Do the dead sing? Do they love?
-Recurring question, The Reach
It was his birthday today, he remembered suddenly. Happy Birthday me, his mind thought a tad bitterly. The big five-eight. He sighed at this thought, choking up a bit at not only the realization of just how old he was getting, of how he had ended up on that cruise ship of old age without even realizing he'd boarded. Ah, but he was in such wonderful company. That boat was packed body to body, its cabins and decks full of people. And it's final destination…death of course. Now, he also was realizing the hard, solid fact that he had no one here to wish him a happy birthday, that there were no messages on his phone from friends or family telling him to have a great day on this special day – his day. But he was really too old now to cry, wasn't he? So he swallowed the lump in his throat in spite of the bitter, acrid taste it left in its wake. His mouth felt cotton-ball dry, as if someone had taken a bunch of Q-tips and decided to go over-enthusiastic in swabbing his mouth with them. He reached out for his glass of wine blindly, needing something to wet his parched lips and mouth and only succeeded in toppling it over on the table, the glass breaking on impact and the rich, ruby red wine seeping over the table and dripping onto the floor.
He swore loudly, pushing his chair back hastily, already rising. Muttering to himself, he hurried across the kitchen to the stove, grabbing the tea-towel that was hung there. He hurried back to the table, chucking the towel down onto the surface and using it to sop up as much of the mess as he could. A chunk of glass bit into his finger and he winced, jerking his hand instinctively away from the table as a dull pain radiated from the pin-prick cut on his already bleeding finger. He tried his best to keep his cut hand, trembling from the shock and a touch of pain, still as he raised the other to pull the shard of glass out. It wasn't that hard to do really as the glass was large enough to see easily and was easy to remove, pulling out quickly and leaving a slight spurt of blood trickling out.
He groaned loudly, still holding his injured hand. This really wasn't his day, was it? Holding his injured hand in the other so as not to drip blood on the floor, he headed wearily into the bathroom. It was after running his hand under the lukewarm water, cleaning the bit of blood off, that he looked up into the mirror. God, he looked his age now too, didn't he? There were wrinkles in his face now, gray liberally streaked through his hair that hadn't been there before. He swore these things popped up suddenly while he was sleeping or something. Making a disgruntled sound, he looked away from his reflection, reaching up to swing open the medicine cabinet, swinging the glass (and his reflection, that reflection of that old, old man who was but a stranger to him and yet was all too familiar) away from him. Bandaging his finger, he swung the cabinet door closed without looking up at it.
He went back into the kitchen, staring at the table. Most of the mess had been cleaned up before he'd impaled himself with glass. The wine was merely a few spots here and there; it was just the broken glass left. Ah, that could be left for tomorrow morning he decided. It wasn't like it would go away on him. It would still be right there when he got up tomorrow. So he went over to the cup-board and got himself down another wine glass, already picking up the bottle that sat, uncorked, on the counter-top. Setting the glass down, he poured himself a glass of wine, smelling the slight fruitiness of the wine. Hmm, maybe he should go out and sit out on the porch for a bit, enjoy the cool evening air and watch the sunset…clear his head.
Yeah, that sounded good, that was exactly what he needed to do, clear his mind and just relax. The cool air would be good for him and at least out there, there'd be birds or insects, something other than just him and that eternal silence that seemed to stretch on lately. So, picking up his wine glass, he made his way through the bachelor's pad (with all the markings of a man without a woman; dirty dishes, messes left on tables and chairs, dirty clothes on the floor, and very little and mismatched furniture) to the sliding glass doors that led out onto the veranda. It was really just a tiny, wooden porch, barely large enough to fit the metal chair and table set that he had out there but it had a fantastic view of the Italian country-side and it worked well enough for him.
It was at this table and chair set that he settled in, taking a seat in one of the chairs and swinging his long legs up to rest on the other chair. Even with age, he'd still managed to mostly keep that slim, rangy body he'd had for much of his life. Even at fifty-eight, he had the body of a much younger man, something he was very vain about. Sure, he was vain because he enjoyed looking good but at times, when he really stopped to think about it, he wondered if there wasn't something else to that vanity, something deeper; wondered if maybe the real reason he still trained and worked his body was because it kept him the same, kept him as he had been back then, his own body a preserver of the old days.
