OK! :)

Sasori is totally amazing and I love Deidara (probably even more than Sasori, so it makes me kind of sad the way this turns out) BUT, it had to be this way.

I loosely based this on the song Driftwood by Cursive, which is a great indie-ish band if you want to check it out, and I thought it went pretty well.
So please, read and enjoy! if you liked it, please review!

WARNING: gets a bit gruesome...

Disclaimer: If Naruto were mine, I tell ya one thing, Deidara and Sasori would still be alive!

It had been the most arduous task he'd ever taken on. Systematically taking out his own organs, supplanting them with chakra, and incorporating human functions into a wooden body was after all, a near impossible feat. He'd done it to plenty of other bodies before– hollowing out the host and creating everlasting splendor in their place with their empty shells. God himself couldn't create that kind of beauty - that much he was sure of.

But an artist's folly is that there are always more beautiful ways to go about things, more artistry to be captured in the moment, and well, how beautiful would it be if he himself could be made to last forever, caught with only his heart in a safe container to become the immortal being that people only dreamed of? His own body would be an impenetrable force of cold hard materials, made to withstand damage and time. It would be perfect.

He could live forever, constantly creating an army of art to follow the slightest whims of his fingertips. They would live and never corrode with time. Everyone else around him might die, but he and his puppets… they would live on. That, he knew in an instant, was true artistry.

So he did it. He sculpted the wood expertly, molding each inch of the body into perfection. He screwed the joints on with care, working days and nights on end, always working steadily without any lapses in his attention.

When it came time to take out his heart, he knew it would be tricky. How do you do it, forcibly rip out your own heart and connect it to the fake veins and fake arteries in a wooden body? It was careful work. He tore apart his chest, disconnecting one arterial line from the real heart before quickly reattaching it by chakra into the chakra infused lines of his hollow shell. One by one, the pulsing organ made its way to be connected completely into the puppet. Blood and chakra mixed into one as his heart thumped anxiously from the odd transfer. He had hardly felt any pain at all.

His heart was captured in a cavernous body much too big for its contents – his fingertips were tinged with poison and every inch of his being was carved down to perfection.

This was, by definition, art.

---

He couldn't feel things – not the way he used to. Blood flowing out of cuts, seeping through his clothes, that was nothing. The sensation of someone touching his skin was hardly noticeable.

He felt, oddly, no joy when he stared into the mirror. As if every time he stared into the reflection, he would think to himself 'ah, it's you. It's perfection.' And a grim part of his mind would say he should be proud, but a tiny part of him complained that he couldn't feel anymore. What good was perfection anyways? It only meant he had nothing else to strive for.

The proverbial heart was numb, though his physical heart continued to beat.

.

What would be truly beautiful – it had just crossed his mind shortly after the body transfer – would be actually dying. The death of an immortal. The stigma of killing something incapable of actually corroding. That, he thought, could be art. And part of him wished dearly that maybe he could die, though he knew from his careful work that it would be highly improbable unless someone had knowledge that his heart still existed.

And someone did come to know that knowledge, eventually. His name was Deidara and he was almost as obsessively compulsive about his art as well – not that Sasori considered his creations to be anything close to true art. But the boy had heart when he talked about his pathetic moldings, he had sensations and emotions that Sasori only dreamed of ever feeling again.

What happened didn't happen over night. It happened steadily, at a numbingly slow pace, as if testing Sasori to see if he would notice the changes. And he had. Feelings like hot and cold were still impossible for his skin-taut wooden body to feel, but other things became clearer to him. Things like obsession and fervor and internal heat and even an inkling of what he thought might be love.

Deidara himself hadn't done much. But it was that obsession in his eyes, that way his voice rose when he talked about explosions. It was the way his blonde hair fell into his eyes, the way he looked at Sasori when he called him 'danna' and it was the way that he sneered when he was watching his so called art come to life.

Sasori almost thought it was magical watching the new artist. His creations weres, to be honest, crap, but he was a walking masterpiece. And the dull aching in his hollowed out chest told him it was love or something like that.

He mildly wondered how puppets could even know the meaning of love.

.

When Deidara actually touched him on the arm, so unconsciously unaware of his actions, Sasori almost snapped. A puppet, it was said, cannot feel pain nor pleasure; a puppet is a shell and shells are simply casings for what's inside. Shells can't feel. But Sasori felt the heat of the blonde's fingertips grabbing onto his skin, he felt the way his hair grazed over his face, and suddenly, he felt alive. And then he craved more. He needed more to serve as a reminder that he was in fact still breathing.

Small puppet hands felt soft skin, the slight goosebumps on Deidara's arms, the sensation of a wet writhing tongue against cold skin pulled over a wooden frame. He felt something like the heat of body friction and the sticky pull of sweat and he thought 'This could be art, this heat.' But another part of him informed him that Deidara was art, nothing else.

.

One night, Sasori realized that he might have slipped-up when he reconstructed his body. Apparently, he had created his lips to betray him and his thoughts. Apparently, his lips had been following some irreparable, severely mistaken order when they parted open and muttered something like 'I love you' after he felt Deidara's warmth envelope him.

And he prayed for a second that God, so full of blunders and mistakes, might've created Deidara with a problematic left ear, but to no avail – Deidara was something akin to perfection, and he had heard the words. He laughed, a sonorous sound in the dead of the night.

"Quit your lying, danna. We both know you aren't capable of that word, hm." The blonde still held onto him, neither relaxing his hold nor tightening his grasp as he drifted off to a peaceful sleep. The stiff cold body stared up at the ceiling and felt awfully frozen inside.

