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Tsuna wakes up tired. The world pulls at his bone marrow, weighing him down until he’s a thousand pounds. Moving even a single inch will be a Herculean feat, so torturous it will make his nerves scream with pain at the slide of the sheets against him, that it will be mythic in its tragedy.
He wonders how he’s ever going to get out of bed.
His eyes burn but he’s too tired to cry.
It’s not hard to notice something is wrong. It’s never been hard, in fact, when Tsuna used to cry for hours and hours as a child. He remembers it vividly, even now, how it felt to be that small, and so full of useless, helpless anger at the world for being so loud and so bright and too much.
It clued his mother in, to say the least after the fourth time she’d had to put him under a cold shower to calm him down because at least the shock of the temperature difference would get to him when nothing else would.
He has been in and out of hospitals since he was three, and by the time he is seven, he gets his diagnosis seated in an uncomfortable plastic chair in the middle of a chilly hospital room. He tries to pay attention to the doctor, but it’s hard, with the hum of the AC, the sharp smell of disinfectant and the bright, fluorescent lights overhead. It washes everything out, so that even the things that aren’t white — his clothes, the brown desk sanded down to perfection, Mama’s plastic flower-covered yellow hairclip — get washed out.
Wait, the doctor was speaking. Tsuna tries to focus. There’s a blackhead on her nose, and her hair is very shiny, and her mouth is moving but Tsuna only notices the sesame stuck between her teeth.
He’s so tired.
The doctor frowns. Did he miss something? Tsuna tries to zone back in. It takes so much effort, his eyes straining until he’s staring, his ears aching from the input. But he understands when she repeats what she said. “We’ll be able to help you more now. You understand that, right?”
He doesn’t, but he nods after taking a look at Mama. She takes his hand and squeezes it, and he knows she’ll explain again later, in his room, where it’s nice and dark and quiet and he can put his soft pajamas on.
His muscles relax one by one when the doctor acquiesces at the nod and lets them go. The relief is massive, but the hallways back towards the carpark are full and bright, and it is all he can not to close his eyes and just follow his mother blindly.
The car won’t be much better — the smell of gasoline and the firing of the engine and the hundreds of other cars make sure of that — but at least it will have fewer people.
This is his life.
“You have ADD, attention deficit disorder,” Mama explains quietly later that afternoon, having pulled down the blackout curtains in his room just before. The little brand label on it proclaims its sentinel-grade quality. “And CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome.” She’s sitting on the edge of his bed, while Tsuna has wedged himself into the corner, blanket over his head to drown out as much as possible.
He has no idea what she’s talking about, but Mama is way ahead of him, as usual.
“In practice, ADD means that you’re often distracted and getting that diagnosis means we can get you medication now to help you focus. CFS is what is making you so tired. Most children who have it were really sick before they got it, while the doctors haven’t been able to narrow it down to a single instance before you were chronically tired, you’re a textbook example of most of the signs. Activities of any kind and stimuli make you tired. Do you know what that means?”
Tsuna shakes his head. Outside, cicadas cry.
“It’s whatever your brain has to process. So that means sound, flavor, visuals of any kind, smells and touch. All of that can be way too much for you. People too, because they cause a lot of those.”
“I could’ve told you that too,” Tsuna whispers, peeking out of the blanket. The room is dark enough that he can deal, even after the awful hospital trip.
Mama laughs.
It’s loud, but he doesn’t mind. Her smile is worth it.
“Yes, but the label means we can try things now that we couldn’t before. I’m hoping it will get better for you, baby.”
He’s hoping so too, because none of this has been very fun so far.
More items join the blackout curtains and soft pajamas. Headphones with noise canceling, that try their best but never quite cancel out everything despite being the best on the market (Guide and Sentinel Safe! the cheery booklet it came with declared in bright red letters), weighted blankets to sleep under at night or pull over himself when he reads his manga.
They help a little, with managing at least, so that’s good, but the diagnosis leads to a lot of less fun things too. Figuring out which ADD meds to take takes forever. Some make him so despondent he doesn’t even get off the couch, even though they do give him the focus to plan more. The next type they try do the opposite — he can’t plan ahead at all, but keeps running around doing without thinking at all. It’s funny for five minutes, but he refuses to take it again even though the doctor said he really should take it for at least a few days.
