Authors: Abreaction, KISproductions.

Fandom: Reborn

Timeline: Choice Ark

Pairings: 10051
Rating: M
Genre: Angst/Tragedy
Warnings: Multiple character deaths, AU-ish, blood, spoilers, shonen-ai, and Byakuran.
Disclaimer: We want that sexy marshmallow, yo.
Summary: Byakuran is forgiving to the ones he loves.


Othello



Chapter I-Apple of Discord

"Shou-chan, it's good to see you again."

Goose bumps instantly rise on his skin when he hears that voice, a chill running up his spine at the same time his blood freezes in his veins. Suddenly, the iron shackles around his bleeding wrists felt much more heavier, the coppery taste of blood in his mouth doubling in its unpleasantness. Slowly, his lips form a bitter smile, and he knows that if he had not already been on his knees, his legs would have given up on him the second he'd have heard that cheerfully pleasant voice.

Footsteps, his death toll ringing, come closer and closer, until Shouichi sees dark boots coming to a stop in front of him. He doesn't dare look up, his chained hands tight fists at his knees, where they clutch the relic he had once believed in, in its owner and how he would stop this wolf in sheep's clothing from destroying the entire world. He doesn't want to look up, not only because he doesn't want to see that eerily familiar face, but because somewhere inside of him a part of him still refuses, even now, to acknowledge the truth scattered around him.

The stench of death is thick in the air, as thick Sawada Tsunayoshi's blood in his hands.

"Maa, was chaining him really necessary, Kikyo-kun?" that sweet, lie-coated voice chirps. "I'm afraid Shou-chan isn't used to such rough treatments, so this really won't do at all."

A rough hand fists his hair, strong fingers gripping red tresses and harshly pulling his head up to meet amused purple eyes, the eerily-colored gaze more chilling than any gaze has right to be. Shouichi's glasses lay broken on the ground some feet away from him, and he's glad that he can only see a misshapen white and black blurry blob as Byakuran, the new ruler of the world, kneels in front of him.

This was never supposed to happen.

"Tsk-tsk. Now, now, Kikyo-kun, there's no reason to be mean to Shou-chan," Byakuran gently chides the man holding Shouichi by his hair, and with a frown, the fearsome holder of the Mare Cloud ring lets the redhead go.

"I still don't think you should be here, Byakuran-sama," the man says, clear annoyance spelled on his features as he crosses his arms over his chest. There are droplets of blood on his black coat, and Shouichi tries hard not to think of the young boy whose blood that belongs to. "There's no reason for you to get your hands dirty with this useless garbage."

Byakuran laughs, it is a cheerfully false sound that Shouichi knows carries a carefully disguised threat. "Nonsense! As a team, we must work together, or am I not part of the team, Kikyo-kun?"

Shouichi knows Byakuran's mind games all too well, he has had to learn the rules and how to cheat at them to survive under the white-haired Mafioso's watch while he had been under him. Byakuran's games are cruel, twisted, and more than a little sadistic. They're almost as bad as his words, which although coated with sugary sweetness, are twice as poisonous as his actions. If there truly was a devil walking among humans, it was this man.

And it was thanks to him that this devil now had complete control of everything.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he grits his teeth and wishes he could turn back the clock. Back to the day he made the stupid, irreversible mistake of traveling to the future not once, but numerous times just for the sake of his selfish reasons. All of this was his fault, his doing, his cross to carry. Everything that had happened up until now, all the deaths, the sacrifices and lost dreams, was because of his existence. How foolish of him, how naïve, to think that he could fix his past mistakes. Two wrongs don't make a right, he should have known this. Helping the Vongola family stop his nightmare from turning into a reality wouldn't save him from the punishment that awaited him once he died, he had done too many wretched things to ever be forgiven. What he had done, what he had created, what he had helped happen, none of it could ever be redeemed no matter how hard he tried. His sins were vile, and piled up they amounted to not only the destruction of the world, but all the deaths his existence had caused.

If only he didn't exist, this nightmare never would have happened.

"Shou-chan, do you not feel well?" Byakuran questions, the unparallel glee in his voice masked behind his fake concern only making his lies all the more worse, all the more twisted, and Shouichi doesn't think he can hold back the urge to be sick for much longer.

Regardless of that, he doesn't say anything, refuses to say a word because he knows anything he says will only make Byakuran's victory taste all the more sweeter than it already does. That is why he says nothing, does nothing, as another set of fingers, gentle and soothingly warm, begin threading through his hair, coarse and rough with dry blood. They caress his bloody cheek, tracing the deep cut running down the side of his face until they stop at his lips, powdery soft fingertips brushing against sensitive pink flesh.

His grip around the small keepsake only tightens.

