It is only because the door has been built to withstand such attacks that it does not break off its hinges when Gokudera barrels into it, knocking its panels wide open, skidding into the foyer so quickly he almost slams into the opposite wall.

In his arms, he clutches a huge, cloth-covered bundle, and he checks it frantically, pressing it to his chest as if terrified it will be stolen away.

“Help,” he rasps, then louder, until he’s screaming the word at the empty walls. The paintings lining the wall rattle, and for a moment he believes the movement has been caused by the sound of his own voice. Then he hears the heavy footsteps racing through the house, and a boy tumbles into the room.

He is tall and slim, and his eyes are oddly dichromatic, flashing gold and blue and terrible outrage. His face is contorted in something resembling anger, or shock, or fear, but Gokudera pays it no mind. 

“You,” he says, taking a half-step forward, then another. He cradles his burden closer to his chest, hunches over it as if in an effort to protect the fragile thing he carries. “Are you the witch?”

“No,” the boy says. “Sir, could you please be more careful with how you enter? You almost broke the-”

“Then where is she?” Gokudera shouts. He accidentally jostles the package in his arms and freezes, staring down at it. “No,” he whispers. “Come on, it’s okay, just be safe a little while longer.” He turns back up to stare wildly at the boy in his path. “Please!” he says. “I need to see her! Where is she?”

“I’m here,” a voice says, and Gokudera’s head jerks to stare at a tall, beautiful woman who leans against the wall. She holds a small, black, trembling thing in her arms, and her kimono has been lovingly painted with beautiful arcs of wisteria, sweeping down the sleeves. She stares quietly at him. “You’re one of Reborn’s. Gokudera-kun, is it?”

Gokudera’s face twists, and he nods jerkily. “Please,” he says, taking a staccato step forward. “You have to help him. He’s dying, Reborn said you could save him. You need to-”

“Lay him on the floor,” the woman interrupts briskly. “Take off his cloak. I need to see.”

Gokudera hesitates, then places his delicate burden gently onto the wood beneath their feet, and unclothes it.

Tsuna lies there, unconscious, half dead, awash with his own blood. His legs are like two broken, twisted twigs, his chest all-but split open with how badly it is torn. There is not a bit of him not covered in red and black, and the tiny, invisible motion of his rising chest is a miracle.

There is a gasp behind him from the unnamed boy, but Gokudera does not notice. All he sees is Tsuna.

“They ambushed us,” he gasps, unable to take his eyes off his Juudaime’s bleeding, broken form now that it’s been revealed. “Fuckers are dead now, but he was their target, they concentrated everything they had on him, and it was-” he chokes on his own tongue, and bends as if he will throw up.

“Fuckers,” he sobs. “Fuckers, they separated everyone from him, they got him, they just kept on tearing at him and by the time we broke through he was like this.  H-he couldn’t take on that many by himself, there were hundreds and they had knifes and spears and-” He laughs hysterically. “Got them good, I did, they won’t be able to count the pieces.” He wipes at his eyes.

“Reborn-san said to come here. Said they’d cover me, and that it would be okay as long as I brought him here. Please,” he says, jerking his eyes away for the first time from Tsuna’s body. He stares at the witch, and bows, as deeply as he can manage, his hands clasped together in supplication.  “Please. You have to help him.”

She does not look at him. Instead, she kneels delicately on the floor and takes one of Tsuna’s broken wrists between her hands.

“You are lovers,” she says. It is not a question.

Gokudera’s face contorts in confusion, and he bares his teeth. “What the fuck does that matter!? He’s dying! You have to hurry!”

“It matters,” she whispers. She places Tsuna’s hand onto his bleeding chest, and folds her own in her lap.

“There will be a price,” she says.

Gokudera stares at her in disbelief. “So?” he asks. “So?! I’ll pay it! Help him!”

The witch closes her eyes. “It will be a heavy one.”

Gokudera‘s face twists into a feral mask, and he slams a fist into the floor. “Do you think I care!?” he screams. “Does it look like I care!? I’ll pay it! I’ll pay it, just fix him!”

