अप्सरा (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} picnicbird) wrote,@ 2008-03-22 02:34:00 |
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that's why i want you to sing it anyway --
HAPPY BIRTHDAY,sei_kou_ki!!! ♥ LOVE THEE ♥ ♥ ♥
You really deserve -- not to have your birthday wishes stuck as a prelude to an alarmingly bad fic, so I won't be long here, and instead save it for warmer waters -- I love you, and you know that, and I will never be able to understand how there is such good in the world as you. You make me smile, and you make me think, and you inspire me. AND YOUR WRITING IS TOPS. Which is always awesome. XD I hope you have a wonderful birthday, and stay well! Enjoy it. :D
Anyway, I'll be short on this next intro since jet lag still has its hold on me and this is the latest I've been able to stay up since I got back (which is pathetic to the point of being worrying, I mean, WHAT where is my FIREEE) --
Back in August! Many of you probably saw this unfinished, rough draft of a fic. It was Squalo/Dino, and I had no idea where to continue from the melodramatic part I left off -- and I remember distinctly that I said I didn't like it at all, but I just "needed it out of my sight."
....What made me go HAHAHA despite the late hour was that I only remembered I said that right after I hurriedly finished said fic up tonight and thought about how much I just wanted it away from me.
So that probably tells you what sort of fic it is. I'm glad I was able to finish it, but I am never going to be satisfied with it. It's OOC, it's slow, it's -- LAAAME.
Also, that means an apology to those on my flist who read the original draft of the first 1/2 of this. D:
ALSO you guys, constructive criticism is my #1 love. Please please please? :D
Title: How to Kill
Author: Your Mother.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Dino/Squalo
Warnings: slight shounen-ai; OOCness [but tell me if it's believable or not]; gore; blood; harsh words!
Summary: ["...But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden,
will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..." The fox gazed at the little prince for a long time. "Please -- tame me!" he said.] Squalo doesn't like getting his gloves dirty. You can call it sissy, but he prefers the term 'dignified.'
Once upon a time, as all devastations begin that way, Squalo coughed and coughed and coughed and did not stop until he coughed out his heart.
It was probably a rich, red, hopeful heart, healthy and young (no more than eighteen years growing; the fading color of his eyes suggests it’s only been a few years since the incident), plopped onto the dirt and rolling until it grew cold and the dirt-caked. And Squalo was stronger for that loss. He forgot about life beyond assassination and the stench of death; he forgot that to declare devotion one didn‘t have to seek to spill blood; he forgot the way he -- desperately -- wanted to smack Dino in school so everyone else would know they had no right to. Smack him because no one else should ever feel their palm stinging except him; he forgot childhood, and became a demon. As you do, if you want to please Xanxus.
But when it was all over and his failed leader lay on scuffed earth coughing up simple bitterness, Squalo no longer had a purpose.
Xanxus still follows that same desperate path, endless plans floating by on breezes and then discarded in favor of others. What next, he murmurs. It’s time for a hiatus. That’s what. Don’t lose your touch, any of you, Xanxus says -- but disperse. Let’s make it difficult for those bastards.
One day during that lull Squalo rolls back his shoulders, grinning, encircled by Dino’s men who mean to kill him. What purpose do you have here, they shout, guns drawn and unwavering. We don’t let people like you just come and go as they please. What are you doing inside secured Squalo laughs, because he has predicted what happens next: Dino appears and his subordinates look to him as though he has all the answers, and Dino (of course) says, “It’s okay; lower your weapons.“ It’s okay, because it’s Squalo.
“Wanted to see just how much you’ve grown,“ Squalo growls, “because fuck knows I couldn’t see much of anything when you had me hooked up to those wires.“
“You’re running?” Dino asks conversationally.
Squalo snorts. “I don’t run! I’m wasting time.”
“Hah.”
He regards Dino suspiciously, begins feeling stifled by the ornate hotel lobby.
“Just thinking.”
“That's a bad idea.”
It’s the way Dino almost smiles, hopeful in a resigned like-hell-it’ll-happen way when he offers a nice room for Squalo. For as long or short as he likes.
“Who cares,” Squalo says sourly, his childhood memories have been flooding once-closed gates now rusted with neglect. He can’t remember being young, but he remembers the condescension that it brings, and the schoolbooks, and the way they slid from Dino’s fingers like sand through an hourglass. Remembered it because even now, Dino means too much smiling and too many weak whims; you’d think he was the Virgin Mother with all the flowers and blessings and visits to churches before he conducted any particularly messy business. The way his men’s lips linger on his hand when they kiss it and the way they stare hard in Squalo’s direction when Squalo never makes a move to do the same. The way Dino doesn’t mind.
Dino looks pleasantly surprised. “Right,” he says decisively. “I’m glad.”
“I can tell.”
Dino just dawdles a moment and then offers him a cup of coffee.
Squalo’s teeth are still sharp and his nose attuned to the scent of blood ready to spill, his hands seize up when he remembers raw power and death. Every night, very quietly, he sates that urge, harmless boys lost on their way home, or old men sitting without one -- so that he returns to that excessive hotel spotted with the life of others, feeling it so keenly on him he breathes in deeply and just smiles.
Dino’s subordinates never utter a word; they know Dino knows, perhaps they’re wondering where the Saint George is, simply wait on him to strike down this unbearable monster. Dino never says anything; he gives Squalo a look, an I-can’t-understand-you look, a you’re-building-a-rather-elaborate-fortr
Tigers, they would have you believe, don’t bite because they hate. Every story concerning a tiger and a human ends the same way, but it isn’t the product of rage pouring until overflowing and infecting the beast. It’s something else.
A trigger.
It’s a steady weight bearing down on a switch. Squalo stands there in Dino’s makeshift office, waiting with arms crossed to tell Dino he demands a larger suite, and finally he watches and listens to the young man he has known for too long. Observes with his once-blue eyes.
Dino’s head is bowed, a bit of shame as he says very clearly into the phone how he’d like to carry out the assassination. Not me, he says again and again (cowardly). I need an assassin. Can’t risk the life of the precious Cavallone boss over one rogue man. A freelance assassin, that’s all we need. How would you like this one?
Dino shifts in his chair, Romario keeps his eyes on Squalo. “Do you know where he lives?”
A pause on the other end of the line. “Tomorrow night if at all possible. If you can find someone who can take care of him when he’s sleeping. Spare his family.”
Another pause. “Spare his family.”
Pause.
“I can’t do it myself; why do you think I‘m here and not over there? I’m incapable, I have business here. Spare his family.”
Squalo begins laughing.
“Spare his goddamn family.”
Romario gives him a look; Squalo is used to looks.
“Listen! All it takes is your best, and then you don’t need to involve the other family members.”
A quick beat.
“Do you have none up to the task? I just need someone who wouldn’t stumble around a dark house and make more than one pull of the trigger necessary -- what do you mean, that sounds like --”
“He means,” Squalo speaks up, amused, “that you make an ass of yourself whe -- “
Romario shoots him a look.
“I have the money. As much as you need to give me someone capable.”
A long silence. “Yes. Thank you.”
Dino hands the phone to Romario and presses his forehead against the desk.
“Heey, I need a bigger room,” Squalo says.
Dino looks up, bleary-eyed. “Oh, how are you,” he answers.
