Somewhere Over the Rainbow (Part III)
~Deep Purple~
It's 1 in the morning here and I might be seeing double and half crazed from caffeine and bout of inspiration so I'm sorry in advance for my shit grammar or wrong spelling, English is not my first language so please bear with it.
Small gloved fingers traced the smile from purple painted lips on the framed photo of a happy Skull wearing a ridiculously frilly apron. The teen in the picture has his eyes solely focused on the small heavily bandaged figure sitting across him, all giddy and expectant as he holds a perfectly made mochi between his fingers as he attempts to feed the other.
Skull was the only color in the otherwise monochrome picture, against the gray walls of the communal kitchen with its black and white tiles and grayscaled furnitures and appliances. He stands out more than just his bright colors and through the photo alone his vivacious personality can be felt in an otherwise cold lifeless picture.
Bermuda can still imagine the very scene in his head, how it all played out and how the picture was even taken.
(He misses him already. Through their soul link Bermuda checks on the other tentatively and was greeted with gentle carding Flames that his own can't help but purr into.)
It was taken during Skull's last visit two weeks ago, when Jack had visited the man to whine about missing his cooking and baking, and because Skull is a soft-hearted fool, he had let himself be taken from his motorcycle tinkering to just bake and cook for them.
Which was a fool's errand when all of Vindice are partly undead and mayhap almost tasteless taste buds and have no real need to eat for sustenance.
(Being nearly not able to taste food of choice for their lifetime is just one of the reasons for their ever long list of grievances towards The Man with the Iron Hat. One of the side effects of becoming a walking corpse is to be stripped of the simple pleasure of eating and tasting.
They're already stripped of their humanity, eternally mangled, forever to be one with the night and its darkness. But even simple pleasures that they once had in life were taken from them. How cruel and maddening, they can't even use the lack of sleep as an excuse for their insanity and short fuse for the ability to rest is lost to them. They were simply cruel and mad as it keeps them alive and hounding for revenge.
Vindice stands for vengeance, and they will not stop until their own personal justice is served, until all of their combined bitterness and despair was felt by that elusive vermin.)
But Skull's food, for no reason at all, is different.
They can actually taste it for one. So Jack, whining about Skull's cooking is not entirely for baseless reasons. The simple pleasure of being able to eat and actually taste something had been one of the many driving forces as to why they kept contact with the otherwise civilian stuntman.
Skull's Flames lingered in his food and it's entirely accidental on the man's part.
The sweet intent of wanting someone to enjoy his cooking always clung to their tongues and the ever mysterious Flames have done its owner's pure wishes and the result was fantastical.
Bermuda thinks that even if Skull's food was not as palatable, all of Vindice would still love it and come to miss it just for the sake of tasting it and not being another bland paltry mush, it's just an added bonus that the stuntman happens to be a phenomenal chef.
Even in his faded memories, Bermuda had never tasted a better stew than the one Skull makes, and it's saying something as a once noble who indulged in the finest things from a very distant past.
Skull is a man of impossibilities and mysteries and Bermuda, no, Vindice as a whole delights in his presence.
Their first meeting itself is the height of impossibility.
Bermuda knows a thing or two about coming back from the dead and that's exactly how they met.
Skull died.
(He was a child, a small thing and not that much taller in Bermuda's cursed form. He was nothing more but a burnt corpse of what remained of a child with a staggering amount of bullet holes. Seeing him then, and remembering it now made the cold dark Flames under his skin burn with anger and to clutch at warmhomefamily Flames tightly.)
It was supposed to be another insignificant death, death by murder is not that extraordinary but a common place, but the circumstance before the child's death happened to be one of the heinous crimes in Vindice Law.
Skull had his Flames broken before he died.
Not to mention that it was Sky Flames and he was a child. And according to Skull's checkup after he miraculously came back from the ashes like a phoenix, it is one that pushed his small body into shock and had caused him to die before he was fully engulfed in fire.
It was truly a tragic painful death.
There are three ways for a Flame user that can get their Flames broken. One, is when their bonds were forcefully or abruptly shattered. It leaves wounds on the soul having what was essentially a part of them torn, this could happen if a Sky snaps the bond themselves or when a Sky or their guardian dies abruptly that leaves the user floundering and tattered. This first case mostly happens towards non-Sky Flame users, because as much as Skies are lauded for creating harmony, they can also be quite cruel.
