Influence and charisma
Naruto would freely admit he wasn’t the most observant person in the world, usually he didn’t care. No-one ever paid much attention to him, why should he bother paying attention to them. Especially when so much of himself was taken up just trying to get them to look at him, because so few people ever did, they looked past him, or through him, or over him, but they never looked at him. Sometimes, in darker moments he wondered if he was even real, if someone who no-one really saw, could really count as a person.
He didn’t let himself think like that too often. It only made him miserable, and he couldn’t pull off the cool brooding look the way Sasuke bastard could. It was much easier to just take out his frustrations on the village as a whole by wreaking merry havoc on all their lives. At least when they were shouting at him for pranking them they were shouting at him. Admittedly not at his most socially acceptable behaviours but still, it was about something he’d done, and enjoyed, not… whatever it was that made people turn away when he tried to speak to them, and usher their children away when he tried to play. He didn’t know what that was about but he didn’t like it.
He wasn’t the most observant person in the world, so it was odd, the way he’d started to notice one of the younger kids at the orphanage. Sawada Tsunayoshi his name was, and Naruto had first started to notice him after he’d fallen in the river and nearly drowned, which admittedly was the sort of thing that did draw attention.
It was more than that though. Maybe it was the way that after that Tsuna had changed in ways that were hard to describe. Sometimes, it felt like he was as lonely as Naruto himself was. He’d never been an especially sociable child but after the river the look in his eyes… well Naruto hadn’t seen it outside the mirror, or the faces of a few of the more broken adult shinobi.
Part of him had almost wanted to approach Tsuna, had thought that maybe if they were lonely together it might not hurt so much. But then he’d started at the Ninja academy and his life had suddenly been busier than it had ever been. There had been a thousand and one things to learn and none of it came easy. His teachers didn’t want to help, and his classmates avoided him, and it took everything he had just trying to keep up, and somehow in the busy chaos that had taken over his life the thought of a small boy with eyes as lonely as his had been pushed to the back of his mind.
And then that mess with Hibachi had happened and Naruto’s enthusiasm for making friends had taken a heavy hit. By the time he’d been willing to take a risk on people again, Tsuna had started the academy himself, and the loneliness in his eyes had vanished. Tsuna had friends now, good ones. There was Shikamaru’s cousin Hayato, who once managed to blow up his classroom so spectacularly that it caused structural damage to the whole academy and everyone had ended up having to take their lessons outside for a week. There was Takeshi who was better with a sword than the final year students, and Ryouhei who was louder than Naruto himself, and Ryouhei’s twin sister Kyouko who was the prettiest girl in her year. Not as pretty as Sakura chan of course but still very pretty. There were others too, lots of others, Tsuna’s whole year seemed to love him. Naruto told himself he wasn’t jealous. How could it be so easy for Tsuna to banish that loneliness that still echoed back at Naruto whenever he looked in a mirror. Tsuna’s friends were always having fun and causing trouble together. They were always there to support each other and Naruto wanted.
If he’d known it would be that easy he’d have started wanting like that a long time ago. Not that he hadn’t wanted before of course, but it wasn’t until he’d seen Tsuna show how it was done that he’d wanted in that particular impossible to describe way that seemed to draw people to him. He didn’t know exactly how it worked and he wasn’t quite stupid enough to ask an adult but it worked. He’d wanted, and gradually, over time his classmates had stopped hating him, had stopped ignoring him, had actually laughed when he played his pranks. If he hadn’t seen Tsuna do it he would have thought it was just because they were getting used to him. But it was more than that. He knew that, somehow, without words or reason.
He wasn’t the class idol the way Tsuna was, but the way the social structure of his class shaped itself around him, the way his behaviour formed the keystone of all of their interactions, that was more like Tsuna’s effect than most people could see. They might not all like him, but every one of them saw him. At the academy at least he was never invisible. It wasn’t like Tsuna’s tight knit friendships and wild popularity, but as time went by and he became an integral part of his class rather than just the outsider, he started to gain friends of his own, Kiba who would pull pranks with him, Chouji who would share his lunch with him, Shikamaru who would sigh and say troublesome before explaining Naruto’s homework, Shino who always looked to him first when it came time to do groupwork. As that happened he found that he was less and less jealous of what Tsuna had and more hopeful of what he could have for himself.
He might have tried to approach Tsuna at that point, but whenever he mentioned him Shikamaru started twitching, and muttering about cults, and evil cousins, and then Chouji would give Naruto a look for setting him off, and it just never seemed to be worth upsetting the status quo. Not when Tsuna looked perfectly happy where he was, and Naruto was getting there.