29 - [Katekiyo Hitman Reborn] child-king (i)
Rating: durr let's say PG13
Fandom: Katekiyo Hitman Reborn
Characters: Varia, other Vongola folk. More people as it progresses. Alternates between Xanxus/Squalo and Squalo/Xanxus (yes, you read that right).
Summary: Xanxus the child vs. Squalo the Right Hand Man. A story on how important the word everything means, and a discussion of "dreams and futures". What dream? What future? There is only one.
Notes: AU. Xanxus gets hit by a malfunctioning TYL bazooka, shrinks to about 6 or 7 years old and tries to come to grips with the world he left. Warnings put in place for minor swearing and violence. Also, took major liberties in timelines. This is set about 2-3 years wherein the Millefiore's defeated, Vongola's safe.
There was a child sitting on Xanxus' throne that morning when Lussuria went in to report. He was small -- and the chair was too big for him and him slouching on the red velvety thing made him even smaller -- and he had short hair and his clothes were dirty, kind of like how dirty some boys' clothes become when you know they've been playing too much in the mud and on the streets.
Lussuria let out a little shriek, babbled something about 'security breach class S' and pages the nearest members of the Varia to run like hell to the boss' room. In the meantime the boy just sat there, calmly, watching with mild interest as there was a flurry of panic from outside the room -- people screaming and swearing in mixed languages, people running back and forth with funky hairdos. There was a guy with a red mohawk who tripped and there were some flashes of shiny metallic things here and there that he couldn't quite see -- later on, he'd wished he never did -- and above all that, there was a cacophony of black-suited men running, running and running who don't seem to know where they were supposed to be headed to.
There was a moment silence while Lussuria convened with Squalo and Bel, who got there minutes later with hard smiles on their faces and the shiny glint of knives and swords. The boy just sat there, a little apprehensive but otherwise, he just felt fine. He's seen knives before, and guns, he knows the sounds that they make because his neighborhood wasn't exactly the safest in Italy. Too many mafia men playing on their streets, throwing out trash.
Mafia. Perhaps, he thought, looking at the gathering outside with men in black suits and even darker shadows, perhaps that was the word for this murder of crows.
--
Squalo enters first, and he enters in long strides sharp and alert and his sword's already out. Mammon comes behind him, walking quietly, face grim as always. The two of them plant themselves before him and the boy just sits there, watching carefully, not making the slightest movement to tip off anything -- fear, terror, that cold feeling that twists itself around his stomach and makes him want to puke. But he just sat there, and he sat tall, and for a moment Squalo was deceived -- for a moment he could've easily passed off as any other heir, maybe even that Sawada brat or any of them when they were young -- but then he's still a boy, he has grubby clothes and he looks like he's been through a mud bath, and that's where the similarity ends.
Their eyes met and the boy tries his best to hold his gaze and still he said nothing. Don't speak unless you're spoken to, he remembers his mother saying when there was this shiny black car passing through their streets with shiny toy guns which really weren't toys at all, he found out later. He doesn't know why, but it looks like it can come in handy for the meantime.
Squalo stares at him at length and tries to place his face in his memories. He knows he's seen him before ... He stands there, just staring at the boy and not doing anything and Mammon coughs a little and Bel, tired of waiting outside, runs in and whips out his knives and chucks one towards the boy.
It hits his shoulderblade and the boy turns bone-white and watches his blood as it trickles down his chest. Bel titters from behind Squalo and Mammon while the boy hisses in pain, he clenches his fist to prevent himself from screaming, and lets only a small whimper escape his mouth because the pain was too much.
"Where did you come from, little bird, and how dare you sit on the boss' throne!" Bel exclaims. "I will slice you and dice you and put you in the oven for the baby and me!"
"That's the stupidest version of pat-a-cake I have ever heard, and the one that I heard from The Poison Scorpion was really bad," Mammon said. It was hard to tell whether he just got grumpier or not.
"It's super effective," Bel pouts, and points to the increasingly pale pallor of the boy who still hasn't budged from the boss' sit. "He'll be gone there in a minute."
"But we don't even know how he got in yet," Lussuria said. There was a small murmur of agreement outside of the room as people wondered about their boss. In the meantime Squalo was still standing there, his eyes not moving away from the boy, still thinking where it was he saw him.
"So I'll ask you again -- " Bel screeches and he gets another knife, he's waving it in the air and it's ready to move in the flick of a wrist. "What famiglia did you come from?"
