Here's the next chapter!

It took a lot less time than I though it would - I guess it's OK though since this was wasn't as rushed as the last one. At least I don't think so anyway.

Foreign Understandings

It took a week before the two were actually sent away to France, where their assignment was, and most of those seven days were spent checking Mukuro's general health and prepping for what they were supposed to do. Hibari, before boarding the plane, decided to read through the manila folder than had been untouched since it was delivered to his room. The whole thing was boring and he discarded it half way through the first sheet. He would figure out what to do.

So, eventually, after the Vongola medical people decided that Mukuro was fit enough to leave the base (even though Mukuro would have left even if they didn't allow him), he and Hibari went off on their mission. It was going smoothly, until Mukuro decided that it would be fun to scare the hell out unwitting people who were in the airport.

Thankfully, the plane ride was uneventful - apart from the fact that Hibari hated planes with a passion and ended up clutching the armrest for the journey. Also, there was the incident were Mukuro commented on how he found Hibari so 'cute' when he tried to repress his reluctant fear of airplanes, to which Hibari replied by ripping the armrest off and repetitively hitting him in the face. That was when he realized that he no longer had anything to clutch, and ended up gripping Mukuro's discarded jacket.

Other than that, they managed to get to France without any major problems. So what if the airport had their names and faces and decided to call the police because of the damage that Hibari had caused to the seat - they could easily get out of it.

Sorting out their little mess was easy and soon, after a day of settling in their hotel and having a rather pointless foreign argument with a Frenchman (Hibari couldn't speak French, the man couldn't speak Japanese) they finally found themselves breaking into a large, high-tech business like building. Complicated devices like key coders and fingerprint locks and retina scanners were easily bypassed with Mukuro there, when usually on an assignment Hibari would just break in, let the alarm blare and kill everything in sight. That, unfortunately for him, didn't need to happen this time.

He followed the illusionist with a bored expression on his face, not knowing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Asking Mukuro was out of the question, since his pride just wouldn't allow it. Besides, the idiot also didn't read the information for their assignment, so he shouldn't really have known what to do either. But he did though, which shouldn't have really surprised Hibari. It was a fact that Mukuro knew almost everything thanks to that annoyingly brilliant mind of his.

As if he was reading Hibari's thoughts Mukuro spoke. 'France is the center of a worldwide drug ring,' he explained casually, smiling knowingly. 'The Vongola wants us to find incriminating information so that we can storm the place and basically kill everyone we come across.'

Hibari look towards Mukuro. 'Why can't we just kill them now?'

'Because, my dear Kyoya, Sawada Tsunayoshi isn't certain that this is in fact the center of operations.'

Hibari rolled his eyes. 'But you are?'

'Of course I am,' Mukuro chuckled, keying in a pass code to another door as if he belonged there. 'The French have been at it for twelve years now. It's about time somebody decided to do something.'

'Twelve years?' Hibari repeated, raising a brow.

'The drugs haven't hit Japan until recently, so the Vongola has only just found out. Selling drugs is also a great way to make money, especially if they've been doing it for twelve years,' Mukuro said. 'Which is exactly why this place is so fancy.' He gestured around extravagantly, doing a little twirl for emphasis. Hibari simply rolled his eyes again and punched Mukuro in the head for acting like an idiot.

'How are we supposed to gather this information if we can't speak the language?'

'Kufufu~ Who says I can't speak the language?' Mukuro chimed, grinning teasingly. Hibari stopped and glared at the illusionist.

'I didn't know you could speak French,' he glared, his brow twitching ever so slightly.

'I can speak many languages, Kyoya,' Mukuro chuckled. 'It's one of the advantages of living more than one life.'

'So you decided to let me struggle to speak to these French bastards when you could have easily just spoken to them yourself?' Hibari's temper was obviously rising at that point, and Mukuro could tell. Still, why would he waste an opportunity to annoy his favorite Skylark?

'Yes, I did' he said playfully. 'Maybe next time you should try speaking in English to them - they learn that in school.' All he got in return for his words of wisdom was a punch in the face. He was expecting that though and quickly ducked to avoid getting his teeth knocked out.

'I hate you.'

'You say that but you still tolerate my presence,' Mukuro stated, slinging a casual arm over Hibari's shoulder. The Cloud Guardian's glare deepened, but he neither confirmed nor denied it. He walked on, lightly shrugging Mukuro's arm away and stopping at a door that looked rather promising. Mukuro stepped forward and studied the door before coating his hand in an illusion. What replaced it was a darker, burlier looking limb and he used it to activate the fingerprint lock.

