Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

1.1.

Nero mentally cursed. The job was supposed to be easy. Male civilian, with no Flames, no training, no real underworld connection despite recent ventures into the world of crime, not to mention so outrageously out of shape it was a wonder how he hadn’t kneeled over dead yet. Vernon Dursley was just a wanna-be smuggler who didn’t know how to keep his sticky fingers away from the merchandise. The only reason there was even a hit put on him was because his superior was offended at how incompetent his attempt was and wanted to make an example. The job should be a cakewalk even for a no-name hitman like Nero. The only possible complication was the fatso’s family, which was why he was doing stakeout from across the street.

For the life of him, he couldn’t tell what he’d done wrong to result in this. 

“Hello Mister. Are you here for Uncle Vernon?”

1.2.

The kid was a wisp of a thing. He looked about four, although by Nero's intel he knew the boy was a second-grader. With his oversized clothes and that rat nest of hair, he looked more like a street rat than one living in a middle-class household. Everything about his appearance screamed small, weak, unremarkable. 

Except for his eyes. There was nothing unremarkable about those striking green eyes.

“What do you want, brat?” Nero rumbled, trying to make his voice deeper, hoarser, and more unwelcoming to scare the boy away.

The brat didn’t look scared. “You’ve been watching the house,” he announced, “I saw you yesterday, and this morning. You have a telescope.”

Nero hated that the kid sounded more confident than he, a professional hitman, felt. “What’s that got to do with your uncle?”

The kid’s eyes flicked, very deliberately, down at Nero’s waist. Where the gun was poking out of his waistband.

Shit. Shit.

“Uncle Vernon’s not a good man,” the kid whispered. “He must have annoyed lots of people.”

1.3.

Nero wasn’t listening. His thoughts were static with panic.

He should kill the kid. Had the brat told anyone yet? Were the cops coming? Should he drop the job and run? No matter what, the kid was a witness. He should kill the kid.

He didn’t want to kill the kid. Nero had been a hitman for four years, had been in the Mafia since he was a brat himself, and yet he had never killed kids. He didn’t want to be that kind of monster.

The kid was still watching him with those startling green eyes, calm like Nero didn’t feel.

“He goes to the pub after work every Friday night and always drives back drunk,” the kid murmured, his voice soft but clear. “No one will be surprised if he has an accident.”

What.

His piece said, the brat turned and ran across the street. In ten seconds flat, he disappeared into the house. Dursley’s wife's shrilling voice rose to greet the brat.

What just happened?

Chapter Text

2.1.

For all that his - admittedly limited - hitman sensibilities screeched at him, Nero didn’t cut and run. Instead, he sabotaged Dursley’s car that Friday, then stuck around the house to watch the fallout. He watched as the police came to deliver the news. He watched Dursley’s wife scream in denial and woke up her whale of a son, who utterly failed to understand the sudden tragedy and threw a fit at being woken up. He watched as the cop’s professional sympathy steadily shifted toward annoyance, until he snapped at the new widow and left. He watched for the next few days as the woman ( the kid’s blood aunt ), who had always been a housewife and who didn’t seem to have the skills to be anything else, scrambled to make up for the absence of her husband, rushing her son to school every morning despite his daily tantrums ( she forgot her nephew several times, despite both boys going to the same school. The kid walked to school on those days ). He watched as the woman grew more harried by the day, even snapped at her son a few times, which only caused the spoiled brat to throw even more tantrums and wailed like he was a pig being castrated. 

No one in the house seemed to mourn the dead man beyond the inconveniences his absence caused. After a week, Nero was sure that no one suspected anything about the incident. The files at the police station, when he risked sneaking in to check, classed it as an open-and-closed case of accident due to drunk driving. He reported the successful hit. The client settled the payment, and he left with a recommendation for a job done so squeaky clean.

Everything was fine. The hit turned out perfect despite the complications. He didn’t have to kill the boy. He should leave.

He didn’t.

2.2.

“What do you want, brat?” Nero barked at the kid, who had just joined him in his quiet corner of the park. How the fuck did the kid keep sneaking up on him? He was a professional hitman!

… a pathetic one, as Martino kept reminding him; but still, a professional!

