YaKasumi.
Prologue.
Kasumi Tendo was crying. This didn't, as one would expect, bring the entire Tendo household, plus guests, charging in to find and destroy what had caused this event, as the rest of the Tendos were a little too busy doing crying of their own at the moment, and one of their house guests was tossing cats into a freshly dug pit, in preparation for throwing the other into it. The astute reader would now realize that Ranma hasn't arrived at the Tendo Dojo yet, and Kasumi Tendo was approximately nine years old, as she huddled on a bench in the park, her shoulders shaking with tears.
The girl didn't even notice as an older man settled down on the other end of her bench, producing a bag full of bread scraps and beginning to spread them on the grass before him for the birds. Sighing, he dropped his bread bag to the ground and looked across at the brown haired girl. "What's wrong with you?" he asked, bluntly.
"Hmm?" Kasumi asked, looking up from her crossed arms, rather startled by the question.
"I said, what's the matter with you?" the old man repeated, sounding irritable. "You sit crying in a public park? What are you, an idiot? You've got 'target' painted all over you."
The brunette rubbed one hand to clear her eyes, so that she could get a better look at the other. She noted that he had short, neatly cropped black hair, and his face had several jagged looking scars running across one side. In addition, he wore a dark suit with one arm rolled up just enough to show a tattoo of a snake biting its own tail. "Um..." she said, nervously, sliding slightly backwards on the bench.
"Oh, so you were content to huddle there and stare at your own arms before, but now you see me, you're afraid?" the large man asked, rolling his eyes. "Seriously, kid, what's wrong. I want to know."
"N... nothing," Kasumi stuttered, looking away. She knew that things weren't doing very well, ever since her mother had died, her father had fallen pretty well to pieces, and she'd heard someone from the bank talking about taking the Dojo, but she was pretty sure that she didn't want to talk about it with some random person she met in the park.
"Nothing, huh?" the large man asked, leaning back against the bench and grunting slightly as he cracked something. "Must be an awful lot of it. Last time I cried over nothing this much it was 'cuz I had to shoot my favorite dog."
"You shot a dog?" Kasumi asked, actually somewhat horrified.
"He'd gone nuts," the man shrugged. "Only thing I could do. Make 'im die with some dignity, rather than after he'd done something stupid. It's always important, having dignity..." He trailed off, shaking his head. "Got off topic, there. But you going to tell me about your nothing, or what?"
Kasumi shook her head, though the man's words did run around in her mind for a moment. One thing she was sure of was that her father was nowhere near dignified, though her mother had been, at the least. She'd made the mistake, over the last year, of looking up the medical facts of the illness that had taken the Tendo matriarch and, though she hadn't understood all of the medical particulars, knew that it was extraordinarily painful. "She just smiled," she muttered, confused.
"Hmm?" the old man asked, curiously. Kasumi shook her head and stood, walking away. "Hey, so what, you're not gunna tell me now?" he asked. "Feh, kids. I'll never understand them."
Grunting, he scooped up his bread bag, stood and started ambling down a path towards the opposite edge of the park. Seeing a small, grey car, he walked up and opened the back door.
"Did you have an interesting walk, sir?" the driver asked, adjusting his mirror several times, carefully.
"There was no walk," the old man replied, evenly.
"Of course, sir," the driver said, before the black haired man slammed his door, and the car moved away from the curb.
HR.
"B... but sir, I'm begging you, please reconsider!" a short, rather weaselly looking man stuttered, nervously.
"The boy is NOT a demon of annoyance, and we are NOT paid to deal with him," the man Kasumi had met before snarled. "I don't care how much bad Shakespeare he quotes, if you can't get him to leave, that is your problem." He shrugged, gesturing over to a corner, where a seven year old boy was standing on a table, waving a dessert spoon around. "Besides, I hear he's rich. Just overcharge him and it'll make up for anyone he drives away."
"But I..." the ice cream shop owner stuttered, his expression locked somewhere between panic and outrage.
"Not our problem," the large man said, his words clipped off in obvious irritation. "If you call us in over this one more time, our protection is cut off, and you wouldn't want that to happen, would you?"
