Title: This Is How Empires Rise

Summary: There are eight particularly notable children entering Hogwarts this year, and by far the most troublesome is the boy with the gun. [Everyone is too busy being cautious of Reborn, when they really should have been looking for the handler.]

Warning: Exactly like my other story 'Beginnings and Middles', except HP style.

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"Giglio-Nero, Luce!" the teacher calls out with a strong voice, holding the Sorting Hat up high.

Luce smiles nervously and disentangles her hand from the kind boy she met on the train. She paces the short walk to the front of the room where a stool is perched and tries her best to stay calm under the stares of the entire magic school.

The teacher gives Luce an encouraging smile as the little girl takes a seat and then the wide brim of the hat is slipping over her eyes and blocking the room from view. The last thing she sees is the kind boy's pitch black eyes.

"Hufflepuff!" the Hat announces, almost instantly.

Luce blinks at the return of brightness when the Sorting Hat is lifted away and she stands from the stool to the sound of cheering, quickly making her way to the yellow and black table where they welcome her with smiles and hugs.

Reborn waits patiently until his name is called and then moves forward with a lazy stroll. He can hear whispers already, the students naming him as Slytherin as soon as they catch sight of the newest eleven-year-old to step up.

Reborn ignores them with ease and comes to a stop in front of the Sorting Hat, the old material held aloft by the teacher who looks so painfully bored behind the practised polite interest. Reborn reaches up and slides his fingers along the brim of his own hat.

The background noise has grown, teenagers giggling at how 'nervous' the boy is. Reborn stares at the Sorting Hat, and then pointedly slides a glance towards the table he wants. When the Hat says nothing, Reborn narrows his eyes.

"Hufflepuff!" the Sorting Hat cries quickly, almost panicked.

Reborn politely nods and saunters away. The girl next to Luce immediately vacates her seat when Reborn approaches and the black-eyed child settles in next to Luce, a possessive arm coming to rest across her shoulders.

Luce peers up at him with a smile. "I'm so happy we're in the same house."

None of the other Hufflepuffs agree with that statement.


Verde walks down the library aisle, his eyes scanning for the textbook he needs. He adjusts the strap of his bag higher over his shoulder and reaches for the book he's been trying to find, but before Verde's hand can touch it, the text slides out from the shelf and zooms away.

The Ravenclaw startles and then scowls when the book is snatched from the air, whoever summoned it standing behind the end of the shelf so Verde can't get a proper look at them. The hand and the book disappear, but Verde stalks after both.

Someone has been taking all of the library books that Verde needs for the homework and assignments. That someone is going to die today.

The Ravenclaw follows the thief down the tight walkways, taking twists and turns through the ridiculously unorganised shelves that normally protrude out from each other in a perpendicular fashion more than they actually manage to be parallel.

Verde picks up his pace but no matter how fast he goes, the thief is always just disappearing around the corner as soon as Verde turns down the aisle. The Ravenclaw finally bursts out from the shelves and stumbles into a small open space with just a round wooden table and a few chairs.

There are two Hufflepuffs sitting there already and Verde automatically dismisses them as unimportant. He's just about to dive back into the mess of shelves in search of his thief, but then he catches sight of the text lying on the table.

"That's mine," Verde blurts out before he can stop himself.

"It's a library book," the Hufflepuff boy with the hat says, a mocking edge to his tone. "It's property of the school."

The Hufflepuff girl hits the boy lightly on the arm in reprimand, her attack more like a gentle pat than anything. She turns to Verde next. "Would you like to sit with us and share the book? I'm afraid we might take a while with it, I haven't started the charms essay at all."

Verde contemplates just cursing them with his newest spell and taking the book but then his eyes fall on the boy's parchment and the equations there. The Ravenclaw sits down.


"Lichi?" Fon calls out, wandering down the hallway. "Lichi, where are you?"

The Ravenclaw frowns lightly as he searches the castle. Lichi had been getting restless in the stone fortress, always wanting to go outside with Fon, to stretch and go through a few katas and just stop following the strict schedule that the teachers insist is necessary.

Fon is feeling a bit off as well, not sure what he's doing here in Hogwarts instead of in China's magical school where the classes are all voluntary. He transferred to be closer to his uncle, and while the man does make time for Fon, the adult is more often terrorising the Ministry or napping on the roof.