“Why can’t you do it, Haneuma?” A smirk is just waiting on his lips.
Dino pauses, sits up. “Why do you think?” he says, a little awkward.
“Coward.”
“Morals.”
“Hiring an assassin is the same thing as killing the bastard, Haneuma. Only lazy.”
“That’s not true,” Dino says, but then huffs a sad little laugh. It is true; they both know it well, it’s innate. A hand just closing the curtains with the help of a rope safe behind the wall.
“It’s satisfying. It‘s easy.”
Dino just looks at him, and then shakes his head.
Romario has left the room to prepare for other errands, endless plans. Dino and Xanxus following one narrow path, yet different species. The thrill of seeing Xanxus almost smile is the same as that of making Dino stare openly at him, only him. “It’s better than fucking,” he grins, leaning over the desk, predatory.
It’s all too easy to get the reaction he wants.
“So why can’t you do it?”
In the evening, that adulatory party gathers outside. You’d think of Shakespeare, such a stage presence with Dino, a constant din about him, all for him. A royal procession, here arrives our Once and Future King. The clouds have blocked out the stars, the moon -- the silence is reassuring. His loyal subjects smile as though they were amateurs.
Something motivates Squalo to follow along, long steady strides independent of the suited men who crowd Dino as means of protection. Tonight, putting an end to a mild problem of assassins sent for the Cavallone family. Hypocrites, Squalo sneers. They already know how it’ll end: it’ll be smooth, simple, hardly a drop of blood spilled. Peaceful protestors.
Hibari Kyouya stands there, looking more alive than one could ever imagine him -- lips parted, body poised with tonfa ready, yet eyes animated and darting back and forth as flighty as a bird -- he’s drinking up every command and question and living in this moment, heart full in anticipation of victory. Such a child, so grateful Dino has agreed to take him along just to show him how it works. All school uniform and messy hair and home-made badge. This blood-thirst driving them both is all that links them together (a flimsy chain) -- and it’s Hibari’s heart Squalo wants to tear out right now, this rush of life he wants to spill out onto the floor.
And, as always, Dino does not mind. He laughs when Romario reaches forward to fix his sloppily done tie, “I can’t get the hang of suits.” He jokes with his older charges, allows their hands to rest on his head; when the time to leave has arrived, that long walk to a confrontation, he heaves a long-suffering sigh as his men crowd securely about him, their don; but:
he has time to find Hibari with his eyes and flash him a smile and a good-natured wink. And Hibari -- Hibari’s mouth twitches, he glances away and steadily sinks into that group of professionals. Dino‘s eyes continue their searching, but he seems unable to find what he was looking for. The group moves, an amorphous mass.
And Squalo, there in his pristine Varia uniform, the independent steps, his own plans, weaves in and out as effortlessly as a shadow.
Guns crack the silence into halves. From inside that disruption, mindless men stomp past Squalo, and he isn’t certain who he ought to be slashing into a mess of limbs and half-dead pleas, they all look the same. All that same goddamn suit. He finds his one target, his toy for the night. Same suit, but a ruddy face that challenged Squalo until his savior gun was knocked from his grip in a scuffle, crude and all grasping and tearin.
Now the man huddles, a mix of cursing and explanations jumbled into nonsense. And Squalo’s smirk grows into a grin, and he knows he can make something of tonight. “Heey, don’t worry. I have a reason for killing you,” he drawls, and raises his sword high in the air.
Always, always, always have a reason. It makes the process that much more beautiful, he thinks, when he finishes up and spits his own blood from his mouth (as much as he’s willing to give up for tonight). He surveys his work, and breathes in the howling wind, closes his eyes, and floats. It’s like being underwater, this gratification, this jumping in and emerging stained and volatile. He finds himself thinking of summer clothes, grass stains -- blond --
He saw it coming, it is what he wants.
“Squalo,” Dino’s voice carries across that void. “Squalo.“ Still has a moment to spare for him, after all. Dino trots by Squalo’s alley, disheveled and at peace with himself, waving on his men, searching --
He starts and backs up, smiles and slowly meanders his way to Squalo.
Those footfalls sound slower and slower as he begins to make out that slow river of blood at his feet. He swallows, Squalo can feel it. His eyes adjust to the bleak stretch of darkness in which he stands. “What,” he asks, a question to Squalo (who kneels there with an unshakable grin, his sword dripping dark), to that crumpled figure.
There’s a head discarded somewhere, somewhere further down the alleyway as though it were garbage. What is the body, but pieces? The fingers on the cold hand have all been bent back devastatingly messily, and the fingernails, he pries the last of them off -- Squalo finishes and raises an eyebrow. “I’ll let you have the other hand, Haneuma.”
Dino stares down at him.
“Can’t do it, can you?” Squalo barks, thoroughly tempted to shove that lithe figure down (because he falls so easily) and make him, make him feel something for Squalo, make him feel what Squalo feels. “Never could do it. Cowardly and faltering till the very end.”
Dino’s face is drained of color. He turns away, shaking his head, intent on forgetting and perhaps forgiving Squalo, floundering saint that he is.
The stars have been blackened out. Dino seems horribly lost for it.
“What is this?” he asks, hollow, betrayed, baffled.
That heat in Squalo boils over -- “Look at me,” he growls.
The mist makes crescents of the streetlamps. Ghosts, Dino thinks, and why did you have to go create them. “Why?”
“Because I get to see Cavallone‘s spoiled darling this way. Because no sorry smile, no hiding, Haneuma, all your attention on me, watching me, wishing you could love this as much as I do. Because I have power over you. Because I know you’re a coward.” Squalo waits. Had enough?
“Because it’s fun.”
Dino’s faultless brows knit, some small testament to the revulsion; shuts his eyes and his jaw clenches as purely as any self-righteous Prince Charming.
He does not see Squalo stalking toward him, reaching with clawed hands like a wolf, let me in, and it takes a grab, a pull and then a shove, to make Dino’s eyes fly open. See him for what he is, finally, after so many years of skirting around a dangerous edge.
He leans in close, traps Dino with his weight or with the threat of his blade, it’s neither here nor there because Dino stays. “I could kill you here,” Squalo hisses, sliding his blade to Dino’s throat. He thinks, I’ll cut away that tattoo and free you from this right here. Your alliances are only skin-deep. And you love saving, you make it a profession and then who’s there to save you?
He moves, Dino stays, obeisant as a puppet. When he presses the blade in, Dino looks to the dark background, some silent refusal to believe.
“I could kill you here if I wanted. While your student looks around for you like a goddamn lost pet.” The thought buzzes, so intoxicating, the idea of tying up frayed ends so nicely after so many years of letting them wave free -- “Just like this bastard. Chop your head clean off like a fish, and I’ll eat you alive.”
Dino stares at him sidelong. “Will you?”
Squalo growls. “Don’t tempt me.”
Resilient sidelong stare. “You want to kill me?” This is almost intolerable. No one asked to be judged here, and yet -- Squalo bristles and shoves aside the ghosts, the fog.
Squalo has pressed close enough to feel the dip of his jugular when he swallows, the untouched hollow of his neck, the hum of life beneath his skin. But he does not look at Dino until Dino separates their bodies with a gun to Squalo’s chest. He pushes with the gun, the rift between them growing. He pushes and stares him down and returns evenly, “Don’t tempt me.”
