Chapter Text
Mista woke up in the middle of the night. His bladder was full; he really needed to take a piss.
As he muggily opened his eyes he saw Giorno was still beside him, deeply asleep and turned over the other direction, facing the window. The second floor balcony's open doors let in a warm summer breeze that touched at the edges of the Boy King's loosened, sleep-mussed hair, and sent them shifting in small gold flickers against his brow. He was warm from sleep and slightly flushed, his lips parted as he breathed, shirt off his shoulder and sheets pooling at the small of his back, mostly off him.
God, he was fucking adorable. There really wasn't another word for it. Mista smiled in sleepy fondness and, through his half-there haze, tried to slip away from the bed quietly so he wouldn't disturb Giorno. Mista knew how hard it was for Giorno to get enough sleep as it was.
Everything was quiet. No crickets singing in the garden, no sound of rustling trees, no distant sound of vehicles. A deep, complete stillness enveloped everything. Even the air, which moved in light puffs, left no sounds in its wake.
Mista's tan hand slid along the bedside table. He picked up his revolver - just a habit, really; he didn't feel right without it being at hand at all times, even for something as dumb as this. Then he padded across the bedroom floor to slip into the bathroom and relieve himself. He yawned silently. His footsteps made no sounds on the carpet. When he put the gun down on top of the toilet, there wasn't even the slightest clink of metal on porcelain.
When he yanked down his bright red boxers to relieve himself there was no sound of the piss entering the toilet. The gunner wasn't really awake enough to notice; he was on autopilot and his eyes were half-closed, fogged with sleep. The Sex Pistols were a dull clatter in his head but he didn't quite follow - they were always yammering about something or other, his random internal thoughts and subconscious instincts manifested into a colony of weird bullet-imps, and half the time he just tuned their chatter out on autopilot.
A huff of unheard breath, he shook his dick out and tucked himself away, and there still was no sound at all. When he reached for the handle of the toilet - no sound. He was way too fucking tired for this, and blinked at the handle for a second. He just assumed the toilet was broken, so he jiggled the handle again. No piss. Water running clear. But … where was the gurgling? Huh. Weird. He shoved a finger into his ear canal and jiggered it, like that would somehow help.
Something in the back of his head started to buzz, maybe the Pistols had it before he did, maybe it was just instinct: a tiny itch that said 'something's wrong', and he was so fucking tired and whatever it was, honest to GOD he didn't want to deal with it right then. But Giorno was in the other room, asleep, and it was his job to make sure that Giorno had a good night's sleep for once, so Mista wiped at his eyes to try and push the sleep off, snatched up the gun from the toilet and moved fast back into the bedroom.
He ran face first into a wall of oppressive Stand energy, a miasma so thick and smothering he could almost smell it. Hell, he could see it. There was someone standing in the bed, in their bed, looming over Giorno's sleeping body, surrounded by a sickly rust-orange Stand glow and a tangible sense of menace. A weird, zombie-like looking kid with the biggest, creepiest, widest, emptiest eyes Mista had ever seen. The kid looked like some kind of spectre, some cursed zombie that had crawled straight out of a thrift store painting done by an insomniac, and Mista was all at once fully and horribly awake.
What the fuck what the fuck what the FUCK.
Mista instantly braced, snapped and aimed, right at the kid's head, without so much as a moment of hesitation. What the fuck, he opened his mouth to yell, thought he was yelling, get away from him right now.
Nothing came out. And then everything dropped on his head all at the same time. Silence. Giorno. This kid. Attack. Sex Pistols, all six of them, roared out from around Mista's head and shoulders, and he couldn't hear them even inside his head, but he could feel and see them. The Pistols were gesticulating wildly to each other in mid-air, making frantic motions with their hands, slapping their hands mutely at the sides of their cone-shaped heads, trying to scream at each other, eyes panicked.
Mista realized he wouldn't be able to wake up Giorno with the gunshots or any cries. Mista tilted his gun a fraction of a millimeter and shot the creepy kid in the fucking knee, trying another tactic. Bright red blood sprayed all over their cream-colored beddings. Blood that splashed partially over Giorno, over his face and in his hair, sprayed into the mattress and both of their pillows, falling in absolute silence under the fractured moonlight from the open terrace. Giorno didn't seem to respond, didn't flinch, didn't even move against the pillow his head rested on. Mista grimaced. The Stand was probably muzzling everything, and possibly also keeping Giorno numb, too. The kid, the Stand user, fell away, nudging Giorno's sleeping body (better just be unconscious better not be dead you of all people wouldn't die this way) slightly in the arm, staggered to the left side of the bed, slipped on the blood on the mattress and then flopped like a broken doll to the floor.
Mista moved around, the Pistols glimmering near him and his revolver ready to shoot again. The zombie kid staggered up and just looked at him for a second, with those eerie eyes and blank face, and then started to limp-run on all fours toward the door leading out of the master suite. Fast for some little shit that just took it in the knee, skittering like a wounded spider with a weird gait.
If he didn't move he could lose the kid in the depths of the house. He could either try and wake up Giorno or get after the little fuck. Without the ability to hear each other he couldn't coordinate his intentions with the Pistols and he didn't have time to waste trying to pantomime out what he wanted them to do. He made the best call he could in the moment. Mista barrelled after the creepy little kid, following out into the hall, and the confused Pistols followed him in a bewildered swarm.
