Chapter 3: XXI-XXX 1/2

Author's Note : I managed a bit of history weaving in here, yay me.

Couple more things before we get on with it.

First and foremost, do not use my review page to spark a conversation with another reviewer. That's just… beyond rude. Even if you both are guest reviewers, my review page is not the place to start a discussion on another's review especially if you have nothing to say about the story itself. Which, FYI, is the whole reason why we have that nifty reviewer system. It's not a forum, don't use it as such.

Moving on.

The whole OC complaint thing... which all I can say is Really? There is less than five of them I'm asking you to remember, and they'll end up showing now and again through the whole story. How is that hard to keep track of?

I intended for this to be part of the first chapter's AN, but I forgot and then kept on forgetting about this.

How I got the timeline I did was all due to Shamal's age and the tidbit that claims he was the one to erase Reborn's past life after he becomes resigned to the curse of the Arcobalenos. Which leaves only certain timeframes to be worked within.

If Shamal was 35 at the start of canon, then the Arcobaleno have to have been in cursed!baby form for less than two decades by the time Katekyo Hitman Reborn! canon starts. Guessing that between the ages of seventeen to nineteen would be the earliest point when Shamal was competent enough to do said erasing, that Reborn both knew him as an adult and was noted to be thirty-two at the time he was cursed, leaves me a bit of time free to play with before that. I took random stabs in the dark for the other Arcobaleno ages, and for how much time they spend chasing the I Prescelti Sette title before being cursed. Bear in mind it had to be long enough for them to become the 'rising stars' of their generation and specialization but not too long enough that they become stubborn loners that would refuse to work with others because of being jaded by betrayal or habit. Reborn is, of course, the exception to most of that as he's already the World's Greatest Hitman before getting tagged for the Sun Pacifier, then Lal Mirch and Colonnello due to the fact they both were soldiers before getting cursed.

Edit (6/24/2015) : As a warning, there will be 'historic errors' in the future. Mainly they are supposed to be there, but this is part of the story where our main character starts to note a few things are off from the history she recalls. Sonya will not catch all of them, but there will be bits and pieces you might be able to catch before she ever has the inkling there is something not right. We will eventually get to and cover the main ones in story. I did totally forget to put this in, my bad.

Edited (4/24/2017) - General grammar and flow corrections.

Edited (3/16/2018) - Final formatting and minor corrections.

Edited (9/1/2018) - Minor corrections.

Russian Roulette : Reloaded

XXI-XXX

XXI (Friday the 3rd of June, 1960. Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

To be honest Sonya didn't expect Cherep to protest, fuss, or come up with any sudden or not objections to the new living arrangements.

Being wrong in that at least forced her to pay a little more attention to her civilian friend and what made his personality up.

Through the two years they had known each other as mostly casual friends, neither had pressed the other's boundaries anywhere near the point a few months of living together under the same roof did. She wasn't exactly the most stellar example for using social niceties in existence, she didn't tend to talk more than once or twice a day before he started living with them, and he had a few issues himself over exactly what he could or could not do when it came to her.

That was before the fact his best and probably only friend was an unrepentant crook got shoved into his face in a way he could neither deny nor refute. He may have noticed before, but she hadn't ever been so frank with what she did in front of him. There was no real way to hide it, not with how their home was run and what training the girls still did on occasion.

She found out that Cherep wasn't inherently nasty, morally numb, or cruel minded enough to be indifferent to that. The most Sonya would say if pressed was that he was a wimpy pushover who was also way too nice for his own good. Which stood to reason that he would have a few moral problems with the fact she regularly robbed people of their petty cash and anything else of value they carried daily.

Worse yet, she robbed people and she got praised for it… or, at the very least, wasn't scolded for doing such. In front of him. Usually with a comment or two about how much she brought in or what they would like her to look for the next day she had little else to do.

Rachel might have seen the world like Cherep once, in shades of color but mainly in black and white. There were good people and bad people and Rachel had tried to be good, only to end up as a statistic of a good girl killed by someone who could have not meant to but hadn't changed a thing in the end.

