Never was there a story of more Woe than that of Tsuna and his Mukuro
SPECIAL THANKS TO MYRAFUR FOR GOADING, ENCOURAGEMENT, AND HELP IN DARK TIMES. ILLUSTRATED and TAGGED BY ULTRA-TALENTED BELLICOSUS.
To: Questofdreams
From: Octavius_x (and bellicosus)
Title: Cycle
Rating: R/NC-17, for violence, adult themes, sex and vulgar language.
Pairing: 6927, Mukuro/Tsuna
Summary: Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you toward desire? Were they laid Hansel and Gretel style towards a house made of dreams? Dreamscapes of the TYL!Tsuna and TYL!Mukuro with the threat of the Millieflore.
He drags himself to shore. On the bank some local festival of the Holy Mother is taking place, her statue moves slowly down the shore draped in insectoid lights wired to a car battery at her dress train. The lights bobbling and weaving as men struggle to heft her cement platform on their shoulders as they head into the surf. Where the wires dip into the water a soft hiss and crackle. At a yell from one of the carriers they halt and the lights are extinguished; the water diffuses up their shirts turning them slick and wet like the bodies of seals. Boys following the procession move between the bearers placing candles in her clasped hands, on her shoulders, at her bent knees and light them. Her ceramic face is serene in the face of such ignition. She drifts out, a beacon, her human wake submerged up to their shoulders forming a half-circle around the area of her release, their bodies spent, the hair at the nape of their necks wet and curling black. A sexual wetness, as if her body had been that of a lover they had labored over in the dark.
Mukuro knows that the Romans too had set funeral pyres burning from the same shore. Her form out against the veiled sky with the flame at her temple is like the face of another, head tilted down against the weight of the world. As she sunk the ceramic face would hold mass for the silent lives of fish, the seaweed fluttering hymns until the men would return next year, lift her out of the water and clean her porcelain brow. That face floats above him now, her high forehead with the widow’s crook, clothed in blues and reds, the lumps of breasts beneath her dress entirely non-sexual. Her impassive expression looms over him, not like the Tsunayoshi he left in Venice, but of another--the face of the Vongola Tenth when he is younger wreathed in flame. Then Mukuro's eyes roll back into his head exposing white, his pupils expanding in an effort to examine his dark insides. His hands grasping at nothing, floundering in the coarse sand of the beach.
There is a shout from one of the villagers. The hymns of the women on the shore stop abruptly and break into Italian. The men in the ocean slog over to the shore, the grandeur that had inhabited their movements previously, gone. Their shoulders are numb, feet going cold. It’s the boys who’d lit the candles that discover the body. In packs they whoop back across the shallows, collecting in twos and threes to flick lighters hurriedly behind palms and bum cigarettes from fathers and uncles. Lorenzo who's mind is still spiraling up with his cigarette smoke trips over a leg and lets out a yell. The villagers are not sure what to make of the man on the shore, while examining him they each remember different tales told by grandparents and great grandparents. All dim children's stories passed over the cradle, but for a moment the figure might have been a construct of those myths...mermaids, selkies, things that came in unexplained from the sea. The younger generations remembered their parents stories from the war: how whole regiments of bloated blue-black corpses had washed up on the bank along with cases of ammunition, canned rations, pieces of left-over tanks, tennis shoes, and in the case of Adaline's father an entire case of Pinot Noir with the mark of the Nazi's on it. It is the priest who moves forward first, leaning down with his handkerchief over his mouth he felt and for and found a pulse. He flips the body over exposing the bullet holes on the other side, the rings on its right hand.
"Tch," said the father, "Mafioso."
I rise like a bubble to the surface.
The Vendici winch up the body on a heavy mooring chain and dump it on the floor. Hibari leaves it where it falls. Out of the water it resembles something pulled too early from the womb, something formless and primordial the way it is curled. Clothed all in rags, pale grey shapes like birds shuttered around the body. It makes Hibari wonder for a split second if it isn't dead and if this isn’t all a monumental waste of time.
It coughed once then convulsed and gagged up the oxygen tube. The skin beneath the apparatus is corpse white, the look of fish deep beneath the ocean starved for sun. It rolls over to look at him. The implant had left a concentric ring of bruising over the eye socket, a target painted on the face, but at the center the bull’s eye is flickering and steadies like a light bulb filament brought slowly to life.
The thing on the floor sighs then Mukuro smiles and says, "Nice to see you again, Kyoya-kun."
He has been held for years in coffin-like blackness. Entombed and eye enclosed. Rendered tender. Dull sparks now. Devils don't sleep, they lie in wait. He breathes--
Mukuro has found there is little known about the Vendici. Records show that they existed as far back as the 1800's and have never borne allegiance to any family, or chosen sides in any war. They keep to their own affairs and are generally concerned only with the capture, and for the first time, in his case, recapture of their charges. The wrapped faces of his jailors are a mystery but the chains in their hands are not; although Cesarino in 1857 observed they had an affinity for cruelty, he does not need to be told. They are beyond possession, brutes driven by their single-minded purpose, inert dull meat, and they do not take kindly to what Tsuna has done.
They bring him forward in chains wrench his head back and force him to his knees. Only one pupil dilates (the other is taped shut) and takes in the room: the high grooved ceiling of oak, the old world maps that paper the walls where the coastlines of China and the Antarctic are still indefinite blurs. Blue blown Venetian glass in all the round window panes. Outside he sees the sinking city, the water a shifting plane plucking and shuffling the colors of sunset, the shining top of the Duomo.
And other less interesting room adornments--families and associates of the Vongola smoking, shuffling, shaking hands. Making deals in the same room that their ancestors beforehand had used, marking the maps around them as the most profitable places monopolize routes, spices, human lives, perfect algorithms for triangular trade. Geography had changed become more accurate, coastlines and trade winds quantified by electric and digital instruments--the trappings had changed but what was exchanged was still the same. Here they are still gathered around a figure in chains, lives still in the balance. Their presence is part of a formality that had gone on for years, since the invention of cloak and dagger, and before that the traitor’s discovery of the knife in the sleeve or poison in his glass, and the disbelief in his eyes when he bled out. A million stab wounds in the name of Vongola, a million glasses and bodies drained.
Sawada Tsunayoshi enters the room and these people around him suited in Armani, Gucci, Salvatore Ferragamo, the entire accumulated wealth of Milanese runways crease their tailored waistlines to bow in his honor. Hayato Gokudera and Takeshi Yamamoto strong at his back like the guard dogs they are, ramrods in the well oiled gun barrel of the mafia. The face of Sawada up on the throne is still a child's, older perhaps, the suit is fitted to him, the throne as if he's sat in it before, the skittishness is gone, but the baby at Sawada's elbow is still not quite as good an illusionist as himself. He smiles.
"Guardian of Mist, Rokudo Mukuro" Reborn says, "by the order of the Tenth head of Vongola you have been released temporarily from the Vendici Prison to fulfill your duty as a Vongola Guardian. You were chosen specifically for your particular skills, if someone else could have done this, believe me, we would have no need of you. Do you accept?"
Oh, had the world gotten darker while he'd been away? The Vendici pull impatiently at him, metal collar cutting into his neck. All eyes in the room go to him, except Tsunayoshi who is not looking at anything at all. He had been expecting a death sentence, but supposes this is about the same thing. The covered eye throbs in its socket.
"Time for one last screw by the Vongola huh? Not even going to tell me what it is?"
"All we want to know is if you'll do it."
"Don't be angry with me Hayato-chan. If they wanted you they would have asked."
He pauses feels his next sentence out in his mouth, "Let me talk to the Tenth alone, then I'll consider it."
"Like Hell he will--"
"Tsunayoshi-sama," says Mukuro's white face.
