Skull opens the door to a dark house, shivering in the cold night air and bare foot in stolen hospital scrubs.
Through the darkness is the vague form of Reborn, watching Skull, sitting on the couch with his Guardians laid out - too still on the living room carpet.
Skull hesitates. "What happened to them?"
Reborn says nothing, just keeps watching.
Skull hesitantly moves forward. "I...I'm going to turn the light on."
The ceiling lights flick on.
Reborn has a sluggishly bleeding hole through his chest, orange flames blending to a sickly black that rolls across the floor like a tide to Skull.
Skull takes a step back and the waves surge forward with Reborn's lunge. Skull flinches and the front door slams shut, his back colliding with it a moment later as Reborn presses closer, fingers digging into Skull's shoulders.
"Are you trying to leave me again?" Reborn whispers hoarsely.
Skull looks up at Reborn, sees the paleness and feels the trembling in the man's fingers. "No," Skull swears. "Never." Skull brings Reborn in even closer, hugging the man tightly until it becomes painful. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I thought I could - I'm sorry."
Reborn shakes with his sob, collapsing against the stuntman. "Wh-where did you go?"
"I was doing a show," Skull admits, helping keep Reborn up, grabbing fistfuls of Reborn's rumpled suit jacket. "It was a new stunt, the set up was different, I was being careless, I-I fell. When I woke up in the morgue I couldn't feel you, couldn't feel anyone."
Reborn snarls, slamming Skull up against the door. "Don't lie to me!"
Skull pets him, hushes Reborn gently. "It's okay, baby. It's okay." He pulls at Reborn's hands, guiding them towards Skull's neck. "Kill me, I'll show you. I didn't want to break our bond, I didn't mean to, I would never."
Reborn snaps Skull's neck and they both drop to the floor. Reborn scrambles back, sobbing harder. He lurches forward and tries to fix Skull, repositions him the right way, but Reborn's Sky flames are getting in the way of his Sun and nothing is healing.
Reborn didn't mean to do it! He was – he was just angry. And confused, and he doesn't understand what's happening because the hole in him, this broken bond, should be healing but it isn't - because even now his flames know that Skull is here, and they're trying to reconnect to a dead man.
Reborn moves back again, sits in the middle of the room surrounded by ragdoll Guardians, pulls his knees up and tries to muffle his crying by putting his hands over his mouth.
He doesn't know how he got to Italy from France, doesn't know when he found his Guardians and brought them back to Reborn's safe place, this house where he has weapons and food and he'll keep them here forever where they can be safe and they'll never leave him.
But of course they'll leave. Reborn should know best, he kills people all the time, he knows how fragile life really is.
What if Verde gets in an accident in the man's lab? What if Lal or Colonnello never come back from a COMSUBIN deployment? What if Fon just has a heart attack out of nowhere and he leaves Reborn too?
Best to just get it over with, really.
Make it hurt now, do it quickly so it doesn't drag out the suffering. Surely it can't hurt more than it already does.
Reborn crawls to Colonnello, the nearest one, and straddles the man's chest. Reborn fumbles for his gun, thinks he'll reach right through the gaping hole inside him but his fingers touch cold metal and he pulls it out, presses it to Colonnello's head.
Fon's hand wraps around Reborn's wrist too tight and the shot goes wide, sinking into the floor just in front of the cabinets propping up the TV. The gun falls from Reborn's lax grip, his fingers no longer able to move with Fon's hold.
Fon is wild eyed, looking between Skull's corpse, Reborn, and a still unconscious Colonnello lying next to the other knocked out Guardians. Fon looks dazed, definitely concussed. "What are you…"
"I'm going to die," Reborn explains to him. "You're going to kill me."
Fon shakes his head. "No. No, Reborn. It's going to be fine, I'll make it fine."
"Look at what Skull did," Reborn says bleakly. "Look at what he did to me, Fon. I have fucking hole through my goddamned chest!"
Reborn lashes out and his elbow catches Fon in the face, both of them tumbling off Colonnello and rolling until they hit Skull's corpse.
"I have five more of you!" Reborn screams. "I can't – you'll kill me!"
Fon snarls and they twist until Fon is on top, half crouched and able to pin Reborn down better. "We'll fix it! It won't happen again, just stop! Reborn, stop! You're hurting yourself!"
Skull sits up.
Reborn and Fon go very still and very quiet.
The kill was a clean break, snapped the nerves neatly, very professional. An easy fix, especially when Skull's flames were already bubbling under his skin.
Skull crawls over and Reborn yanks his arms away from Fon's grip to drag the Cloud closer, scratching red welts into the skin of Skull's face.
"You're so strong," Skull soothes. "You'll be okay. Look at you, still fighting even now. Fon's going to have a black eye in the morning."
"It fucking hurts," Reborn snarls, digging his nails into Skull's face harder, making him bleed, hands shaking.
"It'll be better when we bond again," Skull whispers and it finally gets through to Reborn that Skull looks…not okay. "Yeah? So let's bond now."
Reborn shoves Skull away and covers his face with his arms. He breathes shakily, stuttering. "You'll die again."
"Yeah, shit happens," Skull grunts. He shoulders Fon off and climbs on top of Reborn instead, pulling the man's arms down to see his face. "But you'll be there, won't you? Nothing will happen because you'll be there, and you're going to keep us all safe and fix us up with Sun flames, yeah? Yeah, babe? Nod for me. Come on."
Reborn nods along in a daze, going limp.
Skull puts a hand over the hitman's chest, feels the hole there, Sky flames bubbling up and clinging, sticky, to Skull's fingers. "We need to bond again. It'll make the pain go away, so let's bond now, okay?"
Reborn isn't very responsive but his flames still react. Cloud flames pour into the hole to fill it back up, black sludge turning to a beautiful and clear deep honey colour and springing up into proper flames again, flickering weightlessly on Reborn's skin.
Reborn blacks out from exhaustion.
.
A/N: Oh, sure, a broken bond hurts like nothing else and it'll kill a lesser man. But Reborn sure as hell isn't a lesser man.
The problem here is that Skull's flames are like 'we're not dead, and if you run off to another Cloud while we're gone, we are going to be having words. This is ours, we'll leave a part in here to reserve it until the main body comes back to claim it again'.
So Reborn's flames know Skull is out there, and behave like the bond is still breaking because a small part of Skull's flames have a death grip on him, and so Reborn is feeling that initial, tearing pain, constantly.
Reborn has kind of lost his shit, which is understandable. (and very fun to write)
