Disclaimer: I do not own KHR.

I had part of this chapter written up on my laptop…. But then it got infected by a lethal virus… All of my precious data, GONE! Now, a moment of silence for all the documents and files I was too lazy to back-up.

Alright, you may now proceed to read another chapter of filler material. Note that only a few sections are based on actual manga chapters, and that I am going by the chronological order that the anime follows (sort of).

Post Scriptum 10) Toxic Training

Thursday, Naoki's kitchen

"You fail." Naoki gave the poor boy a cool, calculating glance that clearly communicated her lack of sympathy for his incompetence. Then she tilted her head and smirked just so—"Again."

Tsuna sighed for what seemed like the thousandth time that week. Ever since he had figured out the redhead's 'secret', Reborn had forced him into what could only be described as a series of impossible wagers which were supposed to end with Naoki joining the Vongola (though Tsuna still did not understand why she was needed. Or why he needed to become a mafia boss in the first place), but as the week progressed, it seemed as though they were only intended to embarrass the life out of Tsuna.

The way Naoki had just smirked at him was proof. Tsuna had found that the challenges he was supposed to win were becoming progressively simpler and easier, and because he failed every single one of them anyway, this only added to the sense of shame he was faced with afterwards.

Just now, for example, he had lost three rounds of rock paper scissors. Consecutively. With Naoki looking at her cup of tea the whole time. Even luck had it against him. Then again, luck had always had it against him.

Naoki herself did not seem as averse to the idea of joining the mafia as she had been only a few weeks ago. Maybe seeing the scrawny little boy trying so hard had opened her heart to the idea. A better explanation would be the lack of excitement in her life—she was simply bored beyond reason. Apparently, having an extremely enthusiastic boxer as a friend just wasn't enough anymore.

"Amazing," the redhead was saying, eyeing Tsuna from head to toe, "I've never seen anyone so spectacularly below average."

This remark actually ranked quite low on the scale of snide comments with which she had showered the boy during the last few days. Nevertheless, her words were not exactly encouraging.

"Reborn!" Tsuna whined, as if blaming his tutor (and rightly so) for all the physical and mental scarring he had endured lately. "I can't do this anymore!"

Simple games were not the only things he had failed at—there had been mind-boggling math riddles, frustratingly easy tasks with time limits that made them impossible, physical challenges worthy of the Olympics, and wagers that seemed wildly irrelevant. Naoki managed to win all of them.

Reborn simply sipped some of his espresso, completely ignoring his student's mental breakdown. Tsuna hung his head and sighed yet again.

"Hold on," Naoki muttered suddenly, getting up to open her refrigerator, "There's one more thing for you to try."

Tsuna sighed once again, watching the girl warily as she pulled out a jar. A jar full of pickles. She set it on the counter in front of him.

"Open it," she said simply. The three stared at the jar. Then Tsuna stared at Reborn. He stared right back.

"That's all? And you'll… you'll join?" the teen muttered uncertainly, not sure whether he really wanted to do this—after all, as unsympathetic as she seemed to be, Naoki was, as he had recently discovered, a girl, and as far as he knew the mafia was not to be taken lightly.

Disregarding Tsuna's worries, she shrugged.

"Sure."

Tsuna wasn't so 'sure', but with one look from Reborn he clasped the lid of the jar and attempted to turn it counterclockwise. It wouldn't budge. He tried a few more times. The jar remained unopened. Naoki had long since finished her tea.

A few moments passed in silence. Then, a few sparrows took flight from a tree in the backyard at the sound of a gunshot.

"Open the jar as if I were to die!"

The flame on Tsuna's forehead died out soon after, with him holding the lid in his right hand. The jar lay in pieces on the counter. Naoki was not impressed.

"…That doesn't count."

"I-I'm sorry!"

By the end of the week, he found himself owing the redhead quite a lot of money.

Tuesday, Namimori Middle School

Another boring day at school, or so Naoki had thought, until she encountered a small Chinese child holding a lunchbox and, by the sound of it, asking for directions.

Naoki had just been asked to run an errand for a teacher, meaning that she could take her sweet time and skip some of the boring class. She never paid any attention in math anyway.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand a word you're saying," Naoki told the child who sighed, bowed politely, and ran off down the hallway.

