Author's Note: Do not expect all the chapters to update this fast. This chapter wrote itself very, very quickly. No complaints, but this is not normal.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed the last chapter.

Warnings: Blood, demons, sex eventually.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

Vice

Chapter Four

The afternoon was passed slowly, wandering from room to room in Sasuke's apartment. There weren't that many - kitchen, livingroom, bed and bath. There was a tiny corner where the livingroom and the kitchen met with linoleum flooring rather than the eggshell-brown carpet, and which the landlord called a diningroom. The landlord called it that because he was a far more generous man than Sasuke was.

Sakura and Kakashi left shortly after dropping Sasuke off. Sakura had given him a brief, supportive hug before she left, which was both incredibly trusting and deliberately stupid on her part. Her life had flared around him, tantalizing, and while he liked to believe he could have controlled himself, he was also honest enough to recognize that the reason he hadn't tasted that power was because he was so shocked to find himself surrounded by it. She had released him and backed off by the time he recovered. Kakashi left with a wave, saying he'd "be around." Sasuke wasn't unhappy to see them go.

Alone in his apartment, he felt more normal. Without the constant temptation, his hunger eased.

He noticed other changes more when it wasn't an issue, too. He noticed that he wasn't moving or seeing right. He noticed that he couldn't seem to sit still. He noticed that he wanted onigiri, which wasn't actually so odd, but he resented that there were none, which was.

He noticed that his eyes were vivid red-orange when he looked in the mirror, like cherry amber, the pupils slit. No one had mentioned that. His stomach sank when he saw, and he didn't crave onigiri anymore.

He avoided the mirror for the rest of the afternoon. He couldn't quite bring himself to activate Sharingan. Those eyes... he wasn't ready to deal with that yet.

Naruto dropped by that evening; he didn't stay long. They spoke little, and what conversation they had was stilted. It was hard to focus when Naruto's life force breezed thoughtlessly through the apartment. Naruto brought takeout noodles with him, though, which was nice. "Since I didn't figure you'd want to cook," he said when shoved the white takeout bag into Sasuke's hands. "Not that I can see letting you shop and all." It wasn't what Sasuke really wanted, but better than nothing.

He was hungrier than he'd have thought. It seemed like he shouldn't be, not in the traditional sense, not when he could suck the life out of people. But he hadn't eaten all day, and as soon as he took the first bite of noodles, his stomach started to mutter, and his appetite recovered full force. The rest of the evening was spent picking through his nearly bare fridge and half empty cupboards.

If this lasted more than another day, Sasuke would have to ask Sakura to pick up groceries for him. He'd thrown out everything that might spoil before their last mission.

Sasuke tried reading, but he couldn't read more than three pages or so without getting distracted. He wasn't really that big a reader at the best of times.

He tried watching television, but it bored him or it irritated him, and he just kept changing the channel. There weren't that many channels.

In the end, he went to bed early for lack of something better to do. Sleep didn't come quickly, though.

For a long time, he lay there and pretended not to be awake. He pretended not to feel the sheets, too warm and tangling constantly with his legs. He pretended not to see the clock, cycling steadily through numbers. He tried not to toss and turn, but he couldn't seem to find a comfortable position on his bed. He tried not to kick off the blankets, but he was too warm with them; he tried to ignore the draft after he'd kicked them down to the foot of the bed, but it was too cold without.

He ignored the sounds of the building settling, and the sounds from his neighbors that came through the walls. He ignored the wind and the light that seeped in under the drapes, and the scurrying of squirrels over his balcony and through the eaves.

Eventually, he drifted not quite to sleep, but more asleep than awake. He blinked occasionally, or he thought he did. He was aware of the knot of blankets he'd caught himself in, and of his own idle struggling.

When he started dreaming, he knew they were dreams.

They were all jumbled, the impressions disjointed and barely related. He might be running, and when he ran, he might be on two legs, or he might be on four. Then, suddenly, he'd be eating. Or feeding. Vaguely, and with dreamlike certainty, he knew the difference. Then he was fighting, and he might be grappling like a human, or he might be struggling to sink his teeth in some place soft.

There wasn't any logic to the dreams, and he wasn't really a part of them at first. He hovered, like a swimmer with his head just below the surface and watching the world above fracture on the choppy water. Still there was his bed, his sheets clinging to him, his alarm clock telling time. His body, a real weight and human shaped beside the shifting form in the dream. He shuddered and turned, strangely comforted.

But even when he opened his eyes, he was dreaming. He felt the body he fought, smelled forest air, tasted blood and fur while he stared at the clean white plaster of his ceiling.

He closed his eyes and found himself on two legs - he preferred that to four, at least. He was running; not hunting, but hunted, and totally unafraid. He was leading the chase, and he laughed. He could hear his pursuers crashing through the undergrowth; he could hear their dogs baying. He could feel the men, hot-blooded with the chase, and he could drink them out of the air.

He closed his eyes again, and there were bodies. Some of them warm and breathing, others cold, pushed aside when they couldn't offer anything more, but all twined together. The warm ones didn't even see the cold, or if they did, their minds were clouded to them. Then there were the hot bodies, the ones who were taking. There were few of them, but they were greedy.

