Sato slaps herself across the face. It's only when her ears ring and her neck burns that she realizes she'd forgotten to draw the fire out of her arms. "Oh, shit," She says. "I think I gave myself a concussion."

The thugs marching her through the compound exchange looks over her head.

"Are my eyes still purple though?" She pats her cheeks, then holds her hands in front of her eyes like goggles.

Neither of the men answers her.

She sighs. "We've been walking for ages. Are we there yet?"

"We've been walking for 2 minutes!" One of them finally snaps, knocking his gun against the back of her head.

"2 and a half you ignorant fuck." She hisses, then flinches. "Sorry, I'm still angry about the whole betrayal thing. Does he do that a lot? Okuri?"

"Are you kidding me?" The other thug snorts. "He'd sell you out for a blade of grass."

"Okay, I'll keep you in mind for when I assassinate the child."

The thug who had spoken pales, and his friend shot him a warning look—the gun digs deeper into her head.

"Shut up."

After Okuri had told his father she was a "cloud" (whatever that meant), he'd gestured for one of the thugs to take control of the gun in her back. "Bring her to the foyer, and get Hibari." The boss had rumbled, before turning on a shined heel and disappearing through the gates. Okuri hadn't cast her a second look as he slunk away, tail between his legs.

For what it was worth though, she'd figured out why he knew so much about chemistry: "A meth lab!" She yells delightedly, pointing at a building in the far distance. Its windows were propped open despite the snow thickening on its sills, the white blanket unable to hide the dead vegetation stretching from the building like a toxic shadow. There's a trolley of empty propane tanks beside the front door.

"What the fuck?" One of the thugs say. "Why do you know that?"

"One of my clients tried to lie to me about his operation. He was so stupid, don't lie to your lawyer? I am at your house, I can smell the fumes, no I don't want any tea, no I am not going to tell you why I know those pots are going to blow if you don't fix your tubing, but I am going to leave if you don't. Anyways, he lost custody of his kids."

"Fuck, you're weird. I hope the boss shoots you. We're here, take your shoes off."

Sato tears her eyes away from the meth lab and blinks up at the house they'd walked up to without her noticing. Its 3 stories, beige walls, and layers of sloped terracotta roofing. It reminds her of Italy, but as though she were looking at it in a mirror. Inverted; off somehow.

'Don't let them take you to the secondary location.'

She flicks her eyes at the gun pointed at her head. The thug is glaring at her.

She crouches and begins undoing the laces on her boots. She's on a veranda. Though the front door is closed against the elements, voices spill out of a nearby window. She recognizes one as the boss, and the other as the old man who'd walked with her: Hibari Hajime.

"You're certain she's a cloud?"

"Her eyes glowed purple. I don't know where my useless son found one, but…can you train her?"

"They're not the sort to do well in captivity."

Sato unthreads her shoelace. Hiding her hands with her body, she loops it to a more manageable length.

"She's a child, 7 at best. It'll be easy to train the loyalty into her, and the mouth out."

"And if that doesn't work?"

"We'll keep her here till she imprints on the territory. I'm asking you because you're the least likely to be injured during the settlement period."

Sato kicks off her boots. The thug with the gun had relaxed, caught up in arguing with his partner. She turns slightly, trying to see if the other one was armed: her lips thin. He was.

"Hm. What about her passport? Identity?"

"She's an orphan, we'll just 'adopt' her, same the rest."

Sato pumps the fire into her legs and snaps the laces taut. She spins on a heel, looping it around the gun and wrenching it down, then to the side—the gun is ripped from his grip. She lunges for it and ('Too slow, not enough time to turn around—') shoots through the gap of her elbow, behind her. It cracks into the armed thug's knee cap.

The recoil turns her momentum around and she slams onto her back. The hand holding the gun is hurled upward, still in motion, and ('I need more time. Distraction?') she fires it into the air.

The thug she'd stolen from jerks away from her, and the other screams, curled around his leg. She sets her feet flat on the ground and hurls herself upward. The door opens behind her.

One leg slides back, and by the time she's upright, she's already kicking off with it. She bolts, the field flying past her in a jagged streak of green and white.

She's nearly at the gate when it happens. She doesn't remember falling, but as she hits the ground with her forearms and skids 50 feet on the side of her face, the gun spinning out of her grip, she's just glad she remembers anything at all.

She lays there for a long time, clouds spilling from her lips as she pants. It reminds her of a steam engine. She can't feel her legs. The sky spins, overcast and rippling like a reflection in a pond—it dips down to kiss the horizon, and her eyes unfocus trying to follow it.

