Work Text:
I
Gokudera walks out of the convenience store with his plastic-wrapped bento, two onigiris, and a bottle of water, and nearly trips over the small shape folded up on the ground a few steps away.
The streets are twilit, and he almost walks past the figure before he stops and does a double-take. It's a person - more precisely, it's a girl who’s crouched there, staring at nothing in particular.
Kokuyo-green uniform, eye-patch, strangely pinned-up hair. Gokudera nearly pulls out a dynamite at the first part, out of pure reflex, before he suddenly remembers.
It's that girl, the stand-in Mist Guardian, isn't she? Mukuro's body-double. Her name is - something to do with skulls, an inversion of Mukuro's -
"Storm person," says the girl in her strangely musical tone, whose name Gokudera figures out just then. Chrome. Ku-Ro-Mu.
It's a nonsensical name, but it's probably better than nothing. Gokudera assumes Mukuro chose it for her. What bad taste - both for him to have chosen it, and for her to have kept it.
It's none of his business, though.
"It's Gokudera Hayato," says Gokudera, who's always been proud to bear his mother's surname ever since leaving home at seven.
She gives no indication of having heard him, except to continue staring up at him with one large, clear, violet eye.
"What are you doing here, anyway?" asks Gokudera, fishing around for something to say so he can sooner make his excuses and leave.
"Ken threw me out," comes the serene answer.
God, she must be the creepiest kid Gokudera ever saw - besides her "Mukuro-sama", that is. But does Mukuro count as a kid, really? Thinking about it hurts Gokudera's brain, so he tries not to.
Also - threw her out? Gokudera was under the impression that despite Mukuro's lackeys' general distaste for her, she was at least somewhat important in their schemes, configurations, whatever. For communing with their resident prisoner-ghost and receiving orders from him, if nothing else. But maybe not.
"Full offense, you've got lousy friends," says Gokudera, out loud.
"It's not their fault," says Chrome, blinking, perfectly sincere and irony-free. "Chikusa is in a bad mood, I think, and Ken is trying to protect me."
Gokudera doesn't get what she means at first, and then he remembers: the angrily-related story by two wounded, dying teenagers; the darkened, viscera-splattered theatre, the bloody denouement to one week of utter, senseless violence.
Estraneos. Child human experiments.
"Makes sense," he muttesrs, for lack of anything else to say, dragging a hand through his hair.
Chrome Dokuro, who isn't Rokudo Mukuro, is still crouched on the street, hugging her bag, staring up at him calmly. Her midriff is bare; her lips are tinted blue.
It's January, for heaven's sake.
Gokudera turns and walks down the street. When he doesn't hear booted footsteps following, he bites down on the end of his cigarette irritably, then stops and half-turns around.
The last rays of the sun are dying down, painting the street in faded, dream-like gold. A few drifts of fallen leaves spin and float in dark corners. There's a slight nip in the air.
All these, more or less, help him say what he needs to say.
"What are you dilly-dallying for?"
A singular, unsettling eye blinks at him, once, twice. Then the girl straightens up, almost hesitantly, still hugging the black leather bag to her chest. It doesn't look like it has anything in it. She looks like a strong gust of wind could knock her over.
Gokudera shoves his hands in his pockets.
"My house is that way," he indicates with a jerk of the shoulder. Really, must he make it awkward by spelling it out this plainly? But Chrome doesn't look like she'll understand otherwise. "Whatever. I'm fine if you want to spend the night on the street."
He turns, so he misses the slight, grateful smile on Chrome's face as she hurries over. He hears it in her voice when she thanks him, anyway, and shakes it off violently like it's a bug.
*
Ken doesn't text her that night.
Chrome wishes she could help, but she's just not that close to Ken and Chikusa yet. She and Mukuro-sama have to be close; their survival depends on it. But Ken and Chikusa have been with each other far longer than she's been with them, and despite Mukuro-sama's assurances, they are wary of her.
Besides, she's a reminder that Mukuro-sama isn't here, and wouldn't be, not for a long time.
She understands.
Gokudera Hayato's studio apartment smells like him: cigarettes, burnt sugar, and some faint, nameless perfume. It's surprisingly spacious, and located in a nice part of town. Gokudera only grinds his teeth to her inquiring gaze, so she doesn’t ask.
