01.
Sasagawa Kyoko woke up on her tenth birthday feeling like something was amiss.
At first, she thought that it was because she couldn't hear her brother yelling as he ran around the house. But with one look at the alarm clock, she realized that he must have gone off on his early morning run already. She had overslept.
Which made sense, considering it was a family policy that if someone in the Sasagawa household had a birthday they were allowed to sleep in for as long as they wanted. Meaning that the rest of the household's occupants had to be as quiet as they possibly could, and that included Ryohei.
And then Kyoko thought that it was just the sensation of finally reaching the double digits. She was ten years old now. She had lived for an entire decade already, and it blew her mind to think that she was that old already.
The little brunette let a breathless smile cross her face as she stared up at the ceiling. That must have been it. This feeling inside her must be what growing up feels like.
And with that in mind, Kyoko sat up in her bed, arched her back in a stretch, and swung her legs around to the side of the bed and hopped down-
-only to immediately scramble back onto the bed when she discovered that not only did her floor suddenly turn squishy overnight, but it made a squelchy noise too when she stepped on it.
Her eyes shot down to the floor and she screamed.
02.
The bedroom door slammed open, and Kyoko's parents burst into the room.
"What is it? What's wrong?" Kyoko's father asks, his eyes wild and apron disheveled. He must have been working in the kitchen, making a delicious homemade red velvet cake for his daughter.
Kyoko couldn't find her voice, instead, she raised a shaky hand and pointed at the person that lay sprawled out on the hardwood floors beside her bed.
"Kyoko! Are you ok?" Her mother asked, lowering the fireplace poker that she had brandished like a weapon.
The ten-year-old spent a few brief moments working her jaw, trying to force herself to speak before finally she managed to stutter out a weak "Th-the there's a pers- person."
Her mother and father scanned the room, their eyes furrowing in confusion- like they were trying to solve some sort of puzzle.
"Sweetie," Kyoko's father said as he crossed the room. Kyoko watched in absolute horror as he walked through the person on the ground as if he didn't even notice the unconscious -maybe even dead- stranger. "There's no one here."
Kyoko was dumbfounded, and suddenly her words came back to her.
"What do you mean there's no one there, you're standing in her!" she shrieked as she scrambled away from the edge of her bed, pressing her back up against the wall.
Her parents exchanged concerned glances.
03.
Ryohei knew that he wasn't the most observant person in the world. He was well aware that he had a tendency to rush into things without thinking them through, and he had to admit he was sometimes oblivious to other people's feelings.
His little sister often called him a true Gryffindor because of it- like the main characters from that book series that she had recently gotten into and was trying to get him into it as well.
There were only three books in the series so far and yet Kyoko had already read each one of them four times and even managed to get a hold of an English version of each copy. The fourth book -Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire- wasn't due to be released until July, but Ryohei heard his parents talking about getting an English version as a late birthday gift for Kyoko.
Reading those fantasy books always made his little sister so happy, even if she couldn't read the original English editions without constantly using an English to Japanese dictionary.
And right at that moment, Ryohei wanted to run upstairs and grab every single one of her Harry Potter books and give them to her. Maybe then she wouldn't look so sad.
Ryohei wasn't sure what happened that morning after he left for his morning jog -quietly! Because he didn't want to wake up the birthday girl!- but when he returned he immediately knew that something was wrong.
Kyoko was drinking glass after glass of water in the kitchen while tears flowed freely from her eyes. Their parents hovered around her, alternating between showering the ten-year-old with reassuring words and shooting each other worried glances and whispers.
Ryohei's heart shattered into a million pieces to see his sister in a state like that. And that heartbreak morphed into righteous anger when Kyoko cried out that there was a stranger in her room.
Fury gripped him like no other, and Ryohei stormed up the stairs- screaming at the top of his lungs how he was going to beat up whoever dared make his little baby sister cry.
He barely heard his parents shouting as he smashed the half-open door into the wall -almost breaking it right off its hinges- and started flipping furniture in an attempt to find the evil person responsible for making Kyoko cry.
"Ryohei, stop!" His mother yelled as she lunged for him, restraining his flailing arms with a monstrous bear hug. "Ryohei!"
The eleven-year-old struggled for a few moments longer, trying to escape his mother's grasp to continue upheaving his sister's room to find the person who made her cry. But the harder he tried to escape, the tighter his mother's hug became.
