Summary:
Once upon a time, there was a girly-looking guy and a boyish-looking girl who argued. A lot. "I do not look like a girl, brat." "Yes, you do! And you thought I was a guy when we first met, un!" "We were 5 when we first met." But they were friends anyway. "Eternal." "Transient!" Yes, very good friends. In, um, their own ways. [AU] [Non-Chronological Connected Drabbles] [SasoDei] [Fem!Deidara]
Disclaimer:
I don't own Naruto. Or the cover picture. I edited it, though.
The blond was new.
Sasori knew that the blond was new, because he had never seen him in the Sunagakure playground before.
Besides, a Suna native wouldn't be sitting criss-crossed in the sandpit, scooping up grains of the golden material, and letting them run through his fair-skinned fingers like a cascading waterfall of promised riches and glory.
Pardon the cliche.
His hair was long for a boy, barely brushing his narrow shoulders, and fell in sleek straight lines, so every hair would cause a slightly rippling effect when he shifted his position.
It was… oddly vain.
Sasori assumed that he was a civilian; shinobi-in-training, which was what Academy students essentially were, did not typically care for appearances unless they were from a Clan.
A light stepping sound drew the blond's attention away from the sand, as Sasori moved forward with all the grace that a five-year-old could muster up.
Considering that he was a 'prodigious' Academy student with a lot of pride and perhaps more contempt than he was strictly allotted, it was pretty freakin' graceful.
The blond turned to Sasori, and cocked his head in obvious curiosity; the bright sunlight of early-day Suna in autumn, not hot enough for the commonplace summer heat waves, but just warm enough for a pleasant 'basking' feeling, highlighted his delicate features and large blue eyes, wide-open at the presence of someone unfamiliar.
(More than blue, Sasori reflected later, much later, months later.
They were a shade of blue that was too light to be cerulean, too dark to be ice, too un-green to be the ocean currents.
Perhaps a fast-moving river?
Constantly changing, swifter than thought, deceptively shallow, but delighting in mischief such as knocking unwary travelers off their feet, reducing haughty egotists into floundering wrecks soaked to the bone in sun-warmed water.
Unpredictability fit the blond's character, from what he had seen so far.)
"Ohayō!" he greeted him cheerfully.
Bubbly, even.
"I'm Deidara; who're you?" he continued, holding out an expectant hand.
Sasori frowned mildly.
Quite clearly, the blond was one of those accursed creatures known as 'morning people', who seemed to exist for the sole reason of annoying those not nearly so acclimatized to waking up at ungodly hours of the day.
He wasn't exactly a night owl himself, but still. The blond's exuberance at 5 a.m. irritated him on the principle of the matter.
The only reason he was up right now was because he'd forgotten that there was no school on Saturdays, and had woken early as usual, for running through some basic katas and chakra control techniques before the Academy began.
His mother had shooed him outside to 'socialize', claiming that it would be good for him, and that 'you're already up anyway'.
Never being one to resist his parents, he'd obediently wandered outside, with the intention to head to the deserted park and work on his chakra strings in peaceful silence.
Only, the park/playground wasn't deserted.
Which threw off his plans a bit.
Small steps, right? He could think up a way to deal with this… unforeseen variable.
"Sasori," he muttered curtly, eyeing the proffered hand.
Slim, untanned by heavy sunlight exposure, neatly trimmed cuticles, healthy moisturized skin.
Again, vain.
Or simply lucky to have good skin genes, with a conscience about appearance.
His hand was slender for a child; the fingers were longer and thinner, slightly callused at the tips, not the short and rounder kid hands with baby fat still clinging.
Artist's hands.
(So similar to his own.)
Maybe it was just wistful imagination, just Sasori's desire for someone to discuss his art with.
To properly appreciate his art.
(Because it wasn't perfect yet, okay, it wasn't even magnificent like Granny Chiyo's were hailed as, but he was getting there, and some part of him desperately wanted someone to be with him along the stages of getting there.)
HIs parents were supportive, yes, but in a distant, slightly confused sort of way, like they didn't really understand why he was so passionate about his art.
Like they didn't truly understand him.
