Chapter 5: Scars are Accidental Tattoos
When Deidara dragged the back of his hand across his face to wipe the bloodstains – some spattered like sun-kissed freckles, some racing down his chin like red tears, some darkened, barely visible against the gleam of his sword – he made sure to feel every spot. Warm. Cold. Dry. Fresh. Soldiers'. Children's. Parents'. He didn't look back at them.
The walk to the mansion's entrance was a long, shaky one. He wobbled down the hallways like a drunk man, blaming his clumsy footfalls on chakra exhaustion. At least, he hoped it was. Sasori had his head tilted towards the sky when Deidara joined him on the front porch.
"It's over, Deidara."
Throughout the whole post-massacre procedure: reporting to Zetsu, handing over the captured victim, receiving lavish mission rewards, Deidara was spacing out. Even the rumbling hymns of the victor, he didn't listen. The Taiyou clan spoke praises of their mercenaries, spoke ill of their fallen rival. They went as far as offering him and Sasori a week's stay at their accommodation for their "excellent service". In response to this, Deidara nods without thinking.
The price of so-called excellent service wasn't as high as he expected, however. On his third night in the shabby cottage provided by the Taiyou, he sank into the darkness deep enough for the shadows to take form and the devil to hush. Hush, because he must not make any sounds. Hush, because his voice would drown out the scream of the last Yotsuki-nin shackled somewhere in this household, out of sight but within earshot.
Deidara rested the back of his hand on his sweat-laced forehead, putting together his thoughts.
On the verge of Muragakure losing its stance in the shinobi world, the Taiyou were desperate, not to say power-thirsty. It didn't help that their rival clan leaders committed suicide before Deidara and Sasori could haul them onto their explosive clay vehicle (a blade through the heart, biting one's own tongue, imploding with a wind jutsu in one's stomach).
Now they would examine even the Yotsuki-nin's butthole if it meant they could acquire such precious kinjutsu, that Deidara was certain.
But then, what Deidara did—killing Kiyoi despite having seen her ability, was… good?
By cutting her head off, he spared a young girl of a life of sufferings, of harrowing experiments, of being sliced up open and touched all over by desperate hands in search of a pipe dream. By committing a fatal mistake on a mission, he saved someone—another scream tore the night—from this.
And why did he kill her, anyway? Was it all the battle thrills, the adrenaline rush? Did it have anything to do with the surprising firmness of the mother's tug on his shirt, or the wavering in Sasori's will?
"Nah," Deidara muttered. "It was adrenaline."
The next morning, Deidara ventured into Muragakure's forest, deciding over-exertion was the best way to get his mind off Kiyoi. The montane landscape was so bland and bereft of green it resembled a wasteland. Deidara found a suitable spot on the mats of thin grass and low-growing plants, then began to undress—only his upper body, but there was something about being naked on a forested mountain top with no one around that made the idea tempting.
Deidara unraveled the stitches sealing his chest-mouth.
"Sorry for keeping you waiting." He tucked pieces of clay in the pitless mouth.
It chomped on the meal with usual enthusiasm, robbing him of color with each swallow. He smiled watching his chakra pathways turn visible: a network of coursing black veins under his now transparent skin. The sun glared through him and shed light to caress the grass below his feet. The misty air, the fresh morning dew, the sandy soil, the croaking of crickets—all now belonged to a distant dream.
The pain came slow. It reached inside him like a tender hand, smothering, digging sharp nails into whatever. But all was a worthy price to pay for salvation: to fall falls that feel like flying, groan groans that come out as silence, breathed breaths that are bound to become air.
The explosion's hypocenter, his heart, was sucking his veins dry of chakra. It grew heavier, chock-full of Explosive Release. Just a little bit more, he reassured himself. He needed to win.
The "Katsu!" had barely left his mouth when he collapsed. His other mouth spat out its long-awaited meal, which had been reduced to saliva-coated, shapeless white lumps. Deidara curled up and brought his knees to his face.