Finally, Ryohei stopped moving. And he noticed.
Other than his mother and him, there wasn't a single soul in Kyoko's room.
04.
She could remember the unassuming calm. The quiet before the firestorm hit.
Then heat and flames enveloped the night.
There was a loud pop. Like the cork of a bottle of champagne being popped open. Or maybe like the sound of an artillery cannon fireing.
The lights were too bright to be real.
And yet, the colors around her were dull. Faded to unremarkable shades of black grey and white.
She was tired. All she wanted to do was sleep.
Just to turn off the world for one blissful moment.
Tiny pinprick stars swirled around in her vision like chunks of unmashed bananas in a poorly made fruit smoothie.
It was too much to look at.
The shifting shapes were still there, oozing and lurching even with her eyes closed.
Did she succumb to the nothingness?
Maybe she did, maybe she didn't. But the nothingness surrounded her. Confusing her. Nothing meant no danger. No reason for fear. But nothing also meant no safety. It was nothing. Nothing at all.
And right then?
Right then she felt the nothingness. She breathed the nothingness. She smelled the nothingness. She tasted the nothingness. She was the nothingness.
It became difficult to tie the strings of her thoughts together. Stray questions, answers, comments, monologues fluttered by in a heavy fog of exhaustion.
That was when the panic set in.
Because how can you not panic when you become the nothingness that suffocates you?
She struggled. Squirmed. Tried to push herself away from the void of nothing. But she didn't call it the void of nothing for nothing. No matter which direction she turned there was nothing, and no one.
She screamed for help.
Is anyone there? Help me, please! I don't know where I am! Hello? Where am I? What happened?
...Please. I'm scared…
There was no answer.
05.
Kyoko sat quietly at, numbly nibbling on forkfuls of cake as she listened to Ryohei yell about how he was extremely happy that she liked his present. It was a pair of hot pink rollerblades complete with a matching helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, and wrist guards. Ryohei wanted his little sister to be safe when she was out exercising.
And although Kyoko truly did appreciate the gift her brother had spent so much of his own personal allowance to buy, she couldn't put her heart into the celebrations.
Not when her parents were busy murmuring to themselves when they think she isn't looking.
Not when Ryohei's smile doesn't quite reach his eyes.
Not when Kyoko was hyper-aware of the fact that the stranger was still in her room, with shredded, blood-soaked clothes.
The woman that no one else but Kyoko could see had been there for more than four hours. She hadn't moved, hadn't made a sound, and she wasn't-
She wasn't even breathing.
And Kyoko had double checked the pulse in her wrist like she saw people do on those crime shows that her father watches late at night. There was no beat in the woman's vains. None at all.
Maybe she wasn't doing it properly, or maybe the woman was just breathing so slowly, Kyoko couldn't see if her chest was rising and falling as it should. Heck, maybe everyone was right and she really was hallucinating or dreaming or whatever.
But the heaviness of the stranger's arms when Kyoko lifted it… The course and frizziness of the hair when she prodded the head… the wet, red liquid that rubbed off on her finger…
Kyoko knew that there was a dead body in her room. Wave upon wave of guilt threatened to sweep her off of her feet and drown her.
She should have called for an ambulance. She shouldn't have listened to her parents when they told her that there was no one else in her bedroom. That there was no strange woman lying face down on the ground dying while Kyoko was too busy crying hysterically to be of any use.
A woman was dead, and Kyoko felt like that was her fault.
06.
Kyoko's father ended up taking her to see a doctor bright and early the next day instead of letting her go to school with Ryohei.
A full twenty-four hours since the stranger appeared in her room.
The doctors did a bunch of tests that blurred together. Putting Kyoko into machines, checking for a concussion, making sure there was nothing else wrong with her.
Kyoko couldn't remember much about it. The image of the dead body plagued her every move.
She tried to explain it to the others, she really did. Kyoko at least wanted to give the nameless person a funeral. She may not have known who the woman was, but everyone deserves a proper burial.
Her pediatrician referred her to a therapist. The first session was on Tuesday of next week.
Kyoko came home exhausted and well aware that nothing had changed. The stranger was still there, and Kyoko numbly accepted the fact that the body was there to stay. She wasn't going to get any help from her family in that respect.
