A/N: Some action, some contemplation, some talking… Enjoy!
Keeping Your Character – Chapter Twenty Eight
The next blast was not so distant, and a split-second later, a body came hurtling down toward the group. Lambo, keeping her eyes on the epicenter of the explosion, merely side-stepped it.
Naturally, this meant that the poor schmuck collided with Tsuna – the poorest of schmucks.
He shrieked as he went down, then curled up on the sidewalk with a groan beneath the human projectile.
"For a bodyguard, Lambo sure picks and chooses when she actually guards my body," he muttered.
"Ah! I apologize," the body on top of him said, quickly pushing himself up.
Tsuna froze when he peered up at the boy through squinted eyes. He looked pretty beat up, and there was a flickering Flame just above his eyebrows – and even stranger, it was blue instead of the more natural-seeming orange Tsuna was used to.
"Eh?"
Oddly enough, the boy seemed almost as shocked as he was.
"Thou… thou art…!"
'Thou?!' Tsuna thought dubiously. 'In this day and age?'
The speech pattern was almost weirder than the flaming forehead, if only because he'd been subjected to the latter on a semi-regular basis since Reborn had arrived.
"Tenth?!"
"Tsuna! You okay?"
Gokudera and Yamamoto rushed to Tsuna's side, worry written all over their faces. As soon as he saw his boss sit up, relatively fine, Gokudera turned a snarl toward the launched boy.
"You! Who the he—?"
"You guys might want to shut up. You're drawing attention," Lambo said at them over her shoulder. "Basil, right? On your feet."
"You know this guy?" Yamamoto asked with a tense grin.
He was ignored.
"Lambo-dono!" Basil scrambled to his feet, stepping up to stand beside her. "Forgive my rude entrance. I did not expect to be pursued so blatantly into such a populated area."
"He's Varia," Lambo deadpanned. "You shouldn't expect common sense or care for civilians from them."
As if to prove her point, the dust cleared a bit, showing Squalo standing atop a low rise roof. He was grinning savagely.
"VOII! I'll cut up any of you scum that gets in my way!"
Then he brought his arm blade downwards with enough strength to send slashes of pure air pressure screaming down at the heels of the panicking, fleeing crowds of hapless shoppers.
Lambo eyed him, unimpressed by the complete lack of subtlety. Then she glanced over at Basil.
"Anyway, don't you have a job to be doing?" she asked calmly.
Basil's eyes shot open, and a moment later he was back near Tsuna, spitting out another quick apology and dragging the clueless boy away from the enemy. They didn't get far before Squalo leapt down, aiming a swipe at Basil; even when the boy blocked with his… boomerang thingy, the sheer force of the blow sent him skidding backward through a wall.
Squalo aimed a harsh-eyed stare at Tsuna.
"You! How're you related to this guy?" he yelled, pointing his sword arm at the new hole in the building.
"Eh? HIE?!" Tsuna wibbled in fear and shock.
Lambo, who had moved to a higher vantage point, watched with careful eyes as Gokudera and Yamamoto reacted to their friend's distress. Honestly, she could have easily intervened, but she was pretty sure that being outclassed and lightly beaten by Squalo now was better than dying later as a result of lacking motivation in a rigged gladiator match.
Yamamoto locked blades with the assassin for a brief moment, and was quickly struck down by a detonation of gunpowder that had been ejected from the hilt of Squalo's blade. Gokudera followed suit less than a minute later, the tops cut off his dynamite, and the boy himself flattened down by a cruel elbow to the back.
When Squalo looked to be going in for the kill, Lambo shot a quelling glance at Basil – stay out of it and complete your assignment instead – and pushed off from the roof in a mighty leap.
Her forward foot was inches away from connecting with Squalo's arm when the man shifted slightly, tilting his sword so that her momentum would carry her straight into impalement. Unfortunately for him, she was expecting his quick reactions – it wouldn't do to underestimate a Varia officer – and arched her spine back, bending just enough to miss the edge by a hairsbreadth.
It was like limbo, but the kind that could end with you looking like Voldemort in the nose department.