Sonya, Mafiya foster child and budding thief, had that worldview shattered into tiny pieces before she could even walk. She knew just because one person said 'crime' and another said 'livelihood' it didn't mean either were wrong, they were just different perspectives across similar lines society drew out in shades of legality and morals.

Arseniy wasn't a nice or a good man. He was probably a murderer in his own right, had vices that could make a pastor weep, and seemed perfectly content like that. Lisa, for all that she tried to seem neutral and caring at the same time, had her own problems and struggles that she was only recently come to realize existed. Tatiana never really seemed to have an issue with what they were in training to do with their lives, Sonya didn't know if she really had no problems or not due to the fact they weren't all that close.

Cherep, getting suddenly shoved into a Mafiya household as he had, was only seeing the very end results of nearly half a decade of work the girls had put into their prospective jobs. Half a decade of social conditioning and training to be able to be thieves for the clan and live perfectly content with the consequences.

The tiny blonde tried to keep that in mind as she listened to him babble on while they people watched from a park bench, and the fact he still thought in 'good vs bad' terms rather than 'this faction vs that faction'. Trying to remind herself that he probably didn't know what he was asking of her, and she shouldn't hold it against him until someone with enough patience went through it with him.

Technically she should really be picking out marks to rob, but her still newish foster brother insisted they were 'people watching' and like to point out that robbing people just encouraged them to steal or cheat from others to get back what they lost.

It was a very interesting way to phrase 'an eye for an eye', at least.

"Why can't you just go after other criminals?"

Sonya gave up the pretense of watching for her next mark and buried her face in her hands, all the while thinking of the varied and many ways that suggestion could go wrong.

Beyond the fact that there was a kind of social pretense in place for all the Mafiya brats she knew in the neighborhood, a collective assumption of 'us against them' and a very shallow type of brotherhood of thieves still in the process of being worked into place, they all were still Mafiya. Vory, for all that Sonya would never actually hold that title due to her gender, had their own ways of fixing disruptions in their Motherland. Getting hauled into a council of vory and her actions being judged through the lens of hardened murderers wasn't exactly her idea of 'keeping her head down'.

Even if she was encouraged to steal from others, stealing from another Mafiya brat would gain her a reputation that would cause the other kids to avoid dealing with her. Which would just harm her in the long run, when she started getting into different jobs that might need different skills to handle.

She might be acrobatic and a deft hand at both pickpocketing as well as lock picks, but she knew safecracking would just get harder as time went on unless she poured a massive amount of time and energy into honing that skill. Tatiana was better than her in that, would probably continue to be better than her in it, and stealing a safe instead of opening it on site might just be something she would have to deal with decades down the line.

If she turned her foster sister against her by stealing from her little ring of thieves before they ever left their foster home, she would probably be forced to go to someone else with the right safecracking skills she might need that she wouldn't trust nearly as much as the redhead.

There was also the fact forgeries needed a well-developed network to be useful for more than a single use, and Lisa was teaching the older girl how to maintain her network if needed. Sonya didn't have the skills there either, as being sociable was a large part of that and she greatly preferred dealing with her foster sister to dealing with individuals she didn't know nor could get face to face with.

"Cherep, trust me when I say that will not be possible for a couple years yet… if at all."

"But you're going to think about it?" Her purple haired friend pressed, heedless of the worries that would dump on her.

"Sure, whatever."

Maybe if he thought he could 'reform' her she could actually get something to bring home today.

XXII (Wednesday the 27th of July, 1960. Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

She knew, the same way she knew the sun would rise in the east and would set in the west, that when Cherep brought up maybe changing who she stole from the next time he got unnerved by the Mafiya overtones of their home life that Sonya would be hearing about the idea for the next couple of years.

…or however long she could get away with having her best friend at hand and not off by himself doing god knows what that might cause his undead/undying issue to come up again.

He was an odd fit in a Mafiya household, because besides the combat training he faithfully tagged along on and a couple of the gymnastic lessons when Aleksandr could force him into going he didn't attend any of the other general Mafiya or thieves' lessons still ongoing on top of anything else.

