It is not unheard of for a puppet master to talk to their puppets. Masters of this jutsu are often recluses and need an outlet. A puppet may act as a diary to their puppeteer who can sometimes sit for hours spilling their feelings to their deaf audience, occasionally even believing that the puppets can hear them. This phenomenon is rare. Rare, but not unheard of.
Deidara could not ignore the talking any longer. He respected his partner's privacy, mostly in the interest of his own safety, but not being part of a conversation was one of few things that could drive Deidara to risk his well-being.
"Sasori no Danna!" he leaned against the door that separated their rooms as he finished slipping his sweat-dampened robe from his slim shoulders. "Who are you talking to, yeah?" He didn't expect an answer. Sasori was always irritable after missions and particularly sullen after this one. He had heated up tea and retired to his room before Deidara had finished sticking his face under the sink and redoing his hair. The sculptor was not exactly predisposed to being hot and sweaty. Deidara blew his bangs in not completely unexpected exasperation at his partner's silence. "Danna?" Suddenly the door slid open and the blond had to call upon all of his shinobi ability to not fall flat on his back at his partner's feet. "Danna!" Sasori surveyed him coolly, a glance that Deidara was used to seeing before being reprimanded for some reason or another. Sasori had to tilt his head back in order to look down his nose at his slightly taller partner whose single visible eye was narrowed with uncertainty, ready to defend or attack depending on the redhead's next move. Sasori smirked, throwing Deidara off guard.
"Hm. Hey, Dei," a slight pink worked it's way to the tips of Deidara's ears at the use of this informal, intimate, and rarely used by Sasori nickname. "You wanna go on a date?" Sasori locked their gazes and gave a genuine, innocent smile, one so uncommon on his childish features and so inviting it had an equal, if not greater, chance as the absence of the door moments before had in knocking Deidara off his feet.
"A date? Like a date date, yeah?" This received a snort,
"What other kind of date is there, Dei? And whether you come or not," Sasori reached back into his room and grabbed a coat off the chair at his workbench, "I'm going!" His eyes crinkled merrily as he beamed again and snapped up the coat over a turtleneck sweater that covered his wooden torso and arms. He strode through and out of Deidara's room, stopping at the door to smile mockingly. "Stop gawking at me and get your coat, Dei? We're going to visit Kiri!"
The puppeteer had wasted no time in escorting his disoriented partner to the land of the Waves' single but well-known Museum of Fine Art. Deidara pulled his scarf up over his mouth and nose as he followed his partner up the grand marble steps.
"Oh! I almost forgot!" The sculptor stopped short to avoid colliding with Sasori who had whirled around, one hand digging through his coat pockets. He looked up with an excited gleam in his eyes and purposefully placed a ticket in Deidara's hand. Sasori's thin fingers were strangely warm. "Here's your ticket!"
"Hold on a minute, Danna!" Sasori paused in mid-turn expectantly. The blonde's breath came out in a puff of smoke and his words created a little haze of fog between them, "How long have you been planning this and what's gotten into you? The ruthless Sasori taking his annoying partner, not only out, but on a date? And I've never seen you so excited, Danna. Did someone whack you on the head a little too hard on that last mission, yeah?" Sasori was quiet for a bit and then gave one of his obnoxiously disarming smiles,
"Well, I have to show you what real art is, Dei" He grabbed a loose end of his partner's scarf and pulled him through the museum's spinning doors.
Any concern over Sasori's strange behavior dissipated once the two missing-nins entered the museum.
"Wow, Danna! This place is huge! I've never actually been to a museum, yeah!" Sasori took his ticket stub and waited while the man at the entrance took Deidara's ticket. "We don't have anything in Iwa. Just a bunch of rocks." The man called after them as they made their way to the first show room.
"Say, you two look awfully familiar. I think…I think I know you…maybe from the bingo-" Sasori's baffling smile.
