The first two chapter serves as prologue, which is entirely in Deidara's POV. Afterwards, a police arc is introduced to guide and push the story forwards, bringing in Naruto's minor characters like Nara Shikaku (Shikamaru's father) and Yakushi Kabuto to advance the plot.
This whole fic is convoluted, complicated, and has many open ended questions. But, most of all, it's a mystery, intended to drive readers up the wall. Shikaku, a major character and a frequent POV, among with other characters, throw in their impressions, their thoughts, and their actions into the fic, which all serves to give the reader the information to piece together the two central, core characters for themselves: Deidara and Sasori.
This is an AU, and I don't adhere to canon ages and personalities all the time. Every single character, though, has a place in the fic. There won't be any slash elements until much later, and only then it's to supplement the plot, not overtake it. The fic is M-rated for a reason, too.
The little boy kneels stricken on the ground, eyes courting the horror that was his mother's body.
"...Mama?"
Desecration. A soulless smile is stretched out wide across that pale, beautiful face. His mother's lidless eyes cannot close in aching, wanton rest. Lank hair, thick with death, is streaked in red.
His mother is collapsed on her side, the cavity of her chest exposing a still heart, all seeping fluid and silent fluttering beats, and the belly that bore him delicately cut open, pinned back; her innards scream with maggots and flies. She is a specimen, a soft and fleshy cadaver, and the little boy does not quite understand. He crawls forward.
Once creamy skin is marred with flippant scars, slashed wildly all over her body. But it is her legs that catches the little boy's attention; they are hacked into pieces. With ligaments and skin still attaching the many parts together in a hazardous broken pattern of muscles and clinging flesh, his mother's legs are rich with decay and blood.
Her clothes are cut, shredded. The only untouched portion of his mother's pearl and periwinkle dress remains around her womb, and the clothes swathe her hips in a mockery of purity as the cloth around there is absent of blood. The little boy does not want to see what is under there.
It hits him. The smell. The little boy kneels stricken on the ground, eye courting the horror that was his mother's body.
The floor is stark with a substance he does not understand.
The little boy's retching adds to the room's oder. The walls parody a painting with its medley of smeared blood and gore, and the chyme and fluids from his upturned stomach only adds to it. He wants to cry—he cannot.
His knees give way and he slips forward into his own filth. He falls, just as his mother had, and he crawls and claws and pushes himself away from her body with a blank-faced terror that commands him to flee, to flee! The urgency in the action seizes his throat until he cannot breathe.
He can't see. He can't hear. His pants are dry, sobbing, heaving ones, and he is struggling not to scream.
Delirium sets in, a blanket of despair that settles over his thin shoulders and makes his view of the world narrow and warp until he can only see his mother's face. As her beautiful skin twists into gray, sunken tones, as her vivacious eyes morphs into two dull, gleaming balls—the image of his mother from before and the stranger he sees now collides and twists painfully. They become one. He can no longer remember his mother's face.
He doesn't want to.
His smile, stricken and wide, stretches until he is grinning. In grief, in disbelief, he holds that frozen expression, seeing nothing. His mother is gone. The room is gone—he sees nothing.
The little boy stares blindly ahead, not knowing how to deal with this feeling that wells up inside of him. Not knowing how to escape. He is in denial.
His throat collapses onto itself. His mouth forms soundless words.
The world has disappeared. He is falling.
He is gone.
--
Deidara is five years old when he realizes what his father does for a living.
The man is a painter. He paints beautiful things. With each work done, each canvas is carefully framed and fixed upon the studio wall. The room looks wildly unique from the rest of the pristine house—it is his father's sanctuary and not even Deidara is allowed inside.
It bursts with a warmth and a life that Deidara desperately wants to grasp. His hands grope high for this impossible dream, but he falls short. He cannot reach.
Deidara is six when he sneaks inside.
Fire. The room screams of fire on its glorious high walls. The pictures, always painted with hues of brilliant reds, speaks of a stranger Deidara does not know but does not care to know. He is distracted by the smell. Acrylic and acid and sharp sensations that attack his unprepared nose; the studio reeks of supplies.
But like all children, Deidara is quickly distracted by something else. There are muffled yells deeper into the enormous enclave that is his father's studio. It pricks at his curiosity. He slides up to a door off to the side that he did not see before.