There's a large, bulky, cloth-covered shape in the corner. Chrome's fingers curl in curiosity, but she knows better than to nose into someone else's business when she's a guest staying over.
She's been nothing but a guest lately, she muses. Sometimes even in her own body. In some ways, she supposes, it has always been this way her whole life.
"Bathroom's that way, you can use the purple towels," Gokudera points while he tidies the contents of his cabinet. It looks like fussing to Chrome; Gokudera's apartment is almost freakishly clean and organized, especially for being a boy's space. She's lived with Ken and Chikusa for a few months now, she knows what boys can be like. Even Chikusa, at his most particular, did not clean their bedroom in Kokuyo to quite this degree, and there was always Ken to mess it all up again. But Gokudera lives alone, and is - evidently - a different kind of boy.
"My sister bought them for me," mutters Gokudera when she doesn't look away, apparently under the impression that she was asking him about the towels. Chrome has just been just spacing out, but she doesn't mind listening. She finds it interesting, looking into other, ordinary people's lives. Even though Gokudera isn't ordinary. "Really, she knows I hate purple. I swear she does things just to spite me sometimes. Sisters, you know?"
Chrome doesn't "know"; she's never had a sister, or a brother. The closest she can think of is Mukuro-sama; but the proper vocabulary for their relationship doesn't quite exist, she thinks. It hasn't been invented yet.
Chrome doesn't really know what to say to that, or if she's even supposed to say anything at all, so she just ducks her head and slips into the bathroom.
*
Looking at Chrome Dokuro's pale, bloodless toes on his cold wooden floors makes Gokudera's teeth ache, so he tries not to. He shoves the onigiris at her instead, and scrunges up some hot coffee from the cabinets: instant, which is an affront to all decent Italians but he's had worse living on the streets, and no milk. She thanks him (for the fifth time that night, he wishes she would stop) and sips it without any visible qualms, which is yet another sign that there's something deeply wrong with the child, but she's not his problem, so.
Gokudera himself downs the entire cup like a shot and starts his attack on another chapter of a chemical engineering textbook, using an old English to Italian dictionary as reference.
For a while he forgets about Chrome on the sofa behind him, having lost himself in the practical application of thermodynamics and heat transfers, picking at the bento idly. When he finishes a chapter, he starts in on an architectural text instead. Controlled demolition could prove useful in the field in future, but something about it just doesn't feel as satisfying to him as lightning the fuse himself and seeing the dynamites hit their target. Needs must, however.
Gokudera gets up from the desk to throw away the empty food box, and nearly makes it halfway across the room before he registers the small, still figure on the sofa.
"Who - "
He pulls the dynamites from his pockets the same instant Chrome startles, face pale and one eye round in its surprise, before she literally vanishes from the fabric of existence.
He blinks at the spot where she was a mere second ago. The sofa is empty - or at least all his senses tell him so. If it weren't for the mug still floating in mid-air, Gokudera could've sworn he'd hallucinated the whole thing.
"What the fuck," says Gokudera with feeling.
And the mug winks out of existence, too.
"Oh for -"
He shoves the dynamites back where they belonged, trudges into the kitchen annoyed with both himself and whoever taught the girl to have that kind of response to sudden attention.
The hiding part, not the physics-defying vanishing part - of the latter, Gokudera has no doubt who's responsible.
When he comes back out, Chrome is visible again, though still watching him with a hint of wariness, arms wrapped tightly around her bare abdomen. Gokudera has no idea how to convey to her that he isn't a threat, considering that he rather is one, what with the bombs and whatnot, so he elects not to say anything, instead plopping down in the chair, back to work on the soul-numbing architectural text.
When he looks back to check on her a while later, she’s playing with a tiny stem of red rose. It’s hyper-realistic, velvety petals and blunt thorns and drops of dew and all, but Gokudera knows with absolute certainty there are no florists selling roses this red in the middle of January. There are decidedly no stray rose bushes in Namimori, either.
Gokudera determinedly looks away from the illusionist girl currently sharing the living room with him, and reminds himself not to look again.
*
Sometime later, his phone blares Toxic loudly.
Gokudera's pen pokes through the paper and he swears in the dirtiest Italian he knows.
"Che?" he says irritably into the receiver.