She slid forward on her shins, until her velocity abruptly cut off. Lambo turned a taunting grin on the assassin behind her; she'd deployed her Meteor Hammer a split-second after her attempted kick, and the far end of it had coiled neatly around the man's sword arm like a snare.
He stared her down, nostrils flaring as his irritation surged, and attempted to pull his arm back. It didn't budge.
This, of course, meant yelling.
"VOI! Now this one?! Who the hell are you!"
"Just a concerned fellow teenager with a talent for angling," Lambo said seriously, even as she bared her teeth in enjoyment.
He took in her look of delight, and shot her a sarcastic sneer. Then he planted his feet into the concrete with an absurd amount of raw strength, preparing for a more effortful tug. Probably wanted to turn the tables on her and yank her in for a shish kebab.
She copied him, then went a step further and Solidified her limbs. He wouldn't be able to out-leverage her.
After a few ineffectual tugs – during which his frustration became more and more entertainingly evident – he snarled, his posture shifting in preparation to simply leap at her instead.
Lambo grinned at him a little wider, then allowed her Lightning Flames to show in a few visible arcs of electricity near her end of the cable – for the sake of being underestimated, she made it look more like she had a souped-up taser rather than access to mafia superpowers.
Those were mostly for a later Arc, after all.
Squalo's eyes widened. On anyone else, it would have looked like disbelief. It was mostly anger. He sprang forward with a yell.
"VOIIIIIII! You've got to be shi—"
The charge swept down the cable between them.
There was an explosion – because this was a shounen series – and as the dust cleared, it became readily apparent that Lambo no longer had a shark on the line.
She did, however, have his hand. Sword. Sword-hand?
Lambo flicked her Meteor Hammer, the motion simultaneously pulling and releasing the prosthesis toward her. She caught it with her free hand, looking it over with interest. The surface looked a bit blackened by the blast, but when she squeezed with a Solidified hand, it didn't bend in the slightest. Sturdy stuff.
"YOU!"
She turned to face the assassin, still smiling. He stood a few yards away, looking no worse for wear than before other than the missing appendage. His remaining hand clenched and unclenched convulsively, and she could see a vein throbbing on his temple.
"Me?" she parroted innocently.
Incandescent rage swept over his face like a flashflood. He looked about ready to charge her, sword or no sword, when a loud, familiar shriek echoed from a nearby rooftop. Squalo's head snapped toward it, though he kept an eye on her. She saw his jaw shift with tortured slowness, like his teeth were about to grind away from the force of his agitation.
"That kid from earlier…" he hissed.
He whipped to face her once more – and honestly, all this head turning made it hard to take him seriously because he looked like a billowy hair commercial – his eyes straining beneath the weight of his angrily lowered brows.
"YOU! If this were any other day I'd be stringing you up with your own weapon, slitting your throat over your mother's doorstep, and prying my sword from your shitty dead fingers!" he screamed at her. "Don't you dare believe this is over!"
Then, he darted in the direction of the scream – because Tsuna-shrieks meant Tsuna, and Tsuna had earlier been dragged off by Basil, and Basil carried the case that was his ultimate target.
Lambo examined her newest souvenir for a moment, then pressed a small indentation on the side of the middle-finger's knuckle. The blade folded in on itself to a rather impressive smallness, then withdrew inside the prosthetic hand. She took one of the loose straps that had once held the thing to the stump of Squalo's arm, and tied it to her belt loop.
Then she followed.
She arrived just in time to hear Dino make his entrance.
"Isn't it a little embarrassing to be so rough on some kids?"
He actually sounded somewhat cool for once, Lambo had to give him that. But he'd missed the perfect opportunity.
"You should have said 'underhanded,' Dino," she complained lightly.
"Huh?" Dino startled slightly, though thankfully Romario's presence a step or two behind him meant that he didn't flail and make an epic face-plant.
She pointed at the hand strapped to her pants.
"Huh!?" Dino's eyes bulged, darting back to Squalo – or rather, his lack of sword.
(Because honestly, knowing him meant that the lack of sword was more shocking than the lack of a hand.)
"It was a gift," she said, straight-faced. "Secondhand."
