[Week 18, Day 5] Dream #5, or the fabulous mafia nonsense of 18, 96, and 69, with occasional NC-17?
ooc: Warnings for explicit (for once) sex in this part of the dream. Some (less explicit) violence throughout. Please tell me if you know where the two pics came from (I found one on Tumblr) so I can assign proper credit.
It is the morning of the first mission apart from the other Guardians.
Chrome slinks down the street like a pet cat gone astray, through a district of Lombardy where striped awnings reach overhead from shops of croissants and deli meats and wines, where tourists pile against one another on the sidewalks and boys and girls give chase, and service workers look down from hotel windows at the stream of coming and going humans, among which there is the one curiously young Japanese female. Chrome has, by now, acclimatized to being alone in and of itself; it scarcely perturbs her, but this is not Namimori, and the language spoken by the natives of this country is not her language. The syllables trouble her, and the conjugations: il participio presente, passato remoto, and what if she should confuse her words at an inopportune moment? Mukuro rests in her mind, eternally unperturbed and unwilling to be bothered to wakefulness in the morning.
A sign advertising Crêpes & Coffee: Chrome turns, trundles beyond the glass door (today, she is wearing tennis shoes with checkered knee socks), meeting with a whiff of cigarette smoke and the scent of coffee beans and the sound of Italian dialects and tourists and working people speaking in English, too; Chrome recognizes the hard New York accent. The voices, the smells, are a congregation of Otherness. Restaurants always feel like congregations of Otherness; unconnected lives passing each other briefly on the way to disparate destinations.
She walks to the counter. Stares at the menu beyond.
Yamamoto Takeshi, she thinks briefly, works in a restaurant with his father. Sushi. A family business. And Chrome has eaten there before, with the other Guardians, although she was quick to remove herself once the meal had finished. Gokudera Hayato smells of coffee beans and cigarette smoke and sometimes Chrome has heard him, in snatches of conversation, speak in an Italian dialect, too. This side of the world is theirs, isn't it? Perhaps she should think as they would think. How are those two faring on their own mission? She wonders, fleetingly.
In Italy, the crêpe becomes crespella; five minutes after ordering and sitting with her hands clasped together at one of the tables, Chrome is handed a plate of -- well, crespella, with a filling of chocolate, strawberries, and banana, as well as caffè latte with a dash of cream foam. She looks down. Fumbles in her kitten-adorned purse for the money (drops it, momentarily, and she is aggravatingly conscious of perhaps holding up other customers), and Mukuro says, They got your order wrong.
In fact, she does not like bananas.
No more than you care for pineapples, I seem to recall, he muses.
Oh. Yes.
It is not surprising when he chooses to speak to her anymore, even if it emerges from what had previously apparently been a silence not so unlike sleep. With that man, it is difficult to tell when he is watching sometimes.
Her hands are already outstretched.
Are you going to accept that?
A faint dizzy feeling, as if hit with an epiphany, and a moment later, Chrome stutters in perfect Italian (which she does not actually know, but somehow the words drop into her throat as if lowered, temporarily, by a cord): "I think you have my order wrong."
She leaves the shop with strawberry and chocolate crêpes with a splash of rum and her latte, smiling a little at nothing in particular for a moment before her attention turns to the dress shops, fabrics and lace and measuring tape and scissors and so many mannequins looking back at her with smooth constructed eyes, unseeing, and blank bodies and hands resting eternally upon hips over legs which look nothing like her own. She thinks of boudoirs of dreaming girls in European cities, libraries filled with classics and calls for dinners and ice cream parties every night, a life nourished on crêpes, and she crushes the thought. Looks down at her feet, where one sock is drooping.
It's a little strange, having a purse filled with money.
Change compared to what you will soon have, Mukuro notes. But preferable to the salary which you and Ken and Chikusa were eating on before, I should think.
Which would be to say: No salary to speak of.
You are happy to see me purchase food, Mukuro-sama?
There is a long, almost disbelieving pause.
He recovers: Such questions. What use is to be had in a starving body?
Afterwards, he disappears once more. This is all right, as Chrome is still growing accustomed to navigating these strange roads, and the voice within her head can become a distraction at times. Mukuro is not always forthcoming; he is as distant as he is near, and flits between the two in an instant. It's that solitude again. That idle contemplation of the tinkling of change in her purse and the economical value of being able to buy for one's self, for a girl who used to never leave her house unsupervised, and who once took it for a given that her parents' money would always support her (perhaps, she supposes, it was this they hated her for). She can buy food, now. An epiphany? A small success, rather.
Hibari stares out the window of his hotel room with a conqueror's stare, and Chrome knocks gently, waits for him to turn (which he does, passingly), and lays the extra crêpe (its plate neatly covered in plastic) upon the bed.
He crosses the distance in three easy strides, peels the plastic away with a jerk, and asks, "What is this?"
"Um. I thought -- you might want one," Chrome tries.
"A fruit concoction for herbivores."
She does not know what to say to that, so she silently returns to her own room and takes her meal, watching the news briefly in the meanwhile. By the time she has glanced towards Hibari's room again, there are nothing save for crumbs on the paper plate, which has found its way into the trash.
The curtains are wide open. The sun of Lombardy cuts into the room like a spear, and when Hibari jerks his tie and tilts his head, the line of his neck is an angle so sharp it makes Chrome think of geometry at her old school: fearsome architecture, his face a study in the symmetrical planes of lips and nose and eyes like a storm off the Italian seas, roiling and dark. She stands, stark in the moment when the world forgets itself, fills with sudden warmth, as of the feeling when the hot gusts blow in from the sea; humid and unnatural to what you felt when walking across the cool coastal rocks ten seconds before.
