electrasev5nwrites

[electrasev5nwrites]

ok note to self i gotta leave the house regularly so that i dont feel like im slowly transforming into an evil fucking shadow clone of myself

[electrasev5nwrites]

The Drowned Halls

[electrasev5nwrites]

I truly don’t think listening to audiobooks is reading and the only reason we are so defensive about it in liberal spaces is that we have unconsciously accepted the faulty premise that reading is intellectually superior to other forms of learning and consumption. That premise is the problem. Yes, there are annoying, smug assholes who think that reading is superior to listening and are obnoxious and superior about how they only consume literature via paper books, “look at me, I’m sooo smart, blah blah, you’re not a thinker like me bc you listen to audiobooks in the car ( smug fart noises).”

The problem with those people is that they are invested in the belief that reading is superior to listening. They need to believe that to feel superior. The correct counter argument is “reading is not intellectually superior to listening, you chode.” It is absurd, unconvincing, and untrue to accept their premise that reading is superior to listening and therefore back yourself into the corner of claiming that listening and reading are the same thing.

It’s very annoying. They’re very literally and obviously two different activities. But it’s unacceptable in many spaces to say so because people will abuse you of being an evil, mean, ableist (?????????).

Like. It is objectively not ableist to observe that reading and listening are different activities that use different skill sets. They are. It’s a fundamental fact of language acquisition that they are different skill sets. It makes me feel, as a language teacher, like everyone else has been taking crazy pills.

There are four language skill sets. It’s not a matter of opinion or perspective. It’s just fact.

Receptive: listening and reading.

Productive: speaking and writing.

It is academic fact that they are different things (and you need to teach them in different ways!). But the current state of identity based discourse requires you to adopt that absurd position or else be accused of being a bigot.

okay im bored. let's have a spicy takes night. what are your most controversial opinions? mine is i hate all those posts about ~gifted kid burn out~ being some sort of unique ailment of people more special than the rest of society

[electrasev5nwrites]

I want BLOOD

riGHT NOW

in my head not my legs. HEAD!!’ not just the feet!

Send blood. Send blood please. Upwards.

(Being so goddamn disabled right now being super duper disabled today and failing my potato goal . I repeat FAiling potato quest! 🥔 no harvest.)

[electrasev5nwrites]

Stuff I Learned at My Writing Workshop (That I’m Kicking Myself in the Head for Not Realizing Sooner):

-  The difference between a book that grabs you from the beginning vs. one that you’re on the fence about tossing out the window is winning your trust. It’s why it’s “easier” to read books by authors you already know, or fanfic where you’re familiar with the characters. Winning the reader’s trust as quickly as possible should be your first goal as a writer when you’re going back and editing your first draft. This can be accomplished by things like: speaking authoritatively about the subject (even if it’s utter bullshit), graceful prose, or establishing quickly in the story what it’s about. For example,“Character A had a problem. Character B didn’t love them back, so Character A was going to kidnap them so they would.” Maybe it’s not a story you want to read, but you are now firmly couched in what you signed up for in this story and the promise the author is going to deliver on before the end. 

- Characters need goals. They need goals in every moment and in every scene. Every character needs a goal in every moment and in every scene. Maybe they’re not directly pursuing that goal right this very moment but it’s probably always at the back of their mind. Romances and detective stories are the easiest to deliver on this need. Character A wants to win their love. Detective A wants to solve the case. Even when they’re having tea with grandma, their thing is at the back of their mind. Keeping your character and your story focused on this thing they want helps pull your reader along and keeps them engaged on the “So what?” and “Why are we reading this scene?” questions of why they should keep reading.

