Title: I Absorb You Into Me
Rated: PG
Pairing: MukuroTsuna (6927)
Word count: 519
Warnings: Um. Shifting tenses. D-d… *tries again* d…ddddeeaa… ;___; Implication of impending d–. *sobs* I’M SO SORRY, MUKURO DDDDD8
Summary: Mukuro is on the chopping block *ducks for cover*
–
“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks,
your Loveliness and the hour of my death.”
-John Keats
There is a beach, undisturbed in the canals of Mukuro’s mind. Solitude will never cast aside its novelty. At the shore, he lets the waves break against his ankles. He shifts on his heels and feels the grains slip between his toes.
For once, Mukuro smiles and revels in the brevity of it.
—
“I can’t… I can’t help you.”
Nothing, Mukuro decided, was more beautiful than the anguish of Sawada Tsunayoshi. He wanted to take it in his hands, roll it between his fingers, press his mouth to it and feel it flutter against his lips. Tsuna, ignorant to his thoughts, pressed his palms against Mukuro’s chest, his forehead to Mukuro’s shoulder.
The links of his manacles chimed a dirge to the cadence of Tsuna’s grief.
—
Across the way, the sun sets. Light scatters in the air, reflected in countless glittering arcs across the swell of waves, a burning display that razes the horizon, not unlike the sky flame.
Mukuro does not watch it—beauty does not move him. It may have, once, but he prefers not to remember. Instead, he closes his eyes and breathes. Catches the scent of the Mediterranean, the smell of desperate men and shadows strung like pearls in the surf.
The air grows cold at his back and he sifts his fingers through the sand and the moment. The grains pass through his hands like seconds.
—
“Th-The Vendici. This… this is above me.” The cloth of Mukuro’s shirt nearly came apart in Tsuna’s hands, brittle and worn as it was. “I have to think about the Vongola. I can’t… I have to think about everyone else.”
What Mukuro always admired—perhaps, in some forgotten crevice of his soul, envied even—about the Vongola Tenth was that he could function all the better for the softness in him.
—
Mukuro presses a hand to his chest and memorizes the steady beat. He wonders what new adventures await him beyond the sixth path of Hell. The prospect is exhilarating.
His hair catches the wind, laces the tangled wisps in memory and brine. The air carries with it a faint whining—like the slow hiss of a whetstone dragged along the axe’s blade, like the screech of metal as the guillotine is raised.
In spite of himself, he hopes Tsuna will some day understand and shed his guilt.
—
“I can’t,” Tsuna said. “I can’t.” He turned his face, his breath warm and unsteady against Mukuro’s neck. “I can’t save you,” he said, shoulders trembling, chest heaving.
“Enough,” Mukuro said. He rested a hand against the small of Tsuna’s back, his other cradling a jaw grown angular over time. “Vongola Tenth—Tsuna. Death is an illusion. And I am a master of illusion.”
The words appeared to sooth him little, because Tsuna collapsed against him, broken gasps caught in the cradle of Mukuro’s collarbones. Had he the power, Tsuna would have saved him. It was naïve. It was sentimental. It was beneath everything Mukuro had ever known.
It would make Tsuna the greatest of the Vongola bosses.
“Enough,” he said. And it was.
The end.
–
And then Mukuro out-smarted the entire Vendici and somehow escaped his execution and lived to see Tsuna rise to greatness.
…
*sobs* I AM NEVER WRITING DEATH FIC EVER EVER NEVER AGAIN.