Love is cruel. Truly, it is as simple and as harsh as that. Love is a coldhearted bitch that just revels in broken hearts, a sadistic and deviant teacher that hands out the questions to which there are no answers.

Love is what drove people to go insane.

Luckily, there is Lambo for the lovesick fools of the Vongola family. He also happens to be one of those lovesick fools, but his brand of cure depends on others to come to him. To open up to him. To use him.

To fuck him into a void of no emotion while they themselves imagine another in their arms, writhing and begging. They use their minds and he uses his body. He will be anyone they want him to be as long as they will play at it hard, make him bleed, make his mind fuzzy and his breathing uneven.

Make him hurt. Because that is the love he wants.

… iIi …

Ryohei comes to him, all energy and shit-eating grins as he screams about the extreme weather, the extreme mission he has just returned from, and how hungry he is to the limit.

Lambo feeds him, cooking up a good, nutritional lunch for the middleweight champion boxer. Ryohei screams a little more about how extremely good the food is, about how Lambo should train with him to the extreme, and even goes on to brag about how Hibari is going to –

The conversation ends abruptly there. Ryohei finishes his food in eerie silence that Lambo doesn't break, quiet with understanding.

Hibari, he knows, shares a one-sided love with the 'king of herbivores', as he had so long ago dubbed Tsuna. The 'king of herbivores', however, shares a wedding band with Kyoko. Now Kyoko Sawada (Sawada, Kyoko, if they're in Japan).

Nonetheless, Hibari pressures on the side, damning the legal documents to hell and not too subtly fighting for his own wants. Because Hibari isn't one to snivel in the background as his desires walk away from him, nor is he one to share. He is silent, certainly, but his actions are profound and he hides his goals from no one. Not even the wife. Kyoko, Lambo knows, often goes to bed with dirty dreams of her husband and Hibari making love on their bed.

At one point, she had ashamedly admitted to him that Hibari had – in one of her dreams – allowed her into their 'fun'. Cheeks stained red, she had murmured that she had woken up… wet.

Tsuna, no matter his wife's inclinations or Hibari's demands, remains completely and utterly faithful.

And it tears Ryohei apart, really, for two reasons.

One, Hibari's advances are messing with his little sister's mind, twisting her pure thoughts into 'what would happen if Hibari bends Tsuna over the nearest horizontal (or vertical) surface?'

Two, Ryohei wants to bend Hibari over the nearest horizontal (or vertical) surface. Maybe no surface at all. Maybe even have Hibari bend him over.

Lambo cleans the dishes, Ryohei glaring at the spot where his plate had once sat. When done, he turns the faucet off.

And then the lights.

He slides onto the island counter, situating himself in front of Ryohei with feet planted on the ledge, stretched apart.

Because Ryohei loves Hibari, he isn't gentle as he grabs Ryohei by the throat and drags him to him, planting their lips together so that their teeth clack together and their tongues entwine in a losing battle.

Ryohei is with him for a long moment, possibly equaling eternity, before he rips his mouth away and bites down on his jugular with enough force to split the skin. His bandaged hands drag at Lambo's hips and pull him off the table, just enough that Lambo is half-suspended with his shoulders digging painfully into the marble counter.

Ryohei flips him onto his belly, saying nothing as Lambo wheezes with the sharp, cold rim of the table digging into his lean belly. His feet shakily touch the floor, knees buckling in his dazed state.

Hibari is a selfish, merciless specimen of a man. One that feels little pain. One that demands everything and gives nothing.

So he bites back his scream of agony as his pants and boxers are torn a moment before he is horribly violated, thick, dry heat invading his unprepared entrance.

Instead, he fights. He manages to shove Ryohei down on a stool and steal the pace from him, doing what he wants to do. Whispering things that would make any other fear their imminent death. Demanding that Ryohei touch him, give him pleasure, or else he will leave him here.

Ryohei listens to all of his orders with feral growls and loud moans. He tries to kidnap the tempo of their hips slapping together and Lambo grabs a misplaced knife on the counter as a result. He cuts a jagged line down Ryohei's arm before stabbing it cleanly through his palm.

