[fic] The Piper's Promise 2/3
with long stories, my priority is simply to get them out of my system, so... i apologize for being wham-bam here. just shamelessly indulging my 8069 atm >P
part one is here.
The Piper's Promise
II. Takeshi
Mukuro-sama.
A tiny voice roused him from sleep. A girl's voice.
Chrome? No... the voice was was much younger. It didn't come the waking world. It came from the waiting place, the mist-filled room between the waking world and the bright meadow.
Mukuro-sama.
The waiting place was still his realm; he was able to find his way to it in the blink of an eye. Soon he was standing before a little girl - a lively, lovely child of six.
He remembered this one. It was the orphan who had been bleeding to death. He had followed her flame to an empty field, to a tiny battered body, left to die by a group of young men from the city. Mukuro had stepped inside to where she hid, breathed life back into her crushed lungs.
She would have been like Chrome - but he had gotten to her in time. The hospital was able to patch her up, and in just a few months she was walking and talking again. Her body had been traumatized, but fully functional.
But when Mukuro came to her and asked if she wanted to find the ones who had attacked her, she took the hand he offered, and she walked with him through her own nightmares, and showed him their faces.
Mukuro had found her assailants easily, destroyed them in their sleep - and then Manami was his. She worshipped him, even before he found her a good family who would love and take care of her in spite of her scars, her empty stares.
"Mukuro-sama!" the child cried. In her dreams, her stares were not empty, and they were fixed only on him. "You came! You came!" She ran into his arms, young enough to know he would never turn her away.
"Somebody saved Manami today," she volunteered, all sunshine and honesty. "Somebody very nice."
"Oh?" He smiled brilliantly. "What happened, Manami-chan? Did anyone try to hurt you again?"
"Nooo..." She shook her head, made nondescript motions in the air with her scrawny arms. "There were looots of cars... and lots of screeeeching, and - "
A traffic accident? Mukuro was not surprised. In the waking world, Manami was often distant to the point of absent, called to attention only by steady eye contact and hearing her name several times. She was too young, also, to manage crossing the street by herself.
"And, and this oniichan..." She grabbed his sleeve, started tugging at it. "Mukuro-sama, this oniichan saved Manami. Manami wants to see Oniichan!"
Mukuro shook his head. "No one must see me, Manami-chan. I've told you this, haven't I? Did you forget?"
"But I want Mukuro-sama to meet him, too!" She pouted. "Because he was nice and strong and handsome and - and he was nice and he saved Manami!"
Well, Mukuro told himself after some thought, it wasn't as if it would take a lot of his time and energy. He wouldn't need to actually meet this person, as Manami wanted - he could just reach into her memory and walk with her in it. She was six years old, she trusted him implicitly, and she would not know the difference.
Besides, he was curious. Who was this savior Manami so badly wanted him to meet? Manami - like Guido, Ken, Chikusa, Chrome and all the others - was special to him. He would like to see this person who had rescued one of his chosen.
"All right," he said. "Take me to him." Happily, she took his hand.
His red right eye gleamed once.
***
They were in a private hospital ward.
It was nighttime. Mukuro looked around. It could be any hospital ward - these things had a way of looking the same. But if this was where Manami last saw the person who saved her, it was safe to presume it was somewhere within Tokyo.
"There he is!" she cried, tugging at his sleeve urgently. "There he is, Mukuro-sama!"
He followed Manami to the only bed in the room.
He looked at the teenager lying there with his head bandaged, hooked up to crude machines. His damaged and poorly-patched together exterior looked surprisingly peaceful, showing precious little of the struggle within. Manami's sharp mind had recalled every detail perfectly, down to the tempo of the boy's soft, barely perceptible breathing.
It can't be.
Why this one...
"There he is," Manami said in a whisper. "He's sleeping... he was sleeping when Manami last saw him, too! Oniichan sure sleeps a lot, doesn't he?"
Mukuro didn't answer. He didn't need to look at the life support device; he could tell at a glance that the boy on the bed wasn't merely sleeping.
The boy had no visitors - that was strange, for this one. Mukuro looked over at the cheap analog clock hanging on the wall across the bed. It was 7 o'clock - it probably meant Manami came here when visiting hours were almost over.
The door to the ward was ajar. There were two people talking outside. It impressed him that Manami was able to remember even this. Mukuro abandoned all else for a moment, stepped closer to the door so he could better hear the conversation.
