Chapter 4: a
A hand is on Tsuna's shoulder, shaking the man awake. If it isn't removed in three seconds Tsuna will rain angelic justice down upon whoever is waking him.
"Tsuna, get up," Giotto calls, leaning over to prod at his younger brother. "There's an urgent mission."
Tsuna lets out a sound akin to a beached whale giving birth.
Giotto sighs heavily before taking a seat on the large and fluffy bed. "Tsuna, you are a grown angel and you should respect me as head of Vongola."
"I'll respect you at a more respectable time," comes the drawl.
Giotto rolls his eyes. "You are to take Takeshi and Ryohei and find the person who made four fallen run."
Tsuna jerks up into a sitting position, suddenly completely awake and serious. "Fallen?" he asks, his wings ruffling in agitation behind him. "How do you know they were fallen?"
Giotto sighs. "We think they might have been Varia."
"Wait," Tsuna begins, holding up a palm as a stop sign. "The Varia attacked other fallen? Why would they do that when there's barely any of their kind left and they could recruit the new ones instead?"
Giotto opened his mouth to speak but Tsuna cut over him.
"And there were four of them," Tsuna continues. "The Varia wouldn't let them just leave. Not to mention where did the fallen come from? We didn't lose any angels, did we?"
"Tsuna," Giotto says slowly. "The Varia were the four attacked."
Tsuna blinks and his hand drops to the quilt with a little 'puff' of noise. "What…the Arcobaleno fought them? Was it ours that did it? I don't remember any mission for that."
"It wasn't the Arcobaleno," Giotto says. "They're practically drooling for whoever did it, and you know facing the Varia would be a suicide mission, it would never be assigned to an angel unit. Besides, it was only one person and not a team."
"So who was it?" Tsuna demands impatiently. "An Alpha of course but was it, what, Byakuran? You need to give me details, brother, what will I be up against?"
Giotto lets out a huff of breath and shrugs. "We don't know."
"Don't…know…what took down four fallen Varia?" Tsuna repeats slowly. "There's really not a long list here, Giotto."
"Well if it was someone known they're not talking," Giotto says simply. "We only know what happened because that Varia, Fran, was happy to tell everyone how badly Belphegor got hurt."
Tsuna and Giotto both know that Fran wasn't the only reason. The supernatural grapevine is greater than even hate between races and word moves incredibly quickly, especially since instantaneous transport is easily accessible.
Plus the spies everyone has out, of course. It's not war time but the Otherside is known for paranoia and love of violence no matter which race is used as an example. It's only a waiting game until someone oversteps or takes offence, and it'll kick start another large scale fight.
The blond leans in and drops his voice to a whisper. "The wounds were still there when they got back to the Underworld."
"It crossed dimensions?" Tsuna whispers back, completely caught up in the atmosphere. "But that's impossible."
Giotto leans back again and shakes his head. "Whatever it is, it's dangerous, but it would be even more so if whoever that is falls into the wrong hands. The balance was kept because Fon went down and Alaude came up. If the Arcobaleno get another strong member, the demons will overpower us."
"That's fine, though, right?" Tsuna hedges, his eyebrows drawn together in worry. "They don't want war, they never have."
"The Arcobaleno don't, but they won't exactly stop the other demons from trying," Giotto says. "And the angels up here get twitchy feathers when another race is stronger."
The creatures on Earth have less numbers than both angels and demons and so the two main races have mostly focused on each other in the past. Somewhat recently, by angel standards, both the Arcobaleno and the Vongola took over in Hell and Heaven respectively, which meant a shaky peace settled down. Neither group has warmongers in their midst no matter how much they like to fight once in a while so it's been stable.
It has been like this for centuries, but angels and demons live much longer and most still remember a time before when it was still outright war. The instincts and grudges stay no matter how hard Giotto and Tsuna work to erase them.
"Okay," Tsuna says. "I'll find them and bring them here."
Giotto smiles but it's a tired one. "I'm sorry about this, but people are already getting fussy and I need to stay and deal with it. I would give you one of my Guardians but we need everyone here to either deal with the angels or keep Daemon in line."
"Daemon?" Tsuna sounds out cautiously. "What happened?"
Giotto looks conflicted but eventually speaks up. "I guess you need to know...and the other Alphas will have knowledge of this already. Do you remember Mukuro?"
"Yeah, of course," Tsuna shrugs easily. "He's only been gone for like half a century. Does he like it on Earth? I've always wondered why he hasn't visited. I mean he doesn't like Daemon, obviously, but I thought we got along well."
Giotto hums. "Well, he's a fallen actually."
Tsuna blinks.
