Disclaimer: I do not own the Naruto franchise and make no money from this piece of writing.
Warnings: Canon-AU, GEN, Jinchuriki-centric, Language, some artistic liberties with backstories
Summary: Uzumaki Naruto seems to bring people together by sheer, tenacious force of personality if nothing else. He grows up scorned and ignored but not entirely alone, and is consequentially determined to make friends with the eight other occupants whose mindscapes he shares.
For their part, the rest of the Jinchuriki are not quite as enthusiastic about this plan. Naruto, however, is very good at talking people into submission. And with access to the back of their minds, there's really no escape.
Chapter One: White Room
Most of the time, Naruto lands in the White Room.
The place is not quite a room as it is a space, really. There are no walls, no ceiling, just a stretching blankness that goes on and on and on. There is a center. Or, at least, what had been duly christened the center by the first generation of Jinchuriki, solely for the fact that it's the only landmark within the entire area. Sprawled across the floor, the seal is a craft of crisp lines and stark contrast, red on black on white pentagrams snaking outwards, and it would have been beautiful had it not been such a vicious reminder.
Naruto likes the Room. It's always warm inside, always clean. When he looks down he's usually wearing his favourite clothes, which had been puzzling at first, because he knows that this pair of shorts should have been long disposed of and that T-shirt is scraped and muddied and carrying a hole near his shoulder in real life, but now that he's sort of figured out, sort of been explained the exact mechanics of the Room, it's just cool.
Naruto likes the Room because there are no darting, suspicious eyes, no foul words muttered beneath a curled mouth. He has his own space, of course, but it's smelly and dank and a sewer of all places, which he finds patently unfair. He is grudgingly familiar with it, if only because there had been times he had gotten curious and subconsequently gotten lost in the labyrinth of dripping water and empty pipes, wandering through the dark corridors until he managed to backtrack his way to the exit.
The others call the sewer his mindscape. Naruto is under the impression that his mindscape should be a more awesome place. This is probably the giant fox's fault, he's half sure. Only half, because Naruto tries to avoid the fox as much as possible.
The others don't like the White Room as much as Naruto does. Well, Gaara likes it, and so does Fuu but they are his age and also Naruto's best-best-best friends in all the world. The other ones, the older ones, don't come in as often. Not that it matters-Naruto can hear them always, the whisper of thoughts and emotion, of voice pulsating outwards from individual mindscapes, seeping into the blankness of the Room and being amplified and ricocheted into all nine connected minds.
The White Room is a constant, a familiarity, a companion that Naruto knows will always exist no matter where or how or when. As steady as the sun rising in the early morning gloom.
And then, before that. Or maybe not before. Maybe at the same time, maybe after. But that far back the cabinet of his memories is a muddled amalgamation of images, there is the dungeon and the Fox. Livid red energy. Orange tails. So much anger and hate and bitterness Naruto wants to scream with it. The fox is trapped, behind bars as wide as Naruto is tall,and when it talks the words grate iron filings into his ears.
Another perk of the White Room: Naruto is safe there. Naruto isn't exactly sure he's safe in the sewer, where the fox is a constant, boiling presence of toxic rage.
So, there is the White Room, and there is the Fox. However, before even that, there are the voices.
For the first few months of his life, Naruto's mind is more or less his own.
There's the fox, of course, but Kurama is sunk deep into his conscious, raging against a cage that holds fast no matter how he trashes. Naruto's infant body sifts through the foreign chakra. This new container is young and malleable, gifted with the bloodline of the ancient Sage himself. It twists Kurama's anger, modifies and integrates the poisonous energy into something less, something purer, something that the body's system can convert into fuel instead of venom.
For four months, the back of Naruto's mind is a cacophony of mundane sounds. Footsteps across chipped tile. The screech of a creaking hinge as a door eases open. Trepidation of a woman's voice, jittery and nervous. Plaster trickling down softly in an out-of-the-way orphanage room.
