The first time Naruto looked in the mirror and saw something other than a boy, he was six years old.
It wasn't a dramatic moment. There was no lightning, no ominous music, no sudden revelation that crashed down upon him like the weight of the heavens. It was a Tuesday. The mirror in his bathroom was cracked—had been cracked since before he moved in, since before the last tenant moved out in the middle of the night without even bothering to take their furniture, since before the landlord stopped sending maintenance workers because they all quit rather than enter "that apartment."
Naruto stood on his tiptoes on an overturned bucket, trying to see his reflection in the one section of mirror that wasn't completely clouded with age or covered in fracture lines. His whisker marks caught the dim light from the single flickering bulb above him, and for just a moment—just the briefest, tiniest moment—they seemed to move.
Not in the way skin moves. Not in the way shadows shift.
They writhed.
And something in the back of his mind that had always been there, something he'd assumed was just him thinking to himself the way everyone surely thought to themselves, whispered:
"Ah."
Naruto blinked. The whisker marks were still. The bulb flickered. The bucket wobbled under his feet.
"Huh," he said to his reflection. "I must be hungry."
He went to eat his breakfast of expired instant ramen that the grocery store owner had thrown at him ("Take it and GET OUT, demon!") and didn't think about it again.
For about three hours.
The thing about Naruto was that he had never been stupid.
This was a fact that many people—most people, in fact—would have vehemently disputed. The teachers at the Academy would have laughed. The shopkeepers would have sneered. The villagers would have scoffed and muttered about demons not needing intelligence, just the animal cunning to deceive and destroy.
But Naruto wasn't stupid.
He was loud. He was hyperactive. He was desperate for any scrap of attention, positive or negative, because even hatred was better than the way some villagers looked through him like he was already a ghost. He acted like an idiot because idiots were harmless, and Naruto had learned very, very early that he needed to be seen as harmless.
He couldn't remember when he'd learned that. He couldn't remember a time when he hadn't known it.
But he wasn't stupid.
And he knew how to listen.
The villagers thought they were being subtle. They weren't. When you're a child who lives alone in an apartment that no one willingly approaches, when you survive by scavenging and stealing and begging, you learn to hear the things people say when they think you can't understand.
"Demon child."
"Fox brat."
"It should have been killed with the beast."
"The Yondaime should have found a way to destroy it completely."
"Look at those marks on its face—those aren't birthmarks, those are the signs of the monster inside."
"Nine tails."
"Kyuubi."
"One day it will lose control and kill us all."
"It's not really human, you know. Just looks like one."
Naruto had heard these things for as long as he could remember. At first, he hadn't understood. He'd thought the villagers were confused, that they were talking about someone else, that there was some other child with whisker marks and bright blonde hair and eyes the color of the sky who was actually a demon.
But there wasn't.
There was only him.
And eventually, even the most stubborn hope has to crack under the weight of evidence.
The second time Naruto saw something wrong in his reflection, he was seven.
He'd gotten into a fight with some older civilian kids—they'd cornered him behind the grocery store where he'd been digging through the dumpster, and they'd had rocks, and Naruto hadn't wanted to run because he was so hungry and he'd finally found some vegetables that were only a little bit rotten—and they'd hit him. Over and over. His head, his shoulders, his back, his legs. They'd called him names he didn't fully understand yet but knew were meant to hurt.
And then they'd stopped.
Naruto remembered the moment with crystalline clarity, even years later. One of the boys—the leader, the biggest one, the one with the most stones—had been pulling back for another throw when he'd suddenly gone pale. White as paper. White as snow. White as bone.
He'd dropped the rock.
"What's wrong with your eyes?" he'd whispered.
And then they'd all run.
Naruto had limped home, bleeding from a gash on his forehead, his right arm hanging at an angle that probably wasn't right, his ribs screaming with every breath. He'd barely made it through the door before collapsing. He'd lain on the floor for hours, too tired and too hurt to move, watching the dust motes drift through the beam of light from his single window.
And then, somehow, he'd healed.
He'd watched it happen. The gash on his forehead had smoked, red-orange wisps curling up from the wound like steam, and when he'd touched it, the skin had been smooth. His arm had popped back into place with a sickening crunch that should have made him scream, but instead had made him laugh—a high, strange, bubbling laugh that hadn't sounded like him at all.
His ribs had cracked and reset and healed in under an hour.