In the end, he couldn't kill himself. Not yet.
Deidara didn't know how long he had stayed in the forest, slurping down gulps of air. What annoyed him wasn't the pain (he welcomed the pain), but the fact that his ultimate art was nowhere near complete. He had been working on his greatest technique, C0, ever since he joined the Akatsuki, but every time he failed to keep the chakra flow consistent. He lost the battle every time.
After a sequence of getting up then falling, Deidara brought himself to his feet. He grabbed his shirt, which was hung over a skinny tree branch, and slipped it on. The heartache sprawled across his body, subsiding into awful yet tolerable soreness. He had left the forest with the intention to return to the cottage, but his legs betrayed him when he steered past the building complex into the village center. His standard shinobi navy shirt and pants stirred no attention among the crowd.
Deidara wasn't sure why he took a sudden interest in touring Muragakure. Nothing crossed his mind as he walked aimlessly around the houses and shops. The intense tug-of-war against life drained him to the point he didn't want to think. There was, however, something other than the pain in his chest.
An artist was first a loner. Loneliness fostered creative minds. But now, standing amid an animate street, searching for solace in the faces of strangers scurrying by, Deidara wished he hadn't been alone. He supposed it was human instinct; when people got hurt, they became vulnerable, they wanted someone to cling to.
He stopped at a newsstand, where stacks of newspapers and magazines lied on decrepit tables and shelves. Inside the booth sat a bespectacled man on a rocking chair, a smoke pipe fixed between his lips. He gave Deidara a brief nod.
"Not from here?" the man asked.
Deidara mouthed a "yes", then picked up a newspaper and skimmed over it. As he expected, speculations about the Yotsuki incident and Muragakure's future without one of its prodigious clans had filled the pages. In one interview article, the Taiyou clan leaders even expressed deep grief and vowed to fulfill their promise to restore the village, "to carry on the wishes of a rival we missed the chance to call a friend."
"Awful, isn't it?" A cloud of smoke billowed out of the man's pipe as he drew it away from his mouth. "It's like Konoha's Uchiha all over again."
"What do you think of the Taiyou?"
"Now Yotsuki's gone, they are our only hope left," the man said. "We've been striving to stay alive for over a decade, you know? Everyone thought they were going to die with this shit hole, but—"
He puffed on his pipe again before continuing. "Man, they could be doing human experiments for all I know, and you know what? I don't give a fuck. We need that jutsu. We need to restore shinobi service."
As smoke tickled Deidara's nostrils, he burst into a coughing fit. Clasping a hand over his mouth, he forced out gushes of ugly sounds and spit into his palm.
The man looked up, concerned. "Young man, are you sick? There's a clinic right around the corne—"
Deidara expelled the last remains of air out of his throat, put the newspaper back, and left.
Throughout four years in partnership with Sasori, Deidara had grown awfully aware of his lack of experience. Compared to Deidara, whose daily tasks consisted of blowing shit up on his own, blowing shit up on missions, and working on how to blow more shit up, Sasori was always drowning in infinite art projects, spy meetings, and shady businesses with the Akatsuki. His schedule became even more hectic following the Yotsuki's demise. That was why Deidara reacted with surprise and a little joy when he opened the door to the sight of Sasori walking down the stairs.
Sasori opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, then opened it again. He eyed Deidara over. "You look dead."
"Eh, I was pretty close."
"Training?" Sasori's little scrutiny came to an end as he approached Deidara. "Human physical limitations are unfortunate. Pushing yourself too much can kill you."
"A puppet's strength is limited to how it's built, yeah."
"Advancing technologies and new-found material guarantee a puppet's progress endless, forever moving forward." Sasori sounded like he had been rehearsing his lines for months; Deidara wasn't one bit surprised. "Humans, however, are bones and flesh. They can only get so far before deteriorating."
Not waiting for the other's answer, Sasori walked past Deidara and headed for the exit.
"Going off to your base again? Are you going to make another human puppet?"
"How do you know that?" Sasori summoned Hiruko with a cloud of smoke.
