Note: I'm sorry to all of you who have already read this chapter, but it got deleted so I had to put it back up. I should have the next chapter up soon! love you all!

Note: Hey, guys! Here's the new chapter. I don't really think there's anything really special in it. Kakashi-affection if that's what you call special.

Warnings: Language…some shonen-ai and an angsty Sasuke…but what are any of my stories without an angsty Sasuke?

Summary: Sasuke Uchiha is new to York High School and people are fawning all over him, just as Naruto Uzumaki expected. But what is so wrong with this new kid that he'd turn down popularity? Naruto finds himself wanting to find out and wanting to protect Sasuke from things he never thought he'd ever have to face.

Masochist

By: Jaiden Lockheart

Chapter 4: Passion

POV: Sasuke Uchiha

Location: York High School

Day: 7, November 2

The walls of the school were swimming around me by the time Naruto and I made it to the nurse's office. I felt like I was sinking into the floor and if I swerved a little to the left, I'd undoubtedly be swallowed by the row of lockers. I could feel the sweat on my brow, rolling down in beads that couldn't be very attractive, but I wasn't too worried about it. The nausea was enough to take away most of my care for anything. Anything but the pain in my arm.

So I staggered down the halls in a sort of blind pain, trying not to run into anything. Though I doubt I would have felt it even if I had. My lids grew heavy as exhaustion settled in. I knew I'd lost a lot of blood. Well, maybe not a lot, but enough to explain the weariness in my limbs. My sleeves were soaking up most of it so I don't think Anko had really known just how much had already poured from the wound. That and the fact that I had been really focused in holding it closed while I had been lying on the floor.

Now I had the limb dangling at my side, careful not to hit it on my leg while I walked. The sleeve was keeping it safe from the air that would have hurt it had it been hit with a cold draft. I really wanted to cradle it against my chest again, but I didn't have the energy to pull it up, nor the will to close my hand over it again. My palm was tingling and itched like hell and my wrist throbbed every time I moved.

Anko must have called down to the nurse's office while we were walking there because I didn't even get inside before I was bombarded with questions by a young nurse with black hair. She placed a hand on my back, ushered me into the room and set me on one of those brown leather cots.

She was saying things, worrying over my arm, but I wasn't listening to her. I could no longer focus on anything. Her voice was but a fleeting noise against the fuzziness muddling my brain. I knew I wouldn't stay awake for much longer, knew I should have insisted on staying in the gym until the paramedics could come and take me to the hospital. This wasn't the first time I had lost this much blood and I knew the results of doing things to make that blood flow faster. Like getting up and walking to the nurse's office.

As my vision blurred even more, I looked up to try and find a point I could focus on. Anything that would anchor me to the room for just a few more moments.

I found blue. A magnificent blue that seemed to rival that of the sky in Kyoto on a summer day. It crystallized, forming something solid and beautiful. A jewel of turquoise and sapphire, small chunks of diamond throughout. It was the sea and ice. It was the sky and clouds. It was calm, but worried. It was safety, but disaster. It held me captivated, but afraid. Afraid that it was going to go away at any moment. This beautiful thing was going to escape me soon.

And it did, a moment later. When my eyes closed and I succumbed to my tempting darkness.

--

--

I came to what seemed like only a moment later. The beeping of machines and the sterile smell of a hospital assaulting my senses. I squinted against the bright light of the emergency room, the fluorescence that shaded the entire building hitting my dilated pupils too quickly. It took me a second to adjust. A moment of breathing deeply with my eyes shut tight, before I could try again.

The moment when the room was plunged into darkness, I could have cheered. But I knew my throat would hate me for it. I was still too tired to talk loudly.

"How are you feeling?" I heard a voice ask me from my bedside and recognize it instantly. I searched the man out with eyes that were still adjusting.

"Like shit." I answered truthfully, glad that my throat didn't hurt too bad.

A moment later I felt a shift of the mattress and knew I was no longer the only occupant in the small hospital bed. I leaned into the chest that provided more comfort than anything else in this room. The fingers that ran repeatedly through my hair were lulling me back to sleep.

"You lost a lot of blood. You've been conked out for a few hours." Kakashi said and I buried my face in his shoulder. "You've got an IV, as I'm sure you've noticed, and they're still giving you fluids. They want to take you for another x-ray tomorrow morning to make sure they didn't miss anything. You've been pretty doped up. They didn't want you waking up when they were putting your bones back together."

