Summary: Yashamaru’s thoughts run like ghosts that walk through the backdoor in his head. They barge in unexpected, and unwanted. And the medicine— the medicine was only supposed to keep them quiet for a day. One day. Instead, it ended up burying himself so deep in his own head, that Anko has to find him again and bring him back.
Day 1: Exploration entry for @naruto-scifi-week
Ship: YashaAnko
Warnings: death mention, ptsd mention, biopolar mention, some vague mention of maybe human experimentation, suicidal ideations are sort of there, people generally have lots of problems in this fickinda trippy? Ish? I mean they’re mentions but they get like a sentence maybe s paragraph
“Sorry, it’s—“ He struggled to put the key in. The wrong key. Struggled to keep the crying baby from squirming in his arms. There was a large tote bag full of grocery items, a bruised apple peeking out from the top. He smiled at her, still trying to jam in the wrong key. “Give me a minute. I’m almost there.”
Anko looked at the man in front of her, at the memory in front of her.
No, not a memory. But a shadow of one.
“You’re not my Yashamaru.”
It stopped wiggling the door knob. The baby was still crying.
“I’m sorry— I can’t seem to get it in,” it smiled at her. That sort of sheepish smile Yashamaru got when he knows he’s in for a scolding.
But that wasn’t how that night went.
Anko held her supplies tightly and turned her gaze to the corridor that continued into the darkness. Keep going. I need to find him. She didn’t think the mirages would be that easy to ignore it— but she knew Yashamaru.
And she knew that evening like the back of her hand. He had dropped the apple when he climbed up the stairs, and it rolled all the way down her corridor like a soft hello. Hey, you dropped your produce— you okay? Yashamaru had all the bad hours of that day streaming down his cheeks, and the little smudge of baby barf on the white coat he forgot to take off. Sorry it’s— the twist of his lips, trying not to break down in front of a stranger. I’m fine— I’m so sorry for the noise—
“You’re leaving me,” it whispered with the all too familiar crack in his voice.
Anko stopped— her weight still in between a stride. “That’s low,” she hissed, holding her supplies tightly and grasping for the shape of a knife.
“But it’s true, isn’t it?”
Stay focused. An echo of an earlier conversation rang in her ears. You cannot get lost down there. If you enter the wrong room, we would lose both of you…
I won’t get lost. I’ll bring him back.
Anko continued forward and unto the next plane of Yashamaru’s mindscape.