"You known, I was lonely without you, Shou-chan. Our family just isn't complete without you."

Shouichi almost cracks a smile at that. He knows very well he never belonged in the Mafioso's family, and Byakuran knows that as well, knows it better than anyone else. It was only him and his twisted desire to how the redhead would fare in the vicious politics of his family, that kept Shouichi's position safe all these years. No, not even, because after all, he'd kept the real Millefiore guardians from him, proving that Shouichi had never been important enough to know of them. A smart move, because Shouichi would have no doubt been prepared to face them if given any information about the six Funerals he could have aided the Vongola family with.

His betrayal was inevitable, but how Shouichi wishes he could have taken more with him when he left Byakuran's side.

Gently cupping his face, the Millefiore leader forces him to look up into imploring purple eyes. "It hasn't been the same since you left us for Tsunayoshi-kun."

Liar, he wants to say. We both know I have always been more than disposable. He's not foolish enough to not known why he had been kept alive all these years, he'd outgrown that naiveté not long after getting involved with this dangerous world. To Byakuran, men were easily replaced, rarely was anyone not expandable, and Shouichi was nobody special. It had only been Byakuran humoring him, making 'little Shou-chan' believe he was actually doing something to stop him, when all along the man knew the redhead would betray him. The fake Sun Mare ring? Nothing, just a mere game Byakuran wished to play to see how Shouichi would react to him knowing his betrayal from the very beginning.

It's that part that hurts the most, Shouichi thinks, knowing that all of his efforts to stop his greatest mistake had amounted to nothing. The Vongola family, his only hope, the only power that could have stopped Byakuran's greed, dead because of him. Now there really was nothing in the universe that could take this man believing himself to be a higher being down. There would be no more plans, no more sneaking behind his back to meet enemies-turned-allies in the middle of the night in an attempt to defeat him, no more anything.

This time, this really was the end.

"If you keep crying like that," the man says, voice incredibly gentle as he caresses the side of the engineer's bloodied face, "I'll start crying, too, Shou-chan."

He hadn't realized he had been crying; his cheeks are too cold and his limbs are too numb with the unshakable truth he can no longer ignore:

Shouichi's dream, his last pathetic attempt at redemption; Tsunayoshi and his family's goal, in the end it had all burned to ashes against Byakuran's own selfish wish.

However, this time, with innocence shattered and veracity eclipsed by an incessant slew of lies spilling from Byakuran's lips, there was no potential phoenix to ascend from the ashes of their charred dreams; no second chances to rectify previous mistakes.

No hope. There's no hope; all asphyxiated by the vermiculated aspirations of a tyrant, his own personal cathartic dreams for a world with his hands clasped around the reigns.

Byakuran is the hairline fracture of his own creation, developed by Shouichi's own selfish, petty childish ambitions. Before his eyes, Byakuran had morphed into a fault, bisecting the world until it groveled at every blade of trampled grass he stepped on, every charred remnant of a life left in his wake, and pressed its lips against his heel.

"And when I cry," the man with the cosmos at his feet muses, his whispered sibilants lost in the vermillion strands of hair he was weaving his fingers through, working their way through the coalescent blood clinging to the tresses, "the world does."

At the belittling words, Bluebell makes a botched effort to stifle giggles behind her small hand, her high-pitch twitters reverberating off of the walls. Shouichi can feel Byakuran shift, the blurred mass of his head pivoting on his neck to face her. She silences.

Silent. Speechless like his hollowed out vocal chords, refusing to compose sentences and sonant diphthongs. Against his own better judgment and free will, he cannot speak. The mere thought of vaunting his own phobias, particularly to a man thirsting for blood and purgation of the world until only those who would agree to abide by his vermiculated sense of justice in order to keep their lives, ground his lungs, his heart and his throat to sand until he couldn't speak, couldn't breathe, couldn't live. Not while Byakuran was here, his untainted fingers tracing patterns onto his flesh with that smile on his face, never fading. Not while he can feel the blood splatters on his arms anhydrate into flakes, easy to chip away with a nail.

Byakuran tilts his head slightly to one side, his indistinct features concealed by locks of fogged white splotches most likely representing his hair.

There is anger like something akin to an acid pooling inside of him, brimming and on the brink of breaking him down until he was nothing left but a skeleton painted red with the blood of the lambs he led to the slaughter, which he thought would be their victory.

If he were never born, just reabsorbed into oblivion before he had the chance to supply the world's future dominator with his efficacy, then none of this would have happened. Then Tsunayoshi would be biting the chewed length of his pencil, which lacked an eraser that was worn to the quick with indecision on his math exam, as opposed to lying sixth or so feet under the soles of someone's shoes in an undisclosed area, with only patches of slightly dampened dirt from Shouichi's tear droplets to honor his death.

