Disclaimer TO THE EXTREME: My righteous fury at this whole damn Inheritance Ceremony Arc is disclaimer enough, I believe. *seethes quietly in a corner*

This one's kind of weird, but we'll see...

He remembered the face of a woman, but only vaguely – the hair was very dark and the eyes were very green, but the rest of the details were soft and muted and blurred, as if the memory was just behind a clouded glass.

That was all he had ever been able to recollect of his birth mother.

There would be times, when he was feeling small and alone and vulnerable, when he could remember more – when the eyelashes would be long and lovely; or the nose would be perfect, absolutely perfect; or when the lips would be –

And then it would fade, and he would remember the hair that was very dark and the eyes that were very green and nothing else, really, because the haze that concealed the rest of her features would creep back into his mind and settle there, a weight on his heart and on his shoulders.

But he supposed it was more what he remembered feeling that counted – the warmth and the safety that accompanied the memory, the sense of being loved and protected that overwhelmed him and encompassed him and lulled him to sleep at night. It was the feeling, and not the face, that made a mother, and that was why she was still his and he was still hers; and that was why he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she would always be his mother; and that was why he still had her, his mother, somewhere, waiting for him…

Somewhere.

.~o~.~o~.~o~.~o~.~o~.

He had asked the Boss, once, where his mother was.

The Boss hadn't answered for a very long time, and he had listened, during that time, to the overwhelming and weighty silence of an unanswered question, broken only by the ticking of the clock and the sounds of an ink pen on paper – the Boss, scratching out an important note. The Boss was always writing important notes. Always doing something important, too important for anyone else to do and too important to be interrupted.

He'd had to wait until the Boss put down his pen.

The silence hung heavy in the air, and the Boss' eyes weighed heavy in his heart.

He had asked the Boss, once, where his mother was, and the Boss had left the room without a single word.

He had asked the Boss, once, where his mother was, and he understood, and he would never ask again.

.~o~.~o~.~o~.~o~.~o~.

He met the hitman Reborn in a back alley in Sicily, on a very warm night in the middle of April. He was four years old, almost five, and it was far too late for any four year old to be out on the streets alone.

Naturally, that was why he had been sent out in the first place. The Boss had taken to giving him jobs in which he wandered the streets, pretending to have lost his way, sniveling and looking pitiful to the best of his ability until some rich older woman took pity on him and offered him help or money.

Low-level, pickpocket jobs. He hated them, hated tricking the women like a common con man, hated stealing their money like a dirty pauper. But they were jobs, and they were from the Boss, and whatever the Boss asked, he would do.

The night that he met Reborn was also the night that he was truly, genuinely lost.

He had wandered into the alleyway, scared and sad and alone; had looked up to find the baby hitman leaning against the wall with his fedora over his eyes; had frozen, hoping the other hadn't noticed him…

And suddenly Reborn was asking the same thing that all of those fool women had asked all day, where is your mother, little boy?, but there was something cold and razor-sharp to his voice that made him seize up, made his stomach drop, made his heart freeze, and in a moment of piercing clarity he knew, he knew, that Reborn was no mere child and that those words were no innocent query – they were a knife, aimed straight for his heart.

He had never before felt this same sense of burning blistering searing hatred or pure unadulterated abject fury as he did now, towards this child-that-was-not-a-child, and he felt his face twist up and his fists clench and he knew that he would not forgive.

But Reborn had smirked, had brushed past him, had knocked him to the side, had smeared the salt all over his wounds:

You don't know where your mother is.

The words hung in the air long after they'd been spoken, heavy and tangible, and he sank to the ground and tried to stay calm and felt around in the dark of his mind for the memories of those beautiful green eyes and that beautiful dark hair and found cobwebs and dust instead.

.~o~.~o~.~o~.~o~.~o~.

The day that he was sent to Japan by the Boss was the day after his fifth birthday.

There had been no birthday party.

.~o~.~o~.~o~.~o~.~o~.

The dreams he remembered the most vividly were the ones involving sinister men in dark suits with dark eyes and dark hats, darting from shadow to shadow as he watched helplessly from the sidelines and cried, because he knew their aim, knew who they wanted to point their gun at and erase from his life and heart and mind and memory, and he could do nothing about it because he couldn't move –

She was washing dishes. Always, in the dream, she was washing dishes, standing in the kitchen, the running water too loud for her to hear the door open, to hear the footsteps in the hallway, to turn around until he was pointing the gun at her heart –

The gunshot would ring out, and she would fall to the floor, and her eyes were open wide, and her hair was spread under her head like a halo, and he would cry and cry to watch something so pure breathe its last breath before it even hit the ground –

And when he woke up shaking and crying and Mama was there to comfort him, every time, without fail, holding him close and whispering soothing words to him in the dark, he could never remember if her eyes had been green or brown, if her hair had been dark or light, if she had been a memory or not.

.~o~.~o~.~o~.~o~.~o~.

The day the realization hit him was four days after he turned nine, on the first of June, when he snuck downstairs after I-pin had fallen asleep and tugged on Mama's pants leg and she, rather than scolding him for being up past his bedtime, smiled sweetly at him and sat him down at the table and slid the very last piece of birthday cake in front of him and told him that he was a good boy.

He smiled at her, scraping a finger along the icing on the top, and he felt the sense of warmth and safety that always seemed to accompany Mama, the sense of being loved and protected that always overwhelmed him and encompassed him and lulled him to sleep at night. It was the feeling, and not the face, that made a mother, and that was why she was his and he was hers; and that was why he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she would always be his mother.

That was the exact moment that he knew, as clearly as a nine year old boy possibly could, how incredibly lucky he really was.

(P.S. I don't know what I think about the line breaks. They're sort of tacky, but it's not like I can do anything else about it.)

This idea hit me when PhantomsDaughter13 and I were discussing Reborn! at 2:00 in the morning in the middle of July, and we noticed that not a single member of Tsuna's Family has, like, a past that's worth mentioning. I mean, they go into Gokudera's in detail, but...who's to say that everyone else's isn't just as harrowing? I mean, where the hell are the Sasagawa parents? What on earth happened to Yamamoto's mom? Under what circumstances did the newly-cursed Fon have to take I-pin under his wing? And, the most glaringly obvious of all - has anyone else ever noticed how Lambo doesn't really seem to have a mother? Or any family at all, for that matter?

I hold a special spot in my heart for the kid (we share the same birthday, teehee~), and I felt kind of bad for him. So I wrote this.

Poor Lambo. All he really wants is love and attention.