Sometimes one small mistake can lead to an entire avalanche of nasty consequences.
One of the first things Sawada Iemitsu did in his apprenticeship to the Vongola Ninth’s outside advisor was bring the Ninth news of the woman who claimed that her son belonged to Timoteo Vongola. It was an act that Iemitsu reflected on later, grimly, deciding that it was the event that colored his entire service to the Vongola.
Squalo meets Xanxus and Xanxus meets the Varia, and everything follows from that. Beginning overlaps the end of “Blood Will Tell“.
The sword was everything to Squalo—the purity of a single goal and the cleanness of perfection. In a world that hid so much, despite the stark edges of every word and action, the sword was one thing that made perfect sense. It made him a little crazy that no one else seemed to understand that.
Really crazy.
Hibari thinks it’s about time someone told Kyouko and Haru a few things.
He remembered the point in his past, his old past he supposed he should say, when Kyouko had finally coaxed the truth out of her brother and Sawada; it had been the first time he’d thought the girl might have teeth after all. He remembered the impressive black eye and the hangdog expression that Sasagawa and Sawada had sported, respectively, afterwards; the bruise had faded sooner. He remembered the fierceness in Sawada’s eyes when he’d demanded Kyouya’s word that he would protect the younger Kyouko and Haru, when they came forward; only after that word was given had he, reluctantly, agreed to the whole plan.
Of course, in Kyouya’s opinion, the best way to protect someone was to sharpen their teeth.
The Giglio Nero boss talks to Kyouko and Haru about the other side of the mafia.
"I did mention that those girls were transparent?" She nibbled on the end of her pen. Coffee, yes, that would be… unthreatening. "If we’re to be allies, I’m not letting Vongola stand around with a weakness like that hanging out where anyone can aim at it. And those boys probably won’t even see it until far too late."
As Kyouko and Haru settle into their lives with the mafia, sometimes they need advice.
"…and never, ever accept red flowers. All right, I think I got all that." Kyouko sat back, one hand rubbing her forehead.
Unità’s lips quirked in sympathy. "You’re doing very well, for someone who’s never even traveled abroad before."
Kyouko’s soft smile was more wry than usual. "And here I thought that, once I was done with the university entrance exams, I wouldn’t be studying any more."
Kyouko and Haru meet Uni as she’s introduced to Tsuna, and get a shock.
Abruptly Haru’s mouth snapped shut and her eyes narrowed. "Your necklace," she murmured, as if casually. "Is it your rememberance of your mother?"
The quirk to Uni’s mouth turned a bit sour. "Exactly."
Kyouko looked down at the pendant, puzzled. She’d seen it once or twice before, though Unità usually wore it under her clothes. It was an odd shape, she remembered…
And then her heart nearly stopped as she really looked at it for the first time.
Kyouko and Haru deal with Family (and family) politics. This fic was originally written for the first round of khr_undercover and has been revised from the originally-posted version, mostly for the sake of development and expanding a few things.
The first day of her official duty as Sawada Kyouko’s personal bodyguard was nothing like I-Pin had imagined it would be.
Yamamoto decides Gokudera is broken and needs to be fixed. It takes a while to find the right opening.
Gokudera’s constant growling had always kind of amused him, and he admitted that every now and then he sort of poked Gokudera just to get him going. Like playing with a cat; a few scratches were fair trade for getting to watch it flail at you. Actually, Gokudera reminded him a lot of a cat, sometimes, a feral cat that would only let one person pet him without biting, and that person was Tsuna. Even when they’d just met it had made Takeshi wonder a little how often Gokudera must have gotten kicked, to be that way, and now he was wondering more seriously.
Gokudera’s trust issues are Yamamoto’s new hobby; he has his work cut out for him.
"Delivery!" Takeshi called, cheerfully, banging on Gokudera’s door. It took a few minutes for Gokudera to answer the door, and another for him to finish staring in disbelief.
