Fiamma & Famiglia - Chapter 2

“This is…” Gokudera shouldered his pack more comfortably on his back.
“It’s where I trained for the Zero Point Breakthrough.” Tsuna led the group to a nearby cave at the base of the mountain while he explained. “Like I said before, this is going to be dangerous. I don’t want anyone hurt by accident since I’m not really sure what’s going to happen.”

“If you don’t know what’s going to happen, then how do you know it’s the right thing to do?” Yamamoto asked.

“Hmm…” Tsuna dropped his pack to the ground and sat on a nearby rock. “Like I said before, I can’t really explain. It’s mostly just a feeling that this is what I’m supposed to do.” He shrugged.

Reborn sipped his coffee and relaxed against a fallen log while he listened to Tsuna. “Blood of Vongola.” He said suddenly, causing everyone to stare. “It seems that once again, Tsuna’s hyper-intuition is kicking in. At this point, the best thing you two can do is trust him.” Gokudera and Yamamoto nodded to each other.

“Yup,” Yamamoto smiled broadly, “Tsuna’s never been wrong yet when it comes to things like this.”

“Of course,” Gokudera said threateningly, fingering the fuse on a stick of dynamite. “There’s no way that the 10th would be wrong.”

“No way!” Tsuna wailed, quickly trying to suppress their hopeless enthusiasm. “I make mistakes all the time!”

An hour later, the group had a small camp made ready within the cave and Tsuna stood with a feeling of finality. “I can’t put it off any longer, I guess.”
“What do you need me to do, Boss?” Gokudera asked with hopeful eyes.

“Well, for now, I just need Reborn to put me in Hyper Dying Will Mode, then I need to put some distance between us.”

“Distance?” Reborn asked.

“Yah,” came the quiet reply. “And I want a promise from all three of you.”

“Anything, 10th!” Gokudera instantly replied.

“What is it?” Yamamoto asked, beginning to get worried about the shadowed look on Tsuna’s face.

“No matter what happens…” Tsuna said slowly, as if to emphasize every word. “None of you will help me unless you can do so without getting hurt.”

“?!” Yamamoto and Gokudera were knocked speechless at the quiet force they could feel behind that statement.

“All right.” Reborn agreed. “I don’t know what you’re planning, but if you’re that determined, I won’t stop you. I’ll keep these two blockheads in line, as well.” With that, he fired Leon and a bright flame blossomed on Tsuna’s head. When Tsuna looked up, his eyes held a clear and determined look.

Tsuna rummaged in his pack and pulled out binoculars for his two friends. Then he pointed to the east. “If you look a quarter-mile that way, there’s a rock clearing. That’s where I’ll be.” He handed Reborn his Vongola ring. “Keep that safe for me.” Before the others could reply, he had increased the flame from his gloves and flew out of sight.

“Oi, Reborn,” Gokudera said in a small, worried voice. “He’s going to be okay, right?”

Reborn suddenly felt apprehension. Somewhere along the way, he’d fallen into Tsuna’s pace and hadn’t gotten any answers about what the boy was going to try. Realizing his own mistake, he had Leon transform into a pair of binoculars and climbed on top of a nearby rock outcropping. Curious, the other two boys followed suit.

Within seconds, the three had the rock clearing and Tsuna in their sights. From their point of view, Tsuna was simply standing in place, staring at something cradled in his hand. With a small start of surprise, Reborn said, “That’s the Rebuke Bullet that Leon gave him.”

“What’s he planning?” Yamamoto asked to no one in particular. The other two couldn’t answer.

A movement from Tsuna got their attention. Instead of looking at the bullet, he was now giving a sad look at the location where the three of them were watching. Then, without any other hesitation, Tsuna closed his eyes and stuck the bullet in his mouth. Before any of them could react, Tsuna had already swallowed.

The three watched in shock. “Did he…”

“He just…”

“This is bad.” Reborn said in a dark voice. “Tsuna’s already in Hyper Dying Will Mode. If the energy of a second bullet were to be released within him…”

They all turned their eyes back to Tsuna’s location. Tsuna was bent over on his knees, clutching his stomach. The look on his face was full of pain. Gokudera immediately stood to run to Tsuna’s side, but a sharp tug from Reborn tripped him. “What are you doing?!” Gokudera yelled.

“Can you get to him without getting hurt?” Reborn asked simply. Both Yamamoto and Gokudera paused and looked at Reborn in askance. “He’s said several times that he didn’t know what was going to happen. If you go now, are you positive you won’t get hurt?”

A look of frustration passed across both the boy’s faces. “That’s the only thing he asked of you two. Without first understanding the situation you’re running into, you could possibly end up hurting Tsuna.”

“Hurting him…?” Gokudera asked.

“Tsuna’s finally starting to trust his own intuition. However, if Tsuna makes it out of this in one piece and finds out that he hurt one of you two… Instead of questioning his trust in the both of you, he’d constantly be second guessing his own choices.”