"You'll think again if you know what's good for you!" The puppet master turned on his heel and followed Deidara into the first room, leaving the man nervously contemplating their tickets.
"Hey, Dei?"
"Mm?"
"Do you want to play a little game?" The enraptured sculptor turned apprehensively to the puppet master.
"What kind of game, yeah?"
"Just choose a favorite piece in every room and I'll choose mine. Then we'll tell each other. Nothing much…it would just be…interesting." Deidara shrugged and gave a mischievous grin as they neared the last painting.
"Sure, why not? It could be fun, yeah." They entered the next room smiling; each wrapped in their own secret thoughts, then abruptly stopped and turned back to the other room to examine the last painting.
"Hidan!" They said in unison at a closer look. The canvas was splattered in red with no apparent method to the madness. And then, one broad splash of yellow as though accidentally painted split through the middle. "Definitely Hidan." They walked on.
"Mine!"
"This one." They turned to see where the other was pointing. Sasori groaned, Deidara clicked his tongue and rolled his eye, "Typical, Danna!"
"What is that?"
"It's art, yeah!"
"A two year old could have made that!" Sasori gestured to a fragile sculpture of fine paper on wire strings chasing each other up on an orthodox spiral and randomly branching out to smaller spirals.
"Well, if they did they're a genius."
"I bet if I sneezed it would shatter!"
"That's the beauty of it!" One of the precariously perched papers fluttered to the ground like a drunken butterfly to join several other scraps that had come loose. "See? Wasn't that artistic? Unplanned and original, Danna! That's what makes art interesting, not detail." He looked across the room at the vase Sasori had selected. It looked uniform in material but a closer look revealed tiny squares had been put together, all of slightly different hues of gold, to create the final product.
"Hn. That's true beauty created by a true artist! Practical, detailed, and it will endure the ages as a masterpiece!"
"Oh yeah, I bet if I pushed it it would shatter, un. Then it would be real art!" Sasori's red hair bristled in indignation.
"This one wouldn't break unless you used explosives!" said Sasori smugly. Deidara was unimpressed.
"So what? It's just a rock and god knows I've seen enough of those, yeah."
"Tell me you can at least appreciate it's sleek, compact build and the ingenuity that went in to it's configuration." They watched the orb of marble rotate on it's stone stand, water sliding down it's sides and keeping it in rotation from below.
"Alright, so it's a pretty rock, happy?" Sasori shook his head as they made their way past Deidara's chosen, a sculpture of wet sand that fell apart slowly day by day as it dried, and into the next exhibit. "Hey, what about this, Danna!" It's 'sleek and compact', yeah." The puppet master went to Deidara's shoulder to examine a small, solid pillar of dark stone that at first appeared blank. As you looked at it longer, however, a complex carving of serpents could be seen weaving in and out of each other's coils. Sasori made a face, mouth small and drawn and dark lined eyes stony.
"I don't really care for snakes." It took all of Deidara's shinobi ability not to lunge into his danna's arms. Instead he grinned at his partner's back and said airily,
"Really, I had no idea, un!"
They came to the final exhibit after much debate, evaluation, petty insults, and bouts of indignation in which Sasori would get extremely flushed and lose the ability to speak while Deidara, first snickered, and then outright laughed at him. Had more people been at the museum that day they would have attracted some suspicious glances but as it was, the cold weather and inartistic populace resulted in complete privacy save for an occasional guard or security camera. The last exhibit had artwork related to musical paraphernalia and, for some reason, the two were stumped on finding a favorite. Sasori took off along one side and Deidara along the other, studying each piece intently and silently save for an occasional grunt of distaste, thoughtfulness, or boredom. Deidara sighed and stole a glance at Sasori who was staring up at a large brass horn of some sort with his hands clasped behind his back and occasionally rising up to the balls of his feet in a steady rhythm. He felt heat on the tops of his ears again and turned around quickly to grab the rope surrounding the artwork for support. Maybe he couldn't find a favorite because he didn't want this to end and some seven year old mentality had been unlocked in the carelessness of looking at art for fun, and being out of the lair, and- he glanced back to his partner who had moved on to a glass flute-
is it being with Danna? Why does he make me so…giddy? Like I'm a kid again. He's not like this on missions or at home…Is this the old Sasori I'm seeing? Deidara idly passed several pieces, lost in thought. This Sasori was most definitely different. There was no trace of the sulking unemotional puppet in him, his heavy-lidded eyes seemed to be open a bit wider, and the general impatience with all things had vanished. The heat was spreading down to Deidara's cheeks and he was oblivious to the quickly closing gap between he and his partner as they neared the exhibit opposite the door they had entered. Then the sculptor did a double take as he saw the piece he'd just passed and opened his mouth to exclaim but was beat by another voice.
