Chapter 3: Flowers Are Living Corpses
Donning the emblem of crimson clouds on one's black cloak, a ruthless cut across one's headband, a ring on one's hand, and color on fresh nails equaled chaos. Tranquil days were rare, uneventful trips a revelation, a good night's sleep—undisturbed by Leader's words droning in his ears—virtually non-existent.
"Sasori, Deidara, you've been assigned with a new task." Pain's command stirred Deidara out of his precious slumbers. "Connect for more info."
The voice that forced its way into Deidara's head was distorted and intermittent, per usual, yet never waning in audacity. Knowing that begging for five more minutes of sleep meant earning a five-million-ryo payroll deduction, Deidara hoisted himself up in a series of curses marked by yawns. Next to him, by the side of the bed, was a very startled redhead.
Sasori was hovering above the bed with one outstretched arm like he was about to grab something. Then, as soon as his gaze landed on Deidara, he reset to his default state: standing upright, lips tight, and eyes soberly yet dreamily half-lidded.
It took Deidara a good five seconds to surmise an explanation of what was going on. "Don't tell me you're trying to kill me in my sleep?"
"Funny," replied Sasori, "how that's the first thing you think of when you see me reaching for you."
Possibilities raced through Deidara's mind, but the mind of an abruptly-awoken man wasn't the best jury. Through the haze of a just relinquished dream, he saw nothing but a cunning puppet wielder, a master manipulator, an echo of flesh and blood. Such images all pointed to attempted murder, what else?
Then it came all at once, flooding into his system. The heart and its stupid reasoning overshadowed all doubts. Kanyu's advice, last night's coming-out conversation, the awkward graze of dexterous fingers against his scalp, and soft mattress supporting his weight in place of what should have been dusty wood panels.
The first drops of daylight crawled through the blinds and illuminated everything, everything, but Deidara was only occupied with one bright spot that landed on Sasori's cheek.
The surrealness of the situation was enough to silence Deidara's "thank you".
"I could've been trying to strangle you or tucking you in," The blanket wrinkled as Sasori slumped down on the bed. "Have fun guessing out which."
Another call from Leader averted Sasori's attention, to which Deidara heaved a sigh of relief. It was the first time he associated something positive with receiving orders because, as much as he loved arguing, sometimes Sasori, or rather, the overpowering emotions Sasori inspired, caught him tongue-tied.
The Artist Duo settled into their meditation postures with their backs straight, legs folded and hands clasped in a Ram seal.
The feeling was akin to death.
Deidara's chakra fanned out, trickled between his bones, then slipped out of his grasp. Streams of consciousness fled from his control, too, weaving through the cracks of time and space to arrive at Leader's location. The world around plunged into darkness, and it was the habitual darkness of the Akatsuki hideout that lured Deidara and Sasori in.
How artless it would be, Deidara thought, to die like this: slowly falling into oblivion, seeing no faces, hearing no blasts, smelling no blood at all.
"We received a request from the Taiyou clan in Muragakure. They want us to wipe out their rival clan, the Yotsuki," Leader wasted no time in his delivery of the new mission. "You know how things are in Mura, yes?"
Deidara opened his mouth to answer, only to press his lips together seconds later when nothing came to mind.
"I do—" Sasori passed Deidara a glance, and by the way his glance congealed into a glare, Deidara could tell his partner's negligible dose of patience for the day had run short. "It's a small village on the East coast. Tiny population, low resources, mediocre jutsu. No surprise it failed to compete with the big guys." Sasori breezed through the village's introduction. "From what I know, it's supposed to have stopped offering shinobi service a long time ago."
Leader's swirling eyes emerged from behind his cloak's collar. "That was the case, until two clans, the Taiyou and Yotsuki, rose. They gave the people a promise that was too good to be true: to develop a powerful new jutsu and restore the village. In return—"
"They want power, yeah?" Deidara asked, nodding to himself. For someone with zero knowledge nor interest in politics, he sure had been caught in-between a multitude of inter-village conflicts and political warfare. "The authority over the whole village. A power struggle in the disguise of a noble cause."
