Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Although I hadn’t seen him in more than ten years, I know I’ll miss him forever. I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”

— Stand by Me (1986)

That second day—after dealing with Zucchero and Sale, and after being ordered to protect Trish—they hide themselves away deep in the vineyards. The wretched house reeks of mold and probably hasn’t seen a soul in twenty-five years, and Giorno loves it. 

He has a rare moment to admire the view, so he takes it. And up there on the balcony, surrounded by the mountains and the vines and the sunset of his smile, he feels his dream all falling into place, slot by beautiful slot. 

He will do it. Can do it. Jesus, he drove stick for two hours today through the Lattari. He can do anything. 

“Hey,” Mista calls, peeking around the double doors. He lights up at the sight. “Ah, nice and pretty up here, huh? But we’re having drinks downstairs, so. Y’know. Come on.”

Giorno raises his eyebrows. “I can’t drink.”

“You can’t drive,” Mista points out. 

“But I do.”

Mista laughs, but—well, it’s more like a guffaw. “See, you get me!” He nudges Giorno out the door and down the stairs. “You and me, Giorno, we’re gonna get along just fine.”

True to his word, everyone is sprawled in various states of lounge in the downstairs living room. Even Trish, with a half-glass of red wine, who looks just as uncomfortable as Giorno feels. 

“Giorno,” greets Bucciarati, gesturing to the empty space on the couch beside him, “here is free.”

Abbacchio scowls and moves to pour a glass for Giorno, but Bucciarati intercepts him with a silent raise of his hand. Like that, he’s pacified. Or…something close to it. 

Bucciarati pours the glass himself, then promptly sandwiches himself between Abbacchio and Giorno, playing the mediator. 

“Okay, Trish,” Narancia says. “It’s your turn.”

“No,” she bites.

“But—it’s just—”

“No.”

Fugo intervenes with a roll of the eyes. “Fine, whatever. Abbacchio?”

“Don’t have one.”

Mista slaps the arm of his chair. “You can’t say that!”

“Are you going to stop me,” Abbacchio asks, sans any suggestion of a question. He downs the rest of his glass and pours another. 

Narancia turns his puppy dog eyes to—

“Giorno?” he asks, and his voice has a crack right down the middle, and oh, that’s so pathetic. He’s a master of his craft.

“I don’t know the question,” Giorno says. 

“Your favorite movie! What is it?”

A favorite movie. That’s what they’re talking about down here? These big, bad men? The same ones who licked him into submission just days ago and who salivated over the chance to torture a man today? These men?

These men—oh, Lord. They’re all staring at him. Right. These men want to know his favorite fucking movie. 

“The…” Giorno begins, and they all shift forward, like the stage direction just called for it, “Thing.”

“The Thing,” Narancia repeats, flat.

“The Thing,” Fugo confirms, flatter than a day old Coke. 

To everyone’s surprise, and probably even hers, Trish laughs. Laughs like she damn well means it. And they soon find out she becomes a completely different person when she laughs—no longer hunched in on herself, but instead unabashed and unguarded, slapping Fugo’s arm in rapid succession. 

Abbacchio takes this as his cue to leave. 

“Men,” he says, a whisper in the face of Trish’s laughter, “it’s been a displeasure.”

Fugo follows soon after, if only to get away from Trish and her hands. Narancia shadows him, always. And then Trish herself, but she tops her glass off before she goes, still laugh, laugh, laughing the night away. 

“Hey,” Mista says. He rubs the back of his neck. “Don’t worry about them. The Thing is cool, man.”

Giorno smiles, sidelong. He has never seen The Thing a day in his life. 

Pretty soon it’s just him and Bucciarati, who’s looking a little melted out of his mind over there. It’s kind of endearing. 

“Well, now that my taste in film has created a mass exodus,” Giorno says, coming to a stand. “Goodnight, Bucciarati.”

Bucciarati huffs a laugh. “What is it, really?”

“Hm?”

“Your movie. You lied.”

Oh, right. Somehow the knowledge that this freak of a human lie detector is someone he now takes orders from slipped him.

“It is The Thing,” Giorno says. He shrugs, but his lips lift in slight. “You have a bunch of men frolicking around in the snow. What more could you want?”

Bucciarati tilts his head, fond. Fond? That’s certainly what it looks like, but that kind of emotion leveled at Giorno is unheard of. 

Something warm curls in Giorno’s chest. He sits back down, sips at his wine. He hasn’t even drank half, so he can’t blame it. No, no, he knows better—knows this is Bucciarati’s doing. He’s only known him two days out of his whole life, but…there’s just something about Bucciarati that urges him to throw the theater away. Urges him to be a little like Trish, maybe. Writhing, dancing around. Unabashed and unguarded. 

He twists the stem of the wine glass. And then he looks over to Bucciarati, and says:

“Stand by Me.”