"It's time. Let's go," he says.
Chrome nods.
~*~
Chrome is not nervous.
Not about the mission, rather. (The necessity of her interaction with human beings insofar as communication is concerned, however -- )
Perhaps, she thinks, nervousness would be an intelligent emotion, but the mission is moving slowly. It's not quite the instantaneous battle of guns, swords, box weapons, and explosives which she had been expecting. There seem to be numerous preliminary details, and while they are caught waiting for paperwork to clear and once she has performed a crude introduction in Italian for the Family with whom they are engaging in business, she escapes with care from the scene. Simply heads off to the restroom (which is an ornate affair with gilded faucets which run warm water even before one has thought to turn the knobs) and locks herself away in a stall. Pushes aside the inexplicable if instinctual fear that someone will break down the door. Breathes deeply. Pushes aside the room and her strung, trip-wire body, and incarnates a new space for herself so that she can release Mukuro.
The rules have gradually begun to change since first they met. Where before he always created a world for Chrome, now sometimes she invents a niche for him. She spreads the layout of the room out in her mind: Victorian, mahogany furniture and a canopied bed and a chair in which she sits, pose careful, and another chair over which Mukuro will discard some article of clothing, perhaps his jacket. His gloves, he will leave at her feet, after biting them from his fingers.
"The room is not finished," Mukuro chides. He breathes out these words, then inhales so visibly that one could almost believe she had truly freed him, as if he were tasting fresh air. "Your imagination has not sufficiently prepared the sheets."
She squirms a little and feels herself flush at the suggestion. What's difficult sometimes is not the bodily element, for she had so long thought of her anatomy as neuter that her teacher seeing it was not impossible, but this: the mental landscape. He recognizes, intimately, the contours of all that she desires, whether economic ends or boudoirs or crêpes or something besides all these, and she lowers her eyes a little in aquiescence. Paints red velvet across the bed.
"An improvement," he says, but she is embarrassed at the impracticality of the set-up.
There are some kinds of women, those whom Chrome reserves distant and alien admiration for (if this is what you would deem it -- perhaps it is more a creature curiously taking note of another species as it passes by), who are red velvet and mahogany. She is checkered socks and bright, stark pinks and blacks and purples and the occasional red, but no hues; no blood rouge or apricot. She does not take those kinds of dares -- in real life.
She has learned to kiss back by now, though he likes to lead, and she lets him: a hot, steady press, mouth to mouth, and she breathes in a murmur, sucking the air from between the two of them; (although really, there is no air; there is nothing between them, here), and she arches away from the chair, slightly, at the feel of a ringed knuckle pressed through the fabric of her panties. An electric sensation to her clit. Mukuro smiles against her jaw, kisses where the bones of her chin form a paper heart's V -- smiles as if he is a magician preparing a trick, and waits against her, cheek to cheek, as his finger curls inside of her. He drags the gasps from her and leans up to cover her mouth, so the air slides back into him again, and she fills with the steady, gradual burn. Dark and warm and relaxed; she feels herself throb, and he mimics the motion with a second finger. His other hand unclasps her bra.
Chrome does not alter the shape of her body in these moments; does not project a self which is in any way idealized. Mukuro has commended her for this, amid the ever-present punctuating reverberations of his laughter. (Others would be tempted, you know.) It's usually the same routine: a slow, almost artistic fingering of her breasts, trailed by lips, as if she is being explored. Combed. Hard, massaging pressure to her sides, to her neck, her back, gloves dropped at some point, and she mirrors as best she can, although rational thought (and her nerves) melt rapidly; dissolve and slide free. Once she is sighing and trembling and moulded like a sculpture, played like an instrument, all her tender places peaking beneath his hands -- once this is so, he drops down to his knees.
She slides off her panties.
At first, it was always her who did this, usually on that couch, but again, the passing of time offers greater reciprocity. Mukuro wanted her to allow this, and she does, though she still shivers furiously.
"There's something on your mind today," he says softly, still smiling.
Her hands tangle themselves in his hair, fingernails digging through the curious whorl of which she has styled a copy.
"I--" Her bare feet begin to cross over one another.
Chrome's knees press together, and Mukuro pulls them apart; spreads her by the thighs as if she is a project he is sitting to work at (which perhaps is not so far from the truth) and begins the process: tongue pressing into her, fluttering over her clit. A brush of teeth, and she jerks, sighs and tightens, and her toes curl.
"Yes," she murmurs.
"Your other partner? Do you want him -- " His finger hooks inside of her, strokes something sensitive, and then a lap of tongue, and he lifts one hand to rub circles of her wetness against her belly. "-- to do this?"
"Um. I -- "
It's very difficult to speak with your head there, you know, she would say, if she could. He laughs as if he understands the thought, regardless, and flicks his tongue in a quick, rhythmic succession of motions, which has her swallowing hard; the sweat runs slick over her neck and chest, as if this is real, as if it's all so real, and the texture of him is rough and sweet and playful and demanding. Coaxing.
"Yes," she admits, after a minute more, and her thighs tremble, and he pinches the hood; pulls it up, and she can feel his breath and his whimsical chuckles and his pulse in his digits against her pulse, inside of her; the sweet ache spreads up into her belly, where he is still rubbing tenderly (or possessively, of the organs he has created), and Chrome exhales, and those insides clench and spasm, and after a few moments more of his hair tickling so strangely against her inner thighs, she comes with a groan, hips jerking forward against his mouth, fingernails scraping Mukuro's scalp.
