The person you made me

14. The apricot shawl (Tobirama's perspective)

It took almost two minutes before he opened his door after I had knocked on it. 

Not that I had expected anything else. He never did anything in regards to me without it being a well-calculated power-move. So even this. It was ridiculous.

When he opened, he feigned surprise when he was me. I saw right through him, as he knew I did.

"Tobirama", he said even if we were far from first name-basis. "What brings me the honour?"

"Where are they?"

At first, he looked confused. Fake, of course; he was just toying with me, making time pass to stress me out. It was working.

"Those two black-haired Jews?" he asked innocently. "8963 and... What was the other?"

"Izuna and Madara."

Suddenly, Mengele grabbed my collar, pushed me into his hallway and into the wall.

"Since when are you a Jew-lover?" he hissed into my face. "I bet you fuck them, too. I should have you gassed."

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. I wasn't frightened of this small, pathetic excuse of a man. But I didn't want him to waste another second of my time.

Calmly, I lifted my hand...

And before Mengele understood what was happening, I had grabbed him by the throat and pushed him into the opposite wall. When he lifted his hands to push me away, I put my knee into his stomach, right where his spleen was.

"Make one single move and I'll crush your spleen so you'll bleed to death", I said calmly. "Both you and I know I know exactly how to do that."

First, he looked scared. I hated to confess it, but seeing him afraid of me made my mouth water.

"You..." he hissed. "Always you. The rest of us fought with everything we had for our country. What did you have to do except being born whiter than the rest of us to clamber over the corpses of our lost careers to get to your position? And what have you done there? Nothing! You just waltz around, letting the rest of us do your dirty work. Not anymore, though. Now, I'm in charge."

"Where are they?" I asked calmly again.

That disgusting, evil grin spread across his face, that grin that had come to be so known and feared. I wasn't affected by it other than with disgust. 

"You made a mistake that day you took those boys underneath your wings, Tobirama." An ice cold hand clenched at my heart. "You made them vulnerable by making yourself vulnerable. Why do you think I've been keeping them all this time?"

I pushed my knee further into the doctor's spleen.

"You're sick."

"We know that already, but stop that." He looked down on my knee. "I promise you want to hear what I have to say."

I didn't lessen the force in my knee, but I didn't increase it, either.

"Go on", I said.

"I have learned so many things with my experiments, Tobirama. The amount of time the human body can survive in different temperatures of icy water. The effects of different poisons on different body parts. The genetic conclusions!" He laughed gleefully at this. "It's award-winning discoveries! But one of the most important things I've found out is, the more one person is tortured, the longer time they are put under unimaginable suffering..." his disgusting grin spread across his face, swallowed any trace of sanity that you could have found there, if any. "The more their beloveds suffer when they die."