Sawada Iemitsu sighed to himself as he got behind the closed doors of his quarters, allowing the goofy carefree smile he usually maintained to wilt away. His gaze traveled to two large bottles of strong vodka and he momentarily considered trying to drown himself with them.

He doubted it would work. His alcohol tolerance had become too strong of late for a mere two bottles. Besides, the drinking never really made the pain go away, just numbed it for a while.

Dragging his feet, he went over to his bed, reaching under it and pulling out a large three ring binder, setting it down and starting to thumb through the pages. It was a copy of all of the family photos, the one's from the first five years of his marriage, back when they were all happy, he still had a presence in his family. Back before he screwed up.

Looking through the scrapbook, Iemitsu found a picture of himself with a three year old Natsumi at the beach, the girl smiling energetically as she rode on her father's shoulders. Iemitsu had hoped the happy memories would ease the pain, but it only made it sharper.

He could still remember it, his meeting with Nana. He had been 17 at the time and Reborn had recently declared his training to be basically complete before ditching him to go and start training that Dino kid who had managed to become the head of a family at the age of nine. Iemitsu had decided to take his newfound freedom and return to Japan to see the sights and had ended up running into Nana.

She had been so beautiful and pure, fitting the mold of the Japanese ideal with her long dark hair and bright eyes. Iemitsu had been in love at first sight. Iemitsu had been so in love with her that he… might have hid a few things from her… such as everything. How exactly could he tell a pure angel like her that he killed people and trained child soldiers as part of the family business.

He had hid his entire life, wearing a construction worker's uniform that was made to stop people from noticing anything unusual. He was so afraid that Nana would find out about what a sinful man he was, that he didn't even take the outfit off for his own wedding, even though he knew that its effects lingered.

He sometimes wondered if Nana taking it in stride had been because of her own bubbling personality, or if it was the effects of the clothes that made her so cheerful about such an embarrassing scene. She should have kicked him to the curb, sooning up in that dirty orange jumpsuit when she had been in such a beautiful dress.

He didn't deserve her, but that didn't stop him from loving her, and when she had given birth to a beautiful baby girl, Iemitsu couldn't be happy. They spent four, beautiful happy years together as a family, with Iemitsu ignoring most of his responsibilities to the CEDEF in order to be with them. Even his father's untimely death and his becoming the CEDEF's 'boss' didn't drag him away for more than a few weeks out of the year. While he was with them, all of the darkness seemed so far away, and he could just forget about where he came from… until reality came crashing back down on top of him.

He had been hoping that his daughter wouldn't inherit the Dying Will Flame, or at the very least, wouldn't inherit the Vongola Hyper Intuition. After all, he had never shown any signs of having the famous intuition himself, so he figured his children wouldn't. It had been the thing that disqualified him from becoming the next Vongola Boss, as he wouldn't be able to sync with the Vongola Rings.

But while Natsumi was still four years old, she started to be able to see through the magic that had kept her mother happily ignorant. She started to ask him why he always wore such suspicious clothes. She started to ask him where he went when he disappeared. She called him out on being a liar whenever he responded.

It started to create tensions in the family as Nana, sweet angel that she was, would get upset whenever something contradicted what she understood to be going on. She even occasionally started to shout at little Natsumi in her frustration.

Iemitsu did his best to ignore these developments, and continue to pretend that he had the idyllic slow family life going. But even he couldn't ignore it when Natsumi turned five and he caught her with a small glowing orange light on her forehead.

Iemitsu panicked. There was no way things could keep going as they had if Natsumi became an active flame user, and to become active at such a young age was unheard of. With Natsumi being flame active, he would be forced to come clean with Nana and find out what she thought about her husband being a hired killer.

Iemitsu had turned to Timoteo for help, begging the boss to help him do something to stop his wife from finding out. At first, Timoteo only seemed annoyed with Iemitsu, perhaps even disgusted, but in the end, after meeting Nana and Natsumi for himself, he finally agreed to seal Natsumi's flames.

...The next time Iemitsu saw Reborn, his old friend and teacher would give him the pounding of his life. He'd be lucky if he was only thrown through one mountain and shot with a hundred thousand bullets.

Iemitsu had never paid much attention to the spiritual aspects of the Dying Will Flames. He knew that he didn't have even a normal a Sky's Intuition because he had too much negative energy, too many lustful and self-centered thoughts, not enough empathy, but he never paid as much attention to that as to the combat. You didn't need to understand the balance of the Yin and Yang to let go of your fears and start cracking heads.

As such, he had no idea what he had asked Timoteo to do. Not until his daughter had collapsed from a seizure. Suddenly Timoteo's original disgust and his constant asking if Iemitsu 'understood the consequences' started to make sense.

