Author's Note: I realized when I was rereading that I made Leora much taller than her age was supposed to be, especially since she's supposed to be small for her age. So here's the edited chapter.
Star of the Circus
Chapter 3
Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it – memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.
-Tad Williams
Leora woke to a pounding headache and a mouth that felt like it was coated in grit.
Scrubbing the roof of her mouth with her tongue a few times, the carney decided that water could wait and snuggled farther into the bed to sleep off the dregs of what felt like a really bad hangover.
Then she remembered where she was.
Bolting upright turned out to be a bad idea as she over balanced, tumbling off the bed and onto a sleeping Tsuna. She had no idea why he was on the floor in the first place but his startled screech did nothing to help ease her headache. Or panic.
Because she was in an anime.
An anime that she had watched in her free time. An anime where the underworld was everywhere, people could burst into Flame, and cursed babies kept the world from ending while their dead counterparts policed the criminally inclined. An anime where the main character's life would go to hell when he was thirteen. A main character who had run her over and dragged her home with him before presenting Leora up to his mother like she was a puppy he wanted to keep.
A main character who had stopped screaming and was now looking at her in concern.
It was hard to move once the initial adrenaline spike wore off. Everything just felt so heavy; her arms, her legs, her head. Like the blood had frozen in her veins, making each numbed movement stiff and awkward.
Her vision narrowed down to a point, focusing only on Tsuna. His spiky hair and concerned, too big eyes. He was talking, probably to ask her a question, but the words were distorted, barely heard over the pounding in her ears as it fully sank in that this was real.
Leora wasn't sure how she managed to get to her feet and stay upright. She wasn't sure she actually garbled out the strangled sounding I have to go, or how she made it down the stairs without breaking her neck. One second she was staring at Tsuna, the next she was out of the house and running.
The cold was still in her blood, creeping its way from her chest, inching its way in waves down her limbs in time with the pounding in her ears. But she kept running. She tore through the residential area, making lefts and rights in a mad dash to get away. When the scenery gave way to something familiar she sprinted by the warehouses, covertness abandoned.
Leora tore over the bridge, Home Base her supplied somewhat hysterically, and kept going into the woods. She ran until she couldn't see the buildings anymore. She ran until her legs, cramped with bare feet that were scratched and bleeding, gave out.
Unable to get back up, to keep going, to run away, Leora curled into a ball and screamed.
It was dark, she noted absently. The ground was cold too, mist curling around the edges of trees and shrubs, but Leora kept her eyes firmly on the small gap between the trees and the few stars that were peeking through. She didn't try to get up.
Her whole body ached again, like when she first woke up into this nightmare. And it was a nightmare. She'd lost the only place she'd ever called home, the only people she'd ever called family, and for what? Some fucked up fanfiction plot that she'd never truly wanted to experience.
A small part of her whispered that they hadn't abandoned her. That they really, truly wanted her and hadn't abandoned her like she meant nothing.
That small relief was drowned out by the larger part of her, the more practical side, which pointed out that she was never going to see them again.
It hurt.
God, did it hurt.
Leora knew she needed to get up soon, needed to get warm and find shelter. Probably needed to eat. She never did make it to dinner at Tsuna's house, and she had done her panic-run-freak out before getting any breakfast. She should be hungry.
She wasn't.
All she really felt was numb, empty, and kind of broken, like a shattered cup that someone had glued the pieces of back together wrong.
What was she supposed to do now?
She didn't have any money. No clothes, no shoes, no place to stay. No real reason to get up every day.
That last one made the broken feeling worse. Her whole life from the age of six had revolved around the circus, doing her part, making them realize that she was worth the investment they put in her. She had found her place, her niche, something she was good at, enjoyed doing.
That didn't exist anymore.
She didn't choose to jump dimension, didn't want to be in an anime. She had no reason to change the plot. The only reason she'd met Tsuna was because he bowled her over. Everything worked out in the end so she wasn't needed.
Leora entertained the thought of just lying there, not moving, until everything just stopped. Until she stopped.
Five minutes later she was hauling herself up onto unsteady feet, stumbling back the way she came, being careful not to twist her ankle on one of the many roots hidden in the dark.
Sifu Yaozu and Amma Eva always said she had good eyes. They probably wouldn't be happy a trek through an unfamiliar forest, barefoot, and at night was what she was using them for, but they would understand.
Her family would never forgive her if she just gave up. Right now she only needed to live. She'd find a reason later.
