Disclaimer: The characters and concepts presented are created and copyright of Akira Amano. The story is copyright of me, so do not use without permission.
"Behold!" Lambo yelled out as he fell down the mountain just above the snow. "This is the genius method I have invented to maximize my effort on the slopes. Antigravitazione Snowboarding, utilizing my natural electric current abilities, I vaporize the snow directly under me, reducing friction and allowing me to glide gracefully down any hill!" Lambo leaned over to dodge Hibari's furious swing of his tonfa and jetted across the entire track almost into the fence. Thankfully, he pulled up and sailed down the plastic fence sideways, eventually steadying back out with a frown.
"Oh yeah" Lambo said to himself. "It's also really hard to steer without any snow to steer on. Ah, this is troublesome." He looked over at Hibari, who was leaning forward and aiming to win no matter what insanity came up next. "Very well then, Hibari from now, I'll fight you!" Lambo leaned his entire board forward and jetted ahead. The two were locked in an uncontrollable battle of speed now.
"Now that we're almost done with the race," the announcer said, giving Tsuna a cold shock of premonition, "we'll introduce the next set of obstacles." The snow unsettled and shot up in powdery clouds. "Now, we add ramps!" Indeed, strewn in the racer's path down were several small ramps. A minor annoyance for Hibari, who steered and swerved around them, but deadly for the speedy Lambo who was already bracing himself for pain. Ryohei was closing in from behind, eying down the best looking ramp jump for a better chance at catching up to Hibari.
"Okay," Ryohei decided, steering towards one good-looking ramp.
"Oh, also" the announcer continued, with the snow around some of the ramps moving again. "Let's put some ominous holes around the track as well!" The snow opened up to deep and wide holes that shocked the racers still alive, including Gokudera.
"It never ends, does it?" Gokudera complained. He kept his balance and took out a cigarette to pass the time for the rest of the race. Also, the other teams were closing on his quickly and he wanted them off his tail soon. When he heard one of the more pompous skiers from before start to hack and cough, Gokudera smiled.
"That's cheating!" one of the self-proclaimed pros yelled from behind Gokudera and the rest of team Clam far ahead. "I'm reporting them."
"No, dear" the man's significant other chided. "We're just here to ski ad have fun, right?"
"Well, I can't have fun if these jerks are cheating!" the man boisterously demanded. He steered away from the young man's smoke stream and went over to the fence. Before he got far, he was pelted with some horrid, oozing snowball made of purple ooze.
"Honey! No! WHY!?" the woman dramatically screamed before getting pelted likewise. Gokudera's nose picked up a familiar, terrifying stink approaching him. He turned around just slightly and caught a glimpse of his sister skiing effortlessly down the hill, thankfully with goggles on.
"Hayato-kun" she yelled over the whipping wind. Gokudera put a hand to his ear and listened up to her. "Please try not to set off any dynamite. The snow on this mountain is very loose and you could cause an avalanche." Gokudera gave his OK sign and refocused on boarding forward. Then he shook his head rapidly to try and shake off the illusion that his clumsy sister was in fact skiing beside him.
"Wait," he demanded, pointing a shaking finger at her, "when...how'd you learn to ski!?"
"Dino-san gave me a crash course" Bianchi said. "I found him here before you all did. Besides that, he's just a much better teacher and skier than you are, Hayato-kun." As she finished her taunt she started pulling ahead of Gokudera, who was still stuck in a daze for a few seconds more. Snapping back to his reality, Gokudera noticed that he was coming up on the ramps now.
"Go!" Kyoko shouted. "Go Onii-san!" The video screen was now focusing on the third place racer, Ryohei, who was wildly ramping up and about, spinning in mid-air and landing perfectly to ramp again.
"Go, Vongola!" Haru cheered for the general racers.
"Come on, Gokudera-kun!" Yamamoto shouted out, regaining his basic speech once again after his abrupt concussion earlier. "You can do it!" Just then, the video switched to a view of Gokudera, who somehow got the impression that Yamamoto was cheering for him. Across the publicly populated bleachers at the bottom and the civilians watching in the sidelines, woman covered children's eyes and men laughed as Gokudera shouted something inaudible and flipped off the camera. Bianchi caught sight of that as she carefully swerved around the bigger ramps and turned around with a sneer to her brother.
