AN: The blame for this getting published can be laid at Wyrvel's feet. I started writing this in September of 2013, never got past 4,000 words, read a bunch of Wyrvel's stories and then had a burning need to write Low-Key Hellishly Passive-Aggressive Mother-In-Law Yamamoto Takeshi.
'Befriend Miura Haru,' says the note in his handwriting, along with a corresponding date, place and time.
Shouichi wonders who this person, this savior is, the one who his could-be self seems convinced will somehow manage to fix his mess so superbly that nobody and nothing else is necessary. He almost talks himself out of meeting them at all, out of some strange mix of despair and guilt. Those feelings are only ghosts of possible-futures he vaguely remembers, though, so he does in fact find himself in front of the surprisingly cute cake shop at the arranged moment.
A girl a year or two younger than him crashes her way out of the door and through him, leaving them both sprawled out on the pavement and the cake she was carrying splattered firmly across Shouichi's face and chest.
"Hahi!" The girl shrieks in dismay as she clambers up onto her knees. From what Shouichi can see, between the smear of frosting on his glasses and the vague blur that is the world without prescription-corrected vision, she certainly does look upset—but whether that's for his sake or the cake's remains to be seen.
"Haru is so sorry!" The girl continues, wringing her hands anxiously and producing a handkerchief. She makes a confused, abortive motion as though unsure where, exactly, she should start cleaning.
It's not the most auspicious of meetings, but he's woken up shaking in the middle of the night with visions of wastelands dancing through his head one time too many—every time too many—and that makes him just desperate enough to run with it.
"It's okay," he insists with an awkward smile. "I didn't see you coming out, so the fault's half mine." He adjusts his glasses, and does his best to ignore the glob of cake sluggishly sliding down from the lens to his cheek.
Miura Haru smiles at him, a little shy and a little grateful, and he feels a flicker of hope light up within himself.
She's not exactly what he was expecting, true. Shouichi isn't sure exactly what he was expecting, really, only that she is so far outside of those expectations that he doesn't even have the energy to panic about being helped up and cleaned off by a moderately cute girl roughly in his age bracket.
Miura Haru may be unexpected, but perhaps all saviors are in some way or another.
Miura Haru is most certainly not a savior.
Shouichi figures that out about two days into their fledging friendship, and once he understands that, it utterly confounds him that he ever thought otherwise for so much as a second.
Haru is loud, and petulant, and righteous; she dresses up in strange costumes that no other—normal—girl would touch, but which somehow her classmates at Midori never ridicule her for wearing.
"It's Haru," says one of the Midori girls who had seen his shell-shocked reaction on the first official day of their friendship, when he showed up for the replacement shirt he had been promised. The girl speaks with the rueful ease of one who had seen this sort of thing up close and personal for years. "She can be a little… out there, sure, but she makes things interesting. She's a good girl; she always means well."
That, Shouichi doesn't doubt for a moment. Haru is too world-jarringly sincere about everything she puts her mind to for anything insidious to be cooked up behind that beaming face. She had hand-made him a new shirt after the cake-smeared one had been deemed a loss despite all their efforts to save it, and he's fairly certain that the little Namahage embroidered on the breast pocket was her doing as well.
But that second day, when Haru gushes about Mafioso babies and explosions and the amazing Tsuna-san.
That's when Shouichi understands, with perfect clarity, that Miura Haru is not a savior.
Saviors do not speak of criminal activity and mayhem with heartfelt sighs, and it isn't even as though Haru is glitzing things up in her head. …Well. Maybe in the case of the illustrious, heroic, handsome Tsuna-san, from what little Shouichi remembers of the meek boy he met briefly during his attempt to return his ill-gotten temporal goods to Lambo Bovino. But that's beside the point. The point is that it would be reassuring if Haru was just building a bubbly fantasy. But she isn't, because roughly the same instant as the original understanding dawns, a second but no less important epiphany strikes him: Haru is smart.
Not like him, not like how he can run algorithms in his head faster than a computer; Haru is the scary kind of smart, the way that the most successful people always are. Haru has goals, and Haru has accomplishments that follow those goals, and no failures—merely goals in various states of achievement or goals she has tossed aside in favor of greater, more alluring plans. She doesn't delude herself, or at least, not with the big picture of what she wants and how she plans to get it.
