The sealed kunai

Chapter 67: The Root of All Pain

When you're raised to do one thing, when your entire childhood development is centered around achieving one significant far-off task decades in the future, the gravity of your situation doesn't set upon you at first. How could it? You can be told that something is all-important, and that you should take it seriously every day, but as a child yet to hit double-digits in age how much can it weigh on you?

This doesn't really occur until you grow, until you gain a practical understanding of your situation and of just what you are slated to do. As time carries on, things settle into your psyche more and more and the pressure builds. But that's not really strange. That occurs with almost every facet of your life; as you grow older you begin to see just how important even the mundane things in your existence are when you gain the knowledge needed and truly look back on things.

No, what really brings about the crushing weight, the pressure of your own situation, is when you know that you're shooting for the absolute top, and that there's no one else in position to take it except for you. When you learn firsthand just how vital your future is to the prosperity and overall wellness of the people around you that you love, and even people you've yet to meet.

That sort of realization doesn't easily set onto you over time. It hits you all at once. One day you wake up, you eat breakfast and stare out through your bay window over the village that you call your home, and you think idly to yourself, 'Someday soon, this entire village is going to be my responsibility to take care of.'

...And then you pause. You freeze everything, because that's a fucking terrifying thought. It was for Naruto.

Not because he didn't think he could do it. Too many people believed that he could. Danzo, Tsunade, Jiraiya, Maki, Sai, all of Root, Gaara, Yugito, all sorts of people amongst his friends; they all thought he was capable of it.

Not because he wasn't prepared, because he knew he wasn't prepared and that wasn't the point. That wasn't the problem. Everything he didn't know yet, Tsunade had already declared she would teach him as she groomed him for a few years to take things over in the aftermath of the war.

It was the simple gravity of that idea. The idea that he would be in charge of everything. That he would be responsible for every man, woman, and child within the walls of his hometown. That no matter what, for better or for worse, the buck would stop with him.

No matter how important things had been in the past, Naruto had been able to break it down and somehow compartmentalize it. He would tackle things as they came, even if they progressively grew in importance and difficulty. As long as he could keep a straight-head outlook of handling things one step at a time as they were in front of him he could take anything. It was why he was able to deal with the progressively more horrifyingly powerful people he'd been taking on since he battled Kimimaro, how he'd kept from feeling in over his head no matter what mission was thrown at him.

As things stood, even if he had resigned himself to do battle with Nagato, or Pein, as far as Naruto was concerned it was the logical next step to take. At this point in the war the only thing left to do was take him down and force Ame to surrender. Even with the importance of that battle, Naruto still justified it as being in his wheelhouse because he was a soldier. An extremely important soldier, but still a soldier whose duty it was to battle Konoha's enemies.

Then Tsunade dropped the to-be Hokage-in-training news on him and took him from being a wartime commodity to the man who would be king.

He wasn't saying that he didn't want it. He definitely wanted it. She just could have been a bit more subtle about it. In that vein they were definitely more than likely related somewhere down the family line, even if it did so happen to be rather distant.