khr ain't mine.

Well this a long chapter huh? I'm not sure if I should split it to shorter ones so that it's a bit more readable...

Anyway, thanks for joining in to read this. Let me know what you think. Hope you have fun reading this.

Here we go! (๑✪ᆺ✪๑)

Chapter 4

Down the memory lane

When Sawada Tsunayoshi was in kindergarten, it wasn't the punches, kicks or slaps that made his tears flood out. It was the shock that came with being hit with the full brunt of their disapproval. The pain was momentary at that instant, and after the incidents, it stung and lingered. It was the rejection that hurt him the most.

He wasn't allowed to love fiercely, because when he hugged Amore to vent everything out; the cotton doll's arm almost ripped out. It was then, that he saw the sorry state of it; it was covered in snot and his breakfast since he insisted on sharing his meals with it. He had to face the fact that his love would eventually destroy it- and then, he'd be left to fight his battles alone. At that time, no one cared about an unwanted child wandering the streets. At the same time, their attention was captured by a rising dictator.

Everyone woke up every day, ready to handle everything life could throw at them. But he was a damn coward, so he kept a lookout for refuges. Before he had transformed his room, he used to wander the streets of Namimori, to search for places people rarely came to. Their stares scorched his skin, and his bruises flared when his eyes met another's. He felt his teeth chatter, his breath rough and shallow, his eyes swimming and his nose smelled copper and iron. His sharp fingernails were reassuring when they sunk onto something, but he hated its scent. He wanted to keep his hands busy with something.

When he saw a quiet shop, one that no one in town mentioned, he entered the place assuming that its owner was dead or the guy abandoned it and fled to another town. There wasn't a soul in the shop and it was dark. So he tottered inside and sat comfily near the porch that lead to a small courtyard. There was a badly maintained garden with overgrown weeds and there wasn't anything that he was doing at the moment. He spent the next couple of days pulling out weeds, removing the moss from the pond and collecting the trash thrown around the place.

There was a festival that was going to come in the next couple of days, so he pulled his mother along, intent on bringing back koi fish for the pond along with flower seeds to plant in the garden. His mom had gotten distracted during the fest, leaving him untethered do whatever he wished. So he spent the entire night trying to sic a lotta fish. That night, he made a bedsheet turned rope and headed towards the abandoned shop.

That place was his new hidden base, his very own secret hideout. During his several visits, he brought a kotetsu over to keep himself warm and cuddly as he would watch over his work. The garden now had a bunch of flowers that his classmates would shove from the windowsills of the upper floors when he tried to get in the nursery building. The others were the neglected flower gardens that his mother gave up on. It used to be her hobby and she used to nurture them like they were her very own children, but she had stopped recently when he heard her scream from her bathroom. When he dashed there, she had slouched against a broken mirror, with a bloody wrist. She looked like a wilted flower and it mimicked the way her flower garden had become lately.

Father hadn't been visiting and she had been tracing her finger over the youthful, beautiful figure dressed in a wedding gown. Tsuna thought that the neighbors' rumors and concern had been getting to the lady. So he had decided to shift the blame onto the absent father, since he couldn't handle living with someone who would become as broken as he would be in a while. He whispered to the gossiping wind that his father became a star. And then, his mother received the spotlight and showers of flowers.

The garden in the backyard looked like they thrived in his attention, even though they were abandoned by the one person that truly mattered. Truly, his mother was a flower on a high peak.

Unfortunately, the fun couldn't last forever and Sasagawa Ryohei had caught him on his return to his hideout. The boy who was similarly wounded and bandaged up as regularly as he was, but he, unlike him, was conferred the title 'Warrior'. He looked the brunette with righteous fury.

"Sawada, what you're doing is extremely uncool! Stop skipping classes! You're bringing up problems Hana!

She's supposed to be you guys' class in charge and she's taking the blame and covering your sh*t for you! As a man, don't you find this pathetic?!"

Tsuna wasn't masochistic and he will not go to a place to get a wallop or a daily dose of it. So he left the hyperactive boxer behind. He's perfectly fine letting the hero-in-the-making label him as scum. It wasn't like having a bad reputation or relation would affect him in any way. He couldn't stoop lower anyway.

