Fandom: Naruto
Title: Karma
Author: hana-akira AKA rurichi
Genre: Angst, Tragedy
Character: Uchiha Madara, Uchiha Sasuke
Rating: 17+
Warning: OOC, doesn't-follow-Canon
Prompt: The comment about how Sasuke looks like Izuna. Karma: The concept that what goes around comes around. Basically, if you've done something bad, something bad will soon happen to you. Equivalent exchange in other words.
Summary: You think it's karma because it's the only possible explanation that such a horrible human could be wearing your most precious person's face.
A/N: Done in the first-person perspective of Madara.
—
When your eyes finally fall upon the form of Uchiha Sasuke, you think it's karma because it's the only possible explanation that such a horrible human could be wearing your most precious person's face.
Karma was the action of bringing upon oneself inevitable results—results that could make or break someone—the principle and the law that what went around came around.
It's karma. It has to be. And you know undoubtedly that it must be your fault because you're the only one still alive.
Uchiha Sasuke is Uchiha Izuna's doppelganger and it's all your fault.
—
You have only thing to say to him and it is only this:
"When I look at you, it hurts." (Because you look so much like him, but he's been dead for decades now and you don't act anything like him.)
Because it's true—Uchiha Sasuke is nothing like Uchiha Izuna and it shows in so many obvious ways that it hurts like a katana skewering your insides or a tanto slitting your throat.
Uchiha Sasuke is nothing like Uchiha Izuna and it hurts.
—
There are many differences between Sasuke and Izuna that it drives you mad knowing that there are so many from this devil before you and your dead beloved younger brother.
Izuna was not wicked, was not evil, and he definitely wasn't rotten to his core (He might have rotted away, but that had been your fault, not his.) Izuna wasn't like that at all. But Sasuke is. He is and then some.
Sasuke is the polar opposite of Izuna: Dark, vicious, cruel, indifferent, and absolutely pitiless and hollow to his very heart. You even think he's heartless, with the way he treats his own comrades without even one backwards glance, and it frightens something deep down inside you. So callous, so ruthless that it alarms you in ways that the Bijuu never could.
Uchiha Sasuke is not like Uchiha Izuna, not like him at all, and it scares you because he wears your most precious person's face and you know you could never say no to it.
—
It must be karma, you think, because why else would you have to suffer so? Why else would you have to endure the mirror image of your most important person doing vile deeds and feel no remorse for it? Why else would you have to bear knowing that a demon in a human's skin is parading around like he owns the world?
Why else would you have to stand having the most saint-like being you ever knew have their image tainted by such a foul creature?
It's the only explanation, the only rationalization you can come up with that makes sense to you, and you wish it wasn't so because the dead deserve better than this. Izuna deserved better than this.
Izuna had a heart full of gold and this beast which stands before you has a heart made of stone.
(You don't know which is worse—the fact that you are able to once again behold the face of a beloved but only because of karma or the fact that it's all your fault that the spitting image of Izuna is twisted like a snake.
This is karma and karma always pays its dues.)
