[Katekyou Hitman Reborn]: "To Kill a Mockingbird" (KHR mini-bang fic, 1.5/3)
Have a continuation!
Oops, shame, etc.
[in which the students of namimori middle have changed, but the building has not]
The fact that he hadn't yet been shot or strangled was a good sign. The fact that they were, without a doubt, heading farther and farther away from the school's infirmary was a bad sign.
A very bad sign, indeed.
It had all started like this:
"All right, kids," the phenomenally popular new gym teacher, Take-sensei, said to them that morning, toying a bit with the small silver whistle he carried around his neck. A couple of girls in their class had twittered, blushingly, and he'd graced them with a shining smile that had nearly made them swoon. "As much as it pains me that we haven't quite reached baseball season yet, apparently Ayashi-sensei's old curriculum states that I'm supposed to spend this quarter having you guys run the marathon, so, well, there you have it."
There were groans all around; Shoichi hated the marathon, if not more than any of them, but he kept his mouth shut, not wanting to draw attention to himself.
"Ha ha, I hate to say it, but some of the times in this class are pathetic," Take-sensei went on, but smiled sheepishly and scratched the back of his head in a way that took off the edge. Shoichi didn't trust him one bit. At least his sister's new tutor, the chain-smoking foreign guy, didn't bother to hide his murderous temper.
It had been nearly a week since the two of them had barged, without warning, into his life, and as much as it startled him to realize it, there hadn't been a single gunshot or grenade explosion aimed in his direction since they'd shown their handsome, duplicitous faces. (Handsome?! Shoichi pinched his arm, chastizingly.)
Of course, that could only mean that they were lying, in wait, to unleash some sort of dangerous, potentially fatal, trap.
For example:
"So, whoever finishes last in the marathon today will have to stay after school and help me sweep the gym field," Take-sensei said, cheerfully.
Shoichi's eyes nearly popped out of his head.
"Hope you like hard labor, twerp," Moriyama-kun, who was standing next to him, snickered cruelly.
"Yeah, Sho-kun's times are the worst out of all of us," someone else said, near the back. "We got lucky~ It would have really sucked if we were in a class like 1-A, which has got all the jocks."
Shoichi had never particularly minded sweeping the field with Ayashi-sensei. Perhaps that was because Ayashi-sensei, as far as he'd known, had never taken a hit out for his life.
The gears in his head began to turn. He had two hopes. He went for the first, easiest hope.
"Maaaan," he sighed, in what he hoped was as discreet a manner as possible, as class 1-C took their starting lineup. "Being stuck sweeping the field, all alone, with Take-sensei..."
Emi-chan, standing on his right, took the bait, perking up her ears interestedly. Thank God that crazy yakuza was somehow a hit with the women. "Ohhhh," she said, a bit dreamily, "you know, Sho-chan, I think I might have turned my ankle just now..."
Yes!
"Hey, Emi-chan!" Hayasegawa hissed, from her friend's right, "don't forget that the new episode of Lovely Lovely Makeup Complex comes on tonight, you dolt! You're gonna miss it if you're stuck sweeping the field all evening after school!"
Shoichi stared. That damned television show. All it was was some foreign guy with a heart-shaved head named Lessurio or something making over completely boring, average, everyday women. Besides, it ran the same time as Gundam Z, for God's sake, which meant that he never got to see it anymore because his mother and his sister hogged the TV.
"Oh," Emiri said, as though waking up from a dream. "I forgot."
Take-sensei blew his whistle. Shoichi stared at the cloud of dust that was left in his wake.
He had one hope, then.
Fat Misato.
Fat Misato was, obviously, an unfortunately fat girl named Misato whose times at the marathon were nearly as bad as his (yet still, embarrassingly, just that slight bit better). She, of course, didn't have the fear of certain death adding a spring to her step, so maybe, just maybe, Shoichi might -
"Yo," Take-sensei said, suddenly beside him, staring at the other students disappearing into the distance, Fat Misato in their wake. "At this rate, looks like it'll be you and me, hunh?"
Shoichi took off in a mad dash.
Fear had actually propelled him to beat almost half of the class, plowing through them wide-eyed and screaming at the top of his lungs about cigarette burns and water torture, and he finished the last lap around the gym field with the sense of elation that could only really come from dodging almost certain death.
"Hey, good time," Take-sensei said to him, tapping a pencil atop his head, before Shoichi's red, sweating face went suddenly white, and he vomited all over the dirt.
And here he was, now, hooked over the back of one of the men who surely meant to kill him, on a piggy-back trip to a bed in the infirmary (or an early grave, if he couldn't get away fast enough). The latter was looking more likely than the former, unfortunately, considering the fact that they'd been walking farther and farther away from the nurse's office with every step. Where were they going, anyway? The woods across the street? It'd be easier to dump his body, at least. How was the assassin going to go about it, anyway? Gunshot? Asphyxiation? Shoichi's fingers dug into the man's shoulders, broad and warm under his hands, and his brain worked furiously for a way to escape.
"Ha ha," his teacher laughed, in a voice that was deceptively free of bloodthirst, back rumbling against Shoichi's stabbing, aching chest. It hurt to breathe. His every muscle cried out in agony and pain. Really, death would almost be a comfort. He hated the marathon, for sure. "You're a funny kid. Anybody else would have had the sense not to push themselves so hard, you know?"
Anyone else, the boy thought, nastily, wouldn't be targeted by a pair of supermodel yakuza for doing absolutely no -
"S-Supermodel?" Shoichi breathed aloud, in disbelief with himself. What was the matter with him, seriously? Looking good was how they'd suckered his mother and his sister and his classmates - if he couldn't stand up against them, then who in God's name could?
"Eh; what was that, kiddo?"
"N...Nothing," Shoichi muttered, wishing that his final words could be something a bit more cool. He wanted to run; with every fiber of his being, he wanted to run, and yet...
"Hey," Take-sensei interrupted his thoughts, amicably, "I've been holding off on saying this for a while, Ichi-kun, but...I think I'm lost."
What? "...What?"
"Yeah, uh..." An awkward laugh; an almost pitiable smile. "Which way's the nurse's office, again? I haven't been here in almost ten years, you know... Not like, uh, I spent a lot of time there when I was your age, or anything... Ahahaha!"
Why on earth was he laughing so hard? Shoichi leaned; the man's face turned, and suddenly, awkwardly, they were almost nose-to-nose. He leaned back, with a sudden, unstoppable yell, and the two of them overbalanced, and almost fell.
"Ow; hey, my eardrums!" Take-sensei laughed, with what was probably an exaggerated wince, and peered at his cargo, curiously. "I was right," he said, smiling fading a bit, around the edges, and eyes growing wistful for a brief, strange second. "You really are just like him, when he was your age."
"Who?" Shoichi asked, without thinking, and flinched when the man's gaze sharpened on him, considerably.
"My boss," his teacher said, laughing so openly and amicably then that Shoichi wondered if his expression a second ago hadn't just been a trick of the light. (Then again, he'd thought that about the bullets, too, and look where that had gotten him.) "Anyway, Ichi-kun - "
"Shoichi," the boy interrupted, quite fed up by now with this fraudulent gym teacher being unable to remember his name. At least know the name of the person you've been sent to kill! he thought, quite grouchily, and pushed his glasses further up on his nose.
" - point me in the right direction, would you? I think I should have made a left at the pool; or was it at the cafeteria? Ah, jeez..."
Shoichi hesitated, quite delicately, as though unable to believe the turn the last ten minutes had suddenly taken. "You're...really taking me to the infirmary?" he asked, and just as quickly flinched when he realized that what he had said was probably not a very good incentive for the man to actually do so.
