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KHRween: Harvest
As is usually the case, strange and difficult mafia matters have made their way back to Japan once again to bother the hopeful heir of the Vongola Famiglia. The hopeful heir who is also the son of Oregano's employer. This is nothing unusual, really. Par for the course when it comes to a situation such as that. But even so, sometimes some additional protection is required for the civilians around him, neither law enforcement nor mafia.
That's why she is here.
In this large field. Kneeling down in the dirt. Carefully digging up sweet potatoes.
"Oh, you got a really nice big one up now, haven't you?" Nana Sawada gushes, hands clasped together as Oregano deposits the latest sweet potato down into the large basket they've got between them. "Really, you have such fantastic luck when it comes to these things~. Or maybe it was my good luck that you came to stay with our family right when we got that lucky invitation to harvest sweet potatoes here!" Picking up her own trowel, Nana begins to carefully poke through the earth herself. "I won't complain~."
Shaking a little bit of dirt off of her thick glove, weight just enough to annoy her in the back of her mind, Oregano returns the smile. A little awkwardly, perhaps, but she does return it. It's... really the least that she could do. "It's really only luck, Nana-san," she says, which she knows isn't the smoothest way of referencing her, but, well, it really is the compromise that they've come to. Certainly she won't call her Nana-chan like her hostess would like her to. "But it's nothing compared to what I-pin managed to get a little while ago. I didn't realize that the kids would be so excited just to go harvest sweet potatoes."
Then again... Oregano supposes she can't remember the last time she ever really interacted with children. Certainly none of the Arcobaleno count in that regard. And the children that she has interacted with... It was always brief.
And it was always with children who were already neck deep into the criminal underworld, whether through family or Famiglia or lack of both.
Nana winks at her; Oregano tries not to think about the charming way that such a little action pulls at some of the wrinkles along her face. She may be a young mother, but age comes for them all eventually. Oregano thinks she wears it very well. "Oh, there's nothing more children love than to get all muddy and dirty! I'm just glad that it can be out here in the countryside rather than back at the house! I thought Tsuna could be a handful sometimes when he was little, but so many more kids really does make it far worse! It's so silly how obvious that sounds, doesn't it?"
Carefully prodding through the dirt, Oregano shakes her head. "There's some things that seem obvious, but you really only understand once you've gone through it," she says, and thinks about the first time that she had killed someone. "Ah, but you really do seem happy about it all."
And Nana just smiles so brilliantly at her. In the warmth of the sun and the vivid brilliance of greenery all around them, she seems really quite incredible. "It's hard to regret a life that makes me so happy!"
It's nice for her. Really, it is. Oregano tells herself that while they finish up digging some of the potatoes in this particular plot of dirt.
She tells herself that while she laughs at the silly little jokes Nana tells which she picked up from the local newspaper. She tells herself that while Nana leans over with a little handkerchief, gotten for free from someone trying to sell something at the train station before they left. She tells herself to try and ignore a great deal of things.
And she likes to think it goes pretty well, really. She keeps herself professional, or at least as professional as a person can act when they're faking being a casual civilian instead of an undercover mafioso who is here purely to make sure that her boss's wife doesn't get in trouble.
She doesn't have to think about this little feeling in her chest. Just have it stay buried there beneath the dirt.
Some things don't need to be dug up, after all. It's better for them to stay where they are, rot and become food for other things, other feelings. So many emotions are only as temporary as life into rot. It's comforting to think of it like that.
Of course, real life doesn't allow itself to be so comforting. You'd think that's a lesson she would have learned a long time ago, and yet she still occasionally gets caught off guard even for all her preparation and education and experiences. So she's not really expecting it when, as they heft up their baskets of sweet potatoes and yams, Nana glances over at her and asks, "You know, I have to wonder something, although I don't know if you might find me a little bit too nosy for it?"
"I would never think of you like that," Oregano promises her immediately, without thinking twice about it.
Nana laughs at the way she answers that quickly, but it's not a bad thing at all in Oregano's opinion. Nana's laugh has a lot of energy to it. More than anyone would have ever thought she'd still have, after a life doing grueling domestic work for a family that's only been growing more and more. "Well, when you get to my age, you do start to wonder if you end up the kind of person that you always grumbled about when you were a teenager... Oh, but enough about me before I go rambling on!" Nana clasps her hands together rather admirably, considering that the basket is still hooked along her arm. "Do you have anything on your mind, Oregano-chan?"
