Naruto Fic: "Flesh and Blood" 20/20 (NC-17) - Sasori/Deidara
Title: "Flesh and Blood" 20/20 
Fandom: Naruto
Pairing: Sasori/Deidara
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 4,139 for this chapter
Spoilers/Warnings: Spoilers through Chapter 394. Warnings for bloodshed, violence, and (on a lighter note) male/male sex.
Summary: Sasori had planned his death and his miraculous resurrection into a human body. What he hadn’t planned was how his brand new flesh and blood would affect him once he reunited with his old partner.
Flesh and Blood
by Kantayra
Chapter Twenty - Malleable Clay
“Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.” - Eric Hoffer
***
Seven years ago…
“If you could have anything in the world,” Sasori asked as they watched the sunset from the ocean bluffs in the south of the River Country, “what would it be?”
Deidara’s eyes slid over to him, and he gave Sasori a lazy smirk. “Anything?” he teased.
“Be serious, brat,” Sasori grumped.
“Maybe I am serious, yeah?”
“I mean, out of life in general,” Sasori clarified.
“Hmm…” Deidara considered for a moment. “I guess I’d want to do exactly what I’m doing now, and what I did before, too. I love the missions, the danger…”
Sasori scowled and waited for it.
“The explosions.” Deidara grinned gleefully. “I love the opportunities to use my art at every turn.”
“Then why leave Akatsuki?” Sasori asked. “If you’re so happy with the missions, why do you hate it so much?”
“It’s about freedom, yeah?” Deidara retorted. “Maybe what I’m doing isn’t so different from what I did before, but it feels different. Before, it was art for art’s sake. Now, it’s been reduced to a mundane job. It cheapens everything.”
“So, if you were to ever leave Akatsuki?”
“I’d want to do everything I’m doing now,” Deidara agreed eagerly. “I want the taste of blood, the constant challenge. I want to die some day, in the heat of battle, sudden, unexpected, unpredictable…” Deidara smiled softly at the thought of his own demise.
“You’re insane.” Sasori rolled his eyes. “What’s the point of gaining your freedom just to die?”
“What’s the point of living forever just to be a slave?” Deidara shot back.
Sasori sighed. “I don’t understand you at all, brat.”
“Maybe that’s just because you’ve never really tried…”
***
Present day…
Sasori ran.
Later, he wouldn’t remember when he’d tossed Hirohisa from Jirou’s body and put Deidara inside in his place. He never for a moment regretted the choice, though. Deidara was the most precious puppet he’d ever owned; Hirohisa and their revenge were insignificant in comparison. Besides, Hirohisa was already poisoned. He probably wouldn’t survive anyway.
Sasori also wouldn’t remember fleeing from the battlefield, wildly at first because all his attention was on Deidara’s slow-beating heart inside Jirou’s damaged carapace.
He wouldn’t remember the enemy chasing them, the half dozen times he’d actually been caught, only to lash out murderously against their pursuers.
He wouldn’t remember fleeing into the desert and finally losing the enemy. It was a good thing Sasori had lost them, though, because otherwise he would have led them straight to their home.
He wouldn’t remember finally laying Deidara out on the operating table, searching madly through their first aid kits for extra blood and an IV. He wouldn’t remember extracting the bolt from Deidara’s chest, or frantically trying to sew together the wound.
He knew that it all must have happened, though, because he was home now, with Deidara lying pale and wounded on the table. With nothing else to think about other than how his partner was dying, it was a lot easier to try to piece together all the details of an escape that was nothing but a blur to Sasori.
The waiting, though - the hours and hours of waiting - Sasori would remember every second of.
***
Deidara couldn’t die, Sasori finally concluded after the sun had risen on the next morning. Deidara’s skin might be a sickly grey color, and his breathing might be shallow and strained, and his heartbeat might be nothing more than a flutter, but he couldn’t die.
Sasori knew this because fate owed him.
Deidara might not believe in fate, but Sasori knew that it had to be true. Sasori had had his whole life stolen from him before he’d even been old enough to understand what was happening. He’d grown up miserable and alone, and he’d never understood why.
He realized why it had all had to happen now, though. Fate had taken his parents, because compared to the gift Sasori was going to be given, they were nothing. That was what Deidara was, Sasori concluded, a gift from the heavens. There was no other explanation for it. Deidara was perfect for him, and him alone.
It was a trade: Sasori’s youth and innocence, for Deidara. At the time, Sasori would have been foolish and chosen his parents, but that was why fate had never given him a choice. Now, though, Sasori wouldn’t trade his partner for anything in the world. Deidara was his, no matter what the cost, and Sasori would happily sacrifice anything else to keep Deidara by his side.
Fate had already taken everything from him once; it wouldn’t dare try again.
That was how Sasori knew that Deidara couldn’t die.
Sasori went over the stitches in Deidara’s chest a hundred times in those hours. The crossbow bolt had just nicked Deidara’s lung. It was amazing, really, how much the bolt had missed. It hadn’t hit Deidara’s heart, and it hadn’t made his lung collapse.
Sasori had never wished more that he was a medical ninja. He knew how to rip organs out, but he had no real idea how to put them back together. He’d left the lung alone lest he do more damage than good. Given that Deidara wasn’t waking up, though, he thought that it might not be enough.
