Summary: Where there's a war, there's a way.
Note: Prompt: butcher, bandage, fact. Anko (Once again, thanks to the mighty Chocolate Pencil for suggesting this character. :D)
Warnings: Language. And I used REALLY LONG sentences at a few points.
Pairings: None
Characters: Anko. Orochimaru and Kakashi mentioned
I own nothing of Naruto, including but not limited to the characters of the Narutoverse.
Where there's a war, there's a way.
Anko doesn't quite learn this during her first battle, and she certainly never saw it coming during her academy instructions. She may have felt the pangs of loneliness when she sat on her cot, whittling an unbecoming caricature of a roommate into the wall, with the cacophonous mayhem stirred up by the other orphans quaking the air around her (it's lonely as hell because there should be a plentiful supply of friendship, yet there isn't; Anko is much to good at the ninja arts to solicit friendship from her fellow jealous classmate-orphans), but it wasn't really thoughts of the war that took her parents' lives that chewed on the edges of her consciousness. All Anko worried about in those days was being better at fighting than everyone in her school, her village, her country, her entire world, because some damn idiot out there had killed her damn parents, and she wouldn't rest until his head was skewered on a pike and dangling on a rope from the nostril of the Hokage monument like some repulsive, bloody, strand of snot.
Idly, she digs around in her nose and flicks an offending booger in the direction of a roommate's cot.
It was a genius idea (and an old one), to rake up the orphaned remnants of a previous war and train them to fight the next one. Because there's always a next one, no matter how much the politicians cry for peace and throw their fist up into the air as though they've conquered the world, because everyone always wants more than they have and the only place they can get whatever it is from someone else, and because there was always some other war to give payback for (because it's never our fault that the war started; it was all because of them).
Anko doesn't give a shit about all those idealistic ideas though, and if the teacher somehow strays from the topic of throwing deadly knives into deadly places and starts talking about history and the ongoing fight for world peace, she pounds her fist into the inexpensive, Academy table impatiently and shouts:
"I don't give a shit about this!"
And then the teacher berates her for talking out of line and reminds her that ninja must obey orders, and by way of proving that sentiment to her, orders her out into the hallway to sulk by herself. But she always keeps the door open a crack, just in case the teacher starts talking about the important topics; about what to throw when, and how to throw it where so that it does the most amount of damage in the smallest amount of time.
It is blood that Anko desires - the blood of that ninja that killed her parents (the grownups always say it was an enemy ninja that killed her parents) - and she will go to any lengths to attain the power necessary to find that ninja and butcher him to pieces and lick his blood off her kunai with all the relish she saves for devouring her favorite food and namesake. When the sanin Orochimaru notices her bloodlust and her skill, he takes her on as a pupil and she has not the slightest objection to the harsh training he puts her through because she's heard the murmurs around her village of war, rumors that Orochimaru is one of the strongest ninja in the village and perhaps even fit to be Hokage, and she knows that he has the power she so covets and that maybe, just maybe, she'll be able to glean some of it for herself if she works hard enough.
She wins her genin headband soon enough, but despite her ability, the higher-ups deem her too irrational and reckless to make a good team leader, and thus sends her off to a new war (the short peace in which she trained her hardest with Orochimaru had been doomed to crumble into war sooner or later; every general knows that cease-fires and alliances made with other nations are just time-out sessions to allow the restocking of fresh soldiers) without her chuunin status, which sits with her just fine because she really doesn't give a shit about having a bulky green vest to weigh her down.
Although she was never close friends with any of her fellow classmate-orphans, there's something about the way they scream out for their lost parents, as they clutch at a knife in their gut or their eye or their ribcage, as they tremble in little puddles of their own blood, as they roast in fireballs, drown in spheres of water, and are crushed by landslides of stone, that make Anko stare for a little to much time than is reasonable to waste in the middle of a battlefield.
But she shakes it off and brings her gaze back forward. I am poweful, she thinks, That will not happen to me.
Then, she steps over her fallen comrades and lets five-meter-long pythons pour out of her sleeves in rivers of writhing flesh to take on a fresh enemy team. She thinks of her parents and hardly bats an eye as the soldiers fall before her and her face spatters with their blood, which she wipes off with her hand and licks away with her tongue (she soon learns to associate the metallic flavor of blood with the sweet taste of victory) when she has the time.
Once, though, a ninja from the Stone stabs her through the back just below her ribs, and runs a sword down her arm, before she even realizes what is going on (it was a surprise attack). Her comrades leap to their feet and throw themselves into battle, and she is left lying on the ground because medical ninjas take too much time to train and are in short supply, and because no one can spare her a moment of care while they're battling for their lives. Anko flees into the woods while her comrades are fighting their enemy, and bites her tongue painfully while tightly bandaging her arm, contemplating just how many of her own comrades she'd previously left gasping for help and drowning in blood as she fought, and whether the ones she'd just abandoned in that clearing were going to die because she'd removed her powers from their arsenal to tend to her own wounds.