Komushi could appreciate his art to some degree, but that was because he clearly saw the beginnings of a glorious future for Sasori, whose puppets were already seen as remarkable for his age, and wanted to be part of that future.
Oh, Sasori wouldn't deny that Komushi truly wanted to be his friend as well.
However, it was Komushi's aspirations for fame, and his role as a messenger for Granny Chiyo, that had first sparked their kinship.
And he wasn't an artist himself, had no interest in art beyond how it could benefit him in battle.
A decent person, yet one who had no patience for the finer intricacies and meanings of life.
… Whatever it was, it was something.
As the pause started fringing on 'awkward', he reached unsurely for the hand, and took it in his grasp, shaking it once, before quickly letting go.
The skin-on-skin contact felt… cool.
Clean, at least, for someone who had been sifting through sand for some time now.
.
.
.
"Great!" Deidara cheered, blinking a few times to get rid of the sand specks collecting on her eyelashes. "Wanna play with me?"
This 'Sasori' was the quiet sort; he barely spoke, though he consented to playing with her in the sandbox.
Really, there was far too much sand in Sunagakure, in her opinion.
It was still a nice change from the constant grit and rocky mountains of Iwagakure.
The Land of Wind's grit, in contrast, was slightly softer, to be sure.
Watching the rolling, undulating dunes of the desert on her way to Suna had been fun, anyway.
Kaa-san had told her, as she carried her on her back and ran over the golden mounds, that those dunes were what the sea looked like, if the dunes were water and moved more.
She'd been entranced.
Iwa wasn't in a land-locked country, but it was still a fair distance from the seashore, and the waters up there were supposedly cold and frigid, only good for pearl-diving and for landing the few ocean-treading traders that came that way.
Deidara had never seen the sea, being 5 and an Iwa resident and a Kekkei Genkai user from a fairly respected if small Iwagakure Clan.
There hadn't been a good enough reason to bring her to the seashore, other than 'she wants to see what an endless expanse of water looks like', which was considered a mere childish whim.
She'd gotten mad and sulky over the constant rejection, especially since her older brothers and father were always running missions to exotic places and had seen plenty of seas in their time.
But she was the sole female bearer of their Explosion Release bloodline, which apparently meant something, other than 'she's a kunoichi and can't participate in the competition for becoming heir', other than 'you're weaker and more fragile and will have to be homeschooled by your mother until you're old enough to test for Genin', other than 'you'll never be as good as your brothers'.
(It was infuriating at times, and there were moments when she just wanted to throw a clay spider at their stupid faces and burn them all in beautiful, glorious art.
Kami, she wanted to do that so bad.
Stupid kami-damned artless bastards.
[Maybe for real, too, since her father wasn't exactly known as a shining paragon of morality, and so long as they were all blond and had the Kekkei Genkai of the Shinsei Clan, no one could ever tell the difference.]
Then her mother would lay a warning hand on her thin shoulder and steer her carefully away, cradling her fingers in her own, unafraid of the fangs and tongues.
"Deidara," she'd say, eyes deep and eyes dark, and that would be that.
She always obliged her mother.)
And the sand of Suna felt pleasant, too, all warm and smooth and grainy on top, rubbing away the dead skin of her hands into perfect smoothness, all chilly and damp and clumped underneath, like a differently-colored new clay type that fell apart moments after she tried compressing it a free-standing shape.
Nevertheless, she kept on trying to mold the sand, cross-legged and face scrunched up into concentration, her Kekkei Genkai occasionally helping out with flickering darts of pale pink.
Sasori, silently tracing lines into his flattened patch of sand, asked her a couple of questions, which she happily agreed to answer, since, well, he was taking the time to play with her, even if their 'playing' was basically her humming and attempting to form sculptures and him sitting across from her digging seals for practice.
"Where are you from?"
"Iwagakure! Me and Kaa-san came here for negotiations! Well, she did, and she let me tag along because she knew I wanted to see the ocean but couldn't and she's nice like that, so she brought me to somewhere different as a consolation prize of sorts!"
"So, you're… a family of merchants?" he hazarded a guess, eyes narrowing and a face so serious it made her want to throw sand at it.
She didn't, though, because Kaa-san would inevitably find out and stare at her with that disappointed look.
