Cricket Capers
One of the better things about being Varia was how much freedom being one of the world's best assassins gave a person. Sure there were responsibilities, paperwork and actual missions plus planning to get there. There were a few more issues concerning the timing to do the job and get back but all that was easy. Also easy was keeping in shape that was required to do the Varia's missions especially if you'd been doing so since you were eight. Being a genius only helped with the former, not the latter.
For the most part the Varia didn't care how a job was done, just that it was. Same went for a lot of other things. It was remarkably lassize-faire of the Varia, but some fools just didn't quiet get the difference between having Quality, having Varia Quality and then being Varia. A lot of people had skills but the difference was in the devotion the Varia put into what they did. The fools just didn't get why the Varia culled out those that failed being Varia either since they seemed to value human life no matter if that person was traitorous scum.
Then again, peasants always had trouble thinking things through, which is why they had Royalty to rule them. Someone of Varia Quality that had access to Varia resources -and Vongola resources through them- who was less than loyal? It was a mess and a half. The only reason the Ottabio situation -the very dead and not missed Cloud Officer- hadn't ended before it could even begin was that only someone higher in the chain of authority could execute or cull below them; there was even paperwork for that. Ottabio had been Tyr's Vice-captain. When Squalo killed Tyr, Ottabio's position hadn't changed but when Squalo brought in Xanxus as Boss and demoting himself, he had also dropped Ottabio to just an Officer. It really didn't matter now, as Ottabio and his conspirators were long-since dead.
Even work-related accidents could be tolerated in the Varia, so long as it looked like an accident and no one wanted or knew better than to investigate deeply. The problem with Ottabio wasn't that they couldn't kill him -the Shark had the authority- but that doing so wouldn't be worth the resulting mess at the time. During those years that Boss was frozen, the Shark was in charge but had his hands and sword tied by the fact that Ottabio had subordinates and a network that needed investigated, taken apart and killed with him. Once Boss was defrosted, then Ottabio acted so the Varia was able to take the Cloud, his network and collaborators down in one fell swoop. The Varia's Cloud Division was pretty much decimated due to that and none of them that were left were Officer Quality and they didn't want another Levi-situation; promoting someone who was just that little bit better, no matter his or her other failings. Even the robot was just a stand-in, a nice and dangerous toy but still not the kind of Quality the Varia -and Boss- wanted in its Officers.
Still, the amount of personal freedom afforded was surprisingly staggering for those not used to it; made picking out the newbies and mooks so easy for scaring purposes. The active members of the Varia -especially those with proven Quality- had their own suites of rooms that were there to deal with as they wished. Being an organization of assassins meant they generally liked their privacy and weren't afraid to protect it through traps and lethal surprises. Locks and normal security were by-passed as easy as breathing for any Varia; even the mooks were good enough to get past a mafioso's moderately paranoid security or should be unless they wanted to wind up dead on a mission.
Bel knew that there were several Varia who had hobbies involving corpses that didn't involve what Lussuria did with them; sometimes it ended up as fridge horror as there was no better way to tell someone to take their personal security more seriously than a severed head in their fridge. He knew of people who collected skulls to speak to, who sacrificed organs to gods of a forgotten civilization and those who just found a better use for the meat and flesh that was a corpse like turning it into glue or bones into weapons. Then there were some who just fertilized their plants with human remains; a corpse was a corpse, human or animal and corpses were just meat, flesh and bone depending on how fresh it was. Rot away lifeless, killers have best cherry trees, they feed on old blood.* The point was that the Varia had the freedom to do so and made few demands other than reaching a level of Quality and serve.
Even so, assassins weren't exactly the neatest of people which is what Varia Housekeeping was for. They kept the Varia fed, supplied with stuff they needed, made sure transportation worked, the building clean and made sure the Varia were healthy; they did everything not pertaining to assassination directly. That was left to the assassins and the Varia's intelligence agents. Can't kill a person if you don't know where they're at and assassination was a lot harder to do should alarms be triggered. Intelligence was needed to be able to work properly, as was an understanding of politics. Starting a war between famiglias was fun if moderately to majorly difficult; keeping the Varia -and the Vongola- out of the war so to benefit later was harder. Nothing was ever truly neat and assassins knew that like they knew how to keep a person from ever breathing again.
