Reborn knocks.
"Who is it?" Skull sing-songs from inside, skipping up to the door of his apartment.
"Me."
"Me who?"
Reborn kicks the door down and it rips off the hinges, slamming into Skull who's standing behind and knocking him to the ground. Reborn casually steps around the groaning man squished under the broken door and heads further inside the building.
"This is what happens when you fuck around," Reborn berates lightly. "Learn from your mistake."
Skull crawls out from under the door. "Fuck you and the shitty Vespa you rode in on."
"I took a taxi," Reborn corrects, already fiddling with Skull's subpar coffee maker.
Skull slumps against the dining table, elbows braced on the wood and chin in his hands.
"Stop staring," Verde finally snaps, angrily tapping away at a laptop from across the table.
"I'm bored," Skull says.
Verde peers over the edge of the screen, hands still typing away without pause. "There's bleach under the sink."
Skull blinks. "Reborn gets upset when he has to fix me."
Verde just looks away, intent on ignoring the idiot. Skull rises up and starts crawling onto the table.
"What are you-?" Verde's eyes go wide and he rears back, snapping his computer shut and shoving away the chair as he stands.
"Love me!" Skull shrieks as he launches himself over the table at Verde.
Verde is ridiculously tall, but he's also a nerdy shut-in. So Verde dodges the first lunge by way of having such long legs but he doesn't get far.
Skull catches Verde around the waist in a flying tackle and they both go down. The laptop clatters and skids across the floor after being knocked out of Verde's grip but the modified machine could probably withstand a tank running over it so neither of the men are particularly concerned about it.
"Get the fuck off me, Skull!"
"Play with me!" Skull screams back, struggling to keep the much bigger man down as he slowly crawls up the scientist's back.
"I don't regret giving you cancer that one time!"
Skull leans in close and whispers into Verde's ear. "Um, so, Colonnello shot out the tires on that hatchback we made. Just barely got through even with his anti-tank, so real nice job on the wheel body, but I can't find that same model of run-flats any where."
Verde sighs and goes limp on the ground. "I made them custom for you, I can print some more."
"Thank you, senpai!" Skull chirps, plants a wet kiss on Verde's cheek and scampers away.
Verde sits up and brushes himself off irritably. "Worse than Reborn sometimes, I swear," he mutters to himself.
Said devil abruptly drops through the air conditioning duct in the ceiling and lands lightly, perfectly unruffled despite having been slithering through the walls like some particularly large, humanoid termite infestation.
Reborn glances around in confusion. "I heard someone challenge me ... but you're too smart to say such a stupid thing, so I'm not sure who wants to die today."
"Skull went that way," Verde deadpans and points out the backdoor.
"Lackey~!" Reborn sings, sauntering off. "Come here, let me teach you about Mafia things!"
There's the faint sound of a motorbike starting up and Reborn turns into a black blur as he goes into hunting mode.
Skull stops and Luce almost runs into his back. The Cloud laughs and toes a little metal thing on the sidewalk. "It's a nang."
"A what?" Luce asks in confusion.
"Like a..." Skull trails off. "Never mind."
"Is this an Australian thing again?"
"Let's not talk about it."
"It'll be easy," Verde says carelessly.
"Nice," Reborn muses, leaning over to Verde's side of the couch to see the 3D model on the scientist's laptop. "Oh, that is easy, like two minus twelve."
"Ten!" Skull says excitedly, wanting to join in.
Reborn looks over. "Two. Minus twelve."
Colonnello tilts his head. "Yeah, ten?"
Skull shrugs. "Look, I dunno maths."
"Okay," Reborn says slowly. "Okay. Listen. Two minus twelve."
Skull frowns. "Is it...negative?"
"Yes," Reborn says encouragingly. "Now..."
"Negative twelve," Colonnello states confidently.
"Oh my God," Reborn gasps in pain. "Verde, please, I can't." The hitman crawls into Verde's lap, knocking the laptop off.
"It's okay," Verde soothes, petting the distressed hitman. "They're not normal people, they're practically braindead."
Reborn wraps his arms around Verde's neck and tries to breathe through the stupidity suffocating him.
Skull trudges along through the mall, vaguely following Lal's back. Something about finding plaster to wall up all of the holes Reborn keeps making.
Skull slaps Fon's dangling braid. It swings wide and comes back. He slaps it again.
Fon stops walking and turns around. "The hardware store is three floors down on the other end of the shops. Do you want to race?"
"Yes please," Skull says nicely.
Fon vaults over the glass barrier to drop a floor while Skull races around and leaps up onto one of the escalator handrails, sprinting down and occasionally having to jump over people's hands.
Skull stares.
"What? What do you want?" Viper snaps from across the table.
"Did you just." Skull looks from Viper to Reborn's espresso and back again. "Did you just dunk a biscuit in his coffee?"
"Yeah," Viper says smugly. "He'll never know."
"I always know," Reborn hisses, crawling out from under the table.
"Jesus! What the fucking-"
Viper tentacles spasm out, wrapping around their chair, and the house loses gravity for a split second before the Mist reigns everything back in.
Colonnello and Lal rush down the stairs because while it's common to hear Skull screaming, Viper is difficult to startle. Fon ducks his head through the window while Reborn clambers onto a chair and takes his coffee back, rather smug.
"I didn't sign up for this," Viper complains, looking like something out of a horror movie with too many limbs and not quite defined edges.
"No one did," Skull argues. "But you can't choose family, so you're stuck with us."
Colonnello lifts his hand excitedly. "I'll be the dad! Lal, you can be the mum."
Reborn rolls his eyes so hard it's nearly audible. "I'll be the better husband with a yacht that Lal eventually leaves you for."
Colonnello's arm comes down, his hand smacking Reborn on the head. "How about you can be the bad-touch uncle that we only see at funerals."
Fon laughs quietly behind a sleeve.
Reborn scowls. "Don't you start, pet dog."
Fon smiles. "Watch yourself, I bite."
.
A/N: So I'm think about going to a hundred chapters but I need some help. Any ideas? Anything you want to see happen?
