HOW TO READ: The White Orchid Protocol

this isn't a chapter so much as it is me lining up all the Byakuran scenes in Chroma Diamonds, which tell an important part of the story that we're about to launch into. Because it takes me forever to update, and I think most of you guys have been ignoring this part of the story, consider this a recap before we launch into the main arc of Chroma Diamonds

It comes with chapters included, so you can remind yourself of the context~!


Chapter 5: Over His Dead Body


Tsunayoshi picks up another cookie from the dish. As he's fitting it into his mouth, he blinks.

There's a boy at the table. It's a bit odd, like when Tsunayoshi had sat up to see Hibari crouched over his bed, tonfa buried in his pillow. The idea that there's something very wrong with the whole picture, and yet there's no immediately alarm or terror.

The boy blinks back at him. He has a whimsical kind of smile, and a spill of white hair like someone's tipped a carton of milk over his head. It tangles, frayed and jagged. Tsunayoshi somehow expects his strangely colored eyes to be violent and bright, but they're pale and misty and strangely sharp.

Tsunayoshi blinks.

"Is this where it started?" the boy asks him.

The cookie is getting soggy in Tsunayoshi's mouth. "Sorry," he says, garbled and muffled around it, "who?"

Tsunayoshi blinks a third time. Nana's excited voice echoes down the hallway, meaningless this and that which might just be her talking over whatever objections Haru's mother might be making. Haru must have given over her house number at some point… or otherwise Tsunayoshi's mother is inviting herself over to a stranger's house who merely shares a last name.

He's alone in the kitchen, staring a bit blankly at a beam of sunlight coming in the window just so.


Chapter 6 : A Good Friend


And Tsunayoshi will die if he's left alone, he realizes that now. Ahh. Ahh. He's got to do everything there is to stop that from happening.

"You must have felt it start to happen," the boy with misty eyes and milk-spill hair says pleasantly, a little too young and too high to be silk-smooth. He blinks misty eyes at Tsunayoshi; little mothwing flutters over cheeks as childhood plump as Tsunayoshi's own.

"They stuffed you into a little box and thought it would all turn out fine. But people like us - well, if you keep us from fulfilling our purposes, then it all eventually turns inwards, and then it begins to twist. It twists and then it ties itself all up into a knot. It twists and knots until it turns upside-down and inside-out.

That thing's called 'inversion,' you know."

'Inversion' sounds like an ugly, desperate, sad thing, Tsunayoshi thinks, blinking back at him. People aren't like little bonsai trees that hold no grudge for being shoved into tight little spaces and being forced to grow in a certain way.

Of course a person would hold some serious kind of grudge over that, but the boy's expression is complicated when he says it. A little bitter. Almost yearning. "If I at least inverted," he says, "I could have taken my revenge for what she's done."

But what kind of thing would he have become in doing that, Tsunayoshi wonders. He's so pale and distorted as it is that if this isn't inversion, then the real thing must be terrifying. He wants to say that he's glad he hasn't, but then the boy looks at him.

"Even without anyone helping you, you managed to save yourself anyway. Tsu-kun, your instincts are quite terrifying, you know?" He smiles, thin and sharp. Like clippers, wet with sap. "Isn't that great? The worlds were you don't - well. Everything considered, I guess having to live in this world isn't too bad, if it has this you in it, too."

He looks at Tsunayoshi with that twisted little whimsical smile, with pale eyes that are sharp enough to slice a person open on them, and a long spill of hair like it's been endlessly growing for years, and years, and years without care. Far from the attentive over trimming of a bonsai tree, Tsunayoshi thinks, and yet-

After a moment, Tsunayoshi wonders what he's doing, standing in the middle of the street and staring at a whole lot of nothing while Nana is walking away, headed back home.


Chapter 8 : A Chewtoy Extraordinaire


Maybe he feels a lot less like his hands are wet and sticky - or may become that way through some unfortunate circumstances beyond his control.

Sometimes he still smells iron, though.

("Say, Nayo-tan: living in a world this noisy seems nice," the boy with milk-spill hair says, hands clasped behind his back, his dangerous misty eyes shielded by the falling tangle of his hair. There are so many awful sharp edges for something so gentle. Cat's paws, and cat's nuzzling, though there are long, sharp claws and teeth to catch him with the moment he tries to escape. "Won't you let me live here, too?"

