The day Hibari met his English cousin, the first thing that came to mind was "herbivore". Next came the knowledge that the boy had some bad experiences with cousins. The way he flinched whenever Kyouya threatened to bite him was very telling.

Hari was not used to being the center of attention, and within a week found most of the same hiding spots Hibari used himself to avoid the herbivores. More importantly he had almost no idea how to speak Japanese, much less read it.

Out of respect (or perhaps wariness of past experiences with 'family') the abnormally short boy learns Kyouya's patterns to the point he can avoid entering his space, while at the same time evading the annoyingly large number of bullies who had it out for him.

It wouldn't be until Hari was eleven (he had come to them when he was nine) that things changed between them to the point Kyouya went out of his way to protect him from the Stupid herbivores.

It would be the day that the letters started coming from a school he had never heard of, but his mother had. And she wasn't impressed.

"We'll find you a better one, or hire a tutor," she told the confused Hari. At this point she viewed him like a second son.

"Why are they so determined to get him to go?" asked his father, Minoru.

His mother, Yue, sneered.

"The idiots think they're the premiere school of their type, when it's little more than a breeding ground for bullying, prejudice and a loss of common sense. The headmaster has lost his damn mind a long time ago, and he seems determined to take everyone down with him. The only reason they're bothering poor Hari is because he had the bad luck of surviving the same curse his parents didn't, and now they want him back."

Over my dead body, seemed to be the unspoken additive.

"Why didn't they take him in instead of dumping him?"

Yue beamed at her son for the question.

"The idiots don't even consider proper training until eleven, and thus expect the families to deal with that until they're ready to take their kids off their hands and indoctrinate them in stupidity. Don't worry Hari-chan, we're not going to let them ruin your future because they think they deserve you."

Hari was still reeling from the fact he had a family that wanted him, even if Kyouya was very closed off. On the plus side, he would rather have the solitary Kyouya over Dudley any day of the week.

At least Kyouya didn't chase him down or ensure he had no friends by being a jerk. He just didn't interact with him.

After a few days (when his mother writes a firm "No Thank You" in no uncertain terms to the people sending the birds) everything seems to go back to normal.

Then they get a visitor. His mother is distinctly not happy. Kyouya finds himself being sent out of the house with a confused Hari (who was finally starting to get the hang of Japanese writing) and they spend hours wandering around town until they visit the shrine, where he finally gets some peace from the herbivores. Hari knows his moods enough to grab a book and quietly stumble through learning Japanese since if he could master that, most of his homework would quickly follow.

The teachers had been giving him English worksheets, but made it clear they expected him to learn the language by the time they reached middle school. Outside of a few minor errors when he turned in both sets of assignments (he was given "twice" the amount to make it easier for him to translate the papers and learn it) he was making some impressive progress.

On the plus side, Kyouya's English grade had never been higher. He was rather fluent at this point, since he did listen while his mother patiently taught his cousin how to speak the language.

When his Uncle finally locates them and brings them home, Kyouya thinks that's the end of it, because the visitors are nowhere to be seen.

Except it's not. It's just the calm before the storm.

During one of the rare times they're left alone in the house during a thunderstorm...Hari discreetly sticks close to him, but is otherwise keeping the required space between them... Kyouya wakes up from an impromptu nap to find his cousin hugging him, positively terrified of something. He's so quiet that Kyouya would think him mute if not for the fact he heard him practicing Japanese with his mother.

There's someone in the house.

Kyouya is angry, and reaches for the tonpa his mother had given him for his birthday after he successfully bit a kidnapper who tried to take him away and made their lives hell.

For a house wife, she was surprisingly vicious and a good teacher. And that was before his uncle, who happened to be a cop, dumped him into the same training the police got for their batons and the 'dirty' fighting tricks they used for suspects who didn't take a hint and stay down.

Kyouya breaks the wrist of the first intruder, causing the man to curse strongly in English. He mentally saves the words for a later date, before going after the second...except he's knocked out from behind from a third.

When he wakes up, his mother is home...and she's downright livid.

The only thing that struck him the most once the aftermath of the intruders was this.

He had failed to protect his cousin.

The intruders have done something to the quiet and slightly shy kid that had slowly started to grow on him because he had been careless and too weak to stop them.

Where he had slowly started speaking up a little in the presence of others, he could now only speak in stilted words and had great difficulty vocalizing anything. Where he was quietly courageous and at least made tiny attempts to socialize with others, there was now a boy who could barely tolerate the idea of being anywhere near others. He openly shied away from any groups larger than four people.

He had only just started to open up around them, and now he had been shoved several steps back from the tiny strides he had made through perseverance.