It kind of terrifies him to realize that he has become one of those goals already, but the fact that they even met remains proof that Shouichi is capable of shelving his own cowardice to get things done.
She's also whip-smart academically, courtesy of good old-fashioned hard work and genes from her math professor father. And her father is yet another thing that blindsides him—Shouichi meets the man an hour after their not-so-accidental introduction, draped in one of the man's large t-shirts while Haru fights a losing battle against the ruined confection smeared into his own. At first glance, Shouichi pegs the man as one of his own breed—a wimpy, pacifistic intellectual type.
Then the man shrugs off his deliberately ill-fitting blazer, showcasing a physique that is much, much, much less pot-bellied than it previously appeared and more like the dictionary definition of 'barrel-chested' as he softly enquires whether Shouichi will be staying for dinner.
For the record, after he recovers from his initial fear and subtly—frantically—establishes himself as a purely platonic insertion into the household, it turns out to be one of the most delicious and amiable meals he has ever taken part in.
But no, that's the precursor to their friendship, the negative-first day. It's the second day when those dots begin to connect.
Miura Haru is not a savior.
She is a destroyer of worlds.
They have only really been friends for two days. He thinks to himself after the double strike of clarity lands, as she grips his shoulders and laughs, delighted while they bike up and down the small suburban hills in flagrant violation of safety regulations, that perhaps, just perhaps, it isn't too late to cut ties and hope that some other could-be future version of himself has a Plan B.
He knows it absolutely is too late when he sees a vaguely familiar head of bushy brown hair and hears Haru call out happily, only for the younger boy to blanch and poorly play at deafness before fervently ducking around the corner. He feels Haru's fingers curl just a bit tighter and somehow knows without looking back that she's still smiling, as though the boy she had been singing the praises of hasn't just blown her off spectacularly.
He thinks to himself, when he peddles past the street that Sawada Tsunayoshi took off down and Haru doesn't ask him to turn after the boy, that maybe a destroyer of worlds isn't such a bad option after all. If what little he remembered of the futures he visited were indicative of the majority, then maybe it might be a good thing for the possibilities for all those could-be worlds to go up in smoke.
He speeds up at the top of the next hill just to hear the bubbly, scarily focused girl he met two and a half days ago squeal with laughter on the way down, and tries to ignore the niggling instinct that says that the futures haunting him probably imploded as soon as he decided to let the force of nature known as Miura Haru slam into his life.
He's actually able to forget it quite successfully when one of Namimori's increasingly rare police officers pops up on the sidewalk to bark at them about the dangers of tandem riding and Haru shrieks at him to go faster before the man can catch them.
"Haru wants to die," she declares miserably one afternoon, two and a half years or so into their friendship. It's not long after the beginning of her second year of high school and his third.
Shouichi trades a look with her father from over the homework he already has spread out over the table. He and Haru have, by this point, grown close enough by now that their homes have somehow melded together into one great hive of a residence, split miraculously between two fairly distant locations without either family taking much notice at all. The older man raises the large carrot and grater he has in his hands and gives him a 'what-can-you-do' sort of smile, leaving the boy on his own once more.
"What happened?" Shouichi asks, obligingly shuffling his papers around so she can slump over the table morosely.
Haru whimpers something into the mahogany.
Shouichi carefully sets his pencil aside and gives his friend—his best friend by now, all world-saving-slash-destroying plans aside—his full and undivided attention. "Sorry, one more time?"
She slowly lifts her head, letting out an anguished howl. "I said, he told me I'm like a sister to him!"
Shouichi shoots a desperate look to her father, but the man has produced a pair of large headphones from somewhere and is continuing to grate his carrots, humming along loudly to a popular Enka song and bouncing slightly to the beat.
The traitor.
"…maybe he has really deep-seated, family-based psychological issues?" Shouichi offers tentatively. They both steadfastly ignore the soft, choking sounds of poorly hidden amusement from the kitchen.
Truth be told, this is both exactly the sort of thing Shouichi has been hoping for, and simultaneously the exact opposite.
After all, it isn't that he hates the Vongola in particular, or wants to see his friend this distraught, or that he resents how roundabout and unkind Sawada Tsunayoshi has been about turning Haru down after literally leading her on for years—
…okay, truth be told, maybe a little bit of the second factor is coloring his views. Or a lot.
