AN:/ And now we start touching on the dark parts of this story. Changeling Child is my 'creepy and monstrous' dark fic, and this one seems to be leaning towards 'sad and lonely'. Sorry about that. Beta-ed by Tsurai as usual

Also, theres a poll up on my profile you should check out.

—

They set her up in one of the suites with a round the clock guard disguised as a doorman. It's partly for her own safety; if anyone were to figure out that they had a time traveler on their hands, very soon they wouldn't.

Not that it was looking like that would be a problem. She still didn't seem to remember anything useful.

"Could be an effect of time traveling. The universe's way of keeping the timeline complete," Reborn offers up afterwards, sitting in the Ninth's office.

"That's rather convenient of it," Timoteo says wryly. Reborn shrugs.

"The math checks out, and the medics are already running the DNA trace now," is all he says.

Both men are quiet for a while.

"And Iemitsu?" Timoteo asks eventually, crossing his fingers in front of his face and looking the assassin in the eye.

"Can't seem to decide what he wants to do, as usual," Reborn snorts.

The Ninth nods, thoughtful, before sighing.

"I suppose I will have to contact the Bovino to get some more information on what could have caused this. They are the only family currently dabbling in such a foolhardy science," he says, rubbing his temples.

"Are we sure? One of the other families could have thought to get a leg up on competition," Reborn asks.

"Which one? All the current families involved with research and development are still concerned with the rise of flame assisted weapons. Isn't that why the Bovino stopped their experiments in the first place?" the Ninth laughs.

"And yet we have a woman in the mansion who claims to be from the future," Reborn replies, "or at least it appears that she is."

The Ninth hums in thought, one hand on his chin, before rifling through some of his papers. On the wall, an old weathered clock chimes softly.

"Well, the best option I can think of currently is to have her return to Namimori. We will have to send someone with her, as a measure of surveillance, but we must keep it secret. If someone were to find out they might try to take advantage of her knowledge," he says finally, after the silence has stretched thin.

"Let me guess, it can't be someone officially affiliated with Vongola, for security's sake," Reborn mutters, pulling his hat down. Across from him the Ninth smiles.

"I'll owe you one," Timoteo says, and Reborn huffs. Both of them know that's not something he can refuse.

—

Nana sleeps fitfully, memories mixing with her nightmares like a particularly gruelling fever dream. In it she sees Tsuna, young again and rosy cheeked, standing tall in face of the burning shrapnel on the ground.

On her lap Lambo cries senselessly, tiny hands beating against her chest. The grim faces of her son's friends, his team, look young and vulnerable in the dim light.

She knows this isn't how it happened. Knows that she wasn't anywhere near this fight, that by the time the fighting got this bad her son was already an adult living on his own.

Still, the fear grips her heart, and she can see vividly how it would have gone down. Defiance in the face of death, hope to the last breath for all of them. The dream is soundless, besides the hiss of air that her brain translates to the roar of the fires set outside, but she looks up anyway when someone starts talking.

Chrome is older than the rest of them, having already seen too much to be a child when Nana met her the first time. She's wearing the torn clothing they found her in that last week, bloody hands clasped around a half-melted trident. She smiles at Nana and mouths something, before dissolving into shadow.

Without Mukuro to sustain her, half her body simply vanished. They had to have a closed casket funeral.

She hunches down and buries her face into dream-Lambo's curly hair. She doesn't cry, has used up most of her tears already, but she takes one gasping breath and lets it soak into the small body anyways.

Then she wakes up.

She blinks up at the ornate ceiling and sighs. Rubbing her face doesn't chase away the exhaustion any, but it forces her body to move and by the time she has scrubbed the dream away, she decides she might as well get up.

The room she is in is a warm and cosy one, filled with burnished wood furniture and thick golden carpets. The walls are a tasteful cream, the bed a soft yellow, and the windows large and bright.

It makes her all the more aware that for most people living in the mansion, it is a home, and not a just a workplace. She wonders if she should feel flattered to be included in the Vongola's inner sanctum.

She laughs a little to herself at the thought.

Try as Tsuna might, he had never been able to wash the bloodstains from Vongola. Hadn't been able to wear away the sharp corners and the hidden shadows. A Vongola without him would just be worse.

More likely they just want to keep an eye on her. She wonders at her chances of going home, of seeing her son, young again. She doesn't know how she should feel at the thought. She thinks back to dream-Lambo and wryly admits that he would probably have a better answer for her. Out of all of them, he was the only one who mourned sensibly.

Which might have been why he was one of the only ones to survive for very long afterwards.

She's been standing, staring at the wall with her hands on her hips for a while before the thought of leaving the bedroom comes to her. She's wearing her old dress, having forsaken the provided pajamas in exchange for something familiar, but she could dearly do with a shower.

She still smells like gunpowder.

She smoothes down a few wrinkles in the fabric and turns towards the heavy oak door. A quick peek outside has her facing an expectant face. It appears to be the same one that settled outside when she went in, even if there doesn't seem to be a hint of fatigue in the man at all.

