Bloodsport, a katekyo hitman reborn! fanfic

Title: Bloodsport
Characters: Gokudera, Yamamoto, Ryouhei, Shamal, Tsuna, Hibari, Lambo, Squalo
Summary: Gokudera knows that this can't possibly end well.
Warnings: AU with vampires; angst, violence, fangsex, death. No pairings but plenty of subtext. 27,707 words.
Notes: Once upon a time, readerofasaph posted the beginnings of a fic about Yamamoto hunting vampires and running around all bloody, and asked someone else to take it off her hands. I flailed at her excitedly in the comments, because it was a shiny premise and I wanted more. After a quick exchange, I posted a brief snippet for her, with the caveat that "mind you, i have no idea what the context of this is, so. this is probably all you're getting."

Those were, shall we say, famous last words.

We exchanged several world-building sorts of comments, then we both got busy and distracted, and the whole thing fell dormant for a few weeks... until readerofasaph's birthday, where she inquired, hopefully, about a continuation to the vampire fic. Her request was felicitously timed, the stars were right, and over the course of about two weeks, I churned out something like twenty-five thousand words to build on what readerofasaph had started, while she and branchandroot cheered me on and helped me plot and world-build and contributed bits and pieces when I got stuck. This is the end result of that: we hope very much that you enjoy it!

Bloodsport

The summer after his father's death, Yamamoto Takeshi started baiting vampires. It was a trendy game that year, a little fringe but with that tinge of the romantic, and not a few cool kids were getting into it. So far nobody at their school had died, which Gokudera Hayato thought was a great pity.

He nearly told Yamamoto, "I hope you die," except that given the context it seemed more tasteless than usual.

He had no such compunctions when Sasagawa Ryouhei announced that he too, would take up the nocturnal sport as a form of boxing practice. (Also to scout other fierce and extreme club members, but with Ryouhei, that was a given.)

"I sincerely wish for your exsanguination," said Hayato told him, in the little space of silence after the grand announcement. When Ryouhei merely looked confused, Hayato lost his temper and explained, "I hope you trip over a rock while pissing yourself in fear and die from cerebral trauma, you idiot!"

The incomprehension faded from Ryouhei's face; they were back on familiar ground. He rejoined, "Octopus Head!"

"Baboon!"

"Singing monkey!"

"Moron!"

Yamamoto interrupted them before they could really get going by wandering into the classroom. Hayato, who had been wondering whether the phrase 'puerile nincompoop' would be lost on Ryouhei, felt all possible insults die in his throat.

He snuck a look at Yamamoto's face, caught Ryouhei doing the same, and exchanged frowns with him over Yamamoto. Yamamoto walked past them without even noticing, taking a seat at his desk without a word, just like he'd been doing for a couple of weeks now.

Maybe the best thing they could do for Yamamoto just now was to act like normal, he decided, and returned to insulting Ryouhei.

"Egg-sucker!"

"Mouth-breather!"

"Navel gazer! No, not the garlic, have you already forgotten that garlic is useless?" That was for Yamamoto, not Ryouhei, because Yamamoto had opened up his bag and was removing from it a startling array of anti-vampire goods.

Yamamoto appeared not to hear Hayato.

Hayato stalked over, snatched up the bulbs of garlic that Yamamoto was holding and pondering, and with perfect aim, hurled all five of them at the trashcan sitting behind the teacher's desk.

"Garlic. Is. Useless," he repeated with loud and clear enunciation, attempting to make eye contact with Yamamoto. Since Yamamoto's eyes these days resembled nothing so much as the vast and empty caverns of the universe, this was something of a feat.

Eventually Hayato detected a flicker of recognition in Yamamoto's gaze. That was encouraging. "You can't kill a vampire with garlic and crucifixes, remember? You can't even hurt them."

At first he wasn't sure whether he was getting through to Yamamoto, but then Yamamoto reached into his bag, pulled out a delicate bronze-colored crucifix on a silver chain, and held it out. His expression was still blank, but the gesture was curiously offering.

Hayato took it and looped it around Yamamoto's neck with a sigh. "It's supposed to protect only true believers, but on the off-chance—the garlic is definitely useless though. Let's see what you have there. Lighters, good. Flammable objects, good. Sterling silver earrings, not so good. Silver's completely ineffective against vampires, and anyway you don't have any ear piercings. Baseball bat, good." It was pretty much exactly the array of equipment Hayato would have expected any amateur to have assembled. If it had been anyone other than Yamamoto, any circumstances other than these, Hayato wouldn't have worried. But it was Yamamoto, and Yamamoto Tsuyoshi hadn't so much died as been ripped apart by vampires, and that was what compelled Hayato to say, "Look. Do you want me to come with you?"

He made the offer fully expecting Yamamoto to ignore it. Given that it was Yamamoto, who had previously made a career of frustrating Hayato's expectations, he should have known better. "If you want," said Yamamoto, which was the first thing he'd said in Hayato's hearing all damn week.

"Yes, come!" said Ryouhei, and added, "Octopus Head!" as if the nickname was enough to nullify the shame of desiring Hayato's presence at vampire baiting.

Hayato hadn't really expected that from either of them, and it caught him off-balance. Unfortunately, it was too late to retract the offer. "Let's go to your place this afternoon," Hayato said, before remembering the now-closed sushi bar with its silence and empty counter and upside-down stools sitting on dark dusty tables. "Actually, let's go to my house." No, that wasn't a good idea at all, on second thought. "No, the ice cream parlor. Definitely the ice cream parlor."

Ryouhei flashed a stunning grin. "I love ice cream!"

"You're not invited," said Hayato, but Ryouhei came anyway.

A startling number of Hayato's friends were mind-numbingly stupid. He'd questioned the universe why a score of times, but said universe was prone to answering in the incarnation of Miura Haru, who explained scathingly that nobody sane and intelligent would spend more than ten consecutive minutes around him. Her remarks—although prone to glancing off Hayato's psychological armor completely unnoticed—had struck home once or twice, enough to make him give up prolonged scrutiny of his own social intelligence. Self-knowledge, as Shamal had told him several times, simply wasn't worth it.

Yamamoto was not stupid, but sometimes acted as if he was. This gave Hayato more reasons to scream at the universe than Ryouhei's actual stupidity ever did.

While they were waiting for their banana splits Ryouhei said, "Eh, Yamamoto, didn't you try to kill yourself in junior high?"

Yamamoto did not reply. Undeterred, Ryouhei went on, "When you broke your arm. Kyouko told me you jumped off the school roof! I wasn't there, I was training for boxing."

Hayato had heard this story, though it had happened before he'd come to Japan. Given the circumstances, he didn't think it was terribly appropriate. Under the table he stamped on Ryouhei's foot.

Unfortunately, Ryouhei's school shoes were sturdy, and he carried on, undeterred. "I hear a big black bat swooped down while you were plunging to your death and caught you in its talons and saved your life."

"Do bats have talons?" asked Hayato, since dwelling on how Yamamoto'd had to give up baseball when he'd hurt his arm didn't seem calculated to draw Yamamoto out of his grief for his father's death.

There was silence. Ryouhei's forehead wrinkled with the effort of puzzling out an answer to the question, and Yamamoto hadn't seemed to have noticed that they were talking about him. "I don't know," Ryouhei said. "Don't they have little paws?"

Sometimes Ryouhei made Hayato want to scream at the universe, too. Hayato stomped on Ryouhei's toes again and considered adding a grenade. "Moron." He jerked his head at Yamamoto and made a series of faces at Ryouhei.

Ryouhei actually seemed to get it, after a few seconds of puzzled staring. "So, er, anyway." He coughed. "What I was saying! You decided it was better not to kill yourself, right? Even if you couldn't play baseball. So basically no matter what happens, the best thing is to fight it to the extreme!"

It was almost sweet to watch him try to cheer Yamamoto up, in his blundering, ham-fisted way. Unfortunately, Yamamoto didn't seem to be listening.

Before Ryouhei could embarrass himself any more than he already had, the waitress came with their banana splits. That interruption and the business of distributing the splits and spoons and napkins around the table foreclosed pursuing the topic. When she had gone, Hayato took advantage of Ryouhei's preoccupation with his ice cream to seize control of the conversation. "When are you two idiots planning on going out?"

Ryouhei had just taken an enormous bite of ice cream, but before he could maneuver it enough to answer, Yamamoto spoke. "Tonight."

Till then he had been silent, sitting with his elbow on the table and his hand supporting his chin, staring at something that lay well beneath the floor. Even now, his banana split was sitting untouched in front of him, the scoops of it melting together and mixing with the syrups, and his pose hadn't really changed since they'd come into the store and claimed a table.

"Well, tonight is—" Hayato began, meaning to point out that it was a little late to be planning for something only a few hours away.

Ryouhei jumped in. "Tonight will be awesome!" he proclaimed.

"But—" Hayato started.

They ignored him. "We should meet around sunset," Ryouhei said, rolling right over Hayato's attempt to object. "On the edge of town, so we don't lose any time."

So much for having control of the conversation. "Yeah," Hayato said, giving it up. "Sunset, on the edge of town." With any luck, they'd spend a few hours bumbling around in the woods in the dark, until Ryouhei and Yamamoto got bored, and then they'd be able to put this whole stupid thing behind them.

Comforting himself with that thought, he turned his attention to his ice cream

After putting Ryouhei off by insisting that he had homework to do before sunset arrived, Hayato headed home. He went straight for the small, lonely living room that he used for a workshop instead living in, where there was a couch and a low table and the parts and pieces of many kinds of volatile and flammable weapons scattered all over the room and the workbench he had crowded against the wall. He bent over the table and picked up a lighter and a kind of blowtorch that he had been tinkering with recently, wondering how it would do as a small, portable flamethrower.

"Hello," said Shamal's voice, scaring the crap out of him and causing him to drop the proto-flamethrower.

Hayato whirled around and saw his mentor leaning against a wall, shrouded in darkness, and vented his surprise accordingly. "What the hell are you doing here? It's not sunset yet."

Shamal failed to be impressed, as usual, and shrugged. "Sunglasses and sunhats. Remarkable inventions. Is there any blood in the fridge?"

"Only frozen," said Hayato, but Shamal had an affection for processed blood—it was, he said, like junk food—so they went into the kitchen and defrosted the blood packs. Shamal poured the slightly-gelled liquid into a tumbler, drank a bit, and instantly spat it out.

"I don't feed on men," he said.

"You can't identify sex by taste." In fact Hayato wouldn't be surprised if Shamal could, but the principle of the matter still held true.

"I've tasted this man before, at the blood bank." Shamal reached for the menthol-flavored mouthwash Hayato always kept by the sink, unscrewed the cap, tipped the green fluid in between his teeth, gargled, leaned over the sink to spit again, and proceeded to repeat the entire sequence of actions (minus the reaching and unscrewing).

"I think your mouth is clean now," said Hayato, impatient with his theatrics. "What are you here for, anyway?"

"What, I can't stop by just because I was in the area?" Shamal poured the blood down the drain and rinsed the glass. Then he gave the freezer a look, like he rather hoped that Hayato would tell him to help himself to another pack of frozen blood.

He could just keep hoping, as far as Hayato was concerned. "Not when it's still broad daylight, no." Hayato folded his arms. "What do you want?"

"Just a place to stay till the sun goes down." Shamal flashed a grin that was probably supposed to be charming, and might have been, if Hayato'd been possessed of a second X chromosome. "Sakura might have found out about Michiko. She was yelling a lot, anyway, so I thought I should probably leave."

"You're lucky she didn't take your head," Hayato told him, and left the kitchen.

"She would never do that," Shamal said, cheerful. "Doesn't have the upper body strength." He followed Hayato, like the pest that he was, and watched as Hayato rummaged through his tools and his stock of explosives. "Her boyfriend might," he added, contemplative.

"I hope you don't expect me to cry whenever you finally end up going through the true death," Hayato said, regarding the proto-flamethrower and then setting it aside as too heavy and too experimental to take along for the evening's expedition. "Seeing as how you'll have earned it about a hundred times over."

Flash grenades, he decided, and a few real grenades, and some smaller explosives. That should be enough to protect them for the evening.

"Ungrateful brat," Shamal told him.

"Sleazy old pervert," Hayato retorted, and wondered why he spent so much time trading insults with people as he found a belt with a series of holsters on it, and began loading them.

Of course, Shamal didn't bother denying the charges. Instead he watched Hayato work. "Planning something?"

"That idiot Ryouhei and Yamamoto are going vampire-baiting," Hayato told him, without looking up. He didn't have to, when the quality of Shamal's silence changed. "I'm going along to keep an eye on things."

"I see," Shamal said, and his tone said all kinds of things besides.

Hayato put the belt down. "It's Yamamoto," he said. "You know how he's been since his dad got killed." He'd certainly told Shamal, though one had to wonder how much Shamal had retained, since there weren't any pretty girls involved. "Anyway, he'll get tired of it when he's realized that baiting vampires doesn't really do anyone any good."

"You think so?" Shamal said, mildly enough.

"Don't you?" Hayato looked up at him, curious, but Shamal wasn't really looking at him any more. "Shamal."

"It's just funny," Shamal said, at length. "That's all."

"What is?"

Shamal just shrugged, with an abstracted little smile that Hayato didn't entirely like the looks of. "Oh, that his father was probably killed by vampires, so he's taking up vampire-baiting. Seems counter-intuitive."

"That's Yamamoto all over," Hayato said, and bent back over his work.

"Mm," Shamal said, and didn't say anything else until it began to get dark. As Hayato strapped his belts on, and found his flashlight and batteries to go with it, he said, "Be careful."

Hayato gave him a flat look, one that he hoped fully conveyed his disgust at being told such a thing. "What are you, my mother?"

"Perish the thought," Shamal retorted. "Just—oh, never mind." He flapped a hand at Hayato. "Go on."

Hayato looked at him, and started to ask what would prompt Shamal to warn him like that. Then he decided that he didn't actually want to know. "Yeah, yeah. See you later."

"Later," Shamal echoed, and Hayato let himself out to go meet Ryouhei and Yamamoto.

There was a wooded area south of Namimori, nothing extensive or really even that wild, but the branches of the trees had interlaced themselves and after the sun went down, sensible people stayed away from the area. It wasn't that it was the place where vampires liked to hang out, really, but it seemed like the sort of place where they ought to lurk, and thus was very popular with the vampire-baiting crowd. It was a vicious sort of cycle; now that stupid teenagers were spending their time there, the vampires were, too.

It was, Hayato thought, as he and Ryouhei and Yamamoto tromped through the underbrush, until they found a likely sort of clearing, all painfully stupid.

The first indication that this wasn't going to be a run-of-the-mill round of the vampire-baiting game—the kind of round that mostly consisted of idiot teenagers stumbling around in the dark, shrieking and giggling and scaring themselves with every shadow that moved—came when Ryouhei asked, cheerfully, "So, who's going to be the bait?" He was holding up a little vial of dark liquid; it probably looked like real blood to him, but then, Ryouhei was an idiot and it clearly wasn't. Too liquid, for one thing.

"...bait?"

Both of them were startled by the sound of Yamamoto's voice, disused and scratchy, like a record being played a long way away. He was looking at them, and the stupid waiting expression on his face made Hayato want to scream.

Ryouhei recovered first. "Bait," he said, cheerful. "They come for blood, so someone has to wear some blood to attract them."

Yamamoto made a sound, sort of like understanding. Before Hayato or Ryouhei realized what he was doing, he had a knife in his hands—what the fuck, Hayato thought, where had he gotten a knife from, and how had he known to bring it?—and laid open a slash on his arm. "Like this?"

"Whoa," Ryouhei said, and Hayato hated him for how deeply impressed he sounded, as blood welled up from the cut, dark and gleaming in the moonlight. "That's pretty extreme! Most people just buy their blood."

"Most people are idiots," Hayato snapped, and reached over to clamp his fingers on Yamamoto's arm and the blood that was oozing out of the cut. "They buy that imitation blood, because no self-respecting vampire gives a shit about that stuff. They only care about the real thing." Despite the moonlight, the night suddenly felt darker now that the scent of Yamamoto's blood was hanging in the air, heavy and metallic.

"Fake?" Ryouhei waved his little vial around, indignant its behalf. "This is one-hundred-percent genuine! The guy said so!"

"Yeah, that's why it says 'synthetic' on the side, right?" Hayato snorted. "God, you're such an idiot."

"Watch who you're calling an idiot!"

Hayato didn't bother replying; he was more preoccupied with the darkness and the sounds coming from the trees. Was that rustling just the wind? And small animals moving through the undergrowth? Or was it something else?

Yamamoto stood beside him, perfectly still, waiting, while his pulse beat steadily under Hayato's fingers.

"—are you even listening to me? Hey, don't ignore me!" Ryouhei blustered.

"Oh, shut up," Hayato said, and heard something in the darkness, some kind of movement, something big, perhaps, that was trying to move softly.

"Don't tell me to—"

"Shut up!" Hayato hissed at him, urgent, and some of that urgency seemed to finally communicate itself to Ryouhei, who shut up. "I think—"

He didn't get to finish the sentence. The vampire dove on them, growling, and slammed into Ryouhei. Ryouhei, to his credit (though Hayato would sooner have died than admit it) withstood the tackle remarkably well. "Hey, wow!" he exclaimed, delighted tone wholly at odds with the situation. "It really worked!"

