F:CV | cold lights
Tsuna is goggling at him with eyes so large he could balance teacups on them. Reborn gives him a dry look as he crosses his legs on the floor, two inches away from Tsuna and with a sketchbook and crayons splayed out before them.
"Let's draw," he says. It's not a suggestion.
Tsuna lunges for the crayons like it's the only thing keeping Reborn from throwing him out the window.
He soon forgets that Reborn is even across from him. He's sprawled on his belly, a fistful of crayons in one hand, a blue one clenched in the other. There's a sky being filled in and the blue bleeds into the yellow of the sun.
"Is that somewhere you know?" Reborn says idly. Tsuna shrieks and drags the crayon across the page, leaving a dark, ugly mark. Reborn's eyebrows raise, and Tsuna's fingers push together in embarrassment.
"I-It's… I-I'm drawing another place."
Well, yes, Reborn wants to say snidely, but he refrains and waits patiently.
"M-Matron took me there on weekends when the d-daycare was closed or when she was on vacation."
There's a black crayon in Tsuna's hand, and he's scraping it across the page, outlining a squat building with prison-like windows, Reborn notes dryly.
"What's that?"
"Orphanage. Last month, Matron was away, and she dropped me off here."
Tsuna populates what Reborn guesses is the playground with stick figures and continues on to draw a swing set and a slide.
"Did you like it there?"
The crayon stops, drawing Reborn's gaze to Tsuna's face. It's oddly blank. Tsuna goes back to coloring in the grass with the messy strokes of a child.
"I had a friend there," he says presently. He pauses and reconsiders. "Well, I think we were friends. He wasn't very nice to me."
If he wasn't nice, how was he your friend? Reborn muses.
There's a mission coming up, thank the heavens. The Ninth, despite insisting that peaceful times are approaching, is running short on men, and there's a family on the other side of Japan that needs to be dealt with. Reborn can already feel adrenaline coursing through his veins. He watches Tsuna pick up a red crayon and start to fill in a few scraggly flowers and realizes that he should probably find somewhere for the boy to stay while he's out.
Which has very conveniently been provided by the small human himself. Reborn had back-up plans, one being the house of a man and his baseball-fanatic son, but he gets the feeling Tsuna would rather be around people he's familiar with than thrown into an arena on the other side of which is a very hyper, trigger-happy, baseball-throwing monster.
"Would you like to go see your friend?"
Reborn thought Tsuna would jump on the opportunity with bright eyes, but unexpectedly, Tsuna hesitates.
"Are you going somewhere?" he asks quietly. Reborn blinks and regards Tsuna through evaluative eyes.
"For a while, yes. But I'll be back soon."
When Tsuna doesn't say anything, Reborn says lightly, "I have to make money sometime, you know. Can't just sit around the apartment all day watching you draw pictures."
He wonders if he's said something wrong, and maybe he has; he knows it himself that he hasn't been paying much attention to Tsuna—who doesn't need much attention anyways. Reborn spends most of his day sleeping or disappearing to the houses of whoever cares to invite him, and Tsuna passes it playing with Fred or eating raw vegetables or drawing pictures or—
Or.
What else does he do?
Maybe spending time with his friend at this orphanage would be good for Tsuna. Yes, Reborn decides, it is high time that Tsuna goes out and plays with someone of his own age instead of—his nose wrinkles—keeping this poor old, lonely man company.
"I'll be away a weekend; I don't know exactly when yet. So I'll drop you off there, and you can spend time with your friend. Won't that be nice?"
It doesn't escape his notice that Tsuna looks down before greeting Reborn's gaze with a wide smile. But he doesn't try to make anything of it, just returns the smile with one of his own.
"I'm hungry," he says suddenly, boggling Tsuna so hard that the poor boy is left with his mouth open. "I'm feeling like some sushi. What do you think?"
The boy stares at him like he's grown a second head, and he mentally notes that he should probably eat more if it shocks others this much when he decides to dine. He takes hold of Tsuna's shoulder and herds him out the door, all the way down to his favorite sushi restaurant in town:
TakeSushi.
"Welcome!" the familiar greeting reaches their ears as Reborn bows into the restaurant, whose doorframe is just a little too low for his liking. Tsuna toddles in with no problem, of course, goggling and gasping like he's never been a restaurant before.
