disclaimer: ha ha I only wished I owned this series.
notes: this is a light-handed view of what Haru's life could be like in the future. it works under the assumption that Reborn wouldn't let Haru and Kyouko stick around if they were, you know, just there to cook and clean (though canonically, that...probably is the reason). but, uh, yeah, it's gen and not all that serious and I'm not sure there's a point. also, this is a high T for language. :D

Concrete Feet

"Oh my God," Haru says, "oh my God, you blew up my room, why the hell did you blow up my room."

The boys — Reborn and Lambo, and they're boys because they're all of a head shorter than her now — point at each other. They haven't changed. Still stupid, still prone to throwing grenades when words will do.

"Just. I. Clean it up," she says, staring at the crater where her bed used to be. She learned, during her first week in Italy, that valuables (like books and research and clothes) should be kept locked away. Reborn lives in this wing of the house, along with Lambo and Hibari and the rest of Tsuna's guardians, who are just as insane so there are plenty of explosions that ruin things.

(She's planning on moving out, eventually. She just...needs to find a place better than Koenig's basement.)

"I'm going to kill you," she hears Lambo telling Reborn once she's halfway down the hall. "You made Haru mad."

Reborn says something along the lines of 'stupid cow' and then the banging starts again.

Haru goes to the basement. Koenig's a freak but he's an understandable, people-fearing freak.

She graduated from Todai with a degree in physics and a minor in comp-sci so she's reasonably smart (to her dad, that is; her dad wants her to go for her doctorate and become a professor at MIT). She's smart enough that when Tsuna told Koenig that he'd be getting an assistant, the man had mumbled and twittered around instead of whisper-shouting that he didn't need another watchdog.

(Reborn hadn't let Koenig out of his sight for the first few months of his 'employment.' Koenig's never forgotten and rarely ventures upstairs.)

He thinks she's kind of awesome, in his own flinching way, and they've made improvements on the boxes and the tech and she likes to think that without their knowledge of the future, they would have figured out the mechanics eventually. (She does wonder, occasionally, what her original ten years older self had been doing. Haru doubts it had been physics — she picked that only after their trip forward; before that, she'd run with the idea of being a fashion designer, someone famous, soon to be well-recognized among mafia women.)

Haru is like Koenig's loudspeaker, so when Tsuna needs someone to explain to young, delusional mafioso that messing around with boxes is a bad, bad idea (think very big fireworks in your hands because box technology hasn't come so far that it's completely stable for anyone to use, barring, well, Tsuna and his stupid family and equally stupid enemies). Lambo usually comes along as her would-be bodyguard; more often than not, he ends up charming the girls and making the boys come at him with their fists. It works out, at any rate, and Haru gets to stand there looking pretty.

Though there are times, like this one, where the young, delusional mafioso decides that he doesn't want to listen to the pretty lady, because hey, he's got a working ring that shoots out fire and he's got a box he picked up off the street — so why not?

"Man," Lambo sighs. There's a purpling bruise high on his cheek and he's been wincing with every other step, but he shoves Haru into an alley regardless, sighing all the way. "I hate boys," he says, peaking around the corner. The young mafioso is screaming and — yeah, his poor luck that he ended up being a storm type because wow, that raccoon is going for his face with flaming claws. "They never listen."

"I should show more leg," Haru considers, looking down. She's got fantastic legs — Koenig kicks her out of the lab at random times, so she goes for runs. No reason to let her beauty go to ruin, after all. "They like legs."

"I think he was more of a breast guy," Lambo says, pulling out his phone. He texts Tsuna, then glances back at Haru. "You could change that, if you wanted to. Or get Chrome to."

Haru snorts.

Then she kicks Lambo in the ribs, right where she's sure Reborn had cracked one, and leaves him howling with the young, delusional mafioso.

"That was mean," Yamamoto says once the door to Tsuna's office is shut behind them. They can still hear Lambo sniffling inside. "You know how hard Reborn hits."

She doesn't, actually — Reborn had taught her how to shoot straight. He hadn't bothered with hand-to-hand combat, instead telling her to go find Hibari and learn the hard way. (For the record, Haru watched a spar between Hibari and Yamamoto and she'd decided, quickly, that she'd rather learn how to shoot and reload really fucking fast.)

"It was an insult to my honor," she says, throwing her nose into the air. "And it's not like you weren't laughing."

He laughs again. Yamamoto always laughs, though; it's creepy and getting creepier as the years go on.

"So how are the boxes going?"

