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KHR Rarepair Week Storm: Found Family
"Famiglia" is a fake thing, and they know this for as long as they can remember. For as long as they have been able to remember.
Famiglia means ties of blood, genetics that are at best distantly related. Who amongst the men in white or the men in black can claim to be a father, an uncle, an older cousin? It's impossible to say. Maybe they should look for similar eyes - brilliant warm brown, the dull misty purple. Which of them has blond hair, so distinct from the usual black? Maybe through searching out these things, they would find out some sort of connection that their blood allegedly grants them. Yet they look upon those faces over the muddied white of labcoats and the unforgiving black of suits, and they find nothing. They find only unfamiliar coldness. They only find something which shares nothing in turn with them.
Does this mean their Famiglia is inhuman, or are they?
Famiglia means a return to glory, a return to the past. This is not something they are always told, but they are told it enough. It is their only purpose in life: to live and die for the Famiglia so that one day the future might prosper. Once upon a time they were so great. Once upon a time in the years to come they will become great once more to reclaim their place and make their enemies who caused this to suffer. Everything is for the future. Those amongst them, those who do not wear faded white or grubby black, those who die? They are a part of the past and should not be thought of anymore.
Why is the idea of their Famiglia only a future dream, rather than something that shelters their present?
While they do not have all the words, not concretely, they still think these things as they live out the hours under the same unfading buzz of laboratory lights. They ponder it as they search out similarities in alien faces, watch the unbreathing husks of their kin be dragged away when they've served their purpose.
Famiglia is blood. Famiglia is glory.
Famiglia is a cage that traps them mercilessly, slowing closing in, waiting to choke them from life when they too have served their purpose.
...But there is a fourth option. It is an option, a description, a meaning that is learned the day that one of their own is pulled away into one of the surgical rooms and deprived of one single brilliant blue eye.
In exchange, he sees more than he ever has. He sees more than them, or the men in white and black. He sees the truth of the past, and the present, and the future. He sees the fourth meaning of Famiglia, and it is this: Famiglia is worthless, and worthless things can be destroyed.
So they do.
They destroy this faux-Famiglia from a future that would never belong to them. They stab through it with three metal prongs. They tear through it with fang and claw. They slice through it with the same scalpels that used to slice through them again and again. Then, when there is no more Famiglia, when it is only the three of them who have the most distant and muddied of blood ties, when the blood which tied is sticky all along the bare pads of their feet... They leave.
"Famiglia" is a strange thing outside of the labs, and it burns nearly as bright as the brilliant blue sky which stretches out over their heads every single day.
Unlike down in the labs, they know nothing about it, not initially. There are no adults to drone on and on at them about what Famiglia means, about how it is their only purpose for living. The outside's idea of Famiglia is a foreign thing that they have to learn about for themselves. It is far from easy, to be quite honest, and most of that is because of how foreign it is.
While they rarely talk about it - save for their leader, their strongest, the one who is guiding them down the right path and loves to hear the sound of his own voice - they all make something of a silent agreement with one another. Something that they understand, because it is the only kind of truth that surely must exist in the world they have seen.
Those people, those famiglia who are also bond by blood if not by crime and wealth, are liars.
The quietest of their number is at least willing to concede - to himself if nothing else - that perhaps they are not purposeful liars. Who would they be lying to when he watches them from the nighttime shadows as they all settle down around the same table to eat from the same dishes?
And yet they are certainly lying, of that there can be no doubt. They must be. How much would they truly sacrifice for one another? Which of their 'own' would they shove down into the dirt if push really came to shove? The nights at the dinner table, the laughter which filters out from the windows in hazy noons, the bustle of mornings - they may seem dazzling, so dazzling as to hurt the eyes, and that is because they are something akin to dreams.
Dreams have nowhere to belong in the simple reality of life. Anyone attempting to bring them there, to play out this sort of fantasy... It can be nothing more than a lie. A pathetic sort of lie that leaves them nothing short of vulnerable.
