A WIP Amnesty Post
22 June 2013 12:17![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lysapadinI've been looking at my folder for Works In Progress and have concluded that some of them are never actually going to be finished, generally because I had a neat idea, wrote a scene or two that fulfilled whatever yen I had in the first place, and then never felt particularly compelled to finish the rest. (It's all to do with how I write: I write to find out what happens next, so if I figure that out in too much detail, I no longer feel all that fussed about writing it down.)
So here are some things that I will never actually finish writing, edited up a bit, with closing notes that summarize roughly what would have happened in the rest of the fic, had I finished it. Caveat lector, dear readers: these are things that I am laying to rest because I will not be finishing them.
Competence Kink: in which Yamamoto is very confused. 671 words.
The first time it happened, it came out of nowhere as far as Takeshi was concerned. They were coming back from negotiations with the Pozzo Nero, which had gone about as well as they ever did—that is to say, pretty badly, at least until he and Gokudera had gotten impatient enough to remind the Pozzo Nero who they were dealing with. Gokudera had been unusually silent afterwards, right up until the moment they reached their floor of the hotel and Takeshi had bid him a cheerful goodnight. Then Gokudera stopped short and cursed, low and vicious.
"What?" Takeshi asked, going on the alert, figuring that Gokudera had seen some threat that he hadn't. He couldn't imagine what, precisely, given that this hotel was Vongola territory and practically an annex of the main house, but stranger things had happened.
Gokudera muttered another curse, low and frustrated, and then grabbed Takeshi's sleeve and dragged him into his suite, and slammed the door after them. "Just shut up and don't say anything." He bit off each word as he pushed Takeshi up against the nearest wall.
"What—?" Takeshi didn't mind following orders, provided they made actual sense, which these manifestly didn't.
Gokudera clapped a hand over Takeshi's mouth, calloused and smelling of cordite and cigarettes. "Shut up!" They were nose-to-nose; Takeshi wasn't one to quail, but at this range Gokudera's glare was almost enough to push him to it. "God, you make me so fucking angry sometimes...!"
Takeshi would have liked to have defended himself—felt nearly honor-bound to do it, in fact—but when Gokudera's hand left his mouth, it was because Gokudera was dropping to his knees and undoing Takeshi's belt and fly. He reached inside and wrapped his hand around Takeshi's cock. Takeshi's demand to know what the heck was going on here, seriously, turned into a strangled moan as the leftover adrenaline from having to pull a gun on Giorgio Pozzo Nero combined with the roughness of Gokudera's hand on him, getting him hard so fast that his head swam. He sagged against the wall, suddenly grateful for its support at his back, and stared down at the top of Gokudera's head and the way Gokudera was glaring at his fist moving on Takeshi's cock, and tried again. "What the hell—?"
"Shut up," Gokudera snapped, with a fierce look up at Takeshi. Then he followed it up by wrapping his mouth around Takeshi's cock and sucking hard, eyes glittering and angry all the while.
Takeshi did the only sensible thing a man could do in the face of an unexpected blowjob: he groaned with the sudden rush of pleasure, so fierce it almost hurt, and let his hips roll into Gokudera's mouth. Gokudera grunted at him and let him do it, and if Takeshi'd had any brain cells left to think with, he'd have been amazed at that. As it was, rational thought was currently beyond him, so Takeshi didn't even try; he just went with it, rocking against Gokudera's mouth and gasping as the heat of it drew him taut, until he groaned an inarticulate warning, just before orgasm crashed down on him.
He leaned against the wall after, light-headed and trembling in the aftermath of the most unexpected orgasm of his life. He was dimly conscious of Gokudera still kneeling, one hand between his own legs, moving fast until he arched and came with another bitten-off curse. His face was flushed and his eyes half-veiled; Takeshi watched him, dazed and wondering. "God," he said, and then, "Gokudera—"
Gokudera was on his feet again before Takeshi could find the words to finish that. He growled, "If you say a fucking word about this, I will end you," as he did up his slacks and belt, and then he was out the door and gone.
He sounded like he meant it, too, and Takeshi was left blinking after him, utterly confused. "No, seriously," Takeshi said to the silence of the room, "what the heck was that?"
All Cats Are Bastards: How Gokudera and Uri came to understand each other. 1396 words.
It just goddamn figured, Hayato thought, aggrieved, and took another drag off his cigarette. Fucking cats.
At least that idiot Yamamoto had the decency to look embarrassed. "Um," he said, and winced as Uri started kneading his lap.
Yeah, those claws were sharp, weren't they? "Still think all those scratches I got are funny?" Hayato inquired, all sugar and acid.
Not that Yamamoto noticed; he was too busy trying to unhook the claws that were hooked in his jeans. When Hayato had tried that maneuver, it had ended up in a set of parallel scratches a good ten centimeters long. Now that Yamamoto was trying it, Uri just purred louder, and went boneless.
Fucking cats.
"I don't suppose—ow—you could call him—ow, geez!—call him off?" Yamamoto asked, when Uri refused to be budged or to stop kneading.
"No, I think he looks happy where he is," Hayato said, stubbing his cigarette out and swinging himself into the top bunk.
He hoped Uri drew blood. And that Yamamoto would turn out to be deathly allergic to cats, and would have to move to another room, and that he'd be left in peace. Relative peace.
Might as well wish for the moon while he was at it, and for an end to Millefiore, and for Irie and Byakuran to come begging for mercy. Hayato rolled over, the springs of the mattress creaking under him, and ignored the sound of Uri purring for the baseball idiot.
Fucking cats.
It was just a goddamned cat, and Hayato had approximately one billion other things to worry about, including, oh yes, figuring out the Sistema CAI (and avoiding his hag of a sister). Hayato did not have the time to fret over one stupid box cat and its traitorous affection for baseball morons and the girls and noisy little kids and—anyone who wasn't him. No skin off his nose if the four-legged bastard wanted to shed all over Yamamoto's clothes and not his. That was one less thing to worry about, anyway, and besides, who ever heard of a right hand with cat fur on his suit? That's right, no one.
So he had all kinds of reasons to resolutely ignore the sight of Yamamoto stretched out on his bunk with Uri curled on his stomach, when he came back from the library in the evening. Really, he was just waiting for the stupid cat to get distracted and take a flying leap off Yamamoto's stomach to chase a shadow or something. Maybe, if he was lucky, the stupid thing would disembowel Yamamoto when he did. Had to be a matter of time, right? Right.
And whenever he went to turn off the light in the evening—because of course Yamamoto always went to sleep first, the inconsiderate jerk—Hayato ignored the way the two of them were curled up together, both of them snoring softly.
The bunks were pretty narrow, anyway. It was just as well that he didn't have to share with that space-hog of a cat.
Box animals weren't supposed to exist outside of their boxes unless called for by their owner's Flames. Nor were they supposed to need to eat, be inclined to shred things of their own accord, or shit and piss. They were box animals, for God's sake.
"Fucking cats," Hayato said, savagely, and scrubbed harder at the wall, hoping beyond hope that he had been quick enough to catch this, and that they weren't going to be stuck with the smell lingering.
Hayato was sure the damn thing had chosen his side of the room to mark, too. On purpose. The little bastard. "You should have marked Yamamoto's crap," he told Uri. "He's the one you like so much."
Uri ignored him and placidly continued to groom his ears.
Hayato would not have believed it of himself if someone had told him he could sink so low as to attempt bribery. Nonetheless, here he was with a can of tuna that he'd snuck out of the pantry, offering it to the cat on the sly.
Uri looked at him, and then at the plate. He leaned over it, sniffing the tuna delicately.
Hayato held his breath.
Uri looked at him again, eyes slitted, and then turned his back, quite pointedly, and stuck one hind leg straight up so he could groom himself.
Hayato groaned in disbelief. "You're choosing your own asshole over tuna?"
Uri continued to ignore him, and didn't touch the tuna, even after Hayato had retreated from the room, in case Uri wanted to eat in private. When he came back a couple of hours later, the tuna was untouched and had started to dry out, and the whole room reeked.
Stupid prissy cat. Hayato disposed of the tuna and retreated to his bunk to read, wondering what the hell his future self had been thinking, having such a stupid box animal.
When Yamamoto came in later and asked, nose wrinkled, "Why does it smell in here?" Hayato growled and threw his pillow.
Even the fact that he had to go retrieve it after that couldn't quite erase the satisfaction of pegging Yamamoto square in the face with it. (Nor could the sight of Uri wrestling with Yamamoto's hand, chewing on one knuckle and mock-disemboweling his forearm, if only because Uri didn't seem to be all that good at the "mock" part of things.)
The only good thing Hayato could say about his future self (who was apparently incompetent enough to let the Tenth be killed, and had shitty taste in box weapons besides) was that he hadn't lost the habit of keeping extensive notes. It would have been nice, though, if he'd managed to pick up the habit of labeling things sometime in the next ten years—if they got out of this alive and managed to get home again, Hayato promised himself to work on his organizational skills. Presumably he'd thank himself for it. Or again. Or whatever; thinking about what this was doing to his timeline made his head hurt.
In any case, he was starting to get a grip on the Sistema CAI—and okay, maybe he was saying so himself, but it looked pretty ingenious to Hayato. He was rummaging through his future self's notes and files, looking for anything else about it he might have missed, when he found the notes on the box animals themselves.
Hayato hesitated over them for a good minute or two, his attention already caught by the first sentence—Do we choose our box animals, or they us?—before he marked that page to come back to later, after the raid on Irie's base. There would be time, then.
He hoped, anyway.
The middle of a fight with Gamma was a hell of a time to be surprised by Uri's metamorphosis into a fighting form with actual offensive abilities. Hayato, however, prided himself on his ability to multitask—there was plenty of opportunity to eye Uri in disbelief while kicking Gamma's ass at the same time.
Hayato was pretty sure that he wasn't imagining the smug look in Uri's eyes, either.
Fucking cats.
"Where are you going?" Yamamoto asked when Hayato stopped and backtracked. Idiot; Hayato had wanted to be subtle about it. It figured that Yamamoto would ruin that for him.
He flapped a hand at Yamamoto. "Go on ahead, I'll catch up," he said. "Thought of something I need to pick up."
Was it his imagination, or had Yamamoto's eyes flicked past him to the shop window that had caught his attention? "I can come with you."
"No, someone should stay and watch the Tenth," Hayato hedged, keeping a wary eye on the group ahead, lest they realize that the two of them weren't keeping up. "I'll just be a minute, I promise."
Yamamoto nodded, eventually, looking reluctant about it. "Just don't make Tsuna worry." He turned and loped after the group before Hayato could yell at him about people who were able to take care of themselves just fine thanks, and people who lived in glass houses.
Hayato contented himself with grumbling about it until Yamamoto was safely away, and then ducked into the pet shop.
Uri was still a pain in the fucking ass, but Hayato figured he'd probably earned some catnip.
Augmentation: Kyouko/Haru with implications of Tsuna/Gokudera and eventual Tsuna/Kyouko/Gokudera/Haru. 1326 words.
Kyouko and Haru are the first to say that they love their men dearly, as they should and they do: Sawada Tsunayoshi and Gokudera Hayato are the best of men, honorable and good-hearted and noble, not to mention tenderhearted and infinitely good to Kyouko and Haru. Kyouko and Haru love them both beyond the telling of it and rest secure in the knowledge that they are equally loved in return.
However, this does not preclude their respective men from having certain shortcomings. Tsuna is a worrier, fears the worst, and is prone to being overprotective as a result. He tries, sometimes, to shelter Kyouko from the darker sides of life in the mafia. Kyouko regards this tendency of his with exasperation, sometimes fond and sometimes irritated, and has been working on getting him past this for years. Hayato, of course, has a similar impulse, though in his case the way he tries to protect the ones he cares most about is by pushing them away lest they be hurt due to their proximity to him. Haru, of course, is generally too stubborn to let him get away with such shenanigans.
