and there is soot in your eyes

. ... .

Naruto doesn't realize it, but he breaks the whores' hearts.

The first one is -

i. Atsuko. She doesn't remember her last name or her mother's face or the way she used to adore making bread in the mornings while her brother took the laundry down to the creek - she doesn't remember her favorite yukata (the pinwheel-patterned one) or the wrinkly, leathery hands that gave her sticky-sweet dango because she has been a working girl for so long now (three years) that pretty, happy things have been forgotten out of self-defense. She is too used to disgusting people and joyless, fake smiles as she winds a cornsilk curl around a perfectly scarlet nail and giggles would you like some more sake handsome i'll kiss the cup's rim because you're so special and i don't usually work on my knees but i'll kiss your dick too.

She only ever sees half of the money. It is better than nothing, though, and still better than any job she could get with her nonexistent skill sets, even if she could somehow disentangle herself from Kudo's nub-bitten fingers (flicking through a stack of ryo and here's your cut buy some nicer earrings, dismissive and casual like he doesn't really own her - but he does, from the refracted green of her eyes to the freckle on the heel of her right foot).

This night is like all of the others. She waits in the bar, dolled up in high whore fashion - all gaping peach silk and kohl and berry paste - and watching for a likely-looking customer. She exchanges nods with a few of Kudo's other pros, making a note of the night's competition.

Competition turns into a moot point when an old man and a kid enter. She doesn't pay them any mind at first because old men are usually nostalgic drinkers, uninterested in what she has to offer (and she hates that sex is the entirety of that - she would like to sit down with one of them and just listen for a night, but Kudo would extract the missed income with special clients like Matsui-the-entrails-fetishist) and the kid looks to be about fourteen, a shock of electric-socket yellow hair and mud-encrusted orange fabric. She figures he will be kicked out in short order.

Sure enough, the bulky bartender (his name is Jin and he likes assplay both ways but really hates fags, which Atsuko thinks is overcompensation but will never voice) stares at the old man condescendingly when he tugs the kid to the counter and orders a bottle of warm sake.

"Get the brat outta here, Gramps. Looks like his bedtime."

The wording is unoriginal, but the sentiment is clear. Jin doesn't want law enforcement poking around the place. The red light district here exists only on sufferance - the mayor likes to think of himself as a reformer, but Atsuko knows that his weakness is a good rim job.

The old man (who has strange red tattoos on his cheeks, she notices, interested despite herself) just snorts and grins, clapping his hand over the indignant boy's mouth as he replies easily, "It's his birthday. Don't worry, I'll make it worth your while. A round for everybody!"

The odd duo gets more popular after that.

The other girls move in, Atsuko with them. Birthday boys are usually guaranteed, and she can't care about age or some distant memory of a brother (three years older than her, about this brat's age the last time she saw him) when it interferes with income. (Atsuko tries not to think about it, but any fair-haired man who fucks her could be her brother. It has been seven years, after all, and - but she tries not to think about it. See, she kind of - enjoys herself with the blonds. She has never claimed to be without issues; she is Atsuko-no-last-name, the hooker with unflaggingly perfect physical health who takes a scalpel to her own memory banks.)

So she manages to slide into the seat next to the kid, ignoring a glare from the aqua-swathed brunette with the gold stud in her nose.

"Hey, sweetie," she says automatically, berry-paste smile and whore lingo and peach silk. "So how old are you now?"

He grins at her brightly, and she isn't taken aback by the genuine pleasure directed at her when he says, "I'm fifteen. What's your name?"

She doesn't know where it comes from, but she would lay odds that the pure mischief in the curl of his mouth is what incites this to exit her mouth: "Let's play a game."

He smiles again, eyes squinting, and chirps out, "Sure!"

She finds herself smiling back more sincerely than usual. "There are rules, you know! Every time you guess my name wrong, you have to take a drink and give me a kiss."

The old man, who has been fondling and flirting with the two girls sitting in his lap, overhears and whistles. He leans over to slap the boy's back, and his "Naruto, you little brat!" comes with a wink.

The kid she now knows to be Naruto reddens and splutters a bit while the other girls laugh. It is a little endearing and also a sure sign that she is dealing with a virgin. Virgins aren't the worst by far - they don't last long and don't know enough to request the more unusual services. So she leans forward in a way that makes the peach silk slide tight and gape in all of the right places, running a red nail down the boy's scarred cheek as she says, "Not a brat at all - I think you're quite big enough for me. So how about that game, or should I just take my winnings now?"

