MMM, GEN. TASTES LIKE CHICKEN.

----

It's been a little while since Deidara last went back to Iwagakure. Akatsuki are supposed to sever all ties with their old villages, but he's sure his occasional visits to his old home village can't be too damaging – not for Akatsuki, anyway. More often than not they leave sections of Iwa in need of repair. Deidara is fond of the place, but Deidara's fondness is not really something anyone, anything or any place should really aim to attract, because the missing-nin's favoured form of expressing this fondness is explosives – and not harmless, pretty fireworks, either: Deidara prefers bombs. In his eyes – or eye, because the same explosives that the remaining one appreciates so avidly took the other out a few years back – there is no firework whose coloured lights can match the beauty of the instant of a weapon's detonation – and indeed, no symphony that can compare to the scream of its fall and the crash of its impact, and no painting that can capture anything like the glory of the chaos of its aftermath.

Besides, fireworks are petty entertainment for the ignorant masses; as far as Deidara is concerned, a destructive explosion is art in its highest and purest form, and no firework-watching crowd of commoners who 'ooh' and 'aah' at a muffled bang and a sprinkling of artificial stars could hope to appreciate his works of art.

That said, he's watching them now, and he'll admit there's a beauty to their fading, ephemeral glimmers of glory, but he doubts the crowd gathered to celebrate New Year's (he left in summer, and knows they don't let fireworks off any more at that time of the year) can really see it for what it is to him.

And Deidara thinks, for that, they should die.

He eases his foot forward slightly and the great clay owl swoops forward from its perch atop what he knows is precisely the sixth highest peak of the mountains that surround Iwagakure. The cold air chills him through his cloak as he dives, and he loves it, grinning into the wind as it rushes through him.

It's possible they'll see him coming, but he doesn't mind especially. The horror of anticipation can be as good as a surprise. He flies low, the wingtips of his sculpted mount near brushing the tops of the higher buildings, and he watching the fireworks still and waits for the alarm to be sounded – ah. There. He sees a sentry leap frantically from roof to roof a little way ahead of him, and his grin turns smirk, his eye gleams; he reaches for the clay that will decimate the crowd – number twenty-three, especially for home – and cradles it in his hands as as he nears his target.

The villagers are panicking as he soars over them and something in him sings to know it; the owl beats its wings and flies him higher above them, looping with his exuberance, and he's upside-down when he drops it, looking jubilantly down at them. He can make out some of the faces, even from this height – even without the scope, his sight was always superb – and the terror he can see in them only further fuels his joy – and then he's too far for the faces but it doesn't matter because there's the beautiful beautiful impact and the song in his soul rises to a glorious, ecstatic crescendo for just that moment, that one perfect moment of glory and noise and chaos and death – but it'll still be singing for hours, and he won't leave the sky until dawn.

Eighty-four people died that night, but the fireworks were superb.