My Storm, My Cloud, My Sun, My Sky
Summary: Reborn met Fon, they became Arcobaleno and went separate ways, not seeing each other for years. Kyoya was born, Fon had to leave to protect his family and they didn't see each other for years. Tsuna met Reborn, the adventure starts. Hibari met Reborn, craziness starts. Dino met Kyoya, Fon returns and secrets are revealed. Better than it sounds, I promise! D18, RF, LalCol possible others.
Fon's grandfather had been an incompetent idiot.
Now, Fon has always been a polite person. He was surprisingly calm for someone with such strong, pure Storm Flames. He liked to take life one step at a time, observe and then, no pun intended, take the world by storm when he unleashes the parts of his personality he had learned to contain to a battlefield.
As such, he usually had very little problem with people in general. In fact, people tended to like being around him. He's heard more than once that he has a calming effect - or was intimidating enough, in some situations - that usually helps dissolve tensions or problems that might occur in the line of business he's decided to follow. (He says 'decided' but means 'been thrust into' but we'll get to that in a moment or two.) He can make friends easily enough. He's handsome and strong, which attracts attention. He's smart, so he can entertain even snobbish 'elites' if it ever comes to it. (And not lose his head - literally - when people start perceiving him as a threat; that's a particularly good skill to have in his line of work.)
So, really, Fon is usually not the type of person to drop insults. He's often polite to the point of unnerving his boss or just about anyone else who lives as bloody a life as he does. Even his worst enemies - the ones that he's not allowed to kill, rare as they might be - know him as almost painfully polite and can't say a single bad word about his manners, in any way.
It should really say something, then, if Fon calls his own grandfather an incompetent, usless, no-good idiot.
The man deserves it, of course. All of the epithets Fon gave him are spot on, though one should add that he's arrogant, uninformed, rash, has no skills in politics or any fighting prowess to speak of and is, at his heart of hearts, a coward. Fon knew this since the moment his grandfather discovered Fon had a talent for fighting, since the moment he had seen the intense blood red Flames dancing over his fists for the first time, and had without a second thought sent five year old Fon to China, using their family's connections to get him an apprenticeship with a former, rogue Shaolin monk who had broken some sacred brotherhood law or another. Probably had killed someone. Fon didn't remember his first master all that well. The only thing he remembers well is that the man had tried to kill him when he was eight and already better than him at all the martial art forms he could teach him, from Kung Fu to Tai Chi to Gyoza Kempo to various styles using various traditional Shaolin weapons.
One might wonder, why a grandfather would send his practically toddler grandson to such a deadly, dangerous man at such a young age, talent or no talent. Well, that would be because, about twenty years before Fon and his younger sister were born, when their grandfather had just assumed the position of Head of the Hibari Clan, the clan was all but wiped out because of a mistake he'd made.
The Hibari Clan was an ancient one. They'd had several different names, had either hidden themselves or been in plain sight of the world, but they had always been the 'deciding factor' of how the fate of the world would turn. They'd been massive, their members usually living on practically all continents. In fact, two of their members used to live on Antarctica half of the year with a group of researchers until the massacre happened that practically wiped them out. The Hibari had held the world in their hands for centuries, had kept the powers in balance so there would never be an all out war that could have devastating effects on humanity. They couldn't always be successful. WWI and WWII happened despite their best efforts in various countries to stop it. The Cold War and all of America's other conquests happened in more recent years as well. Terrorists still ravaged the world every now and then.
About twenty years before Fon was born, his grandfather had made a big blunder, one that cost them everything. There used to be nearly two thousand Hibari all over the world, but then his grandfather had called a summit regarding some suspicious movements in Italy - the usual struggles for power between mafia famiglias, something that usually didn't really concern an independent, neutral party like their clan unless it happened on their territory - only for there to be an ambush. As it turned out, later, after only a rare few managed to escape with their lives, his grandfather had gotten into a drinking competition with a man he was doing business with some weeks back and had revealed that the summit would happen one of these days. The man had no means to take on the Hibari himself, but there were other enemies, plenty of them, that would pay handsomely for such information.
