close to home - part 2
Takeshi opens his door on a Wednesday evening and is immediately dizzyingly grateful that Hayato isn’t around, because there’s a hysterical, bloody, fourteen-year-old girl on the doorstep, and Takeshi knows for a fact that Hayato couldn’t handle that.
He grabs Asami by the hand and pulls her inside before the neighbors see. His neighbors still think he’s a nice man, despite various family members’ best efforts, but even he couldn’t explain away a bloody little girl.
“Papa,” she gasps, “is going to be so mad.”
She’s shaking, but it’s probably just adrenaline. As far as Takeshi can see, none of the blood is hers. The wild eyes-well. He remembers what a first kill feels like. The eyes make sense.
Baby’s first murder.
“Why do you think he’ll be mad?” he asks calmly, leading her to the kitchen and sitting her down on a wooden chair that already has bloodstains, courtesy Hayato. Takeshi has a designated chair for bloody people. Life is weird.
“I ruined my dress,” Asami says, upset in wild disproportion to the problem. To what she’s telling herself is the problem. “Papa bought me this dress!”
Takeshi studies the dress in question. Before it became a blood-soaked disaster, it was a summer dress, white with blue straps and a blue sash. Modest but cute. Takeshi tries to picture Hibari walking into a store and buying it, and he just can’t.
“I love this dress,” Asami continues sadly, looking down at it-a white dress soaked in blood. There’s no hope for it at all. Asami jerks her head up and stares belligerently at the overhead light, which is what she always does when she’s about to cry. She hates and resents tears, and if you don’t watch her, she will stare at the sun in an attempt to burn them away.
“Ah,” Takeshi says, pretty much at a loss. What do you tell the beloved daughter of a borderline sociopath under these circumstances? Where’s Squalo when you need him? “Your dad’ll be happy you fought well. Maybe he won’t care about the dress.”
“No,” she wails, losing the fight against tears and enraged about it. “I didn’t, I didn’t fight well! Look at me, I made a mess-God, you’re so stupid, you don’t know anything!”
“Wait a second-you mean you’re supposed to be neat?” Come to think of it, Hibari usually walks away from nasty fights looking like he’s leaving a tea party. And always with that smile, too. “Okay. Okay, but when he was your age, your dad made huge messes. Huge. Blood, dirt, torn clothes, the whole deal. You have to work up to being neat, right? He won’t be mad.”
Asami shoves tears away from her eyes and glares suspiciously.
“Come on. Your dad’s always fair.” Or he’s consistent, at any rate.
“Papa’s always fair,” Asami agrees reluctantly.
Takeshi hesitates, because he’s about to make this very weird conversation even weirder. But it has to be done. “Do I need to be…calling someone? About, I don’t know, a body?”
She looks embarrassed. “Don’t tell Tsuna.”
“…Why not?”
“He’ll get all upset.”
Takeshi can’t argue with that. “And you don’t want to bother your dad because you think he’ll be mad about the mess?” She nods woefully. “Your mom in town?” She shakes her head. “Right…how about we have Kusakabe take care of the body, and Sasagawa clean you up?”
“You mean Aunt Kyoko?”
“Yeah.” No contest. Kyoko will be less bothered by this than anyone else Takeshi can think of, whereas Ryouhei would freak out and possibly destroy a building.
Asami nods, calmer now that there’s a plan. “Tell Tetsu not to tell Papa.” Tell everyone not to tell anyone, huh? Great.
Takeshi calls Kusakabe and explains the situation, and Kusakabe shouts hysterical questions into his ear. He’s never heard Kusakabe shout before. Another new experience.
Next he calls Kyoko, who doesn’t shout. She just says, “I see. She’ll need a new dress, then. What did the old one look like?” Takeshi smiles. This attitude is the reason Kyoko gets stuck with cleanup duty so often.
“So,” Takeshi says once his calls are done, settling into the chair across the table from Asami. He’s already tired, and the drama’s not even half over. “What led up to this?”
“This?” she asks blankly.
“Oh, you know. Bloodstains. Dead bodies. All that.”
Her eyes slide away from his and she smiles, and sometimes you can really see what a hand Tsuna had in raising her. “I was annoyed,” she says. They’re very Hibari words, but the delivery is an exact imitation of Tsuna’s dismissive style when he’s lying because he doesn’t want to worry you. This must drive her father insane.
Frankly, it’s not making Takeshi very happy, either. What could Asami possibly think would worry him more than the idea that she plans to kill everyone who annoys her?
“Man or woman?” Takeshi asks as lightly as he can manage.
“A man.” Asami grins maniacally. Hibari particularly enjoys it when she beats the crap out of men.
“Mm. How did you do it?”
She hitches her skirt up high enough that Takeshi looks away in alarm, not sure where this is going-but she’s just pulling a short knife from the thigh sheath she apparently wears. Who knew?
“I gouged his eyes out,” she says thoughtfully. “Then I cut his throat, too. That’s what made the mess. I made sure to clean my knife, though.”
