To all my reviewers: gives you cookies I LOVE LOVE LOVE YOU!!!!

The first thing he noticed when he woke was that the sky had turned white. It was a very pale white, almost translucent in its color, but it seemed to have developed a nasty sort of cloud, very round and very black, and right smack in the middle of the effervescent white. Odd…clouds were usually poofy and silver in color, blurred around the edges as the wind caught bits of their cottony substance…

"Oh good. You're awake."

A huge, off-white blinder suddenly pulled down out of nowhere and covered the sky and its huge, black cloud before almost immediately flickering up once more to reveal the weird firmament. Naruto blinked and swiped a rather grimy paw across his eyes before he realized, with the speed of tinder catching fire, that this particular sky wasn't, in fact, a sky at all…rather, the white was, quite literally, a white, or more commonly referred to as whites, and the nasty black cloud was actually…

Sai had perched himself on top of Naruto's knees, and it looked like he was perfectly comfortable with the mere three millimeters of space that now separated their noses.

It all made sense now…the whites of the eyes…the ominous cloud that served as Sai's pupil…the flicker of his eyelid as he blinked…Naruto resisted the urge to smack himself for being so ridiculously stupid. White lips spread in a deadly wooden smile as Sai reached out and gently stroked the blonde on the tip of his nose.

"So glad you're back among the living. Kakashi wants us down by the bridge to play with the butterflies and the hummingbirds, so I'd suggest you join us by seven-thirty?" The tone was casually ironic, duly amplified by the artfully delicate curve of the pale boy's lip.

Naruto responded with a noncommittal "Uhnnn" and promptly shoved his legs off of the bed (Sai neatly flipped off of his knees, landing softly on the windowsill), letting the sheets slide down his body as he plodded off to the bathroom. The cream-colored door slammed with a sharp click and running water was heard, along with the occasional mutterings of the blonde as he rummaged around in his cabinets. Sai arched an elegant eyebrow as he smiled at the sounds.

"Sometimes I wonder what his cock looks like…" he murmured softly to himself before deftly slipping out of Naruto's open window.

Seized with a sudden surge of what seemed to be a mixture of inspiration and impulse, the dark-haired artist turned and glided down the streets of Konoha, following the growing tingling in his body. A sharp chakra signature caught at his senses, a metallic, almost ominous chakra, and he veered to the right, narrowly dodging Kurenai as he passed her in his wake. Sai sped with mercurial fluidity down a nearby alley, hung another right, and suddenly planted his foot in the ground, slowing his flight to a mild walk as the object of his attentions stepped out a nearby door. A delighted smile crossed his features as what could have been his counterpart appeared in his line of sight, flanked by two Anbu who apparently seemed to have no intention whatsoever of letting down their guard, though their quarry had his hands tightly bound by chakra bonds bearing the signature of someone Sai quite suspected to be Hyuuga Neji himself.

Sasuke, the eerily beautiful Uchiha that Naruto had somehow managed to ensnare, would be having a nice little chat with him at a time fast approaching.

Withdrawing a fine-haired brush from within his pouch, Sai deftly ran the pad of his thumb down a kunai, watching almost rapturously as a ruby-red gem welled from the slit. He dipped the tip of his brush into the liquid and waited patiently as the crimson libation climbed up the white hairs, then pressed the utensil to the ground and drew a long, sweeping line with a flick of his wrist. The line grew and thickened, growing eyes and a tail, until a snake emerged from the ground, beady eyes glaring brightly at its creator. A silent command passed between creator and creation; the snake flicked its tongue and began to weave between the cracks in the pavement, making its way towards the Sasuke and his guards. The Anbu, spotting the creature, immediately sensed the current of chakra buried deep within the snake and flickered out of sight, in hot pursuit of the offending reptile.

Sai, in a movement not unlike the slippery serpent, slid out from the walls of the alley and casually walked to where the Uchiha stood waiting.

Sasuke allowed himself the most miniscule of acknowledgements, barely lowering an eyelash as Sai approached at a leisurely pace. He stood perfectly still, seemingly at ease as his counterpart, or, rather, replacement drew level with a toxic grin of amusement on his face. Sai sank into a mocking bow before the Uchiha, the maddening smirk still smeared on his lips.

"Ah, Uchiha-san. So how does it feel?" His voice was sinuous, derisively tender, and about as smooth and welcoming as silk.

The merest twitch barely registered at the corner of Sasuke's pale, sinful lips.

