Disclaimer: Do not own.

Warnings: A bit of gore.

I don't think I'm ever going to be fully satisfied with this one, but I've decided I just don't care anymore.

Enjoy!

As It Is

It was battle and it was chaos. The whir of bullets and explosives all around him was nothing like the intensity and focus of the one-on-one matches of strength that Yamamoto was used to. This was ducking and weaving and never keeping your eyes in one place for too long because you might end up being taken out from behind.

The man before him fell to the ground, knocked out by the hilt of Shigure Kintoki, and Yamamoto heard someone approaching him from behind. He spun around, whirling his sword with him, but the man had been moving faster than he thought and was too close to Yamamoto. He moved backwards to create the space necessary for Shigure Souen to be effective, but he'd cornered the last man against a wall and now he was being cornered against it himself. The man in front of him had pulled out a gun too quickly for him to avoid and he was staring down the barrel of it (but not for too long because he couldn't afford to in this battle), so he looked up, into the man's eyes, and saw only determination, and oh God, this man was going to shoot him. Then there were three shots followed by a ringing silence.

He had not closed his eyes, there hadn't been the time for that, not even for the reflex, and Yamamoto had watched how first the man's arm, then his neck, and finally his head had exploded in a mass of blood and bone and noise. In the following silence he saw nothing but the dead man in front of him, so close that he could reach out and touch his hand, the one with the wedding band on it.

Something clicked in his mind and then the only way to force down the nausea was with anger at the violation of everything he had ever been taught. He turned to face the culprit, a young man not much older than himself whom he had never fought with before; one of Dino's men. He was still holding the gun, still pointing it at the corpse on the ground, staring with the same numbness Yamamoto had until just a second ago, but when Yamamoto faced him he turned to meet his eye. That was when Yamamoto's anger boiled over.

"Why did you do that?" he yelled at the man, panic tingeing his voice. "Why did you kill him? He didn't have to die!"

The blank look of concentration had slipped ever so slightly off the man's face and Yamamoto could see something wild in his eyes, something akin to terror, or despair. But Yamamoto didn't stop.

"You had no right!" he continued, "You had no right to –

At that moment a sharp "Yamamoto!" sounded through the room, cutting him off. He looked away from the man and could see Gokudera approaching him, with Tsuna, Reborn, and Dino following right behind. He saw Tsuna stare in horror at the dead body, while Dino walked right past it and up to the man who had shot him. He put his hand on the man's shoulder and said something low in Italian. The man then finally lowered his gun, but his body remained tense and the skittishness didn't leave his eyes.

Dino sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "We'll talk later," he said to Reborn before leading the man back to the rest of his group, keeping a gentle hand at his back.

It had been Gokudera who had called out Yamamoto's name and Yamamoto turned to him now as Reborn perched himself atop of Tsuna's shoulder, his face inscrutable, and Tsuna finally managed to tear his eyes away from the dead man. Gokudera had been angry at Yamamoto more times than he could remember, but Yamamoto had heard no anger in Gokudera's voice when he had called his name and he saw no anger in Gokudera's face now.

"Why did you stop me?" Yamamoto demanded, not bothering to conceal his own ire.

Gokudera examined him, taking in the emotion on Yamamoto's face and weighing it against his usual calm, then shrugged. "You needed to be stopped."

Yamamoto opened his mouth to retort, but Reborn interjected at that point, telling them all to go home and get some rest, so he simply nodded tersely at Tsuna and walked out of the building without looking back.

***

As he walked home and later, as he lay on his bed, he could not shake the image of the man's eyes a split second before they had exploded with his head. The shock of that image and the anger he had felt at Dino's subordinate remained, but he could not help but feel that something was wrong. He was missing something and it unsettled him. He continued to dwell on it even as his thoughts were interrupted by the creaking of his door and Gokudera stepping into his room.

"Your father called you, but you didn't answer," Gokudera offered in response to the confused expression on Yamamoto's face.

"What are you doing here?" Yamamoto asked, turning to face the wall, hostility creeping back into his voice.

"I came here to make you understand," Gokudera replied, grabbing Yamamoto's desk chair and sitting himself down on it.

"What's there to understand?"

Gokudera frowned, "Lots, judging by your reaction this evening."

"I don't see what was wrong with my reaction."

There was no response to that and when Yamamoto looked at Gokudera he found him staring at one of the baseball posters on his wall. He appeared to be deep in thought. After a few seconds he turned back to Yamamoto and looked him right in the eye.

"That man," he began, "you shouldn't have yelled at him."

"He killed someone!" Yamamoto said, his voice dangerously loud in the small house.

"He saved your life," Gokudera corrected and Yamamoto flinched.

"Well he didn't have to," he answered, "and even though he did, he didn't have to kill that man."

"You're an idiot then," Gokudera said, "which I already knew, but I thought you at least understood what you're a part of now."

"Killing is wrong," Yamamoto countered, "that's what Tsuna believes, and I agree with him!