Her voice is wavering up and down, up and down.
“Ah.” Takeshi turns to study the pattern of evening light coming through the curtains; this is no time for eye contact. “It’s a cold feeling, isn’t it?”
“Blood is hot,” she corrects shakily, setting her knife carefully on the table.
“Yes…but still. Cold.”
“Cold,” she agrees, hunched in on herself, arms wrapped around her middle, over the bloodstains. “He deserved it.”
“Of course he did. You wouldn’t have done it otherwise. But knowing that doesn’t help as much as it seems like it should.”
“Feel sick.”
“Need to throw up?”
“No.”
“Put your head between your knees, lower than your heart if you can.”
She doubles over, head resting against her skirt, gasping for more air than she really needs. Takeshi studies the light against the curtains, and he waits. This, you have to work out on your own. He wishes Asami hadn’t felt the need to work it out at fourteen.
She always was precocious. Too much like the rest of them.
Eventually she sits up again and braces both hands against the table, concentrating hard on just breathing. “Anyway,” she says, steadier than before. “I’m fine.”
“I can see that,” Takeshi tells her, and laughs when she marches around the table to kick him.
Kyoko, with her usual good timing, chooses this moment to arrive. She says her hellos, then inspects the apartment-bloody girl, bloody chair, knife on the kitchen table-ending with a steady gaze in Takeshi’s direction. He hustles to get out of her way.
“I’ll go for a walk,” he says brightly, edging toward the door. “I’ll be back in…?”
Kyoko contemplates the state of Asami, and says, “An hour.”
“I’ll be back in an hour!”
He realizes he’s fleeing his own home, but that’s the least of his troubles. In fact, he’d like an hour to process all the chaos, but of course it doesn’t work out that way. Hayato has a sixth sense for the rare times when Takeshi is planning to brood. Takeshi gets a call about ten minutes after leaving his apartment.
“Yamamoto,” Hayato grates out, steady and slow. “What the hell is going on?”
Takeshi winces. That is one angry right hand man. “Haha…did you go to my place?”
“Your bloodstained place? Yeah. Yeah, I did. You weren’t there, but Sasagawa was, and if I understood her correctly, she just told me to fuck off and mind my own business. What the fuck.”
“Well, I can’t go back for an hour. Want to meet up at yours?”
“What do you mean you can’t-no. In thirty seconds or less, what’s going on?”
“Thirty seconds, haha, that’s harsh. Okay. Asami ruined her dress killing someone. She was worried Hibari’d get mad about the dress, so she came to me. I called Kusakabe to get rid of the body, and Sasagawa to clean up Asami.” Not even twenty seconds. Takeshi’s good.
Hayato’s making a scary hissing noise now, like he’d be screaming if he weren’t biting his tongue. He should really learn not to ask for things he doesn’t want.
They end up meeting at the Namimori middle school baseball diamond, where they sit in the bleachers and talk about work and murder for a while. Just making the day that little bit more surreal.
“I don’t know what the fuck I expected from Hibari’s kid,” Hayato announces, glaring at third base like it spit on his shoe.
“I expected her to make it to sixteen, at least,” Takeshi admits. “That was my first kill. Sixteen.”
“Yeah, but you-you were protecting the Tenth, you didn’t kill a random guy in an alley. That’s fucked up.”
I was protecting you, too, Takeshi thinks, but he knows better than to say so. “What about you?”
Hayato remains fixated on third base. “I was ten,” he mutters eventually. “And it was a random guy in an alley.”
Oh.
“Been an hour yet?”
“…Yeah,” Takeshi answers, voice a little rough. He clears his throat. “Yeah, it’s been an hour.” He casts about for something to get that look off of Hayato’s face. “Should we bring back food?”
Hayato rolls his eyes in exasperation: Takeshi wins. “What, like, ‘Congratulations on killing someone, have a pie’? No.”
“I think,” Yamamoto says, “they’ll be hungry.”
“Nothing like scrubbing blood off things to work up an appetite.”
“Exactly.”
“Baseball freak. No.”
“Just something small-”
“No.”
“Or I could cook-”
“Shut up or I swear to God I will blow you up, and then we’ll have another body to get rid of.”
The walk back to the apartment seems to take no time at all.
“Perfect timing,” Kyoko says when they arrive.
“You sure I’m allowed to come in now?” Gokudera demands resentfully. Takeshi laughs.
Kyoko ignores them. She produces Asami’s old dress and hands it to Takeshi, gesturing to the skirt. He looks at it and his mood instantly takes a dive.
Now that he’s really paying attention, he notices there’s a long, jagged tear in the hem. As if someone tried to rip the skirt off, or out of the way. Kyoko notices him noticing, nods, and vanishes back into the bathroom.
So Takeshi won’t have to keep pushing Asami to tell him why she killed that man. It’s pretty clear. He passes the dress to Hayato, who notices the tear in an instant. Hayato notices everything.
