[fic] KHR - A Year in the Life: Haru (Betrothal)

[lysapadin]

Title: A Year in the Life: Haru
Characters: Haru, Reborn, Bianchi, Yamamoto, Kyouko, Gokudera, Tsunako
Summary: In which Tsunako gives Haru a new pattern to think about.
Notes: Continuing the re-imagining of the Daily Life arc from Haru’s point of view. Genderswap, subtle gender politics, and cake. Part of Choice: The Betrothal Arc. Series Index. General audiences. 11,954 words

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A Year in the Life
Haru

Most things, Haru had noticed, made patterns with varying levels of regularity. Abe-sensei gave quizzes in science every third Tuesday, regular as clockwork, and kept firmly to that schedule regardless of holidays or the material being covered. Her mother packed her bento with an unvarying rotation of meals—leftovers on Mondays, rice and vegetables on Tuesdays, tamogoyaki on Wednesdays, hot dogs on Thursdays, and onigiri for Fridays. Haru supposed it was good that she didn't mind those repetitions. Or something.

Her father's days were as regular as her mothers: he got up early and commuted to the school where he lectured; sometimes he didn't return until late at night. Generally he was buried in student papers or his own papers, and he disliked it excessively when anyone disturbed his work. Kaasan spent her days keeping the house in order and attending her social clubs and hobbies, and Haru spent her time doing what she could to follow the pattern that had been laid down for her. She'd placed into a good middle school and took the top grades in her class on a regular basis. She was a competing member of the school's gymnastic team, and she felt sure that she was on track to get into a top-quality high school when the time came, and Todai after that for university. After that, she'd find a job teaching for a while, at least until she got married, and then it would be time to have and raise children of her own.

Sometimes Haru wondered whether it was all right to be in middle school and already bored with life.

 
 

Haru was fond of patterns—she was the daughter of a math professor; it ran in her blood—and even more fond of the moments when those patterns failed to hold true. Her father liked to rhapsodize about the beauty that dwelt in the lines of pure math, the equations whose sinuous lines curved and snaked to elegantly simple conclusions—Haru knew he did; she'd read the reviews of his last book that had all but accused him of waxing lyrical at the expense of supporting his proofs (Maekawa-sensei had been merciless; Tousan had gone about in gloom for weeks). Tousan wasn't wrong. All that was beautiful, but Haru thought that the places where the patterns broke down were beautiful, too, in their own ways. That was why she enjoyed watching people so much: they had patterns, but their patterns changed—sometimes broke apart—and there weren't equations quite sophisticated enough to predict those moments. (At least, there weren't in any of the things Haru had been able to get her hands on or make sense from. Perhaps when she was older and had taken a few more classes, and could get into the really interesting math.)

People could change, was the thing. Alter the values assigned to their variables, introduce new variables to their equations, and send the linear progressions of their lives curving off in strange new directions without warning. She wondered, sometimes, how they contrived to do it.

Consider the girl Haru had been watching now for several months: Haru had noticed her at the same time she had started at Midori. The girl walked past Haru's house every morning at the same time; she had brown hair that flew about her face in spiky, flyaway wisps, and she wore the uniform of the local school. Haru watched her most mornings as she brushed her teeth. The girl trudged along, usually without looking from side to side, and though Haru was not particularly well versed in how people worked, if pressed, she would have said that the girl was lonely. It was a stretch when she had no data to draw on (not having actually ever spoken to the other girl), but it was a hypothesis she felt comfortable making.

Loneliness was a quality she understood.

Spring had just finished ripening into summer when the girl's pattern changed. It happened on a Tuesday morning: Haru took her mug and toothbrush to the window to watch for the other girl, but when she appeared, she wasn't alone. There was a child with her, a baby dressed in a suit, and the girl didn't look lonely. Exasperated, maybe, or somewhat freaked-out, but not lonely.

When the girl had passed down the sidewalk and turned the corner, Haru realized that she'd been so arrested by the sight that she'd dribbled foam all over her blouse and had to rush to get changed before she left for school.

The same thing happened the next morning, the girl and the baby—he, Haru decided, based on the suit—the exasperation and the irritation. The baby didn't seem particularly interested or impressed by either emotion. He walked along the wall that lined the street, strangely independent for such a small child, and Haru watched them until they were out of sight.

She'd hardly begun hypothesizing what this meant before the girl's pattern changed yet again, and she walked by with two boys, one on either side of her. Haru stared in astonishment the first morning that happened—boys? Two of them? Midori was an all-girls' school, so she didn't quite know what to make of this strange new development, or the disparity in the boys themselves. One was tall and carried an athletic bag over his shoulder with a relaxed, casual grace. The other boy slunk along, his outlandish silver hair matched by heavy rings and silver-studded ears and belts. The girl looked embarrassed by the two of them, but Haru was fascinated—how had this come about? It didn't make any sense.

The boys persisted, though—no matter that the girl looked first exasperated, then annoyed, as the days swept past, until finally she settled into something like resignation. One morning the athletic one walked by with his arm in a sling, her only company; another time he was absent and the boy with the silver hair was her only companion (and looked, Haru thought, very pleased by that fact).

And over time, the girl's entire demeanor changed, until one morning Haru watched the four of them walk past and thought They've become friends.

She couldn't help feeling just a bit wistful over that.

One morning they walked past, all three of them looking grim; Haru spent the day wondering what had happened and taking less thorough notes than usual as a result of that. But whatever it had been must have been easy to fix. The next day the three of them seemed to be back to normal, though Haru thought that the boy with the silver hair kept stealing glances at the girl, like he couldn't quite believe she was real.

And then, shortly after that, one morning they didn't appear at all. Nor did they appear the morning after that, or the one after that—it was a full three days before Haru saw them again, and in that time she had worked her way through all the possible permutations for why that might be—sickness, unexpected school holidays, a new route to school, a transfer, a family emergency, death—and had made a good start on the statistical likelihood of each. Then they appeared again, like normal, and the next morning, before disappearing again, and Haru realized that she might have gotten the tiniest bit over-invested in people whose names she didn't even know.

It was just interesting, was the thing: the girl, the baby, the boys, and the way they all changed as she watched them. They were interesting because they didn't seem very like anyone Haru actually knew, not the girls at school or on the team, not like her parents or their friends, and it wasn't really strange if she wanted to know more about them, was it?

They had to have been varying their route deliberately, she decided after spending some time watching them and tracking the mornings when they appeared later or earlier or didn't appear at all. The pattern, if it were a pattern at all, was erratic—too erratic, as far as Haru could tell, and she wondered over it. Why so much variation? Why had the girl started going around with the boys in the first place? What had changed?

There was really only one way to find out, of course though that presented a quandary of its own, one that Haru fretted over. What if the girl and her friends turned out not to be interesting after all? What if there were a perfectly mundane explanation for the way their routes changed? (What if they didn't like her?)

Sometimes that talent of looking through all the possibilities that had made her such an asset to the gymnastics team and good in her math classes made other things absolutely impossible.

Before she had quite finished dithering over whether she actually wanted to meet the girl and her friends (and if so, how), the Midori gymnastics team went to Namimori Chuu for a tournament. It was, Haru reflected, not the sort of opportunity that came one's way every day. If nothing else, she supposed she might get a name or names to go along with the faces she'd been watching so intently.

