Chapter Text
It made him sick. He was the youngest Akatsuki member, sure, but that didn’t make him their fucking errand boy.
He scowled at the pile of dishes laid out before him.
He glanced over at the glass, half filled with a dark liquid.
Deidara was not a glass half full, nor a glass half empty person.
He was more of “smash the glass and writhe about in the shards until that beautiful crimson blood envelops you and your star burns out” sort of person.
He always thought that determining what kind of person you were in response to how you react to a glass of water was ridiculous.
Either way, he picked up the glass, filled with scorn at his wretched task of cleaning it.
He was above such things, he was an artist!
Artists don’t have time for this sort of thing.
He smelled it hesitantly. It reeked of wine, a disgusting and sour odour.
He hated alcohol, and took great joy in watching it snake its way down the sink.
It looked almost like his blood circling down the shower drain, but he cut that thought off quickly.
Now wasn’t the time for that.
As he slogged through doing the heap of dishes, his thoughts drifted.
Instead of scrubbing Hidan’s filthy plates, he wished he could be scrubbing his hands of someone’s blood.
Maybe his blood, maybe the blood of that stupid fucking Uchiha, who not only made him do this absolutely absurd load of dishes, but got him trapped in this godforsaken organization with his stupid genjutsu.
He was only fourteen when he had to join this place, he was seventeen now, and he always knew he could have been doing something so much better for himself.
Literally anything else would be infinitely less soul crushing, but he knew he couldn’t have that.
Deidara was always one to complain to himself about what could have been, but never out loud.
Saying anything of the sort out loud has a sort of selfish finality to it.
As soon as he finished the dishes, he ran out of the kitchen, and over to his room.
He looked around the room, no sign of his partner Sasori, though that creepy Hiruko puppet was lying motionless in the corner.
He makes a bit of a face, desperately wishing the puppet wasn’t currently inhabited.
Once certain of this fact, he sits down on his bed, and sheds his Akatsuki robe, gazing down at the scars that litter his body.
He got plenty from his current line of work, and several from his previous.
It turns out that being a suicide bomber was a job that carried quite a few physical reminders
Several of those scars were rather unfortunately acquired.
Self-inflicted, or so he assumed for the ones he didn’t remember receiving.
He most certainly remembered receiving some of those scars though, when he was younger, and new to the organization.
His first day in the Akatsuki, only fourteen years old.
They led him to this very room, and since Sasori wasn’t there, he was completely on his own.
He remembered all the crushing weight of loneliness, like quiet stone, like the village he ran away from.
One of the first things he did was make sure he was alone, so he could cry in peace.
He sat down on this bed, took out his knife, and the closed eyes on his skin were promptly opened, all of which wept scarlet tears.
He wanted to run to whoever was in charge of this place in tears, to look up at them with those tearful blue eyes and all the slits up and down his arms looking at them, to tell them what they had just done.
To show them what they had just invited to their organization.
Obviously, he decided against that, even at fourteen he had a tiny spark of sense in that head of his.
Instead he just went to sleep,with the knowledge that the eyes of the puppets in the room, and the red slashes on his arms were all watching him.
He lay down on his bed, snapped out of his hazy memories, and thought of all the other members of this organization.
He didn’t know much about Pain, or Konan, they were always too busy to deal with him directly.
Tobi was annoying, but never directly in his vicinity for too long, Kakuzu had always kind of freaked him out.
The same went for his partner, Sasori, who not only inhabited a creepy puppet, but disagreed entirely with Deidara about the nature of art.
Zetsu had definitely always freaked him out.
Kisame scared him a little at first, but turned out to be pretty chill in the end.
Hidan, while infuriating, was kind of cute, he guessed.
That left only Itachi.
Uchiha Itachi, the one who tricked him into joining the organization.
The one who possessed those sanguine eyes, those beautiful, artistic eyes.
It made him sick, the fact that someone like that could possess something so inherently artistic, but Deidara, an actual artist, could only ever gaze at those damn red eyes in envy.
He dreamed of those eyes sometimes, and he hated it.
He hated that his truest art was either in the red of those eyes or the red of his own death.
Deidara curled up into a little ball on his bed, and let the pain of his current situation wash over him.
He should have been somewhere else, doing whatever it was normal boys his age did.
He would never even know what being a normal seventeen year old boy was like.
Not that he was normal to begin with, before he joined the Akatsuki.
He never was capable of being normal, he was born unstable, as if his world was constantly tilting on the edge of a knife.
So why did he care so much about wanting to be a normal teenager?
He guessed that he just hated his current life, he would have given anything to be your average unstable and explosive teenager instead of being an S-Rank criminal.
Unfortunately for Deidara, he knew his path would have always led here anyways.
His art was never accepted by anyone, not even the Akatsuki, but they accepted it more than his village had.
At least the fact that they were all criminals made them slightly more accepting of his violent and transient art.
Only slightly, though.
Nobody really did understand his art, nobody except himself.
They never did, and the likelihood of anyone understanding it in the future was extremely slim, thinner than the long and timeless needle used to thread his life.
It’s a pity he couldn’t just explode that needle, that certainly would have made things much easier.
Deidara turned onto his side, and hid under his robe, desperately clawing at the tears forming at the edges of his eyes.
He lay down, and let the tears blind him, until the world went white, then black, almost like an explosion, but without the fatal results.