A/N: It's been super long since I did anything with Mahiro and Tsuna, but here's a short oneshot written a while back. Reading this brings back so many memories of Mahiro. So many feels and potential. I'm considering on picking this story up again sometime in the future, but we'll see. I need all the support I can get. Review and tell what you think. This was one way that the story could have continued on before Mahiro's supposed death (WSVDSA, Chapter 5) sometime in the distant KHR fanfic future.

Smoke, Smoke, and Maybe Some Flames

"You've been to these sorts of places before haven't you Mahiro?" Tsuna asked, skirting around a suspicious looking brown lump. It had bright yellow pieces in it and...Tsuna decided not to think about it too hard. "Mahiro?"

The nineteen year old girl shook her head irritably, "What?"

Tsuna patted his side where he kept his cellphone. "You know scary, dark alleyways?" He elaborated, dark brown eyes warily gauging the distance from here to certain safety. "With needles and syringes everywhere? Kind of like a place where it looks like we'll get jumped by a bunch of crack-heads at any moment? Those kind of places."

Mahiro snorted, broken glass crunching beneath her steel-toed boots. "Well don't you sound holier-than-thou? Have a good look Tsuna; this is the type of world that organized crime creates in real life. Look, and remember this Tsuna, the next time Reborn comes along singing his song about you becoming the tenth vagi-"

"It's Vongola!"

Mahiro rolled her eyes over her shoulder. "Both gets hairy and fishy at a moment's notice, same diff."

Tsuna grimaced. "That doesn't even make sense."

A glove clad fist grabbed the front of his neck and jerked him in close. Mahiro's dark eyes seemed to burn with an inner fire. "Neither does having a relatively normal JAPANESE kid like you-"

Tsuna grunted in pain when Mahiro tapped his still recovering ribs. "Become the godfather of a fucking Italian underworld."

Tsuna's hand shot up and closed over the leather that covered her fist. Orange flames began to flicker over his knuckles and were reflected in his lightening brown eyes. "Weren't you the one who told me that there was no such thing as racial superiority?" Tsuna asked softly.

"Yeah," Mahiro grinned, her teeth a gleaming white in her dusky tan face. "Remember the rest of what I said? The part about how we're all piss and shit and blood and jism, and the only thing that will ever set us apart from the miserable rest of our species is -and try and hear me on this Tsuna- how we LIVE and DIE."

Tsuna began to notice the searing cold where their hands were clasped, he felt himself beginning to grow especially numb down his arm. The gloves, he thought, Mahiro is using the ability of her gloves on me. ME.

Strange how he wasn't feeling hurt about it, a part of him noted.

That's because you know that deep down, another part of him answered, Mahiro would never betray us- that is- unless we betray her trust in us first.

Us? Tsuna thought, bewildered. It wasn't the first time that Tsuna had conversations like this with himself. After all, Tsuna had not only been a rather lonely kid not that long ago, but he'd suffered day to day humiliations that would've had crippled the average person. Being able to talk his self out of bed in the morning and out of jumping off the nearest building had become something rather important to his survival. But it was the first time he'd actively participated- or more accurately- he'd always participated because it was actually himself talking to himself- or was it his selves?

Whoa. Don't short a circuit there buddy, said one of his voices. Look, Mahiro, like the friend she's always been to us, is trying to tell us something that might just help us live longer so stop thinking and listen.

Have I always been so bossy? Tsuna wondered.

Shut up! She's talking! One of his inner voices hissed.

Tsuna did the smart thing when your hand was on top of something that was so cold it gave you burns. He took it off. And because he didn't want Mahiro to spend another training session beating him bloody to 'toughen him up', he didn't do the second thing a smart person would do when they got an ice burn, which was to jump around doing the 'ouch-ouch' dance. No weakness should be shone in front of Mahiro when she was like this.

Instead, here's what a really smart person would do when faced with a Mahiro with that glint in her eye.

Shut your mouth and pray.

It was a little hard to do, Tsuna admitted still a little bit in his hyper-analytical mode, with Mahiro's knuckle right underneath his chin. "It won't be like this when I'm in charge," Tsuna heard himself saying. His inner voices screamed in horror at his stupidity.

Mahiro, incredibly, smiled. It was beautiful, sweet, and a little sad. "Yeah?"

"You don't know for sure if the Vongola Crime family is even involved in any of this." Tsuna waved his hands.

Mahiro let go of the front of his shirt, and tucked her gloved hands in the front of her black Levi's with a hard smile. She angled her chin in the general direction that Tsuna waved. There were used needles, syringes, cigarette butts, and a few condoms collecting dust and grime in the corners.

"What do you know Tsuna? What do you really know at all about what the Mafia does apart from what you get from the movies? You're just some kid who used to get bullied, and is still getting bullied only now there's a chance that you might become the biggest bully of them all. Do you know what godfathers do in the Mafia Tsuna? In any mafia?"

Orange flames bloomed over Tsuna's fists, and Mahiro noted them and the furious glare with an approving nod. "Seems you're getting it already, yeah. Godfathers bully their families, they rule their families, they live and scrape, and does whatever must be done to make their families even stronger, so they can bully the entire world into giving them what they want."

Mahiro kicked a syringe away from her feet and watched it disappear into a dark corner. "This is how the rest of the world works actually, Tsuna," She said softly as if talking from a dream.

"Shut up." Tsuna said, the flames of Decimo riding him. "You talk like you know everything but-"

"You talk like you refuse to know anything." Mahiro snarled, her eyes gleaming like black daggers.

"The Vongolas have honor! They would never do anything like this!" Tsuna yelled.

"Tsuna, I said that the only way for people to distinguish themselves from the rest of shitty humanity is how you live your life and how you end it." Mahiro said quickly, her hands bunching at her sides. "You really think that you can change how this world works! Change how any world works?

"Especially the world of the Mafia that is run- literally- run on dirty money like this!? You can't change this world that you are so fucking excited to enter. If you play nice and honorable like Reborn's been telling you how it is- all those precious friends you want to protect so badly will die and they'll die protecting your ridiculous illusions and I will tell you now Tsuna, as your friend that I will kill you before you spread more filth and shit and misery in this world that has already had enough."

That word, enough, lingered on the air like smoke from a bullet. Tsuna was breathless with shock and horror and fury when he said, "It will never be like that."

Mahiro's eyes flashed. "How do you know?" She asked low.

Tsuna's fists were clenched so tight they should have strangled the flames, " Because I won't let it."

Mahiro grinned humorlessly, "How will you stop it if you won't see?"

For the first time, since the day that seven year old Mahiro had come over with red eyes to say that her family was moving to Tokyo, Tsuna lost his temper. "BECAUSE YOU WILL BE THERE TO SEE FOR ME YOU IDIOT!" Tsuna roared, and orange flames exploded from his forehead and fists, incinerating the refuse in the alley like the breath of god. Mahiro just watched, with an unimpressed look on her face as her gloves sucked in the unleashed raw energy like so much dust. When Tsuna ran out of juice and started to wobble though, Mahiro was there. She slapped a piece of dust out of his gravity defying hair and sighed with a parent's long suffering exasperation.

"And what will you do if I die, eh?" Mahiro joked.

"Oh please," Tsuna grumbled with exhaustion while they stumbled out of the alley and into the bright sunlight. Ew, he could taste smoke on the back of his tongue. And who would've thought he'd be able to do something like that? Definitely something to explore in a fire proof place, like maybe near a pool or a similarly large body of water... "If you died, you'd probably give the devil a black eye and get expelled to heaven."

"That boring place? Shit, don't you know that cocoa beans only grow in a sub-tropical habitat? Why do you hate me so?"