F:CV | stumbling forward

Reborn hasn't always been this way.

Lal remembers a time when he was kinder, lighter-hearted. When he even smiled, really smiled. And, as bizarre as it seems, when he laughed.

It wasn't a big or noisy laugh; it was one of those laughs you saw rather than heard. As much as Skull claimed to hate Reborn, Lal knew Skull was always looking for that laugh. It just made their group that much more complete. That much more together.

That much more precious.

Lal looks up at the stretch of building laid out before her. If the earth just tilted the wrong way, it could become a road to the sky. Made of glass and steel, worked by human hands, a path that leads straight to the heavens. A one-way avenue with no chance to get lost.

She wonders, sometimes, what life might be like if Luce were still around. If they hadn't decided to take that suicide mission with confident grins and arrogant attitudes. They were strong; they were said to be the strongest, but there was always someone stronger. And that was what had killed them—as individuals, as a group, as a future.

The doors sweep open for her, and she checks into her hotel room under Mira Nelo, a faux name made to deter anyone who might target her, though it has been a long time since one has been foolish enough to attempt an assassination. She's not like Reborn, who's indiscriminately killed many, thus birthing a new generation of avengers, or Skull, the resident brat. She's strong but keeps a low profile, and she kills anyone who compromises that.

Except for Luce. Luce had bigger plans for them all, until she died.

And it was after that that Reborn had changed.

No, that wasn't the right word for it. Regressed. He had regressed after Luce's death, after Colonnello had almost died. Lal still remembers how he had been the first day he'd arrived, stone-faced, cold, fireless. Without a single motive other than to complete every mission to the T, like a doll created to serve.

She passes by an open dining room, sees a table of five laughing at a sixth man with pudding all over his face.

She remembers a scene like that. It seems like decades ago, but it's really only been a few years. Reborn trips the waiter and causes him to spill chilled cucumber soup all over Skull, who whines and pouts but never dares raise a finger against Reborn, and then leaves the poor waiter a hefty tip of $1,000 for his pains.

She remembers the first time a smile graced his face; it was during a sparring session with her then-student Colonnello. The two fought like idiots who didn't want to stay in the world, and she watched them like a tether to an eagle to stop them from flying away.

At the start, their group was loose and flimsy. A breath of wind could have blown them to pieces. None of them particularly wanted to be there; nobody especially wanted to leave. Luce was the glue that held them together. Nobody could refuse her. She forced them to dinner. To the skating rink. To training fields. Until one by one, their personalities began to clash in a constructive manner and yielded the odd motely of geniuses that would emerge as a powerhouse in the mafia world.

She thinks she misses it sometimes.

"Hello, Lal," comes the greeting as she opens the door to her room.

There wasn't supposed to be anyone to meet her.

Lal hisses and moves to draw her gun, but it's too late; she had been careless during her reminiscence, and now she pays. Little arms crawl across her skin, an infinite number of robotic ropes binding her tight in that split second when half her mind was still walking down memory lane.

She snarls, not because she is frightened, and only half because she is irritated at herself for letting her guard down. The other half is because she dislikes this man that stands in front of her for the things he does and the way he acts—especially when he conducts himself in this manner. She stops struggling against the machines because she knows it's impossible to escape anyways. Better to give this man what he wants and get rid of him quickly.

With a furious gaze, she growls out, "Release me, Verde, or you'll never get what you want."

"On the contrary, even if you die, I think I will get everything I want," Verde returns, stepping out of the shadows like the melodramatic wannabe villain he so is. Lal shakes her head; she shouldn't be spiteful just because of a few things Verde said years ago. She knows he has no inclination towards being hero or villain; all he wants is the world and time to himself to further his scientific explorations. "You are merely… a shortcut. A liaison to my most recent interest."

Lal glares at him pointedly until he sighs and claps his hands. She's dropped to the ground gracelessly, much like a rag doll. As she gets to her feet, she thinks that's probably all she is to Verde anyways—a doll, like all other humans, serving no other purpose than to satisfy him.