“Not unless you know,” the witch says. “You must know what you give up, if you choose to save his life.”

Gokudera snarls, and his hands turn to claws with the force with which he restrains himself from slamming her into the wall and choking the life from her neck. “What?” he asks. “What do I have to give up? What price could possibly be equal to his life?”

She tells him.

Gokudera goes quiet.

“What?” he asks.

The woman closes her eyes. “That is the price.”

The world is a desolate wasteland, the room a barren void. Color has been washed from its jagged corners.

“What?” Gokudera asks. “What?”

Silence is his only response, and he continues.

“I don’t understand,” he whispers. “Do you know what you’re saying? You can’t know. You cannot mean this. It’s impossible.”

She says nothing. Only stares at him with those wine red eyes, a universe hidden in the black of her pupils. Behind her, the boy trembles.

“It’s impossible, do you hear me?!” Gokudera says, hysterically now, the words tripping over themselves. “You can take everything I have, it’s yours, but you can’t steal this.”

“No, I can’t,” she says, and smoothes the lap of her dress. “You must give it.”

“No!” Gokudera roars. He shakes his head, tears at his hair. The world is crumbling to ashes, and all is death. “You can’t take him from me! He’s all I fucking have, and if you do this, you-”

“It’s the only thing you have to give,” she says. “The price must be equal to the request, and this is all you have. The only thing you have.”

Gokudera shakes his head, slowly, pressing his forehead against the wood of the floor. He does not see. “Anything else,” he rasps. “Please. Please. Take anything else. My life,” he says. “Surely it’s equal to what he’s lost. But not this. You can’t steal this.”

She looks at him, as cold and unmoving as a stone god. “I can’t use you in exchange,” she says. Her hands have begun rhythmically stroking the fur of the animal in her arms, a pattern that would be soothing save for the whimpers emerging from the things mouth. “It’s this or nothing. This price, for his life. Your choice, Gokudera-kun.”

Gokudera breathes in deep, his nostrils flaring. His eyes dart towards the Juudaime. Tsuna lies on the cot, his breathing shallow, labored. His face is pale. He looks so very thin. His pulse is rabbit-quick against the skin of his neck, and blood is everywhere. Hands, arms, legs, waist, chest, thighs, forehead.

Once upon a time, Gokudera kissed every millimeter of skin on that body. He drew patterns upon the smooth expanse with his tongue, lips, fingers, worshipped the trembling, eager boy beneath him with every bit of emotion he held in his heart. Basked in the gasps and moans of Sawada Tsunayoshi as he paid homage to the glory beneath his fingertips.

Once upon a time, two boys laughed as they fell into bed, clutched hands, tripped and sprained knees and ankles and they were in love. Spring, when the world was mud-luscious, poetry upon prose, free verse and songs, odes composed to the beauty that was their lives.

Blood, soaking jeans and t-shirts and skin. Flesh, torn asunder by lead and sword. He imagines he can see the sheen of intestines under the red and black of broken flesh. Tsuna.

Dear God.

Dear God.

Please deliver me from this hell.

“He’s suffering,” the witch says.

“Shut up,” Gokudera sobs, because he can say nothing else.

“He’s dying.”

“Shut up!” he screams, slamming his fists into the floor beneath his knees. And then again, because the blood on his hands is his penance. The price he pays for his selfishness. His greed. “Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up-”

“You have minutes,” she says. Her face is a mask, her dress an elaborate costume. Is that what it is? Is this naught but a play? It must be. Merely a play, Tsuna the grand actor, Gokudera nothing more than the support. Never more than the friend, the one who fails, the one who is saved, but now comes the time where he must make a choice and he would burn the world if only it meant he could thrust this cross away from himself.

“Your choice,” she says.

Gokudera closes his eyes, because he cannot stand the sight of wisteria.

His nails are broken, ragged. Blood coats his fingertips, his knuckles, the skin of his cheeks and arms and legs, where those fingernails have clawed bloodied tracks. They will scar.

