The hardest part for them was living with it. Living with the knowledge that they could have done something and didn't; that they should have seen it but couldn't.
The hardest part for him was the fact that they knew. All of them did. They would treat him like glass because they all knew he wanted to die. They would handle him gently because if they didn't they would drop him and he would break. Everything would be…different.
Oh he had lived, Kyuubi had seen to that, but he had tried. It was the fact that he had tried to die, tried to kill himself, that made them treat him so.
And some were full of joy at the event. They stood at home and on the streets, even in the stores, laughing. The Kyuubi brat had tried to off himself, how funny. But their number had dwindled, they were but few now.
Some cried, but they were few as well. Shinobi are not allowed to cry.
Most wondered why, for what reason.
One knew.
And a powerful reason it was.
What he didn't know, when he tried, was that this one was in Konoha on the particular day he had picked, had seen him fall, had been the first to reach his unconscious body at the bottom of the Hokage monument, and had been the one to carry him to the hospital. This one person had sat with him for hours, days, as he slept, but a mission had called the person away.
So when he woke, the person was gone. To him, no one had ever been there. He hadn't heard the person whisper to him, hadn't felt the hand holding his. To him, no one cared. He woke up in an empty room with the curtains closed, no flowers, no signs of kinship. To him, no one loved him.
He checked death by falling off his mental checklist, he would have to try another method.