Warning: Unbeta-ed. Major character death. This fanfiction is yaoi/BL which means its boy/boy. If this genre does not fit you, I highly recommend you to click the back button or close the window immediately. If I would ever receive a message complaining regarding this, it will be ignored. Thankyou.
Disclaimer: I do not own Katekyo Hitman Reborn! All rights belong to Amano Akira.
A/N: Special thanks to my Microbiology professor. Without her this would have never existed.
No one saw it coming.
Not even the world's greatest hitman himself have foreseen this.
The Vongola Decimo's infamous hyper intuition failed as well.
No one saw it coming, really. It happened ten years ago, and it took a decade before the symptoms started arising. It went undetected, right under their noses.
And now, the Tenth Vongola Don is going to pay the price.
He's dying.
It started with the Vongola Don seen staggering at times when he walks in the corridors of the mansion. Most thought it was fatigue, or maybe even hunger-because he's been cooped up in his study most of the time, they all thought he just needs to take a break, and so they gave him one.
Everything is going to be alright again, then.
That's where they were all wrong.
After that, he started losing control of his body coordination. He seems like he's having a hard time moving his limbs. His movements are jerky, and his speech started slurring, like his tongue coiled onto itself, his speech deteriorated.
They don't know what's going on-he's too young for all of this.
And before they know it, he lost the ability to walk, just like that.
His body started shaking as well.
After that, the symptoms got stranger.
He can't seem to grasp his emotions properly. They would usually see him depressed, which is normal, for someone who suddenly lost everything to him without even doing anything. They understood why.
What just puzzles Hibari is his laughter.
There are times-random times, whenever he have the time, he'll enter his room, just to see how he's doing, or maybe even get to talk to him, even though-surprisingly enough-he's the one who does the talking, even though most of his topics are all about the box weapons he'd found, or rings he confiscated, he'll suddenly laugh out of nowhere.
He'll chuckle, cackle, and laugh-for no reason at all.
Every time the Vongola Don laughs like one of those times, he'll look at him, with his scrunched brows and teary eyes-that he can't tell if it's because of his uncontrollable, excessive laughter or maybe something else, but whenever he sees those eyes staring right at him, he can't help but feel that painful quench his chest does to his heart.
Back then, he is the only one who knows of the Don's laughing tendencies, but then before he knew it, everyone else does now too.
The pain in their eyes reflects those of the Don's, and somehow, along the way, he started to feel numb about it. It's like it's his body's way of coping with the pain every time he sees him like this.
Sometime later, their question is finally answered.
Vongola's Tenth Boss is suffering with a degenerative neurological disease called Kuru.
It's a disease endemic in the tribes of Papua New Guinea. It is transmitted through their ancient tradition of cannibalism. It is a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, caused by a prion found in humans, primarily in the brain.
The symptoms matched with the Don's, and soon enough, he'll completely lose his control over his own body and emotions, due to the disease's degenerative neurological capability.
No one knows how in the world he got the disease but since it takes a long time before the symptoms appear, the doctors estimated he must've got it no more than a decade or so-ten years ago, the time the hitman came into his life to train him into a mafia boss.
They came into a conclusion that somehow an enemy family got his information without their knowing through good connections, and somehow managed to sneak some brain of an infected deceased tribe member of said nation into one of his meals, sat back, and waited for reaction ten years from then.
All of these went past undetected, right under their noses.
The thing is, although Vongola is the most powerful family in Italy, they failed to find this mystery family who committed this long-term assassination plan on their Don. Ten years is a long time, the evidence could've faded along with it.
They hired the best doctors in the world, only to find out there is no available cure for the disease as of yet, and its already too late, since he's already on his second stage before the third comes and he dies. It's already too late from the beginning he started showing the symptoms, since once the prion entered his brain and inhibits his cerebellum, he is as good as dead.
They were ten years too late.
They were all filled with pain and sorrow, knowing the mafia Don will die a slow, painful death.
Many decided it was for the best to commit euthanasia for his sake, for he's too kind, too good to die like this, and they are feeling a great deal of hurt every time they see him like this, hear him laugh and cry at the same time, with his eyes glinting in pain.
