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Chapter Text

A sailor and his joy stepped from the pier and into
the fragile boat together. Why was there only one?
Because you, dear, said to the night, I don’t care
about the rest. And I said, Neither do I.
And then the harbor was behind us. 

— Matthew Olzmann, “The Millihelen”

“Patrizia quit.” 

In the bright and unapologetic light of her Milan apartment, Trish watches her manager light a cigarette. The smoke briefly obscures her face, climbing lazily toward the ceiling. It only clears when she starts to pace the living room, gesticulating through the haze.

“We’ve got you in Berlin in two weeks and Patrizia quit. Says to me, ‘Giulia, I’m having a baby.’ A baby! Again and again she tells me she doesn’t want kids, says they smell, says they’re too much work. And now look at her. Can you imagine? Patrizia? The child will come out of the womb with a Tanfoglio. I’m glad she’s found her happiness, but couldn’t her happiness have waited until September? Well, mannaggia. If she wants to leave you to die, so it goes.”

Trish is stretched out on her favorite pink loveseat, the one she’d had shipped over all the way from Paris, and before the cigarette had been lit, she’d been having a perfectly relaxing time reading the May issue of Vogue Italia. She sets the magazine down on her chest and sighs. 

“Do you mind?” she asks, and pointedly gestures with one hand to the window in the kitchen. 

Trish had met Giulia Borroni four years ago at a music festival in Catanzaro, just after her eighteenth birthday, and Giulia had been smoking then, too. She had come up to Trish in the wine tent smelling of cigarillos and strong perfume and said, You’ve got a striking face. The kind of face that makes people pay attention. I’ll make you famous, and Trish, having had nothing to lead her forward at the time save for a handful of nebulous ambitions and her memory of a long and violent spring, had seen no reason to say no.

She figures that she might have become famous anyway, but it wouldn’t have happened as fast without Giulia, who knows everyone everywhere, at least in Trish’s estimation. That doesn’t make her any better about smoking in Trish’s apartment, though.

Giulia huffs at her and moves into the kitchen, unlocking the casement window next to the sink. The noise of the city seeps in, children yelling and someone’s music playing and the flower trader hawking bluebells across the street. Milan is beautiful in all seasons, but Trish has always liked it best in May, like this; not summer or spring but something halfway and blue. 

Giulia slots the cigarette between her scarlet lips and takes a drag until the tip glows. She scowls out at the city, tapping the ashes out through the window. 

“We can’t cancel,” she says. “We’ve already booked every venue from here to Barcelona. I’m closing the last leg today. God damn it, Patrizia. Two years with us, and now this. I’ll kill her.”

“It’s not like she’s the only bodyguard in Italy,” Trish says, rising from the loveseat. She wanders past the end table, where eight huge stargazer lilies from somebody in Artist Relations at Baby Records are arranged in a vase, and runs a finger along one of the petals. “Just hire someone else.”

Giulia makes a face. “And pay touring season rates? Are you joking? I’d be better off buying a yacht.”

“You have a yacht.”

“A second yacht.” Giulia grinds the half-smoked cigarette into the flowerpot saucer that Trish keeps on the windowsill for her. “Well, if you know any for hire, you tell me, yes? Bodyguards, not yachts. I’ll pay them whatever they want, as long as it’s what I paid Patrizia.”

She fans the last of the smoke out the window with one hand, glances at her thin gold wristwatch, and shouts, “Shit! I have to run!”

Trish stretches her arms over her head, unbothered. Giulia lives in a constant state of having to run. 

“I was meant to call Sony BMG five minutes ago!” Giulia moans, and rushes into the foyer, heels clicking on the hardwood floor. “You’ve eaten, right? Have you eaten? I’ll order something for you in the car; tell Fabrizio downstairs not to shoot anyone carrying a pizza box. I’ll call you at seven. Please tell me you’ve started packing.” 

“I have,” Trish lies. 

Giulia, one hand on the doorknob, whirls around and points at her, narrowing her eyes.

“You are lying to me,” she says, and throws the door open. “Ciao!” 

In the quiet that settles behind her, Trish leans against the sliding glass door and breathes out, letting her arms dangle. A breeze passes through the room from some open window, lifting the curtains and rustling the stack of magazines on the coffee table, and on it she can smell the lazy approach of summer, and the city waking slowly to it. 

In three days, she’ll be leaving for Vienna, and won’t see Milan again until August. This isn’t her first tour of Europe, but it’s going to be her last, although she hasn’t mentioned that part to anyone yet. She doesn’t really know what she wants to do, apart from the abstract—keep living, be happy—but music has pretty much run its course. She’ll study fashion in Paris, maybe, or go to New York. People tend to find things in New York, or so she’s heard. 

She combs her fingers absentmindedly through her hair, feeling the warmth of the afternoon sunlight on her back, and closes her eyes. She’s got nothing left to do today, but tomorrow will be busy: breakfast with the road manager, rehearsing all afternoon, looking over the nightliner in the evening, and then dinner with some producer. Exhausting. 

“Well, Spice,” she mutters, “want to help me pack?” 

Dead air, as usual.

“Thought so,” she says, and pushes herself off the door.

She eats too many strawberries from the box in the fridge, watches the last half of some old American movie on the TV, and takes a shower. The setting sun is turning the walls orange when Fabrizio, the guard Giulia employs for the lobby, brings up a pizza delivery, and she sits on the yellow shag rug in the living room to eat it straight from the box in her pajamas, picking off the artichoke hearts.

She’s still on the floor, thinking very hard about packing, when the phone in her bedroom rings. 

“Yes, Giulia, I’m packing,” she says curtly when she picks up, wedging the pink handset between her shoulder and ear. “My place still smells smoky, by the way, so thanks for that.”

“Huh? It’s Narancia.”

Trish’s heart stops.

It stops. 

“Um, Ghirga.”

It’s like the scirocco in summertime. So many things get blown in with it: morning in Venice, a pain in her wrist and a narrow boat and a touch at her back. A particular laugh, a promise of protection. An iron bar through a still hand. Vines and white flowers. 

Narancia. Narancia Ghirga, from Passione. Whose hands she had bandaged. Whose life she had taken.

She hasn’t spoken to him—to any of them—in how many years, now? Five, or something like it.

She thought she’d die before hearing that name again. 

“Oh,” she says. “Oh. Hi.”

“Hey,” Narancia says back. 

His voice is different than she remembers, and yet it isn’t—it rises and hitches in the same places, and something in her chest still opens to it without wanting to run. It sounds far away, separated by too many miles, and she can hear waves and seagulls and voices, kids laughing. He must be on a beach, or close to one. 

“Hi,” she repeats. “I. Narancia. Sorry, um—is everything okay?” 

“Huh?” She can picture his face, bewildered in the light, the wind whipping his hair across it. “I mean—yeah? Yeah, everything’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be?” 

“I just thought—” And then she remembers to breathe. “I just thought that’s… why you’d call.” 

“Oh,” Narancia says in a tone that she can’t read. “Oh. Um, no. I mean that’s not why.”

“Okay,” Trish says, and thinks, and thinks. “How did you get this number?”

Narancia hesitates. “Bucciarati.”

There’s no wind in that name. It’s more like a strong wave, a rip current. 

She frowns. “How did he get it?” 

“I dunno. It’s Bucciarati.” Another hesitation. “So, um. How’s it going?” 

“Fine,” Trish answers automatically. Her fingers have tangled themselves into the cord without her notice. “Why are you calling me?”

She winces the second it jumps out of her, the wrong sentiment in the wrong tone—brusque, accusing. This time, the silence lasts longer. The sound of the wind fills it, a choppy, grainy rumble that’s hard to hold so close to her ear.

“Sorry,” Narancia mumbles. “I just wanted to, I guess. If it’s not a great time, I can—”

“No, it’s fine,” she says in a rush. “Sorry. It’s just.” 

“No, I—I get it,” he says, and she thinks in spite of herself that Narancia had always had an ear for the things she hadn’t known how to say. “I just, um, heard one of your songs on the radio a few minutes ago and—ugh, that sounds so stupid—it was just playing, I swear. In, like, the grocery store. Anyway, I just thought I…” 

Then a quick inhale. “I wanted to tell you I—passed the esame di Stato. Graduation was last week.”

Graduation. The word moves through her with a quiet, unexpected joy. 

“Really?” She sits up, drawing her knees close to her chest. “I mean… congratulations. Sorry for not—I’ve just been really busy.” 

“That’s okay. Bucciarati took a ton of pictures! I think Abbacchio’s even smiling in one of them. If, um, if you want to see it.”

Trish doesn’t think Abbacchio had smiled at all when she’d known him. She hopes there had been white clouds over Naples for Narancia’s graduation, the full and towering ones that he had always liked the best. She hopes that the sky had been a riot of blue. 

She has so many questions. She wants to laugh. She wants to hang up. 

“Just if you want,” Narancia says, a little quieter.

She doesn’t think she has an answer to that. She leans against her pile of pillows, the motion pressing the receiver a little closer to her cheek, and casts around for a polite question. 

“What are you going to do now?” she settles for asking. 

“Man, I guess get a job?” She can hear the wince straining his voice. “A real job. No more Passione stuff. I have to save up!” 

“Save up?”

“Yeah.” He’s quiet for a moment, vacillating, before he clears his throat. “I… I wanna open a restaurant. A really good restaurant! But shit’s expensive, and I don’t just want Giorno to pay for it all, so… job it is. Prep cook or something. I don’t know.”

A restaurant. The simplicity of it throws her, for a second—but she remembers the afternoon that Giorno had gone with Fugo and Abbacchio to Pompeii, and the rest of them had stayed behind in the safehouse by the vineyard, and after an hour or so she’d heard Narancia banging around in the kitchen, throwing together something with spaghetti and garlic and anchovies. She remembers the song he’d been humming, off-key. La varca mia, Santa Lucia.

She remembers so much more of Narancia—so much more of that fistful of days of hiding and running and hating—than she wants to. Even today. Even now.

“Or,” she says, “you could come on tour with me. My bodyguard just quit. Like, this morning.” 

Narancia’s silence cuts across the distance. The words, which she hadn’t recognized until it was too late to withhold them, hang in the emptiness of her room like the echo of another voice, hers and not hers, planned and not planned. Maybe it’s that voice that keeps going.

“I’m going on tour this summer. All over Europe. I’m supposed to have a personal bodyguard; you know, for like, after concerts and stuff. Someone to deal with the paparazzi, mostly. It pays a ton. It would just be until August, but… you could save a lot. Travel expenses are all paid for. You don’t have to, obviously, but if you really need a job or the money or whatever—I could talk to my manager.” 

More wind, and all of that scattered into it. She glances out the window, searching for the spot where the sun is sinking, as though she can line it up on a map and find Narancia underneath it, barefoot and still on a distant shore with one hand in his pocket. 

She wonders, absently, if he’s gotten taller. 

“What?” he finally asks, halting. “Like—are you serious?” 

“I mean, yeah.” She shrugs one shoulder, a habit, even though she knows he can’t see it. “Sure.”

“Um… wow.” Then a long and comprehending silence. “Um. How much does it pay?” 

“Fifty.” 

“A day?” 

“An hour.” 

“NO WAY!” She has to tilt the phone away when he starts yelling. “For real?! What do I have to do? Do I get a gun?!” 

“Just follow me around, I guess,” she half-yells back, and brings the phone to her ear again. “Between concerts and on the road and stuff. And, like, guard the door to my hotel room all night. That’s what the old one did, anyway.” She pauses. “What would you need a gun for? You have a Stand. A Stand with infinite bullets. That flies.”

“Oh yeah.” A rustle follows. Maybe he’s switching the phone to his other ear, tucking it against one narrow shoulder. “Doesn’t sound all that different from what I did before! When we were all protecting you for the boss, I mean.” 

“It is,” Trish says, biting the inside of her cheek and thinking of the empty Colosseum, the continuous rain, the way the words protect and end had sounded in Giorno’s voice. “It is different. I don’t need to fight Stand users. I just need to sign autographs.” 

“Seems pretty easy!” Narancia says, and there’s a smile in his voice, unmistakable. A long time ago, Trish had come to learn the sound as well as the shape. “Especially if there’s no Stand users! Hey, can I get one of those? An autograph, not a—anyway, Mista would lose his shit if you gave me one and not him.” 

Unexpectedly, Trish feels a laugh building in her. She has to push it back down. 

“Yeah,” she says. “Sure.” 

“Sweet! I’ve got all your albums! You can just sign your favorite.”

Before Trish can answer—before she can ask, pink-faced and incredulous, all of them?—there’s a low beep in her ear that signals another incoming call. Probably Giulia. 

“Listen, um,” she says, hating how obvious the hesitation is, “I have to go.”

“Oh,” Narancia says, disappointed. “Okay.” 

She swings her legs off the side of the bed, her feet brushing the rug, and half-consciously grips the phone tighter, the way she would a wrist.

She could let it go there. She really, really could. She’s gotten pretty good, after all, at the letting go, in years since the spring that three half-strangers had died for her—since the summer that they had all come back, one by one, unscarred. 

She could let go. It would barely hurt, she thinks. It would barely leave a mark.

“I meant what I said,” she tells Narancia, soft and deliberate in the now-dark bedroom. She should turn on the lamp, but she doesn’t want to lift her arm. “About the job. You’d have to come to Milan to interview for it and everything, and we’re leaving in like—three days. But you’ll get it. Trust me. If I tell my manager I want you—f-for the job—she’ll hire you.” 

Narancia is quiet for a time again. The beeping continues, subdued but unceasing.

Trish pulls in a breath, keeps it close to her pounding heart. Despite everything, she does not let go.

“Okay,” Narancia says.

Okay, pressed gently into her hands like a small fruit, cautious and alive over the sound of the ocean she can’t see. Okay. 

Like that’s all there is. Like that’s all there needs to be. She can’t help feeling like he’s given this to her before, in another life. 

“I’ll, um—take a bus or something,” he goes on. “Yeah. You said three days? I can be there tomorrow.” 

“Sure,” Trish says. Tomorrow. “I’ll call you.” 

“Okay. Okay, yeah! Call me!” 

“I just said I will.” 

“I know, I know.” His smile is so close that she can almost feel it, pressed to her cheek. “I’m just—I really—um, never mind. Talk to you later.”

“Narancia,” Trish says.

“Yeah?” he answers, his voice ticking up hopefully. 

Trish’s fingers slacken, gentle, around the shape of the phone for a moment. It’s tucked comfortably between her shoulder and her cheek. Through the window, split by the grilles, she can see the moon, waxing in the hazy blue dusk beyond the rooftops. 

She holds onto the words for a moment, and then releases them: “It’s nice to hear your voice.” 

It had taken a month for Narancia to come back from the dead. Maybe a little bit longer—Trish hadn’t been keeping track. She had been back in Calabria, emptying what remained from her mother’s house in a late spring rainstorm that had lasted for days, far removed from Naples and all the ghosts that lived there. She had heard the news in the middle of the night, in the pitch-dark kitchen, and the only thing she’d thought to do was sit right down on the cold tile floor, clutching the phone to her ear. 

Giorno’s voice had been murky, all words save for Narancia and alive indistinct. Trish hadn’t been able to retain much. What she knew was that Giorno had gotten a very confused call from a policeman in Rome, some foggy morning before sunrise, saying that a kid they’d found wandering around the Colosseum had given them his name. 

The others had followed: first Abbacchio, and then Bucciarati. Bucciarati had taken the longest—the greenness had begun to leave the Apennines, gone for another year, and Mista had been the one to call her that time, half-crying, talking too fast for her to understand. 

It had seemed to shock even Giorno, and Trish’s impression was that it was something his Stand had done of its own accord, with its vast unknowable power, simply because in his heart he had wished for it. The particulars of Stands had always seemed to grow more tangled when she asked about them, and so this time she hadn’t asked. A part of her had been wary of it anyway, as if doing so would somehow undo the repair, strange and tragic though it was.

May had passed drearily, without a shape; somewhere inside of it Narancia aged another year. Despite her trepidations, Trish had gone back to Naples on the cusp of June, not because she had wanted to but because Bucciarati had asked her to. Once more, he’d said over the phone, and Trish had been in the kitchen again, barefoot and unable to speak. Just once more.

The train ride had been long, and it had already been hot in the unfamiliar city; the clear, unbroken heat of early summer. She’d brought one suitcase and stayed in a tiny hotel room by the harbor.

Giorno had paid for it. Insisted. Trish had been less equipped than usual to turn down his generosity, though he had already given her so much of it, more than she’d ever lose the welts of carrying. He had needed to press the matter only twice, and then she’d relented. 

Meeting at Libeccio had been Bucciarati’s choice. Trish had heard them all talk about it once or twice—about the white curtains and the good bruschetta—in whatever threadbare moments they’d all had between each catastrophe. It had felt strange to see the back room in person, to absorb the light in it, as though she might discover that it was a movie set, with nothing but sawdust and scaffolding underneath. She had been the last one of seven—the seven of them, as it had been in a courtyard on the white cliffs of Capri—to arrive. 

She had paid attention to so little of the conversation, looking at napkins instead of faces, hearing ghosts instead of voices. Bucciarati had told them then that he would leave Passione, though Giorno had tried to convince him to stay. 

“It’s yours,” Giorno said, restrained, into the silence settled across the table. “What we fought for—it’s yours.”

Bucciarati just smiled. “Then it is mine to give, isn’t it? So I give it to you.”

Abbacchio leaned back in his chair with a scoff, tossing up his hand. “I’m out, too. You can only die so many times before you take the hint.”

The rest, Trish could have predicted—Mista drawling, “I’m going where Giorno’s going,” Fugo hiding his agreement behind the rim of his glass when he lifted it to drink—but Narancia had been quiet, the kind of quiet that should have had its own seat. When she had glanced at him across the table, even then afraid to look for fear of seeing some transparency, some trick of the light, he was staring contemplatively at his plate of untouched gnocchi. He hadn’t glanced back.

Eventually, he folded his arms and leaned on the edge of the table and said, with some embarrassment and some steel, “I enrolled for the fall already, so—”

And then a hesitation.

Bucciarati caught onto it first, as always. “Of course, Narancia,” he said, in his strangely gentle way. “I’m sure you’ll do well.”

Narancia’s grin had taken up his whole face, growing only wider as Mista clapped him on the back and Giorno eloquently praised him. Trish had jabbed her fork into a slice of mozzarella, feeling suddenly out of place, unneeded, in a way that she hadn’t since a silent train ride from Rome to Naples with only Giorno and Mista beside her, waiting for dawn to dully break beyond the Monti della Meta. The conversation had left her again. She had let herself fade into its outskirts.

Bucciarati had shocked her by offering her a house by the sea to call her own. In spite of herself she had been able to picture it—the places she would put the relics from her mother’s house; a hand mirror here, a vase there—but a jagged, hateful feeling had restricted her from doing any more than that. 

She couldn’t look at him when she refused, saying it to the napkin in her lap instead. 

“I’m all right,” she said, hating the taste of it. “I… Naples isn’t where I belong.”

She hadn’t called it running, then. But Bucciarati had seemed to see it for what it was and let her take it anyway, a rope flung, an unobstructed exit. 

He only bowed his head and said, “I’m not worried, Trish. You seem—” A portion of a smile came to him, which Trish hadn’t known what to do with. “You seem like you’ll be at home wherever you go.”

It humiliates her now, but she had come so close to crying, right then—so close that she would feel it for years.

That afternoon in Libeccio was the last official meeting of Bucciarati’s team that she was privy to. The seven of them had eaten a quiet meal, settled into the threadbare miracle of being alive, and Bucciarati had paid the tab, and then they had left. 

Outside in the heat, as Giorno said something to Fugo and Mista about a meeting with Polnareff, Bucciarati’s eyes had landed on her. His mouth had opened, faltered, and closed again. 

He had only said, “Be well, Trish.” 

How? Trish had wanted to ask, on her knees, in the middle of the street. How?

The others had given her their goodbyes, too: Mista with a crooked smile and a knuckle nudging her chin; Abbacchio with a turned head, Fugo with a gesture; Giorno with nothing more than a silent, apprehending look, as if he could see her intentions even then. Trish can’t remember what she had given them in return. Maybe nothing. 

“You know that you can write to us,” Bucciarati had said, “or call for us. For anything.”

Abbacchio had nodded behind him. “One word, kid.”

“Okay,” Trish had murmured, even though whatever word he meant wasn’t one that she’d known how to build.

They had all lingered for a moment in the sunlight, unable to separate, held together still by something that none of them could name. In that final, crucial moment, Trish looked at Narancia. 

Maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised that he was already looking back. But she was. She had gone still, and her throat had closed. 

That was when she had known, one way or another: this, all of it; it wasn’t a trick of the light at all. Narancia was not dead. Narancia was alive, with the same dark lashes and attentive eyes, the same sharp elbows, the same body and the same breath. Narancia, unbent, unwounded. He was alive—and she was, too. 

She hadn’t known what to do with that, though it had been so plainly given. She had searched herself for the right word to leave him with, for anything, but it had been too much. A paralyzing, unfelt grief. 

“Good luck with school,” she had said to his chest instead of his face, with one hand on her arm. Inside her hollow chest, her Stand had almost wept. “And, um, thanks. For everything.”

It had been a quick and painless replacement for the truth. I cried when you died. I cried.

Narancia’s voice had sounded far away, invented. “Yeah. Just, um—” And he had gone quiet, bowing his head, his hair veiling his eyes. Trish had been able to intuit nothing. “Yeah. Take care, Trish.”

Trish had gone back to Calabria, made her mother’s funeral arrangements, and stayed for a time in the house where she grew up. It hadn’t been so bad, except in spring. The loneliness had given her room to move again, rebuild again, nail by nail. She saw Giorno in wildflowers, Bucciarati in the scales of fish, Mista in the gold grass. Abbacchio in the fog at night, Fugo in the mended fences. Narancia in the clouds beyond the Apennines, and in the flight patterns of swifts, and in the blossoms on the orange tree. 

She endured it. She let herself bend.

Eventually, in the wine tent in Catanzaro, she had met Giulia. A life had spiraled out of that, for better or worse. Her mother had raised her to sing, so that’s what she had done, navigating the electric guitar in the studio at Giulia’s villa over the course of a rainy autumn: first a song about the ocean, then one about a scar. Then an EP, then a studio album, then a tour, and then the cycle over again. She had seen herself on televisions, magazine racks, the sides of skyscrapers. She had stood on so many stages, in so many cities. She had written songs for each of her old guards, carefully disguised. Bucciarati’s, the one about the ocean; Giorno’s, the one about the butterflies; Mista’s, the one about rolling down the windows. 

Narancia’s—she’d lost track.

And maybe all of that had been fate, or something like it; maybe that had been the ending that Bucciarati and the rest had all hoped for, the closest thing to his promise outside a narrow elevator: a far-off country, a new name, a morning in another life where she left Italy and never saw any of them again. Maybe they had only ever belonged to something violent and unknowable, a strange week in a strange season—a series of wounds. 

In the end, she hadn’t kept in touch with any of them—no phone calls or letters, no utterance of the single miraculous word Abbacchio had been so sure existed—not with Bucciarati, and not with Mista, and not even with Narancia. Dreams had replaced them, pulling her out of bed in the middle of the night, jumbled with the nightmares about airplanes and a hole in her stomach and a voice from the Tiber River, calling out to her. 

On an unadorned summer evening, during apricot season, she left Calabria for Milan with a hand mirror and a vase. She didn’t tell any of them. With mountains and roads and cities between them, they were living, and she was living. And at the end of it all, or what had felt like the end, that had meant something. It had meant everything. 

“You’re distracted,” says Giulia.

Trish lifts her chin out of her hand, pulling her eyes away from the car window and turning her head to the left, where Giulia is sitting next to her, viciously clicking away at her BlackBerry. 

“That’s twenty minutes you’ve been staring out the window and sighing,” Giulia continues, her focus unbroken. “I have counted ten. Sighs, that is.”

“I wasn’t sighing,” Trish mutters.

“You cannot fool Giulia,” Giulia says, putting a finger in the air for emphasis. “She knows all, hears all. Are you lovesick, mia passerotta? Is it true you have a heart?”

Trish is long past rolling her eyes at the nickname, but she still huffs. “What are you even talking about? I’m just hungry.”

“Hungry, she says. Well, fine. I will find another topic. That—what is it—Narancia of yours. He’s nice,” she says, in that way that she says all people are nice, like it’s its own joke. “A very nice boy. His bus came in at four A.M., did you know this? How grueling it must have been. I took him to lunch. He held the door open for me—so very funny. How did you meet him?” 

“He’s not mine,” Trish snaps. “He’s—an old friend. Sort of.” She wants to ask, how is he; she wants to ask, does his smile look the same; but what she asks is, “Will you hire him?” 

Giulia hums again. When Trish glances at her face, she’s smirking down at whatever email she’s sending with one eyebrow raised.

“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” she replies. “When I asked him about his work experience, he choked on the garganelli. But the most important thing is not my trust; it’s yours. So?” 

“So what?”

“Do you trust that boy with your life?” Giulia asks.

Trish thinks of ice cubes in a glass, how they’d shrunk so quickly the moment that she’d touched them. She thinks of light glinting off of a blade, and a bruise on Narancia’s jaw, and how he had leaped onto the deck of a motorboat in the dark outside Rome; how his face had looked from below, set against the stars, when he had reached in desperation for the wheel. 

“Yes,” she says.

Giulia finally clicks the keyboard back into place, slipping her phone into the pocket of her blazer. 

“Then I do, too,” she replies. “Trust him with your life, that is. Mine, I am not so sure. For that I have Carolina.” She sits abruptly forward, smacking her hand against the back of the driver’s seat. “Fabrizio, I’d like for us to get to Ortensia sometime in the next geologic era. Before I am a mummified corpse, yes? Are you not familiar with a gas pedal? It is a marvelous invention! Use it!”

Trish tunes out the rest, sinking back into her seat and watching the city pass. They’ve been stuck in traffic for almost half an hour, crawling along at a slower pace than the pedestrians. She’s already restless, the way that she always is when she’s locked in a car for too long, subduing the instinct to wrench the door open.

She lets her eyes wander along the sidewalk, passing over storefronts, lingering on a cute dress on a mannequin, a thing with long sleeves that glitters. She wonders what the light had been like when Narancia’s bus had gotten in, when she’d been wide awake halfway across the city with her covers thrown off and her hands wrung at her stomach. She wonders if—

“Beatrice Una, are you listening to me?” Giulia interrupts, snapping her fingers once in front of Trish’s face. Trish jumps—she hadn’t even noticed that Fabrizio had pulled over and parked. “If you fall asleep in front of Valentina Montalto, I will never work for you again. I will repeat myself only once more. Your boy is right there ahead of us, you see? Get out of the car!”

Even now, though Trish would never say it, she thinks that she could find Narancia through anything: a crowd of thousands, a firefight, a hurricane. All of that considered, a sidewalk in Milan is nothing. 

She sees him through the tinted window, lean and restless in a bright orange-and-white jacket, rocking on his heels with his hands in his pockets. He has the same headband, the same wild hair; the same tendency to hold himself a little warily, as if waiting for a gun to go off. He’s looking at the sky. 

Trish loses track of what happens between catching sight of him and feeling Giulia’s hand at her back, shoving her firmly out the open door and onto the sidewalk. 

Her heels click loudly on the stone. Narancia’s eyes—the same eyes, still vigilant, still violet—abandon the sky and come to her.

The look on his face is difficult to comprehend, but it’s so familiar that her first instinct is to burst out laughing. She manages not to.

She ends up standing a little closer to him than she’d planned—close enough to feel a warmth unfolding in the silence between them, evidence of life and something else—and she almost loses her balance on the heels. Almost.

She opens her mouth to say something, maybe a hello and maybe his name, isolated. Narancia opens his, too, smaller. 

There’s a sudden burst of sound, the ascendant roar of an engine—and then Aerosmith has launched itself from the familiar blaze of light at Narancia’s edges and zipped past him, straight to Trish, soaring in circles around her head in the middle of the sidewalk.  

“A-Aero!” Narancia shouts, embarrassed. “Stop that!” 

Aerosmith does a loop at Trish’s side, a twirl above her, revving excitedly. Wind rises in its wake, rushing over her face and tousling her hair—and it stirs some helpless, joyful thing in her chest before she can put a name to it. It takes her a second to even realize that she’s laughing. 

“Okay, Aerosmith, okay!” she exclaims. People are staring, but she doesn’t care. When Aerosmith comes to hover in front of her face, she sets a hand over her hair to keep it in place against the gust and fondly says, “I missed you, too.” 

Her eyes catch on Narancia’s face over the wing. He’s staring at her with wide, almost disbelieving eyes. Trish’s heart leaps inside of her at a pace too frantic to keep hold of, so fast that it might outrun her.

After a moment more, Aerosmith returns to him, glinting under a street light for a moment as it goes. It skids along his shoulder and is gone. The wind fades, and then only the still night is left, and Narancia looking at her in it—Narancia, in front of her for the first time in years she realizes only then she’s been keeping count of.

After a second, he closes his mouth, eyes darting to the pavement and then back to her again. There are no bruises on his face, no cuts. His hair is still in his eyes.

“Hey, Trish,” he says. 

And Trish says, “Hi.”

Narancia has gotten taller. Maybe. Maybe Trish is imagining it—maybe she feels so much like he should have that she’s letting the low light invent growth. It’s hard to tell for sure when he’s sitting down, and when there’s a whole table between them. 

She’s had this dinner with Valentina Montalto, a major record producer, on her calendar since January. Giulia had made the reservation at Ortensia, some exclusive nouvelle cuisine restaurant in Zona Tortona that Trish has never been to. It’s dim inside in the way that all fancy restaurants are: golden and sophisticated, commanding a particular quiet. Food portions the size of a clementine are presented on plates triple their size, garnished with pan-fried herbs or edible flowers. The menu is printed on birch bark. 

It’s kind of funny. Trish has seen Narancia stare down death itself as naturally as taking a breath, but the blank terror on his face when the server asks him to make a wine selection is extreme. It’s a little mean, but she has to discreetly cover her mouth with one hand to keep from laughing at him. 

Now, she’s supposed to be paying attention to what Valentina Montalto is saying about the future of popular rock music, but all that she can actually focus on is Narancia’s miraculous face, and the places where his hair has grown out, and the fact that his shoulders are a little wider, his jaw a little sharper. He’s been thumping his foot restlessly ever since they’d sat down, and he still has his jacket on; he’d given the maître-d’ a distrusting look when she’d offered to take it for him. 

He looks out of place in a jagged, obvious way, his eyes canvassing the room, flitting to Trish at the slightest breath or movement. He just about springs out of his chair anytime their waiter comes by the table to check in. His shirt is different, but it still has a lot of straps, and the jacket’s pretty cool. She’d caught a glimpse of some kind of green mesh belt thing outside, which she doesn’t really get, but somehow, on Narancia, it works. 

“You need to write more love songs,” Valentina Montalto says loftily to Trish as the waiter comes to distribute their entrees. She takes a pointed sip of her Chianti. “That’s where the market is these days. The world needs a ballad from Trish Una. Something vulnerable.” 

Trish only half-hears this, since the disgusted noise that Narancia makes when he sees his plate drowns out the rest. He slams one hand on the table and whirls on the waiter with a scowl. 

“What the fuck,” he says, and jabs a finger at the plate, “is that?” 

The waiter blinks back at him for a second, then frowns. 

“That’s—your spaghetti, signore.” 

“Do you have eyes, stupid?” Narancia snaps. “Does this look like spaghetti?”

“W-Well, it’s been emulsified, you see—”

“I don’t see the damn pasta, si-gno-re,” Narancia drawls over him, and starts to rise menacingly from his seat. “Are you messing with me? Huh? You think you’re funny?”

“Not at all; I—”

“Oh yeah?” Narancia says, and reaches in one broad sweep for his back pocket—his switchblade pocket. “Cuz I don’t think you’re funny either!” 

“Narancia,” Trish says sharply.

Narancia freezes, eyes narrowed at the waiter’s ashen face, his hand poised in midair. Trish tilts her glass back as casually as possible, and when Narancia looks down at her, she clears her throat quietly against the rim. 

Just like that, he clicks his tongue and straightens up, his arms dropping to his sides. He falls unceremoniously back into his chair. He links his hands behind his head, churlishly closes his eyes, and that’s the end of that. 

To her credit, Valentina Montalto seems completely unperturbed by this incident. She goes on talking to Trish as if nothing had happened, and Narancia sits quietly for the rest of the meal, slouched into his jacket, prodding at his food with a salad fork. 

At the end of it, Trish is pretty sure she’s landed a record deal—Valentina likes her enough to insist on paying for the meal—and after the polite, professional goodbye she finds herself on the sidewalk with Narancia, watching the nightlife dart past them like so many fish, without a clue of what to say. 

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other and tucks one hand under her elbow, glancing at Narancia without turning her head. His lower lip is sticking out, the way that it does when he’s thinking. 

“So,” she begins. And ends.

Narancia jolts a little, eyes darting to her and then back to the street. He clears his throat.

“So,” he replies.

Trish combs a set of fingers through her hair, gathers up a sentence. 

“I’m supposed to go home,” she says.

“Oh.” Narancia blinks, turning his head to the right and the left. “Like, which way?”

“That way.” Trish points across herself, to the left.

She regrets it immediately, because it prompts Narancia to look at her head-on. He follows the line of her finger, leaning over and balancing on one foot.

“Okay,” he says, nodding slowly. “Do you, um, need me to come… with you?”

Trish shrugs with her hands. “Probably?”

“Huh?” He swings back onto two feet again, frowning. “What do you mean probably? I’m guarding you, aren’t I?”

“Well—yeah.” She throws one hand up, a little annoyed. “Giulia’s your boss, not me. Didn’t she tell you my schedule?”

Narancia’s face stiffens with displeasure at the word schedule. “I mean, yeah, but…”

“If I call her, she’ll send us a car,” Trish says, rummaging in her clutch for her Nokia. “Just give me one—”

Narancia suddenly lets out a loud groan, throwing his arms over his head. Trish jumps.

“Screw that! I’m still hungry!” he yells to the sky, and drops his arms again. He whirls on her. “Come on, Trish. Let’s go get some real food.”

Before Trish can react, he reaches across the space between them and closes his hand around her wrist. His fingers are firm and sure and warm—so warm that Trish feels it all the way to her face.

He tugs her toward him with no more force than a gust of wind, capricious and inviting—and that’s it. She lets it carry her, two steps behind him, down the street. 

All of that time in the restaurant wanting to talk to him, and now she can’t think of anything to say. The heels of her shoes click along the stone more loudly than they should, or maybe it’s her imagination. Narancia slows occasionally to glance up at a street sign, mutter to himself, and stride confidently onwards. He doesn’t let go of her hand. 

“Where are we going?” she finally has the sense to ask. 

Narancia tilts his head over his shoulder. “Hm? I told you. We’re gonna get some food. Bucciarati recommended a place.”

“In Milan? When has he—”

“Bucciarati knows places everywhere,” Narancia says, and grins wide at her over his shoulder. She knows that grin still—the one that illuminates his whole face, the one that’s impossible to argue with. “He told me last night when I—oh! This is it!”

Trish almost crashes into him when he stops in the middle of the sidewalk. She glares at him for a second, unnoticed, and tugs her hand free.

At the end of the alleyway is an osteria without a name. Warm light swells against the windows and spills onto the street through the open door. At least seven of the guys crowded inside have shoulder holsters.

“Um,” she starts to say, but Narancia is already springing inside and yelling for the owner in such rapid Neapolitan that she can barely keep up. 

He gets them a tiny corner table by one of the windows, flanked by two high stools. He swings himself onto the one wedged against the wall, leaving her the other, with more space behind it—the way she’s always liked it. His feet touch the red tiled floor at the toes. Ah, Trish thinks, a bit triumphantly, lifting herself onto the other stool. Taller. 

He brushes some crumbs from the tablecloth and nudges the tea light in the red candle holder out of the way so that he can set his elbows on the table. When he orders a margherita pizza, he emphatically says con funghi, gesturing with both hands so that the small flame sputters, its light flickering against the plane of his neck. 

They’re quiet while they wait for the food. It sounds stupid, but Trish is strangely at ease just watching Narancia be: exactly as she remembers, and yet not quite. He seems a little more patient, although he’d always been patient when it had come to her—good at listening as well as hearing—but his habits are still the same: he scratches at his head, drums his fingers, bounces his leg. When the waiter comes back with his pizza and her Coke, his face lights up the same way, too. 

Trish pinches her straw between two fingers and watches him start eating. Messy and noisy and—happy. 

“You’re still you,” she blurts out. 

Narancia lifts his head mid-chew and blinks at her. Trish feels stupid, but she doesn’t know how else to say it. It’s true. It’s so true that she could write a song about it.

“Oh.” He looks self-consciously at the tablecloth, swallowing. “Um—is that—good?” 

“Yeah,” Trish answers. “And you’re… taller.” 

“Really?!” he exclaims, brightening. “I knew it!” He pumps his fist, grinning smugly at the ceiling. “Suck it, Mista.” 

Fondness flits across Trish’s face before she can hold it back. She bends forward to disguise it around the straw.

“How is he?” she asks. “Or—everyone, I guess.” 

Narancia beams, clearly happy to be asked. 

“They’re all great!” he says, animatedly going back to eating. “Passione’s super different now, but also… not? I dunno. Giorno cleaned out a lot of the drug rackets; now it’s just gambling and protection and stuff. There’s a ton of Stand users still. He’s been working really hard, and he’s crazy busy, so Mista’s crazy busy, too. Oh, Mista and I got this place on Via Toledo a while back—but he’s like never there, and when he is it’s always, ‘Giorno said this, Giorno said that, what do you mean you haven’t seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’ Like I care. Let’s see… Bucciarati and Abbacchio are really good—they let me come over a lot, and sometimes I get to help Bucciarati fish! But Abbacchio usually doesn’t come. He gets seasick.”

“Did Bucciarati…” Trish pauses, stirring the ice cubes. “I mean, I remember him saying something about… getting a boat?” 

“Oh, yeah,” Narancia says. “Some piece of junk he bought for, like, nothing. He spent forever fixing it up—all of us helped. Now he and Abbacchio just lounge around on it all day and listen to boring music. Like old people.” 

Trish can picture Abbacchio lounging without much trouble, but the notion of Bucciarati lounging anywhere seems surreal. She’s glad, she guesses, that he has the occasion for it now. 

Narancia glances at the ceiling, mouthing to himself like he’s running through a list.

“Oh, and Fugo’s—” He frowns, squints, and then shrugs. “Still Fugo, I guess. Giorno was all nervous cuz he didn’t know whether to make him or Polnareff consigliere. Then Mista told him to just do both, so he did. All the old guys were losing it. ‘Two consiglieri?!’ Who cares? Anyway, kinda perfect for Fugo; he still rides everybody’s ass, but now he gets paid for it.”

Trish almost asks about their Stands—although she hasn’t been on the best of terms with hers for a long time—but then Narancia waves a hand, bending over his plate to cut into the pizza. 

“Anyway, what about you?” he asks. “How’ve you been?”

“Oh, um,” Trish says. “Fine.” 

“Fine? You’re, like, famous and everything! That’s awesome!” 

Trish doesn’t feel like faking enthusiasm, so she makes a noise of half-acknowledgment, toying with the corner of her napkin. Narancia doesn’t seem too bothered by the noncommittal answer. 

“Do you like it?” he asks through a mouthful of pizza. “Like, are you happy?” 

Trish glances at her plate, suddenly unable to look back at something capable of seeing her.

“I don’t… hate it,” she answers. “It kills time. And I guess it’s fun. Like, traveling, and stuff.”

Narancia’s chewing slows. He lowers his fork. 

“But you don’t want to do it forever,” he says for her. 

Trish’s eyes flick back to him. He’s watching her intently, his hair still mussed from the windy walk, his face bright from a faint sweat. The restaurant really is hot and noisy, steam wafting out between the tables from the kitchen. He glows in the light. 

“I don’t think so,” she says. It’s the first time she’s told anyone. Not even Giulia knows, yet, about her thoughts of another city and another dream. Leave it to Narancia to get it out of her with nothing more than a slice of pizza and a long look. “It’s not that it’s bad. I’m just… bored, I guess. It doesn’t feel like it used to.”  

“What’d it used to feel like?” Narancia asks, scooting a little closer. 

Trish considers him. She lifts one shoulder, evading his eyes again, rolling her head to look instead at the fogged-up windowpane. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “Not like this.” 

From the moment that she’d met him—really met him, not just twisted his arm and stuck a blade in his jaw—Trish had taken notice of the way Narancia listens. It’s the same way that his Stand listens, breath by breath. This is yet another thing that hasn’t changed.

“I didn’t even know you could sing,” he tells her after a while. “Back then. But you’re really good.” 

Trish stiffens against the compliment, the same as always. “I’m just lucky.”

“Lucky and good,” Narancia retorts. A smile breaks on his face. “I really like the new one, you know, the one that goes like—” And then he starts singing it, from the chorus. The one about the rain in Naples. 

Trish lunges across the table and claps a hand over his mouth. He blinks back at her with wide eyes, but stops all the same. 

“Don’t do that,” she hisses. 

“Why?” Narancia asks, muffled, against her palm. 

“It’s—” She doesn’t know how to say it. Writing songs is one thing, but the idea that people hear them—that Narancia hears them—that he knows the words well enough to say them back to her—is another one entirely. She settles for a lie. “It’ll make people look over here, and if they see me…”

“Oh,” Narancia says, with complete understanding, and then he faintly sniffs her hand. “Your perfume smells nice.” 

Trish’s hand darts back so fast that it bumps against her chest. 

“Thanks,” she says. “It’s Versace.”

Then the conversation lags—Narancia eats; Trish absentmindedly stirs her Coke. The buzz of the restaurant occupies the silence, snatches of laughter and responses, crowding together into a single, unbroken current of noise. Trish, with her chin in her palm, comfortably watches Narancia exist—watches the way his eyes seem to glow a little when he takes each bite, like he’s tasting it for the first time. 

“Are you sure you don’t want some?” he asks, nudging his plate closer to her with two knuckles. “It’s pretty good.” 

Trish tries not to make a face her mother would scold her for. Before she can turn him down, though, he doubles over a little, snorting into his fist. 

“Just kidding,” he says, and slides the plate back. “I know you hate it.” 

“Y-You remember that?” she exclaims.

“Huh?” Narancia frowns. His cheeks are bulging and there’s some sauce on his face. “Sure I remember.”

Before Trish can answer, he drops his left elbow onto the table and starts lazily ticking things off on his fingers. 

“No Margherita pizza,” he drawls, the same way he’d recite the multiplication tables for Fugo. “No orange juice. Mineral water, but only if it’s from France. Vogue Italia. Nylon stockings—reinforced at the thigh, right?—and Givenchy blush.” He grins smugly afterwards, clearly expecting praise. “Well? Am I right?”

“But—” Trish blinks hard, shakes her head. “When Fugo was giving you the driving directions… you couldn’t—you had to write them down. On the map.”

Narancia wrinkles his nose. “Why would I care about Fugo’s shitty directions?”

He lowers his hand into the crook of his other elbow, and gazes unreadably at the table.

“I remember a lot,” he says, quiet, “about you.”

I remember a lot about you, too, Trish almost says. I remember everything.

“Anyway,” Narancia goes on, waving a hand. “I think if you’re bored, you’re bored. You’re gonna be amazing no matter what you do. Don’t worry about it so much.”

“Well,” Trish says, even though Narancia saying things so plainly makes them somehow undeniable, “for now, I’m still doing this. So…”

She sets her fingers on the edge of the table, running her thumb along the line where the tablecloth bends to feel the wood underneath. 

“So…” she mumbles, suddenly self-conscious. “Thank you. For coming.”

“You asked,” Narancia says frankly, instead of something normal like you’re welcome. “So I came.” 

“I—I know I asked,” Trish says, and Narancia tilts his head. “But you didn’t—I mean, you didn’t have to say yes. Like… you didn’t have to do that.” 

Now Narancia’s looking at her like she’s explaining algebra. “I… know?” 

Speechlessly, she bows her head over her almost-empty glass—she had held one just like this, that first afternoon in the turtle room, when the flowers in the vase had died so quickly and Narancia been limp in her lap, bird-boned, breathing too slowly—and looks at the small flame still burning in the candle holder, made crimson. 

“Um, Trish?”

She slackens her hand on the glass until only her fingertips remain, glancing hesitantly across the table, first at Narancia’s elbow, then his face. 

He seems determined to look at everything between them in sequence: the plates, the crumpled napkin, the candle, and, for an instant, her hand. He finally sets his mouth into a line and lifts his chin, so that their eyes are level. 

“You’re still you, too,” he says.

“I am?” Trish asks faintly.

It gives too much away, she knows—but Narancia takes what she gives easily, without fanfare or expectation. He hasn’t changed after all, she thinks. Not even a little. 

“Mm.” He nods again, slower this time, and scratches absently at the back of his head. “Yeah. You are.”

Trish lets it sink into the air between them, at their private table in the corner, by the window. She couldn’t say why those words might be enough to light the way home through any darkness she can imagine. 

“Well,” Narancia adds, and when Trish glances up at him, his eyes evade hers, darting to the pane. “Except your hair.”

She reaches up reflexively to tug at a strand, narrowing her eyes. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

“N-Nothing! It’s just different! You know,” Narancia waves a hand over the crown of his head, “choppier? But it’s cute!” Panic seizes his face. “Um! I mean—nice. It’s just… it’s nice.”

Trish starts laughing. It surprises her, and she tries to hold it back, but the rest of it bursts out, doubling her over for a second. She lets it pass through her until only the breath remains. 

When she recovers, Narancia’s watching her with something adjacent to awe. That’s right, she thinks, with a pang between her ribs—he never did see this. 

“Sorry,” she gets out, laying a hand over her mouth. “I mean. Just. Thanks.” She realizes that she means it. She realizes how much. “Thanks, Narancia.” 

“No problem,” Narancia answers, admiring, and then he clears his throat and sits up straighter. 

After that, Trish finishes her Coke, and Narancia finishes his pizza, and afterwards he walks her back to the main street, and waits with her there. Fabrizio pulls up after only a couple of minutes in the Lancia. 

It only occurs to Trish as she’s lowering herself into the backseat. “Where are you staying, anyway?” 

“Huh?” Narancia pauses in the middle of stretching his arm behind his head, his fingers going slack behind the elbow. “Staying? Hm…”

His eyes wander to the sky, lingering there thoughtfully. After a couple of seconds, he shrugs. 

“No idea!” he says. “I think that manager lady said she got me a hotel after she took my stuff.” He looks from side to side. “Probably around here somewhere…” 

“Ugh. Call her, will you?” Trish shuts the passenger door, tossing her clutch onto the other seat, but rolls down the window and pokes her head out to keep talking. “There’s a payphone back by the restaurant. She’ll tell you what to do. Her name’s Giulia, by the way. And she would definitely fire you if she knew you forgot.” 

“I didn’t forget!” Narancia snaps, but at Trish’s discerning look he relents. “Okay. Giulia. Fine.” He mutters it two more times, emphasizing each syllable. After a second, he stuffs a hand into his jacket pocket, rummaging for something, and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper. He smooths it out, squinting at whatever’s written on it. “I’ve got her number. I think. So…” 

“So, see you,” Trish says, settling back into the seat. 

As she fastens her seatbelt, she sees Narancia stepping closer in her periphery, the heels of his shoes landing brisk on the edge of the sidewalk. He leans down to prop both elbows on the bottom of the car window, and when Trish lifts her head, he’s smiling.

“What?” she asks. 

“Nothing,” he says happily. “Just—you’re really still you. You know?” 

Trish sucks in a breath. Narancia doesn’t seem to notice. She jabs her finger into the button to roll the window back up, and he springs back in alarm. 

Before the last inch closes, she lifts her finger away. Through the tinted glass, Narancia’s silhouette is dimmer, but she can still see his eyes through the opening, hopeful and expectant. 

“Thanks for showing me that place,” she says. “It was good; the—” Wait. She hadn’t actually eaten anything. “The… Coke was good.”

How lame. 

Narancia blinks once, twice, and then beams. 

“It was pretty good!” he replies. “Better than whatever that shit spaghetti was. Let’s go again sometime!”

Trish blinks. Sometime, huh?

“Sure,” she says, before she can keep it to her chest. “Let’s.”

When the car pulls away, she goes limp in her seat, eyes wandering to the soft gray ceiling. The radio is tuned to the classical station, a little muffled through the speaker embedded in the door. The car still smells like Giulia—like cigarettes. 

After a while, she reaches for her phone. There’s a text from Giulia, sent an hour ago, and a bunch of missed calls—also from Giulia. 

I have called you three times. No answer! So either you are dead, or you are happy. Tell me which one so that I can sleep tonight. 

Trish’s thumbs linger over the keyboard, lit in golden blurs by the passing highway lights. From the speakers, an oboe.

Not dead, she types eventually. See you tomorrow.

Chapter Text

When Trish hears a knock at the door of her hotel room by the harbor, Naples has been dark for hours. 

She’ll be going back to Calabria at first light, an eight-hour journey splintered by bus transfers, but she’s barely even packed. She hadn’t brought much to begin with—a hairbrush, a compact, whatever arrangement of clothes had been within reach and vaguely complementary—but the task of reassembling it, making it all fit, still feels insurmountable. Her suitcase is ajar at the foot of the bed, mussed fabric spilling out of it onto the sheets; outfits she hadn’t even needed for an overnight trip, but had brought all the same, just in case.

She hates the sheets in this place. They’re an ugly color, and too thin and stiff to sleep on, and they smell like a hospital. She’d switched on every lamp before night had started falling, and now they fill the flowered wallpaper (ugly) with a hazy, tawny glow; not so harsh that they’ll keep her awake, but pervasive enough to illuminate every corner—just in case.

She’s been driven to a lot of choices by just in case these days.

She’s still in the dress that she’d worn to Libeccio, even though she’s been sweating in it all day, making the cotton limp. She hasn’t felt like changing. All she wants is a cold shower, and maybe amnesia. All she wants is to be home. 

She ignores the knock the first time, but then it comes again. 

There’s no peephole in the door, so she leaves the chain on when she opens it a crack. Out in the hallway, in an orange button-down, is Narancia. 

Her heart clenches up, a closed fist. Narancia’s face is hard to see, obscured by hair and low light. He isn’t quite looking at her—at things close to her, like the door jamb, like the chain, but not at her. His hair is wind-blown, uncombed. His eyes have shadows under them. His hands are in his back pockets. 

“It’s late,” she says in lieu of a greeting.

He rolls one of his shoulders and bows his head to the floor. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Trish considers closing the door on him—considers telling him to go to Mista’s, or Bucciarati’s—but nothing in her wants to. Nothing in her wants to do much of anything. She numbly slides the chain out of the lock. 

She doesn’t wait for him to come through the door before she goes back to the window. His shoes land soft and dull on the carpet when he follows, stopping somewhere behind her. 

“Wow,” he says, so thoughtlessly alive that Trish can hardly bear it. “You can see the whole bay from here.”

He’s not wrong. Far out in the distance, Trish can see the mournful silhouette of Pompeii. At the horizon’s edge, some of the sky is still not quite black, but dusk-blue, the day’s last breath falling gloomily into the water. 

“Giorno picked it,” she explains without really knowing why. Maybe to remind herself that it hadn’t been her choice, really, to come. “Bucciarati tried to get me a room somewhere nicer, but I didn’t want it.” 

“He’s just looking out for you,” Narancia says. “It’s Bucciarati.”

Trish could do without Bucciarati looking out for her, or so she almost says. She could do without the sidelong glances and the hesitations, all the reinvented wounds large and small; she could do without a cryptic sadness on a cryptic face, watching her in silence across the table. 

She mutters instead, “I didn’t ask.” 

“Oh,” Narancia says, and is silent for a while. “Look, um… sorry for just showing up. I just—when you said goodbye at Libeccio—it didn’t… feel right.”

“Feel right?”

“Yeah,” Narancia mutters. “I mean, after everything—shit. I don’t know what I’m saying. I just wanted to… I mean…” He makes a low, frustrated noise. “Where are you gonna go now?” 

“Home, I guess,” Trish answers, dull even to her own ears.

“And then where?”

“I don’t know,” she says curtly. “Somewhere else. Does it matter?”

Narancia is quiet for a moment so tense and tentative that Trish swears she could touch it, push it up to the wall.

“I guess not,” he says, and even Trish can tell that he doesn’t really believe it. She hears him sigh roughly, preparing himself for something. “Hey, um—can I ask you something?”

She lifts one shoulder. “If you want.”

“It’s gonna sound weird.”

Trish works the inside of her cheek between her teeth to keep the words from coming out sharp. 

“Just say it.”

Narancia breathes in, then out, deliberate enough that Trish can hear how it moves through him, rib by rib.

“Um,” he says after. “How did I die?” 

Trish opens her mouth, and closes it, and lets the question decompose in the silence. At last she manages to ask, “What?”  

“Sorry, it’s just—” Narancia’s voice breaks off, restarts. “I know that it, um, happened. But… I can’t remember. And nobody’ll tell me. They keep acting—”

He can’t seem to find the word for it, but Trish doesn’t have to think too hard to know it. Acting like she is now, probably. A dull noise begins to gather at the back of her head and spread out, obscuring all the rest. 

“I didn’t see it,” she hears herself say, far-off and unreal. “None of us did. My father’s Stand—King Crimson—it… removed it? Like, the time. It was already over when we—found you.” 

“Found me?” 

“Yeah,” Trish says. “Up there.” 

“Up where?” 

“I—I don’t want to talk about it.” 

“Why?” 

Trish whips her head around determined to hate him for that, for asking it so painlessly, but seeing his face right there—without bruises or lesions, no different than it had been in the plain light of a room inside a turtle—scatters it from her like so many shards of glass. She wonders if his heart still beats the same. He looks back at her without blinking, the same as always, all confusion and tension and pain.

One of the bars had gone right through his head. Temple to temple. She can still see it, even now; she can trace the path with her eyes even though the wounds are gone. Empty, Giorno had said, in Narancia’s voice, so ragged and so mournful—so unlike Narancia at all, though in a different life it might have been the last thing she ever heard him say. I could slip right in and—

“Why would I?” she half-shouts, throwing out her arms. “Narancia, it was—” 

She can’t finish. What it was, and what it still is. This scatters from her, too.

“But… I mean, it’s fine now, right?” Narancia says, and there’s a pitiful smile struggling on his face. “Giorno brought me back. Abbacchio and Bucciarati too; we’re all—it’s all okay.” 

Trish chokes back a laugh, disbelieving.

“It doesn’t work like that.” 

“Why not?” Narancia asks, and for a second Trish swears she hears a kind of desperation threading through his voice, begging for a true answer. “Why can’t it?”

The sound of it could leave a crack in her heart, if she let it. But she won’t. 

She shouldn’t have answered the door. 

“Because—because it doesn’t, it can’t.” She grabs her hair and turns away and tries to breathe, breathe, breathe. “It just doesn’t.” 

“I don’t get it,” Narancia say helplessly. “Are you mad?” 

Trish drops her arms to her sides of her small, small body, too small for all of the words clamoring inside of it, and winces, and shakes her head, and tries to breathe, breathe, breathe.