"It wasn't... just an accident." The first voice was soft, but familiar. It made Mukuro halt in his tracks. "His bones were crushed. And he hasn't fully rested from his last injuries. He - "
"Don't worry too much about that guy, Tenth." The other voice. Not as soft, and not as pleasant, but certainly more familiar to Mukuro. He had been in that head, that body before. "He... he'll pull through. You know how stubborn he can be!"
Mukuro knew it was pointless to look out the door. Outside would be a black hole, or an empty corridor - exactly as Manami remembered it. If she had never seen the young men talking outside, he would not be able to see them in these memories either.
"Reborn says he might die." The tremor in the young Vongola Tenth's voice was unmistakable.
"Tenth..." At a loss for comforting words now. "It's late. Your mother must be worried..."
Then the sound of footsteps vanishing down the corridor outside. Mukuro waited until the sound had faded completely, before turning his attention back to the boy on the bed, and the child who had taken him there.
Manami was leaning over the bed, chattering into the silent patient's ear. Her elbows irreverently rested on the edge of the pillow under the boy's head. "...and you'll like him! For sure! He's really smart and really strong and really nice, just like you! Oniichan... please wake up now. Manami will be sad if you don't." She looked over to the other guest in the room, her large eyes pleading. "Mukuro-sama... what's wrong with Oniichan?"
Mukuro retuned to the child's side, then crouched down low so they could converse.
"Oniichan... he's not just sleeping, is he?"
"No," Mukuro replied. "The accident... it really hurt him, Manami-chan. He's only human, after all." Only human - somehow it was a funny thing to say, in this situation.
Manami bit her lower lip. Her gaze shifted from Mukuro to her new friend, and back again. She looked like she was about to cry.
"But... but you're going to make him all better, aren't you? Just like you made Manami better?"
He laid a hand on her head. "Manami-chan... I didn't make you all better. The doctors did that. If they've done everything they could, there's nothing more I can do."
And you're not Chrome, was what he held back from her, because she wouldn't have understood. You don't have the power to create your own illusions. You could still have died, if you had not been found in time.
And this one... is just like you. But what's strange is, he should have been stronger...
Before he could even finish talking, she had launched herself onto him, wrapped her thin arms around his neck. She did this with such fury, he remembered the bright flame that had led him to her in the first place.
"Mukuro-sama, it's not fair," she said into his shoulder. "He was really nice and - and before they took him away, he smiled at Manami and said he was going to be fine and - why is it like this? Why is he hurt? Save him, Mukuro-sama - please!"
He studied the still form on the bed. The eyes were closed - Mukuro remembered them brown and laughing, always laughing. Always wide open and ready for anything. That was all he remembered; the boy wasn't the sort he was normally interested in.
"You can save him!" the child cried. "You can! Please promise!"
He had saved her. She had called him just to make this request. So close to him, clinging so tightly, how could he refuse her anything?
"Manami-chan. This person. I..."
***
At times Mukuro could forget his body was still trapped in the Vendicare prison - chained and shackled, fed and controlled and kept alive by tubes.
At times he could forget he was slowly disintegrating.
These were the times when he was walking through other people's dreams.
He loved the dreams of children best. Those bored him less, with their inexplicable nightmares, their simple desire, anger, pain and indignation magnified several hundred times.
And anyone who wished to be a child could simply dream him/herself as one. It wasn't the same as actually being a child, of course - the mechanics were different, the symbolisms less intricate.
Mukuro didn't particularly care about whether or not this particular target chose to see himself in his own dreams as a child, or not. All Mukuro was concerned about was that he had promised Manami that he was going to try and rescue the boy who had rescued her.
And that this was not a one-way trade.
This was an injured Vongola in the palm of his hands. And not just any Vongola - one personally important to the Tenth. If he ever had an avenue to destroy the family, short of crippling the untouchable Tenth himself, it would be this.
Mukuro's consciousness shot through the void, following the beacon that was the bright blue flame of the Vongola's Rain Guardian. Even then, it was clear enough that the blue flame stood out - this one was a human among humans, asserting its difference in the space between truths.
***
And Yamamoto Takeshi smiled at him.
It was a default reaction, Mukuro knew - a child who was born to laugh at everything as if the world was one big cosmic joke, would greet any stranger with a smile, even if there was no real welcoming or joy in it.
(The human mind is highly selective. If Yamamoto Takeshi decided that as a child, he would not recognize Rokudou Mukuro, or anyone he met later in life, it would be so. Mukuro was never inclined to challenge this natural thing; if there was anything he liked about the human mind, it was that it's full of chaos just waiting to be exploited.)
