"I am a lion and I want to be free

Do you see a lion when you look inside of me?

Outside the window just to watch you as you sleep

Cause I am a lion born from things you cannot be

How can I sleep at night, there's a war inside my head?

I found a lion hidden right beneath my bed

I will not hide myself from the tears that you have shed

Cause I am a lion and you are dead

Here's a story of everything we'll ever be" -Lion by Hollywood Undead

There was complete silence as six pairs of eyes moved from Reborn's gun to the empty chair to Skull doing a fucking one-handed hand stand on the back of the chair. Skull who was currently holding his body in a perfectly straight line without swaying or shaking. Skull who had dodged one of Reborn's bullets at close range. Skull who was supposedly a civilian. Skull who was grinning the biggest shit-eating grin.

"How rude. And you hail from the beautiful Italia, home of the smooth, the suave, the debonair."

They all watched as he launched himself up into the air - still one-handed - and land feet first on the chair back as light as you please.

"If you're always so trigger happy, it's quite the mystery as to how you've had as many lovers as the rumors claim."

Luce may have been surprised but her eyes burned with determined relief. She'd seen visions of other worlds where Skull was bullied and treated like shit and was so done with the others that he just let them die in the end. But she'd also seen worlds like hers, where Skull broke any and all expectations placed on him, where he bent reality to his will because he was never told that he couldn't. This Luce refused to be like so many of her alternate selves that didn't fight, that laid down and took it all, that were so defeated and passive that she renounced them as being versions of herself. She wanted to live, to end this curse, to end this farce of 'balance'. Looking at Skull, she mentally grinned. Checkerface didn't know what he was getting into and it was going to be glorious.

Beneath their hood, Viper's eye twitched. They had received the invitation not out of curiosity but out of vanity, to be able to state who they were and laugh at the peons who'd doubted them thus far. And then curiosity got the better of them and they researched who the previous title holders and found barely any information outside of the Giglio Nero famiglia. The same famiglia that contacted them with a list of names from the Donna of who would be invited. The mist used the information and assembled dossiers on everyone. Except the Cloud's -Skull's - seemed incomplete. Viper didn't know what specifically was missing but they knew what was generally missing. He wasn't a civilian. They needed to know more, and who it was that hid the information that well.

Fon was a martial artist, one of the best, if not the best. And he knew the man with purple hair was not normal in much the same way that he himself was not normal. They had trained and condition themselves to move in specific ways and react in others. Fon saw it in the way that Skull walked into the room, lithe and relaxed in a way that screamed predator to those who knew how to read such an athletic body. The Storm wasn't surprised by the sudden acrobatics but rather the reaction time to the bullet with barely any flame usage. Most had to use their flames to move at such speeds and he hadn't. He grinned behind his tea.

For all that Lal was a military woman, she had no problems with the Cosa Nostra that most in her profession had. Then again, it helped that she was born into that world in a minor fringe family that straddled the shades of grey. She knew how to read situations, read rooms, but this one was odd in the fact that the civilian clearly wasn't civilian, the Donna was pleased as punch about that fact, and this looked like a set of guardians meeting with a sky.

Verde knee something wasn't right, even though he accepted the invitation to the Greatest Seven. The scientists of the neutral and darker famiglias didn't like to deal with him and yet he had received an invitation to this. Wheels turned as observation were made and hypotheses were extrapolated from the data acquired. He didn't have all the pieces, but he noted the Donna knew something and that she appeared to want them. It was possible that they were connected, or perhaps they weren't. More data was needed.

Reborn stared at Skull, the man that wasn't what he seemed and had driven his instincts batty while his eyes were telling him otherwise. He trusted his instincts and wanted to know for himself why they were haywire around a civilian except he wasn't a civilian with a reaction like that. Amusingly, his instincts calmed as the Cloud and Sun t stared each other down, Flames teasing and testing on another plane before approving of each other. The Sun wasn't stupid and knew they were called here for something other than the "Greatest Seven" bullshit that was spouted to him. Now that he knew the one unknown would be able to handle himself, he gave a languid smirk at the Cloud.

"Perhaps not all my lovers share my Italian roots and prefer a different approach."

If Reborn thought of riotous red curls with wild eyes and manic laughter on a train car roof, well that was no one's business but his own.

(In another world, Luce was resigned and pregnant and just ready for everything to be over with. In another world, the Seven were younger and prideful. Too bad for this world's Checkerface that he got the Luce with a greater Will than he could ever have and Seven who were more skeptical than he wanted. In this world, the curse was on borrowed time.)