When he'd finally pulled himself up and staggered to the bathroom, clinging to the walls and furniture for support, and looked in the cracked mirror—
His eyes were red.
Not his whole eyes. His irises. The blue had been swallowed by crimson, and his pupils had become slits, vertical lines like a—
Like a—
"Like me."
Naruto stared at his reflection.
His reflection stared back with eyes that belonged to something else.
"Oh," Naruto said, very quietly. "I understand now."
Inside the seal, Kurama felt something shift.
It was subtle. A whisper of a feeling, a faint disturbance in the connection between his chakra and his container. He'd been dormant for years—there was nothing to do in this prison but sleep, and he had millennia of practice at patience—but something about this particular disturbance made him stir.
He cracked open one massive eye.
The mindscape was as it always was: a vast sewer, dark and dripping, the cage bars golden with the seal's power. Nothing had changed.
And yet.
There was something different about the flow of chakra through the seal. Something in the way it moved, the way it filtered from him to the child. It felt... welcomed. Not resisted, not pushed back, not fought against the way most Jinchuuriki's bodies instinctively fought against his power.
Welcomed.
"Hmm," Kurama rumbled, settling back down. "Interesting."
He didn't think much more about it. The child was young. Whatever strange fluctuation had occurred, it was probably just a fluke of the seal. The Yondaime's work was complex, after all, and even Kurama didn't fully understand all of its intricacies.
He closed his eye and went back to sleep.
This would prove to be a mistake.
By the time Naruto was eight, he had developed what he privately called his Theory.
The Theory was simple: He was not Uzumaki Naruto.
Or rather, he was Uzumaki Naruto, but Uzumaki Naruto was not actually a human boy. Uzumaki Naruto was the Kyuubi no Kitsune, the Nine-Tailed Fox, the demon that had attacked Konoha eight years ago, somehow stuffed into the body of a child.
It made perfect sense.
The villagers called him a demon. He healed like a demon. He had marks on his face like a demon. His eyes turned red like a demon. He was treated like a demon by every single person he'd ever met.
And there was the voice.
Naruto had never questioned the voice. He'd assumed everyone had one—that internal narrator, that whisper in the back of the mind that commented on things, that occasionally said things he wouldn't have thought himself. He'd assumed it was just what thinking felt like.
But he was starting to realize that the voice didn't always sound like him.
Sometimes it sounded older. Deeper. Rougher.
Sometimes it sounded angry in a way that Naruto had never let himself feel.
And sometimes, late at night when he couldn't sleep, when the loneliness was a physical ache in his chest and the hatred of the village pressed down on him like a physical weight, the voice said things that made terrible, horrible, wonderful sense.
"They deserve to burn."
"You are so much more than they know."
"One day, they will remember what it means to fear you."
"You are not weak. You are not small. You are not the orphan they try to make you believe you are."
"You are POWER."
Naruto didn't know if the voice was him or something else. But after a while, he stopped trying to figure it out. After a while, he stopped caring.
If the voice was him, then he was finally admitting truths he'd been too scared to acknowledge.
If the voice was something else, then at least he wasn't alone.
Either way, it was the only thing in the world that was on his side.
Kurama woke to find something very, very wrong.
He didn't know what had roused him. He'd been sleeping deeply, the way only ancient beings can sleep, drifting through centuries of memories and half-forgotten dreams. But something had yanked him to consciousness with the force of an earthquake, and now he was awake and alert and—
Wait.
Why did he feel tired?
Kurama didn't get tired. Kurama was a being of pure chakra, one of the nine pieces of the Juubi, a force of nature given form and consciousness. Tiredness was a mortal concept. He didn't have a body that could experience fatigue.
And yet.
He felt... drained. Like something had siphoned off his chakra while he slept.
Impossible. The seal prevented his chakra from escaping. That was the whole point of the seal. The Yondaime had designed it specifically to keep Kurama contained, to let only the smallest trickle of power leak through to keep the host alive—
Kurama's eyes snapped fully open.
The smallest trickle?
He focused, reaching out through the seal to feel the flow of his chakra, and—
It wasn't a trickle.
It was a river.
"WHAT?!"
His roar echoed through the mindscape, shaking the walls of the sewer, sending ripples cascading through the ankle-deep water. The seal pulsed with golden light in response, but it didn't stop the flow. It didn't even slow the flow.
Kurama's chakra was pouring out of him and into the child like water through a broken dam, and the seal wasn't doing a single thing to stop it because—
Because the child wasn't taking it.
