A Melancholy Mitarashi
by Alan Quicksilver
Mitarashi Anko was many things. She was a survivor first and foremost as many shinobi are. She was a killer, as many assassins must be. She was a proud kunoichi of Konoha. She was often called psychotic and insane, but only those closest to her knew the truth. Only a select few knew how fragile she really was. Her boisterousness was natural in coming to her, and she played the act of a sadist well. It was only when she was alone that her softer and more gentle side came out. Make no mistake, she was always Anko, and she was always ready to kill at a moments notice. Given orders to terminate life, she would do so without showing the slightest bit of remorse. But sometimes when she was alone, she couldn't help but remember things about her past that made her feel cold and alone. Most of the time these thoughts centered on Orochimaru – his deception and ultimate betrayal of her trust still bothered her from time to time – the bastard snake. Other times it was the way the village had failed to comfort her after her return from her apprenticeship.
This time was different though. As she sat amongst the stones of training ground thirty five, her thoughts had gone back further than she'd ever let them. It had started oddly enough with her remembering the Uzumaki boy. Naruto had always brought about some weird feelings in her. The boy's normal attitude sometimes reminded her of herself in a way, but that wasn't what brought out the odd sensation. She had seen his serious side a few times, those times when his precious people were in danger, that she got those feelings. She had been thinking about one such time as she broke from training to catch her breath. She'd always wondered where those rogue feelings came from, and today the memories had resurfaced. She'd finally remembered why Naruto's serious demeanor made her feel so self conscious. She'd remembered, and she'd began to cry.
That was how Kakashi found her. He had been sent by the Godaime to retrieve her, as she was late for her psychologist appointment, an old practice she'd re-established after a look over a number of the Jounin elite who's odd habits bordered on dangerous. Most of the behavior caused by "Jounin Psychosis Syndrome" was a harmless release for the stress of battle and death. But it was people like Anko and a few other jounin of her caliber that had taken a bad turn that was the cause for concern. When Kakashi had been sent out, he'd expected to find the sadistic and provocative woman either training or eating dango. Evidently she had been training, but as Kakashi jumped down from a tree bordering the edge of training ground thirty five, he was astonished to find Mitarashi Anko on the ground, curled up into the fetal position, and bawling her eyes out.
This was one of the few times in his life that Hatake Kakashi was at a loss for what to do. The first time had been when his father had died, but he'd found an outlet in being a 'by the book' shinobi. The second had been when Obito had left him to rescue Rin, but he'd followed him and learned the most important lesson in his life. The third was at the Valley of the End, where he'd thought Naruto was lost forever, but Naruto had been fine if not disappointed that he couldn't fulfill his promise to Sakura as soon as he'd liked. Now, he had no idea what to do about a broken and distraught Mitarashi Anko. A woman most thought without feeling, the prime example of sadism and pure insanity.
But she was still a woman, and her emotions seemed to have gotten the better of her.
Kakashi shook his head to clear it, and then sighed. There was only one option. If he didn't bring Anko back to Tsunade and the psychologist he'd be a dead man. Conversely if he simply tried to move Anko in the emotional condition she was in, she would certainly react badly and he would die just as painfully. No, his only option was to console her and find out what was bothering her. He carefully sat down near her and gently placed a hand on her back. When she didn't respond immediately he began to rub her back in small circles. It had been one of the things he'd learned from Minato after he and Kushina had become lovers. Slowly Anko's ragged sobbing calmed. She sat up and looked at Kakashi with watery eyes, her mind and soul embroiled in a chaotic cacophony of emotion. Her movements were so subtle that he almost didn't see her lunge at him, and it was to his credit that he resisted pulling a weapon or becoming defensive.
