Chapter 9: Omen of Doom

Mentions of suicidal depression/suicide attempts in this chapter.

"Hi Mum."

"Tsuna! You remembered to call!"

"Of course I did, I'm not- Well, anyway, how are you settling into Sicily? Are coping with the change alright? Did all of your china arrive safely?"

"Oh yes, the moving people were very efficient and careful with it. Everything was properly packaged and I'm so glad I used the moving company your father recommended. You really should have done so too. Sicily is wonderful; the food, the scenery and of course your Papa!"

"Oh, right. Uh, how is he?"

"Very busy; their office is very understaffed and he works late nights all the time. Your Papa is a real big shot here you know! You should try to be more like him; he is so successful! He even has his own chauffer."

"Uh, that's nice."

"Do you know? He even hired me to be his new secretary!"

"WHAT? But wait- That isn't- Isn't-Isn't that a bit dangerous?"

"Why would it be dangerous? It's just a bit of secretarial work; Mama used to be a secretary before she became a housewife you know!"

"But he-! That's-! Never mind, what kind of work do you do?"

"Oh, filing papers, getting coffee, that sort of thing. There is a young boy here, about your age working as your Papa's assistant while going to university part-time! You could learn a thing or two from him, Tsuna; he is so polite and helpful and I've never seen him make mistakes with his work. He even speaks to the clients sometimes! Oh, but your Papa doesn't really let me serve clients; he says if they see me they might fall in love with me!"

"Uh, that's nice? Look Mum, I think you need to be careful. The- uh- construction business is really cutthroat so sometimes people get a bit- a bit- aggressive."

"Oh, your Mama can take care of herself! You need to look after yourself; make sure you study or your grades might slip again!"

Sigh. "Yes."

"So have you been eating right? The food in Italy is quite different isn't it? I tried to cook a traditional Japanese breakfast for your Papa the other day and had to go to three different stores just to find the ingredients!"

"Yes, but it's mostly alright. But Mum, be careful at work! I know he's the boss and everything, but he can't look out for you all the time. And you haven't worked in so long-"

Muffled sound. "Oh, that's the door! Do you want to speak to your Papa? That should be him right now-"

"No! Uh- It's alright, these phone calls are expensive; you know long-distance calls. And you just said that he's really busy right? He probably has better things to do. And- uh- I've got an appointment and I'm running late so-"

"Oh! Then you really must hurry up; you really need to learn to be more punctual, Tsu-kun!"

"Right, okay, bye. Take care of yourself."

"I will! You too!"

"Yes, I will."

- Phone call between Sawada Tsunayoshi and Sawada Nana, 30 September 2017, 2149 hours

Construction was going… not well, but not terribly either.

They managed to purchase Kokuyo Fun Land's plot of land and associated contracts for a pittance, rather quickly, with relative ease. The area was actually far larger than they needed, but Reborn had said extra space was always good.

The problems began to accumulate after the land was purchased.

Hiring architects was easy; it was much more difficult to balance the needs of their new squad. Hana insisted on a resource and telecommunications room. Gokudera gave input on an armory. Ryohei wanted a boxing ring. Lambo wanted a separate kitchen just for desserts and sweets. Haru wanted a room bigger than the medical bay for costume design. Kyoko didn't ask for anything, but was absolutely useless in getting the rest of them to calm down.

Tsuna was left to carefully negotiate everything. Hana's proposed telecommunications room was cut down to half its original size, but relegated to the centre of their base for easy access. The armory would occupy the other half of the room that housed their telecommunications centre. A boxing ring would be too limited, Tsuna patiently explained to Ryohei, but there would be a state of the art training room in addition to large section of open space for outdoor training and a gym. Lambo was told to sit quietly and not make noise or he wouldn't get any of Tsuna's homemade cake, and Haru was given a small prep room where she could keep her disguise tools, but instructed that her cosplay would be done at her own time. Kyoko made tea for everyone and smiled.

In order to assess them, or so he claimed, Reborn wanted them to demolish the buildings themselves. Unfortunately, the destroyed rather more than they were supposed to.

"The water pipes here, here and here are damaged," Hana told him, pointed at three circled areas on a map of the grounds. "Get those dunderheads can keep off the property until we fix the damage."

