Title: Gaslighting the Necronomicon

Summary: Reborn 'finds' a book that summons creatures from beyond the dimensional fold. The Arcobaleno show up. Reborn doesn't put the pieces together.

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The client is half an hour late and so Reborn sits in the private booth at the back of the third storey restaurant, a beautiful blue sky seen through the glass ceiling as afternoon sunlight streaks through hanging vines and baskets of flowers as he sips espresso.

The thing is, Reborn isn't new to this game, and he knows people will try to cut and run. That's why he asks -like this time- for half the payment in advance. It's just a little bit strange that he would be hired to not only kill someone but also bring the client a book, and then the client flakes out.

Maybe the client is dead, as in the person Reborn just killed also ordered a hit on them, so they both got taken out. It's happened, and sometimes Reborn will track down the other hitman just to have a laugh about it, so it wouldn't be strange to just leave at this point.

But Reborn really wants to know what this book is.

Mist made, clearly, considering its dripping blood onto the nice raw wood table, and as Reborn flicks through it the pages will fold themselves or the pictures will move. Half a chapter back it started screaming at him and he had to threaten it with his gun to shut up.

If this was a normal restaurant, that would have earned him weird or frightened looks, but it's a mafia restaurant so no one gave it a second thought why a grown man was threatening a screaming book. Because, quite frankly, they've all seen weirder shit than that.

Reborn was getting bored waiting for the client, anyway, so going through the book while enjoying his nth cup of his lifeblood (espresso) was a legitimate way to waste time instead of repainting the restaurant's creamy walls red with unorthodox 'paint'.

It's never good when Reborn is bored. Reading a book, even one as suspicious as this one, was the less chaotic route and the one less likely to end up with him being chased down by Vindice.

Considering he's Reborn, he should have known better.

All it took for the whole place to go up in flames is for the nervous waitress coming with his new cup of coffee to trip and spill the hot drink all over Reborn and his table - and the book on it.

Reborn jolts at the burn he can feel through his pants though his stomach is at least safe with the waistcoat layer stopping most of it. He flares Sun flames down his thighs as stands with a scrape of his chair, pulling at the material of his pants to get it off his skin even as he flicks a glance around, expecting that to be the distraction to kill him.

"I'm so sorry!" the waitress cries, panicking hard as she scrambles off the ground where she landed, grabbing the mug and lifting it off the table like that's going to help anything. "I-I, the bathroom! Over there, I'm so sorry."

That's a very genuine response and Reborn wonders if he's feeling nice enough to not kill her anyway, but the most pressing issue is that his suit is ruined - coffee is harder to get out than blood. He just rolls his eyes and walks past her, leaving the mess for her to clean up, and there better be a new espresso by the time he's done.

Reborn ends up blotting at the coffee on his suit with paper towels and water and it does absolutely nothing. He braces himself against the edge of the sink how his hands and sighs heavily.

It's not that the day has been the worst, but he had to wade through a ridiculous amount of Mist flames getting the book from what seemed like an entirely different dimension with too many eyes in the ceiling and human-faced dogs, and then he got stood up, and now his clothes are ruined.

Reborn is getting to the point where he just wants to sit somewhere nice and – he doesn't know, pet a cute lizard while he sips coffee.

Whatever, he was going to buy himself a new wardrobe soon anyway. Reborn pushes off the sink and swipes a hand down his suit jacket and pants. Still wet but unnoticeable with the black colour and material. Doable.

He pushes open the bathroom door and pauses.

Everyone is dead, sprawled in seats or halfway across the room trying to get to the door. Blood drips off the hanging plants, splashed over the windows, pooling on the ground.

Weapons don't do this – don't twist people's torsos around, don't unravel arms like fraying yarn. There's a woman hanging from a ceiling beam, like she'd been thrown there, like the entire store has been jerked to the side.

