dream 2 || why can't we sleep forever [Week 14; day 2]
There is some pre-sex sexiness in this dream, but I don't think it's terribly graphic. (Read: No actual pr0nz or anything?) If you're extremely squeamish, you might want to skip that part. But uh, I THINK everyone can read this one.
Morning, if barely.
She wakes to the consonant syllables of la Costiera Amalfitana; 11:00 am tides sweeping drowsy lines up the mountainous peninsula, while the sky sweeps another shade of blue down from above; this second hue is bleached by puffs of misty cirrus not yet abated, rising off the waters, exhausting the horizon to a frail cornflower.
Come noon, the sky will rend itself asunder, will break and shine with fullness, and Chrome will walk the sands before Hotel Miramalfi, the long stretch of the Campiana almost too white for her one eye to hold. She will relax at the shore, let the sand filter in her sandals, and drink home-made sangria while working her way through her latest Amazon purchases.
Presently, she eyes the alarm clock on the nightstand -- numbers in red LED staring back, unblinking.
The spot of unbearable warmth which Chrome feels against her waist, she knows, can only be the child. Feeling well-rested and not groggy in the least, she sits upright, yawning lightly and tugging the sheets downwards.
There indeed she spies the culprit: pale curled hands, ribbons still in her hair.
The lady of the house is content to watch for a few seconds, body already craving breakfast and a drink.
While the ghost of a dream lingers faintly, unremembered in the sleep-heavy air, Chrome leans down. Swipes her fingers through strands and strands of ocean and sky (for her daughter has inherited a color that harmonizes the two) with maternal fondness.
"Maman." The half-unconscious refrain. Mumble between lips.
"Yes."
High summer is rapidly moving along. Soon, as per the dictates of the girl's private education, she will return to her Parisian tutor. Will travel. Will write letters in elegant, looping cursive to her mother while in foggy, antiquated London, by the lamp glow and above the cobblestones. She will read poetry and advanced novels for her age range, and she will continue to form something of an opinion on T.S. Eliot, singing mermaids and all, despite that her literary consumption eludes her in any deeper sense. It would be a lie to say that she knows all the words of the books she is fed, but with an adult to tell her of their significance, it hardly matters now.
Still, she is bright, pays rapt attention in her courses, recites and internalizes well, and echoes her tutors' opinions all the better. She is training in the flute and piano, and already aggressively, merrily proficient in soccer. She is, at present, eleven years old.
"Do you want to go to the beach?"
Their limited time together compels her to ask.
Alessandra blinks tiredly with eyes that are large and violet, reflectively thoughtful, and, in all respects, identical to her mother's. She is quiet in waking, not one to fidget or grumble or thrash. Her movements have a slow, stilted quality that conveys a sense of maturity for her age; moth-like, steady beats of eyelashes and the flutter of hands. Younger than Chrome was when the accident happened, born to wealth as she had been, and prone to silences sometimes, but the similarities otherwise end there, and her mother is insistent that this will remain the case.
"Yes," she answers. Wide smile, stretching limbs, and Chrome leans forward, reaches beneath the girl's arms and pulls her up, holds her close and kisses her face.
"Maybe Marie will be there today . . . " the girl continues, thoughts apparently unbroken.
Her eyes are transfixed by the specters of seabirds, gulls and terns seen as splotches of winged white and grey in the sky beyond the windows. Chrome knows she is not really watching them; looking farther than the point of the sky, rather, and Marie, perhaps, refers to a neighbour's child, though she could not say whose. She wonders: my child, my child, if I turned you around, and looked deep into your eyes, would I see the evidence of a first boy somewhere, writ deep in lavender space? Or books, only, and trophies and terns and the cool foam of the Mediterranean?
Italian, French, and English she knows; Russian she is learning, and German, a little, but only fading, lilting echoes of her mother's Japanese.
Chrome has just begun to rise when she hears the footsteps on the other side of the double-doors, and then they swing open to the tune of Alessandra's surprised, delighted exclamation of, "Papà!"
Mukuro is fond of the greenery of Italy's countryside; it was he who purchased the seaside villa in Amalfi, one among the rose gardens, and when he enters the room, their fragrance follows, spiked as it is with Aglianico from the vineyards, soon to be crushed, and Yves Saint Laurent, his own preferred sub-category of cologne thereof. The fullness of his scent was one thing which Chrome had not anticipated during her years with his illusion, when she had only caught whiffs: a petal of rose or a peel of apple or a little dash of hotel mint and leather. Then, their meeting in the flesh. Linens and pillows drenched with his scent, the force of him, like a living thing, from the slide of his hair across the sheets, and his mouth tasted ever so slightly of leather, of metal, where he'd cup his hand to his lips in thought, or chew the ends of his hell rings, eyes half-lidded in mischievous ponderings, in schemes which brought in the uncalculated wealth (though this, you would know, was never their final intent, never the bottom line).
He moves with electric grace, a minor serpentine streak which never entirely departs from his limbs as he claps -- to the side -- and says: "Buongiorno, figlia mia. Come, come, let me have a look at her before she departs. I brought summer truffles -- " And with another wave, he presents the box. "The last of this year, I should say."
The girl climbs off the bed and makes her way to him in a series of hops. Truffles are exchanged; a tender, almost possessive stroke of the gift-giver's hand across her head -- and even Chrome can no longer tell what is parody. Idle affection he does best. It is the connectivity of conversation which has ever troubled Mukuro; he masks it well by asking pointless questions so as to drag one's words and thoughts out, so that what one hears is precisely what one wants to hear (their own voice, their own story). Here, again,
"I hope your studies are faring well. Tell me, what is your favourite book that you have read this year?"
She wrinkles her nose for a moment of thought, then ventures, "I like everything I read. But I guess -- Lolita, really."
A predictable answer. Even Chrome, of course, knows that this is the favourite book of every literati-in-training, every young European girl for whom the word sprezzatura is known and even used unironically, and every college freshman who has just stumbled giddily upon the classic texts. With a plot popular and internalized enough by society at large to be accessible and prose significant enough to merit its reputation, it sounds decent for an honest answer -- the kind of novel you know you're supposed to admire -- and Mukuro smiles knowingly at Chrome from across the room, as if to say, do you remember being like this? Though you were quite a bit older. Collegiate, I believe.
"Ah, my dear, it truly concerns me how the education system is always giving my child such -- " Dramatic pause. " -- morally unsound literature. Seeing a young girl in the throes of manipulation to an older man is. Well."
Chrome does not even need to lift her eye to know she is being gazed at.
"Questionable." Tap of the finger to the lips. Conversational laugh. "And what with all the incest and abuse and violence in those books of yours. It does make me wonder what I am doing spending such funds on providing your curriculum."
"Papà -- don't be so prudish. You don't understand literature. I love you, but."
"It's simply that I don't wish for my only progeny to be subjected to undue villainy. But I suppose they can't keep that out of the school systems, can they? The alternative was sending you to Catholic school, however, and while their sense of morality is -- interesting, to say the least, I thought that the whole fetish of putting up imagery of nude, flagellated men at every turn was perhaps advertising a little too strongly for the BDSM scene. My daughter should be free of such propaganda. How a parent suffers."
"I'm glad you didn't send me to Catholic school," Alessandra says, and he kisses her forehead.
A strange look, and then he tugs the glove off one hand.
Presses the back of it to her brow.