I chuckled at his words and he did too. It was a nervous laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. It hadn't been very long since I'd been in this situation the last time. And I'd been drugged for a completely different reason. This was almost a nice change from the last time.

Almost.

"I don't want to be here." I said a moment later.

"I know, but you can't go home yet. The doctor said you'll probably go home tomorrow and you'll be back to school by Monday." He propped himself up on his elbow. "Do you want me to stay tonight?"

I didn't really have to answer that question, but I nodded anyway. The two of us stayed like that for a long time. I curled against him further, closing my eyes and enjoying how safe I felt laying beside him. I always knew that the two of us weren't a real family. We couldn't be, because both of us had once had a family and this was nothing like the way that had been. I was told to look at Kakashi as a father figure by the social workers who had placed me in his care six years ago. But I didn't look at him like a father, and he didn't look at me like a son. We were something else entirely.

Kakashi and I fought like we were family, like my brother and I had before the two of us had been separated. But then, we were closer than normal. I didn't talk much about what had happened to me, and he didn't talk much about what had happened to him. But what little we did say got the message across quite clear. I didn't have to say much, because he completely understood.

And it hadn't taken long for us to settle into something akin to normality with each other. It hadn't taken long for us to find comfort in one another. Because I knew I brought him just as much comfort as he brought to me. And we had been all each other had had at one time.

"Naruto was really worried about you." He said before I could drift back off to sleep. I thought back on the blonde boy who had walked with me to the nurses office and found myself wondering what he was doing right now.

I wondered if he'd found someone to go to the mall with him tonight, because he had wanted to go check out a new playstation game. I wondered if he'd found someone to replace me and wondered if I myself had replaced the person who had been hanging out with him before I had come to Maine. Had it been his girlfriend, whom I noticed he'd been repeatedly ignoring for the past week? In fact, the two of us had done a lot together, so what did that mean for his other friends?

I didn't respond to Kakashi's comment. Instead, I closed my eyes and spoke softly.

"Night, 'kashi."

"Goodnight, Rave…"

--

--

POV: Sasuke Uchiha

Location: Starbucks coffee shop

Day: 10, Sunday, November 5

I could only hold the steaming mocha latte in my left hand as I sat down at a corner table. I would have brought my notebook with me so that I could write, but I'd been having a little bit of trouble with that since my right arm was encased in plaster from the middle of my palm to about half-way up my forearm. I had a hoodie on now, hoping no one would notice it. But I was just kidding myself. Who wasn't going to notice the neon pink casting poking out from the bottom on my sleeves? I had nothing to take the attention away from it, as most of my clothes were black, a stark contrast to the bright color that was going to be permanently fixed to my skin for close to eight weeks.

It was all Kakashi's fault, I just knew it. He had told the doctors to give me a pink cast just to make fun of me every time he got to see it. He'd denied it when I had asked him when I'd woken up on Friday morning. But he was a very bad liar when he was really wanted to laugh about something.

And seeing me in anything pink was probably very funny.

So, out of spite, yesterday, I had gone with Naruto to the mall and picked out a hot pink t-shirt with some American band label on it and worn it home. Just to show him that it didn't bother me. Only, that didn't deter him and he just kept bugging me about it anyway.

Shaking my head in a mixture of annoyance and amusement, I took a drink of my coffee, setting it down a moment later and picking up the novel I had been assigned to read for my AP Literature and Composition class.

I leafed through the pages in Lord of the Flies until I found the spot I was looking for, where I'd left off. I'd read this book so many times I had parts of it memorized. However, every time I read it again, I found something I'd missed the last time. I enjoyed the story a lot, but I wasn't sure why, as I usually hated books we had to read for school. Of course, in Japan, this hadn't been a required work like it was here. I'd picked it up on my own one day while shopping for manga in Tokyo.

I read for a few pages, trying to decide what I would write my essay on next week. It wouldn't be that hard, Asuma had given us a list of things to choose from. The symbolism would be a popular subject I'm sure. The time period would be one as well.

"Enjoying your coffee, sexy?"

I didn't know how many times Gaara was going to be able to sneak up on me before I would finally be able to notice his presence before he spoke, but I blamed it on the book this time to make myself feel better. I whipped my head up just in time to see him pull a chair over from the table next to mine and sit down on it backwards before turning back to me. His bright eyes were even more noticeable in the sunlight, and the color was brought out by the green apron he wore over his black t-shirt. He had a smirk on his face that both excited and worried me, and he crossed his arms over his lean chest. I didn't answer his question.