They met at the edge of the bright meadow. The boy of around age five sat with his thin legs splayed out, underneath a large hardwood tree. The tree itself was nothing Mukuro recognized - its branches were thick, gnarled and lush, casting an ominous shadow over the boy and the area of earth within their reach.
Happy sounds of children laughing and playing permeated the air, and yet - there was no other child in sight.
The little boy's hair was black, short-cropped. His brown eyes were even wider than Mukuro remembered them to be. The child held a stick in one hand (little more than a twig, really - it must have fallen off the tree) and was tossing pebbles in the air with the other. Without ceremony - without much attention, even - the boy attempted hit each pebble with the stick he held, before it fell to the ground.
It was an automatic motion; clearly he was doing it merely to pass the time. Mukuro approached him, but he didn't even stop playing this silly game. It would seem, also, that he was not even inclined to wonder why he never ran out of pebbles, when he wasn't exactly sitting at a particularly rocky spot.
Then again, Mukuro never figured Yamamoto Takeshi to be the kind who asked unanswerable questions.
Mukuro sat on his haunches, watched the child for a bit. Then, "You know," he greeted, "it's no fun playing all by yourself."
The boy tossed another pebble into the air.
"Wouldn't you like to play with the others? Don't you think it might be fun?"
"Yeah," the boy responded vaguely, not caring if he missed hitting the pebble because he was listening to this stranger talk. "Maybe."
Mukuro detected a measure of loneliness in the boy's voice. He zeroed in on it and made his own voice gentler.
"You could stay here forever if you want. With other boys and girls like you. Everything that ever made you feel pain - you will never remember them. Nothing can hurt you anymore."
If I can't revive you, I can at least end your suffering. This wouldn't constitute breaking his promise to Manami, he said to himself - he would still be saving the Vongola Rain Guardian. He just wouldn't be bringing him back to life.
"Tell me what you want, Takeshi," he said outright. "What will make you happy?"
The boy stopped playing and held his stick loosely in one hand. When he looked straight into Mukuro's eyes, Mukuro thought he saw a flash of recognition there.
But Mukuro smiled at the boy, and the boy relaxed, like any child would, in the face of all the promises in the world made real.
(tbc)
part 3 is here.
part one is here.
The Piper's Promise
II. Takeshi
Mukuro-sama.
A tiny voice roused him from sleep. A girl's voice.
Chrome? No... the voice was was much younger. It didn't come the waking world. It came from the waiting place, the mist-filled room between the waking world and the bright meadow.
Mukuro-sama.
The waiting place was still his realm; he was able to find his way to it in the blink of an eye. Soon he was standing before a little girl - a lively, lovely child of six.
He remembered this one. It was the orphan who had been bleeding to death. He had followed her flame to an empty field, to a tiny battered body, left to die by a group of young men from the city. Mukuro had stepped inside to where she hid, breathed life back into her crushed lungs.
She would have been like Chrome - but he had gotten to her in time. The hospital was able to patch her up, and in just a few months she was walking and talking again. Her body had been traumatized, but fully functional.
But when Mukuro came to her and asked if she wanted to find the ones who had attacked her, she took the hand he offered, and she walked with him through her own nightmares, and showed him their faces.
Mukuro had found her assailants easily, destroyed them in their sleep - and then Manami was his. She worshipped him, even before he found her a good family who would love and take care of her in spite of her scars, her empty stares.
"Mukuro-sama!" the child cried. In her dreams, her stares were not empty, and they were fixed only on him. "You came! You came!" She ran into his arms, young enough to know he would never turn her away.
"Somebody saved Manami today," she volunteered, all sunshine and honesty. "Somebody very nice."
"Oh?" He smiled brilliantly. "What happened, Manami-chan? Did anyone try to hurt you again?"
"Nooo..." She shook her head, made nondescript motions in the air with her scrawny arms. "There were looots of cars... and lots of screeeeching, and - "
A traffic accident? Mukuro was not surprised. In the waking world, Manami was often distant to the point of absent, called to attention only by steady eye contact and hearing her name several times. She was too young, also, to manage crossing the street by herself.
"And, and this oniichan..." She grabbed his sleeve, started tugging at it. "Mukuro-sama, this oniichan saved Manami. Manami wants to see Oniichan!"
Mukuro shook his head. "No one must see me, Manami-chan. I've told you this, haven't I? Did you forget?"
