#click on the links and go listen even if you haven't played ffxv

[lynffles]

AU # 4

Time-travel fix-it AU, also known as: tfw when you realize you’ve laid down the foundations of something that could very easily more like painfully be expanded into a multi-chapter where the massacre never happens and Kurapika gets wooed into joining the Ryodan

9th of December, Friday [Failure]

“—chou. Danchou!”

The first thing he heard after the world shattered into the white fuzz and noise of a video screen gone bad with static was the insistent murmur of his second, and Kuroro blinked rapidly, momentarily disoriented. His vision cleared immediately, but the high-pitched whine in his ears remained, and—had someone taken a sledgehammer to the back of his skull while he hadn’t been paying attention? The debilitating pain was making him nauseous, and given that he’d never been so much as sick even with a simple cold ever since learning nen, the sensation was as alarming for him as it was mind-boggling.

Or maybe the reason he felt like throwing up was because he could see fatal wounds on his friends where there weren’t any, and you should be dead and I saw you die kept skittering along his thoughts like a deranged mantra.

“Danchou, are you listening?” Pakunoda’s tone was clipped now, the way it went sharp and slightly accented whenever she got impatient. He looked up and ignored the phantom dribble of blood trailing down the corners of her lips because it wasn’t real, just as imaginary as Shal’s smashed face and the horrific cut bisecting Coltopi’s throat—

“I am.” A pause, because no, he wasn’t, and he needed a second to recall just what it was they’d been discussing before something tore his awareness in half—right, they were deciding on the next job to take. “Can I see the list again?”

“Did you fall asleep, Danchou?” Nobunaga (your heart should have been crushed, how are you still alive) teased, and Feitan somewhere in the back of the room gave a low but still audible snort and said, “Maybe he didn’t get enough last night because your snoring kept him awake.”

Kuroro ignored the cacophony of the ensuing, inevitable scuffle and the bizarre ache in his chest, and instead focused on the scrap of paper he accepted from Paku. Written on it was a short list of only five items, nothing so remarkable or world-shattering to cause his headache to double in intensity, but—

A clan living in seclusion in Rukuso Valley was the very first item, and Kuroro had to swallow the bile that crawled up his throat. It was a wonder that none of his sharper-eyed subordinates had realized that something was very wrong with him; he felt cold as he stared unseeingly at the words, the roar of a waking nightmare crashing through his ears—

“You knew—this was going to happen—”

“The first one,” he heard himself saying slowly, almost dreamily, a counterpoint to his senses threatening to shake apart at the seams, “who sent the request again?”

Silence greeted him, and he looked up to find Pakunoda and Shalnark exchanging questioning looks. The rest had varying degrees of confusion on their faces. Nobunaga and Feitan’s impromptu spat had expanded into a four-way wrestling match to include Uvogin and Phinx, and the four now froze in unison as the awkward wake of Kuroro’s question washed over them.

“No idea,” Shalnark finally answered. “These things never come with their requesters. Does it matter?”

“—knew this was going to happen sooner or later—”

Kuroro resisted the urge to shake away the maddening familiar-unfamiliar echo of a voice he’d never heard before, and yet—can you all hear that, he wanted to shout, and risk getting called crazy because it was clear that none of his Ryodan were experiencing the same strange symptoms now plaguing him.

“I’m not sure,” he continued in the same distracted, disconnected manner. “Just—” He tapped a fingertip against the single line. Single, as opposed to the more fleshed-out items below with more details. “It’s too vague.” Were he in a lazier mood he would have just gone with it, vague or not, and left it up to Paku and Shal to find out more about location and identity of their targets, and then—

Something inside him shuddered and refused to take the thought further.

“Call it scratching an itch,” he continued, giving Paku and Shal a small smile of—something. It must have conveyed enough of his need for answers because Paku shrugged and stood up.

“I’ll see if I can track down the requester. I’m assuming that you’d want to talk to them yourself?” she asked with an eyebrow arched at his uncharacteristic interest in that one specific request.

Kuroro nodded, and settled down to wait as she slipped out. It wasn’t as if they were in a hurry, in any case; they were used to being on standby, while the more restless members were free to wander off and find things to occupy themselves with. Shalnark (young, uninjured, alive) scooted closer to once again badger Coltopi into getting the same model of mobile phone he was using, and Kuroro felt the slight tremor of Franklin ambling over to fit himself into the space Pakunoda had vacated.

“Must be a pretty big itch if you’re going out of your way to find out more about this request,” the larger man rumbled in reference to his earlier comment.

He hummed noncommittally (stubbornly, absolutely refused to acknowledge the shadow of extensive bruising wrapped around Franklin’s neck and face) and pulled out his nen book—a clear dismissal against anyone else looking to grill him about his behavior.

“—you knew—this was going to happen sooner or later, so why…”

His headache was abating, revving down to a dull, more bearable throb between his eyes, but his hallucination continued to whisper, choked, dying gasps of a voice gone hoarse with rage and grief.

He’d failed—something. Someone. A lot of people, it felt like, and now he couldn’t shake off the urge to make sure it never happened again. But how to do it, when he was still struggling to figure out what was wrong with him—

*

“What is wrong with you? I thought the Ryodan accepted any request without asking questions?!”

Well, they did, but—Kuroro couldn’t keep his astonishment from seeping into his expression as the requester Pakunoda had tracked down after half a day of searching the eastern outskirts went increasingly red in the face the more he tried and failed to argue his case.

“Any request, but within reason,” he repeated. “You want us to go all the way to Rukuso—that’s on the other side of the continent—because, what? You got caught pickpocketing by a kid half your size?”

