Title: Dom Andra

Rating: T

Genres: Supernatural, Horror

Summary: Naruto catches the eye of a not-so-nice demon boy, and of course Sai is the only one off-kilter enough to believe him.

Author's Note: OC alert! This story is strongly inspired by Kent's "Dom Andra" and the character Hades in Olympos; though of course I'm trying to add my own twist to it. Hopefully, you guys will still give this a chance...

Edited 12.04.15

I.

Naruto only utters a bewildered "Wha...?" when he sees a dark-haired figure circling his female teammate. At first he thinks it might be Sai, but when the former ROOT member meanders his way onto the scene and comments on his penis seconds thereafter, he realizes that this is not the case.

"S-Sakura-chan!" He chokes out, shocked that she's allowed this stranger to come so close.

The girl is sitting peacefully on a cracked boulder in the middle of their training grounds, absentmindedly caressing the stranger's face—whose chin has now come to rest on her shoulders—while using her free hand to read a small medical book gifted by Tsunade.

Naruto can't understand why she's letting him do this. As far as he knows the only males actively pining after Haruno Sakura are himself and Lee, and there is no chance in hell she would let a new admirer invade her personal space bubble so soon.

To make matters worse, there are a multitude of things so very well off about this newcomer that it makes him sick. Naruto had never been one to believe in all that hocus-pocus 'aura' crap Ino sometimes liked to go on about, but he can practically see the waves of putrid, dark plumes roll off this stranger in waves. The smell is overpowering, like strong alcohol, and the stranger himself looks like a psychopath.

Naruto knows a psychopath when he sees one because his own ex-best friend is one too. Unlike Uchiha Sasuke, however, this psychopath has no history with him to alleviate the sense of unease he feels in his presence.

The stranger is pale and sickly. His eyes are flat, unremarkable almond-shaped coals, framed by thick lashes reminiscent of spider's legs. His nose is long and pointed. His face is sharp and angular. He has a somewhat cruel look about him; contrasted by long, flowing black tresses hanging limply down his back, disturbed by a multitude of curled ivory horns on his head. Barefoot, and dressed in robes foreign to any land Naruto's ever been to in his life, the jinchuuriki grows increasingly agitated as to why no one else seems to think this is strange except him.

Sakura looks up from her textbook, pretty green eyes glittering in sunlight.

"Hmm? What is it, Naruto-kun?"

"You—you..." he sputters. "...what are you doing?"

She arches a brow.

"Reading?"

"NO!" Naruto blurts. "I mean—touching that...that thing!"

Sakura frowns, and Sai and said "thing" mimic one another's facial expressions as their lips and eyes curve up, turning fox-like. Sai tilts his head to the side and Naruto just knows now that the boy is about to say something to piss him off further.

"What's wrong, dickless? So insecure in your manhood that you're growing jealous of a deer?"

Naruto blinks.

Okay, so that did kind of piss him off. But more so confused him than anything else...

"Deer?" He echoes.

Sakura stands up and pockets her text. The stranger gives her some space before drifting close again, smiling airily.

"It was there when I got here." Sakura explains. "I figured it must be one of Shikamaru's. He's lazy enough to lose them on occasion, and I was thinking that maybe we could all bring it back, once Kakashi-sensei comes too."

Naruto looks back and forth between she and it. Sakura smiles pleasantly, and the stranger gives a smirk reminiscent of Sasuke.

He feels something painful and deep prick at his heart.

"But, that's not a deer." Naruto argues, a hint of desperation seeping into his voice.

The stranger's looking directly at him now, and Naruto feels an urge to stomp over and punch him in the face. There's a superior air about him, and he gets the sense that this guy knows something Naruto doesn't—which he probably does. It makes him furious, it makes him lonely. His teammates simply aren't seeing what he's seeing, and the stranger knows it. In fact, he's reveling in it.

The unease that Naruto had felt in the pit of his stomach morphs now into a subtle, creeping hate. He feels it begin to eat away at him, like acid, because this stranger is a threat and he's standing too casually, too close to his precious teammate…

They lock eyes, and Naruto outright lunges when the stranger leans over and gives a slow, sensuous lick along Sakura's ear. His tongue is long and vulgar.

"GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER!" Naruto snarls, striking the stranger's face point-blank. It is a powerful blow, and the stranger reels back with it's sheer force, his skin already a raging red.

"NARUTO!" Sakura shrieks, horrified, before coming down and punching the jinchuuriki away herself. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!"

Sai decides that this is a good time to intervene before Sakura gives the blond permanent brain damage; though he disapproves of Naruto's needlessly excessive reaction. Animal abuse was something that Sai disliked—having studied an extensive assortment of animals for his signature ink techniques, Sai had developed a deep respect for non-humanoid creatures.

The shinobi wedges himself between Naruto and Sakura, mostly holding the latter back from mauling the former.

"NARUTO!" She bellows.

"BUT SAKURA-CHAN!" Naruto shouts back. Sai feels his ears growing fuzzy. "THAT THING WAS LICKING YOU!"

"IT'S A DEER!"

"BUT—"

"—NO BUTS!"

The pinkette takes a deep, shuddering breath—trying to reign in her anger—before exasperatedly pulling away from the tangle. She makes her way towards the stranger, reaching out to caress his face again before he pulls back, lightly shaking his head.

Then for one, agonizing second, he locks eyes again with his attacker.

Naruto feels himself being scrutinized—he feels this stranger being smug—and he can't stand it. In the span of merely two minutes this man has made him feel as badly isolated as he had been in his early childhood; it is a right reserved only for Sasuke, because Sasuke himself knows the feeling and when they were alone they were alone together.