“Of course I’m not mad; I just…” 

“Trish, tell me,” Narancia murmurs, and Trish feels rather than hears him step closer. 

She’s used to this sensation now: the way his Stand power shrinks the air, the way its warning reaches her teeth. He’s talking to her the same way that he had in Venice, all that time ago, when she had woken up with someone’s jacket rolled up under her head, smelling the canals and the omen of hot weather, and his face had been the first thing that she’d seen: wet hair, wet eyes. Trish, he’d said, hoarse as if from shouting; Trish. Just her name—a reminder, almost, that it was still hers. 

“I don’t know,” she answers. “I don’t know. I just can’t…” 

“Can’t what?” 

You have sheltered me well, my wretched daughter, a voice had said in Rome, just before her vision had corroded to black. How generously fate rewards me, even now. 

She closes her arms around herself as tightly as she can, over everything red and vital, over all of the things that can betray her. Narancia’s too close, she thinks. Three meters. 

“Do you really not remember?” she whispers. 

At his answering silence, she finally turns around, craning her neck without moving her feet. Narancia is illuminated halfway by the city, uncanny and golden in places—the refractions catch in the loose hair at his face, in the buttons of his shirt. His expression is stiff, irresolute; Trish has learned where the apprehension reveals itself, how it falters at the edge of his mouth. He stares back at her, unyielding.

She doesn’t like this expression: how it’s possessed by something unnameable, stuck between fear and want. She wants the old Narancia back, the one who’d sat cross-legged in the upstairs bedroom of the house by the vineyard and told her something about birds, and smiled at her for the first time, unencumbered. The one who’d been born to fly.

“I remember…” he says, constructing each word slowly, prepared until the last moment to take it back. “You said my name. And you were Mista, but—for a second it was like I could really hear your voice. And…” His eyes stray to the floor. “You were smiling.”

Trish remembers that smile; how delicately it had carried his name in the rain, how it had quieted everything in her; how it had felt like a hole in the roof of some ruined place, accommodating the sun. She remembers the future as Narancia had described it: a gentle and unremarkable thing comprised of light, in which she would always be welcome; and she remembers how easy it had been to believe in it, for just an instant, in the coming dawn, before her father had taught her better. 

“And it—smelled like rain,” Narancia goes on, “and Bucciarati was there; he told me to—scout with Aero? And then Mista asked you to pass him some bullets, and then…”

“Narancia,” Trish says, realizing too late how frantically her heart has started throbbing in her chest, pushing the air from her lungs. “Stop. Forget it, okay? I can’t. I can’t, okay? Please just—”

Right then, she wants nothing more than to plunge into the ocean, so many fathoms down that no light can reach her. Where her spine meets her skull, Spice Girl says, faintly distorted, Breathe, breathe, breathe.

“You were right,” she says, digging the heel of her palm into one eye. “It’s fine now. It’s all fine. Giorno brought you back. So please don’t make me—”

“Trish,” Narancia says, in a broken little voice that guts her where she stands. 

“You said you’d go back to school, didn’t you? So just—go. Be happy.” 

At this, Narancia flinches back. He lowers his dull wet eyes to his shoes, at last seeming to comprehend what she’s asking. What she’s begging for. 

Giorno’s flowers had opened for him so beautifully. All of them, fragrant, together. 

“You’re leaving,” he says. “That’s it, then, huh? You’re just gonna—”

“So what if I am?” Trish demands. “That was always going to be the plan, you know. Me and a faraway country.”

Narancia shakes his head silently. His face is red and screwed-up, aimed out at the bay. Trish watches the words work through his mouth until he says them.

“Are you ever gonna come back?” 

Trish watches the fishing boats returning to the harbor, watches the countless lights of Naples break apart over the unsettled water until they’re forgotten, eaten up by the expanding night. 

She hates everything about this beautiful city, she realizes—it takes so many things for itself. It’s going to take this, too.

“I don’t think so,” she whispers. 

Narancia doesn’t argue. He doesn’t even start to. Trish had wanted this—she’d wanted this—but it hurts all the same. She might carry it with her forever, a sliver of glass embedded in the skin; the entry wound closed over, though the artifact remains. Breathe. Breathe.

Breathe.

“Okay,” Narancia says, low and empty. “Okay. Fine. That’s fi—” His voice shakes. “That’s fine, Trish. Arrivederci.”

And that’s it. A movement of feet, the door opening, and then the door closing—and then he’s gone. 

The room is too small to have echoes, but Trish thinks she hears one all the same, breaking into pieces on the carpet. Arrivederci. Arrivederci. 

Spice Girl’s displeasure is like a set of fingers at the back of her neck, closing down. 

“What?” Trish mutters, wiping at her dry eyes with one hand. 

Spice Girl is silent for a good while, but Trish can feel her thinking, a rubber band about to snap. She busies herself again with the suitcase and its needless objects, waiting for her Stand’s sentiments to coalesce. It’s a wait she’s gotten used to. Spice Girl always takes her time.

When she does speak, it’s an hour or so later, and Trish is on the bed and half-awake. She’s lying on her back with the covers cast onto the floor. She can never sleep in the dark these days, so the lamp on the bedside table is still on, its old brass light muffled by the burlap shade. Spice Girl’s voice ripples through her, cold and discontent.

You, she says, never want what you need, or need what you want. 

Then, after a long pause: This makes you hard to hear, Trish.

“I’m going to sleep,” Trish murmurs to the empty room, and rolls over to close her eyes. “Just—forget it. Okay?”

She can feel how Spice Girl examines this, how she searches each edge of it for something to comprehend. Forget, like that’s something that a soul can just do.

Understood, she says at last, and then retreats beneath the blood.

Just after 6 AM, Trish’s Nokia starts vibrating under her pillow. She rolls over to blink hazily at the fake mahogany wall of the nightlinger bunk. Its sheen reflects the glow of the overhead reading light, which she had left on. Her legs are tangled up in the sheets, and her right foot is asleep.

She gropes around under the pillow for a second before finding the phone, which goes on buzzing insistently in her hand. She doesn’t bother checking the caller ID before she flips it open—Giulia would kill her, but she’s too tired to remember that. 

“What,” she mumbles, wiping some drool from her cheek.

“Ah—I’m sorry, Trish. Did I disturb you?” 

“Giorno?” Trish lunges up and hits her head on the ceiling. “Ow. Giorno? How did you get this number?” 

“It’s not important,” Giorno answers from the speaker with a brusque affect that reminds her distinctly of Bucciarati. “Good morning. Is Narancia with you?” 

Trish blinks and scrubs at the corner of one eye. Now that she’s properly awake, the displeasure of being on the phone with Giorno fully sinks its weight onto her, and she switches instantly to annoyance.

“What’s it to you?”

“Well, he has been quite technically missing for three days,” Giorno answers patiently. “And at this point I’d like to come to a decision on whether or not it will be necessary for me to expend organization resources on locating him. And by organization resources I mean Mista and Fugo.”

Trish reaches up to knead the bridge of her nose, wedging the phone against her shoulder. 

“Mista and Fugo?” she repeats after a second.

“They’ve already volunteered,” Giorno says. “Pro bono.”  

Trish falls inelegantly back onto the mattress, bouncing slightly with the impact. Now that she’s a little more awake, she can notice that Giorno still sounds like Giorno, albeit a little deeper, more measured. He still talks like nothing in this world could ever frighten him.

“Narancia’s fine,” she says. “He’s with me.”

“Ah. That is a relief.” Giorno pauses for a second, pretending to gather his thoughts as if he doesn’t have them all neatly laid out in front of him, color-coded. “And what is Narancia doing with you, exactly?”

“Work,” Trish says, bristling. There’s no trace of insinuation in Giorno’s voice, but she suspects it all the same. “I’m paying him. I needed a bodyguard for my tour.”

“Ah. Of course. It would be about that time now, wouldn’t it? Where to first?” 

“You can just look it up, can’t you?” 

“I could,” Giorno admits. “But a certain someone wouldn’t appreciate my using the Internet to check up on an old friend. And, well… I suppose a certain old friend probably wouldn’t appreciate being looked up, either.” 

A certain someone? What’s that supposed to mean? It doesn’t matter—she’d lost the patience for sussing out what the hell Giorno Giovanna is ever talking about about fifteen minutes after she’d first met him. She blinks sleepily at the tiny air vents overhead, reaching up with her free hand to redirect one so that it sends some cold air to her face. 

“Vienna,” she mumbles, and Giorno repeats it with a note of awe. 

“I’ve never been,” he says. “Are you nervous?” 

“Nervous? Please.” Trish switches the phone to her other ear and sits up again, beginning the task of unraveling the thrashed sheets from her legs. “I wouldn’t be much of a pro if I was, would I?” 

“So that’s a yes,” Giorno says. “I have no doubt you’ll do well, Trish. You truly have the—what’s the word—charisma. I’ll have to make it to one of your shows sometime.” 

“Please don’t.” 

Giorno lets out a laugh, brief and well-articulated. Trish isn’t sure if it makes her angry or relieved, but it makes her feel something.

“All right,” he concedes. “Not yet.” Trish hears leather moving, and then an exhale, as if he’s leaning back in a desk chair. “Will you be on the road for very long?” 

“Three months,” Trish says. “More or less. My last show’s in—in Rome. In August.” 

“I see,” Giorno says, with such care that Trish almost shrinks from it. 

“Before that, though, I’m—all over,” she continues. “Denmark, France, Spain. Giulia’s really going all out since this is… my last one. For a while.” 

“Your manager, I presume?” 

Trish makes a noise of affirmation, nodding her head. The words are unfolding from her with surprisingly little hesitation; she supposes Giorno’s always had a way of coaxing things out of the world.  

“That’s quite a lot of flying,” he says. 

Something cold jabs at Trish’s stomach. 

“I don’t do planes,” she mutters. “We’re taking a bus.” 

Again, after a beat to think about it, Giorno says, “I see.” 

Trish is struck by an old sentiment, then: that she wishes Giorno would see less.

“Now pardon me if this is ignorant,” he goes on, “but do you travel with a band?”

Trish sighs. If she’d known that she was going to spend her morning explaining the finer details of her music career to Giorno, of all people, she would have turned off her phone. 

“Sort of,” she says a little curtly. “They usually go their own way. It’s just people Giulia finds.”

The truth is she’s never had the same personnel on more than one album, and most tracks are usually just her anyway, on a keyboard or guitar, with the other instruments recorded later by people whose faces she never sees. She has names—Paola, the bassist from Lerici; Federico, some drummer nephew of Giulia’s—but anything beyond the names has never seemed to take. 

She doesn’t tell Giorno this, though. She doesn’t know what he’d see in that, but she knows she wouldn’t like it. 

“Anyway,” she says, and clears her throat. “All of that’s just—the way it’s always been. It’s not that interesting.” 

“To those of us outside of that world, I assure you, it’s quite interesting,” Giorno tells her with a flicker of amusement. “Mista in particular is fascinated. I’m sure there’d be no end to his questions.” 

Trish can imagine some of Mista’s questions. Do you get a lot of free shit? How many cars do you have? Can you give me Monica Bellucci’s number? She scowls. 

“But, well—Narancia’s taken care of. That’s what really matters. As it happens, there’s something I’ve been meaning to—” Trish hears a door open and close. “Ah, Fugo. Good morning. Just give me one—yes. Yes. No, we were just finishing up.” 

Trish can hear Fugo’s voice moving in the background, familiar inflections and emphases, but he sounds different in a way she can’t quite fit in a word. Then again, she’d never had much occasion to acquaint herself with Fugo’s voice, with the parts of it that are sprained and not sprained, so maybe this is just another change she’s inventing. She wonders if Polnareff’s around. 

Giorno comes close to the speaker again. “Sorry about that.” 

“You know I don’t care,” Trish says. “Well. Don’t mind.” 

“I appreciate it,” Giorno says, and Trish can tell that he means it. 

Then he’s quiet for a second. Trish has always had a good sense for what Giorno plans and doesn’t plan. This feels unplanned. 

“You sound well, Trish,” he says at last. “Just like in your songs.”

Trish pulls her leg free from the sheets and lets it dangle over the edge of the bunk, brushing against the drawn curtain. In the dense brown noise of the moving bus, it’s easy to imagine that nothing exists beyond her compartment; that there are no good reasons in the world to lie or hide or pretend. The truth is that Giorno’s voice is easier to answer than she’d thought it would be, though the memories it excavates are harsh and overexposed: so many jagged pieces of death, almost, and grief, almost.

She wonders how she, in turn, must sound to him. 

“I’m glad Narancia found you,” he tells her, with a particular warmth and weight.

“Yeah,” Trish says more softly than she wants to. “I’ll tell him to call you.” 

“No need. Though Bucciarati might appreciate a word or two, if he has the time.” 

“Fine, fine.” Trish already has a headache just from hearing Bucciarati’s name. 

“Ah, and about Narancia—” 

“What about Narancia?” Trish snaps. Just when she’d blissfully thought they’d moved away from that particular topic. 

“Look after him,” Giorno says softly, “won’t you?” 

Trish doesn’t know what to say to that—it’s the tone that throws her, not the words—but silence would feel insufficient, so she laughs, a sad, hollow thing that wouldn’t fool anyone, least of all Giorno. But it’s all she has. 

“What are you talking about?” she asks, trying to sound as blithe as she can. “He’s the one with a Stand, not me.” 

“Trish, what—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, and draws her knees up until she can brush a hand against her ankle. “Bye, Giorno.” 

She pulls the phone away from her ear and hangs up before he can answer. 

Stupid. She stares at the screen for a second, then drops her arm and falls back on the mattress. 

The bus had left Milan the night before, just after 23:00, so they’ll probably reach Vienna in a couple of hours. Trish has never liked being stuck on tour buses—the air makes her mouth dry, and there’s never enough space—but this one is pretty nice, compared to most. There are mini fridges. 

She lies there for a while, waking up, and then gets dressed: the brown shirt, the long plaid pink skirt, the choker that she always wears. She can hear Giulia moving around a couple of bunks down as she makes her way to the staircase. 

On the lower level, she finds Narancia wedged into a seat near the front, dead asleep. The tiny TV inlaid in the back of the seat in front of him is playing the cooking channel, barely audible. He has his arms folded loosely at his chest, and his head lolled to the side, and one foot braced on the seat so that his knee is propped against the window. 

He’s drooling. 

Trish stifles a laugh behind one hand, startled by how fully it bubbles up inside of her. Still, a noise makes it out, and that’s all it takes for Narancia’s head to spring up and his eyes to open, blinking watchfully around the bus before landing on her. They go a little wider when they do. 

“Trish!” he blurts out, like he’s surprised to see her, and he scrambles to sit up straighter, kicking the seat by accident. “Um, sorry. Morning.” 

Trish shakes her head, lowering herself into the outermost seat across the aisle. She sets one elbow on the armrest. 

“You know you have a bunk up there,” she tells him, and gestures vaguely to the ceiling. “There are, like—ten.” 

Narancia is coiled up a moment longer, and then relaxes, hands-first. Once he has, he yawns, rubbing at one eye.

“Tried it. Those things are way too tiny, and you can’t see shit. I like it better down here.” 

Trish sighs and shrugs with both shoulders. “Well, whatever. Do what you want.” 

It’s quiet for a moment, and then Narancia sits forward to switch the TV off and it’s even quieter. The sound of the road passing outside fills up the narrow bus, which is still dim with all the curtains drawn. Trish reaches across the seats behind her and pulls hers open.

There’s only sprawling countryside beyond it, with the occasional village in the distance, marked by a church spire. The sun hasn’t quite come up, so the sky is made only of a dull, hard light, a little paler at the horizon line. 

“So,” she says, letting the curtain fall off the back of her hand again. She turns her head back to Narancia, who’s staring raptly out his own window, crouched forward with his arms linked at his stomach and one foot thumping on the floor. “A restaurant, huh?” 

He lingers on the view for a second—beyond the glass, Trish can see Aerosmith flying alongside the bus, a sight strangely familiar—and even when he turns around, sleepy-eyed, he seems distracted, as if a part of him is flying freely out there, too. 

“Hm?” 

“A restaurant,” Trish says. “On the phone—when we talked. You said you wanted to open a restaurant. Since when?” 

She holds back a grimace at the last part, which comes out more condescending than she plans. 

“Since forever,” Narancia answers, and his sideways glance makes Trish wonder for a second if this is something that he’s shy about. “I like to cook.” 

Trish nods, ignoring the strange pang in her chest at the fact that this is something that she had not known about him—that there are likely countless things more that she had never learned, for lack of time or understanding. 

“That’s nice,” she says, and means it. “What kind of food?” 

Narancia ponders this for a moment, then shrugs. 

“I dunno,” he says. “Good food, I guess. The kinda food that makes people happy to be eating it.” 

“Pizza?” she teases him, and he grins. 

“You remember that?” he exclaims. “Yeah—yeah, pizza! I think…” His hands start to fidget in his lap, and he bows his head, his smile softening. “I think I’ll name it after Bucciarati. Since he—fed me so much.” He reaches up to wipe his nose with one hand. “Is that dumb?” 

“No,” Trish says, shaking her head. “I can see it.” 

Narancia nods, and for a moment when he looks at her the softness of that smile means something different. Trish casts around for the next thing to say.

“Speaking of Bucciarati,” she lands on. “Sort of. Giorno called me.” 

“Oh, shit!” Narancia groans, slapping a hand to his forehead. “I totally forgot to tell him I was leaving!”

“Yeah, I heard,” Trish says dryly. “He sounded like he was going to turn the whole country upside-down.”

“Aw Giorno,” Narancia says with a grimace. “He always gets like that. I gotta call him, like, once a week, or Bucciarati gets mad at me. I don’t get it.”

“What?” Trish asks before she can stop herself. “What do you mean you don’t get it?” 

Narancia frowns at her, opening his mouth, but just then footsteps come down the stairs. Trish twists around in her seat at the same time that Narancia does. 

“You are both awake?” Giulia greets them, tying her hair up as she strides down the aisle. “The youth. Absolute animals. The sun is not even up. Trish, what have I told you? Eight hours, yes?”

Narancia’s eyebrows shoot up. “Eight?” 

Giulia’s been planning this tour since last spring. Twelve major cities in three months—Vienna, Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, Reykjyavík, Dublin, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Rome. Trish can never get the order right, but that’s the order Giulia recites at one of the panorama tables after breakfast, methodically ticking each one off on her fingers. 

“There will be space in between, of course,” she says, leaning back on the seat she’s sharing with Trish, who’s finishing her strawberry yogurt. “You will have to fight for every second of it, but it will be there. The rest will be rehearsing, recording, interviewing—”

“Recording?” Across from them, Narancia sits eagerly forward into a strip of morning sunlight through the window. “No way! Are you making a new album?” 

“It’s… kind of a secret,” Trish says, already imagining far too clearly an enthused phone call to Bucciarati. “But yeah. For next year. Fall, probably.” 

Narancia beams—there’s a flare of pride in his eyes, flame-bright, completely undisguised. 

“We have about a quarter of it finished,” Giulia says. “The girl works slow.” 

“I do not,” Trish mutters. 

“Is this a bad thing?” Giulia scoffs. “Garganelli boy, listen—” 

“It’s Narancia…” 

“Narancia,” Giulia repeats with a little smirk, “this is your first music tour, yes? Let me tell you an industry secret. A tour is not a time for going from one city to the next city and sleeping in nice hotels. That would be a waste of money. I waste enough money in this business. So the true aim is to use this time for promotion.” 

Narancia nods vigorously, as attentive as Trish remembers seeing him when Bucciarati would talk about combat strategies, the parts of the human body to aim for. She scrapes the last of the yogurt out, running the spoon along each crevice, until the bowl is clean. 

“So you will be watching the stage, yes,” Giulia continues, “but that is only, hm, fifty percent of the job. The rest is—” She shrugs. “Standing outside of doors. Walking to and from cars. It is not thrilling.”  

“Still sounds easy,” Narancia says, sharp and confident, and he gives Trish a conspiratorial grin, as if to emphasize how this job description measures up to having his tongue bitten off by a miniature shark. 

“Well!” Giulia says, relaxing against the back of the seat and giving Trish a dry look. “I’m glad one of us thinks so.” 

At every concert, for as long as she’s been giving them, Trish remembers her mother: sitting on the living room couch with her hands in her lap, her fingers interwoven, her nails pink or white. She remembers in the makeup chair, in the dressing room, in the passageway backstage, flanked by security guards she doesn’t know. She remembers how each afternoon had felt endless in that house, a duration of uncompromising light; she remembers how dusk had not descended until, suddenly, it had. Don’t lock your knees, her mother would say, with one hand resting thoughtfully on her cheek. You’ll faint. 

It’s different on a stage than it had been in the living room, before the fallow autumn of her mother’s nameless sickness; before a man called Pericolo had told her not to be afraid, as though that was something a person could simply decide not to be. The pattern has complicated itself, but certain crucial threads remain; all it comes down to, really, is singing to someone. 

Going by the lights alone, blinding her to everything else, the venue in Vienna is no different than a tiny club in Crotone five years ago, where it had been just her and a piano, where the air had smelled like sweet Toscanos and the three floodlights had obscured whatever crowd there might have been. It’s no different than a bright day in a forgotten living room, with a little imagination. There are never any faces to sing to, after all—just voices, meeting hers through the glare—so in some ways she can imagine a carpet under her feet, and a breeze in the curtains, and her mother on the couch, telling her how not to faint.

She comes onstage in a fluffy black coat, a blue minidress, white boots. Her heart is going to be stuck in her mouth until she opens it. There’s cheering, a shrill unified wave of it, an avalanche of life that she can’t see. 

But she doesn’t need to see Narancia. She knows, right away, that he’s there. Bucciarati had once told her something about how Stand users were drawn to one another, across continents and time; how they might have been fragments of the same kind of soul, reassembling themselves. Narancia’s near the front—whatever a soul might be, hers finds his by soundings—anticipatory, watchful, like a hawk about to dive. She opens her mouth, and her heart goes free.

“Hello, Vienna,” she says with both hands on the microphone, smiling obliquely into the light. “I’m Trish. Thank you for having me. This is a song about the ocean.” 

And maybe this is the part that she likes best—the part where they answer. The part where they know the words.

“I’m going to fire him. I could have done it ten times,” Giulia announces the next morning on the bus. Trish looks up from painting the nails of her left hand—bright blue, to match the dress she’d worn the night before—to see her on the couch by the kitchenette, viciously typing on her phone. “Tell this fool boy that when he’s in front of the stage he’s to watch the crowd, not you.”

From behind the open refrigerator door, Narancia’s head pops into view, his face twisted up with indignation. He tosses an arm across the top of the door to brandish a bottle of Orangina at Giulia’s shoulder. 

“I was watching the crowd!” he snaps. 

Giulia rolls her eyes to the ceiling. “And now he lies to me.” 

“I’m not—!” Narancia splutters. He rises to his feet and slams the fridge closed with his foot, stalking over to stand in front of Giulia. “So what if I looked? It’s a concert, isn’t it?” 

Giulia stops typing mid-sentence, which Trish has only seen her do on maybe three occasions, and glares dangerously up at him through narrowed eyes. Trish thinks it’s a little funny for anyone to glare dangerously at Narancia in the outfit that he’s wearing—a green t-shirt, dark overalls with the front hanging loose around his waist. He looks so… normal.

“For people who buy tickets to go to a concert? Yes!” Giulia barks. “Did you buy a ticket, garganelli boy?” 

Narancia pulls a horrible face. “Are you kidding? That shit’s like two hundred—”

“Then you are free to spend two hundred on that shit next time!” Giulia says, and snaps her keyboard shut. When she stands, she throws both hands in the air. “God knows I pay you that much to stand there gaping like an imbecile! I am going to take a nap!” 

“Imbe—?” Narancia starts to squawk, but Giulia’s already stomped up the stairs and out of sight. 

After she’s gone, he mutters something furiously under his breath, unscrewing the cap a little harder than he probably needs to, and chugs the Orangina in one go. When he’s drained the bottle, he chucks it into the chute of the recycling bin one-handed. 

Because she’s distracted watching him, Trish’s hand wavers and she accidentally paints too much base coat on the side of her pinkie. When she groans, Narancia turns around to look at her questioningly, still surly. 

She holds up both hands, knuckles-out, fanning her fingers apart.

“Can you help me?” she asks, exasperated. “The right hand’s a pain.” 

Narancia blinks back for a second. Trish can practically see his mood adjusting itself.

“Oh, sure.” He drops into the opposite seat and slides down the length of it until he’s directly across from her. “Give it.” 

Trish passes him the bottle and watches him unscrew the cap, brushing off the excess polish on the rim. He motions for her hand, and she lowers it unsurely into his, which is still cold from the Orangina; her skin jumps at the touch.

“You’re good,” she observes once he’s almost through the first coat. 

“I did it for my mom all the time,” he mumbles, leaning closer. “Abbacchio, too. It’s easy.” 

Trish lets her wrist slacken in the cradle of Narancia’s palm, until all of the weight settles, until she’s withholding none of it. His eyes are fixed on her fingertips and his tongue is sticking out from between his teeth, and his wrist moves in nuances. He hasn’t made a single mistake.

“I don’t know what she was so freaked out about,” he mutters darkly after a few minutes. 

Trish blinks. “Who?”

“Your manager. Giulia.” He sighs, still holding up her hand while the polish dries, and turns his head to frown grumpily out the window. “I had Aerosmith out.”

Trish remembers—she’d seen the occasional glint on a red wing, ten feet or so in front of the stage.

“She doesn’t even know what Aerosmith is,” she says, treading carefully. 

“I know.” 

“This isn’t Passione.”

“I know,” Narancia repeats, harsher. He looks remorseful afterwards, shrinking closer to his shoulders, though the line of his mouth is still rigid, withholding. “Sorry. I just—I know.”

Trish winces into a prolonged silence. Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned it. After a little longer, he lowers her hand again, reaching for the bottle to paint on the second coat.

“Did—” By the time she considers keeping the question to herself, it’s already pushed its way through. “So… did you like it?”

Narancia’s eyes flick up, then down again. “Hm?” 

“The show.” 

“Oh! It was amazing!” he shouts, and fixes her with a look of earnest, wide-eyed wonder, all tension forgotten. “You were amazing! I had no idea you could do all that stuff! I-I mean, we’ve seen you on TV, but…”

“TV?” Trish repeats, fingers curling in his incrementally. A part of her had always felt that she would vanish from the minds of her old guards once she was out of their field of vision, and the alternative dazes her a little. “Um, thanks. Glad it wasn’t boring.”

Narancia shakes his head emphatically. “No way. I wanna be there every time now.” He scowls, hunching over her hand to put on the second coat of polish. “Not that I’m allowed. I finally get to go to one of your shows and now I can’t even watch it? Stupid.”

Trish breathes a laugh. Narancia’s eyes flit to her for an instant, drawn to the expression, and then quickly retreat again. A corner of his mouth turns up, too, and her stomach flutters inside of her, tracing the line.

“Listen,” she says after a few minutes of companionable silence. “Why don’t you just tell me which shift you want off, and I’ll make Giulia let you take it. And then you can watch all you want. I’ll get you a good seat.”

Narancia considers the offer, then gives a stout nod. “Mm. Deal.”

Another question lingers in Trish’s chest—which song was your favorite—but she loses track of it when Narancia’s fingertips brush along her palm, fringe-light, and he gently sets her hand flat on the table before beckoning for the other. 

“That one’s done,” he drawls. “Next?”

Everything feels so easy, right then. What more is there than her, and Narancia, and a table between them, and Germany beginning beyond the window under a new, bright morning? What’s she so worried about?

She drops her wrist into Narancia’s waiting hand, and smiles, leaning closer. 

“Next.”

It’s sunny in Berlin, and the surface of the Spree is glittering and calm like so many bits of glass. The bus pulls in just before noon. Giulia had gotten Trish a room at Das Stue. 

She had noticed it offhandedly in Vienna, but it’s even more obvious when they check in: Narancia’s exposure to fancy hotels up to this point seems like it’s been, at best, pretty limited. He reacts to most things—the complimentary champagne, the fully stocked kitchenette, the omnipresent bellhop—either with suspicion or bewilderment. It’s not surprising or anything, she guesses; after all, she doubts Bucciarati’s the type who would have put them up in places that drew attention to themselves, back when they all worked for him, but it still takes her aback every now and again. 

It seems like it takes Narancia aback, too. 

“Hey, asshole,” he growls in the lobby, at full volume, “you trying to steal the lady’s bags? Huh?” 

“My God,” Giulia moans, and Trish steps protectively between Narancia and the terrified bellhop picking up her luggage, hissing out an apology. 

“What was I supposed to think?” he snaps later, sulking outside Trish’s door just before she goes back in for the night. 

“That hotels pay people to pick up your bags?” she says. “So you don’t have to carry them? Listen, don’t worry about it. Just, next time—”

Narancia looks her in the eye with a surly, embarrassed expression. Trish falls silent.

“Oh,” she says, only then recognizing the root of it. Carefully, she goes on, “Hey—it’s all fake anyway. You know? They just have to make stuff up so they can charge all that money and act like it’s special. Who cares?”

Narancia’s face lightens just a little. The tension wanes from his jaw. He grinds the heel of his boot into the carpet, stuffing his hands into his jacket pockets. 

“Yeah,” he mumbles, and then, with more confidence: “Yeah. Who cares.” And they leave it at that.

The next day is for rehearsal. Narancia watches from the second row, leaning on his elbows against the seat in front of him, and whistles through his fingers after every song. 

Trish has never had the gift for gauging the success of her shows—she usually leaves that part to Giulia, who’s always vocal enough about it to compensate—but she feels like the concert at the Waldbühne goes well. She sustains a note that always gives her trouble with almost no effort, like it’s nothing but a breath. Her white piano is tuned nicely. The lights are bright, but not blinding. The evening air smells sweet and dry, like summer. From some direction, somewhere, someone shouts to her that they love her. 

The day after, she has a photoshoot for the fall collection of a small designer at a studio in Friedrichshain. Since Narancia’s off, she’s assigned one of the temp guards, a jovial forty-something knife enthusiast named Felix. He tells her about balisongs on the car ride there and back, and reminds her a little bit of Pericolo. 

When the car drops her off at Das Stue, it’s nearly twilight—the almost-dark of early summer, a silky, deepening blue. Felix rides in the elevator with her, chatting to the bellhop about the best klöße in town, and scans the hallway watchfully when they reach the top floor before nodding to her and saying good night. 

Trish is a little distracted, because she can smell garlic cooking from the moment she steps out into the hallway. The rest comes after: tomatoes, bell peppers, something like crab. She swipes her key card and hesitantly pushes the door open, and falters in the doorway when she finds Narancia in the kitchenette with his back to her, stirring something in a saucepan. The suite is full of steam even with all the windows open, and smells delicious.

She tosses her purse onto the chaise; Narancia must be too wrapped up in cooking to hear it, because he doesn’t turn around. As she crosses the room to take her boots off on the ottoman, she slows—the kitchen table is fully set for two, with cloth napkins and everything. She can see a full bottle of Perrier on one side. There are five yellow tulips in a drinking glass at the center.

Her eyes linger on the full shapes of the flowers as she lowers herself onto the cushion and gropes vaguely around for her boot’s side zipper. The stems lean in all directions over the rim of the glass, and the color of the petals is lively, and vivid, and her favorite. 

“Hey,” she finally says.

Narancia jumps about a foot in the air before whirling around, clutching a wooden spoon. There’s a tinge of white sauce on it. 

“Wh-When did you get back?!” he yells, and then winces, like he hadn’t expected the yelling to be that loud. 

“Just now.” She throws one boot across the floor and nods questioningly to the table.

Narancia follows her line of sight until his eyes land on the tulips.

“It’s your birthday today, right?” he asks. “Uh, I think. So I thought I’d make something.” 

Trish’s wrist stalls over her calf, halfway through undoing the zipper of her other boot.

“How did you know that?” she blurts out. 

Narancia blinks at her for a moment, and then says, “Oh.” He taps his temple with two fingers. “I just remember.” 

What Narancia remembers about her, Trish thinks, seems to expand by the day, a bolt of memory unfolding impossibly wider and wider. What else do you remember? she almost asks, with a kind of desperation that scares her. Tell me what you remember. Tell me who I was.

“It—” She settles for laughing instead of stammering, tucking her hair behind both ears. “Well. You’re not wrong. It is my birthday.” 

She’d almost lost track of it with the touring schedule, but it’s there, the same as it is every year, a silent fanfare for still existing. So many summers on the road have made her fall out of the habit of celebrating beyond champagne with Giulia and a card or two from distant relatives. 

She’s 21. 

“I knew it!” Narancia crows, and levels the spoon at her triumphantly, although he scrambles back when some of the sauce drips onto the carpet. “Shit, shit—sorry—I shouldn’t cook while I’m distracted—you stay right there, okay? It should be ready in…” He cranes his neck over the pot, peering in. “Fifteen minutes?” He does not sound very sure. 

Fifteen minutes is about right, though, for how much time it takes after Trish moves to the loveseat for him to cook and serve the food—linguine with crab meat and some kind of white wine sauce—which he heaps into two of the hotel’s gilded bowls. Balancing one in each hand, he beckons her over to the table with his head.

He’s in the green shirt and overalls again, and his forehead is bright from sweat or steam or both. 

“I, um,” he says when they both sit down, “didn’t really know which fork to use—so I, uh, put both.” 

Trish glances at the knife and shrimp fork on the left side of her plate and the spoon and dinner fork on the right. Her mother would totally lose it.

“Both is fine,” she tries to reassure him. “Both is good.” 

Narancia visibly relaxes, easing into a smile. Still, he seems restless in the mahogany chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs, thumping his heel erratically on the rug. While Trish unfolds her napkin, he lifts his wine glass to eye level suspiciously, like he’s expecting the Clash to be in it, curled up and waiting. 

Trish considers the luggage, and looks at the silverware again. 

“Hey,” she says. Narancia’s eyes meet hers dubiously. “Who needs all this stuff, right?” 

It isn’t that she doesn’t like his arrangement—the opposite, in fact; she likes it so much that she doesn’t know how to say so—but at the flash of dejection on his face, she sees how it comes off. 

“I just—” She sweeps a hand over the table. “I just mean you didn’t have to do all of this.”

“Do you not like it?” Narancia asks, frowning. 

“No—I mean, I do,” she says, and sighs. “I like it, Narancia. Really. But you just shouldn’t stress yourself out, that’s all.” 

“It doesn’t stress me out or anything,” Narancia insists, leaning emphatically forward, his brow still stitched tight. “I wanted to. Because you’re…” Here his confidence falters. He slouches by a fraction, bowing his head. “You know.” 

Trish shakes her head, and he slouches even further.

“Classy,” he mumbles with a wince. 

Trish blinks. His face is a little red, and hers feels suddenly warmer, too. 

“I can be classy and still like to eat on the floor,” she says eventually, and rises from the chair with her dish and wine glass in hand. “It’s not hard. Watch.” 

She goes into the living room and drops cross-legged onto the carpet. Narancia gapes at her from the table as she sets her empty wine glass next to her thigh.

“Come on,” she says, waving him over. “Bring the flowers.” 

It’s the flowers that seem to unlock him, or maybe that’s just her imagination. Either way, he stares at her a moment longer before breaking into a grin. He swipes the wine bottle and makeshift vase off the table with great enthusiasm.

They eat just like that, facing each other on the floor next to the coffee table, with just one lamp on and all of the windows open. The pasta is delicious, and the crab meat is perfect. 

Crab, Trish thinks, dwelling on the taste of it. Had Narancia remembered that, too? 

“This is good,” she tells him, discreetly covering her mouth with one hand. Then she laughs without really knowing why. “It’s really good.” 

Across from her, Narancia brightens. Hunched a moment ago over his lap, where his bowl is, he proudly sits up straighter.

“You think?” He beams so widely that his eyes close over it. “Thanks! Happy birthday!” 

An easy warmth blooms on Trish’s cheeks, and stays, and stays. She pretends to be very engrossed in pushing her pasta around with her fork. 

Narancia’s smile eases. He reaches for his wine glass on the corner of the coffee table and drinks from it. A silence uncurls itself between them, companionable. 

“The crab’s fresh,” he says after a while, and holds up two fingers. “Two of ’em.” Then his eyes darken under a scowl, and he jabs the prongs of his fork into a piece of the white meat. “That geezer downstairs got a stick up his ass when I walked in with them, though.” 

Trish pictures Narancia striding confidently into the lobby with a live crab in each hand. Typical. She has to fight to keep her expression neutral. 

“At the front desk, you mean?” she asks. 

Narancia grunts affirmatively. “Stupid old bastard.” Then, under his breath, “He tried to throw me out.” 

Trish lowers her glass. Just like that, the air in the room has changed. The set of Narancia’s jaw is tense; he jabs his fork into his bowl, and the prongs hit the porcelain too hard. 

“So what?” she asks when he doesn’t speak further. 

Narancia’s eyes flash to her. He makes a sound tangentially like a laugh, but it’s stiff and empty. 

“Trish, come on,” he says, and Trish doesn’t think he’s ever spoken to her in this exact tone—like she’s missing something obvious. Something painful. 

“Don’t let it bother you,” she tries, but this doesn’t seem worth much, either, by the way Narancia scoffs and shakes his head. “Who cares, remember?” 

“I care,” he says sharply. 

Trish falls silent. A second later, his face seizes up into a grimace. 

“Sorry,” he mutters, drawing up one leg and stretching his arm across the knee. He lowers his empty bowl to the floor, his hand lingering around the rim. “I know it’s stupid. I know. But…” 

Whatever the rest is, he keeps. Trish feels torn, as ever, between pursuing and releasing it. She’s not used to seeing Narancia like this, not used to the doubt and embarrassment clouding his face or the quiet apology folded between them, buckling under its own weight. 

She trawls for the right thing to say—some illuminating answer, something that Narancia can hold—even though the right thing to say has never been her forte, and even though seeing him like this is altogether like putting weight on a sprain. For a strange moment, she wishes that Bucciarati were here. The unspooling of these things had always come easily to him, after all, or at least it had seemed to—especially when it came to Narancia.

“Okay,” she says carefully. “But I’m telling you, you don’t need to get hung up on any of that stuff. It’s just—people with a lot of money, they just come up with it so they can feel better about themselves. Like if they make it hard for everyone else, it means they’re special.” She twists some pasta around her fork, lifting it up to the light for a moment. “But they didn’t make this. You did.” 

Something that she can’t put a name to moves subtly across Narancia’s face, until his gaze is clearer. She doesn’t know where her next words come from, but they come. 

“You don’t have to pretend,” she says. “Not for me, or anybody else.”

In the half-light—so close to the night that smells of the river, and the summer, and the stars—Narancia, his face dimly golden and perfectly, unreadably still, looks at her for a long time. Trish concentrates on the air inside of her: the releasing, the replacing; the taking and the giving. What she doesn’t say is this: the food that Narancia had made for her is still warm, and fills her in places that she hadn’t known were empty. 

She thinks that she can see a reply beginning in his eyes once, twice—but some force pulls it back every time. Finally, a corner of his mouth softens a little, and then pulls up, until it faintly dimples. He ducks his head halfway. Whatever look he gives the floor between their feet, his eyelashes hide. 

“Mm,” he says, soft and low. “Okay. Thanks, Trish.” 

They finish eating, and the conversation ambles—to Naples, mostly. Trish falls into the listening easily. Narancia tells her about Bucciarati’s record collection, and Abbacchio’s homemade limoncello, and many things besides. She’s both surprised and not to hear about Giorno’s recent decision to grow a hedge maze in the backyard of his villa.

“I told him he could just make Gold Experience do it,” Narancia says, and pinches his thumb and index finger together, “from like, pebbles or nails or something, you know—but he wants to do it all by himself. Like, from scratch. Same old Giorno.”

Trish laughs more wanly than she had at the record collection, the kind of laugh that she doubts would fool anybody. Narancia talks about their Stands so naturally, the way one might talk about their arm—so naturally that the name might only exist to help other people comprehend it. It makes her heart twinge. 

She’d thought of Spice Girl this morning, in the car, when she’d looked absently out the window and seen ducks on the water: three of them, and one diving over and over beneath the surface, searching patiently for something that she could not see. Spice Girl had always had a soft spot for unremarkable things like that, fascinated by snowfall and birds’ nests and passing trains, little signs of life continuing. She would have liked the ducks. She would have glistened into view, like light off the scales of a fish, and watched them through the glass.

Trish lets out a long, quiet breath through her nose. Narancia is still talking, but the words don’t reach her. The sound of them is nice to listen to anyway, in the way that rain is nice to listen to; maybe it’s that sound that coaxes a foolish, lonely question out of her before she can bury it again.

“Narancia,” she says, and at once he goes quiet. “Has Aerosmith ever... left?”

“Left?” His face furrows with confusion. “What’s that mean?”

Trish struggles to assemble the right way to say it—some way that won’t feel like giving new power to an old curse; some way that betrays no pain or failure.

“I mean, when you don’t need your Stand anymore,” she says carefully, “what do you do with it? Where does it go?”

Narancia’s frown loosens up into something more perplexed. He scratches at the back of his head, his elbow sticking out at an angle.

“You always ask stuff like this,” he mutters. “I dunno. A Stand’s just—it’s a Stand. It doesn’t, like... turn off.”

Trish drops her gaze to her lap and asks, “How do you know?”

Her voice sounds small and sad in the quiet between them. When she glances up again, Narancia slowly lowers his hand. 

“You just know, I guess,” he says. “Um, Bucciarati’s always been better with this stuff, y’know? Maybe... you should ask him.”

Trish rolls one shoulder. “I don’t know if I could.”

“Why not?” Narancia asks.

Trish looks back at him. 

“Because I—” She breaks off and shrugs with one hand. “Not everyone’s like you, Narancia. I can’t just... pick up where we left off.”

He tilts his head and asks, perfectly serious, “Why not?”

Trish shakes her head in disbelief and scoffs, looks away. She wants to tell him that it’s complicated—she wants to tell him about the vase she might have put in Bucciarati’s house—but the word won’t come together in her mouth. She’s not sure Narancia would understand, anyway. For him, Bucciarati is never complicated.

“I don’t know what I did,” she whispers, “to make her hate me.”

“Spice Girl doesn’t hate you,” Narancia says, and sits forward emphatically. “Trish, that’s not it. There’s no way she could hate you.”

Easy for you to say. Trish chokes this back, too. Without the words, all she can do is slowly lock eyes with Narancia, who sobers in a way that makes her wonder how she must look. 

“What’s really going on, anyway?” he asks, scooting closer. He wraps his arms around one knee, tilting the empty glass in one set of fingers so that it glints in the lamplight. “With you and Spice Girl, I mean. Like… you can’t summon her anymore?”

Trish swirls the wine in her glass, watching the surface move. 

“Yeah,” she says quietly. “More or less.”

Narancia says, “Shit.”

“But it’s not like...” Trish says, and fumbles through the haze for a feeling, a reason. “It’s not like she was never there to begin with. Like... I can feel that she’s not there. All the time. Or I can feel where she used to be. Like it’s an empty room inside me, or something. And it—”

“Ah!” Narancia exclaims, snapping his fingers and pointing at her. “It’s like that thing Signor Polnareff talks about! Phantom pain!”

Trish frowns, repeating, “Phantom…?” 

Narancia nods vigorously, setting down his glass on the carpet so that he can gesture with both hands. 

“He said he used to feel it in his legs. It’s this thing where... hm... like you lose your arm, right? But your brain thinks it’s still there. And it has to keep remembering over and over that it isn’t. And every time it remembers, it makes it hurt like hell, or feel like it’s all twisted up.” 

His face stiffens with concern. “It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

Trish considers the anatomy of the word hurt. It isn’t a physical pain, exactly, but it has its own ways of hurting, its own habits, its own bony edges. She’s learned them by touch. 

“Not any more than being hungry,” she says, which feels true. 

Narancia seems to contemplate this thoroughly. He leans back on his palms and looks at the ceiling—mouth twisted, eyes distant—swinging his raised knee from side to side.

“I... think I kinda know what you mean,” he says at last, in a low voice. “Aerosmith’s still around, but... going to school and stuff and not using it felt... weird. Like it was... really high up, sometimes. Farther away, you know? Quieter. Or it—” A shadow of confusion passes over his eyes. “I’d have to tell it to do things. It wouldn’t just know like before. It—” Then a small flinch, barely perceptible. “That hurt, too.”

Trish nods dimly and takes a slow sip of the wine, holding the glass to her mouth long after she’s swallowed. She’s never known anyone to talk about their Stand like Narancia does, with an equal mixture of familiarity and envy. Maybe he hasn’t realized it, but she has—that his pain hadn’t come from wanting Aerosmith to return, but from wanting to follow it.

“Really?” he asks. “She’s really just... gone?”

Trish turns her head to the side, running a hand along the back of her neck. She doesn’t think she has the nerve to say it aloud, so she settles for a single, halting nod. 

Narancia sighs, his eyebrows knitting together. 

“Man,” he mutters. “Not cool, Spice Girl.”

The genuine reproach in his voice takes her by surprise—she snorts despite herself, draining the last of the wine to disguise it.

“I’ll pass it along,” she says into the curve of her glass. “Leave a voicemail.”

Narancia holds her gaze for a second, and then cracks a smile—and then, in unison, they both double over and start laughing. 

Trish buries her face in the crook of her elbow, shoulders shaking. Narancia covers his eyes with one hand, pitching backwards onto the carpet and landing with a soft thud. The sound of him darts to the ceiling, soars. 

Trish feels sure of something, right then: she would chase that sound anywhere.

“God,” she says when her laughter slows down, subtly pushing a tear from the corner of her right eye with the heel of her palm. “It’s not that funny.”

“I know,” Narancia gets out between wheezes. He goes limp, draping one arm across his eyes, still smiling so wide that it almost hurts to look at. The hem of his shirt rises a little, and in the warm half-light Trish can see a plain sliver of skin, and that might hurt to look at, too. “I know. Just… you ever remember other people don’t have ’em?”

“All the time,” Trish says. 

Narancia quiets in fits and starts after that, but he ebbs into it eventually. Trish wraps her arms around one knee, tucks her chin against her wrist; she smiles softly into the bone, looking at Narancia, splayed contentedly out on the floor of her penthouse suite, his chest rising and sinking with each new breath.

“I’ll bet Bucciarati would know,” he says meekly after a while. When he briefly lifts his head to meet Trish’s silent, skeptical stare, he laughs before dropping it again. “Really, he would.” 

Then he wiggles closer with his hands linked at his stomach.

“You could call him up…” he says, drawing out the last syllable until it’s almost a song.

“No thanks,” Trish says, and flicks his nose with one finger. Finally she sighs and gets to her feet, fingertips tenting on the carpet. A splinter of her smile remains, though her voice doesn’t quite match it. “Anyway… it’s not like it’s the end of the world, right? Passione’s old news. I lived through it. Now I have to live through all the rest.”

Narancia doesn’t answer that with anything. Trish sways on her feet for a moment when she stands all the way, then steadies herself. She pads into the kitchenette to set her empty glass on the countertop. 

“How was everything?” Narancia asks, still on the floor.

“Good,” Trish says, perplexed to find that she sounds sad. “Really good.”

She hears Narancia sit up, a soft movement of fabric and body. She hears him breathe out, too, a long exhale that laps against the walls like a tide she can’t see.

“You’ll figure it out, Trish,” he tells her, with a firm, inarguable faith. “You always figure things out.”

Trish turns around, and the twinkling lights of the city from the balcony vanish in her periphery. Only Narancia is left, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, gazing at her intently in a strange, proud way. 

It’s hard not to take him at his word. He untangles so many things, she thinks, without even noticing. She almost wants to laugh again.

After a moment, he yawns, stretching both arms over his head.

“Man, I’m beat,” he groans. “When’s my shift start?”

Trish glances at the clock over the sink. “An hour ago.”

“What?! Shit!” Narancia yelps, and lunges to his feet. “I gotta get outside the door! That manager lady’ll kill me!” He goes scurrying past her to the foyer, tripping into his shoes. “Don’t worry about the dishes, okay? I can do them in the—”

“Room service,” Trish reminds him for the tenth time, turning around and bracing both hands on the countertop. 

“Oh,” Narancia says, nodding his usual vaguely suspicious nod. “Right.” 

He pats himself down, muttering something under his breath, and then closes his hand around the doorknob, but does not turn it. He turns back around after a few seconds, chewing one side of his lip, mulling something over. 

“You really liked it?” he finally asks with a somber look, clearly trying to sound gruff about it. “You don’t gotta lie, y’know.”

Trish rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. 

“Yes,” she says. “I liked it. Get out.”

Narancia smiles back—all the way to his eyes—and, for another long and uncertain moment, lingers in place, as if there’s something more for them to say. 

He settles on, “Night, Trish.” 

He blows out the door, spilling light from the hallway in his wake for an instant. When it falls closed behind him, pitching the room back into its quiet, easy dimness, Trish stays in the kitchen in her bare feet for a little while longer, and waits for her eyes to adjust.

Chapter Text

“How does this look?” Trish asks. 

Narancia looks up from the picture of a pelican in National Geographic, rolling the lollipop in his mouth to one side. Trish turns around, smoothing down the front of the long tulle skirt she’s trying on; the fitting room door hangs a little ajar behind her, and he can see her purse and bright red blazer hanging neatly from one of the hooks on the wall. 

The skirt has roses on it, and little embroidered leaves and vines. It looks great on her, but then again, Trish can make anything and everything look great. It even goes with what she’d already been wearing: the black cropped shirt and the black boots. 

Trish looks good in black, he thinks, and then stuffs that thought down as far as it will go. 

“Mm! Really cute!” he says eagerly. 

With the lollipop in the way they don’t really sound like words, but Trish seems to understand them all the same. Her expression softens when she inspects herself in the mirror, first from the left and then from the right. She reaches up with both hands to tousle her hair around; it falls in pink strokes over her fingers. Narancia stuffs down a thought about that, too. 

“You think?” she asks, and hooks her hands behind her neck, tilting her head pensively to one side, then the other. “Hm.” 

She’s keeping her voice even, and the sunglasses she wears whenever she goes out are disguising her expression, but Narancia can tell that she likes it. It’s plainly evident in the line of her mouth—not that he’s spent a lot of time studying Trish’s mouth. 

Same old Trish, he thinks with the usual spurt of affection. Never any good with compliments. 

“Definitely,” he says, and when she glances at him over her shoulder he gives her a firm thumbs-up. “Definitely.” 

He can’t be sure, but her cheeks look a little flushed for a second. Maybe it’s warmer by the fitting rooms. 

If this had been the kind of stuff he’d gotten paid to do for Bucciarati, he definitely would’ve stayed in Passione. He’s been spending the whole day with Trish at some big department store in Copenhagen, lounging on all of the fancy couches outside the fitting rooms with their huge mirrors, and drinking organic blended juices, and watching Trish try on designer clothes, which is all way more fun than what he usually does, e.g. (he learned that from Giorno) standing around bored out of his skull outside hotel room doors or car doors or bathroom doors or… whatever door Trish happens to be on the other side of. Not that that’s bad, or anything. It’s just that—well, Trish is usually on the other side of the door. 

After however-many years of only getting to see her on posters and TV spots, he could do without a few doors.

“You’re not bored or anything?” she asks from the other side of this particular door, which is tall and white and has a little round chalkboard that says Trish on it in cursive. “We can head back to the hotel if you are. Or just walk around.”

Narancia hums, sinking back among the shopping bags and velvet cushions that he’s successfully arranged into a small fortress. He opens the magazine again, holding the pages over his head.

“Nope,” he says, still a little muffled by the lollipop. “C’mon, show me some more stuff.”

Trish makes a noise like a laugh—and that’s when Narancia decides to hate this door, too—and says, sincerely, “Thanks.” 

Narancia isn’t sure his voice wouldn’t betray him if he answered, so he keeps quiet and half-reads about pelicans. It’s pretty boring, but Bucciarati would probably be really into it. He’ll have to mention it to him when he calls home next. 

I hope she’s well, Bucciarati had said over the phone back in Berlin, and Narancia had been able to hear the bay moving in the background, countless gulls crying out on the wind. Today’s her birthday, isn’t it?

Narancia, wrangling two live crabs in the sink with the phone wedged tight between his ear and shoulder, had grunted affirmatively. I’m cookin’.

Bucciarati had chuckled one of his Bucciarati chuckles, fleeting but genuine. I’m sure she’ll be delighted.

Delighted, huh… Narancia had muttered, frowning skeptically at one crab. Mm. Maybe.

So this work you’re doing. What does it entail?

One sec. Narancia had turned the faucet on, startled as usual by the intensity of the water pressure. He’d rinsed the crabs, then turned it off again. Sorry. Um, it’s kind of like before? He’d paused, gone still. But… kind of not.

I see.

Bucciarati had said this in a tone that Narancia could not interpret. Something about it had made him nervous, though, so he’d rushed for another topic. 

She’s amazing on stage, though! Super amazing! She always opens with that one you really like, y’know, the one about the ocean? But it’s a different, like—mm… the arrangement’s a little different every time. 

I see. Bucciarati had sounded touched by this, and Narancia had grinned. Then you’re enjoying yourself?

Yeah! It’s fun, it’s… he’d said, and thought of Trish on the sidewalk in Milan, holding her hair against Aerosmith’s wind in the glittering night, laughing. It’s… nice.

You’ve missed her. 

Eh?! M-Maybe! 

“What about this?” Trish asks. 

Narancia tilts the magazine and lifts his head as far as he can without having to sit all the way up. It’s a dress this time—short and shimmery and sort of purple. It makes her legs look long. Narancia stops looking at Trish’s legs. 

“Nice!” he says, too sincere and too loud. 

“Hm,” Trish says. 

Narancia goes back to reading about pelicans with renewed focus. 

“You know they, uh, their wingspans are like nine feet?” he mumbles. “Pelicans.” 

“I think,” Trish says like he hadn’t spoken, “this is the first one you haven’t called cute.”

She buys the dress. She buys the skirt, too. The store clerk gives them to her in a bag stuffed with fragrant tissue paper, and Trish gives the bag to Narancia, and Narancia hooks it onto his arm with the other bags and goes back to his lollipop. 

They’ve been in Copenhagen for three days and will be here for three more. Trish’s concert at K.B. Hallen the night before had gone great, and it was attended by a crowd so huge that Narancia couldn’t see the fringes—innumerable people, innumerable voices, rendering her name a pulse. It’s too much breath and energy for even Aerosmith to track most of the time; the radar gets too cluttered up to make heads or tails of at all. He has to do what Bucciarati had taught him, over and over, in every shipyard and alleyway in Naples: rely on his eyes, and his ears, and his intuition. 

Intuition. Some part of him always hears that word in Bucciarati’s voice, as if it’s Bucciarati’s invention, Bucciarati’s weapon. Intuition, as if it’s unassailable. Narancia doesn’t exactly feel like his intuition is unassailable, but it had gotten him on the late bus to Milan, so maybe it’s not all bad. 

So? Mista had asked him last week, his voice clear and eager on the speaker of the Berlin payphone. What’s it like?

