Author's Note: Well, this one was a while coming. While I can't promise updates are going to become regular, I can promise I will eventually get this story done. I have some more things in an end note on this chapter, but I didn't want to clog up the beginning too much.
As you all know Reborn doesn't belong to me, it belongs to Akira Amano. The story lines, original characters, and such are products of my imagination.
Thank you for reading and putting up with me, I appreciate it!
Target 09-04: Summer Savory
"A two week exchange course?"
Haru glanced up from the bag she was packing to see Chiharu in the doorway of her bedroom three days after the Forum. "Yes," Haru replied.
"Where are you exchanging to?" Chiharu questioned. "What about the group project?"
"I apologize for the sudden development; I will have to take a zero on the project. Please continue working well with Yamamoto, Chrome-chan, and Akagi-san," Haru said.
"Akagi-san…" Chiharu trailed off. "Aren't you being a little childish, Haru?"
Haru zipped the bag with more force than necessary. "I'm doing what I must, Ishida-san. I will see you in two weeks."
She shouldered the bag and moved towards the door only to find her way blocked by Chiharu. "This isn't the best way to deal with things, Haru…"
"If I'm wrong I'll suffer the consequences," Haru stated.
"It won't just be you 'suffering the consequences'. You're the head of a large division of a powerful organization; if you allow yourself the childishness then you're looking at destroying any hint of respect you may have earned from your subordinates," Chiharu snapped.
"What would you know about my circumstances?" Haru demanded.
"My mother is Ishida Satomi, what do you think?" Chiharu reminded her.
"Our conversation is finished, Ishida-san, go finish cleaning your new Tengu mask," Haru said flatly.
Somewhere in the back of her mind the idea of the Tengu mask hit a button, but Haru didn't pay attention to it. A small part of Haru acknowledged that she might be overreacting a bit, she'd been warned of consequence but blithely decided that they wouldn't hurt anything. After the meeting at the gate of the school, Akai hadn't spoken to her of anything except the school project and polite conversational exchanges that were required. Haru still wanted to pin Akai down and demand why she had to go along with things too, but she wasn't going to, she had a Famiglia to protect.
"You're going to regret it if you don't put your head back on straight Haru," Chiharu said icily.
The girls glared at each other for a long moment before Haru swept by her and down the stairs. She exited the house and headed for the dark sedan parked just outside the gate. Iemitsu Sawada was standing by the vehicle, looking at his watch. "We'll have to hurry, Haru," he said. "I told you to be ready ten minutes ago."
"I had to take care of some last minute things I can't from an unsecured network in the airport," Haru stated. "I'm sorry."
Iemitsu took her bag and opened the door for her to get in. Haru settled on the seat and stared at the back of the seat numbly as she heard the trunk open and close before Iemitsu joined her in the vehicle.
"We've deployed our agents the way you ordered in the security council meeting and Irie is working with Spanner to set up a few more secured nodes. Yamamoto and Ryohei are both irritated you're taking off without them, but are doing their jobs admirably," Iemitsu said. "Your trip home is already arranged, but I will be staying behind and sending one of my subordinates with you. There is a very narrow window of time where you might be able to greet Tsuna and Gokudera, but if things don't align properly it won't happen."
Haru nodded.
Silence lingered between them as Haru turned brown eyes to the passing scenery. "Who exactly is Nadeshiko?" Haru suddenly asked. "I know she's a legendary hitman, but they opened it up easily to all the Families. Mother didn't detail much about it in her journal…"
"Nadeshiko existed in Japan before Vongola Primo even stepped foot onto the soil," Iemitsu said. "Nadeshiko was a fierce opponent who threw herself into the midst of the various wars between Clans and attained a mystique that carries over to this day. She was once a neutral entity that maintained a balance of sorts between the clans, but it evolved into what you see today. Having 'Nadeshiko' within the ranks of your Clan or Famiglia is regarded as a great status indicator, but just because a Clan had one Nadeshiko doesn't mean they will have the next Nadeshiko as well. Nadeshiko chooses their own successor, picking the successor from those who show promise and training them—sometimes the one chosen is from another Clan or Famiglia entirely or perhaps not even affiliated with the underworld. The day the apprentice overwhelms and defeats them is the day that the mantle of Nadeshiko changes hands. At the beginning, in order to attain the mantle of Nadeshiko, the successor killed the previous Nadeshiko, but in the past few generations it's shifted to simply besting the predecessor. The face of Nadeshiko is never known except between Nadeshiko and the chosen successor in that final moment as the mantle passes. Once the mantle has been taken the former Nadeshiko moves on to whatever life they've chosen. Some, like your mother, choose to leave the underworld altogether. Others adapt new roles within their chosen clan that widely range from remaining a hitman to positions of leadership."