There's also the fact that many of the things Tsuna and Hayato do are things neither Kyouko nor Haru can participate in, which leaves the two of them to find their own way to work with and for the Vongola. They don't mind this; they are resourceful women and have made places for themselves that suit them well. They get by well enough and are pleased with the work that they do—though Haru does sometimes wish, wistfully, that she could just go shoot some of the people who make her work difficult, and Kyouko sometimes dreams of setting certain particularly irritating people on fire. But life among the Vongola demands certain compromises. They both knew that going in and the fact of it no longer troubles them too much.
And, too, there is the small matter of how Hayato is completely in love with his boss. That little fact took a little more adjusting to than some of the other issues of life in the Vongola, because Tsuna has a big heart. He can't help responding to his people, especially when they give of themselves as completely as Hayato does. If not for that they probably would have gone on as many do, quietly ignoring the elephant in the room, creating their own individual happinesses or quietly suffering their respective miseries, except, of course, that doing that would have been stupid when there were alternatives. Kyouko might sometimes wish that Tsuna would curb some of his more overprotective instincts, but she would not wish to change who he is.
And Tsuna is a man who will not leave any of those he loves without an answer.
Haru had more reservations—doubts, perhaps, about where her place would be if Hayato turned to Tsuna—which were not unnatural. But the thing about Hayato is that when he does permit himself to love, he does so loyally. He and Haru connected well before Kyouko (with a certain amount of fond exasperation) told Tsuna that she didn't mind if he felt like he needed to take his right hand to bed, as long as it was okay with Haru.
Kyouko always has been the practical one—not necessarily about business things, of course, though she has a far better grip on the Vongola's business than most people outside Tsuna's inner circle really suspect, but where people and their hearts are concerned. She was the one to talk Haru through her insecurities, too, pointing out the way Hayato lights up whenever Haru comes into a room, the same way he does for Tsuna. She doesn't mind being the practical one; someone needs to talk them through it, and besides, she likes for the people she loves to be happy.
So the boys have each other and it's good for them both, even if the boss-and-guardian thing they do with each other sometimes shuts Kyouko and Haru out a bit. It's okay, though; the boys do their own thing and Kyouko and Haru get on with their own business. The way Haru puts it, there's no point in hanging around all the time waiting for the boys to leave off whatever they're doing in order to pay attention to them, after all. They've both seen where that leads to, just from watching some of the other women of the mafia, women who seem more like accessories than wives to their men, and they want none of it. They will be self-sufficient and pursue their own happiness.
Tsuna is prone to blushing violently whenever he thinks about the fact that Kyouko and Haru have a relationship parallel to his and Hayato's, and Hayato is even worse. Even so, there's the faintest hint of speculation lurking at the back of their eyes whenever the topic comes up. Kyouko supposes that's natural; she and Haru have had fairly lengthy conversations speculating about what the boys get up to, conversations fueled in part by Haru's collection of BL manga. But, and this is the important part, what Kyouko and Haru do with each other isn't for the boys' sake, either for their titillation or to let them off the hook for the times when they're so busy holding the Family together that they have to let their attention to their families lapse a bit. What Kyouko and Haru have is for them, for each other, an augmentation of what they have with the boys rather than a supplement. It is not for anyone's satisfaction but her own that Kyouko invites Haru to her bed, and vice versa.
And it is satisfying. That was, perhaps, the only thing Kyouko had not been entirely certain of when she'd first proposed the idea to Haru—who was her friend and whom she loved dearly, of course, but who didn't exactly possess the configuration of tender bits Kyouko was accustomed to desiring. But Haru is Kyouko's best friend for a reason and was quick to lay that particular concern to rest.
Haru is aggressive in bed, pushier than Tsuna, and was willing to press herself against Kyouko from the very first, to kiss Kyouko breathless and then help her slide her clothes off, to run her hands all over Kyouko's body—knowing hands, ones that knew exactly where to linger because their owner knew what felt best from the inside out. Haru had been the one to push Kyouko down against the pillows and trace her mouth over Kyouko's breasts and then kiss her way lower, running her mouth along Kyouko's stomach and thighs before settling between them to stroke her lips and tongue against Kyouko. She was absolutely fearless about it, absolutely ruthless, too, and took Kyouko to pieces that first time with something very like efficiency, leaving Kyouko spread out against the sheets, stunned and gasping in the aftermath of it.
And Kyouko is, perhaps, just a very little bit competitive. After a beginning like that, she could hardly do anything else but respond in kind by reaching for Haru to touch her until Haru was limp and panting against the sheets, writing around Kyouko's fingers and under her mouth.
Haru is noisy in bed; Kyouko likes the way she can make Haru cry out by pressing her fingers into Haru and stroking them at just the right angle, and the gasping, breathless sounds Haru makes when she's arched over Kyouko, coming apart on Kyouko's tongue. She may have been uncertain of this thing with Haru at first, but she's long since forgotten that.
Which is just as well. There are enough things in their lives that are difficult without this being difficult, too. And, though Kyouko would never admit it to anyone but Haru, she's glad that they have each other, because sometimes it's good to have someone she can rely on who isn't Tsuna.
Recruitment Opportunity: The one where the Varia recruits Bianchi. 1698 words.
The crisis was dealt with, everything over but the cleaning up—and boy, she was not looking forward to that—thanks to Tsuna and his apparently inexhaustible supply of optimism and that heart of his. Bianchi, finally off duty for the night, felt that the averted crisis was worth a celebratory drink. She was thinking about Tsuna, and the Vongola First, and relative strength when Squalo slid himself into the seat across from hers.
Bianchi paused with her glass of wine halfway to her mouth and gazed across the table at him—and that was Xanxus, too, looking at the bar behind Squalo and glaring at the bartender (who looked both confused and terrified). Well. This was interesting, in the old Chinese curse sense of the word. She set the glass down but did not let go of it. Simple enough to transmute it to acid, and she was willing to gamble that she could get it in Squalo's eyes if he moved. That left Xanxus at the bar, but there were all those lovely bottles of alcohol lined up in neat rows that she might be able to use to her advantage before he tried to kill her.
That wasn't much of a plan, said the Reborn who lived in her head. Needs must and beggars can't be choosers, she said back, silently, while she raised her eyebrows at Squalo. "My goodness," she said. "The Varia. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Squalo smiled, sort of, more of a twitch of thin lips than anything else. He looked tired around the eyes—hell, Bianchi felt pretty sure she had dark circles under her own eyes after these past few days and couldn't fault him that. "Wanted to talk to you."
"Here I am," Bianchi said, projecting a calm she didn't entirely feel. "Talk."
That got her something that was closer to an actual smile—she saw a flash of Squalo's teeth, anyway—as he leaned back in his chair and hooked an arm over the back of it. "Straight to the point. All right. The old man's had you guarding the brat these past three years, yeah?"
Bianchi let her eyes narrow while she affected a sulky moue. "I'm not concerned with that kid," she said, throwing in a contemptuous sniff for good measure. "I only put up with him because darling Reborn is his tutor." She regretted turning the wine; a good slug of Shiraz would go well to wash the taste of that out of her mouth. Christ Jesus, but she was tired of that cover story.
"Right," Squalo drawled, managing to pack a whole lot of tolerant amusement into it as he did. His eyes didn't match his tone. If anything, they looked almost approving. "Must have gotten mixed up."
"You must have," Bianchi agreed.
"Guess so." Squalo tapped his fingers against the table, one-two-three-four. On five, the downbeat of his thumb, he said, "Reborn's not going to be doing that for very much longer."
That was true enough. Tsuna was creeping up on his eighteenth birthday and the Ninth was making pretty serious noises about not letting him leave for Japan again, even though the dust was settling. Tsuna's protests about that were getting more and more perfunctory. As Reborn had said just the other day, it wouldn't be long now.
Bianchi lifted a shoulder. "Possibly not."
"So what are you going to do after the old man cuts dear little Reborn loose?" Squalo inquired, injecting just enough irony into it to be very, very clear that her cover was more holes than not, far as the Varia were concerned.
"We're still talking that over," Bianchi murmured, maybe a shade more dry about it than she strictly should have been, but really. She was sick of that cover. "Why do you ask?"
He tapped his fingers on the table again, one-two-three-four, watching her the whole while. "Because I was wondering what your plans were for after you finish this job up." He paused, deliberate, and then corrected himself. "I mean, after Reborn's job finishes up."
Hate, hate, hated that cover. Bianchi showed him her teeth. "We're still talking that over. Like I just said."
Squalo merely snorted. "Please. If nothing else, it's the twenty-first century. You're a free agent whether you admit to it or not. Now. What the hell are you going to do with yourself after the brat finishes getting his act together?"
The temptation to throw wine-turned-acid in his face nearly overwhelmed Bianchi, but she'd been trained too well to surrender to it. Besides, Xanxus was leaning against the bar, glass in hand, watching their corner. "I suppose I'm keeping my options open," she said, trying not to grit it out from behind clenched teeth too obviously. "As one does." That was what being freelance meant. "What's it to you?"
Squalo smiled a little wider, lounging in his seat like the arrogant fucker he was. "I like to keep an eye on the rising talent, that's what. Get a sense of their quality."
Bianchi did not permit herself to show any reaction to that, not her confusion nor the sudden switch her brain made into high gear. Quality had a peculiar meaning in the mouths of the Varia, the kind of quality that made the Varia the legend it was, the team of assassins wielded by the Vongola, the knife in the dark and the perfectly executed hits that baffled the survivors with how they'd been done. And here was the Varia's second-in-command, speaking of rising talent and quality and her plans for the future. "I suppose that's the prudent thing to do," she said, mouth dry.
"Yes," he said, watching her. "Recruits have to come from somewhere."
Transmuting the wine had been too hasty a decision. Bianchi really wanted a drink now, something normal to steady her. "Recruits," she said as Squalo watched her, his pale gaze never wavering, and he didn't seem to be laughing (or sneering) any more. "Are you seriously sitting here, trying to recruit me to the Varia? Surely you must be joking."
Squalo gazed back, bland enough that he could have almost passed for a bank manager. "Thought I should beat the rush."
Something that was first cousin to a laugh filled Bianchi's throat. "The rush. Right." No one rushed to hire the freelancers, not unless they needed someone either expendable or good enough that he (or, sometimes, much more rarely, she) was so good that relying on a Family connection wasn't necessary for survival.
"The de la Stella have adjusted their rankings," Squalo said. "They put you second now. Only the Asp ranks higher, and you know that he's almost ninety now. And retired."
Bianchi permitted herself a blink in reaction to that news—being, effectively speaking, the top-ranked poisoner in the world was worth a moment's surprise and pleasure—and exhaled. "Really."
"The de la Stella never lie," Squalo pointed out.
So they didn't. Which suggested—
Bianchi pushed that treacherous thought aside. Unwarranted pride in one's abilities was the single leading killer of hitmen, freelance or Family-affiliated. "And I only have your word for it at all." The smile felt tight on her mouth, forced. "What's your actual angle, Squalo? I'm not in the mood for games."
Tap-tap-tap-tap went his fingers while he stared back at her. "Just think about it," he said, abrupt, and stood.
"Sure," Bianchi said, leaning back just enough to meet his eyes as he towered over her.
He looked down at her, maybe frustrated—she waited to see whether he was going to do any yelling—but turned away from her, walking out as silently as he'd come. At the bar, Xanxus knocked back the remainder of his drink and followed him.
Bianchi didn't neutralize the acid in her glass until they had been gone for a good ten minutes, during which time she glared around the bar furiously enough that even the half-drunk barflies didn't dare swing by her table to hit on her. When it seemed likely that they really had gone, she left as well, any inclination she might have had to celebrate Tsuna's victory long since gone.
It seemed that it was time she talked to Reborn.
