Flashback:

"You're one bastard of a father."

Chapter 10: Family Ties

Lil and these two sweaty men had been waiting just beyond the door for what Lil knew what some sort of ambush. The longer she was cramped in with these men underground in the hot August weather, the more her head throbbed.

She knew she was bleeding, but it must not have been much. Nothing was profusely running down her hair or her face. Her entire body was numb with fear.

How could she, an exclusive member of the Varia, allow herself to be captured by these… these amateurs?

The door the group stood by suddenly echoed with gunshots and screams of slain men. Lil's eyes widened when she realized that the voice that loudly boomed through the door belonged to her boss. He sounded incredibly angry; she'd never heard him so pissed.

He was yelling about how whoever was in there was his father, and that's when her heart skipped a beat in realization. Was that the man that they'd come here to assassinate? But why? If this man was Xanxus's father, why would he want him dead?

"Linsalata is going to pay us twice than usual for this one, isn't he?" One of the men's giddy voices shook in happiness and glee. Lil assumed that it was the skinnier one of the two.

"That's what he said. I just want to get this over with." The other one sighed unhappily. Must have been the heavier-set one this time.

A moment of silence crept up on the three until Lil's mind slowly connected the dots. She numbly slipped her left hand into her weak pocket and pulled out a green dart.

This particular one took about ten minutes to kill, resulting in unawareness of impending death. This poison affected the heart, causing it to gradually slow up until it couldn't pull its own weight anymore.

Perfect.

The two men continued their stupid small talk about how they were going to get paid and what exactly they were going to do with the money as Lil planned exactly where she would land her dart.

Swiftly, she pricked both men's hands nearly simultaneously… or as close as she could get.

"Shit," the bulky man cursed as he stared at his pricked hand. "Think there's damn snakes and shit down here?"

The skinnier one nodded, his wavy hair nodding with him. "Probably. Let's hope Linsalata calls our asses in faster."

Lil only pretended to close her eyes and act half-dead; that would be the best way to observe the entire scene without being suspected.

Beyond the door, the conversation between he and his father continued in a rushed and unexpected manner.

"What the hell?" Squalo whispered, his eyes widening in astonishment.

The old man even looked a little bit like the boss. Their broad shoulders were identical, but their facial features weren't quite matching. Although their jaw lines were differing, the entire statures of their bodies were nearly mirrored.

"So, you must be the child that came out of that slut, huh? Thought you looked familiar."

The boss raised his arm to point the muzzle of the gun at this man as his insolence set in. The only reason that he stopped himself from immediately shooting his 'father' was that he wasn't here to kill him straightaway.

He wanted answers.

Xanxus wanted to hear if everything he'd suspected was real and had actually happened.

Despite his age, the man flexed his muscles cockily. "Can't kill me yet, can'ya boy?"

Eh, fuck.

Xanxus stared even harder at this man as his mouth parted into a laugh. Even that about the two of them was similar.

"What the hell is happening?!" Squalo demanded, but he lacked an immediate answer. The two men sat in a staring match for a long moment; a disgustful, yet meaningful moment.

"You really do look like her," the older man commented again, appearing to have studied Xanxus for a little while longer. "You have her eyes." A smug grin appeared on his face. The wrinkly features of his soft face sparked a sudden but expected hate-filled twitch from the irked boss.

Squalo glanced in-between the two relatives as Xanxus's hackles rose higher. "Bastard." The boss snarled quietly. His nose crinkled in repulsion as this man smiled at him with a malicious smirk.

"You," Linsalata glanced toward the silvery-haired man who stared between the two men with wonder and confusion mixed into each other. "You don't know the story… do you?"

Squalo looked at this man with disgust equal to his boss's as he slowly shook his head. "The hell is going on?"

"That woman, I don't remember her name, only that it began with an M. I met her on one of those perfect days; the sun shone beautifully between the occasional cloud on a January evening." The blue eyes that had burned with wicked content suddenly turned almost nostalgic until Xanxus spoke furiously: "Don't spew bullshit."

Squalo only narrowed his eyes distrustfully as he bit his lower lip in concentration. "What about that day?"

Linsalata rubbed his chin with his weathered hand and nodded thoughtfully. "Well, she said that she needed the money, so I said come over to my place. It wasn't any normal prostitution, though."

He quit talking just as Xanxus's face screwed up in a scowl. "Keep fucking talking."

"Who are you to order me around?" Linsalata chuckled arrogantly, placing his hands on his own hips in a carefree manner. "After all, I have something that you two probably want back, right?"

He turned to a well-hidden door as two people came through with a third on the skinny one's back.