The old days… 'The good old days'. Wasn't he sounding like an old fart now? They really were the good old days though, he mused, sipping his wine, his eyes on the floorboards beneath his feet. Porch-boards. These weren't the good old days anymore though. Those had flown away…this was no longer the era of Decimo. Decimo was dead and his successor was ruling the Vongola quite nicely from what he'd heard recently. All Decimo's guardians were gone, all but one dead. All but him dead. And he hadn't been needed by the Vongola Undicesimo who'd rounded up his own guardians. Not that he'd minded…the new Lightning Guardian was probably more capable then he'd have been anyways, the new young blood replacing the old like it should.
He was the last Guardian and, in fact, one of the last remaining members of the Vongola Decimo's family. There was just him now…him and Fuuta, who was up in a nursing home in Roma, put there by his concerned and loving children when the Alzheimer's got too much for them to handle. Poor old Fuuta. Lambo was proud that he was still fully functioning, able to live and let live by himself. That was only right; after all he wasn't that old yet. But then, Fuuta was only four years older than himself. Poor old Fuuta, he thought again. He felt bad for him in a way but, deep down and never really thought about, he was a little jealous at times because, in its own deprived way, a part of his mind thought that a good old debilitating case of Alzheimer's wouldn't be so bad at times.
Sighing, he tilted his head back a bit, his eyes shutting as he took another sip of wine. Relax, that's all he needed to do. He just needed to stop thinking and just relax. Yes, just relax, he thought, rolling his neck a bit and concentrating on the feel of the warm evening air as it blew across his skin. It tickled his skin and it sounded almost as if the wind was singing to him. It was almost tuneless…almost. He could barely make out a tune in the seemingly discombobulated sounds. And it seemed, to his tired and weary mind, that there were words to this song, someone singing barely audible words that he couldn't quite make out. Were they Italian? No, he didn't think they were. They sounded, instead, vaguely Latin. But that was silly. Who'd be singing a song in a dead language? And who'd be singing at all?
Lambo tilted his head up a bit; just enough to see around him as he cracked open his eyes just a bit. He could see quite a bit through his heavily lidded eyes. Though as soon as he took in the scenery, his eyes snapped wide open as he jerked his body up, coming to sit straight up at the edge of his chair. No, it couldn't be. It was impossible. Yet his eyes were telling him otherwise. Because there, half-way down the grassy, sloping hill was someone that shouldn't…no couldn't…be there.
It was I-Pin; he would have sworn that on his mother's grave. He could only see her back and about a quarter of her profile but he knew it was her. There was that same thick, black hair bundled into the twin braids she'd always worn, that same confident way of holding herself that he'd always found so sensual. And even the bit he could see of her face…it could be nobody but I-Pin but at the same time…it couldn't be I-Pin. It was impossible. I-Pin was dead, had been for a long time now, taken away far too early at the tender age of thirty-three in a drunk driving accident. And he would know better than anyone as he'd been the one to identify her body in the morgue.
He wanted to turn his eyes away, to dismiss this all as just a product of his over-active imagination but he found he couldn't, that his eyes seemed to be forced to this figure. And as the figure of this woman, who was so like I-Pin but just couldn't be, turned to look at him, brown eyes meeting his green ones, all doubt was wiped from his mind…no, that was wrong. It was like all conscious thought was wiped from his mind, as one is apt to feel in these situations were the impossible crashed down around you and you found out that there was much more to this world than you had ever imagined.
"Lambo…" the wind voice (the voice of the dead, the voice of the wind, the voice of I-Pin) called to him, seeming to whisper softly in his ear despite the amount of space between him and this ghost…if that's what it was. He was barely even aware that he had risen until he found himself at the first stair of the stairway that led off the porch.
"Come back, Lambo. We're waiting. Come back to Japan," the voice whispered to him as he clamored down the stairs, rushing as fast as he possibly could. But it was useless, he knew that before he'd even risen he guessed, but he'd tried running to her, his dead fiancée, even as she faded from his sight. But here was the clincher. Here was what would stick in his mind for days afterwards. As she disappeared as if she'd never been there, he heard a distinct pop, almost the sound of a cork shooting out of a bottle of wine-a sound that signaled the rush of air coming to fill up a space where something material had once been.
He stood there at the bottom of the stairs for quite a while afterwards. It could have been an hour or only mere minutes, he really couldn't have told. His eyes were sweeping around the area around him, waiting to see if she would show up once again. But she didn't and, with a slight sigh, he turned back to walk up the stairs he'd descended. Nothing more than a delusion, his mind playing tricks on him. Maybe he should go to the doctor and see if something was wrong…it was probably just exhaustion making his mind go haywire though, he hadn't been sleeping well recently. He'd probably forget all about it tomorrow, he thought, as he gathered up his wine glass and headed in for some much needed (and hard to get) sleep.