"But I want Mukuro-sama to meet him, too!" She pouted. "Because he was nice and strong and handsome and - and he was nice and he saved Manami!"
Well, Mukuro told himself after some thought, it wasn't as if it would take a lot of his time and energy. He wouldn't need to actually meet this person, as Manami wanted - he could just reach into her memory and walk with her in it. She was six years old, she trusted him implicitly, and she would not know the difference.
Besides, he was curious. Who was this savior Manami so badly wanted him to meet? Manami - like Guido, Ken, Chikusa, Chrome and all the others - was special to him. He would like to see this person who had rescued one of his chosen.
"All right," he said. "Take me to him." Happily, she took his hand.
His red right eye gleamed once.
***
They were in a private hospital ward.
It was nighttime. Mukuro looked around. It could be any hospital ward - these things had a way of looking the same. But if this was where Manami last saw the person who saved her, it was safe to presume it was somewhere within Tokyo.
"There he is!" she cried, tugging at his sleeve urgently. "There he is, Mukuro-sama!"
He followed Manami to the only bed in the room.
He looked at the teenager lying there with his head bandaged, hooked up to crude machines. His damaged and poorly-patched together exterior looked surprisingly peaceful, showing precious little of the struggle within. Manami's sharp mind had recalled every detail perfectly, down to the tempo of the boy's soft, barely perceptible breathing.
It can't be.
Why this one...
"There he is," Manami said in a whisper. "He's sleeping... he was sleeping when Manami last saw him, too! Oniichan sure sleeps a lot, doesn't he?"
Mukuro didn't answer. He didn't need to look at the life support device; he could tell at a glance that the boy on the bed wasn't merely sleeping.
The boy had no visitors - that was strange, for this one. Mukuro looked over at the cheap analog clock hanging on the wall across the bed. It was 7 o'clock - it probably meant Manami came here when visiting hours were almost over.
The door to the ward was ajar. There were two people talking outside. It impressed him that Manami was able to remember even this. Mukuro abandoned all else for a moment, stepped closer to the door so he could better hear the conversation.
"It wasn't... just an accident." The first voice was soft, but familiar. It made Mukuro halt in his tracks. "His bones were crushed. And he hasn't fully rested from his last injuries. He - "
"Don't worry too much about that guy, Tenth." The other voice. Not as soft, and not as pleasant, but certainly more familiar to Mukuro. He had been in that head, that body before. "He... he'll pull through. You know how stubborn he can be!"
Mukuro knew it was pointless to look out the door. Outside would be a black hole, or an empty corridor - exactly as Manami remembered it. If she had never seen the young men talking outside, he would not be able to see them in these memories either.
"Reborn says he might die." The tremor in the young Vongola Tenth's voice was unmistakable.
"Tenth..." At a loss for comforting words now. "It's late. Your mother must be worried..."
Then the sound of footsteps vanishing down the corridor outside. Mukuro waited until the sound had faded completely, before turning his attention back to the boy on the bed, and the child who had taken him there.
Manami was leaning over the bed, chattering into the silent patient's ear. Her elbows irreverently rested on the edge of the pillow under the boy's head. "...and you'll like him! For sure! He's really smart and really strong and really nice, just like you! Oniichan... please wake up now. Manami will be sad if you don't." She looked over to the other guest in the room, her large eyes pleading. "Mukuro-sama... what's wrong with Oniichan?"
Mukuro retuned to the child's side, then crouched down low so they could converse.
"Oniichan... he's not just sleeping, is he?"
"No," Mukuro replied. "The accident... it really hurt him, Manami-chan. He's only human, after all." Only human - somehow it was a funny thing to say, in this situation.
Manami bit her lower lip. Her gaze shifted from Mukuro to her new friend, and back again. She looked like she was about to cry.
"But... but you're going to make him all better, aren't you? Just like you made Manami better?"
He laid a hand on her head. "Manami-chan... I didn't make you all better. The doctors did that. If they've done everything they could, there's nothing more I can do."
And you're not Chrome, was what he held back from her, because she wouldn't have understood. You don't have the power to create your own illusions. You could still have died, if you had not been found in time.
And this one... is just like you. But what's strange is, he should have been stronger...
Before he could even finish talking, she had launched herself onto him, wrapped her thin arms around his neck. She did this with such fury, he remembered the bright flame that had led him to her in the first place.
