Chapter Text
Being alive for hundreds of years had many perks, one of which was access to knowledge that had long since been forgotten. If Leone were kinder, maybe he would have used it benevolently. Poisons, panaceas, inventions that were lost to time for good reasons… there were no limits for those who remembered. As he strutted through the doorway of a wretchedly-understaffed hospital room, Yuu Shiobana rolled over in her shitty cot to face him with nothing but boredom.
“Took you long enough,” she sneered.
“So you know who I am?” he paused by her bedside and sat down on one of the plastic chairs. It creaked under him; how insulting, they just didn’t make things like they used to. “Then you know why I’m here.” How had she learned? If she knew what he was capable of, there was no telling who else was. That was all right. Let danger invite itself to his door, then. He would dispose of it as he always did.
“Are you going to cure me or not?”
“Of course. In exchange for something el--”
“My firstborn?”
Just like that, she was going to give it up. Disgusting. “Yes, but--”
“What is it with you weirdos and wanting my firstborn? What if I never have kids?” she sniggered.
Leone balked but stifled it. If Shiobana noticed, she didn’t let on. “You will,” he supplied, sounding worlds less convincing than he would have liked, “Fate will ensure it.” He didn’t have to explain his methods to a mortal.
“Fate, fate, fate, who gives a damn?”
“You must, since it’s your fate for your life to end here.”
“If you want my kid so badly, you’d better get to changing that.”
How rude. Leone had half a mind to leave her to die, just to teach her a lesson. She didn’t even think twice before giving up her flesh and blood? Even if the whelp was not a twitch in the father’s loins yet, Shiobana was far too eager for Leone’s liking. Impudent and rude, like she was the only one who mattered. Perhaps such a woman would be better suited without a child, however hypothetical it was at the moment. “You’re in a hurry.”
She turned away from him and coyly faced the wall. “Why wouldn’t I be? It’s my life on the line here. I have a contract you’re going to sign before we go any further, though.” The crinkling of paper rustled on her bedside table, and she passed a sheet with messily scrawled handwriting his way as well as a ballpoint. She was nothing if not prepared. Leone missed the days of elegant writing utensils. “Read it over, do what you want, but sign it.” This wasn’t standard procedure, but it only reiterated what Leone treated as givens in his deals anyway. Leone Abbacchio will not go after or send Associates after a Miss Yuu Shiobana after the birth and exchange of her Child in return for curing her of Disease. Who needed to stipulate that on paper?
With a twist of his fingers, a fountain pen appeared in hand, and he signed it with a grand flourish. “You’re very demanding. It’s like you forget you’re dying and that I’m the one with the power to change that.”
“Well? Get to it.”
“Fine. Brace yourself. This is going to hurt.” Leone didn’t even need to pull his tome from the liminal space it rested in for such a simple restoration. He could cure this woman with a thought, but it would be far more interesting to deconstruct the body, remove the virus, and reconstruct it. Shiobana deserved something so unnecessarily complicated and painful.
Contrary to popular belief, magic and science did not contradict one another. With surgical precision, he took the disease from her flesh. Atoms split apart and cleansed themselves in the sunlight before returning back to stasis and left only human, however grotesque it was, behind. The pulse monitor flatlined and then jolted back to life with far too many heartbeats in a second. Her mouth fell open in a silent cry, no vocal cords to shred to pieces in pursuit of venting agony. As she slumped back into her cot, Leone smirked. “See you in nine to ten months. Have fun.” Doctors swarmed the room, but Leone was already gone. He had a nursery to decorate.
There was nothing that Leone hated more than being late. Tangled up in an unfortunate altercation with the latest cult spawned by chemicals in their drinking water supply, he knew that he was missing something very important, but couldn’t put a finger on exactly what it was. It was only after he finished prestidigitating the blood out of his jacket that he remembered the deal he’d made with a certain expecting mother, burnt into his mind hard enough to scar. Like a man possessed, Leone appeared at to the hospital, letting the terms of the deal guide his way through the halls to the room in the maternity ward where Miss Shiobana waited.
She was still just as repulsively human as the last time they’d spoken. “It’s you. Three days late,” she said, rough and flat. A very small, very pink, blob wrapped in an even pinker blanket lay nestled by her side. If he squinted, maybe it was cute. “Take him.” With shaky arms, she thrust it into his chest and he took it hastily. Leone had half a mind to yell at her for such careless behavior concerning a being the consistency of a marshmallow, but before he could, it swiped at his hair and tugged.
It took all of his self control not to swear and drop the infant. A three-day-old blob should not have been capable of pulling so hard. Miss Shiobana’s lips jerked upwards into a not-smile. “Are there any last words?”
Her mean-spirited grin melted into animal fear. Leone wanted to spit in her face. “Wait, you signed the contract, you can’t lay a finger on me.”
“To your kid. You think my memory’s that short?” She didn’t answer and just watched his face. “What?” Shiobana was silent. “Is my eyeliner smudged?”
“Where is he?” she muttered, almost inaudible.
“I’m standing right here. Who else are you waiting for? Archangel Gabriel?”
“Him.”
