note: i actually had no plot prior to writing this since i kept on mixing up my other ideas which was of another fandom until i stopped myself and began drawing the characters i wanted. i think better when drawing the characters and the plot, actually. and then i just began drawing everything i could think of, everything i wanted in a fanfic, and this happened. another semi-dark!oc but the twist is that there are two self-inserts which just makes me want to bend down and throw up. i get like that when i'm excited. so we know the whole si!tsuna or si!tsuna's-twin but personally, i haven't read something with both of them so here i am, writing both si as tsuna and si as tsuna's twin sister. i'm really excited for this and excited for how i will maintain writing two characters. though i think there will be consistent reference for 'them' and 'they' because... well, things are complicated.
i just really hope you like it and are excited as i am for this because i really am excited for this. i also had to do some research about the tokugawa clan since the sawada family all were named after tokugawa shogun and i doubt iemitsu would name his daughter after a shogun so i had to thoroughly research the women of the tokugawa clan and debated over tsukiyama and tokuhime, both who married in the tokugawa clan. it was a hard choice since both females were... complex women, in lack of better terms. but i decided at the end that the history of the woman she was named after will be somewhat of a foreshadowing. and please, don't get me started on tokugawa tsunayoshi aka the dog shogun.
summary: and the world revolved not around the sun, but around them. always them. [si-oc!tsuna & si-oc!tsuna's sister] [twin-fic] [semi-dark!oc]
warning: mentally unstable characters duh
si dice sempre il lupo più grande che non è
Eventually, they die.
It takes a long time and their hands are clasped between one another, tight and almost desperate. The ground shakes from beneath them and they are not sure if the earth is coaxing them to fall from wherever they are or maybe, the ground is not what is shaking but their knees quivering because of the cold warmth that spreads across their skin. (Their hands tighten, wrapped tight.) The femme fatale cocks her head to the side and offers multi-colored nothings and their grip loosens a little but they welcome the euphoria clinging to the edges of their throat, the mountain erupts but there are no ashes and no clumsy men and women trampling over one another. Instead, there are blank eyes and shaking joints. The woman stares at them head on with almost apologetic eyes but she pours rainbows to herself as well, envious of their eyes which stare to nothingness. There is beauty in the way the neon lights blink at the femme fatale's twitching form. She melts with the vibrant gleam and the sweat clinging to the bodies of the mast.
They succumb to the booming music and the wicked beauty of youth's fragrance. One of them takes a glance down to where their hands are one, grinning with yellow teeth and bubbling crimson-tainted lips. They both smile and their bones of their hands creak at the tightness of their hold, never letting go because why will they let go? The other's painted nails draw enough blood to give the stench of iron. "It hurts," one of them complains but only a smile is given in response. "can you feel it? The pain?"
The question is ignored and they are both dragged to the middle of the swarming bodies and exploding gas. They gulp the ocean of the masses and weave through the forms of young volcanoes. Their mother and father warns them not to play with the flickering dance of red and orange and orange and red but their hands push forward to the raw seduction of immaculate radiance. Dance with the flickers and oh, this platonic romance; romanticize death with me, mold a casket of too thick bones and whispers ragged under the breathes of intoxicated rattles. This platonic romance, endless jointed arms darting for a body and another. The temperature is over a hundred degrees Celsius and the summer wind inhales the oxygen from their constricting lungs. The grains of the sand beneath their feet throbs and it is heavy with ever step they take but they move and move as if there is a hooded man chasing their identical frames. For once, they are the patchwork of ivory and gold, and oh, for once, they are swallowing the sun whole and the world revolves not around the sun, but around them. always them in this romanticization of Samsara.
They feel like wolves scavenging for the scent of something miles and miles away, too far to reach with too short hands and too heavy breathing. They are not wolves, or even the patchwork of ivory and gold. The sun is not their meal for the night but it is close enough - they realize. It is close enough to see but far enough to reach for nobody can ever reach death, can they? They can see it with bare eyes and yet, their eyes will not be as alive as it is supposed to be when their skinny fingers wrap around what everyone calls death. The world revolves.
And it learns to stop revolving for them.
(Eventually, they die.
It takes time but they still do.)
Sawada Nana is a simple woman. She takes happiness in the smallest of things; from the way the sun clings to the galloping waves, to the way the scent of roses wilt away from the bouquet of flowers delivered from the other side of the world, from the way the blonde man with moons for smiles instead of stars she has always imagined her last love will have, opens her doorway with the expectation of a warm night, to the way he flusters over the grocery still light but keeps on insisting he wants to carry them for her and kamisama, Sawada Nana is very simple woman with simple wishes and simple dreams. She sees the way her husband (her beloved Iemitsu and the heat of his burning skin) dims when his phone rings. She sees it all even with the naive quirk of her lips and wrinkles of her eyes. She had braided and long hair once upon a time but she feels her Iemitsu snuggling closer to her neck, leaving constellations of stars than can never be seen in the sky, leaving the remnants of his existence he doubts is still there. She goes to the salon and tells the woman with sharpened blades to give her a haircut. The woman asks if she is heartbroken and she wants to say no, I'm not broken but my heart was taken and I will do anything to get it back - she simply shakes her head and hopes her smile is enough to convey the feeling of love forcing its way in her throat.
