A/N: This is part of a draft that's been hanging around since I wrote the first two parts.

Now with a part 2, because details

i. then

As Byakuran studied Harry's unchanging features from outside the capsule, he was reminded of how similar this was to the times he tolerated Shouichi's lies.

In all honesty, he knew he could've taken care of this sooner. However, no matter how much he lost pieces himself and gained others whenever he crossed worlds, something always stayed his hand before his patchwork soul could even finish the thought of just brainwashing the two of them to get it over with.

At the end of it all, both Harry and Shoichi were his. Byakuran could never truly forget how much fun he had dragging Shoichi around town, poking and prodding and prying until he got a wealth of ideas and secrets and inventions. Were it not for him, Shoichi would never have pushed himself as hard, and that brilliant mind would've been wasted on utterly boring and inconsequential projects.

And Harry...

There was negative space in where their bond was supposed to be. At first, Byakuran thought the strange prickle in his chest wasn't anything special, a consequence of long days spent waiting for classes to end so he could look for actual entertainment with those two. Then, sometime after exam week, he urged Shoichi to include Harry in one experiment with a prototype for modern Flame technology, just for fun. Lo and behold, the man was an inactive Lightning.

Byakuran had been delighted at first. He rather liked Harry, that gutsy, reckless boy who put up with him and his whimsy - they got into bizarre situations more often than not (Harry swore he wasn't doing it on purpose, and Byakuran laughed even after being shoved off the couch), and they helped each other out of a sundry of messes. The other teen was, as far as Byakuran was concerned, good guardian material.

When a flame bond failed to form, however, that was the beginning of their fallout. Byakuran never took well to being denied.

"Inactive" was was a convenient yet misleading placeholder for the actual phenomenon. As new as Byakuran was at the time to the whole Flame deal, he could sense something was off with Harry's, and this observation was something he kept to himself. It was like reaching out to an outstretched hand, only to find that the distance remained the same no matter how fast he ran.

In other words, he had been rejected by the same person over and over and over again across a multitude of worlds, and the fraying of his personality as a cost of dimension travel didn't help matters. Harry - his original Harry and all the other ones his alternate selves spoke to since - never mentioned he noticed anything strange, before his momentary disappearance after their graduation and his subsequent re-emergence as a guest of the Giglio Nero famiglia.

(He remembered Harry's transformation in one. They were in a warzone, beams of light being shot from all directions, and Harry had turned into a majestic feathered serpant, calling in the winds and rain for the sake of a forced ceasefire.

Byakuran, awestruck, wondered if his Harry could manage the same.

He never did find out.)

Funny how their first encounter in years was also their most heated argument over the Gesso's direction. His old friend had always found Byakuran's brand of meanness disagreeable.

Well, that was that. Byakuran could not help who he was, nor would he apologize for his actions or admit to regrets, if he had any at all. The same went for the man he once knew, who now lay in artificial sleep. Harry, he knew, would've torn down the base had he been awake, all for the sake of a distant cousin he hadn't even introduced himself to.

So much for Harry's little speech on blood ties not mattering that much in the face of loyalty. Hadn't Byakuran tried to gain it?

(It had not been in a way Harry approved of, and Byakuran knew it.)

"You know where to drop that off." Byakuran tore his gaze from the sleeping man to look at the officer next to him. The amiable smile on his lips widened when the man's trembling worsened. "Make sure it isn't damaged in the process, hmm~? I'll be very, very displeased if someone interrupted his beauty sleep."

The man, now ten shades paler, managed a snappy salute. "Y-yessir!"

It was fascinating, how something as visceral as terror inspired obedience in the weak.

So off Harry went, and Byakuran popped a marshmallow in his mouth on his way to R&D.

That was that. Maybe now, between subjugating the other famiglias and taking the Tri-Ni-Sette for himself, he would be truly at peace.

(Absorbing all those flames during the fight with Tsuna made it worse.

He had never been complete.

Never will be.

That missing link had continued to gnaw his soul until the day he died.)

ii. now

"Tsuna," Yuni said with a secretive smile as she guided him through the house earlier. "There's someone we'd like you to meet."

Tsuna gaped at the exhausted foreign-looking teen smiling at him from across the table. Then he remembered his manners and closed his mouth before Reborn dive kicked him from some convenient air vent.

"Sorry about this," the new person said with a yawn and a distracted reach for the nearby plate of biscuits. "My body clock's still messed up from the flight. Would've held this off to when you weren't busy - I mean, don't get me wrong, it's nice to finally meet you - but Yuni insisted it had to be now. I just wish the circumstances weren't as urgent."

