the dead and the forsworn
Voting for the UFO Awards is going on right now if you would like to vote! Welcome Home and Hard Living got nominated, so thank you! Whoever nominated them. ^_^
The nominations are kind of like a rec list, which is useful. Well done for existing, UFO Awards.
Meanwhile, on an unrelated note, this is that Hibari fic of which I spoke. Solidarity, Hibari. I also used to beat kids up for misbehaving in class.
Um, yeah...
Katekyo Hitman Reborn! does not belong to me. JUST AS WELL, PERHAPS.
The Dead and the Forsworn
Hibari Kyouya’s day begins with his garden.
The garden is, of course, perfect. His mother designed it, his father created it, and Hibari takes care of it. His garden.
He spends a half hour drinking in the order and the beauty of it. It’s probably the last order and beauty he’ll see all day.
After half an hour precisely, he goes back into the house, collects his school things, and checks the kitchen. His mother is nowhere in sight, but she did leave a bento out for him. She’s a quiet woman, like a ghost in the house. Herbivores tend to think she’s one of them.
They’re wrong.
When Hibari was seven years old, one of his father’s rivals broke in, thinking a wife and child would be perfect hostages. His mother slit the man’s throat with a kitchen knife, then ran for a plastic trash bag to drag him onto before his blood could stain the tatami too badly.
They’d had to replace two mats. She still frowns at those mats now and again, when she isn’t thinking of anything in particular.
Hibari told the story to Kusakabe Tetsuya once when they were in grade school. Something had reminded him. Maybe some herbivore they’d beaten up for not paying attention in class had landed on the ground the same way as that man. It doesn’t matter.
Tetsu avoided him for a week afterward, and he still doesn’t know why.
He doesn’t talk about his family anymore. If even Tetsu can’t understand, then there’s no hope for anyone else.
He picks up his bento and walks silently out the door. Out of perfection and into chaos.
* * *
Predictably, he’s driven to murderous rage within ten steps of the school gate.
Sometimes he thinks having a perfect home is a disadvantage. If he didn’t have a proper standard, he wouldn’t know how spectacularly wrong everything is, and it wouldn’t bother him. But then he’d be just like the rest of them; terrible thought.
The tragedy of it is that the school principles are sound. The problem is the students. And the teachers. And the administrators.
The odds are stacked against Hibari and Namimori Middle School. Still, the only thing to do is make the best of a bad situation. To try, yet again, to fix what may well be unfixable.
Ten steps from the gate, there’s a girl backed against a wall by a boy. The boy is leaning over her, confident. She’s smiling at him, but it’s out of fear; her whole body says fear. Except for her clenched fists, which say hatred.
People have always told Hibari he needs to talk more, listen more, make an ass of himself just like the rest of them. Their blindness to their own stupidity is unbelievable. What could talking communicate that looking hasn’t already?
Hibari beats the boy unconscious for being too stupid to see the obvious. The girl thanks him, and he gives her a thwack, too, for thinking he did it for her. Is she utterly worthless? Hibari’s mother would dissect any man who tried to corner her.
Herbivores.
“That was a lesson,” he says slowly and clearly, because they seem to need simple facts pointed out in blazing neon letters.
The girl whimpers. The boy remains unconscious. Hibari walks away before he’s driven to hit them again out of sheer frustration.
He’s trying to train them. Humans are much more difficult to train than other animals. An entire species of morons, and yet they’re so self-satisfied. It’s disgusting. So proud of their intelligence, though they’re the only creatures in the world that don’t know their place. Hairless, awkwardly upright, nearly deaf, blind, and numb. Nothing so pathetic. At least real herbivores know what they are.
Hibari can’t believe he was born human. It had better never happen again.
* * *
The first time the school called Hibari’s mother in to discuss his behavior, he was eight years old.
His father had been teaching him to use tonfa, so short and light they couldn’t do much damage. “The principle remains the same,” his father said. “Look for worthy opponents. It’s the only way to make yourself strong. When you’re strong enough, you can find something to protect.”
Hibari had looked for worthy opponents. His teachers hadn’t taken well to it at all.
He didn’t understand why they were upset-he’d waited until lunchtime. He hadn’t disrupted class. He hadn’t meant to upset discipline, but apparently he had, and that would disappoint his parents. He hadn’t meant to.
His mother came home from the meeting, nodded to him in passing, and picked up a report on drug interactions. He waited in something like dread for his father to come home. He could count on one hand the number of times his father had been angry with him, and he didn’t want it to happen again.
His mother didn’t seem angry, but that didn’t mean anything. She never seemed angry. She skipped anger and went straight to punishment. It might be hours before Hibari figured out whether he was in trouble with her or not.
His father came home and said hello to Hibari. His mother didn’t notice. (She’s oblivious to what’s going on around her when she’s reading; his father always says it’s a terrible trait for a yakuza’s wife. And yet he doesn’t seem to mind.)
The living room settled into silence, Hibari’s mother reading, his father sipping the tea his mother had prepared, Hibari quietly panicking.