Not withstanding his lack of a clear image without his glasses, the redheaded engineer could nearly picture the perennial smile on the man's face. Byakuran was a monster that had escaped the confines of the realm nether Shouichi's bed, walking around in broad daylight with nothing but his smile masking his bloodthirsty desires as he spread his pyre to every blade of grass in the world, waiting for the day where the entire world would catch aflame, only for him to hold the hose.

"Tsk," Byakuran mutters, perhaps slightly agitated at Shouichi's refusal to even acknowledge his victory, albeit not showing it. He's taunting him with every word that rolls off of his tongue in that sickeningly honeyed voice of his. Absentmindedly, he cradles Shouichi's cheek in his palm, his thumb grazing over the deep gash in his jaw. As an automatic reaction, the redhead whimpers. "That face you're making, it's breaking my heart."

Bullshit.

The urge to spit at Byakuran's feet—obviously donning polished shoes—is very enticing. It's a dangerous game the Millefiore leader is forcing him to play, undoubtedly testing the limits of his self-restraint, waiting for him to split open at the seams.

A ferment atmosphere settles into place; Shouichi can feel it in between Byakuran's fingers on his skin, emanating from the sounds of the Millefiore boss' six strongest allies shifting, irritated that their leader isn't simply disposing of him, the unwanted variable in their otherwise perfect world. The polychromatic chess piece that would never belong to either integrated black and white set.

Shouichi remains silent, unwavering despite the tears skidding down his cheeks, the quiver in his bottom lip and tremor running throughout his shoulders, as Byakuran's foggy outline begins to shorten the gap in between them, his thumb stroking Shouichi's lower lip as the remainder of his fingers curl nether his chin.

Gentle. Byakuran was always so uncannily gentle, soothing, when it came to his touch. Even now, with the thick, unrelenting scent of blood weighing down Shouichi's heart and muffling his heartbeat, Byakuran's movements were fluid, comforting, in a twisted sense. Ridden with intentions veiled behind a devil's smile wearing an angel's mask.

Smiles.

Shouichi remembers Tsunayoshi's warm smile, brilliance emanating from the curve of his soft pink lips. His semblance of strength and ability to become flustered, arms flapping and cheeks flushed, over the most insignificant of compliments—all reduced to speckles of blood slathered onto fabric, flesh and tile. Byakuran's smile, a polar opposite of Tsunayoshi's pure one, is all he's left with. It never falters; never a slight dip in the corners of his lips. Never any sympathy or remorse. Just saccharine words concealing vehement bloodthirsty objectives.

As Byakuran's fingertips leave his skin tingling where they grazed, Shouichi's clutch around the relic in his hands grows tighter until he can feel it leave an impression in his palm.

"Shou-chan," he feigns disappointment, nonchalantly caressing his lips, "look at me when I talk to you."

Shouichi swallows bile, forcing it to slide down his closing throat. Even if the Byakuran before him is nothing more than a mesh of whites, lavenders and other various pastels contrasting greatly with sanguinary aims, he knows that, if their pupils meet, if only for an instant and nothing more than a mere glimpse of those irises with the pyres and ill-will of the entirety of Hell lapping behind them, Shouichi knows he'll be engulfed whole.

Byakuran's nails leave scratches in Shouichi's skin as they trowel into them, slightly, signifying his awry form of amusement with his captive's stubbornness.

The way Byakuran's lips form around his name, his tongue sliding over the vowels, the slight higher octave of the closing syllable; it sent ripples of chills spiraling throughout every plexus of Shouichi's body.

The natural albeit meek way that Tsunayoshi would say his name, almost as if he were someone whom he held closest to his heart as opposed to two collaborators conspiring to fulfill their dreams by bringing Byakuran down to taste the dirt—it almost made him feel wanted for means besides his technological skill, as if he had a friend working alongside him, someone to share the last breakfast dumpling with and protect from harm. Tsunayoshi gave him a purpose beyond pixels and theocracies.

His wrists, numb and raw from the chains scraping a layer of skin off, quiver as he clenches his fist around the tangible memory of the tenth Vongola boss.

The keepsake is more bloodstained than Shouichi's arms, which had cradled its owner as his breath slipped out from his lungs.

Byakuran traces his fingers along the laceration marring his engineer's flesh, his smirk never dissipating even as his fingers became coated in a thin layer of the crimson liquid.

"Look at me, Shou-chan," Byakuran reminds him before laughing in a high-pitched twitter, a sound not fit for the dreary, black world that the universe has now become.

