Work Text:
Numbers have always eluded Naruto.
Everyone talks like they can be pinned down, like they're this concrete predictable thing. Like every question has only one possible answer, and it's like all the people around him are in on a secret he can't grasp.
A lot about life is like that. Naruto knows he's dumb, that everyone around him knows stuff that he doesn't.
But when he comes to math he's pretty sure his academy teachers are just lying to him. Or maybe he's just missing something huge again.
Thing is, Naruto knows a bit about life, how the world works. Life is strange, changeable, and always, always out to get you if you don't keep running. In real life there are no straight answers.
Naruto's been buying his own food and clothes, budgeting his own monthly stipend, since he was five years old. So he knows how numbers work, how tricky they are. There's no way of knowing for sure how the stack of cash he gets every month will be split up into tens and fives and ones, how far that money will get him.
At school he is told to add three and five to make eight, that eight and eight makes makes sixteen, and later, that three times five is fifteen, and so on and so forth, and if Naruto doesn’t arrive at these numbers, these exact numbers, then his teachers just look angry or disappointed or sneering and he’s wrong. He doesn’t even get credit for being close.
In real life though, Naruto buys five multipacks of instant ramen at the beginning of the month. They cost nine dollars each and he knows that the total, when the lady at the front of the store tells it to him, could be anything from fifty to seventy five dollars.
In real life, when buys laundry detergent it costs eighteen dollars and when Naruto hands the man at the counter two fives and a ten he says he’s still short three, so Naruto counts out ones: one, two, three, four, and the man tells him to scram.
So Naruto knows that things don’t always add up in predictable ways. There aren’t answers, just ranges, probabilities, and math is guesswork. Numbers are governed by strange forces which Naruto cannot hope to understand and are completely outside his control. But then, of course they are. Isn’t everything?
And at the end of the month, when he’s out of cup ramen and almost out of money, he walks to Ichiraku Ramen with a five in his pocket and ones counted one, two, three. Miso ramen is the cheapest and costs eleven dollars and he knows he can’t have that much, but this is all he has and he’s hungry, so he asks if maybe, could he have half a bowl? And Teuchi looks at the cash and smiles at him, and tells him he must have miscounted, because this adds up to exactly eleven. And Naruto smiles like the sun.