No warping from Cloud flames, no signs of Storm disintegration or Lightning burns either. Reborn didn't hear anything through the door of the bathroom, and that should have been his first clue, the noise of chatter and steaming of the coffee machines cutting out.

Reborn rolls his eyes and steps around bodies, avoiding blood so his shoes don't get dirty even if that means walking on people like playing the floor is lava.

Whoever the mist was didn't come after Reborn in the bathroom (too scared?) and his fancy book is still on the table (which has skidded a couple meters away). Not Reborn's problem, especially when everyone here was mafia and drive-bys are a common thing.

Reborn snatches up his perfectly dry book, plus the new espresso sitting beside it and heads out. He'll have to change clothes and hunt down his client.

Something touches Reborn's hand and he pauses, looks down. A tiny neon green…chameleon? It's staring up at Reborn with wide, bulbous yellow eyes, clinging desperately to the bottom of Reborn's stolen mug, pawing cutely at Reborn's pinkie finger to try and get a better grip.

Reborn holds the book flat and hovers the mug over it so the little lizard can slowly make its way off. It stands on the book and they have a brief staring competition. Are chameleon's even legal to have in Italy? Why would someone bring their pet to a café?

Fuck, but it's so cute.

"Well," Reborn says. "Mine now."


After way too much time visiting bespoke boutiques and world-renown architecture firms to demand they make lizard-sized ball gowns and mansions, Reborn finally calms down.

He's the World's Greatest Hitman and his prices are three mil a head, money definitely isn't the issue and moderation doesn't factor into any of his decisions because he has bad impulse control. The only thing that stops him is the thought that if he buys everything good now, he can't buy anything interesting later.

Now, submerged in a clawfoot bathtub, Reborn puts his lizard -now officially named Leon- into a tiny tugboat sitting on the water, Leon already wearing a tiny sailor scarf and hat. Reborn gives a little push and the boat takes off. Leon slowly waves around a front foot until he can grab the tiny wheel, then lifts his other foot until he's steering.

Reborn wheezes and sinks down deeper into the water, having a fucking mental breakdown about how cute this is.

He runs a hand through his wet hair to slick it back and settles into the fluffy towel draped over the edge of the bath as a headrest. Okay, work, actual work. Reborn knows how to control himself.

He grabs the book and a pen from the nearby counter and opens it back up. He's going slowly with his translations - some of his contacts were able to pass on other translated texts that Reborn is using to help decode it but he's working off half torn pages or the marks people have carved into their own flesh.

He's still halfway through because he's managed to convert it into mathematical formula and now it's going by like a breeze.

Reborn opens the book and it starts chanting at him. He dunks it under the lavender scented water, slaps it against the edge of the bathtub and waits. It behaves. Reborn uncaps the permanent marker (because when he used normal pen it started bleeding all over his stuff or would vanish it) and gets stuck into it.

He's not very cautious with the book because it's always dripping blood or whatever anyway. If it's lavender essential oil that does it in, Reborn is just going to laugh.

The only reason he hasn't tossed the book at the highest bidder (because anonymous people have somehow called him to offer millions for it) is because it's been so fun.

Finding his client was a dead end, literally. The entire famiglia was wiped out, apparently they'd all simultaneously started having hallucinations and ended up clawing and biting each other to death – never mind the dental records look more like a dog than a human, never mind the ones travelling and alone also have the same cause of death.

He carries the book around with him now after the one time he left it in a safehouse and came back to someone trying to steal it. Reborn keeps getting ambushed by people in hooded cloaks who are just really intense evangelists with their 'have you heard about our lord and saviour [insert garbled language here]'.

Thankfully, Reborn has discovered Leon can eat people (as soon as Reborn blinks the bodies disappear) so he doesn't need to stop and call the mafia cleaners every time there's a dead body but Reborn can't do anything without being interrupted.

Like right now, as Reborn hears people ransacking his apartment – this is like the third safehouse in as many days, he has no idea how these people are finding him.

