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Day 3 - Butterfly
Everyone knows about the Poison Scorpion.
"Everyone" includes Yuni, of course, when she's given the first explanation of the various assassinations for hire - a necessity when the Giglio Nero is still a little family that prefers doing things indirectly rather than leading the fray. It's where they belong, how they do things best, Yuni knows that. So it's good for them to have outside parties that they can work with, those who won't ask too many questions, all of that.
Reborn is the best. Everyone knows this. But Reborn is also engaged with a strict contract with the Vongola, and anyway he's busy these days in teaching Tsuna on how to be the next boss. So of course everyone knows that it's better to look to other groups. It's not hard. There are many options even outside of the world's greatest hitman.
...But Yuni rather likes the idea of the Poison Scorpion, of Bianchi. Of a woman only some years older than her, an older teenager than someone just stumbling into adolescence, being well known enough that people pay her top dollar.
There are many ways that she likes her, of course. She likes her in the way that she likes her memories of her mother, and her grandmother, and the many strange ways that the Gilgio Nero women are all bound together in a way far beyond the physical. Her mother was a similar kind of woman, able to hold her own in a world that didn't want her to, bold and loud and with a smirk that said she knew what to do and how to do it.
Bianchi does very much the same thing, the ink on her skin a warning and the poison in her touch a threat. She smiles a relaxed and lazy smile at times, wears tight jeans that look like they've been through multiple ringers, and has a glare that even makes Gamma stumble.
It's an existence that Yuni adores, admires, wishes she could live out herself. Her Flames might not be suitable for poison, but still, she wants everything else.
She wants to be able to stand on her own, walk away independtly, be tossed into dangerous situations and trust her own self to get out of them. She wants to wear that heavy eye shadow that dissuades nice men from talking to her, and wear lipstick shades that can only be described as funky. She wants to be able to glare so sharply that it punches a hole through metal.
And maybe she wants other things, too. Maybe she wants to know that she could be besides a woman like that. Maybe she wants lipstick smudged on her cheek. Maybe she wants to see a soft smile on a harsh face directed on her.
Neither is really an option for her, Yuni knows that. For starters, of course she can't be a woman like that. It's not in her nature, not the kind of person the head of the Giglio Nero should be. As its precious donna, as a seer who can see the way the future stretches out beneath her fingertips, she can't just go out into the field so recklessly. It's something that should only ever be a last ditch attempt... and while Yuni knows that being in situations doesn't exclude being able to handle herself (her mother was able to shoot a gun quite skillfully, she knokws), and that she doesn't even need to know how to handle herself in order to look like that... She still wishes, in a part of her heart, that she could do all of it.
And to continue the cycle of Giglio Nero, to continue the countless entwined lives that remembers past and present so keenly... She knows that she probably can't be in love with a woman like that, either.
Of course, telling the heart is an entirely different thing from the heart listening. So even as she grows, leads the Giglio Nero to quiet prosperity nestled in like a mine within Italy's underworld, Yuni still thinks of the Poison Scorpion fondly. She prefers her as an assassin or spy or whatever else, and excuses it occasionally with saying that their history together makes Bianchi a clear choice.
"Uh huh," Reborn says one day when he's come over for a visit, to see how his godchild is doing, and just smiles.
...Well, Reborn does that with a lot of things, honestly, but Yuni supposes that it's not surprising that he'd pick up on that kind of thing. As the world's greatest hitman, one of the things that makes him so great is his ability to read other people. Yuni just puffs her cheeks out, and keeps doing what she's always been doing.
One of the things that she likes to do is treat Bianchi a little bit - whenever she comes over for details on her next job, or when she reports back in to let her know that it all went according to plan. Yuni knows it's not exactly the normal relationship between an employer and the professional assassin she hires, of course, and yet still. She wants to spend a little more time with her even if it's only in this way. So she lets her have a bit of coffee, accompanies it with the snacks she slowly learns Bianchi favors the most, and they talk business.