She bided her time until the tournament was over—in Midori's favor, to no one's surprise, as NamiChuu had a reputation as being boringly average to maintain—Haru placed herself in the way of one of the NamiChuu gymnasts. "Nice match today," she said, which seemed to be a good sort of place to start things off. The girl brightened and thanked her. "I'm glad I got to come over today… maybe there's something you could help me with."

She did her best not to sound too intent and it must have worked. The girl cocked her head to the side, bird-like, and said, "Oh?"

Haru let her voice drop lower, confidential, and slipped a bit closer. "Well, I was wondering… there's a boy who I see walking to school everyday. I think he's a Namimori student, and I was wondering if I could get his name." It wasn't too weird to ask after a boy, she thought; everyone she knew seemed to talk about boys all the time.

Sure enough, the girl's eyes brightened even further. "Maybe! What does he look like?"

"Well, he's got this really fair hair… I'd call it silver, almost." The guy had to be spending a fortune bleaching it, unless it were (improbably enough) natural. Either way, it was striking enough that there couldn't be two students at NamiChuu with hair like it. "It's longer, shoulder length. Does he sound familiar?"

"Oh, you mean Gokudera-kun!"

"Gokudera," Haru repeated, tasting the name. "So he does go to Namimori."

The girl nodded enthusiastically. "Oh, yeah. He transferred here a few months ago." Then her smile dimmed. "But I should warn you, he doesn't really have any time for anyone who isn't Yamamoto-kun or Sawada-chan."

Haru felt her pulse quicken. Yamamoto and Sawada. "Are those—I do see him walking with another boy and a girl a lot," she hazarded.

"Has to be them," the girl confirmed. "Yamamoto Takeshi and Sawada Tsunako. None of us know how she got both of them, either. It's just such a waste."

Haru dug her nails into her palms, excited. "What, really? Are you sure?" Could she get the girl to tell her more, as easily as this?

Apparently so. The girl heaved an enormous sigh. "Oh, very sure. Sawada-chan has them both wrapped around her fingers and no one knows why. She's not the prettiest girl in class, she's kind of stupid, and she's clumsy. She's so boring! It just doesn't make any sense."

How someone could make no sense and be boring, Haru didn't know, but she didn't say anything, being rather more interested in getting the other girl to say more. "That's too bad," she began, as one of the girl's teammates drifted over and asked what they were talking about.

"She was asking about Gokudera-kun," her informant said. Her tone was wistful. "She gets to see him walking to school in the mornings."

"Lucky," the new girl sighed. "I wish I got to see him every morning. He's so cute."

"I'd rather look at Yamamoto-kun, myself," her first informant said. "He's nicer, for one thing."

"But Gokudera-kun is so exotic!"

It sounded like an argument that was ongoing and well-rehearsed. Haru listened closely until her teammates called for her to come board the bus back to Midori, and walked away pleased with what she'd learned.

 
 

"I was right," Reborn announced with complete self-satisfaction, managing to convey an ineffable sense of but you already knew that of course at the same time.

Bianchi waited for him to clarify what he happened to be claiming this time; given that she couldn't recall arguing with him on anything lately, she could afford to stay silent and wait him out. He knew it, too, because he only waited a moment to say, "We are being surveilled."

On the one hand, Reborn could be sublimely blasé about the kinds of threats to make sensible bodyguards blanch. On the other, Bianchi had been hanging around him for far too long to consider herself a sensible bodyguard. She settled on raising an eyebrow and saying, "Yeah? Who?" A girl had to take her fun where she could find it, after all, especially when this was the first she'd heard of any surveillance.

Reborn clicked his tongue against his teeth. "She appears to be a student at a local academy for girls."

"Only appears?" Bianchi inquired.

"I haven't uncovered any connections to any of the Families." Yet, his tone promised.

Bianchi turned that over in her head. "Do you expect to?"

"I expect to find something." His tone was dark. "By now there ought to be plenty."

Ah, so this was as much about his disapproval of the local yakuza groups as anything else. Bianchi couldn't entirely share that—if the local boys wanted to stay oblivious, that was fine by her, though she suspected that Reborn saw every day that passed without having to deal with the yakuza as a day wasted. "Perhaps. What are we going to do?"

He made a thoughtful sound. "Perhaps we ought to leave that up to Tsunako." Which really meant that he'd already made a plan of some sort to turn this into a learning experience for the kid. Well. They were supposed to be teachers, after all. "Let me see what I can arrange."

"Whatever you say," Bianchi agreed.

 
 

Haru watched for the three of them for two days before she saw them walk past again—Yamamoto and Sawada and Gokudera, she repeated to herself, telling over their names with a shiver of something almost proprietary. Gokudera was saying something—declaiming it, really, waving his hands through the air with a vigor that made Yamamoto throw his head back and laugh. Sawada was watching them both.

Her pattern really had changed a lot. She was smiling at them both, amusement and fondness and wonder all mixed together. That was rather curious, Haru thought. Her informants had implied that there was something romantic there, but limited as her own observations of romance were, she still didn't see any of that in the three of them.

Another fascinating datum, that, though she hardly knew what to make of it.

And likely wouldn't, she was forced to admit when a few more days had slipped past and she'd caught a couple more glimpses of the three—one morning, a Monday, they all three moved stiffly, as if they were sore or injured, though that hardly made sense. Wouldn't make sense unless she found a way to find more data.

Maybe it was like Tousan's friend from the chemistry department insisted—a person could only gather so much data through observation. Eventually, or so Nakagawa-sensei insisted, a person needed to get in there and start tinkering with things. (Tousan insisted that Nakagawa-sensei was just too far removed from the mathematics to understand, but then, that was their pet argument.)

But how was she supposed to do that with people? Haru tried to imagine it—could she just—lie in wait for the three of them and introduce herself some morning? She shuddered back from the idea. People didn't like that kind of thing, though she wasn't entirely sure why. But it made them uneasy if they knew they'd been observed, that she could pinpoint their patterns with a measure of accuracy. It was better not to let on. Yes.

Perhaps that could be her back-up plan, if she couldn't think of another one.

The question occupied her for a few days to such an extent that she barely paid heed to Tousan's hardly-contained excitement. Some professor of mathematics was coming to town, someone important. Haru wondered how important he could actually be when she didn't remember seeing Borin-sensei's name in any of Tousan's journals, either as an author or in the citations, and Kaasan looked vaguely puzzled by Tousan's excitement too, which was an even better sign. Kaasan read over all Tousan's work to check it, so if she didn't recognize this Borin-sensei's name, surely he couldn't be all that important. But it made Tousan happy, especially when his department chair picked him out to be the one to look after Borin-sensei during his visit.

Of course Tousan would be happy about that, Haru though while she was helping Kaasan clean the house. She guessed it was a sign of something, no matter how much extra trouble it put them to. Kaasan to. Same difference. Maybe it would be interesting to listen to the mysterious Borin-sensei, though. Visiting academics had interesting patterns. (She still remembered Ramirez-sensei, if only because it had been so funny to watch him begin a sentence and then end up somewhere else, kilometers away from his starting point, while everyone listening to him scrambled to keep up. The best part had been how Ramirez-san had been so completely unaware of what he'd been doing in his innocent assumption that of course everyone else was just as smart as he was.)

It was still probably for the best that Borin-sensei wasn't going to be staying long and that they were only going to have to host him for one evening. Haru prepared herself for the experience as much as she could by listening to her classmates to catch up on which idols she was supposed to be talking about and which shows she was supposed to be watching, and was perfectly prepared to be bubbly and cute for Borin-sensei (assuming he even noticed her at all).