Second way is when another Flame forces another to submit to them and bond with them. And in this case, it can be a foolish arrogant Sky who wants someone underneath them or it can be a forceful stronger Flame user towards an unwilling Sky. One would be surprised that most that turn out broken in this case were the Skies. As they are so rare and so few in between, Flame users scramble to become guardians and find a home for themselves, disregarding the Sky's choice.
And for the third and most painful way a Flame could break is total rejection towards their own Flames, towards their being, towards their very own soul. To reject what made you you is existentially, psychologically and spiritually damaging. It shatters the soul and healing it is a nigh impossible feat. The first and second type can be managed, can be healed although scarred, but those that came out broken the third way are better off dead because they essentially already are. The third one is the rarest case and most of them die over a few weeks or even days, whether it was self-inflicted or other means.
And poor young Skull had been the third. A little girl who rejected and despised herself so wholly that she broke.
His breaking point was not self inflicted but by the hands of another that pushed his very young mind to do so. It was beyond cruel. Bermuda would only wish that kind of death to Checker Face alone and that's saying something when Bermuda is a cruel vengeful spiteful man.
(Because he knows how it feels to break. To reject everything, to reject reality, to reject his circumstance. Bermuda is a fucking Cloud goddamnit, he refused to be left for dead after serving as a battery for the world. He rejected his faith so thoroughly that he came crawling back from the dead to take vengeance on that man. He refuses to die as long as the one who had taken away his freedom continues to live. He rejected his own self and so he broke and was reborn anew, with black flames instead of bright purple, but it will do. Who cares if he's broken, he only lives to exact his own personal justice.)
That's where Bermuda comes in in that story, he was supposed to enforce justice to the perpetrator, but alas, he was too late for the party and a young mad, raging powerful Mist had taken the prerogative to kill the worm. And out of pity and respect to the grieving Mist guardian, Bermuda didn't interrupt his act of vengeance. And for one so young, the little Mist was quite creative.
But then Skull rose from the dead and in the surprise abruptness to what just occurred, Bermuda could only think of taking the alive sleeping child from there in case she would turn out like them.
But she wasn't, she remained human despite the unthinkable, broken, but essentially still human, still whole with no rotting flesh or cold skin. It's a miracle.
(It was so long ago, Skull had still been a little girl and referred to her as such, that is until another scum came along and turned her off at the thought of being female because another – dead very dead – child predator had thought to prey on her. So the girl became a boy and now a young man, how time passes by.)
The girl reminded Bermuda of himself, the flickers of black in the rainbow of flames a thorough testament of that observation.
(Her flames separated, undecided on what it should be, flickering and sputtering in different colors so quickly that it was dizzying and that is not mentioning the sheer output coming from her small beaten body.)
But despite it all, the girl continues to defy his expectations. Even while fractured and shattered, she oh so demonstrated why she was a Sky.
Instead of screaming in fear when she had first laid eyes on him, the first thing that came out of her mouth was concern.
("Are you hurt? Is that why you have so many bandages?")
And one day when she accidentally saw what lay underneath the covers, tears only filled her eyes. Not out of fear and horror. But out of sadness for him. For all of them.
("No wonder you all sound so sad, so hurt and very angry. Is there any way I could help all of you?")
How can one be so good? She's so inherently good it is unreal and Jack is half the mind to say that she might be some sort of Angel, undying and pure and all.
Her wispy broken Flames reached out for him in a bid for stability and Bermuda is not the type of monster to push against it when the owner, a goddamn child, just recently had her soul broken.
So Bermuda lets it happen, he lets himself be the anchor that tetters her soul together.
Of course it's not a full bond, he wouldn't want this child to be so intimately connected to a creature like him.
(Now he could care less about such notions, he is – and by extension the whole of Vindice – Skull's enchained personal eldritch pets.)
In the child's stay with them, they taught her what to fundamentally know about Flames. What they are and what just happened to her. Days pass and her Flames surprisingly settles down to a bright brilliant purple. But thinking about it again, it wasn't so surprising when the girl vowed to herself to not be chained down again, to be free, or die trying.
When asked if she wished to go back to her life, she spoke of her fears of being pulled under once again. Her wish was to live her life as a civilian and not be involved with the Mafia anytime soon.
(A difficult and impossible wish, but given how the child entered it, it's not that surprising.)
Despite the unlikelihood of remaining as a civilian when she is Flame Active, for her fragile state of being, the Vindice taught her how to wield her Flames and how to hide it.