Still.
Way too serious.
Also, his cheeks were pudgy with lingering baby fat, and coupled with his overly-mature attitude, Deidara had to exercise some serious self-control to hold back from patting and pinching and pulling the sides of his face.
Kami, the things she did for the sake of a tentative maybe-friend.
"Nope! I'm not a civvie, I'm going to be a ninja," she corrected him, not using 'kunoichi'.
There were connotations attached to the difference between a kunoichi and a shinobi.
Even when times progressed, modernizing slightly overall, and even when 'kunoichi' is technically just the term for a female ninja…
There were connotations, and Deidara resented those connotations, and now she's going to stop thinking about things that make her mad before she does something impulsive and misses her new maybe-friend's reply.
"I… see," he said, eyebrows knitting a little closer together, tone just skeptical enough to imply ambiguous confusion.
"But then," he continued, pushing away the sand he'd been writing in, "why are you not training instead, if you are truly serious about becoming a ninja?"
She scrunched up her face into a distasteful expression.
"Okay, you are way too serious for a kid," she decided, self-control slipping, and voicing her former thoughts.
"Like, do you even know what 'fun' is? Fun is what you do as a kid. Because you're a kid. Who wants to grow up so fast and become an adult? Adults have icky stuff like responsibility and work and they're always sad. Sad for a reason. The reason being that they're adults. Have what fun you still can have, before you grow up too much and people start piling societal expectations onto your shoulders."
He appeared faintly stunned.
"What?" Deidara scowled defensively. "I can use fancy-shmancy words like 'societal expectations' too, y'know. Just because I don't always speak as nicely as you might do doesn't mean I'm dumb."
Because kami knows she's gotten her fair share of 'dumb blond' jokes in Iwa.
It was more of a gentle, expected ribbing than anything else, since the Shinsei Clan was moderately respected for their great destructive powers, but it was still annoying to experience.
Sasori nodded, and shrugged.
"... sorry."
Scrutinizing him suspiciously for a long moment, she pronounced him to be a person who didn't apologize often, and thus took what she could get.
"Apology accepted," she graciously declared.
As these idle questioning chit-chats go, passions are soon brought up.
In specifics: shared passions.
Which meant the blond and the redhead, the blond smoothing off some sand from her packed-tight sphere, the redhead levitating a layer of sand over his hands for chakra control, reached the topic of art.
That was a discussion far shorter and less explosive than it had the potential to be, particularly if it had happened when they were older and more lethal and Deidara had mastered her Explosion Release Kekkei Genkai.
It still devolved into a shouting match, of course.
Thankfully, it was still early in the morning, around 6:45, so there weren't many people in the Sunagakure playground.
Or, um.
Any people other than themselves.
Not that they noticed; they were too caught up in trying to establish their own very vehement ideas of art as the 'correct' one.
"Art is something that lasts for all posterity, all eternity! Art is eternal and immortal, and you'd better acknowledge that before you can consider yourself a true artist!" Sasori growled, clearly stoked by the mention of his favorite subject to wax poetic on.
(He didn't really wax poetic on it, but it was the closest to it that he'd ever get, in all likeliness.
That counted, right?)
"Excuse me!? I am so a true artist, yeah! Art is fleeting, it is transient, it is beautiful precisely because it cannot be captured! It is here for a glimpse and gone in the next, yeah, a teasing flash of revelation and understanding of art's deep meaning! An artist, a true artist, is one who knows that they will never know the extent of their art, yeah!" Deidara roared back, eyes glowing blue anger and hair stiffening with indignation.
(Well, no, none of that actually happened, but she was angry, and she was indignant, and she did tense up with coiled adrenaline.
That counted, right?)
"... I admit that your translation of what a true artist is holds some grain of truth, but your interpretation of art is definitely skewed!"
"Oh, yeah!? W-Well, my kaa-san said that art can mean different things to different people! So they're all right, all the interpretations of art, because those interpretations are, um, 'personal and unique to how they feel'," she carefully quoted her mother.
"A-And she also said that everyone has the right to be wrong! So there!" she finished off furiously, slightly drained from her spur-of-the-moment rant, jabbing a stern finger into his chest.