How he survived to see his grandchildren be born is beyond Fon's understanding.
His sons were no better. He sired three and none of them had been suitable as heirs. Fon met only two of them and one was his father. He could definitely see the family resemblance between the morons and his grandfather.
Said grandfather died when he was about twenty years old. The news reached him several months after the fact and he had missed his father taking on the duties of Clan Head as well, because he had been deep in the mountains with his fifth teacher. She, at least, was pleasant company. And an overall good person. She had been the one to introduce him into the Triads when he'd expressed his wish to join. He had had little choice in the matter. The clan had lost too much power; they could barely hide themselves anymore, let alone protect what little territory they still held. Within two years, he'd climbed the ranks of the Triads and had amassed enough of an influence to at least protect their ancestral home, Namimori. She had been very proud of him and had stayed with him until she died of breast cancer she'd never told him about, but he'd suspected.
He'd made his way home to check on things, growing a bit suspicious when he'd met the current Cavallone Don upon arrival, acting like drinking buddies with his father. The man was genuine in his friendliness, but as a high ranking member of the Triads, Fon now had access to all kinds of information, so he knew that the Cavallone were in deep debts. Cavallone and Hibari are old allies, though they rarely arrange meetings like these. It would make sense for Cavallone Nono to approach the Hibari for help. Hibari, despite all that they had lost in members and influence, were probably still the (secretly) richest family in the world. They had millennia of accumulated treasures and knowledge to fall back on should they ever need it.
Cavallone had once experienced one of those aspects of what makes the Hibari so successful. Cavallone experienced the other as well, under Fon's father's 'reign'.
Fon stayed out of it, instead spending his stay with his sister, maybe one of their cousins here and there. His sister had gotten married in the years he'd not been able to climb down from China's rocky mountains or take time away from Triads' many hit jobs. Fon didn't think much of his brother in law. The man was a civilian, but fairly skilled in his job as one of Interpol's inspectors, though that usually meant he was almost as absent from home as Fon was. His little sister didn't seem to mind all that much. In fact, she seemed glad for it. Her husband wanted a child but she had learned that fate had been cruel as to make her infertile. If her husband wasn't around as much, he can't discover that. Fon had wondered why she stayed with a man who might as well view her as little more than a broodmare, but he knew it was not his place to dissect their marriage, not even as a concerned older brother looking out for his sister. Not when he had been so absent from her life, even if it had started out as not by his own choice.
Not all that long after that visit - maybe a year and a half later, when Fon finally settled in the outskirts of Hong Kong instead of some mountain cottage miles away from any form of civilization - a strange invitation appeared in his mailbox. It had nothing to do with the Triads. It was not a death threat. It was not a job.
It was an invitation to convene as one of the world's 'strongest seven', a month from that day, relatively close by. (As in, he didn't have to travel to another continent, as he guessed some of those other 'strongest seven' might have to.) Several hours by train would get him to the meeting point, from where they were supposedly going to go by foot to the real location of this 'training' to make them even 'stronger'. Fon was skeptical, but intrigued. He had decided to go, if for no other reason than to see if this could in some way help his clan. He was not all that fond of his family members, but he loved his sister and he didn't want her, if not anyone else, to lose the protection their name used to bring. She was a strong woman, one of the strongest Mists he had ever seen, and she could take care of herself with ease, but she had decided she didn't want to get involved with the underworld, so Fon had to make sure the underworld stayed away from her. He wanted to give her a normal life and was willing to sacrifice his own for this goal.
(When he became an Arcobaleno, he almost laughed at the bitter irony of how his 'wish' had come true. Five years later, he raged at the injustice and the shame of his own failure to make his 'wish' stay true.)
Meeting the other 'strongest seven' was an experience in and by itself. They were all so different from each other and they were expected to live together for several weeks, maybe even months? Fon could already detect some tensions running high the moment he had stepped into the room. Though that might be the fact that the tall Italian hitman had just shot a gun at him and he had managed to catch the bullet. That always freaks people out, even if just a little bit. Reborn, as the man introduced himself, at least seemed impressed.