Narancia had stalled out, leaning on one arm against the yellow phone booth wall, arranging an answer. It’s a lot of things, he’d almost said. It’s watching slow sunrises through bus windows; it’s pushing through paparazzi; it’s fancy hotel rooms with beds too comfortable to sleep in. It’s cities he’s never seen, and food he’s never eaten, and languages he’s never heard; it’s movement and elegance and sound, rehearsals and photoshoots and car rides. It’s sitting in an empty concert hall with the morning half-over, watching Trish tune her white piano. 

It’s Trish, in every direction, at every altitude. It’s Trish, laughing and throwing her cards at him on the bus when he beats her at briscola for the fourth time in a row; it’s Trish, pulling at her fingers in the dark backstage, never at ease until she’s popped every joint; it’s Trish, magnetic, illuminated, crouching down at the edge of a stage with sweat on her collarbone and a microphone in her hand, pointing to him on the word you. 

It’s cool, he’d said instead, and then shifted to a question about the heat wave. It’s the same, Mista had told him; it’s always the same. Summer swallows everything whole. 

“Do you want one?”

Now, at the sound of Trish’s voice, Narancia blinks back to himself. She’s looking up at him from behind her sunglasses, adjusting the strap of her purse on one shoulder. They’d stopped at a crêpe stand along the riverbank; she nods to the menu. 

“Huh?” Narancia points to himself, shopping bags gathering in the crook of his elbow. “Me?” 

One corner of her mouth turns up. Narancia’s eyes trace the red line. 

“Yeah, you,” she says. “My treat.” 

Narancia lifts his head to look at the ice cream flavors, all of them written out neatly in chalk. Chocolate. It had been a long five years in Naples. Vanilla. The first had been the longest. Blackberry. He’d painted the house for her, just in case—every wall, blue. Pistachio. But that’s probably not the kind of thing you just tell somebody.

“Oh!” he exclaims, and beams, pointing with one quick hand. “Jaffa orange!”

When they get back to the hotel, Narancia throws the bags on the bed first and himself second. The mattress bounces against the impact, and he stretches his limbs with a contented hum until they’re splayed out in every direction. Trish rolls her eyes as she passes him to hang her blazer in the walk-in closet. By the front door, Aerosmith hovers dutifully in place. 

She’s gotten accustomed to the way Narancia fits into a room over the past few weeks—how he’ll arrange himself on furniture, or slouch against a wall—more used to it than she wants to examine. He’s a fixture, scowling suspiciously at her stylist’s eyelash curler in a dressing room or barking at some temp security guard backstage or lounging on her hotel room bed to watch TV, wearing one of her old tour t-shirts.

It’s strange, but rooms feel empty now if Narancia isn’t in them, fiddling with his knife or peeling an orange. Then again, maybe that’s not so different from before.

“You gotta do anything tonight?” he calls. 

Trish rolls her eyes again. Giulia tells him her schedule every morning, but he never remembers. 

“No,” she answers, smoothing the shoulder pads out over the hanger. When she’s satisfied, she lifts one leg onto the striped pouf to pull her boots off. “Just a shower.”

“Oh. You want me to leave?”

“I don’t care,” she says, and sets her boots neatly on the shoe rack before coming back out with her pajamas. 

He’s lying comfortably on her bed without a care in the world, his shirt riding up over his navel. He’s rummaging through one of the shopping bags—the black one—and after a second he grins and pulls out the snakeskin jacket he’d bought. Trish likes it. It’s a dark, burnt orange. He holds it up to the light.

She passes him again, taking the two steps up to the bathroom. It has one of those modern designs, elevated on a granite platform and surrounded by panes of frosted glass. She pulls the door closed behind her and lays her pajamas on the marble countertop.

“Oh, yeah,” comes Narancia’s voice through the glass, indistinct. 

“Hm?” 

“Can I call Mista?” he yells. 

Trish stills, halfway through taking off her skirt. Mista, huh. 

“Do whatever,” she calls back.

“What?”

“DO WHATEVER.”

“Thanks!” he says cheerfully, and she hears him spring off of the bed, steps fading toward the desk. 

The water comes out cold, torrenting onto the stone with a force that dulls all sound, and Trish stands under it for too long, wondering about Mista. Mista, whose braying laugh she can conjure in her memory with no effort at all; Mista, who had taken the seat next to her on the morning train from Rome and talked at length about Fellini. The Pistols had been out, marveling at the scenery through the window. It might have been the first time she’d heard Number Five speak without crying. 

Narancia’s still on the phone when she turns off the shower; she can hear the distant movements of his voice. She bends over to towel off her hair, dripping water onto the dark floor and watching it run off into the bronze drain under the sink. 

“Huh?” she hears Narancia exclaim. “Fuck off, no way. That’s crazy. That’s crazy!” He laughs, one of the crinkled-up ones, the kind he usually covers his eyes for. “Man, one of these days you’re really gonna die and then you’re gonna look like a real dumbass. Not that you don’t anyway. Yeah, Aerosmith’s doing—huh? Copenhagen. Yeah, we’ve been here a while. Concert was last night. We’re here til… Sunday, I think? Then Amsterdam. Yeah, the food sucks.” 

Trish rolls her eyes. She should’ve known he was just pretending to like the fiskefrikadeller. She moves to the mirror, bending forward to comb her hair to one side.

“I don’t know. August. I told you, I’m like her—uh, like a bodyguard. Like before, kinda. What do you mean ‘why?’ I just—cuz she asked me. And I wanted to. Quit laughing. Quit laughing, Mista; I’ll kick your ass!”

Trish frowns at her reflection. She straightens up and turns her head to the door. She can see Narancia’s silhouette, moving in and out of sight.

“What the hell’s so funny, huh? It’s good money, y’know. No, of course that’s not the only—so what if I wanted to see her again? Don’t you? Eh?! Th-That’s not—”

His voice is getting louder, more worked-up, but at whatever Mista says next, he goes completely quiet. Trish hears a long exhale and a flump, like he’s fallen back on the bed. 

“You’re wrong,” he mutters, and whatever it is that that’s supposed to mean, she can tell by his low, half-hearted voice that it’s a lie. She has a feeling that Mista can, too. “No, it’s not the same as you. It’s not like that.” 

She doesn’t know how a lie can feel like it’s pressing down too hard on her heart, but this one does. The weight settles in the silence. She should turn on the sink, use the hairdryer, something—but she can’t convince herself to move. 

“Okay, so maybe it is like that!” he snaps abruptly, and then he starts to pace the room, his footsteps landing heavy on the carpet. “Maybe it is! Okay? So what? Yeah, I know—I know, okay? No I haven’t told her—I’m not… huh? Pathetic? Kiss my ass, Mista.” 

Another movement across the room, and then a hollow thud, like he’s dropped his forehead against the sliding glass door to the balcony. 

“Because it doesn’t matter,” he says, with an undercurrent of what she realizes is pain. “It’s not a big deal, okay? It’s not.” Then an empty laugh. “A sucker, huh? Takes one to know one. Look, I don’t wanna talk about it, okay? She’s in the shower and—yeah. Yeah.” 

Most of his responses after that are incidental—the occasional oh, a lot of mm-hmm. Trish stops listening. She reaches for the hair dryer. 

“How was Mista?” she asks when she comes back out, as neutrally as she can manage. 

Narancia’s back on the bed again, legs stretched out, watching TV. His socks are purple. He smiles when he sees her, muting whatever’s playing—some car-racing show. 

“Good,” he says. “He wants to know if you can give him Monica Bellucci’s number.”

Trish scowls.

“Yeah, I told him no.” He falls back on the pillows, tucking one arm behind his head and jiggling his right foot. He jabs a thumb at the door. “Oh yeah, the manager’s got me workin’ a double, so I’ll be outside tonight.”

“A double?” Trish frowns, knotting the drawstring of her sweatpants. “What for?”

“I asked if I could have one, and she said yeah,” he replies. His eyes dart back to the TV. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “Extra money, y’know.”

Trish tugs a little too hard at the knot. Money. Right. 

“Yeah. Of course.” She sets her hands on her back, chewing at the inside of her cheek, and looks at the floor for a moment. The words swing out of her, a quick, clumsy blow: “I think I’m—done. For today.”

“Oh,” Narancia says, surprised. Trish can’t blame him; it’s not even dark out yet. “Oh, okay, sure. Do you want dinner?”

“I’ll just get room service.” She pauses. “Don’t try to stab them this time, all right?”

Narancia grimaces as he swings his legs off the side of the bed. “I didn’t try to stab them! They were lookin’ at me funny!”

“You think everyone looks at you funny.”

“That’s cuz they do,” Narancia mutters churlishly on his way to the foyer. He slings the new jacket over his shoulder and shuffles into his sneakers, crushing the backs under his heels. “’Sides, better safe than sorry, right?”

Trish drops onto the bed in the space he’s left—it’s still warm—and shoots him a skeptical look. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks as he opens the door.

“Huh?” Narancia asks, and blinks back at her, just over the threshold. The light from the hallway blooms gold across his shoulder. “I gotta keep you safe, right?”

Something winces through her like the words have pressed on a bruise. She plays it off by clicking her tongue and reaching for the remote.

“Worry about yourself first,” she says. “I’m your boss, so you have to listen to me.”

“Eh? You said that manager’s my boss!”

“Well, I’m her boss,” Trish retorts, and crosses one leg over the other, flicking her hand under her chin at him. “So there.”

“Hmm.” Narancia’s eyes narrow dramatically—dramatically enough that she knows he’s messing around. “Fine. You got it, Boss.”

Boss. That feels less like a bruise and more like a fracture.

“Oh, and... Trish?”

“What?”

“You looked really good in that skirt,” he says, fast, and then he’s out the door with a smile and a salute before anything can show on her face. 

Once he’s gone, silence sinks down the walls in inches. Trish is used to silence, for better or worse, but it feels hollow and hard to exist in for a moment; the room looks wider, the granite stairs darker, almost a fabrication. 

She runs a hand over her face. Boss. 

From the other side of the wall, she can hear Narancia moving around, pacing the length of the hallway. She can hear Aerosmith, too; the steady, muffled hum of an engine. That sound’s become a fixture, too, like a fan running in another room, a thing that lulls her to sleep in so many unfamiliar beds.

Her eyes wander to the shopping bags on the carpet. She should really hang up the clothes inside of them, but now that she’s on the bed she doesn’t think she could handle the labor of getting off of it. Through a tuft of glittering black tissue paper, she can see some of the purple minidress she’d bought, the satin shimmering under the light when she tilts her head. 

Nice, Narancia had called it. The word keeps coming back to her, reinventing itself. Nice. And then something about pelicans.

She breathes out and unmutes the TV, and the silence is replaced by a story about Ayrton Senna, somber and methodical. On the screen, a photo of the wreckage. Smoke without a fire. Maybe she’ll order ceviche for dinner. 

Trish is on a bridge. It could be any bridge. The brick is white, the stones long, and her elbows are on the balustrade. The water of the river underneath is black, almost glutinous; there’s a full moon reflecting off of the surface, disturbed into fingers of light, wavering. She is wearing a beautiful dress.

“You’re late, figlia mia.” 

Anger curdles into dread in the pit of her stomach. It creeps up to burn her tongue. Against her better judgment, she turns her head over her shoulder, toward the city, or where the city ought to be. 

Instead of the city, there is a darkness tunneling into infinity. At the edge of the darkness, resting on the cobblestone, is her father’s head. 

“What do you want?” she asks, each word sticking to the roof of her mouth. 

“Is that any way to greet me?” he asks. King Crimson’s eyes blink curiously up at her from the sockets, a familiar green. “It’s been so long since you’ve come to visit. It’s been so long.”

Trish has been on this bridge before. She has felt this fear like an iron fist before, this permanent anticipation of an explosion that never comes, a knife unsheathing, a dead hand bursting out of the water and grabbing her ankle, dragging her back into the depths. She has been here before. 

“You look well,” her father says. “Happy.” He speaks it like the name of a disease. “This is what our power gives us, isn’t it? Happiness. No, not quite happiness… peace of mind.” 

“It’s not our power,” she whispers. The river writhes beneath her, a little higher, maybe—it’s hard to tell. “It’s not yours.” 

“But of course it’s mine. Can’t you feel it? In your blood?” 

“I don’t feel anything,” Trish says, hard and dull like a cube of ice, clouded over. 

“That is a lie.” King Crimson’s eyes flit this way and that, made more uncanny still by the smile across the mouth below them, twisting, lengthening. “You feel too much. That is your curse.” 

This, she does not answer. The voice that she would need for it is gone. Her dress is gone, too, and in its place are clothes she hasn’t worn in years: her old skirt with the math print on it, and a single brown boot. 

Her other foot is bare, the ankle bruised. Suddenly it hurts to stand on; it buckles beneath her weight. 

She collapses. She scrapes her hands when she hits the ground. 

“There, you see,” her father whispers, his hair in tangles on the stone—and when Trish gets her head up she sees his smile pulling back over his teeth. “We are all slaves to something, figlia mia. Do you know what enslaves you? Do you?” 

“Get away from me.” She tries to crawl away, but her arms give out, again and again. “Get away… get…”

“I understand. I do.” His head is closer, closer without having to move. “Death spits you out, but its appetite remains. Shall I tell you of the beach, the charnel house? Shall I tell you of the Colosseum gate, how I took him by the throat, how little he weighed? How he cried out for you?”

She’s going to be sick. Strength juts back into her enough that she can lurch to her feet, stumble for the bridge’s edge. She empties her stomach into the water, down, down—she empties her whole body, all the guts and bits of glass inside. 

You’re lying, she wants to scream, vicious, unforgiving, until it pries the air apart. You’re lying.

“You are a fool still,” her father’s voice says in her ear, in her head. “Open your eyes, my daughter. This is the important part.” 

Trish sees the thick black river, and emerging from the depths is her father’s body, without a head. 

His arm lashes up, viper-like. His hand grips her wrist, crushes the bone to a powder, and pulls. 

“No, no,” she whimpers, and tries feebly to free herself, but it does nothing, nothing. “No, please, please—S-Spice Girl—Bucciarati—”

It takes only one vicious tug to pitch her over the railing, and she hits the water like a stone. It folds over her, heavy and cold and everywhere. She thrashes for the surface, claws at the hand that drags her down, but then there’s another hand at her elbow, another at her neck, another at her ankle. She opens her mouth to scream and water pours in, so thick that it chokes her, so thick that she’ll suffocate—down, down—Trish?—down—hey, Trish!—down—Trish, wake—

“—up!”

Trish’s eyes fly open. Air slams back into her lungs with such force that it catapults her forward, but something catches her—a pair of arms at her back—and through the din and terror a voice vibrates urgently against her body. 

“It’s okay, it’s okay!”

Her hearing is the first of her senses to reset itself, so she hears herself panting high and frantic before she can perceive anything else. The rest comes piecemeal: the dim wall, the still life of the fruit bowl, the sputtering light of the lamp on the bedside table. The sheets tangled up in her legs, the grip of her fingers on the surface of the mattress, the feeling of cotton against her throat. The taste of sweat and spit and sick.

Narancia’s hand, cradling the back of her head; Narancia’s shoulder, tucked under her chin; Narancia’s chest, rising and falling against hers. Narancia’s voice, steady, even, gathering beside her ear: “You awake?” 

She’s not sure words will come, so she just swallows and nods, or imagines that she does. Narancia’s chest rises again. It stays a little longer. 

Eventually her breathing starts to even out again; eventually her fingers unclench. Eventually she leans back, and Narancia’s arms fall open like they’d never been there at all, and she sits there on the bed and looks numbly back at him through the dark. 

Some of his hair is in his face, which is faint and sleepless, or maybe that’s a trick of the light. There are shadows under his eyes.

“Okay?” he asks.

“How—” she says hoarsely. “How did you…” 

He shakes his head. 

“You were screaming,” he says. His voice is scraped down to the dregs, like he’d been screaming, too.

“Oh, God.” She closes her eyes and roughly scrubs at her face with both cold hands.

“Sorry,” he says hurriedly. “I-I didn’t mean—I just—if you were getting hurt, or something—”

Trish waves the words away with her hands, and Narancia obligingly goes quiet. He lowers his head, one hand fidgeting with the duvet cover. Trish wraps her arms around herself, pulls in one breath—it stutters clumsily through her—and releases it.

His eyes flit to her, then away, then back to her again.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t wanna, but—”

“I don’t,” she says, empty. “I don’t want to.” 

She can still see his face angled towards her out of the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t turn to meet it. She’s not sure she could take the look in his eyes, whatever it might be. 

Silence unspools itself between them, lengthening and lengthening. Trish finally lifts her head when Narancia pushes himself off the mattress and settles on the floor beside her, drawing up one leg and stretching out the other, dropping his head back against the wall. 

She should shower to wash off the sweat, but she doesn’t want to get up. 

“Do you still have them?” she asks, almost withheld.

“Yeah,” Narancia says quietly. “Not as much as before, but—yeah.”

Relief shakes through her, and a potent guilt after it. She can’t imagine the kinds of things that must haunt him. He gets this bottomless look in his eyes sometimes—he has it now—that warns her against trying. 

“Your dad?” he ventures. 

Trish grimaces. Swallows. Nods.

“He’s dead,” Narancia says. Not a judgment, but a comfort, a promise. “Giorno killed him.”

Trish runs her hands up and down her arms, fighting back each shiver one by one. She draws her legs up, staring vacantly at the sheet draped between them.

“Did he?” she whispers.

Narancia doesn’t answer, so she turns her head. He’s frowning up at her intently, trying to interpret something, but she doesn’t think she has anything to give him. 

“You were there,” he says, “yeah?”

Trish swallows back the memory.

“I was, but—” Her hands on a balustrade, her eyes on a river. “Giorno… said he was gone, but I—if he was dead, I would have—” She sets a hand over her chest, fisting the fabric. “I would have felt it. And I didn’t feel it, and I—”

She breaks off, eyes wandering back to Narancia, pulled there by a force she can’t name. He’s watching her with something caught between tenderness and vigilance, breathing softly. Her eyes have adjusted to the dark, so she can make out his face more easily now.

“I still don’t feel it,” she whispers. 

She’s never spoken that out loud before. She’d come close, wringing her sore hands in the quiet of an empty train car—but some cold fragment in Giorno’s voice on the bridge over the Tiber had pulled the words apart. To hear it like this, hoarsely uttered in the shapeless dark, renders it so small, the kind of thing that could be dropped and lost on the carpet, inconsequential. 

Narancia’s face is serious, his eyes watchful, hawklike. It strikes her, for a second, what a different shape that watchfulness takes now—something understated, nearly hidden—no longer jagged or hungry, no longer swallowing everything else. She wouldn’t call it control, exactly—but she’s reminded of something that Bucciarati had told her, a long time ago, on a windswept hillside in Sardegna. By naming things, he’d said, and Trish had been bruised all over from training before dawn, so exhausted that she’d translated it into anger, we own them. 

She wonders, with a stab of jealousy, what things Narancia’s learned the names of in the past five years. 

“Sorry,” she says, and kneads the heel of her palm into her right eye, hard. “I’m not making any sense.” 

“Um… not really,” Narancia mutters, not unkindly. He bows his head to the floor, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “But—I believe you.” 

Trish’s hand goes still. 

“Oh,” she murmurs, surprised by the thin laugh that follows, surprised by the fact that this is the first time anyone’s spoken those words to her, in that particular, crucial order. “You—You do?”

“I don’t… really know how to help with it, or anything,” he continues, and starts to idly fidget with his fingers, hands loose between his knees, “but… if he really does come back… you can just kill him for real.” He tilts his head to one side until his neck cracks. “We’ve got your back. Aerosmith, and me.” Hastily, he adds, “A-And everybody else, too.” 

“Everybody else?” 

“Well, yeah,” says Narancia. “Bucciarati, Giorno… Abbacchio and Mista and—Fugo, even. You know we—” Something struggles across his face, then, and is forced out of sight. Something sad. A lonely, longing part of her leans closer to it. “Um… do you want me to tell Bucciarati?” 

“No,” Trish says emphatically. Narancia’s body doesn’t flinch, but his eyes do, glinting dully in the dark. She bows her head, apologetic. “Don’t. It’s…” 

She doesn’t have the words for what it is. She thinks that she might say something about object permanence, something about loneliness and pride, joy and anger. She thinks that she might say something about Bucciarati’s hand when they’d found him in the Colosseum, outstretched over his head, reaching for someone who wasn’t there. 

Narancia gives a silent nod and drops his head against the wall. Trish can’t imagine that he’s comfortable, but he’s made no move to get up. 

“Gonna try to sleep?” he asks after a while.

Trish exhales through her nose. Her eyes and body are prickling with exhaustion, but her mind is alert in a dull, habitual way that’s impossible to pacify. She’ll just have to wait it out. 

“Probably,” she answers, and moves haltingly to lie down again, hitching the quilt up to her shoulder with one hand. 

Part of the mattress is still too warm, so she shifts to one side, where it’s cooler. She ends up facing Narancia, curled on her side; she can make out most of his face, bowed and in profile. 

“Aren’t you tired?” she asks. 

The question surprises her, and it emerges in a rush, almost accusatory—the same way she might have asked him about a shark bite, once, and the anatomy of its pain: already knowing the answer, but strangely desperate to hear it articulated, admitted to. She feels stupid for a moment afterwards, frowning at her limp hands in the dark. 

Narancia hums out a sigh, tilting his head to the ceiling. “Kinda,” he says, and nothing more. If she wants the rest, she’ll have to infer it on her own. “What d’you usually do? When you… can’t sleep.”

“I don’t know,” she mutters, even though she does. “Sing something, I guess.” 

He shifts a little closer, the back of his shirt rustling over the wall. The comforter moves when his shoulder brushes against it. 

“One of yours?” he asks. Trish decides that she likes this particular voice, soft and low, without inflection or demand. Easy to float in. 

She lays her head down on the pillow. “Sometimes.” 

“You,” Narancia says carefully, “you can do it if you—”

“Don’t feel like it,” Trish says, which sounds much better than can’t. She rolls over in three movements, settling her hands across the mattress, and stares at the curled shapes of her fingers, inclined to hold onto something even at rest. 

Eventually she mutters, still facing away, “You don’t have to stay.” 

Narancia is quiet for a moment, evaluating the words. 

“D’you want me to leave?” he asks her at last, and she doesn’t know precisely how to answer, so she keeps silent, as if that will press the choice back into his hands, as if it will reveal something. 

He doesn’t repeat the question, but he doesn’t get up, either—so Trish settles into her stillness, tracking it through each limb, keeping her eyes open a sliver. She can make out the wall, the undisturbed pillow. She can hear Narancia breathing in and out through his nose, building a tide. She can hear Aerosmith at the door, each propeller infinitely turning.

She doesn’t know how long it is before Narancia speaks again. Long. She’s on the rim of sleep when it comes.

“Trish?” he asks—quiet, so quiet, like he doesn’t want her to hear it at all. “You awake?” 

Trish doesn’t feel like answering, so she doesn’t. She breathes in and out. She keeps her eyes closed. 

Narancia starts to sing. 

This is quiet, too. Some of the notes shift into breath only, and the rhythm doesn’t quite track, but the words take shape steadily, not once second-guessing themselves—and she knows this song. She remembers writing it on the back of a receipt in the empty kitchen of her mother’s house at four in the morning, sleepless and shivering; she remembers the letters for scar, the letters for hands and hurt and waste. 

Narancia sings these words, and he sings all the rest. The version she’d recorded had been raw at the edges, an open wound—buried on her first EP, Flowers Grow Here, which one magazine had called “an exercise in anger”—but with the slow tempo Narancia’s made for it, it could pass for a lullaby. He sustains notes that she hadn’t, and hums between the verses, and it sounds almost like a different language. 

It’s her pain, and yet it isn’t. It moves through him and returns to her, remade. Had it really sounded like this, back when it had named itself, back when it had ruled her? Had it really sounded like—

He finishes the last line and lets it drift into a whisper, or something close. After a moment she hears a dull thud; his head hitting the wall, maybe, angled upwards. 

“That’s my favorite,” he murmurs, as if to himself, a stitch between sadness and longing. “That one’s my favorite.” 

She doesn’t know exactly when she falls asleep. She only knows that she does at all when she wakes up in the empty room, underneath the unfamiliar ceiling and the pale morning light and the sheets, unthrashed. 

The concert in Amsterdam is a disaster. Trish has had worse, in hindsight—the hangover in Nice, the panic attack in Brussels—but forgetting her own lyrics halfway through the second song is still pretty bad. 

Giulia forgives her for it. She’s always taken things like this gracefully; she has a Bucciarati-like talent for not asking questions. Still, the ride back to the hotel in the backseat of the limo is so quiet that Trish feels like she could shatter it with a punch—and maybe she wouldn’t mind trying.

Narancia sits in the front seat, next to the driver, and Trish’s eyes keep gravitating to the back of his neck. He used to wear his hair so long, she thinks, tugging at her fingers in her lap until the joints crack, but there’s no remnant of it now. The nape is exposed. 

When the car drops them off, she can tell that he wants to say something—it’s like a muscle memory for him, isn’t it, trying to make things better—but whatever it might be doesn’t materialize. He follows two steps behind her through the glittering lobby, into the elevator, down the hallway to the penthouse. When she gets to the door, fumbling in her purse for the room key, she hears him breathe in behind her, as if before a word. 

Right then, the possibility of a word from Narancia feels like a gun at her back. Before it can come, she swipes the card and slips silently inside without him. 

She paces the length of the room five times, maybe six, her bare feet crushing into the carpet. It’s larger than the one in Copenhagen, more old-fashioned; the striped wallpaper is the color of butter. The city is coming alive outside, opening itself to the night; when she opens the sliding door to the balcony, she can hear voices, snatches of laughter, heels clicking on stone. From across the street, someone is playing music.

She lets it waft in, and paces the room again, and runs her hands back through her hair until they’re linked together at her neck.

For the past handful of days her mind has been stuck on a sentence in her mother’s voice, taking frail shape on the too-white sheets of an unfamiliar bed. Memory’s the kind of thing that can bury you alive. So many things had coexisted in that voice—bitterness and love; acceptance and remorse—that it had made Trish sick to hear it, a dull and expanding ache in her stomach, as if her body was adapting itself to a punch. 

She scrubs her hands over her face. She hasn’t dreamed about the bridge—hasn’t dreamed about the thick black river—hasn’t dreamed about her father’s head in years. And Narancia had held her through its aftershocks, but he doesn’t understand.

He doesn’t understand that when she looks at him, sometimes all that she can see is a diagram of wounds. 

Gold Experience Requiem had taken every mortal lesion from him—from all of them—unmade each one as if unraveling a seam, until the suture was not present. Until the need itself for a suture was forgotten. It’s not like it had been when Gold Experience would heal them; it’s not a reinvented heart, or an organ from a doorknob. Trish is reminded of the nights that the power would go out at her mother’s house, how they’d reset the time on the microwave in the morning, restoring it to the present. For Narancia, death had been a lull in electricity. A bulb burned out, replaced. A darkness mysterious and temporary, just wide enough to light a candle in for a little while—and then it was over.

But death happened. Trish remembers: the sudden, violent absence. The stench of blood and the fragrance of flowers and how this combination had made her want to scream and puke, right there, in front of everyone. She’s sure Giorno remembers—sure Mista remembers—but wonders, sometimes, if they remember the same things in the same way, and if for them those things had ever even felt irreversible at all, like they had for her—like they had for one hollow, rain-dulled week. 

She wrenches her eyes shut. She thinks of Bucciarati’s lovely boat, and Abbacchio’s lovely music, and Giorno’s lovely garden and Mista’s lovely movies and Fugo’s lovely books, and Narancia’s lovely restaurant, whatever it might be—whenever it might be.

She thinks of Narancia’s voice on the phone, undercut by a wind she couldn’t feel: How much does it pay?

She holds back a thin, pathetic laugh. Extra money, y’know. Who could blame him for that? Will the nightmare in Copenhagen pay for the dishes? The dinner in Berlin for the silverware, the long game of briscola for the chairs? 

He could furnish the whole place on kindnesses. Every listening could become curtains, or something smaller, in time. 

She turns her head toward the door. On the other side of it, she can hear Aerosmith, a steady, familiar hum. A part of her had wondered, long ago, if it had shared the exit wounds; if there had been a gaping hole in the wing, spilling smoke; if the glass of the canopy had shattered. If it had fallen.

The wondering had run its course. So many things had, splitting off, thinning, until they were too small for names. But now it’s remembered its mass, and it spills onto her in excess, accumulating under her fingernails, filling up her mouth and nostrils: a long, slow burial. 

Bucciarati, some part of her soul writes in the quiet room, is the sea still blue? Does it still feel like home?

That room feels too small, the distant sounds of life too jagged—the humming of Aerosmith’s engine too much like a dirge. 

She can’t stand it anymore.

“Narancia,” she says when she’s thrown open the door, “I want to go out. Let’s go out.”

Narancia, who up until only a second ago had been lounging on his feet against the wall, practically leaps out of his skin. He whips his head to the side, sees how close she is leaning out from the doorway, and springs back. 

“Go—” Behind him, Aerosmith’s engine sputters. “Go out?!”

“Outside,” Trish clarifies. “To a club.” 

“Oh!” Narancia says, and starts nodding rapidly. “Oh, yeah! Yeah! Haha! Right!” He nods a few more times at the carpet until Aerosmith settles. When it does, he glances up unsurely. “Are you sure? It’s kinda late, and… that manager might be pissed…” 

“It’s none of her business,” Trish says sharply, and then has to suppress a wince. Dial it back. “It’s fine. I do it all the time. But I can’t go anywhere if you don’t come with me.” 

“I know,” Narancia says, still unsure. He stuffs his hands into his front pockets, rocking on the balls of his feet, and looks over at Aerosmith like they’re exchanging a thought. “It’s just…”

“Just what?” 

Narancia looks at her for a long moment, conflicted. “Nothing,” he says at last. 

“Great.” Trish moves for the door again. “I’ll change.” 

Narancia looses one hand from his pocket and holds his arm out, bowing his head to look himself over. 

“D’you think I should?” he asks.

Trish lingers, and her eyes do, too. Narancia’s shirt is a bright, candied orange, with short sleeves and a loose collar, tucked in at the front but not the back. He has the first three buttons undone; there’s some black accessory over it, an arrangement of straps and metal hoops in the approximate shape of a holster, connected by a choker at his neck. Two purple o-ring straps are fastened to his belt loops. The orange wristbands are familiar. 

He looks like he could be on a red couch in a strange room, for a second. He looks like he could lift his head and ask her if she knows how long the train ride is from Naples to Florence.

“No,” she says faintly, and then shakes her head. “It doesn’t really matter. If it’s a good place, it’ll be too dark to see anyway.”

What she means is, Orange still looks good on you. What she means is, The bar went through your wrist. 

Trish has been on tour enough times that she knows clubs everywhere. This one is Rembrandtplein, just around the corner from the popular ones, in the basement of an old building. It’s theoretically close enough to walk to, but she’s wearing heels, so she has the car take them. 

The city glitters at night. Trish watches it vacantly from behind the tinted window, listening to Narancia thump his leg two seats over. 

She lifts her chin out of her hand, glancing at his knee as it judders through the dark. His face is turned away; his arms are crossed. He hasn’t said a word. 

She’s in the purple dress from Copenhagen, the one that he’d called nice. When she’d come out of the hotel room without a jacket, smelling like Acqua di Gioia, his face had done something sudden and indescribable.

That expression keeps echoing through her. She runs her thumb along the hem of the skirt and looks away again. 

Fabrizio drops them off a couple of blocks away, on an out-of-the-way side street. Trish lets the crowd carry her, and Narancia follows a step behind, announced by the heels of his shoes on the cobblestone. It’s a balmy, fragrant night, disturbed by trailing breezes; Trish keeps her head down and breathes in the summer-smell. 

If anyone recognizes her, they don’t come over. She wonders how much Narancia has to do with that, but she doesn’t want to look over her shoulder. 

The club is soundless from the outside, its unmarked red door at the bottom of a concrete staircase the only indication that it’s there at all. Trish leads Narancia down the steps. The bouncer recognizes her in about half a second and opens the door. 

She’s always liked this place. It’s noisy and exclusive, and defies time, folded into a thick and intimate darkness disrupted only occasionally by pink light. There’s a bar upstairs, where the drinks are overpriced and delicious and taste like spring, like gardens. On the fringes of the wide dance floor are stools, loveseats, high tables. Nobody speaks Italian. 

Tonight it’s jammed with people, an expanding cluster of laughter and movement, made to be swallowed by. Trish doesn’t recognize the DJ, but she assumes it’s someone popular—the music is hypnotic, a body thudding its back against the four walls; the lyrics are in English. It’s a remix of that song that had been all over the radio last winter: something about climbing a ladder up to the sun. 

Trish can feel tension unlocking from her shoulders already. The music is so loud that she can feel it in her teeth—loud enough that when Narancia, who’s standing at her elbow with a dark and wary expression, turns to say something, it takes her a second to make it out all the way. 

“This place is loud,” he says unappreciatively. 

“Yeah,” Trish yells. “That’s the point.” 

Narancia’s forehead wrinkles. “What?” he yells back. 

Trish frowns, stuck for a moment, before she leans in close, hovering on the outskirts of his neck. Even though they aren’t touching, she can feel the way he tenses up, every muscle at once. 

“It makes it harder to hear yourself think,” she says into his ear. 

Narancia’s had this look at the edges of his face all night, like there’s some difficult thing he wants to say to her, but whether it’s difficult to say or difficult to hear she can’t be sure. She sees it when she draws away, no longer at the edges but closer to the center. 

“I’m getting a drink,” she says before it can be articulated. “Do you want anything?” 

The knot between Narancia’s eyebrows lessens, but it doesn’t vanish. He starts to nod, maybe out of habit, and then stops himself. He glances up the stairs and then back to her again, wedging his hands into his front pockets. 

“Wait… I can’t,” he says. “I’m working.” 

Trish blinks. She could laugh, hearing him talk about working like it’s life or death (again, says a voice at the bottom of her). To disguise its beginnings, she sighs and looks to the side, running a hand back through her hair. 

“If you weren’t working, would you get one?” she asks. 

Narancia shifts his weight to his other foot. “I guess so.”

“Then I’ll get you one.” 

Narancia points to one ear. “What?” 

Later, Trish will call it an evaporation of patience, a voice that’s sick of being trained to carry, even if that isn’t what it is, not entirely. Either way, she sets her jaw and reaches for Narancia’s arm, and hooks her hand around his elbow, and drags him as close as he’ll come. 

His mouth skims the tip of her nose. His startled breath stutters lightly across her face. His Stand energy gathers near her abdomen, a wire about to snap. There are so many things that she should notice—his eyelashes, dark and many; the reaction growing in his eyes, some intersection of want and alarm—but maybe what she notices first and last is that he hadn’t resisted the pull. 

She digs her fingertips into the crook of his elbow when she says, low but clear, “I won’t tell anybody.” 

Narancia stares, and stares, and stares. And then he nods, shallow and thoughtless.

“Okay,” he says.

His elbow’s touching hers on the bar when he orders upstairs. He picks something strong and citrusy, aperol almost. Trish tries it—it tastes like mezcal before it tastes like anything else, and it burns on the way down. The name of hers is too long and pretentious to pronounce; she distinguishes Peychaud’s. 

She finishes it fast and orders another. Eventually they drift downstairs again, settling into a vacant loveseat; Trish sits on the edge, and Narancia takes the inner corner, knees angled outwards, sinking against the back. 

“This shit’s too strong,” he mumbles against the rim of his nearly empty glass, and Trish sets hers down on the low table and shakes her hair out and says, “I’m going to dance.” 

Narancia looks at her, then the dance floor, and then at her again. His eyebrows go up—the farthest from his eyes that Trish has seen them all night. 

“Do you dance?” she asks. “Generally.” 

“I guess so,” Narancia answers with obvious hesitation, like it isn’t something she should know, even though memory and common sense could have told her that much anyway—even if she didn’t remember how he and Mista would fool around in their downtime to whatever song they recognized on the radio, she would know it by looking at him, by the way that he moves and fights and thinks, constantly in motion. “Why?” 

Trish watches him for a second—watches his eyes flit to her and then away again when they find something looking back at them—feeling pleasantly heavy, and bold, and unconquerable. 

“Dance,” she says, and nods to the crowd. “With me.” 

Then the pink light. It waxes onto one side of Narancia’s restless, wanting face, which is suddenly redder. 

“With you?” he asks, in a voice that’s a little higher than she’s heard before. 

She nods—down, up. She wants to say that at a place like this, dancing isn’t hard. It’s less about looking good than it is about the eye contact, and the sweat, and the hands. 

“Trust me,” she says, as if he’d have any reason to.

But reason or none, Narancia stands up. 

She leads him by the wrist into the crowd, until it swallows them like it should, until they could be anybody. Some part of him stays focused on all of the people, always vigilant, checking each face and corner for some threat to neutralize, and Trish is sick of it—sick of the idea that danger is a thing that can be bested by aiming right—so she puts both hands on his face, turns it back to her—this face that’s never seen Rome in the rain.

“Keep your eyes on me,” she tells him, and slides her hands down to his shoulders, linking them behind his neck. 

“What am I supposed to do?” Narancia asks curtly, even as Trish catches the smallest shiver when her fingertips graze his nape.

“Whatever you feel like,” she says, because it’s true, and that’s the beauty of it. “Whatever you want.” 

Narancia’s expression is conflicted for only a moment longer. It eases up in sections, first the mouth and then the rest, until he relaxes under her arms. 

Dancing with Narancia might be one of the easiest things that Trish has ever done. Their bodies just—understand each other. It’s as easy as combing her hair, as easy as putting on lipstick—she knows what to touch without having to think. She knows the pliant movements of his torso, the beats he’ll respond to, the tight push and pull. Their eyes meet. She sidles close. Her bare arm, his bare chest. Contact.

When they pull apart, Narancia moves smoothly, grinning, showing off until she laughs. She recognizes the crossing ankles, the thrusting arms; she’d watched him practice it with Fugo, once, by a dusty roadside. 

She spins, arms bent above her head, and catches the next beat with her hips, with her spine. When she comes back around, Narancia has gone still, his grin forgotten. 

“You okay?” she asks, still moving. Side to side, knee to knee. Like the water. 

“Yeah,” Narancia says, breathing fast and faint. He frowns at the floor and pushes his hair back with both hands, and shakes his head like he’s trying to loosen something from it. “Fine—fine. Just… dizzy.” 

Trish laughs, this one lower and perhaps less genuine than the ones before, and reaches for his wrists, tugging them languidly closer. 

“You can hold onto me,” she says, and only when she’s said it does she realize she doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean. “Here.” She laughs again, doubling over, dropping one of his wrists. “Here,” she says again, and the laughter breaks it into three syllables. 

She laughs for longer than she should; she isn’t sure where it comes from. She straightens up again, throws her head back, and lets it scatter over the heads and bodies of strangers. When she’s worn it out, she opens her eyes, starts to speak—and whatever the word might be dies. 

Some force that she can’t see seems to drag Narancia forward; he leans closer, and closer, as if about to fall, until his forehead meets hers. When the skin touches, both his eyelids and his next breath seem to tremble, unraveling in small movements, spellbound. She brushes the back of his wrist with her fingertips. 

She thinks, for a moment that consists of nothing but music and impossible light, that she might want to lead him by that wrist somewhere, to some back room or balcony, where the door has a lock—forget the whole tour, forget everything—lay every uncertainty down on the table like small change she doesn’t need. She thinks that maybe nothing else in the world has ever mattered besides this: Narancia’s forehead at her forehead, like one end of a familiar thread, like an anchor on a chain.

“Trish,” he murmurs, so near that she feels the shape of it on her mouth. His hands tighten on her waist when he repeats, with a plain and quiet hunger, like it’s a thing that keeps him awake: “Trish.” 

Unconsciously, Trish lifts her hand and cups his cheek. A warmth thrums subtle and constant beneath the touch, even through her glove. There’s blood running somewhere inside, she thinks, with a rush of hot exhilaration. Running for the heart. 

She eases his head away, but not by much—just enough that she can see all of his face, just enough that she can see his eyes move over hers in the haziest inches—just enough that she can see that when the lights go pink, he glows all over. 

His eyes flicker downwards to where her mouth might be, and then come back, comprehending. His right thumb presses itself a little closer to her hip. A little closer.

He swallows. Trish indexes the changes of his throat. Want flinches between his eyebrows, unmistakable, but he keeps still, biting his lip, still restraining something. 

She breathes in deep, looking at Narancia’s lower lip, and everything it’s holding back. He tilts his head close to her palm, as if magnetized. The music is so loud, possessing her, rewriting her pulse into something braver—and she’s decided that she’s going to kiss him, just like this, under the lights, among all the noise and motion—with her mouth open, with her blood running—so she does. 

The initial contact is brief, impulsive, nearly accidental. Trish had had longer kisses in secondary school. Narancia breaks off with a small, soft gasp, and across the inches between their faces he stares at her with so much hope and disbelief that it steals a heartbeat from her. 

Trish whispers, “Oh.” And pulls him back again. 

Narancia’s mouth is tentative, and tastes of aperol, and fits against hers so nicely that she closes her eyes to feel it more. Her hand slackens at his cheek, forgetting itself. It doesn’t feel at all like she’d imagined it would—had she imagined this?—and yet it doesn’t surprise her at all. He isn’t doing very much—waiting, always, for her to point the way—but all she wants to be is closer to it. She breathes in through her nose, lets it fill her up, and up, and up, and pulls him still closer, until his chest is pinning her elbows to her chest, until he gives her a gentle sound to swallow—and oh, oh, this is what it’s like to kiss Narancia; this is what it’s like to be kissed by Narancia; this is the sky given body. This is it. 

And no one can take it from her. Not her father. Not her cowardice. Not anything. 

Is this what she’d wanted from the very beginning? Is this what she’d wanted to dig out of the phone in her old room, bare-handed, across the miles? 

Is this it? Narancia’s mouth, opening gently against hers as if it’s memorizing how?

She centers herself on it. Her hand is on Narancia’s back, learning the planes beneath the fabric of his shirt collar, and above their heads the song is changing: it bleeds, hot and fast, into the next one. She vaguely perceives some bars on a synth, a voice. A familiar voice. Wait.

Her voice.

Her eyes fly open; she breaks away. Narancia’s are still closed, as if he’s fallen asleep—oh, God—the lashes edged in rosy light.

And she freezes.

The air it would take to breathe with is stuck to the back of her throat. From the speakers, her voice wails over a dreamy electronic melody—a remix?—and at the first note, Narancia’s eyelids start to rise. He gazes at her dimly at first, longingly at first, before clarity condenses on his face. 

His eyes go very wide.

“Ah,” he says. Then, with a crescendoing panic, “Aa-aa-ah—”

Both of them jerk back at once, hands flying up. Everyone goes on dancing around them, whooping and cheering, singing along; someone bumps into Narancia, making him stumble sideways by a step. When he whips his head to the side to glare at them, whatever invisible thread Trish had felt between his body and hers frays and breaks, quietly, and she can breathe again. 

She sets a gloved hand on her head, absently patting down her hair. Her heart beats fast against her ribs, so fast that its movements can’t be traced. She blinks, hard, to try to push the haze from her head. 

And Narancia moves naturally across from her, scowling at somebody, gesturing combatively—as if nothing had happened at all. 

She lifts one set of fingers to her lips. They’re tingling. 

“Asshole,” Narancia’s saying when she comes back to herself. “Jeez…”

He pushes his hair back with two hands. The sweat keeps it in place. He turns his face toward her again, and the glare on it fractures into five different, smaller expressions. His eyes soften at the corners. He closes his open mouth halfway, but Trish can still see his teeth.

She searches for what to say. And searches. And searches. 

“Do you want to leave?” she murmurs, surprised by the daze in her voice, how little it sounds like hers. 

The lights flash in Narancia’s eyes, but illuminate nothing. He frowns, tense again, distrusting again. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, and turns his head away.

“Do you?” he asks—and he doesn’t sound like himself, either.

“Maybe. Yes,” Trish says. “Let’s—yes.”

They walk back to the hotel. The night air smells like apple blossoms and anonymous perfumes, and Narancia’s hands are in his front pockets. He moves separately from her, his steps out of sync, along the very edge of the curb.

Trish keeps her head bowed, tracking her feet, one step before the next. After a long while her eyes stray over and take notice of Narancia’s shoes. They look like patent leather; the buckles are gold, and glint fleetingly under each street lamp they pass. They’re definitely the nicest shoes she’s ever seen him wear. 

“Thanks,” he mumbles when she tells him so, slurred and sad and aching in a way that she can’t understand. “I wore ’em for you.” 

She leaves him outside the penthouse door, the same as before, the same as always. She feels the instinct to apologize, loitering in the hallway with one gloved hand on the jamb, even as the hurt of not being looked at goes deeper and deeper. 

He doesn’t say good night. He doesn’t say anything. So neither does she. 

That night her dreams are different—pulsing, luminescent things—color, and touch, and Narancia’s breath on her neck. She wakes up hot all over. With all the lights still off, she frantically writes a song on the hotel stationery about a thunderstorm—writes the feeling out of her until she can fold it up, stuff it in a pocket—because someone had told her once that by naming things, you own them.

Chapter Text

It’s a hot day for April, and Narancia’s ribs are bruising. He prods at the tender skin with two fingers on his way to the Aleppo pine where Mista sits, wincing when the pain rolls outwards, hard and definite. 

Sardegna is bigger than any island should be, made of wind and maquis, more rock than road. When they’d ditched the plane, it had dropped them somewhere in the north, and they’ve been picking their way through the shrublands for three days since, charting a rugged course to the Costa Smeralda. Narancia’s sick of walking, sick of sweating—sick of bruising. Bucciarati’s training has been even more relentless than usual these days, but he guesses that makes sense; the boss wants their heads, after all. Might as well make them harder to get. 

“Brutal, man,” Mista says when Narancia’s within earshot. He’s leaning against the pine’s trunk, one knee drawn up to support his arm, his hand holding a half-eaten yellow fruit. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you get that much of your ass handed to you at once. That last hit looked like it hurt.” 

It did, but Narancia’s not about to admit it. He flops down next to Mista, stretching out his legs all the way. 

“I’m hungry,” he whines. 

Mista extends the fruit to him, bite-side up. “Quince? It tastes like shit.” 

Narancia wrinkles his nose and shakes his head. Mista shrugs one shoulder and bites into the fruit, turning his head back to the clearing, where Bucciarati’s just begun a round of sparring with—

“Whoa, Trish,” Mista exclaims. “Damn, I keep forgetting. Still kinda surreal, huh?” 

Narancia follows his line of sight, slumping against the tree. Trish and Bucciarati are facing each other across the grass, their faces tense with concentration as their Stands lunge and dodge and swing and parry. Spice Girl seems to struggle with blocking Sticky Fingers’s blurring fists, her arms raised protectively at either side of her head, weathering the impacts rather than fighting back. She just keeps taking it. 

Narancia’s eyes wander to Trish, whose shoulders are freckled and pink, whose eyes are fierce and resisting, whose jaw is set so tight he has to wonder if it’ll crack. She keeps flexing her fingers at her sides, opening and closing her hand, like she’s remembering that she has bones inside. 

Mista’s chewing slows. His voice is low and unreadable when he says, “Bucciarati’s sure not going easy on her, huh?” 

Over the wind, Narancia catches a segment of what Bucciarati shouts to her—something about doubt, something about anger—and whatever the rest of it is makes Trish’s expression harden, like she’s about to cry or scream or both. 

“Yeah, I can’t watch this,” Mista says after a second, and stands up, brushing grass off of his pants. “Way too depressing. I’m gonna go read in the turtle. Later.” 

Narancia grunts, perfunctory, without turning his head. Mista’s footsteps retreat across the underbrush, crackling and then vanishing. Under the Sardegnan sun, Trish lifts her head and closes her hands into fists, and Narancia catches the subtle movements of the muscles in her neck, defying something. 

Her Stand looks up. Its eyes look different. 

It lashes out at Sticky Fingers’s middle and lands a sharp, quick hit. Bucciarati tenses, but doesn’t double over. Suddenly the fight has shifted: Sticky Fingers is on the defensive now, holding out against a rush of attacks from Spice Girl, who is shouting and cursing in a way that Narancia’s never known Trish to shout or curse. It’s sudden, and messy, and beautiful. 

“Taking notes?” a voice drawls from Narancia’s right. 

He looks up, squinting one eye. Abbacchio’s blocking the sun. He tosses something to Narancia, and Narancia catches it in both hands—an apple, bright red. 

“Hey,” Narancia greets him, watching him take a seat on a nearby boulder. “Not really. Just bored.” 

“Bored, huh,” Abbacchio muses, slouching forward with his elbows on his knees. “Yeah, Sardegna does that to a man.” 

Narancia stifles a snort, mouth crumpling. Abbacchio adjusts his posture, sighing when he’s satisfied, eyes following the rough movements of Trish and Bucciarati in the hot, wind-stripped air. 

Narancia’s never seen Trish like this. Angry doesn’t seem like the right word; there’s too much grief for that, too much confusion. It’s just sparring, but she looks like she’s just trying to survive, adapting herself to pain and fear out of necessity rather than choice. Her hair is loose, sweat-dark. She wipes at her mouth with the back of her wrist, her eyes dull and shining, her skirt dirt-faded. She looks like she could burn down this whole damn island and then some. 

“So,” Abbacchio says. “Her wound is your wound, huh?” 

Narancia whips his head to the side, dropping the apple. “You heard that?!”

“Damn near all of Venice heard it, Narancia. You probably woke God Himself with the racket you were making.” 

Narancia reddens, caught. Abbacchio’s voice sounds as grouchy as ever, but there’s a strange undercurrent to it, almost rueful, almost kind. He’s still watching Bucciarati. 

“What about it, huh?” Narancia snaps, and bites into the apple, chewing vengefully on the too-big chunk that breaks off. 

“Oh, nothing,” Abbacchio says, and breathes out. “Pretty sure you were the only one who got on that boat for her, though.” 

“You’re wrong,” Narancia says, flaring in anger for reasons he can’t explain—he’s never been mad at Abbacchio. “Bucciarati did, too.”

Abbacchio huffs out a laugh, rubbing at his chin with one hand. “Damn. You’ve got me there.” 

Narancia glances at the grass, the places where the blades have broken, and then back to Abbacchio. 

“And you,” he says carefully, “you got on for Bucciarati, yeah?” 

Abbacchio’s quiet for a long time. In the absence of words, Narancia can hear the wind, and Trish panting and moving in it, reaching for a victory with everything she has. 

“Yeah,” Abbacchio says at last. “You’ve got me there, too.” 

Narancia bows his head, rolling the apple a little in his hand, until the outline of the bite is gone and only the red skin is visible, unbroken. 

“Even if you might die,” he says before he can keep it inside. 

“Ha. Maybe.” Abbacchio makes a noise between his teeth, and leans back on his hands. “I don’t know about you, kid, but I don’t plan on it.” 

Narancia doesn’t know what to say, hearing Abbacchio utter something like that with such ease and conviction—Abbacchio, who had once told him that only in death can a man find his purpose—so he says, “Oh.”

“Do you?”

“I…” Narancia bites his lip. He thinks of Trish and the glittering canals of Venezia, Trish and her brave eyes, Trish and her hands. He thinks of the way Giorno had spoken the word courage, and the way Bucciarati had spoken the word traitors, and the way Fugo had spoken the word righteous. “I don’t know.”

“But you would,” Abbacchio says, without judgment or opinion.

This, Narancia does know. “Yeah.”

“For her.”

“Yeah.”

“Hm. Maybe this damn Mediterranean air’s getting to me, but—you know what I’ve been thinking?” Abbacchio asks, and aims his eyes at the sky. “I think living says a hell of a lot more than dying.” 

Narancia listens to the sounds Trish makes, all the way across the undergrowth, vicious and enduring. He looks down at his knees.

He doesn’t know how to say that most days he feels like his life is all he has to give. 

“I don’t get it,” he confesses, the words painful in his mouth. 

“Yeah, it takes a while.” Abbacchio sighs, bending his head back when a gust of wind disrupts his hair. “Give it time.”

He closes his eyes, the closest to peaceful that Narancia’s ever seen. After a moment, he braces his hands on his knees and stands up again, and as he passes Narancia on his way back to the turtle he reaches out and ruffles his hair with one broad hand.

“Life’s full of boats to follow, Narancia. There’s a reason we’re born knowing how to swim.” 

“Stop at the next corner, please.” 

“Okay. Here?”

“Yes. I have to leave you now. I'm going to go to that corner, there, and turn. You must stay in the car and drive away. Promise not to watch me go beyond the corner. Just drive away and leave me, as I leave you.”

“Alright.” 

“I don’t know how to say goodbye. I can’t think of any words.”

“Don’t try.” 

“What is this that you are watching?” asks Giulia, glancing up from her laptop. “American film?” 

The upper level of the nightliner has a big screen TV. Trish is on the leather couch that faces it, curled under a soft red blanket with her feet tucked between the cushions, and more or less has been for the past twenty-four hours, sleeping and thinking and watching movies she’s already seen. 

London is a day away. They’d left Amsterdam just before dawn, when the city had looked empty and lusterless, when Trish’s head had been aching and her mouth had been dry and her body had been stiff, and heavy, and tired. It had just been her and Giulia and Narancia, and a handful of suitcases between them, and Narancia hadn’t looked her in the eye. 

“Roman Holiday,” she mutters, pulling the blanket up to her chin. “It’s a love story.” 

Giulia ducks her chin so that she can look appraisingly at the screen over her reading glasses. Audrey Hepburn has Gregory Peck in her arms, and they’re kissing. Crying. 

“If they are in love, they do not look very happy about it,” Giulia says. 

“You’d have to see the whole thing,” Trish sighs, closing her eyes. She’d watched this with her mother countless times, and she knows what’s happening by the score and the broken breaths—Audrey Hepburn’s about to get out of the car. “They have this—one perfect day together. Just one. But she’s a princess and he’s a reporter and even though they fell in love she has to go back to her old life. And he can’t fit in it, and she can’t fit in his. But they could fit in each other’s, just for a day.” She opens her eyes again, watching Gregory Peck watch the empty street and hope for something that can never be. “That’s the point of the whole thing. They treasure it for what it was, because it was everything.” 

“This tall man is an idiot,” Giulia says, gesturing at the screen with one hand. “Driving away from a girl like that! To do something so stupid in Roma is an insult to our history. Who would make such a film?” 

“William Wyler.” 

“Hmph. Well, I don’t like him,” Giulia says with a sniff. “I don’t like him at all.” 

Trish smiles halfway into the couch pillow. “Don’t worry. He’s dead.” 

Giulia hums at that. Trish hears the clacking of her keyboard for a while, the sound jutting up under the dialogue of the movie, only slightly disruptive.

“So,” Giulia says briskly after another ten minutes or so, “you are fighting with your garganelli boy.” 

Trish lifts her head from the pillow so that she can glare at her better. It’s uncomfortable, but she holds it for a good few seconds. 

“Who said we were fighting?” she snaps. “Did he say that?” 

