So… this isn't a one-shot anymore, it's sort of a drabble series from now on. You guys can thank the people who reviewed for that, if not for those wonderful people I never would have gotten the motivation to pluck this out of my head and write it down. It's shorter, but this is the lenght most chapters will be, I'm sorry if you don't like that.

I should probably have waited a bit to write this. I just watched The Hobbit: BotFA again, and I'm afraid that that reflects on the chapter… I wrote the last chapter after reading some REALLY fluffy shit, can you spot the pattern? D:

THIS CHAPTER IS NOT CRACK (more angsty-feely on Nana's part)

Nana is a small bomb of angst

Nana was still treasuring Iemitsu's reaction to her secret months later; it really was too bad that he had somehow destroyed all of the blackmail material, even the video of his girlish scream and subsequent faint. She wasn't ashamed to admit that it was for blackmail, a woman needed something to hold over her husband's head, and Iemitsu had somehow overcome his fear of dogs, so she couldn't threaten to tell Tsu-kun about that anymore.

She had hidden all the videos and photos underneath the neighbor's dog house and it had been protected with some of her more painful wards.

Nana thought about that for a second.

Iemitsu had been driven to the hospital just before he had had to leave, come to think of it… huh. She really was as oblivious as people said, wasn't she?

One thing she was not oblivious to, however, was when her son was in pain; he couldn't hide the bruises and black eyes and sometimes-broken noses.

She had been pretending to be (oblivious, that is) though, ever since the time she had made his bullies cry from a stern talking-to when Tsu-kun had been five and he had come back from kindergarten with a black eye. Her son had sobbed and taken the blame, and Nana hadn't wanted to make her darling cry again but had been unable to not do something.

She had taken to sending the bullies terrifying nightmares (monster bears, and clowns, and spiders, and sometimes, when she felt especially cruel, of being denied candy), but they didn't get the message. What else could she do but bring out her ladle, when Tsu-kun's back was turned?

Before Iemitsu had pushed his way into her life, Nana had been apart from society for four hundred years, and it is only now that she's noticing that she had lost something during that time. She loved her son – more than she loved Iemitsu – but she had never really seen (hadn't allowed her to see, maybe? Her thoughts had been turning against her, Nana noticed, however that happened... perhaps she was going senile?) that he had been hurting on the inside. She had felt lonely, yes, and she had longed for some real human contact (but she hadn't trusted herself with it after Giotto's little vigilante group), but not to such an extent that it had hurt.

She had grown up bullied by her family and everyone who should have cared for her, and the mindset she had developed in those dark years in the cupboard under the stairs had been easy – maybe too easy – to revert to once she had laid Hermione, Ron and Teddy to rest.

The knowledge that Tsu-kun had made some friends – true friends, and that Hayato-kun and Takeshi-kun never gave him any time to feel alone – soothed some of those feelings.

It didn't stop her from feeling like a failure, however. Every time Nana watched her son open the door, always with the look of surprised happiness when he spotted his friends… it never ceased to make her heart clench. Had she really grown so far apart from humanity that she had never noticed how lonely her own son was?

Nana didn't really have any problems with her Tsu-kun become a Mafia boss (now that she knew the full truth, anyway), and pretending to be oblivious of everything Mafia related that happened in her home was quite amusing, really (and it was easy to distract herself with all the commotion). She had always intended to allow him to do as he wished, and had tried to keep from influencing any choices he made.

With Iemitsu out of the country all of the time and with the way most people treated Tsu-kun; she was, really, the only adult figure that he had in his life and Nana did not want her son to have her as a role-model. Distancing herself from Tsu-kun was probably the most painfully agonizing thing she had ever done, but Nana found it more bearable than having her son imitate her as he had done in his younger years.

If only she could work up the courage to tell him that…

Nana knows that the memory of Tsu-kun's lost and hurt expression – of when she had changed from hugging-and-kissing him to absently patting his hair – will never stop making her want to stab herself with a rusty knife.

(She won't, because she doesn't deserve any respite.)

Blegh! I'm feeling sad (WHY DID YOU DIE, YOU STUPID DWARVES?!), why did I write this? I'm not sure I captured what I was going for, either… Tell me what you think, even if this is the worst, most disgusting crap you've ever read; I WANT TO KNOW.