The annoying thing about Reborn—one of the annoying things about Reborn, of which there were many—was that there were times when he simply could not be found, usually when one happened to want him most. Bianchi suspected him of doing it deliberately, perhaps aided by something like his own version of creepy insight. She hunted all over the Vongola house for him, much good that did her, and checked his favorite haunts, and ended the evening in bad temper all around, thanks to Squalo and Reborn alike. It wasn't much improved by a night's sleep or finding Reborn at last, late the next morning, even though the time had given her a chance to think.
He listened to her précis of the conversation, impassive enough. "What I can't figure out is what they're doing," Bianchi finished and waited for his opinion.
"Doing?" Reborn inquired, sounding more like he was laughing than Bianchi thought was strictly warranted.
"You know perfectly well what I mean." Bianchi frowned at him, annoyed by his smile and the cock-sure way he sipped his espresso in the morning sun. "Tsuna's confirmation is coming up fast. Xanxus has to be planning something for it."
"And you think so highly of yourself that you assume you must play a role in that plan?"
Reborn was nearly the only person who could still make her flush, hot and embarrassed. "Maybe it is arrogance," she retorted, "but honestly, what else could it actually be?"
Reborn didn't answer that. He set his demitasse in its saucer and hopped down from his seat. "I'll leave you to figure that out. I have a meeting."
Bianchi waited until he was out of the room to sock a frustrated punch against one of the pillows adorning the couch. "A fat lot of good you are," she muttered, before going to the gym to work out the rest of her frustration on a proper punching bag.
Creatures of the Night: the one where Bianchi is a vampire and Dino is a hunter. 2291 words.
The first really coherent thought Dino had once he'd groped his way back out of unconsciousness was that Romario was never going to let him hear the end of this. "Boss," he would say, clearly exasperated and just as clearly laughing behind the sternness, "what is the first rule of hunting?"
"Never let your guard down," Dino murmured, answering the imagined question. His mouth tasted dry, not foul; he hadn't been out for long.
"Generally words to live by." The voice startled him; he hadn't heard anyone in the room with him and hadn't seen anyone—but then, why would he have done? "That something you're planning on remembering?" She was behind him, but she stepped into view as she spoke, prowling around the chair that held him, all the little pretences and illusions that had made her seem to be what she was not—human—stripped away to show the predator beneath. She was dangling his belt with its assortment of useful implements from one negligent hand, and stared down at him with her lips curled up at the corners.
It almost looked like a smile.
Dino stared back as defiantly as he could manage considering that she'd whammied him, stripped him of his weapons, and tied his hands and feet to a sturdy old chair. "What the hell," he said, "your hands were warm."
"Yes, they were, weren't they?" Her smile stretched her lips wider; that the trick, whatever it had been, had worked clearly pleased her. Even now, knowing her for what she was, Dino couldn't help the way his pulse sped up in response.
(He didn't even want to imagine what Romario would have to say about that.)
"It was the coffee," he blurted out in order to distract himself. She'd had a cup of coffee, she'd held it between her hands while they'd talked, even raised it to those red, red lips from time to time. "You were drinking it!"
Christ, she'd been note-perfect, too. He'd never seen a vampire so good at seeming human.
She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "I always was fond of a good cup of coffee."
Dino thought he might have been gaping at her; that wasn't supposed to be possible. His confusion seemed to amuse her, because she laughed, bright, throwing her head back to show the long, creamy line of her throat the way she had before, when she'd still been pretending to be human and had been luring him in with that façade.
"What are you?" he asked, discomfited by how little difference the lack of artifice was making now.
That cut off her laughter and her smile. She looked down at him, her eyes gone cool. "That is an astonishingly rude question."
He met that gaze as squarely as he could. "They left a few rough edges on me when they were working on me." It wasn't strictly true, but he was just off-balance enough that it was effectively the truth. And banter wasn't going to get them—him—anywhere. "So, what. You bring me here to kill me?" Wherever here was; he didn't recall anything of the trip and couldn't tell much by the furnishings of the room, which were vaguely antique and residential.
"I haven't ruled it out yet." She moved then, astonishingly fast, and dropped his belt, careless of the flashbangs and the vials of volatile oils as she went for another chair, this one ladder-backed, and set it before his. She planted herself in it, straddling the seat and folding her arms across its back so she could stare at him, eye-to-eye. The pose meant that the demure grey skirt she wore rode up far enough that Dino could see just enough thigh and a glimpse of deeper shadows to make his mouth run dry. (God, what Romario said was true: his love of the ladies was going to be the death of him.)
She ignored his response and fixed night-dark eyes on him. "You said you were looking for someone. Is that true?"
Dino stared at her, not sure why she was asking—not sure where any of this was going. He'd been hunting for years and had never heard of a vampire behaving like this one.
She waited for his response, apparently with all the patience of in the world, or of a cat waiting at a mouse hole. "And if I am?" he said finally, not seeing any arm in confirming it and not entirely sure why she hadn't just whammied him to get the truth.
"So am I." Her tone was matter-of-fact, though her eyes were burning darker, "And peculiarly enough, my search crossed yours." She tipped her head to the side. "Do they still teach hunters that there's no such thing as a coincidence?"
Dino almost winced with the memory of how many times he'd heard that admonition (usually accompanied with a smack to the head). "They do." His fingers itched to rub the back of his head, because the fact that she knew that raised a lot of questions—hunters were nearly as secretive as the prey they hunted. "Why?"
"Who are you looking for?"
Dino pressed his lips together, studying her. "Who are you looking for?" he countered.
She didn't respond right away. When she did, it was by parting her lips, pulling them back and showing her fangs, long and white. Dino was suddenly acutely aware of how securely his bonds were tied. "I believe I asked you first."
Dino weighed his options and the fact that there were no coincidences. "Another hunter. An apprentice hunter," he corrected himself. "He went out a few days ago and never came back." It likely meant the worst—Tsuna was almost certainly dead—but one did not let a brother hunter disappear or die without doing for the vampire that had done for him.
She tucked her fangs away. "I'm looking for a brother, too."
There were so many things wrong with that statement that Dino hardly knew where to begin. "Vampires don't have brothers," he blurted, because it was true: all the lore insisted that they were solitary creatures not given to forming connections, which was why the ones who hunted them forged the bonds they did—it gave them a strength that the vampires could never possess or understand.
She raised a single perfect eyebrow. "My goodness, do they still perpetuate that nonsense?"
Dino found that he was staring at her, his jaw hanging loose.
She lifted her chin from where it rested on her folded arms and rearranged her hands, clasping them before her. "I'm looking for my brother. He disappeared a few nights ago." Her tone was measured. "The last anyone saw of him, he was heading downtown."
She paused there, perhaps expectantly, but Dino wasn't sure he recognized the significance of her point. When he didn't do anything more than raise his eyebrows, she sighed. "Don't they teach you boys anything anymore? Wait, what am I even asking, of course they don't. It's easier that way." She grimaced and unclasped her hands, flicking her fingers like she was casting something aside. "There are vampires and vampires, hunter boy, and the clan that controls the downtown district are the kind the rest of us would prefer to let you boys wipe out, if only we could trust you to know what it is you're doing."
"You don't have a very high opinion of hunters, do you?" Dino asked, more for the sake of getting a moment to assimilate that. Clans of vampires? Hoo, boy. If she was telling the truth—a big if, that—that put a whole new spin on a lot of things. Could be a lie, of course, though he wasn't sure to what ends. Yet.
She just snorted, a sound distinctly at odds with the elegance of her appearance. "You noticed. That puts you one up on most of your brother hunters." She said it like the words tasted bad in her mouth. "No. I don't think much of your little packs of thugs and bully boys. I prefer not to think of you at all if I can help it, but needs must. And I need to find my brother."
Oh—hey, maybe it was time to get to the point. "I get the sense that I'm supposed to offer to help with that, but I'm not sure I see why." There, that was nice and clear.
She smiled at him. "You mean aside from the fact that I'll just kill you if you don't?"
And there was the thing he'd been doing his best not to own up to since the moment he'd first come swimming back up to consciousness and realized that he'd been completely disarmed, tied to a chair, and subjected to a vampire's nonexistent mercy. There was no way this was going to end well for him. Dino took a breath, looked that prospect square in the face, and said, "Yeah. Aside from that."
The shape of her smile changed subtly, turning thoughtful. "I suppose you've got balls to go along with that half a brain and pretty face." She nodded like this satisfied her. Maybe it did, considering the backhanded compliment.
"Thanks. I think."
"Don't thank me yet." She straightened up and ran a hand through the loose waves of her hair, brushing it back from her eyes. "The reason you're going to help me is that when he was last seen, my brother wasn't alone. He had a junior hunter by the name of Sawada Tsunayoshi with him."
"That's not possible." Really, it wasn't possible. A hunter wouldn't go anywhere with a vampire—not peacefully, not of his own volition, so—"Somebody must have been mistaken. There's no way that could have happened."
She shook her head. "I trust my source. He says that's what he saw, so that's what he saw."
"So why would your brother put a whammy on Tsuna and take him to the downtown district?" Had to be a whammy, if it had really happened—there were no other possibilities.
"It wasn't a whammy." She smirked at him. "You boys might not be able to tell the difference, but we can. Trust me, the baby hunter was there because he chose to be. I'm looking forward to shaking the reason out of my brother."
There was something in the way she said that which made it sound less like hyperbole than a promise. Which was a thought that—Dino took a breath, because the lore had some things to say here. "What makes you think that they aren't dead?" Tsuna at the least, assuming he was with a vampire. Assuming she was telling the truth about the downtown district and the clan that held it. Hell, they'd all pretty much assumed that Tsuna was lost to them. He was the only one still looking, and that was only because their mutual teacher was quietly ignoring what he'd been getting up to.
"I would know." There was no compromise in her voice, no possibility that she might be wrong. "He's not. The baby hunter might be, maybe, I don't know. But perhaps not. Until you see the body, there's no reason to disallow the possibility, and the lore be damned."
Hope was the most dangerous of emotions; a weight that had been lying on Dino's shoulders since Tsuna'd missed his first check-in lifted before he could stop it. "You know an awful lot about the lore for a vampire," he said while he struggled to hold onto his common sense in the face of the outrageous hope that Tsuna—naïve, idealistic Tsuna—might not be dead yet.
"I like silly things." The way she watched him might have been sympathetic. "You in?"
Dino got a grip on himself. "I don't even know what you want from me."
She straightened her spine, and a part of him couldn't help noting the good things that did for her figure. "A cover. A hunter like you walks into the right place downtown after dark, it's going to stir up the folks there enough to let me find my brother."
Dino parsed that. "I'm going to be bait."
Her teeth flashed as she laughed. "More or less. Bait with backup, though. You boys do still watch each other's backs, I assume."
Which, yes, they did, but—"What do I get out of this?"
She raised an eyebrow. "To find Sawada, or find out what he was doing and why. What more do you need?"
"Ideally? To go home still breathing after it's all over."
She brushed a hand through the air, dismissing that. "Breathing is overrated. You'd get to do some damage to a nasty set of vampires, too. Don't forget that."
"How could I forget?" Dino leaned his head back against the chair. "I could have gone into business," he mused to the ceiling. "Been an accountant. Instead I chose this."
"You don't choose hunting. Hunting chooses you." When he looked down, her expression was sober, the way the oldest of their hunters tended to be when they spoke about the job. "Are you going to cooperate or not?"
The thing was, it wasn't even a choice. Not when there was till a chance for Tsuna. But before he gave in and acknowledged that—"Why don't you just whammy me, if all you need is bait?"
"I told you. We can tell the difference." She shrugged. "And it's too much trouble to keep up." That was all she seemed to care to say, because she raised her eyebrows at him. "Well?"
"I hope Tsuna appreciates this when I'm wringing his neck," Dino said.
She smiled. "Probably not. Brothers are very ungrateful creatures."