"And I hope he is allowed to believe it for a long time yet, but for us it's different. We're guardians, mafia guardians, Vongola guardians, what we believe is irrelevant," Gokudera said, the matter of-fact resolve in his voice so different from his regular temperament.

"I would rather have died myself than that that man died!"

"Christ, Yamamoto, are you even listening to yourself?" Gokudera said, rolling his eyes. "You sound like a belligerent seven-year-old. What good would that have done? Are you really so naïve as to think that your death would have saved his life? I can guarantee you that the moment you had died that man would have been taken down by either myself, or Dino, or Reborn, or, God forbid, the Tenth. Then the Tenth would have had to come here and explain to your father why his only son was not coming home. Then those idiot teammates of yours would have lost every game this season, because you're the only player worth anything on that team. Then the Vongola would have been one guardian short and I'd have had to work with fucking Squalo, and it would have been a fucking waste, all because you refused to understand that you are part of the Mafia now and it's not some fucking game and people die, but if you do things right then the people who die aren't the people you care about."

Yamamoto stared at him. He didn't know how to respond, didn't know how to react at all to this outburst. He could feel the cheerful, fun-loving, all-star baseball player in him rebelling against every word, but underneath that was a voice of blades and scars and the soothing rhythm of rain that spoke of Family and loyalty and protection.

"Tsuna," he said, attempting a reply, but mostly just invoking the name as some sort of desperate charm against the darker roils of his mind.

Gokudera seemed to understand. "The Tenth," he said, "may never give you the orders for it, but don't think that means you'll never kill anyone."

Yamamoto looked away. Gokudera's face, composed, calm, accepting, so unlike his usual whirlwind of moods, was suffocating.

"Look," Gokudera sighed, "I said I came here to help you understand, but there's really not much I can do. You have to work this kind of thing through yourself. I'm just saying, that man, Carlo, it's the first time he ever killed a person."

Yamamoto frowned at that, but continued to stare resolutely at the wall. "How do you know that?" he asked.

But Gokudera didn't respond and deep down Yamamoto already knew. It was to be found in the differences between Gokudera's and Tsuna's reactions to the death that evening, in the uncharacteristic patience Gokudera had exhibited throughout their conversation, in the easy impassiveness he used to discuss this, to discuss murder. Suddenly it struck him that the people he had come to see as friends (closer than friends. Family) were everything he had known, completely instinctively, he would never become. Because how could a person kill? How could a good, sane person, as he knew himself to be, kill?

But the answer came to him now, in the eyes of the man just before he had died, in the faces of Dino, Squalo, and Reborn, in Bianchi and Gokudera and their childhood. These people, who were everything Yamamoto had always abhorred on principle, had no concept of, as Squalo put it, going at the enemy with the blunt side of the blade. They had been raised on violence the way Yamamoto had been raised on team spirit and sportsmanship.

He had his missing piece now. Memories of Tsuna, Gokudera, and all the other people related to the Vongola flashed through his mind as he recognized the completely instinctive, certain knowledge within him that he would kill whoever tried to kill them. That same determination he had seen earlier today would be the last thing his enemies would see in his eyes before they died.

He looked to Gokudera for some sort of confirmation, but Gokudera was already gone.

He had to work this through himself.

***

The next day Yamamoto went to the place where Dino and his men were staying and asked for Carlo. He said nothing as Dino carefully scrutinized his face and nodded. Dino himself led him to where Carlo was. The man looked better than he had the day before, but his face was still a mixture of emotional exhaustion and the barest hint of raw desolation. When he saw Yamamoto he started ever so slightly, but faced him directly, just as he had the day before.

Yamamoto did not apologize, because it was not an apology that was necessary. He bowed, then looked him straight in the eye and said, as earnestly as he could: "Thank you."

For a second Carlo looked taken aback, then he smiled, very briefly, at Yamamoto and replied in heavily accented Japanese: "Any time."

Yamamoto knew he meant it.

***

Eight months later they were in another battle and Yamamoto slit a man's throat just before he was able to stick a knife in Gokudera's carotid artery. He stared in shock and morbid fascination as the pool of blood around the man grew. Even when he knew with absolute certainty that the man was dead he still could not stop watching. He felt building within him an overwhelming need to run away and hide, to vomit and cry. It mixed and clashed with the adrenaline from the battle and the intuitive anger he'd felt as he'd seen the man sneak up on Gokudera. He felt himself on the verge of hyperventilating until he felt a hand on his shoulder and heard someone say his name sharply.

He turned and saw Gokudera giving him that same patient look he had all those months ago in Yamamoto's bedroom, although this time there was something else as well. He looked Yamamoto straight in the eye, squeezed his shoulder and said, more sincerely than Yamamoto had ever heard him speak before: "Thank you."

Yamamoto's shoulders sagged as the tension left them, the crushing feelings of disgust and fear lightened and he took a deep breath. He thought briefly and guiltily of Carlo, but mostly there was just irresistible relief. He returned Gokudera's gaze and replied: "Any time."

And he meant it.

Thank you for reading!