Rating : Pg. Don't use that as an excuse for clicking the back button.

This is dedicated to my best friend.

As a goodbye.

-

Everyone has this feeling at some point in their life.

Maybe all of it.

I'm taking a chance at externalizing it.

Cold Syrup

It's like cold chocolate syrup running through Sasuke's veins, chilling his soul like nothing else can.

He knows it well, this feeling. It walks hand in hand with him on moonlight beaches and knocks on his door at night to deliver him from apathy.

He feels it when they turn away from him, when he runs into that empty house and hears no one answer his desperate calls.

He feels it when he spends hours trying to avoid the fact his calls are in fact, desperate. The house is actually empty, and they do really turn away.

He lies in bed at night till he feels that feeling rusting underneath his bed before crawling up into his blankets and into his heart. The chill floods him, the room becomes an eerie contrast of black and that feeling, and he realizes how truly cold his bed is compared to the heat of his beating heart.

So his remaining heat flows from his heart into that chilling bedspread, leaving him lifeless; suspended in a bed of lava. The feeling has neither compassion nor mercy and treats him to a 3-course meal of frozen chocolate syrup.

One day the heat didn't return to him by dawn. He got up and went on his way to school like every other 13-year old child, but his skin was frozen to the touch.

But it was alright, he reasoned. No one touched him anyway.

He put away the thought that no one would want to touch you who could possibly filth murderer vile you were never good enough for me for him for her who would want to touch you?

Days passed and collided into weeks that all sang the same lifeless tune. And every day, when he left his burning bed, he would wander around like a ghost.

He was alive only in brutal mechanical movements that for some reason made him the envy of all. They stood and gawked at him, wishing in their hearts to have the same hair, same abilities, same strength, same life.

And he pummeled his punching bag until stuffing pooled on the ground, ignoring their jealous gazes.

Ignoring how much he would love to be normal like them just another person standing there watching the genius not having to be cold day in day out he wanted warmth.

That syrup had long since turned to ice, his veins chilled and constricted until he felt like nothing more than a bag of bones and feelings being dragged around day after day.

Sometimes, he saw flashes of the feeling in other people's eyes. He saw it in their clothes and backpacks and homework and the way they walked and he ignored it.

Because he was sure they ignored it in him.

He looked just as alive as normal, the fire in his eyes didn't look as it had been put out with a bucket of water , and his overly tense body had nothing to do with the way he held himself to control the shaking that came from living in a subzero corpse.

And he was just fine with that.

Sasuke was fine with that syrup of feeling flowing through his veins and filling the hole in his chest that had seemed empty for so long.

"Why are you so cold?"

Naruto was warm.

"This isn't normal."

He was the sun and he was heat and he was everything that Sasuke wasn't.

"Or maybe it is."

His laugh was like a hot summer day.

"You probably sat in a freezer all night just so I would make a fool out of myself."

And when Naruto turned and walked away, flashing a brilliantly warm smile over his shoulder, that was the coldest syrup Sasuke had ever felt.

fin.

What is the 'syrup' to you?

To me, it's loneliness.

But putting it in a box is so petty.

Or did I not even get my point across?

I hope I did.

Don't take this at face value.

-

All readers appreciated, reviewers hugged, flamers accepted, and constructive criticizers given my first born child.