XSummary:You meet all sorts of people when you stand behind a cash register.

XThe MartX

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2.The Family

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School was not something Tsuna looked forward to. Rather, anything that made him leave the safety of his cluttered room was not on his favourite list; even food. He would prefer the expired caramel chocolates stored in his cupboard (for emergency use only) any day compared to his mother's veggie stocked kitchen. In fact, any sane person would. Oh, how he hated peas! And she loved them with equal vigor. The woman had even tried making a pea cake!

Loosing his sanity didn't seem like a distant thought anymore. Especially considering how his life seemed to have taken a more twisted and winded path to his doom. He couldn't see his future anymore –sniff- Well, not as long as that psycho stock loader was working under the same ceiling as him. What was his problem? What had Tsuna ever done to him? But that was the whole point of bullying, wasn't it? Doing it for no reason at all.

The last straw came when Hayato accidentally spilled juice over his pants and right where no one should ever see a spill –if you get what I mean. Well, some heck of an accident that had been, spilling that goddamn drink exactly there, and the delinquent hadn't even tripped or anything, he was just 'hey baby face' and Tsuna went 'wha-?' and the next thing he knew the accident had occurred.

"EAT DUNG YOU ASSHOLE!" and a wine bottle was sent swinging.

Uh, nah, Tsuna didn't do that to Hayato. No one did that to Hayato actually. Some drunken idiots had stumbled into the store and started bickering, before the workers knew it, the young drinkers had started a brawl and were soon beating each other with everything they could get their hands on.

While Tsuna and Chrome hid behind the counter, the rest tried to handle the chaos that had ensued. Even though Takeshi had constantly commended on how "amazing" Hayato had been on handling the mischief makers, the brunet swore he saw Hayato drinking down from a new bottle – which the bully himself had taken the liberty of opening- and hardly budged a finger while the rest of the workers panicked and tried to smooth things out. He couldn't understand why Takeshi tried to make Hayato look like a good guy. There was not an ounce of goodwill by and far in his character.

And as if God hadn't made him miserable enough, he not only had to deal with being termed 'wussy' after that particular incident but apparently a nickname that an old regular customer had given to him had traveled miles.

Tsuna had went to his hero –the flawless and fearful Hibari- to return the change, which had made everyone in the store obsessed, only to see the student council president smirking before the words that crumbled his world slipped out of his lips. "Hello, baby-face."

His response had taken less than a part of a second. The teen threw back his head, let out his infamous wail –because of which people easily mistook him for a girl- and ran out of there with his face in shades of red and his eyes prickling with tears. Oh, and he was also flailing his arms around.

The creepy dual eyed customer had also returned. "Hello Tuna-boy!" By then Tsuna lost count of the nicknames he had. He just let the navy haired customer poke fun at the setting of broken bottles –courtesy of the drunk dorks- that Ryohei had decorated again, even though everyone had repeatedly told him not to. The hyper male had insisted that broken wine bottles made for a better display than intact ones. No one wanted to argue with him so they let him be. Giotto would handle it when he returned from his classes.

Giotto, on the other hand, seemed to agree with Ryohei. The instant he had set his eyes on it he was all "WOW!" The workers explained the brawl and how Ryohei had decided to make the most of the leftovers and what had been Giotto's response? "I like creativity and that looks kind of cool." They couldn't have asked for a more stupider boss.

At home things weren't exactly pleasant either. Things were never pleasant for the Sawada child at home to begin with.

"I've finally made a pea-soup!"

These are not the words a pea hater wants to hear after a bad day.

"Drown it down the drain!" The teen yelled as he directly went upstairs. His head was pounding. The last thing he wanted was his mother's idioticy infecting him.

"But I made it with all of a mother's love!"

He stopped, sighed, turned around and went back to the dining room. "I'm sorry mom. I've just had a bad day."

She smiled at him. There was not a day she remembered when he hadn't said that. "What happened?"