He flushes so much that she doubts he is such a sure thing after all. Th old man guffaws, throws back another cup of sake, and growls out, "The little punk wouldn't know what to do if you kissed him" with far too much blatant sneakiness in the set of his jaw.

Naruto doesn't notice. He scowls, blush fading as he snaps, "Shut your hole, old perv - I do so!"

"Prove it," she cuts in, unwilling to let such a perfect set-up go to waste.

"Fine!" He grabs the clay sake bottle that she has been toying with and throws it back, throat working for long seconds. Before she can say anything, he is kissing her. It is insistent and soft and a little clumsy, but he isn't hopeless by any means. She is about to deepen it when he beats her to the punch, tongue probing her mouth bravely and -

He has a talented tongue. Room for improvement, yes, but Atsuko knows that comes with experience, knows that this child and his smile will crack hearts and give away his spark. When he pulls away a few moments later and grins at her sheepishly, scratching the back of his head, she smiles in return and lets the glow in her ribcage leave with her next easy exhale. (She had thought to be beyond that already, but his warmth makes her wish that she wasn't a prostitute.)

"He definitely knows what he's doing," she tells the old man, tossing her head prettily and lying like the lying lie she is. She drapes herself across the boy and pours him a drink. "So, Naruto-kun, what's your first guess?"

A couple of hours later, they are back at his hotel. He is nervous, she can tell, and not nearly as drunk as he should be after imbibing as much as he has. The door swings shut behind them, and she can clearly see his youth in the awkward set of his shoulders. She is about to reassure him, but suddenly -

"Teach me. Please, I'll be a good student, I swear - "

As he babbles on, she stares at him, surprised but unfazed. She thinks why so eager to ruin your life with sex? before putting her finger on his mouth in a shushing gesture.

"Sure thing, sweetie," she murmurs, moving in for a kiss with some rubbing thrown in to get him started.

But his broad hands - a sign of the man he will grow to be - catch her peach-silk shoulders, and she is pulled up short. His face is serious like she hasn't seen it all evening, and he says, "One thing, though. A - a favor, 'kay? Quit acting like a whore."

She laughs, low and sexy like he hasn't just devastated every ramshackle atom of her being, and then she fucks him. She doesn't let her mouth linger on the smooth cut of his hip bone, and she doesn't chuckle too intimately when he gets overeager and slips out messily for the fifth time in two minutes. At some point he nuzzles the curve of her breast and rib cage, open-mouthed and humid and hah-hah-hah, and she doesn't pull him up for a kiss or notice the brush of his lashes against her delicate skin. She fucks him, and that is all she does.

"Stay," he mutters sleepily, eyes peeking open at her movement, all bleach-blue and slow-lazy like summer days. "Just - stay."

"No," she says, and she leaves her heart on the bedside table as she gaping-peach-silks herself out of the room.

. ... .

ii. Keiko knows she is a bit dull, but she is told she has pretty features. Men have been approaching her on the streets since she turned thirteen, so she supposes there is something to that. Now she is fifteen, and she knows that her mom probably isn't coming back for her this time and she hasn't eaten in a week and Aika says it's real easy.

It is. She lets the man push into her, and he moves for a few minutes, making weird grunting sounds at the headboard. His body is arched tight like the seal she saw in the cage at the circus that one time, and then there is a sensation of wetness down there, and that's it. It's real easy.

So she starts standing on street corners in the red light district, and it stays pretty easy. Men fuck her and then they give her money, and sometimes they do it in a bed and let her sleep there after. They love her long legs, like to bend them in different direction as they hump her - on the nights she sleeps over, she usually wakes up to her knee hooked sideways on someones forearm and her face in a pillow. Aika calls it doggy-style, which Keiko thinks is a funny name. They don't like it when she giggles, though, so she tries not to think about the term when it happens. It's easy. She's good at not thinking.

Then it gets a little harder. A man comes by her corner and he calls himself Hitoko - he pats the curve of her face and calls her beautiful, gentle fingers at odds with the hardness of his eyes. He fucks her like it's a favor and doesn't pay after. He tells Keiko that she works for him. She isn't too sure about this but she nods anyway.