They're ambling down the hall in the vague direction of her new room — far enough away from the idiots that she thinks she might be able to sneak in a textbook in relative comfort — and Haru, after a second's thought, comes to a stop. Yamamoto does too, a perfectly vapid smile on his face.

"What do you want?" she asks. Her arms cross automatically; it's a defense system she honed around Reborn, and, well, Yamamoto is Reborn…reborn, really. He's not one for small talk unless he cares for the answer or has some other motive. It's usually the second.

He's still smiling. "Stay in the house," he says, hands drifting into his pockets. The thing about Yamamoto that makes him different from Reborn is that he knows Haru gets him, and there are times where he tries to put her at ease (Reborn enjoys her discomfort, sometimes does things deliberately so she has to give him the finger and leave). "What happened today, what you said, caught someone's interest, so…it's best if you stay in the house for a while. Koenig too."

"Koenig wouldn't leave if you lit a fire under his ass," Haru mutters. She squints at Yamamoto, sighs, and then shrugs. "Fine, whatever. I'm not interested in getting blown up."

"Sure you aren't." The boys, excluding Gokudera, don't understand her passion for physics and boxes. That's fine, because Haru really doesn't want to understand or try to understand their obsession with beating each other bloody.

Haru flaps her hands at him. "Go, shoo, do…something. Go get beat up by Hibari again. And tell Reborn to give me my gun back."

(He, for some stupid ass reason, likes to take her favorite gun and hide it. Says it makes her more flexible, or something. Haru just thinks that she's going to snap and try to put a bullet in his back one of these days.)

"I…are you serious. Oh my God. How the hell did you get into the gardens, oh my God. Tsuna's going to have a meltdown."

Tsuna likes to think that the house is freakishly protected, and it mostly is. Then things like this happen where some rival family manages to sneak in and snatch one of their own, and then Tsuna goes for weeks looking like a pale beanstalk that refuses to grow. It's sad, really, and it makes Haru feel like shit because this time, she's the one that got snatched, not even a full day after Yamamoto told her to be careful.

"I can't believe this," she says to the man guarding her. He scowls at her. "Who are you, anyway? Russo? Rizzo? I swear, I heard r-something…"

"Shut up," he says, and then he turns his back to her, finger going to his ear. Haru would give him the finger, but her hands are tied behind her back. Shame.

"So," Haru says once she establishes that yes, her spare gun has indeed been taken from her person, "who am I waiting for? Your boss? You could save him or her the trouble and let them know that I really, really don't know anything. I'm an average girl. Really. I like to knit and cook."

She feels the man's sneer and contemplates trying to kick his heels when he says, "If you don't know anything, then why am I getting reports that they're coming for you?"

"…I'm a very good cook," she says blandly. "They can't survive without me."

She doesn't get to hear the man's retort because the door to the room gets kicked in at that moment, and in the next he's down on the ground, unmoving. Haru thinks he should be grateful that the carpet is as soft and as comfortable as it is; she wouldn't enjoy dying on concrete.

"That was fast," she says to Reborn. It's freaky, the way he puts his guns back in their holsters and looks at her with his weird, teenage eyes. He could be worried, or relieved, but it's Reborn and he's rarely anything but displeased or content. "Can I have my gun back now?"

"Hibari," he says. Haru makes a face. "That's the deal."

"I'd hit you if you weren't a kid," she tells him. Reborn's face does a spasm thing that's probably a smile, but to her it looks something like a grimace.

Haru ignores Reborn for the next week (and gets out of the way the two times she thinks she sees Hibari in the distance) and after a chance meeting with Ryouhei, she signs up for boxing lessons. Or she was signed up for boxing lessons, until Reborn dumped a bucket of water on her in the middle of the night, said Hibari, and left.

In his own way, he's trying to care. She thinks. Haru sort of remembers Kyouko telling her that Reborn had made her go through all kinds of training — though in Kyouko's case, she'd gotten to have sparring lessons with Chrome. Chrome's not really any better than Hibari, but she at least looks like she won't kill you on sight.

"Please don't mangle my body too badly," Haru says on day one. Hibari stares. "I want to have an open casket funeral, so, yeah. Not too badly. I'd ask you to avoid the face, but. No real point in that."

She stops talking because Hibari comes charging at her — and later, she figures, she'll appreciate that he doesn't believe in holding back, but right now she really, really hates him and Reborn.

"Fighting," Koenig says, eyes wide and fixed on Haru's purple…everything, really. "I didn't think you were a fighter."

"I'm not," Haru says through a split lip. She hates Reborn, and had said as much when he'd showed up in her room that morning. With a camera. "Can we just — let's work. Okay? Okay."

