Anko's world is dim-dark, and Orochimaru's face is all she sees. He is a moon-man, glowing-light, like he absorbed it from the sun and took it all for himself, robbed everyone of everything that they ever loved and ran into the tunnels below, chortling all the way down.
His hands are cadaver-cold on her fever-hot skin, tracing after the patterns burning across her face and throat. Orochimaru's hands have always been the blurred lines between comfort and fear, but all she can think about here is the way her chakra burns in her gorged channels and how dirty the bastard's mouth must've been all those years ago when he bit her in the dark, and-
If the snake's venom doesn't kill you, the infection will.
She hasn't forgotten, even now, a decade away from her seaside grave. She remembers everything he tells her.
Don't try to suck the venom out.
"Good. We're making progress."
A bone-white hand grasps her necklace, smile stretching wider and wider across the craters of his aging moon-face.
And. . .Anko wonders. . .just how old does a soul need to be before it rots and crumbles to pieces?
She hates him, wants to cut another smile across his throat. The fever hits its pitch. The venom wants to ooze through her dilating pours, bleed out on the stones, but she smiles back, grinning teeth renting her face in-two.
"I will kill you."
The cord around her neck snaps with a tug of his fist.
His smile lights his pus-yellow eyes as he dangles the necklace in the shrinking distance between their faces. He breathes the rot of death in her face.
"You may try."
Time bleeds-out until there isn't any left.
Alone in the dark without a soul to keep her company, Anko thinks of Konoha. Memories of the village of her youth fade as silently as a dying star, with all its fanfare muted by the agony of distance. Its leaves are burning in the flames of Orochimaru's ire. She'll burn too eventually. They all will, because a man like that has to outlast everyone.
The heavy door moans open.
He's never been so happy to see her before.
"It's time for you to die for me, Anko."
She hears herself scoff, doesn't bother catching her tongue before it retorts.
"Again?"
Her casket is round, her pall-bearers young and smooth-faced as they escort her. The bitter taste of Orochimaru's ambition clings to the back of her throat where that pill he'd forced into her had clung. She is dressed to die. The venom in her veins bubbles. She won't have to worry about infection at least.
The pungent smell of dying flesh wafts in the air, mingles with Orochimaru's chakra.
The young shinobi lower her into the casket.
Her eyes meet his, asking:
Are you dying?
He answers with a smile.
No, never. . .
Then the lid closes and the venom finishes its course.
AN: Have you ever tried writing something around ,like, one line that just came to you one time? Yeah, that's what happened here. It was written in about an hour, so it's probably a mess.
This serves as a prelude to a would-be one-shot I've had floating around in my head for a while now, wherein Orochimaru and Suna manage to overtake Konoha. Kakashi comes across Anko in the wreckage, months after she's been in Orochimaru's hands. . .