Reborn casts him a glance, a subtle voice in his mind wondering whether that's not so far-fetched an idea.
"Ah, Reborn! You here for the usual—or not," Tsuyoshi, the owner, amends as he sees little Tsuna trundling at Reborn's side.
"Before you ask: He's not my son," Reborn says as he takes a seat at the bar. He sighs and gets off again so that he can pick Tsuna up, who's been struggling to climb to the bar, and plop him down on the adjacent seat. As he sits again, Tsuyoshi passes him a glass of water.
Reborn's eyebrow raises.
"There's a kid next to you," Tsuyoshi says with a mischievous grin. "No alcohol for you."
Tsuna looks sorry, so Reborn downs the entire glass in one go. "I wasn't feeling alcohol anyways," he lies. "Where's the baseball horror?"
"Takeshi? He should be home from baseball any minute now."
Tsuyoshi busies himself with what he knows Reborn wants to order. The restaurant is in its odd, in-between hours, only a few customers sitting in the back near the muted windows. It's a nice atmosphere. The smell of fish isn't overwhelming like in other sushi bars, the sunlight isn't too bright, and it's not too loud until Yamamoto Takeshi, the baseball terror, bursts in through the door and chucks a baseball at his father's head.
"Catch, dad, catch!"
With reflexes of a trained fighter, Tsuyoshi snaps up the ball in the palm of his rice-covered hand. Reborn hopes he doesn't go back to making his sushi with that dirty palm. The baseball horror bounds up to the bar, laughing like he's vomiting sunshine from his mouth, and nearly knocks Reborn's glass over.
"How was that, dad? Coach says I'm pitching faster now!"
Takeshi, Reborn notes, is missing several front teeth. He secretly hopes it's because someone socked that sunshine-infused face right in the kisser.
But it's probably just baby teeth. Reborn glances at Tsuna, wondering with a shudder if he'll be forced to play the role of the tooth fairy once teeth start dropping out of Tsuna's mouth. He can just imagine the Ninth forcing him into a fairy costume, all pink and frilly, and dancing around the room, showering money on the small human.
It makes him want to shoot something.
"Oh, hey, old man!" Takeshi hollers once he notices the dark cloud gathering above Reborn's head. Reborn offers him a stiff smile and draws his water cup closer to his body before a disaster can happen. To his chagrin, Takeshi leaps onto the seat beside him so that he's sandwiched between two mentally stunted brats.
Takeshi leans forward so he can see around Reborn. "Who's this? Hi, I'm Yamamoto Takeshi!"
He thrusts his hand across the bar, right where Reborn's water cup had been. Tsuna nervously pinches it between a finger and thumb and stammers, "I-I'm Sawada Tsunayoshi. You can call me Tsuna."
Yamamoto gives him a grin so bright that it blasts Reborn's soul to smithereens.
"That's cool! Hey, you wanna play catch? I'm really good at throwing!"
"Not inside, Takeshi," Tsuyoshi admonishes. "And wash your hands. Here you go, Reborn."
The sushi is a small comfort in this hole of chaos. Don't get him wrong; Reborn loves chaos, but there's something distinctly different between the chaos of a fight and the chaos wrought by little children who have too much energy for their own good. The first roll is already in his mouth when he realizes that Tsuyoshi had not washed his hands after catching Takeshi's dirty little baseball.
He swallows it with an acrid expression because assassins should not be petty.
"So how's parenthood going for you?" Tsuyoshi asks after he's fed all three of them and as Yamamoto runs in circles around Tsuna outside.
Reborn scoffs. "It's not parenthood. It's… extended babysitting."
"How long has he been in your care?"
"Six days," Reborn answers. His eyes trail after Tsuna, whose rather measly body can't keep up with Takeshi.
"He looks more like his mother."
"A good thing, that is," Reborn breathes. If Tsuna had looked anything like his good-for-nothing father, Reborn might have made a punching bag out of his face. Tsuyoshi laughs like he knows what Reborn is thinking—and he probably does. The man's sharp, unlike his dreadful son who only knows how to laugh and shout and throw things.
"…Tell your son that if he tries to throw another ball of mud at me, I will give him a haircut he'll remember," Reborn says icily as the aforementioned mud ball slides down the wall, having missed his face by an inch a moment before.
