Luce was the kindest woman known.
She would give the shirt off her back to the children shivering in the rain, her apartment to the homeless, her food to the hungry, her time to the abandoned – she was simply the most amazing being alive.
Not only did she have a heart of gold, she was beautiful. She had deep aqua blue eyes that saw through one's soul into their fears and strengths. She was a tallish woman with a slender build, her skin pale and a flower-shaped birthmark beneath her one eye. Her hair was black with a blue sheen, cut evenly at the bangs and yet coming together in the back to form a long tail reaching down her spine.
Not only was she good and beautiful – she was desolate, poor, and left in a situation that would make any other person weep their little souls out.
Her boss, who had raped her nine months ago and had then fired her, had found out about the child she carried.
As if hell had risen to smite down an angel, her boss had sent his gooneys after her.
Of course she had run – she would fight forever and a day for the life of her child, whether she had wished to be pregnant with it or not.
And she had fought; after some time of running, they had caught up to her and she had had to fight with everything she had in her. She was deceptively strong and she managed to hold them for a little while.
Yet there were two factors that ultimately played the mini-war into their hands.
One, she was outnumbered.
Two, she was nine months pregnant.
They left her bleeding and dying where they had beaten her, in a dirty alleyway between two rundown apartment buildings where the occupants within regularly ignored the cries of the pained or needy.
She felt the contractions and the agony sliding up and down her spine, a sensation like her body was being split in two.
Her baby wanted to meet the world. She was in labor.
And she wasn't even sure if she had the strength to deliver the infant.
She could just barely stay awake as it was.
Yet she had strength – more strength than any could have imagined from such a naïve-looking woman. It took looking into her all encompassing gaze to see her power.
She stared up at the sky, trying to relax and let the spasms push the tiny body out of her. She was sad that her baby would be born in such a dirty place and that she might not actually have the chance to even say 'hello' to the little darling – but at least her baby would be born.
After the beating she had just taken, it was a miracle as far as she was concerned.
Not a cloud in sight and nor a storm to be seen, the sky was a calming abyss of blue. She focused on it, telling herself that her heart wasn't weakening in its pace, that her lungs weren't choking on blood.
She told herself that her baby was going to be born, and her baby was going to be healthy.
Something… shifted in the sky above, almost as if the endless blue haven had nearly dropped – had come closer to her.
She heard feet scuffling down the alleyway towards her.
"Hello, Luce…" A kind, warm voice uttered with undeniable sorrow and yet infinite familiarity. "I'm sorry… that this is how your life turned out… You were always such a good person…" There was a hitch in that last part, as if the speaker was trying not to cry.
The person came into view, a slender man with a wild head of bronze locks and large, all-seeing caramel brown eyes. He wore a stainless white suit and held a fluffy blue blanket in his hands.
"If you'll let me…" He murmured. "I will do better by your child. I will make sure she has a good life that doesn't end in such a hellhole."
She tilted her head and smiled softly, wanly. "… She… You say 'she'… You know what my child shall be?"
She could see in his eyes something inhuman – something that had witnessed all of time and all of its tricks.
She was humbled that someone with such eyes would cry so openly for her.
The man smiled in turn. "No." He answered with pure honesty. "You know what your child shall be."
And she saw it in her mind; for one, brief moment, she saw a woman with a mane of pale black hair and kind blue eyes.
"… Did you do that?" She whispered in awe.
He shakes his head. "I can do a lot of things…" He admitted sheepishly. "But I can't tell the future."
A contraction stole the breath from her lungs as well as the question on the tip of her tongue.
She wondered, then, if he was telepathic. He knew without asking what she had meant.
He kneeled next to her and helped her onto the blanket; as she watched, he muttered a name – Yamamoto – and rain began to drip from the clear blue sky.
He murmured another name – Chrome – and mist traveled into the alleyway before departing, leaving a bucket in its midst and fresh towels.
He said one last name – Hibari – and a foreboding man with piercing gray eyes stood at the mouth of the alley with disarray black hair and a severe frown on his lips. Clouds boiled in the sky above and the rain fell a little heavier.
Not a drop touched her.
Her savior turned to the lonesome man and something like silent communication occurred. The man turned and disappeared.
The clouds galloped to the west. She vaguely remembered that that was the direction her attackers had fled in.
He stroked back her hair. "But I have a little brother who can." He conversed, as if there had been no interruption or weather change. "Or at least he could. When he was a child, he could go forward in time; now that he's older, the only thing he's interested in doing is going back. He doesn't have much faith left in the human race… Ah, but there was a child he found about five years ago that has made him seem curious about how the life of your kind is going."
He spoke easily as if referring to the human race as not his own species wasn't odd in the least.
Because she had seen that look in his eyes, she didn't find it odd either.
Conversation dwindled off as spasms took the last of her common sense and the pain the last of her resolve.
The man was murmuring nonsense to her, as if he understood she needed no words to push harder, but only the knowledge of another's company.
On the brink of death and on her last ebb of strength, she bore a child into the world.
She looked at her mucus-covered body, a creature more resembling an alien than an actual human so soon after birth. For a moment, she thought her baby was dead – that the beating she had taken had ended her life.
The man tickled the baby's chest, cooed incoherent words, and she saw something like fire race from his fingers into her baby's breast.
Perhaps any other who had seen such a thing would immediately assume 'demon'.
She saw the humility and relief in his gaze as her baby drew its first breath. "Would you like to hold her?" He whispered.
She looked at him and she saw neither 'demon' nor 'angel'. She looked into his eyes and she saw the ever expanding embrace of the sky.
"… Just once… If you could help me…" Her vision was graying.
The man helped her to sit up and wrapped her arms around her tiny baby.
She did not ask why he did not try to save her own life in the way he had saved her baby's.
The answer was in the way his hands shook, how his smile quivered, and in how his eyes watered.
He couldn't.
This was a sacrifice; her own life for the life of her child – a transaction that occurred without any words.
They both seemed to hold the same type of hyper intuition, she noted with a dying smile, her eyes glazing open.
She gazed at her baby one last time.
She would be strong and beautiful, she could tell. She would be a leader and a sister and a magnificent being.
She would live.
It went without saying that she loved her infant child with last of her beating heart.
And then she died, a storm approaching from the east with light thunder while the rain above trickled a little more forcefully and the mist thickening outside the alleyway. The clouds to the west were highlighted in red. The sun above and the brightened sky stared down upon her with warm generosity.
Author's Note: In case no one has caught on, this series is basically the Vongola guardians finding and guiding the arcobaleno instead of vice versa.
In this case, Tsuna helps Luce give birth to Aria.
In regards to the saga, this is five years after Lambo finds Reborn and five years before I-Pin meets Fon.