Disclaimer: KHR belongs to Amano Akira, etc.
Notes: Ficlet/drabble thing. More gen/study than romance (again). =D
coat and tie
She can make him stop.
It won't be hard—a word, an expression, a lie—and he'll hang up his coat and tie and they'll have the family she's always wanted. He's waiting for it, waiting for the day Haru opens that pretty little mouth and says don't go and who is he to disagree? She's got him neatly caught in her soft hands and that's bad, it's horrible because he's mafia and he is supposed to be Tsuna's.
Yamamoto knows she wants him to end it all. It's all over her face when he stumbles through the door at some odd hour and she's wrapped up in a threadbare blanket on the couch, half-asleep with a mug of coffee cooling in her hands. He's tired and dead weight so she directs him to the bed and he collapses there with a pretty girl running manicured fingers through his hair.
The worst part is that she won't say a word.
She'll sit there in a white dress, her sweet face left unseen to the world, and whenever he's finished with whatever he has to do she'll do the same thing she's done for years.
(So he's exaggerating a bit—but a job and friends can't give everything and call him cliché but she's made for so much more.)
"Read a book," she says one day, the only sound in the otherwise silent room. He looks at her through a half-open eye and she taps his cheek in response. She's got that faraway look again, the one that appears when she discusses theories and a bunch of science logic that makes his head whirl. "I'm not waiting for you like girls in books do. You're here; you're not saying something crazy like 'I'm leaving for a very long time so get married to someone else', and…do I need anything else?"
He's barely awake and murmurs, "You read funny books," but he's smiling and Haru lets him off with a cuff to the head.
"I'm sad, yeah." She jams her arms close to her body and he imagines it's quite uncomfortable, her being on her side and all. "I miss you and I wish you weren't gone so much. But…I walked into this knowing. So don't—don't look at me like that anymore. I'm not leaving and you, you have a job. And you do love that job, and…you're asleep."
Haru watches him for a second, his chest rising up and down—and so, so different from his still body all those years ago. It's not everything she'd wanted growing up (the blood, the screams, the nights wondering if she'll have to hang up her white dress) but it is, she thinks, enough to make a half-real fairy tale.