Sasori gave him a look. "I think everyone here already knew that."
"You—"
"Deidara, Sasori."
A worthy leader was one who understood his team members well. As for Leader, this understanding extended to the point where he could sense potential arising conflict between members from their tones of voices and dismiss it with ease.
"Success is now in the Yotsuki's favor. According to rumors, they've got their hands on a rare kinjutsu," Leader proceeded with his speech, Rinnegan flaring despite his astral projection of a body. "The Taiyou want two things: information on their rival's secret first, a massacre second. This means you'll need to do more than dropping a bomb or an army of puppets."
Deidara rubbed his chin in contemplation. "We just need to capture the clan leaders for interrogation, then."
"You need to think further than that," Sasori said. "Not anyone can wield a kinjutsu. Only a handful of people have the capacity to successfully perform one and not die. This is a dying village we're talking about, so even fewer."
Sasori's last words lingered in the air for more than his impatience allowed. "Human experiments don't always work, but it might be possible to extract a kinjutsu's effect from an individual when it's a corporeal one."
The tongues of Deidara's hand-mouths writhed out of their depository and flashed in the dark. Deidara grinned and added, "One that mutates the human body."
"Yes, like the one from Iwa," Sasori said as he turned away to regard Leader with an expectant look. "I'm thinking we can capture those with the kinjutsu as well. They're probably not easy to identify, as they may strive to hide their power, but it's better to be extra careful."
"Excellent idea as usual, Sasori." Leader's implacable mannerisms relaxed a little at this suggestion. "I'm adding that to your mission objectives. Bring the Yotsuki's leaders along with individuals who may wield the clan's secret kinjutsu back alive."
"May?" Sasori asked.
"You won't have time to confirm the capture-ability of every suspect," replied Leader as he regained his stoicism. "Besides, the more kinjutsu users we're able to deliver, the more generous they'll be with their rewards, and the more reliant they'll be on the Akatsuki's service."
Deidara's eyes were roving over the vacancies in their meeting circles when he felt four suspenseful eyes hooked on him. He scratched his cheek. "…The easier it'll be to assert control over them in the future, yeah?"
Sasori relieved him from the intense goggling session by veering his gaze to the side.
"You're getting closer to aligning yourself with the Akatsuki's way," Leader said, audibly pleased.
"The Akatsuki's way." Deidara made no effort to mask the sarcasm dripping off his tone. Why did that sound like a legitimate shinobi mantra?
"More like your way" was his intended next retort, but in the suffocating atmosphere of the Akatsuki's hideout and the menace lurking therein, he found himself settling for a simple "I understand".
Sasori was startled by this development—this was proven true by the ripples on his chakra-boosted avatar.
"Well," mumbled Deidara in a voice that screamed can-I-sleep-now. "Anything we know about the enemy's fighting style? Element?"
Came Leader's prompt answer: "Wind, I believe."
"Good," Deidara said. He thrived on challenges, but battling against a clan full of Lightning users would be pushing it too far.
"You have five days. I'll have Zetsu hand you the specific details later," Leader said finally.
Deidara first joined the Akatsuki with a grudge, a couldn't-care-less attitude, and a thirst for revenge upon the famed Sharingan. Four years into membership, he gained a crush on his partner, a plan for revenge, and a decent amount of curiosity mixed with respect for the man he worked under.
Time did things to people, stimulated progress. The majority of the time Deidara spent bound to the Akatsuki's clutches could be considered progress in the broadest definition of the term, minus the crushing bit, which was either regression or transition into a new period.
As for other members, Deidara had come to the point where he recognized their artistic value (if there were any), raw to the touch yet alluring to the mind—the unexplored kind of artistry. The murderous kind of artistry. The paths that lent them beast-like power must have been treacherous. The waters they walked to arrive at the same destination varied in depths and perils.
Being in the Akatsuki was like watching the world burn, or rather, causing the world to burn.
In each person's eyes, the world must burn a little different.