"Grad School Is Hell: in which Dino is a hapless graduate student. 2034 words.
"Congratulations," his graduate coordinator said at the end of his first year, handing a slip of paper across his desk to Dino. "Your peers, in their infinite wisdom, have elected you to represent them in the august body of the graduate student senate. Meetings are every other Friday, three to five, in the second-floor gallery of the administration building. If you skip, graduate students in the English department will become ineligible to apply for conference stipends from the graduate college, so don't skip."
Dino was still finishing up his first year of doctoral work at that point and had not yet fully realized the depths of evil to which their department's graduate coordinator could stoop or the full mind-numbing potential inherent in an interdisciplinary meeting of the minds. Consequently he felt rather flattered and honored to have been elected, and said, "Thank you, sir. I'll do my best."
Reborn looked across the desk at him, fixing him with that unnerving, unblinking stare that terrified undergraduates and graduate students alike. "Do better than that," he said, and pointed at the door. "Now go. You still owe me a seminar paper."
"Yessir," Dino said and went to wrestle with the British modernists some more. He managed to eke his twenty-five pages out the rise of fascism and dystopian fiction just in time to print out the hard copy and stuff it in Reborn's mailbox before the mailroom closed for the day, and thought no more about the honor bestowed upon him by his fellow grad students. After the dystopia paper, it was on to the other seminar paper, the one for Skull about queered heterosexuality in Middlesex, and the annotated bibliography for Lal Mirch's seminar on contemporary literary criticism (companion to the fall semester's survey of the history of English studies, from Matthew Arnold to Slavoj Žižek). By the time he had finally emailed the annotated bib and its essay off, Dino had just enough wherewithal to drag himself to his bed and faceplant himself in it.
He spent the first week of the break between the spring semester and the start of the summer session alternating between his bed and his couch, where he stared blearily at cable marathons of What Not to Wear, Mythbusters, and Pawn Stars while his brain slowly rebooted itself from the end-of-semester frenzy. He was just beginning to be able to think in coherent sentences again by the point it was time to pack a bag and drive down to his parents' house for a flying visit. His mother fussed over him the whole time ("Don't you ever eat anything up there?" she demanded as she put another tray of cookies in the oven, and Dino had to confess that he subsisted on coffee, nerves, and multivitamins during the last third of every semester) and his father gave his tattoos long looks ("I don't know how you think you're going to find a job looking like a thug, son.") in between asking him to take a look at this rash he had ("For the last time, Dad, not that kind of doctor!"). Which did not make for a restful visit, however much he loved his folks.
Then it was back to campus for summer classes, French bootcamp for desperate grad students (damned language requirement, double-damned undergrad institution without a language requirement, thrice-damned self for not having had the sense to acquire a second language every time Nonna had offered to teach him), linguistics (Jesus Christ in heaven, linguistics; Lal Mirch was exponentially more terrifying when teaching in her area of specialty), and 602: Introduction to Pedagogy, the seminar that every grad student with a teaching assistantship had to endure before the university would unleash him or her on the hapless undergrads taking gen ed courses.
Dr. Timoteo Vongola taught the English department's offering of 602 and presided over the drowsy afternoons on the fourth floor of Memorial Hall, lecturing in a large classroom that had a single ceiling fan and one air conditioning unit in the window to combat the heat of a Midwestern summer. Dr. Vongola paid no attention to the heat or the assembled grad students who struggled not to fall asleep while he attempted to guide them from being budding would-be teachers to full-blown blossoms of writing pedagogy. It took exactly one lesson for every one of them to see that Dr. Vongola (who had enough publications on his CV to literally bury any one of them, knew anyone and everyone who was worth knowing in the field of literature, and was both older than dirt and long overdue for either an honorable retirement or a discreet sidestep into administration) had decided what the teaching of writing should be sometime in the late seventies and had not changed his mind since.
Dino put his syllabus together as conscientiously as he could nonetheless and submitted it to Dr. Vongola. He received it back, the pages redolent with the smell of pipe tobacco—Dr. Vongola's office reeked of tobacco smoke in defiance of the campus ordinances prohibiting smoking inside the building and repeated postings to the English department's list-serv reminding them that smoking was prohibited inside campus buildings—with a kindly suggestion that he revise it to be more in line with the sample syllabus the good professor had handed out the very first day of class.
"Don't worry," his new officemate said when Dino unburdened himself of his frustrations. "He tells everybody to match the sample syllabus." He lifted another set of books out of the box he was unpacking. "You don't have to actually do it."
"Are you sure?" Dino asked, feeling pretty doubtful about Squalo's air of breezy assurance.
"Sure I'm sure." Squalo added the books to the shelf he'd claimed, stuffing his copy of the blue-bound Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism next to the Riverside Shakespeare. He eyed the way the shelf was bowing in the middle, shrugged, and added the Norton Anthology of English Literature (Major Authors), stuffed Eagleton's Literary Theory on top of that, and wedged Gilbert and Gubar in with them as well. The brackets groaned; Dino held his breath, but the shelf stayed put in defiance of all expectations. Squalo dusted his hands briskly. "I asked Colonnello about it. He's the writing program administrator anyway, and just between you and me, I'm pretty sure he'd much rather we didn't follow the sample syllabus."
Dino automatically shot a glance at their office door, but it was firmly shut. Still, the walls in their hall were like tissue paper, so he lowered his voice in deference to that. "Really?"
Squalo rolled his eyes and resumed unpacking. "Duh. Everyone knows that he's been angling to get 602 out of Vongola's hands ever since the department hired him, but Vongola won't give it up. Colonnello's going to have to pry it out of his cold, dead hands. Probably literally." He reached for the drawer pull of the desk—early 50s industrial, by the looks of it—and Dino clapped his hands over his ears at the unholy wail it made as he dragged it open. "Jesus, way to shell out for quality here, guys."
"At least we have an office of our own," Dino said, looking around the tiny claustrophobic space of it. "We could have been stuffed in a basement room with all the other GAs." As far as graduate student offices went, this one had a lot going for it: it was above-ground, there were only two of them occupying it, and they even had a window with a lovely view of the faculty parking lot. (Grad students got the same permits as undergrads, and had to either suck it up and submit to the vagaries of the campus shuttle system or circle the commuter student parking lots in the back of beyond in hopes that they would be able to find an empty parking spot. The university steadfastly refused to consider building a parking garage to accommodate the parking overflow; apparently such a structure would ruin the charming architectural integrity of the campus skyline.)
"I guess." Squalo dumped a handful of red pens in the drawer and followed that with boxes of paperclips and binder clips, dry erase markers, staples, and chalk. "So what schedule did they stick you with, anyway?"
Dino groaned at the reminder. "God. Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Eight a.m."
Squalo had the decency to whistle and look sympathetic. "Ouch. Sorry, man, that sucks."
"Don't I know it," Dino sighed. "How about you?"
Squalo suddenly became very busy with the things he was unpacking and the way he was carefully lining up his stapler and three-hole punch and desk caddy in precise formation. He muttered something at his desk, indistinct.
But not indistinct enough. "I hate you," Dino said. "You asshole, how the hell did you land a Tuesday-Thursday afternoon section? I thought they didn't ever give those to the first-time GAs."
"Who's a first-time GA?" Squalo retorted. "I taught all four semesters of my MA, thank you so very much." He grinned then, sharp as a fox. "Maybe the office just likes me better than they like you."
"I still hate you," Dino told him, annoyed. He shook his head. "Anyway. So when are you going to have your office hours?" God knew there wasn't room for more than three people in this room.
"Oh, whenever." Squalo deposited his tape dispenser on the desk and began breaking the box down. "Not like it matters. None of them will bother showing up till around midterms anyway."
"...right," Dino said. "I figured I'd have mine on Mondays after class," but Squalo wasn't really listening.
"More important question," he said, stuffing the box into the trashcan. "I have a mini-fridge I can bring in. You have a microwave you can bring in? If not, I was talking to the guys upstairs, and Elena said we could have her microwave now that she's sharing an office with Spade. But the real important thing is this." He straightened up and fixed Dino with a fierce look. "You can use my coffee maker, but you're going to have to shell out for your own coffee. Got that?"
Dino blinked at him. "If it means that much to you, I guess?"
Squalo snorted. "Damn skippy it does. I've seen you drinking coffee, Cavallone. You're happy with that swill from Starbucks, which is just tragic, really."
"If it gets caffeine into my bloodstream, I don't care what it tastes like," Dino told him, more amused than anything else.
"Tragic," Squalo said again, shaking his head. "And clear evidence that you don't deserve nice things. Bring whatever Folgers crap you want in for yourself and leave my coffee alone."
Dino gave in. "Fine, fine, I won't touch your coffee, if it means that much to you."
This seemed to satisfy Squalo. "All right then," he said as he perched a hip on the corner of his desk and sized Dino up. "As long as we have that settled, this'll work out just fine." He paused and lowered his voice. "I was afraid I was going to get stuck in with Byakuran."
God, Byakuran, their cohort's most annoying member. "Me too," Dino confessed. "Do you know who he ended up with?"
Squalo shrugged. "I'm not sure. I just slipped Nana a gift certificate to the spa downtown as a token of my regard and mentioned that I was worried that I wouldn't be all that compatible with him as an officemate."
Dino stared at him. Squalo looked back, blandly, at least until he snickered. "You are such an asshole," Dino told him, not entirely sure whether he thought Squalo was making that up or not.
"And I have so much fun," Squalo told him, grinning. "So hey, I need to go over to the student union and pick up my parking pass. You wanna come with me?"
"Might as well," Dino agreed, easing himself off his own desk.
"Seriously, though," Squalo said as he navigated his way around the filing cabinet to get to the door. "Thanks for not being Byakuran."
"It's absolutely my pleasure," Dino replied, and they went to pick up their parking permits, laughing the whole way.
So here are some things that I will never actually finish writing, edited up a bit, with closing notes that summarize roughly what would have happened in the rest of the fic, had I finished it. Caveat lector, dear readers: these are things that I am laying to rest because I will not be finishing them.
Competence Kink: in which Yamamoto is very confused. 671 words.
The first time it happened, it came out of nowhere as far as Takeshi was concerned. They were coming back from negotiations with the Pozzo Nero, which had gone about as well as they ever did—that is to say, pretty badly, at least until he and Gokudera had gotten impatient enough to remind the Pozzo Nero who they were dealing with. Gokudera had been unusually silent afterwards, right up until the moment they reached their floor of the hotel and Takeshi had bid him a cheerful goodnight. Then Gokudera stopped short and cursed, low and vicious.
"What?" Takeshi asked, going on the alert, figuring that Gokudera had seen some threat that he hadn't. He couldn't imagine what, precisely, given that this hotel was Vongola territory and practically an annex of the main house, but stranger things had happened.
Gokudera muttered another curse, low and frustrated, and then grabbed Takeshi's sleeve and dragged him into his suite, and slammed the door after them. "Just shut up and don't say anything." He bit off each word as he pushed Takeshi up against the nearest wall.
"What—?" Takeshi didn't mind following orders, provided they made actual sense, which these manifestly didn't.
Gokudera clapped a hand over Takeshi's mouth, calloused and smelling of cordite and cigarettes. "Shut up!" They were nose-to-nose; Takeshi wasn't one to quail, but at this range Gokudera's glare was almost enough to push him to it. "God, you make me so fucking angry sometimes...!"
Takeshi would have liked to have defended himself—felt nearly honor-bound to do it, in fact—but when Gokudera's hand left his mouth, it was because Gokudera was dropping to his knees and undoing Takeshi's belt and fly. He reached inside and wrapped his hand around Takeshi's cock. Takeshi's demand to know what the heck was going on here, seriously, turned into a strangled moan as the leftover adrenaline from having to pull a gun on Giorgio Pozzo Nero combined with the roughness of Gokudera's hand on him, getting him hard so fast that his head swam. He sagged against the wall, suddenly grateful for its support at his back, and stared down at the top of Gokudera's head and the way Gokudera was glaring at his fist moving on Takeshi's cock, and tried again. "What the hell—?"
