(warnings: burning, balls, balls that are burning,)
Tsunami takes one look at her slipspace and sits down, hard. Her eyes squeeze shut and she massages the bridge of her nose like it's somehow going to help the headache she is developing while inside her own head.
"What the fuck," she whispers. What the hell, it's not like there's anyone around around to hear her anyways. She cups her hands around her mouth and, as loudly as she can, hollers, "WHAT THE FUCK." In English, even, because her grasp of the Japanese language has yet to extend to curse words and she needs something a little stronger than 'poopy' to fully express her feelings.
Save for the soft orange glow of her North Star, her slipspace has always been dark. Always. It was one of its charm points.
Now? There are not one, but two supernova suns hanging suspended in the darkness. They're fucking huge and, yeah, they're burning too. Of course.
"Everything is on fire. Why is everything always on fire," she mutters to herself, borderline hysteric. Clearly, igniting her little brother was not enough for the universe.
Which, speaking of, she is not even remotely sure how to process the fact that her stupid, noisy baby brother is actually the protagonist of an anime. An anime she is now living in. An anime about the fucking mafia (that her brother is going to lead, what the shit) and superpowers and goddamn time travel. Real, actual, honest-to-god time travel. She feels a little faint.
Less than an hour ago, she attempted to assassinate Sawada Iemitsu with her tiny little toddler legs. He's probably shot more people than she's met in her life.
She once put an icecube down Tsuna's back just to watch him shriek and try to finagle it out of his onesie. He was going to grow up to be a crime lord. The crime lord, even.
She buries her face in her hands and screams.
All in all, Tsunami is feeling really, really stupid right now. Her brother's name is Tsunayoshi, they were birthed by a woman named Nana, and their blonde father recently returned from an unexplained absence with an old man who needed bodyguards. It's been a long time since she has has anything to do with Katekyo Hitman Reborn, but not that long. She'll admit that 'I was reincarnated into anime' is a really fucking weird thing to assume right off the bat, but honestly. All the clues had been right there.
It's probably a good thing she Slipped when she did. Had her mindscape not allowed her to separate herself from the majority of her negative emotions, she's fairly certain she'd be doing something more drastic than shrieking into her own palms, like laughing or crying or hyperventilating herself back into an early grave.
...She needs to wake up.
The man she'd thought of as a sweet old grandpa was a real life fucking mafia boss and he was, like, four feet away from her. Tsunami didn't want to think about what he might assume if he caught sight of her completely blanking out, and he would see her. She may not have burst into Dying Will Flames in the middle of the freaking lawn, sure, but she had no idea what she looked like when she zoned out. She could be drooling or something. Whatever it was, it probably wasn't typical toddler behavior and the last thing she needed was Vongola Nono to be looking at her.
Tsunami peeks through her fingers.
...She should also maybe address this whole two-suns thing. Having unexplained burning shit in her mindscape wasn't something she should just ignore, especially if she isn't the one who put it there.
(Which, yeah, having a mindscape in the first place kind of makes more sense now. She was trying not to think about it because avoiding difficult subjects is one of her greatest life skills, but it was nice to know that she wasn't going crazy. It was just a side-effect of the fire magic. Of course. Idiot.)
Unlike her north star, she is able to approach the two new lights with no obstructions. This close up, she can see that they're… weird. Weirder than floating mind fire usually is, she means.
(And what is her life anymore, that mind fire is something she has to fucking deal with. Lord alive.)
They're burning almost too brightly for her to look at directly and Tsunami narrows her eyes to slits to try and make out some of the details.
"Sunglasses would be nice," she mutters, shadowing her eyes with a hand to try and mitigate the glare.
The light abruptly dims to manageable levels and it takes Tsunami a moment to realize that it's because an enormous pair of movie-star sunglasses have materialized on the bridge of her nose.
Right, mindscape. Reality is an illusion, the universe is a hologram and all that. Newly emboldened by her sudden ability to see, she steps closer to the two lights.
It's the first time she's been able to get close enough to one of these to see them in detail. They look like glass balls, both roughly the size as her head and perfectly spherical, hanging motionless in the air about hip-height. She waves her hands above and below the one on her left. No strings, no heat, no weird tingling sensations. She kneels down to get a closer look.
Fire burns inside each of them, tinted sepia through her sunglasses. The one on the left is solid orange and swirls around the ball in smooth, controlled circles. It feels weird to ascribe age to fake fire she made up in her head, but something about the steady circulation and almost hypnotic quality of the fire inside strikes her as being very old.
