Title of Work: Nitimur in Vetitum, Semper
Author: Miles
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: affairs, sex, drinking, experimental characterization, Dino as a plot device, comma abuse.
Dynamics: Haru/Kyoko, background Dino/Kyoko, prior Haru/OMC
Chosen Prompt: 'Haru/Kyoko, a mafia boss' wife'
Summary: We always strive for the forbidden. Haru, a wedding, and the fall of the world which happens before and after.
Notes: Originally written for ryuutchi  in my yuri_exchange . Of the two pieces I did, this is the one I vastly prefer. I love this thing~


Don Cavallone is all sunshine smiles and gentlemanly grace. The type of man with a presence to fill the room in romanticized tales but who's reality may shine brighter for all the imperfections which seek to bring him down to earth. He's the type of person that Haru thinks is impossible to hate, and wonders if it is such a barbaric betrayal that she just might.

-

Kyoko does not meet him at the party, all silk and lace and elegance, but it is the first time Haru recalls them having a conversation. Their laughter mingles with the music (something old and Italian, poetry that Haru can not understand) and though she can not read the swift changes of their lips, she sees the easy balance between them and it sends a childish spike of envy through her tendons, to arm bones, to hands, to the phalanges wrapped around her glass. Kyoko notices her from across the floor and offers her a toast. To life, she mouths, and Haru thinks, to love.

-

(Fast forward. This happened long ago and now there's nothing that can be done to change it, even if you had wanted to, even if back then you could have, that's not the way the story goes.)

-

Kyoko's wedding is a western cause, the kind of thing her traditional parents would have never dreamed and her once dreamy school mates might have idolized. The dress is a mercuric white and pure and embroidered heavily with beads at just the right places so that it crinkles and glitters when she laughs. Haru knows, because as she pulls up an invisible zipper on the back of Kyoko's dress, her normally demure friend attempts a twirl in twig thin heels to topple backwards, just a tad, into Haru's rouge red shoulders with brilliant giggles to chip away her heart. There are wrinkles now, right at the back of the gown, and Haru chides the other lightly as she moves her hand to brush them away. This has to be as close as she (as either of them) can get to perfect.

-

Haru dances like a flea on a metal bridge, tapping out the tattoo of her heels as if this constancy will cause the earth to quake, the world crumble beneath her like it may already have in her mind. But the twirls make her head spin and her legs ache hotly such that even she must cease in her futility eventually to rest, joining the others in in laughter and satiation. The night speaks of heavy June summer, the air thick with all the steady vapor yet to fall, and Haru thinks that she could be gone out those doors with no inhabitants of this chilled haven the wiser. She thinks, maybe, that she always had a chance to run. This thought is not what keeps her. She has all the time in the world now to remember alone, so tonight she tries to forget.

-

Haru tests Kyoko's new name on her tongue, letting it roll there with the flavour of sour sake (a call to her homeland, now far, far away), making an eternal repetition. Or what might have been, except that her throat closes on the tenth echo and the voice she tries to urge past her forced silence is let out as a shaky crack, like a bitter whip or dark thunder break.

She sets her cup down to clatter on mahogany, hot mist exhaling from the remaining liquid in ephemeral halos and skulls, and twists freely on her perch. The inside of the bar is warm and smooth and uncaring, it's people only there for an ounce of escape or a pint of desire. The bartender comforts a dying man, the waitress accepts a bribe, Haru simply feels more alone.

There is no clack of heels behind her, and maybe this is what lets her know. Kyoko's flat shoes are an innocent truth: she will endevour to be anything she is not (and still Haru thinks her amazing). She sits next to Haru and offers a smile, to which the other woman returns a hasty grin.

“Do you mind if I have a sip of your sake?” Kyoko questions lightly, “Italian wines tire after a while, and it would be a welcome change.”

Haru's fingernails on the pitcher are chipped rough from her teeth as she pours the alcohol drop by drop, before passing the cup to her bar-mate. Kyoko tilts back the ceramic as it touches her lipstick, downing it gracefully, keeping in composure. Her tongue traces a smudge of Chanel pink and Haru forces back a swallow.

“So,” Haru's mouth widens playfully “You as tired of him yet as you are of the wine? Or is it true love, do you think? Can you tell after being married for a few days?” Her hands knot in her lap.

Kyoko always has been radiant when she smiles.

“I think... we can be happy together.”

Haru's heart is not a being that is meant to ever break, so it doesn't, but when she gets home (not Italy, not this spacious Cavallone compound, but her own single bedroom flat in the heart of Japan) she will cry until her eyes burn away and her head screams mercy, for she is not sure what she can take [maybe even this]. Now, however, she orders another round and pretends the fall of happy 'congratulations' doesn't turn her tongue to ash.

-

Haru falls for Tsuna in a whirlwind of youth, claims him for her own in a single swoop and for days (weeks, months, years) he is all she will think about and all she will say. Her fantasy was as his wife, a gleaming beacon amid the fire of their guns and she is ever loyal to Tsuna for all that he is her savior and faerie tale knight.