Tsuna understands then, while looking at the figure on the floor, why the Varia refused to accept him. He is newly 19 and is hit with the realization that the Varia had recognized Xanxus' scars as not only the mark of a traitor, but accepted them as testament to his ability for leadership, the fortitude to betray and a disposition to take lives.
The suit scratches his wrists. The armrests are just tall enough to make him uncomfortable. He opens his mouth, "If you succeeded Rokudo Mukuro I will grant you that wish."
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway.
London is a city of small revelations. Where the vicar slumped in his seat over his sermon and fell asleep, where a kid peeled the magnetic labels off a DVD and walked out of HMV, where students miles away in Cambridge jumped the space between the Bank Building and Keys college, or whether in the backroom of a pub in the East End two shot guns, an air rifle, and an assault weapon were pulled from the chest in the backroom. There is always the sense that a similar event somewhere in some different circumstance has happened before.
“What the hell do you want?” They say and he idles in the doorway picks up a glass of Contreau and takes a sip. The men to his right get up and file into the back room.
"If I were you," says the man left at the bar, "I would turn m'self around and stroll back out the door."
Mukuro takes another sip and out of the corner of his eye he sees someone take an ornamental machete off the wall. He puts the glass down. The bartender bends to retrieve something on the floor, and above him martini and lager glasses chime delicately as they shift in their racks. The TV blares the football announcers voice, rough with excitement, "Liverpool F.C. or Liverpool Football Club are a professional football club based in Liverpool, in the north west of England with 18 titles, have been crowned champions more times than any other club having dominated during the 1970s and 1980s. They are followed by Manchester United..." Someone behind him opens fire. The heavy Kachunk Kachunk of the assault weapon loading copper cartridges, and spitting out shells. The sexual thrust of it whipping into the tight crook of the man's shoulder in the kickback. Bullets bite into the wood of the bar. Mukuro turns and is welcomed back to the world in a flurry of violence. He licks his teeth and heads grinning into the fray.
Couches erupt stuffing that has not seen the light of day in years, grey and packed down under a multitude of asses and trysts. Glasses shattering, the fire extinguisher erupting white and frothy like a child's ice cream float, a fine layer of powder over the bodies on the floor. The Elk's head mounted on the opposite wall is missing and ear, and now peppered with a shot gun blast looks deranged, mental, but it is nothing compared to the man in the center of the room breathing lightly. The trident leaves huge triangular shaped gouge marks in the floor, piercing the cheap linoleum down to the wood beneath. At the end of it he returns to the bar and wipes the blood from around his eye with a napkin.
"I was looking forward to watchin' the game," says the single man still undisturbed at the bar. He shifts off the stool, moves his folded coat from where it had been sitting over his right hand. "Fucking cunt, you are." On his uncovered hand is a ring in the shape of a skull with a snake for a tongue. The man takes a drink with one hand, eyes still on the TV and brings up the wood stool with the other.
It has been too long, he thinks for a split second before the trident cracks into the stool. It slides forward, missing and cutting into the man's neck. The man's surprised eyes bulge out huge, bulldog-like. He wipes at his neck with one hand, and then turning smashes Mukuro across the face with his other fist.
It hits him hard. Like taking the keel of a ship to the chest (or waking up underwater for the first time, the wheeze of the oxygen tubes in his lungs--the blackness after).
"Tell that fucking Vongola brat to mind his own fuckin' business," Bulldog forces out between his grinning teeth.
Mukuro's eyes seem intent on focusing on the wrong things. For instance, the two tracks left by his legs in the white powder from the fire extinguisher. All 69 kilos of him snake easily around the carnage in the capable hands of the Bulldog. Bulldog bends and retrieves the machete off the floor dragging Mukuro by his hair to the far side of the bar away from the door.
"You know, I heard about you, bein' in prison and all that. I'm surprised and rather flatter'd you came all this way yerself just for the likes of me. Feel like I should give you a litt'l reward, I've had this little theory for a while so I'm going to tell it t'you. There are two kind of people in this mafia business, the doers," Bulldog wipes blood off the blade with the heel of his shoe, and in the same motion uses the hilt to smash Mukuro's head into the bar wood. His mind floats up, unmoored by Bulldog's fist into a casket darkness like the city before an air raid, and then into old London, soft enveloping gas lamp glows, starch in the cravat at his throat, the Thames bloated like a living rat, grey scuttling slowly within its banks, and before in the ruin of the Romans pale ships moving with their sails cut the old fashioned way, the river called something else then, but everywhere as vicious as the voice in his ear, "--and those that get done. Now I figure you're more of a doer what wit' all those people that yer out possessing, and them, they're the ones that get done. But sometimes you just meet someone wit' a bigger cock than yer own and you get down on your knees and bend over. Issn't that right Rokudo?"
He pulls Mukuro's hand across the bar; it has the consistency of a corpse. His head on the bar is level with scattered bar peanuts, and bears the same glassed look as the taxidermied Elk on the wall. Bulldog's shirt front is stained with blood from where he's been wiping his wet knuckles, and deep black singe marks on the cotton from the Hell ring fire.
"Now Roku-is it alright if I call you Roku m'boy? Well whatever I don't give a fuck," he laughs, rolls up his sleeves and pins Mukuro's arm between his elbow and the thick sweaty weight of his body, "Now, Roku--dun't fall asleep on me now."
He slaps him. Mukuro's eye twitches.
"I need you to tell me exactly how many of your fingers I'll need t'send to the Vongola brat before he'll get the message to 'Fuck off'".
The machete carves the air above his arm.
"One, two, maybe six? How about a compromise, an arm then? You can still embrace your boss one-handed? Can still finger his ass up good one-handed, right?" Bulldog slaps him again, and now he can feel his fingers.
"Yer not being very talkative now Roku. Who'm I supposed to ask now that you've gone and killed everyone? Lookit' poor Larry there." He grabs Mukuro's face in the vice of his hands, turns it to look at the corpse, the ring sears the side of his mouth. Tastes like sulfur. Bulldog laughs, face glistening, red and wet like something boiled, "Jus' don't know when t'stop d'you. But oh, you've met the devil now."
The words hit him. "No one's made me bleed for a long long time," says his tongue, a white dead thing.
"Oh, I'm gonna have some goddamn fun wit' you," Bulldog says, shakes his head and draws his fist back. Mukuro knows their weight now, heavy, like a hammer to the head. Like the cloaks of the eighth circle dressed in lead to crumple ribs like accordions. Like the chains of the Vendici as they dragged him back the second time, the new dew of the morning had already been laid on the grass, wetting his open hands. His other arm still works sluggishly. Two fingers are broken. They touch his face (he always expects bone but gets something softer instead). He feels the pulp and squish of his eye only on the edge of his senses, the 5th state had always made that easy. Among other things. His hearing comes back last, but by then Bulldog has already stopped screaming. A pity, really.
I have been to the bottom of the ocean. Time there is relative.
Their cheeks brushed in the dark. Tsuna leaning over to look at the bus schedule and grimacing at the green tea drink Reborn always makes him buy. Even when its 9 at night at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere. The Arcobaleno is no where to be found, and Mukuro is crowding Tsuna's space because he can.
Their cheeks brush in the dark. Mukuro's head snapping to the side like the flick of a match striking a booklet. Sparks should have flared up in that small movement, but the real world was sometimes less interesting. If a match had been struck, it should have been one that wavered and was snuffed out immediately between thumb and forefinger. Instead he reached out and took it: lifting Tsuna by his uniform shirt and pushing him up against the juice machine so hard the change dispenser dug into his back.
A muffled "Ow".