"You seem to be running a slight fever."
"I feel fine," she insists.
"Ah, perhaps it's just the sunlight, then. Did I hear your mother say you're going to the beach? Why don't you go ahead down and wait for her?" He looks at Chrome, eyes cool and distant and knowing. "She'll be along shortly."
~*~
Chrome opens her eye to a room that appears, for one moment, improbably blue-tinged. Shadowed. Length of a warm body curled against her, sinuous, and for a long instant, she drags in a breath. Tight. Half-choking.
A wave crashes hard outside, and the sunlight is as bright as ever.
"Yes," Mukuro whispers, a sibilant laugh, as his teeth graze the flesh of her earlobe, and his tongue laps a slow procession inward -- mimicry of the ocean beyond their doors, the licking of the tidal waters. "Calling out for me in your sleep, my Chrome."
A question or a statement, she is not certain, but she presses a hand to her forehead, wondering if she is the one who is running the fever. She does not remember lying back down. Does not remember dozing off. Glance at the clock. A jolt: 12:00 pm.
"Oh -- I didn't mean to -- she'll have been waiting on me." Fragments of words, and she is trying to rise.
A slip of leather-clad finger beneath her lip halts her, and she turns, half-way. The daylight renders Mukuro's red eye with a strange tinge of normalcy which is almost itself unsettling. "The child is well-supervised and enjoying herself with those her own age. For now, it is you I wish to attend upon."
She begins to respond automatically, to say, "oh, all right," but catches herself, remembering that --
Her last conscious thoughts had been, in fact, that she wished to speak with him. Chrome would not bother him about it in front of their daughter, but when Mukuro had walked in the door, she had wanted to ask him what good fortune had brought about his return. Had wanted to say, without casting aspersions (but with a considerably puzzled expression): I thought you had work to do. Sicily. A job. He had given her the details. Would not be returned for weeks.
"Of course it went well," he answers, and laughs once more. "Otherwise, how might I have been fortuitous enough to return to you?"
Slide-scrape of metal belt buckle as he stands and plucks a truffle from the box. He has not removed one item of clothing, though Chrome almost expects it. She can still feel the heat from his breath at the nape of her neck; the trail of his kisses a lightly reddened patch. It is odd, perhaps, that she trusts him, but she does. Knows there is nothing heinous he would do which he would bother to conceal; in his transparency, there is a paradoxical honesty, and she does not worry as she supposes other wives (which the papers, at least, title her as) must.
"But I have another. Tomorrow." He is beginning to tug his jacket from his shoulders.
Back against the headboard, half-sitting, half-lying, Chrome feels the expectant shiver. Could feel it even with her eye closed, because it is the sounds which alert her: rustle of clothing, rings dropping to the nightstand with reverberating metallic clicks, the jerk of a tie or belt. In contrast, she is wearing only a nightgown, silk, thin and flimsy, and his body heat has already burnt through it, settling deep in her skin. The tension in the air reaches past her clothing, and at the familiar quickened rhythm of his breath (so slight as to go almost unheard), she feels her breasts and belly prick with attentive sensation; an alert, heady, eager warmth which trails down her spine and pools heavily between her thighs, almost uncomfortable. The expectation, always so vividly intense, of being satisfied by that lean, hard body.
"So reactive even after all of these years," he muses, as if he can feel what she feels -- and perhaps he can, or some fair approximation, having lived in her as he has.
"I missed you."
"Did you? Slide those lacy things off, then. Let me taste how much."
His scent, like a wild creature around her, and then he is in the bed, the pieces continuing to be tossed, without regard, into the pile in the floor, until he is wearing only the clips in his ears and that cunning forever smile, and she is wearing only her eyepatch.
The white hot darkness surges around Chrome, once more, behind her good eye.
~*~
Mukuro has departed by the following day.
By the next, Chrome takes Alessandria to the hospital.
"Perhaps it is narcolepsy," Mukuro says, over the phone.
"I -- don't think so," Chrome replies. "She won't wake up."
And, indeed, it is dramatic.
The day before, Chrome had returned from a dinner party, pleasantly boozy, to find the child sprawled about the expansive sofa (where she had been nodding off into a nap before Chrome even departed), hair lopsided in her pinned ribbons, legs at implausible angles, but it was by no means an unusual pose for her, as she had always been, like her father, an expressive sleeper. The truffle box lay open on the glass dining table, and Chrome ate one of the remaining three before preparing herself a gin and tonic in the kitchen. Then, drink in hand, she had sat beside her daughter, the glow of the lamps and the Italian night sky feathering across their faces.
She had reached behind herself, dragging her fingernails against the criss-crossing marks on her back, her shoulders; most prominently on her neck, which fortunately her hair concealed. As promised, she had spent the afternoon before over-seeing her daughter beneath the unforgiving sunlight of la Costiera Amalfitana; had any among the legions of the hotel guests, the tourists, the dark-hued, sun-warmed beach dwellers -- had any noticed the bruise-bites which appeared here and there to the sides of her bikini straps? A scandalous story written upon her flesh.
Chrome, to her sometimes dismay, does not tan.
While seated in the living room of her villa, she had had a strange, niggling, incomprehensible feeling. Not necessarily an instance of negativity or a sense of dread, no. It was an emotion older than that. A great nameless thing -- when the shadows on the water and the stars and the night sink into your bones, and you feel, at once, pensive and restless, caught in the inescapable reality of your own humanity. Memento mori. Life, here and now: an assessment. Here am I. An adult. Thirty-(something; she deliberately strikes it out). Retired from what she had grown up doing. Retired from Japan. With her big, wide house -- and yet, she muses, not so unlike the big, wide house where she had first grown. Family? She had one. Friends? People to go out with, in the least.
Yet, alone with her thoughts and her gin and tonic in her big, wide house, alone with the starry sky and the sofa cushions and the ocean sounds and the water shadows -- alone in the beauty of the vast world at night, she had felt a curious absence.
And why? There was nothing missing from her life. Nothing in any respect.
It was only the solitude and quietness of the night which was playing tricks on her mind. Making her feel the weight of human loneliness.
The night, which says, in all its lulling beauty: We all go into the grave alone, in the end. What do your days amount to, but putting this off?
She dozed off, knowing it would be better come morning. Come life.
The next day, she awoke, but her daughter, she found, did not, and did not wake through the day.
Chrome touched her. Pulled at her. Spoke words. Implored -- then louder, with frantic urgency. Her name, again and again. Nothing besides the faintest stirring came as a result (if as a result), and even that, only on occasion.
After intermittent moments of pained staring, Chrome had run upstairs and pulled out the laptop. Typed in a string of information. She had, upon a random search, hit an article about a girl sleeping for two weeks. Kleine-Levin syndrome: another search, and she reads of a disorder wherein it is possible for a patient to sleep for weeks at a time, to wake and be well for months, then to fall into the pattern again.
Words. Phrases.
Unable to attend school or work.
Uncommunicative and bedridden even when awake.
She clicked out of the window and turned the computer off. Breathed in and resolved to take the child to the hospital.
It's only been a day, she tells herself, and it's only sleep. Only sleep. Probably nothing, in the end. Certainly not anything that could be named with an entire disorder. Disorders -- by this stage of her life, surviving all that she has, disorders must be things which happen to others. Things which happen to the children of others. A more natural cause, perhaps.