"Hmm."

During lunch the same day, Naoki opened the door to the school roof, immediately regretting it as her ears were met with a great deal of noise. Spotting Sawada and his cronies, she contemplated quietly closing the door and returning to her classroom when something was thrown in her direction.

Instinctively, she shut the door, a dull thud immediately ringing through its surface.

"Aah! Itoe-san!" she heard through the door, and opened it again cautiously. The Chinese child she had met that morning lay unconscious on the floor just behind the opened door.

"Oh," Naoki commented, then, "Sawada, what are you doing? Throwing children around like that."

Tsuna had already gathered the child in his arms and seemed to be too panicked to listen to her reprimands. Now that she got a better look at it, the child seemed to have strange dots painted on its forehead. Naoki made no attempt to understand how the patterns of dots were changing with each second.

Ignoring her (the nerve of him), Tsuna quickly passed the child onto Yamamoto, who was standing nearby, and frantically told him to toss it in the air, which he did without hesitation.

Naoki gave them all a look of mild disgust which quickly turned into wide eyed exasperation at the sudden explosion up in the sky.

"I can't believe you just blew up a child," she muttered numbly, safe behind the half open door.

"Itoe-san, it…it's not what it looks like!"

Wondering whether this was part of his mafia training (what else could it be?), she shook her head and returned to her classroom. At least there she wouldn't have to worry about exploding children ruining her lunch.

Sunday, Naoki's house

It was morning.

Well, it was more like noon, but on Sundays those terms were interchangeable. Naoki had just woken up after finally getting to bed some time at dawn, having spent the night on experiments and such.

Ryohei, having finally accepted the fact that Naoki was simply unavailable on Sundays, had mercifully stopped popping up for random challenges and training. Consequently, Sunday had become her favorite day of the week, and she mostly spent the time tending to her garden or simply relaxing. No strenuous activities, physical or otherwise, were allowed on this day, she told herself.

It was then not surprising that she groaned out loud at the sight of Reborn sitting on her kitchen counter.

"It's Sunday," she declared irritably, "And on Sundays I demand to be left alone."

Little did she know that that exact demand would ironically ruin the rest of her Sundays from here on out.

"A perfect day for some training, don't you think?" he simply replied, completely ignoring her request and smiling innocently.

"No," she answered flatly, "Wait, what training?"

"Gokudera and Yamamoto are going through a strengthening program right now," said Reborn, as though this would explain everything—which it did. She knew exactly where he was going with this.

"What exactly do I need to strengthen? Having Ryohei as a friend involves more than enough 'training' as it is," Naoki told him, slightly offended at the suggestion that she needed any sort of special program.

"I've invited someone to help you get started," was his response, which once again failed to answer her questions. "Bianchi," he then called.

She heard a strange hissing and bubbling sound, but before she could investigate a young woman had appeared, holding what looked like a whole stack of lunchboxes.

"Reborn!" she called dreamily, dropping everything on the counter before gathering the child into a hug.

"… Hello," Naoki greeted numbly.

She was promptly ignored, though by now she no longer cared. Faint purple smoke was wafting around the unknown packages on her kitchen counter. On her kitchen counter. That was where she prepared her food. Not today though, most definitely.

The next few minutes went by in a flash while she stood there, speechless, and Reborn basically told her to 'practice' on what was easily a few kilograms worth of undiluted poison.

"You'll be in very good shape once you are able to neutralize Bianchi's poison cooking," he was saying when Naoki finally opened her mouth to object.

"Err," she said, quite convincingly.

"Have fun," was the last thing Reborn told her before he hopped onto Bianchi's shoulder and they walked out of the kitchen.

Naoki was still eyeing the steadily increasing amount of purple smoke when she heard her front door slam shut. The strange thing about that was that there was no ensuing click of a lock that was supposed to fall into place automatically. Hesitantly, she shuffled out of the kitchen and stuck her head around the corner.

She stared down the hallway at her front door.

Where the lock and door handle should be, a rather large hole was steadily increasing in size, its edges covered in what looked like steaming purple ooze, consequently allowing daylight to illuminate the normally dim corridor. So that's what that strange hissing sound had been earlier. Her front door was melting.

Naoki gave a silent scream.