Naruto growls unconsciously, a deep tremble rumbling loudly from his throat.

The stranger simply smiles again before trotting off.

Sai is pushed back, and a head of pink hair bobs angrily into his vision.

"Naruto..."

"Urgh." He replies eloquently.

"Look what you did!" She exclaims indignantly. "Now you've made the poor thing run off! What's wrong with you? What's Shikamaru going to think when he see's the injury on it's face?!"

"Animal abuse." Sai answers vaguely.

Sakura ignores him.

"I'm going to tell his mom it was you." Sakura threatens, and Naruto feels himself sweating under her furious emerald gaze. "I'm going to tell her it was you, and Yoshino-san's going to beat you up worse than I ever could!"

Naruto doesn't doubt her. Once upon a time, when he, Shikamaru, and Chouji had been found skipping class together back at the academy, Yoshino had given them all a rather traumatic spanking he had yet to forget to this day.

He shuddered.

Mrs. Nara wouldn't spank him anymore, of course, but now that he was sixteen he'd be upgraded to a bonafide ass-whupping far worse…

"Okay okay!" He concedes, bringing his hands up in surrender. "I'm sorry! I'll..." he swallows, feeling more than his pride slither down his throat. "...I'll go after him—it, I mean, and I'll give it back."

"Good." Sakura says, satisfied. She crosses her arms, and looks towards the direction of forest the stranger disappeared to. "I'm sure Kakashi-sensei will understand. He knows how scary Yoshino-san is too. I'll tell him what happened while you were gone."

"He'll probably look down on you." Sai adds unhelpfully. "For getting jealous of a deer of all things, dickless."

Naruto seethes.

"Stop calling me that!"

*ahem*

Haruno Sakura clears her throat. She glares at him pointedly, then jerks her thumb back at the expanse of woodland behind her.

Naruto sighs resignedly, and Sai smiles.

—

Shadowed sunlight peeks sleepily through the thick canopy of leaves above him, and birds twitter as he trudges grumpily along a self-made path through the forest. Despite his mood, Naruto can't deny that it's a beautiful day. There's a barely-there breeze that blows through his hair, and his eyes flutter pleasurably as he feels it cooling his heated face.

"Stupid thing." He mutters, because Naruto's not sure what it is that he saw anymore. He rubs his head. Naruto himself had seen some ghastly mutant, but his teammates had perceived only a deer. It boggles his mind. Genjutsu, perhaps? But then Sakura-chan is leagues above them all in genjutsu—ever since she was a genin, so if it was one then she would've been the first to dispel it.

"What did you do to them, you fucker?" He wonders aloud.

Unexpectedly, the blond gets an answer.

Naruto whirls around when the stranger not-so-subtly drops down from a tree branch behind him. His eyes are relaxed as he picks himself up languidly, without a word.

'How did I not sense him?!' Naruto panics, taking a step back, whipping out his kunai in an act of bravado he does not feel.

"Nothing." The stranger says smoothly. "I did nothing."

His voice is deep, condescending. Vaguely, Naruto thinks it is akin magma—molten, shifting, burning…

"Liar." Says the genin. Then, after a moment of thought: "Stay back."

The stranger hums, doing just that.

"So you can understand me. How charming. So can you see me, too? What do I look like?"

"Ugly." Naruto retorts quickly.

He isn't lying. In this lighting, the stranger looks like a dead woman on the verge of decomposition. His thin, stretched-out smile is undeniably hideous. His eyes (already black, already lifeless, lightless) reflect a type of apathy people usually reserve only for the mostinsignificant of insects.

Naruto is used to being looked at as if he were worthless... a monster, a loser, a weakling, a child—but never an absence of such, of anything at all. In this stranger's eyes, Naruto gets the sense that he is nothing, and it irks him.

He is something.

He is a loser, a dead last—the student of a sannin and the future hokage.

He is Uzumaki Naruto.

And so he says this.

"I didn't ask." The stranger replies, almost tenderly. Naruto feels his skin crawl at the tone in his voice. There's something dark and abstruse and twisted about it: like he's sincerely trying to sound nice, but he can't, because there's something so evil inside him that it's tainted all capacity to do so.

"Then don't comment!" Naruto shoots back, and from those lifeless, lightless eyes finally emerges a spark of interest.

"Little boy." He coos, not wholly unlike what Naruto imagines Orochimaru doing to Sasuke in his nightmares. "You'd do well to respect your elders. I imagine that others will not be so generous as I."

"Shut the fuck up!"

"Temper, temper." He chides, as if Naruto really were a child. "What did I just say?"

"I SAID SHUT THE FUCK UP, UGLY!"

Naruto doesn't even see it coming when the stranger backhands him viciously, ten times harder than he'd done to him. The boy recoils. His body flies back a solid few feet, then comes to a dirty, rolling stop at the base of a tree trunk, his head colliding harshly against hard wood.

The stranger strolls to him casually then, only pausing when his lithe figure towers above him.

Naruto is too bewildered to move.

He's used to being punched, kicked... it's all part of the job of being shinobi, after all.

But backhanded, like an ordinary, abused woman?

"'Ugly?' From whose lips does that conceit spring, I wonder...?"

The stranger eyes his cheek scars now, and Naruto shifts uncomfortably, despite the searing pain. Then, as suddenly as he had come, the stranger disappears in a miasma of pitch-black toxin. Several wisps of dark mist linger after his absence, and feeling significantly out of his depth, Naruto stands wobbily to his feet.

"Wha...?" He repeats.

There is a faint flutter of wings before a storm of birds shoots out from the tree behind him.

[to be continued...]

—

Author's Note: ...so what do you think? :) please review!