Eggs and Fortunes
Summary: Byakuran comes bearing gifts that leave a special sort of Chaos in their wake.
Author's Notes: An Easter-inspired chapter, and with Fon!
[~][~][~]
Anyone with any form of previous interaction with Byakuran could tell you that he was the worst sort of trouble maker: the clever, unpredictable kind.
You could never tell if he was going to do something insanely clever that inspired goodwill in all nearby, or if he was going to do something insanely clever that made all nearby give some serious thought to homicide.
Either way, Byakuran reveled in Chaos, in throwing the metaphorical fox among the hens and sitting back to watch the resulting pandemonium with a smug smile that had more than one person wanting to put their considerable skills in all things nefarious to good use.
Given this understanding of Byakuran, it was no surprise that everyone was wary when the former Mare ring holder showed up to the Easter dinner with a basket of chocolate eggs and began to hand them out while wearing his signature vulpine smile.
Tsuna, the one everyone agreed most likely to survive whatever disaster happened, was voted to open his first.
With a whimper of dread, Tsuna cracked the egg.
With a muffled thwump not unlike the Ten-Year-Bazooka firing, a surprisingly small – well, small compared to the usual amounts of smoke they were used to seeing – plume of purple smoke blocked Tsuna from view.
A collective "Tsuna!" went up from around the table and was answered by the sound of coughing; the smoke cleared, dissolving at the frantic waving of Tsuna's hands. A ripple of relief went along the table at the sight of the physically okay Sky.
On the table, surrounded by pieces of broken chocolate shell, was a container of the same antacids that Tsuna kept in his desk, the ones that he tended to pop like candy when going through the piles and piles of paperwork.
"E-eh?" Tsuna stuttered.
"It's what you wanted most, Tsunayoshi-kun," Byakuran smiled.
"This, this is really clever, Byakuran," the Vongola boss praised.
With their suspicions allayed, the rest of the Vongola gathering began cracking open their own eggs, multiple explosions of smoke going up until the dining room was rather hazy. Exclamations of joy and laughter sounded throughout the room, everyone so caught up in their gifts and in seeing what each other got that no one really noticed the two Arcobaleno not participating.
Seated opposite one another, Skull and Fon only studied their eggs in silence.
Neither was sure that the egg could give them what they wanted most right then.
.
Skull missed home.
Though that was nothing really new for him; the longing for home, for the one who made it home, was constant, an itch in the back of his mind. Sometimes, if he kept busy, it faded and he was able to ignore it for a time.
But other times, it would hit him. In the quiet moments: sitting on the roof of the Arcobaleno house, or in a tree, watching the sky. And in the hectic moments: the middle of a fight with adrenaline, magic, and flames rushing through him, fighting at the side of people who had started out as strangers but became friends, became comrades.
It would hit him and all he could think was that he missed her.
Perhaps it was childish; perhaps others would judge him harshly for it, but in this moment…
Skull just wanted his mother.
.
Fon had met her completely by accident.
He'd been looking for something quick and cheap to eat, hungry after just having finished a job. The restaurant he'd chosen had been average, one of those hole-in-the-wall kind of restaurants, not overly popular where it would be difficult to get something to eat, but it had dedicated customers that just barely kept it afloat.
He'd stepped inside and took a seat at the only other table in the place that had a clear view of the entire layout; he'd taken note of her, of course he had. She was a Westerner in a tiny, out of the way restaurant in the poorer side of the metropolis; she stood out, not only for the fact that she was so obviously foreign, but that she was attractive.
(And despite what other Arcobaleno – Reborn— said, Fon was quite capable of noticing attractive women, and enjoyed doing so. He just had more self-restraint than the Hitman and saw no need in flirting with every attractive woman that crossed his path.)
So, he'd settled at his table, ordered his food, and had set about peacefully eating.
Of course, a group of Triad members would also walk in, looking for a meal. A group of Triad members that recognized him and wanted to make a name for themselves for taking him down.
The idiots never learned.
It was simple from there: they started a fight and he finished it.
He just hadn't meant to throw an attacker at the woman sitting on the other side of the restaurant, calmly slurping at her noodles and pretending the fight wasn't happening. The triad member had landed on the table top and rolled across it, knocking off the teapot and cup. Curiously, the woman had managed to save her bowl of noodles and, in fact, was finishing off the last of them as the Triad member began to shake off his daze.