She acquiesces because he is an old comrade.

"You weren't at the funeral," she says.

"What funeral?" Verde responds. She feels another surge of anger, but she quells it. "Oh, you mean the one for the sushi-maker? I felt it was unnecessary to attend. But onto more pressing matters—"

"And what makes you think I'll help an asshole like you?" Lal breathes.

Verde turns a very poignant eye on her, like she is some sort of bug beneath him.

"Because I will help you in return."

"You're late."

Reborn addresses the long braid travelling down the back of the man standing in front of Tsuyoshi's grave. The owner shrugs a little, like he could whisk up an apology but doesn't really see the point in it, which Reborn appreciates. He doesn't like superficialities.

"I'm late," the man echoes. "And I'm sorry to be. And the others…?"

Reborn shoves his hands in his pockets and moves up so that he's standing next to the other man.

"Lal was here."

"Of course."

"I saw Viper's footprints. He didn't bother hiding them, so he must have wanted someone to know he'd dropped by. No trace of Verde to be seen."

"And Skull?"

Reborn looks the other dryly in the eye.

"He hasn't been heard from for years. You should know. You're the one who paid Viper a fortune to track him down, Fon."

Fon chuckles, folding his arms.

"Indeed I am. Quite a disappointment, really. I had to sell my house to foot the bill. You'd think that after being comrades for so long Viper would offer a discount. But it's good that he stopped by," he finishes softly. "Tsuyoshi would have been glad."

Fon's fingertips brush the still-shining stone with the delicateness of a butterfly.

"You will be missed."

They fall in step with each other as they walk from the grave, Fon musing over something otherworldly, Reborn with his eyes fixed on something distant visible to no one else.

"What of his son?" Fon says when the time is right. Reborn shrugs.

"He'll go to an orphanage fifteen miles away. He'll switch schools and stay in his baseball club and see a private psychiatrist for a couple of weeks or until necessary. There'll be guards around the orphanage and his school at all times of the day, and the Ninth will ensure he gets everything he needs until he's able to provide for himself."

"And what of you?"

"What of me?" Reborn says, and he realizes he has said it with a sharper edge than intended. He can see the smile on Fon's face and wants to shoot the braided martial-arts maniac in the foot.

He hates that melodramatic tinge on his lips.

"You were closer to him than any of us were," Fon says. "Are you feeling alrigh—"

"I," Reborn interrupts very flatly, "am fine. Now, did you come here for a reason, or is your sole purpose to be a needle in my side?"

Fon spreads his hands a little helplessly, like there's a lot more he would like to say, and the breeze catches his hair, tossing it like the grass blades below. With his clothes flapping around him, Fon looks like at any moment he could just leap into the air and be swept away.

Reborn hates how it makes him look so free.

"Namimori is a town of wind," Fon says, and Reborn has to fight the urge to roll his eyes. Here comes another cryptic spiel. "You must be careful, Reborn. In times like these, sparks are waiting to fly. And since the rain is gone, fire might easily consume this town."

"Are you done waxing poetry?" Reborn asks sardonically. Fon just gives him a gentle smile.

"I am. You should try it once, Reborn. It soothes the soul."

"And irritates the souls of others," Reborn mutters under his breath. "I suppose that now you're in Japan, you'll be stalking that cousin of yours?"

"Stalking is a strong word," Fon says mildly. "But yes, I will check in on him briefly before flying out to China. Oh, and—Colonnello's birthday is coming up. Will you visit?"

Reborn says nothing, but he suspects Fon expected that, for he fluidly follows up with, "Lal mentioned something about you being… ah, a 'donkey with a stick stuck up its ass.'"

Reborn snorts through his nose.

"When have I ever not been?"

"You've had your moments," Fon says with a shadow of a laugh in his voice. "Look, you're having one now."

Reborn's eyebrow twitches in question. Fon's lips spread wide.