She was not prepared to come downstairs when she heard Tousan come in just in time to hear Kaasan say, voice faint, "I… had expected you to be taller for some reason. Please pardon my rudeness."

"It's glandular," came the reply, shrill and grave, from somewhere around Kaasan's knees. Haru directed her gaze downwards and nearly missed the last step in her surprise, because it was Sawada's baby. He was gazing up at Kaasan, solemn and wearing a pair of glasses and a tweed jacket with tiny leather elbow patches, but Haru would have staked her life on its being the same baby. "I take no offense. Most people have a similar first reaction."

"I… of course," Kaasan said, still faint, before she rallied, just as she had when Mortensen-sensei had started drawing equations on the tablecloth and when Tousan got into one of his sulks. She smiled at Borin-sensei, smooth. "Forgive me, and welcome." She looked up and saw Haru, who was frozen on the stairs in her surprise. "Please permit me to introduce our daughter, Haru. Haru, this is Borin-sensei."

"Pleased to meet you." Haru stepped down and bowed, hoping she looked like she was surprised by Borin-sensei's height and not because she recognized him.

"Likewise," he replied, before Tousan stepped forward to sweep Borin-sensei into his study, talking all the while about how excited he was to have this opportunity to work with him.

Kaasan looked after them, a puzzled little frown on her face, before she turned to Haru. "Well! Come into the kitchen and help me get dinner on the table," she said, dismissing her confusion briskly.

"Yes, Kaasan." Haru followed her, wondering what on earth was going on and what pattern it was going to end up making.

It didn't make sense, she decided. That Sawada's baby friend should also be Tousan's Borin-sensei was too much a coincidence. There shouldn't be any connection at all, but it was also insupportable to say that there were two such individuals who looked just alike without that being somehow connected.

When they had the meal on the table and Kaasan called Tousan out of his study, he and Borin-sensei were deep in conversation. Something like conversation, anyway—Tousan was talking excitedly and Borin-sensei was listening politely. At least, that looked like what he was doing, except that Haru wasn't so sure. She'd seen that kind of look on people's faces before when they were listening to someone—Tousan, a teacher, or someone else who liked to talk a lot—but not really hearing what was being said. Tousan had that effect on people a lot.

There was an awkward moment at the dinner table when they realized that the table was far too high for Borin-sensei to sit and eat at. Tousan flushed and fell over himself apologizing for the oversight while Kaasan sent Haru to gather several thick books from the living room bookshelves. "Don't mention it, please," Borin-sensei said as Haru and Kaasan stacked the books on the seat of his chair. He hopped up to the top of them, apparently utterly unconcerned by having to sit on them. "It's far better than a high chair, I assure you."

Haru giggled, almost in spite of herself, at the mental image that presented—Borin-sensei had so much gravitas that the thought of him in a baby's high chair was incongruous, to say the least. He looked up at her, regarding her thoughtfully, and then Tousan jumped in to apologize some more.

Borin-sensei was a funny sort of academic, Haru decided, listening to them talk as she ate her dinner quietly. He didn't have much—anything—to say about his own work, which was frankly amazing. When Nakagawa-sensei or Mizutani-sensei came to dinner, it always ended up in a battle to dominate the conversation. But Borin-sensei let Tousan rattle on and on without once trying to hijack the conversation to his own research. That was unprecedented in Haru's experience, and she would have wondered whether Borin-sensei was even an academic at all if he hadn't occasionally responded cogently to the points Tousan was making.

It was all very strange, and made for a quiet dinner for her, since Tousan didn't call on her to demonstrate what a smart daughter he'd had. Haru knew better than to interject herself into the conversation without that opening. She excused herself after the meal and went upstairs to work on her homework, and then thought until it was time to go to bed.

Sawada and her friends were even more interesting than she'd initially decided they were. Their patterns were absolutely baffling.

About the time she'd decided to go to bed, she heard Kaasan in the hall, conducting Borin-sensei into the little cubby of a room that she sometimes called her office, though never without a twist to her mouth. It also served as a guest room when they needed one, and sometimes for storage or other things, and occasionally Kaasan sat in there with Tousan's papers, lending a hand with grading or proofreading. Haru didn't think much about that as she changed into her pajamas and slipped into bed. She picked up her book and settled in for a chapter as she listened to the sounds of the rest of the household preparing for bed.

She was embroiled in her reading when the door opened just wide enough to permit a small figure inside, and her first thought when that occurred was to wonder how on earth Borin-sensei could have reached the doorknob. Then her brain caught up with things and she opened her mouth, intending to demand to know what he thought he was doing in her bedroom. What came out was something else altogether. "Who are you, really?"

He paused in the act of hopping onto her desk, balanced on the seat of her chair, and gave her an assessing sort of look. "You mean you don't know?"

Haru shifted around, leaning against the wall and tucking the blankets in around her knees as he hopped up to her desk. "I know you're strange," she said as he seated himself, a peculiar figure in a nightshirt and diminutive nightcap. "I've seen you, or someone who looks very like you, walking past my house in the mornings for a few months now. I know that you have enough mathematical theory to put on a good show with Tousan, but that I can't find you in any bibliographies. Aside from that, I don't know who on earth you are."

"Ah," he said. "An empiricist." He gave her a long look. "Or a very good strategist."

"To be a good strategist, you have to know what the game is," Haru countered, one part of her wondering what she thought she was doing and the rest of her just thrilled to be talking to one of the strange people who had captured her attention so thoroughly.

"A fair point." He lapsed into silence, watching her with unblinking eyes. "I find that I don't know what to make of you, either."

Later in her life, Haru would come to realize how uncharacteristic an admission that was for him, but she had no way of knowing his patterns yet, and only said, "Make of me?" Was it possible that his visit wasn't at all about mathematics or her father?

"You appear to be a girl in a private academy with an eye for detail and a rather better brain than you care to let anyone else know about." His voice was very calm, as if he were reciting a theorem. "Your grades are good but not outstanding; your athletic performance is really very precise. You take great care in your interactions with other people, but do not seem particularly comfortable with them, or perhaps with your handling of those interactions. And either you have no criminal connections at all, or are so clever that I can't uncover them."

No criminal—that didn't even make sense, given the other things he'd mentioned, which was another fascinating disjuncture in the pattern he made. More significantly… "Have you been spying on me?" What a discomfiting thought. Haru wrapped her arms around herself, skin crawling just a bit.

"You've been spying on my—" his hesitation was barely perceptible "—pupil."

His pupil. "That's Sawada, isn't it?" Haru asked, eager in spite of her discomfort. "It must be," she continued when he kept his mouth shut. "It's the only thing that fits, since you were the first person to show up and it looks like Yamamoto and Gokudera orbit her. Whatever you are, she's at the heart of it." And he'd asked her about criminal connections. "Are you yakuza?" she hazarded.

He didn't show any reaction that Haru could perceive, but the atmosphere in her room turned indefinably sharper. "Tell me why you asked that."

"It fits," Haru said slowly, feeling her way through her response and unraveling the logic that had gone into that leap. "The patterns the group of you make. The spying. The way you talked about my criminal connections. You wouldn't ask that kind of a question if it weren't already a concern, and since I'm not yakuza, you must be. Or something like it. Or have dealings with the yakuza. Something like that, I don't know. I still don't have enough information to figure out what patterns the group of you make." She thought that she ought to have felt a little more concerned about talking privately with a possible member of the criminal element like this, but it was almost an afterthought, like Tousan embroiled in his writing and forgetting things like meals and sleep.

