Missed an update last week, I have no good excuse except that I was having a rough week (insert sympathetic crowd aww sound file here) and blablabla was uninspired etcetcetc but now I'm good. c:
Once again, thank you for all the follows/reviews/favourites! This story has over 50 followers now, and I'm happy to say that with each passing day, the follower count increases! It's quite humbling to know that there are this many people following this story, and I hope I can continue to interest you with my future chapters and have your support!
Disclaimer: FANfiction. I only own the OC. Any changes to the original canon story is due to the fact that this is fanfiction.
Warning: May contain coarse language.
Of fucking course it was Hibari. She should've known.
It was, to put it bluntly, odd to see Hibari dressed in such a casual manner. Now that she thought more about it, it had actually always been quite difficult to imagine the infamous Hibari Kyoya having a life outside of the four walls of school. That was, until now, of course.
He took a step towards her, and there was an absence of the usual clicking of his shoes. Instead, he was barefooted, but something about his silent footsteps made them a lot more scarier than his regular ones.
As she backed away from him, Riko swallowed thickly when she felt the cold concrete of the wall behind her pressed against her back. She nervously noted that there were no possible escape routes now - Hibari had definitely not been included in the calculations of the mission outcome.
Closing his arms over her, Riko's head was caught in a prison of Hibari's limbs and face. His steely eyes were mere inches away from hers, burning with sadism as they bore into her skittishly darting eyes. It was as if she would turn into stone if she made eye contact with him. As he usually did, his hand drew back momentarily to pull down the goggles that masked half of her face before closing the prison he had made around Riko again.
Riko flinched when she felt cold fingertips grazing her hipbone. When the fuck had he slipped his other hand underneath her shirt?! Instead of yelling at him for breaching her personal space, the acrobat remained silent, lest her cries attracted unwanted attention from the other residents of the mansion.
Job first, survival later.
Holding her breath and squeezing her eyes shut, Riko stood frozen as Hibari slowly moved his hand up the side of her abdomen. She would have to thank her lucky stars, she supposed, for the fact that she wasn't ticklish. Uncontrollable laughter in a situation like this was the furthest thing from being appropriate at the moment, that much she knew.
A foreboding shiver trickled down her spine as Hibari's chilly hand was stopped by the obstruction of the chalice she had hidden moments ago. A wicked smirk played at his lips, as he raised a dark eyebrow.
"Oh? And it seems you've taken a souvenir, too."
His fingers deftly unworked the leather strap that held the chalice in place, and as the slip of cowhide fell uselessly onto the wooden floor, Hibari pulled his hand out from underneath her jumper. The chalice glittered prettily under the burnt orange lights, winking in an almost excruciatingly teasing manner at Riko.
"Stealing is an act of recidivism, herbivore," Riko was fervently praying that there was a god or two out there that would pull her out of this sticky mess, "And for your recidivist acts, I have to discipline you."
"But you don't even have your weapons!"
The words came out of her mouth before she could rein them in, and she instantly regretted it. Hibari lifted an eyebrow at her sudden outburst; her silence had been broken.
"Don't I?"
Those were words she had been hoping that he wouldn't say.
The dark-haired prefect dipped his hands into the folds of his kinagashi. The sleeves hitched up his arm as his forearms crossed, revealing the infamous cloud bracelet that Riko had been warned so many times about.
An opening!
In an instant, Riko had bolted from where she had been previously trapped, and was now perched on top of a massive display case that housed various aged daggers.
Hibari remained where he was, only turning around with a half-smile that was promising torture and pain in the next ten minutes of Riko's future. His fingers were wrapped around the handles of his tonfa; the bracelet once more hidden by the long sleeve of his kinagashi.
"What, no bracelet powers?"
"Oh? The herbivore wants me to camb-"
Riko's eyes widened. "Don't you fucking dare!"
"-io forma, Roll."
"Kyuu!" A high-pitched squeak emitted from Hibari's wrist, and a burst of white light flared in the room, momentarily blinding Riko.
Dark spots stippled her vision as she blinked to compose herself. A sudden presence of body heat behind her back made her shove her hands against the edge of the glass case, and used her feet to propel herself towards the wooden beams of the ceiling.
Crouching in the cramped space between the ceiling and the beam, Riko could see that Hibari was a whole sight different now.
He still wore his kinagashi, but he now had a dark, sweeping trench coat draped over it. His tonfa were now sectioned with black metal, and for a few seconds Riko had been drawn into the vibrant embroidery that spanned the inside of his coattails.
"Nice dress, Kyoya. Really loving the bird design," Riko's voice floated from the beam towards the Cloud Guardian.
Hibari looked up at her, narrowing his eyes slightly. Did this herbivore have no skills other than to constantly flee with an impressive amount of speed as well as mouthing off uselessly to taunt her opponents?
His thumbs swiped over to release the catches, and chains dropped down from the ends of the metal rods. As he swung an arm back, fuschia flames licked up the length of the chain, and it extended at an incredible rate, almost as if it were stretching, towards where Riko had hidden herself.
The metal chain instantly wound around her ankle, and Hibari's eyes darkened with satisfaction. He had caught his prey.
He roughly yanked the tonfa back, and was met with surprise when the chain retracted back empty-ended.
His cool facade was almost broken when momentary confusion took over him. He could have sworn that he had caught her. He had watched it curling around her leg!
His head snapped up to see Riko quite literally flying across the room, before catching another beam and slipping herself in the space beneath the ceiling again. A gunmetal strip glinted at her ankle - the chain.
She had managed to cut herself free. But how?
An ache started to gnaw in his chest; a deep yearning slowly sprouting from the seeds of intrigue that had been sowed from their first meeting. Blood thrummed in his ears as the lust for battle started to grow inside him.