There was a momentary pause while the boy tries to piece what little politeness he can muster under the circumstances because honestly, right now all he wants to say is "fuck you and your fucking tiara", but that doesn't seem to be able to guarantee him his life. So he says "home", instead, and Bel smiles widely and another knife makes it through his right arm, pinning bone and muscle against the wood of the chair.
He screamed.
"That is not an appropriate answer, little bird, and not the one we need, and it's going to be more painful from now on and you're going to cost me my salary for dirtying the boss' chair," Bel scowls. "Children nowadays. Can I kill him yet?"
Murmurs of agreement from outside.
"God, you fucker. You're gonna be so screwed." Squalo finally says. "Put your knives back before you kill the boss."
"Before I kill the -- what. What did you say?"
There was a period of dead silence while they compared their boss' face to the face of the boy who's bleeding on the chair, pinned, thank you very much, and the boy smiles sardonically while he watches the guy with the pale silver hair go to one of the bookcases at the side, pull out an old-looking, heavy book and flips its pages until he finds a small photograph and showed it to the rest of the Varia.
They took a long time comparing faces back and forth while the boy sat bleeding on the chair, smiling languidly and saying nothing, flexing his fingers and willing for that flame to appear again. He managed to do it yesterday while he was fighting against some of the older boys, perhaps he could use it now to help him? That would be the best skill ever, he thought, and concentrated on getting that flame out of his hands while the rest of the men in black suits stared at the photo and him back and forth and finally gasps come from everywhere, and that's about the time he manged to light his hand -- Squalo grins, but he doesn't see that -- and he tries to pry himself off of the chair but it's no good, the knife was stuck well so he's trying to burn the damn thing off.
Squalo kneels before him and covers his fist with his gloved hand. "No need for that, it'd be best to save your energy right now because you'll feel more tired the more you use it. I bet you're not even trained yet to use that flame," he says conversationally, and his eyes widens -- how did he know? -- while Squalo just removes both knives out of his body with ease and he feels sick, scared, he feels so nauseated that he didn't even had the time to cry out: he lunged forwards, trying to find some warmth and faints right on his arms, feeling both metal and skin beyond his black suit.
--
They haven't exactly accepted him as the kid-version of their boss yet. As far as they know Xanxus was supposed to be having a meeting with the Vongola -- and here a shudder of dread passes on most of the Varia because that could mean everything, too -- but the boy looks nothing like the boss that they know, but the similarities in the photo that Squalo showed them was very very painfully close, close enough to dismiss the whole thing as fact; and besides, it was Squalo who confirmed it, and he's the right-hand man, so he'd know about these things, right? Right?
But Levi wanted to be sure, and Bel and Lussuria agreed to as well, to have the boy tested. There's plenty of blood to compare from this boy to the boss -- Mammon hasn't tended to his laundry duties yet -- so they can get a DNA sample just to confirm things. Just to be safe. Squalo wasn't too pleased at this, but he's not dumb enough to ignore it, anyway -- so he let them. But he still wasn't too happy that people aren't trusting him about Xanxus enough.
Several phonecalls were made back and forth the house of Varia to the Vongola, and it was Bel's turn to do negotiations, which was just horrible but the Varia goes through a cycle of violence to go their job so Bel it was. The phone calls normally ended in shrieking, screaming, mocking laughter and hand motions that the other person on the line would be happy not to see, ever. In this case it was Tsuna.
"L-look, we're sorry, we didn't realize what happened until Lambo-kun told us!"
"You should've called the minute it happened!" Bel shrieked.
"But we did! I begged Hibari-san to inform you guys that -- oh, what's that Gokudera-kun? He -- hieeeeeeeeeeeeeee he didn't tell them?! Uh, Bel-san -- "
There was a number of phones being slammed on that day, plus duties reshuffled and paperwork and meetings arranged, cancelled. Squalo suddenly finds that he has twice the amount of work that he had to and he's pretty sure Bel just dumped half of his assignments on his agenda just so that he can look at the kid-boss.
"I'm telling you, you're not allowed to visit him! He's still recovering!"
Bel sniffed. "You're just trying to make sure you hog the kid-boss all by yourself, don't you? I'm telling boss of your pedophiliac tendencies when he comes back -- "
"But this is an awful amount of time for the boss to stay in his kid form," Levi mumbled, and most of them nodded and came to the conclusion to blame the Vongola further so that they can rush their research department into coming out with solutions, conclusions.