"You're such a moron!" Hayato howled at him, and shoved Yamamoto away from him, going for his belt and the explosives holstered there.

The vampire was sniffing at Ryouhei. "Not you," it said, wrinkling its nose, and threw him across the clearing. There was nothing good about the sound Ryouhei's body made when it crashed into the little stand of saplings there.

Hayato winced, but there was not time for Ryouhei now. "Hey, fangface," he said, and waved his bloody fingers at the vampire. "Over here."

The vampire rounded on him, though it was probably more for the sake of the blood than the insult. "Mm," it said, and pounced. The world went spinning, a kaleidoscope in black and grey and silver, as Hayato wrestled with it. The vampire caught his fingers and—oh, disgusting, he was going to have nightmares for weeks. Then the vampire gagged, and spat. "Not you at all," it said, outraged, but before it could vent its rage in any more permanent form, Yamamoto caught it across the shoulder with his baseball bat.

The vampire made a sound and dropped Hayato, and turned on Yamamoto with an eager sound. "So it must be you," it sing-songed, and ducked under Yamamoto's next swing to backhand him. Yamamoto went flying.

The first thing Hayato's fingers closed on was just a little bomb, not enough to do any real damage. He threw it anyway, but the vampire batted it away and the explosion went wide. "Don't be ridiculous," it said, and turned on Hayato again. "I suppose I'll have to kill you first."

Hayato reached for a flash grenade—several thousand lumens' worth of full spectrum light, not enough to permanently damage a vampire but certainly enough to give it a very bad night—but as his fingers closed around it, Yamamoto hauled himself back to his feet.

His shirt was hanging off him, mostly in shreds, dark and wet in places with what Hayato was pretty sure wasn't just mud. He stood for a moment with his head bowed, swaying like he wasn't quite steady on his feet. When he finally lifted his head, something had come back into his eyes after all this time, and he was smiling, sort of, but not in any kind of way that could be classified as 'nice'.

This, Hayato suspected, was probably not an improvement.

The movement caught the vampire's attention. It looked away from Hayato. "You're a stubborn one, aren't you?" The vampire laughed. "Well, all right, if you're that eager for more."

Hayato could hear Yamamoto's grip creak on the baseball bat that he still held. "Yeah," he said, still wearing that unnerving little half-smile. "Come on."

The vampire did. A warning rose and lodged in Hayato's throat as it blurred through shadow and moonlight, hands reaching out for Yamamoto. Yamamoto stood his ground, and Hayato swallowed his warning down, because he wasn't stupid enough to shriek out a warning for any damn vampire who was too stupid to see the danger standing right in front of him.

He was willing to look aside from the results, though, although there wasn't anything to muffle the wet, meaty sound of impact or Yamamoto's little grunt of effort, perfectly audible over the thump and rustle of a body hitting the ground.

Yeah, Yamamoto didn't play on the school team any more, but it sure sounded like he'd kept his hand in. "The head," Hayato said, over the harsh sound of Yamamoto's breathing. "You have to take the head." And after that would come the fire, but first the vampire needed to be put down long enough for that to happen.

"Right," Yamamoto said, and Hayato closed his eyes at the sounds that followed.

While Yamamoto dealt with that, Hayato went to Ryouhei. He was still breathing, which was a pity and a shame, but he was out cold and had a trickle of blood running down his forehead. His arm was twisted at an unnatural angle, too, so maybe it was just as well that he was unconscious.

The sounds from behind Hayato ceased. "Now what?" Yamamoto called.

"Fire," Hayato told him, and dragged Ryouhei out of the undergrowth to where Yamamoto was standing over the vampire.

Yamamoto looked down at his handiwork. "Fire?" he repeated, and yeah, he probably couldn't see the need for it.

"Vampires can regenerate," Hayato told him, and reached for the flask he almost hadn't bothered to bring. "Taking the head—" or bashing it in, good God "—slows 'em down." He uncapped the flask and dumped it over the body, and the smell of the accelerant cut through some of the reek of blood and other things. "Fire, though. Fire can bring the true death. Stand back." Yamamoto shuffled a few steps back as Hayato found his matches and lit one, and dropped it on the vampire.

The body went up as fast as he remembered, with a whoomph of sudden heat and a greasy, choking smell that overlaid the smell of Yamamoto and Ryouhei's blood. The reddish glow of it lit the satisfied half-smile on Yamamoto's face as he watched the vampire burn.

That boded ominously, Hayato thought.

When the flames began to die down, and all that was left was a greasy spot of charred ground, he said, "Okay, we're done. We need to get Ryouhei back home so someone can look at that arm." No point in worrying about Ryouhei's head; it wasn't like he used it anyway.

"...the vampires?" Yamamoto asked.

Hayato didn't think he was asking about whether they'd be safe from the vampires, but he chose to interpret it that way. "They won't smell the blood on us now," he said, and jerked his chin at the last smoldering remains of the vampire. "We'll stink of that, instead." He knelt. "Come on, help me out here."

Yamamoto moved, slowly, to help him get Ryouhei off the ground and into a rough approximation of a fireman's carry. "But... there are more vampires."

"They're not going anywhere, I promise," Hayato said, grunting a little with Ryouhei's dead weight. "There'll be other nights."

"Yeah?" Yamamoto said, and if it weren't such a relief to hear him be eager about anything, Hayato would have been disturbed.

"Yeah," Hayato said, although he was pretty sure that wasn't actually the answer he wanted to give.

"Good," Yamamoto said, satisfied, and didn't add anything else.

It was a long, silent walk back to town.

Part of Hayato had hoped that it would take one real encounter to satisfy Yamamoto—that he'd get a taste of the very real dangers of baiting the vampires who weren't stupid younglings just out for a thrill, the ones who didn't have any more use for humans than most humans had for cows, say, and that would be that. One encounter with a mature vampire and Yamamoto would realize that there wasn't much a mere human could do against a vampire who meant business, he'd get past his anger and start moving along through the Kübler-Ross stages, and then Hayato could have done with wasting precious brain cells worrying about him.

That, or he'd get himself killed. Either way, one real encounter and it'd be over.

Hayato should have known better, really. This was Yamamoto. If there was anyone in Japan more frustrating, Hayato sure as hell didn't want to meet them. And he only wished he could be surprised when Yamamoto came to him, just a couple of days after that first vampire, and said, "Tonight?"

"We have a test to study for." Not that Yamamoto would study. He'd just sit at his desk when the tests were passed out, and the teacher would take his copy up again without so much as a mark on it.

Hayato wondered how long it would be before the school did something. Part of him thought that they probably should have already done something, but then, no one had exactly asked him.

Yamamoto's expression hadn't even changed. "Tonight," he said, again, not as a question this time.

"Didn't you even notice the part where the vampire nearly killed you and Ryouhei?" Hayato had his reservations about how much Yamamoto was actually noticing these days, which was the real problem. A person couldn't bait—or hunt—vampires with his head up in the clouds.

About the time that particular thought floated through his head, Hayato realized he'd lost the argument. But owning up to having lost was another matter altogether, and he wasn't going to go down without a fight.

At least Yamamoto appeared to be giving the question some thought, or so it seemed, until he tilted his head and asked, "...so?"

"So you got lucky this time!" Hayato told him. "Nothing says you're going to pull that off again!"

Yamamoto blinked at that, slowly. "So you're not coming," he said, the statement measured, like it was difficult for him to string that many words in a row together. Possibly it was, given how far he'd gone down into his own head.

Hayato opened his mouth, and then shut it again, glaring at Yamamoto, furious with him. Someone as stupid as Yamamoto didn't deserve to be helped.

He didn't deserve to be eaten by a vampire, either, though, which was the real problem. "I'll meet you at sunset," he snapped, "but don't count on me to keep helping you like this! I've got better things to do!"

Yamamoto just nodded at that, absently, and drifted back to his desk.

Hayato put his face in his hands and cursed himself, and Yamamoto, in every language he knew, because there was no way this could end well.

Ryouhei made it back to school after just a few days of convalescence, and wore his injuries like badges of honor. He lived it up with their classmates, since he was just about the closest any of them had actually come to getting killed by the vampire game, and that had its own cachet. Hayato would have been disgusted by the whole display, but he had bigger things to worry about, like the three vampire younglings he'd watched Yamamoto kill while Ryouhei had been lying around and nursing his wounds, and the fact that Yamamoto was getting to be disturbingly efficient, for a beginning hunter.

Hayato wasn't entirely sure how he felt about that, really.

Yamamoto had come back to something like life. The slackness had left his shoulders, and he moved like there was someone at home in his body, directing its movements, rather than like a puppet whose strings could be pulled at will. He was holding his head up again and looking around him like he was actually registering the things his eyes fell on.

Unfortunately, Hayato had the unsettling feeling that when Yamamoto looked at the people around him, it was to catalog where they fell on the threat scale.

And he was smiling again, but it wasn't his big, amiable grin from before. It was that little half-smile, the one that hadn't wavered even once, not since he'd raised the baseball bat and brought it back down again that night.

And somehow, he'd come to recognize that Hayato understood vampires better than anyone else around them.

Hayato was pretty sure that this wasn't going to mean anything good, in the long run.

Shamal showed up in the hour before dawn, as Hayato was stripping out of his gear. He'd just set aside his belts for restocking—he was down a couple of flash grenades, plus a real grenade and one of the shrapnel bombs; it had been a busy night—when Shamal let himself in by way of the window, and pulled the curtains closed behind him. "That friend of yours is going to get himself into real trouble if he's not careful," he said.

"He's not my friend," Hayato said, knives following his belts, since they could use sharpening.

Shamal's snort was eloquent in its disbelief.

"He's not," Hayato insisted, and leaned over to unlace his boots.

"What do you call him, then?" Shamal said, as Hayato's boots thunked against the floor, one-two, an offense to Japanese customs that Hayato couldn't make himself care about.

"A fucking menace," Hayato said, stretching his feet and wiggling his toes. "I'm just trying to keep the collateral damage down, that's all."

"That's a real first for you," Shamal told him. Hayato flipped him off as he reached for his knives and the whetstone. Shamal let him work in silence for a few minutes, till Hayato had sighted down the last of the knives and satisfied himself that the edge was true. "Whatever you call him, he's pushing it."

"Tell me something I didn't already know," Hayato grunted, and heaved himself up off the couch to go rummage through the stock of bombs and explosives on the workbench—he was running low on flash grenades; time to stock up again.

"Watcher's taken an interest," Shamal said, and Hayato fumbled the grenade he was holstering. Both of them would have had a bad time of it, if Shamal hadn't moved, faster than thought, to catch it. "Guess you didn't already know that."

Hayato set his hands flat on the table, and tried to breathe. "Yeah. No. Fuck."

"Thought you should know." Shamal set the grenade down. "You sure this is the time you really want to start worrying about the collateral damage?"

Hayato picked up the grenade and slotted it into place on his belt. His fingers were steady; that was worth being proud of. "What are you really trying to say?"

"Cases like that one don't ever end well." Shamal turned away from him. "Be careful about how wrapped up in his business you let yourself get."

"Yeah," Hayato said, and picked up another grenade to slot into place. "I am. You staying the day?"

"No," Shamal said. "I have things to take care of." He hesitated, like he wanted to say more. Then he shook his head, and was gone.

Hayato spent the day brooding on the news, watching the alert lines of Yamamoto's back two seats down and one row over, and the way Yamamoto never quite stopped being coiled and ready for action, even in the middle of their literature class. He may have been staring out the window, but it was in the tautness of his posture and the way his fingers never stopped moving over the lines of what Hayato knew was a long knife, poorly hidden by a sleeve.

Their teachers had stopped calling on Yamamoto weeks ago, when he'd first descended into his—might as well call it a funk. Now they were in the habit of paying no attention to him.

They weren't much in the habit of calling on Hayato, either, if for different reasons—though he still maintained that any teacher who was so ignorant that a high schooler could reduce him to tears of humiliation and rage didn't deserve to be a teacher in the first place, and word had gotten around—and that gave Hayato plenty of time to chew over possible ways of dealing with the watcher. Not that one ever really dealt with watchers, really; one mostly kept one's head down and hoped not to draw their attention.

And watchers didn't generally pay attention to humans. Well, why should they? Wasn't like humans paid much attention to individual blades of grass, either. There wasn't a point to it, really, and it wasn't like blades of grass ever rose up against the animals that fed on them.

Would be difficult not to notice a blade of grass that had, though, he thought, watching Yamamoto stare out the window, long fingers moving over his knife, unceasingly. And grass was so easy to cut down.

Stupid metaphor. Hayato gave himself a brisk mental shaking. There were more productive things to be thinking about, like what they were going to do about their particular watcher situation. No time for philosophizing, after all.

It was too much to hope for that Yamamoto would agree to stop, to go away to another territory and fade into obscurity. He'd had the taste of it now, had caught a glimpse of what he thought he wanted, and he wasn't the kind of person who let things go easily. (More the pity, too.) It was possibly also too much to hope that he'd agree to moderate his behavior, but that was a starting point. Hayato would have to see.

And after that—what? It'd come down to the watcher, he supposed, not that he knew much about this area's watcher, even after the years he'd spent in Namimori. That could be a good thing or a bad one.

Damn it, he shouldn't have let Shamal slink off like that. He needed more data than this. A man couldn't make any kind of plans without enough information to work with.

"So," Hayato began, when it was beginning to look like none of the vampires were going to take the night's bait and let themselves be slaughtered. Maybe Yamamoto'd already managed to kill off the foolhardy ones, or maybe they'd learned to be wary of him. Well, stranger things had happened, and it wasn't like it was written in stone that vampires had to be stupid and slow to adapt. It was just stereotypical for a reason, was all.

Yamamoto glanced at him, briefly, acknowledging that he was listening, but never stopped scanning the area, clearly on the lookout for his prey.

Hayato cleared his throat. "So there's still stuff you need to know about vampires," he said, keeping his voice pitched low and running a stick of explosives over his knuckles, back-forth-over-under. "There are vampires, and vampires. Young ones and older ones, and clans and covens and really stupidly complicated rules about territories and treaties."

"So?"

Yamamoto sounded less disinterested than not; even so, Hayato had to squelch the sudden surge of his irritation. Didn't the idiot realize that Hayato was telling him this shit for a reason? "So you keep on like this, you're going to get people noticing you. The kind of people you don't want noticing you. You know?"

To his credit, Yamamoto actually seemed to consider that, however briefly; his brow wrinkled, and his eyes narrowed. Then he said, "So?"

"So they're going to come after you, if you keep kicking up this fuss," Hayato exploded, feeling the vein in his forehead beginning the throb the way it always did when Yamamoto was being especially obtuse.

"Any of them going to be the ones I want?" Yamamoto inquired, cutting Hayato off in mid-expostulation.

He had to consider it, consider the territories that were layered and abutting each other. "Maybe," Hayato allowed. "Some of them."

Yamamoto's smile crept a notch wider. "Then let 'em come."

"Yeah, well, see, that's why you're clearly an idiot," Hayato began, but then the vampire took the night's bait after all, and he didn't have the time to explain all the things he'd been working up to.

At least the vampires really weren't getting smarter after all. That kind of stupidity was offensive in its predictability, of course, but it was reassuringly familiar... unlike what happened next.

The vampire dropped from above, silently, which was more than Hayato could say for most of the younglings gone into a frenzy over the scent of fresh blood. That in itself was a sign that this one was old enough to be a little more in control of itself. A little more dangerous, as a result. Hayato made note of that as he dove out of the way, going for one of the bombs on his belt as Yamamoto went the other direction.

The vampire went after Yamamoto, the way they always did, hands outstretched and growling now that it didn't have to be stealthy. Yamamoto came up swinging, and caught it a good crack across the ribs.

This was an older vampire; it grunted, but the blow didn't stop it from coming on. Hayato curse as it closed with Yamamoto, too close for him to throw a real bomb. He went for one of the flash grenades instead as the vampire lunged for Yamamoto, faster than a mere human's speed could evade—even a human like Yamamoto, who was fast and determined and a little crazier than Hayato was comfortable with. Hayato cursed again as it seized Yamamoto, and raised his arm to throw the flash grenade.

A grip like iron closed on his wrist, and someone spoke in his ear. "No."

"The hell?" Hayato struggled against that grip, going cold with the fact that he hadn't heard the other vampire coming, hadn't noticed its presence till it had revealed itself. Its grip didn't budge, even fractionally. In fact, it tightened, till Hayato's fingers went nerveless and loosed their grip on the flash grenade. "Who the fuck are you—"

"Be still," it ordered, chilly, as Yamamoto twisted against his vampire in a way that Hayato was sure couldn't be good for Yamamoto's shoulder. "I want to see what this human can do on his own."

And only then did it register with Hayato just who—and what—had him in its grip, and he froze with the sudden stab of fear, the kind that youngling vampires didn't—couldn't—inspire, and that he didn't feel even around older vampires.

Namimori's watcher had him.

The watcher made a sound that might have been satisfaction, or amusement, or just disdain, as Hayato stopped struggling, and then there was nothing to do but watch the vampire and Yamamoto.

Yamamoto had kept his grip on his baseball bat, and was holding onto it with a tenacity that was laudable, even if it wasn't going to do him any good with his arm twisted in the vampire's grip like that. The vampire growled again, loud enough to be heard over the harsh sound of Yamamoto's breathing, and lifted Yamamoto off the ground with the casual strength of its kind.

