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“I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me,
and I have to search my body for the scars, thinking
Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in?”
- Richard Siken, Wishbone
Hibari comes across him for the first time dressed in dust and blood, with bodies stacked high around him, like a boy surrounded by his toys. The ceiling has caved in around him, neatly, and there he stands in the heart of it all, untouched—the center of his own little kingdom of devastation.
Such a legend has sprouted up around this one that no one can remember who he truly is, or from whence he came. All that remains is his legacy: a legacy of fear, cultivated through tall tales heaped upon hearsay piled atop rumors whispered through clasped hands, each one more baseless than the last. He was born of an unholy union between a witch and a devil. He sprung, fully-formed, from his mother’s side, already capable of speech and of performing the most vile magicks.
Demon is what they call him. Sorcerer.
“Templar,” Hibari names him, coldly, and knows it to be true.
It takes a second for Rokudo to respond. Even the way he turns round to face Hibari—deliberate, predatory, the movement rippling across his body from his toes to his shoulders—seems designed to intimidate. Their eyes meet, across the sand, and here Hibari discovers that there is, at least, an element of truth to the stories told about Rokudo. One of his eyes is red, the other blue, half a mirror to Hibari’s own, and wholly... unnatural. It’s enough to put the more credulous of his compatriots in hysterics, and Hibari is momentarily grateful that none of them are in attendance.
But Hibari is not afraid, because he sees the truth of things with his own eyes, and he knows better. No true sorcerer would stoop to wielding a trident if he could kill with a word.
“Come to put me down, assassin?” Rokudo mocks, loudly. His laughter makes Hibari’s skin prickle, thousands of tiny insect bites tingling on the back of his neck. The setting sun at Rokudo’s back flares one final time, defiant, before it sinks below the horizon, plunging them into a darkness so thick that it seems to bleed the very air from his lungs.
Hibari unsheathes his blade. The sound of steel slithering against the scabbard is like that of something dead or dying, dragging itself along the dirty ground.
In answer, Rokudo flashes a deranged smile, raising his bloodied trident.
“So be it,” he hisses, soft and sibilant. “I never did enjoy foreplay.”
Hibari is in possession of a secret: when you cut him deep enough, Rokudo Mukuro bleeds like everyone else.
There’s little else he takes away from that day—just vague impressions of cruelty and destruction, mainly unintelligible against a backdrop of light and sound. Their first encounter leaves him in the infirmary for three weeks. His physician had told him three months, but something as unimportant as his physician’s opinion wasn’t about to stop Hibari Kyouya.
His physician also called it a miracle, and looked shocked when Hibari told him, “No.” In retrospect, one can’t blame the man; he was drawing conclusions based on the evidence laid plain before him: nothing more, nothing less. But Hibari knows full well, none of this is accidental. Everything is—no, must be—part of some sinister plan.
(Hibari also thinks he knows who masterminded that plan—but he’s been wrong before.)
The night before he’s released from the infirmary, Hibari dreams.
In his dream, he is surrounded by shadows, which flicker and tremble like a candle’s flame, drawing close around him in a dark, threatening circle. Incomplete as they are—half-formed thoughts, fragile as a soap bubble—he recognizes the imprint of their maker upon them, and holds his ground. Before his eyes they shape-shift, crude horrors that morph together into visions a thousand times more terrifying.
Hibari faces them all with the indifference of one who has driven a stake clean through a man’s head; who has scrubbed guts and bits of flesh out from under his fingernails each night. (Fantastical ghosts and imagery rather lose their potency when one has faced the horrors of the real.)
At last, imagination spent, the shapes melt away into nothingness, until only a single figure is left, standing alone. It is Rokudo, his expression like an open palm, saying nothing at all. And as their eyes meet, in the dream-world, a flash of something like understanding passes between them.
Night slips away like ash and cobwebs through his splayed fingers, and before Hibari knows it, it’s morning once more. He wakes all at once, with the word ‘death’ warming his lips, and somehow, he knows—it won’t be the last they see of each other.