"If you wanted to come over a little more so that this looked more natural and your visits couldn't be so easily matched to assassinations, it wouldn't be a bad idea," Yuni mentions one day, while Bianchi is packing up to head out once again. "It may help us a little more with that sort of friendly framing. Since I'm young, it robably wouldn't look that strange if I were interested in some of the few female mafiosi around."
That's her excuse, anyway.
Bianchi pauses for a moment, glancing over to her, and then there's a small little smile on her face. "Do you think so? Well, I'm a pretty free agent... As long as you remember to hire different people, it shouldn't look... too much like favoritism."
And Yuni does! She promises that she does. The Giglio Nero aren't such a poor Family that they're incapable of hiring from a vast pool of assassins if they really needed to, although Yuni tries not to rely so hard on that. (Sabotage often does just as well as getting rid of the human factor, in most cases.) It's just nice as well, to speak with Bianchi, and get a view outside of her Family on the ways the Underworld is moving and changing.
There's no shortage of things to discuss over these little meetings, either. How Tsuna is only a year or two from coming to Italy. What Bianchi's favorite thing to cook is. The different areas of dispute between the different Families, items and business and territory. The way politics are poking their nose into the Underworld, or vice versa. How Bianchi likes her coffee. What music is becoming popular in both Japan and Italy. Variety is the spice of life, and so their conversations are never dull affairs, in Yuni's opinion.
Maybe because their conversations are so diverse that it can't be helped that, eventually, Yuni's admiration slips out. Of course, she means the kind of admiration that is strictly in the professional sense, as one woman to another. The admiration of how Bianchi is how she is, and all the ways that Yuni knows she can't quite follow in her footsteps.
"I don't think anyone could imagine me as carrying the kind of moniker you do," she clarifies, and laughs a little bit. "No one would think poison scorpion looking at me."
Bianchi leans back in her seat, knuckles following the curve of her jaw with just one finger pressed up against her cheek. "It sounds like you're a little disappointed with how you look to other people," she comments, which, well, Yuni can't say she isn't. Probably, it's just one of those things which comes with being a teenager. Her memories tell her that all the other Donna of the past have felt similar, in some way or form. Some were more obvious than others, especially when the views of other Families towards women were so strict and difficult to work with. The Eighth Vongola truly did help perceptions with that, even if her preferred way of doing so involved a crossbow. "Although, you know... Just because you're so cute and sweet doesn't mean you're lacking any poison yourself."
Yuni has to wonder about that herself and, more importantly than that, she wants to ask just what Bianchi means when she says it. Yet she doesn't get the chance. Bianchi is a busy woman, after all, and she needs to go not long after she's said what she's said. Yuni doesn't see her for a good couple of months, after that.
She technically still hasn't seen her when she gets a package in the mail.
It's been lovingly packed - first in the kind of shipping box which keeps it safe and isn't afraid to be bettered, then further wrapped still when she pulls out something that's been done up in adorably cute wrapping paper. Packing material fills the box in a way that's at odds with it, to be sure, but Yuni isn't really minding that. She's more preoccupied with the beautiful wooden frame her hands find with the paper peeled away, torn underneath short trimmed fingernails. Her fingertips brush against smooth glass.
There, pinned beneath glass and sharp metal both, an enormous and beautiful butterfly nearly seems to glow underneath the light of her room. Delicate wings, stretched wide, are a deep satisfying orange, painted between splashes and lines of black.
Yuni,
The African Giant Swallowtail. You never see the ladies come down from where they're soaring high over the tree tops, waves of orange that birds don't dare touch. I thought you'd like her. She's just as poisonous as anything else.
I look forward to our next afternoon coffee.
Bianchi
And there, right there on the space left beneath her quick written words, is a lipstick mark that nearly punches a hole through paper with the intensity of its brilliant purple hue. Just the faintest graze of her thumb along its edge meets a dried tackiness to the mark. It's real. Yuni's hear flutters in a way this butterfly no longer can.