- Characters shouldn’t just have things they like, they should have obsessions. This is the one I’m kicking myself for. The scientists in Pacific Rim are eccentrically obsessed with studying their thing. Thorin in the Hobbit is obsessed with regaining his home. Katniss Everdeen is obsessed with protecting her sister. Every crazy whackadoodle fandom darling character is obsessed with something. What do they have in common? They’re intensely obsessed with the thing that they care about. We love characters who are obsessed with things beyond reason, whether it’s reclaiming their home stolen by a dragon, or building artisanal bird houses, saving your sister, or studying monsters. Everyone “likes” things, but people and characters who are obsessed with something fascinate us. Examine the characters you’re most attracted to writing in fanfic, and examine your original characters if you’re trying to build those, and figure out what are they obsessed with and how does that inform their character. That’s the thing that’s going to make readers care about them. 

(Was this advice helpful? Consider donating to my Ko-fi!)

[electrasev5nwrites]

Trying to sneak and creep but my enemies hear me coming by the clicking sound of my ankles and my wrists and my shoulders and my

[electrasev5nwrites]

Unpopular opinion but if you don't enjoy the process you should find a different thing to do.

And I think this is true in general but now I'm talking about it in the context of AI.

If you don't enjoy making art and only care about the end piece and how it'll look and how much traction it"lol get online then making art is not something for you, find something you enjoy from start to finish.

Same goes for writing: if you do not enjoy writing and rewriting and then some more and instead want AI to write for you, being a writer is not something you should pursue.

Sure, not every part of creative process is going to be equally enjoyable but you should get satisfaction from solving the problems along the way and you should get a sense of accomplishment on your way of "making the piece yours" and you should have a sense of ownership once you are done.

None of these things will come from typing in a prompt into chatGPT. And I am sad to see so many people are missing on the opportunity to experience the joy of making something with their own hands and brains.

[electrasev5nwrites]

monthly housekeeping

The month's schedule for Aiko posting (and other posting) is available to view here!

[electrasev5nwrites]

[staggering to my feet and wiping a single perfect drip of blood from my mouth] i have to get back on my bullshit. no matter the cost

[electrasev5nwrites]

I think we in the A:TLA fandom have missed the absolute potential of the fact that Ozai Firelord is canonically a fucking idiot. I mean the dude's straight up stupid. And I want to be very clear that this isn't a plot hole, this isn't a flaw in the show, this is a fantastic and super realistic element that honestly enhances my enjoyment of it! Dictators are often stupid and breed a culture of cronyism-over-competence. Any similarities with real world leaders, dead or alive, are coincidental yet inevitable.

What do I mean?

Well, let's take the Drill. When faced with the problem of Big Wall, Ozai's Fire Nation comes up with Big Drill. One singular Big Drill. Which, as anyone except an idiot could have predicted, immediately breaks down and accomplishes nothing. And if the Fire Nation had made it past the wall, then they would have been fighting through a narrow opening against people who can hurl long distance rocks! Which, if your face or body is vulnerable to high velocity rocks, is a bad thing for you and also for the battle.

Not to mention the resource cost of that thing! It's so insanely gigantic, it must have cost the Fire Nation the equivalent of trillions. For ONE drill. Not ten smaller drills. Just ONE drill. (Fanfic fuel: how much did Ba Sing Se profit off of stripping that drill for parts? Did they reverse engineer it? Did Long Feng keep that for himself?)

And you might be thinking, fairly, that it was War Minister Qin who came up with the drill and you'd be right, but it's Ozai who's approving all this shit. Instead of doing the reasonable thing and asking Qin if he et the whole edible, or even the in-character thing of burning him to death, Ozai just goes... big drill. Makes sense. We should have the biggest drill, because we are the biggest nation. Drill, baby, drill. sorry

It's not the first time, either! He also approves Zhao's invasion of the North Pole, apparently just because Zhao is good at kissing ass and hates Zuko? I couldn't tell you what merits Zhao has. We do not see him lead a single successful mission. The closest he comes is Pohuai, and even then its the Yuyan archers who do most of the work. (My longstanding headcanon is that the reason we don't see the Yuyan archers again is because Zhao blamed the whole thing on them and they were disbanded. This is great fic fuel for displaced Yuyan archers just, wandering around, being elite.)

He approved a massive naval invasion of the North Pole, surrounded by and made of water and ice, inhabited by people who bend water. A nation that was, by its own choice, completely out of the war.

