Chapter 14
Mizuno had lived with her aunt Nana and cousin Tsuna since she was around four. She wasn’t there for her baby cousin's birth, her parents only dying when she was four and Tsuna was one, but they were as close as siblings nonetheless.
The fact that she was three years older than Tsuna meant that she remembered the cute, charismatic, genius little boy that had dozens of friends and was close to skipping a few grades, to the downtrodden meek depressed boy who couldn’t read and kept tripping over his own feet.
Something was wrong, but aunt Nana refused to take him to the hospital, and aunt Nana herself had been going more airheaded and stuck in her own world since her husband left. She’d looked it up, and figured Nana was probably depressed and either maladaptive daydreaming or dissociating, and so she stepped up.
She did the research on developmental disorders, and though she never really found one that fit with all of Tsuna’s symptoms, the tips and tricks on how to teach them to get through everyday life still applied.
Repetition, a set schedule and such, flash cards and drawings for memorization during studying, ten minute breaks every thirty minutes. Things like that. He’s not called Dame-Tsuna, at least not openly, because she was always right there two steps behind him, walking him to school and making sure today wasn’t the day he tripped badly enough to crack his skull open, and she had a violent streak to rival the Demon Prefect when it came to people that were hers.
She considered everyone in Namimori hers, but Tsuna even moreso, on account of him being her brother.
She’d had a part time job since she was twelve, and she’d been helping around people's houses, picking up groceries, cleaning, fixing things, babysitting, anything that could feasibly help someone in Namimori as soon as she was physically able to, when she’s not watching Tsuna. She’s the sweetheart of Namimori, an orphan yet always so helpful and taking care of her disabled little cousin too!
She and Hibari Kyoya have a reluctant understanding, after many, many fights that ended in draws. Kyoya claimed Namimori as a whole as his, and she claimed the people of Namimori as hers. The people are technically his too, but not really. He’s only concerned with making sure they follow the rules, and he doesn’t break bones after one of their fights when they were still in grade school anymore.
He’s more focused on the infrastructure, the land. Making sure that parks are well kept and that people aren’t burning their trash and that abandoned buildings are sold quickly and that every single building is up to code and updated.
There’s a sadly large amount of crossover with her and Hibari, to the point they’d had to compromise and work together
For all that Tsuna’s not quite right, he can manage most things by himself. He needs help with homework, and he needs someone to wake him up in the morning and tell him to go to bed at night and walk him to and from school, but otherwise he’s mostly self sufficient.
She has a lot of free time on her hands, most of which she uses up by doing odd-jobs to be helpful while listening to audiobooks, working her actual part time job, volunteering at any of the animal or homeless shelters, studying, learning new languages, and her hobbies, which include intricate jewelry making, playing violin, gardening, and baking. She can cook well, but if she doesn’t have to she wont.