"Do you know why I summoned you myself?" Leader turned to Deidara, his image flickering on and off against the darkness that threatened to swallow it whole.
"Uh, Zetsu's busy?"
"Take this as a warning, Deidara." Deidara did not like the way Leader drew out his name. "I know your fighting style is intense, but tone it down. You don't want to be hunted down by other villages before we capture the Tailed Beasts."
"Understood, Leader." Deidara fell out of the dark cave and bounced back into sleep anew.
"They're fragile. Be careful!" Kanyu shrieked.
She was either unaware or actively ignoring the stiffness in his gestures and the suggestion of unwillingness between his creased brows. Deidara suspected it was the latter as she shoved her parting gift into his arms, and he received the item reluctantly, albeit with extra gentleness.
"They are in full blossom. Pretty, right?" A full smile blossomed on Kanyu's face.
Deidara stared down at the flower bouquet nesting in his hands, articulateness far beyond him. The verdant green fronds curled against his cracked palms in their dreamlike softness. The dirty, greyed-out fabric of his robe expressed more age—years of defying the sun and wind and the explosions while trailing across five continents—when put together with the flowers' blinding white.
He traced a careful hand along the thornless stems, torn between wanting to celebrate Kanyu's present and wanting to watch their petals crippled between his fingers. It was what fueled his art: the need to destroy destructible things.
"Hello? Deidara? Deidara of Iwagakure? Deidara the inter-continental insurgent? Deidara the blond-haired princess? Deidara the struggling artist? Deidara the partner admirer—"
"Stop." Deidara, who was forced back into reality at the increasing ridiculousness of Kanyu's name-calling act, held up the flower bouquet at her. "Or I'll shove this up your nostrils."
"You were zoning out," she pouted. "What were you musing about? Sasori's cerulean eyes?"
"His eyes are brown."
"Ooh, introspective." Kanyu nudged Deidara with her elbow. "Having a crush changes things, huh?"
Deidara scoffed. "I'm always introspective. How do you expect me to make art without reflecting, yeah?"
"Is that so?" Kanyu asked. "You seem too occupied with your explosions to give a damn about anything else to me."
Something inside Deidara clicked. He did find himself thinking about a lot of things other than art lately, but before he could lapse into another round of reminiscence, Kanyu flicked his forehead. "A hungry-to-blow-shit-up face and a deep-in-thoughts face look different, you know?"
He remained silent, holding no objection to her words though he wanted to.
"What do you think we're going to do with this? Decorate our lair with it?" Deidara said after a while, changing the course of the conversation. Then he occupied his hands by plucking some best-looking flowers from the bunch and dropping them in his pocket (a black hole borne from his refusal to carry around anything but clay). "Yeah. I'll just casually put this bouquet on the Demon of the Six Paths statue or something, or pin it to Hiruko's skull and hope I'll make it out unpoisoned—"
"Hey." Kanyu tilted her head at him. "Are you going to do something risky?"
"What?"
"You've been acting strange," she said, twirling a strand of golden-brown hair. "Like you have a big plan coming up or something."
"You're not… entirely wrong." The next thing Deidara did in avoidance of eye contact was hand-brushing dust off his clothes. "You said I need to change, yeah? You may be right, after all."
"That's quite an improvement, coming from a self-centered prick like you."
"Thanks. I know I'm quite a big thing," Deidara replied with much sass, but his frown vanished as fast as the day's heat left them. "All this time, all I've ever cared about is myself and my art." He swallowed hard. "So, when someone else entered the picture, I didn't know what to do."
As the afternoon hours faded into sunset, Kanyu's sneer melted into a soft smile.
Unknown pressure melted off Deidara's shoulders.
He exhaled shallow breaths into his palms. "I want to do what you said. Fail. Change. Seek closure. Give these feelings a chance. But before that, I also want to look for new perspectives."
"Oh my god," Kanyu's jaw went slack. "You're asking Akatsuki members."
There was no use denying it now. "I'm asking Akatsuki members."
"For dating advice?"
"For new perspectives."