“There was never a choice,” he whispers. His voice is a trembling, broken, bloodied thing, much like the useless organ beating within his chest. It never did anyone any good. Treacherous heart, why does it still beat when the rest of him dies?

“Go,” he rasps. “Bring him back.”

To me remains unsaid, because it is no longer true.

***

Tsuna’s eyes flutter open.

The first thing he sees is a frightened face, irises of blue and gold, bent over him, hands pressing a cool compress to his forehead. He tries to open his mouth, but his throat is a dry, brittle mess, and no sound emerges.

The second thing he sees is a beautiful woman, as proud and solemn as any empress. Her eyes bore into his own. They are so unsettling he immediately looks away.

The third thing he sees is Gokudera, dozing against the wall not ten feet away. The sight gives Tsuna a voice.

“Go…” he hacks, and Gokudera’s head jerks up. His eyes are wide and red, surrounded by circles so black they look like they’ve been caused by a blow. His face is whiter than the walls at his back.

“Gokudera-kun,” Tsuna manages to whisper. “You’re so pale. Are you alright?”

There is a moment where Tsuna thinks Gokudera might start screaming, so wild do his eyes look. Then that moment passes, and something in Gokudera’s face crumbles to ashes, and he falls to the floor, sobbing so brokenly Tsuna is for a moment terrified that he has died, and is merely watching the proceedings in the form of a ghost.

But no, his hands are flesh, and his whole body aches, though the feeling is not quite pain. He is alive, that much is for certain. So why does Gokudera cry?

“Gokudera-kun,” he whispers. “What’s wrong? Where are we?”

Gokudera does not answer. He kneels there on the floor, sobbing like a babe while Tsuna watches on, growing steadily more terrified by the second.

“You’re at my shop, Sawada-kun,” the woman says softly, kindly, jerking his attention away from his right hand man. “My name is Yuuko. Gokudera-kun brought you here. You were hurt very badly. He wished to save you.”

Tsuna’s brow furrows, and he twists his head to get a better look at her, gasping with the effort it takes. “I don’t understand,” he says, hoarsely. “Why here? Why not to a hospital? What’s wrong with Gokudera-kun?”

“You were very hurt,” Yuuko repeats. “No hospital could have saved you.”

Tsuna blinks in confusion. “And…you could?”

“Yes,” she says. “For a price.”

Tsuna tries to sit up, but his limbs are leaden. It feels a Herculean effort just to move his head. “A price?” he says. “How much do I-”

“It’s been paid,” the woman interrupts softly. “You need not concern yourself with it.”

“But…” There is a hitch of breath to his side, and Tsuna’s attention again jerks to Gokudera. “Gokudera-kun,” he says, the confusion once more giving way to fear. “I’m okay. Don’t cry. It’s okay.” He attempts a laugh, but it comes out as a choke, so he rides the fit out and then smiles as best he can. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault. Please don’t cry.”

Gokudera’s entire form trembles.

“That is not why he cries,” Yuuko says.

“Don’t tell him.”

Tsuna turns to look at Gokudera. White, wet strands of hair hang over his face, shielding the emotion there. His voice sounds different. Not like Gokudera. Like one who has been screaming for a very long while.

“Gokudera-kun,” he says. Something is horribly wrong. Tsuna wants to cry with the ache of it. “What are you-”

“I can’t tell him,” Yuuko interrupts. The words are aimed at the boy crumpled upon the floor. “Do not worry. He will never know. I have given him that relief, at least.”

“Guys,” Tsuna says. Terror is clawing at his chest, his stomach, all pervasive. He struggles to sit up, cursing his wounds when he fails again and again. “Guys, what are you talking about? What’s going on, what’s-”

“Pay no mind, Sawada-kun,” the lady whispers, and her eyes are so unbearably sad Tsuna has to choke back a sob of pain just at seeing them. “Do not worry. Sleep.”

And she passes her hand over his eyes, and Tsuna knows no more.

