Disclaimer: Katekyo Hitman Reborn! is not mine.


Shoichi, his sister and mother sighed, was a good boy. It did not sound precisely like a compliment.

However, they always went on to say, it would be nice if only he'd take a little more interest in interacting with other children. If only he'd participate in sports or even his school's computer club…

If Shoichi himself was in the vicinity, he'd usually look embarrassed and quickly scurry away to his room so he could tinker some more with his computer. At least he wouldn't have to listen up there.

As it so happened, Shoichi did not have to join a club or play sports to get noticed. He was the one who was approached, completed out of the blue, by certain figures that he recognized. The traumatizing incident rose rapidly to the front of his brain, but he could never forget those people. The baby currently wielding a lime-colored gun with expertise had made an especially deep impression on him, never mind the grenades tossed in random directions.

Shoichi wanted to run. Very, very badly.

Sadly, before he could do more than scream shrilly and take a few stumbling steps – he really should have put more effort into gym – the weak-looking boy was sent flying towards him and successfully stopped Shoichi from getting any further.

"Hiiieee!" he distinctly heard the nondescript boy wail. What had he to wail about?

"It's not polite to take a look at someone and run screaming, Shoichi-kun," the gun-wielding baby admonished, suddenly appearing on right in front of him.

Needless to say, Shoichi declined to listen and screamed harder, trying frantically to escape. The boy on top of him mumbled a soft sorry and got off. Shoichi stared. That had been far too easy. Then some guy – was he smoking? That had to be incredibly bad for his health! – got into his face.

"How dare you bump into the tenth!" the scary guy exclaimed passionately, sending a look of absolute adoration towards the rather mousy guy who had flew into Shoichi and then looking back at Shoichi with a hostile stare.

The silver hair and the way the cigarette was clutched between his teeth - Shoichi was surprised he didn't drop it - made the guy, who couldn't be more than fifteen, look like some gangster. The way he was looking at the other boy made him look like a puppy wagging its tail for a beloved master. Shoichi didn't feel as though the two images quite fit together.

Shoichi blinked up at him from the ground, paralyzed. Another guy – wasn't he that popular baseball player, Yamamoto Takeshi? – smiled at him calmly and extended a hand to help him up. Shoichi took his hand numbly.

"Don't worry; Gokudera's just playing this game of ours. Those toy dynamites of his look real, don't they? Ah, toys today are really advanced," Yamamoto explained, patting him on the shoulder for good measure. Shoichi was not reassured. In fact, he was sure that he'd heard something about this boy being involved in a suicide attempt. Looking at those sparkly teeth, it was difficult to believe that as well. Still, the force of Yamamoto's pat nearly knocked him back onto the ground.

"Haha, sorry about that," Yamamoto apologized cheerfully, rubbing the back of his head. Behind him, Gokudera glowered, holding up a stick of dynamite and crushing it ominously with his bare hand. Shoichi gulped. The only other sane person there was alternating between terror-filled apologies and...well, terror-stricken looks at Gokudera and the baby. No help there, obviously.

"It's very simple, Shoichi-kun," the baby told him. "You are going to join the Vongola, Tsuna's mafia family."

The tiny baby ignored Tsuna's – at least, Shoichi assumed that the mousy-looking guy was Tsuna – protest, saying something resembling "you can't just tell someone that and expect him to do it!"

Shoichi wanted to run away now, even more.

The gun pointed to his head didn't help at all - but surely something that looked like a toy gun couldn't fire real bullets?

He decided to obey his instinct and ran like hell.


Naturally, it wasn't that simple. Reborn had let him run, but where could he hide? His house? He'd come home to see his relatives drinking tea with Reborn, who was masquerading as some martial arts teacher called Master Pao-Pao. (Not to mention the fact that he had gotten there so fast.) And then, "Master Pao-Pao" had announced that he saw the seeds of great ability within Shoichi. His mother and sister - those traitors - had agreed to letting him become a disciple with smiles on their faces.

He distinctly recalled being dragged off screaming while his mother waved to him with a brilliant smile on her face. It was not fair.

After a series of tests that Reborn – Shoichi knew the name of the really, really dangerous baby now – had put him through, Shoichi got in as a member of Tsuna's family. Well, the gun still pointed in his direction had helped a great deal in increasing Shoichi's motivation.

In short, he had become a bona fide Mafioso.

The whole thing still terrified Shoichi when he thought of it.

Now, after quite some time spent with Tsuna and his family, Shoichi had realized something. Several things, in fact, that the younger version of him had never noticed when Tsuna first recruited him.

First, Gokudera disliked Shoichi immensely. As a matter of fact, Gokudera's hostility towards Shoichi was greater than the hostility that he directed as a matter of course to everyone besides Tsuna, Reborn, and his sister. However, the only reason that he directed no hostility to Bianchi-san, Shoichi couldn't help but notice, was that he would be overcome by a need to regurgitate upon the sight of her face. Despite Gokudera's nature, it seemed that he directed more than Shoichi's fair share of dynamites towards him and he would never, never allow Tsuna to be alone with Shoichi. It wasn't just dislike, Shoichi had slowly realized, Gokudera didn't trust him.