"Is that any way to greet your dearest sister, Hayato," replies the all-too-familiar, saccharine voice, and Gokudera nearly breaks out in hives.
"What do you want," he bites out.
The world outside has gone softly dark. Street lamps cast circles of diffuse light, underneath which insects swarm and flutter in rhythmic, dance-like patterns. Gokudera idly watches the trembling of the shadows of tree leaves while Bianchi's voice prattles on by his ear.
A pen flips back and forth between his fingers, and he lights another cigarette with one hand. Only belatedly, he recalls the guest in the house and goes to open the windows, before walking back and attempting to decipher English text in the midst of Bianchi's noisy chatter. It's near impossible, but he's determined to multitask.
Bianchi is explicating her woes with her thirty-fourth boyfriend, or more accurately, murder-target-slash-fling, as she’s been doing for the past month. Comparisons with a certain Romeo is cropping up with increasing frequency.
"Well then just kill the guy," Gokudera finally snaps, finally having heard enough of the latest on Bianchi's disastrous love life.
In his experience, it's always over the minute they start to remind her of Romeo, which, inevitably, they all do. Some days, Gokudera is honestly and unironically glad that he is her brother, and not some random man she might see fit to play with and then cast aside like a cat with its kill.
"I can't," Bianchi complains. "Our father still wants things from him, and it wouldn't do for me to dispose of him simply because I've become bored."
Gokudera twitches at the "ours" and elects not to correct her on this count, lest this one-sided conversation escalates into a full-on shouting match, which is terrible manners for having a guest over.
When he finally hangs up, Chrome's small, ghost-like voice sounds behind him.
"Are you meeting Bianchi-san for lunch tomorrow?"
Gokudera startles, whipping around to see the slip of a girl curled on the sofa, watching him, intent. She doesn’t look like she has any Italian blood in her.
"You caught that?" says Gokudera, disbelieving.
Chrome nods.
"Chikusa has been teaching me."
The girl rummages around in her bag, comes up with a small, crumpled notebook, then proceeds to scoot closer to him on the sofa. Gokudera resists the urge to back away.
"Is it Buongiorno or Buongiormo?"
She points to a section on page two, noted in neat lead lines, with a heading that says "Greetings." Her expression is all earnest sincerity.
Gokudera did not come to Japan to be someone’s Italian tutor.
Then again, he didn’t come to Japan to be the Vongola’s Storm Guardian either, so there’s that. He sighs and drags the notebook over.
*
Gokudera Hayato is really unexpectedly nicer than he likes to make out, Chrome muses. In that way, he’s not unlike Mukuro-sama and Ken, and Chikusa.
When she comes out of the shower, though, Gokudera unexpectedly stares.
"What are you wearing that for?" he says.
Chrome glances down. What she’s wearing is a plain white yukata-style gown, except it's quite obviously not a normal yukata - the material is too paper-thin for that, too unadorned, and deliberately loose and shapeless around her body.
"This is my nightgown," says Chrome, who doesn't find anything wrong in this particular clothing choice at all.
"Are you sure it's not a - it looks like a hospital gown," says Gokudera, in aghast tones.
"It is," says Chrome, puzzled. "But I've washed it."
"It is a hospital gown," repeats Gokudera, horrified and faint. "What are you wearing that for?"
"...For sleeping," explains Chrome again, hesitant. The conversation, she thinks, is starting to become circular.
Why is Gokudera Hayato reacting like this? Is it really that weird? Neither Ken nor Chikusa bat an eye at it. Chrome tugs at the edges of the robes, for the first time feeling somewhat self-conscious about it.
"It's what I wore when I slipped out of the hospital. I don't have anything else," she says.
It's matter-of-fact, for her; Chrome never really cared what she wore, and cared even less when she changed her name and left that loveless place she once called home. She has multiple sets of the same Kokuyo uniform now, and it suits her, keeps her movements free and unhindered during battle. Anything more is merely an afterthought.
Gokudera's expression goes through a spectacular series of changes. She can tell he's valiantly holding back pity, but it crops up once or twice anyway; there's sympathy, and horror, and thoughtfulness too, though about what she can't guess at.
"Right, you are not lounging around in that," Gokudera grumbles, going to the wardrobe and rooting around.