All three of them accept this sort of truth, because that is the only thing it could be. None of them question it, as they make their way throughout the country side, through small towns and sometimes larger cities, figuring out the way that it all works, how they fit into it all.
At least... They don't question it for a while.
It's the blond one amongst their group, the one who can tap into the power of wild beasts, who speaks up about it one night. They've all broken into a home that's been abandoned for perhaps a week or two; its owners are on vacation in some other place. The exact place doesn't matter of course. Only their absence. So they all huddle together in the place furthest away from any windows, down in the basement, cooking up food that can actually be warm.
Maybe it's only natural, for them to slip right back deep underground or into abandoned grim places, after all their lives were lived down in hidden laboratories. And yet the basement of this family could not be further away from the place in which they lived.
There is no neverending and eternally dirty white, always seeming stained with dirt or blood or vomit. There are no carefully locked cabinets, designed to keep them out from tools which they could use to rebel or drugs that they could use to sabotage the process the scientists were so focused on. There are certainly no scientists, or any other people besides the three of them as they curl down underneath there.
Just boxes. Boxes upon boxes, made of cheap cardboard, some of it falling apart at the seams. A shovel, propped up in one corner. Some sort of painting that just seems like colors slapped onto a canvas rather clumsily. A large blanket, folded up, on the verge of being nibbled away by the resident bugs.
It is down there, where they've scrounged up a campfire at night and are slowly dispersing the smoke up to the door at the top of the stairs, that their bestial companion asks a question inbetween his sniffling and coughing.
"Hey. Are we a Famiglia?"
Their leader makes a sound that is almost too derisive to be called a 'laugh'. "Of course not. That sort of thing is only reserved for that wretched criminal underworld, those mafiosi who follow their whims for shallow material reasons. We are a group together, us three, and yet we are nothing like them. We are better things, to be sure."
And that makes sense. The idea of Famiglia with the people who did so much to them was always a foreign thing, but there was never any doubt on what it was aimed towards: respect amongst the other mafiosi, riches, territory, that sort of thing.
What use would they have for all that sort of territory? What need is there for riches when they can simply take what they need in order to survive? And respect?
If they are respected by such things as mafiosi, then they are not really creatures worth staying alive.
So it makes sense. So they nod. Maybe it was a stupid question, but he has always been a little bit stupid, or so the quiet one has attested for many some days now. That should be the end of it nonetheless. They are not a Famiglia like that which they ran away from. They will never be like that. Yet instead of being satisfied by that answer, as he helps guide the smoke up into the rest of the house where it will slowly dissipate and fade away, the blond speaks up once again. "Then, are we a famiglia like this?" And he gestures, from the top of the stairs, to the rest of the house that is just a little hard to see through with all the smoke.
He gestures to the very old pieces of furniture which are propped up, apparently inherited from past people from many years ago. He gestures to the pictures which hang up there on the wall, displaying smiling faces all gathered around together in front of the very house that they live in. He gestures to an old calendar that hangs up there on the wall by a rusty nail, various dates scribbled upon including the one for Vacation! with stars drawn around it.
They cannot be a family like this, of course. They do not have treasured items from their predecessors, or at least they were not willingly given without blood being spilled. No photos exist of any of them, let alone that which has them smiling. There is nothing written down of their lives and happy dates to look forward to.
Yet still. Are they a family like this? Family born of blood in some way?
Logically - at least, two of the three of them know this to be logic - maybe there is some sort of blood connection between the three of them. There is of course a difference between "Famiglia" and "famiglia", yet there is no doubt that without the sort of resources they had access to while a proper Famiglia on the surface, the Estraneo could only rely on what they already had on their exile. That is to say, the children of their various members... or, perhaps even before that, the members who were not trained in violence or science. Rarely did they ever see women down there in the labs, after all.
It is unlikely that any of them are brothers; all three of them seem to be the same age as much as they can tell. It wouldn't be strange if they were cousins. And yet, it would be even more expected if they were simply all children of different blood, of different families, who simply ended up trapped in the cruel trap which calls itself Famiglia.