When Yuni asked him if he had time to for a private conversation, being left in a sitting room with a complete stranger a cheerful request to 'please get along well' wasn't what Tsuna had expected. Not now, or ever, especially in the middle of the Representative Battle.

As if anything in his life went the way he expected it to.

"Um," he started, then stopped.

Right. He could do this. Tsuna gave what he hoped was a reassuring smile and tried to get his mouth to form a polite greeting, but it got caught somewhere in between despairing over more people getting dragged into this mess and quiet panic. He couldn't remember if he's seen this guy anywhere at all, and this was clearly important to Yuni if she asked for them to get to know each other. Would she be angry if he made a terrible first impression?

"Hi. You're a friend of Yuni, Potter-san..?"

"Yeah." There was a slight pause before Potter decided to elaborate. "She and Byakuran talked quite a bit about you, then and now."

"O-oh!" Tsuna didn't know if he should be concerned that this person knew Byakuran, or that Byakuran was talking about him. The ex-Millefiore's interest in anything meant something terrible was about to happen - but then again, he had helped Yamamoto this time around, hadn't he? And Yuni didn't look uncomfortable next to him this time around, too. "So. Ah. They thought I could help you with something?"

He couldn't help but squeak out those last words because that was apparently his life, though Potter, with how he gave a tired laugh, might as well have heard please don't kill me.

"Something like that." Potter gave him a rueful smile, and Tsuna got the impression the other was waiting for a particular reaction. "More like, they knew I had a problem to deal with, and thought that solving it'll help with whatever's going on here. But before that -"

Potter ran a hand down his face, sighing, and spoke as if he was confessing to an old grief.

"Thanks for stopping Byakuran in the future."

"...I'm sorry?"

"The idiot really didn't care about how unendingly unstable he'd made everything." The teen closed his eyes briefly, letting himself sink into the armchair. "Sorry, I'm probably not making sense, am I? Probably should've gotten Shouichi to explain this bit. He's told you about why he helped the future you, yeah?"

Tsuna stared, bewildered. Potter felt sincere, but that didn't answer a million other questions, like how Irie was even involved. "Um. Yes?"

"Good." Potter gave Tsuna an apologetic look and continued to speak, as if he was afraid to lose steam. "Look, it's not like I want to bring up painful memories for anyone - you and Yuni most of all, because the both of you lost a lot before you found a way to fix this - but you have to understand: the you and the Yuni of now only went through the experiences of one world. Shoichi and I saw several. Those were shitty times to live in, and if I could scrub my brain of how some of those timelines ended, I would."

There was a story there, full of grief and frustration. Tsuna didn't doubt that Potter tried to be a good friend, and it was easy to guess that Byakuran probably hated being told off and went off to do things on his own. Or something like that.

"Now I can't even punch this present Byakuran's face in because he literally hasn't done anything yet," Potter was now saying. "Him getting to know you and Yuni sooner rather than later almost guarantees that even if the universe does get destroyed in the future, it won't be because he was bored. So, yeah. Thanks."

Thanks for helping him when I couldn't.

Potter rubbed his neck awkwardly.

Now, Tsuna looked. Really looked at him, with eyes of burning amber.

(Resting on Potter's middle knuckle was a ring - a tarnished thick band, too aged and plain in comparison to the other Flame or Famiglia rings he's seen. Set on its center was an opaque, round stone with a crack down the middle. Something about the piece of jewelery nagged at Tsuna's Intuition - it was important and not about the Tri-Ni-Sette for once, but there were other things to focus on at the moment.)

"I'm glad he has a second chance," he said, calmer than he was before, but no less earnest. This was important to say right now, and Tsuna's intuition never had failed him before. "This also means he can be close to others again, even those he's hurt before."

Potter, who had sat upright when he noticed Tsuna's change in demeanor, froze.

Tsuna scratched his chin. "You know, I don't think Byakuran really talks to people that much other than Yuni, Irie, and the Wreaths. I also bet that, in the future, there was a point when he stopped sharing important things about himself because his goals took over. Anyway, what I'm saying is that I'm sure he probably misses you, too."

"...oh." Potter still looked out of it, holding up a biscuit that never reached his mouth. "Was that why my hotel room was flooded with feathers and marshmallows the other day? I thought a chicken broke in."

It was Tsuna's turn to stare.

"- hieee!?"