In the meantime, the boy rested in what the long-haired man -- Squalo, he said his name was, or at least, that's what he thought he said -- said was his room, and it was huge and bigger than his room and his mother's room combined, and it was twice as cold and lonely. Oftentimes a maid comes in to give him food, and they were good food, not like the crap he gets from takeout restaurants and run-down markets and he feels good, but somehow, undeserving, too, because as far as he knows he was just a runt from the lower end of the slums and now he's got new clothes, new scars, he's living like a prince and has five escorts just to go to the bathroom. It'll take some time for you to adjust, Squalo has said to him before (don't call me signor was the other thing he said embarassedly), but this house is yours, and everything in it is yours, and if you need something, just call. And when he does call for someone -- when he says he wants food, or anything else -- about one hundred people answer in front of his door and he has to grit his teeth in frustration because honestly, he only needs one. Everything was entirely different from back home; and he's not sure which one is worse.
--
In the middle of the night he's seen some of what Squalo told him was "the other members of the Varia". He shrank from the guy with the tiara, whom he found out was Belphegor, much to the prince's dismay ("but we're friends!"), and he observed the small baby with interest. Lussuria fawned over him while the tall one, Levi, didn't even know what to do with him and just stood there looking at him and when he caught him looking, runs off quickly like he's expecting a barrage of insults to come spewing out of the boy's mouth. They all come in turns to check on him, on his wounds. They've questioned him -- this time without much terrorizing -- as to how he got here, and all he could remember was that he was playing and there was an explosion of some sorts and he thought he died, but then he was in some room with people screaming and panicking. And then he fell asleep. And somebody with a small yellow bird on his head led him into the Varia, beat up some people, and dumped him on his chair and left.
There was another round of screaming and shouting on "who was in charge of security yesterday, fuckers?" echoing around the room and more orders were made in a language that he can't understand -- code this and that, alert this and that. Later that day a couple of hours were spent with him making the boy understand codes, cryptic language, terms that he'd never heard of in his life. It made him dizzy, and as they were concepts too hard to understand for him at this moment he let them do as they will, and promptly forgot everything he'd promised to keep in mind for them.
Squalo stands beside him while a maid bustles to bring in his dinner for the night, then he takes his spoon and tastes the food, and promptly starts screaming to get him another one. He sighs.
"This is ... too much to handle in two days," he says.
Squalo laughs. "You'll get used to it," he replies. "Hey, you become really good with it when you get older. So just keep training and keep living, Xanxus, and you'll be fine."
It was the first time he's been addressed as something other than 'boss' for the past two days, so he looks at Squalo in surprise. "You call me Xanxus?"
"... uh. When, uh, no-one's looking."
"Oh."
"And when you're in a good mood and uh preferably drunk."
He smiles. "Do you know that that's not my real name?"
Squalo looks at him and he pauses and then nods gravely.
"I'm not sure what your real name is, though, when I told you -- well, your older self anyway -- that I dug up as much as I can about your past you sorta got mad at me and, uh, destroyed as much as you can find that I haven't dug up yet."
"I see," the boy called Xanxus says and he laughs. "I wouldn't tell you, either."
"Yeah, I kinda figured that out," he mutters. The maid brings in another set of dishes for him to eat and Xanxus eats in a comfortable silence while Squalo goes out for a bit and yells more instructions, more threats to any unfortunate man who happened to be walking by.
--
Xanxus is not included in meetings anymore. Once upon a time, Squalo says, he was an important part of everything that the Varia does, ever -- he still is, he says -- but he's a childlike version of what they need, which is not what they need at all. So they left him out. He's allowed to go everywhere around the mansion, except for the more dangerous parts like the labs and the training halls. But everywhere else he could roam, and the boy indulges walking in different parts of the mansion once in a while while everybody else goes around to many different places, researches, makes phonecalls, makes tests.
He's met other people. He met the Cavallone, who did nothing but bump and stumble and fall on every turn and apologize almost every single time for nearly trying to kill him, accidentally, to which he promptly just told him to "shut up". Nearly as bad was the guy named Sawada Tsuna -- Tsunahashi -- Tsunasa -- he can't even pronounce his name. Sawada. The guy kept alternating between being completely apologetic and trying to know as much as he can ("which school do you go to? who are your friends? what's your favourite sport?") and he was just thankful when Squalo told him to just "fuck off and leave our boss, come back when you have something to help us" and no mincing of any words whatsoever, just pure badass adult language.
"... I'd like to learn that sometime," he said to Squalo afterwards.
"Learn what?"
"That. When you talked to Sawada. You just spat out everything and told him whatever it is you wanted to say and you swore a bit and stuff and he went away."
Squalo frowns a bit, and he's torn between basking in glory and being humble. "Ah, well ... it's ... it'll come to you normally, I mean, you're Xanxus, after all, you'll know all about talking like grown-ups do and you'll be ultimately better than anyone of us combined, and, uh, stuff ..."
