chapter twelve: tiger's eye
I'm a dragon,
You're a whore
Don't even know
What you're good for.
.
.
.

Tokyo was a city bristling with people, lights, noise, and a violence unique to its internal structure. It was a city hundreds of years in the making, as beautiful and inviting as it was dark and unsavory.

It was the city Tsunade had lived in the majority of her life, and she often confused its toxicity for unbridled opportunities of finding wayward shooting stars in an atmosphere clouded with poison. She could have been anything, she supposed. As a young woman she had possessed a beauty unparalleled from most of her female peers; honey-blonde and hazel-eyed with a cinched waist and spilling cleavage that had caused rupture in the brains of almost every man she had come into direct contact with.

Men.

They fascinated her. They always had.

The manner in which they uninhibitedly stared, their penchant for considering the world—and the women upon it—to be a part of their inherent belonging, and their tendency to break, wound, and overall destroy the female spirit was truly something to behold.

She supposed that her father had been the first man to teach her the complexities of cruelty, often laying hands on both her and her mother when he came home from work in the late evening, drunk and drenched in rage at his own inadequacy. He had been a small, pitiful man, but possessed a brutality that was unlike anything Tsunade had ever experienced.

Because he beat her, she loathed him. Because he was her father, she loved him.

The end result of such a complicated dynamic—a befuddling mixture of unadulterated hatred and cautious, careful wanting—had caused a devastating crack in her psyche that would later mutate her expectations of men and entangle her in many an abusive relationship.

She had run away from home at the age of fourteen after her father had careened her mother's head into a bedside table, nearly splitting the hard-ivory bone of her skull in half. Her mother, a timid woman who had never learned to read or write, had been lying in a pool of her own ruby-red blood for hours when Tsunade had discovered her. Her father had moved into the small living room and fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand, likely unaware that he had given his wife an injury that she would never recover from.

Tsunade had allowed herself to grieve her mother for only a few short minutes before she devised a plan that would enable her to have both revenge and freedom.

Brushing a strand of hay-colored hair from her mother's still-open eyes, Tsunade stood to her full height, walking into the living room where she briefly inspected her father for the last time. His soft snoring permeated the space of the room and left a ringing in her ears. His chest rose and fell in rhythmic timing with the thundering of her own heart, so piercing that she feared it would break from its encasement of bone and awaken her father to her mutiny.

But he did not awake.

And she would never forgive him.

Her mother had constantly berated him for smoking in their home; told him it was dangerous and foolish. At least she had died correct in those assertions.

Tsunade plucked one of her father's cigarettes from its leather case next to his chair and lit it, taking a deep, long inhale before she pulled it from between her lips to study the fiery tip carefully. She blinked, sighed, glanced at her father, and then delicately flicked the cigarette onto the carpet, where it began to angrily sizzle.

She supposed it did not take long for the house to burn. But burn it did.

She was alone after that. Utterly alone.

The moment she left her home, she belonged to the city. For the next five or six years, she lived off whatever kindness Tokyo had to offer, and it never offered very much. By the time she was twenty, the number of men that had used her outweighed the number that had loved her, and she could take the deception and defeat no more. She left Tokyo, and found herself in Ukiyo, Shiragiku, where Kokoro quickly called her home.

It was then that she opened the Vanilla Villa.

The building had belonged to the father of her one of her lovers, and he was one of the very few creatures whom Tsunade kept a secret fondness for tucked away deep in the hidden compartments of her heart. When she had relayed to him her desire of procuring a space where street girls could work in a safe, organized, and controlled environment, he had been excited to help her, enraptured by her passion, wit, and ferocity. Tsuande was a woman unbroken by the grit of Tokyo, despite being tossed into its unforgiving trenches. The building was bought, remodeled, redecorated, and renamed the Vanilla Villa, and when Tsunade's lover left her—because all of her lovers eventually left her—in order to secure a banking job in Naha, Okinawa, she was confident and independent enough to scout for girls and open the building for official business.

The girls were always broken, lonely, and desperate, and therefore easy to persuade. Tsunade was always patient, compassionate, and forthcoming, which made her easy to believe. Her dominance was subtle, but unmistakable. Her girls believed that they owed her their lives, and their work ethic reflected it. They flirted with and fucked anyone who came knocking on their respective bedroom doors and Tsuande had no qualms because the money never stopped pouring in.

She had been the sole proprietor, manager, and mistress of every and anything that took place inside of the Vanilla Villa's red-brick walls for nearly a decade, and the power that accompanied owning the bodies of fifty-something young, naïve girls had not gone unnoticed by her.

