Summary: Shinso Hitoshi's name was either a really weird coincidence or someone was screwing with him. It was either his parents or Byakuran, Skull still hasn't quite decided.

Disclaimer: Neither Boku no Hero Academia nor Katekyoshi Hitman Reborn! belong to me.

Warnings: Language (sometimes?), maybe some dissociation, probably blood and just the general mix of these two worlds

Author's Note: HAHA! I know I shouldn't but I couldn't help myself. Don't know when this or my other stories will be updated. I didn't even read/watch BnHA, I just read a bunch of fanfics and decided that yep, I need to do something. I don't know what I'm doing! Haha! (help)

It really was quite bizarre, Skull thought, watching from his room as the children played in the backyard of the latest orphanage he was staying at. He leaned his chin on his fist, his eyes dully following the latest game of tag or as the children here called it, Onigokko.

He glanced at his door, knowing it was futile to try the doorknob, there were three locks on his door. From the outside, of course.

He returned his gaze to the window, eyes unfocusing and staring into his reflection. The window was coated in a layer of dirt but he knew very well that the circles under his purple eyes were very much real. His hair was as wild as ever, flyaway strands tickling his nose and sticking up like he just woke up. His lips were chapped and there was a cut on the left side of his mouth, angry red but not bleeding anymore. His tooth, he looked down for a moment to the little white thing on his windowsill and probed his gums with his tongue, was out. He bared his teeth at his reflection seeing the gap where his upper left canine used to sit firmly this morning.

He supposed that he should feel lucky it was still a milk tooth but the only thing he could feel at the moment was a simmering resentment and bitterness. Even this soon faded into an alltoo familiar blankness.

The slap to the face he received this morning courtesy of the matron had quite the power behind it. He really shouldn't have opened his mouth to ask for that fork. The caretakers in this home wouldn't give him any cutlery, only a plastic bowl with rice, fish and vegetables and a pair of chopsticks. His fingers were pudgy though, uncoordinated and too short to operate the chopsticks. He wasn't a native Japanese kid, he was an European through and through.

(Even after a lifetime of traveling as an Arcobaleno and his veritable love of Japanese sweets and treats, he simply never learned how to use chopsticks.)

At least he still had his flames, was the thought that kept pushing him forward. He snapped his fingers to see the purple fire flare up for a moment but quickly extinguished it, paranoid. It gave him power. Because even alone, hated and feared in equal measure, the knowledge that if push came to shove and he truly needed to get out, he could. He just didn't feel the need to quite yet. This second (or was it even third, did being an Arcobaleno count?) go at childhood was very similar to his first. Being ostracized, without family and without friends, for something he couldn't control. It all checked out even if it was a little earlier than in his life of before. At least he still had his father then. He didn't really know what (and if) to do something about it.

And now, as an about three year-old kid, in an alien world, without support of anything familiar, he drifted. There was no Arcobaleno, as much as he could depend on them on the best of days, or even Vongola or the Shimon Families, whose bosses actually liked him for a change. He certainly could see a deeper working relationship with Enma at least, maybe not on the level of Reborn and the Vongola but something.

He had nothing. Not even history. He didn't check every source yet but he was quite sure that Flames were an alien concept in this world. Oh, there were flame powers, he has seen them, but there were no Actives. No users of the Dying Will Flames (aside from him), every person he encountered had their flame so deeply buried inside, so smothered that he couldn't even tell what they were.

And he knew that Flames were mostly Mafia stuff, yeah, top secret and all, but once you knew what to look for, you knew how to find the users and how to distinguish with the non-Actives and guess their dormant Soul Fire. And Skull, despite being an oblivious (partly by choice, partly because he didn't bother guy, and trying to pretend the Mafia was all one big joke (to somehow preserve his sanity, and optimism because it was pretty hard being positive when your whole life has been ripped away from you by a curse of all things, but apparently flames were real and so was all this magic mafia bullshit), was still a mafioso. Even more importantly, he was still an Arcobaleno.

He was thrown into the Mafia a civilian with no idea of the world but he learned. And Reborn may have been an asshole but nobody can say he was a bad teacher (an insane, trigger happy abuser, God yes, but he took teaching seriously and even got a goddamned degree in it), he was also downright decent near the end. Also, Viper, but that took some money, the greedy bastard refused to even contemplate wasting time on explaining the Flames to a civilian without a hefty sum paid forward. With time, his relationship with the other members of the Cursed Seven (plus Lal Mirch, plus Aria and Yuni later on) has deepened and so did their desire to see him make something out of himself in this shitty situation.

So he learned, from the glimpses and from the real lessons provided by his friends (?). And after spending so long amongst Mafia people, he could recognize an Active, someone on the brink of becoming one or even when a situation involving them and the Mafia (or Yakuza or even the Triads) happened.

But there was none of these here. Even during the calmest of times among the Mafia, there were still incidents, a burst of power here, an Active on rampage there, weirdly masked happenings covered by the power of money and just sheer disregard of logic (as was the Vongola way) or, just, something. It was easy for him to know when some incidents were hidden with the intention of attending to the civilians and those not under the Omerta. Because it was always obvious once you knew what to look for and it wasn't here, damn it, not in this world. Not one incident of mysterious fires or a whisper of weirdness in Italy or anything.

He wasn't home, not anymore. Was it the future? Or an alternate universe? A different world altogether? He didn't rightly know.

He didn't remember anything past getting shot in the head by the Vindice, not really. When he woke up, he was smaller than his normal toddler form. And more restricted. He couldn't talk, could hardly move and when he did, it was uncoordinated and flailing (which, fair, he did flail a lot even back then, but it was more dramatic and controlled than this) and he could not control his bowel. Basically, he was a real flesh and blood child.

