Underneath the Underneath

A Naruto fanfic

By

EvilFuzzy9

Rating: T

Genre: Friendship

Characters/Pairings: Ibiki Morino, Anko Mitarashi; [N/A]

Summary: People see what they want to, and not what's actually there. Ibiki and Anko have plenty of experience with this, which is probably how they became such fast friends.

People so often see only what they want to. Humans make superficial judgements based on shallow first impressions. Everyone, no matter how liberated or open minded, will inevitably filter the world around them through a lens of preconceived notions and subtle, personal prejudices.

Most of us never even notice it, or think about it. Our brains are designed to take shortcuts wherever possible. We apply simple, generalized definitions to infinitely complex social phenomena. It's the only way we can realistically function. These brains which evolved for the tasks of tracking edible plants and prey animals, living in small and intimate family groups, were never intended for seeking universal truth.

Reality, objective and absolute, is no concern of the human mind. We are, all of us, selfish and shallow, biased and prejudiced in an multitude of small and varied ways. We construct excessively simplistic mental categories, defining people and groups – fairly or unfairly – based on the barest of actual knowledge. We see only what is convenient, and expedient.

That is just how people are. We have to take the easy way out, cut all of these proverbial corners, in order to get through the day. Life is too short, the world too dangerous a place, to let ourselves be lost continually in deep reflection and contemplation. The brain limits thought as much as enables it.

Our distant, primeval ancestors would never have survived to reproduce and raise future generations if they had stopped to consider the needs of the predators chasing after them, and their own ultimate role in the food chain. They had to be selfish and egocentric in order to survive this harsh and unforgiving world.

However much we may think of ourselves, in truth humanity has changed little from those days. Modern enlightenment is little more than a thin veneer over the primitive, base impulses which drive our every action.

Basically what I am trying to get at is: people only see what's on the surface.

When most men looked at Anko Mitarashi, they saw an attractive young woman dressed in a flashy, arguably scandalous fashion, even by kunoichi standards. In her work, for better or worse, she mimicked a number of her old mentor's mannerisms: intentionally or unintentionally acting out a reflection of the persona Orochimaru had built for himself as her teacher and a shinobi.

People who saw Anko employ the psychological warfare her estranged master had taught her – simple but effective psyche outs like licking the blood off a knife, intimidating younger or less confident men with shows of aggressive sexuality, getting in close, speaking in a low voice, all but molesting her foe – all too often concluded that she was some manner of pervert, or worse.

Anko knew that she was attractive. Orochimaru had often told as much, in a detached and clinical sort of way, when she was young. She knew that the world she lived in was one where sexuality was a tricky subject, something that many decent people were uncomfortable with. She also knew that she was strong.

She had confidence. Good looks. She dressed however she wanted, impulsive and uncaring of what other people thought. When it seemed it might work to her advantage – when she could see an opponent's eyes straying down from her eyes, hesitantly and anxiously taking in glimpses of a toned, shapely body – she would employ her own sexuality as a weapon, ruthlessly attacking her foe's psyche.

Orochimaru may have done many awful things, but he had taught Anko well. Ninja were not meant to fight fair. Not ones like her, or her master. She was fiercely loyal to her village and her comrades. She cared deeply for her fellow shinobi, for the people of the Leaf.

She would do anything to ensure their safety. In that way she was not unlike the man Orochimaru had once been – a man who had once been great and noble after his own, pragmatic fashion, favored by his teacher and admired by his peers. Long ago he had chosen to walk in the darkness for his village, to do the things more decent souls could not, all to protect his people.

Anko admired the man he had once been. Back when he first took her on as a student, one could still see it: that stern and distant, brilliant ninja who had risen so high and garnered so much fame and esteem.

Anko did what she had to for her village. She cared deeply for her comrades, and would do anything for their sake.

Ibiki would be the first to tell you what a splendid ninja this made her. He too, like Anko, walked the line between light and dark. He was a large and physically imposing man, swift and powerful. Back in his days on the front lines he had been a formidable warrior, naturally gifted in close range combat.

Those who only saw the Ibiki of today would be amazed to know the kind of person he had been before. With his dark trench coat and many scars, Ibiki had a fierce and frightening look about him. Even seasoned shinobi (who rarely gave war wounds more than a casual, sparing glance) would often stare, or look abashedly away, when they saw the full extent of his mutilations.

Ibiki Morino was head of Leaf T&I. He worked closely with the ANBU, the dark side of the shinobi world. He willfully projected a cruel and fearsome aura, acting the part of a cold and calculating sadist so well that many believed that to be who he truly was.

Not many people knew or remembered Ibiki from before he got his scars. He had been an early bloomer, so to speak, growing larger and earlier than his peers in the Academy. This had given him an edge in sparring, and his own dedication to training bore a fair deal of fruit. He scored consistently well in practical combat arts, and while not as extraordinary as some, he had been no blustering weakling.