Had the truffles -- ? But no, she had eaten them, too. Mukuro had taken one, as well.
She remembers.
Think back.
Mention of a fever.
Why had she not done something, then?
"It's nothing they'll solve for you," he says now, on the other end of her cellphone. "I was younger than she was when I was taken in for health-related issues. I think one might recall how that turned out. Doctors in this country have curious tendencies. You would have better luck in dealing with the mind and body the way we always have -- the way I taught you."
"I need a diagnosis," she replies.
He laughs a little -- inappropriately, she thinks (for once not with fondness), and says, "My dear, you created your own organs, and I yours before you. You cannot deal with a sleeping child? I suppose I must make occasion to return home early, then. But if a diagnosis will ease your mind, then procure one -- no matter my misgivings about doctors touching that which is my own."
The tone of the final line, low and dark, surprises her. It was nothing they had ever discussed before, but she had not expected him to mind. Of course he must not mind too stridently or he would not agree at all, she reasons; that is one aspect of his demeanor she has long learned by now. It doesn't matter, she thinks, hands gripping the wheel tightly, shakily. It is only then that she realizes she has been crying -- when she wipes her eye and pulls her hand away to see it smeared with mascara, with shadow. It doesn't matter. Determinedly. Your paranoias. Your old ways. I put them behind me.
And it is the first time she realizes it is true.
Somewhere, at some point, she put everything behind her.
It's raining outside. Heavy, fast drops striking the windshield. A storm climbing up the Italian coast, one of the downfalls of life on an island, and she watches, bleary within and without, for the street lights, the signs, the turn signals. No driver for this occasion. No public transportation. Just herself. How long had it taken Chrome to bother to learn to drive? At some point in her life, had she not gone everywhere by plane, or with vehicles provided by her connections?
Beside her, in the passenger's seat, the child sleeps, looking content for all the world as contrasted against her mother's quiet, entrapped panic -- and it would be comical, were it all over, all a passing dream. Were this not happening.
Boss, she thinks, out of the blue. I'll call Boss.
But he is not her boss any longer, is he?
"Hello, Chrome," the voice at the other end, when she dials, and she almost deflates with relief. As if some piece of the world is all right again.
She explains the situation. Says she missed him. Just checking in, as well. The usual courtesies, and how is your wife?
Long silence.
"Do you trust Mukuro, Chrome?"
He had not answered many of her questions. For that matter, he seemed surprisingly incommunicative. Distant. Not like the Tsuna she had known before. But it must be her anxiety, she thinks. It is the day, wearing her out. Making her feel as if everything is off-kilter.
"I -- always have."
Chest tight.
And even now, she would be lying if she did not admit that Mukuro's tone of self-assurance had encouraged her. He had talked, as he always does, as if he might sweep in and restore everything. Repair it. Set it right. As if he could do so, and, perhaps more to the point -- as if she could not. As if she had forgotten how. And she almost begins to cry once more. Like having a god or a devil or a little piece of magic in your pocket; sometimes, that's what it was like with Mukuro. A handful of walking miracle. But she had not kept it at that. She had gone on and made a man of him. Consummated a relationship with him, bought a house, had a child.
You didn't do such things with a live wire, with the devil, with a handful of magic. You couldn't have them both, could you? The human and the power? Hadn't Chrome's powers all been sublimated by this adulthood?
"But this isn't about him, Boss," she adds, because -- right now, right this minute, it's not.
It's about her.
Her own ability to navigate a problem.
"Good luck, Chrome. Be sure to call me again tomorrow," he says, and, again, Tsuna's voice seems to convey words from across a great distance. A divide. "I have to go now. Work. But please, call me later."
Disconnect. Dead air.
Alone, again. When his voice goes, so go the tears, and she is clearheaded for the remainder of the drive to the mainland, past schools and streets and a crawl of rain-soaked cars, past convenience stores and apartments and the fenced in landscape of the Old World. How did it come to this. Chrome in a silver coupé, alone, with her ill child, and last night -- had she not been a different woman, only last night?
The hospital appears out of the greyness, monolithic brick, many-storied, surrounded by fir trees and car lots. One strangely out of season winter-black tree whose gnarled branches slide to her side view as she pulls in and parks the coupé. Then there's the walk inside, warm bundle of child in her arms, still sleeping, expression persistently untroubled. The wind latches hold of the umbrella, jerks it upwards, and both are splashed by rain. Beads of it on their jackets.
It occurs to her, as she signs the forms with the usual pseudonym, that none among their family holds an honest name; both she and Mukuro are estranged from their own relatives. What if family health history is asked into? What if transfusions are, for some reason, necessary? And Chrome recalls herself, only barely older: close relative, they had insisted.
She -- he -- had severed their pasts.
The insurance will cover the expenses, at least, and that is paid for under both of their pseudonyms.
"All expenses will be accounted for," says the woman behind the desk, smile affable.
Chrome drinks coffee in the lounge from patterned paper cups. Watches the slack faces of the others in the waiting room. Hears the whirr of the vending machine.
Thinks that it must not be anything too severe. Sleeping sickness. Only a minor bout.
Must not be anything too --
Cannot be.
It rains.
~*~
When she wakes, she does not hear the rain.
The machine, also, is different.
Pulsing beat of a heart monitor.
Voices, indistinguishable conversation filtering through a haze; bright lights, and the words seep past the flourescence, condense into a cloud of a murmur, and it is with tremulous self-awareness that the old scene returns to her. That the old nightmare begins, and here she is: here the girl is, on a table, draped in a white sheet, all laid out to die. There is, indeed, a tube in her nose. Chrome cries out, and the voices turn on her in agitation, and the next thing she knows, she is jerking at the tubes, leaping from the hospital bed in one swift motion which slams her hard onto the ground, a sharp pain flaring in her shin.
Someone is telling her to calm down, please, for the treatment has not ended yet.
You have the wrong person, she thinks. I'm not the patient.
And she says this, or merely thinks it. In that moment, she is not sure which; an anaesthetic of some variety is flowing through her system, dulling her senses, and her words? She does not know if she is giving words. Even her own name. But the animal panic to escape compels her to remember herself.
The way I taught you, she almost hears him say, and in another instant, the reflexes of her former life return.
There are lotus petals in her wake as the hospital door is torn open.
~*~
That Chrome is able to reach her driveway without destroying herself in a car crash is surprising even to her.
By the time she pulls in, she is half-hysterical, drawing air in panicky breaths. She is still wearing a hospital gown, drenched now, blood fresh on her nose from where she had torn the tube out. Shaking with nerves and chill. She had accosted an orderly in the hall, had demanded to know the condition of her child. And when Chrome had given a name, the orderly had replied, with a curious expression,
"There is no patient here by that name. I'm sorry. I can try the other branch -- "
"No," she insisted. No. This is the room they told me. Take me to it.
But when she arrived, the room was empty. Sterile and white. Sheets unrumpled. Unlived in. An impossibility. Here she found herself questioning her own perception of reality. Had that rainy drive truly happened. Had she spoken to Mukuro. To Boss. Had he been there. Brought truffles. Had she, only the day before, spent an afternoon at the beach. Had she checked her daughter in here. Had she just been assaulted. Had she even escaped.
What was she escaping.
"Your own name," she is told, "does appear, though."
Multiple times.
A suspicion, but she does not want to believe it.
Who signed the papers?
