#tammycola

Naruto:

I think a lot about Naruto as a child, and how he pretty clearly wasn’t raised with other children in an orphanage or foster home, or taken in by Root like Sai, and had no adults who took on parental roles.

I’ve come to the conclusion that he may have been EVEN MORE neglected than the canon shows us.

At age twelve he was living alone in a tiny apartment that we can only assume the city paid for, and buying food with money we can only assume the city gave him. He doesn’t seem to have enough money to take himself out to dinner (he is ecstatic at Iruka’s offer), and the only foods we see him with in his own home are (expired) milk and instant ramen, so he clearly doesn’t have much money to spend.

The marks on his face, and the seal on his stomach have been there his whole life, so it wouldn’t have been possible to hide his identity from the citizens Konoha. Anyone in charge of an orphanage wasn’t likely to be comfortable placing the nine-tails Jinchūriki in the same room as other children, for fear of the other children’s safety, and if the general populace heard about such a thing taking place (which they would no doubt perceive as endangering other orphaned kids), they’d probably riot.

The headcanon I’ve come to is that Naruto lived alone pretty much all his life (literally), and the city paid for caretakers to come by and check on him/clean up after him/feed him, etc. but since people were afraid of him, they gave him the absolute bare minimum of care, and interacted with him as little as possible.

Naruto, as an almost entirely unsupervised child, probably accidentally hurt himself a lot, but would heal before anyone showed up to check on him, so they would show up to check on the demon fox child and see unexplainable spots of blood all over the place.

I doubt any individual caretaker kept the job very long, and I bet the ones who quit told people about how creepy he was, which only fueled people’s fear of him.

When he was very young he wouldn’t have been very capable of leaving the apartment on his own, so caretakers would have been his only human interaction. I headcanon that Naruto developed disinhibited reactive attachment disorder (he also developed anxiety and a bunch of other issues that neglect can cause), and sought comfort from literally any human he encountered. He learned that acting out got a reaction while behaving well allowed them to ignore him. 

They’d have to stay longer if there was a mess to clean up, and would leave right away if the apartment was clean, so he learned to make a mess on purpose, because that meant less time that he was alone. Even adult Naruto would get anxiety over his space being too clean, and he would be triggered by anyone cleaning up his space and then immediately leaving.

I don’t think Naruto has any idea just how fucked up his childhood was, because he was so isolated that he doesn’t really understand what a healthy childhood is like.

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I think Jiraiya probably wanted custody of Naruto but Naruto wasn’t allowed to leave the city, because he was the nine-tails Jinchūriki. I think the Third Hokage probably told Jiraiya he couldn’t take Naruto away and Jiraiya, grieving and furious, just left because he couldn’t deal with staying. 

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I also have a headcanon that he invited his whole class to his birthday party every single year, and no one ever showed up. They each figured other people would go so they wouldn’t be missed, and since Naruto never complained afterward they never realized their assumption was wrong. 

Follow this headcanon up with the first year people actually DO show up and Naruto is like “what are you guys doing here?” Someone (Kiba probably): “Uh, you invited us…???” Naruto: “Yeah, but nobody’s ever actually come before.”Everyone: **feels like a jackass because they should.**

Sasuke:

Sasuke is a different story, because he actually had a family until what happened happened, and he was already old enough to be in school. While this obviously doesn’t make him old enough to actually BE independent, ninja culture is fucked up, so they probably concluded that he’d be fine taking care of himself.

I’ve always gotten the impression that the Uchiha family made up a considerable portion of Konoha. They weren’t like the Hyuga’s, with a couple families in a special walled-off compound consisting of a few houses– I got the impression that there was an entire district of Konoha devoted to Uchiha properties and that they made up possibly up to 1/5th of the population. Nobody refers to Shisui as Itachi’scousin, they just refer to him as his best friend. Similarly nobody references Obito as someone Sasuke or Itachi would have necessarily known. The idea of the Uchiha’s potentially turning against the city wasn’t viewed as something that might cause some casualties– it was viewed as an uprising that would probably have succeeded. When the massacre happened, there were bodies everywhere, just littering the streets. There were a LOT of Uchiha’s before Itachi killed them all.The fact that he managed to kill them all was seen as fucking terrifying, BECAUSE there were so many of them.

So I think since Sasuke was the last Uchiha, and therefore likely inherited at minimum an absolutely ridiculous amount of money and property, the powers that be concluded that he could pretty much do whatever he wanted in the Uchiha part of town.

I also think that public opinion of the Uchiha’s at the time was also largely fear– if not because of the suspected uprising, then simply association to the massacre probably caused fear. People didn’t know if Itachi was coming back, or why Sasuke hadn’t been killed. I think the same fears that would have kept Naruto from being welcome in an orphanage probably kept Sasuke out of them too. 

And people in power DID know about the suspected Uchiha uprising, and didn’t know what to expect from Sasuke. 

So I think they basically gave him the key to the Uchiha district (I’m not being literal about the key thing, but I do think the Uchiha part of town is sectioned off from the rest by a literal gate), and let him do whatever he wanted. Which traumatized him even further, since he was now isolated in the neighborhood he’d grown up in, after seeing the corpses of all of his family and neighbors littering the streets he was now stuck, alone, living in. 

I think he probably stayed in his childhood home, because he was a child, and it never really occurred to him that he could live anywhere else. 

I also think that while the city cleaned up the corpses, they probably didn’t do the most thorough job cleaning up the bloodstains, or fixing any property damage caused by people fighting or fleeing. I don’t know if I think that Sasuke would have done any of that cleaning himself, outside his own home. I think he keeps his own home spotless, and it looks almost like no one lives there, because he’s too afraid to change anything.

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