A word of advice to all of those crazed otaku out there chomping at the bit for a chance to be reborn into an anime:
Don't do it.
It's total bullshit.
I mean, I guess if you were cool enough to get something as simple as a goddamn guide or even a freaking warning it might not be so bad. Did anyone think to get me one of those? No. I was going into all of this completely blind, and I hated it.
When I woke up for the third time, I was immediately assaulted with a multitude of random gibberish cooing noises and large, beaming faces not even inches from my own. I tried to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming, but I quickly aborted that plan when I realized that instead of hard and pearly teeth I only had... gums.
'You have got to be kidding me,' I wailed mentally. To my shock, my eyes actually began to well with tears and I blinked them away furiously, annoyed with myself. Was I crying more easily because I was a baby, or was all of this starting to get to me? I hardly ever teared up usually. I took a moment to recompose myself and looked around curiously, trying hard to not acknowledge the giants hovering over me. I wasn't quite ready to tackle that development yet.
On my left, all I could see were bars. Since I was currently a baby (what the hell even- no no no, don't think about it) I thought it safe to assume that I was in a crib. My eyes flickered to my right only to immediately clench shut as my heart gave a worrisome jolt.
Okay.
Come on, you can do this.
Just breath through it.
I cracked my eye open and sneaked another hesitant peek, repressing shivers of...well, something. I wasn't entirely sure it was unpleasant, but it was definitely uncomfortable. Snuggled into and drooling onto my right arm was a little bundle of blue. If memory served me correctly, this was Sawada Tsunayoshi.
'Your new brother,' my mind supplied. I clamped down on the thought and banished it. I wasn't ready to think about that yet. Not at all.
Sawada Tsunay- no, Tsuna- no, bad thoughts- the burrito baby's toothless mouth was wide open and a thick stream of globby baby-saliva was dribbling onto the portion of the blanket covering my sleeve. If I shifted a little, I could feel that the wetness had seeped through the material on to my skin. I shuddered and tried not to gag.
On one hand, the baby version of the main character of my favorite anime was sleeping practically on top of me and marking me with his spit.
On the other hand, the baby version of the main character of my favorite anime was sleeping practically on top of me and marking me with his spit.
I didn't know if my heart was doing the samba because of fangirlish glee or panicked revulsion. I settled on a mixture of both.
The cooing people above decided that they didn't like being ignored and began touching me, brushing away the few tears that had escaped my eyes and readjusting the nauseatingly pink blanket I was swaddled in. I fought the urge to shrink away from the pair of meaty man-hands that reached into the crib and instead let them tap my nose and tighten my blanket. Peering around the massive hairy intrusion, I got a glimpse of honeyed eyes and a roguish smile before the face abruptly retracted out of my line of sight, muttering excitedly in Japanese.
This language barrier was already starting to get annoying and I'd only been awake for a few minutes.
The other person leaning over the crib continued smiling softly, laughing and nodding in response to whatever it was that the man had said. His face reappeared in my view, wide eyed and slack jawed but kind-of-sort-of-almost-not-quite smiling. Just what was he gaping at?
My hands automatically went up to try and probe my face, but they were effectively pinned to my side by both the offensively bright blanket and the little drooling burrito on my right. My eyebrow twitched downwards and the woman squealed, pushing frantically at her husband at pointing at some object that I couldn't see. He disappeared for a moment and came back with a camera in hand.
Inwardly, I groaned. I hated pictures. And since I was so small and pretty much paralyzed, I couldn't even duck or cover my face.
Instead of frowning at the camera like the people obviously wanted me to, I closed my eyes and pretend to sleep. The excited noises quickly fell into whispers.
Without the smiling faces above my head to distract me, I was left alone with my own thoughts.
I didn't like that.
First came the questions. Was I dead? Was this heaven? If it was, then God had a seriously sick sense of humor. You weren't supposed to feel pain in heaven, right? Because being born had hurt. Heaven sucked.
Why was I here? Not just the obvious in-Namimori here, but also the 'snuggled up next to Sawada Tsu-'
Next to Sawada Tsunay-
…Next to this little burrito baby.
It occurred to me that maybe, just maybe the people making the ridiculous baby noises above me were Iemitsu and Nana.
Well shit.
I sighed through my little button nose. Trying to ignore the warm and squishy patch of drooled-on blanket over my arm, I settled down and tried to get some actual sleep. If I was lucky, I would wake up tomorrow in my nice warm bed with my mom yelling at me to get up and my cat trying to sit on my face.
