A/N: First thing's first, miss Lunakatsuma's review- LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THAT THING IT TAKES UP LIKE A THIRD OF A REVIEW PAGE! I think my heart stopped for a moment when I saw that. I can hear the medical bills going -WHOOSH-. But she wasn't the only one to leave a long review that brought me to tears of happiness- *cough* RenegadeWarrior, xXxMentalPancakesxXx *cough*. I... I sorta love you all you guys that review this thing. Really. If I don't die from heart problems then I'm going to drown in my own tears of happiness.
Just go on, reader-samas, before I start bawling...
Saturday, Palermo
Vongola Headquarters, 9AM
Very rarely did Seiji and Shin do much together- while being father and son, one was heavily involved in the criminal underworld while the other was trying to move away from it. The only times they even saw each other was when they visited Simonetta's grave together each year.
So perhaps it was the thickness of Yukimura blood showing when the two managed to move perfectly in synergy when taking out their anger on the Vongola's excessively large training field, the unfortunate rookies and even instructors that day mercilessly beaten down dozens by dozens.
"Shouldn't you stop that?" Mukuro asked the Ninth Mist Guardian nonchalantly, as they watched while drinking tea from the porch of the equipment storage building. "You'll probably lose half your potential men."
Bouche Croquant shrugged. "We have plenty to spare."
"I'm sure."
The two seemed perfectly content to just sit and listen to the pained screaming and fleshy thuds as they discussed how both Mukuro and Chrome would inherit Croquant's position over Earl Grey.
Inside the equipment building, Aoshima and Suzume could be seen wearing borrowed tracksuits and poring over various weapons to find the latter a temporary replacement on the Ninth's insistence. It was dangerous to wander around Sicily unarmed, especially with associations to the underworld. The pair were far less than comfortable taking aid from the Vongola, but figured they might as well humor that hopeful expression Tsuna had worn when he thought that maybe they could smooth things over after all.
In the Vongola main office, Coyote Nougat was pacing the room with the Ninth sitting calmly in his chair, watching his right-hand man sweat buckets as he tried to think of a way to appease Seiji and Shinichi. The new recruits would only entertain them for so long.
In one of the computer labs, Ganauche III and some of his men were carrying out research on Yukimura Shou for questionable reasons.
In the dining room, while polishing off the leftover roast quail from the night before's feast that was his late breakfast, Gokudera Hayato had an epiphany. He slammed his fist against his palm, yelled out a "Sou!" and ran out down the hallway.
The doors of the nursery exploded open as the Tenth Storm Guardian grabbed his fellow Sun Guardian by the hoodie and just about dragged him along the floor the whole way outside before he could gain his footing.
"What is extremely going on!"
"Your flames! I almost forgot about them since it's been so long. Your flames have the Activation factor- you can heal Aoshima and Yukimura and grow Yukimura's hair back out!"
After taking a moment to process this, Ryohei grinned like the sun he was. "THAT IS EXTREMELY AWESOME!"
Saturday, Palermo
Vongola Headquarters, approximately 10AM
Suzume was sat in a chair in the middle of an empty room, still in her tracksuit, a large glass window looking out onto the courtyard the room's only distinguishing feature. Aoshima stood beside her with a couple pairs of scissors, and Ryohei was in the corner doing breathing exercises with Gokudera.
"I'm not so sure about this, Suzume. Even if we grow it back out, it'll be a completely different set of hair- we'll have to re-groom the whole thing to the exact weight and length again, and it won't be as high quality-"
"If there's a chance, I'm taking it," she interrupted him simply.
Gokudera had agreed to not wait for the return of the Varia in the next month and subsequently the return of Lussuria, to help with the flame output levels, mainly because the Vongola's animosity with the retired Prince of Winter and the very much active errand boy Autunno was giving Tsuna grey hairs. Ryohei didn't mind, so they went ahead.
Aoshima fiddled with the scissors as they waited for Ryohei to get himself prepared, trimming his own messy hair using the window as a mirror, brushing the trimmings off the waterproof material of his jacket. He had never had as much of an attachment to his hair as Suzume did, and so he figured he might as well take the opportunity to make it more manageable.