Fon somehow ended up being closest to Reborn and Luche, though he was okay with Skull and Lal Mirch as well. Luche, being a pregnant woman, activated all of his learned 'Hibari instincts' so to say, making him all but turn into a mother hen. The Sky greatly appreciated his assistance, though she seemed a bit confused why an unmarried, childrenless man would know so much about how to take care of an expecting mother.
Fon couldn't very well tell her that, one day, decades ago, Vongola Primo's Cloud Guardian married into his clan with a rather telling ... feature under his coat, courtesy of Don Cavallone Primo and a (well-kept secret) consequence of an experiment gone wrong in what will become the Bovino famiglia's research labs that mutated several of his gene structures and that he, when he took a wife, passed that down to his children and they their children and so on until it became a normal feature in Hibari males, as long as they had strong enough Flames to maintain the 'delicate condition' for longer periods of time. Instead, he told a half-truth that it was a family tradition that everyone, no matter their gender or age, knows how to help a pregnant person. Luche could tell he wasn't entirely truthful but not even her Sky super intuition could possibly guess as to what could be wrong with his reply, so she let it go and instead embraced his kindness and help.
Fon honestly thought he'd never have to worry about that aspect of being a Hibari in his life. He had no real desire to find himself a partner. In fact, he had been almost sure that he was asexual, since he had never really had any need to satisfy the more carnal desires of the body. Sex had held little to no interest to him and he had never wished for more intimate company. Then again, he had never really had true friends before but he found that his new companions, these 'strongest seven' - except Verde; not even he liked Verde - might just be those true friends he had never bothered to make. They accepted him for who - though they actually knew next to nothing about that - and what he was. Hell, they understood him for who and what he was, because they were all pretty much in the same situation as him.
It felt ... nice, to be around people like himself for a change. The Triads ... were not so friendly towards those with enough skill and reputation, because it is strength that is followed, reputation that earns loyalty. Fon did not like being famous for being capable of snapping a man's head in three hundred different ways or being able to make one die of internal bleeding simply by pinching one of seventy different pressure points on the body. The others were, of course, impressed by that, but then Reborn would comment on how he'd once managed to take down fifty men using only ten normal bullets and nothing else, Viper would share the story of how they'd managed to make an entire famiglia believe they and their HQ were on fire, revealing all the secret spots where they had hid their money, weapons and information which they believed they had saved from the 'fire', only for the illusionist to walk in and clean house. Verde had once commented that he had made a single strand of human hair become three times harder than a diamond and had used that to pierce through a safe that had been hiding some of his stolen experiments and then set an army of robots to destroy the idiots who'd stolen from him. Skull mostly had stories about how many different ways he'd died and why Death seems to hate him. Lal and Colonello had war stories of all kinds.
In short, they were all monsters in their own right and Fon realized that they might actually belong together. Luche stuck out a bit, since she was innocent of such a lifestyle as their's, but she was a mafia boss in her own right. She had her own full Guardian set, though, so they never harmonized with her. Fon suspected that there were actually individual bonds being built between his new friends.
He knew he felt a bond between Reborn and himself, which actually made him uncharacteristically embarrassed.
He'd, of course, noticed that the world's greatest hitman treated him differently than the others, that he paid him more attention, that he spoke to him with an ... intimacy not even Luche got to experience and the woman had declared herself Reborn's little sister and he had actually let her. It took him embarrassingly long to figure out why that was and he had felt like an idiot afterwards.
He had been blindsided, because he knew Reborn's reputation - everyone did - but the hitman hadn't been making any obvious moves. He had been subtle, going slow and gentle, as though trying not to scare him away. Which was ridiculous, because Fon was one of the rare few people on this Earth that would dare stand up to the Italian without flinching, put him into his place if he must, glare him down from trying to shoot Colonello or Skull and he knew he could get away with it even if Reborn were to go all out on him. Reborn and he were almost evenly matched where skill was concerned, though the Italian was maybe the tiniest bit stronger and had weight and height advantage. Not that Fon wasn't used to throwing sumo wrestlers with one hand, but Reborn was hardly slow and relied only on one technique. And Reborn could easily match his speed if he uses his Sun Flames. They'd tested it.
