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1. Rex
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The wrinkled face closes its eyes for a brief second against the pale sheet of the pillow.
“I shouldn’t have let him escape, that time. I shouldn’t have done it because I knew I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to seal him again. Please. I’m sorry to burden you with this, an old man’s problem, but do this before he damages himself beyond repair.”
Tsuna isn’t good at these things, he never knows what to do or if he can help and his arms are trembling at the thought of this responsibility as he bites his lip.
“I don’t know, what should I say? I don’t think he’ll listen to me.”
The old weathered hand, no longer laden with the ring but instead with age, hovers in the air before it gently, heavily, rests on Tsuna’s wrist. Timoteo’s plea continues silently through this strangely painful contact. Tsuna can’t look away from the old man’s eyes, this stranger who somehow chose him over his own son. He doesn’t know why, but it’s only in this moment, when his predecessor is touching him, that he feels like he gets it, that he knows why he’s the direct choice for this line of succession.
He tries not to shake too much when he takes the ninth’s fingers into his. What comes out of his mouth isn’t the denial that he was fully prepared to say, suddenly clear words blurting out on their own.
“I’m s-sorry you had to put your trust in someone like me.”
The Ninth only smiles, closing his weary eyes against the pillow while his successor stays for a while, silent, by his side.
-0-
Kindness was the last thing he could have wanted from anyone, and if there ever was one thing he could acknowledge of that Pretender, was that Tsunayoshi was the cruelest person to him that Xanxus knew.
“I don’t think you can ever be the Tenth.”
It doesn’t matter that he’s the Vongola head, Xanxus’ fist comes flying out automatically on its own, hands curling around the tiny collar of the other’s shirt as his fingers clench so hard he can hear his own knuckles begin breaking. The burning pain in his lungs starts again, ripping away his ability to think, like it always does when he’s about to go insane with rage at the sight of this...boy. The snarl at his lips as he almost shoves the brat against the wall is the only concession of violence he can make.
“Don’t give me orders like you’re better, you weak trash! How many years do you think you’ll live before some worthless upstart takes you down? The Vongola don’t deserve you.”
It takes Tsuna several swallows, but even as he’s trembling so much he can hardly stand, the look in his eyes is as steady as they were in his first declaration.
“Maybe they don’t, maybe I didn’t want to, b-but there’s nothing to be done. I’ll just have to become the very best I can. I didn’t say that to hurt you, i-it’s just the truth.”
He’s scared, for a moment, at the flicker of molten red that threatens to erupt and tear him apart, but the choking hold on his shirt is abruptly lessened as that crazed look never subsides. Tsuna can’t help but wonder at a man who could live feeling like this every single day. Suddenly, he understands Timoteo’s words.
He mumbles almost to himself, but not quite- “You should go see him before they ship you off for trial.”
There’s an eruption of heat so scalding Tsuna has to back away as a fist crashes through the wall where his face had been just seconds ago. Shards of splintered wood and paint crumble to the ground while blood, in splattered spikes across the gaping hole drip down like the wall was bleeding. Smears of thick red spread down Xanxus’ sleeve and onto the floor as flames engulf the man in one bright, cutting inferno.
The bitter laugh that rolls out almost cuts Tsuna with how jagged it sounds.
“Why? He was the one who betrayed me.”
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2. Et Tu?
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It’s hard to hear through the blasts of heat that nearly melt the walls and columns around them, but the Ninth’s words come across the wave of fire, as if the old man’s flame was sentient and speaking.
“Stop this foolishness! I can’t protect you anymore, Xanxus. You have to do that for yourself, now. If you keep forcing your hand I will have to take you down and the Vongola won’t forgive you if you keep defying them!”
The scalding red of the wrath flame brightens, flaring at the words that only fueled him on. Closer and closer, Xanxus steps towards his old man, eyes narrowed in concentration as his arm, still engulfed with his dying will, reaches out to touch his once father and rid itself of his biggest block.
“Stop acting like I betrayed you, old man! Your sad, worrisome eyes are pathetic. This is what you wanted to do all along, so don’t act like you regret it you senile hypocrite!”
This halfhearted shit geezer was still cranking it out mercilessly, and despite the waver in Timoteo’s eyes, there’s nothing but surety in his grip as suddenly, he snatches Xanxus’ wrist before he could burn that irritating face off. It’s the “I’m sorry” that’s inherent in his gaze that really enrages him. Contrary to Timoteo’s words, contrary to the ice slowly consuming his arms, his torso, his face- that look in the old man’s eyes, like he was crying inside, is the final cut that makes Xanxus loose all control.
