I think that basically, this is every YamaGoku fanfic that has ever been written.

It feels like the culmination of everything that they've ever worked for, the past seven years. Reborn assures them that the real work is only just beginning, but looking at Tsuna, the Vongola ring resting on his left hand, unchallenged, Yamamoto is strangely relieved. Something is right about the universe, a final puzzle piece slotting into place.

The inception ceremony is in a week, scheduled to coincide with Tsuna's 21st birthday, and as such, the task of planning Tsuna's birthday party is taken off their hands. Tsuna himself is taken off their hands almost as soon as they touch down in Italy, groggy and jet-lagged. He has a week, Reborn says, to learn proper etiquette and enough Italian to keep from embarrassing himself at the ceremony, or else.

"...or else what?" Tsuna asks, because sometimes, he really is a little slow.

"Execution," Reborn replies simply, cocking his gun.

"Geh."

Yamamoto favours teaching through practical demonstration, Gokudera through theory, and Reborn through the simple expedient of throwing his student into the deep end of the pool, head first, at the bottom of which is a thing of SHARKS.

"Sorry, boss," Gokudera says apologetically as Tsuna is dragged off to one of the mansion's many side rooms. When Reborn clears his throat meaningfully, he repeats it in Italian, his tongue careful over every syllable, unlike the rapid, liquid drawl that Yamamoto has heard him share with Dino and Dr. Shamal. Yamamoto will remember, later, that 'sorry' is the first word of Italian that he ever learns.

The moment Tsuna is out of sight, Gokudera droops a little, bringing his hand up over a yawn. Yamamoto had managed to sleep through most of the plane ride, but it's contagious, and he finds himself stifling a yawn of his own.

"I wonder what time it is in Japan," he says.

"2.15," Gokudera replies off-handedly, although Yamamoto hadn't really been expecting an answer. "AM."

"No wonder we're tired," he smiles. They'd all gone to university, but Yamamoto had never mastered the art of the panicking undergraduate all-nighter, and Gokudera had never needed it.

"What is this 'we' business," Gokudera starts, the effect of his displeasure ruined by another yawn. "Ugh, I'm going to take a nap."

"I guess I will too."

Gokudera snaps at Yamamoto not to follow him, but their steps match up naturally as they walk to the second floor, where their rooms are. An entire wing of the compound has been reserved for their use, which impressed Yamamoto, embarrassed Tsuna, and which Gokudera accepted as just the Tenth's rightful due. The others will come on their own time, Reborn says. When needed, they gather.

"Maybe you can show me around tomorrow," Yamamoto says, one hand on the door knob. Gokudera already has his own open, between them, but he deigns to look around it.

"Why the hell would I?" he replies with a scowl, and disappears into his room, door closing none-too-gently behind him.

It isn't a 'no'. Yamamoto smiles, the boyish one which has always served him well with girls and the occasional little old lady, and which he knows has pretty much the opposite effect on Gokudera.

"Goodnight," he says, to empty air.

It's a nice room, simply but tastefully furnished with what he thinks are real antiques. Gokudera would probably know. Yamamoto's not usually the kind of person who has trouble sleeping in unfamiliar places, but staring up at the ceiling, he's not really tired anymore. He spares a moment to think of how Tsuna's doing, until a muffled gunshot rings out somewhere below and he decides that he doesn't really want to know that much. He wonders how Gokudera is doing instead, one wall away.

Unlike him, Gokudera does have trouble sleeping in strange places, staying up grumpy but alert those few times they've been forced to hole up somewhere. (But Yamamoto remembers one night, a couple of years ago, when they had all crashed out on the tatami floor of the restaurant, coming off the adrenaline rush of some disaster or another. When he got up to try and clean the mess invariably left behind when people like Lambo, and Gokudera, and Ryohei, and Hibari and... well, all of them, were left in the same area for any extended period of time, Gokudera had woken up immediately. And then he'd sighed when he saw Yamamoto's face, frown smoothing out, and rolled over, right back to sleep.)

It was a good memory. They've made a lot of those.

Yamamoto wakes up late for breakfast the next morning, surprised to see Tsuna still sitting at one of the dining tables, apparently trying to drown himself in orange juice.

"Morning!"

