101 Words
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto nor do I own it's characters. I make no money with this.
Author's Note: Officially, I'm in too much of a hurry to even be here and post this... My alarm clock just died on me. -.-'
Truth
Naruto knew what people said. He was aware of how they talked about him and Sasuke. More than that, he was aware of how they thought about the two of them.
Even he couldn't pretend to be deaf enough not to hear when people whispered behind his back, words like 'demon', 'traitor' and 'broken' making their way to the blond's ears easily. He'd learned to cope with that, to ignore it as he walked past.
But that didn't change the fact that each time again, it stung.
And no matter how wrong their reasoning, they were still right about one thing. Both he and Sasuke were broken.
He'd even go as far as to say they were both fucked up beyond repair. They'd both lost and buried pieces of their souls, some of them left behind in order to gain something else, some of them ripped out by a world that never cared to care.
There was no way he'd ever get rid of the memories of what his life used to be like beforeTeam 7 – they would always be inside him, along with the knowledge that he never even got the chance to become someone else. The Kyuubi's fire would always continue to burn him up from the inside, too.
And he knew that Sasuke would never regain what Itachi had taken from him, that the person the younger Sasuke could have become had died with the rest of the Uchiha Clan. He also knew that Sasuke would never get rid of his nightmares, be it the ones of that night or the ones of other nights that they both pretended Naruto didn't know about.
Naruto had learned not to react to people talking about them like they knew all those things, like they knew of the pain they'd gone through. Like they actually understood what Sasuke had done to himself when he'd betrayed his Village or what Naruto had endured over the years of growing up to become the Village's hero.
It was easier that way.