Yamamoto went for his knife, dropping it down into his off hand and slashing at the vampire with the kind of anatomical precision that Hayato would never have expected him to have, even a few weeks ago. It was only his off hand, so the blow glanced off the vampire's throat, opening it up and sending a gout of dark blood washing over them both.

The watcher growled against Hayato's ear, very softly and distinctly hungry, at the scent of the vampire's blood hanging in the air. The vampire gurgled and Yamamoto reversed the direction of the knife, hacking at its throat again, and then again. A human's strength wasn't ever much to write home about, but a human's persistence could be: it was the vampire who fell, head rolling on a half-severed neck. Yamamoto dropped on top of it and finished the job with brutal efficiency, and dropped the head on the vampire's chest.

The watcher's growl had changed to something almost like a purr, Hayato noticed. That was a little horrifying. "Interesting," he said, against Hayato's ear, and then the grip on Hayato's wrist and the oppressive presence at Hayato's back disappeared.

Yamamoto never even noticed. He was busy dousing the vampire's body with lighter fluid. Hayato kept half an eye on him as he stepped back and lit a match; the whoosh of the flame going up turned the slick of blood across Yamamoto's face and clothes a glistening black, and his eyes gleamed in the light, satisfied.

And the watcher was definitely gone.

"Okay," Hayato said, announcing it over the crackle of the flames, and stooped to find his flash grenade, "we're in deep shit now."

Yamamoto didn't know when it was better to quit while he was ahead. Hayato damn near had to drag him out of the woods and back to the relative safety of the city, where the street lamps pushed the darkness back and the people on the streets gave Yamamoto quick, horrified looks and a wide berth.

It was like they didn't want to think about what they shared a territory with. Hayato couldn't much blame them; he didn't want to, either.

Didn't have much choice about it now.

Yamamoto still lived in the set of rooms above Take Sushi, though the storefront itself was closed now, and the chairs were stacked on the tables and accumulating a layer of dust. Yamamoto's rooms were a mess—more than a teenager's mess. The clutter bespoke a thorough ransacking followed by a half-hearted effort to restore order afterwards that had been abandoned halfway through.

But there were plenty of bandages and weapons, all within easy reach.

Once away from the promise of vampires to bait, Yamamoto went somewhat pliant, insofar as he permitted Hayato to boss him around, getting him to clean off the mess of the kill and let Hayato prod at his shoulder. It wasn't dislocated, which was a stroke of wholly undeserved luck, though Yamamoto was starting to favor it. Hayato wrapped it anyway; better safe than sorry. As he did, he told Yamamoto all the ways he was an idiot for continuing to go after the vampires.

If Yamamoto was even listening, he gave no sign of it. He just sat there, letting Hayato's words roll over him, until Hayato tied off the last bandage and said, "There. You shouldn't use that for a few days, give it a chance to rest and heal."

"No," Yamamoto said, flat refusal and pure obstinacy. "I'm not going to."

"The hell you say," Hayato told him, exasperated. "Look at you—you're a mess. How long has it been since you had a full night's sleep, anyway?" Not that Yamamoto's eyes hadn't been ringed with dark circles for weeks now, but it was getting worse.

"I'm fine," Yamamoto said, which was a lie of such magnificent, epic proportions that Hayato had to pause for a moment to admire the sheer grandeur of it.

"If you want to kill vampires, then you have to take care of yourself," he said, instead of addressing Yamamoto's case of denial head-on. Yamamoto's expression shifted, minutely, to something that could be called receptive, if one was inclined to be stupidly generous. "Yeah, you have to stay in good shape. You wouldn't—" Hayato searched for a good metaphor, and hit upon one that made his soul shrivel a little. "You wouldn't play baseball without—I don't know, stretching and shit, or whatever the hell it is you jocks do, right?"

"Conditioning," Yamamoto said.

Hayato pounced on it. "Right, conditioning, exactly. You'd keep up your conditioning. And you have to keep up your conditioning now more than ever, since vampires are a fuckload more complicated than a stupid ballgame." Yamamoto's eyes flickered, briefly, and Hayato almost let himself hope that he'd rise to the insult to his precious sport, but in the end he said nothing and the moment passed. "Anyway. Give it a few days, rest your arm. Let the vampires relax and get stupid again, so you can catch them off guard."

Yamamoto looked up at him, clearly weighing the idea against the fire that was driving him. "A few days," he repeated. "Two?"

"A week," Hayato countered.

"Too long. Three days," Yamamoto argued.

"Five," Hayato retorted, figuring it for a long shot. Yamamoto's jaw tightened. "Four. No less than that. And you have to sleep. And eat. And go easy on your arm."

Yamamoto's jaw was still tight, but in the end he said, "...fine."

That was more than Hayato had really expected; he eyed Yamamoto. "All right. Four days," he said, and that would give him some time to figure out what the hell they were going to do about the watcher.

Really, he should have known better.

He was arguing with Ryouhei in their normal desultory manner a bare two days later when Yamamoto walked into the classroom with a set of parallel lines grooving his cheek—four of them, as from being raked by a set of claw-sharp nails. Hayato stopped in the middle of calling Ryouhei a troglodyte and rounded on Yamamoto instead. "You went out alone?" he demanded, as Yamamoto took his seat and their classmates gathered round to watch the show. "What the hell is wrong with you? No, don't answer that, it would take a book to do it, and clearly you have lost your ever-loving mind!"

"You went out to bait vampires alone?" Ryouhei, predictably, failed to see the scope of Yamamoto's idiocy. "That is extremely cool!"

"It's extremely dangerous!" Hayato snapped, and hated himself a little for sounding like Ryouhei. He poked at Yamamoto's cheek. "Those should have stitches."

"They're fine," Yamamoto said, ignoring the poking and their classmates' whispers both. "I was fine."

"But you might not have been!" Hayato said, not even bothering to keep his voice down, not with the ring of wide eyes around them. "One of these days, you're not going to be able to kill them, because they're not going to be the stupid young vampires. And then where are you going to be?"

"You're killing vampires?" Ryouhei was clearly missing the whole point.

"Yeah," Yamamoto said, like it was a perfectly normal sort of thing for a high schooler to be doing, and not a clear manifestation of insanity.

A little murmur of awe ran around the circle of their classmates, and Hayato had to walk away from them all before he throttled them all, just to spare the world their collective idiocy.

He was waiting for Yamamoto at sunset anyway. "You're an idiot," he said, pushing away from the wall as Yamamoto walked past him. "And you break promises. I should let the vampires eat you." Tactless, yes, but Yamamoto had disqualified himself from deserving tact.

Besides, Yamamoto ignored it and just kept walking away from the edge of town, away from the streets and their lights and their sheltering bustle, heading for the darkness of the woods beyond.

It said something about him that he followed after, Hayato thought, and not a damn thing that it said was complimentary. Damn it. "So what happened last night?" he said. Not that he really cared, but if Yamamoto was going to throw himself at the vampires, then he needed to know how bad it was going to be.

Yamamoto lifted a hand to his cheek, absently, fingers running over the scabs. "Nn. She was stubborn." His teeth flashed. "Like you."

"Like you, you mean."

It was supposed to have been a joke, albeit one with both feet firmly planted in the truth, but Yamamoto's smile vanished. "Don't compare me to them," he said, and it was possibly the longest speech he'd made in weeks. "I'm not like them. At all."

"Uh," Hayato said, "right." He cleared his throat as they crossed into the shadows beneath the trees. "So where are we hunting tonight?" he asked, rather than try to have that conversation just then, especially when he could see that Yamamoto's knuckles were showing white where he was gripping his baseball bat.

But Yamamoto seemed to be done with talking for the night, and didn't answer.

Shamal was like a fucking cat: underfoot all the time when a person couldn't even stand the sight of him, and nowhere to be found when his services were actually needed. Not that Hayato had permitted himself to need Shamal for years, now, but it would have been useful to have someone reasonably informed around so that he could talk over the watcher, and the watcher's interest in Yamamoto.

Not least because the watcher was stalking them, at least when they were out hunting, although Yamamoto hadn't noticed yet. Hayato didn't quite understand how Yamamoto had managed it, because the watcher had a presence so dense that it damn near had its own gravity well, and seemed to like lurking in the shadows whenever Yamamoto opened up a vein and made himself a target for any vampire in the area.

But then, Hayato wouldn't put it past Yamamoto to be that oblivious.

Or maybe the watcher just wanted Hayato to know that he was there; he had a habit of interrupting Hayato whenever Yamamoto could have used a helping hand, or at least a helping flamethrower. Hayato was developing some theories about why the watcher might be doing that, but he didn't like them very much. He'd have liked to have laid them out for Shamal, to see whether Shamal agreed with them or thought that he was just being paranoid, but Shamal, frustratingly, stayed away, and the questions continued to mount up.

And the answers, when they arrived, came from a wholly-unexpected quarter.

The vampire sitting on Hayato's couch wasn't one he knew, and scared the life out of him when he came in, all preoccupied with the hours till sunset and the way Yamamoto had refused to take the night off, even with the sprained wrist. "So you would be Gokudera Hayato," the vampire said, and Hayato jumped and swore.

He had a stick of dynamite lit and in the air before the last syllable had left his mouth, but he might as well have saved the effort. The vampire moved faster than Hayato could track and snatched it out of the air. It pinched the fuse out, and then stopped moving, holding its hands out from its body in a calculatedly neutral pose. Not that it mattered, really, because Hayato had never had trouble telling when he'd been outclassed. "I'm just here to speak to you," the vampire said, after they'd stared at each other for a few tense seconds.

"About?" Hayato asked, eyeing it—him. He was young, maybe the youngest-looking vampire Hayato had ever seen. Whoever had turned him had been flirting with the general consensus that children weren't to be turned, because the vampire must have barely been thirteen, or maybe fourteen on the outside, when he'd been changed, despite the way his suit was carefully tailored to make him seem older. "And who are you, anyway?"

"You may call me Tsuna," the vampire said, with a polite smile to go with it, one of the ones that didn't show his fangs. Hayato blinked at the show of careful courtesy, which he'd rarely had aimed at him. "I'd like to speak about your friend's activities, if I may."

"He's not my friend," Hayato said, the response coming automatically and giving him time to think—this one had been turned young, but he was no youngling. Hayato could feel some of the edges of this Tsuna's strength and control, and they hinted that the whole was... significant.

Well, and no surprise. There were lots of reasons why turning young humans just wasn't done, and it wasn't all about the problems implicit in being stuck in a child's body for the many years of one's unlife.

Tsuna smiled, gently amused behind the mask of his sunscreen. "Your hunting partner, then. If you prefer."

"Guess it'll do," Hayato conceded, grudgingly. "What about him?"

"I believe I understand what motivates his hunts," Tsuna said, letting it be clear that he was choosing his words carefully. "It's an understandable feeling."

"Is it really?" Hayato inquired, unable to quite stop himself.

Tsuna's eyes sparked, just a bit. "You, of all people, should know better than to ask a question like that."

"Yeah, well. You didn't know Yamamoto and his dad." And whatever Yamamoto's dad had been involved in—Shamal had made intimations, ones that Hayato hadn't been able to bring himself to share with Yamamoto—he and his son had adored each other. It had been tooth-rotting, really.

Tsuna just smiled, still exquisitely polite, with proper old-fashioned manners that pretended that Hayato was actually his equal, and inclined his head. "I never had the pleasure," he said, and something about the way he said it and the way he looked rang a bell in the back of Hayato's head, one that he'd have to think about later. "That doesn't mean I can't respect their closeness. Or young Yamamoto's grief."

"There's a 'but' coming, isn't there?"

"There is," Tsuna said. "I respect young Yamamoto's motivations, but he's punishing the wrong people. The fledglings he's been slaughtering had no part in his father's death." Then he smiled again, sharper, with the sort of respect only accorded a worthy opponent. "Yamamoto Tsuyoshi would have been insulted by the implication that a mere fledgling could have killed him."

"You know who did kill him," Hayato said, because that was more important than asking, Who was Yamamoto Tsuyoshi, really? or What was he doing when he was killed? or even So what secrets was he keeping from his son?

Tsuna let him see the moment of his hesitation before answering. "I don't know exactly. But I have my suspicions."

"So lay 'em on me," Hayato said, even while he wondered whether Tsuna was worth trusting.

"One of Byakuran's people, I think," Tsuna told him, and if he was to be trusted, that flat tone said that he didn't much care for Byakuran. "Not Byakuran himself, though. One of his subordinates. Kikyou, perhaps, or Squalo, though I can't be sure. I was on business elsewhere that night, and I wasn't able to get to Tsuyoshi soon enough." He paused. "I do regret that."

Hayato stared. To Tsuyoshi...? "You knew his dad."

He saw that quick, sharp smile of respect again. "We had a working relationship, of sorts. He was good enough to leave my people in peace, as long as I kept them in order," Tsuna murmured. "I always knew he would leave this world too quickly, but I'd hoped it wouldn't be quite so soon as this."

Tsuna's people? That was when Hayato realized he'd heard that name before, the longer version if anyway, when Shamal had been telling him about the area's politics and talking about one of its lords, Sawada Tsunayoshi. "Right," Hayato said, as pieces of his world spun around and resettled themselves into new patterns. "So what do you care about Yamamoto?"

Tsuna was quiet. "I don't care to watch him trying to destroy himself," he said, at length. "It would be a waste. And a shame. And I respected his father, and respect his father's memory, enough to want to prevent that, if such a thing can be done. I don't imagine that it will be an easy sort of thing to do."

"You can say that again," Hayato muttered.

Tsuna smiled at that, wry, the sort of smile one accorded an equal. "The Yamamotos have always been complicated folk," he agreed. "To begin with, I'll settle for persuading him to stop slaughtering the fledglings. They may not be fully innocent, but they are innocent enough."

"Look, I'd love to," Hayato said, "but I can't even get him to take a night off when he's injured."

Tsuna frowned. "I'd noticed," he said, and then paused. When he continued, it was with a certain delicacy in his tone. "You have not told him about your, ah, ties to our kind, I think?"

Hayato forced himself to breathe carefully, not that it meant much to someone as powerful as Tsuna. "No," he said. "No, I haven't."

"I hadn't thought so," Tsuna murmured. "Then he won't believe you, if you try to tell him otherwise." He shook his head. "I suppose it will have to be Hibari, then."

"...Hibari?" Hayato echoed.

Tsuna's teeth flashed, sharp and white and full of respect. "Hibari. I suppose he hasn't bothered to introduce himself. He doesn't bother with many of the forms."

Something sank in Hayato's gut, like a pit opening up in ground that had previously been solid. "He's not...?"

"Our watcher, yes," Tsuna said, and smiled gently as Hayato swore. "I see that you've already had the pleasure of his acquaintance, then."

Yeah, if he wanted to call it that, Hayato supposed he had. "We've spoken," he managed, when he'd gotten a grip on himself again. "Not formally, of course."

"Of course." Tsuna was still smiling, faint and wry. "There is very little that he bothers to be formal about." He brought his hands together and inclined his head in a little bow. "I will speak to him, and perhaps he will be able to reason with Tsuyoshi's son. Thank you for your time, Gokudera Hayato."

"Wait, you're going—?" Hayato began, but Tsuna had a good turn of speed on him, even for the daylight hours, and had spun away before Hayato could delay him. And for all the questions he'd answered, sort of, he'd left half a dozen more.

Damn it.

Telling Yamamoto, "So hey, I was talking to this vampire, Tsuna, who knew your dad, and he says you should lay off," was right out, but Hayato thought it probably wasn't a good idea to spring something like the watcher—Hibari—on Yamamoto with due preparation. "Hey," he said, when Yamamoto came out in the fading evening light.

He wasn't sure, but Yamamoto seemed a little surprised to see him. Possibly irritated, too, though these days it was next to impossible to read most of Yamamoto's limited range of reactions. "Hey," he said, locking the door behind him.

"So I was thinking," Hayato said, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "You plan on keeping this up, right? So you should probably know a little bit more about vampires than you do."

Yamamoto walked past him, baseball bat slung over his shoulder, a little awkward; his wrist was still wrapped. "Why?" he asked, as Hayato matched his long strides.

Hayato had pretty much expected that reaction. "Because the more you know, the better you'll be at hunting them."

He'd figured that one right; something indefinable about Yamamoto's expression relaxed. "Oh, he said, and added, "Like what?"

"So you've killed, what? Ten or so vampires now?" Hayato asked. Those were amazing numbers, really, especially for an inexperienced hunter like Yamamoto. Yamamoto Tsuyoshi must have been something, himself, if his amateur of a son was this good at it naturally. Yamamoto grunted something vaguely affirmative. "Right, I figured. So the ones you've been killing are really young vampires. Fledglings. Just turned, you know? So they're pretty weak and they don't have any self control yet. That's why they come out when they smell the blood. They can't help it."

They paused at a cross walk and Hayato checked Yamamoto's face. There was no indication that Yamamoto was listening; he was staring into the distance and smiling like he was contemplating something he rather enjoyed.

Hayato hoped that it wasn't the number of younglings that he'd killed, whatever it was.

"Anyway," he said, after they'd crossed and lost the handful of other pedestrians, "fledglings, younglings, they don't always make it out of that stage. They're too stupid for blood to do it, really, unless they're just lucky. But some of them do, and that's when they start getting really dangerous. They start being able to think again, see? To strategize. You follow me?"

