the weapon was always there.
i'd like to say that i have an excuse.
i don't have an excuse, guys. :|
also, i still can't stop listening to "sorry, sorry" even though i've finally realized that it is a really boring song. :|
title: semplicemente
rating: PG
genre: general / drama / humor / i really don't know...
characters: dino, hibari, romario
word count: 2,450 words of ridiculousness!
notes: written for 6_cocktails, but only unofficially because i am a loser like that. i used course three ♥
1. NEVER ON SUNDAY
"I don't think I'm asking much of you," he says thoughtfully, brushing back stray strands of blonde hair. Hibari doesn't even look at him, opting to look out the train window instead. Welcome to- he misses the city name. "But I think that this is what's best." Dino smiles disarmingly at him, opening himself up like a public letter from the government for everyone to see. "Don't you think so?"
Hibari slouches, nestling himself deeper into the cushioned seats. Like a bird, Dino thinks. It was almost annoying how much of a bird he was like. He still does not look straight, his sharp grey eyes following the trees and the train tracks on the other side.
"Don't speak to me like you know who I am," he says sleepily almost minutes later.
"But I do," Dino insists. "Let me tell you what I know about you. You are Hibari Kyouya." The boy scowls at the use of his first name. "You are a student of unidentified year at Namimori Junior High. You are antisocial. You are a tyrant." The last bit he adds more firmly. "You are the Vongola Cloud Guardian."
He glares daggers, but daggers can't kill Dino. "And which idiot decided this without my consent? I am not a flock of sheep to be herded around." His eyes narrow. "You-"
The door slides open and Dino almost sighs with relief, but Hibari stays still like he is made of rock. And the man, the mixologist, with the traveling bar-a bar on wheels, imagine that!-smiles a flashy smile at them that manages to warm up the somewhat chilly atmosphere. "Would you like to drink something, sirs? I've got anything you've ever imagined."
Hibari shuts up. Dino says, "Something sweet. That's vague, I know." They both laugh, like they were sharing some private joke. "Something not very strong."
The man says when he is done, "It's a nice day, isn't it?" He hands the drink over to Dino, and then he leaves.
"I hope it stays nice," Dino says to no one in particular, but hopes that Hibari would listen to him. Just a little bit. He wasn't asking too much of him. He sips his drink and makes a sour face that Reborn would scoff at. Too sweet. But sweet things heal bitter people. He glances at his newly acquired student, the boy he was dragging to the beach. It was a little bit like cake. You eat cake when you're sad. Or maybe you ate it when you were happy, because you were happy and cake was happiness and you'd be happier and happier.
He begins to see the oceans, and he laughs at that, makes an inappropriate joke. "I should've asked for Sex on the Beach," but he doesn't expect anyone around him to get it because Hibari is the only one there.
"Don't be stupid," snaps Hibari.
"I was being witty," says Dino lightly. "You prude." He slides the beverage over. "Here. Drink this."
-
2. HARD CASE
"I really can't think when I'm being pressured, Romario," Dino says woefully, slightly irritated at the lack of progress with him and Hibari. "I've only got five days left, and then what's next? I'm sending my own kid-" Romario raises an eyebrow "-sorry; student-to fight against this… thing."
"Maybe you're not approaching it the right way, Boss," says Romario gently after jabbing the ballpoint pen on to the paper to form a period on a report.
Dino is sitting in front of a mirror, fixing the fur on his coat. "Just look at me," he says. "Twenty-two! I'm twenty-two years old-I couldn't even imagine being twenty when I was fifteen-and I can't even get this kid that doesn't even know his own age to listen to a single word I say." He pulls at his head and clicks his tongue. "Six hairs. Six hairs, Romario. Perhaps the family curse decided to haunt me after all." He turns around and smiles weakly. "I'm gonna be bald before thirty."
Hold still, thinks Romario.
It all falls apart.
He leans back into the mirror tiredly. "It's not about the hair," he murmurs sadly, palm under his right cheek, looking three years older than he really was.
"Maybe it is," argues Romario. "You bleach it too much. Chestnut brown is a wonderful color."
