NaNoWriMo 2008: Official Status Report VII
47891 / 125000 words. 38% done!
Aiming to hit 50,000 words before Sunday. CAN I DO IT?
Posting the entirety of Chapter Five for this one, and the new few reports will also have whole chapters since it's hard to understand the scenes without seeing everything. This is pretty much completely unedited, so watch out for typos?
Chapter Five. Blood and bone and a little bit of night music.
Seven years ago. Somewhere in Tokyo.
The family records will later insist that the first job he ever did as the Rain Guardian of the Vongola was a success, but the reality could not have been further from what the reports said. Sure, all of the assigned people had dutifully punished (killed in three sword strokes or less) and all that should have rightfully belonged to the family was rightfully returned to the family (because guys don’t really have a say in the matter once they’re dead), but it had not been pleasant and it was far from clean. His ring was meant to reflect the sort of work he was supposed to do - clean-up jobs, smooth-tongued negotiations, turning the tables and tweaking all the right conditions to keep things in the underworld exactly the way the Vongola Family wanted them to be. Now he was beginning to wonder if it was all some sort of cosmic joke. There was nothing clean about clean-up jobs, and there was nothing smooth about negotiations with rival families, and really, until that moment he had not known that for some particularly persistent buggers, telling them to surrender and maybe slashing at them a little for emphasis just wasn’t going to cut it. Stabbing and hacking away, however, had proven to be a lot more effective, if not a whole lot grosser.
Yamamoto Takeshi almost wished that he hadn’t thought about that last part - he had almost recovered from his latest bout of retching. Almost. The young man felt his guts clench up, sending bile surging right back up his throat and into his mouth; he bent over just in time to deposit more of the insides of his stomach into the gutter at his feet. Gokudera probably wasn’t going to like it if he ruined yet another pair of shoes. Those things were expensive.
“Are you done yet?”
“God… I sure hope I am.”
Yamamoto reeled back up after he had finished puking for the umpteenth time that hour, throwing an arm up against the brick wall in front of him for support. He pressed his forehead against the cool bricks, fighting to ignore the sour taste lingering in his mouth. He could feel his companion’s eyes drilling holes right through that spot just in between his shoulder blades, but at that point, he was too busy marveling at his latest discovery: that it was entirely possible for a guy to throw up more than what he had actually eaten in a day. Yamamoto held still, taking deep and regular breaths, quietly willing himself to stop shaking. He was suddenly grateful to both Reborn and his father for forcing all those lessons on the art of meditation and giving him pointers on how to separate one’s self from the moment so seriously, but now he wondered why they hadn’t ever bothered warning him about how completely brutal it was to use a sword against people. Carving up dead fish was one thing. Carving up living people until they were dead beyond all reasonable doubt was quite another.
“If you don’t hurry up, I’ll bite you to-”
“Later, later,” Yamamoto cut in without turning around, waving a hand at his companion from over his shoulder. “I think I make for a pretty boring target right now… I mean, you like it when people fight back, right? Besides,” he added with a weak chuckle. “I might end up throwing up on you if you try and fight me or something.”
A pause.
“…You’re disgusting.”
“Ahahaha. Sorry?”
Hibari Kyouya did not answer him; a moment later, Yamamoto could hear the sound of the ex-prefect walking away from him, soft but distinct against the sporadic passing of cars on the street in front of the alleyway they were in. The young man wasn’t particularly surprised by that - he might, in fact, have been more alarmed if Hibari had bothered to stick around and watch him try his best not to sick up any more than he already had that evening. Hence, as he was certain that Hibari had probably abandoned him, Yamamoto took his time, moving only when he was sure that he wasn’t going to be struck by the urge to find the next available gutter to puke some more in. He smoothed his suit, ran a steadying hand through his hair, stuffed his hands into his pockets and ambled out of the alleyway, wondering if the trains were still running at that time, practicing exactly how he was going to smile at Tsuna and tell his boss and best friend that he was really fine-
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Yamamoto blinked. There was Hibari seated on the curve, arms balanced on his knees, cigarette in one hand and cellular phone in another. The Cloud Guardian was texting someone, face awash from the eerie glow of his phone’s screen, fingers tapping out words at a speed that was sure to make Yamamoto dizzy if he bothered watching them for too long. Hibird was the bright yellow ball of fluff and feathers nestled just within the crook of Hibari’s shoulder, wings drawn up tight against his body, eyes peacefully shut.
