what we fought for - part 1
Katekyo Hitman Reborn! canon + the little I know about actual organized crime in Italy = disaster. I think we can all agree, disaster.
AND HERE IT IS.
Basically, I got very taken with the idea that the fallout from the Future Arc caused…well…reality. That the mafia as it really exists is Tsuna’s fault. This was a bad thought, both for Tsuna and for me.
KHR doesn’t belong to me, but I did play pretty fast and loose with its timeline.
Most of what I know about crime in Italy I learned from Roberto Saviano, that deranged man. The quotes in italics are all from his book Gomorrah. I really should have thrown in some Machiavelli too, for the lulz, but ran out of energy and will.
Haha, I can’t believe I wrote this. Or perhaps I should say, attempted to write this. o_O So many thanks to zephy_magnum for above and beyond betaing. *bows down*
There are reference notes at the end. I know. You shouldn’t actually need them, though. They are there in case of random curiosity.
What We Fought For
“If you don’t scare anyone, if nobody feels uneasy looking at you, well then, in the end you haven’t really succeeded.”
* * *
Sawada Tsunayoshi, Tenth boss of the Vongola, is sitting at his desk. He should be working. He knows he should be working, and, moreover, that Reborn is going to catch him in a minute.
Reborn doesn’t kick him in the head anymore, which is strange, because it seems like it would be easier now that Reborn is taller than Tsuna. Tsuna misses the good old head-kicking days. Head-kicking versus paperwork: no contest.
Instead of working, he’s spinning a pencil and bouncing it off his desk. Eraser, point, eraser. Lal Mirch says the Vongola boss shouldn’t be using pencils at all: pens are more dignified. Colonello says she has no sense of humor. Chaos ensues.
In Tsuna’s office, chaos, generally speaking, ensues.
This is the better future, he reminds himself. It’s already been ten years. If they hadn’t changed the future, Byakuran would be running wild by now. Yamamoto’s dad would be dead. The Vongola would be hunted. The Arcobaleno would be dead.
Of course, the Ninth and Gokudera’s father would still be alive.
Eraser, point, eraser, point.
Tsuna is trying to calculate the number of people his guardians have murdered. Just his guardians and immediate circle, leaving aside the Varia as a separate problem. Leaving aside Reborn as utterly beyond Tsuna’s control.
Yamamoto alone has killed a dozen people that Tsuna knows about, and Yamamoto and Gokudera both do their best to hide things like that from him. Mukuro might have been into triple digits before Tsuna ever met him. Chrome herself, not controlled by Mukuro? Five at least. Hibari, unknowable. Ryohei, maybe four. Lambo has killed three people. Tsuna knows this because Lambo still comes to Tsuna to report, proud of his tally. Unlike I-Pin, who probably doesn’t bother to count her dead, and Bianchi and Gokudera, who certainly neither count nor care.
Tsuna knows he’s responsible for every death.
Point, eraser, point.
He considers the fact that he doesn’t know how many people he’s killed himself, and drops the pencil.
* * *
“Never in the economy of a region has there been such a widespread, crushing presence of criminality as in Campania in the last ten years. Unlike the Sicilian Mafia groups, the Camorra clans don’t need politicians; it’s the politicians who need the System.”
* * *
The Millefiore left a power gap when Byakuran was excised from time and space, and nature, Gokudera assures Tsuna, abhors a vacuum.
There’s no gap now. The space the Millefiore had shouldered into was filled on the ebb by the ’Ndrangheta, the Sacra Corona Unita, the Basilischi, overseas branches of the triads and the yakuza. And above all, by the Camorra, the clans, the System.
The Camorra have a horizontal structure, Gokudera says, instead of a vertical one. A hundred largely independent clans, minimal centralized control. Most of the workers aren’t clan members at all, they’re drones. Gofers who don’t even know which boss they’re working for. Their crime is the crime of having no other options, and Tsuna has all kinds of sympathy for that.
“No respect,” Reborn says, sounding about eighty years old. “No tradition.”
“I think we’re not in Sicily anymore,” Gokudera mutters, mostly to himself.
This is another thing Tsuna hadn’t known until he was forcibly dragged to Italy: Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, is not the scariest of all mafia groups. Almost the opposite, in fact. Everyone watches Cosa Nostra. Everyone knows they exist. People fight them right out in the open.
The better documented a family is, the weaker it is.
The mafia world began to favor looser, more flexible organizations the moment Tsuna defeated the Shimon family-the moment it became clear that there was no weakness there to exploit, that there was nothing to be gained from trying.
In the absence of Byakuran, who was aiming for world domination (which takes a special kind of madness), and with no hope of taking down the Vongola (for now), the other families slowly moved away from special shots, rings, medical experimentation, super-soldiers. At the end of the day, there was very little profit in it, and, more importantly, it was the wrong kind of flashy. Definitively mafia, not to be mistaken for local crime.
Mistake, confusion, and misdirection are the allies of a truly successful family. It’s hard to beat something that defies definition. (There is no criminal underworld; it’s your imagination. You’re paranoid. There’s nothing here for you to fight.)
A quiet, ‘accidental’ fire burned a lab to the ground, and the technology for box weapons was lost before it was found. The boxes became a Vongola secret, never used for their intended purpose, but kept just in case. In case.
If the families didn’t need to protect themselves from the Millefiore, they didn’t need to waste time, money, and anonymity on super-soldiers and flashy weapons. A teenager with an AK-47 or a necklace of grenades would serve just as well. Better.
Old enough to be loyal, too young to have second thoughts.
“Hayato worked for the clans once,” Bianchi mentions off-hand. Gokudera tries to slump himself into invisibility.
“For the Di Lauros, yes?” Reborn says thoughtfully, and Tsuna fights the urge to drag Gokudera out of the room and hide him. “How did that happen?”
Gokudera clearly does not want to answer that question, but he’d never be so rude as to ignore Reborn. He says, “Well.” Hesitates. “I was a kid on my own in Campania. It’s not like I had a ton of options. Besides…”
“If you’re trying to find a way to say ‘Cosimo Di Lauro was hot’ that won’t embarrass you,” Bianchi puts in, “you’re wasting your time.”