Something kicks dangerously behind one of her ribs, almost like her heart but maybe something a little more base panic. But she's kept her head cool in far worse situations. None of it shows on her face. She makes sure of that. "I don't think so, really," she says, lying coming to her as easily as breathing after so long in the underworld. "Why, did I look concerned?"
"Well, I wouldn't quite say concerned..." Nana glances over to where the kids are running ahead of time. Lambo, as per usual, is threatening to either drop every single thing in his own tiny basket. Fuuta is doing his best to be the responsible one of the group, in a way that only mafia children really ever try to mimic, but, well, perhaps it's been good for him that he's grown up in the Sawada household where its primary caretaker still lives a civilian life. Ipin is balance at least three different baskets.
It's only when she's certain that the children are at least a little distance away does Nana look back to Oregano, smiling almost sheepish. "I wouldn't say that you looked concerned, exactly. But there was a little moment of silence when we were speaking earlier, and it seemed as though you were contemplating some things. So I wondered."
Oh. The tension in her chest eases up, or at least it does around her heart... even if the heart itself doesn't ease up at all. "I might have just gotten lost in thought remembering something," she tells her. "What were we talking about? Maybe I can recall what it was." Nothing important, she hopes.
Nothing she can't lie about, at least.
Certainly, that's what she believes up until the moment that Nana says, "Well, it was right there at the beginning of our little talk, and we were talking about regrets! So I was wondering if maybe you were bothered by something that you always meant to do."
Sometimes, it seems that Nana Sasagawa is very easy to fool, considering the admittedly cheap lies which her boss has told his wife over the years to hide his criminal activity and profession. All the lies about what he really does, where he spends all his time, how he earns his money. Why he appears back home so spontaneously. Why he has so rarely brought coworkers over, or taken calls by them.
Other times, for the most ridiculous and trivial little details, she picks on them alarmingly quickly. Oregano just wishes that hadn't happened now.
At least her poker face can still hold on. "Well, I think a lot of people wonder about things they regret," she says, filler words while her mind works out her excuse on the fly. "But it's not really anything serious - certainly nothing like raising any children." Oregano laughs, because that feels as though it should lighten up the atmosphere somehow. Laughing is supposed to do that. She doesn't know how well that often works. In most of the situations she's called into, laughing isn't really a part of the atmosphere. "Sometimes you just wonder about what your life would have been like if you'd done something a little bit differently. I think I've already forgotten most of what I was thinking about during that part of the conversation."
It helps in most cases to keep explanations vague, Oregano has found. Less people than one would think really care about the *details*. Conversation in a lot of cases is really just to fill dead air, keep things from seeming too lonely or awkward. Social species that humans are, silence *has* to mean something, after all.
In truth, it doesn't, but that's the glitchy human brain for you.
And then there are the people who decide to fill in the vague empty spaces with ideas of their own on what they could represent, as though they were meant to ever represent anything. That's her problem right now as Nana tilts her head to the side and echoes back, "Most of it?"
Dammit. Now she has to spin even more things. It'd be for the better if she could have simply cut it off there, but now she has to figure out what something believable would be. It gets easier with time, certainly, but Oregano has still always found it to be troublesome no matter how easy. "You know how it is," she says before she's even mentally decided what it is. Fortunately, a life of surviving the mafia means that her mind is always moving. She has the answer within the space of her next breath, the next step over a root protruding from the dirt path they traverse together. "Just little romances that you think about even a long time after the opportunity has passed you by. Girlish things."
Lies do best when they're mixed in with truth. It's easier to remember things like that, and they appear just a little more genuine that way too. A counterfeit of conversation.
So of course she regrets some things to do with past romances, or romances that never had a chance to come to fruition. Hell, it's true for her current moment, isn't it? Where here she walks alongside the wife of her boss, basking in the warmth of that simple presence, with the knowledge that she shouldn't act on it even more than she shouldn't act on such things in all the rest of her life.
But that wasn't what she was thinking about during their conversation, she' pretty sure.
...Anymore than usual, anyway.
At least it's enough to get Nana nodding along sympathetically, and that's all she needs for right now. Especially since they've reached their little farm out here in the middle of the mountains where they can all stay for the time being on this definitely-not-contrived-but-totally-coincidental vacation. Then all the time and energy gets sunk into cleaning up the children, washing off the sweet potatoes, and pretending that Tsuna doesn't return absolutely covered in bruises and dirt and maybe a little bit of fire damage.
