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SKULL
It’s a difficult thing to determine when precisely one is marked by Death.
Skull knew, obviously, that he had indeed been marked, but at what point did he become aware of it? When did it occur, and when did it become irrevocable?
Could it have been that earthquake when he was sixteen?
The elevator accident when he was fourteen?
The tuberculosis when he was ten?
There are far too many possibilities. Perhaps it always was inevitable, but he certainly couldn’t know. Not with any degree of certainty, at the very least.
(he has a suspicion, but it will never be more than that. He has come to accept the inevitability of that point. But there’s something in his very soul that shrinks when he thinks back to being twelve years old and curled up in the cupboard under the counter in his parents’ camper, listening as his uncle bellowed obscenities and his mother finally stopped screaming. There’s something chilling about recalling the bruising grip that yanked him out from his hiding place, the sharp sting of air on places that air isn’t supposed to touch, the warmth spilling rapidly down his front and nothing he could do about it, not even scream. The eruption of purple that consumed his whole being without warning before his vision was eaten by the blackness.)
(There’s something horrifying about remembering looking at his mother’s still form and thinking only not me, not me, not me. )
Regardless of the specifics, he finds ways to work his immortality to his advantage.
Turns out it’s pretty easy to get cash when he can make bets with squishy mortals and get his winnings whatever the personal cost. Perhaps he should feel bad about the deaths that follow him like footprints in the Appalachian snow, but he can’t really bring himself to care. It’s their loss, after all. Hardly his fault when they’re dumb enough to play russian roulette with five bullets in the barrel. Especially when they know about it. Then comes the question though, how can he make cash without leaving a trail of suspicion behind? Because bodies he may be indifferent to, but they are awfully inconvenient.
The answer strikes him out of the blue— rather literally. He’s wandering a circus ground as they’re setting up and is landed on quite suddenly by their motorcycle stuntman as he falls at speed from where he’s launched himself up a ramp into the air. The bike is heavy and massive compared to his slim and starving youth and he expires rapidly under its weight. Which is to say, of course, that the motorcycle driver lands incorrectly and breaks his neck, dying quickly but still slowly enough to recognize that it happened after the bike had stopped rather than on impact, and the spotters haul the scrawny drifter out from under the machine and tell him it’s a miracle he survived.
After that, they need a new motorcycle jumper of course, and Skull has never ridden a motorcycle but damn him if he’s going to let that stop him. They sign him on and tell him he can wait to start rehearsals until after they’ve buried his predecessor.
He takes the bike out, far enough away that they can’t hear him revving it beyond all reason, and practices until the day after the funeral. He’s careful to hit as many roadside creatures as possible as he learns to ride; another death would certainly delay rehearsals further, obviously.
(the man who crushed him with his bike named the machine Baby , like some kind of misplaced sense of loyalty and tenderness led him to care for it and keep it running like a dream fresh from the manufacturer. Skull wasted no time in rechristening it Kraken , less after the sea creature and more after the sound his predecessor’s bones made in his last moments on earth following that silly, fatal mistake. No one ever asks, and Skull’s rapidly developing sense of showmanship is terribly disappointed by this fact, but acknowledges that it’s probably for the best. People so rarely take jokes about their friends’ and coworkers’ demise in good taste, after all.)
By the time he’s allowed to try to ride in front of the others, he’s got a good handle on how to handle the glorious beast, and he shows off with only slightly restrained abandon with shining results. As it turns out, having no need for nor ability to sleep and many hours of practice unrestrained by silly concepts like fuel makes for rapid progress in the skills department, and it would hardly do to have another funeral so soon, after all.
He’s officially hired on and added to the show on the spot.
If there tends to be a higher number of deaths among audience members during his performances, well, it can hardly be that surprising. After all, wouldn’t most people be alarmed to see a man crushed by his own bike, bones snapping and flesh tearing, only to stand and walk casually away? A heart attack or two, an apoplexy or unfortunate stroke here or there are really to be be expected.
It’s the first of many circuses, and leads to his first movie deal as well, and he spends many late nights looking back fondly at that stupid, stupid man and his lovely bike, glad that he took the time to die on the circus grounds that day.
(There’s another story to be told about one of those circuses, one about trading his services both as a performer and with the odd purple billows that follow him wherever he goes for a great number of lovely deaths, and developing a keen distaste for pain, especially where skin is involved, but it does not belong here. It is a statement that has already been made, sitting in a box in a faraway Archive, waiting for a new Eye to Behold it. Perhaps, if it is very lucky, it will someday be read.)
To be entirely honest, Skull de Mort is a flash-bang. His introduction to show biz occurs in his fifteenth year, and he rises rapidly to behind-the-scenes stardom in film and live performance infamy under as many pseudonyms as his brain can produce to keep up with gigs. In barely two years his life devolves into a writhing mess of crash after crash, alcohol blurred afternoons, drug-hazed debauchery, and general riotous living.
He’ll never be quite sure when or where he was born, perhaps, but he calls himself seventeen in his head and twenty-three to anyone who asks when the knock comes at his trailer door.
It’s a job offer, but not of the usual kind. Not an invitation to perform for a new company, not a request for a hit film in the works, but an offer he truly can’t refuse:
An invite to witness some of the sweetest deaths he ever will see, with the Arcobaleno.
To be entirely honest, Skull has never really questioned the billowing purple flames that tend to erupt from his being every now and again. They started about the same time as his immortality— which is to say, he’s really not sure when— and he’s just kind of assumed that they were in some way or other related and left it at that. But now he’s being told that there are others like that— others like him, with vibrantly colored flames that erupt at convenient times to consume or increase or unite or soothe or harden or deceive or fill with life, and he’s always been far too curious for his own good, really.
He accepts, and just like that, Skull de Mort vanishes from the Show Biz just as quickly and quietly as he arrived. Classic film buffs and the occasional circus junkie or media studies student will latch on to his name and wonder whatever happened to that Hollywood stunt man with the bike, the Immortal Something-or-other, but instead of increasing fame and fortune, he will instead settle into urban legend in the filmmaking community. As public death goes, it’s not a bad one— his name will stay as quietly immortal as he himself does.
(as far as the mafia community is concerned, it’s probably near-impossible for any arcobaleno to die; a particular irony, given the true nature of their curse and the fate of every arcobaleno who has gone before.)
As is only typical of the Immortal Skull, it can hardly be called a death at all.
(as far as Skull himself is concerned, the mafiosi aren’t exactly wrong. The other arcobaleno take this knowledge from circumstance and do with it as they feel they must. If any non-arcobaleno mafioso has ever had such a suspicion confirmed, it was only a certainty in the bare moments preceding their inexplicable and untimely death in near proximity to a Cloud of unreasonable durability.)
(as is only typical of the Immortal Skull, there isn’t really any death that will take him at face value for a long, long time. not until everything else has died first, at the very least.)