Sunlight Casts a Shadow

1

The alarm went off, as the morning sunlight streamed through a crack in the curtains. Dull blue eyes cracked open, squinting in the bright light as their owner slowly reached an arm out to turn off the blaring sound. He rolled over and attempted to return to dreamland.

"Don't you have class today?" asked a snarling voice in his head.

The blue eyed boy blinked and sat up blearily. He slowly turned himself around and tried to find the energy to get out of bed.

"Yeah, but what does it really matter?" the blond replied. "It's not like anyone will really care that much whether or not I'm actually there, you know."

"I know for a fact there is at least one person who would care that you aren't in that room today. And his name is Dolphin," replied the snarling voice.

"Good point. Don't want to make him mad." The blond shivered, just remembering the last time he made his teacher mad for skipping class.

He slowly got out of bed, and grabbed an outfit from his closet, an annoyingly bright, kill-me-now orange jumpsuit with blue accents and a white fluffy collar. He threw on a mesh shirt underneath, and his "iconic" goggles.

Once dressed, the blond stood in front of his full length mirror, ignoring all the cracks, as he took a good look at himself. He made himself grin as broadly as possible, to the point of making his cheeks hurt and squinting his eyes, but it was a rather memorable smile. At least to those who believed it to be real.

Finally, the boy made himself a container of instant ramen, the only food item that he could afford, and that no store owner could give him stale or rotten.

With his meal eaten, the boy left his dirty, graffitied apartment, rushing to the shinobi academy.

This was a normal morning for a beautiful blond boy, with eyes that put both the ocean and sky to shame with their blue shade, and hair as bright as the sun. It was always a struggle for Naruto to wake up in the morning, and it took a bit of convincing on Kurama's part to get him out of bed and off to class. It wasn't easy, and it didn't always work, but the fox did his best for his jailer, as his own form of repentance for all the hell the blond had had to go through on the giant fox's behalf.

Naruto was a scrawny little 11-year-old boy, who looked more like he was closer to 8 due to malnutrition and lack of sleep. It wasn't his fault of course. He did his best to get all the nutrients he could from any foods he could afford. The problem was, what he could afford wasn't very nutritious to begin with.

11 years earlier, the village of Konohagakure no Sato was attacked from within by a giant manifestation of chakra in the form of a nine-tailed fox. In order to protect his village, and unbeknownst to most, the leader at the time, a man by the name of Minato Namikaze, the Yondaime Hokage, sealed the giant chakra beast into the body of a small baby. His newborn son, to be exact. The entire village rejoiced that the fox had been "killed", until it was discovered that the Hokage was dead, and where he had died was a small infant child, with whisker-like marks on his cheeks. This single incident set in motion all of Naruto's hardships.

For some reason, despite most of the civilians believing that the Hokage "killed" the fox, many also were informed of a (supposedly) SS-rank secret, that the baby was the jailer of the fox. However, this knowledge became so skewed, that instead of the boy being praised as a hero like Minato intended, since if it weren't for the little boy the fox would have most likely destroyed the entire village and then continued his rampage, the villagers all blamed every death that occurred that day, onto the little young blond, and began referring to him simply as, "the demon" despite the kunai being very different from the scroll it's sealed in.