Disclaimer
I do not own the Katekyo Hitman Reborn! series. All rights belong to Akira Amano and Co.
Chapter One: Gunshot
It's always cold in the slums. No matter if she can steal a few blankets from the old lady five blocks over who mostly pretends not to know, or scavenge a few partly-used matches, she always shivers through the night.
Theresa spends the dusk curled up just inside the door of their little shack, quietly watching the too bright sun struggle against the dying of day through a crack. As the lanterns and streetlights flicker awake, the clatter of drunken feet against the pavement come alive and the rushing of clothes and coin and secrets fills the new night, she listens. And when her mother brings in a new drunkard, tainted silver song ringing through their one-and-a-half room space, Theresa hides, cradling a small bundle into the shadows.
Her mother always removes the man at the first call of day, the first chatter of people along the streets. Then she comes to find her daughter and son, taking the smaller hand into her own and the cloth-swaddled babe into the other arm. And despite the faults, despite the dozens of bottles lining the corners and floor of the room, Theresa knows that her mother can care. She always comes back, after all.
On odd days, when Ariel doesn't have the need or desire to pick up another client, she sits down beside her spawn, nursing a bottle in one hand and a stick in another. It's on these days that Theresa learns to read and write, to learn and listen, and to use others. She learns how to paint her nails with wax and wild berries, to form her phrases, to walk (with poise and elegance and lethality.) Her mother often says that she has to learn how to play the world into her palm. (It's every woman for herself in the red light district. It has never been anything less, and never will be anything more. You learn your way around or you bleed out in the alleys.)
Never mind that she's five, and he's barely one.
The baby cries, occasionally, and screams and whimpers until the day dies. Ariel hates him, most of the time, so Theresa hides him away. Staring into red eyes, letting small but strong fingers pull on her light colored locks, she sometimes thinks that they barely look alike. He has shadow-black hair and bright red eyes, and her own blond-grey combination doesn't match at all. They share their mother's angled nose though, Theresa notes. When they walk into the streets she can see that in the puddles along the stones.
When she's alone with the baby and the day is clear, she wanders with him along the sides of the buildings, the turn of the roads, and the grass of the fields. She whispers her thoughts to him and he giggles. Holding this piece of life in her arms, Theresa doesn't know if she could ever love something so much as she does now. When he walks his first shaking steps and says his first word (sorella), Theresa's there to catch him as he falls down, and kiss him on the forehead lightly in congratulations.
Sometimes her mother's clients are pushy and violent. Theresa learns which ones are shy and which ones will make you bleed. Ariel's long mastered the art. Her daughter watches as the woman fixes her hair and eyes (that unusual grey that Theresa's inherited), her face and her smile. Watches as she approaches the one who has a slight twitch in his step, as if he doesn't know if he should walk forward or right back home. The one who carries himself with a little more poise than others, whose strides are just a little longer. Ariel always had a weak spot for the sophisticated lookers.
That weak spot, a couple bottles, and a bit of unnoticed drugged wine meant Ariel's last trip. When she hears the sharp crack of a bullet, the silent sigh of a trained killer, and the eventual retreat of footsteps, Theresa comes out of hiding. The moon is high in the sky, but she doesn't see. The floor turns from red into brown and she doesn't see. She sits uselessly by the corpse, her usually vivacious brother quietly watching on, for the whole night through. The gunshot rings through her mind, louder than her own stuttering heartbeat.
It's cold in the slums.
She has to protect her brother. Xanxus needs a sister.
Electrifying green fire runs through her veins and fingers and toes, and it's not cold anymore.