And he was right for the most part. By the time his feet hit the floor the next morning (after a very restless night of sleep broken up by horrible nightmares) he barely even remembered anything weird had happened the previous night. It might have lingered in his mind but whatever internal bodyguard lives inside us and protects us from our own thoughts and memories was doing its job and that memory of the previous night was kept out of the forefront of his mind, hidden way back in the shadowy crevices of his mind.
The planned trip to the doctor was dismissed. Really, there was no need of it. It really must have just been a one-time delusion brought on from lack of sleep because nothing like it happened the next night or the night after that. Nothing spectacular happened at all for quite a while and for two weeks he never even thought about what had happened…while awake. His dreams were haunted by it though and he found himself getting less and less sleep. And when you got as little sleep as he did normally, that was not a good thing.
It was actually a trip to purchase sleeping pills that brought him out into the village's shopping center that day, two weeks after the appearance of the first ghost (which he was still firmly denying having seen). It didn't take too long to get the pills; he had a long-running prescription for them. Most of his life he'd been plagued with sleeping problems but considering the things he'd seen and done, that was really no surprise. The problem seemed to be getting worse though as he got older.
White bag, perfectly nondescript and respectable, clutched in one hand, he made his way back towards home, moving through the milling, moving bodies around him. While shouts of greetings and waves were extended towards him, politely returned, he kept moving on. He could barely remember most of the people's names and to be honest he really didn't give a damn who they were, much less care enough about them to stop and have a conversation with them. There was really nobody he wanted to spend time with anymore, all his friends were dead or as good as in Fuuta's case. Old coot wouldn't know him even if he went up to visit. He hadn't the last and only time Lambo had gone to visit him. And why, Lambo had thought then and still thought now, go visit someone who didn't know you anymore?
It was during his trek through the throng of people, anxious and eager to get back to his safe, quiet home (lonely though, his very safe, quiet, lonely home) that it happened again, his 'delusions' popping up again. Because, making his way through a particularly crowded spot, he saw something that made him stop in his tracks. A man bumped roughly into him, muttering an insult and a 'watch where you're going, old man' before skirting around him. Lambo paid him no mind though, his eyes focused on the sight in front of him.
Because once again he was seeing something, someone who couldn't be there. It was impossible for him to be there but there he was-Ryohei Sasagawa, who had died of a heart attack at the tender age of 60. Too much pressure on his body all of the time, too much work and not enough relaxation, that had been the doctor's explanation for it. But hell, he'd gone out the way he would've wanted to, dying while training. That pretty much embodied Ryohei if you asked Lambo. Yet here he was, looking better than he had in years, younger in fact, looking only like a man of maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight, leaning against a wall and whistling out a haunting song. The same song, in fact, if Lambo thought about it (and he did now, now he thought maybe they weren't just delusions), that I-Pin had been singing.
"Ryohei?" he gasped out loudly, earning a few confused or slightly anxious expressions from those closest to him. Not that he noticed this, his eyes trained on his fellow (dead) Guardian. And if he had, he probably would have sympathized with the people. After all, you see a guy talking to himself in the middle of a crowded street, staring at a blank space of wall (blank only to them, only to them but not to him), you have to wonder about the guy's sanity and whether or not he's going to flip out and go crazy in the middle of the street.
Ryohei looked up at him at the sound of his name and gave Lambo a large grin. He shifted against the wall and stopped his whistling, rising up a hand to the Lightning Guardian.
"Come on home, Lambo! We're all waiting for you!"
"Why though?" Lambo gritted out through his teeth, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, his hand fisting so tightly around the white bag that his fingernails poked holes in the thick paper.
But when he opened his eyes to look at Ryohei once more, to get his answer, Ryohei was no longer there, a blank wall showing once again where the Sun Guardian had been only moments before. Groaning tiredly, Lambo once again set off, his stride faster and more aggressive now, towards home. What was going on here? Home, that was what he needed. He was just over-tired. There could be no other explanation. He'd go home and he'd pop a sleeping pill and this would be nothing more than just a figment of his imagination run amok.
And that's exactly what he did. He walked as fast as he could without breaking into a run and arrived at his home in record time. He was already kicking off his shoes as he unlocked his door and pushed it open. He let the shoes drop wherever they landed, his attention more focused on locking the door behind him as quickly as he could with one hand while the other hand ripped the remaining still intact pieces of the bag away to get to the prescription pill bottle inside.