Giulia’s eyes flick to hers, as incisive as ever. “No. But you just did.” She lays both hands on the laptop screen and folds it shut. “I have many clues, you see. The first, you have barely said a word to each other since we left Amsterdam. The second, you are always making a racket playing briscola with him at this time, but you have not even gone downstairs. The third, this movie, you looked away when the man kissed her. Such pain on your face. So obvious.” She crosses one leg over the other, leaning back in her seat triumphantly. “What have I told you? You cannot fool Giulia.” 

Trish drops her head again, cursing under her breath. 

“We’re not fighting,” she says, in what’s maybe the saddest attempt at lying in recorded history. “And even if we were, it’s none of your business.” 

“None of my business?” Giulia exclaims, laying a hand over her chest. “None of my business? I will tell you, cara mia, what is and is not my business. Who you do and do not have one of your little flings with is not my business. What the two of you do and do not fight about is not my business. But when you are so beside yourself about it that I have to watch you moon around like this instead of doing your work? Then it is my business.”

“I’m not—we’re not—” Trish doesn’t even know what to argue with first. “It’s not a fling, we—” 

“My God,” Giulia says in horror. “Something more serious?” 

Trish’s throat tightens up. What she manages to get through it is, “He’s my friend.”

Giulia arches her eyebrows. “Your friend! Oh! What a fascinating definition of ‘friend’ you young people have!” She opens the laptop again, typing furiously for a moment and then turning it around on her knees. “So you do this with your friends, is that it? Oddio! Lucky friends!” 

Trish’s stomach plummets straight down. Giulia’s browser is open to a tabloid site, and right in the middle of it is a dim, blurry picture of Narancia kissing her at the club. His hands are on her elbows, and hers are on his neck. Her head is bent back, and despite the low quality of the photo she can still see the shadowed shape of her tongue, meeting his. 

She sits bolt upright, dropping the blanket into her lap. “How long has that—”

“You think I know? Long enough.” Giulia cranes her neck, inspecting the picture upside-down, and makes an impressed noise. “This is a good angle for you. Small mercies.” 

“Has—” Trish swallows, mouth dry, hands cold. In the photo, Narancia’s eyes are closed. “Has he seen it?” 

“Again, you think I know?” Finally Giulia flips the laptop back around, and Trish no longer has to look at the vague shapes of Narancia’s knuckles, the dark tangling of his hair, the echoes of pink light all over his skin. “I do not keep track of your whirlwind romances. Besides, who has seen it does not matter. Because I have seen it.” She whips her glasses off, narrowing her eyes and pointing to Trish with one finger. “There is no point in lying anymore, although there was never a point to begin with. You are so very terrible at it.” 

Trish resists it for a moment longer, and then slumps, defeated. She rubs her hands slowly over her face, as if that will wipe away the sudden warmth seeping into her from all the places that Narancia had touched two nights ago. 

“Tell me,” Giulia urges her, only there’s a gentle, patient tone in her voice this time, the one that Trish only hears once or twice a year. “Tell Giulia.” 

“There’s nothing to tell,” Trish says dully, muffled by her palms. “I’d take it back if I could.” 

The words feel wrong in her mouth, like they don’t quite fit. Her forehead is pulled so tight that it hurts. On the TV, Gregory Peck says, admiring, “What a picture!” 

“Hm,” Giulia says, looking down at her screen and raising her eyebrows. “I don’t think I believe that.” Then she snaps it shut, and sets the laptop on the side table, and settles back into her seat, folding her hands over her stomach. “Do I need to fire him? I will do it.” 

“No.” Trish screws her eyes shut, sighing into her hands. “No, no, he—it’s not his fault.” 

“A kiss like that is always somebody’s fault.” 

“Then it’s mine,” Trish says sharply. “I’m the one who started it, all right, I started this… this whole thing.”

Giulia rolls her eyes to the ceiling. “I knew it. ‘He’s just an old friend, Giulia. Perfectly qualified, Giulia.’ Oh, Patrizia! Why did you leave us? Why, God?” 

“Don’t be so dramatic—”

“Dramatic!” Giulia exclaims, throwing her hands up. “Dramatic! I could have had Patrizia, who never said a word to anyone! All she ever did was polish her gun and mind her own business! Instead I get this flighty boy who is in love with you!”

“He’s not—” Trish’s voice breaks off inexplicably. She swallows. “In love with me. It’s not like that, it never was. He’s here because I’m paying him. That’s it. All right?”

Giulia looks at her for a long, pitying moment, and then turns her head to the window with a sigh. There’s less exasperation in it than Trish expects. A little of the late afternoon light lays across her face. 

“My dear, you are not paying him. I am paying him,” she finally says. “And I am about to pay him for covering the biggest concert on this tour. This very, very expensive tour. So please, for my sake?” She clasps her hands together. “Sort out your problem. By the way that boy looks at you, I do not imagine he will make it very hard.” 

Trish laughs emptily, falling back on the couch again and pulling the blanket over her head. She opens her eyes and stares at the dim fabric, the places where the light gets in—she can make out each thread if she looks hard enough. 

“I don’t think he wants to talk to me,” she mutters, and everything else aside, that, at least, feels true. 

He’d barely looked at her when they’d boarded the bus in the waning dark. The most that he could have seen with his head bowed the way that it was were the backs of her ankles, the small of her back. He’d been wearing a yellow t-shirt, and under his eyes there had been shadows, barely visible. Trish had walked ahead of him, like she’s supposed to, and made her way past the seats and kitchenette to the staircase, and she hadn’t looked over her shoulder, and he hadn’t asked her to. 

“I have every faith in it, as I have faith in relations between people.” 

“May I say… we believe that Your Highness’s faith will not be unjustified.” 

“I am so glad to hear you say it.” 

“You don’t think he wants to talk to you,” Giulia repeats under her breath, with the exact amount of scathing judgment that Trish is expecting. “That is the kind of thing you say when it is you who does not want to do the talking. My God, you should see him. Every time I go down the stairs for coffee or a cigarette he sits up in his seat like a little Spinone, you see, like this—” Trish peers over the top of the blanket and sees Giulia posing alertly in her chair, gazing dewy-eyed at the opposite wall. “When he sees it is only me it is like his heart breaks before my very eyes. I don’t think that he can take the disappointment another time.” She shakes her head. “Put him out of his misery. I am begging you. I just want my coffee.”

“Rome,” Audrey Hepburn says. “By all means, Rome. I will cherish my visit here, in memory, for as long as I live.” 

Trish gives, stabbing her thumb into the mute button and throwing off the blanket. 

“Fine,” she says brusquely, and swings her legs off the couch, shooting Giulia the most resentful look she can muster. “Fine.” Then, quietly, to her knees, “I’ll try.” 

After she stands up, Giulia looks at her for a moment, as hard to read as ever. She pushes her glasses up into her hair, the way she does when she’s trying to distinguish some distant detail, and the thin black frames vanish among the curls. 

“Good,” she says eventually, with one firm nod of her head. “That’s my girl.” 

She pulls her phone out of her suit jacket pocket, and scans whatever message is on the screen. As she starts to type an answer, Trish bites the corner of her lip and walks tentatively to the doorway, setting one hand on the frame.

She lingers at the top of the stairs, listening to the bus move along the highway. 

The carpeting really is ugly—dated beyond redemption. Too garish, too many colors. She goes down them barefoot. 

It’s brighter on the first level; all of the curtains are open. It’s quieter, too, nothing but the sound of the refrigerator and a television playing among the seats, too low to distinguish any words. She doesn’t see Narancia right away, so she follows the voice until she gets to the third row from the back, and then halts.

Narancia is folded into the window seat, arms crossed over his bare stomach, watching Julia Child make salade niçoise. His clothes are plain: a black crop top, black pants with too many zippers. Socks the color of ferns. His hair is a mess, like he’s run his fingers through it too many times, and his right leg is jiggling. 

He must catch her in his periphery, because when she stops beside him he turns his head distractedly, and then does a double-take. 

He sits abruptly forward. His knee bangs into the back of the seat. He fumbles for the buttons on the screen for a second before managing to turn it off.

He doesn’t say anything. Not even a hello. Trish can tell that he wants to—she can see its soft shape in his jaw—but he withholds it, like he’s waiting for her permission. 

Her stomach wrings itself into something tight and small and helpless. Narancia’s face is guarded, building an apology she hasn’t asked for. 

Narancia’s face is… 

She closes her hands into fists. 

She opens her mouth, and waits to see what question will come out of it. Was that nothing? Was that everything? Was it new? Was it always there? Can we talk about it? Can we forget about it? 

Can we do it again?

She hates this. Talking to Narancia is supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be easier than anything has ever been. It’s not supposed to feel like pressing her heart into a citrus juicer.

Her hands fall open again, limp and useless. She closes her mouth and keeps walking. 

She takes a seat four rows ahead, on the opposite side of the aisle, where she’d left a copy of Vogue Italia, still open to the blue spread of the French Riviera. 

Narancia doesn’t call out or come after her, but he doesn’t leave, either. Trish doesn’t know what to make of that, and so she sits there, with so many meters of silence between her body and his, and pretends to read about Toulon. 

Maybe she isn’t all that different than she was at fifteen. Maybe all she’ll ever have to her name is pretending, when it comes down to it. 

Trish has only ever been to London in the rain. There’s no promise of it in the sky when they arrive, but the air is still just slightly humid, and the blue that peeks between the sleek buildings is streaked with feather-thin white. It’s nice weather, by all accounts, and London itself is nice—the days pass quickly there, and people have a tendency not to look at you—and Trish’s hotel is nice, too, five tube stops and a transfer from the one where Narancia is staying, with arched windows in every room and fresh fruit on all the tables. 

There’s a studio that Giulia wants to try out while they’re in the city, some tiny place in Shoreditch with brick walls and a chapel-like sound. Just one song, she’d said on the bus, holding up a finger, a gesture all at once imploring and non-negotiable. Just one. For old Giulia. And Trish, for all her airs to the contrary, is loath not to do things for Giulia—so on the last day of June she puts on her most comfortable clothes and goes with a bodyguard named Jesminder to Curtain Road and, in a wide red room, records a demo of the song about a thunderstorm. 

It comes out bare, and aching, and intense. It’s the kind of song that’s made to be a last cut, but then again, every song she’s written in the past year is the kind of song made to be a last cut. That’s the problem. 

“It’s like you are full of endings,” Giulia tells her on the drive back, flapping her hands in exasperation. “Like there is nothing else you know. Boh! You are impossible. It’s almost spiritually moving.” 

Trish drops her head back. “Look, if you hated it, just say so.” 

“If I did, I will.” Giulia lights her cigarette, pockets the red lighter. She rolls the window down. “But I didn’t. So I won’t.” 

Trish doesn’t know what to say to that, so she braces her chin in her palm and watches the unfamiliar city wander by. 

Her concert the next night is at Koko, where she had done a show a year before, some cold night in April. It looks the same now as it had then—spacious and intimate all at once, its gilded rococo ceiling and balconies painted a light-deepening red—and it’s packed to the walls when she steps onto the stage. 

Giulia had decided to have Narancia cover the backstage, a tiny act of mercy for Trish’s sake. She can’t sense him from the front of the crowd like she usually can; it’s more like a back against her back, a dull and half-perceptible weight, but if nothing else, it’s easier to ignore. 

“Hello, London. I’m Trish. Thank you for having me. This is a song about the ocean.” 

She wears her glittering burgundy jumpsuit, and shadows her eyes wine-red to match it. The stage lights catch on it like a moonglow on scales, scattering little fractals onto the dark wood under her feet. Whatever power had choked her in Amsterdam is gone now; she feels weightless and lucid and right. She ends up coming back out for two encores. 

The next day she’s booked for a photoshoot and interview in Covent Garden for some music magazine. They want her for the cover of their August issue. 

“I am coming, of course, and we’ll take garganelli boy,” Giulia declares over breakfast, as if this is remotely acceptable. “Jesminder’s rates are beyond redemption.” 

Trish chokes on her cranberry juice and slams her glass down.

They’re in Giulia’s suite, at opposite ends of the long mahogany dining table, with plates of ricotta and artisan bread and a pitcher of bitter honey between them, and Trish is still in her pajamas. 

“Then I’ll pay her,” she says, wiping her chin with the back of her wrist. “I’ll do it. I don’t care.” 

“Hmph. You will, will you?” Giulia purses her lips and flips to the bottom half of la Repubblica. “This is your punishment for going back on a promise.” 

“I never promised anything!” Trish exclaims. “I said I’d try, and I tried!” 

“Then you cannot have tried very hard,” Giulia says primly. 

“I,” Trish mutters, “I did…” 

Giulia takes a pointed sip of her coffee, raising her eyebrows over the rim of the cup. Trish knows better than to argue with Giulia when she takes pointed sips of things. So she clamps her mouth shut, and tries to talk her stomach out of churning, and stands up to get dressed. 

Narancia is leaning against the passenger side of the car when hotel security escorts them to the porte-cochère, with his hands in his pockets and his head bowed and a strip of morning sunlight ablaze on his left cheek. Trish’s eyes flicker over his body before he looks up, indexing the details: the snakeskin jacket, the bare stomach, the tired eyes; the loose arrangement of his hair, as black as his clothes.

He meets her eyes without having to search for them, and his shoulders slacken when he does. Trish unconsciously grips the strap of her purse a little tighter. 

He opens his mouth. 

“Good morning,” Giulia says very pointedly, breezing past Trish. “Are we going to get in the car or are we going to stand around gazing at each other?” 

The interviewer's name is Sophie. She’s wearing a powder blue pantsuit, and she talks fast, and the first thing that she says is that she likes Trish’s outfit.

“Well modern,” she says as they sit down in two velvet armchairs, brushing her short hair back with one hand. “The sleeveless turtleneck, the miniskirt… love the neutrals.”

“Thank you,” Trish replies in English. “I love them too.”

Giulia and Narancia are seated on a red upholstered couch against the office wall, to observe, and as the words leave Trish’s mouth Narancia sits up and gapes at her. Giulia lightly whacks his shoulder with one hand and he closes his mouth, scowling.

“I’m turning the recorder on, okay?” Sophie asks, setting down a small black box on the end table between them. 

Trish nods, shifting in her seat. “Yes. That’s fine.”

“All right, and… go. Lovely to have you here, Trish. I mean really, it’s really lovely. How’s the tour so far?”

“Good. Fast.” 

“Ha! Yeah I bet. You’ve got, what, twelve cities on the schedule this summer?”

“Something like that.” 

“Good lineup, good lineup. Glad you stopped by to see us in the UK. Your show at Koko was brill. Spectacular sound there, yeah? Have you got a favorite venue? I mean generally.” 

“It’s hard to choose. But I’m liking to perform outside, especially in the summer. That’s why Berlin was so nice.”

“Outside? Any particular reason?” 

“Reason? Um, I not think—I don’t think so. There’s just something about the, the fresh air. And the stars. You can truly feel like… like the world is so big, and so real, and you’re alive in it. Like that.”  

“Wow. Lovely. You know, that reminds me of a line from one of your early singles. ‘Like the world looks from an airplane / Something managed, something small / Each death and damage shrunken / Like a name you can’t recall.’ It’s a real tonal shift from your more recent work—well, from all of your other work, really. You started out very raw, very personal—but you’ve distanced yourself from that not just in your sound but in your lyrical content. Could you talk a bit about that?” 

“Yes. Sure. That is a… big question. I used to—”

“God, that accent is so cute. ‘Us-èd.’ Real Shakespearean. Oh don’t be embarrassed, sorry, it’s just got a lovely sound! Go on, go on.” 

Trish crinkles her eyes in lieu of a smile. “I could talk more about my ‘cute accent,’ if you like.” 

Giulia slashes a hand across her throat from the couch. 

“No, really,” Sophie says, clasping her hands at her chest apologetically. “Stupid of me to say. Wasn’t thinking. Go on.” 

Trish glances at Giulia again, who motions emphatically for her to speak. Next to her, Narancia is slumped all the way back, staring boredly at the ceiling. Trish can’t blame him. He probably can’t understand a word they’re saying. 

“I used to write songs that way because that is… how I felt, when I wrote them. But I don’t feel that way now. I’m having many feelings as the time, um, as time passes and my career and my life is changing. I think that for an artist to always be sounding the same is very boring, and for me it feels like I’m not growing. I was also deciding—um, I decided that I… had different things to say than that. Music is not my place for saying the truth.”

“That’s so interesting. A lot of critics say that the appeal of your work is its willingness to be escapist without compromising authenticity. Plus it’s a bit of a legend among your fans that, what, the penultimate track of every album is ‘the honesty cut.’ That’s where you’ve always experimented with heavier lyrics and a more slowed-down feel. Could you talk a bit about those songs? And list them for us?”

“Yes. Um, on Flowers Grow Here it was…” Her mind stumbles on the memory of the verse in Narancia’s voice, unfurling in the dark beside her bed. “It was ‘Little Scar.’ On Una it was ‘Breaking Wave.’ On Songs for Sardegna it was ‘Perrier’ and on Spice it was—‘Venice.’ Those songs are the important… they’re very important to me. They’re more important than I…” She quiets, looks down at her hands. “Know how to talk about.”

“Do you find that happening often with the important things? Is that why you turn to songwriting?” 

“I… maybe.” Trish manufactures the laugh she always uses with interviewers, light and pleasant. “Maybe saying the truth is easier when you can rhyme.” 

“Ha! Maybe! Well, and I mean, aside from writing your own songs, you’re also quite the musical virtuoso, yeah? What is it that you play, exactly?” 

“Mm… the piano is my best. I play also the guitar—acoustic and electric. And I learned—learned the bass last year. As a hobby I play the violin. I would like to learn the drums next. I’m hoping someday to make an album that is only me.”

“That’s quite an aspiration.”

“Yes.”

“Speaking of which, there’ve been rumors that we can expect a new album from you at the year’s end… any truth to that?”

Giulia catches her eye. She raises her eyebrows, and nods, once.

“Yes,” Trish says, even though the word takes a moment to come together. “I’m working on it right now.”

“Oh, brilliant!” Sophie sits forward eagerly. “How far along are you? What can you tell us about it?”

Trish withholds a sigh, crossing one leg over the other. She hadn’t expected to be talking about it this soon, much less in English—much less before she’s gotten around to telling her own manager that it will probably be her swan song—but she guesses there’s no helping it now.  

“There is… there isn’t much to tell yet,” she answers, trying to sound blithe. “Valentina Montalto will produce it. It’s still… hm… coming together. I recorded only one song. But I’m excited for it.”

“Any word on when we can expect a single?” 

“I think the autumn.”

“What can we expect from it, thematically?” 

“Oh,” Trish says, floundering. “Oh. I’m not decided.” 

There’s a gentle, unexpected movement in her chest.

“Love.” 

She jolts back to herself in time to clap her stupid, traitorous mouth shut, but the damage is done—Sophie lifts her chin from her hand, eyes wide and intrigued, and exclaims, “Love! That’s new! Have you ever been in love?” 

She may as well have just broken a plate over Trish’s head. 

“I—” Trish laughs. “I’m… sorry, I-I’m not understanding the question in English.” 

“Well, I mean,” Sophia says, shrugging one shoulder, “it’s not a subject that’s come up often in your music. And you’ve always kept your personal life very private, you know, aside from what’s in the gossip mags—you’ve never dated anyone seriously, right, I mean, there was that actress you were seen with in Monaco last summer, and the American guy a couple years back, but those lasted a couple months, barely—”

“I don’t,” Trish interjects, and forces a smile, “really want to talk about—”

“But now there’s this mysterious person you’ve been kissing in Amsterdam, isn’t there?” Sophie asks with relish. 

Ah. 

“Ah,” Trish says, frozen. 

“Ha! Yeah, I read the fishwrap, don’t start catching flies on me.” Sophie grins. “Looked well scandalous, can I just say. Whatever they’re wearing, it’s top. No one’s got any clue who they are. So? Can we get a word?” 

“That’s—” Trish says harshly, waiting for herself to figure out exactly what it is: private, stupid, none of your business. “That’s…”

Instinctively, she looks at Narancia—but he’s still completely oblivious, watching her with his chin in his hand and a befuddled, strange expression on his face. He hasn’t reacted at all. 

Do they really not know that it’s him? Well, maybe that’s to be expected—people who aren’t famous all look alike to the media, and the photo hadn’t been very well-lit anyway—even though Trish couldn’t imagine not recognizing Narancia, couldn’t imagine seeing his face without thinking of the wind, and the sky, and Sardegna in spring.

“It is someone,” she hears herself say before she even knows it’s coming, “very… important to me.”

Narancia tilts his head in confusion. Beside him, Giulia rolls her eyes to the ceiling and mouths, “Dear God.”

“Happy for you, then,” says Sophie, and when Trish manages with a slow, lurching effort to turn her head back, she’s met with a smile. “Keep your secrets. There’s more to a girl than who she’s kissing anyway, right?”

“I…” Trish says, her mouth inexplicably numb. “Right.”

Sophie stoops over the notepad in her lap, tapping her pen on the paper. “So, we’ve got through the tour stuff… got through your discography, a bit… got through your instruments and your kiss scandal… oh!” Her eyes brighten. “How about your necklace?”

Trish blinks, reaching up to finger her choker unconsciously. “This?”

“Yeah. You’ve got it on nearly always, haven’t you? I mean even since your debut album back in ’02. Trademark piece, practically. It could pass for a tattoo. Who’s the designer, anyway?” 

“A-Ah… right… well, the…” She tries to kick some semblance of coherence back into herself, setting her hand firmly back in her lap. “There is no—designer. I made it myself, with—I don’t know the word… ehm, the string for fishing?”

“Fishing line.” 

“Yes, this. The design was inspired by—” The spidery lines on Bucciarati’s chest, the unexpected tenderness on his face when he had laid his hand there and said, For my father. “Someone I knew, once.”

“You’re just full of mysteries, aren’t you?” Sophie says teasingly. Trish has never appreciated being teased, especially by strangers, so she has to fake another smile. “Well, that’s all the questions I’ve got. Unless you have any parting remarks? Advice for your fans?” 

Trish shakes her head vaguely. She lifts her right shoulder in a shrug. 

“I don’t think so,” she says, but in spite of herself she gives it thought. “Just to… keep living.” 

Sophie nods, reaching for the tape recorder and clicking it off. Trish practically goes limp with relief.

“Not too boring, I hope,” Sophie says cheerfully. 

“No.” Trish shakes her head, eyes drifting to the ceiling. “Not boring.” 

Sophie ushers her into the photography studio next, and Narancia and Giulia follow. The set is small, with a white backdrop and an arrangement of props: antique tables, rococo furniture, plum blossom branches in tall gold vases. Giulia steps out to take a call, and then only Narancia is left, wandering to hover uncertainly beside the exit. 

Trish pointedly avoids eye contact with him as the photographer and assistants come in, and she bids a polite goodbye to Sophie, who waves at her with both hands and breezes back the way she’d come. The photographer is an older woman, unsmiling, in a white button-down and coke bottle glasses. 

“All right then,” she says, glancing at her clipboard. “Una. We’ll start you in the Chanel.” 

So Trish follows the stylists into the dressing room, and lets them curl her hair and put red lipstick on her, and changes into a pastel pink Chanel dress with scalloped sleeves and a high collar. When she comes back out Narancia gives her a look that sinks into her stomach like a knife. Even across the room, she can see his Adam’s apple move when he swallows. 

She looks away again.

“Let’s get to it,” the photographer says, clapping. “Get her the rose bouquet. Una, I want you to turn to the side and hold that like a baseball bat, right, like you’re about to hit a strike…” 

This, she can do: reclining on a chaise in an Armani Privé gown that plunges to her navel, faking a crinkled laugh in a blue Anna Sui dress, tuning a white electric guitar in a Givenchy suit, pretending to smoke in a Jean Paul Gaultier corset. This—the pretending—is easy. 

She’s just finished posing in the corset—leaning languidly back on one of the couches with her legs spread wide, the way Abbacchio always would—when there’s a commotion from the edge of the set. Trish thinks she catches the photographer say “shit.” 

“Our model called in sick,” the stylist says when she comes over to touch up Trish’s foundation. 

“Fucked off. They fucked off,” the photographer interjects. 

“They fucked off,” the stylist says, defeated.

Trish can only understand about half of the ensuing conversation—they’re speaking too fast for her to follow—but she can make out something about a bracelet being on loan, and something about a ruined vision, and the word “shit” again. She sighs, fluffing out her hair with one hand. The hair stylist had taken a curling iron to it, so she looks like she has a perm, and she hasn’t decided on her opinion of it yet. 

Her eyes wander of their own accord along the wall until they land on Narancia. He’s standing with his arms crossed and his temple resting on the wall over his shoulder, his left knee loosely bent. She half-expects him to be dozing off or cleaning his fingernails or doing any of the things she’s seen him do when he’s bored, but—

He’s watching her, clear-eyed, engrossed, as if he has been the entire time. When their eyes meet, he jolts, caught. 

“Wait,” the photographer says suddenly, wrenching Trish’s mind back into place. “I want him.” 

Trish blinks once, twice, and whirls around. Across the floor, the photographer bows her head to inspect Narancia over her glasses, and after only a second she snaps her fingers and points to him. 

“You,” she says decisively. Narancia looks from side to side and then points to himself in bewilderment. “Sì, te. Jacket off. You look like you’ve got a good back on you, so mind if we borrow it?”

Narancia squints and mouths a few of the words, totally uncomprehending. His head swivels to Trish. 

“What’s this lady want?” he asks, pointing rudely at her, his frown so deep and distressed that it wrinkles his forehead. “I can’t understand that shit.”

Trish blinks again, still processing it herself. “I… think she wants you to… model.” 

Now Narancia’s nose wrinkles, too. “Hah?” 

“He isn’t a…” Trish says, turning back to the photographer with a vague, helpless gesture. “That is my bodyguard only, he isn’t…” 

The photographer waves a hand dismissively. “All he’s got to do is stand there. Come on, he’s quite handsome. Bring him, bring him.” 

Trish is glad that Giulia’s still out on her phone call. She’d probably be laughing herself to death. Red-faced, she beckons Narancia stiffly over. 

He pushes himself off the wall, staring at her quizzically. She beckons him again, more emphatic. This time, he comes. 

“Take your jacket off,” she says through gritted teeth. 

“Why?!” Narancia yelps.

“Just do it.” 

“Jeez… fine, fine…” 

Narancia shoulders off the jacket in two movements, the muscles in his forearms tensing briefly as he does. He practically jumps out of his skin when the stylist appears at his elbow and takes it from him. 

“Yeah, Alicia, get him the black one with the open back. Armani, I think. We want to accentuate the shoulders.” 

While Trish and Narancia wait for the stylist to come back, shuffling their feet awkwardly, one of the lighting technicians wanders over. He leans in to get a better look at the scar on Narancia’s neck—a faded, pockmarked remnant of his fight with the Clash, not nearly so red or raw as Trish remembers it. The last time she’d taken a long look at it, it had shimmered in the Venice afternoon, all smooth and pink and new; Gold Experience had made the skin from little stones. 

“That’s sick, bruv. Shark take a nip off you, or what?” 

Narancia looks at Trish urgently and hisses, “The hell’s this guy saying?”  

“Ignore him.” Trish waves her hand. “He just likes your scar.” 

Narancia perks up, pointing to it with his right hand. “Huh? This one?” He turns to the tech and says, exaggeratedly, “Thank-you-ve-ry-much.” 

“Oh, cheers.”

A moment later the stylist reemerges with a black shirt slung over her arm. She hands it to Narancia without a word. 

He holds it up, frowning skeptically. “What’m I supposed to do with this? It’s all open.” 

“They want you to put it on,” Trish says. “For the photo. The—” Her mouth feels dry all of a sudden. She busies herself with the front of the corset. “The open part is the back, so you… put it on the other way.” 

“Eh…? This designer shit sure is weird,” Narancia mutters, but then he reaches for the back of his t-shirt and tugs it over his head, taking it off right there in the middle of the studio. “Well, whatever…” 

Trish’s eyes are stuck for a moment too long on the bare planes of his shoulders, the lean muscle shifting underneath—the movement beneath his ribs and navel when he takes an incidental breath, the array of time-dulled scars she’s never seen. She manages to wrench them away before he notices, and concentrates instead on one of the fresnel lights overhead. 

She hears a rustle and a sigh, and then Narancia asks, “Like that?” 

This time, it’s the looking back again that takes too long—or maybe it just feels like it, a moment stretched out to its breaking point—and when it happens Trish feels it right in her stomach, like the closing of a hand. Narancia has turned away from her, one hand tangled self-consciously in his hair, and through the wide slit in the satin she can see his back as plainly as before, given a new symmetry by the cut. 

The shirt is sleeveless with a high neck. It makes him look taller, his back longer. Trish can see his spine, the arch and dip of it; a scattering of small moles, the places where the muscle is defined. He rolls his left shoulder restlessly, and she can track each part of him that moves for it, straining and relaxing under the skin. 

“Perfect,” the photographer says before Trish can. “Oh, great choice. Totally works on you. Okay, er, you can come on over here, yeah, and turn your back to the camera—and Trish, you come stand on his other side, and let’s get this on you—” 

The stylist comes over to fasten an ornate bracelet onto Trish’s left wrist—from the Dsquared² fall collection, she says; the huge garnets are surrounded by small diamonds, and the chain is 24-karat gold. It’s gorgeous, but heavy, and has got to be nearly seven centimeters wide. It fits her like a cuff. 

The photographer motions for her to stand closer to Narancia, who is craning his neck to the ceiling like he’s looking for a skylight to escape through. 

“Okay, what I’m gonna have you do is stand over there, facing him—” 

Trish goes where she’s pointed, ruffling her hair with both hands. Narancia’s eyes catch on hers when she faces him head-on, and she can’t quite work out what glints for an instant inside them, sharp and familiar. His face is dusted red.

“Little closer,” the photographer says. 

Trish flexes her fingers and takes two small steps forward—any further and they’d be touching, chest-to-chest. Narancia makes a startled noise and blinks at her questioningly, but he doesn’t move away. 

Trish bites her lip unconsciously. The presence of his Stand energy is immense this close, like a third body, flush and thrumming against her own. 

“Right. Great. Now put your arms around him.” 

Trish whips her head up so fast it makes Narancia stare at her in confusion, but she ignores him. 

“Wh-What?” she blurts out. 

The photographer sighs, waving a hand distractedly as she fiddles with the camera settings. “Put your arms around him. Not tight or anything, but, you know, possessive.” 

“My… arms?” Trish stares down at them like they’ve just sprouted out of her for the first time. 

“Yes. Arms. Braccio, yeah?” 

“What’s she want?” Narancia furrows his eyebrows. “Arm?” 

Trish bites the inside of her cheek, eyes flicking to his face, and with a tense and quiet effort she breathes out. She takes the last step closer, until she can feel the Stand energy in her ribs, and carefully slips her arms under Narancia’s shoulders, embracing him. 

He tenses up, his breath hitching softly when her body meets his. Trish keeps the contact tentative, a brushing of the chests and little else—but this is already closer than she’s ever been to him, closer even than the club in Amsterdam. 

He’s furnace-warm. When he breathes in, she feels it: under her hands, pressed to her stomach. The sound is vague and shallow at her ear. She forces back a shiver. 

“Put your hands on his back,” the photographer says briskly, and Trish starts to raise her arms, feeling around for fabric. “No, sorry love, on the skin.”

Trish stalls, then turns her head unsurely, meeting eyes with a clueless Narancia. 

He mouths, “What?”

She tries to think of something better to ask him than, Can I touch you?

In the end, she doesn’t ask for anything—only slides her hands up his back. Underneath the trailing touch Narancia shudders, and draws a breath so soft and quick that it could be a gasp, if she listens. 

His skin is warm, and smooth to the touch, and firmer in places than she expects. She can feel its intricacies as she goes, the smallest bumps and seams from a mole or a scar, and when she reaches his shoulders she twists her right hand up the nape of his neck, tangling her fingers loosely into his hair. 

She wouldn’t have heard the noise he makes if she weren’t so close. It breaks gently in the shell of her ear, some sore translation of a whimper, and then vanishes. She lays her other hand, the one with the bracelet, just over the slope of his shoulder, splaying her fingers over the bare skin of his back. 

He arches a little into her palm. His cheek brushes her cheek. She swears she hears him say her name, pain and amazement folded into a whisper—but with all the noise and voices around them she can’t be sure. 

“That’s perfect,” the photographer says enthusiastically, oceans away. “Keep the bracelet right there. Now look right at the camera. Give us something really intense. Like I said, we’re going for possessive. Like, confident, but… romantic. You follow? Oh, yeah, just like that! Hold that!”

Then the clicking of the camera, the low rushing of Narancia’s breath—and Trish’s heart, thudding acutely inside of her. She glances down by accident. If she were to bow her head, her mouth would meet his collarbone. 

“Um,” Narancia says, without a voice, and then he swallows, pulls it back. “Sorry about this.” 

Trish shakes her head minutely, too subtle to be caught by the camera. Her eyes wander to the side and linger in the shapeless dark of his hair. 

“It’s fine,” she mutters, remembering the taste of aperol, remembering everything. “It’s just a picture.” 

“Mm,” Narancia answers, but whether it’s an agreement or something else is difficult to determine. “Yeah. Just a picture.”

“All right,” the photographer interjects, “we’re just going to try a few different approaches, yeah? So, put your hand a little lower, over the shoulder blade—yeah, that’s it—and now turn your head like you’re about to say something into his ear. Like, whispering, you know.” 

Trish presses her palm a little more firmly to Narancia’s shoulder, closing her eyes when it earns her a dipped head and a soft, contented sigh. Her skin tingles warmly in every direction. 

Her stomach clenches up. For a moment all she wants is to curl her fingers in, scrape her nails along the bone until she’s learned it, hear what sound it earns her—but she cuts the thought off roughly. 

“Don’t overthink it,” the photographer adds. “Think of him like… like furniture, yeah? Like… attractive, but inanimate.” 

Narancia clicks his tongue, annoyed. “Now what’re they saying?” 

“That you’re furniture.” 

“Hah?!” 

He starts to whip his head around, but Trish catches his chin in her left hand and steers it back to her before she can think on it. 

Their eyes lock again. Trish’s hand falters, straying along his jawline in an accidental gesture. 

Handsome. It’s strange—before the photographer had said it, the word had never occurred to her, but now, with nothing to look at but the faintly crooked bridge of Narancia’s nose, and his long dark eyelashes, and the smooth edges of his face, it’s the only word that she can conjure at all. She’d never really deny that Narancia is good-looking, but this is something entirely different. Handsome in the way a knife is sharp, in the way a sunset is brief. Handsome in a way that shouldn’t be looked away from. 

It must show in her expression, because Narancia’s eyebrows work subtly toward each other as if he’s seeing something for the first time. She lowers her hand to the crook of his neck. In a moment only he relaxes again, his body unlocking itself, reduced to nothing but trust.

“Just…” Trish says, outside of herself. “Hold still.” 

She rocks up slightly on the balls of her feet and lifts her mouth to his ear. 

Narancia doesn’t hold still—he turns his head by a shocked, instinctive fraction, barely a movement at all, but it’s enough that her lips touch the shell of his ear by accident. 

His breath catches. Trish keeps it together; she exhales as softly as she can, holding the pose for the camera, until she can feel the air from her mouth warming his skin. Under the lights, the garnets on her wrist glint like blades. 

“Brilliant,” the photographer says effusively, clicking away. “Brilliant, yeah, hold it.” 

Trish’s skin jumps when she feels the tentative touch of a finger at her elbow, so light that at first she mistakes it for a piece of fabric. She keeps the faraway expression tacked on, but her hand curls up just barely in Narancia’s hair, a question. 

It must be his middle finger. The tip is broad, and warm, and circles her bone with almost no weight at all, a word that he can’t say.

“Hey, model guy, can’t remember your name, but keep your hands down, yeah? If we want you to change pose we’ll tell you so.” 

Trish glances edgewise, even though she’s too close to see Narancia’s face. 

“Put your hand down,” she tells him quietly. 

Narancia sighs, almost an apology, and obeys. 

“Sorry,” he murmurs, and nothing else.

The touch had barely lasted for a second, faint and incidental enough that she could easily convince herself that she’d imagined it, but still her arm feels altered in its aftermath, heavy and sore, like it doesn’t quite belong to her. 

“Okay, that about wraps it up, I think!” the photographer calls, and Trish registers the words as if through a pane of glass. “Lovely work, you two. Tell your friend thanks again for jumping in. Absolutely indispensable shoulders.” 

It takes her and Narancia a moment to move apart, and when they do, Trish falls back on an old, fragile instinct: she’s the first to let go. 

In the car ride back to the hotel, Fabrizio is playing classical again. Trish is in the back seat with Narancia, pulling at her fingers in her lap until the joints pop, one by one. Outside the tinted windows, the London night is buzzy and glittering. 

Narancia has spent the whole ride with a deeply pensive expression on his face, slumped back in his seat with his arms folded and his foot tapping restlessly on the carpet. Every now and then Giulia, who’s in the front seat, will twist around to give that foot an annoyed look, but it doesn’t discourage him. Trish doubts he even notices. He’s pretty single-minded.

“How did your photoshoot go?” Giulia asks, seemingly giving up on the foot. 

“It was fine,” Trish says. “The clothes were nice.” 

“Yes, they said they will let you keep the Chanel. They are sending it to the hotel. A gift.” 

Trish brightens despite herself. “Really? That dress was super cute.” 

Narancia looks up. “Which one?” 

“Eh?” Trish turns her head, faltering. “The… pink one. The first one.” 

Narancia looks thoughtfully at his knees, recollecting it, and then gives a single nod. 

“Mm,” he says. “Yeah. It was.” 

Trish’s face warms. She goes back to looking out the window. 

Her palms have been tingling ever since they’d left the studio. She slips her hands under her thighs. 

Narancia is pulling another double shift, according to Giulia, so he joins them when the car drops them off at the hotel. Giulia bids them a curt good night and goes up to bed, striding into the lobby and vanishing around the corner past a fan palm. As the car drives away, Trish starts to follow. 

“W-Wait,” Narancia says from behind her. 

She stops mid-step, but doesn’t turn around right away. When she does, she adjusts her purse strap even though it isn’t falling down. 

In the dim sodium light of the port-cochère, Narancia looks less familiar than usual, with all of his shadows in the wrong places. 

“What’s the matter?” she asks, crossing her arms—even though she already knows the answer.

Narancia opens his mouth—and he’s facing her with a strained, indescribable emotion, all gravity—and frowns, and closes it, ducking his head. He’s back in his jacket again, and the material makes a rustling noise when he lifts his right arm to scratch nervously at the back of his neck. 

“I don’t,” he rasps eventually, “wanna go up there yet.” 

Trish isn’t sure she wants to go up, either, right then. She isn’t sure she could face that emotion in a place with walls. 

“Where do you want to go, then?” she hears herself ask. Her voice is cold. 

“You think I know?” Narancia grimaces. “I don’t care. Wherever. I just…” His mouth tenses, wavers. “I wanna talk to you.” 

Trish glances aside and mutters, before she can hold it back, “That’s a surprise.”

She feels rather than sees Narancia flinch.

“Not like you gave me much of a chance,” he retorts under his breath, but then he sighs, almost defeated. “Trish—listen.” And Trish wants to ask what choice she has when he’s saying her name like it’s an epicenter, when it ruptures unseen in the distance between them. “There’s just…  something I gotta say. That’s all.” 

Say it, then, Trish’s heart spits back, made of pettiness and fear and nothing else—but she manages, somehow, to keep it inside. Narancia has given her five days of hiding. She could stand to give him something back. 

“Fine,” she says again, cold again. “But not far.” 

Narancia nods, and gestures for her to lead the way. Trish lingers for a moment before starting off toward the bustle of the sidewalk. She keeps her pace slow, but Narancia still follows exactly one step behind her—like always. 

“Don’t—” She sighs, craning her neck. “Hover like that. It’s weird.” 

“Weird?” he retorts. “The hell do you mean? I gotta cover you.” Then something like bitterness edges into his voice. “It’s my job, isn’t it?” 

“Whether it’s your job or not, can you at least do it in my peripheral vision?” Trish snaps. “I don’t—like feeling like people are following me.” 

Narancia doesn’t reply, but he takes one pointed stride forward so that they’re walking side-by-side. He’s on her left, nearest the street; when a car passes, the wind will intermittently toss his hair back. 

Trish’s eyes linger on his hair, and the plain, open face it leaves behind. 

“That jacket looks good,” she says without understanding why.  

“Huh?” Narancia glances at her over his nose, almost skeptical. “Oh. You think?” 

“Mm. It suits you.” She exhales, feeling a little of the tension in her shoulders wane with it. “Like, your style. You know.” 

Narancia scuffs the heel of his shoe on the ground. When Trish steals a look at his profile, his lower lip is sticking out.  

“You think I’ve got style?” he mumbles. 

An apology wrings weakly in her stomach, but the words come out wrong, tangling into something else: “You always had style.” 

Narancia’s silence is fragile, suddenly. He doesn’t thank her. 

A moment later they come upon a side street on the right, so Trish turns onto it and Narancia follows without a word or question. It’s narrow; their footsteps echo against the tall brick buildings. The sounds of the main avenue recede.

“So?” she prompts him. 

“So what?” 

Trish runs her hands up and down her arms, even though it isn’t especially cold. 

“Whatever you wanted to say, say it.” 

Narancia takes a breath beside her. She can hear it move through him, almost unwanted. 

“I… the other night,” he says quietly. “At that club.” 

She’s replayed it so many times, but her face still flushes at the memory, if a cluster of pink impressions—a thumb on her hip, a face in her hand and a breath on her breath, and the wonder of Narancia’s mouth, tender and unsure—can be called a memory at all. 

Her throat closes up, maybe panic and maybe self-preservation.

If only because he won’t say it first, she says, “It was a mistake.”

Narancia falters. His steps slow down, and then stop altogether.

“Oh,” he says, in a voice so small that it might wound someone kinder.

Trish stops walking, too. She keeps her back to him. She bows her head rigidly, fixing her eyes on the uneven cobblestones, their edges grazed in yellow from the streetlamps.

“That whole thing,” she goes on, keeping her voice as airy and dismissive as she can. “Kissing you.” If she wavers on the word, he doesn’t point it out. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. It was... stupid, and. Unfair. And if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to forget about it.”

She manages to turn her head, but not the rest of her. For a long, straining moment, Narancia doesn’t speak. In the distance, Trish can hear people laughing and moving and living, impressions of a separate world. Bit by bit, moment by moment, she sees Narancia’s eyes grow duller, and his jaw harsher, and his posture as wary and closed-off as she’d expect if she were a stranger. 

“Yeah,” he echoes, low and without inflection. “Yeah. A mistake. Okay.”

The way he says mistake sounds different than it had when she’d said it—like a bone fracture. Something like regret pangs in her chest, and compels her mouth to open, but all she has inside of it is the same pathetic silence as before. 

Narancia inhales deeply through his nose, all the way. Then he exhales; this, too, all the way. When he’s finished, his eyes sink down to the ground and he says, like it’s the only word that he has left: “Sorry.” 

Trish scoffs quietly, hugging herself. 

“Sorry?” she mutters. “What are you sorry for?” 

“There’s just something—” Narancia’s eyes sharpen and wrench shut. He starts walking again, moving past her, furiously rumpling his hair with both hands. “Ah, damn it! This whole thing. I thought I could handle it, I told Abbacchio I could handle it, but—”

The familiar name pricks at Trish’s heart, but as she opens her mouth to interject, she catches a movement at the end of the alleyway. 

There’s a figure walking slowly towards them. 

“Trish,” Narancia says, “even i-if it was a mistake, I—”

“Stop.” Trish locks eyes with him intently and jerks her head over her shoulder. “Someone’s coming.” 

Narancia blinks, his pleading expression breaking away, and cranes his neck. The silhouette has stopped now, a good few paces from them, not close enough to any light to make out a face on. It looks like a man. 

“What’s he just standing there for?” Narancia mutters. 

Trish recognizes the edge to his voice. She’d heard it once or twice—outside a bathroom in Capri, at a restaurant table in Venice.

“Maybe he’s lost,” she offers, even though the second it’s out of her mouth she hears how stupid it sounds. 

“Maybe,” Narancia says under his breath. He straightens up. “Hey, you got a problem?” 

The person doesn’t answer. He doesn’t move, either, at least not at first. After a second, he starts advancing again, faster and surer this time. Narancia takes a step back. Trish doesn’t. 

“Are you Trish Una?” a voice asks in rough Neapolitan.

Trish can hear an engine starting in the air, about to launch. A burst of wind.

“What’s it to you?” Narancia snarls.

“And Ghirga, too?” Then a laugh, slow and derisive. “Thought you were supposed to be dead.”

Adrenaline prickles up Trish’s spine, sharp and sudden. She spreads her feet wider, just like she’d been taught—in a different life, among the dirt and maquis.

“Come a little closer, asshole, see how dead I am!” 

Trish takes a step back, looking frantically for something she can pick up, a board, a bottle, anything, but she’s not fast enough—within another second the man’s right there, right there, an arm’s length from her, and he can’t be much older than they are, and right on his lapel is a gold pin that she’s seen before, on Giorno and Bucciarati and—

“Die, traitors!” he spits, and tears his hand out of his coat to reveal a knife. “For Diavolo! For Passione!” 

He lunges for Trish first. Trish’s brain screams at her to move, move, so she does, stumbling back, preparing to run, though her eyes stay on the blade. It glints in the moonlight. Clean and sharp. Six inches, maybe more. It’s big. Not close enough for her to try disarming him. Maybe if he goes for her stomach—somewhere low—she could have leverage—try—

Narancia’s arm collides with her chest, shoving her behind him. In the same movement he catches the blade in his bare hand. 

Trish cries out, but Narancia doesn’t move or flinch. The tip of the knife protrudes from his fist, seeming suddenly much smaller. Within a second blood is gushing dark and thick through the lines between his fingers, and it drips slowly down his wrist, to the ground. He’s gripping it so tightly, knuckles jutting blanched into the dark, that it shakes from the force. 

“For me?” he drawls, conversational at first, and then his voice darkens. “Tch. Already got one, thanks.” 

The assassin struggles—Trish sees shock register on his face, or maybe it’s fear, or maybe some panicked meeting of both—and reaches swiftly up to grip Narancia’s arm, but Narancia is still fast. He punches him in the gut once, twice, and wrenches the knife free and tosses it aside. It clatters across the stone past Trish’s feet, trailing blood. 

When she looks up again, Aerosmith is right in front of her, and the assassin is on the ground, and Narancia is standing over him. His right hand is open above his shoulder, so red and garish that she can’t even tell where the lesion begins. 

“Aerosmith,” he calls, low and deliberate—nothing like the hot-blooded shout she remembers, nothing like anything she remembers at all—and his Stand answers. 

Trish doubles over with a shriek, hands flying up to cover her ears. Even through her palms she can hear the roar of the engine and the barrage of the guns, the sound so close that it feels for a moment like the bullets are piercing her, too. She thinks the assassin screams, but it’s ripped apart before she can really know. 

Within a handful of seconds the assassin falls to the ground, unrecognizable—barely even human anymore—but Aerosmith keeps going, emptying infinite clips into the corpse, and when it’s finally finished smoke rises from the remains. A pool of blood seeps, viscous, out of the heap, expanding and expanding in the dark, thick and bright and—

“—ish. Trish.” 

Trish jolts back to herself, ears ringing. Narancia has turned around to face her, still holding up his injured hand, fingers loose and open; there’s a spray of crimson on his right cheek. 

He stares back at her, panting, his pupils blown and adrenaline-dark, and roughly asks, “You good?” 

“We,” Trish hears herself say, “didn’t ask him—who he was working for—”

“Who the hell cares?!” Narancia exclaims. “Bastard was gonna kill us! Did he hurt you?”

She thinks she might throw up for a second, but it passes. In the aftermath, she can’t even think straight, so furious and scared that nothing in her vision has a shape. All that she can see is the gash on Narancia’s hand, the wound jagged and open, the blood glistening all over. His right hand. His—

“Why did you do that?” Her voice splits in two. “Why did you do that?!”

“Damn it,” Narancia mutters, and clicks his tongue in annoyance. He shakes his hand out a few times; the blood spatters onto the pavement in three sweeps. “Probably gonna need stitches. I hate stitches.” Then he scowls at the assassin’s body, kicking it lightly in the side. “Asshole, I just bought this damn jacket—”

“Narancia,” Trish asks, growing louder, “why did you do that?”

Finally Narancia seems to remember that she’s there, lifting his head to look back at her. He’s breathing with his mouth open, and some fury is still gripping his face in places: the eyebrows, the jaw. 

“Huh?” he snaps. “Do what?”

Trish flexes her cold fingers, in and out, and holds them in fists when she’s through. She doesn’t know what she plans to strike with them, but she knows that she wants to strike something. Anything. Everything.

“You only have two of those, you know,” she says coldly. “And Giorno’s not around anymore.”

Narancia frowns back, his face still harsh and closed-up, like she’s just insulted him in a foreign language. Blood continues to drip from the wound, though the flow is lessening.

“Giorno?” He blinks fast, uncomprehending. “The hell’s Giorno got to do with—”

Trish fights with herself for the words and loses. In their absence she seizes her head with her hands, maybe out of frustration and maybe to try to contain the pounding—too sudden and too vicious not to spread to the rest of her, distorting her fear until she can pretend it’s rage, or strength, or hatred.  

“You really don’t think, do you?” she spits out. “You really just don’t think!”

Hurt spasms on Narancia’s face and disguises itself as anger. His mouth twists up. He throws his arms out, scattering more blood; Trish can hear the droplets hit the street, frail and fleeting. 

“You want me to just let you get stabbed next time?!” he shouts. 

“What, there’s no middle ground between me getting stabbed and you getting stabbed?” 

“What if there isn’t?!” 

“There is! There should be!” 

She wants to tell him that they’re not in Rome, that his arm isn’t rotting, that there’s no one ordering him to throw a turtle onto the shore—that no one should have ordered him to do that at all, and hadn’t she always meant to say so? She wants to tell him about the vines, the flowers, the long train ride, the phone call in the dark—she wants to say protect, or something like it. She wants it to be new, and bloodless, and kind. 

“I don’t get you,” she says, covering her face with both hands, and then she throws her head back and breaks into a cracking shout. “I don’t get you, Narancia! Was once not enough for you?!”

“I don’t get you, either, y’know!” Narancia barks, but despite the intensity of his voice Trish can find no anger—only something injured and tired, like a sprain that never quite healed right. “You said you’d give me a job, so I took it! And now you’re pissed that I’m doing it?!” 

“That,” Trish screams, and points roughly at his single, bleeding hand, “isn’t your job!” 

Narancia’s face is red now, and twisted up, and his eyes so fierce and bright that she almost wonders if there are tears in them. But that wouldn’t make sense, would it? Not when he’s looking at her like this—like she’s got a knife, too.

“If a job’s the only reason you’re here,” she says, even though it aches the moment she says it, “then that’s fine, Narancia, but I’m not paying you to die, got it? So don’t—”

“Die?” Narancia echoes, incredulous. “Is that what you’re worried about? C’mon, this guy was nothing! I could’ve gotten him in my sleep! It’s just a cut, it’s not even that—”

“Idiot!” Trish chokes out, instead of there was so much blood in Rome, instead of it came down the cracks in the stone, instead of what she should. “Go guard somebody else, then, if you’re so tough! Why does it need to be me, anyway?! Go jump in front of a knife for somebody who doesn’t even know your name, because I—sometimes I wish that I didn’t!” 

She sees the moment of impact clearly: how he recoils from it, as if from a punch. It seems to shock the anger off of his face, and what’s left behind is something that Trish can’t put a name to—but it hurts her all the same, for just an instant, before she manages to talk her body out of bruising. 

She can hear the night traffic from the main street, continuing. She can hear footsteps, and fragmentary conversations, and Narancia’s ragged breath, losing control in the silence that she’s made. 

“He was nothing, huh?” she says, scoffing. “Well, at least there’s that, right? At least it was easy. Is that all that matters to you? Winning?”

“Of course not—damn it!” Narancia throws his head back, cursing at the sky. “You’re not listening!” 

“What else matters, then? Huh?” Trish strides forward before she can think the better of it, until Narancia leans away from her, turning his stiff and wounded face to one side. The word comes to her again, cruelly. Handsome. “If that isn’t it, then—” 

“You matter!” 

He shouts it so loudly that the last fragment comes out hoarse, so loudly that its echoes ring sharply in the air like shards of glass. Somewhere above them, a light goes on. 

He makes a choked noise, undoing his fists at his sides. Trish can’t see the gash anymore, only its aftermath, dripping down the middle finger. His eyes shine dully at the pavement. The light goes off again. 

She takes a step back. Her next breath comes out so hard that it sounds like a sob, or a laugh, or both, and she isn’t sure which is more pathetic.

The question that she manages to land on is, “And you don’t?” 

“I just—” Narancia breaks off, conflicted, tired, and digs the heel of his uncut palm into one eye. “I matter… less…?”

And Trish can’t fathom how to answer that, nor how to unwrite it—the only thing she knows how to do, right then, with so many other chances to be better, or braver, or kinder, is walk away. 

“I’m going back to the hotel,” she says, before the burning behind her eyes can dissolve into something as stupid and worthless as tears. At the sound of halting footsteps in her wake, she shouts with such force that it might cut the night in half, “Don’t follow me!” 

This, at least, Narancia hears. 

“Pronto.” 

“Hey,” Narancia says into the payphone receiver, dropping his head against the pane of glass beside him. “Giorno. Hey. Sorry for callin’ so late.” 

“Narancia?” Giorno’s voice cuts clear and alert through the speaker, already perceiving something in Narancia’s tone. “Are you all right?” he asks, without preamble. 

Narancia sniffs and wipes his nose with the back of his bleeding hand, which hurts like hell now that the adrenaline is spent: persistent throbs in every direction, bone-deep. There’s a headache the consistency of concrete growing behind his eyes, and the smell of exhaust in the night air is making him sick, and his legs won’t quit trembling—but some things realign the moment he hears Giorno’s voice, the same as always. 

“’m fine,” he mumbles. “Listen—I’m in London—some guy just jumped me and Trish. Aero and I took care of him, but I checked him out after and he’s Passione for sure. Got the pin and everything.” 

“And he attacked you?” Giorno’s voice hardens. “I see.” Then, all business, “Did he speak to you? Did he tell you anything at all?”

“I…” Narancia kneads his thumb into the bridge of his nose, slumping over the phone box. “Shit, I don’t know, I don’t remember…” 

He starts to flex his fingers unconsciously, but the movement sends a pain ripping out to the tips, seizing up the muscles. He has to bite back a strangled noise. 

“Try,” Giorno tells him. “Remain calm. If you—”

“I’m fucking calm!” Narancia shouts, wrenching his eyes shut until spots bruise his vision. Why did you do that? “Who cares what he said?! If somebody tries to kill you, you kill ’em first! What else… what else was I supposed to…”

“Narancia,” Giorno says sharply, and Narancia’s voice stutters out. Only then does he recognize how hard he’s breathing, high and wheezing, like an animal about to die. “Listen to me. You are alive.” 