Shouichi can hear the distinct sound of Kikyo inhaling, entrapping his breath inside of his lungs. Watching his God willingly dirty his precious hands in the blood of the unworthy was obviously not something he was used to witnessing. However, he makes no move to interject. All six of the Funeral Wreaths remain silent, some probably literally biting their tongues, as their opinions would most likely elicit a negative reaction from the Millefiore boss.

Shouichi vaguely wondered, a distant thought lodged in the innermost recesses of his mind as the little piece of Tsunayoshi in his hands refused to have his mind wander to any other topic for too long without reminding him of the blood spilled on his hands, why Byakuran would be so uptight, to tense. He won, received everything he'd ever wanted. Crushed everyone else's dreams and lives with that incessant smile on his face, but had finally conquered every single parallel universe.

The world was in Byakuran's palms, with him wearing the doomsday clock around his wrist, albeit he must have wanted more.

The avaricious bastard, Shouichi grinds his molars against one another, irritated at his own ability to stop his tears when something warm and salty enters his parted lips. He's already taken everything from me, yet he wants more.

Shouichi shudders as Byakuran's thumb slides across the side of his face, erasing all semblances of his tears from existence.

Kikyo's discomfort is a phase-change away from concrete as Byakuran's fingertips flit over Shouichi's sensory coral-pink folds of skin, his thumb resting on the bottom lip, slightly tugging on it until Shouichi automatically let a moan of discomfort escape his mouth. His smile grew. Everything is a game to him—from wars to lust.

Tousled, blood-matted red bangs rest upon Shouichi's cilium; he can feel their weight on his lashes, dipping over his dampened eyelids whenever he blinks. In its haze, he can see his blood on Byakuran's fingers meshing with the tear droplets, creating a blob of a light red hue staining the nebulous blob of his thumb.

Red. The vermillion liquid mixing into the mud.

Tsunayoshi's blood is chipping up to Shouichi's elbows, dried and burrowed into his own scabs of his flesh and in partially coagulated clumps under his nails. In the crevices of skin on his palms, he can feel the boy's blood flake as he tightens his grasp around the ring that once belonged to him—branding itself into his palm. He wills the memories of Tsunayoshi to escape him, because he's too weak to face them, too pathetic to allow his mind's eye to flash images of the boy, his warm smile and open arms, the tawny strands of his hair splayed across the pillow when he slept, the congenital sweetness of his voice—as opposed to Byakuran's faux, artificial one.

The nebulas may bow to Byakuran, but Shouichi would never grovel.

Byakuran's fingers dipped up and down as the redhead's lips formed over words he hadn't the strength to verbalize orally. His tongue uselessly rolls over unspoken words, his jaw working through the motions despite the unparalleled pain that erupted in the slash along his cheek.

"Hm?" Byakuran murmurs, his hand that was previously massaging Shouichi's red locks ceasing in its rub. "Shou-chan, you need to speak up, or your voice won't be heard."

I hate you. The words simple and blunt albeit something in itself; better than the nothing he had been presenting to the table. The blood on his hands is drying into thin scarlet shards. Even now, with wrists bound, Shouichi can still feel the slight frame in his arms, the synthetic fibers of the adolescent's shirt clinging to the skin of his chest as it was heavily weighed down with his own blood. There was no screaming, no wails, only ragged gasps of agony and deep honey-colored eyes with an almost ceramic glaze to them.

Life was slipping through the boy's fistful of Shouichi's shirt, knuckles white as he gasped out his final words, syllables melting into the next as the beads of blood clasping to the contours of his lips glinted in the light as they relaxed, his eyelids slowly merging together as his pupils sucked in their last blurry image of light. His diaphragm expanding and contracting for the (final) time; a surplus of blood—more blood than Shouichi even thought humanly possible—seeping from his wound and onto the red-haired boy's arms, sinking him elbow-deep into the crowning seconds of the child's brief, unfulfilled life. Tsunayoshi's hand in the engineer's tightening before loosening, the ring around his finger slipping off and into the redhead's sanguinary palm as he finally went limp, like the heap of laundry that used to lie in the corner of Shouichi's room until his mother forced him to throw it into the hamper, against his friend's stomach.

'Shouichi-kun, please…'

Tsunayoshi's last words weren't even coherent—just a fragmented sentence ridden with pathetic chokes for air and blood, so much blood, dripping from his lips, staining them forever red.

He was fourteen-years-old when unconsciousness inundated him, his naïveté—the trait that Shouichi had learned to abandon by the wayside soon after becoming a player in Byakuran's twisted game for his own entertainment—his own downfall. The sacrificial lamb offered to the gods as penance for Shouichi's mistakes. He was barely beyond the age of lush comprehension and feeling, having a very weak grasp on the world and its cruelties, still believing that there was good in every entity if he scavenged deep enough. With his heart still tethered to puppy love, short skirts swishing above the knees, and pinky promises. Still a boy who succumbed to the tears of another, offering up his own sleeve to dry their eyes and wipe them away.