Leora ended up sleeping in the woods that night, despite making it out of the trees. The numbness was still there, making it harder to grab things, and climbing back up the rope to her bridge would become more suicidal than safe.
There were also groups of men standing between the warehouses, smoking, drinking, and being altogether intimidating. So she slept under a bush for the few hours it took for the sun to rise and the gang to clear out.
Then she went back into town to find a more secure place to call Home Base.
No one was glaring at her this time. She got a few odd looks for being barefoot, but for the most part she was invisible to all the people around her.
It was kind of amazing what a change of clothes could do, but the few stares that she did get made her skin crawl. She didn't want these people looking at her.
So she kept to the roof tops.
She made a short detour into an alley behind a restaurant to scrounge up the breakfast she didn't really want but knew she needed – the burger tasted like ash – and Leora was back to hobo house hunting. Joy.
Sarcasm fully intended.
There really wasn't much to work with, if she was being honest. After hours of jumping roofs and ducking in and out of alleys Leora didn't have much to show for it, besides being more comfortable in her smaller frame.
Namimori was severely lacking abandoned buildings and rundown apartment complexes. When it started getting dark again, Leora settled for sleeping on top of a small antique shop until the next day. Not that she slept much. After the first nightmare of the big top burning down she resigned herself for staring at the night sky until morning.
As soon as the sun came up, she was off again.
She was back on the antique store roof come nightfall, frustrated, and chilled from a surprise shower sometime around lunch time. She had dried off, but she was still colds.
She had managed to snag several water bottles and a few apples that she hadn't eaten yet from the market district during the chaos that apparently was a special sale day. Leora didn't see what was so special about it. To her it looked like a horde of starving hyenas masquerading as housewives attacking each other for a bag of rice.
It must be a cultural thing.
Either way, the hoard had been too preoccupied to notice their wallets getting lighter so that worked for her. She was now the proud owner of ¥22,000. An actual apartment might actually be possible, albeit a really cheap one, if she could make off with at least another ¥10,000 from the market district.
Hopefully.
Leora really had no clue how much apartments should cost. She'd never needed one before, least of all in Japan.
So, apartment hunting. One that would be decent enough to not be falling apart around her, but questionable enough that they wouldn't call the police on the 112 cm brat trying to rent an apartment on her own with no parents, no papers, and no shoes.
She really needed to find some shoes, but all the kids size ones where sold in the department store. She wasn't a good enough thief to make it past all the clerks and video cameras. Plus she was still barefoot. A kid walking into a department store barefoot and dirty was pretty much the same as wearing a blinking neon sign that screamed Desperate: Keep In Sight!
Why the hell did she have to turn into a kid on top of falling into another dimension? It just made things so much harder. And cliché. She wasn't even going to start about how cliché this whole clusterfuck was.
Day three of hobo house hunting actually paid off.
The building itself was tiny, only two stories with eight apartments to the whole building and on the edge of Namimori near the warehouse district. The bricks were a grey streaked brown in some places, black in others while the stair case and railing were badly rusted. Paint was peeling in thick stripes off most of the doors and what she could see of the tiny, barred windows was coated in grim. Most of the lightbulbs by the doors were busted out and the glass left where it landed. A small vacancy sign was propped up by the only door that looked like somebody cared enough to wash it.
The place looked like a drug den in the making, and any sensible person would have instantly said 'nope' and kept hunting.
Leora knocked on the door with the sign.
Someone inside dropped something, cursed, then dropped something else. There was a lot of clattering, more mumbled curses, then the door was yanked open by the scariest woman Leora had ever seen.
She wasn't that much taller than Leora's small stature, maybe another thirty centimeters or so, with a rail thin body the carney had only seen on the starving or really, really old. A towel was pinned haphazardly over greasy hair that fell into a sagging face that looked like it had been smashed with a frying pan. When she sneered Leora could see that she was missing teeth.
"Wha' da yah want, brat." Her breath reeked of sour food and alcohol, and made Leora's eyes water. It took considerable more will power than should be necessary not to step back to breathe easier.
"An apartment." The woman spat on the ground and pointed a cracked fingernail in Leora's face.
"This ain't no toy house brat. Go home an' play with yur dolls."
"I don't have dolls." Leora said with a calm she didn't feel. "Or a home. You gonna rent me one or not?"
"Wha'd you do? Got mad at mummy and daddy? Run away?" the crotchety old bitch spat, pulling a cigarette out of a pocket and lighting up with the lighter she'd pulled out the other.