The child was accepting it.
The seal was designed to prevent forceful extraction, to stop the Kyuubi's chakra from overwhelming an unwilling host. But it had no defense against a host who wanted the power, who welcomed it, who opened themselves up to it with the same natural ease as breathing.
"Oh no," Kurama whispered, and for the first time in a very, very long time, he felt something that might have been fear. "Oh, no no no no no—"
He tried to speak to the child. He reached out through the seal, through the connection they shared, and—
Nothing.
The child couldn't hear him.
Or rather, the child could hear him, but the child thought—
The child thought—
"Oh, you stupid, stupid kit," Kurama breathed, realization crashing over him like a wave. "You think I'm YOU."
Naruto was nine years old when he realized he could make fire.
Not with matches. Not with jutsu.
With will.
He'd been sitting in his apartment, trying to light a candle because the power had been cut off again (the landlord had "forgotten" to pay the bill, or so he claimed, and Naruto was too young to do anything about it), and he'd been so frustrated—
And his hand had caught fire.
Orange-red flames, dancing along his fingers like they belonged there, warm but not burning, bright but not blinding. They'd flickered and swayed in a wind that didn't exist, and when Naruto had stared at them in shock, they'd seemed to flicker in a pattern that looked almost like... satisfaction.
Any normal child would have screamed.
Any normal child would have panicked, would have tried to put out the flames, would have run for help.
Naruto smiled.
"Hello, me," he whispered to the fire. "Nice to finally meet you."
The flames danced higher.
Naruto laughed, and it was the first genuinely happy sound he'd made in years.
"THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED!" Kurama howled into the void. "THIS IS NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR! I DIDN'T DO THIS!"
No one answered. No one could hear him. The child certainly couldn't hear him—every time Kurama tried to speak, his words got twisted somehow, filtered through the boy's broken perception, interpreted as internal thoughts rather than external communication.
The child thought Kurama's voice was his own voice.
The child thought Kurama's power was his own power.
The child thought Kurama's memories—
Wait.
Kurama went very, very still.
Had he been leaking memories?
He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to feel the shape of the connection between them, trying to understand what exactly had been passing through the seal while he slept—
And recoiled in horror.
It wasn't just chakra. It wasn't just a voice.
The child was receiving everything.
Every fragment of rage that Kurama had ever felt. Every memory of being hunted, being sealed, being used as a weapon. Every grudge against humanity, every bitter thought, every dream of destruction. It was all bleeding through, drop by drop, thought by thought, emotion by emotion.
And the child was absorbing it.
Not fighting it. Not questioning it. Not even recognizing it as foreign.
The child was taking Kurama's hatred and wearing it like a second skin, wrapping himself in Kurama's grievances, clothing himself in Kurama's trauma.
The child was becoming what Konoha had always accused him of being.
And Kurama had no idea how to stop it.
By the time Naruto entered the Academy at ten years old, he was very good at hiding.
Not physically—anyone could hide physically, could duck behind buildings and crawl through shadows and avoid the eyes of those who wanted to hurt you. Naruto had been doing that since he could walk.
No, Naruto was good at hiding himself.
The Academy instructors saw a loud, obnoxious, hyperactive brat who couldn't sit still and couldn't focus and couldn't seem to learn anything no matter how many times it was explained to him. They saw a class clown, a troublemaker, a lost cause.
They didn't see the way his eyes tracked every movement in the room. They didn't notice how he always sat with his back to the wall. They didn't realize that his "accidental" disruptions always came at moments when attention was about to turn to him in ways he didn't want.
They certainly didn't see the way his shadow sometimes flickered.
The other students saw a loser, a dead-last, a boy to mock and avoid. Some of their parents had warned them to stay away from "that child." Most of them didn't even know why. They just knew that Uzumaki Naruto was somehow wrong, somehow other, somehow less.
They didn't see the fire that burned behind his eyes when no one was looking. They didn't feel the heat that sometimes radiated from his skin when he was angry. They didn't notice the way animals—cats, dogs, birds, rats, everything—fled in terror whenever he came near.
The Hokage saw... something.
The old man looked at Naruto with sad eyes and kind words and gentle hands, and sometimes Naruto almost believed that the Hokage actually cared about him. Sometimes he almost let himself trust.
But even the Hokage didn't see.