But the main reason he has been slowly and steadily weaning Haru from the Tenth Generation's clique and vice versa is very simple; clinically so, even. Put in terms of an equation, if Haru is the solution to his future problem(s), then Vongola is about fifty-seven extra variables that make the process that much harder.
And the best way to get a good, solid answer, he knows, is to simplify the issue as much as possible.
He certainly isn't happy that Sawada Tsunayoshi still cares enough to see her as family—such a damning label with that baby in the fedora still in the picture, seriously, what was the boy thinking?—but neither, thankfully, is Haru.
"I want to disappear forever, hahi," Haru mumbles, and it's the consistent, proper use of a first-person pronoun that finally makes Shouichi realize just how well and truly upset she is over this development. He immediately feels a rush of guilt for being a bad, manipulative excuse for a friend. His shame deepens as a treacherous, selfish thought immediately begins to take form in the wake of her misery. He salves the twinge of self-recrimination with the knowledge that it will benefit her in the long run, plans or no plans.
"Haru…" He hesitates, of course he does; he always does. It's on purpose for once. "If… I mean, it's just an idea, but if you really think you can't stand seeing him around all the time, um…"
"Spit it out, Shou-kun," her father advises, already four steps ahead and munching on a thin shaving of carrot, headphones now hung around his neck as he shamelessly watches them over the kitchen counter.
The man is an enigma, Shouichi swears.
Still, he gives out good advice. "Let's be real," Shouichi says frankly. "You're way, way smarter than you let people think. You could probably have tested out of high school before the entrance ceremony, and we both know it. If you really can't stand it…" He takes a deep breath. "I-I'm headed to Todai next year. We could go together." He fiddled with his pencil. "I mean, I know it might seem a little rash—"
He looks up and sees Haru staring at him, not in horror or exasperation or mourning, but in pure confusion. "…what? Why are you giving me that look?"
"Papa and Shou-chan's parents didn't tell you?" Haru asks, which has happened a lot over the course of their friendship. A lot a lot.
"Whatever you're talking about, the answer is probably no," he sighs.
"We already have an apartment waiting for us a stop away from campus when first semester starts," Haru explains, perking up a little for the first time since she swept through the door in a restless storm of heartbreak and woe.
"…of course we do," says Shouichi in a tone halfway between delight and defeat. He turns back to look at her father, but the man has moved on to merrily chopping up a radish.
He gives up.
Shouichi just can't bring himself to be too upset about the happy bombshell; not when thinking about moving on and ditching Namimori and the remains of the painful, dogged pursuit of her first love in a suitably dramatic and healthy way are starting to put the ghost of a glimmer back in Haru's eyes like that.
Besides, for all he worries about his future almost-self's plans, it's still… refreshing to get caught up in somebody else's machinations, without having to be part of the plotting and execution process.
Haru apparently decides to keep mum on the matter of skipping a grade and then skipping town entirely to live it up at college with Shouichi and grow as a person without being dragged into crazy mafia infighting until the last possible moment, which he would usually approve of on principle. Except Sawada Tsunayoshi and friends somehow find out on the day they are all set to move.
The whole motley crew stampedes the station like something out of a sappy, B-list movie while he and Haru are waiting for their train to pull in, their luggage already safely shipped ahead with the movers.
"H-Haru!" Sawada Tsunayoshi stammers out, breathing hard, and for all that he has grown taller, Shouichi isn't sure he's changed much from the meek boy Shouichi first met at all. "Are you… I mean… you're not really leaving, are you?"
"…" Haru blinks, and the blatant surprise on her face almost seems enough to reassure her so-called other friends.
Yeah, okay, maybe Shouichi is a little bitter. But it's on Haru's behalf, because she would never in a million years let herself feel that way towards them.
"Of course Haru is," she says, blunt instead of gentle due to her confusion at this sudden panic. "Haru and Shou-chan are heading out to start their college careers and embark on the road to adulthood!"
"I…" Shouichi almost feels a stab of pity at how lost Tsunayoshi looks. Almost. "But… I-I thought… I mean…"
You thought she'd linger by your side forever, loving you even without the barest shred of hope, Shouichi translates in his head. Or maybe this is the outcome he had feared for years and the true reason he had taken so long to answer Haru's feelings, if Shouichi wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Shouchi isn't feeling very charitable, though. He is so bitter and he regrets nothing.