"Of course," Take-sensei replied, brightly, turning his head this way and that as though there were a sign or something that would miraculously point him in the right direction. For a yakuza, he was almost impossibly...absent-minded. "Where'd you think we were going? I can't think of anyone who gets lost on purpose."
"I thought - " the boy started, and found himself suddenly quite unable to speak, so he pointed, instead, to the low copse of trees that was on their center-right.
"Oh," Take-sensei said, a bit strangely, and his expression went dark. Shoichi tensed; ready to let go, ready to run. "Oh."
And then the man's face changed, in an instant, and he was back to the affable gym instructor from a moment before.
"I'm flattered, kid," he said, smiling sheepishly, and shrugged his shoulders so hard that Shoichi felt his ribcage thump, "really, I am, but I could lose my job, you know? Sorry."
Shoichi stared him. And then turned a sudden, disgusting, alarming shade of red.
"No!" he shouted, such that the poor man winced, again, and made a great show of hunching his shoulders up to his eardrums, "that wasn't - ! I didn't...!"
"Ahahaha, it's not really a big deal," Take-sensei pointed out, which was a rather ironic thing for him to do, considering; "I used to have a crush on my classical Japanese teacher when I was your age, runt. 'Course, she was a lot cuter than I am."
R-Runt? That wasn't a particularly nice name for a student to be called by a teacher. One would think, for an undercover yakuza agent, that the man would put more effort into his camoflauging role. "I don't - " Shoichi muttered, and wondered what the point was, when in any number of seconds he'd probably be dead. Realized, even, that with all of his academic awards and school smarts, that he was still no match for this cheerful killer, and his constant smile.
"The pool," he said slowly, resignedly, feeling his glasses slip down the bridge of his nose, again, "you should have made a right, at the pool."
"Oh?" Take-sensei asked, as though interested, and made a face at himself, chastizingly. "You're a lifesaver, kid."
How could he say something like that so casually? They walked along the edge of the school in silence, making the necessary turn at the pool towards the nurse's office, and Shoichi sucked in a breath, suddenly, and reminded himself that he couldn't afford to be fooled.
"You'll be the death of me, though, won't you?" he asked unsteadily, almost despairingly, and tightened his hands on the man's shoulders, hard enough to leave marks. "You, or the other guy that came with you - you'll be the death of me, for sure."
[in which gokudera displays particularly poor word choice and locks himself in a restroom]
"The way he said it, you'd think we were gonna kill him, or something," Yamamoto laughed, over the phone.
In the future, they used untraceable, disposable cell phones for the necessary communications, but try explaining to a wireless communications dealer that you had a phone plan, already, you just had to wait another eight or so years for it to kick in. Gokudera, understandably, was having a small amount of difficulty adjusting to the idea of cell-phone minutes (hadn't dealt with them, after all, since he was about sixteen).
"Are you an idiot?" he asked, flatly, to the idiot over the phone - had no illusions, of course, about what the answer to that question would be. (It was mostly just a matter of mood demonstration, at this point.) "Of course we're gonna kill him, as soon as we find the opportune time." The lines of his face deepened, considerably. "You don't think he'll go looking, do you, now that he's on to us? It'll be a problem if he finds those plastic explosives I stored in their hall bathroom."
"Ha ha! What the heck are you gonna do with those, darling?" Yamamoto laughed, with the same blissful ignorance that Gokudera had always hated yet never been able to overcome. Of course, the shorter man had also seen him laugh that same sort of laugh while slicing through a man's intestines, so maybe the word 'ignorance' wasn't really saying much. Who knew?
"Don't call me that," he growled, and rang the bell for house 303, hearing it make a false, pleasant ding. "Anyway, it's my shift now, so it's my show, you moron, and I'll do what I want. I'll see you at 18:00, got it?"
"Awww, sounds like somebody's got PM - "
Gokudera hung up before he could say the S.
In reality, though, actual women with actual PMS were more frightening by far, as he discovered the instant the front door was opened and he was assaulted on all sides by what appeared to be an armful of crisp, clean laundry.
"It was mom's idea, really, 'cuz all she's been doing is washing and ironing them, really, and nobody's been wearing them - " Irie Yoko babbled, her petite, nondescript face appearing around a row of brown, perfectly pressed work slacks. (They really did all look alike, those Japanese. The Tenth had just enough Italian in him to lighten his hair, to brighten his eyes. Gokudera had once lost Yamamoto in a shopping mall and had spent the greater part of an hour attempting to find him again. Not that he would ever look for the idiot, of course.) " - and I mean, we don't mean any offense or anything, sensei, but - "
"What?" Gokudera stumbled, feeling suddenly overwhelmed by this onslaught of information and ironed-out dress shirts. Amidst all the confusion, there was a sudden stab and slightly less pressing trickle of fear - the M80 under the ironing board; had they found it? He forced himself to resist the urge to just frag the entire Irie family for evidential purposes and forced himself to think about what was actually going on.
"You haven't really had time to settle, have you, dear?" Yoko's mother, Hinako, asked him kindly. Gokudera saw her regularly but spoke with her rarely, for all she always seem to have something permanent and ubiquitous to do in the kitchen whenever he was there. She seemed a bit...oblivious, which certainly explained why her son was so adept at being a cruel, criminal mastermind.
"It's - not really a big deal," Gokudera muttered, but he'd been just a hair shy of telling her that it wasn't any of her business. Besides, what did any of this have to do with M80s?
"Of course it's a big deal!" Hinako told him, fussily, striding over to where her daughter was still pressing an armful's worth of laundry into the Italian's face and beaming, happily. "You've done so much for Yoko already - " Gokudera always attempted to smile when the stupid girl did something right, and her test scores had escalated a whopping 20 points, " - so we'd like to do something for you, for a change." Her expression turned delicate, momentarily, and Gokudera restrained himself with difficulty from reaching into his jacket pocket and fumbling for a cigarette.
Irie Hinako said it all in a rush: "It's just, you've been wearing that same suit for the past week, Gokudera-san."
Gokudera stopped thinking of paper trails and piano wire for long enough to blink, perplexedly. "What?" he said, and because of unfortunate natural default, it actually came out sounding rather rude.
Hinako fluttered. "We... We don't mean anything by it, honestly, but Yoko-chan and I thought that you might not mind some of my husband's old hand-me-downs, until you got settled in Japan for a while."
"...What?" That also came out sounding somewhat rude. Gokudera sort of meant it that way, though. He kept the damned suit as clean as he could, but with the baseball idiot's crap salary and the small potatoes he was earning now doing this tutoring job, he just hadn't been able to afford having it properly laundered. And he didn't really care about buying new clothes. If it wasn't a suit, he didn't want anything to do with it - it came with the profession (probably). The vaguely-established point was, however, that he didn't smell, and it was really rather uncalled for for this woman to insinuate as such.
"They're old," said Yoko, assuredly, a little subdued by her tutor's less-than-enthusiastic response but determined to stick it through to the end, regardless; "but they're still in good condition. Mom runs them through the wash at least once a week, and besides, Dad hardly ever wore this stuff anyway, before he..."
Gokudera had once snapped at a blind man to watch where the hell he was going, but even he could sense the awkwardness in a silence like this one. It was rather like how the Tenth's father had been conspicuously absent for the greater part of the Tenth's life, though of course he doubted that the Irie patriarch was a man who had been as venerable as the Tenth's. Still, he'd always assumed that the Millefiore brat's father just worked a late job, or maybe even had been deported overseas (an ordeal to which Gokudera was unwillingly sympathetic. It took a long time to re-apply for a Japanese work visa). Knowing that, of course, still didn't make the current uncomfortable silence go away, so the Italian shuffled his feet, a bit self-consciously, and almost thought about confessing to the M80, just to have something to say.
