Noah's Hitman:

Chapter 2: Things never go smoothly.

There had been a number of things Hit had anticipated about his reincarnation when it was given to him by the Grand Priest and the two Zen'os. Things like, where he would be, what his new body would be like, and what he may do with his new life now that his previous one as Universe six's most infamous assassin was over.

The last thing he'd been expecting, and perhaps that fault laid more on him than anyone else, was being reborn literally from his new mother's womb as a foetus.

That had been jarring, to say the least. Made more awkward by the way his new mother had taken him in her arms once he'd been wrapped up in a blanket, and cuddled him into her chest with a warm, motherly smile.

The doctor seemed to be rather surprised that he didn't cry. Rather, he seemed to be amazed by how quiet he had been, all whilst his mother cooed to him and treated him like any loving mother would their baby. Showering him, even in her weakened state after child-birth with a copious amount of maternal affection.

It would've been a small mercy if the rest of that day had gone by faster. Unfortunately for Hit, fate seemed to deem it necessary to draw out the day of his birth to agonising proportions from his perspective. With his mother having to wait in the hospital until the next day to fully recover from the birth, and make sure he and she were healthy. Meaning he had to deal with the woman's full attention focused on doting him.

This probably would've been nice if he had the mentality of a small child or an actual baby that held little to no self-awareness rather than a fully grown adult, who'd lived for over a thousand years with most of them being spent as a professional hitman. As it stood right at that moment, that was quite possibly the most embarrassing and downright awkward experience he'd ever had.

Sufficed to say, he was glad when that day ended, and she was able to leave the hospital. Granted, it didn't stop her from constantly cooing and doting on him, making a bunch of cringeworthy noises at him because in her own words, he was just 'oh so adorable!'. At least it was a little more tolerable after that initial period in the hospital.

That had been about ten years ago today. Hit could only sigh thinking back to his arrival in this world, knowing that if the Grand Priest and the Omni-kings were watching, they'd likely gotten a kick out of watching him react to his predicament.

He shuddered even now to think if they'd been watching him while he was still in diapers. If being born again had been a humiliating experience, then having to deal with the fact that he didn't have any other choice but to let go in it and literally piss and shit himself until he was old enough for 'potty training' was a truly degrading and downright awful period of his new life. He had cringed more in that small time-frame of less than two years more than he ever had in his millennium long life-span in Universe six.

Thankfully, that awful time was past him.

Now a young boy physically, Hit was garbed in a simple white shirt over his diminutive body, accompanied by some cheap brown pants and shoes as he sat on his plain looking bed within his bedroom. A messy main of dark purple hair filling his head, with a few curly bangs framing his temple but not quite reaching his blood-red eyes.

His bedroom was quite small, with his bed being to the side of the room, with the top part of the wooden structure touching off the far wall, whilst the bottom part was barely a few inches from the other wall and the door to his room. A small window being at the centre of the back-wall giving a view to the outside, of which there was nothing of note to look at.

"Harry! Your supper's ready! You don't want it getting cold now, do you?" His mother called out teasingly.

Oh yeah, his mother had also chosen to name him Harry of all things. He didn't particularly dislike the name, although admittedly he did groan at being called it from time to time. Perhaps it was a little childish of him, which was amusing considering he was a child at the moment, but he simply much preferred his old name over that one.

This was his second chance at life though, new life, new name. It was only fair, and he wasn't about to moan about it, especially since she'd named him that the day after his birth and had been calling him that since before he was capable of speaking properly.

Regardless, he let out a smaller sigh this time as he obliged his mother's wishes, getting off his bed and making his way out of his room.

Trekking his way through the hallway to the dining area, a room with pasty walls about three times the size of his room, with a rectangular wooden table near the centre big enough for about four people. His mother was laying out the food as he came in, which looked to be a bowl of hot soup with some vegetables and meat in it. There was already someone sat there before him. A man wearing long brown pants held up by a belt of the same colour, and a button-up grey shirt with a collar pulled down over a tie wrapped around his neck and dangling from his chest. Face obscured by the newspaper he was reading at the table, with only a crop of dark-brown hair that was progressively turning grey all around showing.

Right as he got close to the table though, the man spoke. His voice sounding gruff and gravely, like he'd just shovelled down a pile of dust beforehand. "Have a good day at school, boy?"

"I guess so." Hit shrugged, answering his father of this world evenly.

That was another thing, he supposed. Since he was now a kid again, he of course had to be sent off to a public school during the day. Which, given his intellect and experience, he found to be the easiest thing he'd ever had to do.

