Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of Naruto and Starcraft.

Betas: Michelle T

Chapter 1: Subject N

'Month 9 from Point Zero, progress with Subject N's mental powers stalling. We have run dry of test scenarios. Prime test revealed that using the Yamanaka's mind power to probe the extent of the Kekkai Genkai—which was, for all intents and purposes, a higher tier ability within the same hierarchy—would be… ill-advised. The machines and sensors have exhausted the clues found in the subject's blood and the little biomatter allowed.

Though there are harsher measures… we have seen from trial and error that the subject tends to react with extreme emotion and consequences (appendix 0.1: Ground Zero incident, death toll: 67) when put under pressure. There is time yet for us to touch upon such drastic solutions and, for now, the priority of the project is the physical, mental and emotional safety of the subject. Actual research results, while important, are secondary and if lost or missed, easily reobtained. The subject, on the other hand, are irreplaceable. He must be protected even at the cost of slow progress.

Operating under these parameters, we have hit a wall through which we cannot, at this moment, pass.

This is to be expected and accordingly planned for. There is a limit as to how fast and how much one can learn and discover when dropped into unknown territory, of which Subject N's Kekkei Genkai is a fine example of. We decided to venture to other areas yet unexplored. Ever since the conception of task force Cultivate, questions have been raised about the exact nature of the subject's unique physiology. Correction—questions have been raised ever since the full nature and history of the subject was revealed to the core researcher team.

Subject N. Among the last of the Uzumaki bloodline, which was in itself a scarcely documented line with various offshoots. The bearer of the Kyuubi and blood child of the previous bearer. Again, an undocumented phenomenon.

Additionally, it is doubtless that the activation of the subject's psychic ability created biological markers and alterations within the body, much like the Yamanaka's mind art inducing abnormal growth in various parts of their brains. Postponed test on subject's neural chemical reactions.

We have, insofar, steered clear of invasive medical testing of any kind, in consideration of the trauma subject N has been forced to experience. Any progress in this venture will have to be slow and carefully monitored.

- Document N006 - Subject: N - Task force Cultivate, sub-branch of Root - Director: Danzo Shimura -

Before his fifth birthday, Naruto couldn't remember much of his life. If he concentrated hard enough, he could summon up brief flashes of bright light and a colorful landscape. Trees, lots of trees, and blurry gigantic faces whose names he couldn't recall but knew was important to him carved into sandy colored stone. He remembered vague words. Loud noises. The crackle of fire, the thundering of too many feet stamping the ground at once, walking—no, running, towards him, on him, over him. The shadows in his memory called out to him, reached for him. They had many names for him. Boy, you, brat.. more words, hurtful words, though he could only remember a distant impression of pain so dim he had to think about it for a full minute to recognize it for what it was. The memory was so fleeting—like an ant's bite, gone the second after—that it fled his young mind at once.

For all intents and purposes, his life before he turned five seemed a distant dream, too quickly dispersed upon his awakening.

His first clear memory was waking up inside a tank, floating peacefully amidst cerulean blue water, naked as the day he was born and not at all bothered by it.

He felt good, warm, drowsy. Yet strangely enough, despite his sleepiness, he could feel his surrounding down to every last minute detail.

The water. 38.5 C. Density: 1030 kilogram per cubic meter. Composition: salt water, nutrients, muscle relaxant, mild sedative.

Air. 25.2 C. Density: 1.19 kilogram per cubic meter. Composition: 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% Argon. Chemically sanitized.

He did not stop to wonder how he knew about this. He just did. It felt as natural as breathing to him.

Through the glass, he felt people. Five… no... sixteen. There were more beyond the second layer of walls, observing. He could feel their intention, their curiosity, their hopes, all fixed upon him. It felt like a bad kind of weight.

"... heart rate raising… subject is waking up…" He heard. Lazily he opened his eyes in a sliver, peering with mild curiosity right back at them.

"... brain activity picking up… Do we want him awake?"

Was he awake? Or was this a dream? He wasn't quite so sure. Something… something had changed in his body. He felt something uncurling. And… oh… it felt gooood. Like a big yawn that filled up his head and eardrums.

Red liquid entered the blue water. A pressure touched his eyelids gently. He slept.

The second time he woke up, he was lying near naked on a metal slab with tiny drain holes in its surface. They were so small, but somehow, he felt them there anyway. There was liquid running across his abdomen, down the sides of his torso, pooling where his body met the metal, then ran down through the drain holes. He heard the tell-tale ting-tang-ting of liquid falling into an iron flood pan down below.

