Personality Issues

Disclaimer: Disclaimed.

Chapter 2: Voices

Tsuna dazedly swarm back into consciousness, his body still protesting for more sleep due to the ungodly hour he had fallen asleep at. He sensed that there were people around him, though he didn't really care who they were. All that mattered now was to find a way back to the land of sleep.

"Should we jump him?" a boy whispered from somewhere to Tsuna's left.

"Just do it quietly though, we don't want to wake Hibari-sama up!" Another person, a girl this time, hissed.

A guy chuckled. "Don't worry, that guy wouldn't wake up even if the sky fell on him!"

There was a rustling sound at the foot of the bed as Tsuna felt his bed sheets being yanked off him. The cold breeze circulating around the room hit him suddenly, making him shiver and reach up to take his blankets back before he froze. Someone grabbed his outstretched hand roughly and dragged him off his bed, making him fall onto the floor.

At this display of roughness, Tsuna's instincts immediately told him that something was not right and to get his ass out of the land of sleep out straight away. And his instincts, although only useful in times of danger, were always accurate.

His eyes snapped open as someone threw his bed sheets on him and wrapped it around his body. Tsuna thrashed wildly, feeling his air supply being cut off as the cloth around his neck tightened. One of his flailing legs caught the person behind him by sheer luck and the cloth around him loosened. Without hesitation, Tsuna tore the thin sheet covering his face and yelled for all he worth. Embarrassingly, his voice cracked and rose, making it sound like a girl's.

The people around him swore eloquently in reply.

"Shut him up!" the first boy roared.

One of his attackers shoved him facedown into the tangle of bed sheets pooled around him and pulled them around his body hastily. Before he could recover his senses and react again, a kick connected solidly with his chest followed by another one in the head, making him swim into unconsciousness for a second or three.

His body numbing in pain after such attacks, Tsuna didn't move as felt himself getting picked up and carried out of the room by three pairs of arms. Tears of panic, fear and, maybe, anger started prickling his eyes as he sensed himself being carried down the corridor.

Tsuna thought that he was used to this, having experience such things in his life before. It was common, getting beaten up for lunch money, sitting at the wrong table by accident or even just because they thought it fun to bully someone like him, weak and unable to fight back.

But he actually hoped that it would change after growing up and entering university. He didn't tell anyone, even his mother, but upon entering the university he had found friends for the first time, people willing to talk and laugh with him despite him being utterly useless.

Someone sighed. Tsuna twitched. The sigh sounded as if it came from inside his head.

"You aren't weak. You just don't know how to use your strength."

Suddenly, the people carrying him stopped. Tsuna felt himself being dropped to the ground once more. Somehow, he didn't really care this time, thinking frantically, What strength?

"You do have strength, being me after all, Tsuna."

"Sawada?"

The cloth around him fell away, replaced with a familiar face whose name he somewhat remembered from the introductions carried out yesterday.

"H-Hibari-san?" Tsuna blinked at the older boy glaring down at him. If Tsuna knew him better, he would have known that this was Hibari's I-have-just-rescued-you glare, reserved for reassuring rescued victims. However to Tsuna, it just looked like his normal I-am-pissed-off glare.

Behind him, four bodies, two guys and two girls, laid twitching on the blood sprayed ground. Tsuna noticed with interest that the guys were looked like they had been beaten into unconsciousness, being covered in bruises, while the girls looked as if they had merely been knocked out.

"What are you doing here?" Tsuna asked Hibari stupidly, bashing himself up mentally for stating the obvious. Hibari must have heard him being kidnapped and, out of the deeply hidden (really deep) goodness in his heart, came to rescue him.

"They woke me up and I bit them to death."

The shoujo like storyline got shattered.

There was no way in hell someone like Hibari would rescue someone even if it was his best friend, let alone an almost stranger like me, Tsuna concluded, thinking that his stupidness would be infectious if he carried on like this. He pulled himself to his feet, using the nearby wall as a support. In front of him, Hibari had already started walking away, backing up Tsuna's newly made theory about his roommate.

Tsuna turned to follow him, his foot catching on the bed sheets spread out on the floor. Apparently his clumsiness that had followed him faithfully for eighteen years and not deserted him. He tripped.

In front of him, Hibari turned around and grabbed his arm, pulling him up before he could fall. Unfortunately, his saviour pulled him up a little too high, making his feet dangle just above the ground.

"Sorry." Hibari muttered, dropping him as if he was embarrassed that he had just saved Tsuna from such minor incident as falling. Unprepared for the sudden lost of support, Tsuna fell to the ground, his right ankle sliding under him as he landed.

An ominous sounding crack resounded in the corridor.

--

"Oh my god, Tsuna. What happened to your ankle?" Kyoko greeted Tsuna as he entered his the Vongola classroom for the first class of the day, hobbling to an empty space next to her. His ankle was swathed in layers of thick bandages.

Hibari, who was conveniently walking past their table at that time, answered for him, shooting Tsuna a look that said to keep his mouth shut, "Carcassa (1) tried to kidnap him."

This statement was followed by sneers and scoffs from the students in the room. Being elites, they had nothing to fear about an attempted kidnap, seeing that they could just beat their kidnappers up before anything got too serious. Tsuna, however, was a different case. Suddenly, everybody started speculating on ways Tsuna must have beaten them.

"But I can't fight!" Tsuna found himself blurting out in reply to one boy's gory description on how Tsuna must have defeated them. He really had to commend them on their imagination, despite everything being a little too exaggerated.

His sudden flustered outburst was met with silence. Hibari turned away from him and sighed.

"Then you must have used your great intellect, Tsuna-chan?" Haru broke the silence, her face lighting up with hope.

