A/N: I never imagined that this story would be so dark. I want to get to some fluff, but the journey has been quite long. Next chapter I'm hoping!
As always, please enjoy.
Katekyō Hitman Reborn! does not belong to me
Tuna and the Beast: A Chanced Meeting in the Forest
Iemitsu woke up to the sound of confusion and hands lifting him from out of the carriage. His eyes blurrily managed to identify that he was in town, because darkness had fallen his eyes needed more time to adjust. Everything felt heavy and convoluted: his mind poorly attempted to grasp at any thoughts to ground his reality. Some men in town had surrounded his wagon and were desperately wrestling with the Sawada's horse.
"Iemitsu! Crazy asshole, get a hold of your horse!"
"What the hell do you think you're doing? How could you fall asleep while driving a carriage into town?"
What had he been doing? The trip. Nana calling out to him. Tsuna. His eyes widened dramatically.
"TSUNA!" He cried out and pulled at the collar of one of the men, "My boy has been taken!"
Iemitsu's hand was wretched off and he was met with a quizzical glare, "Taken?"
The men all paused to listen.
"A beast has him!" He exclaimed and began to frenetically describe the beast. He feverishly gesticulated with his arms to demonstrate as best he could the size and characteristics of the beast.
"A beast? Nutcase Iemitsu is at it again!" Some of the men cracked a toothy smile and others hooted in laughter.
Iemitsu shoved his way through the crowd looking for someone that would listen, "This is serious! Believe me! I need to save him!"
One of the more sympathetic men firmly grabbed a hold of him by the shoulders and shook his head, "Calm down! You're more nuts than any of us gave you credit for. There's no such thing as a beast. You've had a long journey, just get yourself to bed, and we'll talk about this in the morning."
Iemitsu could see that no one would hear him out and he dashed through the town. The cobble stone path seemed to stretch on endlessly as he sprinted through the streets and the trees seemed to reach out their branches like arms in attempt to catch at his clothes to slow him down.
From a distance Iemtsu could see the flame of the cottage lamp was barely hanging on, and was beginning to die out. The heavy darkness, pressed down upon his heaving chest, was akin to the one that surrounded his small home.
When he made it to the familiar steps he cried out, "Nana!" He burst open the door. Nana had been sitting at their kitchen table, stricken and overwhelmed with worry. Her hair was disheveled and her eyes told him that she had been sitting there the whole time. The smile on her face slid off when she spotted only one of the two most important men in her life. The look on her husband's face made her stomach drop and she knew.
An inaudible no escaped her lips, her whole frame wracked with grief as tears poured from her eyes and she managed to croak out, "What happened?"
He couldn't bear to look at her: his wife, mother of the son that had traded his life away for his father's. He didn't deserve to enter their precious home. He fell to his knees, begged her to forgive him, cried out that he was worthless, and he was no man. Nana knocked over the kitchen chair as she stumbled over to him and went to her knees, burying her face into his chest.
"What happened?" She repeated fearfully.
Iemitsu raised his voice barely above whisper, "He has him."
He tried to explain the rest of the story without breaking into a sob and when he finished he finally managed to look up at his wife. Her face morphed into a wry smile filled with heartbreak and she searched into his eyes for an answer why. Her eyes squeezed shut and she took a shaky breath inward. It was just too much. All the stress overtook the poor mother; it squeezed against her chest until she felt she could no longer breathe properly. She felt the darkness take her. Faintly, she heard the muffled yell of her husband calling her name before her consciousness was fully consumed.
"Master," Mammon had called out from the darkness. Although the floating candle was looking forward to the entertainment that would come when Xanxus had caught the scrawny kid in his room, never did it conceive the extent to the beast's fury. The boy was the closest thing to a chance at lifting the curse. Either way that didn't mean the candle was willing to admit the misdeed either.
Xanxus stood in the center of the wreckage breathing harshly; his fur standing on its ends. He threw his head back and expelled a deep-throated roar of explosive frustration which shook the broken walls.
An ominous silence over took the dark room. Xanxus stalked over to the bell jar and held it in his massive paw. The glow of the rose softly hit the brooding beast. His eyes were set upon the enchanted rose, but he gazed through the bloomed flower with a faraway look. It was so delicate. Tsuna's horror stricken face flashed into his mind and he felt the impulse to crush the rose. That dammed weed. It reminded him of what he had lost. What he once was. What he had become. The emptiness. He screwed his eyes shut.
"Master," Mammon had repeated, this time inside the room, breaking Xanxus out of his reverie. "The boy ran away."
The beast snorted, "Dumbass, of course he did." That was to be expected, but even so why did he feel so numb? He set the bell jar back carefully in its rightful place and turned to exit.
"Will you chase after him?" The flame of the candle followed the beast out of the room and reignited itself.