For one moment, his constant mantra - Deidara can’t die - faltered, and he allowed himself to envision the possibility. He imagined himself living forever, stretched out over the centuries, more alone than he’d ever been as a child. He imagined a world where there was no one there to surprise him, to tease him, to enrage him at all the wrong moments. He imagined creating masterpiece after masterpiece with no one there to appreciate them. He imagined a world without Deidara’s laugh or his smirk or the annoying way he snapped his clay in his mouths.
For the only time since Sasori had found immortality, he hated it.
“If you leave me, I’ll kill you,” Sasori informed Deidara’s unconscious body.
Deidara didn’t quirk his lips and reply with something equally ridiculous that left Sasori sputtering and rolling his eyes. He didn’t wink or stick out his tongues. He didn’t flirt shamelessly. He didn’t move at all. It just wasn’t right seeing Deidara’s face that drawn and sickly.
“If you leave me,” Sasori whispered softly, as if he was afraid someone would overhear, “everything that’s good in my life will die with you.”
All these years, he’d thought that death was his greatest enemy, but it turned out that it had been loneliness all along.
***
The second day, when Deidara’s condition hadn’t improved and Sasori was on the last of the blood transfusions, he allowed himself to consider the obvious solution to his problem.
He wasn’t a medical ninja; it wasn’t in his power to save Deidara. He was, however, an expert puppet maker. Deidara was still alive, and his chakra pathways were intact. Deidara, as a human, was already his favorite puppet. It would be so easy to…
It would be so easy.
A puppet didn’t need to breathe, so it didn’t need lungs. Sasori could replace any part of a puppet’s body. Most importantly, a puppet would last forever. Deidara himself had said countless times that he planned on dying some day. Even if, by some miracle, Deidara survived this injury, Sasori would still be faced with this loss again some time in the future.
A human puppet would be the easiest, of course. There was virtually no risk there. Sasori had managed that with bodies that had technically died, even, although those puppets had been less than perfect. Deidara was more than alive enough for that.
A human puppet would never speak to him again, though. It wouldn’t be able to think or react. It wouldn’t be Deidara, just a puppet that looked like him. For the first time, Sasori clearly saw the distinction. If Deidara became a human puppet, he would die. Sasori would only have a pale imitation to touch in those lonely nights and remind him of what he’d lost.
The other option was that Sasori could give Deidara a puppet body like his own. This plan was more feasible. The problem was that Deidara wasn’t a puppeteer. Sasori was fairly confident that he could transfer Deidara’s consciousness into his heart and install him in a newly immortal body. Deidara wouldn’t know how to move, though, or even to see and listen.
Sasori would have to teach him by example, push his own chakra strings through Deidara’s core and out into Deidara’s limbs. Deidara would have to master the precise chakra control that Sasori used. He wouldn’t be particularly good at it; he’d always been a power fighter. With endless years to practice, though, he would learn. He’d suffer years as a total cripple - unable to so much as raise his hand - but one day he’d finally figure it out. One day, he’d be like Sasori: a walking, talking, sentient puppet.
One day, he’d be able to open his mouth and tell Sasori how much he hated it, and how he hated Sasori in return for forcing that life on him.
Deidara wouldn’t be able to leave Sasori, though, no matter how much he hated him. Deidara as a puppet would never be the powerful ninja he was now. Maybe with hundreds of years of practice, he might refine his control enough to be able to fight again. It would never be the same, though. He’d need Sasori to teach him, to take care of him. He’d be as helpless as any of Sasori’s other puppets.
Sasori had to admit that the idea had its appeal. Deidara just planned to throw his life away anyway, on some ridiculous notion that art was ephemeral. Sasori could save him from all that, make Deidara into everything he wanted in his life’s companion.
He could probably even stop Deidara from killing himself, once Deidara developed the movement to try. Sasori knew for certain, as he thought about it, that Deidara would try.
“You’d be so beautiful,” he informed Deidara’s comatose body, wooden fingers running through sweat-slick hair and not feeling a thing. “One day, maybe you’d even grow to appreciate it.”
Deidara didn’t respond because he couldn’t. In a way, it was very symbolic of what Sasori was thinking of doing to him.
“I promise you’d have your freedom again some day. It might take a thousand years, but you’d have a thousand years. Would it really be so bad?”
Without Deidara there to answer, Sasori had to answer for him. He looked down at Deidara’s pale, dying face, and suddenly wished that just once in all the years they’d been together that he really understood Deidara. His partner was deadly one minute, and a ball of aggravating fluff the next. He liked explosions and interior decorating and goading reactions out of Sasori. He disdained life to the point where he would delightedly take his own, yet he cherished Sasori’s happiness to the point of self-sacrifice.
“I don’t understand,” Sasori sighed. “What should I do?”
In the end, all Sasori could do was try to follow Deidara’s model. Deidara was flighty and unpredictable, but there were a few things that were constant.
“I don’t want to live without you,” Sasori informed him, and he picked up the scalpel.
***
On the third day, Deidara’s cheeks were pink once more and slowly, against his own will, his eyelids flicked open.
Sasori was at his side when it happened, and he ran lifeless fingers along the side of Deidara’s face. “Welcome back, my puppet.”
Deidara tried to open his mouth to speak, but found that he couldn’t move.
“Shh, shh,” Sasori soothed him. “Don’t worry.”
A glint of panic lit Deidara’s eyes nonetheless, and Sasori felt a wave of relief wash through him. There were two very different ways this conversation could have gone. The fact that he could curve his artificial lips into a smile as he explained, let him know that he’d made the right choice.
