Tsuna knows he is having nightmares. The word "nightmares" doesn't even really do them justice. Even "nightterrors" falls short; they're nothing short of horrific. They go on for hours, the moment he shuts his eyes, and until dawn he suffers quietly, lips closed, nostrils flared as he hyperventilates, oxygen burning in his nose and his chest cavity; he trembles through vicious, eviscerating visions of things he can't describe to anyone else. They're too far away from reality, but he knows by the twist in his stomach how terrible they are, how justified he is in the white-hot rigidity of his fear. He is tugged through them by the throat every night, kept on the end of a leash held a shadow he can barely make out the shape of. But he can recognize the shape of those skeletal hands. And he knows that the leash is held tight because he can't scream past the choking pressure across his throat.
And he wants to.
Tsuna knows he is having nightmares.
Rather, he knows Mukuro is haunting him, torturing him, mercilessly.
He tells no one.
When Mukuro wakes up, it is quiet enough that most human beings would assume they were alone.
Mukuro, of course, knows better.
After all, it is primarily the water in his ears that makes it quiet. He is imprisoned in every sense of the word. It is rare for him to return to personal consciousness in this body; strange and useless, after all, to return to a body that is useless to him when there are so very many others to partake of. He cannot even feel his limbs, and so he mulls momentarily over his own lack of control – it is a sensation he dislikes intensely. A situation he dislikes intensely.
There is someone on the other side of the glass. And on the opposite side of his mind. He lets himself flick calmly across the thread-like links there, floating in spiderweb strands alongside his brainstem, trailing from there off into the murky darkness that he knows to be the rest of this universe. It is simply a matter of drifting through time and space along one of them to find one of his more suitable vessels; even now he can feel Chrome as distinctly as ever.
He smiles, softly, and revels in the similarly-vivid memory of what the Vongola Decimo's face looks like when he cries.
"Oi, Tenth!"
"…ha? Ah! Ah…again… Sorry, everyone…"
"Tsuna? You're alright, aren't you…?"
"You baseball idiot, what sort of question is that?! Of course he's not alright!"
"Eh, Gokudera-kun, I'm fine!"
"I don't know… You have been falling asleep in your food a lot…"
"No, no, I'm fine—"
"How undignified. Whoever heard of a mafia boss drowning in his own soup? Tsuna, you really are a good-for-nothing."
"I wasn't going to drown!"
And all along, he thinks, I can't tell them. I absolutely can't.
It's like having an illness. That's the only thing he can relate it to. Sometimes it isn't there, but when it is it's a heavy nausea that swoops into his sinuses and yanks him into the terror headfirst. Like a hook. Like a phantom. He can't resist it and he's never been able to fight it off. Whenever it happens, it begins the minute he closes his eyes and drives him so deep that when he wakes it's a cold shock, like plunging into the world. When he wakes, it always feels as if he's fallen hard, from a long distance, to his bed and since it all began, he hasn't been able to fully quell the way his stomach trembles and knots all the while. Remembering what he's seen. Clenching in anticipation of what is inevitably to come.
He won't fear him. He can't bring himself to. He convinces himself that he can take it. Not that he is strong enough – even he can't convince himself of that; he knows it's only a matter of time until he snaps, and when that happens he doesn't know what to expect. He doesn't know what he'll do and he is wary of that, in and of itself. He isn't strong enough for it not to be an eventuality. But he won't fear him. He refuses to. Mukuro is family. Even with things as they are, Tsuna cannot think of him anyway else. In the same way he cannot fear Gokudera, cannot hate Hibari, cannot dislike Ryouhei, cannot disagree with Yamamoto, he won't turn away from Mukuro. He doesn't dare.
Because he is not so naïve any longer as to think that he can expose his back to Mukuro and escape unscathed.
Or even to think that he can escape him at all.
So it is probably for the best that he doesn't try.
Mukuro takes his time. He twists Tsuna up and tangles him around his slender fingers, fixes in his own mind the virility and zeal of the Tenth's facial expressions, and the ways in which his small, boyish body bends, spasms, crumples. The artistry involved in his determination and the clenching of his fists.
He goes through his memories, too, on the pretext of educating himself on a body he will inherit soon enough. He pearls through them with an ease that shouldn't surprise him; Tsuna is as unguarded when he is sleeping as he is in wakefulness, neither aggressive nor defensive by anyone's measure. He finds himself more than able to multitask, sending Tsuna spiraling through layers upon layers of pain and cold terror and whiling away the hours pinwheeling with a summer slowness through his mind while he's crippled in his distraction, observing him with a dual cognizance.