But he couldn't stop the flinch when the other yelled after him when he planned to pull a fast one over him. He overreacted at that instance and fell over to the ground and immediately moved his arms to shield himself from any punches.

"S-sorry." the other mumbled and the brunette looked at the albino haired boy in shock. No one ever apologized to him, not ever.

The boxer scratched his head in slight embarrassment and moved his hand towards his arm to pull the smaller kid up, ignoring the flinch at the gesture. Then he shuffled at the spot and offered to help the other with whatever he was doing.

The brunette wasn't used to any form of kindness, so he just decided to roll with it, being kind of curious in what would happen in this kind of development. So he moved to the secret base and brought the watering can that lay standby on the table to water the flowers. The boxer looked at the garden with awe and peered over at the edge of the pond to see the small fish swimming around. Seeing that the other had moved to the place while looking around sneakily, he felt like this place was a secret one that he had been invited to. So, he couldn't show this extreme place to his little sister, since he was a man that didn't violate the bro-code.

Since then, the enthusiastic kid began bringing all sorts of nifty things to decorate the place with. He brought over a whole lot of shiny, sparkly pebbles of different colors to surround the pond. He even regularly visited the flower shop and brought brightly colored flowers like sunflowers, marigold, and roses to brighten the place up; saying that the place was too gloomy for his tastes. Sasagawa was so engrossed in prettying the place up, that many of his bandages had been reducing since he wasn't getting in as many fights as he had before since he was more preoccupied with something else.

His sister looked way more relieved now, the brunette observed. But the same couldn't be said to her friend since Kurokawa Hana wasn't happy that the guy forgot the mission that she had assigned to him. But she couldn't say anything since it did the guy a whole lotta good, making her friend really happy.

Well if the two boy's budding friendship taught the boxer anything, it taught the boy to choose his fights and only fight if there was something important to him at stake. Because he would have to choose to spend time settling scores instead of having fun at the base. Tsuna had been getting lax with the peace that befell him since the other could drag him out of sticky situations with his bullies even if the brunette tripped over thin air. True, getting dragged with his face in the ground was a bit annoying, but it was less humiliating than the alternative that the boy offered- being princess carried.

Then... his mother found out about him being a neet... and then harshly reprimanded him for letting her see the actual harsh reality. He had interrupted her dream-like experience. So, he had to go back to school.

If anybody celebrated his return, it was his friends who missed him so much that they pushed him around saying that they were lonely. Sasagawa couldn't accept this kind of treatment and got back into fighting... and it was a long war. He was burning with just fury. And they were burning with the annoyance at a meddling kid who was getting in the way of their fun. Violence begets violence and Tsuna soon couldn't figure out who was taking their revenge on whom.

Having enough of seeing her bruised and battered brother, Sasagawa Kyoko shrieked at him with rage that he should fight his own battles. Kurokawa Hana backed her up and told him to grow a spine and stop being a wimp. The boxer couldn't intervene since he didn't want to hurt his sister who seemed to splitting hairs and at the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The sister turned her watery eyes at the boxer and begged him to promise her to stop getting into fights. At that time, it dawned to Tsuna, who looked at the scene in front of him, like a bystander; that Sasagawa Ryohei was Sasagawa Kyoko's knight in shining armor. That he was the angel to her goddess. So... before Sasagawa look at him with a sorry in his expression, he interrupted them with a callous dismissal and claimed that their base was actually occupied by its original owner. So he was through with the boxer.

The sister stepped in front of him and slapped him and called him despicable.

That day was just horrible for the lad anyway. When he stopped by the base that morning, he had seen an albino haired man who looked at the garden spellbound. Tsuna had to force himself to come in terms with the fact the garden was now the shopkeepers' and that homely house was also his.

Now he had to comprehend that Sasagawa was his sisters'. His mother was his fathers'. He was born empty-handed and he still is empty-handed.

People were never really something he could own or even belong with. They were always someone else's.

"What's yours is mine, Tsuna-chwan"

His bullies really spoke words of wisdom. It was like he was a broken kite or an unmoored ship.