Koenig takes another look at her face, mutters to himself, and starts shuffling papers into her hands. Her fractured, bruised hands that aren't quite as pretty as they'd been the day before.

Fucking Reborn. (She'd say fucking Hibari but that doesn't seem quite safe, even in her mind.)

"I'm not really that interested in…this." Tsuna waves a hand around at his office, the money and the obvious power. "I was hoping you'd be the same way."

Tsuna's a bit of a freak in that he still thinks he's not a mafia boss, more of a glorified…babysitter. He'd hoped, after graduating from high school, that Haru and Kyouko would go to a nice college, find nice boys, have nice lives that didn't involve the mafia (or the yakuza).

Kyouko went to college, wrapped up a psych degree in three years, and went to Italy to smile deftly at all of Tsuna's protests. Haru went to college and came out of it ready to take names. Tsuna has to wonder why he even tried.

"I mean," he says, slumping in his chair, "it's only going to get worse now. People want to know about the boxes, and Koenig…"

"Koenig likes to live like an ant, so they're going to try to come after me," Haru supplies. "Come on, Tsuna. I can take care of myself." He frowns, so she adds, "Okay, I can mostly take care of myself. This was a fluke. They happen."

"It's going to get you killed." He says it carefully. Like she's never heard it, or like he's never had to say it. "I'd…rather it didn't come to that."

Her dying would mean Tsuna retaliating. He'd have to.

"The only other thing to do," Haru says, not unkindly, "is to send me away. Give me a different name, a different face. I don't want that."

He smiles bleakly. "You're doing that already," he says, looking the bruises lining her face.

Haru laughs, and shrugs. "So there's nothing to worry about, right? Before you know it, I'm gonna be out of the lab and into your ranks as a hitman."

"Ha. I'd rather that not happen, either."

He doesn't say no outright, and Haru spends the rest of the day trying to figure out what that means.

"Tsuna's not against me becoming a hitman. Why. Why. Who died that he's this desperate for manpower."

Reborn's always entertained her hysterics, more so than he did Tsuna's, so he doesn't roll his eyes or bang a hammer over her head. No, Reborn looks at her like he's considering what she said, and she starts to remember that Reborn never does anything half-assed. He trained her for a reason.

She just never figured it would be this reason.

"You wouldn't be bad," he says eventually. "Not," he adds with a smile, "as good as Yamamoto or Bianchi, but good enough."

"That's not reassuring," Haru says under her breath. Then, louder, "Did you expect this? You're the one who told me that pursuing physics would be a good thing!"

"It brought you here," Reborn says blithely. He doesn't bother to answer the rest.

"Oh my God. I'm not an assassin. What the hell." She's starting to sound like Tsuna, back when Reborn had first shown up. Hell, she's starting to understand how Tsuna felt.

"I didn't say you were. I'm saying you're capable of it, if you wanted to be." He lifts a shoulder. "Anyone's capable of it."

Haru leaves him in her room and goes to the basement. The basement is her friend.

She's not a fucking assassin. She's the normal one. Someone has to be the normal one.

"I'm good at this, right? It's my calling?"

Koenig doesn't look at her, but then Koenig rarely looks up from his notes. He does, however, mumble something that sounds like "not incompetent," so Haru takes that as an affirmative and continues scrawling down her notes. The box research is coming along, inches at a time, but it's something. They won't have an actual, new box for another year, but at least these boxes are founded on actual studies and not tampered time.

"I like this," Haru adds. Her desk, so clean when she'd arrived three years ago, is strewn with papers and has scorch marks and there are bird droppings down one leg that never really managed to get wiped away. This, the science, makes sense. She's always been good at this. She's always enjoyed being good at this.

Koenig twitters away in his corner, repeats how it's not enough, never enough.

"I'm staying," she says to the walls. "God. I think they were just screwing with my head. Fucking Reborn."

The thing about guns that Haru knows but never really got is that they're designed to kill. Put a hole in someplace vital, drain out all the blood, leave them to die. They're made to hurt.

Reborn had said to never point a gun at someone unless you meant to shoot them.

The man bleeding before her now had grabbed her on her way out of a salon, dragged her into an alley, slammed her up against a wall. His breath had been hot, his palms sweaty, and in the morning light she could see the beginning of a beard growing on his young, pale face.

He'd wanted to know about the boxes. Said he'd do anything.

He had held Haru's shoulders, but he hadn't bothered with Haru's hands. It didn't take much to reach back, pull out the gun, push it into his middle, and shoot. Didn't take anything, really. A half-second. Not much sound made because the second thing Reborn had taught her was that a gun was only as good as its silencer.