"I...thought that it would be nice," Hinako said, after a moment's pause, "for him to come back to things as the way they were, as though he'd never left. But it's been so long, now, and... I was actually thinking of donating these, recently, but when I saw how much you've done so far for my daughter, I thought of a much better use for this old wardrobe, instead."
"Some of it's pretty nice, too," Yoko chimed in, helpfully, holding up a pair of slacks for emphasis. "See, like these - they're John Lawrence Sullivan, and worth a pretty penny, too, if you can, uh, just ignore what Dad did to the crotch."
Gokudera wouldn't have noticed the coffee stain if she hadn't have pointed it out, but now that he did, he couldn't stop staring at it. By unfortunate circumstance, the stain hung on the slacks in the shape of a pair of hefty, tan-colored testicles. He'd give that pair to Yamamoto.
Because, despite the fact that people generally assumed from his inherent nature that he was the type who would never, ever, upon threat of painful and/or extremely humiliating death, accept charity, this in fact was not true. He had actually acquired in his youth a very terrible and insidious habit of hanging around people whom he didn't particularly care for in order to get things from them when they were about to throw them away. He got day-old sashimi from Yamamoto's dad (for which his colon had never quite forgiven him), hawked half-empty shampoo bottles from his teammates after gym class, and borrowed back issues of porno mags from that pervert Shamal, though he was careful never to touch those much with his hands.
Put bluntly, Gokudera was cheap. It was a side effect of going from suddenly being very rich to suddenly very poor. He stole from department stores when he was young, but he didn't particularly care for having to frag the salespeople when he was caught. It'd be nice to bypass all of that now.
"I..." Thank you was a very strange series of words to Gokudera, but he was getting better at it now that being in the mafia meant more ass-kissing Italian politics and less pointless brawls battled out over a bar pool table. "Thank you...very much."
He soothed his pride by telling himself that the Tenth would have been proud. (Though he actually probably would have laughed behind his hands, just like anyone else.)
"Oh no, you're quite welcome," Hinako beamed, truly relieved, because she'd found what appeared to be a very large gun strapped under her ironing board this morning and she hadn't known what to think. Probably just one of her son's toys, like she'd thought, and she set about sitting on the sofa and folding her husband's old laundry while Yoko went about with her arithmetic tutoring.
"Here, try this on!" she pestered Gokudera, first, because in the end she was very annoying but quite smart when she actually tried.
"Finish your worksheet," he grunted at her, making an unpleasant face like one does when they've been unexpectedly kicked in the groin.
"I'll finish it while you change," she bargained, sweetly, her slender, nondescript Japanese face smiling up at him dangerously. He hoped that he never had to go with her to the mall.
"Fine," he groused, and took the suit that she offered him, surreptitiously sniffing under one of his armpits as he did so for unexpected funk. There wasn't any, that he could tell. Maybe he'd ask the idiot when he got back tonight.
Gokudera ventured down the hall towards the bathroom. He tried to avoid using it when he could, because Japanese bathrooms were small and there was nothing quite like getting stuck on the toilet between a sink and the wall. As he changed, he thought a bit about the current situation.
There was a thing, he knew, called Vitelli's Third Law of Interference that prevented him from doing too much in the past that would drastically alter the future, and he also knew that if he ever happened to corner Irie Shoichi in an empty room with a gun, that he would probably inevitably break that law. There were things like dire consequences and space-time anomalies that he apparently was supposed to be afraid of, but of course, Gokudera felt no fear. ("Don't I...know you...?", and his hands gripped the button-down shirt so hard that it almost ripped.)
In truth, thinking about it pissed him off so much that Gokudera probably would have barged out of the bathroom shirtless with his pants half-belted and killed the shit right then and there if something else hadn't have happened, instead.
"Moooom, it looks like Moriyama stuck gum in my hair again," Irie Shoichi whined, and yanked open the bathroom door.
The future captain of the Millefiore's 2nd Rosa White Spell squad was a short kid, even up close. He had very bright, unruly ginger hair upon which was, indeed, placed a very large and shiny piece of chewing gum, currently stinking quite heavily of grape. The boy's face was one shade darker than his hair.
A shirtless half-foreign guy with his pants hanging half-open in the family bathroom couldn't really have been that big of a deal, Gokudera imagined, but then none of that mattered because Irie Shoichi just as suddenly went pale, and the older man belatedly remembered that as of the current moment, he was packing enough artillery under his clothes to completely decimate a third-world country.
"Mooooooooom - mmmggh!" the brat had time to scream, before Gokudera wrestled him into a one-armed headlock, clapping a hand over the kid's mouth, and dragged him into the bathroom, slamming the door shut again behind them. He locked it, for good measure, and struggled to manuever the kicking, flailing brat into the furthest corner of the bathroom.
"Sho-chan, is that you?" Hinako asked, worriedly, from the other side of the door. She tried the handle - no luck. Her voice grew a bit louder, a bit more concerned, as she queried; "Are you all right?"
Gokudera's brain ticked like clockwork. "Gum!" he yelled, and gave a grunt that in the end wound up to be very convincing considering that the Millefiore brat had just elbowed him in the groin, "It's just a bit of gum, kid! Why're you acting so paranoid? Gimme a second and I'll just cut it out!"
"Mmmm-mmmmmm!" articulated Irie Shoichi, throwing his head furiously from left to right. His eyes were emerald green behind his glasses, and very wide. He was currently staring at the set of rocket bombs Gokudera had strapped beneath his ribs with a very real, palatable fear.
"Oh, don't be such a baby, Sho-chan," Hinako said, kindly but exasperatingly, and tapped warningly on the bathroom door. "Just let the nice man fix your hair. There are scissors in the cabinent above the sink, Gokudera-san."
Scissors? A bit messy, but effective. Gokudera waited until the woman's footsteps had receded down the hallway before he popped open the medicine cabinent, pulled out the barber's shears that were sitting inside, and held the bladed edge to Irie Shoichi's throat, warningly.
The Millefiore brat went immediately still. There was a fine trembling to his shoulders and back that the older man could just barely catch, but he was fine with that. He didn't have plans to do much, anyway. The timing was all off, if anything - he'd have to go through maybe a dozen or so people, if he were to attempt to get away with murder at this time of day. He just... It felt better, to stand there, with a pair of scissor blades at the kid's throat and know that Vitelli's Third Law of Intervetion could just go and be damned.
"Don't move," he ordered, voice caught and a little bit rough, and knelt as best as he could on the cramped bathroom floor. His free arm dropped from the brat's shoulders to his waist, where he held on, gruffly. The other arm held the scissors quite still. "And don't talk, either, not 'til I tell you to."
That, it seemed, wouldn't really be a problem, because Irie seemed to have lost his capacity for coherent human speech anyway. He just breathed, quite rapidly, hands balled into tiny little shaking fists at his sides, and his eyes as wide and glassy as green marbles. The grape gum in his hair still stank something putrid. It was practically up Gokudera's nose. He glared at it, cross-eyed.
"This sat on your head all day and you didn't fucking notice?" he asked his hostage, incredulously.
The boy jumped, as though goosed, and shook his head, frantically. It was a rather earnest way of answering - Gokudera had to adjust the scissors, an inch, so that the brat wouldn't accidentally saw his own head off. Of course, the fact that he didn't just let him do it anyway made him quite unsettled with himself. And no small measure of annoyed. Irie Shoichi's heartbeat fluttered against his other hand from the bars of its cage.
Gokudera wasn't sure what the hell he was doing. He should either kill the kid or just let him go, but for some reason, he didn't seem capable of doing either.
"Sit down," he barked, a bit testily.
