"So, I'm guessing Bianchi has finally made her entrance then, huh?" Shamal said disinterestedly as Shirou and Natsumi brought Gokudera into the nurses' office. "Just drop him in one of the beds and leave him there."

"You're actually going to help with one, right?" Shirou said, giving the man a hard look as he returned to his dirty magazine.

Shirou's duties as fake janitor and fake Disciplinary Committee VP had expanded to include fake nurse since the man had shown up, due to the fact that Shamal wouldn't treat any of the guys that came in.

"No need. There isn't anything actually wrong with him. He just goes into shock like this whenever he sees his sister. His body instinctively seized up to get ready to expel all poisons. Let him rest for awhile and he'll be back on his feet." Shamal said with a shrug.

"Why would he react like that around his own sister?" Natsumi asked, confused.

"That little Ojou-chan, is because Bianchi isn't your ordinary person. Every single thing that Bianchi touches turns poisonous." Shamal explained. "You can think of it as being like the Curse of Midas, only instead of gold, it's sickness."

"Hiieee!?"

"Bianchi-chan first started to come into her powers when she was only ten years old, not even realizing it herself at the time. A five-year-old Hayato was having a piano recital, and Bianchi, being the loving big sister that she was, decided to bake him some cookies." Shamal snorted. "Kid got a serious case of food poisoning and the recital was a disaster, but for some reason, all those idiots listening to it thought that it was 'supposed' to sound like that, and that it was deep and artistic. So their father decided to force Hayato to eat his sister's cookies before every recital. Now the boy stops just short of puking whenever he sees his sister's face."

"That's…" Natsumi said, stammering a bit at the thought.

"You seem to know a lot about it." Shirou said, digging for info.

"I had been hired by the family several times in the past. I was actually there up until Reborn took on Bianchi as an apprentice." Shamal said. "Beyond that I can't tell you. Doctor patient confidentiality and all that."

"You just did tell us something, that someone there was your patient. And since it was someone we might ask about, it must be either Gokudera or Bianchi, and given your policy about treating men…" Shirou said.

"Smart brat. I see why Reborn likes you so much." Shamal huffed.

"So, Bianchi's parents hired you to help cure their daughter of her poison touch? Considering I can still smell her from a mile away, I'm guessing it didn't work out." Shirou said.

"Smelled huh? Storm user?" Shamal asked. "The Storm Flames are related to the Muladhara Chakra, located in the asshole. If the Flames are pure enough, they have been known to give a supernaturally enhanced sense of smell."

"Smart old man. I see why Reborn likes you so much." Shirou replied, not seeming happy about it.

Shamal snorted. "Well, doctor patient confidentiality, that's all you're getting out of me. Ask Reborn if you are really interested, now be good students and just go to class." Shamal said.

"You really can't tell us any more than that?" Natsumi asked, still confused over everything she had seen that day.

Shamal paused for a moment, before adding something else. "Tell me Emiya-kun, if you really are so smart, how do you think that Bianchi's poison works?"

"...They are a mixture of Storm and Cloud Flames. The Storm Flames provide the corrosive effect while the Cloud Flames propagate the effect and spread it to everything she touches." Shirou said, sounding like more than just a random guess.

"Right on the money." Shamal said. "I don't know what happened when you met her, but I can take a good guess. Bianchi isn't a bad girl. The Cloud Flames are connected to the Sahasrara, the highest spiritual center, so users have a tendency to be a little disconnected from reality and often fall back on easy to understand rules in order to function. Take that Hibari kid and his belief that everyone is either a Carnivore and a Herbivore as an example. Bianchi never wanted to hurt Hayato. She just couldn't understand that her cooking was causing him pain. In Bianchi's mind, so long as it is a gesture of love, it has to be good."

"A gesture of love." Natsumi mumbled, feeling sort of sad for the woman, despite everything.

"Now that is seriously all I'm telling you. So get to class." Shamal said, before kicking them out of the room. They went willingly.

He had already given them enough to think about.

"Boss, Mr. Reborn, we're here." Romario called back to Dino and Reborn as the car pulled up to the Barbagallo Famiglia's mansion.

They were a low key group, with only baseline knowledge about the greater world, but with a solid foundation, over five hundred members and a good finances. All in all, a completely insignificant group within the Vongola Alliance, and one that Reborn would have normally just ignored all together, save for that it was his old friend Doctor Shamal who had called him in, and because the case sounded interesting.

