Amare et sapere vix deo conceditur
Hitokugutsu. For Akasuna no Sasori, they were the embodiment of his ultimate goal and obsession - eternal beauty, the means to conquer death, and to achieve life immortal, beyond bodily pain, rot and decay. The obsession fueled by being orphaned at an early age, the questions unanswered, a child hatched from despair and loneliness. This same goal drove him to discard his human flesh, to move his consciousness in the perfection that he currently inhabited. He was eternal beauty itself, indefeasible by time, forever lasting.
Only those Sasori deemed worthy of perfection of eternity were turned into hitokugutsu. When Sasori was not busy with work in the Akatsuki, he scavenged battlefields, dug through grave yards and stole bodies. He inspected carefully the corpses he took, only the best would do, not those with deformities, those with scars, those with things big or small that he believed to be imperfections.
He would stalk his targets first, from afar. Nearly all his hitokugutsu were shinobi, starting from Hiruko to the Third Kazekage. He would lie in wait, the scorpion in the sand, and he would snatch his targets away either in life or death, and preserve them in the processes concealed in his laboratory, amid poisoned fumes and chemicals and chakra-infused wood. His works of art, like his mother and father. Sasori defied death this way. As hitokugutsu, those that he loved, in his own twisted way, would never part from him again.
When he first saw the boy, he was at mere thirteen years, but for Sasori, it was love at first sight. Concealed inside Hiruko he felt it, this familiar tingle, this skipping of the heart concealed in its protected cylinder, this tiny itch niggling at the back of his mind, he knew it, all of it familiar, and it was only a matter of time before it became full blown obsession and he knew that the boy was his, and that the scorpion had found his prey.
But he was perfection, was he not, this tiny slip of a murderer, this boy who stained his hands with the blood of his kin, murder and parricide. His hair, his eyes, his lips, his nose, yes, even those lines beneath his eyes, they were all perfect for Sasori, and he vowed that if the boy fell in battle then it was the hitokugutsu out of him that would crown his collection.
And when his eyes changed from black to red, Sasori's obsessive feelings only intensified, until the puppet general knew he must burn with it, if feelings set people and things aflame. He would gladly dive into that fire, that brazen heat, that furnace, yes.
It was the boy who came to him. In quiet moments, in the recesses of the Akatsuki's quarters, the boy who, presumably was getting used to his new way of life, wandered into his laboratory, and Sasori could only be astounded as to how he avoided all the traps he had laid out, and the boy stood there in his red-cloud cloak much too big for him, in the middle of the room, holding a puppet's wooden hand.
Any intruder would have been ripped to shreds by Hiruko's stinger, if not Sasori's own. But the boy was different, oh how Sasori watched him greedily from afar, how his wrists flicked if he threw kunai, that quiet way he turns his head this way and that, how no scowl ever creases his brow. Sasori showed himself, discarding Hiruko's cover, and he stood there too, an arm's length away, and his obsession pounded strongly inside his head he could not even hear himself think.
He wanted to pull the boy then from the grasp of life, murder him, drain out his blood and pluck out his eyes and preserve them, and turn him into the embodiment of all eternal art.
The boy watched him quietly, and he swooped forward in a bow, his ponytail dancing, just sliding carefully forward, going round the curve of a perfect, slim neck.
Sasori stayed his hand.
The boy's visits became frequent, and in his quiet curiosity Sasori found something he had been looking for - a disciple. The child did not do art, which was a shame, but when confronted about it, the boy told him that genjutsu was an artform in itself, altering reality and warping minds, sculpting it however he wished, with red-eyed crows and black feathers and something else entirely reared its head inside Sasori's consciousness.
Unafraid, that was what the boy was, whenever he came at a bad time or Sasori simply got too irked with his quiet, inquisitive presence in the laboratory, watching him assemble his meticulous creations. Cursewords did not scare him, not even when Sasori threatened him with his own stinger dripping poison. Deadly serenity, that was what he was, just standing there or sitting down, or quietly slipping away when Sasori had had enough of his company and observation.
They continue in this wise, for two…three years. The boy's patience never run out on him, and Sasori's obsession only increased, festered, grew.
And spun out of control.
Lying on his tummy on an old examination table, watching as Sasori attached modifications upon Hiruko, with the red-head explaining what each modification did. The boy propped his face upon an arm, his dark eyes simply following Sasori as he moved about, his dark hair loose, spilling around him like ink. He asked questions softly, here and there, pointing out weaknesses and blind spots, and Sasori cursed and spat, maintaining that there were no such thing as weak spots on his creations, though his hands jotted down notes and crossed out suggestions and formulated them.
A look.
A glance.
A twitch of a lip longing to say a word.
Ringed fingers running through ink-black hair.
Eyes black and red.
A crash, as they both topple to the floor.
The vial of poison does not break but harmlessly rolls under one of Sasori's many storage cabinets.
A voice in his ear, a soft cringe of pain.
Whispers uttered in the dark, a caress of words and tangled limbs.
He meets the boy's mouth, naturally, as if they were meant to meet there forever.
Sasori wishes he could preserve that moment forever, but that was fleeting, and it fueled his obsession again, and again, and again. The scorpion reveals itself from the cover of the sand, and waves its pincers defiantly, challenging the world to try and snatch this one from him, as he would not let it, he would never, as long as he existed, as long as his mother and father existed, a reminder that it was Death who should bow to him, not the other way around.
The boy becomes a man, and reaches perfection in itself. Sasori knows that any day now is as good as any, and he should pluck him from the grasp of an unsightly life, and preserve him. But there is something inside that he has not come to expect, and he stays himself, and does nothing.
His crow, that is what the man is to him, that dark messenger of death and hellfire and revenge.
They stand side by side in silence, even as he is concealed inside Hiruko, and the presence beside him gives him quiet. His obsession runs a different path, slow and cold against non-existent veins.
He delays until the inevitable end comes crashing over his head, delivered by his grandmother and a girl with rose hair. His lone fading thought as everything else blacks out,
His crow,
His dark and pain-riddled love,
How he wished
He could have seen him
One last time.