In contrast, the one on the right is wild, chaotic, full of life. It's a deeper orange with brighter sparks of tangerine coursing through it like glitter. It almost seems like there's too much of it for the ball its trapped in and it pulses wildly, licking around the inner perimeter of the glass like it's searching for any weakness in the glass it can exploit in order to escape.
A little spooked, Tsunami scoots away from it.
Finding out that anime is real after all has knocked her a little off-balance, but she's not an idiot. There's obviously some kind of correspondence between the balls of fire and the two flame-active mafioso outside. She just… doesn't know what it is. They remind her of suns, or maybe snowglobes.
"Star balls," she decides. If she recalled correctly, a kitsune's starball was supposed to hold parts of their soul and energy. That was her whole magic floating orb situation in a nutshell, if she was guessing correctly.
Also, 'star balls' sounded a lot cooler and more shonen than 'the magic nightlights I see inside my head'.
Genre-necessitated fancy names aside, she has no idea what to do with either one of these. Smashing them seems like a bad idea, if only because she has no idea what they do. Tsunami's life is anime now. She can't just break suspicious shit anymore, she might end up accidentally cursing her entire bloodline or something.
"Screw it," she sighs, pushing up her sunglasses so she can rub at her eyes. If she is really lucky, the issue will resolve itself while she's back in the outside world working herself into a fucking panic attack. Someone is bound to have noticed her blanking out by now.
When she presses her hand against nearest star ball to help haul herself back upright, it's cold to the touch as if the fire inside were only an illusion.
She only has time to note that it's the icing on the cake of weird experiences her whole day has been before the glass under her fingers gives with a sharp pop and something pulls. She stumbles palm-first into the swirling orange flame within and-
no no no no, bad, too much too much too much
she's burning, there is pain going all the way up her arm up her neck in her head, her brain is boiling inside her skull everything is red red red red she needs to run she needs to escape she needs to get away from all this fucking fire she needs to—
—yank back—
She wakes up.
For a long moment, the only thing Tsunami can do is stare at the back of her eyelids. The sudden transition from burning alive to cool and whole and unharmed is a little too much for her to wrap her head around all at once. She focuses on her breathing.
Tsunami isn't sure what the hell just happened, but she won't be forgetting the feeling of her skin melting any time soon. Once her head stops swimming and she feels like a person again, she opens her eyes. The sunlight seems much so harsher than it was before she Slipped and her eyes immediately water against it. God, but those sunglasses would be nice right about now. She raises a hand to wipe them dry, wincing.
Her throat is aching.
The first thing Tsunami does once her vision readjusts is look for Tsuna. If he can spontaneously combust within ten seconds of her looking away from him, lord only knows what he's gotten up to in the full minute (five? ten?) she's been out of it.
He is fast asleep in Nana's arms, his thumb in his mouth and his body thankfully extinguished. Nana rocks him gently, humming softly. She glances up and-
They lock eyes.
Tsunami is expecting Nana to be at least a little relieved that her second child has surfaced from her drooling coma, but no such emotion is present on her face. Nana just smiles warmly at her like nothing unusual has happened.
Tsunami would pay a lot of money to figure out how she is pulling that off, because if she isn't mistaken, the kid being cradled in Nana's arms was doing a pretty good Human Torch imitation not even five minutes previous. She'd like to think that qualified as unusual, if nothing else.
Her grandfather— Vongola Nono, jesus shit —is settling himself gingerly back into the lawn chair he'd been sat in before this debacle had begun. He looks a little frayed around the edges, which she figures is probably par for the course. Sealing flames can't be that easy to pull off or everyone would be doing it.
The ground under her backside suddenly shifts around and Tsunami realizes with a sharp jolt of fear that she's not actually on the ground at all. There is about a six foot drop between her and the grass and the only thing stopping her screams is the persistent ache in her throat. Her legs curl in tighter to her body and she blindly flails for the first thing within reach, which is an unfortunately familiar white wifebeater. She isn't in much of a position to be picky, though, and she bunches as much of it as she can manage in her tiny fists.
"Oh-ho! Finally decided to join us in the world of the living, hmm?" Jackass— Iemitsu —laughs, and the explosive force of it jostles her dangerously. She very, very carefully does not let herself react. That sentence has several different meanings, none of which Iemitsu should have been able to figure out just from a brief space-out on her part.
"You fell asleep in the grass, princess," he elaborates, misconstruing her owlish look as one of confusion. Internally, she breathes a sigh of relief. Passing out is still wildly fucking bad but its a lot easier to explain away that sudden onset catatonia. "Must've been tired, huh?"