Luckily—or unfortunately, depending on how one viewed the whole matter—one of his marginally less socially inept companions takes over before Tsunayoshi can make any more of an ass of himself.
"Haha, aren't you moving a bit too early though, Haru? I mean, you're our age!" Yamamoto Takeshi flashes a winning grin their way, and Shouichi has to hold down a shudder at the way the taller, more fit boy's eyes cut at him, jovially suspicious and bright like the edge of a blade catching the light.
You aren't one of us, the star athlete's gaze seems to say. How dare you.
She isn't either, Shouichi thinks petulantly, and has to fight a smile when Haru's answer echoes along similar lines.
"Haru took a few tests," she admits with a shrug. "It was always the plan to graduate with Shou-chan. There's no point in waiting the extra time, after all."
"Tch! Like a stupid woman like you could possibly graduate early!" Gokudera Hayato spits out, scowling so hard that a muscle in his cheek twitches.
Please, Shouichi reads in the vulnerable, defensive set of his shoulders. Please don't do this. Don't leave. He has been the most vocal, the most vicious of the group Shouichi has been tugging Haru away from, bit by bit, but it's the same sort of clingy enmity that Shouichi recognizes from his interactions with his own sister, when they squabble over chores or the bathroom.
He blinks, and there are suddenly two thigh-high assassins clutching at her legs and sobbing in their respective mother tongues. Two girls come forward to gently pry them away—Haru's once-rival for Tsunayoshi's affections and a quiet slip of a girl in an eye-patch who looks two steps from following the children's example—and behind them comes the entrance of the glamorous pink-haired woman Shouichi remembers from his initial peek into the madness that is the criminal underworld and the infant in the bespoke suit who sets all of Shouichi's primal instincts into a fearful frenzy.
"Haru told you all months ago that she was going to Todai, hahi!" He hears his best friend exclaim, still trying to wrap her head around this little slice of melodrama.
"But Haru-chan!" The blonde rival—Shouichi can't, for the life of him, remember her name—pleads, tears in her eyes. "We thought you meant for next year; that you were just planning ahead!"
"Haru is sorry, Kyoko-chan," Kyoko, that's half of it. The surname is… something-kawa? She has an older brother, currently being lectured by station security in the background, but that helps surprisingly little. "But all the arrangements have been made. Haru's going, and that's that."
Still, Haru makes a round for last-minute hugs and murmured good-byes, managing to snag one from everybody. Some, like the children and the girls, cling as though they can keep her here, as if a full semester of rent and tuition is just that simple to walk away from. And maybe it is, for Mafiosi with friends in high places, but Haru's resolve is not so easily broken, as they should well know. Others, like Gokudera and Tsunayoshi, bear it uncomfortably and gently break away, as if burned by the finality of the act.
And then there are those, like Yamamoto and the pink-haired woman—Bianca, perhaps? His memory isn't exactly crystal clear when it came to that day—who whisper words of encouragement into her hair and squeeze her tight, but eventually she is left staring down the best-dressed toddler in the room. Heck, probably the best-dressed child in all of Namimori, if not Japan entirely.
"Come on, Reborn-chan." She holds her arms out in a silent invitation, with a rueful, private smile that Shouichi doesn't fully understand. It bothers him more than he thought it might. "Technically, you never did give me an answer to my request," she says, and there's something soft and kind and a little nostalgic in her voice.
There is a long, long moment of silence, and Tsunayoshi seems to be having heart palpitations of some sort in the interim. The boy—almost a young man, chronologically, but for some reason Shouichi still can't picture him as anything more than a boy—nearly keels over when Reborn actually hops into her embrace, letting her hug him with the strangest, scariest twist to his mouth that Shouichi has ever seen on anybody, let alone a baby.
Shouichi thinks it might be his attempt at a smile, and in that moment knows true terror.
"You should always rely on your famiglia," Reborn advises her, and no voice that high pitched has any right to sound so domineering.
She will once she finds them, Shouichi thinks, without really knowing why; he wants to keep himself and Haru out of that world, doesn't he? He nearly jumps out of his skin when Reborn's glossy dark eyes snap towards him, as though the tiny monster has actually heard his thoughts.