Worst of all, is that when confronted with the possibility of violence, Hari no longer makes a point of fleeing from it. Instead he simply stands there and takes it, even though it sends him to the hospital twice.

Whatever flame the boy had in him that kept him going, it was viciously stripped away without regards to the damage. And for that, Kyouya hates whoever has broken his tiny cousin.

But most of all he hates himself, because he was too weak to do anything to stop it.

Middle school marks the beginning of a chance to heal for Hari. After the incident when he was eleven, when the old man did something to the special energy inside of him that his new mother assured him wasn't anything evil like Vernon and Petunia made magic out to be, he found himself trapped in his own body. And he hated it.

His mother was beyond livid when he describes on a scrap of paper from his homework what the men looked like, because while they sealed up his special energy, the spell they used to try and erase the memory remained.

The men are subsequently banned from ever entering any of the areas controlled by the special community that his mother belonged to. Something about how the old man had no right to seal away his "flames" just because Hari refused to become a wizard.

Worse, because of the sealing he is no longer allowed to have magical training because he would find it incredibly difficult to even access enough of the power without having some sort of nasty backlash from the seal.

As if being trapped inside his own mind and forced to use written communication since his voice is restricted to stunted words for reasons he can't explain or understand wasn't bad enough, he is always cold. The power the old man sealed had kept him alive when his magic couldn't, and now he was always shivering to the point people looked at him oddly for buying hot drinks during summer.

He hated it. He hated being trapped and he hated that old man to the point that if he ever saw him again, he wouldn't hesitate to kill him.

Tsunayoshi Sawada is not someone people went out of their way to befriend. Frequently bullied, with the worst grades in class and not particularly athletic, he was the epitome of a wimpy loser.

The only reason he bothered with school was because he had a crush on the most popular girl in his class, and even then he was too chicken to be around her.

In fact the only person who was bothered more than he was, though rarely to the point of beating like Tsuna was when they were bored, was Hibari Hari.

Tsuna only knew of who he was happened to be from a rather...memorable... incident involving the Disciplinary Committee (which was a barely veiled name for the local ruling delinquent group) and a group of boys who made a point of picking on kids like Tsuna and Hari.

It came as no surprise that shortly after seeing the scary Hibari Kyouya beat the crap out of the boys when they made the mistake of thinking Hari was another victim they could go after without consequence when Hari went out of his way to draw their attention away from Tsuna, that he became the dubious first real friend Hari made since being adopted.

Hari wasn't blind, he knew Tsuna was using him to avoid getting the hell beaten out of him because the bullies knew Kyouya would make them suffer for laying a hand on him. However Tsuna was at least upfront and honest about why he was doing it. So that was okay.

Tsuna doesn't mind his stilted words, and is very patient to wait for him to finish writing out a reply before asking him another question.

As a side effect, Tsuna's ability to read English shoots up considerably around Hari. They're odd friends, but it's still better than being around large groups of people who pretended they liked you but didn't really go out of their way to help.

Tsuna was surprisingly adept at reading when Hari had enough of being bothered, and would go out of his way to cause a distraction so he could duck into the Receiving Room Kyouya had taken over shortly after entering school. He could study in peace, and he didn't have to deal with the weird girls who found his "shy and quiet" personality (combined with his looks) worthy of notice.

He wasn't unapproachable like his brother (Kyouya had firmly discarded their previous relation as cousins and started calling him his little brother after the incident), and he was unable to tell them to back off. Hence why the majority of Kyouya's terrifying fan club had apparently decided that if they couldn't bother his older brother, he made a fine replacement for their affections.

The number of chocolates he gave to Tsuna once they were far away from the school was rather staggering.

At least he had someone to talk to after school.

Three years later...

When Tsuna was forced to introduce his new "home tutor" to his best (read: only) friend, the first impression "Reborn" had of Hari was that he was quite possibly mentally retarded. It was one of the rare days his mother encouraged him to speak up, in hopes that he would eventually be able to talk normally again.

Finally Hari got frustrated enough that he pulled out his board and wrote something Reborn immediately identified as English.

What's with the fake baby?

Tsuna winced.

"Apparently he's here to turn me into a mafia boss."

Hari blinked twice. He vaguely noted Reborn pulling out a gun and putting it to Tsuna.

You mean that crap's for real? I thought the darker half of society didn't bother with the civilians. At least mom said they didn't.

"Tsuna is the last available heir, so I'm here to whip him into shape. Who are you anyway?" asked Reborn in English. Hari glared at him.

Considering it had been an Englishman who did this to him, he wasn't exactly charitable to the country or the people in it.

Hibari Hari, Tsuna's friend. And for future reference stick to Japanese or any language not English.

Reborn looked at Tsuna questioningly.

