05/02/2014
Disclaimer: I do not own the sandbox I play in.
Clay Clocks Tick Back
Arc 1 – Reset
1.01 – Tick
Look underneath the underneath.
Those words marked the start of the journey. The start for tens of thousands of shinobi across the Elemental Nations. They were words harking back to the days when shinobi were gods of deceit and manipulation, when the landmasses that shinobi fought on were rendered unrecognizable by their battles.
They are the words that will start our journey.
Are you paying attention, reader? Then answer me this: what turns a child into a bomb?
A rush of memories.
He gasped for air. His blond locks was laden with droplets of brown water, and not for the first-time, he wished that his additional mouths could breathe – but that wish was all he had time for before his head was dunked under again.
The next time he was brought up, he was choking. His tormenters were inexperienced, but brutal, and he hadn't been able to prepare that time. A lungful of water was the price of his negligence.
Again and again, his head was dunked into the trough, and then suddenly, mercifully, he was tossed to the ground. There were giggles as the other children ran off.
Slowly, between gags, Deidara caught his breath. His pale eye shone with unshed tears beneath his bangs.
He would not cry.
Another rush.
Deidara carefully balanced on the edge of his cot and pressed his clay cup against the door. It was a trick they'd learned at the academy – a trick he'd been unable to practice in class when his cup had mysteriously disappeared. The chūnin instructor had lengthily harangued him for his lack of responsibility, but hadn't met his eyes.
It was to be expected. Most people's eyes tended to swerve and lock onto his extra mouths on the days when he forgot to wear gloves.
Still, now he could practice, if only to eavesdrop on his parents.
"He's too young, Takumi! It's too early for him to be a Conscript." – that was his mother.
"We can't keep this up, Miu. People know. They see his abnormality, and we're paying the price, hm! Our bills, the vendors…you know as well as I do that we can't afford to pretend everything's fine– it's only a matter of time before they lynch us outright…and the brat wants to spend more on clay - !"
His father's voice stopped, and Deidara was frozen for a minute. Then he scrambled for his covers, but he overreached, lost his balance, and the cot fell sideways. In the next moment, before he could even get up, his father had opened the door and stepped inside.
When Deidara looked up, it was into a pair of haunted eyes staring back at him.
Despite his father's earlier anger, there was no rage to be seen in those eyes. Only despair. Dread that his truth was now known.
There could have been a lot said, but the writing had been on the wall for weeks. His father left. He tossed and turned in his bed, and somehow found unconsciousness.
The next morning, Deidara woke to an empty house.
They say that before you die, your life flashes before your eyes.
The Iwa Conscripts did take him, in the end.
He didn't need to fake his age. The recruiters looked the other way these days – too many were dying on the frontlines. His earth affinity meant that he could tunnel, and that meant he could set traps. His youth, his country accent, his "hms" and "uns" at the ends of sentences, they each set him apart, in their own way.
His extra hands never even came up. He was isolated before they ever could.
The commanders didn't care. They sent the blond boy out into the worst of the Third War, expecting him to die as cannon fodder. There'd been no need to help him socialize, much less do a proper psych eval.
The problem was that he survived.
It was so…cliché.
In the aftermath, Deidara found himself the subject of even more latent anger. Iwa had lost, and as an anti-social member of so many teams, he was a primary scapegoat. No matter where he went, there would be stories about him. He was a dreamer, a slacker, a fuck-up, and (when those talking were drunk enough), a traitor.
It was his art that helped him survive during the so-called "peacetime".
He made clay pots at first, and then moved onto increasingly elaborate bowls, ornaments, clay lamps and vases, even sculptures. He sold them to the villagers, putting in just enough detail that they would forget for a moment that he was the monster of Iwa, the one they all had to avoid. His childish face and his gloves helped, but even so, people never forgot for long. He would count his profits, pack up, and move on.
He never dawdled in one place. Hearing the explosions was enough.
It would take nearly a year of doing this to small, isolated villages before a survivor reported him and he became a missing-nin. Nearly a year before he would ever see his art up-close, in a frenzied battle against hunter-nin. Deidara had talent for the visual stuff, but he'd never really been a visual person.
His art was the sound of villages crumbling in an instant.
The flashes were clearer now, more recent. More detailed.
