True Colors
I feel like GokuHaru again!
To satisfy my craving for my newly favorite OTP I've whipped up this 2 part story. I hope to have the next part done by tomorrow...or tonight? It's past midnight in my zone. lol. Anyway, do enjoy and leave your reactions as desired.
Title: True Colors
By: lunadeartemis
Paring: GokuHaru
Rating: PG (Swearing)
Summary: Miura Haru doesn't want to feel like she's a piece of furniture to him any longer.
She can feel his stare bludgeoning her spine.
He’s as relentless as always, acting offended when he’s at fault for never giving her what she wants. Which, she in turn finds unreasonable: that he finds her expectations just as unreasonable.
“You know how I am,” he says whenever she comes out and says what’s bothering her, dismissing her. It makes her love corrode into something ugly, anger and loathing that drives between them like metal bars. She can see him and reach for him, but something will always be in the way.
His dumb ego.
The insults.
They are a part of him, but even after all this time he never notices when he drives too deep. He wounds her time and again, and tonight she can’t say she can let it go. She can’t affirm whether she wants to hold onto him or not. The bitterness, she feels, coats her love for him so that it is hard to put the two into separate feelings.
Does she love him, or does she hate him?
Haru is not sure anymore.
---
“Stupid woman,” he mutters in her ear, taking her elbow as she tries to mingle away into the sea of suits and dresses that grace Vongola Decimo’s birthday party. “You’re avoiding me again.”
She stops and regards him with cold balefulness, the chrome lining her eyes glinting like steel. It makes his breath catch, and he rolls his eyes to disguise his reverence. “You’re embarrassing me, you know,” he growls.
He’s right. Two can play his hurtful game. He refuses to show her he loves her, so she suffices to do the same. By now, everybody has noticed that Miura Haru has been snubbing her boyfriend all night.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she answers, pulling away from him and continuing to walk on, noting how his cheeks have reddened and more than one person is murmuring about their wreck of a relationship.
His brow furrows and he moves to walk along with her, and uses his height and strength as leverage to maneuver her to a secluded balcony, despite her attempts to meander away.
She gives up, and stalks to the railing, planting her elbows on the stucco, gazing anywhere but at him. He comes up next to her, leaning back and pulling out a cigarette. He lights it and takes a long drag before exhaling. “Two weeks ago…” he begins, and her heart constricts. “I guess I should apologize. I didn’t mean what I said, you should know that.”
“Haru thinks that you expect too much,” she replies, surprising him with her calm, colorless tone. She should be teary, shouting, red-faced, not expressionless like she is right now. He feels something foreboding expand in his chest, sending danger signals to his brain.
“Haru,” he murmurs, throwing the cigarette down and grinding it under his foot.
“Haru thinks that she should be able to love you, and be loved back. But instead, Haru has to suck it up and understand that her boyfriend is a mean jerk. I have to swallow insults, and sort through them to find out what you really mean.” She stares at him, glassy-eyed and lips quivering. “It isn’t fair. You make me so sad, and I don’t know if I can stand feeling like this anymore.”
There’s something stuck in his throat an all he can do is stare at her incredulously, his body heavy like his tongue. She straightens her spine and smiles at him bitterly, her lips stretching into a counterfeit smile to keep from sobbing, but the tears curving down the slope of her cheeks are not to be deterred.
“Haru has been thinking about this for a while. That it would be best to end this now, before we hurt each other anymore,” she says, her shoulders quaking. “You don’t have to worry about it being awkward either; I’ve decided to go back to Japan for a while.”
He continues to stare, unable to process that the stupid woman is breaking up with him. She can’t, can she? He’s never analyzed what he should do in a situation like this, because in his mind he had already decided she was forever. How? How?
She is walking away now, and the box in the pocket of his slacks burns through the cloth against his skin.
---
“There he is!” exclaims Yamamoto as he pushes open the door to the Tenth’s study. All the guardians and family are already there. The Tenth stands up from the red couch, and his wife rises with him. Kyoko san looks like she’s about to burst from excitement, and the Tenth is smiling brightly, never one to hide what he is feeling.
Surrounding the pair are the sports freaks, the stupid cow, I-pin, and the Tenth’s parents. Over by the window Hibari attempts to seclude himself, and close by at a small table sit his sister, who is holding Reborn, Futa, and Chrome.
He knows that the expression on his face will give everything away. There’s no way he can hold back his sorrow, not when it’s so fresh and stunning, still buzzing in his veins, shocking him with new waves of pain every time he breathes.
“T−Tenth,” he gasps, standing before them all, feeling lost.
The boss is at his side in an instant. “Gokudera kun! What happened? Where’s−” He trails off, looking for Haru, but the stupid woman isn’t beside him. Nevermore will she be.
“She left me, Tenth. She told me it was over.” He looks at his boss desperately, finding a little bit of solace in the disbelief that overtakes his features. Someone else also can’t believe this is happening. “I didn’t even get to propose.”
Yamamoto is clapping a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, and Ryohei is shouting about how this can’t be extremely happening. He glances up to see Kyoko san looking devastated and near tears. But she’s not looking at him, instead she’s typing furiously, fingers blurring over the keypad of her cell.
Tsuna’s mother envelops him in a hug, confusion on her face, but clearly she means to comfort him. He finds himself sagging in her arms, unable to sustain himself too well.
