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Figuring out how to live without the death penalty hanging over their heads isn’t easy, neither Leone nor Bruno had expected it to be, but goddamn, they hadn’t expected it to be so hard. No matter how well golden child Giovanna’s hellish Requiem Stand had pulled them from The Beyond, it couldn’t replicate the process of actually strengthening new muscle. Had they even died, in the eyes of the universe, or were they simply holes in the fabric of reality for a few days until they weren’t?
“Good morning,” he mutters, shuffling up behind Bruno and hooking his chin over Bruno’s shoulder, wrapping arms around his waist as the other sleepily pours a cup of coffee and gestures to the tea kettle already on the stove. He never did like coffee, and even though Bruno always puts on the kettle when he wakes up before Leone, it touches him that he remembers every day nonetheless.
And out of Bruno’s mouth slips a gentle “I love you,” so adoring that Leone has to stop for a moment and bask. He made love so effortless, like sinking into a warm bath at the end of a long day, and Leone envies the way he’s able to say kind things without flinching. So when Bruno recoils like he’s been slapped and covers his mouth, shooting Leone a look like he’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Leone has no idea what just happened.
What did he do? What had he done to set Bruno off like this? Did he not like being touched? “Bruno?” he says, but it comes out flimsy and stilted, not nearly as authoritative as he would have liked.
“Leone,” his lover says back and glances to the ocean out the window that glimmers in the early morning light. It blinds him.
“Bruno.” He doesn’t move. Something in the air reminds him of the way Buccellati found him years ago but in perfect reverse. Instead of rain drowning him, a bottle clenched in his hand, there’s a sun and a sea behind his lover that frames him like one of those old Renaissance paintings. Leone’s mouth opens but he cannot muster any words and closes it again.
“I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“You deserve… more than me.”
Leone can’t stop the bitter chuckle that slips out, and Bruno goes desolate. “ You don’t deserve me? If anything, it’s the other way around. I’m still waiting for the day you tell me that this, all of it, is just some cruel joke you were put up to. Every day I wake up because you saved me. If you hadn’t intervened that night in the alley, do you know where I’d be?” Bruno stays silent. Without emotion, Leone says, “Six feet under in an unmarked grave.”
He is not the most gifted with his words, or the most intelligent man, but Leone hopes desperately that the honesty in his heart shines through. It’s so hard for him to take things seriously, to not make some gallows humor joke about it and defuse situations once they become too much for him, but he is trying, and the weight of the struggle against his own nature lances through him and traps him in place. Bruno looks like any minute he’ll zip a hole through the wall and start running. “I don’t know how to respond.”
“Nobody ever does. Respond by staying here. We can talk this out. You know, like adults do.” The last fragment crawls out of his throat, unexpected even to himself. It’s patronizing and a little cruel to add while they’re like this.
Letting out a shaky sigh, Bruno takes a long sip of his coffee and the tension disappears from his body. Instead of draining and leaving behind serenity, it only reveals the bare skeleton hiding beneath Bruno’s skin. Spun together by years of pretending he’s fine when he wasn’t, it’s brittle and looks prone to shattering, like he’ll splinter to pieces at any moment. “I’m sorry for what I said.”
“Why do you keep apologizing and apologizing?” he rolls his eyes.
“It’s not right for me to take advantage of you like this for my own happiness, just because you’re too polite to say no.”
“Take advantage of me like—- like what?”
“I’m your boss.”
Leone frowns. There was a point where that was true, but death, the great equalizer, had them both otherwise. At first in the great beyond, Leone hadn’t wanted to believe that someone as perfect as Bruno was capable of dying. He was just there, something that always was and always would be. Such worldly concerns as death could not possibly have touched him. But then, after a month in the afterlife that was suspiciously similar to the dream-filled month Leone’s family had spent on the Naples coast one summer when he was a child, he realized that gods died too. Buccellati’s luster in his memory dulled itself until it was less of an untouchable gold and more of a well-worn, homey, bronze. “Yeah, and?”
“All you’ve ever done is follow me faithfully, and all I’ve ever done is use you.”
He wasn’t wrong. Once upon a time, Leone was little more than a husk to be filled with the residual pride of a higher power’s goals being achieved. He lived to carry out Bruno’s orders for the hope of some of his joy at success rubbing off on his own empty void.
But those days were over, and they had been since before he even met his maker.
It was still so odd, to think in terms of before death and after death while still being alive.
Leone died not because he was told to, but for something he believed in, hope in his heart as it was torn out of his chest. Here he was, living(?) proof of that. “You never used me.”
“This! All of it! The living together, the domesticity, the sleeping together, in both senses! Every bit of this little… charade we have going has been me pushing my own desires onto you. Why don’t you tell me to stop? We are not in a relationship!”
“I—-“ he petered out. Was he being serious? “We aren’t in a relationship?”
“No,” Bruno said regretfully.
“This whole time, I thought that you were just supposed to kiss your friends on the lips,” he snipes back. It isn’t the time or the place, but as Bruno bears himself to the world, Leone retreats back into his shell. A lot of things make sense now that didn’t before. “And you think that I only kiss back because you’re my boss?”
“...Yes.”
“Bruno, you haven’t been my boss in months. And you think I’m still clinging to you having some farce of authority? Is that really what you think of me?” If Bruno really had still been his superior, there’s no way he’d be mouthing off this hard and they both know it. There is no correct way to answer his question. Abbacchio waves it off with a “but that’s not important” before Bruno can shoot himself in the foot trying to answer. “No. I’ve been doing all these things because I love you.”
“You’re joking.”
“That’s my line.”
Bruno pushes off the counter and makes a noise somewhere between a wheeze and a giggle. He’s a little hysterical-sounding, but that’s okay. “Are you serious?”
“As a hole in the torso.” They both snort. It isn’t funny, but that’s why they laugh.
“Then may I kiss you?”
“You don’t have to ask.”
Then Bruno’s soft hands are on his jaw and his lips are on Leone’s and he’s the one being pushed against the counter and Bruno still tastes like coffee and it’s a little gross but Leone can’t bring himself to mind.
And somewhere in the kitchen, the tea kettle boils other and starts to sing, but that’s not important, because Leone’s got better things on his mind.