It's been FOUR CENTURIES, APPROXIMATELY
I wasn't sure how I wanted the Mochida scene was going to go, so this festered a lot longer than it should have, but I outlined it properly two days ago and trucked right through it. And NOW IT'S DONE. I have the next chapter outlined too, so that shouldn't take literal months
Also, an older note I had pre-prepared:
It occurs to me that not everyone is omniscent of my stance on certain things and therefore might form some unfair expectations, so I want to be absolutely clear:
1. As a survivor of childhood sexual assault who was groomed all through my teen years to find my abuse normal, the idea of an adult dating a child is abhorrent to me on every single level. I find the idea I could be somehow promoting such a relationship with my works stomach-churning, especially considering my reoccurring interest in Reborn being intimate with emotionally needy teenagers. There is no romantic or sexual relationship between any adults and any children they interact with. I wish I didn't have to say "don't ship a 14-year-old with a grown-ass adult" but here this is anyway. I don't want to hear about anyone finding my sexual abuse tantalizing in the context of your fav characters. This includes child-on-child sexuality!
2. KOU IS A LESBIAN
Chapter 4
That Guy From Italy (Side B)
The radio hisses with feedback noise before kicking back on.
"—Your grades aren't improving," a sneering voice declares, tinny through the weak signal.
"I'm sorry, professor." It's a little hard to pick out with the audio quality and the briefness of the statement, but this must be Kou.
"You think you could be accepted into a good school like this? Your mother must be ashamed."
No response. Creaking noise.
"If you spent less time on reckless monkeying about and more time on studying, imagine what you could accomplish!"
No response. Paper being slapped against a hard surface. The tittering of classmates.
Based on the number of steps before the teacher stops again, Okumura Kenta is absent. No other student receives criticism harsher than a 'disappointing'.
Reborn twirls around in his office chair to the other side of the room, where he's set up documentation on people close to Sawada Kou, and adds a note to the teacher's file. There aren't many people on his corkboard; just a few friends of Nana, all of Kou's school teachers, and that irritable acquaintance…who she knows via her mother's friend.
Farther down the board are people Reborn doesn't really need to think about, like her doctor and the clan that lives in the Hakuyou area. She doesn't seem to spend a whole lot of time forming meaningful relationships with other people, beyond keeping up with her extended family.
It is, in total, not a whole lot to work with.
The second radio starts picking up noise. Reborn kicks off the wall, twirls back to the recording equipment, and turns the dial on the machine next to the radio giving him a live feed of Nezu Dohachiro bullying middle-schoolers. The playback gives him a muddled whine. He adjusts a few dials until it can cleanly parse the sound it's picking up.
"You don't know who he is? What kind of hitman are you?"
"…We don't exactly…socialize."
"Is that it? Or are you just too pathetic for anyone to pay attention to? Have you even killed anyone?"
Reborn holds up a finger for each voice that isn't Okumura Kenta.
"I don't have too— that's never been my job! I—"
"I've killed people. You want me to kill you?"
"No, I can— he has weaknesses!" Okumura's voice wobbles. "He's sick. And busy trying to protect…trying to protect Sawada's kid, right? So…all we gotta do is split them."
"Split 'em?"
"We can get them both," Okumura says quickly. "You can overpower the bodyguard, and I can get the girl. He's got Aura, I've seen it, we don't even need the blackmail! It's lower-risk!"
"How do you suppose we'll do that?"
Reborn leans forward in his seat, elbows perched upon his thighs, with his clasped hands held to his smirking face.
"How indeed."
-o-o-o-o-o-o-
Kou is miserable.
To be fair, she is often miserable. At school, her default mood is overwhelmingly 'blaaaahhhhh'. She doesn't have the energy to get too invested in the callous dismissals of her peers, since the people she really needs to suck up to are in Hakuyou, but being surrounded by people who think it's perfectly fine and normal to treat her like crap is obviously going to bother her anyway.
It's now bothering her a little more than usual, though, because she knows Kensuke slightly more than the rest of them, and now he doesn't like her.
Well…They've never liked each other much to begin with. But now he doesn't like her because he thinks she's amassing some sort of death cult, leaving her with only Reborn as the only person outside of her mom that she can actually talk to, and he's the source of the problem to begin with.
Kou has a problem with criminals. She's not scared of them, and doesn't find them reprehensible, but she just doesn't like them. They make extreme decisions and tend to be unpredictable, so when she has to deal with them, she spends more time feeling terrified and small than playing up basic social decorum. If she cried in front of a criminal teacher and chastised them, they'd probably waterboard her.
Criminals make her feel weak.
And miserable.
So far, Reborn's doing a bang-up job of living up to his background.
It isn't fair that Kensuke is avoiding her because of some guy who's harassing her. He should be the one protecting her from the harassing. They're childhood friends, sort of, well, not really, but she made a point of that when she was trying to get him to protect her, and now he should be more sensitive about her situation. He said he'd let her hang out with him and now he's so mad at her he'll probably lose it if she shows up like this, but she's out of options.
Kou peeks over the windowsill into the kendo hall. It's a little cramped in comparison to the gymnasium, but ever since the new wing of the school was built for the Judo and Boxing clubs, they've had more room to move and more time to practice, and the school's ranking has gone up.
She hasn't seen any notable difference ever since Kensuke became captain. She doesn't know enough about kendo to say if he's skilled or not; from what she's looking at right now, he seems to hit awfully hard, and doesn't have a lot of flourish. He manages to win the practice match she's watching, and from the way the rest of them react, that's common for him.
Kensuke pulls off his helmet and reclines on the side of the ring and another pair of boys step up. He chats with his clubmates while mopping up the sweat on his brow, looking like he's in a good mood. Kou leans from one leg to the other, weighing her options. She doesn't know what Kensuke's told his friends about yesterday. He might get mad at her for not saying the right thing.
