Warnings: (not really graphic) descriptons of violence, nonsensicalness, ask your doctor if this kind of burbling incoherency is right for you.
Notes: So I replayed FFX recently and was kind of fascinated (and frustrated, srsly Seymour) by the death mechanics in it. This is a game where NPCs just casually walk off death and somehow in-universe, no one finds this particularly interesting. So I wrote fic.
I'm not really happy with it, but I've been struggling with this long enough. This for you, tinytin!
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Tsuna sat crouching in the cold and lifeless wasteland around him, watching dry grass leaves swaying slightly in an intangible gust of air. Pale sunlight struggled its way through an overcast sky, turning the turf a strangely colourless grayish-green.
It had only taken two shots. Reborn was going to kill him.
Worse than usual, Tsuna thought glumly as he stared down a particularly uninteresting leaf.
It was strange. Even the insects seemed to have forsaken this place. In this cold brown ground, nothing moved, only the grass seemed to uphold its constant movement in the face of a wind he couldn't feel.
No one came here but the dead. Why wasn't the ground crawling with little critters then?
Resurrections were costly, Tsuna knew. Reborn was going to be disappointed again, wear that tight little frown he usually wore when dealing with Tsuna's flat-out incompetence, his refusal to face facts or lives or even death.
Dame-Tsuna, getting killed again. Don't you know that resurrections are precious? Even if you'd work yourself ragged till you bled you couldn't pay for one by your own self.
… he'd say.
Ah-ah-ah.
In this world, the dead need guidance.
It is what they preach in every school in every town, in every country. In case of death do not approach the corpse. Do not panic. Do not run. Stay calm and wait for a Summoner to arrive. The line between the living and the dead ought not be crossed.
Sometimes you can feel it, if you have just that bit of talent. A cold sensation in the back of your neck, things moving in your sight's periphery.
Empty space where there shouldn't be.
This is how Summoners are singled out: Paraded around in front of corpses, playing I Spy with the things crawling in the dark. Sometimes the things would get angry. That, too, is how Summoners are selected.
It's okay, the parents say to their children. They'll soon be at peace.
Getting shot in the lung was the worst.
What an ignoble death, thought Tsuna, as he woke up to stare at his own corpse, suffocated on his own blood.
No, he thought: That was more excruciating than usual, as he remembered his last hacking coughs, the tightness in his eyes as if they were about to explode, his desperate attempts at sucking in air through destroyed organs, flooding his airways with dirty blood.
No, what he really thought was: Dame-Tsuna. Even in death I look stupid. He mustered his gaping mouth, the caved-in chest and grotesquely wide open eyes. Wasn't that just his luck.
He sat down, arms around his knees, cheek on his shoulder. His head felt so heavy. There was movement on the street, but he saw nothing from this little back-alley of his, and the loud noise that was ever so present before had turned into complete silence.
Hopefully Reborn'd come alone. He didn't want the others to see him like this.
But then again, he'd need a High Summoner. Reborn was very good at the First End thing, not so much at the Second Birth.
Tsuna didn't even know how often he had been reborn.
Suddenly restless, he stood up. He knew that Reborn told him to stay put, but…
But!
He wandered over to what had once been a lively business street.
This was the secret of the dead:
The worlds of the living and the dead not only shouldn't be crossed, they couldn't be crossed. Just as the living can't see the dead, the dead don't see the living. Vacant streets criss-cross through cities ripe with decay, senseless without the souls that build and inhabit them; giant forests with only the wind howling through overbearing trees, no nestling in the woods to indicate the inane meandering of woodland creatures; deserts swallowing the whole of humanity.
Sometimes, someone gets lost. They wander around, for all eternity if they're unlucky, alone in an empty world.
It's enough to make you doubt your sanity.
He watched as they held Squalo down, the Shark screeching all the while.
"I'm sorry," he said in the middle of a brief interval in which the swearing had to make way for some heavy breathing. "I really didn't want this."
Squalo choked on his own spittle before it flew out of his mouth, landing two inches in front of Tsuna's left boot.
"You didn't want", he said.
"You pussy," he said.
"You could've had," he said again.