He rests his ear on its side. The door is thick, but now he hears a terrible screaming that makes him afraid. It is his father being tortured in that room.
Another man speaks, and Deidara realizes there are two voices inside.
The little boy notices there is a slither of light gleaming along the door's edge. A crack. He eases it open until he can peek through.
His one visible eye grows wide.
A tangle of limbs. Curved, white flesh. A stranger on top of his father. Screams, pants, drool. Dripping and hot, shuddering bodies are bathed in thick, crawling milk. It slicks down his father's side, his leg.
Mesmerized. But Deidara also feels uncomfortable. With clenching fists, he leans in closer, but the wooden floor creaks! He stills, breath caught; the men inside do not hear.
The little boy relaxes until the stranger gives pause and swerves his head around to look over his shoulder. The little boy freezes. The stranger smiles strangely before giving one last thrust into his father's hips. The man moans into the sheets, shuddering and twisting all over until he lays back, exhausted. His lids are closed. The stranger is pleased.
Deidara is horrified. He wonders if his father is dead.
He looks up and meets the stranger's eyes.
The stranger has never looked away from the little boy's face, not once since Deidara has found them. His neck is turned and held taunt as he continues to stare at the little boy from over his shoulder. The stranger has never stopped smiling.
Deidara blinks. He wants to move away, but his legs refuse to cooperate. They tremble and shiver underneath his clothing, and he feels weak. He collapses to the floor. Deidara is in a heap, but still the stranger does not stop. Staring and staring, the stranger is the one staining the studio walls. He is the one his father keeps painting over and over.
Brilliant hues of reds, the man pulls away from his father. Naked and stark white, the man stalks towards the door. Towards him.
Deidara crawls away on hands and feet that cannot make him stand. He slips and slides and frantically scrambles as the door swings open. The man doesn't turn as he closes the door behind him shut; his eyes are all on the little boy's form.
Something deep and innate is screaming for him to get away, but Deidara cannot move.
The man crouches and studies the little boy. Deidara is tense and is shaking all over, but still the man does nothing.
He leans out a hand and Deidara cowers. The man rests slick, wet digits against Deidara's face. They slide down his cheek and down, down his neck until they rest on his shoulder. They push, and Deidara falls back. He stares up at the man, terrified.
The man crawls over him and brings the boy to his chest. He strokes the blond's hair and whispers mindless things against his throat.
Before Deidara can even think of screaming, the man pulls away and rests a hand on his eye. The fingers suddenly claw into the lid, socket, and Deidara can do nothing but scream. His body flails wildly. He punches and screams and kicks. The man is unmoved, even as he digs fingertips in deep and destroys the little boy's left eye.
The pain is all consuming and overwhelming. Deidara faints, the man continues his work. The man smiles.
The wide expanse of his chest is splattered with his victim's blood, but there is a slow, methodical ease to his movements. The man knows what he is doing. He moves around the house to get what he needs. He comes back and the little boy is near dead. He sits down and brings his lips to the boy's brows. The man kisses his face, fluttering kisses that eventually stop at the convulsing and bleeding socket. He pulls out his tools.
He gets to work.
The little boy is naked when the murder is found. Unconscious and profusely injured, Deidara is alive but the police finds that his father is not.
It is to their shock when they examine Deidara's wound.
The left eye is heavily mutilated. The skin around it is slashed with a careless grace and the jagged cuts have been cauterized by something hot. The room reeks of burnt flesh. As if to cover up the horrific sight of the mangled eye, the corners of the left lid is sewn shut to the skin of the boy's cheek. A glazed, dull pupil can barely be seen peeking through the opened slit.
No other part of the little boy had been touched, but the brutality done to his single eye is telling. The police latches onto the studio with grim precision. The corpse in the next room over is recovered, and the little boy is carted to the hospital. The sewn lid is unraveled, but the cauterized wound is infested with gleeful bacteria.
There is no doubt in anyone's mind that the boy will never see through that eye again. It is a permanent wound. It is the least of their worries.
The killer had struck again. The paintings that glorify the monster's face are left untouched by the man himself. Eyes captured with a fervent gleam and hair that speaks of fire and lust, the artist's obsession is seen clearly through his works. Perhaps the killer acts a narcissist when he's left the pictures in peace. Perhaps he doesn't cared about covering his tracks.