"Yosh! I am extremely ready! Aoshima! You too, get ready for some extreme trimming!"
And of course, it was at that exact moment that Coyote Nougat burst into the room, panting.
The first thing he did was stare at Aoshima.
"For I minute I thought I'd gone back in time," he muttered. "You look so much like Squalo when he was your age."
"What's wrong?" the silver-head asked, brushing off the comment.
"Oh. Right. Fortezza attack. You all need to get into the bunker."
Aoshima raised an eyebrow as the glass window behind him shattered with a giant crash.
"I'm guessing that it might be a little late for that."
Coyote barked orders into his collar as the four teenagers took on the dozen or so intruders that had just happened to use that one room they had thought was supposed to be empty to access the Headquarters.
Aoshima subtly put himself in front of Yukimura as he spun twin pairs of scissors in his hands, eying the masked attackers who warily backed into a formation when they realized that perhaps these weren't normal children.
Ryohei, already fired up from preparing to grow out Yukimura's hair, threw the first punch, adding a yell of 'EXTREME!' for good measure. Gokudera followed up with a flying kick and a few mini bombs thrown precisely in some of the Fortezza's collars, his larger explosives most likely not safe in the relatively small room.
Aoshima defended from the blows and shots in his direction easily with the long blades of the shearing scissors. He looked over to where Coyote was protecting the door, and sighed.
"Nougat-san."
"What?"
"These are all Fortezza survivors?"
"Most likely. Any other Families that help the survivors of a Family that we have dissolved risks dissolution themselves."
"How many are in the building?"
"Reports say probably around four to five teams, and by judging by the size of this one that means from forty-eight to sixty."
Aoshima sweat-dropped. "Nougat-san."
"What?"
"Is it just me or is the Vongola terrible at dissolving?"
"Just- just don't let them through the door!"
At some point Yukimura got surrounded by three attackers when Aoshima was taken to the other side of the room in a spar, and she was seeing the limits of her close-combat knowledge.
When one of the attackers picked up a larger pane of glass from the broken window and brought it down towards her head, Yukimura instinctively grabbed behind her waist at lightning speed, only for her hand to meet loose hair.
Frozen for a split-second in momentary shock, it was all the time in the world for the window glass to come crashing down over her head and shoulders.
"SUZUME!"
She fell easily, but regained her senses just as quickly to make use of her position and kick two of the attackers as hard as she could in the kneecaps, effectively bringing them down to the floor as well.
The one that had crashed the glass over Yukimura, however, saw her foot coming and managed to grab it, if only just, and lifted her up by the ankle, leftover piece of glass pressed into her thigh as a threat to Nougat to leave the door.
He was only able to just cut through the track pant with it before Gokudera tackled the man to the ground and knocked him unconscious.
Yukimura fell to the ground, and sat up, before staring at the piece of glass rammed into her leg.
Gokudera turned to stare as well as Ryohei and Aoshima finished the Fortezza team off in the background.
She blinked. "Might as well get it out while I still can't feel it."
Even the Storm Guardian winced a little as she ripped the glass out, rather brutally, and patted down the material of her tracksuit to cover the bleeding area before standing.
Only to be tackled down by the last remaining Fortezza trying to escape.
"Today is not my day," she muttered, as the man brought a knife to her neck as he tried to back himself to the window.
She elbowed him in the stomach, and gained a little distance, this time remembering her ruined hair before trying to grab at it.
Sensing her hesitation, the Fortezza, of all things, slapped her in the face, grabbed her by the hair, and leapt out of the broken window.
Saturday, Palermo
Vongola Mansion, approximately 12PM
Tsuna was shedding hair at an alarming rate all over the dining table. Though him burying his fists in it and pulling at it so much might have had something to do with it.
"Decimo, you and your Guardians did exceptionally well in this attack. Nono is still safe, nothing was stolen, and there are minimal injuries." Coyote set a cup of coffee before the boy.
