Yamamoto took his plate of eggs and bacon to the kitchen table, along with his freshly made coffee, ready to eat. He glanced at the clock and sighed, remembering, Lambo's coming down in two minutes...
He started frying a couple more eggs and some more bacon and put some bread in the toaster. He poured Lambo a tall glass of milk and set it on the table.
Two minutes later, Lambo stumbled downstairs, still in his cow pajamas. He was rubbing his eyes and tripped over his feet and fell, poking his eye with a finger in the process. As Lambo started wailing, Yamamoto laughed said, "Maa, maa, Lambo, be more careful. Haha, this is the seventh time in a row!" and handed the sobbing Lambo a pack of ice he had previously taken out, 'just in case'. Lambo simply sniffed and shuffled over to the table. Yamamoto smiled for no reason at all and brought out another plate and gave Lambo his breakfast.
He sat down to eat, when the clock caught his eye. Maa... Hibari's going to come up to get a bag of tea now, isn't he...
Sure enough, a few seconds later, Hibari calmly stepped into the kitchen. Like the other seven times this had happened, he said, "Weak herbivores, when will you buy more green tea."
"Haha, sorry Hibari, keep forgetting," Yamamoto laughed. Hibari grunted and took a packet of French Vanilla tea instead and left the kitchen. Yamamoto saw Kusukabe rush past the doorway right after.
Yamamoto took out another pack of ice from the freezer, tossed it by the stove, and settled down next to the sullen Lambo to gulp down his breakfast. And a few minutes later, just as the past seven days had played out, Yamamoto heard a stream of curses from the stairs. For the seventh time, Yamamoto quickly dropped his fork with a loud clatter and clang and slapped his hands over Lambo's ears, who winced and looked at Yamamoto quizzically. Yamamoto grinned and inclined his head towards the kitchen doorway, where Gokudera was leaning against its frame and was rubbing his foot, scowling furiously and uttering every foul word in his vocabulary.
"Damnit," Gokudera growled. "Sword-freak, is there any ice?" Ever since Yamamoto quit baseball, Gokudera had resorted to calling him 'sword-freak.'
Yamamoto swallowed down the hunk of bacon in his mouth and grinned. He pointed to the area next to the stove, where a damp pack of ice sat lumpily. Gokudera grabbed it and pressed it against his toes.
"Haha, seventh time this week," Yamamoto said cheerfully. He heard a low "shut up" from Gokudera's direction before Gokudera dumped the rest of the bacon and eggs in the frying pan into an empty plate, all the while balancing on one leg and keeping the ice pack on his foot. Gokudera walked over to the table where Yamamoto and Lambo sat and slammed his plate down, making the milk in Lambo's cup slosh up over the edges and drip down the sides, forming a small, white puddle around the glass' edge.
Yamamoto looked up in surprise, Lambo doing the same. Gokudera stomped over to the coffee pot and poured out the last cup of coffee. He dumped a sugar cube into his coffee cup and as he stirred it around, he poured cream into it and watched as the coffee slowly turned a lighter shade and rose up to the brim of the cup. Gokudera walked back over to the table and set the cup down more gently than he did with the plate and noticed Yamamoto and Lambo looking at him with surprise written all over their faces.
"What," Gokudera snarled grouchily, plopping himself down into one of the chairs.
"Haha... W-well, this is a change..." Yamamoto said unsteadily.
"What the hell do you mean?" Gokudera asked, viciously biting into his breakfast. He stood up again and shuffled over to the pantry, where he took out a loaf of bread and started slicing it up.
"Well... uh..." Yamamoto said, eyes fixed on the knife in Gokudera's hands. Gokudera was slicing the bread in a rather odd fashion; venomously stabbing the knife deep into the bread before actually slicing it. "Erm..."
Gokudera gathered up the slices and dumped them into the toaster. He walked back over to the table and sat down, looking expectantly at Yamamoto, an eyebrow raised.
"What is it, sword-freak?" Gokudera said, stabbing an egg on the prongs of his fork.
"Well... uh... usually after you get your breakfast, you take it downstairs into your room and... um... you just don't really ever sit down for uh... breakfast with... us...?" Yamamoto said lamely. He laughed a bit in an attempt to make it sound less... lame.
Gokudera stared at him for a bit and only stopped when the toaster went ping! He looked away and said "Che!" before getting up to retrieve his toast.
The rest of breakfast went on in silence.
He had scoured every single letter, character, word, line, phrase, and paragraph, yet he could find nothing. No clues, no hints, no orders, no commands. Hell, he had even taken the first letter of every line, the first letter of every word and arranged them together in every way possible and he still found nothing.
But why was he expecting something?
After all, it was just a letter.
Gokudera-kun,
It's not your fault, so don't kill yourself. And keep an eye on Mukuro, make sure he doesn't do anything stupid. Great job with everything.
Very good, keep yourself busy and take good care of the family, alright? I'm sure you will, so why am I worrying like this? Don't worry Gokudera, for sure, everything will be fine and totally great! Orchids are nice, don't you think?
I really think that everything will be okay. Make sure that everyone's underground in case or if there's anything dangerous going on.
Anyways, like I said earlier, don't feel too down, okay? It'll all be okay and great later. Promise? Take good care of the family, and make sure Lambo doesn't drink too much milk.