Byakuran, the man who was now trying to warrant some distorted form of lust from his trophy locked in chains, decided that Tsunayoshi hadn't deserved to have his first kiss; to graduate from middle school, to get lost in the winding always of the high school on his first day as a freshman; to see the sunrise on the following day. All because Byakuran wanted to see the world burn to ash—and give none other than Shouichi, the teacher's pet, front-row seats to the crucifixion of mankind.

When Tsunayoshi's last shaky breath warmed his lips that Byakuran was now touching, Shouichi knew he had died alongside him. Their corpses juxtaposed, Shouichi's arms still hooked around the child's body, in the mass grave that the legitimate Funeral Wreaths had dumped the Vongolas' carcasses into before covering it with a thick layer of mud. As if they were never there, as if they were not worthy of something other than Shouichi's tears marking their existence six feet under the ground.

Tsunayoshi's death shoves its vermiculated reality down his throat, making him gag on the hours until he knows it will finally be his time to pay the price for his own sins, when he ran out of lambs to inadvertently slaughter to save himself.

Now, here he is, with Tsunayoshi's last words replaying endlessly in his ears and Byakuran's lips inching closer to his, allowing the child's murderer to caress and hold him in his arms as if they were star-crossed lovers.

Byakuran is heartless. With a smile on his face and sugarcoated words rolling off of his tongue, he doesn't have a soul.

Shouichi can feel a sore feeling in the rims of his eyes, irritated and chafed with Byakuran's already-blurred outline meshing into his penumbra. He can feel faint slips of breath, signs of life, fan across his cheeks as the dominator of mankind exhales. In spite of his breath, the man had no heart beating in his chest—eclipsed by a black hole that Shouichi himself unintentionally sparked, swallowing every modicum of spilled light around him until everyone was submerged in the darkness that only he had adjusted to, that only he could win in.

The man kneeling before him, as if in some vermiculated form of irony—the God of the Universe on his knees in front of his Judas, with his hands tangled in his hair and fingers stroking his lips, he hates him. Loathes him more than he despised himself the second he allowed Tsunayoshi to glissade away in his arms, leaving nothing behind but pitiful last words swirling around his conscience, a manufactured piece of him in his palms, and speckles of coppery liquid on Shouichi's cheeks, cohering to his skin if only to remind him of the innocent (sacrificed) for his own selfish mistakes of the past, the ones that he could never amend.

Daisy is grinding the tip of his boot into the marble tile almost enough to tangibly split it. His urge to feel the blood staining Shouichi's face as he slices it is nearly tangible. Shouichi can feel the holder of the Mare Sun ring refrain from licking his lips as his eyes covet the droplets of blood sliding down the redhead's hands, speckling the floor as they drip from his fingertips hanging limply at his sides, and the bloodstained shackles grasping at his wrists, gnawing at the skin.

The sound of Kikyo's heel perpetually meeting the tile echoes off of the walls, ricocheting in Shouichi's ears.

"Look at me, Shou-chan," Byakuran feigns heartache in his tone, his hands grasping the side of his engineer's face once more, his head slightly tilted to a slight angle as he gazed into the eyes of his partially blinded captive. "Is this any way to treat a friend who's missed your company?"

Friend. What a mocking choice of diction. As if he meant more than a speck of gravel on the soles of his shoes; as if he appreciated him and all of the sacrifices he made to attempt to save the world from the hellfire Byakuran created by playing with matches. As if his emotions and opinion had any form of value to him.

He refrains from regurgitating all over Byakuran's pristine white coat, from tainting him with a stain on his otherwise supposedly impeccable existence.

"He won't stop blubbering, Byakuran!" Bluebell abruptly whines, impatient as she twirls her fingers, her small shoes tapping against the marble.

"Don't refer to Byakuran-sama so intimately, flat-chest," Zakuro chastises, glaring at her with a small smirk on his face. He remains uniform, unmoving.

"Can we just kill the traitor already?" she mewls, stamping her foot against the floor.

Shouichi's breath catches in a pocket of his throat. He's freezing, his shoulders trembling and incapable of getting warm. He's not afraid of death, however. He deserves it; he needs it. For someone to smash him, crush him to bite-sized bits just like the cracks in the lenses of his glasses.

Halting in mid-caress, Byakuran's nails abruptly dig into Shouichi's flesh as his eyes flicker towards her. Shouichi can see the repressed inferno in his irises, locked behind the gates of his own withering self-restraint.

The corners of the world's dictator's lips twitch, slightly, but remain in its immaculate smile.

