Title: si guarda al fine
Fandom: Katekyo Hitman Reborn
Characters: Yamamoto/Hibari
For yamahiba_fest

Ten years is the measure of how long it takes for Yamamoto to write out his penance. When the family is dead and gone and replaced simply by a newer power structure, he sits outside the veranda and takes his tea while he writes.

Across the room, Hibari watches him. It is strange to consider him in formal robes, this time, instead of a sleek, Western suit. Time has not lent him the same sort of masculinity more present in Yamamoto's set shoulders, the definition of his muscles. Instead, Hibari is as slender as before, made more apparent by his hakama. If he were to stretch his arm forward, Yamamoto would be distracted by the bones of his wrist, the whiteness of his arm, but the gesture is as frivolous as some of Yamamoto's more flightless fancies, and Hibari is never one for frivolity.

"Can you wait for a few more hours?" Yamamoto says. "I'm only halfway done with it; it shouldn't take too long to write out my last will and testament."

It's meant to be a joke. He gets a raised eyebrow in turn.

"And what makes you think I'm here to kill you?" Hibari says, his voice smooth and cool and unflustered. Perfect poise for provocations. Yamamoto, in spite of his own reservations, thinks he makes a good yakuza leader like that.

"Just a hunch," says Yamamoto, even if his instincts are telling him to run.

He's no coward, after all.

on structural cohesion, and its failings

The decline of the Vongola began shortly after the assassination of the tenth capo. On the 14th of October, shortly after 14:00, Sawada Tsunayoshi was found dead in his room at the second floor of the main house. In his dresser were his X-Gloves. He had no protection, no recourse; presumably, he had known his murderer well, but the suspect was never convicted.

Shortly after that were a series of inconsequential coups and the elimination of several potential heirs; whatever political base the Vongola had soon fragmented with the internal tensions brewed by contestations of legitimacy and aspirations to power. Sawada Tsunayoshi had no wife to bear him children; rather, he had no interest. Potential successors were limited to distant cousins and estranged followers such as...

Yamamoto peers at his writing; he scratches the back of his head. "What's another word for asshole?"

"Are you describing yourself?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Yamamoto says. "But, no, I'm really trying to describe Xanxus here."

Hibari almost looks bemused.

Yamamoto shakes his head, and picks up his pen.

a question of legitimacy and authority

- you see, ultimately, whatever power struggle there was in the family was projected in the foreign policies of the governments they controlled; if the Italian faction felt that the security measures taken by the Japanese faction were to extreme, they were tangled in a security dilemma. What made the Tenth seem all the more legitimate was not so much primogeniture as it was...

His hand stills; his fingers tighten around his pen. Well, there were many reasons for Tsuna's ascension to power, mostly from dumb luck, as Tsuna would repeatedly mention with the self-deprecation characteristic of his rule, and from kindness, doled out in appropriate measures, regardless of how it was perceived as indivisible.

"You balance power and make it acceptable by making it moral," says Yamamoto, tapping the base of his pen against his chin, and the scar throbs with its imagined ghost of a wound.

"Morality is meaningless," says Hibari, shortly.

"Yes," says Yamamoto, "only you would think that. But the rest of us need something else to hold on to other than strength, or else we'd go crazy."

If Hibari were a normal man, he would have felt wounded. Instead, Hibird pokes out of the sleeves of Hibari's hakama and trills a sad tune of the school song instead.

"Oh, don't give me that," says Yamamoto, rolling his eyes. "I never said you had to live by it. You just have to seemlike it."

and if you'd like an instruction manual, you can have it

Appearance is necessary to retain power. Whatever Medieval notions of honor existed, it does not necessitate stability in the Modern era. You can prefer to stab your enemies in the back before they stabbed you, but the more pragmatic notion is to kill all potential threats, regardless of alliance. If collective security, or some semblance of it, is used as a tool, then by all means do so. But the harshest reality is that appeasement rarely works, and it all comes down to balancing power in the end.

For protection, they say. For justice, they say. For peace. There's no end to the madness.

Hibari could use some of his advice, later on. Yamamoto almost laughs at the thought. Hibari runs his gang with the same animalistic tendencies he'd protected Namimori; with ruthless strength, all hard power and no soft power in turn.