It's times like these that have Oregano wondering if Nana Sawada really is as sweetly oblivious as her husband likes to gush about, or if there's something more to the way that she has to rummage around in the cabinets for just the right thing while her son tries his best to creep up the stairs to the bathrooms without her noticing.
That's why she is here.
In this large field. Kneeling down in the dirt. Carefully digging up sweet potatoes.
"Oh, you got a really nice big one up now, haven't you?" Nana Sawada gushes, hands clasped together as Oregano deposits the latest sweet potato down into the large basket they've got between them. "Really, you have such fantastic luck when it comes to these things~. Or maybe it was my good luck that you came to stay with our family right when we got that lucky invitation to harvest sweet potatoes here!" Picking up her own trowel, Nana begins to carefully poke through the earth herself. "I won't complain~."
Shaking a little bit of dirt off of her thick glove, weight just enough to annoy her in the back of her mind, Oregano returns the smile. A little awkwardly, perhaps, but she does return it. It's... really the least that she could do. "It's really only luck, Nana-san," she says, which she knows isn't the smoothest way of referencing her, but, well, it really is the compromise that they've come to. Certainly she won't call her Nana-chan like her hostess would like her to. "But it's nothing compared to what I-pin managed to get a little while ago. I didn't realize that the kids would be so excited just to go harvest sweet potatoes."
Then again... Oregano supposes she can't remember the last time she ever really interacted with children. Certainly none of the Arcobaleno count in that regard. And the children that she has interacted with... It was always brief.
And it was always with children who were already neck deep into the criminal underworld, whether through family or Famiglia or lack of both.
Nana winks at her; Oregano tries not to think about the charming way that such a little action pulls at some of the wrinkles along her face. She may be a young mother, but age comes for them all eventually. Oregano thinks she wears it very well. "Oh, there's nothing more children love than to get all muddy and dirty! I'm just glad that it can be out here in the countryside rather than back at the house! I thought Tsuna could be a handful sometimes when he was little, but so many more kids really does make it far worse! It's so silly how obvious that sounds, doesn't it?"
Carefully prodding through the dirt, Oregano shakes her head. "There's some things that seem obvious, but you really only understand once you've gone through it," she says, and thinks about the first time that she had killed someone. "Ah, but you really do seem happy about it all."
And Nana just smiles so brilliantly at her. In the warmth of the sun and the vivid brilliance of greenery all around them, she seems really quite incredible. "It's hard to regret a life that makes me so happy!"
It's nice for her. Really, it is. Oregano tells herself that while they finish up digging some of the potatoes in this particular plot of dirt.
She tells herself that while she laughs at the silly little jokes Nana tells which she picked up from the local newspaper. She tells herself that while Nana leans over with a little handkerchief, gotten for free from someone trying to sell something at the train station before they left. She tells herself to try and ignore a great deal of things.
And she likes to think it goes pretty well, really. She keeps herself professional, or at least as professional as a person can act when they're faking being a casual civilian instead of an undercover mafioso who is here purely to make sure that her boss's wife doesn't get in trouble.
She doesn't have to think about this little feeling in her chest. Just have it stay buried there beneath the dirt.
Some things don't need to be dug up, after all. It's better for them to stay where they are, rot and become food for other things, other feelings. So many emotions are only as temporary as life into rot. It's comforting to think of it like that.
Of course, real life doesn't allow itself to be so comforting. You'd think that's a lesson she would have learned a long time ago, and yet she still occasionally gets caught off guard even for all her preparation and education and experiences. So she's not really expecting it when, as they heft up their baskets of sweet potatoes and yams, Nana glances over at her and asks, "You know, I have to wonder something, although I don't know if you might find me a little bit too nosy for it?"
"I would never think of you like that," Oregano promises her immediately, without thinking twice about it.
Nana laughs at the way she answers that quickly, but it's not a bad thing at all in Oregano's opinion. Nana's laugh has a lot of energy to it. More than anyone would have ever thought she'd still have, after a life doing grueling domestic work for a family that's only been growing more and more. "Well, when you get to my age, you do start to wonder if you end up the kind of person that you always grumbled about when you were a teenager... Oh, but enough about me before I go rambling on!" Nana clasps her hands together rather admirably, considering that the basket is still hooked along her arm. "Do you have anything on your mind, Oregano-chan?"
Something kicks dangerously behind one of her ribs, almost like her heart but maybe something a little more base panic. But she's kept her head cool in far worse situations. None of it shows on her face. She makes sure of that. "I don't think so, really," she says, lying coming to her as easily as breathing after so long in the underworld. "Why, did I look concerned?"