"But I wanna learn now."
"Yeah, well, I don't think that's appropriate for a kid, uh ... "
"What's not appropriate is you keeping me here and not letting me go home. I have stuff to do. Do you know, how hard it is to earn money for food when you don't even have the perks of being as rich as this? Dammit, man, I wanna learn."
"Look, it's not our fault that you're stuck here, the mechanism's malfunctioned and the bazooka can't send you back unless those Vongola bastards work on it, and we're working on it too and we're making sure that we'll get things done and you'll be home before you even know it, okay, so just sit back and enjoy."
Xanxus snarls. If it was a more adult version of him there would've been a shiver running down Squalo's spine right about now but he's not, he's just a kid, and the best impression that Xanxus can make of his own frustration doesn't even come close to that, so Squalo laughs at him and this just makes him even angrier. "You told me," he said, voice low and quietly seething, "that you'll do everything for me."
"I do, yes," and there's a vaguely amused smile on Squalo's face.
"But you haven't."
"... what?"
"What's this machine that you talk about that can fix me?"
And Squalo goes off in a long tangent about time-travel and physics and science and god knows what else until finally he gets so fed up that he stuffs his ears and kicks him in the knee as hard as he can (he would've aimed for the crotch, but he couldn't reach it).
"You're not telling me anything!"
"What?! I just told you everything!" Squalo's screaming at him now, incredulous, and it takes a long time for Xanxus to realize that Squalo actually screams almost everything that he says. He wonders how his older self could stand it.
"No! You told me nothing and I didn't understand it!"
"Well, that's because you're too young and you have to wait until you grew older so that you can understand everything, and for now you just have to trust me when I tell you that we're working on things!"
"But I don't know anything!" He growled. "I ask you what you're doing and you give me some explanations with terms that I never even learned in school! I ask you what I do for a living in this world and you tell me I'm a leader! I ask you what am I to you and you tell me that I'm your boss!"
"But I told you everything!"
"No, you didn't!" and Xanxus stamps his feet in rage. "You told me half of everything! You didn't tell me anything true! You said you'll do anything for me, Squalo, so why are you lying to me?"
And Squalo narrows his eyes and he's forced to admit a thought that'd been crossing his mind for a while and keeps him awake almost every night:
"Well I can't just tell you everything because how am I to know what you'll grow up to be in the future and what if you choose another path?! Who'll be the leader of Varia, then?"
It dawns into Xanxus that maybe, just maybe, all this while he was being used -- for his whole life, he's going to be used -- and he took a sharp breath in and nearly fell down at the idea of being manipulated into someone that everybody was waiting for: a long-awaited king.
"... that's what you want me to be?" He asks and his voice falters at the end and he gets even more pissed at the idea of showing weakness, and feels sick that he's already learned the basics of how to survive in this world in a matter of days.
"That's what you are! That's who you are! That's what you're defined as!" And Squalo ends every sentence with a triumphant and proud yell and the boy that was Xanxus becomes terrified, and musters up his strength.
"I should've died," he says flatly. "When that guy -- Bel, or whatever his name was -- when he chucked his knives at me he shouldn't have missed. I should've died."
In the middle of the hallway Squalo stands tall and firm and his eyes burn in fervour. "You'll change your mind eventually. When you grow up you'll understand -- "
"-- I understand a lot more than you do, Squalo, thank you very much," and now the boy talks in words half-bathed in acid and Squalo winces (he's getting there, he's getting there), but continues anyway.
"-- you'll understand and you'll love this job. ... well, you never actually say that. But you'd rather be doing this than anything else."
"This?" and he motions to everything around him that he can see: the red carpets peppered with blood stains, the expensive furniture riddled with slashes and cuts and replaced everyday, people completely replaceable, everything at a dime-a-dozen. An endless supply of commodity built on lies and deceit. "I'd rather die," Xanxus laughs hollowly. "What do I care for you, or anyone else? This is crap. I have dreams other than this."
"Your dreams," Squalo mocks him and sneers at the very word, the context that he'd used it. "Dreams. Don't make me laugh. In those slums and their greasy roads and gutters full of rain and slime you talk about dreams. You have other, grander dreams," he proclaims. "You'll rise above everything else, you'll be with people who move like the wolves. Eveyrone will fear your name. This is your dream."
"His, not mine," he said, and he runs back to his room terrified, his heart pounding like a metronome, his fists clenched tight as though choking someone else's windpipe, but moves with his chin held high and eyes flat and cold and Squalo smiles. The boy's halfway to becoming the man he knows and it's only a matter of time before he truly becomes him.
tbc.