Except that there wasn't really anywhere to sit, since the bathtub took up one corner and the toilet took up the other, and in front of the tub there was the sink. Gokudera sat in the only free space between the sink and the wall. He propped his legs, half-bent, against the closed door, as the brat set himself gingerly between the V of his limbs and dug his fingernails anxiously into the tile of the bathroom floor.
"So," said Gokudera, quite amicably (which was far more frightening than if he had actually yelled), "you didn't see a fucking thing, am I right?"
A series of stiff, jerky nods, and a stuttered, "r-r-r-r-right." The kid looked about to freaking cry, which made Gokudera feel momentarily ashamed as a member of the Vongola family, which would one day lose to this brat. (Though the truth was, he simply underestimated the power he held over people when he actually attempted to be pleasant, for a change.) He moved the scissors, but hooked the fingers of his other hand around the scruff of Irie Shoichi's neck.
"Who the hell is Moriyama?" he asked next, and the question surprised the hell out of him, too.
"A...classmate," the boy replied, voice unsteady but at least moderately comprehensive, now.
"Bully, hunh?" Gokudera corrected, half-assedly, and resisted the urge to be a total prick and squash the gum into the kid's hair even more. "Strap on a pair every now and then, why don't you." He exhaled, loudly, and tilted his head back towards the ceiling, staring at the overhead light and wondering if he dared chance a cigarette. He opened his mouth again. "I'll make the punk eat this goddamned gum if you'll do something for me, brat."
What?
What the fuck was he saying? It was Yamamoto, that had to be it. Being around the idiot for so long had somehow infected him with stupid. Somehow infected him with... well, he didn't have a goddamned clue, but it was probably something retarded, and heinous, and -
"What?" Irie Shoichi asked him, slowly.
"I said," Gokudera repeated, irritably, feeling a bit more like himself, "that I'll make that Moriyama or whatever eat this digusting hairy gum of his, if you'll do something for me, in return."
This was not really a question to be posed half-naked, and within unreasonably close proximity to an awkward, unsociable 14-year old boy, but Gokudera had never been one to factor in pheromones and physical stimuli and such, so of course he didn't notice. Irie Shoichi noticed, though, and that was why his heart banged clear out of his chest and his nails dug like claws onto the tile floor in earnest.
"No!" he said, quite loudly, and amended at the Italian's noise of sudden annoyance, " - thanks. No, thank you." He hunched in on himself like a turtle. The tips of his ears were red. Gokudera made a sour face at them, rebuffed, and wondered if were possible for a person to go crazy from nicotine withdrawl.
"Fine," he grunted, and shrugged in a way that made their shoulders brush, lightly (he didn't notice, of course). "It's not like I really need your permission, anyway. Just thought I'd be a nice guy, and offer you an equal trade."
Again, this was not really the prime thing to say in their current situation, but chances were good that he might not have cared even if he had understood the implications his tone were making. He was very, very aggravated. The assault he was going to have to perform if this brat didn't stop whimpering and shaking and just being all-around pathetic was going to be equally as aggravated.
Gokudera threatened his hostage with the scissors again, the point digging into a small, skinny neck with a steady hand. "Your room is the room across the hall from this one, right? The one that's always locked?"
The lock that he'd been unable to pick, too, the only time he'd been able to spare a second to try. It wasn't really that the lock was different from any other lock, it was just that he wasn't particularly proficient at lock-picking on the whole. If he couldn't go around it or through it, he generally preferred to just knock it down.
Irie Shoichi gave a frantic, petrified nod.
"Good. We're gonna go there." Gokudera manuevered, with a bit of difficulty, into the button-down he'd left dropped upon the floor, but couldn't do much for the buttons themselves, so he just ignored them. It meant, of course, that any casual observer could see the row of dynamite he had strapped around his midsection, which he wasn't exactly comfortable with. He gnashed his teeth as though he were gnawing on a cigarette, of which of course he had none. "Button this," he barked, and shook Irie Shoichi rather roughly by the scruff of his neck. "And don't touch anything."
The Millefiore brat turned, slowly, and very gingerly did as he was told. "Dad's," he said, for a second, "these are..." but shut up when the older man rolled his shoulders in a surprisingly threatening manner.
"Go whine to your mother, then," he grunted, remembering how he'd felt about his dad when he was this kid's age and feeling suddenly very awkward with himself. "She's the one who dumped them on me." He paused, shrugged, and figured that he might as well go for broke. "Where the hell is your dad, anyway?"
Irie Shoichi struggled with the final button. "Who knows?" he muttered, shakily, and his hands jerked, and the button slipped free of the hole once more. "Who cares?" His hands shook, he missed the loop, and his pulse jumped visibly in his throat. "I don't care."
So he said, but he sure seemed to be having a fuck of a time getting that button. Gokudera thwaped him with his knee. "Forget it," he said, because he didn't have a goddamned eternity to spend in this bathroom and that button was kind of close to his crotch, anyway. "Stand up."
The boy sprang to his feet as though he'd been shot out of a cannon. He practically fell over himself to get out of Gokudera's way when the older man stood, too, with an annoying amount of difficulty (who the hell would have thought that he'd actually be too tall for something? Jesus Christ). He motioned with the scissors again.
"This is what's gonna happen," he told the brat, assertively, shaking the barber's shears for effect and nearly knocking a framed landscape picture off of the wall with his elbow as he did so. "I'm going to go into your room with you and do my thing." (Word choice, word choice.) "I don't know how long it's gonna take. Your job is to go out into that living room and tell your mother, and your sister, whatever the hell you have to, so that they don't start asking any unnecessary questions." With a flick of his wrist that went quicker than a blink, he had the scissors against the kid's jaw again. "I don't think I need to tell you what's gonna happen if you don't do exactly as I tell you. Am I right?"
Another fast, frantic nod. "They... They wouldn't believe a-anything I tell them, anyway."
Oh? The Italian's job just became %1000 more convenient with those words. He tried not to let it show on his face, though. So the kid's family knew that he was a pathological, possibly dangerous liar? Fucking coward, to boot. It should have been annoying, but instead, it was... No, it was annoying, and that was the end of that. Gokudera lifted a foot and booted his captive in the ass. "Get going. If you just do what the hell I tell you to do, then nobody's gotta get hurt."
Gokudera turned the knob on the door, and almost cut himself wide open on the damned scissors as something caught his eye, and he whipped out his hand, lightning-fast, to catch the brat by the neck once more. "Wait."
There were about a billion ways that the Millefiore brat could currently use to get away, but he didn't seem inclined to attempt a single one of them. The whole thing was really rather pathetic, and... No, that was a terrible word to use, a word that people like idiot women used or maybe even that baseball freak Yamamoto, when he was in one of his more...candid moods. Endearing, hell! He might as well knock on the Millefiori's headquarters in Italy right now and ask if there was anything he could do to help. But still, there it was. Gokudera wasn't ranked as 2nd out of 82,203 who liked kids for nothing, for Christ's sake.
So. "Hold still," he said.
He tilted Irie Shoichi's head back, and cut some goddamned bubble gum out of the kid's fucking hair.
And in the hour after that, he would commit the murder that would eventually change everything.
AN: FUCK YOU, SECOND POSSIBLY-EPIC MULTI-PARTER. I dunno how in ball's name I expected to be able to wrap a prompt as detailed as this one up in a minimal number of words, but apparently I did, and (obviously) I failed. *shrug* I...honestly doubt that this will be wrapped up in a second part, but one can always hope, I suppose. It's looking to be more like another trilogy, by which I shall then throw myself from atop the highest tower I can find in America and make the news and possibly the Darwin Awards. I feel like this is a noble goal. But hopefully I'll finish this story before then. AIDS, etc.