"So my mother defeated the previous Nadeshiko, but never chose a successor?" Haru asked.
"Your mother left the mafia world abruptly. One moment she was there, the next she vanished into the mists and no one knew what happened to her," Iemitsu said. "You are likely to be best acquainted with the reasons she chose to leave."
"Mother never gave details in her journal," Haru said quietly. "She just told me of what she'd done in the past in case it came back to haunt me. She wanted me to be prepared. I do not think she expected me to wind up where I am now."
"Do you regret it Haru?" Iemitsu asked intently.
Haru's eyes snapped to the leader of CEDEF at his question. "I…"
"If you want out, you can still leave," Iemitsu said. "We can arrange for you and your father to quietly disappear and find a life somewhere else. Our contacts are extensive and we can make just about anything happen. We can make arrangements for someone else to take over in Namimori, but if you choose to leave, you leave everything and everyone behind."
Haru's hands clenched tightly in her lap as possibilities ran through her mind. Right now, the option was horribly tempting.
The phone in her pocket vibrated and she pulled it out.
[Let us know when you get there safely. We'll hold down the fort until you get back.]
"I cannot and I will not walk away from them," Haru finally stated. "They're trusting me and I won't let them down. I will protect my Famiglia."
Iemitsu regarded her for a long moment and it took all of Haru's willpower not to squirm under his silent stare. Finally the blond man broke the eye contact and reached into his pocket for his phone. "I don't know if I can trust your will right now, Haru," Iemitsu said bluntly.
The silence was a thunderclap.
Haru flinched and drew her knees up to her chest on the back seat of the car and stared miserably out the window as the landscape slipped by.
A few hours later, she settled into the first class seat that the Vongola purchased for her. Iemitsu and the others accompanying her to Italy chose to fly coach and Haru felt vulnerable and alone in the massive seat.
I don't know if I can trust you right now.
The words echoed in her head, edited by her own guilt.
"It's weird that the Vongola would leave one of their own so blatantly unprotected," a voice observed conversationally.
Haru's gaze snapped up to the speaker and her eyes narrowed at the woman securing luggage in the rack above them. "Who are you?" Haru demanded.
The woman smiled affably and fidgeted with the luggage a bit more until she was satisfied then regarded Haru with mischievously sparkling blue-green eyes. "I could be an enemy. I could be a tutor. I could even be your long lost great Aunt Sue, but who knows," she shrugged. "Apparently though, for the next twelve hours I'm going to be your next door neighbor."
"I don't have a great Aunt Sue," Haru mumbled.
"Well, I wouldn't be long lost if you knew about me, now would I?" the woman grinned, tucking a strand faded silvery-lilac hair behind her ear.
She wore an airy floral chiffon skirt and a pale green peasant blouse and when she settled down next to Haru she felt like she'd been engulfed in a spring breeze through a garden in full bloom. "Though if I were an enemy, you wouldn't have to worry about it right now," the woman added. "This is a commercial airline flight and while about a third of the passengers are made up of those I could consider a threat, there are still innocent bystanders and children. This plane isn't made to stand up to an assault of Dying Will Flames and while there are a lot of things that I will do—purposefully harming children isn't one of them."
"Who are you?" Haru demanded again.
"I suppose you're not going to play along with the 'Great Aunt Sue' bit," the woman said. "Most people call me Summer, short for Summer Savory. You are Haru Miura, yes?"
Haru stiffened and Summer chuckled. She touched her finger to Haru's boarding pass. "Your name is right here," she said.
Haru started and flushed a bit at the revelation. Of course that was…
"You're actually going to buy that?" Summer asked with surprise.
Haru's eyes narrowed and her hand clenched around the boarding pass. "Who are you?" she asked again.
"Well, let's just say you and I have a mutual interest in shellfish," Summer grinned. "And I've been informed by a certain master of the spice cabinet you need a bit of guidance."