"Scum, are you questioning me?" The beast turned his intense gaze at Mammon. He prowled over to the candle and paused to measure up Mammon. The candle let a brief moment of contemplation pass between the two.
"I just assumed that he was your property." Xanxus let out a warning growl and snorted, blowing the flame out. He resumed his way through the halls. When his sensitive ears picked up on the thump of Levi's steps Xanxus sped up his pace, but even so the persistence of the large umbrella proved its worth.
"Master, it's snowing." A flash of annoyance passed over his face; knowing full well what the flapping umbrella meant by that statement.
He grounded out through clenched teeth, "And?"
Levi , always the more obedient of the servants, nervously spluttered out, "…the b-boy has left into the storm."
"If the brat wanted to go so badly into that storm like an idiot, then I'll let the little shit suffer and freeze," the dark furred beast sneered.
Without realizing it, Xanxus had headed towards Tsuna's room. Fucking servants wouldn't let him be, would they? He spotted Squalo, in the corner of the room, being unusually quiet and for some reason he felt his anger rise further up.
"Maaasstterrrr," Lussaria cried out from within the boy's room, "Tsuna is gone? What did you do?" The floor groaned out in pain when the bureau wobbled back and forth on his side in despair.
"PISS OFF," barked a frustrated Xanxus, "I didn't do shit."
"The peasant has left?"
"Then we brought these leftovers for nothing, sempai."
"Shishi, the prince will cut you if you say anymore."
The two silverwares sat upon a rustic, but elegant dining cart. They had clumsily scrounged the rest of his leftovers onto one plate and bullied Levi into flapping the cart up the stairs. The crowned knife wanted to play, as in bully—lest you ever believe Bel to be kind, with the new peasant and the fork was bored enough to follow along (but he was also bullied too).
How long had they gone breathing in the same old stale air, breaths mingling recycled oxygen and particles of fine dust, for the past centuries? The castle had gone undisturbed for a long, long time; the boy was the first to ever fully bare witness the skeleton in its sparse remainders.
He was gone now.
Tsuna did not want to look back, regardless of the guilt he felt for running away. What would happen to his father if he came back home? A warm image of his family melted into his mind: his father and he were sitting at the table, his mother wrapped around his father laughing in her typically ditzy manner. They had been blabbering away about their plans for the summer. Tsuna had been trying to weasel his way out of the trip, only to be met by a hearty laugh from his father, who would not take "no" for an answer, and at that moment in time he had been so annoyed. A twinge of regret squeezed his heart and the cold snapped him back to reality. It gnawed at his appendages; his toes had gone numb and his blue-tinted lips were chapped from the gust of wind.
He slowed his pace down considerably and against the storm Tsuna had very little chance of making it through the forest. With his aching head, adrenaline could only take him so far. The snow violently twirled around from every which way; it distorted his sense of direction. He had no clue where he was.
He was lost.
Then something whispered out to him, telling him to continue in the direction he was aimlessly wandering towards. The veil of snow barely allowed him to make out the silhouette of a tall figure. His brain buzzed.
"Hello?" Tsuna called out in tired and weary voice. Throwing caution to the wind, because this person could be his only hope, he did not wait for a reply as his usual timid self would and approached the shadow.
"Oya? Who could be in the forest during this intense snow storm?" Now that he was closer, Tsuna could make out a taller man with shocking blue hair. His face was devilishly handsome and Tsuna could not help but notice, with some jealousy, the silky baritone of his voice. Most surprising of all was his two mismatch colored eyes: one deep ruby, and the other a deep cerulean. His black gloved hands gripped a brown case with gold clasps—Tsuna recognized the case as the ones that belonged to traveling apothecaries. Every month an apothecary would make their rounds to the town to deliver medicines to the town doctor and sell home remedies to the townsfolk, but this must have been a new one. He had never seen this man sell anything in the town before, but he was relatively young looking, possibly a few years older than Tsuna himself, so he could have been fresh at the job.
"My name is Sawada Tsunayoshi," he was always overly polite when he felt awkward, "would you happen to know where the town Namimori is?" All his hope was riding in this man.
His two colored eyes studied him for a brief moment and then he smiled disarmingly, "My name is Rokudo Mukuro and you're in luck I was heading in that direction until this storm broke out." The stranger gestured his thumb towards a random direction behind him. When he was near enough, Mukuro took Tsuna gently by the elbow with his free hand, "I stumbled upon a nearby cave, Tsunayoshi. It would be best if you waited the storm out with me—you're looking a bit pale." He leaned in closer to examine Tsuna's face. Tsuna's frozen nose caught a whiff of cherry blossom and his mind went hazy. Mukuro's eyes shimmered in worry, "We'll head out as soon as it's over." The two were already walking in the direction before Tsuna could formulate an answer.