He got the pill bottle out and uncorked it as he finished locking his door. Swallowing a pill dry, he made his way to the bedroom. It should kick in soon and give him at least a good eight hours of sleep, a dreamless sleep at that. And it did because almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, he was out. For eight or nine hours, he slept an uninterrupted and wonderful sleep, unburdened by thoughts or dreams.
It was dark out when he awoke, the sky outside his window a dusky, velvety black. It was cloudy out, the clouds hanging in big, threatening clusters and obscuring the moon and stars. Thunderstorms tonight and tomorrow, he thought, if he remembered the weather reports right. It didn't really bother him. His mouth was dry and he got up, planning to head to the bathroom and get a drink of water before he popped another sleeping pill. The next one should knock him out until morning.
It was cold in the house, he mused, as his bare feet padded across the hardware floors into the bathroom. His eyes were on his feet, more the luck for him. They didn't look up farther than the sink as he grabbed the glass that lie on the bathroom cupboard, kept there especially for these times when he woke up needing something to drink. His hand reached out to turn the cold water facet and he downed a couple glasses of water in quick succession before setting the cup aside once more.
It was then that he looked up, planning to check his reflection in the mirror to see if those dark bags under his eyes (nearly a permanent fixture on his face by now) had receded at all. But as he looked up into the mirrored surface of the medicine cabinet above the sink, he found himself looking not at his only reflection but at Mukuro Rokudou. The Mukuro Rokudou who had been killed by Tsunayoshi Sawada at the age of 31 after the former tried to kill off the Vongola family. The bastard illusionist had almost succeeded too, Lambo thought with distaste, as he stared, wide-eyed into the mirror. Several family members had lost their lives to Mukuro's trident.
The Mukuro in the mirror was smirking out at him as he hummed a song that was becoming eerily familiar to Lambo. No, this couldn't be real. This was a dream, he was still in bed and he'd slipped past the sleeping pill's influence into a dreaming, fitful sleep. That was the only explanation for this.
Lambo raised a hand up, bringing it to rest on the mirror, feeling the cold glass beneath his hand. He was so sure that if he touched the mirror, the odd reflection of Mukuro would fade away and disappear. But, to his surprise and horror, Mukuro only raised a hand as well, setting it overtop of Lambo's on the other side of the glass.
His voice, sounding far off and distorted through the glass, spoke. Blurry as it was, Lambo could still make out his words.
"See you in Japan, Vongola Lightning Guardian."
This time, he forced his eyes to stay open, to not blink despite the burning, itching feeling that came from forcing ones eyes to stay open, wanting to see the Mukuro reflection leave. But he lost that battle, as everyone tends to do, and he blinked several times in rapid succession and when his blinking stopped, Mukuro was gone.
"Okay, I get the point," he muttered out into the empty bathroom, chuckling nearly hysterically. Oh, it felt good to laugh and he laughed until tears came to his eyes and his sides burned, his laughter tinged with terror. He laughed because it was better than screaming and he felt he might have to save the latter for later on.
Turning around, struggling to get his laughter under control, he made his way to his living room, or more precisely to the cordless phone that was docked on it's charger in the living room. It only took one call and he had booked a flight from Italy to Tokyo, Japan. The thought of going back to sleep was far from his mind and much of the rest of the night was spent packing.
At precisely six thirty in the morning the next day, Lambo boarded a plane from the Venice airport heading to Tokyo, Japan. It was a ten and a half hour flight and thankfully, once the take-off was complete, he slept through most of it. He was one of the few who did, as the air going out of Venice was quite turbulent and the air going into Tokyo was as well. Freak thunderstorms in both areas made the flight bumpy and a lot of passengers were worried the plane would crash. But Lambo slept through all but an hour of it.
The hour before the plane landed (safely, by the way, proving the worried passengers and crew of the flight wrong in their predictions of a crash) Lambo awoke with a start. Turning his head, he saw another ghost from his past but this time he didn't waste his time with fright or shock or denial. He was slowly getting used to this and though that fact alone should have scared him, he felt no fear only a sense of detaching from the world around him.
Yamamoto Takeshi sat beside him, dead for only a couple years, yet, like Ryohei, looking remarkably younger than he had been when he died. Yamamoto turned his head to look at Lambo with a smile which Lambo returned without a second thought.
"Coming home, kid?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm going home now."
"Good."
Lambo shut his eyes with a small sigh as the man in the seat across from him lowered his newspaper and looked over at the old gentleman who was for all extents and purposes, talking to an empty seat. Clearing his throat, the man in the across-seat spoke, drawing Lambo's attention.
"Excuse me sir, are you alright?"
Lambo opened his eyes and sent a smile the man's way.