"Sure," Yamamoto said.

Hayato looked at him, suspicious that Yamamoto was placating him, but he seemed to mean it. "Yeah, good," he said. "So adult vampires think, and plan, and play politics with the other vampires, because they get bored easy. And the older they get, the stronger they get."

"...right," Yamamoto said, after a moment. "Gotta watch out for the wrinkles, then."

"Don't be an idiot!" Hayato smacked him, even though a part of him was pretty sure that Yamamoto had just made a joke, and was incredibly relieved by it. "Vampires don't age!" He stopped, and shook his head. "Outwardly, any way. Once they turned, they stay looking like they did when they died. If anything, it's the ones that look young that you have to watch out for. There's a lot of power in being turned when you're not an adult. And if you ever meet a vampire that looks like a baby, you might as well kill yourself and get it over fast. They're scary little fuckers."

"...vampire babies." There was a note of honest amusement in Yamamoto's voice, and if this hadn't been so important, Hayato would have laughed to hear it.

"Yeah. There're only a few of them, but they're out there. And they're not someone you can beat."

"Maybe," Yamamoto said, the arrogant jerk.

"No, I mean it, dumbass!" Hayato took a breath, and counted down from ten, and then again; now wasn't the time to get angry. "Never mind, there's no way you'll ever meet one of them. Like I said, there aren't that many of them." He raked his hair back. "And there's one other kind of vampire you really need to know about. They're called watchers."

"...let me guess. They watch things."

"Mostly, yeah," Hayato said, and then added, as casually as he could, "We've got one watching us."

The brief easing of Yamamoto's mood vanished, and he dropped into a ready crouch, eyes roving over the buildings around them. "Where?"

"Not right now," Hayato said, hastily. He hoped. "But when you hunt."

Yamamoto straightened, slowly, bat still at the ready, and gave him a flat look. "You didn't say."

"I'm saying now!" Hayato flared. "Besides, you never listen." Yamamoto was still giving him that flat, unreadable look. "Anyway, watchers are... strange. Stranger than regular vampires. They don't feed on humans or other animals." He paused, peering at Yamamoto through the gathering gloom, but Yamamoto's expression stayed blank. "They feed on other vampires."

Yamamoto finally blinked at that. "They do?"

"Yeah," Hayato said, and fell into step with him as he began moving again. "There aren't too many of them, but they're around, and we're hunting in this one's territory. I don't know what this one wants with you, though. Maybe he's pissed that you're killing off his food supply."

It probably wasn't that, but better to say that than to freak Yamamoto out by telling him about the way Hibari liked to purr when he watched Yamamoto take the younglings down.

Yamamoto absorbed that, as they turned onto the road out of town. "Too bad," he announced, as the buildings thinned out. "I'm not stopping."

"Yeah," Hayato sighed, "I figured you'd say that."

"I don't think you're going to get anything tonight," Hayato said, later, when it'd been several hours and the blood had long since clotted and dried on Yamamoto's skin, and the night had turned chilly enough to make Yamamoto shiver, just a little. "I think we can call it a night."

Yamamoto took that just about as well as Hayato had expected he would. He shook his head, no. "More blood?" he suggested, already reaching for his knife.

"If they didn't come before, they're not going to come now," Hayato said, impatient.

Yamamoto didn't look convinced. "Why not?" He was still fingering the hilt of his knife.

"How the hell should I know? Vampires do things for their own reasons," Hayato retorted, even though he was wondering why they hadn't. Yamamoto wasn't ever shy about opening up a vein and the scent of his blood generally carried a good distance. "Maybe they've got better things to do than eat idiots tonight." Or maybe Tsuna was exerting his influence to keep them from getting themselves slaughtered. He seemed like the sort that would try.

"Still." The knife slid free of its sheath with a soft sound. "Couldn't hurt."

"Keep your blood where it is."

The unfamiliar voice had Yamamoto dropping into a defensive crouch, knife at the ready, while Hayato's knees went watery as the watcher's presence came unveiled all at once. It was no wonder; Hibari wasn't even making an effort to conceal his strength, and it weighed against Hayato's senses, oppressive.

Hibari dropped out of the trees on the far side of the clearing where they'd set up for the evening, a piece of darkness that detached itself from the gloom and landed soundlessly. When he rose from his crouch, Hayato got his first good look at him, and swore softly.

Hibari couldn't have been turned much later than Tsuna had.

Hibari gave him a brief, incurious glance, eyes dark under a fringe of darker hair. Hayato could tell he'd been evaluated and found wanting just as quickly as that.

It was just as easy to see that all Hibari's attention was for Yamamoto, who was practically vibrating where he stood, even though his human's eyes surely couldn't tell more than that there was someone standing a few meters away from him.

"Yamamoto," Hayato said, wanting to warn him, but Hibari raised a hand at the same time and beckoned him with a quiet, "Come on."

Yamamoto did, rushing Hibari in near silence, except for the sound of his feet slapping against the ground and the whistle of his baseball bat rushing through the air where Hibari had been standing.

Hayato hadn't even seen Hibari move; Yamamoto couldn't have, but he dropped when Hibari reappeared behind him, eluding the hand that would have slashed against his throat. He stabbed up with his knife in the same movement, and didn't seem at all disconcerted that it only punctured the air where Hibari had been. Yamamoto rolled, evading the lash of Hibari's kick at his head, and struck again.

Both of them, Hayato saw, heart sinking, were smiling.

He could also see that Hibari wasn't fighting with his full strength, though Yamamoto was. It wasn't even enough to land so much as a hit on Hibari.

Hibari didn't tire of the game until Yamamoto was panting for breath and his shirt was dark with sweat. When he did, he twisted Yamamoto's weapons out of his hands between one blink and the next, and drove him to the ground, pinning him there with a knee in the center of his back and both of Yamamoto's wrists gathered in one hand as Yamamoto thrashed. "No wonder you're only fit for picking off the lambs," he said, conversationally. "I'd expected more from Yamamoto Tsuyoshi's son."

Yamamoto went still, and when he spoke, his voice was harsh. "Who are you? How do you know my father?"

"He's the watcher," Hayato said, and was only a little insulted that it startled both of them, like they'd both forgotten he was even there.

"Namimori's watcher," Hibari corrected him, and ground his knee against Yamamoto's back as he began to struggle again. "I liked to watch Yamamoto Tsuyoshi hunt," he said, and Yamamoto stopped moving—stopped breathing, even—at that. "He was very good at it, very nearly a proper predator." Hibari's smile gleamed, full-fanged and nostalgic for a fallen comrade. "Pity that his cub isn't, really."

The sound Yamamoto made didn't have words in it. It didn't need any; all his disbelief and rage were clear enough in his bellow. He thrashed under Hibari, and Hayato thought he was trying to get free, at first, but it wasn't even anything so logical as that—all Yamamoto seemed to want was to get at Hibari, somehow.

Hibari rode it out, looking bored as Yamamoto bucked under him, until Yamamoto had exhausted himself. When he'd stilled, and was gulping in harsh breaths of air, Hibari carried on, as if he'd never been interrupted. "Pity that his cub is too stupid to see what's in front of him. Pity that his cub is too weak to avenge his death, and has to be satisfied with killing the stupid little lambs who'd have cowered at the very name of his sire."

Yamamoto made another sound, low in his throat, very nearly a growl. Then he said, voice harsh enough to make Hayato take half a step back, "What the fuck do you mean?"

"I mean that you are wasting your time. The lambs you've been killing had nothing to do with your sire's death," Hibari said, each syllable slow and precise. "If you want revenge, you'll need to look elsewhere for it."

"Where?"

Hayato thought he might have seen Hibari smile at that, but it was too swift an expression for him to be sure. "Byakuran."

"Who?" Yamamoto asked, but Hibari seemed to be done. He moved, releasing his grip on Yamamoto and sliding away before Yamamoto could react.

"Ask the little dhampir," Hibari said, and this time he definitely was smirking. "There are plenty of things he can tell you."

And then he was gone, vanished into the darkness like he'd never been there.

Yamamoto clambered to his feet slowly, and he was frowning. "Ask the what?"

His knife and his baseball bat were several meters away from him, but Hayato wasn't entirely sure that Yamamoto couldn't find them again if he really wanted to. "Dhampir," he said, dropping a hand to his belt, finding a grenade. "Half-vampire, half-human. You get them when a vampire tries to turn a pregnant woman. It's... not a pretty process."

Yamamoto was still frowning. "But who...?"

Hayato eased the grenade out of its slot, felt it heavy and cool in his palm, and the pin round against his fingertips. He drew a breath. "He meant me."

Yamamoto stared at him, expression gone completely opaque and still. Hayato kept his fingers on the pin and his arm taut, ready to snap the grenade at Yamamoto and run for it, if he had to. "You're... one of them," Yamamoto said, when he finally spoke, and he shaped the syllables carefully, like he'd only just learned how to speak.

"Hah! Yeah, no, not really." The words still tasted bitter to say, even after all this time. "I'm not anything, really. Neither one nor the other. Real vampires won't have much to do with me, and real humans freak out when they find out what I am." Shamal was an outlier, like he was about everything, and Tsuna had exquisite manners. And Yamamoto was probably just a few seconds away from trying to bash his skull in.

Well, Hayato'd been getting sick of Japan, anyway.

Yamamoto blinked once, slow. "...right," he said. "So who's Byakuran?"

"I don't really know much—wait, what?" Hayato shook his head, replaying that exchange in his head, but no, it still didn't make any sense. "That's it? You find out I'm half-vampire and that's all you have to say about it?"

Yamamoto tipped his head to the side to think about it, in the way that Hayato had used to claim clearly meant that there was spaniel in Yamamoto's family tree, what seemed like a very long time ago now. "Yes?" he ventured, after considering it.

"I'm half-vampire, you idiot! I'm not really human! I'm stronger and faster than you, and clearly a hell of a lot smarter!" He was also shouting; well, maybe Yamamoto would actually listen. "Don't you get what any of that means?"

Yamamoto still had his head tilted. "...that it's good you're on my side?"

"Jesus Christ, you are too stupid to let live," Hayato said, helpless in the face of sheer suicidal idiocy. "I mean, seriously, you have all the self-preservation instincts of a lemming."

Yamamoto shrugged, the barest twitch of a shoulder. "Byakuran?" he said again, and oh. That was why he didn't care—his eyes were nearly glowing, now that he had a name and something to aim himself at.

"I don't know much," Hayato said, slowly. "He's a vampire lord. He's strong." And really, he wasn't sure he wanted to say much more than that out here, where anyone—anything—could be listening. "C'mon. Tell you the rest in the light."

Yamamoto frowned at that, but after a moment, he seemed to bow to that. "Okay." Then he looked around, clearly squinting through the darkness. "...my stuff?"

"Of, for pity's sake—" Hayato stomped over to retrieve the knife and the baseball bat, and shoved them at Yamamoto. "Next time, don't lose them!"

"I won't," Yamamoto said, perfectly self-assured, and made the knife disappear before settling the bat on his shoulder, just like normal.

Hayato refused to admit, even to himself, how good it felt to side the grenade back into its spot on his belt.

Yamamoto jittered with impatience that was poorly concealed, even for him, all the way back into town, and barely suffered Hayato to get them indoors and ensconced in Yamamoto's disaster of a kitchen. "Byakuran," he said, again, because apparently he only had room in his head for one thought at a time.

Hayato didn't know why that surprised him, really. It wasn't like he hadn't already seen how obsessive Yamamoto was. "Byakuran," he said, with a headache beginning to pinch at his temples. Byakuran, Tsuna, and Hibari, and now them in the middle of it all, flying blind. "I really don't know much. Vampire lords like him don't have a lot to do with the likes of me, you know? And the likes of me, well, it's healthiest if we don't have much to do with the likes of him."

Yamamoto made an impatient gesture, and Hayato couldn't help snorting at himself for expecting Yamamoto to have any attention to spare for anyone else's personal tragedy. "Anyway. He's a lord, like I said. He's powerful, and he has a lot of other vampires who are—I suppose you could say that they work for him, sort of, or are loyal to him. It's all very medieval, really. Most vampires never did get their heads out of the Middle Ages."

Yamamoto moved again, restless, fingers drumming out an arrhythmic beat against the table. "So where do I find him?"

"I don't know," Hayato told him, which was the fullest truth.

Yamamoto's mouth flattened, and his fingers stilled. "How can I find him, then?"

"Follow the bodies, I'd imagine." Hayato pinched at the bridge of his nose. "Look, Byakuran isn't just powerful, okay? He's young, for a lord, especially for a vampire turned as late as he was. And he's crazy, from what I hear. I mean, most vampires aren't exactly sane, but he's... really not playing with a full deck, if you know what I mean." That's what he'd heard in the gaps of the things Shamal had said, anyway, and Shamal was many things, including sensible about politics.

Yamamoto just looked at him like he failed to see why or how this could be a problem... probably because he was a few cards short of a suit himself. "So how do I find him?" he asked again.

Hayato sighed. "I don't know. I can... look, it's bigger than just you and Byakuran, in case you haven't noticed. There are other players getting involved. Hibari, for one—that's the watcher." Yamamoto's eyes sharpened; yeah, no surprise there. "And there's Tsuna. He's a vampire lord, too. He showed up this afternoon, to talk to me."

Yamamoto looked at him, the seconds ticking by silently until he asked, "When were you going to tell me?"

"I was working up to it," Hayato retorted. "I was waiting till I thought you probably wouldn't start foaming at the mouth when I said the word vampire." Now it was just the name Byakuran that would do that, and Hayato still wasn't entirely sure that was an improvement on matters.

"Is there anything else you've been keeping a secret?" Yamamoto inquired, and it was the mildness of his tone that made Hayato want to squirm, just a bit.

He looked away, eyes running over the stacks of old takeout containers on the counter and the pile of junk mail that was threatening to tip over under its own mass. "Not that I know of. If I start at the beginning, will you listen?"

"Sure," Yamamoto said.

And he did, with narrowed eyes and a frown of concentration, as Hayato explained how Hibari had taken to watching them, and what Shamal had suggested about Yamamoto Tsuyoshi. Bringing up Shamal required him to digress, briefly, about Shamal himself—"He's a vampire, yes, and he's an ass, but he's all about getting enthusiastic consent from the ladies. Killing him probably would be doing the world a favor, but I'd still rather you didn't try," he said, and earned a slow nod of acquiescence from Yamamoto—and then he had to explain Tsuna's visit and what he'd said, and who, precisely, Tsuna was. "He's another vampire lord," Hayato said, fidgeting with a stick of dynamite. "But I don't know how he fits into all this. He's... almost reclusive, from what I hear. Doesn't really get involved in most of the political games that the others play. No one really knows what he gets up to, but he did seem to know your dad. Seemed to have liked him, and seemed very sorry that he was killed." For whatever that was worth to Yamamoto; Hayato was pretty sure that any vampire's sympathy would go to waste with him.

Not that he could tell by the way Yamamoto looked, still and drawn in on himself, thinking. "Can he help me find Byakuran?"

"Oh, for God's sake—probably, yes," Hayato said, aggravated, "but don't you think he has better things to be doing?"

"No," Yamamoto said, simple as that.

"Why do I even try to reason with you? I swear," Hayato grumbled, rubbing his forehead.

Yamamoto didn't say anything to that, just looking at him, clearly expecting him to somehow produce Tsuna on the spot for an interrogation.

Hayato rubbed his head some more, willing his headache away. "Anyway, that's what I know." It wasn't much at all, and left more questions unanswered than not, like what Yamamoto's dad had been doing, that Byakuran had decided to have him killed.

"Mm," Yamamoto said, and then, "Can you find out more?"

Hayato looked at him, thinking about a promise to rest that had been broken as easily as it had been made. "Yeah," he said, "probably. Gonna take some time."

"Not too much time," Yamamoto said.

Hayato couldn't tell whether that was supposed to have been a request, or an order, or a threat. "It'll take as long as it takes," he said, and stood. "You should use it to get stronger," he added, and watched Yamamoto's eyes spark. "Byakuran's strong like Hibari is. So're his people. Way you are right now, they'll take you apart without even blinking."

"They can try," Yamamoto said, with a little smile that was creepy in the way it reflected the gleam in his eyes.

"Get stronger anyway," Hayato told him, and let himself out.

Shamal was sprawled on his couch, feet propped up on a stack of ordinance catalogues, and Hayato thought that it just goddamn figured. "What do you want?" he asked, stripping out of his belts and dropping into the easy chair. "And get your feet off the damn table."

"Is that any kind of a greeting?" Shamal retorted, and left his feet right where they were. Hayato thought about throwing something at him, but it was too much effort to go to when Shamal wouldn't even let it hit him. "Really, I'd swear I raised you with better manners."

"It's been a long fucking day." Hayato leaned his head back and closed his eyes. "Long night, too, okay? So I'm really not in the mood."

"I see," Shamal said, and then there was the sound of the couch's springs creaking and two feet hitting the floor. "Have you been eating? You're looking a little peaky."

"Of course I'm eating. What do I look like, incompetent? I had onigiri from the conbini before I met up with Yamamoto," Hayato said.

"No, I mean eating," Shamal said. Hayato pressed his lips together and didn't answer, and heard Shamal's sigh. "Idiot," he said, but the tone of it was gentle, for Shamal.

