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“Oh shit,” Narancia says, in a surprised, conversational way that one might comment on a sudden rainfall, and then he collapses to the floor.
In the short amount of time between a plate of bruschetta with Bruno Bucciarati and this—this being a gunfight in a shipyard, an asshole with a Stand that turns things into magnets, and only one bullet left to his name—Mista has heard oh shit preface a lot of things. It’s multi-purpose. He’d said it himself when Basic Element had landed a hit on Narancia’s shoulder and the bullet Mista had fired a second earlier had swung a hard, sudden left, straight into Narancia’s stomach. He’s heard it plenty.
But this time it’s different. This time it’s bad.
Mista kills the guy in one shot. Right between the eyes.
Mista can’t wait for Bucciarati to make capo. For one thing, it’ll mean more money, but for another thing, it’ll mean that he’ll have practically every surgeon in the city under his thumb, instead of just the veterinarian in Quartieri Spagnoli, a whole damn twenty minutes away from the shipyard.
“Are we there yet?” Narancia mumbles from the passenger seat, leaking blood onto the carpet and Mista’s balled-up shirt. His head lolls around whenever Mista swerves too hard to blast through a red light. He’s breathing too fast, too shallow. “Hey… Mista? Mista… I’m hungry. I mean I’m seriously really really hungry.”
Mista doesn’t know what to do, not with so many blocks still left to go and Narancia’s voice sounding so small, so he punches the steering wheel and curses. Why him? He’s been a gangster for what, a month? He barely even knows this guy—barely knows any of them, beyond some laughs around a restaurant table, beyond the shared exhilaration of Stand-fighting—but he knows him enough to know that he’s good, in a way like no one Mista’s ever known is, and that if he dies… if he dies because of Mista—
Whatever you do, Bucciarati had said, his voice taut and static-wrung on the speaker of the burner phone, keep him awake. We’ll meet you there.
“Oi, Narancia,” Mista barks, swerving to avoid a pitched-over trash can. “You still with me?”
Narancia hums, faint but there. He’s slumped almost completely over now, his previously steady grip on the shirt Mista had passed him to stem the blood flow slackening by the second.
“Shit,” Mista says under his breath, and fumbles for a topic, a rope to throw. “Tell me something, man. Tell me about, uh… I don’t know… what’d you do before this? Before Passione.”
Narancia’s silence stretches between them, cold and inert, and Mista is about to panic when it breaks.
“Um…” Narancia gulps, soundless, sitting up a little. His hands are shaking. He’s got small wrists, Mista’s noticed. “W’s gonna die. Eye hurt. Bucciarati… fixed me.”
Another red light up ahead. Mista floors it.
“He fixed you, huh? Yeah. Me too.” He takes a left down a narrow side street, barely wide enough to fit the car, but it’s quicker. The cobblestone rattles the car. “Listen—you didn’t die then and you aren’t gonna die now, okay? You—”
“R-Really?” Narancia asks, so softly that Mista almost doesn’t hear it.
“What?”
Narancia chokes on something, the passing shafts of light in the darkness flitting across his one glistening hand, the red-black bloom on his shirt. His voice is thick with pain and something else when he lifts his head, looks Mista square in the eyes, and whimpers, “You promise?”
Mista almost stops the car right there, but he knows he can’t. All that he can think about, for a second, is the idea of that face going still, the eyes empty—and it makes him feel like he’s going to be sick.
On his first day with Passione, Bucciarati had sent him on a bodyguarding mission with Narancia. Standard muscle for some banking executive who had to close a shady deal in a shady neighborhood. On the walk back, Narancia had summoned his Stand, just for the hell of it, just because the thing had been restless with so little to do.
Mista had craned his neck to look: he had seen the sunlight glinting off of its wings, its sleek red shape darting among the clouds, and Narancia watching it go, laughing. Wind in his hair. Narancia, calling after it through cupped hands, fierce and proud: Volare via, baby!
Mista had known it then, and he knows it now. Narancia’s the kind of person who should live forever.