"Well, I wouldn't quite say concerned..." Nana glances over to where the kids are running ahead of time. Lambo, as per usual, is threatening to either drop every single thing in his own tiny basket. Fuuta is doing his best to be the responsible one of the group, in a way that only mafia children really ever try to mimic, but, well, perhaps it's been good for him that he's grown up in the Sawada household where its primary caretaker still lives a civilian life. Ipin is balance at least three different baskets.
It's only when she's certain that the children are at least a little distance away does Nana look back to Oregano, smiling almost sheepish. "I wouldn't say that you looked concerned, exactly. But there was a little moment of silence when we were speaking earlier, and it seemed as though you were contemplating some things. So I wondered."
Oh. The tension in her chest eases up, or at least it does around her heart... even if the heart itself doesn't ease up at all. "I might have just gotten lost in thought remembering something," she tells her. "What were we talking about? Maybe I can recall what it was." Nothing important, she hopes.
Nothing she can't lie about, at least.
Certainly, that's what she believes up until the moment that Nana says, "Well, it was right there at the beginning of our little talk, and we were talking about regrets! So I was wondering if maybe you were bothered by something that you always meant to do."
Sometimes, it seems that Nana Sasagawa is very easy to fool, considering the admittedly cheap lies which her boss has told his wife over the years to hide his criminal activity and profession. All the lies about what he really does, where he spends all his time, how he earns his money. Why he appears back home so spontaneously. Why he has so rarely brought coworkers over, or taken calls by them.
Other times, for the most ridiculous and trivial little details, she picks on them alarmingly quickly. Oregano just wishes that hadn't happened now.
At least her poker face can still hold on. "Well, I think a lot of people wonder about things they regret," she says, filler words while her mind works out her excuse on the fly. "But it's not really anything serious - certainly nothing like raising any children." Oregano laughs, because that feels as though it should lighten up the atmosphere somehow. Laughing is supposed to do that. She doesn't know how well that often works. In most of the situations she's called into, laughing isn't really a part of the atmosphere. "Sometimes you just wonder about what your life would have been like if you'd done something a little bit differently. I think I've already forgotten most of what I was thinking about during that part of the conversation."
It helps in most cases to keep explanations vague, Oregano has found. Less people than one would think really care about the *details*. Conversation in a lot of cases is really just to fill dead air, keep things from seeming too lonely or awkward. Social species that humans are, silence *has* to mean something, after all.
In truth, it doesn't, but that's the glitchy human brain for you.
And then there are the people who decide to fill in the vague empty spaces with ideas of their own on what they could represent, as though they were meant to ever represent anything. That's her problem right now as Nana tilts her head to the side and echoes back, "Most of it?"
Dammit. Now she has to spin even more things. It'd be for the better if she could have simply cut it off there, but now she has to figure out what something believable would be. It gets easier with time, certainly, but Oregano has still always found it to be troublesome no matter how easy. "You know how it is," she says before she's even mentally decided what it is. Fortunately, a life of surviving the mafia means that her mind is always moving. She has the answer within the space of her next breath, the next step over a root protruding from the dirt path they traverse together. "Just little romances that you think about even a long time after the opportunity has passed you by. Girlish things."
Lies do best when they're mixed in with truth. It's easier to remember things like that, and they appear just a little more genuine that way too. A counterfeit of conversation.
So of course she regrets some things to do with past romances, or romances that never had a chance to come to fruition. Hell, it's true for her current moment, isn't it? Where here she walks alongside the wife of her boss, basking in the warmth of that simple presence, with the knowledge that she shouldn't act on it even more than she shouldn't act on such things in all the rest of her life.
But that wasn't what she was thinking about during their conversation, she' pretty sure.
...Anymore than usual, anyway.
At least it's enough to get Nana nodding along sympathetically, and that's all she needs for right now. Especially since they've reached their little farm out here in the middle of the mountains where they can all stay for the time being on this definitely-not-contrived-but-totally-coincidental vacation. Then all the time and energy gets sunk into cleaning up the children, washing off the sweet potatoes, and pretending that Tsuna doesn't return absolutely covered in bruises and dirt and maybe a little bit of fire damage.
It's times like these that have Oregano wondering if Nana Sawada really is as sweetly oblivious as her husband likes to gush about, or if there's something more to the way that she has to rummage around in the cabinets for just the right thing while her son tries his best to creep up the stairs to the bathrooms without her noticing.