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Sunrise, sunset, and everything in between—there are three parts of the day. Anko doesn’t look at the sky often because she’d rather look down on someone. She’d liked it as a child, though, that big blue expanse, a shining sun people had warned her not to look into. Hint: she looked anyway.
Sometimes the sky represents endless possibilities. No limits. Anko had become a shinobi under the sky; her jounin-sensei had stood there and watched as she tied the headband to her forehead, teammates beside her repeating the same action. Orochimaru had been different back then. They’d been a keen mind, a desire to see the next generation of shinobi grow and thrive and know. Now they are a keen mind trapped in a rotten body, a cornered animal. She wishes she could kill them.
Turn the lock on the door. Step outside.
Anko rises early enough that it’s still mostly dark when she leaves her apartment. The sky holds the promise of the sun, daylight will come, shine upon those winding streets, but not yet. She walks the silent steps to Jounin HQ. Most shinobi are early risers. Gekko is glued to the coffee pot. Sarutobi is poring over some mission info. A dozen other jounin are doing a dozen other things.
No one greets her when she enters the building. Anko has less friends than she can count on a single one of her hands. Kurenai, Ibiki, Genma, and a weird antagonistic relationship with Hatake that can also be grudgingly classified as friendship. And that’s okay.
She takes up her usual space on one of the couches in headquarters and pulls out a mission report. Anko was never made for paperwork. She’s a fighter down to her bones. Harunobu was a paper-nin, did all the team’s papers and liked it to boot, but he doesn’t talk to her much anymore. It’s probably the Orochimaru thing.
Yes, the mission succeeded. Yes, she killed that guy. And that other guy. And wrecked a bunch of furniture. Yes, she has the body in a sealing scroll. No, she wasn’t caught, not by anyone who’s still alive.
She almost startles when someone’s hand falls lightly on her shoulder.
“Hey, Kurenai,” Anko says. The edge of Kurenai’s thumb is brushing against her curse seal. That touch shivers down her spine, shakes and shudders. Anko subtly shifts her posture so Kurenai’s hands are farther apart. “What’s up? Thought you’d be getting ready for training today.”
“Mmm, I’ve got a few hours before my team meets up. I wanted to see you,” Kurenai says, lifting her hands and coming around to the other side of the couch to sit beside Anko. “Paperwork?”
“Always,” Anko says. She catches Kurenai’s eye—is she feeling brave today, brave enough to rest her head on Kurenai’s shoulder—she is—Kurenai’s shoulders are firm and strong. Anko would know. She’s spent hours tracing the outline of them, tracing her fingers over Kurenai’s arms and feeling the hard muscle there. “I feel like I spend more time on this couch than I do actually on missions. Awfully boring, that’s what it is.”
“Such is the life of a hardworking shinobi,” Kurenai murmurs.
Anko doesn’t respond for a little bit, just lets herself breathe and feel the press of her cheek against the bones in Kurenai’s shoulder.
When Anko was younger she had no friends, not really. Between the Orochimaru thing and—well—the Orochimaru thing, really—she didn’t have the time or the patience or the softness to have friends. She was never like ice because ice runs cold and Anko is hot as a furnace, full of fighting spirit and the will to prove everyone wrong about her, but she was like something.
Kurenai happened. She just—happened.
Anko didn’t meet her, never had that awkward stage of young friendship where she asked and was asked things like what’s your favorite color, favorite animal, favorite time of day. Or maybe she doesn’t remember.
But she thinks it went like this:
Kurenai happened while Anko was still in the academy, still soft, untouched by threads of sticky hate. She was aware of Kurenai first, and Kurenai was the nice girl everyone liked. Anko liked her too, kind of, a little flickering flame in her chest that lit up when they were together. They didn’t talk much, really, after they graduated from the Academy. Not until they both made chuunin, and by then they were already friends.
(They talked after the Kyuubi attack. Anko would have been around thirteen, Kurenai the same. Just promoted to chuunin, on their way to becoming real shinobi, so close they could feel it at the tips of their fingers. It made the hairs on Anko’s arms raise sometimes, the idea of becoming a real shinobi.
After the Kyuubi destroyed buildings and families and lives, they talked.
It was dark. Anko was shaking, sweating, wishing she’d been out there to help, grinding her teeth when Orochimaru-sensei had told her to stay and disappeared into the fray. Kurenai was in the shelter too, desperately clamoring for a chance and swallowing her pride when she was told no. And they talked.