When he speaks it is deliberate, slow, with a serpent's sweet smile. It has been months and Tsuna is at his feet. Mukuro carefully counts the knuckle lumps of his vertebrae, the three that stand up between the sharp edges of his scapulas, from beneath the dusty brown of his hair. His are an adolescent's limbs, thin and corded with lank muscle. He tugs at the chain along his neck, idly, simply to watch him choke.
It's a comfort.
"Ah, Vongola~ How easily you're defeated here, hm?"
Tsuna trembles, breath rasping as blood trails from his temple, sliding with a near sensuousness along his cheek. A hot wine that drags its fingers slowly down along the side of his face.
Such a comfort.
Mukuro smiles so wide that it dimples.
"How did you—"
"Oh, surely you know how I found you, little Vongola."
"Mukuro-sa— Ha—"
"It's just a dream, you know."
But he has so much trouble believing that, nowadays.
The less he sleeps, the more he begins to think that perhaps Mukuro has had him forever. Perhaps the real dreams are the happy times he has spent with everyone else.
And as his delusions multiply, he convinces himself that the preservation of that happiness is more important to him than the possible alleviation of this torment.
They never converse. More, Mukuro smiles and turns him over, eyes like knives in him and Tsuna breathes when he can. Some nights there is more to be said. Some nights there is less. Tsuna learns again and again every night to what degree he should be wary of his touch. When he wakes it is always abrupt. Mukuro forces him into sleep and forces him from it with equivocal, diabolic ease. As if he had him by the mind, and by all means he does.
The visions become personal; Tsuna is no longer driven through simple visions of a general hell but through grotesque personalized smorgasbords of meat hooks and barbed wire. He becomes well acquainted with the smell of rotting flesh. Damnably familiar with visions of his family's deaths, over and over. With the sight of Mukuro, suspended above him like the undo pendulum of a grandfather clock.
"Ashes to ashes, Vongola."
And the inevitability of mortality begins to haunt him, making his visage more gaunt. He realizes it, staring into his pale face in the mirror. He leans forward, casting a soft shadow over the porcelain of the sink, blinking slowly at the bags that hang along the loosened cords of his lower lashes. He reaches up and passes his fingers so lightly across the edge of his cheek, scrutinizing with an exhausted slowness the off-white of his pupil and the softly trailing branches of the veins therein. He sighs and rubs at them to try and get the gunk out of the corners, hoping that when he looks up his appearance will have changed. When he does, it is inevitably the same.
And Reborn is there. He can see him in the reflection, at the doorway, and he starts, slightly, without even noticing he does it. It's a slight pitch forward. The sink digs into his stomach.
But his tutor is the one who speaks first.
"You've been behaving strangely," he says, watching him steadily, seeming to take in every hair on his body in utmost clarity. He's painfully observant. As always.
"Eh…?" Tsuna's mouth quirks automatically, and a smile bares itself on his lips like worn fangs. "What're you talking about, Reborn? I'm—"
"You shouldn't lie to me."
Tsuna lets his lips relax, slink back to cover his teeth. He turns to look at him.
"I'm fine. Really. It's nothing."
"You really don't listen." The infant hitman stands away from the wall, turning and walking away, slow enough that Tsuna can still hear him. "Everyone's been wasting their time worrying about you. It is my duty as your tutor to correct your irresponsible behaviors; if you refuse to tell me the cause of this particular episode, there are plenty of ways to find out what it is you're hiding."
"I don't want you to." It's a second before Tsuna's mind drives him to panic. A slow-paced acceleration of nerves seizes him and he realizes that with one tremor, it's possible that his entire house-of-cards life will tumble down. He realizes that a single tremor could perpetuate Mukuro's ravaging of his by-now-tattered mind. "Reborn! I don't want you to! Oi!"
But Reborn is gone.
And, Tsuna's conscious chimes (in, interestingly enough, something very similar to his tutor's voice), Reborn has never cared what he wanted. Not really.
But it's not like before, his heart pleads. You mustn't. You can't.
It's not like before.
Reborn ends things with a bullet, as always.
"I admit I'm surprised you found a way in."