Every time we see Ozai doing something, it's something stupid. Like disfiguring and banishing his firstborn child in a culture that has primogeniture. And then (once he's done pissing away a massive fleet of ships) he does the logical thing and sends his only other heir to bring his first heir back - even though his first heir would have been willing to return with a simple invitation. Like he could have sent a letter saying "dear son come home miss u pick up 200 000 tons of steel qin wants 2 build a drill lol", and Zuko would have come. (Okay, he did have a valid reason for having Zuko escorted, since he thought Iroh was a traitor, but there's absolutely NO reason to risk Azula. Why not send Combustion Man? It's the luckiest stroke of luck ever that Azula is 100 times more competent than her dad.)

Of course, a dictator(-wannabe) sending his daughter on high-level diplomatic missions is pure fiction. Nobody would do that.

The best part of this is that it's entirely realistic and in-character. I could absolutely imagine Ozai purging all of his competent admirals and generals, and then promoting brownnoses like Zhao and crackpots like Qin, because they promised him glorious destinies and secret knowledge of Big Drill.

I also really, really want a scene of Zuko and Azula realizing that their father is a fucking idiot.

I would also like to note that all this stupid shit happens after Iroh leaves with Zuko. So, here's a headcanon: the only reason the Fire Nation didn't immediately implode when Ozai took the throne and purged everyone is because of Iroh. Iroh leaving with Zuko doomed Ozai. It's also a nice little drop of complexity in Iroh's character - he knew he was single-handedly keeping the Fire Nation afloat, yet he only left when Zuko did. Did he plan for Zuko to take the throne from the start? What was his plan before Aang showed up? Did he not intervene in the Agni Kai because he was afraid, or because he knew that Ozai was making a huge mistake and didn't want to interrupt? Give me chessmaster Iroh please.

[electrasev5nwrites]

You've driven me to make a patreon acct! XD in my hurried scrolling to reach a chapter I saw something about you having posted on Royal Road, but couldn't find it. Do you still post there?

Hi! Wow, thanks!

I posted Swordpoint Diplomacy there for a while, but I didn’t really understand the site and I didn’t get any interaction so I lost steam with it. I don’t really understand the benefits of it, tbh, though I assume that more visibility would be one.

[electrasev5nwrites]

Made it all the way to work and realized I forgot my cyanide pill in case of capture

[electrasev5nwrites]

Ain't No Grave (galvanic vitalism) 2/2

part one

Deidara spent about two blissful weeks in perfect solitude, making a decent kiln and digging out clay. He really took the time to process it nicely, achieving the best ratio of chakra and clay for his work, and created a few types of clay to work with using varying levels of local minerals. 

Basically, it was what he had tried to do before Itchia shithead Uchiha had come by and kidnapped him into bringing the average intelligence and competency of the Akatsuki up a few percentage points. It had been a total waste of him that he could have been spending studying animals for his art, obviously.

Deidra took advantage of it now, on his stomach and staring with narrowed eyes at a lizard. The reptile moved once, jerkily, then froze again. He committed its proportions to memory. The movement… He could replicate that. Deidara prodded it with a finger to see the reaction. He crossed his legs at the ankle and let his bare feet sway and extend into the air.

When he wasn’t studying live models, he used all the free time to contemplate his life and his mistakes. He had lived through a lot of life and mistakes in 17 short years. What could he do better, going forward? Where had he gone wrong?

His real regret, Deidara decided, was that he hadn’t stomped the miserable remnants of the Uchiha out. What was the lesson to be learnt there? He had certainly tried, so it certainly wasn’t any shit about lacking passion and intention. 

Did it mean he should spend more time preparing and thinking through his goals? Maybe he hadn’t had enough TNT. Maybe he had made a mistake by engaging before detonation so that his enemies would know who had killed them– that was a little cocky, he had to admit it, but it just felt so much better than assassinating some bingus with clay that looked like a boring rock underfoot. Deidara sighed, woefully weighing his artistic values and pleasure against his professional development. 

