Reel In Reverse
Author: Jusrecht
Characters: Tsuna and his Guardians
Warnings: alternate storyline(s), general vagueness
Note: These sections don't necessarily happen in the same timeline. Each is just a what-could-happen thing.
–
(one hell of a)
Gokudera Hayato was eleven years old when he left his father's house and swore never to return.
It was one hell of an oath, but Hayato was one hell of a boy. He carried hatred so deep in his heart, lungs, spleen, and it was one hell of a hatred, enough to fuel denial and make him stay away from his father's world forever. He embraced the one thing he still considered his own, and that was his mother's legacy, the gentle, exquisite sound which framed the mosaic of his childhood. Four years later, acknowledgments came from all over the world: Gokudera Hayato, the young, genius virtuoso whose performance dazzled young and old, men and women, a world without boundaries (and how wonderfully, how beautifullyit formed an irony, he whose world was all boundaries, but Hayato was always one hell of a something, even contradiction). Music became his life and it was his sister who came with him in his tours, whose cheek he would kiss every night, whose smiles soothed the ringing emptiness in his heart—for he never did know a boy with brown hair and a pair of utterly, impossibly kind eyes that gave him an offer of a lifetime.
(He stayed away.)
–
(eventually)
Yamamoto Takeshi was thirteen years old when he first contemplated suicide.
It did not happen because he was discovered by one of the teachers and dragged down the parapet just in time. Eventually his arm healed. Eventually he reached Koshien. Eventually he got his dream (play for Japan, look straight into the eyes of his opponents, batter them to the ground), but eventually he got into a driving accident, lost his left arm, and lay in a hospital bed thinking about gravity, velocity, and the many ways a human body could break. Eventually he found himself on the roof, past the protective fence, the night wind whistling in his ears and cars speeding at his feet. It was a long way down, but he neededa long way down to be properly dead.
(This time around, there was no hand to stop him.)
–
(small and inconsequential)
Lambo Bovino was fourteen years old when he had this brilliant idea.
His Family was a small, inconsequential Family—and how strange it was, Lambo thought every time he weighed the ten-year bazooka in his hands. They were the ruler of time, the master of do-you-know-how-five-minutes-can-fuck-up-t
he-whole-history; all they needed was an opportunity. And he had this brilliant idea. He was tired being the inconsequential boy from the small Family that was too busy kissing Vongola's feet to realisethat they were the ones who had power in their grasps after all. They were the only one who could make that tricky, cruel mistress, Time, bend over the proverbial table and play her like an instrument. And he had this brilliant idea.
(It was only when another world war broke out between countries which now wielded time, that Lambo Bovino realised for what a small, inconsequential price he had sold his soul.)
–
(not so ordinary)
Sasagawa Ryouhei was sixteen years old when he first noticed Kurokawa Hana as anything other than the girl with the black hair.
This realisation was out of the ordinary. She was suddenly something different, something strange in his ordinary life, something special. When she cornered him one afternoon after classes ended, he could only gape at her open-mouthed kiss. She was smirking and he wanted to touch her and painted his ordinary days with her colours. They remained together after he had graduated high school, college, right down to endless switching of jobs and finally the opening of his own boxing club (his dream, the glowing star tightly clasped between his rough fingers and her beautiful hand). Then he sank to one knee and shouted the question—otherwise he'd stutter and falter—with a gold ring gleaming on his bandaged palms. She sobbed once, then nodded, and he knew that he would remember the brightness in her eyes for the rest of his life.
(It was like a dream, such a perfect dream, but Sasagawa Ryouhei was a man living an ordinary life with everyday ordinary happiness—and he was grateful that he led such a life.)
–
(rules and rulers)
Hibari Kyouya was seventeen years old when he left Namimori and set his eyes on the whole country.
It was not about power, he told his right-hand man somewhere along the way—but rules. Power without rules was an invitation to anarchy, but rules in themselves were already power. The rest of the world had it backwards; the rulers clung to power and that was when the masters became slaves. There was a scroll hung on the spartan wall of Hibari's bedroom: rules ruled rulers (and Kusakabe Tetsuya smiled at this, but he had smiled at nastier things in the course of his unswerving loyalty). By the age of twenty-five, Hibari Kyouya had become the de facto ruler of Japan, and everyone knew this.
(Except they did not; he never stopped at 'ruler'.)
–
(the crazy madman)
Rokudo Mukuro was twenty-three years old when he earned the title of the most notorious persona in the Italian Mafia world.
The crazy madman: it was what they called him, pleonasm and all. There goes the crazy madman. The crazy madman strikes again. It's the crazy madman who wants to destroy our lives. Mukuro did not mind any of these; his goal was to destroy the Mafia and one epithet was as good as the next as far as he was concerned. Names were illusions—illusory. Deeds went down for ages and it was with this thought that he weaved dreams, braided nightmares, and made them reality. Once, there had been hundreds of Families; now there were barely fifty. The crazy madman indeed.
(In Japan, a girl once called Nagi lay in her grave and never woke up.)
–
(ages and aging)
Sawada Tsunayoshi was one years old when his parents died in a plane crash.
Oblivious to it all, he grew up happily in the care of Vongola Nono and thought that the old man—too old, really, he probably should have noticed, but a child's world was simple and thoroughly joy-oriented—was his father. At the age of eight, he discovered his Sky Flame and laughed at the brightness tickling his fingers. At the age of ten, he killed a man who had come into his bedroom to kidnap him, and there was terror laced with disgust soaked in misery, but most of all, there was a shattering instant of knowledge that to kill was to kill. Three years later, Timoteo announced the name of his successor and watched with sad eyes (grieving but proud, for what father did not feel pride at his son's success) as Tsuna calmly accepted his congratulations.
(Later, when Xanxus challenged him for the throne, Tsuna killed him with his five fingers all splayed, and thought how perfectly they fit in Xanxus' throat.)
End
–