Chapter 7
She thought she was doing pretty well for herself.
Sure, one could say that being an assassin for the mafia wasn’t the height of stability, but she’d be too bored doing anything else.
Was it incredibly ballsy to run away to Sicily in the dead of night as a stowaway at six? Yes. Did she know her original identity was missing presumed dead? Also yes.
Did she regret leaving her dad behind? Yes.
Did she regret doing it? Absolutely not.
Contrary to popular belief, she didn’t run away because her dad somehow traumatized her, or because she was being abused or neglected.
No, it was more a problem with her dads houseguests.
She’d always been a possessive little shit. She now knew this was because of the instincts that came with Cloud Flames, but back then she was just another spoiled rich girl who never learned to share.
Her dad had never cared. It wasn’t really that hard to not go into her room or office/workshop, and if he needed her attention somewhere while she was in one of those rooms he just had the portable J.A.R.V.I.S she let be installed in one of her phones let her know.
If it wasn’t urgent, and could be done at a later time, she just had to let him know she’d get that particular thing done by that particular time and that was that. He’d always treated her as the mature person she was, even if she knew he was under the impression she was probably Autistic.
She was a genius, after all. A prodigy. She was smarter than her dad, the reporters whispered.
And then everything with the Avengers started happening. And her dad was getting led by the nose as their personal bank account, and he didn’t notice, and Pepper Potts was going about everything the wrong way, trying to make his issues about her, and she just. Couldn’t do it anymore.
The Widow broke into both of her rooms the first day she was living in the tower and bugged them, Captain Propaganda kept on opening her door to get her to do something and gave her lectures when she said she’d do it later and told her that she was too spoiled and needed to see the real world eventually. The arrow dude once dropped down into her bedroom from the vents to get her attention. Needless to say she put every single bit of martial arts and weapons training to use to get him out and then blocked off the vents by her rooms. Thor, surprisingly enough, was the only one who actually listened to what she said and respected her boundaries. She was touched until he said he’d learned to listen to his brother when he said the same things and it was second nature.
Then she wasn’t so touched because it made most of her dads houseguests watch her more than ever like she was going to spontaneously start shooting green magic out of her ass and try to take over the world.
They were condescending at best, kept trying to baby her and not let her near sharp or dangerous things as if she hadn’t demanded self defense and weapons training when she was four after seeing the statistics for child rape, because children ‘can’t defend themselves’.
The last straw, though, was when they staged some sort of intervention when she’d gotten back from school one day, about how it is and isn’t okay to act. They were talking at her for a good thirty minutes before she told them to fuck off and suck a dick and went back to her room.
That's when she started planning. Because in that ‘intervention’, they were mentioning things like taking away her technology and door and her LED lights and everything that made her space hers and personal until she learned a lesson. She couldn’t bear to live with people that so obviously didn’t care about her well being, or boundaries.
So she packed the little she could afford to take with her, trashed her technology but saved some things like phone numbers and pictures, and took every bit of money she could out of her trust fund.
She left a note for her dad and found a plane she could safely be a stowaway on, and off to Sicily she went.
Really, there's a lot of countries she could’ve chosen. She spoke eight languages near-fluently, if accented, and ten more conversationally. Her fluent languages are Sicilian, her first language, English, her second, Italian, her third, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
She’d started the asian languages young, otherwise they would’ve been lost to her as she grew up.
Her ten conversationally fluent languages are Dari, Pashto, German, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Irish, Indonesian, Dutch, and Tamil.
She could’ve gone pretty much anywhere, but she wanted to be in a place where she could speak her mother tongue. She’d only ever spoken to her dad in Sicilian, even in public, because she refused to speak in English to him when he knew very well what she was saying.
It was enough of an injury to her pride that someone had driven her out of her home and territory, she’d needed somewhere to stay where she could be comfortable and uncompromising.
And she had been, comfortable and uncompromising that is. She’d quickly found that just about the only way to survive in sicily as a six year old that would work with her is to try and get into the good graces of a street gang that would let her run errands for them until she could build a reputation up and get an actual job as freelance.
And that's what she’d done, for years. She chose missions at her own leisure, she didn’t take hits on kids, or people who she deemed as good people, or really, people that didn’t deserve to be killed. She also rarely took jobs from assholes. She didn’t only kill, though. She also stole, and destroyed property, and would even sabotage companies if given the reason.
She was Named Shadow-Hime, for the way she seemed to pop out of shadows during her kills, the way she slipped through the shadows when she stole, the way she manipulated from the shadows when she sabotaged things. No idea why the first variation of her Name was in Japanese, but it quickly turned to Shadow Princess, or Shadow Lady, or simply Shadow.
She worked freelance like that, making a nice living for herself, honestly, until she was twelve. Six years, she’d made quite the reputation. Then Xanxus di Vongola took over the Varia and recruited her. At first, she was going to ignore it like everyone else who’d tried recruiting her. She didn’t want to be tied down. She blatantly refused, actually. Even after it became apparent that her and Xanxus were compatible.
Then he told her she’d be allowed to do her freelance work on top of the Varia work if she could keep up, and well. Who could resist a Home, job security, and the resources of the cream of the crop?