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lysapadinTitle: Wild Justice
Characters/Pairings: Tsuna/Kyouko; Gokudera/Haru; Chrome, Mukuro, I-Pin
Summary: Most people assume that Kyouko's really nice. They're mistaken: she's simply polite. And there's a huge difference between "nice" and "polite."
Notes: Teen and up. A hugely belated fic for round four of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
khrfest, prompt III-17: Kyoko – Haru is killed by a rival family, Kyouko doesn't take it lying down; "Fly away/ Take control / Beyond the edge will make you whole." Character death, angst, Kyouko being a badass. Kind of a grim AU to "They Also Serve". 8801 words.
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Wild Justice
They would not let her look at the body at first, not until Kyouko raised her voice and pushed Yamamoto-kun out of her way and went into the room where they'd brought Haru to rest.
Someone had draped a sheet over her that hid the worst of the damage, for which Kyouko, looking at the slack lines of Haru's face and the splatter of blood across her cheek, could only be grateful. She crossed the floor to the table slowly to look at her. It was funny, she thought, how everything she'd ever read had said that the dead looked like they were sleeping. Kyouko had seen Haru sleep before; this empty, still shell had nothing in the common with the restless way she slept. Had slept.
"Who did this?" She recognized the voice as her own, though it and the question seemed to come from somewhere else.
The room's other occupant did not look up from the hand that he held between his own. His voice was hoarse. "We're not sure yet."
Kyouko took her eyes away from Haru's face—there would be time enough to mourn her later, there would be the rest of her life to mourn her best friend—and fixed her attention on Hayato-kun. He looked lost, like he didn't understand what had happened. Haru had said, once, when they had fallen into talking about the boys, sharing secrets and giggling over them, that Hayato-kun was far more fragile than he ever wanted anyone to see. Kyouko hadn't believed her then, but she did now that she could see the pieces of him spread out before her.
Perhaps it hadn't been for her protection that they had tried to keep her out of this room.
Kyouko reached across Haru and laid her hand on top of Hayato-kun's. "We will find them," she promised. "We will hunt them down. And then we'll destroy them."
Some part of her was a little surprised at her own fierceness, but Hayato-kun finally raised his eyes to hers, slowly, and nodded once. "Yes," he said. "We will."
The work that Haru had done for Kyouko—for the Vongola, but mostly for Kyouko—had been the work that only she could have done. They'd known that from the start, known that only Haru's place as both insider and outsider would let her get away with the flirting and flitting about, giggling with the men of other Families and exchanging gossip and information with her network of friends and contacts and then bringing the things she had learned home to lay in Kyouko's lap. They'd also known how dangerous that would be. Kyouko had wrung her hands over it in private and to Tsuna, fretting over the danger that Haru had courted. Haru had always insisted on going ahead, had insisted on being useful and on working for the Vongola in her own way.
There was no pleasure in having been proved right after all.
"I should have found a way to stop her," she said once she'd managed to cry herself out against Tsuna's shoulder. Her eyes felt gritty and raw and Tsuna's shirt was soaked through, but he didn't protest and Kyouko wasn't ready to move yet. "I should have found a way to keep her safe."
Tsuna's arms curled around her more tightly, but it was a while before he answered that. "I don't think we could have done that and kept her happy."
"There might have been something." Only they wouldn't ever know, now. "How do you stand it?"
Held close like she was, she could feel the little shudder that ran through him then. "I don't know," he said, voice heavy. "I just do. Somehow. And pray it doesn't happen again. Or to any of the people I love most." He stopped and swallowed. "So much for that last."
"Tsuna..." She found his hand and gripped it. "We're going to find who did this," she whispered. "And we'll make them sorry, and show everyone why they shouldn't take our people from us."
The sound he made then was distressed, torn. "And when does it stop?" When Kyouko lifted her head, she saw that he looked exhausted. "If we destroy them, they'll feel justified in striking back, and it'll go on, and on, and nothing will ever change."
"Tsuna." Kyouko heard her voice coming from very far away. "Do you hear what you're saying? About Haru?"
Tsuna's face was wretched. "I know."
Kyouko felt the blood turning cold in her veins. "But—" she began, stopping herself at the wretched look on his face. "We'll do something, won't we?" she asked, instead of saying the things that she wanted to say.
He nodded. "Something, yes. When we find out who did it."
That didn't seem like enough to Kyouko, but she swallowed that down. Later, she promised herself. She would talk to him later, when they were both more reasonable.
The funeral was small and quiet because Kyouko had refused to let it be turned into an opportunity for other Families to come and gloat from behind veils of false sympathy—she'd already gotten enough notes from those who'd clucked over Haru's death, gunned down in the street as if she'd been no better than she should have been, to know that had one of them approached her at the funeral, there would have been an unpleasantness. She'd kept it to the Family and friends only, which was better anyway. That way there were no unfriendly eyes to pry at Hayato-kun's grief and wonder how it might be exploited and there were friendly arms to lift the weight of Mari and Daisuke from her arms, passing the two around—two small, solemn-faced toddlers who understood that this was a serious occasion, even if they didn't understand why.
When it was over, Chrome came to Kyouko, making her way to Kyouko's side so quietly that I-Pin made a low, distressed sound at the ease with which she'd insinuated herself there. "You will be doing something about this," she said. Her voice was as soft as it had ever been, but there was something in her gaze that Kyouko recognized, something that simmered and seethed. "I will help."
"Thank you," Kyouko told her.
Chrome dipped her head and moved away again, as silently as she'd come, as Yamamoto approached with Daisuke, who'd turned fussy. Kyouko accepted him and soothed him absently, mind turning over new possibilities. Chrome came and went freely, just as Mukuro did, and in that, there was something that she might be able to use.
Chrome came to her with other ideas, appearing in Kyouko's morning room (which was nearly unbearably lonely without the sound of Haru's laughter) and placing herself in front of Kyouko, fingers curled around the haft of her trident. "Tell me, Kyouko-san," she said, her voice lilting the way Mukuro's did when he was playing a game with someone. "If you died today, what would your regrets be?"
Kyouko knew the look she was giving Chrome was a hard one and could not quite keep it from her face despite her best intentions. "I should think that would be obvious."
"And yet these things so rarely are." Chrome tilted her head, studying Kyouko. "You suspect me of toying with your grief, perhaps?"
Kyouko winced away from the note of reproof in Chrome's voice. "No, I—it's not that."
"Then what is it?"
Kyouko twisted her hands in her lap, knowing that Chrome would see it and recognize the agitation in the gesture. "I can't do anything," she said, and stopped. "She was my hands, she was my eyes, she was my link to the world outside the house, and without her I am helpless." The words were bitter in her mouth. "I have let myself be made helpless."
"Good," Chrome said, her voice turning crisp. "You recognize the problem yourself. I was afraid that I would have to drag you through it."
Kyouko's eyes jerked away from her hands at the sting in that. "Anyone else would be telling me how wrong I was," she noted. "And would remind me how much power the Vongola Tenth's wife holds."
"Are you that fond of flattery?" Chrome's mouth quirked. "If you are, tell me to go away again and I'll leave you to it."
Kyouko drew a breath and let it out again, slow, expelling the prickle of wounded ego with it. "No, stay," she said, lifting her chin and giving Chrome a direct look. "If you recognize the problem, I assume you have some thoughts on the solution?"
"Ah. Now you're thinking, rather than reacting. Very good." Chrome finally took a seat then, leaning her trident within easy reach. Kyouko tried not to be conscious of whose seat Chrome had taken; it wasn't Haru's any more. "Tell me, now. If you died today, what regrets would you take to your grave?"
Kyouko thought about it this time. "There would be many things," she said, sorting through them. "That I would be leaving my children. That I would be leaving Tsuna." Chrome was watching her as closely as a cat at a mouse hole; she smiled when Kyouko drew a breath and added, "And that I would be leaving Haru unavenged."
Chrome nodded, her smile creeping wider. "That should do nicely." She moved so swiftly that I-Pin could do no more than lunge forward as she swept the trident up and scored a thin line across the back of Kyouko's left hand.
What happened next passed before Kyouko's eyes in slow motion. I-Pin knocked the trident away from Kyouko's hand, snarling at Chrome as she did. Chrome's laughter was bright and amused; Flame flickered around her hands and wreathed I-Pin's wrists and ankles, forging bright steel cuffs and linking them together. "Calm down," she said as I-Pin went over, straining against restraints born of the Mist. "If I had meant to do your mistress harm, she would already be dead."
Her words seemed to reach Kyouko's ears from far away; Kyouko found that she could not move, that she was caught like a fly in amber, her own will captive to someone else's. Chrome's, she decided, after the first disorienting moment had passed, because the feel of it was detached and curious. She could feel a second person's will observing the whole affair, and his presence was dense and ancient—Mukuro.
Chrome saw I-Pin settled in a fairly comfortable heap before turning her attention on Kyouko. "Now," she murmured, setting cool fingers under Kyouko's chin. "Let us see what you are made of, Kyouko-san."
And then the world caught fire.
Kyouko remembered the time at the beginning of the whole thing, when Tsuna had first gotten involved with Reborn-san and had first begun to change, and the afternoon when Reborn-san had shot her. The world had gone slow and quiet then, muffled against the flare of her anger and the overwhelming need to do something about it. She and Tsuna had never spoken of that afternoon, not even after he'd finally confessed what it was that he and his friends had gotten them all involved in.
Perhaps, she thought distantly, they should have.
"I thought so," Chrome said, sounding immensely satisfied about it, as Kyouko looked at the haze of purple around her own hands—the perspective was odd, till she realized that she was seeing herself through Chrome's eyes, not her own. She didn't just hear Chrome's satisfaction; she could feel it curling sleekly around her. "I said that you were already doing things that were of the Mist."
So you did. Mukuro's tone was decidedly amused as his presence wound itself closer. And I believe that I told you how exceedingly unlikely it was that she would embrace her Flame enough to use it when she accomplished so many things without it. He was close now, the weight of ages and lives pressing against the strange other place where Kyouko was aware of herself, and Chrome, and now him.
You're wrong about that, Chrome told him. Isn't he, Kyouko-san?
Kyouko found that she had a voice again. "Yes," she said, and watched I-Pin go still against the floor, her eyes dark and wide and clearly wondering who was speaking through her lips. "Show me. For Haru's sake."
I-Pin's eyes went a fraction wider in something like understanding. In the back of Kyouko's head, Mukuro began to laugh like a man honestly surprised and delighted by some turn of events.
Chrome merely smiled at Kyouko. "It goes like this," she said and began.