"Such a donkey described by Lal would never bother to visit the resting spots of the dead."

And as Fon walks away with a melodic laugh, Reborn has to stop and really think about what he just said. He's had many solo missions and many partner missions, and it strikes him that, up until now, barring Luce's death, he's never bothered to attend a single funeral.

A crazy laugh bubbles up inside him, dark and bitter, and he turns his fedora down and shoves his hands deep in his pockets.

See, Tsuyoshi, see what you've done? See what you've changed? See how broken it is without you?

Reborn thinks this is the most poetic he's ever been, but Fon is a liar. It doesn't make him feel any better. It makes him want to rip his fedora in two, turn the world over, and set fire to hell itself.

But he turns on his heel and heads home, because assassins shouldn't entertain those sorts of emotions.

When Reborn returns to his apartment, it's to the sight of something underneath a miserable blanket of crumpled old newspapers. He knows who it is immediately—only one person could be dumb enough to do something like this, and only one person would have the free time to do something like this.

"What are you doing here, Dino Cavallone?" he says in fluid Italian.

The newspapers move and out from underneath emerges a boy with blond, wild hair and brown eyes, disoriented and sheepish.

"H-Hi, Reborn," he says, laughing a little nervously. "I-I guess you didn't expect to see me here."

"No," Reborn says. "No, I didn't. The Ninth did mention you would come around sometime—but I hadn't presumed it would be under guise of a—"

He looks distastefully at the pile of newspapers arranged haphazardly over Dino.

"—a homeless bum."

"H-Hey, not all homeless people are bums," Dino says weakly, but he scrambles out from his makeshift blanket and tries to arrange himself in a presentable manner. And, being Dino Cavallone, the laughingstock of the mafia, he somehow manages to pull his pants down and jab himself in the eye all at the same time.

All just by pulling newspapers off of himself.

"…Put your pants back on," Reborn says tiredly. He turns to open the door when it strikes him what Lal had said a few days ago, that someone from the Cavallone family would be coming to aid him on the mission.

His heart sinks as he turns very, very slowly to look at Dino.

"It's not you, is it?" he says almost despairingly. Like his life will end if it turns out that some higher up, who clearly didn't have his or her head screwed on correctly, had presumed Dino, of all people, is qualified to be considered reinforcement.

"What's not me?" Dino asks. He looks up at Reborn, giving him a good look of his face.

Cavallone Dino isn't someone Reborn particularly likes, but he doesn't particularly hate him either.

The boy is so much like a prematurely-born horse foal that you can't help but pity him. Reborn had always thought that 'tripping over your own shadow' was just a hyperbole used to describe mildly clumsy people—until he met Dino, who literally always tripped over his own shadow.

Reborn puts up with him because he's fun to bully.

But it never is as fun seeing someone else bullying Dino.

"I think there's something to be said when the heir to the Cavallone Family gets beaten up the moment he sets foot in Japan," he says, looking pointedly at the bruised eye and split lip Dino sports.

Dino has the courage to look sullen in front of Reborn and says, "The Ninth did ask you to train me."

"I don't think any amount of training can help you. And, kids don't just beat other kids up for no reason. What did you do?"

"When your name is Dino Cavallone," Dino says glumly, "yeah, they do. And they weren't all kids. And I tried to tell them I was going to become a boss of a fearsome mafia family, but they don't know Italian, so I don't think I got across to them."

He tries to kick the carpet ruefully, but it ends up almost knocking his front teeth out. The carpet almost knocks his front teeth out, for mafia's sake.

"Well, if you're not here for the mission, then are you here to take Sawada Tsunayoshi off my hands?" he says (hopefully).

"Who?"

He's sorely tempted to whack Dino across the head, but out of the kindness of his heart, he refrains.

"If you're not here to help me, then what are you good for in life?" he mutters.