Rokudo has a way of finding him when he least wants to be found. Or, perhaps, it’s the other way around: perhaps he has a knack of stumbling across Rokudo when he least wants to see him. (Not that he ever does, mind.)
So Rokudo finds him sprinting across rooftops after a kill, blood on his hands and adrenaline singing high in his veins. Up here, above the world, there are no distractions: neither creed nor oath, nothing to tie him to this world, full of petty treachery and the political maneuverings of the trivial-minded. Just heat, burning blood, and dust weighing down his cloak, with only the sky to witness their meeting.
“Long time no see,” he calls, faux-cheerful, greeting Hibari with outstretched hand. A lie—but then again, isn’t it always?
Hibari says nothing; simply stares at the tendons in Rokudo’s throat, and thinks of how simple it would be to put an end to this. To just wrap fingers around his throat and squeeze until his eyes bulge like overripe tomatoes; until his lips turn cold and blue. Or else carve out his heart, and bleed him dry like a pig. Thousand of ways he could shuffle off this mortal coil, and Hibari a master of administering every one of them.
He does not move. Rokudo cocks his head and smiles crooked at him in a way that says I know, I know, I know what it is you want, what you dream about at night. The look grates on Hibari’s nerves; after all, he’s not even sure he knows what he wants.
“... I’m going to kill you,” he decides, at last. The moment the words pass his lips, he knows they are true.
For his part, Rokudo simply tosses his head back, and looses a peal of laughter that seems to carry halfway across the city. The sound of it makes all the hairs on Hibari’s arm stand on end.
Then, without warning, he flings himself bodily from the edge of the roof, disappearing from view.
Don’t look, Hibari thinks, holding himself perfectly still. Don’t look.
He looks. Several stories below him, Rokudo dangles from the edge of a crumbling balcony by his fingertips, gazing blithely upwards. When he catches Hibari’s eyes, he winks, impudently, and mouths,
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
—before letting go, tumbling out of sight.
Hibari Kyouya, age eighteen, is the best and worst apprentice that Reborn has ever had. Hibari can gut a man with an effortless sweep of his arm, like he’s unveiling a spread for dinner. Hibari knows all the places on a man’s body to disable him, or else to cause so much pain that it has the same effect—the kneecap, the floating ribs, the solar plexus, the occipital ridge. Every blow is perfectly calculated for maximum effect: a study in intimate violence.
For all this, Hibari has a single flaw—but a glaring one—that keeps him from assuming his rightful place in the Brotherhood.
“Three little words is all it would take,” Rokudo sing-songs, against his ear, against his neck, a flutter of breath halfway to a laugh. Hibari takes a swing at him, but his fist kisses only air, and Rokudo dances away, answering his silent snarl with a smile like a taunt. “I obey, master. That’s all you need. Bend the knee and say it with me.”
“Go to hell.”
“I’ve been; it’s not a very pleasant place. Lousy weather.” He titters at his own joke, which makes Hibari’s fingers twitch, compulsively, as though itching to wrap themselves around his throat and choke all the laughter out of him. But again, he does not; he does nothing at all. He couldn’t possibly begin to wrap his head around the twisted game that Rokudo is playing with him, but he knows this much: he who moves first, loses. And if there’s one thing that Hibari Kyouya cannot bear, it is losing.
Rokudo Mukuro, older than he looks, younger than he seems, never fights fair, and laughs like it would hurt him to stop. At times, he seems almost to be a figment of Hibari’s imagination. (The only way he can tell that Rokudo truly is real is the knowledge that his imagination would never be so perverse as to birth a creature like him.)
“Let me cut you, once,” Rokudo says to him one night, laughing, while they tussle under the stars, knuckles and knees bare and bleeding. “It won’t hurt—I promise.” He produces a silvery knife from somewhere—his sleeve?—with a flick of his wrist, smiling wide, and draws it across his own thumb, making a slit that beads with blood.
