"They dress you up to fit the part,
Believe that you don't have the heart,
Now I've grown so sick of running,
To find I'm only at the start,"
Hold on to You, NateWantsToBattle
(Before)
Sasori bit off a corner of a ration bar and thought about how tedious it was that he needed to eat.
It was only because he had to stop that he hadn't collected the bodies yet, hadn't sealed as many as could fit in the empty scrolls attached to his left side for... later use.
He swallowed with some difficulty, his teeth taking too long to break it down, the bar itself too dry for his throat not to resist choking it down without water.
Waste of time.
He knew himself well enough to recognize it as his body began to strain under his neglect, knew that if he continued to ignore his empty stomach it would only diminish his abilities.
And that bothered him more how much time he was wasting by sitting here.
He unhooked his canteen, half-filled with stale water.
"Bastard..." a voice croaked from his right.
The sand around him was stained bright red. Iwa-nin were scattered near the bloody patches in pieces.
Sasori raised the canteen and drank as his eyes slid to the still-alive Iwa-nin, sand squeezing through the man's fingers as he dragged himself forward.
The Iwa-nin's back was home to a bed of needles, his flak-jacket dyed redder than the material it was made of, and his eyes—
Sasori paused, eyes widening slightly.
No matter how many human-puppets he made, he could never make their eyes look quite like that. The bright burn of rage, the dark abyss of absolute hatred.
The eyes were always so dull.
"Get off her, you bastard!" the Iwa-nin shouted, trembling, blood matting dark hair.
And yet those eyes...
His seat was still warm.
It'd be a waste to kill someone with eyes like that.
But alive subjects resisted his efforts to turn them into works of art and he had no desire to repeat the experience of being caught by Chiyo the second time he tried.
A corridor of horror in her eyes, growing longer and longer the more she stared at him, eyes flicking from his tools to the man pinned to the wall, to the teeth and blood on the floor—but it didn't awaken his inspiration.
Instead it made him feel small and dull, like that time with his Mother and Father puppets, or the other time she found his human-puppet workshop and forbade him from desecrating the dead like that ever again.
Distaste made his water go down bitter. All Sasori could do was try and try to recreate those eyes in his work, immortalize them.
"Get up, dammit!" the Iwa-nin shouted at him, voice cracking. He found the strength to throw shuriken, despite how hard his fingers shook.
And beneath the anger, the fury, desperation swirled and swirled and swirled.
Half the shuriken missed and hit the sand, while the other half were deflected by a burst of shuriken that made the Iwa-nin's head swivel to the right.
Sasori raised his free hand and a dead Iwa-nin rose with the movement, blood on her lips, face blue from asphyxiating on his poison, heavier than either a wooden puppet or a human hybrid.
"You sick fuck," the Iwa-nin whispered, horrified.
Fear blossomed in those pretty eyes, but even that more basic emotion he could never make look natural on a puppet.
"I'm an artist," Sasori dismissed, taking another bite of his ration bar. "How else will I find inspiration if I don't create it myself?"
He wiggled his fingers and his puppet stumbled forward like an infant learning to walk.
The Iwa-nin twisted his face away and squeezed his eyes shut. "Kill me. Just kill me already!"
Clearly the man had some resistance to his poison.
Natural immunity? Or has Iwagakure been experimenting again?
He should've used something stronger.
Either way, being unable to take him back meant Sasori was losing interest in all this fast.
"As you wish," he acquiesced, and his facsimile of a human puppet stumbled towards the Iwa-nin.
The Iwa-nin shuddered at the sound of her heavy, unsteady footsteps and pounded a fist against the sand. "Asshole—"
Sasori flicked his wrist and his puppet fell abruptly to her knees, hands shooting down to squeeze his neck, and he choked on the rest.
Sasori put his ration bar away with his free hand, re-strapped his canteen as the Iwa-nin gagged, and pulled off his headband.
He stared at the hourglass in the middle. This, this was the biggest waste of time of all.
Fighting in a war he didn't care for, following orders that took him away from perfecting his human-puppet experiments.
Why?
He had no need to test the capabilities of his puppets in battle anymore, not when he was too heavily monitored to make new offensive puppets.
Sasori tilted the headband slightly and saw Chiyo's horrified eyes in the reflection, the uneasy gaze granduncle Ebizō threw at his back when he thought he wasn't paying attention.
The Iwa-nin stopped struggling, stopped moving.
Sasori's hand clenched around the metal.
What would he be leaving behind? His workshop full of inartistic, mass-produced puppets? His Mother and Father puppets?
He squeezed and squeezed until he could feel the metal bite into his palm.
It'd been so long since he felt anger that he almost didn't recognize the heat clawing up his throat for what it was, the flare in his chest, let alone that it was directed at himself.
He was stalling, wasting his own time.
But the anger was fleeting, disappearing back into the deep well of apathy inside him before he could properly feel it.
His fingers unclenched.
Sasori tied the headband back around his forehead and stood. He felt numb as he headed for the outpost he was supposed to check-in at to receive his next assignment.
.
.
.
He defected the next day.