"Oy, Reborn. Thanks for coming." Shamal said as he approached the car, dressed in a full hazard suit. "I'm afraid the situation here has gotten a bit out of hand."

"I can see." Reborn said as he looked over the multitude of medical tents that had been set up. Even from this distance, he could still feel the flames of the little girl within the mansion, radiating outwards, infecting everything that got too close.

"Up until recently, I'd been able to control it somewhat with my Trident Mosquitoes, but now even my mosquitoes drop dead before they can touch her. The poison is getting stronger by the hour." Shamal explained.

"Interesting. I think I'll have a look inside." Reborn said with a smile.

"We've got a hazard suit already waiting for you." Shamal said, gesturing towards one of the tents.

"Not needed. I'd rather not have to have my first face to face meeting with the girl be through one of those suits." Reborn said with a chuckle. "Besides, I really don't need one."

"...Forgive me, I forgot just want kind of monster I was dealing with." Shamal said with a sigh.

"Reborn, should I get one of those suits?" Dino asked.

Reborn looked up at the eighteen-year-old boy with a smile. He had come a long way in the last nine years, volunteering to go in with Reborn like that. But no. "You are useless without your men around, and I'd rather not drag Romario into this." Reborn replied.

"Reborn, don't go spreading that rumor around again. I can take care of myself without the boys around." Dino said, with a blush of embarrassment.

He really couldn't. Without the presence of one of his men, his Flames of Restoration were too chaotic, like their Sun Flame component, and threw off his sense of inner balance. He couldn't even ignite his ring without one of his bonds close by to calm his inner flame.

"Reborn." The Boss of the Barbagallo Famiglia… um… shit… Reborn forgot his name… ShittyDad™, came up to them, in a pin striped suit and a thick mustache. Reborn had never liked people with overly groomed mustaches, as they were inferior to his sideburns in every possible way. "I apologize for troubling someone as important as you in this family affair of mine."

"No problem. It was Shamal who called me here anyways, and I am just curious." Reborn said in his usual cheerful tones.

"Well, I apologize all the same, and if things do not go well, I will understand if you take… drastic actions." ShittyDad™ said dramatically.

"...Are you suggesting I kill your daughter?" Reborn asked as five mosquitoes buzzed around the man's head, and Shamal seemed to struggle with the urge to kill him.

"I'm not suggesting any such thing. I am merely stating that I will not hold Reborn accountable no matter what happens in there." ShittyDad™ said.

"What the hell is wrong with you!?" Dino shouted, outraged. "That is your daughter in there, isn't it!?"

ShittyDad™ narrowed his eyes at Dino. "Is the Cavallone Famiglia in such a good position as to be picking fights?"

Dino's face broke at the man's words, and he looked down. "Forgive me. I let myself get carried away." Dino said, a look on his face like someone was pulling out his teeth and his fist clenched hard.

Despite Dino's best efforts, his father had left him with a dump, a Famiglia that was on the verge of collapsing, more enemies than he could count, and a slew of debts to pay off. With Reborn's help, Dino had managed to claw his way all the way up from the brink of destruction to being a functional Famiglia, but he still lacked the influence to go against ShittyDad™.

Reborn liked that look in Dino's eyes. The promise that one day, he would have this bastard's neck underneath his boot.

"We're dealing with pointless hypotheticals here." Reborn chuckled, snapping his student out of his funk. "After all, I don't make a habit of failing."

"Reborn." Dino said with a hopeful smile.

"Well, regardless. I wish you the best, Reborn." ShittyDad™ said before walking off.

"Fuck that man. Fuck him into the grave." Dino growled as he watched ShittyDad™ go.

"Now you see the root cause of all this." Shamal said with a sigh. "Usually I'd say this is a doctor patient confidentiality thing, but fuck it. This is a mess and that girl is suffering."

"What can you tell us?" Reborn asked with a raised eyebrow.

"It all started about two months ago, after Bianchi's mother found a hidden stash of love letters between her husband and his old mistress who died four years ago." Shamal said.

"She's upset about the mistress?" Reborn asked.

"Hardly. She knew about the mistress and even spent the last seven years raising the woman's bastard as if he was her own son. No, the thing that caused shit to hit the fan was that her husband had proposed to the woman, promising to marry her." Shamal said.