“How would I feel,” he mused to himself, “if those fuckers were dead, but they hadn’t known it was me? Would I be more satisfied?”

It was, overall, just what he had wanted when he had run away from Iwa at age 14, although at that time he had expected to watch a lot more movies and eat in restaurants to save time hunting and cooking. Before that Uchiha dickhead had come and folded Deidara up into the Akatsuki, Deidata had been looking for an opportunity for artistic solitude and intellectual growth. 

This brief time was probably the lifelong peak of his mental health. So of course those dickweeds came to ruin it for him. Deidara sensed them kilometers away, but he was busy with some fiddly detailing on a frilled lizard sculpture that was going to be able to eat humans and blow up with them inside its distended belly, so he sighed and waited. He didn’t want to have to outrun them. There wasn’t a world in which those two freaks gave up without having the conversation they wanted, so he might as well get it over with. 

“Don’t care what they want, yeah,” he mumbled rebelliously to himself. Deidara wiped clay off of his face and scowled. “I’m never going to be tricked into misusing my art for a stupid quest for someone else again. I am only winning from now. I am self realized, yeah. I know myself and with that I cannot be led astray from my purpose and benefit.”

With that pep talk, he was a little more ready to talk with those assholes.

Kakuzu hummed, low, when he entered the makeshift studio clearing. Deidara had been using his cloak to keep water off his workspace and sleeping in the mine where he’d been digging out clay. “This is a lot,” he commented, with no opinion on the art visible. His gaze swept dispassionately over labeled mounds of clay in the process of curing, and the smoke from the kiln that Deidara was heating for the day. A lot of work and technical expertise was on display here. He itched for someone to talk about it intelligently.

Hidan snorted contemptuously. “But what’s it for?” he complained. He scuffed his feet on the ground, clearly considering giving a sculpture a good kick. Deidra silently hoped that the fuck would do it. It would probably take him a week to reform from that.

“It’s for my art, yeah,” Deidara said through his teeth. It was such a simple concept. He talked about his interests enough. He seethed in polite resentment for his shithead former coworkers. He knew about their interests, he thought. Kakuzu liked money and control, and Hidan liked tying up intestines and making people beg for Jashin at the end. The both of them stank, of course, like offal and human rot. Deidara eyed them for signs– Hidan’s fingernails still had blood under them, yeah, and Kakuzu had what was probably a body on his back. It was wrapped in bandages like it had come from a grave. Hm. Deidara eyed it. He was hearing some kind of faint sound from it, like whispers.

‘Surely it’s not alive, is it?’ he wondered dubiously. ‘Not like Kakuzu at all.’

“What a dumb way to use the time,” Hidan said blithely, poking a sculpture. Deidara tried to kill him. Kakuzu stopped him with a tentacle and wide, crazy eyes that said something like “hands off my boyfriend.” 

“Ugh,” Deidara said, but backed off for the moment. He glowered. “What are you bothering me for? We aren’t friends and we don’t work together anymore,” he challenged sulkily. The whispers were getting louder.

“We could,” Kakuzu said. His tone might have been idle, coming from another old man. Coming from him, it was a subtle threat.

“...We could?” Deidara repeated, as neutrally as possible. He wasn’t really interested, yeah.

‘On the other hand, he might be able to point me in the direction of someone who would be worthy of my art. A stockpile like this shouldn’t go to waste.’

Kakuzu grunted. “There is an opportunity here,” he said, and then stopped like that was sufficient. Deidara let his eyebrows raise up to their limit and waited for more words to struggle out of that steel trap. “...I have eliminated our most likely competition.”

“--despicable low born sellswords, grave robbers and infidels…”

Ugh. The body was definitely talking. Behind Kakuzu, Hidan began to laugh like a hyena. It put the hair up on the back of Deidara’s neck. His eyes were wide and crazy as he reached over and patted the prisoner. The smell got even worse, somehow.

“What’s that mean, yeah?” Deidara asked suspiciously. “What’s funny?”

Kakuzu rebuffed him with a sneer. “None of your concern.” His face twitched, once, before he smoothed his expression out. “You can make accurate clones from your clay, sustained for days independently of you.”