"Any homework?" The man asked. Words coming out almost in a wheeze.

"No sir." Hit replied respectively.

"Good." The man sighed, closing his newspaper up and placing beside his soup bowl. Showing his rugged, middle-aged, pale face that seemed rather sickly. His coal-black eyes squaring down on his own supper, a bowl of beef and vegetable stew, with a hint of aggravation. Dark rings underneath his eyes from more than just a lack of sleep. "Now then, I could really do with something nice to eat after the crap I had to deal with today."

"Something bad happen at work, dear?" Hit's mother asked with a hint of concern as she sat down with her own plate in between them.

"Just some idiot down in the mines. Stupid bugger didn't do any work like the rest of us. Most of the time, he just kept staring at us like a weirdo." The man snorted derisively. Though to them it came off sounding like he'd just inhaled ash. "Moron got us all in trouble for his lack of work, and when the boss came around to give him a piece of his mind, he gave him the most wooden apology I've ever heard. The boss thought he was being a smartass about it, so he punished all of us along with him." By this point, a heavy scowl had come over the man's face. "Thanks to him, we all have to work overtime tomorrow to get back up to the quota, and we ain't getting paid for it either. The prick."

"James! Language!" Hit's mother admonished with her own pretty frown, covering his ears as if such a word would physically hurt him. "I get that you don't like it, but our son is with us right now! You shouldn't be saying stuff like that in front of him!"

Hit almost smiled at the woman's unplaced worry. He'd heard and seen far worse than that when he was Universe six's greatest hitman.

His father seemed to be much on the same wavelength as him, if the bemused snort was anything to go by. Even if it did resemble the sound someone made when something unpleasant was rising up their throat. "Oh, come on Lyra. He's a growing boy. A word like that won't hurt him."

The man's reply only made his mother glare at him. "Don't give me that! I've seen for myself what your friend Robert did to his son with that same attitude! Rudy used to be such a nice boy, and now he's become a complete potty mouth that's as rude as they come, just like his father! Have you heard some of the awful things that have come out of that boy's mouth these days? Its deplorable!"

The woman proceeded to hug the side of his head against her firm bosom as if to comfort him from his father's 'scandalous' speech. Her next words coming out in a hushed whisper as she cradled his head, like he was still a defenceless infant. "It's okay, honey. I won't let your father turn you into some hooligan with no manners. You'll stay a good, nice boy for mommy, won't you?"

A sweat drop rolled down both father and son's faces at the woman's antics.

Still, after dealing with her for over a decade, if there was one thing Hit had learned about his new mom, it's that it was best not to argue with her. Lest you want to deal with a massive pain in the ass. "Yes, mother."

"Good boy, Harry." She said lovingly, as she kissed the top of his head before detaching herself from him and leaning back into her seat with a happy, satisfied smile.

James deadpanned at his wife's own antics, rolling his eyes at her behaviour. "Jeez Lyra, sometimes I have to won-" A sudden cough from the man cut off whatever he was about to say. His hand quickly coming up to clamp over his lips as several more came out in quick succession. His shoulders hunching over as he hacked into his palm like his lungs were trying to force their way out of him.

The former legendary assassin's mother was quick to manoeuvre out of her seat and place a hand on the man's shoulder comfortingly. Any trace of her earlier attitude erased and replaced by a new wash of worry for her husband.

Hit watched on as the man continued to cough violently into his hand for a few more seconds. A sharp look in his eyes as he caught a sizeable mixture of saliva and mucus as black as coal splatter on to the side of his hand, before the man wheezed and ceased his hacking fit for the moment. He then turned his head over to his wife now by his side and gave her an apologetic look.

"Feh! Sorry about that…" He said, already moving his spittle and mucus-coated hand to his pants and wiping it off them. "I'm okay now. It's alright."

If it wasn't for countless years of practise in his old life tempering his emotions to keep a cool head, Hit would've scoffed hard at the man's shoddy attempt at reassurance.

The man was far from okay. Ever since Hit had known him, he had never been in right health. And that was most likely owed exclusively to the coal mines he worked in and had been doing so long before he was reborn into this world.

As Hit had come to find out earlier in his 'childhood', there was actually a sizeable age gap between his new parents. A twenty-year age gap to be precise. Turns out, his assessment of his new mother being youthful when he was born was more dead on then he'd initially thought, as she'd turned out to only be, funnily enough, twenty years old when she had him. Whilst his father on the other hand, was already pushing forty at that time, and had prior to his birth, been working inside the very same coal mine he worked in, to this day for almost the same amount of time relative to their gap in age.