She and Tatiana didn't have to attend nearly as many of those thieves' lessons as they used to, even if they occurred under the same roof they all lived under. The blonde girl had blanket permission to miss as many as she wished if she was doing something productive since her first heist, and the redhead was in the beginning stages of planning for her first with the rest of her team.

While Cherep knew they went on, and that both girls had attended them for nearly half a decade, he never actually had to be in the house for them nor meet more than just a few of the Mafiya members in the neighborhood.

Sonya had no problems dragging him out so the older and more aggressive Mafiya brats around wouldn't catch sight of him.

Arseniy was providing him with some protection, a roof over his head, and three square meals a day for however long the kid decided he may need the help. Mostly for free, as he was a kid in some distress and a friend of hers, while the man took a hard look at his past and parents to ensure what happened to him never happened to anyone else... but it was more Sonya's job to ensure he kept out of trouble and out of anything he might regret later. It was her who brought Cherep to the vor's attention, and she was pretty much his only friend still with the semi-intentional isolation going on.

Additionally, she wasn't the most popular in the neighborhood. That distinction belonged to another, a friend of Dmitriy's that made her skin crawl for no apparent reason other than the sleazy charm that seemed to ooze off the kid. Bullying wasn't much of an issue, more of a non-issue since they were all combat trained at least at a basic level and encouraged to take care of any major fights under Aleksandr's weathered eye.

Cherep, unfortunately, was playing catch up in the worst way and would probably be considered a weakness she needed to deal with or rid herself of.

Targeting that weakness would be any Mafiya brat's first move if they ever had an issue with her, or even if they respected her. Admiration and envy went hand in hand, her maybe slightly unusual skills and young age hadn't earned her any favor among her peers. Her lack of social interactions had ruined what was left, to the point she was rather unpopular with her fellow Mafiya brats.

"To be bluntly honest, trying that around here would probably just make things hard on me without any real cause for it." She was forced to inform him one night, when the class Arseniy was holding would probably overrun by an hour or two more than usual and so she took him a bit further afield than normal.

On the edge of another Mafiya group's territory, but they would be safe enough if they held to the more universal vory z zakone principles and didn't make waves or trouble while in foreign territory.

"Why?" He even had the gall to look depressed by her flat refusal, in that stupid kitten way that made him look even more girly than usual.

Sonya felt like she had just sucker punched him in the stomach after kicking his puppy, and she hadn't even done anything to warrant either the look or feeling. It was the downside of being friends with him, and she hadn't even known she had heartstrings left to pull after everything else she had been through as both Rachel and Sonya.

"Because even if I'm as careful as possible, that would inevitably piss off someone who has Mafiya connections. That person would alert his or her contacts, I'll eventually end up with a bad reputation of stealing what my fellow thieves stole, and probably might end with my death before long if I'm not lucky."

She had really considered it only once, well before she had become resigned to the fact she would be a Zolotov thief, but the drawbacks outweighed the risks of that method to pander to her battered morals. It wasn't an original idea, someone else had tried.

Keyword: tried.

She didn't know what happened to that kid who stole from his fellow Mafiya foster children, no one did. All she knew was that he wasn't there anymore, either kicked out or sent somewhere else or worse.

Though, she was kind of doubting that worst part, given Cherep's situation and status as a fellow houseguest. Even her own situation made her doubt, if her presence in Moscow really had been because her father wanted to spare her whatever her mother's intentions were instead of satisfying her debt thing with someone in the Mafiya.

He still abandoned her without so much as a backwards glance, fuck him too.

"Everyone you can think of has connections like that?" It was a valid question, for all that it sounded like he was grasping for straws to keep his idea afloat.

Sonya answered him anyways. "Around here? Yes. It was why I had to leave Moscow in the first place. Before I could go after bigger targets, I would need practice. The only practice around here are my fellow Zolotov members, and that's just like shooting myself in the foot."

Cherep obviously hadn't thought of his suggestion/plead in the terms of 'steal from' paired with 'Arseniy' yet, but he seemed to be making up time in that from how white he blanched. That really wasn't the best thing to think about, she knew it just as well as the violence the man could wear like clothing when he had a reason for it.

