(no subject)
Title: Building Familiar Houses
Fandom: Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
Character/Pairing: Tsuna-centric, Tsuna/Hibari
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3600
Warnings: Spoilers through the end of the Future Arc
Notes: This is a much, much overdue fic for questofdreams. She gave such a lovely prompt, but I kept turning out the most predictable possible stories, and I didn't want to do that. Still, it was a lot of fun once I really got going! I hope she likes it, and I hope you enjoy reading this one too. :)
Shibuya Prefecture, Seven Years Later
(This is so cinematic, Tsuna thinks to the empty audience of himself, the light, her angles.
It's a word he just learned in university, and it's true. The camera lens of the world has condensed down to his tiny untidy apartment, the yellow light of early morning, the white, white tangled sheets of his worn-out mattress on the wooden floor. Kyoko is naked in the chaos; his head is pillowed on the dip of her belly. She pulls her fingers over his hair and the touch makes him feel so much like an infant that he could curl up inside this womb with her and live there forever.
"But what do you love," she asks him, her voice the bell to signal awakening, the dissipation of a dream, "what is it that you love?"
His breath is a soft cloud of laughter. He kisses her navel. "Mmm," he says in mock deliberation, presses lips to the warm curve of her hip, "you?"
"Silly Tsuna," she says with a voice like his mother might have had back when she was young and blossoming. She rests her palm over the back of his neck. "I mean love-love. What do you love?"
Somewhere, their cat is curled up in a warm nest of sleep. Outside, a car splashes through a puddle. A flock of birds lifts in fluttering unison.)
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
The Vongola compound is so quiet at night, even this night, the last night, nestled in the secrecy of ground, a multi-story coffin sunken away. Tsuna can hear the others, but nothing is as loud as the noise of his own body. Each soft scuff of his feet against the tile of the hallway, a quiet apology.
In the kitchen, he can hear the girls laugh with this older Bianchi for the last time. They spill secrets of love, of boys, of how grown up they all feel, how grown up.
He can't, in the ugly scheme of it all, help but to reciprocate. They've all seen so much, they've all done so much, and none of their hands are clean. If he were the thinking sort, he would wonder about the outcomes of war, the meaning of it all, the exact shape of his soul, his sin, now that he'd put on the cloak of a warrior. But he's not that sort, not really, not more than enough to stir up some guilt. It petrifies him sometimes. Sometimes, it guts him.
If this were another life, he feels like it would have been appropriate for him to step into the kitchen--into the laughter--and pull Kyoko to him. To kiss her. To say, I've loved you for years and look what I've done, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. He listens to more laughter, to just one more exchange, and then he moves on.
It's like the multi-verse had branched off, somewhere in the middle of this last fight with Byakuran. Somewhere, his body in the grass, bleeding, listening to Reborn trying to encourage him up to his feet. Somewhere, and his fingers clutched at the edge of a cliff--another path, a different destiny. In that moment, choking on his own blood, feeling his strength waning out of him, he was a different person. As Kyoko watched on, he became a different man. He became a different man and robbed another of his breath.
Kyoko's voice fades as he walks down the hall, Bianchi's voice, Haru's.
***
Turin, Italy, Four Years Later
(Haru laughs breathily against his neck. The black dress plunges down the pale line of her back, gathering in a light, sweeping pool just above her hips. She holds a wine glass in her right hand. The left is on Tsuna's shoulder as he maneuvers her around the empty balcony in an approximation of skillful dance.
Tsuna has lost track of how many times he's danced with her like this. She is graceful on the balls of her feet, the hem of her dress brushing over the tops of his shoes.
She's too beautiful, he thinks, too beautiful to be such a good friend. He swears someday he will pay her back with more than awkward preemptive flowers for all of these parties for which she poses as his date. Haru never complains. She waves off each apology, a roll of her eyes, asks that he help to select a dress for the occasion. He never knows what to pick. She always looks so lovely.
But now she's laughing at something he doesn't remember saying. The wine makes him feel heady. It adds volume to the music of her voice. Too much fine wine, too many fine men in fine suits lavishing her with delicately worded compliments to her beauty, to her grace. Haru loves it.
Her cheeks are pink. She catches Tsuna's eyes, whispers his name like a thin, silver prayer. And on the balcony, in the night air, everything shifts. Everything shifts around them--the earth tumbling down into the hole of time and paths charted out since the first collision of atoms, and Haru leans forward. He knows she wants to kiss him.