"Shut up," Gokudera snapped, with a fierce look up at Takeshi. Then he followed it up by wrapping his mouth around Takeshi's cock and sucking hard, eyes glittering and angry all the while.
Takeshi did the only sensible thing a man could do in the face of an unexpected blowjob: he groaned with the sudden rush of pleasure, so fierce it almost hurt, and let his hips roll into Gokudera's mouth. Gokudera grunted at him and let him do it, and if Takeshi'd had any brain cells left to think with, he'd have been amazed at that. As it was, rational thought was currently beyond him, so Takeshi didn't even try; he just went with it, rocking against Gokudera's mouth and gasping as the heat of it drew him taut, until he groaned an inarticulate warning, just before orgasm crashed down on him.
He leaned against the wall after, light-headed and trembling in the aftermath of the most unexpected orgasm of his life. He was dimly conscious of Gokudera still kneeling, one hand between his own legs, moving fast until he arched and came with another bitten-off curse. His face was flushed and his eyes half-veiled; Takeshi watched him, dazed and wondering. "God," he said, and then, "Gokudera—"
Gokudera was on his feet again before Takeshi could find the words to finish that. He growled, "If you say a fucking word about this, I will end you," as he did up his slacks and belt, and then he was out the door and gone.
He sounded like he meant it, too, and Takeshi was left blinking after him, utterly confused. "No, seriously," Takeshi said to the silence of the room, "what the heck was that?"
The Word file for this was created on 6 October 2009 and last modified 26 June 2010. As I recall, the premise of this one was going to be that Gokudera got seriously turned on every time Yamamoto demonstrated a moment of extreme badassedness and would then proceed to climb him like a tree, thereby confusing the daylights out of Yamamoto. As you can see, I never got any further than the opening scene, but eventually Yamamoto would have figured out what was going on and somehow contrived to deal with Gokudera's case of extreme emotional constipation. And there would have been a lot of smut.
All Cats Are Bastards: How Gokudera and Uri came to understand each other. 1396 words.
It just goddamn figured, Hayato thought, aggrieved, and took another drag off his cigarette. Fucking cats.
At least that idiot Yamamoto had the decency to look embarrassed. "Um," he said, and winced as Uri started kneading his lap.
Yeah, those claws were sharp, weren't they? "Still think all those scratches I got are funny?" Hayato inquired, all sugar and acid.
Not that Yamamoto noticed; he was too busy trying to unhook the claws that were hooked in his jeans. When Hayato had tried that maneuver, it had ended up in a set of parallel scratches a good ten centimeters long. Now that Yamamoto was trying it, Uri just purred louder, and went boneless.
Fucking cats.
"I don't suppose—ow—you could call him—ow, geez!—call him off?" Yamamoto asked, when Uri refused to be budged or to stop kneading.
"No, I think he looks happy where he is," Hayato said, stubbing his cigarette out and swinging himself into the top bunk.
He hoped Uri drew blood. And that Yamamoto would turn out to be deathly allergic to cats, and would have to move to another room, and that he'd be left in peace. Relative peace.
Might as well wish for the moon while he was at it, and for an end to Millefiore, and for Irie and Byakuran to come begging for mercy. Hayato rolled over, the springs of the mattress creaking under him, and ignored the sound of Uri purring for the baseball idiot.
Fucking cats.
It was just a goddamned cat, and Hayato had approximately one billion other things to worry about, including, oh yes, figuring out the Sistema CAI (and avoiding his hag of a sister). Hayato did not have the time to fret over one stupid box cat and its traitorous affection for baseball morons and the girls and noisy little kids and—anyone who wasn't him. No skin off his nose if the four-legged bastard wanted to shed all over Yamamoto's clothes and not his. That was one less thing to worry about, anyway, and besides, who ever heard of a right hand with cat fur on his suit? That's right, no one.
So he had all kinds of reasons to resolutely ignore the sight of Yamamoto stretched out on his bunk with Uri curled on his stomach, when he came back from the library in the evening. Really, he was just waiting for the stupid cat to get distracted and take a flying leap off Yamamoto's stomach to chase a shadow or something. Maybe, if he was lucky, the stupid thing would disembowel Yamamoto when he did. Had to be a matter of time, right? Right.
And whenever he went to turn off the light in the evening—because of course Yamamoto always went to sleep first, the inconsiderate jerk—Hayato ignored the way the two of them were curled up together, both of them snoring softly.
The bunks were pretty narrow, anyway. It was just as well that he didn't have to share with that space-hog of a cat.
Box animals weren't supposed to exist outside of their boxes unless called for by their owner's Flames. Nor were they supposed to need to eat, be inclined to shred things of their own accord, or shit and piss. They were box animals, for God's sake.
"Fucking cats," Hayato said, savagely, and scrubbed harder at the wall, hoping beyond hope that he had been quick enough to catch this, and that they weren't going to be stuck with the smell lingering.
Hayato was sure the damn thing had chosen his side of the room to mark, too. On purpose. The little bastard. "You should have marked Yamamoto's crap," he told Uri. "He's the one you like so much."
Uri ignored him and placidly continued to groom his ears.
Hayato would not have believed it of himself if someone had told him he could sink so low as to attempt bribery. Nonetheless, here he was with a can of tuna that he'd snuck out of the pantry, offering it to the cat on the sly.
Uri looked at him, and then at the plate. He leaned over it, sniffing the tuna delicately.
Hayato held his breath.
Uri looked at him again, eyes slitted, and then turned his back, quite pointedly, and stuck one hind leg straight up so he could groom himself.
Hayato groaned in disbelief. "You're choosing your own asshole over tuna?"
Uri continued to ignore him, and didn't touch the tuna, even after Hayato had retreated from the room, in case Uri wanted to eat in private. When he came back a couple of hours later, the tuna was untouched and had started to dry out, and the whole room reeked.
Stupid prissy cat. Hayato disposed of the tuna and retreated to his bunk to read, wondering what the hell his future self had been thinking, having such a stupid box animal.
When Yamamoto came in later and asked, nose wrinkled, "Why does it smell in here?" Hayato growled and threw his pillow.
Even the fact that he had to go retrieve it after that couldn't quite erase the satisfaction of pegging Yamamoto square in the face with it. (Nor could the sight of Uri wrestling with Yamamoto's hand, chewing on one knuckle and mock-disemboweling his forearm, if only because Uri didn't seem to be all that good at the "mock" part of things.)
The only good thing Hayato could say about his future self (who was apparently incompetent enough to let the Tenth be killed, and had shitty taste in box weapons besides) was that he hadn't lost the habit of keeping extensive notes. It would have been nice, though, if he'd managed to pick up the habit of labeling things sometime in the next ten years—if they got out of this alive and managed to get home again, Hayato promised himself to work on his organizational skills. Presumably he'd thank himself for it. Or again. Or whatever; thinking about what this was doing to his timeline made his head hurt.
In any case, he was starting to get a grip on the Sistema CAI—and okay, maybe he was saying so himself, but it looked pretty ingenious to Hayato. He was rummaging through his future self's notes and files, looking for anything else about it he might have missed, when he found the notes on the box animals themselves.
Hayato hesitated over them for a good minute or two, his attention already caught by the first sentence—Do we choose our box animals, or they us?—before he marked that page to come back to later, after the raid on Irie's base. There would be time, then.
He hoped, anyway.
The middle of a fight with Gamma was a hell of a time to be surprised by Uri's metamorphosis into a fighting form with actual offensive abilities. Hayato, however, prided himself on his ability to multitask—there was plenty of opportunity to eye Uri in disbelief while kicking Gamma's ass at the same time.
Hayato was pretty sure that he wasn't imagining the smug look in Uri's eyes, either.
Fucking cats.
"Where are you going?" Yamamoto asked when Hayato stopped and backtracked. Idiot; Hayato had wanted to be subtle about it. It figured that Yamamoto would ruin that for him.
He flapped a hand at Yamamoto. "Go on ahead, I'll catch up," he said. "Thought of something I need to pick up."
Was it his imagination, or had Yamamoto's eyes flicked past him to the shop window that had caught his attention? "I can come with you."
"No, someone should stay and watch the Tenth," Hayato hedged, keeping a wary eye on the group ahead, lest they realize that the two of them weren't keeping up. "I'll just be a minute, I promise."
Yamamoto nodded, eventually, looking reluctant about it. "Just don't make Tsuna worry." He turned and loped after the group before Hayato could yell at him about people who were able to take care of themselves just fine thanks, and people who lived in glass houses.
Hayato contented himself with grumbling about it until Yamamoto was safely away, and then ducked into the pet shop.
Uri was still a pain in the fucking ass, but Hayato figured he'd probably earned some catnip.
Created 19 May 2009; last modified 7 January 2011. This was supposed to be the fic about how Gokudera and Uri came to understand each other, with a sprinkling of theorizing about the box animals on top, but I think I was waiting to see how the TYL arc would end before moving forward. And then the TYL arc went off the rails and I was too appalled and irritated to continue. Ideally, what would have happened is that Gokudera would have spent some more time rummaging around in TYL!Gokudera's notes about the box animals and would have come to a better understanding of how Uri reflected him and he reflected Uri, and they would have contrived a rapprochement of some sort before the kids got booted back to the past. And there would have been a cute fluffy coda about Gokudera being reunited with Uri sometime after that, once the boxes had been invented again.
Augmentation: Kyouko/Haru with implications of Tsuna/Gokudera and eventual Tsuna/Kyouko/Gokudera/Haru. 1326 words.
Kyouko and Haru are the first to say that they love their men dearly, as they should and they do: Sawada Tsunayoshi and Gokudera Hayato are the best of men, honorable and good-hearted and noble, not to mention tenderhearted and infinitely good to Kyouko and Haru. Kyouko and Haru love them both beyond the telling of it and rest secure in the knowledge that they are equally loved in return.
However, this does not preclude their respective men from having certain shortcomings. Tsuna is a worrier, fears the worst, and is prone to being overprotective as a result. He tries, sometimes, to shelter Kyouko from the darker sides of life in the mafia. Kyouko regards this tendency of his with exasperation, sometimes fond and sometimes irritated, and has been working on getting him past this for years. Hayato, of course, has a similar impulse, though in his case the way he tries to protect the ones he cares most about is by pushing them away lest they be hurt due to their proximity to him. Haru, of course, is generally too stubborn to let him get away with such shenanigans.
There's also the fact that many of the things Tsuna and Hayato do are things neither Kyouko nor Haru can participate in, which leaves the two of them to find their own way to work with and for the Vongola. They don't mind this; they are resourceful women and have made places for themselves that suit them well. They get by well enough and are pleased with the work that they do—though Haru does sometimes wish, wistfully, that she could just go shoot some of the people who make her work difficult, and Kyouko sometimes dreams of setting certain particularly irritating people on fire. But life among the Vongola demands certain compromises. They both knew that going in and the fact of it no longer troubles them too much.
And, too, there is the small matter of how Hayato is completely in love with his boss. That little fact took a little more adjusting to than some of the other issues of life in the Vongola, because Tsuna has a big heart. He can't help responding to his people, especially when they give of themselves as completely as Hayato does. If not for that they probably would have gone on as many do, quietly ignoring the elephant in the room, creating their own individual happinesses or quietly suffering their respective miseries, except, of course, that doing that would have been stupid when there were alternatives. Kyouko might sometimes wish that Tsuna would curb some of his more overprotective instincts, but she would not wish to change who he is.
And Tsuna is a man who will not leave any of those he loves without an answer.
