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It’s a new millennium.
The fireworks pop off from a thousand directions, and the cobbled-together team of misfits Bruno Bucciarati has made for himself cheers as the clock turns over. There are people on the streets, but they’re a little away from that, by the riverside, watching fire and colors burst over the water. The tension that’s built in the air, over the past thirty seconds, the past year, the past decade, rips open, unzips itself at the seams in an explosion of cheering and noise.
Mista and Narancia, definitely planned, both kissed Fugo’s cheeks at the same time. Bruno can’t help but laugh - it’s cute, how Fugo sputters, and his temper starts to lick at his heels, but the crack of a screamer being lit cuts him off, and they all pause to watch it tear over their head and fizzle out over the river. Another follows it, and two more, from somewhere a few blocks down - definitely not legal, but no policeman worth his salt is going to go after it tonight of all nights. There’s too much happening. It’s a cacophony, laws broken, as always, sound rattling the air apart, cheers and shouts and music from what seems like every man and woman in Napoli.
The main event of midnight, for their little group, is forced into being soon after. Narancia and Mista tear into a cake with their bare hands, cackling and dancing, and even Fugo partakes - with a fork, because he’ll do a lot of things, but not eat a full cake with his hands like an animal. Bruno swipes icing off Narancia’s handful and pops his finger into his mouth, the taste bursting on his tongue like the fireworks bursting in front of his eyes.
“Come on, boss,” Narancia laughs, “get your own!”
“You’ve made piecemeal of that cake already,” says Bruno, brushing off the conversation as soon as it starts. He loves talking to Narancia, but there’s an ethereal quality to this night, 12:00:38 on New Year’s Day, the first day of the next thousand years, that requires his full attention like it has the magic of a faerie dance. “I’ll have breakfast with the rest of the world.”
“Missin’ out,” says Mista with his mouth full, and Fugo snaps at him for his bad manners, which only makes the two little gremlins laugh harder. They eat like wild things, like there’s nothing but this for them, like the teenagers they are. Bruno’s heart aches as he turns his back to them.
The shape of Leone is silhouetted against the colors, black and silver in all his normal glory, but his hands are loose on the railing, for once. The tension that wraps him like a snake has loosened, just for this moment, as their ragtag team enjoys the brief, chaotic respite from their day-to-day.
Bruno steps up beside him, but he doesn’t speak. They stand in silence, feeling some different, quieter kind of tension between them. The same as it ever was. Even tonight.
“You know,” says Leone, almost startling him, “you missed your New Year’s kiss. Fugo got two, did he steal yours?”
Bruno laughs. “It’s a silly tradition, but tradition is tradition, I suppose.” He rests his hands on the railing next to Leone’s, fingers curling tighter than his partner’s. “I did miss it, didn’t I? I was too busy watching them.”
Leone hums his acknowledgement, and then his eyes, slowly, move to Bruno, his face following soon after. He just looks, for a moment. Bruno lets him look before glancing back, a brow quirked on his head. He doesn’t want to startle him out of it. Leone isn’t fragile, but he’s a skittish thing, and whatever is forming in the new millennium’s brisk cold, he doesn’t want to watch it wisp away like so much insubstantial smoke.
He bites his lip. Lipstick smears on his white teeth.
And Leone’s mouth is on Bruno’s, quicker than he can blink, and the eyebrow still over Bruno’s eye shoots up to match its brother. His hands go up in surprise, but they, soon after, find themselves on Leone’s sturdy biceps, fingers digging in tight. Bruno manages to kiss back once he feels familiar, thin sleeves under his hands, as if understanding for the first time who the man in front of him - kissing him - is.
And Leone pulls away too soon, a ball of nervous energy in his chest and behind his gorgeous eyes, and Bruno is too stupid to say anything.
Did the kids see? Did that really happen? Bruno is too dumb to talk. He is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything but ask silent questions, his eyes locked with Leone’s yellow-purple gradient that is too otherworldly to be anything but faerie. This is what it is, to be stolen by some changeling. A kiss and he’s gone. There’s a feral glint in Leone’s eyes now, his makeup almost (almost) perfect, but for the lipstick smeared outside its lipliner and smudged on his teeth. The string holding them back pulls tight, shakes with exertion, and snaps.
Leone throws his head back and shouts into the night air, a guttural, loud noise that rips apart the night and replaces it with a newer, rawer one. It fades into an almost hysterical laugh, and Bruno is laughing, too, before he even registers it. Mista whoops, and Narancia howls, and Fugo says something drowned out by the incoherence of the moment, all celebrating with the idiocy of youth.
“Buon anno, boss,” he says, with a smile slashed across his face as if with a knife. And he’s gone, a flash of black and silver, some shimmering onyx thieved from him by the night.
Leone digs his hand into the cake, taking a massive handful, and he takes one bite out of it before slapping it across Narancia’s face. His nervous energy is gone, now. It’s all joy, quiet, restrained, and covered by sarcasm as it usually is, but now a little more honest. A little more clear. Narancia shrieks, and Fugo laughs, and Mista jumps immediately into throwing cake like a child. He is, in some sense. They are all so young.
Bruno leans on the railing and watches his family.
Tomorrow, they will go back to routine. The parties will end. The police will pick up their batons, the roosters will crow, and some fool will walk into Passione business and need a little roughing up, the same as always. Their time will tick onward, inexorable. Time cannot be stopped, it cannot be erased, and it cannot be avoided. This moment, like all others, will pass.
But whatever this new millennium has in store for them, they will handle it together.