if you can't beat em - part 1

[metisket]

Hana fic! Finally.

I’ve been meaning to write this for ages-TYL!Hana is just so lovable. “Here, Kyoko, let me save you from dangerous men and give you mysterious messages I don’t understand. By the way, what is with your incredibly shady lifestyle? And why do you suddenly look ten years younger? Never mind, don’t answer that, that’s not even the weirdest thing happening today. Here, have some underwear, try not to die. fml.”

The Future Arc must have changed Hana’s life a bit, as close as she is to the Sasagawas, but surely nothing can change the awesomeness. God, it has to be hideously stressful, being Kyoko’s best friend. o_O

Spoilers through the beginning of the Inheritance arc. KHR doesn’t belong to me.

If You Can’t Beat ’Em

Hana’s worried.

She knows she shouldn’t worry. Kyoko is amazingly tough, despite having that pretty, pretty princess act down to an art form. She can take care of herself; Hana wouldn’t like her otherwise.

Still, things are getting pretty bizarre in Namimori, and Hana’s finding it hard to keep her cool. And even harder to pretend she hasn’t noticed.

Take Sawada: troubling item the first. He still has an embarrassing crush on Kyoko, so at least the world hasn’t spun completely off its axis. When he knows people are watching him, in fact, he’s a convincing imitation of his old loser self: goofy, klutzy, awkward but sweet.

It’s when he doesn’t know people are watching that things go sideways. When he thinks he’s alone, when he’s looking inward instead of outward…it’s like he’s seen it all, done it all, and is absolutely incapable of being frightened by anything.

Then some third year will walk by and he’ll panic and flail and fall out of his chair. Hana thinks he may be doing this specifically to drive her crazy. It’s maddening even before one takes into account the way Kyoko treats him these days. She was always fond of him, in that my-cute-but-spastic-pet-kitten kind of way, but it’s different now. She respects him now.

Why why why? What happened? Nothing had time to happen! This all started, seemingly, between one day and the next, and it makes no sense. Which would be worrying enough if it were just Sawada, but it’s not. Oh, no. Gokudera and Yamamoto have decided to try this sudden lifestyle change thing, too. Apparently they’re…friends now? And not friends the way they were before, when Yamamoto thought they were friends and Gokudera was trying to work out how to kill him and make it look like an accident, but real friends, almost like normal people. Those two being in any way normal is terrifying.

And when Sawada walks into a room, they turn to him like flowers toward the sun. They’ve been headed that way-the way of unsettling, slavish devotion-for a while, but sometime when Hana wasn’t watching, they arrived.

So, fine. Earthquakes, transfer students, catastrophic shifts in personalities and social dynamics for no apparent reason. Hana could have handled all that and more if Kyoko hadn’t been involved. She is, though, and that puts it over the line.

Hana walks into class on Monday, and Kyoko and the troublesome trio are all present for the first time in ages. Kyoko’s uncharacteristically stressed and worried, Sawada’s guilty and timid, Yamamoto’s oblivious, and Gokudera’s even more twitchy and unreasonable than his usual high standard of twitchy unreasonableness.

Partially out of spite, partially further to an experiment she’s conducting, Hana walks to her desk and drops her books onto it with a bang. Most of the class jumps a little, turning to see what the noise was.

Gokudera and Sawada reach into their pockets and Yamamoto lunges for his bat, and they all reflexively duck low, like they’re trying to…what? Stay out of the line of fire?

Belatedly, they realize the bang was just books. Sawada sits back, jittery and unhappy, Gokudera looks all kinds of pissed off, and Yamamoto…well, Yamamoto laughs, but that’s just the way he is.

Now, what does one call this behavior? Apart from demented, that is.

Hana turns to ask Kyoko what she makes of it, only to notice that Kyoko’s looking a lot like Sawada. Jittery. Unhappy. Did she just reach for a weapon and think about hitting the floor, too?

Oh, hell no.

It’s one thing for Sawada to turn weird. It’s one thing for Sawada to form underground sumo clubs or whatever and drag a bunch of idiots along with him. When he drags Kyoko along with him, though, Hana loses her sense of humor about it.

If she’d been paying proper attention, she would have seen this coming. She must not have been paying proper attention; she is clearly a terrible friend. But as God is her witness, she will miss nothing from here on out-and since Sawada is evidently the source of all the world’s troubles, she’s paying especially close attention to him.

The first thing Hana learns is that Sawada has a lot of people keeping an eye on him. Most of them aren’t really a surprise…but then there’s Hibari Kyouya.

It takes Hana a while to believe what she’s seeing, but yes, it is a fact that Hibari follows Sawada and crew around school like a creepster. Hibari’s refusal to take notice of individual humans used to be his one saving grace, but no more. He’s made an exception for Sawada. Well, why not? Everyone else has.

Sawada notices Hibari stalking him every once in a while. And when he does, he smiles a nervous, shy little smile.

Sure, you know, Hana would smile too if she caught the scariest sociopath on campus following her everywhere and staring at her with his freaky dead eyes. Cause for celebration!

But whatever, at least Hibari isn’t following Kyoko. No, he leaves that duty to this Haru character. Where she came from and how she came to be perpetually glued to Kyoko’s side, Hana isn’t sure. Nor does she feel that she can ask, because she knows exactly how bitchy she’d sound if she did.

She’s not jealous. Well, she’s not really jealous. If she tells herself she’s not jealous often enough, in any case, she’s sure she can make it true. After all, this girl…and Kyoko…

Well, Hana was never going to sleep with Kyoko; that’s just not the kind of relationship they have. The Haru creature is-or will be-serving a function that Hana can’t. Fulfilling a need. So that’s good.