Hibari walked in first and looked around, totally uninterested in what was going on. He would be fine if he had people to bite to death, but they had yet to run into someone that had decided that they were a threat. They only came into contact with some weak looking idiots who thought that the two were higher ups in the organization. Hibari had decided that the French were idiots.

'Well, this looks interesting,' Mukuro stated blankly, letting his eyes dance around the room. All they saw were stacks upon stack of paper and pale yellow folders that slumped against army green filling cabinets. He shuffled further into the room, avoiding the mess of papers that were littered about on the floor as Hibari glared around, leaning against the door frame.

'Can't you do something to speed things up?' he asked as Mukuro began rifling through some papers.

'I'm not a miracle worker, Kyoya,' the illusionist replied. He knew that the place they were in was in fact the base of the drug ring that Tsuna was so worried about, but no doubt the Vongola boss would want proof. Mukuro couldn't even give Tsuna a fake document because of that damned hyper intuition of his. That only left him the option of searching through the room and finding something if he wanted to avoid yet another lecture.

'This will take forever,' Hibari snapped. Mukuro stood up straight and rubbed his chin with a nod.

'Hm, I think I know why Sawada Tsunayoshi decided to send me instead of Chrome,' he mused out loud. His smirk grew sinister and he turned to Hibari, hovering his finger over his lips as if he was asking him to be quiet. 'Stay here, Kyoya, I'll be right back.'

Usually, Hibari would give Mukuro a tonfa in the face for telling him what to do, but he was admittedly curious to what the idiot was planning. No doubt it would involve some crazy mind game and illusions. So, instead of reacting like he usually would, he leant against the wall and stared at a sheet of paper that was filled with a neat scrawl of French handwriting. He occupied his time by trying to decipher it.

Mukuro came back soon, insanely soon, and had a little mustached man following him. A trident cut was prominently noticeable on his chubby French cheeks.

'Chrome dislikes interrogating people,' Mukuro explained as he all but danced back into the room. 'She hates to see others in pain, but I really couldn't care less.' He chuckled loudly as he controlled the Frenchman, making him do strange twirls and spins before forcing him to sit on the floor.

'Sawada knew this would happen?'

'Well, he obviously assumed something,' Mukuro said with a light shrug. 'He probably guessed that the information would be near impossible to find unless we ask someone and nobody really likes my way of asking.'

Hibari grunted, knowing all too well of the illusionist unorthodox methods of getting the information her wanted. He turned his attention back to Mukuro and their victim.

'Pouvez-vous parler Japonais?' Mukuro asked, the foreign words rolling effortlessly off of his tongue. The man was allowed to nod slowly. 'Ah, Kyoya, you're in luck. He can speak Japanese. Surprising, really. Not a lot of the French can speak this language.'

Hibari glared at the man. 'Which means that you are probably the one who deals in Japan,' he said sharply. The man looked up at Hibari - a worry crease line in between in eyebrows as he noticed that the Cloud Guardian looked like he wanted to kill him.

'I will tell you nothing,' he snapped. His Japanese was rather good, but a little broken in places.

Mukuro bent down so he was eyelevel with the man and smiled that eerie smile of his. 'There are three ways I could do this,' he said softly. 'You could either tell Kyoya and I what we want to know and get out of here with just a few of your memories destroyed, or I could go into your mind, throw my consciousness around a little and leave you nothing more than a vegetable, or I could make things up as I go along and I should warn you that things may get out of hand if that happens. It's your choice, my friend.'

The Frenchman looked disgusted. 'You Italians are trash! You think you can do anything you want,' he spat before turning his angry gaze to Hibari. 'And the Japanese! You are stupid, all of you! You buy our merchandise without any second thoughts!' Hibari's brow twitched as the man continued to add more fuel to the fire - completely unaware of how violent Hibari could get.

'What did you say?' he snapped. The man tried to reel backwards under Hibari's glare, but found that he was unable to as he couldn't overcome Mukuro's control over him. The illusionist held up his hand to stop Hibari from attacking the man and smiled.

'Well, I take it that the first option is out of the question,' he said playfully. 'So that leaves the other two.'

'Go with the last one' Hibari ordered. Mukuro looked up in surprise, but smiled as Hibari's glare penetrated into the little man, who now looked incredibly uncomfortable. It seemed that Hibari approved of how sadistic Mukuro could get when he was improvising.