“I’m scared,” Kurenai whispered to her.
They were pressed shoulder to shoulder. Anko measured time by the beat of her friend’s unsteady breaths. Kurenai was holding her hand. Maybe she needed it. Maybe Anko needed it. Somewhere above their heads, above the shelter full of the civilians and children of shinobi families who’d managed to make it, the Kyuubi raged.
“Me too,” Anko said.)
That was then.
She still doesn’t really have friends, not like other people do, wide networks of information and people they can get a drink with after a rough mission—no, not Anko, but it’s better than years ago when she slept alone in a cold apartment and thought that was it.
“I am the hardest worker I know,” she says. “Where would this village be if not for me?”
“Somewhere sad and desolate, I’m sure,” Kurenai replies dryly. “I can almost hear it . . . the money we save on not needing to replace furniture.”
“What’s the point in having a fund if we don’t spend it?” Anko asks. “How much time do you have, realistically?”
“Enough to take you to get dango,” Kurenai says. Anko hears rather than sees the soft smile in her voice. “Come on. The paperwork isn’t going anywhere.”
“I don’t even need an excuse,” Anko breathes, picking herself up off the couch and extending a hand toward Kurenai. “Let’s go.”
*
In the evening when the sun sears the edge of the sky, Anko walks home.
Sunset is her second favorite time of day; sunrise, the first. They’re both heralds of change, night and day: revolution. Sunset is only her second favorite because she can’t see as well in the dark, into every corner and cranny to make sure she’s safe.
When night becomes day Anko is reborn. Another day, another her. She can put that wicked sharp smile back onto her face. The fear of the night has whetted its edge—she’s not afraid. But it shouldn’t matter—she’s a snake, slides on her belly anyway, she’s the outcast and when people look at her they think she’s something someone discarded. No one says it but she knows it.
One foot in front of the other.
Anko walks because she has the time to. She could jump over roofs, feel the wind in her hair and on her face but when she walks she is so intimately aware of her own body, so in control of herself. She would never give that up, so she walks for as long as it takes, as long as she can, focusing on the soft rhythm of her feet hitting Konoha’s streets.
Turn the lock on the door. Step inside.
Night falls.
*
Anko sleeps with her back pressed up against the wall.
*
When Orochimaru was Anko’s sensei, she wanted nothing more than to be like them. They’d been kind and attentive, making sure the whole team learned as one, worked as one, killed and breathed and lived together.
Those days are distant, her sweet summer past. The ugly taste of betrayal pools bitter in the back of her throat when she thinks of everything—all those firsts, all the deaths she hadn’t known were going on—the day the Hokage called her and her team into his office and assigned them to a different jounin-sensei.
She hadn’t known until she heard it from the mouths of civilians—Orochimaru is possibly Konoha’s worst-kept secret—there’s also ROOT, what really happened on October 10th, ANBU, Konoha’s lack of aid in Uzushio’s time of need, but those secrets aren’t so close to Anko’s heart.
The only ones who don’t know are the children she sees hiding behind their mothers’ skirts, peeking up at her when she walks past, children who’ve just enrolled in the academy. No one wants to tell them. They will figure it out eventually.
Orochimaru’s ghost still blows through Konoha like a bad-smelling wind. She sees them in the faces of the experiments they tossed away. There’s a civilian girl living on the end of her street who only really leaves the house for groceries and a weekly trip to the therapist’s office—her name is Kaoruko.
Anko knows her because she found Kaoruko in one of Orochimaru’s hideouts about a month after they’d fled the village.
The memory makes her sick. Orochimaru had taken her there, had taken her teammates there, had let the three of them use their scroll collection. She’d summoned her first snake below the streets of Konoha, unknowing that in the next room over a girl had been crying.
Kaoruko was how Anko found out—she was also how Anko uncovered the rest. They don’t talk much anymore. Too many bad memories for the both of them, she thinks, but every once in a while they pass each other on the street and Kaoruko smiles at her.
It’s a beautiful smile. Anko wishes she could have gotten to know her under different circumstances.
*
Kurenai wants to lead a team, to pass on her knowledge to the new generation. And that’s good.
It’s not Anko’s fault, but she is afraid. Kurenai tells her she’d be a wonderful teacher if only she could hold her tongue but Anko is only worried that when her (potential) genin find out she used to study under Orochimaru, they’ll ask to be replaced.