Fandom: Katekiyo Hitman Reborn
Characters: Varia, other Vongola folk. More people as it progresses. Alternates between Xanxus/Squalo and Squalo/Xanxus (yes, you read that right).
Summary: Xanxus the child vs. Squalo the Right Hand Man. A story on how important the word everything means, and a discussion of "dreams and futures". What dream? What future? There is only one.
Notes: AU. Xanxus gets hit by a malfunctioning TYL bazooka, shrinks to about 6 or 7 years old and tries to come to grips with the world he left. Warnings put in place for minor swearing and violence. Also, took major liberties in timelines. This is set about 2-3 years wherein the Millefiore's defeated, Vongola's safe.
There was a child sitting on Xanxus' throne that morning when Lussuria went in to report. He was small -- and the chair was too big for him and him slouching on the red velvety thing made him even smaller -- and he had short hair and his clothes were dirty, kind of like how dirty some boys' clothes become when you know they've been playing too much in the mud and on the streets.
Lussuria let out a little shriek, babbled something about 'security breach class S' and pages the nearest members of the Varia to run like hell to the boss' room. In the meantime the boy just sat there, calmly, watching with mild interest as there was a flurry of panic from outside the room -- people screaming and swearing in mixed languages, people running back and forth with funky hairdos. There was a guy with a red mohawk who tripped and there were some flashes of shiny metallic things here and there that he couldn't quite see -- later on, he'd wished he never did -- and above all that, there was a cacophony of black-suited men running, running and running who don't seem to know where they were supposed to be headed to.
There was a moment silence while Lussuria convened with Squalo and Bel, who got there minutes later with hard smiles on their faces and the shiny glint of knives and swords. The boy just sat there, a little apprehensive but otherwise, he just felt fine. He's seen knives before, and guns, he knows the sounds that they make because his neighborhood wasn't exactly the safest in Italy. Too many mafia men playing on their streets, throwing out trash.
Mafia. Perhaps, he thought, looking at the gathering outside with men in black suits and even darker shadows, perhaps that was the word for this murder of crows.
--
Squalo enters first, and he enters in long strides sharp and alert and his sword's already out. Mammon comes behind him, walking quietly, face grim as always. The two of them plant themselves before him and the boy just sits there, watching carefully, not making the slightest movement to tip off anything -- fear, terror, that cold feeling that twists itself around his stomach and makes him want to puke. But he just sat there, and he sat tall, and for a moment Squalo was deceived -- for a moment he could've easily passed off as any other heir, maybe even that Sawada brat or any of them when they were young -- but then he's still a boy, he has grubby clothes and he looks like he's been through a mud bath, and that's where the similarity ends.
Their eyes met and the boy tries his best to hold his gaze and still he said nothing. Don't speak unless you're spoken to, he remembers his mother saying when there was this shiny black car passing through their streets with shiny toy guns which really weren't toys at all, he found out later. He doesn't know why, but it looks like it can come in handy for the meantime.
Squalo stares at him at length and tries to place his face in his memories. He knows he's seen him before ... He stands there, just staring at the boy and not doing anything and Mammon coughs a little and Bel, tired of waiting outside, runs in and whips out his knives and chucks one towards the boy.
It hits his shoulderblade and the boy turns bone-white and watches his blood as it trickles down his chest. Bel titters from behind Squalo and Mammon while the boy hisses in pain, he clenches his fist to prevent himself from screaming, and lets only a small whimper escape his mouth because the pain was too much.
"Where did you come from, little bird, and how dare you sit on the boss' throne!" Bel exclaims. "I will slice you and dice you and put you in the oven for the baby and me!"
"That's the stupidest version of pat-a-cake I have ever heard, and the one that I heard from The Poison Scorpion was really bad," Mammon said. It was hard to tell whether he just got grumpier or not.
"It's super effective," Bel pouts, and points to the increasingly pale pallor of the boy who still hasn't budged from the boss' sit. "He'll be gone there in a minute."
"But we don't even know how he got in yet," Lussuria said. There was a small murmur of agreement outside of the room as people wondered about their boss. In the meantime Squalo was still standing there, his eyes not moving away from the boy, still thinking where it was he saw him.
"So I'll ask you again -- " Bel screeches and he gets another knife, he's waving it in the air and it's ready to move in the flick of a wrist. "What famiglia did you come from?"
There was a momentary pause while the boy tries to piece what little politeness he can muster under the circumstances because honestly, right now all he wants to say is "fuck you and your fucking tiara", but that doesn't seem to be able to guarantee him his life. So he says "home", instead, and Bel smiles widely and another knife makes it through his right arm, pinning bone and muscle against the wood of the chair.