“I went too far, Tenth,” he attempts to explain. “I never noticed how I hurt her. I never thought she could−“ It hadn’t been plausible. How could she go when the thought of ever being without her had never crossed his mind? Haru was constant. She was supposed to love him always. But now she was gone.
“Haru chan says she’s going to be gone for a while. She says not to worry,” says Kyoko san, already typing. Another crease dimples over her brow. “She just blocked my phone…my message was sent back.”
The Tenth pulls out his phone, as does seemingly everyone else in the room with a handheld, and he is led to the red sofa where he falls into the velvet like a sock puppet. No one is able to get a hold of her.
Gokudera Hayato closes his eyes and sees her face. He sees her in his mind’s eye as his vision last drank the sight of her, drowning in tears, leaving him before he could say or do anything to stop her.
“We’ll find her, Gokudera kun,” the Tenth assures, but he’s not sure that it will make a difference.
---
“It’s nice of you to come and visit me, Tsuna san,” she says brightly, leading him from the elevators to the restaurant in the hotel he surprised her in. She was in her room, surrounded by her three laptops as she worked on a system for Giannini from an inconspicuous hotel in Sicily. It took one of his investigative teams to find out that she had never left Italy in the first place.
She had been surprised when he was the one behind the knock on her door. Her eyes had immediately scanned behind him, no doubt looking for his right-hand man.
“I’m alone, Haru,” he told her, smiling sadly at the state his friends were in. “Can I come in?”
She returned his pained smile and invited him downstairs, where they currently walk into a small restaurant and are seated in a secluded corner for privacy.
“I’m sorry, Tsuna san. I must have worried you and Kyoko chan. But I just had to get away for a while.” She doesn’t say his name.
“I understand,” he appeases her, taking her hand over the table. Her lips curve serenely and he notices her hair is a little shorter. “You cut it again.” She blushes a little and nods. “You always do when you change something. Last time you cut it because you decided to give up on me. Have you given up on Gokudera kun completely, then?”
She jumps a little, startled by his bluntness, and her bangs fall over her eyes. “That was the intention,” she says, biting her lip to keep the tremors at bay.
He clutches harder and she looks up. “He’s a big mess right now, Haru. From what he’s told me, from how I know you two, he never though you two could ever fall apart. None of us did.” Her eyes narrow and he shakes his head. “I know he’s taken you for granted, but I really do think he can be better. Haru, he loves you. You know that.”
She is still for a moment, and then sighs. “Haru loves him too, but I can’t …” she trails off, a sob breaking from deep in her throat. “I don’t want to cry everyday anymore. I don’t want to be told I’m stupid like it’s my name. I don’t want him to think I’m furniture. He can’t walk all over me and expect me to love him like always. It’s not fair. Deep inside he’s still that mean teenage boy he was when we first met, and I’ve overlooked it because deep down we made a connection that led to loving each other. But lately that was getting impossible to uphold.”
Tsuna gets up and pulls her into his arms, taking the strength of her sorrow into his body as her tears soak his suit and the crying that shook her body made him tremble too.
“Haru,” he murmurs into her hair. “It will be okay. I will help you through this. I will help you both. Count on it.”
---
When she wakes up the next day Gokudera Hayato is lying next to her.
From the furniture and the general décor she can tell they’re at Vongola mansion, in the east wing that’s scheme is green and silver. She’s always liked this part of the place because the green is so similar to Hayato kun’s eyes.
She sits up in bed, trying to remember how she got here, but is unable to recall anything after her little crying episode in Tsuna san’s arms. She cringes, and looks over at him.
He’s completely sprawled over his side of the bed, legs haphazard and arms thrown back across the pillow and his chest. He’s wearing his usual suit with the red shirt underneath, rings on his fingers, and the earrings she gave him as a present the year they started dating, for his birthday. Her heart clenches when she notices that despite his clean appearance there are heavy rings under his eyes and his mouth, always soft in his sleep, is curved like he is having a nightmare.
She gets up, resisting the urge to touch him. Finding her shoes at the front of the bed she slips her feet into them and heads for the door. Hand on the knob, she stops when she hears him.
“You’re here,” he says, and it’s the hopelessness in his tone that floors her. Gokudera Hayato is a confident man, but the man whose voice resounds in her mind is someone else. She turns her head despite herself and sees him staring at her in pain, hope, longing, so many things at once that she thinks they’ll both shatter again.
“Hayato kun, go back to sleep,” she manages to choke out. “You look awful.”
He looks like he can’t decide whether to get up or to stay down. She realizes that he doesn’t want to make the wrong move, to have her flee if he reaches for her.
“You don’t look so good yourself, Haru,” he says.
“Well, I’ve definitely been better. For instance, I don’t even know how I got here. But I’m guessing Tsuna san had something to do with it.” It’s forced, but she has to work something out, has to salvage something between them. If not their love, then at least their friendship, even a small part would be enough, she thinks.
“Come here, with me,” he asks, extending his hand, but she shakes her head and turns the knob. She opens the door as he springs up from the bed, calling her, and the next thing she sees is Lambo kun, holding a purple sphere in his hand and a determined look on his face.
“30 minutes, Haru nee,” he says, and then the world explodes in a noisy amethyst cloud.
---