“Shut up, Sis-”
“Then you must know a lot about how they work,” Tsuna says hastily. “That could be useful.”
And because they’re now talking business, the embarrassment disappears. This is the serious, calm Gokudera Tsuna first met ten years in the future ten years ago. This is the Right Hand of Vongola X, feared and respected.
No one outside the family is allowed to see that, in fact, he’s still twitchy, hyperactive, geeky, and bad-tempered. He’s learned to disguise his personality incredibly well. He’s learned to be his title.
Maybe they all have.
“I was low-level,” Gokudera says. “I wasn’t around long enough to be trusted with much beyond lookout duty. And then he-Cosimo Di Lauro-was arrested.”
“And then,” Bianchi murmurs, “there was no reason to stick around.”
Gokudera ignores her, in full professional mode now.
“I don’t think it’d help anyway, Tenth,” he says. “The way they work changes with every boss, and the boss might change every few months. Besides, every clan’s got its own boss, and they’re always in and out of feuds with each other. It’s a mess, that’s all you can say for sure. It’s too dangerous even to try to play them off each other; you never know when you’ll wind up involved.”
Tsuna sighs and rubs his temples against the headache that’s always threatening whenever it isn’t actually present, and he tries to think his way around this.
He’s bitterly aware that thinking has never been his strong point.
* * *
“Hardly any of the younger generation become clan members; they work for the clans without ever becoming Camorristi. The clans don’t want them.”
* * *
Tsuna went to Naples for the first time when he was eighteen. Until then, he’d been busy making the base in Japan as impenetrable as possible; everyone had agreed that that was wise. Ninth was technically retired, but he agreed to take care of Italy if Tsuna took care of Japan.
By the time Tsuna was eighteen, though, Ninth was dead, and Tsuna had taken over the family in truth. Reborn decided that it was past time for him to see “where the money comes from.” Most of the money, apparently, came from in and around Naples.
Tsuna walked three steps from the train station before entrusting his wallet to Gokudera, getting a death grip on Yamamoto’s arm, and giving himself wholly over to blind panic.
Within two blocks, Gokudera and Bianchi made perfect sense. Beautiful, terrifying women and slouching, wary men were everywhere, pushing past each other, yelling at each other, pointedly ignoring each other. The city itself was clearly insane, every inch of it. The traffic, the architecture, the layout. Pandemonium. Tsuna was so busy staring around open-mouthed that only Yamamoto’s reflexes saved him from death by motorcycle. What in the hell a motorcycle was doing on the sidewalk, Tsuna did not know.
He loved the city from the start. Reborn had trained him to love things that might kill him at any moment, after all.
* * *
“Tomorrow,” Gokudera said once they’d reached their extremely dubious-looking hotel, “we’ll go down to the port.”
“Why, is that the real Naples?” Yamamoto asked cheerfully. Yamamoto was, unsurprisingly, the world’s most easily pleased traveler.
Gokudera glared at him, but didn’t snap back, which was worrying. “It’s our Naples,” he said. “Part of it, anyway.” He took a long drag from his cigarette and stared past the shutters down to the chaotic streets. He said, almost gently, “You’re not gonna like it, Tenth.”
* * *
“Someone said that living in the south is like living in paradise. All you have to do is stare at the sky and never look down. Ever.”
* * *
Gokudera was right. Tsuna didn’t like it at all.
“What is this?” Yamamoto asked, staring at the scene with wide eyes.
Gokudera shrugged impatiently. “The heart of the world’s shipping industry. Trash, oil, dead fish, a little water. I think they call it Porto di Napoli, moron. The Port of Naples.”
The confident Gokudera of the last three years had faded with every step they took toward the water, and the Gokudera in front of them now was one Tsuna barely remembered. Twitchy, volatile, miserable in his own skin.
He wondered if Reborn had really known what he was doing to Gokudera, sending him back here. Sending him to walk through his nightmares.
“How do they get those big crates on the ships?” Yamamoto asked blithely.
“Containers. They’re called containers, idiot-and what do you think those cranes are for? They’re not fucking decorative, what’s the matter with you?”
“Oh, so they lift them…hey, can we hang around and watch them load something? That’d be cool!”
“Do you think we’re here for the scenery!?”
Yamamoto’s famed distraction technique. Tsuna knew it well. And the beauty of it was that no matter how often he used it, it always seemed to work.
“Haha! What are we here for?”
“We’re here to meet somebody, I told you a dozen times, you-” Gokudera cut himself off abruptly. “That guy,” he muttered. “We’re meeting that guy.”
A group of men were standing in front of a warehouse talking in low voices. They looked serious and busy. They certainly didn’t look like the sort of people who would work for the mafia, but one of them turned when Gokudera called out. The rest glanced up, noted people approaching, and left, carefully not looking anywhere but the ground. If asked later, Tsuna thought, they could honestly say they hadn’t seen any faces.
“This is Nico,” Gokudera said once they were close enough, gesturing to the man. He was Chinese; Tsuna was pretty sure he hadn’t begun life with the name Nico. “Reborn hired him to take care of shipping for us, so he figured you ought to meet him, Tenth. The last guy died.”
Tsuna effortlessly translated “shipping” to mean “smuggling,” and tried not to wonder about the fate of the last guy.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Tsuna said, bowing.
Nico eyed him narrowly, then rattled something off in rapid-fire Italian. Between the Chinese accent and the random scattering of Neapolitan words, all Tsuna managed to pick out was “fucking Japanese boss.”
Gokudera, with a firmer grasp of the language, slammed Nico up against a wall. Yamamoto had no grasp of the language whatsoever, but he’d gathered all he needed to know from body language. He loomed ominously behind Gokudera, a wall of silent support. Smiling that smile.
Yikes, that smile.
Tsuna said, “Calm down, you two.”
Nico had said bad things about Japanese people while on his own and in the presence of three of them. Three of them, heavily armed. Either he had a debilitatingly serious problem with Japan, or else he was completely insane. Whichever one it was, slamming him into walls wasn’t going to help.
“Why don’t you want a Japanese boss?” Tsuna asked once Gokudera had stepped fractionally back from Nico. He tried to sound calm. Sometimes Gokudera could be coaxed into calmness, if you surrounded him with enough of it.
