Ah. Feels so strange. I was almost dead for a while back there. I still am, actually. Like an internet connection whose pings went up to 6000, I'm uploading like a snail. Sigh.

It was amusing to see just how far its reach had extended to over the course of a few hours.

Of course, its container, prison, nuisance-from-the-seventh-hell, so have you, was in mortal peril, but that wasn't something new. It seemed to be something that one just took for granted where the kid was involved. Might as well do something useful instead of aimlessly pacing around, it decided.

'Something useful' turned out to be making little orbs of orange chakra appear on the boy's side of his mindscape and making them dance around his downcast head in dainty little circles.

The boy, too, was acting slightly out of sorts. Compared to the last time he had ended up in this unfortunately shared living space, he was rather quieted down. Where usually the place would be akin to a tennis court, with the cage an all encompassing net, it felt like a hospital waiting room then. But the pinpoints of energy changed that.

The little human would swat at the orange chakra spheres occasionally, scowling, sometimes screaming at the fox to keep 'them balls' where he couldn't see them, but the fox was just a demon like that and it wouldn't stop unless it wanted to.

As it happened, it didn't want to.

And so the dance of the merry chakra-balls went on.

It must have gotten to the brat because he rose up a few seconds later. "Stop it! Just because you can do it doesn't mean you need to!" he raged, trying to pummel the balls into oblivion. Of course, since they were made of chakra it was a fruitless endeavour to begin with, but rage has its way of screwing with your head.

The demon, unremorseful as ever, kept lifting the targets higher until the child would jump as high as he could and still not reach them. The victim, unrelenting in his quest for vengeance, kept jumping with shouts of frustration and anger.

"Gotcha!"

A fist of his hit one of the orbs and the fox was momentarily surprised to feel the blow as if it had landed on its own person, until it recalled the two-way nature of the seals' unravelling.

Naruto was getting a little too enthusiastic and happy with his apparent victory, so the fox let the whole exercise go as a lost cause.

There was a slight pause where Naruto warily looked around for any other surprises, but after a while of silence he sat down with a huff and folded his arms.

This was perhaps the umpteenth period of silence the two had observed together, silence reigning over the mindscape of the unsilence-able.

The fox noted with minute curiosity that the everpresent sounds of falling droplets were gone, and the water that usually stayed on the floor had vanished as well. It hadn't registered earlier, strangely. Not to mention that the floor did not seem so hard anymore.

"Hey, how'd you do that, anyways?" Naruto asked.

The kyuubi gave its addressee a passing glance before staring back into nothing; Naruto wasn't looking at the demon either, so why bother?

"Showing me those things?" The human continued.

"In my head? All those memories?"

Again, the fox looked at the boy speculatively, then resumed staring at the wall. It just didn't feel like answering, though it didn't know why. For that matter, it didn't know why it had shown all that to the boy in the first place. Neither did it feel any particular hints of anger, or laziness, or frustration... Just an uncomfortable compromise between all three.

It just wanted to curl into a ball and sit there silently for eternity. That wasn't something that was unexpected; the demon was quite lethargic and it knew itself to be so, but coupled with that desire was one to piss off the boy as much as possible.

It was a first in the bijuu's long life to actually want to aggravate someone. Kill and maim or destroy, yes, that was understandable. This, however, wasn't.

It had never thought it could be so petty.

The question deserved an answer though.

"Chakra."

There. Question answered. Now go away... Oh wait. You can't, sadly.

It looked up to the frustrated looking monkey and saw him wording another question.

"And that thing with my eyes?"

"Chakra," the fox muttered, saying it like it was the most obvious thing in the world and Naruto should have been ashamed of even asking. It even thought of rolling its eyes, but couldn't muster up the energy.

"...And why do you hate hate?"

"Chak-"

Oh wait, that wasn't chakra.

The fox harrumphed, the child guffawed. And the loser of that particular verbal spar grumbled in a 'you did not win the war' way.

It then busied itself in staring at anything but the only other conscious being in the vicinity, while the boy stared unabashed. Naruto had cupped his face in his arms and was sitting in a posture even the fox could say was going to destroy his spine with time, if not for bijuu regeneration. Or the fact that this was all just in a mindscape.

It was at times like these that the kyuubi cursed it's own existence as a demon; Oh, the power and knowledge that came with being one was more than worth it, but there was so much more to being one of the nine than just that. A little talent that the Kyuubi had inherited - like a bloodline, or a chakraline to be exact; all bijuu had gotten at least one - had been the ability to read intent like an open book.

