Mio Famiglia, Mio Scudo

Episode XIII

Mizushima Heiji, aged fourteen, stared at the large wooden door in front of him. Sure, he'd known that his mysterious sky, or fire, lived in the old house, but he hadn't expected it to be so... So... Massive.

The middle schooler swallowed difficulty, his throat feeling dry and hoarse.

This was it. He'd finally, finally, meet the man who had visited him in his room that night, who had since then been plaguing his dreams by appearing into them as a warm and welcoming presence, who had been somehow calming him from afar.
Oh how nervous he was, he really wished that Kousuke had come with him but...

"Go to the Oda residence? Sorry pal, I can't do that right now", Kousuke said as he smiled apologetically to him, "I need to grade all of these tests".

Oh, Heiji knew that Kou was lying to him, he wasn't stupid, but he'd decided not to push it. The man had been really stressed out lately, spent more and more time with testing out the new spy equipment that the government kept sending him, tweaking them, improving them. It didn't take a genius to realise that the older Mizushima was being held between a hammer and an anvil as both the government and the mafia wanted his services.

Heiji reached his hand up, ready to press the doorbell. He had to get up onto his tiptoes to do this, much to his displease. Why couldn't he be the size of an adult already? His index finger nearly brushed against the button.

"A, so you're the Coal Guardian? Come on in, he's waiting for you", a man with bright blue eyes and black hair said suddenly from behind the teen, who stumbled backwards in surprise. "Oh- Ah- Um! I am Heiji! Nice to meet you sir!" he said perhaps little too loudly as the man blocked his left ear with his finger, his brow twitching ever so slightly. "Cain, Inferno", the foreigner said as he opened the gate, gesturing the teen to come in.

Cain sensed a strange aura coming off of the house next to the Oda residence, his brows furrowed in confusion and eyes turned into slits. Fire flames, he could sense them coming off of the house that belonged to that scary teen, who was supposed to be in high school already, Kyoya Hibari. He sent some of his own to investigate, but soon were stopped by a mix of Glow and Rain flames. His blue eyes widened as he noticed the person in the distance, his short black hair and darker complexion stating that he was a Kusakabe. The two conversed in silence with only their flames and Cain withdrew his own.

There was an injured man who lived next door, he'd been injured for a long time as he'd lost one of his own, and the foreign Glow was there to keep him safe and sound.

Cain led the boy, who had been staring at him with worried expression, inside, where the air conditioning was already fuming despite the fact that it was only the start of the May. Taran and Nyx apparently couldn't take heat very well so Naoki was trying to play it safe and keep the temperature down. In reality it was Naoki, who had slight trouble with adjusting to the changes in environment and especially the temperature. He decided not to mention it though because by default some people had the twice damned habit of doing something that is simply known as "One upping" in which you attempt to make your own problems sound even worse despite of going through exactly same things. This seems to happen especially often with people who are too lazy to check what certain temperature in Celsius is in Fahrenheit and viceversa. More than once Naoki himself had come across a foreigner stating that him feeling hot in 30 Celsius degrees is nothing compared to 86 Fahrenheit. Newsflash, it's the same temperature in different units. However this never quite seemed to be caught on by the tourists who came to his mother's job in order to file complaints to the police about the weirdest things, one being loss of subtitles. What did these people even think they were in? An anime?

To say the least, Naoki had a great dislike towards those kinds of people and thus usually wrote them off as unnecessary drama creators, who made his usual days slightly unsightier.