It was different—she was different, but she didn't know in what way. She didn't know the self that had come before.
She was still grasping at wisps of memories, things she could recall only tiny bits of. They were never enough and she had so many, so many regrets. Despite not knowing from where, despite not knowing why, she had them.
She couldn't let go of the things she didn't know.
She tried to fill the gaps, connect the pieces, sort the certain and uncertain—her name was Anko Mitarashi. She was a jounin. She didn't remember her promotion but she remembered a voice congratulating her. It had been a man—her father.
Anko had the curse seal.
She had the curse seal.
She didn't know how or from where. As she tried to recall, nothing came to her. Memories inside her were just—just gone.
From there it was her recovery—or lack there of.
For all it was worth, her knowledge had been useless. It didn't save her from anything, didn't spare her the pain. Wasn't that just great? Getting tossed into a world, into a lie, and then made to suffer, suffer because she didn't know enough.
Was this Hell? Hers? Did she do something—
No. Her past life had been boring. She had done nothing to deserve her horrible fate. But it didn't matter in the end because she was, because she couldn't think, because she couldn't remember, she was broken.
Broken.
Broken.
Her mind had transformed into a—hah—a mindfield and she was the bombs going off every second.
Boom!
No one flinched.
Could bombs go off inside the human head? Could it be caused by thoughts? Could someone explode from thinking?
Anko felt she was on the verge of testing that theory and she had a feeling it was going to be a resounding, fucking yes.
That's how the Curse Seal made her feel.
Which was pretty fucking great, but to top it all off she had guys from TI hounding her for more information on Orochimaru. HAHA, FUNNY JOKE THERE, SIR. IF SHE HAD MORE INFORMATION THEN SHE NEVER WOULD HAVE ENDED UP THE WAY SHE HAD, WOULD SHE?
Like she'd know anything that happened when she didn't even know the door of her apartment.
They're stupid, in short.
"Do you want dango?" a man asked and he looked familiar. She liked him the moment he met her gaze but he put a damper on all of that just by asking such a stupid fucking question.
Anko glared at him.
"I'll shove a piece of dango so far up your fucking ass if you ever ask me that goddamn question ever again, you fucking got that? Or do I have to show you just how fucking serious I am about saying no to fucking eating dango for the last time!"
She was breathless and she was hurting and everything in her is broken.
Broken. Broken.
He looks at her with raised brows. "Want to go out for some BBQ then?"
She nodded, if only for the fact that he wasn't looking at her like a traitor when the others were. She didn't know his name but she found that she didn't need it. If he was someone important to a stupid plot, then it doesn't matter because she was too—and she was never very vital to that story, was she? She doubted this man was either.
Anko didn't ask because she didn't care but he gave his name to her anyway.
Ibiki Morino—and she was right that he hadn't ever been that important but it doesn't matter, because now they're the same in their sameness and it didn't matter that she was broken either. He didn't want to fix her and she appreciated that.
Instead, they eat at the Akimichi restaurant and she covered up glad tears with a laugh that gets a chuckle out of him.
That laugh became a mask, something to pretend that she was okay and normal. She wasn't but they didn't know that.
The mask became physical and she was no longer a name. She was no longer Anko Mitarashi.
Instead, she was assigned at random the name and mask of Snake.
She laughed at this and the others that knew her do too. They offered to change it but she kept it. Not because she found it funny or because she was loyal to Orochimaru. She didn't care to know why she kept it, actually. Maybe it was because when she dreamed, it was always of the same thing and her summons were all snakes. Something simple like that.
It's something simple like that, that made her pretend to know about a planned invasion on the tenth. It's something simple like that, that made her say that Orochimaru had donned a mask and had planned to destroy Konoha using the Kyuubi on the night of the tenth.
Why did she do that? No, really, why? She didn't know but it left the Yondaime alive, along with his wife and son. Did that mean she did good, somehow? Who was she trying to make happy here? Minato thanked her, not fully aware of what she did. She wasn't fully aware either, and so she just said to him, "Don't mention it."
Because, really, don't mention it.