features, frowning even in their silent contemplation.

Deidara dislikes the forests. Here, the branches hang low and their reaching limbs obscure the sky. There is no freedom in this place, only a trapped existence close to the earth. Here, the youth cannot fly his favourite creation for fear that the eyes of the Hokage’s spies will see and note his fleeting shadow.

For all that he does not wish to linger in this place, it is no use to speak of such things to Sasori. The puppet master will at best ignore him, at worst, turn loose his puppets to convey his ire.

Deidara sighs and fidgets and Sasori bends low to pick up another fallen limb.

The night is silent and cold. Passing far beneath him is the canopy of trees that spread verdant across the tiny country of Rain. This place is lush with life and vigour, but for all its beauty its Village is small and timorous, full of diplomats and cowards who will fear to look a stranger in the eye, let alone raise their eyes to the Heavens.

Far above the youth gliding on his clay bird, the greatest art of Creation is played out in the burning of long distant suns. With these creations, the youth thinks, Kami has far outdone himself.

Deidara glides beneath a canopy of a thousand thousand stars, looks up into infinity and smiles.

The forests thin away to nothing. The ground changes slowly from rich loam to a patchy, weedy grass that itself eventually falls in defeat before the onset of the desert sands.

Sasori is silent. Sasori is always silent. Now though, his silence is palpable.

Deidara is no fool, he was trained a ninja and a ninja knows his enemies. The youth is well aware that his partner’s origins lie deep in the wandering dunes of Suna. If nothing else, his beautiful puppets betray their master’s identity.

Here, there is an arrogance to Sasori that he rarely displays elsewhere. It is in the tilt of his puppet’s body, the snap of his stride, the clear trail of footprints he leaves behind him in the sand. He walks as though he owns this place, and this too tells Deidara far more than words alone.

For a time the youth walks beside the puppet master, until the challenge of the other man’s gait begins to tease too greatly at the youth’s nerves. Sasori is silent and will not answer his questions save to dismiss his concerns out of hand.

Deidara worries that their footprints will be seen.

Sasori answers that the deserts of Suna will never betray him.

Deidara is concerned that they will run into border patrols.

Sasori scoffs and informs him that even if they did, they would never be seen.

Deidara asks if Sasori would kill his own countrymen and the Scorpion’s tail misses his head by the barest inch.

The youth laughs mockingly and takes to the skies.

It is deepest night when he finally returns, forced at last to the ground by the bitter cold of the night-time sky. He finds Sasori’s campfire easily, set-up as it is without a concealing jutsu or any care for those who might see. There is no sign of the puppet master and shivering, Deidara huddles close to the tiny flames.

Sasori cannot be concerned that they will be discovered he reasons, or else he would insist upon his usual set of restrictions and precautions. For all his questioning, Deidara trusts his partner’s instincts. By the very nature of his chosen speciality, Sasori is almost pathologically concerned with his own defence. If he sees fit to travel openly in this place, then Deidara will not challenge that.

The puppet master has left his cloak beside the sputtering fire, neatly folded and set carefully out of reach of stray sparks. Deidara glances over at it longingly and pulls his own cloak tighter around his neck to keep out the chill. This place is as cold as the mountains in winter.

For a long time he sits dozing, and in the midst of his half-dreams, he thinks he hears the desert whispering. Some time during the night, he is not sure when, he falls into sleep. When he awakes, the fire has long burned out and Sasori is sat across from him, dark eyes trained intently on his youthful partner’s face.

Stretching out his stiff limbs, Deidara wrinkles his nose at the puppet master and the other turns away with a soft sound of contempt. The youth shrugs and turns to beckon his bird.

They travel during the day until the heat almost kills Deidara.

On the third day his bird falters in the sky, wings dipping oddly before it falls in a graceless dive to the ground. Sasori watches from the distance, his dark eyes following the arc of the creature’s descent as it plummets. He waits until he certain nothing is stirring beneath the hunched form of the prone bird, before setting off at a steady walk towards the construct.

He finds Deidara retching beneath the shelter of the bird’s wing, his face flushed and his hands trembling and stares down at him, his expression unreadable. The youth slurs something almost incoherent about a break before slumping back against the fallen bird.