There were hands on him, and the cold poke of surgical steel.

"... EEG going up…" He heard before he could even open his eyes. "... ss metabolism rate is adapting to sedative… amazing… no... quicker..."

Then a voice, cold and laden with authority.

"Put him to sleep."

The third time it happened, he was in a proper bed. Not like the thin, thatched straw-filled thing that he could… very vaguely… recall from his ever fading memory, but a proper bed, with stuffed bedding and blankets and more pillows and throws than he knew what to do with. There was even a fuzzy brown teddy bear with a white fuzzy belly and purple tie sitting against the wall to his right side. Its plastic button eyes pinned him.

He sat up in a daze and looked about the room he was in.

It was big. Bigger than… he racked his brain. His memory was failing him. He got only the impression that he had known only one other thing as big as this room was, but wasn't sure what. Any way, it was Big, with a capital B.

A little tap startled him and he turned up to see a woman in a nurse uniform looking down, plastic clipboard file in hand. Dull brown hair and clear plexi glasses on her face.

"Good morning," she said conversationally. "How are you feeling?" Quicker than he could react, she turned his face up with her free hand, and when he opened his mouth to say something, pushed a glass thermometer in. He closed his mouth with a snap, momentarily surprised into inaction.

"Keep it closed boy. There's a good boy. You can talk around a closed mouth can't you? Now tell me, how are you feeling?"

"... mmhmm... okay."

"Nothing strange? Do you have aches anywhere? Sores? Thirsty? Hungry?"

Now that he thought about it, he did feel a tiny bit peckish.

"Breakfast will be served in half an hour," she said, as if she could see the thoughts clearly on his face. But the thing was, there was no clock in the room, and the nurse herself wore no watches that he could immediately see.

"Where am I?" He asked around the thermometer.

"You are home," she replied matter-of-factly. Then she counted with one hand, folding her fingers one at a time. At five, she pulled the thermometer from his mouth, read it in silence then pocketed it without telling him a single thing.

As the nurse scribbled on her file, Naruto opened his mouth, then closed it. He could have sworn she was wrong. This wasn't… home. He couldn't remember what his home was, but he was sure this wasn't it. Problem was, when he reached deeper, he summoned up nothing but emptiness where memories of this 'home' should be. Even the word she used… 'eighh-oh-mm-eee'... sounded foreign. As if Naruto himself wasn't used to throwing around that word so casually.

Either way, without anything concrete to put to words, he had no other choice but to stay quiet.

In front of him, the nurse seemed to have finished writing because her eyes went from her clipboard to him. Her hand followed and before he could even blink, she had torn off the medical monitoring patches and cords attached to his temples, arms, and wrists.

"You won't be needing this," she said by way of explaining, holding a fisful of white plastic cords in her hand. "Your readings are all normal."

At the end of that sentence, he got the feeling that there was something else she wasn't telling him.

"Who are you?"

"I am your nurse. More than that you do not need to know." She answered without so much as a pause.

He frowned.

"Why am I here?"

"Where else would you be but here?" There was an edge to her voice now and suddenly Naruto wanted to shout or… jump up and do something. The urge came to him almost like an ingrained habit, which was strange since he had no recollection of how he had been before. It felt as if there was a veil in his head, thick and translucent. It obstructed him from his own memories, but at the same time left him aware enough to know that there things he could not recall.

"The director will see you after breakfast," she said, then almost as an after thought, added. "Eat well. Your body needs it."

Then she left leaving him alone in the room. As she crossed the threshold—steel reinforced concrete door, he noted, one feet thick, opened and closed with hybrid mechanical hydraulic press—he entertained thoughts of running pass her and to the outside. It would be easy, he felt. His body felt light and buoyant, bursting with momentum. He felt capable in a way he had never felt before.

But then after that door, he hadn't a clue what he would do. So he stayed put and waited for breakfast.

He ate heartily. He hadn't even known he was that hungry until his senses registered the food brought in on a three deck trolley. And then all of a sudden he was starving.

The labcoat duos that brought the trolley in laid out a veritable feast on a collapsible table. He descended on the food without a word to them, couldn't even wait for them to finish.

It took another hour after they left for the door to open again, and this time, an old man came in. This one had one arm in a sling, or perhaps that was not an arm, but a stump. From his spot at the door, he fixed Naruto with his one good eye. And when he spoke, it was with the voice that had so coldly ordered for him to be put to sleep.