For four months, the surface of Naruto's mind is blanketed in soft silence. Four months, before the Fox's chakra seeps deep into his system, so intertwined it is that each breath Naruto takes pulses with it, that it would be crippling to the host should his tailed-beast be separated.
Four months. Kurama grumbles and seethes, once again chained to a human soul and infant body.
And then a door is formed.
The door is less an actual door and more a symbolic representation of one. Although, in the depths of the human mind, so close that one leaves the outer conscious and plunges into the inner soul, the line between reality and the metamorphic is allusive at best and nonexistent at worst. Naruto creates the door only in the vaguest sense. His infant brain is only starting to develop, firing synapses and connecting neurons and creating new highways for information. At his age, he has neither recollection nor the necessary spatial capacity to know what a door is.
The fox helps. Unwillingly, as it was for his previous two hosts. It gives access to a place where only the tailed-beasts should allowed through its presence alone. He does not know of the door's location, or of its appearance. Just that it is, that it exists, as sure as the link that connects him and his siblings, an anchor and a chain and a bittersweet memory at once.
Cherry wood. Silvery, newly oiled hinges. The door is painted a pale, shimmering blue like the gentle waters of Uzushio's white sand beaches, the size and shape equal to that of all the doors to be found in all the apartments in Konoha's eastern residential districts. The knob is golden brass. Nailed carefully near the top, there is a redwood plaque with big bold letters, painstakingly, lovingly inscribed: "Naruto's room.'
Once upon a time, this door existed in a place outside of Naruto's mind. It was mulled over and scowled at and the paint was chosen after three hours of careful consideration over colour samples, most of which involved Uzumaki Kushina bellowing at the the store assistants as the Yondaime perused stacks upon stacks of baby clothes. Nowadays, there are only wisps of memories left. The first lies tucked away in the hearts of two chakra imprints bound to the Fox's cage as a fail-safe, the second materialized in the Door. Because when references are needed, the resident two-thousand-year old chakra manifestation is too consumed with rage to form anything lucid, and the main information source is barely out of infancy, then the inner subconscious takes matters into its own hands and seeks out more reliable information deposits.
So the door forms. It is not open but has no lock. From the other side, there are snatches of conversation, words drifting in and out with the same flippancy of a spring breeze. Glimpses of emotion. The sting of physical pain and the exhilaration of job well accomplished.
These impressions travel to the edge of Naruto's door, permeate through to the other side, a little muted but no less understandable.
Separated by hundreds of miles of distance, stationed across the elemental nations, seven other Jinchuriki pause momentarily in their actions to process the shift.
And in a small, dusty room at the back of Konoha's orphanage, much to the relief of his ANBU guards. Naruto quiets from a screeching wail to a soft hiccup, befuddled but curious of the new sounds in his head.
Yugito notices it first.
She's out in the mountains; fourteen-years-old and bandaged fists smashing a steady rhythm into the trunk of a half-demolished hemlock tree. The early morning light slips in between the leafy canopy above, and Yugito twirls on her heel, blond hair a whipping braid behind her as she moves.
A pivot on her left foot, and she brings her palms up and out, focusing chakra at her fingertips and letting it smash straight through the rough bark. She should be moving on to boulders by now, Yugito knows, but it's beautiful here. The dew at her feet has yet to evaporate, and all around it's quiet. Picturistic. The sky above snakes a ribbon of pastel blue in between the opening of the leaves. Further beyond, a sliver of a transparent moon dangles, not yet gone as its sister the sun creeps slowly above the horizon line.
The air is wet and cool. Her teachers are out, taking a slight break from supervising her training to map out the surrounding landscape, and here, now, with nothing but muted birdsong and the exhale of wind over rustling grass, is the closest Yugito will get to peace.
It's quiet.
Right, left, somersault. Left leg smashing down.
The tree creaks and moans distressingly, splintering at the base of its trunk and slowly toppling backwards. Yugito lands her hands, dirt and grass at her palm, before flipping backwards and straightening to her feet.
