Assuming that Basil is indeed trained as a spy and not without powers of observation, he should have realized by now that the way he speaks Japanese is not normal. (Honestly, he should have realized that even if he had never been to Japan, CEDEF is not cut off from the outside world.)
Therefore, I propose that he continues to make a fool of himself on purpose, potentially for the following reasons:
Spite. He’s actually conducting a social experiment to see just how far he can go with the act before his master fesses up. So far, the conclusion is infinitely far, and that Iemitsu will confess never.
Guilting Iemitsu. Iemitsu might not ever confess to making a fool of his apprentice, but he does sort of feel guilty about it, so Basil has realized that his boss is a whole lost more amiable to his requests if he buckles down on his Ye Olde Japanese.
Playing stupid. Being underestimated is quite useful in his line of work, and people seem to dismiss him as a gullible fool the moment a “thou” passes his lips, at which point they forget that he successfully survived two chases across Eurasia alone. Given how little effort they put into lying to the teenager who believes that Japanese people speak this way, it’s hardly a surprise when they get caught due to the information they let slip to the person they thought was an idiot.
Spite again. Iemitsu is a Japanese man in the rather xenophobic mafia. Emphasising that aspect of his master’s identity reads as rather viciously spiteful. Jury’s out on whether Basil’s trying to make Iemitsu uncomfortable or his detractors.
Leading on this point and my decoy son headcanon, playing up Japanese stereotypes makes it more likely that people actually believe in a degree of family relation between the two, and when you need people to believe that the Young Lion’s hiding his son in plain sight so they don’t need to look further, every little bit helps.
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I have two hcs regarding how the CEDEF handles its own succession in conjunction with the Vongola Family’s.
1. The new head steps up immediately after the new Don, because the old head was involved in choosing the Don. The old head may still work in the CEDEF, but they will no longer be in command. This is to reduce the odds of the CEDEF head having too much influence over the Don.
2. As we never understand how the rings go from being completed to getting separated again, I HC that with each new CEDEF head, they take the Half-Rings back when the new Don ascends, which means that Tsuna and co have already made a Tradition completely unviable.
Extracted from the broader fic in which he is but one character.
Once upon a time, there was an old woman.
No, this gives the wrong impression. The old woman is still there, like many of her kind, keepers of knowledge—and therefore power—far beyond mortal men. The old woman was—is—a witch.
In a time—a darker time, perhaps—a meaner time, certainly, the time when magic existed openly in the world, before cold iron, hot powder, and clean penstrokes banished it to shadowed corners and liminal spaces—there was a woodcutter. Woodcutters and their children seemed to be rather prone to strange happenstances at that time, as it were, and so, he loved, and married, and his wife bore him two children.
You know this story, don't you? The two children were named Hänsel and Gretel. The first a boy, the second a girl. Their mother died, and their stepmother, in the manner of stepmothers of this sort, found them expendable when famine struck, and left them in the woods and the hands of fate. Of course, in the manner of all children left in the woods, they did not die. The first time, they found their way back home; the second time, lost deep in the dark forest, they found their way to a house. A wondrous house! One of gingerbread and icing, spun sugar and tempered chocolate. Driven by hunger, these two children ate, and for their crimes, the brother was imprisoned, to pay back with flesh what he had unlawfully taken (for witches have their own laws, see, alien to us though they may seem); the sister indentured, to work off her debt by feeding her penned brother and keeping the witch's house.
You know what happened. The brother endured—the passive sort of endurance, bearing captivity and confinement and the knowledge of his impending death, forced to watch his sister suffer. The sister endured—the active sort of endurance, biting down on rebellion and too-telling inquisitiveness and the fear of the fate in store for her brother, forced to comport herself despite her hands being forced to bring their doom. In the end, the sister's ingenuity, coupled with courage, defeated the witch and won the siblings their freedom.
This is when the story starts being wrong. Witches are feared by men, and men react to their fears with fire. No witch worth her spells can be harmed by it, not if she has any love of life. But Gretel had won the house and its contents by right of conquest, so the witch could not—would not either—oppose the girl further. The children left. The witch left also, to build another house of cakes and cookies.
The children grew up, and had children of their own, who had children in turn, allowing memory to fade to mere myth, as they lived their mundane lives. Yet their ancestors had supped at a table of what they would call a Hexe, and that marked their blood as changed. Touched by witchcraft—a very attractive quality, for certain other creatures.
Uncounted generations passed. The witch checked on the descendants of the siblings who bested her, sometimes. Call it curiosity, call it concern, call it a combination of the two. It was only natural for her to hear the news of one of them being taken by the Courts. Seelie. They had a fascination for the simple innocence of children, as great as the Unseelie love of adults' complexity of emotion. The witch watched as the mother went to treat with the Court, as such things went—and if the way to the Good Neighbors was so easily found, what of it? If the woman found two iron knitting needles in her pack, what of it? If a red riding hood could be found beneath a tree, if a wolf would startle the woman from her enchanted stupor, if a hoary crone gave her a flask of some vital substance for the price of a mere story, what of it?
These too-fair folk had changed since the days when Janet could save her knight by waiting at a crossroads and not letting go. Though the woman saved her child, she lost her life.
The old woman had cradled the infant in its swaddling, and laughed away all the fair lords and ladies who cooed endearments and dripped sympathy with honeyed voices, then tramped back to her new gingerbread house.
The baby had been fed with goat's milk and bread sops, watched over by skulls glowing with fire within. He grew up riding in a mortar and pestle, stirring mysterious concoctions and knitting cotton candy to sweaters for gingerbread children (there was an episode during which he thought himself one of them, and was deathly afraid of water and foxes both). There had been no one to return the boy to, and so he was raised by three riders, of the sun, night, and day, two witches, one tall and thin, the other plump and stout, and a single great wolf, taller than he.
He learned strange things, in his childhood years: guard your name carefully, give it to no one. True love is potent beyond measure, though it need not be born from Cupid's arrow-prick. Evil stepparents get their comeuppance. And you could not truly live if you spent your life as a boy in fairyland (although as his first human friend, who would become the woman called Oregano, demonstrated, it wasn’t as if spending your childhood in the real world was a more rewarding experience).
What his guardians forgot to teach, perhaps thinking the truth self-evident, was that the names your loved ones called you had just as much weight as the one you were born with.
It would have warned him, thought Turmeric ruefully, to beware the Young Lion when his Oma had, in lieu of his name, called him Löwenzahn.