By the way, Hope, I stole a name from your novel. This is a hint for you to WRITE MOAR.
Oops, shame, etc.
[in which the students of namimori middle have changed, but the building has not]
The fact that he hadn't yet been shot or strangled was a good sign. The fact that they were, without a doubt, heading farther and farther away from the school's infirmary was a bad sign.
A very bad sign, indeed.
It had all started like this:
"All right, kids," the phenomenally popular new gym teacher, Take-sensei, said to them that morning, toying a bit with the small silver whistle he carried around his neck. A couple of girls in their class had twittered, blushingly, and he'd graced them with a shining smile that had nearly made them swoon. "As much as it pains me that we haven't quite reached baseball season yet, apparently Ayashi-sensei's old curriculum states that I'm supposed to spend this quarter having you guys run the marathon, so, well, there you have it."
There were groans all around; Shoichi hated the marathon, if not more than any of them, but he kept his mouth shut, not wanting to draw attention to himself.
"Ha ha, I hate to say it, but some of the times in this class are pathetic," Take-sensei went on, but smiled sheepishly and scratched the back of his head in a way that took off the edge. Shoichi didn't trust him one bit. At least his sister's new tutor, the chain-smoking foreign guy, didn't bother to hide his murderous temper.
It had been nearly a week since the two of them had barged, without warning, into his life, and as much as it startled him to realize it, there hadn't been a single gunshot or grenade explosion aimed in his direction since they'd shown their handsome, duplicitous faces. (Handsome?! Shoichi pinched his arm, chastizingly.)
Of course, that could only mean that they were lying, in wait, to unleash some sort of dangerous, potentially fatal, trap.
For example:
"So, whoever finishes last in the marathon today will have to stay after school and help me sweep the gym field," Take-sensei said, cheerfully.
Shoichi's eyes nearly popped out of his head.
"Hope you like hard labor, twerp," Moriyama-kun, who was standing next to him, snickered cruelly.
"Yeah, Sho-kun's times are the worst out of all of us," someone else said, near the back. "We got lucky~ It would have really sucked if we were in a class like 1-A, which has got all the jocks."
Shoichi had never particularly minded sweeping the field with Ayashi-sensei. Perhaps that was because Ayashi-sensei, as far as he'd known, had never taken a hit out for his life.
The gears in his head began to turn. He had two hopes. He went for the first, easiest hope.
"Maaaan," he sighed, in what he hoped was as discreet a manner as possible, as class 1-C took their starting lineup. "Being stuck sweeping the field, all alone, with Take-sensei..."
Emi-chan, standing on his right, took the bait, perking up her ears interestedly. Thank God that crazy yakuza was somehow a hit with the women. "Ohhhh," she said, a bit dreamily, "you know, Sho-chan, I think I might have turned my ankle just now..."
Yes!
"Hey, Emi-chan!" Hayasegawa hissed, from her friend's right, "don't forget that the new episode of Lovely Lovely Makeup Complex comes on tonight, you dolt! You're gonna miss it if you're stuck sweeping the field all evening after school!"
Shoichi stared. That damned television show. All it was was some foreign guy with a heart-shaved head named Lessurio or something making over completely boring, average, everyday women. Besides, it ran the same time as Gundam Z, for God's sake, which meant that he never got to see it anymore because his mother and his sister hogged the TV.
"Oh," Emiri said, as though waking up from a dream. "I forgot."
Take-sensei blew his whistle. Shoichi stared at the cloud of dust that was left in his wake.
He had one hope, then.
Fat Misato.
Fat Misato was, obviously, an unfortunately fat girl named Misato whose times at the marathon were nearly as bad as his (yet still, embarrassingly, just that slight bit better). She, of course, didn't have the fear of certain death adding a spring to her step, so maybe, just maybe, Shoichi might -
"Yo," Take-sensei said, suddenly beside him, staring at the other students disappearing into the distance, Fat Misato in their wake. "At this rate, looks like it'll be you and me, hunh?"
Shoichi took off in a mad dash.
Fear had actually propelled him to beat almost half of the class, plowing through them wide-eyed and screaming at the top of his lungs about cigarette burns and water torture, and he finished the last lap around the gym field with the sense of elation that could only really come from dodging almost certain death.
"Hey, good time," Take-sensei said to him, tapping a pencil atop his head, before Shoichi's red, sweating face went suddenly white, and he vomited all over the dirt.
And here he was, now, hooked over the back of one of the men who surely meant to kill him, on a piggy-back trip to a bed in the infirmary (or an early grave, if he couldn't get away fast enough). The latter was looking more likely than the former, unfortunately, considering the fact that they'd been walking farther and farther away from the nurse's office with every step. Where were they going, anyway? The woods across the street? It'd be easier to dump his body, at least. How was the assassin going to go about it, anyway? Gunshot? Asphyxiation? Shoichi's fingers dug into the man's shoulders, broad and warm under his hands, and his brain worked furiously for a way to escape.
"Ha ha," his teacher laughed, in a voice that was deceptively free of bloodthirst, back rumbling against Shoichi's stabbing, aching chest. It hurt to breathe. His every muscle cried out in agony and pain. Really, death would almost be a comfort. He hated the marathon, for sure. "You're a funny kid. Anybody else would have had the sense not to push themselves so hard, you know?"
Anyone else, the boy thought, nastily, wouldn't be targeted by a pair of supermodel yakuza for doing absolutely no -
"S-Supermodel?" Shoichi breathed aloud, in disbelief with himself. What was the matter with him, seriously? Looking good was how they'd suckered his mother and his sister and his classmates - if he couldn't stand up against them, then who in God's name could?
"Eh; what was that, kiddo?"
"N...Nothing," Shoichi muttered, wishing that his final words could be something a bit more cool. He wanted to run; with every fiber of his being, he wanted to run, and yet...
"Hey," Take-sensei interrupted his thoughts, amicably, "I've been holding off on saying this for a while, Ichi-kun, but...I think I'm lost."
What? "...What?"
"Yeah, uh..." An awkward laugh; an almost pitiable smile. "Which way's the nurse's office, again? I haven't been here in almost ten years, you know... Not like, uh, I spent a lot of time there when I was your age, or anything... Ahahaha!"
Why on earth was he laughing so hard? Shoichi leaned; the man's face turned, and suddenly, awkwardly, they were almost nose-to-nose. He leaned back, with a sudden, unstoppable yell, and the two of them overbalanced, and almost fell.
"Ow; hey, my eardrums!" Take-sensei laughed, with what was probably an exaggerated wince, and peered at his cargo, curiously. "I was right," he said, smiling fading a bit, around the edges, and eyes growing wistful for a brief, strange second. "You really are just like him, when he was your age."
"Who?" Shoichi asked, without thinking, and flinched when the man's gaze sharpened on him, considerably.
"My boss," his teacher said, laughing so openly and amicably then that Shoichi wondered if his expression a second ago hadn't just been a trick of the light. (Then again, he'd thought that about the bullets, too, and look where that had gotten him.) "Anyway, Ichi-kun - "
"Shoichi," the boy interrupted, quite fed up by now with this fraudulent gym teacher being unable to remember his name. At least know the name of the person you've been sent to kill! he thought, quite grouchily, and pushed his glasses further up on his nose.
" - point me in the right direction, would you? I think I should have made a left at the pool; or was it at the cafeteria? Ah, jeez..."
Shoichi hesitated, quite delicately, as though unable to believe the turn the last ten minutes had suddenly taken. "You're...really taking me to the infirmary?" he asked, and just as quickly flinched when he realized that what he had said was probably not a very good incentive for the man to actually do so.