"You pose cryptic questions," He responded in a soft murmur that reeked of sweet decay. Sai seemed unfazed, though the tension in the air took a sharp, sudden spike.

"Oh, forgive me, I wasn't aware that you were misinformed," Sai replied breezily as though discussing the weather. "I was wondering if I could take the teensiest liberty and ask you how it felt to be second-best for once."

Obsidian eyes flashed in the sunlight as the temperature visibly dropped, ruffling cloth as bloodlust whipped across Sai's delicate body. The fragile curl of Sasuke's lip was intimate, derisive, and so subtlety accusatory.

"Quite deluded, are we not?" A simple statement in a glass-thin tone, yet razor sharp and hungering for blood.

"Let's face the facts, Uchiha," Sai replied in honeyed tones. "Orochimaru's personal fuck-toy couldn't even hold a candle to the former village idiot. Let me put it in perspective: he completely demolished your beautiful ass."

He could feel the blood start to seethe in his veins at the insolence of the bastard before him. His….his replacement had the nerve to deliver such cheek…he cursed himself for failing to slaughter the impudent, pathetic excuse of a human. And yet…Sai's words floated like malevolent little wraiths in the recesses of his mind and forced him to reconsider exactly what had happened. Naruto did—he ground a tooth into his lip at the blasphemous thought—Naruto did manage to render him comatose long enough to (drag his sorry ass off) bring him back home.

"You know it, don't you?" Sai insinuated in tones of mocking disdain, though the silk and the sibilance still tainted the words. The candid phrase drew a necklace of blood through Sasuke's stone mask, and for the barest hint of a moment, the onyx eyes flashed red.

"What did you say?"

"You know it," Sai repeated, in the barest thread of a whisper. "Naruto's finally gotten ahead. You pretend you don't care; you push away thoughts of Naruto's growing skill so that you can obtain your goal of killing your brother. But deep inside, down in the cesspool that serves as your heart," the words seemed to slide like smoke from the boy's porcelain lips. "You care. You care more than anything else in the whole world, and it just shatters your ego, now doesn't it? You can't bear to even think that a prodigy such as yourself could come in second to that pathetic little demon-child, so you pushed away your thoughts, tiny little instances that warned you of his genius. And now he's better than you. "

No sooner had the words bid farewell to his lips did Sai recall a time when Naruto wasn't worth the dust on the underside of Sasuke's sandals; oh yes, the rumors were true; the noble-blooded Uchiha cared naught for the poor, besotted blonde. But then again, the pale boy mused with a sweetly poisonous leer, that was before the tiny little changes happened. That was before Naruto had suddenly evolved into a bona-fide genius, and at this particular wrinkle in time, there wasn't anything Sasuke cared more about than said overnightly-created bona-fide genius.

A delicate twist smeared itself onto cruel, white lips as Sai watched the miniscule, intermittent spasms wrack the Uchiha's now-clenched fists, tastefully hidden by his long, white sleeves. Sasuke, contrary to popular belief, could be so easy to read, and therefore, became that much more fun to play with. With just a mention of "Naruto" or even of "blue-eyed blonde" for that matter, one could send the Uchiha's temper spiraling into the stratosphere. As long as, Sai thought with another delighted grin, one had the ultimate protection; if one was precious to Naruto, Sasuke couldn't do a damn thing about it no matter how much he wanted to ram a fucking Chidori through one's highly tempting skull.

Sure enough, once he'd pulled his head out of the clouds, Sai could detect the slightest of changes in the Uchiha before him; a tiny muscle was ticking at the junction where his lips ended and his cheek began, and his eyes alternated between red and black, flickering the Sharingan on and off like a bare-naked light-bulb after a full-blown thunderstorm. Ohhhh, this was good. This was so deliciously, sinfully good, and because he wasn't a saint nor a person with aspirations for sainthood, Sai decided to further taunt his quarry by making a whole performance out of turning his back on the livid Uchiha as he sauntered away.

Sasuke stood staring, nails slowly grinding into the chakra that bound him by the wrists. As the thick drops of red slowly bled from his eyes, he only recalled seeing one sole vision: cornflower eyes narrowed in the blissfulness of assured victory right before a blazing blue ball slammed itself into skin and flesh…

This isn't the most interesting chapter of the bunch, but it's a lead up to something important, so yeah….sorry about that. To get your hopes up though, the next chapter's going to be a lemon. cheers So yeah…hope you look forward to that.