“Too bad,” he mutters, wandering to the kitchen and rummaging through cabinets. “If this is all the blood she got on her, the son of a bitch didn’t suffer enough.”
“Well,” Takeshi says quietly, “she was trying to be neat.”
Hayato finds Takeshi’s trash bags, wads the dress up, and stuffs it into one. “I’ll burn this back at the base. I guess we know why she didn’t want Hibari to see it.”
Hibari would kill everyone in Namimori for allowing this to happen, that’s why.
But wow. Asami must have been a real shock for the would-be rapist, molester, whatever. She looks like an easy mark, or at least, she does if you’re not paying attention. Small, cute girl who won’t be able to fight back, he must’ve thought.
Instead he got Asami, who is definitely her father’s daughter.
“The hell are you grinning about, baseball freak?”
Takeshi tries to get the grin under control with limited success. “I was just thinking…it must have been a night of surprises. For that guy.”
After a moment of thought, Hayato starts grinning, too. “Yeah. But lucky him, he didn’t have to worry about it long.”
Asami and Kyoko emerge from the bathroom, Asami in a new but similar dress, looking calm and fragile. It’s such an amazing lie. Takeshi and Hayato beam at her, and she scowls back at them. “Uncle Hayato,” she says. “Why are you even here?”
“It’s my job,” Hayato snaps, smile vanishing. “Thanks for making me find out about this through the grapevine, by the way.”
“Whatever. Telling Uncle Takeshi is the same as telling you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Asami makes a kissy face, and Takeshi seizes Hayato’s arms and twists them behind his back before he can get his hands on any dynamite. Nice that Asami’s feeling better. Of course, Kyoko has that effect on most people.
“I think we’re done,” Kyoko declares, satisfied. “You’re taking care of the dress, Gokudera?”
Hayato stops snarling at Asami long enough to nod to Kyoko.
“Then I’m heading home, unless anything else-”
Someone knocks, interrupting her, and Takeshi releases Hayato to answer it. Kyoko goes out, Kusakabe comes in, Takeshi should just get a revolving door.
“Tetsu,” Asami says softly, abruptly subdued.
Kusakabe looks grim; Takeshi almost feels bad for Asami. She respects Kusakabe as much as she worships Hibari, and Kusakabe is obviously disappointed in her. Though whether he’s disappointed because she murdered someone or because she was messy about it, Takeshi doesn’t know.
“Asami-chan,” he says, slow and sad. “We should head home.”
“I’m sorry, Tetsu.” Asami’s voice is going shaky again.
Kusakabe nods, apology noted, if not exactly accepted. Takeshi studies the floor and Hayato coughs uncomfortably. This is kind of rough, and Takeshi really wishes he weren’t around for it.
“Don’t tell Papa,” Asami begs.
“I won’t,” Kusakabe replies, “because you’re going to.”
Takeshi looks up to see Asami’s shoulders hunch pitifully. That’s not his number one concern, though. Hibari is. Do they really need to tell Hibari? Because the world might end in fire if they do.
No, no. Kusakabe knows Hibari best, and he wouldn’t let him go on a vengeful killing spree. Would he?
Hayato has his eyes closed and is muttering the Hail Mary, which is doing nothing to add to Takeshi’s sense of security.
“I’m sorry for all the trouble our girl caused you,” Kusakabe says formally.
“It’s no problem,” Takeshi answers. Hayato cracks an eye open and nods agreement, generous when it counts. Kusakabe bows, and Asami silently follows him out, meeting no one’s eyes, distressingly and uncharacteristically meek.
“Yeah, no problem, kid, you’re welcome,” Hayato mutters to the closed door. “You tiny future serial killer.”
Takeshi’s not touching that one. “What are we telling Tsuna?”
“Everything, if he asks,” Hayato declares. “Nothing, if he doesn’t. And he really has to ask, he has to use her name. Right?”
Takeshi nods soberly. They’ve both vowed to stop falling for Tsuna’s Are you sure there’s nothing wrong? trick. Not that they’ve had much luck so far. Tsuna will probably know all about this by tomorrow, and then he’ll make that crushed-by-the-world face. Takeshi’s not looking forward to it.
When he opens his door the next morning to find Hibari lurking outside, he reflects that he wasn’t looking forward to this, either. But at least it’s not a surprise.
“Asami,” Hibari manages to get out before choking on confused rage. Yikes. If parenthood can do this to Hibari, it would kill Takeshi.
“Come in.” Takeshi steps back. Hibari walks in just far enough to let him close the door, then stands there uneasily, like something feral. Takeshi shakes his head and leans against the kitchen table. He wishes he’d thought to get rid of the bloodstained chair, because Hibari’s making eyes at it. “She’ll be fine.”
Hibari glares wordlessly.