"No. The place went up in flames with everyone in it." Leora spat back bitterly, watching with a curl of satisfaction as the old bitch jerked in shock. "How much for an apartment?"
It was less a question and more of a demand, and they both knew it. The landlady eyed her for a bit, dragging on her cigarette before blowing a lungful of smoke in Leora's face.
"¥39,000." Leora snorted.
"¥20,000"
"This ain't no charity, girl." The landlady growled, jabbing her lit cigarette in Leora's face.
"The place is a wreck and I doubt the rooms are much better." Leora countered, crossing her arms. "You want me to pay more, fix the place up. ¥20,000."
"¥35,000."
"¥21,500."
"¥34,500."
"¥22,000." The lady looked murderous.
"¥34,000." She grit out around her cigarette. "Apartments ain't cheap, brat."
"They are when they're run down and don't have any tenants." Leora tossed back, "¥24,000."
"¥33,000."
"¥28,000 and I'll throw in two bottles of sake with a carton of cigarettes once a month with the rent." The landlady looked dubious.
"How're yah gonna get that you brat?"
"Do you really care as long as you get it?"
The lady squinted at her through a haze of smoke, trying to find any cracks in Leora's utterly bored expression. Finding none, she took one last drag on her cigarette before dropping it and grinding it under the toe of her fuzzy pink slippers.
"If da cops come by, Ah'm tellin' them yah broke in." she announced before pulling out another cigarette. "You can have 2B."
Stamping back inside her apartment, the old lady slammed things around for a bit before returning with a battered looking key. She stomped up the stair with more force than Leora thought they could hold before stopping at a door and unlocking it.
Pocketing the key that was tossed at her head Leora pulled out ¥22,000 and handed it over. The woman snatched it greedily before starting to count. She scowled when she realized it was short.
"This ain't ¥28,000 girl."
"You'll get the rest tomorrow. Your booze and cigarettes at the end of the month. I'll pay rent every first of the month."
"You don get ta call the shots, brat." Leora's new landlady sneered. It apparently was her default expression. Leora glared right back.
"Do you want my money or not?"
The old bitch scowled some more, spat at Leora's bare feet, and stomped her way back down the stairs. Waiting a minute longer to hear the door the floor below her slam shut, Leora closed and locked her own door.
Then she turned around to see her new living space.
There was a short hallway leading into the main living space just past that weird little step thing all Japanese households seemed to have that held a small sink, a burner, an ancient looking washing machine, and an equally ancient looking mini fridge. Across from that was the bathroom.
It didn't have much of a bath. The tub looked more like an oversized bucket that could easily be spanned by her smaller arm reach. The toilet was crammed right next to it in a corner. There wasn't a sink – she figured that she was going to have to use the one in the hallway – but there was a mirror on the opposite wall. The water ran and the toilet worked, so Leora overlooked how dirty it was.
The main room wasn't much. Small, square little room with a scratched wooden floor, a small window, and a single bare light bulb that was starting to flicker. Leora scrunched up her nose at the gritty feeling the floor had. She didn't want to know what the grey stuff on the walls was.
A closet took up some of the available space. A dusty futon was crammed in the bottom half of it and Leora did a mental happy dance at the find. Once she managed to beat the dust out and wash it, she would have a halfway decent – if somewhat threadbare – bed.
All in all, her filthy little shoebox place wasn't as bad as she thought it would be. It definitely beat sleeping in the woods or on somebody's roof again. And no roaches. She couldn't stand roaches.
Taking one last look around Leora left her new apartment, careful to pick her way around the glass that could embed itself into her already abused feet.
She needed to get her hands on the remaining ¥6,000 and some cleaning supplies. And shoes. She really, really needed to find a pair of shoes.
Her feet couldn't take much more of this.
.
Getting the remaining money turned out to be harder than she thought. There weren't any more sales going on currently at the shopping district to distract people from the lightening on their purses. There also weren't that many people out shopping this close to dinner time. So Leora did something that was probably stupid.
She helped herself to the pockets of a group of high school aged delinquents who were smoking and well on their way to being drunk off their asses.
She had to pretend to be lost, stumble a bit, act afraid, and bolt almost immediately after, but she now had ¥9,000 and enough cartons of cigarettes to cover her bitch of a landlady for the next two months.
She probably shouldn't have promised sake as part of her rental agreement. That would be a lot harder to get her hands on than cigarettes.
