Speaking to Silence
(life is bittersweet)
Naruto talks to people who aren't there.
Any time that he's alone—curled up in bed and trying to fight off nightmares, or huffing over a mission scroll that's vexing down to the last little period—the words pour out of his lips like water running over the edge of a bathtub.
When he was younger, he used to clamp both hands over his mouth in attempts to hold the words back. …But in time, he learned that some things were just unstoppable.
He couldn't stop himself from falling into Mizuki's trap after he failed the graduation assessment. He couldn't stop Iruka from being caught in the trap, either. They both ended up hurt, bodies battered and prides wounded.
He couldn't stop Orochimaru from setting his sights on Sasuke, and he couldn't stop Sasuke from being lured by the illusion of power.
There are only a few things he remembers about being twelve years old. He remembers seeing Sakura cry, feeling the punch of a white-hot Chidori, and having the orange cover of Kakashi's favorite porn book there through it all, like an anchor to hold him steady.
The thing he remembers most, though, is all of the talking that he did. Every day, he had a chat with someone new. None of them were actually there with him, not there in flesh and bones, of course, but he imagined them there and it was enough. He could picture them standing with him—any way that he wanted them to—and he'd smile because, for once, he had control over something, no matter how little or how fake.
Some of the people he talked to were dead, and others were supposed to be away on missions, but most of them never existed to begin with.
He spoke to the parents that abandoned his tiny newborn self, and he asked them why they left him. He asked how they could bear to leave him behind in a world filled with so much hatred and filth and betrayal. They never answered him, but he asked anyway, hoping that someday, a stranger might hear him and take pity and pretend. He needed to hear that his parents had reasons for what they did.
But the reasons never came, and, as days turned into months and then into years, he stopped pestering.
He spoke to the god that he'd always believed in so blindly, and he asked why he wasn't born as someone normal. He asked why he had to be thrown into a life stained with so much blood, and he wondered out loud why his path had so many dead ends. The god, like his parents, never answered, and Naruto, after a while, gave up on praying.
If Sakura was away on a mission, he'd imagine her in his living room, eating cup ramen and grinning over one of his lamest jokes. He liked to picture her as relaxed as possible, mostly because he didn't see her that way very often. Sasuke had torn her life to pieces and, even though he tried, she wouldn't let him paste them back together again.
He didn't talk much to the fake Sakura, because he knew that she wouldn't be able to answer. Obviously, he couldn't expect her to. …So he let the silence speak for her.
He figures he's been doing that for most of his life, anyway.
Fin.