Of course I'm not capable of that word.

My lying tongue.

.

The story goes on

.

When they lay together on a bed or strewn out across any floor, Sasori made it a habit of trying to make sure that Deidara was too tired to stay awake a single second after the sex. Because it had become something of a habit for his lips to betray him and they would open and whisper hoarsely something like 'I love you' and sometimes if Deidara was completely spent, his lips would whisper in a croaky groan 'I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you...' And he couldn't control his lips or stop them from forming those words any more than he could control the pulsing of his still beating heart.

Deidara was awake once, had heard the whole ordeal. When he whipped around to face Sasori, the puppet grew quiet and still as if pretending to have died.

"You love me, hm?" There was something deathly quiet about his voice that night and Sasori thought he must've screwed his neck on incorrectly as well because it began nodding slowly despite his commands for it to stop. Deidara bore his liquid eyes at him calmly, serenely. "Danna, lying isn't a good habit, hm."

.

It soon became more than physical obsession because that dull aching in his chest became a full fledged fire raging through his frame and coursing up towards his skin, as if itching to escape and bleed out its fury.

Sasori vaguely considered writing off his human body transfer as a failure for how his puppet body seemed incapable of following his demands.

His puppet brain insisted on moving each joint to show some sort of care for his blonde partner. His puppet hands stroked the long locks almost tentatively and carefully, afraid to snag a piece of that hair on a splinter of skin.

And his lips kept whispering in that god awful voice 'I love you I love you I love you' and the blonde nodded vaguely, still with those calm liquid eyes that said he didn't quite understand the movement of his own neck either.

Deidara felt cold soft lips touching his own and brushing his hair, caressing his neck and somehow he knew that Sasori wasn't the one talking anymore.

.

"You love me… hm.." It was almost thoughtful, the way he said it. It was a detached sentence, not a question or a musing, but a statement. And it hung above Sasori's head like a weight waiting to pull him down. The weight nodded his head up and down and Deidara laughed again. "Of course you do." He swung his feet off the bed and smirked at the puppet. "Because you're human, hm. Tell me Sasori, do you even have a heart?" The dreadful weight tugged his neck up and down again, slinging him into a truth he didn't want to admit.

"I have a human heart. Does that make me human?"

Deidara looked at him with those liquid eyes again, searching and probing inside the hollow body, ignoring his sincere question.

"Prove it. That you love me, I mean. Show me your heart, hm."

And then his body shut down. The blood and chakra seemed to stop flowing, the sense in his head became jumbled and confused and his eyes died. A part of Sasori told him to show Deidara, and then the other part screamed that he couldn't. Because it would be living proof that he wasn't human.

"I can't do that, Deidara."

With a sad kind of smirk on his lips, the blonde Akatsuki member nodded quietly, mumbling to himself 'as I thought'. He shifted in the bed and stood up, stretching his limbs out lithely. Then he walked out.

.

When they slept together, it used to be a sort of magical thing where Sasori could feel things and he could touch emotions on the tip of his fingertips. Now when they fucked, it was more like it was just to get the job over with.

The blonde had lost all of that energy, that emotion, that heart that Sasori had so craved in the beginning. And now he was nothing but another shell, emotionally hollowed out and alone for Sasori to play with like a puppet of emotions. He still whispered 'I love you, I love you, I love you' but the words sounded so vacant now; he knew that Deidara didn't believe them.

Deidara wasn't the dynamic, explosive person he used to be, and that's when it hit him square in the face.

'You destroyed art. You destroyed Deidara.'

It was sacrilege. Almost worthy of death.

A death he couldn't even have.

---

The night he made that revelation, he left. He walked outside and stole a breath of the cold air, only knowing that it was cold because that was what Deidara had told him it was. It was supposed to feel like some kind of ice cube sliding down your throat, but he didn't remember what that was like either.

He continued walking, steadily, never ceasing in his pace. A puppet never tires, a puppet never wearies. Even when torn to shreds, a puppet feels not one goddamn emotion at all. So the numbness of the air on his human skin and the numbness in his chest all seemed to make perfect sense to him.

His feet took him to a place he thought he'd been forever done with since his 'magnum opus' in the shape of his own flesh and body: his puppet workshop.

The wooden door creaked against his hand, groaning in protest, as if completely aware of what the man had planned next.

A scalpel, the shining metallic sliver of a razor gleamed in the lamplight. In his hands.

He slit the chest of his body open like a surgeon, before ripping apart the flesh 'and why can't I feel a damn thing?'

Artificial blood poured out of him in gushing waves and thick viscous veins stared at his brown eyes. 'blood. I don't feel a thing.'

The scissors, tracing its silver blades in the light and smirking sinisterly at the blue and red arterial pathways.

He snipped the wiry substance, feeling each cord slip out of his hands.

Nothing, not even a trace of pain filled him.

Then the container – the heart – the whole sin of it all.

His puppet hands held the cylindrical container in the left side cavity of his chest as if surprised by how light it was.

He punched out the container 'better dying by my own hands. I said art was in my death,' and the heart thumped, painfully and achingly, sitting at the crux of the cylinder.

He reached out, grabbed the organ, and squeezed.

The blood – real blood this time – spilled out from between his fingertips, staining the fake slick skin a pink tinge as the heart slowly stopped.

A final beat.

An ironic smile.

This is artistry.

AN: DONE! If you enjoyed it , please review!

If you didn't, I'd be happy to listen to constructive criticism! I know it got kind of gross at the end, but BLOOD IS ART GRAWR. lol, iunno...

soooo yea! Reviews are swell, keeps a writer happy and shtuff! :)