But they cannot tell her. And would a name tell her anything? Perhaps it is someone from her past, returned. Some enemy to the Famiglia. Someone old enemy of an alliance she had rubbed the way with a hit. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it's. But the name would not reveal a single thing, would it? It could be any name. Any name. Any face. That was something he had taught her. Friend or foe. Nondescript people blurring into crowds.
It could be anyone.
She returns home. Not out of defeat, because she's determined not to be defeated, and not because she does not intend to scrape those people off the map, whoever may be controlling them (and the instinctual violence of the thought, even now, surprises her a little). No. She returns for answers. She returns, as if tugged by gravity, because something tells her that the house holds the answer. That it will be waiting for her. That it has been here, with her, all along, and she has somehow been looking in the other direction. There is no rational reason to believe this -- to believe that these events have any meaning whatsoever that could be discerned to her now, and yet she is certain there was some word, some moment, something which had already transpired.
In the past two days, it is there, lurking.
It must be. If only she could remember.
Truffle box on the table. Opened, but nearly full again. As if they had replenished themselves.
The hospital staff's words, when she checked in:
All expenses will be accounted for.
It is to her own surprise that no one attempted to stop her when she walked out.
She tries to phone Tsuna, Gokudera, Yamamoto. Anyone. The lines are all dead. Moreover, she receives messages that their phones are no longer in operation. But that's impossible; she just spoke with Tsuna earlier in the day. Or did she? Chrome is certain of nothing anymore. Her wide house, once imperious, now looms. Large, with dark corners, and the rose gardens are drowning with the gush of the downpour. The wind moans in the distance like a hungry spirit, and the ocean sighs its response.
The house is empty.
Empty. Lifeless. She opens the nightstand upstairs and removes her revolver.
It has been many years since she has used it properly, and her hands are still given to incessant shivers. The ocean roars outside the window, huge and tossing and threatening to grow with the storm. Below, the door creaks, and it could be the wind, but she knows it is not the wind. It is not. The rumbling sounds of the storm produce illusory noise, as lawn chairs and trees fall by the wayside --
-- but. Thap, thap, thap.
There is no mistaking the sound of footfalls, cushioned on the carpeted floor.
She finishes loading the gun.
Points it at the bedroom door.
"Well," Mukuro says, as he opens it, "do you see what I meant about hospitals? They can't be trusted to do a job properly. There was no reason for all of this. I had to rush home to make certain nothing went wrong, but even now, it appears I'm too late."
Her knees buckle. The tears which have been accumulating in her eye begin to fall again; his expression is mysterious, but unsatisfied. "What did you do?"
She asks. Does not want to ask. Not now. Not even now.
"You don't trust me, then?"
"I want to." By this point, the admission is at least half-rueful. She is, she realizes, still holding the weapon. Still ready to kill him. To kill him. And it's the first time the thought occurs to her so consciously.
She whips the pistol around, shifting the intended target.
"Nagi. I promise -- "
"Where are they? Boss, Gokudera, Yamamoto? Everyone? What did you do to them?"
"I saw to their deaths," he answers matter-of-factly. Then, "Years ago."
She does not move.
Mukuro sighs, long-suffering, as if the one who is ragged and bleeding. In fact, so far as Chrome can see, there is not a droplet of water on him. His hair, still tied, is impeccable for its lack of disarray. "The Tsunayoshi you spoke with today was an aural illusion I created for you."
Chrome sits on the bed. Folds her arms in her lap in a parody of ladylike manners. The gun is still there, albeit limply and loosely held. Mukuro watches, leaning on the doorframe. She does not make eye contact, but she can see that, in the twilight created by the storm, he appears frustrated, almost aggrieved. It is a rare look, but on such a day, she can hardly be bothered to care. There is one person she has not asked about yet. She does not think she wishes to know.
"Alessandria?"
A pause.
"Her organs were donated to others, even as I had given you yours. I suppose some would call that irony." He is looking down, twisting one of his rings. "She died years ago, as well. I was -- approximating, of course, in my conception of what she would grow to be like."
It should be surprising. It should be shattering. But the first thought, amid the bile in her throat, is: You knew this.
Voice fragile as rice paper: "Your doing?"
"No, Nagi. It was yours." He looks slightly exasperated by this situation, but impossibly, impossibly, there is a hint of tenderness as he lifts his hands -- the old theatrical story-telling style. "Euripides writes of Medea, who destroyed her children as vengeance upon her husband. I could have supposed that this was the case with you, but I do not think it was so pre-meditated. I think you must have lost your mind after I orchestrated the others' deaths. You locked your hands around her throat and -- you said you were saving her, I believe. From me, perhaps? I never knew. That was the best I could understand it."
A sigh.
"Foolish and wasteful, I thought. I would've taken care of the child, of course. She came from you, and was mine, as well. I would have taken care of both of you, but I suppose I pushed you too far, in the end. You did not wish to remember. We agreed that you would not. You were the one who signed the papers. You agreed to undergo treatment, and I -- of course I would supply my precious Nagi with the life she had always wished for."
He walks to the window and opens it, gazing down wistfully at the rose gardens.
"After everything, this was truly the best outcome we could have hoped for. A life of endless joy. Or it would've been, had you not developed some slight immunity to the injections. I had to return home early this last time and orchestrate a diversion for you to go to the hospital, and they still botched it. Now, I suppose, you understand my contempt."
The sleeping sickness, Chrome remembers with floating clarity, was her own. Little details: The alarm clock being set on a day she did not have to work (though this was always, now), the bedroom with her drowsy offspring, waking up with Mukuro shortly thereafter and losing an hour of life at random, and the next night, that strange feeling -- the tiredness which overcame her. A result of the treatment she had been under. The drugs which had facilitated her memory loss, aided undoubtedly by his powers. The warm patches at the back of her neck: sites of input, needle scars she could not see.
She remembers.
And it was beautiful.
It was perfect.
It was made to be so perfect.
He is still looking down at the rose garden. Chrome once jumped five stories and only broke an arm; three stories and a fall into roses -- no, that might not work. But wouldn't it be a pretty way to go? Picturesque, like everything else within their estate. Her fingers smooth over the trigger: words, images. The way we always have -- the way I taught you. The way you taught me. His back is turned. She could just --
Or she might put the gun to her temple. One click, and eternal forgetfulness. Would he even look around and see? Would he leap into her body and halt her hand? Plath had treated it as an out. A form of resistance. Barnes had written that force-feeding deprived one of the right to die, to make that final stand, the ultimate rebellion.
She has been force-fed a steady diet of lies.
Chrome lifts the gun. Points at --
And destroy the first and last person in her life?
Destroy the last person in his?
For giving her what she always wanted, or for the fact that he had done only what he had always said he would?
"Come, come, Nagi," he says, not turning. "Do not despair for loss. This is not in the end. In our world, nothing need ever be transient. I'll see to it that the dosage is fixed or the medication is changed to something more potent. Come here. You will wake up tomorrow and all will be as it was two days ago."
Gradually, she stands.
Pads to the window. Leans heavily upon the sill.
"Look at those roses I made for you."
"I can't see them anymore," she admits.
Illusions are based upon one's abilities to believe what they see or hear.
The veneer having worn off, Chrome sees only weeds.
An old mansion, eroded with years.
The Estraneo estate. It withers with its ghosts.