“She got in over her head.” One way or another. Given what Asami was wearing, where they found the body, and the time of day she was there, Takeshi suspects she might have been using herself as bait. (Irie’s checking whether the corpse had a police record.) But that’s just speculation, they’ll never know for sure, and never in life does Takeshi plan to share that thought with Hibari. “But she handled it pretty well.” By Hibari standards. “She took care of everything herself; only needed help with the cleanup.”
“She went to you,” Hibari hisses, barely holding himself in check, rage pouring off him like it did when he was a kid.
“She was afraid you’d be upset.”
Hibari’s mouth drops open. Takeshi would love a picture of this, but not quite enough to defy death by taking one.
“Look…I don’t know how it worked with you, but I never told my dad about the really bad stuff. I didn’t want him to worry, you know? I mean, what if I gave him a heart attack? Parents take stuff way too seriously. So when you have a serious problem, you go to people who love you, but not the ones who love you more than life.” And when you’re ashamed of yourself, the last thing you want is your dad finding out what you did.
Hibari stares for, Takeshi’s guessing, a solid minute, then he leaves without a word. Come to think of it, that’s kind of a family habit.
Hopefully he feels better. It’s hard to tell with him.
* * *
Hayato is lurking outside the gates of a high school like a pervert, and he’s not entirely clear on why. He’s never the babysitter-he only gets stuck with Asami duty when he’s with Takeshi, who’s the second most favored babysitter after the Tenth. He always assumed Hibari had some unstated problem with him. So what’s special about today?
Well. For one thing, he and Asami’ll be outside the whole time they’re together. Maybe Hibari’s got a problem with secondhand smoke. Uptight prick.
Ah, here comes trouble-Asami and gang. God, it’s such a warped flashback. Asami’s got Chrome’s eyes and Chrome’s build with Hibari’s face and Hibari’s attitude, and the net effect is outright disturbing. Asami’s gang isn’t a discipline committee, though-just freelance thugs. She claims they refuse to be “oppressed by the institution” or some such horseshit. She confuses the hell out of Hibari, at least. That much is hilarious.
Her crew are mostly guys, generally big and mellow, but still intimidating-Kusakabe-esque, one might say-but she’s got a few girls, too. The girls are wiry and wild-eyed and look like they might haul off and do any fucking thing. But the creepiest thing about the lot of them, and the one big thing they have in common with Hibari’s guys, is that, however they feel about institutional oppression, they don’t look like rebels. Perfect uniforms. No cigarettes. No dyed hair. Oh no, the trouble runs deeper than that. It’s in the way they move, in their eyes. Truly dangerous people are rarely flashy about it.
Hayato’s always been flashy. Whatever that means.
“Asami,” he calls out.
She turns away from a hulking fellow thug and her face lights up, not Hibari-bright, but surprisingly bright. Hayato firmly denies any and all proud, giddy feelings. She’s still a brat. “Uncle Hayato!” She splits off from her crew without a backward glance. Must be a fairly loose organization, because they hardly even notice her go-though a few of them shoot Hayato long, measuring looks. He reminds himself that Tenth doesn’t approve of violence against high school students, no matter how richly they may deserve it.
“Your dad sent me to get you,” Hayato says, wondering at the words as they come out of his mouth. “I guess you were supposed to meet him in the woods to beat up woodland creatures, or whatever it is you freaks do for fun. But the plan’s changed.”
“Uncle Hayato, we don’t beat up woodland creatures. We beat up humans because humans are worthless. Why didn’t Papa send me a text?”
Hayato starts walking because people are staring and it pisses him off. “There are some guys in town.”
“…Some guys? You mean you’re my bodyguard?”
“Shut up, it wasn’t my idea. I don’t care if you get abducted.”
“Aw, you love me.”
“You spend way too much time with the baseball idiot, and it shows.”
“Aw, you love Uncle Takeshi.”
“I will push you into traffic.”
“I’ll take you with me if you do.”
“How’s the body count, by the way? Staying steady at one?”
“Keep talking about it, and I’ll gouge your eyes out. I have no idea how Tsuna puts up with you.”
Hayato snorts and resists the urge to light a cigarette. In contrast to most of Hibari’s weird hangups, Hayato almost respects the secondhand smoke thing. If that’s what it is. “Tenth puts up with everything. And don’t try to screw with my head. Where’d you learn that? Hibari doesn’t screw with people, he just kills them.”
“But Mom screws with people’s heads for a living,” Asami says, rolling her eyes. Her Chrome-given eyes. Why is it so hard to keep in mind who her mother is when it should be obvious every time you look at her? Is that some creepy fucking mist thing? “Anyway,” she babbles on, “it’s lucky Tsuna puts up with everything. I mean, I want him to put up with me, and I’m pretty hard to put up with.”
She doesn’t seem bothered by the fact, which irritates Hayato. Or at least it does until he picks up on the rest of that statement, at which point he finds other things to be irritated about. “What do you mean, you want him to put up with you?”
“When I work for the Vongola.” Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
Hayato shoves her over to the edge of the sidewalk, out of foot traffic, and stares her down. For once, he’d like her to take him seriously. If only for the novelty of it. “What you don’t appreciate,” he hisses, “is how hard Tenth works to keep you in the family but out of the business.”
