O little sparrows, mind your place!

This takes place somewhere between the end of the series and ten years into a new future. The title is taken from the 31 Days theme for October 31, 2009.

It is morning by the time he wakes; he knows by the silence and smell. Impenetrable as the dark is, there is a shade to it, perceptible only to a child like himself: still, cool, urgent with the first touch of dew. An hour of anticipation, of waiting for the light.

Hibari Kyouya realizes that he has never seen Dino this close before – he has never been in any real position to study the man uninterrupted, for all the intimacy of the battlefield and, more recently, the bedroom. There’s a moment of irritation, white hot and bad enough to threaten what little hold he has on his own temper. He forces himself to think on it to calm himself down, and realizes that it’s because of the way the man looks: quiet and peaceful, disarmed and perfectly at home with having a murderer-in-training – the Guardian of another Family that may be his rival somewhere down the road – beside him in bed.

There’s another something he can’t define in him, something much colder and sharper, made of the whispers in the corridor, the looks people send them both when they think Hibari is not watching them and it is safe for them to talk and rant and speculate and judge. As if their standards were his standards. As if they had the right to understand exactly what it is between him and this perfectly infuriating, perfectly vulnerable man.

Perhaps it hurts, but Hibari does not know what it is to hurt. He watches the gentle rise and fall of Dino’s chest, considers waking the man up with a tonfa to the side of his jaw and ends up reaching over that sleeping body, for the pack of cigarettes lying on its side by the night table. Hates the things, really (they taste like Dino’s mouth more often these days), but this is the one thing that he can never stop himself from doing now, even more so than breaking bones down the road to almost-perfection.

Someday, Hibari tells himself, he will leave this one. He will stand up, shake that hand off of his shoulder and walk out the door and never look back. Dino has human concerns, and he believes that he is above such things – has to be, with what he plans to do. Fighting means flying means not getting tied down. Not staying still long enough to come to consider dangerous possibilities.

Hibari lights up and takes a drag and does not move. Dino turns towards the warmth of Hibari’s body and sighs in his sleep.