Something Really Ugly

You don't exactly expect to wake. You don't expect anything, really. What is there left to expect for a man who'd thought he'd died? But when you wake, it is to clean sheets and white walls, a blurry figure that may be an IV drip to your left and …

You're alive. This in it of itself is something suddenly startling and unpracticed. Like breathing, like seeing, like losing all feeling in your right hand beneath the weight of something very dark and very warm.

"Yamamoto," you croak, feeling the rasp of disuse scratch foreign pitches into your voice. Yamamoto starts awake; you don't remember him being so jumpy in sleep, but that is something you've become almost unfamiliar with in these last few months.

"Hey," he says, by way of greeting. His face is solemn, but he offers you a soft grin that unfurls his features into something tried and recognizable. You still see his rage in the shadows of your mind's eye, cold hard planes like cracked stone. "How are you feeling? Shamal said you'd be waking up soon. Want some water?" He holds your right hand with his left, curled together like fingers of the same fist. You stare at the bruising across his joints as you nod your assent, feel him extricate his knuckles from yours, trailing across the back of your wrist as he crosses the room and pours you a cup from a tall, clear pitcher.

"You were out about twenty-five hours," he says as he hands you the tumbler. You stare at the water, crystalline surfaces of the cut glass bending the light to look like swimming white fishes in your cup. "Everyone's been worried about you. I-Pin even wanted to try some ancient Chinese thing to make you get better faster. We stopped her after she brought out the needles." He laughs, quiet but open: full-bodied shudders of movement. "I know how you hate needles." You take a sip from the cup, losing the fishes to the tilted angle of your hand.

Yamamoto watches you and smiles, stretching his lips around the gauze and stitches keeping his chin together. "I was afraid I might have hit you a bit too hard," he admits quietly, the tone of a guilty schoolboy still trained into his voice even though it's been nearly eight years since Namimori.

There is quiet a moment, filled only with the ticking of the analog clock on the opposite wall. "The building collapsed," he says at last. "Some wiring or something caught the roof on fire. We sent a couple of teams to try and get in to look for the body, but —" You take one more sip from the heavy glass before you fling it across your body. Yamamoto might not have dodged it in his younger days, but he is nothing if not competent now, honed into a perfect mechanism of reflexes and wiry flesh. The tumbler crashes into the wall instead, brings the tick, ticking clock to a crumpled pile of gears and shattered glass.

You lunge, because that's all you can do right now, and you lose one hand to one of Yamamoto's right away, pinned down besides your head when you'd tried to smash it into his. You feel the IV rip out of your other arm, but you are weak and desperate and even with a rip in his face and bullets in his back and gouges along his ribcage, Yamamoto's always been bigger and stronger and faster than you. Your legs then, trying to kick your way out of the starched sheets but Yamamoto follows suit as with your hands, though he is damnably mindful of your injuries and doesn't pin you down, just puts your knees between his own as he hooks your ankles with his feet.

"Gokudera—" he tries, grunting as you try to break his nose with your forehead and miss. "Gokudera, stop—" You scream, a mostly strangled sound, but you lunge up once more, find purchase in his shoulder with your teeth. Yamamoto's hiss is more from surprise than pain; you can tell because he's always worn too many goddamn layers and the blood in your nose isn't on your tongue, just the clean taste of freshly laundered wool.

You scream again, and Yamamoto releases your left hand and spreads his fingers across the curve of your skull. The tears come then, salt and heat, soaking into your hair and Yamamoto's yielding shoulder. Your struggles become pathetic, open palmed smacks against his chest, grasping fingers at his open collar. The high pitched noises from your throat are whines in every sense of the word, but Yamamoto circles his hands around your waist and lets you hide them in his collarbones as he buries you into his chest.

You cling to him, as children and drowning men cling to things that they know to be solid reassurance and wail, your failures, fuck, fuck, you failed, you failed, and now the Tenth is dead and the Millefiore have won and fuck, the Vongola, your Family is fucked because you fucking failed.

Yamamoto doesn't insult you with wordless comforts, childish repetitions, absolutions; just holds as you cry, not minding to be the only thing real that holds you together as the world ticks steadily, silently on, falling under and crumbling into its own weight.