She led him into a room, her room, and closed the door behind them. Holding a torch in hand, she walked through to find a seat, turning on a lamp. "It was years ago…" she started, "There was a traveling fair in the city. Gypsies. I was very young studying to be a ballerina." He mind flew away to the back of her mind as she told Sasuke the story she knew.
She remembered everything she saw: fire-breathers, exotic dancers, animals aplenty. "One of many living in the dormitories in the opera house." She recalled the big burly man, telling her and the other girls to 'come and see the devil's child', how it was just a small child with markings down the side of his face, how they would beat him with a whip, how all the people would laugh and throw money at him.
But just before she left, she turned to see the small boy grab the rope left behind and strangle the man, who was more than twice his size. The man fell down onto the bed of hay that was left to serve as bedding, his face laying beside the monkey plush that served as a toy to the 'devil's child'.
She had helped him escape as the other gypsies had been calling out 'murder…murder…!' She had sent him into one of the opera house dormitories where he had been hiding for years. Tsunade remembered coming through a different door to meet him in the small room lit by candles to hide him in a different room.
"I hid him from the world, and its cruelties." She sighed. "He has known nothing else of life since then, except this opera house…" she explained how it became a playground for him and later his 'artistic domain'. "He's a genius…an architect and a designer…a composer and a magician…a genius…" She looked toward Sasuke, as if searching for some sort of answer to be written upon his face, wondering if she had given him enough information.
"But clearly, Miss Tsunade, genius has turned to madness…" Sasuke muttered as his onyx eyes stared at her steadily in query. Tsunade smiled at the comment, letting her breath flutter away from her lips.
A car flew down the road in the pouring rain, the man inside watching a deer run by. They were coming up fast on a town in which he knew to be that of his birth place. The rain made it hard to see, but gave a rather distinct reflection of his maid and driver in the front seat.
The café and the streets were empty, a traveler wandering the damp street, his pegged leg clacking against the brick roads that lay in front of the opera house steps.
Everyone was getting ready for bed, but Sakura couldn't help but stare out her window, the moonlight being the only thing that shone through; it illuminated her satin bed sheets. Quickly, she got out of bed, shuffling out of her sheets, searching for her cloak.
As she walked out the door, she saw Sasuke asleep against the pole that lay just outside her bedroom, his white undershirt unmoving in his slumber. She took a deep breath before heading down the staircase and out the door.
She took graceful steps outside, one of Ino's helpers passing her by through the snowy weather. She met with a man, handing him money. He looked down at the coins that lay within the purse. As he looked up, he asked her one simple question. "Where to?"