She stares back, blank yet menacing. “Why bother? I’ll end up working for him sooner or later.”
“Why? You’ve got decent grades. You could get an honest job.”
“Uncle Takeshi says you had decent grades, too. Why didn’t you get an honest job?”
The answer is, This is all I’m good for. It’s the same answer for both of them, and it’s pathetic. “Tenth won’t like it.”
“He never likes anything, but he puts up with everything. That’s why he’s already going gray.”
“And if you work for him, that’ll become something you have to worry about. You really want that?”
“I won’t be a guardian or anything, though. I’ll just be…around. Like Uncle Ken. So I won’t have to worry as much as you. I can handle it.”
Hayato gives up, turns away, and marches back into the flow of people. He should know better than to argue with a Hibari. Beating your head against a brick wall is both more productive and less painful. “Forget it.”
Asami scurries after him like a happy little wolverine. “So you’re on my side now, right, Uncle Hayato?”
“Dream on,” he says, lighting a cigarette and be damned to Asami’s lungs. “I’m pretending this conversation never happened. I heard nothing. I’ve never met you in my life.”
“You’re such a jerk.”
Hayato tries to remember if he was this annoying as a teenager. He has a faint, horrible suspicion that he might have been worse.
* * *
“…Tsuna?”
“No,” he replies, a little muffled. He’s sprawled on the couch in his office holding a pillow over his face like he’s thinking about smothering himself. He has a fit like this about once a year; Reborn used to call it regression. It means he’ll be impossible to talk to, which is a shame, because Asami really needs to talk to him. Technically, she doesn’t need to talk to him today, but she did walk all the way over here. Turning around and leaving again would be stupid.
If Papa were here, he’d attack Tsuna, and Asami can see why. The problem is, she wants something from him, and if she attacks him, he won’t be in a very receptive mood. So.
“Tsuna, if you agree to let me work for you, I’ll leave you alone.”
“I knew you were going to say that,” comes the voice from under the pillow, “which is why I said no.”
It figures that he’d work that out; it was her graduation last week. Also, Tsuna reads minds. Cheater.
“If you don’t agree to let me work for you, I won’t leave you alone.”
“And your friends can’t work for me either.”
“I can’t get a job without getting them jobs!”
“You aren’t getting a job, so there’s no problem.”
“Uncle Hayato taught me a cool trick with tiny bombs. Want to see?”
“One stick of dynamite, and I swear to God I will pack up and move to an undisclosed Caribbean island.”
“You’ve been saying that for as long as I can remember, but you’re still here. Anyway, it’s not like I need your permission. I bet Papa didn’t wait around for your permission.”
“Yes, let’s talk about your father. Death, thy name is Hibari Kyouya. You think he wants you working for me? Because I doubt it.”
Tsuna is honestly scared of Papa. Papa says Tsuna could wipe out all life on the planet if he wanted to. The whole relationship is insane. Anyway, as if Papa even cares. He just wants her to kick ass, he’s not particular about the arena. “He’ll get used to the idea.”
“Why don’t you work for him?”
“Um…for Papa? That. Really wouldn’t work out. I’m bad at taking orders.”
“And yet you wouldn’t mind taking orders from me.”
She can’t think of a polite way to explain that she plans to ignore Tsuna’s orders, whereas she wouldn’t dare ignore Papa’s. Luckily, Tsuna keeps talking, so she doesn’t have to.
“Are you finally going through a rebellious phase? Does it really need to involve me? Why is it always like this?”
“Come on, Tsuna, don’t make this hard. If you won’t let me work for you, I’ll have to start my own gang and take over the Vongola myself. Think how much work that would be.”
Tsuna goes totally silent. That is never good.
Asami doesn’t like that she can’t see his face. She can’t tell if he’s mad or thinking or upset. He may even have fallen asleep to avoid the conversation; he’s been known to do that.
But he has to let her work for him. He has to; he’s going to. She’ll be nice about it as long as she can, but this is her life, it’s always been her life, and he’s not keeping her from it. She’ll do anything she has to.
“So you want to be my successor?” he asks, slow and thoughtful.
Anything but that. That sounds really ominous. “No. No, that’s not what I-”
He abruptly tosses the pillow away, sits up, and leans toward her with his hands clasped between his knees. She’s never seen him this intense, not even when she fights him, and it’s…weird. Extremely weird.
“If you want to be Vongola XI,” he says, “you need to start preparing right away. By the time I was your age, I was already the de facto leader of the family. You’re behind, Asami-chan.”
“Tsuna, I just wanted-”
“Don’t worry, Eleventh, I’ll train you. And-” Sudden silence, but Asami knows what he almost said. Reborn has been dead for five years, but Tsuna still hasn’t gotten used to the idea. It’s scary, because Asami knows she’ll be the exact same way when Papa dies. “…And so will Gokudera and Yamamoto and Basil,” Tsuna continues after a second, a little subdued. “And you know, I doubt Hibari-san will mind this. So you’ll have plenty of help.”