She did at least throw her friend a bone, because it had been a valid suggestion if not a good one. "I can't do that now but ask again in a few years and we'll see."

He blinked.

"We… or at least I, don't plan on spending my whole life here. While hunting in my own home ground is a bad idea, hunting in someone else's might not be. Depending."

She still intended to avoid the Vongola and its allied Famiglias with all due caution, but that was just a large chunk of Europe and some of Japan. The Americas, the Far East, Africa, and an innumerable amount of smaller countries in between were still places she could go.

He looked thoughtful, so she cautiously assumed he wouldn't mind either tagging along with her or her tagging along with him for a few years.

Once they left the USSR, anyways.

XXIII (Monday the 8th of August, 1960. Arseniy & Lisa's home, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

Cherep naturally had very low expectations. Something honestly earned over his short life so far.

That way he couldn't be surprised or disappointed, and it generally worked for most things.

Somehow, he had survived his own death without permanent impairment to either life or limb which was alright… but his parents had become frightened of him to the point both had to be in the same room with him or neither would be, which hadn't been. Getting kidnapped a little more than a year or so later hadn't been all that great either, but he did finally stumble on someplace to call home where he wasn't feared or flinched from so that balanced out a little. Living alone as a street rat had been hard, but then Sonya took an interest in him and cared a little just in her own strange way making everything that much easier on him.

Her turning out to be a thief in a Mafiya clan was almost unsurprising in the end.

Now, Cherep was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He wasn't yet one more beggar child lurking in the streets anymore, or homeless and going hungry like he had been before even that… or the possibly devil possessed child they would never be rid of his parents had thought of him when it all started.

He couldn't figure out if his new circumstances were a good thing or not.

On one hand, Arseniy was scary as sin, but he didn't have much to do with the man whose home he lived in now. He somehow now had foster sisters, one elder and a younger one no matter the face Sonya pulled at being called so by Tatiana. Lisa was nice enough but reserved and a little bland with him, which was kind of understandable.

On the other was the glaring fact he lived in a home of Mafiya members.

That his 'new baby sister' stole at all cast all the help she had given him over the last couple years in a very strange light. The money alone… he knew, now, that she had probably stole it and most of what she had robbed others of had gone to Arseniy and what little she kept as a twisted kind of allowance had gone to him.

It was a bit heartbreaking and thoughtful all at once. The only help she knew how to give was twisted up into the Mafiya already, and she was only a few months shy of her tenth birthday.

At least she didn't seem to mind that he wasn't at all alright with what she had done, was in the process of doing, and training to do with her life.

The only bright spot in the murky situation was that he wasn't expected to follow along into criminal activity even if he did live with Mafiya members. The combat and gymnastic training seemed to be compulsory for everyone, which he didn't mind doing so long as Sonya went with him at the very least.

She might be up to the point of trying to shatter an iron pole in her own training while he learned the basics of self-defense, but that was alright with him. The USSR, including Moscow itself, wasn't crime free, ironically enough not because the neighborhood contained many Mafiya members. Self-defense would probably eventually pay off later on and prevent his new baby sister from stressing out over him more than she had already.

What it seemed he was expected to do was… nothing he hadn't already been doing. Which made Cherep feel rather dubious over the whole situation.

From what Sonya had informed him, Arseniy had been the one to order her to bring him home. Why seemed to be because he might be at risk for another kidnapping attempt from what he understood from it. For how long seemed to be until the youngest foster sibling decided to leave home herself, or possibly even a little later given the lack of pushing to find other arrangements he was going through.

Lisa, the woman that kept the household running and very patiently helped all three children in their education, had been eyeing him speculatively lately so that may change sometime soon.

He was still confused, though. Even more when a copy of his birth certificate, a passport he wasn't sure if he never got, and immigration papers he was very certain he never had before got pressed on him one day by Tatiana.

At least he was legally in the country now.

XXIV (Thursday the 13th of October, 1960. Arseniy & Lisa's home, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

Adolph Hitler had been assassinated.

