Be Happy, I Love You [fic]
The ring drops out of his numb fingers as he tries to pick it up, and it spins across the floor, glinting in the last ray of sun through the dark, roiling clouds, before that light is blotted out and the gem’s fire dies, leaving dead stone.
--
The path isn't an easy one and neither of them would have chosen it, but in the end everything is never lost, and something new can always be found. 27K and 2759. Angst/tragedy-->romance/hurt/comfort. Character death. Will probably end up with a sequel at some point in the nearish future.
It takes them almost nine years. Death and tragedy and white funeral flowers and heartbreak.
Sasagawa Kyoko dies because she’s kind; because when a man comes to her shaking and sobbing and pleads for shelter from the vengeful family he left behind, she accepts him whole-heartedly with that kind smile that her boyfriend loves so much-the one he’s thinking of as, at that moment, he reaches out and takes a little velvet box from a jeweler’s hand, staring at the diamond ring inside. She’s worth it, he thinks, as she leans forward, worried at the sight of spattered blood on the man’s coat, she’ll love it as he reaches out as though to take her shoulder for support.
The ring drops out of his numb fingers as he tries to pick it up and it spins across the floor, glinting in the last ray of sun through the dark, roiling clouds, before that light is blotted out and the gem’s fire dies, leaving dead stone.
The knife is small and vicious and sharp, small enough to hide in the sleeve of a jacket, vicious enough to disregard beauty and kindness and a sweet smile, sharp enough to slit a soft human body from ribs to pelvis without catching, almost without pain. Hayato’s down the road when he hears the screams, and when he arrives the man has a split second to smile at him before he raises the knife and slits his own throat.
He’s seen far too many deaths and he knows the instant he sees her; knows there’s nothing he can do, that these are the last seconds of her life-unforgivable, an unforgivable sin this can’t be happening-but he yells at a terrified woman “-call an ambulance!” and drops down next to her anyway, pressing the wound shut, trying vainly to stem the rush of hot blood over his hands.
She shakes her head and tugs gently on his hands, pulling him towards her face. And he can hear her ragged breathing, wet with blood, and her whisper, “…tell him I…love him-be-happy-” He’s seen death before, seen people cry and shake and scream as they struggle to hold on to life and he has survived that terrible sight.
But as her eyes glaze and start to fall shut and go dark, it’s the sight of her sweet, untainted smile that almost breaks him.
“…sorry,” she breathes, her voice fading already, blood staining his hands and his knees and turning her chest and stomach pure red. “…I…I love…him…tell him…b-brother…Tsuna…” For a second her voice hitches like she’s about to cry, but she smiles like the sun and her hand rises to his face and leaves its scarlet handprint there, unbearably gentle. Her eyes catch his, and she smiles just for him, and he knows the words she isn’t saying and they make him want to scream but he can’t, not when her voice is so faint, fading, fading- “…going…earlier…than I thought…I love…all of you-all of-so much…”
“I’ll tell him,” he thinks he says, and she smiles and smiles. “…I’ll tell him-I should have-I’m so sorry-I was supposed to-”
But she shakes her head, her hand cooling on his cheek, the flush leaving her cheeks as people murmur faintly around them, distant, unimportant. “…all of…you,” she repeats, and those words are forgiveness, those words absolve him even as her eyes fall shut. “…love…”
Sasagawa Kyoko dies because she’s kind, and it’s hours before he can bring himself to wash her blood off his hands.
The family never stops mourning her, really. She was light, and joy, and hope, and they still have all those with her gone, but it’s…colder. She’s lost, forever, all for a second of slicing impact, a single cut and she vanished, ephemeral. Hayato tells the family her last words-he doesn’t cry but he can’t smile like her either, and he can’t look as Tsuna collapses in on himself. He’s frozen where he is, in so much agony he can’t even hurt anymore. He’s numb. Numb as the other guardians stare at him, devastated and disbelieving; as Ryouhei roars his grief and agony, he stares ahead, and he sees her smile and doesn’t understand the feeling in his chest. It’s too huge-trying to understand how he’s feeling is like being an ant trying to comprehend the ocean. He doesn’t feel a thing, because he’s not capable of feeling.
