A/N: I finally started it, as promised. Hey everyone, welcome!

I'm sorry for putting this off so long, but I wanted to make sure I had every detail in order, so that it would make sense, and that took me a little too long. I've been busy, so I finally forced myself to sit down and work on this.

This was originally supposed to be just a one-shot, but seeing as how Fran has literally no back-story or character development (yet anyway), this had to be broken up into chapters. It follows the 'Crawl with the Heretics' style, i.e. Fran is speaking and telling his story. Also, I broke it up because if I didn't, you'd all be waiting until the end of time to read it lol It depicts Fran's life from childhood until his time in the Varia. So there's a lot to talk about. Enjoy.

So yeah, babbling aside, read on!

By the way, before anyone says anything about it and I hit them, I developed this headcanon before Chapters 347 and 348 of the Reborn manga, so the stuff about the Varia, and his grandma (not to mention the now infamous apple hat) will not be anywhere. Just needed to make that known beforehand.

Okay now I'm done.

Warnings: The warnings will differ from chapter to chapter, but for this chapter: ideologically sensitive content, themes, and a bit of bad language.

Disclaimer: Sushi*Bomb does not own Katekyo Hitman Reborn. I wish I owned Fran and his apple hat though. He is a cutie patootie.

A Consecutive Series of Misfortunes

Misfortune 01: Birth (Unnatural)

Life sucks and then you die.

In my humble opinion, truer words have never been spoken. No one's ever truly perfectly content with their lot in life. We always want something better; we're always striving for goals and dreams that are ultimately unattainable. And all in hopes that maybe, just maybe, we'll find some sort of happiness, however temporary it will inevitably be.

I find it sort of depressing, to be honest.

But it can't really be helped. It's just the way people are. Humankind is a miserable race.

Though I guess in my case, I was destined to be unlucky even before that night when my parents had a little too much to drink and their little 'accident' rolled down the tube exactly seven months later.

I was born two months premature, on a particularly chilly October evening. When I think about it now, it seems fitting that I was born in a month with such a negative stigma attached to it, but I'll explain why later.

Anyway, even though I looked normal enough when I was born, it was pretty obvious there was plenty else wrong with me. And when I say I looked normal, I mean I didn't have green hair like I do now. It was jet black for the first…hmm… four or so years of my childhood, and then it went downhill from there.

Because I was born so early, I had a lot of health problems, specifically with my lungs. I was very weak, and there were a few times when I had to be resuscitated. I spent the first two months of life in an incubator, with a whole spectrum of wires and tubes attached to me, monitoring me constantly.

I'm glad we as humans are incapable of remembering that far back, because I wouldn't want such an unpleasant memory floating around in my head. I've already got plenty enough as it is.

But I do know that my parents rarely came to visit me.

Once my mom was healed up and on her feet, the two of them were right back to work, kissing ass and throwing ridiculously lavish parties with money that didn't belong to them.

Oh, I guess now would be a good time to tell you a bit about my family.

Contrary to what fallen-prince sempai says, I actually wasn't poor growing up. Not at first, anyway. In fact, my family was pretty well off, considering who my grandfather was. You see, I was born into a family of politicians, namely my grandfather, who was the Prime Minister of Italy, second in power only to the Italian President. Both of my parents held seats of relative influence in the judicial parliament. In short, I guess by sempai's standards, I was pretty close to being royalty myself.

I'm never going to tell him that though. If Bel ever found that out about me, he'd probably throw me over a balcony or something.

My heritage is also the reason why my file in the Varia is considered 'classified.' To avoid a whole political mess, given that the grandson of the late Prime Minister is now an assassin for the Mafia. I'm sure you are all smart enough to understand the potential consequences of information like that finding its way into the public forum.

Anyway, back to my parents.

I think they might've come to see how I was doing once or twice in the months I spent in the hospital, but I wouldn't count on it. If there was anyone who really gave a damn about me, it was my grandfather. He used to tell me that when I was still in the hospital, he'd come by every night to see if I was improving.

I remember that when he would tell me about myself as a baby, my grandfather always got this very distant, pensive look on his face. Like he knew something that no one else knew. I remember always asking him what he was thinking about.