Dino shot her a "how-are-you-not-dead?" look. She got a lot of those from people who knew her longer than in passing, which probably said something about her – but she was having too much fun to contemplate it. She could hear Squalo growling in the back of his throat even at a distance.
Dino sighed, took a deep breath, then took another step forward.
"Squalo, I'll be your next opponent if you don't stop this game of yours right now," he said seriously.
"I'll help," Lambo said brightly. "You definitely can't beat us single-handedly."
Squalo's entire face twitched.
"Voi, Bucking Horse, I have no issue killing you right here, right now," he said, seemingly determined to ignore her. "But attacking an allied Famiglia would have the higher-ups nagging. So today I'll peacefully…"
He quickly lashed out with his remaining hand, grabbing Tsuna by the wrist and holding him aloft.
"Let go of him!" Dino shouted, lashing out quickly with his whip.
But Squalo merely smirked, then spit out a small, round pellet. It exploded into a thick cloud of smoke. Lambo immediately shut her eyes, focusing so as to use her electroreception. Surprisingly, Squalo didn't even hint at going near her to retrieve his lost prosthetic. And his pride, she supposed.
He really was dedicated to the mission. Or Xanxus, rather.
The smoke dissipated slightly, revealing Tsuna collapsed back onto the ground but sporting no new wounds – and Squalo holding a small, black case.
"I'll leave their lives to you," he told Dino with a snarl of a grin. "But I'll be taking this."
Then, with one last, fire-tinged glare at Lambo, he dashed away.
He was fun to mess with. She kinda wanted to see his face when he realized he'd been duped with a case of fake Rings.
"Ack!" Basil attempted to stand, despite his evident wounds; there was literally blood coming from his mouth.
"Hey, don't try and move," Dino cautioned him.
"The Vongola Rings…!" Basil lurched again.
"It's too dangerous to pursue," Reborn said, popping up out of nowhere like a demented mole, as he was wont to do.
Tsuna shrieked his name, immediately all aflutter over the idea of Reborn not coming to his aid against such a foe.
"I'm not allowed to attack that man," Reborn stated plainly. "Because he's also part of the Vongola Family. People like him are part of the reason Lambo was hired to watch you."
Another Tsuna shriek.
"I was attacked by someone from the Vongola? What's going on!?"
"Who knows?" Reborn said blankly, shooting a look at Lambo.
She shrugged, languid from getting a fight. And thankfully, before anymore meltdown stuff or awkward questions could happen, police sirens sounded in the distance, steadily inching closer.
Strange, to be thankful for the police for once.
Dino ushered Tsuna along with him, headed for the unpopulated hospital he'd had set up for the occasion. Tsuna dithered for worry over his defeated friends – as if summoned by his fretting, Gokudera and Yamamoto came running up a moment later. Before they could follow, Reborn shut them down completely.
"The level you're fighting at now will make you guys nothing but dead weight," the tiny hitman said plainly. "You can go home."
He hopped a distance multiple times his height to land gracefully on Lambo's shoulder, nudging her slightly to follow Dino. If not for his position, she would have shrugged again. As it was, she simply raised a lackadaisical hand (her own, not Squalo's – though it was tempting) in farewell to the two recently-curb-stomped boys, and went along.
She felt their gazes burning into her back. She doubted her pristine condition, or new souvenir had escaped their notice – nor the fact that Reborn easily included her, when they had been blocked because of their lack of battle prowess.
She wondered if either of them would confront her. Gokudera was practically confrontation personified, after all. And Yamamoto could be ridiculously competitive if the right button was pushed.
Squalo was definitely a button pusher.
Well, if they wanted to be strong, they could put in the effort. Or get experimented on. Not her problem.
Lambo mostly patrolled the hospital's perimeter as Reborn and Dino explained the whole Ring thing to Tsuna and attempted to give him the real ones. When Tsuna came darting out of the room minutes later, nervously glancing back even as he made a beeline for home, she followed him.
There was men's laundry hanging from the lines at the Sawada household. Which meant… Iemitsu was there.