"Grhjgakjfgkshaf," Tsuna replies, looking up, dark circles prominent under his eyes. A maid appears the moment Yamamoto sits down, possibly summoned through magic, and asks him what he would like to eat in halting Japanese.

"Ah... toast?" the maid looks politely confused, but with some pantomiming and a scatter of English, she finally nods. "How was your lesson?" he asks, turning to Tsuna, who moans and drags himself into a vaguely upright position.

"He taught me how to say 'gun' and 'explosives' and 'Hello, let us do good business today or I will shoot you in the head'. But not how to get breakfast."

"Haha, well, it'll probably come in handy."

"So would not starving to death," Tsuna says gloomily.

"Reborn won't let you starve," Yamamoto says. "I think." But he shares half of his breakfast with Tsuna, although 'toast' turns out to be some kind of baked omelette thing. Italy is strange, he thinks, or maybe he's just no good at English and worse at charades.

Gokudera comes downstairs when they're just about done, squinting at the light streaming through the windows as if it's a personal affront, one hand in his hair. He's never been much of a morning person (although it could be argued that he wasn't much of an afternoon or evening person, either), but for Tsuna, he tries.

"Morning, Tenth," he greets automatically, accepting the pot of coffee that appears at his elbow (definitely magic, Yamamoto thinks, or maybe some sort of mysterious Vongola-trained telepathy) and pouring out a cup. The way Gokudera drinks coffee would probably kill a lesser man, but he looks a lot happier after his third mug, mellowing out enough to actually acknowledge Yamamoto's existence, even if it's just to yell when Yamamoto volunteers him as a tour guide for the afternoon. ("DON'T DECIDE THIS KIND OF THING ON YOUR OWN but I guess it's okay if it's for Tenth.")

"I can't," Tsuna says, although he looks longingly at the door. "I still have to practice. or reborn will shoot me in the head."

"Well, if it's the Tenth, there won't be a problem," Gokudera says with the unconditional faith that stresses Tsuna out, but which hasn't failed either of them yet. "Do you want me to stay and help?"

"No," Tsuna says firmly. "You should go out and have fun."

Gokudera protests - predictably - that it wouldn't be any fun without Tenth there, especially if he has to spend the whole day with that baseball idiot, but he doesn't put up more than a token fuss when he leaves the mansion with Yamamoto in tow.

"Because," he says, "You'll end up playing in traffic or something stupid if I leave you alone, and if you die and mess up the Tenth's 21st birthday, I'll kill you."

The threat strikes Yamamoto as being a touch counter-productive, but he laughs. "You're probably right."

"And don't think I'm going to show you to any tourist traps," Gokudera warns him. "I bet you bought one of those lame guides."

"Hahaha, well, they were on display at the airport..."

"Why do I know you," Gokudera asks flatly. Yamamoto knows better than to answer.

It's his second time here, but the Italy that he sees here isn't anything like the one that Dino showed him, which had consisted of various tourist traps. Gokudera wanders through winding alleys and dim streets and the shadows of buildings that look nothing like Tokyo. Yamamoto gets the feeling that Gokudera barely remembers he's there, but sometimes he off-handedly points out things like 'that used to be a fig tree,' and 'this is where the 8th head of the Giovanni family got caught in an ambush and shot to death.'

They stop at a street market. Yamamoto feels that he should be reminded of the matsuri back home, but everything he passes by, cramped stalls and merchants calling out greetings to either side - salve, ciao, buona sera - isn't like anything familiar at all. He spends some time fascinated at a display of candy, Gokudera rolling his eyes several feet away.

"What are you, twelve?" he asks, but he accepts the hard toffee that Yamamoto presses to his mouth. His glare suggests that Yamamoto's lucky he doesn't lose a finger, but Yamamoto has been a part of Operation Feed Gokudera a Goddamn Sandwich since Haru founded it sometime in their third year of middle school (although she denies choosing such an unladylike name), and candy is a minor transgression, all things considered.

"S'good, isn't it?"

"Too sweet," Gokudera complains finally, swallowing. "...save some for Tenth."

Yamamoto smiles breezily and obeys, folding the tiny paper sack over and tucking it into his backpack.