With her arms gripping at his back and her face buried in his chest, Kakashi once again thanked the kami that Minato had taught him so much about women. He again began to rub her back again, just like before, but did not mutter comforting words to her as he should, because he didn't know what she was upset about, and didn't know what to say. As he silently comforted her, he marveled at the eerie silence that surrounded them. It seemed that when a person like Anko was depressed like this, it threw the whole balance of nature off. Kakashi just hoped she'd be able get over whatever it was that she was feeling soon. He didn't know how long he could keep playing the concerned guy.
They sat there for a few moments as Anko's sobs slowed to a still and Kakashi marveled at just how off kilter the world seemed to be at the moment. Anko had stopped crying, and he thanked Kamisama for that. As she dried her eyes, she began to glare at him, an expression he had more than enough experience with. Kakashi almost felt as though the world had righted itself again, at least until she spoke.
"I blame you..."
Kakashi stared. Blame him for what exactly? "Excuse me?"
"You're student did this to me." Her face wasn't angry, like he thought it should have been. When Anko made accusations she was always angry and just a little psychotic. But her face was melancholy, a fact made all the more evident by how splotchy her face was, and the redness of her eyes certainly didn't help the image.
One of mine huh? "Which one?" he said aloud. Two of his students weren't even in the village at the moment, and the third had little time left in her schedule to torment anyone as of late.
"The little blond shit." That sounded more like the Anko he knew, but she still didn't look psychotic enough for him to be comfortable, not that anyone was ever comfortable around Mitarashi Anko, "Mistress of Pain".
"Might I point out that Naruto is leagues away by now?" He looked up into the sky for a moment, his one remaining eye glazing over as he thought of his obnoxious, ramen loving student. He must have been really out of it that day, because when he looked down again Anko had crawled into his lap and was hugging his middle again. He decided to ignore it for now and asked. "How could someone who's not even here upset you like that?"
It took her a few moments to respond. "It's the way he looks at you sometimes," she said, "You know, when he's dead serious about something and believes that nothing can stop him." Kakashi knew very well. It was a look he got regularly from Naruto. He nodded and she went on. "It dregs up memories, ones I spent a lot of time burying." He knew about that too. Naruto always reminded him of Obito, as much as he tried to forget, even Kushina had reminded him a little of his old teammate. But while Kushina only acted a little like Obito at times, Naruto was almost Obito's ghost come back to haunt him.
"I know what you mean." He mentally scolded himself. He shouldn't have said that, now she'd be curious. He counted down from ten. Three... Two... One...
"You do?" And there it was.
"Yes," he shook his head slightly. He knew that this would eventually come back to bite him in the ass, but he told her anyway. "He reminds me of where I got my eye." He pointed at the hitae-ate covering the left side of his face. "An old teammate. They carry themselves similarly. Stubborn, fun loving, and determined as hell to be something they shouldn't have to aspire to be." He sighed, "My old teammate only gave me that look once, but every time Naruto gives it to me I can't help but see a stubborn, looser of an Uchiha that makes me ashamed to be alive."
They sat in silence for a few moments, and Anko looked like she was about to say something. Kakashi decided he'd better head off that conversation before it started. The last thing he needed to to was go into the subject of Uchiha Obito and 'what might have been'. "But that's enough reminiscing," he said. "The reason I'm here in the first place is probably plotting my death as we speak." She quirked an eyebrow at him in confusion. He smiled under his mask and said, "You late for your appointment with the shrink." Suddenly, Anko was up and dashing into the woods towards the village. She let fly a stream of curses that would have made Zabuza blush.
And that should have been the end of it, or so Kakashi tried to tell himself. He stood there and stared for a moment, out into the middle distance where he could almost see his own thoughts. Things should have gone back to normal once Anko had started swearing again, when she had left in such a hurry, rudely forgetting that Kakashi even existed in her rush. But the world hadn't righted itself. Instead it left itself as it was and laughed at the lone Hatake from it's cockeyed position.
As he walked towards the village himself, he habitually pulled out his little orange book. But as with everything else, it seemed weird in his hand, a foreign object that wasn't his and never had been. He sighed again, putting his beloved Icha Icha back into his pouch, and asked himself how he was going to go on after this? How could he go back to being that one-eyed-bastard that was always late and didn't really care about anything? How could he walk back into the streets of his village looking for all the world as though he hadn't just held a distraught psychopath comfortably in his lap and consoled her?
