She was born as Sawada Tsunayuki.
Welcomed into this world at twenty-seven minutes after midnight on the 16th of October 1998, she greeted the hospital staff as a beautiful healthy tiny baby girl blinking her large sunset-coloured eyes at the nurse while the bewitched women counted the ten perfect fingers and ten just as perfect toes.
Her very entry into this world should have been celebrated, as each new life is owned to be. But the unspoken unfortunate circumstances of her birth were less than happy. Or wanted.
Sadly, it was enough to condemn her …
… because not only was she a girl, and as such lesser to the obviously stronger gender …
… she was the younger twin.
Her fate decided by the laughable difference of seventy-two minutes and one chromosome.
All she was good for ... was to be the ignored spare.
Worthless.
When you are alone in a world of familiar faces, it hurts.
It hurts to stand in a crowd that always moves around you, forwards and backwards, to the left and right, while you are rigidly frozen in place, condemned to watch but never act. Your voice has gone silent, pleads falling on deaf ears and screams drowning in the happy laughter you will never be a part of. Your eyes have finally closed in resignation, the despair in them shadowing once vibrant liveliness into frighteningly dull apathy as those you love, those you care for, stare blatantly through you, your quiet tears not even worth the barest glance or a cursory hint of worry.
No. You stand there, untouchable, unmoveable. Silent, unseen, unheard.
Of no consequence.
And when you close your eyes, when the ignorance, the carelessness begins to encroach on your heart, to encase it in a wall of iron-hard suffering, your lips twitch, trying and failing to form any kind of a smile. You know that it could have been different; your mind is only too aware that there is always hope, that you are still so young, so able to determine your own fate and reach for the stars just rotating in the reach of your trembling frail hands, but you only shake your head and look away.
Being alone when surrounded by those supposed to love and care for you ... is exhausting. It's hard.
You are tired.
And when you eventually give up, when your raw throat is bleeding red and your eyes have lost the last rebelling spark, you finally see. You see what has been there for so long, all along. A wall of immovable indifference.
You never mattered.
You …
You really just want to rest. To leave the tiredness behind.
What are you living for? To only experience disappointment, abandonment and demeaning ignorance?
Was there ever a valid reason for your existence? Were you ever important … to anyone? For just a moment?
Were they ever happy to have a daughter? A sister?
No one answers. No one cares.
And like a marionette with its strings cut, you collapse.
Your strength. Gone.
Your will. Extinguished.
Your determination. Broken.
In a world full of familiar faces that ignore you, you capitulate.
Because when not even hate blossoms in their eyes, when you are so insignificant to those you cherish the most that your own life doesn't matter in any fucking way …
… it's time to let go.
Just let go.
When we grow up, it's only a natural desire to seek our parents' approval, their acknowledgement and praise in what we do and what we are. You want them to be proud of you. To smile with this unmistakeable gleam in their eyes and that ridiculously smug smile on their lips. All you want is their love, their unconditional support. Their acceptance.
Tsuna learned quickly and early on that while her older twin brother was showered in those emotions, that while neither of their parents had a problem showing their endless love and tolerance for him, she would never experience that miracle. At least not at the gracious hands of her own hypocritical family.
And so, she did what she had to.
To survive. To thrive.
She learned to hide her true self away.
If she got better grades then her big brother, her parents flushed a most unfetchingly unhealthy angry red and shouted at her for apparently cheating, for intentionally showing up her wonderful brother and exchanging her own pitiful results with his excellent ones.
… she could never be as intelligent as him. Obviously.
If she got things faster done than him, if she dared to voice her achievement, they glared poisonously, lips white in repressed fury, and threw her out for the day, sometimes even the night, a lesson to not make her brother feel bad and slow; Tsuna learned quickly to neither torment herself by begging to be allowed to return nor even announce when she got something right, instead resigning herself for the undeserved ridicule of being at most second best. Most of the time, even less than that.
… she could never be talented in anything. At all. Obviously.
If she got compliments, no matter what kind, in front of her parents, they strained themselves somewhat painfully by faking a smile for ignorant strangers only to turn quickly around in the secure confines of their nightmarish home and tell her how she was a nuisance and shouldn't bother others with her aggravating presence; that it was pathetic to deceive innocent bystanders into believing she was worth anything, and to obstruct the fact that she was a shame to their family.
… she could never be nice, polite or pretty. Obviously.
