Just watch. All of these will be rendered totally pointless by some upcoming chapter of KHR, I just know it. Maybe even as soon as THIS AFTERNOON.

Meh, oh well. I finished it, didn't I?


Reborn


1.

Just as Xanxus has Squalo, and Tsuna has Gokudera, Reborn once served as Timoteo's right-hand man and Guardian (Sun, in his case).

Timoteo had only to point and Reborn would shoot without hesitation, say jump and he'd ask how high, and when the Ninth asked him to take on the Arcobaleno curse, well, there was really only one answer he could give.

(Reborn's greatest regret about the Arcobaleno curse is the distance it has put between him and his former family members.)

2.

Reborn knew both Lal Mirch and Colonnello long before the Arcobaleno incident—Lal Mirch from their days in the mafia academy and the time they both served with the Vongola family, and Colonnello because the two of them honestly did grow up together.

As a child he was significantly weaker than both of them, and both were the sort to take advantage of such a thing. He considers it an act of revenge when puberty hits and he quickly manages to surpass Lal at their training school. By the time Timoteo recruits both he and Lal for the Vongola family, he has run into Colonnello again and gleefully proven himself superior to his old friend as well.

(His second, but unintentional act of revenge is introducing Lal Mirch and Colonnello to one another.)

3.

The name Reborn is an alias he assumed when he began working as a hitman, and he has made every effort to get rid of as much evidence of his original name as possible from the day he decided on said alias. Lal Mirch and Colonnello aside (as both knew him before he became Reborn), there are only two people in the mafia he has ever revealed his real name to.

One is Luce. The other, naturally, is Timoteo.

4.

Reborn spent the majority of his years as the Vongola Sun Guardian hitting mercilessly on Lal Mirch solely because he knew Colonnello was after her.

(Of his many talents, matchmaking has never been one of them.)

He's still baffled by the fact that Colonnello's painfully obvious jealousy didn't cause one of them to take a goddamn hint already.

5.

While Reborn has little problem with bullying Skull day in and day out (the little brat deserves it for being so damn annoying), the Arcobaleno he is least fond of is Verde, and the feeling is mutual.

This is because they both realize that Reborn is, of all the Trinisette guardians, the only one who is every bit a match for Verde in terms of intelligence, and therefore the hitman can see just how much Verde abuses his skills for his own benefits.

(Interestingly enough, many years later they face death together in an unlikely partnership against Byakuran himself, and it is only then that they finally come close to understanding one another.)

6.

Reborn is not a hat person. When he first became a hitman he bought and wore a number of truly hideous hats that were often conveniently destroyed within minutes of whatever mission he happened go on afterwards.

Lal claimed it was divine intervention. Colonnello just laughed and asked how a guy who prided himself on being a snappy dresser could have such terrible taste.

(Lal would then roll her eyes when Colonnello would show up minutes afterwards sporting, at the very least, a broken nose.)

Timoteo is the one who finally puts an end to the Great Hat Fiasco by ambushing Reborn outside a hat shop not long after a mission, stuffing his signature fedora into his hands, and ordering him to never take the damn thing off on pain of death.

Until the curse, he never does.

7.

Reborn can and will happily list any number of reasons for why he enjoys beating the ever-loving crap out of the likes of Skull and Lambo, but the truth is that they just remind him too damn much of his easily victimized younger self.

On the days he can bring himself to admit this, he comforts himself with the thought that at least he was so frequently picked on for being a nerd. Those two are just obnoxious.

8.

Uni is the spitting image of her grandmother, which relieves Reborn, because if she'd been the spitting image of her grandfather Tsuna probably would have started asking a lot of awkward questions.

9.

Reborn is an avid hater of children, incompetence, and anything less than instant gratification. As such, tutoring is pretty much the last career on Earth he'd ever expected himself to take up, especially after years of watching Lal Mirch and Colonnello's pitiful excuse for a relationship, so when he's roped into teaching a young and extremely clumsy Dino Cavallone he goes into it fully determined to be so horrific at the job that it's never asked of him again.

He's still not sure how Dino emerged from his hellish program alive, let alone as a halfway decent mafia boss, but after that unlikely outcome it's more or less impossible for him to say no when Tsuna's name comes up.

10.

Reborn watches Timoteo lose three heirs to enemy families and one to his own ambitions over a period of less than a decade, and fears for the continued stability of the Vongola family. Absolutely none of these fears are assuaged when Iemitsu turns down the position in favor of his young, inexperienced and utterly ignorant son, particularly when Iemitsu claims that Tsuna's more likely to flourish under Reborn's dubious care than that of his own father.

Training Tsuna promises from the start to be even more difficult than Dino, both due to the boy's lack of experience in the ways of the mafia world and Tsuna's inheritance of the Vongola line's uncanny ability to attract only the most deranged of allies and enemies (most of whom have a tendency to start as one and end up as the other). There is nothing Reborn will admit to liking about Tsuna, save for the endless potential he refuses to use, and had it not been for the ever-calming presence of Sawada Nana Reborn suspects he might have tried killing Tsuna in earnest.

Reborn very bluntly relates all of this to one Vongola Decimo years later, and the fact that Tsuna is able to laugh about any of it says volumes about how much he's grown.

(Reborn is never able to tell how much of the man Tsuna becomes is the result of his teaching and how much is his former student's innate nature, but not once does he look back on their time together with regret.)


…That Brow Nie Jr. guy is totally young enough that this is still plausible, dammit.

In other news, the vote! I-Pin, Lal Mirch, Haru, Bianchi, or Kyoko is up next. Who shall it be?

Until then! (And may it be sooner than this time was. By a lot.)