Haru had more reservations—doubts, perhaps, about where her place would be if Hayato turned to Tsuna—which were not unnatural. But the thing about Hayato is that when he does permit himself to love, he does so loyally. He and Haru connected well before Kyouko (with a certain amount of fond exasperation) told Tsuna that she didn't mind if he felt like he needed to take his right hand to bed, as long as it was okay with Haru.
Kyouko always has been the practical one—not necessarily about business things, of course, though she has a far better grip on the Vongola's business than most people outside Tsuna's inner circle really suspect, but where people and their hearts are concerned. She was the one to talk Haru through her insecurities, too, pointing out the way Hayato lights up whenever Haru comes into a room, the same way he does for Tsuna. She doesn't mind being the practical one; someone needs to talk them through it, and besides, she likes for the people she loves to be happy.
So the boys have each other and it's good for them both, even if the boss-and-guardian thing they do with each other sometimes shuts Kyouko and Haru out a bit. It's okay, though; the boys do their own thing and Kyouko and Haru get on with their own business. The way Haru puts it, there's no point in hanging around all the time waiting for the boys to leave off whatever they're doing in order to pay attention to them, after all. They've both seen where that leads to, just from watching some of the other women of the mafia, women who seem more like accessories than wives to their men, and they want none of it. They will be self-sufficient and pursue their own happiness.
Tsuna is prone to blushing violently whenever he thinks about the fact that Kyouko and Haru have a relationship parallel to his and Hayato's, and Hayato is even worse. Even so, there's the faintest hint of speculation lurking at the back of their eyes whenever the topic comes up. Kyouko supposes that's natural; she and Haru have had fairly lengthy conversations speculating about what the boys get up to, conversations fueled in part by Haru's collection of BL manga. But, and this is the important part, what Kyouko and Haru do with each other isn't for the boys' sake, either for their titillation or to let them off the hook for the times when they're so busy holding the Family together that they have to let their attention to their families lapse a bit. What Kyouko and Haru have is for them, for each other, an augmentation of what they have with the boys rather than a supplement. It is not for anyone's satisfaction but her own that Kyouko invites Haru to her bed, and vice versa.
And it is satisfying. That was, perhaps, the only thing Kyouko had not been entirely certain of when she'd first proposed the idea to Haru—who was her friend and whom she loved dearly, of course, but who didn't exactly possess the configuration of tender bits Kyouko was accustomed to desiring. But Haru is Kyouko's best friend for a reason and was quick to lay that particular concern to rest.
Haru is aggressive in bed, pushier than Tsuna, and was willing to press herself against Kyouko from the very first, to kiss Kyouko breathless and then help her slide her clothes off, to run her hands all over Kyouko's body—knowing hands, ones that knew exactly where to linger because their owner knew what felt best from the inside out. Haru had been the one to push Kyouko down against the pillows and trace her mouth over Kyouko's breasts and then kiss her way lower, running her mouth along Kyouko's stomach and thighs before settling between them to stroke her lips and tongue against Kyouko. She was absolutely fearless about it, absolutely ruthless, too, and took Kyouko to pieces that first time with something very like efficiency, leaving Kyouko spread out against the sheets, stunned and gasping in the aftermath of it.
And Kyouko is, perhaps, just a very little bit competitive. After a beginning like that, she could hardly do anything else but respond in kind by reaching for Haru to touch her until Haru was limp and panting against the sheets, writing around Kyouko's fingers and under her mouth.
Haru is noisy in bed; Kyouko likes the way she can make Haru cry out by pressing her fingers into Haru and stroking them at just the right angle, and the gasping, breathless sounds Haru makes when she's arched over Kyouko, coming apart on Kyouko's tongue. She may have been uncertain of this thing with Haru at first, but she's long since forgotten that.
Which is just as well. There are enough things in their lives that are difficult without this being difficult, too. And, though Kyouko would never admit it to anyone but Haru, she's glad that they have each other, because sometimes it's good to have someone she can rely on who isn't Tsuna.
Created 2 February 2011. I think this was a fill for a prompt fest or Porn Battle or something, I can't even remember. I know that I tucked it away with firm good intentions of turning it into something longer, something that would be all about how Tsuna, Gokudera, Kyouko, and Haru settled into happy polyamorous domesticity. Basically there would have been a lot of smut in as many permutations of Tsuna/Kyouko/Gokudera/Haru as I could have managed, and that would have probably been the extent of it. Maybe Yamamoto would have showed up to be amused at the four of them a lot, as is his wont.
Recruitment Opportunity: The one where the Varia recruits Bianchi. 1698 words.
The crisis was dealt with, everything over but the cleaning up—and boy, she was not looking forward to that—thanks to Tsuna and his apparently inexhaustible supply of optimism and that heart of his. Bianchi, finally off duty for the night, felt that the averted crisis was worth a celebratory drink. She was thinking about Tsuna, and the Vongola First, and relative strength when Squalo slid himself into the seat across from hers.
Bianchi paused with her glass of wine halfway to her mouth and gazed across the table at him—and that was Xanxus, too, looking at the bar behind Squalo and glaring at the bartender (who looked both confused and terrified). Well. This was interesting, in the old Chinese curse sense of the word. She set the glass down but did not let go of it. Simple enough to transmute it to acid, and she was willing to gamble that she could get it in Squalo's eyes if he moved. That left Xanxus at the bar, but there were all those lovely bottles of alcohol lined up in neat rows that she might be able to use to her advantage before he tried to kill her.
That wasn't much of a plan, said the Reborn who lived in her head. Needs must and beggars can't be choosers, she said back, silently, while she raised her eyebrows at Squalo. "My goodness," she said. "The Varia. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Squalo smiled, sort of, more of a twitch of thin lips than anything else. He looked tired around the eyes—hell, Bianchi felt pretty sure she had dark circles under her own eyes after these past few days and couldn't fault him that. "Wanted to talk to you."
"Here I am," Bianchi said, projecting a calm she didn't entirely feel. "Talk."
That got her something that was closer to an actual smile—she saw a flash of Squalo's teeth, anyway—as he leaned back in his chair and hooked an arm over the back of it. "Straight to the point. All right. The old man's had you guarding the brat these past three years, yeah?"
Bianchi let her eyes narrow while she affected a sulky moue. "I'm not concerned with that kid," she said, throwing in a contemptuous sniff for good measure. "I only put up with him because darling Reborn is his tutor." She regretted turning the wine; a good slug of Shiraz would go well to wash the taste of that out of her mouth. Christ Jesus, but she was tired of that cover story.
"Right," Squalo drawled, managing to pack a whole lot of tolerant amusement into it as he did. His eyes didn't match his tone. If anything, they looked almost approving. "Must have gotten mixed up."
"You must have," Bianchi agreed.
"Guess so." Squalo tapped his fingers against the table, one-two-three-four. On five, the downbeat of his thumb, he said, "Reborn's not going to be doing that for very much longer."
That was true enough. Tsuna was creeping up on his eighteenth birthday and the Ninth was making pretty serious noises about not letting him leave for Japan again, even though the dust was settling. Tsuna's protests about that were getting more and more perfunctory. As Reborn had said just the other day, it wouldn't be long now.
Bianchi lifted a shoulder. "Possibly not."
"So what are you going to do after the old man cuts dear little Reborn loose?" Squalo inquired, injecting just enough irony into it to be very, very clear that her cover was more holes than not, far as the Varia were concerned.
"We're still talking that over," Bianchi murmured, maybe a shade more dry about it than she strictly should have been, but really. She was sick of that cover. "Why do you ask?"
He tapped his fingers on the table again, one-two-three-four, watching her the whole while. "Because I was wondering what your plans were for after you finish this job up." He paused, deliberate, and then corrected himself. "I mean, after Reborn's job finishes up."
Hate, hate, hated that cover. Bianchi showed him her teeth. "We're still talking that over. Like I just said."
Squalo merely snorted. "Please. If nothing else, it's the twenty-first century. You're a free agent whether you admit to it or not. Now. What the hell are you going to do with yourself after the brat finishes getting his act together?"
The temptation to throw wine-turned-acid in his face nearly overwhelmed Bianchi, but she'd been trained too well to surrender to it. Besides, Xanxus was leaning against the bar, glass in hand, watching their corner. "I suppose I'm keeping my options open," she said, trying not to grit it out from behind clenched teeth too obviously. "As one does." That was what being freelance meant. "What's it to you?"
Squalo smiled a little wider, lounging in his seat like the arrogant fucker he was. "I like to keep an eye on the rising talent, that's what. Get a sense of their quality."
Bianchi did not permit herself to show any reaction to that, not her confusion nor the sudden switch her brain made into high gear. Quality had a peculiar meaning in the mouths of the Varia, the kind of quality that made the Varia the legend it was, the team of assassins wielded by the Vongola, the knife in the dark and the perfectly executed hits that baffled the survivors with how they'd been done. And here was the Varia's second-in-command, speaking of rising talent and quality and her plans for the future. "I suppose that's the prudent thing to do," she said, mouth dry.
"Yes," he said, watching her. "Recruits have to come from somewhere."
Transmuting the wine had been too hasty a decision. Bianchi really wanted a drink now, something normal to steady her. "Recruits," she said as Squalo watched her, his pale gaze never wavering, and he didn't seem to be laughing (or sneering) any more. "Are you seriously sitting here, trying to recruit me to the Varia? Surely you must be joking."
Squalo gazed back, bland enough that he could have almost passed for a bank manager. "Thought I should beat the rush."
Something that was first cousin to a laugh filled Bianchi's throat. "The rush. Right." No one rushed to hire the freelancers, not unless they needed someone either expendable or good enough that he (or, sometimes, much more rarely, she) was so good that relying on a Family connection wasn't necessary for survival.
"The de la Stella have adjusted their rankings," Squalo said. "They put you second now. Only the Asp ranks higher, and you know that he's almost ninety now. And retired."
Bianchi permitted herself a blink in reaction to that news—being, effectively speaking, the top-ranked poisoner in the world was worth a moment's surprise and pleasure—and exhaled. "Really."
"The de la Stella never lie," Squalo pointed out.
So they didn't. Which suggested—
Bianchi pushed that treacherous thought aside. Unwarranted pride in one's abilities was the single leading killer of hitmen, freelance or Family-affiliated. "And I only have your word for it at all." The smile felt tight on her mouth, forced. "What's your actual angle, Squalo? I'm not in the mood for games."
Tap-tap-tap-tap went his fingers while he stared back at her. "Just think about it," he said, abrupt, and stood.
"Sure," Bianchi said, leaning back just enough to meet his eyes as he towered over her.
He looked down at her, maybe frustrated—she waited to see whether he was going to do any yelling—but turned away from her, walking out as silently as he'd come. At the bar, Xanxus knocked back the remainder of his drink and followed him.
Bianchi didn't neutralize the acid in her glass until they had been gone for a good ten minutes, during which time she glared around the bar furiously enough that even the half-drunk barflies didn't dare swing by her table to hit on her. When it seemed likely that they really had gone, she left as well, any inclination she might have had to celebrate Tsuna's victory long since gone.
It seemed that it was time she talked to Reborn.
The annoying thing about Reborn—one of the annoying things about Reborn, of which there were many—was that there were times when he simply could not be found, usually when one happened to want him most. Bianchi suspected him of doing it deliberately, perhaps aided by something like his own version of creepy insight. She hunted all over the Vongola house for him, much good that did her, and checked his favorite haunts, and ended the evening in bad temper all around, thanks to Squalo and Reborn alike. It wasn't much improved by a night's sleep or finding Reborn at last, late the next morning, even though the time had given her a chance to think.
He listened to her précis of the conversation, impassive enough. "What I can't figure out is what they're doing," Bianchi finished and waited for his opinion.
"Doing?" Reborn inquired, sounding more like he was laughing than Bianchi thought was strictly warranted.