“A Japanese man killed my father,” Nico hissed, easy enough to understand once he slowed down. For better or worse.
Gokudera snorted. “Yeah, right. An Italian guy killed my father. What’s your point?”
Tsuna frowned. It wasn’t like Gokudera to mention his father’s death. Moreover, that was clearly not the whole story on Nico’s problem with Japan, and it was unlike Gokudera not to pick up on that. It was just a hint. It did give Tsuna a place to start, though, which was all he needed. He was used to dealing with people in a towering rage who didn’t believe he was capable of anything.
He mentally scheduled time to worry about Gokudera once this was over.
“The Vongola didn’t kill your father,” Tsuna said, reasonably confident that it was true. “And I’m Vongola before I am anything else.”
Nico narrowed his eyes. Tsuna couldn’t tell if he was suspicious of Tsuna’s sincerity, or if he just couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was admittedly a pretty terrible thing to say, and Tsuna was silently, frantically apologizing to he-knew-not-what, his non-mafia ancestors or the spirit of Japan or something. But it was true.
“We’re all foreign in this country,” Tsuna pointed out. “It’s a chance to start over, in a way. But if you don’t want to work with us, you don’t have to. We won’t hold it against you.”
“Tenth!” Gokudera gasped, scandalized.
“You’d replace me?” Nico asked with the contempt of an expert for amateurs.
“We’d have to replace you with someone who doesn’t know the business as well,” Tsuna said, and it was probably true. Reborn liked to hire the best. “But if you don’t want to work for me, then I’ve lost you already. Haven’t I?”
Nico studied Tsuna’s face. “Funny boss.”
“It’s a one-time offer,” Tsuna said. “If you stay with us, you’re ours.”
“They said you were soft. I thought they lied. They never said you were Japanese.” Nico sank into thought, scowling at everyone’s shoes, for a very long time. Gokudera fidgeted impatiently until Yamamoto subtly elbowed him, at which point he switched to baring his teeth at Yamamoto. Who smiled back.
“Fine,” Nico announced at last, sounding anything but happy about it. “Fine, I’ll take it. You’ll die in a month anyway, so what do I care? I’m your man for as long as you live. My Japanese boss.”
Tsuna smiled, and spoke over Gokudera’s growl. “Well, that seems fair.”
* * *
“He talked about Cosa Nostra as if it were an organization enslaved to politicians and, unlike the Caserta Camorristi, incapable of thinking in business terms. … Businessmen. That’s how the Caserta Camorristi define themselves, nothing more than businessmen.”
* * *
Gokudera took them back to the hotel, apparently determined to keep work-related activities down to one a day. (Tsuna was really, really starting to worry.) It was a quiet afternoon, comfortably centered around food.
The next day, though, it started again. Lessons on where the money came from.
They drove north in a Mercedes that Gokudera had somehow managed to acquire. They went to a place called Sant’ Antimo.
“We’re just taking a look, boss,” Gokudera said several times. “We’re not talking to anybody. Just in and out.”
In and out. Like a hit, Tsuna thought, then silently cursed Reborn for ruining his mind.
They arrived, stepping out of the car and leaning against it, all in a row. Looking up at the factory.
Tsuna wondered why he was so horrified. Maybe it was because Sant’ Antimo wasn’t ugly, and he’d expected that it would be. No, in places it was incredibly beautiful. Not an ugly town, but a broken one. And nowhere was it more obvious than at the factory.
He wondered if some of the factories belonged to the Vongola. Because if they did, then he was responsible.
“Do we own any of these factories?” Yamamoto asked obligingly.
“No,” Gokudera snapped. “They’re mostly privately owned, but I think the clans own a few. The clans own a few of fucking everything. Right, this is pretty complex, so I’m gonna explain it really, really slowly. Pay attention.” A nervous-nervous?-glance toward Tsuna. “Sorry if you get bored, Tenth.”
Bored?
“The way it works is, the label-the brand, right? Valentino, Versace, Armani, whoever-they have meetings with a bunch of the factory owners. The label announces a number of pieces and a date it needs them done by. Any factories that think they can do it shout out, and the label gives material to all of them. The factory that gets it done first gets paid, the rest get to keep the material.
“The thing is, the factories need loans to do the work because they don’t get paid until after the label accepts the finished pieces-you following this? But no bank’s gonna give a loan when the odds are so stacked against them getting paid back. So we give the loans. The factory that gets paid, they pay us back. The rest of them have designer-quality clothes they can’t do anything with, so we sell the stuff for them. Nico ships it all over the world. The label doesn’t care because the clothes are designer quality, so it doesn’t make them look bad-it gets their name out there for cheap. Knockoff but not. The Italian fashion industry wouldn’t exist anymore without us. And not just the fashion industry.”
“Um,” Yamamoto said after a moment, sounding a little dazed. “Whoa.”
Tsuna couldn’t have put it better himself.
Gokudera tapped a cigarette out of the box, turned it over a few times, flicked his lighter on and off. “We’re not the bad guys here, Tenth.”
They definitely weren’t the only bad guys. Tsuna didn’t much like being a symptom of the disease, though.
“Reborn says the families involved in the drug trade are the bad guys,” Tsuna murmured. He said it so often, in fact, that Tsuna had been finding it hard to believe even before this trip.
Gokudera fiddled with his lighter until he nearly dropped it, then abruptly stuffed it back into his pocket. He had the slightly feral look he always wore when he was about to disagree with someone he considered a superior. “The thing about drug trafficking,” he said, “is that it doesn’t affect everybody, not really. Not like clothes, construction, real estate. Trash.”
“Trash?”
“We don’t have anything to do with it, Tenth.” Fiercely, savagely. This was clearly personal for Gokudera-but then, everything in this part of the world seemed to be.
“How do you make money from trash?”
Gokudera shook his head. “Just, it’s expensive to get rid of, right? The toxic stuff, especially. Or at least it’s expensive if you do it right. If you get paid to dispose of it and instead dump it in the nearest river, that’s pure profit.”
“What?”