The latter is most certainly true. The tools used to carry out the little boy's torture and the father's death are strewn throughout the room. The sight of them mock them, the police, as they've lost yet another household to a maniacal beast.
The monster targets artists. That is all the police can ascertain of the man's motives.
The methods are always a little different, and the victimized artisans always vary in fame and skill and mediums, but each and every scene screams of the same brutality and grace that defines the killer's M.O.. And the damages done are always permanent. The monster takes delight in destroying the psyche, but he seems to take even greater joy in inflicting permanent wounds.
It is one of the innately disturbing things about the man—that his murders carry a sort of sickening grace seen in no other homicides. He has never committed atrocities outside of the country, and he has never moved away from the district. He is content to be patient with his kills, investing years worth of work into preparing each death. As if that is his perfectionist art.
The killer must have been well over forty years old for all the time the police has been chasing him. And yet the paintings of his face still screams of a man in his youthful twenties.
The man is a legend in these parts, but the legend himself has acted out of character.
In all the time he has played with the police, he has never left them a survivor before.
--
The little boy is pitied and alternatively inspires horror and rage in his onlookers. Horror, as everyone down at the station knows his past, and rage because he represents all the injustice in the world, the failure of authorities to catch the man who can do these terrible things.
Society shies away from him, looks away from the little boy as if he were a spawn of the devil itself. People do not like what they do not understand. They fear the unknown; Deidara is the unknown.
Unwelcomed, feared, and lonely, Deidara secludes himself in blissful ignorance and pretends he does not see the world and the world does not see him. He is afraid, and the police is at a loss as to how to interrogate a boy who cannot even recall the monster's face. His mind had shut off the memories the police so needed, but the horrific experience had not left him unscathed.
When an officer mistakingly shows the little boy one of his father's paintings, Deidara screams.
The family's wealthy state and rich status means nothing in the scarring aftermath of the artist's publicized murder. The mother, a society woman, falls apart.
She is overcome and takes the little boy away. Distraught and horrified by her husband's illicit life and scandalous death, she is quick to leave their spacious home.
Deidara does not understand. But his mother, he understands, is all he has left. He does not know what has happened to his father. At age six, he only knows that his left eye constantly throbs and that no one will tell him why he feels such pain. Eventually his hair will grow to cover his deepest shame.
Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months. Deidara is seven-years-old when his mother is killed. No one questions who is the killer; the scene reeks of familiarity.
Once again Deidara is kept alive.
He keeps his memories this time, but he has lost his words and refuses to speak.
He doesn't even know if he can.
--
"It's time to go! Hey," the blond swings around from beyond the doorway, "are you listening?"
The other blond whose back is to her shrugs. His shoulders are hunched over something she cannot see but knows very well what it is.
She frowns briefly before stepping over. "Whatcha got there, kid?"
He holds up a small bird. Eyes widening, she marvels at its realism before grinning. She musses his hair a bit, much to his consternation, but she doesn't care.
Setting his sculpture down, he bats her hands away. Her grin is infectious, though, and soon she is pleased to see its effects on his face.
Reluctant to take it away, she sighs. "Okay, so you know I'm supposed to register you today at your new school, right? Why don't we go and get it over with?"
To her surprise, he continues to look pleased. Frowning openly now, she says slowly, "You don't mind...?"
Turning to pick up a marker and pad, he scribbles something on it before presenting the words to her with a flourish.
The large, sloppy kanji are as confident as ever. The girl reads it quickly, the wariness in her furrowed brows easing more and more as she finishes.
Still, something doesn't sit right with her. Sweeping back the heavy tresses covering her right eye, she looks at him firmly. "This is really what you want? You wrote it, so I don't want you taking back your words when we get there. No protesting, okay? Junior high isn't so bad."
He nods placidly, still smiling.
Uncertain and taken aback by his compliance, she kneels to meet him at eye level. "Deidara," she says, taking his hand in hers, "I know it's going to be big and scary, and I know how important your art is to you. You don't have to hide your fear. We're family, aren't we? You don't have to keep all your feelings inside. Trust me. Please?"