“...If I care to, yeah,” Deidara admitted. “I don’t like to work with color, but I can mix pigments and paint them onto a sculpture that I animate-”

Hidan cut him off with a fart noise. Highly offended, Deidara started thinking that it might be worth detonating everything here, take them all back to hell, wouldn’t that be funny–

“curse from my ancestors–”

Kakuzu grunted, ignoring the complaints from his back as if he didn’t even hear them. He shouldered off the prisoner on his back. He hit the ground with a wet squelch that told Deidara he was wrong– that was a dead guy. What the hell? He reeled in confusion. What the hell was he hearing a third voice for, then? 

“Recreate this man,” Kakuzu said. “It will lead to havoc.”

“Havoc?” Deidara asked, intrigued despite himself. He took a glance down at the body and immediately decided he didn’t care to know how it was talking. It was not fresh.  He wrinkled his nose. “You dug that up?” Deidara said judgmentally. “Gross, yeah.” He knelt to examine the body, using a stick to poke at the features. The skin was grey and beginning to slip, but that nose… Deidara felt a sneer wrap across his face. “Looks like that Sasuke guy.” He ignored the offended sounds that the corpse issued somehow without moving its mouth. Some kinda kinjutsu, probably, he didn’t care. He jabbed it  in the side with a stick. Heh. Stupid fucking Uchiha. He was dead and Deidara wasn’t, so who was the winner here? It wasn’t as nice as seeing Itachi’s body would have been, but it wasn’t half bad. Deidara smiled viciously as he tore into the soft flesh with his stick. Take that, loser. He jabbed the stick in the throat almost absentmindedly and left it– maybe that would shut it up, yeah.

“I don’t like Senju Hashirama,” Kakuzu said. It was as close to serenity as Deidara had ever heard from him. It was creepy, yeah. Deidara gave the old man an alarmed glance, but Kakuzu was clearly lost in his thoughts. “No one has a higher bounty. After his clan formally subsumed their rivals, there are many people who will pay for his death and the failure of his ambition.” The corpse grunted once, as if to say it agreed. 

“...I don’t really care, yeah,” Deidara pointed out, wiping his hands off. He cocked his head to the side. “What’s in it for me?”

Hidan laughed again and barreled over to cling to Deidara’s side, an arm carelessly thrown over his shoulder. Deidara tried to squirm away but it was fruitless. The smell of rot was hot in Hidan’s breath when he crooned, “Wouldn’t you like to blow up the Senju and Uchiha clan heads? All that power and potential, gone!” He threw his hands up for emphasis.

“Curs!” the corpse shrieked.

Deidara took the chance to step away. He could have run– but he bit his lip. The Senju… They were dregs by his lifetime, yeah, but that Tsunade… She was a very impressive woman. What must her forefathers be like? And how would they react to his art– to a life model of what must be an Uchiha noble defeated in battle, returned from the dead? He felt a rictus smile pull across his features at the thought. It would be exquisite, yeah…

“What if I blew myself up?” he asked wistfully. “I want to see them, yeah.”

Hidan made another lunge for him, but this time Kakuzu grabbed the idiot and restrained him. The old man’s creepy green eyes glittered as he made eye contact. “That’s the idea,” he said. “You watch. When the Uchiha arrive and see that Senju Tobirama has defiled their beloved dead’s grave, imagine the scene.”

Deidara staggered. “Havoc,” he agreed worshipfully. “Blood, yeah, blood and fire and guts.” The first village founding was a historical event. How cool would it be to blow that up, yeah?

“Blow up Hashirama,” Kakuzu proposed, “and then Madara will murder Tobirama.” He looked… happy. “No hidden villages, no competition and no international regulation and cooperation.”

The corpse was silent now. Perhaps this was too horrific for it to contemplate.

“That’s not interesting to me, yeah,” Deidara managed. He was still a little breathless. “Yeah, alright.” He swallowed down a grin. “I just need to start making paints.”