“Oi!” Yamamoto exclaimed. He pointed to the east where a large light had started to form. Everyone immediately pulled their binoculars back into place and Gokudera fell back to his knees at the sight they beheld.

Tsuna was still bent over and moaning in pain. Around him steam began to rise from the ground, partially obscuring their view. Suddenly, Tsuna pulled his head back and screamed in anguish. That’s when they finally saw that the flame on Tsuna’s head had flared exponentially larger. “A flame that large is too much for him to control,” Reborn muttered. Yet, even as they watched, the flame continued to grow, quickly encompassing not only Tsuna’s head, but his entire body. And still it grew larger.

The ground around Tsuna turned black and the rocks began to melt from the heat he was emitting. Where the flame touched trees, all that was left was ash and dust. Tsuna began to rise from the ground from the immense force of the flame.

“10th!” Gokudera cried but Tsuna was too far away to hear the words.

“Where…am…I?” Tsuna thought. It felt like he had fallen into a volcano. All around him was searing heat and pain. But he could feel it. The source of the flame that burned him. The flame that surrounded him and hurt him had several flows. He had to control those flows…somehow…before it killed him.
He could feel it. His life gushing out faster than he could stop it. He was running out of time.

“Must…control…it…”

He raised a hand toward the source of the flows. Even through his gloves, he could feel the immense power before him. As he pushed closer, trying to gain control, the worst happened. His gloves, which he had always thoughtlessly relied on, failed him. The cloth pealed from his hands in strips, leaving his hands utterly unprotected.

But still he pushed forward. His hands burned from the flame’s heat, but he knew he couldn’t stop. Without conscious thought, he grasped one of the flows of flame around him and used it. He wrapped his left hand in it, then without stopping to think, he forced the flame to change. When he looked down, he could see that it wasn’t perfect, but wrapped around his fingers and palm were protective strips of highly compressed negative flame…ice.

Tsuna panted from the effort. He could barely feel his body’s pain anymore. Part of him admitted that it was probably a good thing. He clenched his frozen fist. By forcing the flame into strips before transforming it into ice, there was a degree of allowed movement. Again he raised his hand toward the flame.

“This…is…it…” he told himself. “It’s either do…or die…”

Gokudera, Yamamoto, and Reborn watched silently as the flame finally stopped growing. Tsuna had been limply hanging from the core of the flame since it had lifted him off the ground. His clothing had long since burned away and the only things left were his gloves. When even those began to burn, Gokudera tossed his binoculars aside and began running with Yamamoto in close pursuit.
Reborn didn’t try to stop them. Tsuna had picked his location well. Even at their top running speed, they wouldn’t reach Tsuna for several minutes. By then, Reborn could already tell that everything would be over.

Almost as if to answer his prediction, a loud rumbling began. Peering through his binoculars, Reborn watched as the flames encompassing Tsuna began to flicker out violently. What containment the boy had over the flames was starting to break. “It’s now or never, Baka-Tsuna,” Reborn said to himself.

In answer, Tsuna’s eyes flew open and the flames around him abruptly died. Yet Tsuna still hung motionless in the air. A moment of silence ensued, so piercing that Gokudera and Yamamoto’s footsteps faltered to a stop. Then a storm of flame erupted, gushing out from Tsuna in waves and turning everything it touched to ash.

The two guardians could only stand and watch as the trees in front of them vanished like mist and a wall of fire rushed toward them. The next thing they knew, they were laying on the ground behind a immensely large rock with a scorched Reborn slightly panting from effort. Yamamoto thanked Reborn as he stood to brush himself off, only to be knocked down again by Gokudera.

“Why did you-” Yamamoto began to say when another wave of flame licked around the edges of their shelter.

“Had you been standing, you would have been roasted, baseball freak.” Gokudera brushed his singed hair back from his eyes.

“That last one didn’t reach as far, but it’s still enough to toast us if we go out.” Reborn said, wiping ash from his face. “It looks like we’ll have to wait it out here until it’s over.”

“Dammit! What was the 10th thinking?” Gokudera exclaimed after several more waves erupted.

“Who knows?” Reborn answered.

After a few minutes passed, Reborn took the chance to peek out of their shelter to try and see the current status. The heat blasted him in the face, but it wasn’t intolerable. The flames had weakened enough that they only reached half the distance between their shelter and Tsuna. He gave the thumbs up to the other two boys, who immediately poked their head out to have a look.

The backside of their rock shelter had been melted down to half it’s original thickness, leaving behind a mass of already-cooling magma and glass. “Had you two gotten any closer, there wouldn’t have been anywhere to hide,” Reborn scolded.

“What do we do now, little guy?” Yamamoto replied. “We can’t get any closer to Tsuna, but it can’t be good for him for us to let this continue.” The three looked up at Tsuna’s form which was still producing flames of frightening proportion.