"You will see them again, tomorrow," he says, and brushes her hair, and Chrome leans hard.
Thinks: It is a long way down.
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
-- "Sunday Morning," Wallace Stevens
Morning, if barely.
She wakes to the consonant syllables of la Costiera Amalfitana; 11:00 am tides sweeping drowsy lines up the mountainous peninsula, while the sky sweeps another shade of blue down from above; this second hue is bleached by puffs of misty cirrus not yet abated, rising off the waters, exhausting the horizon to a frail cornflower.
Come noon, the sky will rend itself asunder, will break and shine with fullness, and Chrome will walk the sands before Hotel Miramalfi, the long stretch of the Campiana almost too white for her one eye to hold. She will relax at the shore, let the sand filter in her sandals, and drink home-made sangria while working her way through her latest Amazon purchases.
Presently, she eyes the alarm clock on the nightstand -- numbers in red LED staring back, unblinking.
The spot of unbearable warmth which Chrome feels against her waist, she knows, can only be the child. Feeling well-rested and not groggy in the least, she sits upright, yawning lightly and tugging the sheets downwards.
There indeed she spies the culprit: pale curled hands, ribbons still in her hair.
The lady of the house is content to watch for a few seconds, body already craving breakfast and a drink.
While the ghost of a dream lingers faintly, unremembered in the sleep-heavy air, Chrome leans down. Swipes her fingers through strands and strands of ocean and sky (for her daughter has inherited a color that harmonizes the two) with maternal fondness.
"Maman." The half-unconscious refrain. Mumble between lips.
"Yes."
High summer is rapidly moving along. Soon, as per the dictates of the girl's private education, she will return to her Parisian tutor. Will travel. Will write letters in elegant, looping cursive to her mother while in foggy, antiquated London, by the lamp glow and above the cobblestones. She will read poetry and advanced novels for her age range, and she will continue to form something of an opinion on T.S. Eliot, singing mermaids and all, despite that her literary consumption eludes her in any deeper sense. It would be a lie to say that she knows all the words of the books she is fed, but with an adult to tell her of their significance, it hardly matters now.
Still, she is bright, pays rapt attention in her courses, recites and internalizes well, and echoes her tutors' opinions all the better. She is training in the flute and piano, and already aggressively, merrily proficient in soccer. She is, at present, eleven years old.
"Do you want to go to the beach?"
Their limited time together compels her to ask.
Alessandra blinks tiredly with eyes that are large and violet, reflectively thoughtful, and, in all respects, identical to her mother's. She is quiet in waking, not one to fidget or grumble or thrash. Her movements have a slow, stilted quality that conveys a sense of maturity for her age; moth-like, steady beats of eyelashes and the flutter of hands. Younger than Chrome was when the accident happened, born to wealth as she had been, and prone to silences sometimes, but the similarities otherwise end there, and her mother is insistent that this will remain the case.
"Yes," she answers. Wide smile, stretching limbs, and Chrome leans forward, reaches beneath the girl's arms and pulls her up, holds her close and kisses her face.
"Maybe Marie will be there today . . . " the girl continues, thoughts apparently unbroken.
Her eyes are transfixed by the specters of seabirds, gulls and terns seen as splotches of winged white and grey in the sky beyond the windows. Chrome knows she is not really watching them; looking farther than the point of the sky, rather, and Marie, perhaps, refers to a neighbour's child, though she could not say whose. She wonders: my child, my child, if I turned you around, and looked deep into your eyes, would I see the evidence of a first boy somewhere, writ deep in lavender space? Or books, only, and trophies and terns and the cool foam of the Mediterranean?
Italian, French, and English she knows; Russian she is learning, and German, a little, but only fading, lilting echoes of her mother's Japanese.
Chrome has just begun to rise when she hears the footsteps on the other side of the double-doors, and then they swing open to the tune of Alessandra's surprised, delighted exclamation of, "Papà!"
Mukuro is fond of the greenery of Italy's countryside; it was he who purchased the seaside villa in Amalfi, one among the rose gardens, and when he enters the room, their fragrance follows, spiked as it is with Aglianico from the vineyards, soon to be crushed, and Yves Saint Laurent, his own preferred sub-category of cologne thereof. The fullness of his scent was one thing which Chrome had not anticipated during her years with his illusion, when she had only caught whiffs: a petal of rose or a peel of apple or a little dash of hotel mint and leather. Then, their meeting in the flesh. Linens and pillows drenched with his scent, the force of him, like a living thing, from the slide of his hair across the sheets, and his mouth tasted ever so slightly of leather, of metal, where he'd cup his hand to his lips in thought, or chew the ends of his hell rings, eyes half-lidded in mischievous ponderings, in schemes which brought in the uncalculated wealth (though this, you would know, was never their final intent, never the bottom line).
He moves with electric grace, a minor serpentine streak which never entirely departs from his limbs as he claps -- to the side -- and says: "Buongiorno, figlia mia. Come, come, let me have a look at her before she departs. I brought summer truffles -- " And with another wave, he presents the box. "The last of this year, I should say."
The girl climbs off the bed and makes her way to him in a series of hops. Truffles are exchanged; a tender, almost possessive stroke of the gift-giver's hand across her head -- and even Chrome can no longer tell what is parody. Idle affection he does best. It is the connectivity of conversation which has ever troubled Mukuro; he masks it well by asking pointless questions so as to drag one's words and thoughts out, so that what one hears is precisely what one wants to hear (their own voice, their own story). Here, again,
"I hope your studies are faring well. Tell me, what is your favourite book that you have read this year?"
She wrinkles her nose for a moment of thought, then ventures, "I like everything I read. But I guess -- Lolita, really."
A predictable answer. Even Chrome, of course, knows that this is the favourite book of every literati-in-training, every young European girl for whom the word sprezzatura is known and even used unironically, and every college freshman who has just stumbled giddily upon the classic texts. With a plot popular and internalized enough by society at large to be accessible and prose significant enough to merit its reputation, it sounds decent for an honest answer -- the kind of novel you know you're supposed to admire -- and Mukuro smiles knowingly at Chrome from across the room, as if to say, do you remember being like this? Though you were quite a bit older. Collegiate, I believe.
"Ah, my dear, it truly concerns me how the education system is always giving my child such -- " Dramatic pause. " -- morally unsound literature. Seeing a young girl in the throes of manipulation to an older man is. Well."
Chrome does not even need to lift her eye to know she is being gazed at.
"Questionable." Tap of the finger to the lips. Conversational laugh. "And what with all the incest and abuse and violence in those books of yours. It does make me wonder what I am doing spending such funds on providing your curriculum."
"Papà -- don't be so prudish. You don't understand literature. I love you, but."
"It's simply that I don't wish for my only progeny to be subjected to undue villainy. But I suppose they can't keep that out of the school systems, can they? The alternative was sending you to Catholic school, however, and while their sense of morality is -- interesting, to say the least, I thought that the whole fetish of putting up imagery of nude, flagellated men at every turn was perhaps advertising a little too strongly for the BDSM scene. My daughter should be free of such propaganda. How a parent suffers."
"I'm glad you didn't send me to Catholic school," Alessandra says, and he kisses her forehead.
A strange look, and then he tugs the glove off one hand.
Presses the back of it to her brow.
"You seem to be running a slight fever."
"I feel fine," she insists.