This day had taken a sudden turn for the weird, and it had all started with a melancholy Mitarashi.
Yamanaka Kaitsuu, watched as her patient finally arrived for her appointment. Fifteen minutes late for her appointment. That lout Hatake must have held her up with some ridiculous excuse. Anko rushed in and made many apologies, bowed a few times, and sat down in her customary place on the plush red love seat that she had bought upon learning that she'd be taking up her aunt's old post of Shinobi Psychologist. Over the last few months, Kaitsuu had come to know a very different Mitarashi Anko than the one she showed to the world at large.
It had taken a long time to convince Anko to open up and share her story, but eventually she had and, under vows of confidentiality and secrecy the likes of which would make a monk scoff with indignation. The Anko that was listed in the bingo book was portrayed as tempered steel, a sword sharp and dangerous that had been cast aside by it's previous owner because of it's flaws. She was a tool that was cast aside, and her mind had almost broken because of it. She was a vengeful sort of person, a sadist and a psycho.
But the Mitarashi Anko that sat on that undersized couch was someone different entirely. She could best be compared to a glass kunai. Dangerous to the touch and deadly to it's foes, but ever so fragile in the hands of strangers and friends alike. The glass had cracks and fissures in it, and she had shut that kunai away where no one would touch it again lest it shatter. Kaitsuu counted herself lucky that she was even allowed to look at that beautiful glass kunai, even if she wasn't allowed to touch, restricted by her own codes and morals as well as the owner. She felt herself a child in a museum, staring at a wonderful artifact from ages past.
"What kept you?" she asked. "It's not like you to be late like this." Anko looked away. Kaitsuu noticed that Anko had foregone her shinobi gear for the session. She normally wore all the accouterments of her profession, but on occasion she would come dressed as a civilian. She had let her hair down, so that it brushed at her shoulders, and instead of the fishnet shirt and overcoat she wore s simple blue shirt and a pair of black shorts. She had opted for regular sandals instead of her normal shinobi issue zori. All in all, she looked rather nice, and nothing like Mitarashi Anko.
"I got caught up in old memories." She wasn't lying exactly, but Katisuu knew there was more to that statement. In fact she was willing to bet that it was the reason she had changed clothes before coming. When you dressed as outrageously as Anko normally did, a simple change of clothes was all you needed to hide in plain sight.
"What kind of memories?" Anko chewed on her lip for a moment trying to decide whether to confide or not.
"Memories I had tried very hard to forget." Kaitsuu nodded. Many shinobi had the kinds of memories that needed buried away, never to be remembered again. It was common practice to try to forget everything that made you human so that you could be a better tool for your village. Unfortunately, it never worked the way it was meant to. There were a few oddballs, she was certain, like Hatake Kakashi that continually relived those old memories that many would have buried, but these seemed to give him the strength to go on.
Kaitsuu still didn't know where Anko got her strength from, but it wasn't from old memories. "You know you don't have to," she started as she often did when approaching such subjects, "But you might feel better if you talked about them." She was sure that it would help a bit if she identified the problem and worked it out, but not everyone could do it so easily as that.
Again Anko chewed on her lip for a few moments. Kaitsuu knew the signs well, she was battling with herself over whether to tell or leave it as is. Minutes passed and Anko finally sighed, ready to tell. "When I was in the academy, back before my apprenticeship," she hesitated with that last word but went on regardless, "I knew someone. And I was thinking about another person who reminds me a lot about that someone." Kaitsuu nodded for her to go on. She knew that shinobi tended to see parallels in their comrades in arms. Painfully familiar parallels. She had heard many of the other staff members muttering about the similarities between Kakashi's team seven and the Densetsu Sannin.