Then he looked at Tsuna; shut up and for the first time really looked at him. With narrow eyes he clenched his teeth, hidden behind a mouth pinched into a disgusted grimace everyone seemed to adopt as soon as they encountered Tsuna; and Tsuna felt skewered, not by the stare, strangely, because there was plain disinterest in it, a dismissal so obvious it lost out only to the seething contempt right next to it. It was something inside Tsuna that wanted to claw out of his chest, scouring a burning path through the spaces between his ribs, scratching and bending them in its wake and leaving them gaping open, heaving frantically.
"What you want," Squalo said slowly, carefully, nose drawn up as he deigned to waste another glance, a few more breaths on a lost cause. "You don't get it, do you? Someone like you is gonna fail fast around here. You have nothing. Somehow you have less than nothing, Jesus Christ. I can't imagine someone less suited for anything."
Squalo kept staring at him, as they tied his hands down, as they bound his feet tightly together and chained him to metal posts, and when Tsuna didn't move or say anything, he began laughing.
"You're gonna die. A lot. And when you do, we'll be there to take that title you never wanted from your cold, stiff fingers."
And they strapped him to a bench and carried him off.
Generally speaking, the dead don't even see each other. The price to be paid for staying in this world past your time is to be eternally blinded.
Once in a blue moon, someone with the sight is born: a quality so hard to quantify that it barely counts as a power. Does the sway they hold over the realm of the dead stem from their sight or from how they use it? In broader terms, does the influence they hold over the lost souls come in conjecture with the sight, or is it derived from the conclusions they themselves draw when confronted with a new sense? Is it heritage or character?
Few people can send the dead to a place from which there truly is no return, freeing or forcing their lonely specters into the eternal void. Even less can bring them back.
Recently, Tsuna was fighting rather a lot. Less and less talks brought about peaceful solutions, and the meeting room now stank permanently of blood.
He hated it.
He had no real influence over the murder missions (though he could have, a part of him whispered, a part that looked at him with the same expectant eyes his men were gracing him with, unchanging through all that occurred and always waiting), and while he despised doing it, orders bid him to pull people out of the game permanently. Disobedience was not an option. Still, he didn't really want to add more names to his kill list.
So he froze them.
The Zero Point Breakthrough was a technique tailor-made for him. He was surprised that it stemmed from another man's hands, from another man's time. Dragging the living into a facsimile of eternal rest, yet not killing them outright. Keeping them hovering on the border of life and death, frozen in time (and space).
It appealed to him on a visceral level.
"It suits you, brat." Shamal was sprawled over a desk chair, bottle in hand and a cigarette in his mouth while Tsuna continued opening and closing his burning hands.
"Is that a compliment?"
"Why not? You can sub-zero entire legions, I fail to see how that's not snazzy."
Tsuna made a face. "Please don't say snazzy." His fist closed of its own accord and was forced open again by some strange power. "I can burn armies to chilly bricks. That is not 'snazzy'."
"Blah blah woe is me, I get it, I get it."
"At least use 'cool'! Lots of things are cool, you can't go wrong with that."
"Bad pun."
A sigh. "Please shut up and treat my back already."
"Still don't see no breasts on you, kid."
Tsuna grew to dislike talks with the Ninth.
The mafia don would receive him sitting at a small table, fully decked out for two, on the quaint little balcony of one of his more remote estates. Two tea cups sat tidily on a tablecloth the color of molten egg yolk; snacks were grouped towards the middle, right next to bowls full of sugar and milk. There was more quaint cutlery than Tsuna could deal with, two sets of fine silver gleaming in the afternoon sun. Always just two, even though Reborn used to sit into their meetings with a startling consistency, hovering a few steps behind Nono's shoulder or making himself comfortable on the railing while he quietly polished his gun.
From the corner of his eyes, Tsuna always saw the glint of jet-black eyes squinting from beneath the rim of a black fedora.
"I'm still not sure", was all Tsuna had to offer.
Nono's eyes (still exhibiting a friendly glimmer the meaning of which he could never quite grasp) never left his face. Only when Tsuna looked down nervously a thoughtful hum left him, golden eyes still mustering his successor's downcast face before he turned his gaze to the horizon.
"You are unsettled." he remarked, shaking his head when Tsuna wrenched his head up.
"No, do not deny it. You are in your right to be."
His eyes turned to his own tea cup, picking it up with fingers long and elegant, with a grace Tsuna could only dream of possessing.
He wears his sins well, something in him commented. From the side, black eyes were drilling their way into the depths of his mind and he struggled to make the thought disappear.