Tsuna feels like a caricature, like a fool, when he turns away. He rests his fingers on the small, bird-like bones of her wrist. "I can't," he says, "I wish..."
But Haru is lovely even when her heart is breaking, graceful. "It's okay," she says--and isn't it always?--"It's okay. You love her. I know. But you should tell her, right? Your secret. Let her forgive you too."
When the music ends, when the wine glasses are cleared, violins and wind instruments swaddled away in their velvet cases, Tsuna still stands alone on the balcony, nursing a glass long empty.)
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
Further down the hall, in another room, and he catches a glimpse of Gokudera stretched out on his belly, pouring over love letters, faded photographs, a life that was never his, and yet was his, all at the same time, another corner of his life carrying on, hidden behind some curtain, and Gokudera convinced that he was only imagining the laughter he heard but couldn't see.
"He's finally reading them," Bianchi says from behind him and Tsuna jumps. When he turns, he sees her take a long, languid drag on her cigarette. "Maybe he will understand now."
And normally he wouldn't say anything at all to her because she terrifies him, but the tight, closed features of her face are like the darkness of a confessional, so he says it. "I wish I could take it back, Bianchi. I wish no one had to suffer because of me."
Bianchi frowns at him. (She always frowns at him; it's the same look her brother levels at Yamamoto and Sasagawa every day. So precise and practiced.) She blows a mouthful of white smoke at him. It bobs and weaves between them like a fighter.
"Your friends are too permissive of you," she says.
Somehow, this punches Tsuna in the gut. "What? They don't--"
"And that would be fine," she continues, her voice firm, "if you were going to be a software salesman. But you're not. You're going to become the leader of an empire, Sawada. It can't stay this way."
Bianchi, with her curves and her sharp, smart eyes like her brother has, the competent way she rests a hand on her hip, is the kind of person that swallows the words right out of Tsuna's mouth. He never knows what to say around her, finds himself incapable of reason. He sinks down the wall and sits on the ground. His hands hang between his knees. "Why," he asks, "why would anything have to change?"
Bianchi takes a step forward until she is standing just in front of him, frowning down at the pathetic heap at her feet. "Because," she says, "you need to be able to rely on them and they need to be able to rely on you. You need to be stronger than they are going to force you to become. They are your friends, Sawada. They love you. But don't mistake love for duty."
As she walks away, Tsuna hears the hiss of struck flint in Gokudera's room as flame tickles the end of another cigarette, an empty pack on the bed.
***
Lombardi Provence, Three Years Later
(Tsuna takes his first and last drag on a cigarette when he is eighteen years old and trying to impress the beautiful daughter of the Salametti Family. Gokudera looks equally torn between his constant giddy desire to please the Tenth, and mortification that he may be giving his boss cancer.
But he lights it anyway, and he watches Tsuna breathe in, cough in violent shuddering spasms, and he rubs his hand in soothing circles on his back. "It's all right, Tenth! I do it all the time too!" Gokudera feigns a cough; Tsuna does his best not to look miserable.
Eva Salametti will slip into the arms of another man for a dance, her long hair swaying back and forth over her spine, the pendulum powering a clock.)
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
In another room, Yamamoto and Squalo. Advice, and a staggering, jelly-legged friendship. Young, clear laughter slamming full-force into that gruff voice like a warm front. Tsuna doesn't know how this thing works, how two men so armed and dangerous can come together, even now, in something so hazy like comfort and calm.
He'd always known it would come to this. Yamamoto makes friends as easily as Tsuna makes enemies, it seems, so why should he be surprised? Of course Yamamoto would earn Squalo's respect. He could earn anyone's respect.
Tsuna wonders if Yamamoto reaches out a hand to touch gently at the place where Squalo used to have an arm. Tsuna wonders if he doesn't.
***
Namimori Middle School, Ten Days Later
(The locker room and Yamamoto on the ground, a miracle that breath still inflates his lungs, and blood and bone, and trust and trust.)
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
The cool night air outside the compound steals away into Tsuna's lungs. He breathes it in, one of his last chances to take in this air, this air of the future which fueled everything, all of it, just a cloud of gasoline passing from one mouth to the other, waiting for someone to swallow a match. The air of the Namimori that he knows is not like this. That air is cool like water.
He wanders through the dark, a terrifying entity made suddenly safe by the messy disposal of the biggest boogeyman Tsuna has ever known. The path winding up from the compound cuts through trees and the dense moisture of forest air. He breathes in the thickness of cedar, somehow infinitely more innocent that the air around the compound. He breathes it in, breathes it deep, and barely without noticing, he finds himself at Namimori shrine.
