Reborn shot up awake, gasping.
Fuck. Fuck!
He was going to slaughter that white-haired bastard.
He gripped the sheets pooled under him, gritting his teeth and bursting with unrestrained fury. An insult.
It was an insult.
The guy hadn't even had the guts to face him head on! Reborn was killed by an underling!
An underling!
A goon!
Death would be too pleasant of an end!
The air rippled with killing intent.
He was going to make him pay.
Byakuran.
The man who killed them -unforgivable- and killed him and-
And wait the fuck a minute.
Reborn blinked blankly, thoughts screeching to a halt.
He... The man who...
The man who killed him. Him. Reborn. Meaning he was killed.
Meaning he was... dead?
Finally, Reborn actually registered his surroundings. A simple bed, with an almost-but-not-quite threadbare blanket, a cabinet beside it, a window overlooking the inside of an alley, and then two adjacent doors -one of them probably leading to a bathroom.
Vaguely familiar.
But... where? It had been a remarkably long time since he had been in a room this ratty. Definitely no one would dare to give him a room like this and he could afford any hotel in the world with his long accumulated fortune.
Except that wasn't the most remarkable thing.
Reborn stared at his hands.
Bony, callused, and large.
At least, larger than a baby's. And he'd had decades, to learn by heart what the hands of a baby looked like.
A not-quite panic surged in him.
He threw off the sheet on top of him and stared wide-eyed at a pair of adult legs, his toes just visible past the hem of the black trousers. He distantly noted that he had stopped breathing and was having difficulty resuming the rhythm.
Reborn jumped off the bed, stumbling towards one of the doors and practically battering it down. He felt heady.
He stopped short of the sink and stared back at the reflection of his adult self.
...well, almost his pre-Arcobaleno adult self.
He thought he was in his early to mid twenties maybe.
But he couldn't care less about the specifics.
His neck was bare.
And he was at least five feet tall, again.
_
He was twenty-four.
Reborn glanced over the newspaper, littered with the familiar propaganda from a time he thought to be long ago.
November 1, 1914.
The first year of the first great war.
Five years until the Fated Day.
He set aside the papers and drank his tea, watching people stroll down the streets with some driving around Pierce-arrow runabouts, Premiere four-door tourings, and other old gear automobiles.
...He wasn't sure how he should feel in this situation.
Not exactly relieved. There was still the rage, though now subdued what with the fact that the target hadn't even been born yet. And... Well.
Maybe anticipation.
They had died. Killed. Except for Lal, everyone else, including him now, was...
But anyhow, his course of action was obvious. He needed to track down the others.
After all, if he also went back in time after dying, the same might've happened to them. No one could know the effects of dying as an Arcobaleno, after all.
He was carefully refusing not to think about parallel universes, timelines, and the probability of him still being in his original universe.
He nibbled his sandwich.
Reborn mentally reviewed his chronology.
So by this point in time, he had already established his reputation. Definitely not to the same extent as it was in the future, what with the lack of a widespread information platform like the internet, but still not inconsequential. At the very least in Europe, he already had a stable foothold.
He closed his eyes.
Luce should be the easiest to find.
...But he was honestly not feeling up to seeing her yet. He even had to struggle to consciously think of her.
So that left the others.
Out of everyone, only Fon, Lal, and Colonnello, were aligned to an organization. Verde was an independent element of his own.
He opened his eyes to gaze at the clock over the door of the cafe.
Skull was already performing and was a rising star so getting to him should be relatively smoother, what with him being a civilian while the others already had people backing them.
Well, there was also Viper and their brother, they should be just a bit harder to locate than Skull...
But that still remained the question of how exactly he, a renowned hitman, was going to approach them without accidentally creating some kind of needless suspicion if it happened that they didn't have memories of the future.
He stalled, before admitting to himself -hopefully they didn't have memories of the future.
Reborn sighed through his teeth.
Shit, this was hard.
He couldn't bring himself to be careless. Reborn knew exactly what was hinging here.
This was a chance. A second chance.
If... if he played his cards right...
He dabbed a napkin over his mouth, his eyes dark as he stared at the table-top.
If he played his cards right, this time around, he won't only get his family back.
He could keep them.
He was so ridiculously unbalanced right now. The thousand 'maybe's and 'what if's running through his head that he had come to memorize through the years -each one that he might very well be able to turn into reality now.
...This was the first time in his life he felt pressured to the point of almost wanting to hurl.
(Still not enough to make him sympathize with Tsuna, though.)