Tsuna shook his head, wishing that the floor beneath him would just open up and swallow him whole, sprained ankle and all. The students in the room were looking at him in a mixture of pity and disgust. Even Kyoko beside him looked startled.

The classroom door opened loudly and abruptly, stopping whatever the Vongola students were going to do. In walked a toddler, dressed in a businesslike suit and a fedora perched stylishly on his head. All the students stood up as he strolled over to the table smoothly and hopped onto it.

"Good morning class." He greeted them in a squeaky yet professional voice.

"Good morning, Reborn-sensei."

Reborn gestured for them to sit down, his sharp eyes staring intently at Tsuna. "For those who don't know, we have a new student in our midst, Sawada Tsunayoshi. He's here on a scholarship."

"But he can't fight, Sensei!" one of the students interrupted.

"And he's not smart!"

"Why the hell is he here in the first place?"

With every accusation, Tsuna sank down lower into his seat, looking down at the floor, praying that they would stop soon. The window was starting to look very tempting since the floor didn't seem to want to open up.

A gunshot went off, shutting up all of the students who had something to add about Tsuna.

The toddler stood on the table, a gun pointed towards the ceiling where a small hole showed where it had been shot. His fedora tilted forward to shadow his eyes and the top of his face. When he got everyone's attention, he busied himself with putting his gun away and straightening his coat.

"Sawada, come over." Reborn ordered, his babyish voice laced with steel. Tsuna hesitated but went forward reluctantly after meeting Reborn's eyes. He knew it when a teacher meant business.

Reborn rummaged in his coat before taking out his gun again, a green one this time. Tsuna flinched at the sight of the weapon and started to inch away, convinced that the teacher was going to shoot him after hearing all the negative things about him. He never expected to die at the tender age of eighteen, shot to death by a baby more than ten years younger than him.

"This gun is loaded with the Dying Will Bullet Version 2." Reborn explained, breaking into Tsuna's thoughts. "Don't worry, it won't kill you when I shoot but…" He smirked, an evil expression that contrasted greatly with his baby looks. "I'm sure we'll get very interesting results."

He pointed the gun at Tsuna's head and shot him.

--

"It's all yours, Tsuna. I showed them; now don't make a fool of yourself."

Tsuna heard the voice he had heard when he had been kidnapped laugh. He was sure he was going mad, even someone as ignorant as him knew it wasn't normal to hear voices in your head. But when he opened up his mouth to answer, his eyes opened instead. The classroom swam back into his vision.

Open-mouthed students stared back at him, their faces filled with an emotion Tsuna had never seen directed at him before. He looked beside him and saw Reborn still smirking but in a less darker way now. The toddler sensed that he was being watched and looked sideways at Tsuna.

"Good work," Reborn praised, lowering down his voice and adding, "'No-Good' Tsuna."

Tsuna was confused. He didn't remember doing anything besides getting shot in the head with a strange bullet and blacking out after that. Yet, the expressions on his classmates' and Reborn's faces said differently. There was newfound respect on their faces and, in his friends' faces, relief.

"Tenth!" A silver haired boy, sitting somewhere at the back, shot out of his seat and slid onto his knees before Tsuna. "I finally found you!"

"What just happened?" Tsuna asked Reborn, giddy at the sudden attitude change in all of his classmates and trying his best to ignore the boy before him who had started proclaiming his "ever-lasting loyalty to the Tenth head of the Vongola".

Reborn merely shook his head, smiling secretively.

"You were great, Tsuna!" Haru cheered, waving an overly decorated device in the air. "Thank goodness I caught it down on tape!"

Upon hearing her exclamation, Tsuna practically flew over to her, begging the girl to let him see the video. Haru nodded enthusiastically, flicking open the screen of her mini camcorder and pressing the play button.

An image of him popped up on the small screen, at the moment Reborn had shot him. He fell from the impact of the shot, his eyes rolling up to the back of his head.

That he remembered. What came next was something totally new and he had no trace of it happening in his memory.

Then, miraculously, before he touched the ground, clear orange flames flared out from his palms and propelled him forward into a standing position. The camera then closed up on his face, showing a maniacal looking face, his pupils coated with a glassy sheen of orange, the colour of his flames.

Tsuna watched himself in shock and awe as he flew up into the air until the top of his head grazed the ceiling. The flames emitting from his palms burst out, licking the glass of a nearby window.

"Non mi sottovaluti. (2)" The Tsuna on the screen laughed coldly, his unfamiliar voice sending shivers down the watching Tsuna's spine. It sounded almost like a different person entirely, almost. There was a barely detected tone in his voice that sounded like his.

On the screen, Tsuna smirked and the flames from his palms started to shrink, making him float slowly to the ground. When his feet touched the ground, he closed his eyes for a moment before opening them up again. The flames in them had disappeared.

The screen went blank.

"You were so cool, Tsuna-chan." Haru snapped the screen shut and beamed at him. "I didn't know you had the Sky Flame!"

"But, that wasn't me…" Tsuna argued weakly. It had been him, hadn't it? There was no mistaking the shock of orange hair, the untidy way he wore his clothes or the slight build of his body. It did happened, didn't it? There was a scorch mark on one of the windows, proof of where the flames had touched it.

The thing that scared him the most was that he had absolutely no memory of it happening. And his face, it seemed twisted into an expression Tsuna had never used before.

That Tsuna the class had just seen was the complete opposite of who Tsuna was. It was someone Tsuna only dreamed of becoming in his darkest, most secret dreams.

"Who are you?" Tsuna asked mentally, tuning out the voices of his classmates' praises and admiring whistles.

It must have been the voice in my head, it must be! Tsuna thought desperately. It was you, right?

But there was no reply.

(1) Another mafia family.

(2) English translation: Do not underestimate me.

A/N: Late update! I know, I know! I'm sorry! -kowtows in apology-