"Wow." Kanyu clasped a hand over her mouth, barely successful in reining in her laughter. "You're a genius."
Deidara gave a defeated smile. "You won't see me for a while, but when it's all over, I promise—"
Deidara was met with sudden warmth as a pair of hands encircled his.
"I'll be waiting for good news, Deidara."
The setting sun painted the hunching houses and messy clay batches and explosion-inducing kilns in mellow shades. It was not the end, only a new beginning. Deidara would visit Kanyu sometime in the future, mull over his childhood in Iwa while sniffing clay smoke and listening to popping clayware again.
Still, Kanyu's smile bid the taste of farewell.
At Deidara's side, the heavy thumps of a Hiruko-clad Sasori were approaching, hauling killing intent and complaints about the time under his breath. It provided little distraction from the tightness in his chest when Kanyu squeezed his hands.
Had she ever learned the definition of personal space?
For some reasons Deidara would rather not dwell on for long, he wasn't against it: this human warmth—so different from the half-human-half-puppet kind of warmth he'd got used to—this normalcy, this ordinary companionship…
Deidara knew he shouldn't make too many connections, so that he was ready for death at any given time. He had spent most of his living years dreaming of his dying moments, the marvelous end of human's fleeting existence, the pinnacle of artistic beauty. Sasori and Kanyu, though—he could allow some leeway in that case.
What he didn't know was that there was going to be too, too much leeway, with too, too many people.
Zetsu's report was bad news to Sasori and atrocious news to Deidara.
The area they would wreak havoc on this mission was of mountainous terrain, with steep slopes encouraging miraculous falls and rugged bedrocks cushioning those falls by cutting into flesh. Muragakure's buildings and farms lay strewn on tiers carved onto a cluster of hills: depressing strokes of brown on an equally depressing, tree-lacking canvas. It must have been magic—a village managed to survive on such low resources, not to say produce shinobi.
On the far end of the land encompassing the village, Deidara and Sasori's battlefield stretched across corroded soil on a separate mountain slope, isolated from everyone else. According to Zetsu, the Yotsuki had moved there a few years ago, claiming that a secluded area was pivotal to the development of their new technique. In response, the authorities had readily approved.
The Yotsuki set up their accommodation with apparent forethought. The mountain was lofty with sides too rocky to travel fast, and the high altitude guaranteed harsh weather whose cold slaps stung. An ambush or planting landmines were out of the question, too. The meticulous Yotsuki shinobi had adorned the place with some kind of miniature chakra network used to detect intruders.
"There's nothing in our favor. Guess we'll have to make a grand entrance." Deidara thumbed through Zetsu's report scroll.
The Akatsuki's scouting specialist had a peculiar way of creating his mission overview reports. They were twenty percent useful information, seventy percent hilarious unnecessary jokes and witty horrible notes, and the remaining ten Black Zetsu's attempt to cross out and sabotage those seventy.
"Have you ever not made a grand entrance?" Sasori gestured to the portraits strewn on the ground between them. "There are certain people we must keep alive. Don't go around mindlessly blowing people up."
Deidara stared at the faces of the Yotsuki's leaders (Zetsu was surprisingly good at drawing people) and tried to commit them to memory. "You said you would take them, yeah? I get the fun part."
"Right. The fun part," Sasori repeated. "Even if I'm the one handling them, don't you think you should at least be able to tell them apart? In case someone escapes my sight?"
Deidara waved it off. "Got it, got it. Such an old man."
"Do you even remember our plan?"
"You take the clan heads, I take the massacre," replied Deidara, having Uchiha flashbacks. "If one of us find anyone with some weird jutsu, immediately go after and capture them."
"Both of us."
"Whatever."
"It's important," Sasori reaffirmed. "You must not leave my side, Deidara. We agreed on this."
"It's not technically 'your' side, yeah."