"The patterns we make?" He tilted his head to the side, the tassel of his nightcap bobbing as he regarded her. "Say more about that." Haru's shoulders hunched themselves without her thinking about it. "You don't want to."

"I shouldn't have said that," Haru said, acutely conscious of all the times that trying to explain patterns had backfired on her.

"Perhaps not. Too late now." He lifted a tiny hand and snapped his fingers, imperious. "Tell me what that meant."

Haru pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, hugging them and the blankets to her chest. "People make patterns," she said reluctantly. "If you pay enough attention, you can see them. Only you're all… complicated. So your patterns are hard for me to see."

He didn't laugh, which was a kind of relief. He didn't say anything at all, actually, not right away, though Haru felt like she could almost feel him thinking. When he was done with that, he asked another question. "Why are you so interested in the patterns people make?"

Haru blinked. "Why wouldn't I be?" He raised his eyebrows, so she tried to explain. "It's… people change their patterns. They don't get… locked in. Not all of them. And that's—I want to understand how they do that." If she could understand that, then she could—do anything.

"I begin to see." Which wasn't a statement that told her much, but then, it probably hadn't been meant to. He looked at her, pursing his mouth, and finally said, "I'll tell you two things." He held up a finger. "If you pursue this pattern, it'll change things. And change isn't always good or safe." Haru nodded, acknowledging that, and he held up a second finger. "Second, the pastries at the little café called Greatest Cake are especially good on Thursday afternoons." He folded his fingers down and jumped off her desk, and somehow managed to land without making a sound.

"What does that—" Haru stopped herself as he glanced up at her, because maybe she did know what that meant. "I—okay. Thanks."

"You may not thank me when all is said and done. Think carefully on that," he directed her, and let himself out.

Haru was too caught up in puzzling that out to pay attention to how he negotiated the doorknob.

 
 

Bianchi kept one ear on Tsunako's doleful account of the weekend and Kyouko's delighted giggles—it was pretty amusing in retrospect, though it hadn't been all that funny at the time. The boys were coming along nicely, though, and Tsunako was too. Bianchi wasn't sure Tsunako even realized it, given the exasperation in her voice as she described those three hapless would-be pickpockets' attempts to make off with Nana's money. That was something they were going to have to address at some point, probably sooner rather than later.

Before they could do that, however, there were other things to consider.

Tsunako came to the end of the story and Kyouko smothered her giggles behind her hand. "I wish I could have seen their faces."

Tsunako looked like she wished she weren't smiling at that. "They did look pretty upset by the end." She rattled the ice in the bottom of her glass. "I'm going to get something else to drink. Do either of you want anything?"

"No, I'm fine," Bianchi said, and Kyouko waved the offer aside. Tsunako smiled and got up; Bianchi watched her go, reflecting on the changes a few months could make.

Then Kyouko said, voice low and her lips barely moving, "The girl two tables over has been watching us all afternoon."

"Yeah, I know." She'd been keeping an eye on her, in fact, for reasons of her own. Bianchi glanced at Kyouko, keeping one eye on Tsunako at the same time. "What else do you see?"

"She was here last week, too." Kyouko tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. "That's a Midori uniform she's wearing, and Midori's a little out of the way for her to be here. Especially alone. And she watched us all afternoon last week, too." She paused. "Us. Well, Tsunako-chan."

"I noticed that, too." Though probably for slightly different reasons than Kyouko had. Bianchi took a sip of her espresso and used it to glance over. Miura Haru, that was the name. The girl was slight and dark-haired and, as Kyouko had noted, all alone at her little table. She watched the people around her like she was absorbing everything about them.

"Do you think she's…" Kyouko's voice trailed off for a moment; Bianchi thought she was reluctant to say what she thought, but then Kyouko finished, "A problem?"

So it had been a matter of finding the proper word, then. And wasn't that just the question? Reborn had been cryptic, which could have meant that Miura wasn't a threat, or could have meant she was only enough of a threat to make things lively for Tsunako. Reborn did like to encourage an active approach to learning. "I don't know yet," Bianchi said as Tsunako turned away from the counter and began threading her way back through the crowd toward their table.

"Would you like me to speak to her and see what I can find out?" Kyouko asked. Bianchi wasn't Reborn, not by a long shot, and didn't have his sangfroid or his reluctance to show surprise when something warranted it. She cast a startled glance at Kyouko, who looked back, the very picture of composure, and raised her eyebrows. "It would be a way to find out what she might have to say for herself."

"It might," Bianchi allowed, tempted by the idea and by the thought of getting to see Kyouko in action. As Tsunako slid back into her seat, Bianchi drummed her fingers against the table. "You do realize that's a risky proposal." A voice rather like Reborn's scoffed at that caveat in the back of her brain, but Bianchi ignored it with the aid of habit. Sometimes Reborn didn't pay enough attention to the collateral damage, and Kyouko didn't have as many defenses against physical attack as she ought. Yet.

Kyouko pursed her lips, delicately. "I suppose there is some risk," she admitted as Tsunako looked back and forth between them, clearly trying to figure out what they'd started discussing in her absence. "I think it might be something I could mitigate, however. This is the second week. Do we have cause to suppose there will be a third?"

"There certainly could be," Bianchi said.

"Then perhaps I could come ahead next week." Kyouko's eyes looked distant for a moment, calculating. "By ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps, and the two of you to follow. There would be enough people around to prevent unpleasantness." She paused. "And maybe Reborn would like to come along to observe things?"

So she had caught on to how much time Reborn spent watching over them. By God, they'd gotten lucky with her.

Tsunako cleared her throat. "What are we talking about?"

"Have you noticed the girl in the Midori uniform?" Kyouko asked. "The one who's sitting a couple tables over?" She folded her hands under her chin and flicked her fingers in the appropriate direction.

Tsunako looked, not particularly casually, and blinked a bit. "Her?" she asked, looking more puzzled than anything else. "Should I have?"

Bianchi suppressed a sigh; they were going to have to work on that.

"She's been watching us quite intently," Kyouko said. "I was just thinking I might go over and talk to her and see whether I could find out why, and Bianchi-san and I were talking logistics."

Tsunako glanced around again, probably without even thinking. "What, her? Really?" She smiled at Bianchi and Kyouko, half-uncertain. "You don't think it's just because she likes cake, do you?"

"It could be, I guess," Kyouko conceded. "But it would be a good idea to be sure. Don't you think?"

Tsunako looked like she still had some doubts; Bianchi repressed another sigh. Someday she'd get the girl to understand how important she actually was, but it probably wasn't going to be any time soon. More was the pity. "I… guess. Do you really think it's dangerous?" she asked Bianchi.

"There's always a risk," Bianchi said, careful, because Reborn really hadn't been all that specific.

Tsunako's mouth tightened. "And you want to do this alone?" she asked Kyouko. "That doesn't seem fair."

Bianchi buried her smile behind her espresso. There were plenty of things left for Tsunako to learn, but some of them she already had a fine grasp on.

"I won't be alone," Kyouko pointed out. "I think we can assume Reborn will be happy to observe."

"Observe," Tsunako said, tone dark. "Yeah, I'm sure he'd observe. What I'm worried about is whether he'd do anything but observe."

Kyouko smiled, faint and true, and murmured, "Well, you could tell him to lend a hand if he thought it was needed."

