https://archiveofourown.org/works/62776159?view_full_work=true
The act of Sealing was, for a lack of kinder words, vile. Vigil had really only seen it done once in Italy. An informant of hers had been caught up in a small-scale war between Families – not the kind that larger Families like Vongola liked to stain their fingers in, but still a war, with consequences for the losing side. The heir to the Seppia family was captured, Sealed, and married off to the newly-crowned Don of the Rondine family – and the Seppia family, having lost its only eligible heir, was dissolved and subsumed into the Rondine family. It had not been a pretty or clean war – both sides lost an excess of fifty people, and it was only through the rushed Sealing of the Seppia heir’s Flames, rendering them useless, did the Rondine come out on top. And, to nobody’s but Vigil’s surprise, the Seppia heir died half a year later. They were tricky things, Flames – not only did they represent the Dying Will of their holders, they were, too, literally their Will, and also had far-reaching effects on their bodies. Or so it ran in this world – this was all entirely new to Vigil. Flame theory was in its cradle, its development unexpectedly slow for something discovered more than 400 years ago, and the available and comprehensible information even less for someone who wasn’t knee-deep in research locked behind Mafia academia doors. Numbers and data and metaphysics; something for Bishop to immerse herself in, but not for Vigil, who preferred the field to the lab. The Seppia heir died not of suicide (what she’d first thought it was), but Flame Starvation and its effects – dyspraxia, brain fog, depression; developed lupus and Guillaine-Barre syndrome. A particularly acute case, the reports read; usually it took a decade or more for the autoimmune diseases to even manifest. There were academic papers (in Mafia academic journals) published about the Seppia heir, exploring the reasons it came on so acutely; most came to a conclusion of neglect and abuse by the Rondine family – pressure to birth an heir despite the Seppia heir having a history of miscarriages and reluctance, not being allowed to leave the Rondine mansion, not even to the gardens, malnutrition, even the occasional beating or two as relayed by an informant. And if the Rondine Don died in a tragic car accident that no one could’ve seen coming, that obviously wasn’t the work of Vigil and her ragtag team of amateur spies. And if the Rondine family faded into obscurity after that despite a hasty claim by a cousin of the Don, well, the Mafia didn’t have space for Families who couldn’t even keep their Dons alive, did they? Vigil remembered how the Seppia heir’s body looked in the coffin, and didn’t want to see Squire’s body in place of it.