That's madness, naturally, but all the same he feels better when their train pulls up and she transfers Reborn back to Tsunayoshi, returning to Shouichi's side and waving farewell one last time, her other hand hooked securely in his own. Then she's shouldering her tote bag, handing over her ticket, and following Shouichi to their seats.
They let a stunned sort of silence settle until the train starts moving.
From their window, as the train picks up speed, they can see a certain white-haired boxer keeping pace and waving with the children braced on his shoulders until he is eventually outmatched, and just before the scenery totally blurs they both catch a glimpse of a dark, foreboding figure pulling away on a motorcycle.
"I had no idea they would care this much," she says quietly.
Her voice is surprised, and a little sad, but when he looks back at her there isn't a trace of regret in her face; only pensiveness. Shouichi lets out a silent breath, and for once does not feel guilty at all.
He thinks that, if it weren't for that fateful note he left himself—would leave himself? Might have one day left himself? Ugh, he hates time-travel—Haru might have never known any of them cared about her to this extent, even with their bonds untouched by his selfish machinations. The problem, Shouichi knows, is that Haru is simply too good of a friend. She's the type to slip seamlessly into somebody's life, and make it warmer and more fulfilling in the tiniest, most crucial of ways—but so gradually that the friend in question barely notices how precious she becomes to them.
If Shouichi hadn't been hyper-aware of her existence and actions from the start, he might have fallen into the same trap.
He thanks the alternate Shouichi who sent the note, suddenly, selfishly, then breaks the silence again with an awkward cough.
"So… Tokyo. That's going to be interesting."
Haru gives him a flat look at that vast understatement, but the ice is broken.
The rest of the ride is split between her usual brand of mayhem, speculation about the new life hurtling closer to them by the second, breaking open their snack supplies, and sleeping.
Shouichi's dreams are filled, briefly, with dark, glistening eyes cataloguing all the ways he could be killed. The dreams, unbeknownst to him until later, morph into something kinder and far more ridiculous around the time Haru's head slips down to rest on his shoulder.
The first time he opens their apartment door and finds a large wooden crate waiting outside for him, Shouchi has war flashbacks.
Literally; some of the suppressed memories of far-off, desolate futures are dredged up, dancing mockingly in front of his eyes and making his gut churn sickly before the delivery man coughs to get his attention and asks if he is Miura Haru-san, and if so can he please sign for the package.
"No, I'm Haru," his friend says, ducking around where he is half-collapsed against the open door to take the little clipboard and sign it with a flourish. They have been here for over two months and she has left the childish third-person speech behind her in Namimori; he's grateful for that, if only because he doesn't think the big city will automatically be so accepting of her eccentricities. "Have a good day!" She bids the man goodbye while Shouichi is reminiscing and begins heaving in the heavy crate, without even considering asking for his help.
That's fair. There's no contest as to which of them is more physically fit, after years of competitive gymnastics. He's reasonably sure she could bench-press him, if she wanted to.
"Did you order something?" He drifts along nervously in her wake, trying not to have a panic attack over what he now sees is a box made of cheaper-looking wood than the Bovino care-package that started everything.
"No, I have a pen-pal as extra credit for one of my classes. The International Relations one."
"Oh?" His stomach gives a burning throb. "Where from?"
Don't say Italy don't say Italy don't say Italy don't say—
"France," Haru tells him brightly. "A region called Jura, in the countryside. She's an older woman, who runs an orchard. She has the cutest little grandson ever. Remind me to show you the pictures, sometime."
Thank God.
She pulls a crowbar out from underneath their couch and begins cracking open the package. Inside, there are—similar to the first, most traumatizing apology gift—a few bottles of what they determine, after some squinting at the hand-written labels, to be cider, some jars of apple jam, and a little oval picture frame with a pressed flower inside. Apple blossom, he guesses, though he has no way to be sure. Haru seems more taken by a sheaf of polaroid photographs included in an envelope marked with her name in elegant cursive, cooing excitedly and forcing him to admire the chubby-cheeked ten-to-twelve year old with green hair and dead eyes that bore damningly into Shouichi's very soul. He is also, for some reason, wearing a gigantic apple on his head.
"Cute," he obligingly lies through his teeth.