Tsunako gave her a look of utter disbelief; Bianchi couldn't fault her for it. "Tell him," Tsunako repeated.

Kyouko's cheeks dimpled as she laughed. "Well, ask him politely?"

"Maybe," Tsunako said, tone dubious. "And then I'll ask for a pair of wings so I can fly, shall I?"

Kyouko laughed again, bright and amused. "It doesn't hurt to ask," she pointed out. "And if he won't play along, I could always borrow one of the boys. Yamamoto-kun, I think."

Tsunako opened her mouth and stopped, looking at Kyouko. When she spoke, Bianchi suspected it was something entirely different from what she'd meant to say. "Why are you so set on doing this?"

Kyouko shrugged. "It needs to be done," she said. "And I think it's something I'm suited for, don't you?" Her mouth quirked. "More so than beating up wannabe thieves."

"It was only one!" Tsunako protested automatically. "Yamamoto and Gokudera handled the other two!" She stopped and gave Kyouko another look. "We'll ask Reborn," she said. "And if it really is dangerous, the boys, too."

"That should be acceptable," Kyouko agreed, smiling serenely, and Bianchi once again considered how lucky they were that Sasagawa Kyouko was going to be on their side.

 
 

It was strange, Haru thought, how Thursdays had so quickly come to be the day of the week she most looked forward to. It barely seemed logical, but it had already happened—two weeks of observing Sawada and her two friends she didn't know names for had made Thursday afternoons something to look forward to.

Now, if only she could figure out the right way to approach them and introduce herself. There was the real problem, the one she didn't know how to solve. She almost hoped that they'd be the ones to speak to her—Sawada had looked her way a couple of times last week, and it had seemed deliberate—but failing that… perhaps she could find a reason to strike up a conversation? Maybe about the food, because the cakes were quite good here. Or… surely there was something. The older girl's—woman's?—hair color, maybe, thought Haru didn't quite know whether she dared. That one was so effortlessly, deliberately in control of herself, and Haru didn't know what to make of her patterns yet.

Yet. That, she told herself as she drifted over to her window, toothbrush in had, was the operative word.

It seemed like a promising sign when the three of them—no, four, Borin-sensei was walking along the wall this time—came down the sidewalk as she brushed her teeth. Yamamoto was saying something, illustrating it with a wave of his hands, and Gokudera was smoking. It was difficult to say at this distance, but Haru thought he was rolling his eyes, too. Sawada was smiling, though. Then Borin-sensei stopped directly in front of her house, briefly, and lifted a hand to adjust the brim of his fedora as he turned his tiny face up. Haru was nearly certain he was looking her way, but before she could figure out how to react, he'd lowered his hand and moved on.

She didn't hold much with superstition, but it was difficult not to take that as a sort of sign. Today was going to be the day, wasn't it?

Haru went through her day on a sort of autopilot, taking notes in class and responding to questions when she had to, but her thoughts kept returning to Sawada and her friends and what she should say. Borin-sensei had mentioned danger, risk, and a part of her stomach seemed devoted to butterflies and second-guessing that. Did she really want to get involved in something dangerous?

On the other hand, it was certainly a shot at doing something out of the ordinary, something none of the other patters she'd seen playing out in her own life could account for. And that, more than anything else, was what decided her. At the end of the day, she skipped out of Izumi-sensei's class—it wasn't like Izumi-sensei was lecturing on anything she hadn't already extracted from the textbook herself—and caught the bus across town. She claimed one of the small tables near the corner table Sawada and her friends usually took and opened up a magazine next to her plate of petit fours, and tried not to be nervous now that she was almost committed.

When the girl who had accompanied Sawada walked in with Yamamoto, but without Sawada anywhere in evidence, Haru's mind went blank with confusion—this wasn't supposed to happen. Yamamoto and the other girl glanced around the shop, then the girl made a straight line for the table where Haru was sitting. She smiled down at Haru, all perfection and poise. "Hi! Would you mind if I joined you?"

"I—no. Not at all," Haru said, too surprised to be the one approached to say otherwise.

"Lovely." The girl drew out the chair opposite Haru's and settled into it. Yamamoto hung back, a lone tall figure among the slight figures of the girls surrounding the display case and clustered at the counter. For all the casual way he stood, hands in his pockets and an easy smile on his face, Haru thought he was—watchful. And the other girl was arranging her hands before her, curling her fingers together as she smiled. "I'm Sasagawa Kyouko."

"Miura Haru," she responded, finding that she didn't quite know what to say—all the mental scripts she'd prepared had been for speaking to Sawada, but Sasagawa didn't strike her as having very many of the patterns that she'd seen in Sawada. And that was—disconcerting. Yes, disconcerting.

Sasagawa seemed to understand her uncertainty, or perhaps just had her own agenda. She smiled again, quick, and tipped her chin just a bit. "Isn't that a Midori uniform?" When Haru nodded, Kyouko smiled, looking satisfied. "I thought so. You've come a long way for cake."

Haru blinked, trying to parse that. Was… was Sasagawa trying to… warn her off? "The cake here is very good," she said, for lack of anything better to say. "And I don't… live that far away."

Sasagawa smiled. "Isn't the cake good? It's one of my favorite cafés." She lifted a hand and rest her chin on the palm. "It's a good place to meet friends."

Haru found herself fidgeting with the pages of her magazine, riffling the edges, and made herself still her fingers. "I—can see that." She hesitated and then said, quickly so that she wouldn't lose her nerve, "Where are the friends you usually sit with?"

Sasagawa's smile stretched across her face, wide and satisfied. "Why do you ask?"

Haru hesitated, not certain how direct she ought to be with Sasagawa, this unknown quantity. Sasagawa was watching her, her eyes steady, and it looked like Yamamoto was watching them both. But Borin-sensei had sent her here, hadn't he? She took a breath and met Sasagawa's eyes. "The three of you are usually together, and the way you interact with the staff says that's a regular arrangement. So I wondered."

"So you were watching us." Sasagawa's tone was casual enough, but she seemed to have gone alert on some other level. "May I ask why?"

"You can, I guess." And now they came to the problem. "I don't know if I can explain without sounding weird. Or crazy." Too late now to adopt a cheerful, cute cover, too—Sasagawa had already seen her nervous and discomfitted.

Sasagawa hummed thoughtfully, but before she could say anything, Yamamoto strolled over, deposited a plate with a slice of the lemon tart at her elbow, and grinned at Haru before he took himself off again. Haru blinked a little, surprised, and said, "Is he your boyfriend? I didn't think—" Then she stopped herself, embarrassed.

Sasagawa raised her eyebrows again as she picked up the fork and sliced off a small bite of tart. "Didn't think what?" she prompted as she raised the fork to her mouth.

"I… didn't think he was interested in anybody but Sawada," Haru said.

Sasagawa blinked a couple of times, but didn't react otherwise. "You've been watching us for a while," she said, thoughtful tone at odds with the mild, polite smile she wore.

"The three of them walk by my house in the mornings before school." Haru toyed with the pages of her magazine, rolling up the corner of one glossy page and unrolling it again. "I asked some people at Namimori about them when I was there for a competition." That really did sound weird and creepy and awful now that she'd said it out loud. She must have been crazy to think that this was a good idea. "They just seemed… interesting."

