Title: Hungry Ghosts
Characters/Pairings: Xanxus
Summary: Xanxus doesn't get what they want from him.
Notes: General audiences. For Round III of KHRfest, prompt III-54. Xanxus – grudge; "father is a holy ghost and there's lions in a cage". Xanxus-logic is not earth logic. 720 words.
Hungry Ghosts
Sometimes it seemed to Xanxus that he was surrounded on all sides by old men whose only goal in life was to tell him what he couldn't, or shouldn't, do. Every time he turned around, it was to find that there was another of his father's guardians standing over him, frowning at some thing he'd just said or done, telling him that it wasn't appropriate behavior for the Vongola, till Xanxus wanted to roar his frustration at them. Sometimes he even did, which was satisfying in its own way, at least until the point when his father came to talk to him, grave and full of infinite fucking patience for Xanxus and the things he did.
Xanxus preferred the old men to those conversations with his father; them he could piss off, some easier than others, of course. When they were angry, they became almost real to him, instead of seeming like a circling pack of hungry shades whose only purpose was to continually tell him no. When they were angry, he could see the blood moving through them, giving them life and color and a substance than they did not have when they were calm.
His father never got angry, no matter what Xanxus said or did. He stayed as patient as a carved saint, and spoke gently to him, and drove Xanxus just a little crazier every time he forgave Xanxus for his latest infraction. Sometimes Xanxus marveled that he'd even come from such a man; how the fuck had the old man managed to get him on his mother in the first place?
And how could such an insubstantial wisp of a man be the head of the fucking Vongola when all he ever did was speak softly to placate and to calm? The Vongola were supposed to be the strongest of the Families, old and proud and fierce. Even the old man's guardians had more spirit to them than the old man did; how did it not gall them to be commanded by such a frail, dried up shadow of a man? It made no sense that Xanxus could see.
His brothers were no better, pallid and weak as their father. There was no blood at all to them, not in clever Federico or stolid Massimo or milquetoast Enrico. Maybe, Xanxus thought, they'd had spirit to them once. He doubted it, but maybe it had been sucked out of them till they were shadows, just like the old man and his guardians. They were pathetic, the lot of them, weak and useless; they would not have survived a day on their own in the neighborhood where Xanxus had been born.
Xanxus could not fathom why they would have brought him away from that place, only to try to turn him into a shadow like they were, soft-spoken and forever afraid to exercise the power that they held. He roamed around the house some days, feeling like a lion pacing his cage, trying to find a way out of it, trying to make sense of the restraints that the old man kept trying to place on him.
There was only one answer that made any sense, and Xanxus finally fastened on it out of exasperation. The Vongola weren't what they had been, once upon a time, had become weak and degenerate. There had been days, once, when the merest whisper of the name "Vongola" passing from mouth to mouth was enough to terrify people, but those days were gone now. The old man knew it as well as Xanxus did, could see the Vongola fading and could see that there was no hope of his other sons being able to revive the Family's glory. That, surely, was why he'd brought Xanxus to the Vongola, to provide an infusion of much-needed strength to the Family.
He could do that, Xanxus supposed, even if it meant enduring the fussy of the pack of old men in the meantime. He could let them hover over him like a circle of ghosts, hungry for the strength they could have no part in. He was strong enough to stand it, and his father was old, and would die soon. And then, when Xanxus was boss, he would see about exorcising the ghosts who plagued him and his Family, once and for all.
end
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