Kyouko felt strange in her own skin as she walked through the halls of the Vongola house. Normally she would be with Mari and Daisuke at this time of the day, helping supervise their lunches, but today they were going to have to make do with someone else's attention.
Some of the men she passed gave her puzzled looks. Kyouko supposed they were confused; she rarely came to the part of the house where Tsuna conducted his business and the underbosses came and went. She paid them no mind and they let her pass, unchallenged.
She supposed that she didn't really have to let it be that way. She could have passed through them unseen and avoided their puzzled glances. Had Mukuro's voice still been with her, he would have suggested as much.
But Mukuro was no longer near now that Chrome had released her, and Kyouko thought that it was better to do this openly.
Tsuna was alone in his office, for which Kyouko was grateful. He was frowning over some papers as his lunch went ignored at his elbow, and it took him a moment to realize that she had slipped in, I-Pin close on her heels. When he did, he smiled at her, soft and private. "Kyouko." He put the papers aside and rose, and only then did he realize that I-Pin was placing herself between them. His smile melted away and he looked from I-Pin to her. "What—?"
"You're going to need your Will," Kyouko told him, really rather pleased by how steadily her voice emerged from her throat. "I-Pin isn't sure whether or not I'm safe just at the moment, so you'll set her mind at ease if you would just check me over, please." She reflected on that for a moment and added, "I think I would be reassured, too, come to think of it."
Now Tsuna was beginning to look alarmed, even as his Will lit his brow and his hands. "What am I checking for, if you don't mind my asking? And why?"
"I'll explain afterwards, if you'll promise not to get angry," Kyouko told him.
Tsuna's mouth tightened. "I'm not going to like this, am I?"
"No, probably not." It was true, and was why Chrome had said she was going to get clear of the house after she'd released her hold on Kyouko. "But you need to listen to the reason. It's a good one, I promise."
His mouth tightened still further, but he nodded. "I'll listen. Now, what is it?"
Kyouko held out her hand, showing him the thin scratch. "You need to check me to see whether I’m still possessed, please."
He understood immediately; the way his Will flared higher, so bright it was nearly unbearable to look at, said as much, and the sound he made was nearly a snarl. "Mukuro—"
"Chrome, actually," Kyouko told him. "There's a reason. But first, please." She extended her hand to him.
He drew a breath and settled himself, Flame dimming to less incandescent levels. "Yes." He came closer and grasped her hand.
Tsuna's Will felt nothing like Chrome's or the sleek, insinuating weight of Mukuro's presence. Tsuna's touch was warm and sure and immeasurably strong, boundless as the sky itself and shot through with feelings that were so raw that Kyouko had trouble giving them names at first—though she did after a moment, identifying fear and anger and love twined together in the careful, searching touch.
Some of the anger was already ebbing away, replaced by relief, when he said, "I don't think you're still possessed."
I-Pin's shoulders sagged with the same kind of relief; the look she turned on Kyouko was mingled guilt and apology. "I'm sorry, I had to be sure."
"No, of course," Kyouko said, distracted by the dizzy feeling of being left alone inside her own skill as Tsuna's Will drew away. She gripped his hand, leaning against him, and added, "Now, Tsuna and I need to talk."
I-Pin was as wise as she was dangerous. She nodded and executed a smooth bow before slipping out, shutting the door after herself with a soft click. Kyouko permitted herself to lean against Tsuna's chest for a moment longer, savoring the warmth of his arms, before she said, "Now, about that explanation."
"They had better hope it's a good one." Tsuna's tone was still a little distant with his Will, though the glow of it had faded away from his hands and only lingered in his eyes.
"I think it is," Kyouko said. "But let's sit down." He had a couch in his office; he'd slept on it a few times during crises that wouldn't let him come away from his work long enough for a full night's sleep. It was better than the chairs because it meant that she could curl against his side, holding onto him, and try to explain without having to see the look in his eyes. "I relied on Haru too much," she began. "And I didn't make sure she had all the protections she should have had. I've let myself be held inside these walls. Without Haru, I'm as helpless as I seem." Tsuna started to make a protesting noise, but she didn't let him finish. "No, Tsuna, I am. I think I may be able to rebuild some of Haru's network, but it's going to be different from what it was. And I'll have to be more active in it. I'll have to be able to protect myself. That's what Chrome and Mukuro helped me with."
A heartbeat passed, and then another, before Tsuna asked, his voice even, "How did they do that?"
"They helped me find my Flame. And showed me how to use it." Kyouko lifted a hand. "See?" Mist twined around her fingers, just the way Chrome and Mukuro had showed her; she shaped it into a rose just picked from a garden, with dew still clinging to its petals.
Tsuna sucked in a breath and took it when she offered it to him, and immediately muttered something under his breath when he closed his fingers around a thorn. When Kyouko stole a glance at him, he was frowning at the rose. "The Mist."
"So much of what I do for the Vongola is made of smoke and mirrors anyway." Kyouko looked at the rose as he twirled it in his fingers. "That was why she possessed me. To wake my Flame and show me how to use it, so I won't have to rely on others to do my work for me unless I choose to."
Tsuna drew a breath. "But you're—"
"I wonder what Haru's Flame would have been." Kyouko felt him go still against her side. "And I wonder why we never thought to find out till it was too late.
"A Flame can't always stop bullets," Tsuna said; she could hear how careful he was trying to be.
"No." Kyouko let the rose disappear and took his hand. "But it could have been something else. Something she could have drawn on. But she didn't have it, even though we've come to this place where so many people are against us, and even though she put herself in their way to do her work." Kyouko drew a breath and gripped his hand, willing him to see her point. "It's not right, Tsuna."
"It shouldn't be like this," Tsuna said, voice full of regrets.
"Then we have to change it." Kyouko looked at him and waited until he was returning her gaze. "And from now on, I'm going to be part of that."
"You already are a part of it," he said, which wasn't what she had meant at all. She could tell he knew it by the way his eyes dropped. "Kyouko, it's—"
"Dangerous, yes, I know." She squeezed his hand. "I know it's not safe—do you think there's anyway I can't know that now, that I haven't known it all along? But I can't stand back while the rest of you face that danger over and over, not anymore." Her voice was becoming dangerously unsteady; she cleared her throat. "I have to do something, Tsuna. I have to."
He still wasn't quite looking at her. "All I want is for you to be safe."
"None of us is safe here." Kyouko bit her lip as soon as the words left her mouth; that was the closest she'd ever permitted herself to come to reproaching him for taking the Vongola ring.
"No." His voice was quiet and sad. "I suppose not. But I had hoped to keep you away from the worst of it."
"The worst of it has already touched me." Kyouko rested her head against his shoulder. "I miss Haru so much."
She felt him draw a breath as if to say something. Then he let it sigh out again, changing his mind about whatever it was. Instead he curled his arm around her and said, "What is it that you want to do?"
"Gut the people who took Haru from us," Kyouko said. "With my bare hands."
"Kyouko!" He sounded genuinely appalled.
"She was my right hand! I know my history; gutting them isn't unreasonable." And she wasn't really exaggerating all that much. "I'm going to see them pay for this, one way or another."
He still looked appalled when she looked at him. "We're trying to change this world."
"Sometimes to change things, you have to get rid of some things first." That was the first principle of housekeeping; what Tsuna proposed to do with the mafia was really only housekeeping writ large. But perhaps she shouldn't let him dwell on that for too long. "Chrome has promised to introduce me to some people that I might be able to use. We're going to begin there." Everything else would follow from that.
Tsuna didn't say anything to that, not immediately. Instead he sighed. "You've made up your mind, haven't you?"
"I have," Kyouko said. "Whatever the Vongola does, I want to be a part of it. I have that right."
He couldn't deny that much, no matter how much he wanted to. He closed his eyes and pressed her close. "You will be," he said. "Just—promise me that you'll be careful. I couldn't bear to lose you."
"I won't let that happen," Kyouko promised him. "I'll be as careful as I can." It wasn't quite the promise he'd asked for, but if he noticed, he didn't say anything about it.
When she'd left Japan to follow Tsuna to Italy, Kyouko had known that she would be giving up some things to gain others. She'd made her peace with that, or thought she had.
Now, walking anonymously through a crowd, hidden behind a disguise drawn of Mist, Kyouko realized that she had missed some things more than she'd thought. Someone jostled her, careless, and she laughed because she couldn't remember the last time she'd rubbed elbows with a stranger—who would let a stranger so close to the Vongola Tenth's wife?
"Steady," Chrome told her, though the stranger's face she wore was smiling faintly.
"I am steady," Kyouko told her. "I've spent my whole life being steady." That was what a good girl like her did. "You'll forgive me for enjoying myself just a bit."
"There's no wine so heady as freedom." Chrome sounded like Mukuro when she got sardonic; Kyouko wondered whether that was her or Mukuro speaking. It didn't matter; there was a look of understanding in her eyes—stranger's eyes, muddy hazel and ancient, wholly out of place in the teenager's face she'd adopted. "But never mind that. There are people you should meet."
Chrome and Mukuro had their own networks that they put to their own ends; only some of them overlapped with the Vongola's. Tsuna overlooked that deliberately, choosing to occasionally call Chrome and Mukuro in and ask after their business. Were Tsuna anyone else, it wouldn't have worked, but he'd pried Mukuro out of the Vendicare's hands—among other things—and so it did work. Kyouko wondered whether the people Chrome took her to see—a baker covered in flour; a man who worked o the docks and smelled of rum and the sea; a girl too old for her age, who served them coffee while she dressed herself for the evening; and half a dozen others—were part of their network or another. She didn't ask.
What was more important was the way each of the people Chrome introduced her to were hungry for something that the Mist could give them. The girl who served them coffee wanted a reverie built in jewel tones and soft edges; Kyouko didn't ask her the young man was, and focused on her coffee while the girl danced with his shadow. After they had finished, the girl's eyes were brighter and she promised to pass along whatever news she heard.
"Is it bothering you?" Chrome asked after they'd left the man who'd spent his time with them holding a small child who'd curled confidingly in his arms, a child whose living counterpart wasn't anymore.
"I don't know," Kyouko said, since it was the honest truth. "They know it's not real, don't they?"
"What's real?" Chrome took a long step and turned on her heel, walking backwards and looking at Kyouko, her disguised face smiling broadly. "If you can hold it in your arms, touch it, talk with it, isn't it real?"
"But it doesn't last."
"What does?" Chrome's smile turned crooked. "Does duration mark the boundary?" She spread her hands. "So it only lasted an hour and then disappeared. While it lasted, it was as real as anything else."
This was, perhaps, a philosophical argument better left alone, Kyouko decided. "Are we taking advantage of them?"