“How long will that take?” Hidan asked. He picked up the hem of his robe and squeezed. “I have red.”

Kakuzu sneered. “Time is of the essence,” he said suspiciously. 

Deidara waved him off. “I’m an expert, yeah. I just need primary colors and white. I can make it today if you go get the materials.”

“Can we not–”

“We are not purchasing art supplies for my creative climax, shithead. Start gathering herbs or just kill me.” Deidara crossed his arms, ready to die on this hill.

There was a long moment where Kakuzu clearly considered it. His lips flattened. The light went out of his eyes, leaving them cold and pitiless. He grunted. “Begin the sculpture,” he commanded, as if he was someone’s boss. His cloak flared behind him when he turned. “Hidan!” Kakuzu barked. “Find oak acorns.”

“What is this preschool quest bullshi- fuck!” Hidan bellowed, steam coming out of his ears in outrage that Kakuzu had pushed him through a tree. His ribs were flattened out, every one of them clearly broken. “Fine, fuck.” He plugged his bleeding nose. “I’ll find duh stubid fuggin acorns. Bitch.” Kakuzu stalked away without acknowledging any of that.

“I want kariyasu grass and suoh wood,” Deidara called out absentmindedly. He was already crouched over to give the corpse a good investigation. Height, musculature… “Yeah, I can use one of my clones as a basis, you’re about my height,” he muttered to the body. He gave the poofy hair a companionable pat. “We are gonna do great things together, yeah. Gonna get rid of all the Senju.” 

The corpse said nothing, of course, but he couldn’t help but grin wildly at the idea that he was going to use an Uchiha to kill both the Senju. The bastard was probably shrieking up at him from hell now in outrage for his precious alliance. How angry would he be that his clan head was manipulated into attacking Senju Hashirama?

Haha. It wasn’t that different from the bullshit Itachi was always doing, confusing people about who was their friend and what way was up. But this time, it would be Deidara, yeah!

Deidara felt much cheerier now.

‘It’ll be my big victory against the Uchiha,’ he thought, already feeling vindication. ‘They would hate this so much.’

The body of Uchiha Izuna had nothing to say about this. He didn’t want to ruin it.

[electrasev5nwrites]

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

[electrasev5nwrites]

reblog if you’re okay with people writing fanfics of your fanfics and/or fanfics inspired by your fanfics

[electrasev5nwrites]

Aint No Grave (galvanic vitalism) 1/2

part 2

His stumps hurt like a bitch. 

Deidara rolled over and groaned, thoroughly sick of this phantom pain bullshit and tedious revivals. “I have died twice,” he complained to management. “This is unacceptable, yeah. I earned my culmination.”

Why was he back again? No one was commanding him into battle-- and he didn't feel dead, anyway. Aside from a buzzing in his bones he just felt alive. Regular. Total bullshit.

That was weird but he didn’t have the emotional energy to devote to wondering why he had woken up again, after dissolving into dust at the end of that asinine battle for the continuation of humanity with all those Konoha chucklefucks and the zombies. He sulked in the dirt. Ugh. What the hell was it now? Some magical goddamn last-chance heroes quest to clear his soul’s debt and make it into the pure lands? Barf. It was highway robbery to steal his right to leave a final and dramatic mark on the world.

Someone grunted. It was low, dismissive, and very familiar.

Deidara rocketed up, bracing himself with– holy shit, his arms were working. He spent a moment staring dumbly at his gaping palms before he remembered that he had heard someone fucking awful in his vicinity.

Kakuzu gave him a look of pitiless disdain and went back to his work, stitching the lips shut on Hidan’s severed head. An arm flailed angrily from where it was pinned to a tree. The other arm was inching towards the other body parts, but the legs kept drunkenly ambling away from it. Hidan’s legs were still attached to his hips and they were trying to walk over to what was left of his lower torso, a few yards over yonder. This looked like Kakuzu’s work.

That didn't explain anything that he cared about, yeah.

