AN: Inspired by 'Admiration', song by Incubus: "It's a photograph discovered, a decade after; its canon blast disguised as a firecracker." This takes place after Sasori's death.
Perhaps one at last will be left in peace.
Deidara was cleaning what was left of Sasori's possessions. Sasori had little, and what he needed he brought everywhere he went and it all fit with him inside Hiruko. It seemed odd when he found a single travel suitcase in Sasori's room at headquarters. Inside, there was a pair of luxurious fur-lined robes, one black and the other silver-grey. He recognized these as clothes Sasori used to adorn his puppet creations. There's a stack of blank, unwritten scrolls. There are heavy hard-bound books of old medical and chemistry texts dating thirty years ago, along with thinner paperback copies of classic plays. There's a large sketchbook filled with drawings of puppet prototypes.
Hidden under all these things, a book bound in black leather caught his eye. He traces the embossed symbol on the cover Sasori used to mark his creations: an outline of a red scorpion. Sasori always owned nice things that look like they weren't bought but made with the highest quality materials and the finest craftsmanship. Sasori himself made them, probably.
Deidara opens the book, and realizes it's a picture album.
It's unlike any photo album he has seen before. All the pictures look as if they were freshly printed, colors still crisp and clear as the day they were taken, though he's sure they were years old.
The first page is a picture of a smiling couple holding an infant: a dark-haired woman with wide brown eyes and a man with red hair touching the child's head. Deidara recognized them as Sasori's parents judging from appearance. He briefly thinks that Sasori got his eyes from the mother, and the bright shock of red hair from the father. The next pages are filled with pictures of the couple, together and alone.
The next pictures are a timeline of Sasori's life, from infant to a boy. The parents are absent and the pictures feature him and an older woman he knew as the one who ended up ending her own grandson's life. Sasori's life. There's Sasori wearing a Suna hitae-ate, dressed in all black, as a genin in the middle of four wooden puppets.
He turned to another page and saw two same pictures of Sasori standing in front of a cave wall, illuminated by the ochre light of flickering candles. Deidara noticed that the two pictures were taken at different times by the differing cast of shadows on the background of rocks.
An involuntary shiver runs through his spine when he realizes that these are transition pictures from human to puppet. The only thing giving it away is the faint and almost-invisible lines on his neck and arms, now with lethal things hidden at the seams.
All the pictures after that, Sasori's face never changes.
There was an old group picture of the Akatsuki, one of those less serious photo shoots where they dramatically pose in their most evil poses as a parody of their own organization. There was Hiruko as Sasori. Itachi looked barely fourteen and there was a couple of members he couldn't name – one of which was probably a deceased former partner of Kakuzu.
Deidara smiles at several pictures of Orochimaru and Sasori. The snake guy's grin is fanged but he was quite good-looking as a young man, and Sasori looking sullen beside him. There are many pictures of puppets, in life and after Sasori has made them to art.
The last pages were blank. There's a heap of unfiled pictures tucked between random, empty pages. They were pictures with Deidara- the first with Hiruko, when Sasori hadn't revealed his real appearance yet. They had been in a town on their first mission together, and Deidara found a Polaroid camera. The picture was a grinning Deidara holding up a hand in a peace sign (and mouth in his palms also smiling) and Hiruko scowling at the camera as usual. Deidara wore his hair a different style then, not a tight top-knot but in a loose ponytail or braid.
Deidara remembers that he has the same copies, tucked in a pocket one of his bags for clay he never bothered to look at again once they were placed there. There were more pictures with Sasori in his real form, too. Mostly, it was Deidara who likes the picture-taking. Sasori always wore the same sleepy, slightly annoyed expression; though in a few pictures he was smiling and that was cute, Deidara thought.
For over three years worth of pictures, Sasori had always looked the same. Deidara was sixteen years old then, and he's now nineteen. There are marked changes in his appearance, no longer the scrawny boy when he first joined Akatsuki. He had looked more androgynous then – but through time, the almost feminine softness was replaced by unmistakable maleness. It was eerie, looking at how Sasori never changed in contrast to him.
Their last picture together was taken before their mission in Suna to capture the jinchuuriki. It was one of those rare pictures where Sasori's smiling, with Hiruko between him and Deidara. A large clay bird is in background, a picture taken before flight. There is a soft glow of multi-colored light on their faces suggesting distant fireworks. A rare moment.
The disorder of the last pictures gave the impression that Sasori simply tossed in the newer pictures of the last three years without giving them a second thought. It seemed that no one has opened the album from the first page for a long time.
Like anything that is left for the future as a thing of eternal beauty... He got killed straight off!
Deidara remembers thinking this upon returning to Sasori and finding him dead. A magnificent death for an artist, to see Sasori among his own destroyed creations, in the death embrace of the puppet versions of his mother and father. What a moving finale, even for me, Deidara had thought.
Looking at all these pictures made Deidara miss Sasori, but he's glad about it. Save for the arguments, they had a good partnership. It was great while it lasted. He even thinks that those debates about art are what he will remember fondly most of all.
It was always the brief, ordinary moments that he had seemed to forget, flash back most vividly.
Like how Deidara liked it more when Sasori scolded him in his real form, not through the impatient lashes of Hiruko's tail he always dodges anyway. Sasori had looked like a fifteen-year-old. It amused Deidara to no end that it always looked like a kid was reprimanding him and calling him you brat, and he was calling that same kid Master. Deidara was only smiling at himself at how Sasori looked like a cute, homicidal teen threatening to kill him, and he ends up not listening to what Sasori's saying anymore once he starts laughing. Those arguments end up with Sasori retreating back to Hiruko, glaring before closing the lid and confining himself in – only to attempt choking Deidara with the poison tail again. Deidara kept on laughing. Even with implied death threats earlier, Sasori's last sigh had sounded almost amused.
He keeps the last picture, and removes everything with himself in it. Akasuna no Sasori was almost a legend, so he's sure these things and the whole album will sell for the highest prices at black market auctions. Deidara's sure there must be missing-nin fans collecting things like this, or maybe even Sunagakure's puppet brigade will be interested. He'll leave them all to Kakuzu to bother about.
~oOo~