It hurt. Dying hurt. He had always imagined that it would be a gentle force, one that would end the pain. But in his expanse of unfeeling, it was a pang of agony. He shivered, to the point that his tiny frame rattled. Two blades, right through him. Right through the last part of him that was alive. And he lifted his head.
His mother, his father. They brought him into their arms, beckoning him to the death he had lost them to so long ago. His eyes sought and found his grandmother, watching him. She stood out against the approaching backdrop of blackness. He spoke, but could no longer hear anything. He revealed some uselessstatement to that medic who had helped slay him.
It was a faint, faint thought in his mind that swelled forward, consuming everything, every thought, every part of him.
He was going to die.
And he smiled.
He lost his balance and collapsed, as his grandmother lost the strength to hold him up. But he never saw his mother and father return to their state as wooden dolls. He just kept falling.
The nothingness swallowed him up, and the pain faded. There was no need to breathe, no need to think, for his passing was finally complete. His torn clothes fluttered around him as he fell. In the distance, he saw figures swirling around him, perhaps dream images of his fading life. But they kept away, whispering amongst each other.
He closed his eyes, hoping to simply fade completely; the gift he had been waiting for all these years.
But when he opened his eyes once more, he was no longer falling. Had the falling even happened? He stood in a white tiny room, with a swinging florescent light. It buzzed as it swung, blinking off and on.
The tile was clean, but the grout was a stark black. Before him were his perfect tools, the scalpel gleaming in the winking light. Mindlessly, he picked it up, and turned to the body in front of him. Contentment flared in him. The man on the dissection table had no face. Perhaps he intended to add his own.
Behind him, something else crackled into existence.
Without even looking back, he could tell what it was. A tape player. As the spools turned, a soft hum began, and the sweet whines of violins filled the air. He brought the scalpel down. The skin peeled back perfectly, and blood seeped out from the folds. He noted the organs, observing the health of the muscles overlaying the ribs, and the curled, moist intestines.
These pale treasures lay unguarded by any bones, and were perfectly easy to remove, once you detached them from the stomach and the colon—
In his minds eye, he could see the bows suddenly slit across the dusty strings of the instruments in a sudden burst of music. The arm of the body lurched forward, curling around his clenched hand. He turned his head, and stared at the corpse---that stared back at him. His own eyes, brilliant, reflecting himself in an instantaneous paradox. Was he-Sasori, the artist, or the artwork?
He felt like air above a symphony, bouncing above the furious drums, being beaten by the forces of the brass, and being caressed by the careful movements of the bow on the strings. A boat on the sea, rocking, rocking. rocking... And above him swung a light, back and forth. Its hinges squeaked as the light flickered. And a scalpel gleamed.
He smiled up at himself, no longer frightened. He released the hand he held. He looked down at himself, and nodded in acceptance. Stooping over, he went back to his work. Vaguely he felt the slit in his organs, the spilling of precious fluids inside his exposed flesh.
The person who rose back up to examine his face once looked at first like a stranger.
But he blinked his eyes, and suddenly it all cleared.
"Mother?" He whispered, his voice a hiss from the pressure on his lung
She tilted her head, her lack hair streaming down to tickle the flesh on his ribs. She had that smiling, yet tearful look that mothers get sometimes. One he had always dreamed of seeing.
"Yes," she sobbed. "Yes, my son." she lost herself for a moment, in a gasp of emotion. "Oh, my beautiful boy..."
"I love you, mom." He whispered, even as she reached down into his exposed organs, and pulled out the gleaming, wrinkled intestines. She smiled at him, the delicate tears still running down her face.
"Oh, Sasori... I've m-missed you so much..." she managed to tell him through her tears. She held up his snakelike organs, up to her face to examine them.
When she lowered them again, however, his mother was gone.
"F-father?" he lifted up his head a fraction of an inch, staring at the man who everyone told him he resembled so much.
His dad nodded, dropping his guts into the wastebasket beside him. "Oh son. I haven't seen you in so long. I know you've had it tough, and I just want to say, I'm proud of you." At the table on his right side, his father lifted a medical saw, and began halving his ribcage.
"That means a lot to me, dad." he spoke, over the scratchy sound of his bones.
His father grunted a little as he pushed the two halves apart, exposing what they protected. Reaching down, his father cupped his throbbing heart. He felt it, but only a little.
"Of all the things you've been through, it makes me so proud to know that you still have a good heart." Smiling, his father held it up for him to view before dropping it too into the wastebasket.
And he reached over for the scalpel once more, but his hand brushed it off the table. His father scowled as it clattered off the floor. His head dipped out of sight. "There we go, found it," came the all too familiar croak of a very aged woman.
