A/N: Yeah, I don't know either... It's a ways post-timeskip, if that makes it less creepy.
Something Anko This Way Comes…
Chapter One: A little touch of Anko in the night
There were times, Anko admitted to herself, that the cursed seal Orochimaru had branded into her shoulder had come in handy, allowing her to defeat opponents she'd had no business engaging, turning the tide of battle after her own chakra reserves had been depleted. In some ways, she knew she owed her continued existence to the Snake-Sanin.
Tonight, she reflected bitterly, was not one of those times.
As she'd discovered, after the first time she'd been caught in a desperate enough fix to actually use her old master's tainted gift, once you cracked that package open, you couldn't close it back up again and pretend you hadn't.
Her seal, as she'd later discovered digging through some of her former sensei's recovered research, was an incomplete, experimental version. Rather than inject so much of his own chakra into one of his numerous and expendable guinea pigs, Orochimaru had simply summoned something up from whatever the deepest darkest Hell he'd had ready access to, ripped it into ten more or less even pieces, and set about shoving them into his test subjects.
The other nine had died, in excruciating agony, over the next twenty-four hours or so. To this day, Anko sometimes wasn't sure if that made her the luckiest of them, or just the opposite.
Whatever the seal was made of, the creature had a profound appetite for chakra, the stronger the better, and certain… predilections, about how it was obtained.
Failure to feed the seal, she knew, would result in it eating most of her own chakra, little by little, until she could barely move. Recovery time, she knew from experience, could take weeks.
Also, there would be the pain. Mind-bending, body-wracking, being-trapped-in-Itachi's-Tsukuyomi-would-seem-like-a-vacation-comparitively-type pain.
She had learned, after a few mishaps, how to harvest the chakra the seal needed without having to call on the creature inside it overmuch.
Anko sighed. It wasn't as though she didn't like sex, but knowing it was always tinged with an ulterior motive made it less of a joy and more of a chore sometimes. Also, the reputation she'd had to cultivate as a hard-drinking wildwoman, (or the village bicycle, depending on who you asked) was not something she'd exactly aspired to growing up.
The trouble was, her potential 'dating' pool was somewhat limited. Civilians were out. Their tiny chakra reserves tended to leave them in a near-coma for days after she fed on them. Leave too many partners hovering at death's door and eventually people would start to notice.
Her comrades presented a different problem. While they might have chakra aplenty, any shinobi worth the name would notice if lots of it inexplicably went missing. And forget about any kind of steady relationship. After a few repeat performances, somebody was bound to notice that a roll in the proverbial hay with ol' Anko seemed to leave one a lot more tired than normal for that particular activity, and then the awkward questions would start.
The brunette kunoichi shook her head. People were suspicious enough of Orochimaru's former protegee without them deciding she was some sort of… chakra-thieving succubus as well.
Not that it was a totally inaccurate description, considering what the seal seemed to house…
Given that she couldn't visit the same well too many times in succession, and that sometimes she didn't have time for a traditional seduction when she just needed the chakra so badly she could barely see straight, (which was sort of sad, considering a lot of her 'seductions' consisted of something along the lines of "So, you want to?") Anko had been forced to get creative. Given its responsibility for the situation, at least the thing that lived in her shoulder had decided to help, sharing what was probably a high-level kinjutsu.
As a result, for the last several years, numerous Konoha-nins had experienced what they thought were a series of very vivid, highly erotic dreams, which left them feeling oddly lethargic the next day.
In reality, Anko had snuck into their rooms, established the technique, done her thing, and escaped, leaving her targets none the wiser. She always tried to hit people coming back from missions. The last thing she needed on her conscience was somebody dying because she'd snacked on them before they went off to battle.
Mentally, Anko chuckled, allowing herself a moment's amusement despite the situation. According to her dark passenger, the technique allowed the user to transform themselves into their victim's greatest desire, making the chakra-harvest easier, and, helpfully, also much harder to trace back to the source.
