Wings
Wings
Her hands are stained with color. There is red and black under her nails, and gray mixed with rose where she scratched her cheek absentmindedly. She moves back, straightening her spine as she moves away from the canvas so he can see over her shoulder. It cracks and she sighs tiredly.
“What do you think, Tsu kun?” she asks, glancing back to smile at him expectantly. He’s not an artist so he doesn’t have the language, the right words, for how to praise it properly. But he does think it’s beautiful.
“It’s beautiful, Kyoko,” he tells her, bending his head to kiss her cheek. “How did you come up with it?”
“Hmm,” she murmurs, closing her eyes. Whether to savor his kiss or ponder her inspiration he isn’t sure. “Haru.”
“Haru?” he repeats, his tone rising at the end to indicate a question.
“That’s right,” she answers. “We went to a hot spring the other week and I got this image as we stepped out of the sauna.” The girl, painted in pastels that bleed into one another, is standing amid shrouds of smoke. They tastefully cover her bare body, but he can see enough to catch his eye. His cheeks heat up a little, recognizing the lines of the body that do indeed belong to his friend.
“Haru has wings?” he asks, trying to hide his embarrassment through half-hearted humor. But Kyoko giggles anyway.
“She doesn’t,” she assures. “But if she did, I imagine they would look like this.” She moves to bend over the canvas again, smudging a bit of black to shadow the rose-gray mix that shapes the wings.
“Do you think it looks like her, Tsu kun?” she asks.
He laughs. “Are you asking me if I’ve seen Haru naked?” he teases and she turns to smack him playfully on the arm.
She leaves a print, a hand in a medley of colors, on the arm of his black jacket.
“Oh no,” she says, distressed, immediately standing up. “Hold on, I’ll find you a wipe to clean it before it stains.” She runs off before he can protest and he takes her chair as he waits. He looks at the painting, where the figure of his friend shows him only her back, replete with wings. She is angelic in the portrait, but he knows she is more than that appearance. Kyoko could only see that, the innocent side of their friend. Because Kyoko was innocent and that was all she would ever be. Whether she had gone on with her life without him in it, or if she hadn’t become his fiancée, she would have always been innocent.
Haru is already waiting in his office, sitting straight and undoing the tie around her neck. His relief at seeing her safe is enough to make him slump against the door.
“Tsuna san?” she says, alarmed, and stands up to help him. He waves her hands away, pulling himself together.
“I’m fine,” he assures, looking her over to make sure she is too. “It went well, I assume?”
She raises an eyebrow at him and pouts childishly. “Hahi! Tsuna san should know it did. Haru never fails.”
“So you say, while making the face of a child,” he points out, reaching out to pull her into a hug. He isn’t shy about it anymore. He has learned to dole out his affection; one never knows when you’ll lose someone you love in the kind of life they lead. She smiles and hugs him back, patting his back reassuringly.
“Haru is a lady, not a child,” she corrects, pulling away to flip her short hair dramatically.
“Really?” he asks, a smile playing on his lips. “All these years I thought you were a Namahage.” She laughs out loud.
“Haru is still a Namahage on the inside,” she assures him. “But don’t tell anyone. Haru has an image to keep.”
He sighs. In her suit and short hair she is the picture of professional. He remembers the bright outfits of her childhood, the kind of feminine clothes that Kyoko still wears but he hasn’t seen on Haru in years. He imagines her wings pinned underneath the black jacket while Kyoko’s freely bloom from her back.
Just as often as he wishes that Reborn hadn't seen the natural born hitman in Yamamoto, he also laments and wishes the same for Haru. She would have been better off had he also not seen the natural born spy in her.
“Haru is hungry,” she says suddenly. “Will Tsuna san come buy some cake with me?” She pulls at his hand and it’s her familiar love for cake that pulls him from his melancholy thoughts and lets him see her as she truly is. He’d oblige her in whatever she wanted.
His hand closed over hers. “Let’s go.”
She decides to make a detour after having cake at the smallest, hardest-to-find, bakery in all of Italy. But he doesn’t mind so much because she talks along the way about sweets. She chatters about which ones she likes best and which ones she thinks would suit his palette.
It’s reassuring to hear her speak normally when he knows she’s killed someone in her absence. But this time she doesn’t bear the signs of anguish as openly as the last time. The guilt is there, but only slightly. The sickness that pulled down at her mouth and blurred her eyes was absent. He knows she won't lie immobile with remorse as she had done for so long at one time in the past. He breathes freely, but with a heavy heart. Haru will never be like Kyoko again.
Her hand is small in his and her hair bounces slightly as she moves. It sways when she stops suddenly and turns to look thoughtfully at a shop. The light coming from it highlights the pondering pout of her lips and then the idea that sparks behind her eyes.
“Let’s go in, Tsuna san. I want to get one.”
He looks at the window, where the sign tells him he’s standing outside a tattoo parlor. His mouth falls slightly open. “A-a tattoo?” he demands. “Are you serious, Haru?”
She nods, pulling him, and he goes in with her, baffled. He should be used to it by now, he thinks. He should be accustomed to her randomness enough to be calm and collected in the face of her whims. But he never is and he thinks that’s part of why he loves her.
“I want to get a tattoo,” she tells the man behind the counter. He’s a skinny young man with a single tear tattooed under his eye. He moves to place his hand over her shoulder.
“Hold on, Haru. If you really want one then wait for me to ask Dino where he got his, it would be better if-“ She ignores him, shrugging off his hand and asks the man to show him what kind of tattoos he draws.
“Haru,” he sighs.
“Don’t worry Tsuna san, it’s my skin not yours.”
“That’s not the point,” he disagrees, taking her hand. The boy suddenly unbuttons his shirt and shrugs it off, turning so that they can see the expanse of his back. He feels the tremor that runs along her body.
“Beautiful,” she says, mirroring what his mind speaks. There are wings breaking free from his should blades, pulled in so they look tucked in against his back. He wonders what they would look like unfurled, and Kyoko’s painting comes to mind.
She’s lying on her stomach, her arms folded under her chin as she watches him with a grimace. The young man is burying his needle under her skin, excavating for the wings buried under the black suit she wears every day.
“How do they look?” she whispers.
They expand from her shoulders, creating the vision he dictated to the tattoo artist, and expand across her back and along her arms, looking like wings in flight. The feathers are delicate, curved like a bird’s and tapered like angel wings.
“They look like you, if you were an angel,” he tells her.
Surprisingly, Haru comes to their engagement party. More unexpectedly she’s discarded the black suit for a white gown that falls open down her back.
The black outline of the wings contrasts beautifully, he thinks, against the color of her dress.