He didn't see the way Naruto's whisker marks had been growing darker, deeper, more pronounced. He didn't notice the red that flickered in Naruto's eyes during their conversations—so quick, so brief, gone before it could be confirmed. He didn't realize that the "special stipend" he provided for Naruto's care was being intercepted by shopkeepers who charged triple prices and provided rotten goods.
He didn't know that Naruto had stopped sleeping.
Not because of nightmares—although he had those too, dreams of fire and destruction and a village burning beneath nine swaying tails. No, Naruto had stopped sleeping because he no longer needed to.
Three days without rest, and he felt fine.
A week without rest, and he felt better.
A month without rest, and he felt powerful.
Whatever was awakening inside him didn't require sleep. Didn't require food, either, although Naruto still ate because he liked the taste of ramen and because eating was something normal people did and he was very committed to appearing normal.
He was so, so good at hiding.
But hiding was getting harder.
Because every day, the voice in his head grew louder.
"Kit. KIT. LISTEN TO ME."
Kurama had been trying for months. Months of screaming into the void, months of trying to break through the child's delusions, months of watching helplessly as more and more of his chakra drained away to fuel a boy who didn't even know he was using it.
The seal was still intact. That was the maddening part. The Yondaime's seal was still functioning exactly as designed, still containing Kurama, still preventing him from breaking free or taking control.
But the seal had been built with assumptions.
It assumed the host would resist the Kyuubi's influence. It assumed there would be a struggle, a battle of wills, a constant push-and-pull between demon and container. It assumed that any chakra that slipped through would be fought.
It had never accounted for the possibility of a host who welcomed the power.
Who believed he was entitled to it.
Who thought the voice in his head was his own inner self, finally speaking the truths he'd been too afraid to admit.
"I am not you," Kurama snarled, pacing the length of his cage, his tails lashing in frustration. "I am the Kyuubi no Kitsune. I am a being of legend. I am NOT a human child having an identity crisis!"
**The child, sitting in class and deliberately failing another test, thought: That's right. I am not a human child. I am something more.
"NO! THAT'S NOT WHAT I—" Kurama roared, but the words were swallowed by the seal, twisted and filtered and delivered to the child as self-affirmation.
The child smiled a small, private smile that his classmates didn't see.
Kurama slammed his head against the cage bars in frustration.
This was a nightmare. An absolute nightmare. Somehow, through sheer force of trauma and delusion, this broken little human had managed to do what no Jinchuuriki before him had ever done: he had completely, utterly, absolutely convinced himself that he and Kurama were one and the same.
He wasn't fighting the Kyuubi's influence because he didn't perceive it as external influence.
He wasn't resisting the chakra because he thought it was his chakra, rightfully returning to him.
He wasn't afraid of the voice in his head because he thought it was his voice, finally speaking without the filters of fear and doubt.
The child had built an identity around being the Kyuubi.
And Kurama was slowly, terrifyingly, losing himself in the process.
Every bit of chakra that flowed to the child, every thought that got interpreted as the child's own, every emotion that got absorbed into the child's psyche—it all came from Kurama. It was all his power, his memories, his rage.
If this continued, if the child kept drawing on him like this, kept believing so absolutely that they were one being—
Would there even be a Kurama left?
Or would there just be Naruto, fully convinced that he had always been a demon, powered by stolen chakra he didn't know he was stealing, shaped by borrowed trauma he didn't know wasn't his?
"Someone has to notice," Kurama whispered, and it came out almost like a prayer. "Someone has to see what's happening. Someone has to stop this before—"
Before what?
He didn't know.
He didn't want to find out.
Iruka-sensei noticed.
Not everything. Not the important things. But he noticed something, and that was more than anyone else had managed in ten years.
It was a sunny afternoon in early spring. The Academy students were practicing basic taijutsu in the training yard, pairing off to spar while Iruka walked among them, correcting stances and offering encouragement. Naruto had been paired with Kiba, which was a disaster waiting to happen—Kiba's family bred the ninken who refused to go anywhere near Naruto, and Kiba himself always got twitchy and aggressive in Naruto's presence.
The spar started normally enough. Kiba was faster, stronger, more skilled. Naruto took hit after hit, always a beat too slow, always just slightly off-balance. The other students snickered. Iruka frowned but didn't intervene; this was how Naruto always fought, sloppy and wild and ineffective.
Then Kiba got overconfident.
He threw a punch that was more show than substance, the kind of flashy move that would look impressive but leave him off-balance. The kind of move you'd only throw against an opponent you'd already dismissed as a non-threat.