She can't find Aika later, so she lets him keep her. Days turn into weeks and she never finds Aika, so she stays. It's easy. She doesn't have to stand on corners any more - Hitoko brings men to her bedroom. She has her own bed, and she makes friends with a couple of other girls. She gets food pretty regularly, too, and the rattling cough that has been stealing her breath for the past couple of weeks dwindles to infrequency. The only problem is -

Well, she isn't allowed outside, and she misses the sound of trees talking. She misses the smell of oden that sails out over the street at exactly 3:35 every afternoon. Most of all, she misses being able to jump into puddles. So - well, it's a new day and it's raining but it stops. She hasn't had a man at her door in about an hour, and she really can't stop thinking of all of the wonderful puddles that must be outside, clear silver reflections of nothing. She knows she's not supposed to, but this is what she does: she goes down to the kitchen.

"Momo," she says helpfully to the bitter twist of the cook's back, "someone destroyed a door by the bathroom." It's nice that she isn't actually lying. She doesn't really like lying all that much. It makes her stomach hurt.

So the cook strides off, snarling under her breath, and this is her chance her chance her chance. She slips out of the back door, and Keiko is free for the first time in what feels like forever but hasn't even been an entire season. She doesn't have proper shoes on but that's okay - she just wanders away as efficiently as possible, very much not drawing attention until she is about three blocks away. She feels a smile stretching her cheeks as she takes in the bleak lines of the bare trees against the peeling planks of some building, and then her mind zeroes in on her entire motivation. Glancing around, she finds the perfect puddle - not so enormously big that she will soak other pedestrians and get yelled at, but just big enough that the splash will be satisfying. She pounces, giggling, and when she has destroyed the perfection of it thoroughly enough, she jumps to another one, and then another one, and another one - but she is suddenly on her ass, the wind knocked out of her. Her lungs are empty empty empty, and she feels the hack rattle knock start down in the deeps - like fish, she thinks nonsensically - and she can't stop coughing and she can't breathe.

"Shit," she hears a guy's voice say, slightly panicky. "Old perv, now look what you've done! Are you really a ninja?"

A deep man's voice is replying but Keiko doesn't register his response. She can't breathe - can't do anything but try not to choke on the scraping skin of her lungs. Somehow - suddenly it's okay again. Her chest feels warm, and she looks down to find an old man's hand resting just beneath her collarbone, glowing green. She glances up to see sharp eyes and a wild mane of incredible hair, red tattoos like a promise splitting weathered cheeks.

"Alright now?" Hair-san asks gruffly.

"Yes," she answers honestly.

"What's wrong with you?" This is from the boy - sunny-haired and bright-eyed and a warm day at the beach. She likes him even though she likes the rain of winter better than the beach.

"Don't be a rude little shit, brat," Hair-san cuts in before she can respond. Beach-san just sends him a scathing look before returning his focus to her.

"What's wrong," he repeats.

"I don't - it's a cough," she tells him. And that's all it is. "Aika had one too. It's just a cough."

He is squinting at her. "It's sounds like you're dying."

Keiko doesn't know what to say to that, so she just shrugs. His eyebrows scrunch together at the lackadaisical response, and the squint intensifies. He looks funny. She giggles.

"You look funny," she tells him.

"What?" he squawks, brow clearing in outrage. "I do not! I'm not the one who's jumping in puddles in the middle of the winter." He nods vehemently, all take that!

"No," she agrees, "you're not. But maybe you should." With that said, she turns to the old man and smiles and beckons for him to lean down. He does so with wariness in the angle of his eyes, and she gives him a kiss. There is a choking sound from next to them. When she pulls back, Hair-san is blushing red with his mouth wide open.

"Thank you for letting me breathe," she tells him.

"Don't give the perv a kiss for that! You're too young!"

"I was going to give you one as well - do you not want it?"

"Idiot, your kisses are worth more than a quick jutsu! Save it for yourself, jeez!"

She stares at Beach-san. His mouth is taut with indignation and outrage, and his pretty puddle eyes are squinty again, and she loves him as much as she can so she just smiles at him and turns to leave.

"Wha - hey, where are you going?" Beach-san half-yells.

