AN: This is an alternate POV to my other story Feathers ('till they're all on the ground), and as such will make much more sense if you go and read that first.

There had been a time when Tsuna was an innocent young boy. He'd been a civilian, living a life free of bloodshed and horror beyond homework and running from bullies and, occasionally, Hibari. There were days when Tsuna looked back on those days and wondered… Would he have seen it if he had never entered the world of the mafia? If he had remained a civilian and, by some chance or quirk of fate, met them… Would he have seen it?

Tsuna looked out the window of his office and down into the gardens below. They were sprawling and beautiful, perfectly trimmed and yet, there was a darker undertone in their beauty, one born of this being the garden of a mafia stronghold, and it reminded him of them.

Mukuro and Chrome. Chrome and Mukuro. Bound tightly enough that they couldn't be called two people, but separate enough they couldn't be called one person. Two people, trapped in a sort of limo unlike any other Tsuna had so much as heard of. It was a strange sort of contradiction, and he assumed it was this contradiction that blinded all the others to what he saw.

He could see them now, walking through the pathways in the garden. Chrome hanging onto Mukuro's arm in a parody of a proper lady hanging onto a nobleman, and Mukuro with a hand around her waist. Mukuro said something to her, and Tsuna couldn't tell what was being said from this far away, but Chrome laughed so it must have been something funny.

There was something more to them, Tsuna knew. He wasn't quite sure how, just that his intuition pinging something in the back of his mind. The contradiction. Two people, one person, neither and both. Separate yet connected. Violent and kind.

They felt old. Old in a way that even Kawahira hadn't felt old, old in the way that stone was old, that the ground was old, but that was impossible, wasn't it? Even if Mukuro claimed reincarnation and Chrome was so closely connected to him, had housed him for months on end…

Tsuna frowned and shook his head. Whatever they were, he could tell they meant no harm to him or his people, and the bond between him and them stood strong, their mist in his sky just as right as it had always been since the three of them had harmonized years ago.

He could go without knowing for a while longer.