Chapter Text
He hadn’t thrown a fit, in the end. Just watched as their boat drove off in Venetian sunset-dappled waters, purples and oranges and the barest hints of blue, small details disappearing until a kaleidoscope of salty water filled his vision. Brackish water hit Fugo’s cheeks when Narancia jumped in, the former too dazed to grab at the latter or follow into the simulacrum of color.
Instead of letting the gravity of the situation hit him, Fugo chose to perseverate over the technicalities of whether he’d be a betrayer slash deserter slash target or not. Sure, he didn’t actively declare he was working against the boss, but he didn’t try to stop Buccellati and the others either. Didn’t report to—well, who would he report to? Polpo, Pericolo, Buccellati, all the levels of hierarchy Fugo was aware of toppled overnight, he had no one to answer to anymore. He sat in that paradoxical state for six months, the days flying by and yet seemingly endless in the moment. His brain was filled with the same images over and over again, pianos, dirty carpets, newspapers, reflections. Like a child with a cheap, plastic Viewmaster, flipping through the images over and over again. Sitting there, waiting for something to change without the will to enact it himself.
He had a lot of reservations about going inside. On his commute from the forgotten, empty apartment that Buccellati had in his back pocket to one of the bars Fugo played at, he’d pass by a homeless shelter. And sure, it’s not like he turned up his nose at the people filing in and out as he passed by, and he isn’t even really homeless, or poverty-stricken, for that matter. He doesn’t need to go in there, take a bed from someone with no connections and no skills and no legs to stand on. No, there’s no reason when Fugo already has a perfectly good living situation, taping up the windows and killing the cockroaches and staring at crumbling wallpaper.
Fugo didn’t get a lot of sleep.
Maybe it was the fear of them coming for him. Of the boss, of Buccellati, of Giorno. He’d mourned Giorno, out of everyone. He thought the boy green, an idiot with aspirations far beyond the little event horizon of dirty Naples streets. He didn’t think about how it must’ve felt, for Narancia, to dive into a freezing canal for a girl he just met.
So he didn’t get a lot—actually, any sleep for six months. Nightmares are bad, sure; they color your waking moments, make you tired and paranoid and distrustful of abstract concepts far beyond the grasp of your everyday reality. But not getting sleep at all is a different kind of torture, wearing the beds of your nails down to flesh and blood, waiting for the hammer to connect as you get stuck in an ennui that is as comforting and all-consuming as a grave.
He stole newspapers right off of stands, looking for any noise of gang wars or casualties or bodies surfaced in Venetian canals, bloated and small and dead before their time. He listened to the radio, news stories interspersed with songs he barely heard by girls he barely understood. He watched the news on televisions in store windows, standing for hours, hoping for even the confirmation of grief. Like he could will the television to make a decision for him, open the box and kill the cat. He was sick of the in-between, of ambiguity and exclusionary states of matter. When the lamplights would buzz to life and the storefronts closed, Fugo would be left staring at his reflection in the glass and unable to recognize the person on the other side, feeling that reflected world to be something unknowable.
(Maybe I wouldn’t pass the mirror test. Maybe I’m no better or worse than an animal looking for it’s mother, wandering the streets until something like a virus finally kills me.)
(In perpetuity, stuck in between choices. Maybe the pain isn’t from getting killed but from waiting for the bullet to hit. Maybe a gunshot is kinder than a cancer, because you’re spared the dread. Maybe you love the dread, because it reminds you that you’re wretched and alive—maybe you hate the dread because it reminds you that you’re wretched and alive.)
“You’re not Giorno.”
The thing next to him smiles, or maybe that’s only Fugo’s mind attributing human characteristics to something distinctly not. The face, mimicking Giorno’s baby-fat cheeks and round eyes, is thrown in dramatic lighting. Like a Caravaggio, he wants to say, but this isn’t Giorno, who would’ve appreciated the art history anecdote, who would actually be listening to what Fugo’s saying—what he isn’t saying.
Purple Haze Distortion is gone, nestled in the cartilage between Fugo’s fingers. No reason to stick around without any perceived threat. And it’s true, he doesn’t feel like he’s in any danger.
“Maybe.”
