AN: Hi! I'm alive! Anyway, this is a short drabble on arguably my favourite pairing, DeiHina. I don't care if people say it's a crack pairing. They're perfect. And work with me here, I know he's never seen her, let alone more than once. Please R&R! Flame if you want, but be warned I will roast marshmallows over them.
Deidara: She forgot to say that she doesn't own anything, un!
Me: Dang! But if I did, I wouldn't have let you get blown up Dei-chan!
Deidara: Un! Wait, what did you just call me, un? –takes out a lump of clay-
Me: I still love you! –runs away screaming-
P.S. I really don't own anything. I only wish I did.
To him, it was simple. Art was something fleeting, preferably with a big blast. And something beautiful, anything beautiful, was Art (with a capital A, that's right.) And something fleeting equated something beautiful – it made sense, considering the type of jutsu he used. It was a big cycle, and that's how he liked it.
In all his years, he'd never kept any of his clay animals, no matter what memories they brought. Yes, the birds were beautiful. Yes, the centipedes were beautiful. But they were so… lasting. So imperfect.
So he blew them up. Easy.
Except it wasn't.
The first time he actually noticed the petite little female was when she was still a Genin. Everyone seemed to think well of her and take no notice of her at all, as if she was background scenery. Deidara could also see all the flaws in her – his artist's eye picking out the too-full bottom lip, the too-short hair, the milky blindness of her eyes, her nervousness and finger-poking, irritating him to no end.
He dismissed her to the back of his head, where it was cobwebby and dusty, along with other thoughts like "That [insert person's name] person needs to be blown up, un," and "Man, does Tobi have to be so irritating, un?" Wait, scratch the second one, it was at the front. Since a certain someone refused to stop being annoying. But back to the point.
The next time he saw her she was little taller, but more confident, with a smile hanging on her lips constantly. Her eyes weren't blind anymore, they were all-seeing and pure; her bottom lip wasn't too full anymore, it was like a plush cushion and suddenly all he wanted was to feel it on his own; her hair had grown out into beautiful indigo streaks.
She wasn't just aesthetic-looking. She was kind, the kindest, sweetest being he had ever seen in his pathetic life. He was pretty sure she'd been kind the whole time, but previously she had been too shy to tell. Her blush was warm and red and her voice was liquid silver.
He would have pronounced her the most perfect piece of art in the entire world, except that she was years too old. Sixteen years, to be exact. She should never have stepped foot on this blighted, tainted world.
The only way left to immortalize her beauty was to blow her up.
But he couldn't. He couldn't imagine her hourglass figure being splattered into bits, nor her wide white eyes looking up at his, hating him. He couldn't imagine her not existing, or her one second of fleeting beauty actually making up for years of not hearing her bell-tinkling voice.
While he thought over this, knowing full well it was impossibly easy to sneak in her house and probably blow up the whole compound yet feeling a strange reluctance about doing it, he opened up his cupboard. Musty air blew out, so stale he could practically see the dirt floating in the air, and he imagined that the back of his head was something like that.
His hands reached for the spare cloak on the second shelf. Just as he was about to close it and start dusting the cloak off, his scope caught an image of a pale white thing under a thick sugar-coating of dead skin (wasn't that what dust was made of, anyway?).
It was a clay animal. From pretty long ago, he guessed. The shrunk version of the bird he had used to carry Gaara back to the base, from a mission from eons ago. The clay was a little chipped, and his scope zeroed in onto a few grains of sand still around the tail area. Wow. Had he really left it there for such a long time? And left it there, untouched, without blowing it up?
Maybe Sasori-no-danna was right after all. Maybe… just maybe, some things were meant to last. Beautifully imperfect, but beautiful all the same.