It is rare for her to scream during the first orgasm.
The first is always sweetly relaxing, as though her body is made of lace ribbons and his long fingers are untying her. Drifting on an ocean of sensation. Being undone.
And, when the shaking subsides a little, and her breaths are almost even: "Is it wrong?"
"Why should it be?"
"Because -- us."
"What of it?"
What of it. Chrome does not know how to reply. They have never given -- it -- an official name. A nebulous unity of two; he is not her sibling or her father or her titled spouse, though in a way, he does partake of all of these functions, and master and sensei, besides. But more specifically, Mukuro is her male half, and this is their routine, the game which they play together with their mingled bodies.
"And it is true that most teenage girls have begun to develop desires of their own, is it not? I should hope you realize -- "
Mukuro licks his lips and fingers, then taps Chrome's chest. Presses her back into the velvet which she has, for this occasion, invented, and she falls weightlessly, so that he is able to peel away his pants and lean over her. She opens easily, oversensitive and raw and stimulated; eye closing and wet enough now for it to be a glide, almost; that first, breath-stealing movement which eases him into her; that blunt, slick pressure of which she has come to be so fond. She pulls him down by his tie, by his hair and forearms and what she can reach, and their sweat pools as skin collides with skin, chest to chest and legs to legs.
"-- I should hope you realize, of course, that you are not the only human who -- fascinates me, for that matter," Mukuro says, and kisses her. "Take what you want. Who you want. And I will do the same."
"Ah," she murmurs, and it is soft and low and prolonged, a sigh which transforms into a rough purr.
She tightens, experimentally, and reaches her hand down between them and kisses him in reply, and wraps her legs around his waist and squeezes, and at that, his breath catches slightly, and in that slow, back and forth current, she lets him fuck her to another orgasm, until his body locks and finishes in hers, and they are brow to brow, hairline to hairline, chimera-like: one body, unending, and Chrome closes her eye.
Focuses on the feel of him exiting, slipping out wetly. Focuses on sliding his shirt all the way up, so she can touch his heartbeat. Wonders if the skin which she has made for this occasion is as sensitive as her own.
"You taste," he breathes, voice thick, "like strawberry crêpes."
And pushes her hair away from her face with the back of one hand; a cooling touch.
~*~
"Five minutes," Hibari says, when Chrome emerges from the restroom.
He is standing in the lobby. His eyes cut through her, as ever, but she is cool, her gait a series of slow strides on the black pumps which she has worn for the occasion. For business, Chrome wears a suit, black dress skirt, and stockings only a shade darker than her fair complexion. It is nothing she would wear except for business occasions, and the niggling sense of the suit looking strange on her slim shoulders remains, but there is a part of her which feels mature like this. Womanly. And five minutes. That is not a bad transition to real time; when she enters the other world, she is always slightly concerned that the gap in time will be too long -- that someone will get suspicious.
Chrome meets Hibari's gaze. Eye to eyes.
He looks down.
A moment of smugness, until --
-- she notices a stray curl of toilet paper under the spike of one shoe.
Oh.
He turns away without so much as a demand for her to follow, and Chrome kicks her heel to the floor and flutters her hands, laces them behind her back, and chases after him wordlessly once he exits.
~*~
Someone shoots at them once they emerge from the taxi.
More than one person, Chrome has time to note, and Hibari grabs her aside so hard that she almost strikes the ground. She creates a fire wall in front of herself before she has thought to ask questions; Hibari says, "Phase one."
And lunges through the columns, Cloud flames aglow, white-purple, and something disconnects; chains and points and a circular jerk which almost gives her whiplash without so much as coming near Chrome's body, and the next thing she knows, there are screams and blood and harsh cracking noises. Metallic screeches and the thud of bodies, and after a moment she turns, blearily, and notices another individual cocking a pistol in her direction. Three, actually. She swallows and neatly dumps them into a pit of hell. And then Chrome realizes she forgot to warn Hibari about the nature of her illusions, but well, he has already jumped through them and killed everyone. As Chrome is assessing the body pile (and there was rather a lot of blood and sound and her ears are ringing), she feels a hand on her wrist.
Looks up to see that gaze pressing down on the Vongola ring of Mist.
"That was his attack." He indicates, with a look, the now-closed portion of road into which Chrome has recently dumped her own share of their opponents.
There is no question, of course, to whom the pronoun refers.
"It's -- " Steadies herself, and eases her hand away. " -- my attack."
The correction, if it can be called such, is for Chrome, more of a truism: I am the Guardian of Mist. The attack is my attack -- no matter its origins.
"I despise illusions," he replies, but his voice is softer than usual, and he closes his eyes, briefly, then turns. Regards their surroundings. Their first (strangely quick) victory.
The thing about missions in the mafia, you see (as Reborn or anyone with more expert knowledge might inform a person, and as Chrome, by now, has learned), is that the goal itself is only a small part of what you are expected to achieve. The presumed end, in this case, would be to guard a Family, to therefore protect those in the Family's care, and to retrieve stolen weaponry. But it is not so straightforward: it is not always so easy to trace which alliance originates a feud; sometimes they hunt you before you can hunt them, upon gaining word of your presence, and this involves a considerable amount of being human target practice. And in order to retrieve stolen goods, of course intel is a necessity, and intel can take a while.
They search the bodies.
Both agree, with relative certainty, that the identification cards they find are fakes; it would be foolish to carry real names or proper social security numbers, but Hibari sends them back to the emerging Foundation, regardless: even a wrong turn can leave an accidental bread trail towards accurate information.
