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They’re stupid kids with mud between their toes and grass in their hair and Fugo loves Giorno the way that he loves the sound of the ravens bickering in the morning, except more. They’re kids and Giorno has his mother’s blue, blue eyes and they’re light like the sky when it’s given up on the rain. Fugo feels the mud under his feet and smiles, just a little.
He takes Giorno’s hand. “Maybe we’ll always get to be together,” he says, young and quiet and full of hope.
A ladybug crawls on their knit fingers. Giorno smiles back. “Maybe,” he answers.
The wind changes direction and the story skips.
—
The ghost that lives in Fugo’s house is angry, is what a well-meaning friend doubling as a self-proclaimed medium tells him. He hasn't decided yet if he wants to believe in ghosts, but the circumstances press him toward yes.
But the ghost doesn't feel angry. It rearranges his magnets sometimes, rolls his water bottle toward him on his desk when he gets too wrapped up in his work. It flicks the radio on sometimes, especially when he’s not home; he’ll come home to music playing in his empty room. And when his parents fight down the hall, it locks his door.
“You’re not bad, are you?” he asks his ceiling late at night, his reading glasses discarded on his bedside table.
The ghost doesn't answer. Without Fugo moving a muscle, the light turns off.
—
He wasn't born to hold a sword and it shows in the way that he stands, grip unsure and stance uneven, halfway hunched over a boy he hardly knows. He’s not meant for this; he’s a noble, for gods’ sake. The last sword he’d held was wood and paint when he was half his current height.
The king’s magicians mob around him like a swarm of angry bees. When the air starts to split into the sharp crack of incoming magic, Fugo braces himself and closes his eyes.
Giorno’s up in a second, loose hair floating around him like a makeshift crown. He says something in a language Fugo doesn't know, and energy bursts out of him in a great, crashing wave. His gloves had been torn off in the prior struggle, and when he grabs Fugo’s wrist and makes a run for the door, Fugo feels the black claws of his fingernails dig into his skin.
“Why are you taking me?” he shrieks, stumbling into a sprint in an attempt to keep up. Giorno’s hair seems to grow in front of his eyes, and the edges smack him squarely in the face.
“Would you rather die?” Giorno huffs, eyes fierce and intent and focused solely on the gate out of the city, their only means of escape.
The wind picks up, dust blowing onto Fugo’s dark pants, into his eyes. In front of them, the gate starts to close with a harsh, angry creak.
—
The voice on the radio is nice and even and he enjoys having it on in the background during his long drive home. It’s rare for him to pass through this section of desert and even rarer for him to find anything with reception to listen to.
When he drives too far, the voice flickers and dies out; he reaches out without looking and changes the station.
—
Fugo has magic humming under his veins and it feels like death and fire and the only reason he ever does magic is because he wants it to be out. He wants that feeling he didn't realize he had as a kid of being quiet and cold and of not being so increasingly, incredibly aware of his body, but his fingers twitch at his sides and his hair smells like coal, and his eye bags are dark and heavy.
His summon this time is a golden burst of light with a name that’s sweet on the tongue, but when it dissolves into crackles and bursts after one too many hits from the opposing party, he can’t bring himself to feel too sorry. Summons are to a summoner what a nail is to a carpenter, and once it’s been used, it’s been used.
In the distance, thunder crackles with an intensity that shakes all surrounding sound.
—
Across the line, the voice on the phone is pretty and low. “I’m sorry,” it says, not especially apologetic, “but I think you have the wrong number.”
Fugo opens his mouth, maybe to apologize or maybe to not — but the click of the line disconnecting is as final as anything else. He pulls the receiver away from his ear, rereads the note in his pocket. Carefully repunches in the numbers.
A familiar voice picks up this time: his coworker, boring and not especially pretty and the person who he had meant to call in the first place. Fugo puts the note down, smooths his brow, and tries his best to pay attention.
When he lies down in bed later, the sound of the phone disconnecting repeats in his head.
—
He’s never noticed it before, but the sky howls when it’s angry. Flushes a deep, angry purple and opens up the way a poorly stitched wound splits, cries its distress in great gusts of something that should be pretty but just sounds like pain. Fugo leans his back against the lighthouse with a daze of a feeling, watching the town below, his town, get swept into pieces like a miniature replica, like an unwanted movie set.
At his side, Giorno’s eyes are blank and his skin is damp and cold. Fugo wants to reach out, to feel his pulse as an indication he’s still alive — but he couldn't touch him, not now.
The storm screams empty. Within his camera, the film splits.
