AN: Why, oh, why did I write this? -holds head in hands- It was pure, sudden impulse! No SasorixDeidara, no fluff, no lemons… don't twist it around! It was a passing whim that needed to be written in order to continue with Iwagakure's Unexpected. (Btw, next chapter will be out pretty soon, I hope…) The title means "Art of Lives". I think most of you know that… but I could be wrong. Oho, you know that the song "Cartoon Heroes" is really sad? I almost cried over it when writing this oneshot. It's terribly tragic, actually… At 1:22 a.m. you get really creepy and emotional when writing about Sasori's death and listening to "Cartoon Heroes". He should have been eternal like the cartoons they sing about; just for his sake. Art's really brief, you know…
Geijutsu of Lives
By TransientBANG
I had reached the point.
The walk had been excruciating in my condition. My newly reattached arms seared with the agony of ghost limbs that had been reincarnated. Every thick stitch rubbed against my skin and dug into it… and every nerve cried out in horror. Rehabilitation would be nigh unbearable. But I'd get over it. And every scar would get covered by another.
I would have flown if I hadn't been commanded not to… Now I'd have to lay low for awhile…
Two days of waiting had seemed like the ridiculous eternity he had been prattling on about just so recently.
A fortifying breath and a few uneasy steps into the cave. A chill coldness washed over me. I wasn't sure if it was a change in the temperature or just me… Surely, the cavern deprived of its roof was no longer retaining the moisture and darkness it had once locked away.
It was fitting for him. He never cared for the warmth or light. And now he was somewhere among the mounds of immobile shinobi instruments, basking in the revealing rays of the sun… Yet he still made me feel so empty. He was still indifferent and still maintained his iron hold of fascism over me.
Definitely in the wreckage… he was definitely still there. Nothing could make those chills run down my spine like his presence…
I ambled over the rubble, searching among the countless bodies of puppets. Different faces, different types of wood… some even flesh. He was among his brethren now; buried in a graveyard of his kind.
Or had it really been that way?
I shook my head, putting one of my sensitive hands against my hitai ate. I brushed my long, blond bangs aside, letting them sweep right down to where they had been.
Hadn't he once told me… that he was neither quite puppet, nor human? Caught in limbo; he was constantly barred between two identities. And had he cared? Had that bothered him? I didn't really know. He had bluntly told me he didn't feel anymore. He felt nothing in his body and nothing in his soul.
It didn't take me long to spot him. Prone and immobile, he was positioned awkwardly between two ragged, roughly hewn puppets draped in furry rags. On closer inspection, one almost looked like a crude, mistaken version of… him. Red hair that curled slightly in the same way, but a larger chin and a face even more stiff then his. The other was a dark-haired female who held the same blank expression and lusterless eyes.
I approached him and his murderers, blinking rapidly. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was denying it. I couldn't shake off the feeling that I had been hoping, somewhere, deep inside, that he would have chosen to escape… rather then die. From my hiding place in that bush, I had watched those two kunoichi join up with the jinchuuriki and copy-ninja… I had known then, that he was defeated. Beaten and discarded like some deadly, broken toy.
And I might have been as intense as my partner had been stoic… I didn't hold many things to be of value, and denied it when anything besides art managed to weasel its way into my concern. But something had…
I stepped on a curved, metal object, and upon removing my foot, I saw that I had happened upon an old, Sunagakure forehead protector. The small hourglass symbol inscribed on it had been rent with a long, jagged scratch and seemed sadly dilapidated. The blemish mirrored the one on my Iwagakure headband resting above my eyes.
"What was it like? Did you go out with a 'BANG'? Or did you slowly fade away?"
His body lay still, as cold in death as it had been in life. Katana and a menagerie of other weapons were buried in his back. I knelt down in front of the solemn scene. I gently placed my fingers on the once so smooth and finely sanded surface of his shoulders, being careful to avoid the dangerous blades. Now it was dented with clefts and wedges, not unlike the blows of a kunai or misguided chisel stroke.