To be specific, all negative intent.

Which led to all kinds of bad things happening immediately after. For a time the fox could still remember, humanity had feared the nine-tails more than any force alive. Everything that had come before, including the parent of all bijuu's, could be reasoned with to some extent. Not the Fox, though, no. It's drive to destroy the sources of malice that it could feel all the time was like an obsessive compulsion, something without which the demon could not rest in peace.

It took a lot of time for the fox to grow out of it, to put a clamp on the urges and live somewhat in peace with the environment.

And then the Sage's broods had found it. And ever since then it had been one host after another, a horde of humans to dodge and escape from. A damned shame for someone existing from so long ago.

Point being that the fox knew when someone felt unkindly to anyone else. And Naruto did not give any such vibes at all now. In the beginning, yes. Horribly so. And then it had felt so good to terrorize the child into feeling afraid. But now he was unnervingly... nice. The usual rules of intimidation did not apply anymore, and the fox did not appreciate the kid putting it out of its element.

"Why won't you tell me anything?" the boy whined.

What the Kyuubi would've done, had it been completely at ease, was gracefully chew Naruto out and demean him with something regarding his being a brat, but now...

"Screw you," the euphemism dropped out before the demon could even think about it.

Naruto blinked, stunned. He raised an eyebrow and eloquently said "Huh?"

The fox just dropped its face on a tail.

Screw you? Really?

Naruto got up and walked to the bars of the cage, gripping them and leaning his head in. Very comfortably in biting distance. His face looked even more unfamiliar, with wide eyes and quirked eyebrows, and the fox was reminded of humans peering into a cage at a zoo.

"You okay?" Naruto asked.

"Get. Back. From the cage," the prisoner growled, to the further lifting of human eyebrows.

The demon regretted it as soon as the words were out of its mouth, because it knew that now Naruto would keep asking the same question over and over again. And the only thing to stop it would be to answer them. Or flick Naruto out of the corridor with a chakra whip. Which was something that should be tried and practised, just in case.

But to the demon's relatively gob-smacking surprise, Naruto drew back and sat back down. Without a word.

"Well, I'll be," the behemoth grudgingly muttered.

"What?"

"You'd said that talking was a good thing. But you did not talk," the demon said, and there was a very slight tone of awe to the words.

"Yeah. I'm starting to figure you out, you know. You can't seem to leave things when they don't act normal. And you always say something when someone pisses you off," the brat said smugly.

"Oh! And you also have this habit of throwing your head on your tails, and I think it means that you're open to conversation, and then when you put your head on your paws instead it means you're just gonna stare at things and grunt alot..."

For a moment, the fox felt quite uncharacteristically affectionate. Then it remembered itself promptly when the child did not stop talking and went on and on about the slightest things that the demon would do. I spoke too soon, it thought with a sigh.

"I do not grunt, you ape. I growl. And I don't throw my head down, I recline," the fox corrected, indignified.

"Yeah," Naruto eye-rolled. "You're the laziest creature I've ever seen, no doubt about it."

"When you're all powerful and you know it, it tends to happen."

"Heh. You're not so powerful on that side of the cage," Naruto pointed.

"Oh really?"

The Kyuubi grinned maliciously, and bright balls of light winked into existence around Naruto's head and resumed their spinning. Naruto grinned and tensed, ready to punch around aimlessly again.

Until they were both struck in the face by a gust of sandy air.

Shaking their faces and looking in the direction of the intrusion, to the demon's left, they saw sand streaming in at a steady pace, filling the floor slowly. And this had to happen just when the water was finally gone, they both moaned.

They looked at each other, and a silent agreement passed between them. The kyuubi threw out some chakra into Naruto, and when the human's eyes became slitted and orange and the demon could see through them, Naruto followed the trail into the darkness of the corridor.

The demon, extremely curious as always regarding the world it had not seen for such a long while, was gawking at the view the human 'eyes' provided. Sadly there was not much to see except corridor after corridor after corridor. The paths they travelled through had a strange way of making one loose orientation, but thankfully the flow of the sand gave a good sense of direction to the duo.

In time, the walls started to brighten, and the sand begun to gust with prodigous force. It took some trouble to move ahead, but then a doorway seemed to materialize in front, and the light through it was blinding. With a push, Naruto passed through it.

Now THIS is a sight to see, the demon said gleefully.

But how is this here? Naruto wondered. When its exhilaration passed, the demon began wondering too.