The twentieth day of month ten marks incident Itohara (see appendix Itohara record number SN-2215), named after the substitute psychiatrist in charge of the subject's psych eval session for the day. It seemed the protocols for security-screened personnel have been breached because Itohara, instead of working on subject N's pervading mental trauma, actually proceeded to further provoke him.

The result was the complete destruction of underground facility A2O, the loss of nine staff members on hand—including Itohara himself—and a significant portion of unsaved research data. Adjacent facilities are thankfully spared due to the use of isolation fuuinjutsu. The subject himself was safely retrieved from the rubble though he lost the use of his arms and legs for the subsequent month.

This proved to neither be the first nor the last of similar, though of smaller scales, incidents.

Under these new conditions, director Danzo Shimura has sought approval from the Hokage himself to repeal the non-invasive barrier to testing of the subject's ability. Our number one priority remains the subject's physical and mental health, of course. However, control of the subject's power is of equal importance.

The director's reasoning is only one.

Subject N's power is too volatile for soft containment. As it was, subject N is a danger not only to the people around him, but also himself.

Of course, as a ninja village, we have seen our fair shares of bearers of first generation kekkei genkai, but to say that they were anything like the force at the subject's whims is to catastrophically underestimate Subject N's power. Its sheer potential for destruction is unparalleled. It cannot be evaded and it cannot be countered.

Imagine a child of no more than six years capable of commanding the death god with a mere thought. He kills and maims with his mind. There are no warnings. Attacks can happen in the blink of an eye. Counters are incredibly difficult to execute even for veteran battle specialists. The fact that the kekkei genkai is wholly subjected to his emotions make it even worse. Even the smallest tilt of his emotional state towards the negative spectrum is enough to set it off.

If he's hungry, someone will bleed. If he feels neglected, something will break. If he's scared or angry, as Itohara himself found out the hard way, someone will die. He does not mean to as far as we are able to discern, but he is no master of his own power. The drain on task-force resources and personnel is… significant. More importantly however, is the fact that the subject's power is a danger to himself. He can keep his power from hurting himself no more than he can keep it from hurting the people around him.

Itohara's attack not only demonstrated the danger of mishandling the subject, but also reversed most if not all, of our progress on stabilizing the subject's mentality. To the date of this document, the subject remains deeply traumatized by the event and is deemed too dangerous for close contact handling. He has, since the incidence, been locked inside a secret underground vault built during the first Ninja world war.

Further direct handling can only be carried out once he has been chemically sedated. We are concerned about the potential long-term harm to the subject's psychological status if his sedation continues but there is no other safe alternative. We must make do until a method to control or at least redirect his power is created. At the time this document is written, another branch of the task force is already pouring resources into researching feasible safety mechanisms that can temporarily block his power based on the Yamanaka mind technique principles.

- Document N009 - Subject: N - Task force Cultivate, sub-branch of Root - Director: Danzo Shimura -

The old man with the cold eye introduced himself as Danzo. He called Naruto, 'child'. The sound of it was strange, the word pointed and weighted with pressure, as if there was a second meaning underneath the first.

"I have something for you," said Danzo as he put a translucent glass tube the size of a finger on the table between them. Inside the tube, a glowing green liquid sloshed around. Its movement was hypnotic, beckoning to the eyes.

"What is that?"

"Your memories."

He snapped his gaze up to look at Danzo in surprise.

"You are wondering why you can't remember anything before this room? It is because your memories are suppressed." Slowly and so very casually, Danzo lifted his good hand and made a knocking motion against his temple. "The human brain is vast and mysterious but there are certain pockets where memories are stored. With knowledge of their locations and certain chemicals, such places can be closed off, locked away. And this…"

He made a spreading motion with one hand at the green glass tube. "... is the key to that locked gate of your past. You need only drink it."

Naruto reached for the tube, but before his hand made contact, another hand closed around his wrist, stopping him cold.

"Knowledge is pain," Danzo fixed him with a cold look, one good eye boring deep into his face. It felt as if Naruto was being picked apart under the weight of his gaze. "Truth has its price. Will you pay the toll in full? Can you endure the grief of knowing? There is a reason why you are here and why your memories must be suppressed."

He released Naruto's hand then and sat back to watch him in silence.

Now effectively cowed, Naruto eyed Danzo and the tube warily.

"What will happen when I drink it?"

"You will remember," Danzo said simply.

"And then?"

"Depending on how you remember, I will decide what happens."

Again, that second layer of weight, of pressure.

"That doesn't sound like a decision an adult should leave to a kid like me," he hedged cautiously, to which Danzo merely smiled.

