The hunger doesn't go away.
It doesn't ease in the slightest even after three meals the next day, and he starts panicking, wide eyes wet with unshed tears because he is four but he knows what this means, to an extent, he knows his food is human and knows they had to be alive before they were killed. They were killing people and it's bad, the police might come and ask and take his mother away and Tsuna doesn't want that. He'd rather starve than have his mother taken away.
He tells his mother as such and she laughs daintily behind slender fingers. He's seen those very same fingers tear a man's arm from the socket and crush their trachea barehanded.
(She doesn't wear a wedding ring, he realizes later when he's seven-years-old.)
"It's alright, Tsu-kun," she reassures him. "It's just for a few weeks. It'll calm down after a while."
He nods with uncertainty. "...Mama?" he calls.
She hums in question.
"Do… they- who are they?"
Her eyes darken, something shuttering over her far too bright eyes - like his, he thinks, and similarities don't just run bone-deep - and taking away the light to drown in vivid black. Blood red, like the veins that crawl on the sides of her eyes, rips through him.
"They are prey," she answers and her voice is cold. Unforgiving. "Harada Eiichiro murdered his mother and his wife. Haruno Nissho raped his second wife's son and daughter. Fukuhara Kenji drugged his five-year-old daughter and brought her in a bar to be raped by other men. They are prey, Tsunayoshi, and they must be devoured."
Prey, he repeats, lips mouthing the word over and over. The back of his eyes tighten and he stares at his mother, his left eye gold and the other a matching red.
It's odd, Nana finds herself thinking at times, because female ghouls are told to be incapable of conceiving children with a human father. She has heard the stories of mutilated and cannibalized infants because of their inability to survive and cope after birth, has feared that Tsuna would suffer through the same fate once upon a time until the moment Tsuna opened his eyes and breathed, her blood and something else, something just as potent, singing under his skin.
Iemitsu was a fool, but he was a fool that carried the blood of a legacy.
"Do you understand, dear?" Nana asks. "We do not feed on innocent people. We feed on dirt. We feed on rotting corpses. We feed on people that would not be remembered, on people that have already been forgotten."
Sometimes, she sees black and red. Sometimes, she sees gold.
Tsuna smiles.
"Yes, Mama."
And Nana- Nana sees fire.
