Title: Yakuza
Author: Dirtwater Fox
(Notes: Alright, listen. I don't know how this is going to turn out. I only get a couple minutes to work on this every day, but I feel bad about not being able to update any of my stories while I'm out here in Kentucky, sooooo I've decided to write a mini-series of sorts. I don't know how long it'll be between updates. I don't know how long individual chapters will be, and I don't know how many chapters there will be… but I intend to write it the entire time until I leave.
Now, again, since I only get a couple of minutes here and there to write this, I don't really get time to do more than fix a few spelling errors. Sorry. Oh, by the by Kanabô is the iron club that Oni – demons – of Japanese mythology favor. It's also the name that Tsunade has taken later in life.)
Settled lazily within the confines of her office, one Tsunade Kanabô was vastly more absorbed in the rich timbre of a favored western band than she was in the paperwork she should have been spending her time on – not that this was anything new. Tsunade was a powerful woman, and a respected leader, but she was also widely acknowledged as lazy.
However, being known as lazy didn't particularly bother her, because she was rather confident in both her ability to foist the responsibility of paperwork off onto her apprentices, and to ruthlessly deal with any and every single event that threatened her organization or a single member within it.
Years ago, when the war – 'rebel uprising,' the government had labeled it – had expanded until it was nearly at her comfortably medium sized hometown, her lover had spotted a group of men attempting to steal their car during the evening. She'd been mildly sloshed at the time – having only just that evening received her promotion to head medi-nin – and so hadn't been as quick on the uptake as she should have, but the memory was as crisp as if she'd never imbibed in her life.
In less time than a half hour's passing, her world – respected member of the community, fiancée to her Academy sweetheart, rising star of the medical world, loving older sister to young nin destined for Hokage-dom – was defiled and destroyed. She'd been hurriedly throwing on a pair of Dan's sweatpants - so that she might rush to his side and assist him in driving off what she assumed to be drunken Academy dropouts – when a horrible sound had reached her ears, freezing her in place.
Gunfire - a loud, harsh, barking sound that assaulted her bleary senses as if it were a hammer blow. The first one had frozen her in place, but the successive shots got her in motion. By the time she'd reached the door, she'd lost count of the amount of times that terrifying sound had echoed through her house. What disturbed her even more though, was the fact that they'd stopped.
As she burst onto the side porch, her eyes were already glassing over with preparatory tears, and an immense pressure began to build within her chest as chakra exploded from her tenketsu's and enveloped her curled fists. She was prepared, in that single moment more than any other she had previously experienced, to kill and possibly be killed to save her lover from the fate these thugs sought to deal him.
She was too late, though. Tsunade lost the fight for her lover's life long before she could even consider throwing a first punch. A pain, wholly new and unwelcome to her, of unimaginable intensity struck her abdomen with hurricane force – she'd been shot. A .357 round had torn through her body like a juggernaut, destroying her womb as well as severing an ovary – before exiting her body and painting the walls with her visceral fluid.
Tsunade fell then, stumbling down the stairs as her legs crumpled beneath her. The world was becoming black before her eyes but she would not let the darkness claim her. Struggling to rise, her mind only registered the physical trauma of a booted kick to the head in a vaguely detached sense. Regardless of how she felt about it, her body followed the foot and she found herself flipped onto her back.
Tsunade would have continued the struggle to rise against them, but, as the first droplet of blood sliding into her eye caused a slight involuntary head jerk to clear the acidic liquid, her peripheral vision caught sight of her downed lover – haloed in a blurry pattern of euphoric light – and the disturbing amount of grey matter spattered across the concrete around his partially concaved skull.
"Dan…" A plaintive call of her lover's name was the last thing Tsunade was conscious of doing. With Dan's death confirmed, she'd simply lost the will to fight.
Tsunade's head jerked slightly as she shook herself from those horrid memories of a time long past. There was nothing she could do about either of them – for there had been a second victim that very same evening – Dan or her younger brother, Nawaki, now or back then, and she constantly tried to remind herself of that when gripped in a dark mood such as the one that beheld her now.
Painted finger nails slid between the thick pages of the international newspaper held open in her lap – though her mind continued to relive the tragedies of her metaphorical death, and her vindication of a triumphant rebirth. Pages fell by the way side, though she pair them no heed. In her mind's eye, she was back in the hospital, blinking her eyes open against the harsh florescent lights of a hospital room.
"Boritetsu? Tsunade Boritetsu?"
A name, one she'd heard before – many times before as a matter of fact. It was her own name. But now, it felt so alien – so… off. It wasn't as if she wasn't Tsunade. No, she was still very much the same brown eyed blonde who wore pigtails by preference, had a bit of a gambling problem and enjoyed the taste of warm sake perhaps a little too much.
It was not a wrongness that would perhaps mean she was, in fact, someone else. When Tsunade tried to consider this matter more deeply – ignoring the slightly porcine looking man garbed in the uniform of the more mundane and less skilled police force for the moment to do so – and was quickly able to come up with a solution to the conundrum.
Something had changed… something was fundamentally different from before that made her name a seeming misnomer. As she considered telling the porcine man this, a name suddenly caught her attention – Nawaki.
She had asked what they had said about her darling little brother, but the answer was wrong – to unreal to be acceptable. Nawaki, dead? Impossible. Her brother hadn't been scheduled to return from his mission until... 'oh no!'
Her mind screamed, nearly rending itself upon a newfound horror – another body to the funeral pyre. Today was the fifteenth, Tsunade's brother was set to return home on the fourteenth – last night.
Tsunade sighed softly as set the leading edge of the newspaper down, picking up a long fluted glass filled with a rich burgundy wine – staining her lips and easing the tension building in her throat. Those had been hard times, she reflected. Luckily though, it was only a short time later that a representative of her estranged grandfather's estate came to visit her – saving her the anguish of returning to an empty house that could never again be home.
Over a period of roughly thirteen years, Tsunade had taken over her family's corporation and now resided as the president of Hidden Leaf. Amusingly, Tsunade could never quite figure out if her own company was more secret society, or yakuza. Either way –
"Hello, what's this."
Wine stained lips parted in a soft purr of predatory amusement as Tsunade's focus centered on a photograph attached to an article she'd just turned to. It was partially blurry and indistinct, but the general outline and poise of the featured figure immediately roused her interest.
Quickly, she'd turned on her computer and gone to the newspaper's URL to get a color version of the picture. Watching color bleed into the outline as the page loaded, Tsunade's smile only grew wider.
Reaching across the expanse of her desk to tap open her intercom line, Tsunade ordered a connection to Shizune. When the voice of her first apprentice reached Tsunade's ears in a report, Tsunade laughed softly before saying…
"Shizune, find Naruto and tell him his leave is cancelled… we have a job for him."
(AN: Welp, that's it for the prologue, hope you guys like it – and I also hope this makes up for me not updating for… well, possibly until march. Just depends on how fast I can get my shit done. See ya later faithful readers!
Dirtwater.