"Are you okay?" Such gentle, everyday words. Even so, they moved Tsuna's delicate heart.
No one had ever asked him that. His mother would always sigh and say "silly Tsu-kun" or "be more careful" when he got hurt. His father and teachers never noticed. He had no friends to worry about him.
It was the first time anyone ever asked him if he was okay. It was the day he met her.
It was the day he fell in love with Sasagawa Kyoko.
("Ohayo gozaimas'!Anata-no namae-wa nan desu-ka?")
It started out as everything does: as a simple curiosity, a need to know more about this caring girl. It quickly blossomed into a shy crush that stuck with him for fourteen years.
But that was where it started to change.
In his life as Vongola Decimo, his love for Kyoko continued to simmer quietly, hovering below the surface but gently curtailed by Tsuna. They became friends; nothing more, nothing less. His love for her was slowly tempered into a beautiful creation that was destined to never see the light of day.
As Sawada Tsunayoshi, bullying victim, it was a desperate, passionate kind of need that burned through his veins with everything he had, with no friends or dreams to hold it in check. Kyoko was his only light; the untouchable angel that spread her kindness in a feathery circle. His love flared into something that raced along his skin and devoured his pain, giving him the strength to face each day.
In high school, Tsuna met Tsutomu Masaru. The one Kyoko would marry. Traitor, bully, liar – Tsuna could call him any number of things, and none of them were good. As a victim, Masaru was his worst tormenter: he smiled to Tsuna's face as he punched him in the stomach.
In Namimori High School, Tsuna was able to pass his days in relative obscurity. People forgot about him the excitement of high school, moving onto juicier victims with cutting edge gossip. Sawada Tsunayoshi became background noise in their soap opera lives.
It would have stayed that way, too, had Masaru not stepped in. A Korean transfer student with slick brown hair and black eyes, he was the picture of frozen beauty. With cruel and cunning remarks, he drew Tsuna's dreams from him and crushed them beneath his heel, twisting them into something to laugh at.
Tsuna saw his efforts crashing down around him. He had finally stabilized his life, focusing on his art class in an attempt to get something out of his schooling experience, but Masaru easily tore the ground from under him with a few words. Tsuna's schoolwork became sloppy and useless once more, and his grades were dotted with zeros born of mysteriously missing work.
To rub salt in the wound, Kyoko fell deeply and irrevocably in love with Masaru. She was blind to his faults, instead praising his intelligence and the supposed kindness he showed Tsuna by "defending" him from delinquents, humiliating the smaller boy in the process.
Surprisingly, Tsuna found himself with Mochida Kensuke more often than not. The ex-kendo captain had faced a bout with cancer, leaving him too weak to properly use the sword, and his girlfriend at the time had dumped him and told her sycophants every little embarrassing thing, true and untrue. Tsuna wouldn't say they were friends, per say, but they stuck together when the bullies came hunting. The scale was just too unbalanced with them; Mochida was as chauvinistic and selfish as ever and never missed the chance to remind Tsuna that he was better than him.
Even he had his moments, though. Sometimes, when Masaru incited his followers into leaving the two bloody and bruised, Mochida would bring Tsuna back to his house and help him dress his injuries. In return, Tsuna helped Mochida with his physical therapy when he could, supporting his fragile ego. The two slowly began to depend on each other to keep the pieces of their broken lives together.
Masaru couldn't let it be. He used his connections to tear apart Mochida's family, uncovering personal secrets and throwing the dojo into disgrace. Mochida was forced to drop out of school, after which he told Tsuna "S'better, somehow. No one at my new job looks at me funny; they've all got the same problems."
Tsuna persevered; he only needed to see that bright smile to stay together under Masaru's torture. It wasn't as if the Korean could do much anyway: Tsuna's father was out of his reach, and he otherwise lived alone in a house that was paid for by the CEDEF and therefore untouchable. Tsuna's grades were already shot to Hell, and the brunet had long since learned to deal with physical pain. By the time they graduated, Tsuna was hiding scars under every jacket and stray lock of hair.
What happened next has already been explained, so now we shall take the reader into another universe, where two teenagers meet for the first time in the halls of Namimori High School.
("Eto… Watashi-no namae-wa Sawada Tsunayoshi desu.")
"Hey, Tsuna! Didja know that there's a new transfer student today?" Yamamoto Takeshi cheerfully asked, slinging and arm over Tsuna's shoulders.
Gokudera Hayato scowled and pushed at Takeshi's arm. "It doesn't matter if they're some fancy-schmancy transfer student. I will protect Juudaime no matter what!" Tsuna laughed nervously. 'Gokudera-kun, you were a transfer student too…"
Tsuna's head was turned, and he never saw the figure in front of him. The Vongola Decimo was thrown back into Takeshi, while the other was hardly moved.
"Oh! I'm s-sorry… I didn't mean to run into you like that!"
The other tilted his head and smiled charmingly. "It's not a problem. I'm wasn't hurt." The charisma in the words was so pure that it felt forced. "Are you a student here?" He didn't wait for Tsuna to answer. "I'm Tsutomu Masaru. Can you direct me to room 303?"
