[Cross-posted from AO3; originally posted there on 30/3/2014.]
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Assessment begins at nine o' clock sharp that Monday, five hours of quarantine in the high-ceilinged art room with its great shining windows and reeking smell of staling paintbrushes. There are sloppy Year Eight batik prints hanging from the high white walls; there are sloppy Year Ten efforts at papier-mâché sculpture on wire propped atop the shelving units; there are sloppy Year Seven paintings drying in the racks, crisping and curling at the corners for want of sealant. On the teacher's desk, a radio is playing. A young woman sings; there is a beat; the beat is - vulgar.
In the classroom: an air of festivity. It is abhorrent.
Sasori sits alone with his back to the wall and spreads his desk with newspaper, and the newspaper with slick black binliner, and the binliner with the entrails of the cat he will turn in for his final project. It will be rewired, and repurposed, and infinite. It will score him an A*. It is without doubt. It is art. He bites off his thread and takes up his needle with his left hand, his scalpel with his right. The cat is not yet dead.
It mewls. He ignores it. Directly across the classroom sits Deidara, his chair kicked back on two legs, his boots swung up onto the desk, talking and talking and champing at his clay and blowing a terracotta bubble from the palm of his left hand that bursts as he gestures vigorously about him, grinning from all three visible mouths like a boy unhinged. Sasori ignores Deidara also.
The exposed chambers of the cat's heart still pulse, feebly. A bubble of blood swells and bursts. A Hyuuga girl sits at the next desk down, dabbing her brush into a tray of insipid watercolour tablets; occasionally she glances at his workspace, her expression revolted. Sasori is certain he would feel the same revulsion, were he forced to gaze upon the tired banalities that she produces and dares to consider art.
A lunch break is called. Sasori's mechanical frame does not require lunch. In the face of Sasori's explanation the invigilator remains unmoved, however, and Sasori is compelled to join his fleshy human classmates as they swarm from the art room to the lunch room, fleshy human hands clutching at clingfilm-wrapped cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, wet human intestines clenching and contracting as they consume. He cannot see this, of course, but he imagines it. With the damp smacking of lips against tongue against saliva against Tesco Wafer Thin Ham Slices all around him, it is difficult not to.
Deidara squats beneath the windows, surrounded by classmates as noisy as himself, as tackily, immaturely-clad as himself; and Sasori sits alone, gazing far out across the distant, muddied playing fields, far out beyond the paltry range of vision of any mere human. A person could be stirred near beyond the point of endurance by the constant wet champing of at least three mouths - one busy in a bag of ready-salted Walkers, and another one shoved in his little sack of clay, and the last one hooting with laughter loud enough to aggravate even the perfectly crafted balsa interiors of Sasori's ears - but Sasori is, of course, no longer a person: and Sasori has transcended all emotions petty enough to be stirred by the aggravations of Deidara.
The lunch break ends; and, two hours later, so does the first round of assessment. The cat's skeletal system has been partially restructured, its vertebrae restrung with wire, its joints resocketed. He has already engineered a simple flamethrower, ready for oral installation once he rehinges its jaw next week. Art without the potential to aggress is no art at all.
Across the classroom, Deidara has produced nothing constructive whatsoever with his time - nothing whatsoever but for a single sculpture, rapidly crafted on what seems to be the suggestion of the Yamanaka girl beside him and set down on the Yamanaka's desk to a raucous gale of laughter, the clay still glossy with saliva. It is a human penis. It is unamusing. It explodes after a moment, relieving its vulgar imposition on Sasori's line of sight.
Sasori fills a plastic bag with non-essential cat parts and takes it with him when he leaves, dumps it in the rubbish bin at the edge of the school car park. It lands with a sloppy splash. The cat's purpose has been redefined: from animal to object, from pet to puppet, from a functionless, mortal waste of time and expensive cat food to an item of great use, not only in its ability to shoot razor wire from the pads of its paws, but also in its guarantee of an A* for Sasori in GCSE Art.
Sasori carved out all human emotion when he carved out his human heart; but he imagines that, were he still capable of sentiment, he might perhaps be feeling rather smug.
Deidara is feeling rather smug. There is no question that Deidara is feeling rather smug. The second and final installment of the class's assessment time falls at the same time the next Monday, and the whole of the intervening week Sasori spends sketching designs in the margins of his classwork, jaw clenched, trying and doggedly trying to devise some form of aural filter he could program to sift through all audio input, leaving only that which is not Deidara.
