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Gokudera heard Lambo crying from the other room.
He sighed and got up to see what had happened: Sawada’s place was almost empty, and the Tenth was currently in the garden, being chased by a tiny hitman with a hammer, Fuuta was doing his homeworks and I-Pin… well, she was little too. If Lambo was injured, she couldn’t make a lot about it.
When he got to the kitchen, I-Pin was nowhere to be found. There was only Lambo, weeping on an apparently injured hand.
“What happened, Aho Ushi?” Gokudera asked, crouching down beside the little boy. Lambo hid his hand at first, but Gokudera firmly held his wrist.
There was a superficial cut across his palm, the kind that seems to hurt more than a knife in your leg. Like a papercut, but it was less neat, and there was no paper in sight.
“How did you do that?” Gokudera asked, trying to be as gentle as possible. Lambo didn’t answer, but side-eyed a bottle of grape juice, its cap still on.
Gokudera grabbed it and saw that there was an imperfection in the plastic: probably it had cut Lambo while he was trying to open it.
“It’s nothing,” Gokudera said.
“It hurts, Ahodera!” Lambo protested, annoyed.
“I know, it’s like a papercut,” Gokudera said, then tried a smile. He was always a bit goofy with Lambo, and he knew why, even if he didn’t like to think about it. Lambo stared at him, suspiciously.
“I’m serious! I know it hurts,” Gokudera repeated, then said: “Let me get some rubbing alcohol on that. I don’t know if Nana disinfects stuff from the konbini, and we don’t want it to get infected, don’t we?” Lambo sniffed and nodded.
Gokudera got up, and Lambo with him. Then, the older boy put a hand on the other’s shoulder and gently led him to the bathroom, where the emergency kit was.
He had Lambo sit on the edge of the tub, then carefully disinfected the cut. It was not neat, in fact, and he bet that Lambo was upset about it.
He then produced two big gauge band-aids and asked: “Unicorns or emojis?”
“Unicorns!” Lambo promptly replied, “Unless the other one has the poop emoji.” Gokudera checked it: “No poop emoji. Let’s go with unicorns.” he placed the bandage on the palm of Lambo’s hand, then hesitated.
Lambo asked: “What?”
“I was thinking about kissing the boo away, but saliva is full of germs.”
“That’s not how it works, Ahodera!” Lambo wisely corrected him, “It works because of love, not because of saliva. You don’t have to drool all over my hand!”
“Oh, I see…” Gokudera pretended to be taught something he didn’t know, “That’s why it never worked before.” Lambo nodded firmly and Gokudera had to hold back a laugh.
“Let’s go back to the kitchen, I’ll open that bottle for you,” he said. They did, and he poured some grape juice in a glass so that Lambo wouldn’t have to deal with the killer bottle. Lambo flashed him a little smile before he left the room.
Back on the couch, with the Tenth nowhere to be seen, hopefully not too near to the school because Hibari, Gokudera stopped and thought.
His relationship with Lambo was… weird. He knew that they all were like brothers, with Ryohei probably being the stupid kid who gets everyone in trouble, but with Lambo it was different.
They all had a family of their own, more or less dysfunctional, but still they had blood relatives. He did too, although his sister only caused him bad stomach aches and even worse nightmares in which he relived his childhood. He couldn’t really consider her as a relative, and maybe he never did. She was nothing more than an annoyance: he felt more prone to consider Shamal as family. He was a weirdo, and a pervert, but he fit better into a guiding role.
And he was Lambo’s guiding role, wasn’t he? He felt that they were kin.
Both coming from Italy, no blood relatives you could be happy with, alone and stranded in a foreign country, living out of expedients and sheer luck.
But for Gokudera it was easier: he had run away from home when he was a kid, alright, but he was eight years old. He hadn’t had it easy, of course, living in the street is never easy, but at least he could fully understand the words he heard, he knew the city and he was old enough to manage to find some food.
Lambo, instead… he had grown up in a rich environment, and he was of course spoiled rotten; then, all of a sudden, he had been sent at the other side of the fucking planet to kill a skilled hitman. Gokudera had joked about the Bovino Family being fed up with him and trying to get rid of him, but the cap just didn’t fit. It was too likely to be funny, and too sad to joke about. There was no other explanation, in his opinion.
So, slowly and without taking notice of it, with the Sawada household being already filled with all family roles, he had taken up the only one left.
Not the mother, that was Nana.
Not the older brothers, those were Fuuta and the Tenth.
Not the sisters, older and younger, those were Bianchi and I-Pin.
He had taken upon himself the role of a father.
A single father, with Nana being so oblivious at times; it was a wonder that the Tenth had grown to be such a beautiful person, having been raised like a house plant.
He had fallen into the role of the one who scolds, the one who teaches, and sometimes the one who goofily tries to kiss a boo away, without knowing that the secret ingredient is not saliva, but love.
Or maybe he knew it from the start, but he didn’t want to admit that he loved Lambo; it was implicit, to him, that he did. Or else, he wouldn’t take those little extra steps to have his candies always on himself, to have a spare change of clothing if he happened to get dirty.
But maybe it wasn’t, like to him it wasn’t obvious that Shamal loved him; now that he thought about it, it was pretty clear, but for years he had just rejected him, sure that there had to be something treacherous.
He got up from the couch, hearing the Tenth’s voice. I-Pin seemed to have come back from wherever she had been, and Fuuta’s voice sometimes raised a joyful screech.
He went outside, and saw that Tsuna had been tricked into a game of throwing a ball; Lambo was playing too, even if he grimaced every time the ball touched his hands.
He dropped the ball and was gleefully mocked for losing first, and he gloomily went away, stomping feet and sporting a pouting mouth and muttering something under his breath.
Gokudera asked: “Wasn’t your hand hurting?”
“Yes,” Lambo replied, still pouting, “But I-Pin wanted to do this game she learned at school and it was just her and me, before Fuuta and Tsuna-nii came, so I had to say yes.”
“Ah, I see…” Gokudera said; Lambo sat down heavily beside his feet and didn’t reply.
Maybe this was the right time?
Gokudera touched Lambo’s hip with his bare foot and called: “Hey.”
“What, Ahodera?”
“Sono fiero di te.” Gokudera replied. It took Lambo a second: he probably hadn’t heard any Italian in a while. But then it sank.
Gokudera left before he could come up with an answer, and before the embarrassment burnt both of them to ashes.
Sono fiero di te.
I’m proud of you.