Squalo’s expression falters, Dino should remember this to be a sign of outrage. Dino should remember Squalo needs the upper hand or he will tear down landscapes for it. Dino should consider this the first time Squalo has seen him as anything other than a shock of bright hair and a sunshine smile, the better half.
Dino’s face pale and those shaking exhalations, the gun replacing a warm, familiar hand, Squalo does not tempt him. It isn’t fear, simply something intuitive and visceral, perhaps cognizance of the other’s importance in this act, just for now -- understood like one’s own mortality, what is there to do but shrug it away.
Squalo regards him with wholehearted contempt. Something should be said to save this moment from wilting into Dino’s hands. You’re fucking aggravating, he wants to say, but it sounds like something Lussuria would say, and god damn him where is that disgusting dandy in his hour of some brand of death; he would take a candelabra to the head, he could stand to have his hair pulled and listen to a prince’s empty death threats and clink of knives if he must; the night grows deeper and more negligent. He sneers, it feels like failing himself.
“I ought to skewer you!” I should’ve dumped you out like trash when you thought it was cute to follow me around, heedless of what I’m capable of, as though I’m someone like you, was that it? How adorable, wanting to be my keeper.
And then Dino is the first to brush past and then that means he’s the first with a truly devastating weapon, the first to leave and then it’s Squalo who is greeted by men who he isn’t meant to know, and it’s Squalo who is carried away by the tide of loosened nerves and neckties and laughter and yells. And it’s Dino now who falls to the back, watching and thinking in endless, convoluted parades of words. Scattered, composure finding its way back home, and then rising into civilized commands, can you guys clean this up, and not a word of it mentioned?
Because Dino has a fondness for sinners. And Squalo would like to blame it on a clandestine desire to embrace some demon within (Xanxus narrows his eyes at a mention of his name and says: He needs to be on our side, he is not expendable), maybe because Squalo has a fondness for the naïve. Something you can mold into something acceptable.
Squalo glances at his glove, removes a blond hair.
But contrary to what you want to believe, it really doesn’t fucking matter.
The police fall on the scene deftly, they know who they’re dealing with. Dino’s expression is closed, he’s the one who drifts (until he loses sight of those nameless disciples, and he stomps and stumbles) through the most treacherous routes back to that warm, lit goal. Squalo thinks, for one opaque minute, that he wants to walk unabashedly on the empty streets, just to make Dino pull at him and rage at him. He thinks this as he follows Dino through the drying stream, his boots covered in mud. Through the tunnel, pitch black and isolated until he thinks his lifeless hand brushes the back of a jacket, and through the alleyways veiled in the scent of death. Dino’s eyes are trained to the path ahead of them until he glimpses the light of home.
Squalo watches the hushed reception, Romario grinning wryly at the mud they’ve tracked in, and leans against the wall. Hibari Kyouya drifts nearer, Dino notices him like clockwork and flashes him a smile. Is he really there, though -- his shoulders hunched underneath some incommunicable weight, his hands in his pockets. Hibari waits for a moment, Dino tells him to come back soon, please, you’re a ray of sunshine in this boring bunch -- Hibari huffs and, gratified, brushes out the door. Good -- this is what he wanted.
Squalo crosses his arms, he doesn’t resort to this often, but when Dino has turned away from him and seems to be absent in his words to those one would think he loved more than anything, he wants to throw out any pretenses of propriety. His teeth are gritted under straight-line lips. Strange, like he should be able to mutter something poisonous. Or leave.
Dino’s mouth moves, no reservations in the presence of Squalo. He glances out the window and wonders what Dino would do to save this house from destruction; how such a boy (boy) can have weathered through the blood and systematic purging still breathing and thinking, it may as well be a fairytale. Squalo remembers the distaste of a heart when Dino pulls in close to him to press his hand to a subordinate’s -- he can see the tremor in the clothing, what a strong-beating heart. What you need to do, he almost says right there in that soft light of the entranceway, is learn how to do with out it. You grow accustomed to the silence, a little more dead.
He begins the long process of smiling, slow quirk of his lips spreading into something crazed, it’s what you expect, when his hand brushes the arm of his uniform. His hand grows cold and his stomach hot.
He looks. That beloved label, the only loyalty he has known, is missing. A few spare threads hang uselessly from where his Varia patch had once proudly proclaimed its worth. Suddenly, in the way that eludes words and all conventional reaction, he feels terribly vulnerable.
“Shit,” he barks, but his voice cannot carry; Dino turns to him more slowly than he would ever have dared to, if this night had not existed. “We’re going back.”
One of those ineffable happenings, how Dino’s eyes fall right on that damning spot Squalo failed to notice -- when was the moment his death turned meaningless, you’d think he would’ve felt it -- and he looks at Squalo plainly, says reasonably, “No one’s gonna think anything of it here, you’re okay. You’ve got another unifo -- “
“Heeey,” he growls low, dangerous, “we’re going back now. I need it.”
He hadn’t expected Dino to immediately excuse himself and reassure Romario they wouldn’t be long. But neither does that matter; he stalks out the door, Dino close at hand, with shameless intent retracks his steps. Dino looks over his shoulder for the both of them, stumbles and grasps that unadorned sleeve.
“I didn’t think anything would be so important to you, is why,” Dino says, bending down to squint at the ground. Squalo looks up from where he’s scanning. It has been an hour, they stand only fifty feet from the tempting comfort of the hotel. The wind has picked up, sounds a little like sirens. He almost imagines that helpless decoration strewn in some inaccessible ditch somewhere.
“I care more about the politics of all this than you do, Haneuma,” he grits, on edge, and feels all the better for it. There is his incentive to steal glances through fences, pretend there’s a chance it’s going to be as easy to find it as that.
“Too bad,” Dino murmurs, and Squalo kicks a gate because it seems the only sensible thing to do. The limbs work, the eyes work.
“Heeey, enough of your fucking underhanded comments or I’ll tear you open here!”
Dino hasn’t stopped looking horribly bothered. His eyes are enamored with the ground. “So it‘s that easy,” he remarks; no malice can be detected. “To just -- “
“Yeah,” Squalo grins, having returned to familiar territory. He looks ahead to the long expanse of path awaiting them. “I’m done with your half-wit ethics. I don’t need another’s existence!”
“Except Xanxus’,” bland. (Bothered.)
Squalo nods curtly, off-guard. It’s the anger. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“What’s wrong with things you can’t understand?”
“Stop talking to me,” he barks.
“You asked me to come,” in answer, rising to the bait.
Squalo bares his teeth -- “I need it right now!”
Childish. That’s what Dino’s agitation declares. But if he can’t understand, does it matter, does he need to when all he really is, is the bus stop across the street from them, one step in this purgatory of days spent waiting for life to return the meaning to you?
Squalo moves ahead, his limbs work, his eyes move, all on their own accord, mechanical. Dino moves away, toward that deep mud, quiet. He almost vanishes from sight in all that fog. Squalo begins, laughably, to wonder if he is going to lose everything that means anything.
Or has it already happened, does it matter when he stands with his head bowed like a dog to the ground, déjà vu (searching for homework when the breeze tossed it from their hands and scattered the pages across town) intense, when he belittles himself in this expressionless uniform. He kicks at the ground. Curses to fill the minutes in useless pursuit of something far gone.