Next step: force yourself to like her. Despite-despite!-the giggling. You can do this, Kurokawa Hana! You’ve liked more annoying people.

Haha. That’s a lie.

And as if Hana’s life weren’t disastrous enough, there are also the babies. They’ve been around for a while, but now there seems to be one every time Hana turns around, babies everywhere. Screaming, crying, being…sticky. Why the hell are they always sticky or wet or both? Seriously, what’s that about, is that some kind of disgusting baby law? Plus, they always feel compelled to grab onto you with their gross, mysteriously goopy hands and scream for no apparent reason, refusing to be shut up. And if you beat them off like the howling little parasites they are, people call you barbaric.

Why do humans reproduce? It must be a temporary, hormone-induced madness. That’s the only feasible explanation.

Last but not least, the cherry on top of the bizarre sundae that is Hana’s life, there’s Kyoko’s older brother. Hana hardly even knows Kyoko’s brother, and he’s nonetheless conspiring to make her world surreal.

The last time she saw him, he froze like a small, hunted animal-odd, coming from the high school boxing champion-and stared for an uncomfortably long time. After which he straightened up, declared, “I am not ready for this to the extreme!” and ran away.

Just. What.

* * *

Hana’s foolish hopes that things might one day return to normal are soon dashed. Every year, the troublesome trio have more unexplained absences from class. Every year, Sawada’s face gets a little thinner and his eyes get a little crazier. Every year, his people pull in tighter around him, harder, colder, more protective.

Kyoko is one of Sawada’s people. Hana can deny it all she likes, but that doesn’t change the facts. Sawada still hasn’t made a move, romantically speaking, and Hana’s starting to doubt he ever will…but he’s always there. Just like Kyoko’s brother, only scarier. Scarier despite being about half the size.

The trio drop out of high school midway through their final year, which seems a poor choice. So close to graduation-why not graduate? How do they think they’ll get decent jobs? Are they aiming for a life of crime or something? What the hell kind of career plan is that?

And why doesn’t it sound as implausible as it should?

Their dropping out changes very little, though, socially speaking. Kyoko persists in dragging Hana over to Sawada’s, where the entire gang apparently lives. (Sawada’s mother has to be a saint.) Sawada sometimes comes to pick Kyoko up from school, often with Ryouhei, Yamamoto and Gokudera, or the Haru girl. They go off together to undisclosed locations.

Sawada’s gang, though they should be utterly unemployable, are always stressed and busy, and always neatly-professionally?-dressed. It doesn’t compute. No, that’s not true-it does compute, but Hana really doesn’t like what it adds up to.

The whole situation makes her sickeningly nervous.

Kyoko and Hana graduate like normal people. They go to college like normal people, and far enough away that visits from the old Namimori crowd drop to monthly instead of daily. Well, except for Ryouhei-his visits are weekly, because, say what you will, he is a devoted brother.

Hana knows better than to hope that the reduction in visits means that Kyoko’s escaped. For one thing, it would help if she wanted to escape. At all. Even a little.

Haru follows them to college, but Kyoko opts to room with Hana. Hana would be touched by this if she didn’t suspect that it was just because it was an awkward time in Kyoko and Haru’s courtship for them to be living together. She figures her room will effectively work out to be a single.

Kyoko makes poor life choices. Hana wishes she didn’t have a front row seat for so many of them.

Hana majors in law, which is why she has a bookcase full of law books. Haru double majors in economics and poli-sci, and has corresponding books. Kyoko’s major is nominally psychology, which completely fails to explain the books on her shelves.

Gomorrah. Midnight in Sicily. Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld. The Monster of Florence. The Place That Was Promised. Helter Skelter. The Raven. Mein Kampf. And a few books on post-traumatic stress disorder, which is something.

The books may not, for the most part, be major-related, but there is a definite theme. A troubling theme. “Kyoko,” Hana says halfway through the second month of classes, staring at the bookshelf. “I think you’re majoring in the wrong thing. I’m not sure you’re even in the right faculty.”

Kyoko peers over the top of a massive biography of Mao. “Oh no, my major’s really helpful. I mean, I’d like to know why charismatic people…well. Why they sometimes decide to form cults or take over the world. That sort of thing.”

Right. Give or take a little serial killing and organized crime.

Hana considers the charismatic people Kyoko knows. Yamamoto’s pretty charismatic, but he’s too easygoing to form a cult or try for world domination. Kyoko herself has a certain quiet charisma…but it’s quiet charisma. Gokudera and his sister Bianchi both have charisma, if you like dangerous, unpredictable, dramatic types, but no, Hana knows, she knows who this is about.

This, like so many things, is about Sawada. Sawada, who has charisma to spare (and who saw that coming in school?) Sawada, who has a flock of scary people trailing devotedly after him. Sawada, who looks more strung-out, exhausted, and grim every time Hana sees him.

Except when he smiles. He looks straight-up fucking insane then.

“So. Preventative measures?”

Kyoko frowns and turns back to her Mao, but doesn’t answer. And why should she? She’s just worried Sawada might turn into Asahara Shoko or Charles Manson, no big deal.

Hana falls backward onto her bed and stares at the ceiling. Get real, Kurokawa. Like you’re any better. Why are you interested in law? Can you honestly say it’s for nobler reasons than to keep Kyoko out of jail?

She can’t say that. The desire to keep Kyoko out of jail was definitely her number one motivation for pursuing a law degree. Which means, taken to its logical conclusion, that she doesn’t care what illegal shenanigans Kyoko gets up to as long as she isn’t punished for them. This says nothing good about Hana’s moral fortitude.

Her life is spiraling into disaster by association. This is ridiculous.

