AN: I do not know what is possessing me to write this thing, but my desire to make a statement about dear Sasuke's extremely twisted personal motivation has overcome all else. I have lots of… theories about characters, some more bizarre than others. This is an expression of one such theory. It shall be three chapters, and is finished already; I am just editing the next two sections. Author motto = Prompt updates are prompted by prompt reviews.

Warnings: discussions of sexual matters, disturbing implications, onesided incestuous obsession (Sasuke. Just… Sasuke). Shall shortly contain Orochimaru/Sasuke, implied Orochimaru/various Sound ninja, and implied Madara/Izuna.

Chapter 1: Terror_

Sasuke is terrified of sleep.

He will never admit it, not even to himself, but the darkness lurks in the back of his mind, coiling like a snake or- or a long tail of black hair, twisting in the wind.

In Konoha, he tosses and turns in his bed for long hours each night, trying to stave off the exhaustion which seeps into his limbs like poison, like death. He hauls himself out of tangled sheets each morning, dreading the cheery, hopeful faces of his teammates, the quiet assessment of Kakashi's single eye.

The two children- he is not a child, and has not been for a long time- do not understand why their talented, desired comrade is so silent, so sullen. They do not realize what madness waits for him in the dark.

Sakura thinks she knows him, but all she knows is his pretty moon-shaped face, his graceful movements, his alleged maturity and talent. If the naïve young girl who believes she is a kunoichi could see into Sasuke's mind, she would not stop running for a long, long time.

She worships him, and mistakes his daytime pathos for sophistication.

Naruto sees more, but not everything, not nearly everything. The wild, golden boy who could and does love anyone, everyone, however broken or bereaved, does not comprehend what it is to feel nothing for the human race, nothing for anybody save one man. Naruto is sane, healthy, good; he knows nothing of obsession. He knows nothing of the dark.

The other boy tries to beat Sasuke out of his self-imposed apathy. He is sometimes successful, but the bright sun which is Naruto cannot burn away a black sky, a full moon, a trail of crimson blood. Naruto cannot get rid of sleep, and all its weighted horror.

Sasuke does not know how much Kakashi sees, but his teacher is wise, and does not interfere too much. The copy-nin understands what it is to crave revenge, to crave power, to feel nothing but hatred and arrogance. He thinks that retribution is what Sasuke wants. He is right; up to a point.

Kakashi watches, as he always does, and Sasuke is left alone, isolated amidst crowds, made into stone by exhaustion and terror and pride.

On missions, Sasuke lies quietly, listening to Naruto mutter in his sleep, observing Sakura's soft breathing. He cannot struggle and fight for wakefulness; not here, in the company of others; so he lies like a dead thing under the moon and pinches his leg with repetitive fingers, making spasms of pain.

During the day, he fulfils his duties with the mechanical precision of war-deadened shinobi twice his age. He fights and fights and fights until the opponent is dead or the task complete, and he grimaces with pain as often as he smiles, which is rarely.

Sakura, whose fierce intelligence has a blind spot when it comes to Sasuke, is awed by his skill.

Naruto, who will never admit how much he loves-hates-envies the other boy, strives to match him, not realizing the price one pays for battle-calm, for easy murder.

Kakashi, who has lived through war and loss himself, wonders what exactly goes on in this Uchiha's head, and whether Konoha should begin to be afraid.

And every night, Sasuke's body is frozen and rigid while his mind turns circles like crimson kaleidoscopes and his fingers twist his flesh, chasing pain away with pain.

Sasuke is terrified of sleep.

He comes from a clan bred for pride and power, trained for rage and absolute control. Though all but two known Uchiha are now dead, Sasuke is still a wielder of the sharingan, and he lives up to such people's reputations.

During the day, he holds onto his mind with a grip of steel, and the beautiful mask he calls his face barely slips.

During the day, he is cold and caustic and uncaring, displaying only hints of emotion below the surface.

During the day, arrogance and anger are enough to keep him going.

