Chapter 1
Tsuna didn't know what was wrong with him, not really. He knew something was wrong, he just didn't know what.
He didn't think he was a psychopath, or a sociopath. He’d taken so many online tests, and a lot of the symptoms didn't match up.
He knew when it started. After his old man and the bastard had visited, he’d… changed.
He knew now that he'd had his Flames sealed to stop a succession crisis, but back then…
Well.
He’d changed. Before, he'd been all sunshine and rainbows and making friends with everything that breathed. He'd been protection and standing up to bullies because it was the right thing to do and innocent, in a way he wasn't after.
Afterwards. Well. He'd been poorly bitten back snarls and possessive like he'd never been before and an itch for violence when his Mama had gone into his room to clean without asking. He'd stood up to bullies because the people they were hurting were his, and how dare they not listen to his rules? They were his! This was his territory and his city and they weren't listening!
But it unnerved his Mama, his changes. And Mama had been his the longest, so he listened.
He hid his snarls and he let people borrow his things and when his Mama cleaned his room he smiled and thanked her no matter how much it made him want to bash her head into a wall for trespassing, because that wasn't normal and he wanted to keep Mama, and Mama wanted him normal. He stood up to bullies and failed half the time because fighting wasn't for normal kids, and he learned to not get attached to people. It never worked out well for anyone.
The changes in his head weren't the only changes though. The longer that went on the more obvious it was. He was needlessly clumsy, he couldn't remember anything, he had a really hard time paying attention to anything for longer than about a minute. Even back then he'd known that whatever the bastard called Nono did to him was fucked up behind belief.
Then Reborn came with talk of hitmen and and Italian Mafia and how he was the last resort, and he could tell Reborn wasn't telling the whole truth the same way he could tell that Hibari Kyoya was like him, in the same way that he could tell his mother was dangerous with a knife and to not startle her while she was cooking, in the same way he could tell Takeshi Yamamoto’s smiles were horribly fake.
He went with it anyway. When Reborn told him about Flames he feigned ignorance and when he told him that Tsuna was a sky, that they had been sealed but his dying will flames were orange and he would harmonize with his elements, he carefully kept quiet about the purple Flames that had come to him easily since that fateful day when he was five.
As soon as the seal broke, even though it was just a little crack, he pulled as many as the pretty orange flames forward as he could, pushed them out and around, and kept the purple internal, never letting anyone see, never leaving a trace that they were even there.
He let everyone have the impression that he was a Sky, a powerful Sky, that he had a very minor Cloud secondary he could barely use.
When Hibari realized this, he looked torn between laughing his ass off and trying to bite everyone to death, including Tsuna for being idiots. Because Hibari had always known that Tsuna was the same as him. ‘A carnivore in a herbivore's skin', he’d called him once. Hibari knows.