“Don’t stand around like that. People might think you’re retarded.”
“Sorry, sorry~”
The Rain Guardian plopped down beside Hibari and grinned, oblivious to his companion’s hiss of disapproval. In the recent years, Yamamoto had re-learned what he had actually known years back, when he used to be the good-natured baseball fanatic and Hibari the young delinquent he used to drag home and out of the rain - he had discovered that the ticket to getting close to Hibari Kyouya was to force him to consider your existence, to carelessly invade the ridiculously wide circle of personal space he drew around himself, to laugh off all the insults and the punches he was bound to throw in your direction, to just stand and offer up your neck the moment he tried to bite you. It was only after the two of you have moved past the point where you could have gracefully given up and he’s too tired to keep fighting you off that he might finally realize that you mean him no harm.
“Hey, I didn’t know you smoked. I thought Gokudera was the only Guardian who did that.”
“Quiet.”
“How does that stuff taste, anyway? Is it all ashy? And, does it really warm you up? Reborn mentioned that to me before, when I asked him… he said it’s nice to smoke during cold weather, kind of like how it’s good to drink coffee when it’s cold and stuff.”
“…Quiet.”
“I mean, I’m really curious about it, but I’m technically an athlete outside of this whole thing, y’know? I’m not supposed to do any of that bad stuff since it’s bad for my health and bad for publicity. Lots of gangsters seem to love smoking though, huh? I wonder if they’re doing it because they think it’s cool or something. If that’s the case, then somebody should really make them stop. But that’s kind of hard, huh?”
“I thought I told you to keep quiet.”
“Oh, hey! HERE’S an idea! Maybe I can talk to Tsuna about some sort of smoking ban in the family! Ahaha, Gokudera’s probably going to be really pissed about it, but it’s good for his health in the long run. He’s kind of a walking cancer story, you know? Besides, he always does exactly what Tsuna tells him to do, so maybe-”
“You nearly botched the mission up tonight because you were weak.”
Yamamoto fell silent. Hibari shut his phone with a snap and turned around to stare at his companion, eyeing the other Guardian with that special sort of disdain that he only seemed to reserve for Gokudera, Lambo, crowds and other things that he absolutely detested.
“You hesitated,” Hibari went on to say, in a cool voice that denied the smoldering disapproval in his eyes. “You did not want to kill them, so you tried to find some way around it. They took advantage of you, so you were forced to fight harder and I was forced to step in and help you finish them off. That’s why it got messy. If you had not stopped, then they would not have had the time to resist. Maybe they would have had cleaner, more painless deaths.”
“…But they still would have died.”
He spoke without thinking, but he did not regret it. Hibari blinked.
“I thought you herbivores wanted to change the future.”
“We do, but… people don’t have to die this way.”
Yamamoto suddenly felt like he was back to being six-years-old and openly defying his father for the first time in his young life by choosing a sport over running the family business, stubbornly repeating himself, fumbling over his own words. Hibari leveled him with another look, and then lifted his cigarette up. A long drag, a cloud of smoke.
“Grow some fangs, Yamamoto Takeshi, or you’ll be dead before we can fix things.”
Present day. The docks, Puerto Princesa City.
Yamamoto could, the moment he stepped into the area, guess what must have happened at a glance: he was, after all, very familiar with Hibari Kyouya’s S.O.P., and everything about the setup fell right within the predictable margins he had built over his years of working closely with his family’s Cloud Guardian. The area, for one, had been completely cleared of its security detail; there were no guards (or bodies of guards) in sight, and the security cameras looked like they had been smashed through with a morning star, a flail, or some other weapon with a hell lot of spikes. Electronic devices of any sort instantaneously shut down, and Yamamoto had a feeling that even his own phone - something that Irie had modified, making it capable of blocking off that sort of interference - would not be able to receive or make calls to anybody for so long as he remained within the area. The immediate surroundings also gave no indication of there being anything amiss: the grounds were clean, and there was even an old janitor hoisting up the trash bags piled up against the wall of one of the warehouses. Yamamoto waited until the man was gone before he reached into his jacket, pulling out a small, scarred box inscribed with images of summer rain upon its surface from his inner pocket.