Haru watches the boy-man die. In this part of Italy, it won't draw too many eyes, and they're far enough back in the alley regardless.

She's not going to be allowed to go outside alone anymore. Isn't really allowed even now, but it's been quiet for months. Tsuna had relented.

"Fuck," she says to the now dead boy. Her shoes have flecks of red on them but her hands are clean and steady as she pulls out her phone. "Fuck," she says again as she presses a number and brings the phone to her ear.

Yamamoto picks up on the second ring. He's out of breath, so she figures he's with Hibari — probably just finished up, all bloody on his end, and there's a laugh in his voice as he says, "What's up?"

"I don't know how to take care of a body," Haru says. "I, uh. I'm by the salon. You know, the one Kyouko and I like?"

To his credit, he doesn't miss a beat and asks for exact directions. Then he tells her that he'll be there in five minutes, not to worry, and not to move.

Haru waits until the line goes dead before rummaging through the boy's pockets. There's an ID in there, a few years' expired, but it tells her that the boy's name was Nico and that he was nineteen.

"Fuck," she says. The ID goes into her pocket, the gun goes back into her waistband, and she thinks her mind had gone away after the bullet had punched through the boy's stomach.

"Should have gone for the head," Yamamoto says during the car ride back. He'd taken a look at the body and nodded to the man he'd brought with him. Then he'd taken Haru by the shoulder, guided her into the waiting car. "Faster, cleaner if you do it right."

She'd open her mouth to say something, but the vertigo's starting to set in and she's already gotten blood into the car, she doesn't need to add vomit.

The rest of the drive is silent. Haru's kind of glad that Yamamoto doesn't bother to ask if she's okay.

(See, she's seen death so many times that she's not sure it bothers her. She's not sure she's feeling what she should be feeling, if she's feeling anything at all.)

"Messy" is what Reborn says once she's settled into her room. The maid had pressed a cup of tea into her hands, taken away her shoes, wiped a wash cloth over Haru's hands. For metaphorical reasons, she thinks; her hands are clean.

"You're better trained than that," he says, leaning against her desk. He'd been waiting for her, thin-lipped and narrow-eyed. "It's not going to happen again."

Haru laughs.

Reborn, for once, doesn't smile.

He does take her gun from her, sigh, and start to clean it.

Tsuna's frowning. "You shot someone last week," he says. "That — that doesn't mean you understand."

Koenig's been saying for years that they need more research, more information than that found in databases. He refuses to go himself — he hates outside, dislikes people as a rule — and the only thing stopping Haru had been the thought of Tsuna sending one of his guardians with her. He stupidly would; he'd send two if he thought he could get away with it.

Now, though, she's got a kill under her belt and Hibari's been beating her up for a year. She understands plenty.

"I'm going," she says. "I'll go no matter what you say. I'm just asking that you let me go on my own terms."

He's still shaking his head. "You're — you're not a fighter, Haru. And people know your face. You can't just go out there."

"I don't think they care enough about me to organize a hit in America," she says gently. The furrow in Tsuna's brow doesn't go away. "Koenig and I aren't the only ones studying this. They don't really need me anymore, but you do. The Family does."

"So let me send someone with you — Chrome, Yamamoto—"

He's adorable. "I signed up for this," she reminds him. "Let me do my job, Tsuna."

"I hired you as a research assistant," he says; it comes out as a groan. "Oh my God. I'm going to get you killed."

"I'll take someone with me," she reassures him. "Just, you know. Not one of your six limbs."

"Reborn?" he asks hopefully.

"No, no he's your problem. Keep him."

To the delight of her father, she starts her doctorate studies at MIT. She doesn't anticipate finishing them, but it's nice to be in school again, surrounded by people whose fears revolve around letters and percentages.

New York would have been a better place, overall, but Koenig had insisted upon MIT so she's here, picking up pieces of gossip and stalking the physics department for all of the latest developments. The mafia's only recently started investing in scientists so Haru figures that a good number of her professors are doing box research in their spare time, and it won't take long before they start blabbing about whatever they've discovered.

(Academics, Haru's realized, love to be recognized. It's why they teach.)

Her 'bodyguard' is a baby-faced hitman that's worked for the Vongola for years, and he takes to his undergrad studies with barely veiled amusement. He leaves Haru alone, and she has to wonder what Reborn told him.

She's freer than she's been in years so she talks. Makes friends. Calls home, every now and then, to reassure Tsuna that she's still breathing and to tell Koenig not to flinch every time someone steps into the lab. She misses it, sure, wants to go back, but not too soon.

