His blood is warm.
It clings to his skin, the unmistakable tang of copper mixing with gunpowder and the scent of ash, and it's the closest thing to home he'll soon learn to have. It's the cold embrace of war, the grim company of death in every breath taken into blackened lungs, the crippling sensation of never knowing the future, if there will ever be an aftermath left to witness.
The man in white has his fingers wrapped around the interwoven threads of dimensions. Ruthless and without mercy, he'd conquered and destroyed, and he wonders, most times, he wonders what it's like to end lives that have already been destroyed in another reality, to feel the burden - if there even was, if it even weighed on Byakuran's conscience - of watching world after world fall apart by his own hands, never quite content, never quite satisfied.
The mantle is draped over his shaking shoulders. It's shredded and torn, and unlike the red on his hands, it's cold. It weighs heavy on his bones, pins him to the ground as he kneels over the child he'd taken into his home when he was fourteen years old.
He smells like smoke and crackling thunder, and Tsuna screams.
Lambo is five when he was thrown out of his Family with one instruction: assassinate the strongest hitman, Reborn, and bring glory to Bovino. They gave him hand grenades and bazookas because although he was their heir, he doesn't know how to use a gun, doesn't know how to pull the trigger no matter how many times they force his small fingers around it, no matter how hard they hit his the back of his hands and face until he's barely breathing.
He shouldn't have to, Tsuna had told Lambo.
("What a shame," Aunt Ottavio says and it haunts his dreams, echoes until he couldn't sleep, until he learns to scream and yell and be loud to drown out the sound of her voice, "If only your parents could see you now.")
And Lambo doesn't, couldn't, he's just a child, after all, but he tries.
And then he's ten, and true to his lineage, he kills a man.
They were being followed and Lambo remembered the helpless fear that overcame him when the man destroyed his phone before he could even call. Kyoko and Haru - his family, his sisters - tried to help him escape, to distract the man so that Lambo could ask for help but they weren't fast enough, weren't strong enough, and they woke up bound and sedated in an unfamiliar room. He stared at them, leered at his sisters like he wants to devour their skin with his yellowing teeth and crawl inside them, and Lambo was just ten but he sees red when the man threatens to strip and defile them with his hands.
He moves before he could think. Before he could regret.
He was their little brother first but he never once forgot that he was born a Bovino.
And Bovino's are trained to kill, trained to wield weapons they've created as young as five.
Lightning had crackled on his skin, fraying the ropes that held his wrists behind his back, and he moved, ignored the blow to the side of his head with a resilience that would make Reborn proud, and he steals the gun from the man's holster with piercing green flames coating his fingers.
(For a fleeting second, he thinks of Aunt Ottavio and his parents.)
Lambo shoots.
He isn't quite the same, after.
(That same night, he crawls into Tsuna's bed and cries, and Tsuna cries with him.
"Tsuna-nii," Lambo whispers brokenly and he wrapped his arms around him. Lambo felt too small, then, like he could easily break if Tsuna held him any tighter. A part of him had wished he could turn back time, wished he could change things so that it didn't have to be this way, but they both understood.
Lambo did what he had to do.
"I'll protect you," Tsuna says instead. He promised, he swore that he will.)
He couldn't fulfill it, in the end.
"Come to think of it," Byakuran says lightly, the corners of his eyes crinkling in amusement, "you were around his age when you first met Reborn. He got off lucky, didn't he? He's the heir of Bovino, after all."
And he should worry, he supposes, that Byakuran has stopped pretending to not know.
But he couldn't.
Lambo is-
His little brother is dead.
He had been too slow, had been too careless, and Lambo is dying before he could move. He had looked at Tsuna through watering eyes, grateful and knowing and pained because he knows his older brother and he knows he'll blame himself the same way he did when Lambo first killed a man. His hands trembled when he reached for his horns and Tsuna wanted so desperately to say he can't, he couldn't, not like this, but Lambo smiled at him through bloodied teeth and asked, "Stay with me?" like he would when he'd go to bed when he was five.
