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1.
Mista raises his voice, laughing, telling some story that requires more animation than Giorno will give to all his stories combined in a year. They're in some crowded, bustling restaurant, all white linens over circular tables and waiters with bow ties carrying trays of expensive wine. The table is both too small and too big: their food lies packed in front of them, crammed and cramped, but the three of them when sitting equidistant are just a little bit too far away.
Fugo and Mista’s reaction to this predicament has been to slide closer and closer to Giorno: for Fugo, it’s been a slow, gradual process, sneaky but for the way that it’s so incredibly obvious; and for Mista, it’s been a less often, more dramatic sequence of pushes, allegedly in order to hear better or steal a bite of food or whisper gossip about the wait staff. As a result, Giorno sits with Fugo at one side and Mista at the other, the three of them connected through their barely brushing elbows.
And so when Mista raises a hand in some sweeping gesture, his hand is just a little bit too close. Giorno feels the air swish against his hair, his ear, his neck, and flinches away instinctively, knocking his shoulder into Fugo’s and his glass into his lap.
Deep, dark wine spreads heavy across the dusty blue of his pants. He watches it blankly for a moment before Fugo makes some thin exclamation and Mista shoves a napkin into Giorno’s lap.
Giorno freezes before he can help himself at the sudden threat of touch, then forces himself to unfreeze. “Thank you,” he croaks, voice cracked and strange, and ignores the looks he feels them throw him.
2.
The car swings around at 6:50 in the morning, and Giorno steps in at 6:52. He doesn't apologize, doesn't ask how long he’s been waiting; when he opens the door and slides in, his head is high and his voice is firm, and all he says is, “You’re early.”
Fugo, who is already pulling away from the curb, craning his neck to see some unknowable angle in the rear view mirror, barely glances at him. “So are you.”
Their destination is on the other side of town. Morning traffic clogs the main streets and spills unapologetically into the side roads that Fugo swerves through, hands easy and practiced on the wheel. Giorno wonders when he started driving. He’s been meaning to ask, but it never feels quite like the right time, and they never talk about anything that happened before.
Giorno nearly bites his tongue when a car cuts in front of them, and Fugo slams on the breaks, slams his palms into the outside of the steering wheel, and says, “Motherfucker .”
Like a flip of a switch, Giorno’s heart is in his throat, hammering faster than he can breathe; and he isn't quite suffocating but he's nearly choking with how close he is to suffocating, and that’s worse, somehow.
It takes one moment, then two. Traffic keeps moving, Fugo keeps his tense, angry energy directed toward the road without even a glance at Giorno. Giorno keeps breathing, and keeps very, very still.
The anger falls off of Fugo in a gradual simmer, and by the time they’ve been driving another ten minutes, he’s back to normal, smile sheepish and embarrassed, boyish bangs falling into his eyes. “Sorry,” he says, nearly a stage whisper, and then, “How has your morning been?”
Giorno yanks his eyes away from Fugo’s hands — no longer white-knuckled, no longer angry. Safe, normal, regular hands.
“Good,” he answers quietly. “It’s been good.”
3.
Sometimes it feels as if though they have all circled each other so long that there is nothing any of them could do to break that orbit. It’s both comforting and very, very lonely, because every inch they can’t move apart is one they can’t get closer.
Twenty years old, and already Giorno suffocates in the role he’s built for himself.
4.
Buccellati was not his friend when he was alive but he’s something close to it now that he’s dead. Or maybe he’s exactly what he’s always been: an accomplice. Some sort of foggy, distorted mirror.
Giorno had stopped bringing flowers to Buccellati’s grave when he’d formally taken the mantle of don, and had started bringing them again two years later. He has a million and one reasons for the neglect in neat, tidy lists in his head — that he was too busy. That he didn’t care. That the dust hadn’t settled, and it would be too much, too soon, to pay such homage to a fisherman’s son with all the eyes of Naples on him.
There are more than a few funny things about being both famous and infamous. One, that the dust never really settles. Two, that it matters less what he does than he’d thought it had, ultimately.
And so Giorno spends a late windy afternoon at the cemetery, flowers already laid across stone, expensive shoes sinking into the earth as if to claim him, too. He’s alone, despite Mista’s best attempts; it’s too much somehow to be with anyone else here. There are things in his life that he can admit only to the ghosts.
Sometimes he feels he should be dead already — not that he wants to be, just that he has a bone-deep certainty that his clock stopped ticking years ago. Sometimes he feels the only thing that’s kept him alive is his burning, bleeding unwillingness to die.
Buccellati’s name stares up at him from the earth, only just covered by a beautiful, expensive bouquet of lilies. It’s strange to think Buccellati would likely not have cared about how expensive or beautiful they were, if he could see them. It’s strange to think that doesn’t bother Giorno at all.
5.
When Giorno comes around the corner, Mista has Fugo pinned against the wall with a single hand, and their faces are close and serious. The heights are a little wrong — Fugo’s at the tail end of his growth spurt, and his knees are bent to accommodate Mista’s slightly shorter stature. It would look comical in any other circumstance, in any time when their voices weren’t quite so tense and their brows so furrowed.
