Hiruzen Sarutobi, the Third Hokage of Konoha Village, sat behind his desk, wearing a large and somewhat intimidating red and white hat. Opposite him sat Cyan, a very unusual person who had just popped up out of nowhere one day.
"Am I in trouble?" Cyan asked meekly.
The Hokage just stared at him.
"...because, I was just filling out this CYOA, and just as a joke I gave myself infinity points, and all the bloodlines, and a doujutsu called the Shenanigan, and-"
"Enough," the Hokage said, kindly but firmly, gesturing to some papers on his desk. "I have seen your self-reported status report. According to this, you have more power in your pinky finger than a dozen S-ranked ninja have in their whole bodies."
"I never even watched Shippuden," Cyan said in a soft, childish whine.
"Your truthfulness should be easy enough to test," the Hokage said.
"Okay," Cyan said softly. "What do I need to do?"
"Have sex with a kunoichi."
...
"Beg pardon?"
"If even half of these claims are true, then you should be at no risk for a chakra blowback."
"A what?"
The Hokage snapped his fingers and a kunoichi wearing a plain bird-faced mask appeared in the room.
"Hawk will escort you to a private room."
"Are you serious?" Cyan asked nervously.
"As a heart attack," The Hokage replied.
"Okay..."
Hawk walked out of the room, followed by Cyan.
The Hokage snickered to himself. What a buffoon. Nobody could pass the test Sarutobi had set for Cyan. It took months or even years of training for a ninja couple to learn how to safely merge their chakras together during the act of intimacy. The thought that this random nobody could somehow safely do it with a complete stranger was preposterous.
Sarutobi had set Cyan up to fail, and he knew it. He even felt a little bad about it, considering the man's obvious mental deficiencies, but doing it this way advanced several of Sarutobi's goals, many of which were inscrutable even to himself.
...which was just the way he liked it.
Sarutobi leaned back and puffed on his pipe.
----
Cyan sat on a clean, medical bed in a sterile room. Hawk stood by the entrance, waiting for Cyan.
"No," Cyan finally said. "I can't do this. I won't do this."
Hawk tilted her head. "I don't understand. The Hokage has ordered it."
"I don't care," Cyan said firmly. "It's wrong. You work for him, right? Can you even turn down this order?"
"Of course I can," Hawk said. "I wanted this."
"You... what? Why?"
Hawk said nothing, simply stared at him through her mask.
"Look, Hawk... I'm sorry, can you take the mask off? If I'm going to have sex with you, I at least want to be able to see your face."
Hawk shook her head. "I cannot do that. However, if you wish, I could create a henge. Though it would not be me, just a random woman."
"I guess that's better than nothing," Cyan reluctantly said. Hawk made a hand seal. There was an explosion of smoke, and when it cleared an average-looking female ninja with dull brown hair stood in front of Cyan.
"Thank you," Cyan said. "Now, what was that about wanting this?"
"I have not been intimate with another person in several years. I am afraid that I will not be able to. And if there is even a small chance that I can be intimate with you without your chakra burning you alive, I would like to take it."
"Hold on, WHAT?! You can't just drop that on a guy! Do you have a bloodline or something?"
"No," Hawk said. "It is simply the nature of chakra. No coercion or force can ever be used to obtain sex, or the victim's chakra will cause the aggressor's chakra to backlash. I assumed you knew."
"IT'S NEWS TO ME!" Cyan yelled. "So, wait... to safely have sex, you need to trust me, and I need to trust you?"
"An accurate, albeit simplified explanation."
Cyan sighed.
"All right," he said. "Tell me about your childhood."
----
Ayane sobbed, her henge and mask discarded as Cyan held her and patted her back soothingly. "And then mom said, 'I wish I'd never given birth to you!'"
"That must have been so rough," Cyan said consolingly. "No child deserves to hear that from their parent. But Ayane? You are a valuable, worthwhile, and lovable woman. Nobody and nothing can take that away from you."
"Really?" she asked, looking up at him with teary eyes.
"Really. I mean, look at you! You're an adult, you're a ninja, you're working for the freaking Hokage himself! And even if none of that were true, you'd still be a great person."
Ayane cuddled up against Cyan.
"You mean it?" she asked, vulnerability in her voice.