"Back to Hitoko's," she tells him, tilting her head back at him. "I'll be missed by now."

He is sputtering and she loves him so she lets the crowd swallow her. They disappear from sight with a quick step and turn of the body, "Go to a hospital!" the last thing she hears.

She makes it back, but Hitoko is angry and kicks her a lot and swears a lot, and then he pushes into her. It's easy, it's recompense - she thinks of Beach-san and smiles while Hitoko grunts puffs of air against her left shoulder blade.

She doesn't go to the hospital.

. ... .

iii. Her name is Sakura. It isn't her real name, but Okaasan gave it to her and it is the only one she is known by. She is a popular commodity, even though she truly doesn't try to be. She hates everyone - the men who undress her thin figure with their eyes and paw at her small breasts most of all, and she isn't afraid to show it. She swears them out with the tension in her cheekbones and swats their hands away - glares like her uncle did when he came home from the daimyo's wars. She doesn't use her nails only because Okaasan has them trimmed every three days - they learned that lesson well.

She used to fight when the men fucked her, but that usually turned them on. The damage they dealt her was always more than the hits she got in, so she stopped trying. She has a few regulars who enjoy being hit, though, and they worship her. She likes to kick them in the face when they are down on their knees. (They take the spirit of the pain she inflicts in the wrong way. She wants them to burn - and not with pleasure.)

She sits at a table in the brothel's lounge every night and gives the world the dead eye like it will make any difference. Sometimes it does, but her fine, delicate features and and pale, porcelain skin betray her. Sakura knows that she is only making it worse for herself - she knows that the men who remain interested in her despite her obvious unwillingness are the sick ones, the ones with mommy issues who want to rape their sisters. She knows she is really just fucking herself over, but she can't bring herself to stop. She wants to die. No, she doesn't want to die - she wants to cut their throats and pack the gaping slits with the ashes of this prison. She wants to walk out of this backwater metropolis in slippers made from the sensitive skin of Okaasan's inner thighs.

Okaasan knows it, at least intellectually. It is why the woman disarms every man who comes to fuck her - why Sakura eats with her fingers, is disallowed window duty and contact with the other girls. It is why her nails are trimmed and her wrists remain bruised, strapped together beneath the sleeves of her kimono.

Tonight is different. She won a battle with Okaasan earlier today - she hacked her long horsetail off with a knife she managed to lift from the servant boy in the lounge. The woman's face had been white with fury, the fine brackets around her lush mouth made into trenches, but Sakura's threat of taking the sharp steel to her own face had caught her attention. (Sakura - she can't live like this anymore. She must kill, leave, or die, and she isn't picky about the order any more.)

Okaasan had said, "What are your terms?" with narrow eyes, her mouth a smear of hibiscus that matched the paint discoloring Sakura's inner thigh and cunt. (She likes to get Sakura off because she knows how much Sakura hates it - hates when her body turns against her, hates when she has no control. Sakura has no idea how beautiful she is when lit by detestation and contempt and helpless lust.)

"Let me pick my customers."

Okaasan's tight expression had eased slightly, greed and calculation replacing anger and fear. She had straightened her kimono leisurely as she considered, covering her full breasts and retying her obi before saying, "Three a night."

Sakura didn't blink when she replied, "Once a night."

"No."

"Once a night. A double night three times a week, three per night once every two weeks."

"Ten tonight."

Sakura hadn't hesitated, just let "yes" ride the air past the envelope of her mouth.

"Deal then. Now give me the knife."

Sakura had felt the sticky lip paste in her folds as she moved from the bed, mixing with the slickness running down her thighs. She had stood, naked, and the knife shivered in the floorboards three feet to the right of Okaasan's gracefully arched bare feet.

(This is a small victory, but it is a victory. It is the worn navy sash that her cousin used to drop at the start of foot races - this is her life coming down to the wire, either way.)

And this is now. Here she is, sitting in her bedroom as the hard-faced servant girl who beautifies Sakura each night glares in consternation at the ruins of her black hair. Sakura stares blindly at her intricately carved vanity with its lacquered surface, the garish bedroom as habitually overdone as suicide - and she realizes what she has done, what she will have to do. She has willingly agreed to this lifestyle. She has given up and in. She now has control over something, and it is over who is going to pay to fuck her. She is pimping herself out now, without the helplessness or unwillingness.