This rendezvous her Iemitsu calls true love makes her stomach constrict and her lungs grow Camellia Japonica poured in the darkness of red wine. And she thinks of how Iemitsu makes her feel. He is a prince without a crown, has a kingdom but never his. The blood in his veins cannot give him what he wants and yet, he sits idle in his throne with the eyes of something she has forgotten. He is the wings of hummingbirds wherein their razor sharp flaps leave trails and trails of the remains of her heart. It is irreparable and even the halos of all the angels she has seen in his loving loving loving gaze is not enough to put a stop for her thirst. She loves Iemitsu, really. She is a simple woman and she loves what she loves. She is the Azalea in his non-existent garden and the meaning behind the hanakotoba he stumbles over. He will never understand her blooming language but she thinks it is alright. She does the understanding for both of them.
She lets his seed bloom within her and watches them grow for both of them. (She does the understanding and the loving for both of them, she realizes over and over again as she lays white chrysanthemums on the other side of the bed he once promised to live with her in.) Her little flowers—her Tsunayoshi and Tokuhime. (His seeds but always her her her flowers.) Her beloved children.
Her beloved Tsu-kun and Toku-chan are heavy in her arms but she tries her best to carry them. She will do the carrying for her husband, will do the loving for her husband, will do everything for her husband if it means she keeps her little Tsu-kun and Toku-chan with her. She cries a little when a few months pass and she sees from which parent they inherited their features. They both take after her, she realizes with a smile of relief. (What relief? Why relief?) The same brown hair and doe eyes—the reason why Iemitsu fell head over heels for her. There are days when Nana wonders if the reason why Iemitsu left is because of how he does not love her (their) children and maybe that is why she is relieved when she sees them, sees how much they resemble her. Maybe—maybe her Iemitsu will love them now.
"I'm sorry, Tsu-kun, Toku-chan," she apologizes once upon a midsummer night. Her body is beneath the sheets of her (their) bed and lets her children rest with her. They have been crying for hours to no end and she just does not know what to do. They keep on crying and crying and oh, are they crying for Nana and her Iemitsu, the same way Nana does the loving and the caring and the taking care and the everything for the both of them? Her children are more like her than she has thought and that makes tears just bubble from the corner of her eyes. She feels like crying too. "Forgive your Papa, okay? He's a very busy man but he's doing all of this because he - because he..." She remembers Iemitsu's nightly calls and his encouraging voice and stammers. "...he loves you."
She wonders if she is trying to convince her children, or herself.
They do not remember if their voices have always been like this; always been so tiny and so unfamiliar. Their throat constricts with their words and somehow, they stumble upon the 'r' and 'l' more times than they can count. Their accent is different too; the tilt in their English is gone and the disappearing letters have completely reappeared. There is something within the new language the sad woman gives to them that makes them feed themselves with spoonfuls of sharp-edged syllables that looses the music in the patterns of their speech a lifetime ago. They don't like the aggressive corners of the phrases but the woman who takes care, loves, and smiles at them brightens (like the feeling of a lover making the sun rise from your skin, telling them that the blazing ball of star-not-star awakens for them, that the world revolves around them but the world has long stopped revolving around their too small frames) as if they have given her something too beautiful to not smile at. They think that they will do this for the woman who calls herself their mother. She is kind of sad to look at and their other half thinks that that making her happy will please them.
One of them is Tokuhime. The one with female reproductive organs and star patterns on her back. Okaasan says that their Otousan has lots of black starts engraved in his skin too and says that it looks like the stars missing from the sky. Tokuhime asks why the stars on her back are the same color as the darkness she sees when she closes her eyes and there is sadness behind the supposedly naive gaze of their mother. "You've taken all of their light, Toku-chan," she says with fondness she reserves for her children.
Tokuhime really wants to see the woman happy. She wraps her small arms around the petite woman, wanting to give all the light she has stolen from the stars that mark her back to Nana. She does not say the l-word just yet (or is it the aishiteiru-word since they are no longer in the land with posh sonatas but the land where the sun rises) because she still does not know if she feels that way but she tries to convey her feelings - how she feels as if she is at home within Nana's presence, the scent of hot chocolate in a particularly shuddering-cold night, how she feels as if she is the cherry blossom in spring with petals that scatter through the world and cheeks clinging to the blush of childhood. She does not love Nana just yet but she thinks she will.
The other is Tsunayoshi. The one with male reproductive organs and the moon in his eyes, wary about everything else and the wannabe-aegis of his sister littered with stars. Okaasan says that his eyes kind of look like Otousan's, especially when he is frowning. He does not ask their mother about it because he is still afraid of what she may represent for he has seen it in the pages of a forgotten tale about multi-colored flames, an absent father, and a responsibility tightened around a young boy's (his) neck just because of the blood that keeps him alive. He is afraid of the woman who shows that everything here is not just a page in a something-number-of-volumes in a book he scanned through. He is not supposed to feel sadness because of a character who looks longingly at their front door, their telephone, and the picture frame beside the television. He is not supposed to feel attachment to something that is not real.
