WARNING: Current manga spoilers (up to chapter 250).
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I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running 'round my brain
I guess I'm always hoping that you'll end this reign
But it's my destiny to be the king of pain

— The Police, King of Pain (Synchronicity)

.:End This Reign:.

Acknowledgment. Most people are given acknowledgment simply by being born. A hungry newborn is shown acknowledgment when he is offered a milk-swollen breast. A distraught friend is shown acknowledgment when she is offered a warm embrace and sympathetic shoulder to lean on.

Acknowledgment is a basic, human reaction to another person. It is compassion, love, forgiveness, grief, anger, hate... It can be positive or negative. Uplifting or devastating. How one is acknowledged is the standard by which all humans measure their value.

There is no ultimate truth to how one is acknowledged by their peers. That is a lesson I am still struggling to learn. It is difficult to understand how a selfish, murderous aristocrat can be regarded as the epitome of greatness, an infallible being without equal while the humble servant willing to lay down his life for people he barely knows can be treated as nothing more than a waste of human flesh.

Sometimes the way people acknowledge you is nothing more than a conditioned response or thoughtless prejudice. As a child, I was always regarded with a mix of reverence, hate and fear. In the innocence of youth, I misunderstood the reverence for love, the fear for compliance and the hate for envy. As I grew I began to understand that I was not loved at all, but tolerated.

No, that's not quite right, either. To say that I was 'tolerated' is too vague in the description of how I was regarded by my own people. After all, a crying child in a restaurant is tolerated and a boy who whispers to his mother during a play is tolerated. I wasn't tolerated in those amicable terms. Perhaps a more apt description would be to say that I was simply allowed to live because of the perceived benefits that my uniqueness offered. When I cried for something I wanted, it was given to me. Not because anyone wanted to comfort me or show me kindness, but because to deny me meant to suffer the wrath of a child's tantrum.

And in my case, tantrums led to death.

Human interaction — socialization — is wholly dependent upon acknowledgment. It helps to shape our personalities and establish ethical boundaries. If you hurt someone and they reject you, a sane person will alter their behavior to make amends or prevent another rejection in the future.

This is how you learn to be a better person.

I remember two specific moments as a child that played a fundamental role in shaping who I would become. My offer of kindness and friendship to a peer was met with fear and anger. My need to love and be loved in return was met with betrayal and resentment.

That was when I decided that if no one would acknowledge me in the way I craved, I would become what they accused me of being.

It was easy.

For as long as I can remember I have felt the yearnings to destroy and maim. I have felt the tide of hate within me, threatening to consume me if I dared to sleep. It is exhausting — emotionally, physically and spiritually — to deny something so primal and dark. The only reason I was able to resist it as a child was because it terrified me so much. I feared the consumption, the becoming of nothingness. There was no peace in sleep, no pleasant dreams, no feeling of waking up well-rested and calm. Sleep meant insanity and loss of self.

I hated being at the mercy of the thing within me and the feelings of those around me. I hated being hurt and rejected. I hated being afraid of what I was. I hated the choking sense of loneliness. If I had been able, I would have killed myself. At least that way I could have some sort of control over my existence, but the release of death was an impossibility for me.

So there was nothing else I could do. Trusting... needing people was too painful. Hating them was easy. Hurting them was easy. My nightmare could be their nightmare. My pain could be their pain. Little by little, I gave in to the demon within.

It felt good. Satisfying. Empowering.

The power I felt when my victims realized that I controlled their fate made me forget how completely loathsome I really was. The crunch of their bones gave me worth. The squish of their innards gave me depth. For the briefest of moments, their fear of me dwarfed my fear of my father, my family, my peers, my people, my demon and the scent of blood filled me with reassurance. I was real and tangible and worthy because their death meant I still lived.

And the thing trapped within me praised me for it. Shukaku acknowledged me for my deeds as he whispered about power, death and control. He encouraged me to kill again, to delight in chaos and pain. If I was going to be called a monster, he reasoned, than I should be a monster. If people were going to fear me no matter what I did then I would show them what fear truly was!