"Hayato!" Bianchi shouted in anger. She let herself slow down and waited for her little brother to get close. Gokudera jumped a ramp and successfully landed without losing any speed or direction, keeping his balance and bending his knees at just the right time to keep going. That's when his stomach started to cramp up. He turned to see his sister next to him, arms crossed and face uncovered. Instantly, Gokudera passed out and fell over, tumbling down the rest of the hill until his body got caught in a hole and bounced around the edges until he was sunk in like a basketball.
"Don't" she nefariously started, "be rude." She yanked down her goggles again and kept racing on with a bowl of rancid doom in her hand, prepared with love for her competition ahead.
"Ha!" Dino laughed. "This is hilarious!"
"But," Romario started nervously, "at this rate we'll lose the bet!"
"No we won't" Dino said. "Look. That's the Bovino boy, right? He's Tsuna Thunder, a member of the Vongola, so if he wins we'll win."
"Not only that" Romario added, realizing what his boss was so happy about, "but the random alliance bingo as well!"
"Indeed!" Dino confirmed. The 'random alliance bingo' Romario referred to was the Chiavarone's failsafe against losing most of the bets they ever took up. Basically, if they knew more than one family was in a competition, they could bet on their favorites and any one member of the other family to tie and multiply the money by a factor of twenty instead of five. It was a genius system that the rest of the mafia world hated because the Chiavarone always took advantage of it and won tons of money off of it.
"If Lambo and Kyoya-san tie," Dino began enthusiastically, "we'll have enough money to buy that cruise ship!"
"The one with the three-store pool?" one of Dino's nearby men asked. Dino turned and nodded his head. The man was so excited he ran out the door to tell the news to his comrades. Dino just chuckled and went back to watching Hibari and Lambo race down the hill. Lambo's hair was ruffling wildly in the passing mountain air, as was Hibari's. For the young women below, it was no longer a contest of speed, but of heat.
"GO, Cow-shirt guy!" An entire bleacher section cheered with impromptu signs baring Lambo's face all shiny and glowing.
"Screw him!" Hibari's section shouted. "We love you, evil guy!"
"Yeah!?" one girl shouted and threw a snowball into the Hibari section. "Eat snow and die, hussy!" IN a second, a war of fandom broke out, leaving Hibari speechless and Lambo distracted as he pushed his hair back arrogantly.
"Don't worry" Lambo said to his racing rival. "You'll get used to it." Hibari re-found himself and snapped over to Lambo, who leaned out of the way, over a hole, and went rocketing up a ramp. As he flew through the air, slowly tipping sideways and frozen completely, he had the same stunning thought that he usually had when he stared down death.
"I wonder" Lambo said, cupping his chin with his finger and thumb, "just how long it would take a helicopter to fall if its rotors stopped in an instant..." His random, abrupt thought was interrupted by the rushing, burning sting of snow shooting up his shirt as he impacted to ground and went rolling away down the hill. His speed was so great, however, that his static-charged board continued to propel him forward at the same pace as Hibari. Just a few more meters to the goal line and a tremendous collision occurred. The two young men were mixed up in a tumbling ball of chaos and snow. In the final seconds of the race, a photo flash went off.
"HAAA!" Ryohei screamed as he fell down from the sky, upside down. "EXTR--" The rest of his victorious shout was captured in film, as he landed face first on the finish line. Bianchi soon thereafter gracefully came across. As for the other racers...there were none. No one but the Vongolas had survived the ramps and pits.
"Payday" Dino lowed victoriously. Down in the winners circle, the girls were still fighting over the snowy bodies of the winners that laid face down as the officials evaluated the definite winner.
"Cow-shirt-san" one of Lambo's fans called out, "are you alive?" She skipped over and picked him up, freezing in horror at the terrible red mark on his face from the deathly graze along the hard snow. She started screaming when she looked down at the small puddle of red where his face once lay.
"Please" Lambo said, quivering and reaching out his hand for the girl's shoulder. "Is it...serious?" he asked with his one sad eye and a gruesome looking gash on his forehead. Blood from his head, nose and mouth was oozing out. "...the pain..."
"KYAAAAA!" the girl screamed, tossing him away. As Lambo slowly rag-dolled through the air back to the ground a tear left his eye.