So with a whimper of resignation, Kyoko told her father that she was going upstairs to take a nap in Ryohei's room. He nodded and told her that he would be in his office if she needed anything.
Kyoko quietly trodden up the stairs, bypassed Ryohei's half-open door after a brief moment of hesitation, and stood in front of her own closed bedroom door.
She stared at it, her mind blank, and her eyes unseeing.
Then she reached out and turned the knob.
It had been a full twenty-four hours, and the dead body was still there.
07.
Kyoko learned how to live around the body.
She didn't know what to do those first few days- hovering around outside her room, too scared to go in but too morbidly curious to leave it alone.
Eventually, Kyoko gathered up all of the courage she could muster, and in the dead of night, she dragged the body outside to the old tool shed in her backyard.
It was a lot more difficult than Kyoko anticipated. She was just a little girl who hadn't spent a lot of time playing sports or working out. That was more her brother's forte. Kyoko couldn't pick up an adult woman by herself, and she was too nervous to go to her parents or brother for help.
It wasn't like they could see the woman anyway.
So Kyoko buckled down and pulled the woman out of the house by her legs. It took her a solid hour to finish the job. And all throughout, Kyoko felt a constant urge to look over her shoulder. To make sure that she was alone. To make sure that no one was watching her stash away a body.
She placed the woman in the middle of the shed, surrounded by gardening tools and various sports equipment like some sort of shrine.
Then, Kyoko turned around and pulled a bouquet of newly bloomed wildflowers she had picked from the schoolyard out from behind the lawnmower. Carefully, she maneuvered the woman's hands to her chest and Kyoko placed the flowers between the fingers.
She took a step back. Moonlight filtered through the cracks of the shed's roof, casting ethereal shadows across the stranger's body.
Kyoko thought the woman looked almost like a ghost in the pale glow of the night.
08.
One week turned into two weeks, and two weeks turned into three.
Kyoko visited the shed twice a day to say a prayer. Once before school, and once as soon as she returned home.
In all that time, the body didn't change one bit. It was still in the same position she put it in that night when she moved the woman out of her room. Kyoko thought that dead bodies were supposed to start to stink by now and decay.
At least, that was the reasoning her parents gave her as to why they had to get rid of her pet hamster that died three years ago.
It was as if the body was frozen in time. The blood on her clothes retained its bright red hue, her dark brown skin didn't seem to sag or wrinkle, and at a certain angle, the woman looked like she was simply asleep.
But the woman's heart wasn't beating. Her chest didn't rise, nor did it fall.
Kyoko put a mirror up to the woman's mouth to see if any condensation formed from the woman's breath -another technique the ten-year-old picked up on from her father's TV shows- but no fog formed on the reflective surface.
Eventually, Kyoko gave up.
Eventually, Kyoko stopped talking about the dead body that showed up in her room on her birthday and now occupied the Sasagawa family's barely used tool shed.
Eventually, her therapists decided that her mad ramblings were a one-off thing and let her go with a stern warning that as soon as she felt like something was wrong, she should come right back.
Eventually, things went back to normal.
And Kyoko was happy. Or at least, as happy as she could be given the circomstances.
Until she woke up in the middle of the night -12:01AM on March 31 to be exact- to the sound of someone screaming in the backyard.
09.
"She's alive," Kyoko whispered, too scared to raise her voice. "Oh God, she's alive!"
The ten-year-old peaked through one of the broken windows of the shed. Through the spiderweb cracks of the glass, Kyoko watched with a mix of morbid curiosity and horror as the body seized and spazzed as if the person was desperately trying and failing to wake themselves up from a nightmare.
The person suddenly lurched forward into an upright sitting position. The sheer unexpectedness of the movement caused Kyoko to flinch away from the window and she crouched under the window pane to hide from the undead woman's sight.
A beat passed, and then Kyoko's hearing was assaulted by a blood-curdling scream. The kind that sent waves of ice down your spine. The kind that grips your heart with frostbitten hands. It was the kind of scream that soon-to-be-murdered victims release in a last ditch effort to find someone who could save them.
Kyoko had never heard such a gut-wrenching sound before. It made her freeze in her place and her mind went completely blank. As if her brain couldn't comprehend what was going on around her.
It was only the intense urge to make sure that the woman was alright that Kyoko tilted herself forward onto the balls of her feet and slid her way over the shed's door.
