Self-Portrait in Black
Naruto needs answers to questions he never knew he had. Mildly Naruto/Deidara, but only if you blink.
Written in dubious honour of Ibiki's return in the manga (since all kids should be okay with the concept of torture), and Akatsuki hunting in general. Apologies to all the other Deidara fans out there; I'm just a bitter sadist at heart. Psychological fic.
"Relax," he murmurs, and despite himself gently smoothes back some of the long blonde hair that has fallen into the prisoner's face. Eyes, glazed by pain and dread but still as blue as his own, gaze at him expectantly. He knows he should feel some sort of satisfaction or pleasure in the image, but all he can muster is numbness.
Numbness, and a growing sense of horror.
He knows he shouldn't have come here, that just by being here he could be seriously setting back whatever work Ibiki has been doing.
Whatever work. Sure, he thinks, grimacing. He now knows exactly what goes on behind closed doors in the interrogation unit, and wishes he didn't. All the talk about teamwork and the good of the village, even his own dream of becoming Hokage, recede into the background. In this cell he senses the presence of true evil, and for the first time in his life, he cannot tell whose face wears it.
The small, logical part of his brain that survived the initial horror screams at him that this is necessary, that somebody who would happily kill him for the demon inside, who did murder his friend Gaara, was undeserving of his pity (pity? Was that even what this was anymore?) And although he knows it is true, although he knows how cruel and dangerous the captive before him is, Naruto is disgusted.
The prisoner is looking at him like he's crazy.
Not for the first time, Naruto wonders if he is.
"You're the jinchuuriki, hmm?" the other asks, finally flinching away, his voice tired but more curious than fearful.
Naruto can only nod. He wonders how much of what this man is showing him now is a mask. He knows much about masks; he should, he has worn one all of his life.
More recently he has learned that other people wear masks as well. Kakashi, for instance, though Naruto has long since realized that his sensei's masks cover much more than the skin on his face. Sasuke wore one too; Naruto didn't notice that until it was much too late. He fights down the wave of bitterness that threatens to overwhelm him at the thought of his broken friendship, and turns his attention back to the prisoner. Not a safe diversion, but safer, at least.
"I haven't talked for your specialist, hmm. I sure as hell won't talk for you, jinchuuriki." His tone is equal parts defiance and amusement, and Naruto is impressed despite himself.
"Well, I don't want you to talk anyway, so don't worry about it," he snaps back, wondering why he added the second part on. The Akatsuki doesn't seem worried in the slightest.
The captive relaxes visibly, however, and Naruto finds himself thinking about masks again. He remembers his friend Haku, who wore the mask of an enemy. Not only those on his side of the battle lines, who fight for the villages and the law, are entitled to hide their vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Naruto finds the concept vaguely disturbing.
He now wishes he had never thought of masks in the first place; the world is so much easier to understand when you can easily classify what's in it. And yet he knows that the ability to see beyond the surface is worth the blending of the boundaries between right and wrong.
"Then what do you want, hmm?" the prisoner asks, curious. Naruto wishes he knew his name, but isn't certain he is willing to spend the rest of his life remembering it.
He opens his mouth to reply, but realizes that he has no response to give.
Why did he come here? Did he come to spit in the face of his friend's killer, of a person who saw him as nothing more than a tool to be killed and used? Did he want to be sure that someone who saw him as subhuman was suffering for it?
Apparently not.
Naruto thinks about it for a moment longer, and the other is content to wait for him. He is mildly surprised; the Akatsuki hadn't seemed particularly patient at their last meeting.
He thinks about the mindless rejection and isolation that had plagued him throughout his childhood, and he suddenly has his answer. It is not one that he finds pleasant, but Naruto knows it for the truth.
"How?" he finally asks, rather than answering the question.
"How what, hmm?" The Akatsuki looks mildly confused. Clearly he has been asked "why" so often that "how" takes him by surprise.
"How can you kill jinchuuriki… people… without caring?" Naruto elaborates, wondering if he just gave himself away.
"Ahh," the prisoner voices softly, and Naruto knows that he did. Silence reigns for a few moments, and Naruto despairs of ever getting a response. Finally, the Akatsuki asks, "How can you, hmm?"