He struggles fiercely, the flame coming from his body burning him up from the inside as he tries to pour out his soul in a conflagration of destruction. The red hot aura around him glows and smolders, fighting against the clear spikes that run jaggedly around him. Xanxus screams into the dark, abandoned by everyone with only this pathetic scum of a old man not even fit to be his father staring into his eyes with pity, and when the final remnants of ice crawl up onto his face, Xanxus vows to himself, that no one, no one will ever look at him that way again.
Encased, a glittering spectacle is left in the center of the foyer, drawing every bit of light in the dark room to the young, straining body within. Timoteo bows his head, the lines of age scarring his normally jovial face. His hand comes out to touch the glass-like sheen of his handiwork, and there’s something missing, dead and empty in his eyes.
“O my son, my son, would I had died instead of you, my son no more.”
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3. Keys to the Kingdom
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There’s nothing to do but stagger. For three hours he laid in the same spot, cold and blind in the stone recess of the unlit room, trying to learn how to breathe again, how to think, how to move. There’s still blood on his shirt, caked brown, from a fight he didn’t remember how long ago. Xanxus starts off at a crawl, body forced into movement because he refuses to believe in defeat, especially one as thorough as this.
He’d seen the scorch marks on the ice. Seven of them. There was only one person who was responsible for that, and his pity, his charity was something so disgusting it almost made Xanxus want to throw up from the thought that he was freed. That he was indebted to the man that did this to him was so abhorrent he wants to stay isolated, never to bare this shame for people to see.
Instead Xanxus makes it to the outside world. He takes one painful step at a time, tendons stretching their brittle selves and ligaments chalky from disuse grinding his joints. His journey is a short three blocks but it’s made into a lifetime until he stops at a phone booth. He dials for a cab and takes it to the only place he knew he could start his empire again. At the foot of the steps of a clean, modern apartment, he gathers enough strength to throw a rock at the door, eyes glaring as with that one tiny effort he’s exhausted.
When the door bangs open with a loud “VOIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!” He shoves himself inside at the unguarded shock on Squalo’s face and falls flat into the floor.
-0-
It takes him more than a day to recover, and during those long hours where he’s left alone, Xanxus almost severs his skin from his body with the force of his flame.
He can’t turn it off, it doesn’t matter that the trembling in his arms can’t stop, that his palsied legs won’t rise when he wants them too, that each second of him lying in his useless bed is a cutting reminder of one more betrayal coming from his own, human body. The flames keep rolling off of him and leech his strength, filling his veins with an ephemeral burn, boiling just beneath his screaming muscles. His eyes are still adjusting to the light so his curtains are kept shut to the world. He can’t look outside for fear of blinding himself, a leftover gift from the black pit his frozen body had been thrown into. He can only stare at the cream wall, the empty television screen, or the scars crawling across his hand.
He stares at his skin and nothing else.
The first day is the beginning.
-0-
As soon as he’s able he whips the empty glass in his hands into the wall of the hotel. There’s a burn in his arm and the screeching sound of shattered glass rings in his ears along with the angry scream from Squalo who stood in the doorway. His limbs move easy, now. He doesn’t wince at the light or jump at sounds he’s been unused to hearing for a span of eight years and the weak trembling that stole his might had all but disappeared.
It’s so satisfying, and suddenly Xanxus is laughing. He can’t stop throwing shit around the room. The porcelain lamp on the nightstand, the bottle of sangria on the tray, the silver bowl on the table, he flings it all around as the crashing tinkle of sound makes grating music in the air. Squalo’s hair whirls around, a two feet longer than he’s used to, as the sparkling shards dance around him in lethal crystal motes. Xanxus is forced to keep up the pace of broken objects just so he could make the other man dance and soon enough flames start to pour from his fingertips and lick up his arms while he keeps laughing.
“GET A FUCKING GRIP YOU STUPID BOSS DID YOUR MIND CRACK WHILE YOU WERE-”
All the motion in the room stops. The smothering red iris dominates everything into stillness as Xanxus steps closer to his subordinate, something hard and satisfied in his eye as he looks down at this pathetic fool who welcomed a once caged monster. To speak about his freezing in his presence was something he would never allow to happen again.
“Leave, or I will rip out your eyes.”
Squalo can’t believe what he’d just heard, pupils dilating in left over anger and the vaguest of fear as he, for once, sees his boss in a fit of uncontrollable joy and for the first time it scares the shit out of him. This was only the tip of the iceburg, Xanxus was only just released a week ago and if this was what he was like now, then what the fuck would he be like later? He knows there are times when it’s better to just leave him the hell alone.
“Yeah. Sure. Whatever boss.”
The clunk of a pair of boots retreating through the door makes him laugh again. He was here again, and before him all his petty subjects had done his will, even while he was dead to the world. It didn’t matter that Squalo had just told him that morning about a new successor. The marks of betrayal had long ago bored into him a lesson of never having expectations. He had to grab what he wanted himself.