Deidara didn't know how old he was when he was inducted into the Akatsuki. It couldn't have been too long after the war, but his sense of time had been attuned to his art, not to the passing of the days.
From the moment he joined, he despised all of them, from the most senior members to the newest ones. Kisame was a brute; he was unsophisticated, blunt, and most unpleasantly, he was utterly loyal to their leader. Kakuzu was nearly the opposite, with his carefully clipped tones, but his obsession with money and constant dry criticism set the blond terrorist on edge. Hidan, of course, was immortal and everlasting, which earned him a special loathing in Deidara's heart.
It was ironic, really, that Hidan had been taken out. With a bang, no less.
Itachi was the last member of the Akatsuki that Deidara truly knew to any capacity, but his hatred of the Uchiha was so great that it bled over to all the other members he didn't interact with.
The Uchiha. Their damned eyes infuriated him. Before he'd felt the terror of the leader's chakra for the first time, he'd made regular attempts on the Uchiha's life, only to be carelessly stopped each time. Only once had Itachi actually gone on the offensive, going so far as to pull out his precious Mangekyo Sharingan, and it'd been in response to an army of clay snakes.
The young artist had taken note of the fact. He didn't know Orochimaru well, but soon he made the connection that the snake-freak made Itachi uneasy. It was a thrilling discovery, but a bitter pill to swallow when he realized that the outlying battle hadn't even been due to his own prowess. In short order, he'd placed Orochimaru on his hit list, directly beneath Itachi's spot at number one.
The last flash was short. To the point.
Dusty brown eyes peered at him from beneath a mop of red hair.
"Are you alive, Deidara?"
It was a wooden voice, in more ways than one, but it brought a warmth to his chest.
"Yeah, un."
Deidara blinked, and blinked again, as the images in his head faded away. He took stock again of his present situation.
His leg was in utter ruin, and it didn't take his anatomy lessons with the puppeteer to realize he wouldn't be using it for the rest of the battle. He could probably identify individual sources of pain if he focused, but semantics were no longer important. It was a pity. His last moments would at least have had some theatrical value if he was standing up. It would be a terrible finale. For this sort of thing, it would be nice to have full control of his arms too, but the pain there was excruciating. If his extra mouths had vocal chords, they would no doubt be screaming themselves raw.
Spilt milk.
His diaphragm protested as he breathed in, and for a moment blackness threatened to swallow him. He had to bite his tongue to focus. This drama would be over soon enough.
The two earthen snakes he'd sent to bind Sasuke slipped to the ground as he coughed out a few giggles. Weak. They rapidly escalated to peals of mirth, until he was roaring at the sky in a sort of delirious glee. If he got himself worked up, perhaps he could fake insanity to wear it was passably nerve-wracking.
It's the end of the line for you, you little prick! He thought, but there was a feeling of surrealism to that thought. It's so close to the end for both of us. His chest-mouth opened, famished and eager to bite. He brought out his last chunk of clay, and as he did, he flushed the rest of his chakra into it. The clay was pure, and already had a net of his chakra into it, but the extra juice wouldn't hurt. He tossed it up and his chest seemed to move independently, heaving his body upright to gobble up the treat.
Shit. His eyesight really was going out now. He'd been considering a C-4 display to augment his C-0, but at this rate he'd have to strain just to trigger the C-0.
Deidara let his eyes flicker to Sasuke's. The boy's onyx orbs were widening, fear appearing there for the first time since the battle had started. Good, he'd seen the danger in that last chunk of purified clay. He probably thinks I'm insane, Deidara thought to himself with another wet chuckle.
He went through the few handseals he needed to prime everything, openly flaunting the snake and boar signs common to all earth jutsu. His blood started flowing out of his wounds, flowing ripped across his skin in dark streaks, and his face lit up in a fierce grin. No acting now. This was the pinnacle of his art. It was supposed to be for Itachi, but taking the bratty brother out would do.
Even in his primal joy, he noted that the explosion would probably be less defined than he liked. The silhouette of his body would be blurry, the blast radius messy without additional chakra to guide the process.
Spilt milk, he thought again, and readied himself for his last bit of melodrama. It came out sounding more beast than human.
"ADMIRE. DESPAIR. AND SHOUT. FOR MY ART…IS A BANG!"
A/N: For those of you who have seen this story before…it's getting a revamp.
For those who are new, welcome. I hope you enjoy the ride.