“Reborn…never told you about the trash thing in 2008, right? You’ll have to ask him when we get home.”
Reborn, it turned out, had never told Tsuna about a lot of things.
“That’s enough for today,” Gokudera said, clearly exhausted. “I don’t want you to get worn out, Tenth. Let’s eat something.”
“We’re not talking to the factory owner?” Tsuna asked.
Gokudera shook his head, meeting no one’s eyes. “Nah. They’re busy, Tenth.”
Busy. Tsuna wondered how many hours these people worked every day.
“Where are we going tomorrow?” Yamamoto asked once they were back in the car. A grim question, very different from his earlier tourist’s optimism.
“Nowhere.” Gokudera shrugged. “I thought we’d take a day off. Day after, we’ll go see Chiavarone. That’ll be so annoying, Tenth’ll need a day to brace himself for it.”
Silence all the way back to Naples, which was as strange for Yamamoto as it was for Gokudera. And Tsuna couldn’t come up with anything to say. He wished he could stop thinking about that town. Sant’ Antimo. It had looked like it was drowning. To hear Gokudera tell it, all the towns north and east of Naples were that way.
They made it back to the hotel. Gokudera parked the car in a very strange spot that Tsuna doubted was strictly legal, and then they walked, on a quest for dinner.
“What are we going to eat?” Tsuna asked, because at least it was something to talk about. Something to get that look off of Gokudera’s face.
“Real Italian pizza?” Yamamoto suggested brightly, gratefully running with it.
“We had real Italian pizza yesterday,” Gokudera snapped. Tsuna and Yamamoto both smiled at him, which annoyed him more. “Today we’re eating meat.”
“Real Italian pasta?” Yamamoto tried.
“If we’re having it as the course before the meat, sure.”
“How about seafood? We’re right next to the water.”
“If you like radioactive fish, then-”
“Hayato Gokudera,” a woman’s stunned voice cut in.
They turned to the speaker; middle-aged, thin, tired, and crossing herself with a horrified expression. A glance at Gokudera’s face showed that all the good work Tsuna and Yamamoto had done was now undone, and Tsuna felt a wave of annoyance. Did this woman really need to show up right now? Really?
“Gia,” Gokudera said blankly.
“You left,” she said, somewhere between disappointed and enraged. “You left, why are you here? Why would you come back?”
“I’m not back,” he told her, obviously meaning it as a comfort. “I’m showing these two where I grew up, that’s all. Then we’re going back to Japan. I’m going back to Japan, Gia. I won’t stay.”
“You want people to know where you grew up?” She gave a bitter laugh and cast suspicious eyes over Tsuna and Yamamoto. “‘Friends.’ Your poor mother must be turning in her grave. Show me your arms.”
Gokudera rolled his eyes and sighed, but obediently rolled up his sleeves. “Look, Ma,” he muttered. “No tracks.”
One of those little Gokudera statements that got more horrifying the longer you thought about it.
Tsuna watched Gia scowl, and firmly reminded himself that killing civilians was the sort of thing he was opposed to on principle. He put a restraining hand on Yamamoto’s arm to remind him, too.
Gia folded her arms and started drumming her fingers. She studied all three of them in turn, taking her time about it. Tsuna wished she would stop with the drumming.
“You’re too skinny,” she finally told Gokudera, sounding pissed off about it. “You’re always too skinny. Do you even know how to cook for yourself?”
“You refused to teach me to cook, Gia,” Gokudera snapped, wrapping his arms around his stomach, defensive. “Maybe that’s why I’m skinny.”
“You break plates just by looking at them; I didn’t want you anywhere near a stove. It’s only thanks to the Holy Mother that you haven’t blown yourself up! Come to dinner, you’re so skinny it hurts me to look at you.”
“I can’t-”
“Bring your ‘friends.’ It was Nino’s first communion today, so everyone will be there. Hayato, you haven’t seen Maria since she was a girl, you haven’t met her husband, you haven’t written a single letter to poor Don Luigi after all he did for-”
“Fine, God!” Gokudera shouted, then realized what he’d done, and turned to Tsuna in sudden panic. “I mean, unless-”
“It sounds fun.” Tsuna smiled, trying to ignore Gia’s savage glare.
This was how they found themselves, ten minutes later, sitting at a dining room table being largely ignored as Gia prepared dinner with more crashing and banging than seemed really necessary.
Tsuna turned worried eyes to Gokudera. “I didn’t know you still had friends here,” he said. “She doesn’t seem glad you’re back?”
Gokudera sighed, absently smoothing the tablecloth.
“Gia’s husband was shot by the Casalesi,” he explained in a reluctant undertone. “Some fucking pentito said he was a traitor, and the Casalesi got to him before the carabinieri or the police could. She’s never…if she could get out of here, she would. And she’d never come back. She doesn’t understand what I’m doing.”
Tsuna thought that Gokudera wouldn’t have come back here either, if he’d felt he had a choice.
“Was her husband really…working against the Casalesi?” Tsuna asked, equally quietly, trying to understand.
“He was shot for being a traitor.”
“But was it true?”
“It doesn’t…it doesn’t matter, Tenth. What, you…? He owned a grocery store, he had a wife and three daughters, he’s dead. That’s the truth. Someone betrayed the Casalesi, somebody said Rico did it, they executed him for it. He might as well have done it. It’s true now. It’s true enough. If you betray the clans, you get shot fifty times and they put you in a car and burn it. It’s true.”
Tsuna nodded, though he didn’t understand. He gazed out the window, studied the trash piled along the side of the road, and didn’t look at Gokudera because he didn’t think Gokudera could handle it right now. Tsuna was a mafia boss. He was not allowed to cry no matter how upset his right hand was. “I’m sorry.”
Gokudera laughed a little, desperately, breathlessly. “Okay, Boss,” he said. “Okay.”
“Hayato!” Gia shouted from the kitchen. “I need onions!”
“All right, I’m going!” Gokudera shouted back, then scowled at Yamamoto and switched to Japanese. “Look after the Tenth while I’m gone.”
Yamamoto smiled. “You got it,” he said. He and Tsuna watched Gokudera duck out the door.
“So,” Yamamoto said. “What’s going on?”