"What are you doing?"
"Bringing you dinner." Takeshi dangled the bag of carryout from raised fingers.
After a hard workout, some privacy finally leads Gokudera and Yamamoto to a significant intimacy. Takes place some time between Comfort Food and Going Back Someday.
Gokudera hissed when he tried to reach his back with the sponge and Takeshi looked up from rinsing his hair and shook his head at the black and blue starting across Gokudera’s ribs and shoulders. "You’re going to have a lot of bruises."
"Yeah, I got that part," Gokudera grumbled, twisting gingerly on the bath stool.
Yamamoto comes to visit Gokudera and they navigate around their trust and need for each other—indirectly as always.
"Takeshi?" He blinked, hands full of his front door and his math textbook, neither free to adjust his reading glasses the way he felt a momentary need to.
"Hey." Takeshi leaned in the doorway, grinning. "Thought it was about time I stopped in for a visit."
After over a month away. Hayato sniffed, but stood aside for him. "I suppose you might as well come in, yes."
Hibari looks at the world differently than most people. Written for the drabble exchange prompt: Hibari, Possessive.
"I have to say, you’re not the one I’d expected to be the most protective of the Vongola’s reputation." Dino folded his arms and leaned against the wall, one foot braced, and considered. "Actually, I guess you and Gokudera are probably tied. But I didn’t expect that, either." He kept coming back because Kyouya kept surprising him.
Atobe deals with some trouble among his officers.
"How badly were Taki’s forces defeated?" Tarou-sama asked, evenly, eyes
on the men passing him."Completely," Keigo reported, keeping his voice dispassionate, no matter
how much he wanted to grind his teeth with frustration. "They would
have lost two out of three, had we been in the field."
Yukimura and Sanada discuss the future a little.
Yukimura turned his head back to look up at the ceiling. "I may not be with you at Kawanakajima this time." The curve of his mouth could not be called a smile.
Alexiel has a talk with Hatter. Hatter is unexpectedly drawn in. Shameless wingfic.
"Hatter! I hadn’t realized anyone was in here."
Belial tried not to grind hir teeth. "One was just finishing," se said, stepping up out of the water. "Don’t let one interrupt you."
"Not at all." Alexiel slid into the water with a pleased sigh. "It can be nice to have company."
Belial made a noncommittal noise, wondering a bit grumpily how Alexiel had retained Setsuna’s obliviousness.
Before it all starts, Kou is a bit of a brat. Ryuuko scolds him. After it’s all over, Kou is still uncertain of his place. Ryuuko reassures him.
"KOU!"
Kou dashed down the hall, laughing, and dodged around a startled Ryuuko-sama to hide behind him.
Mukuro likes strong things, and pawns who are loyal to him.
He leaves a message behind for whatever Estraneo survivors there might be. It’s written in smoke and blood, and it says, quite simply, Don’t do this again.
After another experience of Akira’s shin-ness interfering with Ryuuko’s power, Akira wants to know exactly what’s going on. And then he has to think about who, exactly, he is.
Akira paused in the middle of pulling his shirt off. "You know," he said to the wall, "I still don’t remember much of that time two years back, when I met Kou-nii. Or the other time you say I did that scythe thing." He hesitated for a moment. "Does that mean… when I’m Ryuuko I’m not me?"
Shirogane was quiet for longer than he liked.
Kou is concerned over what Akira has gotten himself into. Akira isn’t.
"Hey." Kou shook his shoulder gently. "I get it. It’s only natural." He sighed. "I just worry about you with him."
Aya also wants to make sure Akira isn’t in over his head; Kengo is already confident.
Akira was getting used to the fact that he couldn’t have a calm, normal walk home from school, anymore, with nothing more exciting than maybe a gang of seniors wanting to beat him up. If it wasn’t kokuchi it was some shin and if it wasn’t either it was Aya. And he was starting to think he preferred the attacks to the friendly conversation.