Ryohei screams. Inside of Lambo, his cock becomes thicker, hotter. Needier.

He continues to dole out punishments for every time Ryohei attempts to take control, to dominate him.

By the time he comes across his lean belly, his chest darkened from his harsh breathing, Ryohei is a map of scabs and slashes, eyes bright and sightless in the aftermath. He comes endlessly inside of Lambo. Against his ear, he whispers Kyoya…

They clean up after themselves. Lambo disinfects Ryohei's wounds and Ryohei runs a hand towel over his body to erase the marks of semen and blood.

Ryohei, content, leaves in silence.

Lambo, no longer Hibari, begins to shake.

Because it hurts.

… iIi …

He follows Yamamoto without a word into the study. Gokudera is left behind to admire his Tenth at work, occasionally throwing in a comment or helpful criticism (hard to believe that he had refused to utter a single word against Tsuna in the old days; now he works on improving Tsuna to the best of his ability; because that it was Tsuna wants more than a silver pet).

Yamamoto is hurting. His grin is fake, his nails are cutting crescent marks into his calloused palms. He poses in front of the fireplace, staring at the unlit logs. He rests an elbow against the ledge atop the masterpiece with his other hand shoved in his pocket.

Lambo locks the door behind him and shuts off the lights.

Gokudera is in love with no one. He simply loves Tsuna to obsession. But not the kind of love Hibari and Kyoko share for their small, wise boss. He wants Tsuna to be his older brother, his baby brother, his father, and his son. He wants Tsuna to be his everything, but not his lover.

Because Gokudera simply can't see Tsuna in that light. Tsuna is God. And God is untouchable. At least in that aspect.

And because God is a jealous being (though he really isn't), Gokudera never spares a single romantic thought for anyone.

And that is what clutches Yamamoto's heart with frozen claws, slowly but surely piercing the organ's lobes and bringing the swordsman's life to a close.

The more Gokudera denies his love, the longer Yamamoto spends in the dark. He strives for Gokudera, his moon in the star-filled sky. Tsuna, Ryohei, Hibari, Haru, Kyoko, Tsuyoshi, and everyone else who mean something to Yamamoto… dull in comparison to the silverette. They are the stars that are nothing if the moon disappears.

And the moon is reaching its last waning stage. Left in the shadows of the night, Yamamoto will undoubtedly forget to see the stars.

He will become the monster the mafia can see buried in his once feather-light heart.

Because love is maddening, of course. Because it hurts.

So Lambo wraps his arms around his waist and leans his head against his back. Gentle. Without complaint. Almost shyly and yet with confidence.

Because that is how Gokudera loves Tsuna. And though Yamamoto wants a different sort of love from Gokudera, he wants love nonetheless.

Yamamoto tangles their fingers together and (eyes shut, perfecting the illusion) kisses each of his fingertips.

Eyes still shut, he turns around in Lambo's arms and kisses his forehead, trailing inquisitively down until the contact of lips is accomplished.

He travels further down, nose brushing aside Lambo's collared, button-up shirt (and, really, it can't be that hard to imagine it to be Gokudera's because Lambo purposefully wore the same brand, if not green; but Yamamoto isn't looking, so what's color to mean?). He nibbles and teases his throat and then his collarbone, murmuring between each suckle of snow-white skin, alabaster flesh…

Lambo's skin is pale caramel. Light beige. Not white. Not even relatively close.

Yamamoto lays him down on the floor (because finding the couch would mean opening his eyes and that would break the spell he has cast over himself) and Lambo eagerly – so eagerly because that is how Gokudera serves Tsuna's needs – undoes his clothes, casting them aside with impatience. Almost rough in his rush, but not quite.

Yamamoto is slower with him, a small half-smile on his lips as if he can imagine Gokudera's every word, every action in his mind and Lambo is blending in perfectly with his unreal silverette. His fingers dance and twirl and so does his tongue.

He has Lambo come twice before he even enters him. He comes a third time and then tiredly has a fourth mini-gasm while Yamamoto experiences his first climax.