“You’re still here,” the kid had the nerves to sound confused. To be honest, Nero was too. What on earth was he still doing here? He should have booked it weeks ago.

“Not your business. What. Do. You. Want?”

“I wanna say thank you,” declared the kid.

Nero stared. “For your Uncle.”

“Yup.”

“You have issues, brat.”

The kid shrugged. “Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia always called me ‘Freak’. I guess that means I really do.”

2.3.

Nero had never been the best of conversationalists. Even if he had been, what did people say to little boys who thanked them for killing their uncles? Who suggested the plan to kill said uncles?

“Shouldn’t you be at school?” he blurted out. It was Wednesday. Right? His inner calendar said it was Wednesday. Brats went to school on Wednesdays.

The kid flopped down onto the ground in front of him. “Aunt Petunia wants to pull me out of school. Said it’s wasted on freaks like me. She wants me to stay at home and earn my keep.”

Nero was at a loss. “Isn’t primary school mandatory?”

“‘Mandatory’ means we have to go, right?” the kid frowned in question, then at a nod from Nero, continued, “I don’t know, maybe? She will let me go back soon anyway. A few more days of seeing me around and the neighbors will start asking questions. Aunt Petunia hates it when they ask questions about me.”

2.4.

“Does she beat you?” Nero had seen the kind of parenting ‘Aunt Petunia’ tended to do, at least when it came to the boy. It wouldn’t surprise him if she was abusive as well as neglectful. The late Vernon Dursley had bopped the kid on the head a few times before his demise, hard enough to make the boy stumble. Anyone with eyes could see that there was no love lost between the boy and his relatives.

“She tried to bang me on the head with the saucepan once,” the boy said nonchalantly, as if there was nothing remarkable about nearly being brain-damaged by his caretaker. “I ducked though. Uncle Vernon used to hit me with the belt, but he’s gone now. Now I just have to avoid Dudley and his cronies when they go ‘Harry Hunting’.”

Nero knew many kids on the streets, or even in the Mafia, who had less horrible childhoods. He himself was from a reasonably happy home, just torn from it by unfortunate circumstances. Some others, his best friend Martino for example, decided that they stood a better chance on the streets, risks of starving included, than with their shitty families.

He thought back to the man Dursley had been, and wondered if the boy would have done the same, had the bastard lived.

Chapter Text

3.1.

In the end, Nero stayed in England for four months.

It wasn’t all because of his incomprehensible compulsion to check in on the brat. ( Brat was sent back to school when the neighbors started muttering, just like he predicted. The aunt showed no sign of struggling for money despite providing for two kids while not taking on a job. There was still no effort from her or anyone else to teach the residential piglet how to behave like a human being. ) About a month in, Martino had contacted and told Nero that there was something going on with his nominal Famiglia, something that had to do with the Vindice, and to lay low; in fact, just stay the hell away from Italy. Nero had been too happy taking that advice.

When he found himself writing to Martino about setting up a permanent safehouse in the area, Nero finally admitted it: this inexplicable fascination with a civilian boy wasn’t going to end anytime soon.

3.2.

“Hey. So, you're an assassin, right?”

“Hitman,” Nero grunted. He didn’t bother asking the kid how he found the safehouse.

( Nero’s pride might not survive that answer. )

“Is there a difference?” the kid asked, but didn’t sound like he wanted a reply, so Nero just gave another grunt. “Anyway, can you pick locks? Could you teach me?”

At that, Nero turned fully to give the kid a long look. Brat ducked his head, avoiding Nero’s eyes. He wondered why. Given that the first thing the brat asked of Nero was to kill his uncle, this request was almost innocent in comparison. 

“Sure I can,” he drawled, because yes, lock-picking is a basic hitman skill. “Why do you want to learn, though?”

Brat bit his lips, ducked his head even lower to hide his eyes and worried at his oversized shirt in the first obvious show of nervousness Nero had seen during the past month. 

3.3.

“Aunt Petunia moved me to Dudley’s second bedroom,” the kid mumbled, eyes still downcasted. “The lock there is good so I can’t sneak out at night to get food. The Dursleys used to lock the cupboard’s door too, but that one’s broken so it opens if I shake it just right.”

