Chapter Text
For the first time since arriving in Italy, Katsuki woke up without an alarm.
The realization was so unfamiliar that he opened one eye suspiciously, stared at the ceiling for several seconds, and waited for responsibility to appear.
Nothing happened.
No shuttle schedule, no meetings, no reports, no engineers waiting for presentations.
Just silence.
Saturday.
He immediately rolled over and went back to sleep.
----
His phone vibrated nearly three hours later.
Three messages.
Shouto.
'Going into town.'
'Touya is driving.'
'Sorry in advance.'
Katsuki stared at the screen.
Then at the ceiling.
Then back at the screen.
'That's not a selling point.'
The response appeared almost immediately.
'I know.'
Traitor.
----
Half an hour later he was standing outside the hotel wondering how his life had ended up here.
A bright red Ferrari appeared around the corner exactly on time.
Which somehow made everything worse.
The passenger window lowered.
Touya.
Wearing sunglasses.
Again.
It was barely ten in the morning.
Nobody respected him.
"Get in."
"No."
"We're getting coffee."
A pause.
"...Fine."
Touya looked entirely too pleased with himself.
The drive into town was short.
The suffering wasn't.
The moment they parked and met up with the rest of the family, it became obvious that Shouto wasn't visiting Maranello.
She belonged there.
She walked through the streets without hesitation, turning corners before anyone else knew where they were going. Shop owners greeted her. People waved. Nobody seemed surprised to see her.
It wasn't celebrity recognition.
It was familiarity.
The kind built over years.
----
The café sat on a shaded corner overlooking a small square lined with old stone buildings. Conversations drifted between tables while the smell of fresh coffee filled the air.
Before Katsuki could properly take in the atmosphere-
"Shouto!"
A woman appeared from inside carrying a tray.
Shouto smiled immediately.
A real smile.
Easy.
Automatic.
The woman hugged her without warning.
Then greeted Fuyumi.
Then Rei.
Then Touya.
Then Natsuo.
Like she had been doing it for years.
Because apparently she had.
----
The morning continued like that, everywhere they went, somebody knew them.
The bakery owner knew Rei.
The bookstore owner knew Fuyumi.
An old mechanic greeted Touya by name.
A man outside a café stopped to ask Natsuo about university.
Nobody acted surprised.
Nobody treated it like anything unusual.
Eventually Katsuki couldn't take it anymore.
"Why does everyone know you?" the entire family looked confused.
Then Fuyumi answered.
"We've been coming here forever."
Like that explained anything.
Apparently it did.
The Todoroki family history lessons began shortly afterward.
Entirely by accident.
---
It started with a fountain.
A completely normal fountain.
Water.
Stone.
Absolutely no indication that anything interesting had ever happened there.
"Oh." Fuyumi pointed "They finally fixed it."
Katsuki looked at the fountain.
Then at Fuyumi.
Then back at the fountain.
"...Fixed what?"
"The fountain."
A terrible feeling settled over him immediately.
"Why did it need fixing?"
Silence.
"...Touya."
Touya pointed at himself "ALLEGEDLY."
"There are photographs." Natsuo replied.
"It was in the newspaper."
Katsuki stopped walking "The newspaper?"
Nobody elaborated.
The conversation moved on.
Apparently this was normal.
It wasn't.
The bell tower incident happened twenty minutes later.
Church bells echoed across the town.
People continued walking.
Life continued.
Then Natsuo casually pointed toward the tower "I got stuck up there once."
Katsuki turned "What."
"I was eight."
"WHY."
Natsuo pointed at Touya, Touya pointed at himself.
"Leadership." "Attempted murder."
"Tomato. Tomato."
"Those are the same word."
----
The goat story somehow made less sense.
Rei pointed toward a nearby field while they walked.
A small smile appeared.
"That's where the goat chased Touya."
Silence.
"The goat?"
"The goat."
"Why?"
Rei thought about it.
Actually thought about it.
"...I don't remember."
Fuyumi looked horrified "He stole its food."
"I was six!" Touya defended.
"The goat didn't care."
Apparently neither did fate.
----
By the time lunch arrived, Katsuki had accumulated enough information to start a criminal investigation.
The problem was that every answer somehow created three more questions.
"Wait."
Everyone looked at him.
"The fountain."
"Yeah?"
"The goat."
"Yeah?"
"The bell tower."
"Again, yeah?"
"WHY ARE THERE SO MANY STORIES?"
For a second nobody answered.
Then Shouto looked up from her drink "We've spent every summer here."
Simple.
Matter-of-fact obvious.
The answer settled differently than the others.
Because suddenly all the strange pieces started fitting together.
The café.
The bakery.
The mechanic.
The fountain.
The field.
The people who knew their names.
The stories everyone remembered.
The stories nobody needed explained.
None of it was random.
It was years, Summer after summer after summer.
The kind of history people built without noticing.
----
For the first time, Katsuki stopped seeing Italy as a place the Todorokis visited.
And started seeing it as a place that had helped raise them.
----
The afternoon disappeared after that.
Shops became side streets, side streets became conversations, conversations became stories.
Every location seemed to contain another piece of Todoroki family nonsense waiting to be uncovered.
By evening they found themselves sitting outside a small restaurant in the town square.
Warm lights hung overhead, music drifted through the air.
People filled the surrounding tables.
The last sunlight painted the rooftops gold.
For once, nobody was arguing.
Much.
Katsuki sat back in his chair and listened to Fuyumi's stories, to Natsuo complaining, to Touya making things worse, to Rei laughing quietly at all of them, to Shouto joining conversations instead of watching them.
Different.
Not a different person.
Just a different version.
More relaxed.
Lighter.
Home.
And somewhere between lunch and dinner, between the stories and the laughter and the ridiculous amount of family history he'd been forced to absorb, Katsuki realized something.
He hadn't thought about the hotel once all day.
Not once.
At some point, without noticing, he'd stopped waiting to leave.
Across the table, Shouto was laughing at something Natsuo had said, the sound carried easily through the warm evening air.
For the first time, Katsuki understood something.
Ferrari was impressive.
The estate was impressive.
But neither of those things were the reason she loved Italy.
It was this.
The people.
The memories.
The history.
The life she'd built here.
And somehow, without noticing, he'd started looking forward to being part of it.
Which was a problem.
A very serious problem.