And the trap which is famiglia as well.
So they cannot say for sure, any of them, if they are famiglia or not. And yet there is zero hesitation in their leader's voice as he says, "No. Who outside us is allowed to say that we are or not? Why could they be trusted to say whether we are or not? All the reason they would want to shackle us with such meanings would be to imprison us, ignore our words and the meanings we ascribe to them. No. We are not." Their leader miles, the expression barely visible in what little light the embers give him. "We are simply more than that."
What does that mean? They know, and don't know. But in the end, it doesn't matter, not really. Indeed, they are more than just whatever petty words others would put upon them in the place of shackles.
This is a view that the three of them simply settle into as the truth for many years, until their ages reach into the double digits for the first time, and their bodies decide to go through some.... interesting changes that are less traumatizing but more constant and annoying than what they had to experience down in the labs.
The blond one starts to stink even more intensely than he already did, which is saying something. Their quiet member keeps hitting growth spurts, which the leaders insists does not annoy him. (It does.) Their leader's voice changes, and occasionally cracks, although they witness this sort of thing rarely - perhaps even only the one time - before they never hear it again. "Hidden with illusions," the quiet one explains to his partner, although it hardly seems worth the effort in the end with how words go in one ear and right out the other.
And there are other changes as well. Changes that stir deeper inside them than mere flesh can truly penetrate, although the flesh certainly reacts too.
For all the things they do, the bloodshed they cause, the Famiglia that they stir up into trouble and death, there is quite frankly a lot of downtime. And within that downtime, they can only do so much, and a lot of it is being with one another. It's never been an issue, before they started to live lives within the double digits, and from there, well...
They end up with each other, of course.
Because they are always with each other.
"I suppose I never had any need to worry," their leader says when he returns from overseeing whatever nonsense he was overseeing - or perhaps just playing with one of his most favorite toys, the toy he got the second they found their first target after escaping the labs. His Mukuro who acts in his stead, and is too broken to rebel. "Well, I suppose this is better in the long run than it being drawn out and becoming a nuisance, isn't it?"
Not like their leader worried in the first place. They both know that, just like they know he sure has impeccable timing for showing up in their hideout for the day while the quiet one - Colum for right now if anyone asks - is half sprawled and half naked underneath a blanket they stole ages ago.
Colum shifts as if thinking to move, but ultimately doesn't bother. Shame is something of a foreign concept he only knows about from other people; there's never been any use for it in his life. Especially with their leader. What part of them has he not seen already? What part of them is he not familiar with as much as his very own body? So all he does is stay in place, looking up at him without moving. Somewhere, glasses lay that he should probably put on, or at least put away. He's needed to use them in the last few years. His leader is close enough it doesn't matter.
It's hard to say what has the question stir inside his chest, his skull. Why now, after so many years where they left its predecessors behind down in the dust and dirt of that little basement where they cooked food together as children who hadn't quite solidified the first step of their leader's plan to take down the mafia and all the rest of the world too.
Yet maybe in the dust and dirt is where they planted that idea and now, years later, it finally sprouts a little bit, curious bits of green twined around the words which reach out past his lips. "Does this make us famiglia now, or not?"
It shouldn't matter, really. Only after he's spoken it does Colum realize this might make him sound desperate for the concept, as though he's been chasing it all this time - or even just chasing it throughout his partner, when that couldn't be farther from the case. Of course he's not desperate for it. A Famiglia, or a famiglia, are some of the worst things in the world.
But he has seen the way the world works, now a teenager with some experience under his belt instead of a mere child trying to puzzle it all together. He has seen the way that teenage couples will come together, holding hands and kissing and going off to do things that are now very clear to him. He has watched women in bars lean in very close to the men that are there, for mundane and ill intent alike. He has heard the wedding bells ringing out through small towns, and got glimpses of white to black. What happens when two people come together? That. And then they become famiglia.
There is no need to worry in the end. His leader knows him as well as he knows his own body, and he crouches down, leans in close so that their lips too, might meet.
