If Sasuke Was Really Emo
Our lives weave an intricate web of choices and possibilities. The potential for so many things form one giant woven pattern, and every moment there are millions of possibilities for the next. For each one of these potentials a new world is formed, one that lives out the "what if" stories that exist only on the outer edges of our dreaming minds. The man who turns left down the road wonders, "What if I had turned right?" but the same man in a different world turns right and wonders, "What if I had turned left?"
One boy, the last of the survivors of the Uchiha clan, tries not to concern himself with "What if?" and seeks only to move closer to his objective. In his mind, he must be the best, because every inch he falls short of perfection creates a mile of difference between him and his brother, the man who annihilated his entire clan, Uchiha Itachi.
This boy, Uchiha Sasuke, often remains reserved within himself, while appearing outwardly confident. Inwardly, the pain of his losses and the fear of failure press always on his mind. His greatest battle wages inwardly against himself, against this fear, and against what he believes he must do to accomplishes his own, personal life mission of revenge.
Some have described this boy as "whiny," "annoying," and "emo." His personal battle seems to irritate, even offend others, and he becomes an object of ridicule for an illusionary crime he never committed. Today, however, we will explore a "What if?" story that illustrates how terrible Sasuke's life could actually have become, and how horrifyingly pathetic and stupid the possibilities could have been. Today we ask ourselves about the truth: "What if Sasuke was really emo?"
"Come on, Sasuke, this is your last day at the ninja academy, you shouldn't be late," said Itachi to his younger brother, pulling him along by the hand towards the school.
Sasuke stumbled along behind his brother, kicking up dust along the road, and complained, "Itachi, you graduated from the academy by age eight, why do I still have to go now that I"m twelve?"
Itachi sighed silently at his brother, and replied, "Sasuke, most people graduate from ninja school at age twelve, and hopefully if you don't fail today you will too. The only reason I graduated early is because I didn't waste the talent that runs in our family."
Sasuke thought for a moment, as he was dragged along, to consider if Itachi implied anything specifically with this comment. However, as they approached the front door to the school, Sasuke moved on to something more important: himself.
"Brother, nobody understands me. It seems like wherever I go people hate me just because they can. Life doesn't have a point even. There's no use in living when your life is as terrible as mine," Sasuke said, droning on.
Itachi had heard it all before, and he was getting tired of hearing it. He stopped and dropped to one knee so he could face his brother directly before sending him into the classroom, and said, "Sasuke, people hate you because you annoy the hell out of them."
Sasuke blinked, but didn't appear to comprehend what Itachi was trying to tell him.
"Sasuke," Itachi continued, "When I was about your age I went through a phase sort of like the one you're going through now. I had lost almost all faith in the world secluded myself almost entirely from the rest of the society. But then I realized that there were other people I cared about after all, and I decided that I wanted to grow strong to protect them and their happiness. People like you, Sasuke."
Sasuke looked doubtfully at his brother. "Well you're not doing a very good job," he said flippantly, "My life consists of the perpetual torment of loneliness and darkness."
His younger brother was making Itachi regret his decision.
"Sasuke, have you ever looked at your best friend and had so little faith in humanity that you would be willing to kill him, your family, and possibly even your entire clan in cold blood just to increase your own power?" Itachi asked his younger brother with a piercing gaze.
"Umm...I don't think so. I don't have any friends anyway," replied Sasuke flatly.
"Then your life is fine. Now get in there and don't fail that final exam or else I'll tell mom and dad about you stealing from the women's clothing store."
"You wouldn't!" shouted Sasuke as Itachi shoved him through the door into the classroom.
"Okay, class, we need to conduct our final exam before you can graduate ninja school," said Iruka, bringing his classroom to order as Sasuke stumbled in and found his seat. "You should have mastered each of the techniques I've taught you this year, so this exam will be graded based off your performance with one technique, which will this year be the shadow clone technique."
"Oh god, just another reason to hate my own life," blurted out Sasuke immediately. He pulled his face from his hands for just a moment to roll his eyes at Iruka, then placed it back down on the table as if about to cry, and shifted around uncomfortably in his tight, black pants.