"So." Aya swung her school bag casually in one hand. "You and Shirogane, huh?"
Wagatsuma is concerned for Shirogane and tries to speak to both him and Akira about it, with little success.
Akira hunched down on his chair. Great. He wasn’t supposed to sleep with Shirogane because of his past incarnation; yeah like that made sense.
Shirogane has a plan to buy them all time and reinforce the boundary between worlds, provided Ryuuko agrees, and provided Shirogane can bring himself to carry it out.
Shirogane settled his hat back on, speaking from under the brim of it. "You and I are the direct kings. Weakened or not. If we take an action together that resonates through our realms, that may reaffirm the balance for long enough."
In bed with Shirogane, Akira wants to see his hair loose. It reminds him of things he doesn’t quite remember yet.
Shirogane’s hand stroked down his back and the thought escaped on a sigh. "Do you ever undo your hair?"
Shirogane paused and lifted his head. He was smiling but his eyes were darker than they usually were in bed. "Not… for some time," he murmured.
In the final confrontation with Homurabi, Ryuuko returns. Afterwards, Akira finds that he remembers and understands a few more things. One of them is why Shirogane has refused to make any more shin than him.
Whenever Akira had changed in the past he’d been too occupied with, most usually, almost dying to notice before he was suddenly waking up again. This time was different. This time, Akira could feel it happening, like walking down a see-saw and reaching the fulcrum, the tipping point, when uphill suddenly became downhill and the world turned over.
After Shirogane returns to see to his own world, Akira comes to visit and get him to unwind a little. Lulu has a talk with Kou, in the meantime, about finding more shin.
"Mm." Kou hadn’t looked away yet. "So you’re not worried he’ll be pissed off if you just show up unexpectedly?"
"Probably will be," Akira allowed. "So what?"
Kou choked on a swallow.
"Sometimes he needs something he doesn’t want to admit to." Akira shrugged. "So I should know how to go."
Kou laughed through his last few coughs. "Yeah, you’re you all right." He leaned back, mouth quirked. "And totally in love too, aren’t you?"
Akira jerked upright. "I am not!"
A year or so later, life is going on. Two moments, one from light and one from shadow.
"Hah! Take that!"
The screen flashed with colorful explosions and Akira tossed his controller down in disgust. "You’re even a demon in games."
A series of linked shorts that follows Lys ap Adin’s "What to Expect When You’re Expecting". Kyouko and Tsuna’s first child is a daughter. She’s soon followed by a lot of brothers, and the mafia world may be in for a big surprise—provided the Vongola themselves survive the experience.
Kyouko still thought Sicilians had strange ideas about their ceremonies, but at least she could understand this part of the christening perfectly well—the part where Vongola and their allies, and a few who weren’t either, gathered to chat and politic on the lawn, all come to see her firstborn.
Takes place some time early in "The Queen and All Her Men". Tsuna has to be convinced that his children need to learn early how to fight. Fortunately, Kyouko is more pragmatic.
"Stop acting like an herbivore, Sawada."
A person can learn all sorts of useful, interesting things by eavesdropping. Takes place early on in The Queen and All Her Men.
Kyouya supposed that it was all well and good that Sawada’s cub had survived another year. Given the general atmosphere in which she’d done it, he even supposed that he could understand commemorating the accomplishment. What no one had been able to explain (to his satisfaction, at any rate) was why doing so involved filling the south garden with every squalling mafioso brat from one to ten years old, and why he was required to attend.
Mari chooses her Guardians, which runs into occasional trouble with both family and Family foibles.
"You wanted to see me, Father?" Mari closed the door of the study behind her, noted her father’s expression, both affectionate and harried, and looked around for a baby in a suit. Sure enough, Reborn was in one of the armchairs with a tiny cup of coffee. "Reborn, welcome back."
Kou thinks he’s figured out who the next king of shadow is. Now they have to convince Akira to let him go.