"And Daemon sealed him away."
Tsuna tilts his head to the side. Then he launches himself forward, gets a good grip on Giotto's collar, and shakes the man hard. "What do you mean fallen?" Tsuna cries. "Don't you need to eat a family member's flesh for that?"
"Yep," Giotto states, reaching up and laying his hands on Tsuna's to detach the younger so the brunet will stop shaking him. "Mukuro took Daemon's eye, and you know how the stories go, so now he has a red eye to signify the first piece he ate."
Tsuna gags and clamps a hand over his mouth, managing to stem the reflex, but his imagination is a powerful thing.
"He wanted to stay with a girl called Chrome," Giotto continues as Tsuna tries to get control over himself. "But Daemon wouldn't let him and activated the Eden gate."
Tsuna's eyes grow wide. "That's horrible," he whispers. "It would have…"
"Shackled his wings to keep him from moving worlds, yes," Giotto finishes. "But the gate doesn't work on anyone not an angel so…"
"So Mukuro fell," Tsuna murmurs. "Why didn't he talk to someone? We could have helped him and convinced Daemon to stop."
Giotto shrugs, unwilling to tell Tsuna that sometimes people don't stop after they're asked. "Maybe Mukuro just wanted to fall, I don't know, but the conversion to fallen took him by surprise and Daemon took the chance to seal him away."
"Did you talk to Daemon about the Eden gate?" Tsuna asks in anger. "Mukuro was wrong but so was Daemon."
"I did," Giotto states. "Or at least I tried but you know him, he can evade. So, yeah, they should have talked to us but…it's over now," he says vaguely.
"Why is he worried now?" Tsuna asks.
"Oh," Giotto blinks. "I completely forgot what started this conversation. Yeah, he's freaking out because Mukuro is gone."
"Gone where? Do we have another fallen, as strong as Mukuro, out there?"
"Yep," Giotto says, popping the last part. "And you know how strong Daemon's wards are so we're thinking the one who took down the Varia also freed Mukuro. Good luck, lil' bro. Don't die."
Tsuna stares after the Vongola leader as the blond slips out of the room. He sighs and drops his head into his hands. "I'm so going to die."
...
Mukuro looks around the field they appeared in, the grass brushing his knees as it bends with the soft wind, and nothing but rolling hills for as far as the eye could see. The gate behind the three stunned men is a simple boulder, unexciting with a few scratches in it to note the gate buttons.
Mukuro lets out a slow breath and links his fingers, resting his hands on his head.
He's out. Half a God dammed century, and he's out because a little human wanted a shower.
Mukuro has used every other races' method of travel – he burned himself half to death trying to get past the barrier as a dragon, prayed to Gods he found pathetic to gain demi-god powers, and almost killed himself out of sheer shame when he tested fey travel, those ridiculous tree huggers.
He has broken every law regarding portals and has surpassed the line of what most thought impossible, and yet the one method he doesn't know -the hunter's gates that are guarded jealously with so many different codes, most leading to the bottom of the sea or five kilometres up in the air as punishment for those who mess with things they don't know- is the one method that led outside.
"Okay," Mukuro murmurs, letting his hands fall to his sides. "Okay then, what's next?" He's out now, it's fine. Time to move on.
Next step: give Chrome a proper funeral.
He's so late to meet her. He had promised the tree nymph to help her move the parent flora she spawned from. As a fey subset, Chrome can't move too far from her sakura tree and the humans were planning to cut it down and build a new set of apartments. It took almost two months to find the proper ritual and set up the tree she was going to transfer into.
Mukuro was hours away from saving her but Daemon ripped apart Mukuro's wings just to hear him beg. And then the fucker had the audacity to say he was keeping Mukuro from making a mistake. That the vampire and werewolf were bad enough company, but a nymph was pushing it.
Admittedly, even then Mukuro still loved Daemon as a brother. It's just that he loved the fucker's screams even more. So Mukuro took Daemon's eye, skipped right past falling, and dived.
The change caught him off guard, understandable since the only information on the birth of a fallen is based in rumours. So of course Mukuro wasn't expecting the excruciating pain, doubled since the Eden gate knew exactly what he was trying to do and thus took to slowly incinerating Mukuro from the inside out because that thing is a sadistic torture device.
Mukuro could have handled the pain. A thousand times over in fact. If only it didn't debilitate him to the point of Daemon being able to seal him away – from Chrome, from the kind tree nymph who only wants to help people, from the woman that became Mukuro's sister.
"We're going to find her," Mukuro says. His eye -Mukuro's personal mark of the fallen- glows a bright, blood red. "And then Daemon dies."
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