Sick
Tayuya hadn't known Deidara that long when she found out some seniors beat him up for his feminine features in the September cool of their first year at Oshima. (In fact, Tayuya had hardly known anyone, for she had come all the way from Oto to the island, and the only face she recognized, with a manner of disgust, was Itachi's, and she made a point to lash out at him or just ignore him when she could. Both were surprisingly difficult, as the security for fighting, especially in Freshman classes, was pretty tight, and she'd already been suspended for beating up a couple of the students in retaliation to provocation, and it was sickeningly difficult to ignore Itachi because he was the only one she knew.)
The news itself really isn't a shock when it reaches her from where she sits in the back of Jiraiya's classroom, legs resting on the surface of her desk and her shamelessness evident with her skirt nearly hiked completely at her hips and deep, nasty scars on her legs and thighs flaring and proud for anyone to see. (Anyone, being most of the boys in the class, because she is distracting, whether they find her attractive or not.) She looks up as Deidara's name is uttered between the heads of two nameless boys, and her eyes harden when "'Heard some upperclassman kicked his fairy ass." is spoken in passing.
She is escorted from the class when a nose is broken and her fists are soaked in blood.
(-A substitute had been there that week.)
Tsunade suspends her for a couple of days, and she walks home, stopping at a gas station for a carton of cigarettes (Fake ID) and a bottle of beer (Fake ID) to kick down the sidewalk when she was done killing herself from the inside just a little bit more. When she leaves the station, smoking a fresh cigarette and sighing into the drag (she had some pot, acid, a few tabs of ecstasy, and some morphine back at her apartment, and the craving for a joint comes in the unsatisfactory beginnings of a five minute nicotine buzz. Burn, inhale, exhale, breathe-) "-Tastes like goddamn horse shit, bastard sold me some cheap shit."
How she finds herself at Deidara's apartment is a matter of chance. They hardly live at a close distance to one another, in fact, the distance is pretty great, and there is one reason and one reason only that she managed to get to his building so many blocks away from her own and be unaware of it.
Tayuya had only lived on the island for a month.
She can recognize she's at the wrong building when she eyes it from the outside, it is built in a completely different fashion than her own, and as she eyes the many doorbells on the front door, a relatively new looking card, by comparison to the others, catches her eye, and she laughs a little to herself at the irony of her situation. (She tosses the empty beer bottle behind her and waits for the satisfactory scream of the shattering glass before she moves, pulling a lock picking set she'd crafted herself out of broken credit cards, bobby pins, needles, small screwdrivers, and a few paper clips and letting herself inside the lobby of the old building with a series of clicks and clinks.) The sound of a scar screeching behind her makes her grin.
"What a fuckin' retard."
The apartment lobby is old, and the thick smell of dust and rotting wood reaches her nose, but it is far more pleasant a smell than that of her own, so her nose doesn't crinkle in disgust as most would. A thick man sits behind the desk, reading a magazine, and she approaches him coldly, irritation so evident in her eyes, though the appearance of a fourteen year old student that was far too skinny hardly one of threat. (His eyes snake down to her skirt, which is ripped in several places, some intentional, though most the results of fights. Her fists tighten.)
"What can I do for ya, lil' lady?"
Jesusfuck. A goddamn American fatass. My fuckin' luck.
"Got the room number for a little blondie foreigner? Dei-da-rah or something?" (The Yank in her voice accents his name awkwardly. Oto is really too far away.) She puts a hand at her hip and eyes him with a glare, slanting slightly towards his desk so her opportunities remain open.
"Sorry, lil' lady, that there's confidential, for the respect of m'."
Tayuya glares hard at the man, but he only smiles, running a hand through his greasy hair and returning to his magazine, nonchalantly, daring her to propose something in her favor. (Sick motherfucker, I'm gonna kick your ass in the next ten seconds if you don't give me the goddamn-) A palm is placed with a forced, sickeningly sweet calm, and she gazes at him with a hardness in her glare only (-a goddamn yankee-) could have. He just grins.
"I would really fucking appreciate the number, if you goddamn please."
His grin vanishes and is replaced with a look of disappointment, and he crosses his arms in an almost scolding fashion. "Pretty lil' girl like you shouldn't use such dirty language." He sets the magazine on the counter next to an older looking computer, a mug of coffee, and a calendar with naked women at every angle. "Now I'm really not gonna give you the number. Dei'd hate to have a pretty girl who talked poison to come see m'-"
In a sudden, sporadic movement, Tayuya's fist collides with his face, and for the second time that day, the satisfying feel of a nose breaking under her knuckles and the agonized yell of someone beneath her makes her grin something sadistic. ("What brings you here?"
"Fuckin' fighting."
"That's a dumb reason to be in a place like this. Cut the swearing."
"Go fuck yourself.") The slick feeling of fresh blood between her fingers widens her grin, and the caked, crusted blood from before moistens again, and her hand feels suffocated with human secretion. The sound of the man's curse and shouting is distant, and silent with another punch, the feeling of a permanent tooth being dislodged in her anger something sick and beautiful that only a girl like her could glut in. ("How often do you get in fights?"