So he tightens his hands around Tokuhime. "Do you love her?" He asks with fear lacing his accented English, the same accent that represents their nationality a little while ago.
"Not yet," Tokuhime answers in Japanese and it breaks Tsunayoshi's heart when she does. His fingers slowly part from hers but Tokuhime wraps her fingers around his all of the sudden and turns to face his identical face with a small smile. "It's okay. She is very easy to love. I'll love her soon, and you will too. We'll have a real Mum now. Aren't you happy?"
Tsunayoshi frowns, unconvinced. "But she's," supposed to be not real, the evidence of our future, of my future, the evidence of the tragedies waiting to happen, the evidence that the dancing embers are going to reach for them and never let go of them, the evidence of the world truly revolving around them and oh, make a coffin out of our bodies for we are going to die, "she's..."
Tokuhime smiles and it feels like the seas touching the dryness of the sand and the scorching heat of a summer getaway. "I know who she is, what she is, who we are, and what we will be," and Tsunayoshi realizes that Tokuhime has always been the calm one between them, but always the crybaby, always the one to get attached first, and always the first one to run back to each other because of the agonizing pain of betrayal, "but aren't you curious of the potential of this - of everything? The flames that they preach and the unbreakable familial bond that everybody strives for? The elements clinging to their sky, the feeling of being accepted and welcomed? We can take everything with this, brother dearest. We can take it all."
Always the selfish one between them.
"We can do anything we want with this. Brother, the world revolves around us and it always will," Tokuhime chirps and pulls his hand to his shoulder, forcing him into an embrace as he closes his eyes in acceptance of what they will be, what they will always be, "aren't you happy?"
And Tsunayoshi is always the wistful one.
"I am."
They say that the Sawada twins (yes, the one with the working European father and airhead of a mother, exactly those two) are a peculiar pair of children. The neighbors who have been there since day one will comment on how the twins are screamers—crying in the middle of the night, almost wailing as if they are mourning for something they have lost but you can never know with infants. They keep on seeing petite and beautiful Nana with bags under her doe eyes and her short hair ("Long hair suits you more, Nana-chan," a soft sigh of disappointment, "you shouldn't have gone with that European boy.") messier than it usually is.
And then, the Sawada twins grow.
Little Tokuhime and Tsunayoshi both look exactly like their mother—except for those pointed eyes and stiff shoulders.
Tokugawa Tsunayoshi was known for being the Dog Shogun and while this is an ongoing joke in their humble Namimori preschool, Tsunayoshi frowns in disgust whenever those mutts—he never really called it such but with that pout he forces to be a scowl, it almost sounds as if he is mentally addressing them as mutts. Dogs, especially that newborn chihuahua a couple of houses away from theirs, seem to really dislike little Tsunayoshi. Oda Tokuhime who married within the Tokugawa Clan, specifically marrying Tokugawa Ieyasu's son, Matsudaira Nobuyasu, was a somewhat wicked woman disliked by her mother-in-law. The hatred grew for years and years until Tokuhime found a way to have the woman executed, only for her beloved husband to get dragged along the tragedy, only with Nobuyasu committing seppuku because of his father's inability to kill one of his sons. Sawada Tokuhime is the one resembling her mother the most with vibrant smiles and fleeting sundresses, a hand always around her brother's.
There are days when one neighbor looks at the pair with frowning lips and squinted eyes.
"Oh, Sawada-san has twins?"
"Yeah!" A high-pitched agreement, riddled with surprise, "didn't you know? Tokuhime-chan and Tsunayoshi-kun are always together. Everybody knows Sawada-san has twins."
The neighbor purses his lips. "The last time I looked, I was pretty sure Sawada-san only had a boy, and he wasn't that... gloomy-looking."
Another snorts. "You probably saw Tokuhime-chan then. They looked really alike when they were much younger."
"Hm, I guess so."
note: that's it for the first chapter. so like, there are already lots of differences seen - i wrote tsuna as a more private character, one who tends to go away from the crowd. both of the twins are still skies though. but if i were to give them other elements, i would say that tsuna is a cloud and toku is a mist. their characters are really hard to write since i keep on writing tsuna as someone almost like sasuke without the revenge and i keep on writing toku as someone like eto, when they aren't supposed to be like that. i think the first few chapters will have me focusing on tsuna since i really like writing from tsuna's perspectives, especially with the next chapter being reborn's arrival ... in one way or another. but i really am excited for the upcoming plot twist. i'm trying my best not to put iemitsu on the dark side since he's also a complex and selfish character but eh, that's how it works.
i hope you liked this chapter. this is actually my first khr fic that i actually posted publicly. makes me want to post more and more chapters idek why. and it's like 11 in the morning and i still haven't eaten breakfast. my laptop is dying ... i think. anyway, reviews feed the author so i would love to hear more of your opinions on this fic! i also have a naruto one, just saying. like yesterday was my debut on but i also have an account on wattpad but i think i'm liking more. sorry, wp.