Dino is playing with his hair now, curling it around his finger. "Was I really that vain when I was younger?" he asks Romario, and his trusty right-hand man nods with second-hand embarrassment. "Well, I guess it was because I was a… was a what, a troubled teenager?" He looks even closer, close enough to see the browning roots of his hair and the flecks of orange in his eyes. "Is that what Kyouya is?" he says, almost to himself. "A troubled teenager?" He pulls back. "Well, in that case, he's got no hope until he turns twenty."
Romario says helpfully, "I packed the booze."
Dino laughs sunnily. "Don't say 'booze,' Romario." A pause. "It'd better be the hard stuff."
"It is," he replies jokingly. A few good-natured minutes later, Romario passes Dino a glass of liquor. "Here. Drink this."
-
3. MISSLE STOPPER
"Did I hear correctly?" says Dino, quite amused, sitting with his legs crossed and idly tapping the table with his chopsticks. This was his business-casual look (also known as "default position"), he wanted to explain to Hibari, but Hibari wasn't listening.
The boy grunts in reply. Dino takes this as a "Yes, Dino, you heard correctly, now please shut the hell up and let me eat in peace."
He bursts into laugher. "Oh God," he says in between gasps of air. "What are you now, some kind of robot-killing machine? Like the Terminator. But only backwards. I'll be back! I love Arnold Schwarzenegger, don't you? I have his autobiography on my desk; he makes me feel better about having such a messy schedule all the time." This last bit was said cheerily and aimed directly at Hibari, who apparently did not care.
Hibari stabs his chopsticks into the bowl of rice like he is a foreigner just learning how to use them.
"I think this calls for a toast." The toast was called. The alcohol was poured into two tall glasses. "This is probably illegal in fifty different countries," says Dino, "but I don't really care. To robot-killing machines!"
When Hibari doesn't take up his glass, Dino sighs exasperatingly and presses the cup into his hands. "Here. Drink this."
-
4. DIZZY DAME
"Sorry," he says.
Hibari wakes up with a pounding headache and stars in his head as he opens his eyes to Dino's brown ones. Immediately, his arm shoots up; his body quickly follows before slumping down again, waves of nausea present all over. He was an ocean of sickness, it seemed.
"Sorry," Dino says again, voice louder this time-but maybe it was because Hibari was more awake. "I probably shouldn't have told you to drink all that. You're the lightest lightweight I've ever met."
"Shut up," he groans, hands over his eyes to block out the sun.
"You know what?" says Dino a little bit after. "Wait here-well, I didn't really expect you to move before, but after the whole poison thing in the tournament, I wouldn't be so sure of myself. But wait here for a bit. I'll be back with the Cavallone family remedy."
True to his word, Dino was back a few minutes later with a disgustingly-colored glass of what looked like pink vegetable pulp in his hands.
"What the hell is that," demands Hibari flatly.
The blonde laughs brightly. "Let's see now. Egg whites. Tomato juice. Celery sticks. I think five coffee beans? Oh, and cold water. That's so trivial-the coffee beans, I mean, but I'm not really sure because that's what I usually put in there. Romario made it for you, so maybe he's got different things in there? Rhubarb, maybe. I don't know why he put rhubarb in there because I looked in the fridge and I was like, 'Oh, the rhubarb looks less rhubarb-y than it did yesterday.' But enough with this small talk," he says frivolously. "Here. Drink this."
-
5. SUNDOWNER
"Turtle," Dino tells him at dinner out of the blue. "You are a snapping turtle under that bird bone."
"And what are you?" he asks, annoyed, quietly setting aside his fork. It makes a muffled click against the porcelain plate.
"Clouds. The wind. Things floating gently in the sky. Maybe dandelion tufts. Maybe parachutes." He is hinting at something, but Hibari can't exactly tell what it is. "A camel. I don't know. I'm whatever I want to be for the day." He cracks a fading smile. "Tully. Do you know Tully? He's the dinosaur that goes rawr-rawr-rawr-"
"Ridiculous," Hibari snaps. Underneath the table where Dino cannot see, he is tearing up the cloth napkins with his hands, digging deep into the seams and shredding the tightly-wound threads apart.
"Always biting the hand that feeds you, I know," Dino says airily. "Don't think you're the only one."
"Unreasonable of you to tell me now."