* * *

On an innocent spring day at the end of their first year, Kyoko’s brother knocks on the door of their dorm room while Kyoko’s out getting groceries, so Hana’s the one who opens the door.

“Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry, Kyoko’s not-”

“Okay!” he interrupts, very man on a mission. “Think I’m ready. Let’s do this thing!”

Hana’s eyebrows climb. She’s only spoken directly to Ryouhei four or five times, and that includes the not ready to the extreme encounter. She wonders if he’s always like this. “Thing?”

“Getting married to the extreme!”

Unsurprisingly, it only goes downhill from there, and culminates in him standing outside, shouting up at her window about love and destiny while she hurls half of Kyoko’s collection of psychopath books down at his idiotic head.

“Brother?” Kyoko calls tentatively, having finally returned from her grocery run to save Hana from her crazy, crazy relation. “Hana? Um…what’s going on?”

“Kyoko, make him leave!”

“Your friend,” Ryouhei says reverently, “is EXTREME.”

Kyoko giggles. Hana rescinds every nice thought she’s ever had about Kyoko, and chucks The Raven directly at Ryouhei’s upturned face. 700 pages, lots of shiny (heavy) photographs, the chilling history of a false prophet.

Doesn’t even slow Ryouhei down.

* * *

Hana doesn’t know how this happened.

No, wait, she does know how it happened. Kyoko made that pleading face, and Hana is weak to the pleading face. She knew Kyoko made poor life choices, but she didn’t realize they were contagious.

“This was your idea, buddy,” Hana declares unsympathetically. “So it’s your job to entertain me.”

Ryouhei stares at her across the table, seemingly every bit as confused as she is about how they ended up here, on a guaranteed-to-be-disastrous date, in an Italian restaurant that Kyoko and Haru picked out amidst waves of giggling.

In aid of nothing, their waiter has picked up on the choking blanket of awkwardness over the table. Whenever he finds time, he watches them with malicious glee, hoping for a scene-tears, storming out, thrown glasses. Hana had a brief, horrible stint as a waitress, and she remembers how other people’s drama could temporarily lighten the misery (when it wasn’t adding to it). That said, it has never been a goal of hers to provide amusement for embittered waiters. She hates Kyoko.

Ryouhei isn’t faring much better. He’s muttering to himself in distress, staring blindly at the menu, glancing at her nervously like she’s a cipher he doesn’t have a hope of understanding. What the hell is his problem? This was his idea, wasn’t it?

Oh. Not ready to the extreme, huh?

“Pick a topic,” Hana suggests out of sudden pity. “Any topic. I’ll try to run with it.”

“Usually I talk about boxing!” Ryouhei confides to the delight of the waiter, who is ostensibly checking to see if they’re ready to order. “But Kyoko said I was extremely not allowed to talk about boxing.”

“How about work, then?”

“Gokudera said I wasn’t allowed to talk about work!”

“Gokudera? You talk to Gokudera about your dating habits?”

“It’s his job. He’s a weird guy.”

“You’ve got me there,” Hana allows. So Gokudera monitors love lives. What the hell is Kyoko involved in? “Think Sawada will ever make a move on Kyoko?” she asks, figuring Kyoko is the one thing they definitely have in common.

Ryouhei responds with a truly scary expression, reminiscent, in fact, of Gokudera, and says, “Not if he doesn’t want to die.”

Uh huh. “So what are your thoughts on Haru?”

Puzzled face. “Haru? She’s an extreme good friend!”

Okay. This guy is kind of adorable. “Never mind. Go ahead and tell me about boxing; I promise not to tell Kyoko. Do women even do boxing?”

Ryouhei launches into an enthusiastic account of the time he tried to get a mystery girl to sign up for the boxing club because she kicked ass, but then she vanished in a puff of smoke; he’s never gotten over the loss. This somehow segues into a story about the time a baby taught him to smash boulders with his fist, which leads to a distressed and incoherent account of sun types, men with funny hair, and possible necrophilia. Hana isn’t sure about the last bit, but then Ryouhei doesn’t seem all that sure about it himself.

He’s hilarious, though it’s rarely intentional. He may also be certifiably insane, but Hana finds she doesn’t much care. If he is, at least he’s found an entertaining way to lose it. Plus, the longer she looks at him, the more she wants to kiss his nose and bite his biceps, which is pleasantly distracting. The disastrous date is turning out to be shockingly fun.

The waiter eventually admits defeat, takes their order, and slinks away, disappointed. More drudgery, less drama. Poor thing.

“Why did you want to go on a date, anyway?” Hana asks when Ryouhei temporarily winds down. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“That’s exactly why!” Ryouhei shouts, pounding on the table and alarming their fellow diners. Hana resists the urge to smirk at them. Pansies. “Kyoko says I should ask you to tell me…uh…stories about your childhood! Or something!”

He gazes at Hana expectantly. He makes no sense. It’s breathtaking how little sense he makes.

“Okay,” she allows. “My stories aren’t going to compare to yours when it comes to sheer, blinding weirdness, but I’ll give it a try. If you want. I mean, you don’t have to do whatever Kyoko tells you.”

He frowns. “I do when I can.”

Yeah. Weird guy, but adorable. “Right. So once upon a time my father bought this hair-cutting kit…”

This story is stupid and ends in accidental violence. Ryouhei should love it.

* * *

“So I hear you’re dating my brother,” says Kyoko, turning away from her homework, eyes alight with evil, evil glee.

“Shut up,” Hana tells her, deciding to forego the dancing around and just cut to the chase.

“He is a great guy.”

“Which part of ‘shut up’ did you not understand?”

“If I’d known he was your type, I’d have set you up ages ago…”

“Kyoko-”

“But you kept going on and on about how you wanted someone calm and mature and intellectual-”

“Have I ever mentioned that I hate you-”

“And as much as I love my brother, I never would have described him as-”

“You can stop any time.”