Gokudera had at no point paused to translate anything for Yamamoto, and Tsuna had been too unclear on everything to try. A bad sign: under normal circumstances, Gokudera made sure that Yamamoto knew what was going on.
Tsuna really didn’t understand how it was that Reborn let Yamamoto get away with not speaking any Italian at all.
“The lady who’s making us dinner,” Tsuna said. “Gia-san. She and her family knew Gokudera before. She’s worried about why he’s here. In Naples, I mean.” It was absolutely true and yet somehow managed to completely miss the point. “I’ll tell you later.”
Yamamoto frowned: another bad sign.
Dinner should have been awkward, but it wasn’t. People wandered in and out-relatives, friends, or neighbors, Tsuna was never clear. Children ran though the house; presumably one of them was Nino. Haphazard introductions were made. Everyone was perfectly polite and they were given more food than they knew how to handle, but it was clear that Tsuna and Yamamoto weren’t considered part of this family chaos. Gokudera was. Tsuna watched in some amazement as Gokudera was pulled into the rhythm of it, pulled in like he’d never been gone-shouting at the daughters, herding children, carrying things for Gia, arguing with the men about soccer teams, everyone talking at once. Tsuna would never in a million years have guessed that Gokudera followed soccer.
“He’s like a different person,” Yamamoto murmured. But he wasn’t, not really. Not when Tsuna thought about the way he was with the family-always pushing at Yamamoto, always looking to Tsuna for guidance, always bullying everyone else. Maybe this was what he wanted. To be pushed back. To be shoved and bullied and held, to be reminded every day where his place was. To be reminded that he had a place. Maybe they’d been letting him down all along.
Gia grabbed Tsuna by the back of the neck in passing with the hand that wasn’t holding a heaping bowl of mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil. “Take good care of Hayato,” she hissed into his ear, making him shiver. “Or I’ll kill you.”
She walked on. Tsuna thought that if he survived the evening, every question he’d ever had about Gokudera would be answered. He also thought that Gia and Bianchi were probably really good friends. Or else deadly enemies.
“Do you miss them?” Tsuna asked quietly later on, when Gokudera had pried himself momentarily away from the soccer debates. He asked in Japanese, for Yamamoto’s benefit and for privacy.
“Miss them? No. Yes.” He stopped and made an effort to organize his thoughts. “I hated it here,” he explained at last, unusually quiet. “These guys…I mean, I like them. I guess I do miss them, but not enough to stay here. They wouldn’t want me to stay, anyway.”
“They’re a nice family.”
“But they’re not my family, Tenth.” He seemed bewildered as to why this had come up. “They don’t mind having me around, but I’m not their problem. They have their own problems.”
Tsuna smiled. They weren’t letting Gokudera down after all. “Good,” he said. “You’re our family.”
“Haha, you’re our problem,” Yamamoto threw in, and then, “Ow,” when Gokudera kicked him savagely under the table.
They escaped at long last-many good wishes, and the occasional veiled threat aimed at Tsuna when Gokudera was preoccupied. Tsuna thought Gokudera underestimated how much they considered him their problem. But that was okay. He had his own family now, and they wouldn’t let him forget it.
Gokudera brought the car and Yamamoto offered to drive. This kicked off a screaming argument that carried them all the way back to the hotel.
Yamamoto’s famed distraction technique.
* * *
“If they kill you delicately, a single shot to the head or stomach, it is interpreted as a necessary operation, a surgical strike, no malice. Unloading more than two hundred shots into your car and more than forty into your body, on the other hand, is an absolute method of erasing you from the face of the planet.”
* * *
If Tsuna is good at nothing else, he’s good at adapting.
Within a few weeks, everything about Naples seemed normal: ubiquitous mosquitoes, random trash, stray dogs basking in piazzas, nothing ever being on time, trains going on strike every few weeks. Motorcycles or at least mopeds feeling free to drive down the sidewalk.
As far as Tsuna could tell, in Japan, people tended to feel responsible for everything, but in Italy, people tended to feel that everything was out of their control. Maybe he should have been born in Italy.
No, he didn’t have trouble adapting to the country. What he failed to adapt to was the same thing he’d been failing to adapt to for years: his job. A shame, because he could theoretically hide in Japan forever, but he’d learned the hard way that he was never going to escape the mafia. So he had to keep trying. He had to understand.
“How does Dino make money?”
“Extortion, mostly,” Gokudera said with a shrug. “It’s so old-school, it’s kind of embarrassing. You’d think one of his men would have a head for business.”
“Extortion?” Tsuna repeated in a voice weak with horror.
“It’s not enough, either; his family’s constantly broke. Which is why he does favors. If you think about it, everybody owes Chiavarone. If he’s in serious trouble, he can call in debts from half the families in the south.”
“Favors?” Tsuna asked. “What kind of favors?”
“Hits,” Gokudera answered. “Guard duty. Helping train Vongola X’s guardians. He doesn’t seem picky.”
Tsuna suspected that sometimes he had trouble understanding things because, deep down, he still didn’t want to. “Extortion?”
“Yeah, if you can call it that. People have to pay, but they’re happy to do it. You know how Chiavarone gets when somebody does something to his people, Tenth.”
Tsuna knew. “What does he do when people won’t pay?”
Gokudera shrugged again. “People pay.”
…Right.
This had come up because they were visiting Dino again today, and in Tsuna’s new state of money-consciousness, it had occurred to him that he’d never even wondered how Dino made a living. And now he knew, and he was going to have to look Dino in the eye and not think things like mafia whore.
This was why questions were a bad idea.
“I’ll stay with you, Tenth,” Gokudera said diffidently. As if he hadn’t asked to stay fifteen times already.
“But you’re going to Franco’s today,” Tsuna said patiently. For the sixteenth time.
“Then I’ll leave the baseball idiot with you.”
“Gokudera, I’m going to be in a room with an ally and a bunch of his men. You’re going to be wandering around the city all alone. I’d feel a lot better if you took Yamamoto with you.”
“I won’t be wandering the city! I’m only going to a bar, I’ll be safe, you don’t have to worry-you’re going to be in Secondigliano. I used to live in Secondigliano, Tenth, they call it Terzo Mondo for a reason!”