"See?" He says that in the same breathy tone he uses when he's tired, when he doesn't want to speak anymore, when people just do not understand what he is trying to say. "Because the truth is that you don't know how to deal with this, so you just hide. You can chase after your boxes, you can collect your pretty shiny rings, you can leave your town. It's not so much research as physically escaping what you need to face."
For a moment, the whole dining room is silent before Hibari suddenly stands up, the chair making a screeching noise when his legs push it back.
"Turtle," says Dino quietly. "Always hiding underneath your turtle shell. It's okay, 'cause I understand. I really do." He turns around and pulls out a bottle of wine the color of rust, like a melted sun, his hands nimble and quiet like offering a sacrifice to the head of a family, like finally surrendering to God.
"Here. Drink this."
-
6. ITALIAN SUNSET
"I don't think I'm asking much of you," he says thoughtfully, tearing his gaze from the window and onto his student. He almost felt as if he was in a trace-windows did that to him. "But I think that this is what's best." Dino tilts his head playfully, blonde hair falling into his eyes. "Don't you think so?"
Hibari doesn't speak, doesn't even look at Dino, but Dino is so used to this fact even only after three days of knowing the boy that he doesn't particularly care.
"Let's talk about something else, then," he says, still pleasant. He tries his best not to stare out the window for too long, because only God knows when he'll ever get his consciousness back if he does. "Hey, do you believe in blood type characterization?"
"I don't care for trivial subjects like that," he replies.
Dino smiles tiredly. "I guess you could say that it's really irrelevant to anything we're going to do today-unless, you know, you fall and bash your head open against some sharp rock-" the look Hibari gives him says, 'It's you who's going to do that' "-and you suddenly need a blood transfusion and then what if I don't have O-type, Kyouya, what are you going to do then?"
"But you have O-type," Hibari says sharply, "so why are you asking me?"
Strangely, Dino is silent for a moment, a solemn expression on his face. He looks at Romario. Romario doesn't look back at him, but he knows what his Boss is going to say, so he wipes his amused smile off his face.
"You know," says Dino very quietly, leaning in towards Hibari, "I keep on getting this fantastic notion. Well, not fantastic per se, but it's very different from what I really usually think." He then smiles triumphantly and then bends back, lounging as much as the car seat allowed him to lounge.
"What?" says Hibari.
"I've always thought that I was a robot," he confesses, and Hibari makes a sound as if he were choking. "Ever since I was little! I was such a troubled kid when I was little, people always accused of being an android or something. And I woke up one morning and I was like, 'Wait, what if that's the truth? What if I'm a cyborg or something?'" He studies Hibari's face, a mix of disturbed and annoyed, and laughs it off fairly easily for someone who just told another their lifelong secret.
"So anyways," Dino continues, "because I figured that robots couldn't bleed and cyborgs were half-human and half-robot… so I was the Cavallone brand? So they could breed an undefeatable boss? I'm not sure what I was thinking at the time-Romario, stop laughing, why can't you take me seriously for one minute? But I digress again! So one day, for a medical check-up, my papà, he said to me, 'Hey son, you gotta get your brain scanned'-except, you know, not in those exact words-we were speaking in Italian, too-and I said, 'But I don't want to get my brain scanned!' and then he looked at me all funny and he was like, 'Son, there comes a time where every man must get his brain scanned' and I said alright, let's do it because they would be chickening out and I didn't want to blemish my career already."
He stops and smiles dazzlingly.
"And then what?" Hibari asks, in spite of himself.
"I," declares Dino with a lilt in his voice, "am apparently not a robot!" He frowns now. "But people still accuse me of being one, I don't even know why. I've even got the proof! I'm not emotionally-retarded or anything, because I believe I am a good person who can actually read people."
He looks at his watch and starts to wave frantically. "Romario! Stop the car, stop the car!"
"Is it time already?" he asks, concerned. He stops the car anyway.
Dino laughs at Hibari's expression. "We've got the goods," he says good-naturedly.
A few minutes later, Hibari finds himself on the beach with a magnificent sunset in the background, staining the sky with the color of rubies and gold. Everyone's hair color takes on a shade of brown, turning even the color of wine into something more beautiful.
"A toast to the sky!" Dino says brightly. He gives his student a grin and slides him a glass.
"Here. Drink this."