Nero tried hard to ignore the implication that the kid used to sleep in a cupboard, or that he often went to bed hungry. He already knew that his homelife was shit, and at least it was improving. “Don’t they miss the stolen food?”

The kid sneaks a quick offended glance at him. “I don’t take food from the fridge, that’s stupid. I take from Dudley’s snack pile. Sometimes he has midnight snacks. They never notice some of it going missing.”

Nero frowned at him in consideration. Lock-picking was a street brat’s survival skill in addition to hitmen’s, and while this brat still had a roof over his head, he might just as well be considered one. Mind made up, he dug into his supplies to find the lock-picking kit. “Ok, I’m going to teach you how to do this with proper equipment first, then with things more easily found like hairpins or paper clips later…”

3.4.

It didn’t end at lock-picking. Over the next few weeks, Nero found himself giving the brat pointers on sneaking around the house ( which he was already disturbingly good at ), how to pick-pocket small bills from his bullies at school to get healthier meals than his cousin’s snacks ( Nero fed him sometimes, but contracts in Britain were hard to come by for an Italian mafioso, and well, the kid asked ), how to avoid being cornered by and hit back at those same bullies ( there was a whole gang that frequently hunted him; what was wrong with the adults around here that no one stepped in? ), and how to disappear into the crowd when he was pursued ( Nero was an idiot. The brat was seven, and small for his age. He wasn’t going to win any brawl anytime soon ).

Nero was in the middle of Central London, having dragged the brat along on a trip to pad his wallet between jobs and give the kid a chance to practice pick-pocketting in a more anonymous setting, when it occurred to him that he was raising a ruffian.

Chapter Text

4.1.

It took Nero all of three months to start having a nagging notion that Brat might be Flame Active.

The kid healed abnormally fast. The scrapes and bruises he had from scuffles with his cousin’s gang never stayed longer than a day or two. A large gash on his arm once disappeared overnight. Another Italian mafioso would have realized that much sooner, but admittedly Nero had never been the sharpest tool in the shed. And it wasn’t like there was an easy way to tell for sure, either. Unless you were absurdly strong and/or had one of those nifty rings the biggest Famiglie held a monopoly on, Flame uses were mostly unobtrusive. Which was good, really; Omerta would be nothing but a joke if they were throwing around visible fire on the streets. 

Nero was also leery of asking the brat outright about any more unusual abilities. If it turned out he was wrong and Brat picked up something from his questioning, he’d be forced to either kill the kid or induct a Flameless seven-year-old into the Mafia to avoid a one-way trip to Vendicare ( and it was pathetic, how he knew, for sure, that Brat would pick up something. The kid had an uncanny talent in weaseling things he wanted out of Nero without him catching on until days later. ) On the other hand, if Brat was really Active, and Nero learned that for sure , then he’d be forced to conscript the kid anyway. 

Somehow, the idea sat wrong with him.

4.2.

Nero dithered. For days, until one night he startled awake and realized the problem he had with the idea of pulling the kid into the Mafia.

The problem wasn’t that Brat was too young ( although he was ), or that the Mafia might kill him in short order ( although it might ).

The problem was that he might thrive .

4.3.

Brat barely had any morals. Nero had glimpsed that from their first meeting, and that understanding had only deepened since. The kid didn’t feel anything about his uncle’s death, not even malicious glee. He saw nothing wrong with robbing complete strangers, and barely reacted to his own injuries after fights with the kiddy gang, or, more concerningly, the injuries he caused in return. The look in his eyes after one such fight, which left him with a series of scrapes and deep bruises, when he reported to Nero of breaking another kid’s arm , reminded Nero of some of his own colleagues .

“Natural-born hitman,” Martino once told him after one such colleague freezed him with just a look . “Some people just seem to be born for Mafia life. Even trained killers normally have some reactions the first time they take a life, or get queasy with things like outright massacres , but not them. They adapt real quick to the lifestyle, better than even the Mafia-raised ones, so they tend to rise in rank much faster than normal mafiosi. Fortunately they also tend to be snapped up by the likes of the Varia and don’t deal with small fries much, so if you ever run into one of those, just stay out of their way and pray they ignore you.”