Frowning Haru's fingers clenched in her own skirt and she turned the woman's comment over in her head. She felt the Vongola Lightning ring that nestled against her chest and her eyes widened for a moment. "You're CEDEF?" Haru blurted out, although she managed to keep her voice low enough not to be overheard as the flight attendants announced that they would be departing shortly.
"Special auxiliary to it anyway," Summer said. "Mr. Sawada assigned me to be your tutor this time around. However, before I know what direction to go, you and I need to have a long and involved discussion that may take up a few of the next twelve hours. You can keep your secrets, I've some of my own, but I need to know where you're starting from. What kind of combat training do you have? What Dying Will Flame do you use? How athletic do you think you are on a scale of 1 to 10 and about a half dozen other things…" she trailed off and gave Haru a wry smile. "I've got Reborn's report on you, but he hasn't seen you for the better part of a year and things can change. I know you've received training from sources other than the Vongola so I don't have access to what you learned there. Mr. Sawada gave me some information—but he was too busy trying to show off the latest ultrasound pictures of his future daughter and making kissy faces at his wife on Face Time for me to get a clear picture."
Haru partially relaxed at Summer's words and carefully picked her words and what revelations she chose to share with the woman.
They were about three hours into their flight when Summer dipped her hand into her bag and pulled out some origami paper and handed it over to Haru. "Start making cranes, Miss Miura," she ordered. "Use all of it."
Haru looked at the paper doubtfully. It was crumpled into a large ball and not all the pieces were intact, some of it was viable but other pieces were ripped, torn, oddly-sized, and otherwise didn't appear useful.
"How can I make anything out of scraps, origami is a very precise art and…" she began.
Summer smiled slowly. "Sometimes we're not given intact pieces to work with in our line of business. It is our job to take what we have, broken, torn, and bent and make it into something that's going to carry the day or at least get us through to the next battle when we may get a better hand," she said. "You and I, Miss Miura, have to work with what is given to us. We can't pick and choose what gets dropped in our lap. We take pieces of things and put them together, sometimes with Band-Aids and Hello Kitty duct tape—and we make them work. Make this work Miss Miura."
"But…" Haru began.
"Does your side of the Famiglia run on excuses, Miss Miura?" Summer asked quietly. "Because our side sure as hell doesn't."
The air around Summer changed and Haru shivered inadvertently.
Summer smiled brilliantly and dipped her hand into a bag and pulled out a magazine written in a language that Haru didn't understand. "Each of those papers represents something you are going to deal with and each one has their own part to play," Summer said. "I don't expect you to build a masterpiece the first time through, but this is only paper. When you're pulling a mission together, you usually don't get more than one chance. Oh I forgot one thing…"
She put the magazine down and pulled out a folder and extracted a pristine piece of origami paper. "When you're looking at the scraps they're what you have. This…" she held up the paper. "This is you. This is the only thing you have full control over."
Summer handed the paper over and picked up her magazine. "I'll leave the rest to you Miss Miura."
End Note: Admission Time...I'm really struggling with most of my fan fiction stuff right now (and to be honest the original stuff isn't going great right now either)-so I think after this chapter it'll be a bit of a hiatus. I keep telling myself I need to at least finish this story before I go back and do some revisions on the previous stories of the Future Revised series, but the more I look at it the more I desperately want to rewrite Haru's Resolve (and do some subsequent editing to the stories that follow). I want to do this so much I've been fighting with this chapter for a long while-I'm mostly satisfied with this chapter, but I think that when I rewrite the earlier stories I'm gonna have to rework a few other things for the continuity changes.
I'm sorry to everyone who has been keeping up with me so far, and I ask your patience with me for awhile longer. I'm going to put the rewrite of Haru's Resolve (and the final chapters of Transparent Wings for those who are following my Skip Beat! fan fiction) on the stuff I am doing for Nanowrimo this year and I'm hoping that I'm going to beat through these writer's blocks and become the fan fiction writer I was in the past (have stuff done and getting things updated regularly).
Don't worry, I will come back to this and finish it, I promise-it's just going to take me a little bit to work through.
At present, my plan is to post the revised versions of these stories on AO3 (unless there is a lot of demand for me to put it here). I'll keep things updated via my author page on Facebook: /yukisekifanfic/