The swordsman wilts over him, still silent. Still dreaming while awake.

When he opens his eyes, he's close enough to Lambo that all he can focus on is his gaze. He keeps smiling. Because Gokudera's eyes are green too, if they're caught in the right lighting and the right mood. And, apparently, this is the right lighting and the right mood.

They kiss again and Yamamoto rumbles against his lips I love you, Hayato.

When they clean themselves up and Yamamoto leaves, Lambo begins to shake. Because he isn't Gokudera either.

And it hurts all over again.

… iIi …

The day Hibari steps into his room, unannounced and yet very well informed, Lambo believes he will finally reach that peak he needs to forget himself.

He turns out horribly, horribly wrong.

He had thought S&M, perhaps some role play and definitely some spirit-breaking. He squeezes himself into the role of his wise and soft-spoken boss, 'big brother', and dear friend. He becomes the modern-day Tsuna, the one that is Vongola boss and savior of thousands.

And Hibari slaps him. That isn't the Tsuna he wants. Give me my Tsunayoshi.

He isn't sure exactly what Tsuna that is. So he plays for the younger version. The one that had only enough backbone to thank Hibari for fighting with them and yet not enough to be fearless in the other's presence.

He stutters. He blushes. He begs.

Hibari tumbles him onto the bed and – sweet, gentle, wanting and most certainly soft. He makes love to him – to Tsuna, really – in a way that not even Yamamoto has accomplished.

He worships him. He keeps him on the edge of his orgasm for a good hour, ignoring his pulsating need and his twitching entrance as his eyes miraculously transform caramel skin into pale peaches and sable black locks into a gravity-defying mass of copper. Lambo's gaze ceases to be green and instead becomes bronze. It helps that Lambo is a teenager, that his frame is slim and seemingly undeveloped. That his body looks a lot like what Tsuna's had appeared as whenever he had been sent into dying will mode.

The amazing tricks of the mind that acquired fantasy, somehow aided by truth.

He gasps. He whimpers. He cries out and he wriggles. He begs.

He screams.

Hibari enters him and everything that follows that action lasts so much longer than the torture that had occurred beforehand. He keeps Lambo going until he wants to pass out, until he is so done with wanting that he wants to die, before he strikes like the predator hidden in the unknown and sends him tumbling over the edge.

He follows not too long afterward.

Once done, Hibari isn't so kind as to help him clean up. He smoothes out his suit, ignores the blissed-out teenager on the bed, and leaves.

Lambo knows that he won't be coming back. He has scratched his itch, played out his greatest desire, and now he is fueled to fight again, clean of the healthy and yet cursed (or at least cursed when love is unrequited) hormones that men on Viagra wish to have without the pills.

Hibari will now last another ten years before another itch emerges. Perhaps then he will return.

Perhaps then he won't have to.

When his mind settles, he is starkly aware of the fact that he has been stripped of his persona of Tsuna.

And he shakes. Because it hurts even more.

… iIi …

He comes knocking, trembling because it is now his turn to imagine. To wish. To pretend.

The door hidden by debris cast by the sea and sand releases a dying wheeze before sliding open. He travels down the ladder, one foot and one hand after another.

When he settles on the bottom floor, he goes through the routine.

Take off your shoes. Done.

Take off your clothes. Done.

Place your horns and Vongola ring in the cubby. Done.

And then come to me.

Bare to the underworld of metallic walls and cold floors, to a no-longer-covert surveillance system that trails after him with mocking in their black lenses, he takes to the corridors.

He steps into a control room, the air near sweltering. A crocodile that swallows up the space of the floor cackles at him, reptilian eyes tracking him.

The large swivel chair set in front of the surveillance screen swings around.

Verde taunts him with rusty eyes behind oval glasses. With a crook of his finger, he calls him over.

Like a well-trained pet. Which he most likely is.

The damnable crocodile slides after him, jaw gaping open. It misses Lambo's heel by an inch, teeth clasping audibly shut with purposeful intent.

