String


It's raining through sun, and the rain hisses at her while the sun glares with amber eyes.

Orochimaru dances behind a screen inside her head, and each of his steps are like the clatter of books to the floor, or comparable to the sound of someone tap-dancing. Her head is pounding.

His silhouette is etched into every fiber of her being, and when she moves it is because he is pulling the puppet strings.

Anko has always liked to think that she was in control –Liked to think that the thing on her neck (that ugly blue mark that burns, burns like the wick of a candle) was just a spot where the man who'd tattooed her arm happened to slip. Yes. Maybe the man slipped when he was stamping her as an ANBU member. Maybe she slipped when she signed her life away.

But she doesn't know. Not anymore.

The rope hugging her to the chair is not tied properly. It's too loose, because it was that Haruno girl that tied it. (The one who clung to little Sasuke for years, the one who wept when he decided to leave her.)

Anko wonders if Sakura knows what a joke her life really was, still is. She wonders if Sakura is that blind not to have noticed the Uchiha slipping farther and farther away from her.

Anko imagines her with fingers outstretched in the air, lying on a grassy hill somewhere with her arms held above her. Does she think that the one cloud, the one right there…does she think it looks like Sasuke? Just like him? Does she reach for it and clench her fists closed, hoping to catch him?

…Does she cling to dreams like Anko once had?

Huffing, Anko sits up taller. The window is high on the walls (the white walls, pallid like Orochimaru's skin), and her eyes are almost level with the place where it begins.

When she tilts her head, she can see the rain. And the sun. And…the clouds. Yes, Anko can see the clouds, stained gray and gushing.

In all of their miserable glory, the clouds are beautiful.

Some of them look more black than they do gray, and she thinks of the way Orochimaru's hair swayed behind him in the wind, not glossy but not broken either.

She watches as the trees' branches bend, the rain whipping through them, and Orochimaru pulls the marionette strings higher.

Anko sits with her back pulled straight, staring out at clouds and glaring back at the sun.


Finite.

(Because, for Anko, it will never be over.)