Except, Nero couldn’t stay away from this brat . And he knew , with absolute certainty , that if he took the little bratling into the Mafia and the kid somehow didn’t die within the first week, then it was only a matter of time before he grew into one of those .

If he wasn’t already one.

Chapter Text

5.1.

“So you think I have this Flame thing too?” Brat asked, still poking Nero’s arm with the pocket knife and a worrying amount of fascination. Nero grunted, held out a hand, and with a pout Brat gave it back.

( Good thing, too. Nero wasn’t exactly good with his Lightning Flames, or he wouldn’t be doing grunt work. If this went on any longer Brat might actually draw blood. )

“Likely Sun Flames, with how fast you heal. Strong Suns can even heal others.”

“One time I turned my teacher’s wig blue,” Brat offered. “Can they do that?”

Of course this brat had a secondary. “That sounds like Mist Flames. Mischief makers.”

“That’s the dark blue one, right?” Nero nodded. “And Sun’s yellow.”

Brat mulled that over. “Can I have the Sky one too? Orange?”

Nero snorted. Ambitious brat. “You wish. Skies are rare . The whole of Italy has only, like, a handful.”

Brat scowled at him, adorably offended. Nero stifled a laugh and held his tongue. He might just find himself short of a few gears and his wallet if he actually called the little bastard adorable.

5.2.

Of course, since Brat was both a quick study and an overachieving little shit, two days later the kid greeted Nero with a smug smirk and a palmful of yellow Flames that occasionally flickered into indigo. 

Because why not? Apparently.

5.3.

“Does this mean I’m going back to Italy with you?”

“No!” Nero barked. The kid jumped, wide eyes looking askance at him. He pulled at his hair and screwed his eyes shut. “Fuck.”

Nero had been relieved when he got the news from Martino that his Famiglia was no more. The Vindice had taken all the upper echelon for some unstated offense, and the lower ranks had scattered when their neighbors moved in to fill the power gap. While that meant Nero had been effectively set adrift, it also meant that he was no longer duty-bound to bring this ridiculously powerful kid he found into the Famiglia.

He should have considered that Brat might want to be Mafia though. More fool him.

5.4.

“Look,” he finally said. “You have it good here. Don’t roll your eyes at me, I don’t mean your aunt’s anyone’s ideal caretaker or your bully problem. I mean you still have a safe place to sleep, you can eat somewhat reliably, and you’re not risking your health or your life at the mercy of the elements. Or harden criminals’. I’m effectively homeless, you’ll be too if you tag along with me, and life in the Mafia’s harsh and has no mercy. I’m telling you, don’t throw away those luxuries you still have until you absolutely have to. If you do, you won’t get them back for a long time.”

Brat was clearly not convinced. Every line of his face screamed ‘mulish’. “I bet I will manage. Faster than you anyway.”

Nero barked out a helpless laugh at this ridiculous kid. “I bet you will, too, somehow, but why compare yourself to me ? I’m nobody ! And if you jump in now, that’s also what you’ll be. A nobody. For at least the next five years. Is that what you want?”

For some reason, that made Brat stop short. And Nero didn’t know why that hit a nerve or which one that was, but he was Mafia enough to immediately capitalize on it.

5.5

“Right now, you’re a kid and a scrawny one. Doesn’t matter how strong your Flames are, no one’ll take you seriously when you look weak. And until you have the raw power, the skills, the money, the connections and God knows what else, you are weak. Without those things, you’ll just end up being the goon for whoever’s around, doing whatever they tell you to do.”

Brat visibly chewed on that. “So if I’m powerful enough, I can do what I want?”

Figured Brat would get snagged on that. “You’d get a choice. You’d get to say no, I don’t want to do this job, I won’t work with these people, and have them listen . There’ll still be things you’d have to do anyway and people you simply can’t avoid, just… less of them.”

