Title: Apotheosis
Characters/Pairings: Daniela Vongola (Vongola Ottavo)
Summary: She was not born to lead the Vongola. But she did it anyway.
Notes: Teen. For Round III of KHRfest, prompt III-77. Daniela Vongola – apotheosis. 2252 words.

Apotheosis

The man who would become her right hand only asked her whether she was sure of what she proposed to do once. Taddeo's eyes had been dark and serious when he fixed them on her. He had not asked out of any misguided sense that Daniela did not know her own mind, so she gave his question the careful consideration it deserved. "Yes," she told him. "I'm sure."

And he did not ask again.

Daniela Vongola had not been born to become the leader of the first of the mafia's Families, nor had she given the matter much particular thought as a child. Her earliest memories were of adults who murmured to each other of a war to end all wars, but she did not feel its effects in any noticeable way. She and her brothers were the favored children of a favored family, after all.

She had four brothers, and no sisters; she grew up knowing (as they all did) that her oldest brother, Filippo, would be the one to follow in their father's footsteps, to take up the ring of the Vongola and call himself the Eighth. It was not a matter Daniela concerned herself with, really; she came of age during the giddy post-war years and had her debut in a whirl of glittering parties. She made a marriage that was, if not brilliant, then satisfactory to her parents and herself, and then had a son. With that, she settled down on her husband's estate to raise him in the appropriate fashion.

Hers would have been an altogether unexceptionable life, had it not been for two events that interfered with its orderly progression. First, the war that was supposed to have ended all wars didn't. Second, both her father and her eldest brother died at unseemingly young ages, within a week of one another, and threw Daniela's whole world into chaos by doing so.

Like many of the men Daniela knew, her husband went off to war. Like many of the men she knew, he did not come home from it. She mourned him, as was only proper, changing the bright colors she had been fond of for sober black, and went on as she had done in his absence. Their estate and its lemon groves would not manage itself, after all, and Timoteo was a very small boy still, far too young to be burdened by his rightful responsibilities.

And so Daniela found that she rather liked the responsibilities that she was forced to take up, much as many widows before her had when unusual exigencies thrust them into roles normally reserved for men. She also found that she was rather good at her new job. It was a surprise, though a pleasant one. So Daniela threw herself into the business of managing Timoteo's estate with a good will, so that his future would prosper even in the midst of difficult times.

It might still have ended there, if her father and Filippo had not died. Filippo went first, through circumstances too purely stupid to have been anything but accidental. He had always been fond of driving fast and had always managed his car skillfully, but his luck ran out on a damp day, when the pavement was wet and slick and a broken gate had permitted a flock of goats to escape their pasture and wander across the road at precisely the wrong moment.

Daniela always suspected, privately, that it was the utter ignominy of Filippo's death, rather than the shock of its suddenness, that really carried her father off after him. She supposed that she couldn't blame him for it, if that were the case.

Filippo had barely been buried before her father collapsed in the middle of a meeting--the one regarding which of his sons would be his new heir, in fact--clutching his chest and looking surprised.

All things considered, it was really rather inconvenient of him.

Daniela was reasonably fond of her brothers, though mostly dutifully so, since one was supposed to be fond of one's siblings. She had never been particularly close to her oldest brothers, growing up: Filippo had been so many years older than her that he'd been beyond noticing his baby sister, and Antonio had emulated him in that as he had everything else. Cosimo had been much closer to her age. They had squabbled and bickered as brothers and sisters did, but perhaps too much so: they had never particularly liked each other. Enzo, who was a year younger than she was, had been the brother she was closest to, because he had been a patient child, willing to let her play with him as she had played with her dolls.

Of all her brothers, his was the death she regretted the most.

Her last moment of naïveté was at her father's funeral, when those who could gathered in the church to hear the funeral mass and see the Vongola's seventh boss laid to rest with all the honors due him. She looked around at her brothers with their grave expressions and sober suits as they watched the coffin being lowered, and thought, We shall have to stand together now. The world was a mess and there were other Families who, she knew, would be happy to take advantage of the instability in the Vongola.

She did not expect that sort of opportunism from within her own Family, though she supposed, looking back on it, that she should have done.

Three days after the funeral, someone tried to kill Antonio. The attempt failed; the bomb detonated early. The only casualty was Daniela's niece, who had been playing in the courtyard while she waited for her father to come home.

That was enraging enough in its own right; Daniela could not begrudge her brother his fury or his right to throw the Vongola into a frenzy in his desperation to find the culprit, even though he had neither been formally named the Eighth, nor even gone through the trial of the ring. Their world was a harsh one, which she knew perfectly well, and generally accepted. Even so, there were lines that she felt ought not be crossed and lives that ought to be respected.

And she was growing very tired of attending funerals for the members of her own family.

The problem was that her father had been a traditionalist, and had looked to his firstborn son as the only possible heir to the ring. Filippo had been capable, intelligent if not brilliant, and would have made a perfectly good Eighth if fate had not intervened. Consequently, her father had not particularly paid attention to the capabilities of his other sons.

That had been a mistake.