"Yes ma'am?" he asks with a smile, in Japanese. "Would you like some breakfast this morning?"

She tucks a frown away from her mouth and, with practiced ease, smiles at him.

"Please. But first, if you would be so kind as to point me to the nearest bath…?" she murmurs, tugging her dress a little.

She gets a sympathetic look, that might be fake, and the man kicks off from the wall cheerfully.

"Of course, just this way," he beckons, waiting for her to exit the room before starting to walk down the hall. She wonders if Vongola is so hard pressed to find female members, or if they just didn't think of the awkwardness of having a male attendant.

At this point, she doesn't even care, as long as she can wash away the lingering feeling of her dream.

She doesn't have time to obsess over the past-future. Not if she wants to stop it from happening.

—

"I'm still not sure this is a good idea," Iemitsu says, voice coming out tiny from the phone. The Ninth hums in thought as he watches the dark form of Reborn accompany the willowish one of Sawada Nana.

"How old is your wife, Iemitsu?" he says slowly. There's silence on the line for a few seconds before the other man answers.

"She turned twenty-five in march."

The Ninth nods, even though Iemitsu can't see it.

"When we asked, she said she was forty-one. As far as I can tell she hasn't questioned why her son is only five."

There is no response.

"It is possible of course, that she is a plant or spy. But both of us know how unlikely that is," Timoteo says, tapping his fingers on his desk. A black car rolls out of the driveway and he watches it go, off to the airport.

"And time travel is?" Iemitsu says, voice rising. The Ninth rubs his chin and doesn't take his eyes from the road.

"Considering everything else? Yes," he replies, before sighing.

"Consider this, the DNA tests came back positive. Which means it's her, or someone engineered to be her. We can keep her locked up on suspicion, have to find someone to look after your young son, and possibly lose any sort of good will to what is almost conclusively your wife. Or, we could let her go back to her home and keep an eye on her."

"You mean so you can find out what she knows about the future," Iemitsu mutters, before sighing himself. "No, no, I get it. It's important we get to the bottom of this, without making any big waves. It's just. How are we going to explain to Tsuna what has happened to his mother? And where our Nana went?"

Timoteo laughs.

"You'll have to figure that out yourself, I'm afraid."

—

The plane ride over is awkward. Reborn is supposedly coming as an "escort", something she knows she wouldn't have blinked twice at fifteen years ago. Of course her husband's company would arrange an escort for her, considering how devoted he is.

She knows better now.

Reborn, for that matter, seems content to read his selection of Italian newspapers and flirt with the stewardess. She wonders how he deals with being physically a child in comparison to all the women he charms. Does he miss being able to have a relationship, or is that just another thing that the curse robbed him of?

Luckily, she has a large selection of in-flight entertainment to distract her, and no noisy children around to interrupt her. Mostly because Vongola has once again gone overboard and chartered a private jet.

"Oh my," she says, looking over the extensive selection of movies attached to her individual TV.

"Yes?" Reborn asks, turning towards her. She smiles at him and sheepishly shrugs.

"I just realised I can't remember if I have ever seen any of these. I might have, but then again, things are still so fuzzy."

It's not untrue. A lot of the small things from this time in her life are fuzzy, blurring together. Raising a child on her own was not conducive towards having the energy to notice things.

"If you would like a suggestion, 'Morrington's Downfall' is a superb piece of fiction," Reborn muses, flicking through the channels.

She joins him in browsing, and sure enough, 'Morrington's Downfall' is ranked first in the historical fiction category. She has to wonder if he had known that she studied history in university, with a minor in film studies, before dropping out.

It's probably in her file.

"That does look good," she says, reading the description. Part of her feels like she should try and continue the conversation, maybe about films since he seems to have some knowledge in that department.

Instead she plugs in the large and clunky headphones and starts the movie.

As she does, she can't help but muse on how odd the whole situation is. Of course, she has travelled fifteen years into the past, but she has had to get somewhat familiar with time travel just living with Lambo. No, that isn't the most odd part about it all, even if seeing the old Vongola was a shock.

It's the knot in her throat at the thought of seeing her son again. Of being able to hold him again, knowing as she does that he won't be what she remembers. It is quite likely that he won't ever be that child she remembers ever again.

After all, the only way back to her future is from the other side of the bomb. And no one's left to bring her back.

She watches the opening scene and hums. That's maybe not completely true. The Millefiore were still going strong when she left after all, but there's no one there that would be interested in retrieving her. She's not her son after all, and the only use she ever had to them was as leverage over the Vongola.

She wonders where her younger counterpart is. Not in the future that is for sure, or if she is, not for long. The lab would have been hot enough to melt bone after the bomb went off.

Perhaps she just ceased to exist. If that is so, Nana is a little sorry for her younger and more naïve self, but not enough to feel guilty about it. That version had buried her head in the sand for so long that she missed out on and left all her responsibilities on her son. She isn't sad to see her go.