He was a big guy, but those who knew the young Ibiki would have said that he'd had an even bigger heart. From an early age he had demonstrated a keen sense of loyalty and solidarity with his comrades and classmates. Despite being bigger and stronger than many of his peers, he did not use this to lord over them or bully. He was boisterous, to be sure, and eager to fight, but beneath that was a kind and simple heart.

Ibiki did well enough in his early career as a ninja. He was by no means a prodigy, and there was no shortage of shinobi at a similar age who yet far outstripped him in even his strongest areas, but he made good use of the big and hardy body he was born with, and the considerable strength and skill he had gained through harsh and rigorous discipline. On the field of battle he distinguished himself through a fierce determination and willingness to put himself in harm's way.

This sense of loyalty was eventually put to the test in a very real way. Ibiki was strong and a good fighter, but there were many shinobi far more skilled than he, and in a war people rarely fought fairly. His squad was ambushed during a routine mission, overwhelmed by a small force of elite enemy ninja.

Their enemies were veterans of the Second Shinobi War, a team of their village's finest handpicked for the most arduous and dangerous of operations. For all of his talent, all of his strength and dedication to training, all the discipline and coordination of his squad, Ibiki and his team could do nothing against their ambushers. They were caught flatfooted, at a disadvantage from the very start, and ruthlessly overwhelmed before they could even put up a defense.

Ibiki's team was decimated, effortlessly crushed like rank genin. He and two others survived, and were taken alive for interrogation. By the time any help came, Ibiki was the only one left alive, and even then just barely.

He had told the enemy nothing, hanging on to his resolve by the thinnest of threads. They tortured him to the brink of death, but he kept his mouth shut. He had a good and loyal heart, fiercely determined to never betray his comrades. The torture nearly broke him, however. Maybe it really did break him.

A part of him, at least, was lost forever.

Like Anko, Ibiki lost his innocence. Even after a timely rescue, a squad of his allies breaking into the enemy's hideout right when the situation seemed absolutely beyond hope, regaining his life and his freedom, he could never again go back to the boy he had been.

He had been young and idealistic, ill-prepared for the callous disregard, the almost alien cruelty of his captors. He told them nothing, to be sure, but the shameful truth of the matter (which he had only ever admitted, in confidence, to three people) was that he probably would have told his tormentors anything to make it stop, that the only reason he never gave away any information to save himself was because by the time he reached that level of desperation, his body had grown so weak, and his mind so muddled with pain, that he could scarcely remember his own name.

It was, ironically in his opinion, nothing more than Ibiki's own weakness which had saved him from betraying the sacrifice of his comrades. The only people he ever told this to were the Lord Third, Inoichi Yamanaka, and Anko Mitarashi. The shame of this knowledge burned at him, and the lasting damage done to his body during his time in captivity took Ibiki permanently off of the front lines.

Many of the injuries from his torture healed wrong, broken bones left deliberately un-set by his captors to mend at debilitating, painful angles. His arms and legs were useless for weeks after his rescue, the medics needing to break his bones once again just so they could set them right.

His fingers had been horribly mutilated, his hands suffering severe and lasting nerve damage. Before his capture Ibiki had prided himself on deft and cunning fingers, able to cleverly and skillfully handle even the most complex of ninja tools. After his capture, and eventual subsequent rescue, he did not even have the motor control to use chopsticks.

Ibiki was in that hospital for months, confined to the long term ward as he gradually, painstakingly relearned the most basic of manual tasks. For someone who had, as long as he could remember, excelled in the practical and physical aspects of ninjutsu, such disability was deeply shameful. He could not bear for his comrades to see him like this.

That was probably the worst period of his life. The sheer helplessness, the sense of being treated, rightly or no, as an invalid incapable of doing even the most basic of tasks by himself. Recovery was long, slow, and painful. For weeks after his initial rescue, Ibiki spent his days in a bleary haze from the painkillers. Even all of his battlefield, wartime training and conditioning could not have prepared Ibiki for the sheer, horrible agony he experienced.

His body was broken and damaged nigh irreversibly, scarred and mangled to a terrible extent. His own teacher had difficulty meeting Ibiki's eyes, unable to disguise the slight touch of reflexive, shameful horror and disgust at the sight of his poorly healed wounds and grotesque, unsightly scars. It was likewise even with his parents, his own mother – certainly, they told him how proud they were of him, and how he had done right by the family's name, but they could not wholly disguise the visceral discomfort they felt when looking at him, savaged and brutalized as he was, mutilated and disfigured almost entirely beyond recognition.

