GaaNaru fic: Movie Go-er
Movie Go-er
GaaNaru
PG-13 for language, some violence mentioned
Summary: What insomniacs do at night, going crazy bit by bit until all the bits are all eaten up. I was going for a spooky-strange-pyschological feel; I rather like how Gaara came out here, slightly dark but still human.
Movie Go-er
gelfling
gelfling8604@yahoo.com
People dictate their own behavior.
--Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson), Clerks
***
Sometimes people wonder what he does at night.
He can’t sleep, doesn’t have the patience for crafts or novels, can’t go anywhere worthwhile in the isolated arid alien settlement, and dislikes people. For a while-for a long while-it was assumed he hunted, killed anything after dark when the life shut off in the village.
That had been nearly true. Most of the time.
Now, not even his sister Temari is sure what he does. What it’s like to be conscious all the time, constantly awake and aware, never having a moment’s silence or darkness, never knowing peace? He never talks about it, and no one asks.
She wanted to think he got bored with murder and blood lust, and now had moved onto paperwork. Nice, quiet non-living paperwork. She liked to think that-not as dramatic as killing, but more mentally devious and challenging, the thrill of mystery instead of the hunt. She’d like to think that, and there’s some proof-her little brother always knew when he was being lied to, had a tendency to know the answers before the questions…but still. Still.
Being the Kazekage wasn’t being a paper pusher, but a lot of paper was pushed, albeit with more indifference and intolerance now.
But…still. It seemed strange, for Gaara to opt for a position where he dealt with people all the time, when he had avoided them fervently before. Trade negotiations, territory disputes, diplomatic envoys…a lot of talk, a lot of old men, whispers, rumors, and lies. And Gaara had wanted it. Why?
It should’ve occurred to her long before the blonde from Konoha physically came; her instincts must’ve been rusty. Temari wasn’t naïve enough, desperate enough, to believe her brother had magically become sane, miraculously human and domestic without a glitch. She’d washed the blood out of his clothes too often. But it wasn’t until the blonde came that she understood.
Sometimes, Gaara does read at night. Sometimes he works. Sometimes he plots, schemes, and plans.
Other times, he acts his age and stares at nothing for long stretches at a time, no longer afraid of secret assassination by his father.
In his head, in the dark cheerless caverns of memory and mind outstripping the actual size of his skull, he plays scenes over and over again-obsessively, a neurotic insomniac watching the same scene in the same movie over and over again, blindly searching for a shadow that wasn’t there, for a word never spoken in a stuttered line, with frightening single-minded determined insanity.
He is looking for something, and it never occurs to him that he will not find it or that it does not exist. He is looking for something, with a savage intensity that shows when he kills. He does not do what he does for pleasure.
It’s always the same scene, the same fight, the same people: Uzumaki, Uchiha, the girl, and Gaara.
In the decrepit theatre of his mind, littered with stale popcorn and cigarette butts, the strongest impression is smell, giving the experience a carnal flavor: The hot, oily stink of sweat, strong sour tang of chlorophyll, and musty sweet powder of living wood expanding inside his nasal cavity, polluting his lungs.
Then there’s contact-the Uchiha’s electric punch tearing his nerves to pieces, frying and congealing the marrow in his bones, Uzumaki’s knife up his ass, knuckles stabbing his face, skull hammering iron against his own, blood trickling down with icy slowness down his face, stinging the sensitive crystalline fluid in his eyes.
Finally, there is sound, the cheapest blurred medium of all: Uchiha’s grunts of pain, Naruto’s screams, and his own cellophane shrill gasp of suffocation. Naruto’s words are replayed and rewound so often that the tape is damaged, overlapping the action like an unsynchronized sound track. The words are chopped and spliced, morphing into words Naruto never said it all but instead the words that Gaara heard.
I know how you feel so much it hurts. We’re alike, you and I. There’s no one else like us. We’re alone in what we are and nothing will ever change that. We’re alike like brothers, like sons of the same father. We’re alike. We’re alone.
If you hurt what’s mine, I’ll kill you. If you hurt what I love, I’ll kill you. We’re the only ones who know how we feel, how blood tastes to us, the only living hybrids of human and demon life, but I will kill you, if you hurt what’s mine.
Gaara enjoyed death-the sound of hearts beating, the chill of fatality, the temptation of homicide and seduction of suicide. He was never happier, never felt more complete, content, loved, as when someone was trying and capable of killing him.