And somehow along the way, Bermuda was roped to teach her about Cloud Flames as a former Cloud Arcobaleno and the only one to truly have flames amongst the Vindice.
In hindsight, it was foolish of him to supervise an unstable, powerful fractured Sky turned Cloud into manipulating her turbulent Flames. But they don't have a choice on that matter when there's a huge probability for her to go into Discord or even straight into Flame Destruction.
It's inevitable really, because of proximity and time spent together, that thin string of a connection they shared turned into a rope until it evolved into chains of attachment.
Before he knew it, he was explicitly entangled with her, a fragile full bond, one that he can't just sever at the risk of her broken Flames undergoing Discord then Flame Destruction.
(Flame Destruction is the severe disastrous consequence when a survivor of Flame Breakage self-destructs when their fragile souls get triggered and pulled to the edge once again.)
(Flame Destruction rarely happens, if not ever, it's a matter of a broken Flame self detonating when the strain on the soul has become too much, and it's not a matter of the Flame user wanting to self destruct, no, it's more of an external force that pushed them to the brink after they had suppressed themselves for so long that they just burst at the seams in an explosion of Flames. It's a sad fate, and one of the most heinous crimes listed in the laws of the underground. Storms, Lightnings and Rains tend to be the subject for Flame Destruction as they are the most volatile, self-destructive and moody.
The respective detonation depends on the nature of Flames; if they were a Storm, they would disintegrate everything in their vicinity. If they were a Rain, there wouldn't be any visible explosion, but anyone caught in it would either become brain dead, have a cardiac arrest or fall into a coma. Lightnings would cause massive death through electrocution. Suns would cause an explosion of fire. If they were a Mist, there would be hysteria and people going crazy from unending nightmare illusions. Clouds literally become nuclear bombs in the manner that their Flames' propagation nature causes everyone in the area to have rapid phase cancer or tumor, the explosions they cause are also very loud and very wide no matter the Flame quality of the user.
Lastly, the most devastating of them all are Skies. They attract everyone in their vicinity to stay near them or come closer to them even with the most obvious of signs of explosions, and no matter their Flame quality or even if they were weak, one Sky is enough to take out half of the entire Vatican City.
Of course the area of destruction and the resulting effect always depend on the users' Flame quality. The larger the Flame Output, the wider the area of explosion. The purer the Flame equals to the intensity of the destruction's effect.
The last record of the last and only Sky Flame Destruction that they have in the history of Cosa Nostra had eradicated the whole of the first Mafia Land and killed hundreds of Mafioso and ended generations of Famiglia. This is why the new one has very clear cut rules of no Violence inside the man-made island. But still, the Vindice is very thankful that the phenomenon only happened in Underground infested waters, otherwise it would be a huge pain to clean up that could greatly cause another World War because of having to do a massive memory rewrite on the civilian's brains.)
The girl was basically a ticking time bomb, and one wrong move from Bermuda, an explosion of Flames would come down in Vendicare. He can't imagine the complete annihilation a Sky-Cloud user with such pure and massive output could bring. Bermuda thinks that Vendicare as a whole and the entire mountain range it is in would be nothing but a scorched mark on the ground.
Thankfully, Bermuda doesn't manage to fuck it all up and he has Jaeger to thank mostly for his knowledge for child rearing however outdated it is.
(Jaeger used to be a normal military man turned Mafioso because of his Flame Activation. He used to be just a family man, a father of six children and a devoted husband to his wife. Now, he is just a hollowed out man only living for revenge and unsurprisingly, Skull had brought out the parts of who he used to be.)
The little girl they knew has now grown into a young man, and Bermuda was there to watch it all happen through the years. From his heights to his lows, Bermuda was now irrevocably became a part of Skull and Skull a part of him.
(At some point in time, Bermuda has given up the thought of breaking free.
As a once Cloud, and the strongest Arcobaleno of his time, he never once found his Sky nor did he wished to be chained down to one. The Giglio Nero Sky Arcobaleno of his time was a selfish woman so full of herself at assurance of her ability to see the future but never did she or her daughter foresaw what type of monster he would turn out to be. What bond that could have been formed between them died a painful death when he was cursed, humiliated and diminished from who he used to be.
And now, he couldn't think of being anywhere else but in Skull's Sky.
He never knew what true warmth and acceptance was until he met Skull. He never even knew that he was missing something, and now he never felt more whole when basking under Skull's All-Accepting, All-Encompassing Sky.)
Their thin fragile bond has now become a mess of diamond chains, incredibly precious and impossibly strong and extremely hard to detangle.