He just says "Open your mouth" and kisses him. Tsuna's blood pounding in his ears even though the neighborhood is quiet, crickets moving through the brush playing their legs, and Mukuro's tongue is in his mouth wet and moving, his hand turning your head a little so he can push in deeper. A hot thing. The flat blandness of the green tea drink entirely gone now. The soft glow of the display--the CC Lemon Soda, the Kirin Brand Milk tea--illuminating Mukuro's features in the same way that years later the lights in the Vendici prison define will them. Tsuna is 16 and remembers being completely terrified and how the back of his neck goes hot and soft.
If they had known then--that it would end up like this--Tsuna wonders if he would have leaned over and snuffed it out himself. They end up having to send Gokudera and Yamamoto to drag Mukuro back to Venice. Gokudera calls to make sure Tsuna had said, 'Not in a casket'.
"I could have sworn it was the opposite boss," he says and Tsuna can hear him chewing the cigarette filter like he does when he's annoyed.
"How did it go, you guys are okay?"
"Yeah don't worry, it was easy, a push-over. If you ask me that prison time just made him a softie, no need to get him out again. I'll handle it next time."
"Also," drifts in Yamamoto, "he was already pretty beat up when we got here. So we mostly sort of picked him up." There are muffled sounds of a scuffle in the background.
Gokudera returns breathless, "You want us to bring him back to Venice, Juudaime? Or just back to the Vendici. You didn't actually mean all that stuff about talking to him in private did you? As you advisor I advise against it."
Tsuna sits back in his chair with the receiver in his ear. At the time he did not tell Mukuro that was his third kiss. The first with Kyoko during the Autumn festival, entirely chaste; she'd pecked him quickly behind the booths when he'd taken them on a wrong turn, and they'd both blushed and smiled shyly at each other. The second from a very drunk Gokudera during New Years, it had been sloppy, off-centre and Gokudera had already given Yamamoto-kun's face one long lick beforehand. Mukuro, to his grave, will assume it is Tsuna's first.
Reborn watches him as he hangs up the phone, eyes huge.
"How did you answer Gokudera's question?"
"I--well--"
"The Vendici have already been sent to intercept them, so it doesn't really matter either way." Reborn hops down from the table. Leon on his hat moving like a bobble-headed dog nodding: yesyesyesyes you did
He leans back in his chair and wishes for the last days of high school. A lazy summer, just them pushing up the top of the hill on their bikes. Gears set so low it was almost too easy. Yamamoto and Gokudera disappearing for long moments of time to look for the frisbee they kept loosing while they picnicked, and Hibari eating sandwiches absentmindedly on the grass. Of colder falls with festivals and Kyoko-chan dressed in a yukata with a sunflower pattern; their faces all pointing forward and upward, not at all like the faces that turn to him now when he enters a room, grave faces. Reborn's thinning face. Thick fogged winters wrapped in quilts, but not enough to tie his mind away. Unchecked it drifts into realms infinitely colder, a body curled inward, the shape of an animal in agony. It turns to him, mouth moving behind the mouthpiece but the words clear, "I'm surprised Vongola didn't think you had it in you."
"I didn't--" he tries to say. But the world peels back like the inflorescence of Kyoko's yukata spiraling down to the center, the black stripe on a sunflower seed. Suddenly he's sixteen again, the taste of Green tea in his mouth, the change dispenser digging into his back. Mukuro's knee so high, his thigh so hard.
Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you toward desire? Were they laid Hansel and Gretel style towards a house made of dreams?
"The Millieflore have taken the Sicilian base, Tsunayoshi-sama."
It is he who suggests the release of Mukuro a second time.
The second time he's a good little boy. He fakes injury, avoids his recapture crew and returns immediately to Venice. His first words to Tsunayoshi-sama when he climbs through his window are: "You owe me." He sucks him off with a hand pressed over Tsuna's mouth. There was no need though, he wouldn't have made sound.
The fourth time one of their contacts in a small fishing village 12 miles outside of Venice phones in talking about a man on the beach. Sitting next to the body on an old World War II cot, Tsuna can see the slight but precise scars ringing his eye.
“Don’t come in here hoping for reconciliation Vongola. It would be only too easy to trade places with you let me run the empire while I send you back to sleep.” Here he turned and blew cigarette smoke in Tsuna's upturned face. He looks tired and drawn out. Like the despairing medieval saints, their two dimensional faces with eyes staring out none of Michelangelo's robust figures. There is no room for forgiveness here.
Tsuna coughs a little at the smoke and runs a hand through his hair.
"I'm not here to see you about that."
A voice from the other side of the room, "It's been decided Rokudo Mukuro, you will be returned to prison this evening, the Vendici are already on their way to collect you. You have the thanks of the Tenth head of Vongola and your service will be noted should an opportunity for your release arise." The voice of a man floats out of Reborn's mouth. The baby was dressed all in black today, skin the color of candle wax.
"Oh hello Reborn-san, didn't see you under there. The 7^3 radiation is treating you well?"
"Almost as nicely as the Vendici will treat you when you get back."
"There was nothing I could do. I don't have the authority to release you. Here," he says pulling at Mukuro's hand, brings it to his open shirt collar, "you-you can uh do anything you want."
"You think this is what I want," He dug his fingers in, brought Tsuna's face up all the better to examine it. Every time he has been brought up out of hell this face aged. Each time he is brought before the Vongola Tenth he has seen years pass across that face. When he'd arrived he'd walked straight in and kissed him, and Tsuna had kissed back. Not like the boy under the vending machine but like someone had taught him. He wonders who it had been, looks for it, but Tsuna was right he had grown up and learned to close himself off. Mukuro pulls back with a frustrated noise.
He fucked the Tenth Vongola boss then. The one they called the First Vongola reincarnate, the Last Hope against the Milleflore, he fucked him in the second best guestroom with Tsuna's wrists tied to the bedpost with his own grey silk tie. He wants to consume Tsuna, this is a hunger beyond that of possession. Possession was a means to an end, but the body spread before him is a perfect depiction of another life one that for a split second he could climb into. Into the perfect summer after Tsuna's high school. And with his consciousness spread like a spider's web over the world could there be another Mukuro living that life, or was he only here with Tsuna in the place were he was and wasn't and was and wasn't.
You are such a child.
"If you could take it all back would you?"
"What?"
"Go back and change everything."
Mukuro looks at him curiously, "This isn't some sort of romance," he bites Tsuna's palm, "not some sort of Roman holiday. I'm not going to ride a Vespa with you on the back."
"Of course not" Tsuna says, "of course--not."
Although in some place deep down Mukuro wishes for this illusory second life, a life he knows Tsuna still dreams of; he has walked through them underwater. Though he knows illusions to be a spun sugar apparatus he still recalls his days of freedom with Ken and Chikusa doing Italy with a silver spoon, of walking into the Coliseum at night and bellowing into the empty amphitheater to the ghost of another crowd and watching the wonder that crossed Ken and Chikusa's faces if he tricked their eyes let them believe the stands were full. They would stand in contrapposto poses--relaxed. Not like the stance all the guardians have learned to adapt-- the posture of grieving. The poses of war were so different than those of peace.
He had come across Yamamoto and Gokudera fucking fast and desperate in the entry hall at 2 in the morning. Gokudera sprawled on his back on a glass table his sweat leaving a silhouette of his body condensed on the glass, and when Yamamoto pulls his fingers out of him and grasps the edge of the table the slip and regripgripgrip of his hands should have left behind something, some marker of what had crossed their faces. There was nothing when he passed the hall table the next morning; he flower vase had been changed.
He is dragged and drugged, like a witch on trial they plunge him in and out of the dark waters the way he was pulled in and out of hell. Up circles, down cycles. He drifts.