“It’s just a paralytic,” he assured Deidara. “I had to go back in, cut you open, and heal up the last of the internal bleeding. Your lung… I had to do the best I could. You started to get better right away, though. I think you’ll be fine.”
Deidara stared blankly in his direction, unable to focus his eyes, but Sasori could feel his breathing even out.
“Now,” Sasori sat back and scowled at his little brat of a partner, “don’t you ever do anything like that to me again, or I’ll rip your head off and stick it on a spike on the mantelpiece!”
Inside, Sasori wished that he could laugh with joy at the sight of Deidara desperately trying to scowl at him, but unable to.
“Sleep it off,” he advised, using his chakra strings to shut Deidara’s eyelids again. “You can yell at me all you want once you can move again.”
Sasori almost felt giddy at the notion.
***
“You’re silly,” Deidara rolled his eyes and shifted comfortably against the pillows of the bed.
Sasori blinked at him in disbelief. “I confess to you that I was seconds away from transforming you into a puppet and making your life a living hell, and all you can say is ‘you’re silly’?”
“Well, you are,” Deidara insisted.
It was one of those times when Sasori couldn’t figure Deidara out if he lived to be a million. “You would have hated it!” he protested.
“Of course, I would have,” Deidara agreed. “And you knew I would hate it. So my Sasori would never do anything like that to me.”
“I nearly did!”
“No.” Deidara yawned. “You just freaked out a little. But you understand me better than you think. You could never have gone through with it.”
“You love life…”
“I love art more.”
Sasori scowled at him. “Art lasts forever.”
Deidara laughed and then coughed, clutching at his chest. Sasori was at his side in an instant, feeling for Deidara’s pulse and breathing through the wounded flesh of his chest. Deidara smiled up at him shyly in response.
“You couldn’t make me live as an immortal puppet any more than I could make you live as a mortal human.” Deidara’s hand came up to cover Sasori’s fingers over his heart. He gave Sasori’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Neither of us can ever change what we really are. It’s okay, Sasori. I know.”
Sasori could sense the pressure of Deidara’s palm against the chakra points in his puppet body’s hand. He couldn’t tell how warm Deidara’s grip was, though, or whether it was still weak from the surgery. He had known, when he turned himself again, that this was one thing about being human that he’d miss, but he hadn’t realized that it would be so acute.
“I have something to show you,” he finally sighed, still staring at his hand on Deidara’s heart.
“Oh?” Deidara looked up at him curiously.
“A…gift. In exchange for a gift that was bestowed upon me.”
Deidara frowned slightly, not understanding. With Deidara’s worldview, he probably never would. That was all right, though. Sasori had figured it out, and that was enough for him.
“All right, then,” Deidara finally agreed. “Let’s see it.”
“I have to take you to it.” Sasori’s lips quirked into a smirk.
“You’re being very mysterious…” Deidara said warily, pressing his back further into the pillows like Sasori was creeping him out.
“It’s a surprise.”
Deidara gulped.
“You’ll like it. I promise.”
***
It was two days before Sasori deemed Deidara well enough to leave bed and come see his present. Over that time, Deidara had teased and cajoled him, and one time he’d even managed to set a trap for Sasori using a bucket of wood varnish. It was ridiculous and delightful and exactly the sort of thing that he would have missed forever if he’d gone through with turning Deidara into a puppet.
Maybe Sasori didn’t understand Deidara all the time, but those moments when he didn’t understand - when Deidara was unpredictable and spontaneous - were the most exciting ones. Sasori wondered sometimes whether he really would have had the strength to let Deidara die if that operation hadn’t worked. Seeing Deidara like this now just reassured him that Deidara would never have been the same without his life and freedom.
“I’m not an invalid,” Deidara protested, arms crossed defiantly over his chest as Sasori wheeled him into his workroom and then further on to the secret room he’d created in the back. A wry smile crossed Deidara’s lips. “Ah, yeah. I was wondering when you were going to tell me what’s back here.”
Sasori scowled down at the wheelchair he’d stolen from the hospital in Irihi. Deidara smiled back up at him. “Of course, you knew,” Sasori sighed. “I don’t even know why I should be surprised anymore.”
“You’re always surprised,” Deidara teased. “That’s what makes you so much fun.”
Sasori snorted and rolled his eyes. He wheeled Deidara the rest of the way into his secret workroom.
The seals were still in place from when Sasori had converted his body. If Sasori had decided to turn Deidara as well, everything would have been ready. There were two operating tables in the center of the room, inside the stasis fields. One, Sasori had lain upon that day, only a week ago now, although it felt like an eon.
The other one still held the body of the redheaded boy he’d captured in Keimei. He wheeled Deidara over to it.
“A corpse?” Deidara teased. “You always get me the sweetest gi…” He trailed off mid-syllable as he got a good look at the body.
The chuunin boy’s chest rose and fell, slowly and steadily, within the stasis field. Sasori had already healed the marks from the surgery, but Deidara was clever. He would know that…
“It’s you,” Deidara breathed in awe, leaning in.
The boy’s face was different, of course. He really didn’t look anything like Sasori…yet. “Yes,” Sasori agreed. “I put my brain in him. It’s active, although he’s asleep. We can’t both be conscious for more than a few seconds without starting to lose our minds. A pity I never got to examine Pain’s Rin’negan…”
Deidara looked up at him sharply. “Why?” he demanded.
