Title: Under a Shroud of Smoke
Characters/Pairings: Bianchi/Reborn, Gokudera
Rating/Warnings: PG-13 for character death, drama, angst
Word Count: 1122
Prompt/Theme: #11 "Don't fall asleep now. Sleepiness is weakness of character, ask anyone." (Wash, Ep. 04 - "Shindig") at prompt_in_a_box's Round 17 (revisited) and Dec 12th "when burning bridges won't come down" at 31_days
Summary: There was smoke on that day, thick clouds that billowed as though waving good-bye.
There was smoke on that day. She can remember the thick billowing plumes like clumps of bloated flesh, black from a wasting disease. They rose as if praying for release from their suffering.
She had used to be fond of the sight, the combination of smoke-fire-rubble and Hayato's exuberant grin, the pride of his creation. Not all fires she remembers from their untainted youth had had their source in his hands. And if that had been the case, she had felt no connection to them. Back then, she hadn't seen any link between the occasional blazing houses illumining the night and the hired men her father had never called arsonists in her presence. She had heard the name by accident, barging into his study to let him taste the new dish she had tried out. After that, she had thought of every man in his study unknown to her as an arsonist. They had been her father's answer to reluctant debtors.
She had used to be fond, when Hayato had been the originator of the smoke. Even from those cursed cigarettes. And if he hadn't been, it had never meant anything. Until that day.
Her empty magazine clattered to the ground, her gun followed, a hollow sound as though echoing through the membrane of a dream. Her Scorpions returned into their box, no longer needed: what remained of the enemy was fleeing. Was it fear that drove them away, or the accomplishment of their mission?
Wind whipped strands of hair into her eyes. They burned like the woods around her enemies' faces. The air tasted of their ashes, both acrid and stale. She tucked her hair behind her ears and winced. Her shoulder stung. There was blood trickling down her arm. Small concern.
Gravel dug into her knees, sharp even through her jeans, as she knelt beside him.
"Wake up, Reborn. Now is not a good time for a nap." She brushed away the debris from his hair, the same debris that trickled from her hair, that gnashed between her teeth as she spoke. Her fingers came off red.
She rubbed them together, watched the color smear, but she didn't stop talking. She heard herself warn him about the radiation out here, how dangerous it was for him and that the others must be waiting; it didn't sound like her voice at all, hollow and coming from a different sphere of consciousness as it was. She begged him to wake up, open his eyes, listen to her, stop pretending, stop scaring her. All the time, she expected him to do just that, wake up, open his eyes, reprimand her for disturbing his sleep.
But he never did.
For a long time, she sat talking to him. She talked until the distant gunshots died down, until the smell of burning wood grew fainter, until she no longer felt the stones under her knees or the throb in her shoulder, until she forgot why she kept on talking. For a long time, she sat watching him, watching his softened face, the sunken eyes and slack mouth, the snub nose with its missing sleep bubble.
Nothing moved, nothing but her hair and the swaying branches of the surrounding trees, quivering leaves whispering their condolences, waving good-bye. Good-bye. She thought of everything, every reason for Reborn to wake up, every reason not to think of that word, that closure.
Her eyes still burned from the smoke, her throat felt tight from the lack of oxygen in the acrid air. She remembers it all up to this, when they found her, her and him, one dead and one dying inside, when Hayato took her by her shoulders, oblivious to the blood, and demanded to know what had happened; she remembers their buzz of disbelief and their woeful gazes behind the masks of unfeeling, grown-up men, a collective show of sorrow that fascinated her, sucked her in, woke her to her wasting feelings, black and blistered, suffering from her own poison.
She does not remember the keening wail that erupted from her tongue back then, her throat no longer tight but vibrating with the dissonance of her soul, nor does she remember how she split Hayato's lip or how sweet insanity and unthinking, unremembering tasted.
She remembers waking to the scent of smoke, thinking it was all a dream, remembers Hayato leaning out of the window, a cigarette pressed against the dark spot on his lips where the skin had broken, remembers watching the embers approach him, burn through his image as through paper, folding, curling, crumbling; he sucked on it like it was the breath of life, although all he breathed was death.
And she sucked in the same air, a sharp intake of breath that broke in her throat as though a knife passed through.
She was surrounded by it, by death, felt it clinging to the inside of her skin, coating her heart with layers of poison until beating became laborious. Her body was heavy and weightless, aching and numb, as though someone had been sucking the life out of her while she spent the years between yesterday and today spiralling among the splinters of herself; the way Hayato sucked the life out of his cigarettes, out of himself.
"His funeral is in three days," Hayato said with his smoke-filled voice. He threw the butt of his cigarette out of the window and left, as though his presence upon her waking was all just a coincidence, as though he had not been waiting all this time, restless and on edge, just to tell her.
The world broke into shards of itself then, blurred, like distorted glass, and she remembers it slicing a burning trail down her cheeks, blood welling in its wake. She wished she had not eaten the piece of information he had fed her, swallowed it, taken it in, digesting it, letting it nourish her brain. She wanted to vomit it out before the cycle of metabolism ended, maybe she would forget the word he had used and the heavy meaning that it carried.
This word, funeral, like good-bye, made her dream plastic, real, tangible; it robbed her of the delusion of a nightmare. If it had been just that, a nightmare, she might have laughed at her outbursts, got up and cooked to raise her mood, but she couldn't even fake the semblance of a laugh. If she so much as tried to make a sound, it would seethe in her throat and go no further, bile that creeped up her esophagus, etching it with the poison that she keeps within.
This word was good-bye, a final knot of their threads of fate, something she had never wanted to say to Reborn.