"A better question." Chrome spun herself again and fell in at Kyouko's side. "Yes, of course we are. As they are taking advantage of us in turn." She lifted a hand and rocked it back and forth. "And both sides walk away convinced that they are the ones getting the better of the other. A bit of gossip in exchange for a dance with a former lover? Information about the curious doings of the neighbors for a chance to hold your granddaughter one more time? Trifles, really." Her smile was sharp. "And for us, we come closer to our enemies in exchange for what comes naturally to us, without doing any of the harm that alcohol might."
Kyouko absorbed that. "You are the least comfortable person I know," she said, finally.
Chrome's smile turned wider. "Thank you."
Kyouko wasn't sure that she had meant it for a compliment, precisely, but let it be.
Kyouko hadn't been sure what Hayato-kun would do with himself after the initial shock wore off, but wasn't surprised that the new Hayato-kun reminded her very much of the Gokudera Hayato she'd first met years ago. He seemed to have closed himself off the same way he had as a teenager, anyway, sublimating everything into single-minded service to the Vongola. In his morning meetings with Tsuna—and now Kyouko, who had taken to attending their briefings and covering her coming and going with the Mist—he was grim and quiet, giving dogged attention to hunting down Haru's killers.
Finding the ones who'd pulled the triggers hadn't taken long between Hayato-kun's network and Kyouko's own contacts; figuring out who'd paid them to do it only took a little longer. "It was the Falasco." Hayato's voice was steady enough, making the report, but there was a feverish brightness to his eyes that Kyouko didn't like.
"I'm hearing the same things." She held her teacup clasped between her hands, using it to keep herself from fidgeting. "It was the Falasco's money behind it."
It stood to reason. Haru had been instrumental in teasing the information out of Diego Falasco's right hand that had let the Vongola put a stop to the trade out of Augusta. She'd been so pleased with herself for how she'd managed it, too.
"The Falasco. Of course." Tsuna rubbed a hand over his face, thinking. "They clearly have too much money in their hands. Let's do something about that."
Hayato-kun made a note. "Anything else, Tenth?" His voice was nearly toneless.
Kyouko tightened her grip on her teacup as the two of them locked eyes across Tsuna's desk. Finally, Tsuna said, "What else would you have me do? You've executed the ones who did it."
A muscle flickered in Hayato-kun's jaw. "You're the Tenth. I'll do whatever you say."
"I say we should destroy them," Kyouko said, when it had begun to seem like they were going to stare at each other all morning, breaking each other's hearts on their deadlock. They both jerked like they were startled, like they'd forgotten she was there.
Kyouko decided that she was getting tired of being overlooked.
"I'd like to kill them all," she added as Tsuna started looking distressed and Hayato-kun began to study her, eyes narrowed and thoughtful. "But I suppose we can't, since that's not what the Vongola stand for."
"Really not," Tsuna said, voice strained.
Hayato-kun was very still; only his eyes moved back and forth between them, watching them both.
"We have to do something, though." Kyouko set her teacup down and folded her hands under her chin, meeting Tsuna's gaze as squarely as she could. "We know who it was. We know who they hired. We even know why they did it. The world will know, too, if it doesn't already. Tsuna, we have to act."
"We are!" he protested. "We have. More than that—violence will only multiply violence. It's just more of the same. We can't change this world if we become like it."
Kyouko took a breath, forcing it to remain steady. "If we don't do something, we're all going to be targets. It'll be clear that the Vongola Tenth will not protect his people and all the other Families will feel free to move against us. We're not loved, Tsuna. Not outside the Family." A hard lesson, that, and one of the first Chrome had shown her as they'd started to circulate in the world outside the Vongola demesne. "If we don't defend ourselves—if we don't make it clear that anyone who targets one of our people is in for harsh punishment—we all end up as targets. Not just you. Not just your guardians. Me. Mari. Daisuke." Not that they weren't already targets, to a degree; there had been other candidates for Tsuna's job besides Xanxus, after all. "If we don't do something, we might as well all paint targets on our chests."
"Kyouko." Tsuna was staring at her, incredulous, maybe even a little hurt. Part of Kyouko's heart ached for him and the fact that she could no longer let herself be his shelter against the brutalities of the life they'd chosen. She set that ache aside; the time for that was past now.
"Am I wrong, Hayato-kun?" she asked, keeping her eyes on Tsuna the whole while.
She heard him take a breath. "No. Not wrong. We have to act. The other Families are waiting to see what we'll do." His voice was still nearly toneless, but Kyouko thought that perhaps there was something burning beneath it after all, something intense.
"If we do something, then what?" Tsuna demanded. The look on his face cut to the bone, dismay that didn't understand how Hayato-kun and she could be saying such things, which were everything he wanted to change about the mafia. "If we strike the Falasco, how do we keep them from striking back? Where does it end?"
"Ideally, we hit them so hard that they would not dare to do anything else that might draw down more of the same." Hayato-kun's voice was cool. "That's the usual procedure."
"We could do something else." Kyouko watched the way Tsuna turned to that, looking almost desperate. "We could damage them in something else, as long as we make it clear that we chose that in lieu of blood. It would have to be something significant. Something the Falasco actually value." She paused, thinking about that. "Perhaps their prestige among the other Families, along with their business. They value that more than they value their people, anyway." If Haru's work hadn't damaged the Falasco's most profitable line of drug-runners, they probably wouldn't have killed her.
"Both," Hayato-kun said. "It would be best to do both." There was a fire blazing in his eyes when Kyouko looked at him and he was sitting straighter in his seat. "A Family can get by without reputation or money, but not without both. Destroy those and you destroy the Falasco, whether you kill them or not."
Kyouko glanced at Tsuna. "There. That makes it simple, doesn't it?"
Tsuna's eyes were dark and his mouth was grim. "Nothing is simple anymore." He looked away form them; the muscles in his throat moved as he swallowed. He was silent for a long time; when he spoke again, his voice was heavy. "We can break their finances easily. I don't know about their reputations."
"That will be my job," Kyouko said. His jaw tightened. "What else is the work I've done with my time been for, if not this?"
"I don't know," he said, staring out the window at the view, hazy in the morning light. "I really don't."
Chrome raised her eyebrows when Kyouko explained what she wanted. "You do realize that finding something that this world would find questionable is going to be difficult, don't you?"
Which, yes, of course Kyouko knew that. Chrome and Mukuro were the best exhibits of that: individual crimes were punished severely enough, but a Family could conduct experiments on its own children and no one would interfere. Kyouko didn't know what was stranger, the fact that such hypocrisy could exist or that no one remarked upon it.
"I know it's going to be difficult." She shrugged. "I also know that it's the Falasco and they've surely done something that's worth uncovering."
"Most have," Chrome said. Her smile was tiny and sharp. "Well, let us see what we may find."
Not much at first, as it turned out; while Tsuna and Hayato-kun marshaled the Vongola's resources against the Falasco's businesses, their gambling and extortion schemes, their smuggling rings and their share of the drug trade, Kyouko spent hours working through the network of people Chrome and Mukuro knew, sifting for the things that the Falasco had done that might damn them. There was plenty that was sickening; Kyouko could barely stand to listen to some of the stories their informants had to tell. She stumbled out into the sun after speaking to one grizzled old man with bitter eyes and had to vomit in the alley outside his shop. Chrome followed her there and stood over till she was done. "Will you keep going?" she asked when Kyouko finally straightened up and wiped her mouth. Chrome's tone was all academic interest, not comfort, and the face of her disguise looked no more than mildly curious.
Kyouko wiped her mouth again, grimacing at the sour taste of bile. "You know, anyone else would be asking me whether I was okay, not whether I was going to keep going."
"Maybe," Chrome allowed. Her illusion smiled, faintly mocking. "Did you want to be comforted?"
"Not really." Kyouko spat, trying to rid her mouth of the taste of vomit. "Things aren't okay. I'm tired of people trying to tell me otherwise." Her brother had done it for the longest time; Tsuna had followed his lead; even Haru had sometimes kept things back, sheltering her just a bit. "This world is rotten."
"It is." Chrome's illusion was studying Kyouko now, though what Chrome might—or might not—have been able to see through Kyouko's own illusion was anyone's guess. "What are you going to do about it?"
Kyouko turned that question over as they left the alley and turned their steps toward the next stop on their agenda. "Tsuna is trying to change it. I'll help him." She sighed. "And push him forward when he needs it."
"Sometimes he needs to be pushed." Chrome straightened her illusion's shoulders, squaring them. "What Omar said about that family. It seems unusual to waste that kind of attention on one snitch. Disproportionate."
Disproportionate was one word for what the Falasco had done to Giorgio de Luca's family. Barbaric was another. Kyouko's gorge tried to rise again; she fought it down. "There's something there," she agreed. "Let's find out what."
Chrome gave her a long, considering look at that, but only nodded and led the way onward.
Tsuna was quiet in the evenings when he came to bed, withdrawn to some place that Kyouko wasn't sure he wanted her to follow. It worried her that he was hiding from her, or maybe that he just wasn't sure how to speak to her these days.
They weren't going to be able to go on like this for long, she thought when Tsuna came to bed yet again and settled himself against his pillow with no more than a sigh. And perhaps she was going to have to be the one to make the first move. She sighed too, and turned herself so she could slide an arm around him.
Tsuna went still under her touch for a long, uncertain moment. Then he wrapped himself around her and kissed her, open and nearly desperate. Kyouko sighed again as relief ran through her, letting herself melt into his hands, breathing encouragement to him as he gathered her closer. It felt good to let him run his hands over her body and to wrap her legs around his hips, making love to him for the first time since everything had changed. Afterwards, she held him close, stroking his hair as their breathing slowed.
"Are you not angry with me any more?" he asked, voice soft against her ear.
Kyouko blinked, hand stilling against his hair, surprised by the question. "Angry with you?" she repeated, thinking about it.
"Because of Haru," he said, voice still soft, uncertain. "Because I didn't keep her safe. Because I didn't go after the Falasco's heads. Take your pick."
"I was never angry with you," she said. "I—it was other things. I suppose I wasn't paying attention where I was aiming it." There was no missing the tremor that ran through him, or the way he sighed at that. "Forgive me."
He tightened his arms around her and turned his face to kiss the side of her throat. "I couldn't blame you if you were," he whispered. "I should have found a way to keep her safe, somehow—"
"Tsuna." Kyouko cradled his head against her shoulder, aching at the self-recrimination in his voice. "She knew the risks she was taking." Had enjoyed taking them, even. "She knew it wasn't safe."
"But she didn't have a ring or a box." Tsuna's voice was barely audible. "You were right about that. She didn't have them and she should have."
