An Inch of Gold

9

This chapter has been beta-read by: Sakura's Unicorn

_____

Naruto doesn't pay attention to where he's going. All that matters is not being anywhere near his wide-eyed teammates, his lying sensei, or the strange girl who knows more about him than he ever did.

How could they keep this from me? How could they not tell me?

It's not only Kakashi or the Third Hokage, either. Iruka would know, and even though he understood what it was like to grow up without parents, he never had the decency to tell Naruto.

Deep within him, Naruto imagines that he hears laughter.

Shut up, you stupid fox, he orders.

You're calling me stupid? That's a bit ironic, the demon sneers. You're the thick-head who couldn't figure out that people were lying to you your whole life.

Naruto freezes.

The fox is right.

This means Granny Tsunade knows...and Shizune...and Pervy Sage, too, I bet. I mean, he said I reminded him of the Fourth, and now I get it. And he never said!

Tears blur his vision which is already useless in the dark and winding passages beneath the ground. Naruto desperately wishes he were in the forest or in the village, where he could see where he was going and disappear into his surroundings. He can't, though, and before long, he's walked himself into a dead end.

Naruto punches the wall in frustration. Not for the first time in his life, he wants to be completely invisible. He wants to be allowed to crawl away and lick his wounds because this hurts.

It does, doesn't it, the fox growls. Wouldn't you like to make them hurt, too?

"Shut up," Naruto whispers, shaking the voice away.

His hero—the legend he looked up to in his dreams, the man he's pretended to be whenever he imagined becoming Hokage—is the same bastard who sealed a demon inside of him. He's the same man who Naruto has hated and cussed out since Mizuki told him the truth.

And he's his father.

"Some father. What kind of sadistic creep does that to his own kid?" Naruto growls, punching the craggy walls again. "Was that what he wanted?" Punch. "For people to hate me?" Punch. "For me to never have friends?" Punch. "For people to lie to me my whole life?" Punch.

Because that's what it amounts to.

His whole life, people looked at him with contempt or fear, and he always did his best to make them see him differently. And now he finally has teachers and teammates who accept him, but it turns out all the people he looks up to were keeping this from him.

"What the hell were you thinking?" he hisses to the darkness, to his absent father—to anyone or anything that will listen.

"Naruto?"

He whirls around, shoulders hunched, half-expecting an attack. Instead, he sees Sakura lingering by the mouth of the tunnel he's wandered into, looking uncertain. In the light of the glow stick in her hand, he notices that her eyes are glassy, and there are smudges trailing through the dirt on her face.

She's been crying.

A moment later, he realises the reason these details are so obvious to him is because of the dark chakra bubbling up inside him. The fox is making his senses more acute, the way it does when his anger gets too strong.