"Of course," Take-sensei replied, brightly, turning his head this way and that as though there were a sign or something that would miraculously point him in the right direction. For a yakuza, he was almost impossibly...absent-minded. "Where'd you think we were going? I can't think of anyone who gets lost on purpose."
"I thought - " the boy started, and found himself suddenly quite unable to speak, so he pointed, instead, to the low copse of trees that was on their center-right.
"Oh," Take-sensei said, a bit strangely, and his expression went dark. Shoichi tensed; ready to let go, ready to run. "Oh."
And then the man's face changed, in an instant, and he was back to the affable gym instructor from a moment before.
"I'm flattered, kid," he said, smiling sheepishly, and shrugged his shoulders so hard that Shoichi felt his ribcage thump, "really, I am, but I could lose my job, you know? Sorry."
Shoichi stared him. And then turned a sudden, disgusting, alarming shade of red.
"No!" he shouted, such that the poor man winced, again, and made a great show of hunching his shoulders up to his eardrums, "that wasn't - ! I didn't...!"
"Ahahaha, it's not really a big deal," Take-sensei pointed out, which was a rather ironic thing for him to do, considering; "I used to have a crush on my classical Japanese teacher when I was your age, runt. 'Course, she was a lot cuter than I am."
R-Runt? That wasn't a particularly nice name for a student to be called by a teacher. One would think, for an undercover yakuza agent, that the man would put more effort into his camoflauging role. "I don't - " Shoichi muttered, and wondered what the point was, when in any number of seconds he'd probably be dead. Realized, even, that with all of his academic awards and school smarts, that he was still no match for this cheerful killer, and his constant smile.
"The pool," he said slowly, resignedly, feeling his glasses slip down the bridge of his nose, again, "you should have made a right, at the pool."
"Oh?" Take-sensei asked, as though interested, and made a face at himself, chastizingly. "You're a lifesaver, kid."
How could he say something like that so casually? They walked along the edge of the school in silence, making the necessary turn at the pool towards the nurse's office, and Shoichi sucked in a breath, suddenly, and reminded himself that he couldn't afford to be fooled.
"You'll be the death of me, though, won't you?" he asked unsteadily, almost despairingly, and tightened his hands on the man's shoulders, hard enough to leave marks. "You, or the other guy that came with you - you'll be the death of me, for sure."
[in which gokudera displays particularly poor word choice and locks himself in a restroom]
"The way he said it, you'd think we were gonna kill him, or something," Yamamoto laughed, over the phone.
In the future, they used untraceable, disposable cell phones for the necessary communications, but try explaining to a wireless communications dealer that you had a phone plan, already, you just had to wait another eight or so years for it to kick in. Gokudera, understandably, was having a small amount of difficulty adjusting to the idea of cell-phone minutes (hadn't dealt with them, after all, since he was about sixteen).
"Are you an idiot?" he asked, flatly, to the idiot over the phone - had no illusions, of course, about what the answer to that question would be. (It was mostly just a matter of mood demonstration, at this point.) "Of course we're gonna kill him, as soon as we find the opportune time." The lines of his face deepened, considerably. "You don't think he'll go looking, do you, now that he's on to us? It'll be a problem if he finds those plastic explosives I stored in their hall bathroom."
"Ha ha! What the heck are you gonna do with those, darling?" Yamamoto laughed, with the same blissful ignorance that Gokudera had always hated yet never been able to overcome. Of course, the shorter man had also seen him laugh that same sort of laugh while slicing through a man's intestines, so maybe the word 'ignorance' wasn't really saying much. Who knew?
"Don't call me that," he growled, and rang the bell for house 303, hearing it make a false, pleasant ding. "Anyway, it's my shift now, so it's my show, you moron, and I'll do what I want. I'll see you at 18:00, got it?"
"Awww, sounds like somebody's got PM - "
Gokudera hung up before he could say the S.
In reality, though, actual women with actual PMS were more frightening by far, as he discovered the instant the front door was opened and he was assaulted on all sides by what appeared to be an armful of crisp, clean laundry.
"It was mom's idea, really, 'cuz all she's been doing is washing and ironing them, really, and nobody's been wearing them - " Irie Yoko babbled, her petite, nondescript face appearing around a row of brown, perfectly pressed work slacks. (They really did all look alike, those Japanese. The Tenth had just enough Italian in him to lighten his hair, to brighten his eyes. Gokudera had once lost Yamamoto in a shopping mall and had spent the greater part of an hour attempting to find him again. Not that he would ever look for the idiot, of course.) " - and I mean, we don't mean any offense or anything, sensei, but - "
"What?" Gokudera stumbled, feeling suddenly overwhelmed by this onslaught of information and ironed-out dress shirts. Amidst all the confusion, there was a sudden stab and slightly less pressing trickle of fear - the M80 under the ironing board; had they found it? He forced himself to resist the urge to just frag the entire Irie family for evidential purposes and forced himself to think about what was actually going on.
"You haven't really had time to settle, have you, dear?" Yoko's mother, Hinako, asked him kindly. Gokudera saw her regularly but spoke with her rarely, for all she always seem to have something permanent and ubiquitous to do in the kitchen whenever he was there. She seemed a bit...oblivious, which certainly explained why her son was so adept at being a cruel, criminal mastermind.
"It's - not really a big deal," Gokudera muttered, but he'd been just a hair shy of telling her that it wasn't any of her business. Besides, what did any of this have to do with M80s?
"Of course it's a big deal!" Hinako told him, fussily, striding over to where her daughter was still pressing an armful's worth of laundry into the Italian's face and beaming, happily. "You've done so much for Yoko already - " Gokudera always attempted to smile when the stupid girl did something right, and her test scores had escalated a whopping 20 points, " - so we'd like to do something for you, for a change." Her expression turned delicate, momentarily, and Gokudera restrained himself with difficulty from reaching into his jacket pocket and fumbling for a cigarette.
Irie Hinako said it all in a rush: "It's just, you've been wearing that same suit for the past week, Gokudera-san."
Gokudera stopped thinking of paper trails and piano wire for long enough to blink, perplexedly. "What?" he said, and because of unfortunate natural default, it actually came out sounding rather rude.
Hinako fluttered. "We... We don't mean anything by it, honestly, but Yoko-chan and I thought that you might not mind some of my husband's old hand-me-downs, until you got settled in Japan for a while."
"...What?" That also came out sounding somewhat rude. Gokudera sort of meant it that way, though. He kept the damned suit as clean as he could, but with the baseball idiot's crap salary and the small potatoes he was earning now doing this tutoring job, he just hadn't been able to afford having it properly laundered. And he didn't really care about buying new clothes. If it wasn't a suit, he didn't want anything to do with it - it came with the profession (probably). The vaguely-established point was, however, that he didn't smell, and it was really rather uncalled for for this woman to insinuate as such.
"They're old," said Yoko, assuredly, a little subdued by her tutor's less-than-enthusiastic response but determined to stick it through to the end, regardless; "but they're still in good condition. Mom runs them through the wash at least once a week, and besides, Dad hardly ever wore this stuff anyway, before he..."
Gokudera had once snapped at a blind man to watch where the hell he was going, but even he could sense the awkwardness in a silence like this one. It was rather like how the Tenth's father had been conspicuously absent for the greater part of the Tenth's life, though of course he doubted that the Irie patriarch was a man who had been as venerable as the Tenth's. Still, he'd always assumed that the Millefiore brat's father just worked a late job, or maybe even had been deported overseas (an ordeal to which Gokudera was unwillingly sympathetic. It took a long time to re-apply for a Japanese work visa). Knowing that, of course, still didn't make the current uncomfortable silence go away, so the Italian shuffled his feet, a bit self-consciously, and almost thought about confessing to the M80, just to have something to say.