Somehow, every fault – imagined or otherwise – seemed to be pretty damn obvious.
To her immediate family, at least.
With each hateful comment, with every derisive reprimand, she died a little more on the inside.
It wasn't like she had ever known what actual approval felt like, or that she missed the love and pride, the deep unconditional acceptance of her …. doting parents – how could she? Missing presumed knowing, recognizing, remembering. She did miss the abstract idea of those feelings, of the warm glow books described it as, but she couldn't miss the actual thing, because as horrible as it sounded, you can't miss what you never experienced. And wasn't that just sad?
She continued to long for it, but her wary resignation always kept her down, kept her silent and away from the wonderful warm light her family was bathed in.
It was a miserable existence.
There was once a little girl that cared too much.
She cared for her mother.
She cared for her father.
She cared for her brother.
She cared for her family.
But when the time came, no one cared for her.
Not even once.
Maybe her older brother could have saved her from the cruel way she had always been treated, could have turned their parents' attitude around, but, well ... he was the apple of their eyes. He was the perfect elder male heir. Perfect Ieyasu. Athletic, intelligent, popular. He shined like the sun, and radiated such a happy contentedness; Tsuna didn't entertain any delusions otherwise – as far as brotherly duties went, he couldn't care less for her, simply because he had been raised to see her as the lesser of them and was satisfied to maintain the status quo their parents had set.
She was merely a bother, a barely necessary tool for emergencies, nothing more.
Ignored, trodden down, thrown out, abandoned, neglected … maybe even, in a not physically violent way, abused. Yes, the spare never mattered to them. She was merely the useless discarded replacement that would hopefully never find purpose and be simply forgotten; in truth, if this was the only use they held for her, then she never wanted to be useful – not if it meant permanent incapacitation or death for her brother. He may hate her, but she could never say the same thing. No matter how hurtful he was, she would always love him. Ieyasu was her twin, and for her at least, that was a sacred bond. It meant something.
There were boundaries she never even contemplated crossing.
Besides her own abhorrence for the mere idea of taking over Ieyasu's position in the family, it would be a bad decision on everyone's part. Her brother was already secretly being trained by their parents to take over the family business in their father's stead.
A family business that dealt in blood, death and violence, in money, greed and sin.
What a terrible inheritance.
Not that anyone knew that Tsuna was more than just peripherally aware of the fact that both of her pathologically lying parents were active members of the Mafia – her idiotic lazy father as the Boss of Vongola's External Advisor office, the CEDEF, and her air-headed knife-wielding mother as a top-notch assassin who had aligned herself with Vongola shortly after her marriage to a member of the main bloodline. It was remarkable how utterly devoted they were … to their little family of three that is.
Tsuna never denied that she was bitter.
She just had no one to tell it to.
No one to vent to. Not that she would have, given the opportunity.
She had grown up barely scraping above destitution, always kept down, kept hopeless; an outcast through no fault of her own.
The most she could expect from her pathetic life was to be married of unsuspectingly for an alliance, as a Vongola heiress of Primo's line… while no one, naturally, told her why she had to marry a complete stranger. They actually believed her to have remained beyond naïve all this time.
With those kind of family?
Please.
Delusional much?
There was naive, and then there was criminally idiotic. Being unaware of her family's dealings despite her parents and brother's blatant use of Mafia gadgets and slang would certainly be the second, and Tsuna simply didn't do idiotic. It wasn't her style.
Not that anyone knew.
Just because she didn't show-cast her abilities and had learned the useful art of hiding her ambitions and personality to keep the peace intact, didn't mean that she didn't continue to advance and expand her mind and art. Just because they had denied her any choice or chance in her own life, didn't mean that she would have to accept that.
As lucky as it would have been for them, she was not a dog who simply rolled over and let others do as they wanted with her, satisfied with a hurried bell-rub.
She was her own woman, and she was fucking tired of playing the useless ignoramus for even greater ignorant idiots.
She knew what was expected of her, but she was not in the least willing to simply accommodate those ridiculous fantasies in their approaching transition into reality.
No one but herself would ever dictate her future.
And her family …
… would learn that lesson.
Very fast.
Very hard.
And way too late.
So. Sad.
What does it mean to be broken?
To be shattered into ten thousand pieces?
Does it mean to lose hope?
Does it mean to give up?
Does it mean to pack and leave?
