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After Diavolo is dead, or whatever passes for dead, anyway, Giorno’s takeover of Passione is seamless. Money, power, influence, and everything he’s ever imagined fulfilling his dream would bring falls effortlessly into his lap. He tries to remind himself: he’s earned this. He did, or someone did, or someone’s ghost; but dead men can’t tell tales, and they can’t inherit cities. Giorno holds tight onto his golden key and accepts his responsibility with grace, head held high.
The boy prince of Naples, they say, the Neapolitan golden boy. Coming out of hiding for the first time, they say, and what reform, what favors he’s doing for the people. Giorno makes public appearances and hosts elaborate parties, plans outfits as careful as his charities and dodges the first bullets that dare to graze him. It’s a shame, he thinks, that it’d happened in polite company, but savagery is only in examples that haven't been made correctly. And he doesn't get shot at again.
Giorno Giovanna has a dream, not just in the inside of his head, now, but in his hands, concrete and tangible in a way that he’d pictured, but never imagined. He holds his head high, accepts his crown, feels the weight of the key in his pocket.
—
His stepfather always used to tell him that he sits too still, stares too long, and maybe it’s true. Maybe there’s truth to that, and that’s why the bruises on his skin stained such a dark color, and maybe that’s why he still can’t seem to get them out, years and years later and still waking up with dreams etched black against his eyelids, scratching desperately at his arms to escape the marks that aren't there.
The nightmares have friends, now: dreams of lions and lambs alike led to slaughter, smiling boys pushed through and impaled on thorns and vines, laughter and flowers still bubbling out of their mouths. And a smiling man, a kind man, reaching both hands out but always out of reach, while he rots and wilts and breaks into pieces. Giorno always thinks, in these dreams: I can save them. Even after they’re torn to pieces, holes in their guts, skin falling off, he’s always pressing his palms to their skin, desperate: I can fix them. But he should know better, really; all that grows from him are more thorns. After all, he’d never been a healer.
—
Mista needs the most in the first few months. He sticks close and cautious, attentive as a guard dog; but sometimes he moves too fast, touches too much, and Giorno doesn't need the time off, but he’d like it.
“Mista,” he says without looking up, his hands arranged carefully on his desk, covered in papers and promises, “I’d like you to do something for me.”
Personal missions are a risk because they are the only instances in which Mista will not tell Giorno when he’s making a bad choice. The other man is cautious with his job, his policies, will sit in to meetings and listen to Giorno lean heavy against his chair and complain about money and politics, but when it comes to his life, he trusts Giorno implicitly. Giorno struggles with that.
So that when Mista comes home riddled with bullets, more concerned with giving a mission report than stopping the bleeding, Giorno panics. He freezes mid-step, feels his face go blank; and it’s weak, it’s pathetic, he’s gone through so much worse than this — but that’s supposed to be over, now, he’s supposed to be safe now, and Mista is his friend.
“I knew it’d be fine, Boss,” Mista tells him later, sitting on the floor with his back to Giorno’s desk, “I knew you’d fix me up,” and Giorno wants to scream: he is not a healer. But Giorno Giovanna doesn't scream, so instead he reaches down with one hand to pat Mista’s head, and goes back to work.
—
Giorno got good at a young age at keeping himself contained. It earned him a lot of pain, but then, everything earned him a lot of pain when he was younger. And it was safer, to be quiet and still and careful, to watch for cues and leave when things got dangerous, than it was to be loud or outwardly defiant, to draw attention to himself.
He tells himself it doesn't affect him anymore. Giorno Giovanna — already Giorno Giovanna, always Giorno Giovanna — does not get hung up on useless things.
And besides, he’s never been content to sit still in anything that counts. There is a goal to reach, always, a light at the end of the tunnel; it is his goal that keeps him moving forward. And to an extent, he struggles with that, too, because this ideal he’s been holding up as salvation for most of his life is here in his hands, and now that he has it, he finds himself floundering. Staying up late at night, wondering: what is he meant to be doing now? What is there for him to do? And he forges ahead by the strength of his own light, but he doesn't find the answer, and the nightmares don’t go away.
—
He doesn't know a lot about love. Love can’t be his mother, can’t be his stepfather, can’t be the father he’d never met. It can’t be the friends he’d never had or the family he’d never found, or not when he was a kid, anyway. Giorno didn’t have a lot when he was a kid, besides caution and willfulness, a stubborn sort of passion that told him that he’d get out of this, one day. And that was fine, and that got him here, but it isn't love.
