an excerpt from a Deidara fic I'd been working on—

[tozette]

He thinks they're pretty sad, for all that. Sasori's so-called art is... limited.

He watches him work and he wonders what happens to their consciousness when Sasori binds them in their bodies forever. Does it get trapped, too? Or is consciousness so changeable a thing that he discards it wholesale?

"Do you think the puppets eat their souls?" is what he ends up asking, when Sasori eventually kicks him out and sets him to confused wandering.

Kisame snorts, which is funny because Deidara didn't actually realise he was there. Weird, when you think about it: he's, like, nearly seven feet tall and a weird shade of silvery blue. How do you miss noticing a guy like Kisame?

"Like, do they get stuck inside, or do they go to the pure land?" Deidara asks him anyway.

"I don't think much about religion, Deidara-san," Kisame says, looming. A hand, equally silver-blue, shoots out of nowhere and does not quite grab Deidara by the neck.

"Hey," says Deidara reproachfully, several seconds later, when he registers that this is a thing he should maybe address. Hand on throat, right?

"Somehow I doubt your resting heart rate is in the low hundreds," says Kisame, five seconds ago.

"What?"

Deidara blinks.

He wakes up on a couch in an office he's never seen before. First the methodical scratch-scratch-scratch of someone writing with a modern pen sinks in. It's measured and soothing and it lulls him for a few minutes. It occurs to him after some time that he doesn't know how he got here, and also that the pen scratch means there's someone else in the room with him.

He reaches out to see if he can feel their chakra, which results in a wash of confused terror and a full body flinch. His eyes fly open. What the fuck?

There are five signatures, each of them powerful, and each of them in varying amounts of howling distress.

The scraping stops.

"That was stupid," Kakuzu opines. He has a voice like something that's been through shredder, low and damaged.

Deidara ignores him. Memory, and the cruel grip of perspective, come rushing back. He remembers Sasori. He remembers being ejected from his workroom to wander. He remembers Kisame, a big shadow—two fingers on his neck, his own hands tugging on his arm warmer.

"Sasori got me high," he says, half in wonder. Probably Sasori doesn't even notice the effects of his chemistry projects on the people with lungs anymore.

"He poisoned you," Kakuzu corrects. Buzzkill. As though they're not basically the same thing.

"Yeah, well. His art's shit, anyway, yeah."

Kakuzu hums. He might be agreeing. That's a novelty.