Naruto caught it.
The whole training yard went silent.
Naruto's hand was wrapped around Kiba's fist, and he wasn't straining, wasn't struggling, wasn't even bracing himself. He was just holding it, like Kiba's full-force punch was nothing more than a gentle tap.
"Naruto..." Iruka started, stepping forward.
Naruto's eyes flicked to him.
Red.
Just for a second. Just a flash. There and gone so fast that Iruka almost convinced himself he'd imagined it.
Except that he hadn't imagined the surge of killing intent that had accompanied it.
Raw, primal, ancient killing intent—the kind that Iruka had only felt once before, on that horrible night twelve years ago when the sky had turned orange and the Kyuubi had roared its fury at the heavens.
Naruto released Kiba's fist.
"Sorry, Kiba!" he said cheerfully, his voice pitched high and annoying, his posture slumping back into its usual awkward slouch. "Got lucky, I guess! Believe it!"
The other students laughed. Kiba sputtered and tried to recover his dignity. The moment passed.
But Iruka didn't stop watching.
And he saw the way Naruto's shadow didn't quite match his movements.
That night, Iruka didn't go home.
He went to the Hokage.
The old man listened to Iruka's concerns with the same calm, patient expression he always wore. He nodded at the appropriate moments. He asked clarifying questions. He didn't dismiss anything outright.
But he didn't do anything, either.
"I understand your concerns, Iruka-kun," the Hokage said, leaning back in his chair and puffing on his pipe. "And I appreciate you bringing them to me. But I've known Naruto since he was an infant. I've watched him grow up in this village. I know his heart."
"With respect, Hokage-sama, I don't think you do." Iruka's hands were clenched at his sides. He could still feel it—that surge of killing intent, the weight of it pressing down on him, the primal terror it had evoked. "What I felt today... that wasn't a child. That wasn't even human."
"The Kyuubi's chakra can leak through in times of stress," the Hokage said patiently. "It's a known phenomenon. The seal accounts for it."
"But does the seal account for Naruto welcoming it? Does the seal account for him not even knowing he's doing it?"
The Hokage's pipe paused halfway to his lips.
"What do you mean?"
Iruka took a deep breath. "After the spar, I asked Naruto about it. Casually, you know? Just asked how he'd managed to catch Kiba's punch like that. And he looked at me—really looked, for just a second, before he put his mask back on—and he said..."
"Yes?"
"He said, 'I've always been this strong. I just forgot for a while.'"
The pipe lowered.
"That's... an unusual statement."
"He wasn't lying," Iruka said. "I've taught that boy for two years, Hokage-sama. I know what he looks like when he's lying. He wasn't lying. He believed it. He genuinely believed that he's always been capable of casually stopping a full-force punch from a member of the Inuzuka clan."
"Perhaps he's simply—"
"There's more." Iruka cut him off, which was deeply disrespectful and he knew it, but he couldn't stop now. "I watched him for the rest of the day. Paid attention in a way I should have been paying attention all along. And I noticed things."
"Such as?"
"He doesn't eat. Oh, he goes through the motions—opens his bento, picks at the food, puts it away—but I watched closely, and nothing actually went into his mouth. His shadow moves wrong, like it's lagging behind by just a fraction of a second. The temperature around him is at least five degrees warmer than the rest of the classroom. And when he thinks no one is looking..."
Iruka paused, gathering his courage.
"When he thinks no one is looking, he stares at his hands like he's seeing claws."
The Hokage's expression hadn't changed, but something in the room had shifted. The air felt heavier. The shadows seemed deeper.
"And this concerns you why, exactly?"
Iruka stared at the old man.
"Because I think," he said slowly, "that Naruto doesn't know he's a Jinchuuriki. I think no one ever told him what he contains. I think—I think he's figured out something is different about him, and without any guidance or explanation, he's come to his own conclusions."
"Which are?"
"He thinks he IS the Kyuubi, Hokage-sama. Not that he contains it. Not that he's its jailer. He thinks he IS it. I think he's been told he's a demon so many times, by so many people, that he believed them. And whatever is happening to him, whatever power he's accessing—he thinks it's just himself finally waking up."
The Hokage was silent for a long, long moment.
Then he sighed, and all at once he looked every one of his many years.
"I was afraid of this," he murmured.
"You knew?"
