Cancer

Lee spat blood and grimanced, bracing his arms against his trembling knees. The panic welled in his chest and as he took in her lifeless body again, draped with grace in her death across the floor. Her pink hair was chopped short and her clothes were ripped and stained, but she did not rage at her state, nor at his stupidity, and he knew she never would again.

I must win this battle.

For Sakura.

Panting with the exertion, Lee's eyebrows knit down in a furiously determined expression as he gazed at the blonde teen, who laughed outright in his face. Sakura's face flashed across his temples at the sight and Lee almost cried out.

"What, leaf boy?" The man's blue eyes widened manically, his long ponytail and black cloak whipping, bannerlike, "Is it too much for you? I... I killed her.... And oh, was it beautiful! All soggy pink and green with blood."

Deidara lifted his arms in triumph, smiling with a look unused upon his face. In his insanity, he was beautiful - unrestrained and full of feeling. His heart beat with adrenaline, his chakra raced and his limbs seemed to stretch like rays of light.

Lee didn't understand the sudden change in the teen, couldn't because he didn't know what it was to live after losing what you couldn't sense until it was already gone, didn't know how it felt to have watch the thing every day for your entire life, didn't know how to die. He didn't have that one perfect moment when time slowed and space became just you and your head and everything you created came together in a cacophony of feeling, actual feeling that you could see and you knew would always stay with everyone who witnessed it, and you could say it was because of you, that you had made it. He didn't have that, and he'd never have it, especially now that she was dead and he was left with only the headband around his waist and the weights around his ankles, and nothing else.

Deidara's mouths, all three, formed a splitting smile in his one perfect moment, the art he had created- and though Lee would never know what it was like to make it, he knew what it was to be it, because thats what Deidara had made him. His knuckles, skin broken and bruised, his chest blotted with life fluid, his teeth bared like a dying animal and his eyes, heavy with so much pain and anguish in the sensation of his soul cracking that they seemed to grow within his face until it was all Deidara could see, in front of and behind his blue orbs.

And the blonde teen cried, he cried with the rivers streaming down his face because it was all he'd ever needed, and as his arms fell slowly to his sides he knew that in his last moments of life, which would be dealt by his own creation, he would feel the piece that had escaped him for his entire life, because what's more incredible than creating that one feeling that consumes a person's soul, and forgets them how to love? Perhaps love itself is more incredible, but perhaps not, because Deidara had felt that once and he remembered what it was like, and it had not make his heart swell like that broken look did.

So he laughed and laughed until his voice lost its frantic pitch and calmed into a heady timbre, and his eyes squinted from the light, the wrinkles charming and soothing his face, and his cheeks flushed with his feeling, and his hands were pale and their skin unbroken, and for one moment, he was just another man, overcome with the feeling of his being growing and spreading out, not a tool driven insane by the looks on all their faces.

The boy glinted silver and Deidara fell, and his eyes were vacant but they'd never looked more full.