Which meant she didn't really need to be there to protect Tsuna just then, if his dad was there. And she wanted to go put her souvenir in a safe spot.
She glanced away, and shot a quick nod at Reborn, who had just arrived. She walked home, allowing the bouncy, light feeling of released tension that came post-fight to trickle through her veins.
Lambo walked through her front door, nearly whistling with good cheer. Yuurei trotted up to greet her with a low maow, and she leaned down to scritch the base of his ears.
"Hah? What's got you in such a mood?" Ken asked, poking his head around a corner in the kitchen to stare at her with a curious look on his face.
"Had a good fight is all," she said blithely.
Chikusa also popped around a corner, and gave her a quick, careful look over.
"You don't seem to be injured," he noted calmly. "Was it quick?"
"A little too quick, admittedly," she said. "But more importantly, it means there's more incoming."
Her face shifted slightly. Admittedly, she'd easily come home because she'd known Iemitsu could protect his son just fine – but also because she'd wanted to avoid Iemitsu himself. He'd definitely be lying in wait, just itching to ask her…
"Oya? Incoming trouble?" Mukuro made his appearance as well, poking his head up over the back of her couch. "Vongola, I suppose?"
His lips curled distastefully around the Family's name.
"Kinda?" Lambo tilted her head so-so with a shrug.
"Kinda," Mukuro repeated, deadpan.
"Well, on one hand, you have the main family, and on the other, you have the CEDEF," she lifted one hand, then the other. "A branch with an outside perspective, that nonetheless has a lot of power."
Then she plucked her new toy from her belt loops and brandished it at her roommates.
"And on the other-other hand, you have the Varia. Crazy assassin squad extraordinaire."
The three stared blankly at her for a moment.
"What poor amputee did you steal a prosthetic from, Lambo?" Chikusa asked, pokerfaced.
"The assassin kind; Loud. Angry. Rapunzel-like," she said cheerily, adjusting her grip and then pressing again on the indentation on the knuckle.
The blade snapped forward from its hiding place/sheath and unfolded with great alacrity. Ken and Yuurei both jumped.
Mukuro's eyebrow twitched.
"Why is the Varia in town, and why are you picking fights?" he asked, pseudo-calm.
"You won, right?" Ken piped up.
She waved the hand in his face, wondering how to make its fingers wiggle.
"Well, I got his hand, and he got scammed," she said with a nod.
"Lambo," Mukuro said.
She turned to face him, eyeing him for a moment. She didn't detect anything overtly diabolical in his intentions (though admittedly, all she really had to go on was his face, which had inherent diabolical qualities she had to mentally filter out), so she shrugged yet again.
"Infighting. There's some kerfuffle about right of succession going on right now. Different candidates being backed by different factions, and all that."
Ken scoffed. It sounded a bit like a puppy sneezing.
"Wow, the mafia turning on each other like dogs over a few scraps of power. What a shocker."
"Is that not offensive to dogs?" Mukuro asked with idle interest, his eyes saying he was already contemplating something deeper.
Ken pondered for a moment. He shrugged.
"Nah. They be like that sometimes."
Lambo snorted, and Chikusa face-palmed, muttering something about how internet access was a both a blessing and a curse.
"So what you're saying…" Mukuro interjected. "Is that Sawada Tsunayoshi and his little middle-schooler friends are going to end up against the Vongola's greatest killing specialists?"
"Pretty much," Lambo nodded.
"Although," she continued a little slower, a little reluctantly, but looking him in the eye. "You might want to have a talk with me later."
Mukuro shot her a look, clearly wondering how the situation could involve him at all.
"Why not now?" he asked.
"Because right now I'm riding the high of a nice fight for as far as it will take me before I have to sit down and contemplate an incoming important choice that will make or break the rest of my life," Lambo said cheerily.
That said, she set the sword-hand down on her coffee table, and picked up her cat for a cuddle as she swept into the kitchen for some ice cream.
Mukuro peered after her with a suspicious squint, but obligingly returned to watching Survivor and munching on a bowl of popcorn.