As a consequence of Varia's Housekeeping being sensible and Varia assassins being protective of their space and privacy there were rules in place about the rooms. It said a lot about Varia's Housekeeping that these rules existed and were semi-actively enforced. If there was something noticeably wrong with the assassin's room from the outside -unusual smells, bugs, general sweat musk being overpowering and gag-worthy, blood pooling out from under the door- then Housekeeping would report it. Generally this was referred to as a room violation.
Room violations were usually reported to a superior officer, who then had free reign to fix it. Preferably immediately. The one time Bel had that issue led to Boss burning his room with Wrath Flames. Wrath Flames were very neat at erasing things from existence; not even ashes were left. Bel would prefer it not to happen again. Ever.
Afterwards, Bel decided that while he wasn't going to clean his room -that wasn't Royalty's job- then he could at least make punished subordinates do it for him. It led back to the whole lassize faire mentality. Punishments, rewards, language and the like weren't regulated by things like protocol -the Varia had very few of those- but by good judgement and tradition. Some traditions might as well have been more binding than honor -assassins flouted the law all the time- but some were new, recently acquired or even recently discarded. Tradition was always changing like the Varia was; people joined and retired all the time. Best to let the Varia be Varia and do the things the Varia needed to do.
Currently however, Bel had a problem and wasn't sure how to fix it.
He had crickets in his room.
Bel's room was an acknowledged mess. It was in Ranking Fuuta's top ten messiest rooms in the mafia at number two. It did however get periodically cleaned, much to his subordinates displeasure. Bel had wire traps, knives and poisons strewn throughout his room. Some knives were poisoned, others were cleaned and some were rusty with a chance of tetanus waiting to happen. Clothing was piled in places, books, magazines and more made their own towers or hills if they had spilled. Spare blankets might have one time been folded and rolled neatly but it was currently covering a desk, a chair on top of the desk and a flying knife trap. There were poisons in bottles, next to nail polish and old fraying boots. There were his movie ticket stubs, advertisements, unrolled posters and even amusing tourist crap tossed in for flavor.
Not even Bel liked to clean his room. He knew where his things were at; he could find them. Enough said.
Still, it didn't change the fact that Bel woke up to the sound of crickets. They weren't the quiet sort of crickets either but those that were loud. Bel was certain that crickets weren't supposed to be that loud and that these crickets had to be an illusion. Froggy was wonderfully passive-aggressive in his revenge, which made him fun.
The sound didn't diminish as he brought his Storm Flames up to demolish whatever illusion might have been in his head. If anything the sound became louder. Like they were cricket versions of the Shark but without the 'Voi!' Just exceedingly loud chirping that wouldn't go away! He couldn't see past illusions consistently -especially not Mammon's very tricky ones- but he sure as hell could demolish them if he suspected they were there. He had paid Mammon enough to make sure that he could.
Several small moments of investigation later, Bel had proof that the crickets were real. No illusionist was that particular. Few usually went into details enough to know what a cricket looked like from the inside when dissected with knives; also most people didn't realize that insects didn't bleed red blood. Bug blood was more like plasma than actual blood.
Thinking quickly, Bel assessed his options.
1. Do nothing.
Not going to work. Boss would burn the Prince's room down to the bedrock. Boss was scary and Bel would rather not have to replace everything in his room out of his own paycheck.
2. Get subordinates to do something about the crickets. Catch them, spray them or whatever.
Risk of subordinates saying something. Not enough time to force them into silence. Killing them afterwards would not be worth the effort of cleaning up their corpses. Blood on the carpets and on the walls. It's a terrible idea. Even piling them in the hallways later for scavengers and Housekeeping would be a bad idea.
3. Kill the crickets himself.
Minimal risk, trains accuracy, anticipation and precision. Plus he could go back to sleep afterwards.
"Ushishishi." Bel cackled. "The Prince is hunting buggies tonight to feed the Froggy with."
(It isn't cleaning if he's only collecting cricket corpses to feed to that mouthy Mist right?)
