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Even long after many years went by, Anko never quite understood why had she listened to the blond urchin in a somewhat ragged orange jumpsuit.

Sure, there was dango, but...

It might have been pity. Maybe. The kid was a worse pariah than herself on any given day.

Sure, being an apprentice to the madman and traitor was bad. Sure, they called her slut. Sure, all kind of rumors how the snake sannin 'trained' her circulated around. 'Orochimaru's little fucktoy' was just one of many names she had heard in her youth. Some of them even stuck.

Ironic was the fact that Orochimaru, for all the time she had known him, was nearly asexual. He wasn't gay, like some suggested. He didn't, despite some claiming otherwise, have a taste for young boys.

With Orochimaru, it was all about power. It was his drug, his reason for existence, his God, his alpha and omega.

But it wasn't always this way. One day, every year, Orochimaru took care to place a small, modest bouquet made of various wildflowers on a certain grave. The name was impossible to read, cut and ripped from the grave's surface as if somebody slashed it with kunai in a fit of rage. Or mad grief.

This was also one day in the year that Orochimaru drank himself into stupor, something he usually thought beneath him.

But on that day, he did.

She never had the courage to ask, but from the few times Jiraya took him home to sleep off the alcohol she knew it was a woman. Jiraya always got a sad, faraway look in his eyes.

Orochimaru never spoke of her. Not once.

But each year, he diligently gathered the flowers, put them in a simple bouquet and left them on the nameless grave.

As selfish as it seemed, she liked it about him, back when he was her teacher.

It proved that he wasn't some unstoppable genius standing high on the pedestal, coated in his legend of invincibility, but a man. Man with his failings.

When he... left... She hated that. Hated it. Because he wasn't some kind of irredeemable monster.

The Art of the Deal, Chapter 1