~*~
"It's a bullet," Hibari says.
Chrome nods.
It's a bullet.
That's what they're here for. That's what the Moretti Famiglia has been working on: it's a bullet, but not just any bullet. Oh, no. A bullet, rather, which will extinguish and absorb one's Dying Will flames. A bullet, that is, which contains the ingredients of anti-matter which would tidily erase any substance which does not belong in this world, such as the corporality of illusions produced by Rokudō Mukuro, or by others.
A force of un-making.
It is the first time (but not the last -- no, certainly not the last) that Chrome has felt truly, honestly, almost literally punched in the stomach due to her career affiliations.
The injuries suffered while battling Mammon or Glo Xinia or any opponent were of course unpleasant, but learning that your own Family's ally has given rise to the creation of an item which could nullify your powers, your life's source --
Chrome sits beside Hibari in the back of the limousine, fingers threading through one another as though she is folding paper cranes. Since the fight, his eyes have been as distant as ever, but not unkind.
It is not personal, she decides.
To extinguish Dying Will flames, to absorb them, would harm many people, including her own Boss. It would perhaps not trouble Hibari unduly, but others could suffer besides herself. Besides Mukuro. Weaponry does not choose sides, and bullets are merely tools. She spares a glance at the man beside her; wonders if he has any idea what she is thinking, or whether he cares.
Chrome never learns the answer to this, but a moment thereafter, Hibari does speak, if only to say, "You will be the one to infiltrate."
"Infiltrate."
(Statement-question.)
"Small animals are not always weak," he adds, as the car moves into a tunnel, all darkness and rows of tiny orange lights flashing by. Beautiful Italy's crevices, its corners, its small places. "And if anyone tries to stand in your way, I will bite them to death."
I can't, she thinks, for a terrible moment. I can't. Don't ask it of me. I won't be able to.
"I will," she says.
~*~
This is the part Mukuro never assists Chrome on.
She has not yet decided whether she is grateful to be allotted space to work within or whether she wishes for his answers. It's maddening, sometimes, and she sits on her bed in the hotel room, still feeling as though all the wind has gone from her lungs. He trains her, he fucks her (whether to ease her tension or because it is some amusing way to pass the time; his answers change, depending on the day), he intervenes in her fights if he has cause to, but when it comes to information on the affairs of mafiosi, he is rarely forthcoming, although she suspects and has often suspected that he is a man with an answer or at least a hypothesis for every gap in knowledge. Is it because of you? she wants to ask.
Is it because of you? Is it because of people like you? Is it because of illusionists?
Is it because of people like me?
Or is it just a system?
A game of cards, he'd said once.
Mukuro is holding all the cards.
Not all, he corrects.
~*~
He constructs a table for her, and a bottle of wine, and they sit across from one another, with Mukuro shuffling.
But Chrome does not know how to play.
"You are a card of mine, it's true. But I am a card of others as well. As is Kyouya."
Chrome does not disapprove of the strictly utilitarian definition; it disregards humanity to speak of them as such, but it doesn't bother her, somehow. They are, in a way, all being used -- by one another or by other forces, but if the human condition is to be a cog in a machine, a card in a deck, then Chrome would really only prefer not to grind the mechanisms to a stop. Make us win. Make it run smoothly.
"Of course, I selected you in part because you have this straightforward and agreeable approach. You do slide into place rather more easily than others, who trouble with questions and complaints. When one gets right down to it, the two of you -- simply act."
"I am not old enough to drink, Mukuro-sama."
He laughs. "Chrome. Everyone is old enough to drink in Europe. But never mind about such silly observations. Don't you have something to ask me?"
"I do," she says.
But she can't.
It isn't for her to ask.
"Then you understand, my dear."
She would have (if it were her place, which it is not) noted that he deems himself apart from social conventions, apart from the deck, apart from the other cogs; he is quick to say so, to Tsuna and the others, and she does not disbelieve him, and yet, in their private discourse, Mukuro is ever reminding her that they are contracted, that he goes where she goes, and therefore, the question remains, when properly framed: when you re-shuffle the cards such that you assume the position of servitude, what are you, in actuality, setting up for?
"I -- think they call that a bluff, Mukuro-sama."
He reveals his hand.
She reads: 10 8 6 9 6
"One pair?"
"Maybe two or three."
He seems oddly amused.
She has no idea what he means. Maybe her knowledge of poker hands is even worse than she has realized.
"Real illusions hidden with the illusions, I said once." He puts the cards away. "But suppose you could read my hand. Suppose all creatures could read one another's hands. Their eyes. Their hearts." As I read yours, she almost hears. "Suppose you could in fact read my heart. Consider, Chrome. This is not a hypothetical I have mentioned to anyone else, but our bodies are shared. And thus you must, on occasion, be curious. But suppose indeed that you could read my every whim. The question remains: Would it matter?"
"No."
"All the complications of six hells, and you are the only one with whom I could work so intimately who would not wonder at me at all, and this, of course, is why I do so."
Transparency in the opaque, or something like it.
She is a part of him. A part of his goals. There is nothing to wonder at, when life consists of a series of assignments. They do not come from him. They come from Boss. From Reborn. From higher-ups. From mafiosi. It's all pure action, which is where she fares best. She's comfortable like this. Being assigned roles. Helping to get a job done. Not worrying overly about the intricacies involved behind the scenes. She does wonder, at times; she does, but not for long, because it is pointless, because there is no other life, and she is not turning back.