Xanxus and Squalo watched Bel and Fran 'play' with dead crickets. Bel was trying to feed them to Fran -with some success- while Fran threw or spit them back at the Prince. Fran was dropped off on the Varia by Mukuro for some time. As the Varia didn't tolerate free loaders, the young illusionist was put to work.
"Squalo." Xanxus uttered.
"Got it Boss." The swordsman said, then he turned to face the brawling duo. "Vrroooiii! What do you two idiots think you're fucking doing!?"
Earlier that month, Xanxus found a pet store and placed an order for crickets. A bit of focus to use just Mist Flames -instead of pure Sky Flames or his Wrath Flames- had the crickets wrapped in a veil of silence. No noise could escape the crickets' container. No one would even see it was there either. They had no reason to suspect that the crickets would even be there.
He had a Royal Brat to punish and Xanxus could do cruel and unusual punishments. Crickets were loud, small and annoying. Bel adored his sleep. Bel was also afraid of him burning his room down again so there was no way to report it or make someone else deal with it. Perfect math to aggravate the Prince to frustrated and irritable; Luss would be concerned and motherly and Bel hated that as well.
It would be a bit difficult but he had plenty of crickets and an entire week to devote to tormenting his Officer; Bel had no missions for the week beyond in-country day-jobs and hadn't made any plans beyond being a pest. The tricky thing would be finding time to sneak the crickets into Bel's room but that wasn't so difficult as Xanxus knew Bel better than Bel knew himself.
This would be fun, for him anyway. That's what the royal pain in the ass deserved for stealing his chocolate.
Bel certainly wouldn't enjoy it. Not even if he killed the crickets himself. Especially not after a week of doing so. Bel may have had enough energy to harass the idiot frog today, but tomorrow and the day after that?
Bel stepped out of his bathroom in his towel to the sound of crickets.
"Ushishishi. Some peasant thinks its fun to mess with Royalty? Prepare to die peasant. I'll get you after the crickets."
"Any idea of who Bel is hunting Squalo-dear?"
"So long as it isn't one of ours, I don't care."
"We'll find the corpse later, I suppose."
"Bel, if you don't sleep properly your productivity will fall and you're more likely to get sick. I'm not going to pay for your medicine or the doctor."
Bel just yawned. The he picked up the Mist and cuddled as Mammon increased the prices from last time.
"That peasant is so dead. I'll cut and rip them to shreds and hang their skin up as curtains." Bel promised as the third day of crickets promised to keep him up for some time. He has moved things around, dismantled traps and more so that he could kill the crickets faster. He liked his sleep and he liked not worrying about his room going up in flames. He wasn't getting what he liked at all.
The crickets kept coming back and Bel was thoroughly ready to unleash his royal wrath on those who tormented him. Four days of crickets? Bel was going to skin them alive.
Xanxus smirked, as Bel was clearly in a terrible mood and lacking in sleep; he was also jittery from too much coffee. Revenge was a beautiful thing.
"Bel? Are you having problems? Tell Mama-Lussuria all about them!"
"No!" Bel shouted, as adrenaline gave him the energy to run from the okama despite five days of crickets.
"Long-haired Captain, the midget miser said that they're currently incapable to join the meeting. I think the fake prince is molesting the midget miser in his sleep. Does that make him a perverted prince?"
"Bel looks fucking terrible. Send him on a mission somewhere far away." Xanxus ordered Squalo.
"I think we've got one in Japan." Squalo answered, as he searched the documents. "Yeah. A hit for a mistress vacationing in Japan's own version of Hawaii. Simple job really."
"Send Bel with minder too." Xanxus decided.
Xanxus considered putting crickets on the plane, but decided against it. No need to make Bel have a tantrum and destroy the plane. Best to let Bel have someone to kill, a vacation of sorts and a chance to visit Namimori for sushi. Bel would be all rested up and in a much better mood until the day after.
The crickets would be waiting for Bel to get back after all.
*Supposedly there's a superstition that corpses are/were buried under cherry/sakura trees. The Varia take this literally. I wrote it as a haiku.