But the Don decided himself, with a slight turn of his head and a jerk of a shoulder that he wants to endure it. He still wants to live a little bit more, even if it hurts him by doing so.
They can't do anything against that. He said so himself, so they resorted to blaming, accusing every person their darkened eyes could see.
Starting with the man whose character is the most questionable of all: Rokudo Mukuro.
The bastard laughed it off, saying along the lines of why would he kill him when his body is essential in destroying the mafia? Not to mention that if he knew from the start that he is the Decimo, then he wouldn't have went all through the pain of kidnapping Ranking Fuuta and start beating the strongest kids in Namimori Middle by rank in the boy's list.
Despite his sound reasoning, Hibari felt like killing him off nonetheless, though he held back. The glint in the man's eyes every time he takes a glance at the Don is something he can sympathize with.
He may hide it well, but he knows as much as the other does about how much they yearn him, want him-love him.
The sight of the Don lying in bed, unable to speak, move or control his bodily functions gives them physical pain, pain worse than those injuries they acquired back when they were younger.
All these hardships they went through fighting the Millefiore Boss is all for nothing then, since the Decimo is going to face the same future either way, this time, triple to pay.
Soon enough, the dreaded terminal stage came.
He completely lost his grip on controlling his movements, his speech-he can't speak anymore-and he can't even sit on the bed anymore without a support. Half of his body is already buried on the ground, and he still insisted on living to the very end.
After a few more days, the big day came. He's dead before they even got whiff of the news that's he's on the verge of dying. The very first person to know of his death is a maid, who is assigned on duty that day to change the Don's bouquet of flowers on his bedside table. She noticed that there is no expanding of the chest as a sign of breathing, and the body looked paler than usual, the bags in his eyes a dark shade of purple. Panicking, she pressed the button in the table, which made the alarms go off throughout the vongola estate. They put it there just in case something like this was to happen to the Decimo-although this scenario never crossed their minds.
Doctors and nurses swarmed into the room, bringing all the manor's best equipments. The doctors tried pressing his chest, trying to revive his still heart, pumping oxygen into his lungs, and rechecking his pulse, if it ever were to beat again, to no avail.
The operation lasted for less than three-hundred seconds, and after that, a doctor pulled his sleeve and checked his watch. He declared the time of death while one of the nurses grabbed their data sheet to jot the time down for protocol.
Everyone cried. Well, everyone except for them, the cloud and the male mist guardians.
As everyone shed their tears for the decimo on his death bed, they stared at his body with indifference. In an outsider's point of view, it seemed like they never cared for him from the very beginning.
That's where they were wrong.
The moment these two stepped into the room and saw the Mafia Don's corpse, their bodies stopped functioning. Their legs were glued to the ground, and no matter how much they want to look away, or make a run for it, they can't. They kept their gazes fixed on the Don while the rest were fixed on them-hate and doubt seething from their very beings.
The funeral ended as soon as the Don died.
They left his coffin in the middle of the forest, situated near his hometown, Namimori.
The Gods must be laughing at them now.
That is exactly where they also left his supposedly dead body in an alternate future, where they went sent as teenagers to fight Byakuran, to save this future, to ensure his life.
It seems that no matter how much they try so hard to fight for it, the closer it brings them to this dreaded dead end.
It's like a maze where no matter what route you take, you are always assured to end up in the same exit, because there is no other exit other than this one, this is the only exit that exists, and no matter how much you destroy the walls of this maze, the closer the path brings you to this exit and the thicker the walls grow to hinder you from moving until you can no longer stretch your limbs, and you have no other choice but to walk through the now narrowed walls with both your arms lying lax at your sides, no longer useful because the space is constricting them from doing so.
The more you fight, the more powerless you become-the more helplessness you'll feel as you watch your raison d'être suffer and die as its remains soon turn into dust and be blown by the wind.
They lost, again.
End Note: This story comes in 3 parts, since I'm too lazy to finish it all in one go and I think it'll be more appreciated if I do so.
A/N: I don't really have much information about said disease other than what I got from her lecture, internet is not that useful either when I tried googling for a person infected with this disease so sorry if it's not that accurate. I'm not a biology major too.