The next thing Hayato heard was movement in kitchen, cabinets opening and closing, the clink of class against the countertop and the sound of the microwave humming, all things that were perfectly domestic, if a person didn't know what they signaled. He did, and he kept his eyes closed, even when Shamal returned and pressed a glass into his hand. "Go on," he said, when Hayato didn't move, and stood over him until Hayato raised the glass and drained it. The blood went down as well as it ever did, not quite warm enough to be right and strange with the taste of sodium citrate. He grimaced when he was done.

"I keep telling you, pretty girls taste better," Shamal said, when Hayato opened his eyes, and he didn't look the least bit sympathetic.

"Oh, yeah, because that would go so well," Hayato said, peeling his lips back from the incisors that were only a little sharper than a human's.

Shamal ignored the rude gesture. "Where there's a will, there's a way," he said, leering cheerfully. He was disgusting, and Hayato told him so, but Shamal only laughed and followed him into the kitchen when Hayato got up to rinse the glass, and his mouth, too.

The worst part was how much better he felt, Hayato reflected, grimly, and set the glass in the dish drainer. "Where have you been, anyway?" he asked. "I could have used you a couple of days ago."

"I had things to do," Shamal said, and leaned against the doorframe. "What for?"

Hayato sighed. "Where do I even begin?"

Shamal listened—patiently, even—as Hayato sketched in the short version of things for him. As he listened, his expression turned progressively graver, and by the time Hayato got to the end, he was actually shaking his head back and forth. "That's a bad business," he said, though it wasn't clear which part he actually meant. "You'd best get clear of it while you still can."

He was right. Hayato knew he was right. But he was still shaking his head back at Shamal, no. "Do you know anything about what's going on?" he asked, instead of agreeing with Shamal like a sensible person.

"No," Shamal said, so flat that he must have known something. "And I don't want to know anything. I'll live longer that way, and so will you, if you know what's good for you."

Hayato was pretty sure he'd lost track of that a while ago, actually. "Fine," he said, and it was the surge of frustration that told him just how much he'd been counting on Shamal making this at least marginally easier on him. "You know where I can get a clearer picture on my own?"

Shamal gave him a long look. "Didn't you hear me? You don't want to get any more mixed up in Byakuran's games than you already are. Hell, you're already further in than you should be."

"Yeah," Hayato said, "you know, I'd actually managed to figure that part out on my own, thanks. Look, just tell me where I can start looking, that's all I'm asking. You don't have to do anything more than that, I promise."

"Even that's too much," Shamal said, voice heavy with his disapproval. "If you're that eager to get yourself killed, you can do it yourself."

"Shamal—" Hayato started, but he'd gone, and that was such a fitting cap to the day that all Hayato could do was laugh at himself, mocking and helpless.

Yamamoto was visibly disappointed that Hayato hadn't been able to produce results overnight, and the confidence in his abilities that this displayed just annoyed Hayato. "Don't be such an idiot," he snapped in Yamamoto's stupid hopeful face. "I told you this would take time, and I meant it. Go away and do something productive with your time."

It would have to be Tsuna, he thought, when Yamamoto had decided that he'd been serious about that, and had slunk away to his desk, where he'd probably spend the entire day making lists of all the ways there were to kill Byakuran. Tsuna surely had his own interests in this thing, whatever it was, but that didn't mean Hayato couldn't try to weasel more information out of him. About Byakuran, about Tsuna's goals, hell, even some more information about Yamamoto Tsuyoshi's secret life as a vampire hunter would be good to have.

Especially that last. Hayato watched Yamamoto prop his chin on his hand and stare out the window. If Yamamoto Tsuyoshi had been such a good hunter, how could he have left his son so ignorant—so defenseless—as he had? Surely he had known that the day would come when his luck, his skills, his strength, and all the other things a hunter had to have in abundance would fail him.

Maybe he'd just been counting on them to see him through a little longer. Maybe he'd been one of the ones who just couldn't believe in their own mortality. Hayato permitted himself a grim smile at the thought, because surely he believed in that now, wherever he was.

Tsuna, though. He'd see about finding Tsuna, and after that, well. He'd decide then.

Deciding to turn Tsuna into his own personal reference desk was easy. Actually making it happen was another matter altogether, no least because Hayato had no idea where to find him. And Shamal, damn his useless eyes, was Hayato's usual liaison with the local vampire community, and had disappeared altogether.

Not that he needed Shamal. It was just that Shamal's presence would have made things simpler. Easier.

Less aggravating.

Hayato held onto his temper with both hands and his teeth, and smiled carefully—ingratiating, teeth tucked away and harmless. The vampire who was working the door as a bouncer wasn't impressed, regardless. "Go away," he said, bored, showing just enough fang to say that his boredom could be a very temporary, fleeting mood. "We don't let trash into this club. It's an exclusive place."

Hayato willed himself not to flush in anger, and failed. "I'm looking for someone," he gritted out. "Please—"

"Look somewhere else." The vampire turned away from him, dismissing him with one last contemptuous look, and made a point of gesturing the two giggling blondes who'd been standing in line behind Hayato into the club with a gracious nod.

Hayato hoped, very sincerely, that the sleaziest vampire in the place drained them both to husks, and stuffed his hands in his pockets as he stalked away. He did his best to pretend that he still had some dignity left as he did, and that the laughter that rose up behind him wasn't aimed at him.

Fuck. So much for that. Maybe it'd been too much to hope that he'd be able to get into the underground clubs on his own. He was too vampire to be snackfood, and too human to rub elbows with the real bloodsuckers. And now he was at a dead end.

"Well, well. Look what we have here."

Hayato lifted his head as someone's foot scuffed against a bottle and sent it rolling, and saw that his attempt to get into the club hadn't gone unnoticed. Two vampires blocked his way forward. The one who'd spoken was male, sleepy-eyed and tousle-haired, and was wearing the ugliest damn shirt Hayato had ever had the misfortune of seeing. The other was female, with her hair done up, in an elegant red silk dress.

Shit.

"I'm sorry," Hayato said, "do I know you?"

"No," the male said, "but we know you. You're the little halfblood who's been helping the hunter's whelp."

Hayato dropped a hand on a flash grenade. "So what if I am?"

"So this is a strange place for you to be," the female said, with the faintest trace of an accent—Chinese, Hayato thought, which made sense of the dress. "Hunters and their friends aren't welcome in this part of town."

"Who're you calling my friend?" Hayato planted his feet, wide and solid against the pavement. "I think I can go where I want."

"You think wrong," the male said. "What's your business here?"

"Private," Hayato snapped, letting his teeth show.

It only made them laugh—no real surprise there, since his fangs were barely worth the name. "I think you're wrong," the male told him. They moved in unison, the female going left and the male going right, and Hayato reacted half a beat too slowly. They seized his wrists and his arms, grips relentlessly tight. "When it comes to people like you, there's no such thing as privacy."

"Let me go," Hayato growled at them.

"No," the female said, and together they lifted him, one smooth motion that had his feet dangling off the ground, kicking helplessly. "Not until we find out what you're doing."

The male showed his teeth as Hayato struggled against their grip. "It's the least that the boss would want."

And then they were airborne, ground falling away so fast that Hayato's head swam with the vertigo. Fucking vampires, he hated flying. "Who's your boss?" he asked, to take his mind off the churning of his stomach.

"That's really none of your concern," the male said, as they stopped rising and hovered in mid-air, where the temperature was cold and the air was thin. Not that it bothered either of the vampires.

Hayato shivered, and kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, resolutely not looking down. "And my business isn't any of yours."

"You keep saying that," the female noted, and together, the two of them loosed their grips. Hayato yelped as he dropped into freefall for a handful of terrifying seconds, until they caught him again. "I think you're wrong," she added, matter-of-fact.

Hayato just swore, breathlessly, as his heart thudded in his chest.

"Don't you enjoy this?" the male asked him. "I find flying so refreshing." They rolled into a stomach-wrenching loop, fast and wild, both of the vampires laughing like children. "Oh, I forgot, you're only a halfblood, you aren't used to this, are you?"

"I'm gonna hunt you down myself and spit on the stump of your neck," Hayato told him, raggedly, and threw up as they went into another wild corkscrew.

They didn't even have the decency to let themselves be vomited on, the bastards.

"Are you quite sure you don't feel like telling us what you were doing in our part of town?" the female asked, an eternity later, when Hayato's stomach had wrung itself out so violently that his entire abdomen ached, and Hayato was shuddering with the horror of their aerobatics.

What the hell? At this point, death at the hands of Byakuran's goons was beginning to sound attractive. "I was looking for Tsuna," he said, hoarse with the bile and the way he'd been yelling. He only barely registered the look that they gave each other.

"Why?" the male asked, sharp.

"Because I had some things I wanted to ask him," Hayato said, tiredly.

"Like?" the female asked, giving him a brisk shake.

"Things!" Hayato yelped, as his stomach lurched again. "About the politics! Because he didn't tell me enough the other day!"

"You've spoken to the boss?" the male asked, sounding startled.

Oh, for God's sake. "He's your boss," Hayato said, completely disgusted with himself, and them, and everything. "Oh, for fuck's sake. Of course he is." If it weren't for crap luck, he'd have no luck at all.

The female vampire hissed at the male, something chiding, and he hung his head, looking sheepish. Then she spoke to Hayato. "You've had business with him before, then."

"Yeah," Hayato said, because that was one word for it. "Business."

"Our apologies," she said, and they began to descend, so rapidly that Hayato couldn't stop himself from groaning. They were on pavement again—a good way from the downtown district, he noted—faster than his stomach could quite handle, and they released him as he dry-heaved. "We will speak to our boss," she said, politely. "And we will bring you word when we may."

"Great," Hayato said, bent over and wheezing. "Wonderful."

They bowed, swiftly, and vanished into the sky again. When Hayato thought it was safe to do so, he sank to the ground and put his head between his knees, just breathing as his stomach settled.

Fucking vampires.

Hayato tried to focus on the physics textbook he had open on his desk, but Yamamoto was making that next to impossible. "Will you stop that!" Hayato snapped, when it was too obnoxious to ignore any more, and shot a glare up at Yamamoto, who was unfairly good at looming over people.

Yamamoto just continued to stare down at him, expectantly.

"Holy fuck, what do you think I am, a magician?" Hayato demanded of him, exasperated.

"It's been a week," Yamamoto told him, like that was any kind of reasonable timeframe.

"Look, that's hardly any time at all," Hayato said. "It's not like I have a hotline to Vampire Central Headquarters on speed dial, Jesus. These things take time!" And if he were stupider, he'd hope that the time would dull the edge of Yamamoto's hunger for Byakuran's blood, but Hayato liked to think of himself as a realist, and that clearly wasn't going to happen any time soon.

"There's a—"

"No!" Hayato kneaded his forehead, aggravation giving him a headache. "There's not! God, it's amazing that any one human being can be as stupid as you are. It's like you're some kind of vampire-hunting idiot savant, I swear."

Yamamoto just ignored the abuse, which was something so close to normal but not that the disparity caught Hayato under the ribs like a knife. "How long?"

"I spoke to Tsuna's people the other night, I told you," Hayato said. "Now we have to wait on him, and well, he's, you know. They have their own views on timely response." Time was a relative concept when a person could count the measure of his lifespan in centuries, after all. Things just weren't urgent. Hell, most things were to be savored.

Yamamoto's forehead wrinkled. "Too long," he said.

"It's going to take as long as it takes," Hayato told him, like he'd been telling him all week. "Seriously, just... train. Condition yourself. Get better at what you do, because there's no such thing as being too strong."

Yamamoto just frowned at him some more before he turned away. Hayato watched him go, wondering how long that would be able to hold him.

It was several more days of waiting before Hayato heard anything from Tsuna. And it just figured, he thought, that it really did come from the same two vampires as before. They showed up at his front door shortly after dusk, one evening, unannounced and uninvited. The female was still in her red silk dress, but the male had exchanged one eye-assaulting shirt for another.

"Oh God," Hayato said, upon opening his door and seeing them. "You again."

"The boss will see you now," the female said, more politely than Hayato's greeting strictly warranted.

"Oh, that's just—hey!" Hayato protested as they reached out and seized him again, without permission or warning. They ignored him, and his efforts to escape, and abducted him as simply as that. They took to the sky and zoomed onto a heading that Hayato thought was easterly, though he couldn't be sure. He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon as they flew, willing his stomach to stay calm, and cursed them steadily for the entire time they were in the air.

At least this time they flew in a straight line, and didn't try any of the maneuvers that would have caused him to puke again.

"I hate you both so much," Hayato told them, when they had alighted on the veranda of a large house that was tucked away in the mountains, and had been the only light in the area for kilometers, even from the air. "I swear to God, I am going to set both of you on fire and then piss on the ashes, I promise."

"I would prefer that you didn't," someone said from the shadows. Tsuna stepped out into the moonlight. "I'm rather fond of Lambo and I-Pin, you see."

The two vampires—Lambo and I-Pin, Hayato presumed, but which was which?—immediately bowed. "Boss," the male said, and the female echoed him. "We brought him as quickly as we could."

"Indeed. Thank you; you may go. I'll call for you when we're done," Tsuna told them.

They bowed again, and took to the sky. As they did, Tsuna turned his attention to Hayato. "Welcome," he murmured.

"Yeah, thanks," Hayato said. "You couldn't have just sent a car to pick me up?"

Tsuna smiled. "This house can't be reached by automobile," he said, and inclined his head. "Will you come in and refresh yourself?"

Courtly manners from a vampire lord, for him, Hayato thought, and suspected that not all of his dizziness stemmed from the flight. "Sure," he said. "Yeah, okay."

Tsuna's smile was politely welcoming, and he gestured Hayato inside to a room that was warm against the evening's coolness. It was gently-lit, and furnished with a curious blend of Japanese art and architecture and Western furniture. "I apologize for the flight," Tsuna told him, and indicated that Hayato should take one of the massive leather armchairs. He sat in its twin; it dwarfed his slender frame, but he looked entirely at home in it. "I understand that flying doesn't agree with you, but as this house is not easily reached otherwise, it was a necessary evil."

Hayato took his own seat, wanting to perch in it carefully, but the deeply-cushioned seat nearly dragged him into its embrace. After a struggle with it, and his dignity, he gave up and settled back. "I survived."

"Indeed." Tsuna's smile was gently wry.

The door on the far wall opened, and a man came in. He bore a tray with two crystal glasses, and he offered it to Hayato first. "Please," Tsuna murmured, "refresh yourself." When Hayato hesitated, he added, gently, "It is freely given, I promise you."

Hayato selected one of the glasses. "Thank you," he said, as Tsuna took his own glass and the man withdrew again. He waited until Tsuna raised his glass in a silent toast, and then drank. The blood was still body-warm and untainted by any chemical aftertaste. Whoever had given it so freely had only just done it.

Tsuna was observing all the forms for him, and had even found a way around Hayato's shortcomings—glasses for the blood, instead of embarrassing him by forcing him to reveal the disparity in their respective conditions. The room was warm, but that didn't keep Hayato from shivering a little.

The forms said that business shouldn't be conducted over the meal, so they drank silently. The man came in again, silently, when they had finished and without any signal on Tsuna's part that Hayato had seen. He took the glasses away, and when the door had slid closed behind him, Tsuna set his fingertips together under his chin. "So," he said, looking at Hayato, "what is it that you wish to say to me, Gokudera Hayato?"

"I—" For a long, terrible moment, Hayato's mind went blank. Tsuna simply waited for him, patient and attentive. "Hibari stopped Yamamoto," he said, finally.

Tsuna inclined his head. "Yes, I know. I wonder, now, whether I made a miscalculation in asking him to be the one to do so. His approach is often rather... blunt."

"Blunt like a chainsaw," Hayato said, and it came out angrier than he'd meant for it to.

Tsuna laughed. "Ah, yes. That's Hibari." Then he sobered. "Am I correct in thinking that a scalpel would have been more appropriate?"

"Maybe. I don't know." It had worked, was the thing, and it wasn't like it was all that easy to get Yamamoto's attention these days.

"I see." Tsuna sighed. "I did wonder whether I should do it myself, but at the time I thought that he might be more receptive to one like Hibari than one like me. And it also seemed prudent not to connect Tsuyoshi's son's name to mine too explicitly."

Now that sounded promising. "Why not?"

Tsuna frowned. "Many reasons, most of them complex."

"I'm smart," Hayato said, settling more firmly into the deep cushions of his chair. "Break it down for me."

Tsuna smiled, something that might have been a gleam of genuine good humor flashing through his eyes. "Let us see what I may do, then. What do you know of Byakuran?"

"That he's strong," Hayato said, with a shrug. "That he's not stable. That he's not a man to cross. That he pretty much owns this chunk of the world."

"Then you already know most of what there is to know about Byakuran," Tsuna said. "The important things, that is. The rest is... less relevant, mostly."

"Mostly," Hayato repeated, carefully. That didn't sound good. Words like that could hide a whole host of things.

"Mostly," Tsuna said again, and sighed. "The rest is—what does it matter, that he's a charming man? Or that he has a passion for the language of flowers?" He lifted a hand and closed it into a fist, and then opened it, as though he were casting something away. "Those are all a part of who he is, but set against his madness, they become secondary." He sighed again. "And he is mad. Irretrievably so, I fear."

"With all due respect, I don't know that many sane vampires," Hayato said.