Eventually, finally, his mother put down the report, blinked at the world, smiled at his father. Hibari held his breath.
“Kyouya’s school?” his father asked.
“The children at our son’s school are weak,” his mother said dismissively.
“Hm,” his father replied, not particularly interested, and picked up a newspaper.
Hibari breathed out.
* * *
He’s never found a worthy opponent; he’s starting to wonder if he ever will. Humans are disappointing. Outside the wall surrounding his home, everything is disappointing. But at least he’s found something he cares enough about to protect.
Namimori. It’s perfect for him. He can protect each school as he enters it, and when he graduates, he’ll be ready to protect the entire town. One small town. Not beyond a human.
He’s not alone, either; there are people to help him. His men, he supposes, although they don’t seem much like his father’s men. They’ve made no promises to Hibari and they’ve received no promises from him. It’s just that they want the same things he does. It’s just that they always seem to be around.
Of course, the moment Hibari accepts the future laid out before him, the moment he makes his peace with it, Sawada Tsunayoshi appears. Sawada, who trails worthy opponents like a comet’s tail: Bronco Dino, Rokudou Mukuro, the baby.
Sawada Tsunayoshi. Strange creature. Apparently he’s been around all along, invisible until now. Hibari initially pegged him as the most spectacular herbivore who’d ever walked the halls of Namimori, but then, suddenly, he started making interesting use of his herbivore tendencies. Hibari’s mother would probably like him: Sawada has a good feel for what his limits are.
And then there are the moments when he doesn’t seem to have any.
Sawada is making himself a family, shaping his own hierarchy, discipline, and law. Humans never succeed at creating an order for themselves as successful as the natural order, but Hibari respects the ones who try. He respects them until they fail.
(This is the beauty of tradition. Traditions are a kind of order sustained for hundreds, thousands of years. Almost as good as nature.)
Hibari’s sure that Sawada’s family will fall apart in a matter of months, but he’s ready to be amused by their efforts in the meantime, as long as they don’t get in his way. Sawada may be more self-aware than most humans, but he’s still an herbivore, and an herbivore can’t hold a family together. Apparently he doesn’t understand his weaknesses quite well enough.
It’s only chance that Hibari is the one to tell Sawada that Sasagawa has been attacked. It’s chance that he sees Sawada’s reaction, which isn’t at all the reaction of an herbivore afraid for its herd. It’s the reaction of a predator whose order is being threatened. Not fear, not at first. Not fear, but outrage. A sentiment Hibari is very familiar with.
Hibari steps back and watches Sawada run, mildly curious, but he has bigger things to worry about. He has to protect Namimori; that’s more important than anything else.
More important than anything else, and Hibari fails anyway. Sawada defeats his enemy for him.
This is where it all starts to go wrong.
* * *
Hibari’s mother went to medical school before she married his father. Hibari doesn’t know why she gave up the profession because he hasn’t asked, and he hasn’t asked because he doesn’t particularly care. She’s here now.
She gave up the profession, but she didn’t give up medicine. She takes care of any of the men whose injuries would require awkward explanations. For the same reason, she often prepares the dead.
“Kyouya-san,” she called one day when he came home from school. “Look at this.”
A dead man. Hibari had known him when he was alive, but that didn’t matter anymore. Dead men are all the same.
His mother showed him a cut on the corpse’s neck, only a centimeter long, but deep. She said, “This is all it takes to kill a man, Kyouya-san. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Men like to think they’re stronger than they really are, and their arrogance is the death of them.” He watched her face, pinched and annoyed, as she contemptuously threw a sheet over the body. “Pitiful.”
Pitiful not to recognize your own weakness.
And it was pitiful. Hibari was only nine, but he already knew a lot of his weaknesses. Most of all, he knew he was bad at dealing with people. One of the men had asked if Hibari would lead next, and his father had replied, “Only by his own merit.”
Empires fall because of weak sons, and his father’s would fall if Hibari tried to lead it. He had no interest in the job, no interest in commanding dozens of men and everything that came with that. Black suits and white smoke and bodies under sheets.
Hibari didn’t want anything to do with it. It was best for everyone that he didn’t try.
* * *
Bronco Dino talks constantly. Constantly. An endless stream of babble, always completely beside the point. It would make even a saint want to pound his face in, and Hibari is definitely no saint.
If it weren’t for the babbling, Dino would be interesting, which is the most annoying thing of all. For one thing, he could destroy Hibari with that whip, if he wanted to. Hibari’s not fooling himself otherwise, though he’s hoping to fool Dino.
“Kyouya,” Dino says, which makes him the only person other than Hibari’s father to use that name. Even Hibari’s mother calls him Kyouya-san. “Kyouya,” he says, “if I win, you have to join Tsuna’s family.”
Dino is an idiot. Hibari isn’t joining anyone’s insane attempt at a family; he can’t afford to try to protect two things at once. The last thing he needs is a ring tying him to something that isn’t Namimori.
They’re asking him to break a promise, and he hates it. He won’t lose. He won’t break his promise for the sake of Bronco Dino, of all people. A man who has never said a single thing that made sense since Hibari first met him.
