Dead-Eyed Tsuna (KHR!)

9: POV - The Record Of Gokudera Hayato

- Child -

Hayato's first memories are from when he was three.

Long hair trailing around him. Long fingers against his face, against the piano keys. The shape of her lips when she smiled. He watched her hands religiously, trying his best to imitate them with his chubby little stubs, he worshiped the moments they spent together, flashes of memory that stay eternally lodged in his mind.

When he's four, she doesn't come anymore, and he's too young to truly feel the loss.

When he's five, Bianchi starts cooking.

There's something odd about the food Bianchi makes. At first, back then, it wasn't really too awful, just...strangely rich. There was something off about her cooking, but she wasn't doing anything wrong, so people didn't investigate.

When Hayato is six, Bianchi's cooking starts killing people.

It was just making the staff sick, at first, and everyone passed it off as it being a little too rich, but then she feeds a man she has a crush on, that Hayato thinks might have had a crush on her too, and he dies from food poisoning. It gets worse. Symptoms vary depending who she's feeding, and sometimes it seems like the people she is happiest to cook for are the ones most likely to die.

Hayato is scared, because he loves his sister, and he's sure she loves him.

Through some degree of ridiculous luck, the symptoms for the things she makes him are nothing more extreme than hallucinogens and stomach aches. Her cookies make him insensible, but never dead, even though he's young and his body is weak.

Her cookies also do something weird to his piano playing.

His father and the audiences he plays for adore it. Hayato is force-fed Bianchi's food, shoved out on stage completely beyond all reasoning, and then forced to listen to recordings of the erratic compositions his addled mind made up so he can write them down in his composition book and play them cleanly while in his right mind. The pattern continues endlessly, and Hayato finds no joy in the piano like this, as incredibly popular as he's become. He barely remembers what it's like to play when he's under the influence, and the music sounds like light, feathery nonsense to his ears when he's lucid.

He feels sick when he has to touch the piano keys. He feels sick when he looks at Bianchi. He's always sick, and he wants no more of this.

That's when the doctor gets his attention.

The doctor is there to make Bianchi's cooking even deadlier, as far as Hayato is aware. He'll ask her to put her hands in some sort of dish, and then suddenly fungus sprouts out from underneath her hands, followed by mosses, lichen, fluffy white balls that look like hairy marimo. Hayato thinks she's some sort of nature goddess reincarnated, and always sneaks into the doctor's room to watch her grow things between her fingers.

Hayato starts using it as a distraction. He takes up gardening and urges Bianchi to help him with his plants until she forgets about feeding him entirely. It means he has to replay old songs endlessly during recitals, but it saves his stomach, and the things she grows in those plots are always so bizarre looking.

New plant breeds, their father notes, and he's happy with them and their little gardening moments. Hayato is safe here.

There's also the bugs. Bianchi attracts a lot of bugs. Flies are suddenly compelled to lay maggots, worms like to crawl out into open air if her skin is touching the earth for too long, millipedes settle in her tea set and the kitchen seems to be perpetually infested with beetles. She just throws them into her concoctions, for 'texture'.