"This one hears and heeds, sir. Massimo shall remain secured and under guard, with the assistance of Mukuro and his subordinates while thou and thy forces scour this threat from the earth." I paused, "This one begs assurance: Salt has not glutted Iruka on Mist Fish in the days of this one's absence, has he? This one fears for Bianchi's actions, should she follow his example."

"Haha, no problem!" Sir laughed through the phone, "I gotcha! I'll make sure that Iruka sticks to a strict diet of healthy seafood and absolutely no Misty stuff! Stay put and stay safe, Basil-boy!"

"Yes sir. Swift success to thee." I put down the receiver and glared at my new colleagues, "You have shown yourselves capable enough to misdirect the best intelligence organization between the Atlantic and the Urals. However, comprehend ye the magnitude of this task which ye have undertaken?"

"Duh." Ken said through a mouthful of cookies, "Make everyone mad at each other, start world war three, then rebuild on the ashes after the bad guys kill each other. 'snot gonna be worse than what we've gone through already—stop being such a—whatchacallit—pendant—back me up here, Four-Eyes!"

"It will not be worse than what we have already endured." Chikusa agreed, sipping his coffee (heavily milk-diluted), "And this time, our suffering shall have a purpose."

…that sounded suspiciously like repurposed Jashinist ideology, moving on.

Ken caught the biscuit I lobbed at him, chewing as I listed, "Flour from grain out of the United States, raisins from Turkey, butter from Lombardia, sugar from the Caribbean, salt from the Mediterranean, baking powder from Germany, water from a water plant to our south, all brought together by a chef hailing from France. Without peace, without order, how can that which thou savor come to be? What other food and drink shall be lost to blood and fire? Shelter and safety and simple joys of countless little souls, who even now go about their quiet lives, ignorant of the calamities to come, shall they be turned to ashes and dust? To not be brought back until even their memory remains not among the living?"

"Decadence." Mukuro judged from up high, "All the better to be done away with."

Hypocrite. I mentally ribbed.

I distinctly felt a sense of sulking in my skull.

"And thou wouldst thy chocolate also lose." I pointed out, "Wouldst thou the multitudes deprive of even such small luxuries?"

"Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether'." Mukuro yawned, "Is chocolate so great a sacrifice in comparison?"

"It is a paltry thing to demand when it is not one from whom it is demanded." I agreed, "When with might one might yet seize the stuffs to sate their hungers. Yet who would look to the multitudes? Thou hast styled thyself judgement, executioner and avenger both, come bringing the sword, and yet the guilty will escape punishment, and the innocent will bear the brunt of your ire."

"What do you suggest then?" Mukuro sneered, "for us to turn the other cheek, and be glad in our golden collars? This world is broken, deserving of destruction. It allowed us to be betrayed by our own families, stood by as every line and law it purports to hold was transgressed, permitted helpless children to be forced into the shape of weapons. Even now after our so-called rescue, we are simply tools by another name! You speak of unfairness. You judge us unrighteous. What would youhave usdo? We have been taught by the underworld from which you hail, dearest Basil, that might alone makes right, and that only strength can shield us, never the goodness of men. "

"And so ye all would become those who tormented ye." I dipped my head in a show of submission, softened my tone and cut from it judgement, "And make victims in turn, using the hurt ye have borne as justification. The powerless suffer as always, and the powerful remain little troubled. How is this not the behavior of a tyrant, painting grand visions in blood, warring in the name of the wronged, and yet wronging them further?"

I let them mull everything over, and in the meantime, drew another bulging folder towards me.

Its contents detailed a deceptively minor player in global affairs, and Mukuro's plans for it, and as I turned the pages with surprisingly loud rustling in the heavy silence, my training automatically reinterpreted the information contained therein. Despite the breadth of his gathered intelligence, he had missed the signs of a brewing proxy war. I had not.

"Spark violence with a bombing here." I circled the location with a tawdry purple gel pen, "Wait. After the casualties have risen over ten thousand, and war crimes, preferable committed upon civilians, have acquired international infamy, then reveal of the shadow hands behind conflict war, which will lead to global outrage. Ensure the discovery of a proliferation of mafia-smuggled firearms, and then use the ensuing crackdown upon the cosa nostra to consolidate power, both here and in the United States. Stir the pots of the external actors, until they too erupt into open war." I made a few rough estimates, "That would give for our exertions quintupled dividends—of course, nuclear winter would always be the most efficient method of mass destruction."