Hibari can never quite tell if he’s joking, and ambiguity has a way of making him angry. So he lunges; grabs Rokudo by the elbow, giving a painful twist that sends the knife skittering across the tiles, and then slams his other hand tight over Rokudo’s mouth, pressing down as though to suffocate him. And, all the while, he’s trying to ignore the way those mismatched eyes glitter with silent laughter—amused by some secret joke that only he is privy to.
(There are millions of other tiny details about him that we could discuss, like the scent which clings to his hair—like cloves, like spices baking under the sun; how his hipbones jut sharp, like a knife, against the butt of one’s palm, and how he kisses, all teeth and tongue like the world is ending... but no one, least of all Hibari, is particularly interested in those things.)
“You’re bored,” Yamamoto says to him, one night. “I can tell.”
Yamamoto is... a friend of his, or at least, as close as Hibari Kyouya gets to having a friend—that is to say, not at all. That doesn’t seem to bother Yamamoto, though, which is probably how they tolerate each other to begin with.
For all his jocular idiocy, Yamamoto is at times unusually astute. He claims it’s only ever a fluke, but Hibari knows better than to take for granted the word of anyone who kills people as their main occupation.
“Boredom,” Hibari says, every syllable crisp and clipped, “is not in my vocabulary.”
“A lot of words aren’t, I expect,” Yamamoto answers, eyes bright with mirth, and ducks under Hibari’s partly-playful fist.
On a night as clear as this, they can see all the way to the mouth of the river that runs through the city, where it opens up into the sea. Muddy brown water floods the banks, where herons scrounge listlessly for scraps of food. Observing them, side by side with Yamamoto on the tower’s edge, Hibari feels... at peace. He could be happy like this, he thinks—or at least, content. And they would not destroy each other; he is sure of that much.
But somewhere in the back of his head—in the quiet places of his mind, where night-terrors lurk—he hears a cruel, mocking laughter, and he knows, in his heart of hearts, that it will never be enough.
As if sensing the way Hibari’s thoughts churn, indecisive, Yamamoto gives him a quizzical look and asks, “Something on your mind?”
One sharp turn on his heel, and he’s skidding down the side of the building, away from Yamamoto and his questions, and his insolence.
Yamamoto does not give chase. It is almost as if they are thinking the same thought—and, if so, it’s the closest they will ever come to each other. He labors and struggles and comes right up to the edge of acceptance—and then just falls short. He will never know peace, and this, too, is part of Rokudo’s plan.
The thing is, though, they understand each other. In a sick... strange... twisted sort of way.
They hate each other, too—or at least, Hibari hates him. It’s difficult to decide what it means for Rokudo to hate someone; whether he has feelings at all, or simply views people as... a means to an end. (The way he is, one can hardly tell whether he considers one friend or foe. He’s changeable as the wind—as like to befriend you one day as sell you out the next, and all without a hint of conscience.)
And perhaps it’s not so much that they understand each other, but rather that they know precisely what it is they want out of their little trysts. A dash of sweat, the flesh on his back torn to ribbons—no expectations beyond the here and now, nothing but the present.
(Hibari is distantly aware that all of this smacks of desperate rationalization, but at the same time, he’s too far gone to care.)
Under the sheets, Rokudo finds his hand, brushing dry lips over the place where his ring finger was severed, leaving a tingling sensation in his wake.
Hibari clears his throat, groping for his voice, and eventually rasps, “... What are you doing.”
“This?” Rokudo says, the movement of his lips stilling. “It’s... a pact. A promise, from me to you.”
Hibari snorts, derisive.
“To do what.”
Rokudo’s lips curl into a smile against the knotted scar tissue, eyes coy. “Not telling,” he says, and refuses to answer any more questions, instead distracting Hibari with the heat of his body until he’s quite forgotten what they were talking about to begin with.
Whatever the promise was, it never came up again. Hibari was grateful for that. He was a man who adhered to the philosophy of simplicity in all things, and it was easier to live without thinking, only doing, like an animal—when everything was reduced to a set of actions, denoted either permissible or forbidden. When you broke it down—stripped away all the outer layers, all the pretense and affectations—that was what Hibari wanted more than anything: to do as he pleased, without paying so much as lip-service to anyone... in this world, or the next.