"Bluebell-chan," his saccharine voice peeps, his malevolent intentions almost tangibly dripping from every over-pronounced word, "say such things about a fellow family member again, and I won't hesitate in killing you."

From the way the corners of his lips arch slightly higher into a more voluminous smile, Shouichi knows that Bluebell's teeth must have literally began to chew her lip, forcing herself to keep her childish thoughts to herself lest she breathe her last under Byakuran's heel.

Shouichi can recognize every crack and sever in-between Byakuran's breaths, when he used to sit, his shoulder blades arched and brows knitted together as he contemplated his next action in Choice before moving a piece forward or backward either towards its doom or glory.

He knows him externally, even through the thick layer of fog his lack of prescription glasses ensued, he knew every inch of his face, the perfectly white color of the chalk his homeroom teacher used to use and would always make an annoying scratching noise when it scraped the blackboard.

Byakuran was a god; he is a religion that all has to abide by and adhere to prevent ending up having their mangled corpse tossed into a hollowed out patch of earth where the Vongola now reside. To prevent him from growing bored, one had to provide constant entertainment. Boredom meant disposal—there was always a replacement.

Except, apparently, in Shouichi's case. Chances were that even if he fumbled, Byakuran would wade away the vultures and keep his engineer and his position buoyant.

As the new ruler of the world, having no qualms about burning skyscrapers and quaint homes in suburban neighborhoods to ash, Byakuran would rather count the bodies like sheep than play board games with Shouichi when boredom dominated their rational thought.

Byakuran's fuzzy pupils rivet his, piercing into them until Shouichi is forced to avert his eyes and look away. Everything is a game for him. A game for dominance, to see who will have the last piece standing on the board even after he cheated, making sure that all of the odds were in his favor before rolling the die. Always dissecting the minds of his subordinates with his ever-present smile, mind games that picked and prodded at the very existences, morals and ideals of every entity around him until he could disseminate and relay every inkling of information about them without even attempting to recall the shape of their face. Simply killing and causing total war to erupt wherever he stepped for his own selfish purposes, uncaring of who he pulled under the murky depths of the water as long as the relentless waves stopped lapping at his own hips.

Even with an answer key—his own personal cheat code at Byakuran's games after befriending him, spending endless hours in his basement with pizza crumbs clinging to his lips and the game of Choice at their fingertips, he did not know anything about the murderer before him, their lips mere centimeters apart until Shouichi can make out the true deep mauve flecks swirling in the man's irises, fogged and in a blur, but there all the same.

He was always paradoxical, never a box that could be opened with a ring and the appropriate amount of impetus. Always an enigma in Shouichi's hands, a puzzle he could never solve.

There is lavender constellations locked behind Byakuran's eyes; Shouichi can number every luminous star and celestial being they had pointed out to one another through a telescope.

He wishes he could asphyxiate their brightness in his hand, snuff it out like Byakuran did to Tsunayoshi and his family, children playing mafia with their lives.

But, he knows that he alone had corrupted Byakuran's soul, malleable and easily swayed by the thought of potential immortality, power and world conquest. No Achilles heel to weigh him down; he was fully submerged below the invulnerable water—no weaknesses or love to limit him. Nothing to hold him back, with allies on every corner and only a sandbox full of schoolchildren in his way of total domination.

Through his unleveled breathing, Daisy displays his uneasiness rising to its pinnacle. Shouichi can feel it in the hearts of every Funeral Wrath behind him. There's one last throat to slit and it's the one that Byakuran is savoring, tormenting with his passionate touches and displays of mocking affection.

Byakuran burrows his nose into the crook of Shouichi's neck, nuzzling into the skin.

Despite the Vongolas' strength, remembering Gokudera shielding Tsunayoshi, claiming that they would have to tear his still-beating heart from his chest if they wanted to lay a finger on his beloved friend even though Byakuran wanted to murder the tenth boss first, Shouichi feels his shoulders tremble nether the man's touch. Byakuran is sitting on his throne of broken skulls and shatters bones, caressing him lovingly, his fingers tracing over his face as if Shouichi is just another conquered territory to add its name to his map of the world, just another land mass he had brought to his knees.

"It's good to have you back here with me, Shou-chan," Byakuran murmurs into Shouichi's flesh, his lips vibrating against his neck.

Byakuran always lies. Every consonant upon vowel slipping through his lips a fabrication. Every hollow promise; every supposedly legitimate smile at the dimples in Shouichi's cheeks when he grinned—all just a mere game to him.

"I…"

Eyebrow arched and interest clearly at its apex, Byakuran's repugnant smirk is veiled behind a cherubic curl of his lips. He takes amusement in the fact that Shouichi is fumbling with his words, his vocal chords forgetting how to convey what he has to say.