"Lord of the Flies, huh?" He said while peeking at the cover of the book in my hand. "You know, William Golding had this theory…every human is born evil and they learn to behave the way society wants them to. Put them in a situation that doesn't have a society to tell them what to do, and they act on their innate human evil."

I nodded, listening to Gaara's voice become even scarier as he kept talking. I looked down at the page I was reading.

"This book is a pretty good example of his theory." I said in as low a voice as he spoke. "…but I don't believe it."

Gaara raised an eyebrow at my words and smirked again. "Yeah, it would be a little disturbing knowing everyone is born evil, huh?"

I tried not to think to hard on his words, but it didn't help much to try not to think about it. The sight of blood on metal, the scent of liquid iron, and the sound of ear-splitting--

I shook my head to clear it of those thoughts and looked back up at Gaara. He was no longer smirking, but looking at me in what I thought to be curiosity.

"You know," he said while standing up again, "my shift ends in about fourty-five minutes. If that's not too long of a wait for you, we can do something afterwards."

I nodded, not really sure what I was getting myself into. But it couldn't be that bad. I was still a little wary of Gaara from our last encounter in the locker room, but I figured I owed him a second chance. It was my first day there, and I had been a little wary of everything that had moved too rapidly.

"Alright, well, I'll be back in a little bit, then." He said before moving back to the door that read "employees only".

I went back to my book, immersing myself in the words once more and losing myself in the story of mankind reverting back to primal instincts. And I wondered if it would really be that bad to be stranded on an island like that, where there were no rules or society and no one was telling you what was right and what was wrong. Where evil wasn't labeled as evil but survival, and killing someone wouldn't be anything more than a mistake that would be washed away with the outgoing tide. And where there was evil there was unabashed passion that this world--this damned preoccupied world--seemed to lack so much of. I missed the passion, wanted the passion that no one could give me, and I couldn't give it to anyone else either. Because we had the comforts that humanity didn't offer. We didn't have to make up for the lost comforts with words and bodies and actions to make us feel just a little better, just a little less lonely. That kind of passion didn't exist. And we didn't need it to. We didn't need people when we had other things to give us happiness without so much as a contradiction to what we fed into it. Take all of it away, take away the artificial happiness and what are we left with? Our innate evil to give us the excuse to love someone so deeply, so passionately that it could be called nothing less than a sin.

And it made me wonder…

How could passion for another human being, not the artificial happiness, be something so…evil?

"You look pensive." I heard Gaara's voice again and I found myself getting used to him, jumping every time he showed up and finally let me know he was there. I looked sheepishly up at him, apologizing for spacing out. "Don't worry about it," he said, "coffee can do that to people."

I stood and followed him out of the shop, zipping my hoodie up when the cool air hit me. I slung my bag further up on my shoulder and placed my book safely inside it. I had to walk a little faster than normal to keep up with Gaara as we walked around the parking lot to the back where employee parking was located. It reminded me a little of walking with Naruto, who's legs were about three inches longer than my own.

I wasn't really sure what kind of car Gaara drove, because I had never really been interested in that kind of thing. Pretty much all I saw was silver and small. I wondered if that was weird, that I didn't know that kind of thing, but I dismissed it as Gaara opened the door and sat in the driver's seat, reaching over to unlock my door. I sat beside him, deciding I liked the car with its black leather interior and the smell of the cologne I'd noticed Gaara wore.

We pulled out of the parking lot a few moments later and he headed straight for the main roads of York. I looked over at him. he seemed comfortable here, like his car suited him. He glanced over to me then and flashed me a smile I hadn't seen on him yet. I felt my face flush and turned away. What was this town doing to me?

"Where are we going?" I asked, watching the people walking on the beach as we passed by it. I noticed some of the natives were stomaching the cold and walking with their feet in the water. I shivered just thinking about it.

"You'll see…" we glanced at each other again--his eyes intense--before turning back to the road. "There's something I want to show you."

I settled back into the seat and smiled a little to myself. This was all feeling very familiar and I was reminded of Kabuto when the two of us had first started going out.

But this was nothing like that, was it? This was far from a date. Nothing more than two people hanging out…who have kissed…and are slightly attracted to each other.