"Impressive." Chikusa said, without enthusiasm.

"I want sugoli." Ken complained to me.

I inclined my head, then left for the kitchens.

The next day, I made tris di granite before breakfast, a touch of Rain to the serving bowls keeping their contents in their frozen, slushy state. The newfound smoothness of my power was addictive—if nothing else, Mukuro would need to be thanked for that.

I set the treat down, "This one apologizes for this one's lack of proper conduct." I stated, "Ye wert wronged, and deserving of restitution."

"You did have a point however." Chikusa pushed a selection of colored inks and a dip pen towards me, "Perhaps you can suggest more moderate methods?"

Something tickled my mind as I answered, "Certainly."

"Power grows from power." Mukuro spoke up suddenly from his couch.

"Then, ye willing," I took up the pen with a self-indulgent flourish, "This one shall choose some seeds to sow."

"Belphegor of the Varia, Mukuro sir." Cicero announced in a monotone, the lesser Storm keeping a wary distance away from the greater, some instincts too strong to be suppressed simply by Mist carried through a Harmony.

I stood, uncaring of how my face lit up, "Bel!"

"Page!" He cried out in answer, running forward to meet me in a crushing hug, fierce and warm and strong, "The Prince has come to aid you in all iniquity! What dares trouble thee—what seeks annihilation?"

My hand spasmed, "Nothing much, best beloved, simply work with neither turmoil nor trouble, only toil."

"Liar!" He declared, drawing back to poke me with a knife, "The Page is no Wednesday's child, yet he is full of woe! Never has the Prince seen him so—not even after the Prince's betrayal!"

"Wait—betrayal?" Ken interrupted, "When did you betray him? I thought that—"

Bel slumped comically, flinging himself into an armchair with sulking petulance, "The Prince tricked the Page for the King, because the Prince thought that the Page should be with him, and tried to hide the King's schemes from the Page, but the Page fought the traitor and won, and showed the Prince the error of his ways."

The last line was delivered with a pout, given that Bel, like all genii, detested being wrong. On the other hand, it had been me who had bested him, and so it had not been an insufferable experience.

The traitor: Ottabio, not Bel.

Misdirection.

My Prince sprung up once more, unadulterated joy illuminating his features, "But ours is not so weak a bond, as to be broken with mere calamity! Peace was made, and terms set forth, and the Prince and Page remain as they should be always—together!"

He spun, clapping his hands and drawing the pair into his sway.

I went to get Bel a cup of the granit—almond-flavored, in the absence of anything with milk or blood (had I known my Prince was arriving, I would have made sanguinaccio dolce)—I was lost within boundless grey.

My vision doubled; the world perceived by my eyes of flesh a still snapshot as time in my mind stretched into infinity.

So it begins. The thought slipped through my mind like mist through my fingers, lost almost before I registered its presence.

Hidden even to my own thoughts, I acknowledged what I had done.

I had forced Mukuro to acknowledge that his choice of actions would lead to him becoming a greater villain than the Estraneo, that the victims of the family were acting to make more victims themselves. Ken and Chikusa followed Mukuro out of love for their fellow, and even without my revelations that they were taking their tormentor's shapes, were little inclined towards burning the world. I had then introduced the suggestion of more moderate means. Bel's arrival reframed me as betrayed as well as betrayer, and suggested the possibility of reconciliation, and so offered a peaceful solution to their grievances.

Should their leader be persuaded to stop, they would gladly lay down their arms.

Should he not, they would still ask why.

I had created a conundrum. Mukuro could not call them forward with blind loyalty, us against them, had to address every refused alternative, and he could not.

"When will it be enough for you?" Corpse-cold fingers tightened about my throat, fury making Mukuro's voice raw, "Thief, serpent; tempter, deceiver; dragon, betrayer. They're mine! Away with your grasping fingers, that would make of children chesspieces, worm, parasite, conniving schemer who would have us all on his leash!"

I jerked my head back to impact nothingness, needing no breath to demand, "Wherefore come thou to this belief?"

"You were attempting to make me a Guardian!" Mukuro laughed wildly, "A soldier, a weapon, a—a hunting hound! Tying me with scraps of affection, or perhaps breaking me with loss until I would beg for the collar!"