He didn't remember much of his early life or when exactly he recovered his memories of a past life.

He was in enough of a shock that he didn't even notice that his caretakers changed very often, too often to be a coincidence. When he finally did notice, he could tell there were two options, either he was still himself, only shrunk, without the access to his adult strength as his cursed form allowed, or he was born as something entirely new, with a new set of parents. If it was this second option, he could see that there were no parents, which meant if he was born anew, he was an orphan already.

He knew he wasn't thrown back in time, he was born in Czechoslovakia, for God's sake, in 1963. He had a strict father who died when he was 14 and no known mother. This clearly wasn't a country in Eastern Europe, during the 60s no less. There were flat TVs, telephones, computers, the cars were all modern. And it was freaking Japan.

So no. It was either the future or an alternate universe. He still had to decide which (but he was really banking on the parallel world theory).

He jerked back into present when a blink of light caught his eye. He squinted, looked out the window and frowned. A boy, about 5 years old was showing the other kids his arm, which looked like it was made out of some reflexive surface, maybe a mirror or just really polished metal. The sun beating down on the small yard, the light bouncing off the arm every which way.

This was another thing. Quirks.

He looked away and scowled down at his tooth, picking it up between small, childish fingers, examining it glumly. The whole reason he got knocked in the mouth with a backhand and his door had three locks, all currently engaged in the middle of the day. The reason why he was ordered by his caretakers to just be quiet and to not even look at the others and just get back into the room and eat your food and stay there in such desperate voices.

They feared him. They were afraid of what he could do even though he's been in this orphanage for a total of about two weeks. He didn't even do anything, to anyone, since he learned what his quirk was capable of doing to others. That was about three orphanages ago.

He didn't really care about playing with other children, he was a grown man, but he was craving human interaction like crazy. No one ever talked to him and he couldn't talk if he wanted to keep his teeth intact.

Mind Control wasn't a generally accepted quirk, it seemed like.

Skull continued his idle observation of the yard until the sun set and the children returned to the building for supper. He waited patiently for half an hour, and when a stampede of feet and a cacophony of voices could be heard below his room, he carefully jumped down from the windowsill, mindful of his toddler-soft body.

He hesitated and, after a moment, placed his tooth under his flimsy pillow, knowing that it was stupid but somehow feeling that the tradition needed to be upheld. His father, even if a real hard-ass, always traded a small piece of candy or some flimsy plastic bauble under his pillow at night, in exchange for nearly every tooth that fell out during his childhood.

He wasn't really hoping for anything, it was just a stupid little thing, he didn't know what to do with it, that's why he put it there, but somehow, remembering his childhood almost succeeded in putting smile on his face.

There was a perfunctory knock on his door and soon enough series of clicks, letting him know of the locks being opened. He stood in front of his small bed, his arms loose at his sides, eyes looking forward so that he would be looking at a normal adult's knee (he was that short, when oh when and will he ever regain his height?). Keeping his expression blank and his mouth in a tight line, he waited.

The woman that opened the door was old, about 60 years old, with wrinkles and stress lines but she looked like she smiled a lot, there were deep groves near her mouth and crows feet near her eyes. She looked like a typical grandmother, nice and plying her grandkids with money and hard candy.

She never smiled around him.

She waved her hand at him, a stilted, jerky motion, and turned around sharply, walking off down the corridor with him following a few steps behind. She walked slowly enough that he didn't feel like he was running to catch up but were he to speed up and try to walk with her, he's sure she would notice.

He didn't try moving faster.

As they descended the stairs, he could feel yelling and laughing from the floor below his but didn't try to stop and peek at the children no doubt playing in their shared rooms. They reached the ground floor and came to the kitchen where a single bowl of rice, fish vegetables and a plastic sippy cup full of water were laid out on the counter for him.

There was no one else in the kitchen.

The old matron stepped to the side and he walked in fully, moving sedately to take a seat at the tall counter. He didn't need to look at her to know that she was watching him like a hawk. He slowly pulled himself up and wiggled a little on the tall chair to settle, clapped his hands in a prayer, not muttering the customary 'Itadakimasu' and began eating.

The meal was a little bland but filling. No one could tell that his needs weren't met. He couldn't really complain, they were feeding him, clothing him and housing him. The matron watching him eat was silent but he knew that even though she was uncomfortable with his very existence, she wouldn't poison him or watch him choke on his food.

The backhand from this morning was really a rarity in this case. Maybe she was startled or was just in a bad mood. No one beat him, the matron sometimes stared at him coldly when it looked like he was about to open his mouth but the smack she delivered that day was probably the only time he was touched since he came here. The other caretakers didn't interact with him at all and he was forbidden from approaching other kids (not that he could, being locked up in his room all day, let out for the meals and then constantly under the matron's eye, there and back into his room).

He hoped they moved him to another orphanage soon, then at least he could go out for a moment, if only for the duration of the travel.

The point was, he understood, he really did. Brainwashing was a really frightening concept and the fact that it was wielded by a child instead of an adult made people more unsure about whether to be grateful or even more afraid.

He ate quickly, chopsticks clumsy, lip stinging, resigned to helping himself with the fingers of his other hand.

"Hitoshi," he turned at the call, his new name unable to ignored, he got used to it rather quickly. Whoever named him had to have known about his quirk though, there was no way that his name was some random coincidence, Person and Use? Along with his surname, he didn't really need to announce his quirk, it would suffice if he just introduced himself.

The matron was standing by the door, waiting.

"You're done. Come," and she started walking off. He grabbed the sippy cup with him, slid off his seat and trotted after her, holding onto his drink with both hands. His purple hair bounced with every step he took, big violet eyes following the knees of the elderly matron.