Maybe the sense of safety is an illusory one, maybe it's all a lie, but there's nothing like almost dying to fortify a man's bones with courage he didn't know before.
When Tsuna pounds on the door, he expects venom, expects to be told to go away. Expects, really, a sudden attack and then the slow flow of blood from a major head wound until everything goes dark and cold.
Instead, what he gets is a voice like fog muffled by the closed door.
"What do you want," Hibari asks.
***
Namimori Middle School, Two Years Earlier
("I want to...to come in," Tsuna had stuttered once, thirteen, smaller, more afraid, back before Reborn and rings and the hot electric blood of heritage. "My...my library book is late and--"
"Late? I will bite you to death for your tardiness."
When he got home, he undressed before the tall mirror in the bathroom, staring wide-eyed and panic-breathed at the ring of teeth marks pressed into the soft round of his shoulder.)
***
Namimori Shrine, Ten Years Later
Hibari answers the door, his body draped in a delicate kimono, a small, bone-white cup of tea in his hand.
And, God, that's it; that's when Tsuna knows he's gone crazy. In the tight throat of such danger, he laughs.
"You are an herbivore to your bones, Sawada Tsunayoshi," Hibari says, eyes narrowed to slits.
And now the laughter bubbles up to his eyes as tears--relief or maybe fear or maybe grief, he didn't know, but there they are, spilling over. Tsuna bends over to hold his stomach. "And you're covered in bandages, wearing a kimono, Hibari."
"You are an unchangeable disappointment. Pathetic." Hibari says it with something falling short of his usual predator's grin, all half-hearted sharp teeth. Tsuna thinks, maybe, Hibari looks just slightly caught off-guard at the boldness of such a pathetic disappointment standing outside the door to his private quarters.
Kyoko, Tsuna realizes, would have cradled his head, held it to her shoulder. She would have said, "Shh," would have said, "Nothing is unchangeable. You can be whatever you want, Tsuna," would have said, "I know it."
But the thing is, he doesn't know if he knows it anymore himself. His hands are red with blood, his body sore from the labor of killing a man, and here he is, standing in the middle of Hibari Kyouya's future quarters. He's standing there, hands useless at his sides, and he's laughing at the most monstrous, most mythological human being he has ever known.
He half-expects Hibari to end it with a single blow from his cold, steel weapon. He expects it, but Hibari doesn't move. Instead, he narrows his eyes, tightens the line of his mouth, stretched thin like piano wire. "Hard to believe," he says, "that the baby thinks you're worth keeping around." And Hibari looks at Tsuna with a certain kind of disgust, as if Tsuna may have just wretched on Hibari's neat slippered feet.
Tsuna is pretty sure this is still a distinct possibility.
***
Namimori Middle School, Two Years Earlier
For the next six months after the library-book incident, Tsuna has to fight down the sudden, violent urge to vomit every time he crosses Hibari's path. Hibari, for his part, hardly notices him, just passes him by as if her were a fixed, static element of the environment, and he is, in a way, so long as he isn't breaking any rules.
Humanity, Tsuna will come to understand, is at it's best for Hibari Kyouya when it remains still, stone-like, predictable. Unchanged.
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
What can one man say to another, when the thing he wants to shape his mouth around is an apology for unthinkable sins? Who does a man say I'm sorry for danger as broad and deep as the multi-verse?
Hibari, his bones wrapped in traditional dress, his room a nest of calm and stillness, doesn't look like he needs any apology. He doesn't look like anything has changed at all.
Tsuna sinks down to the floor around the kotatsu, his shoulders hunched forward in something not quite like defeat. He thinks about the lives he put at risk, the love that's swollen in his chest for all of his friends, his comrades, his partners in battle, these men and women who would have died for the cause foisted upon him. Even Hibari, a reluctant co-conspirator, an eager warrior, even Hibari's body is marred with injury, forever changed by the events in this strange time.
And Tsuna would say he's sorry; he really would. He'd fold up the apology like a tiny origami crane and offer it with a deep bow, offer it like his life, and he may yet do that with Kyoko, with Haru, with Yamamoto and Gokudera and Ryohei.
But Hibari is different.
Hibari has always been different, and the sharp, feral glint in his eyes is the same as the light sparking off the edge of the weapon now gripped in his hands, and all Tsuna can say is, "Ah."
And then it is a sudden scramble of feet, of tired and damaged bodies, damaged minds. Hibari swings his tonfa in a shimmering arc through a dimness of the room and topples an exquisite vase. Tsuna dodges and knocks over a chair.