"I…" Naruto blinks, momentarily taken aback. Then he realizes just what he has been asked. "I only kill people like you!" He almost manages to force away the thought of Haku again, and others, such as Neji, who under other circumstances he might have killed with little remorse simply because he didn't understand.
The Akatsuki laughs softly, and Naruto wonders how much of his unspoken thoughts are written on his face. "It's the same thing in the end, yeah. To kill is to kill." He tries to shrug, but breaks off the gesture with a wince.
Naruto doesn't look too closely.
"I only kill when I have to," he hisses back instead. "I don't kidnap people and murder them!"
"You're dying, jinchuuriki," the Akatsuki says, suddenly clearly annoyed. "Your whole society is eating itself away from within, yeah. Don't pretend to know what necessity is, hmm."
Naruto can only stare at him. "Why?" he finally asks, an open-ended question, and in the end a futile one.
"You know I won't answer that, jinchuuriki," the other replies, amused again. Naruto doesn't think he's ever met a man with as many random mood swings as this one.
"Stop calling me jinchuuriki!" he practically screams, startling himself.
He gets no apology (though he wasn't quite crazy enough to expect one), but no scorn either. For that at least, Naruto is grateful. He looks at the Akatsuki, and is surprised to find in his eyes not disgust, but something that in a better world might almost have been understanding.
"I'm not a monster," he follows up quietly.
"Everyone is, in part, yeah. You can't paint a picture in just white. Deny that and you'll just fade into the background like the others, hmm. Unnoticed and unwanted."
"I…"
"Don't come to me to justify your own existence, hmm," the Akatsuki cuts him off.
Naruto opens his mouth to protest, but knows he can't. All his youth he had been viewed as worthless, feared for the demon inside of him. As much as he would like to deny it, he finds himself wondering just how much of that scorn has permeated his own mentality, leaving him irrevocably scared from within. He realizes that Akatsuki has become more for him than just an enemy. As an organization that saw him simply as a container for a bijuu, worth nothing in his own right, Akatsuki had somehow become for him a symbol of a lifetime of abuse.
If he could get just one of them to acknowledge him as more…
It was a stupid reason to come, but Naruto can't deny the truth of it.
"If you're going to be that wavering, you might as well just give yourself to us, hmm. At least your death would be spectacular, yeah. There's no justification in existence… not yours, not anyone's. Not when the only certainty is death.
"When that's all there is, what can you do but make it as beautiful as possible, hmm?"
Naruto stares at him for a moment, surprised. He knows there is something horribly wrong with such a viewpoint, but understands enough to be unable to really despise him for it. Still, this guy must have been very popular in Iwagakure. No wonder he left. "What happened to you?" he finally asks.
He gets no answer. In a way, that is answer enough.
"I'm not going to spend my life loving only death," Naruto finally says. "Even if that's the only possible end… I'm not only going to see the beauty in something after I destroy it." He tries not to thinking of Sasuke. "If everything has to just come to an end anyway, that can't be what makes some things wonderful and others not."
The Akatsuki is smiling at him slightly now. Naruto doesn't find the expression as disturbing as he would have expected. "You remind me of Sasori-danna, hmm. He always liked to argue too. You're not into art, hmm?"
Naruto laughs slightly; he supposes that he's going to have to be spending a lot more time around Sai, just to figure out why these people were so art obsessed.
He remembers that he still doesn't know the man's name, and knows now that he'd regret never learning it. "What's your name again?" he asks.
"Deidara, yeah."
Naruto nods and hesitates, hoping that Deidara will ask for his name as well. When no question is forthcoming, he disappointedly states, "I'm Naruto."
Deidara's grin widens, and Naruto realizes that the bastard had purposely refused to ask.
Oddly, the thought pleases him
Several days later, Naruto learned that Deidara had somehow managed to escape and flee Konoha. The news didn't make him as upset as he knew it should.
FIN
A/N: Feedback is appreciated. This was originally conceived as the first part of a two-shot. Tell me if you'd like to see the follow-up.