Acid crawls smoothly up her throat, coating her tongue, and - she is sitting in the lounge, surrounded by drunken conversation and cheap ostentation - stamped by the scent of alcohol and pussy and opium, sweat and tobacco - so she does not close her eyes. Instead, she blinks for a half-second longer than usual, long lashes falling over black irises like the tassels of a curtain.

In this moment, digestive juices vile on her tongue and seeping between her gums, she recognizes the feel of a man's stare. She turns her head sharply, and her eyes latch on to his after four seconds flat.

Sakura gives the dead eye like it will make a difference and takes a sip of sake to rinse out the taste of bile.

She blinks and waits.

By the sixth customer of the night, she feels nothing when she pulls a man into her.

This is what she tells herself. In reality, the glow of her hatred makes her eyes glitter, and the men who dare touch her have deep-seated issues with women. (They need to have her hate them while they fuck her.) In reality, her simmering antagonism is an almost tangible aura, obvious in the line of her neck and the tension of her fingers.

In reality, she is on the verge of homicide - the clear-headed, calculated, lucid kind. She wants to slice away the hands that hold her here in this building of paper and wood and violation with its too-desperate extravagance and too-human denizens. She is desperately not thinking, is fanning her rage to keep her face expressionless and her weakness at bay. This is necessary; she must overcome the battered exhaustion of her body, the numbness of her thigh muscles. The nerves of her entrance pulled together in refusal after the sixth ramming dick, but the seventh didn't let that stop him - not that she had expected the courtesy of that from him. His huffs of "so...tight..." after he finally managed to shove past the closed-up muscles had infuriated her beyond sensation, and the gratitude this hailed had only fueled more rage.

It is not quite midnight, and she is watching for her ninth customer and not thinking of her garish bedroom or its stench of cum and cunt. She scans the lounge, taking vague consolation in the way one of her old clients twitches nervously when she looks at him. He doesn't buy her anymore, not since she gave him what he wanted.

She glances at him again, almost amused, and the man inches closer to the girl plying him with sake. Her lips twitch, but the moment of mirth passes. She turns away, fingers her strange haircut idly - she still isn't used to the brevity of it, the choppy texture left by the knife - and thinks that she shouldn't have hacked the ponytail off so close to the root. It sticks up in the back now -

"SASUKE!"

There is a blur of orange and yellow on her right, and now -

There is a boy grabbing her by the arm (and there are so many ways her life can go in this instant but they fall into nonexistence with every tenth of a second - )

Her control vanishes and her tendons curl and move in reflex and her fine-boned knuckles (scarred from abusing the masochists who come to her) slam into his cheekbone. The strange boy doesn't even stagger back, just shakes his head a little, sending shaggy yellow hair flying.

"Dude," he says to her ferocious glare, "you hit like a girl."

"You're still touching me," she grits out, trying to find the pressure point in his wrist, which is connected to his hand, which is for some reason still holding her bicep in a death grip. "Let. Go."

"Hell no, bastard, you're coming ba - "

She will never know what he was going to say because this is the moment when she finds the pressure point, and his wrist spasms before going limp. He doesn't make a sound, just compensates too quickly for her to see - she is on her knees with her arm between her shoulder blades in two seconds flat, and all she can think in that tick-tick of time is ninja.

"Loser," she hisses through the meaningless pain of her shoulder nearly being dislocated, "how can you think this is a good move? We have men in security who are perfectly willing to chop off your pathetic excuse for a dick."

"What - what are you talking about?"

"Hey!" It is a loud tone, a hard one - Zanzu, she thinks, but she isn't allowed to fuck the guards; Okaasan is smarter than that - and it is saying, "Let go of the girl before I make you let go" while accompanied by the snick of a katana being loosened in its scabbard.

"What - Sasuke, what's going on?" the asshole is asking, and she wants to rip his face off.

"Look, you utter imbecile, I'm Sakura and I don't know who the fuck Sasuke is - now fuck off before blood gets on me."

The grip twisting her arm loosens minutely, possibly in surprise but Sakura doesn't care; she simply takes the opportunity to elbow him in the crotch with her unharmed arm. She can already feel bruises forming on the other one, but as he lets go and half-curls into a standing fetal position, choking a little bit, she feels that she can almost forgive him that.