“But-”
“I’ve been worried about who to entrust with my family. Everyone the right age is so…I’d really prefer you. I’d be honored to have you as my successor, Asami-chan. And you can hire all of your friends, so there’s that problem solved.”
Asami doesn’t understand how it’s possible that she can clobber Tsuna in every strategy game known to man, and yet he can still totally play her in real life. “Wait a second, Tsuna, wouldn’t I have to be a sky type? Also, won’t the Vongola ring kill me? Besides, I’m not-people don’t-look, you, people just do whatever you want because you use mind control. Life is not like that for me. I’m more like Papa.”
Vongola Tenth waves these perfectly reasonable objections away. “Sky types are rare. I don’t know any your age who could lead the family, so you’ll have no competition. And we’ll work around the blood problem. I never liked that rule, anyway. Surely the ring can be…re-engineered. Or something.” He says casually, as if vandalizing mind-bendingly powerful family heirlooms is no big deal.
“But…isn’t that rule the reason you’re the Tenth?”
“Exactly.”
“Tsuna, don’t be weird. And that still leaves the problem of people being mostly terrified of me. And of me mostly not liking people. You love people.”
“Hm. People like you more than you think.”
Tsuna has no perspective on his own creepy mind control powers. “That’s not-”
“But if you find a replacement-and it’ll have to be someone I agree would be better at the job than you-then I’ll let you off the hook.”
Ah ha, now she sees what he’s pulling. Tsuna’s a jerk. It’s easy to forget because he has a totally sweet face, but sometimes, and especially when he thinks he’s doing it for your own good, he is a jerk. “I’m sorry, Tsuna, but I’m going to have to gouge your eyes out.”
He smiles. “At least I won’t have to do paperwork anymore.”
“Wrong. Uncle Hayato will just read the paperwork out to you.”
“See how well you understand? You’ll make a great boss.”
“Tsuna!”
“Hello, Hibari-san,” he says.
“Sawada Tsunayoshi,” says a voice from the door. “Asami.”
“…Papa.” Asami didn’t notice him come in. She let someone sneak up behind her, even if that someone was Papa. Oh, she’s going to get her ass kicked for that later.
Papa narrows his eyes. Asami cringes on the inside. “Your mother is home,” he says.
“Oh! Really?” Mom is seriously ceremony-phobic for some reason, and Asami figured they wouldn’t see her within a month of graduation. This is awesome.
“I said she was, didn’t I?”
On the long list of things Papa hates, having to repeat himself is up there pretty high. This is apparently Asami’s day to annoy him. So at this point, she might as well go for broke, right? Get the most for her ass-kicking. “Think she’ll play with me?”
“I don’t see why not,” Papa says stiffly, expression really not happy.
Mom will only fight one of them a day. Sometimes she makes the second one wait two days, or even a week. So it’s a big deal to get first dibs.
It used to be that whoever spotted her first got to fight her, but that wasn’t fair at all, because Papa has a whole spy network and Asami had to be in school. So they made a deal to alternate. It happens to be Asami’s turn.
She’s a very bad daughter to rub it in like that.
...And she should probably stop now, because Tsuna is getting that fascinated/horrified look, and soon he’ll be out-and-out panicky. Poor Tsuna. For being the scariest man alive, he’s awfully delicate.
Asami stands up. “I’ll let you two talk. And I’ll talk to you later, Tsuna.” She scowls at him. He doesn’t seem very impressed. “See you at home, Papa.” She leans up and kisses him on the cheek.
According to Uncle Dino, who has a twisted sense of humor, kissing your father on the cheek is a done thing. Also, Papa makes a hilarious face whenever she does it, like he’s torn between being pleased and beating her to death.
She’s always careful to run far away before he makes up his mind. If you’re going to mess with Papa, you’d better be quick on your feet.
* * *
Tsuna knows that laughing at Hibari is tantamount to suicide. In view of that, it’s not usually so hard to resist.
Hibari eventually manages to stop staring incredulously at the closed door, but he’s still distracted. “You’re tricking her into being the outside advisor?”
It’s not getting any easier not to laugh. “…Well, yes, if she finds a replacement for herself as the Eleventh. If not, I was actually serious about that.”
Hibari sneers dismissively. “She’ll find a replacement.”
“Then,” says Tsuna, “I’m sure she’ll be great with CEDEF.”
“You never try these tricks with me.”
“They never work on you.” Because you’re a sociopath, Tsuna thinks fondly.
“Of course they don’t. Are you worrying about your legacy already, Sawada Tsunayoshi?”
“What do you mean, already? I’m almost forty; in this business, that’s ancient. We’re getting too old for this, Hibari-san.”
“You sound like an herbivore.”
“I mean it, soon I won’t be able to handle you chucking me into walls.”
“When it comes to that, I’ll kill you.”
