A/N- There may be character deaths later on in the story, I haven't decided yet and there may be pairing. If there are any pairings it will be either Gaara/Naru or Sasu/Naru but again I havent decided yet. Just thought I'd warn people now. ^^

A person lay lifeless on the floor in front of me, blood leaking out of him sluggishly, staining the ground red. I was staring down at it. I don't know why but it held me, the body's dull eyes staring up at me. The face twisted into a look of horror and agony. The torso ripped up with wounds. I think I was in shock, frozen staring into his eyes. A sharp pain went through the back of my skull and then suddenly I was running, fear and adrenaline pumping through me. A trickle of blood ran down my face into my eye, my mouth. I tasted the sweet metallic taste and spat, shaking my head trying to get it out of my vision. A hand grabbed me from behind and pulled me to the ground.

I should have been panicking. I'd been beaten to the point where I could no longer move. Just lying on the floor waiting for my fate, feeling the cold hard ground against my face. The sound of screams reached me but I felt numb to them, like they had nothing to do with me. I could hear words being shouted, but they made no sense. Just that piercing scream that slices through a person, echoed around my head. A metallic 'SLICK' cut off the scream. There was a soft thud and the scent of fresh blood reached me. I know I should have been upset, terrified even by what had happened but I wasn't. It felt like a dream. Like in a moment someone would wake me up saying everything was alright. But it wasn't alright. No-one would help me, no-one could and I had resigned myself to that fact.

And that was my earliest memory.

Gaara awoke in his cell. He hated having that dream. It felt like it was trying to drag up emotions that had long since been destroyed and it just bugged him. He sat up on his bunk and tried to remember more of it. He had no idea who the dead man had been or the person who had been screaming. He didn't even know why he had been there or where he had been going. That section of memory was the only thing he could ever remember. Every other thought or memory from before that moment had been taken from him, erased. He didn't know if he had a family or what they were like, he didn't know how he used to act before being brought here. All he knew was what happened here, the place he had been taken to the night of that incident.

He flopped back down on the bed and looked around. He could see some of the other children in the cells either side of him, still sound asleep. There was always nine children altogether. At the moment there were some older and some younger than Gaara. The older ones were the ones that had survived the longest. Every time one of them died, a new child was brought in. But no one had died lately. The children all had their different strengths but they were all evenly matched when put against each other. They'd all had the same training. Tests in strength, intelligence and accuracy. You learnt quickly here, if you didn't understand something or you got it wrong you were beaten. Sometimes even to the point of death. So it became a survival instinct to learn.

Some people didn't get that though. He looked over at the cell to his right; the child sleeping there had just been beaten this morning. His arm hung over the bunk, so Gaara could see some of the bruises and cuts that were healing. He wasn't the brightest of the bunch and was always getting the intelligence testing wrong. But even so, he was one of the strongest of the group so the scientists hadn't given up on him yet.

But before even this type of training, your strength was determined in your first year here .The first year here is an intense 'training' system, when the real testing was done. This was when they got inside your head to see if you were compatible with whatever they were doing. They changed you from the inside. Gaara still after all these years didn't know what this was all for. He'd been told once, "You have a purpose. We're making you better." When he had asked what the purpose was he had been laughed at and the reply had been, "You're not ready to know yet. You're not complete." It had confused him at the time, but he didn't care anymore, not that he had a choice in that matter.

Gaara realised he'd been staring into the other cell all the time he had been thinking. A bright blue eye was staring back at him. He looked away quickly pretending he hadn't done anything but he could see out of the corner of his eye that the other boy had sat up. "Hey, Gaara? What are you doing up?" Gaara looked back to see the boy looking at him in tired confusion, his blonde hair sticking up everywhere.

"I'm not doing anything." Gaara replied curtly. It was strange, most of the children had been here for years but they never spoke to each other. It probably had something to do with the fact that every week or so they were made to fight each other. That's how most of the children had been killed, either by another child or by not wanting to participate. If you tried not to fight you were killed, so the children had to do it. Because of this the children didn't exactly trust each other.

The other boy frowned and jumped down from his bunk. He walked over to the barred wall that separated his and Gaara's cells. "No need to be like that. I was just asking." He pouted. "We never get to talk in the daytime, so I thought as we were both awake we could now." He grinned up at Gaara. "It gets so boring here, not talking don't you think?"

Gaara blinked at him. "I don't find it boring." He saw the other boy's face fall and sighed. "But fine, I'll talk to you, I've got nothing better to do." He was a little bit curious as to what the other guy wanted to talk about. He got up and went over to the bars separating them as well and they both sat down.

The other boy grinned again; it was a very mischievous grin, like he was planning something. The grin slipped slightly when he realised he didn't have anything to say. He couldn't ask what Gaara did in his spare time because they didn't have any and there was no concept of 'fun' here. So he said the first thing that popped into his head. "So, if we're talking like this, does it make us friends?"

Gaara snorted and looked away. "Friends? What's the point? We could be at each other's throats tomorrow for all we know." The fights were randomly selected beforehand, none of the children ever knew who they were fighting until a few moments before the fight. Gaara had fought the boy before him many times. Gaara always seemed to have an advantage at the beginning of the fights but the boy would always stand up again after every hit. He would never stay down or give up a fight so the fights had always ended when they had both been knocked out.

The boy frowned again. His face was always animated with one emotion or another unlike Gaara who didn't show any emotion, mostly because he didn't have much emotion to show. "Does that matter? Friends fight don't they?" He looked confused, he'd never had a friend so he didn't know how they behaved.

Gaara looked back at the boy and tilted his head also confused. How did friends act? He growled after awhile and gave up. "How should I know?" He said shrugging.

The boy grinned. "Well, in our friendship, friends can fight, ok? We'll make up other stuff as we go along, yeah? Yeah?" Gaara sighed. Damn, this guy was persistent.

Gaara smirked slightly. "Fine." For some reason this boy brought a slight smile to his face, which was odd as Gaara never smiled.

The boy beamed at him. "So, we're friends now, Gaara?"

"Yeah, we're friends, Naruto." Gaara felt strange calling the other boy by his name, he wasn't used to talking to people like this.

The mischievous grin was back on Naruto's face. "As we are now friends, I think we should do something together."

"Like what?"

"I think we should play a prank."