(no subject)
Title: Unsolicited Advice
Fandom: Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
Characters: Doctor Shamal, slight Yamamoto/Gokudera
Rating: PG [language]
Word Count: 1700
Notes: Ficlet for 3_jane, who wanted Shamal!fic in exchange for the sharing of the Muse. Mmm...Muse...*drools* I tried for funny for about twenty seconds. Why does even my Shamal turn out angsty argh blargh?
Notes v2.0: And, seeing as how it's Gokudera's birthday and all, this will count as my offering. The boy is getting plenty of the good stuff over at the comm. So, here we have some near-gen.♥
The soccer experiment was a miserable failure. Gokudera did not play well with others. He did not, as it turned out, play well in general.
Doctor Shamal leaned against the high counter in his examination room. A cigarette dangled between his fingers, down low by his hip. He hoped, in the harsh fluorescent lights, that he looked authoritative.There, he watched Gokuera's tiny fingers work over a roll of soft, white bandages. He wrapped too loosely, carefully draping the bandages over the deep, sticky scrape on his knee. The doctor could correct him, could reach over and show him how to do it correctly. Gokudera was merely six years old, after all, six years old and lonely, and Shamal would be damned if he ever tried to cure that again by making Gokudera play with other Family children.
He could show him, but he won't. He does not dispense medical advice to males, even if they are only children. And Mafia children, especially, needed to learn those skills themselves. So he'd let Gokudera fumble. That didn't stop him, of course, from dispensing athletic advice. Don't be afraid of the ball," he said, his lazy voice slipping over the words, "if it's coming at you, just go for it."
Gokudera paused in his tending. His face colored lightly "I didn't want to get hurt," he answered, and returned to wrapping his knee with the bandage.
The doctor frowned and flicked his cigarette ashes into a nearby hand-wash sink. "Men live to get hurt, kid," he said, "then pretty nurses will take care of them."
Gokudera frowned at him. "So where are the pretty nurses?" Already a snotty, sarcastic brat for six. That wouldn't win him any points with the ladies in later years. Doctor Shamal would have to work on that.
He stared at Gokudera for a long moment, blowing a a locomotive stream of cigarette smoke from between his lips. After a moment: "All you've got is me, kid."
***
Gokudera never tells anyone, but Shamal stays with him when he's in Japan. As a result, he pays Gokudera's rent. All of it, when Gokudera is in high school, citing Family obligation as the reason when Gokudera protests. Then, a small bit here or there now that Gokudera is grown. Sometimes, he doesn't pay with money at all, but he brings along packages which Gokudera grudgingly and greedily accepts: a bootle of fine wine from a musty cellar, a shirt Shamal found which will suit him, a book of literature in their shared native language.
"You're family," Gokudera will say quietly, his eyes averted, "my home is your home."
He's not sure why, but Gokudera's apartment always makes him feel lonely, always makes him long to be back in Italy, finished with business here. It was distractingly empty when Gokudera was young, and got better as he aged but was still lacking in something. Doctor Shamal can't quite place it.
But this time is different. Gokudera's coat is tossed over the arm of a couch. A few dishes are on a side table. Some papers are strewn on the floor, dips in the carpet where bodies in constant motion had come to rest. Someone had been there.
"A friend," Shamal asked when he'd surveyed the mess. The word sounded ridiculous to his ears, echoing off the bare walls like mockery.
"Work," Gokudera answered, glasses perched high on his nose, his hair pulled back in a perky ponytail, and he shuffled the papers into a stack. He held them in front of his chest for a moment, contemplating returning them to their rightful place in the heavy oak desk; then he sighed and tossed them on another side table next to a lamp.
They sit and watch soccer, drink some wine. Gokudera never looks happy to have him there, but he doesn't look exactly displeased with the situation either. Shamal could be out tonight, could be out at a bar wooing some lovely Japanese women who would giggle behind their hands at him, and then gather with their friends in the bathroom to squeal about the dashing foreign man who courts them. He could be out and, admittedly, he'd probably like that more. But he never does that. He always spends the first evening of his trip with Gokudera. Because Gokudera is lonely, he tells himself. Because, despite he way he sits there now looking almost frightening in his crisp black suit, with the silver hoops and studs lining the shell of his ear--despite this, he is still a child and maybe he needs this.
