Eight Months Ephemeral, In Oils
Author's Notes- A little Saso/Dei-ish AU. I had this other crazy AU going on that I quite liked and wasn't able to do much with, but I liked Sasori's background so he just wrote himself into another fic instead. I'm not happy with the translation of his puppet..ness though. I was going to leave it out altogether (since I think it's quite important that he did it to himself, and it's sort of difficult to get across the transformation in real life without turning him into a demented, Michael Jacksonish character), but decided to include a vague reference to it anyway.
I am hilariously dismal at anything artistic, and I probably can't recognise anything more obscure than the Mona Lisa, so all art references are from research only. Feel free to point out any inaccuracies. Or anything that needs improving at all. There's quite a bit I'm not happy with, but it's been on my computer for three months and probably isn't going to get any better if it sits there for another three months.
Disclaimer- I don't own any of the recognisable characters or concepts. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
- - -
The room was adequate. It was nothing like Sasori was used to, but he did not expect the vaulted roofs and open courtyards of his family home, or the sleek lines of glass and steel hotels rising from Dubai skylines. Let form follow function. A basic architectural principle. It was sufficient.
At least the walls were freshly painted white, not smudged with fingerprints and tide-marked with nicotine. There were no patterned curtains to replace; just clean metal blinds letting in measured slices of watery English sunlight. The furniture was plain and in good condition, but Sasori would buy new anyway. He didn't like finding traces of other people in his space, and there would be a picked-away band sticker inside the wardrobe door, club flyers lost down the back of the drawers, a hair caught in a splinter in the bed slats.
It was also a good-sized room, bigger than he expected. Sasori had few belongings, but he liked all that clean empty space around him. He approved, before he entered the room and noticed the second bed tucked behind the door.
Still, it didn't trouble him much. He requested a single room, and he would get one eventually. Things usually went his way.
On the third day, the near-silence was broken by the busy sounds of other people moving in, the building beginning to warm up like a hive in summer. Mostly, they were happy sounds. There was the constant slam of doors and the muted chatter that followed. A muffled thump of duffle bags dragged carelessly up stairs, while parents followed with suitcases. At night, music throbbed through the walls, and heels clattered unsteadily down corridors, shrill bursts of laughter trailing after like balloons.
Sometimes, they were less happy. A fight, at 2am, began with hysterical tears and ended with the somehow very loud and final click of a door locked shut. Sirens wailed sporadically, the only voice for a hundred minor tragedies Sasori never saw. The girl to his left either listened to one song on repeat, or sobbed monotonously throughout the night. None of it disturbed him. Sasori lined his things up neatly along empty shelves. He brought only art supplies, clothes, the essential. Nothing personal. The walls remained white as a fresh piece of paper.
On the fifth day, he realised he had a roommate. They moved in late, appearing some time between eight and nine in the morning while Sasori was out. He came back, and the whole room had changed somehow.
"That's my bed."
"They're exactly the same," the roommate said, rolling over and burying his face in the pillow. Sasori yanked the blinds open again with a dry insect clatter, and let in brittle morning light. It fragmented in the roommate's tousled hair, a blonde that splintered the light instead of reflecting it smoothly back.
Deidara moved, reluctantly, slamming the windows shut as he passed.
"It's freezing in here. Don't you feel the cold?"
The beds weren't the same any more. Sasori ran his sheets through a boil wash, but the smell of burned-out sparklers seemed set into the fabric, seemed to drift up through his dreams until he woke, sat upright, into a room that only seemed dark because it was so full of smoke.
- - -
Sasori couldn't stand sharing his space.
It wasn't that he saw his room as a sanctuary. He didn't particularly care for it at all. It was like a sealed cell in a honeycomb, a clean white envelope to slot himself into. He could still hear the sounds of others around him, but he had one hundred and six feet of dry air around him. Deidara painted an entire wall in murals in a fit of energy, and pinned posters to the rest. The air never really cleared no matter how much Sasori left the windows open, always smouldering with the slow burn of something that wasn't quite cigarettes or incense.
It would be bad enough with Deidara, except he didn't come alone. Deidara ran through friends like a child flooded with too many toys, bored with them within days. They only lasted a week or two, both male and female, some only sitting on his bed for an hour while he got ready, some staying the night. He seemed to need distractions, admirers, and when he let them go, he did so easily. No real malice in it. It wasn't so much that Deidara was out to hurt people; he simply never thought about them at all.
