Alms to the Birds
Schmoogy

Katekyo Hitman Reborn! does not belong to me.

What if he had arrived first?

The air was wet and mist curled around his feet like ghosts in the grass. He was alone.

'This must be…ten years later,' he thought as the telltale bubblegum smoke dissipated. Idiot cow! He had learned to duck when that ridiculous purple bazooka headed his way, but his reflexes had been too slow. He had been in the middle of something important as well...

But the initial confusion and irritation faded and a little thrill of excitement rippled through him. This was a chance! He could find out what the next ten years had in store for them! He only had five minutes so he probably couldn't unearth much. But he could try. He began walking forward.

His future self must be in the past, he reasoned. Was he strong? Mature? Cool? What would Tenth think of him? Was he still Tenth's right hand or had Yamamoto beaten him? He shuddered. The thought was inconceivable and therefore should not be thought of.

After picking and stomping his way through the thick undergrowth for –'Surely it has been more than five minutes?' – he came to a wide, grassy clearing. Thin birdsong wavered hesitantly in the air and the sunlight had an odd, pale quality to it.

A black coffin lay at the border of the glade. It sat there unobtrusively, quietly, as if it were part of the forest. He approached it warily, ignoring the chill that spread through his bones with every step he took. It still looked relatively new, untouched by wind and rain. He laid a hand on its surface, curious. It had been polished to the point he could see his fifteen-year-old face in it.

It was when his fingers ran over the Vongola insignia, the clams, the bullet, the intricate twists and turns of silver, that his chest went cold. He suddenly found that he couldn't breathe.

His brain knew that only the heads of a family would earn a coffin such as this. It knew that such a coffin was reserved for the boss. It also knew that Sawada Tsunayoshi should be boss of the Vongola at this time.

One plus one plus one equalled hell.

He didn't need to look inside. The X proudly adorning the coffin told him enough.

Decimo. Juudaime. Tenth. Tsuna.

'No…' his mind garbled, frantically grasping for some explanation that wasn't the truth. 'No…No…Nonono…' Fear, hot and heavy and suffocating, rose up in his throat like a wave and jammed in his oesophagus. A yearning, an ache, exploded inside his breast and swelled until he was overflowing –

Air, he needed air. He needed –

Tenth was undefeatable, unbreakable; he was immortal. His guardians would sooner die than let him end up here. Losing him was not an option. How did this…how could this…

Tsuna's homework was covered in red X-s. This X was just another mistake.

Air!

Did this mean he was dead as well? Was there another coffin somewhere in this forest?

No, that was impossible. If he had died, he should have found himself ten feet under some nameless gravestone. Perhaps not even in a grave. Shame hit him like a sledgehammer to the chest and he gagged with its intensity. He belonged in some rat-infested ditch, in a pile of worthless, decomposing bodies where even the crows wouldn't pick at them. His future self had failed. He had failed.

He fell to his knees, gasping, hands splayed on the top of the coffin, as if he could force the warmth from his palms into the body that lay inside it. That's all Tenth was now; a body stiff with rigor mortis with an expression smooth and blank and frozen and gun wounds stitched up, as if hiding the scars could soothe and heal. His lungs heaved and heaved and he heard an anguished scream and then another. Whether it was his, or the sound of his world shattering like sugar glass around him, he didn't know.

"Fuck, fuck," he rasped and the palms turned into quivering fists that slammed down onto the perfect, polished ebony. "FUCK."

Their Juudaime, their Tsuna would die. His luminous smile, his warm, heartfelt consideration would be lost to the earth. His exasperation, his stumbly walk and his skittishness were lost with them.

His sharp, all-seeing, all-understanding eyes were erased. His flame, his brilliant flame extinguished.

His, his, his. All his and never anyone else's.

How could the sky still be that deep, clear blue when Tsuna was -

Dead.

There was a rustle from inside, a bump and a muffled, "Ow."

The right-hand man –a title lost in failure – raised red-rimmed eyes from the ground. The cover slid off, pink smoke seeping out from the gaps like some experiment gone right.

"Ughhh," Tsuna sat up, nursing his forehead. He looked around, brightened and smiled -that beautiful smile- when he saw him. "Oh, thank goodness you're here-"

His body was warm, his spiky hair smelt of laundry and his small palms were gesticulating wildly in wonderful, jittery surprise.

Alive. Not dead.

But the lilies swamped him in the scent of death and Tsuna shivered in the cold, misty air.

Gokudera crushed him to his chest and wept.

"So you saw."

It was more of a statement than anything else and Gokudera could only glare tiredly at the swordsman. A sob threatened to rise again and Gokudera stiffened his entire body until it suffocated and died in his breast. 'How could you let this happen?' he wanted to ask, but feared that if he said it, this hazy future would solidify and no longer be just a nightmare.

A part of Gokudera wanted to know. He wanted to know where the hell they had been on that day. He wanted to know how this had happened. He wanted to know how Tsuna could be have been just as human as they were, with red blood, with paper skin, with a fleshy, fluttering heart that could now all too easily be –

"Yeah. I saw," Gokudera answered, his voice hoarse from the screams. Tsuna's fate hadn't been the only thing he had seen; the dark scar marring Yamamoto's chin, the briefest flash of wet emotion on his face; how his watchful gaze had never left Tsuna; how Yamamoto only relaxed when he knew that their boss was protected by pillows and dreams and sleep.

"You should go to bed as well." Yamamoto shifted, arms crossed, long legs stretched and the sheath of his sword just visible. "There's another bed in Tsuna's room."

"I won't be able to sleep."

Whenever Gokudera closed his eyes, the coffin appeared on the black canvas of his eyelids.

Yamamoto nodded, smiling but not really smiling. "You really haven't changed at all." When Gokudera looked at him, he saw that Yamamoto's eyes were dark and sharp with the weariness of someone who had thought about the past too much. "Your hands even shake in the same way."

Gokudera stood abruptly, the clatter of his chair making the silence crash down on the two guardians, and he stalked out without a word.

Tsuna was asleep, his soft breathing thick with tired tears. Gokudera watched him for a moment to convince himself that Tsuna's chest was rising and falling and rising and falling, that every twitchy movement under closed eyes was another sign of life.

How could he prevent this? Gokudera didn't know much about time travel, about how their presence affected their timeline. If he went back to the past and destroyed the cause of this, would Yamamoto's Tsuna come back? Or was this future his future; unchangeable and undeniable?

He would find out. He would research, experiment and pour every part of his being into ensuring that Tsuna would never make it into that lily-lined coffin. In the meantime, he would protect Tsuna's future by protecting his past.

Gokudera only fell asleep when he was sure that Tsuna's breaths wouldn't catch and fade to nothing, and even then he had nightmares of a darkened, smoky sky.

AN: Jhator – 'giving alms to the birds': A Tibetan funeral ritual, involving the placing parts of the corpse on a mountaintop.

Also known as 'Sky burial'.

Thank you so much Tramontana Keeper for being such a fantastic beta and for helping me fix the twiddly bits.

EDIT: Added line breaks because fanfictiondotnet loves editing the format of my fics when I'm not active.