Sasori sighed and looked down at himself. “It occurred to me that there was a very simple way to expand my ressurection technique. I only had two chakra centers to split my consciousness into, but I needed three. If I activated the implanted one, though… This chuunin will grow into me over the next few months, the same way Hideaki did. He’ll have a brain and a heart, and then I can split him again. I’ll have my three pieces.”
Deidara studied him carefully. “What’s the third one for?”
Deidara already had figured out the answer to that question, of course, but Sasori didn’t begrudge him hearing the words aloud. “I need the first copy of my consciousness for my puppet body.”
“You’re not Sasori without it,” Deidara agreed.
“I need the second to store in another human body, dormant,” Sasori continued. “So that my resurrection technique will activate again, if I ever need it.”
“Right…”
“And I need the third, so that I can keep an active, human copy of myself. It seems I’ve acquired one puppet who has certain…visceral needs. And a puppet-master always takes care of his puppets, even if they are brats.” Sasori quirked a smile in Deidara’s direction.
Deidara stuck out his tongue. “I don’t understand…” he sighed, sounding almost lost.
“I need to be a puppet,” Sasori concluded, “but I don’t really need to be a puppet all the time. I’ve become convinced that a few hours as a human won’t hurt me.” His hand rested on Deidara’s shoulder. He couldn’t feel anything now, of course, but when the chuunin’s body fully transformed, he’d be able to revive it for a few hours and put his puppet body into stasis instead. He’d remind himself of the warmth of Deidara’s skin in those hours, the taste of his lips, the sound of his moans. This time, Sasori wouldn’t slowly forget what it was like. This time, he would have no regrets.
“Do you like it?” Sasori finally asked.
“I still don’t understand,” Deidara laughed, “but it’s the most wonderful present ever.”
As Sasori leaned in and pressed artificial lips to Deidara’s flesh-and-blood ones in a quick peck, he could almost swear he felt something, an emotion so strange and alien that he couldn’t even begin to put a name to it. He liked it, though, and in the end, that was all that mattered.
***
“They’re going to come after us, you know.” Sasori sat on the edge of the cliff and gazed out over the canyon below as the sun set. “All of Hinoiri. Irihi won’t be happy that I raided their village again, either. And then there’s what’s left of Keimei…”
“All that, and you still haven’t rebuilt even a quarter of your puppet army.” Deidara snuggled deeper into the curve of Sasori’s side, his head resting against the wood of Sasori’s shoulder. It couldn’t have been particularly warm against the growing chill of twilight, but Deidara didn’t seem to mind. “It’ll be a lot of fun, yeah?”
Sasori snorted. “Only you would think that having three ninja villages trying to kill us was fun.”
“You think so, too,” Deidara teased. “Admit it.”
Sasori shrugged, causing Deidara to shift slightly and lean on his shoulder just a little bit more. “Maybe,” he conceded slyly.
Deidara let out a contented sigh. “I could stay like this forever. Just you, me, and endless challenges ahead…”
Sasori froze. He’d been waiting for the opportunity to bring this up, and Deidara had just given him the perfect opening. “Then do it,” he requested simply.
“Hmm?” Deidara looked up at him, confused.
“Do it,” Sasori repeated. “Stay like this forever, with me.”
Deidara’s eyes widened. “S-Sasori, I…”
“I know,” Sasori brushed him off. “You think art is temporary. You need to be fleeting. Well, I still think that art is permanent, but I found a way to be just a little bit temporary, so that I could be with you.”
Deidara had opened his mouth to speak, but he closed it then and frowned, like Sasori had said something that he finally couldn’t argue with.
“If I can find a way to be a little bit temporary, why can’t you find a way to be a little bit permanent?” Sasori pressed his point. “Would it really be so bad? It’s a change, yes, but that’s the sort of thing you thrive on.”
“I…” Deidara began hesitantly. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin…”
“You’re a powerful shinobi, and clever.” Sasori shrugged. “Plenty of others have found a way…a way that doesn’t compromise their art, even. If I did it, you could, if you really wanted to.”
Deidara gulped as if something of what Sasori was saying had finally sunk in through that thick skull of his. “I’ll think about it,” he finally said softly, holding Sasori close.
“I’ve got time,” Sasori agreed. After all, change hadn’t come overnight for him; he couldn’t expect it to happen that way for Deidara, either. The fact that he’d even gotten a ‘maybe’ on this issue, though… In Sasori’s mind, it was as good as a done deal. He just hoped that it didn’t take them another ten years.
“Hmm,” Deidara finally said after some time. The sun had set now, and it was dark, but neither got up to move. They watched the bats and night birds flit about up in the sky hunting insects, and thought in silence instead.
“What?” Sasori asked curiously.
“I think I’ve finally figured out what art is,” Deidara announced proudly.
Sasori rolled his eyes. “What now?”
“I think,” Deidara began very carefully, like he was trying to get every word right, “that art is the way one conscious being expresses how they see the world…”
Sasori nodded slowly.
“…In such a way that another, like-minded conscious being can appreciate the truth of that expression.” Deidara bit his lip and considered it for a moment.
“My art is art because you can see the truth in it?” Sasori considered.
“And my art is art because you can see the truth in it,” Deidara agreed.
Sasori debated saying Deidara’s art wasn’t art, just for the sake of annoying him. In the end, however, he decided it wasn’t worth it to keep up that particular argument. “I’ll agree with you on that,” Sasori finally conceded.
Sasori had never seen such a genuine smile on Deidara’s face.
Together, they sat and watched the night come and go for the first of a million times.