Bucciarati puts his elbow to the back of the couch and absently bites at a nail. There’s a crease in his eyebrows. And for a hot second, Giorno thinks he doesn’t even know the movie, or doesn’t like it, and he’s starting to wish he never said anything at all, and—

Bucciarati points. “The one with the song.”

“There are many songs.”

“I mean the one about…cotton candy? No.”

“Lollipops.”

“Yes!” Bucciarati smiles. His teeth are perfect, but the canine Giorno fixed came back a little crooked. “I like that kind of music.”

Giorno can tell, what with his broadcast of a Stand. But maybe it’s more than that. It just feels right, like a universal truth—Bucciarati connecting to old things, worn things, things that sound a little like they’re dead. 

As he leans back and nurses his wine, he can almost picture it: Bucciarati, alone under the wash of a stained-glass lamp, watching a warped record spin with his not-right nails and his not-right tooth. A universal truth. 

“So what grabbed you?” Bucciarati asks. “It’s your favorite for a reason, right?”

And it is, because of course it is. And that’s a reason he isn’t quite willing to share.

But…he could. A part of him wants to, because Bucciarati may still be a perfect stranger in every sense of the word, but Giorno knows he would listen. He’d listen to Giorno tell him how once upon a time that movie was a piece of the meager possessions he was given dominion over, if only to keep him preoccupied, at bay, as if he was animal rather than human. And he’d listen to Giorno tell him how he’d fed the tape to the VCR, and how he’d pressed shaking hands to the screen and spread his fingers through static, and how at some point he’d heard the footfalls of the devil thundering toward his door, but he couldn’t look away, couldn’t care, because nothing had ever mattered more in his entire life than hearing Chris Chambers say:

“You're just a kid, Gordie.”

And Gordie yelling:

“Oh, gee! Thanks, Dad!”

And Chris stopping, and staring, and spitting out a:

“I wish the hell I was your dad.”

With all the sting of a sucker-punch. 

And Bucciarati would listen to Giorno tell him how he’d wished beyond anything that someone cared about him that much, how he’d wished right then and there that he was Gordie Lachance, how he’d got down on his knees that night and crossed himself and prayed to a God he didn’t and would never believe in that one day, one day, he would be Gordie. 

“Kids lose everything unless there's someone there to look out for them. And if your parents are too fucked up to do it, then maybe I should,” Chris had finished. By then, the devil had made it to Giorno’s door. 

Bucciarati would listen, he knows. And he knows that Bucciarati would not judge, would not breathe a word to the others, but—

Giorno’s hand shakes around the stem of the wine glass. He clenches hard. 

“I will have to get back to you on that,” he says.

Bucciarati opens his mouth once, twice, and then gives up. After a few seconds, he says, “Sure.”

And that’s that. They sit there in silence for a few minutes longer, and Bucciarati chews on his not-right nails with his not-right tooth, and Giorno tries hard to behave like a normal person again with his not-right hands and his not-right head. 

They fit, somehow—these perfect strangers, and their world of imperfections. 

“Giorno,” Bucciarati eventually says. His arm brushes Giorno’s, and he has to see the way Giorno flinches, he has to, but he doesn’t mention it. “Without a doubt, we are facing a journey that will be riddled with trials and tribulations. We have to be vigilant. We have to reach our goal. However…” He smudges the condensation of his glass. “It’s important that we have our freedom, whenever it may call us.”

“You want me to trust you.”

“I want you to be comfortable.”

Giorno pauses. He thinks of a boy—his hands pressed to static, wanting to be wanted. 

“I…will have to get back to you on that,” he says again, a little sly this time. 

“Sure,” Bucciarati answers once more, and the lilt to his voice lights him up in ways Giorno could not predict. “Sleep well.”

Giorno watches him leave. His afterimage lingers, as well as the sound of him humming along to a song about lollipops.

Over the years, he has become familiar with many sounds. The door slamming, a crib rattling; the scuff of his stepfather’s boots, and the snap of his mother’s favorite lipstick. A VHS—whirring, rewinding.  

Over the past few days, he has become familiar with the same sounds, in different genres. The rhythm of Narancia’s loafers, and the smack of Trish’s favorite lipstick; bullets rattling, Mista clicking the chamber shut. Moody Blues—whirring, rewinding. 

He thought he had the noise of the famiglia all figured out. 

There’s this one sound, though. He’s heard it only once, but it was not forgotten. And it is, he’s certain, the worst sound he’s ever heard in his life. The mafioso he saved made it.

It wasn’t until his first year of middle school that he was able to put a name to that sound. They’d just covered reproductive systems, pregnancy, and childbirth in health class, and now they were on to death itself. What happens to your body when you stroke out? When you get shot? When your cancer metastasizes and chemo can no longer help you? What are your symptoms? And why the hell did the reaper decide to take you?  

Everyone else in his class got whiplash. Giorno didn’t. 

He’d raised his hand high for once. And his teacher said:

“Yes, Giorno?”