Dino winces and carefully looks away. Interesting. He peers at him like Dino's a spectacular specimen of lizard, and Dino twists his face away with superhuman skills like he's been training to do that all his life. He puts together the fact that Dino has arrived quite literally on his doorstep purportedly without direction and that Dino is being more sensitive than usual about his haplessness levels and then says, "Ho. Your family kicked you out."

Dino is the intended heir to the Cavallone Family, but if he can't stand up to bullies or walk in a straight line, he may as well be dead to them.

And then to Reborn's complete and utter bewilderment, Dino drops everything and begins to bawl.

"You'll… keep in touch, right?"

Yamamoto says it hesitantly, and Tsuna wants to latch onto his arm and never let go. He can already feel his heart breaking at the prospect of not being able to see his friend daily; they won't even be going to the same school. The orphanage Yamamoto is being sent to is well within a different school district—Kokuyo, they call it—and it suddenly strikes Tsuna that this could be the last time they ever, ever see each other.

"T-Tsuna, don't cry!"

"Why are children always crying?" comes an exasperated voice from above. Yamamoto looks up. Is Reborn carrying a sack of potatoes? Oh, no, he was mistaken. It was a boy dressed in brown, looking like a miserable sack of potatoes hanging from Reborn's outstretched arm.

"Did you punch him?" Reborn accuses of Yamamoto, who shakes his head violently. "Well, then, why is he crying?" And then, in Italian, Reborn says through gritted teeth, "And wipe your nose, Dino, you disgusting little boy—for mafia's sake, not on me."

Seeing that Yamamoto is packed, Reborn looks down his nose severely at Tsuna, who's still blubbering away, which is making Dino teary-eyed, and mafia help him, if Yamamoto starts crying, too—

And he does.

Very loudly, like he hasn't wept in years.

(Reborn realizes that he hadn't cried even at his father's funeral)

And there Reborn stands, in the center of a triangle comprised of three bawling children, entertaining a headache and sorely wanting to shoot himself dead.

"I don't want Yamamoto-kun to leave!"

"I can't believe my family threw me out…"

"What's going to happen to me?"

"Stop, stop," Reborn demands irritably, but they pay him no heed. He has to wait it out—and wait he does, for a long, long time. By the time the raucous has settled down, it's lunchtime, and far past the hour at which he was supposed to deliver Yamamoto.

"Look," he says very frankly as he passes out tissues so that they may spare his floor from their disgusting snot. "Takeshi isn't dead."

Too soon, something tells him as Tsuna and Yamamoto's eyes begin to well up with tears. Before another symphony of honking and wailing can begin, he says very sternly, "He's moving fifteen miles away, which means that we can see him whenever you want to. Whenever you want to, so long as it stops your infernal crying."

Tsuna hiccups. Reborn wants to punch the wall.

"My assignment is this weekend, and it may well extend to a week, and I will send you over to where Takeshi is during that time. So, you'll have, potentially, an entire week to spend with this… thing you're so infatuated with."

"What's infatuated mean?" Yamamoto hiccups.

"Nothing," Reborn elucidates very kindly. He rounds on Yamamoto and tells him, "Nothing is going to happen to you, you little twat. There'll be people there who will look over you, and if worst comes to worst, you just take whatever's closest and hurl it at the people you don't like. See? Nothing to cry about. And you—" he says, grabbing a hold of Dino's ear. "If you weren't so useless at everything, your family wouldn't have thrown you out."

"I wouldn't be so useless at everything if you'd agreed to mentor me!" Dino can't help but blurt out petulantly. He seems to regret it as soon as the words leave his mouth.

"No, you would not. Your sort of disease is incurable by anybody but yourself. Enough. If I hear one more sniffle, see one more tear, I will—"

Shoot everyone here, he wants to say, but that's hardly child appropriate.

His voice trails off into an indecipherable grumble, and he turns away to carefully count to ten and not break the window. If Tsuyoshi were here—

No.

"Get in the car, baseball terror," Reborn says tiredly. "All of you, in the car. Dino, in the car. And learn Japanese, won't you? It'll make my life so much easier."