Iruka sighed and said, "Is there a problem, Sasuke?"
"Why would I ever want to create a copy of myself?" asked the boy, "So I can just double my own suffering?"
"Sasuke, creating a shadow clone has nothing to do with—"
"Why do you hate me!? Is it because I died my hair black?" interrupted Sasuke, pounding his fist on the table.
Iruka clenched his clipboard harder than normal for a few seconds and said, "Sasuke, your hair is already black, why on earth would you need to --"
"It wasn't nearly black enough. Not enough to represent the utter darkness of my soul."
Iruka gritted his teeth and paused for another moment. Sasuke easily occupied the role of worst student in the class. It seemed like all he would ever do is complain about how hard everything was or how it made his life worse in some sort of indirect fashion which he would never fully explain. He always acted as if something terrible had happened to him, but as far as Iruka could tell, nothing had. It's not like someone had killed his family and left him orphaned or anything. His family was very much alive and seemed perfectly nice, and when he asked his parents about why Sasuke seemed so upset about everything they just told him that they couldn't find a way to cheer him up either, and hoped it was just a phase that would pass with time, like it had with his brother Itachi.
"Jeeze, is that kid acting up again? It seems like we can't do anything in this class without him complaining about it for twenty minutes," said Ino, the daughter of the flower shop owner to her friend Sakura.
"I know, it's getting ridiculous. All he ever does is whine about how nobody loves him but the reason nobody loves him is because all he ever does is whine about how nobody loves him," replied Sakura, shaking her head. "And I swear I've got the same pair of pants he's wearing in my closet at home. I don't think I can ever wear them again now."
Moving on without addressing Sasuke's outbursts, Iruka proceeded to call down each of the students to perform a shadow clone technique. The line moved more quickly than Iruka expected and each student quickly demonstrated an at least satisfactory ability to create the clones. That is, almost every student.
"Uzumaki Naruto," Iruka called out.
Naruto gulped, and treaded slowly to the front of the class. He glanced quickly over to Sasuke as he passed by, but his face was still sunken in his hands and buried beneath his blacker-than-black hair. The shadow clone technique was Naruto's worst skill. But he had to pass this test, or rather, he had to do better than Sasuke.
Naruto didn't often do well in school and neither did Sasuke. Naruto tried constantly to outdo Sasuke simply so people couldn't say that he was as bad as the annoying emo kid, and he often trained for hours just so he could be at least a little bit better than Sasuke. For that reason many people thought of them as rivals, which irritated Naruto to no end, because he hated the idea of being considered equal to him on any level.
Naruto had practiced the shadow clone technique a great deal when they first learned it and when the only people in the class who couldn't do it were him and Sasuke. He trained day and night to perform the technique back then, and he had accomplished it, more or less, out of class, but that was at the beginning of the year, and he wasn't sure that he would be able to pull it off now. Taking a deep breath, Naruto began molding the chakra inside him and attempted to form it into a duplication of himself. He closed his eyes and focused as hard as he could, putting all his energy into this one move, and he tried only harder when he thought of the social consequences he would have to face should he fail. Naruto gave it everything he had: every muscle in his body tensed, his heart rate increased, and he could feel the chakra pouring from his body like a geyser. He didn't stop until Iruka told him to calm down and that he could return to his seat.
Had he failed? Did he perform so poorly that Iruka didn't even want him to finish the test? Naruto slowly opened his eyes and looked next to him, and saw only a perfect copy of himself looking hesitantly back at him.
He had done it!
"You pass, Naruto," said Iruka with a smile as both Naruto's cheered back to their seat. "Good job, I'm proud that you're finally showing what you've learned after all this time. In fact, that was one of the best clones I've seen today."
Iruka was pleasantly surprised. Naruto usually did horribly on the shadow clone technique, but this time he managed to reproduce himself down to the finest detail. His poor performance on the technique earlier in the year worried Iruka somewhat, but apparently he managed to pull through in the end.
