Pokémon K_S Villian-tine's prompt, "a book/reading" Now Grammarly'ed

[K_S]

Villian-tines,
prompt number 26
A book, part 2​

He'd had to go to the basement. Part to ensure the generator for the fridge and emergency line was working properly, part to root through a few boxes in the back. There were, to his surprise, some old Sakaki keepsakes among the deeds and dated deals. Nothing incriminating, mainly a few odd and end things that he felt like someone had just dumped half a desk into his packing while his back was turned.

He found the black-bound book halfway in.

A quick flip proved it to be part photo album, part scrapbook. Nothing dangerous caught his attention as he skimmed, the back was a glued-together mess, but besides that oddity, he tucked it under his arm and rooted out an odd decoration to take its place.

It had been holding down someone else's tax reports. A quick skim found them to be Zio Sal's property taxes. What the man was doing, owning a bakery when he couldn't boil water, was not Giovanni's business. What was, was that the base of the papers was starting to rise. Alarmingly. Like an accordion compressing in reverse.

Making a mental note to have a burn day, before the bakery papers roused to sentience, Giovanni headed out.

Persian, the brat, had been napping down below. Making her regal presence known among the dust bunnies and topmost boxes. Smoothing the hair she'd swatted when he dared to get too close to her lofty perch, Giovanni made his way out.

The unrepentant cat followed at his heels, meowing things besides an apology. And because of that, he ignored her nudge, a mute request for a good petting.

Used to being ignored when she was being a little demon, Persian murred under her breath about head scratches and treats from Grace.

A snarl from the sky kicked up, and the cat popped. Going from standing to flying straight up in a perfect vertical jump that ended in her landing with her claws drawn. Each leg thumped and clicked heavily at her landing.

Ears pinned back in alarm, Persian glared at him, clearly blaming him for Mother Nature's shenanigans.

Or perhaps for not warning her.

Persian yowled like a Legend was breaking in through the window, barrelling down the halls to the Sakaki's bedroom. Tail poofed and raised like a broken flag to declare surrender to the world. All she had to do was go back down, but no, off she went to get snuggles from Grace.

Stupid cat.

Grace pulled her attention from the quivering cat at his return. A ghost of her old curiosity lit her eyes as she tipped her head at him, in a mute question.

"I found it."

"Is that the Necronomicon?"

He'd read Lovecraft and got that reference, thank you very much. As a reward for his labors, he might have taken the softest blanket from the bed-nest and bundled in. Glaring at the woman and cat from his nook of warmth, like an angry kakunna.

"If I say sorry, will you share?"

There had been a spill between him coming and going. Sheets were stripped and pushed out of the way. She'd made do with what hadn't been soaked, but from her shiver, what she'd made do with wasn't enough.

So much for avoiding laundry.

He considered Grace and Persian; both were employing their infernal puppy eyes. He glared at them and crunched up among the folds.

Grace's hands found the edge of his sanctuary and started tugging and prodding at the seams.

"If you let me in, you'll be warmer." Lies. If she left him alone, he would stop getting cold air coming in. "And you can share and care your vampire book-"

He rolled his eyes, unfolded the edge, and acquired a Grace lamprey as a result.

Persian could damm well take her cat pillow at the foot of the bed, and like it.

To be... completely fair... the "vampire book" seemed to have been started back when cameras weren't a thing. It was done backwards. Starting in near pre-history, and became more modern as it went. Pages had been added in, though how Giovanni had no clue.

The artist hired for the first few generations of Sakaki had taken the idea of somber and monochrome to whole new levels. And the Sakaki's within seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with dark colors.

"Seriously," Grace drawled, "why does everyone look like a vampire?"

Pointedly not looking too closely at the teeth of a distant uncle, Giovanni hummed. "There must be some Sakaki genetic inclination towards wearing black."

"That level of bad taste better be a recessive trait."

If Grace were raised as a Sakaki... well, Giovanni might have feared for his manhood. As it was, her insinuations warmed him better than the best scotch and a blazing fireplace. Toes curling in pleasure, his answering smirk was tender.

Before she could decide if she wanted to take him up on that unspoken offer, Persian decided to flaunt her nesting instincts. Indulging a slinky sort of kneed, that resulted in one stolen pillow and sheet. The feline twisted, making a snug cat croissant at the foot of the bed with only her tan head poking out.

