it's like efficiency, but different
...Katekyo Hitman Reborn! fic. OF ALL RANDOM THINGS.
This fic is evidence of at least four broken New Year's resolutions, and hey, it's not even the end of January. Rock.
One of those resolutions was "Don't start any new fic before finishing the next part of crazy!Ed." You see how that didn't work. I am so, so close to the end of the next part of crazy!Ed. So close. And yet so far away, apparently.
Sigh.
This is a Yamamoto and Gokudera fic. They're so amazingly weird that I have to love them. This is true of many KHR characters, actually.
Someday I will totally write a Hibari fic. I tell myself I won't, but really, it's inevitable. Thank God I didn't make a resolution about it.
Relative Reality
Gokudera’s pretty sure this whole mess is the fault of the rain.
He used to love the rain, used to love the whole sky crying thing. Rain reduces the collateral damage with explosions, too, which is nice. Nothing more embarrassing than going to blow a guy up and accidentally starting a forest fire. He’s done that a couple times. He did it once when he was twelve, and wow, boss of the moment had had no sense of humor about it at all.
Almost the only thing he remembers about the day his mother died is that it was sunny. Bright and beautiful and clear, the sky a pure blue insult.
Yeah, he used to love the rain.
Nowadays, the sky reminds him of the Boss, the rain reminds him of Yamamoto, and he doesn’t know how the fuck to feel about anything. Rainy days kick off awful fits of brooding.
Yamamoto drives him nuts. It’s not just that he’s so cheerful you want to choke him, it’s not just that he’s a moron, it’s not just that he still cares about baseball more than he does about his freaking job. It’s mostly that he’s social.
Social people are the least trustworthy creatures on the whole slimy planet. You think you’re special to them? Sure you are. You and every other asshole they meet on the street. And what does it mean when everybody’s special, except that nobody is?
Not that Gokudera has ambitions of being special to Yamamoto or any shit like that, but he doesn’t even like having these extroverted types around, or at least, not in his family. Family is supposed to be forever, it’s supposed to be something you can have faith in, and social people are flakes. They always flit off or they die and you can’t fucking trust them, you can’t trust them. Just when you get used to the idea that they’re there for keeps, that’s when they cut you loose. Feels like they’re ripping chains right out of your chest when they go.
Gokudera is over that. He’s not stupid. He can see when something isn’t worth the effort, and extroverts are definitely not worth the effort.
Then again, he’s been burned a thousand times and it hasn’t stopped him playing with fire. Fuck.
The Boss is social too, but Gokudera thinks that’s probably okay. (Burned a thousand times). The Boss isn’t like other people-he never leaves anybody behind, it’s a liability sometimes. It’ll be fine as long as Gokudera’s his right hand man. Tenth can have all the troops he wants, and he can fret over every one of them, but he’s only ever gonna have one right hand. Gokudera will make sure of it.
Vongola X. Yeah, he’s a special case. When he looks at you, you feel like you’re the only other person on earth, even though you know he’s tracking like fifty other people in the back of his mind.
Whatever, anyway, Yamamoto is definitely not the Boss. What Yamamoto is is an idiot. He is the last person alive-including Bianchi-who Gokudera wants to be having sushi with on a rainy day when his sanity is going south on him anyway. Screw this.
“How do you like it?” Yamamoto asks, beaming.
Always with the fucking beaming.
“I hate it,” Gokudera says on reflex. He’s had so much sushi shoved down his throat by now that, by rights, he ought to hate it. The truth, though, is that he’s always loved sushi, maybe because Bianchi never made it for him when they were kids. And Takezushi is the crème de la crème of sushi places, in Gokudera’s experience.
He will die before he so much as hints at this out loud.
Yamamoto laughs anyway. Gokudera guesses they’re pretty used to each other by now. It’s been, what, four years?
Four goddamn years of his life spent knowing this guy. That doesn’t seem possible. Too long and too short at the same time.
A time before Yamamoto, before the Boss, before Japan…shit, it all seems like it happened to somebody else. Sometimes he goes so long without speaking Italian that it takes him a while to even remember how. Funny, he hadn’t thought the use it or lose it rule would apply to his native fucking language.
The reason he’s sitting here eating sushi with the baseball idiot is that this is a thing they do. Every Saturday, barring catastrophe, they eat lunch together. Rain does not count as a legit excuse.
Gokudera isn’t sure whether this tradition started because he and Yamamoto thought it was a good idea, or whether it was because Tenth talked them into thinking it was a good idea. Tenth is getting really good at that kind of thing. Gokudera’s proud, but he’s also just a little terrified.
