He lay in the decaying ruins of an old toy store.
Broken toys and abandoned dolls and puppets were strewn lifelessly across the broken floorboards and dusty shelves like remnants of a once pleasant dream.
Of a carefree time when everything was perfect and nightmares were something you could wake from.
Flat out on his back, fingers intertwined on his chest, he gazed at the smog from the explosions that were hiding the sky from sight.
On occasion he glimpsed a star, a tiny pin prick of light somewhere far away.
I'm like that star...
Drifting in and out of an ugly fog from which I may or may not, surface.
It was always the same star.
Once, he mused, there were billions of stars gracing that beautiful dark sky; like diamonds on velvet.
Now, there was only one.
The smog was so thick and dark that Deidara often wondered if the other stars even existed anymore. Perhaps, like the residents of the village he had just destroyed, they had winked out of existence, nothing but memory keeping them alive.
That lonesome star is me...
Once lost in a crowd of millions, indistinguishable from any of the others - now unique, small, and alone.
After abandoning Iwa there hadn't been anything else.
Nowhere to call home, no one who knew him...
He hadn't realised how much his home had ruled his world and now, there was nothing.
There had been nothing for the 5 years since his abandonment.
The loneliness had begun to take its toll.
He had been stuck in this broken village for days, unable or unwilling, to move.
Lost in a labyrinth of psychological ruins, Deidara wouldn't know how to get out now if he wanted too.
Perhaps he had just given up and 'lost' was just a state of mind that ensured he stay trapped in this lifeless place, dead to all.
In the darkness of his own mind, Deidara was alone.
On occasion he had sworn he heard a voice, a noise, accompanied by a blinding hope that he was not by himself... That he was not alone
Just as quickly it would fade, teasing him into insanity, shattering his resolve.
No. There was no one else. He was alone.
He had become a creature unique in his survival, one of the last living in this world.
Maybe he was just crazy...
But perhaps being only one left, crazy was normal.
He had decided at one point that he no longer wanted to be alone.
It had been too late, for he had already destroyed the village.
And so he crafted out of his clay the only humanoid figures he could find; puppets.
The ghosts of memories and people he once knew haunted him. Their omnipresence was unnerving in the quiet nothingness.
That's what the world was now, nothingness, a never-ending darkness covered in never-ending smog.
I might as well just close my eyes and dream, dream of everything that was and everything that could have been...
In the bumbling utopia that had been his home, he had never thought there would come a time when dreams were better than reality.
So lost in thought was he, that he didn't detect the crunching sound of boots over crumbling concrete and rusting wires.
He opened his heavy lids and saw the silhouette of a man standing over him.
No face visible, he was just a dark shape of something that may or may not exist in the mad world of reality.
Perhaps his time was up. His unique existence now destined to conform and fade out like all the other stars.
This man standing over him, was this the Reaper?
Deidaras gaze returned to the sky and his breath hitched in his throat.
Another star shone through the smog, weak, but there none the less.
Two stars... He was not alone.
He carefully turned back to the shadow, afraid that if he moved too quick, the apparition of the man may disappear.
"Who are you?" he whispered in wonder.
The man shifted on his feet, seemingly content with the quiet but not forbidding the small whispers they would inevitably exchange.
"No-one of consequence." He replied softly.
He must have thought I was dead...
Covered in a cold sweat, malnourished and pale, Deidara was the very definition of ill.
Dried blood had oozed out of minor flesh wounds he had obtained wading through oceans of the bodies of the men, women and children he had killed earlier that week.
His clothes were torn, singed and ragged and his feet were scabbed and covered in sores.
"Who are you?" Deidara whispered again.
The man leaned closer, red hair and intricate grey eyes becoming more visible in the fading light.
He looked tired –world weary– and yet despite his phlegmatic expression he had an air of darkness surrounding him.
Something that made Deidara want to trust him, made him want to believe in this man and trust him to take him away from this darkness, this world with only one star.
To save him.
Deidara closed his eyes as he drifted into the smog, into unconsciousness and heard, or imagined he heard, a voice near his ear.
"I am Sasori." The voice whispered tonelessly. "And I am going to take you away."
Ahh... So he is the Reaper after all...
...I don't fear the reaper...