Stopping at the park from her first day walking around Namimori, Leora went through a mental to do list.
She needed to get her stuff from the bridge. No one should've seen the rope, but there was still a chance someone might. The stuff might not be very useful, but it was from Home. She wasn't going to risk losing it.
Cleaning supplies was still high on her list. The whole apartment needed a good scrubbing, and she wanted to be able to fall asleep there without waking up covered in dust.
Laundry detergent was another one. Tsuna's clothes were starting to smell after her mad dash through the woods, sleeping on rooftops, and more dumpster diving. The futon needed a good wash too.
Wincing as one of the many cuts on her feet stung, Leora shifted her priority list around to put shoes at the very top. Which made it tied with a first aid kit.
…Probably should get the first aid kit first. The cuts really needed to be cleaned.
Standing on her much abused feet she started to leave the park, intent on making use of the last few hours of daylight she had left.
"Wait!"
Jerking around, Leora came face to face with a running main character who promptly tripped, falling into the carney and sending them both sprawling. Again.
Leora wheezed as Tsuna's elbow jabbed into her stomach in his mad scramble to get off of her.
"Hieee, I'm s-sorry!"
"Ss fine." She managed after she took a minute to get her breath back and levered herself back upright. "We need to stop meeting like this. You're heavy."
Tsuna's already distressed face when bright red. Averting his eyes, he twisted his hands together, fiddling with his fingers in a nervous way that she had done when she was a kid herself.
Standing up and dusting herself off, Leora held out a hand to help him up. He looked shocked, and a tad bit wary, but he still took it after a moments deliberations. He went bright red again when she started dusting him off.
"I'm sorry I ran out like that." Leora said after an awkward moment where the two of them just stared at each other. "I just really…needed to go." Get away get away her mind supplied, the semi-hysterical chant that had been pushed into a corner since she'd broken out of her panic, but not completely silenced.
It was easier to push aside the more she focused on other things. Like talking to Tsuna, oddly enough. This was the quietest it had been yet. She thought being near one of the main sources of her big breakdown would make it worse.
"Um, it's going to be a while before I can return your clothes." Leora added as an afterthought, more than a little sheepish, and ashamed, of the fact. "All of mine are gone, so…yeah."
"I-it's fine!" Tsuna hurried to assure, arms flailing around a bit. "You can k-keep them as long as you l-like."
Tangling his fingers together again, Tsuna took a deep breath before squaring his shoulders and looking her directly in the eyes.
"D-do you want to come over for d-dinner? You m-missed it last time." Almost immediately after the words left his mouth his determined face crumbled, turned bright red, and his eyes went straight to the ground. He fidgeted even more than before.
Meanwhile Leora was seriously weighing the options.
On one hand it would be wasting what few hours of daylight she had left. She wasn't stupid enough to walk around the warehouse district at night, but she really wanted her few possessions to be in a safe and secure location. Her apartment might be a step or two up from a hovel, but the lock was surprisingly sturdy.
On the other, free food. She didn't have anything but the two apples she'd stolen from the market…which she forgot to eat. She hadn't really gotten her appetite back once most of the numbness wore off. This not being hungry thing was going to be dangerous if she wasn't careful.
They also might have a first aid kit that she wouldn't have to steal or spend money on.
She was also feeling just a teensy, tiny build guilty for probably scaring a kid with her run-away-freak out after he'd taken her home as an apology for running her over.
"If your mom doesn't mind, sure. I need to apologize to her too."
The smile Tsuna shot her was blinding. Literally. Leora had to fight the urge to shade her eyes from the sparkles that were popping to life around his head.
Holy shit, it's genetic.
Feeling a bit theatric – probably because of the sparkles, the circus master would've killed for those kind of illusions – Leora swept out her hand as she bowed from the waste.
"Lead the way Sawada-san."
Flustered, but still grinning, Tsuna started off down the street, Leora falling into step beside him which seemed to make him smile even more.
The grin stayed in place until they had made it back to Tsuna's house, when he caught sight of her scratched up feet while taking off his shoe and screeched.
"Hieeee, what happened to your feet?!"
"I lost my shoes. Does your mom have a first aid kit I can borrow?"
Bodily hauling her across the floor to the kitchen in a mad dash to get to his mother, and the first aid kit, was completely unnecessary, and equally unappreciated. He ended up tripping halfway there and making them both face plant into the floor.