For as much as I hated the Shukaku, there was nothing in me that could argue with his warped sense of logic. Shukaku yearned for violence and death, he yearned to consume my mind and take control over my body so he could lay waste to everything in his path. He had as much love for me as my own father, who had already tried to have me killed. In my heart, there was no difference between the two. Both hated me as much as I hated myself, but at least with the Shukaku I could resist him by not sleeping and placate him by killing.

Not so with my father. The best I could do was to avoid him and always expect him to send someone to try to kill me again. Perhaps next time he would send one of my siblings. After all, if Yashamaru could betray me why couldn't Temari or Kankuro?

So I devoted myself to binges of chaos and violence. My strategy for survival was sloppy, gruesome and born from paranoia, but it was effective. If people feared me more than my father then I was safe. The question was no longer about being a loyal shinobi who followed the Kazekage's orders to kill the Jinchūriki, it was now centered around how you wanted to die. Would you rather disobey an order by the Kazekage to kill his son and die quickly and neatly or face the 'Sabaku no Gaara' and be toyed with until I became bored and crushed you with my sand? This choice drew an invisible line that protected me from further attempts upon my life while also pushing me further from my peers.

But I didn't care. At least, that is what I told myself. With the power of the Shukaku and my control over the sand, I could ignore the gaping hole of loneliness within me and fill myself up with hate and bitterness. I could convince myself that I didn't need anyone or anything. To need was to be weak, to be weak was to die, to die was to become nothing and to become nothing was akin to having an existence without purpose or acknowledgment.

I was not weak.

But then, neither was he.

He should have been weak. He looked weak with his blond hair, blue eyes and idiot grin. I hated him on sight and saw him as nothing more than an easy kill. He was loud, jovial and brash. His peers didn't fear him, they accepted him. He had bonds with them, but he was a waste of space, a collection of human parts that had no value other than to be destroyed. I took no real notice of him until the final phase of the Chuunin exam. When I saw the tendrils of red chakra circulating around him like whips, I knew then that there was something hidden inside of him, too.

But why didn't he use it? If he was like me, why choose to be weak? Only the weak need people. Only the weak require a crutch.

So I dismissed him. Again. Uzumaki Naruto. The Maelstrom.

I focused instead on the one I thought was like me. I saw the hate and loneliness in his eyes. I recognized myself when I looked and him. I knew he wanted to see if he deserved to live, if he was really stronger than the one he was dying to kill. Uchiha Sasuke was exactly what I wanted and I was happy to help him. Ecstatic. He was strong and capable of physically hurting me, too, which made the violence all the more enjoyable. He wouldn't cower or run. He would look me in the eyes right up until the very end, even as I imploded his body with my sand. It would be exquisite. To destroy him would be like destroying the part of me that I hated most. How could I resist such temptation?

When the moment came for me to add his blood to my gourd, a wisp of a girl took up her kunai and protected him. A weak, pathetic girl with a weak, pathetic name and pink hair and bright green eyes, looked right at me in the height of my blood-lust and didn't flinch. She didn't cower or run. Her eyes shined with determination as she protected Uchiha like my uncle protected the school children.

I couldn't kill her. I wanted to. I wanted to so badly I could taste it. At that moment, more than anything, I hated her. I hated her more than my father, more than my village and more than the beast sealed inside of me. She was bold when she should have cowered, she was unwavering when she should have fled.

And I couldn't kill her. She was the representation of love denied and trust betrayed and I couldn't fucking kill her. Instead I pinned her to a tree and used her as leverage to get the fight I craved. Perhaps, I told myself, after killing the others it would be easier to kill her.

My strategy worked. I had a new opponent who was in possession of a power that could equal mine. He was a jinchuriki, too. He would satisfy my hatred and yearning for violence until I grew tired of him and finally ended it. That didn't happen. What I intended to be a source of entertainment for me ended up becoming an epiphany. When I was beaten, bloodied and exhausted, I realized who was weak. Uzumaki Naruto wasn't the one begging not to be killed. He wasn't the one asking who would save him.