'I will tell you nothing,' the man snapped again. Mukuro sat back on the heels of his feet in thought before a sinister smirk played across his features. He made the man hold out his hand and an illusionary carving knife materialized there. Shock registered in the man's face and his own arm edged towards his leg.

'I think you'll enjoy this Kyoya,' Mukuro said, a hint of madness in his eyes. Hibari leaned forward and watched with interest as the knife edged close and closer to the Frenchman's leg.

'What are you doing?' the Frenchman exclaimed, growing increasingly worried. Sweat ran down his face as his hand moved forcefully towards his leg, the knife grazing gently against the fabric of his slacks.

'Are you going to cooperate?' Mukuro asked in a sickly sweet voice. When he got no reply he made the knife move closer. The only response he got was a worried look and a couple of incoherent grunts of surprise and fear.

Mukuro lay back on the bed, slinging an arm under his head as he held the cell phone to his ear. 'Well, what if we weren't aware of the fact that he was one of the dealers who ran the whole operations,' he said with a playful smirk. They got the information they wanted, but they also accidentally killed the man that they were interrogating. Now, Mukuro had to report to Tsuna as Hibari was changing out of his bloodied suit.

Tsuna said something on the other line, to which Mukuro took his time to reply too. A wry smirk creeped upon his face and he let out a low chuckle - creeping Tsuna out a little. Mukuro always did manage to make his spine shiver.

'No, no, he didn't suffer. Well, not by my hands anyway,' he said offhandedly. 'Someone really ought to have told him that it is rather bad to cut off his own leg.'

Silence fell.

'What?' Tsuna's voice was so loud that Mukuro had to pull the phone away from his ear ever so slightly.

'You should have expected it, Sawada Tsunayoshi,' he chuckled. 'Then again, it wasn't just me. Kyoya wanted a turn by the time he was half way through the bone. It was fun keeping him conscious during it. In the end I had to keep him awake forcefully.' Tsuna sighed on the end of the line and told Mukuro to come back to Japan. There was no point in continuing with the assignment when the people they were after now knew that there were some strangers out to get them.

Mukuro laughed loudly and hung up as Hibari walked back into the room. Instead of his suit he wore a blue yukata and his hair was wet from the shower he had just had. The suit was just about ruined, really, since it was stained red with the blood from the little Frenchman. Mukuro was different, since he didn't exactly touch the man physically so his clothes were still as immaculate as they always were.

Hibari threw his ruined clothes in the corner of the room and glared at Mukuro, who was playfully tossing the phone around in his hands.

'Is there any particular reason you had to use my phone?' he asked, raising a brow as Mukuro sat up lazily.

'Yes, actually,' replied the illusionist. 'I use my 'freaky mind powers', as you call them, when I need to communicate with people, so I don't have the need for phones.'

Hibari's glare deepened as he toweled his hair. 'So why don't you contact him the way you usually would.'

'Because the last time I went into his head to talk, I ended up searching through his memories and found out things that he would rather have kept to himself,' Mukuro explained, chuckling lightly at the memory. 'Since then he found a way to block me from entering his mind, so I have to find other means of pestering him.'

Hibari rolled his eyes and threw the towel to the corner where his ruined clothes were. Mukuro laughed and fell back down on Hibari's bed, not bothering to get up and go back to his own room, to which Hibari noted with a scowl.

'Get up and leave before I bite you to de-' he cut himself off abruptly and stared at Mukuro, a thought suddenly coming to mind. 'You're healthy.'

Mukuro blinked, but smirked all the same, as if he knew where this was going. 'Yes, I am,' he drawled, sitting up slowly again. 'Thank you for noticing.'

Hibari looked thoughtfully at the illusionist, before whipping his tonfa and letting a smirk work its way onto his face. 'Fight me,' he ordered.

The smile that Mukuro wore did not disappear as his eyes locked with the Cloud Guardian's. He leant back once again, this time stopping so he could lean on his elbows as he seemed to mull over the demand. Hibari looked serious, as if he was looking forward to this opportunity for a long time and Mukuro didn't blame. He knew how much Hibari loved to fight - especially with someone who was on par with him in battle.

'And here I thought you tolerate me because you enjoyed my company,' he said in mock hurt, holding a hand to his chest with a false pout on his face. Hibari said nothing, but simply held his tonfa up ready to fight. Humoring the Skylark, Mukuro lazily stood up, deliberately taking his time before conjuring up his trident.

Hibari's smirk stayed steady as his eyes followed Mukuro's casual form stroll towards him, trident in hand.

