Chapter Text
They’d found Haruno Shiobana on the outskirts of King Dio’s territory, living under a fake name. He had been less alarmed than he should have been when they’d drawn their weapons on him (defenseless, only wielding a half-full basket of ripe apples) in the middle of the orchard where he lived.
“King Dio’s men?” he’d asked conversationally while Bruno approached, knives poised.
It was Trish Una who answered, “No.”
After that, Shiobana was silent and pliant. He’d followed them on their journey towards the twin, dueling capitals without complaint, and Fugo figured that this was not the weirdest thing in the world. Sometimes, people could be calm in the face of crisis, even if the idea was alien to him, personally.
Fugo watched Trish Una sharpen her blades while watching Shiobana across the fire. She had come into their team in a whirlwind, an unstoppable force of deadly charisma and impossible drive. She had only been with them a week when she’d said, “I want to kill King Diavalo,” and all of them had followed her, defected and set off into the wilderness on a wild goose chase to take care of two problems at once.
Two kings. Two heirs. Fugo watched Trish watch Shiobana and watched Shiobana stare at the ground.
Narancia passed him a bowl of soup before draping himself over his shoulders. “What’s got you so out of it?”
“Nothing,” Fugo snapped. He felt Trish’s gaze on him, now, and he found that the attention was rather unbearable. “I’m going to sleep.”
Trish’s attention was unfixed, intense but fleeting. But as Fugo unhappily curled up around his weapons, he met Shiobana’s eyes across the fire, and his breath froze in his chest. Shiobana arched an eyebrow, as if amused, and Fugo forced himself to close his eyes, but he could still feel the cloying press of his gaze.
The ambush was something impossible to predict, impossible to react to in any meaningful way. Fugo recognized the weaponry and armor of his former kin—King Diavalo’s inner circle of knights were going to be the last thing he ever saw, probably.
They’d been a renowned team for a reason, though, and they wouldn’t go down without a good, bloody fight. Fugo’s sword was a familiar weight in his hand, and if he could just—
He witnessed the vines snake almost lovingly around the ankles of his opponent before the knight was yanked into the ground, and the only evidence of their existence was the freshly turned soil before him.
Fugo whirled around and saw the knights each gently, swiftly entwined with vines before being crushed, yanked, or merely detained. The fight was over before it had even begun.
Haruno Shiobana sat on a rock, expression intent but blank. “You—” Fugo began, breathless, while the rest of his team scrambled to get over the disorientation.
Shiobana’s gaze flicked in his direction. He said nothing. There were vines curling at his feet, docile, and there were flowers blooming around him even though it was the dead of night. Fugo’s jaw clenched.
Once everyone else was asleep, Fugo sat down next to Shiobana and said, “Why did you help us?”
“I don’t owe you an answer.”
He’d forgotten how soft his voice was, and Fugo bit his lip to keep from reacting. “You don’t,” he agreed.
Shiobana shifted, and Fugo felt him watching him again. Fugo risked a glance back at him. He was almost hinting at a smile. “The magic scared you,” he observed.
“I didn’t know that magic was real,” Fugo admitted. “You hear—tales.”
“You should have heard more than tales. Your teammate can do it.”
Fugo blinked. “What? Who?”
“Trish Una.”
Fugo rolled his eyes. “Of course she can. Of course you can. It’s probably a fucking royalty thing.”
Shiobana’s expression darkened, but he didn’t otherwise respond.
“You can’t seriously object to me calling you royalty,” he said, flat.
“I have no royal blood, if that is your theory.”
“Sure, you do. You’re King Dio’s son.”
Shiobana hummed. “He is not of royal blood, though. He grew up a peasant.”
Fugo blinked. It was a fact that he’d known, somewhere in the back of his mind, but he’d forgotten. “Oh.”
“He is not my father in any way that counts,” Shiobana added. “He wants me dead.”
“Well, we’ve all got shitty parents,” Fugo muttered, not sure if he was trying to commiserate or start an argument.
“I have excellent parents,” Shiobana snapped.
It was the first sign of distress he’d shown since they’d met. Fugo stared at him. Shiobana visibly composed himself. “What are they like?” he found himself asking before he could think.
Shiobana gave him a wary look. A flash of hurt went through his expression, and Fugo thought, He’s homesick, with a dull pang of regret. “They have been hurt by both kings,” he began quietly, not looking at Fugo. “Badly. Sometimes the hurt spills into everything they do and everything they are, but it never, ever changes how kind they are. How much they love, and how deeply.”
Fugo remembered the names of the two men who’d been raising Haruno Shiobana from Abbacchio’s intelligence findings. Muhammad Avdol and Jean-Pierre Polnareff, both of them retired warriors, one a rumored magician. That was all that history had deemed relevant, and his chest ached. “You miss them,” he said, hollow.