…and then, soft and shaking and broken, Tsuna starts to cry. And his world shatters.
He runs.
Nobody tries to stop him and he runs and he doesn’t stop until he’s far away from the base, and he remembers the crest of the ring the man was wearing on his bloody hand and grinds his teeth until his jaw feels like it will crack.
The Vongola name gets him into an airport and off the ground in hours. By the time Tsuna’s tears dry and he gathers the family together again, Hayato is six thousand miles away, stepping onto Italian soil for the first time in years. By the time they notice he’s not there, he’s standing under the sky, his mind cold and empty as the aching void in his chest. By the time they realize he’s truly gone he’s walked down through the town, to the crashing, roaring waves of the seaside. He looks down at his phone and the missed calls and unread texts from desperate friends-brothers, sisters, family-wanting him back, wanting him there with them in their suffering, asking where he’s gone, afraid for him.
Then draws back his arm, hearing it ring Tenth’s ringtone for the hundredth time, and throws it out into the water. He watches the water close over it as though it was never there, his only connection to home, gone…
He leaves his family behind and he runs.
They find him almost a week later, still huddled in the cold ashes of a flattened mansion, surrounded by the aging corpses of the dead. It’s rained on these since the explosion that hit this place like a thunderbolt; in the fall the rain is freezing and merciless, but he sits there, still and staring out at the sea from the ashen wreckage. He came here to kill them all, even if he had to throw his life away for his revenge.
He came here to die. And now he doesn’t care anymore.
Tsuna tugs him up by his bloody shirtfront and hits him so hard he almost breaks his nose. Screams at him how dare you you bastard how dare you leave like that without telling us where you were, how dare you do this on your own do you have any idea what it would have been like if you’d-?! but he knows Hayato’s mind almost like he knows his own. He knows that screaming at him and hurting him will never have an effect on him when he’s like this. Hayato believes he deserves it.
And the worst part is, Tsuna believes the same thing.
“I hate you,” he says, soft and painful and broken, and he falls to his knees and tugs him close, not caring that the smell of ashes and rotting blood soaks into his skin, clinging to him like a lifeline. “…I hate you, I hate you I hate-” until he’s not even sure which of them he’s talking about anymore, until Hayato has finally broken and clung to him, shaking, hurting too badly to cry, just trembling like a terrified child after a nightmare, holding him so tight he can’t breathe. He doesn’t need to though-doesn’t want to breathe. She’s dead. She’s dead.
“They’re all gone,” he whispers, and Hayato croaks yes Tenth I’m sorry I’m so sorry I’m sorry I killed-killed so many-“-don’t. Don’t say it. Don’t talk, just…”
They cling to each other in the ashes and Tsuna wails and sobs into his shoulder and Hayato just holds him and shakes, blood caked on his hands like a second skin.
It takes more than a year for Tsuna to go almost back to normal.
He wears the engagement ring around his neck on a thin chain; his smiles are tiny and shaky, but they get better as Hayato resonates his grief, the bereaved to the failure. Yamamoto supports him tirelessly, coaxing him to another smile, another warm time with the family, another word. He gets better, slowly, and the words ‘I hate you’ fade from the air between them, along with the many new scars of that one-man massacre and the quiet, shivering nightmares that leave Hayato drained and sick.
After all, she told them to be happy.
Her brother is a little quieter and that scar will never completely heal. But he tries his best and he fights through it like he does everything else, taking his strength from the people around him and powering through. Yamamoto soothes and laughs and smiles, but his smiles are a little darker now; a little sadder. Haru kept a pair of her earrings-a scarf, a pair of shoes she never got to return. Some days she still finds things, she confides to Hayato, and he pretends he’s not listening, like the words don’t make his whole body tighten in a flinch as a tight stab of pain rekindles for a moment in his chest. Sometimes she finds Kyoko’s things mixed in with hers, and it hits her all over again.