Rehabilitation was a long and lonely road. At first his friends and family would come to visit him regularly, dropping by to show their support and wish him well whenever they had time away from missions, but eventually it just became too depressing, too much of a hassle for them. The war was still ongoing outside of Ibiki's hospital room, and he did not resent or begrudge them this apparent negligence.

He was just one man, after all, in the grand scheme of things nobody too important. There were more pressing and immediate matters for his comrades to attend to. He wouldn't be going anywhere any time soon.

It hurt a little, to be sure. Despite understanding, intellectually, the reasons for the preoccupation of his friends and family, a small and irrational part of him could not help but feel bitter and resentful, like they had abandoned him.

This was his personal hell. From a young age Ibiki had been uncannily strong, and possessed of a strong work ethic which enabled him to train diligently and intensively. He had, for nearly as long as he could remember, taken a kind of modest pride in his abilities. He had not been arrogant or deluded as to where he stood on an absolute level compared to the truly powerful, but he had nonetheless been able to understand and appreciate what power and skill he had been able to develop.

Now all of that meant nothing. The doctors told him that he would probably never be able to handle a weapon again. He had suffered extensive damage to his motor nerves, and while with time and rehabilitation he could regain basic control, he would never again be able to hold a weapon with any manner of skill or finesse.

It was a bitter revelation.

All the years of training, all of the hard missions, the painful sacrifices – fighting so many times against all odds, facing death with such regularity, persevering and struggling alongside his comrades, watching dear, close friends die one after another, each one of them a blood offering to the ravenous machinations of war. It all came down to this, his hopes and dreams brought to a crashing halt, his body crippled and disfigured to the brink of death, helpless and alone in a hospital room as those of his loved ones who still lived went out and fought a seemingly hopeless, unending war.

Despair was upon him, his heart heavy and darkened by an immutable shadow of doubt. A warm, open heart was all the more vulnerable to wounding and scarring. Ibiki had been a gentle person deep down: for all his prowess as a shinobi, and all his calculated ferocity in battle, he had never once taken joy in fighting for the sake of hurting people, for putting others down and raising himself up. He had never fought or killed without reason.

But that kind nature, loyal and steadfast, had been pushed to its absolute limit by the horrors of captivity. A prisoner of war, tortured for information, beaten and battered and broken down to the point of utter helplessness. He was tormented and branded, slashed and gouged, bludgeoned and burned until he would have told his captors anything to make them stop, would have told them everything he knew if he had still possessed the faculties to clearly reason or communicate.

He broke. He was a mere shadow of the man he once was, the promising young shinobi who could have one day worked his way up into the ranks of the village's most elite fighters. The pain was constant. Even after the doctors deemed him to have recovered to a sufficient point to handle the pain through his own willpower and discipline as a ninja – the herbs and roots which went into the hospital's numbing poultices and elixirs being strictly rationed in the midst of this long and bloody war – it was almost more than he could bear.

More than once it reached a point where Ibiki sincerely wished he could just die. The pain was so severe, the helplessness and seeming futility of his situation weighing so heavily upon his mind, that even a man as irrepressible and boisterous as he had once been could only long for the sweet embrace of death.

In a way, it was even worse than his captivity. At least then Ibiki still had the singular, slightest, unquenchable spark of hope to cling to, a half delusional exhortation that rescue would come, and everything would somehow be made better. But now he had been rescued, he was safe once more in his own village, and the delusion of ever returning to how things had once been was thoroughly and mercilessly dispelled by the harsh, cold reality of his situation.

Even the Hidden Leaf's finest medic-nin had limits to what they could do, and most of the best were needed out there on the fields of battle, tending to those shinobi who still had a chance of contributing to the war effort. Left back here in the village were only the apprentices and journeymen – sufficient to ease the passing of the worst cases, and keep the less severe ones clinging to life.

Ibiki was one of the luckier residents of that ward. He was crippled and traumatized, scarcely able to walk or even feed himself, but at least he was young and hardy. Unless all else failed he would never fight again, and he lived with a nearly constant, unbearable pain... but at least he did live.

With time he would be well enough to at least retire to a civilian life, young enough to rehabilitate and learn a trade, and hopefully live many more years in relative peace and contentment. The pain would mostly fade with time, and he could draw on his battlefield experience to at least help teach and instruct young and inexperienced shinobi, if he still desired to serve his village in some fashion as a ninja.

This was what the doctors told him, and Ibiki knew he should consider himself fortunate to have at least this much. It was more than any of his teammates, his comrades who had been slaughtered in that ambush, or tortured to the point of death as prisoners of war. He was the only survivor of that squad – his squad – and he knew that for this alone he should be grateful.