Just this far and no farther, Hibari-san? “Aren’t old animals allowed to act old?”
“Old animals die when they can’t hunt anymore.”
Tsuna should have seen that one coming, really. “Well, maybe it’s not that I’m getting old. Maybe I’m just sick of it.”
Hibari nods, apparently accepting that. Wonder of wonders.
“There is one problem with giving Asami-chan a lot of responsibility, though. Hibari-san, are you ever planning to do anything about the, um. Mukuro. Thing?”
“I taught Asami to break illusions. Chrome taught her to clear mist from her mind. She knows what she needs to know.”
“Yes, but maybe someone should tell her to apply that knowledge. I still don’t understand why you and Chrome left that there.”
“Asami has to take care of it on her own.”
“Why?”
“It’s between her and that man.”
“Hibari-san, that’s insane. She was a baby when he did that. Honestly, I don’t even think he was serious. He had to know you and Chrome would both notice right away-he must’ve expected you to get rid of it.”
“He wouldn’t do anything so meaningless.”
Tsuna rubs his temples. Hibari’s intermittent faith in Mukuro is more headache-inducing than his most unreasonable rage fit. “You don’t care that he’s messed with her mind? I don’t believe that. Besides, if she is going to lead CEDEF, I need her to be able to think about Mukuro!”
“It’s her responsibility,” Hibari insists. “She’ll take care of it.”
Tsuna sighs and sits back, giving up on that conversation yet again. And he’s still none the wiser. About any of it, really. What Mukuro was thinking. What Hibari’s thinking now. What Chrome is thinking ever, at any time. “You came to see me,” he says.
Hibari leans forward and launches into a lecture on box weapons, because the boxes are his lifelong obsession regardless of timeline. In this timeline, though, he has a desk drawer filled with toy box weapons made once upon a time by a similarly obsessed little kid. He refers to them as “defective,” but keeps them anyway. Tsuna wonders if he understands why.
Today, he’s describing the destructive capacity of ferret box weapons with as much animation as he ever shows. It’s nice to see him cheerful. All the same, Tsuna’s dreading the end of this lecture-Hibari’s definitely going to make him fight ferrets afterward.
Tsuna doesn’t care what anyone says. He is way too old for this.
* * *
It’s the middle of the night, and Hibari is breathing quietly beside her, just enough sound for Chrome to be sure he’s alive. Asami is in the next room; Chrome can’t hear her, which is a shame. She likes to watch over both of them, when she can.
She often does this when she stays with Hibari-her own midnight vigil. She sits in the dark, waits out the hours, and pretends to be a shadow. She’s good at that.
It’s always been a game between her and Hibari, or maybe a fight. Or maybe there’s no difference. He tries to find her, and she tries not to let him. And if he always wins these days, she doesn’t mind. After all, she was the one who taught him how.
When they were younger, she sometimes came to his home and stayed for days, silent and still. She stole food at night, used his bathroom when he was gone. She picked up every fallen strand of hair, every crumb, carefully wiped every drop of water from the sink and tub. She even wiped her fingerprints, more for symbolic purposes than anything else.
She’d often leave before he noticed her, but she’d put something on his pillow to let him know she’d been there. A thank you note. A feather. A red rose. It didn’t matter what it was; it meant, I win.
Hibari didn’t like that at all. As much as he hates Mukuro, as much as he despises having his senses played with, she suspects this was what really pushed him to overcome illusion techniques. He hates to lose.
He studied breaking illusions the same way he studies anything that interests him-obsessively-and by the time Asami was born, he could find Chrome instantly nine times out of ten.
After Asami was born, the rules of the game changed.
“Your mother is home,” Hibari said as Chrome slipped in the door wrapped in mist and misdirection. It was her first visit since she’d dropped a baby in his arms and run away.
Kusakabe’s head jerked up in surprise; he looked around and couldn’t find her. The baby didn’t look because she was too tiny to understand. Chrome didn’t know the baby, didn’t even know her name, didn’t want to be seen. But she understood Hibari’s point. She dropped the illusion.
She visited again a few months later. Asami had already started to walk, if you could call it walking. As Chrome watched, she crashed into one of Hibari’s men, fell, and started to cry. Hibari marched toward the man, tonfa held ready. It wasn’t reasonable. Besides, Chrome felt, babies shouldn’t watch men being beaten nearly to death.
Not inside the house, anyway.
“Weapons,” she said, and Hibari turned to her in surprise. “The baby,” she explained, eyeing Asami uncomfortably. She was already up again, staggering around as if nothing had happened. “No weapons in the house.”
Hibari stared at Chrome. She braced herself, because if he didn’t agree, he would attack.
But he did agree. He tucked his tonfa away and nodded. The man he’d almost beaten up heaved a sigh of relief, and Chrome smiled.
No using weapons, including illusions, inside the house (except for self-defense). No fighting in the house. No lies in the house.
This was how they raised their daughter, pushing at each other to make a safe place in between. As safe as any place between them could be.