A lifetime had been spent in constructing his murderer, a lifetime of chosen and deliberate pain, suffering, and adversity. A lifetime crafted for the purpose of killing creatures as powerful as he. The dedication was endearing, if not flattering.
Plenty tried, but few were capable-it made him delirious with joy, with thirst, the raw sincere passionate struggle he always won. Plenty tried, but few ever came close.
Then Naruto came.
Naruto Uzumaki had beaten him. It had been his right to kill him-the fight was his. It…everything…was his.
In that battle in the forest there had been euphoria, thrill, epiphany, and then Naruto came, and they’d been dragged into the street on their knees and shot down with fear. Terror. Of Naruto.
He could kill him. Naruto could kill him.
It wasn’t fair.
Gaara himself wasn’t certain what happened, exactly. But there had been an internal shift-an avalanche, the effects rippling beyond the horizon. In his mind, he looks for the snowball that created the destruction, because the ripples distract him without relief now.
The constant repetition of Uzumaki’s glare, anger, smell, passion, run and run until they overlap and blend into static. It echoes through the abandoned red-felt halls: the stinging poison of Gaara’s blood in his eye, against his lips, haunting and erotic. The shipwreck of after-images resurrects and mutates in his mind, with Naruto slitting his throat, snapping his spinal column, dashing him broken with disdain, contempt for a weaker creature. Naruto had won. Naruto had won.
Naruto could kill him.
In the months following, his body never physically shook as his mind experienced the imagined torture and deaths he had given freely to everyone else. He felt their deaths now. His body never shook, and if his pulse wavered, only he knew.
Naruto hadn’t killed him. He had won. Naruto could kill him.
He hadn’t been happy with himself, before Naruto. He had hated himself-found himself neither admirable nor acceptable, hateful even, a selfish closed-in psychotic killer without friends or even significant enemies. He had hated it, his life, but he had understood it-it had made sense. It had gravity, a center. It was, albeit, a dark cold revolting center drenched in blood and buried in pain and he wasn’t really proud of it, but it was a center. It was something he could stand on.
Naruto destroyed that center.
Naruto destroyed it, and even though he hasn’t fallen through space yet, he knows he still can. It’s a terrible, hellish trap; he has no ground to stand on, and although gravity has not noticed him enough to drag him down, to force him down, it’s only a matter of time before he falls. In the mean time, he merely hovers in limbo, neither one thing nor the other, a damned hybrid of circumstance.
Naruto changed something, changed him with neither permission nor consideration, and a part of Gaara hates him for it while another, darker part suicidally admires the power, the potential, Naruto represents.
If Naruto could do that to him, when Gaara himself was capable of so much cataclysmic destruction on his own, near-invulnerable to any physical attack, then together they could kill everyone in the world. Possibly in less than a year.
A part of him-feral, animalistic-finds this very, very, appealing.
In a way it’s degrading-he shouldn’t feel envious of anyone, but its enough to make him search for hours upon hours for the secret, the key, the thing that makes Naruto more than he is, the gift or treasure Naruto has that he doesn’t that makes him so much stronger, so much more centered. Naruto destroyed his center, and in a desperate slapped-together substitute becomes it instead.
The fear numbed, but never vanished. It mutated. Now, instead being weak, contemptible, the images swirl and coalesce with the tang of his blood, with Naruto’s compassion and sorrowful intimacy, into histories of the battle that never occurred. Gaara never tasted Naruto’s blood, but he breathed his sweat. Naruto touched him, but only to harm. Naruto saw him, but only with fury, contempt, and finally a pity he couldn’t swallow. Naruto had never seen him as an equal, as someone worthwhile-just a pathetic example of what he could’ve become, if it hadn’t been for Sasuke, Sakura and his team. Gaara was what he could’ve become, and instead of envy he pitied him.
Naruto could’ve killed him.
Naruto hadn’t spent his life training to kill him. Naruto had been his equal, had won the fight, and instead of giving him something he could eat, Naruto pitied him, that bastard.
It would be so simple to kill him. It would be so incredibly simple, neat and clean, and it was only because it was impossible that he didn’t do it. Didn’t try for it. Naruto had won. Naruto had won, and Naruto knew something he didn’t. Killing him wouldn’t fix that.
It was months before he saw Naruto again, and then Naruto hadn’t known what to make of him. Gaara hadn’t known what to say.
I want to fight you again. I almost…knew something, when we fought. I want to fight you again. I almost…you did something to me, inside where I can’t see. You did something, and I hate it, it hurts, I don’t understand it and can’t kill it or make it end and…
I want you to feel what you did. I want to change something in you, so you’ll know what you did to me. I want to hold your life in my hands, make you know that I own you, that I can kill you, and let you go.
