Title: Little Things
Fandom: KHR
Pairings: N/A, gen.
Summary: Sawada Tsunayoshi, thirteen-years-old and loser extraordinaire, has given up on life. When an assignment in Home Ec saddles him with a small desert plant, Tsuna fully expects that his two brown thumbs will kill it.
Despite this, he gets oddly attached.
Me, minding my business: looks at the date
Date: June
Me, acutely realizing the last time I actually finished anything was in February: fuck
Ahaha, truthfully, I was just busy dealing with school and Big Tests, so even when I wanted/needed to sit down and write, my mind was bogged down by the Big Tests and looming deadlines.
Luckily, the semester's over, and now I can hopefully get back into the swing of things. Unfortunately, due to the unplanned break, I've lost my writing groove, so I made this in an attempt to ease myself back into writing consistently.
It's not my best work, but hey! It's something.
Frequencies 3, a Naruto fic of mine, is on the way and should be up in a couple of days.
Thanks for your patience!
Sawada Tsunayoshi is in his first year of middle school, and he's given up on life.
Since he's destined to become a shut-in, what did anything matter, really? He had no future plans and didn't plan to eventually make any. He wasn't particularly good at anything - in fact, in most things, he was horribly bad. So bad that it had earned him a particularly unpleasant nickname: Dame-Tsuna.
Useless Tsuna. No good.
And it was true! If he could think of it he'd failed it. And even then, it wasn't like he was really passionate about anything. Sure, he played video games and liked to read manga, but they were just things he did in his free time. He wasn't even all that good at video games, despite how much he played them.
Tsuna was just doomed from the start, really.
He didn't have any friends - had never made any - and couldn't talk to people to save his life. He was regularly bullied for both his appearance and demeanor, for being disorganized and meek. Tsuna knew that it wasn't really anything personal, that he was just an easy target, but even so… it always struck him as a little unfair.
To add on to the humiliations, the only person he talked to on a daily basis was his mom, and even then their contact was fairly limited to the mornings before school or during meals.
Tsuna knew his grades were terrible, that they'd always been terrible and would always be terrible, but at this point he didn't care. He'd been born a failure, so it was to be expected. It didn't bother him anymore. He was clumsy, couldn't aim, and was skinny and weak.
He was the very pinnacle of a loser.
Which was why, when Tsuna scraped up the courage to confess to the school's idol, Sasagawa Kyoko, he expected the rejection.
And rejected he was. Tsuna was right, of course.
Even though he had liked Kyoko for so long, and even though they were in the same class, she hadn't even known his name. Yet, the rejection was kind; the look in her eyes sympathetic, a bit uncomfortable, clearly, but without a hint of disgust or disdain.
It stung as much as it soothed, and the fierce ache that pounded in his chest - even though he knew this would happen - left him teary-eyed and distracted for the rest of the day.
Honestly, Tsuna had more bravery than half the school did. He wasn't good at school, but that didn't mean he had no sense - most of the school like Kyoko. There was a reason she was the school's idol.
That didn't mean they all took to his confession as kindly as Kyoko did, though.
Tsuna had excused himself to the bathroom near the end of the last class, fully intending on either wallowing in his pain on the roof, or heading home early.
He wishes, belatedly, that he'd just headed home.
Because as he closed the bathroom stall behind him and settled in for an hour of distracted, sore wallowing, a bucket of ice cold water was thrown over the stall and onto his head, drenching him.
Shocked, Tsuna barely heard the squeak of shoes and "That's what you get for daring to confess to Kyoko-chan, Dame-Tsuna!" shouted at him.
The door to the bathroom shut, and yet Tsuna sat, drenched and nursing a dark bruise from the bucket, in that stall.
He hadn't the courage to move even an inch, not until the bell rang and he could go home.
Then, once the blessed sound came, an upperclassman with an apparent crush on Kyoko - one Mochida Kensuke - cornered him on his way home and beat him up.
And, just to make the already excruciating experience even worse, he did so with his Shinai.
It was a massively terrible experience. It was also the final nail in the coffin.
Tsuna stepped into the foyer of his house, ignored the greeting from his mother, and marched up the stairs.
Once in his room, he decided, all at once and with the finality of a dying man, that life was pointless.
It didn't matter - none of it did. Tsuna wouldn't leave a mark on anything or anyone, and the world would not remember him. It didn't matter and it wasn't worth caring about.
Nothing was worth caring about.
There was nothing to be done but to let life take its course, and Tsuna was fine to sit in the back seat and watch the scenery pass by.
'I'm done with this,' Tsuna thinks, solemnly, as he crawls into bed and falls into a fitful sleep.
Weirdly enough, though, giving up on everything didn't actually change anything all that much.
Even though Sasagawa Kyoko had broken Tsuna's heart, and there was nothing else to fill the void left behind, he still went to school. Granted, he went to school a little less than before, but it was minuscule compared to just how much hadn't changed.
