Something Simple
'Shopping: the art of acquiring things you don't need with money you don't have.'
"One plus one," Nadeshiko said, looking up from the sheet at Toshiro-sensei with incredulity. "This is easy."
Toshiro-sensei's eye twitched, but he forced himself to smile at his most troublesome student. "Would you like the advanced paper then, Nadeshiko-chan?"
The girl, her fluffy-brown hair in twin braids and cheeks rosy from the spring winds, glanced at the advanced worksheet, which had delightful questions like '9+17=?' and '6+5+?=13'
Nadeshiko was not amused.
"No, too easy," she said disdainfully, making Tsuna sink in his seat. He had trouble with two plus two! What even were numbers!?
Toshiro-sensei grimaced. "Well, why don't you try them Nadeshiko-chan, and if you get them all right, I'll ask Habana-sensei for the upperclassman's worksheet, okay?"
Nadeshiko contemplated this for a tense heartbeat before nodding, much to Toshiro-sensei's relief. The last time he'd made a suggestion she hadn't liked…
He understood, of course, that being this afraid of a four year old was kind of stupid, but at the same time, one look into the unholy glint in that pair of orangey brown eyes made him want to wet himself. All the time.
Five minutes later, Nadeshiko handed him a complete worksheet—all 50 questions answered correctly—and Toshiro-sensei actually started to cry.
Why is she so bad with writing if her numeracy is so good?! he asked himself, blindly ticking all the answers on the paper.
Nadeshiko gave him a bored expression, and by the time he'd reached the end of the paper, he was trembling.
She'd even gotten the hard one at the end correct.
That one required knowledge of division.
He hadn't even taught them division yet!
He slowly, horrifiedly, looked up at Sawada Nadeshiko, who was patiently waiting for him to give her her expected verdict.
"Y-You got them all correct, Nadeshiko-chan!" exclaimed Toshiro-sensei with forced cheer. "How about I run along to Hotaru-sensei's room and get a harder worksheet for you? Ah, you're in charge of the class while I'm gone."
Nadeshiko paused for a moment, translating as fast as she could, before nodding. Toshiro-sensei bid a very hasty retreat, nearly tripping over his indoor slippers.
Nadeshiko turned to face the class, one hand casually stroking her shinai, eyes roving the suddenly deathly quiet classroom, everyone staring at her in horror.
"What is the purpose of thy gormless maw?" she asked the boy who usually sat next to her, Shouji.
He hastily started whispering to the girl that usually sat beside Tsuna. "What did she say?"
"Alien-speak!" hissed the girl, Shizuka, careful not to draw attention to herself from the scary alien girl.
"Nade isn't an alien," Tsuna said bravely, defending his little sister. "She's speakin' like a samurai!"
He'd unwittingly made it worse.
Whispers broke out among the four year olds, worried and scared about what tyrannical samurai things Sawada Nadeshiko would do to them if they so much as blinked wrong.
How they could blink wrong was not questioned.
Such was the hold Nadeshiko had on the masses.
Such was the hold she'd always have on the masses.
Papa lay on the floor snoring in his underwear and off-white vest, a bottle of beer next to him. Nana and Timoteo were out at this current point in time—shopping by the sounds of it.
Tsuna was sitting in a corner, trying very hard to complete his maths worksheet.
He was trying the counting-on-fingers approach, just like Toshiro-sensei had taught them, but he was failing miserably. Maths was just not his forte.
In fact, neither was reading.
Or writing.
Tsuna's eyes started leaking chubby tears and his lower lip started trembling as he thought about his incompetence.
He'd been at school for more than three months now, and he was so far behind that he was running backwards.
Nadeshiko, he consoled himself, was running backwards and sideways in reading and writing, so at least he wasn't a complete failure.
Maths, on the other hand…Nade was doing primary school work! She was as good as the first grade students!
Tsuna sunk into a spiral of depression, hunching his shoulders and sniffling morosely.
Nadeshiko, who'd just walked into the room after putting away her kendo gear, took one look at Tsuna's hunched back and frowned deeply.
She walked up to papa and—the smell of rancid alcohol on father's breath as he slammed her head repeatedly against the wall and please make the pain stop father pleasepleasepleeeaaa—she shook her head to get rid of the thoughts.
She nudged the empty bottles away with her foot and curled up into a ball against papa's side, snuggling into his warmth.
Papa blinked his eyes open, yawning widely and stretching, before noticing that he had a snuggle-bug attached to his side.
"Mia patatina!" he exclaimed boisterously. "How was kendo practice?"
Nadeshiko shrugged, still curled up in her ball.
Tsuna looked over to the both of them curiously, tears shining on his plump cheeks.
Papa frowned. "Did something happen at the dojo?"
Nadeshiko curled tighter, refusing to look at her papa.
Papa started panicking. "Did they hurt you?! Was it Tsuyoshi!? It was him, wasn't it? I knew I couldn't trust that man!"
Tsuna scrambled to get up quickly and run to Nadeshiko, but he, as was the order of his life, tripped over his feet and smashed into papa's thigh.