Kyoko does stop talking, but she doesn’t stop giggling. It may or may not be an improvement.

“You don’t have a leg to stand on, anyway, making fun of my love life,” Hana insists. “Look what you’re dating. Giggles!”

“Ahh, I’m going to tell her you said that.”

“She’s aware of my opinion.” Actually, Hana hopes she isn’t. “What do you see in her, anyway?” She’s waited six years to ask; that seems a reasonable amount of time. She’s given up hoping that Haru will ever disappear.

“Well,” Kyoko says in a you asked for it tone, “she’s funny, she’s beautiful, she’s smart, she’s incredibly talented with numbers and abstract design, she’s great in bed-”

“Stop!”

Kyoko smiles, pleasantly attentive. Kyoko is evil, evil, evil. “Okay,” Hana acknowledges, “that, I admit, all sounds good.” And she knows it’s all true, which is even more annoying. Well, all but the last one. She’ll have to take that on faith. “It’s pretty generic, though. Why her, specifically. Why you, specifically. Is it because of the mysterious, Sawada-related things you’ve been through together? What?”

Kyoko taps her pencil against her notes a few times, pondering. “She’s always been…” Tap tap tap. “You know, I’m not the most expressive person in the world.”

Hana laughs out loud and Kyoko throws the pencil at her. Which, ahem, is dangerous. Pointy objects and so on.

“I am shocked that you think that,” Hana declares, holding her hands up to fend off any more flung objects. “Shocked! Why, you have a whole range of expression. Cute, happily cute, scarily cute, worried and cute-”

“Hana, do you want this explanation or don’t you?”

“Sorry, sorry, I do.”

“Haru is really expressive. Everything’s right there; I always know what she’s thinking. I don’t have to wonder, she tells me. I guess…does it sound weird to say I trust her because she’s not too much like me?”

“Yes.” Weird. Sad. Not really surprising. “But it makes sense. You’re special and warped that way, it’s part of your charm.”

“Besides,” Kyoko says thoughtfully, “she understands about Tsu-kun, and, um. Everything. It would be too hard to explain to someone new. They’d never really understand.”

“Oh, really?” Hana asks dryly.

Kyoko beams at her, all lying (cute) innocence. Hana sighs.

* * *

Giving up on asking Kyoko is not the same thing as giving up, however. There are plenty of other concerned parties, and Hana isn’t afraid to harass the hell out of them. Though she probably should be.

She could ask Ryouhei, but, well. For one thing, Gokudera’s instructed him not to talk about work (God help them all), so it wouldn’t be fair to ask. For another thing, Hana’s not convinced he’d make a whole lot of sense even if he did try to explain. She’s starting to wonder if his boxing coaches were feeding him funny pills as a child. She’s also starting to wonder what’s wrong with her, that she finds him charming anyway.

So instead of upsetting Ryouhei with her questions, she waits until summer break. They go back to Namimori to visit their parents, and almost before she’s decided to try, Hana manages to catch Sawada alone. It’s nothing short of amazing. She thought Sawada was never alone, but lo and behold, here he is in a grocery store, holding a basket overflowing with, oddly enough, cabbages. Hana is shocked to learn that Gokudera lets him shop for groceries by himself. Or at all. Doesn’t he have minions for that kind of thing?

“Sawada,” she says in her most ominous voice, “What are you?”

His head jerks up from contemplation of pears and he almost backs into a pyramid of oranges before he realizes who’s talking to him. He wrinkles his forehead in an adorably worried way, as if she’s the crazy one. “Oh, Kurokawa! Hello. Um, I’m…I’m a Sawada? Does this have something to do with Gokudera-kun?”

“What? No. Well, maybe. What are you? What’s with the suit and tie? You never even graduated from high school! You shouldn’t rate a suit and tie!”

“Oh.” He looks down at himself, apparently surprised by what he’s wearing. Adorably surprised. It’s been a while since Hana last saw him, and he’s lost a lot of the wild-eyed look and gotten exponentially more attractive in the meantime. He and Kyoko must be deadly together. “It’s for work.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. What kind of work do you do?”

He shrugs, self-deprecating. “Just business.”

“If you’re a salaryman, then I’m Mother Teresa.”

He bites his lip against a smile and looks away for a second. Hana has a sneaking suspicion he’s picturing her in a wimple. “…Not really a salaryman,” he agrees. “But…business, mostly overseas. Consulting. You could say.”

She eyes him in blatant disbelief. “You are so full of shit, Sawada.”

He smiles shyly. “Sorry?”

Now how do you attack something like that? There’s no way. “You’re a con artist, aren’t you?”

“Ha! What? I’m…no, I’m really not. Um, Kurokawa, why are you-is something bothering you?”

“You. You are bothering me. You’re a scary man of mystery who hangs around with my best friend, and it is making me really uncomfortable.”

The smile fades away. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not especially helpful.”

“You’re…with Brother, aren’t you?”

She also doesn’t like the way he refers to Kyoko’s brother as Brother. They’re not married, for Christ’s sake. “Maybe.”

He bites his lip again. She’s glad her pain is so freaking amusing to him. “Brother works for me, you know?”

Yeah, she knows. “Great, so my best friend and my boyfriend are under your evil sway. Was that supposed to make me feel better? Because it didn’t.”

“Evil sway,” he sighs, rubbing his face with the hand not holding a lifetime supply of cabbage. Hana refuses to feel bad. She refuses to feel like she stepped on a puppy’s tail. Refuses. “You know, I got into this…work…so I could protect them. But you don’t believe that.”