The phonograph goes next, an artifact at best, and then the kotatsu, the lamp, and the pot of tea.
Next, Tsuna's breath as Hibari barrels into him, teeth bared, nostrils wide and dark.
He feels his head crack back against the wall, feels the inside of his skull go swirly and black, and then he's falling forward, catching Hibari by surprise, his eyes opening to a comic whiteness, and then Tsuna is pushing him to the ground.
***
Namimori, Six Months Later
(Irie Shouichi is leaning against the bean bag in Tsuna's room. Peak of summer, window open to let in more hot air, Irie teaching Tsuna what his teachers had failed to.
Then, "Hey, do you ever," he says, shoving his glasses higher up on his nose, and isn't that the question of a fork in the road? It could be anything, no restrictions but the restriction of expressible words. He says, "Hey, do you ever get...glimpses? You know, of then."
Tsuna doesn't say, 'Yes.' He doesn't say, 'Every day.' He doesn't say, 'I thought that was my intuition.' If he wanted to he could tell Irie about the apartment he shares with Kyoko in this dream space. Or smoking with Gokudera. Or Yamamoto on the ground, bleeding out.
Instead, he says, "No." Then, without looking up from his homework, he asks, "Do you?"
Irie pushes himself up on his elbows. "Well, yeah," he says with that enthusiasm which Tsuna usually finds infectious, "all the time. But I don't think it's really the future, you know?"
Tsuna squirms uncomfortably as Irie flips over their homework and begins connecting lines in a branching pattern. "They're different branches of the universe. They're what happens if you fail this class. They're what happens if you pass."
Tsuna blinks. He scratches his neck. He tries not to give away too much.
"Even this conversation," Irie continues, face alive, overflowing, "maybe you're seeing us--right now--talking about this." He takes a slow breath. "Maybe this changes everything.")
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
"Hibari," Tsuna says, breathless, hardly audible, his forearm pressing all of his weight into Hibari's throat, "Hibari, you need to promise me."
HIbari snarls at him, surprisingly still and attentive for being held in such humiliating capture. His face is red. His eyes, barely visible between his narrowed lashes.
"Promise me, Hibari," Tsuna says, lowering his face into the crook of Hibari's neck, "you're going to get stronger. I need to rely on you."
Hibari growls, this guttural thing like a cornered dog, and hooks one foot around Tsuna's leg. A sudden surge of strength and he's flipped them. Tsuna's back hits the ground with the force of a truck.
He can feel Hibari's panting breath on his cheek, can feel the moisture of it. And then, the sudden dart of his head.
Teeth, teeth digging into his shoulder.
***
Namimori, Twelve Years Later
(It is a sensation both simple and extravagant, this fire crackling away in the hearth, the warmth breathing out into the rest of the room.
Hibari sits in a straight-backed chair, Art of War spread open on his lap, his eyes dragging successive lines over the page, a steaming pot of tea at his side, the bamboo whisk, the matcha powder in a small silver tin.
Tsuna slips in as unnoticed as possible, his tired muscles humming out from a long day at a desk. Who knew that the work of the leader of Empires involved so much paperwork, so much tedium?
He hooks a finger over the knot of his tie, sliding it slowly back and forth until it is loose enough to slip over his head and drape around the doorknob like a noose. His arms stretch up over his head, pulling apart the knots in his back and his long, fluid shadow falls over Hibari, over the book in his lap, the floorboards, the wall.
Hibari, he whispers, his voice a ghost, a puff of smoke, and then his hands are working over Hibari's shoulders, slipping over the curves of them, over the muscle and the bone. His fingers scratch up into the nest of black hair, the smoothness of strands, the warmth of skin, and Hibari sighs.
The sounds of his mouth conflating with the sound of flames, clean white sheets billowing in the wind.)
***
Shibuya Prefecture, Seven Years Later
("What do I love," he asks with another laugh, his body shifting up against hers to slot them together like tumblers. He is sticky from the midsummer sun, from the frantic closeness of bodies. He breathes into her hair. "You. Only you."
Kyoko sighs contentedly. She tangles her legs with his. "Good," she says softly.
Their black cat slinks out from the windowsill where it warms its fur with the sun. It is speckled with street dust, a bit of dried grass which must have drifted in on the wind. And, in Tsuna's head, another word from his studies, this time middle-school biology. Stasis, he whispers to himself, the jumble you get if you mutter "stay like this" over and over again in a desperate chant, stasis, stasis, stasis.)
