She's a Rose in a Lily's Cloak
Author: Jusrecht
Pairing/Characters:Tsuna/Kyoko
Notes: I love the concept of Kyoko as a highly 'involved' wife in Tsuna's job, but sometimes it makes me think: what if she agrees to take a much more passive role. Will it make her (for lack of a better word) less?
So here's my attempt to expand that idea, as short as it is. Title is quoted from the song Ribbons Undone by Tori Amos.
-
Every morning, Kyoko finds herself searching for something in the length of the mirror; a likeness, a proof.
Her soft brown tresses she inherits from her mother, as does the slenderness of her hips and wrists, and her soulful eyes. She tilts her head slightly to the left, like a bird, and can almost see her again beyond the looking glass, deep in thought with brow drawn to a row of faint, pensive lines.
But there, she thinks, the resemblance stops.
-
Every evening around the dinner table, her mother would ask: how was your day.
Her father's answers varied. A high school teacher had many stories to tell at the end of the day, some an echo only with different names, others a new quest that brought rare animation to his staid countenance. Some of them she remembered in pieces, another select few in long streams of silver spun threads, but the evenings when he focused on his rice bowl and did not answer her mother's question rippled the sharpest in her memory.
In one such evening, she overheard a conversation between them long after the table had been cleared. His raised voice did not reach her bedroom, but she heard her brother slamming the door to his own room, and the sound of his bandaged fists exacting revenge from his pillow and mattress for lack of other challenge. She tiptoed down the stairs, wandered in her soft sandals until she noticed the length of her father's shadow, the height of his anger.
Her mother sat in silence on the sofa, watching, listening as her father paced the length of the room and flung words about freely. Kyoko lingered only for a moment, but long enough to notice the unfamiliar redness on his face, the first time in her twelve years. Her mother's subdued voice faded as she ran back upstairs and immersed herself in the familiar pages of a beloved book.
Breakfast proved entirely different. She didn't think she had ever felt more acutely the skilled working of a story-teller, shaping each passage to follow a course in accordance with their wishes. Her mother bustled about as they ate, the precarious balance maintained only by her mild chatter, tone light, undeterred by her son's sullen hush. That the tension would wear off in count of days, even hours, was only a matter of patience—and keeping the balance in between, as soon Kyoko discovered. A few similar mornings and she learnt to pick up the pieces, follow well-trodden paths first with clumsy steps and then the prudence of the experienced.
The years edged onward but little did change. A daughter reads the esoteric lore of marriage and parenthood first in her mother's smiles and frowns. Above all else, Kyoko always wished to be like her.
-
"How was your day?"
The line of Tsuna's lips flattens, and then curls upwards in a hurried effort to mend his slip.
"It was fine."
His lie is a cold hand that squeezes her heart, a chamber of everything she believes in.
-
There was an unspoken rule in his world about civilians, Tsuna began. About children. Wives.
His voice shook but the progress of his speech was methodical, as if rehearsed. He began with the barest shell of history, all dates and names lost in the maelstrom between now and then, and then segued to personal reasons. A family. The safety guaranteed to the clueless and innocent. The bliss of the uninvolved.
"I know I have no right to ask this of you," he said slowly when she did not raise her eyes to meet his waiting gaze. His explanations, long and precise, was a cloak that shrouded them both, away from other well-dressed patrons of the restaurant.
"You already did."
The rebuke tasted sour in her mouth, much like the aftertaste of the wine. Kyoko still stared at her fingers, curled tight into angry fists on her peach-coloured dress. The sweet chocolate cake she had eaten as dessert now felt like a heavy lump in her stomach, as heavy as the gaze she refused to meet but suffered from nonetheless. None of these felt like happiness.
Tsuna was many things, but one thing he was not was an ordinary boy—older now, a man in the making, and with age the distance between him and the clumsy boy of the past lengthened. It was a bleak world he lived in, one he always tried to shield from her eyes, much for his sake as hers. There were times when Kyoko was grateful for her ignorance, content to forget and simply link her arm with his and laugh. If she at all noticed the two trailing shadows whenever they went on a date, one reminding her to angry flames and the other soothing blue, then she would pretend; even now.
But on her twenty-third birthday, six years after they had started dating, he looked into her eyes and proposed.
Kyoko scarcely knew how she looked when she raised her face and accused, "You asked me to be your wife and then to stay away from your world."
"No." He was startled, denial wind-sharp in the palpability of his surprise. This was the first of many lies and she saw the realisation dawning on his face, belated but not denied, and fought back the tears welling in her eyes.
"I'm sorry," Tsuna said after an awkward span of silence. He was miserable, head bowed, lips fiercely bitten, and Kyoko wished that she did not care so much.
"If I disagree to that condition," she began, persisted despite the exposed quiver in her voice, "will you still marry me?"
"Yes." He looked at her, his eyes solemn, the most honest she had seen in a long time. "Yes, I will. I just wish I can protect you from..." he paused and then left it at that, as if the word carnage or blood or any manner of ugliness might spoil her if given voice and chance both.
On the table between them, the ring lay untouched for a long time in its cocoon of black velvet.
-
"How do you do it?"
The question still drifts unanswered when Haru speaks again, the tone of wonder replaced by sad humility. "Haru can never do it," she admits, lapsing to her old speech pattern in a moment of frankness. Haru, whose proficiency in languages has proven valuable for the Family; Haru, who has learnt to fire a gun and carry one with her person always; Haru, who has offered to be her eyes and ears in the name of friendship.