Iruka's sense of joy was fleeting. The last name on his list was...
"Uchiha Sasuke," Iruka called out, almost sighing.
Sasuke didn't move. He sat motionless at his desk with his face still planted in his hands as if he was weeping.
Iruka let out a real, exasperated sigh then said, attempting to contain his temper, "Sasuke, will you please come up here and try to perform a shadow clone technique already?"
A few moments passed before Sasuke slowly rose from his seat and, with his head still bowed, trudged morosely up to the front of the room. After he reached the front, he paused and concentrated for a moment as if taking the test seriously for the first time. However, the result of his effort proved otherwise.
Sasuke returned just as slowly and morosely to his seat, leaving behind him a globular form, that, if examined closely, could on some level be thought to resemble it's creator, but this one had cuts across it's wrists and a steady stream of tears flowing from its face (if one could call it that) and hair that did indeed seem somehow blacker than Sasuke's normal hair.
Iruka dropped his clipboard and clutched his head as if to keep his melted brains from pouring out of his head after seeing something as ridiculous as the spectacle that now morphed about before him. Words couldn't seem to find their way to Iruka's mouth, but evidently Sasuke had plenty, and said, "It represents the way I am inside, and shows how terrible the darkness inside my life has become," and then put his face back down into his hands.
Iruka was having difficulty containing his feelings concerning Sasuke's demonstration while at the same time having difficulty even thinking of the proper words to articulate the same feeling. Still clutching his head, he walked briskly out of the room, and slid the door quickly shut behind him.
The students left inside the classroom stared warily at the door, and didn't say a word. The teacher's frustration was not difficult to see. After a few moments, several loud thumping sounds could be heard beyond the door, and then some sort of shrill, almost inhuman shriek followed by additional thumping sounds.
The rest of the students too petrified to move, Sakura apprehensively left her desk and edged towards the door.
"Iruka sensei, is everything okay?"
A short, heavy pause preceded another shrieking sound which sent Sakura scrambling back to her seat and grasping at Ino for protection. A quiet whimpering sort of noise emanated from beyond the door as time hung gravely and unmoving, but none of the students dared make any further attempts to confirm the source of the sound.
Suddenly Iruka came walking briskly back in and again quickly slid the door shut behind him. He paced speedily over to his clipboard and stated clearly, "Sasuke, you pass, and if anyone—anyone—tries to tell you to ever come back into my classroom for any reason, especially to repeat another whole year in this class, tell them to talk to me personally and I'll persuade them never to let you back in here again. Class dismissed," then he walked briskly back out and slid the door shut and left the classroom frightened and somewhat confused.
"Great," pouted Sasuke, "now I"m going to have some jerk trying to beat me up while calling it training. My life sucks."
Naruto leaned forward onto his desk, rubbed his eyes, and heaved a lengthy sigh of relief; he had actually passed, miraculously enough. When he opened his eyes, he found something surprising: Sasuke crouching on his desk, glaring at him three inches away from his face.
"Well at least you can just relax and be happy now," said the boy with blacker-than-black hair, "I've got to live with the horror of my life every day, and you'll never understand that."
Not wanting to back down to "the emo kid," Naruto didn't move, and replied, "All right, all right, Sasuke, I'll admit it. I have absolutely no idea why you think your life is so awful when your life is perfectly fine, why you die your hair black when it's already black, why you complain ever minute about everything like a loser, or why your pants are tighter than any pants should ever be on a man."
Sasuke didn't respond and Naruto smiled inwardly while maintaining a cool demeanor. He just hit Sasuke with something that he couldn't possibly send back at him, no matter how hard he tried. He could see Sasuke's eyes glare at him even harder, probably trying to think of some sort of witty comeback while trying to avoid thinking about how stupid he looked. Sasuke couldn't do anything to phase Naruto now.
Then something else surprising happened. Sasuke tilted forward and closed the small distance between them, until their lips pressed together as if for a lover's kiss. Naruto didn't move for a few moments; his brain seemed to be having trouble processing his current situation. He felt something on his lips, and Sasuke was right in front of him, but it couldn't possibly be that Sasuke was, in fact, kissing him as of this very moment.
