Work Text:
Trish finds Bucciarati by the water, which doesn’t surprise her. The sun had gone down hours ago, and now Naples is dark—or as dark as Naples can be, with so many sources of light; Bucciarati has his back to this one, and it does not so much illuminate him as it seems to remember him, the way all the world has been since he had returned to it five months ago, at the advent of wild blueberry season.
The light, warmer and more gentle than Trish had known light could be, is coming from the trattoria—Narancia’s trattoria, a little place by the harbor, a stone’s throw from the boats. Trish’s eyes catch the names as she wanders down the pier with her sweater pulled tight around her shoulders: Alba, Piviere, Luna Settembrina. They’re nice and all, but she still likes the name of Bucciarati’s the best.
He turns his head halfway with a good ten steps left to go. One of his hairpins glints with the motion, catching a fraction of the glow so that it’s amplified and fire-bright. A few months ago—another life ago—Trish might have faltered at being heard, second-guessed her approach, but now she closes the distance without lingering, coming to stand beside him at the end of the pier.
“They’re still loud,” she says, looking out over the water. She can’t see much of the bay—only the places where the light reaches—but she can hear it, breathing away beneath their feet.
Bucciarati makes a little noise of amusement; not quite a laugh, but something with a smile in it all the same.
It’s cold out—not Milan-cold, but cold enough for Trish to have goosebumps on her neck—and he isn’t wearing a jacket; only a pressed white shirt, untucked, and black pants, rolled up over his ankles. His socks are blue. Way too blue, in Trish’s opinion, but she figures there’s no harm in Bucciarati discovering colors.
“I don’t know how you could stand it,” Trish goes on, shivering a little when the wind gusts forcefully past, swaying the boats by the masts. “Before. When you were their boss, I mean. You can’t take them anywhere.”
“Practice and patience,” Bucciarati answers. “And Abbacchio. Actually, it may be more fair to put Abbacchio first.”
Trish is still getting a little bit used to this Bucciarati: the one who makes jokes, and speaks a meter more openly, and has begun to relearn the motions for a smile; the one who holds his phone out over the water when she calls, so that she can listen, and think, and miss it a little less.
“Do you like Christmas?” he asks, turning his head to her.
Trish turns hers, too, eyes flicking across his face. Sometimes she remembers what it had felt like to truly believe that she would never see it again; what remains of that belief wedges itself knifelike between her ribs from time to time, like she’s run too fast.
Her eyes are adjusting, now, to the night, and to the way Bucciarati looks in it, made almost less inscrutable by the shifting glow of some distant Christmas lights and by the wind, mussing his hair until it’s person-like again, instead of Bucciarati-like and impossible.
“Yeah,” she says, not even thinking to lie. There’s not much reason for it now, and she’s learning not to need it. “It’s my favorite.”
“Is that so?” Bucciarati asks, raising his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“What’s so weird about it?” Trish retorts, tugging her sweater around herself more wholly, until her knuckles are in her armpits. “I just like it because it’s—” She feels around for the proper word, some eloquent balance between warm and glittering. “Calm.”
“It was my favorite, too,” Bucciarati says, his head drifting away again, drawn to the water. “When I was a boy. I remember going to midnight Mass with my mother and father.”
“Ugh, I hated midnight Mass.” Trish wrinkles her nose. “I’d just fall asleep. So boring.”
“That does sound like you,” Bucciarati says, and Trish whips her head around—is he teasing her? His voice quiets when he tucks his hands into his front pockets and says to the boats, “You know what’s worth staying awake for better than anyone.” Then, in a tone that makes it sound like something more than what it is; an expression of gratitude, maybe, or an admiration: “You haven’t changed.”
Trish blinks at that, not sure how to hold it.
“Neither have you,” she says. “You still make no sense at all.”
As before, this seems to astonish Bucciarati, if the taken-aback look he gives her is any indication. Trish rolls her eyes and turns her head away again, sighing into the night, shifting her weight on her feet. Giulia’s always telling her to stop locking her knees when she stands, how it’s bad for blood flow, how it could make her faint onstage if she isn’t careful. She bends one gently, and then switches to the other.
“You didn’t have to come looking for me, you know,” Bucciarati says without looking at her.
“I know,” Trish says. “I didn’t. Well, not at first.” She fidgets, tugging at a loose thread at the end of her sleeve, suddenly restless, the same way that she’d been inside, watching life go on so luminously in front of her, with so much sound and breath. “I just wanted some… air.”
Bucciarati hums faintly, in a way more understanding than any words. Trish is still a little annoyed that Bucciarati seems to apprehend her doubts and second-guessings with such ease, like something in him is cut from the same cloth, along the same seam—it would have driven her nuts when she first met him, when not being known was her only power, the only thing she had to her name—but now all it does is make something inside of her twinge, and then it passes.
Out here, by the water, it’s hard to feel haunted by anything. The waves break in patterns, gently, against the rocks, and the wood, and the boats; and Trish hears her mother’s voice folded into them, for just a moment: My favorite thing about the sea is that it never ends—it just goes back home. It’s always going home.
“Will you stay for very long?” Bucciarati asks.