She doesn't really give a shit. Not really.
Anko grits her teeth as she pulls the bandage tight. She hears clangs and shouts and screams from the battlefield she's left behind, but Anko is not stupid enough to turn back and throw down her life when there's not decent chance of defending it or snuffing a hundred more of the enemy first, so she unwinds another roll of bandages and busies herself in wrapping up the stab wound in her side, as the echoes of battle thrum gently through the trees around her.
It should be noted, moreover, that Anko was the ripe old age of ten years old while she fought in that war; the fact was, child orphans were gathered like fallen and scattered fruit after a storm of war, to be trained for the next one, whenever it should come; they were more likely to have the bloodlust for revenge, they were more likely to be desperate to prove and make a name for themselves (rise from the ashes, as it were), and they were more likely to listen for the orders of their village than civilian children harvested from the sheltered and peaceful homes where they already had parents to tell them what they should and should not do. Anyone of any age was called upon to kill, so long as they had a the ability to throw something sharp and stick it into its target with a decent amount of accuracy, and it was the orphaned children that would do it without qualm or question in the name of their home and country. They were the leftovers, after all, the remnants of a previous flurry of bloodshed, and if they could make it through this one too, then, well, there was some additional worth to them, wasn't there?
Before and after excessively bloody battles, Anko and the rest of her fellow fighter-orphans are graced with the presence and speech of their general, and sometimes even their leader. Because she doesn't really give a shit about inspirational speeches, she picks her nose with a kunai and discreetly wipes the blade clean on a neighboring ninja's sleeve as the general roars on and on about things like peace and power and righteousness. The idea that these speechmakers are preaching like this in order to further their career crosses her mind for a moment.
At one point, she is placed on a team with the child prodigy Kakashi Hatake, another one who was made an orphan by the previous war. Anko begins to respect him when she sees him spear three enemy ninja through the chest with his lightning-weilding fist, but she is confused by his actions later in battle, when she is knocked off her feet by the force of a water jet. As she tumbles from a tree branch through the air, scrambling and flailing to grab onto something before she splats against the forest floor, Anko contemplates other comrades she's seen, other orphans who'd been pitched off treetops by enemy troops to fall to their deaths, and she doesn't expect anyone to come to her aid, simply because she'd never had it in her heart to do so for them. Any second of a battle not spent battling is a second in which a soldier's life is in jeopardy, and she cannot imagine that anyone would risk their life for her sake. But she'd hardly had the chance to fall more than one story before she feels someone collide with her, sweeping her out of the air and depositing her safely on a branch before he darts back into battle, his white hair glinting in the dark forest light like the shine of a knife in the shadows.
"Why did you save me?" Anko demands of him later, as the survivors huddle around a campfire passing around dehydrated rations.
He just stares into the fire for a while, then says quietly, "I won't let any more of my comrades die."
"Any more?" she echoed.
Kakashi looks at her from the corner of his eye.
"People who don't follow orders are trash. But people who leave behind their friends are worse than trash."
His voice sounds so oddly flat and mechanical, that Anko wonders if he'd been somehow programmed to say the words. But no, the higher-ups never planted in their subjects the idea that anything was of more value than the mission at hand. For the rest of the evening, Anko steals furtive glances at Kakashi, wondering where he'd picked up such a strange notion, and by the time she goes to sleep, curled up in a cot with a newly sharpened knife clutched in her hand, Anko decides that she definitely respects Kakashi.
The war ends eventually, and Anko returns home feeling dissatisfied (she is also raised to chuunin rank for surviving, but still refuses to wear the jacket). There is no more excuse for her to invade enemy territory, track down, and viciously murder her parents' murderers. Instead, a vague sort of doubt begins to crawl into her thoughts, and she wonders if her parents were really killed out of maliciousness, as she imagined, or rather the blind battle-fury and battle-fear that overtakes every soldier and drives them to every length to save their own sorry skins, even at the cost of many, many others. The fact that she doesn't know who had killed her parents begins to bother her, just a little, as she hadn't succeeded in destroying all the enemies in the world, not by a long, long, shot. And without a war, where was she going to go and ruthlessly slaughter all the "bad guys" (but that's not what the village was telling her now; now, it was "allies" and "fellow people" again, although suspiciousness of foreigners ran as high as ever) until she came upon the one that had done her wrong? Without the cover of "fighting for survival" or "crusading for peace," she didn't have a way of satisfying the bloodlust that has been instilled in her for as long as she can remember.
It is only after the war ends and her chance is missed that Anko realizes this fact; she realizes that war is where fighters bloom to their full potential and sink to their lowest evils, she realizes that war is what builds up and tears apart everything from mighty empires to small, sniveling children, and most of all, she realizes that war is the threat, the tool, the very lifeblood that makes the world go round.
Where there's a war, there's a way.