But at night, alone in the dark, Sasuke struggles for the long-prized aloofness of his lineage. He is afraid, deathly afraid, of letting his eyes close, letting his control go, because in the muddled relaxation of slumber all the ghosts he fights against come out to haunt him.

He fears sleep because of the dreams which populate it.

Sasuke is a twelve year old boy, almost thirteen, whose own brother murdered their entire family and then abandoned him.

The young Uchiha's subconscious is a mess of blood and corpses; his most horrific memories are a record of massacre, of holocaust, of gory images and terrible betrayal.

He is an orphan with a prideful façade and a crippling inferiority complex, whose stated motive in life involves committing murder.

One would expect him to have nightmares.

He does not.

Sasuke is terrified of sleep.

He is afraid, but not because of nightmares.

The dreams which claim Sasuke in the dead hours of the morning are far worse than any bloodbath replayed in crystal-sharp definition by acidic memory, far worse than the slumped forms of his parent's corpses recollected.

The dreams begin with a full moon, fat and golden above the dark houses of the Uchiha district. They begin with his brother's face, with beautiful Itachi the prince of death, the beloved idol.

In the dreams, Itachi saunters towards him down the blood-soaked street, picking his nimble way past mutilated corpses. Under the bloated moon they stand facing each other, two Uchihas with black, black eyes and sable hair, two brothers surrounded by a massacre.

Every night in Sasuke's head, the scene plays out, a macabre film with the colors and clarity of a photo negative, a dance of delicate brutality. He meets his brother, under the moon, surrounded by dead family members. They stand in the street for a long time, and then Itachi raises his arm, slowly, slowly, and holds a kunai to Sasuke's throat. It stays there for an aching, endless moment. Itachi does not smile.

But there is no slide of steel, no death sentence, no expected, normal sort of nightmare. Instead, every night, Itachi's hand drops, the blade traces its way downward, along Sasuke's neck, past the bared curve of his collar bones, and Itachi leans down and kisses his little brother with lips as sweet and silent as poison, with love as strong as death.

It ends with the light of dawn spilling in through Sasuke's window, with the morning coming to save him- or to damn him.

It ends, as has been remarked, with tangled sheets; sheets which Sasuke must wash in secret for fear of someone asking questions, seeing the stains. Sometimes they are blood, running from wounds his fingernails have dug into his skin as he tries to excape the dream. Sometimes they are something else entirely.

It ends… it ends with a twelve year old boy (almost thirteen) curled up in a ball on his sin-tainted, tousled bed, sobbing with confusion and guilt and terrible, terrible longing.

After a while, Sasuke gets up, showers, puts on his clothes, and walks out into the world with a visage of stone, a mask of ivory skin and ebony hair, a desperate façade.

Sasuke faces his teammates with seeming indifference and occasional, slightly condescending fondness; because he knows things they do not.

He knows that if pretty, clever, foolish Sakura was told that his older brother fucks him every night in his dreams she would not blush and try to flirt. She would fear him, and pity him. Her revulsion, masked with sympathy, would make things incalculably worse.

He knows that Naruto, to whom love comes as easy as smiling, can never understand what it is to hate one's own mind, one's own heart, one's own self. Naruto never had a family, never had a brother, and so he does not comprehend that hate is just love with its back turned, and that obsession is just a step away from lust.

He knows that Kakashi, who sees much, believes that Sasuke is cold and unreachable because his brother robbed him of the ability to love. He believes that Sasuke hates Itachi, and therefore wants to kill him. The copy nin, despite the transplanted sharingan he conceals, does not see far enough.

It comes down, in the end, to what love and hatred mean. It comes down to the twisted psychology of a cursed clan, and the bittersweet emotional cocktail stirred into fruition by betrayal.

Sasuke is terrified of sleep because it shows him what he wants.

Oh, not sex, not really; he is only thirteen, and although shinobi, especially Uchiha, grow up quickly, he is not yet fixated on desire. That time is yet to come.