She’s not sure whether she believes it or not, but if disbelief means more explanation will be forthcoming, she’s totally willing to pretend disbelief.

Sawada studies her for a long moment, calm and sure in a way she’s rarely seen him. She thinks, So this is what Kyoko loves. She thinks, This is the man Ryouhei follows.

Then she tells herself to stop that, focus, and not let herself get blindsided by charisma. Sawada clearly cheats.

“I will protect them,” he vows, quiet and deathly serious. “I’ll protect them with my life. I promise you.”

He bows deeply and walks away while Hana’s still reeling, off-balance, infected by charisma cooties. He and his cabbages are out of sight before it occurs to her that that was a really disturbing and not particularly reassuring sort of promise.

Oh, hell, she realizes. I let him get away!

Sawada cheats.

* * *

“How’s your number one headache doing these days?” asks Mayumi, an old middle school friend, in the bright, carefree tone of a person whose other friends aren’t all members of a shady secret society. Or whatever.

“Remind me who my number one headache is,” Hana moans into the phone, curling into a sad, self-pitying ball in her uncomfortable desk chair.

“Oh, that doesn’t sound good. Who are my options?”

“Kyoko. Ryouhei. Sawada-”

“Sawada?” Mayumi interrupts. “Sawada Tsunayoshi? Loser Tsuna, the dropout? I didn’t even know you’d stayed in touch with him. Why would you bother?”

Loser Tsuna. God. Hana had forgotten all about that. “Mayumi,” she says, “that guy has some serious hidden depths. You don’t even know.”

“I thought you were dating Kyoko’s brother.”

“Oh, they’re not romantic hidden depths. They’re run-screaming-into-the-night hidden depths.”

“…Are we talking about the same Loser Tsuna?”

“Yeah, I can tell you haven’t seen him in years. Trust me, he grew up lethal. Hibari does what he says sometimes.”

“Hibari Kyouya?”

“That’s the one.”

“Wow, that’s…disturbing.” A moment of silence. “So is Sawada hot now?”

Hana laughs sadly and tries to remember. And she can’t. She honestly doesn’t even know. “You can’t tell, looking at him,” she says mournfully. “He comes off as the hottest thing you’ve ever seen, but that’s probably because he cheats.”

“Cheats?”

“Yeah.” Hana casts about for a sane way to say charisma cooties. “Force of personality. Something. Maybe if you saw him, I don’t know, on TV, he wouldn’t be anything special. But in the same room? It’s scary.”

“Weird.” Mayumi sounds impressed, which happens approximately once an ice age. “I almost want to meet him now.”

“You really, really don’t,” Hana assures her.

“Hmm.” A considering, ominous pause. “So you’ve been with Sasagawa for a while, haven’t you? How serious is that?”

Mayumi has a gift for asking all the bad questions. “I don’t know, shut up.”

“Oh? Does that mean you’re more serious than he is?”

Hah! She swings, she misses! “You know, he never actually asked me on a first date.”

“…He didn’t?”

“No. He said, ‘Let’s get married.’” To the extreme, even.

“You’re kidding.”

“Oh, but I’m not.”

“Okay, you’ve been friends with Kyoko forever, but, like. Did he even know you?”

“Not really.”

“That’s so creepy, Hana.”

“Yeah,” she sighs. “I threw things at him.”

“Didn’t work, I guess.”

“Apparently not.”

“Was he stalking you?”

“No. He doesn’t have the attention span for it. Besides, I don’t think he’s ever done anything that Kyoko didn’t find out about sooner or later, and she wouldn’t have let him.”

“So Kyoko watches his every move?”

“Basically.”

“And…this doesn’t bother you? You are dating the guy.”

“Why would it bother me? Kyoko has an eye on me, too. Nothing’s changed except that we’re making it easier for her.”

“Damn, Hana,” Mayumi drawls, sounding pleased. “Your life.”

“Tell me about it,” Hana mutters. “What about you? You’re being all normal and successful and sickening, aren’t you?”

“Why, yes,” Mayumi says in an unpleasantly self-satisfied tone. “Yes, I am.”

Hana doesn’t know why she’s drawn to all these rampant sadists. It must be a flaw in her character.

* * *

“I thought you’d be proud of me for getting a job,” Kyoko says sadly.

“You say job, I say indentured servitude to Sawada,” Hana snaps.

“I’m just working for him,” Kyoko insists with calm assurance that Hana doesn’t trust a bit. “It’s a business arrangement.”

“Right. So why does it feel like I’m sending you off to join a cult?”

Kyoko tips her head and smiles her very cutest smile. Which, for the record, is absurdly cute. “Because you’re paranoid?”

“Paranoid is not the same as wrong. Especially when it comes to Sawada.”

“Hana…” Kyoko shakes her head.

Under other circumstances, Hana might have let it go. A job is a good thing, right? Even if it does mean working for Sawada. But she can’t let it go, because she has the creepiest feeling that they’ve done this before. Almost like déjà vu. Like she had a dream in which they did this, and she let Kyoko go, and it was a disaster.

“Then get me a job, too,” she decides. If Kyoko’s diving headfirst down the rabbit hole, Hana’s going after her. At least then she won’t have to wonder what the hell is going on all the time.

Great, now she’s basing critical life decisions on funny feelings and random whims. Next she’ll be joining a cult. Assuming that isn’t what she just did.

“You don’t know what you’re asking for.” And Kyoko is not pleased. Now she knows how Hana’s felt for years.

“I think I have a pretty good idea.” Hana casts a resentful glance at the well-thumbed copy of Midnight in Sicily sitting on Kyoko’s bedside table. “And I don’t care.”

“You will care,” Kyoko insists.

“That’s my problem and not yours, isn’t it?”