"We lost Yukimura-san! There's been no sign of her or that one Fortezza member that escaped and it's been two hours now!"
Coyote winced. "Shh. Luckily Seiji is too busy helping Reborn with status reports over at the Headquarters to notice yet, and I hired Shinichi on the spot to deal with the Fortezza members down in the prison. We have at least until nightfall to find her. Aoshima is out searching like mad, and I've sent out my own team."
"Ahh, mou! And just when Hayato-kun thought of a solution!" The young heir's head met the desk as he moaned in despair.
Saturday, Palermo
Vongola Mansion, approximately 7PM
Seiji's hands slammed into the dining table as he stood up.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU LOST MY DAUGHTER!"
Tsuna had long given up on the situation and was in a corner growing mushrooms- a hobby he had caught from Tamaki during the last visit to Ouran.
Tables were flipped, glassware and expensive tableware smashed, and Mafiosi cowered for their lives in the face of the famous Yukimura rage.
"My cute little sister…" Shin chuckled darkly. "After making her go through all of that, you let her get kidnapped?"
"Tadaima."
The room froze as an almost completely mud-coated, bedraggled figure revealed itself in the doorway. With hair hacked up to shoulder level and spiked all over with mud, various rips and tears all over the barely-recognizable tracksuit, and missing shoes, the figure went straight to Aoshima who stood the moment it stepped into the room.
He grabbed his own and various other people's napkins and immediately started cleaning the person's face and neck, fussing over injuries and grabbing Mukuro's drinking glass to use to clean some of them.
"…Suzume?" Shin said tentatively.
"What?" Suzume herself for some reason didn't meet Shin's eyes.
"It is you…" he replied in wonder.
"I thought you were kidnapped?" Gokudera asked bluntly.
"I was. When we arrived at the Fortezza hideout, I stole these," she pulled a pair of handguns out of her waistband and dropped them on the floor, "And these-" she opened her jacket to show twin bands of magazines crossed over her torso, around her shoulders-"and escaped. And kind of finished the job my father left unfinished."
"I left that unfinished?" Seiji wondered. "Was this the underground hideout?"
"No, this one was a warehouse."
"Ah."
Crickets.
Ganauche III cleared his throat. "So let me get this straight. You were taken captive by the Fortezza survivors."
"Yes."
"You then waited until you'd arrived at the hideout, when you turned on your captors by stealing weapons and massacring them guerilla-style."
"I didn't kill, but that's about right."
"So why are you muddy?"
She blinked and looked down at her get-up. "Ah. I also stole a sniper rifle. On my way here I saw a large surviving Fortezza group so I sat in a swamp for a few hours and shot them as they dispatched in small groups for this headquarters."
Coyote shook his head vehemently. "Wait, few hours? When did you arrive at the hideout?"
"About twenty minutes after I was taken."
"And how long did it take you to escape?"
"…Maybe an hour?"
"And how long did it take you to get back to Vongola property?"
"I'm not sure. Not longer than ten minutes, probably."
Silence.
"So you sat in a swamp for seven hours sniping Fortezza fighters?"
She furrowed her eyebrows. "That's not seven hours, is it? The sun's still in the sky."
Aoshima furrowed his eyebrows. "It's seven PM, Suzume."
"Oh." She awkwardly picked up the muddy guns from the floor, seeing they were being stared at. "Then I guess so."
Aoshima frowned. "Suzume, your hair."
She fingered it and chuckled awkwardly. "I cut it. They kept grabbing me with it in the hideout, so I cut it with a rusty pipe and before I started attacking."
"Rusty pipe?"
"There wasn't much lying around…"
"It'll take even more to grow it back now…"
"Forget it," she dismissed quickly, to Aoshima's surprise. "If this is how weak I am without my hair, to the point of getting kidnapped, then forget it. What am I, Samson? I can't rely on something so easily taken off me forever. It had to go someday."
The room went silent. Yukimura Suzume, who before staked her life on her hair, was now saying something like that?
Seiji looked at his only daughter carefully. "Suzume, why did it take you a whole hour to escape?"