Judging by how much of an asshole Kensuke is…
Kou slides in through the kendo hall's door and flattens herself against the wall, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, which is hard when you're wearing a bright orange cardigan. After a few moments, she's noticed by the boys turned her way, and Kensuke follows their gaze up to her. She winces at the dawning horror on his face.
Kensuke abruptly stands and marches over to her. He's so aggressive that Kou takes a step back, but he holds his back rigidly enough that he's probably not about to threaten her.
"What are you doing here," Kensuke hisses.
"I wanted to explain without Reborn being weird," Kou wrings her hands. "I didn't blow you off, or anything…"
"You may as well have, everyone thinks I got stood up by one of the biggest losers in the school! Do you have any idea how embarrassed I was?" Kensuke jabs her painfully in the shoulder.
"I went to school and got drugged up by—" Kou hesitates. "—Uh, actually, I think Reborn was the stalker? But he's here to keep other stalkers away from me, but one drugged me, is the point."
Kensuke stares at her, stunned. Then he strangles the air. "Are you crazy?"
"No, I— My dad is—" Kou realizes that the actual problem is too unreal to satisfy someone like Kensuke, and just settles on the closest possible equivalent, "my dad is in trouble with some guys, and since no one know where he is, they're trying to harass me and my mom until he talks to them. I'm in a lot of trouble!"
"What do you want me to do about it? You want to drag me into your dad's gang activity? Is your dad in a gang? Do you want me to join a gang?"
Kou grits her teeth. "I mean…I'd rather have you ignoring me rather than avoiding me, is all."
"So you tell me your dad's gang wants to kill you?"
"I think you're kind of misinterpreting—"
"Hey, she actually showed up!"
Kou takes another step back when one of Kensuke's friends throws an arm over his shoulder. He's a huge third year, and puberty was good to him, giving him a slight peach fuzz on his chin. Kensuke instantly crumples. He's a prideful person, the most prideful person Kou has ever known, and he's the team captain. These two have to have a tense relationship, if this guy is intimidating to him.
Which means Kensuke, as The Most Prideful, is going to let him say whatever he wants to avoid the brunt of his attentions.
"Uh, yeah…her uh…" Kensuke looks desperately at her. He knows her and was harassed by Reborn earlier, so her explanation makes sense to him, but to someone unfamiliar to both of them, her situation is going to sound totally ridiculous.
Kou tries to deviate even further. "My dad's drinking buddies started following me to school yesterday. I asked M…Kensuke, for help because I thought, uh," she glances to Kensuke's alarmed expression, "I could tell somebody was following me. I just saw like five guys waiting for me and panicked."
Kensuke relaxes, and he looks up nervously to the third-year. "Dumbass can't even wait for me to escort her to school, hehe."
"Oh, man, sucks to be you. Is your family in debt or something?" The third-year leans in closer, and Kou leans back.
"No, uhm, not really…I don't know why they're coming to me…?" She should have thought of an actual explanation for this. 'Extracting his knowledge of magical powers' doesn't really have the integrity for euphemisms.
"Well, aren't you lucky you have the kendo captain for a childhood friend!" He lifts his arm off of Kensuke's shoulders and takes a step closer. Kou is flattened against the door, now. "I doubt too many people would help a brainless chick like you anyway."
"You really get off on belittling people, huh," Kou says, because 'immune to social stress' often also means 'impervious to barriers of social restraint'.
"I'm sorry?" He looms over her.
"What's the point of calling me brainless? Do you get anything from it?" She gestures to the people watching them. "It's all fun to belittle people when you're talking to your friends, but why do it to my face?"
Kou can visibly see when her assertion of social decorum fails to land. She curls up a little into the door as the third-year rests an arm over her head and leans in, shadowing her entirely.
"I'm stating facts to your face because I'm having a conversation, you know? Loads of people use facts in conversations."
She clutches her bag tightly to her chest and tries to make eye contact with Kensuke, but he's looking at his other clubmates. They're laughing, like the third-year is getting in a fight, not bullying someone clearly weaker than him who is also a girl.
"You're stating facts while intimidating me. I'm pretty sure there's a difference," Kou mutters.
"I'm engaged in the conversation!"
It's not working. He knows he's being a bad person, and he enjoys it. Social decorum is totally meaningless to him. She can't talk herself out of this. Kou tries to sidle out from under him. "I-I don't think you should be this level of engaged when you're talking to a girl you don't know."
The third-year guffaws. "Like you even count as a girl?"
Kou's stomach clenches, and tears prickle at her eyes. She tries to catch Kensuke's gaze again. He looks wide-eyed at her, then the third-year, and the corners of his mouth pull up in a sagging, trembling smile.
"…Man, just back off. If anybody thinks you're into a chicks that ugly, your reputation is going to tank."
Kou chokes as the rest of them laugh. Kensuke's eyes slide to the floor, unable to meet hers. Her hands ball into fists around her bag, and her own sense of social decorum decays when she sees the third-year turned to Kensuke, appeased, laughing too, ignoring her like she's nothing, because he's set the stage and got everything he wanted. Kensuke's supposed to be the captain.
Before any tears can fall, she grabs the third-year by the front of his uniform and knees him in the crotch.
He hits the floor to a sudden hush. When he tries to sit up again, Kou wacks him over the head with her bag. Several boys let out a shocked 'ooohhhh'.
She sniffles and looks at Mochida directly. "And you're scared of him?"
He opens his mouth to speak, but she tears open the door and storms out. He doesn't call after her, and she doesn't turn back.
-o-o-o-o-o-o-
Kou is still steaming when she gets home, so she doesn't have the patience to deal with Reborn making stir-fry with her mother in their kitchen, shaking his hips to bubbly idol group pop music.
"Enjoying yourself?" She snaps.
"Immensely. Your mother is a culinary genius," says Reborn. Her mom holds a hand to her cheek and titters.
"Why don't you take those manners and give them to someone who needs them?" Kou bites back. She throws her bag hard enough at the sitting room table for it to skid and storms over to the phone in the dining room. She has her dad's number memorized, because he's listed as a second emergency contact in most of her files.