If there is to be found, in such relations, trust or emotions that run deeper still, then they are, to be certain, mere artifice around which is the biological and physiological core: that is, symbiosis. He is her and she is him.
And yet Chrome, also, is herself.
An entity apart.
It is the morning of the first mission apart from the other Guardians.
Chrome slinks down the street like a pet cat gone astray, through a district of Lombardy where striped awnings reach overhead from shops of croissants and deli meats and wines, where tourists pile against one another on the sidewalks and boys and girls give chase, and service workers look down from hotel windows at the stream of coming and going humans, among which there is the one curiously young Japanese female. Chrome has, by now, acclimatized to being alone in and of itself; it scarcely perturbs her, but this is not Namimori, and the language spoken by the natives of this country is not her language. The syllables trouble her, and the conjugations: il participio presente, passato remoto, and what if she should confuse her words at an inopportune moment? Mukuro rests in her mind, eternally unperturbed and unwilling to be bothered to wakefulness in the morning.
A sign advertising Crêpes & Coffee: Chrome turns, trundles beyond the glass door (today, she is wearing tennis shoes with checkered knee socks), meeting with a whiff of cigarette smoke and the scent of coffee beans and the sound of Italian dialects and tourists and working people speaking in English, too; Chrome recognizes the hard New York accent. The voices, the smells, are a congregation of Otherness. Restaurants always feel like congregations of Otherness; unconnected lives passing each other briefly on the way to disparate destinations.
She walks to the counter. Stares at the menu beyond.
Yamamoto Takeshi, she thinks briefly, works in a restaurant with his father. Sushi. A family business. And Chrome has eaten there before, with the other Guardians, although she was quick to remove herself once the meal had finished. Gokudera Hayato smells of coffee beans and cigarette smoke and sometimes Chrome has heard him, in snatches of conversation, speak in an Italian dialect, too. This side of the world is theirs, isn't it? Perhaps she should think as they would think. How are those two faring on their own mission? She wonders, fleetingly.
In Italy, the crêpe becomes crespella; five minutes after ordering and sitting with her hands clasped together at one of the tables, Chrome is handed a plate of -- well, crespella, with a filling of chocolate, strawberries, and banana, as well as caffè latte with a dash of cream foam. She looks down. Fumbles in her kitten-adorned purse for the money (drops it, momentarily, and she is aggravatingly conscious of perhaps holding up other customers), and Mukuro says, They got your order wrong.
In fact, she does not like bananas.
No more than you care for pineapples, I seem to recall, he muses.
Oh. Yes.
It is not surprising when he chooses to speak to her anymore, even if it emerges from what had previously apparently been a silence not so unlike sleep. With that man, it is difficult to tell when he is watching sometimes.
Her hands are already outstretched.
Are you going to accept that?
A faint dizzy feeling, as if hit with an epiphany, and a moment later, Chrome stutters in perfect Italian (which she does not actually know, but somehow the words drop into her throat as if lowered, temporarily, by a cord): "I think you have my order wrong."
She leaves the shop with strawberry and chocolate crêpes with a splash of rum and her latte, smiling a little at nothing in particular for a moment before her attention turns to the dress shops, fabrics and lace and measuring tape and scissors and so many mannequins looking back at her with smooth constructed eyes, unseeing, and blank bodies and hands resting eternally upon hips over legs which look nothing like her own. She thinks of boudoirs of dreaming girls in European cities, libraries filled with classics and calls for dinners and ice cream parties every night, a life nourished on crêpes, and she crushes the thought. Looks down at her feet, where one sock is drooping.
It's a little strange, having a purse filled with money.
Change compared to what you will soon have, Mukuro notes. But preferable to the salary which you and Ken and Chikusa were eating on before, I should think.
Which would be to say: No salary to speak of.
You are happy to see me purchase food, Mukuro-sama?
There is a long, almost disbelieving pause.
He recovers: Such questions. What use is to be had in a starving body?
Afterwards, he disappears once more. This is all right, as Chrome is still growing accustomed to navigating these strange roads, and the voice within her head can become a distraction at times. Mukuro is not always forthcoming; he is as distant as he is near, and flits between the two in an instant. It's that solitude again. That idle contemplation of the tinkling of change in her purse and the economical value of being able to buy for one's self, for a girl who used to never leave her house unsupervised, and who once took it for a given that her parents' money would always support her (perhaps, she supposes, it was this they hated her for). She can buy food, now. An epiphany? A small success, rather.
Hibari stares out the window of his hotel room with a conqueror's stare, and Chrome knocks gently, waits for him to turn (which he does, passingly), and lays the extra crêpe (its plate neatly covered in plastic) upon the bed.
He crosses the distance in three easy strides, peels the plastic away with a jerk, and asks, "What is this?"
"Um. I thought -- you might want one," Chrome tries.
"A fruit concoction for herbivores."
She does not know what to say to that, so she silently returns to her own room and takes her meal, watching the news briefly in the meanwhile. By the time she has glanced towards Hibari's room again, there are nothing save for crumbs on the paper plate, which has found its way into the trash.
The curtains are wide open. The sun of Lombardy cuts into the room like a spear, and when Hibari jerks his tie and tilts his head, the line of his neck is an angle so sharp it makes Chrome think of geometry at her old school: fearsome architecture, his face a study in the symmetrical planes of lips and nose and eyes like a storm off the Italian seas, roiling and dark. She stands, stark in the moment when the world forgets itself, fills with sudden warmth, as of the feeling when the hot gusts blow in from the sea; humid and unnatural to what you felt when walking across the cool coastal rocks ten seconds before.
"It's time. Let's go," he says.