Like the idiot he was, he babbled on and on about the nicknames people had given him and about how insecure he felt and blah, blah, blah. He came to regret it later on when Giotto came around bedtime and wanted to 'talk' with him. He was pretty sure it would be an inquiry about the fight that had taken place during his shift but noooo.

"I've heard you've been having problems at work."

Shit.

"Not really."

And so Giotto had given his brotherly speech again and spoken some wise terms that Tsuna never thought he knew. It all felt weird because he was sitting in his pajamas at the dining table and Giotto was sitting across him in his usual I'm-more-rich-hot-cool-and-popular clothes on. Not really, he was wearing just a simple shirt and a jacket over it and even that made him look like some sort of super model for dining tables, because he was sitting at one. –sigh- Why were all his cousins so super cooler than he was? All those in his father's side of the family made him feel inferior. His mother's side was more fun to be with, though they all contained equal levels of clumsiness. He couldn't believe it when he saw his grandfather –mother's side- trip over his own feet as he was walking Nana to the altar. That ruined an otherwise perfect wedding footage.

His head was still in another world by the time Giotto was done. And that too was only because Nana said it was time for Tsuna to hit the sack because he had school tomorrow. That made him seem even more lame in front of Giotto because, seriously, what would someone else think about a sixteen year old with bedtime curfew!

'She makes me look like even more of a looser than I already am.'

He saw that Giotto was finding it hard to stay awake.

"Well, I'll be leaving now." The blond said as he got up, grating his chair against the floor, which was against the code of conduct of their family. Their clan always respectfully pulled out a chair without making any noise.

'I'm such a geek.'

He didn't even need these rules being hammered into his head because his mother never let him attend any sort of family business meeting, or rather, any meeting that had their head of family. He only ever met the entire family in the summer holidays and felt inferior all summer long. Sometimes Tsuna wondered if Dino and him had accidentally been placed in the wrong families. Dino with his fair head and skin could easily have been a Sawada and Tsuna with his dark locks and big honey eyes could easily have fitted into the Cavallone clan. Alas! It wasn't so. Dino was extremely popular within the girls of both the families and it was no secret.

"'Night Nana." His boss said as he ruffled his mother's hair, which was a shocker really because she normally got a kiss on the cheek. Even more surprising was the back patting that he gave her as he said "Brothers, okay?"

"Yes…" His mother seemed a bit stifled as she answered. "Good night."

"'Night." He inched towards the brunet who soundlessly got off his chair and was just as soundlessly closing it when the blond bent down and planted a firm kiss on his cheek. All direction of senses lost and the younger teen dropped sideways, muscles twitching and nerves tingling.

'What the hell just happened?'

When Giotto left, his mother erupted into a volcano of giggles. "That was so cute!" She exclaimed. "Did you see that?" 'Uh … I was a victim …!' "The poor thing was so tired he could barely tell left from right!" 'And that makes him cute … how?' In Tsuna's opinion that just made him stupid.

"Mom… He kissed-" your virgin "-son!"

"Well, isn't it some sort of trend these days?"

He gawked at her. Where did she get these things in her head from? "Are you implying I'm homo?"

She blinked her large brown eyes innocently at him. "Are you, sweetheart?"

"Of course not!" He was flustered and embarrassed. How could she think about her own son like that? That's treachery! … in some biased far fetched way…

Her eyelids drooped halfway and she looked at him from under her lashes mischievously. "A mother knows." The expression left just as suddenly as it had come and she laughed heartily. It gave him the creeps real bad because that was a sure sign that she had something brewing up her sleeves. Like peas maybe. See why he thought his mother was creepy and not trustworthy?

