Side note: if anyone wants to adopt from my pieces, do feel free. Please let me know about it, though, so I can see what you do with them!
FireBorne
They thought the worst was behind them having faced monsters in men's guise, broken worlds and broken pasts, futures undone, curses and world-binding unraveled and rewoven.
Of course they were wrong.
Scattered, useless, powerless compared to the thing before them, a thing that held no place in any world, broken free from the breaking of so many futures and settling before them in a mass of hungry greed. Flames touched it, but did not stop it—mere irritants against its power.
It batted them aside with something that might have been limb or thought, darker than Vindice's Flames, denser than Enma's gravitational wells (not black holes, no matter what they'd thought as startled children, for even one black hole was a warp in space that would have swallowed the solar system within the heartbeat of its birth) and one of them stood again.
Their Sky.
When none of them were able to face down what they fought, Sawada Tsunayoshi always, always stood back up. Moved before them, a shelter that they had never asked for but had been granted all the same.
Once again, there he was, Flames on hands and forehead, placing himself steadily between this thing of eldritch nightmare—orange-gold Flame, purest Sky, and when the shadow batted him down, crushing him beneath a well of darkness so deep and heavy that they could no longer feel him…
It was Reborn, no longer cursed pacifier swinging free as he pushed himself back to his hands and knees, who spat out a mouthful of blood and chose to believe. "Tsuna… will never let us down," he growled at the mocking not-voice in their minds.
Half-conscious, Gokudera heard Tsuna's name, but his belief had never been in question. Juudaime was his all, his reason, his faith, because Juudaime had always been a mark of everything good in the world, and Juudaime would not let this thing broken of massed fear and hate take those he'd fought so hard to gain. Too dizzy to even try to speak, all he did was smile.
Scattered across a broken landscape, the others agreed—Mukuro knew it with all he was, no matter how much he'd never say it aloud, and Chrome backed his faith with hers. Hibari smirked, shifting to his knees and tightening his grip on cracked tonfa.
Yamamoto laughed breathlessly, a worn shinai in his hands as Ryohei managed a tired "Extremely."
Further back, Xanxus spat a curse that was as knowing as it was defiant, the other Varia in agreement that not a one of their people was dead, because the Baby Boss wouldn't stand for that.
Former Arcobaleno pushing up to their knees, not reaching for the flames stored in cracked pacifiers because they all had that same sure knowledge that they didn't need to, not yet. Tsuna would get up, he would win, he would burn away this stain on reality and only then would they be needed, to pick up and patch together the world under their Sky.
Others across the battlefield, those who'd seen the faith of their strongest and heard the stories and started to believe themselves.
Beneath crushing darkness, something sparked.
The fire on his forehead had ever been Sky, but never so pure a Flame. Always, the Flames on his hands had been purest, where his gloves filtered his already beautiful Flames to make them shine cleaner still, but now the fire on his forehead was just as brilliant a sunset-flare.
The darkness melted around him, and the battlefield trembled with something that might have been fear except it was only hateful rage.
Tsuna's eyes shone the color of his Flames, turning towards the mass of brokenness with a strangely compelling pity.
"Come."
A single word, spoken quietly, that crashed down over those gathered like a thunderclap. As always, Tsuna had risen greater than before, but this time—this time something was different.
The darkness, only half-real, surged up to meet him.
He did not dodge, nor did he attack. Instead, he raised a flameless hand and set it against the rising sense of broken, sunset eyes bright-glowing but gentle. "You were not meant to be this way," Tsuna informed, and the darkness simply halted.
The cracks in reality that made up its body started to mend, the twisted not-shadow of its being fading.
The impressions it left in their minds went from hate-rage-hate-fury-greed-hunger to healing, and then a sense of relief so profound that none of them remained upright.
"Be at peace," it was a command, a farewell, a blessing. The unnatural shadow over the place that had been their battlefield, had been its entry point into the reality they lay in… slipped away.
Tsuna looked down at the destruction left in the wake of their struggle, and something in his eyes flickered, his Flames blazing too bright to look at.
Reborn gasped as his broken ribs snapped back into place in a way that Sun-healing could not achieve, heat sweeping through him until his breath came easy. All around, wounds and damage were being wiped away.
Something was different.
They looked up, and Tsuna… something about him was so, so different while remaining exactly the same. He was somehow more.
"Tsuna?"
Sunset eyes turned towards them, "Reborn."
His voice… resonated.
"What happened to you?" Reborn breathed out, while the others seemed in to much shock to speak.
"You had faith."
That didn't make sense, did it? What did it even mean? Yes, he had faith—but he'd had faith in Tsuna for a long time, and most of the others had, too. What was different?
"This time," Tsuna informed, quiet and crashing, "so did I."
Reborn frowned.
"Many, many times I have had determination," Tsuna mused, the land around them pulling cracks together and sprouting out new growth, "but this time I had faith."
It was Yamamoto who choked out the answer, seeming to realize something that none of the others had managed to piece together. "'It takes faith to make a god,'" he quoted, sounding stunned for the first time any of them could remember.
It clicked. The change, the sheer overwhelming crash of voice and gently overpowering swell of his Flames…
Their faith in their Sky had birthed a god.
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