Her ears are ringing.

She's going to throw up.

She can smell blood.

Shoes crunch on gravel, and in the corner of her eye, she sees a gnarled hand pick a staff off the ground.

"Old man," She murmurs. "Did you throw your staff at me?"

"Oh," he says, surprised. Then: "Oh." In disappointment. His voice sounds like its underwater. "You're the child from the delivery shop. Miki or something."

Sato turns her face into the cold dirt. The snow is melting around her, and she can feel the water rising slowly. It laps against her lips.

"Let me go."

There's a rustling noise as he shrugs. "Go."

She closes her eyes.

"I'm not going to settle here or work for him. I hate organizations."

"I thought you were a lawyer."

She smiles into the dirt. Her head hurts. "I wanted to go free-lance, you know. But I was one of their best." Her voice is thickening, slowing. "They wouldn't let me go."

"So you stayed?"

"So I got out the hard way. He lost an eye, and I took an insanity plea." She grins then, cheeks burning, and the water trickles into her mouth.

"Well," the old man says. More footsteps then, and a heavier set she recognizes as the boss. "at least you'll be interesting."

"No," She slurs, vision beginning to fade. "I'm going to be a menace."

She spends the first few days recovering from a concussion.

"You're lucky," a woman says, shucking the covers off the bed beside her. She dumps it into a bucket full of soapy red water. The mattress is crusted red. Sato bends over the side of her bed and hurls. "The road rash all over your face isn't going to scar."

She can't see much of the infirmary around her headache, but she hears the bucket slosh as the woman takes it away. "What's your name?" The woman calls distantly, and there's the sound of running water.

"Sat—Mirai. My name is Mirai." The less this place knew of the name on her passport, the easier it'd be to escape.

"Have they talked with you yet, Mirai?"

Mirai snorts. She jangles the handcuffs keeping her attached to the bed frame. "Do they need to?"

"You did miss orientation. Well, there's no helping it." The woman's voice grows louder and she reappears cleaning blood off her hands with a rag. She sits on the bed beside Mirai. Her hands hesitate a moment before fingers are holding Mirai's hair out of her face as she throws up. The sour stench of bile is thick in her nose.

All she can focus on is how gentle the woman's hands are. Mirai chances a look at her and is disappointed to find a completely unremarkable face. She wouldn't forget it—she never did—but this woman would forget her.

"You're a cloud. That means you have cloud flames. Do you know what that is?"

She didn't. The woman tells her. After a while, she starts recognizing the terms—dying will, mafia, sun, cloud, rain, guardians, bosses, skies, Hibari.

The woman doesn't notice when she stops paying attention; when she stares at her hands and turns them over and over and over.

Her hands were small and soft, washed out by the winter weather. They were supposed to be large, ink-stained, slender fingers, and gold nail polish. They were supposed to be a brown richened by the summer that spilled through the windows of her corner office.

She balls her hands into fists and squeezes them shut. Her nails are too short to break skin. She had always kept her nails long.

"What I don't understand," The woman is saying. "Is how you awakened your flames so young."

"I guess," Mirai says. "I just really didn't want to die."

On day 10 she plunges her hand into a fire.

It hurts.

She's not dreaming.

She doesn't believe she's awake either.

There's a cafeteria. On day 12, she finds it's roof access and climbs over the railing. Her weight is on her heels, the only thing in contact with the roof. Her back presses into the metal bars, and they brand her through her clothes with ice.

She looks down and realizes: 'I'm not scared of dying.'

She stays there for a long time, the wind threatening to drag her down—she leans into it once or twice and waits. But her fingers don't shake, her breaths don't waver, her vision doesn't spot. She's not scared.

Her fingers are too numb to climb back over. She feeds the flame in her belly to them, coaxing them back to life. It hurts when they thaw.

She climbs back over and doesn't understand.

'I'm not scared of dying.' She thinks, and feels the flames settle in her fingers—it throbs there until her nerves wake up and the air condenses on her skin. 'So what am I scared of, for these flames to remain strong?'

She reaches out and squeezes one of the bars. It bends under the force. Her bones creak. When she opens her hand, its bruised.

On day 13, they give her a routine: Curfew at 8, training with the old man from 5 to 7. There are breaks in between for meals, and a guard outside her room. Anyone escorting her with a gun is to do so at a distance: she can see how the precautions rankle their pride.

It makes her smile, just a little bit.

Another precaution: she wasn't allowed to explore the compound until her loyalty was secured. They were hoping her boredom would work as an incentive.

It didn't. She uses the meal times to talk with other children—she learns their schedules, how long it takes them to walk between buildings. She learns where the buildings are relative to each other, and draws a map one of them confirms.

