Sawada Tsunayoshi: Day XX Of His Death
All he ever wanted was to be a student.
A crisply ironed junior high blazer resting on his shoulders, standing tall and proud with a school briefcase in his hand.
He wanted to sit at a desk, back ruler-straight against a hard metal chair.
Praying for a quick release from the confines of his classroom as a clock documented every meticulous second.
The gentle rustling of textbooks, a unified fanfare as the class turned to read another page.
There were words on those pages--he swore it--he just couldn't read them.
His classmates had faces--obscured by nothing in particular, yet impossible to make out.
There was no blazer. No textbooks, no white shirt nor bento box.
There was no school, and he was no student.
It was only himself, an empty room, and the idea of death.
People did not remain on this earth if they had no reason to. When they died they died, simple as that.
Tsunayoshi Sawada had died...yet he remained in the empty room that had once been a kitchen.
Everything else was too painful.
The door to his mother's bedroom remained shut, a warning sign to any future Tsunas who wanted to make a terrible decision.
His own room was empty, save for a set of stringy and moth-bitten curtains that had once been brand new. Mom had bought them on sale at a department store. He'd always hated the color, a mustard yellow that'd make just about anyone squeamish.
He'd recently started to like mustard yellow.
But in order to get there, he'd have to go upstairs.
Upstairs on slippery sock feet that had never been kind to him.
Their final revenge had come almost four months ago to the day.
Who knew he had that much blood in him?
At least he hadn't gotten blood on his new school blazer.
His mother had most likely taken it with her.
Mom...the stairs....junior high school.
Tsuna threw his head back, childish anguish ripping from his chest and strangling itself in his throat.
Another deadweight, a sinking feeling that had begun to rise inside of him.
Silent yet brutal, slicing any defense he may have had into infinite shreds.
It had kicked down the dams.
A fragile sort of protection that shattered with the slightest nudge.
Mourning what he had lost, what he never once had the chance to gain.
At least they were kind enough to put a bandage around his neck.
Mom never fixed that step, did she?
In the center of an empty room did he stand alone.
Empty. There was no Tsunayoshi Sawada, student or otherwise.
The thought alone made his knees buckle beneath him, his frail body suddenly crashing to the floor.
There was no jarring split-second panic, no "did I break something?".
The sheet of dust beneath his feet lay stagnant, undisturbed. Still and ignorant to his qualms.
With a shaking arm did he press his hand into the dust, forcing it down with whatever his frail form could muster.
There, barely indented yet just enough to see, was a handprint.
But nobody would ever see it.
Nobody would ever care about him again, would they?
