The Secrets ANBU Keep

II | Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

There's a lot of things they teach you in ANBU.

How not to scream, how to kill, how to hide the body, and how to hunt the people that killed your teammate if it comes down to that (and it usually did) - the other person behind the porcelain mask next to you. It doesn't matter the animal.

(The animal rarely fit the personal behind it at the end of the day when the masks came off.)

If you decide to die at your own hands they'll teach you how not to hide yourself away too well so that your teammates (or someone, but most likely your teammates because there's probably no one else to come looking) can find you later. And they teach you how to make it mostly clean and somewhat painless - but death like that is never mostly clean nor somewhat painless and everybody knows it so there's never really a point.

The logic behind what they teach you is very simple, in the end.

Simple enough to become ingrained in your very being and simple enough that it's not a lesson that bears repeating after perhaps the second time they have to teach it to you, because dang it, it didn't stick the first time.

The things they teach you in ANBU never leave you.

It's like the tattoo they put on your shoulder if you happen to make the cut.

The tattoo can be covered up, can be hidden from view and can be ignored as if it doesn't exist, but it never really leaves. It remains part of the person on whose skin it's inked in blood red - like the blood they spill on the battlefield and if it happens to get covered by blood...well, where the blood ends and the tattoo begins is sometimes hard to distinguish, and it all bears the same meaning in the end.

They don't teach you about what pain lies in the sunlight. It's easier, less painful in the shadows, but you should have already known that if you're joining ANBU. You should be leaving the sunlight on purpose, most think. And that's what most do.

They don't teach you how to torture somebody because, really, if you're mad enough - in your silent, cold, uniform, but still oddly personal, fury - you'll know how.

They don't teach you how to cope, really. Coping is something that's more personal than anger, and if you're in ANBU, the choice to live that lifestyle is probably how you're coping with whatever pain you experienced while outside the shadow's grip.

There's no such thing as an ex-ANBU.

Something deep down inside everyone who has ever been ANBU knows this. You may adopt other habits to adjust to life in the sunlight again, but at home you  might as well have never taken the mask off. Unless you're a really good actor, you might be able to keep up those pretences at home, too. The lessons they do and don't teach you sit off to the side in your brain because you can't just push them to the back - those lessons are too strong to be dismissed so carelessly out of hand.

The shadows are still more comfortable to you, and you try to melt into them whenever you have the chance because there's a part of you that recognises the shadows as some place so much safer, knows you'll be welcomed back with arms ready to bury you again in the faceless ranks of porcelain and bone-white armour.

It's hard to fight temptation, and that's another thing they don't teach you in ANBU.

At some point, ANBU and the things it does and doesn't teach you, become all you have left. There are secrets in ANBU that you keep to yourself, for yourself.

It's just the nature of the job.