Haru's good at this, see. People like to talk to her. Say things they shouldn't, like how they figured out an equation, how they've got 'friends' abroad that are funding their research.

She thinks that if she weren't a physicist (plus whatever else she's become), she'd be playing Kyouko's game like a pro.

"I broke a guy's hand yesterday."

Reborn snorts. "Left or right?"

"Left," she says. "…He was right-handed. I'm not that mean."

"Good. Less likely to come back."

"Mm." Reborn's never been one to ask people why they do something. He's always been more interested in the aftermath. "How are things over there?"

"Koenig's self-destructed," he says smoothly. Probably laughing inside. "Fine, otherwise. Tsuna's muddling through."

Haru smiles. "I think I'm coming back in May."

"You've got everything?"

"Enough. I've been here for two years. It's gotten boring." She sighs. "I miss my gun."

He snorts again. "Sounds like you're doing fine without it."

"Yeah, yeah… I'll see you soon."

She says her goodbyes, packs up, tells her baby bodyguard that it's time to head home.

Koenig tears up at the sight of her, and then pushes a stack of papers into her arms.

"Go on," he says, sniffing. "We don't have all day."

Her meeting with Tsuna is the day after, and it basically goes like this: "You aren't dead. And you didn't kill anyone. Thank God."

Hibari creeps into her room afterwards, Hibird on his shoulder. She thinks that's a half-hearted attempt to make his entrance seem less, well, creepy, and it would work except it's Hibari so Haru throws her pillow at him before she has a chance to think otherwise.

He ducks, and Haru has a half-second to contemplate her life.

"Herbivore," he says. He seems to be operating under the thought 'I'm going to ignore what just happened for my own sanity.' "Tetsu told me you found something in America."

"Uh."

"The boxes are interesting. I want reports on my desk by morning." The or I'll bite you to death is left unsaid.

And he creeps back out, Hibird chirping, and Haru tries to rationalize how this is her life.

"Hibari came into my room last night," Haru says. Her hand twitches at the thought. "I swear, he's like a vampire."

Yamamoto laughs. "Yeah? What'd he want?"

"Stuff about the boxes." Haru shrugs, slumping down in her chair. "God. I thought I was going to die."

"Nah. Hibari likes you." There's a pause, and Yamamoto adds, "As much as he can, you know, like anyone."

Which translates to: Hibari thinks it's more beneficial to not bite her to death, so. He doesn't. For now. (Haru's really hoping that she stays freakishly smart for the rest of her natural life, or until Hibari can't move because his joints are shot to hell.)

"So," he says after their beers are nearing empty, "how was America?"

Her arms still cross, but Haru does answer. (For the record: America kind of sucked. She would have loved it in her teenage years, but now she just winced at the overloud kids and the constant, overbearing sense of not mine.)

"I would have made a shitty hitman."

"Probably," Reborn says. He's cleaning her gun again, and Haru still thinks of it as her gun even though she hasn't seen it for years. "You don't have the gut for it."

Haru looks over at him. He's sixteen or seventeen by this point (Reborn hates birthdays, so there's no real way of keeping count), and he's starting to resemble the hitman of nightmares. "Yeah?" she says, mildly curious. "Just my gut that's the problem?"

"You wouldn't be able to go through with it, over and over," he says. "That was always your problem. Too many thoughts in your head for this line of work. Tsuna's, too."

"I guess." Haru's got the will for it, even if she does sometimes pull out Nico's ID and marvel over how stupidly young he looked. She's got the skill. Just not the…blind dedication to the job that Reborn and Bianchi and Yamamoto have. "I'm a kickass physicist, though. Better than you'd ever be."

His mouth twitches. "Math is more my thing."

"Uh huh."

"Besides," he adds, setting aside her gun, "you're best at getting abducted."

Haru flings her pillow at him. Like Hibari, he ducks.

Unlike Hibari, he's not prepared for the other pillow.

"I gotta go to Russia."

Tsuna's frowning again. Haru figures it's got more to do with Kyouko being pregnant than with her, but, hey, who knows with him.

"The mafia's in Russia," he points out.

"I'm taking Reborn this time." Seeing as how it'd been Reborn's idea, it'd only seemed fair. "In and out in two months. Promise, Boss." Haru grins. "I'll be around when my nephew decides to show up."

"Research assistant," Tsuna says, putting his face into his hands. "I give you one job…"

"Come on, Tsuna. I'm great at my job."

"Yeah, you're Koenig's right hand," he says with a twitchy smile. "Great. Okay. Fine. Not like I can stop you. Or Reborn."

Haru beams at him. "See, you're finally getting it."

Tsuna laughs weakly.