Gokudera frowns at the TV as the Italian forward is fowled. He cusses in the language of home, reserving his ugliest thoughts for expression in the tongue in which he is best versed. Gokudera takes his curses seriously. He downs the rest of his wine. He appraises the bottle--"Good year," he says and it sounds painfully grown up--and then he lights a cigarette.
"I thought you hated soccer," Shamal says and drags his eyes over the cigarette tangling out between Gokudera's lips, "and you shouldn't do that." (Don't say, 'It's bad for you...') "Girls don't like it."
Gokudera rolls his eyes "Fuck 'em," he mutters around the barrel. This is spoken in Japanese; Gokudera doesn't really care.
He smokes silently for a few moments. Shamal watches him, acutely aware of the pack in his own coat pocket. Then Gokudera rises, stretches, and stubs out his cigarette in the pink residue at the bottom of his empty wine glass.
"I've got to sleep," he says, "guests get the couch."
After Gokudera has shut the bedroom door, Shamal gets comfortable. He's reclined there, thinking about years and wasted words and how to be a guardian without really being one, and his hand finds it: Wedged between the seat cushions and the back of the couch is a wadded up T-shirt. White and ratty and smelling of old sweat. Far too big for Gokudera.
And Shamal gets it. The apartment always felt so lonely because Gokudera wanted it to. Like a boy, he clung to it--surly and a martyr. But the emptiness is his life is slowly filling in, getting cluttered and warm along the edges. He has friends now, but he calls them work acquaintances. Love too maybe, but he'd call it loyalty.
The doctor falls asleep there, feeling somehow successful, somehow superfluous.
***
The doctor is there to watch the girls play tennis. He is smoking. He is alone. He is trying not to feel too old or creepy.
He sits high up in the bleachers, the lone spectator to such an early-season practice. The girls fumble a lot--new first-years have joined the team; he doesn't recognize some of them. His cigarettes are starting to taste stale. He's got a new book for Gokudera when he makes his way over there later, a long-undiscovered Calvino novel--half poetry, half philosophical surrealist nightmare. Shamal doesn't read much, but that's what the bookshop owner told him. Gokudera will like it.
When the girls take a break to the bench where he can't see them, he looks around. A good view from up here. He can see it all: the junior high, the parking lots, the steeped and staggered skyline of the town, the baseball diamond.
Really, he hears them before he sees them. "Haha, if you hate it so much, why do you always come to watch?"
Gokudera and the Vongola Rain Guardian. Always together. Not close enough to be called friends; close enough to be called something. Yamamoto wears jersey shorts and a loose T-shirt, a bat hanging down from his hand. Gokudera wears a black suit. He always wears a black suit. He's smoking, too. Shamal doesn't have to audacity to believe that this particular habit persists because Gokudera wants to reject the single piece of medical advice ever administered to him.
Yamamoto is laughing now, his arm lazy and heavy over Gokudera's shoulders. Shamal wonders if Yamamoto is afforded the same domicile privileges that he himself is. (You're family, you're family...) He wonders if they are more like friends in private than they are out in the open like this where Gokudera is a wounded animal.
Then he sees it: Yamamoto's hands on Gokudera's shoulders, Yamamoto's serious look.
"Hey," he says, his voice carrying to Shamal though he is clearly trying to speak quietly and intimately, "hey, be nice to me. So you're not good at sports. So what? I don't care. I'm not any good at math, haha!" Then he steps forward and cups Gokudera's head to his chest. Well, this interesting.
Gokudera struggles a little, a token, a ritual, a display like everything else he does. But he doesn't pull away entirely. Yamamoto is strong. And Yamamoto whispers something. The doctor can't quite make it out, but it looks like, "Please don't run," or "Listen to me," maybe.
He watches on for a moment, feeling for the first time like a voyeur, like a thief. "That's gross," he is tempted to say, a reaction which he knows makes him the sudden student in his long-treacherous relationship with Gokudera. It is an unchecked emotion, an opinion from unknown and likely misinformed origins. And, when he sees Gokudera's shoulders relax into the awkward embrace--The show's over, nothing to see here, kids--Shamal wonders if maybe the kid had heard a snippet or two of his advice over the years.
Tonight, Doctor Shamal will not stay at Gokudera's apartment, will not give him the Calvino novel. He will mail it once he returns to Italy. Instead, he will book a hotel. He will find a bar, a lovely young lady, maybe some wine, maybe some soccer on television but he knows this is Japan. This is not home. So maybe he'll have to settle for a beer, some baseball. He's a hitman. He can adapt. And there are places far less inviting than Japan to be anonymous, unnecessary.