"It's gonna be fucking amazing, yeah," Deidara declares, during morning registration. "Legendary," he announces, in the changing rooms after P.E. "Five years time," he tells their Geography class, interrupting the Haruno girl's unearthly dull coursework presentation on notable tributaries of the River Nile, "I'm gonna be a big name in every gallery in New York or whatever, the biggest name, and you're all gonna be like -" he adopts an accent Sasori can only assume is intended as mockery, although of whom remains as unclear as its intended geographical provenance, "- oh, hey, remember Deidara? And then you're gonna be like, uh-h-h, yeah we do, cos I'm gonna -"
"Shut up!" says Haruno, and knocks him backward off his chair with a single punch. "Don't talk when I'm talking!"
Until this moment, no member of the Haruno family had ever seemed worthy to Sasori of even his passing consideration, let alone his deep, abiding appreciation; but from then on, he is sure to nod at Sakura - minutely, expressionlessly - in the hallways when they pass. He is confident she understands his gratitude.
"Basically," Deidara continues, unabashed, as he follows Sasori between lessons for reasons unknown and unimaginable to Sasori, "I'm gonna get full marks, yeah, and you fuckers are gonna be left standing in my dust. Artistically speaking."
"I doubt it," says Sasori.
"Oh, right, okay - cos chopping up dogs and shit is totally artistic, and totally not psycho?" He flips his fringe dismissively. "Fuck that, yeah."
There is a brace of poisoned needles embedded in the inner joint of Sasori's elbow - for emergencies. He considers triggering it. Instead, he says: "You are aware that purple nail varnish is against our school's uniform policy."
The airy, lofty arrogance is replaced at once by a furious scowl. "I'm expressing myself, yeah?" Deidara snaps. "Don't see you complaining when Itachi does it."
Sasori cannot, of course, feel human emotion. Regardless, he experiences something intellectually close to profound satisfaction for the remainder of the day as Deidara's abruptly blackened mood hangs, low and threatening, over the mathematics classroom. The sound of violent splintering comes from Deidara's desk nine times; nine times, Deidara sticks his hand up in the air and demands a new calculator. Nine times, the mouth of the hand stuck in the air is still aggressively chewing down on the remains of the last one.
Half of their GCSE Art class survive the second examination. Of the other half, six die in the initial explosion - which guts the art room and a good number of its occupants - two in the fire which subsequently rages through the school, and eight in the series of smaller explosions Deidara sets off all through the school's sixth form wing. It is a sequence of detonations Sasori can only track by sight, bursting up in a lethal, elaborate lightshow, silence singing in his deafened ears.
Deidara himself watches from the edge of the playing field, the dual lights of artistic fulfilment and wanton property destruction burning in his eyes. A grin of wild delight shows on all three visible mouths.
Sasori's new-minted cat puppet had performed several understated, efficient maimings just moments before the first bomb went off, but he does not consider himself overshadowed. If the least this flamboyantly ostentatious display does is irreparably destroy the shoddy papier-mâché sculptures in the art room - well, then it will have been worth it. No matter the consequences, it will have been worth it.
Dark, grimy smoke clouds billow over the wreckage of the school.
Neither of them receive an A* grade, when results come through that August. Neither of them even receive an A. Deidara rings Sasori up from the young offenders' institution in which he currently resides and explains, in increasingly heated tones, exactly how the failure of the examining board to recognise his breathtakingly modern and dazzlingly fresh approach to the outdated, stuck-in-the-mud perspective of the academy will go down in art history for being a) blind as fuck, and b) ignorant as shit.
"I have never given you my telephone number," says Sasori, when Deidara appears to have talked himself into exhaustion, panting for breath on the other end of the line. The connection is crackly and unclear.
"B!" says Deidara, soaring up on a second wind of outrage. "I got a B! Has Itachi ever got a B? I think not!"
"You might bear in mind that never in Itachi's life has he stood trial for sixteen counts of murder."
"Bullshit!"
Sasori concedes the point. "Not as a direct consequence of an art project, at least."
"Whatever," says Deidara, in disgust. "It'll blow over. History'll recognise me, yeah."
"Perhaps," says Sasori. "Regardless, I am going to hang up on you."
"You are not," Deidara says huffily, and promptly hangs up first.