“Okay.” Fugo doesn’t ask if Giorno sent it here. That would be like asking if the monkey controls the cloth mother. Fugo looks, really looks into it’s eyes, gleaming with purple stardust and the kind of infinity you only feel when stuck in between decisions, pulled underwater. Like the glass eyes of a taxidermy creature, shiny and innocent and not really dead, but definitely not alive. Imbued with life, a will of it’s own in the static of unbirth.
He’s mostly in the dark about how Gold Experience Requiem handles.
“Are you afraid? Your heartbeat, it’s…” It trails off, not for any gap in thought, but because the intent is clear enough, and, yeah, Fugo’s heart is beating pretty loud, blood in his ears and in his throat. He figures the question is more to assuage Fugo, than to imply any doubt in it’s mind. The gun in Murolo’s face is nothing compared to what he’s faced with now, though Fugo can’t place exactly why that is. Maybe he’s still angry that Giorno didn’t come. Maybe he’s angry that stupid Giorno dropped a stupid doorknob confession on him in stupid Campobasso and hasn’t mentioned it since. Maybe the anger that’s lived in his sternum since around the age of seven is completely unrelated, but Giorno is an easy enough outlet—no, target for the emotions stuck in Fugo’s trachea. His love, his hate, his respect, his admiration, his baggage, his loyalty, his anima, his pinned butterfly.
“Are you alive?” He barely gets the words out, whispered in the stale, ozone air between him and the precipice.
The precipice answers, after a minute. This time it’s pause is contemplative, genuine consideration into a response.
“That depends on your definition. Maybe, if you believe living is predicated on bodily function. Or maybe you mean complex thought. I could be whichever is more comfortable for you to believe.” Dead or alive. Constant states. When Fugo doesn’t answer, it continues, “Are you ?” That snaps him awake.
“Of course I am. Even philosophically. I think, therefore-”
(Rene Descartes was a man who said a lot of things. Sure, you can have the rest of my cake, I don’t care.)
“You are?”
“Yes…”
“If you say so.” How pompous, for this otherworldly creation to parrot Giorno’s mask of indifference, with the knowledge that whatever’s underneath is too deep to see the bottom of. Too grand, too, to harbor any real resentment or fleeting anger. Too cosmically important to want to punch Fugo for being an asshole.
“Fuck you.”
It doesn’t respond, looking out at nothing, maybe the far wall of the building across the street, maybe at whatever lies beyond in the anima of the universe. Maybe at a not-dead father, paying for his sins. Fugo feels the reply anyways, can hear Giorno’s not-voice tell him he’s using anger to mask something much more vulnerable. No shit, that’s how anger works for everyone; Fugo isn’t some uniquely sad person, he’s not that self-centered. But, he is drunk and on the precipice of eighteen and alone, right now.
“... And… and fuck Buccellati… fuck him and Aristotle and Descartes and fuck my parents and most of all, fuck. You.” He points a finger at the space in not-Giorno’s heart-shaped hole in it’s chest, punctuating meaningless words with meaningless action. And sure, Fugo could blame Giorno for carbombing his life or Buccellati for dragging him into the filth of Passione instead of letting Fugo become a street kid selling stolen food or something else shaped like he doesn’t know what love feels like for chump change or blame his professor for being a pedophile or hell, why not blame his parents for entering a loveless marriage and kickstarting this miserable life? Fuck it, why not blame God or the universe for dumping misfortune on him? Most tempting, Fugo could blame himself for everything, he could chalk it all up to being a uniquely guilty person, one that attracts tragedy, that it’s encoded in his DNA or fate or whatever else that Gold Experience Requiem denies the existence of and that’s that.
Fugo feels pent up energy in his sternum, steam stuck in a closed pot. The thing that is not Giorno says nothing of his outburst and yet Fugo feels like he has to make this encounter mean something, impart some message onto it, and by extension, onto Giorno himself.
“Maybe Giorno should go on another trip to find himself, maybe to Greece or Egypt or something, and leave me out of it, this time. Go tell him that.”
“Why? He thought you’d like to be included, for once.”