Later that evening, Mukuro cornered Lambo in her little display room. She was sprawled out on her back on the edge of a veritable mountain of pillows in front of her fulgurite display case. The thunderstorm soundscape was cranked up loud enough when he came in that he had to tap her on the shoulder to get her attention. She didn't quite jump, but she did stiffen with a crackle of green electricity.
That, more than anything, set a tendril of foreboding to growing in his mind. Not much worked her up to the point of sparking.
"Oh, hey Muku," she said. "Not enough idiots to mock on the idiot box?"
Her attempt at her usual blitheness fell a bit short. He tried to ignore it.
"Kufufu, of course not," Mukuro chuckled deliberately. "Fools are numerous enough that it's difficult to not trip over them if I take a walk."
He eyed her carefully.
"I never really took you for a worrier," he said after a moment, unable to resist commenting.
"I'm a hidden worrier," Lambo rejoined immediately. "It's like being a hidden warrior, but instead of secretly beating up the world, the world secretly beats up your brain."
By now mostly used to Lambo's flippant/avoidant tactics, Mukuro sat himself next to her on a spare pillow. They listened to the rumble of thunder over the speakers for a few moments.
"What did you want to speak with me about?" he asked with uncharacteristic bluntness.
"Superbi Squalo of the Varia was in town because he was in pursuit of a young agent of the CEDEF named Basil," she began abruptly.
"And?"
"He believed Basil was carrying half of the Vongola Rings," Lambo continued.
Mukuro's eyes widened. Half the reason he'd wanted to possess Tsuna in the first place was because of the Vongola Family's great power – and a large portion of that power came from the Rings wielded by its seven core members. They were rumored to have supernatural powers, beyond that of the usual mafia eccentricities.
He didn't quite know where to start. He cast his memory back to earlier that day, right after Lambo had come home with that ridiculous hand. An issue of succession, was it?
In a way, it made sense, given the obsession with power that the mafia blackened itself with; it was not necessarily that the seven core members of the Vongola wore the Rings – it was that whoever wielded the Rings had the right to be core members of the Vongola.
"You said he left… 'scammed'?" Mukuro asked after a pause.
"Basil was carrying fakes," Lambo said blankly, crossing her arms behind her head as she laid back to face the ceiling. "In turn, Tsuna and his little buddies got a glimpse of the fight to come, and time to prepare as Squalo takes the fakes back to Italy."
Mukuro stared at the display case for a short while. This was all very intriguing, but he really had little idea what it had to do with him.
"I'm assuming that your little guideline about not targeting Tsunayoshi is still in effect?" he asked, continuing without waiting for an answer. "So why tell me of this… affair, if you aren't airing out a weakness for me to exploit?"
"Because Iemitsu is a stubborn idiot who wants the best for his Family and his family," Lambo frowned.
Mukuro side-eyed her, then nudged her with his boot.
"Oh. Iemitsu's the head of the CEDEF," Lambo explained carelessly. "He's also Tsuna's dad."
That explained why a for-all-intents-and-purposes civilian middle schooler had suddenly become the prime candidate for Vongola Decimo, Mukuro supposed. Nepotism at its finest, and all. Still no idea what it had to do with him.
Lambo sighed. It was a particularly put-upon, melodramatic sort of sigh, and it immediately irked him.
"Iemitsu's the kind of parent who wants the absolute best of a thing for his kid," she explained slowly. "And in this case, he's shopping around for Guardians."
Mukuro felt the little nuggets of information snap together inside his mind, and felt a little ill. And incredulous.
"Kufufu. And he wants you, the notorious independent?" he asked in disbelief, a manic chuckle escaping him. "No – the question is: what kind of screwed up is he that he would want me, who has recently attempted to effectively kill his son and wear his corpse around as a disguise?"
Lambo shrugged.
"The first time we met, he had me trussed up and interrogated because he thought I was a threat to his wife," she noted blithely. "But now he owes me a favor because he personally called on me to protect his kid. I think being in the mafia so long has irreparably warped his enemy/ally sense."
She turned to meet his gaze.
"You can't deny that you're basically the best there is as far as illusionists go," she pointed out.