He finds something, though, in Bucciarati, and then in Polnareff: something like love, and something like home. He didn't love Bucciarati, couldn't have, in the few days they’d known each other, but sometimes he feels like he’s starting to. He visits the man’s grave often, turns his scarves and jewelry into flowers, offerings for someone who would have lived a longer life but maybe not a better one, if he had never met him. The specific flowers are a surprise to him, though the same ones seem to crop up often: magnolia and bittersweet, cyclamen and anemone. Once, palm leaves; more than once, purple hyacinth. He goes home and falls asleep with the taste of rot in his mouth.
“He would have been proud of you,” Polnareff tells him once, looking comfortable and at ease across from him. Giorno does not jump, but he startles; but Polnareff’s attention has already shifted back to his work. When he tilts his head down to do the same, his pen is gone; in it’s place, in the center of his palm, is a sprig of sweet pea.
—
Fugo crashes back into his life the way he crashes into everything: impetuously and reluctantly, and then suddenly he’s fully invested, all pride and staunch devotion. “Giogio,” and it’s in whispers, small kisses to the backs of his hands like declarations of love. And Giorno doesn't know a lot about love, but he knows this.
There’s a careful distance, a step between them that he feels more and more intensely with each passing day. Fugo is a subordinate, an advisor, one of his oldest friends. He loves him. And he isn't sure which one of them is maintaining this distance, or if it’s both of them, because Giorno is untouchable, has to be untouchable, and Fugo can’t be touched. Not like this, not now; the time is wrong. There is so much to know and so much to heal and Giorno is not a healer. These things take time.
Except that Fugo forgets his own birthday but remembers all Giorno’s favorite foods, approaches him slow and doesn't touch him uninvited. Except that Fugo is so kind and hates himself so much, and he’ll spit venom and curses but he melts into Giorno like he’s his whole world. Maybe he is.
“Fugo,” he says one day as the other boy walks into his office, hands folded neatly in his lap, hair neatly plaited, “Will you do something for me?”
Fugo is on his knee as soon as he’s close enough to reach him. “Anything,” he breathes, presses his love to Giorno’s knuckle like a promise, and Giorno believes him.
—
There’s a thought that strikes him, sometimes, when he says or does something that makes the public opinion turn sour, more toward fear than respect, or when Polnareff gives him a look in reaction, equal parts cautious and loving, and he wonders about what Doctor Kujo had told him.
Jotaro Kujo is not a nice man, but he’s a kind man: humble and earnest, with a selfless heart. His voice is low and very nearly gentle when he tells him that his father is dead.
It isn’t grief exactly that he feels; he’d never known the man, after all. But he doesn't feel the hatred toward him that he’s clearly meant to; he can’t bring himself to think of his father as a monster. And maybe that’s the fault in him, the childishness, that he can’t quite manage to tear down this ideal he’s survived on. Or maybe that’s love.
He recognizes it in himself, too: the coldness, the god complex, the power lust. He isn't Haruno Shiobana, not anymore and not ever; he’d left him behind, shed like an old skin, an old weight. But he feels that vulnerability in him still, sharp in his lungs, and he hates it; he’d rather be powerful enough to lose himself than be weak enough to lose. He’d rather be like his father than his mother.
—
Giorno doesn't know a lot about love, except that sometimes, Mista sings. His voice is deep and pretty, smoothest when he isn't paying attention, and he’ll switch mid-song, from singing to humming to whistling and back. Giorno places the tips of his fingers to his lips; he’d never learned how to whistle.
“You’re like a bird,” Mista tells him once, swiping a thumb across his cheekbone, careless smile on his face. It’s a silly gesture, a thoughtless gesture, would be friendly, if Mista didn't love him. As it stands, Giorno knows that he loves him; it’s the category that’s tricky. The love is there, but the want is more difficult. Giorno thinks that he wants to be wanted.
“I’m not,” he refutes, trying desperately to keep his face from flushing, before he realizes that it doesn't matter, that it’s only Mista. The other boy raises his eyebrows at him, and Giorno replies, before he can even think about it, “I don’t know how to sing.”
Mista laughs, full and hearty and at ease, “Then I’ll teach you,” and he doesn’t, really, can’t really tame Giorno’s stammering gun-shy singing voice, but they spend the afternoon sitting too close, feeling too much, and by the end of it, Giorno at least knows how to whistle.
—
Things are less dangerous, now, less dire, but it isn't too horribly rare for Mista or Fugo to drag themselves or each other into his office, bleeding and full of holes, full of wounds for him to patch up. Mista, with his absolute faith in Giorno’s impulsive decisions, and Fugo, so determined to prove himself, working up from the bottom for no reason other than that he thinks he’s supposed to.