Cautiously, I turned him onto a thin side, then flipped him onto his back. Never had I touched so much of him… Never had I drew my fingers over that texture. It wasn't like normal wood… It had an exterior made up of almost imperceptible pores… and just below the surface, a worn away, distant feel of chakra. It was strange… as I could tell this wasn't his usual body. The casket that held his now mangled heart was situated in the middle of this body's chest, not to the left. This body was clothed in a tattered scarlet cloak and wasn't made the same way as the other had been… But still, it was crafted with the utmost delicacy.
Slowly, with trepidation, I eased him onto the cracked and uneven stone that now made up his tomb.
Sasori no Danna's deathbed.
Out of the cylinder in the middle of his chest sprouted two long, thin blades. A fluid… darker and tinged in purple stained the metal and flesh-coloured wood. It looked like poison…
Sasori no Danna's right arm was gone at the elbow, replaced with a sword dripping in the same slippery liquid. His eyes, still open, blank and staring ahead unseeingly into the distance… Into eternity? I raised my gaze up to the bright sky that mirrored my eyes.
"What are you looking at, hmm?" I muttered quietly, narrowing my cerulean orbs. "You were wrong, after all!" I frowned down at him again. "I was right! I knew it all along, see?" I rubbed one of my stinging arms disconsolately. "You're dead, and I'm alive. Art is transient, Danna. So were you really the art you thought you were? Ha!"
I leaned back again, crossing my legs and gingerly propping myself up with my hands.
"You were always telling me how I was going to die so soon… 'Next mission, Deidara; you're dead next mission. This one's going to be too much for you to handle…' Right. You got too cocky for your own good, hmm?
"This is just ridiculous… Now I'm stuck with… Tobi; playing sempai… That's not my job! If you hadn't gone and proved me so right about everything, then you'd still be here… Hmm?"
Of course there was no answer.
I got up suddenly; thoroughly angry. I paced around the circle that enclosed the site of the deed.
There was a seal… Or something like that encompassing the place where Sasori no Danna's body and the two puppets still clinging to their blades lay. Scrutinizing the piles of darkly clad puppets, I spotted some unusual marionettes of a lighter hue among the debris. I passed one of them, or bits of a grey-skinned humanoid figure. A corner of the outer seal was stemming from its gaping mouth. It was almost like… Sasori no Danna had been surrounded. But then what?
I closed my eyes, trying to remember the scene as I had first witnessed it; undisturbed… except for Tobi, of course… the little puke had gone to get Sasori no Danna's ring just hours after he had died.
I pictured the corpse of my superior, face-down, and all of the blades sticking out of his back… making him into some travesty of a pincushion. I focused hard on the way the swords and kunai had been positioned.
Opening my eyes, I strode back to Sasori no Danna's cadaver. Again, I touched the unnatural skin of his makeshift body, sitting him up slightly to examine the weapons in his back.
That was it… There was no way…
I had to force my jaw to stay firmly shut.
I had concluded that, judging by the angles at which the blades would have come from when he was standing, and the velocity and power of the thrust given by the depth they had buried themselves into him by… he couldn't have lost; he could have avoided the attack… or at the very least, countered it effectively.
He had wanted to take the fatal hit? He had wanted to… die?
I swore, kicking an arm aside and stubbing my toe in the process. The hollow piece of wood bounced off a rift in the stone, and clattered down a miniature fissure.
"An enigma to the end…" I said audaciously, as though proclaiming my judgment. "And what an end; beaten by an old hag and a little girl?" I spat out a few colourful adjectives to describe just what he had done, gaiting myself slowly around and around his fallen corpse.
"You know what I thought when those two came back alive and you didn't?" I asked harshly. My voice echoed manically before the sound waves escaped out through the open roof of the cave.
"I thought, 'Like anything left for the future as a thing of eternal beauty… he got killed straight off.'! And you did!" I lashed out at the silhouette of a horned puppet in white robes. It flew across the ground, sprawling on top of a similar figure.
"I never liked you! But I never liked responsibility either!" I shouted hoarsely. "I don't want to be the "sempai"! Goodness knows… I don't even want to be here… And you helped drag me in!"
I rubbed my eyes, but not because I was near to tears; I was so beyond that human reaction.
"Who cares?" I said shakily. "It doesn't matter anymore. Life's too short for regrets, hmm. It's only long enough for vengeance!"
I grinned; my characteristic, wide smirk spreading slowly over my face like a pool of crystalline water slowly being contaminated with poison.