Asami spent most of her time with Hibari, so of course she grew up strong. That was the way it had to be-Chrome needed her to be strong. When Asami was small, she was so delicate that Chrome didn’t dare touch her. She didn’t trust herself with delicate things. It worked out well, because Hibari wouldn’t let anyone touch Asami. Only he and sometimes Kusakabe were allowed.
By the time Asami was five, she was sturdy enough that Hibari was willing to leave her with a select group of people (his parents, Kusakabe, Chrome, the boss, Reborn), and Chrome felt safe reaching out to her. Asami sometimes fell asleep with her head in Chrome’s lap, and it was…fine. It was fine. (And Chrome whispered into her hair, I believed in you until you were real.)
Asami is perfect and strange; she’s a puzzle. She’s like both of them, she’s not like either one. Sometimes Chrome can see where she picked up the pieces of herself-habits, quirks, turns of phrase-but more often it’s a mystery.
Chrome doesn’t regret her choice. Asami is everything Chrome hoped a daughter might be. It’s just that Chrome isn’t what she hoped a mother would be.
The boss is always asking why she won’t clear Mukuro’s illusion from Asami’s mind. She’s not sure what to tell him. It’s like a story about fairies coming to a christening bringing gifts and curses, and the question, really, is whether Mukuro is a good fairy or a bad one. Chrome may ask him, someday. If only to see the look on his face.
It’s also more complicated than that. Mukuro is the chaos to Hibari’s order, but by some miracle, Chrome is allowed to wander freely between them. She’s even allowed to stop and visit people in the middle-Kyoko, Haru, the boss.
Mukuro is one end of Chrome’s life and Asami and Hibari are the other. She doesn’t want them to meet; that would ruin everything. And Asami, seemingly by her nature, draws things together. It’s terrifying.
The short answer to Tsuna’s question is that Chrome is horribly selfish. And she’s not the only one.
She turns to study Hibari’s face in the dim light. Harsh and distant even in sleep, but still beautiful. He has his own reasons for letting Mukuro stay invisible to Asami. Chrome has a pretty good idea what those reasons are, and they’re no more noble than hers. They’re both selfish, she and Hibari.
They try to make up for it, though, in their own ways. Hibari is always there, while Chrome almost never is. It’s the best they could do, and it may have been enough. Asami is grown up and apparently happy; their family seems to work. This life seems to work. Chrome keeps waiting for it to stop feeling too good to be true, but it never does. Which is why she has to leave so often.
“You fought for this,” the boss says. “You bled for this, Chrome. Take whatever you can.”
He’s sweet, but sometimes he doesn’t understand the problem. It’s not that she doesn’t like feeling welcome-it’s not even that she doesn’t think she deserves it. It’s that she can’t believe in it, and illusionists who can’t believe in reality die in short order. Given enough time and exposure, she knows she’d eventually get used to it, but that’s time she can’t spare.
The boss will work out what she’s up to sooner or later. After all, he’s got two different examples of it: Mukuro does the same thing with a different emphasis. He puts a lot of effort into making himself mysterious and hateful because he believes in hatred, while Chrome is always leaving because she believes in being unwanted.
To have faith in being known, loved, wanted…they’d have to become different people. It’s easier to stay this way. For now.
Kusakabe’s wind chimes sound through the room. Chrome tilts her head and lets her eyes fall half-closed, listening to the chimes and Hibari’s breathing, wishing she could check on Asami, but not daring. She last tried that when Asami was fifteen, and got a knife thrown at her for her trouble (she managed to dodge it), followed by half an hour of tearful apologies. Mom, I’m so, so, sorry. I broke your rule! Your rule! I didn’t-I didn’t know it was you, I-
Chrome couldn’t get a word in. The noise eventually woke Hibari, who had a tantrum over being woken up, which caused Asami to fly into an indignant rage, and it all ended with the two of them storming off to the practice room to fight until morning. (Or so Chrome assumes; she went back to sleep. But when she woke up, they were still fighting.) They both spent the next day sleep-deprived and sulking, refusing to look at each other.
Chrome at no point let herself laugh at them. It was hard work. She doesn’t want to have to try again; she’s not sure she could manage a second time.
Hibari’s breathing changes. He’s waking up, though Chrome hasn’t made a sound. Maybe she’s been watching him too long. He does seem to be able to sense it, which is strange even by her standards.
Hibari opens his eyes, and Chrome disappears. He reaches up and wraps a hand around her throat anyway, fingers tightening just enough to be uncomfortable. I see you.
She watches him watching her, patiently waiting for him to properly wake up and remember who she is and why she’s there. It’s funny how many people she knows who reflexively attack on waking. It’s even funnier that the boss isn’t one of them.
“Sleep,” Hibari orders after a long moment, releasing her and turning away. He makes a good point. She’ll regret not sleeping in the morning.
She resettles herself, stares at the darkness, and ignores him. This is more important.
Part 1
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