It was when the seed's shell fell off the roots that he realized just how sad his past was.
"Why is it that the only time I seem to write something down is for homework?" He stared at yet another failed assignment, sighing in exasperation. Hell, there weren't even that many papers left in his room either; after all, he never got any good grades, so why bother keeping them around to mock him?
There were some love notes – as embarrassing as that was. But he didn't have it in him to rip them apart, as well as that there weren't that many of them either. They had been from the time he had thought he had loved Kyoko, and though he knew better now, it brought back good memories reading them.
His baby brother had helped him – or had thought he was helping him – write most of them. He had believed he had known what a girl liked to hear.
"Big brother, don't forget to say you'll give her a cookie!" Lambo pointed at the note in Tsuna's hand. "Give her a cookie!"
He flinched at the memory. Ouch; his heart thumped painfully in his chest.
Was there anything else in the room he could tear apart? He dug through his childhood memories, coming across more failed grades and unsent letters.
He was ready to give up by the time he had thrown practically everything in his closet onto his bedroom floor. He was tired and he was annoyed; couldn't he just use some newspaper? Couldn't he? But, no; the directions had said something he had written. The idea of handwriting enough notes to fill a cup when soaked didn't really please him.
Well, maybe if he wrote the words really big…
As he thought about it, he leaned against the wall in his closet, staring up at the empty rackets above the clothesline. He yelped when the wall gave slightly, causing him to jerk backwards. "What the hell?" He spun around; where he had been leaning, a crevice had formed.
His eyes narrowed; he remembered this… but from where?
"Gya hah hah hah! Let's hide him in here, big brother! Reborn will never find him here!"
His breath stuck in his throat. Right. He and Lambo had brought a kitten off the streets and had wanted to keep it. His mom, dad, and Reborn had all flat-out told them no, but they had been adamant. So Lambo, while Tsuna hadn't been looking, too busy feeding the kitty he had been told he would have to let go, had somehow gotten a hold of their dad's equipment and had made a hole in his closet.
It had worked for a few days, but then Reborn had told them to get the cat the hell out of there – the house was starting to stink because they had never bothered to clean the kitten's messes.
After the kitten had left, they had made other uses of the hole in the closet.
He took the loose plaster off the wall and reached into the dark hole. He pulled out a small, rusty chest.
"Big brother wrote stories in elementary school?"
The mystery of the lost stories was solved. When Lambo had found out, he had gathered all of Tsuna's essays, put them in the old chest, and had hidden them in the hole; occasionally, he had snuck back into the hole to read the tales. Tsuna remembered all of that as he stared at the small box.
He laughed bitterly as he read the stories now; they were full of so many errors… but Lambo had loved them. They were stories about heroes, about falling in love, of how the weak became strong and defended the world… There was even a bigger packet of a narrative his one teacher had created copies of to share with the class; it had been a story based off of strange dreams he had been having about a teenager who was found by a strange baby and was told that he was going to become the Tenth Don of the mafia Vongola family. There were a lot of characters, their personalities matching oddly with people Tsuna knew in real life.
He flipped through the yellowed pages with a soft smile on his face. Lambo had loved this story the best. He had especially loved it because he had thought that the child in the story – the one who wore Bovino horns and used electricity for attacks and defense – was just like him.
Now that he held the stories in his hands again, he felt… nothing for them. He might have written them, but they had been Lambo's. Lambo had been the one to adore them; his tiny hands had been the one to smudge the ink and lead that had made the words.
He looked from the stack of papers to the mass of roots beneath his pillow. Mukuro's love for stories was a lot like his baby brother's…
Maek a wIsh, bIg brOther!
Lambo wouldn't mind.
Author's Note: One of these times… there is going to be a long chapter! I don't know when… but it will happen!