"You'll be dead if anything happens to my main body," Sasori grunted, flattening the report scroll on the ground and using a tree branch to scrawl on the space unoccupied by Zetsu's brush strokes. "As I said, seeing how cautious the Yotsuki are, there's no way they haven't expected this. Look at the location, the intrusion detection system, the rocky matrix—"
The paper crinkled as Sasori doodled a house on it. "When we attack, they're most likely to hide the clan figures away" —Sasori circled his makeshift pen on a corner of the house— "this can be done through a secret route or something."
Deidara touched the folds Sasori created on the scroll. "Isn't the most logical thing to do is to hide the people with access to the kinjutsu first? Yeah, sure, the clan heads hold the secret, but those people—they are the secrets."
"We're not sure if those people even exist. Maybe they are the clan heads themselves, maybe the kinjutsu results in the death of the user. We don't know that. But," Sasori said as he smacked the branch against the side of Deidara's head. "We know for a fact that the Yotsuki have leaders, and those leaders are the masterminds behind this damn thing."
Only when Sasori drew the branch away did Deidara realize he had just been assaulted. "As expected of the wit of my partner, yeah."
"I should've expected my partner's stupidity," said Sasori. "But you surprised me every time you open your mouth."
Deidara laughed more than he should.
He walked himself through the plan again before reciting it to Sasori. "Let me get this straight. You transfer your core into another puppet, blend in with the Yotsuki, find the secret route, capture the targets, while I—"
"You and my real body," Sasori drew two stick figures at the bottom of the scroll, then stabbed the pointy end of his pen through the head of one, twisting it. "Take care of the rest."
"Why do I have to stay with you, yeah?"
"My body consists of various weapons and mechanisms. It'll give me a lot of hassle to repair it if it gets damaged," Sasori said, throwing the branch behind him. He rose and lifted his upcoming vessel, a plain-looking man in the form of a puppet, from the ground with fine chakra strings. "Do you mind? I need to get changed."
After another tedious rehash of their battle strategy, Deidara and Sasori-the-empty-shell flew into the Yotsuki's territory with the real Sasori nuzzled up inside a hole in Deidara's clay bird, pulling the strings from below.
They thrust through the intrusion detecting barrier draping over the area. The chakra surge was too weak to cause any damage, any feeling of pain at all, yet strong enough to notify the place's dwellers.
The scene before them moved fast: A small group of Yotsuki-nin streamed out from jutting houses, then twenty, then a hundred; and looking at his enemies from above, at this distance, through the glint of his scope, Deidara couldn't help but wonder whether the expression on their face was ecstasy.
They were about to witness art.
This massacre was nowhere as impressive as the one Itachi executed or the time Sasori exterminated a whole nation, because the Yotsuki residence consisted of only a handful of tile-roofed buildings perched on a precipitous mountain path. With a brandish of Deidara's arm, an army of tiny clay spiders cascaded down the land. They crawled on every living surface and clung to warm skin, spreading his chakra to every corner.
Deidara shut his eyes, then flashed them open again. If he focused enough, he could track the movements of any shinobi parasitized by his spiders.
"I'm not going to let any of you escape, yeah." His whisper climbed into a shout. "Sasori!"
From aside Deidara, the empty Sasori stood silent. From behind him, the real Sasori's chakra-laced fingers wiggled out of the opening of his retreat.
The chakra threads had been refined to the point they were invisible to the untrained eyes, but Deidara could tell Sasori was, by some complex procedure he refused to understand, connecting his chakra to his real body's limbs and chakra-weaving chest compartment. It was a way for him to control other puppets indirectly, through his puppet body.
Before Deidara could blink, a troop of puppets had materialized around him.
"That should be enough for support?" the real Sasori asked.
"It's way too many."
A typhoon of spiraling wind currents, which gave Deidara the impression of a grouped effort, stormed in their direction. Deidara's clay bird tilted just in time to evade death, but not an acute wind blade that obliterated its right wing.
The bird crashed down, its whiteness resemblant of a falling angel amid the pitch-black sky. Deidara dove for the ground with numerous puppets by his side and a chakra shield in front—he knew Sasori had a shield installed somewhere, and had activated it by disjointing Sasori-the-empty-shell's segmented arm mid-leap.