“Yeah, Narancia; I promise,” he says, with everything in him. “You’re gonna be fine. I’ve got you.” Because it feels important, he repeats it, in the buckling, muffled quiet of the car: “I’ve got you.”
The car emerges onto a main and well-lit street again, and Mista peels out down the wrong lane, knuckles blanched on the wheel. Narancia’s head whacks into the window and he groans.
“Your driving sucks, Mista.”
“Hey, hey, hey! That’s pretty rude! I’m getting us there, aren’t I?!”
Narancia squints out at the street. “Are you…?”
“Of course I am,” Mista retorts. “Six more minutes, tops. Tell me more stuff, will you? Anything that comes to mind. Boss says I gotta keep you awake.”
He pauses, realizing what he’s just said. “I mean—Bucciarati. Bucciarati says I gotta keep you awake.”
“You can call him the boss,” Narancia says. The edges of the words slur together, but his admiration is still evident. “He’s gonna be. Someday.”
He pushes himself up, his arm trembling with effort, and lets out a ragged breath, biting his lip. His eyes are glassy, aimless. The sick feeling returns, churning in Mista’s stomach.
Mista, Number Two and I can pull the bullet out! The first of the six small Stands that had unfolded from an arrow to the neck had told him this, back at the warehouse—its voice had been everywhere at once, heard and not heard. Just give us orders, okay? We can—
“What the hell do you care?” Mista had snapped back, Narancia’s hand fisted in his shirt, Narancia’s blood on his cheek. “Quit distracting me! I gotta think, damn it!”
What do you mean? The fifth one had appeared, floating in front of him, its weird eyes glistening, as if from unshed tears. All of the Stands are about the same size, but this one has always felt like the smallest to Mista, and the easiest to like. You want him to be okay, Mista. You want to save him. You want to protect him. So we do, too!
Then it had started crying, little wailing sobs, rubbing at its eyes with its tiny hands. S-So please don’t yell at us!
Mista can’t remember the last time he cried—maybe at a movie, a goodbye in it, a piano and some strings—but it comes to this one so easily. Number... Five, right? He’s still learning the order, the personalities. Number Five.
Now, Mista shuts his eyes tightly for a second and tries to breathe. He knows how bullet wounds work—the slug’s probably going to stay in Narancia forever. He’ll probably be able to feel it. Mista feels his in the winter, when the weather chills the metal. It’s a grim, alive feeling, twinging between his ribs, like a sprain.
He recognizes this intersection. It can’t be much farther. They’re going to make it.
“Um… tell you stuff…” Narancia’s throat strains. His arm buckles. “I like… Margherita pizza… with mushrooms on it…”
A shocked, braying laugh erupts from Mista before he can even consider it.
“Mushrooms? On Margherita? Sicko.”
“Kiss my ass. It’s good, damn it.”
“That’s gross, man. You like mushrooms? What’s wrong with you?”
“Hey,” Narancia ventures, and all at once the talk of mushrooms is forgotten, and Mista’s boxed in the moment again, surrounded on all sides, “Mista?”
Still awake. Still breathing. Mista hopes Aerosmith’s okay. He likes that little plane.
He turns his head. “Yeah?”
“You’re pretty cool,” Narancia murmurs, eyelids drooping.
His features start to soften—and then he’s smiling.
Shit, Mista thinks when he brakes the car in the alleyway. Shit, he thinks, hooking his arms under the bends of Narancia’s body, carrying him to the door, kicking it, shouting. Shit, he thinks, holding Narancia’s narrow arms down on the metal table when it’s time to close the wound. Shit, he thinks when Narancia’s hand scrabbles for his arm, and clings to it, and stays there, fingers digging into the muscle.
Shit, he thinks, walking him back to the car. Narancia has one arm slung across Mista’s back, his side against Mista’s side, his face very close to Mista’s neck, breath breaking gently over the skin with a lasting, living warmth.
Shit.
It’s a nice smile.