"Three or four times a day."
"How do you not get hurt?"
"I black out and go motherfuckin' crazy.") What all of those Residential Treatment Centers had done for her is unbeknownst to anyone. (They couldn't discharge her for 'resisting treatment', as it was so lovingly referred to as. She was just a little too dangerous. In Juvi, in State's Custody, Tayuya is a devil with pretty smile. However often such may or may not be.) Another loud crunch, and she becomes suddenly very aware of what she is doing as she comes down from the blackout, and the blood that coats her hands and the man's face is suddenly so much more red than it had been before.
His moan is quiet, distant, and the weakness comes in a rush to her head as she the taste of metal becomes registered in her split lip.
She kneels down to him and touches his face, almost gently; a mocking sweetness as she trails her thumb across his blackened cheek, and his flinch into her touch is hard, bringing a smile to her face. (A real smile. Not a sick smirk or a sadistic little grin, but a smile, and it's flattering to her features, how uncommon the occurrence is.) "Can you tell me his room number, pretty please?"
It is choked out among a mouthful of blood, a harsh raspy voice, he utters the number, and she kisses his cheek before taking one of the needles in her lock picking kit and piercing a vital chord in the nearest telephone. "I'll call for a paramedic if you don't tell on me, shithead. If you do, I'll leave you here to die on a dirty goddamn floor of a shithole apart because of blood loss or brain damage. Your choice. When I'm done with Deidei you'll tell me your choice. Until then, ya fucker."
Her probation officer doesn't have to know.
When she reaches Deidara's room, the fluorescent lights on the time-rotting ceiling above her blink on occasion, like a slow motion strobe light in a corridor that tasted like (-blood, but that isn't the air,) and smelled faintly of formaldehyde. (The mold in the plaster ceiling reminds her of one of those pitiful, idealistic horror scenes, and she rolls her eyes as she pulls a bobby pin and a broken credit card from her pocket, latching the card in the thin space between the door and the frame and hooking it into the latch, twisting the pin in a hard jerk to the right and quickly twisting the knob, the card forcing it open almost noiselessly, and she eyes the red handprint on the knob for a second before replacing the tools into her pocket. She could clean it later.)
When she walks in, she doesn't make a point of being secretive, nor does she make her presence blatantly known, only walking into the clean bathroom and twisting the left knob of the sink, letting the water flood from the old fashioned tap and it streaking bright red as it hit her hands. The large mirror tells her she looks something terrible, dark bruises on her neck and dried blood caked in every crevice, as well as one of the holes in her earlobe bleeding as though the stud had been taken out far too harshly. (Goddamn blackouts.)
Tayuya turns to his shower, ripping back the curtain and pulling off her shirt, twisting the settings and waiting for the water to be hot enough to burn her raw before stripping completely and standing beneath the showerhead, grabbing a bar of soap (-bright green and made of something transparent, and she holds it above her, against the blinding overhead light, the reflection much too pretty against her face, a green light against the rinsing blood and the dramatic color of her hair. Beautiful.) She scrubs herself until she can't smell it anymore and borrows a palm of some shampoo that smells like grapefruit (Goddamn girl.) and rubbing it into her hair until she could feel clean again.
Her constant expectation of Deidara to burst into the bathroom with a gun was, to her surprise, never satisfied.
(Or maybe she'd become paranoid.)
When she's finished showering, she puts her clothes back on and doesn't bother to runs one of his brushes through her hair after towel drying it, the tangles and the painful rips of knots of strands at her scalp making her utter irritated noises of protest until she gives up and just drops the brush into his sink (it's bright pink, now) and, almost a little too casually, walking back into his empty living room, and she wonders if he's even home, at this point. (What kind of a goddamn idiot would miss that?)
The sound of a door opening and a floor creaking under the weight of a person jolts her from a muffin she'd taken from a jar, and she swallows her bite and stiffens a little, crossing her arms as Deidara's form appeared from behind a door that had one of the most interesting of scents emanating. (Smelled like fire. Burning rubber, expensive paper, gunpowder, butane, and an array of other poisonous, pyromaniacle scents. It had a strange way of fitting his profile. (Crash and BURN.)
For a second, he just stares at her.
"What the hell, yeah?!"
For several seconds, she stares at him. Bruises edged up and down his face, and homemade stitches on a nasty mark on one of his cheeks is vibrant against his complexion, and his entire self seems to radiate exhaustion, and a shock is in the eye she can see, a bright blue with a dark brown bruise around it. (Black eye. Lucky the bastard who punched him wasn't wearing a ring. If he had, she would be able to tell.) He is dressed loosely in street clothes, just a tee-shirt and jeans, but all over him are nasty bruises, with the occasional burn scar that looked as though it had been there for a long time.
(She knows she probably doesn't look much different.)
She pauses and crosses her arms.
"Wanna learn how to fight?"
It takes nearly an hour to convince him to let her teach him. (She'd punched him, give or take, five times before he finally got it through his head that she really wanted to teach him how to fight, which would require him dropping his sexist Boys Can't Hit Girls values. Tayuya is the exception to that rule. Always.) She grins and balls her fist, putting it up to his eye level so he could see it clearly. (He stares at her knuckles, and they're torrid pink, and he doesn't say anything about it, because he knows what it is.)