"Nade," Tsuna said worriedly. "What is it?"
Nadeshiko peeked through her fringe and glanced at papa before looking away disdainfully. Papa started crying loudly. "IT WAS ME?! MIA PATATINA, WHAT DID I DO!?"
Tsuna tilted his head and contemplated this. "You never say goodbye 'afore you leave, you won't be here for our birthday this year, you make mama sad, you're never home, you taught Nade bad Japanese…" He was ticking things off his fingers one at a time thoughtfully and then pursed his lips.
"Oh!" he lit up as he remembered a problem Nadeshiko had with papa. "And you drink too much!" he said chidingly. "Nade's scared of drinkers."
He nodded firmly at this pronouncement, and then smiled shyly. "Did I get 'em all?"
Nadeshiko nodded as papa gaped at his twins. "Papa," she said. "There's only one thing you can do to make up for this."
Papa's gaze hardened in determination as he said solemnly, "Anything."
Nadeshiko took a look at Tsuna's shoulders, remembered how hunched they'd been only a few moments ago, and said, "Buy us beds."
Papa stared at her for an uncomfortable thirty seconds before bursting out laughing.
Tsuna pouted cutely. "You don' wantsa share with me anymore?"
He was looking at her with such pure puppy-sadness and confusion that Nadeshiko couldn't help herself. She pounced on him and bear-hugged him, kissing his cheeks repeatedly and giggling. "Mio cucciolo! You are too cute!"
Papa agreed, and at that moment, mama and nonno came into the house as well, and mama took out her ever-ready camera and snapped a photo of the twins hugging and giggling, with their papa laughing with them.
It was a good, adorable memory, and years later, they would appreciate it far more than they did then.
"This one?"
"No."
"What about this one?"
"…Tsuna, what does thou think?"
"No!"
"But it has crystals, mio cucciolo. Crystals."
Tsuna looked nearly hysterical, having decided quite firmly that shopping with his family was a nightmare.
Mama kept on getting distracted by everything, papa wanted to buy everything, nonno kept accidentally getting lost, Nade had made three separate shop clerks cry inconsolably, and Tsuna was at the end of all his tethers.
"Nade, no," he said firmly, and Nade sighed but acquiesced.
"What about this one?" papa asked loudly, drawing everyone's attention to the clearly foreign man lifting his clearly disinterested daughter up to see an oak bedpost with flamingos painted on it.
Tsuna didn't even get to comment because he ran to run interference. Mama had just been snared by a weather vane salesman.
"It's all the rage these days, ma'am," said the man, shoving a rather ugly metal contraption at mama. "No house is complete without it!"
"Ara," said mama consideringly, "but it's so expensive!"
The salesman said, "For you ma'am, only twenty thousand yen."
Tsuna may not have been good at maths, but even he knew that that wasn't a bargain. Mama, unfortunately, was very gullible.
"Well," she said, "that's quite cheap!"
"Mama," Tsuna said firmly, grabbing her hand and dragging her away from the vulture. "No."
"Tsu-kun! He said no house is complete without one!"
"No."
"But—"
"No."
"Okay…"
They got back to the others, just in time for him to realise that they'd misplaced nonno again. For the fifth time in the last twenty minutes.
"Nade!" he called. "Where's nonno?"
Nade pointed at a seemingly random direction without giving it much thought as she inspected the varnishing on one of the white bedposts.
Tsuna dutifully accepted her directions at face value and ran in that direction, finding nonno being picked on by—
"Blasted pigeons!" nonno exclaimed, angry for the first time in Tsuna's memory, swatting away a pigeon that was trying to steal his hat from his head. "May God curse you!"
Tsuna had snapped some tethers by the time he'd saved nonno from the evil and surprisingly persistent pigeons, leading him by the hand to the rest of his family.
"Nonno, you can't wander off without us," he said chastisingly, worry etched on his face as he scolded his honorary grandpa. "What if you got sick and then died without any of us knowing? You're old; it happens all the time!"
Nonno's eyes softened as he listened to Tsuna fuss, the boy easily dodging people because he wasn't paying attention to his feet, navigating the streets so easily because he wasn't stressing about which direction to go, and finding his wayward sister and parents effortlessly because he was too busy worrying about others to worry about his own assumed incompetence.
Nonno, as he watched Tsuna reunite with his sister and lose all colour in his face when he took a good look at the bedposts she'd picked out for the two of them—something about bear claw legs for her and lions engraved on his—nonno didn't see a four year old child.
Nonno saw the future.
Tsuna, on the other hand, was done with life.
Seeing as I couldn't get it into the story, let it be known that, after Nade stops giggling, she tells Tsuna that she just doesn't want him to be a hunchback, and that they're growing too big for their crib, not because she didn't want to share a bed with him.
Just so we're clear that no evilness has been done to his psyche on that front.
Does anyone else see the makings of a stressed fussy mother hen in Tsuna? Who am I kidding; we all see it! Review please?