He used to say that I rarely cried, if ever.

When all of the other babies were screaming and wailing, he told me that I would just lay in my incubator, sleeping or looking at him. Despite the undeniable fact that I was the sickest baby in the ward, he said that I often laid there in an almost unnatural calm, always looking about, like I somehow understood everything that was going on around me, and that I knew who he was. That makes more sense to me now in adulthood than back then. I've always been very intuitive. I just understood things, even if I didn't necessarily know why I understood them.

Hopefully that made some kind of sense.

He said that from then on, he knew I was special. Although when I think about it now, 'special' was a bit of an understatement.

As you can imagine, I wasn't exactly 'cured' when my family finally brought me home. It was quite the opposite in fact. I was very weak and sickly looking, and those two things remained pretty constant throughout my life. I was prone to a lot of illnesses, particularly respiratory illnesses, so I spent a lot of time in hospitals.

After a while, my parents decided that it would be best if I just stayed inside. It was convenient for them if I was constantly monitored in the house, and natually, I had no say in that decision. And so, I was never allowed to play outside, because I got tired easily and my Asthma would act up. As a result, I never played with any kids my age.

Not that it really mattered in the end, or anything.

The kids in my neighborhood were just like their parents. Snobby, elitist little gremlins who knew a little too much for their age. Personally, I thought they were all stupid and I didn't particularly enjoy their company, so in a way, I was thankful for my laundry list of illnesses, allergies, and problems.

Besides, I had more fun when I was alone. One thing that has always been true: I have one hell of an imagination, and a very macabre one as well. Truth be told, I was kind of a creepy kid growing up.

No, scratch that.

I was a very creepy kid growing up.

My hair was almost unnaturally black, and coupled with my sickly pale skin, I would've fit right in with the Addams Family or something like that. Nevermind that I had gotten into the habit of wearing dark clothing very early on.

Also, I had these two little marks under my eyes.

Two dark patches at the corners of both eyes that, as I got older, developed into a distinct triangular shape. I always covered them with makeup, because my mom used to say they made me look like some sort of jester or a clown. I still have them now, although the original birthmarks have been darkened in with tattoos, because I'm not ashamed by them anymore.

Those two little marks meant I was special. I always had my suspicions about them, simply because of the way they looked. They were too exact; too distinct to be just a fluke. And I found out very soon that it was no coincidence that I somehow knew that.

Anyway, because I spent a great deal of time in and out of hospitals, I had a lot of experience with death and sickness. I remember one incident in particular, because it was pretty much where my fascination with death began. I was sharing a room with another boy; he had pneumonia, I believe, and he died during the night. The next morning, I was the first one to find him.

He was cold; his skin had lost that vibrant warmth of life, and his eyes were hollow. I remember thinking to myself, 'what was it that he thought about right before he passed?' Because he looked…at peace. Like he was happy to finally go. When the doctors and nurses finally arrived, they quickly ushered me into a private room, away from the body.

But I wasn't afraid. I was completely fascinated by it.

It became something I thought about often, especially when I was very ill. What would I look like when I died? What would be my final thoughts?

I also remember a rather disturbingly elaborate little prank I started to play on the help, as well as my parents. Especially my mother. In retropsect, it's a wonder I wasn't institutionalized sooner, given how much thought I had apparently put into my ideas.

Well…I began to fake my death.

A lot.

I always wondered how people would react if I had actually died, and in my four-year old mind, that was the way to do it. My favorite 'death' was accidentally falling down the stairs. I would lie at the bottom of the stairs and position my limbs into grotesque and painful- looking angles. It never took long for someone to find me, seeing as how my house was always bustling with life. It was hard at times, keeping the smile off of my face when I would hear the familiar shriek of a maid, or better yet, my mom, for someone to call an ambulance. I think she might've actually fainted once.

But it also made me kind of sad too.

Because those were the only times, when I played those cruel pranks, that my parents acted like they really cared about me. Those were the only times that I heard my mother cry hysterically, or heard patronly urgency for the well-being of his son in my father's voice as he shouted harshly to the dispatcher on the phone. Those were the only times they acted like actual parents.

When they thought I was dead.