To bedazzle his opponents even more, Deidara threw some bombs into the mix, setting the sky ablaze as he descended through the rain of wind attacks.
"This is the definition of a grand entrance, yeah!" He smiled and turned to his companion, awaiting a sigh, a glare, even a deadly blow, but it was only Sasori's lifeless face that stared back.
His smile turned skewed.
Deidara was still trying to wrap his head around the fact that Sasori's living core contained the entirety of his existence, and his 'real' body wasn't real: it wasn't Sasori, only a replica of the delicate human form he had shed.
Sasori now resided in another puppet: an average middle-aged man who was clambering out of the damaged clay bird at the periphery of his vision. Deidara watched as Sasori mixed into the crowd before turning to the one next to him.
"You'd better work your ass off not to hold me back," Deidara muttered to the empty Sasori shell. The puppet jiggled as if vexed by his words, and the other puppets around Deidara soon danced to the rhythm of its fluid movements, steering sharp blades through the enemies' flesh.
"Your speed is too slow. You can't catch up with me at this pace." Deidara blitzed through the crowd of Yotsuki-nin with a light-hearted C1 bombardment. "Let's hope danna can't hear conversations through his chakra strings because first, it's ridiculous, and second, he's going to come for me—"
A powerful gust of wind caught Deidara off balance, and he slammed his upper arm on the ground to keep his head from being split by a pointy rock. He could only hope he didn't fracture any bones.
Hands still on the ground, Deidara bent down to fend off another wave, and when the third wind blade struck, he scrambled for one of Sasori's puppets, yanked it by the wrist, and swung it in the air. The puppet shattered under the impact of the attack.
"Now Sasori's really going to come for me."
Wind gusts heaved up a gigantic amount of dust from the ground, and dusty air plus rocky terrain was a perfect recipe for gashes with nasty infections. It didn't take a medic to know this, but God forbid if Deidara had enough time to do anything more than glancing at the flash of pink meat mingled with blood under his elbow.
The image of his necrotic limbs lingered at the back of Deidara's mind as he blasted through piles and piles of shinobi with no hint of a kinjutsu in use.
The truth was that C1 bombs were insufficient. Deidara couldn't use more destructive ones since they would deny him the chance to engage with every opponent in close distance, and Sasori's body would break.
This was a really shitty strategy.
Deidara bounced as high as his legs allowed him. He pivoted to dodge some wind jutsu as clay figures shot out of his palms, aiming themselves at his assailants.
He snatched the sword out of Sasori's grip, but what he pulled away was the puppet's right hand.
His feet found solace on another puppet. He stepped on the hard surface of the puppet's back and did a handspring, leaping forward, into the gusty air of blood, sweat, and tears; of vision-blurring grime, spinning vortexes, and explosion dust.
"I'll give it back later," Deidara sent the core-less Sasori an apologetic smile. It was as quiet as its core-equipped version.
Wielding a sword—well, a hand grabbing a sword, at his disposal, Deidara advanced further into the Yotsuki's land. He bounced on people's heads and skipped along the winding road, employing shunshin regularly to shorten the distance.
There was a moment, a very fleeting moment, a moment between life and death, noise and silence, before chaos ensued.
A moment before an explosion.
And it was also in that moment that laughter echoed in tune with the boom of his explosive feats, graceful footwork unfolded on top of his human stepping stones. Then another, and Deidara was dazed, bruised, lying limp on the ground and coughing up blood.
A/N: Ta-dah, one of my proudest chapters to date! Writing fight scenes is not my strong suit, yet this one came out better than I expected. Hate to leave you hanging at that cliffhanger, but the next chapter may not be up in two weeks' time as my normal posting schedule. I try to write a few chapters ahead, but recently some problems came up with one of the future chapters and I have to rewrite the whole thing. Anyway, don't worry, it'll only be a month or two.
Also, thank you everyone for all the wonderful support this work has received! "Crevasse" was, in the beginning, a passion project, but seeing how other people enjoy it brings me so much joy.
