Blending and belonging
For as long as Takeshi had been able to remember, the Anbu had watched his father. Not all the time, but on and off at random intervals. Checking to make sure he was staying out of trouble, that he hadn’t become a threat. Takeshi had been very young, three years old, when he first realised why. It was because his father was dangerous, the same way the ninja in the white masks were dangerous. Because there was a sword over Yamamoto Tsuyoshi’s mantle, and a predatory grace in the way he moved, and his accent belonged to a country far from Konoha. It was because his father, and so by extension Takeshi himself weren’t real civilians, not the way the other children in the neighbourhood were.
He hadn’t understood really, not then, but he’d known, with the instinct the other civilian kids didn’t have, but he suspected the ninja kids did. He and his father were different, dangerous. Enough so, that the village administration couldn’t just ignore him. So he did what any young child does upon realising they’re different, he tried very hard to fit in. It hadn’t been hard, he was good with people, his father was the respectable owner of a sushi restaurant, he was fully expected to follow in his fathers footsteps. If it hadn’t been for the shadows in bone white masks that hovered at the edge of his vision sometimes, he might almost have been able to fool himself, the neighbourhood kids were easy.
Honestly he had expected to live his life as a civilian, to inherit his father’s restaurant and live peacefully in the village until he was an old old man and the masked ninja no longer felt the need to watch his family. He’d never expected to have a chance to explore the part of him that was entirely unlike the civilian kids, to learn just what it meant to be dangerous. He expected to play at being ordinary until it became the truth, that’s what everyone expected. In the end though that wasn’t what happened.
In the end what happened was this. He’d been standing on top of the Hokage monument when a stone gave way beneath his feet and he fell to his death, or he would have if an academy trainee called Sawada Tsunayoshi hadn’t caught him, hadn’t moved with unnatural speed and desperate fear and saved him. He fell and Tsuna caught him, and Takeshi knew, who he was, who Tsuna was to him. And judging by the panic in Tsuna’s eyes when he saw him fall, so like a moment on a school roof a lifetime ago Tsuna knew as well. After that there had been no question of living a civilian life. Not with Tsuna, and Hayato, and the rest of his family all waiting for him to take his place at Tsuna’s left hand. Not when he’d sworn his blade to Tsuna in a promise that didn’t end with death and rebirth.
…
He’d transferred to the ninja academy a week after Tsuna had saved him. Hayato was already there, as highly strung and easy to provoke as ever, and not long after Takeshi’s transfer, Mukuro had somehow managed to insert himself into the class without anyone at all noticing. He was a year behind the other students but it honestly hadn't made much of a difference. Takeshi had always had a talent for being dangerous.
His father hadn’t been surprised at his choice. A little sad perhaps, but not surprised.
“We’re too much alike, you and me. I’d hoped you might take after your mother, but you have a Samurai’s soul.” He’d said, before putting a sword in Takeshi’s hand and showing him the forms for Sigure Soen Ryuu, the forms Takeshi had no excuse for knowing, until his father decided to teach him. It was interesting, he thought, that the bone masked Anbu were nowhere within sight while the teaching was happening. It seemed his father was good at knowing when he was being watched.
It was less surprising than it should have been, how natural the ninja academy felt after the forced artificiality of civilian life. He had no idea why his father would choose that. Not when he knew the feel of a blade in his hand and a fight in the making. The ghostly shadows watched more closely after Takeshi started ninja training, but after he failed to do anything suspicious they backed off again. Takeshi honestly didn’t mind them that much, except that whenever they got too close they always left him itching for a fight, which could be irritating.
Ninja academy suited him, even if he wasn’t quite a ninja in the same way as the other students, just as he hadn’t been a civilian in the way his old classmates had been. He was after all his fathers son right down to the bones, in both lives, and Yamamoto Tsuyoshi was samurai, not ninja, exiled from the Land of Iron not long after Takeshi was born. He claimed Takeshi was too young to be told the full story, but it had ended with him taking refuge in Konoha in exchange for laying down his sword and living a civilian life.
Takeshi was really more samurai than ninja, but ninja and samurai had more in common than samurai and civilians, and ninja school fitted in a way civilian school hadn’t. He hadn’t known how much strain he’d been under, pretending to be normal, until suddenly he didn’t have to anymore. Where his sudden shifts from easygoing laughter to predatory focus were seen as convenient instead of frightening, where bloodlust was not just acceptable but encouraged.
He found himself fitting in easily. It was a talent of his, but somehow it felt more real more meaningful when he was standing beside Tsuna’s warm blaze of orange flame, with his own blue twined so deep into it they could never be separated, with Hayato on Tsuna’s other side all wild unfettered devotion and brilliance, with all the colours of the rainbow, all of their hearts, wrapped up in Tsuna’s strength, so that none of them would ever falter, strengthened each time one of them remembered the life they had lived. Just as it should be.