Sasori was often the one to open a door to one of Deidara's past friends- puzzled, bemused, sometimes red-eyed- and the one to dismiss them. He could have lied easily- sorry, Deidara's having a hard time now- something that would make it easier for Deidara and gentler for them, but it wasn't as though he owed Deidara anything.
The last to stay the night was the girl. He saw the long, lean naked back and the dishevelled blonde ponytail, and it wasn't until she turned sideways that he realised it wasn't Deidara. The girl laughed languidly, not embarrassed at all.
"He's cute," she said. "Is he even legal?"
Sasori expected a fight, but Deidara didn't complain much, stopped bringing them back and at least Sasori had the nights to himself until Deidara stumbled back at dawn. A few still came by day, but they filtered away one by one. The blonde girl that wore her hair like Deidara, and always laughed whenever she saw Sasori again. A dark-haired boy with a strange, serene smile, someone vaguely recognised from one class or another. A pink-haired medical student who always seemed too intelligent to hang around someone like Deidara, and Sasori wasn't surprised that she was the only one who ever left him first.
- - -
He met the friends again, once or twice.
There was a performance art show. Deidara was enthusiastic about it. He approved of performance art, because it only ever existed in the moment. The venue banned cameras and videos, so that no recording would ever be made. This art could not be bought or sold. It would never be weighed and measured and locked away in a vault to gain value. When the performance stopped, the art was lost save for whatever the audience captured
The venue was small and cold. Sasori was given a plastic cup filled with something deep purple that he didn't drink. He didn't know any of the names they talked about. They seemed a pretentious crowd- tossing around some token names, before getting down to who slept with who. The art was all sensationalist. Chewing razors, crawling naked over mirrors, something Deidara did with fireworks that ended with Sasori taking him to Accidents and Emergency because everyone else had gone to get stoned or high or whatever they called it.
The waiting room was chaotic, full of noise and mess and raw emotion spilling out as freely as the blood and vomit. It took four hours before a doctor saw Deidara, four hours sat watching the little psychodramas unfold. A middle-aged man waited patiently with a lap full of blood and an arm wrapped in a bathroom towel. A hysterical mother went from doctor to doctor, swinging her feverish child in her arms and babbling in a liquid language that none of them could follow. Four pale, shaken girls came in from a night out cut short, their makeup clownish under the bright lights, shivering in short skirts and rocking back on their heels like foundered ponies as they waited for news.
Deidara barely seemed to notice as the angry wound was cleaned out and wrapped in film and gauze. Sasori watched with dull fascination as the skin was stripped back, to show the raw and wet inner workings that had glided there unseen.
"The scar shouldn't be too noticeable," the doctor offered, and Deidara shrugged. His own flesh was of little artistic interest to him.
- - -
In the third month, Deidara insisted they go out again.
It would only be the fourth time. There had been a handful of art-related events. Sasori hadn't cared for them. He didn't need validation in the same way Deidara needed someone to acknowledge his art. He had spent the nights with a single drink, largely ignoring Deidara's current friends.
It was cold. Sasori made few concessions to the weather. When October came round, he bought clothes from winter collections, and wore a coat because that was the normal thing to do. But he didn't layer his clothes for extra warmth, or wear an unravelling scarf or clashing gloves just because they were warm.
He'd never seen Deidara wearing so much. The scarf looked home-made, thick ember-coloured wool, but he'd guess it was probably sold as some kind of ethnic craft, somewhere Sasori could easily have visited and never cared to. The boots look like they were made for a girl, and probably came from some ex who he had shared clothes with until they forgot who had owned which items. There must have been a reason why he had so many holes in his gloves. His clothes would tell a story, if Sasori had cared to hear it.
The air outside was sharp and clear. When they were close enough to see the smudgy glow of the bonfire on the beach, it was filled with sweet smoke from dried leaves and fragrant wood. A guy lolled in the forked branches that shaped the fire, the wood snapping and cracking with gunshot sound until it collapsed in on itself, the stuffed man falling into the glowing heart and gone from sight.
Deidara seemed transfixed by the fireworks. The high-pitched scree of it tearing through the skies, and the dull boom as it tore nothing but empty sky reminded Sasori of the bombings he had overheard once. There were no traumatic memories there. There had been nothing but plasma TV screens to bring it into his safe, secular world.
