Chapter Twelve - After the battle

Bel was crying. Bel had turned up on his doorstep and he was crying. Harry's parenting instincts activated. Who had made Bel cry? He hadn't seen him cry since he was twelve. Harry ushered him in through the front door and summoned the tea, before pulling him down onto the sofa. Bel turned and buried his head into Harry's shoulder.

"The Prince isn't crying," he mumbled, his voice hitching as he trembled with the sobs he was trying to supress.

"It's Ok," Harry told him gently, as he rubbed his back and stroked his hair. He set about removing the tiara from Bel's hair, which was a job and a half since the Prince wove it in somehow so it wouldn't fly away during a fight.

"What are you doing?" Bel demanded grumpily.

"You don't have to be a Prince here. You can just be Bel, and Bel is allowed to cry."

"But if I'm not a Prince then what am I? That stupid storm brat saw through my wire attacks! I only won because he wanted to see fireworks, of all the stupid peasant things. But Boss won against the brat, but we still lost. And Boss isn't actually Vongola, and he's not come out of his room, and Squalo's been quiet, and Mammy made me a sandwich for free the other day and everything's gone wrong! It's not supposed to be like this."

Bel was sobbing and shaking, not even trying to hide it. All Harry could do was hold him and wait for the storm to pass. Bel didn't do well with change. To have just got his Boss back, and then for this to happen, it had shaken him badly.

"So, tell me what happened," Harry asked, once Bel was calm again.

"Fine," Bel grumbled, wrapping his arms tighter around Harry. His voice was muffled by Harry's shirt, but he wasn't about to tell the Prince to move.

"So, we went and met the brats," Bel started. Harry interrupted.

"Brats?" He hadn't been told that they were fighting children.

"Yeah. From what Sawada had been saying, we expected an eighteen or nineteen year old, sixteen at the youngest. What we got was a fourteen year old brat and his school friends." Bel sounded put out. Harry chose to believe that it was because he had been forced to fight children, not because he had been tricked.

"The Storm boy was Mafia, so it was a good fight, I guess. Less embarrassing than the shark. He lost to a middle-school baseball player who'd been learning how to use a sword for all of a week. Luss won thanks to that reinforced knee you gave him." Bel giggled quietly. "The look on their faces when he just got back up! And Mammy lost to that convict illusionist. He's wiped out whole Families, so I guess losing to him isn't too bad. Serves Mammy right for not actually trying."

Bel was quiet for a moment. Harry sat patiently with him, stroking his hair and waiting for him to gather his thoughts.

"But Boss won his fight. We were expecting him to go in hard, but he was patient, and calmer. I don't know what you did to him, but it worked. The peasant brat tried to trap him in the ice again," Harry could hear the raw fury in Bel's voice, "But Boss kept moving so he couldn't. And we managed to get the Rings off the brats, and get them to Boss so he won before the peasant could actually attack. What good is an ultimate attack that takes five minutes to charge in a battle situation? But the Rings rejected Boss, so we're stuck with the useless peasant as Decimo." The sadness in his voice was gone completely now, replaced by burning anger. Harry didn't want to touch the topic of the useless Decimo, so he addressed the other elephant in the room.

"The Rings rejected Xanxus?"

"Squalo explained. The Ninth adopted Xanxus because he somehow had the Vongola Flames, but not the bloodline. Only he lied to him about it, telling him that he would be able to become Decimo. But blood's the only thing that matters to the stupid peasants, not talent, so the Rings wouldn't let him become Decimo and the brat won by default!"

Wow. That was some class-A awful parenting right there.

"But I've seen pictures of the Bosses. Xanxus is like the Secundo's reincarnation."

"The Prince knows! But that's not good enough for the Rings. They'll always choose Primo's bloodline, even though Primo was a coward who ran away to Japan when things got hard, and now decides to bitch that we did what we needed to so we could survive!"

There was nothing he could say to that. All he could do was sit quietly with Bel until the teen fell asleep. Harry carried him up to bed. He looked so young when he slept. His mouth wasn't stretched in that wide grin of his. He pouted in his sleep, it was adorable. Harry removed his jacket, but left the boots on. He wasn't worried about marks on the bedsheets, and it would probably wake the Prince up if he started to unlace those monstrosities. Bel snuggled down under the covers as soon as Harry pulled them over him, pulling a pillow to his chest and mumbling sleepily. Harry watched for a moment before he left the room, taking Bel's jacket with him.

He hung the jacket up on the coat hooks by the door and settled in to watch TV. He was in his apartment, not Teddy's house in England, so he had to be quiet lest he wake up Bel. The Prince was in the only bedroom, so he would probably end up sleeping on the sofa. He had decided to give up on TV and put a movie on when Bel's phone started ringing. Why the Prince had chosen creepy Latin chanting as his ringtone, Harry would never know.

Worried that it might be important, Harry took the call. Only the Varia had Latin chanting as the ringtone, so Harry felt fairly safe in answering.

"Where the Hell are you?" Squalo demanded as soon as he picked up the phone.

"Bel's with me. He's sleeping at the moment, is it urgent?" Harry asked. He really didn't want to wake Bel up unless he had to.

"You finally got Bel to sleep? Thank God. Boss wants him back, but if you can get him into the car he'll fall asleep again. Bring some of whatever you did to mellow him out last time."

Squalo ended the call abruptly. Harry frowned. The Captain had sounded exhausted, and more. Shame? Anger? Grief? Harry couldn't tell, but he didn't like it.

He spent a minute gathering up his stocks of firewhisky, hangover cures, cookies and chocolate, before stowing them in the car along with Bel's jacket. Then he went to wake Bel up. The Prince was stubborn when he was awake, and even more so when he was sleepy. Harry ended up carrying him, duvet and all, down to the car. Bel tried to stab him a couple of times, until Harry flicked him on the nose and told him to behave. He pouted, but allowed himself to be buckled into the backseat of the car. True to Squalo's words, Bel fell asleep the second the car was in motion.

Next, we have more Xanxus and Varia Family Feels. Then we have the Future Arc. Wish me luck.