What Shikamaru appreciated most about his soulmate was the honesty. Most people operated under the misconception that Naruto was just too dumb to be anything but honest and after a lot of years feeling angry on his partner 's behalf Shikamaru had eventually managed to settle in to a pitying sort of amusement that so many of them still didn 't get it. Naruto wasn 't the smartest man in the village, sure, but he was far from the dumbest and he knew better than most the advantage of being underestimated. If people wanted to think he was stupid then he would let them, entirely unbothered by such mild opinions after a lifetime of suffering worse.

The truth was that Naruto was honest because he chose to be, that he was a good man with a steady set of morals he refused to budge on, and that was something Shikamaru greatly admired in a world of shinobi who bent their morals whenever the mission or the paycheck demanded it.