"I...thought that it would be nice," Hinako said, after a moment's pause, "for him to come back to things as the way they were, as though he'd never left. But it's been so long, now, and... I was actually thinking of donating these, recently, but when I saw how much you've done so far for my daughter, I thought of a much better use for this old wardrobe, instead."
"Some of it's pretty nice, too," Yoko chimed in, helpfully, holding up a pair of slacks for emphasis. "See, like these - they're John Lawrence Sullivan, and worth a pretty penny, too, if you can, uh, just ignore what Dad did to the crotch."
Gokudera wouldn't have noticed the coffee stain if she hadn't have pointed it out, but now that he did, he couldn't stop staring at it. By unfortunate circumstance, the stain hung on the slacks in the shape of a pair of hefty, tan-colored testicles. He'd give that pair to Yamamoto.
Because, despite the fact that people generally assumed from his inherent nature that he was the type who would never, ever, upon threat of painful and/or extremely humiliating death, accept charity, this in fact was not true. He had actually acquired in his youth a very terrible and insidious habit of hanging around people whom he didn't particularly care for in order to get things from them when they were about to throw them away. He got day-old sashimi from Yamamoto's dad (for which his colon had never quite forgiven him), hawked half-empty shampoo bottles from his teammates after gym class, and borrowed back issues of porno mags from that pervert Shamal, though he was careful never to touch those much with his hands.
Put bluntly, Gokudera was cheap. It was a side effect of going from suddenly being very rich to suddenly very poor. He stole from department stores when he was young, but he didn't particularly care for having to frag the salespeople when he was caught. It'd be nice to bypass all of that now.
"I..." Thank you was a very strange series of words to Gokudera, but he was getting better at it now that being in the mafia meant more ass-kissing Italian politics and less pointless brawls battled out over a bar pool table. "Thank you...very much."
He soothed his pride by telling himself that the Tenth would have been proud. (Though he actually probably would have laughed behind his hands, just like anyone else.)
"Oh no, you're quite welcome," Hinako beamed, truly relieved, because she'd found what appeared to be a very large gun strapped under her ironing board this morning and she hadn't known what to think. Probably just one of her son's toys, like she'd thought, and she set about sitting on the sofa and folding her husband's old laundry while Yoko went about with her arithmetic tutoring.
"Here, try this on!" she pestered Gokudera, first, because in the end she was very annoying but quite smart when she actually tried.
"Finish your worksheet," he grunted at her, making an unpleasant face like one does when they've been unexpectedly kicked in the groin.
"I'll finish it while you change," she bargained, sweetly, her slender, nondescript Japanese face smiling up at him dangerously. He hoped that he never had to go with her to the mall.
"Fine," he groused, and took the suit that she offered him, surreptitiously sniffing under one of his armpits as he did so for unexpected funk. There wasn't any, that he could tell. Maybe he'd ask the idiot when he got back tonight.
Gokudera ventured down the hall towards the bathroom. He tried to avoid using it when he could, because Japanese bathrooms were small and there was nothing quite like getting stuck on the toilet between a sink and the wall. As he changed, he thought a bit about the current situation.
There was a thing, he knew, called Vitelli's Third Law of Interference that prevented him from doing too much in the past that would drastically alter the future, and he also knew that if he ever happened to corner Irie Shoichi in an empty room with a gun, that he would probably inevitably break that law. There were things like dire consequences and space-time anomalies that he apparently was supposed to be afraid of, but of course, Gokudera felt no fear. ("Don't I...know you...?", and his hands gripped the button-down shirt so hard that it almost ripped.)
In truth, thinking about it pissed him off so much that Gokudera probably would have barged out of the bathroom shirtless with his pants half-belted and killed the shit right then and there if something else hadn't have happened, instead.
"Moooom, it looks like Moriyama stuck gum in my hair again," Irie Shoichi whined, and yanked open the bathroom door.
The future captain of the Millefiore's 2nd Rosa White Spell squad was a short kid, even up close. He had very bright, unruly ginger hair upon which was, indeed, placed a very large and shiny piece of chewing gum, currently stinking quite heavily of grape. The boy's face was one shade darker than his hair.
A shirtless half-foreign guy with his pants hanging half-open in the family bathroom couldn't really have been that big of a deal, Gokudera imagined, but then none of that mattered because Irie Shoichi just as suddenly went pale, and the older man belatedly remembered that as of the current moment, he was packing enough artillery under his clothes to completely decimate a third-world country.
"Mooooooooom - mmmggh!" the brat had time to scream, before Gokudera wrestled him into a one-armed headlock, clapping a hand over the kid's mouth, and dragged him into the bathroom, slamming the door shut again behind them. He locked it, for good measure, and struggled to manuever the kicking, flailing brat into the furthest corner of the bathroom.
"Sho-chan, is that you?" Hinako asked, worriedly, from the other side of the door. She tried the handle - no luck. Her voice grew a bit louder, a bit more concerned, as she queried; "Are you all right?"
Gokudera's brain ticked like clockwork. "Gum!" he yelled, and gave a grunt that in the end wound up to be very convincing considering that the Millefiore brat had just elbowed him in the groin, "It's just a bit of gum, kid! Why're you acting so paranoid? Gimme a second and I'll just cut it out!"
"Mmmm-mmmmmm!" articulated Irie Shoichi, throwing his head furiously from left to right. His eyes were emerald green behind his glasses, and very wide. He was currently staring at the set of rocket bombs Gokudera had strapped beneath his ribs with a very real, palatable fear.
"Oh, don't be such a baby, Sho-chan," Hinako said, kindly but exasperatingly, and tapped warningly on the bathroom door. "Just let the nice man fix your hair. There are scissors in the cabinent above the sink, Gokudera-san."
Scissors? A bit messy, but effective. Gokudera waited until the woman's footsteps had receded down the hallway before he popped open the medicine cabinent, pulled out the barber's shears that were sitting inside, and held the bladed edge to Irie Shoichi's throat, warningly.
The Millefiore brat went immediately still. There was a fine trembling to his shoulders and back that the older man could just barely catch, but he was fine with that. He didn't have plans to do much, anyway. The timing was all off, if anything - he'd have to go through maybe a dozen or so people, if he were to attempt to get away with murder at this time of day. He just... It felt better, to stand there, with a pair of scissor blades at the kid's throat and know that Vitelli's Third Law of Intervetion could just go and be damned.
"Don't move," he ordered, voice caught and a little bit rough, and knelt as best as he could on the cramped bathroom floor. His free arm dropped from the brat's shoulders to his waist, where he held on, gruffly. The other arm held the scissors quite still. "And don't talk, either, not 'til I tell you to."
That, it seemed, wouldn't really be a problem, because Irie seemed to have lost his capacity for coherent human speech anyway. He just breathed, quite rapidly, hands balled into tiny little shaking fists at his sides, and his eyes as wide and glassy as green marbles. The grape gum in his hair still stank something putrid. It was practically up Gokudera's nose. He glared at it, cross-eyed.
"This sat on your head all day and you didn't fucking notice?" he asked his hostage, incredulously.
The boy jumped, as though goosed, and shook his head, frantically. It was a rather earnest way of answering - Gokudera had to adjust the scissors, an inch, so that the brat wouldn't accidentally saw his own head off. Of course, the fact that he didn't just let him do it anyway made him quite unsettled with himself. And no small measure of annoyed. Irie Shoichi's heartbeat fluttered against his other hand from the bars of its cage.
Gokudera wasn't sure what the hell he was doing. He should either kill the kid or just let him go, but for some reason, he didn't seem capable of doing either.
"Sit down," he barked, a bit testily.
