Tsuna sighed as he examined his five year old face in the mirror, then sneered as he remembered his most recent death and the ultimate cause of it. He heard his mother bustling around on the ground floor and frowned.

He took a seat right there on the floor and did the math. He had been fourteen when he died the first time, seven the second time, and he was five again. Did that technically make him twenty-six? And his mother, the woman who kept him fed and housed, but never seemed to see.

"Tsu-kun! Breakfast is ready!" she called up the stairs.

His mother cheerfully served him and nodded at his mumbled, "Itadakimasu," and delicately began to eat.

He escaped soon after and booked it to the library. His brain was working properly again and he was not tripping over thin air, so the building was again a place of wonder and knowledge, not a haven used for hiding from the nastier elements of school-aged children.

'If this sort of thing is going to keep happening, I might as well learn as much as I can,' he thought, 'especially if I have to deal with that whole mafia thing again. Assuming I live so long.'

French, Italian, and whatever other language caught his fancy. Surely the librarians would assist him. A childish story about how his Oto-san worked in far away countries and how Tsu-kun wanted to be able to surprise him on his next visit.

During the evenings, while his mother was busy with whatever it was she did (he was starting to wonder, but could not work up the enthusiasm to spy and find out), he worked on trying to manifest his flames.

The cold wasn't there and the old man hadn't done whatever it was he'd done this time—some kind of seal, he supposed—so perhaps if he could gain control of them ahead of time, rather than hoping to live long enough for Reborn to show up and brag about making him into a perfect mafia boss, he could escape being sealed this time around when they visited.

His breakthrough only came after he, in something not quite approaching desperation, learned how to meditate. And then, when the flames burst wildly free from his fingertips, he was puzzled to realize they were a reddish-brown colour, not orange as he expected from his first life.

"Now what can I do with these?" he murmured curiously. It was not as though Reborn had ever gotten to the point where he had explained much of anything beyond intimidating "facts" about the Vongola Famiglia. Sure, sure, orange flames, Sky Flames, Flames of Dying Will, Flames of the Sky.

He scoffed, still unable to see what the point was.

Still, he would try, to get a handle on them, even if they weren't the colour he expected.

. . .

Ironically, it was when he tumbled out of a tree that it all made sense.

His hands went out in a futile gesture, to ward away the cold, hard ground rushing up to meet him. And then he just … stopped. Tsuna hovered there, staring at the packed dirt beneath him, his hands wreathed in those reddish-brown flames. He blinked a few times, hoping to make his sight make sense again, then abruptly dropped, letting out a soft, surprised sound of mild pain.

Tsuna sat up and stared at his hands, then up the tree. "Well I can't see doing that again on purpose," he muttered, "or flinging myself off a bridge. And I don't think any adult would take me seriously if I wanted to go bungee jumping or anything similar. But what…?"

He huffed, got up, brushed off his clothes, and retreated to the library to look up supernatural phenomena.

'Telekinesis?' He somehow doubted it was so simple, but it gave him a starting point. If he could learn to move things with his flames, as if he had telekinesis, then perhaps he could figure out what it really was.

He had no help in this. No friends, no allies, no one he could trust. And knowing that, at some point, it was likely the mafia would come calling, expecting this silly civilian boy to head the largest, bloodiest mafia family out there, he could not take the chance of looking for help.

It did raise the question of whether or not his mother had a clue who she was really married to.

That caused him to sit back, ostensibly riveted by the contents of the book in his hands, and think. He went over every moment he could recall from his previous two lives when it came to Sawada Nana.

She was oblivious, an air-head, a brainlessly devoted housewife for a husband who was never there. But was she really? If she was, had that man chosen her for exactly those reasons? Tsuna didn't even know what Iemitsu did for a living, though if he himself was a candidate to head the Vongola, why wasn't his father ahead of him in line?

Did his father not have flames?

Was the man angry or jealous that his son did? Was that why he was never home? He couldn't bear to be around someone who had what he wanted?

Or was there some other reason?

He wondered if the man had purposefully chosen an oblivious civilian to start a family with, one from a distant country—though the man's name alone strongly suggested he was actually from Japan—so he could fend off any "offers" from the Vongola to find him a suitable wife with which to breed up potential heirs?

The whole situation was horribly confusing for him. When Reborn came back around, he would have to consider asking a lot of hard questions.

But for the moment, he needed to figure out these oddly coloured flames.

. . .

In the end he got careless.

His mother had managed to catch him at his practice, as he worked on new ways to use his flames, to mold gravity to his wishes. During a phone conversation with her husband she had mentioned the pretty lights. Tsuna only heard it in passing and gave no particular thought to it. It was only later that he realized what must have happened.

He woke up one morning with a sluggish brain, a cold that ached in his bones, and a marked tendency to trip over nothing. It was like wearing a brightly glowing neon sign that said to all the nasty-minded bullies in town, "Come get me."

His dear, sweet mother, never batted an eye when he would come home covered in bruises, leaking blood, his lip or eye swollen. She either truly was oblivious, or was so far into denial it made no difference.

His grades plummeted like boulders in a lake. The day she actually called him "dame" was the day he began to work overtime to force the seal to break, exerting as much pressure with his will as he could.

Perhaps he should not have been so surprised that when it did break, he literally exploded and rained small bits of himself all over the landscape. Had he been capable of being surprised at that point, that is.