***

It is a long while before anyone moves. The slim, odd-eyed boy still carefully tends to Tsuna’s fever, face twisted in a parody of a smile, though the expression is no smile. The beautiful woman still kneels, holding her black, loppy-eared pet. And Gokudera still bows over the ground, looking for all the world like a broken toy.

Finally, he speaks. “He’ll be okay.”

Yuuko inclines her head in a nod. “You paid the price. He will live.”

“The price,” Gokudera whispers. “Is the world supposed to look like blood?”

Yuuko looks at him. “Four things you’ve given up, Gokudera-kun. Four burdens you’ve taken upon yourself. Blood is the least of it.”

“Yes,” Gokudera laughs. Does not laugh. “There’s also pain.”

“Yes,” Yuuko says.

 “His memories of our time together,” he says, and here his voice breaks cruelly. “He doesn’t remember us. He doesn’t know we l-loved…”

“Yes,” Yuuko says.

Gokudera moves, pushing off the floor until he is kneeling. His hair is a filthy mess, his face horrific in its agony. The black-haired boy watching over Tsuna closes his eyes to keep from seeing.

“And,” he says, then stops. “And. And.”

“Touch,” The Witch of Dimensions says. She closes her eyes. “You loved it so very much.”

“Shut up,” Gokudera says.

“Feeling him,” she murmurs.  “Holding him. You no longer have that. Your touch will be as poison to him, and no glove or wrap or barrier shall ever be able to mask the effect. One year of his life for every brush of fingers against skin.”

“Stop,” Gokudera whispers.

“Sawada will not remember your relationship,” she continues. “No one will. Gone forever will be the memories of the kisses you shared, the hands held. Your love will be as if it never was. And because even the most platonic of caresses will be a grave injury, you’ll never again be able to renew what you once had. It is gone.”

“Yuuko-san,” the odd-eyed boy cries. “Please, stop!”

“You must be careful, Gokudera-kun,” Yuuko continues. She does not move, but a strange heaviness seems suddenly to bow her back. “You must take care to make sure Tsuna does not again fall in love with you. Because if he does, you will touch, and with every innocent press, a year is sapped away. How quickly one might become ten might become a hundred. He would die tomorrow if you made love to him tonight.”

“Yuuko-san,” the small black creature in her arms whimpers. “Please. It hurts.”

“So you must take care, boy,” she whispers. “You must distance yourself. You must assume the role of the quiet protector, always on the outskirts of a group you were once part of. Never able to-” She pauses, but only silence meets her. She closes her eyes. Her face is so very weary.

“The price you paid for his life was your happiness, Gokudera-kun,” she whispers. “The most important thing: your place in his life, forfeit. Gokudera-kun, look at me,” she says.

He does not.

“Gokudera-kun,” she says again, and now she kneeling before him, tilting his head back upon a lax neck and gazing into unseeing eyes. “Gokudera-kun,” she says.

He does not answer.

“There is nothing I can do,” she says. “Just live.”

He laughs. The sound reminds him of Belphegor. “Live like this?” He sobs through his laughter.  “With my everything, forever beyond my grasp? Hoping,” he says, moans, “Hoping that he’ll fall in love with me again and knowing it would kill him to do so? Hoping he finds someone else and knowing it would kill me to see him with another? Never able to feel him again?”

There are no words to describe his voice, or the look on his face, or the feeling tearing through his throat.

“Once upon a time,” he whispers. “I held the world in my arms. And then it was torn away from me, and I am to live now, having known that warmth, having been pulled from the lowest depths, knowing I will never again feel him. No,” he breathes. “I will not live like this. I won’t.”

He laughs again. The sound tears its way from his throat like the crash of a storm, and slowly, he lifts his head to meet her eyes, lifts his hands to clutch at her dress, and any day before this day it would have killed him to debase himself like this for anyone, but his saving grace has just been torn from him, his everything has been torn from him, and all that is left is agony. He smiles at her.

“Kill me.”

There is a moment where the air goes still, as if all sound has been sucked out of the world through some yawning void. Then Yuuko’s eyes narrow. “You will not die, you little fool.”