“I didn’t think I’d be using you again this soon,” the swordsman murmured as the ring on his left hand went alight with a distinct blue flame. He pressed the insignia upon the groove on the box, and the swallow within burst out in a quick flash of light. The box animal shot up, circled around once before doubling back, fluttering close to Yamamoto. He smiled at the creature and moved towards the warehouse.
“Make it rain, little guy. Kyouya’s going to need somebody to sweep up after him in a bit.”
Yamamoto did not even turn to watch as his box creature went off in a quick snap of wings. He ducked within the shade of the sun shelter fixed over the entrance to the warehouse just as the downpour started up, crashing over the area with an abruptness not uncommon to a tropical country like the Philippines. No one would think anything of it, and no one would be able to hear when things started getting noisy.
One would think that after swinging a baseball bat on the mound for so long, one would find the weight of a sword frightening and cumbersome. When Yamamoto unsheathed the Shigure Kintoki, however, he felt as though the last time he had wielded the thing had been just yesterday, that he hadn’t kept the sword locked up in its case and opted to use other weapons whenever he was required to do business for the family during his “extended vacation”. He was not bothered. Oddly enough, he felt like he had, in one sense, had simply moved from one familiar place only to slip right back into another, and the transition was smooth and effortless.
Sometime during their university years, he and Ryohei had gone to a bar after a particularly difficult negotiation with the Varia and, after knocking back a few drinks, proceeded to talk about how they managed to keep sane even with all the fighting and how they, as sportsmen, dealt with the fact that they were walking into their respective fields with blood on their hands. Ryohei dealt with it by continuing to play by the rules of the boxing ring, even with the full knowledge that his opponents usually did not care about abstract concepts like honor and the dignity of human life. Yamamoto, on the other hand, decided to approach things the way surgeons approached the patients that they had to slice open and legally mutilate with every operation: with a healthy dose of humor and just the right amount of ignorance towards particular details. It probably wasn’t the most proper way of dealing with it (and Ryohei had told him as much, and rather explosively at that), but it smoothed things over, and being the Rain Guardian was all about being smooth. Hence, when the first guy came out and he sliced him in half at the drop of a dime, Yamamoto did not think about the horrific amount of blood that gushed out just seconds after the stroke, or about how the guts just sort of flopped all over the floor right in front of him, pink and red and putrid. In fact, at the precise moment where the edge of the Shigure Kintoki met flesh, Yamamoto was riding on the instinctual calculations of a batter out to make a homerun, too busy to really notice that the object he had just taken a swing at was a person, not a baseball. The swordsman lingered in the corridor a moment later, blinked at the body, lifted his sword up to the light, peered at it, and scratched the back of his neck.
“Hmm… was that fast enough? I remember swinging faster before…”
Yamamoto stepped over the man he had just gutted, entering the warehouse proper; his favorite song came to mind just as he turned a corner and ran into more men in suits. He whistled along to the tune in his head as he opted to charge forward rather than take cover, stepping right past their defenses, slicing up their guns (and sometimes, the trigger fingers or whole hands holding the weapons in question) before they could fire. The rain he had brought on was coming down stronger, pelting a million little water bullets down upon the metal rooftop of the warehouse, smothering screams beneath collective white noise. Yamamoto, however, did not notice the rain. He continued whistling and walking along, absentmindedly ripping through whomever he happened to come across, eyes seeing past the pile of bodies he was building, ears tuned for something beyond the rain and the song in his head. He was listening for the sound of another Guardian - another necromancer - at work, the distinct thwack-thwack-thwack of tonfa colored by the not-so-occasional snap of a human body driven and twisted well past the point of breaking. He heard it just when he was halfway through the maze of cargo boxes, and was thus prepared for the flash of fangs that lashed out at him the moment he stepped out into the clearing where he knew his fellow Guardian would be.
Where most of the other Guardians of the Vongola had changed in ways that made them almost totally different from their younger selves, Hibari Kyouya had only become more of what he already was: sharp, vicious, uncompromising, driven, fiercely independent. He had bled down to the physical essentials, grown in strength at a fast and frightening speed over the years, first becoming a reflection of the man that Yamamoto, Gokudera and Tsuna had met in an alternate future and then moving on to completely surpass that image, building another that made his old future self seem like a distant memory. He did not deny his ties with the Vongola Family, at least not in the way that he used to. Of course, he expected more than the regular amount of leeway given to Guardians that moved more or less independently from the family unless they were called upon for business. This meant that he did not take to interruptions very well, and always moved to dispose of it immediately and in the most possibly lethal way. While the others were often annoyed at this (or, in Rokudo Mukuro’s case, amused), Yamamoto knew that this was a merely a knee-jerk reaction of a man who despised crowds, and therefore took no offense at the fact that Hibari had just rushed at him, backing him up against the nearest wall with the sheer force of his strike.