He screamed.
"That is not an appropriate answer, little bird, and not the one we need, and it's going to be more painful from now on and you're going to cost me my salary for dirtying the boss' chair," Bel scowls. "Children nowadays. Can I kill him yet?"
Murmurs of agreement from outside.
"God, you fucker. You're gonna be so screwed." Squalo finally says. "Put your knives back before you kill the boss."
"Before I kill the -- what. What did you say?"
There was a period of dead silence while they compared their boss' face to the face of the boy who's bleeding on the chair, pinned, thank you very much, and the boy smiles sardonically while he watches the guy with the pale silver hair go to one of the bookcases at the side, pull out an old-looking, heavy book and flips its pages until he finds a small photograph and showed it to the rest of the Varia.
They took a long time comparing faces back and forth while the boy sat bleeding on the chair, smiling languidly and saying nothing, flexing his fingers and willing for that flame to appear again. He managed to do it yesterday while he was fighting against some of the older boys, perhaps he could use it now to help him? That would be the best skill ever, he thought, and concentrated on getting that flame out of his hands while the rest of the men in black suits stared at the photo and him back and forth and finally gasps come from everywhere, and that's about the time he manged to light his hand -- Squalo grins, but he doesn't see that -- and he tries to pry himself off of the chair but it's no good, the knife was stuck well so he's trying to burn the damn thing off.
Squalo kneels before him and covers his fist with his gloved hand. "No need for that, it'd be best to save your energy right now because you'll feel more tired the more you use it. I bet you're not even trained yet to use that flame," he says conversationally, and his eyes widens -- how did he know? -- while Squalo just removes both knives out of his body with ease and he feels sick, scared, he feels so nauseated that he didn't even had the time to cry out: he lunged forwards, trying to find some warmth and faints right on his arms, feeling both metal and skin beyond his black suit.
--
They haven't exactly accepted him as the kid-version of their boss yet. As far as they know Xanxus was supposed to be having a meeting with the Vongola -- and here a shudder of dread passes on most of the Varia because that could mean everything, too -- but the boy looks nothing like the boss that they know, but the similarities in the photo that Squalo showed them was very very painfully close, close enough to dismiss the whole thing as fact; and besides, it was Squalo who confirmed it, and he's the right-hand man, so he'd know about these things, right? Right?
But Levi wanted to be sure, and Bel and Lussuria agreed to as well, to have the boy tested. There's plenty of blood to compare from this boy to the boss -- Mammon hasn't tended to his laundry duties yet -- so they can get a DNA sample just to confirm things. Just to be safe. Squalo wasn't too pleased at this, but he's not dumb enough to ignore it, anyway -- so he let them. But he still wasn't too happy that people aren't trusting him about Xanxus enough.
Several phonecalls were made back and forth the house of Varia to the Vongola, and it was Bel's turn to do negotiations, which was just horrible but the Varia goes through a cycle of violence to go their job so Bel it was. The phone calls normally ended in shrieking, screaming, mocking laughter and hand motions that the other person on the line would be happy not to see, ever. In this case it was Tsuna.
"L-look, we're sorry, we didn't realize what happened until Lambo-kun told us!"
"You should've called the minute it happened!" Bel shrieked.
"But we did! I begged Hibari-san to inform you guys that -- oh, what's that Gokudera-kun? He -- hieeeeeeeeeeeeeee he didn't tell them?! Uh, Bel-san -- "
There was a number of phones being slammed on that day, plus duties reshuffled and paperwork and meetings arranged, cancelled. Squalo suddenly finds that he has twice the amount of work that he had to and he's pretty sure Bel just dumped half of his assignments on his agenda just so that he can look at the kid-boss.
"I'm telling you, you're not allowed to visit him! He's still recovering!"
Bel sniffed. "You're just trying to make sure you hog the kid-boss all by yourself, don't you? I'm telling boss of your pedophiliac tendencies when he comes back -- "
"But this is an awful amount of time for the boss to stay in his kid form," Levi mumbled, and most of them nodded and came to the conclusion to blame the Vongola further so that they can rush their research department into coming out with solutions, conclusions.