Deidara used all of his years of training to interpret the subliminal message that he should shut the fuck up now. Instead he scowled at the old man. “The fuck is this?” he hissed, and gestured with his working arm, holy shit, that was wild. Some civilian-donated arms had been sewn back on after that buttcrack Hatake wiped his arms from existence, but they hadn’t worked that well for him. These moved like his own arms and they didn’t even smell like human rot. That had been bad enough, to be some weirdo clinging to the past like Sasori-senpai, but to have perfect new arms happen to him again was an unforgivable affront. He squinted at the mouths in his palms. No chipped teeth. They were perfect and undamaged.

He was sort of offended. Deidara waved the arms around a little more to gauge their utility. “Did you do this to me?” Deidara hissed suspiciously. He glanced down at the seam where his stumps ought to end. He frowned. He didn’t even see scarring… There was a tan line. His stump was a little darker than the arms. Ew. He contemplated this perversion. “Looking back on the past with nostalgia is for hacks, yeah,” Deidara said vehemently. “I can make clay with my ass if I have to-”

“Shut up.” Kakuzu’s green and black nightmare eyes flashed with barely repressed rage.

He shut up. Just for a moment.

And then he noticed something weird. “That is an extinct mushroom.” Deidara pointed accusatively at the fungal sack of shit in question. “This is a lame genjutsu.” He huffed. “And that– fucksake, has whoever made this not heard about the post war one land management programs?” He scowled at a growth of mugwort, which had been eradicated in the wild like 30 years ago by the medical industry to ensure patient supply stayed level and no one did any folksy self care. “This is someone’s idiot botanical fantasy,” he complained. “Either that or we’ve traveled back in time.”

Both of the old men were staring at him now. Hidan and Kakuzu exchanged a meaningful look, like they didn’t think he would have noticed the flaws in the landscape.

Deidara rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said disdainfully. He shook his long hair out and ran a hand through it–wow, okay, he had missed that. He twisted a section together to enjoy how soft and strong the strands were. Maybe having hands again was worth it. He forgave them for being a throwback.

There was a wet sound as Hidan tore his lips apart in an attempt to break the thread keeping them shut. “We’re in the past, ass bucket,” he sneered wetly. The effect was ruined by how weak and weedy his voice always came out when he didn’t have two lungs attached. His left arm finally reached his torso and started pulling it to his legs.

“Shut up, uggo,” Deidara said immediately. And then he had to run from his life because Kakuzu retaliated. He used his new hands to blow up a section of the forest, which brought down an angry nature-freak clan of proof that he was, in fact, in the ancient past.

“Those are fuckin’ Senju?” Deidara accused, three sweaty hours later of chasing around increasingly desperate survivors from a patrol squad. He kicked the closest body. It squelched. It almost sounded like a voice protesting, through the mess he had made of the face. He knelt down to pull at the corpse’s face to confirm it really was dead. Huh. Musta been air trapped in the gut or something. It moved when he touched it, like human skin and fat tissue and not like something Sasori or Orochimaru would have kept around mummified or pickled. He made a sound of disgust. “This is savage,” Deidara complained. “The only good thing about coming back to life is that I was gonna have a chance to see the new Fuyumi movie, yeah.” He kicked the body again for good measure, hard enough that it rolled over. It grunted again.

He glowered for a while. He could feel Hidan and Kakuzu moving his way, probably to whine about his lack of subtlety like the old married farts they were. Well, they could go fuck themselves, he decided, standing and bracing his hands on his hips to lean back and crack his back. 

Hidan came crashing into view. “You!” He screamed. His eyes were wild as he pointed at Deidara.

He raised a blonde eyebrow in disdain. “Yeah?” Deidara drawled.

‘Might have to fly away from this. The two of them are a nightmare.’

Ah. Haha. Shit. He hadn’t prepped any sculptures to blow up. Deidara resisted the urge to giggle when he realized he might be in danger.

“You’re immortal now,” Hidan breathed. He got waaay too close, wafting the stink of metallic blood and rot. “You’re one of us, you were worthy enough to be rejected from the pure lands. It’s a sign.”

