Word Count: 400.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
Anko is an insomniac.
If her body isn't loaded with toxins, then she can sleep fine. There is nothing physically wrong with her that keeps her from sleep; Anko is strong and relatively healthy.
Sometimes, when Anko lies down on her tatami mat to sleep, if she's lucky, very lucky, all that will happen to her will be that her curse mark twinges. It will twitch like a vein during stress, and Anko will roll over and ignore it, and stare up at the tiles on her ceiling, or look around at the unadorned wooden walls and the expanses of wood flooring.
On worse nights, the curse mark will make its presence known in other ways.
Orochimaru, it seems, wasn't satisfied with abandoning Anko when she proved to be too weak for his tastes. He wanted to make sure that she would suffer for the rest of her life for being a disappointment and a failure to him.
The mark spreads like a malignance across her body, winding like a parasitic vine, screaming in the recesses of her mind as night descends over her pain-wracked form. She is drenched in cold sweats as her body temperature rises and her muscles howl. Blood seeps from the places where the living ink forms hellish patterns over her body.
Anko can barely tell the difference between vomiting and dry heaving on those nights, can barely lift her head to keep from choking on her own bile. And all the while, a taunting, sibilant voice whispers in her ears, taunting and tormenting, Anko stubbornly ignoring her other-voice.
The worst of it comes when the toll taken on her body by the curse mark finally overwhelms her and Anko falls to the floor in exhaustion, her heavy hazel eyes closing in sleep.
Anko is carried through strange and terrible nightmares in a dark and demented dream world. They are fever dreams, fantastical chimeras to the eye. And all the while, the faces of the other nine, the ones who weren't as lucky, weren't as strong, weren't as fortunate, float through her mind as the memory of what her former sensei did to her assaults her memory.
Anko is an insomniac. By choice. There are some realities that can not be borne.
She pumps her body full of stimulants, night after night after night, praying that sleep won't find her and that the dreams won't come.