"Back before I graduated, before my mother passed away, I was a very lonely child." She was now fiddling with the hem of her shirt as she spoke, "I was rather quiet in classes and always ate by myself." She snorted. "Having a chronically ill single mother to take care of does that I guess. But I didn't try very hard to make friends, and most people found me kinda creepy." Her eyes wandered as she told her story, straying here or there, to the various nick-knacks that were strewn across the room. "My mother had become bedridden again, the second time that month, and I had to stay home with her for a few days and miss classes. The teachers understood and made accommodations to keep me up to date on the work. They'd sent one of my classmates over to my house with some notes and my work."
Kaitsuu took a few notes of her own in a small pad of paper. This must have been hard for Anko to talk about, and she was secretly proud of the progress they'd made in the past year. Anko kept hesitating, like she would back out at any moment but pushed on. "We got to know each other that week, and from then on he was the one who volunteered whenever my mother became ill." She reached for her thigh, and sighed when she came up empty. She had often toyed with a kunai while talking, it seemed to help ease her a bit and let her speak more easily. Wordlessly, Kaitsuu pulled a blunt kunai from a drawer in the stand next to her chair and tossed it to the other woman. Anko mumbled her thanks and continued talking, idly fiddling with the dull knife. "He was an orphan, and like me, had very few friends. We got along really well too, my mother always joking about how we'd probably end up married one day." Here Anko went still and Kaitsuu saw a tear run down her cheek.
"What happened to him?" Anko hesitated once more and Kaitsuu waited while she warred with herself.
"When my mother died, he was there for me," she said, as though she hadn't heard anything. "He told me that no matter what, he'd look out for me from then on. He kept his promise too, I moved into the spare bedroom in his apartment after that and we always went together everywhere if we could." A wistful smile played across her face, "We were teased a lot, about being a couple and all of that childish nonsense. We were called mister and missus Shinkouyuu Chijin." Another tear streaked after the first one. "We spent most of our academy days after that just ignoring everyone else and doing our studies like we were supposed to. He and I had a lot in common, but he was a little odd. He had this dream." She trailed off. She muttered an apology and wiped her face off. The took a moment to compose herself before she went on.
"He'd always tell me that he'd be this great shinobi, that he wanted to be just like the legendary Professor. He never said he wanted to be Hokage or anything like that, but he always looked up to the Sandaime like his hero." She shook her head. "I told him that he'd have to train really hard, and that it was probably impossible for someone like the two of us, with no clan to belong to, unless we had really great teachers. Imagine my surprise when we graduated. We were all set to be put on a team together, be comrades in arms and such, but..." Everyone knew the story at this point. She had shown promise, and someone important had noticed. She had been hand picked by Orochimaru to be his apprentice. Many believed that it had been more than coincidence that that year's graduating class had been just the right size to have one student left over.
"That was when we had our first big fight." Anko was now toying with her hair, tugging at a few strands while she relived what must have been painful times. "Orochimaru wanted me to live with him, so that we could better work on my training. Chijin didn't want me to go, said that living with an older man would raise questions, mentor or not. He wasn't happy when I pointed out that people still questioned us living together like we were. In the end I took my things and left." Her face creased in a frown, "Things only got worse from there. He kept trying to convince me that Orocimaru was bad news, that I could do better, that I could petition to be put on a regular team, but I was stubborn and told him it was none of his business." Her face became tight now, and she was fighting back her tears now. Her eyes shone with her grief. "The last time I saw him alive was another of our fights. He got down on his knees and begged me to come with him to the administration office, he had requested me to be on his chuunin team. I told him that I was still training with Orochimaru, that I still had so much to learn. He begged and pleaded, had his head on the floor asking me to come with him to the administration building.