The floor in front of them both split open like the gates of Hell. Out crawled a man with black hair and ram horns wound tightly on the side of his head, beautiful features glittering like fire and brimstone in an infernal grin. “You look well, Miss Shiobana,” a terrible lilt cut through the cacophony of cracking tiles and lightbulbs shattering in their sockets. Glass rained from overhead like snow. The remaining still-intact bulbs flickered in and out. “I’ll be taking your son and I’ll be going. Did you think I would not find out about him? You tried, I suppose, but it is time to pay the piper.” He made no effort to hide what he was: a demon. He dusted off the front of his white spotted suit jacket and calmly acknowledged Leone, his smile cementing itself but growing eerily sharp at the edges. “Witch, you stink of magic. I will tear you limb from limb if you don’t unhand my charge.”
“Demon, I could say the same. Are you keen on getting blown off the face of the earth today?” Leone didn’t realize that he curled the whelp into his chest as if to defend it. “What do you want with it?”
“That’s mine,” he insisted.
“It’s mine! Shiobana promised it to me!” Perhaps he was being a bit whiny. Leone didn’t care. He healed Yuu like he was told, and dammit, he was going to get what he was owed.
“His name is Haruno,” Shiobana supplied, and both of them whipped around with venom dripping from their glares. Yuu wilted under the force of a twofold stare.
“That’s interesting,” the demon drawled, “Because the delightful missus in the hospital bed over yonder has also promised me the same child.”
Shiobana tittered a nervous little chuckle.
Leone cracked his knuckles and Shiobana flinched. “That’s fascinating. I’ll smite her and we can discuss this further when, say, hell freezes over?” He shifted Haruno onto one arm, freeing up the other hand as the remaining bulbs in the room went out. Light streamed through the windows and shone through Leone’s hair.
“We’ll need to negotiate more favorable terms. But yes, let’s. What’s your name, anyway?”
“I’d rather not share. But while we’re here, it’s Abbacchio to you.”
“Likewise. Buccellati.”
Magic crackled through him. The urge to release it into the world with Shiobana’s body as a conductor grew stronger and stronger.
“Remember the contract?” she gasped. Shiobana’s pitiful idea of self-defense was to draw her arms up to her chest and protect her neck. Legs tensed and shifted underneath thin hospital blankets as if she was preparing to run but unwilling to make the first move. It would do her no good. A dreadful hand with dreadful long nails reached towards Shiobana where she lay in bed, stunned, like a deer in headlights, or perhaps a deer before a wolf. All the energy in the room gathered in his blood, ready to shock right through her as a punishment for daring to trick two immortals. It made contact with her shoulder.
Nothing happened.
“What?” he said dumbly. Shiobana swallowed.
“The contract, you ass,” Buccellati smacked the back of his head and Leone swore at him.
“Then you do it!”
“I can’t. She took us both for a ride.” Buccellati slapped a palm to his forehead.
“And you’re not even going to try?”
“Why waste my time?”
Haruno began to cry and Leone frantically shushed him. Maybe he was in over his head raising a child, but he’d never say that in front of Buccellati; his pride was on the line now and he refused to let it wither. “Come on, come on, come on, Haruno, it’s all right, are you hungry, I can feed you, you don’t need to be upset…” Buccellati didn’t bother to hide his mirth as he watched. “Don’t mock me,” he hissed and moved to disappear into thin air. A hand around his free wrist stopped him, grip tight enough to hurt. He yelped as his attention jolted to the demon’s soulless eyes.
The demon cut straight to the chase. In a voice so much lower than the one he spoke with earlier, he growled, “You won’t take this child from me.” Malice radiated off of him in waves so strong Leone nearly melted into a puddle. “I held up my side of the deal in exchange for this young one, and I will not be swindled out of my reward.”
Leone looked down his nose at him. Disdain pulled his shoulders up and allowed him to stand tall in the face of a cataclysm. “You keep taking the words right out of my mouth.”
“What a conundrum.” Buccellati didn’t let go. It took more effort than Leone was willing to admit to pry the demon’s hands off of his pale wrists. In the morning, he’d have some nasty bruises. “I cannot even soothe my conscience by killing that diabolical woman. How could I let her trick me?” he said. Shiobana was still laying right there. Did he care? Apparently not.
“Since deals keep getting us into trouble, why don’t we make another for good measure?”
Leone didn’t care for suburbia. Everything was too… close together. Humans lived like sardines, crammed together in their tin-can houses, on top of one another in the stench and the filth. Hideous homunculi (children) frolicked about like they had nothing else to do except get on his nerves and be cheerful, which they didn’t, but that didn’t make it any less annoying. And how was he supposed to sleep while hunks of metal and machine-driven magic careened through the streets at all hours of the night?
He dreaded the neighborhood welcoming party. If any mothers knocked at his door with their snivelling brats in tow, he’d hex them and start another Black Death. “Keep a low profile,” Bruno (that was his true name) suggested, but Leone didn’t give a damn. Any interlopers knew the risks when they disobeyed the tasteful DO NOT ENTER mat by the front door.
For Haruno, he’d put up with it. A surprisingly easy child, he’d won the witch over with pudgy fists and toothless smiles, and Leone hated it. All sense departed from him whenever the helpless whelp grinned up at him from his crib and giggled like his neck wasn’t made of flimsy cartilage. It would be so easy to reach down and snap it, and the worst part of being responsible for a child was the way the thought of it disgusted him. Seventeenth-century Leone wouldn’t have flinched. He’d gone soft.
Fatherhood suited him, he thought.