Kyouko sighed. "We can't help it now," she told him. "It's done."
"I talked to the Bovino." Kyouko froze. "They said no, there was nothing they could do. Would do." His voice was bleak. "They insisted it was against their rules. All I wanted was to send someone back to tell us to make sure to teach the two of you to fight, too. But they said no."
Kyouko closed her eyes and took a careful breath, and then another, before she could trust herself to speak steadily. "Have you talked to Lambo?" she asked, since it was fruitless to be angry with the Bovino. God knew they had reason for their rules.
Tsuna nodded against her shoulder. "I don't think he'll have very many more chances."
Which was true; Lambo had left off reaching for the bazooka at every little problem as he'd gotten older. These days it was rare for life to be interrupted by a squalling toddler from the past. "But it's something. Maybe it'll change things for some other versions of us." Small comfort for them, but better than nothing.
"I hope so." Tsuna sighed against her shoulder. "You're really not angry with me? You said—"
"I'm angry with this world. The things Families do to themselves. To others. For no good reason." Just plenty of bad ones. "The things we've seen, looking at the Falasco—I get why Mukuro wanted to destroy it all, now."
The sound of his inhale was sharp. "Do you?"
Kyouko made a face at the ceiling. "I didn't say I agreed with him." Not exactly, and not in the sense that made Tsuna sound so suddenly cautious. "I just don't want Mari and Daisuke to inherit this," she said, softly. "We have to change it somehow. They deserve better."
Tsuna lifted his head to look at her. "I'm trying," he said. "You know I'm trying."
"Shh, I know." Kyouko lifted her hand to his cheek, stroking it. "I know you are." She threaded her fingers through his hair and drew his face down to hers to kiss him. "I'm going to help you do it."
He rested his forehead against hers. "Part of me still thinks I need to keep you safe from this."
"You can't." She stroked his hair, considering it—but no, he needed to hear her say it. "I don't want to be." He went still against her, and she added, "I don't want to stay out of it anymore, Tsuna. I want to have a part in how things change. One that's more than just the job of smiling prettily at our guests. That's not going to be enough anymore." Not now that she'd had a reminder of what the freedom to act tasted like.
He sighed. "I spoke to people." His voice was quiet. "They're making a ring for you. It won't be a Vongola ring, but it'll be the next best thing. And we'll get you a box weapon of your own."
She was probably never going to know how much it had cost him to do that for her, either. "Thank you." Kyouko pressed her mouth against his, soft. "Thank you for understanding."
"I just wanted to keep you safe," he said. "That's all I ever really wanted."
Kyouko wound her arms around him, holding him close. "I know, love. I know."
Kyouko didn't say anything after they left Rossi, who'd traded half an hour with his lost Marco for a handful of hints about why Giorgio de Luca and his family had been slaughtered. Chrome didn't speak either, not till they were a long way away, several changes of illusion and not a few false trails and doubling-backs later. It wasn't until they'd adopted a matched pair of illusions—tourists, this time, sitting in a plaza and enjoying coffee together. Kyouko broke their silence first. "I'm not from this world," she said, staring out across sun-drenched flagstones. "But if what he was getting at is true—"
"Then they broke omertà," Chrome finished. Maybe Chrome; there was a lilt to the words that sounded more like Mukuro. Whichever one of them it was swirled the espresso in their cup. "I believe you may have found what you were looking for."
"Yes," Kyouko said, relieved in a sense. She'd started to be afraid that there wouldn't be anything to find, that the only revenge Haru was going to have was the bullets Hayato-kun had put in her killers' heads and the financial catastrophes that the Vongola had visited on the Falasco.
"Are you going to cry?" That mildly curious tone could only be Mukuro speaking through Chrome's mouth.
The question had a galvanizing effect, at any rate. Kyouko sat up straighter. "No, of course not." Perhaps later, when it was all over for real and she was alone with Tsuna to hold her—that would be the time to cry. "There are too many other things to do first." They had to find something more like actual proof that the Falasco had broken omertà to sell out the Scalzo, and then they had to make sure that proof landed in the right hands, and after that they would have to make sure everyone knew who'd brought this to light, and why.
Mukuro took a sip of espresso. "You do realize that the other Families will tear them to pieces over this, don't you?" The question was casual; his smile wasn't.
Kyouko met that smile head-on. "I know." She shrugged. "If it's true, then it's what they deserve. We may fight with ourselves, but we're supposed to protect one another from those on the outside. Even I know that, and I wasn't even born to this world."
"The two of you are so charmingly old-fashioned," Mukuro mused. He stretched out his illusion's legs and made himself comfortable. "You know that's not how things really work."
"It's the way they should work." Kyouko gave him a long look. "Or do you disagree?"
"Are you quite sure you want me to answer that?" Mukuro inquired, toying with the napkin under his cup.
"I suppose I don't really need to." The faintly startled look that earned her was gratifying. She took a sip of her cappuccino and smiled at him. "Mukuro. You and Chrome are Tsuna's Mist. And I've felt your Will. I know you."
The illusion sitting across from her blinked once and changed posture. "That wasn't very nice of you," Chrome murmured. "You know he doesn't like it when someone sees through his illusions."
Kyouko snorted. "I know. But it's good for him."
"Maybe," Chrome said, and drained her espresso. "We have work to do, though."
"Yes," Kyouko agreed. "Quite a bit of it."
Starting the rumors was easy enough. Kyouko had spent years managing the delicate business of insinuation and gossip through conversations over tea and passed from person to person at parties. This was the same thing, if done in dive bars and back alleys instead of the well-appointed halls of the Vongola house: sharing the seeds of what they'd uncovered about the Falasco with anyone who'd listen and then discarding one illusion for another to do it again. The day Kyouko stopped in to hear what Giacomo the dockworker had to say and he lowered his voice to ask her whether she'd heard about the Falasco and the Scalzo, she merely smiled and encouraged him to tell her.
After that it was merely a matter of time and of nudging the sparks into full flame. And that, Kyouko thought, looking over the people who'd come to the party she'd put together for just that purpose, was easy enough to do. She leaned against Tsuna and said, softly, "We should go talk with Dino and Furetto."
Tsuna glanced at her. "Time already?"
Kyouko nodded. "They're ready." And Dino was obliging; he'd help nudge things around if she needed him to.
Tsuna covered her hand on his arm with his; together they made their way over to where Dino and Paolo Furetto were in conversation with each other. Furetto turned to them almost as soon as he realized they were in earshot. His eyebrows were knotted and his eyes were grim. "Here, Sawada, what do you make of this news about the Falasco?"
"Which business is that?" Tsuna's voice was steady, detached—his business voice. Kyouko was probably the only one who knew that his palms were damp.
Furetto didn't quite snort. "You know perfectly well. They say that the Falasco sold the Scalzo out."
"Ah. That." Tsuna pretended to consider it as the Orsini and the Ruscitti began drifting closer. Of course they were, Kyouko thought, watching them. Everyone wanted to know what the Vongola would have to say about the Falasco's breach of omertà. "It's a disgrace," he said, at length. "If it's true, then the Falasco are a disgrace, no more than a pack of thugs and bullies, and not worth being called a Family." He paused. "If, of course, it's true."
"I think it may be," Dino said. "Falasco covered his tracks well, but my people are turning up some things that we find... disturbing."
Kyouko relaxed, minutely, as Furetto's eyes turned darker and Ruscitti frowned. Bless Dino and his people; they'd just made things that much easier.
"That would be convenient," Orsini muttered. He glanced at Tsuna. "If the Falasco go down, that is. The Vongola would like that."
"The Vongola wouldn't lose any sleep over it, true," Tsuna agreed, which was a lie. Not that Kyouko was going to let anyone know that. His smile was faint and chilly. "However, the Vongola would not stoop to fabricating evidence against our enemies. We find that it's sufficient to merely look a bit deeper."
There was a breath of silence as they absorbed that, Furetto and Ruscitti frowning and Orsini looking sour. Ruscitti shook his head first. "A disgrace," he said. No surprises there; the Ruscitti were an old Family, very traditional and very fond of those traditions.
Kyouko squeezed Tsuna's arm and excused herself—"So you gentlemen can talk freely"—and slipped away.
A circuit of the room proved that rumor had wings; everywhere she turned, the same things were on everyone's lips. The Falasco, Kyouko thought, were in for a bad time of it. A worse time, perhaps, given the trouble they were already having financially. It was the sort of thought to give her a warm glow.
There was, however, a face missing from the crowd. Hayato-kun was outside on the terrace, a solitary figure leaning against the balustrade, pointedly detached from the rest of the party. That wasn't quite right; Kyouko glanced around to be sure she was unobserved and drew the Mist around her, slipping out to join him. He was smoking; there were cigarette butts scattered around his feet and an empty glass sitting at his elbow next to his pack of cigarettes. Kyouko leaned her elbows on the balustrade next to him. "The Falasco's reputation is falling apart inside," she said. "Don't you want to watch?"
"Not really." He stared across the lawn; what she could see of his expression was blank.
Kyouko sighed. "I miss her too," she said softly.
His jaw tightened. "Don't," he said, low. "I don't want to—to—just don't. Please."
"If you'd rather not." Kyouko watched him for a moment and came to a decision. "There's something I can do," she said, quietly. "With the Mist. If you'd like to see her again, I can make that happen." The best illusions came from knowing their subjects intimately; she made shadows for her informants, but for Hayato-kun, she could create something that would live and breathe. "If there was anything you wanted to say, maybe."
Hayato-kun took a drag of his cigarette that finished it. He dropped the butt, crushed it out, and exhaled a stream of smoke before answering. "Anything I could say, she already knew."
Kyouko bit her lip but nodded, relieved in a way that he had refused. "I wanted to offer."
"Yeah, thanks. But no." He shook another cigarette out of the back sitting next to his glass and lit up, not looking at her. "Got an addictive personality. One hit wouldn't be enough."
She could understand that, which suggested something else altogether, something that she'd let lapse in favor of other business. "We're so lucky to have you," she murmured, and laid a hand on his shoulder. "We'd be lost without you. You know that, right?"
Hayato-kun did look at her then. When his mouth quirked, it wasn't entirely humorless. "Point taken." He dropped the cigarette, though it wasn't even halfway burned down, and straightened up. "You know, you're more merciless than he is."
"Yes," Kyouko said as they turned to go inside, "I know."
He huffed softly. "I thought you might."
Kyouko shrugged at him and waved him ahead of her. She lingered on the terrace, looking up at the night sky for a long time, before heading back inside to see what she'd started finished.
end
Comments are lovely (especially for this thing, because I will not even tell you how much of a pain it was every step of the way, argh). Comment here at Dreamwidth using OpenID, or at LiveJournal.
