Title: Five Things Hibari Knows (and one more that changed them)
Characters/Pairings: Hibari
Summary: There are some things that Hibari knows for sure.
Notes: General audiences. For Round III of KHRfest, prompt III-51. Hibari Kyouya – fearless; "I am the master of my fate." I reckon everyone does a Hibari origins story eventually, right? 1034 words.
Five Things Hibari Knows (and one more that changed them)
When Kyouya was very young, one of the first things that he learned was that there were essentially two kinds of people in the world: those who were strong, and those who were not. Those who were strong preyed on those who were weak, and the weak suffered for it.
Even as a grade-schooler, Kyouya was smart enough to know that he did not care to be preyed upon. It was a simple lesson to learn: he saw what happened to the classmates who fell victim to the bullies from the upper grades who tormented them, and it did not seem pleasant. The solution was clear: he would have to be stronger than the bullies, so he set himself to that task with the same obstinacy with which he approached everything that was worth doing (and it if was not worth doing, he did not do it, which was something that made his teachers shake their heads and throw up their hands in despair no less than once a week on average). His single-mindedness was remarkable, especially for a third-grader. When his turn came to be noticed by the six-graders terrorizing his class, he bloodied the nose of one, blacked the eye of the second, and knocked the third one down and kicked him in the ribs.
It was easy.
The second thing that Kyouya learned was that the weak had a regrettable tendency to flock to the strong. This became apparent almost immediately in the fact that his classmates looked at him like he was a hero for having vanquished the bullies that had plagued them. Kyouya found their sudden enthusiasm for him distasteful, especially since he had not done anything that they could not have done for themselves.
That, he decided, was what made weak people weak. Rather than take control of their own circumstances for themselves, they preferred to huddle together and wait to be saved from the things that savaged them. It was detestable.
And so Kyouya learned to dislike people who ran in herds.
The third thing that Kyouya learned was that he rather enjoyed being strong, not because he particularly cared about savaging the weak, but because he liked fighting. When people heard that a third-grader had beaten up three sixth-graders, they grew curious. Some thought that it must have been a fluke and others thought that they should teach him a lesson that would remind him of his place.
Kyouya fought them all.
He didn't care about their reasons for fighting him, but he found that there was a great deal of satisfaction to be had in the fight itself, in the impact of fists against flesh and the taste of blood in his mouth, iron and copper, and in the moment of triumph when he stood over the groaning bodies of those who'd thought they could defeat him. Nothing else he had done before had possessed such a visceral sort of satisfaction; beside it, other pleasures seemed pale and insipid.
Eventually he began to seek fights of his own accord.
The fourth thing he learned was that people would misunderstand anything, and that it wasn't always worth it to correct their assumptions. After a time, people came to assume that he fought because he had decided that his school belonged to him, rather than its packs of bullies and gangs who claimed that it was theirs. That wasn't correct at all, but no one seemed to understand that he fought for the fierce pleasure of it rather than anything else. When they refused to listen to him, no matter how he tried to hammer the lesson into their bodies, Kyouya gave up trying to correct them and let them think what they would of him.
And, after a time, he came to think that perhaps it was not such a bad thing to have a territory of his own. Fighting was still best, but there was a peculiar kind of satisfaction in stalking through the hallways of his elementary school and knowing with a bone-deep kind of certainty that they were his and his alone.
The fifth thing that Kyouya learned was that people were fundamentally the same no matter where he went and that he was always going to be the strongest of them. He learned this when he entered middle school and found that it was just as full of weak people as his elementary school had been. They huddled together like sheep, trying and failing to defend themselves against the carnivores who ran riot through the school.
It was disappointing, not least because of the disorder that those same carnivores sowed in the classrooms. Kyouya took his exasperation out on their bodies, which weren't half as strong as their owners had thought. He sent three to the hospital and terrified four more into transferring schools altogether when he had finished with them. And, while he was at it, he appointed himself head of the school's disciplinary committee.
Apparently, no one else was competent enough to do it for themselves, which was something that Hibari was not going to stand for in his school.
The sixth thing Kyouya learned was that all the things he'd thought were immutable truths, rules to live by, could be broken in the most startling ways possible: sheep could have astonishing reserves of strength, and herds of them working together could overwhelm the strongest of foes, and even he was (possibly) fallible.
Sawada disrupted Kyouya's carefully ordered certainties and routines without seeming to notice what he was doing and enmeshed Kyouya in his Family without so much as asking his permission first. By rights, Kyouya should have destroyed him for his temerity, but Sawada's disruptions came with some compensations. Even if Sawada managed to disrupt all of Kyouya's other firmly-held convictions, there was one that even he could not touch, and that was the joy Kyouya took from fighting. And Sawada attracted fights like a magnet attracted iron filings; opponents practically lined themselves up to attack Sawada, each one stronger than the previous, stronger than anyone in Namimori who wasn't already part of Sawada's little herd.
Irritating as it all was, Kyouya supposed it evened out in the end.
end
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