While Filippo had lived and thrived, the rest of them had gone about their business. Antonio had managed the Vongola's business operations, and Enzo had taken advantage of his position as the youngest to do what he really loved, which was paint reasonably competent portraits of other pretty young men. And Cosimo, the middle son, had applied his brilliance to the negotiating table so well that the other Families winced to see him coming.

Daniela supposed that Filippo's death had been the moment that Cosimo had realized that there were more options available to him than that, and that there was only one life standing between him and the ring of the Sky.

The Vongola was at war with itself within a fortnight, split between the traditionalists who stood behind Antonio, the next-born son, and those who could see that Cosimo was clearly the more apt of the two of them and much better fitted to lead the Vongola. It was a stupid, ridiculous fight. Daniela wanted nothing to do with it and endeavored to stay clear of it. It was far better to stay on her estate, conferring with its manager over the harvest and other mundanities, and her only concession to the state of affairs between her brothers was to tell the men who guarded the estate to be vigilant.

Cosimo won. He was driven and smart; Antonio was slower, more thoughtful, and far less innovative. It did not surprise Daniela that Cosimo prevailed.

He immediately set about consolidating his position, which did.

She had thought that keeping herself neutral during her brothers' fight would make it sufficiently clear that she had no interest in the final outcome. Perhaps that would have done for Antonio. Cosimo, however, was suspicious, even paranoid, perhaps because of the very nature of his ascension to the head of the Vongola.

Daniela would have told him, had he bothered to ask, that neither she, nor Timoteo, nor poor dreamy-eyed Enzo, had any interest in the ring that Cosimo claimed. But he did not ask.

The Sky Flame was the Vongola's hallmark, though it was not unique to the Vongola. Daniela had grown up knowing about it and watching her brothers practicing it with their father. She had never considered the fact that she was Vongola, too.

There was, she thought later, a certain irony in the fact that her brother's attempt to secure his own position was the very thing that undid him, in the end.

Cosimo sent assassins for her and Timoteo, and for Enzo, all on the same night. He did not bother with sending the Varia; he sent Vongola foot soldiers, perhaps because he expected no resistance. It was certain that they met none when they found Enzo. When they came for Daniela, they found the handful of men she employed alert and ready. Nevertheless, there were more of them than Daniela had people.

When they had fought their way through most of the men who defended her and her son, Daniela saw that the faces of those who had come to kill her were the faces of men she had known in childhood. They looked guilty and ashamed of the work they had come to do.

She placed herself between them and her son--not yet ten years old, but slated to die for the sake of her brother's paranoia--and stared them down. Anger flashed through her at her brother's betrayal. As the man who led what remained of his little detachment raised his gun and said, "I'm sorry, I have to," her rage fed the first real flowering of her Will.

And Daniela said, in reply, "You will not," and caught fire.

"There has never been a female boss of the Vongola," Taddeo told her when the would-be assassins had crisped to ash or thrown their weapons down and knelt before her fury, eyes wide and amazed.

"Then I will be the first," Daniela said. Her Will was in her voice, and Taddeo did not try to dissuade her.

Instead, he nodded his head, and asked, "Where do we start, Boss?"

Cosimo had plenty of gall, but even he didn't dare proclaim himself the Eighth without enduring the trial of the rings first. That was where Daniela found him, standing with the most senior surviving members of their Family and a collection of their allies. He was not expecting her--and that was as it was supposed to be; she had supervised the call made by one of the surviving assassins herself--and turned pale when she strode in.

He always had been superstitious; perhaps he thought, at first, that she was a ghost. She hoped so.

"Sister," he said, when he'd recovered from his initial moment of shock. "This is a surprise."

"I know," she told him, and there, before the Family and their allies, she loosed her Will again. "I've come for the ring."

The fight between Daniela Vongola and Cosimo Vongola went down as the stuff of Family legend, as the confrontation between two equally stubborn Wills that both strove for what they thought was best for the Family. The truth was rather more prosaic: Cosimo was brilliant and ambitious, but his Flame was even weaker than their father's had been, while Daniela's was very strong, fed by her rage and her grief for the destruction he had caused. Cosimo was the better fighter, but she had the diamond-hard determination that he should not destroy everything that the Vongola stood for to fuel her Will, and that made up for her lack of skills.

Of all her brother's deaths, Cosimo's was the only one she did not regret. And it was the only one she brought about herself.

She never spoke of the trial of the ring to anyone but her son; even then, she only told him what he might expect from it, and nothing about her own experience. No one ever knew quite what passed between her and the shades of the seven bosses who had possessed the Vongola's Sky ring before she took it from her brother's hand, but they knew that she stood even straighter after it accepted her than she had before she drew it on.

Her Flame had been strong before the trial; afterwards, it was pure and actinic. She used it to weld the arguing factions of her Family together again.

The final piece of advice that Daniela Vongola gave her son Timoteo before she stepped down was very simple. "Be careful of your sons," she told him, gravely. "And choose your heir wisely."

Then she left him to it and returned to the estate her husband had left her. She spent the remainder of her days there, wandering through its lemon groves, and so passed into legend.

end

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