"He was planning to divorce her?" Dino said, surprised.

"You are letting your ignorance show again, Pipsqueak Dino." Reborn said as he lowered his head, his hat shielding his eyes. "There is no such thing as divorce in the Mafia World, marriage is until death. So when he promised to marry the woman, what he was really saying was that he would make his current wife disappear."

Dino's jaw dropped and he was simply speechless.

"Not sure where the mother is now. She and hers have been hard to find since she tried to kill the man. He of course has tried to shoot her back." Shamal said. "Luckily, the bastard is long gone, so he's safe, but everything that has happened wasn't good for Bianchi. As a Cloud Flame user, and a powerful one at that, she needs something to anchor her in reality in order to keep her Yin and Yang balanced. For her, it was the delusion that she was a part of a loving family. As that delusion came tumbling down, her poison has become more and more out of control. Her now ex-boyfriend, Romeo, I think, calling her a poisonous frog and dumping her was the stick that broke the camel's back. Her Cloud Flames went out of control, the rate that her poison spread went nuts with it, turning her poisonous touch into a poisonous aura. The little bastard didn't survive. The poison was so strong it burned the skin off his pretty boy face."

"Well, I shouldn't wait any longer." Reborn said before walking towards the house on his short legs, everyone watching him.

Everything was dead.

Every bug and potted plant had died to the poisonous flames that spread throughout the building, getting thicker and thicker as Reborn moved towards the source, until even the paint on the walls started to crumble away and the wood turned rutton. He even passed a dead body, someone whose hazard suit wasn't up to the task, where the suit itself started to break down.

No normal man would have been able to walk into that house without protective equipment, but by cycling their flame energy within the body, one could resist the Flame based poison. Though after a certain point, even Shamal would have started to become ill due to the high concentration of the flames.

However, Reborn's power was far beyond any normal Flame User, and as such, he had no trouble at all, not even when he came to the room where it was all coming from. Using Leon to twist the door knob and open the door, Reborn walked in.

The room was an absolute mess, everything was in a state of rot as the mixture of Cloud and Storm Flames ate away at it. But Reborn looked past that at the girl sitting on her bed, her legs pulled in close as she just sat there, a mixture of bright violet and soft red light blanketing her, almost matching the color of her hair.

There was an IV in her arm, but the bag feeding it had long since fell to pieces, its contents splattered across the floor before being turned into a purple goo like substance by the girl's aura. She was dressed in pajamas, though it was not only covered in holes, but also in the stomach acid, from when the girl's own poison had made her vomit up the contents of her empty stomach. Her skin was too pale to be healthy and she looked like she had long since ran out of tears to cry.

How long had she been like this? How had she not yet ran out of Flames, bleeding herself dry in her despair?

"Who are you?" She asked, her throat horse, either from crying or from being burned by the stomach acid.

Reborn looked at the poor thing and smiled. "Ciaossu. My name is Reborn, and I'm here for you."

The snot bubble coming from Reborn's nose popped as he woke up from his nap, looking up at the face of Bianchi as she had been giving him a lap pillow as he slept.

"Sorry, did I wake you?" Bianchi asked, pulling back a hand that had been stroking his cheek.

"No. I'm just finished with my nap." Reborn said. He glanced at the clock. 2:30. It will still be a while before Natsumi and Shirou get back home. "I should probably give you a summary of what's been going on since I got here."

"Of course, my love." Bianchi said softly.

Yes. Love.

"Well, it's a good thing you already like to talk about love." Reborn said with a smile as he looked up at her. "How familiar are you with the 'Magical Girl' genre?"

Shorter chapter than usual, but it felt like a natural stopping point for me, as it was the recurring joke line.

Funny how Bianchi's constant talk about love actually makes her fit in rather well with the who 'Magical Girl' cover.

So is she 'Pretty Cure Poison'?

I know that Canon only had her as a straight Storm User, but I have given my reasons for why if felt that Cloud is a good fit for her abilities.

Bianchi's poison touch turning into a poison aura when she becomes emotionally distressed is canon, happening during the 'wedding' episode.

Being a magical poison, if you don't have Magic Resistance and you are exposed to it, you are FUCKED. But with magic resist you only get bad food poisoning.