Deidara pinched his nose. "You reek of blood."
"No, I don't. I always clean up after."
"You do," replied Deidara. "Did you have the urge to go on a killing spree or something, danna?"
It was true—Sasori wasn't always this deadly. The Sasori Deidara knew added a shinobi to his collection only if he got his hands on someone with a useful kekkei genkai. Such instances were infrequent—once in a few months or so. That had changed since their last mission. Now, it seemed like Sasori created human puppets for the sake of creating human puppets. He returned every day spotless and smell-less, but each time his smile was more crooked, his eyes more carved in, his expression more artificial.
Watching Sasori was like watching a rope being torn from both sides. Its coil, made up of bundles of twisted threads, untangled. With each human puppet made, Sasori was one broken thread closer to snap.
One broken thread away from being human.
One broken thread closer to completely fill the crack on his shell, letting no light shine through.
"Can I come along?" Deidara asked.
"You've been on my tail a lot lately." Sasori slid inside Hiruko. "But what's stranger is that you're asking for permission."
"I'll get lonely by myself."
Sasori sat in the armor puppet with its lid open. His fingers, which were wielding chakra strings to close the carapace, halted in mid-air. After a long, long sigh and many cautious looks, he finally nodded.
"Fine, but don't chicken out." Sasori pressed his palm against his face.
Sasori's hideout lay behind the façade of a normal house in a non-shinobi village two hours away from Muragakure. A middle-aged man in civilian clothes escorted the Artist Duo to a door at the back of this house, passing through empty corridors, a boy fiddling with his toy train in the living room and a woman whipping out fresh oven-baked cookies in the kitchen.
The location was perfect. No one would have expected such a typical family to be working for Akasuna no Sasori.
Sasori put five glowing fingers on the door and it clicked open, revealing a large hoist held up by a pulley system—a type of elevator. Deidara and Sasori stepped on the platform of the machine as the civilian wrapped his hand around the winch's lever. They descended into the underground.
Their ride ended in a rusty screech of metal and a distant thud of the door being slammed shut above their heads. Deidara and Sasori walked out into a long and narrow hallway, flickering light from torches guiding their steps. Sasori took the lead while Deidara lagged behind, trudging through the weariness from this morning's training. He bit his lips, pretending to be unfazed.
Doors scattered along the hallway, leading to rooms where Sasori blurred the line between humans and puppets, mortals and immortals. Faint breaths escaped one of the rooms, reaching Deidara's ears, but some things were better left unsaid.
The room Sasori led Deidara to was a scene of mass suicide. Faceless puppets hung themselves on ropes against the walls to Deidara's right and left. In the back of the room sat Sasori's working desk and tool shelves. A big lamp sat on it, casting white, blinding light upon wooden body parts—one of Sasori's unfinished projects, probably.
"My puppet room," Sasori gestured to his working space. "I keep unfinished puppets and some spare ones here."
It did not take long for Sasori to begin working and ignore Deidara's existence, and the latter to regret his decision. Deidara oscillated between inspecting puppets (which got boring fast), toying with woodworking tools (which got him the usual poison-tipped senbon treatment), and yawning while watching Sasori sharpening the edge of a puppet arm.
When Deidara drifted to the corner of the room, he noticed something unusual: a piece of paper lurking in the shade provided by a dangling puppet. He clutched the item and held it up towards the dim light. It was a photograph with curled and yellowed edges, covered with a thick layer of dust.
Deidara dragged a finger across the photo. A familiar face of a red-haired boy greeted him. His eyes were half-lidded and his lips had the ghost of a smile, soft and pure and innocent of malice. With a few more swipes, the photo appeared in its entirety below his touch: a portrait of a family of five: a grandmother, a mother, a father, and their son. Their green robes and the dunes behind them suggested the shooting location to be Sunagakure.
"Don't touch my stuff." Sasori materialized beside Deidara, who almost jumped out of his skin.