He remembered his doll, Amore, who he had kept at the store and paled, thinking that he might have relinquished its ownership to the stranger wearing a checkered mask. But if he begged the other and told him he could do anything for the other, would he give it back? Or was it too late...?

When he stood at the entrance bathed in moonlight, the shopkeeper looked at him kindly. But Tsuna's mind was preoccupied with the doll in the other's hand. It was mended, cleaned, and decorated with beautiful satin ribbons. It looked like the doll was no longer his, since it looked like it was given a full makeover, like as if it was going to a better place.

His eyes burned with unshed tears, and the other pushed his doll further into his vision intending on returning the doll to its rightful owner.

When Kawahira returned to the shop, exhausted from having to monitor and make sure the current Arcobaleno don't get closer to the truth; this time, they were truly formidable, giving him a run for his money. He wanted to stop by for a quick break before getting back to business. He sighed when the mist shrouding him lifted, teleporting to the silent antique shop. He wanted to remove his mask, rub his tired eyes and sleep in his bed for a bit but saw a beautiful garden with fishes swimming under the pond that captured the moon. The fragrance of blooming flowers wafted through the atmosphere and he could now understand why people praised and tried aromatherapy. There was a kotetsu with a kettle that contained oolong tea and soft cushions that he could sit upon while gazing at the scenery. There was a young sakura tree that made him wonder how would the next spring look like, amidst the scattering petals. It made him look forward to the future for once.

There were lanterns near the sliding doors that gave a warm ambiance to the room, making the room seem like it had been lived in and his house looked like home for once.

His reverie had been interrupted when a small child stared at him mutely, before running away. He wondered if he was visited by a Zashiki Warashi. Then his eyes spotted the worn out doll and decided to make an offering for the little spirit, to repay the favor.

He looked at the teary child in front of him and tried to calm him down by praising the renovations he made.

"You've really transformed this place. It's gorgeous. I could never have done this."

Understanding flashed in the brunette's eyes and he finally lifted his tiny hands to accept the doll. It seemed like a deal had been made, even though that wasn't Kawahira's intention.

There was no helping it now, the child made it a part of his routine to visit and tend the gardens. It seemed like he had considered it payment for keeping the doll. The white-haired male couldn't convince him to drop the deal, so he decided to make his own twist of the circumstances. When in Rome...

Now, when Tsuna came over, there'd be sweet manju and tea that they both would snack over. He also bought a lot of doll merchandise since the boy seemed infatuated with them. The child would spend hours quietly decorating them, and the man, unable to handle the child's tears when he messed up, helped the other fix any mishaps from any experimentations.

But the shopkeeper couldn't really stay for too long since he was the arbitrator of the trinisette.

Once, he had gotten careless and left the back door open, and came back from business to see the brunette huddled in the corner moping around his doll. He was near the trinisette model that was linked to the arcobelano's pacifiers. He treated the very model that held the world's balance like a fireplace, holding a marshmallow in a stick, toasting it.

The shopkeeper gave the other a wry smile, feeling amused at the artifact being utilized this way. So he chastised the brunette, saying.

"That thing is dangerous, child. It leaks quite often and it could burn you if you get too close to it." Burning was an understatement, it would disintegrate him. The child was already on pins and needles on a daily basis, he didn't need to be spooked with that detail.

"If it leaks, it would eventually stop. There's no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, anyway."

"Unfortunately, this machine gets its supply to allow it to leak that much." The price was sometimes very, very expensive. It came at the cost of the chosen seven's lives. It made the vindice carry a grudge that made them crawl out of their graves. They could never find peace amongst themselves and didn't rest in the name of vengeance.

He supposed this was why he allowed the brunette to stay for this long. It was because they both were so unilaterally hated by the people around them. There was no one that would wish them to stay alive. They wouldn't wish them to fare well. It was too bad for the earthlings that they didn't have a benevolent god.

Feeling tired, he sat in front of the miserable child and spoke his worries for the first time. He spoke into the silent room on matters that no one in this planet would hear.

"The continuous supply from its source makes it unusable after some time. It makes getting new sources a painful process.

Sometimes, the extinguished sources become violent and volatile. They... have to be destroyed. But because of the system, the sources try to destroy it."