It's a wonder his followers haven't staged an uprising yet.

Yamamoto would probably follow Hibari, if he asks. As long as Yamamoto doesn't particularly probe too much into the day-to-day affairs, and as long as Yamamoto doesn't feel conflicted by his own sense of justice and righteousness, then it's possible they could function well together. Perhaps.

(But there's no truth in that.)

"My father taught me how to be loyal," says Yamamoto. "But if there was one thing he failed to teach me completely, it was how to kill."

Even now, his bones start to shake at that epiphany; there are still some aspects of being consequently peaceful that remain ingrained, regardless of how much his body fights it. He does not think that makes him impressive as a fighter; it only makes him a little human, a little sane.

"No," says Hibari. He sounds bored, almost. "You were already one from the start."

"Ahaha," says Yamamoto, "you got me there."

the ontology of violence

Do you think bloodlust is hereditary? That, in the configurations of our genes, you'd had no escape from it? You were not like Hibari, who'd made no qualms about his nature, but you were still like him, still bred for this.

Do you hate yourself, now?

When Yamamoto speaks, again, his voice is rough, impassioned. Like he's trained for this. (He is.) "Can I tell you a secret?"

"No," says Hibari, flatly, but still Yamamoto goes on.

"I almost didn't go through with it. Almost. He was my friend and he saved me, and I felt like he was responsible for my life forever, you know? Like that fox in... oh, what's the name?" Yamamoto squints at the ceiling. Gokudera was always better at academics than he. "I forget. Well, anyway, I asked Tsuna if I could talk to him that afternoon, and Gokudera was kind of pissed because he wanted to spend the entire day glued to Tsuna's side, right? Because they were. You know."

Hibari checks his nails, unimpressed by Yamamoto's attempts at eloquence.

"But you see," says Yamamoto, "I still killed him. With my own hands."

The silence, afterwards, is measured. So this is your big secret, Hibari's eyes seem to taunt. Yamamoto's figured out a long time ago that the secret isn't too quietly kept after all. "He was bound to die, eventually."

It's true; ever since Tsuna inherited the right to rule, he'd gotten more death threats than Hibari had made them. The betting pool was torn between death by assassination and death by self-inflicted accident. Yamamoto doesn't remember which one he bet on. If he did.

"No, not so soon," says Yamamoto. "He was young, but I had a choice, and I made mine."

"Why are you telling me this?" Hibari says, irritated. Yamamoto ignores him, and Hibari bristles at the thought.

"The strangest thing is," says Yamamoto, thoughtfully. "I think he let me."

It doesn't make the justification more worthy of respect, nevertheless.

fie; fie

Letting a group of criminals define the trajectory of the nation makes democracy less effective. What kind of accountability do we expect when we have a particularly influential group pressuring for more protection against foreign capital, for limiting supply to raise prices? There's always the problem between equity and equality, what more now that there's only a semblance of it reflected in the system?

Yamamoto scratches the entire section out. Then he rips out the sheet of paper and chucks it into the trash can.

"I hate politics," Yamamoto sighs, and gets back to writing.

cycle, repetition number

So you think that goodness begets goodness, and harm begets harm. But where do you turn to when the only real goodness you know can only be pushed forward by more destructive forces behind closed doors? Because, despite what you've always believed, the Vongola were not purely good, nor were they purely evil. They were just strong, just...

"What do you think of, when you hear the word elite?" Yamamoto asks, suddenly. Hibari narrows his eyes, but offers no answer. Perhaps he is still a little annoyed at being brushed off, earlier. Too bad Yamamoto doesn't need one to move forward to make a point.

"I used to think the elite was all about money," says Yamamoto. "Because money is a good resource, right? It helps you build up capital, gets you a good education, a good job. Makes you look more influential, makes others listen to you more. It's everything the honor students used to dream of.

"It's not like we're strangers to the concept. Every society has some sort of elite, no matter how primitive it is," Yamamoto pauses, and leans forward to rest his chin on his palm. "We were feudal once, for god's sake. Political obligations, chivalry, honor and strong clan ties and all that.

"The thing is, I think I enjoyed my job, once. I killed a lot of bad people, and I never asked what for. It made me feel like some kind of vigilante, always out on the prowl to make the streets a little cleaner, a little safer. That was the only skill I had - to kill, as I could protect someone. But then I got into the real meat of the business, you know? The shadier kind, like what you're probably entangled in every day.