Their new instructors, as Reborn introduced them, were of absolutely no help. Bianchi alternated between being delighted to the point of uselessness and trying to poison them with her cooking. Colonello hadn't shown up, but sent a profanity-filled letter to Reborn. Reborn himself was occupied with increasingly varied construction worker cosplays and drowning Tsuna's desk in paperwork.

For someone who was supposed to be in charge, Tsuna felt that he was taking a rather lot of orders.

When he was found sleeping in the half completed communications room one morning, having slept overnight, the others voluntarily tried to ease his burden.

Easily the most helpful of them was Gokudera. He was organized and efficient at dealing with paperwork, with the ability to handle almost anything thrown his way, so long as it didn't involve other people. He and Tsuna found themselves almost sharing a desk in the midst of the uncompleted mansion.

Hana, Kyoko and Lambo found themselves on the more social sides of things. Hana spent most of her time directing and organizing the construction and design team, relaying orders and adapting strategies, intimidating even the most indolent of them to get on their feet and at least pretend to work.

Ryohei displayed a surprising head for numbers, aiding Gokudera with accounting; it was one of the few moments where the both of them could sit in the same room and not cause copious amounts noise.

After two long weeks, something finally cropped up that gave him an excuse to leave his desk. In fact it, had him flying out of his chair and almost getting himself run down trying to hail a cab.

"Is this Sawada Tsunayoshi? Yamamoto Takeshi has been admitted to the hospital for an attempted suicide and is refusing to tell us the contact of his next of kin…"

The sight Tsuna was greeted with when he pulled open the curtains that separated Yamamoto's bed from a dozen others, was at once relieving and infuriating. There was a thick bandage around Yamamoto's arm, his face pale and sickly as he lay there smiling at Tsuna like there was nothing wrong with the world.

Tsuna honestly wanted to punch him.

Instead, he sat down on the flimsy plastic chair by Yamamoto's bed and clasped his white knuckled hands on his lap. There was a long beat of silence.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Don't interrupt me, because I'm not sure I could continue once I'm stopped. I don't even know, really why I'm telling you this." His throat was dry when he swallowed. His resolutely did not look at Yamamoto, half because he didn't have the courage to look at anyone while he confessed some of his darkest thoughts, half because he really wanted to punch that grin off of Yamamoto's face.

The thoughts swirled in his mind, and he honestly wasn't quite sure how to begin.

"I've thought of suicide before." Tsuna took a deep breath; the admission stung, but it was easier to continue once he got that first, terrible line out. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Yamamoto stiffen.

"I've thought of suicide before. Thought of it many times. Sometimes it was the penknife, but it was usually my mom's sleeping pills; she keeps them by her bedside drawer." His breath was humid and hot through his teeth and he remembers it being quite the same way when he sat on the floor by his mother's bed, clutching at the bottle of pills and staring at the label. He always drew the curtains, which made the room even more uncomfortable, the air stale, but he always thought it suited death better like that.

"It was never really one thing that set those thoughts off. Usually it would be a particularly bad week; failed tests and getting mocked and bullied and sometimes it was mom too." He squeezed his eyes shut, willing the slight burning feeling in them away. "Actually, it usually only happened when mom was involved. She's not a bad mother, just… just not very good either. Sometimes she'd offhandedly call me 'Dame Tsuna' or her 'useless son'. Sometimes it would be parent teacher meetings and her disappointment. Sometimes she'd call me a liar for saying bullies hurt me, because the 'kind children from next door would never do that, and it isn't good to tell lies, Tsuna'."

His voice climbed higher with a tinge of hysteria; he took a deep, shuddering breath to compose himself. His right hand was aching, he noted absently. It was probably when he broke his fall in his hurry to exit the cab and get to Yamamoto's room.

His hand hurt the first time he drew blood with his penknife too.

"Whenever I thought of suicide, I almost hated her. She's oblivious, you know? An empty smile and masked emotions. A lot like you. When dad forgets to call, she cries in her room for days then come out smiling like nothing happened. Constantly looking at photo albums and stocking him socks and toothbrushes in a house he never visits. I would wish I had a mother who'd be more concerned with me and stare less into space thinking about her perpetually absent husband; a mother who would put her foot down and divorce him; a mother who would do more than call me useless and actually try to help me."

"But the pills never went down my throat."

It was a lie, actually. Tsuna was too much of a coward to admit that the first time he swallowed the pills he gagged because he had stuffed too many and then spent half an hour heaving into the toilet.