Fuck, what is this all for? The documents he volunteered to carry for Xanxus, the bag he has audaciously unpacked, the -- the what? The fucking mess on his bed, the clothes on top of the suitcase, Belphegor and Lussuria’s temporary addresses stamped all over trivial ruminations, the notes on Dino he takes for no one with the stupid hope they'll come in use and be more than a ruse for trying not to settle inside here-and-now. What? What? Why has he not bought a plane ticket to somewhere opportune, why does he want to shut himself off in the quiet drawing room when he returns to men whose loyalty he only once understood, why does he slip into dormancy, a tamed tiger, when Dino falls back into his childhood mistakes, ice cream on his lap while he mentions hoping to take up the guitar soon.
Squalo has stripped himself of the decency of usual words. He thinks in brute force. He thinks he thinks in brute force. He thinks he’s supposed to be thinking in brute force --
He wonders if that flimsy printed piece had been all that had rooted him to any one thing. He grabs for Dino before tossing his head at the nothingness there, and reaching for a bench. The future wracks him: he drops to his knees and looks under the bench. You never realize how pristine dirt is until you realize it can’t hide anything.
It’s not like he didn’t know nothing lasted. It’s just that it had only just begun, and he had thought it was something more than a whim and a fit of rage and a little symbol. We were proud of the crest, it looked like it meant something. Tangible. But then again, we were both angry.
His arms falter, he presses his hands against still-warm ground, or he imagines it is, beyond the protection of leather gloves. He looks under rocks because after this is that mud no one wants to bother themselves with, no one wants to get dirty because the mess is the sign of getting hasty and desperate; traffic not far, but no one can see him, and no one can see what he’s looking for. Or what it stood for -- no one to ground him, he looks under rocks.
No room for practicality here when there’s no one to save from crumpling. Squalo rocks back into a squatting position, watches the mist fall onto that expanse of dead grass not far; he wonders how long the breeze would bother to throw the patch, and if it did it in animosity or fear. One or the other, there are only two options here he would bother to understand; Squalo spits and stands. Dino will have gone back to that alley to have shielded Squalo from it. That is how he has not changed. He thinks things will not happen again if you don’t let them, but holding them back only agitates them.
This is it. Squalo turns a full circle and shoves his hair out of his face. He snorts to feel insincere, but his body thrums with a new feeling of being curiously -- robbed. His mouth goes dry, he runs his hand down his arm, completely naked because his name has no meaning. And his sword leans against the wall of the room, completely sullied, he does not deserve to return for it when it cannot influence this victims’ land or even himself.
He curses. He curses again. He glances about wildly when the wind picks up, no, not even a stray leaf has let go of its branch. He slouches, stiff in his uniform. The techniques and escapes he has spent his whole life memorizing won’t help him.
He almost sinks to sit on the ground, but he turns to do it, to let his face turn bitter and his arms reach to something to strangle it, and Dino is trudging toward him.
The smile emerges first, those teeth bright underneath the muck and mud. He has fallen in that mud, somewhere in that earnest search. Messy as everything he does, standing there unabashed.
The Varia patch rests in the open palm of his hand. Covered from the mire, it only seems a trifle, and yet. Justification, distinction. Where has it been all this time but here? “Here,” Dino says, breathless, and keeps smiling.
Squalo looks at him.
Relentless, stupid Dino, offering it to him, smile strong and wholehearted and achingly sincere -- Dino, disheveled and happy, like they live in a very simple and clean world of giving and receiving.
He should not be standing here as though it is so.
He stares and seems irritated, but the heart is not in it. God knows the heart has no place here. There is no heart mixed in the equation of his staring at Dino, and the emptiness emptying from the closing rift between them. His mouth is dry, no words can fill it, and what do you say?
Something akin to emotion. His vision pulses, the gift of strain of being caught when you thought you’d rid yourself of that weakness, as well. A tempo, steady, yet loudening unbearably the longer he stands still.
Dino disheveled and muddy, but smiling. He holds out that little remnant of glory and watches Squalo’s face.
To take it from that hand and share the mess, let Dino’s efforts rub off on him and stain his gloves. That inevitable brush of hands. To take it and on his own watch the thick mud cake that minuscule, lifeless object.
You can almost make out a letter ‘v,’ script, and a letter ‘a.’
His feet move toward Dino, his eyes scan that sloppy figure, his hand reaches out (but the heart is somewhere else), and his gloved hand slips against Dino’s. Roughly. Another’s blood has already dried and cracked.
His dirty hand pushes at Dino’s. “Take care of it,” the words drop as if overripe and desperate for so long. He can even, he thinks, feign a sarcastic unsmile. “Clean it up and keep it in good condition, you‘d better not lose it. I’ll take it whenever I need it again.”
Carefully, Dino lowers his hand. Sometime, he had stopped smiling. He smiles again. “Promise,” he says. He doesn’t pocket that little thing, he keeps holding it through that dark walk to the beginning.
“It’s cold,” Dino says, to break the silence. It fades away, rather. Quiet and complacent. How fast.
The can of coke, almost garbage, has been slowly crushed in Dino’s hand the past half hour. And now his head dips forward, his freshly washed hair hanging in his eyes, and he says, “I get it. I get you.”
Squalo’s eyes narrow.
Dino smiles brilliantly. “Whenever I had to do it,” he pushes forward, his voice tired and the four AM solitude flooring sound, “whenever I pulled a trigger, I’d tell myself, this is nothing to Squalo. He wouldn’t care.”
“Hopeless,” Squalo drawls. He does not touch anything here.
“But if you came up, I could do it. And it was easy.” Dino shifts from his sitting place on the stairs. The bricks may have saved the warmth from the long-dormant sun, or perhaps it’s only the heat between the two of them. “Too easy.”
“It’s always easy,” he growls, irate.
“I wish it weren’t. But I’m glad you agree.”
“Heeey,” Squalo grins, and takes Dino’s gun. “The only hard part is finding an excuse!” He aims it at the expanse of black before them, that entranceway to the world. Noisy things. Now is the only chance to let them cry out and feel blameless.
Dino has turned back to his coke with a wry smile.
“So why can’t you do it?”
“I can shoot.”
“Mean it.”
Dino’s hand closes around Squalo’s, mimic of the melding of fingers against the form of the metal. Fingers to one trigger, tenuous, all it would take it one trained roll of a motion and then the world would wake up.
“You know,” he says quietly.
Squalo looks to him out of the corner of his eye.
“You know I do. All of it.”
Dino's other hand has not been sighted since the incident, inside his pocket it holds wholeheartedly that semblance of meaning, little symbol. There is no moving now. Not now.
He smiles to dispel any worry: yes, we might someday understand how to tangle our fingers, instead of train them to tense. I might forgive you, even, if you want me to. Or if you would like to say you have continued to go mad and further away from me, as long as you let me hope it's not so.
Squalo slips his hand out from under Dino’s, lets him hide the gun as if it weren’t the point.
“I missed this,” Dino says hoarsely, Squalo has, in the past, placed that voice with exhaustion, tears, and relief, anticipation.
They watch each other’s hands. Dino might be leaning in close to see how far the world will let him go, how still and how fast.
