From when he was young, the hunger had gnawed at his belly in a weak imitation of the beast inside him. He had been given a monthly allowance by the third hokage, but that hadn't covered all of his needs - he often thanked his lucky stars that ramen was both cheap and delicious, because otherwise he wouldn't have known how to tolerate it.

It hadn't been so bad after he had joined team 7. Kakashi had, on occasion, supplied him with fruit and vegetables that he ate grudgingly, knowing that they contained vitamins that ramen couldn't give him. Sometimes the team would eat together, and he didn't always have to pay for himself. He was receiving money from the endless D-ranks that they were doing. Yet there was still a hole in his gut that he could never quite fill.

It had crossed his mind, after a while, that maybe it wasn't hunger. He had been so incredibly lonely, for so long, and he thought that maybe that was the problem, an all-encompassing lack of contact. It was, in part - the ache would fade a little when he was with one of his precious people. He would steal touches, sometimes. Provoke Sakura so that she would hit him and he could bask in the pain. Pretend to trip and then fall onto one of his teammates in a mission, just for a few brief moments of connection in which he imagined he could feel the beating of their hearts and their blood rushing through their veins. The others had dubbed him clumsy, but he hadn't cared. He lived for the moment of impact. He was a close-range fighter.

But that didn't work, and with it came an awareness of how the hole grew a little when they insulted him. Clumsy, dead-last, idiot. The strange thing was, he never felt like these words were hurting him. He would grin and it would be entirely genuine, because they were his team and his special people and when it came down to it, they would save him just as he would save them. So why was it that every insult stole something from him?

So he drew his next conclusion. Recognition, that was what he needed. He had wanted it since before he could remember but if possible he wanted it even more now. So he saved the village and his friends and people he didn't even know again and again and never gave up. It was slow, but it happened. People would look at him with something less than hatred. He gained comrades, made friends.

He not only gained recognition, but acceptance, too. Acceptance which he eventually gave himself; acceptance that maybe this chasm in his gut would never fade. After all, he had learned to live with it.

Some nights, when he woke up from Kyuubi-influenced nightmares of scenes where he had allowed himself to be consumed with hatred, he pretended not to notice that the hole had filled in a little. Filled in with the blood of everyone who had taunted him, looked at him with those eyes. Filled in with the visions of corpses strewn across the streets, eyes wide in shock of his betrayal.

He pushed to the back of his mind the knowledge that this ache was an insatiable desire for revenge. Deep down there, in the pitch-black subconscious of his soul, he refused to acknowledge a little boy sitting on a swing, crying for someone, anyone.

A little boy with red eyes, who grew up in the darkness.

A/N - I find Dark Naruto really interesting. I wish they had expanded on it more in the anime, because I felt that the whole gaining Kyuubi's power thing went too fast. It never really seemed like Naruto faced up to his past properly.

Anyway, please review *shakes tin*. This is just a oneshot for now, but if people like it I may write more (although they'll probably all be stand-alone drabble kind of things).