Thanks for reading! There will be a short epilogue that I should post within the next few days, but other than that, it's all done! o.O
Epilogue
Fandom: Naruto
Pairing: Sasori/Deidara
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 4,139 for this chapter
Spoilers/Warnings: Spoilers through Chapter 394. Warnings for bloodshed, violence, and (on a lighter note) male/male sex.
Summary: Sasori had planned his death and his miraculous resurrection into a human body. What he hadn’t planned was how his brand new flesh and blood would affect him once he reunited with his old partner.
Flesh and Blood
by Kantayra
Chapter Twenty - Malleable Clay
“Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.” - Eric Hoffer
***
Seven years ago…
“If you could have anything in the world,” Sasori asked as they watched the sunset from the ocean bluffs in the south of the River Country, “what would it be?”
Deidara’s eyes slid over to him, and he gave Sasori a lazy smirk. “Anything?” he teased.
“Be serious, brat,” Sasori grumped.
“Maybe I am serious, yeah?”
“I mean, out of life in general,” Sasori clarified.
“Hmm…” Deidara considered for a moment. “I guess I’d want to do exactly what I’m doing now, and what I did before, too. I love the missions, the danger…”
Sasori scowled and waited for it.
“The explosions.” Deidara grinned gleefully. “I love the opportunities to use my art at every turn.”
“Then why leave Akatsuki?” Sasori asked. “If you’re so happy with the missions, why do you hate it so much?”
“It’s about freedom, yeah?” Deidara retorted. “Maybe what I’m doing isn’t so different from what I did before, but it feels different. Before, it was art for art’s sake. Now, it’s been reduced to a mundane job. It cheapens everything.”
“So, if you were to ever leave Akatsuki?”
“I’d want to do everything I’m doing now,” Deidara agreed eagerly. “I want the taste of blood, the constant challenge. I want to die some day, in the heat of battle, sudden, unexpected, unpredictable…” Deidara smiled softly at the thought of his own demise.
“You’re insane.” Sasori rolled his eyes. “What’s the point of gaining your freedom just to die?”
“What’s the point of living forever just to be a slave?” Deidara shot back.
Sasori sighed. “I don’t understand you at all, brat.”
“Maybe that’s just because you’ve never really tried…”
***
Present day…
Sasori ran.
Later, he wouldn’t remember when he’d tossed Hirohisa from Jirou’s body and put Deidara inside in his place. He never for a moment regretted the choice, though. Deidara was the most precious puppet he’d ever owned; Hirohisa and their revenge were insignificant in comparison. Besides, Hirohisa was already poisoned. He probably wouldn’t survive anyway.
Sasori also wouldn’t remember fleeing from the battlefield, wildly at first because all his attention was on Deidara’s slow-beating heart inside Jirou’s damaged carapace.
He wouldn’t remember the enemy chasing them, the half dozen times he’d actually been caught, only to lash out murderously against their pursuers.
He wouldn’t remember fleeing into the desert and finally losing the enemy. It was a good thing Sasori had lost them, though, because otherwise he would have led them straight to their home.
He wouldn’t remember finally laying Deidara out on the operating table, searching madly through their first aid kits for extra blood and an IV. He wouldn’t remember extracting the bolt from Deidara’s chest, or frantically trying to sew together the wound.
He knew that it all must have happened, though, because he was home now, with Deidara lying pale and wounded on the table. With nothing else to think about other than how his partner was dying, it was a lot easier to try to piece together all the details of an escape that was nothing but a blur to Sasori.
The waiting, though - the hours and hours of waiting - Sasori would remember every second of.
***
Deidara couldn’t die, Sasori finally concluded after the sun had risen on the next morning. Deidara’s skin might be a sickly grey color, and his breathing might be shallow and strained, and his heartbeat might be nothing more than a flutter, but he couldn’t die.
Sasori knew this because fate owed him.
Deidara might not believe in fate, but Sasori knew that it had to be true. Sasori had had his whole life stolen from him before he’d even been old enough to understand what was happening. He’d grown up miserable and alone, and he’d never understood why.
He realized why it had all had to happen now, though. Fate had taken his parents, because compared to the gift Sasori was going to be given, they were nothing. That was what Deidara was, Sasori concluded, a gift from the heavens. There was no other explanation for it. Deidara was perfect for him, and him alone.
It was a trade: Sasori’s youth and innocence, for Deidara. At the time, Sasori would have been foolish and chosen his parents, but that was why fate had never given him a choice. Now, though, Sasori wouldn’t trade his partner for anything in the world. Deidara was his, no matter what the cost, and Sasori would happily sacrifice anything else to keep Deidara by his side.
Fate had already taken everything from him once; it wouldn’t dare try again.
That was how Sasori knew that Deidara couldn’t die.
Sasori went over the stitches in Deidara’s chest a hundred times in those hours. The crossbow bolt had just nicked Deidara’s lung. It was amazing, really, how much the bolt had missed. It hadn’t hit Deidara’s heart, and it hadn’t made his lung collapse.
Sasori had never wished more that he was a medical ninja. He knew how to rip organs out, but he had no real idea how to put them back together. He’d left the lung alone lest he do more damage than good. Given that Deidara wasn’t waking up, though, he thought that it might not be enough.
For one moment, his constant mantra - Deidara can’t die - faltered, and he allowed himself to envision the possibility. He imagined himself living forever, stretched out over the centuries, more alone than he’d ever been as a child. He imagined a world where there was no one there to surprise him, to tease him, to enrage him at all the wrong moments. He imagined creating masterpiece after masterpiece with no one there to appreciate them. He imagined a world without Deidara’s laugh or his smirk or the annoying way he snapped his clay in his mouths.