In the dark cave, the stranger let go of the boy, and gathered dead leaves into a pile of wood. "I was out searching for more firewood when I spotted you," supplied Mukuro, attempting some small talk as he busied himself with shuffling the spare pieces of wood.
Tsuna stood awkwardly watching the handsome man at work. He lit a spark and slowly the flame began to consume the dead leaves that had settled in the cave; the burning leaves produced a strange sooty smell. Tsuna found himself entranced by the warm orange glow of the embers that spiraled upward from the crackling fire.
"Tsunayoshi, sit down and I'll treat that wound on your forehead," the blue haired man ordered as he tapped on his own forehead to indicate the area of the wound.
"Wound? " Tsuna asked in a daze. The youth mirrored his new found companion: he lightly touched his forehead before he hissed in pain and quickly drew back his hand by reflex. The sight of red blood surprised him as he cried out and fell on his backside. He instantly regretted falling as pain shot through his spine: he hadn't realized how much damage he suffered from the beast's swipe.
Mukuro smiled at him from across the fire, his face lit by one side of the weak flame. He then turned to unbuckle his wooden chest of cordials and the glass clinked lightly against each other as he rummaged through his case.
"Here it is," his voice exclaimed softly. The apothecary pushed himself up from his knees and made his way towards Tsuna. Looking up at the towering figure, whose front had been shadowed by the backlight, he found this slightly reminiscent of a horror story.
Mukuro sat on his haunches in front of Tsuna and produced two bottles from his pockets. The smell of cherry blossom overwhelmed Tsuna once more. So that's where the scent came from. His lids fell half masked.
"Oya, are you enjoying my cologne?" He had asked, but the question was rhetorical. The man seductively chuckled and locked eyes with Tsuna, "Kufufu, I made it myself."
Tsuna blushed a bit and averted his honey colored eyes, but chose to remain silent as Mukuro slipped off his leather gloves and replaced them with latex, "One can't ever be too careful—always be prepared." A brief flirtatious smirk graced his lips.
"Have a sip of this, you're still looking pale: it'll warm your body up." Mukuro pushed one of the bottles into Tsuna's hands.
"I-I couldn't take your medicine," Tsuna bowed his head politely. "I wouldn't be able to pay you."
The look in Mukuro's steady gaze compelled the young man to drink, "Oh, I insist, regardless if you can pay or not. It's no matter."
He stuttered a small thank you and took a sip as Mukuro continued to stare. Warmth bloomed from within the pits of his belly as the medicine drained down his throat.
Satisfied after Tsuna had taken a few gulps, he pulled out cotton balls from his pockets and inverted the top of the other bottle onto the cotton before dabbing at the boy's injured forehead. The medicine felt surprisingly cool against his skin and Tsuna let his eyes shut. He was starting to feel a bit tired and the headache from earlier returned with full force.
"You're burning up Tsunayoshi…" The brunet opened his eyes blurrily, and registered that Mukuro had returned to his case. He was being observed intently by the other man. His breath became labored and puffs of hot air emitted from his dry lips.
"Wha…" Tsuna struggled to mumble. Heat pooled over to his cheeks. His honey eyes glazed over and struggled to focus on the apothecary, his gaze was full of question. The kindness in those two colored eyes mutated and shone back with demonic pleasure.
Mukuro's mouth twisted into a sardonic leer, "Sorry, did I forget to mention the side effects? May cause dizziness, sluggishness and high fever." Tsuna wanted to cry out, his body felt as though it were burning and everything was too hot. Among all the sensations he felt, he was most aware of his heartbeat, with every pulse a string of heat wracked through his small frame. The burnet careened back and forth until he collapsed onto his side. Panting, he could barely lift his head. What was going to happen to him? How the hell could he have been so stupid? He watched in panic as the dark man made his way closer to him. The top of a trident glinted in his hand.
As he spoke, Mukuro's face gradually contorted into a sinister expression, "What a pretty specimen I've stumbled upon. It's a pity for you that your parents never taught you never trust strangers." The tone in his voice sounded amused, "Really you couldn't help it, though, my colognewas quite special." He leisurely removed his gloves, "Now, which part of your body shall I possess?" He looked upon Tsuna with a predatory glint in his eyes—the sadism seeping through blue and crimson irises.
His thumb traced over Tsuna's face, almost tenderly, and he purred, "I suppose I should examine every piece of you before deciding." The other hand held the trident which grazed lightly against his skin as a bead of blood pooled at the cut. The blue haired man flicked his tongue over the wound, his lids lazily slide closed, savoring the coppery taste of the younger man's blood.
A shudder of disgust quaked through Tsuna. He heard the trident tear through his clothes and felt cold hands trail up and down his quivering form. He squeezed his eyes shut as he wept. Mukuro whispered hotly into the shell of his ear, "How does it feel to have no control, Tsunayoshi? Your body is no longer your own. It belongs to me."