Love and kindness
The feeling of dying was unlike any other sensation there was. Tsuna was uniquely well positioned to make judgements on the subject. He’d died more times than anyone else he knew after all.
Most of them had only been temporary deaths of course. The kind that were inflicted by dying will bullets and only meant to last for an instant. They had been more than enough to make the sensation of dying and being resurrected an old familiar friend though. They had been more than enough to make him keenly aware of each and every reason he had, to not stay dead. Maybe that was why he’d been reincarnated, his soul too used to clinging to life to just let go when his body finally fell beyond repair.
There had been two deaths that had been more than temporary, that had more than a moment’s hold over him. The first was so carefully planned and executed, so carefully that he didn’t even remember it because time itself had been rewritten by the time the plan had fully played out. The second though, the second hadn’t been planned at all. The second had been a haze of fire, and gunfire, and blood. The second had meant more deaths than his own, had been chaos, and disaster, and no way out. He didn’t like remembering the second. He really hadn’t expected to wake up after that one.
But he had. Whether it was some weird as yet undiscovered side function of the Vongola rings, a consequence of his own soul’s excessive experience with resurrection, or just a bizarre coincidence, he had been reincarnated. He had been reincarnated and he remembered.
It had felt like the universe’s cruel joke when he first reawoke, shivering and shaking and coldcoldcold in a way that ran far deeper than the chill from the almost drowning that had triggered the memories. He was cold because he was there and his guardians were gone, and they had died, and he had died, and he had woken up alone, no bright colours wrapped around the orange flame of his soul.
He hadn’t been doing so well for a while there. He’d spent three weeks with a high fever from the drowning, and worried the hell out of the orphanage staff in the process, and when he’d finally recovered he’d been quiet and withdrawn. Lonely in a way none of his fellow orphans, children and strangers that they were, could ease.
It took probably longer than it should have for Tsuna to pull himself together. If Reborn had been there he probably would have shot him for moping. In the end it was the thought that maybe he wasn’t alone after all that dragged him out of it. After all it had been a near death experience that reactivated his memories. If his friends had been reincarnated they would probably be small children just like him. It was entirely possible they just hadn’t remembered yet, after all, how many small children underwent near death experiences.
Of course that was before he’d figured out exactly what sort of world he’d been born into. When he worked it out it was all he could do to keep from letting out a high pitched squeak. It was like the mafia, but in public, and legal, and no-one saw anything wrong with it. He wondered just how badly Reborn had managed to screw with his head over the years that a part of him found that reassuring. At least now, if his guardians got out of hand, he wouldn’t have to try and cover it up.
Actually. If he’d been reincarnated, that meant he wasn’t Vongola tenth anymore. That meant the paperwork they incurred was no longer his responsibility, it was the job of the hokage and other senior village officials. Maybe this new life wouldn’t be so bad after all.
He’d signed up for the academy mainly because he suspected his guardians would end up gravitating towards it. It was after all the most similar thing to their previous jobs available in this universe. If he wanted them back, the academy was the place to start looking. Besides, after years in the mafia his responses just didn’t fit in to a civilian life anymore and it wasn’t like he’d ever had any burning ambitions before he’d had criminal greatness thrust upon him. He might as well play to his strengths, and thanks to Reborn, most of those strengths were really only useful for a ninja.
He’d signed up to the academy and it had paid off immediately, because he’d found Hayato. That had been a good day, because Hayato had remembered as soon as he’d seen Tsuna. Having Hayato’s storm red flames woven back into his own where they belonged had helped chase away some of the coldness he’d been plagued by ever since he’d woken up alone. (He was never going to tell Hayato how much those two years alone had hurt, he would never forgive himself.) And the day had only got better because ninja academy lessons were easy. It was some combination of the way Reborn’s lessons had stuck, the fact that his flames were unsealed this time around, and of course the fact that he had the memories of a grown man, but he was actually doing quite well in lessons.
And he was popular. That was probably down to the unsealed flames again, because there was no other good explanation for why his classmates seemed so drawn to him. He, Dame Tsuna, was the class idol. It was surreal, he wasn’t sure he liked it. On the one hand it was better than being beaten up for his lunch money, (not that Hayato would have allowed that), but on the other it was more than a little creepy. Still, if Hayato’s possessive glaring wasn’t enough to deter them, he suspected nothing would so he would just have to learn to live with it. He wondered if this was how Kyouko had felt back in Nami middle.
Hayato wasn’t the only one of his guardians that had shown up in his academy class, although most of them were seemingly oblivious to their past lives at least at first, with the glaring exception of Mukuro who had shown up halfway through the year with all his memories in place and casually inserted himself into the class without so much as a word of explanation. Tsuna knew better than to ask. As long as he didn’t ask he wouldn’t have to deal with whatever it was, and judging by Mukuro’s smirk it was something he really didn’t want to deal with.
Getting his guardians back, or at least seeing the opportunity to get them back, eased the ache inside him to the point where he felt comfortable stretching out his flame sense again. Which was how he spotted the baby sky. Naruto in the year above, village pariah, dead last of his class, brimming with untapped power. It should have been like looking in a mirror of his younger self, but he knew Naruto vaguely from the orphanage and honestly he put Tsuna more in mind of a strange combination of pre-mafia Takeshi, and five year old Lambo. Lambo’s desperate attention seeking loudness, combined with the mask of happiness that had nearly driven Takeshi to suicide.
It wasn’t a good situation, and Tsuna wasn’t entirely sure how to fix it. Naruto had moved out of the orphanage when he’d enrolled in the academy, and Tsuna had no real excuses for interacting with him, especially since he had never spoken more than a few words to the boy when they’d actually lived under the same roof. He still felt bad about that. No matter how badly he’d been hurting, he should have seen the state Naruto was in. He had no real excuse to interact with him, and it wasn’t all that long ago that Naruto had been betrayed by a group of kids pretending to be his friends. Tsuna remembered exactly how that felt, and if anyone had tried to approach him out of the blue, after that had happened he would have never let them close.
So Tsuna didn’t push, he stood back, and did what he could from a distance, and let Naruto try an handle his own problems. And it paid off, he could see the way Naruto’s natural sky charisma, latent though it was, slowly undercut the pre-existing prejudices of the people around him. Things weren’t perfect, but Tsuna could see the way some of Naruto’s class were starting to centre around him, and he knew that if he, an active sky intervened at this point it might disrupt that process entirely. So he kept his distance and watched, and then the Uchiha had been murdered, and Chrome was newly reawaken and grieving, and Tsuna was too caught up with the problems of his own family to think about Naruto.