And he’d asked:

“What is it called when you’re hurt bad, and you’re going to die, and you’re breathing…like…”

And he’d thought of his guardian angel, twitching around in his blood, and he’d opened his mouth to his whole class and created a carbon copy of that evil sound. That one long, low groan, and the watery coughs that punctuated it. And then the shorter, sawed-off versions—the desperate rasps, like choked sobbing, like trying to crank a faulty lawnmower over and over and over. 

And then he’d stopped abruptly, and sat up in his seat like nothing happened, and awaited his answer. 

“I—I think…that…” His teacher was pale. She rubbed at the cross necklace around her throat. “That is probably agonal breathing. It can happen when someone is close to death, or has just died. It is the body’s last attempt to get oxygen to the brain. Giorno, will you see me after class?”

He did. He told her he heard that type of breathing in a movie, and when she asked which one, he said, without missing a beat:

“The Thing.”

The second time he hears agonal breathing in his life is far worse than the first. 

For one, it’s coming from Bucciarati. Bucciarati—unmovable, untouchable Bucciarati. No, no, Bucciarati doesn’t make these kinds of sounds. He hums, and sings, and laughs when he’s safe and cusses some clown out when he isn’t. He does not—he cannot—

But he is. And when Giorno gets closer, the scene worsens.

In the eyes and the law of biology, Bruno Bucciarati is not alive. He looks just like that damn mafioso strung out in his own personal red sea, and he breathes just like that damn mafioso—except he’s not really breathing. He’s dead; his heart has stopped and his lungs are shot and his eyes are soulless. All his body wants to do is give him a second chance, and so it fights an involuntary war. 

It is losing. It is not going to win.

For once, Giorno does not think before he acts. He puts his hands over the cavity of Bucciarati’s chest and pours forth life, and he feels his lungs, his liver, his large intestine all bending to his will. They’re perfect replicas, he knows. 

And yet Bucciarati groans, long and low. And then seconds later his breaths saw themselves off, punctuate themselves all wrong, with wet rasps instead of a steady pulse. He sounds like he’s crying. He sounds like that faulty fucking lawnmower. And he’s starting to seize at the fingers, at the wrists, at his legs that kick Giorno right in the gut and brand his suit with blood.

“Bucciarati!” Giorno howls. “Oh, God, help me! Bucciarati!”

He realizes then, right here and now in this moment, in this godless house of God, that he feels exactly like the little boy he once was. Static clinging to his hands, stuck behind the glass, wanting, wanting, wanting something he is not allowed to have. He’s that boy, and the devil is hovering at his threshold. The devil is breathing down his neck. The devil is breathing normally, naturally, and the dead body of Bruno Bucciarati is sobbing and seizing as its final act. 

But, see, Giorno does not feel scared this time. He feels—pissed off. Like the needle’s scraped the record raw, like every screw in his head just fell right the hell out. Because he and Bucciarati have unfinished business, and because he cares for Bucciarati, and because he wants more time with him. And because, like always, God is not with him. Chris Chambers is not with him. His mother and his father and his stepfather and that mafioso are not with him. No, once more he is face-to-face with the one and only constant in his life: Giorno Giovanna is all he has. 

And Giorno Giovanna wants something. And he is going to get it this time. 

He calls upon Gold Experience and seeks the type of power he doesn’t even have a name for—power beyond life, beyond death. Power of apocalyptic proportions. 

And as he holds his fury right at the core of his heart, he runs his hands across every inch of Bucciarati there is. His eyes, his neck, his chest and his hips and his legs and the scar across his right ankle, and back to his chest where he presses and presses and presses and conjures up the image of ten million defibrillators combined. He pushes the sea of his soul like he never has before, until his eyes roll back, until his heartrate spirals into arrhythmia, until his head smacks into Bucciarati’s chest like the force at the bottom of the ocean is holding him under. 

“Giorno.”

He tries to find the sound, but he still cannot see anything except the back of his eyelids. And then a hand meets his. 

“Giorno,” he hears again, and then he’s being pushed off, and it’s all over. His eyes return to their proper state. He cannot see right, he’s too dizzy, too dazed, but he knows Bucciarati is there before him. Not sobbing, not seizing—no, no more. He’s clutched at Giorno’s shoulder like it’s all he has. Resurrected. “Call the others.”

The dream is always the same. 

There’s a hallway. Always, there will exist a hallway. It will wind, and twist, and lope, and you won’t look behind you. You won’t have the stomach to. 

This hallway belongs to you—the you before you. You’ve ran down it many times, often away from the devil, but sometimes you ran to greet your mother. Offered a hand for groceries, or your whole arm for a hug. You knew she’d always opt for the first choice. But you still tried. 