More than familiar with the cat's "it's raining, and I don't care" facade, Giovanni ignored the show. He had Grace in his arms, something to read, and mercifully, the thunder was on the decline.

A few pages later and he had to wonder if he hadn't screwed his eventual children with some prophecy. There wasn't a lick of anything other than an accent in white or red. It looked like he was seeing a procession of great-aunt and uncle funerals, not the acknowledgment of births or family gatherings that were the descriptors scribbled in around each shot.

"Did you notice, no one's smiling?"

"Sakaki gatherings are somber events." Gio mimed Nona's inflection since such shrillness was beyond him. "Men are meant to be sober, loyal, and strict."

"Ung." Grace stilled her relentless burrowing into his side. "You hear this bull, uterus? You need to damn well reject these genes he's talking about. Girdle those eggs. Or no more fun times. Ever. I swear it."

He laughed, and if she took advantage of that to steal a pillow back. Well, it was his fault for indulging, and he was more than capable of adjusting her position, despite her protests, and making her serve in place for what she stole.

As the text became more modern, he started to recognize people beyond obscure, historically inaccurate one-liners. In the areas where he recognized the handwriting, the purpose of documentation had changed.

Pictures, some candid, some formal, stood beside a folded paper that, when teased open, proved to be a death certificate. In a few cases, the papers were several pages long. A few were even a medical examiner's uncensored reports.

After a few pages of this, Grace stopped. "Gio, we aren't reading your mom's "hit" book, are we?"

He... couldn't believe the Madam would be that stupid... this could be something as mild as her notating everyone's deaths so she could savor the ones she hated without drawing attention to her sport...

A sort of feel-good indulgence for the depraved...

But Sal's picture blew a hole in that. A candid hospital shot where he'd been recuperating from having two broken arms and a broken leg. He was awake in the shot, his cast-bound leg raised insanely high on its sling. There wasn't a nurse in sight, or a doctor, or anyone. Just the old mobster, who wasn't that old in this shot. Sal was possibly younger in that shot than Giovanni was now. The Made Man's injuries were fresh, his eyes wide and glazed.

"He can't have been seeing visitors. Not with his eyes like that. He's drugged to the gills."

"Probably best we don't know anything else," Giovanni warned.

He turned a page and saw two little girls. Arm in arm, dressed in their Sunday best and trying to look sober. Their sparkling black eyes told tales. The littlest was nine, the other fifteen.

It took him a long moment to recognize Gemma and her little sister Saphrina on the page. The eldest was long gone, the youngest a fresher loss. Dead at twenty-one, at least if the gossip was right.

It felt positively alien to realize that he was older than his big niece Gemma, that he'd outlived her and her spitfire of a younger sister. He was older than them both now. He flipped through a few pages to see if Saphrina's kids were within but the book was too out of date to tell that tale. The first few pages were blocks of bound papers, a near pouch of documentation in... binary? The code was too thick for him to understand. So he ignored it, flicking back to familiar pastures.

Grace took the hand not holding the book, twined their fingers. They leaned against each other, looking at the picture of those two girls for a very long time. She knew of Gemma, the young woman was one of the few familgia members that had a picture in Giovanni's home, on his personal work desk, no less.

"You know, if you want to know, you could just call."

Grace was a smart thing, having sussed the reason for his flipping ahead, though he hadn't said a word. But her solution was more than it seemed. More than an insultingly easy solution.

Saphrina had overt ties to the Mob. Grace's encouragement to reach out was an offer to mutely tolerate the social fallout of that contact. And, in theory, it might even work. But there were more than just Kanto law to consider.

With a sigh, Giovanni shook his head, moved to turn a page. "I went legit. Barring Executives and the Madam, the rest of the famiglia won't have a thing to do with me... and being around them would be..." He could imagine the shrill screams of P.R. Worse, any smirching of his name was an invitation for the police to all but move in.

Between the scuffles Grace had kicked up during her wild social justice crusade years and Giovanni's... well, everything... the police and the Sakaki's in close proximity were not a good combination. To put it very mildly.

He huffed, and she released his off hand to pin the one twiddling then page.

"You know, when I was younger, it didn't bother me. But now, sometimes, it does."

She took the book and turned back to the girls had been told not to smile. He wished they had dared to defy that order. Seeing their smiles would have been nice.

"Tell me about them?"

