Hi hi~~

This.. Actually was quite hard for me to do to be honest. I couldn't think of anything! So this chapter isn't my best in my opinion but I hope you-

Enjoy~~

Case 4

It was only a month.

One month since Yamamoto. One month since seven dead bodies- a corpse for every day that they had stopped being friends- including the perpetrator himself had been splayed out in the morning sun of Namimori Middle school. One month of mourning, of grief, of peace.

And then blood was once again spilled.

School had just restarted. The baseball team was for all purposes disbanded and the school population was wary and sickened every time they stepped on the dirt covered grounds. Try as they might they could wash away the blood and replace all the earth on the ground but in the minds of the children, it will stain deeper than any simple washcloth or cheque could wipe away.

Tsuna wasn't just an outcast anymore. Nothing so simple. In a small town like this one, rumors and speculation were what fueled the people. With three killers in the last few years, demons in the form of children gravitating around the same small boy with eyes as sweet as honey, it was hard not to talk.

Some were sympathetic. Others still hardened by their grief for their friends, their family, their homes were less so. With the monsters dead, buried and mangled there was only one person still breathing through it all and Tsuna hated that it was him.

They blamed him. Blamed him for not standing up for himself in the beginning with Mochida. For not saying no to Gokudera. For saying no to Yamamoto. Ifs and buts and whys haunted the boy in the weight of the bodies he had indirectly caused. And for someone so young, just on the cusp of puberty, that was a heavy burden indeed.

It wasn't fair. He was just as affected by all of this if not more so. Yamamoto was supposed to be a friend. The baseball star was supposed to be nice, normal. Tsuna felt anger and nausea and betrayal brimming at the back of his head just at the thought of that suicidal bat-wielding psychopath. Screams and pleading and the squelching sound of bat and bone echoed in the silence constantly. Hot, burning reds soaked the cool darkness of the night. Dreams have left the boy, fled, run away, because dreams were for the good and the innocent and he was neither.

Good and innocent people don't cause dead animals, poisoned bullies, and seven dead athletes.

Good people stop those sort of things.

But by that logic though no one in this place should be considered 'good people'. It was a cold hollow comfort but one the boy made all the less.

Because Sawada Tsunayoshi was certainly not good people.

The only one who really talked to Tsuna these days was Ryohei Sasagawa.

Talked was a strong word. Tsuna walked aimlessly around the town like the ghost he should've been and Ryohei would run around on his millionth lap, shouting and waving and smiling at the brunette whenever their paths tended to cross.

Tsuna tried to ignore him at first, any attention was bad attention in his opinion. But it took a pathetically short time for him to break like a thin twig and wave tentatively back at the enthusiastic athlete. He hadn't spoke to a person for weeks by then and while he knows he doesn't deserve it, doesn't deserve anything really, he can't help but still want.

He wants to have friends. He wants to be normal. He wants, he wants-

"GOOD MORNING TSUNA!" Ryohei yelled, loud and brash and warm like the sun.

"H-hello Sasagawa-san." He whispered, a soft breath of a greeting that could have been easily dismissed as a wisp of wind. Yet the boxer somehow heard him, his smile large and almost brightening in how pure and happy it was.

-He wants so badly to be loved.

They started hanging out. Not like playing video games or coming over to each other's places or anything. Just walking together for a bit when they inevitably meet, listening to the older brash boy chatter, laughing together.

Tsuna wasn't better, he was still scared and guilty and beaten down. He was so far from the word 'better' and 'good' and even the word 'relatively okay,' it would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic. But the boy looked forward to these moments with Ryohei, bright and blinding. When the darkness surrounding him for a small moment vanishes and the bruises on his body forget to sting and buzz accusingly. He looked so desperately forward to these meetings, Tsuna didn't even realize how strange it was they managed to meet every single day, no matter the place.

Didn't realize that the sun, shining and so full of light, casting away the horrors of the night, always hides the worst monsters out of sight. Because where brightness follows, darkness always lurks nearby in the shadows being cast.

He was being blinded. Blinded by his own yearning, the simple comforts of companionship and the sunny smile of his friend. Nothing seemed off about Ryohei, he was as genuine as they came, there was nothing faked or forced or manipulative about him. Everything the tanned teen did, had done and will do, was all a hundred percent Ryohei.

Which is probably the most terrifying thing about what happened next.

It, like Ryohei, happened spontaneously, suddenly and extremely.

There was legitimately no sort of sign, no clue, no hint beforehand. A normal day. A normal week. Comforting in its mundane ordinariness. And while everyone has barely just started moving on from the horrific nightmare not too long ago, people were beginning to breathe easy again.

Unfortunately, not all of them would be breathing again.

Tsuna woke up to screams that morning. For once it wasn't his own. For once, he was far from grateful for the reprieve.

His bedroom window had a bloody handprint sliding off it, casting a shadow in the morning light. In the not so distant distance, Tsuna could see bodies hanging off the telephone wires like blankets out to dry. From the fresh red liquid still dripping on his window, the brunette had a terrifying thought that those bodies were hanging out to dry for a much more literal reason.

The sunlight burned painfully.

Tsuna spent the rest of the morning with his frightened mother, holed in his house, wary. His fear simmering underneath his skin as he waited. Even after everything, he doesn't think the fear would ever grow away, would ever feel 'less'. It's cold and hot and electrifying in all the worst ways. There's always shadows where there's none and whispers in the silence. How could anyone get used to that?

There were four bodies. A gossipmonger of a housewife, a doctor, a reporter, and Nezu sensei. It sounded like the start of a really bad joke. Except no joke ended with all four people hanging off telephone wires, their lower jaws ripped out in a show of brutal, brutal strength, and their clothing gone. No joke ended with tongues lolling out, soaked in their own blood as they hung in their exposed, open throats. No joke ended with sightless eyes and twisted necks. No one was certainly laughing.

In the end, the wait was for nothing. It said a lot about a simple place like Namimori when they seemed to know exactly what to do now when faced with such gory examples of what human monstrosity can do. The police were called. Evidence was found. It also helped that Ryohei turned himself in the very same day. Dazed and splattered in red.

Was it wrong that Tsuna somehow felt a pinprick of something like disappointment at that?

Whatever the feeling was, it quickly went away when he found where exactly the missing lower jaws were.

Laid out shameless in the light, staining the grass in his garden, was the torn frameworks of four people's mouth. The jaws were placed in such a way that they looked like two hearts splitting in their middle as blood and pinked teeth and muscle scattered out of it like some sick, morbid piece of modern art.

It was disgusting. It was gruesome. It was grisly.

So why didn't he scream?