But no matter how hard he tried, he could feel only emptiness, and a deeply abiding bitter resentment. Eventually, he began to lose all sense of perspective. His reasons for fighting and serving the village with such blind devotion began to slip from his mind, slowly vanishing in a fog of misery and despair. As months passed with hardly any change in his condition, or any sign of a possible end to the war, he steadily fell deeper into the growing darkness of his own mind.

And right when it seemed that he had sunk past the point of ever resurfacing, he met her.

Ibiki had recently acquired a new roommate when she came, a younger lad, probably a fresh genin. The kid wasn't in particularly bad shape, but most of the other rooms had been full or otherwise unavailable. By this point Ibiki had gone through a dozen different roommates, and he didn't even bother trying to address the boy. One way or another the youngster would be gone soon enough, leaving him alone to his misery.

But a few days after the young genin was first moved into his hospital room, Ibiki found himself rudely awakened from a melancholic slumber by loud and boisterous greeting.

"Hey, Matsuda! Get yer ass up, you lazy bum!"

The voice was that of a girl, almost certainly in her early teens. It was loud, though not shrill, and coarse. Unrefined and rudely familiar.

Ibiki scarcely noticed the ringing in his ears, relative to the far more severe and chronic pains, but he did hear the miserable groan the girl got from her teammate in response.

"Ungh... Go away, Anko. You're too noisy."

To his own faintest blip of amusement, Ibiki also heard the lad mutter:

"And right when I thought I could finally get a good night's sleep..."

Unfortunately for the boy, the girl also heard him.

If a nurse had been present, she probably would have been quite sternly reprimanded for how she responded to that comment, but as it was, Ibiki happened to be the only other person there, and he was of no inclination to lecture someone on how to properly handle a hospital patient.

"Jackass... Being so rude when a cute girl like me takes time out of her busy schedule to pay your sorry ass a visit? Hmph!"

The boy, Matsuda, retorted irritably (and rather stupidly) that he would hardly call Anko cute, and this time even the melancholic and disengaged Ibiki felt it would be only prudent to remind the pair of his presence before things devolved any further.

"Ahem," he said/coughed. Turning his head with some degree of effort, he looked over at the bickering pair.

Matsuda, hearing Ibiki's voice, looked over in his direction. He immediately blanched and looked away, almost certainly shocked to see the extent of his roommate's condition.

"Ah, s-s-sorry," the boy stammered weakly, anxiously clamming up and staring out the window.

The girl, Anko, proceeded to curiously trace her friend's gaze back to Ibiki. He was actually surprised to see, that despite the timber of her voice and overall stature, the lass's face was not quite the rounded, childish profile he had been expecting. She was younger than him to be sure, but judging by the shape of her face and relative dearth of baby fat, it seemed probable to Ibiki that it was actually only by a few years.

She was also, a remote and disused part of his brain remarked, relatively cute despite that sharp tongue and rambunctious demeanor.

Anko stared at Ibiki for a whole three and a half seconds before giving him a broad, toothy grin and cheerfully saying:

"Wow! You look like shit."

That pretty much set the tone for their entire friendship.

A/N: Y'know, rereading the earlier chapters of Naruto not that long ago, I noticed some interesting discrepancies between the canon and fanon portrayals of Anko and Ibiki. The former I had realized to some extent quite a while back, during her brief appearance before attempting to infiltrate Tobi/Kabuto's stronghold, but the latter only truly hit me after rereading through the first phase of the Chuunin Exams.

In the top panel of the second page of chapter 44, the simple sight of Ibiki's broad, toothy smile gave me a whole new perspective on his character. In the same vein, with Anko's first appearance not long after that, I notice a few subtleties of her introduction that I completely missed when watching the anime back when I was younger – particularly the way she reacts upon realizing that she had busted in a little early. Sakura even comments (at least in the official English translation) that something about Anko's playful and exuberant demeanor reminds her of Naruto.

Honestly, I had for a fair while felt intellectually unsatisfied with common fan depictions of Anko... while the frequent interpretations of her as some manner of kinky sex-maniac are certainly pleasing enough in one way, particularly for a man as perverted as myself in regards to fictional characters, I am also as a writer and reader perhaps most happy when I am able to look at characters from a new and insightful angle.

I may have, like Jiraiya, only really become even moderately well known among readers after going down the path of erotica, but that doesn't mean I do not still desire to write other kinds of fanfic. Quite the opposite – while I do enjoy writing smut, and have certainly become rather good at it after my own fashion, I still crave variety.

I am a Jiraiya-class pervert (for 2D characters), to be sure, but I also like to think of myself as a decently intelligent, even mildly philosophical man. Character studies like this are among my favorite things to write and read, and they certainly feel the most intellectually rewarding of all the varied kinds of fanfic I have written over the years.

So, yeah. That's basically my entire impetus for writing this fic.

Updated: 10-5-14

TTFN and R&R!

– — ❤