"Bad day at school?" Her mom asks.
"Mochida Kensuke can swallow worms for all I care."
"Her friend," her mom explains to Reborn, who knows damn well who Mochida Kensuke is.
Her dad doesn't answer the first time, or the second, or the third. She crawls under the sitting room table for privacy while also being close enough to Reborn for him to overhear her conversation, and rings until he picks up the seventh call.
"Sorry, I wasn't in," he says breathlessly. The calls must have made him run. Good.
"Send him back," Kou snaps.
"Tsuna?"
"Send him back to whatever mafia hellhole you found him in!" She pauses, remembers Reborn's explanation of his background, and adds, "and make your boss un-invite him from his next family get-together!"
She hears something that sounds suspiciously like Reborn laughing, and she slams the leg of the table with her foot to show her displeasure.
"Tsuna, I can't. Do you know how hard it was to find someone qualified enough to protect you and your mother from something this vague?" She hears a clink of glass on the other end of the line. "If I'm getting rid of him, I'm going to have to wait until we know what's going on. What's he done?"
"He let me get drugged," Kou says loudly, "and ruined all my friendships and doped me up with his smoke drugs, and made me look at him coughing up blood all over our bathtub! He's clearly not qualified!"
"Well, you're alive, aren't you?"
"Dad!"
"I don't have an answer for you, Tsuna. Unless he actively hurts you, you're going to have to wait at least another two months. Reborn is a friend, and I trust him not to do that."
Kou crawls out from under the table and leans over it, facing the door Reborn is leaning against. She glares at him, and his knowing expression. He let her call her dad. He knew what her dad would say.
"I fell off a roof, dad," Kou murmurs.
"Really? How'd you get out of that unscathed?" He at least has the mind to sound worried about it.
She stares at the woodgrain on the table. "…R…Reborn…"
"Oh, see? He may not be perfect, but he can still do his job. I'm not saying you aren't right, just that he's better than being kidnapped. Or…I suppose death. Did you break anything?"
"No," Kou sulks.
"Okay. That's good. Okay." Her dad takes a sip of whatever he poured for himself. "Listen, kiddo, I am juggling a lot of angry people right now, who are angry about a lot of different things. My schedule is booked from 10 to 10. If there's a problem, you can call right after school, but I just don't have time otherwise."
"How many criminals do you know? Are you in a gang?"
"Of— of course not. I just know a lot of people that are hard to get a hold of, and it's making me a bit of a target."
"What about your boss? Is he connected too? Does he even know? If your family is being threatened, why can't you go on leave and be here to stop it! Doesn't he even care?" Kou is tearing up again.
"It's…it's not that simple, kiddo. Especially right now."
"You lied to us," she sniffles.
Reborn's face is neutral.
Her dad is silent for a moment. It gives her tears time to hit the table. "I didn't want you to worry over nothing. It's never been a danger until now. Knowing is probably safer for you now, though. Sorry your old man isn't as above-board as you'd like."
"I don't…I don't care that you're not above-board." Kou's voice wobbles. "You should be home. You should be here to look after us."
"I will be, I promise. There's— we're all very confused. Reborn and I are both trying to figure out where the information on my family is coming from, and I can't leave, no matter what. But this doesn't…once it's over, you can go back to a regular life, and I so can I. I know it's a little weird to find all this out at once, and it may seem scary, but, well, I'm a little more cunning than I look." He laughs nervously, and then goes quiet again. When he speaks, it's with a nervous edge. "Hey, once I can get back, how's about you and me have a little father-son bonding time out on the lake?"
Kou's grip on the phone tightens until the plastic creaks. "No."
"It's…yeah, we can do whatever you want. You're a strong kid, you know that? You're practically a man already, this is—"
Kou's skin prickles, and the fact she's been actively lying to him blanks out of her mind. She gets up, hoists the phone back, and chucks it at the wall as hard as she can. Reborn watches impassively, not moving an inch, like he expected that to happen too. It infuriates her.
Kou breathes in harsh gasps. Her mother is calling after her, asking what happened. She roughly mops her damp cheeks, and fixes Reborn with a glare, daring him to comment. He doesn't, so she turns on her heel and storms upstairs, ignoring her mom. She can put two and two together.
Her half-finished bird is on her bed; Reborn was probably looking around. Kou takes the bird, chucks that at the wall too, and flops down face first. She has too much energy to just lie down there, so she wriggles up to her pillows, digs her face in, and screams until she feels like she's vented at least a little of her anger. Then she turns on her side and glares at the dent the wooden figure made in the wall. She should have thrown it harder. She should have thrown it so hard it embedded itself in the drywall.
There's a knock on her door.
"I don't want to talk about it," Kou says.
"I wouldn't expect you to." Kou jerks at the sound of Reborn's voice.
"What do you want?"
"I have a rough idea of what he said to you." Reborn slides into the room. His arms are still folded, but he's holding a box in one hand. He opens his arms up to show her. It's her estrogen patches.
Kou's face goes hot, and she buries her face back in her pillow.
Reborn ignores her embarrassment. "Your father asked me to look after his wife and son. Your file said 'Sawada Tsunayoshi'. I was very perplexed."
"Go away," Kou says wetly. Her voice creaks with the strain she put on it from screaming.
"Thankfully, I'm a responsible adult," he sits on the end of her bed, by the feet, just out of kicking range, "and I asked your mother about it."
Kou grabs a pillow and shoves it over her other ear.
"You're intersex. That's a lot of wiggle room. Hiding it from him means hiding medical records, forging at least a few documents, and getting your hormone replacement under the table, complicating a process that would have been otherwise very simple. You obviously don't like it when he misgenders you, so why go through that level of effort?"
Kou pops up from her pillow sensory deprivation chamber and curls her lip into a furious sneer. "You've met him, haven't you?"
"I have." His expression is cool and reading.