Shiobana shot him a brittle smile. “Of course I do.”
“Why the hell are you helping us?” he demanded again, even more bewildered this time.
Shiobana lifted a shoulder. “I am here. Your team has the resources to solve a problem for me. I may as well utilize them, now that I am in this position.”
“You actually want to depose King Dio?”
Shiobana made a face of distaste. “I want him off the throne, preferably somewhere where he can’t hurt me. I have no desire to take his place.”
“Trish wants to be Queen,” Fugo added. “Once she kills King Diavalo.”
“And she will do well. She is powerful.”
Fugo waited.
Shiobana’s lips ticked upwards at the corners, and again, there was an almost-smile. “I just want to return to my orchard.”
“That sounds nice.” Fugo said, and the words felt awkward on his tongue.
“Yes.”
Fugo sighed. “Look, Shiobana, about the magic—”
“Giorno,” he said.
“What?”
“Call me Giorno.”
Fugo’s mouth went dry. Giorno ran a hand through his dark hair, messy from days of travel, his expression pleasant and blank as ever. “Giorno,” Fugo repeated with hesitation.
“A name I chose for myself.”
Fugo nodded slowly. “I’ll make sure you get back to your orchard. After all this.”
“Paltry promises,” Giorno murmured, tilting his head up to look at the sky.
Fugo bowed his head. He watched the flowers at Giorno’s feet, bent not towards the stars but towards the boy, almost like he was their source of light. “I—I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”
“Good,” Giorno said, and they fell into silence.
Fugo noticed both of their magic now.
Trish’s magic was a dark thing, and Fugo saw it in the way that her shadow shifted just slightly too slowly. He saw it in the way the sun never seemed to catch her eyes. He saw it in the way she fought, in the way that her opponents always seemed to spasm and falter for no ready reason. He saw it in the way she commanded a room, in her cold kindness.
Giorno’s magic followed each step he took. Flora and small insects flocked to him like a source of life. Sometimes, in the morning, his dark hair caught the light in such fleeting flashes that Fugo felt dizzy. Giorno talked to frogs and tadpoles in his quiet, soft voice, and Fugo didn’t know if it was out of politeness or if he could genuinely understand them. Flowers always blossomed at his feet, and he never seemed to step on them.
They were, both of them, born to command, and Fugo saw two monarchs on either side of a fire, marching behind a wagon, casting wary glances at strangers. They were almost forces more than they were actual tangible people.
It struck him that he was going to war for them—they all were, really. He searched for the panic and the regret that he should have felt, but all that he could find was a distant sort of exhaustion. Sometimes, he saw an echoing exhaustion in the line of Bruno’s movements or the curve of Abbacchio’s frown or the clench of Mista’s fists or the terseness of Narancia’s silence.
They would kill the kings, and then he would escort Giorno safely back to his orchard, and then—
The future yawned at an abyss before him.
When the twin capitals were a day’s hike away, Fugo stood by Giorno as he washed his face in the cold creek they’d been using as a landmark, hand on the hilt of his sword.
“You take protecting me so seriously,” Giorno said, almost chiding.
“I did promise to see you through this.”
Giorno hummed absently. He sat back, gazing up at Fugo, looking a little bit puzzled.
Fugo shifted warily. “What is it?”
“The others fear you.”
“Do they.”
Giorno nodded. A daffodil sprouted just next to his foot. “How did your face get scarred like that?”
Fugo stared at him, blankly searching for his own anger in vain. “That’s a rude thing to ask,” he protested weakly.
“Abducting me was also rude.”
“Fair point.”
Giorno shot him an empty smile, and Fugo carefully sat down at his side. “I make poisons,” he admitted after an eternity, aborting the reflexive movement to touch the puckered skin on his face. “I’m not always careful.”
“Poisons,” Giorno rolled the word around in his mouth like it was foreign. “Yet, you battle with your sword.”
“Less dangerous. I only use the poisons if I need to. Which is never.”
Giorno was staring at him. Fugo had found that the weight of his gaze was, somehow, a much more dangerous thing than Trish’s. The pull of Giorno’s attention was like the pull of gravity.
“I don’t like doing it,” he whispered.
“Then, don’t.”
Fugo snuck a look at Giorno and found himself trapped. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded helplessly. “You…” He shook his head.
Giorno shrugged. “You know me.”
“What?” Fugo breathed, not sure why he was so stunned by the quiet assertion.
“You do.”
It struck Fugo that Giorno was not only right, but that Fugo had also known this, somewhere in the depths of his chest. “I do,” he finally agreed, voice hoarse.
