He didn't mean to, at least not a first. It was an accident that led him to where he was now, with a forearm full of deep cuts and overlapping scars. It started the day Naruto was poisoned. He had cut open his hand to remove the poison, but he wasn't prepared at all for how relieved he felt afterward.
For his whole life Naruto would receive scornful glares filled with hate and fear. He at least had the comfort of knowing why this was, though he didn't like villagers' bullshit reasoning.
One thing led to another and before he knew it, Naruto had developed severe anxiety and depression. When he would walk through the village, he could feel the painful gazes and the whispers! Naruto hated the whispers. It was when he could feel these things, hear them, that his arm would itch and sting, his fingers would twitch toward his arm, and the urge to cut overwhelmed him.
The urge started, of course, after the incident with his hand. He had been feeling anxiety about the poison, miserable due to his failure in dodging the attack. When he sliced open his hand, though he knew he had gone deep enough, he couldn't stop his hand from pushing the kunai in deeper, slicing farther than he had to.
Kakashi had noticed this, and voiced his thoughts too, though he ultimately passed it off as haste. Naruto meanwhile had felt a strong sense of relief and calming. He chalked it up to the lack of poison, but that wasn't where it had ended. When they did finally make it to the land of waves, Naruto had been feeling overwhelming anxiety once again, and he had subconsciously pressed on his hand. Though he hissed in pain, he didn't fail to notice how happy the pain made him.
Well, maybe it wasn't happiness, but it was definitely some sort of positive feeling. Since that day, Naruto had been using pain, cutting specifically, as his coping mechanism.
Back to the present, Naruto walked through the town to Team 7's training grounds, unsuccessfully trying to tune out the villagers. This was his daily situation; harmlessly walking to a place where he would learn to be someone who could protect the damn town, while helpless to stop himself from wondering if the whispers had some sort of truth to them, and, of course, painfully restraining himself from tearing at his arm.
'Shiiiit,' he thought, unable to resist the urge anymore. Glancing at his surroundings, Naruto ducked into a store, one that he knew would let him in, and then dashed to the bathroom. Trembling with a troublesome combination of anxiety and relief, with a hint of lifelessness mixed in, the blonde-haired boy removed a kunai from his weapon's pouch. The cold metal sent jolts of anticipation up Naruto's arm, stinging his barely healed and completely raw cuts.
He tipped the blade down, preferring to dig and tear rather than smoothly slice. With trembling fingers, Naruto pressed the kunai knife into his skin, hissing as he ran the tip of the blade through a cut he had made the previous night.
Naruto would be lying if he said it didn't hurt, because it did. It hurt a lot, enough to warrant a scream from him if he wasn't the one causing it, but Naruto wasn't cutting himself to feel self-pity. He didn't do it because, 'oh, my life sucks so much and I cut', Naruto did it because in the moment, the cuts hurt more than his painful life.
He was on his third cut when Naruto fucked up. He was always careful to make sure his cuts were at least an inch away from his hand, so he didn't hit a vein, but Naruto had gotten a bit careless. As Naruto was going to finish his third cut, the door to the bathroom opened. Naruto liked to cut so that each cut got deeper and deeper, and usually by the fifth, sometimes seventh cut, he was done. Already with the kunai knife and an unhealthy depth in his arm, the shock of the door opening cause him to jerk the kunai.
It took Naruto all of half a second after he calmed down to realize he had hit a vein. Luckily it wasn't a major vein, but Naruto still hissed in pain nonetheless and stared ruefully at the blood that was pouring into the toilet. He set his kunai down and grabbed a wad of toilet paper, pressing it hard over his wrist. After a while the bleeding slowed so Naruto took out his disinfectant and poured some over. Normally he wouldn't bother, but Naruto was in a public bathroom and he had just cut a vein.
Unfortunately, the disinfectant caused the bleeding to pick up again, as well as cause Naruto to grunt in pain, but the blonde was expecting this. He quickly placed another wad of toilet paper over the wound, waiting until the blood slowed at least a little before wrapping his fresh cuts in gauze and bandage.