Sasori yanked the photo out of Deidara's grip. A wordless moment passed as his gaze flicked from one face to another. Then he crumpled the old portrait and shoved it back into Deidara's hands.
"You can have it," Sasori said in a dismissive tone. "I don't have anything to do with it now."
For some reason, Deidara put the photo in his pocket.
"Have you ever tried decorating your puppets?" Deidara raised the question as Sasori sat down in his desk. "They look a little bland."
"Puppets don't need to look pretty."
"Especially your 100 puppets. They look like they're produced in batches." Deidara launched a light punch at a random puppet hung on the wall and was surprised when it didn't budge. "They have no personality to them at all."
"Do your explosions have personalities, Deidara?"
"Excuse you. I always try to make them unique with different sizes and shapes!" replied Deidara. "Still, my art is fleeting, meaning its beauty lies in its moment of death. Yours is eternal. How do you expect people to remember your puppets if they look at them and can't tell Sasori the Puppet Master made them, yeah?"
"My creations have my marks on them."
"They're stickers." Deidara crossed his arms. "You realize that anyone can make stickers and slap them on every puppet they see, right?"
As soon as the words rolled off his tongue, Deidara knew he had hit a raw nerve. He knew exactly what got an artist riled. Sasori's attention lifted from his unfinished puppet and landed on him, questioning him with furrowed brows. "What do you want, Deidara?"
Deidara removed a couple of paint cans and brushes from a shelf and hugged them before his chest. "This," he slammed the items on Sasori's desk. "Can I paint your puppets?"
"Which one?"
"Your most precious one."
"The Kazekage? No."
"Not the Kazekage, idiot." Deidara chuckled. "You."
"There's no way I'm letting you do that."
"Just a tiny one, please?" Deidara asked. "It's just paint. You can always erase it later."
"No."
A long staring contest occurred between the two of them, until it ended with Sasori standing up and collecting the painting tools to put them away while Deidara refused to let go.
"Sasori," Deidara did his best impression of Leader's assertive tone.
He was facing Sasori now, a solemn expression tucked under his scrunching forehead. It was ridiculous: how a title Deidara started using with the sole purpose of making a good impression on his grumpy new partner, of solving an enigmatic puzzle named Sasori—had evolved over the years to become something so natural, so intimate, something shared between the two of them, so customary the lack of it caused Sasori to freeze.
"I've stuffed my clay into the joints of every puppet here." Deidara's announcement stilled Sasori's moving hands. "Let me paint you now or I'll blow up your whole collection."
Scoffing at the bold statement, Sasori slipped out of his seat and strolled to the nearest puppet, his footsteps graceful and narrowed eyes unbelieving. He lifted the puppet and swiveled it in an idle motion, only for his face to turn rigid a second later.
A white substance was peeking out from under the gap between the puppet's upper arm and forearm.
Sasori's head made a 360-degree turn. "Are you seriou—"
"That's what you get for ignoring your partner." Deidara tapped his wrist. "I'm counting to five. One. Two. Three. Four—
"FINE."
"You should've said so from the beginning." Emboldened by the new victory, Deidara snatched Sasori's chair and nudged his puppet parts to the far side of the desk. "Oh, and that's chewing gum. Got you."
Deidara felt Sasori's intense stare on him as he dragged the brush across Sasori's arm.
"No larger than my hand," Sasori lowered his voice. "And if you draw something indecent, I swear I'll—"
"Kill me, I know."
"You know me well."
The area Deidara chose to leave his trace on was a small patch of skin on Sasori's upper arm, right above his elbow. He hunched over Sasori's outstretched arm on the desk and worked on his upcoming masterpiece, shifting frequently in his seat as he did so. The flat and sturdy surface of Sasori's skin allowed for fluid movements. The more immersed Deidara became in his little artwork, the more he inclined toward his human canvas, to the point his hair was brushing against Sasori's neck.
Deidara had an exact picture of what he wanted to draw engraved at the back of his mind. He had memorized every detail, every twist and turn, every rough line and rounded edge. Deidara altered between brushes and blended colors and shaded like he had been a painter his whole life; the process should be over quickly, but he was wistful of this proximity before it stretched.