"Lil," Squalo breathed in awe. The boss, needless to say, was as taken aback as his subordinate. How the hell had this man, whom he'd refused to address as 'father' in his own mind, gotten ahold of such an elite member of his own squad?

The black-haired girl had a gash in her head that bled faintly, but she didn't seem completely responsive. Liliana lied there, limply… almost like a ragdoll.

Not that Xanxus cared; she, along with Squalo and the rest of his squad were all replaceable. If one of them died, he could find another person who would work harder to earn his respect and hopefully be less fucking annoying.

However, the look on this man's face pissed the boss off to the point where he had to force himself to take his fingers off of the triggers. One wrong slip, one small bout of unmanageable anger… all the answers he'd been looking for could disappear with this man's life.

"Surprised? She was caught off-guard by Luigi's illusion, wasn't she?" Linsalata egged on his own subordinate as the cocky, skinny man nodded profusely. "The bitch wasn't hard to get control of."

The evil Italian man stared down his blood son with malice again. "Soon, she'll suffer the same fate that many others have suffered… you saw them, yes?"

"Them?" Xanxus lowered his gun to stare at his 'father' quizzically. It took a second, but his brain finally connected his prior knowledge of this man's further wrongdoings to this situation.

Squalo growled in understanding. "That's fucking gross; she'll end up in your little stash of dead bodies, won't she?!"

"Well, don't you know what those 'bodies' went through before becoming lifeless? They were once people, you know…" Linsalata shrugged, but only went onto the next subject. "Back to the story; M came over to my place, which is this house, and we proceeded to get into the bed, standard procedure."

Xanxus shivered in a fit of controlled lividness; how dare he talk about his mother, a woman that he never got to actually know, like she was a whore?

"We confirmed the price, which was one hundred dollars for one night. Cheap as hell. Anyway, so within a few minutes, I had a better idea. I told her that if she did it, I'd tack on an extra twenty five."

Squalo tilted his head in interest. "And what might that have been?"

The sick man only smirked with glee and sadistic pleasures. "Oh, it was lots of things; metal pole, tying up, hair pulling, using a chair…"

Xanxus's eyes widened in shock that soon turned into full-blown rage. Dropping his guns so he didn't end up killing this man, he flew into him and began punching. Satisfaction came from every blow that resulted in a painful sound or a small cracking from a bone that he'd hit.

"Xanxus! Let him finish, then you can-" Squalo approached the two, but stopped as the boss threw a sickeningly-hard punch at Linsalata's ribcage. "Shut up," Xanxus snarled behind gritted teeth as he went for another punch.

Who the fuck did this man think he was? Violating his mother like that just because he could?!

Squalo pushed the man off of Linsalata in an attempt to save him from Xanxus's approaching, unfulfilled wrath.

"Fuck!" Xanxus cursed loudly, his head hitting the ground forcefully. Linsalata groaned with pain as he forced himself to stand up and face his son. Panting, the man couldn't resist kicking the boss in the stomach before walking toward his stunned comrades.

"Stupid, kid… your mother was a whore and I treated her like one. Even though I never killed her and she had you, I continued to do it to her, hunting her down, hoping that she'd never forget her whore ways. Isn't that why she went fucking insane? She couldn't take it anymore, could she? The continuous rapes? The result of the first one, though, was you. How you survived inside there after all of them is a mystery in and of itself!"

Xanxus's hands began to get hot with wrath and he felt the damn scars all over his body begin to appear. "Motherfucker better stop," he warned. His voice even shook with the incredible anger that threatened to unleash.

"As soon as she had you, she wanted to fucking get rid of you! You are a piece of me; she never wanted anything to do with you!" Linsalata went on with malice as he inched closer to Lil, who looked up with a distant look in her eyes. "I've never left another one alive since; I do this for a living. Your bitch mother is probably dead by now, boy. She was done living like a whore, so she died like one, too. This one will suffer the same fate."

Linsalata glanced over Lil interestingly and turned his back on Xanxus and Squalo just as the shark pounded on Xanxus. "Shit!"

The uncontrollable rage had taken over as the boss threw Squalo off of his back and picked up his guns. "FUCK YOU!" He screamed as he began rapidly firing randomly at Linsalata.

The shots caused rocks and debris to fall from the rock ceiling and the walls as the blasts caused the entire room to go up in a dust cloud.

Squalo fell back immediately in fear of a stray shot; he'd never seen the boss this angry. Not even in the fight with Decimo. Terrified shrieks came from Linsalata and hopefully his men as the shots kept ringing out and bringing debris down.