"You know perfectly well what I mean." Bianchi frowned at him, annoyed by his smile and the cock-sure way he sipped his espresso in the morning sun. "Tsuna's confirmation is coming up fast. Xanxus has to be planning something for it."
"And you think so highly of yourself that you assume you must play a role in that plan?"
Reborn was nearly the only person who could still make her flush, hot and embarrassed. "Maybe it is arrogance," she retorted, "but honestly, what else could it actually be?"
Reborn didn't answer that. He set his demitasse in its saucer and hopped down from his seat. "I'll leave you to figure that out. I have a meeting."
Bianchi waited until he was out of the room to sock a frustrated punch against one of the pillows adorning the couch. "A fat lot of good you are," she muttered, before going to the gym to work out the rest of her frustration on a proper punching bag.
Created 6 July 2012. This was going to be the one about how the Varia recruited Bianchi, because she's just that awesome, and how Bianchi found her feet there. Mostly I just wanted to write the recruitment scene above, heh. I think I also had vague intentions of throwing Bianchi into bed with Squalo and Xanxus, on the principle that that would be pretty damn hot. I have to say that time has not changed my mind on this. In any case, there would have been a lot of Bianchi not quite believing that she was being recruited into a Family, and her kicking ass and taking names, and Squalo and Xanxus being themselves.
Creatures of the Night: the one where Bianchi is a vampire and Dino is a hunter. 2291 words.
The first really coherent thought Dino had once he'd groped his way back out of unconsciousness was that Romario was never going to let him hear the end of this. "Boss," he would say, clearly exasperated and just as clearly laughing behind the sternness, "what is the first rule of hunting?"
"Never let your guard down," Dino murmured, answering the imagined question. His mouth tasted dry, not foul; he hadn't been out for long.
"Generally words to live by." The voice startled him; he hadn't heard anyone in the room with him and hadn't seen anyone—but then, why would he have done? "That something you're planning on remembering?" She was behind him, but she stepped into view as she spoke, prowling around the chair that held him, all the little pretences and illusions that had made her seem to be what she was not—human—stripped away to show the predator beneath. She was dangling his belt with its assortment of useful implements from one negligent hand, and stared down at him with her lips curled up at the corners.
It almost looked like a smile.
Dino stared back as defiantly as he could manage considering that she'd whammied him, stripped him of his weapons, and tied his hands and feet to a sturdy old chair. "What the hell," he said, "your hands were warm."
"Yes, they were, weren't they?" Her smile stretched her lips wider; that the trick, whatever it had been, had worked clearly pleased her. Even now, knowing her for what she was, Dino couldn't help the way his pulse sped up in response.
(He didn't even want to imagine what Romario would have to say about that.)
"It was the coffee," he blurted out in order to distract himself. She'd had a cup of coffee, she'd held it between her hands while they'd talked, even raised it to those red, red lips from time to time. "You were drinking it!"
Christ, she'd been note-perfect, too. He'd never seen a vampire so good at seeming human.
She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "I always was fond of a good cup of coffee."
Dino thought he might have been gaping at her; that wasn't supposed to be possible. His confusion seemed to amuse her, because she laughed, bright, throwing her head back to show the long, creamy line of her throat the way she had before, when she'd still been pretending to be human and had been luring him in with that façade.
"What are you?" he asked, discomfited by how little difference the lack of artifice was making now.
That cut off her laughter and her smile. She looked down at him, her eyes gone cool. "That is an astonishingly rude question."
He met that gaze as squarely as he could. "They left a few rough edges on me when they were working on me." It wasn't strictly true, but he was just off-balance enough that it was effectively the truth. And banter wasn't going to get them—him—anywhere. "So, what. You bring me here to kill me?" Wherever here was; he didn't recall anything of the trip and couldn't tell much by the furnishings of the room, which were vaguely antique and residential.
"I haven't ruled it out yet." She moved then, astonishingly fast, and dropped his belt, careless of the flashbangs and the vials of volatile oils as she went for another chair, this one ladder-backed, and set it before his. She planted herself in it, straddling the seat and folding her arms across its back so she could stare at him, eye-to-eye. The pose meant that the demure grey skirt she wore rode up far enough that Dino could see just enough thigh and a glimpse of deeper shadows to make his mouth run dry. (God, what Romario said was true: his love of the ladies was going to be the death of him.)
She ignored his response and fixed night-dark eyes on him. "You said you were looking for someone. Is that true?"
Dino stared at her, not sure why she was asking—not sure where any of this was going. He'd been hunting for years and had never heard of a vampire behaving like this one.
She waited for his response, apparently with all the patience of in the world, or of a cat waiting at a mouse hole. "And if I am?" he said finally, not seeing any arm in confirming it and not entirely sure why she hadn't just whammied him to get the truth.
"So am I." Her tone was matter-of-fact, though her eyes were burning darker, "And peculiarly enough, my search crossed yours." She tipped her head to the side. "Do they still teach hunters that there's no such thing as a coincidence?"
Dino almost winced with the memory of how many times he'd heard that admonition (usually accompanied with a smack to the head). "They do." His fingers itched to rub the back of his head, because the fact that she knew that raised a lot of questions—hunters were nearly as secretive as the prey they hunted. "Why?"
"Who are you looking for?"
Dino pressed his lips together, studying her. "Who are you looking for?" he countered.
She didn't respond right away. When she did, it was by parting her lips, pulling them back and showing her fangs, long and white. Dino was suddenly acutely aware of how securely his bonds were tied. "I believe I asked you first."
Dino weighed his options and the fact that there were no coincidences. "Another hunter. An apprentice hunter," he corrected himself. "He went out a few days ago and never came back." It likely meant the worst—Tsuna was almost certainly dead—but one did not let a brother hunter disappear or die without doing for the vampire that had done for him.
She tucked her fangs away. "I'm looking for a brother, too."
There were so many things wrong with that statement that Dino hardly knew where to begin. "Vampires don't have brothers," he blurted, because it was true: all the lore insisted that they were solitary creatures not given to forming connections, which was why the ones who hunted them forged the bonds they did—it gave them a strength that the vampires could never possess or understand.
She raised a single perfect eyebrow. "My goodness, do they still perpetuate that nonsense?"
Dino found that he was staring at her, his jaw hanging loose.
She lifted her chin from where it rested on her folded arms and rearranged her hands, clasping them before her. "I'm looking for my brother. He disappeared a few nights ago." Her tone was measured. "The last anyone saw of him, he was heading downtown."
She paused there, perhaps expectantly, but Dino wasn't sure he recognized the significance of her point. When he didn't do anything more than raise his eyebrows, she sighed. "Don't they teach you boys anything anymore? Wait, what am I even asking, of course they don't. It's easier that way." She grimaced and unclasped her hands, flicking her fingers like she was casting something aside. "There are vampires and vampires, hunter boy, and the clan that controls the downtown district are the kind the rest of us would prefer to let you boys wipe out, if only we could trust you to know what it is you're doing."
"You don't have a very high opinion of hunters, do you?" Dino asked, more for the sake of getting a moment to assimilate that. Clans of vampires? Hoo, boy. If she was telling the truth—a big if, that—that put a whole new spin on a lot of things. Could be a lie, of course, though he wasn't sure to what ends. Yet.
She just snorted, a sound distinctly at odds with the elegance of her appearance. "You noticed. That puts you one up on most of your brother hunters." She said it like the words tasted bad in her mouth. "No. I don't think much of your little packs of thugs and bully boys. I prefer not to think of you at all if I can help it, but needs must. And I need to find my brother."
Oh—hey, maybe it was time to get to the point. "I get the sense that I'm supposed to offer to help with that, but I'm not sure I see why." There, that was nice and clear.
She smiled at him. "You mean aside from the fact that I'll just kill you if you don't?"
And there was the thing he'd been doing his best not to own up to since the moment he'd first come swimming back up to consciousness and realized that he'd been completely disarmed, tied to a chair, and subjected to a vampire's nonexistent mercy. There was no way this was going to end well for him. Dino took a breath, looked that prospect square in the face, and said, "Yeah. Aside from that."
The shape of her smile changed subtly, turning thoughtful. "I suppose you've got balls to go along with that half a brain and pretty face." She nodded like this satisfied her. Maybe it did, considering the backhanded compliment.
"Thanks. I think."
"Don't thank me yet." She straightened up and ran a hand through the loose waves of her hair, brushing it back from her eyes. "The reason you're going to help me is that when he was last seen, my brother wasn't alone. He had a junior hunter by the name of Sawada Tsunayoshi with him."
"That's not possible." Really, it wasn't possible. A hunter wouldn't go anywhere with a vampire—not peacefully, not of his own volition, so—"Somebody must have been mistaken. There's no way that could have happened."
She shook her head. "I trust my source. He says that's what he saw, so that's what he saw."
"So why would your brother put a whammy on Tsuna and take him to the downtown district?" Had to be a whammy, if it had really happened—there were no other possibilities.
"It wasn't a whammy." She smirked at him. "You boys might not be able to tell the difference, but we can. Trust me, the baby hunter was there because he chose to be. I'm looking forward to shaking the reason out of my brother."
There was something in the way she said that which made it sound less like hyperbole than a promise. Which was a thought that—Dino took a breath, because the lore had some things to say here. "What makes you think that they aren't dead?" Tsuna at the least, assuming he was with a vampire. Assuming she was telling the truth about the downtown district and the clan that held it. Hell, they'd all pretty much assumed that Tsuna was lost to them. He was the only one still looking, and that was only because their mutual teacher was quietly ignoring what he'd been getting up to.
"I would know." There was no compromise in her voice, no possibility that she might be wrong. "He's not. The baby hunter might be, maybe, I don't know. But perhaps not. Until you see the body, there's no reason to disallow the possibility, and the lore be damned."
Hope was the most dangerous of emotions; a weight that had been lying on Dino's shoulders since Tsuna'd missed his first check-in lifted before he could stop it. "You know an awful lot about the lore for a vampire," he said while he struggled to hold onto his common sense in the face of the outrageous hope that Tsuna—naïve, idealistic Tsuna—might not be dead yet.
"I like silly things." The way she watched him might have been sympathetic. "You in?"
Dino got a grip on himself. "I don't even know what you want from me."
She straightened her spine, and a part of him couldn't help noting the good things that did for her figure. "A cover. A hunter like you walks into the right place downtown after dark, it's going to stir up the folks there enough to let me find my brother."
Dino parsed that. "I'm going to be bait."
Her teeth flashed as she laughed. "More or less. Bait with backup, though. You boys do still watch each other's backs, I assume."
Which, yes, they did, but—"What do I get out of this?"
She raised an eyebrow. "To find Sawada, or find out what he was doing and why. What more do you need?"
"Ideally? To go home still breathing after it's all over."
She brushed a hand through the air, dismissing that. "Breathing is overrated. You'd get to do some damage to a nasty set of vampires, too. Don't forget that."
"How could I forget?" Dino leaned his head back against the chair. "I could have gone into business," he mused to the ceiling. "Been an accountant. Instead I chose this."
"You don't choose hunting. Hunting chooses you." When he looked down, her expression was sober, the way the oldest of their hunters tended to be when they spoke about the job. "Are you going to cooperate or not?"
The thing was, it wasn't even a choice. Not when there was till a chance for Tsuna. But before he gave in and acknowledged that—"Why don't you just whammy me, if all you need is bait?"
"I told you. We can tell the difference." She shrugged. "And it's too much trouble to keep up." That was all she seemed to care to say, because she raised her eyebrows at him. "Well?"
"I hope Tsuna appreciates this when I'm wringing his neck," Dino said.
She smiled. "Probably not. Brothers are very ungrateful creatures."