Deidara was too busy plugging his nose to listen to the idiot’s words for a moment. When it landed, he laughed. 

Him? Immortal? That was stupid. “I would never,” Deidra drawled. “Immortality is for hacks. Life has no meaning if it never ends— your end is the only meaning!” He declared loudly and proudly to the forest, and was promptly ignored. 

“I can feel it!! Hidan grabbed him by the forearms and brought their faces close together. “Repent and convert,” he breathed, and then kissed Deidara’s forehead. “You have been baptized with death and now speak his tongue.”

Ugh!

Deidara shrieked and blasted a hole in the creep. “Hands off!” He put some space in between them and huffed, outraged. “That’s nasty, yeah, when was the last time you washed the blood off of your- off of your anything?” He spluttered in outrage and shuddered.

Hidan ignored that very good point to start off on one of his religious scriptures. Deidara watched from a safe distance, appalled but willing to take the moment to scoop up some shitty dirt and chakra-treat it to work as makeshift clay. He stuffed it to satiation with explosion release chakra and hurriedly molded it into a shitty fat clay bird. As he worked he tracked Kakuzu’s location. He was probably interested in the bodies that Deidara had left– he seemed to veer towards all of them on his way to intercept Deidara and Hidan’s eventual conflict.

“-have the blessing of our Lord and Savior to see and hear beyond death,” Hidan took a moment to breathe. “Join the holy crusade to convert the filthy fucking nonbelievers and use their blood to paint his will upon the damned canvas of this sinful goddamn world-”

Deidara let it go in and out of his ears until he felt sufficiently armed and his bird’s beak didn’t look so stupid. “You’re cracked, yeah,” he said flatly. “I’m not buying what you’re selling. So you can fuck off.” He gestured for Hidan to leave, shoo.

Hidan stopped talking at least and stared at him, red eyes glittering with malice and something that wasn’t very sane. Kakuzu was close now. He had spent a few minutes with a corpse and picked up speed in a way that implied he was pissed off.

Deidara sensed, in his heart, that it was time to leave. “Don’t call,” he said with a wink, and blew his shitty little sculpture up into the safest size he could manage with such shitty material. He hopped on and lifted directly up.

The impulse was to use the sculpture as a barrier between his body and whatever it was that Hidan was throwing at him– but that would be stupid, yeah, because if this got ruined he would be back on the ground with that asshole, so Deidara leaned over the side to spit shitty clay balls out of his hands. He released them midair in time to redirect Hidan’s scythe. By the time the weirdo had his staff back, Deidara was out of range.

He picked a direction at random, given that he didn’t know what time it was so the sun wasn’t useful for orienting. The geography clued him in before long that he was heading for Suna– oh, shit, for the lands that would one day be unified into Suna.

Deidara considered the soil quality there, hissed, and adjusted his heading to the vague direction of Iwa. 

He didn’t know why he was here, or what he would do. But every situation was enhanced with a large quantity of high-quality clay.

[electrasev5nwrites]

So last month I got hit by a car and died right. Which I didn't initially realize until I watched some guy haul my body into his pickup and drive off. Which, being that it's deep in rural Michigan, I assume means my body will make some venison jerky and maybe some wall decoration, and I'll be resigned to being one of hundreds of deer ghosts floating around Saginaw, which is w/e. But then I find out the guy works at a taxidermy shop or something, and he's actually pretty good at stuffing and mounting deer carcasses, which I come to find out when I find myself face to face with my old body in the shop window. So naturally, I figure since ghosts need to possess something to interact with the living world and etc etc etc the most logical thing to do is to possess my own body, since it's basically a statue of myself. And a little surprisingly, it actually fits like a glove. Like, since it's my body, it feels like stepping right back into place. So I get out of town and back to my herd, eventually. And that's where the trouble starts coming into it, because after I get settled again, I don't know how to explain to everyone else what feels so weird. Like since I can move my body and do everything I used to do, it's functionally the same, like nothing happened. Or it SHOULD be, so I don't know how to explain how it's NOT. But it's just hard to explain it to someone who's never been hit by a truck I guess