I didn't feel very lucky.
Needless to say, I woke up in the exact same place I fell asleep in. The only difference? My entire right side was covered in slobber.
I'm going to do us all a favor and skip over my next few months as a baby. There is a reason why children don't remember breastfeeding or using diapers or- lord have mercy- teething. It's traumatic, it's degrading, and frankly it's boring. Most of my time was spent alternating my blank stare between the ceiling and my new twin brother.
I was still having some issues wrapping my mind around that last one. I had finally reached the point where I could think his name and not have a complete and total mental breakdown, though. Hooray for progress, however limited.
I also spent a lot of time thinking about my parents. My original ones, I mean. What had happened to me? Had I died? Were they sad, scared, upset? It sent pangs of crushing guilt through me every time I thought about it, which ultimately ended up in me crying. Had I not been a baby and therefore expected to constantly cry anyways, it would have been thoroughly humiliating. I prided myself on going almost my entire life without crying in public. Other than these spontaneous guilt trips, though, I was a very quiet baby.
Well, compared to Tsuna, anyways. An actual air strike would have been quieter than Tsuna.
I could now confirm that yes, Sawada Tsunayoshi had been a pansy from the very day he was born. He was the kid that would scream for twenty minutes out of every hour, day or night. He was occasionally petrified by his own shadow and seemed to think his father was going to eat him and reacted by screaming and crying more. For our first few weeks together, I put up with it with a smile because...Baby Tsuna. Just...Baby Tsuna. Enough was enough though. He was the everything I hated about children stuffed into one little body, but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't genuinely hate the kid.
Dislike? Hell yes. Nevertheless, there was just something about his giant eyes and the way he just oozed cuteness and how he always shared his blocks with me when I started crying that pulled me in, even against my will.
Another thing I thought about almost constantly was the future. I was here for a reason. Or I hoped I was, anyway.
I knew that the plot could survive without me, and it could do it well. So what was I supposed to accomplish? It wasn't as if I could go out and really do anything. I was still just a baby. I couldn't, for example, save Mukuro, partly because I had no idea where he was and partly because he needed to be with the Estraneo to get that eye. Was it bad of me to think that? It felt bad.
However, I hadn't just been dumped anywhere. I'm sure if fate had wanted me to fix Mukuro's life, it would have dumped me with him. No, I was Tsuna's twin sister. But…what did Tsuna need my help with? He did fine on his own in canon.
Across from me on our mutual quilt full of blocks and rattles, Tsuna's lego tower tipped over and exploded into pieces. He stared at it uncomprehendingly for a few seconds. Then, without preamble, he put his hands to his eyes and cried loud enough to make my eardrums start ringing. Annoyed with the interruption, I coaxed my meaty infant legs into motion and crawled to his toys, gathering them into a neat little pile. I shoved them back in his face before ambling to the opposite side of the quilt with a pout. I was technically almost 17 by now. I should not have had to deal with this crap.
Tsuna paused in his sobbing to stare at the blocks incredulously. I held my breath, hoping against all hope that he would be satisfied by the new pile and wouldn't restart his banshee wailing.
When Tsuna did nothing but shoot me a toothless, watery grin and resume playing with his toys, I felt like something clicked in my mind.
Sawada Tsunayoshi had a suspicious lack of parental figures in his life. His father- our father now, I guess- had packed up and left not even two weeks after we had been born. He may only be wary of him now, but I knew that later Tsuna would absolutely abhor him. Nana…well, she tried her best, she really did. But even in canon when she only had one child to raise, she wasn't exactly the image of 'parental support'. She mocked her child nearly as often as everyone else did, which was probably why he believed he was as useless as people told him he was.
Another glance at the snotty baby in front of me and I had to concede that maybe some of it was just natural wussiness and not purely an informed flaw. Still, someone to look up to definitely wouldn't have killed the kid. At the very least, he might not get beat up quite so often.
That was the moment I consciously decided that I was going to be the best older twin sister ever.
That was much easier said than done.
A/N: Holy crap, guys.
Holy crap, guys.
It hasn't even been 24 hours yet and I've gotten five reviews and the alerts and the favorites and holy crap they're still coming in.
This has got to be the fastest I've ever updated ever. Thank youuuuuuuu TTwTT