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La Môme Piaf
Written November Seventeenth, 2008
"Hibari-san..." Chrome looks at him, his clothes, his movements. Stares, and he yawns, quietly - one thin, pale arm slipping up to cover his mouth. His hair is freshly cut, and the path they are walking on brings them past roots and earth and...
It's warm, pastel days edging into summer, a late afternoon. She pauses, waits for a little while, and he almost mutters something. She knows. But, all is muted - as if she's hearing, seeing, things through a filter like clouded glass like - because at the moment she feels real. Content. Nagi is one-hundred-two-point-four centimeters away from him: they do not touch, barely speak, and they are fine with this. Always, fine.
Hibari doesn't snap at her, smile cruelly and break her heart. He's older, now, and he has better things to do and she can almost tell what he is thinking, what they all think, and how the years have...
Sunday. No work to be done, other than the usual. No school to go to - and she feels strange, as if she should be - and, it's just her. Mukuro disappeared long ago with hardly a goodbye, melting away with sticks and stones and broken bones, half-cracked words of advice to fill her spirit. To fill her memory. There once was a man who, having riches beyond imagination, moved a castle piece-by-piece across the world. He filled it with wine and painted it with murals, and offered it to the people, and they declined because only the highest of the high take pride in such a thing; a dusty, empty tomb. Hibari is dangerous, but right now he has no teeth, tonfa locked away somewhere with rings and boxes and wool - moth-eaten swatches of matted blacks and greys. She doesn't need her trident to create illusions, and even if he...
Once, she bought ice cream. Vanilla to soothe the heat. He watched her, and, she - bought a second, unthinkingly. Just, because. She (never) offered it to him, and he (never) accepted, the sweet taste lingering on the tip of her tongue for minutes, hours, days. Like words, like sentences, and thoughts. And in the shade of a porch, their gazes wandered.
One's company, two's a crowd.
She can see through him, illusions and illusions and illusions. Pick apart what's real, what's flesh and sinew and bone, sharp wit and a gash of a smile. This is the first time she has been to Namimori in months, sent away to practice her floundering Italian in crème-coloured streets, in mud-swept hotel rooms and dreary gatherings of papers and lectures and crisp, ironed cotton. The meeting was success, however:
There's the patter of the clouds turning a dark, charcoal-grey. Dripping slowly onto the dirt, and the sidewalk, and the grass. And it's Nagi, and she watches with one eye and marvels at a dying mix of hues, at the world blurring before her. Unafraid, (never) afraid. Then there's rain, rain, rain and he pulls out his umbrella with the elegance of a debonair, handsome and more polite than she's ever seen him. A lack of speech. It is expected, demanded, and Mukuro has disappeared with -
And they walk, towards the station with barely twenty-four-point-three centimeters between them, with the drowning rush of the crowd. Brushing arms, accidentally as someone bumps into her from the side. Hibari frowns at her, maybe increases his pace, and then they are sheltered under a concrete ceiling, skies pooling at their feet. He almost presses close.
"You can't get sick." He tells her, and hands her the umbrella; already wrapped up, the wood of the handle slightly warm. She wonders, if there is the need to return it. She wonders, and watches the cracks in the ceiling, and memorizes the folds in his clothes.
"And, you…?" Because, she's seen him. In a hospital bed, feverish, body weak and hardly able to move. In a room full of other patients who've all been bitten to death, whose heartbeats had kept him from sleeping. Needles and antibiotics and -
When he walks her to the door it is with a teasing quirk of his lips, almost a show of his control. Of how he hasn't quite changed, not since she first met him, not since - And, in a strange way, this is comforting. Mukuro has… He adjusts his tie as she clicks the lock, leans briefly against the wood before pushing it open, before she fades away inside, and:
"…Have you… ever been to Mass?"
Her cell phone rings and it is the sound of church bells, thick and heavy and Mukuro disappeared long ago with hardly a goodbye -
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For silhouette_68.
Prompt: 10YL!Hibari + 10YL!Chrome
Visiting Namimori, passing by a church; Hibari-san, have you ever been to mass?
800 words.