Five Things
Summary: Five things about the Vongola Family that are unknown to the public...and everyone else but the person with whom said things concern.
(Or, conversely, five headcanons no one cares about for each Vongola who strikes my fancy.)
Disclaimer: Akira Amano is to be credited for the characters, setting, and plot of KHR!
Gokudera Hayato
o1.
His favorite color was green. Green was the color of the rolling hills and lush forests of his childhood, the ones he stared at in awe from stone balconies and curtained windows and visited in the swatches of time he could take between lessons and parties and escaping from his sister. It was the color of the Christmas tree before the servants draped it with glimmering sashes and bright lights while the family watched, the color of his favorite tie he always wore as good luck before a performance because his "mother" with the long magenta hair had told him he looked dashing in it.
Green was the color of the pianist's eyes, both bright and melancholic and looking exactly like his as she leaned over him, sweet-smelling, silver hair rustling softly as she molded his small hands with hers along the ivory keys.
...
o2.
Red was his least favorite, but it had grown on him. In his younger years it had been the color of his father's power tie, a deep crimson that bled through clothes like blood when a servant accidentally put it in the washer with the lights. It was a bitter, angry, foul-tasting color, like the wine he'd taken a sip of at that one party ages ago. It was the life liquid that he'd imagined his mother, his real mother, had been drowning in as she lay at the bottom of the cliff, her pale cheeks stained with tears as she reached for him in his dreams, crying softly, "Hayato…Hayato…"
He'd had no good memories of red until he met Sawada Tsunayoshi, and then red had become the color of his will, of passion and devotion and fireworks with friends on a lone, grassy hill.
Red had become the color of his future, of friendships and battles and the victories they'd strived for.
It was the color of his hope.
...
o3.
He really, genuinely, appreciated Miura Haru. She was a pain in the ass, a girl with a high, squeaky voice with a stupid speech tick and the stubbornness of an old mule all wrapped up in a quirky personality and an obsession with the Tenth that rivaled his own.
She was also really, really kind. Kind enough to put up with him and his damned pride as he lay in bed cursing himself and that fucked up future-the one that now would never be-and the way that idiotic Yamamoto had called him out on his stupid, stupid, stupid, blinded actions, all the while tending his wounds and forcing him to stay in bed and not strain himself to unconsciousness. That sort of stern, motherly care was something he'd never realized he missed as he traveled Italy for years, looking for a place in this world.
(Also, Miura was smart enough to keep up with him, when the Ninth gave the current generation more and more responsibilities, as they strategized and analyzed and debated, and considering the fact that he was a fucking genius-because he was, with his effortless perfect scores and his incredible ability to calculate on the fly-that was a trait that demanded respect. Even if he wouldn't admit it on the brink of death.)
...
o4.
Yamamoto Takeshi was one of the few people he would trust with his life. That was fact he could no longer deny, not with the two of them going on weekly missions together and teaming up in the once-a-month-all-out-Vongola-brawl Reborn had instigated when the Tenth had officially become the Tenth, even though the Tenth himself took part and Lambo's attacks were nothing short of devastating when the two of them put aside their arguments and let go.
Maybe it's because they're complete opposites, complimenting each other by covering the other's weak points. He is the brains and Yamamoto is the brawn; he is always analyzing, always thinking ahead while Yamamoto takes it slow and catches things he might miss. The swordsman was the emotion to his logic, the one that cut down foes as he watched and attacked from afar.
The requiem rain that washed everything away, and never probed him, never asked stupid, insensitive questions that had Gokudera gritting his teeth with the urge to blow someone up.
He was the calm in the eye of the storm, and it was a treasure, that one quiet moment Yamamoto afforded him in which he didn't have the entire world resting on his shoulders.
And he could share it instead.
...
o5.
He disliked weddings almost as much as he did Byakuran. Which is to say, not as much as before but it was still a healthy amount. He didn't believe in love ending happily; he'd never even witnessed it. Falling in love with his father might have brought him into this world, but falling in love with a mafia boss meant for Gokudera Lavina the loss of her budding career, a son she could only see twice a year, and an end that was met alone at an impossible fall with only a little, green-wrapped gift to remind her of better times.
The marriage between his father and Bianchi's mother had deteriorated after that; to learn that she had been friendly with one of her husband's conquests for all those years had left the woman distrustful and distant, watching all of his father's acquaintances with a close, suspicious eye. Love had left his father a broken man who frowned at him, the boy with Lavina's eyes and hair and pianist hands.
Love had Bianchi chasing Reborn halfway across the world even though he didn't care for her as much as she did him, and love was why her ex-boyfriend Romeo had returned as a ghost that one odd Halloween because love is short and fragile and so goddamn easy to destroy but just as difficult to rebuild and how the fuck could anyone handle the heartbreak that one person could inflict?
'Til death do us part, is what most say, but Gokudera thought secretly that it's all bull. And so he feared the day that the Tenth will want to get married, feared of watching his heart break in little pieces, of despondent bosses watching the horizon for the something that would never return.
(He kept, and still does, this way of thinking to himself, because Turf-Top proposed to Kurokawa and she said yes, and even though they're happy and expecting and Gokudera's never been as close to the Sun as he is with the others, he still panics inside when they argue and Sasagawa comes with a frown on his normally bright expression and he twists the wedding ring around his fingers over and over like it burns him.
Love was a poison, a deadly binding and a force not to be trifled with. That was what he had found out for himself.)