"N... n... no, sir. It won't happen again, sir," the weaselly man stuttered, going pale. The last time he'd seen a place that these guys had withdrawn protection from, it'd ended up a parking lot.
"Good," the large man said, nodding and turning to leave the building, two suited men following him out. As he looked back at some particularly violent wrenching of Hamlet into a reason for providing more ice cream, he felt something bump into his side, and there was a clattering noise.
Looking back the way he was going, he saw a brown haired girl who he recognized sprawled out on the ground, a grocery basket laying sideways next to her and what looked like several apples rolling into the street. "Yoshi, Toji, pick those up," he barked, and the two men behind him nodded, walking past him and starting to collect the spilled foodstuffs without a comment.
"You all right, kid?" the old man asked, looking down at Kasumi and offering her a hand up.
"I'm fine, thank you," Kasumi said, bowing slightly after she'd gotten her feet under her. When the two men who had gone to collect her food came back, revealing that the piece of pork on the top of the pile had apparently either been stepped on or driven over, she grimaced down at it.
"Huh, that's no good for eating," the old man said, grabbing the meat off of the top of the pile in the basket and tossing it into a nearby garbage can. "Here." Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a five thousand yen bill and handed it to her.
"I really can't take this," the girl said, shaking her head and trying to give it back.
"To hell you can't. It's easy, see, you already have," the older man said, turning and walking off.
"But..." Kasumi said, considering taking off after him, but her groceries were still in the basket at her feet. Sighing and vowing that she'd find a way to pay the man back, she scooped up her basket and headed back to the butcher's shop.
HR.
"This again, huh?" the old man sighed, as he slumped down on one end of a bench, setting the cane his doctor had recently ordered him to start using to one side. "So, we going to go through the whole shtick where you don't tell me what's wrong and act all mysterious again?"
"How did you get over shooting your dog?" Kasumi asked, quietly, causing the man's eyebrow to lift.
"Lots of booze, mostly," he admitted. "Not a good idea for kids your age, though. I hear it shoots the liver straight to hell."
"Oh," Kasumi muttered, knowing that she had the key to her father's Sake stash, but doubting it was a good idea.
"So, you are going to be all closed lipped again, huh?" the old man asked, leaning back and staring up at the sky. "I'm guessing this is worse than what happened with my dog, or at least you think it is."
"Of course it is!" Kasumi shouted, before clamping her mouth closed and looking away. "Father tried to start classes in the Dojo last week, to make some extra money, but he just... he started crying in the middle of class. Everyone at school the next day, they..."
The old man had wanted to help the kid, for some reason. Heck, when he'd first seen her a week before, his first inclination was to ignore her and let her sort out her own problems. The Kami knew that he sucked at solving personal issues. Still, he wasn't expecting her to lunge at him, and he was half way through reaching for a concealed knife in one sleeve when she clamped herself around his middle and started crying.
"H... hey now," he stuttered, uncomfortably. "Now calm down, it's gunna be okay, it's not like somebody died, or some..." abruptly, she began sobbing harder. "Oh hell, somebody died. Well damn it..."
His eyes shooting around the park, the old man noticed that no one was nearby, and cursed the intimidating appearance he usually relied upon. At the moment he'd do anything to have some random housewife show up and start comforting the kid, but no one was going to, so sighing, he scooped her up into his lap and began cradling her. "Hey, it's okay, all right? Just calm down..."
HR.
"That was interesting," the man in the front seat of the old man's car said, as his employer climbed in the back.
"Shut up, Yoshi," the old man snapped back, dabbing his suit jacket where Kasumi's tears had soaked it.
"Yet another walk that didn't happen, sir?" Yoshi asked, a small, sardonic grin on his face.
"Shut up, Yoshi," his employer said again, glaring.
"Yes sir," Yoshi replied, adjusting his mirror a few times before starting away from the park. Honestly, he sort of wondered why he'd signed on in Nerima, other than the fact that the place was so weird he just had to. Most of the time, people in his position had to deal with covering up when their superiors accidentally blew a quarter of the group's money on drugs, or whores, or drugged whores. With the old man, he had to conceal illicit bread feeding and little girl comforting sessions. At least it was better than the group of people he flat out refused to work for, who also had to conceal things about little girls.