Except that there wasn't really anywhere to sit, since the bathtub took up one corner and the toilet took up the other, and in front of the tub there was the sink. Gokudera sat in the only free space between the sink and the wall. He propped his legs, half-bent, against the closed door, as the brat set himself gingerly between the V of his limbs and dug his fingernails anxiously into the tile of the bathroom floor.
"So," said Gokudera, quite amicably (which was far more frightening than if he had actually yelled), "you didn't see a fucking thing, am I right?"
A series of stiff, jerky nods, and a stuttered, "r-r-r-r-right." The kid looked about to freaking cry, which made Gokudera feel momentarily ashamed as a member of the Vongola family, which would one day lose to this brat. (Though the truth was, he simply underestimated the power he held over people when he actually attempted to be pleasant, for a change.) He moved the scissors, but hooked the fingers of his other hand around the scruff of Irie Shoichi's neck.
"Who the hell is Moriyama?" he asked next, and the question surprised the hell out of him, too.
"A...classmate," the boy replied, voice unsteady but at least moderately comprehensive, now.
"Bully, hunh?" Gokudera corrected, half-assedly, and resisted the urge to be a total prick and squash the gum into the kid's hair even more. "Strap on a pair every now and then, why don't you." He exhaled, loudly, and tilted his head back towards the ceiling, staring at the overhead light and wondering if he dared chance a cigarette. He opened his mouth again. "I'll make the punk eat this goddamned gum if you'll do something for me, brat."
What?
What the fuck was he saying? It was Yamamoto, that had to be it. Being around the idiot for so long had somehow infected him with stupid. Somehow infected him with... well, he didn't have a goddamned clue, but it was probably something retarded, and heinous, and -
"What?" Irie Shoichi asked him, slowly.
"I said," Gokudera repeated, irritably, feeling a bit more like himself, "that I'll make that Moriyama or whatever eat this digusting hairy gum of his, if you'll do something for me, in return."
This was not really a question to be posed half-naked, and within unreasonably close proximity to an awkward, unsociable 14-year old boy, but Gokudera had never been one to factor in pheromones and physical stimuli and such, so of course he didn't notice. Irie Shoichi noticed, though, and that was why his heart banged clear out of his chest and his nails dug like claws onto the tile floor in earnest.
"No!" he said, quite loudly, and amended at the Italian's noise of sudden annoyance, " - thanks. No, thank you." He hunched in on himself like a turtle. The tips of his ears were red. Gokudera made a sour face at them, rebuffed, and wondered if were possible for a person to go crazy from nicotine withdrawl.
"Fine," he grunted, and shrugged in a way that made their shoulders brush, lightly (he didn't notice, of course). "It's not like I really need your permission, anyway. Just thought I'd be a nice guy, and offer you an equal trade."
Again, this was not really the prime thing to say in their current situation, but chances were good that he might not have cared even if he had understood the implications his tone were making. He was very, very aggravated. The assault he was going to have to perform if this brat didn't stop whimpering and shaking and just being all-around pathetic was going to be equally as aggravated.
Gokudera threatened his hostage with the scissors again, the point digging into a small, skinny neck with a steady hand. "Your room is the room across the hall from this one, right? The one that's always locked?"
The lock that he'd been unable to pick, too, the only time he'd been able to spare a second to try. It wasn't really that the lock was different from any other lock, it was just that he wasn't particularly proficient at lock-picking on the whole. If he couldn't go around it or through it, he generally preferred to just knock it down.
Irie Shoichi gave a frantic, petrified nod.
"Good. We're gonna go there." Gokudera manuevered, with a bit of difficulty, into the button-down he'd left dropped upon the floor, but couldn't do much for the buttons themselves, so he just ignored them. It meant, of course, that any casual observer could see the row of dynamite he had strapped around his midsection, which he wasn't exactly comfortable with. He gnashed his teeth as though he were gnawing on a cigarette, of which of course he had none. "Button this," he barked, and shook Irie Shoichi rather roughly by the scruff of his neck. "And don't touch anything."
The Millefiore brat turned, slowly, and very gingerly did as he was told. "Dad's," he said, for a second, "these are..." but shut up when the older man rolled his shoulders in a surprisingly threatening manner.
"Go whine to your mother, then," he grunted, remembering how he'd felt about his dad when he was this kid's age and feeling suddenly very awkward with himself. "She's the one who dumped them on me." He paused, shrugged, and figured that he might as well go for broke. "Where the hell is your dad, anyway?"
Irie Shoichi struggled with the final button. "Who knows?" he muttered, shakily, and his hands jerked, and the button slipped free of the hole once more. "Who cares?" His hands shook, he missed the loop, and his pulse jumped visibly in his throat. "I don't care."
So he said, but he sure seemed to be having a fuck of a time getting that button. Gokudera thwaped him with his knee. "Forget it," he said, because he didn't have a goddamned eternity to spend in this bathroom and that button was kind of close to his crotch, anyway. "Stand up."
The boy sprang to his feet as though he'd been shot out of a cannon. He practically fell over himself to get out of Gokudera's way when the older man stood, too, with an annoying amount of difficulty (who the hell would have thought that he'd actually be too tall for something? Jesus Christ). He motioned with the scissors again.
"This is what's gonna happen," he told the brat, assertively, shaking the barber's shears for effect and nearly knocking a framed landscape picture off of the wall with his elbow as he did so. "I'm going to go into your room with you and do my thing." (Word choice, word choice.) "I don't know how long it's gonna take. Your job is to go out into that living room and tell your mother, and your sister, whatever the hell you have to, so that they don't start asking any unnecessary questions." With a flick of his wrist that went quicker than a blink, he had the scissors against the kid's jaw again. "I don't think I need to tell you what's gonna happen if you don't do exactly as I tell you. Am I right?"
Another fast, frantic nod. "They... They wouldn't believe a-anything I tell them, anyway."
Oh? The Italian's job just became %1000 more convenient with those words. He tried not to let it show on his face, though. So the kid's family knew that he was a pathological, possibly dangerous liar? Fucking coward, to boot. It should have been annoying, but instead, it was... No, it was annoying, and that was the end of that. Gokudera lifted a foot and booted his captive in the ass. "Get going. If you just do what the hell I tell you to do, then nobody's gotta get hurt."
Gokudera turned the knob on the door, and almost cut himself wide open on the damned scissors as something caught his eye, and he whipped out his hand, lightning-fast, to catch the brat by the neck once more. "Wait."
There were about a billion ways that the Millefiore brat could currently use to get away, but he didn't seem inclined to attempt a single one of them. The whole thing was really rather pathetic, and... No, that was a terrible word to use, a word that people like idiot women used or maybe even that baseball freak Yamamoto, when he was in one of his more...candid moods. Endearing, hell! He might as well knock on the Millefiori's headquarters in Italy right now and ask if there was anything he could do to help. But still, there it was. Gokudera wasn't ranked as 2nd out of 82,203 who liked kids for nothing, for Christ's sake.
So. "Hold still," he said.
He tilted Irie Shoichi's head back, and cut some goddamned bubble gum out of the kid's fucking hair.
And in the hour after that, he would commit the murder that would eventually change everything.
AN: FUCK YOU, SECOND POSSIBLY-EPIC MULTI-PARTER. I dunno how in ball's name I expected to be able to wrap a prompt as detailed as this one up in a minimal number of words, but apparently I did, and (obviously) I failed. *shrug* I...honestly doubt that this will be wrapped up in a second part, but one can always hope, I suppose. It's looking to be more like another trilogy, by which I shall then throw myself from atop the highest tower I can find in America and make the news and possibly the Darwin Awards. I feel like this is a noble goal. But hopefully I'll finish this story before then. AIDS, etc.
By the way, Hope, I stole a name from your novel. This is a hint for you to WRITE MOAR.