He has a surprising range and variety of clothes, Chrome discovers, watching from the side: vary-coloured shirts, jeans, tees, hoodies, coats, even two sets of black suits and one set of what looked suspiciously like tuxedos. When he emerges from the depths of the crowded wardrobe at last, he's gingerly holding out a worn, long winter coat to her, the kind with toggles in front. It looks like something he might've worn as a child to the skiing range.
Chrome fails to see how this improves on the situation, and very nearly says so. But seeing the stubborn look on Gokudera's face, she chooses not to.
The coat is dull green with a fur hood, and when he hands it to her, her fingers encounter soft fabric roughened with repeated washes.
"Thank you," she says to Gokudera, sincerely polite. The hem brushes her knees.
II
In the morning, Chrome wakes to loud bangs on the apartment door.
She stays very still under the covers, listening to the sound of Gokudera Hayato cursing and splashing around in the bathroom, and remembers where she is, and why she is here.
She nudges tentatively at the connection in the back of her mind; no response. That isn't unusual.
She flips open her phone: no new messages.
Finally giving up hope, Chrome emerges from underneath the covers to see the Storm Guardian violently brushing his hair, clipping on wristbands and rings and stuffing two packs of cigarettes into his pockets. Then he marches to the door, as if to his death, and wrenches it open.
There ensued a quick, hot-tempered discussion conducted entirely in rapid, bellicose Italian. Chrome caught the words "lunch" and "mall" and "outside," before Gokudera is being shouldered past and Bianchi strides into the room with purpose, tall and pale and imposing, and she catches sight of Chrome.
She stops, expression growing stormy.
"Gokudera Hayato," says Bianchi in a slow, dangerous voice.
"Che cazzo," mutters Gokudera, before switching to Japanese. "It's not what it looks like. Chrome can tell you that."
"Not what it looks like my ass," growls Bianchi before Chrome can do so. Her voice grows shriller the more she goes on. "As degenerate of a boy as you are, I at least expected you to have proper manners and be a gentleman and not - "
"I told you, it's not what it looks like!" Gokudera picks up the shopping bags Bianchi dropped on the floor and hauls them into the kitchen. Chrome hears the heavy thuds of them landing on the counter.
"Why are you here, anyway?" His voice continues to filter out. "I thought we agreed to meet in front of the restaurant at ten?"
"I’m in the mood for clams, which they do not have on the menu," says Bianchi breezily, leaning on the kitchen doorframe. She’s still looking at Chrome, though.
"You are not cooking at my house."
"Says the boy who made a lady sleep on his sofa."
The sound of a fridge door slamming, Gokudera cursing.
"It's not like that," Chrome finally makes herself say, and winces at the steely green gaze this attracts to her. But she can't back down on this point. "Gokudera-san was only trying to be kind."
“You don’t have to cover for him, you know,” says Bianchi gently.
“I’m not.”
Chrome makes herself return her gaze with equal steeliness. Her heart is thumping in her chest, blood rushing everywhere at once.
Bianchi's expression softens for a moment, before she takes off a hairband from her wrist and throws it in - Chrome presumes to be - Gokudera's direction.
"Ow! What was that for?"
"For making her wear your ratty old coat!"
"She was going to sleep in a hospital gown! It was ill omens! What else was I supposed to do?!" yells Gokudera, banging pots on the stove.
Chrome feels oddly lost, like she'd stepped into the midst of a conversation that has been going on for years, and she's missing any and all context. Which, in a sense, is exactly what is going on.
Chrome folds the borrowed blankets, puts them in the wardrobe, then she slips away into the bathroom to wash up and change into her uniform.
*
When she comes back, Bianchi is lounging on the sofa, texting, obviously having been banned from entering the kitchen.
"I want the scallops extra crispy, Hayato," Bianchi calls in Gokudera's direction.
"Fuck off," comes her brother's response.
Bianchi winks at her.
Chrome enters the kitchen cautiously. Gokudera is muttering insults under his breath while meticulously slicing carrots.
"God only knows if any of these is even safe to eat, she touched them with her bare hands," he moans.
He's wearing an apron with VONGOLA emblazoned over the front, and a cookbook open on the table beside the stove. He has his glasses on, pulled his hair into a ponytail (with the hairband Bianchi threw at him earlier, Chrome notices), and is working with all the concentration and vigilance of a bombmaker in his laboratory.