In other words, the aging man had been busting his ass off with long hours down in the mine since even his own wife had been in diapers.

Now, Hit wasn't going to bother touching on how the two had come to be together given all that, as it was none of his business really, but what that alone revealed, was that the now fifty-year-old codger had been slaving away down in what was essentially a damp, dusty-air filled cave near the town they were in for about three whole decades at this point.

As awful as it may sound, he was somewhat surprised his lungs hadn't given out on him by now with all the damage they'd no doubt suffered from such an environment.

Lyra bit her lip at her sickly husband's words. Something that Hit had seen on numerous occasions when it involved her husband's condition, and his tendency to just brush it off. "Are you sure about that, James?"

"Yeah. Don't worry about it." The man smiled, trying to up-lift her spirits. "It's all good, Lyra. Just the usual cough I've always had, you know that. And it has yet to slow me down. Let's just get back to dinner, okay?"

Lyra didn't respond verbally but did give her husband a nod before sitting down. The look on her face saying it all to the ex-assassin of a long-destroyed universe. A look that told him the man's cough hadn't been anywhere near as bad back when they'd first met.

Something which he could believe, considering the man hadn't been this bad when he'd first been reborn either. His cough was still pretty bad even then, but at least he hadn't been hacking up what looked like liquidated charcoal like he was now.

The rest of dinner went by in silence after that.

Late that night…

Hit's ten-year-old body twisted and turned underneath his bed covers, wriggling like a worm caught by its tail end and held up in the air. Beads of sweat forming all over his forehead as his lips peeled open to show his teeth ground down hard, a hiss of pain flitting through as it felt like needles were stabbing their way through his cranium and poking into his brain with almost enough power to puncture it like a balloon.

Whilst his eyes were closed, it was as if his mind was being sent elsewhere. Images floating through his head that he hadn't the slightest idea were coming from. Images of what looked like a time long since passed. Faces of people appeared but were blurred to him. What looked like twelve shadowy figures following another who was in the lead, like they were running away from something. Another image showing a darkness creeping over the foreign land he didn't recognise, bringing what appeared to be a… a flood with it?

A series of images all but slammed into him after, showing the land be consumed all over, but it all seemed to be from a detached view that looked on at the carnage from above. It was almost as if he could actually hear the countless screams of horror from all the people that were below, but unseen, as they were also consumed by the flood and darkness.

One last image entered his head, of some kind of near ethereal vessel up in the sky, looking down on the proceedings like he had been. Within it, or on top of it, he really couldn't tell, those same shadowy figures from before watched on as it all transpired.

Though he couldn't really see their faces, somehow Hit just knew that all the figures were calm for some reason. Inexplicably calm like they'd known this would happen all along. Like it was always meant to happen.

His view somehow changed then, and he found himself looking down below alongside the other shadowy figures, as the figure that stood in lead before them turned away from the spectacle down below, his attention focusing in on them. Hit didn't know how or why he knew it was a man, considering their features were so obscured it should've been impossible to tell, but he just could. The shadowed man raised his arms and stretched them out wide, as if to thank them for being the lucky few who had managed to join him.

But then, the figure honed-in on him. The figure didn't have any eyes, but it felt like he was staring right at him. Though not with any sort of malice or discontent. Rather, it was with… warmth? It was hard to describe, but all Hit could feel from this figure, was a feeling of being welcome. Like the figure wanted him here, just like the others. As if he weren't just some stranger that had been randomly picked up and happened on this vessel, if one could call it that, by sheer chance.

No. It was as if the figure was telling him something without words. Communicating that whoever they were and wherever this was, that he belonged here with them. That he was no mere stranger, or someone who was just lucky to have survived, but someone who was meant to be here with them.

Like he was part of a family. And that it was time for him to come home.

His eyes snapped open then with a groan. His body lethargically sitting up as the pain subsided from his head. A painful throbbing remaining for the moment in his chest. His lungs burning as if they'd been submerged under water whilst he took breath.

"What the hell is wrong with me…? First these damn headaches, and now these weird dreams…"

The former millennium old assassin wasn't sure if it was something he was coming down with or not, but lately, over the last couple of weeks he'd been having a series of headaches randomly each day. As time passed on, what made them even more annoying, was how they seemed to be getting worse each passing day, and he had no clue as to why. His most recent one in particular had come about while he was at school, and had been particularly aggravating, like a huge migraine on steroids.