"I really do," Cyan said. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
"I like that," Ayane said softly.
Cyan lay down on the bed. "Care to snuggle with me?"
"Would that be okay?" she asked hesitantly.
"I wouldn't mind. You wouldn't mind. Who else matters?"
"The Hokage. I was supposed to test your claims with a sexual encounter."
Cyan waved the idea off dismissively. "The Hokage can pound sand. If he needs an explanation, just tell him it's a trust-building exercise."
Cyan patted the bed next to him. "Snuggles?"
After a moment's hesitation Ayane joined him on the bed, her head resting on his chest.
"You feel... comfortable," she said.
Cyan wrapped his arm around her. "You feel pretty good, too," he said.
----
"Yes!" Ayane yelled, as Cyan thrust into her from behind. "Yes! Yes! Oh god, yes! Please fuck me! PLEASE!"
"I'm close!" Cyan blurted out. "Where should I cum?"
"Inside me!" Ayane yelled. "Please, inside me!"
Cyan felt his pleasure crest and the tension build before he exploded inside her pussy, shooting stream after stream of thick cum inside her.
He sagged and withdrew his slimy cock from her pussy.
"Oh my god," Ayane said dreamily. "Thank you."
Cyan lay down next to her on the bed, wrapped his arm around her, and pulled her close. She made a contented noise and snuggled into him.
----
The Hokage sat at his desk, well after office hours. But the paperwork never stopped, so neither did he.
There was a gentle rapping on the door. Sarutobi tensed up. Who could still be here at this hour?
"Hokage?" a woman's voice called out. "May I come in?"
Sarutobi relaxed somewhat. He recognized that voice, but still... what was she doing here so late?
"Come in."
The door opened and a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair entered, a dreamy expression on her face.
"Hawk?! What-"
The woman tossed a hawk mask on Sarutobi's desk.
"I quit."
"WHAT?!"
"I found a man who could fuck me like I needed. Like I deserve. I'm going to take him back to my place and try very, very hard to get pregnant."
Sarutobi's jaw dropped.
Ayane left the room.
Sarutobi looked down at the papers on his desk, as if somehow they held the explanation for what had just happened.
Cyan sat in front of the Hokage.
Again.
Cyan seemed rather relaxed this time.
The Hokage had dark circles under his eyes.
A different kunoichi accompanied them, sitting in a chair facing Cyan.
"Cyan, do you know why you're here?" Sarutobi asked.
Cyan shook his head. "Nope!" he said cheerfully.
"You seem far too happy for somebody in your position," Sarutobi observed.
Cyan smiled happily. "If you had the evening I had yesterday, you'd be cheerful too."
Sarutobi's sharp mind immediately went to work, dissecting Cyan's words for any hidden meaning, any subtext.
He could only come to one conclusion: Cyan wanted him to know that he had been successfully carrying out spy activities right beneath the Hokage's nose! Damn him!
Sarutobi's hand flexed in anger, but he kept it out of his voice.
"Be that as it may, you must now undergo mental inspection by our Yamanaka Clan. They have the ability to enter your mindscape and uncover your deepest, darkest secrets. Refusal will be seen as equivalent to admitting your guilt-"
"Okay!" Cyan said happily. "Bring on the mind probe!"
"It's not called a-" started Sarutobi. "...whatever. Mina, do your thing."
Mina Yamanaka brought her hands together and sent a thread of her soul into Cyan, establishing a mental link and bringing her into his mindscape.
The last thing either of them heard was Cyan saying, "Whoa, trippy."
----
In Mina's experience, ninja mindscapes were dark and labyrinthine things, full of horrific symbology based on traumas and twisting geography meant to disorient and deflect any potential invaders.
If a ninja mindscape seemed normal, it merely meant she was wasn't seeing the whole picture.
Mina arrived in Cyan's mindscape, on guard and poised to take immediate action.
...and stopped and stared.
Cyan's mindscape was the most aggressively normal thing she could have imagined.
It was just... somebody's house. She had arrived in the middle of a rather open area. Just from where she stood she could see a couch, a flatscreen TV on the opposite wall, a staircase leading down, a hallway leading away, another living room on the other side of a doorframe, and the edges of what appeared to be a kitchen.