"So cute," she sighs, and if there's an echo of wistfulness over other, even scarier children she hasn't seen in weeks and weeks, then who can really blame Shouichi for taking action?
"What are you sending her in return for all of this?" He hands back the photos, as guileless as possible. "Clothes?"
A terrifying glint swiftly overtakes the melancholy gleam that had been beginning to settle in her eyes, and Shouichi pats himself on the back even if it means that he'll have to take over dinner-duty while she buries herself in sketching out the designs dancing through her head. It's worth it, to keep her from getting too nostalgic for Namimori. The texts and e-mails have only just begun to become less frequent, as her so-called friends begin to understand the true pressure of their final year of high school.
He hangs the little apple blossom in the kitchen, and on a whim does a quick internet search on his phone about the language of flowers in Europe. 'Preference, better things to come, good fortune'—he's not a terribly superstitious person, but he'll take what good omens he can get these days, and he smiles faintly at the small pink flower every time he sees it afterwards.
It never gets easier, opening the door and seeing a new crate, once or twice a month, but opening it and hearing little tidbits about Madame Faustine and her little Safran and their idyllic provincial life each time helps soothe some of the sting. Maybe, he thinks one evening, his thoughts as bright and bubbling as the cider he and Haru have downed in celebration of finishing their first semester's worth of finals, maybe once Haru fixes everything they'll go and visit the two of them in France, as a sort of victory vacation.
Shockingly, it only occurs to Shouichi that Haru needs to actually meet the person that ruins everything in order to fix it all after he comes home about a week later and finds the man himself perched on their couch, bare-chested and sporting a languid, amused smile as Haru fusses over him with her measuring tape. There is something damningly familiar about the scene—he thinks it's a slice of carrot cake from Haru's favorite bakery smeared over the shirt he can see soaking in the kitchen sink—and he pauses, swallowing once and trying not to vomit from sheer nerves.
"Oh, welcome home, Shou-chan!" Haru shoots him a quick smile over her shoulder. "This is Byakuran-san. We had a bit of a mishap."
"I'm back," he says neutrally when he's confident his voice won't shake, and finally unslings the guitar case from his shoulder. With Haru's encouragement, he's found a part-time job playing at a local café to keep in practice. After a frantic moment of uncertainty, he falls back on his own experience. "Is he staying for dinner?"
"Certainly, if you're offering," Byakuran shifts, crossing his legs and looking between them with unsettling fascination. "It seems like my shirt might be a lost cause, and I don't think Haru-chan is willing to let me wander out into the cold December night without one."
"She wouldn't let me bike off into the balmy September afternoon without a replacement when we met," Shouichi says, toeing out of his shoes and moving to the kitchen. "So you're probably right on that count." He brushes his fingers over the chintzy little silver frame of the apple blossom where they can't see, hands shaking in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the chilly walk home from his workplace. Then he takes a deep, quiet breath and goes to check the fridge. He pauses, staring. "…Haru, why do we have so much sushi?"
"…because." Haru says evasively. "Ah, that's the last measurement, Byakuran-san. I'll be right back; I just need to grab my sewing kit and some fabric."
"Haru?"
"Yamamoto-kun came to visit!" She called after ducking into her room, safe from his judgmental glare. "He scares you so I made sure you were out while he came by this time."
"I am not scared of Yamamoto Takeshi," Shouichi lies, because they currently have a very obviously amused audience. He is, in fact, terrified by Yamamoto Takeshi. Perhaps he should be more concerned with her enduring links to the young man who slings around live explosives, or that horrifying baby in the fedora, or the little Bovino boy who got him into his current situation, but by far it's Yamamoto who terrifies him the most on some primal level. It's because he's so like Haru—bright and fun and easy to be around on the surface, and inhumanly devoted and capable just beneath that—he's so much like Haru that it feels, ironically enough, like a crime that Shouichi was the one Haru chose to follow in the end, rather than Yamamoto and his group of friends. It isn't a romantic connection, but the two of them have an understanding, nurtured by shared early morning workouts and brilliant, unfaltering smiles and easy acceptance of criminal activity for the sake of their dear friends.