Chrome nods.
~*~
Chrome is not nervous.
Not about the mission, rather. (The necessity of her interaction with human beings insofar as communication is concerned, however -- )
Perhaps, she thinks, nervousness would be an intelligent emotion, but the mission is moving slowly. It's not quite the instantaneous battle of guns, swords, box weapons, and explosives which she had been expecting. There seem to be numerous preliminary details, and while they are caught waiting for paperwork to clear and once she has performed a crude introduction in Italian for the Family with whom they are engaging in business, she escapes with care from the scene. Simply heads off to the restroom (which is an ornate affair with gilded faucets which run warm water even before one has thought to turn the knobs) and locks herself away in a stall. Pushes aside the inexplicable if instinctual fear that someone will break down the door. Breathes deeply. Pushes aside the room and her strung, trip-wire body, and incarnates a new space for herself so that she can release Mukuro.
The rules have gradually begun to change since first they met. Where before he always created a world for Chrome, now sometimes she invents a niche for him. She spreads the layout of the room out in her mind: Victorian, mahogany furniture and a canopied bed and a chair in which she sits, pose careful, and another chair over which Mukuro will discard some article of clothing, perhaps his jacket. His gloves, he will leave at her feet, after biting them from his fingers.
"The room is not finished," Mukuro chides. He breathes out these words, then inhales so visibly that one could almost believe she had truly freed him, as if he were tasting fresh air. "Your imagination has not sufficiently prepared the sheets."
She squirms a little and feels herself flush at the suggestion. What's difficult sometimes is not the bodily element, for she had so long thought of her anatomy as neuter that her teacher seeing it was not impossible, but this: the mental landscape. He recognizes, intimately, the contours of all that she desires, whether economic ends or boudoirs or crêpes or something besides all these, and she lowers her eyes a little in aquiescence. Paints red velvet across the bed.
"An improvement," he says, but she is embarrassed at the impracticality of the set-up.
There are some kinds of women, those whom Chrome reserves distant and alien admiration for (if this is what you would deem it -- perhaps it is more a creature curiously taking note of another species as it passes by), who are red velvet and mahogany. She is checkered socks and bright, stark pinks and blacks and purples and the occasional red, but no hues; no blood rouge or apricot. She does not take those kinds of dares -- in real life.
She has learned to kiss back by now, though he likes to lead, and she lets him: a hot, steady press, mouth to mouth, and she breathes in a murmur, sucking the air from between the two of them; (although really, there is no air; there is nothing between them, here), and she arches away from the chair, slightly, at the feel of a ringed knuckle pressed through the fabric of her panties. An electric sensation to her clit. Mukuro smiles against her jaw, kisses where the bones of her chin form a paper heart's V -- smiles as if he is a magician preparing a trick, and waits against her, cheek to cheek, as his finger curls inside of her. He drags the gasps from her and leans up to cover her mouth, so the air slides back into him again, and she fills with the steady, gradual burn. Dark and warm and relaxed; she feels herself throb, and he mimics the motion with a second finger. His other hand unclasps her bra.
Chrome does not alter the shape of her body in these moments; does not project a self which is in any way idealized. Mukuro has commended her for this, amid the ever-present punctuating reverberations of his laughter. (Others would be tempted, you know.) It's usually the same routine: a slow, almost artistic fingering of her breasts, trailed by lips, as if she is being explored. Combed. Hard, massaging pressure to her sides, to her neck, her back, gloves dropped at some point, and she mirrors as best she can, although rational thought (and her nerves) melt rapidly; dissolve and slide free. Once she is sighing and trembling and moulded like a sculpture, played like an instrument, all her tender places peaking beneath his hands -- once this is so, he drops down to his knees.
She slides off her panties.
At first, it was always her who did this, usually on that couch, but again, the passing of time offers greater reciprocity. Mukuro wanted her to allow this, and she does, though she still shivers furiously.
"There's something on your mind today," he says softly, still smiling.
Her hands tangle themselves in his hair, fingernails digging through the curious whorl of which she has styled a copy.
"I--" Her bare feet begin to cross over one another.
Chrome's knees press together, and Mukuro pulls them apart; spreads her by the thighs as if she is a project he is sitting to work at (which perhaps is not so far from the truth) and begins the process: tongue pressing into her, fluttering over her clit. A brush of teeth, and she jerks, sighs and tightens, and her toes curl.
"Yes," she murmurs.
"Your other partner? Do you want him -- " His finger hooks inside of her, strokes something sensitive, and then a lap of tongue, and he lifts one hand to rub circles of her wetness against her belly. "-- to do this?"
"Um. I -- "
It's very difficult to speak with your head there, you know, she would say, if she could. He laughs as if he understands the thought, regardless, and flicks his tongue in a quick, rhythmic succession of motions, which has her swallowing hard; the sweat runs slick over her neck and chest, as if this is real, as if it's all so real, and the texture of him is rough and sweet and playful and demanding. Coaxing.
"Yes," she admits, after a minute more, and her thighs tremble, and he pinches the hood; pulls it up, and she can feel his breath and his whimsical chuckles and his pulse in his digits against her pulse, inside of her; the sweet ache spreads up into her belly, where he is still rubbing tenderly (or possessively, of the organs he has created), and Chrome exhales, and those insides clench and spasm, and after a few moments more of his hair tickling so strangely against her inner thighs, she comes with a groan, hips jerking forward against his mouth, fingernails scraping Mukuro's scalp.
It is rare for her to scream during the first orgasm.