Narancia gulps down another breath, and it doesn’t go down easy. He presses his forehead to the phone box until it hurts, and tries to count to a hundred. Fugo had always told him you feel more real when you count to a hundred. 

“You are alive,” Giorno repeats. “And so is Trish. It’s 23:48. Friday. The last day of June. And I am here, and I am on the phone with you. And I am not going to hang up.” 

Narancia grits his teeth, but it doesn’t stop what he knows are coming: tears, hot and fast, dripping to the ground between his feet. He knows there’s no point in trying to hide it—no point in silencing the hoarse and ugly sob that aborts itself in his chest—so he doesn’t. He curls tightly forward, hunched over the phone box covered with instructions in a fucking language he can’t fucking read, and hits his head weakly against it, once. 

Why does it need to be me, anyway?

Giorno stays on the line, not speaking, until Narancia’s done. His throat feels raw afterwards, his chest hollowed-out. The pain in his hand has lessened to a dull throb, already forgetting itself. 

“He said,” he croaks, and clears his throat. “He s-said we were traitors. Somethin’ about Diavolo, I think. I dunno.”

Giorno repeats the name, which Narancia is grateful for, because he’s not sure he could say it again. Managing it even once had sent a scattering of old pains through his body, iron ghosts in his temple and his stomach and his chest, prying him apart. 

“Fuck,” he says faintly. “Giorno, hang on, I gotta puke real quick.” And he does, emptying his guts right in the middle of the sidewalk.

What the hell’s the matter with him? He used to take out guys like that as easy as breathing. The only other time he’d thrown up had been his first: the bank of a Regi Lagni, the stench of blood and gunsmoke, a ringing in his ears and Fugo’s hand on his back. It had been easy after that. It had always been easy. This, too, had been easy—easier, maybe, than anything he’s done since he was seventeen and willful, defiant of death and life alike—so why does it feel like his whole damn body’s coming apart? 

“Better?” Giorno asks when he’s through.

Narancia wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and cracks a smile. “Oh, yeah. Awesome.”

“I’ll have Mista, Fugo, and Sheila investigate things here,” Giorno says. His voice strains quietly with something like shame. “This is… new. To me.” Then it’s on even keel again, like it had never wavered at all. “I don’t know the extent to which this could indicate a mutiny, or something more arbitrary. Nonetheless both of you should be on guard until I tell you otherwise. If Trish is a target—” 

“No,” Narancia protests weakly. “No, no, come on, T-Trish is done with all that. If she finds out—”

“Then she will be better prepared to defend herself,” Giorno says evenly, “if it comes to that.”

“You don’t get it, okay?! Her Stand—” He manages to stop himself. “Giorno, c’mon, she… she shouldn’t have to deal with any of that again. That was the deal, right? Bucciarati—”

“It was,” Giorno concedes. “And I know what Bucciarati told us. I know. I hope that this incident was an outlier, I truly do. But we have to be prepared for the possibility that it wasn’t.”

“If it wasn’t, I’ll just make sure nothing happens to her!” Narancia insists. “I’ll take care of it, so don’t—”

“Is that truly what she would want?”

“Giorno, listen, damn it—”

“She is much stronger,” Giorno says, “than you give her credit for.”

Narancia falls silent, panting. An automated voice cuts in in English, and he has no damn clue what it’s saying, but he has to assume it’s to tell him that his time is almost up.

He rummages roughly in his jacket pocket. “Damn it. I’m out of money.”

“It’s all right.” Then a muffled, restless sound: footsteps. “We’ll leave it at that for now. Don’t concern yourself with any of the details.” He pauses. “Give Trish my best.”

Narancia shakes his head mutely even though he knows Giorno can’t see it. Like Trish would want to know he’d talked to Giorno at all. Like Trish would want any of them. Like Trish would want him. 

“And Narancia?”

“What?” 

“I’m glad you’re all right,” Giorno says. “I’m truly—” An emotion that Narancia can’t name catches in his voice, stealing its intensity. “Truly glad.”

Narancia clicks his tongue, digging his heel into the pavement. He can’t stand it when Giorno talks to him like that—or anybody else, for that matter. The years have made it rarer, but it still comes up from time to time. 

“’Course I am,” he grunts. He sniffs, loudly, wetly. “Guy was nothing.”

The other line is quiet for so long that Narancia wonders if he’d gotten cut off. Eventually, there’s a soft, crackling exhale, and he can picture the expression on Giorno’s face just from that: closed eyes and a smile, all exhaustion and that rare, understated self-hatred of his, dimly shadowed in an empty, opulent room.

“Of course you are,” he echoes softly. “I’m sorry. That was silly of me. Only… there was a time when you weren’t, once. Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”

“I remember,” Narancia mutters. “Night, Giorno.” 

He drops the phone back in the cradle, holding onto it for a while. He misses Napule. He misses the view of the sky from his and Mista’s kitchen window, and he misses the long walk to the harbor, and he misses the food and the sun and the wind, and the heat, and the rooftops. He misses the words, and always having the right ones: chiano and ’ncielo, arrevutà and popolo. 

He swallows roughly. Facce sule’ strunzate. 

He lets go of the phone, and lifts both of his hands, palm-up. The right one is barely even bleeding anymore, even though his fingers are caked with it. He should probably find a hospital or something. 

Aerosmith zips out of his chest, ready to scout for one. Narancia gazes after it for a moment, its red shape retreating into the dark of the unfamiliar city, and then slowly starts to walk.

“I have bad news,” Giulia says. 

It’s a still, overcast morning, and in the bedroom of her beautiful hotel suite, Trish is packing early. Her suitcase is open at the foot of her four-poster bed, each blouse and pair of pants arranged neatly inside, with the darkest things on top. At the sound of Giulia’s entrance, she folds her black shirt over her forearm, pressing the fabric to her middle, and turns around. 

“My God, have you slept?” Giulia asks, aghast. She has one hand on the doorframe and the other on her hip. 

Trish shakes her head silently. Normally she’d lie, but she doubts there’s any point. Whatever sleep she’d managed had been fractured by night terrors, her father’s face and a ball on an airplane wing and the ticking of a clock, until she woke fumbling for her stomach in the dark to stem a wound that wasn’t there. 

“I’ll do it on the bus,” she mutters, and faces away again, laying the shirt over the others. 

“Ah,” Giulia says. “Yes. That is the bad news. There will be no bus.” 

Trish’s hands go still. She turns around again, more slowly this time. 

“I’m sorry,” Giulia goes on, clasping her hands in front of her apologetically. “Really, I really am. But to Iceland, we must take a plane.”

“A…?” Trish drops the underwear. Over the jutting of her heart, a wan laugh makes it out, inexplicable. “Giulia, I don’t do planes, I can’t—”

“I know. I know!” Giulia says, but there’s no exasperation in it. She lifts her joined hands to her forehead. “I know. You have told me this so many times, Trish, I would never forget. I would never. Please believe me, I have tried everything. But it is simply not practical. The flight is short, and the jet is private—it will be easy, I promise you.” 

Easy. Easy. The blue expanse of the Tyrrhenian Sea beyond the window should have been easy, too. So many things should have been easy. The little ladybug brooch pulsing in her hand. The closet at the end of the aisle. 

“You will survive it,” Giulia assures her. “Cara mia, it would surprise you, the things you can survive.” 

For one strange moment Trish hears it in a different voice, knelling its conviction in some abandoned chamber of her heart. A hollow sound makes it out of her in its place, and she supposes it could pass for a laugh. 

“We take off from Heathrow at six tomorrow morning,” Giulia tells her, more gently than she’s ever told her anything. “I have canceled your commitments for today. I have already told garganelli boy. He has gone to the, what do you say, the chemist’s for you. I called your doctor in Milano to have him prescribe you something that will help.”

Trish bites back another laugh, this one even emptier than the last. Her skull is crawling with adrenaline, or something like it. Outside of her body, she notices that her hands are shaking.

“It’s fine,” she says, a vacant, practiced lie. “I’m fine, I’ll be fine. But I—I need to pack, all right, so…” 

“Mm,” Giulia answers. “Of course. I’ll go. Ring room service if you want anything, and ring me if you need anything.” 

Trish nods wordlessly. Giulia’s footsteps shift across the carpet as she turns to go. 

“Giulia,” Trish says quietly, suddenly, “how does he look at me?”

Giulia stops, waiting for an explanation. Trish tangles her fingers at her stomach, turning around in her bare feet, and tries to understand what it is she’s even asking. 

“You said he,” she swallows, “on the bus… you said something about the way he looks at me. And I don’t… I don’t understand.”

After all, she’s seen the way Narancia looks at her: nothing but doubt and hesitation, a dozen different names for pain. She’s seen it in a narrow alleyway, and a crowded pink club, and a room overlooking the Bay of Naples—and in the plain light of a room inside a turtle, back when her life had accommodated the notion of turtles having rooms inside of them, when he had been bandaged and small and had looked her in the eye and asked her what she was so angry about. 

She’s through with it. She’s through with Narancia looking at her like she’s something in a frame, like light will degrade her, like she’s some kind of open wound. That wound has been closed for five years. She’d stitched all by herself, bare-handed, not frightened of the blood or pain so long as it was hers, and still Narancia has the nerve to look at her as if she’d forgotten to the thread the needle.

“How does he look at me?” she asks again, more broken than she plans. 

Giulia tips her head back to the ceiling. A strange, faded smile shifts across her face for just a moment, and then wanes again. 

“Oh, you know.” She sighs. “Like you are the center of all things. Like he is always, always swimming after you.” She lifts a shoulder in a shrug, circling the air with her slim right hand. “He does not protect these things, my Trish. Not like you. I suppose that there are people in this world who just never learn how.”

After that, she leaves, and the air smells faintly of her perfume and her cigarettes, and Trish is alone again with her anger and her hurt, as she has been so many times before. 

“You ready, Spice?” she whispers in a small, brittle voice, and even from the deepest, safest part of her, no answer comes. 

Chapter Text

“You’re improving,” Bucciarati says.

Trish is sitting in the shade beside a copse of holm oaks, and when Bucciarati speaks in her periphery she doesn’t turn her head. It’s a bright, blustery day on Sardegna—the sky stripped of all clouds—and in the wind-hulled air, she can almost feel his presence more acutely. 

A part of her has always been able to, she guesses, the way the body senses a splinter—but since their arrival on the island of her father’s birth, the edges of that presence have grown more defined. The first time that she’d asked him about it—asked him about the constant twinging in her blood, like a network of second veins trying to get out—he’d told her that it’s to be expected.

We are drawn to each other, he’d said, and gestured to the others as they walked, five paces ahead, as all Stand users are. The reason isn’t clear. Call it magnetism, or fate, or loneliness. 

Then he’d gone quiet. The feeling doesn’t leave, Trish, he’d said, and tipped his head back toward the white sun overhead. But it defines itself, in time.

They had landed on a rocky beach three days ago, near a village with a name that Trish has already forgotten. The rubbery nose of the plane had ballooned smoothly in the sea for a long, gray moment before it sank, and Trish had been the only one to stay behind and watch it go. Ahead of her Giorno had noticed her absence, and turned back, and waited for her in silence.

She hadn’t slept that night. Or the night after. 

Now, she’s been spending her hours walking, and fighting, and walking some more. Abbacchio tells her over and over that she doesn’t have to hoof it; that she should be staying in the turtle, keeping her head down, but Trish feels like if she keeps her head down for a second longer her neck will break. The alternative is hiking through the underbrush with the rest of them, her face raw and wind-stung, and letting Bucciarati teach her how to hit things. So she takes it. 

His sparring sessions last around an hour. By the end of them Trish is always furious and exhausted, with every muscle twitching and every inch of skin sweaty. He usually does her the kindness of not trying to talk to her afterwards, but today must be an exception. 

Improving. She works her cheek between her teeth and draws her knees up to her chin, hugging them tight. 

“Is that supposed to make me happy?” she snaps.

Bucciarati is quiet for a moment, patiently letting the sharpness fade from the air between them—and that just angers her more, his quiet refusal to bleed from it. His hands are in loose fists at his sides; prepared for the worst, even now—even here, in the middle of nowhere. 

“You needn’t feel anything you don’t want to feel, Trish,” he tells her like it’s obvious. “When I notice improvement, I say so. The same would be true if you were making no progress at all.”

Trish’s grip on her knees loosens by a fraction. She ducks her eyes, letting her lower lip stick out because she knows he won’t see it. 

“Well, I’m not going to thank you, if that’s what you’re after,” she mutters. 

Bucciarati’s only response to that is silence.

Trish lets it be, eyes wandering across the windswept, abandoned landscape: the ragged shrubs, the occasional solitary seagull; in the distance, a cluster of boulders beside a single Aleppo pine.

Against the trunk of the Aleppo pine, Narancia. 

He looks like he’s asleep. His arms are folded at his chest, and his head lolling to one side in a way that will definitely give him a stiff neck by the time he wakes up. He looks so different than she’s used to, all of his wariness and fearsome grace forgotten; fending off nothing, mistrusting nothing.

She can’t distinguish his features from this distance—but then again, she realizes with a strange, understated pang, she already knows most of them. 

Had he been watching them? Her face prickles at the thought. It’s not that she especially cares about winning or losing, passing or failing, as if those concepts can even be applied to learning how to strike back at death—it’s just—

She’d fallen right on her butt. Right on it. 

She glances back at Bucciarati again. The wind is mussing his hair. There’s something dangerously close to an expression on his typically indifferent face, and it seems to gain clarity when the gulls cry out overhead, making their lonely way to the sea. 

“Um… Bucciarati?” 

“Yes?” 

“When you first got your Stand…” Trish leans forward, setting both hands on her raised knees. “What did it feel like?” 

Finally, Bucciarati makes eye contact. It’s brief, more of an accidental glint than anything else, but Trish lets a petty triumph beat in her chest, just once.

His expression seems more roughly hewn in the aftermath, such that Trish wonders if she can find it in herself to think she’d caught him off-guard.

At last, he says, “It isn’t anything I know how to describe.”

“But…” Trish presses him, quietly resenting how small her voice sounds, how shipwrecked. “Could you try?” 

There’s that glint again—more resigned this time—and then an exhale, so quiet that she might not have heard it if she wasn’t listening.

A combination of the sparring and the constant wind has tangled Bucciarati’s hair beyond its usual shape, and now it splits apart and flutters in the stillness. Intermittently it will reveal his left ear. 

“I was not born with my Stand, Trish,” he says carefully. “Abbacchio, Narancia, Mista, Fugo, and myself… in order to join the organization, we had to pass a test. It was given to us by a man named Polpo. This test measured the endurance of our souls, you see. Those whose souls possess the necessary strength will pass—and a Stand is awakened—while those whose souls do not will fail.”

Trish nods slowly, reaching for a weed next to her ankle and tugging it out of the dry, loose earth.

“What happens if you fail?” she asks. 

Bucciarati’s face doesn’t even flinch. “In Passione, the alternative to strength is death.”  

Trish twists the stem of the weed between her fingers. It’s a little prickly, and if she were to grip it any tighter it might break the skin, in some tiny, unimportant way. 

“I see,” she says, even though, if she really thinks about it, she doesn’t. 

“During my initiation,” Bucciarati goes on, in a voice that isn’t quite vulnerable but could be, if Trish is creative, “there was a moment at which I realized it was very likely I would die. But I chose to defy that fate. The power of this choice manifested as Sticky Fingers, and in that crucial moment it protected me. No—I protected myself. Just as you protected yourself, Trish, on the plane.” 

It pries the memory out of her: the slam against the window pane, the smell of whiskey on the cheap carpet; the squealing of an undead thing, whose echoes have shredded her sleep every hot, dry night since.

It feels strange to think of what she’d done as protection of any kind—it had been fear. All of it.

Bucciarati lets out a long, pensive breath. Within another moment he’s dropped into a crouch with his elbows braced on his legs. 

It looks ridiculous. Ridiculous isn’t a look she’s used to on Bucciarati. He could be a boy squatting at a train station, or lazing around UNICAL—the kind of boy she and her friends would have laughed at, in another life.

“To be born with a dormant Stand, rather than to simply cultivate the potential for one…” He shakes his head. “I can’t imagine it. Your power is so much deeper than mine. It stands to reason that because your father is a Stand user, that ability was passed on to you. Then again…” 

“What?” Trish asks when he trails off.

Trish finds Bucciarati indecipherable on a good day, but right then she can tell that he’s considering his words carefully. 

“Perhaps you were tested, too,” he says, and at last he turns his head toward her, and when their eyes meet Trish is slammed into by the sudden instinct to dissolve into tears. “And perhaps your test was not so different from ours.”

She looks away. Her eyes land tiredly on the discarded stems of the weed she had uprooted, which will now be dead in a day or two, for no greater reason than that she had wanted something to hold. 

“You said the alternative was death.” She glances warily back at Bucciarati, with his closed hands and his cold, consoling eyes. “Then… all of you could have—”

She can’t complete the word. She imagines Narancia bleeding out in an empty alleyway, or Fugo collapsing in a metro tunnel, or Mista drowning in the shallows of some canal, forgotten with the refuse. A dull, sick feeling thickens in the pit of her stomach. 

Bucciarati’s features seem to harden again. Maybe he’s imagined those things, too. 

“We do not fear death, Trish,” he tells her. 

Trish remembers the four pillows under her mother’s head, the pale mouth moving on the gaunt face: Don’t be scared, Trish. It’s all right. It’s all right.

“That doesn’t make you sound cool, you know,” she says to him sharply. She turns her head away, runs her tongue over her teeth. Counts the beats of her cowardly heart, one by one. “Being afraid to die is—it’s what keeps you alive.” 

“I disagree. I believe it is the will to survive.” 

Disgust tightens Trish’s face. She hunches forward.

“They’re the same thing,” she says, but Bucciarati isn’t swayed.

“Either you resolve to live,” he says, “or you are content to die.”

There’s something so petty about it, disguised as the noble conviction with which she’d once thought Bucciarati spoke about all things. Now, she sees it for what it is. 

Stubbornness. Nothing more.

“I’ll never understand you,” she says under her breath.  

Bucciarati hums in acknowledgment. “I’ve made my peace with it.” 

And Trish is so sore, and so tired, and so angry in some hollow, interminable way, so she lets the words froth up inside of her until there’s nothing left to do but say them. 

“You piss me off, Bucciarati,” she snarls, and it feels so good to say it out loud that she wants to do it ten more times, until she’s hoarse. “You’re full of it. You’re so full of it! All of this—everything you do, it’s—it’s just a fancy way of being scared.” 

She turns her head fractionally, locking eyes with him, and his face looks so haggard to her for a second that it’s briefly unrecognizable.

She forgets, sometimes, that the two of them aren’t even that far apart in years. She doesn’t forget now.

“I can tell, you know,” she chokes out. “I’m scared every day. I-I’m scared right now. I don’t—I don’t think I know how to be anything else anymore.” 

Ashamed, she looks back across the landscape, her eyes wandering to the Aleppo pine. 

Narancia is gone. He must have woken up and left, unnoticed. She wonders, impossibly, if the tree remembers the weight of his body—if it had softened around its shape. 

I can try. Spice Girl’s voice rises shyly from the base of her spine, and at Trish’s confusion she goes on, We could make it gentle for him, Trish.

“I apologize,” Bucciarati says. 

Trish cranes her neck. She can’t make sense of the look on his face—proud and distant by turns. He doesn’t break eye contact, so neither does she. 

“For what?” she mutters dubiously. 

Bucciarati shrugs. “For pissing you off, I suppose. And many things besides.” 

Some small part of her softens, just hearing the word piss in Bucciarati’s voice—and maybe that’s a silly thing to find the humanity in, but he hasn’t exactly given her many other options.

Maybe that’s by design. She wonders if there’s anything Bucciarati does that isn’t. 

“It’s not like it’s your fault my father thinks I’m worth killing.” She stands up, brushing the dirt and grass from her skirt. “Don’t apologize for things you aren’t really sorry for. That pisses me off, too.” 

Bucciarati stares up at her. He doesn’t rise. 

“What?” she snaps. 

One corner of his mouth twitches, just slightly, as if imagining a smile. 

“You’re actually quite resilient, aren’t you?” he asks her—or tells her. It’s hard to say. 

Trish shrinks back, frowning at him. “D-Don’t just say stuff like that. It’s weird.” 

Finally, Bucciarati stands, too, bracing his hands on his knees for a moment as he does. He makes no sound on the way, save for a faint rustle of fabric, eaten up by the wind that thunders in her ears. 

“Do you feel that, Trish?” he asks. 

Trish blinks, hesitantly turning to each side and then back to him. 

“Feel what?” 

“Keep still,” Bucciarati tells her. “Listen. Do you feel it?” 

Trish plays along for a few seconds, which, to her credit, is longer than she usually gives him. 

“The wind?” She throws her hands up halfheartedly. “The heat? What—”

“That is your breath,” Bucciarati tells her. “The single most essential act of survival—and we barely even notice it. It goes on in spite of fear, pain, confusion, or exhaustion. It stops only for death.”

He steps closer, and for a terrifying second Trish thinks he’s about to put his hand on her shoulder. 

She doesn’t know what she’d do with such a gesture from Bucciarati.

“What I see of your strength is irrelevant,” he says. “Until you see it for yourself—for longer, Trish, than that crucial moment between life and death—it will not belong to you.” 

Trish ducks her head, and laughs an empty and pathetic laugh. As if that kind of ownership is the apex of existence. As if it will somehow make her real. 

“What if I don’t want it to?” she asks—and this might pry her open more than the foolish questions about her father, more than reaching silently for his hand in an elevator. This might expose everything. 

Bucciarati shakes his head, unwavering in the empty landscape, and again, he gives her an answer. He reaches back. 

“That isn’t for you to decide,” he tells her, with something equivalent to kindness. “Don’t deny your power, Trish. It would be easier to stop breathing.” 

Trish doesn’t know how long she’s been kissing Narancia. They’re doing it slowly, lazy exploratory movements against each other’s lips: breath, then contact, then breath again. Her hands are woven into his hair, combing absentmindedly outwards. His arms are slung around her waist. 

She’s lost in the sensations of it. The little sounds she’s coaxing out of him, the slackening of his body against hers, the glow of the overhead lights on his collarbone; the dreamy throb of the club’s music, softening up her insides. The dancing crowd moves murkily in her peripheral vision, barely real. 

Narancia fits against her so nicely, made to be held and kissed like this, with his eyes closed and his mouth open. Made to whisper her name like he does, soft and yearning, before she pulls him close to her again. She curls her fingers, tilting his head to the side just slightly for a better angle—and he sighs, content, and lets her. 

“Trish…” he murmurs, and when Trish opens her eyes she finds him smiling at her, sleepy and easy, his eyelashes aglow with pink light. “We should probably head back soon, huh?” 

Trish reaches up and brushes his dark hair back, briefly exposing his forehead. Handsome. Handsome in so many places; handsome in the eyebrows and the low sleepy eyelids and the cheekbones; handsome in the wet, expressive mouth. She finds new definitions for it every time she looks. 

“Stay,” she says. “Stay, Narancia.”

Narancia sighs again, nosing gently at her cheek before trailing the lightest kisses along the curve. Trish swears she hears a whisper against the skin, maybe accidental, no more than a breath given consonants: cuore mio, cuore mio.

Her heart shivers inside of her. 

He brings his arms up and embraces her, one hand open between her shoulder blades and the other on the small of her back. Trish presses her lips to his right eyebrow, and links her arms behind his neck, still carding her fingers through his hair. 

The curls feel nice on her knuckles, awakening a warmth between the bones. She smiles, unseen.

“I missed you,” Narancia says in a low voice, and kisses her neck. One of the fingertips of his right hand finds its way to her elbow, circling the bone, and her eyes fall closed. “I really, really missed you, Trish.” 

“I missed you too,” Trish whispers without thinking to hold it back. “So much, I…” 

Something warm and thick is on her elbow. Wet. She pulls back, craning her neck. Whatever it is drips to the floor and vanishes. 

It almost looks like—

“Is that blood?” she asks. 

“I thought about you all the time,” Narancia says. 

A sharp and sudden panic juts into Trish’s chest. She whips her head down. Narancia’s right hand is open beside her, his palm split by a deep wound gushing red. 

“You’re hurt,” she says, or tries to—but her voice flickers out. 

The blood moves in rivulets down Narancia’s wrist, soaking his wristband. He breathes out with a barely perceptible shudder and presses his forehead to hers, eyes closed. 

“Trish,” he says softly, “I’m going to protect you until the very end.” 

Trish struggles back, gasping. When she looks at Narancia’s face again, there’s a gaping hole in his cheek; another in his temple. Three more in his right arm, one in the center of his chest, another in his ribs and another in his stomach. Blood seeps from the edges, into the fabric of his clothes. 

“You’re hurt,” Trish tries to scream again, with all her might, but all that comes is a rasping in her throat, wordless. You’ll die.

“Sorry… I’m probably not very good at this, huh?” Narancia glances aside, smiling bashfully; it pulls the skin around one of the hole’s edges. “Can I…?”

“Cut the iron bars, Bucciarati!” Mista shouts frantically through Trish. His voice shatters in her chest. “We need to hurry up and get Narancia down!” 

Narancia leans in again, shyly. The hole in his cheek seems to lead to nowhere, a void where skin and muscle should be.

He smells like flowers.

When he cups her face in his right hand, the blood smears warm and slick across her cheek. 

“Bucciarati, it’s Trish,” he chokes out, desperate—but his voice doesn’t match the comfort and devotion on his face. “The boss is inside her somehow—he’s gonna—”

Trish is on a bridge. It could be any bridge. The brick is white, the stones long, and her elbows are on the balustrade. 

From the emptiness behind her comes a cruel, familiar voice: “You’re late, figlia mia.” 

She does not wake screaming this time: there’s only a sudden jolt, and then the sickness. 

It’s started tiredly to rain by the time Narancia emerges from the crowded underground station to walk to Trish’s hotel. Overhead, the London sky is still and textureless, and even though it’s nearly 10 PM it barely looks dark; there’s a dull, orange quality to it, like a film of dust, like someone could rub their sleeve on it and reveal the stars underneath. 

His hand has already started to hurt less, though the wound is still raw. He’d needed stitches after all. A layer of absorbable ones beneath the skin, and then stiff, dark ones on top. The doctor at the hospital had bandaged it, tight and rigid, to keep his palm inflexible; any strain, she’d said, would reopen it. 

Narancia had watched her sew it up, distant and unblinking, even though she’d told him about ten times that he didn’t have to. Her Italian hadn’t been all that great—she couldn’t roll the r on guarirà—but it had been better than nothing. 

The incision is long, about the full span of his palm from one side to the other. Ten centimeters, maybe. It had been satisfying to see it closed, stitch by stitch, the same as it always is, even if a hospital in London is a far cry from Fugo’s trembling hands in some anonymous, dilapidated apartment. The shit the hospital had shot him up with sure beats a rag in his mouth. 

The doctor hadn’t known many words, but she’d known cicatrice. She’d spoken it arrhythmically, with the weight in the wrong places, awkward and apologetic. 

Well, it’s all the same to him. He’s not a kid keeping count of his scars anymore. 

He glances up at the sky again. It must take a lot of work to make a sky look depressing, so maybe this boring-ass city deserves some credit. A plane passes, low and loud, its long wings delineated by pinpricks of light blinking white to red. It must be bound for the airport.

He drags his eyes back down. 

He’s pulling another double tonight. He’s forgotten what time they’re supposed to be flying to this city in Iceland whose name he can’t pronounce, but he knows that it’s early. He can’t remember the last time he was on a plane. That thing in Perugia for Giorno, maybe, a couple years back. The villages and roads of his country had looked so tiny from up there, so carefully outlined, the swaths of tree-dotted land all brown and golden from the drought. He’d fallen asleep with his temple against the window, lulled by the dim vibrations of the turbines. 

But that had been a short trip—this one’s nearly three hours, and the only passengers will be him, the manager, and Trish. For most of it, they’ll be flying over the Atlantic; the distance is around 1890 kilometers, give or take. That’s only a little farther than Napule is from Paris, and more than double the trip from Napule to Milano. 

These are the facts that Narancia has been repeating in his head to distract himself from the fact that he’ll be confined to a private aircraft with Trish, who hasn’t shown her face since she’d left him in an alleyway the night before, for three hours. Trish, who had said the word mistake so fast that she’d almost swallowed the vowels, like all she’d wanted to do was get it over with. 

Trish, who had gone five years without calling him and then kissed him like she owns him. 

The box in his pocket is for her. The manager had called some doctor in Milano and gotten a prescription for it. He can’t remember the name. Something with an X. Is he supposed to just knock on her door and give it to her? She’ll probably slam it in his face, or—or give him that look again. Like he’s slicing her open, just by existing. 

He’d rather have the door. 

Funny how fast that changed. 

Damn it, he’s lost. He lifts a hand to shield his eyes from the patchy, lukewarm rain and tries to reorient himself by landmarks. He’s already passed the weird pink sculpture and the bus stop where a bunch of people are always waiting with their luggage, which means he’s probably coming up on the restaurant with the cypress trees in front, so the hotel isn’t that much farther. 

The rain’s let up by the time he gets there, but the humidity hasn’t; the air smells wet, like cigarettes and pavement. The hotel’s port-cochère is empty save for a black car idling at the sidewalk. 

He hops nimbly through an empty luggage trolley on his way to the lobby entrance, snickering when the bellhop starts yelling something after him.

Too bad. Can’t get chewed out if you don’t speak the language. 

“You’re late,” a voice calls from behind him. 

Narancia stops mid-step, caught. He cranes his neck over his shoulder to see the black car, and through the rolled-down passenger window of the black car, Trish’s manager. 

Giulia. Giulia. Right. 

She has her curly hair pulled back in a ponytail and her glasses tucked into the collar of her striped blouse. She’s smoking the last stump of a cigarette.

Narancia has the distinct feeling of being skewered by the look in her eyes, the same as ever. 

“By like a minute,” he grunts, and pulls the box out of his pocket, waving it for her to see. “There was a long line, okay?”

Giulia takes a drag of the cigarette and twists around to blow a cloud out her window. When she’s finished, she leans into view again with a bored expression. 

“You’re coming with me,” she announces.  

“Hah? What’re you sayin’? You told me to be here at—”

“You’re very sick tonight,” Giulia says. “Far too sick to work. Food poisoning. I had to hire someone to cover you. Get in the car.” 

Narancia stares at her. 

“Like hell I’m getting in the car!” he squawks. 

Giulia makes a face at him. “What do you think I am going to do, drive you to the shipyard and kill you? My God, we’re not in Sicily. Get in the car.” 

She beckons emphatically again.

Narancia loiters in place for a moment longer, weighing his options. If she’s giving him the night off, he could just as easily go back to his hotel—sit in the plain shower with his hands over his ears to muffle the hot water, zone out for a while to the sound—but, well… his years in Passione had taught him how to spot a capo. 

He jams one hand into his pocket and opens the passenger side door with the other. 

They drive for a silent, suffocating ten minutes, coasting along one of the busy main streets. Eventually they turn onto a narrow one-way alley flanked by a seemingly infinite arrangement of trendy bars and pubs. Through the slightly rolled-down window in the front seat Narancia can hear bits and pieces of loud, laughing conversations, and if he squints through the tinted glass he can see that there’s a seemingly infinite arrangement of people, too. 

The car stops in front of a bar marked by a wooden sign with a crow on it. It looks dark inside, all of the red velvet curtains drawn like it’s closed for the night, but the front door is propped open by a flower pot. 

Narancia looks cagily from Giulia to the bar and then back to Giulia again. 

“What’re we doing here?” he barks. 

He’s so keyed up that his right foot is tapping fast on the carpet, making his whole leg shake. 

Giulia raises one dark eyebrow, unimpressed, and grinds her cigarette butt into the car ashtray. 

“Isn’t it obvious?” She tugs the door handle open with a clunk. “I’m buying you a drink.”

Narancia leans as far away from her as he possibly can, eyeing her suspiciously with his shoulder squashed against the passenger door.

Giulia, who already has one leg out of the car, looks back at him and rolls her eyes. 

“Eh, don’t take this the wrong way, garganelli boy, but…” She circles her hand in the air as if stirring the words around. “You’ve been looking like you need one. Or three. And tonight, I am feeling kind. What do you say to me, when I am showing you such kindness?” 

“Uh…” 

“‘Thank you, Signorina Borroni. You are a saint, Signorina Borroni. I will toast to your health and happiness, Signorina Borroni, and say a nice prayer for you when I go to sleep tonight.’ Just some suggestions.” She steps briskly out of the car, one hand hovering on the door before slamming it shut. “I don’t have all night, you know. Sbrigati!” 

Narancia mumbles a thank you to the driver and gets out, just in time to see Giulia vanish into the bar. He shakes his sore hand out restlessly for a few seconds before groaning through his teeth and following her. 

There’s barely anybody else inside. It looks—Narancia isn’t sure of the right word. Old. The surface of the wooden floor has been worn down, and some of the red upholstery on the booths and barstools has patches of discoloration on it. The dark mahogany walls are lit by gas lamps. It smells like leather cleaner. 

Giulia is already seated on a stool at the bar, and she waves him over when he crosses the threshold. Narancia approaches warily, eyes flitting over the other tables. Three people, plus the bartender. Two by the windows and—

“God in Heaven, will you relax?” Giulia grabs him by the sleeve, yanking him down so that he plops onto the stool beside her. “You are making me nervous. I am never nervous.” 

Narancia glares at her, biting his tongue to keep a cluster of words inside. He settles for shouldering her roughly off in silence. 

“What a life you’ve had,” Giulia exclaims, hushed with either admiration or pity, and Narancia has no clue what that’s supposed to mean, but she’s flagging down the bartender and ordering drinks in English before he can interrogate it. 

Whatever she gets for him is some kind of aperitivo, and it has a tangy, creamy taste. It’s not bad. She orders a Negroni for herself and nurses it contemplatively beside him without making the slightest movement toward conversation. 

Narancia isn’t sure if her silence is an intimidation tactic or a sign of companionship. It feels like the second one. He leaves it undisturbed between their shoulders, fidgeting. 

“Such a dreary city this is,” she says out of nowhere, almost to herself. 

Narancia jumps and glances at her, thumping his leg against the footrest of the barstool. Aerosmith hums at the top of his spine. 

“Huh?” He clears his throat. “You mean London?” 

Giulia tips her glass back and takes a drink, wrinkling her nose when it goes down, and nods. 

“Absolutely lifeless. There is no history, no romance.” She lowers the glass, fingers caging the rim. “I miss Italy. Do you?” 

Narancia glances away again. It’s weird to hear it put so plainly when he’s spent the last month trying to ignore it.

“I guess,” he says. 

“You’re from Napoli?” Giulia asks casually. She leans forward to reach for a Maraschino cherry behind the bar. 

“Napule,” Narancia corrects her without thinking, and then armors back up, hunches forward. “Yeah. Grew up there.” 

“Mm. Now there is a city with a bleeding, beating heart.” She pops the bright red cherry right into her mouth and settles back on the barstool. “Me, I was born in Siena. When I was eighteen I moved to Catanzaro for university and never went back. It is a beautiful place, Siena, but now it exists to be consumed, not lived in. Besides I like the sunsets better in Calabria.” 

Narancia isn’t sure what to say, so he says, “Huh.” 

Giulia trails off, tilting her glass before taking a mild sip from it. She smacks her lips afterwards, and drops it back onto the bar, and tilts her chin up a little to survey one of the cheap, glittery garlands strung across the opposite wall. 

“Calabria is where I met our Trish,” she goes on. “It was her face that intrigued me. Such sadness and anger in those eyes, and yet such softness. It’s beautiful, no?” 

Narancia manages to keep himself from doing something stupid like agreeing.

“She was living in a big house all by herself then. Had her hair down to here.” She levels her right hand at her shoulder. “How was it that the two of you meet? Was she on holiday? A summer fling?”

Narancia stalls, unsure of how to answer. Giulia’s never shown much interest in how he and Trish know each other before, so he hadn’t exactly thought to come up with a cover story. He settles for a noncommittal grunt. 

Giulia shakes her head. “I just can’t work it out. A boy from Napoli. No education. A delitto penale conviction, too many contravvenzioni for me to bother listing—”

“Hey, listen,” Narancia interjects over a stab of panic, “those were—”

“Years ago, and not my concern,” Giulia says with a wave of her hand. “You were young and alone. There isn’t a more painful combination of things in this world. Besides—”

Humiliation crawls up Narancia’s throat. He bites back a wave of words he’d sworn in a stuffy juvenile courtroom never to say again: Wasn’t me. Wasn’t my fault. Didn’t do it. Not fair. Scared, at the bottom of them all, too frail and worthless to mention. 

What stops him is the decent and unselfish undercurrent to Giulia’s voice, the likes of which he’s only ever heard once before, dirty and starving, over a plate of spaghetti in a restaurant with white curtains. As if what she really means to say is, I know. I know.

“Besides,” she repeats, a little quieter this time, with her head turned toward him, “you keep her safe. That is good enough for me.”

Narancia frowns, running his tongue restlessly over his teeth. Pride itches under the wound on his hand. His mouth feels sticky, and his muscles slow, but not in a way that he minds. 

“Am I allowed to know?” Giulia asks. 

Narancia’s eyes flick back to her, narrowing. “Know what?” 

“How you met.” Giulia shrugs. “She will not tell me. Says only that you are ‘old friends.’ This is what she called you when she phoned me at the end of May. An old friend.” She looks away, toying with her little black straw. “Well? Are you?” 

Narancia doesn’t know what it is about the word friend that feels hollow, insufficient. Friend doesn’t fit the taste of brackish water in his mouth in Venezia, or the fearless promise that he’d made in the ruins of a lost civilization—friend doesn’t fit the girl changing his bandages, replacing the mold and blood with something clean, all her pain and terror smelted into a power sharp enough to split his heart in his chest. It doesn’t fit the way she’d looked from under an Aleppo pine: suddenly, viciously gorgeous; the first thing his soul had ever wanted to land for. 

It doesn’t fit the two freckles on the right side of her neck, or her straight front teeth, or her soft pink knuckles. It doesn’t fit her laugh—how he can tell when it’s real by the way it rises and dissolves and wrinkles her nose—or her blue fingernails—how they start to chip after a day or two, revealing little shards of skin underneath—or the subtle surge of warmth in his throat when she tells him that his food is good. It doesn’t fit the heat in the chambers of his heart when he sees her on a stage, so radiant it hurts to look at, stretching one arm skyward as if to drag the stars down and name them.

Trish is Trish. He’s never known how else to put it. After all, it’s not his friend that he’d thought about every day between a hotel by the bay and a bus bound for Milano; it’s not his friend who’d left him at the end of spring, unwanted and unremembered. It’s not his friend that he wants to hand every stupid detail of his stupid life to—the orange tree in his old backyard, the postcards from Asyut, the bruise on his eye—even though she’s never asked for them, and even though he’s guarded them from plenty of people who have. 

It’s not his friend whose perfume he can smell on all of his clothes, now. It’s not his friend that he’s already dreamed so many times about kissing again, over and over, without coming up for air. It’s Trish. 

That’s the problem. That’s the pain at the center of it all, really, is that Trish can stop being his friend, but she can never stop being Trish. 

He’d spent five years of his life trying to dismantle that, pack it away into a box bit by useless bit. He’d figured it out. He really had. And then Trish had gone and picked up the phone. 

“I guess,” he says. “Sort of. Sure.” Then a warm, syrupy pull in his chest—the damn alcohol: “We met tryin’ to stab each other on Capri.” 

Giulia stares at him for a moment in total silence before she throws her head back and busts up laughing. 

Narancia didn’t think anyone could laugh that loud except Mista. He scowls at her, ears burning, and takes the last swig of his drink. 

“That girl!” Giulia exclaims when she’s through, wiping a tear from her eye with one finger. “The secrets she keeps! I’m sure that’s quite a story.”

“It was a long time ago,” Narancia mumbles, instead of, You have no idea. “’n she forgot about me anyway.” 

Giulia doesn’t say anything to that. She just looks at him, in this steady, unreadable way that he decides right away that he hates.

Anyway, it’s the truth, isn’t it? It had taken Trish about five minutes and change to burn her bridges. He’d seen no trace of himself in her eyes on the magazine covers or the perfume ads or the TV spots—no trace of Bucciarati, or Abbacchio, or Mista or Giorno or Fugo—no trace of the girl who’d held a melting ice cube to his cheek and told him, in a voice so small he’d barely heard it, I’m here, like it meant something.

So why the hell’s this Giulia lady looking at him like he’s missing something obvious? 

Eventually the bartender comes by again. Giulia gets another Negroni for herself and a Garibaldi for Narancia. Once they arrive, she turns and raises her glass to him in a toast. 

“To Trish Una,” she says, “and all her secrets. May she outlive us both.”

Narancia can drink to that. The liquor goes down slow, nothing like the fancy stuff in Amsterdam, and settles warm and prickling in his stomach, in his fingertips. His head is starting to feel heavier, in a comfortable, cottony way.

“You know,” Giulia says conversationally, “it took her three years to tell me that blue is her favorite color. Two to tell me that she is an orphan. Can you believe it? I hear about the dead parents first. She guards her life so jealously, you see. It is like she thinks it will slip through her hands if she lets go for even a moment.” She fans her fingers wide, gazing tiredly at the spaces between them. “Like it will not be hers anymore. I wonder what convinced her that it could be taken from her so easily.” 

Guilt and comprehension coil together in Narancia’s chest. He ducks his eyes and says nothing.

“There is still so much I don’t know,” Giulia continues with a rueful sigh. “But I do not ask. I keep telling myself, ‘In her own time, Giulia. In her own time.’ And she has never disappointed me.”

She smiles at the glass in her hand, swirling the contents absently. The light catches in them, makes their crystalline scarlet color evident. Narancia watches the orange rind, split over the rim. 

“I have had five years with that girl,” she muses, “and you have had five years without her. That’s sort of funny, isn’t it?”

Narancia hadn’t really thought about it that way. A dull stab of jealousy lodges itself between his ribs, even though he knows it’s too late and too pointless to be registering the pain. 

“I guess,” he answers. 

Giulia’s eyes flick appraisingly over him. 

“May I be candid?” she asks. 

Narancia shrugs. 

“You do not seem like old friends,” she says bluntly. “You seem like you wish that you were. Both of you. It is like you are learning each other for the first time.” She sips the Negroni thoughtfully, gesticulating with her other hand. “There is nothing wrong with this, of course. All of the people we love were strangers to us, once, except our mothers. But do you want to know what I think?” 

Narancia isn’t sure if he does. He wants to say, petty and defiant, that Trish had told him right away about the color blue, and all its wonder and importance—as if that’s supposed to prove something. As if a color can prove anything. 

It just breaks your heart, she’d said, craning her neck to the sky from the window of a country house outside Pompeii. Doesn’t it?

He tightens his grip on the glass. The Trish who had spoken of that blue with such grief and admiration—the Trish whose face had yearned for the sky in a way he couldn’t help but understand—is long gone, but sometimes she comes back to him when he isn’t expecting it, still waiting for an answer that he hadn’t known, back then, how to give. 

“I think,” Giulia says, “that she has had a whole life before you, Narancia, and you before her. And that it is not the life since that separates you. Do you understand?” 

Narancia looks back at her. He’s always hated that question. It’s a trap. If he says yes, he’s either lying or he’s wrong. If he says no, he gets his ass beat like the shit-for-brains he is. Always better to answer around it. 

“You called me Narancia,” he mumbles. 

“Yes, do not panic, but that is your name,” Giulia says dryly, halfway through folding her paper napkin into the shape of a swan. “God knows I hear it enough from her to remember it.”

Narancia feels his throat close up, thinking about Trish saying his name when he’s not around. Is it the kind of thing that comes out easy? A reminder, a mention—a thread in the fabric of life? Like Trish had been for him, day after day, all the way across the country? 

He can’t imagine it.

The words settle inside of him, foreign and new. The life before. Yeah, like Trish wants to hear about his happy-go-lucky childhood eating stale bread scraps out of the garbage. 

Like he deserves to hear about Trish’s little sun-stained life at all, when he’d been one of the soldati hired to steal it from her.

“By the way.” Giulia nods to his busted hand, arching her eyebrows. “Is that something I should know about?”

Narancia’s eyes dart down. The bandages are still clean, neatly covering his knuckles and wrist. His fingers are curled loosely inwards, unused beside the damp square napkin.  

“’S nothing,” he says. “Broke some glass.”

She doesn’t remotely look like she believes him, but it doesn’t seem like she’s going to push it. He’s not sure what to make of that.

They lapse into silence after that. Narancia can feel a question taking cautious shape in the back of his mouth, all too lonely and all too familiar—and he knows he should keep it inside; he knows, he knows—but it takes time and work to be a better person, and right then, with a heart too heavy for its own good, he’s feeling pretty short on both.

“Did she ever—I mean.” He tapers off, starts over. “A-All that time, she… she never… told you about us?”

Giulia ponders this, her chin jutting slightly out, clearly deciding whether or not to tell him the truth. 

“No,” she says with a small shake of her head. “Not once.”

It’s funny: that’s always been his quietest fear, fraying gradually over the years beneath every other hope and possibility—so he should really be prepared for it, but it still feels like it leaves an exit wound. 

Bam. Not once. 

He laughs emptily over his glass and downs what’s left of the drink, all of it watered down now with the half-melted ice cubes. In the hangar of his heart, Aerosmith is utterly, utterly still. 

“Yeah. Yeah, see?” He sniffs, rubbing out the prickle of heat from behind his eyes. The words are slurring uselessly together, hardly even his own. “Gimme a break. First chance she had. Forgot.” 

The jazz music changes overhead to something with a piano. It sounds sad. Lost inside of itself. He can relate. 

He isn’t expecting a small weight to carefully settle on his shoulder, so his skin jolts around it, but he manages to hold still. It takes a moment for his mind to catch up to the turning of his head, and longer still to register Giulia’s hand, and the patient smile on her face, and her elbow resting on the bar between them. 

“Oh, you silly boy,” she says warmly—the warmest, maybe, that she’s ever been. “No. No. Quite the opposite.”

Ice crystals begin to form around the window’s bleed hole about forty-five minutes into the quiet flight to Reykjavík, or maybe forty-five days. Trish, whose eyes have been fixed since takeoff to the jagged, delicate outline, hasn’t kept track. 

Far below, the rich blue expanse of the Norwegian Sea is out of focus, expanding to the edges of the world without a trace of land. If the plane were to crash, its wreckage would vanish beneath the surface, a nameless hulk to be dived into in a hundred years—no fire or blood or smoke, only a brief sinking and then silence. She’s dreamed it enough to know the formula by heart. The impact, the foundering, the water filling up her lungs. Notorious BIG lashing up from the depths like a kraken, dragging her by the ankles to the sea floor to break her in two. 

Her hands are numb. Her lips, too, prickling in the artificial air. She knows this feeling: the feeling of existing in a body that she doesn’t own, like all the crucial parts of it are retreating from her, one by one. It’s always the hands first. Always. Hands and feet. Then mouth. Then head. Then it goes inwards: stomach, lungs. Heart. 

The Xanax had done little to school it out of her—at best it had only dulled the edges. Trish knows that feeling, too; the terror eating itself for so long that it becomes the body’s habit. It had taken days for it to be purged from her on Sardegna, and longer after Roma. Five years ago, when Spice Girl had made the rubbery parachute from the nose of the plane, the blood had drained from Trish’s arms until the pain was nearly unbearable, but she’d kept holding it open, even when Abbacchio had told her that he had it under control. 

There had been no home for control up there, at their frail altitude above the Tyrrhenian. What had finally convinced her to lower her arms had been Giorno’s need for an assistant inside the turtle, to help him close the wounds. 

Are you hurt? he’d asked when she’d lowered herself in, and in spite of his composure the haze of leftover pain in his green eyes had been plain to see. 

Trish had barely known how to answer. 

Just some bruises, she’d said. 

That had more or less been true. No blood, no lesions. All bones intact. Trivial, in the grand scheme of things. 

She doesn’t have any bruises now. Not one. She’d nearly been run through in an alleyway two nights ago, and she has nothing to show for it but the memory. 

Death hasn’t come that close to her in years. She’d missed it by centimeters. She can still feel the outline of Narancia’s forearm across her chest if she concentrates, incomprehensibly ready, like he had been waiting all along for an attack to come from the shadows. 

When had she stopped? 

Well, anyway. Now she’s on a plane for the first time in five years. Now she’s on a lovely, compact plane for rich people, with lovely leather upholstery and lovely round windows and lovely green carpeting, and she feels like all of it is separated from her by a thick pane of glass. Giulia is somewhere behind her, on the imitation loveseat, typing quietly on her laptop. Narancia must be in one of the individual seats near the front, close to the cockpit; he always likes to be near exits.

The seat next to Trish is empty. 

What color had the seats been on the plane that had gone down off the Olbia Coast? What a stupid question. Blue. Of course they were blue. There were round windows, too, and space to stretch out her legs. And there was the blood, a small dark continent on the cheap carpet, and the shards of crushed glass here and there, and the scribblings on the wall beside Giorno’s vacant seat: È gia un morto. Percìo non possiamo ucciderlo. 

That’s right. Even now, she remembers every detail: the knife clutched in her sweaty hand; the Stand’s necrotic imitation of a face, its golden eye and blunted teeth; the pungence of whiskey on her boot—the frail little pulse of Giorno’s brooch, hope struggling into living tissue—the button under her stupid, trembling finger. Then the ripple of a voice, brave because she couldn’t be: Now, pick up that brooch, Trish. 

She aches for the sound of that voice more than she ever has, right then. It almost feels worth crying over. 

She flexes her hand again. In, out.

She senses Narancia’s approach before she sees him: a subtle thrumming in the air, holding itself back. She registers a noise, footsteps on carpet, and a moment later he appears to her left, lingering in the wide aisle beside the empty seat. 

Notorious B.I.G. had taken him out so quickly. She remembers: Aerosmith’s left wing had snapped right off, and Narancia had screamed, half shock and half pain, as his body had taken the damage. Sudden lesions everywhere, blood spraying from his mouth, and Bucciarati’s voice, shouting at her to run and hide, run and hide, like that was all she was good for. 

She feels the same compulsion now. Run and hide, run and hide. But there’s no ball on the wing. No writing on the wall. No blood in Narancia’s mouth. Only her cold hand, opening and closing on the armrest, and the crystals in the window. 

Narancia stays where he is for a stretch of time, and then lowers himself cautiously into the seat beside her without a word. 

The smallest breath works its way out of her, the first to make it through in what feels like an hour. He’s wearing a roomy yellowish striped button-down, and a black shirt underneath it, connected to his neck by chains rather than straps. His usual orange headband is holding more of his hair back than usual. His head is turned to her, slightly bowed, but her peripheral vision omits any expression. 

“You okay?” he asks her softly. 

It’s strange—Trish has always hated that question, but she can’t hate the way that it sounds coming from him. For all its triteness there’s a heartfelt quality to it, okay if the word meant laying his palm over her atrium, measuring its pain. 

She shrugs wordlessly. 

Narancia shifts around in the seat, then settles, his right elbow coming to rest a centimeter or two from hers. Trish isn’t looking, but she can feel the Stand energy in the empty space, all tension and heat, like a rubber band being pulled too tight. 

She catches something out of the corner of her eye outside and sits sharply forward, stomach plunging—but when she looks out it’s only Aerosmith, flying dutifully alongside the plane. It casts a shadow on the layer of clouds below, with a little halo around its outline from the sun. 

She finds parts of herself realigning again as she takes in the familiar fuselage, the little seams and notches in the scarlet paint, the glint of the sun on the wings and canopy. It really hasn’t changed at all, has it? Narancia is different in five years’ worth of ways—they both are—but Aerosmith is exactly as she remembers. 

A sudden, unnameable emotion surges in her throat. 

It looks just the same. 

She chokes back an unexpected sound, but part of it still makes it out, unmissable in the silence of the cabin. There’s a slight movement beside her, the tentative whisper of a sleeve—and the brush of a thumb on her thumb. 

She finally turns her head and looks down. Narancia’s right hand is open next to hers on the armrest, offering itself plainly. 

His whole palm is covered in clean white gauze, bandaged neatly so that only the fingers protrude. Trish gazes at that hand, riddled with detail even with so much of it hidden away: little scars, indentations, calluses; a visible vein along his inner wrist, life asserting itself beneath the skin. 

Against the pillar where they’d left him in the Colosseum, his hands had been curled gently around the stem of an orange blossom. Mista, crouched beside his lifeless body, had held onto them for too long. 

I made a promise to bring him home, Giorno had said hoarsely, his hair tangled and his eyes red. I made a promise. 

Trish doesn’t know why it’s so easy, right then, to reach across the smallest distance in the world and take Narancia’s hand. She doesn’t know where she gets the nerve. What she does know is that her fingers slot into his seamlessly, and that he holds back without the slightest hesitation, and that even underneath the bandages, his skin is warm. He’s warm. 

There are so many things that she should say: thank you, or I’m sorry, or something even truer than the both of them combined. 

“Narancia,” she murmurs, because it’s the next best thing, “tell me about Napoli.” 

“About… Napule?” Narancia’s hand shifts in hers, getting comfortable. His words come out with the same low rhythm that she remembers from the floor of her Copenhagen hotel room. “What d’you wanna know?” 

“Anything,” Trish says, and gives his hand an infinitesimal squeeze, anchoring her heartbeat to it. “Anything at all. Do you… do you miss it?” 

Narancia hums softly in thought, settling back in the seat. Trish keeps her eyes on his fingertips—his short nails, his splitting cuticles—instead of the sky and all its dangers. 

“Mm. Yeah.” The words are so simple, but Trish can’t help feeling like they weigh enough to ground the plane right then and there. “I miss… the songs my mom sang early in the morning. I miss having more annurche than I know what to do with. I miss sitting on the funicular all day, and how everything looks from way up in the hills—how you can see way out to Capri, and Vesuvio, if the air’s clear—and the… how you could always smell what Signora Gargiuno was cooking upstairs if you had the bathroom window open. You oughta hear Mista. All like, ‘Gioia mia, won’t you spare us poor boys a scrap of your feast?’ Sticks his head all the damn way out, it’s so embarrassing. With these big cow eyes and everything.” He softens. “But… she brings us some. Every time. She makes the best pasta e fasule. The best. I could eat it forever.” 

Trish nods, though she doesn’t know why. Maybe to show that she’s listening, and maybe to give her head something better to do than settle on his shoulder. 

Narancia clears his throat quietly, but his voice still has a worn-in quality to it that doesn’t go away. The words start to come a little easier, with a little less hesitation. He adjusts their hands on the armrest until they’re resting upright, palm to palm. 

“Our place… it’s not big or anything, but—it gets a lot of light during the day,” he continues, and Trish realizes dimly that this is the first she’s ever heard him talk about it. “Never thought I’d have a place like that. Or any place, really. It’s kinda weird, living in Napule like this when I used to live in it like—well, like I did.” He lets out a quick breath through his nose, a sad, knee-jerk attempt at a laugh. “Signora Gargiuno’s frittata sure beats eating watermelon rinds out of the garbage, anyway. But, the city’s still the same, even if I’m on the other side of it. Always will be. I still know all the right spots for hiding. Sleeping. The bakeries that ditch all their bread at the end of the day. Same as I know the right spots for getting a real good view of the sunset, or… watching the sea.”

