Realizations
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True to his word, Reborn takes her to vacation the moment her enrollment papers for the next semester are finalized.
How he found out, she doesn't know.
It is a beautiful place, with an amusement park and a theme park. Behind all of that was private property, a place where one could enjoy the beach privately without the screaming crowds.
Hyacinth loves it and tells him so.
Reborn just smiles at her, an odd little lift in his lips that seems to have made the receptionist faint.
Strangely enough, all the women that sees him looks devastated when they see his arm around Hyacinth.
She absolutely has no idea why.
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Reborn doesn't know how he did it, but he just found somebody denser than his dame student.
He had been leaving her hints and clues, but the normally sharp mind in Hyacinth's head seems programmed not to function properly in these matters, or probably overlook it.
He sighs and wishes to shoot something.
Fortunately, he knows that she probably, in some measure, returns his feelings, but is too dense to notice them.
Hmm, he ponders. Now, to just make her notice.
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From the start, the plan is a disaster.
Hyacinth doesn't notice when he flirts with other women, nor does she get angry when she finally does notice. She just looks at him and smiles a strange little smile that looks so brittle.
"You're having fun, Reborn?" she asks.
Reborn can't bear seeing that look in her face. It is a parody of a smile.
So he stops the plan to make her jealous. Actually, he just stops all plans and promises to enjoy himself.
Someone had hurt her, he realizes later in the night. She had a relationship before, not necessarily romantic. Someone had burned her before and that made her question her own worth.
He seethes about that, even as he calls himself all kinds of idiot.
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It is in the middle of the third week, when a strange, pink-haired woman attaches herself to Reborn that Hyacinth realizes it.
Oh, probably not immediately, but she realizes it when she analyzes why she had such a strong urge to unsheathe her wand and hex the clingy woman to feel the pain of the nine hells.
At that moment though, Reborn is too busy trying to remove his arm from her grasp, all the while the woman is whining at him for not showing up for nearly two years.
Hyacinth has enough when she attempts to kiss him.
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"Excuse me, leech," a soft voice says sweetly.
Reborn feels a cold tingle run down his back. He stops moving, or attempting to remove his arm from Bianchi's hold. Actually, he just wants to back away. For the first time, he hears the promise of violence in Hyacinth's voice and it is unnerving.
Bianchi stops talking at him as well.
"Who are you?" Bianchi asks. There was an insult in the way she says it that makes his eyes narrow.
"None of your business," Hyacinth says. The usually sweet-mannered Hyacinth was glaring daggers at the Poison Scorpion. "However, Reborn's been trying to remove your person from himself. Do me a favor and assist him."
Bianchi looks on the verge of killing her, but Reborn intervenes.
"Bianchi, she's a civilian," he whispers in her ear.
Poison Scorpion gives him an incredulous look. "In Mafia Land?" she asks. But that is enough to get her hands to unwind around his.
Hyacinth takes the opportunity presented and grabs his hand, a surprisingly strong grip for such a fragile-looking woman.
"Are you alright?" she asks. "What a shrew! I wouldn't be surprised if she was a clunge!"
From thereon, she dissolves into cursing, all of them British slang that he mentally translates with a wince. She is basically calling Bianchi a whore.
"Calm down," he says to her. "Look, the house of mirrors."
It works for the moment. A dark look still crosses her face from time to time, so he knows it isn't forgotten.
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Hyacinth analyzes her feelings via Occlumency that night.
She had such a strong reaction to that woman that it confused her. So she took a breathe and plunged deep into a meditation.
It isn't exactly a deep examination of her mind, more of untangling her emotions and finding out what subconscious thoughts caused them.
She emerges from it with a very deeply violent blush.
"Oh," she says.
She glances to the side, where Reborn is lounging, reading a book when she told him she would be meditating.
He meets her eyes and smirks.
"Oh," she mutters again when she finds that handsome instead of annoying.
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It is only the next morning, when he sees her putter around the small kitchen, that he realizes that what he had seen on her face the previous night was knowledge.
There is a certain fragility about her when it came to it, and he knows to be careful when he broaches the topic.
She is once again blushing to the roots of her hair, unable to look at him save for a handful of seconds.
That stops when he places his fingers under her chin, and she meets his eyes, a blush staining her cheeks and fire behind her eyes.
The world tilts for a moment, and starts to turn again.
He kisses her and is gratified when she kisses back.
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More later. Thanks for the reassurance, and the reviews guys!
Avalanche is really taking a back seat because of this.
R & R.
~Hallen