My life is in your debt-you own me. I want to own you. Pride demands no less.
We’re the same, you and I. You said so. We’re the same.
You should know what I want. We’re the same.
I don’t want to be alone again.
They avoided each other after the Thing With Sasuke and Lee’s rescue. It was too early. They were too young.
No one really knows what he does at night.
Kankuro-lazy, lanky, crass Kankuro-came closest, except that Gaara doesn’t touch himself. He simply stands against the wall staring outside, or at his desk staring at words and maps without seeing, while in his head silver screen reels run over each other.
Gradually, the fiction needs more variation. It moves out of the fight; into arguments and night-covered chases, Naruto’s blood streaming through his teeth, Naruto’s raucous laughter oddly alluring. Naruto doesn’t always touch him to pain-sometimes it’s simply a reminder that they exist, that he isn’t afraid, shoulders or fingers brushing. He has no idea what Naruto’s hands feel like when they aren’t pummeling. He doesn’t know what to expect, what to feel. He knows Naruto well enough to know that Naruto makes people laugh, makes them happy. He doesn’t know what that means. He’s not sure if should care.
Naruto beat him. There is very little Naruto cannot do.
Blood never confuses him. Not his, not Naruto’s. He already knows that blood wasn’t what Naruto liked.
***
Sometimes people wonder what he does at night.
He doesn’t dream. He can’t dream. He can’t sleep.
But sometimes things happen in the dark space behind his eyes that do not happen. Impossible, nonsensical things.
Sometimes, his ribs are too small for his lungs, which will not work properly, his heart flopping on the deck of a shipwreck starved of air, and he does not move because he cannot move.
The power of Naruto’s demon had been powerful, but so was Gaara’s. The fight had ended in a stalemate: Naruto had stopped Gaara, and they’d both been helpless at the end. In reality, Naruto hadn’t really beaten him with power. He’d beaten him, but not with power.
In his mind, Naruto’s fingers trace the hollow of his throat from behind, bite without breaking the junction of his shoulder, hands groping his stomach in slow, strained strokes. Naruto’s heartbeat hits his spine, his hips curve and cup his body, lips full and sandpapery-dry as they nuzzle the rim of his ear, traverse through the jungle of his hair machetes hacking, slicing and bringing the jungle to heel. In his mind his knees go weak, his body boneless, and the hunt is reversed cruelly upon him. It’s Naruto’s teeth that consume his ear, Naruto’s tongue that tastes the fear and longing in his sweat, Naruto’s mouth that devours him bit by bit until he’s all eaten up.
It wasn’t power that defeated Gaara. It was fear.
I don’t want to be alone again.
A part of him hates Naruto, for what he’s done.
A part of him rebels, strains, fights…and despite best intentions, it heightens the submission his nervous system backstabs him with, when it imagines Naruto finally coming to claim what was his by right.
All Gaara is left with is a shaking, anxious feel in his synapses, dry lips, and the unending gnawing hunger slowly corroding its way through his stomach walls.
He wants to see him again. He just doesn’t know why. His instincts, his desires, are light-years, galaxies ahead of his rational mind, dragging him forward kicking and screaming into a new role in a new film of life, without ever telling him who he was working for or what was the script.
He wants to see him again. He doesn’t know why.
To fight? To kill? To finally settle the old score that dates back to long before the ninja villages were created, to when the old demons roamed freely and squabbled and competed among themselves, the same demons that control a significant part of their subconscious even now and give them power to live when they should have died years ago?
It wasn’t power that defeated him. It was fear. Fear of what could be, fear of change.
First, the fear of death, of actual physical termination and not the seductive ideal. Then the loss of identity, the fear of not knowing who or what he was, what he was really alive for. Finally, the fear of hope drives him slowly, quietly mad at night, a worm on a hook floating closer and farther and he never reaches out to grab it though he feels the puncture clearly.
Naruto will come back for him. He knows that, without knowing how. But Naruto will come back for him. He can’t accept an alternate possibility-his sense of arrogance is too deeply ingrained. He never bothers to stopper the blood flow coming from his chest, because, in a few days, Naruto will come with the rest of the Leaf delegation, and rip it wide open again.
He doesn’t know what he feels.
Naruto took his life away from him, his gravity and center.
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
***
A/N: I was going for a spooky-strange-pyschological feel; how'd I do? Not sure how I did...haven't tried to write dark for too long a time...
