I know. I know. Sorry about not updating for so long. I'm going to upload a few today then try to update the full story within the next two weeks. I wanted to post the next chapter of Broken Reflection first, but man that fight scene is killing me.
"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
― Kurt Vonnegut
Iemitsu grew up in the mafia.
He had a mafioso nursemaid. He played with mafia children. He went to a mafia school.
The mafia was all he ever knew.
He was a mafia man through and through.
He never thought of living any other kind of life.
Then he met Nana. And for the first time in his life, he wasn't Iemitsu, descendent of the Primo and possible Vongola Decimo candidate.
He was just Iemistu.
Nana was beautiful and kind and didn't deserve the life she had lived. He found her slumped in some back alley of Tokyo. No money. No home. No confidence. He didn't think much of helping her at first. His mama was a true blooded mafia woman and made sure he knew how to treat a lady in trouble. So, he helped her to her feet and offered to take her to dinner and set her up in a hotel until she could get a job.
It wasn't like he didn't have money to spare.
He was Vongola after all.
Nana wouldn't look at him at first and muttered apology after apology for troubling him. He laughed them off and dragged her to the nearest restaurant, chatting lively in hopes of cheering her up. She kept her head down. She responded softly to direct questions but stayed quiet other than that. Iemistu didn't mind. His mother told him that he could keep up a conversation with a brick wall, so he continued to chatter on until she finished her meal.
When she peered up at him hesitantly and smiled at him for the first time, it felt like the entire world shifted in that single moment.
He couldn't leave the mafia.
But, he was more than just a mafia man through and through.
He was a husband as well.
When Nana told him that she was pregnant he was excited to add onto that list.
Mafioso. Husband. Father.
(But he had no right.)
Things did not go as planned.
(The body in his arms was so thin, frail even. Like a bird. A pretty little songbird all covered in blood.)
He crumbled under the glare of his own son and threw himself back into the mafia with a vigor he hadn't had since meeting Nana. He didn't go back often and when he did he focused on his Nana instead of his first child. He closed that boy out of his heart like the coldhearted mafioso his father raised him to be.
(If he had stayed would he have understood? The selfless actions of the child in his arms were not fit for the demon he had created in his mind.)
Hazy green eyes blinked up at him. Hesitant and searching.
(What did he see in Iemitsu? What was he thinking as blood as red as his hair dripped from his wounds and he wheezed and struggled to breathe?)
Then he smiled and Iemistu's world was shaken.
(He had his mother's smile.)
So, this so some unnamed future event/arc. I don't want to give it away. So I won't say much more, but I'll say that we won't get to it in the full story or drabble for a while. Also, the quote and title of this chapter is mirroring Kurama's emotional reaction to seeing his father for the first time in years in chapter 5.