For Val. :D
Crumble
Itachi liked to wander. In all truthfulness, Deidara was not sure whether Itachi had the ability to really like wandering. Perhaps he just did it. The leaves were collapsing to dust, brown and withered. They crumbled underneath Itachi's feet. Either way, they were wandering now. Deidara's companion's eyes were wide in the dark, as if that would somehow help his degenerating eyesight.
"When is Kisame coming back?" Itachi asked, his voice unusually light and vulnerable in the wind. "He was supposed to be back by now."
Deidara shrugged, teeth shining through a grin, but as Itachi peered at him through bleary eyes, he figured he had to say something. "How am I supposed to know? Heh, he got sent on a crap mission."
"I understand." As a foot met an unfamiliar bump in the road, a hand clutched onto Deidara's cloak for support.
He didn't laugh anymore, Deidara didn't. At first he'd laughed at Sasori for his ridiculous puppets and his ugly form, too. When Itachi would miss the table and drop a glass, it had always been Deidara who'd laugh the loudest.
The young man next to him straightened his back and stared forward into a blurry mass of trees. "I don't need your help."
"Un." But a day turned into a week and a week into more, and a dull-faced Itachi sat, strangely alone in a chair in the corner, staring at the opposite wall. Occasionally he'd move, gliding out of the chair and into the bedroom, from the bedroom to the kitchen and back to that same old chair. Deidara guessed that Kisame made Itachi move, made Itachi live. He started out taunting him, poking him and waving his arm in front of him. One time he kicked him.
It had been an awesome game for awhile! Tobi's pleas of "be nice, sensei" had been put off with overdramatic glares. But Itachi was not a normal human being. Teasing somebody who merely watches you with vague amusement loses its fun quite rapidly.
Deidara looked for new distraction as he waited for his next mission, but it didn't come to him. Tobi tried his best and Deidara tried to not murder him for his antics. Somehow, it was allowed if Deidara did it. Day seven and Deidara was sitting next to Itachi's chair, trying to make conversation.
The art of explosions was lost as soon as it tried to penetrate red eyes. After awhile Deidara just sat there, mumbling an occasional complaint or observation. Polite, as always, Itachi would mumble back. On the eighth day, Itachi murmured something that Deidara thought he had to have said it twice.
"I want to go for a walk."
Well fine. Deidara was bored. They stepped out into the dying woods, whose once luscious foliage was now dry and brown. For awhile as they walked, Itachi had merely looked around, squinting in that mild awe he sometimes radiated, as if he'd never seen a forest before.
And here they were. Itachi was clutching onto Deidara's cloak, and Deidara wasn't laughing. A mere puppet had been crushed, ripped apart, and his mechanical body left in pieces. Itachi wasn't sure if Kisame was coming back or not. Neither of them were supposed to care. They were violent, cold-blooded murderers, and they could probably drown in the bodies left at their feet. But as Itachi fingers tensed around the soft fabric, Deidara wasn't so sure anymore, about what he cared about, or where they were going.