"Mine!"
"M-"
"What?"
"What, yeah?" They looked at each other and then quickly away.
"You don't mean that, Deidara, surely-"
"Yeah, I do, yeah!"
"The ocarina?"
"Yes!" Deidara put his hands on his hips. "And what do you mean, un?"
"Hn. I guess we'll have to share it as our favorite." Deidara's whole face warmed with unstoppable blushing. He spluttered at Sasori, who was holding a hand to his chin and considering the little carved bird ocarina. "Hn!" And then he turned to the blonde as they both inquired,
"Why?" Deidara took a deep breath; all other emotion overshadowed by the joy of discussing art with a fellow artist, and put his hands on the rope boundary.
"Well, it's music, yeah. That's always coming and going, always changing. I mean, you could just as easily play the same thing over and over and over and it be all 'practical' and 'constant' or whatever, but it has…potential, you know? Plus the concept is classic but the design is unique. Individual, yeah. That's art." He looked sideways at his partner who was still intently staring at it.
"Well, Dei…" he lowered his hands to join Deidara's on the rope. He was making a face, not like the one he had made at the snake stone, an unreadable one that Deidara had never seen before. "Dei, I picked it…" he felt Sasori's fingers brush gently against his own, "because it reminds me of you." For once, the blonde was lost for words. Instead, he looked down as if a reply was hidden in the arrangement of the floor tiles and speechlessly observed his danna's fingers slide over the top of his and then fall between them, entwining between the pale, bare knuckles and tapered fingers. He studied their hands together. They did not have that time-honored typical large, tanned masculine hand with petite porcelain feminine ones slipping between it's fingers, not like Kisame and Itachi's, thick, blistered blue ones accustomed to heaving Samehada between slim, narrowed pale ones accustomed to the finesse of a kunai. Theirs were the hands of artists, equals, deft but strong. Thin enough to turn tiny screws or add a minute clump of clay and yet temperamental enough to reduce a sculpture to a lump of clay or an entire puppet to splinters. And they were bare: without the rings that reminded them of their allegiance, their obligation, the impossibilities. Bare, like a canvas or a wheel or a cleared workbench, bare and full of what could be. Potential. Like the upturned face nearing his own. But just as with a bare canvas, at some point you must begin and make the first stroke. And so they stood: a pale canvas splattered with red and then in the middle a broad splash of yellow. In some eyes this addition would be odd. But it was no accident.
Sasori closed his door and threw his coat on his chair. He flopped onto his bed and squeezed his pillow to his face. One beat. Two. He counted twenty, that was when he knew there would be no eavesdroppers, and sat up. He pulled a sheet off one of the many covered puppets strewn across his room.
"How did it go?"
"Oh mother, it was incredible! My first date and my first kiss! All in one afternoon!"
"My, my, Sasori! This is a tale I must hear!"
"Of course, okasan! And you will be the first to hear it! The only one to hear it too, probably."
"Now, Sasori, aren't you going to tell your father?"
"Ah, okasan! He doesn't understand things like you do!"
"Sasori, you really must give him a chance! I did marry him after all. He must understand some things; though I'll admit those times are rare. Rare, but not unheard of."