"Why don't you get rid of those?"

"They radiate continuously and they try to source it to the system. It's hard to corner and destroy it. Containing it or stabilizing it is much more unstable."

The brunette thought that this was something like a nuclear energy powered system, so he muttered.

"What about using that extinguished system as the cap for the system? It can replace the leaky part of the new energy source. When the new energy source is dying off, it can be squeezed out to form the core again..." he promptly shut up when he saw the other looking at him seriously.

He immediately started spouting excuses.

"It was like my dolls. If the cotton in it started losing air and it appeared to sag off, I'd use newspapers to fill in the remaining air. That's why I thought it would work!-"

"Sorry, Tsunayoshi-kun, do you think you could go home for today? I've got some work to do."

The brunette looked like he'd been chastised. He took up his doll and rushed to the door, before muttering a sorry. When Kawahira immediately tried to rectify the situation, the boy wasn't there anymore. He huffed in irritation. It was hard to always be on his tiptoes to not set off the boy. He accidentally spoke those callous words, since his mind was whirring with the possibility of fixing this once and for all.

He looked at the full moon outside.

It was a truly beautiful night today.

He returned to the shop after a month and beckoned at Tsuna who was wandering around that area. The child looked spooked when he saw that the older man waved at him. When he approached him, the man lifted him up and twirled him around with a drunk joy. The poor kid looked like he had experienced vertigo.

The child then peeked around him and asked him what happened to the system and Kawahira cheerfully replied that it was out of his hands. Tsuna paled like a white sheet at that and immediately did a dogeza, to which the shopkeeper panicked and tried to pry him off the floor. He had to stop the other from apologizing profusely and couldn't even say a word of thanks. By the time the child calmed down, he was so tired he just dozed off to sleep. Kawahira just laughed softly and patted the child's hair only for the other to nuzzle into the touch. The man just quietly gazed at the garden for the rest of the night.

A couple of days later, the shop door opened with a bang and a young Aria barged into the shop. Tsuna shrieked and hid under the kotatsu. The child had never seen this lady before and decided to stay out of trouble just in case. What would make this lady different from the other people anyway? But Kawahira, that jerk threw him under the bus.

He had closed his ears and crouched in a well-hidden place so that he could weather whatever this was, but after a while, he had been pulled by his arm out of his trench and was made to face the rather briskly speaking lady who spoke in a language that he couldn't have understood. Then a blonde haired guy came forward and broke the iron clutch that the woman had on him. She finally shifted her intense stare to the man next to her and they seemed to argue about something. When Tsuna looked at Kawahira to rectify the situation, that ass just waved his hand towards him. So he had to take this matter into his own hands and broke for it when he thought that they were preoccupied enough to forget that he existed.

There were shouts left behind, but he decided to hell with it and decided to camp at the Sawada residence until things calm down.

The time he had spent was finally enough for the child Hibari to finish setting up preparations to start his despotic reign over the town of Namimori. Thus, when he saw that Tsuna was loitering around the town he faced him and bit him to death. It was the first time the child felt such pain since the other made swift and precise attacks to quickly deal with nuisances.

From then on, Hibari had decided that the streets were his, so Tsuna could only be herded off to elementary. It was like life whispered to his ears that he wasn't allowed to run away from his problems anymore. And it rest its dainty fingers around his fragile neck and choked him quietly.

"Grow a spine, Sawada!"

"You should fight your own battles, Sawada-kun!"

And Tsuna stared at his wrists and wondered if the fists of his could protect anything? His dignity had long been in shambles and he really had nothing to protect.

Tsuna's bullies- no, friends looked at him, and gave him a wide smile. He shivered.

They came towards him and slung an arm around him and welcomed him back. And then Tsuna realized that it hurt twice as bad since he was rarely hurt in the past month. But he trembled at getting used to this. His body had decided to throw the white flag before Tsuna could do anything to stop things from spiraling out of control.

They enjoyed getting a rise from him. They could pop a balloon right next to his ear and he would shut his ears and duck for cover, since the pop struck sharply at his earlobe and the sound hurt his eardrums.

