A/N: A year ago I wrote 'laugh' (Go read it! Shameless self-advertisement!). A few days ago, I came up with the idea for this. I'm sentimental, and I just wanted to prove to myself that, yeah, I can write something with a four digit word count. For twice.

Disclaimer: Amano owns KHR like a boss.

"When we can begin to take our failures seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves."

-Katherine Mansfield

She is disgusted with herself. Her feelings bubble and boil somewhere between her stomach and her heart. It's the feeling of self-loathing and general contempt that is coiling its way through her gut.

The wounds on the outside don't hurt as much. It's always the feelings that cut their way through her insides that leave her feeling tired and angry and all around fucked up. And here she was thinking that so many years into the lifestyle of an assassin she would have lost all feeling by now.

I-pin puts her chin on her desk and feels her newly cut hair brush her cheeks. She props up her chin on her elbow and breathes through the fabric of the over sized sweatshirt she is wearing. The sweatshirt got mixed into her laundry last week and she had been meaning to give it back ever since she found it.

But five days ago, fifteen men died under her direction and she has limited herself to moving around the Vongola base's kitchen and her own room. She has been isolating herself, so it's not like she has exactly had the chance to go and find said owner of sweatshirt. Her room is connected to a personal training room that is outfitted with a tiny bathroom and a shower nozzle. No baths for her, just a cold metal drain. She figures she deserves it. I-pin still does work for the Family, but she has limited herself to doing paperwork and catching up on her school work. Not that anyone is expecting her to go on another mission so soon after her disastrous failure.

Four days ago she cut off the hair she had been growing all her life. She figures she deserved it. Eighteen years for fifteen lives. Fifteen men are dead because of her. Because she rushed into a fight, men are gone. Because she didn't complete a thorough enough check on the situation that she would be leading her men into the weeks before and she hadn't scouting out the area properly. Gokudera-senpai was always going on and on and on about being prepared. And she had listened. In the end, she hadn't listened hard enough and fifteen people are dead.

Fifteen is a big number. Because there had only been twenty five men she had been leading to carry out the ambush five days ago. She can't get their faces out of her head. Some were her age, and had readily jumped into the fray without a thought of how to get out of the fight. Some were older and had families to take care of. She knows that many of them were not born into the world she was born into. And it's her fault they died in her world.

Her throat tingles.

I-pin tastes copper and salt and something slimy slide in her mouth. She has bitten into her tongue and the taste of blood and tears suddenly rushes into her mouth. She curls her fingers into her palms so that her nails dig into flesh and the outside-pain steadies her as the inside-pain carves an ugly path to her eyes and nose. She sniffs and scents of the sweatshirt sooths her for a moment. It smells like detergent and fabric softener, but there is the fainter scent of burnt out light bulbs. The cloth smells metallic, smoky, and sweet. I-pin breaths it in.

She won't forget.

I-pin can't forget. She has killed others and been hurt bt others, but others have never died because of her negligence before. She was supposed to be a caretaker, be a protector, or at least be a decent leader. She had been none of those things.

She hopes it never happens again.

In fact, she knows it will never happen again because she isn't leaving the base ever again. She has resigned herself to a life time of paper pushing because that is what she deserves.

The cut on her face looks like someone smeared a hasty dash of concealer on her skin and forgot to smooth it out. It's almost completely horizontal and runs the length of her cheekbone. The wound starts under her left eye near the side of her nose and is wider than the width of her middle finger. It tapers off to a thin line as it ends just before her ear. The trail of a comet, someone told her when she was hyped up on pain-killers after the fight. The cut puckers around the edges and looks red and angry. She knows because she checked this morning in her tiny, tiny bathroom.

I-pin breathes in through the sleeve of the sweatshirt a few more times. Her proximity to the pages of her math book makes the equations and diagrams blur. She reaches out for the cup of tea on her desk, and her fingers touch cold porcelain.

"Damn."

She stands reluctantly and grabs her large, green mug and shuffles out of her room. She isn't wearing shoes, so she tip-toes across the cool metal ground. The pair of black, cotton tights she is wearing is not doing a good job of keeping her warm. The sweatshirt reaches a little past the top of her thighs when she stands and she finds that it is a warm enough. She hugs her cold mug closer to her chest and pulls her sleeves down her hands. The faces of smiling frogs she painted onto her mug that one summer press close to her heart. Lambo has a matching cup that is as yellow the center of daisies. His mug was painted with buzzing bumblebees.

She hears footsteps come up from ahead and she freezes. I-pin almost bolts, but she can't make up her mind where she wants to hide, and the person walking down the hallway has already spotted her. It's too late for a clean get away.

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear.

"Hey."

Lambo offers a faint smile. I-pin clenches her fingers around her green mug and stiffens. He smells faintly of electricity—burnt out light bulbs—and sweat. She can see blood on his boots and smell the gunpowder on his hands. A silencer peeks out of his coat pocket and she wants to hide from the sight of the empty barrel. It looks accusatory. It's mocking her. Lambo probably just came back from a successful mission.