Fandom: Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
Character/Pairing: Tsuna-centric, Tsuna/Hibari
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3600
Warnings: Spoilers through the end of the Future Arc
Notes: This is a much, much overdue fic for questofdreams. She gave such a lovely prompt, but I kept turning out the most predictable possible stories, and I didn't want to do that. Still, it was a lot of fun once I really got going! I hope she likes it, and I hope you enjoy reading this one too. :)
Shibuya Prefecture, Seven Years Later
(This is so cinematic, Tsuna thinks to the empty audience of himself, the light, her angles.
It's a word he just learned in university, and it's true. The camera lens of the world has condensed down to his tiny untidy apartment, the yellow light of early morning, the white, white tangled sheets of his worn-out mattress on the wooden floor. Kyoko is naked in the chaos; his head is pillowed on the dip of her belly. She pulls her fingers over his hair and the touch makes him feel so much like an infant that he could curl up inside this womb with her and live there forever.
"But what do you love," she asks him, her voice the bell to signal awakening, the dissipation of a dream, "what is it that you love?"
His breath is a soft cloud of laughter. He kisses her navel. "Mmm," he says in mock deliberation, presses lips to the warm curve of her hip, "you?"
"Silly Tsuna," she says with a voice like his mother might have had back when she was young and blossoming. She rests her palm over the back of his neck. "I mean love-love. What do you love?"
Somewhere, their cat is curled up in a warm nest of sleep. Outside, a car splashes through a puddle. A flock of birds lifts in fluttering unison.)
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
The Vongola compound is so quiet at night, even this night, the last night, nestled in the secrecy of ground, a multi-story coffin sunken away. Tsuna can hear the others, but nothing is as loud as the noise of his own body. Each soft scuff of his feet against the tile of the hallway, a quiet apology.
In the kitchen, he can hear the girls laugh with this older Bianchi for the last time. They spill secrets of love, of boys, of how grown up they all feel, how grown up.
He can't, in the ugly scheme of it all, help but to reciprocate. They've all seen so much, they've all done so much, and none of their hands are clean. If he were the thinking sort, he would wonder about the outcomes of war, the meaning of it all, the exact shape of his soul, his sin, now that he'd put on the cloak of a warrior. But he's not that sort, not really, not more than enough to stir up some guilt. It petrifies him sometimes. Sometimes, it guts him.
If this were another life, he feels like it would have been appropriate for him to step into the kitchen--into the laughter--and pull Kyoko to him. To kiss her. To say, I've loved you for years and look what I've done, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. He listens to more laughter, to just one more exchange, and then he moves on.
It's like the multi-verse had branched off, somewhere in the middle of this last fight with Byakuran. Somewhere, his body in the grass, bleeding, listening to Reborn trying to encourage him up to his feet. Somewhere, and his fingers clutched at the edge of a cliff--another path, a different destiny. In that moment, choking on his own blood, feeling his strength waning out of him, he was a different person. As Kyoko watched on, he became a different man. He became a different man and robbed another of his breath.
Kyoko's voice fades as he walks down the hall, Bianchi's voice, Haru's.
***
Turin, Italy, Four Years Later
(Haru laughs breathily against his neck. The black dress plunges down the pale line of her back, gathering in a light, sweeping pool just above her hips. She holds a wine glass in her right hand. The left is on Tsuna's shoulder as he maneuvers her around the empty balcony in an approximation of skillful dance.
Tsuna has lost track of how many times he's danced with her like this. She is graceful on the balls of her feet, the hem of her dress brushing over the tops of his shoes.
She's too beautiful, he thinks, too beautiful to be such a good friend. He swears someday he will pay her back with more than awkward preemptive flowers for all of these parties for which she poses as his date. Haru never complains. She waves off each apology, a roll of her eyes, asks that he help to select a dress for the occasion. He never knows what to pick. She always looks so lovely.
But now she's laughing at something he doesn't remember saying. The wine makes him feel heady. It adds volume to the music of her voice. Too much fine wine, too many fine men in fine suits lavishing her with delicately worded compliments to her beauty, to her grace. Haru loves it.
Her cheeks are pink. She catches Tsuna's eyes, whispers his name like a thin, silver prayer. And on the balcony, in the night air, everything shifts. Everything shifts around them--the earth tumbling down into the hole of time and paths charted out since the first collision of atoms, and Haru leans forward. He knows she wants to kiss him.
Tsuna feels like a caricature, like a fool, when he turns away. He rests his fingers on the small, bird-like bones of her wrist. "I can't," he says, "I wish..."