“Th’ money was mine! I earned it! We don’t do takebacks, so you gotta go kill the little shit—”

“Technically, that money wasn’t yours to begin with,” Shalnark interrupted. “You couldn’t even keep hold of something you stole. The takeback doesn’t apply; you’re just angry because that kid humiliated you.”

Kuroro blinked and regarded Shalnark with no small amount of surprise as the man sputtered and flushed nearly purple. The blond was usually the most affable of their group, not easily riled, and yet here he was getting snippy.

To be fair, he didn’t seem to be the only one reacting negatively to the tone of outraged pretension in the man’s demands. Machi’s sharp eyes were narrowing, and Feitan’s shoulders had dropped into that lazy slouch that meant he was one more whine away from ripping the man’s tongue clean from his throat.

“—my claim’s legit! If you don’t do this I’m gonna let everyone know the Ryodan ain’t good for their word—”

“Enough,” Kuroro cut in, voice gone a degree cooler. “You forget your place. We’ve killed over lesser insults.” And the man—finally—shut up at that, choking seemingly on his own spit and paling into a pasty white as he realized the consequences of attempting to extort the Geneiryodan.

Kuroro let him sweat in silence for another agonizing minute before continuing in a deceptively milder tone, “Like Shalnark said, there’s no merit in us going halfway around the world just to stoke your petty ego. I won’t accept your request.”

“But—”

“Actually, you should be thankful that kid let you off with just a beating instead of leaving you to rot in jail,” he added as an afterthought, with a mental note to himself to tell Kurapika to stop being so stupidly altruistic—

The man left shortly after that, escorted off the premises by Uvogin and a scowling Nobunaga, not that Kuroro noticed much about his exit because he was too busy trying not so show any visible signs of panic at the name that had slipped in unbidden amongst his streams of thought.

*

—tears searing trails down his rapidly-cooling skin, trembling fingertips cradling his face, and someone was crying over him but he couldn’t see anymore, oblivion pulling him inexorably down into a darkness so absolute, and then—

He died.

He died at hands he’d grown to love, that much he was certain of now, because not even his imagination at its wildest was creative (or fucked-up) enough to come up with hallucinations this convoluted and specific.

In another life (or another time? String theory and quantum physics wasn’t his forte, and he didn’t think that had anything to do with what was happening to him, in any case) he’d watched as the only people who’d come close enough to be called family were cut down by a technique nen exorcists only referred to in tones of horror and barely-veiled disgust.

Sacrificing life and all potential for one last burst of unimaginable, unassailable strength, and then—

And then, nothing. He died. They died.

And here he was.

*

Kuroro blinked himself out of the stupor he’d fallen into, just in time to see Uvogin and Nobunaga duck back into the room. Uvo (we never found where he buried you) was theatrically dusting his hands, a sharp-edged grin providing ridiculous contrast to the massive afro he had yet to decide to get rid of in this timeline.

“That was fun. But weird,” he added with the blitheness of someone who couldn’t exactly follow the events happening around him but was happy enough tagging along. “Danchou, what’s the big deal?”

“Good riddance to trash,” Shalnark muttered lowly, ducking his head and hunching over his phone. The tips of his ears were red; maybe he felt embarrassed over his earlier outburst? Pakunoda eyed the younger blond with fond exasperation before turning to address her leader.

“Uvo’s right, though. You’ve never questioned requests before. If word really gets around that we’re picking jobs…”

“We’ve always picked jobs,” Kuroro pointed out with a shrug. “I just didn’t feel like doing that one, it’s too much effort for a measly five hundred zenny he managed to make up several times over in subsequent heists, anyway.”

Pakunoda didn’t look convinced. “We can take the other four jobs to make up for it, if you’re that worried,” he offered as a compromise, which��wasn’t really. He understood her concerns, that taking on the rest to compensate for the first refused one wasn’t exactly the correct answer, nor was screwing with the timeline, or whatever it was he was now doing, but—

His headache was gone, as were the ghostly afterimages of injuries on his Ryodan’s bodies, as if whatever cosmic force had been hell-bent on punishing him had decided to let up now that he’d chosen not to take that first job. If that wasn’t fixing whatever was wrong with him, he didn’t know what was.

Now, where did the man say he got caught for pickpocketing…?

*

It would take him a mere six months to track Kurapika down, which was a shockingly, alarmingly short amount of time for him, because if it was that easy for him, how much easier would it be for unscrupulous Hunters to find the kid if they ever got wind of his identity as a Kuruta?

Then again, it wasn’t as if the blond had been broadcasting his heritage. Entering and then qualifying for a slot at one of the most prestigious universities in the continent at the tender age of thirteen, though—now that would draw attention of a different sort entirely.

“Who are you?” Brown eyes bright with suspicion glared up at him—gods, he’s tiny—quashing all half-baked ideas of him just coming right out and telling the truth. The itch was back, urging him to take the blond into his arms and never let go; resisting felt like the hardest thing he’d ever done.

The massacre was never going to happen if he had anything to say about it. The Ryodan would stay whole, barring accidents like Hisoka worming his way into the number four spot again (but maybe Kuroro could do something about that, too). Kurapika would never know the grief of losing family, nor the all-consuming rage of having to choose between familial obligation and an unwanted love, and—he wouldn’t have to die, forced to burn the rest of his life away for a single act of revenge.

Kuroro wouldn’t fail. Not this time around.

Lol I wrote the second half to the tune of the Somnus instrumental and then LUNA on repeat, both of which turned out to be oddly, distressingly on-point.

And then I put on APOCALYPSIS NOCTIS when I realized that I’d gotten to a good enough stopping point someone put me out of my misery.

(Hi, I’m back? And very late with these things, shush, I’ll be the first to admit that I disappeared for a month to drown in FFXV feels, not that you can’t tell that I’m hopelessly obsessed with all my recent hysterical reblogs.)