She makes an affirmative noise and tucks her face against his shirt. It smells vaguely of sweat and something else thick and chemical that she cannot identify. It's far from the most comfortable position, but she needs to think and world is distracting.
First off, Tsunami has zero fucking clue what to make of Sawada Iemitsu anymore. It was easier when he was just some nameless dickbag that up and left his family for some unknown reason, but now that she knows who he is, it's a little more complicated. On one hand, she now has an entire shopping list full of reasons to hate him, which features gems like 'chronic liar', 'irresponsible deadbeat', and 'generally just an asshole to his kid'.
On the other hand, she knows that having him around too often would paint a big red target on her entire family's back for every mafioso with a grudge to come and shoot at. He literally could not be at home with Nana and keep them safe at the same time. It was a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.
She still thinks he's a jackass for manhandling her like a sack of potatoes, though.
Second on her list, her grandfather had people murdered and extorted for a living. Tsunami is having a really hard time wrapping her head around that if only because the Ninth was so… cute. He's the textbook example of a sweet old man with his big poofy mustache and sparkling brown eyes. He looks like he would be more at home on a golf course than a shooting range, honestly.
There went her theory about him being Nana's dad, at any rate. Or Iemitsu's, actually, if she is remembering correctly. Is he even technically her grandfather? She tables the subject for now. It's not like she is going to be seeing much of him until she is older, so there is going to be plenty of time to get a feel for him in ten years when he is scoping out her little brother for potential boss-hood.
Which brings her to her final issue. She has about eleven or twelve years of prophetic knowledge concerning a lot of shit she wants absolutely nothing to do with and zero idea how to use it. It'd be one thing if she was in Italy or somehow already involved with the mafia, but this? This was Namimori, Japan. The most exciting thing that was going to happen here for the next decade was Hibari Kyoya's rise to military dictatorship, and he could pull that off just fine without any interference on her part.
None of that changed the fact that she was probably going to end up smack dab in the middle of a criminal syndicate before she turned twenty.
Tsunami has to take a few slow, measured breaths to combat her rising anxiety. She's up shit creek and the only paddle she has might as well be made of cooked pasta for how useful it is to her right now.
"Oh!" There's a soft screech of wood against wood and then the ruffling of fabrics. "I should check on lunch, shouldn't I?" Nana titters.
Tsunami doesn't bother raising her head as she patters off. When she's nose deep in shirt like this, it's easy to forget that the world is still happening around her. Rejoining it doesn't sound like something she's up for quite yet.
There's a long silence.
"...Nana seems very lively," Her grandfather— the Ninth— Timoteo offers, somewhat amused. Iemitsu laughs lowly in agreement and the two of them fall back into tense silence.
Timoteo sighs.
"Is she asleep again?" There is a bone-deep weariness in his voice that sets her on edge and— oh, shit, wait, they're talking about her. She forces herself to remain still and relaxed when Iemitsu tilts her slightly to check her face and breathing, even when his shirt begins slipping from her fingers. Hell if she knows what's going on here, but there's a churning low in her gut that warns her to play along.
She listens.
"Out like a light," Iemitsu confirms. There's another weird pause during which he tries to maneuver her back into her original position. Tsunami wants nothing more than screech at top volume and scuttle down his body to the sweet, solid ground, but her curiosity is overriding her panic instinct. Nonetheless, it is taking a considerable amount of effort on her part to keep her face peaceful and her muscles lax.
"I suppose you're wondering why I sealed your son's flames."
"No, actually," Iemitsu hums. He shifts her around once again. "Tsuna's not going to be involved with us. Being a civilian but having that big of a flame signature is only going to attract trouble, so I get it. What I don't understand is why you had to stop sealing Tsunami."
'In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight.'
If her heart rate jacks up, Iemitsu is going to feel it. Tsunami focuses harder on her breathing.
'In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight.'
"You likely noticed," Timoteo's voice is very, very soft. "But your daughter... did not seem to appreciate being touched with Sky Flames."
Tsunami has fuck-all idea what that's supposed to mean, but she does concede that 'did not seem to appreciate' being approached with soulfire sounds a lot like her. Underneath her, Iemitsu stills.
"Yeah, I... picked up on that. What happened?" He asks slowly. Tsunami really hopes she didn't try to frogkick her grandfather in the face or anything while he wasn't looking. Motor control is completely out of her hands when she Slips.
'In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight.'
"When I first saw Tsunami, I fully intended to seal her as soon as possible. Her, ah, eye situation, it's very…" Timoteo pauses. "Well. A glow like that usually only occurs when an exceptional amount of flames are at play."
