Alsoo, Uhm, sorry, gore warning. You're warned.
72. Name
"Geez, the both of you were acting like best buddies yesterday. What happened?" Giannini whined, worriedly looking over me.
I was curled up in a ball, hiding under his work desk, hiding my face and not giving a single nudge of response to him. I wasn't even thinking about anything-- I was just there, staring at my knees, enjoying solidarity.
"What's going on here?" Reborn's voice chimed in from the top of the desk.
"Well, uh, Reborn-san..." Giannini spoke up hesitantly, "Rei-san has been down there for nearly three hours now..."
"What, he's still down there?" Russo interrupted, making his presence known in the room. He stepped closer to the desk, and crouched down before me. A towel hanging around his neck, and water sliding down his chin from his soaked hair--
"What's wrong, little one?" Russo spoke in a soothing tone this time.
I jumped. Something about that tone hit me inside. It was a soft, sweet tone-- and to me, it sounded painfully familiar. It was a gentle, older sibling tone I often used with my sisters, but hearing it used for me was... unprecedented.
Then to destroy the mood, he chuckled. "Was all the zombie nonsense creeping you out?"
"Shut up, zombie." I grumbled, "Go decompose."
"Did your personality change?" Russo laughed out loud. "Don't worry, I'm already rotten to the core!" he assured, "C'mon, Giannini-san has to do his work, y'know?"
"Only if you be like the corpse you are and cease function immediately." I responded promptly.
Russo snapped back in a stern, angered tone: "Shut it, you're just lucky you got the restart button instead of a shitty revival potion."
"You got no drawbacks!"
"I'm a frucken zombie, you call that not a drawback??"
"You don't feel pain!"
"My wounds don't heal!"
Unable to comprehend our utter nonsense, Reborn sighed, dismissing it as some weird thing he really has no time to be worrying about now. Regardless, we were noisy so Reborn gave us each a smack and sent us back to our room.
"Don't come out until Choice begins!" was his order.
-
After drying his hair, Russo tossed the towel aside and pulled the desk drawer open.
"Alright, alright, I'm sorry." He sounded only slightly apologetic, digging around the drawer for something. Picking up a roll of bandages, he grinned at me, "wanna see something gory?"
"If you don't stop existing, I will turn you into something gory." was my response.
"Better not look over here, then." another string of dry chuckles came from his throat.
From my angle, I could see him take off his shirt-- and I realized the entirety of his upper body was a cocoon of bandages-- every inch tightly bound b white strips of cloth, with not an inch of skin exposed.
"Is it really that bad?" I asked before I could think why.
"I thought you weren't looking?" Russo teased. He didn't look over-- it was as if he knew I was going to take a peek.
I pouted, but gave no real response.
"I don't usually take baths," I'm not very sure why he told me that, "because when I do, I have to rebind all these, y'know?" followed by a chuckle.
He began to take them down string by string-- there was so much unfurled, I briefly wondered if a whole roll of bandages was used to secure it all.
I let out a hiss as I saw the state of his body.
Open gashes and wounds littered the entirety of his body. Little slices, cuts or stabs; large tears from swords and the claws of beasts. Rounder holes that seemed to reach deeper than the others-- gunshots, I had to realize. It was as if some madman had taken the time to carve an intricate, abstract work of art on his back.
Above all, his left arm-- shoulder-- it had always seemed a little drooped or out of place in usual times-- but now I realized why. A mess of stitches-- steel wires, I cringed-- weaved itself in and out of the shoulder section, a makeshift reparation to what must've been a severed limb.
His skin was a sickly-- deadly shade, almost a light green-- dark blue and white and black and the maroon red of rust-- But not a single drop of blood was to be seen.
Russo was like a doll made of patchwork cloth. Pieced together barely-- but the smile on his face was perfect, flawless, strong, fake.
I felt sick to my stomach-- and something seemed to build up at my throat. Covering my mouth-- I swallowed the feeling and averted my eyes.
"I told you not to look."
