"Reborn." Glinting red eyes peer at him from underneath the brim of a black fedora. "I'm going to save you... in the last way left." He lifts the launcher, loaded and pointed towards Reborn's heart.
Fangs peek over a bottom lip as the ex-hitman smirks. "Is that so, cow?" He turns away from the fallen, bloody body and saunters closer to the small teenager.
"Don't come any closer." He growls, one emerald green eye shimmering with tears.
"Can you honestly do it? Can you honestly kill me, cow?" One hand, pale and long fingered, flicks the end of the launcher, sending it crashing off to their distant left.
Lambo stumbles back a step, his determined expression falling to that of despair. "Reborn…" He almost sounds like he is begging; whether for mercy or for something else is uncertain.
"I'm here, cow." He seems to soothe, but his eyes, always so cruel, are evil and flickering with crimson flames in obsidian pupils.
The hand that had carelessly thrown aside the launcher comes up and pets the teenager's cheek. "And you're here." He points out, head tilting slightly. He steps closer to the guardian until he is crowding the young man, his larger body making Lambo seem even smaller.
"Come back home, damn it!" He finally explodes. "I can't kill you, so you might as well come back where there are people who can kill you. And, if not… you can just come back home. We miss you, you selfish bastard." He admits, obviously reluctantly because his eye screams defiance.
"But you would rather kill me." The hand drifts down and unbuttons the cow print dress shirt as it slides down, not stopping until Lambo's shirt is completely undone.
"Yes!" His hands are limp at his sides; tears are streaming down his cheeks. "I would rather kill you than bring you home as you are!"
"And how am I?" He sounds mildly amused. His hand caresses over Lambo's chest, thumb rubbing over his heart.
"You're not you anymore." He spits out. "You left." 'me behind' goes unspoken, but hangs in the air as if said anyway.
Reborn smile actually seems to gentle. "My poor, abandoned cow. I should have brought you with me, huh?" Now he is obviously mocking Lambo's dependence.
"You stingy bastard." Lambo hisses at him.
Reborn runs a tongue over his upper lip and then lowers his head, pressing an open mouth kiss to the jugular in Lambo's neck. "What if I can swear you will never have to live without me again?" He nips lightly at the flesh, running his tongue over the dot of blood that comes from the soft abuse.
Lambo's eye flutters close. "… Then I will be happy." He raises a hand and tangles it in Reborn's hair, the fedora tipping onto the ground.
He smirks and opens his mouth wide, about to drink his cow dry, when the taste of him registers in his mind; syrup and tart grapes. He hates sweets… but there is something stronger than that, something like how a bitch in heat's scent would change, and then something weaker than that, something that reminded him of Bianchi for some reason…
'He honestly does mean to kill me… even if he kills himself in the process.' Reborn hisses and shoves the boy from him, eyes aflame with rage. "You would dare try to poison me?"
Lambo smiles tiredly. "Yes. Yare, yare, I have to bring you home one way or another; dead or undead… even if I can't go home with you." He draws a small blade over his naked breast. "I went through a lot of trouble to be as appealing in scent and blood as I could be." His aroma surrounds Reborn, nearly maddening to the ex-hitman. "And then I poisoned my own blood." He steps forward and closes in on the panting vampire. "Please feed from me."
"… I have greater resolve than that, cow. I can just as easily turn around and leave you here to die pointlessly at your own stupidity." But then he grabs the short hairs at the nape of Lambo's head and pulls on it, exposing Lambo's throat to him. He ignores the already open cut and returns to the mark he had made earlier. "However, you went through so much trouble just for me…" His fangs pierce his neck, drawing a gasp from the teenager of both pain and – after a moment – pleasure.
His eye is wide as he stares with horror over Reborn's shoulder, his hands clinging tightly to his shoulders; what was his plan? Reborn would never so willingly die. He was up to something!
His answer came a moment later when Reborn turned his head and spat out the blood in his mouth. Lambo pales and realizes that… Reborn had no plans of drinking the poison.
"It's like how fine wine once was… to avoid getting drunk, you savor the taste and then spit it back out." And Reborn returns, again and again, tasting Lambo's blood on his tongue before spitting it out to avoid the poison.
By the time he pulls away, a pleased air about him, Lambo is passed out cold, his heart sputtering in his chest from blood loss and then weakened further by the poison.
Reborn chuckles and brings his own wrist to his mouth. "I can't let you die, can I, you stupid cow?" He bites down and lets the dark, almost black, liquid seep from the small wound before pressing it to Lambo's mouth. "Drink, my cow." His eyes fall to half mast when Lambo does just that, suckling like a babe at the liquid reflexively. "Ah hah…" He strokes back sable black locks. "You don't have to live without me any longer… You can be with me in death."
Tsuna never finds Reborn; never has the joy of having his former tutor back home. Yet, worse than that, he never sees Lambo, his charge and all but son, again either.
So why is… that he doesn't feel bad? No… there is something deep inside of him telling him that everything… is going to be OK, and that he has nothing to worry about. Somehow, he knows that Reborn and Lambo are happy in their own ways.
The day they bury him in the ground, two men visit him in the dead of night, crimson flames dancing in their pupils, though one had emerald eyes and the other obsidian.
One cried blood red tears, but the other only smiled approvingly. "Dame-Tsuna." Began the pale, taller man, obviously older. "You did good."
"Vongola…" Whimpers the younger, simply beautiful man. "… thank you for everything." And he gently rests a white rose against the grave before standing and looking up at his long time archrival, long time master, and long time love. "What do we do now?"
For a moment, it almost seems as if the older man is going to ignore him. "We wait out time." He finally says into the silence of the Vongola cemetery. He reaches one hand to the boy, not even looking up from the grave marker. A hand slips into his and then a body presses into his side. "And once time is done, we'll just wait out whatever comes after time."
Tsuna had lived to be a magnificent 101 years old, despite his dangerous life style. He had outlived his right hand man by a matter of months and his rain guardian by two years. Ryohei had died 10 years prior and Mukuro, Chrome, Chikusa, and Ken had disappeared 15 years before that. Bianchi had died only months after Reborn had left and Fuuta and I-Pin had departed some odd years after that. Hibari had simply never been heard of again after his 50th birthday.
They were… the last of that glorious family.