Fic: Endgame [NARUTO]
Title: Endgame
Summary: “Who are you?” Sasuke’s voice is cool and steady. Naruto grins, and in his mind Sasuke is cataloguing lightning fast all the weapons within reach and how quickly he could reach them, because something is screaming not right not right not right - “I am hatred,” Naruto says with the same disconcerting flash of bone-white teeth, and in the next second he has drawn four kunai and sent them straight at Sasuke’s heart.
Characters: Dark!Naruto/Sasuke, Naruto/Sasuke
Rating: M
--
Essentially Kishimoto's recent treatment of his theme of hatred is beginning to drive me slightly up the wall. Buddhist adherent I may be, but I certainly do not believe it possible or even healthy to suppress, or 'cleanse', yourself of hatred. SO UM. BASICALLLY Dark!Naruto escapes from the falls and comes after Sasuke? O.O;
--
“Who are you?” Sasuke’s voice is cool and steady.
Naruto grins, and in his mind Sasuke is cataloguing lightning fast all the weapons within reach and how quickly he could reach them, because something is screaming not right not right not right -
“I am hatred,” Naruto says with the same disconcerting flash of bone-white teeth, and in the next second he has drawn four kunai and sent them straight at Sasuke’s heart.
--
The cavern is vast and dark. His mind, Naruto thinks, is a very different place when you look at it from behind bars, and though it was empty he could feel the hate, the anger, the pent-up rage of a thousand years and a thousand deaths inside him around him everywhere -
It is impossible to burn your hatred away. Naruto cannot exorcise himself of his shadows. They linger, intangible and ghostlike, sometimes stretching behind him, long and thin and restless and insatiable. Other times they wait, silenced and almost forgotten, barely present. Who are you without a shadow, he thinks now, and how could you have thought to rid yourself of yours?
Even now when the cage is empty of the Kyuubi, the rage remains. He has always thought of himself and the fox as separate entities, living in an uncomfortable kind of half-symbiosis, half-parasitical existence - impossible that one live without the other, but equally impossible that they should be confused. They are so very different after all, aren’t they? The Nine-Tails with its fire and blind, blind fury, and him - he doesn’t hate, they told him to fight his inner dark, he remembers embracing the him with dark bleak eyes, telling him ‘You are me -”
And so he is.
--
Sasuke’s eyes are red, oh so red, and Naruto is moving even before the kunai fall to the ground. Sasuke is too, of course, and they are trading quick hard blows, quick meaningless blows because Sasuke knows now that this is bigger than Naruto’s seemingly neverending quest to find him, fight him, redeem him. This Naruto is hungry and savage and unknown and it flashes through him that he does not know him at all, even though through the whirling scarlet of the Sharingan he can see that it is Naruto, and not some other as he had originally thought because quite frankly he is not used to having Naruto try to kill him.
He is torn between trusting himself and trusting what has been one of the only constants in his life.
“You wasted his - my time,” Naruto hisses, and as his eyes darken and he lunges forward his lips draw back into another feral gasp.
A litany, a confession, a torrent; words flow from Naruto’s mouth as he attacks, twisting and striking in a strange fusion of grace and compulsion. “You never cared about him - me - why did he chase after you for so long -”
I can control the Kyuubi, Sasuke thinks with sudden confidence, and he tries, he really does, but Naruto’s eyes are dark and wild and frighteningly strong and most terrifying of all is the fact that he is not entirely sure that this is the Kyuubi, pronoun confusion or not.
“I have a score to settle with you, Sasuke,” Naruto says, and Sasuke is bewildered but not so much that he doesn’t block against Naruto’s attempt to pin him, hurt him, kill him. They are very well-matched, more well-matched than they have ever been, and Sasuke has never thought about it before - from a thoughtless sense of superiority or something less defined and more elusive, he doesn’t know - but fighting to capture is much harder than fighting to kill.
This is Naruto, Sasuke tells himself with a sudden painful exhilaration that thrills through his veins, this is Naruto and he has sided with Konoha. This is Naruto and he’s finally given up his crazy fucking quest to drag me back -
This he wants to believe, even though it was only six days ago that he and Naruto had parted ways at the Kage Summit, and only five since the world had become clear through Itachi’s eyes.
“I was right in the end then, wasn’t I,” Sasuke goads. “Your hatred has made you stronger.”
