Alone

Chapter 6

Naruto woke up with a jolt, sweat pouring down his body. He gasped, with one hand grasping his head and the other curled up on his lap - with his fingernails stabbing into the thin worn flesh of his palm. He sat there for what felt like hours, with a million thoughts running around his head. Nothing was making sense. Why. Why did he have to be...a monster. Why him. Why him.
A crash from outside dragged him out from the darkness of his thoughts and he whimpered, hiding his face in the relative comfort of his stained pillow. A moment passed and another until the lack of further noise signified it was safe to move.
He made a cautious step across the room - barely noticing the steady stream of blood from his now poor abused hand.
There was no one in his house. For once. A bare hint of a smile went across his face at the thought.

                                  ****
The walk to Academy was far less pleasant, he thought, clutching his broken arm as he hid, terrified, behind the dumpster outside the school. As the footsteps receded and the shouting jeers disappeared, he stood up, hunching his back to appear smaller and walked into the Academy.

Naruto awkwardly stumbled into the back door of bustling classroom silently, trying not to bring any attention to himself, however he was soon found by his eagle-eyed teacher that stood at the front. " You're late Naruto !" He exclaimed red in the face, Naruto just stared at his feet as he heard snickering from behind. Iruka sighed and gestured  him towards his seat before continuing the lesson. Somehow Naruto had ended up next to sleeping boy with pineapple hair.
He settled into his chair, stifling the wince that rose in his throat when a boy, two rows back threw a sharp pebble which hit him square on his poorly bound broken arm. The gasp of pain coming from the second stone was harder to cover due to the size of it - but he did his best, hoping that his reaction would not be noticed. That, he knew, would only make the taunts worse.
Little did he know that the sleeping boy next to him, roused by the loud shouts behind him, noticed the wince and gasp of pain as he watched the boy sit down gingerly.
A flicker of interest and concern came across his features as he took in the darkening bruises dotted down the boy's legs and the arm which he held with care. Shikamaru had heard the whispers, of course, and the taunts monster. But he never knew that it was this bad.

As he took in the boy's injuries, he noticed things he never noticed before: cheeks that were too bony, too sunken to be natural, the yellowly green sickly colour of his face, the bones which seemed to be constantly poking through his skin and the...

"What are you looking at". A rasp of breath, brought his back to reality, back to the reality of a boy who stared at him with tattered and stained clothes, whose eyes seemed so lifeless, so dark with an emotion he could never understand. These eyes, previously so filled with impish joy so many years ago, he thought with a horror, wondering when they had changed into the dead eyes he had now.

"Nothing". He grunted, taken aback by the sound of his voice.

The sound that left Naruto's throat was a sound that stayed in his memory for the rest of his life, that when even 60 years later as he stood, an old man over the grave of a child that never truly lived, he could still hear it in the wind. It was the sound of relief and sorrow intertwined with each other. It was mournful, yet joyful, as if he...no he didn't.