"I didn't take you for such things Vongola, Hayato-chan thought you had a thing for that short haired girl--the one who looks like your mother."
Tsuna ignores the quip about his mother.
"If we succeed with this maybe--she--I can. But this isn't a world I can bring her into."
And Mukuro sees her clearly then: in college now, going out to shop during the evenings and returning to an apartment full of carefully folded clothes in pastel colors, bento boxes full of sausages cut to resemble octupi, and rice--white and steaming from the rice cooker; it was an ideal life.
"But in this life, I'm good enough for you?" he sneers. Tsuna's hand had been reaching for his shirt buttons. It paused, then continued more clumsily. Fingers without confidence.
"This is a different life, here I'm-I'm like this."
Buried. Exhumed.
"Tsunayoshi-sama wants to keep you out for two months," Ryohei says a bit warily. He still doesn't touch Mukuro's hands if he doesn't have too. Mukuro thinks he's an idiot. "We need your intel for planning and stuff."
This time Yamamoto's father is dead, Reborn is dead, and the entry hall is quiet. He turns a corner and catches Squalo biting Yamamoto's bloody lip into his own mouth. They pull apart Squalo grinning and Yamamoto looking sheepish and scratching the back of his head.
They collect in rooms, count rings, make plans, and at night the Tenth head of Vongola will walk up to the second best guest room and enter as quietly as the dead. He posses a man beneath a ceiling full of the painted eyes of kings. Mukuro raises the familiar gun to his head and locks eyes with the Queen of Sheba, her white painted neck like phosphorus in the dark, a dense plane to be scraped over with teeth and tongue. He remembers his last time taking Tsuna on one of the low couches propped near the door, the twist of muscle in his stomach, his collarbones moving quick and light as they bore the load of his body. The great vulnerability of his open legs, and how easy it would have been for him to reach in the unbuttoned white shirt and take what he wanted. His lust for that freedom and for the body of the boy overlapping, hot, star-bursts, shooting through him like a bullet. The gun goes off; he is the old the man slumped on the desk. Tsuna's thin body heaving over his, struggling to catch his breath, his eyes like those of the dead kings' in the dark.
Sometimes Mukuro will enter a room and touch only his face, gloved and too hard, kissing him with teeth, and the contact makes Tsuna shiver. The part of him still owned by Reborn wants to pull away, but there are other currents steering him forward, deep subterranean undertows where he has walked in dreams. Tsuna finds there is no difference between violence and affection with Mukuro, that they are overlapping conjoined emotions.
Mostly he is afraid of ending up like Lancia. He dreams of standing in a room full of his dead loved ones with the memory of the crush and heave of the iron ball as it bore down on a cheek you had once bandaged, a hand you had shaken in confidence. Every time he enters the second guest bedroom he imagines waking up to this, but he goes anyway like a drug.
The morning he wakes and knows what he must ask Mukuro to do Tsuna thinks he'll be sick. He can already feel the heavy swirl of the ball overhead wishing and unwishing for the fulfillment of a target.
"So many, Yamamoto's dad, Reborn...This is how it has to be then Kyoya."
"You should...trust yourself." Hibari says.
Oh Lazarus.
"Remember when I asked you before, if you'd want to restart, everything over--"
"You forget I have done everything over. The world didn't change."
The Vendici bring him into the throne room one last time before he is to go. Tsuna is sitting in the throne, finally tall enough to fit in it comfortably. The Vendici are their only other companions, otherwise the room is dark. Outside the light is fading fast, setting on a maritime city built to keep their inhabitants safe from war by taking refuge on water. They built sinking, beautiful, ruinous houses in the mud. What wishful thinking. They should have known what would come of it. From a distance Sawada looks unfamiliar like a carved idol made of marble, something for the remaining families under Vongola protection to pray and worship to; Mukuro turns his head and spits on the red carpet.
"Rokudo Mukuro, I don't have the right to ask this of you--"
"Have you picked out a coffin yet Vongola?" he interrupts, from where he's crouched like a dog in front of the throne. "It wouldn't be very nice for your family to have to do it, and I wouldn't trust it to Gokudera."
Tsuna looks at him with those wide eyes, moves to kiss him but Mukuro makes a noise of disgust and pulls away. The Vendici haul him to the floor.
"I'm telling you this now because--well. Rokudo Mukuro I have something to ask of you as guardian of the Vongola..."
Because I could not stop for Death
They seal him back into deep water. He dreams of an empty Vongola household. Dust covers over the throne. Through Chrome he sees a funeral in Japan--a plain coffin--Gokudera sobbing. In Venice the boats jostle each other in the current. The Gondoliers push into the surface of the water, and it receding up the long black poles as they are drawn up and out; they move slowly, the boats drifting forward a little each time, and this has been his life.
"I believe he left a task for you," Hibari says talking to him behind glass.
...He kindly stopped for me.
"You don't have the Vongola ring so I'm not interested in you. It's time for you to receive a true death, Mukuro."
Byakuran's white hand came toward him. This face, too, was serene in the same guise as the Holy Mother who had been released into the ocean. That was years ago. He wonders whether she has been removed. Had it reached spring? Had she been reinterred in her alcove or was she still buried beneath the waves? But Byakuran’s is not the face he knows. The touch of that hand was not a release, and for once he prefers the smaller stockier hands of another, the bitten fingernails. There imperfection there that cannot be imitated.
Ken and Chikusa had kept his rings for him every time he is sent under. All except the Vongola ring, which like the trident was always in Chrome's care. He remembers his second time being brought up, asking for it, but even before seeing her shake her head knowing what has happened. He has always only worn it on somebody else's hand, but remembers the placement. Which finger. The weight of it years after it has been destroyed. It was a mark, a physical brand that he is collared to Sawada Tsunayoshi as tightly as any other mafia dog.
Now, its absence only magnifies another larger one. He looks down at his hands on the floor, of the fingers he nearly lost that first time, the rings on them: a gem--meaningless, a skull--because now he is only tethered to death.
He has journeyed forever. From the bottom where there was only ice, and fish that bit his ankles like regrets, to the top of Paradisio where he had seen the white face of the god on the mountain. He has been a consciousness spread above the mossed rooftops of Namimori, and he knows the heart to be a circuitous organ, winding from aorta to arteries, and possessing many rooms, each one opening valves from one to the other, each filled with its own complex purpose and punishment like the 9 circles of hell, but he had not thought that he had brought it with him through the six states; had assumed that it like the rest of him had been left in the sheaf of bodies behind him, in a pile of organs unused. It beats in him now, and he knows his name to be an untruth.
"I'm telling you this now because--well. Rokudo Mukuro I have something to ask of you as guardian of the Vongola...," The words come to him as if deep underwater. They hang for a moment in his consciousness before filtering down as if through the surf like an anchor, or a coffin weighted down with lead and stones--the weight of a task transferred.
Tsuna's mouth said, "reconnaissance in the service of Millieflore leader Byakuran," but they both knew what it meant now. Those eyes said in this life or the next, I will save you, I will not fail.
As late as the 1950s, the funeral epitaph of the legendary boss of Villalba, Calogero Vizzini, stated that "his 'mafia' was not criminal, but stood for respect of the law, defense of all rights, greatness of character. It was love."
A/n: While writing this, most of what I did consisted of looking at it and pulling out hair in frustration. It was written on trains and planes and other countries and in hotel rooms and dorms rooms and trans-pacific. Somehow it morphed into like 13 pages, I don't even write 13 pages in a year. My grammar is terrible, there are fragments, my tenses are shot (I AM AWARE). Mukuro isn't mean enough, Tsuna has Christ overtones. I know I am cheesy, cause they're gonna get reborn, see? ARG. Don't even listen to me.
Also good theme music. Ignore the first 5 seconds.
