Obstinacy. That word reminded me of someone, the one who never gave up, who never gave in, who always kept his promises, who always came through, who gave his everything to help anyone he thought deserving of help. Ugh, just thinking about him was enough to give someone a complex.
Naruto. I missed him so very much. But thinking about him, always reminded me why thinking about him was such a bad idea. It was not Naruto's fault that he was so mind boggling. I mean when you first meet him, there are only two reactions I've seen everyone have. They either find him cute or they find him utterly obnoxious. It was mostly the latter. Though I can't for the life of me understand how everyone can be so blind. They never seem to notice the things about him that make no sense. Like how did he always emerge from every impossible situation he's ever been in alive. Especially when they all seem to think of him as an idiot. An extremely dim-witted idiot who they are surprised that he managed to survive to his current age.
How has no one thought beyond that, how they never seem to look beneath the surface, I cannot fathom. I mean, sure some of it could be luck, some of it could be sheer doggedness, but what about the rest of it. How did he manage to do the remainder of the things he did, without dying even with help. How does he do it? What makes him tick? No really, what went inside his head?
His stubbornness can only explain some of it. People helping him covers a little more of it, but what about the rest? I want to know who Naruto really is, not what he appears like, nor who everybody seems to think he is, but who actually is.
This is why I don't like thinking about him, he is a conundrum within a quandary within a paradox. Just trying to separate the individual threads, makes me end up making outrageous assumptions that when I look back at, I end up wondering what was I even thinking about, and how the hell did I end up making a conclusion of that sort.
See I have read his files. From his orphanage and pre-academy reports, his shinobi academy reports to his Jounin's evaluation reports. On the surface it looks like the report everyone who knew of Naruto, would look like. But when I looked at the reports together, some things stood out. Little things, like him being good at something, at some point and then him being abyssal at the same thing next week. I didn't notice it at the time, because they were a lot. But things stood out, every time I would look at the new reports, those things were like tiny little flags, that nagged at the back of my head, until I gave and looked. Then one day I saw him having excellent chakra control, then the next when I saw him he had atrocious control. How could that be, chakra control, once learnt, the body automatically adapts, it can't be unlearnt. Muscle memory could be trained to react differently, but even that would take months, a few weeks at the least. Chakra control wasn't like that. It was difficult, almost neigh impossible to have such chameleon chakra control.
Thats when I started looking at him more closely, when I started trying to understand him. How could he possibly do that. It was physically impossible. His academy reports finally made sense. It was all over the place at the first look. But if you looked at it. The results always had the lowest possible score that was required to qualify as to pass. No matter who was evaluating, what type of evaluation went on, or when the evaluations were conducted.
They all showed the exact same percentile of results. Now a few times i could understand, it could have been a coincidence but every time getting the same results, implied that he understood how the scoring went and chose to get the least possible score. But according to the reports, he barely attended the classes, so how could he figure out how a person would score, when he wasn't even present. And when he wasn't playing pranks, what was he doing when not attending classes. The chunins and jounins chasing him rarely if ever caught him, that many high level ninja not catching him spoke his of stamina and stealth. Especially in his bright, kill me now orange clothes.
Like I said a conundrum. Then on his first C-rank mission, his superior states that it was his idea that ended up turning the fight in his favour. So could an idiot really come up with ideas or plans that almost always ended up in his teams favour. The odds of that are astronomical. So only thing I could come up with after a lot of head pounding and hair pulling moments of slight insanity inducing thinking was, his entire life was his greatest prank on everyone.
That he had been playing people since he learnt how to talk. Just how was it that no one ever called him on any of it? Not even his teammates? How was that the people closest to him, people who spent everyday around him didn't look closely and wonder how he did it, without dismissing it as luck or some such thing. Especially when his teammates were lauded as genii of their class and his team leader was the youngest shinobi in the entire history of Konoha to be made jounin.
It made no sense. Was it something about him, his pheromones or something that messed with people's thinking or his chakra, like his mom's was special, that effected how everyone looked at him. Because otherwise nothing made sense. So thinking I reached for the bottle of sake under my desk. Seeing my reflection in the glass. I frowned at the bags under my eyes and limp way my blonde hair was hanging in its customary two tails. That Gaki was giving her more wrinkles.