He wouldn't have left Giorno alone if he'd seen the carnage in the hall even two seconds before he made it out of the bedroom. Their two prime defensive Stand users, Lattuga and Cetriolo, were dead near the door, their bodies almost unrecognizable with high-caliber entrance wounds where their hands, hearts and faces were supposed to be. The creepy zombie kid somehow made it all the way down the hall and into the south stairwell on his fucking hands and bloody knees, leaving a gory trail all over Giorno's tasteful carpeting. And the the guys that were coming down the south stairs to cover the creepy kid were the size of elephants stuffed inside a couple of silverbacks, and they had semiautomatics still smoking from a hot firing somewhere behind them that Mista hadn't heard. They were all in deep, deep shit.
He was out here in a pair of fucking bright red boxers and nothing else, with five shots in the barrel; he couldn't talk to the Pistols, Giorno was unresponsive (just unconscious; he couldn't be dead he couldn't be) in the bedroom; their prime defenses were dead.
Mista gasped in a hard, sharp breath.
I love you, Giorno Giovanna, he thought, prayed. Wake up and save me pretty soon, yeah?
He snapped out and forward, charging across the hall with an unheard yell, toward the big guys and the creep, and felt the hard sting of the first bullet grinding into the meat of his right thigh without a sound.
Everything went slow around him, like the big expensive American movie where you could see every single bullet trail in motion. He felt great calm descend, and the next few seconds were a hail of soundless traded bullet fire. He didn't have enough ammunition to shoot back, but the Pistols by that point had somehow worked out what was going on and come to a plan of their own, rallying around Number One. They had gone for the White Album play - maybe, somewhere in hell, Ghiaccio might have been satisfied to know he'd left a permanent mark on their psyche. The Pistols swarmed and rebounded, swirling in a cloud in front of Mista like aggravated bees, sweeping wide and refracting the multiple rounds of fire coming from the big guys. The creepy kid was caught in the middle of the crossfire, everyone pinned in their places in the stairwell; the Pistols deliberately skewed shots from the gorillas toward him, and their aim was a little wobbly without being able to track the sound, but good enough to get the job done anyway.
The creepy kid didn't last long when the Pistols aimed multiple shots at his head and back. He went down like tenderized meat in a grinder, torn open in the shoulder and back, with one bullet slamming into the back of his skull and coming out through his left eye, brain matter and ichor ending up bubbling back down the stairwell in slow rivulets.
Dead, the creepy kid's Stand miasma collapsed instantly, and suddenly all manner of sounds came roaring back in. Mista went from being almost numb to almost deaf, as the sound of richocheting bullets exploded loudly around them all at once, the noise bounding off the walls of the stairwell. The Pistols were jeering rudely - and the sound returning startled them, allowing several bullets to slip past them and embed thunk- thunk-thunk into the doorframe, the bottom of the stairwell, and two in Mista's ribs. But for a few seconds nobody fired because the sudden return of the sound after silence was bewildering and without the Pistols control things were just flying wildly everywhere. Mista pushed himself down flat. The Pistols rolled back and formed up above his head, shouting creative curses into the stairwell.
Just when Mista was thinking the tide was going to turn, that they might have a chance, everything went to shit again.
He started to get up, ready to tell the Pistols to get into position to bounce his last shots up the stairwell, and then there was an explosion. A big, loud awful one, fire and heat that hurled him up off his feet and tossed him forward to the next part of the stairwell; he hit the wall with his right shoulder and bounced off it, landing on hard concrete.
His ears rang from the explosion, his body ached from being tossed around and shot, and he couldn't see. At all. At all.
The Pistols shrieked his name, and regrouped around his head again. 5 wailed. "Mista, Mista!! You have to get up!!" Number 7 was near his opposite ear. "We think it's another Stand!"
"Wh... what's happening?" The gunner was bewildered, struggling to get his focus back through the tinny whine now in his ears and the total blackness that had washed away everything. He couldn't see a damn thing, not even the vaguest outlines. Pain and confusion sunk deep into his chest. He tried to think, to focus, like Giorno would, and look for a solution, but he couldn't get over the buzzing in his ears, the blood running down his side, and the searing pain when he tried to take too deep a breath. It was making him lightheaded.
"It's another Stand!" 7 cried. "There's another Stand effect! You need to get up, they're coming down the stairs for you!" Mista staggered upright, hand flailing at empty air until it found the wall. Through the building headache he heard the thumping of multiple sets of boots, heavy feet; shit, the elephant guys were coming for him, right. He bared his teeth. "Can you see, Pistols?!" He yelled, raising his gun in the unending blackness. It was crazy to even consider shooting in this conditions, but did he have a choice?
"Yeah, yeah!! Shoot shoot shoot!" 7 cried. "Get ready to go, bitches!" he yelled to the other Pistols as they moved, invisible to Mista but still tangible in his spacial awareness, "We're aiming for the shitheads upstairs!"
In total darkness and with nothing to go on but the hope that the Pistols could control the shots, Mista swung his revolver toward what he desperately hoped was the right direction and fired three of them. THOOM THOOM THOOM, the shots echoed and cracked like thunder, and he heard the shrill "Yeeeehaaaa!" of the Bullets, the crack of Stand impacting the metal casings of the shots and redirecting them. There were three very satisfying sounds of shots impacting flesh, and loud thumps.
"Got 'em, got 'em!" the Pistols cheered. "Headshots!! Got em, Mista!!"
Mista leaned against the wall, gasping for breath. He could smell smoke wafting into the stairwell; felt a hot surge of air. Well, he knew which direction wasn't a good idea for his naked ass to go, then. He fumbled at the air until he found the stairwell's handrail. He took a tentative step up, his punctured ribs aching with the movement. "Can't...go back down," he ground out. "Tell me... when I get to the door to the roof."
In pain, determined, with two shots left, Mista forced himself upward, guiding himself with his hand on the metal rail. Step by step.