Tonight, you’ve taken to tiptoeing down the hallway. There’s a puzzle scattered throughout—white, shining, studded. You move to pick up the pieces, safe in your little hands, and you realize you’ve never seen a puzzle quite like this. It’s in the shape of a body. An arm by your door, the waist by your mother’s, the legs folded up just near the living room. There’s a scar across the right ankle. 

You think the head should be around somewhere. It isn’t. 

Coming to a stop, you survey your collection, and you start trying to put the pieces together. The legs go here, and the hips go there…

“Haruno,” you hear, and the hair on your neck stands on end. “You have something of mine.”

And this—this has not happened before. What happens is you stitch the puzzle up to its neck and then you wake to the sun, because you don’t have a head to complete it. This has not happened before. You’ve only worked up to the stomach. 

“Haruno,” you hear again, and your hands shake but you do not react, because reacting means turning around, and turning around means seeing something you were never meant to see. 

You piece the puzzle to its neck. The end. Now it’s time to wake up and return to—

“Haruno,” you hear, and you know this is it. There is only one option left: to be Orpheus. 

You turn around and slowly look up at the intruder. 

It’s you—the you after you. Giorno Giovanna. 

“Haruno,” he says once more. He extends a hand. His expression is perfectly passive. “You have something of mine.”

But you don’t want to part with the puzzle. You feel you need to keep it safe.

“And I will,” Giorno clarifies. And without any preamble, he hacks off his entire right arm, and says, “Let me show you.”

With his left arm, he takes an arm from the puzzle and zips it around the negative space he just created. And all the while his true limb falls to the dark wood floor, twitching, writhing, doomed to drown in its own blood. 

“See?” Giorno flexes his stolen arm. “Safe.”

You blink. “It does not look right on you.”

“Maybe. But it’s mine.”

Giorno hacks his other arm off and replaces it with a piece of your collection. And that’s all he does for a while, just hacks and saws and dismembers his limbs like it’s second nature. There’s something very clinical about the process. His expression never changes. You think, maybe, that he’s prepared himself for this. 

As you sit down in his blood to watch, to behold, you think once again that the puzzle does not look right on him. But even so…he seems familiar with it. In tune. He bends with its knees like he already knows the way its muscles will curve, and he fastens its belt with its fingers like he’s tying nautical knots, and he breathes with its lungs as if he created them himself. 

No, it does not look right at all.

“What about the head?” you ask when he’s finished. “Where is it?”

“Ah, I’m glad you asked.”

Giorno crouches and digs around in the bloodied pants pocket that was once his. Out of it, he pulls a compact mirror, and then he crawls over to you on his false hands and his false knees and he opens the mirror and you take a good, long look at the face of—

“Bucciarati…” Giorno hears himself groan. Distantly, he registers the scratch of familiar fabric against his jaw, can hear it unzipping as his head tries to slip back into sleep. Unzipping. Unzipping.

Unzipping.

He jolts awake with a scream that could wake the dead. And then he rocks to his feet with all the muscle memory of a marine and all the adrenaline of a race horse, and he books it to the first door he sees. It is not locked, but when he opens it he is greeted with a hallway.

“Giorno,” he hears, and he does not want to look at the hallway, and he does not want to look behind him, so he screws his eyes shut and drops to the floor and curls in on himself and shakes and shakes and shakes. 

“Giorno…” he hears again, softer this time, “it’s only me.”

“I know…” Giorno whispers. His teeth chatter. He sounds like a man possessed. “I know.”

Behind him, he hears Bucciarati messing with something. After a few seconds he feels cold hands push wires into his ears, and then those same hands give him a Walkman with “B.B.” sharpied across the front. 

Giorno presses play.

The boy was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea, he hears, and then another boy merges with a mirror in the hallway, and then he’s surrounded by horses, white and shining and silver studded, and vaguely, Giorno wonders if he was able to hear Bucciarati’s music while he was asleep. And then he wonders, a little more urgently, why Bucciarati would have it cranked so loud. 

Bucciarati wanders over to the hotel room’s couch they were sitting on and comes back with a case of cassettes. He presents it to Giorno like it’s the Holy Grail, like this is Pulp Fiction and he’s Jules with the briefcase.

“I don’t have any Prince,” Bucciarati says, gravely. “Sorry.”

And despite how terrified he feels, Giorno still manages a smile. 

“I like this one,” he says truthfully. But he still rifles through Bucciarati’s collection anyway—at The Rolling Stones, and The Doors, and Steely Dan, and more Patti Smith and Billie Holiday and Bobby Darin and Miles Davis. At some things he wouldn’t expect, like Marty Robbins and Tom Waits. And at some things he really wouldn’t expect, like—

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Giorno says, twirling said cassette between his fingers. 

Bucciarati smirks. “Can you keep a secret?” And at Giorno’s nod, he says, “That’s my favorite movie. And every year, on Halloween, I see a shadowcast performance.”

“Can you keep a secret?” Giorno asks. He does not wait for an answer. “I’ve always wanted to play Janet.”