On day 14, she pays one of them with her desert, measures the length of their stride with a stick, and asks them to count the steps between each building.

On day 15, her map, hidden in a slit in her mattress, has measurements.

They don't send guards when she's training with the old man. He's teaching her martial arts. She doesn't know what discipline it is, but when she lands on her ass for the 5th time in 3 minutes, he sighs and starts with gymnastics instead.

She's terrible at it.

She can't use her fire—flames to help her. Excess force unbalances her. He's trying to curb her reliance on her flames early.

She's alright with that. As far as she could tell, the old man was the only one who could straight up block her flames—if he wanted to take away his advantage, he was welcome to it.

The old man is the one she spends the most time with. She talks a lot.

"What happened after the trial?"

"You were listening?" She asks, surprised—her handstand wavers, and he corrects her posture with a quick tap of his staff. He's sitting cross-legged in his garden, grass stains decorating his kimono. There's a cup of tea in his hands—behind her is a koi pond, lined with sea glass instead of rocks.

"You make yourself hard to ignore."

"He walked right up to me and punched me in the face. He broke my nose."

"Did you press charges?"

"…I didn't."

"Why?"

She scowls. Sweat drips off her face, throbbing in her ears. "I was busy."

"You're lying." He sounds surprised. (If she was lying now, it meant she wasn't lying before—about anything.)

"I framed his sister for murder. Dragging out the case would have increased the risk of me getting caught." She's still lying.

He doesn't call her out this time. Her posture wavers, and she falls. She plunges into the koi pond, bubbles escaping her in streams.

"…I felt bad." She says into the water, bubbles around her head, and a fish passes by without acknowledging her truth.

The old man pulls her out a moment later. He hadn't the last 6 times.

"Aw," She says, gasping as the winter dug its claws into her lungs. He hands her his teacup, frowning. Her teeth rattle as she shakes. "You care."

It takes her till day 20 to find out where the boss sleeps. Her guard likes to talk to his wife on his phone—he's complaining about something new tonight. About having to walk 10 minutes to the boss' house each day to turn on the heaters. It was fine when he used to be part of the guard around his house, but now that he was assigned to the cloud brat? Wasn't it so unreasonable?

Mirai agreed; it was. The length of her guard's stride is 3 feet. According to her map, there are 2 buildings 10 minutes away at that speed.

On day 22 she swaps t-shirts with one of the kids in the cafeteria— short black hair, brown skin, they look similar enough for her absence to go un-noted.

She grabs a newspaper off one of the guard's chairs before she leaves. When she gets to the boss' house, she walks right in the front door. She raises the newspaper in answer to any confused looks—she's not sure what they assume she's there to do, but they're too busy to think of stopping her.

She pours bleach in his toilet bowl and slides down the rain pipe beside his window to escape.

On day 23 the old man tells her one of the servants in the boss' house had died of exposure to chlorine gas.

"If you're going to assassinate someone," He tells her coolly. "Creativity isn't enough. Your method has to be specific to your target."

Lying on her back in the grass, she wonders if she imagines the note of pride in his voice. "You snitched on me." She says, a little disbelievingly.

"Consequences are best learned early."

She frowns at the sky. It's the weekend, at 6 pm. On weekends, their training ended early: at 5. She'd lost that privilege. Along with her meal times.

Well, she was still allowed meals—just not to go to the cafeteria. They'd moved her into the old man's accommodation, a one-story building with a garden larger than it was. Her world had become smaller, her confinements closer. It wasn't much of a punishment, but the boss had looked at her like he expected her to start crying: so she did.

"Why did I have to cry back there?" She asks.

The old man snorts. "You're a cloud. Having your territory reduced is supposed to piss you off."

She smiles slowly. "Is it? I can use that."

It takes her a while to realize that she and the old man weren't the only ones in his house—she's not sure why. She had seen the signs of abuse, knew Okuri wouldn't want to stay with his father no matter how badly he wanted his approval.

She just hadn't expected to see him walk out of one of the guest rooms, wearing an oversized t-shirt as pajamas and dragging a staff behind him like a security blanket. She gapes and the toothbrush falls out of her mouth. It clatters to the ground.

He blinks at her, then squints. "Hibari-sensei?" He calls. "I thought dogs weren't allowed in the house?"

Mirai is a 33-year-old grown woman. This does nothing to curb the fury with which she flings him 30 feet and into the koi pond.

(A/N) What are some fluffier moments you'd like to see in this story? This chapter is a little shorter to get the update ball rolling :)