"Tell me about your past," Deidara said while adding unnecessary shading to his otherwise perfect painting.
"Why the sudden interest?"
"You were the first to join the Akatsuki. You've been through the Third War," Deidara listed. "You must have a lot of stories to tell, yeah?"
"I was 13 when I was called up for war," came Sasori's placid, almost nostalgic voice after Deidara finished lining his painting for the third time that day. "It's not as pretty as you think. Suna's sand was dyed red, and the relentless fighting, people screaming and crying, and the smell of burning corpses. I was dying for it to end."
"But that was before, right?"
"Before?"
"When you were still a human," Deidara twirled the tool in his hand. "Now you blitz countries with the biggest smile on your face."
"Of course. I'm immune to all of that now," Sasori replied in a mild manner, seemingly taking Deidara's words as a compliment.
Sasori was now using his free hand to comb Deidara's hair out of boredom, and did Deidara really need to sign his painting in the most extravagant and time-consuming calligraphy font he could think of—damn yes, copyright was a big problem among artists, wasn't it?
"How did you get into puppetry?"
Sasori glanced around the room. "My grandmother taught me."
"Here's a better one: How did you get into human puppetry?"
"The possibilities, think about it. There are already many things you can do with a puppet, let alone a human puppet," Sasori said. "Retaining what makes them unique while getting rid of everything that holds them back. It's the best of both worlds."
"It's surprising how much we have in common despite how different our views are, danna." Deidara drew a heart on Sasori's arm, just because. "We always search for more. Hard to go back to normal when you've got the taste of the finest."
"My friend Komushi, he was the first," Sasori said wryly. "He died of accidental ingestion of the poison in the prosthetic arm I gave him. I ended up making him into a puppet, but his mother wasn't happy. I made him eternal. I made him not a rotting corpse, and guess what? She wasn't happy.
"The second was a Suna missing-nin. The man killed his whole family before he fled. Skilled, stoic, confident; a dumbed-down Itachi, you could say. He thought he could defeat me, but—"
Sasori stopped, assuming Deidara already knew the rest of the story. Then he spoke again, this time with a distant voice and pensive look caught far down memory lane, "The third, an infamous bandit. The fourth, a serial sexual assaulter. At first, I limited my options to criminals. Then I got greedy."
"Interesting, this progress to discover true art." Deidara looked up to see that Sasori wasn't paying attention to what he was painting at all. "You're a puppeteer and poison expert turned an immortal human puppet, and I'm a pottery enthusiast turned bomb specialist. It's a natural process."
"I wouldn't call jumping from pottery to terrorism natural," replied Sasori, no longer able to hold back his smile.
"When did you decide to turn yourself into a puppet, though?"
"When you've already experimented with dozens of people, it's only natural for you to want more." Sasori resumed his endeavor of locking eyes with every single puppet in the room. "It was when I was 15, I think. I don't remember much. The only thing I knew was when I woke up, I felt like a new person. No, I didn't feel like a person anymore. Sleepiness, appetite, fatigue, everything was gone."
While listening to these anecdotes from Sasori, Deidara was sitting on the edge of his seat. It was strange: Sasori sharing things from his past, things he used to lash Hiruko's scorpion tail out at when enquired. There were times their conversations revolved more around concepts and philosophies than their realities, and yet…
Perhaps all along, Deidara had been scratching the surface of who his partner really was. The real Sasori, not Akasuna no Sasori, the Sasori with a motive behind his doings, with severed bonds behind his solitude, with a story behind his descent into madness, and with a hint of breakage behind his impeccable shell.
Deidara straightened up and put away the brush in his hand, then put some inches between himself and Sasori. He pointed at the finished painting: a scrawny creature with glowing red skin and hair the deepest green of mid-summer leaves. The lines were a tad scruffy as Deidara touched it up too many times, the shading overwhelming, and there was a random drawing of a heart next to the creature for God-knew-why, but Deidara thought he did a decent job.