Shouichi realizes it; a stunning revelation for the ages that he should have came to terms with ages ago. Byakuran is not human, albeit he is not a god, either.

He's a monster.

Shouichi's nails feel as if they are cracking, splitting open as they trowel into the ring nestled in his grasp—the one last fragment of illumination in the darkness for his undulating, sputtering broken heart to cling to—one last chance for a botched cathartic instance—before shattering.

"You wish to speak, Shou-chan?"

"I…"

"Go on, Shou-chan," he tempts, the corners of his lips arching into a greater smile against Shouichi's skin.

"I hate you."

Byakuran is the white king, always the first to move.

So fitting, yet also equally unfitting.

He clothes himself in the purest white yet his soul is as dark as the varnished paint on the opposing pieces. Yes, he is definitely not human; maybe that explains why he can kill them so easily, discard them without ever feeling a hint of remorse. Shouichi knows the man likes to thinks of himself as a god, and loves it when others think of him as one, too. His sole goal is to rule the world, every world in existance, and that is all. He is cruel, insane, and utterly selfish behind that coying smile, and therefore, the concept of his inhuman greediness is easy for Shouichi to grasp now.

How blind he has been, how foolish of him to think of this demon as still human when he was obviously everything but. Byakuran is a monster, a spoiled child. It is as simple as defeating enemies and taking what he belives is rightfully his, because he's spoiled rotten, used to getting what he wants whenever he wants it. And like a child, he takes it without regarding anyone else but himself, taking pleasure in being spoiled by those who already love and worship him, Shouichi knows this all too well. After all, how many times had he had to leave his work to entertain the selfish man, even at the cost of Byakuran's precious dream falling behind a couple of days? How many times had he been put under a microscope, picked at and prodded at and put back together again, simply to rid the man from his boredom, even if only for a minute?

Too many times, too many times; a fast and easy way for Byakuran to pass the time while he waited for his dream to come true.

His dream, in the end it all came back to that. His reason, his motivation for doing everything he has done up until now, it was all for that one dream. He wants the world wrapped around his fingers. He wants it all under his sole command. He wants everything, and to him, it is as easy and as simple as the world falling to its knees before him and him sitting in his golden throne atop in the heavens. Because that is his dream, and because he has no care for what he has to sacrifice in order to make that nightmarish dream a reality. To him, making his dream come true is like playing a game of chess. To make that dream happen, he has to win, and to win, he has to play the pieces, map out his moves, and be thousands of steps ahead of his opponent.

His power allows him to do that, to cheat where no one else has ever cheated, and that power is what draws others to him. He has the power to make his dream come true (has made it come true, Shouichi bitterly reminds himself), to make others believe in his dream, to give themselves to him as lambs to sacrifice to make his hellish dream a possibility. His pawns willingly line themselves for the slaughter, to be used to win that game of chess, because they all believe in that dream. Byakuran knows this, and he loves it. He lives for the purpose of using them to make the opposing king fall, and when the black king falls, the game is over; the pieces surrender and the board is his and his alone to do with whatever he wants.

He is the white king, his pawns love him, protect him as his loyal shields and follow his every word to the letter because he is God. He doesn't need to do anything other than move the pieces and send them to their deaths, a pastor in a flock of black sheep.

And as the most important piece in the board, he sends his pieces out into the battlefield, never caring if they get caught in a war that will inevitably end their lives at some point of the game. He does not treat them as family because only the strong, only the understanding, only the obedient, only the ones with the utmost loyalty and fiercest devotion to his dream, will be a part of him. You have to earn it. You have to deserve it. Being under his wing is a sacred privilege only he can grant on others, and one he bestowed upon Shouichi even while knowing the redhead would one day turn from his side of the board to join another king.

He was chosen to be one of his perfect (imperfect now, isn't he?) pawns, chosen to move Byakuran beyond the imperfection of humans, to the heavens, and to make him the all-encompassing sky that engulfs the world. Foolishly, Shouichi had done just that, even while he had tried with all his might to bring Byakuran crashing to ground and show him how much of a mortal he truly was. Because that had been Tsunayoshi's goal, hadn't it? Not to kill, but to defeat the boogieman who had engulfed the world in his dangerous nightmare.

Shouichi almost laughs at the utter naiveté of that, but mostly, he almost laughs at himself for being stupid enough to actually cling to those words as well. He should have known better then to believe they could win without having to kill Byakuran, that they could stop the heinous monster without having to take his life. He's not innocent, not like Tsunayoshi, he should have known better. He's killed before, has had to wash blood from his hands. No one knows better than himself how tainted he is, how different he is from Tsunayoshi, who honestly believed they could have won without killing.

