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self-possessed

Five year old Kalluto thinks about his life, home, family, and future

requested on ao3

(warnings: implied/referenced child abuse and neglect, death mention, killing mention, organ mention, some gore.)

*

The rain comes down hazy over Kukuroo Mountain. It’s all a mist, like a curtain, but a soft and sheer one that doesn’t have anything to it but a dampness. It makes the mountain smell more strongly of pine and lilac and wisteria. Every night, Kalluto lies in bed, with his window open, watching the dampness gather on the windowsill.

Howls echo through the woods. It’s all very melancholy, like you would write a great tragedy by candlelight and bind the book by hand, just you, with your threads, needles, bone knife, and paper. But in the end, all of it goes up in flames, because the mountain remembers it’s a volcano, and sends up a fit of lava that consumes home, mist, and tragedy, all at once, creating a bigger tragedy, if anyone should remember you.

See? It’s all like that. Kalluto presses his finger to his lips. It comes away sticky from his lip balm. He watches the mist, the deep greyness of it, how it makes the air change. He lies on his back and counts his ribs. He lies on his side and spaces out hand-widths over his sheets. He isn’t very big. The bed is very wide. The sheets, the shams, are blue. The coverlet is white. It’s beautiful.

Some part of him wants to be happy, but this isn’t the sort of place to be happy. It’s all tragedy, remember? And he can take the tragedy and swallow it all down, because he can hold an enormity of secrets, and most secrets are sodden and full of great sorrow.

‘Someday,’ he tells the bear nestled in the crook of his arm, ‘I’m going to be...’

Then he stops because he doesn’t have even a secret idea of what he wants. Maybe what he wants is to write a great tragedy. He sits up.

It has a sound, the mist, when it comes down, even as soft as it is. The candle flame has a sound too. And he can see the wind. And none of that is normal, when you think of really normal. But he won’t be normal, and there is a power flowing through his body that he can see. Not even Killua can see it.

He makes his lips into a perfect ‘o’ and blows the candle out. That has a sound, the breath, the extinguishing. The smoke has a sound too, very faint, and it disappears, taking the sound with it.

Sometimes Kalluto thinks that his heart has stopped beating. He loses awareness of the sound of it. Then he can’t find it beneath his fingers as he searches wrist, neck, chest, and stomach.

‘I have a heartbeat,’ he whispers to his bear. ‘I know what a heart looks like.’ He licks his lip and his whisper is softer. ‘I know what a heart feels like beating once in my hand.’

He rests his cheek against his silk pillowcase and watches the mist.

‘I could write a great tragedy,’ he tells the open sky. ‘I think it would end with my throat cut. Or maybe my heart stopped. It would be very sad. But only if someone remembered it. Only if someone missed me.’ He kisses the top of the bear’s head. ‘I’ll be immune to poison. I wonder who will kill me? Sometimes I think Papa will. Sometimes it’s Mama. Sometimes it’s Illumi. But we aren’t allowed to kill each other, so they’d be breaking the rules of the family. And we aren’t allowed to do that. I don’t know what happens if we do break them. I didn’t ask. Maybe I should have asked.

‘I don’t think Killua would kill me. But he’s been gone a long time. To get strong, Papa says. Maybe they’ll send me too, when I’m six.’

He pulls the blanket higher. It’s cold out, but he keeps the window open. He’s dreaming of falling into a river, wide and shimmering blue, with lilacs all over the river bank. He would float on his back down the river and watch the clouds in the sky. He’d make his way home when he grew tired of it, and eat bread with butter while the sun set.

That’s something to want. He holds it close to rest of his secrets. It’s warmer than them, and it’s all golden yellow, hazy around the edges, like a memory of something that has not happened.

The grey of the mist is darkening. The moon is setting somewhere behind it. The moon has a sound to it too, a ring. Sometimes you see the ring of it, around the moon, as a halo. But it still has a sound.

He can hear sounds that don’t exist. He can hear people too. He hears how they are, who they are, and he hears their secrets.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘if I want to live and die on this mountain. I don’t know if I just want to be a name, just a name, the youngest child, last on the list, the final piece of the poem.’

See, that would be a tragedy that no one would remember. He closes his eyes, but he sees the world still in the sounds that are there, shouldn’t be there. He can see the ghosts of the shapes of the shadows.

He opens his eyes again. The mist has grown thin. He can see the moon setting, half of it visible now, disappearing fast. On the other side of the world, he can hear the sun. Maybe it is resting. He watches the moon until it is gone. He watches the place where it had been. The mist comes in heavy again.

He holds his hand over his head, fingers spread. There is an aura glowing softly around it, like the halo of the moon, but touching his skin. If he pulls it all inside of him, like the very worst of secrets, he disappears to everyone around him. Sometimes he has to. There’s only so much tragedy the hero can take, after all.

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