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The End Of
Flick, flick, flick, the numbers shutter, black on red — some mechanical monstrosity, hardly a bomb. It looks like a gradeschooler's idea of something, a clumsy bundle of shrapnel and dynamite that might look vaguely threatening on a movie screen. You've worked with explosives all your life; you know the innards of bombs like butchers know the guts and humors of dead meat — this is nothing. Hardly a toy. Would be nothing but a toy, but this room is some shoddy imitation of concrete, these pillars creak under the strain of breathing's weight. The baseball idiot watches you carefully, the Tenth leaning against him, breath shallow.
"Gokudera-kun," the Tenth says. You hear something wet leave his lips, dribble sluggishly onto the floor. "Gokudera-kun, please look at me." There is a whispery sound as you do so, a ferocity of eagerness to please that belies the nearly coy inching of your gaze. There isn't time for this, no goodbyes yet, because Sawada Tsunayoshi is your Tenth and you will follow your master into hell with a ready word — because you have, never mind the blood loss — but you will not say goodbye.
You see him in gradients of red; blood maybe, condensed onto your eyelashes, because there's certainly enough of that in the air — you can smell it every time you inhale, taste it every time you don't. There isn't much time, you want to tell him, your fingers still nimble at their work. Those Millefiore bastards — three minutes and fourteen seconds — how do they expect anyone to disarm this abomination of a bomb in three minutes and fourteen seconds?
"Gokudera-kun." He sighs, coughs, lets his head fall back against Yamamoto's blackened shoulder. "Please stop."
There isn't enough time —
There's never enough time, you want to say. There's never enough fucking time — you don't realize that this has left your mouth until you hear its echoes hanging stagnant in the static of the room. The Tenth smiles, a grimace twisted by an expression of rue, recognizable in its intent rather than its execution. The baseball idiot — Yamamoto — just looks solemnly on. You pointedly ignore him — no, this is simply an exchange of words between the most powerful mafioso of recent times and his most trusted lieutenant; never mind that it's the steady pressure of Yamamoto's fingers that keep the blood of said mafioso's wounds at an appearance of decency.
"Just a little longer, Tenth," you say in quieter tones. "I've got this, just a little longer."
The Tenth shakes his head again, an even fainter gesture this time than before. "I'm not talking about the bomb, Gokudera-kun." You startle then, finally look up at more than a glance. All you see is Yamamoto, his black eyes intent, a dark form at your eyelevel cloistered over the Tenth's never-quite-solid form.
"Retard, what are you doing?" you snap, feeling your panic rise with your bile at the blood, god, you've never thought blood could be so — Swallowing now, everything concentrated on cracking the whip of your voice. "The Tenth is still talking to me. How dare you —"
"Gokudera Hayato-san," you hear from within the angles of Yamamoto's hulking form. "Stop."
Your fingers still, knotted between wires blue and green.
2:09, 2:08, 2:07.
Yamamoto reaches, his broad palm smoothing at the tatters of your suit. "Hey," he murmurs, his voice low and coarse, and you flinch back when the pad of his thumb paints a line of sticky heat across the hard lines at your shoulder.
"Go with him," the Tenth says, softer now, though you can still hear the reassurance he strains to maintain. "You've done everything you can. You've done well. Go with him, Gokudera-kun."
1:58, 1:57, 1:56, flick, flick.
"No," you say numbly, pushing at the flat of Yamamoto's palm. "No. Tenth, I can do this! Just a little more, just —" Green, there are four green wires, two red. Just need to cross one pair, match one of them, cut a blue. Yamamoto's hand grows heavy.
"Gokudera," he says, but you can't shake him off.
"What?!" you shriek, as the bomb flickers, number, number, time, time.
"Gokudera," his voice is hollow, and his eyes must be too; you can feel it, wet heat soaking into your wrist, smell the salt and sweet of it, saturated. "Stop." His fingers circle your knuckles, tug and squeeze.
You freeze. The slick of his skin is hot against yours. It's not all his. He pulls, your fingers disentangling with a plastic rustle.
"We have to go, Gokudera. Tsun— The Tenth. He told us to go."