They were going to give him what he’d been denied once, already. If he had to rip the ring from Timoteo’s cold, dead hands, he would chop off the corpse’s fingers and relish putting it on himself.
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4. Ara Pacis
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So many things about this boy and that man are the same- their gripping, apologetic expressions as they do what they are set out to do, the way they blindly follow each situation and place all their bets on faith. How Tsunayoshi bleats about his scum friends and the righteous indignation he feels that comes from never having sacrificed his lifestyle and dream are achingly reminiscent.
That easy comfort, that look, the way he gripped his gloves and calmly ripped away the power of Xanxus’ flame, he can’t stand the fucking sight of something so horrendous repeating right before his eyes almost sequence for sequence. He’d been made a fool of once and silently sentenced beyond the call of help. This time, it’s only that there are more witnesses to this humiliation that right now makes him loathe Tsunayoshi even more than the Ninth.
He can hate the boy for usurping his place, he can hate him for his weakness and his presumption, for doing this to him, but right as he’s slowly being sealed up again Xanxus can’t hate the look in Tsunayoshi’s eyes.
Freezing his will and taking him down, there was nothing but that supernatural calm, rid of regrets or mercy. Here, the boy is something Xanxus can finally understand. Here, is the only moment in time, when beyond the bitter bite of his own soul, he can almost acknowledge that Tsunayoshi’s will is something to be considered.
The message as he looks up into a pair of deadened eyes is “I’m not sorry.”
After the fact, it’s this one difference that strikes him, still.
-0-
Five years of sacrifice; quiet, caged, and alone- another five years.
The Varia were stripped from him, his loyalist supporters scattered across the globe. His trial was short lived, the piles of damning evidence and Cervello testimony sealing his long known fate. He was not allowed to leave the crystal cage to attend. Instead a contingent of suited men with trails of wire and an LCD screen set up a video com unit in the room. They have him relay and watch everything from his handmade cell.
The verdict simply pushed him down into the darkness of the Vendicare basement. There was no limit given, no time constraints. From the space of static between him and his accusers, he’s damned and transported without further thought.
Never knowing when it would end, he was trapped in time again, suspended in an ageless space. Dark chrome sheeting covered the outside room, dim blue LED lights glowing ethereal in the twilight of his prison. There were no windows, no people, only quiet tanks filled with bodies suspended in sleeping formation. He was the only one alive, trapped behind glittering bars of solid ice.
Though he could move and think and feel as the days go by, the difference between being frozen and being trapped was so fine a thing Xanxus wonders if this small pitiful consideration for him was really consideration at all. The days are waves that lap over him, slowly tick by tick wearing away at his skin, his eyes, his muscles, his soul. The first time this had happened he had been unconscious, and though his body was wreaked with numbness and screaming fatigue, his mind was not. At the end of a certain time, Xanxus stops feeling the mental irritation of being left here, and it almost frightens him, how much this lassitude of inactivity is breaking him down, one cell at a time.
At the end of a long stretch, he hears the doors creak open and spill the thread of light from the illumination of the staircase. When he turns his head it’s not the usual Mosca come down to bring him his dinner.
“The others are waiting upstairs, I came in the hall alone. I thought you wouldn’t want anyone to see you like this.”
That the boy is here, taller, less afraid, large eyes steady with the right of the just, can only mean one thing. He finally sees the handiwork of time give Tsunayoshi the bearing of a king, albeit a reluctant one.
“I didn’t know they would keep this up for so long. They didn’t tell me anything, I swear. I only thought it would be as long as until the trial began. Even if the Ninth had asked me or my dad I would never had done this to you again if I knew.”
Somehow, it doesn’t burn like it used to. It’s the anger, the quick jerked motions of this small Vongola head as he crushed the thick, clear bars of his cage that strike him at his core. The deep wrinkles in his young face as his eyes emote all the frustration and guilt that’s built up over months of litigating and worrying, which tells Xanxus more about his sincerity than anything else.
He knows why he isn’t furious, now. It’s because Xanxus doesn’t have to be grateful, he doesn’t have to be indebted to this boy, unlike that time before, because Tsunayoshi never once said he’d done it for the good of him. The Vongola boss had only done this for himself, to rid himself of the weight that pressed on him for doing this to someone when he hadn’t wanted to, when it went against his own principles as a man.
When that last of the ice is crushed to powder and melted on the floor, he gets up from his bed for the first time in a long time, with purpose. Tsunayoshi is standing, shoulders hunched and face turned down and trembling, even as he glances watchfully at the dangerous man he’d caged just as easily as he’d released, expecting retribution.
One by one, slow at first, he makes his way with measured steps to the new young boss. There is no pause as Xanxus silently stalks past him, his usual expression of arrogance painted across more gaunt features, and walks out the door. Tsunayoshi repeals his cringe in increments once he’s sure Xanxus is gone, and for once the young successor is curious about the other man, who for all the time he’s cost the Varia boss, had not looked upon him with hate.