EDIT: A small scene was left out because of html. It's been fixed as of now. A little before half-way between the vending machine and Tsuna's memories of highschool. enjoy!
To: Questofdreams
From: Octavius_x (and bellicosus)
Title: Cycle
Rating: R/NC-17, for violence, adult themes, sex and vulgar language.
Pairing: 6927, Mukuro/Tsuna
Summary: Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you toward desire? Were they laid Hansel and Gretel style towards a house made of dreams? Dreamscapes of the TYL!Tsuna and TYL!Mukuro with the threat of the Millieflore.
He drags himself to shore. On the bank some local festival of the Holy Mother is taking place, her statue moves slowly down the shore draped in insectoid lights wired to a car battery at her dress train. The lights bobbling and weaving as men struggle to heft her cement platform on their shoulders as they head into the surf. Where the wires dip into the water a soft hiss and crackle. At a yell from one of the carriers they halt and the lights are extinguished; the water diffuses up their shirts turning them slick and wet like the bodies of seals. Boys following the procession move between the bearers placing candles in her clasped hands, on her shoulders, at her bent knees and light them. Her ceramic face is serene in the face of such ignition. She drifts out, a beacon, her human wake submerged up to their shoulders forming a half-circle around the area of her release, their bodies spent, the hair at the nape of their necks wet and curling black. A sexual wetness, as if her body had been that of a lover they had labored over in the dark.
Mukuro knows that the Romans too had set funeral pyres burning from the same shore. Her form out against the veiled sky with the flame at her temple is like the face of another, head tilted down against the weight of the world. As she sunk the ceramic face would hold mass for the silent lives of fish, the seaweed fluttering hymns until the men would return next year, lift her out of the water and clean her porcelain brow. That face floats above him now, her high forehead with the widow’s crook, clothed in blues and reds, the lumps of breasts beneath her dress entirely non-sexual. Her impassive expression looms over him, not like the Tsunayoshi he left in Venice, but of another--the face of the Vongola Tenth when he is younger wreathed in flame. Then Mukuro's eyes roll back into his head exposing white, his pupils expanding in an effort to examine his dark insides. His hands grasping at nothing, floundering in the coarse sand of the beach.
There is a shout from one of the villagers. The hymns of the women on the shore stop abruptly and break into Italian. The men in the ocean slog over to the shore, the grandeur that had inhabited their movements previously, gone. Their shoulders are numb, feet going cold. It’s the boys who’d lit the candles that discover the body. In packs they whoop back across the shallows, collecting in twos and threes to flick lighters hurriedly behind palms and bum cigarettes from fathers and uncles. Lorenzo who's mind is still spiraling up with his cigarette smoke trips over a leg and lets out a yell. The villagers are not sure what to make of the man on the shore, while examining him they each remember different tales told by grandparents and great grandparents. All dim children's stories passed over the cradle, but for a moment the figure might have been a construct of those myths...mermaids, selkies, things that came in unexplained from the sea. The younger generations remembered their parents stories from the war: how whole regiments of bloated blue-black corpses had washed up on the bank along with cases of ammunition, canned rations, pieces of left-over tanks, tennis shoes, and in the case of Adaline's father an entire case of Pinot Noir with the mark of the Nazi's on it. It is the priest who moves forward first, leaning down with his handkerchief over his mouth he felt and for and found a pulse. He flips the body over exposing the bullet holes on the other side, the rings on its right hand.
"Tch," said the father, "Mafioso."
I rise like a bubble to the surface.
The Vendici winch up the body on a heavy mooring chain and dump it on the floor. Hibari leaves it where it falls. Out of the water it resembles something pulled too early from the womb, something formless and primordial the way it is curled. Clothed all in rags, pale grey shapes like birds shuttered around the body. It makes Hibari wonder for a split second if it isn't dead and if this isn’t all a monumental waste of time.
It coughed once then convulsed and gagged up the oxygen tube. The skin beneath the apparatus is corpse white, the look of fish deep beneath the ocean starved for sun. It rolls over to look at him. The implant had left a concentric ring of bruising over the eye socket, a target painted on the face, but at the center the bull’s eye is flickering and steadies like a light bulb filament brought slowly to life.
The thing on the floor sighs then Mukuro smiles and says, "Nice to see you again, Kyoya-kun."
He has been held for years in coffin-like blackness. Entombed and eye enclosed. Rendered tender. Dull sparks now. Devils don't sleep, they lie in wait. He breathes--
Mukuro has found there is little known about the Vendici. Records show that they existed as far back as the 1800's and have never borne allegiance to any family, or chosen sides in any war. They keep to their own affairs and are generally concerned only with the capture, and for the first time, in his case, recapture of their charges. The wrapped faces of his jailors are a mystery but the chains in their hands are not; although Cesarino in 1857 observed they had an affinity for cruelty, he does not need to be told. They are beyond possession, brutes driven by their single-minded purpose, inert dull meat, and they do not take kindly to what Tsuna has done.
They bring him forward in chains wrench his head back and force him to his knees. Only one pupil dilates (the other is taped shut) and takes in the room: the high grooved ceiling of oak, the old world maps that paper the walls where the coastlines of China and the Antarctic are still indefinite blurs. Blue blown Venetian glass in all the round window panes. Outside he sees the sinking city, the water a shifting plane plucking and shuffling the colors of sunset, the shining top of the Duomo.
And other less interesting room adornments--families and associates of the Vongola smoking, shuffling, shaking hands. Making deals in the same room that their ancestors beforehand had used, marking the maps around them as the most profitable places monopolize routes, spices, human lives, perfect algorithms for triangular trade. Geography had changed become more accurate, coastlines and trade winds quantified by electric and digital instruments--the trappings had changed but what was exchanged was still the same. Here they are still gathered around a figure in chains, lives still in the balance. Their presence is part of a formality that had gone on for years, since the invention of cloak and dagger, and before that the traitor’s discovery of the knife in the sleeve or poison in his glass, and the disbelief in his eyes when he bled out. A million stab wounds in the name of Vongola, a million glasses and bodies drained.
Sawada Tsunayoshi enters the room and these people around him suited in Armani, Gucci, Salvatore Ferragamo, the entire accumulated wealth of Milanese runways crease their tailored waistlines to bow in his honor. Hayato Gokudera and Takeshi Yamamoto strong at his back like the guard dogs they are, ramrods in the well oiled gun barrel of the mafia. The face of Sawada up on the throne is still a child's, older perhaps, the suit is fitted to him, the throne as if he's sat in it before, the skittishness is gone, but the baby at Sawada's elbow is still not quite as good an illusionist as himself. He smiles.
"Guardian of Mist, Rokudo Mukuro" Reborn says, "by the order of the Tenth head of Vongola you have been released temporarily from the Vendici Prison to fulfill your duty as a Vongola Guardian. You were chosen specifically for your particular skills, if someone else could have done this, believe me, we would have no need of you. Do you accept?"
Oh, had the world gotten darker while he'd been away? The Vendici pull impatiently at him, metal collar cutting into his neck. All eyes in the room go to him, except Tsunayoshi who is not looking at anything at all. He had been expecting a death sentence, but supposes this is about the same thing. The covered eye throbs in its socket.
"Time for one last screw by the Vongola huh? Not even going to tell me what it is?"
"All we want to know is if you'll do it."
"Don't be angry with me Hayato-chan. If they wanted you they would have asked."
He pauses feels his next sentence out in his mouth, "Let me talk to the Tenth alone, then I'll consider it."
"Like Hell he will--"
"Tsunayoshi-sama," says Mukuro's white face.