Giorno offered him a quiet but genuine little smile, and Fugo clenched his hands into fists to avoid doing something stupid like reaching for him. “When you take me back to my orchard, you should stay for dinner.”
“Yeah,” he managed, and he found himself offering a smile of his own. He watched in fascination as Giorno ducked his head at it.
They stayed there a little while longer.
“I’m going to kill King Diavalo,” Trish said plainly. She never called him anything else, never betrayed any kinship. “In order for this to successfully work, King Dio needs to be incapacitated. I don’t care if he’s dead, he just needs to be out of the picture.”
“So, we should split up,” Bruno concluded.
Trish nodded. “I don’t need any of you to come with me. I can kill the king on my own.”
“I’m coming with you anyway,” Narancia said.
Fugo watched while Narancia and Bruno volunteered themselves to Trish’s side, Bruno stopping Abbacchio from following him by planting a firm hand on his chest and shaking his head once. Mista shifted restlessly at Fugo’s side, and Giorno was calm and still and waiting.
“Meet back up here at dawn,” Bruno said, and his cold expression collapsed into a rare display of fondness when he added, “We can celebrate.”
Fugo had never been to King Dio’s half of the twin capitals. He’d never been allowed. The streets of this half were paved and neat and so falsely bright by so many streetlamps that Fugo was nearly convinced that it was day.
The palace was the same. Orderly. Bright but false. Imposing.
Giorno’s expression was impassive as he strode up to the gates. Fugo felt his heart in his throat. He wanted to stand next to him instead of behind him.
“Don’t fuck up,” Abbacchio said to Giorno, and Giorno shot him one last little glare before requesting entrance.
“My wayward son, finally coming home,” King Dio drawled. This was the only room in the whole fucking city, it seemed that had shitty lighting. Fugo caught the dull glint of a golden crown and the flash of white teeth but not much else. “To what do I owe the courtesy?”
Giorno said nothing for a long moment. Fugo absently reached for his bag of poisons, trying to prepare himself for the worst. “I am here to end your rule.”
King Dio laughed, and the sound was hypnotic and wrong. “Oh? How touching.” He stood from his throne and slowly walked down the steps to put them on the same level, stepping out of the gloom and into the moonlight. He dwarfed Giorno in height and build, and for the first time that night, Fugo felt an urgent pulse of panic. His throat closed. “Let me give you some fatherly advice,” he began, starting to pace in a slow circle around the room. Mista aimed his crossbow, but Giorno put a hand on his arm to still him. Dio was still talking. “You can’t escape it, Haruno. This cycle of ambition and blood and rule and death didn’t begin with me, and it doesn’t end with you.” His teeth were too fucking sharp. “This narrow path to which we are confined was determined so long ago, and if you walk it, you will die on it, same as me.”
“I don’t want what you have,” Giorno said, and then all the glass windows in the room shattered.
A furious swarm of birds and insects shot at Dio, and hell broke loose.
The fight was long and difficult and otherworldly—Dio had some kind of magic of his own that Fugo found confusing and upsetting but couldn’t seem to fully understand—but as the sky outside began to lighten, Fugo, Giorno, Abbacchio, and Mista sat on the steps of the throne room, exhausted and filthy, staring at a dead and deposed king.
Giorno kicked the crown. It didn’t go far, but it was the gesture that counted. Fugo didn’t think much before touching Giorno’s shoulder, and he leaned into it, and Fugo didn’t move away.
Mista laughed, semi-hysterically. “That was fucked up.”
“Yeah,” Giorno agreed.
“Do you think Trish won?” Abbacchio murmured. His eyes were closed. He had a nasty couple of still-bleeding wounds that none of them knew how to fix.
“I don’t really think that was ever a question,” Fugo offered. Giorno slumped into his side in exhaustion, and Fugo forced himself not to react. “Her magic—”
“It’s busted, I get it,” Mista finished, wincing as he rolled his shoulders. “Ugh. We should get up, huh.”
“Just a minute,” Giorno mumbled, dropping his head onto Fugo’s shoulder. “How the fuck did I summon all those birds?”
Fugo blinked in surprise at the use of the curse word, but he only said, “You’re powerful, Giogio.”
“Birds don’t even like me, usually.”
“I wonder why,” Abbacchio said flatly.
“Hey.”
“What are we going to do now?” Mista asked. “Feel like this was the horizon of something I honestly didn’t expect to live past.”
Fugo swallowed roughly, trying not to show how deeply he echoed the sentiment. Abbacchio opened his eyes and said, “I think I’ll start with a fucking vacation.”
“With Bruno?” Mista teased, waggling his eyebrows, and Abbacchio punched him hard in the arm. “What about you, dude?”
“Fugo’s escorting me home,” Giorno said. “My fathers probably think I’m dead.”