And then Bucciarati puts a fist to his split lips to keep his laughter at bay, and he asks, once more, “Can you keep a secret?”

And Giorno nods, and in his ears Patti Smith sings about her horses, and he feels a volatile thrash in his heart—at war, at peace, in limbo. All of it, all at once. 

“I was going to audition for Frank this year.”

Bucciarati shares his laughter with Giorno, because of course he does. This is natural. This is the type of sound meant to leave his lips. 

But…his chest isn’t moving, and his throat isn’t moving, and the muscles of his stomach aren’t contracting. No, he’s stiff as a board. And his words—the tense, the diction. Why did he phrase it like that? I was going to. I was going to.

“Why wouldn’t—”

“You should try to go back to sleep,” Bucciarati interrupts. “In a bed, Giorno. My shoulder is not sufficient, although you’re still welcome there.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I’m going to sit out here and listen to Patti Smith until she sings me a lullaby.”

“Then she will have to sing me one too.” Giorno rubs at his neck. His hands are still shaking, just slightly. “I apologize…for…”

“Enough. What do you have to be sorry for?” Bucciarati closes his case of cassettes, stands, and jerks his chin over to the couch. “Are you joining me?”

In those few hours they spend on the couch, one headphone a piece, looping Patti Smith and the Rocky Horror soundtrack, he learns a lot about Bucciarati. Not enough to write a book about him, Giorno thinks, because there’s a quality to him that just cannot be translated onto paper. No, you couldn’t translate the mechanical itch at his ankle when he talks about growing up gay in a straight world, or the weight his words take when he speaks of his father, or the crazed skate of his eyes over the room when he says he was a boy, he was twelve, Giorno, and he figured out how to bend reality to the shape of a blade, so he crawled out of the depths of hell and introduced two men to its maker. 

Giorno asks and Bucciarati answers for a long, long while. And Giorno listens, observes, analyzes, because that is his nature. When he was younger, his peers used to say he was so quiet, so shy, sometimes I forget you’re even there, Giorno. Sometimes they did. But that was fine, because forgetting means trusting, and if they came to class the next day with a lighter wallet, well—that was their own fault. 

He’s not interested in stealing much of anything from Bucciarati, though. He stole his headphone, and he stole his cold shoulder, and nothing else in this world tempts him further at the moment. 

“What was the best day of your life?” Giorno asks, a little muffled against the fabric of Bucciarati’s suit. 

“The day my father died,” Bucciarati says. 

“I said the best.”

“I know. That’s the one. Awful, horrible day. I spent the majority of it over his bed, or on the phone to my mother, or planning his funeral. And then I came home.”

“And?”

“And…” Bucciarati pauses. “I forgot I turned eighteen that day. And I forgot that Fugo and Narancia were coming over.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. And they were teenage boys with access to money, so there was food, and there was cake, and there was also gelato and pannacotta and everything I did not have any kind of stomach to eat. And please don’t forget this part: they were teenage boys, and so obviously the food was on the floor instead of a table, and so obviously they bought banners most efficient at raining glitter, and so obviously the volume of my poor little record player was set to its maximum. Obviously, Giorno. Obviously.”

“Are you certain this was the best day of your life?” 

Bucciarati smiles. “Yes.” He nudges the case of cassettes with his shoe. “I got this that day. Oh, God, this loud-looking thing. It was Narancia’s gift. And…the way he gave it to me…” 

He laughs, with force, with soul, and Giorno finds himself reminded of Trish that second night, when she’d laughed and laughed like she’d never be able to again. 

“He just slid it across the table and screamed ‘It’s a bomb!’, and Fugo told him to shut up—no, I believe the proper phrasing was ‘Shut your stupid fucking mouth before some shitass pig shows up and ruins Bucciarati’s day’ and it was so ironic that I laughed and I laughed and everything just sucked to hell and back but…” He shrugs, and for once Giorno doesn’t mind being thrown around. Not like this. “But I’m laughing. The record player’s too loud and I want to throw up and it’s my birthday and my father’s dead but I’m laughing, because…these two still love me. They really, really love me, Giorno. And in three days I will have to lower a good man into the ground, and in two days I will have to choose his casket, and in one day I will have to wake up and face the world without him for the first time, but they love me.” His voice grows soft, reverent. “How could anything ever be so bad again when they love me?”

Giorno swallows. And then he swallows again, and again, because he does not want to cry in front of Bucciarati, but Bucciarati has probably already clocked the way his breaths have gone hitched and shallow. He feels—well, moved. But when has he ever not felt moved around Bucciarati? On the funicular maybe, but then again, there was still something about the way he commanded the room that struck Giorno like nothing else. Another one of those qualities lost in translation.  

He hooks his chin on Bucciarati’s shoulder, and he closes his eyes, and he thinks: yes, Bruno Bucciarati would make a wonderful Dr. Frank-N-Furter. 