Anxiety settled deep and heavy in the pit of his stomach.
Almost hypnotically, two of those pale long fingers had begun to trace the rim of a fragile porcelain cup. "I have put you in an unsustainable position," something grave entered the lilting tones of that soothing voice. "I would have liked to offer you a way out. I see now, however, that that may be a task far beyond my capabilities. Especially,"
A pause. Tsuna kept his eyes settled on the edge of his own fingers, short and stumpy by comparison.
"Especially," Nono continued kindly, "when you will not take the other option."
A hand entered his line of sight and settled itself on one of his; pianist's fingers overlaid with those of a normal high-school boy's, dirty and worn out and bitten down to the nail beds. Tsuna fought the impulse to wrench his hand away and scrub down skin and flesh and bone.
The Ninth sighed and withdrew his hand, and Tsuna's unease sky-rocketed (a part of him missed the comforting warmth. It was the same part that, in long nights, looked at his father's picture with longing, only to turn its back abruptly when he delved too deep into these feelings).
"You do not have to accept the legacy right now." Nono said carefully. "Be aware, however, that you will always remain under my protection should you choose to be."
The Ninth was strong, and dangerous, and was possessed of an intimidating intelligence reaching far beyond the limits of the intellectual sphere. He was also generous and kind, and honestly concerned for Tsuna's sake; and Tsuna would forever carry with him the humiliation of only being able to offer up his silence in return.
They had banned him from resuscitating any of the people he felled.
The first few times he had tried arguing against that. Goons, enemy bosses, innocent people who got caught in the middle of endless street wars, killed because there was no other choice. If there was a chance to save someone from an undeserved death (because no one deserved to die like that, murdered in cold blood for a cause they may not even have believed in), who were they to decide who was allowed to live and who wasn't? If they were reviving their strongest fighters, why could they not break that taboo for others?
"Leave it, Tsuna." Reborn wasn't looking at him, choosing to survey the scene for possible blind spots before he turned to the clean-up crew and waved them though.
"We have the money, we have the means", Tsuna said, strangely frantic now. "We can bring them back and lock them up! They didn't deserve to die! I didn't mean for them to die!"
"You know that's not how it goes." Reborn's back said.
The same cold rage that seized his senses during a fight came over him now, forcing out words-
"We're nothing but another pack of hypocrites, then."
-he would otherwise never dare toss in Reborn's face.
There was a long pause as Reborn kept inspecting the Summoner on scene who was about to begin his Sending ritual. Long rhythmical strokes of his arms and legs announced the cadence of this particular beat, a dance to a music only he himself could hear.
The corpses at his feet belonged to particularly dangerous gang members. Until the Summoner was finished, there was no guarantee this sting was well and truly over.
From one moment to the next, Tsuna was whirled two feet into the air. Beady black eyes glinted coldly in the moonlight as his throat was squeezed in a deceptively tight grip.
"Watch it, Tsuna", Reborn's voice was uncharacteristically icy. "If you didn't mean to kill them, mean it next time or don't do it at all."
Airborne, Tsuna struggled to get enough oxygen into his lungs. His eyes fell to the way black fabric (blood-soaked by now) stretched over the strong muscles of Reborn's forearms while hacking coughs were fighting their way out of his throat.
"Death is final", Reborn said, calmer now as he set Tsuna back on his feet, the brunette's chin bumping against his chest and heart thudding painfully in his ears. "You know that. You refusing to make your choice does not mean the consequences will be put off."
When Tsuna chanced a look up again, Reborn's back was once more firmly planted in his line of sight, his arms crossed forbiddingly against the cold of the night.
Across the street, the Summoner was winding down while the last of the corpses were being carried away. Men in overalls began cleaning up the spilled blood.
It was all depressingly final.
(Tsuna did not ask why they let him of all people live, time after time. A successor to a mafia family who neither confirmed nor denied his connection to it, who wasn't able to sway any of the many battles that were being fought in his favour, who was, for all intents and purposes, useless on his own.
He had the strange thought that while those men had not deserved to die just yet, at the same time, neither did he.)
After that, Tsuna refused to take down enemies with anything other than the Zero Point Breakthrough.
When Colonnello saw the ice statues lining the driveways to the mansion, he just shook his head disbelievingly.
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tbc