Sighing heavily, the depressed boy packed up his stuff and cleaned his knife before leaving the place. He got an odd look from the woman at the shop counter (he had been in the bathroom for about an hour), causing his anxiety to flare, but tucking his hands into his pockets, Naruto forced himself not to run back and cut more.
Naruto knew long before he arrived at the training grounds that if he was in deep shit and there were very few things he could do or say to get out of it. His conclusion was only reinforced when he saw Kakashi already standing there with what Naruto thought might be a scowl, though the mask made it very hard to tell Kakashi's moods. Standing behind Kakashi was a middle-aged man, glaring at Naruto and tapping his foot irritably.
"What took you so long!?" Sakura demanded, running up to Naruto and gently smacking his head before grabbing his arm and roughly pulling him toward the group.
"A~hh!!" the blonde boy groaned at a louder than normal volume. He inhaled sharply yanking his arm away from Sakura and gritting his teeth. That damn girl had grabbed his wrist and Naruto was sure that it was one stand away from bleeding again.
"Naruto? Come on, you're seriously saying that hurt?" Sakura scoffed, an incredulous look on her face. In truth, she, Sasuke, Kakashi, and even the stranger were quite concerned.
"Uhn… Sorry, sorry, I just twisted my ankle on the way here and the sudden movement aggravated it," the blonde said, thinking fast. That was one perk of lying all the time; Naruto was rather skilled at making up stories. Satisfied by his lie, Team 7 turned to Kakashi for the day's activity explanation.
"Hmm~" he mumbled in a humming tone, closing his book and looking at his group. He hadn't actually been reading of course, all his attention on Naruto. "Today we're going to be starting a chain of missions."
"What's that?" Sakura asked, nudging Naruto to stop him from disrespecting the grass with his feet.
"Basically we'll be escorting this guy to his hometown, then picking up someone from there and escorting them somewhere else, and once we've reached to third, fourth, maybe fifth town if you're up to it, we'll wait there and do some training until someone needs to be escorted to the town we came from. Once there we'll train again until someone needs to go to the next town, and so on until we reach here again." The three genin nodded to their sensei before looking to the stranger.
"So, we're escorting him first?" Naruto asked.
"Yeah, isn't that kind of obvious dobe?" Sasuke asked scornfully. Naruto glared at Sasuke and started marching over.
"That's it, teme! I'll-"
"Enough!" Sakura shouted. "Let's just get going. We don't want to leave our client with a bad impression, yeah?" Naruto nodded solemnly, Sasuke not responding.
It hadn't even been ten minutes into the long walk to the village when Naruto felt the cutting urge again. It was strong, unreasonably strong, but he had no choice but to fight it.
'Damn it… I need something to distract me!' Eventually Naruto decided on challenging Sasuke to some kind of contest.
"Hey teme! Let's race!"
"Sure!" Sasuke responded in a rather smug tone.
"Hey, wait, you'll get to far ahead!" Sakura protested, but Kakashi placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.
"I don't really think you can stop the even if you try," he warned, eye-smiling. Sakura had to admit that her sensei was right, but it didn't mean she liked it. Team 7 hadn't been all that connected recently, and though no one really knew why, though certainly none of them wanted their team to fall apart. Naruto had no family, Sasuke's was dead. Of the people they had left, or had at all, Team 7 was definitely the closest to being family. Sakura didn't have anything wrong with her family, they just didn't really fit well together. Sakura had no real talents other than Chakra control, but what was the use of that if she had no fancy jutsu to use? As a result, her parents had just kind of dumped her off at the ninja academy and told her 'good luck becoming a shinobi!' before going back to the house. For Sakura, it almost felt like she lived in a house with strangers.
Sakura nodded ruefully, though somewhat pleased that Naruto and Sasuke weren't all that changed. At least they still had their rivalry, though Sakura wished that could be a plain and simple friendship instead.
Naruto wasn't unfit in the slightest, so it came as a major shock to Sasuke when he keeled over gasping after only a few minutes of running.
"You're done already?" Sasuke asked, meaning to sound condescending but coming out more concerned.