The carrot slices come out looking like they had been mesured with a ruler, thin and uniform and beautifully artistic.
Chrome peeks at the cookbook. It’s in Italian, but thankfully she’s already learned most of the basic words for food. She then takes a look inside the shopping bags Bianchi brought.
“I can wash the mushrooms,” she offers. Gokudera hums noncommittally, so she does.
Lunch ends up being scallop and mushroom pasta with a cold salad (the clam having been thrown out by Gokudera on account of "emitting dubious fumes"), with almond tofu from the convenience store as dessert. Chrome picks at the food without really tasting anything, worrying about how Ken and Chikusa are managing at Kokuyo.
She'd left the fridge half-stocked, she realizes, and relaxes minutely.
"I want to go shopping this afternoon," says Bianchi, drinking her after-meal coffee. "I need a new crop top to match with the lime green jeans. Hayato, come carry the bags for me."
"Not in a million years," says Gokudera.
*
"How does this look on me, Hayato?" Bianchi holds out a blood-red blouse and waves it in front of her brother.
"Hayato" is watching her with an expression that speaks of either a toothache or serious murderous intent. Chrome edges carefully behind the display racks, where hopefully if an explosion happens, the clothes will shield her from most of the debris.
The siblings bicker through the stores, with Gokudera criticizing every sartorial choice Bianchi makes but reluctantly carrying the bags nonetheless, and then they come upon a store for teens and Chrome startles to find a navy blue dress being held to her chest.
"Hmm, a little too childish," says Bianchi, considering. "How about this one?" She swaps it for a dark pink skirt, lightning-quick.
Not since she walked away from her former mother had Chrome been so subjected to this particular trial at the clothing stores - well, no quite. Even before that, this was a rare occasion, with clothes-buying duty usually delegated to their rotating list of maids, who preferred to shop online without taking her anywhere. Chrome didn't mind; she disliked clothes shopping in general, preferring to wear her school uniform on most occasions.
But this is different. Bianchi is a one-woman tsunami, overwhelming in her intensity and thoroughness and unwavering determination to have her way. Without herself quite understanding how, Chrome somehow acquires three dresses, two skirts, a nightgown, and half a dozen tops in different styles. Bianchi nearly buys her a hairpiece as well, but Chrome was able to slip away to the bathroom while Bianchi was torn over colors, and when she comes back the human-shaped tsunami has redirected her focus, and is tormenting Gokudera by trying to force a purple shirt over his head instead.
As soon as he gets away from her and the (“Horrendous!” according to Gokudera) shirt, Gokudera leaves the bags on a nearby bench in a huff, and sneaks off to the bathroom himself.
Bianchi buys three sundaes from the little vendor in the plaza, with crisps. When Gokudera doesn't come back on time, Bianchi eats half of his, before Gokudera himself appears in a rage, grabs it from her, and finishes it in giant, angry spoonfuls.
While the siblings are having their third argument of the day (or has it just been one long argument all along?), momentarily forgetting her, Chrome checks her phone again.
No new messages.
She tries to distract herself by thinking of what she can bring Ken and Chikusa when she gets back. Ken will be happy with just a few packets of gums, she’s thinks - maybe a ramune or two. Chikusa is trickier. Perhaps a Keigo Higashino novel. Chikusa likes detective stories, even though he tries to deny it.
They part with Bianchi at a crossroads. The way there is spent with a weird silence. Neither of the siblings said much of anything to each other after the latest squabble, looking to opposite sides with a fake, deliberate nonchalance. Chrome walks between them, trying to fold herself as small as possible.
But when they're about to part, Bianchi smiles and reaches over to ruffle Gokudera's hair, and Gokudera shakes her off, mouths something irritated and petulant. Bianchi smiles at Chrome again before her motorcycle drives off down the road. Gokudera watches her go, something unreadable on his face.
*
The evening is spent paging through Gokudera's Japanese to Italian dictionary, picking out words she knows and noting down the ones she doesn't. Gokudera works at his desk; after a while, he moves to stand in front of the open window, pulling deeply on cigarettes, one after another. The room fills with the smell of smoke, which at this point is even becoming somewhat familiar.
Chrome showers briefly, changes into the brand new nightgown. It’s a baby blue one with frills at the hem and sleeves, and the material is silky-thin. It’s all Bianchi. The way it rubs against her skin is unfamiliar and distracting, and after ten minutes of it Chrome discreetly changes it for her old gown and Gokudera’s coat again, hoping he wouldn’t notice.