"Ah, perhaps it's just the sunlight, then. Did I hear your mother say you're going to the beach? Why don't you go ahead down and wait for her?" He looks at Chrome, eyes cool and distant and knowing. "She'll be along shortly."
~*~
Chrome opens her eye to a room that appears, for one moment, improbably blue-tinged. Shadowed. Length of a warm body curled against her, sinuous, and for a long instant, she drags in a breath. Tight. Half-choking.
A wave crashes hard outside, and the sunlight is as bright as ever.
"Yes," Mukuro whispers, a sibilant laugh, as his teeth graze the flesh of her earlobe, and his tongue laps a slow procession inward -- mimicry of the ocean beyond their doors, the licking of the tidal waters. "Calling out for me in your sleep, my Chrome."
A question or a statement, she is not certain, but she presses a hand to her forehead, wondering if she is the one who is running the fever. She does not remember lying back down. Does not remember dozing off. Glance at the clock. A jolt: 12:00 pm.
"Oh -- I didn't mean to -- she'll have been waiting on me." Fragments of words, and she is trying to rise.
A slip of leather-clad finger beneath her lip halts her, and she turns, half-way. The daylight renders Mukuro's red eye with a strange tinge of normalcy which is almost itself unsettling. "The child is well-supervised and enjoying herself with those her own age. For now, it is you I wish to attend upon."
She begins to respond automatically, to say, "oh, all right," but catches herself, remembering that --
Her last conscious thoughts had been, in fact, that she wished to speak with him. Chrome would not bother him about it in front of their daughter, but when Mukuro had walked in the door, she had wanted to ask him what good fortune had brought about his return. Had wanted to say, without casting aspersions (but with a considerably puzzled expression): I thought you had work to do. Sicily. A job. He had given her the details. Would not be returned for weeks.
"Of course it went well," he answers, and laughs once more. "Otherwise, how might I have been fortuitous enough to return to you?"
Slide-scrape of metal belt buckle as he stands and plucks a truffle from the box. He has not removed one item of clothing, though Chrome almost expects it. She can still feel the heat from his breath at the nape of her neck; the trail of his kisses a lightly reddened patch. It is odd, perhaps, that she trusts him, but she does. Knows there is nothing heinous he would do which he would bother to conceal; in his transparency, there is a paradoxical honesty, and she does not worry as she supposes other wives (which the papers, at least, title her as) must.
"But I have another. Tomorrow." He is beginning to tug his jacket from his shoulders.
Back against the headboard, half-sitting, half-lying, Chrome feels the expectant shiver. Could feel it even with her eye closed, because it is the sounds which alert her: rustle of clothing, rings dropping to the nightstand with reverberating metallic clicks, the jerk of a tie or belt. In contrast, she is wearing only a nightgown, silk, thin and flimsy, and his body heat has already burnt through it, settling deep in her skin. The tension in the air reaches past her clothing, and at the familiar quickened rhythm of his breath (so slight as to go almost unheard), she feels her breasts and belly prick with attentive sensation; an alert, heady, eager warmth which trails down her spine and pools heavily between her thighs, almost uncomfortable. The expectation, always so vividly intense, of being satisfied by that lean, hard body.
"So reactive even after all of these years," he muses, as if he can feel what she feels -- and perhaps he can, or some fair approximation, having lived in her as he has.
"I missed you."
"Did you? Slide those lacy things off, then. Let me taste how much."
His scent, like a wild creature around her, and then he is in the bed, the pieces continuing to be tossed, without regard, into the pile in the floor, until he is wearing only the clips in his ears and that cunning forever smile, and she is wearing only her eyepatch.
The white hot darkness surges around Chrome, once more, behind her good eye.
~*~
Mukuro has departed by the following day.
By the next, Chrome takes Alessandria to the hospital.
"Perhaps it is narcolepsy," Mukuro says, over the phone.
"I -- don't think so," Chrome replies. "She won't wake up."
And, indeed, it is dramatic.
The day before, Chrome had returned from a dinner party, pleasantly boozy, to find the child sprawled about the expansive sofa (where she had been nodding off into a nap before Chrome even departed), hair lopsided in her pinned ribbons, legs at implausible angles, but it was by no means an unusual pose for her, as she had always been, like her father, an expressive sleeper. The truffle box lay open on the glass dining table, and Chrome ate one of the remaining three before preparing herself a gin and tonic in the kitchen. Then, drink in hand, she had sat beside her daughter, the glow of the lamps and the Italian night sky feathering across their faces.
She had reached behind herself, dragging her fingernails against the criss-crossing marks on her back, her shoulders; most prominently on her neck, which fortunately her hair concealed. As promised, she had spent the afternoon before over-seeing her daughter beneath the unforgiving sunlight of la Costiera Amalfitana; had any among the legions of the hotel guests, the tourists, the dark-hued, sun-warmed beach dwellers -- had any noticed the bruise-bites which appeared here and there to the sides of her bikini straps? A scandalous story written upon her flesh.
Chrome, to her sometimes dismay, does not tan.
While seated in the living room of her villa, she had had a strange, niggling, incomprehensible feeling. Not necessarily an instance of negativity or a sense of dread, no. It was an emotion older than that. A great nameless thing -- when the shadows on the water and the stars and the night sink into your bones, and you feel, at once, pensive and restless, caught in the inescapable reality of your own humanity. Memento mori. Life, here and now: an assessment. Here am I. An adult. Thirty-(something; she deliberately strikes it out). Retired from what she had grown up doing. Retired from Japan. With her big, wide house -- and yet, she muses, not so unlike the big, wide house where she had first grown. Family? She had one. Friends? People to go out with, in the least.
Yet, alone with her thoughts and her gin and tonic in her big, wide house, alone with the starry sky and the sofa cushions and the ocean sounds and the water shadows -- alone in the beauty of the vast world at night, she had felt a curious absence.
And why? There was nothing missing from her life. Nothing in any respect.
It was only the solitude and quietness of the night which was playing tricks on her mind. Making her feel the weight of human loneliness.
The night, which says, in all its lulling beauty: We all go into the grave alone, in the end. What do your days amount to, but putting this off?
She dozed off, knowing it would be better come morning. Come life.
The next day, she awoke, but her daughter, she found, did not, and did not wake through the day.
Chrome touched her. Pulled at her. Spoke words. Implored -- then louder, with frantic urgency. Her name, again and again. Nothing besides the faintest stirring came as a result (if as a result), and even that, only on occasion.
After intermittent moments of pained staring, Chrome had run upstairs and pulled out the laptop. Typed in a string of information. She had, upon a random search, hit an article about a girl sleeping for two weeks. Kleine-Levin syndrome: another search, and she reads of a disorder wherein it is possible for a patient to sleep for weeks at a time, to wake and be well for months, then to fall into the pattern again.
Words. Phrases.
Unable to attend school or work.
Uncommunicative and bedridden even when awake.
She clicked out of the window and turned the computer off. Breathed in and resolved to take the child to the hospital.
It's only been a day, she tells herself, and it's only sleep. Only sleep. Probably nothing, in the end. Certainly not anything that could be named with an entire disorder. Disorders -- by this stage of her life, surviving all that she has, disorders must be things which happen to others. Things which happen to the children of others. A more natural cause, perhaps.
Had the truffles -- ? But no, she had eaten them, too. Mukuro had taken one, as well.
She remembers.
Think back.
Mention of a fever.