A dozen people having an erotic dream would be a strange coincidence. A dozen people having an erotic dream about Mitarashi Anko… That would strain credulity.
One of these days, I need to make some kind of record of all this, part confession and part tell-all book. While nobody would be happy to hear what she'd been doing to them, she had a feeling a lot of her fellow shinobi would be interested in the forms she'd been wearing when she did it.
And they were definitely forms. The technique was ninjutsu, not genjutsu, her body reconfiguring itself into new and sometimes unexpected shapes for the festivities.
Since she started using this method, Anko figured she'd hit most of the high-level shinobi of both sexes in Konoha at least once.
She'd caught the visiting Jiraiya once, which had been excellent. She'd worn the body of his beloved Tsunade, no surprise there, and not only had the randy old goat lived up to his image, but his chakra had kept her shoulder-devil fat, happy, and best of all, quiet, for nearly three months.
When the Toad Sage died a few months later, Anko had mourned him, but with the consolation that she'd given him at least one night with the woman he'd always wanted, even if it had been sort of a cheat.
She'd appeared to Hatake Kakashi several times, wearing the body of actress Kazahana Koyuki, star of stage, screen, and several adaptations of the Icha Icha novels. She'd also fed off Maito Guy, disguised as Kakashi. And boy had shifting back from that one felt weird…
The one time she'd fed off Ebisu her form had been nobody she was familiar with, a buxom blond with pig-tails and, oddly, what appeared to be tattoos of whiskers on her face. He'd proven too much of a light-weight to snack on heavily, and had lost her interest quickly.
She'd once tasted Sarutobi Asuma, wearing the form of that bitch, Yuhi Kurenai. On a later hunting trip, she'd chanced to bag one of Kurenai's students, Inuzuka Kiba, and had been amused to no end to find herself morphing back into the red-eyed genjutsu specialist.
Her erstwhile companion had gorged itself on fellow Orochimaru-experiment and ex-ANBU Captain Yamato, and Anko was surprised to find herself in the body of Tsunade's oft-harassed, and, she thought, rather plain, companion Shizune. Unbeknownst to her, Yamato retained some very… vivid impressions of their encounter, which made his interactions with the Hokage's assistant highly awkward for the next week or so, particularly after he misinterpreted her innocent request to drop by her place after work and demonstrate his 'wood technique.' (Her roof needed patching)
Neji, the Hyuga branch clan prodigy had caught her passenger's fancy next, but Anko had refused to go back for another helping, no matter the provocation. Some of the things Neji's subconscious wanted to do with, or more accurately in some cases to, his cousin, were downright perverse, even by her own fairly jaded standards. She had been almost as surprised by that as she had been with the gigantic rack the older Hyuga sister had apparently been hiding under her baggy coat.
In a moment of pure desperation she had tried to feed off Morino Ibiki, despite very much not wanting to see what the scar-faced torturer's ultimate desire was. Inwardly, she still wished she hadn't. Having taken the guise of a small, delicate woman with mouse-brown hair, she'd still been fully clothed thirty minutes later, trying not to feel worse about her chakra-harvesting than usual. All Ibiki had done, from the moment she'd appeared, was cling to her tightly and sob into her shoulder about how much he missed her. Eventually, the creature in her seal got bored, decided that no meal was going to be forthcoming, and shut down their link, leaving their would-be target to cry himself back to sleep. Feeling extra masochistic, Anko had done some research and discovered that the woman had been Ibiki's civilian wife, who had perished when the Kyubi had stepped on her tea shop.
Anko sighed. This little trip down memory lane, counting the notches in her figurative bedpost, had been entertaining, but did nothing to help with her current problem, namely that she was going to need to feed again, soon.
She was wrapping up her third straight mission without any downtime in between, and she was running on fumes. Her intention had been to recharge the seal before leaving Konoha, but there simply hadn't been any time.