Created 10 September 2011. This was going to be the one about how vampire!Bianchi and hunter!Dino teamed up to go rescue their respective brothers from mortal peril, kicked a bunch of vampire ass in the process, and hooked up. There was going to be fangsex, and I was deeply disappointed in myself when I realized that I'd set myself up for something plotty instead of straight-up porny. (I don't know why; I really should have seen it coming. As it were.) I got hung up on the plotty bits, as it happened: I couldn't decide what it was Gokudera and Tsuna thought they were doing, and that pretty much did for this one. In any case, Bianchi would have been a former hunter turned vampire, she and Reborn would have gone way back together, the hunter higher-ups would have known more than they let on, and Dino would have sincerely wished that he'd chosen to be an account at several points through the course of the story.
"Grad School Is Hell: in which Dino is a hapless graduate student. 2034 words.
"Congratulations," his graduate coordinator said at the end of his first year, handing a slip of paper across his desk to Dino. "Your peers, in their infinite wisdom, have elected you to represent them in the august body of the graduate student senate. Meetings are every other Friday, three to five, in the second-floor gallery of the administration building. If you skip, graduate students in the English department will become ineligible to apply for conference stipends from the graduate college, so don't skip."
Dino was still finishing up his first year of doctoral work at that point and had not yet fully realized the depths of evil to which their department's graduate coordinator could stoop or the full mind-numbing potential inherent in an interdisciplinary meeting of the minds. Consequently he felt rather flattered and honored to have been elected, and said, "Thank you, sir. I'll do my best."
Reborn looked across the desk at him, fixing him with that unnerving, unblinking stare that terrified undergraduates and graduate students alike. "Do better than that," he said, and pointed at the door. "Now go. You still owe me a seminar paper."
"Yessir," Dino said and went to wrestle with the British modernists some more. He managed to eke his twenty-five pages out the rise of fascism and dystopian fiction just in time to print out the hard copy and stuff it in Reborn's mailbox before the mailroom closed for the day, and thought no more about the honor bestowed upon him by his fellow grad students. After the dystopia paper, it was on to the other seminar paper, the one for Skull about queered heterosexuality in Middlesex, and the annotated bibliography for Lal Mirch's seminar on contemporary literary criticism (companion to the fall semester's survey of the history of English studies, from Matthew Arnold to Slavoj Žižek). By the time he had finally emailed the annotated bib and its essay off, Dino had just enough wherewithal to drag himself to his bed and faceplant himself in it.
He spent the first week of the break between the spring semester and the start of the summer session alternating between his bed and his couch, where he stared blearily at cable marathons of What Not to Wear, Mythbusters, and Pawn Stars while his brain slowly rebooted itself from the end-of-semester frenzy. He was just beginning to be able to think in coherent sentences again by the point it was time to pack a bag and drive down to his parents' house for a flying visit. His mother fussed over him the whole time ("Don't you ever eat anything up there?" she demanded as she put another tray of cookies in the oven, and Dino had to confess that he subsisted on coffee, nerves, and multivitamins during the last third of every semester) and his father gave his tattoos long looks ("I don't know how you think you're going to find a job looking like a thug, son.") in between asking him to take a look at this rash he had ("For the last time, Dad, not that kind of doctor!"). Which did not make for a restful visit, however much he loved his folks.
Then it was back to campus for summer classes, French bootcamp for desperate grad students (damned language requirement, double-damned undergrad institution without a language requirement, thrice-damned self for not having had the sense to acquire a second language every time Nonna had offered to teach him), linguistics (Jesus Christ in heaven, linguistics; Lal Mirch was exponentially more terrifying when teaching in her area of specialty), and 602: Introduction to Pedagogy, the seminar that every grad student with a teaching assistantship had to endure before the university would unleash him or her on the hapless undergrads taking gen ed courses.
Dr. Timoteo Vongola taught the English department's offering of 602 and presided over the drowsy afternoons on the fourth floor of Memorial Hall, lecturing in a large classroom that had a single ceiling fan and one air conditioning unit in the window to combat the heat of a Midwestern summer. Dr. Vongola paid no attention to the heat or the assembled grad students who struggled not to fall asleep while he attempted to guide them from being budding would-be teachers to full-blown blossoms of writing pedagogy. It took exactly one lesson for every one of them to see that Dr. Vongola (who had enough publications on his CV to literally bury any one of them, knew anyone and everyone who was worth knowing in the field of literature, and was both older than dirt and long overdue for either an honorable retirement or a discreet sidestep into administration) had decided what the teaching of writing should be sometime in the late seventies and had not changed his mind since.
Dino put his syllabus together as conscientiously as he could nonetheless and submitted it to Dr. Vongola. He received it back, the pages redolent with the smell of pipe tobacco—Dr. Vongola's office reeked of tobacco smoke in defiance of the campus ordinances prohibiting smoking inside the building and repeated postings to the English department's list-serv reminding them that smoking was prohibited inside campus buildings—with a kindly suggestion that he revise it to be more in line with the sample syllabus the good professor had handed out the very first day of class.
"Don't worry," his new officemate said when Dino unburdened himself of his frustrations. "He tells everybody to match the sample syllabus." He lifted another set of books out of the box he was unpacking. "You don't have to actually do it."
"Are you sure?" Dino asked, feeling pretty doubtful about Squalo's air of breezy assurance.
"Sure I'm sure." Squalo added the books to the shelf he'd claimed, stuffing his copy of the blue-bound Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism next to the Riverside Shakespeare. He eyed the way the shelf was bowing in the middle, shrugged, and added the Norton Anthology of English Literature (Major Authors), stuffed Eagleton's Literary Theory on top of that, and wedged Gilbert and Gubar in with them as well. The brackets groaned; Dino held his breath, but the shelf stayed put in defiance of all expectations. Squalo dusted his hands briskly. "I asked Colonnello about it. He's the writing program administrator anyway, and just between you and me, I'm pretty sure he'd much rather we didn't follow the sample syllabus."
Dino automatically shot a glance at their office door, but it was firmly shut. Still, the walls in their hall were like tissue paper, so he lowered his voice in deference to that. "Really?"
Squalo rolled his eyes and resumed unpacking. "Duh. Everyone knows that he's been angling to get 602 out of Vongola's hands ever since the department hired him, but Vongola won't give it up. Colonnello's going to have to pry it out of his cold, dead hands. Probably literally." He reached for the drawer pull of the desk—early 50s industrial, by the looks of it—and Dino clapped his hands over his ears at the unholy wail it made as he dragged it open. "Jesus, way to shell out for quality here, guys."
"At least we have an office of our own," Dino said, looking around the tiny claustrophobic space of it. "We could have been stuffed in a basement room with all the other GAs." As far as graduate student offices went, this one had a lot going for it: it was above-ground, there were only two of them occupying it, and they even had a window with a lovely view of the faculty parking lot. (Grad students got the same permits as undergrads, and had to either suck it up and submit to the vagaries of the campus shuttle system or circle the commuter student parking lots in the back of beyond in hopes that they would be able to find an empty parking spot. The university steadfastly refused to consider building a parking garage to accommodate the parking overflow; apparently such a structure would ruin the charming architectural integrity of the campus skyline.)
"I guess." Squalo dumped a handful of red pens in the drawer and followed that with boxes of paperclips and binder clips, dry erase markers, staples, and chalk. "So what schedule did they stick you with, anyway?"
Dino groaned at the reminder. "God. Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Eight a.m."
Squalo had the decency to whistle and look sympathetic. "Ouch. Sorry, man, that sucks."
"Don't I know it," Dino sighed. "How about you?"
Squalo suddenly became very busy with the things he was unpacking and the way he was carefully lining up his stapler and three-hole punch and desk caddy in precise formation. He muttered something at his desk, indistinct.
But not indistinct enough. "I hate you," Dino said. "You asshole, how the hell did you land a Tuesday-Thursday afternoon section? I thought they didn't ever give those to the first-time GAs."
"Who's a first-time GA?" Squalo retorted. "I taught all four semesters of my MA, thank you so very much." He grinned then, sharp as a fox. "Maybe the office just likes me better than they like you."
"I still hate you," Dino told him, annoyed. He shook his head. "Anyway. So when are you going to have your office hours?" God knew there wasn't room for more than three people in this room.
"Oh, whenever." Squalo deposited his tape dispenser on the desk and began breaking the box down. "Not like it matters. None of them will bother showing up till around midterms anyway."
"...right," Dino said. "I figured I'd have mine on Mondays after class," but Squalo wasn't really listening.
"More important question," he said, stuffing the box into the trashcan. "I have a mini-fridge I can bring in. You have a microwave you can bring in? If not, I was talking to the guys upstairs, and Elena said we could have her microwave now that she's sharing an office with Spade. But the real important thing is this." He straightened up and fixed Dino with a fierce look. "You can use my coffee maker, but you're going to have to shell out for your own coffee. Got that?"
Dino blinked at him. "If it means that much to you, I guess?"
Squalo snorted. "Damn skippy it does. I've seen you drinking coffee, Cavallone. You're happy with that swill from Starbucks, which is just tragic, really."
"If it gets caffeine into my bloodstream, I don't care what it tastes like," Dino told him, more amused than anything else.
"Tragic," Squalo said again, shaking his head. "And clear evidence that you don't deserve nice things. Bring whatever Folgers crap you want in for yourself and leave my coffee alone."
Dino gave in. "Fine, fine, I won't touch your coffee, if it means that much to you."
This seemed to satisfy Squalo. "All right then," he said as he perched a hip on the corner of his desk and sized Dino up. "As long as we have that settled, this'll work out just fine." He paused and lowered his voice. "I was afraid I was going to get stuck in with Byakuran."
God, Byakuran, their cohort's most annoying member. "Me too," Dino confessed. "Do you know who he ended up with?"
Squalo shrugged. "I'm not sure. I just slipped Nana a gift certificate to the spa downtown as a token of my regard and mentioned that I was worried that I wouldn't be all that compatible with him as an officemate."
Dino stared at him. Squalo looked back, blandly, at least until he snickered. "You are such an asshole," Dino told him, not entirely sure whether he thought Squalo was making that up or not.
"And I have so much fun," Squalo told him, grinning. "So hey, I need to go over to the student union and pick up my parking pass. You wanna come with me?"
"Might as well," Dino agreed, easing himself off his own desk.
"Seriously, though," Squalo said as he navigated his way around the filing cabinet to get to the door. "Thanks for not being Byakuran."
"It's absolutely my pleasure," Dino replied, and they went to pick up their parking permits, laughing the whole way.
Created 7 July 2012. This was going to be the fic where I vented a great deal of bitter grad student spleen by making Dino suffer. Dino was going to be the hapless English Lit PhD student entering his second year, officemates with Squalo (devoted disciple of Lal Mirch, the resident hard-as-nails linguistics & semiotics/post-modern specialist), stuck teaching first-year composition for the first time ever and elected by his peers to serve as their representative to the graduate student senate. Reborn, of course, was the graduate coordinator for the English department and a celebrated scholar of the Modernist period; Skull's the queer theory/Foucauldian/body studies scholar, and Colonello is the edgy young rhet/comp specialist who is just dying to wrest the required writing pedagogy class out of Professor Vongola's age-palsied hands (because Dr. Vongola's idea of good writing pedagogy fossilized in the seventies, when the Expressivists first came into vogue). The Vongola Primo and his guardians are a year or two ahead of Dino, busy writing their dissertations and squabbling amongst themselves, and Tsuna is the hapless Education student who is taking English Lit courses in order to get a better grip on his content area. (Reborn constantly berates him about switching from Education into a real degree program, hem hem.) Bianchi is in biochem, studying something to do with toxins and the human body. Xanxus is in engineering. They both got drafted to be grad student senators, just like Dino, and the three of them are assigned to the same useless committee, which is how they meet and unite as buddies thanks to their mutual suffering. Eventually Dino hooks up with Bianchi and Squalo takes one look at Xanxus and decides to hit that like the fist of angry god, and hijinks ensue.
Look, I said right up there above that this was all about venting a lot of bitter grad student spleen, didn't I?