There was a boy eating ramen in the corner of his eye.
For all of a second, he paused to stare; no Ichiraku Ramen, no genin in kill-me eye-bleeding orange, and no dandelion tuft of blonde spiky hair. He shook his head, and continued along his path; the thrice-damned tower was still several blocks away, and war in the shape of broken soldiers and hellish paperwork awaited his attention.
He dreaded the tower. It was an awful place, where unsorted red tape was the cause of half the war's casualties, new information siphoned in daily to be analyzed with last month's reports, and if they were lucky, the combined information could save someone's life.
The trouble with that, of course, is that all of that never ending flow of information had to be absorbed by a single individual to put into perspective-it was meaningless if spread across a committee, where every member could forget a vital piece of information that would make the rest of the puzzle click into place.
He hated this job almost as much as he hated himself, but he knew that if it were anyone else, they would do even a worse job than he.
-----
High in this prison, the tallest room of the building, he sat and forced his brain to put all the facts into useable information.
A ghost of the door was kicked aside, though the physical aspect remained in place, and in stormed the boy with yellow hair mutely berating him, a childish scowl on his admittedly ugly face. The boy had her eyes. Half fury, half mischief, and a spark of life that flickered brightest blue beneath the boy's furrowed brows.
The apparition stomped his way about the office for two long heartbeats, and then fell apart into motes of sun-filled dust that flowed lazily in the morning light.
A less-than-sane grin came twitching over his face. Perhaps now the council would let him retire, on behalf of his going mentally insane.
He spent that night staring at old photographs of a woman with red hair.
-----
They did not impeach him, of course. Foolish of him to think so. Once Danzou's plot had been unearthed and the war hawk banished so many years ago, there had not been a straight spine on the entire collection of fogies.
Instead, they declared that he had been merely overworked and fatigued to the point of hallucinations. To counteract this from happening again, the mob of elders appointed him two personal advisors who would share his workload and keep him sane.
He was not surprised to see Jiraiya on this team; Hizashi, on the other hand, had come out of nowhere.
Truth be told, he was a bit leery of working with the man. The Hyuuga spare had been a very good friend during the few short years Minato had been Hokage before the Kyuubi had struck, and indeed had helped him immensely in designing the Shiki Fuujin during that narrow, terrifying week before it all hit the fan.
However, before Minato could perform the ritual, Hizashi's wife had been killed during the attack, and they had never really spoken after that, barring the nightmarish morning when Hizashi's niece had been kidnapped and Konoha went to war.
Nonetheless, there they were, the two of them having arrived in his office even earlier than he had. Jiraiya had a finger in his ear, and Hizashi was picking his nails, but they both shared identical grins promising something unpleasant.
"It seems, Lord Hokage," started the Hyuuga, an unpleasant smile loaning a sarcastic twist to his otherwise respectable words, "That you've been under an inordinate amount of stress, that of which we design to alleviate."
Jiraiya plucked the questing finger from his ear and threw the accompanying limb over Hizashi's shoulders, a definite leer on his warty features. "That means, 'we're here to keep you from going ape-shit crazy, like it or not', so get ready, boss, we're gonna help you win this thing."
-----
The next time he caught a glance of the phantom youth, he stood on an old, grubby bridge that marked the place as having once been a park. He leaned against the rails on one end, and on the other side, the dandelion boy, a girl with powder pink hair, and a pale, dark-eyed waif waited against an illusionary visage of green trees and clear skies. He blinked once, and saw in their place the normal dead landscape of war-torn Konoha.
The Uchiha clan was very much dead. It had been for a decade. His own student destroyed it two years after the Kyuubi incident, and had not been seen since. After hearing about the coup, the young Hatake murdered the lot of them, down to that little toddler of Mikot,o's; he had taken their treasonous plot as an insult to his long dead friend. On the bridge, the male likeness of Uchiha Mikoto slouched condescendingly as the sun child with her eyes grinned blithely.
-----
"My friend, you need a break," drawled the Mizukage over a petite dish of heated sake. The Hokage responded by flitting his eyes upwards to meet Momochi's, then down again to stare at the breaking reflection of his face in the alcohol; if he squinted, it looked like someone else.
Mizukage Momochi grimaced in sympathy for his fellow Kage's fleeting sanity, and tumbled the liquid over shark like teeth. Sanity was overrated anyway; if the Hokage had been in his full mind a few years back, Momochi never would have succeeded in his crazy plan.
-----
The third time he saw the sun kissed child, the boy was accompanied by a caricature of a nightmare.
Hatake Kakashi, the most famous Konoha nukenin since the deceased Orochimaru, single bearer of the Sharingan, a vigilante known for having murdered without mercy an entire clan, stood gently admonishing the child with a disturbing but reassuring smile in his single visible eye.
-----
Hizashi and Jiraiya grew alarmed at how much the Hokage was drinking. The older of the advisors recalled a woman he once knew, who drank with the same forlorn expression for years after her brother died. He wondered which of the KIA reports from the war had sunk the Hokage to this level.
-----
He had not told anyone that he was still having visions. Konoha did not need a ruler who was going insane.
-----
It had been the longest Chuunin exam in his life. Down on the battlefield, clueless genin fought pathetically for dominance, but superimposed on the reality, young warriors proved themselves against monsters.
The sun kissed boy, the one with her eyes; he had fought first, against a young, angsting clone of Hizashi's. That was the only dream he paid attention to, focusing on the reality for the rest.
It was only towards the end that he became interested in the dream world again, when the Uchiha waif zipped down the wall in a glorious blur of white and blue lightening, and impaled his arm through a spiky egg of sand. The pale boy leapt away almost instantly, and in his wake followed a thick blue veined appendage that reached straight across the arena, and then drew back on itself into the egg. It collapsed in clumps of sand, revealing a white-faced youth clutching at his shoulder.
From his viewing point in the Kage seating box, Minato tried to put together what information he could gather from the mirages, and a thought popped into his head.
"Hizashi, can I ask you a question?"
"Yondaime-sama may ask his humble servant whatever he wants."
"Cut the crap. Does Suna have a jinchuuriki?"
"I believe so; for the Ichibi, if I'm not mistaken. The Kazekage's youngest son."
"Red hair, with control over sand?"
"Er, yes. Why do you ask?"
"Oh, just wondering…"
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