The guards are still standing there, their threatening postures out-of-place and useless now. Maybe-Zanzu's gaze flicks uncertainly from her to the boy letting out little keening sounds beside her - there are snatches of syllables, sas-uke sas ke sa sa sasuke. The guard's face suddenly clears, replaced by contemptuous understanding.

"Oh," he says, "it's like that. Back to stations, men."

Completely without input from her, they leave. Evidently she has a reputation for violence in the bedroom, which has admittedly been earned at this point. She feels her lips curl, feels the toxic glow of smug satisfaction in her gut, and so when she glances at the boy she doesn't attempt to snap his neck but simply sits back down.

"So," she says. "Do you want to fuck?"

His head snaps up, face blanched with shock and disbelief and something like clean, open open open like sweeping the grime of years off of a dusty pane with a quick drag of a hand. He says, "Sasuke - " again, the choking smallness of his voice a bud blooming in spring and she can't stand it -

"It's Sakura," she snaps, "but it doesn't really matter what you call me. Let's go."

She stands and walks and he follows her helplessly. She can feel his eyes on her, the desperate burning gaze that is seeing the slight swell of her hips, the too-small shoulders, the graceful arch of her neck that is bared by her new haircut. She knows what he is seeing but knows that she doesn't know what he is seeing. It is unsettling, disorienting - this physical sensation is anomalous.

It doesn't matter. He is silent until he isn't, until he is saying, "You're - you're a girl, what the fuck, Sasuke - "

She grabs the front of his hideous orange jacket and jerks him into her room, kicking the door shut and letting go of him. She sneers only with her voice, says, "No shit. This is a whorehouse - if you want a rentboy, go to Ko's down the corner."

"Wait - so - " The clean is fading now, collapsing like the tents at the end of festivals, and there is a cloudiness in his throat as it rasps out: "So - you're, you're not him."

She glances at him, heavy-lidded and scathing, and he seems to stare at her as though he can't breathe but he does.

"Right," he says blankly. "Right. You're - oh hell, you're a..." He trails off weakly.

"Whore," she finishes for him. "It's what you're here for, right? So fuck me."

"I - "

She doesn't care about the slight panic in his wide eyes, just loosens her obi and lets the material of her kimono shrug off of her shoulders.

"No," he says hoarsely, the words seeming to stick in his throat - "no, no, leave it - leave it on."

He takes her from behind, slow and then hard and rough - they fight with the cant of their bodies, domination affirmation aggression, and she is not meant to be here - she has stolen someones spot, doesn't understand what she is obviously standing in for as he bites her jawline and fists the short tufts of her hair, perfumes the knobs of her spine with salt and need. It has never been like this.

"Stop," she grinds out, "stop stop stop."

His hips snap forward once more before he manages to hold himself still, but he does, and he grits out, "What, Sasuke - what, what is it" against the warm moisture beading at the nape of her neck.

"Get out of me. Get - "

He falls back a little, thrown, and interrupts her with, "Am I doing something wrong? Did I hurt you?"

"I don't want you," she tells him, twisting around so that his dick slides out, slick with her body. "I don't want what you're - what you're giving. Give it to someone else. Give it to whoever the hell it's meant for. Don't - don't burden me with it," and she hadn't really known what was wrong but she realizes as she speaks - he is breaking her with every thrust, with every desperate little swallow of his throat as he chokes on a name and this abominable, holistic lack that seems to own him. It isn't meant for her, and she couldn't accept it even if it was. She - can't handle this, can't be exposed to this.

Sakura crab-rolls away from him, fixing her kimono and trying to shed the sensation of love, love, love, trying to forget the feel of prayers mumbled into her skin sas-ke sas-uke sas sas sask kai sas sas-uke. She glances at the boy, frozen as he is, and lets herself see every nuance of pain in the wrecked bend of his mouth, the soft shock of his eyes.

Then she mutters, "Fuck off already, loser," and leaves.

A/N: Something random that has been sitting in my files - just finished it a minute ago, so feel free to point out any errors. I just wanted to post and reassure my faithful readers that I am not, in fact, dead. I'm abroad, and I have absolutely no time to write - not that I was a punctilious updater before, mind you. I shall put in more effort, though! I really appreciate every single review and message, though I don't have the time to reply to all of them anymore. Cheers!