It's real, and she's a butterfly.
"Everyone" includes Yuni, of course, when she's given the first explanation of the various assassinations for hire - a necessity when the Giglio Nero is still a little family that prefers doing things indirectly rather than leading the fray. It's where they belong, how they do things best, Yuni knows that. So it's good for them to have outside parties that they can work with, those who won't ask too many questions, all of that.
Reborn is the best. Everyone knows this. But Reborn is also engaged with a strict contract with the Vongola, and anyway he's busy these days in teaching Tsuna on how to be the next boss. So of course everyone knows that it's better to look to other groups. It's not hard. There are many options even outside of the world's greatest hitman.
...But Yuni rather likes the idea of the Poison Scorpion, of Bianchi. Of a woman only some years older than her, an older teenager than someone just stumbling into adolescence, being well known enough that people pay her top dollar.
There are many ways that she likes her, of course. She likes her in the way that she likes her memories of her mother, and her grandmother, and the many strange ways that the Gilgio Nero women are all bound together in a way far beyond the physical. Her mother was a similar kind of woman, able to hold her own in a world that didn't want her to, bold and loud and with a smirk that said she knew what to do and how to do it.
Bianchi does very much the same thing, the ink on her skin a warning and the poison in her touch a threat. She smiles a relaxed and lazy smile at times, wears tight jeans that look like they've been through multiple ringers, and has a glare that even makes Gamma stumble.
It's an existence that Yuni adores, admires, wishes she could live out herself. Her Flames might not be suitable for poison, but still, she wants everything else.
She wants to be able to stand on her own, walk away independtly, be tossed into dangerous situations and trust her own self to get out of them. She wants to wear that heavy eye shadow that dissuades nice men from talking to her, and wear lipstick shades that can only be described as funky. She wants to be able to glare so sharply that it punches a hole through metal.
And maybe she wants other things, too. Maybe she wants to know that she could be besides a woman like that. Maybe she wants lipstick smudged on her cheek. Maybe she wants to see a soft smile on a harsh face directed on her.
Neither is really an option for her, Yuni knows that. For starters, of course she can't be a woman like that. It's not in her nature, not the kind of person the head of the Giglio Nero should be. As its precious donna, as a seer who can see the way the future stretches out beneath her fingertips, she can't just go out into the field so recklessly. It's something that should only ever be a last ditch attempt... and while Yuni knows that being in situations doesn't exclude being able to handle herself (her mother was able to shoot a gun quite skillfully, she knokws), and that she doesn't even need to know how to handle herself in order to look like that... She still wishes, in a part of her heart, that she could do all of it.
And to continue the cycle of Giglio Nero, to continue the countless entwined lives that remembers past and present so keenly... She knows that she probably can't be in love with a woman like that, either.
Of course, telling the heart is an entirely different thing from the heart listening. So even as she grows, leads the Giglio Nero to quiet prosperity nestled in like a mine within Italy's underworld, Yuni still thinks of the Poison Scorpion fondly. She prefers her as an assassin or spy or whatever else, and excuses it occasionally with saying that their history together makes Bianchi a clear choice.
"Uh huh," Reborn says one day when he's come over for a visit, to see how his godchild is doing, and just smiles.
...Well, Reborn does that with a lot of things, honestly, but Yuni supposes that it's not surprising that he'd pick up on that kind of thing. As the world's greatest hitman, one of the things that makes him so great is his ability to read other people. Yuni just puffs her cheeks out, and keeps doing what she's always been doing.
One of the things that she likes to do is treat Bianchi a little bit - whenever she comes over for details on her next job, or when she reports back in to let her know that it all went according to plan. Yuni knows it's not exactly the normal relationship between an employer and the professional assassin she hires, of course, and yet still. She wants to spend a little more time with her even if it's only in this way. So she lets her have a bit of coffee, accompanies it with the snacks she slowly learns Bianchi favors the most, and they talk business.
