Leaving Konoha felt less like the start of an adventure and more like a jailbreak.
Naruto adjusted the strap of his pack, feeling the weight of the supply scroll digging into his shoulder. The village gates were already gone, swallowed by the curve of the road and the dense green of Fire Country's forests.
Usually, leaving the village meant excitement. It meant Wave Country, or bridges, or fighting cool guys.
This time, it just felt like running.
Jiraiya set a pace that wasn't quite a sprint, but definitely wasn't a casual stroll. His wooden sandals clacked against the dirt with a rhythm that sounded like a clock ticking down. He hadn't said a word since they left the hospital. His back was a broad, red-and-gray wall that blocked out the view of the road ahead.
"Hey, Pervy Sage," Naruto called out, jogging a few steps to keep up. "Slow down! My legs are gonna fall off!"
"Keep moving," Jiraiya rumbled without looking back. "We need to put distance between us and the walls before sundown."
"Why?" Naruto asked. "The Akatsuki guys are gone, right? You scared them off!"
Jiraiya didn't answer.
Naruto looked back.
Anko was bringing up the rear. She wasn't walking like she usually did—hands in pockets, slouching, grinning like she knew a dirty joke. She was walking backward, eyes scanning the tree line, a senbon held perfectly still between her teeth. She wasn't wearing her trench coat today. Just mesh armor, a high-collared vest, and enough weapons to equip a small platoon.
Her chakra felt sharp. Spiky. Like a cat with its tail stepped on.
"Eyes front, brat," Anko snapped, not breaking her visual sweep of the canopy. "If you trip, I'm leaving you for the wolves."
"There aren't any wolves here," Naruto muttered, turning back around.
He looked at Sylvie.
She was walking between him and Jiraiya, head down, clutching her canvas bag like it contained the last oxygen on earth. Her pink hair—still hacked short and jagged from the invasion—bobbed with every step. Her glasses were sliding down her nose, but she didn't push them up.
She couldn't quite feel the bridge of her nose anyway. The Stasis seal on her wrist had turned her left arm into a heavy, unresponsive pillar of meat and bone, locking the tremors away in a dark box she refused to open. To move was to risk breaking the spell.
She was staring at the ground, counting her steps. One, two, three. One, two, three.
"Sylvie," Naruto whispered.
She didn't hear him. She was somewhere else. Probably back in that hallway, looking at Sasuke's empty eyes.
Naruto clenched his fists. The image of Sasuke's broken wrist, the sound of the snap, played on a loop in his head. And Kakashi-sensei… the way he'd just fallen. Like a puppet with cut strings.
Itachi Uchiha.
The name tasted like ash in Naruto's mouth.
He came for me, Naruto thought. The guilt was a heavy, cold stone in his gut. Because of the Fox. Because of me, Sasuke is broken.
"We're gonna find her, right?" Naruto asked loudly, needing to break the silence. "The Granny? The Slug Princess?"
Jiraiya finally glanced over his shoulder.
"Tsunade," he corrected. "And yes. We'll find her. She has a habit of leaving a loud trail."
"Is she strong?" Naruto asked. "Stronger than… than him?"
Jiraiya paused. For a second, his face looked old. Tired.
"In a fistfight? She could punch Itachi into the next time zone," Jiraiya said. "But strength isn't just about hitting things, kid. It's about fixing them when they break."
He adjusted his pack.
"And right now, Konoha is broken. So pick up the pace."
They walked until the sun started to bleed red into the horizon. The forest thinned out into rocky scrubland, the kind of terrain where you could see for miles if you knew where to look.
Jiraiya stopped near a cluster of boulders by a stream.
"Camp," he announced.
"Finally," Naruto groaned, dropping his pack. "I'm starving! Did we bring ramen? Tell me we brought ramen."
"We brought rations," Anko said, dropping out of a tree she'd apparently climbed without Naruto noticing. She landed silently, dust puffing around her sandals. "Dry bars. High calorie. Taste like cardboard."
"Booo," Naruto said.
"Eat it or starve," Jiraiya said. "I'm going to… check the perimeter."
"You're going to peep on the stream," Naruto accused.
"Perimeter!" Jiraiya insisted, vanishing into the twilight.
They set up camp in silence. Sylvie laid out the bedrolls with mechanical precision. But it was with the jerky, efficient logic of a puppet. Without the feedback of her own nerves to distract her, every fold of the fabric and every placement of a pack was a calculated geometric necessity. She wasn't Sylvie right now; she was a system maintaining a perimeter.
Anko started a small, smokeless fire, feeding it dry twigs until it cast a flickering, nervous light over the rocks.
They ate the cardboard bars. Anko was right. They tasted like sawdust and sadness.
Naruto finished his and wiped his mouth. The silence of the woods was heavy. It wasn't the peaceful quiet of a camping trip. It was the waiting quiet. The kind that came before an ambush.
He pulled his knees to his chest.
"Hey, Anko-sensei?"
Anko was sharpening a kunai. Shrrk. Shrrk. The sound was rhythmic.
"What?"
"Why did… why did Orochimaru want Sasuke?"
Sylvie stopped chewing. She looked up, firelight reflecting off her glasses.
Anko didn't stop sharpening. Shrrk. Shrrk.