“Terzo Mondo?” Yamamoto asked.
“It means Third World. If you’d ever learned any fucking Italian, baseball freak.”
“Please, Gokudera,” Tsuna said.
He shifted and lit a cigarette, visibly unhappy. “You’ll wait inside until we pick you up?”
“Of course,” Tsuna said without any serious intention of following through.
* * *
“Around here keeping your mouth shut is not the simple, silent omertà of lowered hats and eyes. Here the prevailing attitude is ‘It’s not my problem.’”
* * *
If Sant’ Antimo was drowning, then Secondigliano had drowned years ago. After being smashed with hammers.
Gokudera had lived here, once upon a time.
Dino didn’t seem bothered by it at all. It was amazing what people could come to see as normal. Tsuna worried that in a few years, he wouldn’t see anything especially horrible about this town either.
Dino introduced him to people. Or to people’s pictures, anyway. So-and-so, boss of such-and-such, territory here. Drugs, arms, construction, organs, trash, milk, coffee. Ally, neutral, enemy.
This went on for almost an hour. Tsuna knew Dino was doing it on Reborn’s orders, but did he seriously think Tsuna was going to remember all this? The faces flowed past in an undifferentiated stream of exotic names and horrible crimes. Tsuna didn’t have a hope of keeping them straight.
As if reading his mind, Dino clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll figure it out, little brother,” he said confidently.
Tsuna gave him a sickly smile.
“It’s late enough for the drug market,” Dino said, checking the clock. “That’s why I had you meet me here. It’s not something we’re into, but you should see it in action, Tsuna. This is how a lot of people get rich, so it’s good to know something about the process.” He turned to look at Romario, who gazed impassively back. Dino appeared to take courage from this. “But whatever you do, don’t tell Gokudera I took you. He’ll kill me.”
* * *
Tsuna was waiting next to someone’s motorcycle, which was parked illegally halfway onto the sidewalk. He noted this only out of absent habit; it was pretty much the least illegal thing he’d seen today, after all. The bike was a Honda, and enough like the model he’d learned to ride to stir up good memories. It was comforting. He needed comfort.
Open air drug markets. Just like any other market, really; more efficient than most. Tidy, quick, careful. Dino explained the origins and journeys of various drugs as they walked around the edges. Imported from here, cut there, tested on these guys no one would miss if they died, distributed another place. Profit, profit, profit. Dino said the Secondigliano clans were better at this business than anyone else.
Tsuna had never actually seen a person shooting up before; another new experience. He’d learned all kinds of things today.
Five minutes before the police showed up, the whole market vanished as if it had never existed. Police. No wonder Dino didn’t want Gokudera to know where they’d been.
Gokudera, God. Gokudera, who used to live here. It was like he was trying to worry Tsuna on purpose. Dino had let Tsuna escape half an hour earlier than planned, and Tsuna had blithely sent him away, because under normal circumstances, Gokudera would have been waiting at least half an hour before the meeting was scheduled to end. Not this time. It was now fifteen minutes before time, and he still wasn’t here.
Tsuna noticed that he was staring at the motorcycle in a way that might seem kind of suspicious, and forced himself to stop.
Yamamoto was there to take care of Gokudera. Tsuna needed to calm down. He needed to learn to let go sometimes and not get frantic over every little thing. Even though fifteen minutes seemed like an awfully long time when he’d sent Dino away and had no way to get anywhere and had left his phone at the hotel like an idiot and Gokudera had never been anything less than twenty minutes early before. What was happening at Franco’s? Nothing was supposed to happen. They were only supposed to be checking if the Varia had left any messages.
Tsuna stared at the motorcycle.
Am I really, he thought, going to hotwire a motorcycle in some kind of fit of overprotective panic?
* * *
“Oh my God, Tsuna,” Yamamoto said. “Did you steal that motorcycle?”
“Um.”
“Tenth! You were riding without a helmet!? That’s so dangerous! Please be more careful, what would have happened if you’d gotten into an accident, how would we even have known!?”
Gokudera rode without a helmet all the time, but Tsuna knew that argument would get him nowhere. And Gokudera was evidently fine. Which meant that Tsuna had stolen someone’s motorcycle and driven it from Secondigliano to Naples for no reason at all.
“We’re late,” Gokudera realized, seizing Yamamoto’s arm to check his watch, horror-struck. “We abandoned our boss with that moron Chiavarone, that’s why this happened! What if you’d died in traffic? It would’ve been all my fault, I might as well’ve run you over myself-”
“Gokudera, really-”
“Oh my God, Tsuna, you stole a motorcycle.” Yamamoto was gazing at him with something disturbingly like reverence.
“Ah, Spanner taught me how. I guess I can take it back?” Tsuna suggested. Not that hotwired vehicles were ever exactly the same afterward… “As long as you guys are okay, I mean. I don’t need it. Or I didn’t need it, but I thought I did-” God, he needed to stop talking, was what he needed-“so anyway I’ll take it back if you come with me.”
“I’m so sorry, Tenth!”
“He got into a fight,” Yamamoto said with the brittle cheer that Tsuna had been able to see through for years. Something about this fight had really upset Yamamoto. And it had upset Gokudera enough to make him late.
“A fight?” Tsuna frowned. “Mafia?”
“Not…really. Sort of. Please don’t worry about it, Tenth,” Gokudera said.
Tsuna frowned harder.
“There,” Yamamoto said, still not sounding quite himself. “That guy.”
That guy. He could have been Gokudera’s thinner, angrier brother. He’d obviously come out very much the loser in the fight, but it didn’t look like that was going to stop him from trying again.
Tsuna rubbed fitfully at his eyes and wondered how it was that he could trust all of his guardians to take care of him, but none of them to take care of themselves. “You know him, Gokudera?”
“I…yes.”
“You don’t know me,” the stranger said.
“Fuck you, Luca.”
“So this is your boss.” Luca sneered. “Looks like you do have a sweet deal, just like you said. But he’s gonna figure out what you are sooner or later, and then what’ll happen to you, huh? Then what?”