GaaNaru
PG-13 for language, some violence mentioned
Summary: What insomniacs do at night, going crazy bit by bit until all the bits are all eaten up. I was going for a spooky-strange-pyschological feel; I rather like how Gaara came out here, slightly dark but still human.
Movie Go-er
gelfling
gelfling8604@yahoo.com
People dictate their own behavior.
--Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson), Clerks
***
Sometimes people wonder what he does at night.
He can’t sleep, doesn’t have the patience for crafts or novels, can’t go anywhere worthwhile in the isolated arid alien settlement, and dislikes people. For a while-for a long while-it was assumed he hunted, killed anything after dark when the life shut off in the village.
That had been nearly true. Most of the time.
Now, not even his sister Temari is sure what he does. What it’s like to be conscious all the time, constantly awake and aware, never having a moment’s silence or darkness, never knowing peace? He never talks about it, and no one asks.
She wanted to think he got bored with murder and blood lust, and now had moved onto paperwork. Nice, quiet non-living paperwork. She liked to think that-not as dramatic as killing, but more mentally devious and challenging, the thrill of mystery instead of the hunt. She’d like to think that, and there’s some proof-her little brother always knew when he was being lied to, had a tendency to know the answers before the questions…but still. Still.
Being the Kazekage wasn’t being a paper pusher, but a lot of paper was pushed, albeit with more indifference and intolerance now.
But…still. It seemed strange, for Gaara to opt for a position where he dealt with people all the time, when he had avoided them fervently before. Trade negotiations, territory disputes, diplomatic envoys…a lot of talk, a lot of old men, whispers, rumors, and lies. And Gaara had wanted it. Why?
It should’ve occurred to her long before the blonde from Konoha physically came; her instincts must’ve been rusty. Temari wasn’t naïve enough, desperate enough, to believe her brother had magically become sane, miraculously human and domestic without a glitch. She’d washed the blood out of his clothes too often. But it wasn’t until the blonde came that she understood.
Sometimes, Gaara does read at night. Sometimes he works. Sometimes he plots, schemes, and plans.
Other times, he acts his age and stares at nothing for long stretches at a time, no longer afraid of secret assassination by his father.
In his head, in the dark cheerless caverns of memory and mind outstripping the actual size of his skull, he plays scenes over and over again-obsessively, a neurotic insomniac watching the same scene in the same movie over and over again, blindly searching for a shadow that wasn’t there, for a word never spoken in a stuttered line, with frightening single-minded determined insanity.
He is looking for something, and it never occurs to him that he will not find it or that it does not exist. He is looking for something, with a savage intensity that shows when he kills. He does not do what he does for pleasure.
It’s always the same scene, the same fight, the same people: Uzumaki, Uchiha, the girl, and Gaara.
In the decrepit theatre of his mind, littered with stale popcorn and cigarette butts, the strongest impression is smell, giving the experience a carnal flavor: The hot, oily stink of sweat, strong sour tang of chlorophyll, and musty sweet powder of living wood expanding inside his nasal cavity, polluting his lungs.
Then there’s contact-the Uchiha’s electric punch tearing his nerves to pieces, frying and congealing the marrow in his bones, Uzumaki’s knife up his ass, knuckles stabbing his face, skull hammering iron against his own, blood trickling down with icy slowness down his face, stinging the sensitive crystalline fluid in his eyes.
Finally, there is sound, the cheapest blurred medium of all: Uchiha’s grunts of pain, Naruto’s screams, and his own cellophane shrill gasp of suffocation. Naruto’s words are replayed and rewound so often that the tape is damaged, overlapping the action like an unsynchronized sound track. The words are chopped and spliced, morphing into words Naruto never said it all but instead the words that Gaara heard.
I know how you feel so much it hurts. We’re alike, you and I. There’s no one else like us. We’re alone in what we are and nothing will ever change that. We’re alike like brothers, like sons of the same father. We’re alike. We’re alone.
If you hurt what’s mine, I’ll kill you. If you hurt what I love, I’ll kill you. We’re the only ones who know how we feel, how blood tastes to us, the only living hybrids of human and demon life, but I will kill you, if you hurt what’s mine.
Gaara enjoyed death-the sound of hearts beating, the chill of fatality, the temptation of homicide and seduction of suicide. He was never happier, never felt more complete, content, loved, as when someone was trying and capable of killing him.
A lifetime had been spent in constructing his murderer, a lifetime of chosen and deliberate pain, suffering, and adversity. A lifetime crafted for the purpose of killing creatures as powerful as he. The dedication was endearing, if not flattering.