Mid movement, mid stride as Yugito moves forward to inspect the damage done, the feeling hits. "Hungry," it wails. It's not even a word, nothing as coherent as that. Just a rush of emotion, tenaciously single minded the way only an infant mind can produce, creeping warm, prying fingers into the back of her mind. "Cold. Hungry. Sleepy."
Yugito is good at blocking the thoughts, the stream of emotion and pain and sometimes even images. Her expertise doesn't quite match some of the older Jinchuriki—it's a matter of experience—but she dutifully ignores the others as much as she can. The older ones tend to similarly mind their own business, and that suits Yugito fine. It's not as if they're friends. Perhaps acquaintances at best, ninja bearing different loyalties towards different villages liable to charge into war should come the slightest imbalance.
"Coldhungrycold." Another garble of infantile thoughts, and Yugito meets it with a thin press of her mouth and a flare of bitter irritation. More or less, it is Yugito's own carelessness that let it through. She had gotten too comfortable in the rhythm of her training to notice the slip of her wards.
"So the new kid's here." A rumbling voice, deep caverns and oceans and a mountain's solid, indomitable foundation. Killer Bee.
"I don't think it's necessarily old enough to be called a kid," shoots back Yugito, dryly.
And he's not. The newest Kyuubi Jinchuriki is young, tiny, so much that Yugito can barely make out the gender apart from the niggling whisper of instinct. Its presence had been steadily mounting for days since the the Fox had been resealed, sluggishly inching into the collective mindspace and bearing with it the spark of harsh, molten chakra, windswept plains and the ocean waves customary of the Uzumaki clan. One slow drop at the time it fills in the hole Uzumaki Kushina had left when she died. Yugito had just hoped that the process would have happened much, much, slower.
It's probably the age, she figures sourly. The younger the mind and body, the easier it is to adapt. Which means that Yugito is now stuck sharing her days and nights ignoring the caterwauling of three tiny children.
"This time was faster even than the Ichibi's." Bee observes. He seems ready to continue on with that train of thought, but Utakata interrupts before the sentence can form.
"They're so loud." There's a grimace in his voice Yugito finds herself agreeing with. Especially since it's punctuated by another jumbled influx of emotion from three different sources.
A shift. The feel of earth creaking and white hot flames. Rossi's tone is gruff and contemplative all at once, and even without seeing him face to face Yugito can feel the slight shrug.
"They'll grow out of it in a few years," he says, completely unconcerned.
Yugito knows that with common sense alone. Jinchuriki don't get a choice in these kind of matters, don't get a choice in anything apart from the kill, to be honest, and in comparison to the others Yugito can even count herself lucky, considering she's in Kumogakure and they're not. It's less a question of "will they" and more a question of how long. The Ichibi and Nanabi hosts combined are already yowling up a dreaded migraine, but the Kyuubi added on to that?
"This is going to be a very long decade," Yugito scowls. And then she's gone from the conversation, a wisp of blue-black flame bobbing away, snapping up wards best as she can against the four that are not projecting and dutifully ignoring the infantile screeching from the three children that are.
"Prickly," comments Roshi.
"More like puberty," says Bee.
"A bit of both," Roshi concedes.
There's a twinge of a wince from Utakata as a murderous, blood curdling bellow hits. It's the Ichibi's host, with the seal work is so shoddy that the Biju's trashing is bleeding into the boy's own mindscape and mixing with the muddled infantile emotions found there.
"Pain. Anger. HurtMotherPleasehungrysleepWANT."
All in all, the end result is a truly terrible fusion of incoherent screaming.
"I'm going now," comes the distant, teeth clenched murmur, and Utakata too leaves.
Six months in, the Kyuubi Jinchuriki finds his way into the collective mindspace.
It's a rough estimate. Utakata has neither the source nor motivation to find out whether the boy managed to sneak his way inside earlier or not, what with the other Jinchuriki studiously ignoring the White Room due to its recent, ankle-biting additions and the intentionally distant relationship they've cultivated. Considering the sheer blast radius of the boy's emotions (vociferous and bright, far, far too bright, a throbbing star of foxfire and sea-scent chakra) Utakata can't blame them, especially since he's doing the exact same thing. The problem is that within the past week or so it had gotten even louder. Dizzyingly so. Which means that the kid has finally, unfortunately, discovered the amplifying properties of the Room.