“I’ll do it myself,” he promises. “I will.”

The boy tending to Tsuna is making noises. Sobs or shouts, he can’t tell; all he hears is the roaring of blood in his ears and the breaths of the boy on the bed. “What if I wished for it?”

Something in Yuuko’s face tenses, twists bitterly. “I cannot do it. There are rules, and I cannot break them. I apologize, Gokudera Hayato,” she says coldly. “But you must live.”

“I’m dead,” he laughs. “Juudaime doesn’t need me. He has the others. Only thing he ever needed me for was just to be there, and now that’s been taken away from me, too.”

Yuuko’s eyes are stalactites in a desolate chamber. “Then die in his service,” she says. “Die for him. But if you take your life now, Sawada Tsunayoshi will not recover. He will always wonder what he could have done. If it was his fault. He will go crazy, wondering how he so ruined your life. You would do that to the boy you love? You would give him responsibility over your suicide?”

“It’s not his fault,” Gokudera hisses.

“Isn’t it?” Yuuko says. “Everything you do is his fault. You cannot deny this. You are his. That he is no longer, and will never again be, yours does not change this.”

Gokudera’s eyes are shot with blood. He does not answer. Yuuko gazes at him for a moment, then turns to the other boy.

“Watanuki,” she says. “Run to the storage room. Beside Fay-san’s staff you will find a bottle of green solvent. Bring it here.” She turns back to Gokudera, and for the first time since he stumbled into her shop carrying the boy he loved half-dead in his arms, she touches him.

“If you’d like, I could relieve you of your memories,” she says, placing a hand upon his cheek. “The pain will lessen. Instead of having known and lost the greatest love of your life, you will never have felt his touch. I will ask Reborn to send you away, to do your Juudaime’s work abroad. You will never see him again, and so will not run the risk of killing him, and you will not remember all you have lost. It will numb the hurt.”

Gokudera is quiet for a very long while. Long enough for Watanuki to return with the bottle. “Will that help?” he asks finally, pointing at the object.

“The lotion is to soothe your mind as you sleep,” she says.

Silence. Then: “And the price?”

“For the bottle?” Yuuko asks. “A few of those bombs you love so dearly. The memories are their own price.”

Gokudera laughs. The sound emerges a hiccup. “What does that mean?”

“It means, you lose the most precious thing you have left in exchange for some manner of peace,” the witch says. “Your memories for absolution. It is fair, is it not?”

The manic smile on his face falls, and he is once again quiet. “No,” he whispers.

Yuuko raises a brow. “No?”

“Nothing is worth those memories,” Gokudera rasps. “You overcharge me, hag.”

Yuuko, for the first time since Gokudera stumbled into her little wish shop, smiles. The expression is tiny, strained, and sorely lacking in joy, but it is there. “I can’t have that,” she says. Her hand moves from his cheek to cup the nape of his neck, and she brings his face to hers.

“He is alive,” she breathes. “Was it ever a choice?”

Gokudera closes his eyes, and for a moment he imagines it is his mother holding his face in her hands, whispering sweet reassurances into his hair. It will be okay, my darling. You will make it through this.

“No,” he whispers, and turns to look at Tsuna, lying motionless on the cot. He drinks in the exact shape of Tsuna’s eyes. The shade. The arch his eyebrows make upon his fair-skinned brow. The pertness of his nose, the cambers in his cheekbone. The delineation of his jaw, the way his eyelids flutter in exhaustion. He memorizes him. And then, when he’s had his fill (he will never have his fill, but this must be enough) he speaks.

“No, he repeats. He smiles, and twines his hands together because they no longer have a place in Tsuna’s.

“It wasn’t.”


Fin

It’s nothing special, really. Oh, Tsuna had protested for a few minutes, looking at you oddly and saying things like But what’s the point? and I’m not a kid, I can do it myself, you know! and your favorite: Gokudera-kun, you’re just a little bit weird, but there was no real reluctance in his voice, and all you had to do was laugh and smile that sheepish smile of yours; the smile you use all the time, now, because it gets you your way more often than not.

