He didn't always understand just why people reacted to his presence like that. He hadn't done anything bad. He was a good boy. He never got into things that he was told to stay out of; he didn't start fights with the other children, and when he did, he always told the adults what, exactly, had happened. It didn't matter, nothing he did ever mattered. He got into trouble with them anyway.
He briefly wondered if it was because he didn't have any family. Maybe that was the reason why everyone hated him. But no, after his classmate, Sasuke, became an orphan too people didn't hate him. They treated him with even more love and respect than they had before.
When Naruto first heard that Sasuke was just like him, at least in regards to his family (as in, not having one), he was happy.
There was someone else just like him! Maybe they could be friends, and do things together...or even share an apartment! They could be each other's brother. They could be happy and ignore the hatred of the village together.
But...
But that didn't happen. The village didn't hate Sasuke like they did Naruto. No, they loved the little Uchiha more because he didn't have anyone at home.
This confused Naruto even more than getting punished for something that he hadn't even been near when it had gone wrong. If the village hated him because he didn't have a family to go home to, then did that mean that there was a different reason for why they treated him like that?
He didn't understand, and he was a little afraid to even try to understand.
Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was something one of his parents had done to the village. Maybe he was the spawn of some horrible person who had done the village a great wrong.
But...
Didn't they teach in class that you shouldn't treat people badly because their parents were bad? Didn't they say that each person was responsible for their own actions, not someone else's? Hadn't the teacher said that it was wrong to judge someone by their family's deeds? (The teacher had looked over at Sasuke when he had said this, not that many in the room realized it.)
When he had gone home from school that day, he had walked brightly. That meant that even if his family had done something wrong, the village wouldn't hate him for it! He had paused at the threshold of the apartment as that thought completed its way through his mind.
Did that mean that they hated him for some other reason?
Naruto didn't understand.
How could he? He was only 7 years old. Who could expect a 7 year-old to understand something as complex as an entire village hating his very existence for something that had happened moments after he had been born. For something that he didn't even know about.
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Story notes: I wondered...
Chapter end notes: Just something to think about.