Chapter Text
Dino is six years and eleven months old when he wakes, panting from what he really hopes is a nightmare. There’s a little girl who smiles at him with a poison sweet smile - she’s his own age, not the chibi form the Arcobaleno wear - wearing the Sky Pacifier, and then there are flashes of battles, of a Pegasus with Sky Flames for its mane and wings that nuzzled his neck, and of a little brother who looked a lot like a brunette clone of Vongola Primo.
It takes several nights before he ‘remembers’ the little girl’s name - she’s Yuni, and ‘remembers’ her murmuring in his ear just before she steps into the arms of a blonde Lightning, that she needs him to remember everything for her. That she’ll always be too young to change anything, and that the others all have gifts that’ll get tangled up in these memories without someone else - him - acting as a catalyst. His body and his mind don’t yet remember what the 'trauma' that had caused him to Activate was, but his soul, the source of his Flames does; he wakes up from that dream with Sky Flames dancing over his skin, his Flames abruptly Active. He manages to hide the Activation; he’s not sure he knows how he did, but he does.
But the dreams keep pouring over him, night after night, until he’s left with eyes rimmed with bruising and worried siblings and those same newly Active Flames are escaping his control. He can feel them, flickering and dancing beneath his skin and at the back of his eyes and that he does his best to conceal; he doesn’t want to acknowledge that ‘mere’ dreams have sent him Flame Active, might make him his Familiga's heir. But he does greedily accept all the hugs he’s offered by his older sister; something about the dreams makes him miss her desperately, but he hasn’t ‘remembered’ why, yet, and he’s not sure he wants to; not with how real the dreams are starting to feel.
But they’re just dreams. He tells himself that, over, and over and over again, until they offer him some potentially verifiable names, like those of the other Skies that feature in them. He asks his father careful, artless questions, using every bit of the diplomacy he remembers from the ‘dreams’ - he refuses to consider them anything other than dreams, but. The current Giglio Nero heiress is Aria; she has no siblings or cousins, but her mother does carry the Arcobaleno pacifier of the Sky. He tries another, only to find that there are only three Vongola boys, all of whom are older than him, that his father hasn’t heard anything about a fourth - Xanxus must still be on the streets of Sicily with his mother - and none of the Vongola boys look like Ricardo, let alone Giotto.
He has to stop then; his father is looking at him a little strangely, and he’s not ready to be told he’s crazy yet - or worse, for his father to get ideas about matchmaking. He’s dreamt of at least two separate attempts to marry a ‘teenage version of him to an almost adult Aria, and that was without him showing possible signs of a gift like that of the Giglio Nero line. His great-grandmother had been a rare Giglio-Nero second child, so it was possible, he supposed, but the ‘dreams’ the following night insisted that that wasn’t the source of his knowledge; that if it had been Giglio Nero precognition, he wouldn’t have been able to remember, not yet. Yuni had implied that the whole reason that he could remember any of what he was ‘remembering’ was that he hadn’t had a gift like the Vongola’s - or the Giglio Nero’s - for it to get tangled up and confused with.
They had to be ‘dreams’. He was the youngest child, not the heir, and yet he'd been commanding Cavallone men in some of those dreams. They couldn’t be true memories; not with his siblings still alive, if Latent. He was already too clumsy for his father to decide to bypass his older children even for an Active youngest. And the fees for an Arcobaleno's services were too high to waste on tutoring a useless younger son, so that couldn’t be a memory of the Arcobaleno riding on his shoulder. But even with his denials, the nightmares keep coming thick and fast, and detailed, and he now knew too much about the way that the Giglio Nero's visions work - information that would have never been let out of the Family if there wasn’t something odd going on, and he understands the Vongola hyper intuition, it’s limits and it’s strengths in the same way, one that he has no idea how to explain. He’d think his mind was creating things out of whole cloth, but he before he can dismiss the knowledge, can shove it into the same box he keeps any number of other thoughts about things the dreams teach him, he gets dragged along to Federico di Vongola’s birthday party.
And the knowledge allows him to win a game of hide and seek with two Active Vongola Skies, who both have multiple Guardians. He almost fails to pass off as a fluke, but no-one's ever told him what the gift of the Cavallone Skies is. Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised, given his father’s Latent status; but he pretends he ‘felt’ them hunting him, allowing him to change his hiding place stealthily enough to evade detection and while the Ninth gives him an odd look - his clumsiness is already well known - no one interrogates him further.
Then the first of the absolutely verifiable dreams comes true. The Vongola Ninth brings home a street kid, with blood red eyes, a temper and active Flames and proclaims him his son. And he has to accept that at least some of the dreams might be memories of things still to happen.