The first is always sweetly relaxing, as though her body is made of lace ribbons and his long fingers are untying her. Drifting on an ocean of sensation. Being undone.
And, when the shaking subsides a little, and her breaths are almost even: "Is it wrong?"
"Why should it be?"
"Because -- us."
"What of it?"
What of it. Chrome does not know how to reply. They have never given -- it -- an official name. A nebulous unity of two; he is not her sibling or her father or her titled spouse, though in a way, he does partake of all of these functions, and master and sensei, besides. But more specifically, Mukuro is her male half, and this is their routine, the game which they play together with their mingled bodies.
"And it is true that most teenage girls have begun to develop desires of their own, is it not? I should hope you realize -- "
Mukuro licks his lips and fingers, then taps Chrome's chest. Presses her back into the velvet which she has, for this occasion, invented, and she falls weightlessly, so that he is able to peel away his pants and lean over her. She opens easily, oversensitive and raw and stimulated; eye closing and wet enough now for it to be a glide, almost; that first, breath-stealing movement which eases him into her; that blunt, slick pressure of which she has come to be so fond. She pulls him down by his tie, by his hair and forearms and what she can reach, and their sweat pools as skin collides with skin, chest to chest and legs to legs.
"-- I should hope you realize, of course, that you are not the only human who -- fascinates me, for that matter," Mukuro says, and kisses her. "Take what you want. Who you want. And I will do the same."
"Ah," she murmurs, and it is soft and low and prolonged, a sigh which transforms into a rough purr.
She tightens, experimentally, and reaches her hand down between them and kisses him in reply, and wraps her legs around his waist and squeezes, and at that, his breath catches slightly, and in that slow, back and forth current, she lets him fuck her to another orgasm, until his body locks and finishes in hers, and they are brow to brow, hairline to hairline, chimera-like: one body, unending, and Chrome closes her eye.
Focuses on the feel of him exiting, slipping out wetly. Focuses on sliding his shirt all the way up, so she can touch his heartbeat. Wonders if the skin which she has made for this occasion is as sensitive as her own.
"You taste," he breathes, voice thick, "like strawberry crêpes."
And pushes her hair away from her face with the back of one hand; a cooling touch.
~*~
"Five minutes," Hibari says, when Chrome emerges from the restroom.
He is standing in the lobby. His eyes cut through her, as ever, but she is cool, her gait a series of slow strides on the black pumps which she has worn for the occasion. For business, Chrome wears a suit, black dress skirt, and stockings only a shade darker than her fair complexion. It is nothing she would wear except for business occasions, and the niggling sense of the suit looking strange on her slim shoulders remains, but there is a part of her which feels mature like this. Womanly. And five minutes. That is not a bad transition to real time; when she enters the other world, she is always slightly concerned that the gap in time will be too long -- that someone will get suspicious.
Chrome meets Hibari's gaze. Eye to eyes.
He looks down.
A moment of smugness, until --
-- she notices a stray curl of toilet paper under the spike of one shoe.
Oh.
He turns away without so much as a demand for her to follow, and Chrome kicks her heel to the floor and flutters her hands, laces them behind her back, and chases after him wordlessly once he exits.
~*~
Someone shoots at them once they emerge from the taxi.
More than one person, Chrome has time to note, and Hibari grabs her aside so hard that she almost strikes the ground. She creates a fire wall in front of herself before she has thought to ask questions; Hibari says, "Phase one."
And lunges through the columns, Cloud flames aglow, white-purple, and something disconnects; chains and points and a circular jerk which almost gives her whiplash without so much as coming near Chrome's body, and the next thing she knows, there are screams and blood and harsh cracking noises. Metallic screeches and the thud of bodies, and after a moment she turns, blearily, and notices another individual cocking a pistol in her direction. Three, actually. She swallows and neatly dumps them into a pit of hell. And then Chrome realizes she forgot to warn Hibari about the nature of her illusions, but well, he has already jumped through them and killed everyone. As Chrome is assessing the body pile (and there was rather a lot of blood and sound and her ears are ringing), she feels a hand on her wrist.
Looks up to see that gaze pressing down on the Vongola ring of Mist.
"That was his attack." He indicates, with a look, the now-closed portion of road into which Chrome has recently dumped her own share of their opponents.
There is no question, of course, to whom the pronoun refers.
"It's -- " Steadies herself, and eases her hand away. " -- my attack."
The correction, if it can be called such, is for Chrome, more of a truism: I am the Guardian of Mist. The attack is my attack -- no matter its origins.
"I despise illusions," he replies, but his voice is softer than usual, and he closes his eyes, briefly, then turns. Regards their surroundings. Their first (strangely quick) victory.
The thing about missions in the mafia, you see (as Reborn or anyone with more expert knowledge might inform a person, and as Chrome, by now, has learned), is that the goal itself is only a small part of what you are expected to achieve. The presumed end, in this case, would be to guard a Family, to therefore protect those in the Family's care, and to retrieve stolen weaponry. But it is not so straightforward: it is not always so easy to trace which alliance originates a feud; sometimes they hunt you before you can hunt them, upon gaining word of your presence, and this involves a considerable amount of being human target practice. And in order to retrieve stolen goods, of course intel is a necessity, and intel can take a while.
They search the bodies.
Both agree, with relative certainty, that the identification cards they find are fakes; it would be foolish to carry real names or proper social security numbers, but Hibari sends them back to the emerging Foundation, regardless: even a wrong turn can leave an accidental bread trail towards accurate information.
~*~
"It's a bullet," Hibari says.
Chrome nods.
It's a bullet.