There was a huge sun in the sky, and it burned brighter and hotter than the real thing. Huge dunes, larger than words could describe, rolled aimlessly in ways real deserts could never simulate, scattered around by the gale force winds. And in the midst of this roiling mass of discomfort incarnate, there walked a boy with red hair.

His eyes burned, both from heat and the scalding winds, and he crouched and huddled into himself, clutching his knees.

The Sand-Demon was on the outside; he knew that much at least. And while she was there, he was here. Simple, yes. It still didn't change the fact that he felt the agonizing desire for blood even on the inside. It was a purely psychological agony. A conditioned addiction. Not that he would know what that meant.

A gasp sounded from behind.

He moved his arm reflexively, a swish with a clenching fist, and he awaited the sense of control over the particles all around him, the satisfaction that came with bursting flesh and spurting blood. It never came. The sand remained motionless, as did the person who stood behind him. His nails dug into his palm, not drawing blood despite the trouble they gave its skin.

He turned around and saw it was the blond boy from that day at the hospital. He who had denied him the blood of the ninja that he couldn't manage to kill in the arena. He who held something within him so like his own beast. And he had wanted to kill him so badly.

He screamed, the bloodlust eating at his insides and making his face contort in impotent rage. He rushed the horrified looking ninja, but tripped on his own feet and landed in the sand, face down.

"Gaara?" the other kid shouted, hands coming up in a guard position. "W-what are you doing in my mindscape?"

Gaara, as he had been named, lifted his head up and faced Naruto, amidst the gnashing of teeth and trembling of his face. "It's not yours."

He got up and rushed Naruto again.

"This is where I come when I sleep. Where every moment... Is hell..."

He grabbed the lapels of Naruto's jumpsuit and pulled them towards himself, trying to strangle him. As it was, he barely caused Naruto to choke. Even that effort cost him though, and he fell into the sand again, kneeling.

"Are you my next nightmare? The next person I cannot... kill?" He panted, arms quivering.

A moment later, he felt two arms lifting him up, carrying him from under his back. He tried to fight them off, but couldn't do so.

He was rocked back and forth, and soon he let his eyes press against the arms carrying him. The relief it brought was a stranger to him in all ways, and soon enough he wasn't aware of any sand or heat at all. He weakly resisted the hold once again, but now his heart wasn't into it. He just pressed his eyes down further, bringing his arms closer to his own chest...

In moments, he lost consciousness, and he felt blissful.

This was not a good day for Naruto. In fact, Naruto did not know whether it was day or night, so he settled for thinking that he just couldn't have a good day or night anymore.

He carried Gaara out of the desert he had found the psycho in, and guided by a inexplicable sense of direction, ended back in the corridor where the Kyuubi resided. He put his burden down on the fox's side of the corridor, just as he felt the demon leave his mind.

"I told you not to do this," the demon said, seriousness dripping off its every facet.

Naruto just stared back incredulously. "You're the one who said that bringing him here would prove if he's free of that Sand thing's influence!"

"Yet I told you not to do it," the kyuubi replied, nodding sagely. "But since you brought him here, we might as well begin."

"Begin what?!" Naruto screamed, clutching at his hair.

"Why, his deconditioning, of course. You would like to have a slave wouldn't you? I know I would."

If Naruto could look at himself, he would have found the urge to poke at his own twitching eyes irresistable.

It wasn't fair that he couldn't tell if the fox was joking or not, anyways. If not for the established fact that the demon was a DEMON, Naruto could have said with complete confidence that it was a retard.

"No I don't want a slave! And that one would eat me alive anyways, slave or not!" Naruto complained, still horrified. But his words fell on deaf ears. The Kyuubi was already reaching out of the cage with orange tendrils of chakra that proceeded to promptly bonk Gaara upside the head, so Naruto just walked as far away as he could.

The kid with the tattoo on his head sat up and stood up in one fluid motion instantly. He rushed towards the cage and started banging his head on the bars.

Clunckclunckclunck went his head while Naruto stared in fatally high levels of disbelief.

"What did you do to him?!" He shrieked, watching the display of... whatever it was was too horrible to define.

To see someone so scary reduced to a... well.

The fox was just shaking its head, mumbling to itself. "One starts screaming about Ramen and the other abuses his own head... The chakra is supposed to push a mind to consciousness, not shove it into oblivion..."

Naruto was not willing to theorize, though. He jumped to the cage and pulled Gaara back, shaking him awake like someone would normally do.

"Hey, psychohead! Wakey wakey!"

The psychohead woke.