But isn't that the kind of thing a person chooses for themselves, Tsunayoshi wonders; by intentionally softening all those awful parts of them and becoming someone that others won't want to leave? At least, it seems that way to him.

Isn't it true?

The soft smile that shows through lanks of white hair is terrible.)

-0-

That ember in his chest continues to smolder, and the world is so very flammable.


Chapter 9 : for almost twenty years now


In order to have the strength to make sure neither Haru nor Nana have reason to be sad, Tsunayoshi can do anything - become anything. He'll shake that admirable resolve in anyone's face to achieve his ends.

"That's almost certainly not a 'normal' thing to think," Tsunayoshi muses into the empty bathroom.

"Well, you didn't properly think of it that way the first time, did you?"

There's a boy with milkspill hair sitting on the edge of the tub, his feet plunged into the steaming water and his pants rolled up to his knees. He leans forward. The steam and the water pull at the lanks of hair.

"Aren't you being weirdly introspective for a thirteen year old?"

Tsunayoshi blinks.

"Or maybe I'm being impatient," he muses, smiling down at Tsunayoshi with such sharp edges to his teeth. "It's not really my place, after all. That cute kid said it would happen soon, but they haven't even gotten anything ready yet. Say - Nayo-tan."

Danger.

Long fingers splay out across Tsunayoshi's naked chest, even more pale still than his own sun-starved skin. Tsunayoshi inhales. The fragile bones of his ribcage arch up, straining against tendon and flesh.

Eyes like faded flowers, pressed between pages in a book and forgotten for years, and years, and years - those eyes hold no grudge or malice against Tsunayoshi as the boy says, "won't you show them how to burn?"

And then Tsunayoshi is plunged underwater.

-0-

That dangerous spark inside of him that burned him alive and hollowed him out - doesn't so much as char.

-0-

Tsunayoshi sits upright in the tub, steam curling in the air. His hair is dry.


Chapter 12 : the gunpowder plot


If he has no idea what lays out there, then how is he expected to look after his household to the best of his ability?

Although what out there could possibly have any interest in a group of random kids from Namimori is a question he hasn't entirely asked in the first place.

Regardless, he knows his duties.

One - two - three - the fingers that count over his ribs tip up along the breastbone. "How terrifying," the boy with milkspill hair murmurs, sitting beside him on the tram, his overgrown fingernails thumping painfully against the broad bone in counterpart to Tsunayoshi's beating heart. "How old were you then? And you were already like this."

The boy sighs, pulling away and falling against the seat in a slump. "We could have been peers, you know," he laments, eyelashes sharp white wedges over his cheeks, eyes closed. "Why is it that only the worlds where things are the worst for me do things turn out fine?"

It's bad enough to suffer and not really know the extent of it, Tsunayoshi thinks: but to suffer and to be able to compare that to a different existence? Tsunayoshi used to be happier, he thinks, before he understood the extent of how he was different from other people. He's gained a lot, that's true, but that only means that he's so incredibly aware of what he stands to lose - of what 'capable of anything' means.

It's not a good thing.

The boy looks at Tsunayoshi then, his pale eyes glittering like broken mirrors, dangerous and mad. "Say, Nayo-tan. Some others might think it's fine for one to suffer for the good of many, but doesn't that sound frustrating for the person who's suffering?"

Something stretches. More than something: everything stretches. The tram stretches. The scenery outside. The distance between him and the boy with shattered memories of forgotten flowers in his eyes. It stretches and the boy stretches and Tsunayoshi stretches, too.

It isn't that Tsunayoshi's body changes into something strange and unfamiliar, but he knows that how his not-body rests on the not-seat isn't the same as it was just before. Still comfortable, natural, relaxed, but different. A kind of power curls through his limbs, a certain awareness, a certain conviction. He doesn't feel confused or disoriented by the situation at all. It's crystal clear. Everything is in its place and as it should be.

The boy that sits next to him -

The young man that sits next to him with hair too long that hasn't seen a brush, with nails too long since their last clipping: he's the furthest thing from a bonsai cut just so and expected to grow a certain way. He's been forgotten and he's wasting, his cheeks not childhood plump but lean and growing hollow, the sharp angles of his skeleton poking corners out of his skin with sharp, mad, haunted eyes-

(a thing left so long alone in the dark that it begins to think: if only i had the power to destroy all things good i was never allowed-)

Tsunayoshi, with perfect calm, says: "In the first place, who was the person who said that we weren't peers? That's not something you get to decide on your own without consulting me first. And as for that other matter-"

It stretches. The young man beside him sits with wide eyes and washed out skin that pales, almost blue. Madness has become terror in his eyes, though Tsunayoshi isn't sure what about him could possibly be as worrisome as that. The world and all things in it continue to stretch around them, and they stretch with it. In the end, it's easy to breach the distance and grab one of the hands that have been reaching out for him all this time, grasping desperately like a person drowning.