Monday, Classroom 2-A

"Oi, you look terrible to the extreme!"

It was homeroom. As usual, everyone was chitchatting instead of doing what they were told. Except that today, Naoki was looking anything but refreshed with dark rings under her eyes and a rather greenish tint to her skin. The girls were shooting worried glances in her direction and whispering amongst themselves.

A good night's sleep in her own home had been out of the question, seeing that her front door was half gone, leaving her with no security except for the flimsy wall and outer gate of her house. Consequently, Naoki had spent the night trying to get those toxic fumes out of her kitchen. Since the smoke could not simply be aired out (though not for lack of trying), she was left with having to detoxify a large amount of badly poisoned food.

Sadly enough, her knowledge of poison cooking was not exactly extensive, so by the time morning came around her kitchen was still far from its original, toxic free state. School seemed like a good alternative to the purple tinted air in her home, so for once she had been pleased that it was Monday.

At Ryohei's less than sensitive remark, she merely sighed.

"Thanks, Ryohei."

"What's up?" he asked energetically, causing her to shrink away from him ever so slightly. His loud voice was making her queasy.

"The front door to my house is broken," she muttered, propping her elbow on her desk and balancing her head against her hand. She felt like she had forgotten something. But her brain felt like it was clouded in purple smoke.

"You mean you left your house unlocked?" said Ryohei, blinking at her in mild confusion.

Naoki stared at him.

"Oh."

It was only during lunch that she finally decided to go home early and make sure that her belongings were still where they ought to be. For a while she had consoled herself with the fact that a house filled with poisonous fumes was probably pretty safe on its own, but as she sat through the first few classes, she began to be reminded of the many valuable ingredients she had stashed up in her basement.

So as soon as the lunch bell rang, Naoki got up, told Ryohei she was taking a sick leave, took hold of her violin case and exited the classroom. She did not get as far as she would have liked before being held up.

"Itoe senpai, we heard you were sick!"

"Can we help you with anything?"

A group of worried first year girls blocked her path just outside her classroom. How news of the redhead's sickly appearance had gotten around so fast was a mystery.

"No no, thank you," Naoki said stiffly, expertly dismissing them with a forced smile.

This much was expected, but what came next actually caused her headache to become more significant.

"Where do you think you're going?" came that dreaded voice from behind her, just as she reached the gate. If possible, her already sickly complexion turned paler.

"Ah," she told Hibari, because home sounded like an inappropriate answer, "I need to protect my property."

He eyed her with that piercing gaze of his for quite a while. She would have run away had it not been for the pair of tonfa he was holding suggestively at the ready. She didn't feel like being chased down by those today. A distraction would be very welcome right now, she thought.

And just as he took a step towards her, the sound of an explosion captured their attention. It seemed to have come from the school's roof, judging by all the smoke that was now clouding over one of the buildings. She suspected that it had something to do with Sawada.

Blowing up children again no doubt, Naoki thought as she sprinted down the street, away from Hibari. She had turned on her heel as soon as he had turned his head. Seeing that nobody was following her, she soon slowed down and arrived, in one piece, at her house some time later. She could still see a small trail of purple smoke wafting out of the partly opened kitchen window.

Ah, home sweet home.

Wednesday, Naoki's kitchen

"Yesss."

Naoki stared blankly at the last bit of poison-cooking as it ceased to emit any smoke. She held in her hand a vial of clear liquid that had just successfully eradicated the most stubbornly toxic parts of the lunch boxes. The war to liberate her kitchen from those poisonous purple fumes was finally over.

"Yes, yes, yes, yes! It's done," she muttered, her lips twitching into a triumphant albeit slightly deranged smile. The vial was quickly corked and the now harmless leftovers tossed into a garbage bag.

All the windows in her house had stood wide open for days now, rendering sleep pretty much impossible. What was the use of a fixed front door when anyone could enter her house through those windows?

This wasn't much of an inconvenience though, seeing that Naoki had had no time for sleep anyway—her past week had been devoted to neutralizing the overwhelming amount of poisoned food she had been left with since Sunday. And it had not been a very pleasant experience, to say the least.