"Then you know what he's like. He was so excited to have a son, and he's hardly even here. What's one week of pretending if it means…"
"You think he's avoiding you," says Reborn. Kou curls into herself. "You think he's avoiding you, and if you being a girl makes him uncomfortable, he's going to avoid dealing with that too. And never come home."
Kou stares at her socks and wiggles her toes. Reborn's body is just beyond them, in her blurry peripheral vision. He's not moving, or reacting. Her toes clench along with her stomach. He has nothing to say, because he knows she's right. He knows her dad. He knows a lot of things. She still wants to punch him.
"Well." Reborn gets up and stands next to her. She refuses to look up at him. "I've been on protection detail often enough to know a miserable charge is an unmanageable one. What shall we do about that?"
"Nothing. Go away." She flops back down and turns to face the wall.
"Do you have a party dress?"
She blinks and turns back to look at him. He's already halfway to her closet. "Huh?"
"A party dress. Something you'd wear to a nice restaurant."
"I don't…I don't go to nice restaurants," she mutters.
"I'm sure your mother forces you to socialize at some sort of gathering, she's very pushy." He sorts through her clothes-rack, and stops at a piece of clothing she can't see. She sits up again to see better. Reborn pulls out a pastel pink dress with lace sleeves and frilly edges. "This will work."
"I'm not wearing that in public," Kou whines.
"Why not?"
"It'll look stupid on me." Tears bubble up again. She wishes they would stop. "It's too…"
"Too what? Girly?" He strides over and holds it up to her. "What's wrong with that?"
Kou stares at the gleaming pink of the taffeta skirts, and her lips tremble.
Reborn lowers the dress and uses the hook of the hanger to lift her chin up. She looks at his widow's peak instead of his face.
"You're a girl, aren't you?"
-o-o-o-o-o-o-
"I look stupid."
"Everyone looks stupid in a frilly pink taffeta party dress."
"Well I look stupider. I'm going home."
"I didn't spend an hour fitting that dress to you and teaching your mother how to do a flat seam so you could go home and hide in your pajamas, young lady."
Kou shuffles on the street corner, avoiding the gaze of the people walking past. She isn't sure if she wants the walking sign to light up so she can hurry past, or for it to take even longer so she has time to convince Reborn that this was a bad idea.
"I want to go out with mom," Kou tries.
"Can't. She's teaching her friends to flat seam."
"You planned this."
"I did not. You will find that I reserved a table for three when we arrive."
"You reserved a table!"
"I planned some things."
Kou folds her arms and huffs. Reborn had redid the band around her stomach and the shoulders so the dress fit her better, and cut the wrist seams open so they'd flare out instead of balloon in a hideous 80s-era heap of sagging lacy fabric, but Kou doubts it really did much. Reborn also did her makeup. Why does Reborn even know how to do someone's makeup?
Her mom did her hair, so at least there's one thing Reborn is bad at.
Reborn is, of course, effortlessly good-looking. He just threw on a suit and put a hat on and he's automatically gorgeous. The beautiful can never understand the ugly. A little facepaint and a smoother silhouette isn't going to make her look less gross, just like a haircut and a promotion to team captain didn't make Mochida less of an asshole.
The walking sign lights up. Reborn presses a glove hand to the small of her back to push her forward. She stands up straight and storms across the street. At least he didn't make her wear heels. The shiny red flats are a lot comfier than the dress.
The restaurant he picked out is so fancy it has its own decorative garden out front, with those tall pointy hedge bushes and everything. The lettering on the front is in curving gold roman letters, and the place is painted a rich, dark red that oozes luxury. Reborn pushes her in before she can read the katakana below the sign, and she nervously tip-toes over the wine-red carpet. Past the front entrance, it's soft and sinks under her soles.
"Five o'clock, table for three, Von Brant, not expecting our third," Reborn says to the maître d'hôtel.
"Of course, sir. Right this way."
The maître d' guides them past the main dining areas, where people don't look up from their tables, all the way to an area in the back hidden by wooden dividers with complicated carvings of flowers in them. She's a little relieved that she doesn't have to worry about being looked at now. Reborn doffs his hat, and she wrinkles her nose at the smooth, tidily brushed arc of his hair. The little dragon is sitting on top of it, robbed of its hellnest.
They're given their menus, and are told that their server will soon come to take their drink orders. Kou takes her menu and practically hides behind the laminated pages.
They serve their soft drinks in glasses, according to the picture, but Kou would feel bad going to a restaurant this fancy and getting a Bepsi. She skims down the page for something cool, and settles on iced tea. Satisfied, she starts flipping through the dinner menu. She skips the fish and ribs, and slows down when she gets to the pasta. It's not something she has often. Kou is used to eating out by herself, and she checks the price on instinct.
She pales.
Her eyes rake over the price tags, all of them clearing far over the 2,000 yen Kou has come to expect from decent restaurants. "Reborn…!"
"Hm?"
"The pricing is a little…"
"I'm a high-ranking mafioso, you think I can't afford dining for two at a four-star restaurant?"
She makes a noise of discomfort and shrinks down to rest her chin on the table. She likes steak, but it's easily the priciest type of meat on the list. Reborn probably is rich, but she doesn't want to be in debt to a criminal.
The waiter comes to take their drink orders. Kou orders her iced tea, and Reborn asks for a bottle of red wine. When the waiter leaves, Reborn places his briefcase in his lap and unlatches it.
"What are you…?"
"I told you I'd look into your school life, didn't I?" He takes out a piece of paper and hands it to her.
It's a science test. Her science test. It's marked with Nezu's furiously circled and underlined '10' in bright, accusatory red. She had hid it in her desk with all of her other terrible test scores. But now it's been marked in thick golden pen with looping handwritten notes in a language Kou can't quite pick out. The '10' has been scratched out in black felt pen, and replaced with a flourishing gold '40'.
She stares. Her eyes trace back down to the questions. Several sections are scratched out with that same black pen. Several of her answers have sections circled in gold and marked correct. The gold comments are arcing over the scribbled-out comments.