(During the Peloponnesian war, the Plague of Athens devastated it’s residents. While the Spartans invaded, Athenians suffered from lesions and fevers, an assault on two fronts. The combined might of the Spartan siege and what was suspected to be Typhoid killed off two thirds of the population. Imagine that, two thirds of everyone you know, dead. That’s a ratio of 2:3, in a group of six people, that’s four gone. That the remaining two are expected to pick up the pieces and move on. To rebuild in the ashes.
…
Yeah, I didn’t think you’d answer. It’s alright.)
“Of course, you have the version of Narancia who will never leave you. You’ll be fine.”
There’s nothing in the ozone between buildings, no air or nitrogen to fill the space. Just purple eyes, front facing predator gaze staring in between the wrinkles of Fugo’s brain hard enough to burn, and it does burn, hard and fast and blood and adrenaline filling his dead, ozone veins and fuck it , Fugo’s already mad, mad like a bull getting flanked, mad like Jake LaMotta getting his shit kicked in on the big screen in black and white, mad like he was born that way. Mad like someone who never took a step forward, of his own volition, in any of the seventeen and a half years he’s been alive. Mad like someone in love and in grief, with wires getting crossed so badly he starts to sob thinking about Giorno and starts to laugh thinking of Buccellati. Mad like someone who couldn’t take the plunge.
Pannacotta Fugo lunges at ozone.
Pannacotta Fugo passes a sandwich onto the tray. The man across drops the tray immediately afterwards, head hitting the ground as he seizes up in uncontrollable shakes. It takes a few seconds and a few volunteers surrounding the man with a first aid kit for Fugo to realize the purple smoke isn’t actually there, just a superimposed memory over a deconstructed panini strewn across the linoleum floor.
He goes on break after that. The kitchen coordinator rubbed Fugo’s back while talking in her soft voice, asking if he’d need the rest of the day off after that man collapsed in front of him. Like she’s his mom or something. Fugo picks at a scab on his knuckle, staring at the clock until his allotted fifteen is up and he can go back to help in the kitchen with meal prep. A radio plays music softly, another volunteer idly shifting between channels of old Italian romance songs and modern pop. Ciao Bella and something stinging and raw in between the gaps of audio, old and new. The crackly audio that sounds like the wing beats of a moth trapped in the device and it makes Fugo want to take it apart, if not to free the moth then to make the sound just a little clearer. Blood starts pooling in the divot between his first and second knuckle when the door opens, shelter manager walking in with a gaggle of people. She’s speaking loudly and though Fugo hasn’t been here long he can see the guided tour happening right in front of him, like an animal staring through the glass at tourists. Which is funny because he really has no credence to feel this way—Fugo isn’t one of the regulars coming in here for a bed and a meal, lost on the streets with no home, no family. He got lucky. He isn’t being gawked at by new volunteers and… and a boy a little shorter than the rest.
This shelter sees upwards of four hundred volunteers a day, to mann areas in the kitchen, the shelter, and the outreach center. Fugo’s too new for the center, though that’s where he’d prefer to be, helping people get diplomas or jobs or both. But he isn’t above making sandwiches and stirring huge pots of rice until his arms ache either. Hard labour makes a man, or so he’s heard. He isn’t sure if that’s true, if this counts as hard labour, if he’s even a man, edging the border between child and adult like an animal watching the movement of a barrel staring it down.
Buccellati never really made any of them do hard work, unless you count carrying bags of money or unzipped body parts once in a blue moon. Fugo’s never even officially had a job before. It probably builds character, and maybe if he was someone in a different life and a closer tax bracket to people who eat the end pieces of cheap American loaves of bread this would be his community service, his university application supplement. Instead he has this.
Fugo doesn’t bother avoiding the eyes of the group, staring unabashedly at the varied cluster of newbies. His eyes land on a particular head of blonde hair and the head catches him and stares back in incredulity. Fugo’s eyes snap down to the sticker name tag.
He looks back up. And down.
“Fabio, is your break almost over? Why don’t you show some of these volunteers how the sandwich station works?” His sweet kitchen coordinator is asking in a voice that isn’t really asking, and Fugo understands how the line between motherhood and authority can blur.
“... Sure.”
He shows the group the assembly line of sandwich makers and packers until there’s one volunteer left. A blonde boy with ringlets on his head, with a name tag reading Gianni, and isn’t that a funny joke.