Sasagawa hummed again and took another bite of her tart before saying anything. "Tsunako-chan is an interesting person. And she attracts other interesting people." She raised her eyebrows. "So that's why you've been… observing us so closely? Because we're interesting?"

Haru nodded and looked aside; Yamamoto had taken up a seat at a nearby table, stretching his long legs out underneath it, and was keeping a close eye on them both. "I told you I wasn't going to be able to explain without sounding weird."

"Mm, not that weird, I think. I'm friends with Tsunako-chan because she's interesting," Sasagawa said. When Haru turned to look at her, Sasagawa's smile was faint, but warm. "You have good eyes to spot that."

"I… do?" Haru shook her head and corrected herself. "I mean, I'm… I know I'm good at watching people. Do you…" She paused, recalling the way Sawada's schoolmates had spoken about her. "Do you mean that people don't see that, too?"

"You would be amazed." Sasagawa's tone was dry as dust, droll and biting all at once. "So. Did you plan on just watching Tsunako forever, or were you thinking of doing something about that?"

It was Haru's turn to blink. "I—" She nibbled her lip. "I was trying to figure out a way to strike up a conversation," she confessed, feeling shy about it.

Sasagawa smiled; it was kind. "I think we've managed to get around that, at least." She took another bite of her tart, chewed slowly, and once she'd swallowed said, "The thing is, being Tsunako-chan's friend isn't exactly simple."

"I—think I already knew that." Haru glanced around and lowered her voice reflexively, even though the shop was busy enough now that she doubted that anyone would have heard her. "She's from a a yakuza family, isn't she?"

Sasagawa looked surprised. "Not precisely, but close enough. How on earth did you find that out?"

"I—that, um, guy who looks like a baby?" Sasagawa's eyes went sharper as she nodded. "I put it together based on some of the things he said to me."

"So you've spoken to Reborn?" Sasagawa looked exasperated. "And of course he didn't tell us. Honestly." She put her fork down and reached into her bag for her phone; her fingers flew over the keys as she composed a message and spoke at the same time. "And when we complain later, all he'll say is that he wanted to see what we would do and that this will be valuable training for later, of course. That's one of the hazards of being Tsunako-chan's friend, you realize. You have to put up with Reborn." And that, her tone implied, was a tribulation indeed.

Haru blinked at the sudden change in Sasagawa's demeanor, and put aside the question about Reborn—was that what Borin-sensei was really called?—to the side. "Are you—that sure Sawada will be my friend?"

"I don't see why the two of you shouldn't get a chance to interact with one another and find out," Sasagawa said, all calm practicality about it. She gathered up her plate and fork. "Come on, let's move to that table over there. It'll seat more people."

Bemused by the speed at which Sasagawa moved, Haru gathered up her things and followed her over to the table where Yamamoto was lounging. His grin lit up his face as they approached. "Everything okay?"

"Reborn and Miura-chan have already talked," Sasagawa said, bone-dry.

Yamamoto immediately laughed, rueful and open. "No kidding. That guy never gets tired of the tests, does he?" He grinned across the table as Haru took a seat. "So I'm Yamamoto Takeshi. Nice to meet you."

"Miura Haru," she said, "and likewise." Surely it couldn't be this easy, but it seemed to be as far as Yamamoto and Sasagawa were concerned. Borin-sensei, or Reborn, or whatever his name was—his say mattered a lot in this circle. For now, she could see why the girls at Namimori had sighed so dramatically over Yamamoto: he was handsome, and what was more, he had a friendly, engaging smile, one that he turned on her. "So, how'd you meet Reborn?"

"Is that his name?" Haru countered. "He was going by Borin-sensei—he came to visit my father's department as a visiting scholar, and my family hosted him. We, um, talked then."

"A visiting scholar?" Sasagawa sounded interested.

"Mm, yes. My father is a mathematics professor," Haru explained. "Kaasan and I thought it was a little strange that we hadn't ever seen Borin-sensei's name in any of the journals, but everyone in the department was so excited…" She shrugged. "I assume he's not really a mathematician?"

Sasagawa and Yamamoto exchanged looks. "Well," he said after a moment, "he could be, I guess. But that's not really what we know him for."

"He did talk about having a pupil," Haru said.

Yamamoto laughed. "Hahah, yeah, I guess you could call it that." He chuckled again. "It's more fun that school, anyway."

Sasagawa smiled. "He's really more like Tsunako-chan's tutor," she said. "And we're… becoming part of that." She considered Haru. "He must think you'll fit into that as well."

That sounded kind of like speculation and caution all at the same time. Haru chewed on her lower lip, but—"Do you think so?"

"Reborn has reasons for everything." Sasagawa shrugged and looked up. "Ah, here they come—my goodness. How did they talk Gokudera-kun into coming along?"

"Maybe Sawada-chan asked him?" Yamamoto guessed; there was laughter threading through his voice. "You know that's all it would take."

"Yes, but—there'll be food." Sasagawa sounded worried, though she was smiling a bit as Sawada and Gokudera and the woman Haru didn't know came in. (For some reason, the latter was wearing goggles, which didn't exactly make sense, but seemed to be going unremarked by the rest of them. Haru added that to her mental files to figure out later.)

"Eh, he just won't have anything," Yamamoto predicted, stretching a hand into the air and waving it around energetically, even though the three of them had already seen them. Gokudera grimaced and started over while Sawada and the woman headed for the counter.

The first thing he said when he had slouched over was "Stop waving, you look ridiculous."

"Just wanted to make sure you saw us." Yamamoto's smile was all good cheer, but Haru thought he was teasing Gokudera, because Gokudera bristled immediately as he dropped himself into a chair.

"Don't be so fucking stupid, no one could miss you, you enormous idiot." He then fixed a piercing stare on Haru, one that was startlingly, intensely green. "So who are you?"

And again, the sighing girls made sense: Gokudera's dramatic coloring was even more striking up close. (Actually, everyone surrounding Sawada was gorgeous, now that she was thinking about it, and even Reborn had a certain adorable rakishness, for someone who looked like a baby.) "I'm Miura Haru," she said, feeling rather like he was evaluating her for her potential to—she hardly knew what.

"And this is Gokudera Hayato," Sasagawa said when all he did was grunt at Haru's introduction. She was smiling, amused. "Reborn's been talking to her, Gokudera-kun."

Gokudera's fingers stilled where he had been twisting the rings he wore (heavy, silver things, two patterned bands on one hand and a skull on the other). He looked at Haru again, narrowing his eyes. "Has he."

Haru couldn't get anything off that utterly flat tone, couldn't tell what it meant, and retreated to the only pattern she knew for dealing with uncertain situations. She giggled, the nervous sound sticking in her throat as Gokudera's eyes went even narrower. "He has," she said, permitting the words to tumble out in a rush, which they wanted to do anyway. "Of course that wasn't what he called himself, he said he was Borin-sensei and he talked to my father about mathematics."

"Oh my god." Gokudera leaned his head back and addressed the ceiling, for some reason. "Seriously, you must be joking."

Haru twisted her hands together in her lap while Sasagawa and Yamamoto eyed him and her and each other. Sasagawa was the first to clear her throat. "Of course, he was more interested in speaking with Miura-chan." She toyed with her slice of cake while Haru adjusted her sense of Gokudera to include a tendency to take things at surface value. Or something like that. "Miura-chan says the three of you walk past her house in the mornings."

