Do As You Like Chapter One

DISCLAIMER: If I were really Amano Akira, I'd wonder how I was able to write a manga when I was five years old. Don't own, bros.

A/N: Hi, this is teawithmochi here! I've always wanted to write a KHR fic, so here's one of those shameless OC-Inserts. This is an exploration of Kyouya's life before canon in the eyes of another person. I'm still not sure if the story will reach canon, but if it does then expect it to be AU. ^^ Inform me if you see any typos, please!

{KHR18KHR}

"Oh my god, Fon looks so hot~!" The shrill voice echoed from directly beside my left ear, momentarily deafening me. Scowling, I covered my ears and blanched at my friend because, really, she was insane.

"Are you trying to make me deaf, woman?" Ow. I shook my head and dropped my head into my arms, scrambling my short hair. "Tone it down, your inner fangirl is showing through." Nika laughed smacked the base of my skull. Ow!

"Oh, you know you love my fangirling," she joked, spontaneously attempting to braid the short strands at my nape. "But I can't help it! Fon is just waaay too smexy in this picture!"

I snorted. "'Smexy'? How old are you, thirteen? And isn't this Fon supposed to be a baby?"

"Of course! Didn't I tell you? The Arcobaleno are—"

"—The seven strongest babies," I finished with a skeptical glance in her direction. "Plus Lal Mirch. But if they're the seven strongest babies, how is Fon supposed to be sexy?"

Nika sputtered and stared at me. "Well, I mean, he just used his present!"

"…You must realize I have no idea what you're talking about. How is a gift meant to turn a baby into a sexy man…?"

"I—I don't know! Magic, I suppose! This Checkerface guy has the ability to make grown men into babies, of course he can do exact opposite!"

"Then how did he manage to make them into babies into the first place?"

She grabbed my notebook and hit me again. "Shut up! Stop questioning me!"

I cursed. "You're insane!"

Nika harrumphed and stuck her nose up at me. "You just don't appreciate fine literature."

Scrunching up my nose, I didn't reply. Hey, it wasn't like I really liked to read manga or watch anime. That was Nika's domain. Couldn't she, I don't know, read books once in a while? Books like Catch-22, or The Picture of Dorian Gray, or even Ready Player One, a more modern novel that I had finished just three days ago? Instead, she squealed over fictional characters. My eyes rolled. Ridiculous.

"Eee!" The brunette squeaked again, no doubt due to Fon again. I sighed long-sufferingly.

The final day of the school year ended uneventfully, and my class filed out of the room as swiftly as we could once the bell rang signaling our departure. Nika didn't look up from her phone, apparently immersed within the manga. Grabbing her hand and guiding us both to the bus ramp, I killed a biting insult before it could leave my mouth.

Sometimes I couldn't understand how Nika could be so happy all of the time. For the past three months, I had kept an eye on her, ready for her to burst into tears. After all, her parents had died in a fire that long ago, and she hadn't cried at all, not even a single drop. As her (not only, but perhaps best) friend, I worried for her. She showed no signs, true, but I remembered a similar incident when her cat had died when we were seven and she hadn't begun wailing until two weeks later. Now, the shoe could drop at any moment.

One more death, I knew, would break her for sure.

(Please let it not be me.)

We found our bus easily, and I pulled her up the steps and to our usual seats, pulling out my scarf as I did so. She blinked and turned to me, her eyes for once away from the metal device in her right hand.

"You finally finished it?" She asked redundantly, pulling the fabric from my hands. "It's nice. Oh!"

I huffed as she ran her fingers along the black fabric, oohing and aahing at the design. I'd based it on my favorite character from her blasted manga obsession, stitching the number eighteen on one end and the kanji for 'discipline' on the other. I quite liked it, and it seemed that Nika did too.

"It's wonderful!" She once again shrieked, though thankfully quietly so as to not disturb the other passengers. "It even has an eighteen, and ooh! What does this say?"

I told her, and she laughed. "You really like Hibari-kun, don't you?"

"He's the only cool one," I answered wryly, snorting. "The others are wimps."

"Heeehh… Is that a crush I spy?"

This time it was I that smacked her head. "Not at all. If you're trying to ruffle me, it won't work."

Nika pouted. "Aww. And here I thought I could write some happy-happy fun times with you two, if you know what I mean…"

Trying to hide my embarrassed flush, I slammed my forehead into the seat in front of me and wrapped the scarf around my face, ignoring the squawk from the person before us. I readied my reply to her, opening my mouth, but bit my tongue as the bus seemed to hit a pothole in the middle of the road.

The bus lurched acutely to one side, far too much for my liking. My heart leapt as I glanced outside the window and realized that yes; the bus was rounding a curve on a cliffside.

A steep cliffside with wild, crashing waves at the bottom of a hundred-foot drop.

"Nika!" Was all I could cry before the bus tipped over entirely and then—

We were falling.

Everyone screamed in unison, a cacophonous mishmash of terrified teenagers, and the metal deathtrap that had once been our school bus began to sink rapidly, too fast for my liking. Acting on reflexes, I yelled for everyone on the left side—my side, the higher side—to open their windows before the pressure became too much to open the metal panes even a little bit, and shoved the emergency exit open. For once I was glad that I was such a paranoid person that we always sat at the safest point on the bus.

Someone opened the exit at the top. Water spilled in from every direction as, as a whole, we all shimmied through the open windows and out into the freezing ocean. Air! I needed air!

My lungs threatened to burst, but I clamped my lips together by sheer willpower so that the oxygen wouldn't escape me. My eyes blinked rapidly, stinging, and I glanced around for Nika even as my body tumbled with the rushing currents.

I had never been so fucking scared before in my life.

Finally I located her, and frantically swam over to her heart-stoppingly limp body, grabbing hold of her wrist and yanking us both to the surface. We broke, and I heard her loud, heaving gasps before a wave lurched and we were under again. Shit! My grip on her hand slipped loose from the force of the water, and I sank again, unable to keep afloat as my body heat seeped out into the greedy ocean and away from me. I couldn't breathe, having not been able to take in enough air at the last minute.

I was going to die. Oh gods, I was going to die an eighteen-year-old loser with one friend and no one but my family and said friend to remember me. I'd never be a doctor or lawyer or even a mediocre musician. My life would just end like this. A haze descended over my mind as I panicked. Soon, the water no longer felt cold; the burning in my chest no longer seemed so strong; my fingers, numb and clumsy, grasped for something, anything to hold onto, and I pulled on something light and thin.

My scarf? When had it…? As I stared at the purple number eighteen that I had so painstakingly weaved into cloth, I was struck by the sheer ridiculousness of my situation. Here I was, drowning in the ocean. Would my parents care? Would my brother miss me? He was only five, would he even understand what it meant for someone to die? Would anyone remember to feed my pet rabbit in my death…?

Black began to stain the edges of my sight, and I hacked, the pressure of the ocean forcing water into my mouth and down my lungs, choking me. Ah, fuck! My arms flapped about in the water, clawing, but I couldn't go anywhere but down. But where was down? Up? Left? Right? I couldn't see anything anymore, only searching about with my kinesthesia that only confused me even more.

Was Nika alive? Was she like me, drowning and blind? I didn't know. My mind whirred and whirred.

I'm not going to let it end like this! Fuck it, body, move! Get the fuck out of this mess!

And then I stopped working altogether.

{KHR18KHR}

Hibari Kyouya was born on the fifth of May, at six-eighteen in the afternoon, weighing at exactly two-point-four kilograms. A small child. Tiny. Premature, but steadily gaining weight as he slept in his incubator, fingers occasionally twitching.

I had no idea what I was in for when I woke up.