It’s strange for him, to have been assigned this role. He keeps telling them, over and over: he is not a healer. Gold Experience can stitch people back together, plug them up, fill in wounds — but there’s nothing gentle in it. It isn’t kind.
It’s Fugo who relearns that, this time. Giorno rips off his gloves, the new ones, tailor-made and eggshell white, and stuffs one into the wound on Fugo’s side, a direct mirror to his scar from the mission he’d gone on with Sheila and Murolo forever and a day ago.
“Fuck,” Fugo groans, leaning his head back onto the floor, as Gold Experience begins slowly and painfully filling him in, but beyond that, he doesn't complain.
Giorno feels his hands shaking. “I wish you’d stop doing this,” he mumbles; it would be a whisper, if he weren't himself, if he weren't Giorno Giovanna. But he is, always has been, so he ignores it when Fugo whips his head back up to look at him, wincing at the sudden motion.
“Giogio?” he asks, and there’s so much hesitance there, and Giorno hates this; he isn't a healer. He’s good at a lot of things, Naples’s golden boy, armed with money and power and composure, but he isn't good at this. This isn't what he’s made for.
Fugo is still until they're finished, then leans quiet against his desk; he doesn't seem to know what to do with his hands, leaving them in his lap, then at his sides, then on his knees, then back. Giorno watches him from his spot on the floor across from him, only a few feet away; if he’d spread his legs out, they could be touching. He keeps his calves tucked carefully under him; Giorno has to be untouchable, and Fugo can’t be touched.
There’s visible hesitance, his mouth opening and closing several times, before Fugo works up the nerve to speak. “Do you not… like doing it?” he asks, head down, brow furrowed.
Silence, and then Giorno says, carefully, “It’s not as if though it matters what I like doing.”
That makes Fugo look up, eyes locking on him with that unshakeable intensity that he only gets when he’s not paying attention to it. “That’s not true,” he insists, and it sounds like a promise, in the way that everything that Fugo says sounds like a promise. That’s not true, he’s saying, because it matters to me, what you like doing. Because I would follow you into hell, for doing what you like doing. Because I already am.
Giorno knows that, but he doesn't say it. Instead, he brushes his fingers through his hair, carefully adjusts one of his rings, and then folds his hands neatly and intones, “I am not a healer.” A pause, and then, “You can’t just expect me to fix you.”
He hadn't meant to say that, and it’s rare, for him to say something he doesn't mean to say. But if Fugo startles over it, he doesn't show it; instead, he pitches forward, hands on his knees this time, and tells him, “That’s not it.” Even before he continues, Giorno can see it, in his posture, the open want in his eyes; and then he relaxes back against the desk, smiling so small and kind, and breathes, “You’ve already saved me, Giorno.”
And Giorno can’t understand how Fugo doesn't know that he’s the one doing the saving.
—
He doesn't know a lot about love, and he’s never been an incredible learner, really; he excels at what he has an affinity for and drowns in everything else, and he’s never been good at this. But Polnareff gives him advice and doesn't turn him away, even when he comes late at night, waking the other man, shaking and useless from nightmares. He doesn't know about love, but Fugo shortens his steps to match him and brings him breakfast in the mornings. He doesn't know about love, but Mista likes to sing and tells bad jokes when the week’s been too long.
And Giorno laughs, hand over his mouth, and flowers spring up from between his fingers, unintended and unannounced. Stems twine around him in place of his rings, and he manages a weak glare at Gold Experience before he opens his palm.
Orange blossom and bachelor button, small and sweet and pretty. Gold Experience stands behind him, silent, and blinks slow.
Mista pauses in front of him, mid-story. “Gio?” he asks, leaning his elbows on the desk.
This wasn't a part of his dream; they weren't a part of his dream. Not Fugo, who thrives with attention and a goal, a way to prove himself, who’s comfortable in rules and should-be’s and remembers his favorite color. And not Mista, either, who’s always had a purpose, always had a place, but who trusts him so absolutely, who’s with him at every turn and taught him how to whistle. He hadn't meant to find a home, here.
“It’s nothing,” he says, still staring down at his palm, and had it always been so easy to breathe? Had there always been so much light in this room? He tilts his head up and sends Mista a careless, fragile smile. “It’s nothing,” he says again.
He falls asleep with the smell of it under his tongue, at the back of his throat, citrus and floral and sweet: orange blossom and bachelor button; and his sleep that night is long and dreamless.