"Thou hast this one more cruelly bound!" I snarled, orange fire blazing chains over my self in my mindscape, "What could this one have done? Brought about a meeting twixt the Sky and thee, in time, after full maturity, without coercion, absent deception, or even the tugging upon thy heartstrings? Had this one wished the best for ye—as thou hast chosen to disbelieve—would this one have not done the same as what has been done to thee? Given thee bed and board and learning, shelter and sustenance and opportunity for self-actualization, with kith and kin and kindness about—what else wouldst thou have demanded of me?"

"I gave you the chance to join me!" Mukuro hissed back, all darkness and flapping and grasping claws, "You rejected it, and still I forgave you! You betrayed me, and yet I did but so lightly rebuke you!"

I melted into water, flowing free through his dark piece of hell and downwards into the grey that was no ground, "Thy judgement was, that to arrange a meeting with a Sky in the far future was beyond the pale, yet bridling this one's heart was but minor indignity?"

An ash tree drank the water up greedily, binding me in its veins and woody tissue, "You were deserving of worse!"

I could not move.

"Such gentleness was mercy to a criminal, while you would have had us as pawns!"

I scattered into gas and condensed into mist, raining down fine and acidic onto symmetrical ladders of leaves, "What crime have I committed? What misdeeds are yours?"

Fire caught and I burned once more, weeping—why were we in conflict? Bow. Cooperate. You are the right hand and the left, how can you be at odds?Falling, I lost myself, devastated in the grey gloaming.

I could not fight like this, not when Massimo's power could so easily break me. I shouldn't fight at all.

In the intangible slip-slide where my insignificance was strongest, I noted that such blatant use of his greatest weapon was itself a sign of victory.

Mukuro had planned to avenge himself on the Mafia, and his rage had grown to encompass the world itself. Such had been the rage and spite that had sustained the victims of the Estraneo. But the Vongola had rescued them, had treated them well, and under the gentle wearing of kindness, their anger had dulled. Ken and Chikusa, children in truth, with the grace of youth, had learned to set the pain-forged brace aside, more changeable and full of hope than one who had walked the six paths of hell and bore the weight of his journey. Mukuro was in many ways like me, a blend of child's folly and strategist's schemes and an illusionist's understanding of the world, and could not so easily let go of his far greater momentum, and saw too much into his companions' recovery.

We were Mists, illusionists, creatures of control. He was losing what had defined him for so long, what he had used to define his being—avenger, dark executioner—and his comrades had already all but lost their fire. He could not allow himself to be driven by something not exquisitely, absolutely, unquestionably his own, the way that his rage against the world was, the way this new, peaceable existence was not, so he lashed out in a desperate attempt to capture that forgotten ire, to prevent the Vongola from replacing the old impetus with our own, because he interpreted the change as, among other things, an attempt to seize control, for, as was the heart of our craft, to control hearts was to control minds through them.

This crusade was, first and foremost, intended to resist Vongola's assumed manipulations, and fool that I was, I had given him the perfect justification, something far more personal to fixate on.

It all came down to betrayal in the end. I found it poetic, bitterly amusing, as the 666 burned welding cold upon my hand.

After all, my Flame was a cold flame, the ice of Judecca, the traitor's hell, that deepest pit that punished the gravest of all sins. Mukuro accused me of betrayal, and that could only happen if he had thought of me as a friend—a close one at that, if he was willing to fabricate this ludicrous illusion of me willingly on his side. It was without a doubt a sign that he too was unlearning the near omnidirectional enmity he had been taught by suffering; therefore, the crux of the matter was resolving his terror of his own recovery, with a minor addition of addressing my perceived treachery. The misanthropy would solve itself.

I could not fight with Harmony screaming into my ears.

Ironically enough, Mukuro had just forced me to make a judgment of his worth as a pawn.

I took hold of my orange-twined traitor's flame, and tore.

To reject a Sky's fully-formed bond was not just rejecting a Flame. It was rejecting everything the Flame had represented and reinforced, every concept that the Flame had touched. A screech of the bow upon snapping of violin strings, a fluctuation to extremes, serenity lost and then exaggerated to stagnancy.

I ripped out a chunk of my soul, frostbite spiraling up long-fingered hands as I cast it towards Massimo's heart, laced with the only mercy I could give—tranquility, rest, an endless sleep.

Blue bled about me, raging and dulling to embers in turn, while indigo blended into the grey to melt into seven pearls drawing long, sea-dark hair back from my face and faded lavender robes over skin the color of the yellow earth.

The grey mist about us condensed into pouring rain, at once hot and cold.

"You were wronged." I acknowledged, in the voice of a girl who had grown into a woman who remade a regime, "I presumed to make designs on your futures."