"It does not. We are something better, and you and him my finest paired tools."
And he takes that gladly.
Famiglia means ties of blood, genetics that are at best distantly related. Who amongst the men in white or the men in black can claim to be a father, an uncle, an older cousin? It's impossible to say. Maybe they should look for similar eyes - brilliant warm brown, the dull misty purple. Which of them has blond hair, so distinct from the usual black? Maybe through searching out these things, they would find out some sort of connection that their blood allegedly grants them. Yet they look upon those faces over the muddied white of labcoats and the unforgiving black of suits, and they find nothing. They find only unfamiliar coldness. They only find something which shares nothing in turn with them.
Does this mean their Famiglia is inhuman, or are they?
Famiglia means a return to glory, a return to the past. This is not something they are always told, but they are told it enough. It is their only purpose in life: to live and die for the Famiglia so that one day the future might prosper. Once upon a time they were so great. Once upon a time in the years to come they will become great once more to reclaim their place and make their enemies who caused this to suffer. Everything is for the future. Those amongst them, those who do not wear faded white or grubby black, those who die? They are a part of the past and should not be thought of anymore.
Why is the idea of their Famiglia only a future dream, rather than something that shelters their present?
While they do not have all the words, not concretely, they still think these things as they live out the hours under the same unfading buzz of laboratory lights. They ponder it as they search out similarities in alien faces, watch the unbreathing husks of their kin be dragged away when they've served their purpose.
Famiglia is blood. Famiglia is glory.
Famiglia is a cage that traps them mercilessly, slowing closing in, waiting to choke them from life when they too have served their purpose.
...But there is a fourth option. It is an option, a description, a meaning that is learned the day that one of their own is pulled away into one of the surgical rooms and deprived of one single brilliant blue eye.
In exchange, he sees more than he ever has. He sees more than them, or the men in white and black. He sees the truth of the past, and the present, and the future. He sees the fourth meaning of Famiglia, and it is this: Famiglia is worthless, and worthless things can be destroyed.
So they do.
They destroy this faux-Famiglia from a future that would never belong to them. They stab through it with three metal prongs. They tear through it with fang and claw. They slice through it with the same scalpels that used to slice through them again and again. Then, when there is no more Famiglia, when it is only the three of them who have the most distant and muddied of blood ties, when the blood which tied is sticky all along the bare pads of their feet... They leave.
"Famiglia" is a strange thing outside of the labs, and it burns nearly as bright as the brilliant blue sky which stretches out over their heads every single day.
Unlike down in the labs, they know nothing about it, not initially. There are no adults to drone on and on at them about what Famiglia means, about how it is their only purpose for living. The outside's idea of Famiglia is a foreign thing that they have to learn about for themselves. It is far from easy, to be quite honest, and most of that is because of how foreign it is.
While they rarely talk about it - save for their leader, their strongest, the one who is guiding them down the right path and loves to hear the sound of his own voice - they all make something of a silent agreement with one another. Something that they understand, because it is the only kind of truth that surely must exist in the world they have seen.
Those people, those famiglia who are also bond by blood if not by crime and wealth, are liars.
The quietest of their number is at least willing to concede - to himself if nothing else - that perhaps they are not purposeful liars. Who would they be lying to when he watches them from the nighttime shadows as they all settle down around the same table to eat from the same dishes?
And yet they are certainly lying, of that there can be no doubt. They must be. How much would they truly sacrifice for one another? Which of their 'own' would they shove down into the dirt if push really came to shove? The nights at the dinner table, the laughter which filters out from the windows in hazy noons, the bustle of mornings - they may seem dazzling, so dazzling as to hurt the eyes, and that is because they are something akin to dreams.
Dreams have nowhere to belong in the simple reality of life. Anyone attempting to bring them there, to play out this sort of fantasy... It can be nothing more than a lie. A pathetic sort of lie that leaves them nothing short of vulnerable.
All three of them accept this sort of truth, because that is the only thing it could be. None of them question it, as they make their way throughout the country side, through small towns and sometimes larger cities, figuring out the way that it all works, how they fit into it all.
