[attr="class","ctapp3"]She's the liveliness of a flame with as little pain as her own dainty hands are capable of feeling, vibrant in color, bright in the dark, ever changing, and always crackling with life. She laughs with the heartiness of a child whose never known fear, grins with the starlight of one thousand supernovas, and she throws open the doors of the room, and it not even the swinging motion that demands attention – it is the look on her face, the swagger in her step, and the impression that wherever this woman is going, adventure and excitement are sure to follow. Surely, she seems the sort of woman to fly by the seat of her pants (or, rather, skirt), mocking the stiff and sturdy regiments upheld by the Militants and acknowledging issues as problems to be dealt with by an older, wiser version of herself some handful of hours into the future, and it is a wonder how she ever manages to get by in life when the secrets the L'Idra crowds beg her to spill and are most certainly spilled afterward is that she simply does not care, that she takes things as they come, blames no one but herself, and shrugs off the issues as if they were dust specks decorating the sleeve of her shirt. Attention is what she begs for, and attention is was she receives, always the center of some bustling crowd and never one to disappoint what the lot have to ask of her, whether it be enticing stories, the likes of which she assures are real but are almost never firm in their truths, or the most humorous jokes to be found on that side of the city. Truly, she is a charmer, charismatic and as adoring of the people who flock to her as they are of her. After all, she'd be nothing if the people did not love her – and when they leave her come morning, she'll simply have to make do by finding more. This constant cycle of replacement, however, runs as deep as the epidermis of her skin, the meaning of each fleeting relationship less than the last and each passing face serving only to take another swing at a heart desperate for some sort of real connection. Not that's even been very good at those; smile and wave is her game, a grin to draw people in and a wave to welcome them – a grin to contrast watering eyes and a wave to see them off. (If she doesn't push them away first, after all, they'll leave her to watch them stumble and fall, pushed to a distance where she can't catch them before its too late.)

The smiles and the laughs, the stories and the jokes, however, are all fake. Idra was never a person's person from the beginning, preferring the solitary company of her Madre and only her Madre and trading her in for her beloved Alessandro when it came time for her to enter into the Bondone legacy. Where she looks to be spontaneous, she's carefully calculated, each flick of the wrist, each stumble in the bar a thought out action meant to invoke a reaction from the watching and listening audience. They think her charming or they think her a pushover solely because she wishes them to do so – and when they smother her in their secrets because they think she cannot wield them as weapons or is simple too kind a soul to ever so such a thing, so quickly does the sweetness from her facade fade, the orange flicks of flame dying into the hottest, bluest fire at its core. She was not assigned the racket geared toward blackmail for pretty lashes and common blood. They assigned her because she knows best how to play the crowd. She knows best what hurts and what does, how to soothe and how to burn, and at the end of the day, she sits on her mafioso throne with a saltwater taffy grin, footrest made of the poisoned forms of those she's done away with. She's as much a hydra in blood as she is in ability; multiplied limbs are impressive, perhaps, but the crimson that runs through her veins burns with a venom so strong, the air around her alone could kill. Only when she wants it to, of course. It's all practiced. Sixty-four years in the business, and she's rehearsed the play so many times, she could preform it while asleep.

The purple-haired woman is every bit as ruthless as she is fake, no pity spared for those who fall outside of the Bondone scope. When she was young, she wished ill upon her father, her family, and stranger simply because their lives mattered not to her own, and now that she has grown, her love finds itself loaned only to those who bare the same surname, her apathy or – in the instance that the person is an unfortunate soul – enmity shredded onto those outside it. Fool her once and you are a dead man. Despite the strong, if not iffy moral code upheld by the family – no unnecessary killing, no theft, no mindless crime – and the fact that her supposed lid on her emotions would imply that she'd be able to follow that code better than most others, her merciless attitude has left her positions where, more than once, she has almost broken many of the group's own rules simply out of an idea that carrying out the dirty deed would, in turn, benefit the people she cares about. Which isn't to say that she would still or kill to sate any sudden desire to do so, but off days and pent up aggression have lead to scenarios where onlookers believed that was very much the case. Paired with her not-so-blatant distaste for the current capofamiglia, the likes of which is displayed in dry humor and passive aggressive jabs at any turn in the road, many in an out of the family who have not the “honor” of knowing her long would imagine her to be the most likely to turn on the group, quick to flake and do the people she's worked so long and hard for in. Those who do know her, however, current capfamiglia included, should know better. She'd sooner lay down her life one thousand times than see the ending of the Cosa Nostra, her loyalty taken to a bizarre extreme, and everything she does is a carefully laid out plan with only the best intent for the Bondone family in mind, even when it seems to combat what the family she's serving to aid thinks and believes.

Especially when it seems to combat what the family she's serving to aid thinks and believes.

[attr="class","ctapp3"]LONG LIVE THE COSA NOSTRA, they tell her, and she clings to it like a lifeline.

It wasn't always that way, of course. She begins her journey in life as a mother's girl, frilled dresses, pretty smile, always in Madre's arms, and ever oblivious of the work that she and Padre partake in. Truly, she is more like her mother in every way: they've the same blue eyes, the same smooth hair – everything from the spidery fingers to the petite little nose on her face to the way she comes home crying one day with ten tongues choking her from a power inherited from the woman before her. Of course, when the rest of the Bondones, all unfamiliar faces that Madre calls her “aunts” or her “grandmother” arrive, they all tell her how much she looks like her father, the one she never sees because he's too buried in his work. It isn't as though he can help it, though; his wife and his daughter are miles away, a different kind that he can never properly wrap his mind around, and while her parent's love is clear, he simply cannot raise her the way she needs to be, thousand armed and million eyed. Instead, it falls to her maternal figure, and twenty years of her life, her body aging just short of ten years, pass as she thinks of how little she thinks of her father, of the rest of her extended family. Quite content would she be simply taking on her mother's maiden name, carrying on the beloved woman's legacy rather than that of her enigmatic father's. Twenty years pass, yes. Twenty years before she meets Alessandro.