Again he nods, offering her nothing more in the way of words or gestures. Not even a frown appears at her persistence. Usually he is annoyed when his foster parents pry too far, and his adopted sister is no exception. She backs off.
"Well," she says, standing to straighten and adjust her clothes as a distraction, and her expression is strained, "nothing like the present, huh? Why don't you change and meet me in the foyer?" She leaves his room without waiting for a reply.
His smile drops the moment she is gone. A scowl takes up its place. He turns his attention back towards his still wet bird. It is moist with the consistency of clay, and his shirt is dirty and splattered with mud. It must be why his sister asked him to change, but Deidara prefers it this way. It is proof of his joy, his most relieving activity. He likes his clothes filthy and matted because it is honest.
His fake relatives of four years are hypocrites. This family is a farce.
They try so hard to see to his needs and desires, to comfort the supposedly sullen, grieving, and depressed boy with all the love they could force onto him, but he is sick of it. He just wants them to leave him alone. He sincerely wishes he can tell them off.
They don't like seeing him play with clay. It is an attitude that he feels deeply resentful of. It's not as if he's obsessed about his art, either, but they act as if he were an unstable boy with unhealthy habits. Since when has making sculptures of pretty birds and insects been dangerous?
The incident with the sparrow of ripped wings doesn't count.
Neither does the numerable occasions he'd been caught eating bugs count either.
The sparrow is an experiment of sorts. Curious, the little boy of ten plays with the wounded bird until the play becomes a little too rough. But the bird is still alive by the end of it, and Deidara is able to pretend that the blood has just been paint all along. There is no need for the extreme reaction he gets from his mother. Her panic is unfounded, and her alarm, foolish. A hysterical wife greets her husband that day at the door.
He is eleven now, but she never let him forget it. It is in her eyes.
The bugs are another matter. Something about their freakish eyes and grossly organic movements fascinates him. He feels as if he were among his own kind. When he catches a dragonfly for the first time, Deidara shows it his ruined left eye; the meeting is that special.
The same dragonfly is smiled at as Deidara pulls off its wings.
But he isn't hurting it! He just wants to see more of its frantic fluttering...the way sunlight catches and glints off transparent wings. He leaves one of them still attached to the body, but it is to the little boy's disappointment when it falls dead.
Deidara searches the grass for its carcass when he finally sees them, the gooey stains. All over his fingers. To the boy's overactive imagination, his hands are drenched in bug guts. He licks.
It tastes funny. At least now he knows why he killed it. Are all insects this fragile or is it just dragonflies? Deidara wants to find out.
The insect is so pretty. It is only right to make more friends.
Deidara had been a lonely boy before he finds these friends. Friends don't eat each other, of course, but sometimes he does. It's fun.
Now, though, his room is filled with them! Sometimes, he has to be really sneaky not to let his parents catch onto him. After they take away his pet sparrow, he thought he'd never become happy again. He's happy now but doesn't like how he hardly has time for them all.
He's very fond of boxes.
His sister has recently learned of his friends. She overreacted, too, just like his mother had when she found out about the bird, but he knows she won't tell on him; she likes him too much.
She thinks he's fragile. He plays up that image for all it's worth. She's easy to manipulate, that sister of his. She didn't even react when she'd seen his newest sculpture, so Deidara knows that he is safe for the time being. Maybe his parents are ashamed.
He doesn't care. They're sending him to some stupid public school, so it's their fault anyway. He wishes he doesn't have to transfer; he is perfectly fine with his old private school, a wealthy elevator school that priories ability over name.
His real parents had liked that, so Deidara was enrolled. Now they're dead.
His foster family is poor.
"No," the woman claiming to be his mother says. "We're only conscious of our expenses, Deidara. You were held back for several terms because of...well, your tuition's extended even further. We can't support it anymore. We have to think about your sister."
Ah. His sister. Everything comes down to his sister, doesn't it? Because of his sister, Deidara is forced to carry around a blank pad of paper for the convenience of the people around him. What about his convenience? Is looking like a stupid mute supposed to be convenient for him? If only he can speak!
Deidara rebels by writing sloppy. He is delighted when his mother strains her eyes trying to read. His sister, disappointingly, has already adjusted. His father is a mystery.