“I’m sorry about Fugo,” Giorno eventually says. 

“Hmm.” Bucciarati curls a hand in Giorno’s loose hair, and Giorno does not flinch. Slowly, he strokes. “You should stop being so sorry. It does not fit you.” 

It does not look right on you, Giorno had said to his own face. He’d killed himself just to wear Bucciarati’s skin, and he’d said, It does not look right on you. 

“Love fits you,” Giorno mumbles, in that sliver of space between aware and not, when his tongue gets stupid with sleep. Even so, he finds he cannot regret his words.

A thumb behind his ear, so subtle and slight. “You think?”

And Giorno nods, or at least he hopes he does. All he knows is that he’s never been so sure of anything in his life when he says:

“The word was made for you.”

Can you keep a secret? 

Giorno has one, and it sears him like acid: he will never quite outrun Haruno Shiobana. 

So, see, when he puts two fingers to Bucciarati’s neck in that car and is not answered with a pulse, the first thing he does, before he even breathes a word, is pray. Just as Haruno Shiobana did. 

I do not want to be Gordie anymore, he prays, to any and all, to those he does not believe in. To those who are not on his side. Please, I do not want to be Gordie anymore. 

“Giorno,” Bucciarati says, and the roll of each syllable feels like being skinned alive, “I know this is har—”

“The soul.”

“You…are going to have to speak up.”

“The—” Giorno repeats. His voice splits itself in all kinds of ways. “The soul. The tenderness. The raw human condition. Those…those are my reasons.”

It takes Bucciarati a moment to place it. And then:

“Ah,” he whispers, “you finally got back to me.”

As always, Giorno shakes. And Bucciarati cannot feel the motion of it at his shoulder but Giorno wouldn’t move it even if he could feel, because—no. No. He cannot be Gordie. He will not be Gordie. He will not let go, and he will not accept this, and he will not allow Bucciarati to alter the meaning of his entire life and then immediately fade the fuck out of it like Chris Chambers. 

Oh, it’s so very familiar—this rejection of reality. Like he’s stuck in a time loop, or lost in the fog of a recurring dream. 

“I wanted what they had,” Giorno admits. “I wanted friends—or maybe just people, really, who wanted me too. Wanted their laughter, and their warmth, and their sanctuary. But what I really wanted—” he says, and his breath hitches, “what I really wanted was someone like Chris. Someone who didn’t care…who I was. What I’d been through. Someone who saw me for me and decided that was enough, I love you and I’ll fight for you.” He swallows. “That’s all I wanted. I was alive and yet I only felt so when I saw him. I knew, from that day on, I’d never want for anything more. Can you blame me?”

Slowly, Bucciarati’s hands flex around the steering wheel. His fractured nails have not grown. 

He opens his mouth, and he draws no breath, and he asks:

“Did you get what you wanted?” 

And Giorno thinks if he tries to speak any further he will burn the world to the ground in the process, so he answers with a hand over Bucciarati’s dead heart and the life he attempts to give it. 

“Oh, Giorno. Stop.” Bucciarati writhes in his seat. “You have to stop.”

He does not stop. He calls upon the deepest reserves of Gold Experience, calls upon the hum of another world entirely, beyond life, beyond death, and then he reaches inside the cavity of Bucciarati’s chest and squeezes his heart to a rhythm. Just like last time, it wrecks Giorno completely—using up all his energy, giving so much of his soul to save another. But he would do it over and over and over and over, so long as it meant—

“Enough,” Bucciarati says as a final warning, right before sectioning off his chest with one sweep of his Stand. He sends the flesh of it right into the passenger seat. And he, himself, remains unaffected. 

Giorno’s hand slips when dead air hails from nowhere. Bucciarati takes it, holds it in his.

“You are beating a dead horse,” he states, so clipped and clinical. “I can’t find a more gentle way to say it. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. I am dead. You have to accept it this time.”

“But—Bucciarati. Bucciarati.”

Bucciarati kisses Giorno’s hand. Frenzied, frantic, because here it is, one more secret: he has run out of time. 

“Giorno, listen,” he says. “You have created a scene of biblical proportions out of me. It should not have been possible, but you extended my life. You gave me another chance to see our goal though. You moved me, and you changed me, and you freed me.” He lets his Stand take the wheel, turns around to face Giorno. “I owe you everything.”

Giorno shakes his head vigorously. He looks from their hands to Bucciarati’s dismembered heart riding shotgun, to the chasm of his chest, to his not-right nails and his not-right tooth and the not-right tear coming out of his not-right eye. 

It’s not possible. It’s not right. But all you two do is break the rules, you and Bruno. 

“You—Y-You don’t owe me shit,” Giorno spits, and then he swallows, and he swallows, but it’s no use. He is beating a dead horse. He is going to cry. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes,” Bucciarati says. 

“I got what I wanted and more.” 