"You fight in your own way," Kyoko tells her, content to sidestep the question. But Haru is no longer a girl whose only weapon is her bravery; she has grown tall, the length of her shadow by the dusk-painted window reaching Kyoko's feet.
"Is it really enough only to know—not even from his own mouth—and do nothing?"
Kyoko sips her tea, swallows thickly, and with it her answer. Haru moves away from the window to sit at her side, her proximity for once a guest unwelcome, intrusive.
"How do you do it?" she presses on, dark eyes wide with plea instead of curiosity. Kyoko remembers their staged protest so long time ago, in a future now lost, and sees now the difference between her and Haru, not unlike that between stasis and change, slow pace and quick march. Neither is wrong, only different.
"I believe him," she says, the words rolling off her tongue easily. "He may not always be right, but he isn't afraid to learn from mistakes. So I won't ask, not unless I don't have any other choice."
Haru looks down, frustration scrawled all over her face. Her assumed silence spans across more distance than that between them and Kyoko waits—for differences are often not made for understanding, but acceptance. Only a man and his matching shadow think alike all the time.
When Haru finally looks up, she meets her patience with resignation, difficult and unfamiliar still for one with spirit like hers. She seeks as much comfort as she gives when she reaches for Kyoko's hands, paler than hers—and that, too, is a difference.
"You know that I'll do my best to help him, right?"
Kyoko smiles. "Yes, Haru-chan."
-
Her brother speaks freely, always; the only issue which curbs his openness is that of her marriage.
Kyoko believes in his love, in his wish for her to be happy. His loud, hearty congratulation was nothing if not honest when she announced herself engaged, but his politeness toward her future husband which persisted for days following the happy announcement did not escape her. She did not ask, but the blind guesses stayed with her, stabbing at unknown darkness.
Her brother lives too under the black umbrella which darkens Tsuna's world. She knows of the damage, has seen with her own eyes how Tsuna's timid smiles gradually wears down into something less candid, less sincere. For all the strength of her belief, she holds the ghosts of her doubt close to her heart, all through the first months of marriage and beyond. Curious but powerless, she feeds her own lack of knowledge by many tales of imagined horror. In the gathering dawn, when her bedroom is veiled in monochrome blue and the frost of solitude sinks into her bones, they roar the loudest.
Tsuna's silence answers nothing.
-
She is already in bed when he comes in, grey coat wet with rain. The wordless tension which rims his lips is enough to make her sit up, alarmed.
The question suspends unasked, she on the edge of her bed and he on his feet but bereft of his coat, making him look small. Tsuna stares at her, battles himself, and is defeated on both sides when his face contorts in pain and he crumbles to the floor with a harsh inhale. She almost stands up but for the weight of his head, pressed to her lap along with a torrent of words: of a child he has made fatherless, of revenge, of reasons which are now but a blur. No crime, he mumbles to the soft satin of her negligee, justifies what he did to that boy.
"But if you had no other choice?" is her first remonstrance, fuelled by equal desire to convince herself as much as him.
Tsuna stills, and then shakes his head vehemently. "There is always a choice," he says through what remains of his voice, now pitiful wreckage untended, adrift in the storm raging within.
"You made one you thought best."
His silence is heavy with contradictions and angry denials, these tides only stemmed by the calming weight of her hand. In an unspoken accord, they both let it linger, enduring each increase and recede of tension until the pressure completely ebbs. When Tsuna looks up at long last, he wears a different sort of grimness, shadowed with exhaustion.
"The child may come after Vongola once he grows up," he tells her quietly.
Kyoko feels the cold hand that grips her heart, but refuses to acknowledge it. "Maybe not," she says instead.
He is about to argue when her hands reach up to cup his face, a firm cage and gentle entreaty both. It startles him out of the murky grave that is his current bed of thoughts; for the first time that night, Tsuna truly sees her instead of the length of his sorrow.
"Maybe not," he finally concedes with a thin smile. She tries to respond with a likewise effort but fails, her fingers shaking where they stroke her husband's cold cheeks.
"No matter what," she whispers, "come home to me."
His desperate kisses, when they reach her lips, are more than simply a tangible echo of his answer. What Tsuna needs is a place removed from the world outside the door, and as they make love, she wills him to forget.
-
Kyoko does not ask. She notices, instead, when he barely touches his favourite food and prefers to trade the emptiness of his stomach with too many cups of tea, each downed with the carelessness of a drunken man. She listens to the undertone of his voice, the messages he tries to convey but will not, and files her conclusions away until such time that they are needed. She becomes the hands which shape tones and ambience, if not the story, as her mother once did.
-
"Good morning."
Kyoko thinks she loves his smile the most when he has just stumbled out of sleep, unburdened by the knots and tangles daylight inevitably brings. She feels a corresponding smile on her own face and allows herself to bask in the moment's bliss.
"Good morning, Tsu-kun."
-
Kyoko still looks into the mirror every morning, but for a different reason. In a world balanced by both knowledge and the absence of it, she wears smiles as her armour and silence as her weapon, all to protect the life growing inside her.
(And Tsuna's bright grin when she tells him so, her soft voice soon overwhelmed by his kiss.)
End
-