It's not love
It's friendship, it's rivalry, it is a bond they share, it's a promise, it's someone too precious to lose...
But it's not love
Not yet
Not when he didn't know. Not while he put everything he had into training, not when he trained so hard everyday that when he did lay to rest, he passes out into a dreamless faint.
Mostly. Sometimes there are dreams, where he writhes under a paleness that implied cool, but only made him burn. Dreams that felt so much like reality, but a reality that he should know couldn't happen. Dreams that made him cry out in such pleasure and tremble under the touches of someone not there. Staring into false eyes that were black as coal, and had him pulling soft hair dark as ink.
Dreams he felt, until he woke, hot, and shameful, and tingling with the lingering touches of the night.
But it's not love
Not even when his mind only has one goal. Above becoming Hokage, above acceptance, above existence. Because this person is so precious to him that the mere thought of the other made his chest ache so that he wonders if he was kicked too hard in training. Or how the name is always on his lips, like a prayer-like a promise, because he needed him back. He wanted to hurt him and heal him and hold him and protect him and be protected by him and never allow him leave, and damn it -guilty and confused as it made him feel- touch him and feel that fire he saw in the other's eyes be focused on him.
But it's not love
He doesn't tell himself it isn't, he doesn't think of it at all. He never knew love, he would never know love and he didn't deserve love and that was how it always had been and always will be.
So it wasn't love.