It isn't a tight grip. Tsunayoshi doesn't squeeze, but his hold is firm all the same. The young man next to him already has pinpricks for pupils, his heart already beating so fast that his thin, papery skin flutters with it. It's a bit like catching a butterfly between cupped hands, trying so hard not to scrape or bend a fragile wing by accident. It would be a terribly easy thing to do, especially for someone like Tsunayoshi whose hands are only good for things that leave them sticky and numb.

"A system that puts undue weight on someone for others' benefit is intolerable," he says to his peer with absolute conviction. "I'll crush something like that beneath my heel even if I have to die doing it."

Eyes wide and teeth bared with an awful, animalistic kind of fear, the young man with impossibly lengths of tangled white hair recoils, and with him: the world.

The reality that has been stretching to the edge of its endurance around Tsunayoshi - rebounds.


Chapter 14 : a house on the cliffside


Shoichi sure is spoiled, having his own desktop computer, is Tsunayoshi's first thought - but the room is pitch black other than the white glare of the screen, so he should be excused for such a useless first impression. The form with tousled hair sitting in front of the keyboard is likely to be Shoichi, his fingers moving so quickly across the keyboard that it's amazing he doesn't get something wrong. It's so confident and decisive - if only Tsunayoshi himself could ever be half as certain as that.

There's a boy sitting on the table next to the computer, his head laid on arms folded over the monitor, his overlong hair stretched over everything like cobwebs. His face is cast in eerie shadows by the odd position he's in relative to the only source of light, but it makes his eyelashes glitter like snowflakes on the hills of round baby fat cheeks, and he doesn't look up from staring at the hidden face sitting in the chair before him. Those eyes in this darkness should probably be shining, but they're faded, and strained, and dull.

Under the edge of the hospital gown he's been wearing all this time, his bare feet dangle: knobbly ankles, and delicate bones like glass.

Tsunayoshi blinks.


Chapter 15 : taking time running in place


There's so much sulfur and smoke filling his chest that he should be choking on it, except that to something like him, breathing poison and ash comes naturally; the wildly flaring embers that are scattering like a whirlwind inside his lungs and heart and head don't even hurt him, even as he chars and hallows and those embers ignite and devour and consume.

The painful tingling in his palms should be so lucky as to become numbed -

"Don't you have something like this backwards?" the boy with milkspill hair wonders, standing on the side of Tsunayoshi opposite Hana. "Again and again and again. Someone like us should be special, but you always seem to think that care should go in the opposite direction. It's enough to make me wish for a will less self-serving, you know."

Tsunayoshi should have realized before that no one realizes that he's here - the boy with long tangles of uncared for hair. There is sulfur and ash in Tsunayoshi's lungs and embers burning through his heart, and he looks at the young teenager standing next to him in a hospital gown and bare feet and bandages wrapped around thin wrists with so many needle marks in them. For once, the boy seems to see Tsunayoshi looking back at him, and he smiles something broken and sharp.

"Ah - I guess Nayo-tan can't help it, though," he sighs. "That's just the way people like us are. We collect people around us, and then? Well, then we fear to lose the things we have, don't we? And when it comes to losing things-"

His pale eyes lose focus for a moment, flittering back and forth, reading distant text: billboards and road signs and maps.

"Well, we have to protect them, you see," he says, and looks sharply at Tsunayoshi. "Do you see?"

It's a foolish thing to ask someone whose gut instinct upon watching some guy knock his mother to the ground was the immediate murder of that man and his cohorts, isn't it? And just now, what was he thinking in the first place? Crippling Hana and then? What he was planning to do in retribution. By this time, Tsunayoshi well understands the art of protecting things. It's protecting them and keeping them at the same time that's the difficult part - it's acting on their behalf without overstepping and making them feel pressured. Terrorizing their foes without terrorizing them.

If they can't speak their hearts plainly to him without fear, then they're not being protected, are they?