Dinner is in a tiny restaurant cafe, chosen more or less at random, the sort with no storefront and the daily special written on chalkboard outside the door. Gokudera must have heard the gunshots last night because he doesn't protest spending even more time away from the mansion. His devotion to Tsuna is unquestionable, but he has his limits, and they often directly involve Reborn or his sister.

It's cozy and dim inside, the walking space narrow enough that he nearly knocks over several glasses on the way to their table, Gokudera pulling him into line each time with a hissed "Be careful, idiot." He puzzles over the (entirely Italian) menu in the flickering orange of the tealight decorating their table, and makes it through three items before he gives up, by which time Gokudera is already looking through the wine list. Admitting defeat, Yamamoto closes his menu, sliding it across the table so that it nudges the edge of Gokudera's own.

Gokudera looks up irritably. He offers his best innocent smile in return, and when he asks Gokudera to order for him, it's pretty much worth it just for the look that he gets - eyebrows drawn together, head tilted a little to the side, like Gokudera is honestly baffled that Yamamoto is still alive.

"What?" Gokudera says. "You're not a girl. And they hit you if you try to do that nowadays," he adds, the slightly confused sage advice of a person who didn't really know what the feminist movement entailed, but had spent most of his formative years under legitimately terrifying female influence. "What the hell would I know about what you want to eat?"

"I'm sure anything that you order will be good," Yamamoto says. "Unless it's, um, snails or something."

"One," Gokudera replies, more than a little appalled, "Escargot is a delicacy. Two, it's French." He still looks as though he can't figure out how Yamamoto survived to see 21, but flips his menu a few pages back before he signals a waiter, which Yamamoto decides to take as a victory.

He trusts Gokudera, but he's still a little relieved that when the food comes, it isn't snails. It's some kind of flat spaghetti in thick white sauce, rich and slightly sweet, with a name that he can't pronounce. (He looks blank enough when Gokudera tells him what it is that Gokudera takes pity with an exasperated sigh and says "Seafood pasta" instead.)

"It's really good," he says. "Thanks."

Gokudera looks as though he's torn between accepting Yamamoto's gratitude gracefully or punching him in the face.

"You eat raw fish," he says finally, casually hypocritical. "Your opinion on these matters is void."

Yamamoto just laughs.

It's well past dark when they leave the restaurant, the air crisp with warning of the approaching winter. He regrets not taking a jacket with him, especially when he sees Gokudera strip off a couple of his rings and stick his hands into his pockets. Smoking constricts the blood vessels, he remembers reading somewhere, so heat doesn't get distributed as well to the extremities, but he doesn't mention it even when Gokudera heads to a corner stand to buy cigarettes. They haven't had an argument all day, and Yamamoto doesn't want to invite one; his daily target quota of yelling at Yamamoto has steadily decreased over the years, but getting along too well with Yamamoto still makes Gokudera nervous.

The brand on the carton isn't one that he's familiar with. Standing with Gokudera at the corner, watching him tap out a cigarette and light it with strangely bare fingers, he imagines that it's the same scent that clung to Gokudera when they first met, back when he was fourteen, too ignorant to realise that he should be paying attention to this game, to Tsuna, to Gokudera. Gokudera sighs in smoke, looking up, and maybe it's the cold that lets him back up into Yamamoto, just a little.

Yamamoto looks up too. Like Tokyo, all but the most determined of stars are drowned out by the city lights, but he still gets the feeling of being under a different sky, not Japan, not the Italy visited for a weekend and back again without regret. The landmarks here aren't immortalised on postcards or heavy with the weight of tourist admiration, but they're a history, nonetheless, of the Italy that Gokudera lived for fourteen years.

It's nothing like Japan, Yamamoto thinks, just a little homesick, and if Italy is nothing like Japan, then doesn't that mean that Japan is nothing like -

"Did you miss it?" he asks, suddenly curious. "Being here." Gokudera had never shown any signs, but while Gokudera is vocal about the things that spark the flash fire of his temper, he keeps everything else - the things that make him happy, that upset him more than a clean explosion can fix - closer than even Tsuna can reach, sometimes.

Gokudera glances over at him disinterestedly, cigarette dangling from loose fingers.

"Tenth was in Japan," he says, which isn't an answer, but they both know that. Gokudera flicks the remains of his cigarette to smoulder out on the ground, and leads them back to the mansion, unerring, over streets paved with unfamiliar stone.