"Gemma and Saphrina Sakaki Corosso were sisters in arms. Hell-bent on breaking the mind of every sbario they could."

Until Gemma couldn't, a bullet in the head ending her career stupid young. Saphrina had carried on the proud Sakaki cause of being a royal pain in the authorities' ass. Skirting that fine line between brave and stupid until an encounter with police brutality had left her unable to walk.

Oh, she'd recovered, but after?

She'd been too scared to carry on after that.

"So if I'd seen them during my civil unrest days?"

Grace had attended protests and rallies against everything corrupt she could. Hell, she'd even had a record in corporate circles.

That'd been a fun find, when, during his giving her a tour of one of his legit businesses, his head of civilian security had barged in like a Tauros with its tails on fire. Giovanni had gone from placid tour guide to grim Made Man in moments. Expecting to hear that they were under attack by some upstart anti-Rocket insurrection. The commotion had much tamer roots, thank God.

It was just the man having a fit. The head of security had seen Grace on the cameras, and he remembered the fiery red head and her silver colored eyes. The story had come out around a slew of widely inappropriate, angry posturing. The guard had claimed that Grace had assaulted him during a protest against Viridian co'.

Grace's defense had been lackluster at best. She'd accidentally dropped the sign. It'd been heavy.

Surprised at that spot of rather passive aggressiveness, Giovanni had given his fiancée a long, long look. She hadn't elaborated. Or amended her words to become an actual apology.

Knowing Grace... each facet of her behaviour was damning.

"I have everything under control," he'd soothed the irate guard. "And I'll personally oversee her conduct. You have nothing to worry about."

Part curiosity, part to shut the man up, Giovanni did some independent research. It had resolved to be one of those fun social upheavals during his early days as an entrepreneur. He'd nominally owned the company, inherited it in the upheval of his mother's death, and promptly forgot about it during his league training days.

It'd been Madam Sakaki's pride and joy. Suffice to say its practices were overtly evil and wasteful. Enough so the locals, mainly stereotypical conflict aviodent Kantoese, had raised hell.

Grace, and fifty other young adults (a sprinkling of do-gooders, ex-employees, and families thereof) had waged a mudslinging war with both the intellectual property the company produced as well as one noisome CEO. Going over the man's files, Giovanni found himself agreeing with the picketters. The man should have been shot, rather than allowed power over anyone.

A quick perusal found the man had been killed in prison, which took that chore out of the Rocket's hands..

As a whole, the disgraced business had been a slew of greedy bastards.

And that observation was coming from him.

They'd been an economic blight in their time. Chugging down every resource they could. Likely realizing, as he cleaned house,e that they were near the top of his to-do list and...

And the attendant incident report, when things had hit boiling point, was one of those grey things. Yes, there'd technically been an assault. One of the kids of the protestors had chucked mud balls. Yes, the security teams should have been rotated out to prevent them from lashing out due to unresolved stress, but Giovanni had had no clue things were this dire.

The end result was a mini-riot that ended with his security head having to take a mandatory leave of absence due to a concussion. Grace hadn't dropped a sign; she'd used it to break out of the scuffle because someone had armed the unarmed guards with illegal guns.

Recalling that fun aspect of Grace's pre-winning career, Giovanni smirked.

"If there was a chance to throw something, anything, at a copper, Gemma would have had your back."

"How was her aim?"

He made a so-so motion with a hand.

"She once tossed her pokeball with a sirviper, fumbled, and hit herself in the head with it. The ball released the snake on her back."

The snake had gone full constrict mode the second he was out of his pokeball... It'd taken three adult Sakaki's to pry Gemma out of her beast's loops.

"You know, she got me into training?"

"You mean you weren't born riding a rabid rhyhorn?"

Giovanni laughed. "The madam wasn't that deprived."

Not quite, but it was a very near thing.

 

[K_S]

Villian-tines,
prompt number 26
A book, part 3​

The pearly gates were not meant for him. He had no doubts about his final destination in the hereafter, so like any good thief, he stole what bits of paradise he could.


Comfortable, cocooned in warmth, Grace nestled against his side; there was little more he could ask for. Persian lay at thier feet, purring in her sleep. A tame pseudo thunder that drowned out the last gasps of the dwindling storm.


It was his turn. They'd passed the time trading tales. A benign back and forth that had him breaking down a distant scam one childhood ago.