For the only time since Sasori had found immortality, he hated it.
“If you leave me, I’ll kill you,” Sasori informed Deidara’s unconscious body.
Deidara didn’t quirk his lips and reply with something equally ridiculous that left Sasori sputtering and rolling his eyes. He didn’t wink or stick out his tongues. He didn’t flirt shamelessly. He didn’t move at all. It just wasn’t right seeing Deidara’s face that drawn and sickly.
“If you leave me,” Sasori whispered softly, as if he was afraid someone would overhear, “everything that’s good in my life will die with you.”
All these years, he’d thought that death was his greatest enemy, but it turned out that it had been loneliness all along.
***
The second day, when Deidara’s condition hadn’t improved and Sasori was on the last of the blood transfusions, he allowed himself to consider the obvious solution to his problem.
He wasn’t a medical ninja; it wasn’t in his power to save Deidara. He was, however, an expert puppet maker. Deidara was still alive, and his chakra pathways were intact. Deidara, as a human, was already his favorite puppet. It would be so easy to…
It would be so easy.
A puppet didn’t need to breathe, so it didn’t need lungs. Sasori could replace any part of a puppet’s body. Most importantly, a puppet would last forever. Deidara himself had said countless times that he planned on dying some day. Even if, by some miracle, Deidara survived this injury, Sasori would still be faced with this loss again some time in the future.
A human puppet would be the easiest, of course. There was virtually no risk there. Sasori had managed that with bodies that had technically died, even, although those puppets had been less than perfect. Deidara was more than alive enough for that.
A human puppet would never speak to him again, though. It wouldn’t be able to think or react. It wouldn’t be Deidara, just a puppet that looked like him. For the first time, Sasori clearly saw the distinction. If Deidara became a human puppet, he would die. Sasori would only have a pale imitation to touch in those lonely nights and remind him of what he’d lost.
The other option was that Sasori could give Deidara a puppet body like his own. This plan was more feasible. The problem was that Deidara wasn’t a puppeteer. Sasori was fairly confident that he could transfer Deidara’s consciousness into his heart and install him in a newly immortal body. Deidara wouldn’t know how to move, though, or even to see and listen.
Sasori would have to teach him by example, push his own chakra strings through Deidara’s core and out into Deidara’s limbs. Deidara would have to master the precise chakra control that Sasori used. He wouldn’t be particularly good at it; he’d always been a power fighter. With endless years to practice, though, he would learn. He’d suffer years as a total cripple - unable to so much as raise his hand - but one day he’d finally figure it out. One day, he’d be like Sasori: a walking, talking, sentient puppet.
One day, he’d be able to open his mouth and tell Sasori how much he hated it, and how he hated Sasori in return for forcing that life on him.
Deidara wouldn’t be able to leave Sasori, though, no matter how much he hated him. Deidara as a puppet would never be the powerful ninja he was now. Maybe with hundreds of years of practice, he might refine his control enough to be able to fight again. It would never be the same, though. He’d need Sasori to teach him, to take care of him. He’d be as helpless as any of Sasori’s other puppets.
Sasori had to admit that the idea had its appeal. Deidara just planned to throw his life away anyway, on some ridiculous notion that art was ephemeral. Sasori could save him from all that, make Deidara into everything he wanted in his life’s companion.
He could probably even stop Deidara from killing himself, once Deidara developed the movement to try. Sasori knew for certain, as he thought about it, that Deidara would try.
“You’d be so beautiful,” he informed Deidara’s comatose body, wooden fingers running through sweat-slick hair and not feeling a thing. “One day, maybe you’d even grow to appreciate it.”
Deidara didn’t respond because he couldn’t. In a way, it was very symbolic of what Sasori was thinking of doing to him.
“I promise you’d have your freedom again some day. It might take a thousand years, but you’d have a thousand years. Would it really be so bad?”
Without Deidara there to answer, Sasori had to answer for him. He looked down at Deidara’s pale, dying face, and suddenly wished that just once in all the years they’d been together that he really understood Deidara. His partner was deadly one minute, and a ball of aggravating fluff the next. He liked explosions and interior decorating and goading reactions out of Sasori. He disdained life to the point where he would delightedly take his own, yet he cherished Sasori’s happiness to the point of self-sacrifice.
“I don’t understand,” Sasori sighed. “What should I do?”
In the end, all Sasori could do was try to follow Deidara’s model. Deidara was flighty and unpredictable, but there were a few things that were constant.
“I don’t want to live without you,” Sasori informed him, and he picked up the scalpel.
***
On the third day, Deidara’s cheeks were pink once more and slowly, against his own will, his eyelids flicked open.
Sasori was at his side when it happened, and he ran lifeless fingers along the side of Deidara’s face. “Welcome back, my puppet.”
Deidara tried to open his mouth to speak, but found that he couldn’t move.
“Shh, shh,” Sasori soothed him. “Don’t worry.”
A glint of panic lit Deidara’s eyes nonetheless, and Sasori felt a wave of relief wash through him. There were two very different ways this conversation could have gone. The fact that he could curve his artificial lips into a smile as he explained, let him know that he’d made the right choice.
“It’s just a paralytic,” he assured Deidara. “I had to go back in, cut you open, and heal up the last of the internal bleeding. Your lung… I had to do the best I could. You started to get better right away, though. I think you’ll be fine.”