“I love you so much,” Hayato repeats for Tsuna over and over again when he asks, and Tsuna closes his eyes and clutches his hand, listening with everything he has, hands tightening almost painfully. “…be happy. I love you so much.” Repeats it until he doesn’t know-until he can’t tell, racked with guilt at every syllable, whose voice he’s using anymore. Repeats it until he doesn’t know who he’s speaking for. Repeats it until he catches himself wishing with bitter, painful hope that Tsuna is listening to his voice. Words well up in him-words he wishes to say, words too cruel to say out loud-it’s been almost two years, he wants to say; you would have been married by now. It’s been almost two years. She knew how I felt about you from the moment she saw us. Two years, we’re almost twenty-five now, so much further than we ever thought we’d go. And I would have cried at your wedding and you would have thought it was just because I was so glad to see you happy. But her words are truer and better and all he can do is repeat them, the words Tenth wants to hear. “I love you so much. Be happy. I love you. I love you-Tenth-”
He cuts off the word, an aborted gasp, but it already slipped out. Tsuna’s hand lets go of his like it’s red-hot, jolted by shock at the break in the familiar mantra, the calm world shaken and thrown onto its head again. He stares at Gokudera, and it’s clear he’s expecting him to continue-to say something, anything, to make this okay.
He can’t. There’s nothing to say.
Tsuna throws himself to his feet, shaking his head jerkily, his mouth forming silent words-no, please, no, don’t-
He turns his back and he runs.
Be happy.
Hayato looks after him, and wonders how much more badly he can possibly ruin his own life.
“…K…Kyoko-san,” he says roughly, softly, and then, more steadily, “…Kyoko.” He hasn’t said her name since then, almost two years flashing past. She used to smile at him. She saw the way he looked at Tsuna, nothing escaped those kind, brown eyes, but she smiled at him anyway and no matter how he felt about her when he met her she had been kind and pure and good and he had been willing to serve her. She had deserved Tsuna-Tsuna had deserved her, they had been right and Hayato had loved her…had devoted himself to her protection. The princess of the Vongola. “Kyoko, I-”
That’s what you were trying to tell me, right? That single second where she looked into his eyes and touched his face, hadn’t she nodded just a little, hadn’t she smiled just for him, wasn’t this okay-I need this please you’re gone and I know he still wants you, but…
“I…l-love…” he’s said the words so many times, stealing her voice, resting in the security of her last words, weak and wanting those words to belong to him-now he says them for himself and they catch painfully in his throat, strangling him. “…I love-” But his voice breaks, and he can still see her eyes smiling at him as they went dark. Oh stop calling me Sasagawa-san! It’s ‘Kyoko’, just Kyoko. “I…love…h-him. I love--I’m so sorry...” The words spill out of him, broken, “-I know you...deserve...deserved him so much more than me, I know, but-but I-”
He never makes excuses, never to her or to Tenth, but that’s all he can say. I’m so sorry, you deserved him you were better than me I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. He drops his head into his arms and whispers those words over and over again to the ghost of a woman who should never have died-a woman he should have been there to save. “I’m so sorry-” and then, even softer, tiny and pitiful and quavering. “…Tenth…” The word breaks again, and he has to bite his lip and struggle to breathe for a moment, refusing the tears that are building in his eyes. “I don’t deserve-dammit, I shouldn’t have…compared to her I’m just-god…I’m so sorry, Tenth.”
He’s sunk so far down, he doesn’t even hear the soft footsteps coming closer, and he jerks upright as a hand touches his shoulder, letting out a breathless curse that’s more like a sob.
Tenth looks down at him like he’s almost as scared as Hayato is, his hand closed firmly on Hayato’s shoulder.
“How…how long?” He asks, and his voice is shaking and breathless. “How long have you--?”
