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It’s dark, this corner of his mind that he’s found himself shoved in. Muffled too. Like a closet with the door shut tight. He floats through time, a dandelion caught on the wind. He watches and listens to the blurred sights and muffled sounds that slip in through the cracks. Or maybe they’re let in on purpose, to taunt him with what he can no longer have. That seems like Rokudo’s style.
“Khufufu,” the disembodied voice occupying Hayato’s head alongside him echoes. “Have you given up already? I must say, I was expecting more of a fight from the Vongola Decimo’s so-called right-hand man.”
“Shut up,” Hayato whispers. There’s no use in fighting. There’s nothing to fight for one- Rokudo’s nothing more than an oppressive, inescapable presence draped over his mind. He coats everything like an oil slick, is as elusive as a ghost. Even if Hayato had hands to claw him with, he would be impossible to grasp.
God knows how many days Hayato spent trying to root him out.
A glimpse of the outside world filters in, and Hayato can’t help but strain towards it. Where is he? How long has it been? Is Jyuudaime okay? Has anyone noticed the threat in their midst?
He finds his own face staring back at him in a bathroom mirror. A cruel, smug smirk graces his lips; his school uniform is carefully, properly done up; and his right-eye burns red. “I’m so glad you’ve come to accept the reality of your situation, Hayato,” his own voice says. Rokudo’s cursed laugh vibrates in Hayato’s throat, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “It does make thing easier.”
Hayato snarls, which only makes Rokudo’s grin spread his lips further. His hand reaches up and rests against the mirror, and Rokudo leans in until Hayato’s face is almost pressed against his reflection. “Poor little Smokin’ Bomb,” Rokudo whispers, soft and crooning like a lover. “Trapped and all alone with no one looking for him.”
The only thing missing is the feel of Rokudo’s breath against his cheek. Hayato shudders. He retreats from the forefront, and Mukuro lets him go with a dark laugh, wishing him a mocking good night. The world blurs again.
“Jyuudaime will come for me,” he whispers to himself. He holds the words deep within the core of himself, a burning fire he refuses to let die. Still, they burn.
They burn with the memories of those first few days when he fought and fought and fought. Burn with the flashes Rokudo let him see all while his unstoppable flood of glee swelled around Hayato. Burn with Tsuna’s smile and the affection in his brown eyes as he stares up at Rokudo, not a single question in his eyes even as Rokudo sheds more and more of Hayato’s habits and mannerisms in the name of “proving himself worthy of Jyuudaime!”
Even Yamamoto, that baseball-brained idiot, laughs it all away like he does everything else.
Hayato curls tighter around himself, a hurricane compacted into a ball. At the center, in his eye, he whispers frantically, desperately, fighting against the despair licking at his edges, “Jyuudaime will come for me. Jyuudaime will come for me. Jyuudaime will come for me.”
“Oh little hurricane,” Rokudo says through the wind. “No one’s coming for you. Khufufu.”