Title: Simple Line, Day by Day
Characters/Pairings: Yamamoto
Summary: You get one shot. You'd better make it count.
Notes: General audiences. For Round III of KHRfest, prompt V-15. Yamamoto – destruction; "The wheel in the sky keeps on turning". Character study. 486 words.

Simple Line, Day by Day

What no one seems to understand about Takeshi is that he knows how to compartmentalize very well. He's perfectly aware that Gokudera thinks he's a cheerful idiot and that Tsuna relies on him to keep smiling, and that's okay, he can do that, no problem. His baseball team had relied on him, too, to be focused on the game and the win, and that had been easy enough to do, too. That was where he'd learned the trick of it, in fact. He thinks of it like having a box inside his head where he can put anything that isn't baseball or the game and then shut it for nine innings. It's easy.

And it's easy to do with other things, too, now that he's got the hang of it. Comes in handy with practicing Shigure Souen and with fighting. He can't let himself be distracted by outside things during kata or during a battle, not if he doesn't want to get hurt, so Takeshi just doesn't let it happen. And if Tsuna needs him to be cheerful and smiling, he can manage that, too. It's just a matter of putting the things that might keep that from happening--anger or fear or grief, whatever--to the side where he can't get to them, or they can't get to him. And then he leaves them there, either until he has the time to deal with them or until they stop bothering him, whichever comes first.

That's just being practical, the way Takeshi sees it. It's a survival tactic, a way of dealing with the way the world--even the world ten years later--works. The world hasn't stayed the same, and never does, no matter how much a person wants it to. People die, people go away, and things change. Which, yeah, okay, sucks pretty hard sometimes. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes at world-changing, world-destroying levels of suck. But that doesn't mean the world stops, and Takeshi knows it. The world never stops, because it doesn't particularly care.

Takeshi supposes that's pretty harsh, but it's still the truth, no matter how ugly it is. The world doesn't really care when someone has just died, or that there's a whole bunch of unpleasant consequences lining up as a result of that. The sun keeps on rising in the morning and setting in the evening, and life--the general kind, if not always the specific one--goes on.

Once a person comes to terms with that, the rest is easy. It only makes sense to take each day on its own terms and enjoy it as much as possible, because someday, maybe sooner or maybe later, it'll have to end. Takeshi's given his loyalty to Tsuna, so that's what he works for, bending all his focus and his talents towards Tsuna and his Family, because a guy really only gets one shot.

And Takeshi means to make his count.

end

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