It was unfair. All those years Gokudera had been so quiet about his life before he’d met them, and now it was being kicked out onto the ground in the most painful possible way. Reborn had to have known-
Gokudera laughed. Not a bitter laugh, but as if he’d really found something funny. Tsuna turned, surprised, and found Gokudera smiling at him.
“My boss sees right through me,” Gokudera said, more settled than he’d been since they landed in Naples. “The weird thing is, he seems to like what he sees.” He turned back to Luca, and the smile dropped from his face. “Fuck off and die, Luca. I don’t live here anymore.”
“Come on, Gokudera,” Tsuna said firmly. “Let’s go.”
They went, variously in cars and borrowed motorcycles. Luca stared after them with bared teeth and clenched fists, shouting things that Tsuna deliberately chose not to translate. It was just lucky that Gokudera hadn’t made him mad enough to shoot at them in broad daylight. Tsuna had really hoped they were done making enemies. He prayed Luca wasn’t connected to anyone who might try to kill them later.
And he had no idea why Yamamoto was smiling so much. He hoped it wasn’t about the whole motorcycle thing.
* * *
“Women are better able to confront crime as if it were only momentary, or someone’s opinion, or a step one takes before quickly moving on. Clan women demonstrate this very clearly. They feel offended and vilified when they are called Camorristi or criminals, as if ‘criminal’ were merely a judgment of an action, not an objective way of behaving. In fact, contrary to the men, so far not one female Camorra boss has ever repented. Not one.”
* * *
Tsuna was walking along a street in Ercolano. Not a long walk; just from the ruins of Herculaneum to the train station. He was enjoying himself. He’d been pretending to be a tourist with all his might for the last week, and had momentarily managed to push out of mind the purpose of the trip, his title, his real life.
Kyoko, Haru, and Lambo were visiting for the last month before everyone headed back to Japan. Just having them around lowered the stress level. He and Gokudera and Yamamoto alone, Tsuna thought, had a tendency to get too intense for anyone’s good.
Today Haru had declared that she was off to “discover my future husband’s culture!” and she’d dragged Lambo with her, so Kyoko was the only one who went along on the Ercolano trip.
Despite the fact that Kyoko was telling him everything Bianchi had taught her about the Nuvoletta family’s relationship to Cosa Nostra, the walk was peaceful. Ridiculously hot, of course, but you couldn’t have everything. It was so peaceful that Gokudera and Yamamoto had allowed them to get about a block ahead, which was practically unheard of, when the car pulled up next to them and opened fire.
Tsuna had been shot at so often, and by such a variety of weapons, that the wall of flame was a reflexive response, the popping popcorn sound of bullets exploding familiar. And because Kyoko was with him, because Gokudera and Yamamoto were with him, because these people had endangered his family, he let the flame chase the gunfire back to its source.
Everyone he’d ever fought would have deflected the flame, but everyone he’d ever fought had been part of a different world. A world in which strength had been prized over profit. He’d destroyed that world with his own hands.
This was the world he’d made, and in this world, he burned the car down to the frame between one heartbeat and the next.
It was only later (too late) that he remembered it was an unusually dry August, and unless he wanted half the town to burn, he needed to get rid of the fire. So he froze it.
There was a moment of stunned silence, then Gokudera was on the phone shrieking at someone in Italian, and Yamamoto was helping Kyoko up (she’d hit the ground at the first shot) and hustling her and Tsuna to cover, trying to be a human shield.
Tsuna knew he wouldn’t see any rational behavior from Gokudera or Yamamoto anytime soon. They never took well to people being so much as rude to Tsuna, and an assassination attempt was a whole different level of upsetting. As far as Tsuna could tell, the protectiveness wasn’t because they didn’t think he could take care of himself. Obviously, they knew better. It was because the very idea offended them.
Tsuna tried to look very healthy and uninjured for their benefit, and not like someone having a meltdown over accidentally burning an unknown number of people to death. Even though he was having a meltdown. Quietly.
“Tsu-kun.” Kyoko’s voice cut into his thoughts, mildly disapproving. “You shouldn’t have frozen the car.”
She was right. If he hadn’t frozen it, it would have been just another burned out car in Campania. Just another burned out car full of bodies-anyone might have done it. Tsuna had gone and made it memorable.
“We’ll think of something,” Kyoko said, patting his hand. “But next time, be more careful.”
There was a time, Tsuna thought, when she would have been more upset by this than he was. That time was apparently past.
Well, she had seen him kill people before. It was just that this time, it had been an accident. This time, he’d terrified himself doing it.
* * *
“Two shots in the nape of her neck: that was how the old-fashioned taboo of not touching women was breached. A skull shattered by bullets, facedown in a puddle of blood-this was the new direction of the Camorra. No difference between men and women. No supposed code of honor.”
* * *
Gokudera called the Varia, then he called Ryouhei to control the Varia, then he called Dino to question the families allied to Chiavarone. He even tried to call Hibari, but Hibari had changed his number. This caused Gokudera to have what Tsuna generously chose not to think of as a tantrum, even if that was what it most closely resembled.
Tsuna had Hibari’s new number, actually. In the interests of not being bitten to death, though, he thought he’d better keep it to himself. Hibari wouldn’t be interested in this kind of work.
By mid-week, Gokudera’s frantic investigation had turned up the Birra family as the culprits. It was surprising only because it was so obvious-the Birra family had been in Ercolano forever. Strange that they would attack another boss so blatantly in their own territory, even if that boss did have a reputation for being weak, soft, easy.
The lack of calculation was its own punishment. By the end of the week, there had been a coup. The boss who’d ordered the hit on Tsuna had been killed by his own people, along with ten of his most faithful. The clan was under completely new leadership.
This didn’t stop the Varia from killing a dozen more of them out of sheer momentum. Ryouhei was just proud he’d kept them from wiping out everyone. (Gokudera was neutral on the subject.)
Tsuna heard all of this, and he knew he was going to have a reaction to it. Later. He was still in something like shock. He couldn’t tell what he was going to feel when he got around to feeling things, and it was starting to scare him.