I often went to bed angry when I played those pranks, because even though I'd get a good laugh out of it, deep down, it hurt. It bothered me then, and it still bothers me now, that a child had to resort to such disquieting measures to get his parents to pay attention to him.

I was a sick kid, and I needed help. It couldn't have been more obvious.

And they…they just didn't care.

But thankfully, my grandfather filled the void that my parents often left gaping open. He knew I was gifted, morbid and bizarre as I was, and took the time to nurture me. It was from him that I discovered reading.

My grandfather always made time to sit with me and read me stories, and that was often the highlight of my day. He was a gifted orator, so he had no issue holding my attention for hours on end with the amazing books he read to me, so I believe it was only natural for me to learn on my own in a fairly short amount of time. I think it would have been stranger if I hadn't picked up reading as quickly as I did, truthfully.

In any case, I loved reading. It became my one real escape from the mundane. On rainy afternoons, I would curl up under my covers and read comic books. While other kids played outside, I would watch them from my window before scoffing and picking up on whatever I left off on previously.

Any book I could get my hands on, my nose was immediately in it until it was finished. Granted, I was only around one or two when I first picked up a book on my own, and those were picture books a great deal of the time, but regardless, I enjoyed it, and because I enjoyed it, I excelled in it.

I suppose it's very lucky for me in both that I was sick all the time, and that I'm a natural illusionist, because what I lacked in physical ability I more than made up for in mental acuity. When I think back on it now, it should've been obvious from then on that I was something of a prodigy. I could hold a conversation with adults on a variety of subjects, and, once school began, I ran circles around my classmates with my ability to process very complex (or at least what would be considered complex to a child) information in short periods of time.

My grandfather was the first person to both notice and suggest that I might have possessed genius-level intellect, which, upon officially testing later, it was found that I did.

But because of my various illnesses, I didn't go to school often, and eventually it was decided that home-schooling would be best. In terms of intelligence and comprehension, I was already three grades ahead of everyone anyway, so I had little issue with staying home.

For me, that just meant I got to spend more time reading and expanding my imagination, and less time dealing with the processed sausages I called classmates.

Naturally, my two childhood fixations became entwined. I spent more time than was considered healthy for a child my age holed up in my room, with stacks of books about ghosts, black magic, the afterlife and things generally pertaining to the occult towering on my bedside table and my desk.

By age four, I was plowing through books meant for people quadruple my age with relative ease. I often forewent eating, sleeping, and even taking my medication at times, because I was so drawn into a book. From the time I could speak, I had an odd affinity for words, especially bigs words, and I got into the habit of keeping a dictionary next to me when I read more advanced books. Pretty soon, I was a walking fountain of words.

My grandfather was always impressed when he came over to see me, and I would rattle off definition upon definition just for the twinkle of pride in his eyes at my childish excitement. Unlike my parents, he encouraged me in every endeavor I underwent. He was the only person to do that, really.

At times, it frustrated me that my parents weren't the least bit interested in my prodigious talents, or in anything having to with me for that matter. Which in retrospect I find very strange now, considering the kind of people my parents were. To them, status was everything. They lived to be the envy of everyone; to have the nicest, most expensive things, to eat at the finest restaurants, to throw the most lavish, profligate parties. That was all that mattered to them, so it baffles me that they didn't go out of their way to show off their genius son to their acquaintances.

But you know, they probably had no idea to begin with.

I can't tell how you many times I'd been smacked over the head for barging in on one of their fancy get-togethers with their snobby, rich-people friends to tell them the newest word I had learned.

If they had even been the slightest bit aware, they would have realized that four-year olds weren't normally able to spell words like 'ectoplasm,' much less comprehend what they meant.

So after a while, I just stopped telling them things altogether.

And it was around that time that I started changing. Don't worry, I didn't grow fangs or anything. It was just little things at first. Things that didn't necessarily seem connected in the beginning.

First it was the dreams.

I often had very strange dreams. They were dark, they made no sense. At times, it felt more like I was watching a series of disturbing clips, rather than experiencing the results of the subconscious mind, which is what a dream is. Over time, the dreams became more vivid. And more frightening.

Have you ever experienced déjà vu?

