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Quiet little towns like Namimori are mostly peaceful. They're idyllic, full of children allowed to grow and adults without guilt. The artificial intelligence and advanced technology, still new but fast developing, that Vongola has clawed an empire from has yet to swallow the town. Hints of it exist in the flashes of metal 'flesh' and the smooth robotic voices that float from houses but Namimori is still, mostly free.

Shamal will miss it when Vongola conquers.

Idly, he flips through the instruction manual the kids sent him and makes a note to tell them to reduce the ridiculous amount of technical jargon in it. It's headache inducing and treating a human is bad enough, a robot is a whole other level of madness. He's already going mad, what with his stupid student deliberately disobeying him and now they're all going to be in a right mess.

Go find your sister, he told him, her face might make you pass out but she really does love you. You're her brother, she'll protect you, he told him and what had the ungrateful, stupid brat done? Follow him to Namimori. Shamal will tear his student a new one when he drops by. In fact, he'll give Hayato a very valid reason to visit the infirmary. A very validly painful reason.

The door rattles open behind him, shuts and clicks. There is only one student who would lock the door and as Shamal swivels to face it—him? whatever, he—

he drops the instructional manual and instinctively reaches for a cigarette.

Sawada Tsunayoshi looks painfully grotesque. There are bandages clumsily wrapped around his head, mainly covering his left cheek. The flesh peeking through the bandages is horridly swollen and a vivid dark purple. It looks like someone took a bat to his face until the bat and his face broke. Automatically, Shamal finds himself reaching for an ice pack but catches himself because this was a robot for god's sake.

"I got punched." Sawada says by way of explanation.

"With a bat?" Shamal finds himself checking. Sawada squints and Shamal has officially lost it if even a robot gives him looks.

"No…? By Gokudera Hayato." and forget the infirmary, Shamal was putting Gokudera into the damn hospital. Teach the kid to fight once and he beats an innocent kid—robot, Sawada was a robot and Shamal gives into the temptation of his cigarette. He wonders, he really does if the kids ever considered what it meant by making a hyper-realistic robot. Probably not. Genii, Shamal realized, were often unaware of the simplest of things.

"I don't feel pain so I didn't realize he hit hard enough to rupture my…" Sawada grimaces and gestures empathetically to his swollen face, before carefully pulling off his bandages. For some reason, a chill settles in at the base of his spine. The dissonance he felt when he first met Sawada is manifesting again. Shamal frowns as Sawada continues, oblivious or ignoring his sudden focus.

"Normally, I'd drain the blood and put a plaster but I only noticed this morning when…uh, I only noticed this morning and by then it became like this." He finishes and Shamal is very curious about the obvious deflection of when. Not the time though but he'll remember it.

"Why is it purple?" He asks instead of why the hell did Hayato hit you because he can guess the second from the gossip he had gleaned from the staff lounge yesterday. Besides, the physiology of faux-human appearances Sawada pulled off was fascinating.

"Something in my skin is supposed to react when 'blood' touches it from the inside, it's supposed to fade to yellow-green after a few days. If I don't drain it fast enough, it pools and kinda swells. Luckily, it didn't spread yet or half my face would be purple. I'm not supposed to bruise easily." He explains as Shamal takes out the necessary equipment. Almost reluctantly, Sawada moves to sit at the chair he pulled out and obligingly holds the bowl he passes over. Grimacing a little at the bizarreness of it all, Shamal holds the scalpel steady and cuts right under where it is most swollen.

Immediately, liquid a bit too bright red to pass off convincingly as blood gushes out and into the bowl, leaving a trail of red-on-purple on Sawada's skin. When the liquid is nothing more than a thin trickle, Shamal pastes a plaster to plug the cut. He watches unashamedly as Sawada places the bowl on the table and grabs a towel to scrub at his face and neck. Fortunately for him, the liquid doesn't appear to stain synthetic skin easily and comes off without water. He still looks terrible though, thin, wide eyes and splotchy dark bruise like a brand.

"Why did Hayato hit you?" He finally asks because Hayato was hot-headed but he wasn't the type to go round punching random people. This seemed…personal.

"We're neighbours." Sawada states flatly and this had to be some sort of twisted conspiracy because there were three cheap apartment blocks with reasonable rent around the school and Hayato chose Sawada's. "He asked me why the hell I was his neighbour and why I wasn't living with my parents."

"Considering what I am, I had to lie. I said something about it being irritating to live with my mother and then…" Sawada shrugs, "I tend to make people angry." He says and there is a forced note of indifference that rings false in the quicksilver dart of his eyes to the door. The chill intensifies. Shamal wants to interrogate, to chase and find out the reason for this chill but that has never been his style so he nods and sighs because there was a reason he didn't treat anyone but girls. The first time in a while he makes an exception and he's in this mess.

"I'll write you an excuse note so just skip class for now." He says as Sawada makes to stand and doesn't miss the sudden stiffening of his spine. Sawada pauses and walks over to the nearest bed. He settles cautiously and just stares at the blank wall, not even bothering to pull the curtain close. He's too tense for Shamal to bother with right now so Shamal goes back to reading the instruction manual.

Half an hour passes when Shamal next looks and Sawada has relaxed incrementally. His fingers are rest loosely on his legs and seem to be tapping in some sort of rhythm. Sawada's mouth is moving a little and Shamal realises he's humming. The chill claws up his spine and Shamal finally understands what it means.

Awareness.

