Naruto was born a healer.

He was extraodinary in this one, simple, abilty.

The Kyuubi did not heal him - he healed the Kyuubi.

When Naruto's mother placed the small babe on the operating table, her eyes could not meet the Medic-nin's. But Naruto was already healing from the loss of his umbilical cord. He was healing from his birth, his skin flushed with new life.

This trait was strong in him and, with use - like a muscle - strengthed to unimaginable heights.

He healed bad food before it contaiminated his stomach.

He healed scratches before they left marks.

He healed the bones before they even broke.

The pain was a fleeting dream, a whimsical muttering, only as real as the rest of the world. Just a whisper, a shifting moving cloud. It blocked out little light because it did not exist. Nothing, to Naruto, existed.

The cancer, the disease, the vein and the evil spread like the plague it was beneath Naruto's skin. It expanded and pulsed, bleed and dried.

Naruto reached out .. and touched Chouji's cheek. It was round and fat, and incredibly soft. Human flesh still felt strange to him. His fingers smeared through the blood to find the wound.

Chouji stood in silence, and in fear. He tried not to shake, his mind quivering his body without him even then. This was the contamination, the spread. Would he die too, just from being touched..? Was merely being close enough to breath the same air cause enough to perish?

Naruto's fingers tingled, sparkled with light. A glow came to them from inside, and the boy grinned manically.

Chouji's cheek was healed in instant, red light. He reached up to touch were there was nothing, and almost missed the look.

Naruto widened his mouth, and prepared to bite.

----

Notes;

1. Dad has broken pieces of bone in his leg. I think there's a shard somewhere near his knee and a couple on the bottom part of his leg - both under skin. That helped the inspiring..
2. You should see what I dream if you don't think this is weird.

Thoughts on Sick.

To understand Naruto's world better, first you must know more about the sickness. At the simplest, it's most basic principle is mutation. But this is no mutation that one is happy to gain - you do not benefit from super powers or gain membership into X-Men.

In basic, you .. rot away. Your body begins to decay and your mind falls apart. And it is as lovely as it sounds. Flesh peeling, bones actually becoming so brittle that they break and will show themselves through the skin, as fragile as twigs. And it gets worse, more and more gruesome as the disease progresses. But that is not what you need to hear now.

Rather, you should know of the mind. The mind falls to pieces just as easily as the bones, and creates a whole other world unto itself. You begin to live a shifting world of illusions and lies. What is seen with your eyes is never real. What Naruto sees does not exist.

Naruto is the last one cursed with the disease. He is the last only because he is the one who survived. Everyone else has sucumbed to it and withered away. Naruto's natural ability to heal himself is all that has saved him. His life would be forfeit without it.

This ability is something he was born with, and has always had. Over time the constant battle between disease and cure has flexed his ablility to heal like a muscle. With use, it became stronger.

That is not to say that Naruto will ever not see what isn't really there. He will quite possibly always be this way, because the disease, once advanced, has no cure. But, perhaps, one day he will learn to see past the illusions? It is uncertain.

In the time of the Kyuubi, the diease was simple. It killed. It destroyed. It rendered life useless, and nothing more.

But, this all changed with the Yondaime. Newly elected to office and newly infected, he had already the decision to make a change and submitted his own body for testing, for genetic experimentation. Many researchers became contaiminated themselves and were lost, but their's is an untold tale. They all died for the 'good of Konoha'.

I tell you this to let you know how it became. With Naruto, the diease changed. If a person had not been infected for too long in this early stage, there was a possiblity of being cured. They could be saved.

You can't imagine, I don't think you can ever imagine, the terror and fear that coated that village and just how desperately people lived. How unkind they became to any with even a hint of illness. In a way, they were all sick.

But, you know, had this never happened - had Konoha never been infected and Naruto never used as an experiment, as a test, as a guinea pig at the tender age of four minutes - he never would have become what he is. (And what he is, is mad.) In another world, he could have been ostracized just the same and cast out identically from their society. But there he would have risen above it, set a goal and a destination for himself.

This Naruto has struggled just to live, to survive. (And survive he did.) Each breath was a fight for life as his lungs tore themselves asunder again from the pressure of the disease, again and again. And were mended by his ability to heal until it was a battle of atoms. Molecules opposing the other daily on a scale unseen.

He is alone in this.

.

So he lived so alone and isolated with only himself for comfort that he invented this figure, this personality which no one else knows or can ever know. This was his comfort.

And this small fact, that no one can ever really understand what is inside that mind, scares so very many.

They are still afraid.