Anyway, the point was, there's really very little Reborn could do to scare Fon away and yet he was being cautious. Fon didn't know what to think, almost dared to hope ... Because while he may be good at hiding it, his heart wasn't exactly still when Reborn would do something thoughtful, would linger in touch just a moment longer than necessary ...
Then that night happened and he knew he was in trouble.
Fon had never been one to indulge in drink. In fact, he might have been drunk only two times in his whole life and the second time was with his new friends. The first time had been when he had been seventeen. His fifth master had wanted to treat him for joining the Triads as he'd wanted and he had never been able to deny the woman who had been more of a mother to him than his own ever could have. She'd made sure he made it home safe afterwards, of course, and kept vigil the entire night, helped him with his hangover in the morning and advised him to never drink more than two cups again because he was an atrocious lightweight. Seeing as he didn't really like the consequences, nor did he enjoy the taste all that much, he had agreed, but that night had been one of celebration and he'd long since learned to burn through anything and everything that wasn't useful to his body with Storm Flames so he had thought he'd be okay.
He should have known that if Viper and Verde were the ones who wanted to drink with him, it could only spell bad news for him.
Still, he miraculously woke up with intact memories of the night before. It had been early in the morning when he'd stirred, only to feel a very telltale ache in his backside and with an arm thrown around him, holding him close. He'd nearly screamed when he saw Reborn's face mere inches from his own - he was hungover; his reactions at that time can't be held against him - but had instead gathered himself as best as he could, wiggled out of the sleeping hitman's hold - which was harder than he'd expected, because Reborn really tried to hold on to him, even in sleep, and that would have been ... adorable, dare he say, if he wasn't a bit panicky about what had happened and what consequences it could have - got dressed and silently made his way to his room.
He had not expected to find an emergency email from his sister saying that there was trouble going on back home. She wouldn't use this particular email address if it wasn't serious, especially since she knew he'd be home in a few days. He'd been a bit conflicted about leaving right away, but 'family comes first' is a typical motto for the Hibari Clan. So he'd roused Luche until she was lucid enough that she'd remember what he was telling her, packed his things, took his new partner Lichi and sped down the mountain, bought the first plane ticket to Japan, Namimori just in time to fight off a yakuza that had dared attack them for control over Namimori. It took them all of three weeks to finally get the last of them to either flee Namimori or ... disappear and by then, Fon had been pretty scared to test for ... it.
His sister, when she heard what had happened, had insisted that he must because he can't go back out in the world with their clan's secret, as well as his life, possibly at stake. She was there with him as they waited to see the result of the test and she was there to bring him back to consciousness when he promptly fainted at seeing the results. It was rather embarrassing, really, how he reacted, but he felt that he had every right to it.
There was a reason Hibari men usually waited for the one they felt they will marry before they bothered with physical intimacy!
"What will you do?"
That was the ten million yen question, wasn't it? "I don't know."
" ... Will you ... Will you tell him?" His sister had asked carefully, her hand holding his as they both stared down at the test.
" ... No."
"Why?"
Because Reborn probably wouldn't want to deal with something like this. He didn't seem the type to want this in his life. He was a player, a heart-breaker, a person who had a new lover every day if he so wished. Fon was ... Fon was nothing special to him. It was a one night stand that will probably never even be talked about again.
"Well, whatever your decision," his darling sister had said with determination and love. "I will support you through it, Fon-nii."
Fon couldn't help but feel he was being cruel. Here he was, able to do something she couldn't when it should have been her to have something like this. She wanted it. Fon would have never actually wanted it. He had half a thought to end it, but while he may be a killer, a paid assassin, he was not heartless. That, more than anything, would probably kill his sister. And even if not for such a reason, Fon couldn't bring himself to do it.
"When was your deadbeat husband last home?"
"Around ... three months ago? Why?"
" ... I need to go back to the meeting place in roughly four months. Will you help me until then?"
"Of course I will, Fon-nii!"