“What are you doing here?” Fugo’s teeth grind together in a low voice, not quite gritting, not quite smiling. He has a good reputation with these people, he’s polite and kind and a good worker and no one’s even asked about the clusterfuck scar tissue on his cheeks and that is far more a courtesy than he deserves after everything that’s happened. He’s stalking to the back of the kitchens, towards the loading dock where a cart of donations sit. Mostly old clothes, some utensils, a little bit of food, probably past expiry dates. Gianni follows dutifully. Stupid pseudonym, but who is Fugo to judge, really?
“Volunteering. Now, tell me what I need to be doing here.”
Fugo sighs.
“Why are you here? Is the work I give you unfulfilling?” From anyone else, Giorno’s question would sound like a threat, but there’s a nugget of genuinity nestled in between syllables, unwillingly prying Fugo’s mouth open, waiting and ready for a hand to reach in and pull his organs out.
“... I just had a bit of a realization.” Giorno passes the shirt he was folding to their growing pile. “Like how I’ve been coasting by, taking other people’s help ever since I left home. I thought I was entitled to it.”
“Do you think people should earn support?”
“Well, no, but what good is someone who doesn’t give back? I’ve been stuck in my head for too long, anyways.”
“Hm. That’s good, then.”
Giorno stays for his entire shift. It’s eight hours of grunting and sweating and by the end of it Fugo could wring his shirt and form a puddle of sweat at their feet. Giorno isn’t faring much better, hair clinging to his neck and cheeks. And it’s far from angelic, but, well, Fugo’s a little stupid so he finds it hard to see the difference. An entoptic love, adrift from concrete reality.
He can’t wrap his head around his own actions, lately. Maybe this new volunteering thing is a way to inch closer to Buccellati, to understand the man through humility and sacrifice. Maybe Giorno has cabin fever. He hates that they’re intruding on one another’s private world like this, it makes Fugo feel more important, like he’s impressing upon Giorno a larger impact, like Giorno will care more in his absence. Like if Fugo drove into a canal, he would miss their tutoring sessions.
And of course he isn’t suicidal as much as he’s just really kind of exhausted with this mortal coil, thrown in a vicious cycle of being handheld and throttled, back and forth and back and forth and back. And then Giorno has the gall to flaunt his inner world, to include Fugo in decisions about Passione that are bigger than both of them combined. He hates that Giorno is getting cold feet. Sheila E said he was a mirror.
They walk out together, and Giorno looks at Fugo with something in his reflective eyes, something stuck in his mouth, trapped behind pink lips, and, ugh, that’s your boss, focus. If Fugo were the type of person to surge forward, to jump into icy canal water, then- well.
“Do you want to get dinner?” The words don’t necessarily surprise Fugo as much as the timing. He’d think Giorno embarrassed to be caught here, but, well. Maybe he doesn’t know Giorno as well as he thinks he does.
“I don’t really look presentable right now.”
“That’s alright. Mista can cook.”
“I know.”
Mista’s face freezes in such a comical way that Fugo almost forgets he’s barging into their dinner. To be fair, it doesn’t look much like a prepared affair, what with Mista’s work clothes under his apron— Kiss the Cook’s Ass in cursive english—and Murolo hunched over his work laptop on the couch.
Mista’s apartment is nothing like he remembers, from the one or two times he’d been inside, before. Where Fugo remembers a barebones bachelor pad now exists the furnished apartment of a whole person, with picture frames (big enough to fit a family, or some approximation of it) and scavenged flyers decorating walls and real furniture, not a mattress and one foldout chair. He has a coffee table with books on it, for fuck’s sake. Fugo’s proud, in some way, that his coworker seems to be doing much better than he is.
The television is on, ignored by Murolo despite the loud volume. It’s a Shakira music video, and sure, Latin pop’s been on the rise lately.
Fugo takes a seat on the couch, as far away from Murolo as is polite. He doesn’t ask if Mista needs help, he knows the man likes to pretend that he doesn’t hate sharing a kitchen. He watches Mista cringe as Giorno moves his cookware around and bumps his elbow into a bowl and tries to focus on twiddling his thumbs instead of the fledgling friendship. Why did he say yes to this? What right does he have to intrude on something he’d left? Murolo taps away at what is surely an inconsequential report, glancing surreptitiously under his brim in a way that is very obvious to Fugo, though he can appreciate that Murolo is probably trying for subtlety.