"Yes, just fine. Just remembering some things."
The man looked cautiously at him for a second before turning his attention back to his newspaper. The rest of the flight was silent and at midnight, Tokyo time, the plane sped along the runway of the Tokyo airport.
Debarking with the rest of the passengers, Lambo passed through customs and gathered his luggage without any problems. That in itself should've sent out major weird signals as getting through customs and finding your luggage when traveling cross-continent was always difficult. It was almost too easy, almost like there was something else, someone else involved in this journey, clearing the way for him, that thing that humans like to jokingly refer to as fate. But as it was, it was easy and he didn't think twice about that fact. His mind was already chock full of odd things so it was quite forgivable that he didn't notice another one.
Exiting the airport smoothly and easily, he was lucky enough to find a shuttle-bus going to Namimori at the airport itself. That saved time in heading to the train station. The bus itself was less than a quarter full of people and the trip was both quick and relaxing.
The bus made only one stop in Namimori before pulling up in front of Namimori's one hotel where Lambo was the only person to get off. Though he got quite wet getting his luggage and heading to the hotel's front doors, he didn't think twice of it. He checked in and stored his luggage in his room before heading right back out again. He didn't know why he did that as staying in his room, nice and dry and hopefully grabbing some sleep would be preferable, but something in his mind told him that now that he was in Namimori, there was something he needed to do, somewhere he needed to be.
He got drenched less than a minute after he exited the hotel and set off down the street from the torrential downpour that fell, hitting hard against the paved streets before bouncing up a bit. He looked up as lightning cracked through the sky, lighting up the midnight darkness. Mentally he counted. One, two, three. Three counts and then he heard it, the thunder a sonic boom in the air. But he heard something even deeper than the rain, the thunder, the lightning. Because now he heard it loud and clear, the song of the dead. And now he could make out the words, beautiful and haunting, a love song from the dead to those living they held dear, a beacon through the night air.
His feet moved of their own accord, following the song with no clear destination in mind and he allowed that, loved that in fact. He followed the song without a clear thought in his head, knowing only that song, terrible and beautiful all at the same time. And he couldn't say, when his feet brought him closer to his final destination, that he was surprised at where he ended up. He was standing in front of the steps leading up to the Namimori Shrine. Wasn't that fitting? Wasn't this always where the really weird and wonderful things happened in Namimori? This was where Hibari had first fought with the family, where they'd ended and came to every time they left and returned to the future, this was the site of so many wonderful and magical memories.
And the song was clearer here, closer here and he knew what he needed to do. He started climbing the stairs, one foot in front of the other. And something amazing seemed to be happening as he climbed upwards, the song becoming louder and nearer. Because with each stair, he wasn't only getting closer, he was getting younger. He could feel it, both physically and mentally.
By the time he reached the second to last stair, he could see them. The six Guardians-Mukuro and Chrome, huddled together by away from the group, their voices raised to the wind; Hibari, scowling and standing away from everyone and everything, Hibird adding his voice to the song his master was singing; Ryohei, behind Gokudera, his fist raised as he all but screamed out the song; Gokudera and Yamamoto, flanking Tsuna, both of them singing as well and all of them the teenagers they had been when he first met them. And there was I-Pin, smiling at him as she sang, now no more than a child again cradled in Bianchi's arms. And Reborn, not singing, but smirking at him from Yamamoto's shoulder. And there and there, more people he recognized, people he knew. They were all here for him.
His hand stretched out to them and he was unsurprised to find it clad in a cow-printed suit, the hand of the five-year old boy he'd been when he had first became Vongola, became family. He went to climb the next stair, went to join his family when a bolt of lightning hit the stair in front of him, shattering the stone. For one terrifying second, Lambo thought he would die before he finished climbing, before he got to them but instead of pain, he felt himself gently held in a pair of strong arms.
"Its okay, Lambo. You're home now," Tsuna whispered out, smiling down at the young cow.
"Took you long enough to come home, dumb cow," Gokudera's voice said, drifting on the wind.
Early the next morning, the workers of the Namimori Shrine got quite the surprise. The storm of the previous night, the worst one Namimori had gotten in nearly twenty years, had destroyed most of the area around the shrine. Trees had blown over; power-lines had been knocked down. But most surprising was the steps leading up to the shrine. The second to last and last step had been struck by lightning and were crumbling and burnt. And on those steps was a man, pronounced dead by the medics the workers had called. His wallet gave his name and his information.
At fifty-eight, the Decimo's Guardian of Lightning was dead, struck by one last fatal bolt of Lightning.