When I lifted my eyes, Russo had on a pained look on his face. His smile didn't reach his eyes, because my little reaction had hurt him.
Casually, he threw his jacket over his shoulders, and turned around to face away from me. He then began rolling the bandages around his arms.
Of course he's affected by it, I realized. Why would anyone be alright with a body like that?
Climbing out from under the desk, I picked up the can of juice I brought into the room, and popped open my bottle of pills. Promptly downing my pills at the strike of three in the afternoon, I put the pill bottle on the desk and sighed.
Placing a soft peck on the birthmark on my left wrist-- I did not say anything.
Turning my attention back to Russo, who was struggling to wrap the thing with one arm--
"Geez, you're never going to finish wrapping those." I complained, making my way to the front of him. "Give me that. I'll help."
-
"Hey, what was your previous name?" I asked, a nonchalant question that held no real meaning except for casual chit-chat.
Tying the end knot after finally finishing one arm, I proceeded to the next.
"My previous name?" Russo repeated curiously, "Hmm," he took a moment, thinking slowly--"Rot. My name was Rot."
"And my name was Normal." I responded on instinct, "Nice try."
"Haha," he laughed. "To tell the truth, my previous name was Rouge."
"Rouge?" now I was genuinely curious. "That sounds like the guy from Fairy-"
"Yeah, I was joking. That's not my real name." he quickly continued.
"I will smack you."
Russo laughed, like he always does. He never stops laughing. He never stopped laughing. He was like a jester, whose job was only to smile for the crowd.
"I spent a majority of my life in China," he told me next, "My name was Hong."
"Russo," I started in a sterner voice this time, "I may not be the best at this, but I'm a pretty decent lie detector. And when you tell an impulsive lie, your smile twitches for half a moment."
"Nice catch." Russo mused, "You have sharp eyes."
"You have the same tells as my past older brother, that's why." I sighed.
"My name was Rojo." he said next.
"I've already told you I can recognize your obvious lies, right?" I groaned.
"Rosso?"
"Are you ever going to-" I was ready to snap-- but a sudden realization dawned on me. "Wait a minute, you've been giving me varying translations of the colour red!"
Russo laughed harder than before, "Took you long enough!"
"I'm gonna draw hearts and flowers on these bandages." I threatened, reached for a marker on the desk. "And unicorns."
"Wait, I'm sorry, don't!" Russo freaked out.
Turning my attention back to the bandages, Russo sighed in relief.
"I'm not exactly lying either." he told me. "Red is almost my entire identity. Almost as if it's the only thing I can identify myself with. Names, appearances, personalities-- I've changed all of that very often-- but my signature red is the one thing in me that I won't change."
Interesting, I mused. To base your identity not upon a trademark, not a name, not an appearance nor a name-- but simply on a colour.
That was strangely intriguing.
Starting the next string from his abdomen, I continued speaking. "So, did you have a birth name?" I decided to ask, wondering if Russo actually had a complicated story to his identity.
Russo nodded. "I had one," he told me, "but I never used it."
Having a name, but never using it. That sounded familiar.
"I always referred to myself as the colour Red," he told me, "Red. Acca." he pronounced the Japanese translation a little differently, "but most commonly-- I was known as Merah."
My hands stopped. My movements froze--
...Merah?
"I used that name for more of my life than my real one," he told me. "Mera. Merah. I don't think many people actually knew the meaning of the word."
...But-
...Doesn't that mean--
"My real name is a lot different." he chortled a little bashfully, "My younger sister changed it up, so I don't think I've been called it for ages. I forget about it from time to time."
I barely registered anything else.
Merah.
My younger sister changed my name.
"Hm?" Russo looked down and noticed the cease in my movements. "What's wrong, Rei?"
"Our names don't suit us at all, don't you think so?" she once joked, "Hey, wanna switch our names up? Kinda like code names!"
"Not-" I choked out, "Nothing."
Nothing, I repeated just to myself. Nothing, I tried to convince myself.
It can't possibly be.
It's just a freak coincidence, that's all.