--Tsuna
It was a rather strange letter. Such strange sentences and strange roundabout ways of saying things. Gokudera's eyes narrowed. A fake? He took out a hand microscope and scrutinized the letter. No, it was definitely Tsuna's handwriting, but Gokudera found something else. It was small, and it was probably nothing, it was also very subtle, and if you were anyone but Gokudera, you'd probably not notice it at all. But, still, Gokudera clung to that faint hope and examined the letter again. The letter had been written in pencil lead, and various letters were slightly, just slightly darker than others.
Gokudera-kun,
It's not your fault, so don't kill yourself. And keep an eye on Mukuro, make sure he doesn't do anything stupid. Great job with everything.
Very good, keep yourself busy and take good care of the family, alright? I'm sure you will, so why am I worrying like this? Don't worry Gokudera, for sure, everything will be fine and totally great! Orchids are nice, don't you think?
I really think that everything will be okay. Make sure that everyone's underground in case or if there's anything dangerous going on.
Anyways, like I said earlier, don't feel too down, okay? It'll all be okay and great later. Promise? Take good care of the family, and make sure Lambo doesn't drink too much milk.
--Tsuna
P.S. I think G-Script is really cool.
So Gokudera took those letters and wrote them out, hope rising with each letter.
guardiansgather
vongolaringsdefeat
irieshouichi
allfine
Gokudera was right. Tsuna had left clues for him and the rest. Tsuna had trusted him to some extent. His letter had been the only one written in pencil and the rest were in pen. Tsuna had counted on Gokudera to scrutinize every word, every sentence, to go to the extremes in the hopes that Tsuna had left him something other than a messed up, random letter. Now, to decipher the message.
Gokudera frowned. "Vongola rings defeat... Irie? No, he mentioned orchids... Byakuran?" he scribbled that down. What about Shouichi, though? And why was the boss talking about the rings? They had been destroyed. The only people holding the Vongola rings would be in the past...
"The past..." Gokudera mumbled. The only way to get the rings would be to go back to the past...
Or to have the past come forward into the future.
Currently, there was no way to travel back in time, but there was a way to go forward...
Were there rings in the future, perhaps? But the ten-year-bazooka was lost, and had been lost for years now.
"The past..." Gokudera muttered. "Ourselves? From the past."
Gokudera decided to sleep, thinking one more day wouldn't do much.
"Gokudera!"
Gokudera groaned and rolled over. The fist banging on the door was incessant. Gokudera wondered how long that fist had been banging.
"Gokudera! Oi, Gokudera!"
"This is bad," someone else said. "Should we bust down the door?"
Gokudera rolled out of bed and shuffled irritatedly to the door and swung it open before any such act could be carried out. Behind the door was a panicked Yamamoto and an eager Lambo. Yamamoto looked as if he was just about to cut the door up with his sword and Lambo was watching with interest.
"What the hell is it, you freaks?" Gokudera snarled, stifling a yawn.
"Mukuro's missing!" Yamamoto said, pulling his hair.
"What do you mean?" Gokudera said.
"He's just... He... he's gone!" Yamamoto said. "We can't find him anywhere and he left this-" Yamamoto thrust a crinkled piece of paper at Gokudera, "on the refrigerator."
Kufufu~
Until we meet again~
It was unsigned, but who else would put bloody ~'s in and say, 'kufufu'?
gather the guardians
with the vongola rings, defeat Byakuran
eliminate the guy with the glasses in the photograph
everything will return as it was
That's what Gokudera had come up with. It was the only logical way. The only option. The only hope.
Gather the guardians... in this time period would be impossible. Hibari had just left on a mission, Mukuro had disappeared, Chrome had long been missing, Ryohei had been on a mission for a long time now. And they definitely didn't have the Vongola rings now and had no way to attain them. There was no way to defeat Byakuran in their current condition, with enemies left and right and searching 24/7 for their base now. They had no access to where Irie was nor did they know where he was. And with all those hurdles, there was definitely no way things would be fine. So the only thing to do would be to take the Millefiore by surprise and bring their younger selves to the future. They always had a knack of managing to find each other and grouping up to fight in the past.
Gokudera reasoned that Hibari must know something about all this; he had seen him and Tsuna walking together and talking seriously often. Gokudera felt a slight twinge of jealousy, but it was logical for Tsuna to give information to others as well, rather than just to him. And that pineapple bastard, that smirk on his face screamed "I know something you don't~!" It was better that way, Gokudera guessed, and Tsuna did it to ensure the protection of the others if one of them was captured. He still felt happy though, being able to have an important part in this war.
Gokudera had doubt in his mind, but he pushed that back. This was Tsuna, and Tsuna would do anything to make sure everyone was kept safe... even if it meant he had to die to do so. Tsuna must have planned this out, must have predicted everything... still, it was a big gamble. What if Gokudera had given up during his search for clues? If he had died? Had been captured? But Tsuna must have put Gokudera's faithful determination into his calculations.
Gokudera had written the letter out in G-Script and planned to carry it with him everywhere he went to ensure that if ten-year bazooka were fired on him in the past, he and only he would be able to read it. If he were captured, the enemies certainly would not be able to decode it... he hoped.
Hope. That's all he could do now. Hope and wait.
Confusing? Yes. Badly written? Yes. An update? Good enough for me. Sorry for crappiness... and grammar/spelling issues.
Disclaimer: Don't own KHR