The third medication — the one they end up settling on — works reasonably well, but it makes him nauseous all day long, and somehow it makes the world more clear, or sharper, and while being able to do his schoolwork is nice, he hates it with passion for making the world even more abrasive.
School is horrible anyway, whether or not he manages to do his worksheet. When he got his diagnosis there was all kind of talk about extra time for tests for his ADD, but in truth, most teachers don’t actually give him the promised help and more time wasn’t the problem in the first place. They don’t understand how maddening the breeze from the window into his neck is, the rustling of exam papers turning in the whole room, the scratching of pens, of feet tapping the floor in thought.
They understand CFS for fuck all too. School is a fight, a constant struggle, and it is easier to just give up altogether than to try endlessly in the first place because then he'll have to care and— not trying and failing already hurts enough. Just showing up takes monumental effort. He doesn’t have it in himself to do more if he doesn’t know it will yield results for sure. Taking chances is for kids who don’t flinch away from sunlight.
And then Reborn, who Mama thinks will help, but really, really doesn’t.
And then there’s Xanxus and suddenly, the world doesn’t hurt, and Tsuna holds his breath.
The center of his universe shifts.
After Xanxus leaves, everything gets louder again, but the reason Tsuna stumbles home in a daze has far more to do with what is happening inside than what is happening outside.
Mama takes one look at him when he comes in and kicks everyone out to go get ice cream, no buts or ifs allowed. She sits him down at the dining table, shuts the curtains, and listens.
And Tsuna has to explain that being an undiagnosed sentinel looks a lot like ADD and a chronic illness, actually. Complete with brain fog, dizziness and the need for copious amounts of rest, silence and few bright colors around, plus aids like headphones and weighted blankets and so on. “I—” he says, staring at his hands because the world is falling down around him and the least it can do for him is not force him to watch, “So many things you got for me were sentinel safe, Mama. I saw those words nearly every day for years and—” He chokes on his words. There’s a lump in his throat a mile wide and he can’t fucking swallow around it. His eyes are burning. “Was I ever sick at all?”
He can see his mother’s hands flutter up like she wants to cover his with her own, but she doesn’t quite reach for him yet. “I don’t know. You could have been, even as a sentinel. We’d have to go to the hospital to get re-evaluated. I never thought— you were so little. I never even thought it might be symptoms of being a sentinel!”
The clock on the wall ticks torturously slow.
“Neither,” Tsuna says, looking up from his hands, “did the doctors.”
“Yes, but they’re not your mother.” And Mama starts to cry. The tears stream down her face, her bottom lip quivering, the drops collecting at her chin. Her face is twisted with grief, for him, for herself, and just a little bit angry at the world in a way he didn’t know he needed her to be.
He thinks of school, of Nezu handing him back a test marked with a sea of red, sneering at him and telling him to just "bite the bullet and study," as if it was that simple. Of how he had almost wished for a worse illness — or at least something people would fucking recognize! The experience, one of so many, had twisted him up inside, fucked him up in a way he doesn’t think he'll ever forget, just another thing to swallow past that boulder of a lump in his throat, just another thing to lock up deep inside and never, ever look at.
Just another thing he's too tired to deal with, another thing he can’t cry for because he's just too exhausted, too numb and worn down.
The sight of his mother's tears, visceral and raw with the scent of salt, sets him free.
He sobs like a child, until his entire face hurts from it, and Mama stands up to hug him to her, so tightly it should hurt, but the only thing Tsuna does is burrow against her more, turning his face into her stomach. His tears make her shirt terribly damp, but she only clutches him tighter. “My baby,” she says, voice hoarse. She smells like home.
His mother, who tried her best but could never give him what he needed either.
All of this pain, and it had been unnecessary in the end. The thought makes him cry harder, until it’s hard to gasp for enough air.
Together, they sob for all the years and things he missed, that he needn’t have missed at all had they known what was going on.
It is cleansing, like a cloud letting go of rain and thunder, of all the violence of the sky so that it may clear tomorrow.
But for today, Tsuna hugs his mother.