"O-oh! That's my homeroom too! Um, I'm Sawada Tsunayoshi. It's nice to meet you." Tsuna was surprised that he was stuttering so much. Something about Masaru's gaze made him feel as if his skin had been stripped away so that the transfer student could see down to his marrow.
Behind him, Takeshi's grip over his shoulder tightened and Hayato's gaze hardened. Both of them felt the suppressed aura of killing intent that Masaru was exuding. Hayato spoke up before Tsuna could direct Masaru to the correct room. For once, he didn't threaten or yell at the perceived threat, instead allowing his intelligence to engage in a mental battle that would last through the next seven years. "Didn't the secretary give you a map?"
Masaru turned his eyes away from Tsuna, disinterestedly examining the bomber. "She did, but it wasn't very clear."
This time, Takeshi spoke up. "Take a left, straight down the hall, the farthest classroom on the right."
"Thank you." Masaru made a shallow bow, turning and starting down the hall. He paused. "Would you like to walk with me?"
"Actually, no. We have better things to do," Hayato said with slight venom in his voice.
"Oh, okay." Masaru left.
During the exchange, Tsuna had slowly been pulled back by his guardians until he was behind them. Hayato's hand rested on the pocket where he kept his quick-access dynamite, and Takeshi had shifted his katana into a position that made it easier to reach. Neither of them relaxed until they were sure that Masaru was well and truly gone. A whispered conversation where the guardians informed Tsuna of their worries led to Takeshi walking Tsuna to his class (unfortunately, they did not share the same homeroom) and Hayato making a detour to the roof to warn Kyoya of the possible threat (and getting into an argument with the skylark over disturbing his nap).
Masaru made every effort to befriend Tsuna and his friends; but they rejected him each time, watching with hawk-like eyes as he instead turned to woo Kyoko. The oblivious, gentle girl fell easily for his gentlemanly demeanor, and it wasn't too long before they were dating. Dating progressed into betrothal and betrothal progressed into marriage, leaving Tsuna with no choice but to bring Masaru into the Family. At Ryohei's request, the Korean was assigned command of a minor faction that dealt with the Vongola's public front: he was in charge of sales. It was the lowest risk operation. If he failed that job, the only thing they would lose was their façade company, which could easily be replaced.
It went without question, however, that Kyoko had free access to her brother's work. She knew who he was and what he did; it assuaged her worries to know how many safety procedures were in place to protect her brother. Tsuna made sure that the details of the jobs were under lock and key, but Kyoko knew the schedules of all of the guardians, Tsuna, and many of the Vongola's higher ups.
It wasn't long before the assassinations started to happen. They seemed random at first; the consequences of a mafia job.
Kyoya took a bullet in the side at a conference in France. He was out of commission for three months.
Takeshi gained a scar on his chin; an assassin using a blade just barely scraped him.
One of the lower level employees was mistaken for Ryohei when he showed up in place of the boxer for a meeting. He was shot in the temple.
Reborn stopped countless assassination attempts on Tsuna, and the Decimo himself made his first kill: a clumsy hitman who got a little too close with a knife. Tsuna couldn't sleep for months – he often snuck into his guardians' rooms to make sure that they were still breathing. They would often find him curled up in a corner of the room, having fallen asleep watching whichever guardian he happened to choose that night. It got to the point that Reborn suggested roommates, saying that they could watch each other's backs. Tsuna shared with Hayato, and the bomber's sleepy mumbles let him sleep peacefully.
All of this, as they found out, was the doing of Tsutomu Masaru. He had coaxed the information out of Kyoko with cleverly placed words and caresses. The revelation nearly broke Kyoko, crushing her trust in herself and causing the once cheerful girl to withdraw into herself.
But that was where Tsuna's memories broke off. They stopped on his twenty-fifth birthday, during one of the party's gentle lulls as he stood sipping a glass of red wine and letting his eyes wander the room. His last memory was a blurry image of Kyoko as she weakly laughed at Hana's dry sarcasm. The lights of the ballroom danced off of her muted black dress. The night colored garment was accented in a rich dark brown that made Kyoko's smooth skin look sallow in comparison. It wasn't helped by the thinness of her face or the lines that had begun to creep around her eyes, nor the limp way her hair hung across her shoulders, with no attempt to pin it up or decorate it. The only thing that made this memory worthwhile was the smile on Kyoko's face: it was pained, fragile, and damaged, but it was a start. It meant that she was healing.
("Yoroshiku onegai shimas'! Watashi-wa Sasagawa Kyoko desu!")
("Daijobu?")
A/N – My inspiration for this chapter came of two MADs. (For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a fanmade, generally animated or partially animated video. All fandrawn. That's what the internet said, anyways, and the internet is always right. Duh.) The first was called消えない灯火, which I'm pretty sure roughly translates toIndelible Lamplight. I'm still learning and I had to use a dictionary for that, so tell me if I did that wrong. The second was a one-sided Tsuna/Kyoko video that made me cry, to the song Turkestanica. The person who posted on YouTube is named HibaTsunaKuro. Search them up for a pair of tearjerkers. By the way, the letter Tsuna has is a wedding invitation, and the one he circles says "absence". Again, rough translation. The other one is something like "attendance".