Anko is afraid to go near children, and their parents are afraid of her. It hurts but Anko doesn’t care.
She visits Kurenai while team training is going on sometimes. The heirs Hyuuga, Aburame, and Inuzuka had been given to Kurenai. She treats them with care and compassion and soft smiles, none of which Anko has ever been good at outwardly expressing.
It makes something in her heart hurt, sometimes, the sight of Kurenai teaching. It’s obvious how much she adores her team, how they look at her with love shining in their faces.
Anko is—jealous.
*
“Gods, Anko, could you be any louder?” Gekko groans from where he’s—unsurprisingly—glued to his mug of coffee.
“Sorry,” Anko says cheerfully, slamming the door to Jounin HQ shut behind her. “I’ll bring an instrument next time.”
“There’s an actual dent in the wall from how many times she’s kicked the door open. One of two people who actually use the door, and this is what we get,” Hatake laments. “This building is made of solid stone.”
“It’s five in the afternoon,” Anko says, ignoring Hatake’s weak protests. “Why are you drinking coffee?”
“I just woke up,” Gekko says, and Anko nods—that’s perfectly reasonable. “Mission got out of hand—like, way out of hand. If all of us held our hands out and tried to catch it, it would still get away from us.”
“ . . . Have some more coffee,” Anko says.
She takes up her place on the couch and closes her eyes. Kurenai will be here soon. It’s just waiting now, fingers drumming against her thigh, humming a tune that doesn’t go anywhere but which sounds nice anyway, until Kurenai walks through the door.
“I’ve been waiting forever!” Anko exclaims, jumping out of her seat and bounding over toward Kurenai. “The love of my life, the apple of my eye, I would fall to your feet, would I not dirty the ground upon which you walk.”
“Oh, gods,” Kurenai says, sounding exasperated, but Anko can see the tinge of pink on her cheeks, the embarrassed delight evident in the way she averts her eyes. “What is it?”
“Are you done with team training?” Anko asks.
“We finished up a D-rank half an hour ago. I need to fill out the relevant paperwork, then I’m free, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Kurenai says. “Why? Did you want to go somewhere?”
“Yeah. Teuchi said he’s adding dango to the menu, just to test it out, see how it goes, because his daughter’s got a real sweet tooth—he wanted me to come try it,” Anko explains. “On the house.”
“Oh,” Kurenai says, eyes widening in faint surprise, “well. What are we standing around here for, then?”
“I have no idea,” Anko says, shaking her head. Then, in her most gallant voice possible: “Let us depart, my lady; the night is young, and I’m fucking hungry.”
Kurenai giggles, the same little laugh Anko falls in love with every single day, and takes her hand.
(“True love,” Gai intones gravely after they’ve left Jounin HQ, “is the most powerful force of all.”
“I just want them to get a room,” Hatake sighs.)
*
Anko is bitter and hateful, and on her worst days that translates to where she is right now: standing amongst the wreckage of what once was Training Ground 9, lungs heaving, sweat pouring down every muscle, trying her best to sit down and not being sure if she deserves to.
The curse seal, her curse seal, itches, and through the haze of anger and hurt she can’t quite remember if it was the seal that started all this or the anger that woke it, but it’s kicking and screaming now.
It wants her to—she doesn’t know, and it sounds stupid to say this anyway—give in to her . . . darker side. Anko doesn’t have a dark side, just herself and the ways she’s learned to live with that. But it wants her to. She can feel it in the thrumming of her chakra, the painful spike of the seal digging into her and saying, I won’t let go. I will never let go.
Jiraiya himself had worked on her seal, had tried to contain it the best he could, but it’s rooted so deeply inside her she thinks nothing could ever be enough to stop it in any way that really matters.
When Orochimaru placed this seal on her, she’d thought it a gift. She had been honored. She’d thought Orochimaru drafted it especially for her, fine-tuned it and gave it to her because she was their prize student, the one who summoned snakes like them and followed them wherever they walked and wanted to be just like them, so much it hurt.
When she received the seal, she hadn’t known how many people had suffered just so she could have this power. She hadn’t known about Kaoruko, about tens and maybe hundreds of nameless, faceless children, victims of the person she’d promised all her loyalty to.
She tried, once, to cut it off, away. She really was going to do it. She would have skinned her own shoulder, would have done anything to get rid of the mark there, always watching her like some evil eye, always connecting her and Orochimaru.