Giorno puts his forehead to their joined hands, and he thinks dead horse, dead horse, dead horse, and then he cries like he never has before.

One week ago, he had used his Stand to hurt another person for the first time. He was hesitant. He was scared. He did not know his limits, and he hoped it wouldn’t hurt. 

Today, he used his Stand to damn a man to an unending death. He was not hesitant. He was not scared. He did not know his limits, but he knew that it would hurt. 

Chapter Text

It rains for days after Bucciarati dies.

They hold Abbacchio’s funeral first, and then Narancia’s, and then Bucciarati’s. And as always, Giorno feels just like his old friend Gordie Lachance. Watching the casket lower. Knowing this is the end. 

He’d placed one of his brooches between Bucciarati’s cold hands before the casket closed. Soon, it will grow into a purple passion vine, purple columbines, purple forget-me-nots. No one will ever be able to see them. And this, Giorno knows, will be his and Bucciarati’s final secret. 

The priest asks them all to bow their heads in prayer. He asks that God be with Bucciarati forevermore, that God love him like we loved him, and Giorno wonders what it might be like to throw himself atop Bucciarati’s casket and roll around in the mud and sob and seize and raise the finger up to that blacked-out cavity of a sky and scream what God? What God?

“Mr. Giovanna,” the priest says, “would you like to say anything?”

Giorno shoves his hands in his pockets. He thinks of Bruno Bucciarati—newly eighteen years old, surrounded by cassettes and cake and people who love him—laughing, and laughing, and laughing. 

He’s already said his farewells to Bucciarati. Now, he just wants to talk. Wants to make him laugh that laugh. 

Just like his second night as a mafioso, everyone in the crowd leans forward, hanging onto his every word. 

“Bucciarati,” Giorno says, solemn, “I’ve been making a man with blond hair and a tan. And he’s good for relieving my…” He smirks. “Tension.”

With a hung jaw, the priest stares at him. And when Giorno responds by squaring his shoulders, raising his chin, fully assuming the authority of Don, the priest promptly reorients himself and says:

“A-Amen.”

“Amen,” the crowd chimes, unsure. 

Giorno takes a walk in the rain afterwards, alone. Or, well, he wanted to be alone. He knows someone has been trailing him for some time, and he thought maybe it was Mista, but their gait is too light. 

At the corner of an alleyway and a long-forgotten bar, he stops, and he turns on his heel, and he sees—

His guardian angel. 

It’s certainly been a while. Giorno knows he checks in on something of a weekly basis, but he is a hard man to actually catch in the act. The last time Giorno saw him in the flesh was close to a year ago. By now, his hair lingers near his waist, and it’s started to gray at the edges. 

Upon realization, his guardian angel comes closer. The sight is odd, alien. Like a mirage, like the fog of his dreams, like if he looks away for even a second, the man will disappear completely. 

But he doesn’t. And soon he’s towering over Giorno, and he’s holding an umbrella above Giorno’s drenched head, and then he drawls, deep and dark:

“Happy birthday.”

And just like that scandalized priest, Giorno’s jaw swings wide. He’d forgotten.

“Of course it is…” Giorno mumbles. He puts a hand to his lips, and he huffs a bitter laugh. “Life is so funny.”

So funny. And so, so miserable. 

He looks up, and all the man before him does is stare back. Watching, waiting. He does not move an inch. Does not twitch. Does not blink. The rain, in a trick of light, or perhaps bent to his will, rolls right off him. 

“It is not necessary for you to look after me anymore,” Giorno informs him.

“Would you like me to stop?”

“…No.” 

And then he stuffs his hands in his pockets so as to hide their shake. His fingers meet a folded-up pamphlet, one that sings his dead friend’s praises. There is a cross on the back. And on the front, at the edges of his friend’s image, a smattering of cherubs. 

You have created a scene of biblical proportions out of me, that friend had said. His dying declaration. 

“Do you believe in God?” Giorno asks, so quietly he thinks he didn’t even ask it at all.

“I believe in what I can see,” comes the reply. “The sky. This rain. You. Me.” Slowly, he breathes. He makes all the right sounds this time. “Do you?”

“I have tried very hard to,” Giorno admits. He leans his head against the wall of the bar, closes his eyes. “I want to believe. I really, really want to. But God is not on my side.” He shrugs. “So why should I be on his?”

It is silent for several seconds. And then—

“Was he?”

Giorno screws his face up in annoyance. Was he? No, he isn’t, and he just said that, and he will not repeat himself. 

And then he straightens up and snaps his eyes apart—because. Was he? Not is he. Was he? And the inflection, he heard it wrong. Not was he, but was he?

Was he? Was Bucciarati? Was Bucciarati on your side?

“Yes,” Giorno answers, nodding his head so hard he grows dizzy. He does not care. He’d bowl his brains right down this sidewalk just to speak one more word of Bruno Bucciarati. 

“Then maybe you should believe in that instead.”