But Haru is lovely even when her heart is breaking, graceful. "It's okay," she says--and isn't it always?--"It's okay. You love her. I know. But you should tell her, right? Your secret. Let her forgive you too."
When the music ends, when the wine glasses are cleared, violins and wind instruments swaddled away in their velvet cases, Tsuna still stands alone on the balcony, nursing a glass long empty.)
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
Further down the hall, in another room, and he catches a glimpse of Gokudera stretched out on his belly, pouring over love letters, faded photographs, a life that was never his, and yet was his, all at the same time, another corner of his life carrying on, hidden behind some curtain, and Gokudera convinced that he was only imagining the laughter he heard but couldn't see.
"He's finally reading them," Bianchi says from behind him and Tsuna jumps. When he turns, he sees her take a long, languid drag on her cigarette. "Maybe he will understand now."
And normally he wouldn't say anything at all to her because she terrifies him, but the tight, closed features of her face are like the darkness of a confessional, so he says it. "I wish I could take it back, Bianchi. I wish no one had to suffer because of me."
Bianchi frowns at him. (She always frowns at him; it's the same look her brother levels at Yamamoto and Sasagawa every day. So precise and practiced.) She blows a mouthful of white smoke at him. It bobs and weaves between them like a fighter.
"Your friends are too permissive of you," she says.
Somehow, this punches Tsuna in the gut. "What? They don't--"
"And that would be fine," she continues, her voice firm, "if you were going to be a software salesman. But you're not. You're going to become the leader of an empire, Sawada. It can't stay this way."
Bianchi, with her curves and her sharp, smart eyes like her brother has, the competent way she rests a hand on her hip, is the kind of person that swallows the words right out of Tsuna's mouth. He never knows what to say around her, finds himself incapable of reason. He sinks down the wall and sits on the ground. His hands hang between his knees. "Why," he asks, "why would anything have to change?"
Bianchi takes a step forward until she is standing just in front of him, frowning down at the pathetic heap at her feet. "Because," she says, "you need to be able to rely on them and they need to be able to rely on you. You need to be stronger than they are going to force you to become. They are your friends, Sawada. They love you. But don't mistake love for duty."
As she walks away, Tsuna hears the hiss of struck flint in Gokudera's room as flame tickles the end of another cigarette, an empty pack on the bed.
***
Lombardi Provence, Three Years Later
(Tsuna takes his first and last drag on a cigarette when he is eighteen years old and trying to impress the beautiful daughter of the Salametti Family. Gokudera looks equally torn between his constant giddy desire to please the Tenth, and mortification that he may be giving his boss cancer.
But he lights it anyway, and he watches Tsuna breathe in, cough in violent shuddering spasms, and he rubs his hand in soothing circles on his back. "It's all right, Tenth! I do it all the time too!" Gokudera feigns a cough; Tsuna does his best not to look miserable.
Eva Salametti will slip into the arms of another man for a dance, her long hair swaying back and forth over her spine, the pendulum powering a clock.)
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
In another room, Yamamoto and Squalo. Advice, and a staggering, jelly-legged friendship. Young, clear laughter slamming full-force into that gruff voice like a warm front. Tsuna doesn't know how this thing works, how two men so armed and dangerous can come together, even now, in something so hazy like comfort and calm.
He'd always known it would come to this. Yamamoto makes friends as easily as Tsuna makes enemies, it seems, so why should he be surprised? Of course Yamamoto would earn Squalo's respect. He could earn anyone's respect.
Tsuna wonders if Yamamoto reaches out a hand to touch gently at the place where Squalo used to have an arm. Tsuna wonders if he doesn't.
***
Namimori Middle School, Ten Days Later
(The locker room and Yamamoto on the ground, a miracle that breath still inflates his lungs, and blood and bone, and trust and trust.)
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
The cool night air outside the compound steals away into Tsuna's lungs. He breathes it in, one of his last chances to take in this air, this air of the future which fueled everything, all of it, just a cloud of gasoline passing from one mouth to the other, waiting for someone to swallow a match. The air of the Namimori that he knows is not like this. That air is cool like water.
He wanders through the dark, a terrifying entity made suddenly safe by the messy disposal of the biggest boogeyman Tsuna has ever known. The path winding up from the compound cuts through trees and the dense moisture of forest air. He breathes in the thickness of cedar, somehow infinitely more innocent that the air around the compound. He breathes it in, breathes it deep, and barely without noticing, he finds himself at Namimori shrine.