Her eyes sting.
"I've only seen a few of these, but it seems to be reoccurring theme in your science class. There's a notable lack of focus on your other tests, but it's science where your tests are actively sabotaging you."
"That can't be…Nezu-sensei harassed Okumura, not me."
"You think he can't do both?"
Her eyes drink in the flourishes of coloured ink. Could he?
"Sometimes, the world is just as unfair as it looks. Growing up is being able to distinguish that."
The waiter comes back with their drinks and takes their orders — beef stroganoff for her, and a gourmet burger with a side of potato wedges for Reborn. It's not an order that suits him, but she decides not to comment. Their menus are taken away, and Kou folds her hands tightly in her lap and sucks furiously at her iced tea. Reborn is distracted with something in his briefcase.
She doesn't know the time, and didn't bring a watch, so all she knows is that she's almost finished her entire cup and Reborn has put away the briefcase when Kou needs to pee. She squirms and looks around.
"Bathroom is through the door in the left-hand corner," Reborn says without looking up from his wine glass.
Kou stands and tries to leave their table as inconspicuously as possible. Again, no one pays her any mind. She still doesn't straighten her posture until she's past the door and away from any possible prying eyes.
The bathroom is clearly labeled, thankfully, and she pushes the door open to the lady's room. Her breath catches, even though she was kind of expecting the environment. The tiling is exquisite, and there are mirrored strips decorating the walls as the path winds into a warmly lit open room with eight Burgundy stalls and a huge set of mirrors that stretches all the way to the ceiling. She peers at the sinks. They're made with creamy porcelain. When she passes her hand under one of the gleaming taps, it spouts water automatically.
She's almost ashamed to pee here.
Almost, anyway. Kou dances into the stall just behind her and gets her business done. The toilet paper holder has a checkered pattern, to match the toilet lid. She feels like she's in an art exhibit.
Kou makes an effort to smooth her dress and check herself over before leaving the stall, just in case someone drops in to catch her looking dumb. Nothing seems out of place, so she carefully steps out into the extravagant bathroom to see her reflection revealing itself along with her.
Kou approaches the mirror, looking herself over. The dress doesn't hang off her, like it did when she first tried it on. It almost seems to float over her body, especially around the arms. The ends of the sleeves blossom out around her wrists, making them look delicate. Her hair pulled too tightly to her skull to go wild, and it blooms out from her sequined scrunchy. Reborn had pasted her face over with foundation, but there's not much colour to it, just a slightly pink glaze of lipgloss and a little more warmth to her cheeks.
Does she look okay? She can't tell. All she can see is herself. Her eyes are automatically picking out her. Does she look stupid with all this extra stuff tossed on top? Her fingers, covered in callouses and thin scabbed-over scratches, twist together in her reflection. She looks down at them, and puts them under the water as an excuse to not look up again.
She holds her hands up when they're adequately scrubbed and looks for a paper towel dispenser. Her face pulls when she sees it next to the air-dryer. The thing dispenses padded paper towels she'd use to clean up grease spills. Who pays for this?
The door of one of the stalls creaks as she dries her hands, and her spine goes straight in anticipation of being judged. She'd normally be able to stomach it, but her skin is thinner than usual today, and she's not sure how much she can withstand. A bathroom is making her feel pathetic.
Kou turns to the newcomer and opens her mouth to make some sort of pithy comment, but it snaps closed with a little 'click' when she sees who steps out.
"Hi," says Okumura Kenta.
Kou stumbles backwards and trips over her own feet in attempt to get away. Okumura doesn't move.
"W-What are you—"
"I don't have any reason to go after you," he says quietly. "I'm settled with Reborn."
Kou looks desperately to the door. Has Reborn already—?
"I'm…I've settled things. With Reborn." Okumura takes a step forward, and Kou flinches. He pauses, and leans back. "He found me…somehow. Already."
"He found you?"
"He— I…" Okumura hunches his shoulders and squeezes his eyes shut, like all of his words are coming out with brambles that cut his throat, and he needs to brace himself for the pain. "…It's hard to get people into Namimori. You need connections. I'm…I work in sabotage contracts. All I do is move quickly and tear things down. But they— I was hired. To take you. So we could blackmail Sawada Iemitsu for his connections. Reborn found me out and then settled things."
"Oh." Kou slowly stands, hands still pressed against the wall.
"So, I wanted to say. Sorry. In private. Alone." He gives a sidelong gaze at the ceiling, then the floor. "I've never attacked someone before. I wasn't sure what to do. I only know how to use the cords in combat in theory. I've never done it before. You could have gotten hurt."
"Uh…it's…I guess it's fine?"
"It's not. But okay."
"Why are you…" She looks around nervously. "Why are you, erm, confronting me in a women's bathroom?"
His cheeks pinken. "…Reborn asked me to."
"Why?"
"As a distraction. I guess."
Kou hesitates to actually digest that.
Then she sprints out the door.
Okumura doesn't hold her up. He probably already knows what she's going to see. But she hopes she won't find it anyway.
Kou isn't so lucky, unfortunately, and she skids to a stop in front of her table to find Reborn, his hat, and his stupid briefcase missing in action.
She leans against the table with both hands and lets out a furious, tortured groan. Of course. Of course! Why would Reborn bother being nice to her. He needed her and her mom out of the house to do…what is he even doing?
She turns to Okumura when he appears at her side. "What is he even doing?"
"He uh. Settled with me. So…" Okumura tilts his head slightly, eternally furrowed brows wrinkling a little. Up close, Kou realizes they're just shaped that way. "…He…he said he'd get rid of the problem."
-o-o-o-o-o-o-
Reborn appears at the apartment well within his self-imposed time limit. It's an old place, still well-kept, but probably built in the 80s, maybe a little earlier. It's in a nice, equally old neighbourhood, peaceful and secluded, where any loud noise would attract too much attention.
