Hi~! I'm back! So I adopted the idea of this story (with permission, of course) from TheAloofBunny...and yeah... Please enjoy, and drop a review if you can!
*Spacing edits in place.
The man stepped with an almost inhuman grace across the broken streets of a shattered city, not so much oblivious to the danger as accustomed to it. Around him burned the wraiths of hundreds of skyscrapers that had glistened proudly in the bright sunlight of yesterday. It was night now, though, and against the red-gold flickering of fire, the man seemed to be only another smoky shadow.
Up close, he was so much more.
The man passed through the night, his soft breathing masked by the roar of hungry flames. He did not stride through the shells of buildings and narrow alleyways so much as flow around them, a spectral creature of fragments of rainbow light and patches of inky darkness. In the shadowy gloom of his narrow, lean face, twin eyes of an orange that matched the flames surrounding him gleamed.
Running a hand through his chocolate-colored hair, the man stopped abruptly at the front of a small, square warehouse. He listened intently. There was no sound, no apparent movement, but his legendary intuition told him something was wrong. Off. Someone shifted behind him and the man spun around instantly, gloved hands at the ready.
"Wonderful, Tsunayoshi-kun," chuckled a maliciously light-hearted voice accompanied by glowing violet eyes and prematurely white hair. "A lovely job, as always."
The man froze. It was not that the voice itself had startled him; it was the name that that voice had uttered: Tsunayoshi. Tsunayoshi Sawada, to be exact, though his last name was one most had forgotten or were too afraid to use.
"Boss." The man's response was curt, professional, almost amiable if one didn't look too closely behind his tightly woven mask. Slender fingers twitched slightly beneath the glittering steel of his gloves.
Byakuran Gesso smiled cheerfully with a facade of his own. "Tsunayoshi-kun! Mou~! Aren't you happy to see me?"
The man decided not to reply.
Bored, Byakuran yawned and surveyed the city's ruins with an almost child-like glee. Across the horizon, dawn was spilling into the city in wide swaths blood-red light. The man could see bodies scattered here and there across the cracked streets and sidewalks, bodies that were twisted and burnt and horrifically mutilated. His lips tightened. Once upon a time, the sight of so many deaths, deaths he had caused, would have made him cringe. But then again, once upon a time, he had simply been Tsuna Sawada.
One year.
It had taken that much time for the clumsily kind-hearted little boy to die and be replaced by the man (or was monster a better word?) he was now. Tsuna Sawada: a happy, hopeful, impossibly naive relic of the past. The man sometimes wondered if he should be sad Tsuna Sawada was dead; then, he tossed the idea. Tsuna Sawada would not have lasted a second in this world where only the fittest survived. But the man could not stop himself from occasionally reaching out for the past all the same.
The Change had occurred eight years ago, when the man had been at the idealistic age of 15. The man laughed at the way he had thought back then. Change the mafia for the better, help people, ha! Mafioso were and would only ever be men, and the worst of them at that.
The man, the boy, really, had fought Byakuran enclosed in a trap of impossibly pure sky flames. Needless to say, he had lost - badly. Tsuna Sawada had been weak. Untrained. Unprepared. He could never have won.
The boy had fallen unconscious. Blood loss, the doctors had insisted, and a mild concussion. He had been lucky. From what he'd heard of the story, Reborn had sacrificed himself in a last-ditch act of bravery to save the fleeing Vongola Guardians. Confronted with the loss of his tutor and the betrayal of his friends, Tsuna Sawada had finally died after a year of imprisonment and the man had risen from his ashes.
The rest, as they say, was history.
Eight years had passed the blink of an eye. Governments: crumbled. Countries: dissolved. The world: destroyed. Or maybe destroyed was too extreme a word. No, everything had simply been revolutionized, remolded. It had been a necessary change - so the man told himself, anyways.
The man's former Guardians had, for some unfathomable reason, refused to surrender. They called themselves the Knights of Dawn now. When the man had heard that name, he had laughed. Hibari would have been hard-pressed to agree to something so ridiculously sentimental, as would have Mist. It must have been Storm, then, or Sun or Rain who had come up with that idiotic idea. The man had stopped calling his former Guardians by their names; nostalgia was a sign of weakness, and he found himself terribly nostalgic when he thought of his traitorous friends.
