There was one thing that Yamamoto Takeshi learned very quickly, was that no matter how many times anyone stressed that swordsmanship was an art, it was not an art that one could simply walk away clean from. There was back spatter, cast-off patterns, forward spatter, impact pattern, satellite spatter, swipe patterns – and that was simply from your weapon alone, there was still expirated blood and arterial spurting to take into consideration.
Ten years ago, Takeshi wouldn't be able to tell you what any of those words meant. Experience was a bitch.
He didn't know who's idea it was to enter into a target situation dressed to the nines, but it seemed to be a standard everyone in the family took to heart. Countless shirts, and suits ruined because of this standard, every new mission, a new shirt, a new suit jacket, a new tie. A new tie that he still couldn't tie on his own.
And so he sat on the cold white tile floor of the mirrored hotel bathroom, yanking shoes and socks off and tossing them next to the toilet, tucking his phone into one, wriggling out of the wool trousers, his big toe snagging in the whole in the knee. Shrugging out of his jacket, soaked to the elbows in blood, his blue Armani shirt equally as stained, his tie hanging like a noose around his neck, he stripped down until just in his boxers, throwing the ruined clothes into the bathtub.
As he stood he noticed the faint blood transfer on the pristine tiles, where he'd rested his hand, or a sleeve had brushed against the floor, only in passing as he crossed to the table in the corner of the hotel room, blinding reaching in the dark for the book of matches, crumpled and worn in his fist as he returned to the (nearly) sterile white bathroom. He flipped the cover of the book open, two twisted matches stuck up from the bottom. Only two left.
He'd taken the matches from the only smoker in the family, hoping he wouldn't notice their disappearance, hoping to have something to remember him by. As optimistic as he was, as confidant and fool hearty as he knew he was, he knew that there was always a chance that he wasn't going to come back. He knew that as well as anyone (they had seen Tsuna's casket. They knew).
He climbed onto the over polished countertop, noticing the bloody outline of his foot prints on the tile, as he reached for the smoke detector, yanking it out of its socket in the ceiling, dangling on one thin wire.
He pulled one of the matches from the perforation, swiping it against the bottom of the book as sulfur and ash filled the air – it always smelled like him, every time – before flicking the match into the bathtub, polyester and wool smolderingly slowly in the porcelain claw footed tub.
The stench was unbelievable.
If he's done this once, he's done this a hundred times. Eventually the questions about where that nice suit went stop, eventually the questions about "what happened to your face?" stop. Its not like they don't know, its just the social nicety of it all. It was weird thinking that he'd be back at the base like none of this ever happened. He wasn't some deep misunderstood person, that wasn't what the problem was at all, the Yamamoto everyone knew was the Yamamoto that he truly was. It was simply the fact that he was so good at killing that unsettled him, it was the only reason he was entirely despondent, watching his suit curl into ashes.