Before Reborn could answer, the situation changed. The flames Tsuna was emitting began to slow. No only in frequency, but at the speed they rushed out. It was almost as if…

“He’s freezing his own flames!” Gokudera yelled. They watched silently as three more waves were emitted and frozen before they’d gone farther than a few yards.

After what seemed like an eternity, the flames stopped coming out completely. From his mid-air perch, Tsuna’s eyes drooped and finally closed. Whatever had been holding him up until now finally dissipated and the boy fell to the ground with a resounding thud.

Without hesitation, Gokudera and Yamamoto ran past the walls of frozen flame to where Tsuna lay fallen on a sheet of ice. To their horror, he was barely breathing and his skin was painfully hot to the touch. Throwing a Leon-blanket over his unconscious body, Reborn pulled out his satellite phone and dialed.

“It’s me,” he said to the person on other end, “I need a helicopter and your best field medics sent up to Death Mountain and I need them five minutes ago.”

“His pulse is getting weaker!” Gokudera cried.

“Hurry.” He listened for a moment then answered. “Don’t worry, you’ll see where to go when you get here.”

Reborn sent Yamamoto to fetch their packs. Within a few minutes, he’d already returned and Reborn pulled the emergency first-aid kit out of Tsuna’s bag. “I figured as much,” Reborn mumbled. Over the course of the next several minutes, the three went through hell as Tsuna’s breathing became more shallow and slow. The Mafia-grade ice packs from the kit didn’t seem to help cool Tsuna’s fevered body either.

Finally, the sound they were waiting for arrived. The helicopter swooped in and landed outside the rings of ice walls, stirring up a great cloud of ash and debris. Before Dino could even jump out to help, Gokudera rushed forward with the injured Tsuna in his arms. Reborn and a pack-ladened Yamamoto followed closely in his wake.

“We’ve got him somewhat stabilized,” Dino announced as he walked into the waiting room. “He’s got one hell of a sunburn, but his breathing is back to normal.”
“What about his fever?” Reborn asked but Dino shook his head.

“We’ve got him on an IV to keep him hydrated and the nurses are changing his ice packs every 15 minutes, but the fever isn’t going down.” Dino shrugged, “the only thing we can do is wait it out.”

“Well, it’s only to be expected. After releasing that much flame at once, I’m honestly surprised he’s still alive.” Dino looked at Reborn, obviously wondering what had happened to cause the amount of destruction he’d seen.

“If you know that, then why did you let him do it?” Dino snapped, finally letting out some of his pent up anger.

Surprisingly, though, it wasn’t Reborn that answered. It was the usually idiotic and feather headed Yamamoto. However, for once, he was completely focused and serious when he said, “Because Tsuna said he was going to do it. The only thing we can do is support him to the best of our ability when he’s resolved to do something.”

“Even with us there, though, he was hurt pretty badly. I…” Gokudera looked down in shame. He turned to Reborn, “What was he trying to do?”

“No helping it.” Reborn said to himself before looking up at the two ring guardians. “He was trying to gain power.”

“Power? What kind of power?” Dino asked, while the other two could only blankly stare in shock.

“The power to protect his Family,” he answered simply. Reborn shadowed his face with his hat. “That’s the only reason I didn’t question him closer about what he was going to try. The only thing I can say is that he was trying to make the Dying Will Flame into fully his own power. It’s a trial that every Vongola boss has went through. Some do it gradually over time, while others have instantly grasped it during battle. Each boss made the flame into their own power through a different method. I never thought Tsuna would do something so reckless to gain his.”

Before anyone could react, the sound of a large commotion came from the entrance of the hospital. “Looks like the rest of the family is here.” Dino guessed. “Come on, you guys, I’ll do the talking.”

The three exited the private waiting room, leaving an extremely quiet tutor sipping his coffee.

“So that’s how it is,” Dino said to the quiet gathering.

“He…”

“That idiot…”

“He should have known better…”

“Tsuna’s crazy to try that…”

Haru was the first to finish a complete sentence around her shock and tears. “Of course, that’s the Tsuna I love! He’s the only one brave enough to run into a burning building to save an old lady’s beloved dog.” Behind Dino, Gokudera and Yamamoto could only look sheepishly at each other.

“Is he going to be alright?” Kyoko asked worriedly, clutching Nana’s shaking hands.

“We don’t know,” Dino answered honestly. “We’ve got him stabilized and have treated his burns, but we can’t seem to get his fever down. He’s still unconscious, so the best we can do is let him rest.”

“Can we see him?”

Dino began to say no, but the look in everyone’s eyes begged him otherwise. “Sheesh…as long as it’s only two at a time and you promise to be quiet.”

“My rankings say that Momman and Kyoko would be best to go first,” said Fuuta amid his sobs.