"We were wronged." Mukuro agreed, thrown off balance by my change. But I had removed from myself the emotional compromise that would have rendered my judgement suspect, bit my limbs off to escape, and only then given him my confession. He had just witnessed me sacrifice too much to take my words lightly.

"We are players and pieces and people in one, and I failed in my obligations within the framework of the last." I bowed with all the solemn perfection of one drilled in classical etiquette, "I shall from now on give you the information you are owed as a friend."

"It will be so." He not-quite-taunted, a reminder that I was still in his thrall.

I inclined my head, and carried on, time as water flowing past our feet. "The Sky is yet young, as you are yet young. Perhaps, in the greater part of a decade, once we are fuller grown, you would be amiable to testing his mettle. I shall abide by your decision then, no matter what it may be."

Mukuro laughed, a flash of displeasure twisting his form into something monstrous, further distorted by the veil of falling droplets, "You speak of Courting, when you have just cast yourself into Discord to escape a Sky, Basil—if that is yet your name."

"This one was once Kirihara, but Basil has become my name." I bowed again, the cursory salute of introduction, "I would endure Courting and reject it when it is unwanted. Harmony I would deny, for no one yet bears a banner I would call my own, and outside that I must remain independent, should I take the position of the External Advisor. However, will you not make your judgments only in the fullness of knowledge, Rokudo Mukuro?"

"Fair." He allowed, tapping a finger against his chin, "I shall permit it, so long as you too join me in taking his measure."

"Done, done, and thrice done." I intoned.

Arcane alphabets and gnarled vines twisted from him to me, and I clasped his offered hand.

So it was.

Gathering myself, I straightened my spine and asked the most dangerous question, "O death-defier, hell-treader, he who oblivion thrice-twice defied, wherefore bow thou to the darkness of childhood and remain ever in its clinging grasp?"

"Do I bow to it?" Mukuro mused, dripping like too-wet ink, "I think not. I am my own master, the devil and not the tortured soul of my hell."

As a cormorant, I set myself aloft, to escape the creeping tendrils of the red-eyed boy, "And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever." I quoted, "Thou reignst not, an art even now bound in chains of thyself, that work of thy tormentors. What art thou, other than a beast from their hands, set forth to devour the world?"

"No beast by any other hand." He smiled viciously, serpentine as he stretched to catch me in his coils.

I could not help it. I laughed at the ludicrousness of his statement, "Is such the state of thy terror? To call every act manipulation and see puppet strings behind every movement?"

We were falling into infinity, and he could not hold on as I spread my wings, buffeted by wind and wave, until he became a screech owl and flew too in the storm.

"Every action and every reaction." I said, skimming over swells, catching the lift between waterproofed feathers and alighting upon a boat, its timbers varyingly worn, "We change and are changed by them in every moment, and so become in every instant different from who we were. To deny is as much a reaction as to accept, to abjure simply another form of response. Thou art not more free in wallowing in thy darkness, nor more a slave to enter offered light."

Mukuro perched upon the prow, peering into nothingness with mismatched eyes.

The serving spoon hit the surface of the bowl of almond ice.

Matters of note:

Bel was sent by Iemitsu. CEDEF teamwork and interservice cooperation, yay!

Ash trees are associated with Nemesis. And also "hung himself for knowledge of the Runes" Odin. Both of them fit for Mukuro.

The fact that he was in a downpour of Rain, even if it was Discordant, did help Mukuro behave rationally.

Lucifer took a cormorant's shape to enter Eden in Paradise Lost.

That boat was Theseus's ship. Something something we're always changing, stop making it sound like you're being brainwashed just because you don't want to murderize the world with all your heart anymore.

Also, I actually have an excuse for taking two weeks to update this time!

Deleted scenes that delayed this chapter:

1. Mukuro gawking at the fact that Basil's a girl at heart. Removed on the assumption that he had probably been female in one of his past lives, and is comfortable possessing Chrome, plus the fact that his mental self is also suspiciously influenced by Daemon Spade.

2. Basil bemoaning how this is a shonen Talk no Jutsu scene and that s/he should be wearing orange, and noting that breaking his Rain brought him closer to who she was, as opposed to who he chose to be.

3. Pointless exposition explaining just how Basil used the whole "I am beneath your notice" thing to hide thoughts from Mukuro.

4. Something something Massimo. On second thought, while our protagonist does acknowledge that the guy doesn't deserve what's happening to him, he's to much of an obstacle to be worth caring about.