And Tsuna does. He stays, watches as the life drains out of his eyes, and holds his little brother's hand until they stopped holding him back. Until his blood is cold and no longer warm.
"That expression isn't bad at all." Byakuran laughs, revels in the agony that paints itself across the young Decimo's face. "Let's have some more fun, Tsunayoshi-kun!"
Lambo was the first.
He definitely wasn't the last.
Tsuna jolts awake, his back going ramrod straight and his breathing shaky as he takes in his surroundings with wide, panicked eyes. He grabs at his leg where his holster usually is, fingers twitching violently when he realizes it isn't there, only to stiffen in abrupt realization when he sees the leaking pipes, cracked walls, and shredded curtains of the spacious room.
'-he's gone, he's gone and it's all your fault- if only you tried harder, if only you fought harder, then he wouldn't have-'
He's trying to breathe but he can't do it right, each inhale ending in choked gasps. Unseeing brown eyes drilled into busted windows, his vision not quite coming into focus no matter how much he willed it to, and a pang of intense self-loathing strikes deep into his gut when he feels his hands shake, feels more than sees the forced, ice-cold sparks of white flames.
'He's dead, you killed him, you killed him-'
'Lambo was just a child.'
'He didn't deserve to die for someone like you.'
He inhales sharply and puts his head between his knees, feels cold from the sweat trickling down his back. His head is pounding, from the nightmares that kept plaguing him every time he so much as closes his eyes for a few minutes or a month's worth of sleep deprivation, he couldn't tell, but he shoves it aside with the same forced ease he had been subjecting it to for the past few weeks.
'You're running away. You always run away.'
He flinches, hand shying away from his chest, from where the ring used to rest, and he closes his eyes.
'Maybe if you hadn't, Lambo would still be-'
He ignores the trembling of his fingers and shoulders, waits for his breathing to even out and for his heart to stop thudding heavily against his chest, and lifts his head. He wasn't a stranger to the thoughts that haunted him in empty silences - far from it, even - but it has been growing progressively worse ever since he arrived in this timeline.
They feel real, not like a dream but a vivid reliving of the past (or was it what would be of the future?), and it's getting harder and harder to ignore, to pretend that it doesn't affect him because it does, he believes every single word that the voice spits, every question, every answer, every accusation. It follows him, lurks in every corner where he expects it the least, and he has no choice but to take it, to live through it like he always had because this time, there's nothing - nobody - left.
(For once, Tsuna is completely and utterly alone.
He tries to convince himself that it's better this way.
It always had been.)
He scrutinizes the pile of papers in front of him on his makeshift desk with a calm that he doesn't quite feel and tries to focus on the text written on the parchment. He doesn't really succeed for the most part; his eyesight is too blurry, his head is squeezing painfully, and he has to shut his eyes when a wave of nausea hits him from the forced effort he puts into reading what's written on the paper.
If his mother could see him now, he thinks a little distantly, she'd be worried.
Tsuna doesn't get much sleep. He alternates between a 30-minute nap and 2 hours of sleep, more often than not opting to go through a day without a wink of rest just so he wouldn't have to relive anything he would rather not remember. It's only through sheer will that he's still able to move as much as he is from the sleep deprivation but soon, his body will have to give in. If not from the lack of sleep or rest, then from malnourishment.
It's worrying, to say the least, but it wasn't anything new, not for him. He'd grown accustomed to living on bare minimum since food had been scarce back during the war and he didn't exactly have the luxury of taking a break in the midst of it all.
('You say that, but the truth is far more revolting and petty, isn't it?' the voice chimes, tone gentle, and Tsuna is helpless to say anything back. 'Those are just pathetic empty excuses. You do this to yourself because you think you deserve it.
And the thing is, you know you do.')