They’ve been doing the lunch thing for two years. As such, they’ve had to come up with shit to talk about, and while Yamamoto’s worthless on most subjects Gokudera finds interesting, he will talk about the family all day long.
Nobody else will do that, not even the Boss. The Boss gets a sort of hunted look if you go on about the family too long, which is odd, because he definitely spends all day thinking about mafia stuff.
Yamamoto, though. On this one point, he’s pretty fun to hang around with. He’ll speculate and evaluate and strategize as long as Gokudera will.
It’s…well, it doesn’t suck to be around Yamamoto as much as it used to.
They’ve been here for two hours, they’ve been harassed by Papa Yamamoto three times, and Gokudera’s agreed with Yamamoto five times. That’s 2.5 agreements per hour. Last year at this time, Yamamoto was lucky to keep Gokudera around for a whole hour, and he definitely couldn’t weasel more than one agreement out of him. From 1 agreement/hour to 2.5 agreements/hour. That’s a 150% increase over a year. A 100% increase in time (and that’s just meal-time, not counting drinks), and a 150% increase in agreement.
That’s really fucking scary, is what that is. Gokudera feels morbidly tempted to make a graph. Several graphs. They could track things like agreements, packs of cigarettes, death threats.
He suspects he wouldn’t like what these graphs would have to tell him.
Papa Yamamoto breaks into his thoughts, shouting for some special knife. Gokudera doesn’t know what’s with all these sushi knives. A knife is a knife is a knife, for fuck’s sake. There can’t be a sane reason to litter your kitchen with fifty of them.
He’s never said that to Papa Yamamoto. Shamal would be pissed if he got himself killed in such a retarded way.
Yamamoto heads to the storage room where this Special Knife is kept (what the hell does ‘ai-deba’ mean, anyway?), and through the open screen, Gokudera catches a glimpse of the shrine. Yamamoto’s mother’s shrine.
It’s hard for Gokudera to keep it in his head that Yamamoto’s mother is dead, too. Maybe because Yamamoto’s never said anything about it. Makes the whole thing surreal.
Which bothers him, when he thinks about it.
Gokudera’s maybe got a tiny impulse-control problem. He only just manages to wait to pounce until after Yamamoto’s delivered the knife and come back to the table. “So when did you lose your mother?” he asks.
Ill-advised question. It’s nosy, for one thing. Part of him doesn’t even want to know, for another. There’s also the terrible possibility that this will prompt Yamamoto into a flood of confidences, giving Gokudera no choice but to blow up the goddamn building.
Ill-advised. He would never have asked if he hadn’t been in a weird mood. If it hadn’t been raining.
Fucking rain.
“Oh,” says Yamamoto with his best village idiot smile. “When I was still a little kid. I hardly remember her.”
Gokudera also hardly remembers his mother. Somehow, though, Yamamoto’s not managing to stir up much fellow-feeling.
“Holy shit, why are you telling me this with a fucking smile?” Gokudera demands. For the most part, he’s used to what a freak Yamamoto is, but this is too close to the bone, this is just not fucking okay. You don’t tell somebody about your dead mother and smile. You don’t if you’re human.
“I miss her,” Yamamoto says with a blithe unconcern that Gokudera can’t begin to understand. “But being miserable won’t bring her back.”
Well, that much is true. Nothing brings them back, not pain or bombs or prayers. Still, there’s such a thing as respect for the dead. For Christ’s sake.
“Anyway, I’ll see her again.”
So Yamamoto believes in Heaven. How soul-crushingly predictable. “Sure,” Gokudera sneers. He’s got no use for these assholes who treat life like a fucking trial run. Play for keeps or don’t play at all. Bastards.
Yamamoto shrugs and gives the little laugh that makes Gokudera want to take a knife to his vocal cords at the best of times. “She’s bound to come back sooner or later.”
Gokudera has to hand it to Yamamoto-that stops him cold. “What?”
“Eventually,” Yamamoto says patiently, “she’ll come back.”
For a minute, Gokudera’s got nothing, literally nothing. The woman is definitely dead. That is definitely a dead woman’s shrine, and besides, her death makes sense of everything. Gokudera would have pegged Papa Yamamoto as the kind of guy who mates for life, so that’s him sorted. And motherless boys generally turn out weird, just look at Gokudera. That’s Yamamoto explained in a nutshell, too. x + y = z. This is not complex.
Except now he comes out with this weird shit.