Tsuna understands then, while looking at the figure on the floor, why the Varia refused to accept him. He is newly 19 and is hit with the realization that the Varia had recognized Xanxus' scars as not only the mark of a traitor, but accepted them as testament to his ability for leadership, the fortitude to betray and a disposition to take lives.
The suit scratches his wrists. The armrests are just tall enough to make him uncomfortable. He opens his mouth, "If you succeeded Rokudo Mukuro I will grant you that wish."
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway.
London is a city of small revelations. Where the vicar slumped in his seat over his sermon and fell asleep, where a kid peeled the magnetic labels off a DVD and walked out of HMV, where students miles away in Cambridge jumped the space between the Bank Building and Keys college, or whether in the backroom of a pub in the East End two shot guns, an air rifle, and an assault weapon were pulled from the chest in the backroom. There is always the sense that a similar event somewhere in some different circumstance has happened before.
“What the hell do you want?” They say and he idles in the doorway picks up a glass of Contreau and takes a sip. The men to his right get up and file into the back room.
"If I were you," says the man left at the bar, "I would turn m'self around and stroll back out the door."
Mukuro takes another sip and out of the corner of his eye he sees someone take an ornamental machete off the wall. He puts the glass down. The bartender bends to retrieve something on the floor, and above him martini and lager glasses chime delicately as they shift in their racks. The TV blares the football announcers voice, rough with excitement, "Liverpool F.C. or Liverpool Football Club are a professional football club based in Liverpool, in the north west of England with 18 titles, have been crowned champions more times than any other club having dominated during the 1970s and 1980s. They are followed by Manchester United..." Someone behind him opens fire. The heavy Kachunk Kachunk of the assault weapon loading copper cartridges, and spitting out shells. The sexual thrust of it whipping into the tight crook of the man's shoulder in the kickback. Bullets bite into the wood of the bar. Mukuro turns and is welcomed back to the world in a flurry of violence. He licks his teeth and heads grinning into the fray.
Couches erupt stuffing that has not seen the light of day in years, grey and packed down under a multitude of asses and trysts. Glasses shattering, the fire extinguisher erupting white and frothy like a child's ice cream float, a fine layer of powder over the bodies on the floor. The Elk's head mounted on the opposite wall is missing and ear, and now peppered with a shot gun blast looks deranged, mental, but it is nothing compared to the man in the center of the room breathing lightly. The trident leaves huge triangular shaped gouge marks in the floor, piercing the cheap linoleum down to the wood beneath. At the end of it he returns to the bar and wipes the blood from around his eye with a napkin.
"I was looking forward to watchin' the game," says the single man still undisturbed at the bar. He shifts off the stool, moves his folded coat from where it had been sitting over his right hand. "Fucking cunt, you are." On his uncovered hand is a ring in the shape of a skull with a snake for a tongue. The man takes a drink with one hand, eyes still on the TV and brings up the wood stool with the other.
It has been too long, he thinks for a split second before the trident cracks into the stool. It slides forward, missing and cutting into the man's neck. The man's surprised eyes bulge out huge, bulldog-like. He wipes at his neck with one hand, and then turning smashes Mukuro across the face with his other fist.
It hits him hard. Like taking the keel of a ship to the chest (or waking up underwater for the first time, the wheeze of the oxygen tubes in his lungs--the blackness after).
"Tell that fucking Vongola brat to mind his own fuckin' business," Bulldog forces out between his grinning teeth.
Mukuro's eyes seem intent on focusing on the wrong things. For instance, the two tracks left by his legs in the white powder from the fire extinguisher. All 69 kilos of him snake easily around the carnage in the capable hands of the Bulldog. Bulldog bends and retrieves the machete off the floor dragging Mukuro by his hair to the far side of the bar away from the door.
"You know, I heard about you, bein' in prison and all that. I'm surprised and rather flatter'd you came all this way yerself just for the likes of me. Feel like I should give you a litt'l reward, I've had this little theory for a while so I'm going to tell it t'you. There are two kind of people in this mafia business, the doers," Bulldog wipes blood off the blade with the heel of his shoe, and in the same motion uses the hilt to smash Mukuro's head into the bar wood. His mind floats up, unmoored by Bulldog's fist into a casket darkness like the city before an air raid, and then into old London, soft enveloping gas lamp glows, starch in the cravat at his throat, the Thames bloated like a living rat, grey scuttling slowly within its banks, and before in the ruin of the Romans pale ships moving with their sails cut the old fashioned way, the river called something else then, but everywhere as vicious as the voice in his ear, "--and those that get done. Now I figure you're more of a doer what wit' all those people that yer out possessing, and them, they're the ones that get done. But sometimes you just meet someone wit' a bigger cock than yer own and you get down on your knees and bend over. Issn't that right Rokudo?"
He pulls Mukuro's hand across the bar; it has the consistency of a corpse. His head on the bar is level with scattered bar peanuts, and bears the same glassed look as the taxidermied Elk on the wall. Bulldog's shirt front is stained with blood from where he's been wiping his wet knuckles, and deep black singe marks on the cotton from the Hell ring fire.
"Now Roku-is it alright if I call you Roku m'boy? Well whatever I don't give a fuck," he laughs, rolls up his sleeves and pins Mukuro's arm between his elbow and the thick sweaty weight of his body, "Now, Roku--dun't fall asleep on me now."
He slaps him. Mukuro's eye twitches.
"I need you to tell me exactly how many of your fingers I'll need t'send to the Vongola brat before he'll get the message to 'Fuck off'".
The machete carves the air above his arm.
"One, two, maybe six? How about a compromise, an arm then? You can still embrace your boss one-handed? Can still finger his ass up good one-handed, right?" Bulldog slaps him again, and now he can feel his fingers.
"Yer not being very talkative now Roku. Who'm I supposed to ask now that you've gone and killed everyone? Lookit' poor Larry there." He grabs Mukuro's face in the vice of his hands, turns it to look at the corpse, the ring sears the side of his mouth. Tastes like sulfur. Bulldog laughs, face glistening, red and wet like something boiled, "Jus' don't know when t'stop d'you. But oh, you've met the devil now."
The words hit him. "No one's made me bleed for a long long time," says his tongue, a white dead thing.
"Oh, I'm gonna have some goddamn fun wit' you," Bulldog says, shakes his head and draws his fist back. Mukuro knows their weight now, heavy, like a hammer to the head. Like the cloaks of the eighth circle dressed in lead to crumple ribs like accordions. Like the chains of the Vendici as they dragged him back the second time, the new dew of the morning had already been laid on the grass, wetting his open hands. His other arm still works sluggishly. Two fingers are broken. They touch his face (he always expects bone but gets something softer instead). He feels the pulp and squish of his eye only on the edge of his senses, the 5th state had always made that easy. Among other things. His hearing comes back last, but by then Bulldog has already stopped screaming. A pity, really.
I have been to the bottom of the ocean. Time there is relative.
Their cheeks brushed in the dark. Tsuna leaning over to look at the bus schedule and grimacing at the green tea drink Reborn always makes him buy. Even when its 9 at night at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere. The Arcobaleno is no where to be found, and Mukuro is crowding Tsuna's space because he can.
Their cheeks brush in the dark. Mukuro's head snapping to the side like the flick of a match striking a booklet. Sparks should have flared up in that small movement, but the real world was sometimes less interesting. If a match had been struck, it should have been one that wavered and was snuffed out immediately between thumb and forefinger. Instead he reached out and took it: lifting Tsuna by his uniform shirt and pushing him up against the juice machine so hard the change dispenser dug into his back.
A muffled "Ow".