That lifts Trish’s head, slowly. 

“The sea?” she breathes. 

Narancia glances over at her for just a moment and their eyes meet. His face softens into a faint but genuine smile. 

“Mm. Yeah.” He nods, then looks away again, his expression distancing itself. “See, there’s beaches all over in Napule. Big ones, little ones, sandy ones, rocky ones… in the summer, they’re so crowded you can’t even see the shore. Just people, and more people, and then the water, all blue. Mista goes to Castel dell’Ovo to swim all the time, but I’ve never been. Being out there, by yourself, with all that sea going on forever, pulling you around…” He shudders. “It makes me too damn nervous.”  

Almost absentmindedly, he starts to stroke her first finger with the pad of his thumb. Trish finds herself inclined to close her eyes, sinking into that small but constant touch. It hardly feels like she’s on a plane at all. She doubts there’s anything left in the world but Narancia’s hand, and Narancia’s words. 

“A couple years back, Bucciarati let me work summers and a little of the winter on his fishing boat, and one time trying to haul in some albacore, I messed up and fell in—and I got so freaked out I couldn’t even think. Took Bucciarati and Sticky Fingers about three seconds to grab me and pull me back up, but… I dreamed about it for a month. Y’know… being out there. Alone. No boat, no Bucciarati. I’d swim til I woke up, or til I drowned.

“It’s funny, cuz—my dad, he built ships. For Fincantieri. I got to go with him to Cantieri Navali a couple times when I was little.” With his free hand, he gestures broadly through the empty air, and Trish almost leans close, conspiratorial, as if to see what he sees. “It was like being inside a whale. All huge and dark, sparks falling everywhere. His job was to screw in the things that held all the parts together. My mom was an accountant for Aeritalia. She was real smart—good with numbers. And she knew so many stories.”

An accountant and a riveter, and a city by the sea. Trish smiles to herself before she can understand its source. These ordinary things could have created anyone, couldn’t they—but they had created Narancia. 

“She said that when Vesuvio erupted and buried Pompeii and Ercolano, Pliny the Elder sailed to Castiellammare ’e Stabbia to try to save some friends of his. The guys on his boat told him to turn back, but he said—” 

He lifts his finger, enunciating the syllables carefully. 

“‘Fortes fortuna iuvat.’ Fortune favors the brave. And they made it to the city. Anyway, the guy died—just had a heart attack and fell right down, boom—but his friend lived. At least they got to see each other one last time. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, though. Back then—when we were going after the boss—I kept thinking, ‘Fortune favors the brave.’ Kinda stupid. I didn’t know until I heard it in school… it was actually Greek first. And the whole thing goes, ‘Boldness is the beginning of action, but fortune controls how it ends.’”  

He sinks back in the seat with a sigh, tipping his head back toward the ceiling, and asks, “Doesn’t that kinda sound like something Bucciarati would say?” 

Trish sees Bucciarati’s face in a clearing in Sardegna, his hair mussed and his eyes honest, as he tells her that breathing only stops for death. It had seemed like such nonsense back then—obvious at best and meaningless at worst—but she thinks that she might understand it now. 

The air in here isn’t nearly so clear—it doesn’t carry the salt-stung smell of the ocean—but it moves through her more or less the same, and keeps moving, and keeps moving. When Narancia inhales beside her, matching her exhale, his chest rises. 

“Mm.” She nods, resting her head against the seat, letting it fall just enough that it ends up angled towards him. “It does.” 

They both lapse into silence. There’s only the faint white noise of the engine; and Narancia’s breath, and hers. 

Trish wants to ask for so much more, gathering up secondhand memories in the quiet until she’s caught each nuance of Narancia’s face when he gives them to her. She wants to hear about the ruins of Castel dell’Ovo until the knife wound that she can no longer see has healed over, retreating into anecdote. She wants to stay here, above the clouds, until she can look at airplane windows and think of this quiet, vital moment with Narancia, and not the cluster of pain and fear that still sends her heart to the floor. 

“Narancia?” she whispers. 

He turns his head by a fraction, listening. “Yeah?” 

“What I said, I—” she says, in lieu of all the rest. “You’re not an idiot.” 

Narancia gives her a strange look, scratching at the back of his neck with his free hand.

“Huh? You were worried about that?” he asks. “I mean. S’okay. I’m used to it.”

“No, I—I know.” Trish bows her head, directing all her shame to her knees. “That’s why I shouldn’t have said it.”

The look he gives her then is even stranger. Trish can’t help feeling like she’s just said something important. Giulia’s words drift back to her, inexplicably: Like you are the center of all things. 

“Can I ask you a stupid question?” she asks. 

Narancia nods. Trish figures that anyone else would hand her some platitude about there being no such thing, but this touches her far more—like it could be the stupidest question in the world and he’d forgive her. 

“When that—thing attacked us,” she says. “That Stand on the plane. Was it—” She breathes out shakily, forcing the words to stay intact. “Were you scared?” 

Narancia’s fingers press a little deeper between her knuckles. He bows his head, licks his lips—his face armors up, half-hidden by his hair. 

“Yeah. ’Course I was,” he answers. Then, softly, with the kind of potency that makes her wonder if this is the first time he’s ever admitted to it: “I was scared the whole time, Trish.”

Trish stares at him, dumbstruck. Narancia—scared. Fearless, willful Narancia, who had spat at death so many times, who had seemed unconquerable until he hadn’t. 

“It’s weird,” he says. “I used to think nothing scared me so long as Bucciarati ordered me to do it. It was just so easy, y’know? But in Venezia, when we betrayed the boss, I… I was so scared I couldn’t even breathe. I didn’t—want to go. But you were—”

He stops, mouth open, seeming to catch himself. A complicated emotion moves across his face, too true for Trish to understand. 

“I was scared in Venezia,” he says quietly. “I was scared on Sardegna. I was scared in Roma. When Abbacchio—” He flinches. “It stopped feeling real, y’know? I just thought… I’m gonna wake up soon. Any minute now. But it just… kept going. So… I had to keep going, too.”

Trish wants to say, It did. It did. She wants to grab Narancia’s other hand, and pull his arms across the space between them, and look him fiercely in the eye and say, We did. 

But the motions won’t come. Her body’s too tired, and her mouth too afraid.

“When I thought that all of it was gonna be over,” Narancia murmurs, “that we were really gonna win—I was so happy—I coulda cried. My… ha, my legs were shakin’.” 

Mine too, Trish's mouth does not say.

“All I could keep thinking was,” he says, “‘I wanna live. I wanna live.’”

Trish’s throat closes up. She’s there again, for a moment, in a body that she doesn’t understand, assailed by the stench of blood and rain, watching Giorno’s shaking hands try to mend the unmendable and thinking, I want you to live. I want you to live.

She hadn’t been able to look. She had barely even cried. Not like Mista, wailing himself raw with her voice, a grief that seemed to tear the air in half. 

It had shocked her to know that such a sound could come from her body. It had shocked her, even then, to know the kind of anguish she was capable of. 

“You get any sleep last night?” Narancia asks. 

She finds his eyes on her, violet and familiar. She sighs through her nose, her cheek still resting on the seat, and shakes her head. The upholstery will definitely make her hair frizz up, but she doesn’t care.  

“No,” she admits. Now that the latent panic has worn off, she’s definitely starting to feel it. “It’s fine, though.” 

She remembers some shards of a dream: blood, and holes, and Narancia’s mouth on hers. She hopes the heat that creeps onto her face doesn’t show. 

“You oughta try,” Narancia tells her, gentle but not patronizing. “Don’t worry.” And he squeezes her hand, once. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

It’s the easiest thing in the world to believe, right then, even though it shouldn’t be—even though she’d be a fool to fall for the same wild hope twice. 

That’s Narancia’s power, she supposes, and always has been. She keeps her fingers woven into his, her palm pressed to the bandages, and slowly lets her eyes fall closed. 

She doesn’t even realize she’s fallen asleep until she wakes up with her head on Narancia’s shoulder, and the imprint of Narancia’s jacket folds on her cheek; and Narancia’s hand still linked unselfishly with hers as the plane descends at last toward Reykjavík. 

There’s no wad of paparazzi clamoring outside the Keflavík Airport when they land, no scattering of camera flashes in the arrivals gate. The drive to Reykjavík is not long. The straight, two-lane road is flanked by a flat, mossy landscape with the kind of austerity that Trish can only describe as beautiful: lava plains as far as the eye can see, split by the horizon line from an unlit, milk glass sky. 

Narancia exclaims, loud and amazed, that it looks like the surface of the moon, and Trish doesn’t find that too far off. There are barren stretches of basaltic terrain where the moss has not grown, and only far off in the distance can Trish make out the silhouettes of some low, dark mountains, vanishing into an edgeless fog. 

Reykjavík itself is quiet in a way that Trish hadn’t known a city could be quiet: their daylight hours are longer, but people keep to themselves, respectful rather than remote. Trish is glad—quiet is what she needs when vigilance is still breaking off from her joints, and Giulia, for her part, seems to understand. Once they’ve all walked around the city, she and Trish have an early dinner in the hotel restaurant, in a calm and companionable silence, while Narancia stands discreetly by the main door. 

The hotel, called Hotel Borg, is quiet, too, with minimalist decor of a certain Scandinavian sensibility that Trish has always liked. It’s in a white stone building near Lake Tjörnin, with a view of the Reykjavík Cathedral and a grassy park called Bakarabrekka, which Narancia tries several times (unsuccessfully) to pronounce. Trish has to stifle a smile, pretending to wipe something off of her mouth, watching his face scrunch up with effort over the touristy fold-out map. 

They’ll only be in the city for the weekend; Trish is performing at a music festival funded by some big radio station on Saturday, headlining the stage for international artists. Giulia has no other obligations in the datebook: just a free day, a rehearsal day, and the day of the concert, color-coded blue, yellow, and green respectively. 

“Man, I’m beat,” Narancia says with an unreasonably loud yawn while they wait in reception for Giulia to check them in. “Somethin’ about being on planes tires me the hell out.” 

“Don’t tell Aerosmith,” Trish whispers with a tiny smirk.

Narancia spews out a laugh, doubling over. Trish laughs, too, and tries very hard not to look for too long at the dimple in his right cheek. 

“That’s enough of that,” Giulia says, turning briskly to face them. She presses a key card into Trish’s hand. “For your room. I trust it will be spacious enough?” 

Trish closes her fingers over the card’s envelope, slipping it into her skirt pocket, and gives her a funny look. “Spacious enough for what?” 

Giulia blinks nonchalantly at her, then at Narancia, and then at her again. She readjusts the strap of her purse on her shoulder. 

“For the two of you,” she exclaims, like it’s obvious. “You will be sharing it, after all.” 

Trish hadn’t previously known that it was possible for her soul to evaporate from her body. She guesses there’s a first time for everything. 

“Excuse me,” she says flatly at the same time that Narancia squeaks, “Eh?”  

Giulia arches her eyebrows and pretends to be very interested in her nail beds. 

“Oh yes, did I not mention?” she asks airily. “The prices in this city are preposterous. You would have wept to see the cost of three rooms. I did. So I said to myself, Giulia, old girl, our wallet need not bleed for such nonsense. We will put the lovers in one room.” 

“Are you out of your mind?!” Trish hisses, although it’s probably drowned out by Narancia’s loud choke at the word lovers. “I’m not sharing a room, Giulia! I want my own!” 

“What, you think you are Madonna now?” Giulia gestures at her emphatically. “Pull yourself together, it is only for two nights. It is a lovely suite, Trish, and the bed is quite large—”

“Bed?!” Trish shrieks in horror.

“I really must take this call,” Giulia says, pulling out her absolutely silent cell phone from her pocket. “Quite urgent. Breakfast at seven sharp! Ciao!” 

“Huh,” Narancia says. 

Trish, standing beside him at the foot of the lone king-sized bed with her arms crossed, can’t think of anything much better to say. It’s certainly a nice bed—it has a stately dark leather headboard, and Egyptian cotton sheets, and no shortage of pillows—but she can’t form a more complex opinion on it when all she can think about is Narancia on one side of it, and her on the other. 

She glances furtively over at him, watching him for clues—to what, she doesn’t know. He’s standing to her left, clutching the strap of his orange duffel bag for dear life with both hands, staring down the bed like it’s a hostile enemy Stand. 

His face has been red ever since they’d both stepped dazedly into the elevator, and now it’s only getting worse. When he swallows, Trish can track it through his throat. His most infinitesimal movements seem amplified all of a sudden: a quick flex of his fingers, a shift of weight from one foot to the other. He’s so jittery that she feels more tense just by proximity. 

She tears her eyes away. Her heart stutters inside of her with something like a mild hysteria. 

What’s she so worked up about? It’s just a bed, isn’t it? It’s not like she’s never seen Narancia on a bed before. He’s on beds all the time! The only difference is that she would also be on this particular bed, in her pajamas, facing him or with her back to him (she’s not sure which is worse), breathing quietly in time with him, accidentally brushing his ankle with her ankle when she adjusts herself, close enough to smell the Tiger Balm on his shoulder and close enough to feel his body heat contained under the sheets and—

“I can sleep in the bathtub,” Narancia says, loudly. 

Trish whips her head over. Narancia’s head is angled toward the ceiling, and his eyes are screwed shut. 

Trish wonders if the guard at the end of the hallway had heard that. 

“The… bathtub?” she repeats, feeling annoyed and relieved and vaguely disappointed all at once. 

Narancia rights his head again, releasing the strap across his chest to rub the back of his neck with his unbandaged hand. 

“Yeah. I’ve done it before. It’s not so bad.” 

“Not so bad?” Trish parrots, now just feeling stupid. She shakes her head rapidly. “It’s a bathtub, Narancia.” 

“S-Seriously, don’t worry about it!” Narancia exclaims, and gives her a well-intentioned but very forced smile, waving his other hand in front of his chest to reassure her. “You mind if I leave my stuff out here, though? I don’t wanna crowd the bathroom…”

Trish watches blankly as he tosses his duffel bag and jacket onto one of the two white barrel armchairs and then starts exploring the room. He’s doing a frankly incredible job of not looking at her, busying himself instead with other, meaningless things: inspecting the TV, the lamps, the window. 

Trish, with her three suitcases and her banging heartbeat, can’t help feeling like the room is tilting—as if Narancia has reoriented gravity, and it’s taking everything she has to resist it. 

She bites her lip. It’s not like she wants Narancia to spend two nights sleeping in a bathtub, but she’s not about to insist he share the bed with her when it’s obvious he doesn’t want to.

The pull recedes. Of course. Narancia would rather jam himself into a hard porcelain tub than sleep next to her—who can blame him? 

Guilt seeps into her, dimming everything else. 

“I’ll take the bathtub,” she says weakly.

Narancia puts down the decorative vase he’d just picked up for no apparent reason.

“C’mon, no way,” he retorts, a little exasperated—like he knows she doesn’t mean it, like he’s already forgiven her for it. “You gotta have the bed, Trish.”

Trish looks at her feet and relents.

“Thanks,” she says, even though the word feels wrong.

As she settles into the motions of unpacking, Narancia announces with a strange crack in his voice that he’s going for a walk and blows out the door before she can reply. Trish hovers in place for a moment, staring at the space by the bedside table that he’d been occupying a second ago, and waits for the air in the room to unclench itself around his absence. 

No point in standing around, she supposes. She takes a long shower, sits at the desk to hum a few experimental bars of some new songs to the white orchid, and then drifts out onto the balcony. 

She settles her elbows on the railing and lets her eyes wander over the green expanse of the park. It probably looks nice in the wintertime, all covered in snow.  

She cranes her neck skyward. It really does stay light out forever in Reykjavík—it’s nearly 22:00, but the sky has only just begun to turn, retreating into a mild, lingering dusk. The breeze that skirts across her face smells just faintly of the sea. 

Trish closes her eyes and breathes it in deep, listening to the cars below. 

She likes it here. She certainly likes it better than Copenhagen or Berlin—she may even like it better than Milano. 

She opens her eyes again, halfway. A pair of blackbirds dart past high overhead, quick dark blurs in the twilight. 

August and its promises aren’t too far off, now. She’ll be going back soon—back to that sun-stained, empty apartment, and that loveseat from Paris, and that phone she hardly ever uses. She can’t say she isn’t looking forward to it, but—

She lowers her head, staring emptily at her folded arms. 

It’s the first time it’s occurred to her that Narancia will be going home, too. 

A humorless smile pulls dully at the edge of her mouth. How silly of her, forgetting something so obvious. She’d make the mistake once, a long time ago, of believing in Narancia’s undemanding permanence, that he would always exist comfortably within arm’s reach—really, hasn’t she learned?

Already, she thinks, hunching forward, she’s gotten used to having him around. It had taken her nearly three years to grow around his absence, and now look at her: a whole boundless future to go home to, and all that she can think about is how Narancia might fit into it. 

As if he would even want to. 

Stupid. Stupid. They’ll go their separate ways, the same as before, because that’s how it’s supposed to be—that’s how it was always supposed to be. She knows that. 

Her throat feels rough all of a sudden. She sets her jaw. So, why…?

When Narancia gets back, his hair and clothes are windswept and his face is flushed, and he greets her somewhat breathlessly, like he’s been running. He ducks into the bathroom to take a shower, but Trish doesn’t miss the way his eyes linger on the bed as he goes. 

“You wanna take one?” he asks her when he emerges again, rumpling his damp hair with one of the fluffy towels.

In his tank top and purple boxers, he’s all scars and lean muscle, his biceps shifting restlessly as he lifts his arms. Despite his attempt at a casual question, his movements seem rigid and self-conscious. 

Trish shakes her head. Her mouth is suddenly very dry. “No, I did already.”

“Huh? When?” 

“What do you mean, ‘when?’ You were gone for an hour and a half, you know.” 

“Oh.” Narancia’s hands go still in the towel, which obscures his face. His neck and collarbone are still wet, and glisten faintly in the lamplight. “Right.” 

Trish struggles for a topic, wrenching her eyes to her wrists. She’s sitting in the middle of the bed with her legs stretched out, the TV remote unused in her hands. Her favorite linen pajama set feels scratchy, and silly, and too big.

“Was it nice?” she asks. 

Narancia finishes with the towel, slinging it around his neck with both hands. His damp hair is tousled, exposing his forehead.

That stupid word punctures her mind like a dart again: handsome. 

“What, the walk?” he replies. “Um, yeah, I guess so. Didn’t really go anywhere. I was just feelin’ kinda—” He releases one end of the towel to gesture, his wrist turning haltingly in the air. “Y’know.” 

Strangely, Trish finds that she does. 

“You, um…” He hesitates. “You need anything?” 

Trish frowns, puzzled. “Like what?” 

“I-I dunno, just—just checking,” Narancia stammers, and seems to wince afterwards. “Sorry. Stupid question. I just mean if you want, uh, a glass of water or something… I’m already over here, so…” 

He trails off, and winces again. 

“I just,” he mumbles, “know you get thirsty.” 

Fondness nudges at Trish’s chest. She has to fold her lips in to conceal a smile. 

“I’m okay,” she says. “There’s a mini fridge. And I don’t like tap water anyway.” 

“Oh—right.” Narancia nods a few times, relaxing. “Haha. Yeah. Right. Um, then—I think I’m gonna…” He points across his shoulder. “I’m tired.” 

“Mm. Me too,” Trish says, feeling wide awake. “Sorry again about this.” 

Narancia shakes his head a little too quickly. “It’s fine. Like I said, it’s not that bad. But, um… can I…?”

He nods to the stack of pillows next to her. Trish picks up the topmost one and tosses it to him. 

He flinches, but catches it, clapping both hands around it.

“You coulda just handed it to me,” he says grumpily. 

“Didn’t feel like it,” Trish says, and sticks out her tongue. 

“So lazy.” 

“So ungrateful,” Trish retorts, smiling. 

Narancia scowls at her for a second longer and then smiles back, lopsided.

“Thanks, Trish,” he tells her with the level of sincerity that only he can. “See you in the morning.” 

Out of nowhere, Trish’s heart strains inside of her, as if to reach through her ribs for his arm.

“See you in the morning,” she says, more softly than she plans or wants to—and maybe she imagines it, but Narancia seems to linger for a long, taut moment before slipping back into the bathroom and closing the door. 

She lets out a heavy breath when he’s out of sight, slumping back on the pillows.

She doubts she’ll be able to focus on TV, so she draws her knees up and slips under the covers. Once she’s comfortable, she reaches for the bedside lamp, the last light in the room. 

Her hand stalls. What if she wakes up and needs to pee?

She shakes her head and turns it off. 

She rolls onto her side, tucking both hands between the two pillows, and closes her eyes.

Only the dark is left, then, and the slow tide of her breathing, and her cheek sinking further and further into the pillow, and—

And a smear of blood on her elbow, and a hole in Narancia’s face. 

She jolts awake. 

She sits up, panting, shivering. No movement in the room. No shadows. She fumbles blindly for the digital clock beside the bed. 2:03. 

She scrubs both hands over her face, pushing back her hair. She’s sweating all over. Bucciarati’s voice comes back to her, the same damn way it always does when she’s scared and alone in the dark: Breathe, breathe. 

She forces one down. It hurts. Two. It hurts a little less. 

Almost unconsciously, she turns her head toward the bathroom. There’s no sign of movement from inside; the door is open a crack, and the lights are off. It could be empty, for all she knows.

She pushes off the sheets. 

She bumps into the corner of the desk on the way. There will be a bruise in the morning, but she doesn’t care.

She flings the door open with one hand and flips on the light with the other. 

Narancia, jammed into the porcelain tile bathtub with one leg dangling over the side and a blanket strewn across his waist, scrambles up so fast his arm smacks into the wall. 

“Mnuh,” he says. “Ow.” 

“Narancia, are you,” Trish blurts out, hating how her voice shakes. She can’t finish. She doesn’t know what she’d even planned to say. 

“Hah?” Narancia groans, squinting blearily at her as his eyes adjust to the glare. His hair is a mess. “Trish…? Hnn, time is it… whassamatter?”

As the adrenaline starts to dissolve, giving way to a dull, weary embarrassment, Trish lets her arm drop limply to her side. She could just turn the light off again, slip back out, pretend this never happened, but—

“I… I couldn’t sleep,” she hears herself say. “Sorry. I just…” She hauls her pride back white-knuckled. “Look, it’s stupid for you to sleep in here and I feel way too guilty, so just come to bed. Come into the—just do it.” 

Narancia blinks, his eyes still a little glazed. Trish can tell when he registers what she’s saying because they widen by a fraction, suddenly clearer.

“The… the bed?” he repeats. His voice is rough from sleep, just an octave lower than she’s used to. “You want… me in the—”

“Don’t read into it. I won’t be able to sleep otherwise, all right? So let’s just...”

Narancia gazes up at her unreadably, his hands braced on the edges of the tub. Trish could count his knuckles if she wanted to; they’re easy to distinguish with this much light. 

She doesn’t feel like waiting, or maybe she just doesn’t feel like facing that expression, so she straightens up and marches back out. She clambers onto the right side of the bed, burying herself under the sheets, and faces the wall with her eyes open. 

It feels like hours pass before the bathroom light flicks out again, and longer still before she can hear the cautious approach of footsteps. Narancia’s weight sinks onto the mattress behind her with an agonizing hesitation, and he moves under the covers slowly, clearly trying not to disturb them on her side. Trish listens to him shift around; by the way he moves she can tell that when he goes still, it’s with his back to her. 

His body thrums with warmth. It seeps into the space between them, even with so much distance to cross—even with both of them on the very edges of the mattress, silent and unmoving. 

He smells like the hotel soap, and, fading underneath, Tiger Balm. Trish can’t help but remember Coco Jumbo’s red leather couch, then, and the concentration on Narancia’s face as he rubbed the gel onto some damaged muscle or another—she can all but see Bucciarati and Giorno reading their gardening magazines, and Mista foraging in the fridge, and Abbacchio dozing in the armchair.

Her breathing falls in time with his without thought. It’s an easy rhythm to follow. Narancia is, predictably, a fitful sleeper, fidgeting around in increments until he’s comfortable, but Trish keeps still no matter how much she wants to readjust. She can’t help feeling like a thoughtless movement would shatter this, whatever this is. 

“Night, Trish,” Narancia murmurs eventually, barely above a whisper. “Um… thanks.”

Trish is sleepy again, unraveled again, just hearing his voice—too clear and close to be an invention. 

“Good night, Narancia,” she answers, or thinks she does, or hopes she does. The truth of it is, she could already be dreaming—and it wouldn’t be the first time. 

Something heavy is on Trish’s arm. 

The pressure has cut off her circulation; she can feel the pins and needles prickling past her elbow. Her shirt is riding up over her stomach, and the crumpled hem is digging into her ribs. Her neck is sore, bent too far toward her shoulder, and her typically cold hands are warm, as if she’s been toasting them in front of a furnace. 

She doesn’t know what had woken her up, but for perhaps the first time in recent memory it hadn’t been a nightmare. She’d almost forgotten this feeling: this peaceful, bleary heaviness; consciousness without a shape. She hums contentedly through her nose. 

Her mouth feels fuzzy. Her eyes, too. Her nose is slightly squashed against something, amplifying the slow sounds of her breath, whose gathering heat is suffocating. She starts to pull her head back. 

“Mm,” Narancia says. 

Trish’s eyes snap open. 

Somebody is holding her. No, not somebody. Narancia. Somehow they’d ended up tangled together under the sheets, clinging to each other, so close that Trish can feel the steady rise and fall of his chest; so close that her whole body is soaked with secondhand heat. Her face is tucked against his throat. 

He’s still asleep. Trish tries to remain calm, indexing each of her limbs: one arm slung across his middle, and the other pinned under his ribs. Her fingers have slipped past the hem of his shirt and settled against the dip of his spine. Her right knee is hooked around his hips, and his left leg is sandwiched between hers; and his right arm is stuffed under her neck, filling the small canyon between the mattress and the pillow. 

A puff of air tickles the crown of her head when he breathes out. At her brief movement he’d curled a little closer and hummed into her hair, squeezing her gently in his sleep. 

Trish’s stomach twists up at the sound he makes, and at the way it vibrates against her cheek in the quiet of the undisturbed morning. It’s almost a whine, comprised entirely of longing, as if begging her to stay. 

His knee shifts between her thighs. Her mind whites out. 

She keeps completely still, staring wide-eyed at his sternum, irrationally afraid that even the slightest breath would wake him. Eventually he settles down again, nuzzling her hair with a satisfied sigh, and slackens his arms around her. 

Carefully, Trish leans her head away until she can look at his face head-on. All of his edges are softened in sleep, nothing but moles and skin and fishbone scars, veiled by the dark hair that falls across his forehead. He’s breathing softly through his mouth, dry lips just slightly parted.  

Trish softens, relaxing into her shoulders, and looks for a long while at Narancia’s lips. They’re a little bit fuller like this, and at the left corner there’s a white speckle of dry toothpaste. She can make out the shallow indentation of a scar. 

She starts to lift her hand, then stops herself, fingertips hovering a centimeter from his mouth. His exhale rushes through the gaps, a quick ripple of heat that fades in an instant. 

If it had been his body on those broken bars—if it had been this face, she thinks with a throb of grief; this still and sleeping face—there would have been a hole in each cheek. 

She touches two fingertips to the spot where the exit wound would have been, light and restrained. There’s no wound there now. The skin is smooth, undamaged, emanating a haze of life and Stand energy that fits into her hand like a beating heart. Narancia doesn’t stir, but his eyelids flutter when her touch wanders downwards, tracing his jawbone. 

He has never seemed more alive than he does right then. Trish feels it in the chambers of her soul, becoming a fierce, defiant joy. Willful, loyal, impetuous Narancia, who had been the first to call her by her name; Narancia, brave in ways that she has yet to learn, who loves the taste of citrus and the feeling of the wind in his face; Narancia, and the knife in his pocket, and the dimple in his cheek, and the scars on his hands. Narancia, who has stolen so many songs from her and still exceeds each one; who had grown up in the hills of Napoli and ended up here, in a bed in Reykjavík, holding her for no clearer reason than that some sleeping thing inside of him, unnamed, had wanted to.

As far as epiphanies go, this one is quiet. It hardly even feels new, and maybe that should scare her. But it’s true. It’s true. Narancia had lived—he had lived—and somewhere between that miracle and this one a part of her had fallen in love with him.

“Oh,” she breathes aloud, and lowers her hand. 

“Hmm,” Narancia sighs, peaceful, burrowing his face into his pillow. 

It loosens his embrace enough that Trish can slip out of it unnoticed, pushing herself up when she’s free and gazing down at him. His arms are still laid out across the space where she had been.

She sits on the edge of the mattress and watches the lightening of the sky through the curtains. Gradually, the blood starts to flow in her arm again, restoring its sensations—but Trish remembers Narancia’s weight long into the morning, even if her body doesn’t. 

Chapter Text

In the summer of 2001, Mista saves up enough money to buy a car. It’s an old Fiat 500, just big enough to fit four people, although Mista will only ever allow three to ride in it at a time. Among its most distinctive features are its faded yellow paint job, its busted radio, and the fact that it constantly looks like it’s one stiff breeze away from falling apart. He names it La Contessa. 

Narancia is almost positive the thing doesn’t have a muffler. He doesn’t know how an engine that could barely drag a Lambretta one block can make so much damn noise. It might be the loudest thing he’s ever heard, and he has Aerosmith roaring in his head 24/7.  

He also doesn’t know why Mista couldn’t just use one of Giorno’s many, many cars, which are not only pretty stylish but have the added bonus of not being death traps. It’s not like Giorno would say no. (Narancia is pretty sure that Giorno is allergic to saying no to Mista.) He wouldn’t mind driving around Napule in a nice Maserati 3200, or, hell, even an Audi—but no. He gets La Contessa della Morte. 

When he convinces Mista and Fugo to make the trip to a certain house in Marechiaro, one windless August weekend, they pile into La Contessa with a crate of limonata and six buckets of paint and head out just before noon. Fugo begs Mista to play something other than Lene Marlin, but all his whining does is make Mista turn it up louder, and all that does is make Fugo whine louder. 

Narancia, sitting in the passenger seat with his head and elbow dangling out the rolled-down window, doesn’t pay attention to very much of it. It’s the very end of summer, and the air has been still for days—and if he concentrates he can smell the season dying, salt air and dry things, the same as every year. The sky is a pale, cloud-mottled blue, and as the afternoon settles in and they finally make their way out of the traffic-jammed city into the suburbs, the familiar crawl of stone and stucco gradually gives way to lines of motionless stone pines. 

In just a few weeks he’ll be starting school, for real this time, and for all his frantic studying these past four months the prospect still makes him feel like his stomach’s being flipped upside-down. He barely remembers what it’s like to hang out with people besides Mista or Fugo, let alone what the hell a polynomial is. He’s prowled past the building, a graffiti-scrawled liceo in Vasto, about a dozen times now, like that will prepare him for something—like it’ll look less like a particular kind of hell when it’s empty. It hasn’t really made a difference. 

Just have confidence, Bucciarati keeps telling him, and trust yourself. Narancia wants to say that having confidence and trusting himself had worked fine when he’d had to go toe-to-toe with gangsters and Stand users, but that he’s not sure they’ll be worth much when some teacher asks him about the Etruscans. Bucciarati looks so serious when he says it, though, that Narancia doesn’t have the heart to argue with him. 

The point is, things are going to be different soon. Really different. He’s been trying not to think about it, but he can only keep that up for so long, he knows. 

There are a lot of things he’s been trying not to think about these days. Today, at least, is going to take care of one.

He naps for the second half of the drive, eventually waking up to a thick dappling of shade on his face as La Contessa heaves herself up the hills. There’s an abundance of trees this far from the city, all their leaves fat and green and their fruit long gone, and if he cranes his neck he can glimpse the gulf through the openings between them. 

The house is at the end of a rough dirt road so secluded that Mista misses the turn three times, agitating Fugo to the point of hysteria. When they finally do make it, Narancia lingers in the car for a moment with his hand on the door handle, taking it in—even when he can hear Fugo yelling at him to please for the love of God hurry up so they can get this over with. 

It’s small, just two floors, and white, with terracotta roof tiles and dark green window frames. The paint on the shutters is peeling, and it’s clearly been worn down in places by the salt winds. In the yard are two lemon trees, branches burdened by unpicked fruit, and an iron garden table set under them, rusted but sturdy. Behind the yard, a rocky, scrub-lined trail winds down the cliffs to the beach. 

Trish would like that, Narancia thinks, fond and sad and clear, and he feels like there’s a balloon welling up in his throat, about to pop. 

Bucciarati had entrusted the key to him, so he catches up to Fugo and Mista and unlocks the front door. 

It doesn’t look like anybody’s been there in years. The air is motionless, dust-laden, so they split up across the hardwood floors to muscle open all of the windows. 

Once that’s finished, they get to work: dusting, sweeping, mopping; wiping the glass, scrubbing the porcelain, clearing the cobwebs. It’s sparsely furnished, but what’s there is in good shape, preserved under off-white canvas sheets. That’s just as well, Narancia thinks; he gets Mista to help him push all of it to the center of the wide main room, brings in the ladder they’d strapped to the roof of the car, and, in the new heat of the afternoon, pries open the first can of paint. 

“Blue, huh?” Mista comments as he passes by with a bucket and mop. A couple of the Pistols are following him; the rest had darted off in various directions to go exploring. He cranes his neck back to survey the swatch of color Narancia is working onto the taupe of the eastern wall. “Where’d that come from?” 

Narancia dips the roller into the can and grunts, “’S her favorite.”

He’d gone to the hardware store about eight times trying to narrow down his options to the perfect blue, and in the end he’d chosen this one, some fancy shit called Blue Waltz. It’s not in-your-face, but it’s not one of those blues that’s basically white with the flu, either; the light hits it just right. He’d had to save up like a miser from his summer job helping out on Bucciarati’s boat, but he’d made it work. 

“Ooh, her favorite,” coos Mista, tickling Narancia’s ankle bone with one hand until Narancia tries to kick him. “I don’t even know when the hell you had time to learn all this stuff. One time I asked Trish what time it was and she told me to choke.”

“Could it have been, just guessing,” Fugo chimes in from the kitchen, “could it have been because you’re intolerable?”

“Just kiss me if you like me that much, Fugo.”

“Leave him be,” Fugo says, obviously flustered and trying to change the subject. “There’s plenty for you to do besides slouching around, you know.”

“Who’s slouching?” Mista exclaims, slouching toward the kitchen. “You’re just pissed we’re talking about Trish.” 

“I am not pissed—” Fugo hisses, but by the time Mista reaches the kitchen his voice drops to a whisper that Narancia can’t make out. 

He clenches his teeth and keeps painting. 

He isn’t an idiot, despite Fugo’s singular talent for treating him like one. He hasn’t missed the strange, loaded looks; the aborted questions, the quiet scoffs. Fugo’s never been that subtle—always a seething tangle of unchecked emotions, sucking all the air out of any room he enters—but this is different, like a pipe about to burst. Narancia’s gone above and beyond to ignore it, if only because with everything else—having died, having lived, and having been begged in some half-lit hotel room to go, be happy—whatever is pissing Fugo off matters less to him than it ever has. Especially if it’s Trish. 

He sighs, lowering the brush. 

Trish. The name ripples through him like an aftershock. 

Before he knows it, it will be September, and his summer will have come and gone: a litany of hot mornings and edgeless afternoons; the humble beginnings of his small, secondhand life, whatever the hell that’s worth. It’s not that he isn’t grateful—Giorno’s Stand had really gone out of its way to fix him, and Abbacchio, and Bucciarati—but a part of him still doesn’t know what to do with it. A future, after all, hadn’t amounted to much in Passione, that riotous, knife’s-edge world that had chewed him up and then spat him out like a bone. He’d tossed it out on his first day. 

Life is the whetstone, Narancia, Bucciarati had told him then, and your body, the blade. 

Narancia’s body doesn’t feel like a blade anymore. It barely even feels like his, some nights, but he hasn’t really mentioned that to anyone. He hasn’t mentioned how his heart beats a little different, how for a few weeks his strides had felt a little wider. And maybe that whole future thing would be more appealing if it wasn’t going to be defined, in some irreparable way, by Trish’s absence—maybe it would fit better in his hands if she’d given him the chance to keep his promise. 

Until the very end, huh? Well, he guesses the end did come, when you get right down to it. Not that he remembers. Nothing to show for it but weird looks from his friends and what Polnareff tells him is phantom pain, some haunting of the body that jolts him awake in the middle of the night and makes him feel like he’s being pulled apart. Nothing to keep but, Thanks for everything. Be happy. 

Maybe that had hurt worse than dying did. 

He’d taken Abbacchio’s advice. He’d given it time, waited for the scab to form. He’d thought about that room—the open suitcase, and Trish’s back, and what he should have said to it—so many times he’d memorized the wallpaper. He’d occupied himself with studying history, catching red snapper on Bucciarati’s boat, moving his one cardboard box of possessions to a third-floor apartment in Quartieri Spagnoli, arguing with Mista for a week over who should get the biggest room—and cooking, and cooking, and cooking. 

It had helped. A little. But for better or worse he’d retained a habit of doing things for Trish’s sake, and even after all that work and wanting he’d felt like he could stand to do just one more.

He’s decided that that’s what this is. One last street to burn, and one last boat to follow. And then he’ll draw the curtains, and lock the door, and do exactly what Trish told him to do. 

“…Friday, you oughta tag along.” Mista and Fugo are back. “Knowing Giorno, it’ll be a sweet party.” 

“It’s a business engagement,” Fugo grumbles, stalking past the ladder toward the bookshelves in the wall, where Narancia had thrown some cleaning rags. “If Giorno wanted me to go, he would have told me.”

“You’re so damn boring it breaks my heart. Oi, Narancia, you need another can up there?” 

Narancia blinks and glances into the can beside his knee. He’s almost through it all. In front of him, Blue Waltz streaks out in all directions, drying in the afternoon. 

“Oh. Yeah, I guess.” He bends forward to peer at Mista upside-down, beckoning impatiently with one hand. “C’mon, give it.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Mista says, and crouches down to pry one open from the cluster on the floor. “Y’know, painting this whole place by yourself is gonna take forever. You sure you don’t want a hand?” 

“I got it,” Narancia insists stubbornly, and Mista passes him the open can, handle-up. “Thanks.” 

Mista makes a what can ya do kind of noise and yawns, stretching both arms over his head until his shirt rides up. 

“You’re a piece of work, man,” he says, without judgment or pity. “Doing all this.” 

Narancia’s stomach twists up, like someone’s trying to wring it out. A piece of work, huh? That’s one way of putting it.

“Look, I just—” He sets his jaw. “I just don’t want Trish to think we’d forget her, okay?” 

“Ironic,” Fugo mutters, “considering her first priority was forgetting you.” 

“Fugo,” Mista barks—but the words have already embedded themselves in the silence of the house, and Narancia’s arm has already halted mid-stroke. 

Beneath him, Fugo instantly claps his mouth shut. Regret is evident on his face, but he’s always been too proud and too scared for apologies, so Narancia knows he won’t get one. 

“I… I know that was blunt, Narancia, but it had to be said,” he says, his voice so quiet it could pass for desperate. “It’s been four months now. Four months, and you’ve been nothing but miserable. You—” He breathes in, sharp. “You gave your life for her, and she couldn’t even be bothered to give you a phone number. So what’s this all for?”

“Leave it alone,” Mista answers before Narancia can, his voice hard at the edges. “You know it’s—”

“What?” Fugo snaps, wounded and vengeful. “It’s what, Mista?” 

Narancia finally turns his head halfway over his shoulder, far enough to register Mista’s bowed head and clenched fists in the dust-flecked light. It’s always been weird to see him look so serious, but this is hard to look at head-on.

“Complicated,” Mista says quietly. Narancia can tell that he’s ashamed of using a cop-out word like that, but it’s not like he’d have anything better. There are no sufficient alternatives for Fugo anymore, who will always be, incurably, the one they left behind. “Look—you weren’t—there.” 

“Yes,” Fugo says acidly, “God forbid you let me forget that.” 

Mista has nothing to say to that. He winces into silence.

“What do you care, anyway?” Narancia mutters, working the brush over the same stretch of wall even as the bristles run dry. “Bucciarati wanted her to have this place, so we’re fixin’ it up. That’s it.” 

He shouldn’t have even answered. He should just keep painting, let Fugo’s anger run its course—because he knows Fugo doesn’t care about what Narancia or Mista will say, not really, as much as he cares about being right—but his muscles are starting to tense up, awakening for a fight, and he’s no good at keeping them in check when they get like that. Never has been. 

“Of course I care!” Fugo shouts, and for a second Narancia thinks he might believe him. “Do you think it’s fun for me to see you like this?” 

Narancia crushes the brush against the wall. “So stop lookin’.” 

“You’re not listening to me—” For a moment: rage. Then it’s subdued again, pinned to the floor. “So what, then? Is it always going to be like this?” 

“Like what?” 

“Painting houses,” Fugo says derisively, making a sweeping gesture with one arm. 

Narancia locks eyes with him and snaps, “So what if it is?!” 

Fugo bristles, frustration darkening his face, crumpling his mouth. Narancia glares right back, daring him to answer—and for a second Fugo almost looks pained, lost in a way Fugo never does, like figuring out the right words is scraping his insides raw. 

“There’s no—” He sighs, roughly, through his nose. “It’s pointless to cause yourself so much suffering over a person who would do that. It’s not—healthy. Trish made her choice. Why can’t you just accept it?” 

“Fugo, come on, man,” Mista says weakly, moving to put his hand on Fugo’s back.

Fugo slaps him away. “The same goes for you! Both of you—everyone.” He bows his head, aiming a pair of wounded eyes at the floor. “It’s like I’m still—” His face tightens, trapping the words. “I can’t understand it.” 

“Yeah, that must really suck for you, Fugo,” Narancia sneers. “Since you’re such a big damn genius. First time, or what?” 

Fugo just scoffs. “Being petty isn’t going to—”

“Who’s being petty?” Narancia finally jumps down from the ladder. He lands in front of Fugo, seething, pulsing, and rises. “It’s not Trish’s fault you turned your back on us, so quit acting like it is.”

As always, he can pinpoint the exact second Fugo snaps: the narrowing of his pupils, the sudden spasm of his mouth. A fury that shrinks the room.

“And it’s not my fault you’ll crawl like a dog to any undeserving idiot who looks at you right, so don’t talk to me about—”

Narancia snaps next. He whips his arm back and punches Fugo in the face.

Mista yells something, but Narancia doesn’t hear it, because in another instant Fugo slams into him, knocking him to the floor. Then he’s on top of him, swinging and scratching and screaming, and Narancia keeps striking back in every direction he can manage, the chin the chest the shoulder, spitting, cursing, sweeping the pain aside—and despite the rage and terror there’s something easier about this, clearer than any faltering conversation they could have. 

A knee to the stomach. Mela, shut that kid up or I will. An elbow to the cheek. Look me in the eye, you little shit. A yank to the hair. Hey, what are you doing eating out of the garbage? How about some real food?

Fugo’s knuckles crack into his nose, and Narancia feels the impact crunch through him, sharp white sparks behind his eyelids. He cries out and it mutates into a raw, furious scream. His vision goes gray. He headbutts Fugo as hard as he can, lunging forward when it knocks him back, and pins him roughly to the floor, dripping blood and tears onto his red-splotched face. 

“Narancia, shit!” Mista yells, dulled by the ringing in Narancia’s ears. “You’re bleeding!”

Fugo stares up at him with eyes so wide that for an instant Narancia can see everything: shock and confusion and envy and sorrow, and maybe that’s more than he’s ever seen from Fugo before. He’s felt a hundred times like he hates that stupid, pale, snot-nosed face with everything in him, but he’s not sure he can hate it right then. 

“When will you learn?!” Fugo shouts up at him, his voice breaking in ten places. “I’m trying to help you, you stupid—”

Narancia fists both hands into his collar and hauls him up, baring his teeth. They stare at each other for a long, collapsing moment, breath heaving, chins bruised.

Narancia thinks right then that he could never look at Fugo again and everything would be just fine. 

“I’m not your fuckin’ charity case anymore, Fugo,” he snarls. “And if you ever call Trish an idiot again, I’ll break your jaw. Got it?” 

Some of the anger breaks off from Fugo’s face for a moment—but then it’s back again, like an irreparable injury. Narancia doesn’t give it the time to manifest into action; maybe experience has finally taught him better—he shoves Fugo back to the floor, glares fiercely down at him a second longer, and then lurches to his feet. 

He doesn’t bother looking back as he crosses the length of the room, which seems suddenly so much wider; doesn’t bother speaking as he starts to clamber back up the ladder, rung by rung. His blood throbs hotly under the skin of his face, vessels rupturing into bruises, pushing tears to the corners of his eyes. 

“She wasn’t even there,” Fugo chokes out.

In the smothering silence, it sounds like a fracture with a voice. Narancia stops before the last rung, unmoving. 

He hears a movement behind him, Mista muttering something; a quiet slap, rejecting an offered hand; a stumble, then stillness again.

“I was—” Fugo breathes out, hoarse and hard, some kind of self-hating attempt at a laugh. “She took the first train back, you know. Just asked Giorno for the fare and left.” Then a sharp inhale, and suddenly it’s like Purple Haze is right at Narancia’s back, heaving onto his neck, in agony. “We tried to call her about the funeral—we were going to bury you all on the same day, did you know that?—but we didn’t hear a word. Nothing. It was—she’d outlived it. Ha. Is that kind of person worth remembering? Answer me.” 

Narancia grips the last rung tighter, until it pushes back the blood under his nails. He has nothing to tell Fugo at all—nothing to tell him about how Trish had cradled his bandaged hands on his last night alive; nothing to tell him about the music that she’d hum to herself while the others slept; nothing to tell him about the blow that she had landed in Sardegna, and the glorious sight of her breath moving through her body, and Abbacchio’s words about boats. 

Those aren’t the kinds of things, he thinks, he’d ever have the nerve to tell anyone. 

He sets his jaw and keeps going, settling at the top of the ladder with his back turned. Over his shoulder he hears Fugo spit out a sharp, scornful sound and walk away, his footsteps retreating up the staircase. 

Mista stays. Narancia can sense the Pistols hovering fretfully behind him, six little pairs of eyes on the back of his neck. 

“You, uh... want me to handle the kitchen?” Mista asks.

It’s not the first ungainly kindness Mista’s done for him, but it feels like the biggest. Narancia slackens his shoulders and nods. 

“He’ll get over it,” Mista says after a long time. “He’ll—yeah.” 

“Yeah,” Narancia answers dully.

“It’s Fugo.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Yeah,” Mista mutters.

He lingers for a second longer, and then Narancia hears the scuff of feet, and then he’s gone. 

All alone, Narancia keeps painting—leaving the bluest sentiments for Trish to find, someday, if she looks for them, if she listens. There had been no space for them in that little room above the bay, and less of it still on their ill-fated journey to Rome in a different life—so he’s making a house that can say them. 

The work is slow, and his arms are sore, and there’s blood still leaking from his nose—but he’s found tenderness in worse conditions. If Trish ever does cross the threshold of this house, he wants her to find something worth coming back for. Some words he might have said, once, beside an open suitcase: I swear you were real. Don’t go.

“C’mon, do ‘Aeroplano di carta!’ Please?” 

“How many times do I have to tell you? It’s not on the setlist, so no.” 

“Screw the setlist! They’re your songs, aren’t they? It’s not like you gotta memorize ’em!”

“You always get like this… look, if I didn’t make the band rehearse them, then they can’t play them! If you want to hear it so much just listen to the album!” 

“It ain’t the same! C’mon, Trish, please? Please?”

“Enough already! What, do you want me to do a special Narancia Tour or something? You go up and sing it, if it’s so easy!” 

“Maybe I will!” 

“If you try it I will snap your neck with my bare hands,” says Giulia, and vividly mimes the action from the folding chair against the dressing room wall. “Another word out of you and you are unequivocally fired. Don’t test me.” 

Trish stifles a laugh at the indignation on Narancia’s face. He’s in his usual haphazard repose on the leather armchair behind her, his reflection slightly warped in the vanity mirror’s antique glass, wrist-deep in a bag of something called Jacob’s Jaffa Cakes. His legs are dangling over one side, and he keeps pulling them in when the hairdresser or the stage manager or the makeup artist walk by. 

“All you ever do is say you’re gonna fire me,” he retorts through a bulging mouthful of Jaffa Cake. “If you wanna do it so bad, do it, maybe then I won’t have you riding my ass all the time.” 

“Oh yes, and I’m sure this luxury would amount to so very much without your paychecks.” Giulia rubs her thumb and forefinger together. “Who paid for those disgusting biscuits of yours, Narancino? It certainly was not Santa Bona!” 

“H-How the hell did you know my Onomastico?! Up yours!”

Trish tries not to furrow her eyebrows while her makeup artist pencils them. When did they get so close?  

“I will not tolerate this abuse. I am going out for a smoke.” Giulia stands up, brushing off her linen shorts. “I have time, yes? You are on in how long?” 

“An hour,” says Trish, eyes flicking to her in the mirror. “Did you make sure the—”

“Yes, I have ensured that they did not put out still water for you,” Giulia says. She throws up both her hands on her way to the door. “What a trauma that must have been for you in Reykjavík! Thank God you are still with us.” 

Trish sticks her tongue out at the mirror. Giulia makes a rude, emphatic gesture in return and slams the door behind her. 

The makeup artist points to the ceiling with the mascara wand. Trish obediently looks up, keeping still as the bristles tug lightly at her lower eyelashes.

She’s grateful to have something to occupy her eyes with that isn’t Narancia. She’s spent way too much time since they’d left Reykjavík stealing glances at him; a nice, bland ceiling is just what she needs. 

The wood is clearly old, smoothed down and mottled with burls. Every now and then the planks will creak around the movements upstairs. Trish doesn’t miss the way Narancia’s gaze flicks upwards each time, purely reactive, before settling again.

Maybe she should be grateful. Even if half of her energy now is taken up by accidental stares, Narancia has an almost unbelievable talent for never, ever noticing. 

The makeup artist finishes with the eyeshadow—olive green, to match the embroidered foliage on Trish’s rose-patterned skirt from Copenhagen—and then takes her leave, shutting the door quietly behind her. Trish leans forward, inspecting herself in the mirror by turning one cheek and then the other. 

Behind her, Narancia sighs. Trish can hear him fidgeting around in the chair, fabric on fabric and the crinkling of the Jaffa Cake bag and a restless click of his tongue. 

“What is it?” she asks. 

Narancia looks startled to have been seen through so swiftly—like he’s the master of subtlety, or something. Trish tries not to smirk as she evens out her lipstick with her pinkie. 

“How come you don’t ever play that stuff?” he asks her plainly after a long moment. “Y’know, from the older albums.” 

Trish folds her lips in, considering it. Well, he’s right; nothing she’d written before 2003 has ever made it onto the setlist. It isn’t that her early songs were bad, really, but the process of writing them had felt less like creation and more like bloodletting. 

“People don’t like them,” she says eventually. “They’re not—happy.” 

Narancia sinks into the armchair, eyes drifting unreadably to the bag in his hands. 

“Nobody’s happy all the time,” he mutters. 

Trish registers it like a paper cut, quick and small but nonetheless painful: she’d said the wrong thing. 

“I—I guess not,” she says as lightly as she can, reaching for her water bottle. “But they want to be, right?”

She makes sure it doesn’t touch her mouth when she tips the bottle back, to keep her lipstick intact. Narancia’s, a deep violet that she’d let him borrow from her makeup bag this morning, is slightly smudged, just the slightest imperfections at the edges. Not that she’s looking.

“Hey, Trish,” he says suddenly, in a low voice. He drops his head back over the arm of the chair to gaze at the ceiling. “Why d’you write songs?” 

Trish lowers the bottle. The cold water slips down her throat, faintly crisp from carbonation. She glances at his reflection and falters at its intensity. 

“You’re asking me that now?” she exclaims with a quick, instinctive laugh—but Narancia’s expression doesn’t change. “I don’t know, I—I just do.” 

By the way that he’s watching her—the kind of watching that feels like a finger on her pulse—she knows that he’s expecting more. Narancia always expects more, she thinks, than she knows how to give. 

She twists around in the chair to face him, laying her arm along the top rail. The upholstery is old, all traces of texture smoothed down. 

“Don’t you have anything like that?” she asks, a little exasperated. “That you just—you just do? Like, you don’t have to think about it or anything, you just… you just do it?” 

Narancia tilts his head in thought, pursing his lips on one side, and shrugs. 

“I dunno. Fighting, I guess.” 

“Not that. Like—like it’s something you have to practice, but maybe you sort of always knew how to do it. Like if someone looks at it…” 

Narancia watches her, his mouth an even line. Her voice wanders out of reach. 

“They’ll be looking at you,” she finishes, softly.  

There’s a momentary glint of clarity in his eyes—and Trish’s gut plunges down with a suddenness she can’t explain—but then he sighs and scratches hard at the back of his head: as if to say he doesn’t get it, as if to say that not getting has left a bruise. Trish wants to tell him to forget it, but she has a feeling that if she did that right now he’d be stewing about it for days, blaming himself for failing to grasp it instead of blaming her for failing to explain it. 

“What about cooking?” she asks. 

“Eh?” His brow furrows dubiously. “What about it?”

“That’s kind of the same, isn’t it?” Trish fiddles with her earpiece, thumb catching on one of her studs. “I mean, lots of people can cook, but—if you’re just… cooking for you, no recipe or anything, it’s something you made. Just you. And it’s not like you can make it the exact same way twice. Right?” 

Narancia hums to himself, his features stern with thought. Trish thinks it might take, for a second, but then his eyes drift away and his posture tightens up, resistant. 

“Maybe,” he mumbles. 

Trish lets herself look at him a long while, forgetting for a moment about waking up next to him, and about kissing him, and about leaving him behind. With his lower lip sticking out, Narancia looks more like he had at seventeen. She remembers him then, sneering and guarded, exposing his generous heart in the strangest places: meticulously peeling quince with his flick knife, or making caprese in the safe house kitchen. She’d spent so many of those days hungry—she’s sure the rest of them had, too, subsisting on fruit and bread and little else—but that first afternoon in the vineyard cottage Narancia had made enough food for her to have had two helpings, if she’d wanted. Maybe he’d known that it would be the last real meal they’d have for a few days. 

She remembers that caprese. It was the best she’d ever tasted, with sweet juicy tomatoes and mozzarella so soft she could have confused it for cream. It had been the only thing to coax an appetite out of her in days. 

She’d eaten it up in her room, balancing the plate on her knees, with her bare heels on the edge of the dresser, and about three bites in she had started to cry.

She’d never even thought to thank him for it, had she? 

“How did you get started on it, anyway?” she asks. “Cooking.”

Narancia looks back at her uncertainly, scratching at his cheek with four fingers.

“Huh…?” he says, drawing it out. “I dunno, I don’t really think about it too hard or anything. I’ve done it forever. I just kinda… like how happy people are when they eat something I made.” 