Dinner is uneventful. Sheila E can’t make it, and Fugo tries not to care. Giorno passes him the salad bowl, quietly ignoring Mista’s question about what he did today. Signore Polnareff eats a piece of lettuce—or maybe it’s more accurate to say that his vessel eats a piece of lettuce. The man’s ghostly apparition leans on the tortoise shell surface, cheek cradled in hand as he looks at Fugo, and then Giorno, and back at Fugo, before vanishing into the plush depths of Mr. President’s stand without a word.
Fugo looks down at his chicken cutlet and tries not to think about the homeless man having a seizure in front of him, spitting blood on linoleum tile. He compliments the cooking and Mista shrugs it off. Murolo is in the bathroom for a good half an hour, and Mista starts looking for the toilet cleaner.
Pannacotta Fugo doesn’t lunge.
“You turn to ghosts and expect them to haunt you, you know.”
Fugo gets up, drunk still and almost tripping on the concrete lip that kisses empty street in his haste to get away. His arm is seized, and when Fugo turns back it seems he’s caught in a branch that wasn’t there two minutes prior.
“I was having a good night, you know. I don’t need stupid bullshit cropping up.”
It opens it’s (Giorno’s) mouth to speak and Fugo bulldozes, liquid courage and something else in his gut that wants blood, “I don’t need you to come here and ask me about my feelings. I don’t need you to sit there and try to understand what it’s like to be human. Ask someone else to help you with Giorno’s feelings.”
It stands, grasping the branch in one cold hand. Fugo can practically feel the life energy hum under his torn shirt, brambles close to puncturing skin.
“You’re right. You don’t need anything. I think there’s been a misunderstanding.” The branch falls away, withered and dead in the blink of an eye and Fugo watches it bubble away, fascinated that he wasn’t the cause for once. “You think I’m here to counsel you, or implore that you help Giono. That isn’t the case, Pannacotta.”
Fugo feels arrested, head rushing with blood as he’s rooted to the spot. He looks down just to make sure there aren't more branches encasing his legs.
“I’m here on a courtesy call. Everything I do is for Giorno, and for his dream. If you don’t know how to reconcile being helpful with being distressed then I suggest you do something else with your time.”
“You think you know me. You’re just a fucking stand.”
(Something that smells like blood and stomach bile stains Sicilian stone, and Narancia jumps back and he doesn’t because he could never reach it because he’s underground and Sicily is above sea level, 3,000 meters above at the tip of the stratovolcano Etna, the highest point of the island.)
“I know you better than Narancia ever will.”
Fugo doesn’t lunge.
“This is me,” Fugo’s thumb gestures to his apartment door, all rotting wood and peeling paint, “thanks for the ride.”
“Of course, man. Always.”
Mista doesn’t immediately leave, Fugo jiggling his key in the lock, twisting noisily while the other man idles in the hallway.
Mista’s voice is quiet and even, “You know I do love you, right?”
Without thinking, like those flecks of sand that get stuck in your ass crack after spending all day at the beach, words that should come from Narancia leave his mouth in a reflexive, parroted movement. Words that won’t because he isn’t around anymore except in the dark crevices of the mind and the cabinet with an odd smell and the packed Rome crowds on Saturdays.
“That’s gay.”
“Fuck you! I’m trying to be honest here, you fucking asshole.”
“I’m sorry, Mista. I love you too. I do, I really do.” Fugo is sure he feels that he appreciates Mista. The problem, not really a problem but a nagging in the back of his mind, is that he doesn’t know if it’s desperation that pushes those words out. Who else could they love, if not each other? Mista’s parents ditched him the minute he became a sunk cost of an eighteen year old with a life sentence, so sure, he can love Mista. He can love The Godfather. He can love lunches in seafood restaurants and Latin pop and tabloids and paintings on cracked wallpaper and big, empty ballrooms and maybe he could love Giorno, the way people in church sit in the pews and pretend that God loves them in the cruel way He loved his own son. Maybe he can love in a way that isn’t a new pony or a hand down his pants in the library or rotted, melted skin.