"All right, you said you found something," Lulu said, settling on Kou’s best chair. "So what is it?"
Kou blew out a stream of smoke. "Think it’s the king you want. You’ll never believe who it is, though." He certainly hadn’t.
Mari decides that something has to be done to make Fedele comfortable in the Family again.
The study was quiet; Mother hadn’t come in yet and Mari had sent Mamoru out with Uncle Gokudera to talk to the Cometti. In fact, the study was a little too quiet. Mari dropped the latest report on the Leone and gave up trying to concentrate. "Father, we have to do something about Fedele."
Kengo convinces Shirogane to let him help with work.
"I’ll take care of it. Watch what I do, so you can learn it."
Now Kengo frowned, stubborn. "I should do more than that. I can do more than that, I know it."
Echoes of the past twitched at Shirogane’s nerves and he told himself firmly that Kengo was nothing like Homurabi had ever been. "In time."
Some years post-canon, Ciel wants Sebastian, the only one he can trust, to guide him through what sex is like. Written for Porn Battle with the prompt: Ciel/Sebastian, experience.
Warning: References to rape of a child.
I want to know what it’s like, Ciel had said. And that was how he’d come to be naked in his bed with Sebastian, every muscle of his body tense.
Akira, Ryuuko and Shirogane get some closure, and some reopening.
Akira lay in Shirogane’s arms and wondered if humans, or shin for that matter, could purr. He felt like he wanted to try. The sun had gone down, but the air was still clear and warm with spring, and Shirogane’s hands were just that comfortable bit warmer as they slid up and down his back and over his shoulders.
"The shadow in you is thinning," Shirogane murmured against his hair.
To win the battle, Kou needs a king’s power to back his. There’s really only one king available… Picks up post-35.
Kou hauled himself up from the bed, wincing a little. "You’re a real bastard, you know that?"
"A fine way to talk to someone who just finished healing the wounds your own idiocy bought you," Shirogane observed, pulling his gloves back on.
After Homurabi is defeated, Kou and Shirogane have to reach some understanding of what they are to each other.
The shadow world could be kind of boring, Kou had decided. At least now that there weren’t any crazy kings around stirring it up. And he certainly didn’t wish Homurabi back, but with only two people around to talk to, and neither of them Akira, he was definitely feeling out of sorts.
Fortunately there was a solution.
These are things that never happened to Xanxus, but could have done, if only things had started out just a bit differently. This fic is what happens when you say to yourself, “Gosh, I’ve been writing a lot of Xanxus angst lately. I wonder if it is possible to write Xanxus in such a way that he is, well, functionally broken instead of just psychopathically insane.” And then you get tackled by a plot bunny that is the size of a goddamn linebacker.
Xanxus stared up at the old geezer—this smiling old fool was supposed to be the Vongola Ninth? please—and lifted a hand to show him the Flame when he asked for it.
In which Federico teaches his brother a lesson about the importance of controlling one’s temper. For Round III of khrfest, prompt II-62. Xanxus — Anger Management; “He who angers you conquers you.”.
The heir to the Vongola would never do anything so crass as eavesdrop, not least because the Vongola had people for that. But, as Federico told himself, if he happened to be in the right place at the right time he could hardly help what he overheard, could he?
A spin-off from Lys ap Adin’s AU "Five Things that Never Happened to Xanxus" (read that first). What if Federico had lived and Squalo’s duel with Tyr had happened on schedule? What would happen then? And how would Tsuna come into it?
Promotion, in the Varia, happened when a squad leader decided it was about time, or else when the person wanting promotion decided it was about time. The two usually balanced out. The question of who would lead the Varia, though, wasn’t left up to anyone but the one who led already and the one who wanted to.
Lulu notices that Kou is starting to settle in as a shin, and teases him about his new bond to Shirogane.
Kou didn’t realize he was humming until Lulu leaned over the back of the couch, positively smirking. "You’re looking more like yourself lately, Chibi. Did something good happen?"