There was no reply.
"Suzume, what happened?"
Saturday, Palermo
Vongola Mansion, approximately 11PM
There was a light rain outside, a nice background noise to the warm lights of one of the mansion's studies, where the cleaned and fed Suzume and Aoshima sat opposite each other in their pajamas, a chessboard between them.
Suzume's injuries from the day were piled on top of her original ones- she was bandaged so tightly that she could barely walk.
For some strange reason, she had refused Ryohei's help with the injuries, on some strange basis of not wanting him to accidentally grow out her hair in the process. He had explained that with his abilities, he could only use his flames on small areas at a time, but still Suzume refused on the same basis.
Aoshima had pressed her lightly for her reasons, but when she still didn't answer, he left it and just continued to stay with her like he always did.
Seiji and Shin, on the other hand, were asking desperately every few hours, ranting and pleading. Well, the ranting and pleading was mostly Seiji, but Shin wasn't exactly too calm either.
There was a small clack and the sound of a piece falling over, followed by Suzume's light laugh. "Kiyoshi, are you playing seriously?"
"Don't make fun of me when you're the one that sacrificed her queen for a pawn."
"Pawns are the most useful pieces on the board, I've told you that before. Everyone knows that a queen is a queen, but what a pawn will become, is known only to the player. It's called the power of youth, Kiyoshi dear."
He looked up at her amused eyes, and looked back down at the board, chuckling himself as he took out the pawn closest to his side of the board. "Mn."
There was the sound of loud knocking on the main door, and the two looked at each other. They were probably the only ones up in that part of the mansion- even the maids and butlers had to sleep sometime, and that day had been particularly tiring.
The two got up and exited the study to enter the marbled floor of the area directly in front of the main door. Aoshima looked through the eyehole, raised an eyebrow, and warily opened the door.
In the doorway was a man in a dark hoodie and jeans, and it was obvious once the hood was pulled down who it was.
"Oh, I actually almost forgot about you. What are you doing here?"
The young man stared at Suzume for a moment before hugging her tightly. "Oh, you're safe! Thank God! But what happened to your hair!"
A couple minutes of Aoshima giving their surprise guest a condensed and heavily edited rundown of what they had been doing the last few days, and people had woken up because of the commotion. Tsuna, with a bedroom near the stairs, came down first, rubbing his eyes sleepily.
"Huh? Yukimura-san, Aoshima-san, who is this?"
"Sawada-san, meet my second brother, Shou."
Tsuna's eyes widened as he went sprinting back up the stairs, yelling something that sounded like "Oh Kami-sama, more Yukimuras!"
Sunday, Palermo
Vongola Mansion, approximately 7AM
"Tou-san! Nii-san!"
"Shou? What are you doing here?"
"…Did you forget already that I came to Japan with these two? And then they sort of went missing on me? Well, they do that sometimes anyway, but when they didn't come back by Friday night I got worried so I came looking for them."
The Ninth and his Guardians had stopped dead in the doorway, watching the three Yukimura men talk casually together. They slowly backed out into the hallway.
"Yukimura Shou," Ganauche started. "He's a Japanese shooting champion, the star of his University in both shooting and archery. We can assume that he's the one that taught Suzume how to use guns, as Seiji would never teach her."
"You've researched him?"
"There were reports of a man bearing resemblance to the Prince of Winter turning Sicily upside-down to search for a pair of teenagers. He caught our attention when he easily defeated a small Family when they tried to kidnap him with false information."
"The Yukimura bloodline is surely terrifying."
"He has a sportsman's gun license in Japan, but is not yet old enough to obtain any license even for sports in Italy. Which means he defeated that Family either completely or mostly barehanded, if he took any weapons from them."
"So he must have some skill in hand to hand as well," Coyote concluded.
They Guardians talked for another couple minutes before they noticed that their Ninth was already laughing and talking with the newest Yukimura over breakfast.
The Ninth Generation looked at each other, sighed, and entered the dining room.
Who needed social tactics when you had Timoteo?