Theme #14: A Pain So Delightful (Katekyo Hitman Reborn Fanfiction)
This is sort of connected to my Too Many Women series on AO3. It’s only sort of connected because the gender of the guardians has nothing to do with anything, but it is the backstory that I have decided to write for Lambo. Lambo isn’t genderbent in my parallel world so he wasn’t originally going to get a backstory oneshot at all.
You can think of this as like, a first draft. It’s very unpolished. I’m used to planning out what I write better than I have been lately. It will hopefully be refreshing when I got back and edit most of these…
Summary: Question: What kind of famiglia sends a 5 year old to kill a hitman? Answer: One that has zero regard for human life. –Exactly.
Or, why Lambo can survive getting blown up and is so happy to fight for Tsuna.
Electricity burns.
Being shot or blown up hurts. It hurts a lot. But Lambo can stand up after getting hit by a grenade no problem.
The Bovino are a special type of monster.
Much like the Estraneo, they are constantly researching and trying to make the best weapons possible.
Unlike the Estraneo, they mostly use themselves for the experiments or tests. Their winning trait is their member count after all.
Every member of the Bovino Famiglia takes his or her first breath after being hit with a powerful electrical charge. If the babies don’t survive that first jolt, they’ll never make it as Bovino engineers.
The women in the Bovino Famiglia are expected to have as many children as possible to keep the numbers up. At least as many people need to be born as die from random artillery mishaps.
Because everyone dies so often in the famiglia, every person in the Bovino family has an equal chance of inheriting. Their leaders die so often that they call their leader by generation instead of actual count. Not even the Bovino are sure how many leaders they’ve had.
But Bovino’s need to be more durable even than the rest of the famiglia and get twice the charge everyone else gets.
So it was that Lambo Bovino was born screaming as bolts of electricity ran through his body.
When Lambo was born, his father hadn’t been the leader. His younger sister had been leader for about a year at that point. Poor Beatriz had had no head for engineering, but she was smart enough to lead okay. It was thought that she’d live longer having babies than her brothers and cousins would developing weapons.
No one expected her to die during labor of all things. And if her son didn’t make it through his initial wake-up call? Well, just another day for the Bovino.
Lambo was two when this happened and his father was chosen as the sixth eighth leader of the Bovino Famiglia.
His father was chosen because he had seven children out of ten pregnancies his wife had carried to term. People were hopeful that maybe a line of succession could be established.
To make this happen, he established actual restrictions on his children and discouraged them from fatal research.
This is how research on the Ten Year Bazooka really got started.
Lambo did not appreciate how lucky he was not to get blown up on a regular basis and began developing his reputation as the most annoying Mafioso.
On his fourth birthday, his mother gave birth to a healthy sparking little girl and Lambo was considered expendable and sent back to the lab.
For the next year, Lambo was constantly injured as his cousins determined whether or not the type of injury affected the amount of sun flames needed to heal the wound or if only the amount or location of the damage made a difference.
Lambo spent most of his time crying. He didn’t understand how things had gotten so horrible so quickly or why.
He would call and call for his mama. Tired of this, one day a researcher told him his mother had died and he needed to just endure.
They reminded him often to endure, endure, endure.
It quickly became Lambo’s catchphrase as he suffered through the daily torture.
As a side effect of all of the healing, Lambo learned several languages including Japanese.
It isn’t uncommon for people to lose their minds from over-exposure to sun and lightning flames. To prevent this, he was constantly forced to take language lessons to keep his mind sharp.
After a year the results were deemed inconclusive. Lambo recovered too well. Each time he got shot or shocked, he would take less damage and it was ruining the data. No one else had lived through the year and the experiment deemed a failure.
As the only survivor, Lambo considered himself very special and developed a bit of a complex.
Somehow Lambo had become even more annoying. And he would gloat in multiple languages too.
It had been barely a month when Lambo’s older brother begged his father to be free of watching his younger sibling.
Too busy to really deal with it, he suggested shock therapy to fix Lambo’s behavior.
After three months of that, Lambo’s hair had almost magical properties, and they started testing the Ten Year Bazooka on him.
15 year old Lambo was much less annoying than 5 year old Lambo, but he seemed to resent them a lot and kept running off.
During one such incident, 5 year old Lambo came back from a bar insisting that he was now friends with Legendary Hitman Reborn.
This… probably wasn’t true and his excitement at having a friend had him at his most annoying yet.
The family couldn’t take it anymore. Lambo was loud, immature, and took too much attention away from research.
His mother came up with the plan to get rid of him. Since Lambo liked Reborn, he would refuse to assassinate Reborn and they could kick him out on grounds of refusing a mission. If he actually tried to do it, Reborn would kill him without even thinking about it. Either way they were free!
They gave Lambo as many weapons as he wanted and said they’d support him with unlimited supplies and money but he could not come back unless he killed Reborn. If somehow Reborn died and Lambo was not responsible for it, Lambo would be dead to the Bovino Famiglia and family.
Months of peace later, Iemitsu asked for permission to make Lambo a Vongola Guardian. The idea of being forever free of Lambo was so great, the Bovino Eighth cried many tears of joy.
Iemitsu thought he was sad to lose a son, but he was prone to delusions anyway.
That’ show Lambo became a Vongola.
Tsuna could not understand why Lambo would want to be a guardian or who would ever purposely put a child in danger.
This naivete is why Lambo loves him so much. Tsuna treats him like a person and not a tool. He treats him like someone who matters.
Nana loves him. Really loves him and Tsuna worries about him. Living with the Sawada’s is a paradise.
So, sometimes Lambo has to fight or get hurt?
That’s okay because the pain from protecting someone is so much better than pain for the sake of pain that it might as well be pleasure.
KHR is a weird series. It’s… crack. Most of what happens makes no sense at all, but if you really think about the characters, there is so much potential and you have to appreciate how screwed up these people are and how much they must suffer living their messed up lives.
I think Lambo is a totally underutilized character in the series and in the fandom. He is so spoiled, but he’s a mafioso so it’s not like he’s naive and he can withstand and doesn’t even really mind being injured all the time. There’s something seriously wrong there. I wanted to write a story where we can understand why Lambo doesn’t mind being hurt if it’s for Tsuna’s sake because he’s been hurt too often for weaker reasons.
It’s kind of weird that the Bovino family makes such incredible weapons but is known for their numbers. To me, this must mean that there are a lot of Bovino and with that comes a disregard for life. Lambo isn’t actually related to the main family as far as I can tell officially but he is often enough in fanon and if there’s enough people in his family that it doesn’t even matter that he’s the son of the leader…
Anyway, this was inspired specifically by For Love of the Game and a conversation I had with a Lambo cosplayer at Anime Boston 2012. This fic is for you man.
Theme #05: Walking Through the Graveyard (Original Fiction) Theme #06: A Taste of the Divine (Persona 3 Fanfiction)