"Usually they send Zetsu-san to do this, hmm?" I said tauntingly, rolling up the sleeves of my new robes; the old ones had promptly been discarded on my return to the Akatsuki.
"But Leader-sama asked for me specially…" I continued, omitting some of the truth. He had actually told me that Zetsu-san had already gone over the wreckage and destroyed all evidence of Akatsuki that could elucidate our cause. What was left was of no concern to him, and he didn't care if someone took Sasori's body or puppets to analyze them and uncover their secrets. After all, in Leader-sama's mind, it had already been proven that they were ineffective and could be easily beaten by a man of his caliber. I had asked to be permitted to go over the remains. I had needed some sort of… tangible proof. I hated myself for that.
"So… so, Sasori no Danna, I'm going to clean it all up… yeah. Art's transient… art's fleeting… Art's a BANG!"
My hands slid down, painstakingly easing themselves into the pouches belted to my waist. I felt a terrible burning sensitivity as soon as my fingertips made contact with the thick, slimy material. I gritted my teeth, remembering that the nerves in my limbs were still extremely touchy. But, no! I wouldn't be dissuaded by something as trite as pain! Pain was merely a physical sensation, as I had told myself so often, and it could be shut down and ignored.
My palm-mouths began to bite into the clay and tear it apart jerkily. They mashed the pasty earth between their teeth, doing as I bid them to. Pulling my hands out of the pouches, I held them out in front of me, scrutinizing their progress. My palm-mouths opened their maws in unison, proffering the clay to me on their tongues, as though seeking my approval on their work.
I clenched my fists over the saliva-coated substance, kneading and working the material between my fingers and tongues.
When I relinquished my grip from the two chunks, they had been transformed into a pair of sleek, smooth birds. The one perched on my left hand was for my escape. The heck with it; I was going to fly away whether Leader-sama wanted me to or not. The bird on my right hand was fairly large and… spectacular. It had a fancy crest coming up from its head and the back of its neck.
"Sorry, Danna… That's the best I can do with my chakra so low… otherwise I'd give you C3."
Silence.
I dropped both birds onto the cavern floor, signing "tora" to make the one that was going to be my ride expand rapidly. Still surrounded by the cloud of steam, I turned to the elaborate bird to repeat the procedure.
I inhaled deeply, taking in the humid heat of the air.
Glancing at Sasori no Danna's body again, I watching the poison coating the edge of the blades protruding from his heart's casket begin to thin and drip. It streamed down the lethal weapons, pooling on top of the broken surface of the drum containing Sasori no Danna's heart, then slipping through the torn fabric and dripping onto the still organ lying within.
My head pulsed suddenly, as a rush of blood forced its way to my brain.
"Art is not eternal!" I snapped morbidly. "What? You want to stay here and rot? You want to last forever, hmm?" I felt foolish… maybe I had no right to go about and erase him.
"Can you still be art when you're dead? Your art… your eternal art? Think you're going to last forevermore here? Yeah, well I don't!"
Why was I shouting at a puppet and demanding answers from it? He was dead.
"Fine! Be art… or whatever you were…" I whispered. "I don't care if I'm right now… There's no one to argue with anymore…" It was true. Despite our differences and the constant bickering, we were two of a kind in an unsophisticated organization of criminals. We were the only ones to claim ourselves to be artists. We were the only ones to understand the misconceptions of the world. The only ones to see through it all…
What a vulgar… and beautiful world we lived in. Separate in our beliefs, yet united in our differences from the others.
"That's it then." I stepped up to Sasori no Danna's body, staring down my nose at it one last time. I placed the little decorated bird in front of him, beside his discarded hitai ate. "You choose."
Finally averting my eyes from the tragedy, I hopped onto the broad back of the behemoth bird. I dragged my fingers over the cooled clay, savoring its sticky quality.
It spread its wings, raising them high above our heads. I sent a wave of chakra to my feet to lock them in place, and without looking back, I commanded the bird to take off. Driving its wings down hard, it thrust its colossal mass up into the sky, hovering briefly before propelling itself forward.
It felt like a great weight had been lifted. I had known it wasn't my fault, and I didn't care anyway... but...
"You chase that eternity of yours."
Never relent.