'I have issues…'

Even in bed he couldn't help but think it over again and again. 'Did she really mean it?' Maybe the fact that he didn't have a girl friend to date was a sign of something bad. Maybe she was just reading the signs all wrong, like every other wrong thing she did. Like the time when she walked him to school and dropped him at a high school instead of the primary wing. Buoy, loads of crap that had been. And she always forced him into Dino's company. Tsuna remembered quite well that Dino was exhausted by him when the blond was still a teenager and Tsuna a toddler because he was very hard to please. Their bond, how ever, grew as they did with time.

And she was forcing him with Giotto now!

He hated Giotto. He made it a point to show her and specifically tell her how much he hated him. He tried being as modestly direct as he could. But alas! His mother had as many brains as a hydra plant might have – none. She never understood him, she never tried understanding him. Tsuna and Giotto had a history more rough than any other person Tsuna had with. His memories were quite vivid on how Giotto bullied him and locked him in cupboards or made fun of him in front of friends. He was quite certain too that it was because Giotto felt that he was superior to him.

Well, he didn't blame him, actually, he very much did. There was some sort of problem of social standing in the Sawada household. Nana didn't come from as rich a family as the rest of the brides had and that didn't sit well with the elders. Iemitsu had been hard to control as a boy and teenager and as an adult he had gone fully out of hand. He had completely blown off the girl he was engaged to and went ahead and married his heart's desire. Tsuna's birth was as welcome as a rat in the kitchen but his relatives couldn't help but be lured towards him because of how different he was from the rest of the clan.

The first to accept him were his female cousins who wasted no time in using him as a dress up doll. That softened their mothers a bit and then the males gradually took him in too. It wasn't until he was a teenager and capable of making sound decisions that some form of favour came from the family. The whole while that the Sawada's had been burning him in their aura, the Cavallone had taken a loving to him directly at birth and that's why he preferred his mother's side any day over his father's.

No matter how dunce his mother appeared to be, or rather made herself to be, he knew there was some form of cunning and false sense of security that the Cavallone's were good at giving. He hadn't just noticed it in his mother, it was there in her sisters too. They were a really peculiar combination of stupidity, craftiness and attraction.

'It's like my life's been a total tragedy.' He wailed miserably to himself at how unlucky and misunderstood he was. He didn't inherit anything from the Cavallone clan except their signature facials a.k.a baby face, and maybe their clumsiness, but he was sure nothing good was passed on to him. And God forbid -rather forgive him!- if he had anything passed onto him from the Sawada side, nothing he had detected so far.

He couldn't understand how his father fell for a whacko like mom. She didn't seem one bit of a rich person. How did the two even meet in the first place? He just knew that his mother grew up in expensive hotels and stuff and read books on commoners and dreamt of common life and now he was suffering whilst she fulfilled her dream. Really now? Lining your dream at this age?

Tsuna groaned and shifted in his bed.

'There can't be anyone more unluckier than me out there.'

Maybe he was right. Maybe wasn't.

The next day he had a bad feeling in his gut all day. Tsuna was rather surprised at that because Hayato was absent so it was supposed to be a good work day. of course, the horror and the seriousness of it didn't dawn on him until the very last minute.

"Tsuna!" He heard a perky voice call from somewhere in the store. The teen had to raise his head once, instantly bowing it down again –pretending not to notice. That just made things worse. "Tsuna! Tsuna, over here!" He cursed silently under his breath and finally looked up again wearing a weary smile.

"Hey." His reply was rather mute but she seemed to hear it rather clearly, and so did the rest of the shoppers who had all decided to see if free entertainment was on.

"I'm shopping. Look!" She pointed, rather pointedly, to the grocery basket she was holding and then to the shelves. "And in your store!" She laughed and waved at him before busying herself. Her head suddenly poked out from behind a shelf and the teen jumped startled in his spot as she suddenly announced, "You look absolutely adorable in that apron!" After a few moments silence, every head turned towards the brunet.

. . .

"Is that your mother?" Takeshi asked as he helped Tsuna bag items on the counter. He didn't have his usual goofy grin on his face.

"I've never seen her before in my life."

x End x