"Hear that, Takeshi?" Tsuyoshi hollers. "Reborn here'll give you a haircut if you hit him with the mud!"
"Wow, really?" shouts Takeshi excitably. "Gee, thanks, old man! I've been needing a haircut for a while!"
Reborn wants to bury himself ten feet under the ground.
"Lighten up, friend," Tsuyoshi laughs, clapping Reborn on the shoulder. "It's good to have a little fun now and then, especially with an occupation like yours—"
"My occupation is assassin," Reborn says. "Fun is not written in the description. Unless you have fun killing. Which can be enjoyable at times."
Tsuyoshi sighs and shakes his head a little.
"And that's why the Ninth put you on standby."
Reborn gives him a level gaze that Tsuyoshi returns in kind. The shop owner folds and stands from the ledge on which they sit.
"I think one day you'll understand what I mean," Tsuyoshi says. "You'll understand and then you'll see things differently. Maybe you'll even quit—like me."
"You ran away from chaos," Reborn says. "Ran away with your wife, and when she died and left you with a brat—"
"Reborn," Tsuyoshi says warningly.
"—you put up your sword and vowed never to fight again so long as your son was there, everyone knows that. And you enjoyed your life afterwards, away from the fighting, away from the blood. But Tsuyoshi, we're different, you and I. Blood's the only thing I know. It's why I'm hailed as the greatest assassin in the world, and why you are the owner of a sushi restaurant."
Reborn stands, casting a shadow that was too dark for Tsuyoshi's liking.
"You all think I can be changed, and because of that, I was thrown headfirst into a pit with a child I want nothing to do with. But I can't be changed. I won't be changed. You'll see that."
Tsuyoshi watches Tsuna run over at Reborn's call. The boy is happy, but the joy drains from his face as he sees the assassin's expression. He wishes he could do something for the boy—for Reborn. But what can he do? When a person refuses to change, they've set up a wall so high it can't be scaled.
"You should feed Tsuna more," he calls after Reborn as they leave. "He ate like he hadn't eaten in days."
Reborn raises a hand airily.
Reborn shuts himself in his room as soon as they're home, and Tsuna is left to do whatever he wants. He doesn't take advantage of this freedom; there's not much to do anyways. He checks the fridge, even though he's full, and takes stock of the supplies. There's a wilting head of cabbage in one corner of the fridge, a tomato in the other, and a bundle of celery that he still hasn't broken into. He wishes he'd had the forethought to buy a jar of peanut butter and some raisins. Food dioramas were always fun to make and fun to eat.
"Hi, Fred," Tsuna says to the stag beetle that has lighted on to his shoulder. "Do you want to go out onto the balcony?"
Fred nods his agreement, and Tsuna struggles with the door until it pops open. The wind hits his face, a fresh breath that Tsuna takes in. The sun is beginning to set, barring the sky with violets and pinks, and he wishes he could share it with someone.
But Reborn is in his room, so Tsuna shares it with Fred.
Wish though as he might, the sun sinks below the horizon, and the air slowly grows cold. The stars are lit, one by one, like candles in the dark. But they're cruel lights, too far away to hold and with no warmth at all.
Reborn, too, had been watching the sunset, his figure cutting a dark silhouette against the window. The sun bleeding into the sky, staining it that ruby red that Reborn had grown to so like; the stars flickering into sight; he'd seen this so many times that he wondered, occasionally, why he even bothered to watch it at all.
It was all the same red, the same orange, the same pink and purple, the same sky and stars, the same moon.
Why would anyone want to watch such a dull thing?
He wonders if there's maybe something he's missing, something that makes the sunset steal your breath no matter how many times you see it.
Still, he stands there at the window, watching as the stars are lit one by one, like lanterns in the dark. But they're cruel lights, he thinks, glittering so freely in the sky where they're too far away to catch and don't even think to share the slightest bit of heat.
Parallels are amongst my favorite things to write. Tsuna thinks stars are cruel: they're beautiful and alluring and seem to lead the way in the dark, but he'll never reach them. And even if he goes against the odds and does, he thinks they'll have nothing for him; no warmth or anything that he dreams of. For Reborn, stars are cruel: they hold a warmth he dreams of, but he'll never reach them no matter how hard he might try, and they won't share that warmth of their own accord.
Anyhow, hope you enjoyed, and thanks for reading!