He's distracted. That's the first and foremost explanation on why, when he goes to sleep and opens his eyes again, instead of the jagged sea coast of his mindscape he's met with surroundings that are blank and glittering. The pull of the Room is tricky like that. It sucks one in, requires a pinpoint focus to get away from, and once a Jinchuriki first manages to access it then that's that, it will forever continue to be the default of their dreams.
There's the manual process, of course, which is one of the only pieces of information the older Jinchuriki are willing to share in length, and it allows Utakata to maneuver himself so that the first thing he sees when knocked unconscious or asleep is sea instead of white. Landing elsewhere requires a painstaking amount of meditation and an equal amount of mental willpower, but even hiding the cracks of his mind, half pushing away, half resigned to Saiken's rumbling nagging, is better than the sheer discord that comes with the White Room.
He should probably be used to it by now. They all should.
That doesn't mean he has to like though.
The Kyuubi's host is peering curiously upwards from his thin blanket pile, stacked in a chipped, peeling wooden crib that was once a rich blue but now long faded into a dusty beige. Utakata doesn't understand the laws of the Room, nor does he pretend to, but previous experience with the Ichibi and Nanabi hosts have taught him that if the child isn't old enough to toddle, then they somehow materialize a portion of their surroundings with them. Most of the time, this constitutes the crib and a chew toy. Once, the redhead infant had brought in an entire carpet filled with sand.
At least there's only one child here today. The Nanabi's (whose name is either Fuu-Fuu or Gahh-guuh-gahh) is awake and content, feelings tinged with tiny wing beats and clear forest chakra. Ichibi's host is awake as well. Less happy though, and wailing in the distance.
Experimentally, Utakata waves a hand. He's ten and small for his age, and the crib is just high enough that if he stands on his tip-toes, he can loom over the wooden edge and look inside.
The boy scrunches his nose. He's so small. Delicate and breakable in the way only new life can be, soft and terribly unlike the gaunt orphans lining Kirigakure's streets.
Utakata studies him. It's… strange.
Blue eyes squint. Small fingers reach up, waving frantically. The boy's cheeks dimple into a grin.
"Hello," says Utakata. There's no real need to say it out loud. He can think it, and the connotation would come across just as well. Maybe even better, considering that the child isn't old enough to understand words.
The boy makes even more exaggerated grabby motions, paired with a high, whining gurgle. Obligingly, Utakata lets his hand dip lower, holding still as the tips of his fingers are snatched by soft, pink palms.
He lets the boy poke and twist until he grows bored and pudgy arms fall back into the tangle of tiny blankets. There's another gurgle. Something like a bored whine. A wave of curiosity washes over him, lukewarm and not his own.
Whiskered cheeks bulge into a pout.
There's no name for this child, not yet that Utakata knows of. When the boy looks up at him imploringly once again, he makes his best rusty smile, twitching up unused muscles.
"Feeling awkward there," comes Han's voice, like the exhale of steam from the top of a tea kettle.
"I don't want to hear that from you," mutters Utakata, quietly.
The Kyuubi's host makes another grabbing motion, and this time it's accompanied by something like impatience. In response, Utakata slips his hand in between the wooden bars of the crib, fingers pausing as they brush soft fabric.
The boy sniffs.
He clenches his hand. Retracts it, and lets it fall limply to his side.
"Maybe later," Utakata starts, and halts, not quite sure where the rest of that sentence leads to. This is already too much contact. Babies are impressionable, quick to latch on and not let go, and a functioning relationship with another village's Jinchuriki isn't exactly on Utakata's to-do list.
For his part, the boy is making higher, wailing noises now, confusion clouding the previous jittery happiness. More or less, it's likely do to Utakata's own pulse of discomfort.