Does it mean to keep suffering in silence?
Does it mean that your dreams are gone?
Does it mean that no one could help?
Does it mean that you have accepted your fate?
Does it mean that you are too tired to keep fighting on?
Does it mean that you will not even try to pick yourself up?
Does it mean that they have won?
Does it mean that you can't save yourself?
But truly, does it mean …
… that you are beyond help?
Beyond worth saving?
Ten thousand pieces sound like so much, like too much, really, but when you look at the shattered remains around your feet of the miserable girl you once were, when you see how even among those dulled jagged shards the vibrancy of your will, of your life can't be diminished completely, something ignites in your heart.
Strength comes in many forms. Sometimes to be strong does mean to give up, to let go. But - not this time. This time …
… you hold all the shards, all the cards. You, and you alone, will decide if someone rises up from the ashes of your broken self, and should you decide to face this cold world once more, than only you can determine who exactly rises from the grave.
Will you place the shards like an old puzzle, recreate the past?
Or will you cut away the rotten parts, will you take the bright pieces and allow them to heat up the dulled parts that still inhabit their spark and rekindle your fire into a flaming inferno? Will you create something, someone new? Someone … who will fight for themselves? For what they can be? For … a future worth living for?
No one can tell you what to do, not anymore. This ... this is you.
They shattered you. They broke you. They destroyed you.
And know, you can be who you want to be, and only you.
This, is your final decision.
All she had to realistically look forward to in her future was predestined misery … until her fourteenth birthday, that is.
Until the very unexpected day their parents received a very urgent phone call from their Boss and took only Ieyasu with them to Italy to be tested for his Sky Flames, something necessary to surprisingly take over Vongola as the Tenth Boss for their grandfather figure and the Ninth Boss, Timoteo di Vongola, a man who had lost his four sons in rapid succession over the last two years. As a direct descendant of Vongola Primo and the trained heir to the CEDEF, even though one of Timoteo's sons was merely imprisoned for a Coup D'état against his old man instead of being dead, Ieyasu had been unanimously chosen to take over as the Tenth Don of Vongola, and the test was seen as little more than a mere formality solidifying his apparently superior claim …
… that is, until her darling older brother produced … Pure. Hard. Green. Lightning. Flames.
It was hilarious.
Tsuna hadn't been able to contain her hysterical laughter after seeing the results via webcam, having laughably easily hacked into the security feed to watch the big moment. And it was so worth it, to see their shocked and horrified faces. To see her father lose all colour and her mother sink weakly next to her precious son, the boy in question looking ashen-faced and incredulous at the flickering green flames encasing his fists. Her grandfather figure looked like a stroke was announcing itself, and she felt just the barest hint of true concern for the old man who had never actually treated her that badly besides ignoring her most of the time.
Everyone in the room, from the simple personal to the mighty Don and his right-hand man looked completely shell-shocked … in all honesty, Tsuna couldn't understand why. It had been so obvious from the beginning that her brother, while a powerful flame user, was not a Sky - not at all. He didn't have the necessary mentality. And prior to the death of Timoteo's sons, it wouldn't have been a problem. With Lightning Flames, he could still inherit the CEDEF who didn't demand Sky Flames as a necessity for succession, and that was what he had been trained for from the cradle. But taking over Vongola? Impossible. No, Ieyasu never had been a Sky, he neither exuded the typical harmony nor gravitation characteristic for the orange flame and while he was surrounded by admirers, he had never even tried to harmonize with a potential guardian - pretty difficult when you are not a sky, ne?
If she had to take a guess, she would have pegged him as a sun, and it wouldn't surprise Tsuna at all if those were his second flames, and just marginally less powerful than lightning.
And if she, who had only ever been treated with negligence and scorn by Ieyasu, had seen that, had been able to deduct his personality so spot-on, how could her parents, who worshipped the ground he walked on, have dismissed the signs?
Granted, Tsuna had known of the Mafia for years, and she was no stranger to their workings, even though she kept her contact digital and had less than a dozen pseudonyms, but for trained killers who were raised in the Mafia? It was kind of disappointing.
An amused smile coloured her lips as she returned her attention to the live-feed playing on.
The following conversation … didn't surprise her.
Annoyed?
Yes.
Surprised?
Not at all.
" Iemitsu ..."
" Nono, I'm so sorry, I didn't know ..."