"Why!?" he shouted, exploding into a pink cloud. Hibari raised himself up now, angrily stomping over to the cloud and glaring the smoke away. Unfortunately, he only saw a bored little boy with an afro picking his nose, no suave young racer who had taunted him so brashly on the course.
"Where..." Hibari muttered. "How?...Oh." Hibari came to a conclusion that seemed more than reasonable from his current experience. "Illusions. I must be getting weak, he felt quite real..."
"Cow-shirt-san?" Lambo's fans shouted to search for him. The girl who had picked him up was crawling away in terror, staring at the odd little boy out of nowhere.
"Ha!" one o Hibari's fans shouted tauntingly. "Your guy must have run away. All fear and respect the cool, evil looking guy! Evil guy, we love you!" Hibari's fans raced over to him as he straightened himself out and bashed the snow away from his wool cap.
"If any one of you touches me" he said, glaring daggers their way, "I'll bite you to death..." The girls all froze in mid-air, much to Bianchi's amazement, all of them equally scared and shocked. "I'm satisfied with how that went" Hibari commented as he picked up his board and started away. "Farewell." And then he left, leaving the girls who were blindly cheering for him with tears and drool building from rejection and pure admiration of watching him leave.
"And so" and oddly perfect looking Mario, manager of the resort and orchestrator of the race announced, "I'm pleased to announce our winner: Kyoya Hibari. The other young man who tied with him was nowhere to be found, but congratulations to you as well." The audience applauded for good humor, with the fangirls sadly muttering their cheers for their hot heroic devil. "And so, we award this plaque" which he held up, reading 'Best Competitive Skier from Yukikowa Lodge' "to the 'Fighting Clams' of the Vongola cabin."
"No way" Tsuna said, wrapped in a blanket on the sofa watching the TV announcement made on the local broadcasting channel. "Ow!" Tsuna shouted, getting smacked by Reborn with a yardstick.
"Don't get distracted." Reborn chided. "Finish your work." Tsuna sheepishly confirmed and went back to writing his mandatory punishment report on the important factors of snowboarding and how they relate to real life. Reborn wouldn't let him stop until he had at least en pages filled to the margins with facts. Hibari watched from the stairs, keeping away enough from the others so he wouldn't have to socialize with the losers.
"Oh hey!" Ryohei shouted, watching the report from earlier. "There's me!" he pointed in excitement. Indeed, he was seen walking up the steps to receive his congratulatory award for second place, as well as a confirmed award for conquering the Extreme Maniacal Death Course earlier that week. "Ha, that was fun. I should go it again before we leave tomorrow." His sister threw a pillow at him from her seat on the same sofa as Tsuna.
"Never again, Onii-san" she chided. Ryohei smiled and rubbed the back of his head.
"I wonder" Yamamoto began, "how Chrome-chan is doing..."
"Eh?" Tsuna perked, wonder the very same himself. Since the medics brought her back, she had been very withdrawn...only more so and with the girls she had gotten to know so well. "Oh, yeah/ Isn't she sleeping upstairs still?" A jolt of cold went down Tsuna's back.
"You think she'll want dinner?" Bianchi asked.
"Not from you" Gokudera mumbled far under his breath. Bianchi didn't hear it, or at least she pretended not to, and kept on watching the awards as the entire team gathered for a victory-sign pose off. Tsuna was forced to the center, where he could be seen making two peace signs at once with Gokudera at his right side and Kyoko at his left. Reborn liked that picture, so he asked for multiple copies and had one framed above the fireplace for future tenants to view. When Reborn turned back from admiring the televised capture of the Vongola family's first great picture, Tsuna was gone.
Upstairs, Chrome was looking out the window longingly, like she was waiting for someone to appear out of nowhere for her.
"Feeling fine?" Hibari asked for her door. Chrome nodded silently. "I'd like to have a word with you, then" Hibari insisted, "...outside." Even though she could feel the coldness in his speech, Chrome turned and nodded, keeping her face serious and firm. Hibari started walking out in his prefect suit to the balcony and Chrome put on her puffy coat she and the girls bought to follow him out. Tsuna reached the third floor in time to see her leave and shut the door behind her.
"Bad" Tsuna muttered to himself. "This is bad!" He made a rush for the door but stopped short. He shook his head and ran back down a flight of stairs to retrieve his gloves and Hyper Mode pills from his room...