Summary: I have left him behind. I don't really care. Sasori introspective.
Note: First: I'd always wondered about Sasori turning himself into a puppet. How? Why? And what the heck was he thinking? This was meant to be an examination of Sasori's mental state and I originally wrote it to be a very prose-like poem, but it didn't quite turn out as I wanted, so I added more content and reformatted it. I also considered adding this to my Reasons Why collection, but didn't think it fit, since the style is just too dreamy and introspective. Beware some disjointedness.
Thanks again to the mighty Chocolate Pencil for giving this a look.
Warnings: Language. Gore. The usual, if you know me.
Pairings: None
Characters: Sasori. Deidara.
I own nothing of Naruto, including but not limited to the characters of the Narutoverse.
And please, find it in your heart to take a moment to review. :3
During my childhood, when my body was still human, my heart ran rampant with pathetic emotions and senseless dreams.
But that was long ago, and I hardly remember such things. I do not miss them.
All that matters now is the serene silence as I slice open a body, put it back together into a more versatile, useful form, and pack it with more steel and poison than it could have ever stood in life. All that matters now is the imperceptible hum of energy that fans from my fingertips, moving things and shifting the world in ways that wash more liquid iron into the sand. All that matters now is that my fool of a partner keeps his distance when I'm fighting an opponent in battle or when we're travelling between countries or when we share a cramped, dark space when hiding from bounty hunters. He needs to keep his distance, period. The same goes for the rest of them.
Apologies, I lied.
Nothing matters anymore; nothing matters at all, and nothing ever mattered.
This is the world's only truth.
This, and the pure, lighted beauty of permanence.
I feel nothing, care for nothing, and want for nothing. This is what I imagine I desired when I was a prepubescent child sniveling in a puddle of his own tears. This absence of pain is what I desired. This absence of everything.
But sometimes when I see Deidara screaming with laughter high up in the night air, great plumes of smoke and fire exhaling around him and tossing his hair every which way... I wonder for a moment. Is what I have really what I wanted? Is this nothingness what I truly desired?
He lands in front of me in a gust of air, skidding his clay mount across the dirt abruptly and with an idiotic grin plastered to his face. His human body smells of smoke and is coated with soot. He sends off his bird into the sky, lifts one hand triumphantly, two fingers extended, and we are dipped in the explosive light of what he calls 'art,' just for an instant.
His whole face shines with dust and sweat and light.
It is odd, I admit. Perhaps this is some brand of envy for the laughter on his face. But my ponderings are short-lived. I cannot care enough to continue trudging through them. There is something odd about me. I am not stupid enough to pretend that I lack faults. I am indeed lacking everything intangible thing I never wanted, but I am not content. Nothing gets done fast enough. There is nothing I like to do. There is never a moment in any day in which I feel satisfied. While creating art and destroying lives take my mind off the emptiness, I cannot help but sometimes think of what Deidara says.
"Deidara, you know I hate to be kept wait…"
He cuts me off absentmindedly, tying off his hairband with a snap and then stretching out his arms as he stares down at me. Actually, he stares through me, not really seeing. The sun is positioned behind him; he is mostly in shadow, face more defined by darkness than light, but his eye glows with the same steady burning of the blue sky at his back.
"You're strange, yeah."
I glower.
He takes no notice, just relaxes his arms and stares at Hiruko's face a bit.
"You say you're immortal, but you're so impatient. If you think you're immortal, why would you care how much time it takes me to tie my damn hair?"
I don't have a good answer.
"Come on, already, brat."
I turn to leave. I can almost hear him rolling his eyes.
The truth is, I am always feeling impatient. Perhaps the child I'd once existed within had been tangled up in that emotion for long enough to carry it into my eternity. I don't thank him for it.
Occasionally, I have a memory. The shadowy sandstone walls of my old home rise up around me, both my hands are extended and glowing with vibrant chakra. They are shaking. My belief is that he, the child I used to be, is crying. He wants to be freed from the rending emotional pain and the frightening prospect of mortality. (There had been photographs in the mission report.) Some pathetic thought about parents drifts through my memory as I face a puppet replica of me, and plunge my hands into my chest.
Turning myself into a puppet had been had been a disturbing feeling, to put it mildly, but it is now my most vivid memory. Sometimes I float in it for hours as I waver between sleep and wakefulness.
For a long time, I can feel my hands burrowed into my own chest, hot and sticky around my fingers and a cold, nauseating, twisting sensation in my ribs that throbs in my gut. He somehow manages to keep his mental focus, preserving and detaching my core with a steady stream of chakra even as his body begins to die at his own fingertips.
It's miraculous, really, that he succeeded.
The hands fall limp and the body falls to its knees, then its face. The heart beats on. Chakra strings extend from it and connect to my new body, the one incapable of pain.
The first thing I see with my new glass eyes is his body with a clean hole ripped straight through the back, his lifeless blood seeping everywhere like a carpet of silk. The sight doesn't faze me in the slightest. I glance over at the mission report, the one that he'd found in a desperate search through the restricted files. It is a scattering of writing and numbers and photographs of his parents ripped to shreds. He would've been relieved to feel no reaction to seeing them.
But I do not care.
The next thing I saw when I pushed open the curtains was the lumpy outlines of the buildings I'd grown up with. They vaguely disgust me. How ugly they are.
I looked up into the sky and stared unblinkingly at the sun for a while. Glass eyes won't burn. It sits there, glued, immobile, and shining forever in a pure, white light that no sane person would ever dare look at directly for very long, for fear of permanent damage to his or her visual organs. It's worth it, I decide, as I gaze, eye-to-eye into the fixed, disinterested sun. Blindness is a small price to pay for the gift of staring into the face of such light.
The sun continues to hover there, constant and unchanging for eternity, utterly uncaring and pitiless to the pointless scurryings of the world's many inhabitants below, inhabitants that don't dare to ever gaze back up at it in fear of literally being blinded by its beauty.
I let the curtains fall closed before I anthropomorphize the sun any further.
And none of the following memories are ever quite as vivid.
When I awaken, Deidara is still asleep, strewn all over the bed and threatening to tumble off the edge at the slightest disturbance. I'm not sure how long I stare at his precarious position. Life is a delicate balance. I imagine his dreams are of what he plans to do in his waking hours. Mine are of the frozen instant in which I was born.
Strange.
We are watching the sunset from the edge of a cliff, Deidara and I. Deidara has an inexplicable fixation on sunsets and other pointless, beauty-less things. Where is the beauty in looking at a dying sun? Sunsets are inconstant and erratic, each different from the last depending on cloud cover, temperature, month, and mood. They are admittedly slow in their deaths, but quick in their progressions and erased forever once fully set. Where is the beauty in that?
I glance up at him from inside my shell, and see that he's staring into the blazing colors with a look of pure enchantment and happiness in his eyes.
It catches me off guard, as it always does.
I wonder if that child imagined that there was such a thing as happiness, when he had created me, caught in a desperate, pounding delirium of choking fear and breathless impatience.
Probably not.
But truly, I do not care.