His grandmother came back up, scalpel in hand.
"We're almost done Sasori, and then you'll be just perfect." He avoided her gaze, yet at the same time, prayed she didn't notice. With two more cuts with the scalpel, his lungs were carefully removed and deposited.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no noise came out. Of course. His lungs were gone. But as he mouthed /I'm sorry, Grandmother/. She acted as if she had heard him.
"It's alright now, Sasori." she assured him. "Don't worry about it." her words were so comforting, as he moved past the tool stand and around the dissection table towards him. "Everything is going to be okay now." And in a strained movement, she brought the scalpel to his neck, and dug it in and across.
He felt a wet spurt on his neck, and gurgled as if his mouth were filling up with water. Chiyo dug it in, deeper, deeper... and finally he was staring down at his body, and his stump of a neck. His grandmother lifted him high, and brought the wastebasket forward. The white room blurred before him, and abruptly all was black and wet. He couldn't hear the music anymore.
Silence, and the lack of light.
Everything was so wet... he could feel his limbs again, when only seconds ago he had been looking down at his own decapitated corpse. He was hugging himself, wrapping his arms over his tiny ribcage and his slender shoulders. There was a throb. It pounded in his ears and seemed to come from all around him. Silence... and then it came again.
He could barely see himself abruptly. It was a glow, a weak red glow that was slowly brightening. He looked down, and saw himself.
He... was made of flesh. Every inch of him, from his face down to his thin toes. He wiggled them, marvelling. A cord of fleshy material, sort of like his previously lost intestines came from his navel and looped around him.
And he was surrounded...by red, soft and wet. He could see veins running through it. It pulsed, and squeezed him ever so lightly. And he was made of flesh!
Smiling, he looked down upon his wrist. Small purple veins hid behind pale skin. He brought his lips foreword, leaning his face upon the skin. It was warm, and he could feel the blood rushing.
Abruptly, he parted his lips, baring forth his teeth. Pain greeted him, screamed at him, and he was sinking down, down... The skin split open, the veins split open, blood poured into his mouth, all over his face, and down his throat. The flesh around him twisted, sickeningly. And it throbbed. Drawing back, he watched as it poured down his arm, and licked his lips.
A small bulge in his skin appeared. Something was shifting inside of him... the bump crawled forward, towards the opening in his skin... A red... maggot squeezed out from the wound, opening it further. Fear seized him.
More pockets appearing in his skin, all wriggling towards the exit. They came from him, ripping him open further, pouring out like fattened drops of blood.
In desperation, he clasped his other hand over the wound, to stop the flow. But a new pain soon greeted him. Out from his other wrist they fought, tearing him open in a gush of red, falling onto the flesh around him, clutching at the cord at his navel.
He could see his bones, as his flesh faded, pouring out of his wrists in the swarm. His skeletal fingers clutched at his ribs, that stuck out so much he thought they'd burst as well. Dimly, he realized he was screaming.
The throbbing red was shuddering, shuddering around him, fading into a rotted brown. It was tightening, tightening... It pressed down upon him, robbing him of any air.
The maggots were all over him now, squirming, covering him with their slime... or rather, his own blood. He fought the flesh, fought the womb that was killing him, even as it closed, covering his mouth.
He gave a final scream, as it was finishing him now. He couldn't inhale, couldn't move. The bugs were crushed, squirting their insides against his skin.
He would be like that soon. Popped. Smeared. He felt his limbs breaking with noisy snaps, his ribcage flattening, he could see nothing, as the flesh closed around his head. And crushed.
Something sprouted from deep within him, stretching from deep inside the earth. It reached, reached, and spread out, blooming into leafy green against the backdrop of blue sky. It was a tree, a tree surrounded by the golden ocean of sand. His home.
As it grew, the top branch budded something.
It started out green, and swelled, to something bright red. A wonderful fruit. He reached up for it, but somehow couldn't touch it.
Consciousness. He opened his eyes to see a gray sky above him. He felt wet... his body was covered in mud... Wait... his body? He sat up, and saw himself.
Naked. Covered in gray mud, in the middle of a glade of dead, black trees. As he looked down, he saw on his chest a gaping hole where his heart should be.
For the longest time he looked around, and waited, for some new horror to grasp him once more. Nothing came.
There was the quiet noise of wind blowing around him. Finally, he gathered strength to his legs, and stood.
He was alone. And he was awake. He brought his hand up to trace the hole on his chest.
"So. This is death." he remarked, and looked to the horizon, where foggy mountains waited in the distance.
Here he was.