It's been haunting him since yesterday when he first met Sawada. A shadow at the back of his mind, a chill scrabbling up his spine. There is something human in the way Sawada moves but also a strange rigidity, a lingering act of a puppet's movements. Could it be? If yes, did the kids know? By all rights, Shamal should report this to Vongola, even if it's a suspicion.

However, he smirks, stubbing his cigarette out, Vongola had long lost any loyalty he held for it. After all, he was a doctor and not a spy. First and foremost, do no harm, even if his patient was not technically alive. Shamal grins, more teeth than anything else because Sawada Tsunayoshi has just become infinitely more fascinating.

Perhaps, Sawada Tsunayoshi would even become history.


Namimori Middle School should have higher hiring standards.

Shamal is on his fifth cigarette of the day and he knows the open window will do nothing to chase away the smell seeped into the room. He knows what he smells like, ashes, smoke and haze. It doesn't linger around him like a half-forgotten memory but has long settled into his clothes, his breath, him. It won't go away, not that he's even trying to chase it away. They shouldn't have hired him. They shouldn't have continued hiring him.

And yet, here he is. A breeze blows through the open window, it's going to rain judging from the scent, unapparent in the deceptively clear sky. The bell rang five minutes ago, Shamal stubs out his cigarette.

The door rattles open behind him, shuts and clicks. Footsteps and the tell-tale clink of metal, the thump of a body on the chair next to him.

"Oi." As usual, Hayato sounds annoyed. Shamal rolls his eyes and lazily swivels his chair to face him. The purpling bruise on Hayato's cheek should surprise him but it really doesn't, not with the brutal anger on the kid—Yamamoto's face when he came looking for Sawada earlier. His eyes had narrowed and the affable smile on his face had frozen, crumbled and twisted. His hands had twitched and curled as if they wanted to grip something. Like a bat, and oh, the kid played baseball didn't he?

"Tsuna." He said, and wasn't that interesting, "Tsuna," he said again as he stepped into the room, "who did this to you?"

"I'm fine, Yamamoto-san." But Sawada's face looked sickly pale despite the light and there was a strange frailty in the way his body rested deathly still. Yamamoto cocked his head to the side, face carefully blank and stepped further into the room.

"Was it Gokudera?" It was question, but at the same time also a statement and Sawada's slight hunch forward, shoulders rising a half-inch, was an answer in itself.

"I see." Shamal half expected the kid to rush out the room and beat his student up immediately but to his surprise, all outward signs of anger simply melted away from Yamamoto. To Sawada's surprise too apparently as the kid was already half off the bed, prepared to chase him down. Yamamoto shrugged and inclined his head at Sawada.

"Wanna go for lunch?" He had asked, smile light and easy on his face but Shamal had seen the tension lining his shoulders. His hands, noticeably, were clenched behind his back. Sawada had looked confused, shooting a wary glance at Shamal before stumbling off the bed to Yamamoto.

When Yamamoto spares him a sharp, almost calculative glance, a sort of premonition settles in Shamal's mind.

And now, Hayato in front of him, grudgingly accepting the ice pack offered. Brat.

"When I taught you how to fight," Shamal begins, enjoying the guilty tense of Hayato's shoulders, "it was to protect and not to instigate fights with innocent civilians." Granted, Sawada was a robot but it was the principle of the matter.

"He's not a civilian." Hayato hisses and there's enough vehemence in it to make Shamal's heart stutter with fear, fear that Hayato might know and if he did, who else? Resisting the urge to reach for a cigarette, Shamal quirks an eyebrow. As always, there is patience in waiting. Hayato shifts nervously but it's quite clear he came here to confront Shamal rather than seek treatment and eventually he stills.

"I just wanted to test Vongola's heir. I didn't expect him to be so spoilt and weak." Hayato says and Shamal regrets even considering taking on this job. Oh, he had heard the rumours—that Vongola's Young Lion had a hidden son who was being raised to take over, who had travelled to Italy to pay respects to his soon-to-be predecessor but they were so ridiculous, Shamal ignored them after having a good laugh. He hadn't realized they were about Sawada, he hadn't realized that some people like his idiot student believed them.

Shamal groans and buries his face in his hands. He should have known people were going to misunderstand with a surname like 'Sawada' and now that he thought about it, Sawada looked a lot like the woman in countless photos Iemitsu had shoved at him, loudly proclaiming about his 'lovely wife'. Of course he looked alike considering Iemtisu had volunteered a picture of his wife for Sawada's base appearance.

Shamal wants to retire.

"I knew it." Hayato's voice breaks through his meltdown and with dawning horror, Shamal can only watch as Hayato stands up, flinging the ice pack aside. He has that fervent look in his eyes, the kind that only appears when he's ranting about the supernatural.

"I thought it was just a rumour but then you came to Japan to work in a school of all places. You're so protective over him and now, you're not even denying it." Hayato says triumphantly, and before Shamal can even get a word in edgewise, Hayato is already walking away.

"I'll show you. I'll show you he's not worth the title and your time." He hisses, unlocking the door.

"Just wait." Hayato says, pointing a finger at him and then, he's gone, door slamming shut behind him. Always so melodramatic, Shamal thinks exasperatedly, and lights a cigarette with trembling hands.

He's got his work cut out for him. If he's lucky, Vongola will stay the hell away from Namimori. Considering the whole mess they've gotten themselves into, Shamal is highly doubtful of any sort of luck they supposedly have.

He needs to plan.


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