Kyoko frowns, muttering, “You’d be amazed.” She pulls out her phone, presses one button, holds it to her ear, and says, “Gokudera-kun.”

She has Gokudera on speed-dial. Good. God.

* * *

“Why are we at my parents’ house?” Sawada asks, staring around his old room like he’s never seen it before.

“It’s private, Tenth, and she already knew where it was,” Gokudera explains. “We don’t want her figuring out where the base or any of our apartments are, but since she already-”

“But why are we at my parents’ house?” Sawada repeats plaintively.

“Tenth…”

Sawada rubs his face with both hands and collapses onto his bed, gesturing for Hana to take the desk chair. He turns expectantly to Gokudera. Gokudera shakes his head. Sawada raises his eyebrows. Gokudera makes a pleading face. Sawada smiles and points to the door. Gokudera sighs and leaves the room.

Interesting little song and dance, there.

Sawada turns back to Hana, giving her a soothing, rueful smile. “Still worried about Kyoko-chan, then?”

“Even more worried.”

He nods thoughtfully, then scoots back to lean against the wall and hug his knees despite his expensive suit. What with the knee-hugging, the room, and the absence of any hulking thugs, he’s almost managing to give the impression that he’s still scrawny loser Tsuna, completely harmless.

He’s probably doing it on purpose. Hana scowls at him, but he’s too busy gazing nostalgically around to notice.

“Law?” he asks after a few seconds of oddly comfortable silence.

“Right,” Hana agrees.

“…We could use a lawyer. But you’d have to finish your degree.”

“Oh, I am finishing, and I’m taking the bar, too. I’m going to be a real lawyer, not just a…a shady, fake, whatever-you-guys-are lawyer. If you think I trust you enough to work for you without a degree to fall back on, you’re out of your mind.”

“Mm, probably,” he allows, amused. But the soft expression fades, and when it’s gone, he just looks sad and overburdened. It makes Hana feel guilty, and she doesn’t like it. “You know,” he says, “what kind of job this would be.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“We break the law all the time.”

“Do you want me to act shocked?”

“I’m just saying, it might cause you trouble. Morally.”

“Not really,” Hana assures him. “It’s starting to dawn on me that I don’t have a sense of morality outside of making sure the people I love are fine. Is that creepy?”

Sawada ducks to hide his face behind his knees and his eyes crinkle-he must be hiding a smile. Ridiculously adorable. “I’m, um. Not really the person to ask. And Gokudera isn’t either, so. I guess we’ll pretend it’s not creepy?”

“Pretend it’s not creepy. That’s how you live your life, huh?”

“Pretty much.” He straightens and moves to the edge of the bed, feet back on the floor like a grown up. “And you’ll have to live like this, too. Or else, I don’t know, go crazy. Are you sure?”

Of course she’s sure. She’s gone around and around on this question starting from age fifteen. “I have to take care of Kyoko.”

Sawada smiles and stands, holding out a hand. “Then I’ll take care of you.”

Skinny guy in a fancy suit, still more kid than adult, face too worried and sweet to be believed. Hana has no idea why she’s finding it so easy to trust him. Maybe it’s because she’s taken his advice and is going crazy already.

“Deal,” she says, and they shake on it. Fate sealed, easy as that.

* * *

Sawada explained, in one of his terrifying fits of total disclosure, that he wouldn’t force Hana or Kyoko (or Haru) to do any kind of physical training if they didn’t want to. He would do his best to protect them, and, in theory, that would be good enough.

But things, he pointed out, have a way of going wrong.

“I trained with Hibari, too,” he said, eyeing them nervously. “It’s really…um, painful. He won’t go easy on you, but that’s why I picked him. When he’s done with you, everyone else will seem…soft. It’s your choice.” A worried once-over for each of them. “It won’t be fun.”

He was so, so right. He always is, the jerk.

Hibari’s idea of praise is to act like you’re finally doing what he expected you to do from the start. His idea of punishment, on the other hand, is to hit you really hard in a sensitive place. Hana feels that she is not temperamentally suited to this style of encouragement.

“Your brother,” she informs Kyoko, “is going to freak out.”

“That’s why we’re applying makeup, Hana.”

“Yeah, but I can still tell you have a black eye because makeup doesn’t hide swelling.”

“Does he really need to keep hitting me in the face?” Kyoko demands, staring resentfully into the mirror at the mauled face in question. “He never hits you in the face.”

“No, he hits me in the kidneys and makes me pee blood. It’s not better, it’s just different. Maybe he’s going for variety.”

“He always hits Haru in the face, too. Chrome-chan says he never hits her in the face,” Kyoko mutters, resentment undiminished.

“I doubt he hits Chrome much at all-she’s a beast like the rest of them. We, on the other hand, haven’t got a prayer. Just be grateful your internal organs are being left alone, because, seriously, this can’t be good for me. That jackass had better be prepared to donate me a kidney when we’re old.”

“I look like Tsu-kun did all through school,” Kyoko says mournfully, ignoring Hana. “And to think I used to want to know what had happened to him.” She tips her head back and addresses the ceiling. “I take it back! I don’t want to know anymore!”

“Why’s Hibari doing this, anyway?” Hana mutters, dabbing concealer on puffy, split skin, watching Kyoko flinch, feeling an overwhelming sense of futility. “I thought Mr. Rage Issues liked a challenge.”

“Every time he fights one of us, Tsu-kun fights him. Or Reborn-san does,” Kyoko explains. “So he’s being paid for it.”

“Freak,” Hana whispers in awe. “That man is a five-star freak. I’m actually impressed.”

Kyoko’s smile stretches the skin around her eye, and she winces. “It is pretty impressive.”