It hadn't ended there though. Last night before this one, he'd had a similar dream to this one, centred around those thirteen shadowy figures. Accompanied by the same pounding headaches that grown worse over time.

In all of his years including his previous life as the sixth universe's greatest assassin, he'd never had dreams like this before. They felt foreign to him, yet somehow at the same time, they felt familiar. It was a truly bizarre, contradictory feeling. It felt simultaneously like some weird trip of the mind, something alien even to him with all that he'd witnessed in his tenure, and like a… like an old memory would be the best way to put it.

But surely it wasn't a memory. He wasn't a braggart or anything, but he had an incredible memory. Even with all that had happened in his long life, he could still remember every important event in vivid detail. From the tournaments he'd competed in when he was young on his previous home world, to the names and faces of every target he'd ever had, to all the places he'd ever been that had caught his eye outside of his work. He could still recall every last bit of information like it had happened yesterday, rather than several hundred years ago in his previous body, with the exception of the tournament between his and Son Goku's universes, The hit said Saiyan had put on himself just to fight him, and the tournament of power itself.

Whatever that had been, it felt important. Important enough, that he definitely would've recalled it happening in his own life before. So then, why in the world did he feel like it was a memory? Why did his chest ache as if he'd forgotten something crucial, and was only just piecing it back together now?

He doubted this was the Grand Priest's doing, or something that the Zen'os had done for entertainment. The way the Grand Priest had talked to him in his final moments before being reborn, there had been a tone of finality. The head of the angels had made it clear this would be the last time he'd interact in any way with him or the kings of everything.

Rubbing the sweat off his forehead with his arm, Hit was about to lay back down in order to get some proper sleep, or at least try to anyway. However-

"Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!?" A scream suddenly tore through the walls of the house, almost startling the former hitman. Red eyes widening considerably when he recognised the sound of the voice making it.

"Isn't that my mother of this world? What is she screaming for?" Whatever it was, it sounded distressed. Horrified even.

Swinging the covers over, Hit felt curiosity get the better of him as he got off the bed, still wearing the same clothes from earlier and made his way over to his room's door. He opened it wide before making his way over to his parents' bedroom. He came upon the closed door to their room and heard something hit the floor on the other side with a thud! Following that, he could audibly hear someone scrambling along the floor inside, as if trying desperately to crawl away from something.

"What in the world is going on in there?" He thought to himself with a practised calmness that came with centuries of experience. His eyebrows furrowing even more curiously with a hint of concern as he grabbed the knob to the door and turned it.

The door creaked open, and he could see a lone light on in the room lit by a candle. The candle itself being to the right of the bed on top of a drawer sat next to the mattress.

"H-Harry?" He heard a choked whisper, like the person saying it was losing their voice as they spoke. His gaze hovering over to the other end of the room opposite of the light, where his eyes caught sight of his mother huddled up in a corner of the room. Even partially hidden somewhat by the darkness that the candle couldn't illuminate, he could still make out her paling features. Her skin having turned a startling shade of white, almost like a ghost as her body shook. Her hair a frazzled mess as tears fell from her shell-shocked eyes as she reached out for him. "P-Please… d-don't come in!... don't come in any further…" She wept, sounding almost hysterical at this point as her voice lowered to that of a whisper. "Y-Your father he… he…"

Moving his gaze from his mother over to the bed, which he could tell she didn't want him looking at, Hit stiffened up as he saw exactly why she didn't want him to see this, given she thought him to be little more than her naïve, young child.

Laid out on the bed, with the flickering flame of the candle illuminating his features, was his father. The man laid out motionless on the bed, with his own features even paler than the woman cowering in the corner. The difference being his lips and chin, which were stained and dripping with that same black gunk he'd coughed up earlier, mouth opened wide as if he'd woke in sudden surprise.

And then there were his eyes… cold and blank looking as they seemed to roll up into his head. A look that he'd seen many times in the old days of his previous universe.

The look of a dead man.

AND CUT!

Well, that's a way to end it alright! First chapter ends with Hit being 'born' and this one ends with his father dying.

That got a bit dark, didn't it? Well, this is mainly a setup chapter, and I can tell you right now the next chapter should be even darker. For those of you who know D. Gray Man well, you can probably guess what's coming. For those of you who haven't? Well… it'll certainly be quite the read, I'll just say that.

Next chapter will be coming out within July and will be significantly longer than these first two chapters. I'll be going into some real detail in chapter 3, as it will be when this story really starts to kick off.

Either way, I'll see you all then!