This is why he tries to avoid the White Room as much as possible: hiding your own emotions there is an impossible task.
Utakata can feel the echo of uneasiness from the others. He turns, putting his back to the crib and the boy. He's a Kiri nin. By itself, the fact that eight other people have access to his surface thoughts and emotions, that eight others have the ability to throw both out of equilibrium, is enough of a security risk, even if they unanimously agree to try to keep it at a bare minimum. He doesn't need to add even the barest of attachment onto that.
"Careful there," warns Han. He's one of the more genial of the Jinchuriki, and also seems to be the only one willing to engage in a conversation at the moment. "You're projecting."
"I know," Utakata shoots back, too sharp. It's part bitterness, part anger, part festering loathing. He looks back at the boy in the crib and clamps down hard on his emotions.
There's no point to caring.
Naruto turns two.
Mostly, he sleeps, but he's learned to crawl and walk in the small, empty room the orphanage workers keep him in. His vocabulary is sparse, limited to keywords such as his own name and "Ji-ji" and "food" and "toy," because no one has deemed to teach him anything else and the slingshot of conversations in his head are too quick for him to understand. He likes the wrinkly old man with the billowing, red and white hat. He likes a lot of things, such as his blue blanket and his pretty rubber kunai, but one thing he doesn't like is the woman who comes in every morning and afternoon but never seems to make eye contact.
One day, his crib gets moved to the outside. The outside is where all the other kids are, in a room with tall ceilings and wide halls and rows upon rows of neat cribs. It's loud in a way that's familiar, on-going background noise familiar. Naruto toddles around touching wooden crib legs and attempting to stick a corner of the tattered carpet into his mouth.
When he sleeps, his world filters into whiteness.
It's a big place, but Naruto always lands on the same spot, smack dab in the middle of one of the squiggly shapes in the middle of the drawing on the floor. There's another boy already in the Room. Naruto can feel him, the brush of his presence like grains falling and the itch of those tiny ants he sees in the corners of window sills, marching up his back.
The boy's name is Gaara. Naruto likes Gaara more than his blanket and his toy kunai and the wrinkly man with the billowy hat put together. Like Fuu, Gaara is always there for Naruto, even if Naruto can't see him. And Naruto knows this because he can always, always hear Gaara's voice.
The first few meters of white floor Naruto takes at a wobbly walk, and then he's lunging forwards with a whoop, laughing, as he tackles Gaara backwards into his gourd.
"Gaa-ha!" he greets, smiling, all milk teeth.
Shly, Gaara smiles back. "Naru-naru," he says in return.
Naruto laughs, bright and happy as he pulls Gaara in for a hug. He likes contact, he's found, as all toddlers tend to, but outside the White Room no one apart from the wrinkly old man with the billowy hat gives it to him. Gaara though, Gaara is warm and has the sweetest smiles, and when he's here in the White Room with Naruto he's so clear and happy, the emotions bounding into Naruto's own mind and making him giddy in return. Outside-the-White-Room-Gaara isn't as happy. He's more sad, and sometimes Naruto hears him crying, dark and painful and aching where his heart is, but that's okay. Gaara will always be one of Naruto's favourites.
They play parrot, attempting to mimic the big words the others use. Gaara is always better at this game than Naruto, who lisps and drags on syllables and generally mangles the pronunciation, but Naruto is better at leaping lines ( where they jump on the squiggles of the drawing on the floor and see who can go the longest without touching the white) so it evens out.
Halfway through "tak-yaki," ("t's taka-raka, declares Naruto, while Gaara purses his lips and slowly, patiently forms the necessary combination of vowels and consonants needed to form the word) Fuu drops in.
She lands in a shimmer of a heat haze, greens and reds and whites curling into existence. A moment for stability, and then she's solid and real and a head taller than the both of them, green hair bouncing in a short ponytail as she skips over.
Naruto likes Fuu, the same way he likes Gaara. And maybe love is the more accurate way to describe the soaring, sun-bright adoration he feels.