It's not like her to compare track records, but at least he accomplished something for the Family. Not like her, he is not a failure like she is.

"You cut your hair." He continues lamely.

"Um… four days ago."

"Oh. Well, I just got back a few minutes ago, month long stint over in Russia. It was cold." Lambo gives her another lopsided grin. The last time he saw her she had been trying to get him to take a quiz out of a teen magazine.

"Trying out something new?"

I-pin shifts her stance to the balls of her feet. She tells herself that she is just trying to get away from the cold ground, and she is not about the run away.

"Yeah."

"You look…nice."

I-pin senses the limit of coherent sentences Lambo can form while he is probably running on the minimum number of hours of sleep required to keep a body running. She almost manages to side step around him to make her way to the kitchen for a nice, hot cup of tea. At that moment, she can almost feel his eyes slip down from her face to her sweatshirt.

The scent of electricity comes to mind and I-pin wants to smack her palm against her forehead.

"Miss me?" Lambo asks. This time his smile is more of a smirk and he slips his hands into the pockets of his pants and leans closer by bending at the waist. He invades her personal space with the ease of someone much too familiar and his breath fans out across her face. I-pin leans back and her feet touch of the ground fully. The coldness of the metal and the burn in her calves stun her back to coherency.

"No! I just found this mixed in with my laundry last week and I hadn't gotten around to finding out whom it belonged too and I got lazy so I didn't do the laundry this week so I ran out of clean cloths and the sweatshirt was still clean and at the bottom of my basket so I wore it andyoucamebackand…"

I-pins can feel her face heat up. The skeptical look that Lambo gives her is making her heart beat in a weird pattern. He is so close she can see the faint green that flicker deep in his brown eyes. He has been making her feel strange a lot lately and she feels words clog up her brain before she clears her throat and licks her lips to finish her now rambling speech.

"So, no, I did not miss you."

Lambo's smirk practically drops off his face. Instead of pouting, his lips only thin out into a severe line. His lashes brush his cheeks as he blinks, and I-pin can only think of how unfair it is that his eyelashes are so long. He opens his eyes and they are flat and serious as they bore into her face. She notices how the darkness of his pupils seem to bring out just how green the flecks of his iris are and she feels herself lean closer to catch a glimpse of the glimmer of light in his eyes.

"Not even a little?" He breathes. She shivers because the ground is cold and she can almost feel how warm Lambo is. Lambo is her best friend. The only friend she has ever really needed because he has always been there. She hasn't really needed anyone else. She has other people to lean on, but they aren't like Lambo. She needs Lambo like other people need air. It is cliché and disgusting and she would gag herself if she could. But it's true and maybe…I-pin feels her short hair tickle her ears.

How can she think about love when fifteen men are dead because of her? Fifteen people are gone because she just. Wasn't. Enough.

I-pin suddenly leans away from Lambo's delicious warmth and smiles as best as she can.

"Okay. I missed you a lot."

This time she steps forward, and she stands on tip-toes to kiss Lambo on the cheek. When had he gotten so tall?

"Bentornato." She says with a small grin. Lambo had been looking a bit pale even at the beginning of the conversation, but now he was blushing and he pulled one hand out of his pant pocket and rub at his cheek ruefully. His eyes were dancing with mirth and his smile was sweet and I-pin really wanted to taste that smile. But the twinge her cheek had given as it protested her small grin was a reminder. She didn't deserve him. Just like she didn't deserve a lot of things. Maybe one day when she had redeemed herself in her own eyes would she finally be able to look him in the eye and tell him that he made her heart hurt. He made her heart beat and spin and dance just by being near her and being Lambo.

I-pin couldn't decide how this change happened, but his absence had only made her feel sad and now he was back, she could laugh again. That is, if she ever feels like laughing again, because at the moment she couldn't really see anything than the flashes of face after face on the ground, against dark and dank walls, or ripped away. Gone.

I-pin steps around Lambo and makes quick long strides towards the direction of the kitchen. The floor is cold and her heart is pitter-pattering like it has forgotten that beating is an automated function.

"You look good in my clothes."

His voice echos from somewhere behind her and I-pin nearly drops her mug.

She stops to muffle the sound of her laugh against her shirt sleeve but her laughter is silent, catching at her throat while her sides heave and her stomach hurts. Her cheeks ache because her smile is so wide, but I-pin tastes salt on her lips and realizes she's crying. She stumbles to the wall of the hallway closest to her and sinks down into the ground. The metal all around her is cold, but she doesn't take notice that her toes are almost blue. She is crying, like she hasn't cried all week, but her mouth is curved up and her lungs burn with each breath. She sobs and laughs while sitting on the ground for a long time. One hand clutches her almost forgotten green mug to her chest while the other muffles the sound of her breathing.

Eventually, I-pin gets up and gets herself a cup of green tea to wash away the taste of tears.

Bertornato - Welcome Back

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