Maybe the sense of safety is an illusory one, maybe it's all a lie, but there's nothing like almost dying to fortify a man's bones with courage he didn't know before.
When Tsuna pounds on the door, he expects venom, expects to be told to go away. Expects, really, a sudden attack and then the slow flow of blood from a major head wound until everything goes dark and cold.
Instead, what he gets is a voice like fog muffled by the closed door.
"What do you want," Hibari asks.
***
Namimori Middle School, Two Years Earlier
("I want to...to come in," Tsuna had stuttered once, thirteen, smaller, more afraid, back before Reborn and rings and the hot electric blood of heritage. "My...my library book is late and--"
"Late? I will bite you to death for your tardiness."
When he got home, he undressed before the tall mirror in the bathroom, staring wide-eyed and panic-breathed at the ring of teeth marks pressed into the soft round of his shoulder.)
***
Namimori Shrine, Ten Years Later
Hibari answers the door, his body draped in a delicate kimono, a small, bone-white cup of tea in his hand.
And, God, that's it; that's when Tsuna knows he's gone crazy. In the tight throat of such danger, he laughs.
"You are an herbivore to your bones, Sawada Tsunayoshi," Hibari says, eyes narrowed to slits.
And now the laughter bubbles up to his eyes as tears--relief or maybe fear or maybe grief, he didn't know, but there they are, spilling over. Tsuna bends over to hold his stomach. "And you're covered in bandages, wearing a kimono, Hibari."
"You are an unchangeable disappointment. Pathetic." Hibari says it with something falling short of his usual predator's grin, all half-hearted sharp teeth. Tsuna thinks, maybe, Hibari looks just slightly caught off-guard at the boldness of such a pathetic disappointment standing outside the door to his private quarters.
Kyoko, Tsuna realizes, would have cradled his head, held it to her shoulder. She would have said, "Shh," would have said, "Nothing is unchangeable. You can be whatever you want, Tsuna," would have said, "I know it."
But the thing is, he doesn't know if he knows it anymore himself. His hands are red with blood, his body sore from the labor of killing a man, and here he is, standing in the middle of Hibari Kyouya's future quarters. He's standing there, hands useless at his sides, and he's laughing at the most monstrous, most mythological human being he has ever known.
He half-expects Hibari to end it with a single blow from his cold, steel weapon. He expects it, but Hibari doesn't move. Instead, he narrows his eyes, tightens the line of his mouth, stretched thin like piano wire. "Hard to believe," he says, "that the baby thinks you're worth keeping around." And Hibari looks at Tsuna with a certain kind of disgust, as if Tsuna may have just wretched on Hibari's neat slippered feet.
Tsuna is pretty sure this is still a distinct possibility.
***
Namimori Middle School, Two Years Earlier
For the next six months after the library-book incident, Tsuna has to fight down the sudden, violent urge to vomit every time he crosses Hibari's path. Hibari, for his part, hardly notices him, just passes him by as if her were a fixed, static element of the environment, and he is, in a way, so long as he isn't breaking any rules.
Humanity, Tsuna will come to understand, is at it's best for Hibari Kyouya when it remains still, stone-like, predictable. Unchanged.
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
What can one man say to another, when the thing he wants to shape his mouth around is an apology for unthinkable sins? Who does a man say I'm sorry for danger as broad and deep as the multi-verse?
Hibari, his bones wrapped in traditional dress, his room a nest of calm and stillness, doesn't look like he needs any apology. He doesn't look like anything has changed at all.
Tsuna sinks down to the floor around the kotatsu, his shoulders hunched forward in something not quite like defeat. He thinks about the lives he put at risk, the love that's swollen in his chest for all of his friends, his comrades, his partners in battle, these men and women who would have died for the cause foisted upon him. Even Hibari, a reluctant co-conspirator, an eager warrior, even Hibari's body is marred with injury, forever changed by the events in this strange time.
And Tsuna would say he's sorry; he really would. He'd fold up the apology like a tiny origami crane and offer it with a deep bow, offer it like his life, and he may yet do that with Kyoko, with Haru, with Yamamoto and Gokudera and Ryohei.
But Hibari is different.
Hibari has always been different, and the sharp, feral glint in his eyes is the same as the light sparking off the edge of the weapon now gripped in his hands, and all Tsuna can say is, "Ah."
And then it is a sudden scramble of feet, of tired and damaged bodies, damaged minds. Hibari swings his tonfa in a shimmering arc through a dimness of the room and topples an exquisite vase. Tsuna dodges and knocks over a chair.