Sasuke, poor, broken, angry Sasuke wants his brother. He wants Itachi, wants all the things that made him love the other boy as a child; Itachi's smile, his tenderness, his beauty and his talent. Sasuke wants Itachi, and want has twisted over the years.

Kakashi, brilliant, broken, so-much-like-his-student Kakashi, is wrong. Sasuke does not really want to kill his brother. He wants Itachi to look at him, to see him, to value him for one last time, and if he has to hunt down and kill the other Uchiha to achieve recognition then he will.

Sasuke's revenge quest is not for himself, or for his clan, or for any sense of justice. It is for Itachi. For the sake of his brother's attention, Sasuke will kill him. For the sake of his obsession, Sasuke fears to sleep.

Sasuke wants Itachi, and he comes from a clan which loves power with an almost physical fixation. For the Uchiha, always, their siblings have meant power; a brother for is a rival, a twin, a source of eternal life and an enemy who seeks immortality for himself. A brother is a fellow pilgrim on the quest for mangekyou; a fellow pilgrim who one will have to duel to the death someday.

If one fixates on power to the exclusion of all else, and one's family will either be one's victims or one's murderers in the pursuit of it, is it at all surprising that the youngest Uchiha both loves and hates his brother? Is it surprising that he has fixated on him to the exclusion of all else? Is it even surprising, in the end, that Sasuke dreams of sex with his sibling in a street full of corpses every night? The history of the Uchiha is one of sin and loyalty and lust. It is violent and overwhelming and terribly wrong; like two pairs of sharingan eyes, facing each other on a bloody street, silent under the sky. Silent under the moon.

If Sasuke had hated Itachi from the beginning, perhaps the killing of his clan would have hurt less. If the massacre had only been murder and not betrayal as well, perhaps simple revenge would have been enough.

But Sasuke loved his brother, loved him more than anyone else in the world, and so what Itachi did to him was far worse than merely making him an orphan.

Sasuke hates Itachi for killing his clan, but Itachi did more than that. He broke his little brother's heart, he turned himself from an idol into a demon, and Sasuke's mind is now as tangled as his sheets; sticky and full of darkness and regret. He cannot stop loving his brother, he cannot stop hating him, and Itachi is still, even now, more important to him than anyone else in the world.

Sasuke is terrified of sleep, because he dreams of things he does not understand, and wakes up wanting what he cannot have, what will never, never be his again.

He does not comprehend the masochism of his growing sexuality, does not want to think about why these dreams arouse him as well as torment him, and he is repulsed by the fact that he fears to sleep and that there is a part of him which wants to.

Sasuke wakes up wishing for his brother's love, his brother's affection, his brother's touch. These things are lost to him forever, and no cherry-blossom girl or golden rival can replace them.

Naruto and Sakura are ignorant and peaceful; they have not yet been made to face the darkness in every shinobi's heart, and their black-haired, taciturn teammate is a closed book to them.

Kakashi too does not understand, not really. Kakashi has been forced to watch his loved ones die, but he has never been subjected to desiring their murderer.

So Sasuke trains, and reties his mask when it begins to slip, when he begins to value his comrades. He completes his missions; the genius boy, the automaton killer with poison in his fingertips, poison in his heart.

He sees the threads beginning to form, the sacred chains between him and those who call themselves his friends, those who he has begun to call friends, sometimes, when he forgets himself.

He sees the bonds, and, exhausted, scared and broken beyond repair, knows that they must be severed. And every night, in the dark, under the moon as it comes through his window, they are. His teammates, who love him, may distract him from obsession, but they cannot follow him home, into his bed, into his mind. They cannot save him from himself. His older brother kisses him and holds a kunai to his chest, and emotions for others are shattered, cut, sheared away by a blade in the dark.

Sasuke lives with his unwanted fear and his unwanted lust, lives with fantasies of soft kisses and long black hair, with dreams of pleasure and pain and sick satisfaction.

He lives in terror, until the day the serpent comes.