Gemma, himself, and an infant Saph' were pulling the "child is crying, help us" card. Well, he and Gemma were. Saph was unfortunately encouraged to scream as the older kids had alternated between subtly pinching her and rocking the baby with artfully panicked faces to sell the scam.


Unfortunatly Saph' was loud. So the panic hadn't been an act.


They nearly went deaf to get a shot at the wares of a rather upscale cioccolateria. And the torture had been compounded by the old woman who ran the place. She'd been a cold-hearted thing that had no empathy for a howling baby and panicky pre-adolescents.


"Deaf, really?" Grace hummed, twiddling pages in her fingers as he talked.


"I had tenitis for two days after." Giovanni griped. "And it had seemed worth it at the time."


"Mhm, and what'd you learn from all that?"


"Don't rob old mobster shops, they make all thier displays out of bulletproof glass." At Grace's prompt to "think harder," he added. "Also, crutches can't break open bulletproof glass, no matter how hard you swing."


Grace let out a low snort, quipped a line about how she would have paid to see him pulling a Tiny Tim. There'd been some payback delivered via pillow. But after, they settled into thier places, a bit breathless and short a pillow. Persian, the lazy girl, slept through it all.


"Now, where was I?"


"Explaining why Seph' understandably subliminally hates you?"


The flick of pages under her fingers added an interesting undertone to her sarcasm.


"One, she does not." Did not, would have been truer to reality. But for now, he ignored the proper tense. "She was perfectly fine after I slipped her some caramel. Second, we are jumping too far ahead."


"Not my fault..."


Grace was too old to sing-song. But then Giovanni was too old to instigate a pillow fight. As long as she wouldn't tell, he wouldn't.

The soft hiss zip of her fingers teasing the edges of the book helped Gio gather his thoughts. No, he hadn't been dressed as Tiny Tim, thank you very much. But making papier-mache look like a plaster cast had taken hours. While he went on to explain how Gemma had pulled that off, it was to the background music of rustling and purrs.


While many would have viewed the fact that Grace was aimlessly turning pages as he talked as her being distracted, he knew better. It wasn't indifference. Grace was always toying with something. The habit had taken some getting used to, but now served as a sort of barometer for her temper and interest.


The sound stilled a bit as her fingers got caught in the back block of coded text. Between sewn-in pouches, overstuffed with folded papers, brick might have been a better term. Still, her warning that he'd better not teach any of their kids that trick had a firm, tapped, staccato beat accompanying it.


Grinning like a loon. Because the idea of "Kids' was intoxicating beyond belief, he promised he wouldn't. It was an easy thing to offer. The scam was too reliant on too many variables. It required three bodies minimum, one of which was an infant. Unless Grace was willing to have that many kids in succession, it was an unfeasible ploy to pull off.


"I swear you're going to have to go through an ethics class before we even have one, Mr. Variables..."


The book was leveled at him like an accusatory finger. Before Giovanni could suggest she wield something else, anything else besides his family historia, gravity took matters out of thier hands. The staples, pins, and sewing, decades old and poorly executed, came apart mid-scolding gesture.


The result was the book dumped half a novella between the two.


Persian woke with an irritated "Murr" and rolled off the bed to leave the two stupid humans to thier nestmaking.


"Ah crap..." Grace winced at the disaster of mangled, encrypted papers. A quick flick through the book showed the photos were undisturbed.


"Merda indeed." Giovanni sighed, taking the book back and tucking it under his arm. "Well, I'm sure you, in your moral superiority, won't mind handling clean up?"


Grace groaned, but nodded. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to..."


"Grace," A firm tone bellied the soft peck on her lips. It was the kindest way to stop a spiral he's learned. "Sort it, burn it, I don't care. Just get it off the bed before I get back, alright?"


Gathering the laundry from earlier spills and feathers from other activities, he left her to it.


The last glance he had of her on leaving was her sheepishly sifting through the mess, her embarrassment slowly being felled by a familiar expression of frustration. Unrepentant bibliophile, he understood. Not being able to tell page one from another could be frustrating, but being born and raised in the Mob, he knew a deeper truth.


Sometimes it was best not to know.


Letting the Madam's little secret die with her... It was both a feasible and appealing option. If the mess was there when he got back, he'd do the job himself.


"Burning them is an option, Grace, the fire is right there." He reminded gently, closing the door on his way out.