He was still Dame-Tsuna. He was still friendless, and he was still bullied by the school at large. He still got up in the mornings, panicked when he overslept and came home tired at the end of the day - though sometimes he came home tired and with a stack of failed papers.
He didn't know why everything hadn't stopped already - why he hadn't stopped already - but it continued chugging along as if nothing had changed.
Even though everything was pointless and his world had ended, everything was the same.
Tsuna was the same.
Until he went to Home Economics the next day.
Home Ec was a class he hated almost as much as gym class, wherein he was subject to domestic task to domestic task - usually cooking.
Cooking was something he was especially bad at. He ruined anything he cooked, burning, undercooking, or just plain cooking wrong. He'd quickly been shooed out of the kitchen as a child - not that he minded that much - and stayed out of it.
So, needless to say, any cooking done in Home Ec was a monumental failure. Only, instead of being in the comfort of his own home, where he was simply expected to fail and that was… not okay but normal for him, at least, he was in front of all his peers. All his mocking, vicious, apathetic peers.
It always ended in "Dame-Tsuna failed to make onigiri!" or "Dame-Tsuna can't even clean up his own messes!". It was always annoying, always disheartening.
So he hated Home Ec with the passion of a thousand suns.
Or, well, he used to.
But now nothing mattered, so him failing and getting ridiculed for it also didn't matter. He didn't hate anything, because it was pointless to care about what happened during it.
Except, that day, his teacher hadn't sat them all in front of rice cookers and sets of knives he didn't feel like teenagers should be allowed to use. Instead, she and several student assistants brought in pots, planters, and potting soils of various kinds.
An indoor gardening unit, the teacher had said.
A systemic slaughter of innocent plants, Tsuna thought morosely.
Apparently, the Home Ec teacher wanted to spice things up a bit, and so thought that indoor gardening might be a nice change of pace.
To start off easy, she said, they'd pot and take home a desert plant, which are like cacti but not.
She called them "succulents", and Tsuna wasn't even going to try and pronounce that.
Besides, he was sure that most of the plants potted would die within a few weeks in the tender care of teenagers with little interest in plants, or maybe just a brown thumb. Most of the weird, cacti-but-not plants would shrivel and die, thrown out with next weeks garbage.
That was the fate of the little plant in front of him, innocent and unbothered in the little plastic planter. It was tiny, with weirdly fat leaves that positioned themselves in oddly geometrical patterns, nothing like the wild, packed foliage of other houseplants he'd seen before.
It was a desert plant, liking lots of sun and little water. Theoretically, it was perfect for him.
Tsuna would bet money on his dying in less than a week.
Nevertheless, with much hesitation, Tsuna potted the little thing in its forever home. A square ceramic container, white on the inside and black on the outside. He dropped in the rocks that were supposed to go on the bottom with little fanfare, only to spill a lot of the sand that was to go on top of it.
He wasn't sure what the point of the sand and rocks was, but hey, what did he know?
Eventually, though, he got the thing into the new pot. It was a messy arrangement, with less sand than was called for and a little too much potting soil, but it hadn't turned out bad. For Tsuna's standards, it was pretty good! Even if there was sand and potting soil everywhere.
...Which spoke of how low those standards really were.
Regardless, he completed the task with as much grace as he could muster. Not that it would survive much longer, but, still!
Of course, Tsuna is still made to stay after class to clean up. Which he does, reluctantly, if only to avoid leaving with the majority of his classmates.
(He'd been wary, recently, since Mochida. It didn't matter if he was beaten up, but, well, Tsuna had never liked pain.)
Once all was said and done, all the dirt and sand and stray rocks swept up and emptied in a nearby trashcan, he debated throwing the little plant out then and there.
'A mercy killing,' Tsuna told himself.
'It'll die soon anyway,' he thought to himself, harder this time.
He brought it home with him anyway, heart heavy.
'Maybe Kaa-san will want it? She could take care of it better than I could...'
He shouldn't have hoped.
She didn't want it, even though she was weirdly excited to see it.
In fact, she was ecstatic by the thought of it being Tsuna's - of it being his and his alone.
Meaning he was to be the one to take care of it. She even suggested he give it a name!
Great.
Now it was sure to die.
Miserable, Tsuna put the little thing on his windowsill, watered it (how much was he supposed to pour in again?), and went to go play video games.
Two and a half weeks later and the plant was still living. Its weirdly fat, stubby leaves were still lush green, and not a part of it looked like it was crumbling.
Tsuna couldn't believe his eyes.
'It must be unkillable!' he thought, a bit hysterical. Anything that could survive this long under Tsuna's tender care must be immortal.