I was starting to feel a little uneasy.

It didn't take long to get to our destination and Gaara was parking on what seemed like some kind of cliff. He turned off the car and opened his door; I followed suit.

The air was colder up here and I wrapped my arms around my chest, shivering slightly. I followed Gaara a few steps before he turned to look at me. He gazed at me curiously before furrowing his brow. I raised my own in question.

"You're not afraid of heights are you?" He asked me and my eyes narrowed.

"How high up are we?" I asked, noticing the air pressure change. He winced a little at my words.

"Just close your eyes." He said. I looked at him skeptically for a few moments before complying. I didn't move, but I almost jumped when I felt him take my hand in his own. When he spoke again, his voice was very close to my ear. "Move with me."

I walked, listening to Gaara's instructions and following him as best I could. When he told me to stop, he reinforced his words with an arm wrapped around my waist. I felt him pull me back against his chest, his lips close to my ear and his breath across my neck. I shivered again. "Open your eyes."

I did as I was told.

I couldn't breathe for a few moments as I stared out over the ocean from the edge of the cliff. The waves didn't reach us up here, but that didn't mean they didn't try. Crawling their way up the jagged rock, crashing in an eruption of white that seemed strong enough to move the cliff that we were standing on. In the distance I could see nothing but water, the color changing from green to blue to gray to black. It took all I had to wonder how deep the ocean was, how far the under-water drop-offs plunged into the earth. It was raging here, more temperamental than at the calmer beach down the road and I knew it had something to do with the weather, a storm maybe. Even with Gaara's arm wrapped firmly around my waist and me clinging to that limb with my hands in a grip he would have to pry off, I could feel the tug of the wind, beckoning me to join in with the water and wash over the rocks under me. And the power it seemed to have almost took me. I could do nothing but stare. I had no thoughts and no feeling. But oddly enough, I wanted to cry. I could feel the tears pricking at my lids.

It was the same feeling I'd had before I'd passed out last Thursday. I felt so very calm and at peace, but oh-so very endangered. This was solid, yet it slipped through my fingers every time the waves moved out and away. It was emotional and indifferent. It had no feeling, but could invoke such a sense of self that I almost didn't believe it wasn't alive. It had to be alive.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" I heard Gaara's voice say over the sound of the waves and wind. I could do nothing but nod and I leaned back against him when it was too much to hold myself up. He didn't say anything and didn't push me away.

I was vaguely aware of his lips against the back of my neck, his teeth nipping at the skin before soothing it with his tongue. I did, however, notice when his arm moved and his hands gripped my sides, slipping up under my shirt to touch my skin with his cold fingers.

"Gaara…" I said trying to pull away, but unable to because we were so close to the edge of the cliff. "Gaara please…"

"Do you know how far of a drop that is, Sasuke?" Gaara whispered, stopping my struggling, "fifty feet, meaning the equivalent of a six story building, Sasuke."

I swallowed hard against the lump forming in my throat. My heart pounded in my chest and I unconsciously moved further into the firm chest against my back.

"They say certain feelings are heightened when you're afraid for your life…" he said, his voice husky and his breath hot on my cheek. He ran his tongue along the shell of my ear and I shuddered at the feeling, butterflies forming in my stomach. "Your heart races and your breathing quickens, you can't seem to get enough oxygen and your blood pounds through your veins, against your fingertips and your skull."

I turned slightly looking at his eyes, their intensity back. He moved closer, our lips almost touching and I could almost taste him he was so close. I waited for him to move closer, waited for him to take what he wanted, because I knew he wanted it. And I would be as submissive as I always was.

But then I thought about it. The racing heart, the quickened breathing, the pumping blood. I'd felt it all before. The feelings weren't new, and just how familiar they were brought back memories.

I pulled back.

"I can't, Gaara…I have a boyfriend." I said and watched as his eyes narrowed. It took awhile, but he nodded and grabbed my hand again.

"Come on, it's getting late" He pulled me away from the edge and we made our way back to his car. Before I sat down, I looked back to the ocean. It looked darker from here than it had when I was so close to the edge.

And for the first time since I'd moved here, I tasted a little passion.

Note: I'm sorry for all of you who are getting sick of seeing nothing but Sasuke in this story, but I'm sort of a Sasuke-whore and love love love him. Alright, I'm feeling a little nervous about this chapter and it was kind of hard to write, so tell me what you think.

--Jaide