Giorno watches blatantly, hand running absently over the hem of his sleeve. Mista says something and Fugo says something back, chin jerking up, mouth snapping closed so quick he almost looks ready to bite.
Something mean twists on Mista’s face. He takes a step back, casual and unguarded in the way one only is when there is no threat, or the threat is so meager it can barely be called one at all.
Fugo knows this, too; of course he does. It only takes a moment for his face to go from angry to furious, and then his fingers wrap around Mista’s forearm and tug, and the two of them crash into the wall together.
It’s almost violent, the way they kiss — like they want to eat each other, or beat each other, or prove something neither of them want to say. Mista’s leg slots between Fugo’s and Fugo’s hand twists in the collar of Mista’s shirt, and Giorno wonders if they always have this in them, if they are different people with him than with each other, if this is something he doesn’t have access to, or, even more terrifyingly, if it’s something he does .
In the end, it isn’t the sensation of sharp-toothed panic that makes him leave, but the sudden, belated feeling of being a voyeur. He is, in this, an outsider — and he’s never seen this side of them, either of them. Not at all; not really.
In a way, it has nothing to do with him at all. In another, it takes his orbit, his entire world, and breaks it in two.
6.
Giorno’s mother has not been in contact with him since he was fifteen, and even that’s generous. No one in Passione questions it, either because they’re too afraid or because they themselves don’t have a family to go home to.
Mista and Fugo fall into the latter, he thinks; and with a mix of no family to speak of, blood-stained loyalty, and a healthy dose of luck, it’s just never come up.
Until it does. “A woman here to see you,” Mista clips, measured and searching — and by instinct alone, Giorno freezes.
He doesn’t see her; of course he doesn’t see her. He can’t think of a single thing she could say to him that would make him care enough to see her. He’s far too busy and too important to see her. It’s far too late for him to see her.
And if his vision shakes as he holds her phone number on a delivered card in his hand, no one needs to know.
It feels as if though a boundary has been crossed and a particularly unnecessary precedent set. Mista wouldn’t be his right hand if he didn’t know discretion, and he’s smarter than people give him credit for; no one else talks. There’s no talk about it at all, really.
Mista, Giorno thinks, never asks because it isn’t his business. There is a before and there is a right now , and Mista doesn’t seem to care as much about anyone’s before.
Fugo, though — Fugo is curious. Giorno feels it with every second the other man’s eyes are on him, strangely searching from across the dinner table. The event, already several days old, haunts every moment of the night, from the rendezvous point to a post-dinner walk — and for the first time in a long time, Giorno wishes he hadn’t gone along with these weekly group dinners.
“Will you call?” Fugo asks, voice so soft it’s nearly lost to the wind; and Giorno is reminded that for all of Fugo’s compliance, he doesn’t excel in obedience, not really.
There’s an ocean of space between what he wants to say and what first springs into his mouth. He struggles to contain his own impulses for a moment, feeling young and lost in a way that is more unpleasant than it is unfamiliar; and it kills him, the realization that this fear has never fully left him.
“Would you?” he replies after a long pause.
The night is quiet but for the whistle of the wind and they watch Mista meander back over to their little group of two from the hill Buccellati and the others are buried under. “I don’t know,” he admits, sounding lost and sad and suddenly, achingly young. “I really don’t.”
7.
The next day, everything is as it had been. Mista treats him the same and Fugo tries his best to, and no one speaks of it. Giorno dresses himself to the nines in the morning and attends to his responsibilities with the same put-upon loftiness as always; and he shoves the card in his desk and out of his head and shakes it off.
In the coming weeks, as best as he can manage, he doesn’t think of her at all.
Buccellati’s grave stares up at him, and through the mirror of it Giorno sees himself dead in the dirt just like him — but he isn’t; he’s alive. It occurs to him about five years late that maybe the thing Buccellati reflected was never really him at all.
“I’m not going to call her,” Giorno tells Buccellati. “I’m never going to call her.”
There is a guilt on his shoulders that may never go away, because he is living and Buccellati is dead. Because he walks down that hill and into the car, Mista in the passenger seat and Fugo with his hands already on the wheel, and Buccellati never can. And maybe that weight will never leave him, but he is learning to make peace with the ghosts in his chest.
And at the end of all of it, there is Fugo and Mista. Sometimes it feels as if though the three of them have circled each other so long that there is nothing any of them could do to break that orbit. And it’s hard to say how much of that can be blamed on any one of them, or if there’s any blame to it at all; and it’s hard to say if it has changed, or if it even can.
Except that slowly, subtly, Mista’s hand movements get a little smaller when it’s just them, and Fugo doesn’t shout in the car. Except that sometimes, Fugo and Mista leave their shared dinners together, take the same car to the same place.
They share a life now, the three of them, whether they want to or not —
and it’s startling to Giorno to think, now, that he might want to.
As the car pulls away, a gust of wind shakes the cemetery, making the trees whisper and the grass wave and every petal of every lily Giorno had left push and sway — and it feels like a goodbye, almost. It feels like a world tilting in its orbit.