“Ahaha… hi.”
Hibari stared. A full minute passed before the Cloud Guardian released his grip with a derisive snort, all thwarted killing intent and white-hot irritation. Yamamoto chuckled as he straightened up, fixing his collar.
“Um. That was a lot faster than the last time, if it helps.”
“Take that man to your left and follow me. And don’t say anything more stupid than you already have from here on.”
“Man…? Oh!” Yamamoto bent down, checking the pulse of the guy in question; he was surprised to discover that the man was still alive. Nonetheless, Yamamoto did what he was told and hoisted the guy over one shoulder and moved to follow Hibari immediately. The Cloud Guardian was making his way back into the maze of cargo boxes and it did not look like he was going to come back for Yamamoto if the latter happened to get lost.
By the time they were done, the little room at the back of the warehouse was the only clean place left in the whole building. Yamamoto only called his box creature back after they had finished disposing of the bodies - it wasn’t the most thrilling thing on Earth, dragging corpses through the pouring rain, but they applied themselves to the activity with the single-minded determination of people who were experts in their field. Half of what made a gangster job good was to leave nothing behind: no signs, no evidence of foul play, and the eerie sort of cleanliness that left the right message for their rival families to pick up on in the near future.
The rules of classic interrogation dictated the need for a sturdy table, a set of good chairs, a pair of handcuffs, bad lighting and a heavy hand when dealing with your unfortunate prisoner. In the case that any of these factors were absent, a very large refrigerator could suffice.
Yamamoto shut the door of the fridge for the third time that evening, counted off ten seconds in his head, then opened the door again. “Y’know, you’re just making this hard for yourself, buddy,” he said in English, to the man they had stuffed in with the beer and the leftover lunch food. “I mean, we’re asking pretty simple questions here, and you know what they say about simple questions and simple answers.”
“BUT I SWEAR I DON’T KNOW ANYTHI-”
Yamamoto shut the door again, sealing the rest of the sentence shut behind him. “Stubborn, isn’t he?” he remarked in Japanese, turning towards the back door. Hibari took a drag from his cigarette; he was sitting just within the doorframe, fiddling with his cellular phone. He did not turn around, did not answer. Yamamoto chuckled, counted to fifteen and opened the refrigerator once more. Some things in life were bound to never change.
“W-wait, wait! I-I think I r-r-remember something now!”
“Oh?”
“Y-you gotta p-promise me that y-you’ll let me off c-clean if I-” the man shrieked when Yamamoto made as if to close the door again.
“OKAYYOUDON’THAVETOI’LLTALK.”
Yamamoto beamed.
“That’s more like it.”
Some thirty minutes later, Yamamoto ambled over to the doorframe, leaned an arm over the entranceway and glanced down at his companion. Hibari spared him a single glance and, predictably, offered nothing but an annoyed snort in his direction.
“You’re blocking my light.”
“I haven’t seen you in a while.”
Hibari fixed his gaze on the warehouses in the distance, lifted the cigarette to his lips. Yamamoto rocked back on his heels, lightly fanning himself with his shirt. The rain had done little to lessen the oppressive heat that evening - he had thought, wrongfully, that spending all that time playing baseball in Southern Japan would have prepared him for dealing with all sorts of weather conditions. He wondered how Hibari could manage to look so crisp, clean and totally unruffled in a country as warm as the Philippines.
“The girls are waiting for us over in Coron. We should probably head back.”
Five seconds, and Hibari turned into a series of sharp, connected movements: a languid blink, heel crushing a cigarette underfoot, standing, hands fingering a purple box inscribed with clouds, walking, moving away from Yamamoto. The Rain Guardian was unperturbed; with a small laugh and another rueful shake of his head, he moved to follow the other man.
Back in the room, a man locked in a refrigerator had not giving up on screaming and pounding at the door, wondering why he couldn’t push it open, not knowing that his interrogators had wrapped heavy chains around the whole thing and topped it all off with a lock. There was no longer anyone around to hear him.
Chapter Six to follow. o/