Sonya spent a whole half hour blankly staring at the history book she finally actually paid a decent amount of attention to, that she had thought would only need a glance over or two to refresh her knowledge of history. Tracing the same few lines repeatedly with her eyes out of sheer disbelief.

Hitler had apparently been killed a whole year earlier than if he was left to commit suicide, if what she recalled from Rachel's schooling was correct.

The results seemed to have been a mix bag honestly, making her wonder if it had been a good thing or not.

While if Hitler was left to suicide on his own terms, the Third Reich fell apart and a good portion of Germany collectively tried to distance itself from the Nazi ideals as far as possible. There had been the remains of the previous party lingering around which even eventually leached into even America's, highly paranoid at the time, culture via white supremacy groups… but it never got much popularity as a school of thought due to the horrors linked to it.

Nasty and horrifying because it was a world war against a genocidal war regime no matter how you looked at it, letting the notorious dictator commit suicide seemed to have been the best option from what she could see now from what would've occurred otherwise.

The changes made from assassination a year early included the fact many Nazi sympathizers deciding their dead Führer was some sort of a holy martyr for their cause and dragged WWII out a few more years. They had about a year, year and a half, to cover their tracks when it seemed as if their cause was destined to lose no matter what they tried to do.

Then they went underground with it. Taking their former fellow citizens hostage and continuing the war in a guerrilla kind of way. Which made the casualty totals even greater once the Allied Powers started sifting through to understand what had happened and more importantly how.

The European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had barely seven digits to them across the former Axis Powers members.

Due to the sheer difficulty in tracking the culprits responsible down, because even with a head start the Nazi Party still got caught with their pants down halfway due to what seemed to be fanatically driven willful blindness, having Nazi sympathies was tantamount to social suicide now.

In both parts of Germany itself, it was still considered treason.

There was even a still ongoing manhunt for any former members of the German Nazi Party even a decade after the war ended, a civilian based hit contract that anyone could get into and not have to abide by the underworld mafia rules Sonya knew from getting lectured on it by Arseniy every month.

She made a mental note to be very careful in Germany if she wanted to see the Berlin Wall fall. If it would fall. The Nazi paranoia in that area alone would make her double check what she said or did.

The longer reaching effects of that event was more interesting, in a way.

The US had a significant number of boots on the ground in China and the USSR for the last year of the fighting, actually working together with the communist societies, when the Germans tried to continue the bloody struggle their Führer had started. Hopelessly, because between the Red Army and half of the American Forces on one side and the rest of the US military forces and the Allied Powers on the other they got crushed rather mercilessly where they tried to hold anyways.

Due to both the horrific toll of the Jewish Concentration Camps and a mingling of American, Chinese, and Russian soldiers which didn't happen in Rachel's time because the US got only as far as China's west coast in the Eastern part of the world, the Cold War hadn't got into the paranoid driven arms race because of somewhat greater understanding and a lingering brothers-in-arms sense from a year's worth of joint operations.

While the Iron Curtain was still a thing, the Cold War was more of a civilian driven space race/government model argument rather than a military buildup fraught with tensions between previously allied countries.

There were still elements of a communism vs capitalism death fight going on, viciously in the business sectors according to the newspaper, and nuke stockpiling all over the place. Spies obviously were busy trading information, counter-espionage efforts were on-going, and it was still treasonous to even speak of maybe defecting to either country, but there was a distinct lack of military or war-based aggression from either side… discounting the proxy-war going on in Vietnam right now.

However, it seemed the true 'public enemy' was more blind fanaticism to any one cause rather than any single physical group.

Almost as if everyone was carefully not being the next Nazi Regime to be dealt with, instead of paranoid warmongers looking for the next threat to fight. It moderated everyone's approaches into more diplomatic tones, and it seemed as if overtures were still cautiously going around for the United Nations' formation.

She couldn't recall when that started up, if that was early or late for the UN's establishment.

The 'payoff' of an early assassination seemed to be a greater technology development and more diplomatic overtures. With more attention poured into a mostly friendly worldwide race for the stars it meant less was going into watching the military buildup and trying to counter it, most of that seemed to be explained away as recovering from the cost of WWII.

