Disclaimer : I do not own Naruto.
So I pulled this off for a while and made some completely unnoticeable changes and now it's back.
Sasuke had always been attracted to power.
It had begun with his desire to beat, or even equal, Itachi. It had grown with him, at first a relatively innocent ambition to prove his worth, becoming a full blown obsession fuelled and paralleled only by its cause – revenge.
Underlying every thought, every emotion he had ever felt, had been power, strength; it's admiration, envy, desire. People had relationships based on a lot more than acknowledgement. Sasuke could only recognize ability and power and those who had more of it than him.
He was beginning to notice a trend. His most intense relationships had begun, and ended with, power. At first Itachi, his father, then Kakashi, the ninjas he challenged and got challenged by, Orochimaru, Madara…
Naruto.
He did not know what he wanted. Ten years of his life had been dominated with a singularly destructive thought, although the targets had changed. He could no longer distinguish between wanting to get stronger and wanting power.
It was the same every time. Just as his thirst for vengeance had grown, so had his obsession (lust) with power, powerful people. He wanted to gain power, to conquer it; and for quite some time, he had been surrounded by people generally deemed dangerously powerful. And then there had been Naruto with the raw, unrestrained power of the Kyuubi.
He wanted it.
He did not want to become a Jinchuuriki. He had no desire to have an uncontrollable beast inside him, he liked control. And in any case, he was proud of his own source of power, his Kekkei-genkai, and the only kind of power he wanted to gain, he wanted it by furthering his own abilities.
But all that power…
He did not want to kill Naruto. He had wanted to, once, but it had come from the same craving to own it somehow. What he felt for Naruto came close to the feeling he had for Itachi; and if he knew that he loved Itachi, then it must mean that he loved Naruto also.
But this was something else. The feeling was more potent, somehow.
There was something about Naruto specifically, that he wanted to own, to control –
There was friendship and admiration and gratitude mingled with the envy that had never quite left him. It was as though all these unnamed emotions had coalesced into a single sensation that he could not (would not) identify. It was stronger than anything he had ever experienced, a reaction, he thought, to the most intense power he knew.
It was Sakura, surprisingly, who named for him, what he refused to name for himself.
"I know", she told him, only slightly bitterly. She did not explain and he did not ask her - both knew what she meant, and neither liked it.
He looked at the rival of his childhood, one of the most appreciated and talked of people and what he felt was pride that this was the person who had affected him more than anyone else ever had, more than Itachi ever had. That Naruto held the power and knowledge that changed him; almost as if in being so completely controlled by that one person, he was the one in power.
Of course, he did not care to recognize what this meant.
All he had ever wanted was power and Naruto had so much of it, and somewhere in his mind the desire for one became mixed up with the other so that it became indistinguishable, inseparable.
Sasuke clenched his jaw, and his hands, and tensed his entire body, and walked away.
I might turn this into a multi-chapter? Because I know it feels really incomplete... But much as I like to stare endlessly at SasuNaru fan art and read fics, I have no idea how to go about the writing part of it...
Please review!