Sasori, my man, we're really in it now huh?

My general goal is to transcribe everything we know from canon as closely/creatively as I can to a modern/90s setting. Tbh this started because I just was not emotionally prepared to handle canon!akatsuki levels of fucked up war criminals and I just wanted to put them in low stakes shenanigans that keeps the core of their characters without all the murder and angst and action (I hate writing action. Horror is fun and dandy, but spin kicks and explosions and puppets are beyond me for now).

So in the claires au/mallrats cinematic universe, the Akatsuki are just a gang of queers doing your run of the mill criminal activity. Drug dealing, car stealing, chop shopping, gun running, book cooking, you name it. They all ended up kicked out of society for one reason or another, banded together, and became mundane villains of polite society.

For example, Sasori is always depicted as tinkering with his puppets. So I decided that tendency to methodically pull someone apart and back together, that special calculating mindset that it takes to look at a body and come up with twelve different secret weapons to hide in their limbs, would make the perfect fodder for a chop shop mechanic. Stolen cars instead of stolen corpses. He seems like he got the obsessing-over-cars brand of autism and I love him for it. He's weird and reclusive and pretentious and insufferable and genius.

Deidara likes explosives, duh, but guns are so boring imo so I wanted to dig deeper into his love of temporary beauty, and how that meshes perfectly with drugs. They're ephemeral, transient experiences that fade quickly but leave a lasting impact on a person, changing their life, etc. He's also. Super fucking pretentious about it. Don't let him corner you at a party. Sasori might be the chemist but Deidara is the real brains behind the operation, and also the very willing test subject. I see him as a club kid, always on one in the middle of the crowd, and entirely responsible for the Akatsuki's branding. He designed the clouds and the patented pressed pills (we got blue teslas, they got white owls, etc) and also is solely responsible for word of mouth advertising. He's always got a can of spray paint and/or a black business card with nothing but a phone number and a red cloud. He's always bright and loud and shiny and looking for attention in seedy places, always in the middle of the mosh pit or the dance floor or some sketchy back alley or the skate park (skating is kinda like riding a giant flying bird, right?) Either way, everyone wants whatever the fuck he's on.

Together they're a power couple. Absolutely nasty, insufferable to talk to, impossible to be around unless you're just as pretentious as them about their very specific interests AND willing to listen to them bicker endlessly about their arts. Naturally, they only have two friends. Kakuzu and Hidan.

I want to dig into their backstories and relationships later, narratively, but the barest bones of it is that Hidan is Deidara's childhood friend and professional pain in the ass. Class clowns in detention together, bullying the local nerds, weirdo queer kids with serious mental issues from broken homes, a scrappy sort of friendship born out of desperation for someone Like Them etc. I mean Hidan's got a nasty sadomasochistic streak, a propensity for self harm, and an obsession with the occult so don't get me started on him as your local satanic bad influence. Their whole thing could be its own post tbh.

Kakuzu and Sasori are like crotchety old men on the porch. They like to sit in some booth at the club talking shit and looking menacing while Deidara and Hidan are busy 'advertising'. I also see Kakuzu as a bit of a mentor to Sasori, being a bit older and wiser and seeing Sasori get dragged into the Akatsuki after dropping out of med school and being disowned by his grandmother (a whole other post as well) and spiraling into shitty coping mechanisms (alcohol, mostly). Kakuzu smacked some sense into him and got him sobered up because he loves that sad pathetic wet cat of a man they got money to make!!

If and when Sasori and Deidara split up to work, I see them pairing up with Kakuzu and Hidan, respectively. Every artsy twink needs their burly body guard, yknow?

I'm maintaining their age differences to some degree, although pinched closer. At the time Mallrats is set, Deidara is 25, Hidan is 26, Sasori is 32, Kakuzu is 40. Itachi and Kisame are also mid 20s, Konan and Pain and Zetsu and Tobi are in their 30s.

Deidara centric timeline wise (and trying to stick to canon as closely as realistically possible) he gets kicked out of his house for being fruity at 14, ends up couch surfing with Hidan (having 'sleep overs', or sneaking into his room when Hidan's mom said no but didn't care enough think to look under his bed/the closet/that pile of laundry) and when he can't pull that off, staying in the mall til after closing and posting up in there all night. After a while, someone in the Akatsuki notices him kicking rocks in a parking lot and realizes they need some scrappy kid to run a backpack from one end of town to the other without getting noticed. One thing leads to another and he ends up catching Konan's attention. She (30s, forgery and embezzling specialist, dyke and mother of the house) shuffles some papers, gets him his own apartment on the condition that he works for her and the money goes from their business associates to him to her to his landlord.

I have a soft spot for Konan doing this for anyone she can. Queer kids in the 80s and 90s didn't exactly have resources, and she did what she could with what she had, handing them a way to earn their own money and a safe place to live, even if its seedy and illegal. Beats the streets! Most of them were runners for a few years and aged out, she signed their SRO apartments off to them at 18 and they moved on with their lives. There's a whole host of people who only know her as Lady Angel (winknod to canon again) because she did what she could to save em. Deidara just happened to be too good at his job and got pulled higher and higher, until he landed in Sasori's shop.

That's about caught up to what I've gotten so far in Mallrats and The Waiting Room (with so much more to go. My muse is wildly overactive for the amount of time and attention span I got). I got head canons on like all the main characters from Konoha/Suna, all the Akatsuki, and the Sanin. Where they work, how they interact, how their relationships translate to mallrat/clubrat shenanigans, etc.

Every detail Sasori and Deidara falling in love? DUH. But also........... A complete dossier on everyone's kinks? Hidan and Deidara's gay awakening? Sasori's history with Orochimaru? The absolute fuckery that is any of their home life before the Akatsuki? Brazilian Kakuzu? Jashinism in a neopagan satanic context? Kakuzu and Hidan's perfectly vicious relationship? Konan as Lady Angel? Itachi darling son of the police chief working for the mob to spite his homophobic dad? Kisame... well, idk about Kisame, but if you care enough to develop it with me I could be convinced to!! The list goes ON.