His feet are perched on the ledge of what appears to be a rundown apartment when he picks up on the scent of leather and liquor interweaving with the sharp tang of copper. He follows it, head tilting up and up until he 'sees' the heat of an occupied room. Two people, an adult and a child, and he doesn't have to remove his mask to know who they are.

"What the fuck is this?" a man spits, loud and venomous, the noisy clatter of plates and glass following the bellow of his voice. "You failed your test? You failed your test!? You useless piece of shit, you're just like your fucking mother! If you can't get a perfect score, what's the point? Hah? What's the point? There's no fucking point in making you study in a school if you're not going to get perfect scores in your tests! Or is that it? Do you want to end up the same way she did? Do you want me to tie you up and let you bleed out like your dear mother did?"

"...N-no, Papa-" Kensuke, Tsuna thinks, and his entire body jerks when he hears the sound of skin against skin and Kensuke's pained scream.

"Who gave you permission to talk?"

A deadly calm settles over him when he hears Kensuke's whimper.

It's a thin veil, cold and numbing and cutting, and everything quiets in his ears despite the rampaging need to devour and destroy boiling under his skin. His senses sharpen, narrowing down on the heat and the elevated thumping of heart against the prey's chest, focusing on nothing but the flow of red and the movement of muscle beneath skin as he jumps from where he's perched and breaks through the window.

The muted noise stops. There are words, he thinks, maybe even screaming, but it's all over by the time his mind snaps back into the same filtered clarity.

His arm is elbow deep through the man's chest, a splatter of red painting the walls and Kensuke's pale face.

Tsuna turns to face him, meat buried under his fingernails and blood dripping down his black clothes.

"You should run," he tells him, the sickening squelch of the man's insides loud in the abrupt silence.

Kensuke doesn't move. Doesn't breathe.

"Kensuke-kun," he urges. Not Mochida, he thinks, he deserves better than to be called his father's name. "Please. Please run away." You don't have to see this.

Kensuke doesn't run. Instead, he takes a shaky breath. He's favoring a hand to his chest, a swelling bruise on the side of his face, greenish blue and black bruises peeking from under the neck of his ragged t-shirt. There is distant recognition in his eyes.

"...I-" he starts, his voice so, so soft that he barely hears him even with his amplified senses, "I don't have..."

I don't have anywhere to go.

The same voice calls him, the same sound of chimes and thick ice, the warm breath of a whisper carrying stifling heat.

Home. It sings. Bring him home.

He turns to the man in front of him and rips his arm away, unrepentantly watching the body drop with a thud on the small puddle of blood beneath his feet. "Then," he says, uncertain but determined all the same, "do you want to come home with me?"

Kensuke looks at him with fear in his eyes.

And, Tsuna thinks as the boy tentatively and cautiously reaches for the bloodied sleeve of his left arm, with hope.

"...Okay."