Giorno swallows. Swallows. Swallows. Swallows. 

Slow, yet operatic, his guardian angel unveils a flask from the shadows of his coat. He takes a drink. And then he raises it up to the boy and the man and the godforsaken tragedy who saved him, and proposes:

“A toast.”

“To what,” Giorno bites, and he downs half anyway. He swallows through the scorch of it, but it’s no use. He is beating a dead horse. He is going to cry. “I’ve lost everything.”

As Giorno ascends the few short steps that lead to Bucciarati’s house, the one he grew up in, the one he chose to stay in, he tells himself he is only here to maintain it. 

As he closes the door to Bucciarati’s room and claws his way to the unmade bed, he tells himself he is only here to maintain it. 

He tells himself. He tells himself. 

There is a dip in the mattress. Bucciarati has not slept in this house for eight long years, and yet there is a dip in his mattress. 

He tells himself. 

With shaking hands, Giorno affixes a Walkman with “B.B.” sharpied on the front to his hip. He has not changed out of his funeral attire. It’s wet. It’s cold. And a loaded weapon lines the pocket, but someone who bleeds a little less than him might call it a pamphlet. 

He presses play. 

Suddenly, Johnny gets the feeling he’s being surrounded by horses, horses, horses, Patti Smith tells him. And a little later, he switches the tape and Mick Jagger croons, wild, wild horses, and all he can do is writhe and thrash and sob and seize in this bed, in this house, in this life that does not belong to him, and think:

Dead horse. 

Dead horse. 

Dead horse. 

Chapter Text

In a hotel room’s mirror, Giorno watches the reflection of his fingers as they braid his hair. Over and under. Under and over. 

Behind him, briefly, Bucciarati looks upon his collection of cassettes, then secures it with the lid of the case. He puts it with the rest of his belongings, and his Walkman beside it. 

Silently, he moves to fold the blanket spilled across the couch. Funny thing that blanket is. Giorno woke up with it over his shoulders this morning, but wouldn’t you know, it was absent before he fell asleep. 

He’d only slept three hours. It was dreamless. He prefers it that way. 

And when the sun had greeted him with nothing to offer but its everything, he finally removed his head from its place atop Bucciarati’s shoulder and saw that his friend was already awake. There were circles under his eyes, a pallor to his skin. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all. 

But he was smiling. 

He wasn’t even looking at anything in particular. Not at Giorno, not at the rising sun—but he was smiling. It was so subtle. So honest. And upon this Giorno was, and very deeply, reminded of Chris Chambers’ final appearance. 

Chris—beholding a town that chained him, a town that hated him. He’d smiled, too. Subtle. Honest. It fit him, just as it fits Bucciarati. 

“I’ll see you,” Gordie told him. 

And Chris answered, “Not if I see you first.”

And then Chris turned on his heel and faded into nothing. 

Giorno always thought that some part of Chris knew his fate—knew that he would not die kindly, knew that he would die younger than he should have. He’d ruin himself over this theory as he watched the credits roll. It was only a movie, he’d tell himself, when he’d lie awake in bed for hours after, haunted by Chris Chambers’ smile. But the mantra never pacified him. 

Someone like Chris didn’t deserve to die. It seemed that everyone in this world like Chris died at the most unnatural time, and everyone unlike him lived forever. How is that fair? How could God allow that? He’d repeat his burning questions well into the night, well into the years, unable to let them go, because he knew that if he had a friend like Chris, he wouldn’t deal with his death as gracefully as Gordie had. 

No. He’s certain it would set his soul on fire. 

At the mirror, Giorno pins his braid in place. He gives himself one last look before turning around. 

“Do you need any help?” he asks Bucciarati. It’s the right thing to ask, to offer, but the larger part of him hopes the answer is no. If only to delay. If only to linger together a little longer.

“Hm.” Bucciarati surveys the room, unhurried. “You can answer a question for me.”

“Sure.”

Bucciarati puts a few more things in his suitcase. Then, he gives Giorno his undivided attention, and asks:

“What was the best day of your life?”

Ah, there he goes—always trying to coax a secret out. But he’d told his, so Giorno supposes it’s only fair. 

Considering he could count all the genuinely good days of his life on one hand, he’s not surprised he doesn’t have to think too long about it. 

It is seven in the morning, and Giorno has been awake for less than thirty minutes. For all intents and purposes, the day has just begun. He does not know that they will lose a member of the famiglia today. And he does not know Bucciarati will tell him that he’s dead today, that he is only masquerading his body, that Giorno had failed to do the one thing he does best. 

But today, when he awoke to Bucciarati’s peaceful smile, he felt like that little boy once more. Hands pressed to static, wanting. Always, always wanting. 

Except glass didn’t divide him today. Everything he’s ever wanted was right there. And finally, he could have it.

So Giorno smiles, with teeth, and says:

“Today.”

And Bucciarati will know he isn’t lying this time.