It was almost never this quiet. Not after Reborn, or Lambo, or Bianchi.
Not after Vongola.
Tsuna couldn't remember their house being this empty even if he had spent the first decade of his life shutting his mother out, couldn't remember the silence being this deafening, this painful, as he takes in the empty chairs in the kitchen and living room. The emptiness feels heavy on his skin, clinging tooth and claw, dragging until the walls feel like they're closing in on him as the ceiling descends on his head and the floor sinks beneath his feet.
They were always there.
They had always been there.
Tsuna's fingers dig into the skin of his arm.
Don't. He thinks and he tries to pretend that his eyes don't sting. Just don't.
"What's wrong?"
His eyes snap to his mother's across the dining table, thoughts momentarily ripped clean off of the surface of his mind as he fights down the urge to look away. He has her eyes, he couldn't help but notice, he has the softness and her smile.
But he was every bit his father the moment he left them and he's left to wonder why his mother ended up settling for something less than what she deserved. Because they could've been better, they all could have been happier. His father with his family, and his mother with someone who treated her like an actual family-
(If Reborn could see him now, he would probably laugh and call him stupid.
You're hopeless, Dame-Tsuna, he would say, laughter in his eyes and pride in his tone.
He was the Strongest Hitman to the world, but he was the best home tutor to his student.
Tsuna would give anything in this world just to hear him say those words again.)
His hands are shaking by the time he looks at them and he grits his teeth.
This was never supposed to happen.
"...Tsu-kun," his mother says, tentative, and buried in there was the repressed urge to say something more than just his name. The dark bags under her eyes seem more prominent than they had been in his room, her knuckles nearly white from how tightly she's gripping on to her own hands.
This was never supposed to happen, he finds himself repeating, a tad bit angrier at his life, at himself. His mother didn't ask. She cleaned the mess he made without a word as he sat there, too shaken, too tired, too weak to be able to do anything more than follow her with his eyes like he still couldn't believe this was happening. She had stayed eerily silent as she cleaned his wounds and tended to his injuries, lips pressed in a thin line even as she fought to suppress the trembling of her fingers.
The places where the glass dug into his skin stung but nothing could hurt quite as much as the sight of his mother suffering and the knowledge that had he been 14, he wouldn't have seen how much his mother worried, how much she cared when he had been too busy failing in school and wasting his life away in the confines of his room.
"...Tsu-kun," she tries again and this time, her voice breaks a little and Tsuna fights back a flinch. The question is clear.
He looks back at his hands. They were- foreign. Weird. Almost like they don't belong to him.
Without the scars, without the ring-
He closes his eyes.
[I'm sorry.] He mouths, more to himself than to his mother as he stares at the table. And really, what else is there to say? His mother was dead- had been for years because he had made the mistake of taking her for granted when he should have told her all the things he needed to say, when he could have been stronger, when he could have been a better son by telling her the truth.
Tsuna ached. He ached to stay in this time, to make it up to the people he failed, to do things better.
A soft sound, weak, and a shuddered exhale.
"It's okay."
And god, Tsuna ached. He knows she means it, knows that it was all she could say, knows that those words are enough to tell him what couldn't be said. But-
His nails dig deeper. He tastes blood in his mouth.
Without a scar, without a ring-
His mother was dead.
This isn't real.
Tsuna meets his mother's eyes across the table and smiles.
He could lie to himself for a little longer.
(He's been lying to himself for ten years, after all. How is this any different?)
For a while, all Tsuna does is stare at his cracked reflection.
He doesn't leave his room, doesn't take one step past the door of their house. He can barely look at his mother without feeling sick to his stomach or tasting copper boiling at the back of his throat but he takes it in, drowns in the warmth of her presence even as he shuts and locks the windows of his room. He knows far too much, from the names of his classmates and their families to the children who have yet to be born at this time. He knows places that currently are, that was, that would be over the course of the next ten years, knows that at the end of it all is nothing but corpses buried under debris. He knows of Vongola, of Varia, of all of the Mafia and its sins. He knows of future Guardians, of technology a hundred steps ahead, of the dangers of the pink Bazookas and boxes and rings.
Tsuna knows far too much yet entirely too little and it's starting to kill him because he doesn't know what to do with knowing.