Hibari, though, was a different story.
Loops and curls of thick, gray smoke billowed around the man and he was grateful that he could not see Byakuran anymore, even if it was only for a second. The way the Millefiore Boss's violet eyes seemed to be maniacally happy when surrounded by death and destruction was terrifying.
"Tsunayoshi-kun~! You're spacing out."
The man started, head whipping up immediately. "Sorry," he grunted unapologetically.
"'S okay, but only if you get me some marshmallow from that store ever there," Byakuran sang. Gritting his teeth, the man stalked towards a small convenience store that had somehow managed to survive his rampage.
Parts of the neon kanji that had proudly proclaimed "Tokyo-mart" had been torn off or burnt, and one door was twisted haphazardly to the left, its glass surface shattered so that only a metal frame remained. The man stalked inside. He could see the shape of a quivering man crouched behind the cheap counter, and, barely sparing a glance, fired two quick shots with his SP101. A strangled cry, and the clerk was dead before he hit the floor.
After checking quickly for undestroyed security cameras or traps and finding none, the man grabbed a bag of marshmallows - pink, with small blue swirls - and strode outside to find Byakuran gone. Damn Millefiore. Lips drawn into a thin, straight line, the man willed his gloved hands to burst into flame. He climbed into the sky gracefully, hovering at what felt like the zenith of the world for a moment. Then, still holding the pink marshmallows, Hydra, Second-in-Command of the Millefiore Famiglia and formerly known as Tsunayoshi Sawada, plummeted.
"Dammit!" The not-so-illustrious default leader of the Knights of Dawn slammed a hand on the priceless wooden table. A deep crack split it in two. Gokudera Hayato swore again; eighteen years ago, the Vongola could easily have replaced the antique. Now, the famiglia barely had any resources at all.
A glass screen hung on the wall opposite him, playing flickering footage of a burning city. If one looked closely, a small figure lit by the flames on his fists and forehead could be seen hovering at the top of the screen. The Knights of Dawn watched as it fell down, down, down, disappearing below several buildings before swooping upwards again like a humanoid bird. Suddenly, the crackle of static filled the room and the image shuddered briefly before disappearing in a field of shifting black-and-white specks.
"DAMMIT!" Gokudera yelled again, and when he pounded the table this time, it fell apart cleanly along the crack from before.
"Maa, maa, Gokudera," comforted the black-haired man sitting next to him. After knowing him for almost a decade, though, the former Storm Guardian could easily detect the undertones of worry and frustration in Yamamoto Takeshi's voice.
Next to the two, Ryohei Sasagawa, resident former Sun Guardian and boxer, seemed to be uncharacteristically deep in thought. Finally, he looked up at his bickering friends and frowned miserably. "Sawada... is not a man to the extreme anymore," he finally admitted.
"No! Boss is still Boss! That idiot marshmallow freak just...just..." Gokudera trailed off, not sure just what had happened to the Tenth. It couldn't have been that weird possession thing he had done to Yuni; Boss's eyes were still very much alive. But what explanation was there? Gokudera did not, would never, believe his untainted, innocent Tenth could have willingly done the things Hydra had.
"Kufufufufu... The Vongola is gone, Storm Guardian," chuckled Mukuro Rokudo in a voice as masked as Hydra's own.
"What?! How dare you say that? The Tenth is NOT gone! HE ISN'T!" Gokudera bellowed, his red face and emerald eyes making him look suspiciously like a Christmas ornament. "BOSS IS NOT DEAD!"
The other four guardians in the room with the exception of the sleeping Lambo raised their eyebrows simultaneously at him.
"Denial." The whispered word bounced off the walls, even more prominent in the thick silence that ensued.
"'Dera, maybe you should just accept that..." Yamamoto finally stepped in placidly, attempting to relieve the pregnant atmosphere. In the one-sided shouting match that erupted soon after, no one noticed the single missing Knight of Dawn.
An omnivore had given Hibari Kyoya a job, and for the sake of Namimori, the former Cloud Guardian had accepted.
And that's it for now! I know its short, but this is a prologue, so whatever...
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