He just says "Open your mouth" and kisses him. Tsuna's blood pounding in his ears even though the neighborhood is quiet, crickets moving through the brush playing their legs, and Mukuro's tongue is in his mouth wet and moving, his hand turning your head a little so he can push in deeper. A hot thing. The flat blandness of the green tea drink entirely gone now. The soft glow of the display--the CC Lemon Soda, the Kirin Brand Milk tea--illuminating Mukuro's features in the same way that years later the lights in the Vendici prison define will them. Tsuna is 16 and remembers being completely terrified and how the back of his neck goes hot and soft.
If they had known then--that it would end up like this--Tsuna wonders if he would have leaned over and snuffed it out himself. They end up having to send Gokudera and Yamamoto to drag Mukuro back to Venice. Gokudera calls to make sure Tsuna had said, 'Not in a casket'.
"I could have sworn it was the opposite boss," he says and Tsuna can hear him chewing the cigarette filter like he does when he's annoyed.
"How did it go, you guys are okay?"
"Yeah don't worry, it was easy, a push-over. If you ask me that prison time just made him a softie, no need to get him out again. I'll handle it next time."
"Also," drifts in Yamamoto, "he was already pretty beat up when we got here. So we mostly sort of picked him up." There are muffled sounds of a scuffle in the background.
Gokudera returns breathless, "You want us to bring him back to Venice, Juudaime? Or just back to the Vendici. You didn't actually mean all that stuff about talking to him in private did you? As you advisor I advise against it."
Tsuna sits back in his chair with the receiver in his ear. At the time he did not tell Mukuro that was his third kiss. The first with Kyoko during the Autumn festival, entirely chaste; she'd pecked him quickly behind the booths when he'd taken them on a wrong turn, and they'd both blushed and smiled shyly at each other. The second from a very drunk Gokudera during New Years, it had been sloppy, off-centre and Gokudera had already given Yamamoto-kun's face one long lick beforehand. Mukuro, to his grave, will assume it is Tsuna's first.
Reborn watches him as he hangs up the phone, eyes huge.
"How did you answer Gokudera's question?"
"I--well--"
"The Vendici have already been sent to intercept them, so it doesn't really matter either way." Reborn hops down from the table. Leon on his hat moving like a bobble-headed dog nodding: yesyesyesyes you did
He leans back in his chair and wishes for the last days of high school. A lazy summer, just them pushing up the top of the hill on their bikes. Gears set so low it was almost too easy. Yamamoto and Gokudera disappearing for long moments of time to look for the frisbee they kept loosing while they picnicked, and Hibari eating sandwiches absentmindedly on the grass. Of colder falls with festivals and Kyoko-chan dressed in a yukata with a sunflower pattern; their faces all pointing forward and upward, not at all like the faces that turn to him now when he enters a room, grave faces. Reborn's thinning face. Thick fogged winters wrapped in quilts, but not enough to tie his mind away. Unchecked it drifts into realms infinitely colder, a body curled inward, the shape of an animal in agony. It turns to him, mouth moving behind the mouthpiece but the words clear, "I'm surprised Vongola didn't think you had it in you."
"I didn't--" he tries to say. But the world peels back like the inflorescence of Kyoko's yukata spiraling down to the center, the black stripe on a sunflower seed. Suddenly he's sixteen again, the taste of Green tea in his mouth, the change dispenser digging into his back. Mukuro's knee so high, his thigh so hard.
Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you toward desire? Were they laid Hansel and Gretel style towards a house made of dreams?
"The Millieflore have taken the Sicilian base, Tsunayoshi-sama."
It is he who suggests the release of Mukuro a second time.
The second time he's a good little boy. He fakes injury, avoids his recapture crew and returns immediately to Venice. His first words to Tsunayoshi-sama when he climbs through his window are: "You owe me." He sucks him off with a hand pressed over Tsuna's mouth. There was no need though, he wouldn't have made sound.
The fourth time one of their contacts in a small fishing village 12 miles outside of Venice phones in talking about a man on the beach. Sitting next to the body on an old World War II cot, Tsuna can see the slight but precise scars ringing his eye.
“Don’t come in here hoping for reconciliation Vongola. It would be only too easy to trade places with you let me run the empire while I send you back to sleep.” Here he turned and blew cigarette smoke in Tsuna's upturned face. He looks tired and drawn out. Like the despairing medieval saints, their two dimensional faces with eyes staring out none of Michelangelo's robust figures. There is no room for forgiveness here.
Tsuna coughs a little at the smoke and runs a hand through his hair.
"I'm not here to see you about that."
A voice from the other side of the room, "It's been decided Rokudo Mukuro, you will be returned to prison this evening, the Vendici are already on their way to collect you. You have the thanks of the Tenth head of Vongola and your service will be noted should an opportunity for your release arise." The voice of a man floats out of Reborn's mouth. The baby was dressed all in black today, skin the color of candle wax.
"Oh hello Reborn-san, didn't see you under there. The 7^3 radiation is treating you well?"
"Almost as nicely as the Vendici will treat you when you get back."
"There was nothing I could do. I don't have the authority to release you. Here," he says pulling at Mukuro's hand, brings it to his open shirt collar, "you-you can uh do anything you want."
"You think this is what I want," He dug his fingers in, brought Tsuna's face up all the better to examine it. Every time he has been brought up out of hell this face aged. Each time he is brought before the Vongola Tenth he has seen years pass across that face. When he'd arrived he'd walked straight in and kissed him, and Tsuna had kissed back. Not like the boy under the vending machine but like someone had taught him. He wonders who it had been, looks for it, but Tsuna was right he had grown up and learned to close himself off. Mukuro pulls back with a frustrated noise.
He fucked the Tenth Vongola boss then. The one they called the First Vongola reincarnate, the Last Hope against the Milleflore, he fucked him in the second best guestroom with Tsuna's wrists tied to the bedpost with his own grey silk tie. He wants to consume Tsuna, this is a hunger beyond that of possession. Possession was a means to an end, but the body spread before him is a perfect depiction of another life one that for a split second he could climb into. Into the perfect summer after Tsuna's high school. And with his consciousness spread like a spider's web over the world could there be another Mukuro living that life, or was he only here with Tsuna in the place were he was and wasn't and was and wasn't.
You are such a child.
"If you could take it all back would you?"
"What?"
"Go back and change everything."
Mukuro looks at him curiously, "This isn't some sort of romance," he bites Tsuna's palm, "not some sort of Roman holiday. I'm not going to ride a Vespa with you on the back."
"Of course not" Tsuna says, "of course--not."
Although in some place deep down Mukuro wishes for this illusory second life, a life he knows Tsuna still dreams of; he has walked through them underwater. Though he knows illusions to be a spun sugar apparatus he still recalls his days of freedom with Ken and Chikusa doing Italy with a silver spoon, of walking into the Coliseum at night and bellowing into the empty amphitheater to the ghost of another crowd and watching the wonder that crossed Ken and Chikusa's faces if he tricked their eyes let them believe the stands were full. They would stand in contrapposto poses--relaxed. Not like the stance all the guardians have learned to adapt-- the posture of grieving. The poses of war were so different than those of peace.
He had come across Yamamoto and Gokudera fucking fast and desperate in the entry hall at 2 in the morning. Gokudera sprawled on his back on a glass table his sweat leaving a silhouette of his body condensed on the glass, and when Yamamoto pulls his fingers out of him and grasps the edge of the table the slip and regripgripgrip of his hands should have left behind something, some marker of what had crossed their faces. There was nothing when he passed the hall table the next morning; he flower vase had been changed.
He is dragged and drugged, like a witch on trial they plunge him in and out of the dark waters the way he was pulled in and out of hell. Up circles, down cycles. He drifts.
"I didn't take you for such things Vongola, Hayato-chan thought you had a thing for that short haired girl--the one who looks like your mother."
Tsuna ignores the quip about his mother.