Hana smirks. Nice to know that even Kyoko can be driven to overt unkindness.

* * *

Inasmuch as Hana had pictured her life as a criminal, she’d pictured it involving a lot of time spent behind a desk. She’d pictured tinkering with tax records, possibly creating fake identities, writing shady contracts. A lot of corporate, real estate, tax, and/or criminal law.

She’d failed to understand the true scope of her job. Not surprising, given that the scope of her job is insane. She is somehow the one and only attorney for this whole…enterprise of theirs. (‘What are these branches of law of which you speak?’ they ask. ‘What is this specialization?’) She gets some help from Haru with the corporate side of things, from Shouichi with intellectual property, and from Gokudera with extralegal mafia politics. Even so, she’s expected to do more than is rational, reasonable, or indeed possible, and she doesn’t even have a full-time secretary.

Worse yet, the only person she can complain to is Sawada, and Sawada’s job makes hers look like a cakewalk. It’s a losing game, comparing your life to Sawada’s. Hana can’t even bring herself to whine about how hands-on her job is, much as she’d love to-you can’t complain about something like that to a mafia boss who’s both skinnier and shorter than you.

The thing is, as the sole attorney, Hana has to attend lots of meetings with scary, heavily armed people. This is a real shame, because Hana doesn’t win many stars in the diplomacy department. In fact, she has something of a gift for seriously annoying people with guns.

When the situation is delicate, Hana just briefs Sawada on the law and he and Gokudera take care of it-Sawada owns diplomacy. But when there shouldn’t be much tact required, Sawada sends Hana plus muscle.

The system usually works. Unfortunately, people are occasionally quite sneaky about how hostile they’re feeling, and in that case…well, in that case, Sawada thinks he’s safe sending Hana, and he’s wrong. That’s what happened today-Sawada sent Hana and Yamamoto, and they learned the hard way that Yamamoto’s muscle is insufficient in the face of thirty guys with box weapons.

At least Hana’s diplomatic failures weren’t what brought on the disaster this time-she didn’t get a chance to fail. She and Yamamoto flew into Reggio Calabria (always a fun experience, involving at least three unnecessary connections and as many delayed or cancelled flights as Alitalia can manage), and were promptly attacked on the way to their rental car. Yamamoto took down a lot of the attackers, but only managed to annoy the rest.

Hana strongly feels that none of this would have happened if they had a private jet, and so, clearly, they should have one. The Varia have a private jet, but Sawada insists it’s ridiculous. The whole thing makes Hana and Gokudera cry.

But back to the disaster: Hana and Yamamoto got themselves kidnapped and chucked in a basement, and they’re now awaiting God knows what unholy torment.

It becomes awkward and boring surprisingly quickly. Hana hardly knows Yamamoto. He looks and acts like a dumb (if attractive) jock, and she’s already dating one of those. She figured her dumb jock quota was filled, so she never bothered to get to know Yamamoto.

Now she’s going to die with him, which is so absurd it’s painful.

Yamamoto’s filling his time by pacing around their cell like a caged animal-tiny concrete basement, cell, is there really a difference?-checking for weaknesses. The steel door locks from the outside, he discovers, and there are no windows, which Hana could have told him. Because she is keenly observant in that way. The only feature of the room, in fact, is a bare, eye-burning fluorescent light above them. At least they aren’t in the dark, though in a few hours, Hana expects she’ll be wishing they were.

Yamamoto eventually gives up, settling onto the floor beside her with a laugh. The laugh is both wildly inappropriate and completely disturbing, an eerie contrast with the homicidal look in his eyes. But then, all of Sawada’s guardians are disturbing except Ryouhei. And Gokudera, actually, who’s just a geek at heart, even if he’s mainly a geek about explosives.

“Well,” Yamamoto says lightly. “I guess we’ll have to wait.”

Hana scowls at him. “For what?”

“Oh, you know, I’m sure-”

“Don’t you dare tell me someone will come for us and everything will be fine when I know full well how screwed we are. In detail. Do you want to hear the details?”

“Haha.” Yamamoto gives her his full attention, which he’s never done before. It’s frightening. “No.”

Hana doesn’t give a shit what he wants, actually. Frightening or not.

“I’m assuming our would-be hosts were the ones who abducted us,” she tells him, “which means that even if, even if Sawada shows up right now and knocks down the door, our deal with the Tegano ’ndrina is blown forever, which means our relationship with the ’Ndrangheta is in trouble, which means we can’t expand into Calabria, which means those waste disposal contracts Ryouhei wanted are history, which means…”

She goes on at some length. Yamamoto lets her. He even seems to be paying attention, though it’s hard to say for sure, what with his perennial creepy smile pasted on.

Eventually, though, even Hana runs out of grim predictions and is forced to conclude. “…and Sawada will do that horrible quiet thing, Ryouhei will freak, Kyoko will cry. And we’ll probably all end up dead.” With that, Hana stares at the light, which is already driving her nuts, and fiercely wills it to explode.

“Wow,” Yamamoto says eventually. “You’ve really thought this through, huh?”

Hana does not scream in frustration, but it’s a near thing. And Yamamoto’s smile turns suspiciously bright. “Every cloud,” he informs her earnestly, “has a silver lining.”

Her jaw drops. “Oh, you did not just-”

“If you don’t enter the tiger’s cave, you won’t catch its cub. Where there’s life there’s hope! Where there’s a will there’s a way.”

“Do you memorize these?”

“It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

“You memorize these to annoy Gokudera, don’t you.”

“Perseverance is strength, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! After the rain, the earth hardens.”

“Yeah, okay. Even monkeys fall out of trees.”

He grins, apparently pleased that he’s driven her to play along. “Hayato does get pretty annoyed,” he admits. What is this, positive reinforcement?