"No," your voice is impossibly bright, even to your own ears. You fix your eyes upon your carded hands; stare at the red smearing from his onto the white of your fingers — red painted over Yamamoto's like a macabre layer of translucent skin. It's not all his.
"No," you say again, but all you really hear is the flick, flick, flick, another moment closer to T-0, closer to death, closer to turning around and facing your failure. "The Tenth…"
Yamamoto's breath hits your hair like warmth from another life. His arms bracing yours are a comfort you don't deserve. "He's gone, Gokudera. Please. He told us to go. He said—"
It's all you hear, seeing Yamamoto's split mouth, his speckled face, feeling the want to break something, your fingers digging into the hard flesh of his lower arms, biting at your own mouth while clamping your throat shut against scream and the horrible, impossible evidence right there, and —
"Take him," you say, pushing at Yamamoto again, watching nothing but the constant, torpid spread of more red, sluicing the fake-concrete gray from beneath Yamamoto's heel. "Take him with you. The rest of the Family, they deserve —" more than you do, you failed, you failed, so they should at least get "— to say goodbye." You let your hands drop from Yamamoto's, and turn away from the light, the living, back to the flick, flick, of 1:01, 1:00, 0:59, 0: —
"What are you talking about." Yamamoto's voice is like you've never heard it, cold and still and beyond the threat of anger, but you remain unaffected. Not even Yamamoto's idiot insolence can move you from this.
You afford him a chuckle, a rolling sound too smooth to be anything but mania. "I can't stop it now, but I can probably give you about a minute more than you'd have otherwise. That way, you can at least walk out with some dignity instead of showing up outside all bloody and out of breat—"
"What the fuck are you talking about?!"
Your back slams into the dust, the hard corners of the bomb's casing biting into your shoulder. You stare evenly into Yamamoto's distorted face, almost unrecognizable beneath layers of grime and gore, twisted into a plane of narrow lines and ungenerous edges.
"Yama—" you almost begin, when his fist slams into your jaw with an ominous crack. He's always had bigger hands than you, you think dazedly, solid bones. You've had to make do with your mother's delicate features and soft joints, but you've always endured.
You can't feel half of your face.
"When will you learn to wake the fuck up already?!" he screams, fist rising for another strike. You've almost remembered to flinch. By the time your face turns away, his knuckles already break the flesh above your cheekbone. "Hibari's gone missing, Ryohei won't tell us where he is, now Tsuna's fucking dead! You think —" Thud; you feel something come loose in your mouth "— I want to —" His fist goes up again, but this time, you've already closed your eyes "—lose you too?!" You wait, breath short with anticipation, but the next touch of his hand is nearly alien for all its tenderness -- would be, if not that you've become grudgingly accustomed to his hands: to its weight against your cheek, the coarse catch of his fingers in the fine hair behind your ear, a meager penance to pay after years of careful courting.
Yamamoto's eyes are still and terrible but their unbridled rage has dimmed once more. "Do you want to die?" he asks, his words coming just a little breathlessly. "Is that what you want? You want to fucking die?"
You blink, in something that would be akin to languidness but for your swollen eyelids. Flick, flick, flick, you hear: a steady tattoo towards the threshold of death. There can't be more than thirty flicks left in this amateur's idea of a weapon. You can't quite see it, your eyes won't quite focus enough for you to see what's right under your nose. So you turn back to Yamamoto, whose face is still horrible, six inches above yours, fingers fisted into the silver of your hair.
"I," you say, before you feel his hand palm the back of your neck, bring your face that much closer to his. You can feel his breath in yours now, sharing spite between the two of you.
"Yes—" You have things he wants you to tell him, things he's never heard you say without askance in your eyes. "I want to—" Yamamoto's forehead rests forwards, falls against yours and two more flicks pass before he says with what you recognize as the grim resolve of a Guardian of the Vongola's inner circle.
"I'm sorry, Gokudera." You count the flicks. Twenty now, probably. Nineteen, eighteen. The idiot can still make it out of here if he tries, if he flees, if he —
"I can't let you have that."
You are seventeen seconds from death when all you can see is white.
Then black.
Then nothing at all.
Continued in epilogue: "Something Really Ugly"