All work and no play make Anko a dull girl. She reflected absently.
Luckily the mission in question, a basic two-person recon patrol around the border with Grass Country, had been uneventful. Not a damned thing had happened during the entire two weeks, and she and her mission partner had exchanged maybe a dozen words a day.
Anko had hoped, fervently, that her non-corporeal free-loader would stay quiet at least until she was back in the village, especially given her limited chakra usage, but luck had not been with her. Ten miles back down the road she'd felt the familiar twinge from her seal, and had to bite back a stream of vicious curses.
When they'd hit the little crossroads town, she'd signaled a halt to their progress and announced they were stopping for the night.
He'd given her one of his inscrutable, I-might-or-might-not-actually-be-looking-at-you stares and cocked his head to one side.
"Why?"
"Look, kid…" Anko dissembled. "I dunno who I pissed off in mission assignment, but if we trail into Konoha tonight, while the Hokage's office is still open, they'll take our report, make us stand around for an hour while they process it, and then send me out to scout some other piece of even more boring, gods-forsaken wilderness before I even have time to clean up. I want a shower, a hot meal, a drink or three, and a good night's sleep in a real bed for once. The world will not end if we tell the Hokage about all the nothing we've seen tomorrow instead of tonight."
And if I have to sneak into your room and steal some of your chakra during the night, so be it. Her inner monologue added. Hell, maybe you'll even be in a better mood than you have been this whole time afterwards.
Her companion looked across the road at the warm, inviting lights of the inn, then back at her, and shrugged, almost imperceptibly.
"As you wish." Was all he said.
Which was how Anko found herself sneaking into her temporary teammate's room at three in the morning, just looking for a little fix to take the edge off, she told herself.
With practiced stealth, she moved towards her quarry. In the gloom, she could see him laying ramrod straight and perfectly still, almost diagonally across the single bed.
They seem to make chunin so young these days. Anko reflected absently, conveniently forgetting that she'd received the rank at the ripe old age of twelve.
He had the blankets pulled up past his nose, leaving a narrow strip of pale face visible below the absurd little black sleep-mask he was wearing, all framed by an unruly mess of dark, spiky hair.
This was always the trickiest bit. Having crept as close as she dared to a sleeping shinobi, Anko's hands flew through a complicated sequence of hand seals, even as she made the final leap towards the bed.
The young man sat up even as she did, hands popping out of the blankets to form seals of his own, but much too slowly.
The kunoichi landed on her prey like a cat, hands catching his wrists, interrupting the, probably very nasty, technique he'd been about to activate. Her lips found his, the curse mark on her shoulder spinning and pulsing, completing the kinjutsu.
His body relaxed in her arms, all resistance melting away. Hoping she wouldn't have to morph into anything with extra legs, given who she was dealing with, Anko rolled her head back and waited for the change to come.
And waited.
And waited a bit more.
Frowning, she poked absently at the curse seal a couple of times, as though it was a recalcitrant piece of machinery that just needed a thump or two in the right spot to get it going. Nothing.
"I swear this has never happened to me before." She murmured, aware of the irony.
But really, this was a new and highly irritating experience. Apparently her last hope of making it back to Konoha without degenerating into a walking exposed nerve was so totally asexual that her technique wasn't finding anything to work with.
"…No, Mitarashi-san…" he murmured suddenly. "We can't possibly do that on the Hokage's desk. Why? Because Shizune-san will be back any moment now…"
Well this just went from puzzling to super-creepy-awkward…
Or maybe, just maybe, the reason she wasn't changing was because the greatest desire of the male she was laying on was none other than Mitarashi Anko, the loud, brash, moderately fucked-up, probably an alcoholic and definitely self-destructive, curse mark-bearing quasi-succubus herself.
With a sigh, Anko rested her forehead against his. "And what in all the Hells am I supposed to do with you now, Aburame Shino?" she asked rhetorically.
Well, besides the obvious…