Sacrifice
Hibari's heart was like a cave with stalactites and stalagmites and spiders that are good at seeing in the dark. Glacier slow, the lime spikes grow until they are finally united as a pillar. Hibari Kyoya thought there to be a great space between he and Yuka and that they could never live long enough to touch in this metaphorical cave. Still, he had several bonds he would forever deny. This was evident by many things: Kusakabe cooked for him, Ryohei was somehow allowed to keep him company a few nights, and he had a good opinion and respect for Tsuna's morality. They were decent people in the end, though all utterly useless and incompetent compared to him.
So Hibari did not think of the adult Yuka often. Though he moped and sat bitterly by himself for many days, it was not usually about a lady, but the other bits and pieces of his life. Tsuna's plans, the ineptitude of his men. He bottled himself up a lot. He looked into his magnificent garden a lot. Hibari did not dream of her. He did not clutch a lock of her hair. The pain of her absence did not break his heart like waves upon a lonesome cliff. He was a busy man, the leader bee of his hive. He had plans across the board. All of Amano's plots could be inferred from the notepad he kept in his breast pocket – the time machine, Leonardo Lippi, and Shoichie's desperate plan. When elder Yuka visited him, she would stare at his face while he looked down or out at the garden or into his tea. It was good that she was silent and he could think undisturbed about his plans.
Meanwhile, Kusakabe would see his boss hold a conference with a woman in the push-up bra and painfully high-heels – all sass in her black and white, a penguin of a sundae, but in the end, he considered her too sweet. Too much whipped cream, too much processed cherry syrup, the chocolate sauce was over-done and all your teeth grind on were gritty sprinkles. She had no ice cream at the bottom. Kusakabe thought she was nothing his boss could live off of while he spooned perfectly round dollops of rice into the small green bowl.
Today, while Hibari waited for Kusakabe's rice, he rechecked the route from his mountain abode down the mountains to the small village below. Europe was a fine place filled with fine old things, and though it was not the same as Japan, Switzerland suited him. His house was the only one on the mountain. You could not see the road up through the trees.
When he finally drove down the winding road, past grazing milk cows and over cobbled streets and by wind turbines as sleek as his car, he thought of the woman employed by the Millefiore. In his breast pocket, there sat the plot of a different author.
At last he parked outside a beer garden. The café's yard was covered in vines and small, round, glass bistro tables. The flowers grew in a mess. He ordered an aged wine, and though he didn't drink it, he didn't mind the scent and the way it mixed with the flowers. For thirty minutes, he sat like this, eyes tilting this way and that. He picked at a little lint on his suit, checked the clouds in the sky, never fidgeting for he was not prone to nervousness. When he at last checked his watch, he found he had waited five minutes longer than he had planned. As he walked to his car, Hibari's face warmed into a gloat.
Now if the old Yuka met the new Yuka, she would beat her around the block before redoing her hair with a puffy 90s scrunchie and prattling to her to suck it up. Here she was, clinging to Genkishi. Genkishi looked down at her heaving, gurgling shoulder as a standing cobra might his rat. Yuka's face melted into his shoulder, tears bubbling and popping and out of control.
Genkishi thinks he is in some terrible soap opera. He know that the perfect heroine is just the right balance of confidence and insecurity. He's not stupid. He's read Pygmalion and Shakespeare and you can bet he's never picked up any of those shojo novellas. But here is a girl that's either all plus or all minus, black, then white, then black, and its confusing and idiotic and pointlessly painful.
Meanwhile, Yuka is finding it difficult to be in balance, especially when she is a rebel. She is the opposite of what anyone says she is. Lal Mirch succeeded by squeezing her like a blood orange, berating her with insults. Reborn wasn't the only one that made it rough for Tsuna. And don't you see? Yuka, the little girl from the Midori block, well, her heart is breaking, the bean sprout of her frustration is cracking open the thin skins of the hollow space in her chest, and the roots are nosing down. Little girls, little girls. Ah, they are beautiful little creatures, no? Maurice Chevalier can sing forever about what it means to be a child and a girl and a young woman, but in the end, he will never understand the real thing. She wondered who she was and who loved her and would fight with her, and she cried because she could not know. She had no definition of who to say 'fuck you' to. Her enemies glitter about allusively like the sequins on the bull-fighters cape. Her point of view can't even be written any more. It's too much for me.