Fandom: Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
Characters: Doctor Shamal, slight Yamamoto/Gokudera
Rating: PG [language]
Word Count: 1700
Notes: Ficlet for 3_jane, who wanted Shamal!fic in exchange for the sharing of the Muse. Mmm...Muse...*drools* I tried for funny for about twenty seconds. Why does even my Shamal turn out angsty argh blargh?
Notes v2.0: And, seeing as how it's Gokudera's birthday and all, this will count as my offering. The boy is getting plenty of the good stuff over at the comm. So, here we have some near-gen.♥
The soccer experiment was a miserable failure. Gokudera did not play well with others. He did not, as it turned out, play well in general.
Doctor Shamal leaned against the high counter in his examination room. A cigarette dangled between his fingers, down low by his hip. He hoped, in the harsh fluorescent lights, that he looked authoritative.There, he watched Gokuera's tiny fingers work over a roll of soft, white bandages. He wrapped too loosely, carefully draping the bandages over the deep, sticky scrape on his knee. The doctor could correct him, could reach over and show him how to do it correctly. Gokudera was merely six years old, after all, six years old and lonely, and Shamal would be damned if he ever tried to cure that again by making Gokudera play with other Family children.
He could show him, but he won't. He does not dispense medical advice to males, even if they are only children. And Mafia children, especially, needed to learn those skills themselves. So he'd let Gokudera fumble. That didn't stop him, of course, from dispensing athletic advice. Don't be afraid of the ball," he said, his lazy voice slipping over the words, "if it's coming at you, just go for it."
Gokudera paused in his tending. His face colored lightly "I didn't want to get hurt," he answered, and returned to wrapping his knee with the bandage.
The doctor frowned and flicked his cigarette ashes into a nearby hand-wash sink. "Men live to get hurt, kid," he said, "then pretty nurses will take care of them."
Gokudera frowned at him. "So where are the pretty nurses?" Already a snotty, sarcastic brat for six. That wouldn't win him any points with the ladies in later years. Doctor Shamal would have to work on that.
He stared at Gokudera for a long moment, blowing a a locomotive stream of cigarette smoke from between his lips. After a moment: "All you've got is me, kid."
***
Gokudera never tells anyone, but Shamal stays with him when he's in Japan. As a result, he pays Gokudera's rent. All of it, when Gokudera is in high school, citing Family obligation as the reason when Gokudera protests. Then, a small bit here or there now that Gokudera is grown. Sometimes, he doesn't pay with money at all, but he brings along packages which Gokudera grudgingly and greedily accepts: a bootle of fine wine from a musty cellar, a shirt Shamal found which will suit him, a book of literature in their shared native language.
"You're family," Gokudera will say quietly, his eyes averted, "my home is your home."
He's not sure why, but Gokudera's apartment always makes him feel lonely, always makes him long to be back in Italy, finished with business here. It was distractingly empty when Gokudera was young, and got better as he aged but was still lacking in something. Doctor Shamal can't quite place it.
But this time is different. Gokudera's coat is tossed over the arm of a couch. A few dishes are on a side table. Some papers are strewn on the floor, dips in the carpet where bodies in constant motion had come to rest. Someone had been there.
"A friend," Shamal asked when he'd surveyed the mess. The word sounded ridiculous to his ears, echoing off the bare walls like mockery.
"Work," Gokudera answered, glasses perched high on his nose, his hair pulled back in a perky ponytail, and he shuffled the papers into a stack. He held them in front of his chest for a moment, contemplating returning them to their rightful place in the heavy oak desk; then he sighed and tossed them on another side table next to a lamp.
They sit and watch soccer, drink some wine. Gokudera never looks happy to have him there, but he doesn't look exactly displeased with the situation either. Shamal could be out tonight, could be out at a bar wooing some lovely Japanese women who would giggle behind their hands at him, and then gather with their friends in the bathroom to squeal about the dashing foreign man who courts them. He could be out and, admittedly, he'd probably like that more. But he never does that. He always spends the first evening of his trip with Gokudera. Because Gokudera is lonely, he tells himself. Because, despite he way he sits there now looking almost frightening in his crisp black suit, with the silver hoops and studs lining the shell of his ear--despite this, he is still a child and maybe he needs this.
Gokudera frowns at the TV as the Italian forward is fowled. He cusses in the language of home, reserving his ugliest thoughts for expression in the tongue in which he is best versed. Gokudera takes his curses seriously. He downs the rest of his wine. He appraises the bottle--"Good year," he says and it sounds painfully grown up--and then he lights a cigarette.
