Deidara v Modern AU fight club???

[tozette]

Deidara tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, trying to calm his nerves. He was waiting in the car park of a supermarket, just outside the puddle of pale light cast by its giant, illuminated logo. He'd done the snack run already: gummy candies and a massive bottle of orange soda were in the passenger seat, waiting for him for after.

The radio was off. Its digital face showed the time instead, blinking at him. 9:57 PM.

This was his least favourite part: sitting in his car, idling the engine, waiting for the ding! of the message tone. Seconds dilated into eons. It was 9:57 PM for approximately 6 years.

Deidara breathed in deep and then exhaled long and slow. He planted his forehead on the steering wheel, tap-tap-tapping at its bottom curve in an uneasy rhythm. ideas about how he'd approach his next fight whirled in his head, but they were futile and meaningless when he didn't even know who he'd be up against yet.

He looked up.

The clock changed from 9:57 to 9:58. Praise fucking be, yeah.

The anticipation was poisonous every time. Once they sent him the location, he'd be on task and focused. But sitting still and waiting for it was a torment.

When it turned 10:00, Deidara snatched his phone off the seat and unlocked it. His heart thundered along as he stared at the screen, eager to escape the cage of his ribs.

He jiggled his knee, restless.

If he was late...

He didn't finish that thought. Just as he was about to check if the radio and phone clocks were both coincidentally broken and stuck on 10:00 exactly, his phone went ding! in his hand.

The message popped up. It was the address of a local auto scrap yard.

Deidara tossed the phone back into the passenger seat, threw his car into drive and wheeled out of the supermarket parking lot like the devil was chasing him.

The scrap yard was surrounded by mud-smeared trucks and banged up shit boxes like Deidara's. It was hard to get a park. After circling twice, he crammed himself in between a scratched pick-up and some guy's iridescent purple honda.

The scrap yard was a vehicular graveyard: big, metal corpses rose in packed and messy rows up a hill, choking out all but the most stubborn weeds in their shadows. Up the top there was a bright glow where hazard-sign yellow flood lights had been set up all around, and that was the single point towards which the crowds of people were drifting like moths to a flame.

Deidara saw Kisame before he found a way to actually get to him. He was hard to miss, being an enormous, bold silhouette, towering above everyone else, marked by the massive dark case on his back. It was probably a sword, maybe a gun — although modern ninja didn't use them very often — and possibly (...didn't seem very likely) a musical instrument.

Kisame ran the fights. Bookmakers circled like vultures, fighters begged and snapped to get their way, and police occasionally came knocking, but Kisame, in the end, was the guy who held everyone's fate in his weird, scaly hands. He kept everyone's contact information, managed set up, figured out locations. It was he who'd texted Deidara earlier.

It was also Kisame who would be handing out and collecting back the waivers, so Deidara needed to make it through the crowd and up to see him pretty soon. He took the path less travelled by hopping up on the rusty trunk of one of the cars and picking his way across their bodies, past the moving throng.

He dropped to sit on the sloped bonnet of the car behind Kisame, squinting in the flood lighting.

"Deidara, good," said Kisame, passing him a sheet of paper. The waiver hadn't changed in the last two weeks. Deidara pulled a thoroughly chewed biro out of his long blond hair and initialled it.

Then he looked around at the ring from his perch.

It wasn't a bad place, although the ground was uneven and damp, which could cause problems for some fighters... and even him, if he went last. The cage was what ensured every fight got the same space. No matter how many lowlifes showed up to watch, the cage was the same, so they all had the same space and, in theory, the same chances to win. Here, it had already been set up in the mud and was now brightly illuminated, chain links weighted down with hefty blocks of cement.

Around it, people were packing in. And then, the discarded bodies of old cars ringed them like a fence. In places there were even a couple on top of each other, looming. Their shadows grew, made long and dark and ghastly by the lights.

"There's someone here who wants to talk to you about a job, after the fight," Kisame said, drawing Deidara's attention away from the surroundings.

"A job?" Deidara tugged at his hair. "What are you, casually handing out my CV? That's weird, yeah." Although... he did need work. That was his primary motivation for showing up to these fights. Like Kisame, he was a runaway ninja; unlike Kisame, people didn't figure that out the second they laid eyes on him. It was before his time, obviously, but Deidara had heard that people just straight-up forfeited their fights when Kisame got in the cage. Probably bad for business, that.

"Nah. The contract was offered to my partner, but he does mostly industrial espionage, and honestly it seemed more like your kind of thing."

"Yeah?" Deidara kicked his heel against the defunct headlight of the car on which he sat: clank, clank, clank. He'd met Kisame's partner once ever, and he had no desire to meet him again. There were runaway ninja who were laboratory freaks like him and Kisame, and then there were runaway ninja like Uchiha fucking Itachi, whose reputation cast a very long shadow... And he was an ass.

"Hmm, yeah." Kisame took his paperwork and skimmed it for his signature, then tucked it away. "Setting off some bombs in some factories or something?"

Deidara went completely still, which was notable enough that Kisame actually turned his head in his direction.