While horrific and terrible to deal with no matter which way it ended, as it was a World War against genocide, the price tag on the other hand… Sonya was rather sure it wasn't worth it for a ten or twenty-year jump start in tech and friendlier relations between nations.

The Jewish people could possibly qualify as an endangered species now, the only reason they had any kind of stable number was only due to their strong presence in America and Africa absorbing their freed European fellows.

Everything in her book was all civilian history. It made her rather reluctant to ask Lisa for what had happened in the underworld while all that was going on.

There were a few more things that directly contradicted what Rachel had known as fact, Italy hadn't been part of the Axis Powers but still not part of the Allied one either. Apparently, the country had been a hot mess through most of the Second World War and no leader lasted more than three to five months during it.

Due to Sonya's Mafiya education she knew the so-called Mafia Wars had been on during that time, a violent scramble that spread from Italy to France and finally into Spain. Ottavia Vongola had apparently beat the Vongola Alliance into shape during that time, ousting those that had violated her terms and firming up a border of Allied Famiglias to contain the madness.

The Mafia Wars had also made all three countries more vulnerable when they were invaded, so it wasn't entirely a good thing either.

France and Italy had been way too busy trying to oust the Nazi Regime that took up their government to continue the Mafia Wars before long, Spain had been the only place the underworld war managed to fight itself out to the bitter dregs. Meaning that to the Mafia worldwide, both countries were still hot and should be avoided unless you had to visit for life or death reasons and there just wasn't much left of any Spanish Mafia Syndicates once the military finished mopping up their mess.

Given a decade or so that might just change, but even as far north as she was Sonya could still read some of the mess getting reported through the civilian news. If she could hear about it now without too much effort, it probably wasn't safe to go poke yet.

Politically speaking, once the mafia groups in the regions stopped killing each other and went after the invaders, the efforts they put into helping their old governments to get their seats back legitimized them in a way. Those that survived, anyways.

You couldn't award medals to criminals, so mafia cover businesses came to be. A sort of legal fiction in place that was still in use a decade after the fact.

Very little about the whole thing was known in the civilian world now, but Vongola and Cavallone were two names she vaguely recognized. A bit of cautious digging even got her the current CEDEF home office address.

It made her want to laugh, but she caught the hysteric undertones of that impulse and squashed it.

Rachel had studied American history more than European, Sonya resolved to visit the US as soon as she could to see if she could find any other major divergences.

XXV (Wednesday the 28th of December, 1960. Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

Birthdays were not typically celebrated in their home.

Lisa allowed a sweeter breakfast than they usually ate, and Arseniy patted whichever was the birthday girl on the head when he woke up for the day. There might be cake involved if someone had the time for baking it.

Which was pretty much it, other than the sparse gifts Sonya and Tatiana gave each other on occasion.

She hadn't been expecting anything different for her tenth birthday, and indeed it followed the pattern for the most part.

The redhead had quibbled over the date of her groups' first heist to be home for it, which had been appreciated and slightly touching. The almost twelve-and-a-half-year-old girl even gifted the younger thief with her old set of safecracking tools, which had been appreciated even more. Sonya planned on slipping her current set of lock picks into the older girl's traveling bag later that night as well, so a few more tools to make up for the lack was good.

Cherep managed to find and purchase a gift for her, but she had half expected him to do something like that because he had been putting his purple head together with Lisa lately. That had to be something to do with her or his newly semi-legal paperwork, and there hadn't been much else it could have been about.

While different, because usually it was Sonya gifting things to him like the coat he was fast growing out of, it also made her smile.

The fact it was a Russian history book on the Tsar Dynasties was a little strange but given anything else he had seen her doing lately was combat training or thieving when she could?

It wasn't exactly surprising he defaulted to the more innocent or at least civilian friendly option.

With the lack of anything else to do, and her foster brother's nagging about doing something special for her birthday at the very least, she took him to see a local showing of the Moscow State Circus mostly on a whim.