KHR - fic: 59 + Bianchi, "white fruit to change the truth," PG-13, probably.
title: white fruit to change the truth
pairing/characters: Bianchi, background 2759
rating: PG-13 at max
summary: Love makes people do stupid things. Love makes people bite the bullet and do things they wouldn't normally consider. Love makes Hayato go to his sister and beg her for help where love and duty clash.
warnings: crossdressing, BL behind the scenes, whatnot. not that this is exactly a big deal, I don't think I've written any non-BL fic on this journal yet. D: D: D:
notes: I don't know if this is exactly done yet. I'll make a tag or something if this develops into some kind of monstrous multi-part fic. D:
Hayato doesn't go to Bianchi for anything, not help or protection or bandages and especially not for food. She smiles sadly at his retreating back, knowing he's scowling; she squashes the urge to ruffle his hair in passing like she might have been able to if they had been closer as siblings. Something like that would only earn her an outburst very much like an angry cat, and Hayato could be literally explosive.
(She only does this once, slips a note under his door reading "If you need anything the others cannot give you, come to me. - your older sister." His expression does not change in the slightest when he passes her in the hallway the next day.)
Ten years have run roughshod over all of them. Bianchi is twenty-six to Hayato's twenty-four and isn't blind to the way Tsunayoshi Sawada's feared right hand looks at him. She isn't blind to how ruthless her brother has become, either; it had been he who suggested the Gesso be wiped out, down to the last man. (What they had done, she didn't know; it served only to make the Families allied with the Vongola uneasy.)
Tsunayoshi gives the order; Hayato recruits the Varia and Takeshi Yamamoto. The linchpins of the Gesso family disappear; shaken from the loss of the family's leaders, the rest of the family falls easily.
(Tsuna's mouth tightens into a thin line when Hayato reports his success; Hayato bows his head and knows he has been dismissed.)
It is all to protect him, this boy who became the Vongola Tenth. All of it, down to the slight frown on Tsunayoshi's face whenever he receives the reports for something Hayato has done that he finds distasteful, although it was for the good of the Vongola.
Hayato knocks on her door, inscrutable expression painted firmly on his features. "I need your help, Sister," he says.
What could he need from her that the vast wealth of his resources couldn't provide? She asks as much and his expression grows panicked.
"Sister, you don't understand," he says (fighting down the illness at seeing her bare face the entire time, growing progressively more green around the gills). "I... can't stop it, I can't change it. I need your help."
She lets him in.
The problem is that her foolish little brother is hopelessly in love. "Is it a girl from a Family hostile to the Vongola," Bianchi asks. "Is it a girl not connected to cosa nostra? Is it a girl at all?"
"No, no, and no." Hayato is pale and sweating; Bianchi puts on her goggles.
"Who is it, then?"
"Sister..." He swallows, looks at the floor, fists his hands in his perfectly pressed slacks. It looks strange, that Hayato in his suit jacket and tie is sitting on his sister's bed and acting like a schoolgirl--but that's exactly it. In matters of love Hayato has any vested interest in (and there is only one) he is about as experienced as a schoolgirl just discovering that she is suddenly attracted to people.
"I can help you," Bianchi says, "but you will have to tell him."
"The Tenth is too kind," Hayato says, green gaze searing metaphorical holes in the floor. "I cannot do this to him."
Ah, yes. That problem.
That problem, being that though families aligned with the Vongola do not care about who the Vongola Tenth sleeps with (it is suspected that Dino Cavallone is engaged in a relationship with Tsunayoshi's Cloud Guardian, at that) the rest of cosa nostra might; that problem of the unspoken clause in the unwritten code stating that men of honor are technically not supposed to get into this kind of relationship with other men of honor. Cavallone's men don't care about this, considering who their boss is sleeping with--if Tsunayoshi were to begin engaging in such dalliances with his right hand man, the Varia might rib him a little more than usual but nothing would come of it. Lussuria has stranger tastes in any case. The real issue lies in outward appearances beyond the circle of the Vongola family and its allies.
Bianchi thinks that Hayato is over-thinking this, as usual; love is love.
