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Leone indicated the target with a nod.
“Shoot it”
“Do I have to?”
“You do.”
“Do I have to hit the centre?”
“Hit the bull’s eye”
“What if I hit another side of the target?”
“Aim for the centre”
The boy lowered the gun, feeling downhearted. “I can’t. It’s too heavy for me”
What a useless brat. Why did he took that kid’s training upon himself? He had never trained any recruit; he had never even cared. He wrapped the kid’s fingers around the pistol grip “Aim for the fucking centre of that target”
He was a frightened kid. He stared at him with those teary blue eyes and always seemed about to burst out crying.
The shoot interrupted his thoughts, magnetically attracted by the new hole in the wall, half a metre away from the unharmed target.
Sakazaki Yuuya, the kid that came from the other side of the world. He hadn’t even asked how the city he left was like. Probably he had a toy gun back home that he liked much better.
“Here” Leone had told him, handing him a phone. Sakazaki had looked at him with a confused expression.
“You can call your family”
He had refused to take the mobile phone with his hand, the hand that was too little to hold a gun. “I don’t have a number to call”
His big eyes wandered. Are you looking for your mother?, he could have asked.
Sakazaki Yuuya always seemed about to burst out crying, but he never did.
He was thankful for that, Leone's hands were way more used to shooting than to handling tissues.
He placed the gun in his hands and moved his hair behind his ear.
“Look at that damned target. Think about the bastard that’s killed your father”
His hands tightened around the stock of the gun. But he hesitated.
“Think about that disgusting bastard’s face laughing at you! Would you let him do it? You Coward!”
He kept yelling at him; doing the only thing he was able to do, the only thing that had ever been done to him.
The bullet opened his way on the target leaving a sharp and clean hole, so deep that one could have drowned in it.
“I am not a coward” He said, being louder than the gunshot.
“I have a mum and a little brother in France. I really miss him, you know? My little brother. But they said I can’t call him.”
Yuuya was slowly swinging his steamy cup of milk. He was too young for coffee. But one day he would have taught him to drink it, like all the adults do.
Yuuya revealed himself to be a bastard, but a promising one.
“What about you, Leone? Don’t you have a family? A little brother?”
He thought that, after all, he could have pretended they were a bit alike. Even for a little while, even for a moment.