"Tsuna is simple minded." The words seem too small to make it over the ferocity of the baby's stance, and the unforgiving lines of his smoking gun barrel. "Breaking into it is similarly uncomplicated."
"Well," Mukuro says, smile never leaving his face, "I suppose this sullies my fun."
And Tsuna is silent. Silent, thinking only: I can't—
He can't move, in fact. He cannot shift his focus. He is laying limp, completely motionless on his side, left arm hanging across his right, bleeding from his mouth, between the gums. He cannot distinguish which way is up and nausea overwhelms him. He is silent, thinking only:
I can't breathe.
And Mukuro knows it. He can feel the Mist Guardian in his body, threading through his cardiovascular system, darting through his veins like a parasite, pressing his oblique shape into him, like a thick snake sliding down his throat, into his belly, choking him. He feels so heavy, like thick chains are weighting him to the ground. He cannot inhale. The constriction of his chest is too intense.
He can feel him.
Licking his bones.
And the backs of his eyesockets.
I can't breathe.
And then he's being sucked into a different dimension; Mukuro's obsession with his body is that of an enthusiast over a prized collectible, childish and irrationally passionate. He gasps, scrabbles for a second, voice rasping hoarsely, but he can't expel enough breath to form words. He's plunged into a heated darkness, into the black of the six Mukuro holds in his pupil, ink swimming up his chest to incase him, flooding his mouth in a pungent tang. He coughs and struggles; he's drowning, choking in a pool of ink. He tries to hold his breath but there is none to hold. He tries to search for the surface but there is no light. His mind screams for air and when he bursts free it is into black snowfall and he coughs hard and long, dragging air in so desperately it sets his chest into aching flames.
Mukuro is watching him.
Smiling.
"Mu—" He chokes, gasps, hacks up what seems to be half a long. His teeth rattle feebly in his skull. "Mukuro-sa—" A coughing fit overpowers him, wrestling the oxygen from his breath in harsh rhythmic stabs of a pain that is slowly seeping into his skin.
Another gunshot.
The illusion breaks. Tsuna collapses again, shaking, and when he raises his head again, he can see Mukuro hanging in the air a few yards from them. He can feel fresh handprints along the edges of his throat, the red paint of Mukuro's fingers where they dug into the skin.
Sable hair flutters in a non-existent wind as the latter reaches the very edge of his consciousness.
And smiles.
"Arrivederci."
Tsuna wakes up in his own room. He is very aware that it is his own. He hovers softly in a state of almost-wakefulness before coming to entirely, a slow, gradual regaining of consciousness, and when his eyes focus, enough for him to begin to process where he is, he comes to realize that Reborn is standing on the nightstand beside him.
"Wha…at?"
"You've been asleep for two weeks," Reborn says, almost solemnly. Leon hangs along the back of his neck, blinking those huge yellow eyes at him. Tsuna makes a soft sound somewhere between a gurgle and a grunt, and reaches up to rubs at his eyes. "…two weeks?"
"I warned you not to lie to me."
"I—" Tsuna pauses, brain slowly turning over. "…sorry."
"As you should be. Your carelessness has caused irreprehensible amounts of trouble for everyone."
"Is everybody okay…?"
"There was never anything the matter with anyone besides you," Reborn says, frank as ever. "You believed every illusion Mukuro Rokudo fed you. And so you've failed the test."
"This was…a test?"
"I will no longer be the one to initiate the bulk of your tests. You are the Vongola Decimo. It is inevitable that you will be tested by the majority of your adversaries."
It's a while but Tsuna shakes his head, and as he does it feels like his brain is sloshing messily around in his skull. "Mukuro-san…isn't—"
"Mukuro," Reborn says, "will always be your adversary."
"I can…" Tsuna shakes his head again. "No. I can tell… I… He's good. Inside. His heart…I saw it. I know I did. I… He is…my family, and so, if no one else will extend a hand to him…"
"Tsuna," Reborn says, seriously, "I have told you this once already. You must never forgive him, even if it is your predisposition. Even as your family, he is your enemy; and it is for that reason that it is necessary to keep him in close proximity. Your loyalty is not to the genuineness of Mukuro's character. It is to the longevity and reign of the Vongola."
"But—"
"Tsuna," Reborn says, interrupting him again. "This is the second time."
"I saw his heart. I know it."
Reborn watches him somberly for a long while.
"Mephistopheles can take as many forms as he pleases. Never forget that."