That got Gokudera's attention again. He snapped his eyes down from the ceiling, focusing on Haru like she was the only thing he could see. The sudden weight of that regard unnerved her; her stomach fluttered, strange and sick, and she regretted the lone petit four she'd consumed. "Where do you live?" he rapped out, staccato as gunfire from a television screen. Haru gave him her address before she could even think about it, something about the way he snapped the question out demanding her answer. "Hah!" He banged his fist against the table and turned to Yamamoto. "See? See? I told you that changing the routes was important! If she was paying attention—" he jabbed an accusing finger at Haru "—God only knows who else might be. Some of them might even be real threats."

Her cheeks felt hot and she had to stifle the impulse to cover them with her hands to cool them, though it was nonsense to be annoyed by the way Gokudera seemed to have already classified her in his own scheme of things. She didn't even want to be a threat! (She still didn't even know what kind of threat a middle-school boy could be worried about.) Still, it stung a bit, even as Yamamoto laughed and held up his hands. "Hey, hey. You're the expert, you know I'm not going to argue."

"No, you're just going to humor me instead." Gokudera folded his arms across his chest, slouching lower in his chair, looking for all the world as though he was set to have a fit of the sullens right then and there. "Don't think I can't tell. Some of us aren't stupid."

Sasagawa's eyes never stopped moving through the entire exchange, Haru noticed, though she hadn't said anything. Now she broke in. "Oh, dear, I think we're going to need another two seats, aren't we? Tsunako-chan and—" there was the briefest suggestion of a pause there "—your sister are going to need someplace to sit."

Wow, Sasagawa was pretty good. Gokudera came alert at the first mention of Sawada's name and was moving before she'd even finished. He unfolded himself from his slouch and confiscated a pair of chairs from a neighboring table while the rest of them shuffled their own chairs around to make room for the additions. Gokudera took the seat next to Haru's after the adjustments, close enough now that she could smell the acrid odor of cigarette smoke that clung to his clothes—another piece of data for the patterns she was building. Yamamoto shuffled around, too, so that the empty seats were on the far side of the table, just in time for Sawada and the woman—Gokudera's sister?—to join them, their hands full of plates and drinks. Sawada took the seat farthest from Haru, which gave Haru the first really good chance to look at Sawada Tsunako face-to-face that she'd had yet. She wore her hair short; it flew around her face in fluffy brown wisps. She looked around her as she sat, seeking something, and frowned a little whenever she didn't find whatever it was, but settled into her chair as the woman with her passed around the cups of tea on her tray, one to Sasagawa and Yamamoto and skipping over Gokudera entirely. Yamamoto also got a plate with a wedge of something chocolatey from Sawada's tray, but again, Gokudera got nothing.

Haru blinked at glanced his way; there was a muscle working in his jaw, but he didn't say anything about being overlooked—strange. Very strange.

"I hope I picked something good," Sawada told Yamamoto as he accepted a fork and a napkin from her. "I wasn't sure what to choose, but you like chocolate, right?"

He just smiled. "Course I do. This looks great." He kept that smile on her, warm and reassuring, until she ducked her head over her own plate. Meanwhile, the muscle in Gokudera's jaw twitched faster.

Haru found herself revisiting her previous hypothesis. Were they all three friends? It didn't exactly look that way.

Then Sawada raised her eyes from her plate and looked across the table at Haru, clear-eyed and strangely direct, and Haru put that question aside for later. "Hello," she said; her voice was quiet.

Sasagawa stepped in then to make introductions. The woman (not quite a woman, actually, Haru decided on closer inspection, though she carried herself like adults did) was Bianchi, though it wasn't clear whether that was her given name or her family name. She sat quietly, drinking her coffee, and her eyes never stopped moving—tracking what she was looking at was difficult, thanks to the goggles that obscured half her face, but it looked like she was watching both Haru and all the other patrons of the shop. She inclined her head when Sasagawa introduced her, but that was all.

And Sawada just watched her, almost like she didn't know what to make of Haru or her presence. It was a fair reaction, Haru supposed. She barely knew what to make of her own presence at this table or the impulse that had driven her to make use of Borin-sensei's—Reborn's—tip.

So Sasagawa was the one who said, tone bright, "You go to Midori, isn't that right? What's it like there? I thought about applying, but I don't think my grades would have been good enough."

"It's not that difficult," Haru said, after a moment to change mental tracks. "The entrance exams were the most challenging part. The rest is easy enough if you pay attention and can keep up with the homework." There was a lot of that, but it was a school that prepared its students for rigorous high schools; there was supposed to be a lot of studying.

Sawada winced just a bit at the mention of keeping up with the homework, but Sasagawa smiled. "Mm, I'm not sure I'd care for that part." She curled her fingers around the teacup in front of her and cast a sly smile at the boys. "But it must be restful to go to school without having to worry about boys."

"You'd miss us," Yamamoto countered, grinning back at Sasagawa like they shared some secret. Next to Haru, Gokudera grunted something under his breath that she couldn't decipher. She wondered again what was going on, and what the undercurrents moving between the four (five, if she counted Bianchi) meant.

"Not for very long," Sasagawa said, still wearing that amused little smile. Sawada coughed and dropped her eyes to her soda, stirring it with her straw. "I'm sure I'd find something else to do with my time."

"Probably not," Haru said, surprising herself by breaking into their strange flirtation. Sasagawa glanced at her, lifting her eyebrows just a bit, and Haru felt her face go warm again. She laughed, nervous, and tried to explain. "Mostly boys are all that they talk about. My classmates, I mean. I never hear them talking about anything else, anyway."

Gokudera muttered something else under his breath and rolled his eyes, and Sawada glanced up again, a little frown hovering on her lips, but Sasagawa heaved a sigh and snapped her fingers. "Of course, I should have known." She sipped her tea and then shrugged. "So much for that."

"It's probably not that much different from attending any other school," Haru said, wondering why it felt like at least three of them were watching her like cats at a mouse hole—Sasagawa, Sawada, and Yamamoto. "I mean, from what I can tell." Maybe some of the details were different, but the generalities—she was pretty sure the patterns were mostly the same.

"Maybe," Sasagawa said. "But then, you said you've been to Namimori?"

Gokudera went still next to Haru, his incessant fidgeting with his rings arrested, and he turned his head to stare at Haru with another of those narrow-eyed glares. She giggled again, unable to keep herself from it. "Just the once, when my team was there for a competition." Sasagawa took a sip of her tea, no one else said anything, so Haru filled the silence. "The gymnastics team, I mean. That's my club."

Yamamoto straightened up, eyes going bright and interested. "Oh, hey, no kidding. You any good?" He carried a sports bag most mornings Haru saw him; the question made sense, coming from him, if he was the athletic sort.

"Our team is," Haru said, conscious of the way Gokudera was still staring at her. "I'm not bad." All unbidden, Borin-sensei's description floated through her memory: really quite precise. "You?"

"Baseball team," he said, all affable good cheer. "I'm not bad, I guess."

Gokudera muttered again, while Sawada glanced at Yamamoto, her lips pursed. "You're the starting player," she said.

Again, Haru felt the layers of things unsaid floating just under the surface of the conversation, things that she had no way of accessing or understanding. She swallowed her frustration with a sip of her soda.

And Gokudera said, clear and distinct, "Okay, this is bullshit. Are we going to sit here making small talk all fucking afternoon, or are we going to ask her what the hell she's stalking Sawada-san for?"

Haru felt her face go hot in the little silence after that. Bianchi was the one who broke it again, shaking her head over her coffee. "Honestly, Hayato. It's like you were raised in a barn."