The laugh that breaks out of the boy standings next to him sounds like things falling off shelves in a distant basement. "People raised into it understand it less well than you do," he says, sharp and snapping and brittle. "There just isn't any competition to that blessed bloodline of yours - ah. Although it's so misfortunate, isn't it? Or otherwise that blessed bloodline would cherish you instead of leaving you abandoned to be picked up by any hand that is kind enough." He grins. His teeth are sharp and white and strangely jagged, as if they've never been used to bite down on anything even once.

"And what about you?" Tsunayoshi asks him, and they aren't boys standing in a gym together anymore, are they? "What about your bloodline?"

What Tsunayoshi is truly asking must be transparent to the young man standing next to him, because there's something like a terrible fury on his face, and also a great loneliness, and also -

But that child has run away again, as usual. It must be difficult to visit, in various ways, Tsunayoshi thinks, and then he twitches and blinks as his surroundings come back into clarity.

( … text removed … )

Although she hadn't noticed his lapse of attention before he noticed Kyoya. Somehow, he expects that, as well. It's not surprising at all. Why would she have? After all, she isn't -

-0-

No, the problem doesn't lay with Hana at all, does it?


Chapter 19 : bone and blood


The boy with milkspill hair laughs, and laughs, and laughs, sharp and painful. Those thin arms, nothing but skin and bones and painful scars where needles were pushed in again and again and again and left there for countless days or weeks, twine over Tsunayoshi's narrow shoulders so that the spider lengths of his finger tips pitter patter over the breastbone.

"There it is. That's it," he says, hateful and gleeful all at once. "That's the power that she's seeking from you. I wonder how many different worlds also got this far but it just wasn't enough?"

"Shouldn't you of everyone know that best?" Tsunayoshi wonders.

"Even I'm not omniscient," he huffs. Though his face presses in where hair meets neck, there is no breath to prickle Tsunayoshi's skin. After all, that kid isn't here at all, is he? "Certainly, it's my mind alone that's capable of grasping the nature of reality without snapping entirely, but - it's not as though I've been allowed to look around as I please." The words drip and drop, viscous and drenched in bitter, spoiled honey.

Something like that could easily poison a person who listened to it for very long. And yet it doesn't trouble Tsunayoshi in the least. His heart is made of fire. There's not enough bitterness and bile inside this child to douse that flame out or sway it.

"With this," the boy says, the uncut points of his fingernails biting into the shirt, slotting into the hollows between Tsunayoshi's ribs, "we might just be the one that makes it. Survive, Nayo. If you have to cling to life with broken nailbeds and chipped teeth, survive. If you can, you'll be saved, and maybe you can meet that child. It'll be plenty amusing, I think! How would you like to make this reality one in a hundred billion? Hmm?"

Tsunayoshi is left alone in an empty hallway with one hand grasped to his chest, feeling the hollow thump of his sick heart beneath charred ribs. Although smothered, the inferno is only banked. It won't can't ever become embers again. He feels a little like he'll really choke on the poisonous ash, but - somehow, he thinks he'll survive somehow no matter what.

He doesn't have a choice. There are people who depend on him, after all.


Chapter 20 : those whom the sun sets upon


It hurts far too much to even scream. It paralyzes him. The world turns white.

Survive, he remembers the man with endless long lank locks of hair and thin limbs and needle tracks on his arms saying. And so he tries. He tries. His very soul is being ripped from his body. The world keeps stretching.

Tsunayoshi sees himself and Nana leaving. He sees Kyoya's mother, Nuo, saying that she'll be going away with that family member, since she's become a hostage against Kyoya and can no longer protect him. I'll leave him to your care, she says, ignoring Tsunayoshi's bleeding lip and the smudge of blood at the corner of Kyoya's mouth. He sees returning to the hospital several times. He meets a girl there with shy eyes, who is always carrying a bag. She's sad and her eyes see too much and Tsunayoshi would like to keep her around, but he introduces her to his sister instead as to not be unkind. The situation with the Hibari family gets worse. Ikumi gets worse. His hands. They become sticky all the time, then.

Tsunayoshi can't really focus on all these things as the world stretches and he stretches with it and then it begins to fracture, to change into-

"Bare with it," the boy with milkspill hair says urgently, but he's not a boy, he's just a few years shy of being an adult for how awful he looks. His eyes are frenzied. "Is your will this weak? If you're going to die anyway, then live through this, at least!"