"No, sister, I am not." Hayato is glaring at her now. "I cannot stand by and allow the Tenth to lose face for my selfish purposes."
"Love is not selfish."
"Is that really so?" her brother snarls. "Because if I recall correctly you wanted to kill the Tenth for the selfish purpose of having Reborn to yourself."
"Love is not selfish. You may do selfish things in the name of love, but love itself is not selfish."
"... I cannot do this to him."
Bianchi shakes her head. "Fine, then," she says. "We have nothing to talk about, Hayato, if you have already made up your mind."
He stands, brushes imaginary lint off of his suit, and leaves without a word.
Bianchi knows Hayato is not a fool, knows that his intelligence quotient is uncannily high and that the only other people around on a regular basis who can compete intellectually are Shouichi, Spanner (who belongs to the Giglio Nero family anyway, but the Giglio Nero family is allied with the Vongola and thus Spanner is often at headquarters on tech-related visits) and Giannini. She knows the only time she can truly call him her foolish little brother is when his hotheadedness gets ahead of him.
She passes by the Tenth Vongola in the hallway later, greets him with familiar respect. Tsunayoshi nods and smiles vaguely, and then Hayato rounds the corner and doesn't so much as pale at Bianchi's uncovered face, so intent is he on greeting the Tenth with his usual unbridled enthusiasm (tamed only slightly by the ten years that have slammed hooves much crueler than Dino Cavallone's into all of their backs).
Bianchi figures Hayato will last a week after resolving never to speak of his feelings to their object.
--
"Bianchi," the Vongola Tenth says, "do you know what the matter is with Gokudera-kun?"
Summer's slow burn drifts into autumn cools into winter warms into spring flickers into summer heat again. She has long figured out that her initial wager was wrong, that her brother has inherited a certain stubbornness from their father much like she has. "Perhaps Hayato has picked a fight with someone and lost," Bianchi suggests.
"He wouldn't do that," Tsunayoshi retorts, perhaps a little too quickly and too sharply. "Bianchi, I know he's not very close to you, but I thought maybe you would know something. He's been acting strange lately and no one knows anything. I ask him and he gives me evasive answers."
"Why would I know if we are not even as close as he and your Rain Guardian?"
There are many, many more years than twenty-five should have given him looking out from behind Tsunayoshi's eyes when he next opens his mouth. "You are his sister. Blood is thicker than water."
"Sister, I need your help," Hayato says, forehead against her door. "Please."
She opens the door right away because Hayato never says please, and pulls him into the sisterly embrace she'd been waiting to be allowed for seventeen years.
"What can I do that you cannot?" she asks, later.
Hayato winces, scowls, and stares at the floor. "There is only one way I can allow myself to be selfish and pursue the Tenth."
"That is..."
"His reputation must not suffer the way it will should he bed another man of honor."
Bianchi stares. "Hayato," she says, mildly, "have you actually spoken with Tsunayoshi about this?"
"He..." and Hayato looks embarrassed "--the Tenth spoke with me."
"And..."
"He said... that he was waiting for me to say something, that he was wondering if I had noticed his feelings."
"And you said..."
"I told the Tenth that I love him, but I cannot be with him."
Stupid, foolish Hayato, Bianchi thinks.
"Unless..."
"Unless?" she prompts.
"Unless I am with him in the guise of a woman."
Of all the harebrained schemes Bianchi had ever heard in her lifetime, this is very close to taking the cake. "Hayato, what makes you think you could pass for a woman?"
"I can't." He doesn't look at her, even when she slips her goggles on. "I can't. Please, sister, I need your help."
Bianchi has never been able to say no to love. She shakes her head and calls him her foolish little brother, and convinces Tsunayoshi to give Hayato a week's vacation. (Not a difficult feat, that--the most difficult was restraining her brother's near apoplectic fit when he found out exactly which strings she'd pulled.)
She procures clothes, and shoes, and jewelry; she stocks up on makeup and lingerie and a couple of water bras; she buys a few long wigs and dyes them silver. She goes through her small collection of firearms and chooses a couple of compact handguns a girl looking like she envisions Hayato will appear might be more likely to carry.