He uses the keys he was given to get inside both the building and Okumura's one-room apartment. The place is kept surgically clean, making the six-tatami room feel massive. The only furniture is a coffee table, and his bed is a futon stuffed in the closet, sitting on top of his small collection of clothes. The place didn't come with a fridge, so he's using a tiny mini-fridge instead. There's a radio on the little coffee-table, presumably his only source of stimulus in this hole. There are coils of steel cords in the cupboards instead of dishes, and he finds a bag of paper plates in one of the lower cupboards. The drawers are full of more disposable tools.
Reborn opens the fridge and pulls out a piece of paper taped to the back, hidden behind a stack of frozen dinners. It's a catalog of duties, but more importantly, it's a file with an address. He knows the street, and the best way to get there. Task done, he leaves Okumura's sad little apartment as he found it.
The location of Okumura's employers is an office in a little strip mall. Still an area where a gunshot would draw too much attention. Not that Reborn cares. He tries the handle, and when it doesn't open, picks the lock. The inside is furnished to the bare minimum, so someone could look into it without finding it strange that people would be doing business there. Which is to say, a receptionist's desk, a row of cushioned chairs, and a framed picture on the far wall.
Reborn walks confidently down the hallway to the right and tries the handle on the door at the very end, which looks conspicuously office-like with its fogged glass, as opposed to the flaking metal door to the left and the windowed door to the completely empty room on the right. It's locked. He kneels to pick this one too.
The sound of the metal door opening is obvious in the relative silence of the building, though the footsteps are almost inaudible. When he hears the person exhale with the effort of hoisting whatever weapon they have back to strike, he grabs them by the ankle and yanks their entire leg forward. They topple back. Reborn twists around on one leg to place his foot by the attacker's shoulders, punches him in the throat, and throws him against the wall so he falls on his face. Reborn whips a handkerchief and rubber strap from his pocket, stuffs the handkerchief in the man's mouth, holds it there with the strap, and keeps it taught with one hand while he break's the man's arm with his other. The handkerchief does a decent job of muffling the scream.
Reborn takes out a pair of handcuffs next, ties the rubber strap around the man's head, and cuffs his unbroken arm to his ankle. Then he goes back to picking the lock. When he finishes, he takes out his gun, opens the door, and shoots both of the armed men waiting for him in one fluid movement. His arm vibrates with the stress of recoil, but his aim is true.
He steps over the fallen body of the one between him and the nearest file cabinet. There's a bunch of chairs in here too, in a circle, surrounded by beer cans. His nose wrinkles slightly, and he focuses on his search. There's nothing in the cabinets. He's guessing they thought they were going to set up a business here. He goes over to the oak office desk sitting by the window, and tries the thin centre drawer. It opens to a carefully creased note with a coffee ring stain.
Young Lion family in Namimori Japan. Sawada.
Social housewife. Antisocial son.
He gives it a sniff, but only gets the odor of coffee. When he looks closely at the print, it seems like it was digitally typed and then printed, not a photocopy. Tells him less than nothing about the source.
More importantly is that they somehow know that Kou is anti-social, but not that Kou is a girl. The CEDEF is built on a model of information reduction — unless Kou became a missing persons or Iemitsu explicitly asks someone 'is my kid a boy or a girl', they're unlikely to change the faulty base information that they started out with. As for the other contracted individuals stationed to bottleneck the hostile parties entering Namimori, Reborn doubts they'd care about Kou's gender transition enough to make a note of it. Over half of them are retirees.
That means the leak was given out by someone who has access to the reports Iemitsu's been getting, but not the knowledge of the people actually in Namimori.
Another man cusses out the door. Reborn pulls out his gun and shoots him the second he walks into the room without looking up from the page.
That eliminates a huge portion of the potential sources. This is a strange way to get information, though. Probably anonymous.
"Who sent this?" Reborn asks the man he just shot.
"Who the hell are you?" The man groans back.
"Answer the question."
"The fuck is your…"
Reborn strides over to him, whips out another handkerchief, and stuffs it in his mouth. This one seems to understand what's going on faster than the other one did, but Reborn doesn't care much. He presses a gloved hand over his mouth with the paper still held between two fingers and uses his other hand wrap the man's jacket around his fist and punch him in the bullet wound.
Much more muffled. He needs bigger handkerchiefs.
"Torture doesn't work," Reborn admits, "but I don't have anything to bait you with, and I don't much want you alive."
The man's eyes are rings of bloodshot white.
"But desperation doesn't get me good information, so for now, I'm only going to punch you in the bullet wound when I think you're being a bad boy." Reborn whips the handkerchief from his mouth and tilts his head condescendingly. "I'll give you my rolodex full of very important numbers if you tell me who sent you the information about the Sawada family. I will give you five cards if you tell me your best guess. I will give you a business card that is guaranteed to give you good work if you tell me you don't know."
The man has broken out into a sweat, from stress, shock, or fear, it's unclear. His eyes flick from Reborn's ready fist to his cool gaze, assessing the threat.
"I don't know," he says.
Reborn sits back, putting away his bullet-hole-punching fist. The handkerchief-holding hand is still at the ready.
"Theories?"
"I don't know. We got it anonymously. Fr-from what we hh-hh-heard, it's only B-Blackmarket who got the message."
"And it's just the printout?"
He nods.
"…Good enough." Reborn pulls out a card he had pre-prepared based on Okumura's descriptions and tucks it in the man's trouser pocket. He takes the man's cellphone out of his jacket pocket in exchange.
"W-What are you…?"
"Just being tidy about things. Don't worry, I shot you with a nonlethal piece, you shouldn't need a hospital. Maybe some disinfectant." The gun is designed to make wounds that look and feel like the entry wound of a lethal bullet, and they bruise hard enough to cause shock, which is always useful when you want to expedite negotiations.
Reborn dials the number from memory. The person on the other end answers by the second ring.
"Hello?"
"Four indisposed persons in need of relocation," says Reborn.
The man laughs. It sounds high and wheezy. "What'd they do?"