…And Hayato, huh? “Are you sleeping with him?” Hana asks absently, figuring, hey, they’ve got time to kill. Plus, there’s a passing chance that the question might make Yamamoto uncomfortable. That would be funny.

“Yep,” he answers blithely. So much for making him uncomfortable.

Hana briefly considers asking for details, but decides that would just make her uncomfortable, which would defeat the purpose. “Huh,” she says instead. “Thought so.”

“Didn’t know you spent time thinking about my love life. Haha, that’s kind of weird!”

Yamamoto has definitely won this round. “I’m a closet pervert!” Hana announces cheerfully, not quite ready to give up. “Better check your room for cameras after this.”

“Nah, I like you. If that’s your thing, it’s cool.”

“Is it?”

“…Probably not with Hayato, haha.”

“Do you even care if I’m serious?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Do you ever answer direct questions?”

“Sure.”

“The miracle is that no one’s killed you yet.”

“Haha! Hayato says that all the time.”

Hana slumps back against the wall and folds her arms, petulant. She just got verbally smacked down by Yamamoto Takeshi; she gives up on everything. This is probably exactly how people feel when they get into sword fights with him. He looks like such a goof until the fight starts, and from then on you have no idea what’s happening until the moment you realize you’re missing a limb. Apparently he’s not just muscle.

And yet despite all their combined sneaky cleverness, they’re still locked in a basement, aren’t they? Locked in a basement, and Hana forgot to bring a book.

“Do you know why this happened?” she demands.

“…No?” Yamamoto answers warily, because he thinks she’s going to start casting blame. She knows better; she’s almost as much to blame as he is.

“Because I didn’t bring my book.”

He stares at her while his brain changes gears and attempts to process that. “Book?”

“Yeah. I always bring a book everywhere in case I get stuck on a train or in an elevator or whatever. But this time I didn’t. I brought Gokudera’s reports on the Tegano instead because I was sure I wouldn’t have time to read a book. So obviously we got locked in a basement. I should have known.”

“But if you had a book,” Yamamoto says, “You’d be reading, and I’d be bored all by myself.”

“Yes,” Hana sighs wistfully, “you would.” Beautiful thought. But not really her point. “No, what I’m saying is, we wouldn’t be stuck at all, because I would have been prepared, so the gods wouldn’t have seen the need. See?”

“Haha! I don’t think it works like that.”

“Oh, it does,” she insists darkly.

“Maybe we’d have been locked in here with no lights-if you’d brought your book, I mean. Anyway, they’d have taken the book away. They took everything else away.”

“You make horribly valid points, Yamamoto Takeshi. I think I liked it better when you were proverbing at me.”

He laughs again. There is an awful lot of laughter going on for a trapped-in-a-basement-imminent-death type situation. He does stop eventually, though, and tips his head back against the wall, eyes closed, still smiling faintly. Settling in for the duration. Meditating, perhaps.

Hana hates him a little.

She lets her brain chase around horrible possibilities re: the potential collapse of their quasi-evil empire for about ten minutes before giving up and accepting what was inevitable from the moment she got locked in a basement with Yamamoto. Anything, anything is better than being trapped inside her own head with no distractions.

“Fine,” she sighs. “Tell me how baseball season’s going.”

Yamamoto’s eyes fly open and he lights up, and he does, indeed, tell her about baseball. So, so much about baseball. Trades. Batting averages. Historical games. In-depth descriptions of home runs and teams and rivalries and, randomly, the 2004 strike. On and on he goes. It’s better than Hana’s brain, but not by a lot. She bitterly misses Ryouhei’s boxing nonsense, which at least has an element of insanity to keep it interesting.

It feels like a lifetime, but it’s probably only a couple of hours before Yamamoto’s discourse on baseball is interrupted by a strange noise from the door. A sort of hissing, crackling, groaning sound. The door starts to glow red, then orange, yellow, blue, white.

“Oh, good,” Yamamoto murmurs, serene, dragging Hana as far from the door as they can get.

No need, it turns out. Sawada just melts it instead of blowing it up, then paces through the dripping, white-hot wreckage-which seems like a supremely bad idea-and scans the room, eyes settling on Yamamoto and Hana and staying there.

Hana assumes he’s happy to see them. It’s hard to tell with his eyes orange and his face blank and his head on fire like that, though.

Having satisfied himself that they’re alive, Sawada turns to the far wall of the basement and blows out a giant hole-a tunnel leading to ground level. Hana wonders how smart that was, structurally speaking. “Gokudera is waiting with your things,” Sawada says softly.

“You just blew up the last of our deal with the Tegano,” Hana informs him, making Yamamoto laugh.

Sawada turns his blank, burning eyes her way. “It doesn’t matter,” he murmurs, calm enough to chill. “By next week, they won’t exist.”

Ah ha. Well, in that case, all of Hana’s disaster scenarios collapse like a house of cards. Clearly she hasn’t been in this business long enough, because destroy them all didn’t even occur to her as an option. For shame. “Right,” she says. “Well, you might’ve killed anyone standing up there. Reckless maniac.”

“I told all of our people to stay back,” Sawada tells her. “As for the rest…I’m not worried about them.”

Yamamoto claps her on the shoulder before she can come up with any other protests that will only be brutally shot down. “Let’s climb, okay? Looks like the boss has it under control!”

“When we get home,” Hana mutters rebelliously as they climb, “I swear I am never leaving my desk again. I love my desk. I’m a white collar girl. Basement cells are not my milieu.”

Yamamoto just laughs. If Hana never hears Yamamoto’s laugh again, it will be too soon. Gokudera makes so much more sense now.

Part 2