Then she sits Hayato down and makes him learn.
She tosses him into a bath scented with delicate flowers and shows him how to shave his legs; she puts him through a few facial treatments to try to ease the lines furrowing his forehead and forbids him from scowling. Wielding a pair of tweezers, she inspects his eyebrows and finally waves them off as passing.
The wig makes him look like his mother. Not an exact likeness--some of the angles of his face are too sharp, and his expression is too hard. Still, somewhere beneath the cold eyes and the nearly-permanently furrowed brow is an extraordinary likeness to the woman who bore him, lost him, and only saw him three times a year when she came to teach him to play the piano. "You can't sit like that, Hayato," Bianchi says, and corrects her brother's slouch and the spread of his legs when he sits. "The girls who sit like that when they can keep their legs closed are seen as the kind of women who could tarnish Tsunayoshi's reputation." Hayato flinches and carefully pulls his thighs together, smooth legs crossing at the ankle like the way Bianchi sits.
He does a little external research that night and shows up the next day in a pair of the lacy, delicate underwear Bianchi bought for him--she waits until the door is locked before unceremoniously yanking his sweats down to see what kind of initiative he's taken on his own. Hayato turns red and swears at her, but she manages to see how he's tied his cock back before she orders him to strip the rest off. (He scowls, even though she's forbidden him from doing so, and pulls the underwear back up before obeying.)
Bianchi hustles him into the bathroom and inspects the rest of him. Tall, toned, and masculine, he cuts a very odd figure perched on the lid of the toilet in lacy black panties and the rings he refuses to take off. "Hayato," she says, tones unnervingly sweet, "the hair has to go."
"What?" For a second her little brother looks panicked.
"No, no. Not the hair on your head. Hayato, the hair you grow everywhere else has to go, though." She pulls out a waxing kit and laughs inside at the raised eyebrow. "Also, Hayato, if you keep using the same cologne you'll give yourself away. I'll get you some perfume."
The wax takes a while to heat. In the meantime, Hayato relaxes. Slightly.
His sister strikes while his guard is down. She applies the wax, applies the cloth, and pulls.
He snarls in shock and pain. "Sister, if you're trying to kill me you've chosen a very slow and--rgh!--inefficient way to do it!" Hayato grits, in between strips of hair coming away from his skin.
"Hayato, I am not trying to kill you," Bianchi retorts. "Don't insult my sense as an assassin."
"Then what is this, torture?"
Bianchi spreads cotton over one larger section of wax and pulls. "Nonsense. Don't tell me Tsunayoshi's feared right hand man can't take a little pain."
"This isn't a little pain. Some of my burns have hurt less than this!"
"Don't be such a baby. Beauty is pain, Hayato. Now raise your arms."
The days pass in a blur, one by one. This is something Hayato cannot hole up in a library to learn, so he practices and runs over the mannerisms in the mirror and in the bathroom when not in Bianchi's room. The makeup and the perfume and the skirts and the green shawl become nearly second nature, and once he catches himself dressing as the girl he is trying to become in the morning instead of donning his usual suit for a meeting he did not have. He cannot decide whether he is disturbed or pleased, and settles for the fervent love-sickness that flows beneath the surface. All of this is for the Tenth, for the sake of the Tenth's love.
With practice, the process eases--Hayato slips out of his hardened male shell and flips a long loose lock of silver hair back over her too-broad shoulders. He applies her makeup and fastens a sparkling necklace around her pale throat. The dresses Bianchi chose for her fit her flatteringly and are cut fashionably. No one could immediately say that the Vongola Tenth had poor taste in lovers at first glance.
She changes Hayato's small hoop earrings for elegant drops that match her necklace and a pair of diamond studs for his second lobe piercings; she paints his lips with a thin coat of designer lip gloss. A nameless girl looks back in the mirror with Hayato's eyes and runs Hayato's fingers through her long silver hair, and Hayato thinks fleetingly that it must be good if the lines are beginning to blur. He does this all for the Tenth, she exists all for him, and will the Tenth still love him like this?
--
"Pick a name," Bianchi murmurs, making one last adjustment to the bobby pins securing Hayato's wig. Six days have passed.