Characters/Pairings: Tsuna/Kyouko; Gokudera/Haru; Chrome, Mukuro, I-Pin
Summary: Most people assume that Kyouko's really nice. They're mistaken: she's simply polite. And there's a huge difference between "nice" and "polite."
Notes: Teen and up. A hugely belated fic for round four of
khrfest, prompt III-17: Kyoko – Haru is killed by a rival family, Kyouko doesn't take it lying down; "Fly away/ Take control / Beyond the edge will make you whole." Character death, angst, Kyouko being a badass. Kind of a grim AU to "They Also Serve". 8801 words.Wild Justice
They would not let her look at the body at first, not until Kyouko raised her voice and pushed Yamamoto-kun out of her way and went into the room where they'd brought Haru to rest.
Someone had draped a sheet over her that hid the worst of the damage, for which Kyouko, looking at the slack lines of Haru's face and the splatter of blood across her cheek, could only be grateful. She crossed the floor to the table slowly to look at her. It was funny, she thought, how everything she'd ever read had said that the dead looked like they were sleeping. Kyouko had seen Haru sleep before; this empty, still shell had nothing in the common with the restless way she slept. Had slept.
"Who did this?" She recognized the voice as her own, though it and the question seemed to come from somewhere else.
The room's other occupant did not look up from the hand that he held between his own. His voice was hoarse. "We're not sure yet."
Kyouko took her eyes away from Haru's face—there would be time enough to mourn her later, there would be the rest of her life to mourn her best friend—and fixed her attention on Hayato-kun. He looked lost, like he didn't understand what had happened. Haru had said, once, when they had fallen into talking about the boys, sharing secrets and giggling over them, that Hayato-kun was far more fragile than he ever wanted anyone to see. Kyouko hadn't believed her then, but she did now that she could see the pieces of him spread out before her.
Perhaps it hadn't been for her protection that they had tried to keep her out of this room.
Kyouko reached across Haru and laid her hand on top of Hayato-kun's. "We will find them," she promised. "We will hunt them down. And then we'll destroy them."
Some part of her was a little surprised at her own fierceness, but Hayato-kun finally raised his eyes to hers, slowly, and nodded once. "Yes," he said. "We will."
The work that Haru had done for Kyouko—for the Vongola, but mostly for Kyouko—had been the work that only she could have done. They'd known that from the start, known that only Haru's place as both insider and outsider would let her get away with the flirting and flitting about, giggling with the men of other Families and exchanging gossip and information with her network of friends and contacts and then bringing the things she had learned home to lay in Kyouko's lap. They'd also known how dangerous that would be. Kyouko had wrung her hands over it in private and to Tsuna, fretting over the danger that Haru had courted. Haru had always insisted on going ahead, had insisted on being useful and on working for the Vongola in her own way.
There was no pleasure in having been proved right after all.
"I should have found a way to stop her," she said once she'd managed to cry herself out against Tsuna's shoulder. Her eyes felt gritty and raw and Tsuna's shirt was soaked through, but he didn't protest and Kyouko wasn't ready to move yet. "I should have found a way to keep her safe."
Tsuna's arms curled around her more tightly, but it was a while before he answered that. "I don't think we could have done that and kept her happy."
"There might have been something." Only they wouldn't ever know, now. "How do you stand it?"
Held close like she was, she could feel the little shudder that ran through him then. "I don't know," he said, voice heavy. "I just do. Somehow. And pray it doesn't happen again. Or to any of the people I love most." He stopped and swallowed. "So much for that last."
"Tsuna..." She found his hand and gripped it. "We're going to find who did this," she whispered. "And we'll make them sorry, and show everyone why they shouldn't take our people from us."
The sound he made then was distressed, torn. "And when does it stop?" When Kyouko lifted her head, she saw that he looked exhausted. "If we destroy them, they'll feel justified in striking back, and it'll go on, and on, and nothing will ever change."
"Tsuna." Kyouko heard her voice coming from very far away. "Do you hear what you're saying? About Haru?"
Tsuna's face was wretched. "I know."
Kyouko felt the blood turning cold in her veins. "But—" she began, stopping herself at the wretched look on his face. "We'll do something, won't we?" she asked, instead of saying the things that she wanted to say.
He nodded. "Something, yes. When we find out who did it."
That didn't seem like enough to Kyouko, but she swallowed that down. Later, she promised herself. She would talk to him later, when they were both more reasonable.
The funeral was small and quiet because Kyouko had refused to let it be turned into an opportunity for other Families to come and gloat from behind veils of false sympathy—she'd already gotten enough notes from those who'd clucked over Haru's death, gunned down in the street as if she'd been no better than she should have been, to know that had one of them approached her at the funeral, there would have been an unpleasantness. She'd kept it to the Family and friends only, which was better anyway. That way there were no unfriendly eyes to pry at Hayato-kun's grief and wonder how it might be exploited and there were friendly arms to lift the weight of Mari and Daisuke from her arms, passing the two around—two small, solemn-faced toddlers who understood that this was a serious occasion, even if they didn't understand why.
When it was over, Chrome came to Kyouko, making her way to Kyouko's side so quietly that I-Pin made a low, distressed sound at the ease with which she'd insinuated herself there. "You will be doing something about this," she said. Her voice was as soft as it had ever been, but there was something in her gaze that Kyouko recognized, something that simmered and seethed. "I will help."
"Thank you," Kyouko told her.
Chrome dipped her head and moved away again, as silently as she'd come, as Yamamoto approached with Daisuke, who'd turned fussy. Kyouko accepted him and soothed him absently, mind turning over new possibilities. Chrome came and went freely, just as Mukuro did, and in that, there was something that she might be able to use.
Chrome came to her with other ideas, appearing in Kyouko's morning room (which was nearly unbearably lonely without the sound of Haru's laughter) and placing herself in front of Kyouko, fingers curled around the haft of her trident. "Tell me, Kyouko-san," she said, her voice lilting the way Mukuro's did when he was playing a game with someone. "If you died today, what would your regrets be?"
Kyouko knew the look she was giving Chrome was a hard one and could not quite keep it from her face despite her best intentions. "I should think that would be obvious."
"And yet these things so rarely are." Chrome tilted her head, studying Kyouko. "You suspect me of toying with your grief, perhaps?"
Kyouko winced away from the note of reproof in Chrome's voice. "No, I—it's not that."
"Then what is it?"
Kyouko twisted her hands in her lap, knowing that Chrome would see it and recognize the agitation in the gesture. "I can't do anything," she said, and stopped. "She was my hands, she was my eyes, she was my link to the world outside the house, and without her I am helpless." The words were bitter in her mouth. "I have let myself be made helpless."
"Good," Chrome said, her voice turning crisp. "You recognize the problem yourself. I was afraid that I would have to drag you through it."
Kyouko's eyes jerked away from her hands at the sting in that. "Anyone else would be telling me how wrong I was," she noted. "And would remind me how much power the Vongola Tenth's wife holds."
"Are you that fond of flattery?" Chrome's mouth quirked. "If you are, tell me to go away again and I'll leave you to it."
Kyouko drew a breath and let it out again, slow, expelling the prickle of wounded ego with it. "No, stay," she said, lifting her chin and giving Chrome a direct look. "If you recognize the problem, I assume you have some thoughts on the solution?"
"Ah. Now you're thinking, rather than reacting. Very good." Chrome finally took a seat then, leaning her trident within easy reach. Kyouko tried not to be conscious of whose seat Chrome had taken; it wasn't Haru's any more. "Tell me, now. If you died today, what regrets would you take to your grave?"
Kyouko thought about it this time. "There would be many things," she said, sorting through them. "That I would be leaving my children. That I would be leaving Tsuna." Chrome was watching her as closely as a cat at a mouse hole; she smiled when Kyouko drew a breath and added, "And that I would be leaving Haru unavenged."
Chrome nodded, her smile creeping wider. "That should do nicely." She moved so swiftly that I-Pin could do no more than lunge forward as she swept the trident up and scored a thin line across the back of Kyouko's left hand.
What happened next passed before Kyouko's eyes in slow motion. I-Pin knocked the trident away from Kyouko's hand, snarling at Chrome as she did. Chrome's laughter was bright and amused; Flame flickered around her hands and wreathed I-Pin's wrists and ankles, forging bright steel cuffs and linking them together. "Calm down," she said as I-Pin went over, straining against restraints born of the Mist. "If I had meant to do your mistress harm, she would already be dead."
Her words seemed to reach Kyouko's ears from far away; Kyouko found that she could not move, that she was caught like a fly in amber, her own will captive to someone else's. Chrome's, she decided, after the first disorienting moment had passed, because the feel of it was detached and curious. She could feel a second person's will observing the whole affair, and his presence was dense and ancient—Mukuro.
Chrome saw I-Pin settled in a fairly comfortable heap before turning her attention on Kyouko. "Now," she murmured, setting cool fingers under Kyouko's chin. "Let us see what you are made of, Kyouko-san."
And then the world caught fire.
Kyouko remembered the time at the beginning of the whole thing, when Tsuna had first gotten involved with Reborn-san and had first begun to change, and the afternoon when Reborn-san had shot her. The world had gone slow and quiet then, muffled against the flare of her anger and the overwhelming need to do something about it. She and Tsuna had never spoken of that afternoon, not even after he'd finally confessed what it was that he and his friends had gotten them all involved in.
Perhaps, she thought distantly, they should have.
"I thought so," Chrome said, sounding immensely satisfied about it, as Kyouko looked at the haze of purple around her own hands—the perspective was odd, till she realized that she was seeing herself through Chrome's eyes, not her own. She didn't just hear Chrome's satisfaction; she could feel it curling sleekly around her. "I said that you were already doing things that were of the Mist."
So you did. Mukuro's tone was decidedly amused as his presence wound itself closer. And I believe that I told you how exceedingly unlikely it was that she would embrace her Flame enough to use it when she accomplished so many things without it. He was close now, the weight of ages and lives pressing against the strange other place where Kyouko was aware of herself, and Chrome, and now him.
You're wrong about that, Chrome told him. Isn't he, Kyouko-san?
Kyouko found that she had a voice again. "Yes," she said, and watched I-Pin go still against the floor, her eyes dark and wide and clearly wondering who was speaking through her lips. "Show me. For Haru's sake."
I-Pin's eyes went a fraction wider in something like understanding. In the back of Kyouko's head, Mukuro began to laugh like a man honestly surprised and delighted by some turn of events.
Chrome merely smiled at Kyouko. "It goes like this," she said and began.