In the meantime, the boy rested in what the long-haired man -- Squalo, he said his name was, or at least, that's what he thought he said -- said was his room, and it was huge and bigger than his room and his mother's room combined, and it was twice as cold and lonely. Oftentimes a maid comes in to give him food, and they were good food, not like the crap he gets from takeout restaurants and run-down markets and he feels good, but somehow, undeserving, too, because as far as he knows he was just a runt from the lower end of the slums and now he's got new clothes, new scars, he's living like a prince and has five escorts just to go to the bathroom. It'll take some time for you to adjust, Squalo has said to him before (don't call me signor was the other thing he said embarassedly), but this house is yours, and everything in it is yours, and if you need something, just call. And when he does call for someone -- when he says he wants food, or anything else -- about one hundred people answer in front of his door and he has to grit his teeth in frustration because honestly, he only needs one. Everything was entirely different from back home; and he's not sure which one is worse.
--
In the middle of the night he's seen some of what Squalo told him was "the other members of the Varia". He shrank from the guy with the tiara, whom he found out was Belphegor, much to the prince's dismay ("but we're friends!"), and he observed the small baby with interest. Lussuria fawned over him while the tall one, Levi, didn't even know what to do with him and just stood there looking at him and when he caught him looking, runs off quickly like he's expecting a barrage of insults to come spewing out of the boy's mouth. They all come in turns to check on him, on his wounds. They've questioned him -- this time without much terrorizing -- as to how he got here, and all he could remember was that he was playing and there was an explosion of some sorts and he thought he died, but then he was in some room with people screaming and panicking. And then he fell asleep. And somebody with a small yellow bird on his head led him into the Varia, beat up some people, and dumped him on his chair and left.
There was another round of screaming and shouting on "who was in charge of security yesterday, fuckers?" echoing around the room and more orders were made in a language that he can't understand -- code this and that, alert this and that. Later that day a couple of hours were spent with him making the boy understand codes, cryptic language, terms that he'd never heard of in his life. It made him dizzy, and as they were concepts too hard to understand for him at this moment he let them do as they will, and promptly forgot everything he'd promised to keep in mind for them.
Squalo stands beside him while a maid bustles to bring in his dinner for the night, then he takes his spoon and tastes the food, and promptly starts screaming to get him another one. He sighs.
"This is ... too much to handle in two days," he says.
Squalo laughs. "You'll get used to it," he replies. "Hey, you become really good with it when you get older. So just keep training and keep living, Xanxus, and you'll be fine."
It was the first time he's been addressed as something other than 'boss' for the past two days, so he looks at Squalo in surprise. "You call me Xanxus?"
"... uh. When, uh, no-one's looking."
"Oh."
"And when you're in a good mood and uh preferably drunk."
He smiles. "Do you know that that's not my real name?"
Squalo looks at him and he pauses and then nods gravely.
"I'm not sure what your real name is, though, when I told you -- well, your older self anyway -- that I dug up as much as I can about your past you sorta got mad at me and, uh, destroyed as much as you can find that I haven't dug up yet."
"I see," the boy called Xanxus says and he laughs. "I wouldn't tell you, either."
"Yeah, I kinda figured that out," he mutters. The maid brings in another set of dishes for him to eat and Xanxus eats in a comfortable silence while Squalo goes out for a bit and yells more instructions, more threats to any unfortunate man who happened to be walking by.
--
Xanxus is not included in meetings anymore. Once upon a time, Squalo says, he was an important part of everything that the Varia does, ever -- he still is, he says -- but he's a childlike version of what they need, which is not what they need at all. So they left him out. He's allowed to go everywhere around the mansion, except for the more dangerous parts like the labs and the training halls. But everywhere else he could roam, and the boy indulges walking in different parts of the mansion once in a while while everybody else goes around to many different places, researches, makes phonecalls, makes tests.
He's met other people. He met the Cavallone, who did nothing but bump and stumble and fall on every turn and apologize almost every single time for nearly trying to kill him, accidentally, to which he promptly just told him to "shut up". Nearly as bad was the guy named Sawada Tsuna -- Tsunahashi -- Tsunasa -- he can't even pronounce his name. Sawada. The guy kept alternating between being completely apologetic and trying to know as much as he can ("which school do you go to? who are your friends? what's your favourite sport?") and he was just thankful when Squalo told him to just "fuck off and leave our boss, come back when you have something to help us" and no mincing of any words whatsoever, just pure badass adult language.
"... I'd like to learn that sometime," he said to Squalo afterwards.
"Learn what?"
"That. When you talked to Sawada. You just spat out everything and told him whatever it is you wanted to say and you swore a bit and stuff and he went away."
Squalo frowns a bit, and he's torn between basking in glory and being humble. "Ah, well ... it's ... it'll come to you normally, I mean, you're Xanxus, after all, you'll know all about talking like grown-ups do and you'll be ultimately better than anyone of us combined, and, uh, stuff ..."