But she does not love him anymore.

Haru knows when it started, is attentive to the calendar as it rattles off the days in quick succession, remembers in abstract clarity the very moment when Tsuna became a person instead of an idea and that at that time she did not recall but a trace of her affection. She is a genius for all her follies and perhaps she knows when to let go.

Though this will never explain why, a year removed from their present, Haru's heart sought pale flesh and subtle grace, even as her eyes caught on a gold ring, and, in the middle of a busy coffee shop in Shinjuku, threatened to consume her.

Haru idolized Tsuna once, yet when she brought him down to earth her feelings ceased to follow. So, as she lifts Kyoko up toward the skies, Haru knows the fragility of love and wonders how long this can last.

(Her mind says forever, but it has lied before)

-

The light above her closed eyelids comes in unsteady pulses and it jerks Haru awake once she notices. Kyoko is stroking Haru's hair from an awkward position as the other girl leans heavily against her shoulder. Haru looks up and the hypnotic swirl of the lights mixes with the alcohol enough that she wonders if maybe, just once, she can be selfish and brave. She leans up and pushes until, underneath her, Kyoko reciprocates every motion eagerly and smoothly. (later, when Haru has time to think, she will wonder just how drunk Kyoko was, but not now, never now)

Kyoko pants out the name of a nearby hotel (expensive and private, the perfect place) and Haru holds her just a bit closer while she still can.

-

Haru looses her virginity halfway through her second year of high school to the first boy who asks.

She was a popular girl, beautiful and genius more than she could hold, yet there always has been an air of unapproachability about her. She was too quirky, too outgoing, too much of anything to be perfect, for all that she threw herself into the world. So, they left her alone. (they leave her alone, this poor sad girl who must forever find the friends she makes)

But there had been a boy, or rather there had always been many boys, simply never one without plotting subtly, who thought to walk up to her and ask. He hadn't been pretty, nothing of the sort, a normal boy from the affiliated men's school with oil wetting his cheeks and pimples bidding to burst from his skin. Still, Haru is a romantic, and at sixteen she faces down the first person who ever tells her that she is desired and believes unrequited love to be the worst thing in the world.

She learns. There is something in the way he looks at her that shreds her heart and something in his movements that she can not imitate no matter how hard she tries. It's barely a relationship, twisting and falling away after barely a week to Haru's stilted apologies and his soft, knowing smiles.

If unrequited love is the worst thing in this world, then pity must be the cruelest, Haru thinks.

Which is why, waking up naked in silk sheets and Kyoko Cavallone sitting at the balcony table (her hair messy and golden haloed, coffee steam swirling up, an unlit cigarette lingering in her lips), Haru's heart skips a beat and she runs.

-

There is a knock on the door.

“Hey... it's been a while, hasn't it?” says the woman

“I would have come sooner, you weren't that hard to track down with our resources, but I figured you needed some space, and with the baby and all...” she continues

“I named her Virna, after you, it means spring, I... Haru, won't you please talk to me?” Kyoko pauses to stand straight in the doorway, the short pleats of her dress inching up her thighs.

Haru has the door to her dorm three quarters of the way open, reading glasses on and a disposable chopstick to hold back her hair. Her eyes are wide like yen coins and her posture stays stiff even as she ushers the other girl inside the room.

In reality, she has probably been waiting for this day longer than she can remember, but with each passing month she became more certain that it would never arrive. She is a full time student now, pursuing a career in a science field that her mother would never approve of for a beautiful girl and thinking that maybe she wants to help the world, tied down to a school and a number in an ordinary life, but all she had done to say goodbye was board an early plane and never come back.

Haru pours water into an electric kettle, mindless and politely formal, like they are the strangers one year has made them, and not the friends of a lifetime.

“Haru.” Kyoko whispers, her voice lightly pained. A dab of her lipstic is flaking away. Her breath touches Haru's neck, hands up lightly to trace her back and oversized jersey.

Haru stills under the touch, shakes and quivers under the thought, but doesn't move a muscle away.

“I think I'm falling in love with you.” Kyoko whispers with a vague air of disbelief, like she hasn't been thinking on this for months and like she doesn't believe that love is an object of the fickle mind and her self a betrayer.

Haru wants to yell, wants to cry, kick, and knock away the hands that trap her so gently after such an eternity, but her mind has been wiped blank, and maybe this is why she turns to bring them closer and doesn't want to know if she is crying.

The kettle screams.

-

Rice digs it's way into the crevices of Haru's pumps, gnawing at the back of her heels as a maggot would on death. Her gaze is turned now, not to the glistening bride, but on the tree doves who have ruffled already, their earthy excrement coating the plastic chairs, on the people and their peeling makeup melting away with sweat, on the cake that crumbles stale and saccharine.

The bouquet touches the ground.

Haru thinks, nothing lasts forever.