It kinda hurt, since it was really bony, but she grimly kept up her severe, 'don't-mess-with-me' expression that she'd copied from her mother, and vindictively hoped that her fingernail (all caked underneath with gray clay and gold sand that her mother was sure to scold her for later and cut and clean) was at least digging somewhat painfully into his skin, through the thin gauzy fabric of a Suna native's clothes.
He wasn't even paying attention to the fingernail, though.
"What is that?" he asked blankly, staring down at the tip of something that had just spat a clump of sand onto the front of his shirt.
"Is that a tongue-" he started, before being interrupted by Deidara snatching back her hand, face flushing a burning pink that began curling into pale scarlet.
"It's a Kekkei Genkai thing, okay!?" she hissed sensitively, bristling but remembering to keep her voice quiet, like Kaa-san had always warned her to do when talking about the Shinsei's Explosion Release outside of their Compound, and especially when outside of Iwa.
There was a low-level Genjutsu her mother usually cast on her hands when traveling, shallow enough to not warrant notice, a simple one that prevented others from focusing too much on them unless they already knew something was peculiar.
(Having sand spit at you out of someone's palms would count as peculiar, methinks.)
Minorly startled at the laid-back blond getting prickly and worked up over the extra mouths on her hands, but understanding of the paranoia surrounding bloodlines (Suna had a fair few of them; not as many as Konoha, naturally, since no one had as many prominent bloodlines as Konoha did), Sasori cautiously backed off.
"... Whatever," he muttered stoically, which was essentially 'backing off' for him.
When he seemed to have no problems with her Kekkei Genkai, Deidara eyed him warily for an instance more, then reverted to her cheery personality, contentedly spending the next hour refining her sphere-sculpture and entertaining light chatter.
.
.
.
Stuff like:
"How long will you be staying in Suna?"
"Two more days and three more nights! Hey, what's your favorite food, yeah?"
"I don't have a preference. Food is food. It's simply sustenance, fuel for the body's functions."
"Geez, still way too serious, yeah. I think you're a spicy kind of person! Desert food is supposed to be spicy, anyway. Stuff like cactus and peppers, yeah! I like bakudan, myself, though I'd never say no to ice-cream. We don't get enough of ice-cream in Iwa, yeah, and Suna seems to have even less."
"Cactus and peppers? Cactus isn't spicy, and Suna delicacies aren't all about peppers."
"But do you like spicy foods, yeah?"
"... You're oddly intent on this for some reason."
"That's not an answerrrrrrr…"
"Stop whining, brat."
"How am I a brat!? We're, like, the same age, yeah! Practically! I think!"
"I'm five."
"I'm five too, so hah! Birthday?"
"... November 8th."
"Ahah! May 5th, yeah! Suck it!"
"Suck what?"
"... I don't really know, actually. It's just a saying I heard, yeah. I guess it means to taste defeat, yeah?"
"Hm. Maybe."
"My point being, you can't call me 'brat' anymore, yeah! You sound just like my brothers and my dad, too…"
"You don't get along with them?"
"They're stupid and mean and I hate them, yeah."
"...?"
"How are you asking a question without even saying anything, yeah!?"
"Talent and skill. … brat."
"Stop that, yeah!"
"...?"
"Oh, you did not just un-verbally say 'or what'!"
"...? And 'un-verbally' isn't a real word."
Deidara threw a handful of sand at his face, Sasori dodged most but not all of it.
The Epic War of Sand commenced.
When 7:30 came, both were bright-eyed and pinked with exertion, Deidara grinning widely and laughing even as he grumbled about getting the sand out of his hair later, Sasori smiling faintly and smirking even as he listened to him grumbling about getting the sand out of his hair later.
"It's a draw," he suddenly said, referring to their little mini-battle.
"...?" he glanced at him.
"It's a draw," he repeated, sitting up straighter and meeting his mauve eyes directly, something harder resonating in his voice, something harder and softer at the same time. "That means you have to come tomorrow at the same time so we can have a rematch, yeah. Got it?"
He stretched out his hand, a reenactment of their meeting roughly two-and-a-half hours before.
A bridge, him handing him a key, a choice.