"But I wanna learn now."
"Yeah, well, I don't think that's appropriate for a kid, uh ... "
"What's not appropriate is you keeping me here and not letting me go home. I have stuff to do. Do you know, how hard it is to earn money for food when you don't even have the perks of being as rich as this? Dammit, man, I wanna learn."
"Look, it's not our fault that you're stuck here, the mechanism's malfunctioned and the bazooka can't send you back unless those Vongola bastards work on it, and we're working on it too and we're making sure that we'll get things done and you'll be home before you even know it, okay, so just sit back and enjoy."
Xanxus snarls. If it was a more adult version of him there would've been a shiver running down Squalo's spine right about now but he's not, he's just a kid, and the best impression that Xanxus can make of his own frustration doesn't even come close to that, so Squalo laughs at him and this just makes him even angrier. "You told me," he said, voice low and quietly seething, "that you'll do everything for me."
"I do, yes," and there's a vaguely amused smile on Squalo's face.
"But you haven't."
"... what?"
"What's this machine that you talk about that can fix me?"
And Squalo goes off in a long tangent about time-travel and physics and science and god knows what else until finally he gets so fed up that he stuffs his ears and kicks him in the knee as hard as he can (he would've aimed for the crotch, but he couldn't reach it).
"You're not telling me anything!"
"What?! I just told you everything!" Squalo's screaming at him now, incredulous, and it takes a long time for Xanxus to realize that Squalo actually screams almost everything that he says. He wonders how his older self could stand it.
"No! You told me nothing and I didn't understand it!"
"Well, that's because you're too young and you have to wait until you grew older so that you can understand everything, and for now you just have to trust me when I tell you that we're working on things!"
"But I don't know anything!" He growled. "I ask you what you're doing and you give me some explanations with terms that I never even learned in school! I ask you what I do for a living in this world and you tell me I'm a leader! I ask you what am I to you and you tell me that I'm your boss!"
"But I told you everything!"
"No, you didn't!" and Xanxus stamps his feet in rage. "You told me half of everything! You didn't tell me anything true! You said you'll do anything for me, Squalo, so why are you lying to me?"
And Squalo narrows his eyes and he's forced to admit a thought that'd been crossing his mind for a while and keeps him awake almost every night:
"Well I can't just tell you everything because how am I to know what you'll grow up to be in the future and what if you choose another path?! Who'll be the leader of Varia, then?"
It dawns into Xanxus that maybe, just maybe, all this while he was being used -- for his whole life, he's going to be used -- and he took a sharp breath in and nearly fell down at the idea of being manipulated into someone that everybody was waiting for: a long-awaited king.
"... that's what you want me to be?" He asks and his voice falters at the end and he gets even more pissed at the idea of showing weakness, and feels sick that he's already learned the basics of how to survive in this world in a matter of days.
"That's what you are! That's who you are! That's what you're defined as!" And Squalo ends every sentence with a triumphant and proud yell and the boy that was Xanxus becomes terrified, and musters up his strength.
"I should've died," he says flatly. "When that guy -- Bel, or whatever his name was -- when he chucked his knives at me he shouldn't have missed. I should've died."
In the middle of the hallway Squalo stands tall and firm and his eyes burn in fervour. "You'll change your mind eventually. When you grow up you'll understand -- "
"-- I understand a lot more than you do, Squalo, thank you very much," and now the boy talks in words half-bathed in acid and Squalo winces (he's getting there, he's getting there), but continues anyway.
"-- you'll understand and you'll love this job. ... well, you never actually say that. But you'd rather be doing this than anything else."
"This?" and he motions to everything around him that he can see: the red carpets peppered with blood stains, the expensive furniture riddled with slashes and cuts and replaced everyday, people completely replaceable, everything at a dime-a-dozen. An endless supply of commodity built on lies and deceit. "I'd rather die," Xanxus laughs hollowly. "What do I care for you, or anyone else? This is crap. I have dreams other than this."
"Your dreams," Squalo mocks him and sneers at the very word, the context that he'd used it. "Dreams. Don't make me laugh. In those slums and their greasy roads and gutters full of rain and slime you talk about dreams. You have other, grander dreams," he proclaims. "You'll rise above everything else, you'll be with people who move like the wolves. Eveyrone will fear your name. This is your dream."
"His, not mine," he said, and he runs back to his room terrified, his heart pounding like a metronome, his fists clenched tight as though choking someone else's windpipe, but moves with his chin held high and eyes flat and cold and Squalo smiles. The boy's halfway to becoming the man he knows and it's only a matter of time before he truly becomes him.
tbc.