"Ehehehe... Hari was attacked when he was eleven by people speaking English."

Hari shook his head.

No, I was attacked by Englishmen. Idiots wouldn't take no for an answer, and when they found out mom had started teaching me something they didn't like they reacted badly enough that they've been banned from ever coming back. Not unless they have an open death wish anyway.

This was sounding far too familiar with other reports from England. Enough so that Reborn made a mental note to call Shamal in to see if there was a way to reverse what had obviously been done.

Though only if Hari was worth the headache of blackmailing the Mist to treat a boy.

"So why is he here again?" asked Reborn, changing the subject.

Kyouya is off doing something and I know Tsuna has trouble with math. So he lets me hide in his house until the fan girl horde gives up and goes away.

Hari shuddered at the mere thought of those nutters.

Reborn chuckled darkly. Hari had a bad feeling already.

Tsuna, by now well acquainted to what Reborn thought was funny, surprised everyone when he went to slap the 'baby' on the head. Reborn ducked and retaliated, but he did look at Tsuna.

"Leave Hari alone! It's bad enough he gets verbally harassed by the bullies because they're too scared of Kyouya! He doesn't need you setting the horde on him too!"

"I didn't know you had a spine in you, Dame-Tsuna."

Hari growled.

He couldn't speak human words very well because of whatever they did to him, but mimicking animal sounds? That he could do.

Ironically it was how he 'communicated' with Kyouya when he wasn't feeling up to writing or stumbling through the block. His brother liked animals enough that he could understand them on an instinctive level.

"N-n-not D-dame," he managed to bite out.

Reborn raised an eyebrow. Well the kid had loyalty, he'd give him that. If he was right and this was another case of the recent outbreak in piss-poor flame seals, then he could prove a useful Guardian.

Considering this Kyouya sent one of his "friends" to pick his brother up, it was obvious that he was fiercely protective of him.

He had some calls to make.

"Yeah, what?!" growled a voice that sounded like it lived in a bar. "Reborn?"

A light turned on, revealing the scruffy visage of one Trident Shamal. The Doctor was currently in hiding from his latest lover, a Queen. She took great offense to his "philandering ways".

"So you think you might have caught one of the Flame Seal cases on your current assignment? What are the symptoms?" he asked seriously.

Flame Seals, especially poorly done ones, pissed off any Flame user with sense. Mostly because the only ones who did them improperly these days were the idiots who called themselves wizards.

There had been a recent and rather annoying outbreak of seals in the UK, and every single one of them was a child. So far he had the misfortune to deal with two of them, and that only because he treated girls.

One was an eleven year old red head named Ginerva Weasley, brought in by a friend who had avoided the same fate by keeping her head down. The other was a twelve year old who had some rather shocking damage to her on top of the seal by the name of Hermione Granger. Her parents brought her in after she was "kicked out" by some special school in Scotland.

It didn't take a genius of Reborn's level to read between the lines of that one.

Wizards, for some odd reason, were terrified of Flames. So much so that manifesting them was a guaranteed way to get kicked out of their society and banned.

From what the older girl told him (once he assured her that their laws no longer applied to her thanks to the seal) there had been an incident at Hogwarts where a troll got in, and then for some reason ended up in the same bathroom she was crying in. By the time the teachers got off their ass and found her, she had been desperate enough to call up Lightning flames and managed to kill it.

The next thing she knew, she was on a short trip to King's Cross station, her wand snapped and told firmly never to return. That and an unnatural cold had settled over her. They didn't even properly heal her of the damage done to her body from the troll's club.

The other girl was a pure blood, and it had hit her harder.

She had manifested Rain and Sun Flames to save herself from a nasty parasite, and soon after followed the same fate as the older girl. Except she had a friend who lived nearby that knew the unnatural chill was a bad thing, so she contacted the local Flame community and "kidnapped" her from her family home.

Considering there hadn't been any attempts to contact the girl, they weren't losing sleep over her disappearance.

Bastards.

So yeah, Shamal was currently pissed off with the whole thing because they were just kids. They shouldn't have been fed lies and tossed aside because they manifested flames to save their life.

Shamal yawned, but listened to the symptoms. He grimaced when he was done.

"Yeah, that's a sealing alright. A nasty one. Sounds like they were trying to change the kid's Flame to suit their needs, which is odd because they are terrified of the Dying Will Flame."

Looking at his apartment, he grimaced.

"What was your current gig again? Uh-huh. Think this kid of yours would like three witches on his side?"

Because he had no doubt the girls would jump at a chance to get back at the bastard who did this. To be part of something that could fill the void he tried to create, and spit on the ones who attempted to take something that was a part of their very souls.

"I'll be there in a couple of weeks."