He strived clear of bathrooms since they tried locking him in a cubicle and poured buckets of scum and sud on him. He'd shiver and reek like a rat after that. If things went south, they'd drown his head into a toilet bowl. When they flushed, he shrieked like a banshee since he thought that his head might be decapitated from him and get flushed into the sewers. They guffawed at his girly screech.

He had to mute his screeches, since they would either get riled on by it, by amusement or by irritation. Sometimes, he thought he should light a matchstick and swallow it so that his voicebox would burn off and it wouldn't produce any strange sound. He also had to avoid meeting any person's gaze as his eyes would betray him and plead for help when every well-meaning person was a Sasagawa Ryohei who had a Sasagawa Kyoko. Those angels couldn't afford to lend a hand.

The Physical Education grounds were an execution ground for him. His friends kicked sand into his eyes and pushed him whenever he tried to get up. They growled in anger when he couldn't manage to get near them since his body refused to move into their personal space. He couldn't command it to move and he felt like he was losing control of his own damn body.

He felt like the last string snapped when he saw Sasagawa Ryohei approach him and ask him if he wanted to join the boxing club. Voluntarily joining something to get punched around...? Tsuna felt nauseous. He was going to puke at that instant if he even entertained doing that. But the boxer ignored his refusal and dragged him over to the club. But Tsuna's eyes blacked out immediately when he saw the boxing glove approaching him quickly.

Thus, the brunette stood over the kitchen counter and approached his mother for the very first time and spoke,

"K-Kaa-san...

I'm... I'm not really... getting along well with my classmates. Can I please shift schools?"

"Tsu-kun, you have to learn to adjust. In life, you can't be so selfish all the time."

Tsuna wanted her to come over to him and choke his miserable life out its existence.

Then he just silently stared at her and decided to take a page out of her book. He was her kid, they shared the same DNA. So, he can very well get lost in a dream like she did.

He didn't have to live in reality. No one could force him. He himself was abetting her to live in a fantasy. So she could forgive him for drowning in one too, right?

Like mother like son.

Hibari Kyoya knew that people feared and as a consequence of that, respected him. He believed that life had a hierarchy, with carnivores at the top and herbivores at the bottom. But there was one that didn't seem like he wasn't trying to subvert the order, but create one right inside it.

Sawada Tsunayoshi was interesting, as he was infuriating. When he walked into a confrontation between some herbivores and him, they had moved to punch the small one, and the other foolishly took the full brunt of it. He decided enough was enough since they were making a racket and they scurried after getting their just rewards. The brunette lingered there and his eyes caught on to a notepad that the other carried around, stopping his warning from leaking out. The other took a photo of himself and then traced the punch and wrote measurements of the width and length of the fingers. He seemed to be correcting his observations and it was a truly strange way of measuring the human anatomy. Then, audaciously, he jotted down the time that Hibari had shown up there. Hibari had felt a feeling of unease for the first time- It was the simple fact that this kid had many unfortunate encounters with him; It could allow the brunette to know his habits and movements.

Then the other took out bandages and wrapped them around the most affected regions with trained hands and moved quietly out of the area.

He had encountered the brunette in the same isolated street for the 4th time before he clicked his tongue, thinking that the brat didn't have the ability to learn. For the 5th time, he had been chased by some kids into that street and the prefect promptly took care of the teens. The brunette was out of sight by then. Then the same thing happened for the 6th and 7th time, and finally, Hibari realized that he had been played with. His teeth gnashed together in repressed fury.

The next couple of weeks, he thought the other didn't trudge that path, but then found out that his patrol route had been exploited to grant the brunette access to wherever he wanted. It was the payoff of a lingering suspicion that he had been magnificently duped. He had set up IR sensors at isolated street corners and found out that someone had really passed through those places. Upon closer inspection, he found proximity sensor cameras that were triggered to capture photos of people that walked in that area and even had timestamps for each time the photo was snapped. Of course, the camera had no photos of Sawada since the other had erased them thrice a week.

It was from a trusted source, the threatened redhead herbivore could attest to that. That herbivore was strangely shifty-eyed when he gave him that information.