"If we succeed with this maybe--she--I can. But this isn't a world I can bring her into."
And Mukuro sees her clearly then: in college now, going out to shop during the evenings and returning to an apartment full of carefully folded clothes in pastel colors, bento boxes full of sausages cut to resemble octupi, and rice--white and steaming from the rice cooker; it was an ideal life.
"But in this life, I'm good enough for you?" he sneers. Tsuna's hand had been reaching for his shirt buttons. It paused, then continued more clumsily. Fingers without confidence.
"This is a different life, here I'm-I'm like this."
Buried. Exhumed.
"Tsunayoshi-sama wants to keep you out for two months," Ryohei says a bit warily. He still doesn't touch Mukuro's hands if he doesn't have too. Mukuro thinks he's an idiot. "We need your intel for planning and stuff."
This time Yamamoto's father is dead, Reborn is dead, and the entry hall is quiet. He turns a corner and catches Squalo biting Yamamoto's bloody lip into his own mouth. They pull apart Squalo grinning and Yamamoto looking sheepish and scratching the back of his head.
They collect in rooms, count rings, make plans, and at night the Tenth head of Vongola will walk up to the second best guest room and enter as quietly as the dead. He posses a man beneath a ceiling full of the painted eyes of kings. Mukuro raises the familiar gun to his head and locks eyes with the Queen of Sheba, her white painted neck like phosphorus in the dark, a dense plane to be scraped over with teeth and tongue. He remembers his last time taking Tsuna on one of the low couches propped near the door, the twist of muscle in his stomach, his collarbones moving quick and light as they bore the load of his body. The great vulnerability of his open legs, and how easy it would have been for him to reach in the unbuttoned white shirt and take what he wanted. His lust for that freedom and for the body of the boy overlapping, hot, star-bursts, shooting through him like a bullet. The gun goes off; he is the old the man slumped on the desk. Tsuna's thin body heaving over his, struggling to catch his breath, his eyes like those of the dead kings' in the dark.
Sometimes Mukuro will enter a room and touch only his face, gloved and too hard, kissing him with teeth, and the contact makes Tsuna shiver. The part of him still owned by Reborn wants to pull away, but there are other currents steering him forward, deep subterranean undertows where he has walked in dreams. Tsuna finds there is no difference between violence and affection with Mukuro, that they are overlapping conjoined emotions.
Mostly he is afraid of ending up like Lancia. He dreams of standing in a room full of his dead loved ones with the memory of the crush and heave of the iron ball as it bore down on a cheek you had once bandaged, a hand you had shaken in confidence. Every time he enters the second guest bedroom he imagines waking up to this, but he goes anyway like a drug.
The morning he wakes and knows what he must ask Mukuro to do Tsuna thinks he'll be sick. He can already feel the heavy swirl of the ball overhead wishing and unwishing for the fulfillment of a target.
"So many, Yamamoto's dad, Reborn...This is how it has to be then Kyoya."
"You should...trust yourself." Hibari says.
Oh Lazarus.
"Remember when I asked you before, if you'd want to restart, everything over--"
"You forget I have done everything over. The world didn't change."
The Vendici bring him into the throne room one last time before he is to go. Tsuna is sitting in the throne, finally tall enough to fit in it comfortably. The Vendici are their only other companions, otherwise the room is dark. Outside the light is fading fast, setting on a maritime city built to keep their inhabitants safe from war by taking refuge on water. They built sinking, beautiful, ruinous houses in the mud. What wishful thinking. They should have known what would come of it. From a distance Sawada looks unfamiliar like a carved idol made of marble, something for the remaining families under Vongola protection to pray and worship to; Mukuro turns his head and spits on the red carpet.
"Rokudo Mukuro, I don't have the right to ask this of you--"
"Have you picked out a coffin yet Vongola?" he interrupts, from where he's crouched like a dog in front of the throne. "It wouldn't be very nice for your family to have to do it, and I wouldn't trust it to Gokudera."
Tsuna looks at him with those wide eyes, moves to kiss him but Mukuro makes a noise of disgust and pulls away. The Vendici haul him to the floor.
"I'm telling you this now because--well. Rokudo Mukuro I have something to ask of you as guardian of the Vongola..."
Because I could not stop for Death
They seal him back into deep water. He dreams of an empty Vongola household. Dust covers over the throne. Through Chrome he sees a funeral in Japan--a plain coffin--Gokudera sobbing. In Venice the boats jostle each other in the current. The Gondoliers push into the surface of the water, and it receding up the long black poles as they are drawn up and out; they move slowly, the boats drifting forward a little each time, and this has been his life.
"I believe he left a task for you," Hibari says talking to him behind glass.
...He kindly stopped for me.
"You don't have the Vongola ring so I'm not interested in you. It's time for you to receive a true death, Mukuro."
Byakuran's white hand came toward him. This face, too, was serene in the same guise as the Holy Mother who had been released into the ocean. That was years ago. He wonders whether she has been removed. Had it reached spring? Had she been reinterred in her alcove or was she still buried beneath the waves? But Byakuran’s is not the face he knows. The touch of that hand was not a release, and for once he prefers the smaller stockier hands of another, the bitten fingernails. There imperfection there that cannot be imitated.
Ken and Chikusa had kept his rings for him every time he is sent under. All except the Vongola ring, which like the trident was always in Chrome's care. He remembers his second time being brought up, asking for it, but even before seeing her shake her head knowing what has happened. He has always only worn it on somebody else's hand, but remembers the placement. Which finger. The weight of it years after it has been destroyed. It was a mark, a physical brand that he is collared to Sawada Tsunayoshi as tightly as any other mafia dog.
Now, its absence only magnifies another larger one. He looks down at his hands on the floor, of the fingers he nearly lost that first time, the rings on them: a gem--meaningless, a skull--because now he is only tethered to death.
He has journeyed forever. From the bottom where there was only ice, and fish that bit his ankles like regrets, to the top of Paradisio where he had seen the white face of the god on the mountain. He has been a consciousness spread above the mossed rooftops of Namimori, and he knows the heart to be a circuitous organ, winding from aorta to arteries, and possessing many rooms, each one opening valves from one to the other, each filled with its own complex purpose and punishment like the 9 circles of hell, but he had not thought that he had brought it with him through the six states; had assumed that it like the rest of him had been left in the sheaf of bodies behind him, in a pile of organs unused. It beats in him now, and he knows his name to be an untruth.
"I'm telling you this now because--well. Rokudo Mukuro I have something to ask of you as guardian of the Vongola...," The words come to him as if deep underwater. They hang for a moment in his consciousness before filtering down as if through the surf like an anchor, or a coffin weighted down with lead and stones--the weight of a task transferred.
Tsuna's mouth said, "reconnaissance in the service of Millieflore leader Byakuran," but they both knew what it meant now. Those eyes said in this life or the next, I will save you, I will not fail.
As late as the 1950s, the funeral epitaph of the legendary boss of Villalba, Calogero Vizzini, stated that "his 'mafia' was not criminal, but stood for respect of the law, defense of all rights, greatness of character. It was love."
A/n: While writing this, most of what I did consisted of looking at it and pulling out hair in frustration. It was written on trains and planes and other countries and in hotel rooms and dorms rooms and trans-pacific. Somehow it morphed into like 13 pages, I don't even write 13 pages in a year. My grammar is terrible, there are fragments, my tenses are shot (I AM AWARE). Mukuro isn't mean enough, Tsuna has Christ overtones. I know I am cheesy, cause they're gonna get reborn, see? ARG. Don't even listen to me.
Also good theme music. Ignore the first 5 seconds.
EDIT: A small scene was left out because of html. It's been fixed as of now. A little before half-way between the vending machine and Tsuna's memories of highschool. enjoy!