" Vongola needs a strong successor. And it needs to be a Sky, you know that. The rings ..."
" I know. Damn that I know. Ie-kun will still inherit CEDEF, but Vongola … Nono, he can't inherit and you can't free Xanxus. That boy would be too angry, to devastating and wrathful in our delicate situation. He would burn everything in his path to nothing. Take into account that you would have to tell him that his brothers were killed ..."
" No. Not at the moment. I will free him once we have stabilized. But not only would he try to take out his aggression on innocents, as much as he lamented and sabotaged his brothers, Xanxus loved those three fiercely. He couldn't handle waking up to a world where they had left him so suddenly, no matter how unwillingly."
" Damn!"
" Timoteo-san?"
" Yes, Nana-chan?"
" Xanxus and Ie-kun ... aren't the only once left of Vongola's direct bloodline."
" I can't take over, Nana."
" I didn't mean you, Anata."
" Then who do you mean?"
" I birthed twins."
" That girl …? Nana, we didn't train her. She has no idea of the Mafia. Not only is she a girl and would never be accepted by the Old Bloods, we swore to ourselves to keep her out of this bloody world. We couldn't do the same with Ie-kun, but Tsuna was never intended to be even aware of this world. Love ..."
" Iemitsu, your wife has a point. Tsunayuki-chan is the last one eligible descendent to inherit, and we don't even know if she has Sky Flames and can be validated as heiress or if she is the same as her brother and bears another flame type than sky as her primary Flame. You know that twins often favour the same Flame Taste. But she is our last resort, and we need to try everything. I won't let my family be without guidance. I won't."
" … very well, but I don't see how she could be accepted. You know how the underworld sees women who have no credentials in killing."
" And you forget that my mother was the Octavia, and that she was one of the most respected Vongola Bosses. With the right instructions, Tsunayuki-chan will take them by storm. We only need one thing ..."
" We need to know if she has Sky Flames."
" Indeed."
" I will return to Japan immediately to collect her. Don't worry, I will think of a cover story, and Tsuna will not suspect anything. I think she will jump at the chance to be included and won't make us many problems. Ie-kun, do you want to come with me?"
" … no. I … I'm sorry, Kaa-chan, Tou-chan, Nonno. I'm so sorry."
" It is unpleasant, but you bear no fault, Ieyasu-kun. This is out of your powers, I'm aware of that. Let's hope that your sister will have the necessary Flame characteristic."
" I will stay here, Kaa-chan."
" Very well. I'm off."
" Take care."
" Bring her here."
As … interesting as their idea was, Tsuna didn't particularly care for it … or them.
Really?
That was their master plan? Collecting her, completely unaware of the Mafia, and testing if she was eligible to take over a Crime Syndicate from one day to the next?
Did they actually buy into her oblivious timid docile act to such a degree?
Did they actually … believed her to be so broken to just do as they say? For a chance of being ... included?
Fuck, she was good.
Broken I may be, broken I may have been, but broken, I will not stay.
This world is a cruel careless place, and I will not allow anyone but myself to rule over my fate.
Because even if the world is dark, even if it is lonely and bitter, I can see a light, a warm fire dancing in the night and beckoning with promises of more. Of tomorrow. Of a future.
And I want this. I want a future.
I want love.
I want happiness.
I want hope.
I want friendship.
I want success.
I want touch.
I want family.
I want everything you have ever denied me.
And if you stand in my way, if you insist on throwing sticks and stones to break my bones and spirit, than I will return the favour. And I will need nothing more than the truth to utterly destroy you and your very foundation.
Nothing could hurt you more.
And I'm pretty much beyond the point of caring.
Her mother returned to an empty home on the sixteenth of October.
She returned to a nightmare that had become real.
Cameras disabled. Guards unaware. Her daughter's belongings gone. Even the official documents, like her birth certificate, taken.
She returned to a home that felt more like a tomb.
And on her daughter's immaculate bed, sitting atop perfectly innocently folded white cotton sheets, was a single plain note.
Nana's hands trembled as she unfolded it slowly, and her knees buckled beneath her for the second time in as many days as she read the short script that would bring down not only her own little world, her family and friends, but the hopes of a whole Famiglia standing on the edge of an abyss.
As the first mascara-stained tears began to roll over her cheeks and drip down, tainting the simple paper, she couldn't help the bitter smile twisting her ashen lips as she felt the slight tingle of sky flames soaking the English words written in delicate loopy letters. Her fingers trailed the single line drawn elegantly in black on white, and the unbidden thought of 'What goes around comes around' entered traitorously into her mind.