The others had laughed that Squalo wanted to visit Dino to finally rip him open, as though that were all one could ever do to once-upon-a-times, as if that’s what it means to breathe in and plunge.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY,
sei_kou_ki!!! ♥ LOVE THEE ♥ ♥ ♥You really deserve -- not to have your birthday wishes stuck as a prelude to an alarmingly bad fic, so I won't be long here, and instead save it for warmer waters -- I love you, and you know that, and I will never be able to understand how there is such good in the world as you. You make me smile, and you make me think, and you inspire me. AND YOUR WRITING IS TOPS. Which is always awesome. XD I hope you have a wonderful birthday, and stay well! Enjoy it. :D
Anyway, I'll be short on this next intro since jet lag still has its hold on me and this is the latest I've been able to stay up since I got back (which is pathetic to the point of being worrying, I mean, WHAT where is my FIREEE) --
Back in August! Many of you probably saw this unfinished, rough draft of a fic. It was Squalo/Dino, and I had no idea where to continue from the melodramatic part I left off -- and I remember distinctly that I said I didn't like it at all, but I just "needed it out of my sight."
....What made me go HAHAHA despite the late hour was that I only remembered I said that right after I hurriedly finished said fic up tonight and thought about how much I just wanted it away from me.
So that probably tells you what sort of fic it is. I'm glad I was able to finish it, but I am never going to be satisfied with it. It's OOC, it's slow, it's -- LAAAME.
Also, that means an apology to those on my flist who read the original draft of the first 1/2 of this. D:
ALSO you guys, constructive criticism is my #1 love. Please please please? :D
Title: How to Kill
Author: Your Mother.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Dino/Squalo
Warnings: slight shounen-ai; OOCness [but tell me if it's believable or not]; gore; blood; harsh words!
Summary: ["...But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden,
will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..." The fox gazed at the little prince for a long time. "Please -- tame me!" he said.] Squalo doesn't like getting his gloves dirty. You can call it sissy, but he prefers the term 'dignified.'
Once upon a time, as all devastations begin that way, Squalo coughed and coughed and coughed and did not stop until he coughed out his heart.
It was probably a rich, red, hopeful heart, healthy and young (no more than eighteen years growing; the fading color of his eyes suggests it’s only been a few years since the incident), plopped onto the dirt and rolling until it grew cold and the dirt-caked. And Squalo was stronger for that loss. He forgot about life beyond assassination and the stench of death; he forgot that to declare devotion one didn‘t have to seek to spill blood; he forgot the way he -- desperately -- wanted to smack Dino in school so everyone else would know they had no right to. Smack him because no one else should ever feel their palm stinging except him; he forgot childhood, and became a demon. As you do, if you want to please Xanxus.
But when it was all over and his failed leader lay on scuffed earth coughing up simple bitterness, Squalo no longer had a purpose.
Xanxus still follows that same desperate path, endless plans floating by on breezes and then discarded in favor of others. What next, he murmurs. It’s time for a hiatus. That’s what. Don’t lose your touch, any of you, Xanxus says -- but disperse. Let’s make it difficult for those bastards.
One day during that lull Squalo rolls back his shoulders, grinning, encircled by Dino’s men who mean to kill him. What purpose do you have here, they shout, guns drawn and unwavering. We don’t let people like you just come and go as they please. What are you doing inside secured Squalo laughs, because he has predicted what happens next: Dino appears and his subordinates look to him as though he has all the answers, and Dino (of course) says, “It’s okay; lower your weapons.“ It’s okay, because it’s Squalo.
“Wanted to see just how much you’ve grown,“ Squalo growls, “because fuck knows I couldn’t see much of anything when you had me hooked up to those wires.“
“You’re running?” Dino asks conversationally.
Squalo snorts. “I don’t run! I’m wasting time.”
“Hah.”
He regards Dino suspiciously, begins feeling stifled by the ornate hotel lobby.
“Just thinking.”
“That's a bad idea.”
It’s the way Dino almost smiles, hopeful in a resigned like-hell-it’ll-happen way when he offers a nice room for Squalo. For as long or short as he likes.
“Who cares,” Squalo says sourly, his childhood memories have been flooding once-closed gates now rusted with neglect. He can’t remember being young, but he remembers the condescension that it brings, and the schoolbooks, and the way they slid from Dino’s fingers like sand through an hourglass. Remembered it because even now, Dino means too much smiling and too many weak whims; you’d think he was the Virgin Mother with all the flowers and blessings and visits to churches before he conducted any particularly messy business. The way his men’s lips linger on his hand when they kiss it and the way they stare hard in Squalo’s direction when Squalo never makes a move to do the same. The way Dino doesn’t mind.
Dino looks pleasantly surprised. “Right,” he says decisively. “I’m glad.”
“I can tell.”
Dino just dawdles a moment and then offers him a cup of coffee.
Squalo’s teeth are still sharp and his nose attuned to the scent of blood ready to spill, his hands seize up when he remembers raw power and death. Every night, very quietly, he sates that urge, harmless boys lost on their way home, or old men sitting without one -- so that he returns to that excessive hotel spotted with the life of others, feeling it so keenly on him he breathes in deeply and just smiles.
Dino’s subordinates never utter a word; they know Dino knows, perhaps they’re wondering where the Saint George is, simply wait on him to strike down this unbearable monster. Dino never says anything; he gives Squalo a look, an I-can’t-understand-you look, a you’re-building-a-rather-elaborate-fortr
Tigers, they would have you believe, don’t bite because they hate. Every story concerning a tiger and a human ends the same way, but it isn’t the product of rage pouring until overflowing and infecting the beast. It’s something else.
A trigger.
It’s a steady weight bearing down on a switch. Squalo stands there in Dino’s makeshift office, waiting with arms crossed to tell Dino he demands a larger suite, and finally he watches and listens to the young man he has known for too long. Observes with his once-blue eyes.
Dino’s head is bowed, a bit of shame as he says very clearly into the phone how he’d like to carry out the assassination. Not me, he says again and again (cowardly). I need an assassin. Can’t risk the life of the precious Cavallone boss over one rogue man. A freelance assassin, that’s all we need. How would you like this one?
Dino shifts in his chair, Romario keeps his eyes on Squalo. “Do you know where he lives?”
A pause on the other end of the line. “Tomorrow night if at all possible. If you can find someone who can take care of him when he’s sleeping. Spare his family.”
Another pause. “Spare his family.”
Pause.
“I can’t do it myself; why do you think I‘m here and not over there? I’m incapable, I have business here. Spare his family.”
Squalo begins laughing.
“Spare his goddamn family.”
Romario gives him a look; Squalo is used to looks.
“Listen! All it takes is your best, and then you don’t need to involve the other family members.”
A quick beat.
“Do you have none up to the task? I just need someone who wouldn’t stumble around a dark house and make more than one pull of the trigger necessary -- what do you mean, that sounds like --”
“He means,” Squalo speaks up, amused, “that you make an ass of yourself whe -- “
Romario shoots him a look.
“I have the money. As much as you need to give me someone capable.”
A long silence. “Yes. Thank you.”
Dino hands the phone to Romario and presses his forehead against the desk.
“Heey, I need a bigger room,” Squalo says.
Dino looks up, bleary-eyed. “Oh, how are you,” he answers.
“Why can’t you do it, Haneuma?” A smirk is just waiting on his lips.