She couldn’t. Call it weakness, call it sentimentality, but when she held that blade to her skin she looked at the seal and she cried.
It’s another way for her to hate herself. She can’t let go of them, any more than she could let go of her life or her snakes or Kurenai.
She’d sat there in her bathtub, slender knife pressed against the bare skin of her shoulder, remembering the first time Orochimaru had pulled her aside after team training and told her, Anko, the potential I see in you is unmatched by either of your teammates. I’ll not let it go to waste.
They’d taught her the language of snakes, they’d made sure no one could poison her—and years down the line it’s saved her life more times than she can count—they’d held her arm steady when they taught her to throw kunai.
They left her.
They left her because she wasn’t good enough, never was, and they left her, left the village so they could torture innocent children in the name of science, discovery. She’d been fifteen, or sixteen—all the memories from around then are a little jumbled.
First she’d felt alone, and when she discovered Kaoruko the loneliness turned into horror, and rage, and horror again.
Through it all, through the confusing mess of emotions she feels every time she watches a sunset, every time she summons a snake and looks into its eyes and thinks of her old teacher, she never forgets. And it’s on her to make sure nothing like Orochimaru ever happens again, so long as she lives.
If she has to turn their own techniques against them, if they have to die by the fang of a snake they’d once called a friend—that’s only a fitting end to it.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Anko says, tremor in her voice—and she hates that too, “This really isn’t—”
“Save it, please, Mitarashi,” Hatake says tiredly. “Can you be alone right now?”
“Please don’t get Kurenai,” Anko says, a little too quickly judging from the odd look Hatake gives her. “She’s . . . I don’t know how to tell her I just wrecked an entire training ground because I was in a bad mood.”
“I wasn’t talking about her,” Hatake sighs. “But you don’t give her enough credit. She’s been through some things. We’re shinobi, Mitarashi, emotional baggage is practically in the job description. I’m sure she wants you to tell her this stuff.”
“Hmm,” Anko hums, and maybe he’s onto something, but the idea of talking feelings with a guy people call “friend killer” is so laughable she actually giggles. “Hah. Now out of my sight, Hatake, before I get annoyed.”
He eyes her for a moment.
“I’m fine,” she lies—badly, too. He doesn’t call her out though, just nods—or is it more of a shrug? She can never tell with him—and flickers away. “Asshole.”
It’s difficult to get back into a bad headspace when she’s just had a conversation with someone, and maybe that was why he’d interrupted her. But as she takes in all the shit she destroyed, the wooden target posts and training dummies reduced to splinters, she catches herself wishing he’d stayed away so she wouldn’t have had to notice all—all this.
She sits down.
*
The first time Anko meets Uzumaki Naruto, he’s in the middle of being thrown out of a clothing shop.
The second time, he’s at Ramen Ichiraku wolfing down what appears to be his fifth bowl of tonkotsu ramen, and Anko only isn’t surprised because she’s seen how much an academy kid can put away when they really get to it.
The third time, she’s the proctor for Konoha’s Chuunin Exams, and she’s coming through an open window into the classroom just in time to catch that tail end of his argument with Ibiki. The man looks delightfully frustrated and the boy is wearing an expression she’s seen so many times on so many hopeful shinobi wannabes—I’m going to be Hokage, I’m going to be recognized, I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to—
In that split second, when a light that looks a little like hope and a lot like defiance flashes in the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki’s eyes, she’s reminded that he has a seal too, something someone put on him that he’s trying so hard to overcome.
She believes him.
The fourth time, he’s just a blur. She’s running past him, toward the northeast edge of the Forest of Death, where her old teacher has dared to lay a hand on one of Konoha’s.
“—is Sasuke gonna be okay?”
“—think so, but—”
And she’s racing, racing out there, wondering how bad those kids are hurt, wondering if she could have noticed them sooner, if she could’ve stopped this—but she didn’t so she has to get there.
In the end all that’s left for her is broken tree trunks, scattered leaves, Orochimaru’s passive face as they watch her try, try again to land anything more than a glancing blow.
Snakes crawl out of her sleeves—something like disgust shows on Orochimaru’s face for a second, like she’s stolen that which rightfully belongs to her—and miss, and miss. She snarls—they stare at her, always dodging with the barest of movements, like—
“Are you making fun of me?” Anko snarls, baring her teeth, wanting them to do something more than just watch after years and years of wondering if it really was her after all.