"Were there not?"
"Not particularly, no. Still, I chose to continue in the name of being thorough, which is where I encountered the issue at hand. When I tried to seal her, something… pulled, for lack of a better phrase."
'IN FOR FOUR, HOLD FOR SEVEN, OUT FOR EIGHT. IN FOR FOUR, HOLD FOR SEVEN, OUT FOR EIGHT.'
She's not freaking out. She is totally calm. Still waters having nothing on her— she is the epitome of cool and collected and not freaking out.
"Pulled? What does that mean?" Iemitsu asked, voice grave.
Tsunami had pulled. There'd been flames climbing up her arms and the only thing she could think to do was yank back and get out of the fucking fire— the fire, she realized, that was actually coming from The Ninth.
'The star balls,' she realized. If the fire was from her grandfather trying to seal her flames and it had come out from the star ball she had been touching, then was that… there were more than just the two lights in her Slipspace. Were all of those... people?
Her head hurt.
"Honestly, I'm not sure. It's possible that I could isolate the cause, given time, but I'm hesitant to risk it. Even the small flame I introduced was enough to knock her out for several minutes. There's no telling what side effects a repeat performance may have."
"She definitely took it worse than Tsuna," Iemitsu said. There is an emotion behind his voice that Tsunami can't quite pinpoint, but it leaves her feeling distinctly off-kilter and a little warm. She thinks it may be something like... concern? "Poor kiddo screamed like she was dying."
Hearing that from Iemitsu, who has been in the unique position of knowing what a death screech actually sounds like, is a little sobering. It explains the burning in her throat, at least. Hopefully none of the neighbors heard and decided to call the police, because she really doesn't want a Namimori Law Enforcement vs Actual Mafiosi deathmatch going down in her backyard.
"She may be flame sensitive," Timoteo muses. The wood of the porch chair creaks a bit, like he's leaning into it. Iemitsu makes a noncommittal hum low in his throat and shifts her up just a little higher, but Tsunami is too deep in thought to notice much. She shouldn't worry, right? The only person in this entire goddamn city who gave a single shit about the constant explosions and the naked kid streaking down the highway with his head on fire was going to be Irie Shoichi, who was too tiny to call the cops anyways. Things were probably fine.
"...Keep an eye on her," Timoteo advises. This jerks her back into the conversation at hand more effectively than a splash of water in the face because being watched by the mafia is literally the last thing she wants to be dealing with. Tsunami doesn't have to open her eyes to know that Iemitsu is frowning hardcore— she can feel it in the way his shoulders tighten and his breathing slows into a controlled sigh. It isn't hard to figure out why. Luckily for her, there is a whole list of reasons why Iemitsu really can't keep an eye on her, first and foremost being that he has an entire subfamily to run.
Hell, she's not complaining. The idea of being watched is enough to send shivers down her spine. Being watched by the fucking mafia, especially now that she knows whats up? Nightmare fuel.
All she'd gotten was the watered down, audience-friendly version of what the criminal underworld was like with the addition of literal goddamn superpowers and even that has her feeling like something in her chest has withered and died.
Human experimentation was a thing that people condoned around here. Like actual fucking hell she was going to sit around and let those assholes try and pick her brain.
Before Iemitsu can argue or agree or whatever his plan was, the back door slides open with a soft squeal.
"Lunch is ready!" Nana calls, chipper as ever. "Oh, is Tsu-chan asleep again?" The door squeaks again and suddenly Tsunami is being gently untangled from Iemitsu's shirt and relocated to Nana's hip. Being hauled through the air still sucks balls even with her eyes closed, she notes, screaming internally. Carefully limp, Tsunami allows her head to flop against Nana's shoulder and offers no resistance when the woman begins shuffling her limbs around into optimum carrying position. "I'll put her down with Tsu-kun. Food is on the table when you're ready!"
Nana is infinitely more comfortable to fake-snooze on than Iemitsu, so much so that Tsunami is sorely tempted to just conk out for real. Unfortunately, her head refuses to shut the fuck up for more than two seconds at a time.
Forcing a breathing pattern does wonders for keeping her heart rate under control enough for her to think about things without the constant nagging fear of death by cardiac arrest, so she keeps it up even as Nana carts her back to her shared room with Tsuna.
Flame sensitive. God, but she really fucking hopes not. Her life was gearing up to be shit enough without adding a double weakness to the world's weapon of choice. Being touched with fire sure as hell hurt, at any rate.