"I told him to go away, that he was being childish and he needed to grow up." The tears were flowing freely now. "He went missing after that, and it wasn't until Orochimaru fled the city and everyone started shunning anything to do with him that they found his body." She was gripping the blunted kunai tightly now, so that her knuckles were white with the pressure. "The investigation found that he'd gone to Orochimaru himself, tried to reason with him that I needed to be on a team, that I shouldn't be isolated from the world like he'd had me. He'd threatened to tell the council what he'd found during his own investigation. The bastard just laughed at him."
Kaitsuu set aside her pad and pen, and moved to the couch. She wondered if it were her motherly instincts kicking in, since she had no children of her own, but she couldn't bear to see someone in such pain. The rest of their time was spent in that way, her crying and Kaitsuu comforting.
Kakashi sat in a nice normal civilian bar. With the day he'd had after the 'Anko Incident', as he'd taken to calling it, he'd wandered around aimlessly looking at things as though he'd never seen them before. After a while he'd simply felt it would be better for his sanity if he just got smashed and passed out somewhere. It would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to figure out just what had broken his perception of the world, though he had a good idea already. He had foregone the more popular sake for something a bit harder that had been imported from Kusa no Kuni. The people of Grass country had a knack for brewing the kinds of liquor that would leave you wondering how you got where you were in the morning.
The thing that Kakashi liked about civilian bars, was that if a shinobi walked in and sat in a dark corner, nobody spared him more than a glance. Although he did have fun watching the bartender go into near seizures trying to figure out how he drank his liquor without revealing his face. In a bar that normally catered to shinobi, the crowd would have kept an eye on him. Shinobi generally looked after one another, even if it was only out of a sense of duty. Tonight, he really didn't want anyone watching him too closely. He did have a reputation to uphold after all.
He was on his fourth glass when he felt someone sit on the stool next to him, second from the end, and knew instinctively it was a woman. He almost groaned aloud. All he needed was for some civilian to try and pick him up, as though he hadn't had his fair share of that when he was a gennin and genius shinobi. There were times he'd watched Sasuke's little fan club follow him around and thought that some of those girls would have made excellent kunoichi had they not been totally fixated on the last surviving, and at the time, loyal Uchiha. He turned to her and was about to tell her what she could do with whatever she wanted from him, but he never got that far.
His visible eye was threatening to fall out of it's socket, and his jaw would have been hanging open if it hadn't been for his mask. Quickly and covertly he refilled his glass and threw the whole thing back, unconcerned with anyone seeing his face. The very reason he'd come to this bar in the first place was sitting next to him with an infinitely amused expression on her face. Turning to her again he asked, "To what do I owe the pleasure Mitarashi?"
"Surprised Hatake?" Indeed he was. This was not the Mitarashi Anko he'd always known. Scratch that, thought he'd always known. She was not dressed in her normally provocative outfit. Her hair was not up the way it always was, and she did not have her normal manic look about her. And as he took in the changes, she became even more amused. "Like what you see?" She raised an eyebrow playfully and he turned away, thankful that his mask would hide the blush that would tell her that he, in fact, did like what he saw.
She got a glass from the bartender and then filled both hers and his to near brimming. She then lifted hers artfully to her lips and took a sip. "You've got good taste Kakashi." she said.
Kakashi eyed her, "How did your appointment go?" He said it more out of obligation than anything. Not that he thought she'd answer.
"Good. It turns out we've got something in common after all." He looked at her pointedly. He had somehow learned over the years how to make his facial expressions seen and understood even under his mask. "Uzumaki Naruto makes us both see ghosts." He simply shook his head at her while she chuckled a little. She raised her glass into the air in front of him. He arched his visible eyebrow. She smiled and said, "To the future Rokudaime of Konoha. Our own Orange Ghost."
He stared at her for a moment, and then shrugged. "To Naruto..."
"Cheers!"
Just a little story I've been batting around in my head for a while. I kept thinking that there had to be more to Mitarashi Anko than we ever got to see. I even surprised myself with the KakashixAnko pairing, though it's kinda hard to see unless you squint. I'd be ever so grateful if you'd leave a review, but as with everything else, whatever. I just hope you enjoyed it.
AQ