While Tsunade often considered herself to be duplicitous, scornful, and selfish, unaware she was not.

It was why she had been so shocked on the day that Kabuto had assaulted Tenshi, resulting in Uzumaki Naruto whisking her out of the Vanilla Villa soon after, robbing Tsuande of her most requested employee and causing an unthinkable amount of lost revenue. She had simply not seen any of it coming. Kabuto had been undesirable even at his greatest attempt to appear all-together, but Tsuande had accredited his weirdness to a lack of social exposure and not pure wickedness.

When she looked back, she figured even perhaps it had been a mixture of both.

Either way, Tenshi's leaving had prompted other girls to leave, too, and soon she was left with crumbs of a business most lucrative. In less than a few weeks, she was back to having almost nothing.

Very soon after the money started to disappear, the solid red-brick of the Villa caught vicious, violent fire, and when Tsunade stood feet away from the double mahogany doors, watching her child of concrete and cement as it smeared and sputtered itself to flaking ash, all she could think about was her poor, callous, dead father, whose flesh must have feathered from his bones in much of the same manner.

It was all very ironic then. Almost cosmic.

Behind her, where she could not see, chaos ensued, the entirety of Kokoro in massive, panicked uproar at the destruction of the town's shining pearl; the beacon of rimmed, glimmering jewel where women and wickedness reigned abound and uncontained. People were scattering. The fire was steadily becoming more aggressive. Tsunade, despite bearing title as the Villa's creator and therefore—rightly—its mother, was invisible amongst the hysteria of Kokoro's inhabitants, a mere speck of blonde in a sea of raging orange flame.

And she was crying in front of the burning building, her cherry-red nails pressing half-moon hollows into the skin of her face when he touched the round of her shoulder, his fingertips bending into the slot of her clavicle.

Tsunade looked up into his face with wet eyes, and her heart gave a terrified thud.

He was tall, breeching over six feet, with a gaunt, hollow face that was ashen, sharp, and haughty. Black hair cascaded down the length of his back in fine, silky strands, inky fringe and eyelashes shadowing serpent-yellow eyes.

He looked absolutely caustic, but his touch was kind, and—in the midst of such unruly tragedy—almost comforting.

He smiled with white, even teeth, so widely that her eyebrows knitted together in concern for the wellbeing of his jaw.

"You own this place, don't you?" he asked in a voice like smoke.

Tsunade nodded slowly, his yellow eyes keeping her stance locked and still.

He tsked, his lips pressing together in what appeared to be an attempt to stifle another smile.

"So you heart," he continued softly, his fingers making a firmer press in her shoulder, "is it broken?"

"What?" Tsunade hissed, her limbs poised in preparation for defense. There was something in his face. In his eyes. In his grin.

It told her to run.

She found her body edging away before she realized what he was doing; what he had already been prepared to do.

She began to scream as his free hand ricocheted towards her, his fingers looping in the material of her shirt while his other hand dug so deeply into the ridge of her collar that she feared he shattered it into two, neat pieces. She immediately began to fight him, his strength and dexterity taking her by surprise. He appeared gangly, all limbs and height, but his brawn matched that of a man twice his weight and in a few seconds, he had bound Tsunade and dragged her down a dark, empty alley away from the street and the fire. In the confusion, fray, and spurting flames, no one noticed the combative interaction, her screams, or that she, mother of the Villa, was no longer standing witness to its demise.

"What are you doing?" Tsunade screeched from her position against the dank, damp wall of the empty alley. He had pivoted them into the corridor by locking both arms around her frame, slinking into darkness and away from the chaos of the crowd. He released her for only moment to deliver a hard hit to her head, one that caused her vision to swim with shimmering stars. Her body slid to the ground and he toppled her, his knees wedged into the crooks of her elbows, effectively pinning her.

He lowered his head to hers and licked the shell of her ear.

"Don't you know who I am, my love?" he asked, bracing his hand on her head before he gathered a handful of her hair and slammed the side of her skull against the concrete underneath them. "I'm Orochimaru," he confirmed, "and broken hearts belong to me."

She woke up in handcuffs.

They were latched vice-like around each of her wrists, the metal splitting and cutting into the thin, veiny skin, resulting in flesh wounds. Faux pink fur decorated the outside of each cuff, the material sticking to her open lacerations and causing severe discomfort. She was naked from the waist up, and her shoes had been removed. Her hair, which she customarily styled into two low, loose pigtails, was free down her back, a small portion of it slicked to the white of her scalp with blood.