His experience with suicide wasn't like Yamamoto's, who survived by accident. His experience with suicide was mingled with terror and humiliation, each time worse than the one before; wondering if he was so much of a failure, so much of a coward that he couldn't even die properly. It had taken a long, long time for him to change; had taken a long time for his to realize why he was so afraid of the beaded red that squeezed itself from his wrist.

"In the end, I wanted to live."

Almost like a dream, he first voiced the thought

"I wanted to live so badly. Not for mom or dad or the friends I didn't have. I wanted to live for me. Even if I was useless, it was me, my life and I wanted to, still want to, live. So many things I wanted to do, wanted to experience."

Tsuna finally looked up at this point and was relieved to find that Yamamoto wasn't smiling any more. Tsuna's words were caught in his throat; he wasn't quite sure what to say.

"Tsuna?"

Tsuna licked lips and swallowed. "Yeah?"

"I don't know how I should live. I'm not sure I want to live." There was a long pause. "Do you think you could show me? Show-show me how to live so that I'll want to live too?"

Tsuna wasn't sure he could do that. He wasn't sure that there was anyone in the world who could do that.

"Of course."

Suicide watch was much more difficult than Tsuna had expected. Takeshi now slept on Tsuna's floor, and his tiny apartment had all its sharp objects moved to a locked cupboard. On top of paperwork, Tsuna had to pretend that he wasn't doing paperwork for a criminal organization and reading articles journals on how to help someone overcome suicide while his roommate was in the same room.

Naturally, Reborn immediately found out and ruined all of Tsuna's plans for secrecy.

He thus found Yamamoto eating with Reborn and Ryohei in the kitchen at lunchtime. After five minutes of sputtering, oblivious laughs and comments about how friendly and nice Reborn was, Tsuna finally settled down into normal conversation.

Apparently Yamamoto's father had filled him in on the mafia and while Yamamoto wasn't really a mafioso, him knowing about their being in the mafia wasn't a violation of the Omerta. Tsuna didn't trust that Reborn wouldn't induct Yamamoto into the mafia though; the sadistic glint his eyes practically guaranteed it.

"A lot of us come from Namimori, huh?" Yamamoto commented cheerfully.

Tsuna's brow furrowed, beginning to pick at his food. "Yeah, it's kind of strange, actually…"

Reborn rolled his eyes. "Namimori is mafia territory. Over sixty percent of the population there is affiliated with the Allied Families in some way or other."

"What?" Tsuna asked blankly. Yamamoto only commented on how that was so cool and Ryohei added his own two cents with seemingly the only adjective that existed in his dictionary.

Reborn shrugged. "Ever seen anything weird in Namimori completely written off?" Tsuna could think of many examples. A disciplinary prefect that hunted down criminals, a boxing captain that punched through walls, an oddly low crime rate matched with a rather lax police force, an odd number of black suits in a small town community…

"Most people ignore it because they know what is really going on, and children are taught to take such things in stride. Lots of kids don't even know that those things are weird, so if they eventually go into the mafia when they get old, they have fantastic adaptation skills. It's part of the reason why Namimori recruits are sought after. Hana and Kyoko, as you know, were scouted from Namimori directly."

"What?" Tsuna asked blankly. Reborn frowned. Tsuna seemed to be sorely lacking in comprehension skills.

"Namimori is traditionally Hibari territory," Reborn explained slowly, as if to a toddler. "Has been for over half a century. A lot of folks who want to retire from the mafia go to Namimori, and a lot of mafioso with civilian families go there. Some law enforcement too, if they are gutsy enough. After all, any bloodshed in Namimori, civilian or not, is bound to be repaid in full."

Silence reigned for a while as three long-time residents of what was apparently a famous mafia retirement home took in the information.

"In any case Tsuna, with construction almost done-"

"What? Have you seen this place? We aren't even- Ouch!"

Reborn smiled a cheerful omen of doom and Tsuna seriously thought about throwing himself out the window of the building. "With construction almost done, it is about time we started our training!"

I'm really sorry for not updating sooner. I always have trouble writing Takeshi - his inherent cheerfulness, obliviousness and suicidal tendencies are so difficult to align. This chapter is shorter than usual, but I figured I'd just get it out there since I'm unlikely to have time to write until December.