The guardian bond between them is a quiet kept secret, so that the underbelly of scums screeching for a piece of them cannot target his Sky. For what greater leverage and deterrent could there be for their boogymen other than the Sky they are guarding?
It's all for Skull's own safety, and so they made it known to the man that he shan't tell it to anyone, even to the little Mist Guardian that he reunited with. You can never be too careful or paranoid, any mafioso worth their salt would do anything to have something over the monsters that rule over them with an iron fist.
Even if his Sky finds the little Mist trustworthy, to Bermuda, Skull's safety is their top most priority and so it's best to keep it a secret. And from that little Mist's occupation as an information broker, it's not too far-fetched for them to sell the information to the highest bidder.
Speaking of Skull's safety, Bermuda cannot stop the neverending rage he felt when he learned that his Sky was slated to be the next Arcobaleno set.
Oh how they thirst for Checkerface's blood, to condemn their Sky to such a cursed fate he can't refuse.
(The last one who tried to outrun Checkerface was Lillia, the only female of their group, and no matter how elusive she tried to be to escape her fate, the fucker that is Checkerface still captured her and dumped her in the middle of the Arcobaleno Ceremony.)
So they instructed Skull to play it safe, to not immediately reveal he knows how to use his Flames or that he is a Sky.
(But he knows that it's a futile attempt to hide Skull's Flames and the allure it brings, so Bermuda readies himself to the inevitability of the stuntman attracting his future fellow-Arcobaleno into his Sky. Bermuda never doubted this outcome, because he has seen the current Donna of the Giglio Nero family and Skull outsrips her in terms of purity and sheer Flame output.)
From Skull's last visit and from what he felt in their bond, Bermuda knows that the slots for Flame Guardianship in the Vindice's Sky's Flame is now occupied with tentative links and it's helping the shattered mess of Skull's soul. Because it was such a tattered and still healing, Bermuda doubts that Skull even knows that he had ensnared those fools but instinctively knows that they are his and would subconsciously supplement them with his Flames.
(Alejandro had even theorized that Skull could even house more than one Guardian, and that's eventually proven true when Bermuda felt two equally powerful complementary Rains in their bond. It shouldn't really surprise him anymore because Skull is the epitome of miracles and impossibility, but it still did. The fact he that he could cover two Flames that are chosen as the World's current Strongest – they had investigated both soldier Rains before like all the other tentative Guardians, and the two are equally strong, the woman is purer but the man has more output, truly complementary Flames – Rains and make it seem like nothing. Skull himself doesn't even know they were all even bonded and the fact that his Flames even allotted a space for Bermuda's void-like Night Flames is baffling enough. It all speaks volumes to the power Skull would have if the Flame Breakage didn't happen.
He could have had the world in his fingertips but Bermuda knows that his Sky would rather not, he's too kind for that.
The world frankly doesn't deserve him.)
Bermuda would be the last one to point out the Guardianship, because he might tolerate them for their collective use as a way to heal his Sky, but he would never tolerate the thought of Skull consciously twining, dancing and wrapping his Flames on others the way he does to Bermuda.
He is a Cloud after all, possessive, territorial and selfish. He can't tolerate the thought of another subverting the privilege of basking under Skull's Flames, the other members of Vindice are excluded in the junction they were Bermuda's and he is willing to share anything of his to his Sky if it makes him happy.
The only thorn to this juncture is the arrival and the reunion of Skull's Mist, his very first Guardian – who had failed Skull – and Bermuda can't really do anything about it but tolerate, and rejoice at the fact that his bond with Skull has been longer, stronger than the little Mist.
It's the only good outcome that came from Skull being chosen Bermuda supposes, if it helps his Sky to heal, he could tolerate the now called Il Prescelti Sette. But he still needs to think fast to stop the looming despair of Skull's future fate. He needs to find that dratted, wretched vermin that is Checkerface.
Bermuda would rather suffer a million deaths again and again than to see his Sky cursed and dying, for what is a Cloud who can't drift under his Sky and for the Night to come out and join the Sky.
Bermuda had already many in his long life and he won't let his Sky be one of them.
I enjoyed and despised writing this chapter because I can only half remember Bermuda and the Vindice because it was so long ago since I've read KHR so the wikipage and some stray manga panels were my only friend in crafting this and I hope it turned out alright for your taste.
Now all your speculations on who could be Skull's Cloud Guardian can be put to rest. Did any of you guessed it right?