Why had she not done something, then?
"It's nothing they'll solve for you," he says now, on the other end of her cellphone. "I was younger than she was when I was taken in for health-related issues. I think one might recall how that turned out. Doctors in this country have curious tendencies. You would have better luck in dealing with the mind and body the way we always have -- the way I taught you."
"I need a diagnosis," she replies.
He laughs a little -- inappropriately, she thinks (for once not with fondness), and says, "My dear, you created your own organs, and I yours before you. You cannot deal with a sleeping child? I suppose I must make occasion to return home early, then. But if a diagnosis will ease your mind, then procure one -- no matter my misgivings about doctors touching that which is my own."
The tone of the final line, low and dark, surprises her. It was nothing they had ever discussed before, but she had not expected him to mind. Of course he must not mind too stridently or he would not agree at all, she reasons; that is one aspect of his demeanor she has long learned by now. It doesn't matter, she thinks, hands gripping the wheel tightly, shakily. It is only then that she realizes she has been crying -- when she wipes her eye and pulls her hand away to see it smeared with mascara, with shadow. It doesn't matter. Determinedly. Your paranoias. Your old ways. I put them behind me.
And it is the first time she realizes it is true.
Somewhere, at some point, she put everything behind her.
It's raining outside. Heavy, fast drops striking the windshield. A storm climbing up the Italian coast, one of the downfalls of life on an island, and she watches, bleary within and without, for the street lights, the signs, the turn signals. No driver for this occasion. No public transportation. Just herself. How long had it taken Chrome to bother to learn to drive? At some point in her life, had she not gone everywhere by plane, or with vehicles provided by her connections?
Beside her, in the passenger's seat, the child sleeps, looking content for all the world as contrasted against her mother's quiet, entrapped panic -- and it would be comical, were it all over, all a passing dream. Were this not happening.
Boss, she thinks, out of the blue. I'll call Boss.
But he is not her boss any longer, is he?
"Hello, Chrome," the voice at the other end, when she dials, and she almost deflates with relief. As if some piece of the world is all right again.
She explains the situation. Says she missed him. Just checking in, as well. The usual courtesies, and how is your wife?
Long silence.
"Do you trust Mukuro, Chrome?"
He had not answered many of her questions. For that matter, he seemed surprisingly incommunicative. Distant. Not like the Tsuna she had known before. But it must be her anxiety, she thinks. It is the day, wearing her out. Making her feel as if everything is off-kilter.
"I -- always have."
Chest tight.
And even now, she would be lying if she did not admit that Mukuro's tone of self-assurance had encouraged her. He had talked, as he always does, as if he might sweep in and restore everything. Repair it. Set it right. As if he could do so, and, perhaps more to the point -- as if she could not. As if she had forgotten how. And she almost begins to cry once more. Like having a god or a devil or a little piece of magic in your pocket; sometimes, that's what it was like with Mukuro. A handful of walking miracle. But she had not kept it at that. She had gone on and made a man of him. Consummated a relationship with him, bought a house, had a child.
You didn't do such things with a live wire, with the devil, with a handful of magic. You couldn't have them both, could you? The human and the power? Hadn't Chrome's powers all been sublimated by this adulthood?
"But this isn't about him, Boss," she adds, because -- right now, right this minute, it's not.
It's about her.
Her own ability to navigate a problem.
"Good luck, Chrome. Be sure to call me again tomorrow," he says, and, again, Tsuna's voice seems to convey words from across a great distance. A divide. "I have to go now. Work. But please, call me later."
Disconnect. Dead air.
Alone, again. When his voice goes, so go the tears, and she is clearheaded for the remainder of the drive to the mainland, past schools and streets and a crawl of rain-soaked cars, past convenience stores and apartments and the fenced in landscape of the Old World. How did it come to this. Chrome in a silver coupé, alone, with her ill child, and last night -- had she not been a different woman, only last night?
The hospital appears out of the greyness, monolithic brick, many-storied, surrounded by fir trees and car lots. One strangely out of season winter-black tree whose gnarled branches slide to her side view as she pulls in and parks the coupé. Then there's the walk inside, warm bundle of child in her arms, still sleeping, expression persistently untroubled. The wind latches hold of the umbrella, jerks it upwards, and both are splashed by rain. Beads of it on their jackets.
It occurs to her, as she signs the forms with the usual pseudonym, that none among their family holds an honest name; both she and Mukuro are estranged from their own relatives. What if family health history is asked into? What if transfusions are, for some reason, necessary? And Chrome recalls herself, only barely older: close relative, they had insisted.
She -- he -- had severed their pasts.
The insurance will cover the expenses, at least, and that is paid for under both of their pseudonyms.
"All expenses will be accounted for," says the woman behind the desk, smile affable.
Chrome drinks coffee in the lounge from patterned paper cups. Watches the slack faces of the others in the waiting room. Hears the whirr of the vending machine.
Thinks that it must not be anything too severe. Sleeping sickness. Only a minor bout.
Must not be anything too --
Cannot be.
It rains.
~*~
When she wakes, she does not hear the rain.
The machine, also, is different.
Pulsing beat of a heart monitor.
Voices, indistinguishable conversation filtering through a haze; bright lights, and the words seep past the flourescence, condense into a cloud of a murmur, and it is with tremulous self-awareness that the old scene returns to her. That the old nightmare begins, and here she is: here the girl is, on a table, draped in a white sheet, all laid out to die. There is, indeed, a tube in her nose. Chrome cries out, and the voices turn on her in agitation, and the next thing she knows, she is jerking at the tubes, leaping from the hospital bed in one swift motion which slams her hard onto the ground, a sharp pain flaring in her shin.
Someone is telling her to calm down, please, for the treatment has not ended yet.
You have the wrong person, she thinks. I'm not the patient.
And she says this, or merely thinks it. In that moment, she is not sure which; an anaesthetic of some variety is flowing through her system, dulling her senses, and her words? She does not know if she is giving words. Even her own name. But the animal panic to escape compels her to remember herself.
The way I taught you, she almost hears him say, and in another instant, the reflexes of her former life return.
There are lotus petals in her wake as the hospital door is torn open.
~*~
That Chrome is able to reach her driveway without destroying herself in a car crash is surprising even to her.
By the time she pulls in, she is half-hysterical, drawing air in panicky breaths. She is still wearing a hospital gown, drenched now, blood fresh on her nose from where she had torn the tube out. Shaking with nerves and chill. She had accosted an orderly in the hall, had demanded to know the condition of her child. And when Chrome had given a name, the orderly had replied, with a curious expression,
"There is no patient here by that name. I'm sorry. I can try the other branch -- "
"No," she insisted. No. This is the room they told me. Take me to it.
But when she arrived, the room was empty. Sterile and white. Sheets unrumpled. Unlived in. An impossibility. Here she found herself questioning her own perception of reality. Had that rainy drive truly happened. Had she spoken to Mukuro. To Boss. Had he been there. Brought truffles. Had she, only the day before, spent an afternoon at the beach. Had she checked her daughter in here. Had she just been assaulted. Had she even escaped.
What was she escaping.
"Your own name," she is told, "does appear, though."
Multiple times.
A suspicion, but she does not want to believe it.
Who signed the papers?