"Your brain structure has developed far past that of a six years old child. There is no sense in treating you like an infant that can not reason for himself. The fact that you can even ask that question is enough proof of your capability to decide your fate for yourself. Now, make your choice. Will you drink, or will you not?"

The silent question that Danzo did not voice out loud was, 'Will you submit? Or will you demand answers first?'

He reached for the hazy memories in his head, put his hands deep into the veil that kept them from him. He heard buzzes, whispers, the spike of dimmed noises in the distance. What happened? He wanted to know. What was there before this big white room and its vast emptiness?

When he tried to reach deeper inside, he could only feel a bottomless hollow. Without his memories, he was empty.

Tentatively he reached for the tube for the second time. The material was cool and smooth to the touch. He felt the slightest prickle of the low temperature inside.

7 C degree, his mind informed him. Density: 1130 kilogram per cubic meter, slightly more than pure water. It appeared it had just been taken from a chemical freezer somewhere.

He picked it up, uncapped it. Tiny motes of green light escaped from the surface of the liquid inside. He glanced at Danzo once again to check but the old man's face was completely impassive.

He brought the tube to his mouth with two trembling hands.

Danzo said there would be pain. What did he do? What happened in his blank memories? What were the muted voices in his head saying? But he wanted to know so so badly.

He tilted the tube and let the green liquid flowed into his mouth.

.

.

.

The pain descended before the memories, sharp, visceral, like the points of a thousand needles in his eyeballs. The liquid slithered down his throat. He must have screamed but he couldn't hear himself over the roar that came from a thousand voices all of a sudden no longer muffled and chained into the back of his mind.

His memories grasped him in a choke hold.

First, he saw the people. They screamed so loudly he couldn't help but notice. The orphanage, the other kids, the adults, the people in the town square that day where the light went out of his head.

He remembered the light, remembered having it all of a sudden one day when he woke up on the forest floor after an aborted attempt to run away from the orphanage matron with the hard grip. He remembered having it inside his own head for days as he felt more and more out of sorts, like he wasn't fitting right in his own skin. Then the town square happened, when that arsehole of a merchant threw him off the food cart and he landed so hard his elbows and arms got scrubbed and bled and then the light… went out of him. It had felt like a yawn, like pressure fizzling out through his ears, like something unfurling from his mind, reflexive and it felt so so good. And then all of a sudden their heads came apart. Like… plop. And then afterwards, complete chaos.

He remembered talking to… ah… the old man Hokage. Now he remembered him. How could he have forgotten him in the first place?

He couldn't make senses of the things that happened after because now that the light was no longer confined inside of him, it felt like his brain was sloshing around inside his own skull. Like somebody had liquified the inside of his head and was now reforming it anew with torturous leisure.

They took him somewhere, out of the orphanage. They took him underground. He was too weak and too out of it to put up much of a fight. Either way, they didn't hurt him, so he didn't really protest all that hard.

One day he woke up and suddenly he could hear the nurse three doors down the corridor thinking about the flower pot back in her apartment… and the cat she might have forgotten to feed. He felt her anxiety and her idle wish to get back home to Mrs. Bushy Tail as soon as her shift ended. He missed the smooth expanse of her ginger fur and the warm, vibrating purr she let out whenever he held her close, ran his hand through her head, fed her, watched her as she ate with adoration.

Then he broke out of it and didn't know what to feel. Embarrassment… for having intruded into someone's head… or the hunger for more. For how little of his life he had gone through, he had almost always been alone. He had only known the orphanage and the cold gaze of those around him. The nurse's love for her cat, a love that was fully reciprocated by the furry animal, was a strange and wondrous thing to him.

He started seeing things through other people's eyes, knowing things he didn't know before, without anyone teaching him or showing him in the first place. The light—whatever it was—was always with him, a constant force in the back of his eyes. It wasn't all bad. Most of the time, he could only hear the muted thoughts and sensations like fine caresses against the confines of his own consciousness. Only the extreme emotion in those who didn't yet know how to contain it safely inside their own heads proved a problem.

He started getting used to life underground. It wasn't fun of course, seeing that there was no playground, and he never got to see the sun for long until somebody, one of the care takers, came to pull him down underground again, but at least it wasn't filled with hateful people and their painful touches. He was cared for, fed, and watched over. In the evening, a man they called head doctor talked to him in soothing, soft words. It calmed him, calmed the tumult of the day where the light ran free from his head—and that, Naruto found, wasn't something he would object to.

Whereas before he had to fight tooth and claw for a modicum of acknowledgement from the few people unfortunate enough to be forced to share his space, now he had the constant attention of an entire enclave of people. He had no reason to leave.