He thought that there was a way to counter this. He simply decided to move from rooftop to rooftop and learned parkour to enable a new way to patrol over his town. This method was useful to swoop down on the brunette who was confident in knowing the other's patrol route. The kid counterattacked with another solution and bugged his armband with a radar chip. He had realized that he had been beautifully tricked into broadcasting his location when one of his targets threw a water balloon at him to give them time to escape; thus giving him a shock. Naturally, he gave the other a painful beatdown for that, but the revelation still annoyed him.

The prefect tried a new tactic out of spite for the first time. He placed the armband with the chip on a bush, near the isolated street, ringing it over its branch. It sure did intimidate Sawada.

Hibari realized that even if he changed the patrolling time and route, he still couldn't be present at every location at the same time and Sawada could eventually create another routine that could avoid him, even at the cost of pain and retaliation. It was honestly a conundrum that someone would team up with pain to achieve a goal. It meant that Hibari's tactics couldn't be applicable universally. It wouldn't serve as a deterrent.

This time, he decided to apply a different strategy, one that he would never have considered. He moved to the rooftops of a building over that isolated street and tailed the brunette to find exactly where was he going every single time. He learned that it was an antique store that the boy bought doll parts and design materials. So he fiddled with dolls as a hobby, huh? In that case, he didn't really need to block the child from shopping for his items related to his interests, right? (But a voice whispered in his ears that he had lost this battle.)

Hibari decided to make every time he catches the brunette crowding around a group, extra painful for the latter. His conviction on this decision grew stronger when he found out that the redhead herbivore, Irie Shoichi, and Sawada Tsunayoshi were in cahoots this whole time. In fact, they cooperated to reach a mutually beneficial relationship of avoiding those who tormented them- but in Sawada's case, it was the opposite.

If it was Hibari, he could think of better uses for that information. To think, it was the different stance that made the level difference. He smirked.

How very interesting.

The prefect took up establishing a DC committee to increase the range of his operations. He also took up observing the brunette very closely, close enough to notice the traces of paint and close enough to observe how the other constructed and reconstructed appearances into features. It was like an artist memorizing features to replicate them on paper. In fact, it seemed like the brunette was fascinated at his eyes when he decided to teach someone about the boundaries they weren't to cross.

It meant that Tsunayoshi wasn't devoid of bloodlust, it was only right now that he was trying to build his own kingdom. Hibari wanted to drag the other into his world so that he could choose the option of unleashing that chaos onto the chains that the brunette willingly bound himself onto. So, when Yamamoto proposed that he could use the cameras in the school as a surveillance system, he made the brunette as the co-owner as a form of invitation.

The way the brunette kept getting injured was something that put a limitation on the potential he could achieve. But the other couldn't handle the idea of retaliation in the fear of being susceptible to pain. The dolls were the incentive that allowed the brunette to accept pain in the first place. He thought that Sasagawa Ryohei with how incessant he was, could get Tsuna to develop; But after the boxer saw how the other rejected his approach, the idiot became too afraid to give it another go. Hibari figured that since that fool had nothing but good intentions, Tsunayoshi could be nudged towards fighting back with positive reinforcing.

But, something went wrong when he stalled from advancing by pondering. Yamamoto approached him, and Hibari didn't understand how did this guy come to think of him as a mutual friend since he came to him for advice.

"Hibari-senpai, you know what Tsuna likes right? He seemed pretty happy with the matryoshka doll that you gifted him that time. So, could you help me with giving Tsuna a gift so that I can make it up to him?"

"That matryoshka doll was used to spite him- that underneath all those layers it's nothing but trash"

"But Tsuna's eyes glittered like a kid with each matryoshka doll layer that he found inside it..."

He gave the delusional brat a knock to wake him up and left the unconscious idiot on the floor. He didn't need more idiots popping up in his Namimori.

Turns out, Yamamoto was perfectly capable of finding an appropriate gift for the brunette. It wouldn't mean anything if he had contributed to it in the first place. It was a matter amongst themselves anyway. But later in the year, when he saw a crying brunette hunched over a dented matryoshka doll, Namimori had learned that Yamamoto for some inexplicable reason ended up in Hibari Kyoya's blacklist.