And then, like a fuse catching, Gokudera starts to feel the first horrible glimmer of understanding. He’s known Yamamoto for a long time. Despite his best efforts to resist, he’s starting to recognize patterns.
But no way, right? No way. Not even Yamamoto.
“Hang on,” he says oh-so-carefully, because he’s scared of the answer to this question. “Are you saying your mother’s pretending to be dead?”
Yamamoto smiles at him like a skinny, stupid Buddha.
Holy. Shit.
“Are you seriously fucking telling me that you’re playing the game of your mother being dead the same way you play mafia?”
The smile fades until Yamamoto looks almost like somebody Gokudera could respect. “They’re exactly the same,” he says.
Right. Gokudera has always figured Yamamoto’s either a full-fledged moron or batshit insane. The question of which one just became more important than it ever was before.
No, who’s he kidding? Nobody who fights like Yamamoto can be this stupid. So what’s that leave? It leaves fucking crazy, is what it leaves. And it’s not like Gokudera is winning any sane contests around here, but hell, at least he knows what the fuck is going on.
He’s torn. He usually is when it comes to Yamamoto, and that’s another reason he hates the freak. On the one hand, he’s pissed, he’s enraged. How can the asshole do this to himself, to his mother’s memory? It’s just fucking wrong.
Gokudera has to live with the knowledge that he’s never going to see his mother again. Why shouldn’t this idiot be in the same boat?
But on the other hand, there’s totally unfamiliar pity. Because, seriously, how miserable do you have to be before your mind snaps this hard?
“Haha,” says Yamamoto. “You look sick. Did I feed you bad sushi?”
Gokudera is not going to deal with this today. Or at all, preferably. Maybe it’s not his usual M.O. to run away screaming, but hell, the technique does have its moments.
Of course, Bianchi would say it is his usual M.O. to run away screaming. Bianchi can be kind of a bitch sometimes.
“No. Thanks for the food,” he says absently, standing. His childhood politeness training always bites him in the ass when he’s distracted.
“My pleasure.”
Gokudera takes off, which isn’t the norm. Usually he stays a while. Usually they have a few drinks, chase the day down, talk about fuck knows what. Nothing, maybe. Gokudera can never seem to remember the next day. It’s almost sort of enjoyable.
Yamamoto’s insanity is really going to make things awkward.
He seemed subdued right at the end, there. But who can tell what the baseball freak is thinking? Obviously not Gokudera, who’s gone all this time under the impression he was something like normal.
Christ. What’s he supposed to do about this? Because what he wants to do is pretend it the hell away. He wants to blow some shit up, go home, and erase the day from his brain. But he can’t, because Yamamoto is family, even if Gokudera daily wishes he’d never met the guy. More than that, he’s the Rain Guardian. His mental state is no joke.
Oh my God, Gokudera thinks. Does the Boss know about this?
* * *
The minute Yamamoto walks though the door to Tsuna’s office, he knows this isn’t going to be one of their fun conversations. Tsuna looks serious, and…not hesitant, but certainly careful.
Tsuna’s grown up a lot. It’s hard to believe that he and the terrified kid who once talked Yamamoto down from a roof are the same person. They’re still in high school, but Tsuna’s eyes look so old. Still in high school, but he’s halfway through building a compound for the family that would be any paranoid’s dream.
Despite all that, there are still moments when Yamamoto wants nothing more than to wrap him in cotton wool and feed him, and Tsuna’s careful face brings it on every time. It’s terrible. His only comfort is that Gokudera is much worse than he is.
Still, this is no time for cotton wool; Tsuna’s being serious.
He’s serious, but this isn’t business. If it were, Reborn would be here, at the very least. Instead, it’s just the two of them, alone together. Like Tsuna doesn’t want to embarrass him in front of the others, maybe.
Ha. Uh oh.
“Yamamoto,” Tsuna says. “I’ve been talking to Gokudera.”
Poor Gokudera. It must have been his week for Serious Talks, and he doesn’t handle those well. Not that there’s much outside of assassination attempts, music, and math that he does handle well. Funny guy.
“He’s…worried about you?” Tsuna goes on.
Yamamoto can’t blame him for making that statement a question. Gokudera’s worried about him. He should go check for flying pigs. “Haha,” he says. “That’s weird.”
Tsuna’s mouth quirks a little; he looks away and scratches his head. “You have no idea,” he says. “You didn’t see him. It was very, um. Different.”
He doesn’t say scary, but then, he doesn’t have to.