Verde pulls him into his lap, knees drawn on either side of his hips. He eyes Lambo's body, making sure that it is as perfect as the last time the teenager came to him.

He prefers nothing less than perfection, after all.

When Lambo passes inspection, he begins the night with his first order, just as the crocodile lifts its long snout towards Lambo's unprotected calf. Scream for me.

When Lambo leaves somewhere towards morning, he is shivering.

His crème cutoff pants are quickly dyed red as he redresses. His cow-print shirt doesn't fare off much better. He limps, because his one leg refuses to support him and his canal has been thoroughly abused. Not only by Verde's (more than willing) cock, but also by various machinery and probes.

The crocodile follows him out, hissing as he stares longingly at his job-half-done. The fact that he is on the beach instead of stalled by the ladder assures Lambo that the reptile has another way out.

And yet it really is the furthest thing from assuring.

He crumples in front of his motorboat that will lead him back to the mainland, back to Japan where he will stumble and crawl all the way to a hotel so Nana doesn't have to see him as is.

He fingers his swollen lips, bottom lip split open and the corner of his mouth tender to the touch. The fault of another probe, really. Verde isn't one to use his own fists.

He shuts his eyes, imagining, for just another moment, just as his friends suffering unrequited love do, that he isn't leaving Verde. That it isn't a crocodile resting its heavy head against his back.

He visualizes eyes and hair of raven black, skin like alabaster and a soul like a twisted light through a bloodstained room.

He imagines a veiled chameleon with an archaic grin.

For the moment he achieves true disillusionment of reality, it doesn't hurt.

And then the crocodile snorts in his ear, a webbed paw resting against the small of his back and the reptile creeping up his spine as if he plans to flatten Lambo to the ground.

He gets in his boat, pauses a moment to let his mind lose its blackened edges and let his stuttering heart calm (perhaps a false identity and a hospital trip would be better than a hideaway?), before pulling away from the isolated beach and making his way inland.

When he remembers that Verde isn't him, that the crocodile isn't a lizard, it hurts more than ever before.

… iIi …

His injuries are worse than what he first supposed them to be.

By the time he wakes up from a self-induced coma (the doctor murmurs that some patients do that when they are facing heavy physical and mental trauma), he has officially worried Nana (who he had been supposed to stay with) and therefore drags Tsuna into finding him.

When his eyes open, Tsuna is standing over him. Not quite crying, but he looks as if he could have been if not for the fact that no tears have fallen.

He has the medical report. And he wants answers.

Despite his inability to deny his big brother, he finds the will to now. How can he give answers to questions that are not supposed to exist?

He can not explain why it seems he has been sexually active since age 15 (approximately two years ago, though his body build has changed little), or why is appears that he was repetitively raped before he had stumbled into the hospital under a false persona.

He can not explain what is wrong. Not while what is wrong with him stands in the doorway before the Tenth, black eyes burrowing into him with the answers imprinted in their soulless depths.

After more interrogation, Tsuna leaves.

The twisted light through the bloodstained room remains.

He doesn't say a word. He merely stared at Lambo, seeing his dirty soul with obvious disgust. The sneer is in his eyes, not on his lips.

In the few moments he bothers to direct his disapproving glare at Lambo, he crumbles whatever is left of his pride.

And he begs. Kill me. Because his love will never be returned.

There will never be a night where he will be loved for who he is. He will always be someone else. Or he will be no one at all. But he will never be Lambo.

He will never be Reborn's.

In his last, most painful rejection, he is left to his own fractured thoughts. Not dead.

The twisted light abandons the room and it really is nothing more than scarlet, crimson, red everywhere. There are bodies too.

They all look strangely like him.

… iIi …

Ryohei is the first to abandon him. Hana has eased his pain and, though a far cry from Hibari, she is what he needs.

And then Yamamoto. Not because Gokudera has suddenly realized his love for the 'baseball-idiot', but because he has finally lost the moon in his star-filled sky.

Gokudera is the one who has to shoot him to save the small town outside of Vongola HQ. He cries. And then he realizes his love for the swordsman, the man who has always unconditionally loved him and supported him through the years.