He's born to her second cousins, the likes of which were born some fifteen years prior to herself, and where she looks ten, he is just short of that same age. So quickly does she become involved with her relative, distant as she is on the family tree, that the name she had scorned becomes one she wears with pride, the friendship she holds with him one that blossoms far beyond what it should have. She does not love him in the romantic sense, but the platonic adoration she finds herself feeling for him leads her to do a great many things, most of which are not for the better for her, him, or the family around them. He grows faster than she, surpassing her in physical age in a mere five years and skyrocketing past afterward, and when he begins to find himself seriously involved in the family business, his raven-haired acquaintance, too, seats herself at her father's side. It is then that she learns that she was never a mother's girl at all – she is her father in every way aside from his human nature and their opposite genders. They are ruthless, crass, and favor toying with the mind over the body. Most of all, though, they are loyal beyond all else. He dedicates himself to his work, and she dedicates herself to the swiftly retreating Alessandro, throwing herself with a fervor at the things he holds dear as he deepens the chasm between them with each passing day. He goes on to rule at the seat of the family, a grown man with strong aspirations and a great love for the people around him, and despite her look of a teenager, she fights tooth and nail until she, too, has found herself at an elevated throne of a capodecina. She can't give him her everything if she is a lowly soldato, she knows, and when they finally award her the position, she rules her newfound underlings with the fist of an iron giant – with the ferocity of a woman with too much love in a tiny heart.

She learns, however, that her love has grown away from that one particular man. He takes in a son, two-years-old and isolated by alien blood, and for the first time in many years of her heightened position, she puts the needs of the Bondones as a whole above the wants of her beloved; this is not right.

Idra does not despise Luciano. Not at first, anyway. She holds his father with much more esteem than the other capodecinas, watching him with the enthusiasm of a puppy dog, and while their relationship has fallen from the closeness they'd held in childhood to the dreaded “usual,” she still hopes that he cares for her enough to let her play some part in the child's raising. Hoping, however, had not prepared her for permission, and rather than taking an active role as she'd dreamed of when allowed to do so, she sits in the background and watches him with the eyes of a hawk. He calls her Nonna, despite that she's only beginning to look the part of an older teenager simply because she is getting to be in her sixties, and something horrible tugs at her heart when she resolves to call him Bambino in turn. She pities him, if anything; abandoned as a child for goodness only knew what reasons and fortunate enough to land a spot in the greatest family Italy has ever known. (The greatest, at least, in her mind.) There is a fine line, however, between allowing him in and allowing him reign. When the boy's father first speaks of his intent to raise him as an heir to the mafioso, hellfire rages within her – because Luciano is not a Bondone. He can don the title, can pretend all he'd like, but under the skin, in the blood, he is not and will never be a real Bondone, and the fact that Alessandro believes that he can cover that all up, pass the title of capofamiglia off to a male who was so worthless that not even his original parents could deal with him shakes her to the core. Long live the Cosa Nostra, long live the Cosa Nostra – and how can it with that... that thing at its head?

She learns better than to speak out against the capofamiglia so openly, so rudely first hand in the year that follows, mouth spitting venom to rival the blood of the hydra she is named after at him for “disgracing the family name.” There's no punishment under the sun, however, to offer a woman who cannot feel pain, who cannot lose limbs or scar or be decapitated – nothing short of death. She's spared, she thinks, because of their childhood. She's spared once, she thinks. And she will never be spared again. So she sits at her position, quiet as he father dies and her mother carries on with a face as young as ever and the child is raised to take up the reigns of the family. He still calls her Nonna, but when she calls him Bambino in turn, it's covered in subtle barbs, the sort that cling to clothing and don't bother until much later. Later, when he is older. Later, when Alessandro has gone and he has taken his place. The thought sends fire through her veins, and she is glad to see him go, off for the states some thousands of miles away to do goodness only knew what for the family. Infuriated when she, too, is shipped off some handful of years later to ensure all goes well outside of her beloved home of Italy.

America is a disgrace, particularly to someone who has never spoken a word outside of her original Italian in all of the seventy years of her life, but it is is nothing compared to America after the Demon Tide. She's rushed along with the rest of the America-dwelling Bondones and associates south, away from New York and into the safe haven labeled as Sanctum, and the moment they have found themselves inside the massive walls is the moment she realizes that somewhere out there, an ocean and some many countries away, her beloved is gone. Perhaps not in life, but gone forever to her. They will never leave this place, and perhaps he will never leave there – and when Luciano takes his title early, certain of his father's demise, the hydra chews until her mouth is, like in days of old, filled with ten tongues. Just enough to keep her silent.

Long live the Cosa Nostra, Idra has to remind herself, gratefully accepting her renewal of position in the makeshift mafioso they rebuild inside the walls. Her lifeline – her everything. She will never act against something to ensure the preservation of the Bondone name and everything it stands for, and even if she will never pause to let her Bambino know that he is but a candle held to Alessandro's mighty flame, she knows it is the only way.

Long live the Cosa Nostra.

Long live the Cosa Nostra.