Truthfully, it hadn't taken him long to forget about the plant. It wasn't like a pet; it didn't whine for food, didn't yowl and snarl its displeasure with Tsuna. It only sat there, silent. It soaked up the sun and drank whatever water he gave it. It wasn't a big plant, either, where dense foliage and browning flowers would alert Tsuna to his carelessness, only to spite him by dying between his hands.
No, it was none of those things. It was tiny, silent, and it sat on his windowsill, content to be forgotten.
So, of course, Tsuna, known air-head, would forget about it.
That didn't mean he didn't panic when he remembered it, though.
He'd been getting ready for bed, when thought of the little thing floated across his mind. Everything stopped in its tracks. He spat the toothpaste and rinsed the toothbrush with the fervor of a madman, and stumbled for his room, throwing the door open and rushing to the windowsill.
The soil was dry, but other than that, it seemed fine.
It was fine.
It was fine.
Heaving a sigh of relief, the disappointment of his mother held at bay for another day, Tsuna makes sure to give it more water.
He goes to bed.
Two weeks turn into two months. The succulent had changed somewhat, but was as alive as the day he got it.
He made sure to water it whenever the soil was really dry, and as the days went by, found himself spending more and more time tending to it.
It had grown, somewhat, new, tiny leaves sprouting up from the center.
Personally, Tsuna thought it was kind of… cool.
Almost exciting.
Nothing had ever grown under his care before.
Tsuna still refused to name it, though.
(Still, he'd started to check on it as soon as he came home, giving it a greeting as soon as the door to his room swung shut behind him.)
When the first of its leaves browned, Tsuna nearly had a heart attack.
It took a little bit of panicked pacing to calm down, with Tsuna tugging at his hair as his emotions ran from despair and anger to resignation.
He knew this would happen, eventually. It always did.
But he didn't want the plant to die. He'd been doing so well!
(He'd gotten used to greeting it when he came home…!)
It couldn't be helped, but…
He'd do what he could to save it.
(It was pointless, but he needed to try. Just one last time.)
Resigned but resolute, Tsuna pulled the brown leaves out with terrifying ease, the flat, shriveled leaf coming off with a brittle snap.
It hurt his heart a little, for some reason.
The rest of the plant looked healthy, but he didn't know for how long.
He'd had to go to his mother for help, embarrassingly enough. After he realized he knew nothing about how to care for a plant with brown leaves, or what to do when the leaves on succulents shriveled.
After school the next day, as he trudged into his room to greet his green roommate - sick as he was - only to discover a stack of books he'd never seen before sat neatly on his desk.
Examining it, he comes to find they're all about succulents.
"Kaa-san?" Tsuna calls, shuffling down the stairs with the books cradled in his arms.
"Yes, Tsu-kun?" she replies, blinking at him from where she's sat at the kitchen table, a drink in hand.
"What are these books for?"
Nana just raises an eyebrow. "Tsu-kun, they're for your plant problem, of course! I figured all the information you'd need would be in a book somewhere, so I went and bought a few books relating to the succulent you have! Though I realized we never found out what species it was, so I bought an identification manual, too."
Ugh, reading.
'Isn't this a bit much?!' he wants to exclaim.
"Oh, okay," he says instead.
His mom clenches her fist, eyes alight with a fire he hasn't seen directed towards him in a long time. "You can do it, Tsu-kun! Go read up!"
You can do it.
Can he do it?
(Ah, it's been so long since anyone has told him that.)
He'd give it his best shot, even if it was futile.
"Okay, okay, I will," Tsuna grumbles, taking the stack back upstairs, preparing to crack into the one on the very top.
As it turns out, his plant is not sick, or dying.
Apparently, sometimes succulents drop their leaves. Something about water intake and leaf age and other things that went over his head. Point was, he was fine.
It wasn't dying. In fact, it was due to grow more, if he played his cards right.
His succulent was of a species he couldn't even read, let alone pronounce the name of, but he still dogeared the page it was on. It could come in handy later.
Tsuna breathes a sigh of relief and goes to water the troublesome thing.
It says nothing.
He tells it goodnight anyway.
By summer break, Tsuna finds himself well and truly attached to the succulent on his windowsill. He greets it when he comes home, and says goodnight when he slips into bed. He waters it when the soil is dried out and makes sure to check it for weird black spots or bugs every other day. When it grows more leaves, Tsuna finds himself oddly excited about it.
It's the only thing Tsuna can say he keeps up with. Homework? He could never be expected to remember to do that.
He still has bad grades. Kyoko still rejected him and hasn't looked back - he still has no friends. He has no future, no goals, but - ah.
Things are a little brighter now, for some reason.
He keeps his plant alive. Without him, it would die.
That's… not enough, but something.
It was something.
"Tsu-kun, maybe you should move Mr. Plant to the table in the kitchen! It's such a pretty thing, I'm sure it would brighten any guests' evening!"
"No way! And anyway- what kind of name is Mr. Plant?!"
"It's the name you gave him, of course!"
No plot. only plant.
Thanks for reading!