"What?"
"Do you honestly expect to have Tsunayoshi call you Hayato and not have your cover blown? Pick a name. Something you'll remember."
"... Shiromi."
"White fruit?" Bianchi studies her brother for a moment. He-no, she reminds herself, she-looks... beautiful. Austere, but beautiful. As pale as Hayato is, the name fits.
"No." Although Hayato will likely never get rid of the smoker's rasp in his voice, his soft falsetto is increasingly more convincing. Shiromi meets Bianchi's eyes with her hard green gaze. "Shiromi, for 'change the truth.'"
The girl-tall and somewhat flat in proportions all around-runs a hand through her long silver hair, the gesture familiar as Hayato's, and steps down from the box on which Bianchi had her standing to look in the mirror. She fingers the Vongola Storm Ring longingly for a moment before slipping it off her finger and onto a chain. The chain goes around her neck, hiding the ring below her neckline.
Shiromi wraps a forest green shawl around herself, hiding from sight her angular, too-wide shoulders and all but the silhouette of the bust she would never develop on her own. She slips her feet-snugly sheathed in silky hose-into a pair of heels and stands; she walks without wobbling. At last she reaches the door and looks back at Bianchi.
For a moment her eyes are Hayato's. "Thank you, Sister," he mutters, the words tasting foreign on his tongue, and then he slips back into Shiromi. She turns the handle and opens the door; her footsteps are steady as she glides into the hallway with meticulously practiced grace. The hem of her dress swishes in farewell as Bianchi walks to the door to observe the fruits of her week's labor.
"You're welcome, little brother," she whispers.
I think I already listed my reasons, bizarre as they are, for starting a fic in which Hayato poses as a girl. He's going to slip, undoubtedly-one week of conditioning and practice is not going to override years of shaping his behavioral habits a certain way-and someone is going to find out. But... I couldn't figure out any decent way of including the "reactions" without kind of destroying what I already have here and so this happened.
Also, my NaNo wordcount is pathetic. But, uh, this is not news at all. I mean, I haven't really been working on it at all. so... yeah. D:
I know. Flaky Lily is flaky. ;∆;
pairing/characters: Bianchi, background 2759
rating: PG-13 at max
summary: Love makes people do stupid things. Love makes people bite the bullet and do things they wouldn't normally consider. Love makes Hayato go to his sister and beg her for help where love and duty clash.
warnings: crossdressing, BL behind the scenes, whatnot. not that this is exactly a big deal, I don't think I've written any non-BL fic on this journal yet. D: D: D:
notes: I don't know if this is exactly done yet. I'll make a tag or something if this develops into some kind of monstrous multi-part fic. D:
Hayato doesn't go to Bianchi for anything, not help or protection or bandages and especially not for food. She smiles sadly at his retreating back, knowing he's scowling; she squashes the urge to ruffle his hair in passing like she might have been able to if they had been closer as siblings. Something like that would only earn her an outburst very much like an angry cat, and Hayato could be literally explosive.
(She only does this once, slips a note under his door reading "If you need anything the others cannot give you, come to me. - your older sister." His expression does not change in the slightest when he passes her in the hallway the next day.)
Ten years have run roughshod over all of them. Bianchi is twenty-six to Hayato's twenty-four and isn't blind to the way Tsunayoshi Sawada's feared right hand looks at him. She isn't blind to how ruthless her brother has become, either; it had been he who suggested the Gesso be wiped out, down to the last man. (What they had done, she didn't know; it served only to make the Families allied with the Vongola uneasy.)
Tsunayoshi gives the order; Hayato recruits the Varia and Takeshi Yamamoto. The linchpins of the Gesso family disappear; shaken from the loss of the family's leaders, the rest of the family falls easily.
(Tsuna's mouth tightens into a thin line when Hayato reports his success; Hayato bows his head and knows he has been dismissed.)
It is all to protect him, this boy who became the Vongola Tenth. All of it, down to the slight frown on Tsunayoshi's face whenever he receives the reports for something Hayato has done that he finds distasteful, although it was for the good of the Vongola.
Hayato knocks on her door, inscrutable expression painted firmly on his features. "I need your help, Sister," he says.