Fuu is older than Gaara. She has the loveliest eyes, the colour of the early mornings when Naruto can see streaks of rising sun piercing through the orphanage windows, egg yolk yellow and warm and bonfire-beautiful. It bathes the room in honeyed shades, spills across the floorboards and casts neat light patterns into the swirls of the wood. Naruto would sleep tucked under this blanket of sunshine and exhale, content.
Apparently, as the oldest, Fuu gets to ruffle their hair and suffer no repercussions. She does just that as soon as she's in distance to do so, following it up with a poke at Naruto's pout and Gaara's shy, downcast blush.
Then she waves at them to clear the space and sits down, a tiny, green haired girl with two tinier boys at each knee. She clears her voice imperiously. Once, Naruto was told that all good storytellers do this before they begin their recollection, and he thinks that Fuu is a very good story teller indeed.
Gaara loves Fuu's stories, and so does Naruto. In a way, it's less the story itself and more the cadence of her voice, rising high and low, loud and quiet, spinning a tale meant for him and Gaara alone. No one at the orphanage tells him stories. The other kids too are quickly snatched, gone by adult hands whenever he tries to play or make conversation.
Here though, no one is going to snatch Gaara or Fuu away. They are the White Room's occupants, and the White Room is safe, is home and storytime and a hundred games formed from the imagination of three children.
It is voices, bouncing off the walls as a lullaby, whether they be loud or quiet, sad or joyful, whether they be carrying the tinge of smoke-fire, or hot earth, or mountains or deep river valleys or the air prior to a summer shower.
"They're so happy it's nauseating," grumbles Yugito. She's sixteen, a little less bitter and quite a bit more powerful, and had just nearly toppled from her perch on a high rise building after the newest surge of blinding, giddy, glee.
Pain is easy to block out. Melancholy and loneliness and self-loathing are companions older than her memories stretch back.
Happiness is a different emotion, so unexpected and alien that none of them know quite what to do with it.
Through the link, Bee sends back what feels like a shrug. "They're burning bright l'il Yugito. Just for a bit, go with the flow."
That was… not as bad as usual. Yugito sighs, swinging her legs over the hundred feet drop of the apartment roof, spying gray asphalt and the bobbing heads of people, carriages, miniature doll-sized market stalls crowding beneath.
"They're children," she states. It feels a little like resignation. Yugito herself doesn't remember having a childhood, only the grip of a kunai in her hand, training, training, training. Always.
She quiets as Fuu's voice rises into a crescendo, a cliff-hanger. The tight wire excitement of two children floods the mental link like a dam overflowing.
"And that's when momma-rabbit had an idea!" Fuu says. "See, if Mister Tiger wanted to eat the rabbit family, it was cuz he was really, really hungry. So momma-rabbit gave him a polite invitation and set out a great, big pot of vegetable stew by the fields for Mister Tiger, and when Mister ate the stew and grew full he didn't want to eat the rabbit family anymore! And from then on, Mister Tiger and momma-rabbit had an a-gre-ment. Mister Tiger would help bring vegetables and Momma rabbit would cook them for Mister Tiger to eat." A pause. The other two children oohed. "And they became friends and lived happily, ever after."
"Children," Yugito repeats herself. She tries not to scowl at just how utterly, terrifically nonsensical the story was. At best, those are civilian morals. At worst, they're a sure-fire recipe to get a shinobi murdered in their sleep.
Han rolls in. His chakra is warm and sluicing, fine but solid, a contradiction of sorts.
"I think it was rather original," he defends.
Yugito sends a formidable wave of sheer unimpressedness his way.
The thing is: Jinchuriki don't get rights like freedom, or choice, or their own personal morality.
They are weapons first, shinobi second, their own person last of all.
(Three children would like to differ.)
...
Endnotes: Umm. Basically. I scoured the internet for Jinchuriki-centric fanfiction and after finding close to zero, I gave up and just decided to write my own.
Tell me what you enjoyed, tell me what you didn't. I have a general idea of where this is going, and feedback is always appreciated.