"First known group to target the Sawada family."
The statement sucks the humour from the man dry.
"Address."
He reels it off and snaps the phone shut. The man is looking panicked. Reborn neither knows nor cares if it's justified.
-o-o-o-o-o-o-
Okumura ends up eating the burger, which is probably why Reborn had ordered it to begin with. He eats like he's not sure he's even allowed, and it's only an awareness of Kou and the possibility of confrontation that keeps him from sprinting out the door.
Kou's beef stroganoff is really good, though. She should eat pasta more often.
"Why are you even a…a 'hitman'?" Kou asks him when he starts to give the wine a leery look.
"Oh…hm." Okumura swirls a potato wedge in the little porcelain dish of ketchup. "…I never…thought about it? Everyone in my foster home did that. It wasn't a big deal. I, uhm, I don't have the upper-body strength for a bow and arrow. The strain is. It kind of turns my arms to noodles. I'm no good with firing things, in general. But using weird techniques like coil-whips means I can be a mid-long-range specialist. I can, uhm, drop stage lights…and stuff like that."
"Not really many oppurtunities to do stuff like that trying to get at me, huh," Kou huffs.
He shakes his head. "I'm…weaker, and smaller than you. My upper body strength is better than yours, but you'd overpower me easily. Anyone would. And I guess I really didn't want to bother you. Kidnapping someone without hurting them is, uhm. Really, really hard. They got mad at me for trying. Reborn called me stupid."
"Well…Thank you for trying really really hard. I don't think it's stupid."
His mouth twitches into a small smile.
"…Uhm, so…I guess I should ask, since I'm the target. Reborn probably won't tell me, anyway. I don't think he takes me very seriously. Er…How did they contact you? Why were you even working for them?"
"I…I-I, well, I was forced to…" He rubs his finger along his potato wedge. "…I'm. Thirteen years old. As in I turned thirteen, recently. Most second-year middle school kids are? In Japan? Except in Namimori. Most of you are a year older. It makes me…people like bullying me for that, obviously, because I don't know as much as everyone else, I guess. It's easy for people to make me do things. I have to work harder for people to, well, respect that I can do things by myself, I guess. It doesn't help that I'm bad at…pretty much everything."
He puts the potato wedge in his mouth and chews with a grim expression. When he swallows, he seems a bit more confident.
"My foster parents left to Korea, and the mainland isn't as regulated as Japan is. I think they sold my location and status. The government doesn't know they're gone yet. Someone used that information to track me down. I don't know anything about kidnapping, and I wasn't sure what they needed you for, so I wasn't interested, but I'm thirteen. And they had guns."
"They threatened you."
"It's okay. It's normal." He pops another wedge into his mouth.
"It shouldn't be." But Kou has been forcing people to stop bothering her by using social decorum as a shield long enough to understand that Okumura can't understand. He'd need someone far better at explaining things than she is who actually knows what it's like to have ideas this wrong to tell him so. She thinks Reborn and all of her extended family count as people who never had the chance to talk to this hypothetical person. Maybe her dad, too. He makes so much sense, when he talks to her, but he treats potential kidnapping like she's getting inflammatory hatemail every morning.
If this doesn't stop within the next two months, is she going to be just as twisted?
They finish eating in silence. The maître d' assures them their dinner has already been paid for, and they leave to a half-lit sky. Okumura looks around, and gives her an almost apologetic look. "I should take you home. There might be more people who know about you. I wouldn't know, but I mean. Probably."
"Oh, uh, sure. Not a problem."
The streets are emptier at this hour, and without the additional distraction of chewing out Reborn for forcing her to do things, the walk seems to take forever. Okumura seems dead-set in not saying a word. She thinks of what Reborn said about Okumura, a specialized contractor that can't do his specialty decently. The way he describes himself and his helplessness.
"Have you never hurt anyone before?" She asks him, feeling a little hopeful about him now.
He glances towards her, then away. "I've hurt lots of people. It's just never been my job."
All of Kou's organs constrict at once. Her sphincter clenches so hard it practically recedes into her ribcage. "…Okay!"
They don't talk to each other for the rest of the way home.
The streets of the residential area are mostly clear, beyond the sound of people in their yards, until they get to Kou's house. And the person perched on the fence of her house. The person with blood-red hair. Perched on the fence. Of her house.
Kou's muscles all cramp up so tightly she feels like she's about to turn inside out.
"Oh, if it isn't Kou-chan," auntie Yuna waves. Her hair is shorn into a thin pixie cut, and she's wearing some tacky floral shirt, because of course she is.
Okumura tenses up beside her. Kou glances to him, then to her aunt. "What are you downtown for?"
"Him." She gestures to Okumura.
"Why are you—"
"It's okay," Okumura whispers to his feet. "He told me about this too."
"Told you what?" Kou hisses.
"…He's getting rid of my employers. So I need a new one."
Yuna jumps down from the fence and approaches them with languid steps. "We always love new blood in the village."
"What do you mean by new blood? Hey, Okumura-kun, what's going on? What are they employing you for?"
"That's confidential, sweetheart. Why don't you go inside and see your mom, alright?" Yuna smiles sickly sweet.
Kou is torn three ways, between 'it's just never been my job', the inescapable threat of her extended family, and her own bleeding heart. Her bleeding heart colludes with her fear of her family to overthrow her common sense.
Kou steps between them. "What do you mean by new blood?"
"Kou," says Yuna, with a sudden glacial tone that makes Kou flinch, "move."
"Did you know people are trying to kidnap me?" Kou snaps back. "What if I hire Okumura-kun instead? You don't need to take him anywhere! I'm endangered."
"Kou, he tried kidnap you, and he's not strong enough to justify turning him around, right? Move."
"Why do you know about that? What has Reborn been doing?"
"I need to hire him because I don't know what Reborn's doing. Mo—"
"He's thirteen," Kou wails, "why do you need a thirteen-year-old?"