Well, I have. More times than I feel comfortable admitting. Every night, I had dreams so realistic, so detailed, that after a while, I stopped thinking they were dreams altogether. One in particular will always stand out to me, because I had it more than once, and I know for a fact now that it was not a dream, but a vision.

It went like this: I was in a forest of some sort. I was dirty and tired for some reason. And I was running. In front of me, I was barely able to make out the silhouette of a boy. He was holding my hand, and we were running away together. I could never see his face, because it was blacked out. He would keep saying that I needed to get away, and that I needed to survive.

It annoyed me, because I would never see his face. The vision was much too brief, and I'd always wake up right as he was turning around.

Then came the hallucinations.

Sometimes, I'd see something dark move by just out of my line of sight. Sometimes, I'd see someone walking by and when I mentioned it, no one else remembered seeing them. Once in a while, I'd smell or hear something so vividly, that I couldn't understand why no one else could hear or smell it.

And once, I was reading, and the words suddenly began to coagulate together into one big black mass. That mass formed into a wide, grinning mouth and started talking to me.

I told my mom.

She shook her head and had one of the staff members take me to the doctor. They gave me an MRI and a new bottle of pills to pop. I don't even remember what the pills were for, to be honest. I guess they helped. For like a week.

Sometimes, as the days wore on, I had a mix of hallucinations and dreams. On several occasions, I had dreams within dreams within dreams. And they weren't harmless, pleasant dreams either. I often woke up in a cold sweat, shivering and breathing hard from fear.

I never told my parents about the dreams, because as far as I was concerned, they already thought I was a freak, why give them more reason to keep their distance from me?

In fact, after that, there was a long time where I never told anyone about any of the disturbing things I was experiencing with greater and greater frequency. I thought that perhaps I was just stressed out or something. I had been in the hospital for a particularly lengthy stretch of time with pneumonia, and I figured that in my anxiety and exhaustion, my mind was going a little haywire.

But then I started sleep-walking.

Like everything, it started off innocently enough. I would wake up in odd parts of the house, like the kitchen, or in a closet. It was more of an inconvenience than anything else for the first couple of weeks. But pretty soon, it got a little more perilous.

After one singularly terrifying incident in which I woke up hanging by the collar of my sleeping shirt over my bedroom balcony, I realized I had to tell someone. I felt like I was slipping quickly, and I was afraid to leave me room, to eat, and most of all, to go to sleep. My parents were immediately scratched off of my mental list, since during that time, they were in America on business.

I did tell my grandfather though.

He didn't know what to make of it either, and I could tell that he was frightened for my safety. He took time off from his political duties just to spend a few days with me in the hospital. They ran a multitude of tests, checking for any condition that might've been affecting my brain function. They had a list of things they felt could've been wrong: maybe I hit my head, perhaps I had some sort of parasite, an auto-immune disorder, Meningitis, a lesion on my brain, everything.

But over the course of a week, they ruled every single suspected malignity out.

They even did a sleep study on me. But the results were inconclusive I guess, because all I went home with after that week was two new kinds of medication and a journal. The head doctor was baffled by both my strange symptoms, and by the fact that they couldn't find anything pointing to a culprit. So at that point, the best advice he had for me then was to write everything down.

So that's what I did.

For several months, I wrote down literally anything and everything that happened to me. Every hallucination I had, no matter how small or insignificant it seemed, and every single dream, whether it was vivid or not.

By that time, it wasn't just hallucinations and dreams any more. I had another symptom now, although this one wasn't so much scary as it was actually pretty cool.

I could make things.

By thinking about them.

I first realized I could do this when I was in my room reading, and in the book, they described a cake. I closed my eyes and envisioned this cake, because it sounded heavenly, and I wasn't allowed to eat sweets. In any case, when I opened my eyes…

…there was a cake floating about a foot from my face.

I didn't exactly know how to react at first, so I did what any kid would do. I tried to touch it.

As soon as I did that, it vanished, and it was then that my nerves caught up with me. I screamed and ran out of the room. At first, I thought either I was having a reaction to a medication, or all of that reading on ghosts and seances had somehow opened the door for spirits to enter my house. But as time progressed, I realized it was all me.

