Chapter 1: Acknowledgement
Uzumaki Naruto was seven years old before someone, anyone, finally acknowledged him.
Before then, he wasn't non-existent. He was shunned. He was hated. Uzumaki Naruto was The Child Never To Play With. He was the Terrible Little Boy. He was Trouble. He was Dangerous. He was Asking For It. He was Scum.
He was the Demon Child.
He was lonely and unable to make friends. Grown-ups called him things like intolerable and disgusting, words he couldn't comprehend, but feelings he could definitely understand. Before Uzumaki Naruto learned to walk, he knew what hatred was, and what it felt like.
When the child turned three, he learned what the word concussion meant. He had had three within two months at his first orphanage.
He was always alone, but it never really bothered him until he was five.
When the Hokage came and told him that he could live in a room all by himself, he grew excited. He liked it when the Old Man Hokage visited him. All the people that usually had scary stares smiled and he could look at their faces without fear. The Hokage seemed to make everybody smile.
As they walked to his new apartment- a funny word the Old Man Hokage used-, he noticed something about the kids in the crowded streets. "Old Man Hokage," he had asked, "why are there two grown-ups with other kids? Is it like that for everybody? Are there two grown-ups for me? Huh, Old Man?" He looked up into the Old Man's eyes, expectant and hopeful.
"You don't have anyone, my boy."
The little boy's vision became fuzzy; his throat constricted and he couldn't talk. Worst of all, he just couldn't understand why it was like that for him.
At seven years old, he decided to become a ninja. He told the Old Man he would enroll in the ninja academy.
He was excited. Surely, he thought, everyone would talk to him if he trained to become a ninja. Everyone talked to the Hokage, and he was a ninja. The night before he started school, he placed all of his personal possessions on the tattered rug before him: a broken pencil he'd found on the sidewalk; the goggles he found on the playground; and a bronze coin, rusted so badly it was a wild bright color that no one seemed to want.
He was the first one to arrive at the academy that morning. He didn't own a clock, and he didn't want to be late. He wished he had been late, though, when the other students arrived and didn't even seem to notice him. He sat quietly in a corner, timidly observing the room around him. He felt that panging sensation again, the one that made his eyes burn. He clutched the rusted coin in his pocket, his good luck charm, and refused to let his fear show.
That's when he heard snickering.
He looked up, only to realize all eyes were on him. A first.
"Are you Uzumaki Naruto?" the teacher had asked.
"Yes," he responded quietly. No one heard him, and they began to look away. He had to keep their attention, no matter how. He stood up, slammed his hand on the desk and shouted "I'm Uzumaki Naruto, don't you forget it!" He felt the sudden surge of confidence evaporate as the teacher looked at him, his gaze cold like all the people on the street when the Hokage wasn't around.
"Well, Uzumaki Naruto, you'd better take your seat and refrain from such outbursts, or you can enjoy detention for the rest of the month," the teacher told him.
"What's 'refrain' and 'detention' mean?" he asked. That day, he learned to paint a fence by himself.
That night, when the tired, weary little boy got home, he decided he didn't like painting fences, and that he would become Hokage. Because he'd never seen the Hokage paint a fence. It was no fun. But he saw how everyone looked up to the Old Man with the large hat. Everyone wanted to smile with him.
He fell asleep with the rusted coin in his hand, clutching it tightly, believing for better luck tomorrow. He awoke with the wild, bright color on his hands, and decided that today would have to be a good day. When he made it to the academy that morning, the mean teacher had been replaced with a man with kind, brown eyes.
"Uzumaki Naruto?"
He faltered for a moment as all eyes turned to him again. He weighed that any attention was better than none at all. "Yes, and don't forget it, because I'm gonna be Hokage when I get bigger!" he answered.
The class's laughter abruptly died when they noticed that the teacher was not laughing with them or berating the small, blonde-haired child.
"Alright, Naruto. That's going to take a lot of hard work but you seem to have a good attitude already. Are you prepared to always do your best?"
The class was still looking at him. It was different this time, like they were expecting something from him. "Believe it!"
The teacher smiled, and when he did it reached his eyes. "I expect hard work!"
The little boy was elated. Before bed that night, he decided that the wild, bright color, which he would later come to know as orange, was his favorite. He also determined that he would do his best in whatever he did so people would acknowledge him.