5.6

Before long, Nero found himself pouring out his whole life in the Mafia to the brat, telling him things he had never even told Martino. He told him about his blood-family, the civilian one before he went aflame in the middle of the street and was snapped up by a nearby mafiosi. He spoke about the beatings in the name of training, the constant gaslight sprinkled with death threats, the daily struggle just to stay alive at the bottom of the food chain. He talked about the friends he made and lost, through death or distance or jealousy. He whispered about his first mission, his first kill, how he got beaten nearly to death for refusing to kill the prostitute who reminded him of his little sister, how the gun felt when the mafiosi in charge forced it into his hand, then to the head of the girl, and squeezed the trigger.

He murmured about his mother, whose name he still remembered but whose face he had nearly forgotten. He didn’t even know if she survived the car accident when he came Active. Even after all these years, he never dared to look for her. He wondered aloud if he could safely do it now, when his Famiglia is no longer hanging over his head. Then he laughed, softly, and decided that he wouldn’t. The man he was now was far from any son she could have been proud of. 

5.7

“The funny thing about the Mafia? Is that even they prefer people with some morals, some lines they won’t cross, some principles they adhere to. Because who would rather deal with completely unhinged monsters? But when you’re at the bottom of the food chain, you don’t get to draw your lines in the sand. If someone holds a gun to your head and tells you, shoot, kill, torture , you don’t get to ask, why, what did they do, or say no, I won’t, that’s a kid . Because that’s a sure-fire way to end up dead.”

Nero couldn’t even look at the kid as the words spilled out of him. Despite that, he could still feel those emerald eyes boring into the back of his neck.

“The day we first met, I should have killed you. I couldn’t. One day, another fucking stupid incident like that will surely kill me.

“In this life, choices, kindness, principles and honors are luxuries only the strong can afford.

“At least wait until you can afford them.”

Chapter Text

6.1

“And then you just, left , the kid back in England. Ok, whatever. Why are you so dead-set against bringing him in, anyway?” Martino asked, slouching on the couch as if this wasn’t an interrogation. Nero wasn’t fooled; the Mist bastard personally taught him how to watch out for this tactic. Still, after the big loan he asked for - out of the fucking blue - to get his safehouses established in a whole new country, as well as months of beating around the bushes about why that was nessesary, he figured he owed his best friend some proper answers.  

Nero nursed his drink for a moment to buy time as he struggled to arrange the words in his head. Unlike him, Martino was a proper, named mafioso. Civilian moral holdbacks such as “children shouldn’t live a life of crime” simply wouldn’t fly with the man. Finally, he said, “I think, if morality was a scale and we put the whole Costa Nostra on it, right now the kid would land somewhere closer to the inmates in Vendicare than us run-off-the-mill mafiosi.”

6.2

“Ok. Explain that to me.” 

Martino’s nonchalant words were belied by the sudden sharpness of his gaze. Nero begrudgingly took the cup of coffee the Mist pushed at him in exchange for his tumbler of alcohol, silently bemoaning the buzz he just got going. “Well, you know how even the most hardened mafioso knows the difference between right and wrong? Like, we may not often do what’s right, but we still know what it is?”

Martino stared. “Are you implying that the brat doesn’t have even a stretchiest basis of a conscience?” Then, when Nero failed to respond, he put his head in his hands as if warding off a headache, “ Dio mio . How is it that every time you open your mouth, it just sounds worse and worse?”

“It’s not the brat’s fault!” Nero tried to defend… either the kid or his own decision to stick with the kid, he didn’t know. “It was those relatives of his! That whole household was beyond screwed up!” As far as Nero understood, they might as well have called the kid the Antichrist. Everything he did was wrong according to those people. And of course, their precious Diddykins was a perfect little angel whose everything was a gift to humanity. 

Jesus. It was a wonder Brat wasn’t even more screwed up, growing up with them.

6.3.

“If that’s the case, isn’t leaving your mostro piccolo alone a whole continent away even more of a bad idea?”

Nero started to wave his cup dismissively before thinking better of it. This problem, he had given careful thoughts to. “I’m not leaving him completely alone. I’ve already set up a PO box in London so that I can send him letters. I just need to do that again on this side so that he can send his letters to me.”

Martino just looked at him for a moment, before, for some reasons unknown to Nero, sighing heavily. “Well. As long as you’re sure.”