And in the end he just sighs like he always does and looks at you with something that’s part confusion, part acceptance, and part-anticipation, because he knows you’ll never hurt him, and more often than not will make it worth his while in the end.

Not that there’s anything sexual about this. There isn’t, although some people apparently think so; it’s called a fetish for a reason. But there’s nothing sexual about this, and that’s the important part. So you sit him in a chair and kneel at his side and take his bare foot in one hand, playing with the toes. Tsuna stifles a snort of laughter, and wiggles the tiny digits.

“It tickles?” you grin, and Tsuna gives you a look. You love that look. You love all of his looks, but there’s something to be said about this one. It’s so soft, and kind of playful, and kind of derisive, but not in a hurtful way; in the way you might look at Uri as it chases a ball of string. It’s the way he looks at you in bed, sometimes, on the days where he starts things.

“You’re really weird,” Tsuna smiles, as you take the arch of his foot between two hands and press a light kiss to it. “And I think that’s sort of dirty.”

“I can wash them,” you say, pressing another kiss to the instep. “You wanna go to the bathroom?”

“I knew you had ulterior motives,” he groans. “Gokudera-kun, we’ve got work!”

You smile up at him, and trail fingers around his ankle, down his heel. It’s interesting, how the skin goes from soft and fleshy to coarse within a matter of millimeters. If you had more time, you think you could spend hours playing with the delicate skin along the arch, or sucking along the jut of bone at the ankle. Then even longer, making a slow path of Tsuna’s calf, thigh, sucking patches of red and purple onto whiteness.

Another time, maybe. “I know,” you answer a good minute later, when the thrill of making him giggle simply by tracing your name along the underside of his left foot has ebbed slightly. “Here,” you say, and pick up a white sock from where it lays beside you. Slowly, you roll it up his foot, grinning at the way Tsuna looks down at you, smiling fondly.

“Next,” you say, and repeat the same treatment with his right foot, placing teeny tiny kisses upon the skin there, making him gasp and grin and swat at your head when you take a toe between your teeth and bite.

“Now, I know that’s dirty,” Tsuna says, though he’s still grinning, and the flush across his nose makes you think maybe he wouldn’t be averse to a bit of footplay in bed later, after you’ve both washed up. “What the hell, Gokudera-kun? You’re taking after Uri more every day.”

You grin broadly up at him, though it comes out more of a smirk than anything, and place both of his feet in your lap. “Shoes,” you say as an answer, and Tsuna rolls his eyes and hands you a pair of black dress shoes. He hates wearing them, you know, but the first time he showed up to work with sneakers Reborn spent the rest of the day using him as target practice, so now you make him wear them on the job.

By ‘make him,’ of course, you mean offer blowjobs as collateral, but that’s neither here nor there, and thinking of it will probably only make you want to grab your lover by the waist and haul him to the bedroom (and if you two miss another day of work, Reborn really will start using you both as target practice [probably for the trainees, who've just begun learning how to use bazookas] ).  So instead, you just grab the shoes he hands you and slowly slip them on his feet, one by one. You carefully lace them, crossing one bunny ear with the other, just the way your mother once showed you. He looks nice in them, you think, and you place one last kiss upon the black leather before you look up at him.

He’s smiling at you in that way he does sometimes. Kind of happy, kind of shocked, kind of really, really loving in a way that makes you want to hug him and never let go, until you’re both crotchety old men rocking on a porch, wrinkled and world-weary, and still so utterly in love it does the world’s heart good to see you.

You can’t, obviously, but that doesn’t stop you from scooting forward until you’re kneeling between his legs, and it most definitely doesn’t stop you from taking his cheeks between your hands and kissing him, long and soft and it’s never stopped taking your breath away, how wonderful this is. How impossible to take for granted.

And when Tsuna rests his cheek against yours, eyelids fluttering against your temple, and says I love you, it’s all you can do to get your response out fast enough.


Fin