“This isn’t…I’m sure he just misunderstood, but. Well. I’m sorry, Yamamoto, this is a really prying question, but…do you believe your mother is just off somewhere? And, uh, that this whole mafia thing is a game? Still?”
It’s not a question of believing it. Of course he knows his mother is dead. Of course he knows that once a roleplaying game includes paychecks and a body count, you have to throw in the towel and call it life.
Of course he knows. That isn’t the point. They’re all missing the point, and Gokudera, at least, is meant to be smart. Though, to be fair, Yamamoto’s even managed to confuse Reborn with this, and he and Reborn generally understand each other pretty well.
He’s kind of proud of himself for confusing Reborn.
The thing is, there’s a place between pretense and belief, and you can live there all the time if you work hard at it. If you say something often enough, a part of you comes to believe it. Not the sane, rational part, but somewhere in the brain, no more under conscious control than your heart rate.
He’s building muscle memory of the mind. Repeat, repeat, repeat. If he tells himself ten times a day that his mother’s gone away for a while, if he tells himself that their insanely dangerous job is a game, then it doesn’t matter what he knows to be true. The lie is habit, it’s custom, it’s reflex. He trains himself to believe, trains himself to be content.
Nothing in his life has ever seemed particularly real, apart from baseball. But baseball has rules, baseball makes sense. Life never makes any sense, so why should he destroy himself believing in it?
Ha, nobody seems to get that, though. He has to admit it sounds pretty crazy. He tried to explain it to his dad one time, but once the words were out of his mouth, he wished he could stuff them back in. They sounded so strange, out where anybody could hear them.
His dad gave him worried eyes and an enormous plate of vegetables to chop, and no more was said on the subject.
Yamamoto’s not up to the kind of training that would require him to say one thing to himself and something else to everybody else. Once you train yourself into a habit, it’s dangerous to slip. After you spend countless hours making your batting stance perfect, you can’t switch to a bad stance for other people’s benefit. That’s a good way to undo everything you’ve accomplished.
It is a shame, though. If he could switch back and forth, no one would have to know about this mind trick of his, and Tsuna wouldn’t be making that horrified face.
“Tsuna,” he says, and he tries not to smile, because he knows it creeps people out during serious conversations. (He smiles at Gokudera on purpose. Gokudera’s funny when he’s creeped out.) “I’ll be your Rain Guardian.”
Tsuna is looking, if anything, even more horrified. “Yes…you said that.”
“No matter what, okay?”
“I’m glad. Yamamoto-”
“So it doesn’t really matter what I tell myself, does it? Because I’ll be here.”
Tsuna’s eyes abruptly narrow and become determined, focused. Pre-fight Tsuna. Yamamoto is still resisting the temptation to think of him as Vongola X when he looks like this, but it’s probably a losing battle.
“I understand,” Tsuna says quietly.
Yamamoto lets himself smile then, because maybe Tsuna does understand. He understands a very scary number of things, after all. It’s what makes him an awesome boss.
“Don’t scare Gokudera on purpose,” he goes on.
Ha, yeah. Tsuna understands way too much. Because it is on purpose. It’s partly for fun, and partly for reasons Yamamoto isn’t allowed to think about. The only thing in his mind when he does this stuff is, If I step back, will you follow me?
He thinks Bianchi’s probably going to kill him someday in a fit of sibling protectiveness. He thinks he’ll probably have it coming.
“Well,” he says to Tsuna, “I’ll try my best.”
Tsuna’s mouth turns down and he pinches the bridge of his nose. Total cotton wool moment. “I have to talk to Lambo next,” he sighs.
They couldn’t even make Yamamoto pretend to be the boss of this family. “Yikes.”
“He managed to short out half the building while playing hide and seek,” Tsuna says in the tone of voice people use to recount nightmares. “I like it better when people are trying to kill us.”
“No you don’t.”
Tsuna sighs again. “No, I don’t. Should I say something to Gokudera?”
“Um.” Is he really asking Yamamoto this question? “You could leave it up to me.”
Tsuna gives him a very long look. “I’ll say something to Gokudera,” he announces firmly. “Come back on Wednesday. Not before Wednesday.”
Oh, banished. Haha, burn.
He walks outside and considers his options. So, no mafia game today. No school, no baseball. No outings with the kids planned. Nothing on the list, really. He’s already practiced with Squalo today, already checked in with Reborn and been glared at by Hibari.
Maybe he’ll go find Gokudera. Tsuna didn’t actually forbid him, after all.
Hey ho.