Yuna takes two steps forward and places her hand on Kou's forehead.
Stars explode behind her eyes, and she's suddenly overstimulated to the point of insensibility. The fabric of her dress moving across her skin makes her nerve endings scream. Her knees buckle, and she drops to the pavement. The rough cement feels like the entire universe exploding against her cells. Heat ripples through her in a burning wave of brain-scrambling sensation.
She feels like she's been staring at the sky for hours when she comes back into herself.
She sits up.
They're gone.
Kou stays frozen in the street, hands resting in her lap. She looks up at the sky and the stars dotting it. The street is quieter now. No one is around. No one came out to see their fight. There's no one here. The moon is waxing and casting a smoky glow on the edges of the clouds.
She sits there for about ten minutes. When a car drives by, she climbs up onto the fence.
Careful. It's a dark world out there.
The warmth doesn't leave her, no matter how still she sits. It feels awful.
-o-o-o-o-o-o-
The van pulls up later than Reborn would like.
"Sorry," says the driver, "I got held up."
A head of apple-red hair emerges from behind the door, followed by a dull, worn-down pair of brown eyes, monolid and razor-sharp, just like the rest of his family. The brilliant colour of his hair is natural, matching the eyebrows, lashes, and his sparse shadow of a beard. His neck and clavicles are exposed with his low-cut black shirt, exposing the lines of countless scars like he's proud of them.
Yamazaki Kunihiro peers down at Reborn like an interesting insect. There's a trembling mania to him that flickers just behind his gaze. From what Reborn has heard, Yamazaki started in on a manic episode when he was sixteen and then never left it for the proceeding eight years.
When you're good enough at what you do, you can fool just about anyone into thinking the depressive episodes don't exist.
"They're inside." Reborn gestures with his head.
"Much obliged, Mr. Hitman." The bodies are loaded up with a practiced utilitarian rhythm, and though his eyes constantly track Reborn, he doesn't make small talk at all. He looks like he wants something. He looks like he needs something.
"The source is still anonymous," says Reborn.
"Too bad. Thanks for finding them. Giving us…presents."
"Happy to oblige."
Yamazaki wraps his fingers around the handle of the car door, but uses it to lean back instead of opening it. His head lolls lazily, exposing serrated wounds at his throat. "It's weird, you know. That they'd send anyone here. Instead of asking us."
"There's a bit of bad blood involved." No one likes Iemitsu around here, and he doesn't like them right back.
"There's good blood involved too. The Moon Daughters are always going to be beloved. We protect our own."
Reborn, not for the first time, entertains the possibility that the Kouyou family is a cult. Iemitsu hadn't given him a straight answer on that.
"As do we. Kou's a good girl."
"Well, at least we agree on something." He rights himself, and rests his head against the van. His face is a shadowed mirror in the glass. "I feel so insulted, though. As if we can't watch our own kind without help?"
"Does she count as such?"
"Kou-chan loves us very much, Reborn. It's such a wonderful feeling. You'd like it." His eyes slide over Reborn's figure with a sharpness that could cut a man in two. "Maybe."
Reborn has no idea what he's implying with that, but he's sticking to 'cultists'. "Don't you have places to drive to?"
"I'm being sociable," Yamazaki drawls, but he still opens the door and gets in the vehicle. Reborn leaves before Yamazaki can harass him even more — the languid attitude and indirect prodding makes it hard to be sure, but he seems genuinely irritable at the moment.
It's well and truly dark out when Reborn returns to the Sawada residence. Kou is sitting on the pillar of her fence, staring at the brick of the wall opposite her. She's nudging the gate back and forth with her foot.
"Rough night?"
Kou freezes, and turns back to him. She looks miserable. "They took Okumura-kun."
"I know. I had to share. I don't get along with your family."
She squints at him. "Why would my family know enough about you to not get along with you?"
"Why are you asking, when you so clearly don't want the answer?" Reborn holds a hand out to her. After a moment of hesitation, she takes it, and hops down.
"…Is he…Is he going to be okay…?"
"Is there a reason to believe he won't be?"
Her fingers curl around his. "You're a criminal. And he's a criminal. And I think my family is full of criminals. Or are at least suspicious people."
"My running theory is cultists."
She ignores him. "Isn't that what criminals do? Eliminate problems? Uhm…'clean up' or something?"
"You need to stop watching gangster movies. He's in your class, brat, they have to transfer him out to another school to close up that access point. According to the boy himself, he was being forced, after all."
She looks up at him, suddenly buzzing with energy. "Are you sure?"
Reborn holds her hand up and twirls her so she's facing her house instead of him. "If it so plagues you, you can visit his house tomorrow. As friends do."
"We're not friends," she whines, trying to wriggle free, "I'm just worried about him!"
"Make friends. Lots of them. Making friends is just about the most important aspect of staying alive in the underworld, and it's a skill your father has mastered enough to send someone like me to watch you two. Make friends that can support you in tight situations. Make friends who want to do your dirty work. Make friends that can uncover that your teacher is falsifying his educational history and committing tax fraud and is bullying students to deal with his depression and self-loathing." He dances her to the gate, and kicks her into the yard. "Make friends who are worried enough about you to know when you disappear."
She shoots a glare over her shoulder. "I can be worried about someone disappearing without being their friend! Do you realize how scary those people are?"
"Kou," Reborn says slowly, "I was talking about you, not him."
Her jaw fixes, and Reborn can see her flush even in the dark.
"You have zero disposition for using people. It's honestly amazing," Reborn drawls, strolling past.
"Not true! I manipulated Mochida! I just, I didn't follow through with it. Because I was attacked." She dusts off her dress and follows.
"Mochida? You mean your friend?"
"We're not friends." There's a touch of spite to her voice now, bitter and acidic in ways it wasn't this morning. "I hate him. And he hates me. It's very mutual."
"Mm."
Well, that won't be the case for long, if Reborn has anything to say about it.
Protecting two people in two locations at once is very hard, after all.