That's what they're here for. That's what the Moretti Famiglia has been working on: it's a bullet, but not just any bullet. Oh, no. A bullet, rather, which will extinguish and absorb one's Dying Will flames. A bullet, that is, which contains the ingredients of anti-matter which would tidily erase any substance which does not belong in this world, such as the corporality of illusions produced by Rokudō Mukuro, or by others.
A force of un-making.
It is the first time (but not the last -- no, certainly not the last) that Chrome has felt truly, honestly, almost literally punched in the stomach due to her career affiliations.
The injuries suffered while battling Mammon or Glo Xinia or any opponent were of course unpleasant, but learning that your own Family's ally has given rise to the creation of an item which could nullify your powers, your life's source --
Chrome sits beside Hibari in the back of the limousine, fingers threading through one another as though she is folding paper cranes. Since the fight, his eyes have been as distant as ever, but not unkind.
It is not personal, she decides.
To extinguish Dying Will flames, to absorb them, would harm many people, including her own Boss. It would perhaps not trouble Hibari unduly, but others could suffer besides herself. Besides Mukuro. Weaponry does not choose sides, and bullets are merely tools. She spares a glance at the man beside her; wonders if he has any idea what she is thinking, or whether he cares.
Chrome never learns the answer to this, but a moment thereafter, Hibari does speak, if only to say, "You will be the one to infiltrate."
"Infiltrate."
(Statement-question.)
"Small animals are not always weak," he adds, as the car moves into a tunnel, all darkness and rows of tiny orange lights flashing by. Beautiful Italy's crevices, its corners, its small places. "And if anyone tries to stand in your way, I will bite them to death."
I can't, she thinks, for a terrible moment. I can't. Don't ask it of me. I won't be able to.
"I will," she says.
~*~
This is the part Mukuro never assists Chrome on.
She has not yet decided whether she is grateful to be allotted space to work within or whether she wishes for his answers. It's maddening, sometimes, and she sits on her bed in the hotel room, still feeling as though all the wind has gone from her lungs. He trains her, he fucks her (whether to ease her tension or because it is some amusing way to pass the time; his answers change, depending on the day), he intervenes in her fights if he has cause to, but when it comes to information on the affairs of mafiosi, he is rarely forthcoming, although she suspects and has often suspected that he is a man with an answer or at least a hypothesis for every gap in knowledge. Is it because of you? she wants to ask.
Is it because of you? Is it because of people like you? Is it because of illusionists?
Is it because of people like me?
Or is it just a system?
A game of cards, he'd said once.
Mukuro is holding all the cards.
Not all, he corrects.
~*~
He constructs a table for her, and a bottle of wine, and they sit across from one another, with Mukuro shuffling.
But Chrome does not know how to play.
"You are a card of mine, it's true. But I am a card of others as well. As is Kyouya."
Chrome does not disapprove of the strictly utilitarian definition; it disregards humanity to speak of them as such, but it doesn't bother her, somehow. They are, in a way, all being used -- by one another or by other forces, but if the human condition is to be a cog in a machine, a card in a deck, then Chrome would really only prefer not to grind the mechanisms to a stop. Make us win. Make it run smoothly.
"Of course, I selected you in part because you have this straightforward and agreeable approach. You do slide into place rather more easily than others, who trouble with questions and complaints. When one gets right down to it, the two of you -- simply act."
"I am not old enough to drink, Mukuro-sama."
He laughs. "Chrome. Everyone is old enough to drink in Europe. But never mind about such silly observations. Don't you have something to ask me?"
"I do," she says.
But she can't.
It isn't for her to ask.
"Then you understand, my dear."
She would have (if it were her place, which it is not) noted that he deems himself apart from social conventions, apart from the deck, apart from the other cogs; he is quick to say so, to Tsuna and the others, and she does not disbelieve him, and yet, in their private discourse, Mukuro is ever reminding her that they are contracted, that he goes where she goes, and therefore, the question remains, when properly framed: when you re-shuffle the cards such that you assume the position of servitude, what are you, in actuality, setting up for?
"I -- think they call that a bluff, Mukuro-sama."
He reveals his hand.
She reads: 10 8 6 9 6
"One pair?"
"Maybe two or three."
He seems oddly amused.
She has no idea what he means. Maybe her knowledge of poker hands is even worse than she has realized.
"Real illusions hidden with the illusions, I said once." He puts the cards away. "But suppose you could read my hand. Suppose all creatures could read one another's hands. Their eyes. Their hearts." As I read yours, she almost hears. "Suppose you could in fact read my heart. Consider, Chrome. This is not a hypothetical I have mentioned to anyone else, but our bodies are shared. And thus you must, on occasion, be curious. But suppose indeed that you could read my every whim. The question remains: Would it matter?"
"No."
"All the complications of six hells, and you are the only one with whom I could work so intimately who would not wonder at me at all, and this, of course, is why I do so."
Transparency in the opaque, or something like it.
She is a part of him. A part of his goals. There is nothing to wonder at, when life consists of a series of assignments. They do not come from him. They come from Boss. From Reborn. From higher-ups. From mafiosi. It's all pure action, which is where she fares best. She's comfortable like this. Being assigned roles. Helping to get a job done. Not worrying overly about the intricacies involved behind the scenes. She does wonder, at times; she does, but not for long, because it is pointless, because there is no other life, and she is not turning back.
If there is to be found, in such relations, trust or emotions that run deeper still, then they are, to be certain, mere artifice around which is the biological and physiological core: that is, symbiosis. He is her and she is him.
And yet Chrome, also, is herself.
An entity apart.