"You gotta tighten your fist up like you wanna cut open your palms, because a punch can hurt a lot if it's loose and you hit a bone or some shit, so you have to be tight to be able to recoup- NOT LIKE THAT YOU GODDAMN RETARD."
She made him practice on the wall until his knuckles were bleeding. Each punch was more and more violent, and Deidara could feel what it was exactly she meant when she said fighting is intimate, the pain that shot through his arm as he tightened his fist and flung it towards an empty spot in his wall, each time receiving a shout for a certain area of improvement, and when the white of his wall suddenly had four spots of blood on it, she caught his arm.
"You are really weird, yeah." Deidara commented aridly, drinking from soda bottle and waiting for the blood under the gauze bandage he'd dug up from a medicine cabinet, the sting of the set of wounds making him wince ever so slightly, and the bubbly drink burning his throat in passivity down his throat. (This is not what he does. Fighting may be intimate, in the way that only people letting all of their pain away completely in a flash of limbs, and you learn the most about a person when you fight them. It makes sense when she says this things, though he can't think of what he learned from the seniors that beat him up. But fighting is not his art. He exhales and the scent of gas lingers upon it. He wonders if she catches it.)
Tayuya smacks him lightly on the back of the head as she finishes tying material around her knuckles, standing up and bending over, popping far too many places in her back and devoid of shame if Deidara could see anything. (He's only a guy. Who would give a shit?)
"Fuck you too. Get up off your ass."
He's slightly surprised at her abrupt rudeness, (-though not too much so, her reputation had established faster than a disease, and she was living up to it, perhaps a little more so,) but he stands, shoulders going slightly rigid when she grabs them and faces him directly towards her.
Her lips move.
He blinks.
"Hit me."
He stares.
"The hell, yeah? Why?"
She rolls her neck on her shoulders, and once again the sounds of tense muscles releasing pressure comes in an array of snaps, and he winces a little at the noise, though he knows it only sounds painful. (A release. He needs to go to the chiropractor. His spine had gotten too tense to just pop back into place.) "Because," she begins, pulling an elastic hair tie off of Deidara's wrist and using it to loosely pull her own hair up, the better for it not to get in her way. "A wall can't hit back."
The thought of fighting Tayuya for practice was disturbing. (And he considers arguing that the wall could hit back, because he ended up getting hurt anyways, but he could tell she would probably punch him and call him a "GODDAMN PUSSY" if he said such a thing.) He considers his options. Deny her, and she'll persist until he has to. Accept, and she'll think he's cocky and go all out. Tell her to get out and she'll punch him. Walk away and she'll drag him back by his hair. (He'd tried each of these and the results had been black and white.)
"No way."
She glares.
"Don't be such a fuckin' idiot. Punch me."
"No."
"Punch me."
"No."
"Punch me."
"No."
Tayuya's fist collides with a point in his stomach, and Deidara chokes as the wind is knocked out of him, the gasps for breath gaping and reminding her slightly like a fish out of water. Pulling him back up to face her roughly by a shoulder, her voice echoes in his apartment, loud, angry, and demanding.
"GODDAMNIT, FUCKING HIT ME DEIDARA."
The punch he throws is sudden, and it hits her in the shoulder, his aim and balance askew as he recovers from the lack of breath, and an expression of half-surprise, half-relief appears in her eyes as a burn runs up a spot on her upper arm, an angry heat and the oncoming of a mild bruise aching in the spot where he'd hit her. She grins. (It is not like the way she had grinned at the man behind the counter. It is not quite that insane. There is something underlying it. The ability to not break apart from the world completely.)
She punches him back, and it's sharp, erratic, awakening to the fact that she was serious and that he knew what to do, and when Deidara closes his eyes and forgets the person he's fighting is some crazy girl he barely knows, his punches aim better. His kicks meet target more often, and the feeling of her body growing warm in the heat of a fight beneath his hits was more fiery, and more alive, and it is there that he can compare art with fighting without irritation and second thought. (The heatwave.)
It doesn't last long, and she wins (of course), but the both of them are blooming red and Tayuya can remember what she did for the first time in a while, and when she lays down on the floor next to him, while he aches for his breath she'd knocked out of him again in a hard kick at a spot in his chest, something happens, and it's beautiful and strange in it's own way.
Tayuya laughs.
And Deidara thinks she's sickeningly beautiful when she laughs, lying next to him, bleeding from a fight she had demanded out of him.
An hour later it is late, and she leaves as suddenly as she had arrived, giving no notice to Deidara when she does, only walking down the stairs, her body burning with ache as she does so, and stopping in the lobby, walking almost pleasantly behind the counter and eyeing the man.
"Made your goddamn decision?"
Deidara and Tayuya nurse their wounds to the erratic scream of an ambulance.
--
This was done in the universe of a RPG comm I started on LJ called oshimahigh, where Deidara x Tayuya is carazy cannon :D