Kou wrestles with his standing attraction to Ryuuko and his new attraction to Shirogane. Fortunately, Shirogane provides him with a resolution.
Kou leaned his chin on this folded arms and watched shadows curl below him. This balcony was a good place for thinking and he felt a need to think today.
He was getting much more comfortable, here in shadow, since he’d let himself accept that Shirogane was his king. It was a relief to feel Shirogane’s power in him; it was familiar and comforting. And that was starting to worry him.
In the universe where Federico survives, Byakuran is still a problem ten years later. This time, it’s someone else who dies to send Tsuna and Xanxus against the Millefiore.
Sunlight fell gracefully through stained glass and into the open coffin.
Fedele had known it was going to be hard. It couldn’t be any other way when the Vongola’s Boss had been killed—not killed, the back of his mind whispered, clinging to that but he couldn’t let it show or it would all go for nothing—killed by an ambush no one had seen coming. He had forbidden anyone to tell Federico’s wife or son, saying it was for their own safety in hiding, which was true enough. But the fury and pain in the eyes of the other Guardians, the stripped, blank looks on the faces of the two kneeling by Federico’s coffin, sliced his heart like a knife.
Companion to Lys ap Adin’s "Bloodsport"; a series of linked shorts that follows Gokudera, Yamamoto and Tsuna after the end. Lots of fang-sex, a bit of humor, and a smidge of crack thrown in at the end.
There was always the risk, when the doorbell rang after dark these days, that it would be another thrilling moment of flight come calling, so Hayato was already scowling when he opened the door. It was good to get off on the right foot. What stood there tonight wasn’t an invitation to airsickness, but the scowl didn’t go to waste.
A series of linked vingnettes. Ryou reflects on his past with the Ring and chooses a new present.
Ryou sat cross-legged on his bed, looking down at the ring of gold that lay on his blankets.
He hadn’t really expected it would stay buried.
What if Squalo had been taken in by the Vongola earlier, and met Xanxus much sooner? What change would that have made in both of them?
In the end it all came down to Xanxus, Rafaele decided later. He didn’t normally pay much attention to the mafia children until they were old enough to seek a real position. As both Gianni and Maria were wont to say, each in his or her own way, they had their fellow Guardians to satisfy any such urges. But having Xanxus running around the main house like a kid-shaped bomb, ready to go off at any second, would make anyone a little more alert. So when Tyr mentioned, after the sparring session when they were both wrapping their various cuts and bruises, that there was a promising new swordsman coming along among the children, Rafaele listened.
Squalo bonds with Xanxus, and none too soon as Xanxus finds out some things the Ninth had kept from him.
Squalo strolled around the edges of the wedding crowd beside Xanxus, keeping an eye out for any unattended cake they could nail down. He didn’t have all that much of a sweet tooth personally, but it was a way of keeping score among the kids. After all, twelve year olds couldn’t rack up kills yet, or negotiations concluded in their Family’s favor.
Xanxus is finally finding his place in the Family when everything is upset again.
Part of him was glad they felt goddamn guilty about this, and part of him was uncomfortable about feeling glad, and most of him was pissed off about both parts.
Squalo is growing into his place at Xanxus’ side, and starting to look around them for some support.
“And that’s another thing.” Xanxus crossed his arms, glass dangling from his fingers. “The old men run on about how my Guardians are supposed to be the ones closest to me, but I don’t have people close to me!” He glanced at Squalo. “Not besides you.”
“Well, you know who your Rain will be, then.” Squalo smiled at his boss’ irate grunt. “Don’t worry so much. The more you have to do with the rest of the Family, the more chances to meet the ones you need.”
Just when things might be settling down, Mukuro appears, targeting the Vongola’s heir.
Seven months and sixteen days—he’d counted—after Reborn started shadowing them with his measuring looks and annoying observations, Xanxus walked into the old man’s office to find both Reborn and Sawada already there.