He shifts around, his expression unfulfilled: low eyebrows and guarded eyes. Trish has seen him like this before, adjusting his body in preparation for letting go of something, a secret or a memory. She relaxes into the chair despite herself, watching it come. 

“My mom, she—” He clears his throat, gesturing aimlessly with both hands before dropping them back in his lap. “Her favorite food was, um, basbousa. So one year for her birthday I made her some—stayed up all night practicing, making the orange blossom syrup and everything—and I made a huge mess, had to stand on books to reach the stove, but… she said it was the best she’d ever had.” 

Pride nudges at his voice, coupled with a subtle, worn-in grief. It isn’t anything that Trish knows how to touch, much less respond to. For a moment she wants to go back to hearing him whine about the songs she won’t play—because nothing worsens the acuity of the ache that shares his name like that voice and that expression, tender, open. 

“Basbousa?” she echoes, struggling a little around the syllables. Narancia had said it with a swift, fluttering accent, nothing like Neapolitan at all and certainly not Italian. 

“It’s like a cake. With, y’know, semolina and stuff. My nena—um, my nonna made it all the time. Real simple.” He sighs, tucking his hands under his legs. “I like making the simple stuff best. It doesn’t matter if it’s fancy or special, so long as it feels good to eat and so long as I felt good makin’ it.”

Trish nods, resting her chin on her arm. “Mm. Music’s like that.” 

“Yeah?” Narancia asks, turning his head to her. His dark hair is spilling past his bandana, the same as always—never held back, never quite tame.

“Well, it used to be.” She shrugs, eyes flicking to the ceiling. “Now everything’s so—complicated, because I care about it too much. But before… I don’t know if it felt good, but it felt real.”

Narancia’s voice approaches slowly. “Real like how?”

Trish opens her mouth to answer and realizes she doesn’t know what the answer will be. Narancia’s question seems to explore her slowly, searching for something true. 

“Like I was real,” she says quietly. “Like I was here.”

That might be the truest thing he’ll find. At the very least it’s the truest thing she has. She adjusts her head, cheek pressed against the bend in her wrist. 

“I don’t know,” she murmurs. “I’m one to talk. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing it just because it feels like it’s mine. The good and the bad. It all came out of me. Nothing else feels like that.” She quiets, forgetting, for a moment, that she’s speaking out loud at all. “Or maybe it’s just selfish, maybe it’s—maybe it’s because I… I want to know that when I die, there’ll be something left.” 

Her mind finally catches up to what she’s just said, and she sits up and turns away before Narancia can react to it to her face. His silence presses up against her back. 

“How’s that for morbid?” she asks, and tacks on an airy laugh. “I don’t even know what I’m saying. Anyway… I’m done writing songs. I already told you. All it does anymore is kill time.” 

She knows Narancia well enough, now, to recognize that when he’s this quiet, it’s because he’s piecing something together, word by word. She isn’t sure she’ll be ready for what it becomes. 

“Trish,” he says, lifting his head sharply, “when you were—”

Just then, the door opens. It’s the stage manager, sticking his head in to tell Trish she’s on in five. 

Trish stands up before the door closes again, hurriedly adjusting her skirt and fluffing her hair. Oh, she has to pee. Or maybe she just feels like she does. She always feels like she does when she’s this close to going onstage. 

She brushes past Narancia on her way to the door, and even though he’s deep in thought he still reflexively pulls his legs in to let her pass. She pauses with her hand on the doorknob without turning it, glancing down at him. 

“Were,” she says awkwardly, “were going to say something?”

“Oh. ’S nothing.” Narancia swings out of the armchair, all traces of whatever had been burdening him now gone. He rocks on the balls of his feet once he’s upright. “Guess I’d better get out there too. Me and Aero’ll be front and center! Knock ’em dead!” 

Trish permits herself a lingering look at his face, if only because he won’t register it, if only because he never does. Where only a couple of seconds ago there had been a helpless uncertainty there’s only an unadorned grin, and bright-eyed readiness, and at the rightmost corner of his lips, the smallest smudge of chocolate. Trish can hear the opening band finishing up, and further still, the vast crowd cheering. 

“You’ve got chocolate on your face,” she says, and smiles. “See you out there.” 

Before they even make it up to the hotel room, Narancia is begging her to sing. 

It’s after midnight. The concert had run late, and Giulia had arranged a signing afterwards, which had run even later. Trish’s wrist is cramping, and her cheeks are stiff from smiling for so many photos, but it doesn’t bother her too much. That kind of thing has never been hard. It’s just a matter of switching on.

Still, as accustomed as she’s gotten to the packed tour schedule and the effusive showerings of attention that it entails, she prefers the part that comes after: wandering strange cities with Narancia in no particular direction, no appointments or rehearsals, no color-coded blocks on Giulia’s calendar to attend to. After the signing the two of them had agreed to duck into a pub and try “craft beer,” which they had both agreed was disgusting and continued drinking anyway. The yeasty taste is still bubbling its way back out of her, expressing itself in wide steps, and loose arms, and laughter for no reason. Once Narancia has made sure the room is clear she throws her clutch onto the bed and heads for the balcony, smothering another of those pointless laughs as she goes. 

“You just heard me sing for two hours,” she reminds him, unlatching the sliding door. Her room is on the seventh floor, with a sweeping view of the Dublin Bay as it feeds into the Irish Sea. “No encores.” 

“I’m just sayin’, if you won’t sing it for them, will you at least sing it for me?” he practically whines, and he flicks off the light in the bathroom before joining her. At the concert, she’d been able to hear him chanting her name with everyone else, raw and clear at her feet. “It’s been stuck in my head for like a week!” 

Trish sighs and slides the door open. “No.” 

“Why not?!” 

“Because it’s embarrassing!”

“How’s it embarrassing?” Narancia throws his hands in the air as he follows her onto the balcony. “You sing in front of like ten thousand people every week!” 

“That’s different! That’s—it’s totally different,” Trish insists, flustered. “Singing to just one person, it’s…” 

The very thought is throwing off her heartbeat. She’d written “Aeroplano di carta” one summer in Greece, watching contrails from the beach and thinking about what it meant to leave things behind.

It had started out about that, anyway. It had ended up about him. 

“You can’t just let this go, can you?” she asks exasperatedly, folding her arms to brace her elbows on the wrought iron railing. “Why? What’s so important about—” 

“Cuz I wanna hear you sing,” Narancia says, no longer obstinate but imploring. “Just you. I haven’t gotten to hear it since…” 

He trails off, maybe because he figures she’ll know the rest and maybe just because he can’t bring himself to finish. He makes a frustrated noise, scratching rapidly at his head with one hand. The edge of Trish’s smile falters. 

“Ah, forget it,” he groans, and turns his head away until his face is out of sight. “If you don’t wanna, you don’t wanna.”

Trish works her lip under her teeth and stares distantly at the horizon line. There are still so many ships in the harbor, even this late, specks of old light guiding shadows across the water. 

“What kind of fish does Bucciarati catch?” she asks suddenly. 

Narancia turns his head back. 

“Huh?” 

Trish gestures huffily with one hand, then tucks it into the crook of her elbow again. 

“You said he has a fishing boat, right? So what kind of fish does he catch?” 

Narancia starts to laugh. 

It’s a lively, breathless sound, shaking his whole lean body, and goes on for just long enough that Trish’s ears go hot. She elbows him, hard. 

“What’s so funny?!”

“Nothin’!” Narancia splutters unconvincingly. “Nothing’s funny! Um—” He collects himself. “It depends on the time of year, I guess… red snapper mostly. Sometimes swordfish? Sells it to the old ladies in Porto Nolana, every morning. They love him.”

Trish nods, imagining it: Bucciarati, in something resembling normal clothes, chatting pleasantly with someone’s grandmother about filleting. It’s strange how clearly it comes together. A smile tugs at her cheeks. 

“I’ll bet Abbacchio hates that,” she says. “Bucciarati smelling like fish every day.”  

Narancia grins so wide that his eyes glisten, bright as a flame.  

“You know he does!” he exclaims, doubling over the railing with another laugh. When his head drops forward, it exposes the nape of his neck: one small triangle of skin, and the ridge of a vertebrae beneath—but then he straightens up, and it’s gone again, hidden beneath his hair. “Says it’s not right for the most beautiful man in Campania to smell like a fishmonger.”

Trish snorts. She can imagine that clearly, too. 

It’s hardly her place to ask, but she asks anyway, emboldened by the craft beer and something else: “They’re happy together, then?”

“Ah yeah,” Narancia replies contentedly, smiling in profile. “They’re figuring it out.”

There was a time when Trish couldn’t have conceivably imagined Bucciarati “figuring it out” with anyone, much less Abbacchio, who had seemed severely resistant to either acknowledging or pursuing that kind of thing. The most that she’d ever noticed had been that they spoke to each other like they shared a wound, and that alone had gone beyond what she could understand—or at least it had back then. 

She thinks, not for the first time, that Narancia has always picked up on more than people give him credit for. 

Her eyes drift to his hands, dangling comfortably over the railing. His arms are crossed, just like hers, and his shoulders hunched just slightly forward. When a breeze brushes his hair back from his forehead, he closes his eyes and breathes in deep, tipping his head back to welcome it.

The line of this throat is easy to follow, arched in the nighttime. Trish wants to lean over, and sink her face into his hair, and inhale. 

“I’ve been sending paper planes to you,” she quietly sings, “ever since the fall of Rome... telling you I’m doing fine, and you are not alone…” 

Narancia turns his head slowly, marveling at her. He seems to be holding his breath. Any kind of eye contact would be too embarrassing for Trish to stand, so she hooks her attention to his knuckles instead.

When she’d recorded this, her voice had been hoarse and splintering, broken in too many vital places, but now it comes out of her peacefully, like a secret. By the time she reaches the chorus there’s a faint and accidental smile on her face, sweetening the words. 

As if it isn’t bad enough to be serenading Narancia a capella in the middle of the night, about halfway through he starts to hum along, bobbing his head. Trish manages to keep the notes intact, even with Narancia’s eyes meeting hers so tenderly, even with their elbows close enough to touch. 

“We’ve got no place left to be,” he sings with her, low and humble, “and no one left to call…” 

He goes quiet again for the last chorus, watching her raptly as she sustains a vibrato that she hadn’t when she’d recorded it. They must look like idiots, swaying side-by-side, one mistimed breath from cracking up on each other’s shoulders—but then again, at this hour, there’s no one around to see it. She doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.  

“There,” she says when she’s finished, huffing out a parting laugh. “Happy?” 

It’s a rhetorical question, but Narancia still nods, beaming so unapologetically it crinkles his eyes shut. Trish looks away.

“Yep!” he chirps. “Super happy!” 

Trish flushes and looks quickly away. She has to wonder if he does that on purpose. 

There’s a crisp wind coming in from the east, an early portent of autumn. Maybe Dublin is always cold, Trish thinks, even when the rest of the world isn’t. It exists outside of July. Even at night the sky seems sharper, jutting out over the black Irish Sea, the pinhole stars cutting through the dark.

She runs her hands over her arms, trying to force some heat through the goosebumps. 

“It’s chilly,” she mutters for want of something to say, but she makes no move to go inside.

“Oh!” Narancia says. Trish, hunched over and feeling suddenly stupid, glances over her nose at him. In one motion, he shucks off his jacket. “Here, put it on.”

He’s draped it around her shoulders before she can think to respond; his thumb brushes against the side of her neck when he lets go. The jacket smells like him, like wind and clouds, and the warmth from his body is still in the fabric. 

It’s just a little baggy on her; the sleeves would probably cover her hands if she put her arms through them. She closes her hands around the front, pulling it closer. 

“Thanks,” she says, and then, for no reason at all, “It’s warm.” 

Narancia grins. “No problem!” 

He lasts about fifteen seconds before he crams his hands into his armpits and starts shivering. Trish looks at him dryly. 

“Nice going,” she says. “Now you’re cold, too.” 

“I-It’s fine,” Narancia insists, clearly fighting to keep his smile in place. “K-Keep it! I’ll warm up! Th-This is nothing!” 

This time, the laugh gets out: another free and senseless feeling, more than she knows what to do with, spilling out of her like light from a cup. It doesn’t take much observation at all to see that Narancia is spellbound by it. 

“Here. I have a better idea.” She shoulders off the jacket, shuddering when goosebumps bloom up her back anew. “Put this back on.” 

“Huh?” Narancia frowns, but takes it, shifting his weight to his other foot. “Um, okay…” 

Trish stretches her arms out at either side of her. “Now go like this.” 

Narancia mirrors her, dubious. “Okay?” 

Now they must really look like idiots. Maybe that’s what gives her courage, when the moment comes. On the rim of the sleeping city, so close to the water that binds the continents, everything feels like a miracle, suddenly—the way the world had looked from the plane yesterday, and the way Narancia looks now, backlit and waiting and alive. 

She steps closer and slots her arms into the open spaces beneath Narancia’s, linking her hands at his back. Her chest is flush against his, her heartbeat adjacent. When she laughs again, fuller, she has to close her eyes to give it room to grow. 

“There,” she says, and opens them again. “Better?”

“Oh!” Narancia hasn’t lowered his arms yet, but he’s grinning; she can hear it in his voice. “Hey, yeah, that’s perfect!”

Trish wonders how much he might know about her happiness, now, just from being this close. She wonders if he can feel it. 

She lifts her face, unthinking, and freezes when she realizes how very close it is to his. He tenses against her when their eyes meet. His smile falters and reshapes itself—a softening, a comprehension. His eyelids sink lower, almost by accident. 

“Oh,” he breathes.

Trish’s grip around him loosens, her thumb settling against his spine. He brings his arms down slowly, a series of stops and starts, as if second-guessing himself. By an inch or so, he steps closer—as close as he can come. As close as she has ever let anyone. Anyone. 

His hands linger at her sides, so near that she can feel the empty space, and Trish looks up at his eyes, unblinking. And the world expands. 

“Trish?”

Trish doesn’t look away, watching the particular way his mouth moves around her name. She’s never noticed it before. 

“Yeah?” she whispers. 

An emotion flits across Narancia’s face for just an instant. She doesn’t know what to call it, couldn’t begin to invent a name for it—but she knows how it makes her feel. She knows how every part of her comes home to it, like the sea rushing in, always, to the shore. 

She feels the edge of Narancia’s thumb on her cheek before she can register that he’s lifted his hand. He strokes a faint line down to her lower jaw, spellbound by something she can’t see—will never see—and then uncurls his fingers, all four tips touching the side of her neck. His breath shakes in his body when he draws it in. She’s never seen him stand still like this for anything: like there’s nothing left in the world to run from. 

“I want,” he starts to say, but he loses his voice halfway through. Trish watches as he swallows and looks down, then back up at her again, half-lidded. “I want to…” 

Trish almost nods, frantically; she almost says, breathless and certain, Me too, me too; I want it, too. She presses her hand against the small of Narancia’s back in lieu of an answer, pulling him in. She can hear the water shifting restless against the rocks; she can hear a plane passing overhead, and distant laughter, and the steady cycle of Narancia’s breath, a promise without words. 

Something catches dully at the back of her mind. A promise—?

An unripe quince. A moldy bandage. A palm, opening. I’m going to protect you until the—

There’s a haze of longing in Narancia’s lovely eyes, but by the time he leans in and starts to close them the only thing that Trish can see is the ghost of a skinny boy who had died for her. Grief and horror rupture in her skull. She reels back. 

She chokes on a gasp and splays her hand over Narancia’s chest. 

“I can’t do this,” she blurts out.   

Almost immediately, Narancia lets go of her and takes a swift step back, his hands hovering at either side of her. The cold air hits her middle in the space he leaves behind.

“Okay,” he says first, in a rush. “That’s okay! That’s okay, Trish, it’s okay.” 

His mouth opens around nothing. A stillness stretches out between them.

He drops his hands to his sides, and meets her eye, and gives her a shaky, desperate sort of smile, like he’s trying to make up for a bad joke. 

“H-Hey, forget that, yeah?” he says almost laughingly, but Trish sees it for what it is: pressuring the wound, stemming the bloodflow. “Forget about it. Never happened. Here.”

He takes the jacket off again, clumsily, and throws it over her shoulders. 

“You’re still cold, right?” he says hurriedly. There’s no room for her to answer, but she doubts she could stomach it anyway. “You… you wanna head back in? ’S late.”

Trish’s heart throbs inside of her like an open wound. Narancia isn’t looking at her face, only the fringes of it—the empty air beside her cheek, where the sea must be. 

“You go ahead,” she says, bowing her head. “I’ll be in in a minute. Your shift’s over anyway—” 

“I’m serious,” Narancia insists just a syllable too early, his voice fraying. “I mean really, you can really forget it.” 

His smile is coming undone, like a thread being pulled too hard. The state of his face is painful to witness: his firm mouth and his crumpled eyebrows and his dark and shining eyes. 

Trish doesn’t want to forget it—she doesn’t—but saying so might split her in two. 

“Sure,” she whispers, with half a mind to put her hand on his arm. “Don’t worry about it. All right?”

Narancia nods a few times, gaze drifting. He takes a step back, like he’s about to bolt, and croaks, “Yeah.” He jabs his thumb over his shoulder, toward the glass door. “Yeah. I’m gonna… yeah.” 

He stands in place for just a moment longer, buffeted by the wind. Before the gust can run its course, he’s gone. She hears the door slide shut, and by the time she thinks to turn around the room on the other side is empty; by the time she realizes she’s still wearing his jacket, the last of the ships have come in to harbor. 

Whatever traces of Narancia’s body heat had clung gently to the inside of the jacket are gone. All that she has left now is her own, recycling itself in the empty spaces. 

For an instant, the only thing she wants to do is rip it off—send it out to sea, be rid of it. She fists her hands into the front, gritting her teeth. The nylon crinkles up between her fingers. 

It really is too big.

Slowly, she slips her arms through the sleeves, one and then the other. The cuffs almost cover her knuckles. Narancia’s arms never seem this long when she looks at them.

It still smells like him. She feels a little bad; no doubt it will have absorbed her perfume by the time she gives it back. Like Narancia’s really going to want Acqua di Gioia all over the collar of his jacket, pressed to his neck for a day or two before it evaporates. Maybe she should get it cleaned.

She breathes out, running her hands over her face. Heat lingers on her cheeks and neck, almost permanent. She curls her fingers at her hairline. 

A memory comes to her, unbidden, of her mother, drinking from a bottle of San Pellegrino on the patio, her brown hair loose and wild. What made you like him? Trish had asked, eleven and thoughtless, and her mother had snorted into the green rim and said, What kind of a question is that? I don’t know!

I don’t know, she’d said again after giving it some thought. Maybe it was just that he liked me first. Then, after the longest thought of all, He had a cute nose. And he listened.

Trish breathes out again, harder. Her fingers are stiff from the cold. She stuffs her hands into the jacket’s pockets, only to find them both jammed with what feel like wads of papers and wrappers. 

Annoyance pricks at her. She pulls out a fistful, leaning close to discern the contents in the dark—it looks like a bunch of receipts, crumpled and forgotten. She smooths one out, appalled. Giulia’s name and cell number are scrawled hastily on it in pencil. 

That’s right—she’d seen him take this out that first night in Milano, squinting at it on the sidewalk.  She rolls her eyes. Is he seriously keeping something as important as that in the same place as his trash? 

Well, she might as well do him the favor of tossing out whatever he doesn’t need. She goes back inside, dropping into an armchair and pulling out the straw wastebasket from under the desk. Once she’s cleaned out the candy wrappers she starts to thumb through the rest: restaurant receipts, mostly. A hotel check-in slip. A bus ticket.

The paper is worn down, folded in half, and most of the ink has rubbed off. She sinks back into the chair, holding it above her head with both hands. 28 May, 23:45. Three stations, one transfer: Metropark Centrale—Tiburtina—Lampugnano. Napoli to Milano. 

She softens, and flips it over. 

It takes her a second to register what’s written there. The names reach her first—Bucciarati & Abbacchio, Mista, Fugo, Giorno—followed by the numbers. The half-torn ticket is almost too small to fit them all, and Narancia’s handwriting shudders in places like he’d been writing in motion, but it fits them all the same. 

Giorno’s number is the longest, at eight digits. Mista’s has been scribbled out and rewritten. All of them are preceded by 081, the Napoli area code. 

She slaps it facedown onto the desk. Her heart pounds punishingly inside her, as if to fend off a curse, even as she leans back and stares at the wall. Eventually she sits forward, and hesitates, and picks it up again. 

Bucciarati & Abbacchio. Mista. Fugo. Giorno. 

So she hadn’t dreamed them, is her first thought, followed by: she’d never really imagined them as having phone numbers. It seems so ordinary. Giorno, who had snapped his arm in two on the jagged glass of an airplane window, has a landline. 

Her grip tightens until her thumb crushes the paper. Her heartbeat lessens into something heavier, sadder; too much weight to carry. Narancia had scratched out the last three digits of Fugo’s number, and written them again. 

She turns her head, haltingly, toward the door. Although it’s dark in the alcove, the light from the hall seeps in past the hinges. Periodically it will vanish for a moment as the guard outside paces by. Her suitcase is still flush against the wall, unopened, where Narancia had left it for her the day before. 

She looks back at the number.

“Pronto.” 

Time and age have done nothing to alter the cadence of Fugo’s voice. It’s still as Trish remembers, compensating for its natural tension with eloquence, each syllable evenly hemmed. Even five years ago she had noticed how Fugo’s diction stood out from the rest; undoubtedly the product of an expensive education, too many Sundays spent reciting vespers. Out of all of them, his Neapolitan accent had been the mildest.

It had taken him five rings to pick up. Trish had done nothing but sit there, letting the sound pass through her, barely even comprehending what it meant. 

“Hello?” he asks sharply, and Trish jumps like he’s just snapped his fingers in her face. 

She searches for the proper greeting and lands brilliantly on, “Hi.”

“Who is this?” 

“Trish,” she says, and then, inexplicably, “Una?” 

“Oh. You.” There’s no pause for recollection, no tears or pleasantries. “How did you even get this number? Did Narancia give it to you? That little—”

“He didn’t give it to me, I found it,” Trish interjects. She could swear her heart is nailed to her tongue, but she keeps her tone as weightless as she can, revealing nothing. “Listen to you. Same old Fugo.”

Fugo scoffs bitterly. “How would you know?”

So that hasn’t changed, either—he still lashes out fast. It should hurt, but it doesn’t. Her lips twitch, briefly, and that’s all. 

“Mm. I guess I wouldn’t,” she admits, and settles slowly back into the chair. “So. How have you been?”

What a stupid question. Scripted, instinctive. But maybe what’s more stupid is that she actually wouldn’t mind hearing the answer. 

“Let’s not kid ourselves. You don’t actually care.” 

Her lips twitch again. “Fugo—”

“Listen, I’m not especially interested in talking to you, so—”

“You hate me, don’t you?” Trish asks coolly before she knows she wants to, and this time, her lips stay still. 

It had never been a secret. Fugo had treated her with a calculated indifference from the start; not abrasive, exactly, but pointedly detached. She’d responded in kind. Maybe that alone had been enough to sow his dislike for her, but she can only imagine how it had grown. Fugo, after all, had been laughing and bleeding with his crew before she came; by the time she left again he was a traitor, surviving not by strength or bravery but selfishness. 

“No,” he says brusquely, and then his voice wavers, almost flustered, almost human. “No, of course I—I just don’t…”

“Don’t what?” Trish asks when he doesn’t continue. 

Fugo blows out a long, thin breath through his lips. It trembles more than Trish expects. She’d never known Fugo’s breath to tremble.  

“Understand,” he finally says, brokenly. 

It’s barely intact, like he’s holding it together with his bare hands. Trish has a feeling she already knows the answer, but still she bows her head and murmurs, “Understand what?”

Fugo is quiet again, restraining something. 

“It was barely a week,” he whispers, and Trish can’t help feeling as though he’s spoken those words many, many times, unheard. “Barely even a week, and it’s—God, it’s like we lost a sorella. Like you were one of us.” Then some tattered remnant of a laugh—the kind of sound that might have held resentment, once, but is now worn down to little more than empty air. “All these years, they—they talk about you all the time. Miss you. Wonder about you. Listen to your music. And I just don’t understand. You were just some girl—a job. When did that change?”

Trish doesn’t know what to say. What she wants to say is, I wish I knew. 

“Does it stick with you?” he demands. “At all?”

Trish coils the cord around her finger, and pretends not to know what he’s asking. 

“Does what stick with me?”

“Them,” Fugo says, hushed and broken. “What they did. What they did for you.” There’s a creak, as if from bedsprings. “I’d known them for years, and they chose a girl they’d known three days. And what did they get for it? Killed, just like I said they would. And when Giorno fixed that, what happened? She said she wants nothing to do with them.”

“You think it was wrong, then?” Trish asks, hating how her voice catches. It’s strange how something that she’s known for years can still cut so deep. “For me to leave?”

“No, I think you made exactly the right decision,” Fugo says, and exhales. “The same one I would have made.” 

Trish blinks, dumbstruck, and thinks of the skinny blond who had come back from Pompeii with a bleeding lip; the first of them to offer her his life, with a boyish arrogance that had sickened her, and the first—the only—to rescind it. All that she had thought when Giorno told her was, Good for him. Good for him.

“You too,” she tells him.

“What?”

“You’re the only one who didn’t—come with us. I just... want you to know I don’t blame you, or anything,” she says, and only when the words have settled in her lap does she realize how badly she’s always wanted to say them. “I’d have done the same thing.” 

His name had barely come up between Venezia and Roma, as though everyone had reached a tacit agreement to treat it like a curse. Trish had barely even known him, and so she hadn’t made the room to care, but she had seen how it wounded the rest of them, in silent, hidden ways. 

“You probably don’t want to hear that from me,” she goes on, “but I wanted to say it.” 

There’s no sound on Fugo’s end for a moment, and then he groans, quietly, like he’s just put down something heavy. Trish hears a thump as if he’s fallen back on something, a mattress maybe. 

“That’s the worst part of it, you know,” he says, almost defeated. “I understand you.”

They settle into a silence that isn’t exactly companionable, but Trish finds easy all the same. Through the window, she hears a foghorn, dull and distant. 

“Why are you calling me?” Fugo asks, and that is dull and distant, too. 

“I don’t know,” Trish says. “I don’t even know.” She glances at the paper again, at all of the numbers that would have been far more likely to pick up. “I wanted—someone who wouldn’t lie to me.” What she keeps inside is, You never lied to anybody. 

Fugo sighs, shifting around. “About what?”

“Nothing. Just... in general. I don’t know.”

“What are you worried people are lying to you about?”

“It’s not... other people, so much. It’s more—” She huffs. “It’s more—feeling like anybody else would… would try to make me happy. How’s that for stupid?”

“Pretty stupid,” he says bluntly. 

“Ha. Thanks.”

“What? You want honesty, you’ll get it.” He trails off, and when he speaks again it’s not quite as guarded. “He’s still with you, then? Narancia.”

“Obviously,” Trish says, more softly than she wants to. “What, you think I’d just dump him somewhere in Austria?” 

“Please. That’s the last thing we need. That whole mess in London was bad enough.” So Giorno told him. “I don’t know. Maybe I just wasn’t expecting it to last this long. This whole—thing of his. I thought he’d finally gotten over it.” Trish frowns, opening her mouth around a question she doesn’t even recognize, but she’s cut off by a sigh. “Sorry. Not important, not my business. So. What do you want me to not lie to you about?” 

Trish hesitates, courage waning. “It’s… going to sound stupid.” 

“I talk to Mista every day.” 

Hearing Mista’s name uttered so casually shocks a laugh out of her. She lifts her hand as if to cover her mouth and gets lost partway.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I guess I—” She shakes her head. “I guess… I wanted to know if you think people can change.” 

“If people can change,” Fugo repeats, deadpan, like it’s the most idiotic thing he’s ever heard.

“Fuck you, Fugo.” 

“You’re asking me if I think people can change.” 

“You know what I mean. If they can be more than,” Trish elaborates, halting, “than the things… they should have done. If they want to. If they try.”

To his credit, Fugo seems to give it thought. Trish hears nothing on the other line. Her heart is beating swift again, urging her to run, though she doesn’t know from what, or to where. It’s an old instinct, but she resists it. She won’t give herself the satisfaction. 

“Well,” Fugo finally says, with an implicit exasperated shrug, “I think you called me.” 

He presents it suggestively, as if gesturing at something obvious, some foregone conclusion that Trish hasn’t noticed. She frowns, with the phone at her ear, and thinks about the fences along the country roads of Calabria, mended every spring. 

“Don’t—don’t tell them,” she hears herself say, succumbing to her cowardice before she can even consider the alternative. “Please? Don’t tell them I—I mean—”

“I won’t. I wouldn’t,” Fugo assures her, very plainly, and she believes him. He pauses, considering something. “I’ll, what, take it to the grave and all that.”

Trish laughs grimly, even though she shouldn’t. “That’s not funny.” 

“No,” Fugo agrees, with the same laugh. “I guess it isn’t.” 

They both trail off then, neither feeling the inclination to say anything further. Trish doubts there’s anything left to say anyway, except—

“I should have called you,” she confesses. “About the funeral.” 

Fugo says, “Mm.” 

“I just—” She tries to think of something better, but nothing comes. “I couldn’t. I was—I couldn’t.”

Fugo says, quieter, “Mm.” 

Well, there it is. She wonders if he’s going to hang up on her. She wonders if she’s going to hang up on him. But the line stays open. 

“It’s easy to pretend the only person you’re hurting is yourself,” Fugo says, almost to himself, “but it never is.” Trish can nearly see him, then: halfway down the steps to San Giorgio Maggiore, angry and alone, refusing to move. “Good trick, though, isn’t it? For a while.”

Trish’s eyes wander to the bus ticket, still slightly crumpled on the desk. She thinks of Narancia in the backmost seat, transcribing numbers by the window long before dawn, leaving Campania far behind. 

“Yeah,” she agrees, and draws her knees up to her chest. “Pretty good.” 

Within the next few fragile hours, dawn will come to Dublin. She and Fugo stay on the phone a little longer, speaking quietly about nothing in particular—how she finds Milan, how he finds Passione. Trish is tired when she hangs up, so she lays down on the bed with all her clothes and Narancia’s jacket still on, and sleeps.

Chapter Text

We are all going forward. None of us are going back.

— Richard Siken, “Snow and Dirty Rain”

The first night in Sardegna, Trish stays awake until sunrise watching Spice Girl soften bullets. Sometime that afternoon Mista had been killing time by counting a pile on the table, and now Spice Girl is making careful work of them, fingertips sifting through the shells: touch, knead; touch, knead; until they’re as harmless as gum erasers. Whether it’s her absorption that keeps her going or Trish’s is hard to say. 

The others are all asleep. Abbacchio and Narancia are on one couch, and Bucciarati and Mista are on the other. Giorno is aloft, keeping watch. Trish hoards the solitude while she can, hugging her knees in the armchair. In her memory, an airplane catches fire, over and over again—as if remembering it enough will render it safe, old, ordinary. 

She takes stock of her body, scanning the spots of tension from her forehead to her heels. Her ankle has been sore for hours, and her mouth is dry, and since the sun went down she hasn’t been able to shake a dull whine from the back of her skull, growing more insistent as they travel inland. She’s tired, but not tired enough to sleep. She wonders if she’ll ever be tired enough for that again.

Her Stand is no good for these kinds of things. She can ease the shape of matter, but not fear. Not rage. Not pain. Just airplane seats and leather boots and the bullets on the table, one by one. 

“What do you keep doing that for?” Trish asks abruptly, sharp just for the sake of it—for the sake of feeling something, the angrier and more defiant the better. 

Spice Girl lifts her head up, her right hand hovering over the next bullet. In the room’s low light, her green eyes glow just as they had in the back corner of the plane: like two buoy lanterns on a dark sea, marking the depths. 

That face could be hers if the light were a little different. 

“Because you were asking me to, Trish,” she says. “Do you not hear your soul crying out as it does? For a softer world?” 

A week before Narancia’s classes start—after Trish has left Naples for good and the summer has started to die off in her absence—Bucciarati takes him out to sea. 

It’s a hot, furiously blue day, with a warm wind blowing in from the south, just the way Aerosmith likes it. Narancia, having spent the better part of the week before lying on his and Mista’s couch, dipping in and out of sleep, about as attentive to the world around him as a Vespa to a pigeon, is glad to be breathing in the wild air. 

Bucciarati guides the little boat over the whitecapped water with a practiced ease. He teaches Narancia a lot of words: port and starboard, mooring and mast; windward, leeward. Narancia spends the whole day laughing, salt-spray in his face and a kind of raw freedom in his lungs. 

At sundown Bucciarati steers the boat inland, following the gulls home, and Narancia rests his chin on the railing at the stern, watching the light above the horizon burn away into his favorite color: sweet, blazing orange. His neck is sunburned and his hair is in knots. It’s the most alive he’s felt since… well, since he’d woken up in Rome with the worst headache of his life. 

Abbacchio is waiting for them on the pier with a bottle of cheap wine under his arm and his hair in a ponytail. Narancia runs at him for a hug as he comes up the gangway, partly because he’s happy to see him and partly because he still hasn’t shaken the need to check and double-check that Abbacchio is really there, really breathing, really clicking his tongue and batting him away. He figures Abbacchio sees right through him but resigns himself to being hugged anyway and is just pretending to be annoyed about it. 

Narancia’s spent enough time around Abbacchio to know what things annoy him for real and what just annoys him for show.

They gather on the deck, leaning in a row against the starboard railing, and split the wine bottle—the three corpses, toasting their mess of a city, learning uncomfortably how to be alive in it again. It’s a white, which Bucciarati loves and Abbacchio hates and Narancia thinks tastes pretty much like any other wine. Once he’s gotten buzzed he pulls an apple from his pocket, slicing off the peel in slow ribbons with his switchblade. 

After the sun’s gone down and the bottle’s run dry, Bucciarati, the only brave man in Napule, starts to talk about Trish. 

“What about her?” Narancia mumbles around an apple slice. He’s trying for aloof, maybe a little annoyed, even though the way his gut twists like a wrung-out towel feels like it might betray him. 

“I’ve heard she’s well,” Bucciarati replies innocently. “Though I asked that Giorno send no further scouts to confirm this.” 

“That damn brat,” Abbacchio scoffs, turning around to slouch against the rail. “All he knows how to do with that pretty nose of his is stick it where it doesn’t belong.” 

“He is rather good at that, isn’t he,” Bucciarati says with a laugh—a laugh. He glances briefly at Narancia, who pretends not to notice. “I’ve also heard about your intentions for my house.”

Shit. 

Narancia snaps off the next corskscrewing strip of apple peel by accident. It drops into the bay with a sad little plunk. 

Who the hell snitched? Fugo? Probably. Fugo always snitches to Bucciarati. 

“You have my permission, by the way,” Bucciarati adds mildly. “Whenever it occurs to you to ask for it.” 

Narancia flushes, ashamed. He opens his mouth around an apology, but it feels pointless, so he just shuts his mouth again. 

“You got a color in mind?” Abbacchio asks. When Narancia whips his head back up in surprise, he finds him still lounging against the railing, eyes scanning the horizon. “For the walls.” 

Narancia chews on the answer for a moment, not sure if sharing it will blow whatever chances at dignity he has left. 

“Blue.” He clenches his jaw, digging his knife too deep into the apple. “Bucciarati, listen…” 

“Before her father sought her life,” Bucciarati says calmly over him, “Trish was just an ordinary girl. She lived an ordinary life, in an ordinary city, with her ordinary mother, with whom she shared an ordinary love. No matter what came to pass during our time together, she deserves to return to that place—on her own terms, and no one else’s.”

“I—” Narancia’s voice shrinks. With each word—all of them true, all of them right—his heart feels like it’s getting ripped up, seam by seam. “I-I know, but…” 

“Listen to me, Narancia,” Bucciarati goes on, gentler. “Our only duty now is to allow her to live. That is what we fought for from the very beginning. Not one of us betrayed the boss for glory, or money, or power. We did it for Trish. For the life that she deserved.” 

“I did it for you,” Abbacchio says. “She came later. But you’re right. She had a choice. She made it. There are worse things we could do than respect it.” 

It sounds so reasonable coming from them, but Narancia just can’t get it to take, and he doesn’t know how to tell them that. Trish hasn’t even been gone for a full season, and already her absence sticks in him like a sliver of glass in a heel. Every step he takes pushes it in deeper. 

He digs his knife under the next inch of the apple’s skin, chiseling it away. There are worse things, Aerosmith roars from the landing strip of his spine, but there are better things, too.

“But she wasn’t—” he blurts out, and flounders, because it seems so obvious. “Happy.” 

Bucciarati looks at him, tender the way the bruise is. “No.”

Narancia looks back, wordless, jaw tightening. He can’t figure out a way to make this Bucciarati match up with the one he knows: the Bucciarati who’s always right, and always just, and always strong. The Bucciarati who could have been king, if he’d wanted to. 

“‘Happy’ would’ve been a miracle for that kid,” Abbacchio says, bending down to set his empty wine glass on the deck beside his bare feet. “But what’s it matter? Not like Bucciarati’s ever been the type to push the envelope.” 

“The hell’s that mean?” Narancia snaps. “You saying he’s a coward?” 

“I’m saying maybe he’s wrong.” Abbacchio shrugs. His hair has grown a little longer since April, and now the night breeze is making a mess of it. “Maybe she is. Maybe you are. Only thing that’ll work that out is time.” 

Time. There’s sure a lot of that to go around all of a sudden. Narancia’s got more time than he knows what to do with. Time to go back to school, time to buy zucchini for dinner, and time to wait for Trish Una—whose name had meant nothing to him a handful of months ago—to decide if he’s worth remembering. 

“I don’t got time,” he mutters. “I don’t want it.”

“You’ve got all the time in the world, kid,” Abbacchio says, and he teaches over to ruffle Narancia’s hair. “Get used to it.”

“I’ve asked the others to swear it,” Bucciarati says as Narancia squirms away, “and now I’m asking you, Narancia. Could I trouble you to take one more order from me?” 

Narancia’s throat feels tight and hard, like there’s something stuck at the back of it. Not even three, four months ago he would have put a gun to his head if Bucciarati asked him to, but now he feels bruised and empty-handed, and like all he wants to do is cover his ears. 

His damn voice cracks when he tries to speak. “Bucciarati, I—”

“We don’t call on her, she calls on us.” The words are firm, unbending, but Narancia can’t help but notice that Bucciarati won’t look at him when he says them. “For the rest of this year. For the rest of our lives. Do you understand?” 

Narancia doesn’t understand. He doesn’t think he could understand even with all the time in the world to try, and it makes rage and pain swell up in his blood until he wants to kick something. 

Then again, he’s always been able to count on not being wanted, right? Might as well learn to lean into the punch. 

He’s starting to figure it out now. What he couldn’t have known in Venice—what he couldn’t have known, swimming after that little motorboat in the April dawn with sore arms and a sore voice and a sore, beat-up life to give—was that Trish’s wound would close and heal over, given time. She wasn’t made to bleed. She was made to live. 

But him… 

Finally, Bucciarati has the decency to look him in the eye—somehow revealing and hiding nothing, all at once.

“Are you angry?” he asks. 

He’s posed this brutally simple question before, when Narancia’s Stand had been raw and new, when he’d had nothing but anger to his name. It hadn’t been a gentle night like this then, and Narancia hadn’t lied to him then—not like he does now. 

“No.” He bends his thumb behind his finger, pressuring the wound, and starts counting to one hundred. “Whatever you say, Bucciarati.” 

Narancia is drying off his hair from maybe the longest Thinking Shower of his life when Giorno calls him on the hotel room phone. All he’s wearing when he shambles out of the bathroom to answer is a towel, and he hasn’t even been able to dredge up the focus to eat, like, dinner, but Giorno doesn’t need to know any of that.

“Is this a bad time?” Giorno asks him, which is his usual opener for phone calls. 

“Uh.” Half of Narancia wants to say that it’s one in the morning Dublin time and the other half wants to say that he’s still kind of working through how he got so close to kissing Trish again he can still feel the possibility of it on his mouth so could Giorno call back in like an hour, but one of those would be rude and the other would be just plain unnecessary, so he says, “Nah. What’s up?”

Giorno takes a second to reply. Narancia combs his damp hair back with one hand and flops down on one side of the queen bed. The mattress is way too soft; it doesn’t so much bounce against the impact of his head as sink away from it. He misses his twin bed in Napule, with the busted spring on the left-hand side and the old linen quilt from Signora Gargiuno that always smells like flour. 

“I’m not sure where to begin,” Giorno says. 

Narancia immediately forgets about missing his bed. He sits back up, frowning. 

“That sounds bad.” 

Giorno’s laugh is humorless. “I’ll try to be brief. Fugo and Sheila’s local investigation has been concluded. I also sent some associates to look into the attack in London. They’ve just informed me of what they learned.” 

He pauses to take a breath. Narancia wants to reach through the phone and shake the rest out of him, but he makes himself wait. 

“As you know,” Giorno goes on, “when I took over the organization, I took steps to ensure there would be no bad blood between the old guard and the new.” Narancia definitely remembers. Most of the old codgers who’d been in the gang for decades had come around well enough, but the young punks and drug lords had been harder to convince. “There was bound to be resistance. We knew that—Mista and I.” He says this softly, so softly that Narancia feels like he’s not meant to hear it. “But I believed that I could control it. Make peace with the detractors, and never fire first. It’s become clear now that my approach was insufficient. For that, I… I apologize.”

Narancia turns his cheek closer to the phone, exasperated. 

“C’mon, Giorno, you don’t gotta apologize to me. We all knew nobody was gonna take that shit lying down.” 

“Nonetheless, it is my responsibility—” 

“You got enough responsibility!” Narancia barks. “Just tell me what’s going down so I can help out, okay?” 

Giorno sighs, so heavy it crackles in the speaker. Narancia rests his elbows on his knees, thumping his bare foot against the carpet. 

“To put it plainly,” Giorno says, “Fugo and Sheila found that a faction of loyalists has quietly broken off from the organization and begun a plan to avenge the old boss. Their objectives are simple: assassinate those who were responsible for Diavolo’s death, and seize control of Passione. They will leave none of us alive.” 

It’s funny. Narancia feels like he’s spent years waiting for this call to come—this shoe to drop, this chain to tug—but it hits him like a punch to the kidneys. He misses his next breath, and the one after that. His hands go kind of numb. Giorno had gone above and beyond to cover everyone’s tracks from the outset; as far as Passione was concerned, Narancia had died in Rome with Bucciarati, just another noble casualty of the mutiny. Nobody had bothered him since. Maybe that could have been the end of it, but—day after day, year after year, a part of him had always known it wouldn’t be. 

So here he is again, with the same knife at his throat, but the very first thing that slams into his brain, before run, before fight, before live, is—

“Trish,” he says hoarsely. 

“I…” The shame in Giorno’s voice could crack bone. “Yes.” 

Narancia’s mind reels so fast that he doesn’t even realize he’s stood up until the towel starts to slip off his hips. Clumsily, he wedges the phone against his shoulder and cinches it again, or tries to, but his hands won’t quit shaking, fumbling with the knot. 

“Bucciarati and I have discussed the situation, and we believe that there is strength in numbers. I’ve gathered the others at a safehouse on the outskirts of Sorrento. You and Trish must meet us there at once—”

“No,” Narancia blurts out, and then he realizes what he’s saying. “I mean, Trish—she—the tour…” 

Giorno breathes out, slowly. “You still haven’t told her.” 

“Yeah, and I’m not plannin’ on it! Did you not hear me right the last time? She’s done with all this crap! We’re supposed to take care of it, Giorno! That was the deal! Bucciarati made us swear, didn’t he, and besides I—”

“You must know it’s no longer possible to—”

“I said I’d protect her,” Narancia says roughly, and Giorno’s voice falls off into silence. “So I will. I don’t care if I gotta die trying.” 

Coolly, quick as a knife, Giorno says, “You already did.” 

Narancia scoffs behind his teeth. Giorno can sure say that kind of stuff casually, for having no damn clue what it’s like—no damn clue how searingly aware of it Narancia really is, day in and day out. 

His blood is humming in his veins, on the verge of electrical overload. He has to do something. Move. He’s been through this routine before. Drop everything and run. 

“Then—then I’ll leave tonight,” he says, storming over to the dresser and yanking open the top drawer. “I’ll come. I’ll come back. We’ll fucking burn them down before they get a chance to move.” 

“Narancia, think rationally. Leaving Trish on her own—”

“Is the best thing my sorry ass can do for her,” Narancia cuts him off, slamming the drawer shut and tossing a fistful of shirts onto the bed. “It’s what I should’ve done from the start, damn it—”

“But you couldn’t.” 

“Yeah, what, you think that’s pathetic? Huh, Giorno?” Narancia crushes his fingers against the phone, resisting the instinct to throw it at the wall. “Go ahead, say it. I know. I know, okay?! You think it was—”

“I don’t know what it was,” Giorno says quietly. “I don’t think anyone does but you.” 

That shuts Narancia up quicker than anything else so far. He stands, panting, at the foot of the bed, face hot and hands cold. 

He’d called Trish from a payphone by the beach, on the way back from getting groceries, nursing his first sunburn of the season after a weekend of helping Giorno with some gardening. The sound of her song on the overhead speaker in the cereal aisle had stopped time around him, the same as always. She had been singing about orange peels and summer. And the need to tug at her solitary life in Milan had been so immense, right then, that he hadn’t been able to stand it anymore. Not because she’d sounded sad or hurt or lonely, but because she’d sounded—happy. 

What the hell does that say about him? 

“Narancia, are you still there?”

“Yeah, I’m—” Narancia groans, pressing the heel of his palm to one eye to drag his thoughts back into place. “Just gimme til Lisbon. Five days. We’ll be on the road for half. She just—we just—” He gestures lamely, thinking of Trish in his jacket and Trish an inch away from him on a hotel bed and Trish with an assassin’s blood in her hair, and of every tentative smile she’s given him, like the beauty of a long-healed scar, shimmering and soft at the edges. “I’m not gonna drop it on her now.”

“Don’t pretend you’re doing that for her sake,” Giorno says swiftly. It’s the closest he’s come to losing his temper and it’s still tight and measured, every syllable held in place. “The world has dropped many things on Trish Una, Narancia. She’s no stranger to it. What are you so afraid of?” 

Narancia’s not used to the truth coming to him as fast as this one does. It jumps into his mouth, belly-up and pitiful. He slumps his shoulders, staring at the riot of clothes on the bed. The bag he hasn’t packed. 

Running away from Trish sure comes easy, for all that work he’d done to get to her again. 

“Same shit as always, Giorno,” he says with a sad, hollow laugh. “That it’s gonna end.” 

The trip to Lisbon takes two days, all told. Miraculously, Trish sleeps for most of it, napping the afternoons away on the lower deck of the nightliner like her body’s making up for lost time. Her hours awake are spent with Giulia, going over the details of the concert at the Altice Arena: the sound specs, the stage layout, the exclusives for the merch table. Giulia wants 200 CDs signed before the dress rehearsal, and savagely ignores Trish’s protests about hand cramps. By the time they reach the Valverde Hotel, Trish can barely close her fingers around the car door handle. 

“I can fire you anytime I want, you know,” she mutters to Giulia as they head to the lobby, scowling at her through a pair of green Valentino sunglasses. “There are lots of other managers. Nicer ones.”

“Such big talk!” Giulia retorts. “Who plucked you out of your loneliness all those years ago, hm? Who talks to all those horrid record producers so you don’t have to? Who remembers every little detail of your salad orders?” She has her black curls piled up in her favorite red claw clip, and they spring around the crown of her head when she turns to address Narancia behind them. “You hear how she treats me, Narancino? Is it right that I endure such abuse?” 

Narancia shakes his head. He’s got an overnight bag under each armpit and the strap of his duffel bag slung across his forehead. 

Trish looks at him just a little too long. She’s glad their eyes don’t meet. 

She’d seen it clearest when she’d given back his jacket on the morning they’d left Dublin for the ferry, set in stark contrast against the dark circles under his eyes: guilt. He’s been trying his best to hide it; on the surface, he’s the same old Narancia, rowdy and dynamic and persistently willing to drop everything to watch her practice on her guitar while they ride along the unknown expressways. On the bus ride they’d even managed a few games of camicia, and an exchange of manicures, and a late-night Audrey Hepburn movie (How to Steal a Million, at Narancia’s insistence), without incident.

It’s when he thinks she isn’t looking that it surfaces—she’s caught him gazing dully at her from down the bus aisle in the early morning, or clenching his jaw as if to hold words back when it gets too quiet between them—although it never stays in her line of sight for long. 

She tries not to dwell on it. He’s the one who told her to forget it, after all. It would be the decent thing to take it at face value, and she’s trying her hand at decent things. 

She still hasn’t told him that about her late-night phone call to Fugo. To her credit, she’s come close once or twice—but the speaking part always eludes her, swallowed up by shame. It’s not like she has the right to act like she’s fixing something, especially not when it’s something she’d taken the liberty of breaking in the first place.

“You see?” Giulia asks triumphantly, smacking Trish’s room key into her chest on her way to snatch her bags from Narancia. “Conference call at 6:00 with Montalto. Dress rehearsal at 8:00 tomorrow morning. Sogni d’oro!” 

“Ugh,” Trish says to Narancia as they watch her go. She pushes her sunglasses up into her hair. “Golden dreams used to be so normal before I knew Giorno.” 

Narancia clears his throat awkwardly, like he knows he’s supposed to laugh but can’t quite get the sound to come out right.

Trish hides a wince. What’s she thinking, bringing up Giorno? 

“I can get my bag,” she tells him, feeling suddenly bad for making him carry it. 

Narancia hesitates for a second, but then rolls it to her by the handle. Her fingertips brush against the side of his hand when she takes it. Aerosmith’s energy snaps against her skin like a small static shock. 

She bites her lip and turns away to check her card for a room number. She’s on the fifth floor, and Narancia is on the fourth. 

“Mista would lose it,” she says with a hesitant smile. 

“Ha ha,” Narancia says halfheartedly. “Yeah.” 

They go to his room first so that he can drop off his bag. Giulia had shelled out for a regular room for him instead of making him stay at a cheaper nearby hotel. Trish doesn’t miss the way he falters in the doorway, like he finds having a queen-sized bed suspicious. 

He goes up to her room with her afterwards, but doesn’t come in to spend his shift watching TV or bugging her to play a song or two like he usually does. He just makes himself comfortable in the hallway, leaning against the opposite wall with a yawn. 

“Gimme a yell when you wanna go to that manager’s room,” he drawls, stretching his arms over his head until his shirt rides up. Trish glimpses a puckered patch of skin along his ribs—from Cioccolata?—and, much worse, the abs he apparently still has. “I’m on ’til midnight.”

Trish stares for a moment, near-bursting, at his face—skin golden in the dim light, eyelashes thick and dark—wanting to yell herself hoarse for an entirely different reason. 

“’Kay,” she says perkily, and shuts the door. 

The hush of the empty hotel room settles at her back. It smells clean, and floral, and totally unfamiliar. Her hand hangs on the doorknob. She stares at the emergency evacuation map affixed to the door: at the staircases and the supply closets, the hallways with the fire extinguishers, the red dot labeled VOCÊ ESTÁ AQUI. You are here. 

Aerosmith’s engine starts up outside. Narancia says something to it, too muffled for Trish to hear—but she closes her eyes and rests her forehead against the door, listening anyway. 

“Come here,” says Giulia, impatiently beckoning Trish over. “Let me see what they’ve done to that hair of yours.”

Trish turns away from the mirror, hands still poised at either side of her head. It’s nice and cool in the dressing room, air-conditioned to perfection. She’s been toying with her bangs for what feels like an hour, trying to hide her stupid huge forehead. The Portuguese stylist had blow-dried her hair into oblivion and then gone through it with styling gel. 

She walks over to Giulia, fussing with the ends. “I look like Winona Ryder.”

“I do not know who that is,” Giulia says bluntly. She swats Trish’s hands down. “Stop, I will save you. Hold still.” 

Trish does as she’s told, linking her hands behind her back and listening to the clock tick over the door. Of all the backstage rooms she’s killed time in this summer, this one is her favorite: small and private, with gray walls. It’s just her and Giulia in it, and up until a moment ago Giulia had been watching Un posto al sole on the little TV mounted behind the vanity. Trish can still hear Marina talking in the background, a familiar, peaceful kind of white noise. 

“Narancino will be staying backstage for this evening,” Giulia says. “He will escort you to the car when you are finished with dinner.” Trish is going out for bacalhau and cocktails with the band after the show, a thing that Giulia calls building connections. “They have given him this fancy earpiece, you should see him. That Signor Linhares cannot say a thing without sending him leaping out of his skin.” 

Trish stuffs down a laugh. An hour or so ago, on her way back from the sound check, she’d seen Narancia in the break room, rowdily arm-wrestling one of the older security guards, Tomás. Even in passing she had caught the flush on his face, the straining ligament down his inner forearm, and blushed her way miserably back to the dressing room. 

“Four more cities,” Giulia goes on. Her fake nails graze Trish’s forehead. “Spain, and that wretched France, and then at last we return to sweet Italia.” 

“Mm,” Trish agrees, not nearly prepared to acknowledge this fact. 

Quiet settles between them, companionable. Giulia fluffs out the sides of Trish’s hair as she has a hundred times—superfluous, really, but Trish has always found it soothing—and asks, calmly: “This is it for you, isn’t it?”

It’s like a sharp, sudden pinch. Panic leaps in Trish’s chest. Her eyes dart to Giulia’s face, expecting anger or disdain—but she’s met with the same cool expression Giulia has always worn like a pair of diamond earrings, timeless, immaculate. 

“What—” She’s already done for. “What are you talking about?” 

“What is this look of shock? Do you take me for an idiot?” Giulia arches one eyebrow. “What do I always tell you? Hm? What is it that I always tell you?” 

Warmth stutters in Trish’s chest, sudden and comprehending. She chuckles weakly despite herself. 

“Can’t fool Giulia,” she says.  

Giulia nods stoutly. “That’s right.” She leans slightly back, laying her hands on Trish’s upper arms as if to hold her in place. “Hmph. You see? Now you are perfect.” 

As she starts to draw away, Trish bites her lip and swiftly catches both of her hands. Giulia goes still, but her face doesn’t change.

It hits Trish all at once how absolutely beautiful she is, like a caryatid at dusk, built to last for centuries.

She wonders, achingly, what kind of house she’d grown up in, and if she misses it. 

She almost blurts it out, right there, easy as anything: I love you. I had a Stand once. 

“Giulia.” She laughs again, or maybe it isn’t a laugh but something much more helpless. “I’m—”

“Don’t you dare apologize to me. I am paid too well for that.” 

“I won’t. I just—” She’s no good at this. Never has been. “I want to tell you why. I mean, I want us to talk about it. Can we?”

Giulia looks, for a moment, like she’s just going to tease her again—but then something at the corners of her eyes softens, and she smiles.

“Tomorrow night, over drinks,” she says, and loosens her hands from Trish’s grasp to pat both of her cheeks. “But right now, you sing.”

The lights of Altice Arena are a bright, blinding pink. Trish feels incandescent under them, slinging the worn-in strap of her daphne blue Hagstrom over one shoulder—eyes scanning the crowd, which seems more alive and infinite than any crowd she’s ever seen, collected under the roof of this enormous place because she had written words, once, and they had heard them, and remembered them. 