Please, he wants to say, please, forget that I ever said it, forget I even-but he also wants to grab the hand off his shoulder and press his lips to it, to feel him, taste his skin…
“Years,” he croaks, “-I don’t…the ring battles, or…or the future, or…or the first time I met…”
Tsuna dives down towards him and he rocks back against the wall with a startled sound because Tenth is kissing him.
Tenth is...
...Tenth is...
…Tsuna pulls back, breathing hard, and Hayato just stares at him. And stares at him. And stares at him. And finally Tsuna says, shaky and nervous, “-well-? I mean-I-” He’s blushing. Hayato hasn’t seen him blush in so long…it makes him look young again. (You could be young again, you could be my Tenth and I could be your Gokudera-kun and this whole thing could never have happened-)
…but no, because there’s still a glinting engagement ring hanging around Tsuna’s neck, never worn, and he can’t pretend this never happened.
“…did I wait too long?” Tsuna mumbles, and he raises the hand on Hayato’s shoulder, cautious and ever-so-slightly trembling, to cup one pale cheek. “…I mean…you’ve…if you’ve…for such a long time-”
“But-” he can barely breathe, like that split-second kiss stole the breath right out of his lungs. “-but...but you love-”
“I did-I do.” Tsuna shakes his head and squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them again they’re swimming with tears. “But...but I-” his voice breaks, as the first tear trickles down his cheek. “…but for you-if it’s you-I could love you, too.”
He doesn’t know whether that makes him want to laugh or cry or scream-and he doesn’t know which of the three the noise that comes out of his mouth belongs to either. It’s a choked, shuddering sound. But he can’t help but lean into Tenth’s hand, and that hand isn’t shaking anymore. The longer it touches his skin the warmer it feels, like Tsuna’s finally melting again, thawing from his months and years of mourning. Maybe this isn’t just pity, maybe…just maybe…
He leans forward and kisses his boss-kisses Tsuna gently, and then again and again and again and the dream isn’t ending and there’s still a hand on his cheek, pulling him in. He can’t breathe but he doesn’t care and he gasps for breath between kisses and then jerks forward again. He can breathe later after this miracle ends, he can think later but now he doesn’t care, Tenth wants him and every cell of his body wants Tenth in return and if it ends tomorrow morning it will have been for tonight and he’ll hold onto that forever-
“-kudera-mm-! Gokudera-kun-!” Tsuna grabs his shoulders and pushes him away to arm’s length, and for the first time in a long time, he laughs that breathless laugh. Hayato realizes suddenly maybe Tenth has been trying to get his attention for quite a while, and immediately resolves to be more attentive, no matter how badly he wants…well…everything he wants. He can’t risk doing something that Tenth doesn’t want him to do, he would never forgive himself. “-calm down! It’s okay! I’m not going anywhere!” And then his eyes soften and he smiles, a little sadly, and strokes Gokudera’s cheek gently. “…I didn’t…I didn’t know,” he says, and before Gokudera can ask what he mean he pulls his hand away and his fingertips are wet. “…I’m sorry.”
“-oh-” he wipes his face hastily on his sleeve, scrubbing roughly at his wet eyes. “-shit, I didn’t-n-no, it’s not your fault at all! I’m the one who should be apologizing!”
“No.” Tsuna catches his wrists and pulls his hands away from his face with gentle, inexorable force, and looks directly into his eyes. He has to look away…his face is still streaked with tears, his eyes must be red and bloodshot, his cheeks flushed with embarrassment at the humiliation of being caught crying by the person he respects the most in the world. “No, Gokudera-kun, look at me. Look at me. You have nothing to apologize for.” His eyes are fixed on Gokudera’s-the intensity of those eyes, of the meaning behind the words, makes his heart pound in his throat. “…nothing to apologize for,” he repeats, and his hand is like Kyoko’s, warm and gentle, forgiving him for his failure.
“She was…she was a better choice,” he mumbles, and Tsuna’s eyes flinch away-close with pain for a second. And that hurts, and he’s terrified but he has to say it, because Tsuna never will. “…she was a better choice than me, Tenth, I’m-I’m seriously messed up, I do things wrong, I know I-I’m still really stupid most of the time and-and weak, and I panic really easily, and I’m not...I can’t-but I’ll try!” He leans forward, awkward but earnest, bumping their foreheads together and breathing in the warmth of his skin. “…I’ll try. I’ll do my best, I swear.”
