Chapter Text
The dust settled, gritty and acrid on Deidara’s tongue. His good hand scrabbled against the broken earth, trying to push himself up, but a sharp, white-hot agony shot up his other arm, and he collapsed back down with a choked gasp. The world tilted, the dizzying spin of battle giving way to the dull throb in his limb and the heavier throb of defeat in his chest. Below him, shattered clay creations lay inert – his art, reduced to rubble by a sharingan user again.
And then there was the other defeat. A cold certainty settled in his gut, heavier than the earth itself. Sasori… he was gone. Deidara didn’t need a sensor to know. The peculiar, almost magnetic pull of the control that had tethered him to the puppet master for the past year had snapped. Freedom? A cruel, fleeting thought. Because just as suddenly, a new, unfamiliar anchor slammed into place, cold and demanding.
He looked up, glaring through sweat-streaked bangs at the man standing over him. Copy-ninja Hatake Kakashi. Sharingan eye hidden, but the sheer competence radiating from him was a suffocating weight. This was the one who had seen through his art, who had pinned him here, broken and beaten. This was the one the control had latched onto. Fury, raw and unadulterated, surged through him, mingling with a chilling sense of dread. He was sixteen, an artist of the Akatsuki, a force to be reckoned with, and yet, he was a puppet once more.
“Looks like that’s the end of the line for you, Akatsuki,” Kakashi said, his voice calm, almost bored. He adjusted his forehead protector, shielding the dreaded eye.
Deidara snarled, his one good hand clenching into a fist. “Don’t think you’ve won, un! I can still—”
“Stay put.”
The command was quiet, simple, utterly lacking in force or chakra. And yet, Deidara froze mid-sentence. His muscles locked, his breath caught in his throat. His mind screamed in protest, ordering his body to launch a suicidal attack, to detonate, to do something, but his body remained stubbornly, humiliatingly still. He couldn't even twitch a finger without permission.
Panic flared, cold and sharp. This was wrong. The control under Sasori had been a heavy cloak, a constant low-grade pressure that he’d fought against daily, expressed through loud defiance and insubordinate art. Before that, under his old sensei back in Iwagakure, it had been a familiar, almost comfortable leash, the kind you barely noticed until it tightened. But this… this was absolute. A total lockdown.
Kakashi raised an eyebrow slightly, observing Deidara’s sudden, rigid stillness. He expected defiance, a final outburst, not this eerie compliance. “Hm?” he murmured, tilting his head. “Giving up?”
Deidara couldn’t speak. The command held him silent, a gag of pure compulsion. His vibrant blue eyes, usually alight with fanaticism, were wide with a terrifying blend of rage and fear. He glared at Kakashi, willing him to understand the violation, the utter wrongness of this.
Kakashi seemed to misunderstand his silence. He sighed, running a hand through his silver hair. “Well, that makes things simpler, I guess. Don’t move. We need to secure you and figure out what to do.” He turned to glance back at where Sakura and Chiyo had been fighting.
Don’t move? The words echoed in Deidara’s head, not as a suggestion, but as an unbreakable law etched onto his very being. The anger intensified, burning away the panic. How dare this man? How dare he just… take control? Did he even know what he was doing? Probably not. That only made it worse. To be a slave to someone who didn't even realize they held the chains.
He wanted to scream, to rant about his art, about freedom, about how he would blow this entire pathetic world to smithereens. But the control was absolute. His jaw was locked tight.
The memory of the previous shifts flashed behind his eyes. Sensei dying peacefully in his bed, the familiar hum of control fading like a dying ember, leaving him adrift but free for the first time he could remember. The Akatsuki finding him, Itachi’s condescending Sharingan eyes, the blinding speed… and then the slow, insidious creep of Sasori’s control, settling in like a persistent chill he could never shake off, no matter how much he complained or argued. That had felt like being steered. This felt like being frozen.
Sakura approached cautiously, medical kit in hand, her expression wary but determined. She knelt beside him, her gaze lingering on his horribly twisted arm. The bone was clearly shattered in multiple places, protruding at unnatural angles beneath the torn fabric of his cloak. It throbbed in time with his furious heartbeat.
“He’s not resisting?” she asked Kakashi, sounding surprised.
“Seems not,” Kakashi replied, watching Deidara with a thoughtful, almost curious expression. “Maybe he’s finally accepting defeat.”
Accepting defeat?! Deidara’s mind shrieked, a silent, impotent explosion of pure rage. He wanted to laugh hysterically at the sheer, idiotic misunderstanding. He wasn’t accepting anything! He was being forced. Forced by this infuriatingly calm, eye-covered idiot who had no idea the leash he’d just picked up.
Sakura gently reached for his injured arm. Deidara flinched instinctively, a purely reactive movement, but the control clamped down instantly, freezing him again. Even the instinct to recoil from pain was overridden.
“Hold still,” Sakura said softly, her brow furrowed in concentration as she began to assess the damage.
Deidara’s body obeyed the pink-haired medic, but his eyes, fixed on Kakashi, burned with a promise of future retribution. He would endure this, he had no choice. But the moment, the instant, this control ever faltered, Hatake Kakashi would learn the true explosive nature of his art. Until then, he was trapped, a fiery spirit imprisoned in an obedient, broken body, simmering with silent, furious angst. The confusion of why this was happening, the burning humiliation of being controlled by his enemy, and the sheer, maddening misunderstanding from the Konoha ninjas – it all coalesced into a potent, bitter poison in his gut. This was going to be pure, unadulterated hell. And he couldn’t even scream about it.