Dino pauses, sits up. “Why do you think?” he says, a little awkward.
“Coward.”
“Morals.”
“Hiring an assassin is the same thing as killing the bastard, Haneuma. Only lazy.”
“That’s not true,” Dino says, but then huffs a sad little laugh. It is true; they both know it well, it’s innate. A hand just closing the curtains with the help of a rope safe behind the wall.
“It’s satisfying. It‘s easy.”
Dino just looks at him, and then shakes his head.
Romario has left the room to prepare for other errands, endless plans. Dino and Xanxus following one narrow path, yet different species. The thrill of seeing Xanxus almost smile is the same as that of making Dino stare openly at him, only him. “It’s better than fucking,” he grins, leaning over the desk, predatory.
It’s all too easy to get the reaction he wants.
“So why can’t you do it?”
In the evening, that adulatory party gathers outside. You’d think of Shakespeare, such a stage presence with Dino, a constant din about him, all for him. A royal procession, here arrives our Once and Future King. The clouds have blocked out the stars, the moon -- the silence is reassuring. His loyal subjects smile as though they were amateurs.
Something motivates Squalo to follow along, long steady strides independent of the suited men who crowd Dino as means of protection. Tonight, putting an end to a mild problem of assassins sent for the Cavallone family. Hypocrites, Squalo sneers. They already know how it’ll end: it’ll be smooth, simple, hardly a drop of blood spilled. Peaceful protestors.
Hibari Kyouya stands there, looking more alive than one could ever imagine him -- lips parted, body poised with tonfa ready, yet eyes animated and darting back and forth as flighty as a bird -- he’s drinking up every command and question and living in this moment, heart full in anticipation of victory. Such a child, so grateful Dino has agreed to take him along just to show him how it works. All school uniform and messy hair and home-made badge. This blood-thirst driving them both is all that links them together (a flimsy chain) -- and it’s Hibari’s heart Squalo wants to tear out right now, this rush of life he wants to spill out onto the floor.
And, as always, Dino does not mind. He laughs when Romario reaches forward to fix his sloppily done tie, “I can’t get the hang of suits.” He jokes with his older charges, allows their hands to rest on his head; when the time to leave has arrived, that long walk to a confrontation, he heaves a long-suffering sigh as his men crowd securely about him, their don; but:
he has time to find Hibari with his eyes and flash him a smile and a good-natured wink. And Hibari -- Hibari’s mouth twitches, he glances away and steadily sinks into that group of professionals. Dino‘s eyes continue their searching, but he seems unable to find what he was looking for. The group moves, an amorphous mass.
And Squalo, there in his pristine Varia uniform, the independent steps, his own plans, weaves in and out as effortlessly as a shadow.
Guns crack the silence into halves. From inside that disruption, mindless men stomp past Squalo, and he isn’t certain who he ought to be slashing into a mess of limbs and half-dead pleas, they all look the same. All that same goddamn suit. He finds his one target, his toy for the night. Same suit, but a ruddy face that challenged Squalo until his savior gun was knocked from his grip in a scuffle, crude and all grasping and tearin.
Now the man huddles, a mix of cursing and explanations jumbled into nonsense. And Squalo’s smirk grows into a grin, and he knows he can make something of tonight. “Heey, don’t worry. I have a reason for killing you,” he drawls, and raises his sword high in the air.
Always, always, always have a reason. It makes the process that much more beautiful, he thinks, when he finishes up and spits his own blood from his mouth (as much as he’s willing to give up for tonight). He surveys his work, and breathes in the howling wind, closes his eyes, and floats. It’s like being underwater, this gratification, this jumping in and emerging stained and volatile. He finds himself thinking of summer clothes, grass stains -- blond --
He saw it coming, it is what he wants.
“Squalo,” Dino’s voice carries across that void. “Squalo.“ Still has a moment to spare for him, after all. Dino trots by Squalo’s alley, disheveled and at peace with himself, waving on his men, searching --
He starts and backs up, smiles and slowly meanders his way to Squalo.
Those footfalls sound slower and slower as he begins to make out that slow river of blood at his feet. He swallows, Squalo can feel it. His eyes adjust to the bleak stretch of darkness in which he stands. “What,” he asks, a question to Squalo (who kneels there with an unshakable grin, his sword dripping dark), to that crumpled figure.
There’s a head discarded somewhere, somewhere further down the alleyway as though it were garbage. What is the body, but pieces? The fingers on the cold hand have all been bent back devastatingly messily, and the fingernails, he pries the last of them off -- Squalo finishes and raises an eyebrow. “I’ll let you have the other hand, Haneuma.”
Dino stares down at him.
“Can’t do it, can you?” Squalo barks, thoroughly tempted to shove that lithe figure down (because he falls so easily) and make him, make him feel something for Squalo, make him feel what Squalo feels. “Never could do it. Cowardly and faltering till the very end.”
Dino’s face is drained of color. He turns away, shaking his head, intent on forgetting and perhaps forgiving Squalo, floundering saint that he is.
The stars have been blackened out. Dino seems horribly lost for it.
“What is this?” he asks, hollow, betrayed, baffled.
That heat in Squalo boils over -- “Look at me,” he growls.
The mist makes crescents of the streetlamps. Ghosts, Dino thinks, and why did you have to go create them. “Why?”
“Because I get to see Cavallone‘s spoiled darling this way. Because no sorry smile, no hiding, Haneuma, all your attention on me, watching me, wishing you could love this as much as I do. Because I have power over you. Because I know you’re a coward.” Squalo waits. Had enough?
“Because it’s fun.”
Dino’s faultless brows knit, some small testament to the revulsion; shuts his eyes and his jaw clenches as purely as any self-righteous Prince Charming.
He does not see Squalo stalking toward him, reaching with clawed hands like a wolf, let me in, and it takes a grab, a pull and then a shove, to make Dino’s eyes fly open. See him for what he is, finally, after so many years of skirting around a dangerous edge.
He leans in close, traps Dino with his weight or with the threat of his blade, it’s neither here nor there because Dino stays. “I could kill you here,” Squalo hisses, sliding his blade to Dino’s throat. He thinks, I’ll cut away that tattoo and free you from this right here. Your alliances are only skin-deep. And you love saving, you make it a profession and then who’s there to save you?
He moves, Dino stays, obeisant as a puppet. When he presses the blade in, Dino looks to the dark background, some silent refusal to believe.
“I could kill you here if I wanted. While your student looks around for you like a goddamn lost pet.” The thought buzzes, so intoxicating, the idea of tying up frayed ends so nicely after so many years of letting them wave free -- “Just like this bastard. Chop your head clean off like a fish, and I’ll eat you alive.”
Dino stares at him sidelong. “Will you?”
Squalo growls. “Don’t tempt me.”
Resilient sidelong stare. “You want to kill me?” This is almost intolerable. No one asked to be judged here, and yet -- Squalo bristles and shoves aside the ghosts, the fog.
Squalo has pressed close enough to feel the dip of his jugular when he swallows, the untouched hollow of his neck, the hum of life beneath his skin. But he does not look at Dino until Dino separates their bodies with a gun to Squalo’s chest. He pushes with the gun, the rift between them growing. He pushes and stares him down and returns evenly, “Don’t tempt me.”