He watched with little interest. The skies glowed through a year of aurora borealis within minutes, changing from the neon greens of city lights to blush-pink dawns and bloody sunsets. White feathers plumed like milky brush strokes against the inky clouds. Something red exploded and left hundreds of gunshot wounds across the wounded night, each point of light like a glowing cigarette. A thousand tiny stars burned out long before they came close to the earth, leaving nothing but wispy smoke trails and the acrid smell of chemical fire.
And then it was over and the skies were smoky and burned out. Deidara shivered, cold, and turned away from the dying bonfire.
"Where are you from, anyway?" Deidara asked him, after five minutes walking in silence along the beach.
"East," he said, simply.
"Far or middle?" Deidara couldn't tell. Sasori had both the stillness of Zen gardens, and the fine, dry features of something sculpted by sandstorm and white desert sun.
"Abu Dhabi," Sasori could tell Deidara didn't know it. Few people did. He'd usually get a "Saudi Arabia, right?"
"Miss it?"
"No," It was not a lie. Sasori was not sentimental. It was different, that was all.
Even the sand they walked over was nothing like sand in Sasori's homelands. It was wet and greyish and smelled like fish and decay. As they walked, it came up in clogged lumps, strung together with shredded plastic bags and black seaweed. The sand he was used to was fine and white, rocks that had been ground to dust but would be destroyed no further. The same handful of sand once used to scrub away the clean husk of a mummy in Egypt might still glitter in the worn carpet of a New York museum. Sometimes he thought he'd never be free of the sand that still drifted in the corners of his suitcase; would still find a grain of it in the crease of his palm, or glittering in his eyelashes.
It was then that Sasori realised Deidara quite liked him, probably as much as Deidara liked anyone or anything except his art. Or at least respected him, enough to need his acknowledgement. He blinked slowly, watching Deidara plunge through the wet sand, out towards the black oily streak of sea.
It was late. Sasori turned from the dying embers of the bonfire, back towards home. After a minute or two, he heard Deidara follow.
- - -
One night, Deidara didn't come back.
He arrived next morning, flanked by a police man. He was fidgety and agitated, his pupils dilated so far the grey was nearly swallowed up by black holes like cigarette burns. "Does he take drugs?" the man asked Sasori, who said yes, probably. He had no loyalty to Deidara.
Deidara slept for the rest of the day, and when he woke up he was tranquil, almost drugged. His eyes had gone still and heavy like wet concrete.
"Arson," Deidara said, unconcerned, and gave little explanation beyond that. It was not the last time. He got out of the charges, mostly, either lack of evidence or never caught in the first place. Deidara always had to stay around and watch his fires, but at least he seemed to get better at staying hidden.
It seemed to take a little of the fever out of him, and he'd spent hours replaying it in the days that followed. Sasori's questions would roll off him, unnoticed. Small, frantic movements darted behind his closed eyelids, as he walked, in his mind, through a world unmaking itself back to the same burning elements that it had come from. Through cold, dead rock vapourising back to the same cosmic explosion that had made it, a phoenix that took flight for one second before crumbling back into ashes.
There was one victim in the fifth fire, a homeless man who had been sleeping in a boarded-up house. Sasori had seen Deidara come in, dishevelled and streaked with ashes, but didn't care enough to report it. Deidara's nails had bit into the arms of his chair, distressed, when the news report showed the wet, black shell that had been his fire, but the death didn't seem to register with him at all.
As far as Sasori knew, there was no reason for Deidara to do this. He never asked about Deidara's past; didn't particularly care if there was any trauma there, but he'd picked up enough of Deidara's life that he seemed to simply scatter around him, throwing it out like a candle throws out light and heat. Deidara's background was comfortably middle class, no family secrets that he knew of, no early traumas. He simply was that way, some abnormality that ran through him like a seam of coal waiting to be lit one day.
Sasori supposed his various caretakers had watched out for delinquency since his own parents had gone down in flames over Kuwait. There had been nothing. He'd been quiet, too quiet, because when the wound had healed over, nothing but insensate scar tissue had grown back in his cicatrix heart.
- - -
Deidara had many faults, but Sasori conceded that he was an artist.
Mostly, he sculpted, slicing away curls of clay with quick impatient strokes that seemed as likely to ruin as to improve it. He brought one sculpture back to the room. Sasori wasn't sure what it was meant to represent. It didn't so much look like something made, as something unmaking itself. He could see different things in the chaotic lines. A ribcage unfurling like an opening flower. Something misshapen that was not so much being birthed as it was expelled. A nuclear Hiroshima dawn.