"Mukuro-sama, it's not fair," she said into his shoulder. "He was really nice and - and before they took him away, he smiled at Manami and said he was going to be fine and - why is it like this? Why is he hurt? Save him, Mukuro-sama - please!"
He studied the still form on the bed. The eyes were closed - Mukuro remembered them brown and laughing, always laughing. Always wide open and ready for anything. That was all he remembered; the boy wasn't the sort he was normally interested in.
"You can save him!" the child cried. "You can! Please promise!"
He had saved her. She had called him just to make this request. So close to him, clinging so tightly, how could he refuse her anything?
"Manami-chan. This person. I..."
***
At times Mukuro could forget his body was still trapped in the Vendicare prison - chained and shackled, fed and controlled and kept alive by tubes.
At times he could forget he was slowly disintegrating.
These were the times when he was walking through other people's dreams.
He loved the dreams of children best. Those bored him less, with their inexplicable nightmares, their simple desire, anger, pain and indignation magnified several hundred times.
And anyone who wished to be a child could simply dream him/herself as one. It wasn't the same as actually being a child, of course - the mechanics were different, the symbolisms less intricate.
Mukuro didn't particularly care about whether or not this particular target chose to see himself in his own dreams as a child, or not. All Mukuro was concerned about was that he had promised Manami that he was going to try and rescue the boy who had rescued her.
And that this was not a one-way trade.
This was an injured Vongola in the palm of his hands. And not just any Vongola - one personally important to the Tenth. If he ever had an avenue to destroy the family, short of crippling the untouchable Tenth himself, it would be this.
Mukuro's consciousness shot through the void, following the beacon that was the bright blue flame of the Vongola's Rain Guardian. Even then, it was clear enough that the blue flame stood out - this one was a human among humans, asserting its difference in the space between truths.
***
And Yamamoto Takeshi smiled at him.
It was a default reaction, Mukuro knew - a child who was born to laugh at everything as if the world was one big cosmic joke, would greet any stranger with a smile, even if there was no real welcoming or joy in it.
(The human mind is highly selective. If Yamamoto Takeshi decided that as a child, he would not recognize Rokudou Mukuro, or anyone he met later in life, it would be so. Mukuro was never inclined to challenge this natural thing; if there was anything he liked about the human mind, it was that it's full of chaos just waiting to be exploited.)
They met at the edge of the bright meadow. The boy of around age five sat with his thin legs splayed out, underneath a large hardwood tree. The tree itself was nothing Mukuro recognized - its branches were thick, gnarled and lush, casting an ominous shadow over the boy and the area of earth within their reach.
Happy sounds of children laughing and playing permeated the air, and yet - there was no other child in sight.
The little boy's hair was black, short-cropped. His brown eyes were even wider than Mukuro remembered them to be. The child held a stick in one hand (little more than a twig, really - it must have fallen off the tree) and was tossing pebbles in the air with the other. Without ceremony - without much attention, even - the boy attempted hit each pebble with the stick he held, before it fell to the ground.
It was an automatic motion; clearly he was doing it merely to pass the time. Mukuro approached him, but he didn't even stop playing this silly game. It would seem, also, that he was not even inclined to wonder why he never ran out of pebbles, when he wasn't exactly sitting at a particularly rocky spot.
Then again, Mukuro never figured Yamamoto Takeshi to be the kind who asked unanswerable questions.
Mukuro sat on his haunches, watched the child for a bit. Then, "You know," he greeted, "it's no fun playing all by yourself."
The boy tossed another pebble into the air.
"Wouldn't you like to play with the others? Don't you think it might be fun?"
"Yeah," the boy responded vaguely, not caring if he missed hitting the pebble because he was listening to this stranger talk. "Maybe."
Mukuro detected a measure of loneliness in the boy's voice. He zeroed in on it and made his own voice gentler.
"You could stay here forever if you want. With other boys and girls like you. Everything that ever made you feel pain - you will never remember them. Nothing can hurt you anymore."
If I can't revive you, I can at least end your suffering. This wouldn't constitute breaking his promise to Manami, he said to himself - he would still be saving the Vongola Rain Guardian. He just wouldn't be bringing him back to life.
"Tell me what you want, Takeshi," he said outright. "What will make you happy?"
The boy stopped playing and held his stick loosely in one hand. When he looked straight into Mukuro's eyes, Mukuro thought he saw a flash of recognition there.
But Mukuro smiled at the boy, and the boy relaxed, like any child would, in the face of all the promises in the world made real.
(tbc)
part 3 is here.