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Klayter McCabe

000

Anko notices only in the most detached way that Sakura is a pretty little girl. Sakura’s pale skin (which bruises so easily when she’s too slow during her sparring sessions with Godaime), Sakura’s soft pink hair (less soft, now that she’s too busy learning and raging to bother with cosmetic things that once seemed so important), Sakura’s long fingers (so perfect for crushing herbs and suturing wounds and coming out covered in blood).

Anko knows that her world view is distorted – everything is sexual, everything is a fight, everything is red and white and dark, dark purple.

Anko attributes at least some of this to herself (her own inadequacies), rather than laying it all at the feet of Orochimaru-sama.

(Anko would never use “sama” to his face, but the honorific lingers in the looping whirls of her mind.)

Anko notices only belatedly that she is obsessed with Sakura. Not for Sakura’s sake, but for what she represents.

(Anko was once a child like Sakura – small and pale and thin, and never as strong as she wanted to be, never able to quite keep up with the older, bigger boys, never as strong as she needed to be.)

Anko paid little attention to the Uchiha heir when he was still in Konoha, and now she wishes that she’d watched him more. Was it just the Sharingan that Orochimaru-sama wanted? Was it that Sasuke burned, the way Anko once had? Was it only the transfer of obsession from Itachi, who was untouchable, to Sasuke, who was there for the taking? Or was it simply that Orochimaru-sama has always had a weakness for slim, angry, pretty things?

(Anko was once a child like Sasuke – small and pale and thin, full of power that was never enough, surrounded by people who failed to understand the urgency and seriousness and pain of being alive.)

Anko watches Sakura now with the unblinking eyes of snakes, and wonders if the little girl notices that she is...treasured. Her parents treasure her. Godaime treasures her. Anko, too, treasures her, but it is an uncertain mix of worship and contempt.

Anko is twenty-four years old, and she feels ancient. She is jealously protective of the demons she nurses at her breasts, content with their peculiarly symbiotic relationship. (She watches Sakura and wonders if this little girl will grow to birth similar demons.) Anko has no reason to feel red threads from herself to Godaime’s apprentice, but they’re there, cutting and tight.

Anko wants to make it clear to herself that she isn’t jealous of Uchiha Sasuke, precisely, but nor does she pity him. If he’s strong enough, he’ll take what he needs from Orochimaru-sama and emerge stronger, though far from unscathed. If he’s weak, then Orochimaru-sama will consume him, and it will be a greater fate than he deserves.

(Anko was never a child like Sasuke – quiet and humorless and calculatedly rude; standing alone and smirking and trying desperately to pretend that he’d never worshipped his brother or begged for his father’s approval.)

Anko doesn’t know what she wants from Sakura, whether it’s going to be give or take, except that there is something. She doesn’t want to protect her, because Sakura’s had enough of protection, and Anko doesn’t consider herself particularly nurturing anyway.

Anko is not sure what to expect when she finds herself standing outside of Godaime’s tower, fiddling with a dango stick and waiting. When Sakura comes out the door, Anko detaches herself from the wall and simply stands there, one hand on her hip, and Sakura stops short.

“Mitarashi-san?” she asks, voice polite but not meek, and Anko is pleased.

“Sakura.” Anko licks her lips. “Haruno Sakura.”

Sakura nods once. “Yes m’am.”

“Sakura.” Anko thinks that she just likes the sound of that name rolling off her tongue. “I hear that you’re moving ahead quickly in your current studies.”

Sakura bows her head but keeps her eyes rolled up wearily. “Shizune-san is pleased with my progress, but Tsunade-sensei says that I have a long way to go.”

Anko grins. “I’m sure you do.” The grin fades. “Tell me. Does Godaime ever talk about Orochimaru?”

Sakura’s head shoots up, her eyes and attention fixed completely on Anko for the first time since the conversation began. “Orochimaru,” she repeats, making the name not a question, but a swearword.

Anko closes her eyes, and that name and the anger behind it are cleansing. “So you intend to follow the Uchiha, then? Rescue him?”

Sakura’s next words are heated, serpentine hisses. “Sasuke-kun is my teammate.”

Anko wonders how a word like “teammate” can be used in a manner so literally correct and yet completely inadequate. “But your teammate wasn’t kidnapped,” she posits slowly. “He wasn’t taken. He left. And he nearly killed Uzumaki in the process, didn’t he? And weren’t Akimichi Chouji and the Hyuuga prodigy in the hospital for weeks?”

Sakura bares her teeth. “I fail to see how this concerns you.”

Anko lets the words hang like weights between them for a few moments before she speaks again. “A traitor always concerns the whole village.”

Sakura attacks her, but Anko is ready and waiting for it. She catches the girl’s thin wrist, avoiding those lethal fists, and spins her around, catching Sakura’s other wrist in her other hand and pulling her close, so that her breasts are pressed against Sakura’s back and the girl’s arms are crossed in front of her. “You’re strong,” murmurs Anko appreciatively as Sakura struggles.

Sakura says nothing.

Anko holds her for a moment longer, quietly, simply enjoying the human contact, and it occurs to her that she is sick, that terrorizing children is not a hobby that anyone but her former sensei would approve of. That thought makes her sigh, but she doesn’t release Sakura, or even loosen her hold. “The reason,” Anko says slowly, “that I know about traitors, is that I used to be one. Do you understand?”

Sakura stops struggling by degrees as it sinks in.

Anko releases her. “When I was your age,” she murmurs, “A man offered me something that I wanted desperately.”

Sakura whispers the word that is really the core of everything. “Power.”

Anko nods and closes her eyes. “Yes. Power. And I went, because that was what I wanted; what I needed. I left my home to follow a traitor.” She reaches up for her forehead protector and unties it, holding it out for Sakura to take. She watches the girl examine it. It’s the same one Anko was given at graduation, yes – and the scratch she made through it when she first betrayed her village has been painstakingly filled in and filed smooth, but it’s still visible under careful inspection, and that’s the way that Anko likes it.

Sakura hands it back to her with a solemn expression. “Why?”

Anko understands, then, that Sakura knows the word – power – but that she doesn’t know what it means.

(Anko was never a child like Sakura – quiet and mild and painstakingly polite; content to hang back, secure in her weakness, willing to believe that there would always be someone there to protect her if necessary.)

Anko holds out her hand – the solemnity of this whole occasion has been more than she is quite willing to deal with. “If you want the Uchiha back,” Anko says slowly, “I’m willing to teach you what you’ll need to know about Orochimaru.”

Sakura’s heart burns with wanting to say yes, but she glances over her shoulder at the Hokage’s tower, and that flick of her eyes says everything.

Anko smiles, trying too hard to make it reassuring and not her usual predatory expression. “I would never try to take you from our dear Godaime, of course. She has so much to teach you. This would be something else, something on top of your other studies.” She allows a long pause. “If you think you can handle it.”

Sakura bristles, but her reply is not one that Anko would ever have given. “For my team,” Sakura promises, “I can handle anything you throw at me.”

Anko closes her eyes and feels the snakes that are wrapped around her heart begin to stir. There is so much unfinished business, here.

She has much to do.

000

End “Follow”

000

January 15, 2006