“No,” they say, voice even, voice calm. Anko has always liked her opponents to have a little life in them; when she stares at her teacher, it’s like looking at a wall. “Merely gauging how much potential you’ve squandered.”
The words hit her somewhere deep. The battle goes downhill from there, and at the very last second when her vision’s fading and her breathing is labored, when she thinks they’re going to kill her and leave her there, they lean over her, say, “But you will grow,” and disappear.
*
It’s not the pain in her ribs that wakes her up, or the bright lights of Konoha’s shinobi hospital, but a loud voice.
“Kurenai?” Anko asks.
Her voice comes out weaker than she’d like but she can blame that on whatever sedatives they have her on; most likely some ungodly mix of the strongest of whatever they have. Ordinarily, her immunity to most poisons is a very, very good thing; in the hospital, it’s just annoying.
“Um,” says someone who is definitely not Kurenai. “Hi?”
“Ah, Uzumaki,” Anko says, sitting up so she can get a good look at him. “What are you doing here? Don’t you have better things to do than pester an old lady?”
“Uh, okay, you’re not old,” Uzumaki says, and Anko barks out a laugh. “No, really, I’m just here ‘cause I saw you running out in the Forest to go after that creepy snake . . . person . . . thing.”
“And?” Anko says expectantly.
“People said you have a, uh—Curse Seal, like Sasuke, an’ I should come get you because they really need you there right now an’—”
Before he’s finished talking, she’s kicked her thin hospital blanket off the bed, peeled the medical tape and whatnot from her arms as gently as she can without hurting herself or the equipment, and started out the door.
“Which way?” she demands. “Floor? Wing? Is he awake?”
“L-left,” he says, answering her flurry of rapid-fire questions. “Third floor. Uhh. Sealing accidents, I think. He’s awake, just, really out of it, he keeps talking about leaving, and, um, hatred and stuff.”
“All right, kid, I’ve got it from here,” Anko says, turning briefly so she can give Uzumaki a once-over. “You’re exhausted. Go home, get some rest, and check in on your friend tomorrow.”
“He’s not my—” Uzumaki starts, but deflates after a few seconds. “Okay.”
“He’ll be fine,” Anko says, voice softening for a fraction. It’s something about this kid, someone soft and considered an outsider by everyone but the people who’ve bothered to get to know him. Like her, before everything. “I promise.”
*
She shouldn’t be home this early, but shinobi were born to break out of hospitals, so she is. The knock on her door comes thirty seconds into her breakfast routine—instant meals, all day every day.
“Look, Genma, I told you if the medic-nin see me outside they’ll haul my ass—hey, kid, you have got to stop impersonating my colleagues,” she says.
“I don’t even know who that is,” Uzumaki says.
“What do you want?” Anko asks. “Is Uchiha okay?”
“Yeah, he’s okay,” Uzumaki says. “Are you?”
What a strange kid, she thinks, even as she opens her mouth to say yes, she’s fine, but something stops her. Anko sighs.
“I have no idea,” she says. “Is this about Orochimaru?”
“I . . . Kakashi-sensei told me about them, and you were his student ‘n’ it’s probably really shitty to have such a scumbag as a teacher and you fought him, just to protect us.” Uzumaki looks up at her, with those shining eyes, so similar to Kushina’s—the late Fourth Hokage, mourned by all, forgotten by one, as her son lives, a monster—and Anko wonders how anyone could ever hate him. “Even if Kakashi-sensei was evil, even if he wanted to take over the entire world—I—I don’t think I could fight him.”
“It’s harder than it looks,” Anko says. Her food is probably cooling off; she doesn’t care. “Now, did you only come here to throw hero-worship at me?”
“No!” Uzumaki says, jumping like she’s shocked him. “No! I, um, Kakashi-sensei’s really busy now ‘cause he’s gotta watch Sasuke real close and train Sakura ‘cause she thought she wasn’t that strong even though I know she is and, and—can you teach me? How to be like you?”
Anko’s immediate instinct is to recoil, because she’s not good, she’s the absolute worst person anyone could ever, ever ask to be a teacher, but the raw determination in Uzumaki’s eyes, that same desperate urge to get better she sees in the mirror every morning, does something to her.
I could teach him, some part of her thinks. I wouldn’t mess it up.
“How do you feel about snakes?”