"I thought you hated soccer," Shamal says and drags his eyes over the cigarette tangling out between Gokudera's lips, "and you shouldn't do that." (Don't say, 'It's bad for you...') "Girls don't like it."
Gokudera rolls his eyes "Fuck 'em," he mutters around the barrel. This is spoken in Japanese; Gokudera doesn't really care.
He smokes silently for a few moments. Shamal watches him, acutely aware of the pack in his own coat pocket. Then Gokudera rises, stretches, and stubs out his cigarette in the pink residue at the bottom of his empty wine glass.
"I've got to sleep," he says, "guests get the couch."
After Gokudera has shut the bedroom door, Shamal gets comfortable. He's reclined there, thinking about years and wasted words and how to be a guardian without really being one, and his hand finds it: Wedged between the seat cushions and the back of the couch is a wadded up T-shirt. White and ratty and smelling of old sweat. Far too big for Gokudera.
And Shamal gets it. The apartment always felt so lonely because Gokudera wanted it to. Like a boy, he clung to it--surly and a martyr. But the emptiness is his life is slowly filling in, getting cluttered and warm along the edges. He has friends now, but he calls them work acquaintances. Love too maybe, but he'd call it loyalty.
The doctor falls asleep there, feeling somehow successful, somehow superfluous.
***
The doctor is there to watch the girls play tennis. He is smoking. He is alone. He is trying not to feel too old or creepy.
He sits high up in the bleachers, the lone spectator to such an early-season practice. The girls fumble a lot--new first-years have joined the team; he doesn't recognize some of them. His cigarettes are starting to taste stale. He's got a new book for Gokudera when he makes his way over there later, a long-undiscovered Calvino novel--half poetry, half philosophical surrealist nightmare. Shamal doesn't read much, but that's what the bookshop owner told him. Gokudera will like it.
When the girls take a break to the bench where he can't see them, he looks around. A good view from up here. He can see it all: the junior high, the parking lots, the steeped and staggered skyline of the town, the baseball diamond.
Really, he hears them before he sees them. "Haha, if you hate it so much, why do you always come to watch?"
Gokudera and the Vongola Rain Guardian. Always together. Not close enough to be called friends; close enough to be called something. Yamamoto wears jersey shorts and a loose T-shirt, a bat hanging down from his hand. Gokudera wears a black suit. He always wears a black suit. He's smoking, too. Shamal doesn't have to audacity to believe that this particular habit persists because Gokudera wants to reject the single piece of medical advice ever administered to him.
Yamamoto is laughing now, his arm lazy and heavy over Gokudera's shoulders. Shamal wonders if Yamamoto is afforded the same domicile privileges that he himself is. (You're family, you're family...) He wonders if they are more like friends in private than they are out in the open like this where Gokudera is a wounded animal.
Then he sees it: Yamamoto's hands on Gokudera's shoulders, Yamamoto's serious look.
"Hey," he says, his voice carrying to Shamal though he is clearly trying to speak quietly and intimately, "hey, be nice to me. So you're not good at sports. So what? I don't care. I'm not any good at math, haha!" Then he steps forward and cups Gokudera's head to his chest. Well, this interesting.
Gokudera struggles a little, a token, a ritual, a display like everything else he does. But he doesn't pull away entirely. Yamamoto is strong. And Yamamoto whispers something. The doctor can't quite make it out, but it looks like, "Please don't run," or "Listen to me," maybe.
He watches on for a moment, feeling for the first time like a voyeur, like a thief. "That's gross," he is tempted to say, a reaction which he knows makes him the sudden student in his long-treacherous relationship with Gokudera. It is an unchecked emotion, an opinion from unknown and likely misinformed origins. And, when he sees Gokudera's shoulders relax into the awkward embrace--The show's over, nothing to see here, kids--Shamal wonders if maybe the kid had heard a snippet or two of his advice over the years.
Tonight, Doctor Shamal will not stay at Gokudera's apartment, will not give him the Calvino novel. He will mail it once he returns to Italy. Instead, he will book a hotel. He will find a bar, a lovely young lady, maybe some wine, maybe some soccer on television but he knows this is Japan. This is not home. So maybe he'll have to settle for a beer, some baseball. He's a hitman. He can adapt. And there are places far less inviting than Japan to be anonymous, unnecessary.