After that, they travel only in the morning and the last pale hours before nightfall.

He is sick and weak for two days afterwards, and embarrassed for many more weeks after that. Sasori does not mention the incident again, but Deidara knows that when he cannot keep the sickness from making his hands tremble, the puppeteer’s watchful eyes are noting all.

That evening Sasori starts a fire close beside the shelter of the giant bird’s wing and to the youth’s amazement, covers him with his own cloak.

“Don’t puke on it, brat,” he growls.

Any answering words are robbed from his usually fast tongue by what Deidara puts down to the after-effects of the heat sickness. The youth watches his partner shamble off into the desert and does not say a word.

That night his sleep is uneasy and filled with the voice of the desert.

It is three days later before Deidara builds up the courage to ask his partner where he goes each night. Usually, the youth returns to the fire and his partner’s folded cloak with no trace of where the owner of the cloak has vanished to. It was only that one night that he ever saw Sasori leave, and on that night he had been too sick to pursue him and discover more.

Sasori does not answer him. The fierce, dark eyes stare at him silently until, unnerved, Deidara looks away.

He does not ask again after that.

On the morning of the seventh day, Sasori looks to the sky and frowns.

“Be wary,” he says and Deidara nods before taking to the skies.

The sandstorm hits at noon. It comes out of nowhere, rising up from the desert like a wave, and taken by surprise, Deidara and his bird are immediately caught and engulfed. The sands whirl around them, almost tearing him from his mount’s back. Amongst the rushing gusts of air and sharp sands, he can feel the whip and crackle of chakra.

This storm is no natural phenomenon.

Pressing his face into the clay of the bird’s back he tries desperately to shield his uncovered skin from the blasting sands. It is a fight to keep the bird aloft. The architect of this storm has created it in such a way that the whipping tendrils of chakra thread amongst the gusts of wind so that even as the particles of sand scour away at the flesh, the threads of chakra slice persistently away at his chakra.

He just has time to acknowledge the jutsu as being truly masterful before the rushing storm lifts him from the bird’s back and slams him into the ground far below.

It is dark when he awakes. Dark and warm and constricting.

Immediately he panics, his heart hammering a pulse in his throat as he lashes out with his limbs in order to free himself. His feet hit wood with a dull thud and a pair of small hands grip his upper arms in a fierce and vice-like grip.

“Be still, you foolish brat.”

He recognises the voice and halts his struggles immediately. His heart is still pounding in his throat and his limbs are shot through with painful adrenaline-shock, but his trust in Sasori is enough to still him.

Even so, he must fight to keep his breathing under control as the walls of this place close in around him.

“Wh-where are we, un?” he gasps.

Sasori does not answer for long moments, and his grip does not loosen where it holds tight to Deidara’s arms. “Calm yourself,” he says flatly.

Forcing himself to slow his ragged breathing, Deidara realises that he is still straining against his partner’s grip. It is an effort to stop struggling, but once he does, he realises that he can lean back again and rest his head on a solid, cloth-covered surface. Gradually he works the angles into place in his mind and the realisation comes to him at once.

“Are we…inside Hiruko?” he asks eventually.

Sasori’s answer is short and curt. “Yes, now go back to sleep.”

Deidara closes his eyes against the darkness and waits for his pulse to slow. If he does not think about the close confines, then he can ignore the panic that wells in his breast. It helps that he can feel Sasori’s arms, his real arms, one around his upper chest, the other resting on his belly, as he leans back into the puppeteer’s embrace.

It has been many years since anyone held Deidara like this, and it’s a strange comfort now. Reassuring and yet oddly uncomfortable, as though it is forbidden in some way.

Letting out a long, slow breath, he draws his knees up to keep his feet from touching the inside of Hiruko and reminding him of the close confines. Between the knowledge of his confinement, the alien embrace of another being and the burning of his raw skin, it is a long time before sleep finds him.

Deidara dreams.

He is flying over the dunes of Suna, his back pressed against his bird’s, spread-eagled as he stares up at the stars. It is an amazing sight because tonight the stars have been brought down from their lofty perches and they hang close to him in the Heavens. So close that he can see the lazy swirl of galaxies and the burning mass of individual suns.