(He won't have anyone else dying—)

"Huh?"

"Close your mouth before I close it for you."

As they pile into the car, Reborn notices Tsuna eyeing the tires like he's thinking about slashing them, but before he can go any further, Reborn picks him up by the scruff of the neck and looks at him. Tsuna whimpers and, thoroughly satisfied, Reborn tosses him onto Dino's lap and shuts the door on them.

He takes a moment to breathe.

It's not the end of Yamamoto Takeshi. They will still be able to see him. Reborn will check up on him and make sure the guards are doing their job—and if they aren't, there's one happy gun, one hungry chameleon, and one battle-ready stag beetle waiting for them. Tsuyoshi's son won't be harmed. Tsuyoshi's son will grow up a baseball fanatic and do whatever the hell he wants to.

And—

Reborn snaps out of it. Just who is he trying to reassure right now?

He's just—

—Just talking to himself.

He looks down at his hands like it's the first time he's seeing them. He's an assassin. He doesn't need reassurance. But Reborn's no fool.

He knows all these thoughts are because Tsuyoshi had gone and flipped his world upside down and left it all jumbled up.

He quietly turns the key in the engine and drives away, because assassins should move on.

In the southernmost part of Japan, there's a child in chains.

He's a spiteful child, but he hasn't always been that way. He thinks his hatred for mankind began when his freedom was taken away, when the experiments begun, when the pain became too much to bear. When he was younger—and he is already too young—he loved chasing butterflies and fireflies and beautiful things. And now, he is the butterfly or firefly, being chased.

His chains rattle as he draws circles in his bed.

They call him Number 69, but his name is Rukudo Mukuro, or he thinks so anyways. He remembers it to be the last thing his parents shout at him before they were blasted to smithereens. Needless to say, memories of that day aren't visited often, so he can't be positive. But because his name is the only part of him that he owns, he clings to it like he clings to the light in his nightmares.

"Number 69. It's time."

The scientist calls to him in Italian, which he's picked up over the years since it's all they speak here. His fingers are shaking, but he stands resolutely, a defiant look on his face as he's led away.

But as they travel through the hallway, something crashes in the far distance, rocking the ground. Bits of the ceiling rain down on them, and people are shouting—An attack, they're screaming. Run for cover! His heart leaps in his chest.

The ceiling collapses, killing the man beside him and leaving him alone in the shaking hall. This would be his chance to escape—but he's still chained, and he won't be able to run very far. He struggles in vain to break his bonds and then—

Something warm falls from the sky, almost crushing him.

"Oh, I'm so dead… Reborn's gonna kill me; I'm so dead!"

Rokudo Mukuro struggles to sit up, and he finds himself staring into a pair of very frightened brown eyes belonging to a blond boy who must be no older than himself. Blood runs down his head, and his fingers tremble around a sleek, black gun.

"H-Hi," the dumb blond boy stutters in a horrible accent. "I—Japanese no."

He makes flapping motions with his arms that makes Mukuro want to take a fork and put it through his eye.

"I speak Italian," he says rather snidely.

"Oh thank the lord," the blond boy cries, grabbing Mukuro's hand. "I've screwed up so bad, do you know where we are, can we get out, or—or are you a prisoner, which means you don't know how to get out and so I'm screwed oh, oh, Reborn is going to kill me, oh GOD—"

The rest of the ceiling crumbles, and he has barely enough time to see the sky that he hasn't seen in years, and then Rokudo Mukuro knows no more.

…Hi. Hopefully people are still reading this lol. School and things. Health yadda yadda. Expect another long hiatus come January, but I think I'll be trying to do some more writing. Fanfiction and original. I didn't get to all the reviews for last chapter, but I read every single one (maybe more than once lol) and really appreciate them.

Action next chapter (hopefully)! Enough angsting over Tsuyoshi's death. Last scene will be explained in next chapter. Felt bad for just writing angsting, so put in some stuff

Happy New Year/holidays