Deidara stared blankly in his direction, unable to focus his eyes, but Sasori could feel his breathing even out.
“Now,” Sasori sat back and scowled at his little brat of a partner, “don’t you ever do anything like that to me again, or I’ll rip your head off and stick it on a spike on the mantelpiece!”
Inside, Sasori wished that he could laugh with joy at the sight of Deidara desperately trying to scowl at him, but unable to.
“Sleep it off,” he advised, using his chakra strings to shut Deidara’s eyelids again. “You can yell at me all you want once you can move again.”
Sasori almost felt giddy at the notion.
***
“You’re silly,” Deidara rolled his eyes and shifted comfortably against the pillows of the bed.
Sasori blinked at him in disbelief. “I confess to you that I was seconds away from transforming you into a puppet and making your life a living hell, and all you can say is ‘you’re silly’?”
“Well, you are,” Deidara insisted.
It was one of those times when Sasori couldn’t figure Deidara out if he lived to be a million. “You would have hated it!” he protested.
“Of course, I would have,” Deidara agreed. “And you knew I would hate it. So my Sasori would never do anything like that to me.”
“I nearly did!”
“No.” Deidara yawned. “You just freaked out a little. But you understand me better than you think. You could never have gone through with it.”
“You love life…”
“I love art more.”
Sasori scowled at him. “Art lasts forever.”
Deidara laughed and then coughed, clutching at his chest. Sasori was at his side in an instant, feeling for Deidara’s pulse and breathing through the wounded flesh of his chest. Deidara smiled up at him shyly in response.
“You couldn’t make me live as an immortal puppet any more than I could make you live as a mortal human.” Deidara’s hand came up to cover Sasori’s fingers over his heart. He gave Sasori’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Neither of us can ever change what we really are. It’s okay, Sasori. I know.”
Sasori could sense the pressure of Deidara’s palm against the chakra points in his puppet body’s hand. He couldn’t tell how warm Deidara’s grip was, though, or whether it was still weak from the surgery. He had known, when he turned himself again, that this was one thing about being human that he’d miss, but he hadn’t realized that it would be so acute.
“I have something to show you,” he finally sighed, still staring at his hand on Deidara’s heart.
“Oh?” Deidara looked up at him curiously.
“A…gift. In exchange for a gift that was bestowed upon me.”
Deidara frowned slightly, not understanding. With Deidara’s worldview, he probably never would. That was all right, though. Sasori had figured it out, and that was enough for him.
“All right, then,” Deidara finally agreed. “Let’s see it.”
“I have to take you to it.” Sasori’s lips quirked into a smirk.
“You’re being very mysterious…” Deidara said warily, pressing his back further into the pillows like Sasori was creeping him out.
“It’s a surprise.”
Deidara gulped.
“You’ll like it. I promise.”
***
It was two days before Sasori deemed Deidara well enough to leave bed and come see his present. Over that time, Deidara had teased and cajoled him, and one time he’d even managed to set a trap for Sasori using a bucket of wood varnish. It was ridiculous and delightful and exactly the sort of thing that he would have missed forever if he’d gone through with turning Deidara into a puppet.
Maybe Sasori didn’t understand Deidara all the time, but those moments when he didn’t understand - when Deidara was unpredictable and spontaneous - were the most exciting ones. Sasori wondered sometimes whether he really would have had the strength to let Deidara die if that operation hadn’t worked. Seeing Deidara like this now just reassured him that Deidara would never have been the same without his life and freedom.
“I’m not an invalid,” Deidara protested, arms crossed defiantly over his chest as Sasori wheeled him into his workroom and then further on to the secret room he’d created in the back. A wry smile crossed Deidara’s lips. “Ah, yeah. I was wondering when you were going to tell me what’s back here.”
Sasori scowled down at the wheelchair he’d stolen from the hospital in Irihi. Deidara smiled back up at him. “Of course, you knew,” Sasori sighed. “I don’t even know why I should be surprised anymore.”
“You’re always surprised,” Deidara teased. “That’s what makes you so much fun.”
Sasori snorted and rolled his eyes. He wheeled Deidara the rest of the way into his secret workroom.
The seals were still in place from when Sasori had converted his body. If Sasori had decided to turn Deidara as well, everything would have been ready. There were two operating tables in the center of the room, inside the stasis fields. One, Sasori had lain upon that day, only a week ago now, although it felt like an eon.
The other one still held the body of the redheaded boy he’d captured in Keimei. He wheeled Deidara over to it.
“A corpse?” Deidara teased. “You always get me the sweetest gi…” He trailed off mid-syllable as he got a good look at the body.
The chuunin boy’s chest rose and fell, slowly and steadily, within the stasis field. Sasori had already healed the marks from the surgery, but Deidara was clever. He would know that…
“It’s you,” Deidara breathed in awe, leaning in.
The boy’s face was different, of course. He really didn’t look anything like Sasori…yet. “Yes,” Sasori agreed. “I put my brain in him. It’s active, although he’s asleep. We can’t both be conscious for more than a few seconds without starting to lose our minds. A pity I never got to examine Pain’s Rin’negan…”
Deidara looked up at him sharply. “Why?” he demanded.
Sasori sighed and looked down at himself. “It occurred to me that there was a very simple way to expand my ressurection technique. I only had two chakra centers to split my consciousness into, but I needed three. If I activated the implanted one, though… This chuunin will grow into me over the next few months, the same way Hideaki did. He’ll have a brain and a heart, and then I can split him again. I’ll have my three pieces.”