“That’s all I ever asked you for,” Tsuna laughs, and sniffs hard, rubbing his nose. “-well, no. I asked you to stop blowing things up, too.”
Oh god I love him I love him so much. Just the sight of his smile, the sound of his laugh is too much and Gokudera dives forward again and kisses him desperately, stomach twisting at the way he gasps into the kiss and then relaxes and kisses him gently back, laughing softly again as they pull apart for air. “Is this-this is going to happen every time I open my mouth to say something, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Gokudera breathes, and buries his face in his boss’s shoulder, holding him tight. “…yes, yes, until you tell me to stop. I…I can’t…it’s too…Tenth…”
“Shh…” Tsuna raises a hand and lays it awkwardly on his hair, and Gokudera just presses his face into the worn silk of his suit and breathes. “Shh-it’s okay. I’m…I’m right here. Okay?” It’s that feeling again, like he’s trying to fit a sun inside of his body, like there’s something vast around him that he can’t hope to possibly comprehend. He tries to understand how happy he is, how absolutely he adores this man…
…he can’t even begin to scratch the surface.
“I love you,” he breathes, and this time the words are his and Tsuna’s hand strokes his hair. “-I love you-I love you so much, so much, I love you so much-Tenth…”
“Tsuna,” Tsuna murmurs. “I…well, If…if that’s okay…Hayato.”
--and when that voice murmuring his name breaks him wide open and vulnerable that overwhelming, incomprehensible love flows in a little more and floods him and it’s all he can do to gasp-
“-Tsuna,” he whispers, barely audible, and Tsuna’s hand stills on his hair as a soft, shocked sound echoes through his chest. “I…love you. Ten-Tsuna.”
Time passes unmarked in a room without windows; they sit there, rocking gently back and forth in silence, thinking their own thoughts until finally Tsuna sighs and raises his head.
“I can’t believe you’ve…you’ve been hanging on for nine years,” Tsuna mumbles. “…that’s crazy. I mean, I’m just…I still just feel so normal, but all of you…especially you…Goku…” he stumbles for a moment-laughs sheepishly and corrects himself. “-Hayato. I don’t know how you can hang on this long-how you can put so much faith…”
“We love you, Tenth,” mumbles Gokudera, his head still resting on his boss’s shoulder. “-but-but I love you the most!” He hastens to interject, and Tsuna laughs runs his fingers through silver hair again, smiling his shaky, rueful smile. “Especially that bastard Hibari and Mukuro, that creepy asshole-”
“Calm down!” Tsuna shakes his head, waving his hands soothingly in front of him. Hayato looks disgruntled at the thought of the mist and cloud guardians, but he allows himself to be coaxed back down and have his hair stroked again, the tension melting out of his shoulders at the touch. “I know. I mean…I trust Hibari-san…sort of…and Mukuro-san…k-kind of, but I mean…I don’t want to get bitten to death! Or possessed.” He smiles, and Gokudera shivers in absolute bliss as his boss presses a kiss to the top of his bowed head, warm breath ruffling his silver hair. “…you,” he murmurs, and Hayato can feel his heart beating, can hear him breathe. “…I know I can trust you. With everything. No matter what.”
There’s a moment, shaking and painful and glorious, where he breathes in Tsuna’s scent and feels his pulse and hears his voice and he almost breaks down into tears again. He presses his face into that warmth and goes still, and they let the silence fall over them again, time immeasurable rolling past.
“…we need to go out and go to dinner,” says Tsuna eventually, and leans back. Gokudera has to sit up, reluctantly, although he doesn’t let go of his boss’s hand. “I don’t…I don’t know what time it is … It has to be almost seven by now.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gokudera mutters, but he stands up when Tsuna pulls his hand, and they lead each other out into the light.