Sasori looked at the thin, slender, pale fingers.
'Artist's hands', he remembered thinking.
He slowly reached out and shook it.
"Got it," he confirmed, his smile fading but somewhat warmer in a way he didn't quite understand yet.
Deidara beamed, even wider and more radiant than before, all shine and sparkle and very close to blinding him.
Then another voice called from a distance away, on the edges of the playground.
"Musume-chan!" a pretty women in her mid-twenties hailed, large blue eyes and fine features and short ash-blond curls, standing tall in a close-fitting gray outfit.
"Kaa-san!" Deidara excitedly shouted back, bursting into a level of hyperactivity drawn from his seemingly infinite reserves of energy, as if he'd completely forgotten his state of exhaustion a few seconds ago.
… Hold on a second.
Rewind, backtrack, replay.
"'Musume'?" Sasori blurted in bewilderment.
"Well, yeah," he said, bewildered at his bewilderment. "She can't exactly call me her son, now can she?"
There was a pause that was slowly but surely and steadily edging it's way into 'awkward'.
Blinking, Deidara peered closer at Sasori.
"Wait, you didn't…" he, um, she said in dawning sort of horrified amusement.
"You thought I was a guy, yeah!?"
Sasori shrugged uncomfortably.
"You look rather androgynous, and 'Deidara' isn't a very gender-specific name," he pointed out in self-justification, the slow singeing of embarrassment starting to smolder under his skin, gritty with sand from their impromptu 'fight'.
"But still," h- she repeated.
She didn't seem to be mad, however, just shocked with a degree of finding it to be funny.
"Musume-chan!" her mother called again, causing Deidara to jerk to attention.
"We're still on for tomorrow, yeah?" she whispered urgently, uncertainly, getting up and brushing sheets and slabs of sand off of her.
"Y- Yeah," he agreed, because it wasn't like her suddenly being revealed as a girl changed much of what they'd gone through.
"Great, then, bye!" she yelled back to him as a parting goodbye, already up and running to hug her mother, lobbing something in his direction.
Startled, Sasori caught it without letting his surprise show, like a good shinobi.
She waved to him until they rounded the corner and vanished out of sight, covered by stone walls and the scrubby vegetation that managed to eke out a living in the arid Suna climate.
He didn't wave in return, but he watched her leave.
A glance downwards showed the lobbed object to be a sphere of sand, most likely what she'd been working on.
Then the sphere exploded.
Covered in sand, eyes squeezed tightly shut, Sasori waited for the assault to be over, and then slowly shook himself off, making sure to wipe his eyes.
"Art is an explosion, huh?" he murmured to himself, a quirk to his lips that he'd forever deny.
.
.
.
"Who was that boy you were playing with in the sand, Musume-chan? Oh, look, you're all covered in it," Shinsei Hisoka sighed fondly, affection evident in the way she gently picked off a few flecks of the sand from her daughter's shoulders.
Deidara smiled sunnily up at her, one hand clutching her mother's as they crossed the narrow Suna streets, heading towards their hotel.
"His name's Sasori and he's my age and he's, like, way too serious all the time, but he knows the importance of art and can be fun at times even if plays dirty by pulling my hair but that's okay because I shoved his face into the sand and got him to laugh and did you know that he thought I was a boy until you showed up and called me?"
She paused for a massive intake of breath, gazing at her expectantly.
"How interesting, Musume-chan," Hisoka obliged.
That was apparently her cue to continue, because Deidara then shot off onto another fast-paced ramble.
Hisoka smiled down at her.
Ah, how she adored her cute little Ra-chan.
"So adorable," she cooed, ruffling her sand-spiked locks.
Her daughter humored her with a good-natured hug and another smile.
"-so then it turns out I'm actually older than him but he kept calling me a brat anyway and said he was more mature than I am which was so not true even if he used bigger words than I did but I could still understand him anyway and he looked so surprised when I used 'social expectancies' or something like that anyway I think I forgot by now and did you know that he doesn't have a favorite food?"
"Very interesting, Musume-chan."
"And it all started with me throwing some sand in his face because he was being all stuffy and-"
They walked off, hand-in-hand, mother gliding and daughter half-running.