But he's being scooped out or torn into a million tiny pieces, or forcibly squashed into a pancake - it's like all of those things, but happening all at once, and the some terrible weakness is coming in over him. Something vital is being drained out while all of everything else is happening.

"Don't you want to meet that child?" that guy demands, clawing at Tsunayoshi, but somehow not being able to touch him. "Hey! Don't be ungrateful! Yuni and I picked him out especially for you to make up for everything! Hey! Tsunayoshi! Hey! Wake up!"

But as stressed out as Tsunayoshi is about all this screeching while he's being ripped apart at the molecular level, he does precisely the opposite and blacks out.

-0-

"Hey," somebody says, or seems to say, but he has no ears to hear them with. "Hey! Are you okay?"

The blackness swims. It's interrupted by a gentle white glow next to him, and there, kneeling beside him is the guy with the milkspill hair and faded pressed flowers in his eyes. "Thank goodness," he sighs, wane and exhausted himself. "That makes the odds of us surviving this roughly eight hundred trillion to one. Thank goodness. What a relief." He seems to shake, and then he clutches at his face with thin, trembling hands that are barely skin over bone, and sobs.

"Hey? Come on," that someone says again, and then sighs, short and aggravated. "I can't just leave you here…"

The sobs hiccup and begin to turn into something else. It's some kind of horrible, jagged laugh. The hands clutching his face shift and begin to claw and pull at his hair and he throws back his head and laughs in harsh jags that sound ripped right out of him. It comes to a sudden, awful halt. The bones of his expanded chest seem to press out through the hospital gown. "Nayo-kyun," he drawls, still bent backwards from laughing, still with claws full of his own hair. "Zunetto is waiting for you."

"I'll take you with me, so just - wake up."

And since it's not that guy who has been laughing over his body this entire time, Tsunayoshi complies.

-0-


HOW TO READ

So, how do you read this? Well, first of all, it should be obvious that the interactions between Byakuran and Tsunayoshi occur outside the 'reality' of the main story. Although there are no visual breaks most of the time, Tsunayoshi's interactions there are clearly separate from his interactions with the main story.

Furthermore, as early as the second time that Byakuran visits Tsunayoshi, he mentions a 'she' that he wants to take revenge against. Throughout the visits, Tsunayoshi takes repeated note of how neglected that Byakuran looks - starting with his hair that's unmanageably long, though Canon Byakuran has short hair. He appears as a pre-teen sometimes and looks fairly okay, but when he appears as an older teenager, he's unhealthily thin, in a hospital gown with bare feet and needlemarks in his arms. His hair and his nails go uncut and ungroomed, his teeth look rough 'as if unused,' he looks parched. Tsunayoshi notes that he looks ignored and forgotten and uncared for, that he's been left alone in the dark.

Byakuran clings to Tsunayoshi before even discovering that Tsunayoshi has been aware of them all along.

Given that this is a story that deals with parallel universe - and indeed, chapter one talks extensively about the variations that can occur - you can expect some more plot regarding that.

Another thing to take note of is the way that Byakuran usually shows up when Tsunayoshi is having 'fraught' moments when his flames are at their hottest. As the climax approaches and Tsunayoshi is well within the grips of his Sky instincts, Byakuran says that 'this is the power she wanted.'

Up until the last few chapters, just whose side Byakuran might be on may have seemed ambiguous, but we also know that he begged Tsunayoshi to survive, and said that he and Yuni had tried to make up for the inconvenience to him, suggesting that Byakuran feels somewhat guilty for Tsunayoshi being involved, regardless of his behaviors otherwise. He's relieved when Tsunayoshi survives - whether for Tsunayoshi's sake, or for what that means for Byakuran and Yuni's fates is less clear. Byakuran seems to take it as a promising sign regarding their survival, though.

We also know that Tsunayoshi, who has 'terrifying instincts' to the point of picking a fight with Clan Hibari without fearing real retribution, is pretty sanguine about Byakuran and even approaches him with a firm but friendly manner. As a person generally unconcerned with the misfortunes of others unless he feels responsible for it, this suggests that either Tsunayoshi doesn't feel threatened by Byakuran despite the scary things he's done and said, or otherwise senses some kind of reason for it that he's curious about.

As for this unknown person asking Tsunayoshi to wake up, and then Tsunayoshi waking up? Well, that's the meat of the story that we're about to get into!