I was the one with the ability to conjure things into existence. I couldn't always do it at first, but during the rare times when it worked, I was beside myself with joy. Naturally, I noted down this new ability in my journal too.

And over time, I started to notice a pattern.

It seemed like the pattern of symptoms followed a monthly cycle. First, the dreams. Then the hallucinations followed after. As the month progressed, I had a mixture of both. Around the middle of the month was the only time I was able to conjure things by thinking about them. It seemed that that was the peak, because after a few days, I would feel very tired, and the hallucinations would return, followed by dreams, and then for a few days, nothing.

When I showed my journal to my doctor, he was completely flabbergasted that I had pinned a specific pattern down so quickly. In my mind, it was such an obvious sequence, it would've been absurd not to notice it right away.

Not that it lead to an answer or anything. So over time, I did my own research, and I finally found something I felt would be of interest. My sequence of symptoms lined up almost perfectly with the lunar cycle.

During the new moon, I was symptom free, and I functioned with relative normality. During the waxing crescent in the beginning of the month, and waning crescent at the end of the month, the dreams would begin. During the half-moons, the hallucinations would start. I would experience a frequent mixture of both intense dreams and hallucinations during the waxing and waning Gibbous, respectively, and in the days before and after the full moon, I was able to create illusions.

The numbers differed from month to month, but generally, my symptoms stuck to this pattern.

At the time, I was still too young to completely comprehend what this meant, and since I hadn't told anyone, not even my grandfather, about the illusions, I kept it to myself.

I began to develop my own theories.

I read everything I could find on the lunar cycle, and about the human brain. I remembered hearing somewhere that people acted differently when the moon was full, and right then it clicked for me.

I read about the moon's effect on the tides. And the human body is around seventy-something percent water.

See where I'm going with this?

Well if not, allow me to explain.

Have you ever heard someone say 'It must be a full moon out' when someone's acting a little looney? There's more truth to that than people think. The human body is made up of seventy-three percent water, and just like the moon shifts the tides on a beach, the water in our bodies is affected by ebb and flow.

Naturally, this goes double for an illusionist, since our minds are wired very differently from a normal person's, and consequently, are much more fragile than we like to let on. Nothing fucks us up more than any sort of mental imbalance, since an illusionist's mind is their greatest weapon.

And true to that fact, as I got older, the cycle of symptoms went through its sequence without fail, every single month. I learned to deal with it the best I could over that first year, but as time wore on, the dreams became more intense, the hallucinations more strange and terrifying, and the illusions harder to control.

Over that time, I developed many lesser symptoms too.

I alternated between long periods of insomnia, and even longer periods of narcolepsy. No one knew about the insomnia, but it was difficult for me to hide the narcolepsy, since I tended to fall asleep at extremely inconvenient times and in increasingly bizarre places.

I soon added yet another useless medication to my daily regimen of pills.

And then something else happened to.

And I had literally no explanation for it. Even to this day.

I woke up one morning and my roots were green. I thought at first that perhaps I was either dreaming or hallucinating again, so I pinched myself. And it turns out, I was very much awake, and perfectly coherent.

My hair was actually turning green.

And even as a kid, I was fairly certain there was no treatment or medication for that.

I didn't know what to do, so I just started wearing a hat all of the time. My parents, predictably, were none the wiser to my odd habit. My grandfather on the other hand found my sudden and vehement insistence on wearing a hat at every waking moment perplexing and a little unsettling.

But what else could I do?

I had no idea why it was happening, and no matter how hard I searched for an answer, I couldn't find any explanation, so my only option then was to keep it hidden. I was afraid of all of these things happening to me. I was scared to sleep, I was scared of thinking too hard about anything, I was scared that the strange condition I had was physically manifesting itself, changing my appearance to fit the bizarre occurences that made up my life up until then.

And what scared me the most was the fact that I wouldn't be able to hide it for long.

So chapter one is done. What do you all think so far? Let me know!

Oh by the way, for those of you who read Boulevard Nights, Fuuta won't show up until around chapter 3 or 4, in case you were wondering. There's a lot that needs to be explained beforehand.

I'll try to have chapter 2 up next week. Key word try.

Leave me a nice comment if you enjoyed it so far!

Until next time!

-S*B