Work Text:
Sasori knows that rotted flesh, all fetid and cloying with the stink of death, does not allow for proper work.
The cloud of thick decay is something no scalpel can cut through, no lancet sharp enough to tear away the matted, festering heaviness of atrophy. Degradation is human nature, he knows, threaded so deeply within the fibers of humanity that to separate them is to sin, but Sasori has never been a religious man, and he knows well the sound muscle makes when it is being torn, ripped and split from fibrous tissue, the wet meat of it when it falls to the floor, dripping and sopping and sick with death.
He has learned to work quickly, knows how to stave off the clawing fingers of decomposition, has become acquainted with the way a body cools, freezes and locks into position as the rigor mortis sets in. His hands are smooth, always smooth as he cuts and guts and empties, forcing life back into a body that will never breathe again, gives movement where natural will has been stripped, and it is beautiful, he thinks, so beautiful.
Sasori never considered himself a romantic, cares little for emotion and even less for sentimentality, but there is something intimate about excavating a human body, fingers drenched in the thickness of blood, warmed by organs that sit heavy in a corpse, fat and slimy and frighteningly tender, achingly bare against air they were never made to feel. It is love in its own way, born from art and bred from the need to create, to keep, of seeing the world through its potential, and while love and nostalgia make the body weak, artistry and continuation make it whole again.
He wonders what his own insides must feel like, if they’d cling to life or let him die, if he could feel the pulse of his heart through the thrum of his ribs, desperate and wanting and disgustingly, vilely human. It’s a sickening thought, him being human, and he wants it gone, would feel the twitch bleed from his veins with his own hands if he could, and he wonders, briefly, if he could.
He could, he thinks, already knowing what veins and arteries feel like as they slip between meticulous fingers, knows his would feel the same, disgusting, human things that feel like life and birth and want, always sickly and covetous for more and air and blood and bile and movement and being, body an ever-needy, ever-wanton thing, and it’s grotesque, truly, to be forced to live in such a thing that is always desiring, wishing, feeling, dying.
Unpreserved flesh is soft, squishy with moisture and weak with nerves, too feeling and too fragile, and that’s the thing, isn’t it, the curse of mortality, of humanity, always too much yet never enough, doughy and wiry in every way that lends itself to its next breath, yet never strong enough to guarantee perseverance, always so, so painfully human, reliably fallible in its pathetic frailty, and it makes him sick.
Sasori is good, he knows, at steady hands and careful precision, knows his speed and his grace lend way to clear, analytical accuracy, an eager clarity that’s ever-willing to rip the light from human eyes, aching and yearning for that gorgeous glassy detachment, and it burns at him, the way their eyes do not blink, staring unseeingly at a beyond to which only he can deliver to them, and he wants it for himself, this salvation, a life beyond mortal spans and human error, wants art in every molecule of his body, wants his body to be his own creation, touched by no one but himself as the creator, no haunting sensations or phantom hugs or-
It’s curious, he thinks, the idea of haunting a body, wonders with careful detachment what it will feel like when he cannot feel at all, limbs reaching and grazing and not acknowledging, and all he knows is that he wants it, is so, so painfully close, and he wants.
His eyes are matte, dry and desiccated in a way that has never seen the putrid dankness of life, not his, of course, but his, this step toward perfection, a mirror into a life that strips him of condolence, that lifts him beyond mortality into eternity, a death of the body for the birth of the mind. It is art, and so he will be.
Sasori has never minded the smell of blood, olid in its heaviness, how it clings to skin and hair and saturates clothes and pores, how it lingers, festers in the heat, metallic in its acridity, and it reminds him of poison, how easily the body accepts liquid, even that which will kill it. Human bodies are like that, he supposes, so desperate for breath and touch and feel and life that it doesn't know any better, can’t possibly conceive of a way of being that isn’t through wretched mortality, will never understand the beauty that exists in placidity, the cool touch of unyielding eternity.
He does, though. He does, he understands, sees the world for what it is and finds the beauty in existence, in posterity, a constant, unending continuation that he will be, will never die and will never wither, not weak and soft and easy like his-
Scalpels must be kept sharp at all times. All surgical equipment must be whetted, available for use at every given opportunity, because death and rot wait for no one, and Sasori can appreciate that, knows how to be timely, how to work under constraint and deliver elegance where unsavory fragility once existed. He does not like to wait nor keep others waiting, and that includes him, him, his next step, will not let himself sit and wait and decay, not when everlasting life is right there, dancing on blood-soaked fingertips, spinning on serrated knives and wet lancets.
He doesn’t fear it, that sharp, serrated edge, knows its necessity and welcomes it, even, because it is progress, part of the process, and Sasori understands what it is to be a means to an end, knows that for him there will be no end, not with this, no weakness or fragility, no loss. No loss. No loss.
He is tired of meat, of blood, of the fetid stink of sweat, foul and reeking of debility. He will be eternal, he will be, there is no other choice, not for him, not like this, and he will shed weakness and embrace artistry and eternity and they will embrace him back, hold him and cradle him like the hands of his p-
He must work quickly, cannot allow for death and degradation to dig their way into him, already knows how to funnel life and chakra and being into a core that will house him, strip him of flesh and prison and tendrils of humanity, and he will be perfect, he thinks, absolutely perfect, but he must work quickly, must not die. Sasori knows that rotted flesh, all fetid and cloying with the stink of death, does not allow for proper work.