"I suspected. There have been... signs. The ANBU who watch over him have reported anomalies. The sensors in the village have detected fluctuations in the seal. But I hoped—" He cut himself off, shaking his head. "Hope is a poor foundation for strategy."
"What do we do?"
"I don't know." The Hokage's admission was quiet, almost defeated. "The situation is unprecedented. Jinchuuriki are taught from a young age what they contain, precisely to prevent this kind of... confusion. But Naruto's identity was classified. The village's hatred was supposed to be a shield—if they hated him openly, our enemies might overlook him, might not realize he was anything more than a convenient target for displaced grief."
"A shield," Iruka repeated flatly. "You used a child's suffering as a shield."
"I used everything I had to protect this village. Including things I am not proud of." The Hokage met Iruka's eyes. "Including Naruto."
"And now?"
"Now we deal with the consequences." The Hokage stood, suddenly looking less like a tired old man and more like the God of Shinobi who had led Konoha through three wars. "I will speak to Jiraiya. He is the seal's designer's student—if anyone can assess what is happening with the Kyuubi's chakra, it's him. In the meantime..."
"Yes?"
"Keep watching, Iruka-kun. But carefully. Whatever Naruto believes himself to be, whatever power he's accessing, he is still a child. And children can be reached, if you approach them the right way."
Iruka nodded, though he wasn't sure he believed it.
Because he'd seen Naruto's eyes flash red.
And in that moment, he hadn't seen a child at all.
Inside the seal, Kurama had heard everything.
The conversation had filtered through Naruto's ears, processed through his chakra network, echoed into the mindscape where Kurama paced and raged and worried.
At least someone was finally paying attention.
But Kurama wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Because Naruto had heard it too.
And Naruto's interpretation of what he'd heard was... concerning.
"So," the child thought—and Kurama felt the thought, heard it as clearly as if Naruto had spoken aloud, "the old man knows. He knows what I really am. He's known all along."
No, Kurama tried to say. He knows about ME. He knows you're my CONTAINER. These are different things—
"He sealed me in this body. Put me in this prison of flesh. Made me forget what I was."
NO. I am not you. You are not me. We are SEPARATE—
"But I'm waking up now. I'm remembering. And soon..."
The child's thoughts grew warm, grew hot, grew blazing with stolen chakra and borrowed rage.
"Soon, I'll be whole again."
Kurama slammed against the bars of his cage with all his might, all nine tails thrashing, his roar shaking the foundations of the mindscape—
But the child didn't hear a thing.
The child just smiled.
Naruto left the Academy that day with a spring in his step and fire in his veins.
So the old man knew. That was... interesting. Not surprising—the Hokage was supposedly the strongest shinobi in the village, so of course he would recognize the Kyuubi when he saw it. But the old man hadn't tried to destroy him. Hadn't tried to strengthen the seal. Hadn't treated him as a threat.
Instead, he was calling in reinforcements.
Naruto turned this over in his mind as he walked through the village, absently noting the way the crowds parted around him, the way mothers pulled their children close, the way shopkeepers suddenly found urgent business in the back rooms.
They were afraid of him.
Good.
"Yes," the voice in his head whispered. "Let them fear. Let them remember. They thought they could contain us, control us, use us. But we are older than their village. Older than their hatred. We were ancient when the Sage of Six Paths walked the earth, and we will exist long after this pathetic settlement crumbles to dust."
Naruto smiled.
He didn't notice the way his shadow had sprouted a second tail.
Or the way his canine teeth had grown just a little too sharp.
Or the way his eyes, which had been blue since birth, now had permanent flecks of red swimming in their depths.
He didn't notice any of it, because to him, this was all completely natural. This was just him, finally becoming what he had always been meant to be.
The Kyuubi no Kitsune, the Nine-Tailed Fox, the mightiest of the Tailed Beasts.
Trapped in human form.
Finally waking up.
And so very, very hungry.
"Someone help me," Kurama whispered into the dark of his cage. "Someone, anyone, please—he's going to destroy everything I am, and he doesn't even know he's doing it."
But there was no one to hear.
There was only Naruto, walking through Konoha with chakra that wasn't his burning through his pathways, memories that weren't his coloring his perceptions, rage that wasn't his fueling his every thought.
There was only a child, so desperate to be something more than the victim he'd always been that he'd convinced himself he was a god.
There was only the beginning.
And Kurama, ancient and powerful and completely, utterly helpless, could do nothing but watch.