Work Text:
The gunshots echo in an empty Sicilian café, an espresso cup left drained as blood soaks into the tiles, and three miles away delicate red flowers ink themselves in a dire mural that sweeps across the left side of his face, centering his purple tear tattoo.
Sweet Peas. Red Spider Lilies.
They all know the meaning behind those flowers.
Regret. Solitude.
Skull seems to know too-
(Of course he does. Skull had spent hours pouring over thick, dusty volumes of research on soulmates and flowers and hoping- not that one, not like this- will I ever-?)
-he tries to burn them. He blisters his skin with violet, quaking flames and there are tears rolling down his cheeks when he does it. A mockery.
"No." He says, quietly, and nobody else dares speak. He doesn't see anyone for the next twelve days. It's far too painful to look them in the eye. It hurts so much. He is silent, except the for sobs that rack his body at night when he thinks nobody is awake. Flowers appear somewhere on your skin; only when your soulmate dies. Most people are saddened for the loss of what could have been. Might have been. But most people haven't met their soulmate. 3 billion people, and only one that matches? It's such an improbability that nobody bothers to look.
But Skull had.
It was part of what had made him so ridiculous, such a joke to the Mafia. A Cloud so desperate to seek out another was unheard of, but Skull had searched and searched and studied. He'd never given his reasons for doing so, and his fellow Arcobaleno had often teased him for it. The problem was that there were very few ways to tell. Personality tests, astrology and all that nonsense, the flower marks that came in death, and- the first words that appeared at birth, lasted only long enough to be written down, a matter of medical record, and disappeared again without a trace. Skull had never shared them, which was odd for one so devoted to finding his soulmate. Then again, it did happen, sometimes, that they faded too quickly, or that nobody bothered to mark it down, or that the paperwork was lost.
But Skull knows his soulmate.
He has spent hours in his company. He has spent hours with sharp wit and pedanticism and cruel, coy intelligence and utterly ridiculous beauty.
And now he cries, because Reborn is dead, and his small world has torn itself apart.
(There is no longer a Sun for him to search for.)