I was.

And as he crawled toward me with tears in his eyes, I finally recognized him. I finally saw the hellish pain of my existence mirrored within him. Instead of giving in to anger and hate as I had, Naruto continued to reach out to people. Even if they hurt him. Even if they betrayed him.

He had the courage to love and forgive. Because of that courage, people did finally love him. They acknowledged him and that love made him strong.

It is a very sobering and surreal thing to realize that your entire philosophy and outlook on life is fundamentally wrong. It was difficult to accept at first. I was so conditioned, so deeply rooted in my hate that it was hard to think any other way, but I am not one to shy away from truth. Naruto is strong. He defeated me because he wanted to protect the people he cared about. Even the girl, Sakura, is strong. To face me the way she did proved it. Even though we didn't fight the fact remained that she didn't flinch or flee. She would have died to protect her comrade and that courage gave her a strength that I lacked, yet coveted.

That was when I decided that I would be like Naruto. I would gain this new source of strength. I would live a life connected to my village, my people. I would earn their acknowledgment and I would protect them, even at the cost of my own life.

I had no idea how difficult it would be to turn that thought into reality. It is far easier to lose trust than to gain it. Growing and changing as a human being isn't something that can be seen with the naked eye, it has to be experienced in order to be perceived. After losing to Naruto, I desperately wanted to change. I wanted to have the bonds he had. I wanted relief from my loneliness.

Telling others that you have changed is the easy part, living it is something else. I could feel the hope within me. I knew I was different, but the Shukaku was still the same. His hate and anger remained, his whisperings didn't go away, his desire to consume my mind didn't vanish with my desire to become someone worth loving. On top of that, my own shortness of temper and feelings of isolation and pain didn't instantly disappear, either.

I had to start with the basics. I had to start with myself. I couldn't change the fact that my body housed the Shukaku, but I knew I could change myself, my habits. I could change how I reacted to people, I could be more patient, more forgiving, more compassionate. I could be better and I knew that hopefully, with time, the people of my village would see that I was different. They would acknowledge me in a positive way and they would want me around. They would have need of me as a human being and fellow shinobi and not as a relic of the past and a weapon of war.

Changing the path of your life means navigating a road you are unfamiliar with. There will be times that you stumble and people doubt your sincerity. I accepted this and I forged onward. If Naruto could find relief from the loneliness, than I could, too. If I didn't, than my existence would be nothing.

I would be a monster.

Reconciliation of the past began at home, with my own family and peers. It also bled into politics and diplomacy as I used my position as the most powerful shinobi of the Sand as leverage to cement amiable relations with the Leaf. It was slow and cumbersome and often filled with suspicion and misunderstandings, but I thought of Naruto and the girl and reminded myself that true strength isn't about destruction, it's about protection.

In the years I spent working to earn the acknowledgment of my people, I was forced to make peace with my past. At least to the best of my ability. The biggest hurtle for me to overcome wasn't my long-standing feud with my father, but with the betrayal of my uncle. He was the only person whom I believed truly loved me and yet he tried to kill me. That was a wound that I could not close, no matter what I tried, and that was the wound that posed the greatest risk for infection. If I was to fall back into old habits and old hatreds, it would be that wound that would lead me to that place.

I needed to close it. I just never expected, not for one moment, that I would need her to close that wound. I guess I should have. Haruno Sakura is a medical-kunoichi, after all. Her specialty is healing and I needed her medicine to save me from myself.

I often wonder if she realizes how vital she was to my transformation. She knows I decided to change after my confrontation with Naruto, but I sometimes wonder if she is aware of her own role. I wouldn't be Kazekage today if it wasn't for her bravery and kindness. I owe the Leaf far more than they realize. I owe her far more than she realizes.

Perhaps I'll tell her.

Someday.

.:.

AN: To continue, or not to continue? (And if it is 'to continue' it would be after 'Dawning' is finished.)

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