Had she been so blind?
'Assumptions make an ass out of you.'
Four years.
That was how long she had been hiding within the blessed anonymity the underworld and its connection had given her pseudonyms, actually hiding under a … pretty obvious variation of her own birth name, but so deeply buried beneath lies and obstructions that no one from her former life actually found her while at the same time keeping her achievements legal and airtight. She had no wish to be called a fraud. To this end, everything was nicely and legally done over the right lawful channels, and her 'friends', or better yet acquaintances, within the Mafia were only too willing to keep her location a secret and help her emancipation with the liberal use of Mist Flames along the way. She was actually legally an emancipated minor, not just a foreign run-away pretending to be one, and the financial security the little … liberation of her parents bank accounts gave her was a wonderful bonus.
What could she say? Crime …
It was in her blood.
Besides, she was never even accused of theft – which meant that either her parents didn't want to hinder their chances of reconciliation, or, which was a lot more believable, they simply believed the theft and her disappearance to be unconnected. Deft fools, the lot of them.
Assumptions, as they say …
It didn't really matter.
No one found Tsunayuki di Vongola, the fourteen year old Japanese girl with Italian roots attending a prestigious boarding school in Great Britain as an emancipated minor who was also a successful young adult novel author as well as a brilliant hacker doing small jobs for the Mafia.
It was delicious.
She was absolutely in love with her new life.
It was more than she could have ever hoped for.
Since the day she had found out about computers and the internet at the young age of five, she had been completely hooked, and it had only taken her two years to become a Hacker capable of entering and leaving underworld and government servers alike undetectable. A mere months later, and she had all the information over her little family, Vongola, their deals and Dying Will Flames successfully connected and saved on several external USB-sticks.
From that day on, she planned her Great Escape.
Seven years of planning, or creating connections and earning money under numerous pseudonyms to finance her new life – and all that was left was to execute the perfect exit.
And that, they handed her on a silver tablet.
… speaking honestly, she wasn't always as sure and accepting of herself as she was now, but learning about the Mafia, about the reason behind her parents negligence, had brought Tsuna a kind of inner peace which she used from an early age on to portray the timid docile down-trodden child starved for affection. And they bought it.
Hook. Line. Sinker.
It wasn't all a lie. She had been broken. She had been desperate and hopeless. Her family had left her with more issues than was in the least healthy, but she worked through them, and was still in therapy even after four years, to wade through the fuck-load of shit they had left her and disentangle the drama her life had once been. Anita, her psychologist, had at one of her first meetings called her one messed up bitch – and she couldn't deny it.
But as fucked up as she was, she wanted to live. And she had done everything to achieve exactly that.
Nowadays, she didn't even just live – she thrived.
Graduating with all honours from High School, she had just started her studies of linguistics and literature at Oxford, under her birth name – Sawada Tsunayuki. And she didn't give a fuck that her family finally found her again. Why should she?
She had excelled. On her own volition.
Against the circumstances of her birth.
Against the obstacles of her blood line.
Tsuna had bested them.
Wasn't it just typical that as soon as her birth name had pinged up on the radar again, the rats came out of the groundwork, ready to leech off of her? Her loving family at the front, clamouring for her return … to make her into a freaking Mafia Donna. A criminal bathed in the blood of innocents. Ordering deaths.
No. Freaking. Way. In. Hell.
She couldn't care less for the countless reconnection attempts of her family, and she certainly felt no inclination for gifting them with her forgiveness.
They may say that forgiveness is good for the soul, but Tsuna had found out that when it concerned herself, she liked the taste of just that little bit of vengeance just that little bit more. It tasted … delightfully glorious.
Like the sweetest wine.
And as far as Vongola as a whole and their bloody history was concerned … that was indeed a sad sad story.
Because, quite honestly, Tsuna was all out of fucks to give.
She would live her life, and she would enjoy it. A job, a home, a family.
Because all she had taken from her Vongola blood was that a Vongola always got what they wanted in style.
She couldn't wait.
This is hope.
This is happiness.
You smile, and for the first time, it is neither bitter nor resigned.
You smile, because you finally can taste it. Love. Touch. Promises. Family.
You smile, and the world alights.
~ The End ~