Plenty tried, but few were capable-it made him delirious with joy, with thirst, the raw sincere passionate struggle he always won. Plenty tried, but few ever came close.
Then Naruto came.
Naruto Uzumaki had beaten him. It had been his right to kill him-the fight was his. It…everything…was his.
In that battle in the forest there had been euphoria, thrill, epiphany, and then Naruto came, and they’d been dragged into the street on their knees and shot down with fear. Terror. Of Naruto.
He could kill him. Naruto could kill him.
It wasn’t fair.
Gaara himself wasn’t certain what happened, exactly. But there had been an internal shift-an avalanche, the effects rippling beyond the horizon. In his mind, he looks for the snowball that created the destruction, because the ripples distract him without relief now.
The constant repetition of Uzumaki’s glare, anger, smell, passion, run and run until they overlap and blend into static. It echoes through the abandoned red-felt halls: the stinging poison of Gaara’s blood in his eye, against his lips, haunting and erotic. The shipwreck of after-images resurrects and mutates in his mind, with Naruto slitting his throat, snapping his spinal column, dashing him broken with disdain, contempt for a weaker creature. Naruto had won. Naruto had won.
Naruto could kill him.
In the months following, his body never physically shook as his mind experienced the imagined torture and deaths he had given freely to everyone else. He felt their deaths now. His body never shook, and if his pulse wavered, only he knew.
Naruto hadn’t killed him. He had won. Naruto could kill him.
He hadn’t been happy with himself, before Naruto. He had hated himself-found himself neither admirable nor acceptable, hateful even, a selfish closed-in psychotic killer without friends or even significant enemies. He had hated it, his life, but he had understood it-it had made sense. It had gravity, a center. It was, albeit, a dark cold revolting center drenched in blood and buried in pain and he wasn’t really proud of it, but it was a center. It was something he could stand on.
Naruto destroyed that center.
Naruto destroyed it, and even though he hasn’t fallen through space yet, he knows he still can. It’s a terrible, hellish trap; he has no ground to stand on, and although gravity has not noticed him enough to drag him down, to force him down, it’s only a matter of time before he falls. In the mean time, he merely hovers in limbo, neither one thing nor the other, a damned hybrid of circumstance.
Naruto changed something, changed him with neither permission nor consideration, and a part of Gaara hates him for it while another, darker part suicidally admires the power, the potential, Naruto represents.
If Naruto could do that to him, when Gaara himself was capable of so much cataclysmic destruction on his own, near-invulnerable to any physical attack, then together they could kill everyone in the world. Possibly in less than a year.
A part of him-feral, animalistic-finds this very, very, appealing.
In a way it’s degrading-he shouldn’t feel envious of anyone, but its enough to make him search for hours upon hours for the secret, the key, the thing that makes Naruto more than he is, the gift or treasure Naruto has that he doesn’t that makes him so much stronger, so much more centered. Naruto destroyed his center, and in a desperate slapped-together substitute becomes it instead.
The fear numbed, but never vanished. It mutated. Now, instead being weak, contemptible, the images swirl and coalesce with the tang of his blood, with Naruto’s compassion and sorrowful intimacy, into histories of the battle that never occurred. Gaara never tasted Naruto’s blood, but he breathed his sweat. Naruto touched him, but only to harm. Naruto saw him, but only with fury, contempt, and finally a pity he couldn’t swallow. Naruto had never seen him as an equal, as someone worthwhile-just a pathetic example of what he could’ve become, if it hadn’t been for Sasuke, Sakura and his team. Gaara was what he could’ve become, and instead of envy he pitied him.
Naruto could’ve killed him.
Naruto hadn’t spent his life training to kill him. Naruto had been his equal, had won the fight, and instead of giving him something he could eat, Naruto pitied him, that bastard.
It would be so simple to kill him. It would be so incredibly simple, neat and clean, and it was only because it was impossible that he didn’t do it. Didn’t try for it. Naruto had won. Naruto had won, and Naruto knew something he didn’t. Killing him wouldn’t fix that.
It was months before he saw Naruto again, and then Naruto hadn’t known what to make of him. Gaara hadn’t known what to say.
I want to fight you again. I almost…knew something, when we fought. I want to fight you again. I almost…you did something to me, inside where I can’t see. You did something, and I hate it, it hurts, I don’t understand it and can’t kill it or make it end and…
I want you to feel what you did. I want to change something in you, so you’ll know what you did to me. I want to hold your life in my hands, make you know that I own you, that I can kill you, and let you go.