It wasn't until he felt something not wholly unlike a squirming tongue begin to penetrate his pursed lips that it occurred to him what was actually happening.
"G-Get off of me!!" Naruto cried, pushing Sasuke off and scooting his chair backwards until it collided with the desk behind him, but even that wasn't far enough away. Naruto fell over sideways in his chair and rolled on the ground into the isle next to his desks, then sprung to his feet and vaulted over the other students until he reached the opposite corner of the room.
"Why in the hell—what did you think you were—are you mad!?" Naruto exclaimed in a shrill voice from across the classroom.
Sasuke seemed to redden slightly, but he turned away and stated simply, "I slipped or something," before walking briskly out of the room.
"Oh my god, I knew it!" whispered Ino emphatically to her friend Sakura. Sakura, however, could only nod and stare in shocked amazement.
Naruto made his way back to his seat and remained there for a few minutes, trembling, still confused about what had just transpired. He wore the limp, emotionless face of a man unable to cope with the reality that betrayed him. Slowly, he regained his strength and lifted himself from his seat, gathering his school materials together as the rest of the class filed out of the room. Sakura remained in her seat and watched Naruto sluggishly move towards the door. She felt like she should say something to him, but she couldn't really think of anything that made any sense in a situation like this, so she simply waited for him to disappear beyond the door before getting up herself.
However, right as Naruto exited the classroom, Sasuke confronted him again. Naruto, frozen in fear, waited several painfully long moments for Sasuke to do something other than simply stand before him and look at him intently.
"W-what do you want?" Naruto asked, unable to hide his terror.
Sasuke's eyes seemed to look through him as if he was using the sharingan, and he allowed Naruto to squirm beneath this gaze for a few seconds before asking, "So...did you like it?"
As Sakura approached the door out of the classroom, she heard Naruto yell, "Are you crazy!?" from the other side, and she rushed forward with images of the kiss still dominating her mind. What she saw on the other side of that door was something she could never have expected.
"Of course I did!" Naruto exclaimed, throwing his hands up into the air.
As suddenly as the strike of a bolt of lightning, the two boys were on top of each other literally, and, before Sakura's very eyes, Sasuke began to probe Naruto's pants with his hand while Naruto began to probe Sasuke's mouth with his tongue. However, right when it was getting good, Sakura felt a pain in her arm and suddenly found herself back inside the classroom, sitting at her desk.
"Ouch!" cried Sakura, rubbing the red dot that developed on her arm. She turned around and saw Ino behind her, and asked innocently, "What was that for? Why did you pinch me?"
Ino smiled knowingly and said, "Sakura, you really need to stop fantasizing about Naruto and Sasuke."
Sakura whirled around and saw Sasuke and Naruto in front of her again. Naruto sat crouching on top of Sasuke's desk, the two staring angrily at each other as usual.
"Get out of my face you dunce, I don't have time to waste playing your stupid games," Sasuke stated plainly to Naruto, as he always did, wearing a casual smirk.
"That's it Sasuke, I will surpass you no matter what!" Naruto shot back, just like every other time.
Sakura turned back to Ino. "I-I wasn't fantasizing about anything!" she exclaimed, her face growing slightly red as a few of her fellow students glanced her way.
Ino simply laughed. "Yeah right," she said, "I could tell by the look on your face what you were thinking."
"I was not! I'm not into that sort of thing, really!"
"Right, right. And I suppose you won't be writing one of your goofy stories about it tonight either."
"W-what are you talking about? I-I don't write stories about that kind of stuff," Sakura replied, laughing sheepishly, making sure her denial of Ino's accusations were loud enough for her surrounding classmates to hear.
The two girls sat silently for a few moments and let class's attention fall from them back to the oblivion of private conversations. Sakura cleared her throat and whispered, "So, do you want me to send you a copy once I'm done?"
"Of course," was Ino's only reply.