In the following weeks, Natsumi had completely changed. Her old life and energy was all but gone, she would stumble and fall all over the place, she struggled at times to even form sentences, she jumped at her own shadow. Iemitsu hoped that it would become better with time... but it didn't.

Iemitsu smiled and laughed, trying to hide his guilt for what he had unwittingly done, but as if fate was mocking him, even with her flame sealed, little Natsumi could still see through his lies. She might even have sensed what it was he had done to her. His daughter became more and more hostile to him, and Nana became more and more agitated as the enchantments struggled to help her cop, her own psyche deteriorating because of it. Iemitsu watched as his fantasy life crumbled down around him, as the people he loved were irreversibly damaged by him, and when he couldn't watch anymore… he ran away.

He started staying away from home more and more, barely even visiting for more than a week out of the year, until he finally couldn't bear to come home at all. He still set checks back to Nana, making sure the two would never be hurting for money, but that was the extent of his contact. He never even called home to check on them.

Now, he couldn't return, even if he had wanted to. Kiritsugu had found out what he did.

Iemitsu was probably one of the few people in the world who could go one on one with the Hitman Hunter and win, but that was only if the man fought without the use of Mist Flames. Mist Flames included, Iemitsu would be like a plaything in the man's hands. He could just walk straight up to Iemitsu while he was out of his Hyper Dying Will Mode and pull a bullet through his head before he knew what was going on. The curse of being a Sky without any intuition, or even the ability to sense intent.

Iemitsu wondered if he couldn't talk things out with the man, but that would never work. Kiritsugu had killed his own father when his experiments resulted in the death of someone he cared about. He wouldn't care about any of Iemitsu's excuses. Natsumi was like a second daughter to the man. He was more of a father to her than Iemitsu was. If Iemitsu went home now, and broken Kiritsugu's ban, he would be dead by morning, maybe before he even had the chance to see his family.

Reborn would be no better. He'd always hated it when Iemitsu made excuses. He would probably say something like "The time for talking was eight years ago, Pigheaded Iemitsu. If you had any conscience at all, you would have asked for help then."

There was no help. There was no 'cure' for the seal. Timoteo had made sure that Iemitsu understood that. Perhaps if Natsumi became strong enough, she could resist its effect while in Dying Will Mode, but the moment the flames died down, she would be crushed underneath them again.

Sighing to himself, Iemitsu picked up one of the bottles of vodka. Maybe there was enough to at least get a buzz going.

This is supposed to just be a chapter of Iemitsu's self justifications for what he did. Notice he is still an absolute bastard and completely responsible for it, but in his own mind, he is among the victims of fate.

There are a few people who seem really angry at Natsumi for invading Shirou's privacy and for planting part of her energy in his soul.

...You do realize she is only 12 years old and has absolutely no idea what is going on, right? She doesn't know that the soul dive was anything more than a weird vision, or that her dreams are more than just dreams.

And while I haven't show Shirou getting his own side of this yet, that doesn't mean that isn't coming up.

A discussion on Iemitsu's candidacy for being the Vongola Tenth.

On the day that Tsuna first activated his Hyper Dying Will form and used the Vongola Hyper Intuition, Checkered Face set off his minions to free Xanxus, in order to force Tsuna to take the Vongola Rings or die. Xanxus even accuses them at the end of the Ring Battles, saying that it was their plan all along for him to lose so that Tsuna would have the rings.

Thus it is logical to assume that the Vongola Hyper Intuition is a requirement for using the Vongola Rings, as if it was only the Sky Flames and genetics, then Tsuna would have been forced by Checkered Face to take on the rings the moment he had been hit by a Dying Will Bullet. Or indeed, Iemitsu would have stepped up.

At the time canon starts, Iemitsu is 30-31, still younger than Timoteo was when he became the Ninth. (He'd also be around the same age as Xanxus, if Xanxus didn't age while in the ice) So we have to assume that there is something else that disqualifies Iemitsu. We know that Iemitsu has Sky Flames and is pretty powerful in his own right, as with the knowledge and skills of his Ten Years Future self, he is able to fight Tsuna on pretty equal terms (when Tsuna wasn't having an understandable emotional breakdown) while not having a Vongola Ring, or any equivalent.

However, we see evidence that Iemitsu lacks the Vongola Hyper Intuition, as even when close enough to the fake Timoteo to kiss his hand, he still can't tell the difference. Nor could he avoid getting shot. We also know that despite not being of Vongola blood, Xanxus is supposed to have something like Hyper Intuition (just not as extreme), which would explain why Xanxus still thought he was eligible, even though Iemitsu wasn't.