Sasori carefully transferred the photographs onto a drying line in his dark room, already impatient for the pictures to be done. However, there was no real way to get around the drying time. Sitting in his dark room and waiting was not something that appealed to the artist, but he could work on his puppets in the meantime.
Some time later, Sasori was fussing with a recently used puppet. The puppet itself received no damage, but the hair was a mess. The long blond strands had gotten impossibly tangled in an earlier battle. He almost would have preferred to have some other defect to fix. Working a comb through the hair was proving exceedingly tedious. He had never put much thought into how much effort people with long hair must go through on a regular basis, but now he was wondering how anyone had the patience to put up with it.
Finally done, he returned the hair to it's usual style before gently setting the puppet down and retreating to his dark room. The photographs should be dry by now, and he would be able to actually get a good look at the images.
Sasori pulled the pictures one by one off of the line, stacking them up before he left the darkroom for his workshop. He wasn't sure what he would find. The film had been in a corner of his workshop, hidden under a cabinet. It must have rolled under there and been forgotten, who knows how long ago. Sasori hadn't used his camera in years, not since…. Shaking his head, Sasori started to sort through the stack, taking in the pictures.
There was one of Deidara, laughing as he detonated a clay bomb. His expression was euphoric, and Sasori could almost hear him call out 'Art is a bang, yeah!' Another image showed him flying on his clay bird, taken when the brat had looked back at Sasori. The puppet supposed they were both lucky the flash hadn't startled him into crashing. Yet another photo was a blurry close up of a frowning palm, from when Deidara had gotten tired of the constant pictures and had thrown up a hand to block the camera.
If Sasori still breathed, the next picture would have made his breath catch. As it was, a curious constricting sensation overtook his heart. To anyone else, the picture was nothing special. It simply showed Deidara lying back, head pillowed on his wadded up Akatsuki cloak. He had removed his scope, and his hair was pulled out of the high half ponytail he so often wore. In his sleep, Deidara was relaxed and still, a contented smile on his face.
Sasori looked up from the photograph in his hands, gaze landing on the puppet he had been fussing over earlier. Blue eyes closed and reclining against the wall, it could almost pass for sleeping. Yet the face was blank, no smile or arrogant smirk, and its chest didn't rise and fall with the steady breath of sleep.
It looked just like the brat, and in a way it was him. But it wasn't. Not really. The puppet in front of him was just a poor substitute. It didn't matter that the puppet had all of Deidara's abilities, or that it was made from the bomber's own body. It wasn't Deidara, not in any of the ways that counted.
AN: hope you all liked it, despite me being all angsty. These relationships between mortals and "immortals" lend them so very well to angst... Anyway, if you liked it, let me know. If you didn't, go ahead and let me know, too.