Everyone but the Varia and Ryouhei flew back to Japan the next week, as scheduled. Kyoko, Haru, and Lambo split off at the airport, to go to their homes or to Tsuna’s home, depending. Tsuna, Gokudera, and Yamamoto headed to the base, where Reborn was waiting.
Tsuna wasn’t sure of his feelings right up until he saw Reborn’s face, at which point they became blindingly clear. Count on Reborn to help him figure things out.
He was angry, it turned out. Extremely angry. Dizzy with rage, even. It wasn’t his normal way of dealing with things. He felt completely out of control; he felt like crying, like screaming, like smashing things to pieces.
Reborn said, “I hear you had trouble.”
Tsuna said, “You never told me.”
“You could have handled that with more grace, Tsuna. You’re too old to be panicking and burning everything in sight.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Gokudera and I,” Yamamoto cut in, “are going to go check in! With, uh.”
“Giannini?” Gokudera suggested, probably at random.
“Yeah! Giannini! He might have a new…something…so we’ll see you later!”
And with that, they disappeared. You didn’t survive being a Vongola Guardian without being able to tell which way the wind was blowing.
“You said you would fight to protect your family,” Reborn said once they were out of earshot. “It’s too late to change your mind now.”
Under normal circumstances, the guilt tactic would have worked. At the moment, though, Tsuna was in no mood to be played with. “That’s not what we’re talking about,” he said, calm in his rage. Too calm. Almost as calm as a man who knows he’s about to die. “Right now we’re talking about whether or not I can trust you, Reborn. You never told me.”
“I told you the mafia world was cruel. I told you it wasn’t fair.”
“You let me believe I could protect my family without hurting innocent people.”
“You were determined to believe it. I couldn’t tell you otherwise; I had to prove it. Why do you think I sent Gokudera with you?”
Tsuna’s eyes flared wide, and his vision went red around the edges. “You knew-”
“You needed to know-”
“You sent him knowing, you knew what it would do to him, you-”
“He has to get past this.”
“Past it!?”
Reborn chose this time to punch him in the face, but Tsuna’d seen it coming. He rocked back with it, rocked forward, ducked low, reached for his gloves-
He gasped a breath and sat down abruptly on the floor. He was not okay. This was not okay. This was…God, he’d been a second away from attacking Reborn, he was losing his mind.
Reborn gave him a moment to breathe, then knelt down and grabbed him by the front of the shirt-more effective than it used to be, now that Reborn was a normal size. There was no threat in it, though. Reborn just looked sad. “You had to know, Tsuna.”
Tsuna laughed, unbalanced even to his own ears. “I had to know? I never would have agreed to this. You know I would’ve made you kill me first. You waited until it was too late, and now I have to know!?”
Reborn studied his face with those black eyes, the only thing that hadn’t changed after the curse was lifted. Utterly black, no visible distinction between iris and pupil, no visible white. It made him look like nothing human. People assumed he wore contacts, and were terrified anyway.
Tsuna found Reborn’s eyes comforting. He was aware that that was completely weird.
After a good, long staring session, Reborn released Tsuna’s shirt and sat down on the floor beside him, leaning on his hands and tipping his head back to examine the ceiling. “We all had obligations,” he said quietly.
Tsuna looked up at the ceiling, too. It was beautiful. A reproduction of the work of some famous Italian Renaissance artist, Tsuna could never remember which one. The Ninth had picked it before he died.
Obligations.
“Why did you join the mafia, Reborn?”
Reborn snorted. “It was all I was fit for. Loser Tsuna.”
Tsuna laughed a little, noticing that it sounded much more like a real laugh, that he was a lot less angry than he had been. Which meant Reborn could still play him like a violin. Some mafia boss he was.
In the spirit of fairness, though, Tsuna had to admit that Reborn hadn’t created the situation in Italy. All he’d done was involve Tsuna in it. If he’d told the truth earlier, Tsuna would have gotten himself killed one way or another, probably on purpose, and he wouldn’t now be in a position to help. For what that was worth.
“Gokudera’s going to college,” he said.
“Oh?”
Reborn didn’t sound upset with the idea. Good. That meant Tsuna wouldn’t have to throw a fit. Another fit. “He might even get into Todai if he took the entrance exams. If he doesn’t go, that’s…that’s wasting our resources.”
Reborn laughed. “It would be good to have someone able to keep track of what Shouichi and Giannini and Spanner are up to.”
Tsuna looked over at Reborn, who was smiling aimlessly. What was with all this agreement? Tsuna wanted to send his right hand away for however many years a doctorate in physics would take, and Reborn didn’t care?
“What are you up to?” Tsuna demanded.
“What do you mean, what am I up to? What are you up to?”
“You never just agree with me. It’s creepy.”
“I assume you have a reason to want Gokudera distracted for a few years.”
Tsuna looked away again. “I need to spend some time in Italy.”
“Mm,” Reborn said.
“I don’t even know who works for us there. I don’t know the people who live there, I don’t know any of the rules, I don’t know anything, I’m-”
“Hysterical,” Reborn murmured.
Tsuna took a breath. “There’s a lot I need to know, and I’m a slow learner. It’ll take years.” No comment from Reborn. “Gokudera needs an excuse not to come along.”
“He won’t take it,” Reborn said. “That’s why he needs to toughen up.”
“I just have to say it right,” Tsuna insisted. “He’ll stay.”
“He won’t.”
“He will.”
Reborn stood and brushed off his pants. “You’ll learn,” he said, and walked away. Probably off to find Yamamoto. Tsuna sometimes wondered who Yamamoto’s boss really was. He and Reborn had a slightly disturbing world’s-greatest-hitman and protégé thing going, and, well. Tsuna wondered, that was all.
Once Reborn was out of sight, Tsuna sighed and pitched over onto his back in a manner unbecoming a mafia boss, prodding at the sore spot on his jaw where Reborn had hit him. It would probably bruise.
He stared at the ceiling and wondered how he was going to fix all of this. All of this, starting with Gokudera and ending with the Vongola’s whole position in the mafia world.
And now that he was really looking, he could see that the cherub in the bottom right had been laughing at him all along.
“Um, Boss?” Chrome’s voice. “Are you…okay?”
Tsuna sat up and smiled for Chrome.
Part 2