What could he need from her that the vast wealth of his resources couldn't provide? She asks as much and his expression grows panicked.
"Sister, you don't understand," he says (fighting down the illness at seeing her bare face the entire time, growing progressively more green around the gills). "I... can't stop it, I can't change it. I need your help."
She lets him in.
The problem is that her foolish little brother is hopelessly in love. "Is it a girl from a Family hostile to the Vongola," Bianchi asks. "Is it a girl not connected to cosa nostra? Is it a girl at all?"
"No, no, and no." Hayato is pale and sweating; Bianchi puts on her goggles.
"Who is it, then?"
"Sister..." He swallows, looks at the floor, fists his hands in his perfectly pressed slacks. It looks strange, that Hayato in his suit jacket and tie is sitting on his sister's bed and acting like a schoolgirl--but that's exactly it. In matters of love Hayato has any vested interest in (and there is only one) he is about as experienced as a schoolgirl just discovering that she is suddenly attracted to people.
"I can help you," Bianchi says, "but you will have to tell him."
"The Tenth is too kind," Hayato says, green gaze searing metaphorical holes in the floor. "I cannot do this to him."
Ah, yes. That problem.
That problem, being that though families aligned with the Vongola do not care about who the Vongola Tenth sleeps with (it is suspected that Dino Cavallone is engaged in a relationship with Tsunayoshi's Cloud Guardian, at that) the rest of cosa nostra might; that problem of the unspoken clause in the unwritten code stating that men of honor are technically not supposed to get into this kind of relationship with other men of honor. Cavallone's men don't care about this, considering who their boss is sleeping with--if Tsunayoshi were to begin engaging in such dalliances with his right hand man, the Varia might rib him a little more than usual but nothing would come of it. Lussuria has stranger tastes in any case. The real issue lies in outward appearances beyond the circle of the Vongola family and its allies.
Bianchi thinks that Hayato is over-thinking this, as usual; love is love.
"No, sister, I am not." Hayato is glaring at her now. "I cannot stand by and allow the Tenth to lose face for my selfish purposes."
"Love is not selfish."
"Is that really so?" her brother snarls. "Because if I recall correctly you wanted to kill the Tenth for the selfish purpose of having Reborn to yourself."
"Love is not selfish. You may do selfish things in the name of love, but love itself is not selfish."
"... I cannot do this to him."
Bianchi shakes her head. "Fine, then," she says. "We have nothing to talk about, Hayato, if you have already made up your mind."
He stands, brushes imaginary lint off of his suit, and leaves without a word.
Bianchi knows Hayato is not a fool, knows that his intelligence quotient is uncannily high and that the only other people around on a regular basis who can compete intellectually are Shouichi, Spanner (who belongs to the Giglio Nero family anyway, but the Giglio Nero family is allied with the Vongola and thus Spanner is often at headquarters on tech-related visits) and Giannini. She knows the only time she can truly call him her foolish little brother is when his hotheadedness gets ahead of him.
She passes by the Tenth Vongola in the hallway later, greets him with familiar respect. Tsunayoshi nods and smiles vaguely, and then Hayato rounds the corner and doesn't so much as pale at Bianchi's uncovered face, so intent is he on greeting the Tenth with his usual unbridled enthusiasm (tamed only slightly by the ten years that have slammed hooves much crueler than Dino Cavallone's into all of their backs).
Bianchi figures Hayato will last a week after resolving never to speak of his feelings to their object.
--
"Bianchi," the Vongola Tenth says, "do you know what the matter is with Gokudera-kun?"
Summer's slow burn drifts into autumn cools into winter warms into spring flickers into summer heat again. She has long figured out that her initial wager was wrong, that her brother has inherited a certain stubbornness from their father much like she has. "Perhaps Hayato has picked a fight with someone and lost," Bianchi suggests.
"He wouldn't do that," Tsunayoshi retorts, perhaps a little too quickly and too sharply. "Bianchi, I know he's not very close to you, but I thought maybe you would know something. He's been acting strange lately and no one knows anything. I ask him and he gives me evasive answers."
