A birthday present for one of my most favorite anime characters of all time, Uzumaki Naruto.
x.
Today was his thirteenth birthday.
Thirteen years of scorn. Thirteen years of crippling loneliness and hateful stares. Of the invisibility. The isolation. Thirteen years of falling asleep, waking up, and coming home to an apartment almost as empty as himself.
Thirteen years of the Kyuubi.
His birthday, in the past, was never a celebration. And in the first few years of his life, he had never even known what a birthday was. It wasn't until the first grade, a year or two before the Ninja Academy, when Yamanaka Ino had celebrated hers, did he find out.
"What's a birthday?" he asked, enchanted by the sight of the balloons and presents and cake. It was when he was still young and so, so naive.
"It is the day you are born." The teacher scowled. She had never really liked him.
"When's mine?"
"In the fall, the day everyone is crying."
"But why?"
"Because it was the day you were born."
Naruto had spent the rest of Ino's birthday outside, on the steps leading into the school. He felt he didn't deserve to be there. Someone who didn't have a real birthday didn't deserve to celebrate anyone else's.
But this day, the one that marked his thirteenth year of life, he refused to stay in his empty apartment. He refused to take part in the Festival where everyone he knew and cared for was mourning for the lives taken from a monster very much alive and plaguing him.
"It'll be different today." He thought, as he scaled the dizzying heights of the Hokage Monument.
And Uzumaki Naruto, standing above the YonDaime, slathered in red war paint, and donned in elaborate dress robes embroidered with bold scarlet swirls and yellow streaks almost as loud his himself, waved a massive orange banner clearly reading 'thirteen,' didn't care. He didn't care about the horrified gasps and shouts of outrage from the mourning festival crowd dressed in black. He witnessed their livid, rightful indignation and waved harder.
He would not just stand around and accept the fact that no one was glad that he was alive. He didn't ask to be a recluse. He was forced. It wasn't fair.
So if no one else was going to celebrate his birthday, then god damn it, he was just going to do it by himself.
x.