Factories. Plural. Deidara's eyelids fluttered and grew heavy as he thought on that. In his mind's eye, he could imagine little marks on a map, all going up in unison.

He licked his lips. "Well. Maybe I could be persuaded, yeah. For the right pay." For the wrong pay, too, probably... but Deidara was getting really tired of choosing between art and food. For once, he should get both.

"Heh." Kisame was looking down at him with a knowing, sharp-toothed smile. "Sometimes a contract comes my way, and I know the right guy to fill it. So I connect people."

"Is that why you're doing this?" Deidara waved at the cage, the flood lights, the milling crowds. "You're like LinkedIn for thugs?"

Kisame tilted his head. His eerie pale eyes seemed to roll against the motion, perfect spheres retaining their direction in his skull. "Nah. I just think people're more honest when they're beating the shit out of each other."

"Sure. Okay. Well, hurry up with your paperwork. I'm ready to go be really honest with some random guy, yeah. Then you can introduce me to your contract friend."

Kisame laughed. His laugh was unsettling in the extreme, but Deidara was a big strong ninja badass and didn't let it get to him, obviously.

"Just hurry up, asshole," he mumbled.

Despite his complaints, they did move pretty fast. It was a short night, with only twelve fighters. That was six fights, each comprised of the standard three one minute rounds.

The first two fights went by fast.

The combatants always ranged in skill: some were just big guys, solid and strong from labour, looking to make a quick buck. Some were washed out genin ninja, the kinds of runaways who survived because nobody got sent to hunt them down. They were all universally big, the kinds of people you automatically pegged as taijutsu specialists because... who the hell learns the intricacies of advanced chakra manipulation when he can just hit really hard, right?

Kisame was good at carefully matching up skill levels, in as much as he could for any given night.

Deidara was a head shorter than most of the combatants, and he had carefully maintained silky blond hair and nail polish that wasn't chipped or anything. Which meant that sometimes people thought they were really funny when they were calling him shit like 'princess.'

Today his opponent was nothing like that, though. He was a bulky runaway with a huge sword on his shoulder and no eyebrows to speak of, but everything about him — from his ugly legwarmers to his bandaged mouth — screamed shinobi.

"Found a tough one for you," was all Kisame said about it. "From my old home."

Zabuza didn't try to intimidate Deidara by telling him he looked short and cute and girlish and unserious. He just smiled and cut straight to a direct, respectable, "I could kill you in sixteen different ways. Blindfolded."

That sword would have made the fight bad for Deidara, and Zabuza already had a lot of range on him in sheer height. But there were no weapons in the cage, so he had to unsling it from his shoulder and pass it off to his... Kid? Partner? Amoral support? ... Well, an androgynous little person with dark eyes and long hair, who seemed associated with him.

He didn't seem much lessened by the absence of the sword. Zabuza was a big guy.

"Is that meant to be impressive?" Deidara scoffed, getting off his car at last. On equal ground, Zabuza did tower over him. "Sixteen is too low, isn't it? You don't have much imagination, yeah."

This rejoinder made Zabuza smile. He had a smile very like Kisame's, shaved down to gleaming points.

All it took to kill most people in many, many different ways was the opportunity and, you know, a willingness to kill people. There wasn't that much skill involved. It took a certain something extra to take that murder and make it a clear expression of your artistic vision.

Deidara never lacked for artistic inspiration, but reasonable opportunities were thin on the ground.

Kisame lined them both up next to the cage and crossed his arms before them.

"Let me go over the rules for you again. Kicking in the nuts is okay. Biting is okay. Eye gouging is fine. Pulling your hair," he eyed Deidara, "is fine. Kicking someone who's already down is okay. There's no tapping out. If you walk into that cage, you're prepared to die. Forfeit now or not at all."

"Uh-huh." Deidara stretched out his arms extravagantly. Several joints cracked.

"So like always, then," Zabuza said in his low and growling voice.

They entered the cage together. Deidara had only been in here perhaps nine or ten times, but it was enough that he had already formed a conditioned response to it: the lights shining through the chain link, the shadowy faces staring hungrily at him from outside.

His pulse was already speeding. He his mouth was dry. He licked his lips.

There was noise out there: murmurings of voices and the steady calls of the bookmakers, the squeak of protesting metal as someone jumped on a car, the rustling of clothes and thudding of feet... Deidara's own heart, thumping powerfully along in his chest.

"I've got your paperwork and the timer," said Kisame, from the outside looking in.

"Yeah, yeah," Deidara mumbled, "get on with it." He was watching Zabuza closely. The ground in here was damp from the recent rain and churned up from the earlier fights. Usually that would be to Deidara's benefit, but Zabuza could use chakra to steady himself, too.

He looked even bigger in the confined space of the cage. He could probably reach the other side in ten strides or less. The arena was tiny to him. And he probably hit like a train.

Kisame was right. This fight would hard.

"Alright, since you're so eager," said Kisame, and Deidara's heart seemed to still in the slow, hanging second between that statement and his throaty below: "Fight!"