Kyouko felt strange in her own skin as she walked through the halls of the Vongola house. Normally she would be with Mari and Daisuke at this time of the day, helping supervise their lunches, but today they were going to have to make do with someone else's attention.
Some of the men she passed gave her puzzled looks. Kyouko supposed they were confused; she rarely came to the part of the house where Tsuna conducted his business and the underbosses came and went. She paid them no mind and they let her pass, unchallenged.
She supposed that she didn't really have to let it be that way. She could have passed through them unseen and avoided their puzzled glances. Had Mukuro's voice still been with her, he would have suggested as much.
But Mukuro was no longer near now that Chrome had released her, and Kyouko thought that it was better to do this openly.
Tsuna was alone in his office, for which Kyouko was grateful. He was frowning over some papers as his lunch went ignored at his elbow, and it took him a moment to realize that she had slipped in, I-Pin close on her heels. When he did, he smiled at her, soft and private. "Kyouko." He put the papers aside and rose, and only then did he realize that I-Pin was placing herself between them. His smile melted away and he looked from I-Pin to her. "What—?"
"You're going to need your Will," Kyouko told him, really rather pleased by how steadily her voice emerged from her throat. "I-Pin isn't sure whether or not I'm safe just at the moment, so you'll set her mind at ease if you would just check me over, please." She reflected on that for a moment and added, "I think I would be reassured, too, come to think of it."
Now Tsuna was beginning to look alarmed, even as his Will lit his brow and his hands. "What am I checking for, if you don't mind my asking? And why?"
"I'll explain afterwards, if you'll promise not to get angry," Kyouko told him.
Tsuna's mouth tightened. "I'm not going to like this, am I?"
"No, probably not." It was true, and was why Chrome had said she was going to get clear of the house after she'd released her hold on Kyouko. "But you need to listen to the reason. It's a good one, I promise."
His mouth tightened still further, but he nodded. "I'll listen. Now, what is it?"
Kyouko held out her hand, showing him the thin scratch. "You need to check me to see whether I’m still possessed, please."
He understood immediately; the way his Will flared higher, so bright it was nearly unbearable to look at, said as much, and the sound he made was nearly a snarl. "Mukuro—"
"Chrome, actually," Kyouko told him. "There's a reason. But first, please." She extended her hand to him.
He drew a breath and settled himself, Flame dimming to less incandescent levels. "Yes." He came closer and grasped her hand.
Tsuna's Will felt nothing like Chrome's or the sleek, insinuating weight of Mukuro's presence. Tsuna's touch was warm and sure and immeasurably strong, boundless as the sky itself and shot through with feelings that were so raw that Kyouko had trouble giving them names at first—though she did after a moment, identifying fear and anger and love twined together in the careful, searching touch.
Some of the anger was already ebbing away, replaced by relief, when he said, "I don't think you're still possessed."
I-Pin's shoulders sagged with the same kind of relief; the look she turned on Kyouko was mingled guilt and apology. "I'm sorry, I had to be sure."
"No, of course," Kyouko said, distracted by the dizzy feeling of being left alone inside her own skill as Tsuna's Will drew away. She gripped his hand, leaning against him, and added, "Now, Tsuna and I need to talk."
I-Pin was as wise as she was dangerous. She nodded and executed a smooth bow before slipping out, shutting the door after herself with a soft click. Kyouko permitted herself to lean against Tsuna's chest for a moment longer, savoring the warmth of his arms, before she said, "Now, about that explanation."
"They had better hope it's a good one." Tsuna's tone was still a little distant with his Will, though the glow of it had faded away from his hands and only lingered in his eyes.
"I think it is," Kyouko said. "But let's sit down." He had a couch in his office; he'd slept on it a few times during crises that wouldn't let him come away from his work long enough for a full night's sleep. It was better than the chairs because it meant that she could curl against his side, holding onto him, and try to explain without having to see the look in his eyes. "I relied on Haru too much," she began. "And I didn't make sure she had all the protections she should have had. I've let myself be held inside these walls. Without Haru, I'm as helpless as I seem." Tsuna started to make a protesting noise, but she didn't let him finish. "No, Tsuna, I am. I think I may be able to rebuild some of Haru's network, but it's going to be different from what it was. And I'll have to be more active in it. I'll have to be able to protect myself. That's what Chrome and Mukuro helped me with."
A heartbeat passed, and then another, before Tsuna asked, his voice even, "How did they do that?"
"They helped me find my Flame. And showed me how to use it." Kyouko lifted a hand. "See?" Mist twined around her fingers, just the way Chrome and Mukuro had showed her; she shaped it into a rose just picked from a garden, with dew still clinging to its petals.
Tsuna sucked in a breath and took it when she offered it to him, and immediately muttered something under his breath when he closed his fingers around a thorn. When Kyouko stole a glance at him, he was frowning at the rose. "The Mist."
"So much of what I do for the Vongola is made of smoke and mirrors anyway." Kyouko looked at the rose as he twirled it in his fingers. "That was why she possessed me. To wake my Flame and show me how to use it, so I won't have to rely on others to do my work for me unless I choose to."
Tsuna drew a breath. "But you're—"
"I wonder what Haru's Flame would have been." Kyouko felt him go still against her side. "And I wonder why we never thought to find out till it was too late.
"A Flame can't always stop bullets," Tsuna said; she could hear how careful he was trying to be.
"No." Kyouko let the rose disappear and took his hand. "But it could have been something else. Something she could have drawn on. But she didn't have it, even though we've come to this place where so many people are against us, and even though she put herself in their way to do her work." Kyouko drew a breath and gripped his hand, willing him to see her point. "It's not right, Tsuna."
"It shouldn't be like this," Tsuna said, voice full of regrets.
"Then we have to change it." Kyouko looked at him and waited until he was returning her gaze. "And from now on, I'm going to be part of that."
"You already are a part of it," he said, which wasn't what she had meant at all. She could tell he knew it by the way his eyes dropped. "Kyouko, it's—"
"Dangerous, yes, I know." She squeezed his hand. "I know it's not safe—do you think there's anyway I can't know that now, that I haven't known it all along? But I can't stand back while the rest of you face that danger over and over, not anymore." Her voice was becoming dangerously unsteady; she cleared her throat. "I have to do something, Tsuna. I have to."
He still wasn't quite looking at her. "All I want is for you to be safe."
"None of us is safe here." Kyouko bit her lip as soon as the words left her mouth; that was the closest she'd ever permitted herself to come to reproaching him for taking the Vongola ring.
"No." His voice was quiet and sad. "I suppose not. But I had hoped to keep you away from the worst of it."
"The worst of it has already touched me." Kyouko rested her head against his shoulder. "I miss Haru so much."
She felt him draw a breath as if to say something. Then he let it sigh out again, changing his mind about whatever it was. Instead he curled his arm around her and said, "What is it that you want to do?"
"Gut the people who took Haru from us," Kyouko said. "With my bare hands."
"Kyouko!" He sounded genuinely appalled.
"She was my right hand! I know my history; gutting them isn't unreasonable." And she wasn't really exaggerating all that much. "I'm going to see them pay for this, one way or another."
He still looked appalled when she looked at him. "We're trying to change this world."
"Sometimes to change things, you have to get rid of some things first." That was the first principle of housekeeping; what Tsuna proposed to do with the mafia was really only housekeeping writ large. But perhaps she shouldn't let him dwell on that for too long. "Chrome has promised to introduce me to some people that I might be able to use. We're going to begin there." Everything else would follow from that.
Tsuna didn't say anything to that, not immediately. Instead he sighed. "You've made up your mind, haven't you?"
"I have," Kyouko said. "Whatever the Vongola does, I want to be a part of it. I have that right."
He couldn't deny that much, no matter how much he wanted to. He closed his eyes and pressed her close. "You will be," he said. "Just—promise me that you'll be careful. I couldn't bear to lose you."
"I won't let that happen," Kyouko promised him. "I'll be as careful as I can." It wasn't quite the promise he'd asked for, but if he noticed, he didn't say anything about it.
When she'd left Japan to follow Tsuna to Italy, Kyouko had known that she would be giving up some things to gain others. She'd made her peace with that, or thought she had.
Now, walking anonymously through a crowd, hidden behind a disguise drawn of Mist, Kyouko realized that she had missed some things more than she'd thought. Someone jostled her, careless, and she laughed because she couldn't remember the last time she'd rubbed elbows with a stranger—who would let a stranger so close to the Vongola Tenth's wife?
"Steady," Chrome told her, though the stranger's face she wore was smiling faintly.
"I am steady," Kyouko told her. "I've spent my whole life being steady." That was what a good girl like her did. "You'll forgive me for enjoying myself just a bit."
"There's no wine so heady as freedom." Chrome sounded like Mukuro when she got sardonic; Kyouko wondered whether that was her or Mukuro speaking. It didn't matter; there was a look of understanding in her eyes—stranger's eyes, muddy hazel and ancient, wholly out of place in the teenager's face she'd adopted. "But never mind that. There are people you should meet."
Chrome and Mukuro had their own networks that they put to their own ends; only some of them overlapped with the Vongola's. Tsuna overlooked that deliberately, choosing to occasionally call Chrome and Mukuro in and ask after their business. Were Tsuna anyone else, it wouldn't have worked, but he'd pried Mukuro out of the Vendicare's hands—among other things—and so it did work. Kyouko wondered whether the people Chrome took her to see—a baker covered in flour; a man who worked o the docks and smelled of rum and the sea; a girl too old for her age, who served them coffee while she dressed herself for the evening; and half a dozen others—were part of their network or another. She didn't ask.
What was more important was the way each of the people Chrome introduced her to were hungry for something that the Mist could give them. The girl who served them coffee wanted a reverie built in jewel tones and soft edges; Kyouko didn't ask her the young man was, and focused on her coffee while the girl danced with his shadow. After they had finished, the girl's eyes were brighter and she promised to pass along whatever news she heard.
"Is it bothering you?" Chrome asked after they'd left the man who'd spent his time with them holding a small child who'd curled confidingly in his arms, a child whose living counterpart wasn't anymore.
"I don't know," Kyouko said, since it was the honest truth. "They know it's not real, don't they?"
"What's real?" Chrome took a long step and turned on her heel, walking backwards and looking at Kyouko, her disguised face smiling broadly. "If you can hold it in your arms, touch it, talk with it, isn't it real?"
"But it doesn't last."
"What does?" Chrome's smile turned crooked. "Does duration mark the boundary?" She spread her hands. "So it only lasted an hour and then disappeared. While it lasted, it was as real as anything else."
