Okay, to be honest, I'm not the biggest Naruto fan ever... but my friend loves it and she's been pestering me to write something for ages, so I picked a character I thought seemed interesting and ran with it. I'm actually pretty pleased with how this came out.
Dedicated to Nast'ia, an absolute pain- and one of the best friends I have ever or will ever have in my life.
I own nothing.
(From behind a curtain of blonde hair the exact shade of a candle-flame, mismatched eyes watch, captivated, as the world turns to (ruins) art.
He stands unmoving, still as a statue, face bright with rapture as if he were looking upon something heavenly- and perhaps, in a way, he is:
'Heaven' means little to Deidara, but the art before his eyes is nothing short of celestial.)
-*-
It all starts with a flock of delicate clay birds, dainty and beautiful, fluttering down in sweeping spirals to rest, momentarily at peace, on carefully-chosen perches throughout the village.
A fleeting (how apt) hand sign, a word whispered in breathless anticipation- Katsu!
A spark. A flash of white light-
And then there is a rushing, billowing flame, opening up like- yeah, like the petals of some exotic flower, enveloping the village in red and gold and setting the sky aflame with bright, brilliant light- there is sound all around, and the very earth the village is built on shakes and is ripped apart by violent tremors. Everything is full of heat, full of movement, full of life, and fleetingly, fleetingly, fleetingly-
Fleetingly, for one brief, ephemeral instant, the entire world is Art.
Only fleetingly.
It soon fades, and in its wake, it leaves a stark contrast: so dark, with smoke pouring into the sky to devour the sun, buildings crumbling and breaking, a few persistent fires burning amongst the wreckage. It is over, it is finished, and only Deidara is left: spectator, creator, artist. In his ears, the explosion still echoes, in his eyes there are still searing after-images, and he finds himself still trembling from the sheer force of the explosion. His heart is beating fast, so fast; and it's the most goddamned beautiful thing in the world even as the very last remnants of it fade away.
Fleeting.
For Deidara, art is a bang- a temporary, transitory beauty, there and then gone. He will never grow tired of it; never grow bored- he will live in each and every instant, live in the fire and the light and the sound and the trembling of the very earth below him...
...And he will be fleeting, just like one of his masterpieces: a brief moment of life, vibrant and beautiful and intense-and then nothing but ash on the wind, and a distant, inerasable memory.