'In the hotel room, Kyoya, really?' asked Mukuro, stopping so he was about four steps away from Hibari.

'Yes, really,' Hibari replied. 'No boxes, no illusions. Just you and me. We'll see who is really the stronger.'

Mukuro shrugged. 'I must say that I am curious too,' he said thoughtfully. 'But what will happen if you cannot live up to your reputation as the strongest Guardian?'

'That won't happed,' Hibari said.

'If you say so, Kyoya.' And with that, Mukuro attacked.

He spun his trident over his head, avoiding the ceiling light, and brought it down heavily, intending to deal a rather harsh blow only to have it countered by the tonfa. Hibari, blocking Mukuro's attack with one arm, swung the other around, furrowing his brow when it was dodged quite easily. Mukuro chuckled and twirled out of the way of a heavy blow but was quickly hit down but a tonfa to the stomach,

It hurt much more than it should have, considering he had only just recovered from his stay in Vendice, but did not dwell on the fact. It felt good to be in real pain for once, instead of letting Chrome's body take his blows. The thought may have sound a little masochistic, but staying in a glass tube for ten years really took away the feeling of everything, so he welcomed the pain with open arms. That, however, didn't mean that he actually wanted the feeling.

Cocking his head to one side, he grinned. It seemed that Hibari was enjoying himself, even if he didn't like to admit it. Mukuro ran his tongue over his lips and charged forwards again, swinging his trident quickly and heavily catching Hibari's in his ribs. The Skylark jumped backwards - his pride preventing him from clutching the maybe-broken bones in his torso. Instead, he smirked. It had been a while since someone had injured him. It just gave him the motivation to battle harder, and nobody wanted to be the target for his attacks.

Mukuro was different though. He would willingly injure Hibari and would counter any harsh attack that was thrown his way. That was why he was fun to fight - was why Hibari liked to fight him.

'It seems like years since we last fought,' Mukuro remarked, twisting his body around to avoid a swing of the tonfa.

Hibari narrowly dodged a slash of the trident. 'It has been years,' he said back. The yukata he had only just changed into was ripped in some places, but still miraculously clung to his body, as if it did not want to fall off. Mukuro's clothes, which had been so immaculate, shared the shame fate. His jacket was useless and his shirt was slightly ripped at the stomach. His ridiculous boots, however, managed to avoid being in the brunt of an attack.

The tonfa clashed with the trident, and Mukuro let a knowing grin creep up on his face. With quick movements, he spun the trident, sending Hibari's weapons to the floor. Not admitting defeat, Hibari charged at Mukuro with his fists, only to be caught by Mukuro's hands. The illusionist pinned Hibari's wrists and pushed him backwards forcefully, until he was pressed against the wall.

'What are you doing?' Hibari demanded as he was restrained against the wall.

Mukuro tilted his head. 'I think I know the reason to your constant need for violence,' he murmured in a suspiciously low voice. His head leaned closer to Hibari's and he pressed his lips to the smaller man's ear, whispering something incoherent. Whatever it was, it seemed to do the trick as Hibari's face turned from his usual pale self to a pink-red.

'You pervert,' he managed to splutter. Mukuro smirked.

'I think, Kyoya, we can count this as my win.' Before Hibari could argue, Mukuro had leant down and kissed him hard, shocking him. He let out a short gasp and on instinct he tried to pull away, only succeeding in smashing his head against the wall and earning a chuckle from the illusionist.

It was so wrong. It was wrong that Mukuro was kissing him - it was wrong that he had begun to kiss back. It was just all wrong. As if to emphasis his thoughts, he forcefully pulled his hands away and punched Mukuro in the stomach.

'Now that wasn't very nice,' said Mukuro, smirking down at him.

'Shut up,' he snapped. He yanked Mukuro's face back down to meet his own again and smashed their lips together, almost certainly bruising them both. So what if it was all wrong. He had done things that weren't right before - what was the harm in adding one more thing to the list. The thought that it was Mukuro that he was making out with didn't seem to bother him, well, not at that moment anyway. He was a man - he had needs.

They stumbled away from the wall and fell sideways onto the bed.

He'll find time to regret later.

You've got to admit, Mukuro does look like the type of guy to know a lot of languages. Anyway, I've finally managed to put in some actual 6918! I'm pretty worried about them being in character or not in the last bit, but I suppose it's OK. Not too rushed, I hope.

OK, next chapter might be pushing the rating up to M. Do people want smut? I personally don't mind either way - it's all up to you. :D