She huddles low into the blankets, staring at the unmoving mailbox on the screen of her flip phone.
She misses Ken, Chikusa, and Mukuro-sama so much that it’s a physical ache against her sternum. She shuts the screen after a while, and tries to focus on the rhythm of her breathing.
In. Out. In. Out.
The Mist Ring shines on her right middle finger. Her organs are whole and functioning, proof of Mukuro-sama’s presence and continued life. It all happened. It’s all fine, or will be very soon.
She tells herself this, like the last line of a fairytale, or a mantra.
Chrome falls asleep watching Gokudera’s profile in the light of the streetlamps. The faint, pulsing red tip of a cigarette burns away in the dark, chased by the night wind.
*
The room is dark when Chrome wakes again to soft music. The window is still open, curtains fluttering in the breeze, but the person who was smoking by it when Chrome fell asleep is no longer there.
Instead, the faint, muffled sound of a piano strums the air. A familiar melody, one that Chrome cannot name; slow and brittle and melancholic, the more so for its whispering sound, the hesitant way the keys are carefully quested after. It’s ethereal, unearthly; impossibly dear yet also impossibly alien.
Chrome lies there for a while, immobile, floating vainly in the darkness like a ship unmoored, exiled by the sound to an unconscious sea. Another mind floats beside hers, faintly dreaming, there in the murky darkness between sleep and reality. They drift, so very near yet thousands of miles apart, listening to the same muted music, as if from underwater.
Right then, they need no words. Only feelings, instincts, and the incipient shadows of dreams.
The piano stops. The soft pedal shifts back into place. Chrome’s fingers loosen in their grip upon her stomach, and she falls once more into the darkness.
*
The ping of her flip phone wakes her up at half past five. In the bleary morning light, she reads Ken's fuzzy message on the low-res screen, then gets up as quietly as she can.
She leaves the nightgown carefully folded up by the blankets. She'd left the tags hidden inside the collar and sleeve, and the rest of the clothes undisturbed in their shopping bags, so Gokudera or Bianchi can return it to the stores later without any trouble.
She has to work harder at learning how to refuse other’s kindness, Chrome thinks as she gathers her things. The last thing she wants to do is to impose, to be a burden, to be extraneous – like she had been, before. Purposeless. Easily forgotten. Easily left aside.
Eyepatch. Pins. Uniform. Belt. Boots. Vongola ring. The shape of the trident in her mind, waiting to be materialized with a touch of her will.
Center of gravity on the balls of her feet, ready to sprint, ready to act at a moment’s notice.
Chrome takes out a page from her language study notebook and leaves it on the table, besides the dark, bulky shape she now knows to be a piano. She checks again that she hasn’t left anything of hers, and haven’t taken anything that isn’t hers, then opens the apartment door and slips away into the dim, misty morning.
*
Gokudera wakes to a guest-free apartment.
There is a note written on lined paper, lying on the dining table.
Grazie di tutto. Arrivederci. - Chrome
The shopping bags from yesterday are placed neatly at the foot of the sofa, with the receipts folded carefully atop the clothes. Aside from these things, it is as if his apartment has never had a guest in the last two days.
Gokudera drags an irritated hand through his hair.
“It’s not as if I can go over to Kokuyo to return it,” he grumbles under his breath, stuffing the bags and the note into the depths of the wardrobe, right beside the tank of nitroglycerin. “For heaven’s sake, Mukuro’s thugs are there. ...It wouldn't end well.”
Or wouldn't it? Maybe it would, if Chrome were there.
Doesn’t mean he’s about to make nice with two convicted criminals and delinquents, though.
Not even if they all led scarily similar lives, once upon a time. It is only that Gokudera still has some powerful family left in the world, whereas they don’t. Not anymore.
Some days, Gokudera truly detests the ability of his own brain to make unwelcome connections like this.
He wonders about the heating in Kokuyo for a moment, then he tries not to wonder.
It’s not as if he can do anything about it, even if he knew.
The thought leaves a peculiarly hollow feeling in his chest.
Gokudera lights another cigarette, and stares at the smoke winding its way up to the ceiling, a thin, wane, solitary stream.