My life is in your debt-you own me. I want to own you. Pride demands no less.
We’re the same, you and I. You said so. We’re the same.
You should know what I want. We’re the same.
I don’t want to be alone again.
They avoided each other after the Thing With Sasuke and Lee’s rescue. It was too early. They were too young.
No one really knows what he does at night.
Kankuro-lazy, lanky, crass Kankuro-came closest, except that Gaara doesn’t touch himself. He simply stands against the wall staring outside, or at his desk staring at words and maps without seeing, while in his head silver screen reels run over each other.
Gradually, the fiction needs more variation. It moves out of the fight; into arguments and night-covered chases, Naruto’s blood streaming through his teeth, Naruto’s raucous laughter oddly alluring. Naruto doesn’t always touch him to pain-sometimes it’s simply a reminder that they exist, that he isn’t afraid, shoulders or fingers brushing. He has no idea what Naruto’s hands feel like when they aren’t pummeling. He doesn’t know what to expect, what to feel. He knows Naruto well enough to know that Naruto makes people laugh, makes them happy. He doesn’t know what that means. He’s not sure if should care.
Naruto beat him. There is very little Naruto cannot do.
Blood never confuses him. Not his, not Naruto’s. He already knows that blood wasn’t what Naruto liked.
***
Sometimes people wonder what he does at night.
He doesn’t dream. He can’t dream. He can’t sleep.
But sometimes things happen in the dark space behind his eyes that do not happen. Impossible, nonsensical things.
Sometimes, his ribs are too small for his lungs, which will not work properly, his heart flopping on the deck of a shipwreck starved of air, and he does not move because he cannot move.
The power of Naruto’s demon had been powerful, but so was Gaara’s. The fight had ended in a stalemate: Naruto had stopped Gaara, and they’d both been helpless at the end. In reality, Naruto hadn’t really beaten him with power. He’d beaten him, but not with power.
In his mind, Naruto’s fingers trace the hollow of his throat from behind, bite without breaking the junction of his shoulder, hands groping his stomach in slow, strained strokes. Naruto’s heartbeat hits his spine, his hips curve and cup his body, lips full and sandpapery-dry as they nuzzle the rim of his ear, traverse through the jungle of his hair machetes hacking, slicing and bringing the jungle to heel. In his mind his knees go weak, his body boneless, and the hunt is reversed cruelly upon him. It’s Naruto’s teeth that consume his ear, Naruto’s tongue that tastes the fear and longing in his sweat, Naruto’s mouth that devours him bit by bit until he’s all eaten up.
It wasn’t power that defeated Gaara. It was fear.
I don’t want to be alone again.
A part of him hates Naruto, for what he’s done.
A part of him rebels, strains, fights…and despite best intentions, it heightens the submission his nervous system backstabs him with, when it imagines Naruto finally coming to claim what was his by right.
All Gaara is left with is a shaking, anxious feel in his synapses, dry lips, and the unending gnawing hunger slowly corroding its way through his stomach walls.
He wants to see him again. He just doesn’t know why. His instincts, his desires, are light-years, galaxies ahead of his rational mind, dragging him forward kicking and screaming into a new role in a new film of life, without ever telling him who he was working for or what was the script.
He wants to see him again. He doesn’t know why.
To fight? To kill? To finally settle the old score that dates back to long before the ninja villages were created, to when the old demons roamed freely and squabbled and competed among themselves, the same demons that control a significant part of their subconscious even now and give them power to live when they should have died years ago?
It wasn’t power that defeated him. It was fear. Fear of what could be, fear of change.
First, the fear of death, of actual physical termination and not the seductive ideal. Then the loss of identity, the fear of not knowing who or what he was, what he was really alive for. Finally, the fear of hope drives him slowly, quietly mad at night, a worm on a hook floating closer and farther and he never reaches out to grab it though he feels the puncture clearly.
Naruto will come back for him. He knows that, without knowing how. But Naruto will come back for him. He can’t accept an alternate possibility-his sense of arrogance is too deeply ingrained. He never bothers to stopper the blood flow coming from his chest, because, in a few days, Naruto will come with the rest of the Leaf delegation, and rip it wide open again.
He doesn’t know what he feels.
Naruto took his life away from him, his gravity and center.
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
***
A/N: I was going for a spooky-strange-pyschological feel; how'd I do? Not sure how I did...haven't tried to write dark for too long a time...