Yamamoto is the only one that makes the effort to come visit Haru with anything resembling regularity, now free from his team obligations due to Namimori's third-year policies, and each time he meets Shouichi with a bright smile, a hard clap on the shoulder, and the jolliest breed of resentment in his eyes. Depending on how well he takes to being an active member of a crime syndicate, Shouichi is rapidly becoming more and more concerned that the younger man may one day kill him in cold blood and then swoop in to be Haru's crying shoulder at his funeral.
"Of course," Haru humors him, swanning back out of her room with a new, sleek black button-up in her arms, which she hands to Byakuran as his eyebrows shoot up.
"That was…" His eyebrows inch higher as he shrugs into it and fastens it up, rolling his shoulders and enjoying what is undoubtedly a perfect fit. "Astonishingly fast."
"That's Haru, pretty much," Shouichi comments, more comfortable with this monster than the cheerful, steadfastly friendly and respectful Yamamoto. "She's great with sewing. All handicrafts, really."
"Oh, hush," Haru huffs, brushing past him with a bump of her hip to grab one of the meticulously wrapped sushi platters from the refrigerator. "Shou-chan's the really amazing one—he's double-majoring in Engineering and Music Composition."
"Fashion and International Studies don't exactly constitute a light course load either," Shouichi bumps her back, rummaging around their cupboards. "Uh, B-Bykauran-san?" He trips over his own tongue briefly. "We've got a bunch of cider—alcoholic and normal. Other than that, there's water, some milk—uh, actually, no, scratch that." He squints at the carton and gives it a little shake. "There's like two sips left in this. Yamamoto Takeshi could've at least finished it off, if he was going to drink this much…"
"Quit being catty, Shou-chan," Haru admonishes him, but does not contradict him. "I'll use up what's left when I make breakfast."
This isn't the first time Yamamoto has done something like this, after all. Is it paranoid of him to suspect it's some sort of low-key harassment? The last time Yamamoto visited, he somehow used up nearly all of Shouichi's toothpaste when he stayed the night. The tube had been half-full the previous morning, so Shouichi doesn't think he's just imagining the passive-aggressive assault.
"Whatever the two of you are having is fine by me, Shou-chan." Byakuran says, uncrossing his legs and standing to peer at them with even greater levels of fascination. The endearment rolls off his tongue with unsettling ease, sounding so natural that Shouichi doesn't even think to correct him.
"Well, if you're drinking with us we should get a futon ready too," he says, unthinking.
Haru chokes on her own giggles as she pulls down some plates, and Byakuran's amusement swells like a balloon.
"My," says their guest. "Should I have some expectations?"
Shouichi blanches. "No!" He bursts out. "I—wh… no. I just, I meant—Haru, she's not going to be any more willing to let you wander out into the cold December night drunk than she is willing to let you out shirtless! I didn't… there's nothing to expect."
"Nothing but fantastic hospitality," Haru covers for him, shoulders still trembling with poorly hidden mirth despite her wide, innocent gaze. She is definitely her father's daughter.
Shouichi shuts his mouth and grabs some glasses, before he can make things any worse. They all settle down at the low table in front of the couch, and Byakuran's gaze has a physical weight to it, this close. Shouichi isn't sure if he's more comfortable when he feels it himself, or when he doesn't and it's bearing down on Haru alone. Haru, naturally, is entirely comfortable with the situation, gaily engaging Byakuran in a discussion about his likes, dislikes, studies, hobbies, and career goals.
"I'm the future Thirteenth Head of the Gesso Famiglia," Byakuran informs them, nonchalantly sipping at his cider. "The cousin who most recently inherited the title was diagnosed with a terminal illness, so a lot of my current time is going into learning how to run the syndicate."
"Of course you are," Shouichi sighs, because of course he is, and Haru squeezes his knee underneath the table. Be nice, he can practically hear her say. It is a bit too callous, even for him, he can admit. "Sorry about your cousin."
"Oh no," he waves off their concern. "I've never even met the man, don't worry."
Oh, pleasant.
"Well then, in that case, here's to his health," Haru tops up each of their drinks and raises her own in a toast. Haru is a nice girl, the way Yamamoto is a nice boy. Byakuran just watches her for a moment, before something wicked and deep snaps through his eyes and he gamely taps the lip of his glass to each of theirs, even though Shouichi's had only been reluctantly dragged up by Haru.
Shouichi is pretty sure the foreigner has just decided that he's going to keep them, and quietly despairs.