At least... They don't question it for a while.
It's the blond one amongst their group, the one who can tap into the power of wild beasts, who speaks up about it one night. They've all broken into a home that's been abandoned for perhaps a week or two; its owners are on vacation in some other place. The exact place doesn't matter of course. Only their absence. So they all huddle together in the place furthest away from any windows, down in the basement, cooking up food that can actually be warm.
Maybe it's only natural, for them to slip right back deep underground or into abandoned grim places, after all their lives were lived down in hidden laboratories. And yet the basement of this family could not be further away from the place in which they lived.
There is no neverending and eternally dirty white, always seeming stained with dirt or blood or vomit. There are no carefully locked cabinets, designed to keep them out from tools which they could use to rebel or drugs that they could use to sabotage the process the scientists were so focused on. There are certainly no scientists, or any other people besides the three of them as they curl down underneath there.
Just boxes. Boxes upon boxes, made of cheap cardboard, some of it falling apart at the seams. A shovel, propped up in one corner. Some sort of painting that just seems like colors slapped onto a canvas rather clumsily. A large blanket, folded up, on the verge of being nibbled away by the resident bugs.
It is down there, where they've scrounged up a campfire at night and are slowly dispersing the smoke up to the door at the top of the stairs, that their bestial companion asks a question inbetween his sniffling and coughing.
"Hey. Are we a Famiglia?"
Their leader makes a sound that is almost too derisive to be called a 'laugh'. "Of course not. That sort of thing is only reserved for that wretched criminal underworld, those mafiosi who follow their whims for shallow material reasons. We are a group together, us three, and yet we are nothing like them. We are better things, to be sure."
And that makes sense. The idea of Famiglia with the people who did so much to them was always a foreign thing, but there was never any doubt on what it was aimed towards: respect amongst the other mafiosi, riches, territory, that sort of thing.
What use would they have for all that sort of territory? What need is there for riches when they can simply take what they need in order to survive? And respect?
If they are respected by such things as mafiosi, then they are not really creatures worth staying alive.
So it makes sense. So they nod. Maybe it was a stupid question, but he has always been a little bit stupid, or so the quiet one has attested for many some days now. That should be the end of it nonetheless. They are not a Famiglia like that which they ran away from. They will never be like that. Yet instead of being satisfied by that answer, as he helps guide the smoke up into the rest of the house where it will slowly dissipate and fade away, the blond speaks up once again. "Then, are we a famiglia like this?" And he gestures, from the top of the stairs, to the rest of the house that is just a little hard to see through with all the smoke.
He gestures to the very old pieces of furniture which are propped up, apparently inherited from past people from many years ago. He gestures to the pictures which hang up there on the wall, displaying smiling faces all gathered around together in front of the very house that they live in. He gestures to an old calendar that hangs up there on the wall by a rusty nail, various dates scribbled upon including the one for Vacation! with stars drawn around it.
They cannot be a family like this, of course. They do not have treasured items from their predecessors, or at least they were not willingly given without blood being spilled. No photos exist of any of them, let alone that which has them smiling. There is nothing written down of their lives and happy dates to look forward to.
Yet still. Are they a family like this? Family born of blood in some way?
Logically - at least, two of the three of them know this to be logic - maybe there is some sort of blood connection between the three of them. There is of course a difference between "Famiglia" and "famiglia", yet there is no doubt that without the sort of resources they had access to while a proper Famiglia on the surface, the Estraneo could only rely on what they already had on their exile. That is to say, the children of their various members... or, perhaps even before that, the members who were not trained in violence or science. Rarely did they ever see women down there in the labs, after all.
It is unlikely that any of them are brothers; all three of them seem to be the same age as much as they can tell. It wouldn't be strange if they were cousins. And yet, it would be even more expected if they were simply all children of different blood, of different families, who simply ended up trapped in the cruel trap which calls itself Famiglia.
And the trap which is famiglia as well.