One day he came back and the sculpture was smashed. He assumed it was an accident, but Deidara seemed unconcerned.
"You won't get any credit for it."
Deidara shrugged, didn't seem to care that weeks of work had gone to dust and he'd probably fail the year now. It wasn't complete until it was destroyed. Sasori got no further explanation.
Sasori found shards of it for weeks. Under the bed, kicked into corners of the room. Once he lifted his hand from the desk, and found a small and vicious hook of it caught between the bones of his palm. He pulled it free slowly.
"You don't feel pain," Deidara said, triumphantly, over his shoulder. "You don't feel the cold either, do you?"
"I feel it," he said, swabbing the wound. Sliced-open nerve endings slowly recoiled and turned on themselves as though trying to curl back inside the open flesh. It was there, dull and distant, as though he had all turned to fibrous scar tissue.
"Nerve damage," he said,coolly, when pushed, and Deidara only said "Oh," and never mentioned it again. He wouldn't have given the story anyway. There wasn't much to give. He didn't remember anything after the plane went down, enough money to put him back together while he was in a sedated haze, and Sasori didn't wake up until the worst of it was over. He wasn't there while they set the broken bones under his skin into a stiff and too perfect mask, or when they grew the grafts that were a perfect match, only those faint seams to show where they joined, as though he had been assembled piece by piece.
A lingering stiffness around the joints, an odd numbness through him from something small and delicate snuffed out between his own breaking bones. But there had been very little pain when he woke up, long after he had been put together like a doll.
- - -
One afternoon, Sasori came back to the room and Deidara wasn't there.
The room was in the sort of disorder that he hadn't seen in months. A drift of old receipts, spare change and crumbled makeup was scattered across the carpet. The drawers were left half-open, full of nothing but dust and debris. Club flyers, old pennies, a pencil stub. A roll of bin bags spooled across the floor next to an empty cardboard box taped up at the corners. Sasori glanced inside and saw an old textbook, a dusty tshirt, a handful of pens, things Deidara began to pack and didn't care enough to take with him after all.
Many of his possessions were still there. The bathroom was virtually unchanged, still mostly full of half-used and empty, squeezed-up bottles, only one or two of the most expensive thrown into a bag as he left. A poster was still taped across the wall above the empty bed. When Sasori opened the wardrobe, there was a jacket swinging there next to a row of empty hangers. The air inside still smelled like Deidara, the dry electric smell of October nights.
Sasori gave Deidara a week, and then packed up the things left behind and stored them in a box in the wardrobe. Then he cleaned the whole room, moving all the furniture to catch the bits of Deidara that trickled through the slats in the bed. When he was finished, he rinsed everything with diluted bleach and painted over the bright murals and the tapetorn walls marked from posters and fingertips. Then he left the window open to let in cold dawn air. The room was clear and brittle and sterile, full of frozen air and paint and bleach fumes. A clean and empty husk, with no sign that Deidara was ever here.
Bleach kills most things that can't be seen, but it seemed ghosts were more tenacious than the living.
The postcard arrived some months later, right before the end of the academic year, in a water-stained envelope that seemed to have travelled half the world. The postmark was blurred and illegible. No message, just a signature and a scrawled note beneath.
Last letter? I don't have an address, and you move soon.
Sasori tipped out the envelope, in case there was anything else, and only a thin trail of sugary white sand spilled out, bright and brittle in the English sunlight.
He painted Deidara once, in oils. It was not a medium he favoured, but Deidara needed luminous colours, not the stark, clean lines of pen and ink. It was not the sort of painting that was considered fashionable these days, too realistic, a slice of Deidara frozen on canvas. Sasori was right about the oils. They caught the muted saffron of his hair, and built up to form the lines of his sharp, clever face. But they didn't catch the shifting quicksilver in his eyes, or the quick, nervous movement of his fingers carving away clay.
Oil is not really a fixed medium. It takes up to eighty years for the oxidation to be complete, and the paint to be truly considered dry. Sasori would be dead, and his painting still slowly evolving. He would never see it finished.
The painting wasn't good enough to exhibit. It didn't fit in with the rest of his collections, and he doubted anyone would want to buy a painting of an unknown artist. Sasori left it in storage with the other paintings he didn't care for. He didn't miss it.
When the end of the academic year came, he moved out. No more handwritten letters arrived along with his usual correspondence. He set up his forwarding address, expected nothing, and received no more. Deidara could be dead, or in a cell somewhere, or walking through the deserts with his hair glittering full of windborne sand.