"We collect protection payments every other week, and you see how these businessmen have kids cowering behind them and praying the big, bad men go away soon and leave them in peace. But what kind of protection is that, when what they need the most is to protect themselves from us? Doesn't it make you sick, to claim to protect people when all we do is abuse them?"

Hibari has no response. Yamamoto doesn't expect one, and he peers at the remaining ink of his ballpoint pen before opening the drawer to pull out another set.

"But, you know, I think I'm more of a ninja than a samurai, in that sense."

Hibari stares at him.

"Ahahaha, I know, never mind. What was I talking about again?"

"Nothing," says Hibari, "but foolishness."

Yamamoto's smile softens; it looks a little sad. "I didn't think it was nothing, then. But you'd know all about foolishness, wouldn't you?"

man is not self-sufficient

The greatest restriction to freedom is family. Obligation is the entrapment of choice. But to profess such is merely an attempt to disguise choice; by saying "I had no choice, it was for them" does not make the action any more moral.

If you speak of interest and self-preservation, the family as a unit multiplies this rational action tenfold. Let us not talk merely of nuclear families; rather, the more appropriate terminology for such groups as the mafia could hardly be differentiated from a pack.

Protect your own, protect your young. Territoriality is the code to live by. You grow up thinking that this was the only way to go about life, and that your family had its own brand of justice, the most moral, ideological proof of it. But there were extensions of it that you were be blind to, because a family as large as, say, a mafia clan couldn't possibly sustain itself on meager resources. Thus, you have to turn to other interests, to go underground...

"I can't help it," you can tell yourself, the first few times you have to kill a child. "I have to protect my family first."

The truth is, whatever dual morality you would pretend to have is only an abstraction. Abstractions are never permanent unless your mind wills it to be concrete, but some just call it a delusion. It collapses when you feel the most secure, when you think you've done nothing wrong. It's called guilt.

The shishi-odoshi tips forward; a thin stretch of water gushes out to meet the the base of a sieve. A few feet away, Hibari tips Yamamoto over the edge of the porch, fingers tangled painfully in the short spikes of Yamamoto's hair. For a moment, Yamamoto measures the space between them, calculates how quickly he could steal a kiss.

But he doesn't.

"You're still an idiot," says Hibari. Grunts out, more like. In some ways, Hibari is more disarming when he has less finesse, when he seems more human.

"Your bodyguards will worry," Yamamoto points out. His tone is light, but his eyes are severe, almost like a warning. Many, many years ago, he would not have considered this scenario.

(Many, many years ago, he would not have killed anyone just yet.)

Hibari's grip slackens, but does not relieve its hold. Yamamoto reaches up to encircle Hibari's wrist with his own bandaged fingers, a parody of gentleness even as he applies a little more pressure. "And then they'll start to wonder why you haven't killed me yet, and you'll have to explain why, exactly, you've been fraternizing with the enemy."

Hibari pulls away, as if singed. "I wonder about that myself," says Hibari, after a beat. He looks at his own fingers with the frustration reminiscent of a child.

Yamamoto stands up, brushing the dirt off the back of his knees. He wipes his hands against the front of his yukata as he seats himself in front of his writing tools, yet again.

The night is long, but his time is short. In less than two hours, he will die. If not by Hibari's hands, then by more vengeful ghosts from the Vongola. Like Gokudera, for one.

The frightening thing is not that he is afraid of death. What scares him more is that he can still think of how to kill, kill, kill, even before they come at him with all their might.

one final truth

Because this is what family means: there is no escape.

"Are you still afraid, Yamamoto Takeshi?" Hibari asks. Afraid of what, he doesn't say, but Yamamoto understands, all the same, because fear, to Hibari, was always a weakness.

Yamamoto sets aside his pen and considers Hibari's frown. His impatience. The flash of steel against the stiff fabric of his hakama.

What Yamamoto hears is this: Will you come with me?

and another, still:

But Yamamoto was never that sort of guy.

"No," says Yamamoto, and touches the sheath tucked inside his yukata with a smile.

end

they'll fill a pit as well as better: tush, man, mortal men, mortal men. - falstaff, henry iv.1, .