So they cannot say for sure, any of them, if they are famiglia or not. And yet there is zero hesitation in their leader's voice as he says, "No. Who outside us is allowed to say that we are or not? Why could they be trusted to say whether we are or not? All the reason they would want to shackle us with such meanings would be to imprison us, ignore our words and the meanings we ascribe to them. No. We are not." Their leader miles, the expression barely visible in what little light the embers give him. "We are simply more than that."
What does that mean? They know, and don't know. But in the end, it doesn't matter, not really. Indeed, they are more than just whatever petty words others would put upon them in the place of shackles.
This is a view that the three of them simply settle into as the truth for many years, until their ages reach into the double digits for the first time, and their bodies decide to go through some.... interesting changes that are less traumatizing but more constant and annoying than what they had to experience down in the labs.
The blond one starts to stink even more intensely than he already did, which is saying something. Their quiet member keeps hitting growth spurts, which the leaders insists does not annoy him. (It does.) Their leader's voice changes, and occasionally cracks, although they witness this sort of thing rarely - perhaps even only the one time - before they never hear it again. "Hidden with illusions," the quiet one explains to his partner, although it hardly seems worth the effort in the end with how words go in one ear and right out the other.
And there are other changes as well. Changes that stir deeper inside them than mere flesh can truly penetrate, although the flesh certainly reacts too.
For all the things they do, the bloodshed they cause, the Famiglia that they stir up into trouble and death, there is quite frankly a lot of downtime. And within that downtime, they can only do so much, and a lot of it is being with one another. It's never been an issue, before they started to live lives within the double digits, and from there, well...
They end up with each other, of course.
Because they are always with each other.
"I suppose I never had any need to worry," their leader says when he returns from overseeing whatever nonsense he was overseeing - or perhaps just playing with one of his most favorite toys, the toy he got the second they found their first target after escaping the labs. His Mukuro who acts in his stead, and is too broken to rebel. "Well, I suppose this is better in the long run than it being drawn out and becoming a nuisance, isn't it?"
Not like their leader worried in the first place. They both know that, just like they know he sure has impeccable timing for showing up in their hideout for the day while the quiet one - Colum for right now if anyone asks - is half sprawled and half naked underneath a blanket they stole ages ago.
Colum shifts as if thinking to move, but ultimately doesn't bother. Shame is something of a foreign concept he only knows about from other people; there's never been any use for it in his life. Especially with their leader. What part of them has he not seen already? What part of them is he not familiar with as much as his very own body? So all he does is stay in place, looking up at him without moving. Somewhere, glasses lay that he should probably put on, or at least put away. He's needed to use them in the last few years. His leader is close enough it doesn't matter.
It's hard to say what has the question stir inside his chest, his skull. Why now, after so many years where they left its predecessors behind down in the dust and dirt of that little basement where they cooked food together as children who hadn't quite solidified the first step of their leader's plan to take down the mafia and all the rest of the world too.
Yet maybe in the dust and dirt is where they planted that idea and now, years later, it finally sprouts a little bit, curious bits of green twined around the words which reach out past his lips. "Does this make us famiglia now, or not?"
It shouldn't matter, really. Only after he's spoken it does Colum realize this might make him sound desperate for the concept, as though he's been chasing it all this time - or even just chasing it throughout his partner, when that couldn't be farther from the case. Of course he's not desperate for it. A Famiglia, or a famiglia, are some of the worst things in the world.
But he has seen the way the world works, now a teenager with some experience under his belt instead of a mere child trying to puzzle it all together. He has seen the way that teenage couples will come together, holding hands and kissing and going off to do things that are now very clear to him. He has watched women in bars lean in very close to the men that are there, for mundane and ill intent alike. He has heard the wedding bells ringing out through small towns, and got glimpses of white to black. What happens when two people come together? That. And then they become famiglia.
There is no need to worry in the end. His leader knows him as well as he knows his own body, and he crouches down, leans in close so that their lips too, might meet.
"It does not. We are something better, and you and him my finest paired tools."
And he takes that gladly.