Mukuro felt his ego swell slightly. Lambo's characteristic bluntness made her just as good at dishing out sincere complements as she was insults – her personality just tended to make the latter much more commonplace.
Still, there was an issue at hand.
"I hate the mafia," he deadpanned.
"Yep," she nodded.
"You hate working as a subordinate," he added.
"Yep."
"Yet you're considering this?" he half-demanded, reading the restless thoughts churning behind her eyes.
She turned back toward the ceiling, then abruptly reeled off a list that had him near gaping.
"Well for one, because I've been body-guarding in my base form instead of as the Black Sheep for the sake of discreteness, that very discreteness is being done away with; if not already, I'll end up being linked with the Vongola anyway. And with a higher profile comes unwanted attention. If I want to keep my life to myself, I'll probably need more protection than a freelancer is warranted – and sure, I could just make up another persona, I guess, but at the same time it's a lot more comfortable to go around as I naturally am. Basically, it's near inevitable that I'm gonna be grouped with the Vongola in the minds of the mafia; have you heard the phrase 'you can't prevent a war, only postpone it to someone else's advantage'? Shouldn't I seize the advantage and take the best position I can get while the gettin's good and all?
"And honestly, I'm not even talking necessarily about it in the sense of power. It's more the fact that Tsuna isn't exactly the type to think of people as being his minions, much less order them to do something against their morals. It'd probably be more like collaboration than subordination. Then there's the fact that he's been raised civilian, which means that his morals are probably way less whack than mine anyway. Honestly, once he gets some more backbone, I wouldn't be surprised if he turned the Vongola back into vigilantes. Which sounds kinda fun – think of the 'I am vengeance, I am the night' jokes!
"Anyway, talking with Iemitsu at this point means I'd be able to bargain from a position of power and weasel some concessions out of him because of my well-known disinclination for formal alliance. Ultimately, I'd get power, protection, and answer to nobody but a boss who wouldn't even boss me around. Hell, I'd probably have more influence over him."
As Mukuro attempted to process that veritable flood of bullet points (which had come tumbling from her mouth at high speeds), he thought he might have heard her mention something like "really good villain fights" and "plot armor" too, but it didn't really register.
"You've considered it," he confirmed faintly.
"Well, I've kinda had the inkling that Iemitsu has had this in mind since the beginning. I just didn't really want to think about it back then," she admitted. "There were other options for a body-guard. And if not, Reborn should have been able to do the job himself."
Mukuro narrowed his eyes at her.
"You've been planning to join the Vongola," he said.
He wasn't quite sure how to feel about it. Honestly, she was probably the last person, other than himself, who he'd ever thought would join the mafia.
"It was always a possibility," she acknowledged quietly, eyeing him with a certain pensiveness that said she had caught on to his current thoughts.
The reminder of Lambo's perceptiveness, when she mostly hid it beneath flippancy and bluntness, calmed him slightly. If she, who was the only person he saw as something of an equal, thought that this was the best course of action… well, he'd at least have to contemplate things a bit more before he wrote her off as just another piece of the world's criminal refuse.
That, and he owed her enough that killing her like the rest of the filth was not exactly an option.
He mulled over her little deluge of blather – half of which he'd possibly tuned out because she'd been listing positives about a "join-the-mafia" situation. His mind snagged on the word "vigilante" (the most important of several paragraphs, and she'd inevitably followed it up with – covered it up with – a stupid Batman reference).
It was basically the same thing she'd been doing this whole time, wasn't it? Vigilantism, but dressed up as bounty hunting; playing at the mafia's rules only as it gave her opportunities to fulfill her own goals.
He blinked. Turned that thought over some more.
He only became aware of Lambo moving after she'd completely extricated herself from the pillows. He turned to see her eyeing him a little warily, and was almost surprised to hear himself chuckling under his breath.
"Welp. Good talk Mukuro. It was nice to air my thoughts out to someone instead of letting them boil over," she said, rolling to her feet and theatrically dusting off her hands. "I'm gonna go make some s'mores over the firepit. You can sit here and smirk diabolically some more as you think things over regarding your part, or you can come join us to eat sweets and watch Ken inevitably chew through a couple roasting sticks."