"Shut up, hag," he retorted. "It's a perfectly legitimate question." He looked at Haru, eyes narrowed and hard. "So what is it?"

"I—" Haru couldn't keep her eyes on him, or Sasagawa, or Yamamoto, or Sawada, or any of them really, so her gaze skittered around the table and the cafe, picking up a cavalcade of impressionistic fragments—the crumbs scattered on Yamamoto's plate and the ring of condensation on the table from her drink and a group of girls laughing together in a corner and Sawada's eyes, curiously thoughtful as they watched her. "I don't—you were just—interesting. That's all. You were interesting and I wanted to know—I just wanted to know." How had Sawada gone from being that isolated figure trudging to school all alone to being surrounded by these people who made such fascinating patterns together? How had Sawada managed to make that change in herself?

Gokudera drew a breath to respond to that, but it was Sawada who said, "Are you sure about that?"

Haru looked at her and saw that Sawada was looking very serious, for someone who was slight and rumpled and playing with the paper from her cupcake. The way Sawada looked at her made Haru shiver; something about it made her feel like Sawada could see all of her patterns unfolded and laid out in neat rows, explicated and carefully mapped, and that she was examining them one by one as carefully as a scientist testing her hypothesis. "Yes," she said, even though she remembered Borin-sensei's warnings. "I really do."

Sawada nodded and said, "Gokudera, Yamamoto, I'll see you in the morning, okay?"

Gokudera hissed between his teeth, but Yamamoto just chuckled and pushed his chair back from the table. "Yeah, no problem." He hooked his bag over his shoulder and tipped that friendly, easy smile at Haru. "Nice meeting you, Miura-chan. See you around." And he waited, hovering so pointedly that Gokudera had no choice about getting up and saying his goodbyes. He slouched out after Yamamoto, shoulders hunched and his hands stuffed in his pockets, scowling the entire way.

"Sorry about Hayato," Bianchi said after they had gone. "He actually was sort of raised by wolves. It's not entirely his fault that he's so uncivilized."

"He takes his job seriously," Sawada said, quietly, like a counterpoint. It made Bianchi glance at her like she was startled, but Sawada wasn't paying any mind to that. Instead she kept her eyes fixed on Haru. "Why me?"

It was at once the hardest question of all, and the easiest. "Things change for you," Haru told her. "You change things. The patterns people make. Don't you?"

Bianchi and Sasagawa were both silent, watching them now, though there was not telling what they thought of this. Maybe they didn't matter, though, because it was Sawada who was at the centers of their patterns, somehow. It was Sawada who said, "Yes. And no." She frowned, tiny. Thoughtful. "You have to be the one who changes. All I can do is put things in a different perspective."

"That's enough," Haru said, because—it was. It had to be, against all the things she could see stretching ahead of her if she stayed where she was. "That's more than I had before." And she wasn't entirely sure that Sawada was right—it was more than just perspective. Things happened around Sawada. Haru could nearly see it.

Sawada looked at her, eyes thoughtful, and then nodded to herself. "It could be dangerous."

"Reborn already told me," Haru said. "At least that would be different."

Sawada lost the sudden gravity she'd folded around herself and pulled a face. "I wonder if you'll still think that when you've known him for a while." She shook her head and glanced at Bianchi and Sasagawa, like she wanted to be sure they were still there, or maybe to see whether they approved. Then she looked back at Haru and said, "So. What do you know about, um, the mafia?"

The mafia. Haru blinked. Not the yakuza, then, but… close, just as Sasagawa had said. In a way. She took a breath, feeling unaccountably shy about it, and said, "Not much. But I can learn."

 
 

Bianchi brushed her hair slowly, counting off the strokes in her head while Tsunako scowled at her homework. No, she decided, she was going to ask. "You and Haru really clicked today, huh?"

The chance to stop wrestling with her algebra homework meant that Tsunako immediately dropped her pencil and twisted around in her chair to look at Bianchi. "I guess so." She bit her lip and sounded puzzled. "I don't know. I just—felt like I really understood her. Like I was looking at her and it was like looking in a mirror." She shook her head and smiled, wry. "Weird, huh?"

"Sometimes you meet people and just hit it off," Bianchi said. It seemed to satisfy Tsunako, at any rate, but in the absence of anything else, she sighed and went back to her homework.

Later, when Bianchi was sitting outside, jacket wrapped firmly around her to ward off the night's chill, she said, "You hear about the Vongola intuition, but seeing it is something else."

"Yes," Reborn agreed. Bianchi supposed he would know, at that.

Bianchi tucked her fingers into her sleeves and ran her eyes over the surrounding rooftops, finding them satisfyingly empty. "You gonna tell me what Miura's story is, now?"

"Do I need to?" His disapproval floated down from his perch like snow.

"Some of us aren't Vongola, you tiny sociopath. Humor me."

"Lazy," he chided her. "You already know; I've told you about her. And you've heard her describe herself."

"Doesn't fit in with her peers," Bianchi said, thinking out loud since he was set to be stubborn about it. "Doesn't like where her life was going…" Reborn grunted when she trailed off there, so she kept on in that vein. "Pretty smart under all the nerves, from what I could see."

She stopped there because she was fairly certain that misfit loner wasn't the right conclusion. "Tell me about her parents again?"

"The father is a professor of mathematics. The mother stays at home." Reborn lapsed into silence for a moment before he continued. "I'd say the household largely revolves around his ego."

"It's that way, is it?" He didn't answer, but that didn't matter. Made enough sense out of the way Haru had turned to Tsunako and hadn't blinked even once as they'd laid out just what it was they were. "What are you seeing in her?"

"Potential, at the moment." Then, as if he'd seen the roll of her eyes, he added, "She has a gift for analysis."

"Useful," Bianchi agreed, considering that. She leaned her head back and snorted. "She and Hayato are going to get on famously. Like a house on fire." And possibly with all the screaming and chaos that went with that, just as soon as Haru lost some of that uncertainty and or decided Hayato was being too much of a prig, whichever came first. Well, it'd be good for him.

"It would be good for him to have something else to think about," Reborn agreed, echoing her thoughts. And yeah, there was that, too. Something else to think about. Someone else to think about. Same difference.

"There's always something, isn't there?" Bianchi asked, and grinned when Reborn snorted his agreement. Just as well, though. If they'd wanted boring lives, they wouldn't have chosen this, would they?

Bianchi only hoped that the kids, Miura Haru included, would feel the same even after they'd attained more experience with the choices they'd made.

end

So this was a difficult installment to write, for a lot of reasons. Haru is an odd figure in the manga—is she comic relief? Are we supposed to take her seriously? Is she some mixture of the two?—and figuring out her motivations is a tricky proposition, especially in a rewrite of the Daily Life arc that plays it straight instead of comedic. I spent a long time dithering over what could have (seriously) motivated canon!Haru to so enthusiastically throw her lot in with Tsuna et al., and then how I could translate that into motivating Betrothal!Haru to do the same with Tsunako et al. and then (somehow) have it all make some kind of sense. Whether I did that or not is an exercise best left to the reader, but now you know part of the reason why there was a five-month lag between the last installment and this one.

Next up are Fuuta and Dino, probably in that order unless the plot bunnies come up with a better idea, and with any luck in a more timely fashion.

As always, thanks for reading and I look forward to your comments! Comment here at Dreamwidth using OpenID, or at LiveJournal.