Carefully, as if the door handle could potentially bite her hand off, Kyoko pulled open the door and stuck her head in.
The woman was sitting there, raggedly gasping for air and staring down at her hands as if they were some sort of foreign entity. At least the woman wasn't screaming anymore. This was an improvement.
Kyoko pushed the door open a little further, and the movement -or maybe the noise- must have caught the woman's attention because the woman's mud brown eyes snapped up to meet Kyoko's.
The ten-year-old felt a fluster of fear brew in her stomach before she forced it to the back of her mind.
Kyoko took a deep breath.
"Are you al- are you ok, m-miss? I um, I can call another adult if- if you want, you've been kinda, um… dead?" Kyoko said in a shakey and uncertain voice. She had no idea what she was supposed to do in a situation like this.
The woman only blinked her eyes before looking away.
Kyoko squirmed, and just as she was about to say something else, the woman spoke in a language Kyoko only ever heard spoken in movies and in the occasional song played on the radio.
"What the hell happened to me?" The woman murmured under her breath in English.
10.
She missed yellow.
It was such a soft color, always warm and welcoming. Like a giant flower that would pull you into a protective hug.
It was the color of the sun, the color of happiness, the color of the... what were they called? Starts with a 'G'
The boots you wear to keep your feet from getting wet
Galoshes! That's the word!
Or she guessed it would be just easier if she called them rain boots
Rain boots were yellow
Maybe she could become yellow.
Be never ending. Everyone would know what she was
Never alone.
She was thinking again.
Thinking is dangerous.
If you lose yourself too far into the sea of thoughts, you may not come out alive
But what does it matter? She wasn't even alive in the first place.
Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full!
One for the master,
One for the dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane
Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir,
Three bags full...
Oxygen suddenly exploded into her lungs. She gasped and coughed and scratched at her throat. The nothingness disappeared and in its place, vibrant colors and clearly defined shapes emerged.
It hurt. It hurt it hurtithurtithurt so goddamn much, she screamed. She screamed at the top of her lungs.
She managed to take a deep breath through the haze of terror and confusion. And then another. And then another.
Then finally, she was able to catch her breath. She looked down at her hands, stretching her fingers out as far as she could. There were flowers in her lap. Illuminous blue forget-me-nots, scattered and in disarray.
The nothingness was gone. In its place stood metal, wood, and the face of a little girl peeking out behind a door.
She did nothing. Only watching as the little girl pushed the door open and began saying something. Something that she couldn't understand.
And when the little girl stopped talking, she looked back down at the flowers in her lap.
"What the hell happened to me?"
Author's Note:
I would like to begin with a disclaimer. I do not own Katekyō Hitman Reborn! In any way, shape, or form. This is fan work, that is in no way connected to the franchise and I am not profiting off of this fanfiction in any way. The title of this fanfiction "Do I Dare Disturb the Universe" is a line taken from T.S. Eliot's Poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock however this poem is in the Public Domain and therefore not subjected to copywrite laws. Any character, song, or rhyme that is recognizable to the audience is not owned by me. However there will be several OCs in this fanfic that I do own, but again, I'm not making any money off of this.
Now that that's out of the way- Hello everyone! Thank you so much for reading my WIP! It is also up on AO3 under the same username, thepuffinpuff, in case anyone likes the formatting of that website better.
I am going to willingly admit that I've never once read the Katekyō Hitman Reborn! Manga and have only seen the first episode of the anime. The utter lack of strong female representation and general lack of diversity of the characters has just been a real turn off for me. However I am absolutely in love with the concepts and I devour Hitman Reborn fanfics like there's no tomorrow. So all of my knowledge about cannon events is a mishmash of parts that I've pieced together from reading the fanfics and constant references to the fandom wiki. So if any of the characters don't seem to be in character… it's because of that.
I wish I could tell you that there will be a regular schedule for this story but so far this is the only chapter I have written of it and I feel that if I don't start posting the chapters now I'll never get around to doing it.
That being said, reviews are amazing motivators for me and if you are interested in seeing more of this story please please please leave a review telling me what you liked or didn't like. I thrive on feedback, and leaving a review is a surefire way to get me to write new chapters.
And now we come to the conclusion of a very lengthy Author's Note (trust me, the Disclaimer makes this A/N way longer than it usually will be). Once again, thank you for reading my fic and hopefully you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Until next time!
-thepuffinpuff