“You first, and then the village,” Naruto snarls as he rushes Sasuke again in triplicate, “and then all the people who hated me and feared me for something a thousand years before my birth -”
Naruto’s hatreds spill from him in great gouts, small turned huge, fanned by the flames of repression, galvanised into such ferocity and he and Sasuke are both panting from exertion already.
Sasuke wants to claim the greater pain caused by the village; never before has Naruto invoked Konoha’s deeds in front of him, never has he dared to. Naruto has always been on semi-eggshells around him, and now Sasuke wants to hurt him like never before, thrust Kusanagi into his traitor throat and force the words from it, burbling, that he has no right no right to hate Konoha like he does, this hatred is his and his alone. It doesn’t matter whether this is or whether this isn’t Naruto anymore, because this is and this has always been about hate, hasn’t it?
In the end they are two lost boys, two boys broken by hatred, one who gave himself to it and the other who tried to sear it from his flesh as though cauterizing some quiet shhhhh of history.
They are both consumed.
--
He doesn’t know how long he’s been here. He feels as though he is wading through deep water, resistance thick and viscid; he feels he has been sucked up sluggishly into a vacuum and forgotten with the winds of time. Funny that when the Kyuubi had been in here he had been unable to forget him even for a second, with the fire burning inside him all the time, wanting to escape, to be free.
He remembers the waterfall, he remembers seeing himself. Does this mean that the Kyuubi is outside roaming the world then? He shouts, “Where are you, fox?!’ and hears a long echo - f-f-f-ox-ox-ox-ox-ox. Then silence. Then, inexplicably, a hot gush of flame behind him, and a low growl.
The Nine-Tails is on the same side of the bars.
“Useless vessel,” the fox taunts, low and rumbling, “I am here. It is you who is outside, wreaking your anger on the world.”
“I tried to kill it inside me,” Naruto whispers, and he remembers it, the waterfall, and didn’t Killerbee do it? Didn’t he?
“Idiot boy,” the animal voice says, amused, “your hatred is as much a part of you as your much-vaunted love.”
--
Sasuke sees Naruto like something out of a fever dream, blurred around the edges. So much for all that about dying together, he thinks dispassionately, and strikes Naruto in the stomach. Naruto nearly doubles over, winded, coughing; Sasuke seizes the chance and turns and slams his heel into Naruto’s back for good measure.
“Actually,” he says, and even now he knows exactly what will hurt, exactly what barbs will strike their intended target with greatest force, “I don’t think you have gotten very much stronger at all. Given up on being Hokage yet?”
Naruto’s eyes narrow and he is up again, and Sasuke just barely manages to deflect the kunai coming at him from the side, and doesn’t manage to avoid the uppercut which snaps his head back, or the flurry of kicks that come after it.
“I will never be Hokage,” Naruto is hissing with each punctuated attack, “they never accepted me and will never accept me, they only want me now because he saved their fucking hides - he was so fucking stupid, he couldn’t see it, only I can -”
Sasuke watches fascinated as Naruto’s mouth opens again - “Only I can,” and this time he feels the cool slick of blood as Naruto’s left hand slides the kunai deep into his chest. He looks down and sees the dark stain of blood blossom against the white of his shirt. Oddly he is calm, the calmest he can remember being in a very long time, the mindless rage dissipated like ash over a valley. Naruto is kneeling over him now, and it must be a trick of the light because his eyes are flickering between black and a sharp, bright blue, like bits of summer sky. All he can think is he understands now why I wanted to hurt him, and he reaches up with a limp bloody hand and traces it over Naruto’s mouth, and says very clearly, “Kill them all.”
Naruto’s mouth is very red.
--
There is water dripping from the roof of the cave, always. Why, Naruto doesn’t know.
One day, Kyuubi says to him with a self-satisfied purr that there are only two people in the world who can bar him now, and one of them is locked with him. The other, he says, will come for him soon, to let him back into the ravaged world to play as he would, as once they had.
How can I bar you when I cannot leave myself, Naruto says, and the Kyuubi’s lips open into a maw of delicious spite and suddenly - suddenly Naruto can taste blood, and he knows through scent, through taste, that it is not his own.
--
...OTL;; This was so hard to write. HONEST CONCRIT NEEDED AND LOVED UPON, PLEASE BE AS HARSH AS YOU LIKE. Enjoyed it? Hated it? Please let me know; it's the only way a writer can improve. ♥ ♥