Another thing was the way that Tsuna treated him. Most of the other members that Shoichi knew treated him with either contempt or indifference – what did they know about him that he didn't? – but Tsuna actually went out of his way to make sure that Shoichi was all right. Or he might be reading too much into it, and this was simply Tsuna's reaction to seeing someone else around him who had experienced bullying before. However, Shoichi didn't think he was wrong. Tsuna did pay more attention to him than he did to most of the other non-Guardians of his family. The only thing Shoichi did not understand was: why?

Speaking of which, even the girls would treat him just a shade more coldly than they did the others. Sasagawa Kyoko-san was an exception though; she smiled her princess smile at him the way she did towards everyone else. Haru-chan had tried to brain him with Yamamoto's baseball bat the first time they met and warned him seriously that Tsuna was hers; he was not allowed to harm Tsuna in any way. Really, why would he want to harm Tsuna, of all people?

Also, Shoichi was given state-of-the-art equipment to work with but a great deal of supervision. Besides, why would they pick him in the first place? Though really, they had to be insane in the first place to want Sasagawa Ryohei in their family. Or Hibari-san, for that matter.

Oh, well, it's not as though Shoichi could do anything about it in the first place. He shrugged and turned back to his engineering research.


An odd... creature named Giovanni had been one of the first people within Tsuna's family that he got along with.

Giovanni had just come in, riding some machine that could dig holes or fly at Giovanni's command. Shoichi still did not entirely understand the mechanics of it - he worked with computers, not machines - but it had been, for lack of a better word, awesome.

Then he'd realized that Giovanni was every bit as weird as every other person there. Except for him, of course. Shoichi was not weird. Really.

Giovanni had ended up performing some modifications to Shoichi's equipment before he decided that he actually did not need pink-haired feminine robots performing his commands instead of real computers. He had to deal with them for a while before Xanxus had stormed in with one of his rages and shot at Shoichi's robots point-blank.

Well, as long as Shoichi didn't have to clean up, he didn't really mind.

Then Shoichi met Spanner. Spanner offered him a lollipop. He accepted.

This became the basis of their relationship, actually. Not that Shoichi liked sweet things in particular. However, Spanner was very nice and it would have been rude to refuse.

The people that he was in close contact with became his friends, and they were just as nerdy and intelligent as he was. It was the perfect working environment for Shoichi, random explosions notwithstanding.

He was really quite content with his life.


Shoichi didn't really mind torture theoretically, but he had never been required to see it performed in person. This was odd.

He snuck a sideways look at his boss, who was staring ahead fixedly and looking rather pale. Shoichi could sympathize with Tsuna, who he had always thought was too delicate to be in the mafia at all. It had been rather surprising when he learned that Tsuna insisted upon being present at all interrogation sessions. Personally, Shoichi thought it was futile for Tsuna to force himself through it out of some sense of misplaced guilt.

Hibari-san dragged in the prisoner, whose crimes Shoichi was still unaware of, and Mukuro-san glided in front of him with a nasty, vicious grin on his face.

The illusionist pulled up the man's head by grabbing his hair, and Shoichi could feel his heart stop.

The man was very attractive, with spiky white hair and pale purple eyes. He also had a strange tattoo under his eye, which made Shoichi think of clowns for some reason.

Shoichi didn't understand why, but seeing this man's face hurt. He felt as though he wanted to kneel in front of the prisoner – how ridiculous – and to wrap his hands around the person's neck at the same time. However, he couldn't think of any reason why he would have such contrasting feelings towards some person he had never seen before.

He became aware of Tsuna's gaze on him. The look on his boss' face was almost suspicious…

Then the man – Byakuran, apparently – gazed at the grim faces around him, paused at Tsuna's determined look, and his eyes met Shoichi's.

He smiled. In that situation, captured by people who were obviously unfriendly to him, Byakuran smiled.

He kept on smiling even as Mukuro subjected him through the worst his mind could dream up, as well as Hibari's physical attacks.

Even as Hibari methodically broke Byakuran's fingers one by one, he smiled. Shoichi could tell, somehow, that everyone else was feeling uneasy around him. It was odd, but the contrast between the confident prisoner and the people who supposedly held power over him made Shoichi feel frightened, in a way.

Without getting anything out of him, Tsuna decided that the interrogation and torture session was over for the day.

As he exited the room, Shoichi looked back. Through the entire time, Byakuran had never looked away from him. Those eyes, that hair, the tattoo - why did Byakuran feel so familiar?

It didn't matter, though. Byakuran was just another enemy of Shoichi's family – wasn't he?