A tiny taste of my latest fanfic-in-the-works. Enjoy… and tell me if the fic will be a hit or miss, would you please?
"Tighter."
Yamamoto did as he was told.
I drew in a rasping hiss between my teeth as the bindings cinched around my torso. I could feel the bones sliding against each other beneath my skin, and I nearly bit my own tongue off repressing the screams. Searing pain raced up and down my spine, and I shivered a little as the world tilted and the bile rose up in the back of my throat. My tongue burned. I hated this… hated the way I had to show weakness in front of—of him, of all people…
As if I didn't embarrass myself enough on a daily basis.
Contrary to popular belief, I was not blind to the looks I received when I was in public. Being in a constant state of anxiety and screaming about the Boss did NOT make me cool by ANYONE'S standards, but I was past the point of caring. Boss, Decimo, Jyūdaime… Tsuna… he was pretty much my life. And it was never, ever my intention to suffocate him, but—
You people have no idea.
I tried to suppress a rather embarrassing groan as Yamamoto tucked away the end of the bandages underneath my armpit (that part of me was particularly tender). I growled under my breath, convinced that he knew and therefore did it on purpose; Yamamoto was always being a complete jerk like that.
He was uncharacteristically quiet when he finally spoke. "All done."
I always found this part disconcerting: the rest of the week, I couldn't get him to freaking SHUT UP… yet five minutes into this daily routine, and he—
Like his father… or something. I felt like I would be defiling the memory if I finished that statement. (But that was another time and another place, and we weren'tweren'tweren't going to let it happen again, so I swiftly shoved it from my memory and never considered it again.)
I grunted in assent as he moved off the bed. "Thanks, Baseball Baka." I was sure that was as grateful as I ever got toward him.
The look he gave me was strange—only because for once in my life, I couldn't understand what thoughts were going through his head. A part of my own self-pity wanted to say that he looked distressed, but of course the larger, more logical (and therefore more mature and wise) part of me pointed out that no one in his right mind would be sad for me, but rather because of me, and therefore that emotion on his face must be nothing else but disdain.
(But that wasn't right either, because Baseball Idiot didn't have a haughty, self-righteous bone in his body.)
His sonorous voice interrupted me. I started, wondering when he had become so serious and soothing… and… chilling—
His face was blanker than I had ever seen it, his eyes like two hardened gems that glinted at me in the rosy glow of the sunrise. The breath glided between my teeth and caught in my throat, and I scrambled to draw my mouth into a frown and my eyebrows into a scowl to mask the rapid beating of my heart. When he opened his mouth, his voice had transformed to be as deadened as his eyes. "Don't ask me to come here again, Gokudera."
My heart stopped.
It restarted in record time, shooting adrenaline toward every crevice in my body and masking the stabs and aches of a pain that went deeper than my skin. I drew a quick, shaking breath in order to rebuild the walls that had lowered around my vulnerable heart (didn't he know that sneak attacks were for cowards?).
I was off the bed and on my feet in the blink of an eye. "Like I would! I don't even know why you showed up here in the first place, looking like some pathetic drowned rat or something and asking to come in… You didn't have to follow me home."
His stare remained unchanged, and I felt a fire within me spring to life immediately at the provocation—it was always there, I was always suppressing it, but with him… but with him, it so easily came to life that I often wondered if his heart wasn't made of some flammable material that ignited whenever he talked to me. I hissed, furious, using the familiar adrenaline to fuel my actions.
"I don't need your charity, or your pity, or whatever the hell it is you're trying to give me here… whatever, it's pathetic!" His eyes narrowed, and I felt a thrill of fear shoot through me at that expression; unconsciously, I laid a hand on the bandages at my abdomen. "I don't need it, and I don't need YOU! Now get out of my house and let me be on my way, actually HAPPY like I was before I met you, and don't you ever, EVER, for ANY reason come back here! I do not want to see you! How many times do I have to beat you to make you understand? I loathe the way you pretend like we're friends or something. I abhor your idiocy and taste in clothing. But most of all, I hate YOU."
The words boiled over from my aching heart and spilled from my lips like lava, intended to burn him as much as they had burned me coming out; I thought of the days, the weeks, the months we had wasted, and my chest heaved with exertion. The fire that was fueling me was trembling and giving way to a chilling, shaking ache that threatened to envelop my whole heart. I took another gasping breath, desperate to supply that timorous fire with oxygen, but the flame was already dying…
My world tilted to the side once again, but I did not move. Through my haze, I absently wondered if I had ever seen Yamamoto so still and so—
I didn't even know what emotion he was showing.
I felt the need to laugh at the irony (I always sucked at socializing the most), but it got stuck behind the lump that had lodged itself in my throat. I wanted to scream at him again, to tell him to leave me alone to rebuild my pathetic walls and chains and fences, but I could find neither the will nor the energy to do so.
I was so much like my namesake—violent at the slightest provocation, but I burned out quickly.
My fire came and went.
His icy chill never left.
Then he swallowed, and I traced his Adam's apple as it bobbed beneath the skin of his throat. He took a breath—harsher than usual—and I vaguely hoped that some of my words had managed to melt his ice and scar him.
(Scar him like I was scarred, so he would never forget me.)
"I will—" the vindictive, caustic, hopeful, hurting part of me imagined a tremor in his voice, "—I won't be coming back."
Absently, I felt like I should wonder why and how and when, but I couldn't bring myself to care. I reached beneath my armpit and tugged at the bandage, but the area wasn't tender in the slightest. I felt nothing.
Yamamoto's back was to me, and there might have been a shake in his strong, slim shoulders, but the haze invading my room and clouding my eyes prevented me from seeing much of anything at all. This fog probably originated from a position much further south, where everything had once been boiling hot but was now nothing but cold, frozen solid—but I couldn't tell. Neither did I really care.
He paused at the doorway. "I feel… I feel like I should at least try to say 'take care of yourself,' but—" Yamamoto shook his head and left his sentence unfinished, like it was against his better judgment to complete it.
That damned logical part of myself tried to convince me that stopping him was a good idea, that now that he knew my secret I had to stop him at all costs—
But the connection between my brain and my heart was apparently severed somewhere along the line, and I couldn't force myself to do anything more than simply stand… and try not to fall on my face.
The door shut with a click, and I felt my world falling to pieces.
How much had he tightened the bandages?—I couldn't breathe.
On the bed where I had been, a single silver feather lay silent.