"FROG."
Fran sighed. What an awful way to start the day, with Belphegor shrieking at him from across a sterile prison cell. Personally, Fran liked to start his day right, with a bowl of strawberries somewhere in the world, and him wishing he could be in that somewhere, eating them.
He hadn't eaten strawberries in years.
"FROG!"
Fran frowned, feeling a little disconcerted as the sterile prison shifted into a desert plain. An enormous ostrich stood by his side, and why is he lying down?
The ostrich kicked him, and swore.
Wait, what?
The next thing he knew, he was drifting along in clouds. There was a small, tinny noise, and it slowly magnified into a loud, rasping bellow, that, he dimly decided, sounded a bit like Squalo. In fact, it probably would be Squalo, if he didn't know for a fact that it was coming from an enormous magnolia tree that had come from nowhere, and the world really needs to stop being so confusing.
After a while of the magnolia tree trying to trick him into thinking it was really Squalo, he heard Master giggling, and quite a few things were suddenly explained.
Why was he horribly disoriented? Mukuro.
Why did the world keep changing? Mukuro.
Why were Bel and Squalo trees and ostriches? Mukuro.
Fran felt calmer, but still a little worried, seeing as he was now apparently victim to his master's twisted sense of humor.
He twisted around a little, wiggling against the ostrich currently letting him lean on it's feathery shoulder,(he was teasing Bel for that, but right now, he was pretty sure that the prince was the only thing keeping him on his feet) trying to figure out where the fuck Mukuro was.
It involved a lot of squinting, but he finally saw a large, funny lookin' tree with eyes.
That was probably it, he thought, and proceeded to stumble towards it, leaving Tree and Ostrich to argue behind him. When he got to MukuroTREE, he managed to crouch down and stutter at it for a while. The tree waited patiently while he tried and failed to speak. Finally, he managed to spit out something that was remarkably close to the Romanian word for 'pie' and Mukuro decided to take that, and run with it.
"Why, you ask?" he inserted, smoothly. Fran, somewhat relieved, nodded.
"The answer is simple, my dear, frog headed pupil!" said Mukuro, doing his best impression of a benevolent grandfather. "Truth is the only thing worth occupying ourselves with! Well, truth, and WWIII. But thats for me to worry about and you to really worry about. Because I am close. But also, truth."
Fran automatically blocked all the world domination/destruction blather, and tried to focus on the stupid, truth stuff.
"You see, truth ties hand in hand with bravery, Frannigan, and bravery goes hand in hand with love, Frannigan, and-"
Fran vaguely wondered who Frannigan was, before coming to a snap decision to just ignore that bit.
"And tell him that you love him, you have absolutely nothing better to do. So, I'll just restore your powers of speech, and-"
Wait, what?
"You heard me, Frannigan. You need to tell your psychotic fantasy partner how you feel, because Ken and Chikusa dared me to mix Bravery, Truth, and Love into a conversation, and dammit, I am rocking that dare."
The tree winked, and Fran flinched as all his snark, sarcasm and deliberate, jaded charm came flooding back. "Oh," said MukuroTREE, smiling benignly with it's freakish tree mouth, "I've also taken away your ability to Lie. Have fun!"
The illusions vanished, and Fran found himself in front of the smoking remains of a Millefiore fort, with Squalo's voice and Bel's laugh ringing in his ears.
Fran, finding he could stand up and longing for Mukuro's horrible shadow realm, walked over to Belphegor.
Belphegor looked over at him and did a double take. "Oh, so your back. (laugh thats kind of awkward to type over and over again) The prince was beginning to worry. And by worry I mean plot your death. And by plot your death, of course I mean the only reason your alive is because Squalo doesn't want to have to find another illusionist. And by that, I mean... um."
He ran out of steam.
Fran, in an anti-climatic turn of events, babbled out a bunch of stuff about strawberries, and ended the little rant with telling Bel that he didn't completely hate him.
Bel laughed, in a shocked, triumphant sort of way, and kissed Fran.
Squalo went completely ignored.
The next day, they had strawberries in bed, and Mukuro won his bet.