But they cannot tell her. And would a name tell her anything? Perhaps it is someone from her past, returned. Some enemy to the Famiglia. Someone old enemy of an alliance she had rubbed the way with a hit. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it's. But the name would not reveal a single thing, would it? It could be any name. Any name. Any face. That was something he had taught her. Friend or foe. Nondescript people blurring into crowds.
It could be anyone.
She returns home. Not out of defeat, because she's determined not to be defeated, and not because she does not intend to scrape those people off the map, whoever may be controlling them (and the instinctual violence of the thought, even now, surprises her a little). No. She returns for answers. She returns, as if tugged by gravity, because something tells her that the house holds the answer. That it will be waiting for her. That it has been here, with her, all along, and she has somehow been looking in the other direction. There is no rational reason to believe this -- to believe that these events have any meaning whatsoever that could be discerned to her now, and yet she is certain there was some word, some moment, something which had already transpired.
In the past two days, it is there, lurking.
It must be. If only she could remember.
Truffle box on the table. Opened, but nearly full again. As if they had replenished themselves.
The hospital staff's words, when she checked in:
All expenses will be accounted for.
It is to her own surprise that no one attempted to stop her when she walked out.
She tries to phone Tsuna, Gokudera, Yamamoto. Anyone. The lines are all dead. Moreover, she receives messages that their phones are no longer in operation. But that's impossible; she just spoke with Tsuna earlier in the day. Or did she? Chrome is certain of nothing anymore. Her wide house, once imperious, now looms. Large, with dark corners, and the rose gardens are drowning with the gush of the downpour. The wind moans in the distance like a hungry spirit, and the ocean sighs its response.
The house is empty.
Empty. Lifeless. She opens the nightstand upstairs and removes her revolver.
It has been many years since she has used it properly, and her hands are still given to incessant shivers. The ocean roars outside the window, huge and tossing and threatening to grow with the storm. Below, the door creaks, and it could be the wind, but she knows it is not the wind. It is not. The rumbling sounds of the storm produce illusory noise, as lawn chairs and trees fall by the wayside --
-- but. Thap, thap, thap.
There is no mistaking the sound of footfalls, cushioned on the carpeted floor.
She finishes loading the gun.
Points it at the bedroom door.
"Well," Mukuro says, as he opens it, "do you see what I meant about hospitals? They can't be trusted to do a job properly. There was no reason for all of this. I had to rush home to make certain nothing went wrong, but even now, it appears I'm too late."
Her knees buckle. The tears which have been accumulating in her eye begin to fall again; his expression is mysterious, but unsatisfied. "What did you do?"
She asks. Does not want to ask. Not now. Not even now.
"You don't trust me, then?"
"I want to." By this point, the admission is at least half-rueful. She is, she realizes, still holding the weapon. Still ready to kill him. To kill him. And it's the first time the thought occurs to her so consciously.
She whips the pistol around, shifting the intended target.
"Nagi. I promise -- "
"Where are they? Boss, Gokudera, Yamamoto? Everyone? What did you do to them?"
"I saw to their deaths," he answers matter-of-factly. Then, "Years ago."
She does not move.
Mukuro sighs, long-suffering, as if the one who is ragged and bleeding. In fact, so far as Chrome can see, there is not a droplet of water on him. His hair, still tied, is impeccable for its lack of disarray. "The Tsunayoshi you spoke with today was an aural illusion I created for you."
Chrome sits on the bed. Folds her arms in her lap in a parody of ladylike manners. The gun is still there, albeit limply and loosely held. Mukuro watches, leaning on the doorframe. She does not make eye contact, but she can see that, in the twilight created by the storm, he appears frustrated, almost aggrieved. It is a rare look, but on such a day, she can hardly be bothered to care. There is one person she has not asked about yet. She does not think she wishes to know.
"Alessandria?"
A pause.
"Her organs were donated to others, even as I had given you yours. I suppose some would call that irony." He is looking down, twisting one of his rings. "She died years ago, as well. I was -- approximating, of course, in my conception of what she would grow to be like."
It should be surprising. It should be shattering. But the first thought, amid the bile in her throat, is: You knew this.
Voice fragile as rice paper: "Your doing?"
"No, Nagi. It was yours." He looks slightly exasperated by this situation, but impossibly, impossibly, there is a hint of tenderness as he lifts his hands -- the old theatrical story-telling style. "Euripides writes of Medea, who destroyed her children as vengeance upon her husband. I could have supposed that this was the case with you, but I do not think it was so pre-meditated. I think you must have lost your mind after I orchestrated the others' deaths. You locked your hands around her throat and -- you said you were saving her, I believe. From me, perhaps? I never knew. That was the best I could understand it."
A sigh.
"Foolish and wasteful, I thought. I would've taken care of the child, of course. She came from you, and was mine, as well. I would have taken care of both of you, but I suppose I pushed you too far, in the end. You did not wish to remember. We agreed that you would not. You were the one who signed the papers. You agreed to undergo treatment, and I -- of course I would supply my precious Nagi with the life she had always wished for."
He walks to the window and opens it, gazing down wistfully at the rose gardens.
"After everything, this was truly the best outcome we could have hoped for. A life of endless joy. Or it would've been, had you not developed some slight immunity to the injections. I had to return home early this last time and orchestrate a diversion for you to go to the hospital, and they still botched it. Now, I suppose, you understand my contempt."
The sleeping sickness, Chrome remembers with floating clarity, was her own. Little details: The alarm clock being set on a day she did not have to work (though this was always, now), the bedroom with her drowsy offspring, waking up with Mukuro shortly thereafter and losing an hour of life at random, and the next night, that strange feeling -- the tiredness which overcame her. A result of the treatment she had been under. The drugs which had facilitated her memory loss, aided undoubtedly by his powers. The warm patches at the back of her neck: sites of input, needle scars she could not see.
She remembers.
And it was beautiful.
It was perfect.
It was made to be so perfect.
He is still looking down at the rose garden. Chrome once jumped five stories and only broke an arm; three stories and a fall into roses -- no, that might not work. But wouldn't it be a pretty way to go? Picturesque, like everything else within their estate. Her fingers smooth over the trigger: words, images. The way we always have -- the way I taught you. The way you taught me. His back is turned. She could just --
Or she might put the gun to her temple. One click, and eternal forgetfulness. Would he even look around and see? Would he leap into her body and halt her hand? Plath had treated it as an out. A form of resistance. Barnes had written that force-feeding deprived one of the right to die, to make that final stand, the ultimate rebellion.
She has been force-fed a steady diet of lies.
Chrome lifts the gun. Points at --
And destroy the first and last person in her life?
Destroy the last person in his?
For giving her what she always wanted, or for the fact that he had done only what he had always said he would?
"Come, come, Nagi," he says, not turning. "Do not despair for loss. This is not in the end. In our world, nothing need ever be transient. I'll see to it that the dosage is fixed or the medication is changed to something more potent. Come here. You will wake up tomorrow and all will be as it was two days ago."
Gradually, she stands.
Pads to the window. Leans heavily upon the sill.
"Look at those roses I made for you."
"I can't see them anymore," she admits.
Illusions are based upon one's abilities to believe what they see or hear.
The veneer having worn off, Chrome sees only weeds.
An old mansion, eroded with years.
The Estraneo estate. It withers with its ghosts.
"You will see them again, tomorrow," he says, and brushes her hair, and Chrome leans hard.
Thinks: It is a long way down.
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
-- "Sunday Morning," Wallace Stevens