"Power," Anko said. "Greed. Vanity. Take your pick."
"But the mark," Naruto said, touching his own neck sympathetically. "It hurts him. It makes him… angry."
Anko stopped. She tested the edge of the blade against her thumb. A thin line of blood appeared.
"You want to know about the mark?" she asked softly.
Naruto nodded.
Anko sheathed the kunai. She leaned forward, the firelight casting deep shadows under her eyes, making her look skeletal.
"How about a ghost story?" she said. Her voice dropped an octave, smooth and raspy. "To help you sleep."
"I'm too old for ghost stories," Naruto huffed.
"Not this kind," Anko said.
She stared into the flames.
"Once upon a time," she began, "there was a student. A girl. She wasn't special. She wasn't a genius like the Uchiha. She wasn't a monster like you. She was just… loud. And hungry."
Naruto frowned. "Hungry for food?"
"Hungry to be strong," Anko said. "She wanted to matter. And she had a teacher who was the strongest, smartest, most beautiful shinobi in the village. He knew everything. He could do anything. And he told the girl that if she followed him, she could do anything too."
Anko's hand drifted to her neck, hovering over the high collar of her vest.
"So she followed him," Anko whispered. "She followed him into the dark. She let him experiment on her. She let him cut her open to see how her chakra worked. She thought it was training. She thought it was love."
Sylvie shifted, pulling her blanket tighter around her shoulders.
"One day," Anko continued, her eyes unfocused, "the teacher decided to give her a gift. A mark. He said it was a blessing. He said it would make her a god."
She tapped her neck.
"He bit her."
Naruto flinched. "Like a snake?"
"Exactly like a snake," Anko said. "He bit ten children that day. He put his poison in their blood to see who would survive. To see who was a worthy vessel."
She looked at Naruto. Her grin was gone. Her face was just… empty.
"Do you know what the survival rate of the Heaven Seal is, kid?"
Naruto shook his head.
"One in ten," Anko said. "Ten percent."
"What happened to the others?" Naruto asked, dread pooling in his stomach.
"They died," Anko said flatly. "They screamed until their throats bled, and then they melted from the inside out. Their bodies couldn't handle the power. They burned up."
Naruto swallowed hard. "And the girl?"
"She lived," Anko said. "She survived the fever. She woke up with the power. She thought… she thought she had passed the test."
She laughed. It was a dry, cracking sound.
"But the teacher didn't care. He looked at her, and he saw that she was broken. She wasn't the perfect vessel he wanted. She was just… a leftover. A prototype."
Anko picked up a stick and tossed it into the fire. It flared up, turning to ash in seconds.
"So he threw her away," Anko finished. "He left her in the forest and walked away. And he wiped her memory so she wouldn't remember how much she had loved him."
The fire crackled.
Naruto looked at Anko. He looked at the mesh armor, the sharp eyes, the way she held herself like she was waiting for a fight.
"That's a terrible story," Naruto whispered. "The teacher was a jerk."
Anko smirked. It didn't reach her eyes.
"Yeah," she said. "He was."
She stood up, brushing dirt off her pants.
"Go to sleep, brats. We move at dawn. And if you dream about snakes… don't let them bite."
She walked to the edge of the light and sat down on a boulder, turning her back to them to take the first watch.
Naruto lay down on his bedroll. He stared up at the stars.
He thought of Sasuke, screaming in the hospital. He thought of the mark on Sasuke's neck.
One in ten.
Naruto shivered. He rolled over, pulling his pack close to his chest, and closed his eyes.
The fire died down to embers, glowing like angry red eyes in the dark.
Naruto's breathing evened out into a soft snore. He was out.
I wasn't.
I lay on my back, staring at the canopy of leaves above us. My hand throbbed—not a physical pain, but a phantom echo of the chakra I'd pushed through the diagnostic seal earlier.
I looked over at Anko.
She was sitting on the rock, silhouetted against the moon. She hadn't moved in an hour.
The girl who lived, I thought. The one in ten.
In the canon, Anko was a loud, brash, dango-eating eccentric. A background character who showed up to be scary and then disappeared.
But here, in the silence of the Fire Country woods, she was a tragedy sitting on a rock.
She was what happened when you looked for a hero and found a monster instead.
I touched the requisition scroll in my bag. I touched the seal on my wrist. It was starting to itch.
It wasn't a normal itch. It was the feeling of a thousand tiny needles waking up under the skin as the chakra flow began to normalize. As the numbness ebbed, the noise of the forest seemed to get louder—and with the sensation came the return of the hospital smell, a cold, metallic ghost that the seal had been successfully holding at bay.
We were going to find Tsunade. We were going to ask her to heal Sasuke.
But looking at Anko's stiff back, I realized that healing wasn't just about fixing bones or sealing chakra. Some things didn't heal. Some things just calloused over.
I closed my eyes, listening to the wind in the trees. It sounded like whispering.
Don't let him own the real estate, she had told Sasuke.
I rolled over, facing the fire.
We have to find Tsunade, I told myself. We have to.
Because if we didn't, if we couldn't fix this… then Sasuke wasn't going to end up like Kakashi.
He was going to end up like Anko.
And I didn't think he would survive being thrown away.