A year he spent in the care of the underground people. He remembered that with a jolt. He was not five years old, he was six. He had simply forgotten the year before his memory was locked away. And the incident that prompted this change.

Pain, sharp and visceral, blossomed in red flowers in his vision. It came with a face. Hard and edged, like a block of stone hewn into the face of a man rather than the soft, fleshly feature of a living, breathing human. The man who replaced the normal head doctor, on that day,was like a walking volcano of extreme hatred and bitterness. It seethed off of him, hung around him like a burning shroud. And he had pounced on Naruto, pounced on him with words neither soft nor soothing, and from his mind he pulled the painful memories of the day the light went free.

That was the first time Naruto discovered he could do a lot more than just peek a little into people's mind. The light leaped out from the confines of his mind in self preservation. The first thing that broke was the glass cabinet at the back of the room. After that, many other things, including the head doctor replacement himself.

The man was dead before he could even blink. In silence, he… came apart. The light parted him with the ease of a child tearing a paper toy into two. No sound except for a quiet chain of pop-pop-pop and the muted, wet splatters of liquid and organs hitting the floor. The head went first, then the bones. The blood vessels exploded and gushed a red fountain.

The man was dead but the damage was already done. From the depth of his mind, the consciousness and memories of the people he had killed that day in the town square came forth.

The first time it happened he had still been… relatively… new. The people that died that day died slowly, in pain and terror, watching helplessly as one by one the people around them were broken by a force seen only by Naruto. He had remembered every single one of them, had felt their agony and despair as life fled from their empty husks, had felt the sensation of death approaching. Their combined suffering became a storm, a loop that locked him in and fed upon his light. He was too young and too inexperienced to know how to shield himself.

That day, an abyss was dug into his own mind, one where at the bottom lay the pain and madness of 67 dead souls and a hundred others who had been maimed in the process. In self preservation, Naruto had put a lid on it. It was the reason why he had been so out of it as they brought him to the Sandaime. But the lid was makeshift and hasty, a product of a child's self preservation instinct rather than a solid construct that could withstood the test of time and mental attacks.

As the room itself collapsed down upon him and the dead head doctor replacement, quietly he realized that the lid was gone, blown apart by the carelessly cruel words of a single man and in its absence, there was nothing to stop him from falling down the abyss.

As he lay in the darkness of the collapsed room, in pain and terror, he felt himself slowly slipping into insanity.

.

.

.

"Make it… make it.. stop…", he heard himself sobbed the words through a mouthful of blood. As he came slowly into consciousness, he registered the battered room around him. The immaculately white room was no more. The floor has been torn up in huge patches. In the walls, the indentations like the shape of a giant fists. Even the vault door didn't get out unscathed. The bed where he had been sitting on was a heap of rubbles beneath him and the machines messy tangles of metal and wires. And it was not stopping. All around him, the room vibrated with barely suppressed force. The vault door shook ominously. Two ton steel-reinforced concrete door and it shook like a leaf in the autumn wind.

Amidst this panorama of destruction, Danzo stood curiously unharmed.

"Please… please make it stop", he curled in around himself as his mind slowly went mad from the trauma freshly awoken from his mind. "I dont want this… Take this memory away. I don't need it..."

In reply, Danzo sat down next to him and, with poise and calm that looked completely out of place, put a second vial in front of Naruto's face.

Without needing a word of explanation from the old man, he grasped the vial with shaking hands and downed it in one gulp.

The safety mechanism created by the sub-branch of Task force Cultivate was a prototype, the first of its kind. Developed on the basis of the Yamanaka's mental jutsu suppressing chemical, used mostly to detain rouge members of the clan, it was deemed too dangerous to use on any one but subject N. The sheer toxicity of the chemical cocktail, especially when mixed with the memory release drug, would have been fatal to normal humans as live subject testing has proven. It is only temporary as the subject's sheer regenerative power outstrips its potential for destruction.

But it worked. Even when it had to be supplemented with warding seals on the person of Director Danzo Shimura in its first live testing, it worked. The next step then is to perfect it into a training tool to cultivate and further our research into the subject's power and potential… and… if needs be, a control tool to be applied on the subject for the good of the village.

- Document N012 - Subject: N - Task force Cultivate, sub-branch of Root - Director: Danzo Shimura -

End Chapter 1

1. Now I'm going to hop to writing the new chapter of Tis Femina. See you soon!

2. Written for sheer curiosity and somewhat as an exercise in world building. This fic is going to be very… not like other fics of similar premises. Just saying….