"A…ank…kle…" Naruto gasped out, heaving in deep breaths. Ah, he really shouldn't have run. Naruto certainly hadn't forgotten about cutting his vein, but he didn't think that the blood loss would have this much of an effect.
"You're ankle? Then how come you're panting so hard?" Sasuke probed. Naruto instinctively got defensive, shoulders tensing slightly. The cutting urge, which Naruto had managed to dispel some, came back twice as hard.
"I guess… I didn't… drink enough…" Naruto fought to get his breathing under control, desperate to give nothing more away. Sasuke was still plenty suspicious but questioned no further. "I'm gonna go take a dump," Naruto said, forcing his usual casual tone and wording back into his speech. Sasuke sighed but waited patiently for Naruto to come back.
As soon as Naruto was out of sight and earshot, he sprinted into the woods to a covered tree space. Anticipation and anxiety gnawing at him, he plucked a kunai from his weapons pouch and quickly dug it into his arm with a grunt. Squeezing his eyes shut and tensing his muscles, Naruto tore his arm again, making it resemble a battlefield after one skillful, zigzagged cut. After a mere thirty seconds, leaving Naruto to do only two cuts (while he was vicious, he was also careful), the blonde poured water over his arm and wrapped it up. He didn't have time to let the bleeding slow down at all, so Naruto would have to change the bandage sooner than usual.
Burying the old gauze and wrap, Naruto stood up again and began to walk back to Sasuke before he remembered something. Kakashi had a really good nose, much better than Naruto would have liked. When he found a nice root, the boy purposely tripped and scraped his leg. Examining his work to make sure it was satisfactory, Naruto walked back to Sasuke.
"That took some time," Sasuke noted, causing Naruto to tense up. Sasuke couldn't help but wonder why Naruto was so tense all the time, but he chose not to question it. "Do you need water?" he asked the blonde, snagging Naruto's water from his belt and sticking it in his face.
"Ah, sure… thanks…" Naruto, after reluctantly thanking his rival, forced himself to gulp down at least half of the bottle. The more he drank, the more he could support his excuses. After Naruto had finished, the two boys exchanged glances saying, 'continue racing or no?', but before they could come to a decision, the others caught up.
"Hmm? I didn't think you two would wait," Kakashi noted.
"Ah, yeah, I had to take a dump and then I drank some water!" Naruto announced, earning a scolding from Sakura about his 'crude language'.
"Actually, Kakashi-sensei, Naruto collapsed from dehydration and then decided to disappear for a while to shit."
"Sasuk~e!! You didn't need to out me like that!" Naruto complained, unable to keep a small smile off his face despite the overwhelming anxiety and fear of being found out. He was easily able to grow that small smile into a large grin, giving the impression of a joking attitude.
"You collapsed?" Sakura asked, more than mildly concerned.
"Hehe… Yeah," he said, now going for an embarrassed tone.
"Hey Naruto, is that blood I smell?" Kakashi asked, not one to be fooled. 'Ah yes, and here comes the hard part', Naruto commented in his mind.
"Well you see, when I twisted my ankle I happened to trip and cut my shin on this to~tally misplaced object and then…" Team 7 plus their client decided to tune Naruto out as he finished his long winded story. Naruto, pleased to have gotten the reaction he wanted, though hurting in the back of his mind, after all his team had just tuned out a story of how he had gotten hurt, finished off his speech before turning to the group who had started walking again.
After another minute, Naruto began feeling lightheaded again. All the blood loss followed by running was catching up to him, so in a Naruto moment, the blonde-haired boy pounced on Kakashi's back, making the surprised man stumble.
"Kakashi-sensei, I'm tired and my leg hurts, so you need to carry me!" he chirped out with a grin.
"No-" he began but was met with the boy's pleading face dropping down from above.
"Please sensei?" There was something about Naruto's face, something deep in his eyes, that made Kakashi simply sigh and continue walking. Kakashi didn't know exactly what it was, but somewhere in the deepest depths of his mind, he realized in that moment that something was terribly wrong. Kakashi also didn't miss the way Sasuke clenched his fist, his teeth. The boy's whole body looked rigid and… angry. Kakashi couldn't, for the life of him, figure out why his students were behaving this way.