Mina heard rustling noises coming from the kitchen. She drew her kunai defensively. They weren't actual kunai, since nothing here actually had a physical form, but she had found that they still worked in a mindscape as long as the other person didn't know that they weren't real.
Cyan walked out of the kitchen, holding a bowl of cereal with milk.
"Oh, hey," he said calmly. "How's it going?"
"Where am I?" Mina asked, unable to keep the tremor out of her voice. If this was the surface level of his mindscape, the hidden aspects must be truly horrific.
"Huh? Oh, it's a place I used to live when I was a kid. I would have thought my mindscape would eventually update itself to something more modern, but nope. Still the same house."
Cyan navigated to the dining room table and took a seat, calmly eating spoonful after spoonful of cereal.
Every crunch made Mina flinch. The sound wasn't the cracking of bones, or the snapping of frozen ice over a pond. It was just... cereal. Being eaten.
Somehow, that made it infinitely worse.
"Enough!" Mina yelled. "Tell me what you're hiding!"
Cyan put his spoon down.
"I... don't think I'm hiding anything, but you're free to check if you'd like."
"That's just what you want me to do!" Mina exclaimed. "But I won't fall for your trap!"
"Um... okay?"
Mina screamed and the connection snapped. Cyan was briefly left alone in his own mindscape before being pulled back to reality.
"Well that was weird," he muttered.
----
Mina and Cyan both opened their eyes.
"Well?" Sarutobi asked tensely. "What did you find?"
"I'm sorry, Hokage," Mina said. "I failed. His mindscape was a place of infinite complexity, so deep that I couldn't see past the first layer. It was... terrifying."
Cyan simply smiled and waved at them.
"Devious," Sarutobi muttered.
"So... can I go now?" Cyan asked. "I had kind of promised Ayane that we'd spend some more quality time together, and I'm looking forward to doing that."
The Hokage nodded. "You may go."
Cyan stood up and left.
"Mina, send word to the ANBU: Ayane has been compromised and must be treated as a possible mole within our operations."
"Understood. What will be done about Cyan?"
"You leave him to me."
"Understood."
----
Cyan opened a package that had been addressed to him but left at Ayane's house. Inside was a note from the Hokage and a Konoha headband.
"...the fuck?"
----
The Third Hokage sat at his desk. Sitting opposite him was Danzo Shimura, the leader of Root, the shadow organization that did horrible things to innocent children in the name of the greater good.
...at least, that's what Sarutobi had managed to convince himself was the case. No matter how often Danzo protested his innocence, the Hokage refused to believe him.
By this point Danzo didn't bother clearing up the Hokage's misunderstandings. It wasn't worth the hassle.
Hokage stared at Danzo's one good eye. Technically, Danzo had two good eyes and two unbroken arms, but Sarutobi had insisted that Danzo feign weakness, the better to lure his unsuspecting enemies into a false confidence.
That had been two years ago, and Sarutobi still refused to let Danzo remove either the eyepatch or the arm cast. Danzo was pretty sure arms didn't take that long to heal, but when the Hokage tells you to do something, you do it.
Especially when the Hokage was the one directly in charge of Root's "black ops budget".
"Is he one of yours?" Sarutobi asked firmly.
Shit. He was doing that thing again where he expected Danzo to be some sort of all-knowing spy. Who the fuck was "he"? How should Danzo know? But that's not the sort of answer Sarutobi wanted, so Danzo had to dissemble as best he could.
"Perhaps," Danzo said calmly. "But if he were, would I ever admit it?"
There. Vague enough to let the Hokage draw whatever conclusions he wanted, without pinning Danzo down to any specifics.
Sarutobi smirked. "Then you wouldn't have any objections if I... incorporated him into the Shinobi Basic Forces?"
Danzo airily replied, "You may do as you see fit. I will, as always, act from within the shadows."
Sarutobi spent several minutes considering this, mulling it over in his mind.
Get on with it, you paranoid fool, Danzo thought. We both know you aren't going to do anything more.
Eventually Sarutobi said, "Very well. Dismissed."
Danzo stood and started to walk away, counting down in his mind.
Three... two... one...
"Oh, and Danzo."
"Yes?"
"I am the fire that burns brightly for Konoha. You are the shadow that the fire casts. Don't ever forget that."
"As you say," Danzo calmly said.
He didn't even bother trying to pick apart the metaphor.