Naruto got a look into Gaara's eyes, eyes that for once were not filled with hate and outlined with bags of exhaustion. They were completely relaxed and unfocused, and when Naruto let go of the Sand ninja, he slipped to the floor, catching himself on shaky arms. He settled into a squat, still looking down.

"Um, Gaara?" Naruto said, inching back steadily.

The Fox went on grumbling about how Naruto's head couldn't even get chakra to work the way it was supposed to inside it, but it looked on with interest.

Gaara looked around, not really focusing on anything, just vaguely gazing at the floor. "It doesn't hurt here," he said in a very pleasant voice.

"It always hurted not to kill on the outside, and it always hurted not to kill on the inside, but now I don't..."

Naruto stopped budging backwards, extreme pity warring with fear on his face. He found it hard to even imagine what bloodlust like that would feel like.

Funny blue eyes looked up from beneath funny crimson hair and demanded, "You will keep me here."

Naruto spluttered for a moment before crossing his arms in indignity. "Oh hell no, not you too, this place is crowded enough with THAT thing here as it is. Where are you gonna stay?"

Gaara froze up, staring a hole into the only other human there. A few seconds later, his eyes teared up and he began sobbing where he stood. He turned to the giant creature of chakra and repeated his plea, screaming, "Let me stay! Please!"

The demon, however, was a demon. It began to cackle in sadistic amusement. "Let you stay, hmm? You are quite the specimen of an emotional wreck, you deranged ape. You are begging me for a favour, yet you want to kill me at the same time. I can tell, you feel the urge to take over this place and rip us to bloody shreds as you do to all your victims. I suppose old habits die hard, don't they?"

The fox looked at Gaara with a gaze so piercing it laid all bare, but the human flinced not even once, and Naruto watched, hypnotized at the raw display of dominance.

"I respect your attempts more than that brats', though," the demon continued, breaking the staredown and laying its head on a tail again. "You are quite fearless. Or you have forgotten what it is you creatures do when you feel fear. Unlike that idiot over there-"

"Hey! It's MY mindscape, and I decide who gets to stay!" the insulted boy leapt up and proclaimed. He moved over in front of the distraught psycho and fixed him with a stern glare.

"Look, I just don't understand what your problem is. I mean, sure, everyone hated you and you found a purpose in... killing, but aren't you free of all that right now? I mean, come on! You even slept in here! Why do you have to talk like that?"

"Why won't you let me stay?" Came a gasping reply. "Didn't you say that you found a purpose in making... friends? In forgiving people, even if they hated you once?" The boy was spitting out his words with a strange unfamiliarity, as if 'friends' was a word in a whole other language.

"You don't know what it's like at every other moment... All those voices, and all that blood... and... Mother..."

Gaara collapsed into a heap, and Naruto suddenly couldn't take anymore.

He bent in front of him and held his shoulder, and tried to find the right words to say.

"Look, Gaara, I just don't know what's happening here, and I'm as much a prisoner here as you are. But, okay. Stay here as long as you can."

Gaara kept on sobbing, hiccuping in his distress, and Naruto's heart bled in pained empathy. He kept patting the distraught boy's shoulder, and waited for him to calm down. It did not show any signs of happening soon though, so Naruto dragged him over to the wall behind him and set him against it, sitting beside him.

After an interval of time that felt like an hour, Gaara was asleep and his head had collapsed into Naruto's lap, wetting his tracksuit with tears.

Naruto glanced at the silent and huge presence that was looking at the spectacle blankly.

"How did this happen?" Naruto asked very seriously.

"I don't know enough. We'll have to go back and see if the sand is still here," came an equally serious answer.

Naruto went back to looking at the tearstained face resting on his legs.

"You were very compassionate to someone who would have killed you without a second thought were you in a place where he could control his sand," The kyuubi observed.

Naruto, a little surprised, looked up. It had seemed like praise, but the demon's face had no expression whatsoever. None.

"Naah, he wouldn't have... Well, he won't do it now, anyways... I think."

Meanwhile, on the outside, two jinchuriki slept, one encased in stone, one surrounded by enemies from the sound. Each was as unaware of their surroundings as each other, and the surroundings were equally unaware of what went on in their minds. A giant tanuki felt a little odd all of a sudden, as if something vital to it had vanished for a while, but then went on with its rampage, savage with bestial delight.

I realized I was following the outside world with the chunin exams so thoroughly that this introspection and mindscape stuff, things this fic was really meant to explore, were getting ignored. But the plot, which is based on resolving daheck thats going on with Naruto and the Kyuubi, is moving on. And hopefully will continue to.

X.x