"Why would I know if we are not even as close as he and your Rain Guardian?"
There are many, many more years than twenty-five should have given him looking out from behind Tsunayoshi's eyes when he next opens his mouth. "You are his sister. Blood is thicker than water."
"Sister, I need your help," Hayato says, forehead against her door. "Please."
She opens the door right away because Hayato never says please, and pulls him into the sisterly embrace she'd been waiting to be allowed for seventeen years.
"What can I do that you cannot?" she asks, later.
Hayato winces, scowls, and stares at the floor. "There is only one way I can allow myself to be selfish and pursue the Tenth."
"That is..."
"His reputation must not suffer the way it will should he bed another man of honor."
Bianchi stares. "Hayato," she says, mildly, "have you actually spoken with Tsunayoshi about this?"
"He..." and Hayato looks embarrassed "--the Tenth spoke with me."
"And..."
"He said... that he was waiting for me to say something, that he was wondering if I had noticed his feelings."
"And you said..."
"I told the Tenth that I love him, but I cannot be with him."
Stupid, foolish Hayato, Bianchi thinks.
"Unless..."
"Unless?" she prompts.
"Unless I am with him in the guise of a woman."
Of all the harebrained schemes Bianchi had ever heard in her lifetime, this is very close to taking the cake. "Hayato, what makes you think you could pass for a woman?"
"I can't." He doesn't look at her, even when she slips her goggles on. "I can't. Please, sister, I need your help."
Bianchi has never been able to say no to love. She shakes her head and calls him her foolish little brother, and convinces Tsunayoshi to give Hayato a week's vacation. (Not a difficult feat, that--the most difficult was restraining her brother's near apoplectic fit when he found out exactly which strings she'd pulled.)
She procures clothes, and shoes, and jewelry; she stocks up on makeup and lingerie and a couple of water bras; she buys a few long wigs and dyes them silver. She goes through her small collection of firearms and chooses a couple of compact handguns a girl looking like she envisions Hayato will appear might be more likely to carry.
Then she sits Hayato down and makes him learn.
She tosses him into a bath scented with delicate flowers and shows him how to shave his legs; she puts him through a few facial treatments to try to ease the lines furrowing his forehead and forbids him from scowling. Wielding a pair of tweezers, she inspects his eyebrows and finally waves them off as passing.
The wig makes him look like his mother. Not an exact likeness--some of the angles of his face are too sharp, and his expression is too hard. Still, somewhere beneath the cold eyes and the nearly-permanently furrowed brow is an extraordinary likeness to the woman who bore him, lost him, and only saw him three times a year when she came to teach him to play the piano. "You can't sit like that, Hayato," Bianchi says, and corrects her brother's slouch and the spread of his legs when he sits. "The girls who sit like that when they can keep their legs closed are seen as the kind of women who could tarnish Tsunayoshi's reputation." Hayato flinches and carefully pulls his thighs together, smooth legs crossing at the ankle like the way Bianchi sits.
He does a little external research that night and shows up the next day in a pair of the lacy, delicate underwear Bianchi bought for him--she waits until the door is locked before unceremoniously yanking his sweats down to see what kind of initiative he's taken on his own. Hayato turns red and swears at her, but she manages to see how he's tied his cock back before she orders him to strip the rest off. (He scowls, even though she's forbidden him from doing so, and pulls the underwear back up before obeying.)
Bianchi hustles him into the bathroom and inspects the rest of him. Tall, toned, and masculine, he cuts a very odd figure perched on the lid of the toilet in lacy black panties and the rings he refuses to take off. "Hayato," she says, tones unnervingly sweet, "the hair has to go."
"What?" For a second her little brother looks panicked.
"No, no. Not the hair on your head. Hayato, the hair you grow everywhere else has to go, though." She pulls out a waxing kit and laughs inside at the raised eyebrow. "Also, Hayato, if you keep using the same cologne you'll give yourself away. I'll get you some perfume."
The wax takes a while to heat. In the meantime, Hayato relaxes. Slightly.
His sister strikes while his guard is down. She applies the wax, applies the cloth, and pulls.
