Dead-Eyed Tsuna (KHR!)

Chapter 6: The Introduction Of A Friend

"How is Tsu-kun doing so far?"

"Great! He hasn't asked for help once!"

"He's certainly careful with those notes..."

"I spent all night perfecting them! I made sure I explained everything to the closest detail!"

Tsuna pauses in his intensive eyeballing of his textbooks to glare over at Hayato. "Take better care of your body. You have a year to improve my studies."

"Sorry, Boss!" Hayato bows at an impressive 90 degree angle.

"Especially since you're apparently going to redo Koyama's curriculum. Do you even have your uniform yet?"

"Oh! Yes, I do! Let me go get it!" Hayato nearly falls over his own feet in an effort to race up the stairs. Tsuna buries his face in his hands. Will Hayato ever make any sense? He thought he had gotten kinda good at the whole delinquent thing. Maybe mafia underlings and delinquent underlings are too different to conflate.

"He's so full of energy," Tsuna's mother coos, holding a hand against her cheek. "It's nice to have noise in the house again."

"Yeah...I guess..." Tsuna mumbles. He had spent his late childhood almost entirely non-verbal, and even now, he's quiet in a way wrought from years of practice. His lumbering steps are the most noisy thing about him.

Did that really bother his mother so much?

He turns to stare at his workbook. Hayato had delivered; while it's taken him a good two hours to fight through what he feels should be a thirty-minute block, the notes he was provided with gave a thorough breakdown of the basics, and Hayato even provided cute mnemonics and anthropomorphizations as ways of remembering certain facts and dates, a technique Tsuna is positive came from an actual elementary school lesson plan.

So far, he's struggled on most of the problems, but finished them in a way that he felt confident in. It's the best he's managed in a long while, with the care and precision he never got in school, especially in an elevator school that kicked up into the next grade without considering his failures. He can see how much he failed to properly memorize from the previous school year, and how it affected his current learning level.

Tsuna's appreciation for Hayato's hard work is interrupted by Hayato himself, rapidly descending the stairs and flying into the sitting room in a flurry of hammering steps. He throws his arms out wide and grins, ready to receive comments on his new attire.

The Koyama uniform Tsuna has seen before — a long black chouran coat, with simple white trim at the collar and sleeves, and matching dress pants. Less common is the loud-looking graphic T-shirt Hayato has on that looks like it came from the resale shop Tsuna buys almost all of his clothes at. Gokudera's silver jewelry is ever-present, making him look...

Well, like a delinquent. He looks exactly like a delinquent. All he needs is neon yellow bleached hair and a wax strip to the eyebrows, and he'd be picturesque.

"You look so handsome, Hayato-kun!" Tsuna's mother cheers. "Hold on, let me take your picture!"

She rushes out of the room. Hayato turns his puppy-like attention onto Tsuna.

"I've never seen an outfit fit a person more," Tsuna says.

Hayato lights up like the Tokyo Tower.

Tsuna's mother quickly takes the picture, and then has Hayato and Tsuna pose together, and then takes a picture of Tsuna alone for no clear reason other than Son Privileges. She giggles and talks about showing off 'her handsome boys', which makes both Hayato and Tsuna go beet red and become very interested in schoolwork.