Sobriety

Author's Notes and Miscellany: I decided to submit these after a brief consideration. In this, Gokudera is subject to a Roman Sobriety test. There may be room for slash.

Sawada Tsunayoshi wondered how he should explain. Explaining, in and of itself was a strange state for him to be in. Tsuna didn't usually explain things; usually, people much smarter than him, much wiser than him, or much older than him ended up explaining stuff… like this. "Like this", because Tsuna didn't know how else to phrase it. Everything else seemed to lessen the magnitude of the impact this situation was having on… everything.

Tsuna thought everyone knew that Gokudera got sick upon visual contact with his sister. It ended up that, no, not everyone did. Most everyone didn't, in fact, but that was what knowledge did to you. Once you knew something, you thought it was common knowledge for everyone. Or, at least, that was the case right now.

Right now, being just ten minutes after he, Gokudera and Yamamoto were all out of their half-day of school. Bianchi had just passed by. She did that a lot, but she had also stopped to pick up Reborn and leave behind a couple of her cool, catty remarks before pedaling off down the street.

Of course, Gokudera had fainted, this time against Takeshi who had grabbed the other boy before he could fall to the sidewalk. Gokudera, Tsuna thought, had displayed all the symptoms of one who was about to be violently ill; his face was waxy, his eyes glazed and his mouth forced into a rictus of pain and nausea. His whole body trembled, so badly, in fact, that Yamamoto had been obliged to crouch, possibly afraid that the other boy would drop from his arms.

"Gokudera!" Yamamoto had said, his face concerned and alarmed, and had reached up to touch Gokudera's face to feel his temperature.

"We should take him to the infirmiry." Was what Tsuna was expecting him to say. "Are you drunk?" Was what Yamamoto actually said. Tsuna, his mentally constructed conversation so thoroughly shattered, could only emit a "nuh!" of shock.

"In what world does that", Tsuna said, in an attempt to divert impending insanity, and pointed to the languishing Gokudera. "look like someone who's drunk?!" Gokudera, who was being pillowed in Yamamoto's lap, struggled ineffectively, flailing his limbs about in a weak and uncoordinated way, murmuring something incomprehensible about Yamamoto being an idiot.

"I think 'that' is a little harsh, Tsuna." Said Yamamoto, good-naturedly offended for his friend, and completely missing the real point of Tsuna's statement. "I wonder if there's a way to tell for sure… Oh! That's right!" Takeshi was so enthused about his sudden thought that he might have pounded a fist into his hand if both appendages hadn't been occupied with Gokudera. "I read this in our history book- this was what Romans would do to make sure their wives hadn't been drinking."

But before Tsuna could ask what, exactly, a Roman sobriety test was, and why he hadn't read it in their exceedingly dry textbook, Yamamoto made his move on the groggy Gokudera. He ducked his head, sniffing Gokudera's lips the way someone might savour the aroma of a good cup of coffee, before pressing his lips onto Gokudera's.

Tsuna, at this point, thought his brain might have broken a little, but figured Gokudera was pretty much fine, considering how he thrashed against Yamamoto. Yamamoto, however, was not deterred, and his conviction that Gokudera was drunk seemed only to strengthen from Gokudera's desperate antics. Yamamoto pressed Gokudera closer to him, making the silver-haired boy give a small, undignified choke, and flexed his jaw, opening Gokudera's mouth.

Tsuna watched Yamamoto work his mouth for a couple of seconds before coming to a decision; he wasn't sure what the ancient Romans did to test for alcohol consumption, but judging from the present day Italians, he thought he was relatively safe in the assumption that it wasn't a French Kiss. Tsuna kind of figured this was what Gokudera thought, too because, even though his body went limp and he stopped fighting, his face was nothing if not surprised. Yamamoto finally pulled back, Gokudera giving a huge exhalation, a thin string of saliva stretching between his and Gokudera's lips.

The tense moment, where the entire world seemed to have gone silent, was broken and a rush of noise filled the sudden vacuum in Tsuna's ears, along with Gokudera's enraged invectives. Yamamoto turned his head, not even minding when it was wrenched further to the side by Gokudera pushing it, with a little abashed expression.

"Maybe I did it wrong. I didn't taste anything at all!" He gave a boyish giggle, also not seeming to mind that he had left Tsuna standing there speechless, and, with a small apologetic noise, wiped excess moisture off of Gokudera's lips with a thumb. "Sorry 'bout that, Gokudera!"

Tsuna didn't even have the consciousness to try to stop Gokudera from stuffing bombs into Yamamoto's mouth, and he only half-heard Yamamoto's easy-going apologies and Gokudera's cursing, which was changing quickly from Japanese to Italian. He just hoped that none of the Gokudera or Yamamoto (or Gokudera and Yamamoto) fans hadn't seen that little incident. Because, Tsuna knew, with his luck, he would be the getting hate-letters from scandalized fangirls for years to come.