This school is so restrictive; making Fon wear the 'proper' clothes, denying him access to the beautiful forest, saying he can't leave campus for even a few hours.

The other students don't see anything wrong with this and simply encourage him to study more because he's a Ravencaw and that means he likes knowing things. Fon really only likes learning martial arts, and everything else is just something to go through so he can get back to martial arts.

Fon sighs and drags his feet a bit as he turns the corner. His eyes flick up to scan the hallway and he comes to a halt when he finally finds Lichi, currently wrapped around a teenager in a yellow and black tie. The snub-nosed monkey seems particularly interested in the small green chameleon sitting atop the Hufflepuff's hat.

"Is he yours?" the other teen asks.

Fon blinks and then walks towards the odd group. "Yes, Lichi is-"

"I wasn't talking to you," the boy interrupts and glances down at the monkey in his arms.

Lichi nods in response to the teenager's question before the animal climbs up and over the human's shoulder, ending up perched there like a particularly strange owl.

Fon stares, bemused. "My name is Fon, and I am Lichi's partner." He bows shortly. "It's nice to meet you…?"

"Reborn," the other boy introduces himself as. "The reptile is Leon."

Leon raises a leg and waves. Fon waves back, a smile coming to his face. The Hufflpuff with the strange name turns away, calmly stealing Lichi. The martial artist soon finds himself trailing after the other teenager and they end up outside near the Black Lake.

Another Hufflepuff is there, a kind girl who gives Fon a hug and offers him a sandwich out of the picnic basket near her. There's also a Ravenclaw, the one with green hair who experiments on the other students. He seems to be building a small rowboat out of conjured and transfigured materials. It also doesn't seem to be working.

Fon sits down near Luce and introduces himself to the squirrel named Cosmo and the alligator named Keiman. Then he proceeds to eat all of the delicious cake with Luce while watching the other two.

Neither boy notices the cake disappearing since they're too busy getting into an argument about how they should go about making a boat, which devolves -or perhaps evolves- into complicated theoretical models about physics and the effect of charms on the buoyancy of transfigured substances.

To make a long story short: they get out onto the water but the entire raft ends up turning back to grass and sticks when the magic wears off.

A soaked Fon drags himself onto dry land, unable to stop laughing, and finds that maybe Hogwarts isn't so bad after all. Then he has to go and separate Verde and Reborn who are blaming each other for calculating the magic conductivity wrong.


Skull flies around the Quidditch pitch, pushing the racing broom as fast as it can go. He even throws in some car sounds because he's a Revhead at heart and the muggle-born fact just adds to it.

He's currently waiting for the snitch to hide after he caught it again, just doing circuits of the empty playing field with a couple barrel rolls thrown in. The Gryffindor's eyes catch sight of something far below, a figure in black with an orange portion around the top.

Skull drifts lower and the figure becomes clearer, turning into a teenage male with expensive leather shoes and a well-tailored suit plus a black and yellow tie, the entire outfit topped with a black fedora that has an orange stripe around it.

It can only be Reborn, the Hufflepuff that really should have been sorted into Hell -back where he came from- or at least Slytherin.

The purple clad Seeker peers down at the terrifying 'Puff and wonders what the teen is doing near the Quidditch case that holds all of the different equipment.

Reborn crouches near it and calmly, unhesitatingly, takes off the straps around the two bludgers.

The charmed Quidditch gear shoots straight upwards and hovers for a bit before they then fly directly at Skull. The Gryffindor immediately turns tail and runs because he does not know how to make the bludgers stop – a teacher always does that.

Skull turns into a blur as he races around the pitch, weaving in between the towers full of empty seats, going as high as he can, doing loops and hair-pin turns, dropping so low so fast his head spins, circling the goal posts, circling the entire damn school.

He does everything he can to shake the bludgers, and he does get the attention of the teachers and students, but it just means there are more witnesses to his demise when he finally loses sight of one ball and the bludger surprises him by bounding off his head.

He wakes up on the ground somewhere near the Forbidden Forest, his head pillowed on a lovely Hufflepuff girl's legs. Reborn is leaning over him, a bright green wand in his hand as he casts a diagnosis spell which comes back all clear.

The wand then turns into a lizard and Reborn disappears from view, replaced by a Chinese Ravenclaw and that terrifying green-haired mad scientist.

"You had quite the fall there," Fon says with a calming smile. "It's lucky that we were around and that Reborn could heal you."