"Yoshi," the old man said, causing his driver's mind to rather thankfully drift away from his darker thoughts. "I want you to look up a Tendo family. Find their bank account and see if you can give it a slight injection."
"Yes, sir," Yoshi said, trying desperately to conceal a chuckle.
HR.
"We've got to stop meeting like this," the old man quipped, as he settled slowly down on the usual bench, where Kasumi was waiting with a plate of cookies. "People're going to start talking."
The eldest Tendo daughter just looked at him, blinking in confusion, and the dark suited man rolled his eyes. Kasumi was relaxing to be around precisely because she was so naive and friendly, but he still found it rather startling just how little she seemed to grasp of the real world.
"Just shut up and have a cookie," the girl responded, picking one up off of the plate and handing it to him.
He smirked. "I'm turning out to be a bad influence on you, kid," he muttered, chewing thoughtfully and then swallowing. "The guys are going to like these ones. New recipe?"
Kasumi nodded. "One from Mother's book," she replied.
"Hmm," the other nodded, before falling silent. "Well, it's a good one," he finally decided, after a few minutes. Kasumi actually frowned, having noticed the long pause. She contemplated asking what was wrong, but knew that she would likely get no answer, or even more maddening, a response of 'Young girls shouldn't know about that sort of thing.'
"Kasumi," the old man finally said. "I think I'm going to be taking off soon."
"Taking off?" the brunette asked, confused.
"Yeah, I'll be leaving the country for a while." He shrugged. "Got in a little trouble, you know. Old gambling buddies," he waved his hand. "Might not be back for a real long time."
"Oh," the eldest Tendo daughter said, kind of disappointed. "Will you write? I know you know where I live."
The old man jumped, kind of startled and wondering how she'd figured that out, but shook his head. "Nah, but I'll have Yoshi show up and visit, make sure you're doing all right."
The twelve year old flinched slightly. Yoshi was a rather intimidating man, radiating a presence similar to what her father once had, before her mother died, but without the protective element that had always reassured her. "Well, then you should take all the cookies. They've got to last you," she decided, trying to look cheerful.
"Yeah, guess I should," the old man laughed. "I'll enjoy them." Nodding, he stood and picked up the plate, heading for his car.
HR.
"You god damned vultures!" The entire table flinched back as the boss brought down his hand, shaking the china plate that sat next to his seat. "They just told me about this three weeks ago, and I can already tell that half of you found out and are trying to suck up."
"Sir, I don't know what you're..." one man started, before being pinned by the older man's steely glare.
The old man paced around the table, looking down at each of his higher ranked men one after another. Most of them looked him in the eye, but he noted at least five who turned away, refusing to face him. "Well, I want it to stop. I'm not in the ground yet, damn it."
"But sir, it is a legitimate question," the same person who had been glared at earlier piped up before he could stop himself. "One of us will have to take your place after..."
"Who said it would be one of you?" the boss demanded, raking his eyes across the room, and stopping as he noted Yoshi standing next to the door. He winced, realizing that he'd actually just excluded his real pick for leadership of the organization.
"Then who?" Yoshi actually caught himself saying, honestly curious. He didn't even really want the position of leader, but had felt it to be an almost inevitable fate ever since he'd entered the old man's inner circle. This revelation was rather surprising.
The tall man stopped for a moment, facing away from the group, before his shoulders shook a few times and he turned back. "Kasumi Tendo," he said, flatly.
Confused murmurs ran around the room, as sixteen people tried to place the name while one stared incredulously.
"You heard me, my heir is Kasumi Tendo," the man grunted. "Until she is ready for her responsibilities, Yoshi will act as a sort of... what're those called?"
"A regent, sir?" Yoshi asked, calmly, trying to keep the look of dumb shock off of his face.
"Yes, a regent," the old man barked, glaring around the room and daring anyone to disagree with him. No one did, though in most cases it was because they were too confused. Nodding decisively, he turned and marched out.
END.
This one isn't a crossover! Well, unless you count all the mob comedy movies we swiped in order to build the boss man. Also, note that the story is definately in the more comedic style, and along with Nerima being Nerima, the mobsters aren't exactly... normal, for any organized crime family anyone's ever heard of.