Some of the dreams, the memories say the Ninth lies; others that the man speaks truly, but not the whole of the truth. There’s a strong undertone of ‘all this has happened before, and all this is happening again’ and he already hates that phrase; what’s the point if this all has already been decided. He says ‘No’, it will not; he will not allow his siblings to die - not even if that will make him heir, will make using the Familiga’s assets easier; nor will he leave his Tsu-nii to suffer under the Seal - it’s not been placed, not yet, and if he has his way it won’t be. And he knows enough about the zero-point ice from other dreams to want to avert Xanxus’s fate, too.
The more he tries to change things, the more resistant to being changed they seem to become. At least the major events; he suspects he just hasn't found the right lever yet - the small things do change when he pushes them. He breaks into his Father's office - his sister is happy to help with what she thinks is a little bit of mischief, distracting their father and his men long enough for him to plant a few harmless surprises - and tweaks household’s duty rotas, replacing his current bodyguard with his Romario, who is currently a teen just out of training.That helps significantly with his clumsiness, especially when he allows himself the light ‘tether’ that’s the start of a Guardian Bond. Even if his clumsiness has saved his life, once or twice, he refuses to be as much of a liability as he remembers it making him prior to Reborn’s tor-training. With Romario as his bodyguard, he can train and maybe if he fails to change things enough, when Reborn comes, he won't be quite so hopeless.
With his reduction in clumsiness, he manages to talk his Father into sending him to one of the two feeder schools for the ‘Mafia’ Academy; it’s the one slightly further away from their home, which takes all the diplomacy skills he can remember from the ‘dreams’ - which definitely aren’t dreams, he accepts at this point - to manage. But it’s the one he remembers Squalo talking about attending prior to the Academy - his older self had been homeschooled, his clumsiness too much of a liability.
He wants to befriend Squalo earlier - and as an equal. Not that they weren't friends before - Squalo had certainly brought him enough souvenirs from missions and being willing enough to back off when he’d demanded it - but with Romario in tow, he can keep up with the silver-haired - currently Latent - Rain, rather than just being the class joke. He prefers it this way; especially as his next, unnerving step, the one he's still trying to talk himself into, is to befriend Xanxus di Vongola.
He also starts to suspect that maybe Romario remembers some of the future too, for some reason. He’d been expecting complaints to be directed at his Father for the older teen’s ‘babysitting’ duties; looking after the clumsy and useless youngest Cavallone isn’t exactly the assignment that most up and coming foot soldiers would want. His suspicions are confirmed when Romario's Flames start to unfurl, starting the slow, slow shift from Latent to Active that comes with deliberate training to activate them rather than any of the more traumatic and rapid techniques. His own are Active, but he's still hoping that the part of his nightmares where he commanded the full might of the Cavallone wouldn't come true, so he has them wrapped up impossibly tight, not letting out more than the absolute minimum necessary to maintain the tether to Romario he's using to keep himself half-way stable. When Romario's fully Active, he'll see if his Flames still want a full bond with the older mafioso - he hopes they do. He misses the full depth and breadth of that quiet, stabilising bond.
(He sneaks into his father's office again, makes sure that the folders with the information his father and his right hand need to catch the pair of underBosses who nearly ruined the Family are near enough to the surface that they might get looked at in time.)
Iemitsu Sawada drops out of sight for three months - he's annoyed with himself that it takes two of those months to remember why the CEDEF head might have done so, though some of the delay has to be put down to two facts; the sheer quantity of data the dreams have dumped into his brain, and that he's not formally in the Cavallone information loop - he has to listen at keyholes and sweet talk information from his father's men, rather than just being told, and maybe, just maybe he misses being the Boss. Just a little bit. But he remembers Tsuna, remembers adoring his 'little brother', and the trials and tribulations inflicted on him, and he makes himself approach Xanxus at the next of the interminable Vongola events he's dragged to. His father was showing off that like the Vongola Ninth, he too had managed to sire multiple Skies, and parading his older sister beneath the Vongola boys' noses; she’s Latent, but even a Latent female Sky is a major catch.
Meeting Xanxus now, with his own Flames active, and on an almost equal footing, makes the Wrath Sky a far less intimidating creature than Xanxus at fifteen, angry and far more physically capable had been for his older self. Xanxus is just a scared street kid, thrown in the deep end of Mafia society, not a raging - and wrathful - teenager. He wishes again that he had his adult growth - the ‘dreams’ have knocked the Vongola Ninth off his pedestal, and he can see the next six years of mistakes the man makes unfolding before him, and he wants nothing more than to be able to confront the leader of the Alliance, but he can't. He can't even get to close to the older Sky, lest the old man's dubiously functional intuition works long enough to figure out that he's not just the nine year old youngest son of the Cavallone Ninth.
(Not that he thinks the old man's intuition is that accurate, but he might pick up something was wrong, and then there would be Bouche Croquant digging around in his head, and killing the Mist, using one of the methods that Mukuro had drilled into him when they were up against the Millefiore, would ring alarm bells. And shit; the Estraneo!)