Really, it turns out to be a reversed Romeo & Juliet legend, one where death comes first. Except Gokudera doesn't die.

Tsuna doesn't let him die. Instead, Gokudera rests in an endless sleep connected to robot so that he can at least breathe and have his heart beat. When he blew himself up, he did an amazingly good job.

Kyoko divorces Tsuna, not the other way around. She does it with a smile and there is relief on both ends. Because, really, they can finally stop having to worry about Tsuna being raped by his cloud guardian the moment her back is turned.

Now he can do so no matter which way she is directed.

That night, Hibari is in Tsuna's bed. And some of the nights afterward. Usually, Tsuna is in his bed.

His last lifeline offers him an ultimatum, knowing that all the cards are in his hands and that Lambo will do anything he asks just for his brand of punishment.

He disappears off the face of the earth for two years. The Vongola family searches and digs and threatens, but they get no leads.

Tsuna's intuition can't lead him to the person he desperately wants to find because the person he desperately wants to find… is dead. Heart, soul, and mind, though not body.

How is he supposed to find someone so lost that they do not even exist?

Verde takes him apart, piece by piece. A scientist. A sadist. He just wants to study Lambo from the inside out, not really from the outside in.

Two years after his disappearance, Verde slips up by demanding inert metals capable of withstanding electrical shock. They also have to be strong enough to hold down a young, unstable man.

Verde is forced by Tsuna and company to reveal Lambo's coordinates.

Reborn's gun is pressed to his skull as he does so. Leon isn't smiling. Then again, none of the family is either.

Lambo is, when they find him, suspended in a tank of clear, pure liquid. An oxygen mask is connected to his face and a T-surgical cut is apparent form his chest to his naval.

When they cut the chords and free him, he still doesn't wake up.

He continues to sleep for another nine months in which even Gokudera wakes up before him. Screaming.

Dr. Shamal, he hears later, has to slap Gokudera across the face to knock some sense into him. Six times as a matter of fact.

He undergoes therapy – both for the mind and the body (it is difficult to move after more than two years of stillness).

When Lambo does wake up, it is to the strangest sensation of lips on his. Unfamiliar lips. Like clovers and coffee.

And then Leon hisses happily from his overgrown mound of hair.

A hand covers his eyes before he can open them. The mouth remains, tongue slipping into his orifice, dominating his own sluggish pink muscle.

He falls back asleep to that feeling.

His eyes open again to having Tsuna congratulating him on surviving for two years as Verde's lab rat and waking up. This time, he is crying.

Gokudera is in the corner, a shadow of his once great self. Skin grey and bones apparent, he is like the crypt keeper instead of Tsuna's formerly proud right-hand man. A cigarette is shivering on his lips.

Ryohei is in another corner, extremely ecstatic to see Lambo finally awake. He explains to Lambo, once Tsuna is done fretting over him, that he is officially a married man… to the extreme.

Hana keeps him happy. Keeps him sane. Keeps the cold-hearted bitch with all the questions and no answers at bay.

Gokudera leaves. Lambo understands because it hurts to hear of someone else's returned love when same love eludes others.

It feels like days later before he has a second to himself.

And in that second, the twisted light returns to the peeling room with rotten, bony corpses.

Reborn is in the doorway. And then at his side.

And then on his lips, down his throat, stretching his out-of-practice entrance that has decidedly become virgin tight all over again.

When the deed is done and semen coats Lambo like globs of snow, Reborn uses Lambo as his pillow as he takes a nap, black eyes open and yet sightless.

Lambo holds onto him, tightly as he can without waking him up, and stares at nothing in particular.

Because it hurts. But, in the first time in forever, it hurts… in a good way.

He finally has an answer to one of the unanswerable questions the cruel emotion love has asked him. Are you wanted for you?

Whether or not Reborn had made love to him out of love or out of punishment for his past stupidity, he can at least honestly say that, yeah, he is wanted for him.

He knows because, when Reborn came, stupid cow tumbled from his lips into Lambo's ear. And there's only one stupid cow in Reborn's life.

Lambo.