It is the most beautiful, amazing art he has ever seen.

Threading through the air, carried aloft on the back of the gusts of a warm breeze, the desert whispers. He can hear voices, more than one, in fact a whole host. They sing and laugh and cry and their voices make a strange music that he at once can and cannot understand.

Drifting there beneath the stars, Deidara smiles.

The burning pain of his scoured face brings him slowly awake. As he rises to consciousness the star-dream fades and with it, one by one, so too do the voices of the desert. Until finally, there is only one voice remaining.

Deidara lies, half-asleep and tormented by pain, and listens groggily to the sound of Sasori’s voice. The puppeteer is whispering softly, a continuous stream of words in a lilting Suna dialect that the youth has never before heard.

The words are curling and oddly quaint and they sooth his pain and lull him back to sleep. It is their steady cadence that blends in with the dream in his head and slowly, as he falls deeper into sleep, the voices of the dream desert rise up in accompaniment.

They spend three more days in the desert.

After careful questioning, Deidara finally pries the explanation for the sandstorm out of his partner. It was, as he had suspected, an unmanned chakra-trap. A training area most likely, Sasori explains. If Deidara had not been so eager to fly ahead, Sasori could have warned him. It was his own fault.

Deidara huffs and sulks for the rest of the day, and only rouses himself from his gloom when he spots the remains of his clay bird in the distance. Careful examination of the construct confirms that it is unsalvageable, ruined by the effects of the chakra-sandstorm. Furious, he unleashes a string of curses in his native Stone dialect and kicks the broken construct soundly with one sandaled foot.

Sasori leaves his partner to his fit of temper and heads off alone across the desert.

It is night-time before Deidara catches up to him again. The fire is already lit and the cloak lies folded at its side. Scrabbling tiredly for dried rations in his belt pouches, the youth wraps himself in the thick material before bolting down the food and laying himself down as close to the fire as he can get.

It is barely minutes after his head touches the sand that he is deeply asleep.

Some time before midnight, Deidara awakens.

The need to relieve himself has awoken him rather than any creeping intruder, but still he listens carefully for any other. Lying there in the dim light, he realises that he can hear something.

Softly, so quietly that it could almost go unheard, someone is whispering.

He recognises the dialect immediately, more so than the voice itself really. It is the voice of the desert, it is Sasori. The voice that has been creeping into his dreams every night since they have begun travelling through this desert. Deidara makes a small sound of amusement and rises from the ground to find a place to relieve himself. As soon as he moves, the whispering stops. He can picture Sasori, sat within Hiruko, head cocked as he tracks the movement of his partner by the barest of sounds.

It is some time after he has settled himself again before the whispering starts back up. And it is coming from somewhere beneath him, somewhere far below in the sand itself. Shifting slightly, he presses his ear to the sand to confirm his suspicions.

The whispering, faint as it is, is indeed coming from somewhere far below, deep within the dune itself.

The thought of it reminds him of the night he spent in Hiruko’s embrace, the night after the storm, and the thought of that makes him feel physically sick. Not only did he suffer the confines of the master’s puppet, but they must have been buried deep below the sand as well.

Deidara shudders violently inside his cocoon of cloaks and it is a long time before sleep comes to claim him again.

Two days later they leave the desert.

Sasori stands at its edge and looks back out into the distance where the rolling dunes lie. The wind off the desert ruffles the flaps of his cloak and whips dust and grit into Deidara’s eyes. The youth fidgets, uncomfortably reminded of the sandstorm, and without a word turns to his reformed bird, leaping onto its back and urging it skyward.

Let Sasori mourn his strange home, Deidara cares not. He is free again, and after the desert, even the thick forests look inviting.

Gliding with the wind in his hair and the treetops green and lush below him, Deidara smiles.

It will be a long time before he ever hears Sasori whispering to himself again, for it is many years before they will return to the deserts of Suna.

Never again in that intervening time is Deidara ever to hear the voice of the desert, save for those nights when the stars hang low and he once more glides in dreams above the sands of Suna.