The phonograph goes next, an artifact at best, and then the kotatsu, the lamp, and the pot of tea.
Next, Tsuna's breath as Hibari barrels into him, teeth bared, nostrils wide and dark.
He feels his head crack back against the wall, feels the inside of his skull go swirly and black, and then he's falling forward, catching Hibari by surprise, his eyes opening to a comic whiteness, and then Tsuna is pushing him to the ground.
***
Namimori, Six Months Later
(Irie Shouichi is leaning against the bean bag in Tsuna's room. Peak of summer, window open to let in more hot air, Irie teaching Tsuna what his teachers had failed to.
Then, "Hey, do you ever," he says, shoving his glasses higher up on his nose, and isn't that the question of a fork in the road? It could be anything, no restrictions but the restriction of expressible words. He says, "Hey, do you ever get...glimpses? You know, of then."
Tsuna doesn't say, 'Yes.' He doesn't say, 'Every day.' He doesn't say, 'I thought that was my intuition.' If he wanted to he could tell Irie about the apartment he shares with Kyoko in this dream space. Or smoking with Gokudera. Or Yamamoto on the ground, bleeding out.
Instead, he says, "No." Then, without looking up from his homework, he asks, "Do you?"
Irie pushes himself up on his elbows. "Well, yeah," he says with that enthusiasm which Tsuna usually finds infectious, "all the time. But I don't think it's really the future, you know?"
Tsuna squirms uncomfortably as Irie flips over their homework and begins connecting lines in a branching pattern. "They're different branches of the universe. They're what happens if you fail this class. They're what happens if you pass."
Tsuna blinks. He scratches his neck. He tries not to give away too much.
"Even this conversation," Irie continues, face alive, overflowing, "maybe you're seeing us--right now--talking about this." He takes a slow breath. "Maybe this changes everything.")
***
Vongola Compound, Namimori, Ten Years Later
"Hibari," Tsuna says, breathless, hardly audible, his forearm pressing all of his weight into Hibari's throat, "Hibari, you need to promise me."
HIbari snarls at him, surprisingly still and attentive for being held in such humiliating capture. His face is red. His eyes, barely visible between his narrowed lashes.
"Promise me, Hibari," Tsuna says, lowering his face into the crook of Hibari's neck, "you're going to get stronger. I need to rely on you."
Hibari growls, this guttural thing like a cornered dog, and hooks one foot around Tsuna's leg. A sudden surge of strength and he's flipped them. Tsuna's back hits the ground with the force of a truck.
He can feel Hibari's panting breath on his cheek, can feel the moisture of it. And then, the sudden dart of his head.
Teeth, teeth digging into his shoulder.
***
Namimori, Twelve Years Later
(It is a sensation both simple and extravagant, this fire crackling away in the hearth, the warmth breathing out into the rest of the room.
Hibari sits in a straight-backed chair, Art of War spread open on his lap, his eyes dragging successive lines over the page, a steaming pot of tea at his side, the bamboo whisk, the matcha powder in a small silver tin.
Tsuna slips in as unnoticed as possible, his tired muscles humming out from a long day at a desk. Who knew that the work of the leader of Empires involved so much paperwork, so much tedium?
He hooks a finger over the knot of his tie, sliding it slowly back and forth until it is loose enough to slip over his head and drape around the doorknob like a noose. His arms stretch up over his head, pulling apart the knots in his back and his long, fluid shadow falls over Hibari, over the book in his lap, the floorboards, the wall.
Hibari, he whispers, his voice a ghost, a puff of smoke, and then his hands are working over Hibari's shoulders, slipping over the curves of them, over the muscle and the bone. His fingers scratch up into the nest of black hair, the smoothness of strands, the warmth of skin, and Hibari sighs.
The sounds of his mouth conflating with the sound of flames, clean white sheets billowing in the wind.)
***
Shibuya Prefecture, Seven Years Later
("What do I love," he asks with another laugh, his body shifting up against hers to slot them together like tumblers. He is sticky from the midsummer sun, from the frantic closeness of bodies. He breathes into her hair. "You. Only you."
Kyoko sighs contentedly. She tangles her legs with his. "Good," she says softly.
Their black cat slinks out from the windowsill where it warms its fur with the sun. It is speckled with street dust, a bit of dried grass which must have drifted in on the wind. And, in Tsuna's head, another word from his studies, this time middle-school biology. Stasis, he whispers to himself, the jumble you get if you mutter "stay like this" over and over again in a desperate chant, stasis, stasis, stasis.)