It's been a month and he's lost a lot of weight, his wrists thinning to the extent of looking nothing more than just bones hiding under paper-thin skin and ribs sharp against his drastically greying complexion. The few clothes he'd taken with him hang loosely on his frame, his hair unkempt and growing past his shoulders which he didn't bother fixing. With the little time he has left, his well-being wasn't as much of a priority as theirs was, and Tsuna clung to that, clung to the thought of them being alive, clung to the knowledge that they would be alright, that they wouldn't have to suffer this time because he's here, because he was given one last chance.
So he worked and worked, lost himself in it until he couldn't remember the last time he'd slept or eaten even if he tried.
A week after he'd left the house, he was able to destroy the evidences of his and his mother's whereabouts along with any records of the Sawada's residence in Namimori and had persistently worked his way through the network of information to manipulate any man with significant association to the Mafia out of the town by making some calls and engaging in deals. Tsuna did his fair share of purging under the Disciplinary Committee's radar until the crime rates crashed into a decimal worth of percentage, far too intimate with the methods and habits of structured organizations along with self-operating individuals to be able to ignore the possibility of a threat, no matter how minor of an inconvenience they might seem. He isn't as skilled, isn't as experienced as Kyo- as Hibari or Spanner and Irie, but he did the best that he could and he estimates that he has at least another couple of weeks before they start having their suspicions.
He isn't nearly as close to accomplishing as much as he wanted and the urge to constantly do more itches under his skin until it's unbearable, until he's driven himself into this skeleton of a man that did more work than literally anything else.
He had to keep working, had to keep moving because he can't afford to lose the opportunity, not now that he's given a third chance to make things right. Losing some sleep and skipping some meals is a small price to pay in comparison if it meant saving their lives.
(And well, if he ends up dying in the process...
They would never have known him.)
Tsuna rakes his ink-stained fingers through his hair and studies the first few papers on top of the pile, squints at them until he's able to read the text through dry and red-rimmed eyes. He knows the information on the parchment like the back of his hand but he reads it still, goes over it thrice to make sure that he doesn't miss anything.
He knew that he'd eventually have to encounter certain people, knew that the time would come sooner than he expected. He understands, better than anyone, the inevitability of a direct confrontation where his plan is concerned because although he has the advantage of knowing, he's outnumbered and underpowered, and no matter how much he tries to keep his existence a secret, some people will have to know and Vongola is no exception. His knowledge of the future can only take him so far, he knows that.
He toys with the corner of the paper for a while, holds it between his fingers, then places it on top of the pile after another few moments of silent deliberation.
When it comes down to it, he thinks grimly, expression twisting at the familiar spikes of wild dark brown hair and sharp, lidded eyes staring back at him from the paper, if there's anyone I'd rather find me first, then it would be him.
He wrenches his gaze away and stands from the ragged couch, resolutely ignoring the way his knees buckle and vision swims from the abrupt series of movements. He could see the sun rising from the shattered windows framed by tattered indigo curtains that rustled with the whistle of warm breeze, bathing the gigantic, rundown room in a soft orange light that made him feel sick to his stomach.
(Too much like fire, too much like his flames as they curled around Hayato's pale, pale skin-)
Without waiting for the spots in his eyes to disappear or the throbbing of his head to settle, he walks over to the duffel bag in the corner of the room that he brought with him and rummages through several bunched up clothes and sealed envelopes, knees scraping roughly against the floor when they give beneath him. It takes a while for his fingers to latch on to the white shirt, black sweater vest, and gray pants carefully folded within the nest of hastily crumpled shirts and pants, the corners of his lips unwittingly twitching into a hollow smile when he brings them out of the bag.
"Juudaime!"
"Yo, Tsuna!"
"Join the boxing club, Sawada!"
"Stop crowding, herbivores, or I'll bite you to death."
Tsuna presses his face into his school uniform as something warm trickles down the sides of his cheeks, his breath stuttering in his chest, throat tight with a hundred unspoken words and a million regrets.
It's been a long, long time.