Deidara studied him carefully. “What’s the third one for?”
Deidara already had figured out the answer to that question, of course, but Sasori didn’t begrudge him hearing the words aloud. “I need the first copy of my consciousness for my puppet body.”
“You’re not Sasori without it,” Deidara agreed.
“I need the second to store in another human body, dormant,” Sasori continued. “So that my resurrection technique will activate again, if I ever need it.”
“Right…”
“And I need the third, so that I can keep an active, human copy of myself. It seems I’ve acquired one puppet who has certain…visceral needs. And a puppet-master always takes care of his puppets, even if they are brats.” Sasori quirked a smile in Deidara’s direction.
Deidara stuck out his tongue. “I don’t understand…” he sighed, sounding almost lost.
“I need to be a puppet,” Sasori concluded, “but I don’t really need to be a puppet all the time. I’ve become convinced that a few hours as a human won’t hurt me.” His hand rested on Deidara’s shoulder. He couldn’t feel anything now, of course, but when the chuunin’s body fully transformed, he’d be able to revive it for a few hours and put his puppet body into stasis instead. He’d remind himself of the warmth of Deidara’s skin in those hours, the taste of his lips, the sound of his moans. This time, Sasori wouldn’t slowly forget what it was like. This time, he would have no regrets.
“Do you like it?” Sasori finally asked.
“I still don’t understand,” Deidara laughed, “but it’s the most wonderful present ever.”
As Sasori leaned in and pressed artificial lips to Deidara’s flesh-and-blood ones in a quick peck, he could almost swear he felt something, an emotion so strange and alien that he couldn’t even begin to put a name to it. He liked it, though, and in the end, that was all that mattered.
***
“They’re going to come after us, you know.” Sasori sat on the edge of the cliff and gazed out over the canyon below as the sun set. “All of Hinoiri. Irihi won’t be happy that I raided their village again, either. And then there’s what’s left of Keimei…”
“All that, and you still haven’t rebuilt even a quarter of your puppet army.” Deidara snuggled deeper into the curve of Sasori’s side, his head resting against the wood of Sasori’s shoulder. It couldn’t have been particularly warm against the growing chill of twilight, but Deidara didn’t seem to mind. “It’ll be a lot of fun, yeah?”
Sasori snorted. “Only you would think that having three ninja villages trying to kill us was fun.”
“You think so, too,” Deidara teased. “Admit it.”
Sasori shrugged, causing Deidara to shift slightly and lean on his shoulder just a little bit more. “Maybe,” he conceded slyly.
Deidara let out a contented sigh. “I could stay like this forever. Just you, me, and endless challenges ahead…”
Sasori froze. He’d been waiting for the opportunity to bring this up, and Deidara had just given him the perfect opening. “Then do it,” he requested simply.
“Hmm?” Deidara looked up at him, confused.
“Do it,” Sasori repeated. “Stay like this forever, with me.”
Deidara’s eyes widened. “S-Sasori, I…”
“I know,” Sasori brushed him off. “You think art is temporary. You need to be fleeting. Well, I still think that art is permanent, but I found a way to be just a little bit temporary, so that I could be with you.”
Deidara had opened his mouth to speak, but he closed it then and frowned, like Sasori had said something that he finally couldn’t argue with.
“If I can find a way to be a little bit temporary, why can’t you find a way to be a little bit permanent?” Sasori pressed his point. “Would it really be so bad? It’s a change, yes, but that’s the sort of thing you thrive on.”
“I…” Deidara began hesitantly. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin…”
“You’re a powerful shinobi, and clever.” Sasori shrugged. “Plenty of others have found a way…a way that doesn’t compromise their art, even. If I did it, you could, if you really wanted to.”
Deidara gulped as if something of what Sasori was saying had finally sunk in through that thick skull of his. “I’ll think about it,” he finally said softly, holding Sasori close.
“I’ve got time,” Sasori agreed. After all, change hadn’t come overnight for him; he couldn’t expect it to happen that way for Deidara, either. The fact that he’d even gotten a ‘maybe’ on this issue, though… In Sasori’s mind, it was as good as a done deal. He just hoped that it didn’t take them another ten years.
“Hmm,” Deidara finally said after some time. The sun had set now, and it was dark, but neither got up to move. They watched the bats and night birds flit about up in the sky hunting insects, and thought in silence instead.
“What?” Sasori asked curiously.
“I think I’ve finally figured out what art is,” Deidara announced proudly.
Sasori rolled his eyes. “What now?”
“I think,” Deidara began very carefully, like he was trying to get every word right, “that art is the way one conscious being expresses how they see the world…”
Sasori nodded slowly.
“…In such a way that another, like-minded conscious being can appreciate the truth of that expression.” Deidara bit his lip and considered it for a moment.
“My art is art because you can see the truth in it?” Sasori considered.
“And my art is art because you can see the truth in it,” Deidara agreed.
Sasori debated saying Deidara’s art wasn’t art, just for the sake of annoying him. In the end, however, he decided it wasn’t worth it to keep up that particular argument. “I’ll agree with you on that,” Sasori finally conceded.
Sasori had never seen such a genuine smile on Deidara’s face.
Together, they sat and watched the night come and go for the first of a million times.
Thanks for reading! There will be a short epilogue that I should post within the next few days, but other than that, it's all done! o.O
Epilogue