"If you wanted to come over a little more so that this looked more natural and your visits couldn't be so easily matched to assassinations, it wouldn't be a bad idea," Yuni mentions one day, while Bianchi is packing up to head out once again. "It may help us a little more with that sort of friendly framing. Since I'm young, it robably wouldn't look that strange if I were interested in some of the few female mafiosi around."
That's her excuse, anyway.
Bianchi pauses for a moment, glancing over to her, and then there's a small little smile on her face. "Do you think so? Well, I'm a pretty free agent... As long as you remember to hire different people, it shouldn't look... too much like favoritism."
And Yuni does! She promises that she does. The Giglio Nero aren't such a poor Family that they're incapable of hiring from a vast pool of assassins if they really needed to, although Yuni tries not to rely so hard on that. (Sabotage often does just as well as getting rid of the human factor, in most cases.) It's just nice as well, to speak with Bianchi, and get a view outside of her Family on the ways the Underworld is moving and changing.
There's no shortage of things to discuss over these little meetings, either. How Tsuna is only a year or two from coming to Italy. What Bianchi's favorite thing to cook is. The different areas of dispute between the different Families, items and business and territory. The way politics are poking their nose into the Underworld, or vice versa. How Bianchi likes her coffee. What music is becoming popular in both Japan and Italy. Variety is the spice of life, and so their conversations are never dull affairs, in Yuni's opinion.
Maybe because their conversations are so diverse that it can't be helped that, eventually, Yuni's admiration slips out. Of course, she means the kind of admiration that is strictly in the professional sense, as one woman to another. The admiration of how Bianchi is how she is, and all the ways that Yuni knows she can't quite follow in her footsteps.
"I don't think anyone could imagine me as carrying the kind of moniker you do," she clarifies, and laughs a little bit. "No one would think poison scorpion looking at me."
Bianchi leans back in her seat, knuckles following the curve of her jaw with just one finger pressed up against her cheek. "It sounds like you're a little disappointed with how you look to other people," she comments, which, well, Yuni can't say she isn't. Probably, it's just one of those things which comes with being a teenager. Her memories tell her that all the other Donna of the past have felt similar, in some way or form. Some were more obvious than others, especially when the views of other Families towards women were so strict and difficult to work with. The Eighth Vongola truly did help perceptions with that, even if her preferred way of doing so involved a crossbow. "Although, you know... Just because you're so cute and sweet doesn't mean you're lacking any poison yourself."
Yuni has to wonder about that herself and, more importantly than that, she wants to ask just what Bianchi means when she says it. Yet she doesn't get the chance. Bianchi is a busy woman, after all, and she needs to go not long after she's said what she's said. Yuni doesn't see her for a good couple of months, after that.
She technically still hasn't seen her when she gets a package in the mail.
It's been lovingly packed - first in the kind of shipping box which keeps it safe and isn't afraid to be bettered, then further wrapped still when she pulls out something that's been done up in adorably cute wrapping paper. Packing material fills the box in a way that's at odds with it, to be sure, but Yuni isn't really minding that. She's more preoccupied with the beautiful wooden frame her hands find with the paper peeled away, torn underneath short trimmed fingernails. Her fingertips brush against smooth glass.
There, pinned beneath glass and sharp metal both, an enormous and beautiful butterfly nearly seems to glow underneath the light of her room. Delicate wings, stretched wide, are a deep satisfying orange, painted between splashes and lines of black.
Yuni,
The African Giant Swallowtail. You never see the ladies come down from where they're soaring high over the tree tops, waves of orange that birds don't dare touch. I thought you'd like her. She's just as poisonous as anything else.
I look forward to our next afternoon coffee.
Bianchi
And there, right there on the space left beneath her quick written words, is a lipstick mark that nearly punches a hole through paper with the intensity of its brilliant purple hue. Just the faintest graze of her thumb along its edge meets a dried tackiness to the mark. It's real. Yuni's hear flutters in a way this butterfly no longer can.
It's real, and she's a butterfly.