"You'd think at least one neighbour would call the police so I wouldn't have to get out and deal with it," Reborn complains, propping the book on the bathtub ledge and grabbing his gun off the counter. He just got into the bath, he's not leaving until he's done.

Leon peers up at him.

"I should call, shouldn't I?" Reborn jokes, grabbing Leon and putting the lizard on his head where the little guy is safe. "We'd need special ops though, what's the number for COMSUBIN?"

The bathroom door slams open and Reborn plunges under the water, the book toppling in with him, to avoid the giant claws sticking out of a woman's side that elongate to swipe across the room.

Reborn sits up with a gasp, headshots the woman, fires two bullets through the wall to take down the heavy-footed man lingering in the bedroom, and then needs to double tap the woman's third arm because it's still twitching.

There are others still in the apartment, but they seem to have found either Reborn's traps or they're fighting amongst themselves.

Reborn slicks back his hair, gives Leon a pet and lounges back into the bath with his arms up on the sides. The book has sunken to the bottom so Reborn plants a foot on it and wiggles his toes into the cover.

There's a gunshot, which is interesting because Reborn has yet to see a cultist with any kind of weapon. Did Reborn's hitman business just pick the wrong timing?

Footsteps comes closer and Reborn tips his head back, black eyes watching the shadows in the hallway, grip lax on his gun as water droplets roll down his skin.

The footsteps stop. "Are you going to shoot me?" the man asks.

"That depends," Reborn offers. "Is there a good reason I shouldn't?"

"I'm incredibly handsome," the man tries.

"Not better than me," Reborn scoffs.

A blond man pokes his head around the doorway, not even glancing to the dead woman's third arm (still twitching and sort of trying to drag the attached corpse away). The COMSUBIN uniform is a surprise but he's taller than Reborn with nice broad shoulders and a cute boy-next-door kind of grin.

"Alright fine," Reborn allows because it'd be a waste to kill handsome people when normal people are already so ugly. "What's COMSUBIN doing here anyway? This is France, you don't have jurisdiction."

"You summoned us," drawls a woman's voice and another soldier peeks around from the other side of the doorway, dark blue hair and fiery red eyes. She looks Reborn up and down, the water clear enough to show off godly perfection. "You must be – what are you doing to the Necronomicon?!"

The woman storms up and rips the book out from the water where Reborn had it pinned with a foot.

Reborn, stunned by outrage in the woman's voice, splutters a little bit. "I – it liked it! I mean, it just fell like that!"

The blond cracks up laughing, clinging to the side of the doorway. "Shit, I love normies."

"Have you been doing this the whole time?!" the woman snarls, shaking the book at Reborn.

"It's fine! It's not ripped or whatever!"


Colonnello, the man, says they're both here to deal with Reborn. Lal, the woman, says Reborn needs to stop abusing the book.

"It's consensual abuse," Reborn argues, all of them sitting around at a restaurant for dinner because those two are here on a mission or something and Reborn wants a threesome.

The book makes a sad noise where Reborn has put a hot plate on top of it.

"Why are you translating it?" Lal complains.

"I didn't know COMSUBIN dabbled in cults," Reborn retorts. He finishes cutting up the steak then passes it back to Colonnello - because the man had tried to grab the steak with his hands to eat like a five year old.

"Oh, we're not COMSUBIN," Colonnello offers as he digs into his food.

"But this is a hit – sorry, a job," Reborn points out. "And you were picked because you're both the 'most powerful' in your special ops group. And you're Italian. But not mafia."

"You wouldn't understand, you haven't translated that part yet," Lal says dismissively. "So the live fish over there, can I eat one of those?"

Reborn looks at the large aquarium and then down at Lal's steamed fish. "They took your fish from that aquarium. It's the same."

"But this one is…soggy."

Reborn sighs and waves over a waitress. Admittedly, it is interesting to watch Lal unhinge her jaw and swallow down a live fish bigger than her head.

On the other hand, Reborn would no longer like to have a threesome.