Trish lifts one shoulder—the one closest to him—and drops it again. Her memory lingers on a word, on home.
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. Not that long.”
Bucciarati looks over at her the way that she’s seen him look at seabirds, once or twice: recalling migratory patterns, nesting habits, the flyways that guide them home and back between seasons.
“We’ll be glad to have you while we do,” he says at last. He’s quiet for a long time, then, in a way she’s come to recognize; he’s trying to decide whether or not to say something. The scales tip: “Has Narancia told you about the piano?”
Trish assumes he’s talking about the one inside, an antique upright piano with a walnut veneer that reminds her so clearly of the one at her old house that she had ached a little, looking at it in the corner nearest the staircase. She’d been too embarrassed to try playing it with everyone there—maybe later on, when they’ve all gone home, and it’s only Narancia left, with the lights off and the chairs on the tables—but she had stood close to it for a while, one hand holding her wine glass and the other grazing the side arm, eyes tracing the petals of the small rose carved over the music rack hinge.
Narancia hasn’t told her much of anything—it’s been more looks than words with him, all night. But she doesn’t mind.
“What about it?” she asks, frowning.
Bucciarati nods thoughtfully for a moment and then says, “I’ll leave that to him.”
Trish frowns deeper, narrowing her eyes suspiciously—but Bucciarati is already continuing on, with nothing to give away his haste but a quiet clearing of the throat.
“You have a busy year ahead, I expect,” he says, reaching up to hold his hair out of his face when the wind picks up again, a little stronger this time.
“Ugh, I don’t want to think about it,” Trish says. “If Giulia makes me look at one more contract I’ll die. At least the holidays mean she’s too busy at home to bug me with stuff.”
“You sound quite fond of her,” Bucciarati says, and when Trish glares over at him, his smile is unmistakable. “And like she takes good care of you. Give her my thanks, won’t you?”
“Wh-Whatever,” Trish mumbles. She almost tells Bucciarati to give his thanks to Giulia himself, but the mere idea of the two of them ever interacting is so harrowing that she almost pushes him off the pier on blind instinct. “Give Abbacchio mine.”
A childish part of her hopes that this will embarrass him, but he just laughs—for real this time, a quick and bracing thing, open-mouthed.
“He does deserve some thanks, doesn’t he?” he says. “He’d be pleased to hear you say that. He’d lord it over me.”
Trish has a hard time picturing Abbacchio lording anything over anyone, let alone Bucciarati. She’s found herself wondering what it must be like on their little houseboat in Santa Lucia, and if they still watch the sun come up together, the way that she’d always known them to do. She’d never seen both of them asleep at the same time, and back then she hadn’t known what it meant—but when Narancia had told her about the houseboat, and their plans to refurbish it, she’d thought to herself, Of course. Of course.
“We’re glad to have you here with us,” Bucciarati says, out of the blue. “Myself, Abbacchio—Giorno and Mista and Fugo, and Signor Polnareff—Narancia. This is what we fought for, after all.” He cranes his neck over his shoulder, back to land, to the golden windows of the trattoria, and the open door, releasing sound into the night. Trish can hear someone playing the piano, badly, and Giorno laughing, and Mista failing to sing. “This. Tonight.”
Trish finds it suddenly difficult to be cold or uncertain or afraid. Nestled beside her heart, Spice Girl lets out a huff, unfurling herself: This one will just say anything, won’t he?
“Forgive my candor,” Bucciarati says, lifting a hand, palm out and fingers close together. “I know you prefer to avoid it, but I’ll consider it my Christmas gift if you let it slide.” His eyes soften. “Just this once.”
Of course, Trish has already gotten him a Christmas gift, and written him a card—she’d filled up the whole thing, even the back. It takes her a second to process that he’s making a joke, the same as ever.
She could say that she has already let so many things slide for him, and will no doubt do it many more times, behind whatever bluster and pretense she can conjure. But it’s difficult, with the sea going gently home all around her, and with Bucciarati standing beside her, having discovered colors, and laughter, and the tenuous notion of deserving a kind of happiness with which she, too, has begun to acquaint herself, to be withholding of anything, especially forgiveness.
“Just this once,” she mutters, ducking her head. Then, to the water that neither of them can see, she adds, “I’m—glad, too.”
An especially jarring note on the piano aborts Bucciarati’s response, whatever it might be. Both of them turn around, listening to the snatches of life that the wind brings them: Mista howling with laughter, and Fugo begging for some peace and quiet, and Narancia, crowding between them: I told you guys not to mess with that, okay; it’s for—
“Trish,” Bucciarati’s voice interjects, and when Trish looks back at him, he’s lifted his arm, offering the crook of it to her. “Shall we?”
Trish makes up a mildly exasperated sigh, just enough to keep her dignity when she loops her arm through his, her hand settling into the crook of his elbow.
“Have I told you,” he asks her as they start to walk, “about the language of the black-tailed gull? They have over ten unique vocalizations, you know. Ones for warnings, ones for feeding, ones for coming home.”
Trish holds back a smile and shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “Tell me.”
She follows him back inside—to where the light is kept, remembering—down the length of the pier, until the harbor is behind them.