Now Genkishi, he is a different story entirely. He isn't some spunky blue-white fan fiction page to be read on an iPhone, but a real hard cover book! Yellow pages! Cracking spine! The title is rubbed off and the English is so old that it's a whole other language. He too is difficult to translate as well. All that can be said is that it is a rare and ridiculous universe that brought these two together. But what would be a good story if foiling characters did not crash upon each other like Moses' parted sea. Let this tangent continue: Did you know that in the original Snow White, the princess didn't fall asleep? She died. She was an icy white corpse, and that wickedly charming prince slung her over the rump of his horse, trotted her to his castle, and fornicated with her dead body? Genkishi isn't a happy ending either. A Disney heroine doesn't belong in the arms of a Grim Brother's prince. But there she is, the most delicate part of her heart wrenched open by a mischievous hell ring. One day, when it finally could be worn, it would look like a slim, black leech twisted into a circle, and where the jewel might be, petals of teeth would open and close.
Yes, Yuka and Genkishi had lain together, as the bible might say. Genkishi suspected her of nothing but foolishness and stupidity. He took what he got and swallowed without tasting. Sometimes, he found it all tedious and time-consuming, but Byakuran had suggested it to him as frat brothers do reminiscing upon the girls that come to their parties.
So with this little Yuka thing clinging to him like a koala bear, weeping tears, snot, and even a bit of drool onto his uniform, the man was all self-control. His serpentine eyes considered her disgraceful, for Uni had never shown him such a face. This was Byakuran's business, too, and he already reeled about what to tell the man sitting above these glass ceilings and upon the highest floor. He removed her by the collar like a naughty cat and she fell away easily. Her arms slid away until they crossed loosely over her chest, and she could not look at him.
And for Byakuran, eating his ambrosia – heavy on the marshmallows and light on the peach syrup – he had high hopes for the twisting of Yuka's heart. Casual sleeping with the woman hadn't accomplished what removing the child's hug had.
And through all this, Mukuro's old lady fingers pushed aside the leaves of the hedge to spy on the situation. He was an expert at smothering his presence by now, and he picked up all his strings as delicately as spider threads and watched the insects bat their wings.
A mother might call it a tantrum, an animal trainer might call it breaking, a psychologist might call it a catharsis, but Mukuro, in all his mystical glory saw only the rawest and fiercest of emotions. He saw the leech that hatched wildly and fed upon the girl's excellent nutrition angst, and all her problems circled and built inside of her like a hurricane. Soon, the umbilical cord would be cut, but he could not completely confiscate the ring from the girl to which this misty string was ties. He had never been able to hold onto it. It would always return to Yuka's hand until she sacrificed it once and for all in return for a wish of desperation.
The wish of a dying will, of one trapped in her custom-made hell.
Like Talbot, Mukuro knew how the great Hell rings were invented. Only the agony of a woman in love can bear such a burden, and where Byakuran maneuvered Genkishi with boxes of chocolates and fed him lines to repeat to the spy he harbored, Mukuro would slip another man into her dreams. For he knew, Hibari Kyoya, the cloud of the Vongola, had earned a great respect from his pot of fertilizer. And with all the hell rings he currently possessed, one could say, he had mastered the recipe quite well by now. The hell ring can be smelted from any form of love so long as it is pure and powerful and desperate – think of the power of a martyr. Leonardo Lippi and Byakuran's imprisoned Talbot would have cups of tea together on the topic, sipping, chuckling and cackling about the fools long ago. But Mukuro never had Talbot's hobby of taking up the jeweler's glasses and admiring the pieces, reading their stories in their color and their clarity, listening to their pained glints. Mukuro only cares for authenticity, a beggar biting a coin, and today, his cunning would beat Genkishi's.
Mukuro held out this palm. Through the hedge, Yuka, in her last clawing attempts for returned love from a mother, a lover, a friend, traded her ring and all of her dying will power for the one who loved her most. It is a corny wish, but people think they are only worth as much as they are loved. The ring dropped onto the misty string that Mukuro had tied innumerous times, for it was good at wriggling free, and the wish bounced alive. He string vibrated with its power and he strengthened it with a flick of his red eye. Meanwhile, Yuka's figure popped, sizzled, and smoked out of Genkishi's grip in a raw, primal magic that the ten-year-later bazooka had only perfected. Her ring, at last, remained behind.
And as Mukuro walked away and Genkishi knelt to inspect the grass below, a thunderous smoke filled the black car on the empty highway confronting the first waves of the Alps.