It was, like any other day, a quiet morning in Namimori. The song of rustling leaves and chirping birds was absent on a cold December day. The sun had barely begun its climb through the dark, grayish sky of the very normal town in Japan.
No animal could be heard in the forest. And the river was as silent as the windless sky, paused like the painting of an artist. Not a sound could be heard either from any of the houses in Namimori. And no baby was crying in any part of the town, all wary of breaking the silence of the world around them.
A very normal morning indeed. Something the inhabitants of the town had begun to get used to.
Almost three years ago something terrible happened in Namimori. No one knew exactly what, or when it had happened, and there was no obvious sign to indicate so, but everyone could feel it in their veins. Ever since then it was as if the world had suddenly lost a shade of color. Beautiful things and places still existed, but somehow, the feeling of marvel was lost on pretty much everyone living here in Japan.
But no one was as affected by what happened three years ago as the youngest resident of the Sawada household, Sawada Tsunade.
Said seven year girl was the first to break the silence that day by waking up with a shudder, gasping for air as an immense feeling of loss and fatigue devoured her mind. Desperately, she grasped her nightwear with unreasonable force to try and calm her hammering heart. All the while, impressions of wrong, disharmony and fight had her hunching over, bile rising to the back of her mouth.
Breath shuttering and mind working a mile per second, she tried her best to remember where she was. When she was sure she wouldn't cry or vomit anymore, she finally allowed herself to open her eyes to the dark room she had awoken to.
She was in her bedroom in her home, the place which she should feel the safest at, and yet her heart couldn't stop beating furiously with adrenaline. She let her gaze wander around it, noticing the lack of sunlight outside. Tsuna had probably had a nightmare she couldn't remember, like every night since that fateful day.
Silently, she climbed down her bed in search of a pair of slippers with great care to avoid slipping on something. It was still too early for her mother to be up, but Tsuna couldn't stay any minute more inside the house. It felt suffocating to stay in the place she knew something very precious to her had been taken. The memories of her father's last visit were blurry and uncertain, but she could never forget the awful feeling of someone else's will restraining her own.
By being extremely slow and careful Tsuna avoided falling or tripping down the stairs and she reached the dining room without waking her mother. She found the entrance door key's almost immediately and with a bit of effort she managed to get outside without much preamble.
The air was frigid, but Tsuna was always cold nowadays, so she didn't pay it any mind. She began to walk through the streets of Namimori mindlessly, shivering from time to time until her racing heart finally calmed down. It was dark outside, but not as early as she had originally thought, as she could already see some light emitting from a couple of houses.
Her feet led the young girl to a park near Namimori middle, where she often wondered when children her age were at school. Shortly after the incident that occurred when she was four, Tsuna began to fall frequently ill. Her first year at school had been horrible, she missed days more often than any other kids, was terrible at her studies in general and hadn't managed to get any friends at all. Even her mother, who was oblivious at the best of times, had noticed how unhappy she was at school, and had enrolled her in a homeschooled program. Tsuna had been greatly relieved.
Her mother, Nana, didn't work, so she had a lot of free time to teach her multiple things every day. She wasn't exactly very knowledgeable, but with the help of some online classes and her very patient nature she made a formidable teacher for children. Tsuna certainly preferred her over a class of twenty loud classmates who made her anxious and made it even harder for her to concentrate.
The downside of that decision, however, was that Tsuna still didn't have any friends, or acquaintances even. It made the little girl sad, but the undivided attention of her mother often made up for it.
She silently made her way to the only swing of the park and sat down on it, nearly falling in her inattention. Her legs barely reached the ground, and Tsuna couldn't push herself, so she opted to look at the sky instead.
The sky was dark, full of clouds and the sun could barely be seen, but Tsuna found it beautiful. She sometimes wished she was a bird, so she could fly in it all day and never ever return to the ground. It was a futile dream, however, and Tsuna began to feel tired all the sudden.
Her tiredness wasn't a new thing either, for whatever reason, probably because of her inability to sleep a full night, Tsuna was often exhausted. A small voice in her mind, barely a whisper nowadays, didn't agree with that assessment, but Tsuna wasn't sure how reliable her gut feeling was.
Some days she would wake up feeling like she had been fighting dragons all night. Her muscles would ache, her temperature would be unreasonably high and some of her clothes would be a little scorched. Those days were the worst, and Tsuna would barely have the energy to get up from her bed.
All Tsuna knew was that, when she was very young, her father had returned home from a long trip with his boss and when they left, they took something very important from her. Since that day, Tsuna had both unconsciously and consciously been fighting to get it back the only way she knew. By wishing and praying and crying and doing stupid things that had never really helped much. It had never stopped her from trying though.
Well, there was something she hadn't tried yet, she rectified mentally. Something else also life changing had happened that day. Before all the bad things had happened, she had felt terrified she was going to die, which had in turn awoken something in her. But Tsuna loved her mother too much to try to harm herself in any way seriously, so she had never tried something so drastic.
Life hadn't been very kind to Tsuna so far, but that was no reason for her to harm others like she had been harmed years ago.
A year and three months after that day, perched upon the highest cliff she could find, Tsuna would think about that day at the swing and laugh at her ignorance. Why would her mother care about her safety anyways, when she could barely remember who her daughter was?