Hibari’s never actually bitten anyone to death, but he means to, someday. It’s an undeniably appealing idea. And Dino is an undeniably appealing candidate; more so with every stupid word that comes out of his mouth.
It takes Hibari a long time to figure out what’s in this for Dino. He claims it’s out of loyalty to the Vongola (the mouth, it never stops), but that’s obviously a lie. Dino wouldn’t bleed day after day to force someone to join a family that isn’t his. No one would.
Once Hibari does understand, he realizes it should have been obvious from the start.
Dino dances with the whip, he flies. Every movement is alert and light-aggressive, but never abrupt, never angry. Dino, Hibari realizes, is having fun. This is fun for him. They have something in common after all.
And when it eventually passes beyond fun, turns into nothing but stubbornness and pride, Hibari understands that, too. He knows all about stubborn pride.
It won’t be until years later, when Dino has become as familiar as his garden, that it will occur to him that there was another layer to those fights. With the clarity of hindsight, it will be obvious that Dino had also been trying to break him.
Hibari will smile because it hadn’t worked.
* * *
“It’s impossible to control everything,” his father said.
Hibari was ten years old, and his family was at a funeral. Another funeral, another crematorium.
His father’s line of work has a terrible attrition rate, and Hibari and his parents have been to countless funerals, not quite family, more than friends. So many funerals that Hibari’s memory of childhood will always be colored with black suits and smoke.
“He was a good man.”
The dead man had been a cheerful sort, always laughing. Deadly in a fight. He used to bring Hibari candy and demand stories about school, other children. Hibari had never liked him, and now he was dead. It would always be a mystery why his father had thought so much of the man.
Hibari’s father was younger than most of the fathers of the children at school, but he was the only one with so much gray hair. His mother said, “Your father takes on too much.”
His mother’s hair was turning gray, too. Taking on too much.
To a child’s mind, the solution seemed simple, and he couldn’t understand why his parents didn’t see it. I’m only going to have one thing, Hibari promised himself, watching the face of the man’s wife, ugly red and swollen with tears.
One thing. As long as he only protected one thing, then he wouldn’t fail. He’d be done with funerals.
The smoke rose above them and dissipated into the sky.
* * *
Hibari stands behind Sawada Tsunayoshi in the aftermath of a battle he didn’t care about over rings he doesn’t care about, and he can’t decide who to hate. He watches the line of Sawada’s back, watches the tension in small shoulders trying to bear the whole world.
You can’t control everything, Sawada Tsunayoshi.
Hibari hasn’t even managed to control his own school. What Sawada is trying to do is impossible, and Hibari ought to be sorry he came here tonight. He ought to be.
He hates the thought that Dino might have been right about something.
The smoke rises above them.
* * *
“The Vongola heir,” his father says, setting down a book and meeting Hibari’s eyes, poised and challenging as always. “What do you think of him, Kyouya?”
Hibari remembers wide, bovine eyes staring into the reception room from between the strong shoulders of Yamamoto and Gokudera. He’d thought then that Sawada was looking for protection, but it turned out to be the other way around.
He remembers the herbivore who cowered until he learned a friend was hurt, who then bared fangs and defeated the man Hibari couldn’t handle (and still, it burns).
He remembers slim shoulders and smoke.
Sawada is trying to protect too much, and he’s going to destroy himself with it. He’s going to destroy all of them with it. What does Hibari think of him?
“He’s interesting.”
His father raises his eyebrows and turns back to his book.
* * *
The baby has told him to choose.
Hibari is graduating from middle school this year; he won’t be around to learn it and protect it anymore. It’s impossible to protect what you don’t understand.
He folds his armband and places it carefully in the back corner of his desk drawer, then goes to his garden for the comfort in it.
He’ll come to understand the high school, of course. He already understands the town of Namimori, because Namimori has always been his goal. His destiny, if there is such a thing. Namimori is his one thing to protect. He promised; it’s the only promise he’s ever made. He has no business getting distracted now.
Guardians, Hibari thinks. What a joke. Sasagawa Ryouhei, simpleminded and predictable. Lambo Bovino, nothing but a snack for a predator. Gokudera Hayato, too erratic to be interesting. Yamamoto Takeshi, cheerful and dangerous, just like a dead man Hibari once knew. Chrome and Mukuro, codependent and unreliable, still unpunished for the crime of upsetting Hibari’s order.
And even if they improve, even if they learn and change and make themselves something worthy of respect, it won’t do any good. Hibari has seen the future, and what Sawada wants is impossible. The future means destruction, if not by the Millefiore, then by whoever will take their place. Destruction is the cost of trying to protect too much, and Hibari and Sawada both know it.
The knowledge hasn’t changed Sawada’s mind. That’s exactly what makes him so interesting. He recognizes his own weaknesses and chooses to ignore them. He knows he can’t have what he wants, but he struggles for it anyway. It isn’t ignorance or arrogance, it’s defiance.
Sawada Tsunayoshi wants to protect everything.
Choose.
Hibari closes his eyes and breaks his promise.