Remembering Before
The younger ANBU see him around headquarters - he doesn't bother hiding that he's there (even if it ignores training that says he shouldn't be there, shouldn't let these people see his face without a mask, shouldn't even let them know he exists but he pushes that training to the side) and he looms in the corners and in the shadows, watching, red right hand tucked away (out of sight, out of mind, because he doesn't want to think about that) as he watches new people come and go and no one stays for very long. He's been here for so, so long even some of the oldest members can't remember how long he's been here.
He remembers his own Before in perfect clarity (some people don't and he counts them as the lucky ones but they are also, perhaps, the most unlucky). He remembers a towering city on the sea and sandstone (gone, gone, gone, just gone: ancient history). Full of life and colour and the people wandering the streets just the same the whole thing could have been a dream (it's not a dream, it is - was - so very, very real and it hurts so, so much to think it's not anymore).
It comes in flashes to him, in dreams of a woman with lightning on her tongue and in her hands as it flashes under her skin even as she holds children with gentle hands (a living storm and he loved - loves? - her fiercely), in bursts when he sees bright blues and greens and any flash of white that enters his field of view and there's devastating beauty in what he sees - no one else sees it, no one else gets it.
And all of that is gone now, and it won't ever return and it aches and burns because he's the last one left and there's nobody else who will understand this Before and -
Eventually the younger ANBU stop seeing him around headquarters.
Nobody questions it. After a few months they hardly remember seeing him at all.
But there's still an ibis mask hanging from a hook in the Commander's Office and nobody's tried to claim that either. People eventually forget why, but they know it's something to be respected.
They would never know he was a refugee, an elite defender from a village long lost to war and history, only vaguely remembered by time.
YOU ARE READING
The Secrets ANBU Keep
Hayran KurguGathering secrets is par for the course when one joins ANBU. But there's a line between which secrets get passed along and which are kept hidden under porcelain masks and bone-white armour. The secrets they keep are not dangerous, but personal. But...