Squalo’s expression falters, Dino should remember this to be a sign of outrage. Dino should remember Squalo needs the upper hand or he will tear down landscapes for it. Dino should consider this the first time Squalo has seen him as anything other than a shock of bright hair and a sunshine smile, the better half.
Dino’s face pale and those shaking exhalations, the gun replacing a warm, familiar hand, Squalo does not tempt him. It isn’t fear, simply something intuitive and visceral, perhaps cognizance of the other’s importance in this act, just for now -- understood like one’s own mortality, what is there to do but shrug it away.
Squalo regards him with wholehearted contempt. Something should be said to save this moment from wilting into Dino’s hands. You’re fucking aggravating, he wants to say, but it sounds like something Lussuria would say, and god damn him where is that disgusting dandy in his hour of some brand of death; he would take a candelabra to the head, he could stand to have his hair pulled and listen to a prince’s empty death threats and clink of knives if he must; the night grows deeper and more negligent. He sneers, it feels like failing himself.
“I ought to skewer you!” I should’ve dumped you out like trash when you thought it was cute to follow me around, heedless of what I’m capable of, as though I’m someone like you, was that it? How adorable, wanting to be my keeper.
And then Dino is the first to brush past and then that means he’s the first with a truly devastating weapon, the first to leave and then it’s Squalo who is greeted by men who he isn’t meant to know, and it’s Squalo who is carried away by the tide of loosened nerves and neckties and laughter and yells. And it’s Dino now who falls to the back, watching and thinking in endless, convoluted parades of words. Scattered, composure finding its way back home, and then rising into civilized commands, can you guys clean this up, and not a word of it mentioned?
Because Dino has a fondness for sinners. And Squalo would like to blame it on a clandestine desire to embrace some demon within (Xanxus narrows his eyes at a mention of his name and says: He needs to be on our side, he is not expendable), maybe because Squalo has a fondness for the naïve. Something you can mold into something acceptable.
Squalo glances at his glove, removes a blond hair.
But contrary to what you want to believe, it really doesn’t fucking matter.
The police fall on the scene deftly, they know who they’re dealing with. Dino’s expression is closed, he’s the one who drifts (until he loses sight of those nameless disciples, and he stomps and stumbles) through the most treacherous routes back to that warm, lit goal. Squalo thinks, for one opaque minute, that he wants to walk unabashedly on the empty streets, just to make Dino pull at him and rage at him. He thinks this as he follows Dino through the drying stream, his boots covered in mud. Through the tunnel, pitch black and isolated until he thinks his lifeless hand brushes the back of a jacket, and through the alleyways veiled in the scent of death. Dino’s eyes are trained to the path ahead of them until he glimpses the light of home.
Squalo watches the hushed reception, Romario grinning wryly at the mud they’ve tracked in, and leans against the wall. Hibari Kyouya drifts nearer, Dino notices him like clockwork and flashes him a smile. Is he really there, though -- his shoulders hunched underneath some incommunicable weight, his hands in his pockets. Hibari waits for a moment, Dino tells him to come back soon, please, you’re a ray of sunshine in this boring bunch -- Hibari huffs and, gratified, brushes out the door. Good -- this is what he wanted.
Squalo crosses his arms, he doesn’t resort to this often, but when Dino has turned away from him and seems to be absent in his words to those one would think he loved more than anything, he wants to throw out any pretenses of propriety. His teeth are gritted under straight-line lips. Strange, like he should be able to mutter something poisonous. Or leave.
Dino’s mouth moves, no reservations in the presence of Squalo. He glances out the window and wonders what Dino would do to save this house from destruction; how such a boy (boy) can have weathered through the blood and systematic purging still breathing and thinking, it may as well be a fairytale. Squalo remembers the distaste of a heart when Dino pulls in close to him to press his hand to a subordinate’s -- he can see the tremor in the clothing, what a strong-beating heart. What you need to do, he almost says right there in that soft light of the entranceway, is learn how to do with out it. You grow accustomed to the silence, a little more dead.
He begins the long process of smiling, slow quirk of his lips spreading into something crazed, it’s what you expect, when his hand brushes the arm of his uniform. His hand grows cold and his stomach hot.
He looks. That beloved label, the only loyalty he has known, is missing. A few spare threads hang uselessly from where his Varia patch had once proudly proclaimed its worth. Suddenly, in the way that eludes words and all conventional reaction, he feels terribly vulnerable.
“Shit,” he barks, but his voice cannot carry; Dino turns to him more slowly than he would ever have dared to, if this night had not existed. “We’re going back.”
One of those ineffable happenings, how Dino’s eyes fall right on that damning spot Squalo failed to notice -- when was the moment his death turned meaningless, you’d think he would’ve felt it -- and he looks at Squalo plainly, says reasonably, “No one’s gonna think anything of it here, you’re okay. You’ve got another unifo -- “
“Heeey,” he growls low, dangerous, “we’re going back now. I need it.”
He hadn’t expected Dino to immediately excuse himself and reassure Romario they wouldn’t be long. But neither does that matter; he stalks out the door, Dino close at hand, with shameless intent retracks his steps. Dino looks over his shoulder for the both of them, stumbles and grasps that unadorned sleeve.
“I didn’t think anything would be so important to you, is why,” Dino says, bending down to squint at the ground. Squalo looks up from where he’s scanning. It has been an hour, they stand only fifty feet from the tempting comfort of the hotel. The wind has picked up, sounds a little like sirens. He almost imagines that helpless decoration strewn in some inaccessible ditch somewhere.
“I care more about the politics of all this than you do, Haneuma,” he grits, on edge, and feels all the better for it. There is his incentive to steal glances through fences, pretend there’s a chance it’s going to be as easy to find it as that.
“Too bad,” Dino murmurs, and Squalo kicks a gate because it seems the only sensible thing to do. The limbs work, the eyes work.
“Heeey, enough of your fucking underhanded comments or I’ll tear you open here!”
Dino hasn’t stopped looking horribly bothered. His eyes are enamored with the ground. “So it‘s that easy,” he remarks; no malice can be detected. “To just -- “
“Yeah,” Squalo grins, having returned to familiar territory. He looks ahead to the long expanse of path awaiting them. “I’m done with your half-wit ethics. I don’t need another’s existence!”
“Except Xanxus’,” bland. (Bothered.)
Squalo nods curtly, off-guard. It’s the anger. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“What’s wrong with things you can’t understand?”
“Stop talking to me,” he barks.
“You asked me to come,” in answer, rising to the bait.
Squalo bares his teeth -- “I need it right now!”
Childish. That’s what Dino’s agitation declares. But if he can’t understand, does it matter, does he need to when all he really is, is the bus stop across the street from them, one step in this purgatory of days spent waiting for life to return the meaning to you?
Squalo moves ahead, his limbs work, his eyes move, all on their own accord, mechanical. Dino moves away, toward that deep mud, quiet. He almost vanishes from sight in all that fog. Squalo begins, laughably, to wonder if he is going to lose everything that means anything.
Or has it already happened, does it matter when he stands with his head bowed like a dog to the ground, déjà vu (searching for homework when the breeze tossed it from their hands and scattered the pages across town) intense, when he belittles himself in this expressionless uniform. He kicks at the ground. Curses to fill the minutes in useless pursuit of something far gone.