Tsuna's smile was wry, one that was delivered to an equal. "Oh, yes, it's our great failing." Then the smile faded. "But there are our little eccentricities, and there is Byakuran."

"What makes him so bad?" Hayato asked, when Tsuna fell silent again.

"It would depend on whom you asked," Tsuna said, slowly. "Many would say that there isn't anything out of the ordinary about him. I am not one of them, of course."

He lapsed into silence again, gaze turned inward. Hayato cleared his throat and prompted him again, when the silence had stretched out too long. "Why not?"

"You could call it a matter of philosophy, I suppose," Tsuna said. "He and I feel very differently about certain matters. Significant matters. He would not have cared about whether the blood we shared earlier had been given freely, for example."

"Most don't," Hayato noted, out of a sense of obligation to fairness.

"No," Tsuna said, "but they should. And that is where Byakuran and I differ most strongly."

It was an odd thing to hear a vampire lord say, so odd that Hayato had to stare, surprised and a little wondering to hear such a thing.

"In any case, we have our differences," Tsuna said, after a moment. "It was nothing we couldn't negotiate around, or it used to be. We managed to for, oh, a least several decades, or maybe more. I thought we would go on, but he... changed. Became discontent with our ideological truce. He decided he couldn't stand any difference of opinion, and I... declined to be persuaded to his way of thinking."

Hayato mulled that over, carefully. "Yeah, okay, so what does that have to do with Yamamoto?"

"Nothing, and everything." Tsuna stared at something only he could see. "Byakuran wants something that is not mine to give, and I will not give it to him. He has retaliated by declaring war on me and my people. Tsuyoshi was not one of my people, of course, but he and I were... cordial... to each other, and that is why Byakuran had him killed. Not because Tsuyoshi mattered to him, but because he mattered to me."

Well, that sucked. "Great," Hayato said, already able to imagine the way that would set Yamamoto off. But he'd worry about that later. "What kind of something? And why can't you give it to him?" Not that Tsuna would tell him what he was leaving out, probably.

Tsuna's teeth glinted, approving. "You are a quick one."

"Yeah, all my teachers love to hate me. And that wasn't an answer."

"No, I suppose it wasn't." Tsuna went quiet again. "Byakuran is young, is he not?"

"For a lord, yeah," Hayato said, after a moment to consider the question and wonder what Tsuna meant by it. "He's, what, a couple of centuries?"

"More or less. Doesn't that seem odd to you?" Tsuna inquired, and waited while Hayato pondered it, watching him with eyes that were narrow.

"Ye-es," Hayato said, slowly. "If I think about it, it is."

"Have you ever thought about where that strength of his comes from?"

He was intent, leaning forward a bit, waiting for Hayato's response. "No," Hayato admitted, reluctant to disappoint that expectant expression. "But mostly I don't wonder about the real vampires at all."

"Perhaps that's wise of you," Tsuna said, and drew a breath. "Have you ever heard the legends the humans have? The ones that talk about taking in the strength of one's enemy?" When Hayato nodded, Tsuna went on. "So has Byakuran. And he seems to have found a way of doing it, only it seems to have driven him to madness as well."

"Really, Tsuna, do you have to be so melodramatic about it?" The voice was shrill and impatient, and snatched Hayato's attention away from Tsuna through sheer incongruity.

A tiny person, wearing a suit that screamed of tailored good taste, had slipped into the room without his noticing. Hayato's breath caught in his throat at the sight of the adult expression cast in an infant's rounded features, a patent impossibility. "Arcobaleno," he breathed, stunned.

The infant-sized vampire tipped its hat. "Just so," it—he? Hayato thought; it was impossible to guess at its gender based on the piping tones of its voice, but the tiny suit suggested masculinity—said, and was suddenly sitting on the winged back of Tsuna's chair, the movement so fast as to seem instantaneous. "One of the last," he added. "You may call me Reborn... if you ever stop gaping at me, that is."

Hayato snapped his mouth shut, embarrassed, and Tsuna cleared his throat. "You'll have to forgive Reborn," he murmured. "He's gone cranky in his dotage."

Reborn aimed a kick at him that Tsuna ducked away from. "You have better manners than that," he said, testy. "I know, because I beat them into you myself."

"I hadn't forgotten." Tsuna smiled up at him, fondly—student to mentor, son to father, fledgling to sire.

"I wonder." Reborn resettled himself, setting one tiny foot on his knee. "Get on with it."

"Of course." Tsuna looked back to Hayato, who was afraid that he was staring again. "What Byakuran wants is Reborn, you see," he explained. "I'm not prepared to let that happen."

"But... why?" Hayato managed, after the struggle to put away his astonishment—Tsuna's mentor was an Arcobaleno. No wonder he had such refined manners.

"He wants my heart," Reborn said, serenely. "So he can add its strength to his own."

"He's already taken the hearts of at least two of the other Arcobaleno," Tsuna added, though he seemed to be struggling to achieve the same level of calm as Reborn had. "That we know of."

"And no one knows what's become of Fon or Colonnello," Reborn said. "It's possible that they've gone the same way Mammon and Skull have. Byakuran is strong enough now for that to be plausible."

"Mad enough, too," Tsuna agreed.

Hayato blinked. "You can do that?" he asked. "Take on someone else's strength?" Through taking their heart, and he really hoped that part was purely metaphorical.

"You can," Reborn said, his tiny face unreadable. "It's not recommended."

"We're nearly certain that Byakuran's madness stems from the moment he consumed Skull's heart," Tsuna said. That didn't sound very metaphorical at all. "Though he must have been a little mad to have conceived of the idea in the first place." He gestured, fingers describing an uncertain equivalence. "It's beyond mattering now, of course. He's done it, and now he wants more power. And we cannot—I cannot—let him have it."

"Yeah, I guess I can see that," Hayato said, brain spinning. "Especially if he's as crazy as you say."

"Probably crazier," Reborn said, off-handedly. "Tsuna's too kind by half."

"I try not to be hasty. Or ungenerous," Tsuna murmured. Reborn just snorted at him. "In any case, does that answer your questions?"

"Some of them," Hayato allowed, and recalled himself to his actual purpose in coming here. "Oh, God. Yamamoto's going to get himself killed."

Tsuna's eyes sharpened. "How so?"

Hayato shook his head. "He's crazy, too," he said, because there wasn't any point in trying to deny the obvious. "Maybe not like Byakuran is crazy, but he hasn't been normal—sane—okay, balanced—since his dad was killed. Now that he knows who it was that killed his dad, or ordered it, he's determined to kill them."

"That's impossible," Tsuna said, quietly. "A mere human, no matter what his strength, is not capable of touching Byakuran, let alone giving him the true death." The ghost of a smile touched his lips. "I am not able to give him the true death, and I am not the least of our kind."

That, Hayato thought, had probably been the understatement of the century. "Yeah," he said, "I'm not actually sure that really matters to Yamamoto." He looked down, studying his hands. "I think he'd be just as happy getting himself killed trying to do it."

Tsuna made a sound, quiet and full of understanding. Reborn just rolled his eyes. "What, again? The boy's family must be rolling in their graves."

Something sparked in Hayato's brain, the thing that had been bothering him since the first time he'd spoken to Tsuna. "It was you," he said, slowly. "That story, from junior high. He really did try to kill himself back then. And you... you were the one who saved him."

Tsuna shrugged, modest. "It seemed like a waste," he said. "And I've always had a great deal of regard for his family."

"Doesn't hurt to have a hunter who owes you a favor, either," Reborn said.

"Does he know—no, what am I saying, it's Yamamoto, of course he doesn't know, because if he knew it would show."

"Mm," Tsuna said, "I wonder." He smiled, teeth showing in respect to an honored foe. "His family has a delightfully frustrating way of seeming to be perfectly transparent when they're actually cheerfully opaque. His—oh, it must have been his great-grandfather—used to send me into absolute fits."

"I know exactly what you mean," Hayato said, from the very depths of his heart.

"I'm sure you do." Tsuna settled back in his seat and drew up a knee, lacing his fingers around it. "Now. What will you do?"

"Do?" Hayato wasn't entirely sure. Do about what? "What do you mean?"

Tsuna smiled at him, patiently. "You've been seen in the company of my people, not to mention in the company of the last of the Yamamoto line. I believe your mentor—Shamal, isn't it?—prefers to operate independently of the clan alliances, but your actions have foreclosed that possibility for you. You do realize that, don't you?"

If he hadn't before, he did now. Or at least recognized what he'd been ignoring assiduously. "Yeah, I get that. Not neutral any more."

"No." Tsuna's smile was still gentle, even sympathetic. "But you haven't declared any open loyalties, either, save perhaps the one you own your hunting companion. That places you in a rather vulnerable position."

"Yeah, so what else is new?" Hayato smiled back, though he knew the expression wasn't nearly as friendly, or polite, as Tsuna's. "Of course I haven't declared any loyalties. Who wants a mongrel? I mean, really."

"I would," Tsuna said, simple, with a frank, friendly smile to go with it, fangs showing just enough to make it clear that he wasn't hiding anything at all.

Hayato stared, because that was all he could do. "I. What."

Reborn stirred, restlessly. "Are you sure about this?" he asked. "The boy doesn't seem to be the freshest blood in the cooler."

"I'm quite sure of what I want," Tsuna replied, eyes never leaving Hayato's.

"...me?" Hayato said, mind full of static and astonishment. "You... me?"

"Yes," Tsuna said, smiling gently. "Why shouldn't I? Yours is a very agile mind, and you're clearly both determined and resourceful. You have demonstrated a capacity for deep loyalty to those to whom you have attached yourself. You would do great credit to me, were you one of my people."

"But I'm a dhampir," Hayato said, at a loss for any better response to such high praise. "I'm not even a good one—I mean, I'm more human than not."

"So?" Tsuna asked, relentlessly gentle.

"So that matters!" Hayato said.

"No," Tsuna said, with a strange little smile, one that Hayato couldn't classify at all. "It doesn't, really."

"Then you're the only one who thinks that way," Hayato said, hearing the harshness and bitterness in his own voice.

"Yes, well. Tsuna's capacity for innovation is part of the reason I turned him in the first place." Reborn hopped down from his perch. "It does us all good to have our assumptions given a good shaking out, from time to time." With that, he saw himself out.

Even that wasn't quite enough to shake Hayato out of his shock, though it helped. "But I..."

"You will need time to think, perhaps," Tsuna said, before he could marshal another objection. "And to weigh this against your other loyalties."

Something about the set of his expression suggested the implacability of a mountain, so Hayato bowed to that. "Yes," he said, still reeling. "Yes, please."

"Take what time you need," Tsuna told him. "And take it without fear. I will do what I may to protect you in the interim, and after, regardless of your ultimate decision." He held up a hand when Hayato began to protest. "No, I insist. It is only the least that I can do."

"I... thank you," Hayato said, finally.

Tsuna inclined his head. "You are most welcome." His meaning resonated through all the levels of that simple statement. Then he looked up. "Ah, Lambo. I-Pin. Your timing is perfect. Please see our guest home. Gently, if possible."

The two vampires murmured their assent, and Hayato suffered himself to be guided from his seat to the veranda, only half paying attention to the two of them. Even the leap into the sky couldn't wholly distract him from his thoughts, and he passed the short, silent flight chewing over that astonishing offer.

It wasn't until I-Pin and Lambo had left him at his front door that he stopped and considered Yamamoto.

Good God, what was he going to say to Yamamoto?

It would, Hayato suspected, be entirely too much to hope for that Yamamoto would grant him a few days' reprieve before asking him for more information on Byakuran. He was right: he had barely settled at his desk the next morning when Yamamoto came over to loom at him, silent and waiting.

Hayato looked up at Yamamoto's face, and recalled the things he and Tsuna had talked about, and made a rapid decision. "What the hell is wrong with you? For fuck's sake, when I have news for you, I'll tell you!"

Yamamoto's frown etched itself just a bit deeper. "Still?"

"I told you, it takes time!" Hayato blustered, conscious of the half-truths he was telling. Well, he couldn't turn into a bat, but this worked, too. He hoped. "Go away, Jesus, you're in my light."

Yamamoto stared down at him, silently, for so long that Hayato nearly convinced himself that Yamamoto had guessed the full truth after all. Then Yamamoto sighed. "Tired of waiting."

"Yeah, well, I'm tired of your face," Hayato snapped, relieved. "Go away now. Some of us have work to do."

Yamamoto frowned at him one last time, and then shuffled away. Hayato exhaled.

That was one more day's grace, at least.

The sleepy-eyed male vampire with the appalling fashion sense turned out to be Lambo, and he was, as Hayato discovered, regrettably bad at lurking.

What was worse was that he'd taken to doing it whenever Hayato went out after dark.

"What the hell?" Hayato demanded, when he caught him at it the first time, skulking along through the shadows after Hayato as Hayato walked home from the conbini with a sack of cup ramen. "Are you stalking me?"

Lambo stopped trying to fade into the shadow of an overhanging eave. "Just pretend I'm not here," he said, waving a hand cheerily, like that would work to banish Hayato's irritation.

"Like fuck I will! Go the fuck away!"

"Can't," Lambo said, still perfectly cheery. He smiled, amiably. "Don't worry, most of the time you won't even notice me. I won't always be careless."

There were so many things wrong with that statement that Hayato's vision actually greyed out with his rage. "I—you—I—argh!" he sputtered, plastic bag and cup ramen rattling wildly as he gesticulated, hoping that the thrashing of his arms would convey the depths of his displeasure more clearly.

"Besides," Lambo added, "the boss told me to keep an eye on you."

That stopped Hayato cold. "He... what?"

"Asked me to keep an eye on you." Lambo shrugged, as if this should be self-evident. "He's taken a shine to you, I guess." He peered at Hayato, doubt writ clear on his face, and then shrugged again. "So what can you do?"

"You've got better things to do than babysit a halfblood, surely," Hayato said, because that counteracted his first reaction to that news nicely.

Lambo's sleepy eyes widened at that, briefly. "No," he said. "Not if the boss said so."

And there wasn't anything Hayato could say to that, really, though he tried, mostly out of principle. Lambo refused to be put off, which was deeply annoying. He also either wasn't as good at being inconspicuous as he thought he was, or he liked to irritate Hayato, because he was forever poking his nose into Hayato's affairs, whether Hayato had invited him to or not. He even invited himself indoors when he felt like it, and lurked around as Hayato tried to work on his explosives or his homework.

"Ew," he said, one evening, as Hayato slurped down his ramen and tried to focus on his homework—it was only because he was smart that he was managing to keep his grades afloat at all, and Lambo's persistent interruptions weren't helping with that. "How can you eat that?"

Hayato pointedly dug his chopsticks into the cup and scooped up a chunk of noodles. "Like this." He slurped them up.

Lambo wrinkled his nose. "No, I mean—ew. How can those possibly taste good?"

"Hey, I know it's only cup ramen, but it's not that bad." Hayato looked at the container. "Little salty, maybe, I guess, but it means I don't have to cook." Yamamoto had used to be horrified by that, being the son of a chef and all, but that had fallen away like everything else.

"No, I mean... wouldn't blood taste better?" Lambo wheedled.

"Not really. Cup ramen is better than the frozen stuff."

"Frozen blood? Seriously, ew." A person would have thought that Hayato had said he preferred rat's blood, or something. "That doesn't even count as food. That's just desperate measures."

"Maybe for you," Hayato told him. "Not for me."

"You mean you like it?" Now Lambo both looked, and sounded, horrified.

"No, I mean that it's what I can get," Hayato sighed, with all the patience he could muster, because clearly Lambo had never encountered the real world before. "I'm a dhampir, remember? See these teeth? Means I have to get my blood the hard way." No human was going to volunteer to be savaged, after all. "So I know a guy who knows a guy, and I choke it down whenever I have to, and eat cup ramen the rest of the time."

"Well, that's just stupid," Lambo said.

"What the fuck, did I ask you to tell me what you thought about my life?" Hayato demanded, anger flushing all the way through him at Lambo's stupid vampiric arrogance and at his own sense of shame—it wasn't like he'd asked to be a dhampir, and he was just trying to survive the best he could—

"No, I meant about the blood," Lambo said, oblivious to Hayato's rage, or doing a damn good job of faking it. "If you need blood, we can manage that for you." He eyed Hayato, thoughtful, and then nodded. "A knife would take care of the logistics," he continued. "Something small and sharp, I think. What are you looking at me like that for?"

Hayato realized that he was staring. "What are you going on about?"

"Blood," Lambo said, and it was his turn to be patient. "You're under our protection, and the boss said we should take care of you as one of our own. If you need blood, we'll help you get it." Then he smiled, bright. "I'll come for you tomorrow night, and we'll go hunting together. It'll be fun."

"I would rather hold a dead rat in my teeth," Hayato told him, with every ounce of sincerity he could muster. Lambo only laughed, and clearly didn't believe a word of it.

Problem was, neither did Hayato, really.

Lambo would not be put off, so that was how Hayato found himself downtown again, passing into a different club under the bland aspect of the vampire at the door with no trouble at all. "This is our territory," Lambo told him, as they descended a little flight of stairs, approaching the source of a bass beat that seemed to throb in the very walls and floor, steady as a blood rhythm. "People obey the boss's will, here."

