https://archiveofourown.org/works/87676801?view_full_work=true
Honestly, Colonnello hadn’t originally planned to introduce Grace to any of the other Arcobaleno so soon (Actually, the plan was to keep her away for a few years). But over the last few days, he couldn't help but notice the quiet, anxious way the girl lingered in the doorway whenever he was watching over Skull. She was terrified for him, clutching the sketchbook he had given to her in a attempt to help her deal with her visions as she checked to see if he was alive, to see if she had failed someone else.
Besides, Colonnello knew the younger man all too well and had known that the second Skull laid his eyes on those precise, terrifyingly accurate drawings, he would panic because while the Frenchman constantly claimed to hate the Giglio Nero as much as the rest of them, Colonnello could always see right through his bravado.
What Skull felt for the Giglio Nero was nothing but sheer, paralyzing fear.
After all, unlike the rest of them, the former stuntman hadn't grown up in the Underworld nor had he ever been a battle-hardened soldier. He had been an ordinary man, a performer who was ripped out of his life and forced to carry a Curse and a power he never asked for because of the manipulations of one know-it-all, heartless bitch. It had taken almost three decades for the former stuntman to stop being actively suicidal and finally regain some semblance of sanity after the Arcobaleno Curse took their lives away.
So, while throwing Grace into the picture was a gamble he didn’t want to make, keeping Skull in the dark about how Colonnello had gotten his hands on those drawings was an even bigger risk he wasn’t willing to take.
“She’s too young,” Skull rasped after he finished listening to Colonnello’s explanation on how he found Grace, the quiet statement pulling the blonde out of his thoughts. A short, humorless laugh bubbled out of the Frenchman’s throat, smearing a thin trail of fresh blood down the corner of his dry lips. Between his bloody lips, Colonnello could see the pale, jagged edges of several newly sprouted teeth nestled in his swollen gums.
A lot was being left unsaid there, and Colonnello could only close his eyes and offer a silent nod.
She was too young to be dragged into the grotesque underbelly of their world.
She was too young to bear the crushing weight of a cosmic sentence she couldn't possibly understand.
She was too young to live with the silent, terrifying knowledge that her body was actively decaying from the inside out with every breath she took.
Whenever he looked at Grace, Colonnello tried focus on the many questions he had about her situation while pushing those kinds of thoughts away — locking them in the back of his mind where they couldn't bleed into his daily life — but like a clockwork, reality always clawed its way back and he reminded himself that the Sky Curse was a different monster entirely. That, different to what happened to the rest of them, the Sky didn't lock a body in time or torment its host; it devoured them whole.
Colonnello hadn’t cared to know anything about Luce before or after the Curse, but did make sure to learn as much as he could about the Giglio Nero Famiglia and one thing they couldn't hide was the slow death of their precious bloodline. With every successive generation, the Sky Arcobaleno burned out younger and younger, the lifespan between the bearer of the curse and their inevitable death shrinking like a lit fuse.
Luce’s grandmother was cursed at fourteen and died at sixty-five. Luce’s mother had been cursed at seventeen and managed to hold on until fifty-eight. Luce herself was nineteen when they were cursed in 1960 and died at fifty-three in 1992 when her own daughter was barely twenty-one. And Aria, from what he heard, was already wasting away at forty-one, showing symptoms far worse than her mother's when the woman was her age, being confined to a permanent bed in a private hospital since giving birth to her own daughter five years prior.
So, how long did Grace have? Would she even make it to thirty? Or would the simple fact that she was an outsider, that she didn’t belong to the Giglio Nero bloodline, grant her a few more years?
Colonnello snorted, leaning back against the worn leather of the armchair. Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced down at Grace. The girl was sitting on the floor, her back pressed against the base of the chair, completely tuned out under a pair of oversized headphones as her pencil moved rhythmically across her sketchbook. Her eyes were blank, hollowed out by the weight of whatever vision she was currently pouring onto the paper.
The blonde-haired man’s lips curled down into a bitter line.
“Lose it? Really, Jean-Pierre?” Colonnello drawled, his own tone dripping with sardonic irritation.
The Frenchman glared up at him with his eye, the visible muscles in his jaw twitching before he snapped his gaze away toward the ceiling.
“Fort bien… Allow me to correct myself,” Skull spat, a bloody rasp edging his words. “Why did Aria manipulate things so the kid ended up with the Curse? Aside from the glaringly obvious fact that the woman is trying to outrun her own death, of course…”
“She doesn’t know who ended up with the Pacifier, I checked.” Colonnello said, his steel-blue eyes sharpening into something dangerous. Then, after a moment, he added the information he hadn’t really shared during his retelling, “All I know is that Renato sent me out to track down the Sky Arcobaleno, and I literally stumbled across the kid by accident. I originally assumed I was looking for either Aria or her spawn.”
Skull huffed and spat out, “Reborn is too much of a lapdog when it comes to that pouffiasse’s bloodline. There is no way he would ever send you or anyone else after them when he is right there.”
Colonnello decided to not comment on that; he had already beaten himself over that a few times ever since his call with Reborn. He really couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen the red flags at the time.
“It’s possible Aria just wanted to spare her daughter from the Curse, but I doubt she’s any different from her mother or her grandmother,” Skull continued, and he been able to move his left arm, he would have probably reached out to rub his lips as he always did when he was thinking.
The Underworld treated Skull like the weakest, dumbest piece of the Arcobaleno but while he lacked Verde’s clinical genius and Reborn’s lethal brilliance, he was far from stupid. He simply preferred to hide behind a mask. After all, once a performer, always a performer.
“The Giglio Nero only have children because their lineage demands it,” the younger man added, staring blankly at the ceiling. “If there was a single maternal bone in any of those women, they would have never brought any child into this world. They all knew damn well that any of their children would be doomed to carry the curse after them and…” he paused, pursing his lips as he seemed to think of something.
“What?” Colonnello asked, his eyes narrowing to sharp, dangerous slits.
A heavy, suffocating silence stretched across the room, broken only by the faint, rhythmic scratch of Grace’s pencil against paper.
“I think you’ve been giving the Giglio Nero far too much credit,” Skull said quietly. He shifted his head with agonizing slowness, fixing Colonnello with a single, icy look devoid of his usual theatrical whininess. “You’re ignoring the fact that there is one person who can actually overrule them when it comes to the decision of who will bear the Sky Curse.”
Colonnello felt a cold, familiar dread settle in his chest as the implication hit him.
If all of this mess wasn't one of Aria's schemes and if it wasn’t some kind of attempt from the Giglio Nero to stop their bloodline from dying out, then the true puppet master behind the Curse had simply decided to add a new piece onto his board.
“I have a new question to add to your list,” Skull murmured, his voice barely above a raspy whisper. “What makes the kid so special that that Man picked her to bear the Curse?”
And, Colonnello thought, a sneer twisting his lips as his mind raced down an even darker path, did that bastard have a hand in her mother’s death?