Deidara does not remember his own father, but this strange man does not try and replace him. For that alone, the boy is grateful.
But that does not mean he is not wary. Who is this man? What does he want with him? Why has he adopted Deidara?
Deidara does not call him 'father.' He calls him by name.
The child at the heart of such infamy hasn't been adopted by chary families before Inoichi comes to the orphanage. When the blond man first arrives, Deidara ignores him just as he ignores everyone else.
But then the man keeps coming back. Again. And again. And again. Always inquiring after Deidara, always nosy, until finally the littles boy takes notice, comes up to the irritating man, and when Inoichi obligingly kneels down at Deidara's feet, the boy spits in his face.
The man shocks everybody when he only laughs. Days pass, and Inoichi doesn't stop coming. Eventually, the man's persistence in seeing Deidara as a potential adoptee wears the boy down until papers are drawn up and a rabid, scandal-hungry media is eager to eat them alive. By the time they walk out of those orphanage front doors, cameramen and reporters alike are frothing at the mouths.
Inoichi stoically bears it all, but makes no effort in giving Deidara a smile. The confused boy only scowls and turns away, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that he is clutching at his new father's hand. Deidara doesn't do so again; the next day, a mortified Deidara sees an inflated picture of himself clinging to the older man on the front page of a supermarket tabloid.
Deidara can dimly recall the man's face from before his mother's murder but nothing more. He doesn't bother remembering anything from before his father's death. He doesn't recollect anything of the day his father dies—every untactful person has hinted it as a brutal kill, but Deidara sincerely doesn't remember.
But sometimes he dreams...
He's told that theirs was a happy family. If so then it hurts to try and envision what life could have been like were his family whole. So he doesn't. It is a beautiful image, though.
Turning a cold eye on the bird figurine in between his hands, Deidara suddenly smashes it against the wall. Gray matters smears against his hand, the wall, as clay bits falls to the floor. Blank-faced, he picks up the pieces only to toss them in the trash. The destruction is complete. No recycling is to be had.
The clay bird his sister was so impressed with is no more. Art is beautiful that way—fleeting, transient, passing. And brief. Temporary. It never lasts.
It is beautiful.
An unhinged smile alights his face.
Deidara already pulls out new clay, ready to provide his hands the substance they so need. He will make another bird, he decides. A bigger one, perhaps the size of a robin. Or a sparrow. Yes, he decides. A sparrow sounds lovely.
His smile turns delirious with his pleasure. Moist, slick clay is mashed in between his fingers as they shape a shape only he can see. It is glorious, ethereal. Forever—until its death! Deaths are continual yet brief, and the contradiction excites him. Just as they will continue on and on so, too, will Deidara carry out these glorious actions until his own death. His last breath is dedicated to this delicious slavery!
It is an ode, his life's work. He will never stop.
A feather appears! Eager to see more, his wet digits works furiously to bring about its master's baby, his dear. His love.
A vague body is formed. Feet are tucked neatly against its underbelly. Wings are outlined, feathers come to being. The head is formed, a beak!
Deidara imagines, as he pokes in two depressions for the eyes, that he will enjoy ripping this little bird to shreds. He will drench himself in mud and pretend it to be blood. He will whine as that sparrow of old whined, cry as that sparrow of old cried, and laugh as he presents his sacrifice to his father and mother. His father would congratulate him, paint him a new picture—flames, flames, flameflameflflame—and his lovely mother, with her mutilated, hidden womb, would outstretch her hands wide and take her baby boy into her arms.
He is loved.
Deidara falls back, exhausted. He pants as the fledgling bird sings. His smile is crazed as he basks in its glory, as it flaps its wings! The ceiling warps above, calling his attention to that wonderful landscape of sky. The room entraps him, his cage, his prison—but no longer! He frenetically breaks his chains—and escapes. Free! He flies, free, out of his gilded caged coffin...
He waits. Death snaps at his flying heels! But he waits.
For Him.
"Danna," the boy sobs, writhing at the wrath's feet. "Danna..."
Gets kinda vague towards the end, but I like it. Did Deidara really speak? Who knows. At least it's not as ambiguous as my other SasoDei...although there's only a smidge of that here.
Thanks for reading. The prologue ends next chapter, and it only gets more crazy from here on.