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When Giorno Giovanna was eleven years old, hiding from a house he couldn't go back to, not tonight, he found himself wandering the darkened streets of Naples.
He was scared, terrified even, the city practically transformed at night, into some hellish landscape full of addicts and criminals. He felt fear but he didn't let it show on his face. When he was younger, when he was still called Haruno, he had been afraid of times such as these, when the dark shadows splayed themselves across the night like a cat reclining on a ledge, so deep and inky black he felt that if he were to step in them he would fall into the abyss, he was so frightened he couldn't even cry, only shake. But he had decided, he wouldn't be scared anymore. He would stand firm to accomplish his goals. He ignored the tremble in his hands, stopped it from climbing further up his frame.
It was on this night, when Giorno was hiding from a house he could not return to, for fear of what his step-father would do in one of his moods, that he found the abandoned garden centre.
It had been an old project, for a more eco-friendly city, something to show that Naples could be good, something to distract citizens from the pulsing, rotting underbelly full of drugs and murder and betrayal.
It had been shut down due to structural concerns, and left to rot.
The glass roof of the place had faded, dulled over time by rain and the constant presence of bird's claws, everything inside had been left alone as it was abandoned, and nature had thrived. Grass sprung through the cracks of the concrete floor, weeds and flowers and whatever was resilient enough to manage, growing strong in the abandoned flower beds.
Giorno found himself on the branch of a tree that had grown up, up and out of the glass roof, leaves bursting through the top and out into the sunlight. When Giorno shook the branch, the small shards of glass that had been shattered when the tree grew through, lying unmoving for years, fell to the ground with little clink-clink-clinks.
Giorno decided on this night, when he would not be able to return to his house, never a home, that he rather liked this place.
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Giorno is thirteen when he first kills a man.
He buries the body in the garden centre.
It was an accident, sort of, the man had been trying to discretely distribute drugs amongst actual children, (never mind the fact Giorno counted among their number, being the same age and all,) claiming that the first few were free, and that you only had to pay a small amount afterwards.
'Like a flytrap,' Giorno had thought, as he watched wide-eyed as his classmates, people he was only cordial with, no real friends among them, passed around small pills after school hours like they were candy.
Giorno thought back to the man he had lied about to save when he was younger. Thought about how the man had hated the drug trade, despite being a criminal himself. Giorno thought about the path he had been set on when he was younger, how that encounter had changed his life for the better.
He finds himself going up to the drug peddler, and he doesn't know what he's doing, exactly, but he has a pocket knife he had shoplifted for practice, and a half-formed plan is rattling about his head about he could try to scare the man off, the rest of him screaming about how it won't work, but because the voice of negativity sounds so much like what he's designated Haruno (cowardly, weak, scaredscaredscared), he doesn't listen.
He ends up slashing at the man, a mistake, because he's bigger and stronger than Giorno is and he lifts him into the air by his neck and Giorno scrapes and kicks and the voice of Haruno in his head is saying that he's going to die and he can't-
The man trips, awkwardly, unexpected, and Giorno drops from his grip like a rock, landing and rolling across the floor of the alleyway he had followed the peddler into, under the pretense of buying the "more serious stuff". The pocket knife is lying beside him and Giorno thinks about his classmates, and the shakes some of them have already developed, the 'cool' kids who brought the drugs into school. He knows what he needs to do.
When the man is lying dead on the floor and Giorno is pointedly ignoring the red-red-red that covers his arms, the man's chest, and a large portion of the ground around them, his resolve burning dimmer now that everything is over, but never extinguishing, he notices the roots curled around the mans legs.
His right foot, the one he tripped on, now that Giorno is thinking straight, is wrapped tightly around by a gnarled-looking root, stretching up from the ground like a desperate hand. Giorno pokes at it, curious, but he hears movement at the mouth of the alleyway and panics, doing everything in his power to drag the body away from the dimming light.
Giorno looks at his uniform, stained crimson, looks at the corpse, the many, many wounds adorning its chest, and thinks, 'The garden centre isn't far from here.'
The body is buried under two feet of dirt, Giorno washes his uniform out in a rainwater-collector with some bleach he found forgotten in a corner, and he doesn't think twice about it.
Well, thats not true.
He certainly thinks about how the flowers he planted there, above the hidden corpse, bloom more vibrantly than he ever expected.
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It is when Giorno is fifteen years old, now fully capable of manifesting his own soul by his side, that he really gets invested in the garden centre. Well, more than he had been previously.
It is in what little free time he has that he experiments with what he can do, and by the time he finishes the garden centre, the overgrown, abandoned, but recognisable as man-made centre, is completely changed.
No longer is there a single solitary tree growing through the faded glass roof, now there are several, each having grown with a speed that Giorno had only ever witnessed in nature time-lapse videos. Vines hang down from branches like something out of an illustrated book, and bright pink flowers poke out of the bark.
There are flowers everywhere, bursting up from the ground and hanging down from the trees, growing out of the half-rotted wood that makes up the old tables in the centre, species native to Italy, species not native to Italy, various types he has never even seen nor heard of, and he suspects quietly that they might only exist here, in this quiet, glass-covered, forgotten fairytale.
The garden was alive before, growing under his careful hand for the past four years, something to do when not attending school and avoiding the house that contained a step-father who loathed him, and a mother who couldn't care less. Now?
Now it is thriving.
He has less time to visit, what with the whole- new Don of the entire nation-spanning crime organisation thing he has going on, but when he does get the time to visit he climbs the very same tree he did when he was eleven years old, and he looks up through the leaves and into the sunlight, and among all the stress that has come with his position, he feels at peace.
This position does comes with some inconveniences of course. What was once his own personal area, a place no-one knew about but him, a place that was safe, he now has to share with those who guard him, because the new Boss can't possibly leave his shadows out of anything he does.
But seeing as the only people he brings are Mista, Trish, Polnareff and, eventually, Fugo, he finds that he doesn't actually mind that much.
(He fondly remembers the first time he had brought them all there, together. He had gotten distracted with the new breed of flower he was growing, away in a secluded corner among the veritable maze of trees and flowers and eveything in between. The others couldn't find him, so they had gone looking.
At some point, they had gotten the idea that the garden was sentient into their heads, the grass poking up through the cracked stone floor 'far too long', the trees 'far to confusing to navigate', seeming to twist and turn when one wasn't looking.
He wasn't there at the time of discovery, but he found himself laughing as he came upon all four of those he held dear, Mista, Trish, Fugo, even Polnareff, all in various states of disarray and distress around the skull of the man he had killed all those years ago.
They had thought it was him, that the garden had eaten him.
He had thought that it was the funniest fucking thing he'd heard since becoming Don.)