That both was and wasn't an explanation, though Hayato wasn't sure that he wanted to pursue it, or what his place in Tsuna's will happened to be. "Yeah?" he asked, just before they passed through a set of double doors into a room that was dark and low-ceiling, where people—vampire and human—moved against each other on the dance floor, or against each other in the dim alcoves that lined the room.

Lambo's teeth flashed at him, laughing. "Yeah," he said, and dragged Hayato into the mix of bodies.

Hayato wasn't a dancer, and hadn't ever cared to learn or go to the clubs that he'd heard his classmates talk about, but that didn't seem to deter Lambo one bit. He dove into the shifting crowd on the dance floor, and Hayato had to follow after him, bobbing to the insistent beat half-heartedly. He could feel eyes on him, and caught more than one vampire eyeing him. The looks on their faces ranged from naked curiosity to open amusement and outright boredom, but not a one of them looked openly hostile, which was more than Hayato would have expected.

Lambo didn't seem to mind that Hayato wasn't actually dancing. He threw himself into it, hips and body twisting fluidly, unselfconscious in a way that Hayato refused to admit that he was jealous of. He worked his way through the dance floor, brushing up against other vampires and the pretty young humans who danced with them. Hayato watched him circle around the pretty boys who weren't wearing much and the prettier girls who were wearing even less. Sometimes Lambo would fit himself against someone, moving with them for a few minutes, though never longer than the span of a song, before drifting on. Hayato shadowed him, uncertainly, wondering what exactly he was supposed to be doing, until Lambo kept himself twined around a pretty young thing even after the song changed. He leaned close to her ear, lips moving.

Whatever he was saying made her smile, and then nod, and then she turned, heading off the dance floor, Lambo's hand in hers. Lambo looked back at Hayato, gesturing with the toss of a head for Hayato to follow them.

The girl led them to one of the little nooks in the corner of the room, where the shadows were thick over a padded bench. She settled on the bench and drew Lambo down after her, and smiled up at Hayato. Her eyes were lined with kohl, and she patted the seat next to her, invitingly.

"This is Yuuko," Lambo said, as Hayato sat, hesitant. "She is willing to let us share some of her blood." The words had an oddly formal cadence to them, unusual coming from Lambo.

"Mm, yes," the girl said, and smiled at Hayato, slow and expectant.

He glanced at Lambo, unsure of what he was supposed to be doing. Lambo's mouth quirked, but he took the lead, leaning over the girl and kissing her. She made a sound, arching into Lambo's body, and slipped an arm around his shoulders. Hayato squirmed, just a bit uncomfortable with watching them, and then realized that Lambo was holding out a hand to him, beckoning him closer.

Hayato edged closer, until he could feel the softness of the girl's body against his side. She slipped an arm around his waist, drawing him to her. This close, he could smell the sweetness of her perfume and the warm skin and sweat beneath it, and hear the soft sigh of her breath as Lambo's mouth moved along her jaw. Hayato swallowed, and bent his head to set his mouth against the bare skin of her shoulder. She hummed something, wordless and pleased.

Her skin tasted of salt and the traces of soap and perfume, and was warm beneath Hayato's lips with the movement of her blood. He shivered as something sliced through him, sharp and hot—the edge of a desire he normally refused to let himself feel.

Lambo reached across the girl's body and pressed something into Hayato's hand. It was slender and cool and heavy in Hayato's fingers. When Hayato looked down to see what it was, it was what he had suspected—a knife, with a short blade that slid out of its sheath easily, and glittered even in the dim light.

The girl moaned, sudden and open. When Hayato looked up, her head was thrown back, and Lambo's mouth was on her throat. He was drinking, eyes half-lidded; he caught Hayato's gaze and gestured to him again, inviting.

The girl's wrist was slender enough that Hayato could wrap his fingers around it with ease. She let him lift it without complaint, but he had to draw a breath to steady himself before he could bring himself to set the edge of the knife against the tender skin of her inner wrist. The cut he made was shallow, but the scent of her blood rose up immediately, rich and nearly overpowering. She wasn't the only one who moaned when Hayato closed his mouth over the small wound.

Suddenly Shamal made so much more sense.

Hayato wanted to drink slowly, to savor the beat of the pulse under his lips and the texture of the living blood in his mouth, but the sharpness of his appetite wouldn't permit it. He was dimly aware of the girl moaning and moving between them, body writhing against the bench slowly, but only just, and it was much too soon that Lambo's hand pulled him away from her wrist. Hayato heard himself growl in protest at that, but Lambo's grip was firm.

He set his fingers on the girl's wrist, pressing against the wound, and looked at Hayato with dark, serious eyes. "She said some of her blood," he said, quietly. "Only some."

Hayato took a breath, and another, to steady himself. "Right," he said, hoarse, and forced himself to look away from the dark smear under Lambo's fingers.

The girl was sprawled between them, body lax, and her long lashes were fluttering against her cheeks. Lambo smiled down at her, and smoothed the hair back from her damp forehead. She sighed and opened her eyes, and smiled up at them, sleepy and satiated. "Thank you," she said, voice husky.

Lambo smiled again, and kissed her forehead. "Thank you," he murmured.

When she was steady enough for it, they helped her to the room beyond that one, where the club's quietly competent staff took charge of her. They would give her fluids and a safe bed for the night, as Hayato understood it, and an indelible stamp that wouldn't fade before enough time had lapsed for her body to have recovered from the blood loss, and would bar her entrance to the club until that time.

"That was fun," Lambo said, cheerfully, when they had returned to the street.

Hayato just grunted something at him, still a little dizzy with the taste of the blood in his mouth.

Lambo glanced at him, sidelong. "We'll have to do that again, yeah?" he suggested, casually.

Hayato took a breath. "Yeah," he said, after a moment. "Yeah. I'd—yeah."

Lambo just smiled at him, companionable, and said, "We will."

The days passed too quickly by half, at least as far as Hayato was concerned, and Yamamoto's patience frayed more and more visibly as they did. That much was unmistakable; what Hayato couldn't quite figure out was how to speak to Yamamoto about Byakuran in a way that would get Yamamoto to listen.

He was a little afraid of how certain he was that there wasn't anything, actually, that he could say to Yamamoto that would be enough to persuade him that there really wasn't anything to be done. He could imagine Yamamoto being perfectly willing to throw himself at Byakuran's people without any hope of coming out the other side in one piece, altogether too easily.

So he delayed, and worried, and put Yamamoto off as best as he could.

And meanwhile, Lambo continued to coax Hayato to go downtown with him, to the clubs where the humans went seeking thrills and the vampires provided them, all in exchange for blood. Part of Hayato hated himself for how easy it was for Lambo to persuade him into it, and for how he craved the blood and the sense that he was, if not accepted, then tolerated by the real vampires there. It was almost like being one of them, or the closest to it he'd ever come, anyway. Part of him just didn't care, even in the face of the near-certain knowledge that it was all due to Tsuna's influence, and his suspicion that Tsuna and Lambo both knew exactly what they were doing by offering him the blood and the partial acceptance. Lambo never mentioned Tsuna's offer, or pressured him to accept it, but it was there in the knowing slant of his eyes, sometimes, after they'd fed and Hayato was warm and glowing with the satisfaction of it.

The crazy balance of it couldn't possibly last; Hayato knew it and couldn't help wanting it to go on anyway, even when he was driving himself insane trying to maintain the delicate juggling act.

It all came crashing down when they had been hunting together, as Lambo called it, for nearly two weeks, when they emerged from the club into the crisp evening air, replete and content, and almost immediately came upon Yamamoto. He was standing under a streetlamp, haloed by its orange light, and he wasn't smiling, or frowning. He was simply waiting, still and composed, and despite the warm flush having just fed, Hayato went cold when his eyes met Yamamoto's.

Lambo hummed, very softly, only barely audible to Hayato's ears, when Hayato stopped short. "So someone was following us," he murmured, and then raised his voice. "You're a brave one, aren't you?"

Yamamoto ignored him. "So what do you know now?" he asked Hayato, voice pitched low and intent.

Shit. Hayato steadied himself, and said, "That you can't beat him."

Yamamoto's expression didn't even flicker. "Maybe. Maybe not. What have you learned that's new?"

"Not... very much," Hayato hedged. "That even... even other people can't beat him, either. That's all I know about that." All digressions about Arcobaleno notwithstanding, even without having been told, he could tell what wasn't for public consumption. Should he tell Yamamoto about his father, though? No, not in the street, surely. Not when just anyone could hear, and anything could happen.

"That's not very much." Yamamoto's voice was very even. "Especially for how often you come here."

Hayato wanted very much to curse, but bit the words back and swallowed them down. While he struggled with that, Lambo scoffed, "This isn't the kind of place you go for information. You have a lot to learn, little hunter."

"Lambo," Hayato said, but the damage had already been done. Yamamoto's expression shifted, subtly, going colder and stiffer. "Yamamoto—"

"I see how it is, now." Yamamoto was still speaking calmly, words and tone carefully even, but his eyes had started to burn. "You never really intended to help me, did you?"

"That's not true!" Hayato protested. Then his conscience stung him. "Not exactly. I don't intend to help you get yourself killed, that's all, and if you go after Bya—if you try to go after him, you're going to end up dead."

"That's my business, isn't it?" Yamamoto said, while Lambo burst out with, "Wait, you really think you can hunt Byakuran? Are you crazy?"

Yamamoto's attention snapped to Lambo. "What do you know about him?" he demanded, low and urgent.

"God, what don't I know?" Lambo laughed, wry. "Used to be my job to patrol up north of Namimori, keeping an eye on his territory—ow!" He glared at Hayato, who'd just kicked him. Then he blinked. "Was I not supposed to say that?" he asked, for Hayato's ears only.

"No, you weren't," Hayato ground out, and took a step towards Yamamoto, whose eyes had gone even hotter and more avid. Time for desperate measures, then. "Yamamoto, your dad wouldn't want—"

"My father is dead," Yamamoto said, slow and distant. "He doesn't want anything anymore."

Hayato tried again. "But—"

Yamamoto didn't let him. "He was killed by a vampire," he said, softly, and he was looking at Hayato like he was seeing him for the first time. "And I don't have any use now for vampires. Or the people who are friendly to vampires."

"But...!" Hayato protested, taking another step forward. The look on Yamamoto's face as he did brought him up short. He cleared his throat. "I can't—I can't help what I am."

"No," Yamamoto said, slowly, "But you can choose where you stand." His eyes moved away from Hayato—to Lambo, probably, or maybe the club they'd just come from. "Looks like you have."

"Not all vampires are like—him. Them," Hayato said, trying another tack. "I—they're—we're not—it doesn't have to be the way he does it. You should meet Tsuna, you'd see—"

"I know what I see," Yamamoto said, with a slow, awful finality to it.

"Yamamoto, damn it, if you would just listen to me—"

"No," Yamamoto said, and turned away. "I think we've said everything we have to say to each other," he added, and walked away.

Hayato started after him, but Lambo caught his shoulder before he'd gone two steps. "Don't," he said, softly, but he sounded sympathetic, even though his grip was firm on Hayato's shoulder. "You can't be friends with a hunter. It doesn't work. It never does."

"But he—" Hayato protested.

Lambo shook him, gently. "You have to let him go now," he said. "He had it right. You chose where you wanted to stand. So has he."

"This is... this is so stupid," Hayato said, helplessly.

"Yeah, it is, sometimes. I don't make the rules, though." Lambo squeezed his shoulder, once, and then let go. "It's getting late. Weren't you saying something about a test you needed to study for?

Hayato couldn't even begin to care about that, but after a moment, he nodded. "Yeah. Guess I did."

"Thought so. C'mon," Lambo said. "Let's get you home."

Ryouhei was the last person Hayato would have called observant, but even he noticed the way that Yamamoto pointedly took no notice of Hayato the next day. He sidled over to Hayato during lunch and quietly (for Ryouhei) asked, "Did you and Yamamoto fight or something? He's acting extremely pissed."

That wasn't the way Hayato would have put it, but it worked: Yamamoto was still in his seat, but it was the tightly-coiled stillness of someone on the edge of lashing out, not the waiting, patient stillness that Yamamoto had adopted over the past few weeks. And he wasn't speaking to anyone, not even when they stood over his desk and cleared their throats at him.

Hayato was still stinging with the embarrassment of that.

"Yeah," he said, eyes on Yamamoto's shoulders and the back of his head. "We did, sort of. I may have fucked something up."

If Yamamoto heard—and he probably had; it wasn't like the classroom was all that big—he gave no sign of it.

Ryouhei looked over at Yamamoto, and then back at Hayato. "That sucks," he said. "You apologized yet?"

"He's not talking to me," Hayato said, tired.

"Oh." That seemed to be the sum of Ryouhei's advice, because he clapped Hayato on the shoulder. "Well, hang in there. He'll come around."

Yeah, Hayato thought, he wished he could be as sure of that as Ryouhei seemed to be.

Yamamoto maintained his silence for the rest of the day, and packed up his things and left without acknowledging any of the attempts Hayato made to get his attention so that he could try to explain things again.

Not that Hayato knew how to explain anything at all, even to himself, much less Yamamoto, but he was willing to give it a try.

He passed the hours until sunset restlessly, trying to tinker with his proto-flamethrower at first, and then simply picking up bits and pieces of the scattered weapons and tools on his worktable and putting them back down again. He started to reorganize everything, but gave up halfway through, when everything was completely disarranged and the effort of putting it all back seemed like too much, and just sat, toying with a screw driver and trying not to think much at all.

That was how Lambo found him when he let himself in not too long after nightfall, all uninvited and unannounced. "Still moping, I see," he said, hoisting himself up onto the edge of the bench and lounging there.

"I'm not moping," Hayato snapped at him.

"Oh, of course not, my mistake," Lambo said, just gently enough that Hayato couldn't quite be furious that he was being placated. "Come on, then. You won't do yourself any good staying inside and brooding. You need to get out and do something."

In Lambo's vernacular, 'doing something' nearly always translated into 'going to the clubs for blood.' Hayato hesitated. "I don't know..."

Lambo studied him for several seconds. "Gokudera," he said, and his voice was infinitely kind. "You are what you are. There's nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with what we do. We aren't what the hunter thinks we are, but you aren't going to be the one who changes his mind. He's the only one who can do that, and you can't punish yourself for what he decides to do."

It was a surprising speech, all the more so for having come from Lambo, whom Hayato had previously suspected of being as shallow as a puddle. "I... but..." he said, eyeing Lambo, just a bit suspiciously. "You..."

Lambo shrugged, spreading his hands. "You learn a thing or two after your first century," he said. "And I'm telling you, you can't hold yourself accountable for what other people decide to do." He slid off the table. "Now, come on. You'll feel better once you've had someone to eat."

Hayato wasn't entirely convinced, but Lambo continued to chivvy and coax and outright browbeat him till he got Hayato out the door and headed downtown. Only then did he lapse into silence, and leave Hayato to his thoughts.

He was beginning to suspect that he was going to have to seriously revise his opinion about just how smart Lambo really was. He was having to do a lot of that, lately.

They had just crossed the invisible line that demarcated the area that Tsuna claimed as his own when Lambo tensed and stopped, growling. Hayato stopped, too, fingers finding a flash grenade almost automatically as he scanned the area for whatever the threat was that had Lambo on edge.

A figure dropped out of the sky and landed on the pavement before them. Lambo was moving while Hayato was still processing that. He shoved Hayato behind him and lunged for the other vampire in one smooth movement. The other vampire rose to meet him, snarling in the face of Lambo's charge. Then Hayato's brain kicked in, recognizing the lanky frame and aura of perpetual smarm. "Shamal," he said, startled, and then, "Lambo, stop, it's just Shamal!"

Lambo checked himself, and Shamal drew himself up to his full height. "Just Shamal?" he repeated, peeved. "You damn brat, I ought to—" Then he stopped, and Hayato had to fill in some suitably creative threat in for himself, because Shamal was looking back and forth between him and Lambo in clear disbelief. "Damn it, Hayato, I've been trying for years to get you to acknowledge what you are, and the minute I leave you alone, you take up with the Vongola? You ungrateful little snot."

Hayato flushed at that, especially when Lambo chuckled. "Oh, screw you," he said, and glared. "What the hell are you even doing here, anyway?"

Shamal lost all traces of his irritation, and went as serious as Hayato had ever seen him. "I've been looking all over for you," he said. "Your friend, Yamamoto. The hunter. Do you know where he is right now?"

"He's not my—oh, shit," Hayato said, as his brain caught up with his mouth. "Oh, fuck, tell me he's not going after—oh, fuck."

"I figured you didn't," Shamal said, grimly, and held out a hand to him. "If we hurry, we might be able to get to him in time."

Hayato blinked at that, because he would have sworn Shamal hadn't wanted to get involved. Before he could ask about that, Lambo asked, "Are you so sure that he wants to be stopped?" His tone was mild, and curious, and stopped Hayato in mid-step. "It seemed to me that he knew what he wanted," Lambo added, as Hayato looked back at him.

"Maybe," Hayato said, as Lambo's eyebrows drifted up, quizzical. "Maybe he does. But he's my friend. And I'm not going to stand by and let him get himself killed and not try to do anything about it."

He reached out and let Shamal grasp his wrist, and grunted as Shamal dragged him into the air. His shoulder ached as it took his weight.

Just as Hayato was hoping, earnestly, that it wouldn't be a long flight, Lambo caught his other arm and took some of his weight. "Well," he said, with a faint smile, when Hayato gaped at him. "If you're going to be like that about it, I can't really argue, can I?"