He snarls in shock and pain. "Sister, if you're trying to kill me you've chosen a very slow and--rgh!--inefficient way to do it!" Hayato grits, in between strips of hair coming away from his skin.
"Hayato, I am not trying to kill you," Bianchi retorts. "Don't insult my sense as an assassin."
"Then what is this, torture?"
Bianchi spreads cotton over one larger section of wax and pulls. "Nonsense. Don't tell me Tsunayoshi's feared right hand man can't take a little pain."
"This isn't a little pain. Some of my burns have hurt less than this!"
"Don't be such a baby. Beauty is pain, Hayato. Now raise your arms."
The days pass in a blur, one by one. This is something Hayato cannot hole up in a library to learn, so he practices and runs over the mannerisms in the mirror and in the bathroom when not in Bianchi's room. The makeup and the perfume and the skirts and the green shawl become nearly second nature, and once he catches himself dressing as the girl he is trying to become in the morning instead of donning his usual suit for a meeting he did not have. He cannot decide whether he is disturbed or pleased, and settles for the fervent love-sickness that flows beneath the surface. All of this is for the Tenth, for the sake of the Tenth's love.
With practice, the process eases--Hayato slips out of his hardened male shell and flips a long loose lock of silver hair back over her too-broad shoulders. He applies her makeup and fastens a sparkling necklace around her pale throat. The dresses Bianchi chose for her fit her flatteringly and are cut fashionably. No one could immediately say that the Vongola Tenth had poor taste in lovers at first glance.
She changes Hayato's small hoop earrings for elegant drops that match her necklace and a pair of diamond studs for his second lobe piercings; she paints his lips with a thin coat of designer lip gloss. A nameless girl looks back in the mirror with Hayato's eyes and runs Hayato's fingers through her long silver hair, and Hayato thinks fleetingly that it must be good if the lines are beginning to blur. He does this all for the Tenth, she exists all for him, and will the Tenth still love him like this?
--
"Pick a name," Bianchi murmurs, making one last adjustment to the bobby pins securing Hayato's wig. Six days have passed.
"What?"
"Do you honestly expect to have Tsunayoshi call you Hayato and not have your cover blown? Pick a name. Something you'll remember."
"... Shiromi."
"White fruit?" Bianchi studies her brother for a moment. He-no, she reminds herself, she-looks... beautiful. Austere, but beautiful. As pale as Hayato is, the name fits.
"No." Although Hayato will likely never get rid of the smoker's rasp in his voice, his soft falsetto is increasingly more convincing. Shiromi meets Bianchi's eyes with her hard green gaze. "Shiromi, for 'change the truth.'"
The girl-tall and somewhat flat in proportions all around-runs a hand through her long silver hair, the gesture familiar as Hayato's, and steps down from the box on which Bianchi had her standing to look in the mirror. She fingers the Vongola Storm Ring longingly for a moment before slipping it off her finger and onto a chain. The chain goes around her neck, hiding the ring below her neckline.
Shiromi wraps a forest green shawl around herself, hiding from sight her angular, too-wide shoulders and all but the silhouette of the bust she would never develop on her own. She slips her feet-snugly sheathed in silky hose-into a pair of heels and stands; she walks without wobbling. At last she reaches the door and looks back at Bianchi.
For a moment her eyes are Hayato's. "Thank you, Sister," he mutters, the words tasting foreign on his tongue, and then he slips back into Shiromi. She turns the handle and opens the door; her footsteps are steady as she glides into the hallway with meticulously practiced grace. The hem of her dress swishes in farewell as Bianchi walks to the door to observe the fruits of her week's labor.
"You're welcome, little brother," she whispers.
I think I already listed my reasons, bizarre as they are, for starting a fic in which Hayato poses as a girl. He's going to slip, undoubtedly-one week of conditioning and practice is not going to override years of shaping his behavioral habits a certain way-and someone is going to find out. But... I couldn't figure out any decent way of including the "reactions" without kind of destroying what I already have here and so this happened.
Also, my NaNo wordcount is pathetic. But, uh, this is not news at all. I mean, I haven't really been working on it at all. so... yeah. D:
I know. Flaky Lily is flaky. ;∆;