Too tired to even make it up the stairs, she simply dragged herself over to the living room couch and dropped onto its silk cushions with a contended, exhausted sigh. Throwing an arm over her eyes to block out the light, she was just about ready to get some well earned sleep when it dawned on her that she was not alone.

"Good job," she heard a squeaky voice say nearby.

"Oh go away, will you?" Naoki sighed, refusing to open her eyes.

"Nobody's ever managed to neutralize Bianchi's cooking before, you know," Reborn told her, sitting on the back of the couch and watching the redhead with a mysterious smile.

"You mean no one's ever bothered," was her cynical reply. She certainly wouldn't have either if it weren't for the fact that she cared for the sterility of her kitchen. Simply throwing out that blatantly poisonous mess had seemed, from a medical point of view, just plain wrong.

A few seconds of blessed silence passed, allowing her to hope that he had left her alone. She shifted her arm slightly to peer up at the edge of the couch. Unable to spot anyone, she gave a sigh of relief and closed her eyes once more.

"If someone were to swallow this as an antidote, would it work?"

She twitched slightly at the renewed sound of his voice. He had returned with the vial of clear liquid in his hand.

"Of course not. It would neutralize all the enzymes in the stomach," she answered promptly, furrowing her eyebrows at the ridiculous question.

The 'antidote' she had concocted was only designed to brutally extinguish all of the poisonous elements of the cooking in question, in other words for external use only. It was far too strong to be consumed in any way.

There was a pause.

Then she opened her eyes and met his. He smiled. She stared.

"No," she muttered blankly, "You don't… No."

"Whatever do you mean, Lumi?" the child asked innocently.

Admittedly, it had been amusing when he tortured Tsuna, but when she herself was the victim she did not appreciate his character.

"You want me to make an antidote that's edible," she stated flatly after a while.

"Correct," he confirmed cheerily.

She continued to stare at him with empty eyes. Eyes that had not been allowed to sleep for days. Eyes that began to twitch violently. Then, suddenly, she smiled.

"You know what? I'll do it. I'll do it willingly. Before you find some diabolical way to force me," the redhead told him with false cheer, her voice cracking slightly due to all the sleep she had been missing.

"You really are a lot smarter than Tsuna," was the satisfied response.

It wasn't much of a compliment.

Dear Suomi,

I seem to have fallen asleep mid-conversation, seeing that the sun is now rising and the last time I was awake it was just setting. Figures.

I really need to set up a new security system for this house. What use is a brand new front door when tiny little hitmen can just waltz in and out as they please?

Then again, I think I'll just have to be satisfied with keeping burglars away. I have a feeling Reborn can't be stopped by any human means.

In any case, I've finally come up with a sort of counter-poison to neutralize that Bianchi's so-called 'poison-cooking' (how anything so atrocious can be called 'cooking' is beyond me), so now I have to find a way to convert it into an actual antidote that can be consumed. Which means that I'll have to start all over again.

I have a feeling that I might have been force-fed some poison had I dared to refuse this challenge. But would Reborn really do such a thing?

…Yes. Yes, of course he would.

Problem is—I'll need to find some test subjects to try out a few concoctions.

Oh who am I kidding, Namimori is full of test subjects.

This 'training' might turn out be somewhat enjoyable after all. Not that I'm perfecting my skills to help a bunch of mafia wannabes. They would never be able to pay me for what my skills are worth.

Money is the only goal worth pursuing. Father has been telling me this ever since I could walk. I have such lovely childhood memories.

Until next time,

-Lumi Virtanen

Author's Note: Sorry for the lame and late chapter, gotta get back in the mood for some KHR.

Bianchi's now in the picture, so I guess Dino is up next! Though I'm not sure whether I should just go ahead and start the Kokuyo arc… it's high time, don't you think?

So I've been busy with all kinds of crazy things this past year and a half. Yeah I know, excuses excuses. I'm going to start updating again, so no worries. DON'T WORRY, JUST REVIEW! All those reviews I've received over all this time have been very encouraging. Thank you all!

In other news, many many thanks to e-vie on devArt for showering me with lovely and beautiful fanart. I was on the brink of tears when I received so much love. And then I went ahead and finished writing most of this chapter. And then I went ahead and forgot to update. Embarrassiiiing.

Hope you enjoyed it anyway. And to all a happy new year! Twice!