He inhales, shrinks a little more to himself as he wraps his arms around his knees, back pressed against the side of his bed. He couldn't bear looking outside, couldn't stand the blueness of the sky and the peace. He knows he'll destroy it, knows that he is to blame for burning it to the ground. He is 14-years-old but his mind is twice as old and his body remembers killing, remembers bleeding. Not a single day passed in the future where his gloves didn't drip with red and blaze with pure amber which ominously swirled with crimson every time he fought. He had almost forgotten what it was like to swallow the pills and willingly take bullets to his head, the flame on his head constantly dormant because Tsunayoshi had been enough to win battles, to murder, and Decimo didn't have to appear. Brown eyes, cold smiles, it was an era where they feared the incarnation of Vongola's sins.
(No one has lived long enough to remember what warm amber looked like in his eyes.)
He closes his eyes and rests his forehead against his folded arms. He had to come to a decision. He didn't have enough time and he wasn't a fool, wasn't the same naive child who used to take things for granted.
This opportunity will be taken away from him and he knows it will be. He never had anything easy, never had the luxury. The clock is always ticking, counting down to the next tragedy.
He has to decide.
He has to decide on whether he should leave Vongola, or stay and see it to its inevitable end.
He has to decide on whether he's willing to drag them back into the war, drag them back into their coffins with his own hands, or stand with the decision that he is never going to see or talk to them again.
He has to decide on whether he should ask them to stay, or leave.
Tsuna opens his eyes and stares, his gaze empty. The warmth of the flames under his skin shied away from him, pressed desperately against the seals that Nono had buried under his bones. He almost couldn't tell who was going to burn first if they ended up touching.
The skin of his ring finger is rubbed raw, the skin peeling slightly from how much he's been scraping at it with his nails.
Inheritance. Blood. Ancestry.
He breathes, tries to reach with shaking fingers, and the flame is ice cold. It shouldn't have come as a surprise. It had lost all its warmth for years, after all, and he'd been fighting alone. There was a reason why orange flames never blazed in his eyes or his head after Hayato's death. So it shouldn't have, couldn't have, but it did.
Rejection.
His heart twists and Tsuna stands, his decision made.
Destiny is a cruel little thing.
It takes two weeks.
He talked to his mother, persisted to despite his painfully twinging wrist and cramping fingers, talked about the money that his father sends home, how they had met and how it had seemed a little like love at first sight, how Tsuna was doing in school because Tsuna never did tell her, and he knew that it showed. He knew that it showed in how he talked about himself and his father, how he wrote, how he looked at her like a ghost that he wasn't him. His mother had looked at his face with a grim understanding, her usually carefree demeanor lurking still but lost behind the somber grief that clouded her eyes.
"You're still Tsu-kun," she had said despite everything and that broke Tsuna more than it fixed him.
She promised, told him she'd think about his father and their family. And really, that was enough. That was all he could hope to ask for. She didn't deserve being thrown under like that, didn't deserve not knowing even if it was for the safety that Vongola - he - promised. She had spent far longer than Tsuna did pretending that it was alright to not know, that it's best that she stayed quiet and kept what she truly felt under layers of fake and forced optimism. And Iemitsu - and he did, too, didn't he? Like father, like son - encouraged that blissful ignorance by doing the same, by comforting her with empty reassurances and promises.
It's what killed her - them - in the end, and Tsuna couldn't bear to watch her die the same way.
Not again, he'd told himself as he wrote, I'm still him. But I had my shortcomings. I made mistakes. I won't do it again. Not this time. Not if I can do something about it.
And Nana understood, had wrapped her arms around him as sobs wracked through her body.
"What have they done to you?" is all she could ask and even Tsuna didn't know how to tell her that it wasn't what they did, it was what he couldn't do that made and destroyed him.
Something eased between them, a mutual understanding that weighed heavy in their shared silences at times. But it was alright, Tsuna thinks, it was alright because this was all he could have and it's enough.
It takes two weeks before he convinces his mother to leave the house.
Tsuna reassured her that he'll be alright, that she had to because it wasn't safe (not with him, he didn't say but from the haunted look in her eyes, he reckoned she knew anyway). He tells her that she isn't leaving him, that he is more than capable of looking after himself, asks her to trust him on this. He also convinces her to take the money his father had sent home with her to her family despite her arguments.
It takes two weeks, but by then, his mother is back with her family and the Sawada household isn't much of a house as it was a pile of debris.
Sawada Tsunayoshi disappears.
He has made his decision.