Her eyes felt heavy, like they may have been swollen, and as she blinked under the soft light that stretched across the room, she realized that one of her eyes was, indeed, busted, blood and tears dripping down her cheek and lips. Her arms were bent at a strange angle behind her back, and because of the tautness of the cuffs, she could not adjust them. She attempted to hold her head up for a moment to get a better look around the room, her heart sinking into the pit of her belly when her uninjured eye fell upon the purple paint that eloquently decorated each wall of the room.

She, of course, had heard of a room with purple walls; had heard of a room where women went in and never came out.

She swallowed hard, her throat a tight tunnel of muscle, and slowly placed her head back on the sheepskin carpet underneath her.

"I'm in Tokyo…" she said softly to herself. She had not been back to the city since she'd left, and despite her qualms about ever returning, she was there anyway. In Tokyo. In the Snake Room. With a creature too deviant to even be considered human.

Orochimaru, black-hearted and depraved, then proceeded to step into the room. In one hand, he was holding a small glass of what appeared to be bourbon, ice tinkling softly in-between the roasted amber color of the liquor. He brought the rim of the glass to rest directly under his nose, deeply inhaling the fragrance of the distilled beverage before he greedily emptied the contents of the glass down his throat, including the ice cubes. Tsunade watched the column of his grey throat expand as he swallowed, unperturbed and unbothered by the whole chunks of ice, and knew that she was exceptionally doomed.

"You have something that belongs to me," he said.

She violently shook her head against the sheepskin carpet, smearing its white surface with red blood and salty tears. "I have nothing," she gasped, her one good eye wide and wild with unrepressed fear.

He shook his head with a warm smile and a gentle laugh. "Oh, but you do. My girl. My tenshi. I want to know where you've hidden her."

She was silent, responding only with a sigh. Tenshi's whereabouts—like all the girls who had left the Villa—was an enigma to Tsunade. She hadn't the slightest inkling as to where blonde and brave Uzumaki Naruto had whisked her away to. If she were lucky, it was to the other side of the planet. Is this why he had kidnapped her? To siphon information about Tenshi? About Naruto? Had he always known she was at the Villa? Had he had anything to do with Kabuto assaulting her? Was he somehow involved in the fire? Tsunade's head, nearly spilt open by concrete and Orochimaru's fist, was wracking itself for answers as to why she was in this current predicament. She closed her good eye in focused thought, her heart hammering as she suspected how the kidnapping would end. With her lack of conversation, Orochimaru quickly became impatient. The impatience, after a few seconds, sent him into a rage.

He slammed his bourbon glass against the marble countertop behind him and collapsed to the floor, quickly crawling towards her on his hands and knees like a shadowy apex predator, knotting all five fingers from one had into her hair. He pushed the side of her injured face into carpet, and Tsunade screamed in pain and defiance.

"Tell me where she is," he hissed into her ear, "and perhaps your death will not be as painful as I intend."

She braced all the muscles in her body, her arms straining to the brink of acute pain in the faux pink fur framed cuffs. She could squeal. Give away Uzumaki's name. Allow the hunt for Tenshi to become simpler in one breath. She could attempt to save herself from Orochimaru's vexation and violence, but she already knew how it would end, whether she talked or not.

It was hopeless.

"I will not die this way!" she gasped through bleeding lips.

He chuckled. He chuckled and she knew his face would be the last she ever saw. She thought about Tenshi for a brief, fleeting moment, and wondered what she had done to deserve the wrath of such a frightening, despicable human being.

"You, my love, are a whore," he informed Tsunade in the thinning space between them. "And you will die in the manner most appropriate."

His cold, vice grip traveled from her head to her throat, intensifying around the width of her neck, her bound hands clenching around each other as her breath became constricted. As she began to sputter and choke, she was forced to look into his eyes—tiger-like, menacing, and yellow—as they went soft in what appeared to be warm satisfaction.

Blood and tears began to pool into the clear white sclera of her eyes, turning the honey hue of her irises macabre and lurid. With the influx of blood and total lack of oxygen, her vision started to steadily fade, her writhing ceasing, her skin paling to become an intriguing shade of blue. Orochimaru gave her limp neck another squeeze, one that bridged on endearing, and then released her.

She slumped to his white sheepskin carpet, blonde and beautiful and perfectly dead.

He sighed, staring longingly for a moment at her veiny, exposed breasts before standing to pour himself another glass of bourbon.

"What a woman," he said softly, and downed the glass again in one fell swoop, sighing in contentment as the liquor seared his throat. He gazed upon Tsunade's body in deep thought for another minute or so before he placed his glass down and approached the chilling corpse, deftly unzipping his dress pants in the process.

I mean, what can I say? Writer's block, dude.