Fon started forward, moving to finish him off; but, by the time he got to the table, the woman had, nonchalantly as you please, slammed the heavy bowl down on the Triad member's face and, at the very least, broke his nose.
Fon blinked.
The woman stood, tossed more than the required amount of money on the table, and casually walked out of the restaurant, nodding politely to him as she walked by.
Of course, that was when he felt the Sky flames tightly coiled around her body. He'd turned and followed after her, intrigued beyond belief, before he could stop himself.
A small smile tugged at his lips as it occurred to him that he hadn't really stopped following after her since.
Holly, as she'd introduced herself, was a Sky, a powerful one, with only one Guardian. Fon wondered when she'd realize that he was doing his best to make it two.
All the same, at the moment, surrounded by the chaos of the Vongola dinner, Fon really just wanted to see his (possibly, maybe) Sky.
.
Skull and Fon broke their eggs at the same moment.
.
On the heels of the familiar thwump sound, as a veritable mushroom cloud of smoke filled the room, there was the thud of a body slamming into a solid surface, and a feminine yelp just heard over the rattle of dishes.
The smoke cleared. There was a collective blink of confusion.
On the table, curled up on one side, was a woman. She wore a pair of grass stained jeans and a deep red t-shirt; her bare feet had upended a bowl of mashed potatoes and her dark hair, which had been pulled into a messy pony tail, was slowly soaking up the glasses of wine that had spilled on her landing. In her hands, pulled close to her chest, was a bright orange egg.
An emerald eye opened, glancing around, before focusing on Fon.
Then, as if she hadn't just appeared from nowhere and fallen at least three feet to slam into a solid wood table, she asked in a conversational tone: "Why is it whenever we meet, someone ends up on a table?"
The air stilled, disbelief filling the room.
Had she just-? Did she mean -?
"Mum!" a familiar voice choked, horrified and scandalized in equal measures.
There was a moment of incomprehension as the woman – Skull's mother!? – turned to look at the purple haired stuntman, tilting her head in question. Then, the metaphorical light bulb flickered on and the woman's face quickly turned the same shade of her shirt.
"Skull, no! Not like that! That's not how I meant it!" she insisted, hands waving about in denial, one still clutching the bright orange egg. "Fon, help me out!" she half-pleaded, half-ordered.
Fon covered his mouth with one sleeved hand, hiding the wicked smirk. "But Holly, you have thrown me down onto a table before," he replied innocently.
The woman, Holly, spluttered, giving him a look of betrayal. She turned back to Skull, maintaining her assurances that "despite what that two-faced, braided liar said, it really wasn't what it sounded like."
At the head of the table, as everyone got over their shock and began launching questions at the woman, Tsuna took one look at Byakuran's smugly smiling face, and promptly opened his bottle of antacids and downed three.
It was going to be a long day.
.
Much later, after her impromptu introduction to the highest levels of the Mafia, Holly sat at the window of the first empty sitting room she'd found, looking at the stars.
Fon sat, half wrapped around her with his chin propped on her shoulder. Skull was sprawled out on the rest of the window seat, head in his mother's lap. They sat in content silence, just happy to be in each other's company after the initial awkwardness and slight hostility upon realizing the positions of the other in Holly's life.
After a time, Skull opened eyes he hadn't known he'd shut.
"What fortune did you get on your egg, Mum?" he asked softly, unwilling to disturb the peace that had settled around them.
Holly huffed, the sound half amusement and half annoyance, and summoned the bright orange – the color of Sky flames – egg from where she'd left it on the table, handing it to her son.
Skull tilted the egg in the moonlight.
When he found the fortune, he couldn't help but snort in laughter.
In his Aunt Luna's familiar whimsical handwriting, the words 'Good journey, safe fall' scrawled across the shell.
[~][~][~]
Hoping all had an enjoyable and safe holiday!
I'm still alive and still working on chapters/stories. Hope to have another new one for you soon~
Oh! Thank you so much to everyone for the birthday wishes after last chapter. You're all so wonderful and nice and just lakjsdfas. Yep.
-D.