He was one of the hot bodies, and he tasted sweat and blood, and other fluids, all thick on skin. He pushed the cold ones away and reached out to the warm ones.

Sasuke rebelled against that one, floundering helplessly in his bed and forcing his eyes open. He still felt it for a long moment. The physical sensations faded faster than the feeling of drawing the life out of men and women. That lingered, teasing a sense he didn't have a name for and couldn't drown out.

It occurred to him that in both - both what? Glimpses? Bits of dream? Whatever they were, in both of them he was feeding. He could feed, they told him. Anyone who touched him, anyone who fell into his traps, anyone who let themselves be led by him, were all making themselves food in one way or another.

When he closed his eyes again, he was ripping into a corpse. A small, tender corpse, with skin that wasn't yet hard. Flesh and blood and life. That was worse than the last, and nearly enough to jerk him awake entirely. He sat up in bed. He blinked and shook, and tried to clear his head.

But once the vision blurred, he collapsed back to his pillows. For a moment more he watched shadows climb the wall. Then his eyes slipped shut again and didn't open.

Blood again, but this time live. He lapped at it. His hands holding the nurse still as he tongued the wound he'd given her, drinking her blood and sucking the life out of her. In the dream, he didn't stop until she wasn't fighting anymore and her blood came slowly. She sighed at the last, and he took that too, because he could.

He shook that one off. It wasn't real. He remembered. He remembered the call button, and how she'd fallen to the floor when he let go of her. Tsunade had said she'd be okay. He remembered it.

His eyelids fluttered open too briefly to focus. Then he slid under again.

The other was bigger than him. Stronger than him. Its musk and its age overpowered him. The way it changed, furred one minute, masked the next, a man's face or a woman's or an animal's; it confused his eyes, but the power remained constant. It shared with him, first the dead, cold life that came from meat.

Later, they shared the heady electric power of the living. They passed her - the body was that of a woman, her eyes already turning glassy with exhaustion as tears of pain or ecstasy ran down her cheeks - using her hard. She started shivering, and he watched as the other nuzzled her cheek, as it licked her tears and cooed to her while Sasuke buried himself between her thighs. Afterward they ate her too. Nothing was left in the morning but clean bones and hair. And them.

Sasuke gasped. He was too far from the surface now. He tried to breathe, but it was the dream. It was blood and chakra, and buzzing with life while the compliant figure in his arms gave up everything. It was moaning with need and sensation rather than horror. The part of him that still recognized a dream wanted it to be horror. That part of him wanted it to be nausea in his belly, not hunger.

It was the other's taste, its heavy presence, and its burning eyes as it pinned him down.

Sasuke struggled to open his eyes. He managed to - he'd been afraid he couldn't. It didn't help. It didn't do anything. He saw his bedroom, shadows climbing the walls, and he saw the other, a screen of branches behind a face he couldn't make himself understand. Ears pinned back when he nipped at it. Fangs dented a full, feminine lip. His fingers traced the curve of a firm jaw. The eyes looking down at him were rich, dark brown, but burning red at the same time. He licked the blood off a narrow muzzle. He felt claws and fingers, skin and fur and shadows all touching him.

Air came in short, shallow gasps. Warmth danced up his chest and down his legs. It pooled in his groin, something harsher than lust. It was need. It was relief. It was deep and old and instinctual, and it came from him. It came from the other's mouth, when its lips were soft. It came from the other's eyes, red or brown or lost in the dark.

Where it came from didn't matter, because it was in him. It hurt. It burned. It bled in him. The other bit him, held him down and made him cry out, made him squirm.

The orgasm it ripped out of him left him hollow, faded, and sated in a way he'd never been before in his life.

He didn't dream after that.

Sasuke woke up with a stuttering breath, sticky with sweat and hopelessly snared in his bedding. Sunlight filtered through the curtains, warming the room. Birdsong carried through the window, cheerfully mundane.

Carefully, Sasuke unwound himself from his sheets. He'd sweated through them in the night, and they smelled strongly - his experience as a ninja had taught him how pain, fear, exertion or passion smelled. They all clung to his body, stale in the morning after. He hadn't really come, though. That, at least, had only been the dream.

He'd still have to change his sheets and take a shower.

His stomach clenched and churned at the memories that tried to surface, and Sasuke caught himself rubbing his arms. He half expected there to be welts where someone or something raked him with its nails. His skin was clear, though. The scars were all old.

Breathing slowly kept him from panting, kept him steady while he climbed out of bed and into the bathroom, where he was once again confronted with the mirror and his own bright, red-orange eyes. He leaned close to the mirror, searching his face for other signs. For the fangs he knew came and went. For something. Some other mark of what was happening, but it was his face. They were his hands. His teeth. His ears.

But not his eyes.

Dread curled like a snake in his stomach. He stepped back, shut his eyes, and whispered a prayer. This has to work. It has to. Anything but losing my eyes.

"Sharingan."

Sasuke opened his eyes.

He fell backward and let the wall catch him. He could see in the clear, fast detail of Sharingan. Visual information beyond what anyone but perhaps a Hyuuga could process flooded his mind. He could see it. He sighed with relief so powerful it was physical.

Reflected in the mirror, his eyes were still fox eyes.

To be continued.