Tsuna doesn’t know why, but maybe he feels that all the debts to be paid had been met, and perhaps now there was nothing more between the two of them but the blank space ahead.
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5. Consortia Imperii
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He doesn’t go to the service. There’s nothing in him left for a person who betrayed his so-called son, so he defies the whimpering expectations from those weak fools who wanted to wring sentimentality from him for a dead man. Since the scramble for succession years ago he has not seen the geezer’s face, and he loses his last chance when the Ninth is interred, but Xanxus feels nothing. Lingering regrets are for those who can’t abide by their own will.
In the dead of night, though, when everyone’s gone, he’s stands alone and still at Timoteo’s grave. Tears are absent, as are apologies and bitterness and all semblance of grief. It didn’t matter that the old man was a damn fool, a betrayer and a liar, that he struck against the one he called son and had wanted to ever since Xanxus had been picked up on the side like a piece of trash.
This man had been a head of the Vongola. He was the latest and one of the most successful bosses of the generation. In the only gesture of respect he ever gave to the Ninth, Xanxus kneeled close to his grave, bowed his head, and marked the cross with his fingers over his chest.
No sorrow, no repentance. This was simply the acknowledgement of debt one member of the Vongola had to another, and that was all it was.
-0-
There was a line of people curling around the stylobate of the ballroom, waiting for a chance at the podium. The order of speakers had been decided beforehand but Gokudera was taking an awfully long time in his speech congratulating and praising the Tenth on his coronation. Someone from every famiglia and sect was expected to give a brief note to commemorate this moment, and there were still many people left in the night to go.
There were no Varia members up there. No one dared come close enough to Xanxus to even suggest it, and Tsunayoshi wasn’t the type of man to promote himself, much less tell the head of his assassin squad what to do. There was nothing the Varia boss would want to say in front of these assembled trash that had, in their cowardliness, only convicted him through a flimsy screen since he was already imprisoned in ice.
If there ever were something Xanxus would come close to saying out loud in praise of the Tenth, it was that he was a man who cut right into you. Unpleasantly, whether it was welcomed or not, Tsunayoshi would slice right past the ribs to the heart with no conscientiousness.
Facing Xanxus dethroned and furious, there’d been no lingering doubts in the boy’s voice as he declaimed the other successor’s own actions despite his fear. He had not wavered when he took up the Ninth’s request to build up a small detention room for the Varia head to transport him back to Italy. When he built up the minus flame, little by little in sharp peaks, he was not afraid or regretful, only determined to do what he was asked so sincerely to do.
There’s a clink by his side as Tsuna fetches another glass of punch, face red from all the praise being showered at him from the far end at the podium. Clearly a ploy for temporary escape, he chose the most isolated part of the room, which was where Xanxus stood. It’s so easy to read what this obvious brat is doing that a small tinge of hysteria spikes in him that Tsunayoshi, unskilled and undisciplined, was the culmination of what a boss is supposed to be.
When the younger man turns around he almost drops his cup in surprise, but the hard eyed glance the Varia shoots at him freezes his arm. When no threats came, just a simple turn to look at the stage where the speeches were being made, Tsuna gave a small, trembling sigh.
“I just couldn’t stand there anymore while they were talking about me so ridiculously.”
Xanxus delves into the matter without hesitation. He wasn’t here for small talk.
“Don’t think this is the end. I’m going to be watching you and if I see any sign of weakness I will cut you out of the Vongola and take my deserved place.”
Tsuna hadn’t really expected any words of praise or congratulations. That harsh, low intoned declaration strikes straight into him, and as fearful as Xanxus was with disdain glittering in his eye, the bitterness missing from that sentence tells him all he needs to know. Perhaps it was all bled out of him, by now. Even if his rage remained, Tsuna was thankful for that, still. He remembers that quiet moment with an old, aging man and his unspoken plea, and thinks perhaps for once he’s done something right. It’s an alright start to his title of Tenth.
A small, self-admonishing smile passes across the young man’s lips as he looks up with no tremors in his stare at this fearsome person.
“I would expect it of you.”
Their eyes pause for a second, burning each message exchanged in that small four sentence meeting inside themselves. They both turn around. Xanxus stalks over to the nearest busboy for a glass of wine, scowl pasted across his mouth as if those sickly words he uttered needed washing from his mouth. The new boss goes back to Gokudera who’d been waving vigorously at him for the last twenty minutes and laughingly pushes his friend’s arm down, thanking him for his enthusiastic speech.
Even though mutinous words had been spoken, Tsuna can’t help but feel an ease and rightness in his new, foolish consortium that somehow warms him on his coronation night.