Skull really wants to say that Reborn was the one to try and kill him in the first place, but both Fon and Luce look so happy that the Gryffindor is safe that Skull just can't say anything. He nods silently instead.

"We should probably tell someone he's alive," Verde says to the other three, completely ignoring Skull. "They've sent out search parties to find where he fell."

The Gryffindor bursts into arrogant laughter and springs to his feet, striking a cool pose with his hands on his hips. "The Great Skull De Mort is hated by the Grim Reaper! There's nothing that can kill me!"

Reborn's lizard turns into a gun.

This pretty much sets the mood for every exchange between the Hufflepuff and Gryffindor, yet Skull keeps coming back to the strange group. It's probably because of Luce's cooking, to be honest.


Viper doesn't understand why the other teenagers are currently trying to hunt down the Slytherin.

It's not really Viper's fault that the idiots came to the Slytherin for money and even accepted the loan details like interest, then turned around and denied everything when Viper pointed out just how much money is owed.

It's only logical that Viper then went to Gringotts with the legally binding contract the idiots signed and forcefully had the money stripped from the vaults (plus a bit extra, because the Goblins like the teenager). This is what happens when you cross a loan shark – welcome to the real world.

But no, apparently the teenagers think they can just bully Viper into giving back to the money.

Good luck with that.

Viper ducks a curse and sprints down another hallway of the dungeons, planning on escaping to the girl's bathroom and holing up in the Chamber of Secrets for a while. They aren't well versed in illusions yet, but that will swiftly be corrected once they are able to get to the library without risking decapitation.

Viper turns a corner, rushing past the Hufflepuff boy that absolutely everyone in the school is scared of, and continues down the hall.

Then screaming starts and Viper skids to a halt, whipping around to find the Hufflepuff dragging one Slytherin into an empty classroom by the hair, pausing to kick another one inside first, and then coming back out into the hallway to bind the last three with a spell before once again dragging them away.

"You must be Viper."

Viper jolts and turns slowly to face yet another Hufflepuff, this one known for how sweet and kind she is – though it doesn't really look like it at this stage.


Luce and Reborn sit pressed together in a window seat that is occasionally accessible depending on how the enchanted stairs move. They peer all the way down to the bottom level where there are two teenagers, one a Slytherin and one a Gryffindor.

"You want them?" Reborn confirms.

Luce hums happily in reply. "Lal and Colonnello are so cute together, don't you think?"

Reborn watches as Colonnello says something with a grin and then Lal blushes before pimp slapping the poor Gryffindor.

"Sure," he settles on. "Whatever you say, Luce."

"How should we get them?" Luce wonders. "Maybe a double date?"

"Are we going to start fake dating now?" Reborn jokingly asks the other 'Puff.

"Not us. You and Verde."

Reborn makes a disgusted face.

"Or you and Fon," Luce suggests happily. "No, wait, Skull – perhaps Viper."

"Have you been talking to Bianchi again?" Reborn questions in a disappointed tone. "I told you to not get involved with her weird fantasies. She's the Potions professor, she shouldn't even be talking about students' love lives."

Bianchi is not allowed to be in a relationship with Reborn since he's a student so she lives vicariously through her ships – which are more of an army fleet at this point.

Luce waves him off. "I can't decide, you'll just have to be polygamous."

"Or you could go and ask to be their friend," Reborn deadpans.

"I come from a long line of pureblood ridiculousness," she reminds the teen. "Which means I have to bait people into being my friends, as per tradition."

Reborn rolls his eyes. "Yeah, thanks for getting me addicted to espresso on the train ride."


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Other story lines within this one:

1) Kyouya is the Headmaster and will give Reborn detentions if he does not agree to a fight.

2) Tsuna is not a Dark Lord. No, seriously, he just wants equality.

3) Hayato is the Bellatrix in this situation.

4) Byakuran arrives from Beauxbatons and Xanxus comes from Durmstrang. This means the Triwizard Tournament is a lot of fun.

5) As it turns out, Skull's lip piercing may or may not be a Horcrux.

6) Dino gets a few bad grades so he applies for peer tutoring - I think we all know who he gets.

7) Luce slowly takes over the Ministry with kindness (and Reborn). Tsuna gets invited for dinner sometimes and the world domination is really very peaceful.

8) To Guest: The Vendice are Dementors, and everyone soon finds out that Kyouya's Patronus is a unicorn called Kusakabe.