In a risky gamble, Fugo opens his arms. Mista rushes in to fill the space before he’s fully stretched out, solid and strong and real and everything that Fugo is not. Maybe one of them starts crying, silent tears soaked into fabric, he isn’t sure. But the hug is grounding, and after a moment, Fugo pulls away and pats the other’s back.
“Listen… I’m, I’m sorry about-”
“No, Mista, don’t do that-”
“I have to say this.”
Fugo’s teeth click as he shuts up.
“I treated you like an outsider because it was hard to think of you as a friend that made a different choice. I still don’t agree with it, and everything went wrong, but… I’m glad you’re alive.”
“...” He feels the weight of the words settle in the air around them, dust motes in midnight light.
“Can I come in?” Fugo looks back at the boxes thrown in Caravaggio shadow, and shrugs. Maybe they’re friends again.
No, maybe they’re actually friends this time around.
Seasalt air hits Fugo’s cheeks, and it’s so strong he forgets himself.
“Keep your grip steady.” A baritone voice echoes in his ear, and Fugo’s small hands grip the fishing rod with renewed vigor.
“Sorry.” He looks up to his left at the face of a man he knows, older and happier in the sun. Bruno smiles. The rod tugs and Fugo scrambles. The line snaps and Bruno’s chuckle wipes away any encroaching disappointment.
“There’s always the next one.”
“Yeah…”
Fugo finds himself in a younger mindset, more innocent and more stupid, with the courage to lean his head on Bruno’s arm. The man doesn’t react and maybe that’s the best outcome, to lean on a sun-warmed statue, one you know won’t strike out at you.
He can hear Bruno’s heartbeat, calming and even. The older man, older, older, slight wrinkles aging his handsome face into years well beyond what he should be, grips his own fishing rod.
“Do you think I’ll ever be normal, Buccellati?”
“How do you mean?” He looks out at the horizon, hands steady on the rod. Fugo’s is long abandoned, and he’s taken to swinging his feet back and forth over the lip of the boat.
“Like, with everything. My thoughts. Ugh, my thoughts…” When Bruno says nothing, he continues, “Like when I get angry. I get so angry, I just want to wring someone’s neck. Y’know my professor is alive, out there, living a normal life. A normal life that I should’ve had.”
“What do you want to do about it?”
“I want to wring his neck. I want to knock him out and roll him into a carpet and throw that carpet into a car trunk and drive that car out to the middle of nowhere and let him bleed out in an empty room. I don’t want it to be quick. I want to be sure that I’m the dangerous one, not Purple Haze. I want you to be old. I want to be young.”
Fugo peers up, looking for signs or horror or disgust or both or nothing at all.
“I don’t think that’s true, Fugo.” Bruno’s hands are still on the fishing rod and Fugo wonder’s if the line is even cast or if it’s just another prop. “I think you want to act on the past because it’s a comforting pain. You hate the idea of future pain. But you shouldn’t.”
“... Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because growing up is the hardest part. The faster it goes, the more it tears.” Bruno points at one of the holes in Fugo’s sleeve, bright, freckled skin peeking through. It’s true, he realizes. Fugo misses the wounds of being a child because it felt like the end of the world. Now, he knows it will pass. That’s the worst part. That his anger will pass. That all that will be left is the grief.
Bruno’s arm wraps around Fugo’s holes, fishing rod forgotten, “But it’s okay. I can be old and you can be young.” Buccellati looks down and his face is young and ripe with baby fat, eyes shining in the glow of the ocean and zippers bright in the sun. Fugo is taller than him now.
“Do you want some?” Bruno holds out his peanut butter and nothing sandwich.
“No, thank you.” The words are a little muffled, cheek pressed to starched white, and Bruno shrugs.
“More for Him.” He throws his sandwich, the trajectory of the food altered and reversed as it flies up into a cloud and maybe higher, to heaven, to God. “Will you pray with me, Fugo?”
Buccellati was never really religious.
“Sure.”
Bruno bows his head, hands clasped as he leans forward onto his knees. Fugo’s hands join together in tandem, and he looks down at intertwined digits, trying to think of something to pray for. He prays for Giorno, blushing. The older man looks at him and smiles.
Fugo wakes up to armpit hair on his cheek.