"I—but—you said—" Hayato sputtered, off-balance from more than just the town speeding by beneath their feet. And that reminded him. "And you!" he said, to Shamal. "You said you weren't going to get involved!"

"Changed my mind," Shamal said, with a careless shrug that made all three of them lurch in the air. "You kids need all the help you can get."

The really annoying part was how Lambo snorted in agreement. There were, however, more important things to worry about as they flew straight north. "You saw Yamamoto? Where was he?"

Shamal took longer to answer than Hayato liked. "Heading into trouble," he said, finally. "Going straight for Byakuran's territory. Looked ready for a fight."

"Fuck," Hayato said. "Just—fuck."

Neither of them believed in giving false comfort, apparently, because neither of them bothered with empty promises that all would be well. Hayato almost wished they would, even so, as the bright heart of Namimori fell away behind them and they crossed over the expanse of the warehouse district north of town, dark and silent with nightfall. Instead, Lambo asked, "How are we going to find the young hunter?"

"Look for the biggest commotion, obviously," Hayato told him. It was a sad commentary on matters that he wasn't even joking, really.

"Give me some credit," Shamal said, as the wind hitting Hayato's face changed direction, just a bit, as Shamal adjusted their heading. "One of the girls is tracking him."

"So that's true?" Lambo inquired, sounding interested. "You have that much control over animals?"

"Only small ones," Shamal said. Though the words were modest, the tone of them was anything but.

"Fascinating," Lambo murmured.

"It's not, really," Hayato felt obliged to say, because he'd been there to see how much of that 'control' over his rats involved Shamal bribing them with cans of wet cat food and other treats.

"Still—" Lambo began, but didn't get to finish it. Shamal swore and dragged them into a steep dive, one that left Hayato's stomach twisting somewhere in the air behind them, and his heart in his throat.

And then he sensed the third vampire ahead of them, and knew that they weren't going to be in time, no matter how fast Shamal drove them. He could feel the strength of that vampire, even this far away, and it was no youngling to be easily distracted and easily killed. Its strength was old, as sharp as a sword and just as dangerous.

The three of them fell out of the sky like an arrow, driving into the space between two warehouses, into an alley cluttered with stacks of crates, lit by the dim glow of a security light and filled with the smell of blood. Hayato knew the smell of that blood, had spent night after night with it hanging in the air while he'd hung onto his self-control with both hands.

The vampire turned as they landed. He was tall and rail-thin, with a long pale fall of hair down his back. He was holding Yamamoto up with one fist. Yamamoto lolled in his grip, horribly limp, and what was left of his clothes was dark with his blood.

It was funny, Hayato thought, in the distant part of his mind. He'd thought he'd been prepared for the inevitability of this moment, but the reality of it was still worse than he'd told himself to expect.

Someone was growling, but it wasn't until Lambo's arm caught him, wrapping around his chest and holding him back, that Hayato realized it was him. He strained against Lambo's arm anyway, hands fumbling for his holdout grenade.

The other vampire smiled, the contemptuous gleam of it splitting across his face. "And so the cavalry arrives, too late." He tossed Yamamoto aside, as carelessly as someone discarding a bit of trash. "Will you be a better fight? This one wasn't even a quarter of the hunter his father was."

"Don't be an idiot," Lambo muttered in Hayato's ear, as he tried to lung at the other vampire. "That's Squalo, you can't beat him, you little idiot."

"We're not here to fight," Shamal said, over the sound of Lambo's mutter. "We're here to take the boy, or what's left of him, home."

Squalo cocked his head, still smiling. "Are you, now?" He glanced at Lambo. "And yet, there's a Vongola here, where he doesn't belong."

"And there weren't any of you where you didn't belong the night that boy's father died?" Lambo retorted, voice perfectly steady. "Tit for tat, Squalo."

"But the difference is, we knew better than to let ourselves be seen by any of you," Squalo returned, and lunged, fangs bared.

Shamal intercepted him; they crashed together, both of them growling. Lambo pushed Hayato down and out of the way. "Stay out of this," he hissed, eyes gleaming, and Hayato rocked back a little at the unveiling of Lambo's full strength, more than he'd even begun to suspect the vampire possessed. Then Lambo threw himself at Squalo as well.

Hayato had seen vampires fight each other before, or had thought he had. Now, watching the three of them, he realized that the fights he had seen before were nothing more than skirmishes, the bite and snap of fangs purely for show. This was something entirely different—inhuman speed and strength matched against each other, nothing held back. The three of them twisted through the air, using the walls that rose up around them to launch themselves at each other. They ripped chunks out of each other with fangs and nails-turned-claws, growling and hissing at each other as the thick smell of vampiric blood rose to mask some of the scent of Yamamoto's blood.

Hayato hesitated, watching them, but Lambo had been right after all—he couldn't fight Squalo. He was next to useless: too weak and too slow for an opponent who was an adult vampire, and he was armed with weapons that would hurt his allies as much as they would Squalo. He turned away, and went to where Yamamoto lay in a crumpled pile, amid a tumble of empty crates, to crouch over the ruin of him.

For once, the smell of Yamamoto's blood didn't do a damn thing to him.

Up close it was clearer just how badly Squalo had beaten him, and that he'd taken his time doing it, playing with Yamamoto like a cat might play with a mouse. Yamamoto's shirt and jeans were in shreds, soaked through with blood. When Hayato reached down to straighten the awful twist of Yamamoto's limbs, he saw the jagged ends of bone.

And Yamamoto groaned, a low animal sound that made Hayato freeze, hands hovering over Yamamoto's body. "Yamamoto," he said, and bent over him.

Yamamoto's eyes flickered open, but they didn't quite focus on Hayato's face, and he groaned again.

"Yamamoto, can you hear me?" Hayato asked, bending closer. "It's me, it's Gokudera. You're... you're—" The lie stuck in his throat; Yamamoto was manifestly not all right.

Yamamoto's lips moved. Even as close as he was, Hayato could barely hear the bubbling whisper. "Too... strong..."

"I told you they were!" Hayato said, even though there was no satisfaction in it. "You idiot, I told you that it was going to get you killed!"

"Should have waited," Yamamoto agreed, every word a struggle. "Should have gotten stronger."

"Yes, you should have," someone else said, each syllable clipped and impatient. Hayato looked up and stared as Hibari dropped down from the shadows, and crouched on the other side of Yamamoto. "It was stupid of you not to wait."

That was too much, even if it was true, but Hibari only showed his teeth when Hayato growled at him, and then ignored him. He looked down at Yamamoto, curious. "What will you do now, hunter's cub?"

The sound Yamamoto made was horrible and wet; Hayato shuddered when he realized that it was Yamamoto's attempt at laughter. "Die," he rasped.

"All without having accomplished anything," Hibari said, still with that inhumanly detached curiosity. "How wasteful."

"If it's a waste, then do something about it!" Hayato said, with the half-formed notion that Shamal had been a doctor, once, a long time ago, but was too busy fighting with Squalo to be of any use.

Hibari glanced at him, briefly. "Impatient," he said, and the bastard sounded amused. He looked back down at Yamamoto. "Do you want me to do something, hunter's cub?"

Yamamoto took so long to respond that Hayato thought it was too late. Then his answer came sighing out of him on a bubbling breath. "...yes..."

Hayato was perfectly positioned to see the slow curve of Hibari's smile, anticipatory and pleased. "So be it," he said, and brought his own wrist to his mouth, biting down on it and slicing the pale skin of it open. He lowered it to Yamamoto's lips. "Drink," he said, as the sharp smell of his blood rose up and mingled with the smell of Yamamoto's blood.

"That's not what I meant!" Hayato protested, aghast. Yamamoto's lips parted to swallow the first mouthful, and it was too late to protest.

Hibari ignored him anyway, all his attention focused on Yamamoto. The smile never left his mouth; it ticked a bit wider when Yamamoto's body arched between them and he made a sound, low and pained.

That would be the first sign of the change, Hayato knew, though he'd never witnessed a turning before. He still knew how it worked when vampires turned humans, though, and it probably worked the same for watchers. Yamamoto made another sound, body shuddering—dying, poisoned by the blood that would transform it. He lifted a clumsy, flailing hand, and Hibari growled, low and approving, as he closed blood-slicked fingers on Hibari's wrist, dragging it down to his mouth and sucking.

Hayato looked away.

Shamal and Lambo and Squalo were still fighting. All three were bleeding, though Squalo less so—it just about figured that Lambo and Shamal fighting together weren't quite his match, Hayato thought. Even so, they were holding their own, for the time being. As he watched, trying not to hear the sounds Yamamoto made as he began to thrash, dying, turning, Lambo grappled with Squalo, and Shamal used that opportunity to rake his claws down Squalo's back. Squalo growled and threw Lambo off him, and rounded on Shamal, driving straight for his throat.

Yamamoto groaned, low and raw, and Hibari spoke to him. "Enough," he said, tones low and satisfied, and then he added, "Soon."

Hayato looked, unable to stop himself. Yamamoto was arched taut, gripping Hibari's wrist, face twisted in pain. Shamal had said that it was bad when someone was turned in extremis, and had looked grim before changing the subject, but Hayato hadn't realized that it was this bad. Yamamoto's body struggled against itself, healing and dying and changing, conflicting impetuses at war with each other. Hibari's eyes gleamed, avid, as he watched, and then he purred, so softly that Hayato barely heard it, as Yamamoto groaned again, shuddering, and went limp, subsiding against the ground, not even breathing.

The sound Hibari made then was satisfied. "You will want to leave," he said, perfectly calm, as Hayato stared at the deathly stillness of Yamamoto's body. "Even you will look appetizing, in his first hunger."

Hayato couldn't find it in himself to care about the insult. "He's going to wake up?" he asked, watching Yamamoto anxiously.

Hibari snorted. "Don't be such a naïve idiot," he said. "He's only going to be dead briefly."

Dead was still dead, and Hayato was fully prepared to argue the point, even with a watcher. Then Yamamoto stirred.

"Run, little dhampir," Hibari said, very softly, eyes fixed on Yamamoto. "If you love your own blood, now is the time for you to run."

There was no doubt that it was good advice. There was no chance that Hayato was going to take it. He stayed where he was, as Yamamoto stirred again, sluggish, as the change began to come over him, gathering speed, until Yamamoto's body arched with it. His lips peeled back from his teeth, a rictus parody of a smile, and as Hayato watched, his incisors lengthened, turning sharp.

And Hibari was purring again, which was possibly the most disturbing part of all.

Yamamoto's eyes snapped open. They burned, wild and hungry. Hayato couldn't see any sense in them, or any trace of Yamamoto himself.

"I did tell you," Hibari said, tone deceptively mild, as Yamamoto sat up, nostrils flaring, testing the air, and his gaze settled on Hayato.

Hayato swallowed. Yeah, and he hadn't listened. "Yamamoto," he said, very softly.

Yamamoto growled. The sound sent a frisson of cold fear down Hayato's spine; he thought that perhaps he should have listened to Hibari after all.

Something crashed behind him; the sound made Yamamoto's attention snap away from Hayato. The timbre of his growl changed registers, became lower and rougher. "Squalo," he said, slowly, like he was tasting the name. Then he was moving, springing past Hayato and launching himself at Squalo bodily.

Hibari made a sound as Hayato turned to stare at the way Yamamoto tackled Squalo, fangs and claws out. "Interesting," he said, as the two of them went flying. "He should have ripped your throat out. Remarkable self-control for a fledgling. Or perhaps he has better taste than I expected."

"Don't sound so sorry about it!" Hayato snapped, as Yamamoto and Squalo wrestled with each other, a furious mass of growling and slashing claws.

Hibari didn't say anything to that, while Shamal and Lambo picked themselves up, both of them looking startled. Shamal was the one who made the connection first, looking from the blurred motion of Yamamoto and Squalo to Hibari, and back again. "Is that...?"

Lambo looked up. The motion of his throat as he swallowed was visible. "The boss isn't going to like this," he said.

Both he and Shamal were edging backwards, away from where Squalo and Yamamoto circled each other. Squalo, Hayato couldn't help noticing, seemed to be considerably more on the defensive than he had been when Shamal and Lambo were his opponents.

"If Sawada doesn't like it, he can take it up with me," Hibari said, as Yamamoto lunged for Squalo, faster than Hayato's eye could follow. Squalo dodged, but suffered for it when Yamamoto's claws laid his arm open. "You should leave now," he added, and took to the air, launching himself into the mêlée.

"Yes," Shamal said, "we will."

"But—" Hayato protested, as he and Lambo seized his arms.

"No," Lambo said, voice taut; the whites of his eyes showing. He and Shamal sprang into the air. "I am not staying anywhere near a fledgling watcher."

"Damn straight," Shamal agreed, and the last view Hayato had of Yamamoto was of Hibari holding Squalo with a single desultory hand as Yamamoto lunged for Squalo's throat, fangs bared.

Epilogue

The autumn after Yamamoto's disappearance, the principal forbade the baiting of vampires.

He might as well have saved his breath. The sight of Yamamoto's empty desk did more to deter his classmates from going out at night than any official edict could. People whispered about it, for a while, until the empty desk became a part of the new normal. And then, late in September, a new family moved into the area. They had a daughter who was just the right age, and she took the empty desk on her first day of school. With that, it stopped being Yamamoto's desk at all.

Well, to everyone else, anyway. Hayato never looked at the back of Nishiura's head, with its beribboned ponytail, without experiencing a sense of disorientation.

There wasn't much to be done about it, though. Yamamoto was gone, and the only news of him came when Shamal stopped by to say that another of Byakuran's people had turned up missing, or in pieces. It was turning into a bad season to be allied with Byakuran, by the sounds of it.

It was Shamal, too, who gave Hayato the final push into making a decision. "You know," he said, one evening, as Hayato tinkered with his flamethrower and Shamal sipped blood from a tumbler. "You probably don't need the Vongola's protection any more. Byakuran's got enough on his mind to keep him from thinking about you, these days."

Hayato looked at the firing mechanism, thinking about it. "No," he said, "I don't, I guess."

Shamal knew him well enough not to say anything just yet. After a moment, Hayato picked up the screwdriver, and began taking the mechanism apart, laying out the tiny pieces of it in neat rows. "Think I'm gonna stick with them, though."

"Messy thing, getting involved in a clan alliance," Shamal told him. "Can't pick up and go, if you are."

"Yeah," Hayato said, "I know. But I think I want to stay here for a while."

Shamal was good enough to have the decency not to tell him that watchers and vampires didn't make good friends, for which Hayato was grateful. And the next time Lambo came to him to invite him downtown, Hayato looked at him, steadily, and said, "Tell Tsuna I say yes."

"All right," Lambo said, grinning and clapping him on the shoulder, "I'll be glad to."

The amazing thing, Hayato thought, as they fell into step together, was that Lambo genuinely seemed to mean it, too.

"Ready?" Lambo asked him, when the warmth of the room had driven away the chill of the flight and Hayato's stomach had finally settled.

Hayato didn't quite think Lambo was inquiring about his physical comfort, though, not when Lambo was looking him over, scrutinizing him, so he thought about it carefully before answering.

He still came to the same answer.

It was time.

"Yeah," he said, "I'm ready."

Lambo smiled at that, faint and respectful, just a glint of fang to underscore the sentiment. "Come this way," he said. He led Hayato from the little antechamber where he'd spoken to Tsuna and Reborn the last time he'd visited Tsuna's stronghold. They moved through dimly-lit halls, till Lambo brought them to another room and ushered Hayato in before stepping back.

Tsuna was waiting for them, standing before a fireplace, hands clasped behind his back as he watched the small fire burning in the grate. He turned as Lambo slipped out, shutting the door softly behind him, and smiled at Hayato, warm and welcoming.

This was it, then. Hayato drew a breath, and came away from the door to stand before Tsuna, steps steady. If he had to keep his eyes fixed on Tsuna's chest and not the gentleness of Tsuna's gaze, that was no one's business but his own. When he was a hand's breadth from Tsuna, Hayato knelt and lifted his chin.

For the relatively minuscule amount of time he'd considered ever doing such a thing at all, he'd thought it would freak him out. All right, fine, he'd figured it would terrify him. He knew good and well where this gesture had come from, back in the mists of vampiric history, and even now it wasn't always a gesture. But he wasn't scared. As Tsuna's hands settled on his shoulders and Tsuna bent over his bared throat, he wasn't afraid at all. Not even when Tsuna's lips touched his skin, gently, formally, over the artery.

The only thing he could feel was that this was right. With both insanely mixed and divided parts of him, he knew this was right. As a vampire he submitted to Tsuna's will, and as a human...

If Tsuna ever wished to take that from him, he knew he'd give it.

At length, Tsuna drew away. "There," he said, very softly, still bending over Hayato and smiling at him, though now there was an element to it that was different. "Welcome, my own."

Hayato could only stand to look at the possessive, exultant curve of Tsuna's mouth for a few moments before his eyes dropped. "Boss," he said, softly.

Tsuna's hands tightened on his shoulders at that. "Yes," he murmured, and drew Hayato to his feet. "Mine, now." He released Hayato, and gestured. "Come. Let me introduce you to the rest of your clan."

His clan. His clan. "Yeah," Hayato said, seeking refuge in gruffness, "yeah, that sounds pretty good."

Tsuna merely smiled at him, and did.

- end -