"Have you, by any chance, heard of a creature called Akaname?" Deidara said, feeling the smooth texture of the painting under his index finger.
Sasori shook his head.
"You know the mantra of Iwa shinobi?" Deidara breathed out a sigh. "Since we were kids, we were taught to carry a rock-hard attitude, on missions and in daily life, too. Extreme pain tolerance. Being unfazed by anything. The will of the village, we swore on it."
Sasori's eyes did not leave the painting on his arm. "That's the crux of shinobi training, isn't it?"
"That's why Iwa never has any appreciation for art, yeah?" Deidara said. "See for yourself: the boring food, the non-existent literature, and don't let me get started on how, back in the days, the Tsuchikage's tower used to look like a giant… you-know-what," Deidara trailed off, but he brightened again when he noticed the ripples in Sasori's expression. "That's why people blamed these emotionless, artless tendencies on Akaname."
"Akaname?"
Deidara tapped the creature's long tongue, which was drooping from its mouth. "Akaname are demons that feed on a person's emotional core. They eat away your feelings."
"Is it a folklore creature?"
"Yeah."
Sasori's arm curled back to his side. "And why are you telling me this?"
"I suspect you may have one," Deidara laughed. "Don't get me wrong, danna. You're a talented puppeteer, but if you stop dismissing your feelings for once, maybe your works can be more creative and less lackluste—"
"I've told you. Emotions are a burden." Sasori's voice grew cold, tinged with underlying aggression. "They left me the day I turned myself into a puppet."
"You know denial can only get you so far, right? You've got to accept you're not a complete puppet." Deidara rose from his chair. "Or, you know, give up and accept art is an explosion."
Something was coming; Deidara could sense it. He tilted his head in time to dodge a blade launched from the sleeve of a nearby puppet. It sliced through the part of his bang just above his ear.
The sword, having missed Deidara's eye socket, punctured the door of a cabinet behind them.
"Ow, what was that for?" Deidara clutched the hair that had fallen on him.
"Shut up before you irritate me more."
"I'm right, though," Deidara said, knowing his stubbornness would probably backfire. "You have emotions. You couldn't kill that Yotsuki girl—"
Uh-oh.
This time, Sasori's attack involved neither a surprise factor nor a complex setup. Deidara saw the blur of Sasori's arm approaching, palm wide open—the arm where an Akaname now resided in—shooting towards him.
It was not a clever move from Sasori. Deidara could have dodged, hell, he could have grabbed Sasori's wrist and bent it all the way back so it would snap out of its joints, but he chose to stay put. Partly because he was tired, partly because he wanted to see how far Sasori would go.
Sasori's hand landed on Deidara's shoulder and stayed there, neither squeezing nor moving. Deidara blurted out a dry "huh".
"What is wrong with you lately?" Deidara winced, relief soon replaced by confusion. "I'm only saying this because I want to help you improve."
"Please don't."
Not a single drop of venom was trickling under Sasori's tongue.
As the grip on his shoulder stiffened, all Deidara's words were caught in his throat. Sasori stared down at the floor, bright red hair falling before his eyes.
"Stop making me feel this way, Deidara."
It was not rage that dawned on Sasori's expression now, but rather a look of defeat. His grip was asking Deidara to leave, but at the same time, its lingering coldness on Deidara's skin suggested otherwise.
"Stop making me feel so—" Sasori mumbled, and Sasori was as dark as the first time they met, with no fissures, no cracks, letting no light shine through. "—so pathetically human."
A/N:
Okay, hear me out. Deidara's whole concept of art revolves around destruction, and his ultimate art is the destruction of himself. In that sense, it would be fair to say that he has suicidal tendencies, but it's not because he has mental issues or is tired of living, and I have no intention of glorifying suicide. I believe that wanting to die in the most artistic way is part of Deidara's character.
Anyway, sorry for the loooong wait :) I'm back.