.
.
.
"Had fun today, Sori-kun?" Moto Sadao politely asked over dinner, worn and beginning to look slightly gaunt from his work.
Tensions were heating up; a war was almost guaranteed to break about by two years' time, if not earlier.
With any luck, though, he wouldn't be deployed until things really got going, allowing him some more precious time with his family.
Reminded, he shared a loving smile with his charming wife, wishing this peace could last longer, however tenuous.
"Oh, yes, I sent you out to socialize today, didn't I? How'd it go, Sa-chan? Make any friends? Meet any new people? Perhaps a lovely little girl around your age?" Moto Akira joked lightly, her long black hair not hiding the bags forming under her eyes.
Her mother-in-law was busy tonight, buried to her neck in Council meetings, leaving her to make a simple three-person meal instead; Chiyo would probably eat from a foodstand near the Council Building, or mooch off her colleagues.
She didn't really expect her antisocial son to answer positively, and was thus understandably stunned when he did.
"Yes. Her name is Deidara, she's from Iwa with her mother, visiting here for the next two days because her mother is involved in negotiations of some sort. She likes explosions, bakudan, dislikes being called a brat, and is thoroughly immature while remaining one of the smarter people around my age that I've met," he listed, sounding for all the world like he was giving a report in his detached, flat monotone.
He chewed thoughtfully on his pickled plums, and then added with a slightly more energetic tone, "She appreciates art, even if her idea of it is completely wrong."
(Which appeared to be his explanation for everything.)
Sadao raised an eyebrow noiselessly at Akira, gesturing over the ducked head of their child.
Akira raised a mirroring eyebrow and lifted an arm in an one-armed shrug, with a wry smile.
'Seems to be doing him some good, anyway,' she mouthed. 'And I wouldn't object to a daughter-in-law sooner than later.'
'I can't imagine Sasori ever dating anyone,' he confessed in a similar fashion. 'He's so focused and quiet like my father; his grandfather.'
They shared parental looks, and then glanced at Sasori, who remained ignorant to the remarks passing overhead.
"I'll be meeting with her tomorrow," he spoke up again, lifting his head from his food, to the sight of his father and mother acting innocent.
He gazed at him with furrowed brows, but ultimately dismissed their strange behavior and picked up another cabbage leaf.
'Ohmykamiohmykamiahhhhhthisissocute!' Akira air-squealed, fanning herself with a manic smile and zealous eyes. 'Whoever this 'Deidara' is, I so ship it!'
'They're only five!' Sadao protested, sweat-dropping at his complacent wife's enthusiasm. 'That's far too young for a relationship; it's probably just one of those childish friendships that are struck up in hours and last for only a few hours more!'
'Doesn't mean I can't start nudging them towards it!' she retorted. 'If he really takes after his grandfather so much, then we'll have to wait until he's 28 and someone asks him out first after years of waiting for him to make the first move; besides, this is his first friend that isn't Komushi, so we should be encouraging him as his parents!'
"Hey, darling?" Akira said, directed towards Sasori.
"Kaa-san?" he tilted his head in answer.
She smiled sweetly, clasping her hands together.
"How would you like for me to make two bentos tomorrow? You and Deidara-chan could eat together! Don't forget to introduce us sometime soon, I'm sure her mother is a very nice person."
Sasori, inexplicably, felt like he was signing away on something very important when he nodded yes in an otherwise indifferent acceptance.
It gave him the chills, and he made sure to burrow tighter into his blankets that night.
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'Shinsei' means 'nova', at least that's how I interpreted it.
Nova as in star, as in dying nova, as in the gigantic explosion from that.
'Moto' as in 'base', 'origin', 'root'.
The start of something, and at the time I thought it had a connection to immortality, but I'm sleep-deprived right now and am too tired to make sense of the words in my head.
So, yeah.
This will kinda be like 'Academia', just lighter and fluffier and there's nothing even remotely resembling a plot.
Like, at all.
'Evidence' was supposed to be, like, him demanding evidence of her being a girl, but this was already too long and I wanted to post it, so feel free to interpret that however you'd like now.
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-Reviews. Reviews. Reviews.-