This was, perhaps, a philosophical argument better left alone, Kyouko decided. "Are we taking advantage of them?"
"A better question." Chrome spun herself again and fell in at Kyouko's side. "Yes, of course we are. As they are taking advantage of us in turn." She lifted a hand and rocked it back and forth. "And both sides walk away convinced that they are the ones getting the better of the other. A bit of gossip in exchange for a dance with a former lover? Information about the curious doings of the neighbors for a chance to hold your granddaughter one more time? Trifles, really." Her smile was sharp. "And for us, we come closer to our enemies in exchange for what comes naturally to us, without doing any of the harm that alcohol might."
Kyouko absorbed that. "You are the least comfortable person I know," she said, finally.
Chrome's smile turned wider. "Thank you."
Kyouko wasn't sure that she had meant it for a compliment, precisely, but let it be.
Kyouko hadn't been sure what Hayato-kun would do with himself after the initial shock wore off, but wasn't surprised that the new Hayato-kun reminded her very much of the Gokudera Hayato she'd first met years ago. He seemed to have closed himself off the same way he had as a teenager, anyway, sublimating everything into single-minded service to the Vongola. In his morning meetings with Tsuna—and now Kyouko, who had taken to attending their briefings and covering her coming and going with the Mist—he was grim and quiet, giving dogged attention to hunting down Haru's killers.
Finding the ones who'd pulled the triggers hadn't taken long between Hayato-kun's network and Kyouko's own contacts; figuring out who'd paid them to do it only took a little longer. "It was the Falasco." Hayato's voice was steady enough, making the report, but there was a feverish brightness to his eyes that Kyouko didn't like.
"I'm hearing the same things." She held her teacup clasped between her hands, using it to keep herself from fidgeting. "It was the Falasco's money behind it."
It stood to reason. Haru had been instrumental in teasing the information out of Diego Falasco's right hand that had let the Vongola put a stop to the trade out of Augusta. She'd been so pleased with herself for how she'd managed it, too.
"The Falasco. Of course." Tsuna rubbed a hand over his face, thinking. "They clearly have too much money in their hands. Let's do something about that."
Hayato-kun made a note. "Anything else, Tenth?" His voice was nearly toneless.
Kyouko tightened her grip on her teacup as the two of them locked eyes across Tsuna's desk. Finally, Tsuna said, "What else would you have me do? You've executed the ones who did it."
A muscle flickered in Hayato-kun's jaw. "You're the Tenth. I'll do whatever you say."
"I say we should destroy them," Kyouko said, when it had begun to seem like they were going to stare at each other all morning, breaking each other's hearts on their deadlock. They both jerked like they were startled, like they'd forgotten she was there.
Kyouko decided that she was getting tired of being overlooked.
"I'd like to kill them all," she added as Tsuna started looking distressed and Hayato-kun began to study her, eyes narrowed and thoughtful. "But I suppose we can't, since that's not what the Vongola stand for."
"Really not," Tsuna said, voice strained.
Hayato-kun was very still; only his eyes moved back and forth between them, watching them both.
"We have to do something, though." Kyouko set her teacup down and folded her hands under her chin, meeting Tsuna's gaze as squarely as she could. "We know who it was. We know who they hired. We even know why they did it. The world will know, too, if it doesn't already. Tsuna, we have to act."
"We are!" he protested. "We have. More than that—violence will only multiply violence. It's just more of the same. We can't change this world if we become like it."
Kyouko took a breath, forcing it to remain steady. "If we don't do something, we're all going to be targets. It'll be clear that the Vongola Tenth will not protect his people and all the other Families will feel free to move against us. We're not loved, Tsuna. Not outside the Family." A hard lesson, that, and one of the first Chrome had shown her as they'd started to circulate in the world outside the Vongola demesne. "If we don't defend ourselves—if we don't make it clear that anyone who targets one of our people is in for harsh punishment—we all end up as targets. Not just you. Not just your guardians. Me. Mari. Daisuke." Not that they weren't already targets, to a degree; there had been other candidates for Tsuna's job besides Xanxus, after all. "If we don't do something, we might as well all paint targets on our chests."
"Kyouko." Tsuna was staring at her, incredulous, maybe even a little hurt. Part of Kyouko's heart ached for him and the fact that she could no longer let herself be his shelter against the brutalities of the life they'd chosen. She set that ache aside; the time for that was past now.
"Am I wrong, Hayato-kun?" she asked, keeping her eyes on Tsuna the whole while.
She heard him take a breath. "No. Not wrong. We have to act. The other Families are waiting to see what we'll do." His voice was still nearly toneless, but Kyouko thought that perhaps there was something burning beneath it after all, something intense.
"If we do something, then what?" Tsuna demanded. The look on his face cut to the bone, dismay that didn't understand how Hayato-kun and she could be saying such things, which were everything he wanted to change about the mafia. "If we strike the Falasco, how do we keep them from striking back? Where does it end?"
"Ideally, we hit them so hard that they would not dare to do anything else that might draw down more of the same." Hayato-kun's voice was cool. "That's the usual procedure."
"We could do something else." Kyouko watched the way Tsuna turned to that, looking almost desperate. "We could damage them in something else, as long as we make it clear that we chose that in lieu of blood. It would have to be something significant. Something the Falasco actually value." She paused, thinking about that. "Perhaps their prestige among the other Families, along with their business. They value that more than they value their people, anyway." If Haru's work hadn't damaged the Falasco's most profitable line of drug-runners, they probably wouldn't have killed her.
"Both," Hayato-kun said. "It would be best to do both." There was a fire blazing in his eyes when Kyouko looked at him and he was sitting straighter in his seat. "A Family can get by without reputation or money, but not without both. Destroy those and you destroy the Falasco, whether you kill them or not."
Kyouko glanced at Tsuna. "There. That makes it simple, doesn't it?"
Tsuna's eyes were dark and his mouth was grim. "Nothing is simple anymore." He looked away form them; the muscles in his throat moved as he swallowed. He was silent for a long time; when he spoke again, his voice was heavy. "We can break their finances easily. I don't know about their reputations."
"That will be my job," Kyouko said. His jaw tightened. "What else is the work I've done with my time been for, if not this?"
"I don't know," he said, staring out the window at the view, hazy in the morning light. "I really don't."
Chrome raised her eyebrows when Kyouko explained what she wanted. "You do realize that finding something that this world would find questionable is going to be difficult, don't you?"
Which, yes, of course Kyouko knew that. Chrome and Mukuro were the best exhibits of that: individual crimes were punished severely enough, but a Family could conduct experiments on its own children and no one would interfere. Kyouko didn't know what was stranger, the fact that such hypocrisy could exist or that no one remarked upon it.
"I know it's going to be difficult." She shrugged. "I also know that it's the Falasco and they've surely done something that's worth uncovering."
"Most have," Chrome said. Her smile was tiny and sharp. "Well, let us see what we may find."
Not much at first, as it turned out; while Tsuna and Hayato-kun marshaled the Vongola's resources against the Falasco's businesses, their gambling and extortion schemes, their smuggling rings and their share of the drug trade, Kyouko spent hours working through the network of people Chrome and Mukuro knew, sifting for the things that the Falasco had done that might damn them. There was plenty that was sickening; Kyouko could barely stand to listen to some of the stories their informants had to tell. She stumbled out into the sun after speaking to one grizzled old man with bitter eyes and had to vomit in the alley outside his shop. Chrome followed her there and stood over till she was done. "Will you keep going?" she asked when Kyouko finally straightened up and wiped her mouth. Chrome's tone was all academic interest, not comfort, and the face of her disguise looked no more than mildly curious.
Kyouko wiped her mouth again, grimacing at the sour taste of bile. "You know, anyone else would be asking me whether I was okay, not whether I was going to keep going."
"Maybe," Chrome allowed. Her illusion smiled, faintly mocking. "Did you want to be comforted?"
"Not really." Kyouko spat, trying to rid her mouth of the taste of vomit. "Things aren't okay. I'm tired of people trying to tell me otherwise." Her brother had done it for the longest time; Tsuna had followed his lead; even Haru had sometimes kept things back, sheltering her just a bit. "This world is rotten."
"It is." Chrome's illusion was studying Kyouko now, though what Chrome might—or might not—have been able to see through Kyouko's own illusion was anyone's guess. "What are you going to do about it?"
Kyouko turned that question over as they left the alley and turned their steps toward the next stop on their agenda. "Tsuna is trying to change it. I'll help him." She sighed. "And push him forward when he needs it."
"Sometimes he needs to be pushed." Chrome straightened her illusion's shoulders, squaring them. "What Omar said about that family. It seems unusual to waste that kind of attention on one snitch. Disproportionate."
Disproportionate was one word for what the Falasco had done to Giorgio de Luca's family. Barbaric was another. Kyouko's gorge tried to rise again; she fought it down. "There's something there," she agreed. "Let's find out what."
Chrome gave her a long, considering look at that, but only nodded and led the way onward.
Tsuna was quiet in the evenings when he came to bed, withdrawn to some place that Kyouko wasn't sure he wanted her to follow. It worried her that he was hiding from her, or maybe that he just wasn't sure how to speak to her these days.
They weren't going to be able to go on like this for long, she thought when Tsuna came to bed yet again and settled himself against his pillow with no more than a sigh. And perhaps she was going to have to be the one to make the first move. She sighed too, and turned herself so she could slide an arm around him.
Tsuna went still under her touch for a long, uncertain moment. Then he wrapped himself around her and kissed her, open and nearly desperate. Kyouko sighed again as relief ran through her, letting herself melt into his hands, breathing encouragement to him as he gathered her closer. It felt good to let him run his hands over her body and to wrap her legs around his hips, making love to him for the first time since everything had changed. Afterwards, she held him close, stroking his hair as their breathing slowed.
"Are you not angry with me any more?" he asked, voice soft against her ear.
Kyouko blinked, hand stilling against his hair, surprised by the question. "Angry with you?" she repeated, thinking about it.
"Because of Haru," he said, voice still soft, uncertain. "Because I didn't keep her safe. Because I didn't go after the Falasco's heads. Take your pick."
"I was never angry with you," she said. "I—it was other things. I suppose I wasn't paying attention where I was aiming it." There was no missing the tremor that ran through him, or the way he sighed at that. "Forgive me."
He tightened his arms around her and turned his face to kiss the side of her throat. "I couldn't blame you if you were," he whispered. "I should have found a way to keep her safe, somehow—"
"Tsuna." Kyouko cradled his head against her shoulder, aching at the self-recrimination in his voice. "She knew the risks she was taking." Had enjoyed taking them, even. "She knew it wasn't safe."
