He'd been born from darkness and despair, the child of hatred and malice, but everything about him said that he was no more than a normal child. Sunny hair, a smiling face, slow to anger and quick to laugh; he never took too great an offense to any treatment, and his legendary pranks were worthy of fireside conversations. For all that, however, there were very few people in Konohagakure who held no grudge—real or conceived—against him.
They charged him extra in stores and shops, sometimes double or triple the rates they'd use for "normal" customers. Even then, they only ever gave him third-rate options. It's why his jumpsuit was an ugly orange, his milk was eternally spoiled, his shinobi weaponry was only guaranteed to kill with blunt-force trauma...the list went on, with each transgression being more heinous than the last. They spat at him, calling him names and words that not even the most foul-mouthed of sailors would dare to utter. They would occasionally beat him, too, and some might even try to kill him every now and again.
Through it all, however, he remained hyperactive and happy. He never gave them any reason to suspect that there was something wrong, something decidedly off, on the inside; there were voices in his head, three of them, and each told him different things. The first voice sounded ancient, and it told him to give in to his anger and hate so that he could destroy the village and all who had wronged him...he called it the "red" voice. the second voice was cruel, blaming him for all that he'd done wrong, calling him an incomplete failure who should just kill himself and be done with it; that was the "gray" voice. The last voice was dark, vile and evil—it was all that was wrong in the world, and then some more. It didn't ask him, or try to manipulate him, like the other voices did; it commanded, in no uncertain terms, that a day would come when he would walk the earth again.
He thought that it must be normal to hear voices. It was why the scarecrow-man was always in the cemetery, right? He was talking to the voices in his head, the voices of the dead. It was why the Hokage talked about the previous people who'd held his position; of them all, Sarutobi was the only one who hadn't died in office. He had survived for seven decades, almost eight, and would no doubt have plenty of voices to talk to.
There were plenty of signs that something was wrong, of course. From the way he walked to the way he talked, to the way he guarded his thoughts so well, it was clear that something was up; no child moves like a soldier, or talks like a commander who demands respect. No child could be so perfectly neurotypical as he was. It shouldn't have been possible to take such abuse and remain entirely unchanged by the experiences.
He never liked the voices much, but they were the only ones who talked to him. He couldn't even bring himself to hate the gray voice, though it always told him to harm or kill himself, because it talked to him when nobody else would. Its constant reminders of his weakness made him want to prove it wrong, to show it that he was stronger than it gave him credit for. He didn't like the red voice because of the way it demeaned him, tried to manipulate his actions. It told him to move his chakra around in ways that didn't make sense.
The black voice hadn't appeared until he was in the forests surrounding and protecting his home village. It was faint, barely audible, but the red and gray voices went quiet when it spoke. It had been the black voice that made him choose the Taju Kage Bunshin, that allowed him to realize that there was hope for himself yet...and it had been the black voice which ordered Mizuki's death.
The black voice had grown stronger since then, more dominant and domineering, until it was all he could ever hear inside his mind. In the mission room with Iruka, he felt the black voice scream in victory as he lost control of his right arm for a few moments. Against the Demon Brothers, he'd lost all of his limbs to the voice...and against Zabuza, only his brain had remained in control. He'd felt himself slipping away, and did his best to hold on; who was the woman with the Nekomata mask, and why did it feel so comfortable to wear a black Kitsune mask? Where was the orange jumpsuit he loved so much?
He'd seen his body, controlled by the black voice's power, do terrible and unspeakable things to the woman in the first exam; they were things he wouldn't have thought possible, or imaginable, in their cruelty. The black voice spoke sometimes with the red voice, as though they were friends, and he was afraid. In the second exam, he'd moved blow-for-blow with this "Orochimaru," though he didn't know who that was...he felt pain, and then his world went black.
The boy known as Uzumaki Naruto would never wake again...the Hokage, or any of the mind-walkers, should have looked deeper. They had not, and hadn't thought to; they would pay the price, soon enough, for their damning of him. The black voice was now and forever in control of the body and mind, and would never let go again.
Uzumaki Naruto was dead...
At long last, the Dark Lord had returned.