Then she meandered from the room, as lackadaisical as he had ever seen her, the tenseness of earlier all but forgotten. It seemed as though she'd settled herself on a course of action.
But he was only starting to map himself a new path.
When he finally emerged from the thunderstorm room, he followed the scent of burnt sugar to the backyard, only to find Chikusa calmly sitting on a lawn chair, a s'more in hand; next to him on the ground was a flailing Ken, who was practically crying as he cackled into the grass.
Lambo was roasting marshmallows on the pointed end of her recently acquired sword-hand.
OMAKE
"Dino, you were almost cool back there," Lambo commented with a smirk as they all walked toward the hospital.
"Haha, thanks?" Dino said, a little thrown by the 'almost.'
"High-five?" she suggested.
Dino spun automatically and extended his hand, a little starry-eyed at the idea of such a gesture of camaraderie coming from her.
His hand touched something cold and smooth. Something clicked.
"Eh?"
The prosthetic sword-hand pressed palm-to-palm with his upraised hand abruptly sprouted a nearly-three-foot-blade from a slit between the middle and ring fingers.
Dino shrieked and toppled backward (even Romario's presence couldn't solve everything), directly into Tsuna who also shrieked as he was promptly squished to the ground beneath a body for the second time that day.
Lambo exchanged a real high-five with Reborn.
OMAKE 2
Mukuro tuned back in just in time to hear the last item on her list.
"And honestly, the Vongola have a history of being nuts enough that I'm afraid their crazy would kinda gather up into a black-hole and create some sort of reality-warping causality to get me in the position," Lambo continued with her particular brand of morbid cheer. "The kids Reborn's gathered around Tsuna look an awful lot like the First Gen Vongola guys except for the hair – Tsuna's basically a brunette, part-Japanese Primo – and I'm a dead ringer for the First Gen Lightning Guardian."
He stared blankly at her.
"And you look like Daemon Spade," she continued blithely. "Except your melon doesn't look like a melon."
When he blank stare only became flatter in response, she leaned in, practically exuding earnestness.
"Y'know – how you lean more toward pineapple?"
She patted the tuft of cowlicks that always stubbornly stuck out on the crown of his head, ignoring the ominous 'kufufu-ing' that started up in the back of his throat – more of a choppy growl than his usual chuckle.
"You didn't have to do your hair like this to stick with the fruity theme, you know," she said solemnly, though her tone was belied by the look in her eyes. "You exude fruitiness through the mere force of your personality."
She dodged his lunge with a cackle of her own and dashed from the room, and then the house.
The chase only ended when she led them past Namimori Middle, and Hibari inevitably caught the scent of his least favorite illusionist. She patted herself on the back, and went to get crepes.
OMAKE 3
"So, while we're in a sharey-talky mood, I've been wanting to ask you something," Lambo mentioned casually.
"Hm? What's that?" Mukuro tore himself out of whatever thought he'd been having.
"When you were… in my mind," Lambo hesitated slightly. "You looked, well, just like you do now."
Mukuro raised an eyebrow.
"Yes?"
"Well, since you've been reincarnated before…" Lambo continued. "How come you didn't look like one of your past lives. Maybe your first one, or something?"
Mukuro shot her an unreadable look for a long moment, almost a little thrown by her suddenly bringing up the never-spoken-of topic.
"Mine is an adaptable mind," he said finally. "My body is a vessel for my mind to fill, and as such my mind takes the shape of the vessel."
"Huh," she replied bemusedly. "That makes sense, I guess."
Mukuro eyed her for a beat.
"Usually, you would pester for more detail. Or at least make an offbeat comment," he noted.
He paused, looking at her with curiosity, even leaning toward her slightly.
"Why did you want to know?" he asked.
"Haha. It's not like I'm asking because I've been curious about the same exact issue but in regards to me, but I try to face my own problems mostly through indirect methods and subconscious reconciliation because deliberate introspection has only gotten more and more difficult the more trauma I've gone through."
"What?" Mukuro asked, eyes wide.
"I'm going to go make some tea, you want some?"
"Lambo!"