"Shit… if this goes on any longer, we'll all be buried underneath this damn house!" Squalo snarled to himself as he desperately made his way around the fallen rocks and shit to the side with the door.

A hot bullet went straight through Squalo's sleeve as he cursed Xanxus's name a thousand times over for nearly taking his entire arm off. "Fucking boss…"

Tiny coughing caught Squalo's attention as Lil came into view. Her hair and wound were full of tiny rocks and dirt and Squalo couldn't help but pull her away from the carnage.

"We have to get the hell out!" Squalo yelled over the shotgun going off continuously. "What about the boss, though…?" Lil shouted as the gunfire ceased. The two comrades watched the dust clear as a gruesome sight was revealed.

Both of the assailants that Lil had had holding her still had been slowly killed by the poison she'd inflicted upon them, but the aftermath revealed that a stray shot could have also been the cause of their demises.

"Boss…" Squalo gawked openly and Lil traced his gaze. As soon as she met his face, she let out a small gasp:

Xanxus stood upright with both guns in-hand, but they slowly fell out of his hands. Instead of the anger that Lil had expected to be in his face, she could only see sorrow. Hatred and sadness. It was almost as if he couldn't believe what that Linsalata-guy had said to him. The boss then stumbled to his knees as his mouth only faintly moved.

That same man who had said those horrible, horrible things was merely a corpse now, holey and bloody, against the far wall. He'd died with that horrendous smirk on his face, as if he'd won.

The tunnel rumbled with shock; enough rocks and stuff had been shot down from it that it could be coming down any second.

"Boss, you dumb bastard, let's fucking go!" Squalo screeched as Lil stood up slowly, wiping the dirt out of her hair before starting toward the unblocked entrance. "Idiot!" Squalo snarled as he heaved the boss to his feet and handed him his guns, which fell onto the ground almost immediately.

"We're all going to die if we stay," Lil only lightly reminded the two, but Squalo only turned to her with irritation. "Fucking shut up, Lil! I fucking know already!"

Lil shook her head in exasperation. "Fine!" She bent down to pick up the pistols as a good-sized rock fell down near the entrance that was open.

"Xanxus!" Squalo raged. "Let's fucking go! Walk yourself or we'll fucking leave you here!"

The boss only slowly solidified himself on his own two feet at Squalo's words. He began forward as he took the guns from Lil with force and raced ahead, literally leaving Lil and Squalo in the dust.

"Bastard!" The shark raced after the boss as Lil struggled to keep up. She couldn't get left behind; if she did, then there was no way in hell that either one of them would come back and get her, not to mention she'd be kicked out of the Varia for being so damn weak. That is, if she wasn't already kicked out for being captured by amateurs who didn't know what the hell they were doing.

They soon reached a very prominent hole in the ceiling due to some wood, where the boss had already climbed out and Lil tag-teamed Squalo to get out together as the three raced through the house and out the door.

None of them even bothered to look back at that hell of a nightmare as they hurried along the streets to where the limousine had been parked earlier that day.

"Back to the mansion, Lord X-?" The driver began, but was only cut off rudely:

"Just. FUCKING. Go." Xanxus's temper still hadn't calmed down as the limo began to drive. It was quite fast, and Lil watched Xanxus grab three whiskeys and down them all within three minutes.

More drinking. Understandable, one needs a drink after hearing all of that bullshit from your own father, but… he'll be dead by 50 if he kept on like this.

Squalo only glanced at Lil with something in his eyes… and that's when she got it; Squalo hadn't ever seen the boss this way, either. He didn't know what to do just as much as she didn't.

The boss began shaking visibly from the alcohol intake and he closed his eyes for a moment, but when he reopened them, Lil could hardly keep in a gasp.

The leader that she'd just recently gotten used to… had drowned in the liquor he chose to submerge into.

If you haven't seen already, I've rated this story T-M (because Fanfiction made M-rated fics not come up by default). This is an attempt to get more views… hopefully it works. If not, I'll put it back as M-rated. It was mainly rated for some scenes and language… not like I'm writing Smut/PWP/Lime/Lemon or some shiz. (Maybe a future lemon/lime… possibly, not set into stone).

This chapter is very important as to what happens for the rest of the story. Get ready for next chapter; I've been waiting for this next one forever. Personally, Lil's piece seemed a little out of place, but it can be worked on. Might need a little revamp soon; I'll probably spot some misspellings later on. I hope this made you say 'damn'. -feels so clever-

Anyhow, how'd ya like it? I'd like to hear about it in the review box ^-^

By the way, merry Christmas/happy holidays.~