How Shouichi wishes he could still believe in that pure, beautiful image, but he knows better.

War requires sacrifices, and so did having peace. There could be no free world without first shedding blood; blood of the innocent and blood of the guilty.

Byakuran is guilty, and if anyone deserves to be killed to ensure the peace of a free world, it is him. He is rotten, evil, the greediest of them all. His sole, selfish desire to consume absolutely everything has caused death, darkness, and a sea of blood to engulf the world. Byakuran is a brutal man, a merciless demon, a true monster in all meanings of the word, and Shoichi hates him for it. Hates him because he can still remember the days when he had known nothing of this dangerous world he has lives in for years now, the days when a game of chess was only a harmless way for them to pass the time as they waited for their next class to start.

But must of all he hates him because more than anything else, Shouichi wishes he could go back to those days when he had truly believed Byakuran to be his friend and the defeat of the opposing king didn't have to mean the death of an innocent child.

Shackles click together when he covers his mouth to stop himself from puking at the memory of the death of the only true friend he ever had, of the horrid, gory images and the unfairness of it all. Tears fill his eyes again, but they don't have a chance to fall because he is suddenly being embraced by arms that are to the deceiving eye meant look comforting, but are actually suffocating him with the disgusting stench of death.

"Oh, Shou-chan," Byakuran murmurs, loud enough for his pawns to hear, and Shouichi doesn't know if they can detect the almost invisible hint of anger underlining the cloying sweetness that are the white-haired Mafioso's words, "I'm sorry Kikyo-kun bullied you, but I promise you, I only ordered him to dispose of Tsunayoshi-kun and his friends. So don't worry, I forgive you for being mean to me."

"And rest assured Kikyo-kun will be scolded for what he did, the naughty boy," he laughs at the end, shoulders shaking with it as Shouichi manages to see the slightest change of emotions pass through the holder of the Mare Cloud ring. A sliver of fear at the prospect of punishment, a hot flash of anger at Shouichi for being the cause of it all, and finally, willful resignation because Byakuran is his God and his God is sacred.

He wishes he could cover his eyes and pretend he is somewhere else, but his hands are holding the only thing he has left to remember the precious dream Tsunayoshi had entrusted him with. He doesn't want this beautiful demon to take that, too. Although, he can't help but shudder at the icy tone hidden under the faux cheerfulness that is Byakuran's voice, his stomach twisting into a thousands knots at those last words.

Because he now knows why he hasn't been killed, what he has been reduced to.

"Come on, Shou-chan," the encasing arms wrapped around his frame, shackles in disguise robbing him of his last free will, gently pull him up to his feet, supporting him when Shouichi's legs prove to be too shaky to hold him up, "let's go home."

Shouichi is Byakuran's trophy, proof he won and squashed away all hope of salvation. He is being kept alive to see the horrors Byakuran will produce, to be tortured by the knowledge that without him, none of the hellish nightmares that will soon come to pass could have ever been possible.

He is going to be killed, not physically but mentally, and in the slowest, most torturous way possible for having dared betray the man who should have been his only savior.

But he is not afraid of dying, there is no fear left him, no other emotion but the raw, pulsing anger bubbling inside of him, boiling until it fills to the rim and spills in a hot, burning wave of fury.

What made him so special? Why did he deserve to live when so many others, better men than him, had died? Shouichi was no martyr, much less a hero, like Tsunayoshi and his family had been; he was the catalyst to it all, the one who had given Byakuran the initiate to spread his evil, engulf the world in a blanket of war where only those who submitted themselves to serve him survived. He deserves to die as much Byakuran does, if not more, so why was he being kept alive when he should have been one of the very first ones to die?

He shakes his head before those thoughts can be completed, grits his teeth and tells himself that it doesn't matter what kind of twisted perversion led Byakuran to choose him for his last little project before focusing all of his attention on ruling the world.

It doesn't matter, not anymore, because either way Shouichi wasn't going to give Byakuran the satisfaction of having the last laugh; he would, at the very least, rob him of that victory.

"It makes me really happy to have Shou-chan back where he belongs," Byakuran says as they sit in the back of a sleek, polished car, the tinted windows only making the vast darkness of the man's heart all the more thick, all the more suffocating as it spreads farther and farther into every last inch of the world, "I really did miss having you with me. After all, the company of my oldest, dearest friend is something I will never be able to replace."

Shouichi doesn't respond, not even when the new dictator of the world cups his face in gentle hands, tilts his chin up to meet Byakuran's pale lips in a mockery of a lover's kiss.

His hold on the Vongola Sky ring tighten.

At the first chance he could get-Shouichi would slit his throat and kill himself.

To be Continued...

-

A/N: ...aaand that's a wrap, guys!

Last Edited: 10-18-09