Fuck, what is this all for? The documents he volunteered to carry for Xanxus, the bag he has audaciously unpacked, the -- the what? The fucking mess on his bed, the clothes on top of the suitcase, Belphegor and Lussuria’s temporary addresses stamped all over trivial ruminations, the notes on Dino he takes for no one with the stupid hope they'll come in use and be more than a ruse for trying not to settle inside here-and-now. What? What? Why has he not bought a plane ticket to somewhere opportune, why does he want to shut himself off in the quiet drawing room when he returns to men whose loyalty he only once understood, why does he slip into dormancy, a tamed tiger, when Dino falls back into his childhood mistakes, ice cream on his lap while he mentions hoping to take up the guitar soon.
Squalo has stripped himself of the decency of usual words. He thinks in brute force. He thinks he thinks in brute force. He thinks he’s supposed to be thinking in brute force --
He wonders if that flimsy printed piece had been all that had rooted him to any one thing. He grabs for Dino before tossing his head at the nothingness there, and reaching for a bench. The future wracks him: he drops to his knees and looks under the bench. You never realize how pristine dirt is until you realize it can’t hide anything.
It’s not like he didn’t know nothing lasted. It’s just that it had only just begun, and he had thought it was something more than a whim and a fit of rage and a little symbol. We were proud of the crest, it looked like it meant something. Tangible. But then again, we were both angry.
His arms falter, he presses his hands against still-warm ground, or he imagines it is, beyond the protection of leather gloves. He looks under rocks because after this is that mud no one wants to bother themselves with, no one wants to get dirty because the mess is the sign of getting hasty and desperate; traffic not far, but no one can see him, and no one can see what he’s looking for. Or what it stood for -- no one to ground him, he looks under rocks.
No room for practicality here when there’s no one to save from crumpling. Squalo rocks back into a squatting position, watches the mist fall onto that expanse of dead grass not far; he wonders how long the breeze would bother to throw the patch, and if it did it in animosity or fear. One or the other, there are only two options here he would bother to understand; Squalo spits and stands. Dino will have gone back to that alley to have shielded Squalo from it. That is how he has not changed. He thinks things will not happen again if you don’t let them, but holding them back only agitates them.
This is it. Squalo turns a full circle and shoves his hair out of his face. He snorts to feel insincere, but his body thrums with a new feeling of being curiously -- robbed. His mouth goes dry, he runs his hand down his arm, completely naked because his name has no meaning. And his sword leans against the wall of the room, completely sullied, he does not deserve to return for it when it cannot influence this victims’ land or even himself.
He curses. He curses again. He glances about wildly when the wind picks up, no, not even a stray leaf has let go of its branch. He slouches, stiff in his uniform. The techniques and escapes he has spent his whole life memorizing won’t help him.
He almost sinks to sit on the ground, but he turns to do it, to let his face turn bitter and his arms reach to something to strangle it, and Dino is trudging toward him.
The smile emerges first, those teeth bright underneath the muck and mud. He has fallen in that mud, somewhere in that earnest search. Messy as everything he does, standing there unabashed.
The Varia patch rests in the open palm of his hand. Covered from the mire, it only seems a trifle, and yet. Justification, distinction. Where has it been all this time but here? “Here,” Dino says, breathless, and keeps smiling.
Squalo looks at him.
Relentless, stupid Dino, offering it to him, smile strong and wholehearted and achingly sincere -- Dino, disheveled and happy, like they live in a very simple and clean world of giving and receiving.
He should not be standing here as though it is so.
He stares and seems irritated, but the heart is not in it. God knows the heart has no place here. There is no heart mixed in the equation of his staring at Dino, and the emptiness emptying from the closing rift between them. His mouth is dry, no words can fill it, and what do you say?
Something akin to emotion. His vision pulses, the gift of strain of being caught when you thought you’d rid yourself of that weakness, as well. A tempo, steady, yet loudening unbearably the longer he stands still.
Dino disheveled and muddy, but smiling. He holds out that little remnant of glory and watches Squalo’s face.
To take it from that hand and share the mess, let Dino’s efforts rub off on him and stain his gloves. That inevitable brush of hands. To take it and on his own watch the thick mud cake that minuscule, lifeless object.
You can almost make out a letter ‘v,’ script, and a letter ‘a.’
His feet move toward Dino, his eyes scan that sloppy figure, his hand reaches out (but the heart is somewhere else), and his gloved hand slips against Dino’s. Roughly. Another’s blood has already dried and cracked.
His dirty hand pushes at Dino’s. “Take care of it,” the words drop as if overripe and desperate for so long. He can even, he thinks, feign a sarcastic unsmile. “Clean it up and keep it in good condition, you‘d better not lose it. I’ll take it whenever I need it again.”
Carefully, Dino lowers his hand. Sometime, he had stopped smiling. He smiles again. “Promise,” he says. He doesn’t pocket that little thing, he keeps holding it through that dark walk to the beginning.
“It’s cold,” Dino says, to break the silence. It fades away, rather. Quiet and complacent. How fast.
The can of coke, almost garbage, has been slowly crushed in Dino’s hand the past half hour. And now his head dips forward, his freshly washed hair hanging in his eyes, and he says, “I get it. I get you.”
Squalo’s eyes narrow.
Dino smiles brilliantly. “Whenever I had to do it,” he pushes forward, his voice tired and the four AM solitude flooring sound, “whenever I pulled a trigger, I’d tell myself, this is nothing to Squalo. He wouldn’t care.”
“Hopeless,” Squalo drawls. He does not touch anything here.
“But if you came up, I could do it. And it was easy.” Dino shifts from his sitting place on the stairs. The bricks may have saved the warmth from the long-dormant sun, or perhaps it’s only the heat between the two of them. “Too easy.”
“It’s always easy,” he growls, irate.
“I wish it weren’t. But I’m glad you agree.”
“Heeey,” Squalo grins, and takes Dino’s gun. “The only hard part is finding an excuse!” He aims it at the expanse of black before them, that entranceway to the world. Noisy things. Now is the only chance to let them cry out and feel blameless.
Dino has turned back to his coke with a wry smile.
“So why can’t you do it?”
“I can shoot.”
“Mean it.”
Dino’s hand closes around Squalo’s, mimic of the melding of fingers against the form of the metal. Fingers to one trigger, tenuous, all it would take it one trained roll of a motion and then the world would wake up.
“You know,” he says quietly.
Squalo looks to him out of the corner of his eye.
“You know I do. All of it.”
Dino's other hand has not been sighted since the incident, inside his pocket it holds wholeheartedly that semblance of meaning, little symbol. There is no moving now. Not now.
He smiles to dispel any worry: yes, we might someday understand how to tangle our fingers, instead of train them to tense. I might forgive you, even, if you want me to. Or if you would like to say you have continued to go mad and further away from me, as long as you let me hope it's not so.
Squalo slips his hand out from under Dino’s, lets him hide the gun as if it weren’t the point.
“I missed this,” Dino says hoarsely, Squalo has, in the past, placed that voice with exhaustion, tears, and relief, anticipation.
They watch each other’s hands. Dino might be leaning in close to see how far the world will let him go, how still and how fast.
The others had laughed that Squalo wanted to visit Dino to finally rip him open, as though that were all one could ever do to once-upon-a-times, as if that’s what it means to breathe in and plunge.