Abbacchio shifted with discomfort. “Uh. Yeah. We’re, uh, really sorry about that.”
Giorno frowned. “What’s done is done.”
Mista sighed. “Maybe I’ll stick around in the twin capitals. Try and mitigate the chaos.”
Fugo hummed. “You’ve never mitigated chaos in your life.”
Mista laughed. “Whatever, loser.”
“Are you ready to leave?” Fugo asked Giorno. Giorno’s head was still on his shoulder, and he was staring not at Dio but at the crown, shining golden and brilliant in the dim light of the dawning new day.
“Yes,” he whispered. “This palace’s interior design is tacky anyway.”
They met in the proper place. Trish was wearing a silver bejeweled crown, still blood-stained from whatever horrors she’d inflicted upon the previous wearer. “Queen Trish,” Giorno said, smiling with a little bow.
Trish smiled, and it was a brilliant, hopeful thing.
They took the train part of the way back to Giorno’s orchard. They weren’t fugitives anymore, so there was less need to lay low. Giorno was quiet for a good part of it.
“Why did you do this?” he finally asked, staring out the window. “Why did you bet your life on a quest to kill two kings you didn’t seem to care about?”
Fugo frowned. “I can’t tell you why I initially stayed. Maybe Trish’s magic had me convinced that it was the only thing to do.” It was something he’d suspected for a long time but never dared voice until now. “Not sure if she does it on purpose. I don’t think she knows the half of what her magic can do.”
Giorno hummed in agreement. “Like the birds.”
Fugo bit back a smile. “Did you know flowers bloom at your feet wherever you step?”
Giorno blinked. “No.”
“It’s more like that.”
“Oh.”
“Trish believes in what she’s doing so fiercely that she compels others to believe as well. It’s not malicious, I don’t think. Just subconscious. Just dangerous.”
“I see.” Giorno fiddled with a dull ring on his pinky finger, twisting it. “But that doesn’t answer my question, not really.”
“No,” Fugo agreed. He shrugged. “I don’t know. The kings were evil, everyone knew that. Getting rid of them was a good thing.”
“Right.”
“I guess…” he trailed off. “I think I’ve been on autopilot for a really long time. Trying to stay calm. Trying to impress Bruno. Trying to survive.” He furrowed his brows. “And then you were there.”
Giorno looked up at him sharply. “Me?”
“Yeah,” Fugo said, gaining confidence in his words. “Yeah. You and your flowers and your frogs and your orchard and your silences. You really threw me off.”
Fugo watched in delight as an embarrassed, pleased smile lit up Giorno’s face. “I shook your cool, huh?”
Fugo snickered. “Yeah. You’ve got me questioning what I’ve been doing. I don’t know.”
Giorno shifted, and suddenly their knuckles were resting against each other where there should have been an armrest. Fugo’s fingers twitched involuntarily. “What are you going to do after I’m back at the orchard, Fugo?”
“I have no fucking clue.”
“You could stay a while. If you want.”
Fugo, almost without realizing it, turned his hand, an offer, and Giorno laced their fingers together without breaking eye contact. “You—Really?”
“If you want. My dads will probably make your life hard. I get it if you—”
“I would like to. Stay. Maybe. For a little bit. I mean—”
Giorno tightened his grip on Fugo’s hand. His smile was breathtaking. “I’m gonna tell them you thought magic was fake.”
“Your dads?”
“Yeah, they’ll think it’s hilarious.”
Fugo rolled his eyes. “It’s not—I mean—you can’t—”
“Then, I’ll show you the orchard. It’s nice this time of year.”
Fugo took a deep breath. “Giorno?”
He hummed in question.
“Thank you.”
It was cold at Giorno’s orchard.
Muhammad Avdol and Jean-Pierre Polnareff had been weepy and ecstatic at Giorno’s return and mostly wary of Fugo’s presence, but Giorno insisted that they would warm up to him by dinner. Outside, Giorno strolled through the apple trees, a very old and very grumpy dog trotting at his side, and Giorno pointed at his own feet.
“The flowers,” he said, somehow surprised.
“I told you.”
Giorno leaned down and brushed his fingers against the petals of the closest flower. “Fugo,” he began, and then seemed to lose his train of thought as he straightened back up again. He reached out, and Fugo grabbed his hands, feeling nervous.
“Yeah,” Fugo whispered. “Me, too.”
Giorno nodded, and anxiety and relief mingled in his expression briefly before it smoothed back out again, with effort. He tapped his forehead to Fugo’s shoulder once, briefly, and then said, “I’ll show you how to pick apples.”
Their futures yawned open, unconfined, terrifying, exhilarating, and Fugo followed Giorno deeper into the orchard.