—
A figure pins him against the wall in an alley and rips a chunk out his carotid artery before he has the chance to blink. On the corner, the stoplight changes to green.
—
He didn't want someone else in his house, but his mother insists on the charity case with an intensity that only means the other boy will be useful to his father’s political career, somehow. Fugo doesn't care much for it; he’s too old to believe in his parents and too young to do anything about it. When the other boy pulls up a seat at the dinner table, his dark hair falls in his eyes, and he doesn't look up, not once. When he reaches for the butter dish, his hand trembles.
Haruno, Fugo’s parents call him. Haruno. Fugo repeats the name to himself over and over the morning that the boy succumbs to his sickness, lying face up on his bed with a quiet numb in his chest. He wonders what the boy’s body had looked like when they’d taken it out. He wonders if he should've tried to speak to him, to really speak to him, at least once.
Haruno, he says, but something about the name doesn't stick; it slides off his tongue like water.
—
Everything is hazy and slow and Fugo feels like his brain is made out of molasses, both for the speed that his thoughts travel and for the way he imagines it spilling out of his cracked open head and onto the ground.
“You’re okay; you’ll be okay,” Giorno is insisting, but his voice wavers, and Fugo wants to tell him that he has to go, has to escape, that they left a blood trail and Fugo’s as good as dead and that Giorno still has a fighting chance.
“I love you,” he says instead, and Giorno freezes with his hands pressed to the massive hole in Fugo’s torso. Giorno is using his sweater to staunch the bleeding, Fugo realizes. That’s no good; he’ll need that. He gets cold.
He wants to tell him again that he loves him and he wants to tell him that it was worth it, that he’d do it all again, that if only one of the two of them could live then it should always be Giorno and if only one person on the planet could live then that should always be Giorno, too. He wants to tell him that he’s lost too much blood for the pain to be any more than a sharp stab when he breathes in and that he has no regrets and that Giorno has to go.
He wants to kiss him. “I’m not forgiving you for this,” Giorno breathes as he stumbles to his feet; when he swipes the back of his hand across his mouth, it leaves a dark red stain.
Fugo smiles and closes his eyes. “Go,” he says, and when he opens them again, Giorno is gone.
A gun fires in the distance in the direction they’d run from. He hears voices, footsteps, kids just as young and dumb and desperate as them stomping through the brush like untrained hunting dogs. Fugo hears all of this, all of it, closer, closer, closer — then nothing at all.
—
The song on the speaker is more rhythm than sound and Fugo knows in his heart that there’s no point to it, but his friend elbows him sharp in his ribs and the blonde at the counter is so, so pretty, so Fugo gathers the vestiges of his courage and plays for casual as he takes a seat.
It’s obvious from the get-go that the other man doesn't buy it, leaning his chin into his hand with a quirked brow. “A dare from your friends?” he asks, somewhere between amused and flat and sharp, and Fugo’s heart stutters in his chest.
“More a test of courage,” he answers, and it’s mostly true. The other man stares at him long and hard for a moment, then throws his head back and laughs. Fugo runs his eyes down the long, smooth line of his Adam’s apple and feels hopeless, just hopeless.
“Sure,” the blonde responds with a grin that’s all angles, “but I’m no easy A.” He eyes Fugo up and down, a gangly wisp of a man, and holds out his hand.
“I’m Giorno,” he says.
Someone changes the radio station; the song stutters and flips.
—
The whole school won’t stop talking about the boy in the other class whose stepfather had died. It’s a small school, and word travels fast; Fugo keeps quiet and listens to his teachers talk to them in soft voices about respect and grief, and Fugo tries to get glimpses of the other boy across the hall. He can't empathize, exactly, but loss is loss.
When the police come, they take the other boy away in cuffs. Fugo finally gets a solid look at him and is surprised by the dead look on his face; even more surprised at the flashing, furious spark in his eye.
The sirens make Fugo’s ears ache. When they’re switched to off, it feels like an ending.
—
It’s not an ending.
—
His temper breaks with Narancia the way it so rarely does anymore, and he’s so focused on the knife pressed to his throat that he barely even notices someone else walk in.
Buccellati leads the newcomer like a herald for a king and it’s wrong, the way that he acts around him, because Buccellati is capable and not one to bow down. The boy behind him is small and strange, entirely too composed but for the way that his eyes dart around the room like he’s mentally cataloguing it.
The harsh, artificial light off the room shines soft off the red of the other boy’s ladybug pins. Fugo meets his eyes briefly, blue like the sky when it’s given up on the rain, and the fever in the room breaks like a light turned off.
“I’m Giorno Giovanna,” he greets, ducking his head lightly. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”