(It is completely fucking baffling to her that that's not supposed to happen. Tsunami does not understand why being pap-slapped in the cranium with burning handmeat would ever be anything other than horrifically painful, but then again, she's dealing with magic. 'Supernatural Rainbow Fire 101' wasn't exactly one of the classes she took in high school, what does she know?)
Nana lays Tsunami down on her bed and an attempt on her life is immediately made by her squirming little brother. Tsuna does not 'cuddle'. Tsuna establishes dominance in the only way he knows how, which is by spreading as much of his body as he possibly can over as much ground as he can cover. In the three seconds since Nana has put her down, he has managed to roll over almost completely on top of her and shove his left arm directly into her mouth.
As soon as Nana leaves the room and closes the door, she smacks it right back out. Tsunami knows exactly where that boy's arms have been today and she wants no part of it in her body, thanks. She gets about ten seconds to enjoy her freedom before he makes another valiant attempt to usurp her place as the Alpha Twin by smooshing her cheek with his grubby fingers. Experience has taught her that his is probably the best she's gonna get, so she leaves it be. It's not like she isn't used to this by now.
Tsunami finally opens her eyes and glances down to see how much danger she's in of being drooled on. Tsuna is well and truly knocked out and is snoring softly with his mouth wide open— oh, there it goes, all down her shoulder. Lovely.
'He really is adorable,' she thinks fondly, then balks at her own thoughts because he is actively slobbering on her person right now.
That shouldn't be charming.
...It is super charming.
She kind of wants to reach down and pinch his cute little cheeks, but he has her arms pinned down under his weight and also they are kind of slick with child-spittle. This is gross, she reminds herself. She does not enjoy it when babies try to cover her in facial fluids.
'Sawada Tsunayoshi is drooling on me,' she thinks, scrunching her nose. Fuck it all, that didn't help. He's still cuter than a button and she's pathetically weak to his poofy hair and tiny little grabby hands. She's trying to have an existential crisis about her future here, goddamnit.
Tsunami can stress with the best of them, but it is weirdly difficult to summon a single shit about what's to come when she's immobilized by a sleeping child. Something about the full-body crush of weight is squeezing out the anxiety in her like a lemon in a juicer.
Tsuna's fingers twitch against her cheek and his legs twitch like he's a dog having a dream. She bites back a snort.
Tsunami knows a losing battle when she sees one. She is also, like, completely fucking pro at putting off issues until they grow completely out of control and come back to eat her ass alive, so she tables her crisis for another day and settles in for a sound snooze.
It's not like her problems aren't going still going to be around when she wakes up. Better to tackle them later, when she is well rested. Maybe give herself a day or two to process first. A week? Within the next few years, for sure.
An hour and a half later after Tsuna wakes her up by sitting on her till she wheezes, Nana informs them over late lunch that their Papa has left to go take care of some business.
"Papa's… gone?" Tsuna asks, frowning deeply. He sulks deep in his highchair and unleashes his fabled puppy eyes on his unsuspecting tablemates. Tsunami wilts a little under the crushing force of cute. "He di'nt say bye."
"He came to say goodbye, but you two were just so cute he couldn't bear to wake you up!" she squeals, looking thoroughly lovestruck. Tsunami pulls a face and resists the urge to touch the cold patch of drying drool on her shoulder. She isn't sure what's so cute about seeing one child try to drown the other in spit, but... hell, she'd been charmed too. She lets it go and settles for just being relieved that Iemitsu and Timoteo are out of her hair for the time being.
Tsuna, unsatisfied with Nana's explanation, turns the full force of his bambi eyes to her instead.
"...Guh," she wheezes aloud, because holy shit. Forget the fucking X-Burner— if he could weaponize those big sad peepers, half the world would melt into a puddle of starry-eyed goo. Tsunami is absolutely defenseless against the puppy eyes and damn if her brother doesn't know it.
"He di'nt say bye," He repeats, eyes shimmering slightly with tears and lower lip pushed out just enough to look pathetic. She is weak.
"I'll kick 'im real hard for you," she promises. Nana hums disapprovingly, but her admonishments about unladylike behavior fall on deaf ears. Tsuna is smiling again, appeased at the thought of violent retribution. All traces of tears and sadness have been wiped from his face and she's getting the distinct impression that she's just been played. She doesn't even mind.
Tsunami can't help but feel like she is creating a monster. A sweet, chubby cheeked darling of a monster, but a harbinger of destruction nonetheless.
A/N: Thanks to HeirofChairs for being too busy watching children's television with me to remind me I have shit to write. When I realize my ultimate dream of making Enma Kozato my waifu, you can be our flowerboy.
Review at your own leisure and thank you for reading!
(5/22/18 edit)