He swung the chain at her again, and his eyes caught a flash of red whizzing through the air, before broken bits of metal lay uselessly on the ground.
"Impressive, herbivore," Hibari spoke as he looked up towards the ceiling, "It seems as if you do have some fight in you, after all."
From where she crouched, Riko narrowed her eyes at the prefect's words of apparent praise. Was he attempting to lure her out of hiding? "You know, if taunting's my specialty, there's no way I'm going to be taunted by you."
A malicious smirk found its way to the brunette's face. "Me? Taunt you? I would never be so weak as to use that as a battle tactic," Hibari scoffed, "I'm going to make you come out of hiding."
Riko blinked. "Make me? How the fuck-"
She was cut off abruptly when the section of wood beneath her suddenly gave away, and Riko quickly grabbed hold of the beam next to the one she had been on, and horror registered on her face when she realised that Hibari was slowly destroying the ceiling with his chains.
"You idiot! You're going to make this entire room fucking collapse on us if you do that!"
Hibari didn't reply, but the expression on his face said it all. He didn't care if that happened, as long as he got to bite her to death. Riko swore loudly as she narrowly avoided being caught in the tangle of chains again. Squalo was going to get it if that was the last thing she did before Hibari killed her! How had the simple fact that this was Hibari Kyoya's home slip him!?
As a fair bit of the ceiling was already lying on the floor in broken wooden shards, Hibari stopped his assault to assess his prey's situation. She was still attempting to evade him, he noted, and before he knew it, scarlet patches where whizzing towards him, and he sidestepped before they could hit him.
"Kyoya?"
The foreign voice seemed to echo in the massive room, which was now half-filled with wooden debris. Riko curiously dipped her head below the beam to see who had spoken, and a grimace unknowingly made its way to her face as she immediately drew her head back in horror.
"Mother."
A dark-haired woman stood in the open doorway. She bore a striking resemblance to Hibari, save for her dark brown eyes. Her face was small, with a very faint softness that did not subtract from the severity of her features. She was dressed very simply in a powder-blue yukata, but radiated a regality and power that had made Riko retract immediately upon seeing her.
As she scanned her son from top to bottom, taking in the elaborately-patterned trench coat, as well as the tonfa-chain hybrid weapon he carried, her lips pursed very slightly. "Kyoya, I believe I've told you that this sort of activity belongs outside."
Hibari's expression did not budge.
"And I believe these are yours?"
His mother held up a small deck of playing cards, which was met with confusion as Hibari had never once seen them in his life, before his mother raised her head towards the ceiling and said, "Kyoya's friend, am I correct in assuming these are yours? Please forgive me, but I don't believe we've met."
Because she had not been expecting to be noticed, much less spoken to, Riko jumped with a start when Hibari's mother had spoken to her, and she lost her balance and fell off the wooden beam she had been hiding in.
Landing with a loud thud, Riko hastily scrambled onto her feet and with great reluctance, walked towards where Hibari stood across from his mother.
A wary, mistrustful look was cast in both Hibari and his mother's directions. "Er, buongiorno signora."
"An Italian-speaking child?" Hibari's mother lifted a delicate eyebrow, "Are you not Japanese?"
Oh, fuck. If his mother was anything like Hibari… "No! Yes! I mean, I am Japanese! Half-Japanese! I'm Chinese-Japanese!" Riko felt her ears burn with embarrassment as the words ran uselessly against her tongue, "M-My name is Rang Yiko! No! It's Yang Riko!"
"Hibari Suzume," she said slowly, her russet eyes analytically sweeping over Riko's clothes, "Do you not bow to your elders?"
"I-"
"She's not from here, mother," Hibari interrupted. His tone was a scathing one, which made Riko want to crawl back to the safety of the ceiling. She was definitely knee-deep in an awkward situation that she had no business being in. It was clear that Hibari was anything but pleased with his mother's appearance. His Vongola weapon had transformed back into the cloud bracelet around his wrist, but his tonfa were still in his hands, and something told Riko that strict mother or not, Hibari would not be afraid to use it to throw a tantrum.
Riko shuffled back slightly.
"Get some tea prepared for your guest, Kyoya," Suzume said softly, her eyes never leaving Riko, "Receive her properly, won't you?"
"Mother-"
"Get some tea," Suzume's cold gaze turned onto her son, "And bring it to the guest room."
Hibari's eyes narrowed at his mother's icy tone, but said nothing as he turned around and left the room.
"And you, Yang Riko, it was quite rude of you to visit without informing anyone first. Now you want to leave without informing anyone as well?"
Riko froze in her tracks, turning her head robotically to face the dark-haired woman as a lie started to formulate on her tongue. "No, signora Suzume. I was just er, checking the damage Kyoya did to the room. Am I going to get a bill-?"
Because Squalo would definitely use that as an excuse to make a Riko-kebab for dinner.
"Oh, what, this little mess?" Suzume started walking out of the room, which Riko took as a cue to trail after her, "Kyoya, more often than not, makes these messes when he throws a tantrum. Although I loathe to admit, he has a lot of tantrums. I assume it must be teenage angst, but who knows what's going on in that boy's mind these days?"
"Voi e me entrambi, sorella," Riko muttered under her breath.
"Did you say something, Yang Riko?"
"N-No, signora Suzume."
Decided to split one long chapter into two, since my chapters are usually pretty short and I'd like to keep it that way. The next part is on the way, so I hope you liked this one and are looking forward to the next! Review to let me know how you liked it and/or if you have any questions!
Italian Translations
buongiorno - good morning OR hello (formal)
signora - madam
Voi e me entrambi, sorella - you and me both, sister
Delphoxi