"But she didn't have a ring or a box." Tsuna's voice was barely audible. "You were right about that. She didn't have them and she should have."
Kyouko sighed. "We can't help it now," she told him. "It's done."
"I talked to the Bovino." Kyouko froze. "They said no, there was nothing they could do. Would do." His voice was bleak. "They insisted it was against their rules. All I wanted was to send someone back to tell us to make sure to teach the two of you to fight, too. But they said no."
Kyouko closed her eyes and took a careful breath, and then another, before she could trust herself to speak steadily. "Have you talked to Lambo?" she asked, since it was fruitless to be angry with the Bovino. God knew they had reason for their rules.
Tsuna nodded against her shoulder. "I don't think he'll have very many more chances."
Which was true; Lambo had left off reaching for the bazooka at every little problem as he'd gotten older. These days it was rare for life to be interrupted by a squalling toddler from the past. "But it's something. Maybe it'll change things for some other versions of us." Small comfort for them, but better than nothing.
"I hope so." Tsuna sighed against her shoulder. "You're really not angry with me? You said—"
"I'm angry with this world. The things Families do to themselves. To others. For no good reason." Just plenty of bad ones. "The things we've seen, looking at the Falasco—I get why Mukuro wanted to destroy it all, now."
The sound of his inhale was sharp. "Do you?"
Kyouko made a face at the ceiling. "I didn't say I agreed with him." Not exactly, and not in the sense that made Tsuna sound so suddenly cautious. "I just don't want Mari and Daisuke to inherit this," she said, softly. "We have to change it somehow. They deserve better."
Tsuna lifted his head to look at her. "I'm trying," he said. "You know I'm trying."
"Shh, I know." Kyouko lifted her hand to his cheek, stroking it. "I know you are." She threaded her fingers through his hair and drew his face down to hers to kiss him. "I'm going to help you do it."
He rested his forehead against hers. "Part of me still thinks I need to keep you safe from this."
"You can't." She stroked his hair, considering it—but no, he needed to hear her say it. "I don't want to be." He went still against her, and she added, "I don't want to stay out of it anymore, Tsuna. I want to have a part in how things change. One that's more than just the job of smiling prettily at our guests. That's not going to be enough anymore." Not now that she'd had a reminder of what the freedom to act tasted like.
He sighed. "I spoke to people." His voice was quiet. "They're making a ring for you. It won't be a Vongola ring, but it'll be the next best thing. And we'll get you a box weapon of your own."
She was probably never going to know how much it had cost him to do that for her, either. "Thank you." Kyouko pressed her mouth against his, soft. "Thank you for understanding."
"I just wanted to keep you safe," he said. "That's all I ever really wanted."
Kyouko wound her arms around him, holding him close. "I know, love. I know."
Kyouko didn't say anything after they left Rossi, who'd traded half an hour with his lost Marco for a handful of hints about why Giorgio de Luca and his family had been slaughtered. Chrome didn't speak either, not till they were a long way away, several changes of illusion and not a few false trails and doubling-backs later. It wasn't until they'd adopted a matched pair of illusions—tourists, this time, sitting in a plaza and enjoying coffee together. Kyouko broke their silence first. "I'm not from this world," she said, staring out across sun-drenched flagstones. "But if what he was getting at is true—"
"Then they broke omertà," Chrome finished. Maybe Chrome; there was a lilt to the words that sounded more like Mukuro. Whichever one of them it was swirled the espresso in their cup. "I believe you may have found what you were looking for."
"Yes," Kyouko said, relieved in a sense. She'd started to be afraid that there wouldn't be anything to find, that the only revenge Haru was going to have was the bullets Hayato-kun had put in her killers' heads and the financial catastrophes that the Vongola had visited on the Falasco.
"Are you going to cry?" That mildly curious tone could only be Mukuro speaking through Chrome's mouth.
The question had a galvanizing effect, at any rate. Kyouko sat up straighter. "No, of course not." Perhaps later, when it was all over for real and she was alone with Tsuna to hold her—that would be the time to cry. "There are too many other things to do first." They had to find something more like actual proof that the Falasco had broken omertà to sell out the Scalzo, and then they had to make sure that proof landed in the right hands, and after that they would have to make sure everyone knew who'd brought this to light, and why.
Mukuro took a sip of espresso. "You do realize that the other Families will tear them to pieces over this, don't you?" The question was casual; his smile wasn't.
Kyouko met that smile head-on. "I know." She shrugged. "If it's true, then it's what they deserve. We may fight with ourselves, but we're supposed to protect one another from those on the outside. Even I know that, and I wasn't even born to this world."
"The two of you are so charmingly old-fashioned," Mukuro mused. He stretched out his illusion's legs and made himself comfortable. "You know that's not how things really work."
"It's the way they should work." Kyouko gave him a long look. "Or do you disagree?"
"Are you quite sure you want me to answer that?" Mukuro inquired, toying with the napkin under his cup.
"I suppose I don't really need to." The faintly startled look that earned her was gratifying. She took a sip of her cappuccino and smiled at him. "Mukuro. You and Chrome are Tsuna's Mist. And I've felt your Will. I know you."
The illusion sitting across from her blinked once and changed posture. "That wasn't very nice of you," Chrome murmured. "You know he doesn't like it when someone sees through his illusions."
Kyouko snorted. "I know. But it's good for him."
"Maybe," Chrome said, and drained her espresso. "We have work to do, though."
"Yes," Kyouko agreed. "Quite a bit of it."
Starting the rumors was easy enough. Kyouko had spent years managing the delicate business of insinuation and gossip through conversations over tea and passed from person to person at parties. This was the same thing, if done in dive bars and back alleys instead of the well-appointed halls of the Vongola house: sharing the seeds of what they'd uncovered about the Falasco with anyone who'd listen and then discarding one illusion for another to do it again. The day Kyouko stopped in to hear what Giacomo the dockworker had to say and he lowered his voice to ask her whether she'd heard about the Falasco and the Scalzo, she merely smiled and encouraged him to tell her.
After that it was merely a matter of time and of nudging the sparks into full flame. And that, Kyouko thought, looking over the people who'd come to the party she'd put together for just that purpose, was easy enough to do. She leaned against Tsuna and said, softly, "We should go talk with Dino and Furetto."
Tsuna glanced at her. "Time already?"
Kyouko nodded. "They're ready." And Dino was obliging; he'd help nudge things around if she needed him to.
Tsuna covered her hand on his arm with his; together they made their way over to where Dino and Paolo Furetto were in conversation with each other. Furetto turned to them almost as soon as he realized they were in earshot. His eyebrows were knotted and his eyes were grim. "Here, Sawada, what do you make of this news about the Falasco?"
"Which business is that?" Tsuna's voice was steady, detached—his business voice. Kyouko was probably the only one who knew that his palms were damp.
Furetto didn't quite snort. "You know perfectly well. They say that the Falasco sold the Scalzo out."
"Ah. That." Tsuna pretended to consider it as the Orsini and the Ruscitti began drifting closer. Of course they were, Kyouko thought, watching them. Everyone wanted to know what the Vongola would have to say about the Falasco's breach of omertà. "It's a disgrace," he said, at length. "If it's true, then the Falasco are a disgrace, no more than a pack of thugs and bullies, and not worth being called a Family." He paused. "If, of course, it's true."
"I think it may be," Dino said. "Falasco covered his tracks well, but my people are turning up some things that we find... disturbing."
Kyouko relaxed, minutely, as Furetto's eyes turned darker and Ruscitti frowned. Bless Dino and his people; they'd just made things that much easier.
"That would be convenient," Orsini muttered. He glanced at Tsuna. "If the Falasco go down, that is. The Vongola would like that."
"The Vongola wouldn't lose any sleep over it, true," Tsuna agreed, which was a lie. Not that Kyouko was going to let anyone know that. His smile was faint and chilly. "However, the Vongola would not stoop to fabricating evidence against our enemies. We find that it's sufficient to merely look a bit deeper."
There was a breath of silence as they absorbed that, Furetto and Ruscitti frowning and Orsini looking sour. Ruscitti shook his head first. "A disgrace," he said. No surprises there; the Ruscitti were an old Family, very traditional and very fond of those traditions.
Kyouko squeezed Tsuna's arm and excused herself—"So you gentlemen can talk freely"—and slipped away.
A circuit of the room proved that rumor had wings; everywhere she turned, the same things were on everyone's lips. The Falasco, Kyouko thought, were in for a bad time of it. A worse time, perhaps, given the trouble they were already having financially. It was the sort of thought to give her a warm glow.
There was, however, a face missing from the crowd. Hayato-kun was outside on the terrace, a solitary figure leaning against the balustrade, pointedly detached from the rest of the party. That wasn't quite right; Kyouko glanced around to be sure she was unobserved and drew the Mist around her, slipping out to join him. He was smoking; there were cigarette butts scattered around his feet and an empty glass sitting at his elbow next to his pack of cigarettes. Kyouko leaned her elbows on the balustrade next to him. "The Falasco's reputation is falling apart inside," she said. "Don't you want to watch?"
"Not really." He stared across the lawn; what she could see of his expression was blank.
Kyouko sighed. "I miss her too," she said softly.
His jaw tightened. "Don't," he said, low. "I don't want to—to—just don't. Please."
"If you'd rather not." Kyouko watched him for a moment and came to a decision. "There's something I can do," she said, quietly. "With the Mist. If you'd like to see her again, I can make that happen." The best illusions came from knowing their subjects intimately; she made shadows for her informants, but for Hayato-kun, she could create something that would live and breathe. "If there was anything you wanted to say, maybe."
Hayato-kun took a drag of his cigarette that finished it. He dropped the butt, crushed it out, and exhaled a stream of smoke before answering. "Anything I could say, she already knew."
Kyouko bit her lip but nodded, relieved in a way that he had refused. "I wanted to offer."
"Yeah, thanks. But no." He shook another cigarette out of the back sitting next to his glass and lit up, not looking at her. "Got an addictive personality. One hit wouldn't be enough."
She could understand that, which suggested something else altogether, something that she'd let lapse in favor of other business. "We're so lucky to have you," she murmured, and laid a hand on his shoulder. "We'd be lost without you. You know that, right?"
Hayato-kun did look at her then. When his mouth quirked, it wasn't entirely humorless. "Point taken." He dropped the cigarette, though it wasn't even halfway burned down, and straightened up. "You know, you're more merciless than he is."
"Yes," Kyouko said as they turned to go inside, "I know."
He huffed softly. "I thought you might."
Kyouko shrugged at him and waved him ahead of her. She lingered on the terrace, looking up at the night sky for a long time, before heading back inside to see what she'd started finished.
end
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