Onyx Eyes/"Disinterest" - One-shot

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto Uzumaki, Sasuke Uchiha, or any mentioned characters below that belong to the manga/anime Naruto. Please support the official release and enjoy the one-shot!

Naruto Uzumaki thought about it a while back. Much to his own disgust, dislike and regret, he realized that he was very much the same person as Sasuke Uchiha. Or felt like him sometimes. He was just on the different side of the tracks than Sasuke, separated by the large reasons of why he left. Though these reasons didn't matter. Just the feelings they both felt sometimes when they thought no one was looking.

Disillusioned, disconnected, disintegrated. Discontinued, dismayed, displaced. To what? Everything. Just everything. Only sometimes Naruto felt like this, but damn it was intense.

Those words bruised deep holes in his subconscious sometimes, much to his great regret and annoyance. He hated feeling so damn... powerless to those feelings sometimes. Only sometimes they bit him in his ass, and other times they just stayed there, until he was down and attacked him like vultures to a carcass. They chewed on his decaying flesh. That analogy always came up when he thought of them like that and he hated it.

He tried not to show those jaded feelings to the outside world, but sometimes – the really bad times – he knew he was just as bad as Sasuke. Or he had been. From the days and months he and Sasuke actually interacted with each, the time he was still on the team, he seen unsaid things that belonged in Sasuke's shadowed onyx eyes as he locked onto them momentarily with his deep blue.

And it greatly worried him than anything he knew Sasuke felt with his pain.

Sasuke Uchiha was deeply disinterested... in living in this world anymore. The quiet desire to end it all with him was there, joined with an intense hatred for everything that was around him and finally, a desire to say his last words. However all of that then was smothered by his burning ambition of revenge for the man who claimed the lives of everyone and everything he had come to cherish and love. That carried Sasuke Uchiha. Vengeance for everything.

At first, he didn't understand it, and that lack of understanding turned into a lack of sympathy and great annoyance for it and him. Finally a small amount of disgust in seeing Sasuke like that begun. As much as Naruto wanted to understand it, understand Sasuke, he didn't and that left confused and hurt him more than Sasuke's insults did. When Sasuke insulted him, a belly of fire began in him and he easily retorted. He always had a retort when Sasuke was on his shit against him. However, to see all that inner pain in the (apparently) last Uchiha... He had no retort for it. None whatsoever.

His reaction would be to become unusually subdued, to suddenly have his mouth and lips dry. He would have to avoid contact with him, to become annoyed with Sasuke, angry, wanting to lash out on him. Then, a desire to argue and harass Sasuke began too, something to let him know that he was still in the world around him – though he didn't know truly at first who was he talking about when he thought that. All he knew was he had to do it to Sasuke and he had to hear his insults back or something wouldn't feel right in Naruto.

He would definitely feel not of this world if nothing happened.

Now he grew older... And he knew what Sasuke's eyes were about. He despised it even more.

Because it was him, a long time ago. When he wasn't a ninja, and he didn't have the strength to stand for him or the will to go on longer. He had hatred... he hated everyone and everything that hurt him. It made him ill when he reminded himself about it, but it was there. Something he had to deal with when he came to fight himself, "Dark Naruto". "Dark Naruto" was an abstract form of that loneliness, hatred, and depression that he faced when young. The lonely youngling who was isolated from everyone, and therefore started to breed resentment and sorrow for his treatment and such.

Disillusioned. Distrusting. Disheartened. Dispirited. Distant...

Disinterested.

He felt it himself and he didn't want to deal with it. Not again. Sasuke's past, almost reflected and shined like his together. And he hated it. Only because he didn't want to deal with the reminders of struggles and blood, no matter how much he dug it down deep in that hole. All it did, when he reminded himself of it, was bring about horrid dreams that left him up with cold, clammy and sweaty skin after he came from his nightmares.

One of the reasons he hated Sasuke really was because of it really. No... not hate him. Rather, a great dislike for him. And he didn't dislike Sasuke as a whole, really. Just that look in his eyes he got from time to time. Sasuke tried to stand strong as he seen him – so much like him, much to his own disgust again – but sometimes he broke. He broke like glass of a window or the bones he broke to get at his level of power. He broke. That wasn't something Naruto truly wanted.

And then he realized he was truly selfish and maybe not even the same as Sasuke at all. Naruto, he hated Sasuke before because he knew Sasuke was selfish. He was. He threw away everything just to try to kill his brother and pushed away people who could try to see him out of his darkness. Naruto almost feel too, but when Iruka, old man Sarutobi and eventually everyone else that was now his friend, saved him from it, he never fell back.

One of his largest reasons why he never liked to talk about his past or remember it.

...But he understood Sasuke now. He understood why he was like that. Fear was also in the eyes of Sasuke Uchiha and Naruto never seen it when he was there. If had, maybe he would still be in the village and one of the many worries in his life would be over with.

As he grew taller, as Sasuke left to find his own path in life – a more blackened and evil path, he soon found out – he acknowledged the fact that Sasuke was still his friend, still kin to him. A blood brother he wanted to have as much as he wanted to reject him. Him and Sakura were kin to him, and Kakashi, and Iruka and Tsunade and Jiraiya and everyone else who seemed so damn important to him. It ached him, and sometimes it just plain hurt, but he was counting the days and months until he could get Sasuke back to the village. Not just for Sakura's sake, but for his own...

But he hoped the most he never had to see Sasuke's eyes of disinterest in living anymore again...

It too much reflected his former disinterest.

End.

A/N: A short little one-shot. Almost like a spin-off or spiritual successor to the other angst story, "Surreality", that had almost the same level of angst as this one. I think it came out nice. Not too bad. I sure hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did writing it.