“Nós te amanos, Trish!” 

“Tu és linda!” 

“Canta ‘Limoncello!’”

One of her Portuguese bandmates shouts something back. She catches a sign in the front row, handwritten. Your songs saved my life. 

It almost makes her laugh. She wants to tell the shivering girl in Venezia that this will come, someday—all this and living, too. 

“Hello, Lisbon! Buonasera!” she calls out to the sea of faces, and beams as wide as she can, as wide as she wants. “I’m Trish! Thank you for having me! This is a song about—” 

It’s like a little window gets cracked inside her, and a strip of light comes in—rewriting the dark places.

“This is a song about the ocean,” she says into the microphone, “and about a man I knew called Bruno.”

The carpet of the limousine that picks Trish up from the restaurant is blue. This is the second thing she notices, after Narancia.

“You did ‘Aeroplano di carta,’” he says, grinning.

Trish grins back, dropping into the open spot next to him. She tosses her purse onto the opposite seat as the car pulls back onto the street. 

Just for you, she wants to say, but instead she says loftily, “I knew you’d just keep whining if I didn’t.” 

“Hah?! Who’s whining?” 

Trish snorts and settles back into the seat, graceless but at ease. Narancia readjusts himself, pressing his knees together to give her more space to sprawl.

She can’t seem to unstick the smile from her face. At dinner, she had managed to ditch the broad-shouldered night bodyguard Giulia had hired to shadow her—and she can still taste cinnamon and Beirão, spiced and warm on her tongue. There’s a dreamy pop song playing on the radio, and Narancia is wearing the same orange windbreaker he had loaned her in Dublin, and she’s stupidly, guiltlessly glad to see him.

He smells like wind and, faintly, like her: the traces of Acqua di Gioia on his jacket collar, still. 

“Don’t laugh at me,” she says in a rush, “but right now, I’m really happy.”

Narancia turns his head. His eyes are wide. Trish can’t quite put a name to the emotion that catches in them—which is strange; after all, he’s never been very hard to read—but it pulls at something inside of her, something that wants very badly to touch the back of his hand with her fingers, weightless, out of sight. She slips them under her thighs instead, pinning them to the seat, and bows her blushing face over her lap. 

“Sorry for everything I keep putting you through,” she says softly. “I know it’s a pain. The schedule and the rules. I guess that’s what I’m paying you for.”

Narancia is quiet for a moment, then looks away again, almost shy. From the corner of her eye Trish can see his hands fidgeting between his knees, odd-jointed, perfect. 

Just as softly, he says, “I woulda done it for free.”

Trish stares at the blue, blue carpet: alive and a little buzzed and delicately happy. The lights of the street drift across the empty space between them with the steady rhythm of a beating heart.

She feels, sometimes, like her life since the spring her father had tried to kill her has been nothing but turning points: a litany of seismic events through which her best strategy has been learning when to dig her heels in and when to crawl under a table. But this feels different, somehow—less like the walls are shaking and more like a wave is rushing in, clear and warm and bright. 

She lifts her head to look at Narancia, and opens her mouth to tell him something vital and true: that she wishes she had never run away from him. That all she’d had to give him, for the longest time, were songs, but she wants to give him more—for the first time in her life, she wants to give. That she can’t wait to go home with him. 

That she likes his jacket. 

She is about to tell him all of these things, and maybe ten or twenty more, when she notices the black car in the rear view mirror.

And she can’t explain why, because it’s an ordinary car, and the street is full of them—but some raw, long-dormant instinct that lives between her ribs tells her to see it. To watch it.

To be afraid. 

“I think,” she says, even as her mind begs her to ignore it, “someone’s following us.”

Narancia goes quiet. His eyes sharpen. He twists around in his seat, leaning back to keep to the edge of the window, out of sight. 

He calls Aerosmith in a whisper, Stand energy writhing red in the air around him. Through the roof of the car, the roaring turbines amount to little more than a hum. 

“Four guys,” he mutters. “How long?” 

“I don’t know. Since we left the stadium, I think.” 

Narancia sits forward, smacking the driver’s seat with the back of his hand. “Yo, Fabrizio. Pull a left up here, will ya? Some freak’s on our tail.” 

Fabrizio takes a left. The car follows. He drives for two more blocks and goes right. The car follows. 

Trish’s eyes are fixed on its reflection, unblinking. She holds her breath between her teeth.

Fabrizio goes right again, and then again. He takes a left back onto the main road, and the car takes a right. 

Trish’s pulse is thunderous. She collapses back against the seat and exhales. Narancia slumps, too, his fist coming undone in the space next to her leg.

Aerosmith monitors the street for the rest of the way back to the hotel, landing swiftly on Narancia’s outstretched arm like a hawk when they get out of the car in the porte-cochère. There’s a decent crowd of people milling around in spite of the late hour, guests and hotel staff alike. Trish feels too large among them, bright neon, like her heart is beating too loud. 

“Hey, Trish,” Narancia says roughly, and pushes his hair back with one hand, clearly on edge. “Listen, can we go up to the room? There’s something I gotta—I mean, something I wanna talk to you about, or, tell you… or—”

That instinct prickles under Trish’s skin again, sharp and sudden. She whips up her head and catches movement past Narancia’s shoulder. Two men are walking swiftly down the street. Right towards them. 

She tries to force her pulse back into time. There’s no reason to think it’s anything unusual—they could just be fans, or… 

Or… 

Narancia frowns at her, then cranes his neck to follow her line of sight—and his whole body stiffens up like that of a cornered animal. 

“Shit,” he hisses. “Shit, shit. Okay—”

He takes a quick step back, looking down the street. Freezes. Trish whirls around. Her blood runs cold. There are two more men approaching them from the other end of the sidewalk. 

“No,” she says. 

“Inside!” Narancia shouts, and hauls her by the sleeve toward the hotel. Trish rushes after him, follows him toward the narrow alleyway on the right side of the building—he sprints for the service entrance, ripping open the door. 

They’re in a plain linoleum hallway. Down at one end is a door to the stairs. Down at the other are the entrances to the lobby and kitchen. Trish scans the walls as if in slow motion before alighting on an unmarked door. 

There, an unknown voice roars between her ears.  

“There,” she says, and both she and Narancia run for it. 

It’s pitch black inside. Trish blinks rapidly, and once her eyes adjust she realizes it’s a cleaning supply closet. There’s a loud clatter behind her—Narancia bolting the door. Already Trish feels a hysterical, horrified laugh writhing in her chest. What good is a lock going to do? What if they have Stands? What if they—

“Behind that door!” a voice shouts in Italian from the other side. “I saw her go in!” 

Then a cluster of loud clicks. Guns cocking. 

In half a second Narancia gets her up against the wall, shields her with his body. And in Trish’s ears, the blood is roaring, roaring. 

Guns go off. She doesn’t know how many shots. A lot. The sound is terrible, shattering. They’ll blast right through the door, she knows, and into the wall, and into her face, and into Narancia’s back, Narancia’s skull. Not here. Not like this. Don’t come through, she thinks, wrenching her eyes shut as if that will save her; stop, stop, don’t come through. Stop stop stop stop—

The bullets hit the door. 

The door doesn’t break. 

Trish’s eyes snap open in time to see a length of the wood stretch around the first bullet an inch or less from Narancia’s cheek like a wad of gum. Three more follow in quick succession, until the door seems almost to have fingers, straining into the narrow dark. Narancia watches one pass his temple, wide-eyed, recoiling by a fraction. 

“Wh-What the hell is this?” one of the voices barks. “The door—is it rubber?”

“No way,” Narancia breathes. “No way.”

I made the door softer, Trish, a voice says, like the tide into a sea cave, dark and deep, eroding. Please give me orders.

Trish forgets how to stand. The next thing she knows she’s fallen to the ground, slumped against the wall, like all the air’s been kicked out of her. 

“I-I don’t understand,” she chokes out aloud, because she’s there again; she’s there, just like that, an echo, a fist, a memory. “All this time, you—you left me—why now, why—”

You wanted to live, Spice Girl says, so I came.

Trish’s body jerks around a sound that might be a sob. Narancia reels around just in time to see Spice Girl appear before them, shimmering into existence: still pink, still plain, still beautiful. 

Trish can’t look anymore. She lets her head fall forward, staring blankly at the linoleum floor. 

“No way,” Narancia says again, breathless. “Spice Girl? But you’re—”

“I am here,” Spice Girl tells him, “and will remain. Move aside from the door, please.” 

“Huh? What are you going to do? Is Trish—”

“Questions waste time. I will protect you.” 

“But—”

And maybe Spice Girl has never sounded so human, nor so gentle, as she does when she says quietly, “Narancia. Please move aside.” 

Narancia is silent, considering, for only a moment. 

“Okay,” he says. “You got it. Aero and I’ll cover you.” 

Spice Girl’s thoughts rush into Trish’s skull, soft but still commanding: Trish, stand up.

Trish thinks, I can’t. I can’t.

You can. Do you really need to be told something so simple? 

“I can’t,” Trish chokes out. 

You can, her Stand whispers. You have done it before.

Trish’s breath burns in her throat. The bullets in the door spring back, and on the other side she hears screams, the thud of bodies hitting the floor.

“I have eliminated two,” Spice Girl says. “One remains.”

“He’s not running,” Narancia growls. Trish lifts her head. Aerosmith’s radar hovers in front of his eye, glowing faintly green. “I’m gonna shoot the shit out of him with Aerosmith. Just—”

“I do not advise this course of action,” Spice Girl replies, floating alertly beside him. “The exit is twenty meters away. You should retreat.”

“Like hell!” Narancia shouts, but something on Spice Girl’s face must make him falter, because when he speaks again, it’s quieter, more desperate. “If we can’t fight, what can we do? He’s definitely got the jump on us if we come out.”

“Please leave it to me,” Spice Girl says.  

Narancia clicks his tongue, loudly—but he doesn’t argue. He flexes one set of fingers at his side, close enough for Trish to see the slim uneven bones, the knuckles, the sinew. 

“What d’you need me to do?” he asks. 

“Help her to stand,” says Spice Girl. 

A hand closes itself around her wrist, firm, unyielding. Trish tries to see straight—she tries. But everything is so loud. Not knowing what else to do, she shakes her head, pulls weakly away. 

Stand up, Trish. Trish. Stand up. Narancia is warm this close, horrifically alive. When Trish opens her eyes, they meet his in an instant. Have they always been so purple? Had Gold Experience Requiem gotten it wrong? Were they ever purple at all? 

“Trish, come on,” he’s practically begging her. “I’ve got you, come on!” 

It sickens her to draw another breath, but she manages—all she ever really does, she thinks, almost laughing, is manage—and in one motion she pulls herself up on Narancia’s arm, stumbling into his side when he wrenches open the door.

She doesn’t know where they’re going, only that she needs to move. So she moves. She and Narancia sprint down the rest of the hallway, through a heavy door, up three flights of stairs. Trish recognizes sodium light, concrete. Night air. The roof of the garage. 

Her mind reunites, then, with her body, and it senses the sweaty grip of Narancia’s hand in hers and the whir of Aerosmith’s propeller behind her. She hadn’t known that she could run this fast. Maybe she ought to be impressed.

“There!” Narancia pulls her forward, and she clumsily follows. He stops in front of a sleek black motorcycle that’s parked near one of the corners. “Trish—sorry. I’m gonna need both hands, okay?”

Trish doesn’t fight it when he lets go. Shivering with adrenaline, she watches him squat down next to the bike and reach swiftly for some part of it she doesn’t recognize. After a moment she sees wires. Narancia mutters to himself, and curses, and slams the side of his fist onto the seat, and curses again, louder.

“Footsteps,” Spice Girl says, floating watchfully at Trish’s side.

“I know, I know!” Narancia shouts. “Shit. Shit! Come on, you piece of—”

The engine roars to life so loudly that Trish’s heart almost jolts out of her. Her hands fly to her ears. Narancia stands, turns to her, reaches out with an open hand. His mouth is moving. His eyes are fierce and imploring. She can’t understand him. She can’t—

A force at her back pushes her forward. Spice Girl. She finds her jaw steeled, her hands steadied. She brushes past Narancia and takes a seat on the back of the motorcycle. 

If he feels any pride for her then, she doesn’t have the time to see it. He rushes after her, grips the handlebars, and swings his leg over the side. When they take off, Trish is already holding onto him. 

The bike tears out of the garage and down the main street, darting past the cars so fast that they blur. Narancia drives it expertly, weaving through the scattered midnight traffic, slowing down for nothing. Before Trish knows it they’re on a bridge, passing signs for Alcochete and Montijo. On either side of them is the black expanse of the Tagus. 

“Did we lose ’em?!” Narancia shouts over his shoulder. 

Trish turns, trying to see behind them as the wind whips her hair across her face. They’re definitely going to die if they crash; neither of them has a helmet.  

“No!” she shouts back. “There’s a car!” 

A plateless black sedan is gaining on them with its high beams on. Trish’s vision is sharp, crystallized. Despite the glare she sees someone lean out the passenger window with a gun and aim it. 

“Put your head down!” she shrieks.

Narancia reacts a second too late. The second bullet misses him, but the first grazes his temple; blood mists into Trish’s face. He cries out, more out of shock than pain, and jerks against her, but he doesn’t lose control of the motorcycle. 

“Are you all right?!” 

“Fine!” he says, and rises slightly. “Shit, I can’t aim Aerosmith like this!” 

Trish’s heart slams into her teeth. She screws her eyes shut and screams against Narancia’s back, “Spice Girl!”

Spice Girl glints into existence beside her, a flash of pink in her peripheral vision. “Your orders?”

“Attack them or something! Protect us!”

“I cannot. The target is out of my range.” 

Range? She’s talking about range at a time like this? Trish could smack her. Her mind scrambles like a trapped animal, clawing for purchase—and then clears. 

“Narancia! Slow down!” 

Narancia twists around, incredulous. “Hah?!” 

“Just trust me! Do it!”

Narancia doesn’t second-guess her again. He pulls on the brakes without another word. Within three seconds the car is upon them, close enough that she can see the highway lights reflected on the bumper. In her arms, Narancia’s body tenses. 

Now or never. This or nothing. She screws her eyes shut right and screams, “Make their tires softer!” 

Understood, answers Spice Girl, and a moment later she unleashes a flurry of blows on each wheel, one by one. The effect is instantaneous. From inside the car somebody shouts, and Trish cranes her neck over her shoulder just in time to see it swerve horribly, and flip over, and smash into the barrier. 

Narancia whoops in front of her, pumping his fist, and accelerates again. They streak ahead into the night, leaving the wreckage far, far behind. Trish remains frozen in place, staring at the space behind them, long after the car has disappeared from view. 

Eventually Spice Girl tells her, Target has left my range.

Trish croaks, “Are they dead?”

Yes. 

Trish turns back around, her face wind-stung, her mouth dry. In the air is the sweet smell of summer, and the sky overhead is clear, littered with stars so bright she could mistake them for small shards of glass. She can see blood running down the side of Narancia’s face and into his hair, dark and glistening. 

“You’re bleeding,” she says faintly, but she doesn’t think he hears her.

No enemies remain, Trish, Spice Girl promises her. You will not be harmed. Not tonight.

Trish’s next breath comes out of her with a sharp, sudden lurch. Her body seizes up around it like it’s collapsing in on itself. She thinks for a second that she might lose her grip, just let her arms go limp around Narancia’s middle and hit the asphalt back-first, but she doesn’t. Something keeps her holding on. 

“You hurt or anything?” Narancia asks, his voice faded and half-real. “Hey, say something.” 

Another of those wretched breaths comes, all but tearing her in half. She collapses forward, burying her face between Narancia’s shoulder blades, sick and elated and empty and alive, and full of anguish, and full of rage. It all wells up inside her at once, and froths over, and the next thing she knows she’s broken down into sudden, shattering sobs. 

She has never cried like this in her life: wet and frantic, one heaving breath short of puking. She’s glad that Narancia’s jacket smothers the sound and the sight, even if she knows there’s no way he doesn’t feel her falling apart against his back, tremor by tremor. She can’t stop it. It’s eating her alive. Every now and then she gives up on the crying and just screams. 

Narancia doesn’t try to get a look at her, and he doesn’t try to stop the bike; and he doesn’t say a thing except hold on, hold on, like a mantra, in a low voice that hums through his chest. Everything breaks off from her perception but those subtle vibrations, reviving themselves against her fingers. 

She cries for her mother, dancing in the kitchen in summer, remembering a young boy’s freckled nose. She cries for Abbacchio, laid to rest among the rock-roses with a hole in his chest. She cries for Bucciarati, and his slow and unwitnessed decay, and his noble, tragic pain. She cries for Narancia, curled up on the ground of an ancient place with his hair in his face just like it had always been. She cries for herself, and for all the death and harm she sows, and for all the wounds still open. She cries until she’s forgotten how. 

Narancia rides for what must be hours, until the city is far behind them. Eventually, hollowed-out and half-awake, Trish feels the bike begin to decelerate. A moment later there’s the crackle of dirt under the tires. The engine idles for a moment, and then cuts out. 

She lifts her head, eyes nearly swollen shut, to see that they’ve pulled up to the pump of a deserted gas station. There’s a tiny convenience store off to the side that looks to be open, and a neglected-looking pay phone a few meters from the entrance. Dawn hasn’t yet breached the distant hills, but the palest light has started to gather on the fringes of the sky, and the whole world is silent except for the tiny movements in the grass of mice and waking birds. She has no idea where they are.

She dismounts first, purely reflexive. Her legs are stiff; both of her knees pop at the same time. Narancia clambers off after her, cracking his neck. 

He doesn’t ask her if she’s all right, but his eyes do. She manages a single nod. 

“I’m gonna go in and pay for the gas,” he mutters, almost expressionless—going through the motions in a way that eases her, somehow. “You got any cash?” 

“No. My bag—” 

That’s right. She’d dropped it back in the storage closet, hadn’t she? 

“’S fine, I have enough.” He starts to walk toward the storefront, summoning Aerosmith as he goes. “Aerosmith’ll keep an eye out for—”

“Narancia—” Her phone had been in her bag, too. “I need to use the pay phone.” 

He turns, frowning dimly. “Huh? What for?”  

Trish bites her lip, curling her fingers into fists at her sides. “Giulia.” 

Narancia’s shoulders slump, exhaustion and recognition weighing them down at once. “Fuck. Right. Um…” He fishes around in his jacket pocket and produces a fistful of loose change. “Here, uh… this should work.” 

When Trish doesn’t think to react, he slips his hand around hers and lifts it up, dropping the coins into her open palm. She stares down at them, dumbfounded by the contact. 

His hands are cold. Hers, too. 

“What’re you gonna tell her?” he asks, his voice low and his neck bent close, enough that Trish can imagine that they’re running off together for a different reason—something simple, tender. She breathes out, hard, not quite a laugh and not quite a sob, not quite much of anything. 

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I don’t think I can lie.” 

“Yeah,” Narancia says quietly, nodding. His hair is all blown back from his forehead, and the skin shines in the neon light. “Yeah.” 

He breaks off, then, and Trish starts to cross the cement alone. The air smells of exhaust and octane, and the sky overhead is growing lighter still, a dull glassy blue now. A few steps from the phone she notices the sound of an approaching car, and suddenly she’s wide awake again, ready to duck whatever hail of bullets will come, ready to scream—but it just passes the station without slowing down and disappears down the highway. 

Relief washes through her so thickly that it almost feels like nausea. Then it does feel like nausea. 

She doubles over and throws up in the grass. 

You’ll be hungry now, Spice Girl informs her. That was two meals.

Trish wipes her burning nose with her knuckles. Next, she wipes her mouth, and pants a few times, and sniffles a few more. Finally she smooths her skirt out with one hand and hobbles the rest of the way to the pay phone. 

Her hands won’t stop shaking, so she drops the coins the first couple of times she tries to slot them in. Her finger freezes over the blue keypad. She can’t remember Giulia’s number. 

Her hands start shaking harder. What was the first digit again? Was it a 5? 

“Here,” Spice Girl says, sparkling into being beside her. Trish stares up at her in shock, still cradling the handset. “I remember.” 

She dials the number methodically, no pauses, and then slips back into Trish again without another word. Trish can barely react at all before someone picks up, half a ring in. 

“Hello?!” It’s Giulia. She sounds livid. “Unknown number, eh? What are you, a kidnapper? You listen to me, motherfucker, if you try to harm Trish Una in any way I will find you before the day is out and I will break your kneecaps with a sledgehammer, do you understand me, so help me I will personally cut off your—”

“Giulia, it’s me,” Trish blurts out, much more brokenly than she wants to.

Giulia falls silent in an instant. 

“What have they done to you?” she asks, with the slightest tremor in her voice. “Do they want a ransom?”

“I’m fine.” She feels like she’s going to be sick again the moment she says it, but at least she can trust Giulia not to believe her. “No one—we ran.” She closes her eyes. “Listen. I can’t come back, all right? I have to—there’s something—” So many ways for the truth to begin, and she can’t seem to find one that fits. “There’s something I never told you. So I’m going to tell you. And I don’t have a lot of time, but I—”

It feels as if there’s a splinter stuck in her throat, refusing to budge. Her body riots against it, but she forces the feeling back. She can scream later. She can cry later. Right now the only thing she ought to do is speak.  

“My father—was a man called Don Diavolo. He was the boss of Passione. Five years ago he tried to kill me, even though I’d never met him. But some of his soldiers betrayed him to protect me, and… and we killed him first. After that, I left.” 

It makes it all sound so compact, so meaningless, like the summary of a bad movie. She pauses to draw a breath. 

“This whole time I’ve been ru-running away,” she stammers. “I thought it was over, I thought I was—free. But it’s not. I’m not. So I—I think I have to run again, I’m—I’m sure they want to kill me. I have to go. I don’t know when I’ll be finished. Maybe never.” 

Giulia’s silence is completely opaque. Trish can’t even hear her breathing. She stands in place, thumbing nervously at the corner of the phone box, and listens to the solitary cars drift by on the highway. 

“Did you hear me?” she asks when she can’t take it anymore. 

“I heard you,” says Giulia evenly. “I liked it better when you told me you liked the color blue.” 

Trish stares at the pavement. She doesn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it certainly hadn’t been that. 

“Well, that’s that, then,” Giulia says, like she’s talking about a disappointing chart performance. “So these dead men at the hotel—”

“Yeah.” 

“And this traffic accident on Vasco da Gama on the television—”

“Yes.”

Giulia blows out a breath. “How did you get away?” 

Trish’s eyes rise to look through the window of the store. Narancia is still inside, gesturing emphatically at the cashier—no doubt trying valiantly to compensate for the fact that he doesn’t speak Portuguese. His hands can move so fast, when he wants them to.

“Narancia was with me,” she hears herself say. “He… he hot-wired a motorcycle.” 

“That boy,” Giulia says, with a fierce and quiet pride. “Oh, Narancino. I should give him a raise.” 

Trish swallows, or tries to. It doesn’t go down easy. It barely goes down at all. 

“He was one of them,” she says. “Back then, in Passione. That’s how we—” 

“Of course he was,” Giulia replies, unperturbed. “He is a poor liar, you know. No better than you.”

Trish can’t find it in herself to be taken aback. The only thing she feels right then is a dull, offhanded gratitude.  

“Do you need a car?” Giulia’s tone is keen and even. “I can get you a car, I’ll call my friend Nina in Bilbao. Go to Bilbao.” She gives Trish an address, three times. “She will not mind. Don’t worry about the tour, I will take care of it. We will say you have the flu, yes? Refund the tickets, bribe a doctor. It will be a loss but life is full of those.”

Then she pauses. Trish has never in her life known Giulia to pause for anything. 

“We both know that, don’t we?” she asks, gently. 

Trish shuts her eyes tight, aching. She holds the phone closer, as close as it will come. 

“I will see you again, cara mia,” Giulia tells her, and Trish almost believes her. “Count on it. Until then, you do not need to be brave, and you do not need to be strong, and you do not even need to be good. You need only to keep going. Understand?”

Trish’s grip tightens around the phone. A great swell of emotion goes through her, matched in clarity and warmth only by the memory of a woman in a wine tent in Catanzaro, who had smelled of cigarillos and said what she meant—who had taken one look at her and known, without judgment or interrogation, that she needed a place to run to. 

“Yes, Giulia,” she answers, very wobbly.

“Don’t cry, now. It ages your face.” 

“Yes, Giulia.” 

“Sing when you can. It’s good practice.”

“Yes, Giulia.” 

“And eight hours of sleep, like I’ve told you—”

Trish laughs thinly. “I don’t think I’ll be sleeping.” 

Giulia goes quiet, and sighs. “No,” she replies. “I suppose not.” 

There’s nothing more for either of them to say, although Trish wishes more than anything that there could be, that she could have all the time in the world to imagine it. 

“I’ll be fine,” she whispers. “Really.” 

“You are lying to me,” Giulia says softly, without reproach. “Ciao.” 

She waits for Trish to hang up first. The phone hangs askew in the cradle, and Trish keeps holding onto the handset just a little longer than she needs to. 

She’s leaning against the side of the motorcycle by the time Narancia emerges from the convenience store. There’s a piece of gauze taped somewhat shoddily to his temple. He has two plastic bags in one hand and a canned energy drink in the other. 

“Here,” he says, and tosses it to her. She catches it in both hands. “You tell her?” 

Trish nods, pulling at the tab. The drink tastes awful, like what she’d expect if she were to lick a battery. Narancia produces another can from the bag for himself, and as he joins her next to the bike and drains the contents she tells him about the car waiting for them in Bilbao. 

“Okay. Bilbao,” he says, clearly having no clue where it is. He pulls a fold-out road map out of the bag, too, and has her hold it open on one side. “I guess that’s on the way if we go up.” He traces the route with his finger, northeast.

“That’s almost 900 kilometers,” Trish mutters, kneading at the bridge of her nose. The caffeine is starting to hit her, dull and urgent. “It’ll take hours.” 

“I’ll be fine,” Narancia mutters, and folds the map back up unevenly before stuffing it into his back pocket. “C’mon. We gotta keep moving.”

Before they reach Bilbao the next evening they stop twice at gas stations to refill the tank and force themselves awake with bad coffee, and for the whole nine-hour trip Narancia is conspicuously quiet. It isn’t in Trish’s nature to disturb those kinds of silences, but between the sleep deprivation and the strange, surreal process of relearning her Stand she doubts she could even if she wanted to. Spain is a wild, mountainous country, swaths of farmland disrupted occasionally by old cities, and Trish takes in the arcadian sprawl of Castile-Léon through glazed eyes, her cheek resting against Narancia’s back and her hair too tangled to salvage. 

The caffeine and the adrenaline had lasted her for the trip, but by the time they reach the address in Santutxu there’s a thick, almost burning hunger gnawing at her insides. Narancia must be even worse off than she is—she doesn’t think he’s had the chance to eat since lunch in Lisbon the day before—but he doesn’t get dizzy disembarking from the bike like she does. It’s only because Spice Girl appears to catch her elbow that she manages not to tip over. 

The car presumably belonging to Giulia’s friend is white and ordinary; Narancia identifies it as a 1995 Volkswagen Golf. The keys are taped to the underside of the hood. The inside smells like clove cigarettes. There’s a cornicello charm hanging from the rear view mirror.

“I’ll drive first shift,” Narancia says after they ditch the motorcycle a block away. There are dark bags under his eyes, but Trish knows he won’t fall asleep—she recognizes this vigilance, scraped-down and honed to a point. “Uh, hey, Trish, can you drive?”

“Barely.” She’d tried, once, but aside from being what Giulia called paroxysmally bad at it she’d also quickly become too famous to need it. “I know the gas and the brake.”

“Well, ’s more than I knew when Bucciarati put me on getaway,” Narancia says with a half-shrug. Trish honestly can’t tell if he’s trying to be funny or not. “You ready?” 

That’s it. No condolences, no platitudes. Typical Narancia. Typical Team Bucciarati. 

Trish clicks her tongue quietly, opens the passenger door, and says, “As if I have a choice.”

She guesses Narancia doesn’t have a choice either. But there’s no way, now, to take it back. 

“I gotta tell you something,” Narancia says, in a hoarse, broken voice, an hour out of Bilbao. “Don’t be mad.” 

Trish jolts slightly, mouth dry. She’d been hovering on the edge of sleep for a while, and the sound of Narancia’s voice had yanked her out of it.

Restlessly, she flexes her hands. “What?”

Narancia slumps back in the driver’s seat. His whole body is tensed up, as if to hold in the words he’s about to release into the dark, silent car. 

“That guy,” he says, and swallows. “Back in—what—London. He was ex-Passione. I… talked to Giorno after, and he said he thought…” He licks his lips. “In Dublin, he—called me. There’s some people who… who wanna avenge Diavolo. They want us dead. They’ve probably—I mean, this whole time…”

Ahead of them, the highway curves. Narancia turns the wheel. 

“I—” He swallows, eyes flitting down for just a second. “I didn’t wanna tell you. So I didn’t.” 

Trish looks at him. And looks. And looks. 

And splinters.

“Stop the car,” she says quietly. 

Narancia’s eyes flash to her. “What? Trish—”

“Stop the car. Let me out.” 

“Are you nuts? I’m not gonna—”

“Let me out of the car, Narancia.” 

“You can’t—” Narancia breaks off. “How’re you gonna get to Italy if I let you out, huh?!” 

Trish’s voice shakes with rage. “I’ll walk.” 

“Trish—”

“You lied to me,” she says. 

Narancia doesn’t answer. 

“You lied to me!” she spits out. 

“Yeah,” Narancia says dully. “I did.”  

Trish can do nothing but stare at him. The truth slams into her over and over, blow after blow: people want to kill her and Narancia knew; her father’s vile ghost is haunting her still and Narancia knew. An aborted breath heaves out of her. His eyes haven’t wavered from the road, but they look empty. He isn’t even fighting back. That just makes it worse. 

“You never lied to me,” she whispers, too broken. “Not you.” 

Narancia’s mouth crumples. Trish wants to fold up into the smallest shape; she wants to be underwater. To save herself, she decides to cut the sorrow up into hate. 

“That’s great, Narancia,” she says viciously. “This is just like it was before, isn’t it? Everybody else gets to know what’s going on, but not Trish. Never Trish. Shut her up, keep her out of the way. What is she, too weak? Or too stupid? Both, maybe?” 

“No—no!” Narancia shouts, hoarse and raw, almost pleading. “I really, really mean it, Trish, I was just—please, you gotta believe me, I didn’t think you should have to—I mean, now, after you—it wasn’t fucking fair.” 

“Fair?” Trish’s voice splinters into pieces. “You want to talk to me about fair?!” 

Narancia flinches back like she’s just hit him. His fingers go slack around the steering wheel. A car passes them in the opposite lane, its headlights stealing the shadows from his face until there’s nowhere left for the pain to hide. 

She sinks back into the seat, dropping her head against the passenger window, and lets an irreparable silence fall between them. Her whole body feels sewn too tight, about to split at the seams. She gazes at the night road stretching out ahead of them, watching the broken yellow lines stutter through the dark. 

Narancia doesn’t turn on the radio, and he doesn’t roll down the windows. Into a deep and unknown darkness, he just drives.

Chapter Text

Trish isn’t sure what wakes her up. Light, maybe. There’s wind at the edge of her face, bearing a familiar, beloved smell: salt and sun-dried rockrose. Maquis. She breathes in deep, filling her body up with memory, and opens her eyes. 

The sun is spilling into the car, its glow too bright for her to see through the windshield. A piece of coral dangles from the rear view mirror, held there by a worn-down twist tie. The carpeted floor vibrates under her bare feet. She isn’t thirsty, hungry, sore, or tired. A song she’s heard a hundred times is playing on the radio, brassy and holy: Se te-le-fo-nan-do io potessi dirti addio, ti chiamerei-iiiii… 

“Mamma,” she whines, “turn the radio down, it’s too loud.” 

“You want me to turn down Mina? How rude! She would cry if she knew! Se io rivedendoti fossi certa che non soffri—!” 

Her mother looks more beautiful than she ever has. Her brown hair is tied back with a green plaid scarf. Stray strands dance around her face in the wind. Her skin is suntanned, not a freckle on it. Her eyes are on the open road. And she’s singing the high note, pitch perfect. 

Trish can’t help but smile—so wide that it hurts a little. She can’t find it in herself to be annoyed. How could she have ever been annoyed by this? Her mother’s voice is clear and bright, a little dramatic but never overbearing. It could carry the two of them anywhere. 

Trish stretches her arm out the window, her palm gliding on the wind. She thinks that she can make out immortelle fields, rows and rows of yellow flowers rambling toward the distant mountains. She knows this road. This is a good road. 

“Where are we?” 

“I’m not sure,” her mother says cheerfully. “There’s still a long way to go, though.”  

Trish turns her wrist so that the wind fills her hand like a sail. She can hear an airplane, far away. She wonders where it’s going. If there’s someone, in some seat, who’s going home. 

“Don’t be afraid, Trish,” her mother tells her. 

Trish frowns, puzzled. “I’m not afraid.” 

Is that a lie? It feels like a lie.

“You’ll be all right. They’ll look after you.” 

Trish closes her hand into a fist. I hate this, I hate this. “I don’t need to be looked after.” 

“We all need to be looked after,” her mother says. “Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. You looked after me, remember? Even when you were little.” 

“Where are we going?” It’s suddenly the only thing that Trish can think about. The wind is blowing in fast and hard. Mina’s voice is getting hard to hear. Something is about to happen. She needs an answer. She needs—

Her mother laughs, turning her head just for a moment. The light is too bright. Trish can’t make out her face. She reaches for her.

“Don’t you remember?” 

Ah, Trish realizes, crying. This is a dream. 

She wakes up the way the tide goes out. Daylight shines against her eyelids, so bright that her first instinct is to pull a quilt over her head. Her face is stiff, and the seatbelt is cutting into her neck. 

The white noise of the engine muffles the radio, from which the end of “Se telefonando” is fading into a Rita Pavone song. Trish feels like she must have slept for hours, though she’s sure she hadn’t. For a few moments she forgets why she’s in a car at all, but then it comes back to her, ice-cold. 

She counts to ten, and opens her eyes.

Through the window she can see the Pyrénées, floating above the summer haze like strange snow-mottled clouds. Just beside the car, on her side, Aerosmith is flying free.

She keeps still for a while, watching the scenery, giving no hint that she’s awake. The autoroute stretches out ahead of them, well-trafficked, flanked by dry golden hills and countless trees. A passing road sign indicates that they’re about 150 kilometers from Toulouse. She couldn’t have slept for long, then. 

Figuring there’s no point in pretending, she slowly sits up. She rubs her hands over her face, combs out her flattened hair, stretches out her legs as best she can. If Narancia notices that she’s awake, he isn’t saying anything. Maybe that’s for the best. 

She wishes that the radio was a little louder to compensate, but maybe he hadn’t wanted to wake her up.

“I’m thirsty,” she mumbles in a voice like sand. 

“There’s some mineral water in the back,” Narancia replies. His voice sounds like sand, too. “Should be in, uh… one of the bags. The big one?” 

Trish twists around in her seat, glimpsing Narancia as she does: one hand on the wheel and the other dangling out the open window, the sunlight glinting off the lenses of his glasses. She reaches for one of the plastic bags and—

Looks back, at his glasses, again. 

When he notices her staring, he winces, his head rolling to one side. 

“O-Okay, don’t make fun of me,” he says gruffly. “I’m supposed to wear ’em when I drive—”

“You… wear glasses?” What a stupid question. Obviously he wears them; he’s wearing them right now. 

“It was Fugo’s idea!” Narancia blurts out. “When I was a kid I had this eye infection, see, and it was real bad—and even after I got better I couldn’t really see right… but I didn’t want to tell anybody—that’s why Aerosmith was so great, y’know, it always gave me the radar on my good eye… I didn’t really notice how bad it was until Fugo told me to go get my eyes checked before school started…”

Trish tunes out the rest of the apparently complicated history of these glasses, still too stunned by the way they look on Narancia’s face. The frames aren’t flashy—just thin and black. And sweet. And ordinary.

It almost makes her angry. No—it does make her angry. So, Narancia Ghirga is nearsighted. How about that? She could laugh. Or cry. Or hate him just a little bit more.

“I was so stupid,” she scoffs, and forgets about the water. “Thinking I knew you. Any of you.”

Narancia trails off, his mouth slowly closing. Rita Pavone fills the silence, until he reaches forward and turns the radio off.

It’s only when Trish hears herself say it that she recognizes how true it is, and how true it’s always been, and how true it will always be. It’s freeing, in a way. Stupid—yes—stupid! Stupid the way a little girl is—not through any fault of her own, really, but just because she hasn’t learned any better yet. 

She smiles, despite herself—because what is there to do, really, but laugh about it? It’s sort of funny, isn’t it? Isn’t it sort of funny?

Narancia doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t know what she expects him to say anyway. Maybe this silence—pushing in on her from all sides, bruising skin and bending bones—is what they’ve been moving towards all this time. 

“And you were stupid, too,” she chokes out with a vengeance, “thinking you knew me.”

It hurts him just as badly as she intends. She can tell. In an instant Aerosmith’s energy plummets in the air between them. Crash, burn. 

You’re still you, too. You always figure things out. I remember a lot about you. That one’s my favorite. I just know you get thirsty. I woulda done it for free.

Liar, liar, liar. 

“Who did we think we were kidding, anyway?” Trish asks. “You and me—just some singer and her bodyguard, running around without a care in the world—as if. Old friends? Normal people? Did we think that we could start over?” 

Narancia dully laughs, which throws her. “I never wanted to start over.”

“I did.” Trish’s voice breaks. “That was all I ever wanted, Narancia.”

The highway curves southwards. A green sedan passes them on the right. Narancia turns the wheel, just slightly, toward Trish, hands moving slowly over the rubber. Knuckle by knuckle.

Spice Girl whispers, like wind against her palm, It will not break, Trish. Keep going. And maybe Trish has been waiting for permission to keep going for five whole years; maybe she’s just been waiting, angry and alone, for someone to ask her what she means. To point to where it hurts. 

“I wanted to go home,” she tells Narancia, the one to whom her fifteen-year-old self had longed to tell everything. “I wanted to skip class with my friends. I wanted to go to the store and buy a new hairbrush. I wanted my father to go back to being some bum who left us, and I wanted my mom to get up from that stupid bed and take me to Athens like she always promised. I wanted to not know any of your names. But none of that ever mattered. Not to you, or Giorno, or anybody else. You all got what you wanted in the end—you got Passione. And I got away.” A laugh does make it out, then, thin and hopeless, broken in ten places. “Only I didn’t, did I? I never did. And you knew.” 

She looks at him again—really looks, searching for something to make sense of, something that could convince her to forgive him. His eyes are shining dully, thick with tears that won’t fall. A muscle strains softly at the edge of his jaw. 

He’s no better than the rest of them. And she’s no better than cargo with a good price. It had been childish to think otherwise. So—

So why does he look so sad?

Trish wants to scream, breaking every window: Where do you get the nerve? 

“I just—” Narancia says at last, his hands slipping down the wheel. “I really wanted you to be happy, you know?” 

Trish digs her fingers into her arms, rooting herself to the pain. “If you wanted me to be happy then you never should have called me.”

She thinks, right then, that she might actually mean it. She thinks somebody ought to tell him that no matter how selfish it had been of her to leave, it had been so much more selfish of him not to let her. 

She hadn’t asked for it, after all—she hadn’t asked for any of it, from the scar around her wrist to the bullets in the hotel hallway. But it keeps coming back for her, over and over again, the beast of infinite appetite that her father had made. Narancia is no different. 

She shouldn’t blame him. Her father had made him, too. 

She keeps her eyes on the world outside, looking at the dry hills of France without really seeing them. She’d do just about anything for this moment to end, but it stays right where it is. 

“You’re right,” Narancia says, empty. “Worst damn mistake I ever made.”

That hurts. It hurts. Why does it hurt? She had said it first, hadn’t she?

“I don’t know why I thought it’d be different,” he goes on—in a shaky, rapid way that makes Trish wonder if he can even hold it in anymore. “Like, we all got what we wanted—right? Nobody died! Nobody got hurt! We won! We could’ve—” He breaks off, bumping an open palm rhythmically against the steering wheel. “It could’ve been really good, Trish!” His voice cracks, self-hating. “So why—why… why did you leave?!”

It’s the first time he or anybody else has dared to ask her. Trish’s chest twinges like he’s just thrown a knife into it—a knife that her conscience has been sharpening for five long years. Tears spring into her eyes at the impact. The shame burns. 

“You were dead, Narancia!” she screams, uncontrollable. “And I killed you!” 

Three meters—three meters. Narancia is so much closer than that now—laughably close—if Trish’s soul was still poisoned by some fragment of her father’s, King Crimson could make short work of him, just like before. And she would be none the wiser—not even for an instant. Not until the blood started to pool. 

“I killed Bucciarati! I killed Abbacchio! I killed Formaggio, Illuso, Prosciutto, Pesci, Ghiaccio, Carne, Risotto! I killed Pericolo! The only one I didn’t manage to kill was my devil of a father! I never wanted to see any of you again as long as I lived!” She cradles her head in her hands, fingers digging into her scalp. “Giorno—Mista—they should have hated me! They should have hated me like I hated them—like I hated all of you when Pericolo passed me off to you like I was some sack of lire—like I wanted to keep hating you, because you took everything from me, everything, and then you just—you just—!” She doubles over and laughs, or sobs, or some hysterical thing stuck between. “You just gave it back? And invited me out for lunch?! What a joke! Well, I never asked for that! I never asked for you to be my family—my friends—my future—I already had all of those, or hadn’t you heard? And I could never get them back… never! I could never be anything but Diavolo’s cursed daughter—not with any of you! Unless I left! Unless I just… pretended it was all a bad dream… then maybe—maybe—!” 

“Trish…” 

The way he says her name is worse than anything she could have possibly imagined. There’s no hatred in it, no anger or disdain, no injury—no bitterness at all. It’s so simple, so gentle, so comprehending. Like he’s seeing all of her, every single atom, all at once. 

He’s never sounded older—never, ever sounded more like her friend. It breaks her heart. 

She can’t look at him. Her name sits in the space between them, breathing, forgiven. 

She doesn’t know how to make him understand. She doesn’t even know how to make herself understand. 

“It doesn’t matter now anyway.” She concentrates on the words, trying to talk herself into believing them. “It doesn’t matter. We’re here, and—so is everything else. Just like old times, right?” Narancia doesn’t laugh. “Where are we going?” 

She’s baiting him, and they both know it. Narancia doesn’t react right away, obviously torn—but he doesn’t seem to have much stubbornness left in him. It’s an escape hatch for both of them, anyway. He breathes in and then out, hard: taking hold of what she gives him. 

“Giorno’s got a safe house someplace in Sorrento. Bucciarati wouldn’t tell me over the phone—I, uh, talked to him this morning. Pulled over at this rest stop, but you were asleep. I gotta call him every few hours or so, make some detours. We’re gonna switch cars when we hit Liguria.” 

Trish nods, absorbing it. It’s kind of nostalgic. “Have you slept?” 

“Don’t need it.”

“Oh, give me a break. You look terrible. Pull over at the next turnout, we’ll switch.”

Narancia’s eyes flick over to her for just a second. Trish keeps her jaw tight, her chin jutted forward. Back in the day, this face had been enough to make even Bucciarati back down from an argument, once or twice. 

It only takes a few seconds for Narancia’s resistance to fold. He sighs, exhausted, through his nose, and pulls over. 

When Trish gets out of the car, there’s a golden summer wind, wending its way east—to Italy, she realizes, and grips the driver’s-side handle as hard as she can. Italy, which hardly even feels like home anymore—just the country where her father’s ghost is still king. 

Narancia hesitates before stepping into the passenger seat. The breeze throws his black hair carelessly to one side. His hand lies flat on the roof of the car. 

“Trish…” He lifts his head until his eyes meet hers, and Trish thinks that if he tries to apologize to her she’ll fall apart, she’ll really shatter into pieces, and not even Spice Girl will be able to soften her edges, but all he says is—“The gas sticks a little, after you turn the engine on.” 

Narancia had never really thought of Trish as somebody who drove. Her confession that she’d never learned how hadn’t surprised him at all. Even so, she takes to it quickly, without hesitating, the same way she takes to all sudden and necessary things. That doesn’t really surprise him, either. 

The first thing that she does when she gets behind the wheel is turn on the radio, full volume. Narancia figures that’s about the clearest signal he can get to keep his mouth shut, so he drops his head back and tries to talk himself into sleeping. He dozes on and off in the passenger seat, with his arms crossed tight over his stomach and the afternoon sun baking his face. Every now and then some nameless alarm will go off in his brain, scattering whatever scraps of a dream he’d been having out of his reach. If Trish sees him jolt awake, breath caught, blood pounding, she doesn’t point it out. 

They veer south into Perpignan so that he can update Bucciarati on their progress. It’s a brief call; they all are—staying on the line too long is risky. Bucciarati asks where they are, and Narancia tells him, and then Bucciarati hangs up. When he gets back into the car, Trish doesn’t ask him anything about it. He doesn’t know why he wants her to so badly, only that he does—as he puts on his seatbelt, the question bucks angrily inside his mouth: Do you even really remember him? 

Somewhere further along the way, when he’s balancing on the edge of sleep, Trish starts humming absentmindedly along to the song that’s playing. He follows the soft, lilting notes downstream, floating on them, careless, safe, and then he’s out. 

When he wakes up again, it’s dark. What wakes him is the stillness. The car isn’t moving. 

He sits up, sore all over, and cracks his sleep-stiff neck. He can smell the summer night, all dry and sweet; Trish must have rolled down the windows. He looks around just in time to see headlights flicker through some trees, passing down the distant highway and into the dark. 

“Where are we?” he mumbles, yawning. 

Trish has arranged herself comfortably—or, at least, Narancia hopes it’s comfortable—in the driver’s seat, her bare feet kicked up on the dashboard and her arms folded over her stomach. She’s awake, though, eyes fixed on the stars through the windshield. 

“Don’t know,” she replies. “I was tired, so I pulled over. There’s a rest stop a ways back, but…” 

“Nah, better to stay out of sight,” Narancia agrees before she can finish. He stretches one arm out the open window and yawns again. He’s still pretty damn tired, but he’d learned a long time ago that that’s the kind of thing you keep to yourself. “I can keep watch for a while.” 

Trish’s eyes slide to him. There’s no hint of an expression on her face. Narancia guesses that’s better than the way it had looked when she’d told him that he never should have called her. 

“Fine,” she says, and starts to clamber into the backseat. 

Her knee brushes his thigh as she goes, and Narancia breathes her in by accident: sweat and old perfume. It’s only then that he notices how hot it is. The armpits of her shirt are dark. Her collarbone shines. Narancia, miserably, wants to put his mouth on it. He screws his eyes shut to push out the impulse, hoping she doesn’t see it. 

She doesn’t say good night, doesn’t say anything at all—just lies down across the two seats, throws the old blanket that had been left on the floor over her middle, and closes her eyes. 

Narancia sighs, quiet enough that it can be kept to himself. He steps out of the car and walks around the front to take her spot in the driver’s seat. Someone, he remembers Bucciarati saying, should always be positioned near the gas pedal. 

He shuts the driver’s side door quietly behind him and slumps over the steering wheel. Reflexively, he summons Aerosmith to scan the clearing—no signs of life but the small animals in the grass. Where the hell are they? Trish must have pulled them onto some kind of private road. 

He folds his arms at the top of the steering wheel and drops his forehead onto them, tugging gently at the skin over his eyebrows. He’s got a headache. He’s starving. 

On the phone, Bucciarati had sounded—normal. Narancia doesn’t know what made him think that five years of relative peacetime would somehow erase the guy’s capacity to take crisis in stride, but a part of him had. He’d still follow Bucciarati into hell, no question—but it’s the first time in a while that hell has even been on the road map. Truth is, the temperature of Bucciarati’s voice had taken him aback: cold, disaffected. Capable. Was it stupid of him to have expected a little bit of fear? 

He’d longed to hear Abbacchio, or Mista, or even Fugo—but Bucciarati’s their designated handler, for now. Narancia doesn’t even know where the rest of them are. Just that they’re alive. So far.

When he’s satisfied the clearing is empty, Aerosmith flickers out of sight again, but the humming of its engine goes on, idling in his chest. 

“Narancia,” a voice says to his right. 

Narancia jumps, one hand flying for the door handle and the other for the keys, already set to slash somebody’s face open with them. When he whips around, though, it’s only Spice Girl. 

She’s sitting in the passenger seat with her knees drawn up, her head tilted to one side, staring at him. 

“O-Oh. Hi.” He loosens up again, easing away from the door. “What’re you doing out here?”

“I wished to be near you,” Spice Girl replies, like it’s obvious. “Though I don’t know why.” 

Narancia blinks and twists around in the seat to check on Trish. She looks like she’s fallen asleep, unmoving under the blanket with her hands curled in front of her face. She’s breathing too quietly for him to hear, but he can see her body fall and rise with each one even in the dark. 

“Is she dreaming?” he hears himself ask softly. 

Spice Girl wraps her arms around her knees. “No.” 

Narancia turns back around, but the sight of Trish stays in his brain anyway: her eyelashes, her fingers. He breathes in deep, holds it to the count of three, and breathes back out. 

Somehow, sitting next to Spice Girl in a silent car is just as nerve-wracking as it had been to follow Trish into that fancy Milanese restaurant, wiping his sweaty hands on his jeans. The Stand is observing him closely, her luminescent eyes seeming to see past his blood and bones and muscle and into some essential whole, reading a word he doesn’t know. Trish had looked different in Milan, all right—taller, less resentful, more beautiful than he was ready for—but Spice Girl looks the same as he remembers. 

A question springs into his brain. His mouth’s never been all that great at holding those back, so… 

“Can I, uh... ask you somethin’?”

Spice Girl nods. 

Narancia flexes his fingers on the steering wheel, slotting them into the grooves on the other side, which are a little too big.

“Do I seem... different to you?” 

Spice Girl cocks her head. “How so?” 

“I mean, y’know, it’s been a long time, right? It’s not like I’d be the same.”

“You have grown approximately five and a half centimeters. This is the only change that I have observed.”

“No, I mean like... inside.” Narancia looks down at this lap, feeling more stupid by the second. “Do I seem different, um, inside?”

“Unfortunately I do not possess the ability to view your internal organs at this time. It is my assumption that they are in good working order based on your manner and complexion.” She leans closer, peering at his torso. “Should you require further examination—”

“No, no!” Narancia says, flushing for completely no reason. “Just, um, forget it.” 

Spice Girl backs away again. After staring at him a little longer, she turns her head away gradually, seeming to consider something. 

“I should apologize to you, Narancia.”

Narancia blinks. “Huh? For what?”

“Had I thought to soften the bars,” she says, gazing thoughtfully at the carpet, “you would not have been killed.”

Narancia’s heart folds up. Spice Girl’s tone is as measured as ever, but there’s something vulnerable, too. He hadn’t known that a Stand could sound like that. 

“H-Hey, c’mon,” he says, and nudges his elbow into her arm without thinking. “How were you gonna think of that? Besides, he woulda just found some other way—”

“I could have softened that, too.”

Narancia can’t help but laugh. “What, were you supposed to do it to the whole Coliseum?”

Spice Girl looks up. Narancia’s breath fades in his chest. Her green eyes glow like headlights, cutting the dark in half.

“We would have made all the world soft for you,” she says, “if we could.”

It had taken Narancia almost a year to get anyone to tell him how he had died. It had been Giorno, in the end, who had been brave enough to do it—outside of his fancy villa, at sunset, his hands tangled carefully in the branches of a rosebush that he was deadheading. He’d excised the details calmly: impaled, blood loss, too late. He’d gestured to the places on his own body where each bar had gone through, one by one, in the dying light of the garden. His voice had stayed even, but in the subtlest way he’d been shaking.

It hadn’t felt real, watching Giorno break off stems at sundown. But it feels real when Spice Girl says that. 

“I’ve said too much,” Spice Girl murmurs, almost questioning. 

Narancia shakes his head. For some reason he can’t bring himself to look at her anymore, so he doesn’t, bowing his head over the gear shift with an old pain twinging in his temple. 

“Do you remember it?” Spice Girl asks softly. 

Narancia shakes his head again. “Bits n’ pieces,” he rasps, which is more or less true. Rain. Bullets in Mista’s hands. Trish, at the center of it all. “Giorno… uh, he said he could show me. Said his Stand could show me. But…” 

He shudders, trying to pass it off as a laugh. 

“I mean, who’d wanna see that shit, right?” 

Spice Girl is quiet for just too long a moment. “I understand.” 

Narancia runs a hand through his hair, twisting around to slump back in the seat. It hits him like a truck how tired he is. 

“You ought to sleep,” Spice Girl observes. 

Damn, so Trish’s Stand is psychic, too, now? “I’ll be fine. Somebody’s gotta keep watch, anyway.”

“I am capable of doing this.”

Narancia glances at her in disbelief. “Huh? But you’re—”

“And Aerosmith, as well.”

As if in agreement, Aerosmith revs up in Narancia’s chest. Narancia frowns down at his body out of habit, like his Stand’s going to pop out and look back at him.

“How’s that supposed to work if we’re asleep?” 

“One can be asleep but still watching,” Spice Girl replies, and Narancia is reminded of something Bucciarati used to say—in this world, a man learns to sleep with one eye open. “Please. Will you trust me?” 

Narancia figures he’s trusted worse things—worse people. At the end of the day, trusting Trish—even a part of her—is easy. It had been from the start.

“Yeah, okay.” His shoulders slump, but whether it’s in defeat or relief he isn’t sure. He reaches down for the seat lever and pulls it until the seat leans part of the way back. 

His back cracks gratefully in about five places when he settles his weight into the cradle of the seat. If this were a stakeout with Fugo, he might turn on the radio—some noise to drown out his skittering thoughts, which never seem to rest—but as it is, the soft rhythm of Trish’s breathing will work just fine. He closes his eyes and listens to the proof it gives him: Still alive. Still alive. Still alive.

“Hey,” he says softly, “Spice Girl?”

“Yes?” 

“Can I just—why’d you leave her?” His heart breaks a little, asking it; thinking of Trish, all those years, all alone. He opens his eyes halfway. “She really needed you.”

Spice Girl cranes her elegant neck, gazing at her user in the back seat—at the mess of wants and dreams she came from—with something close to love.

“I did not leave her, Narancia,” she says. “It was the other way around.”

By the time they’re approaching Montpellier, it becomes obvious—to Trish, anyway—that they both stink. The idea of passing another sweaty minute in the same clothes she’s been wearing since they’d left Portugal—let alone the twelve hours to Naples—is enough to make her feel queasy, so when they stop in town for the customary call to Bucciarati she convinces Narancia to make a brief detour to a Monoprix. 

They have a little bit of cash left, just enough to buy some touristy clothes from the sale section, and Trish thinks they could probably manage a couple more cheap meals on the road if they’re frugal. Narancia looks ridiculous in a pair of red jogging shorts and a Paris-themed t-shirt with a design that she’s pretty sure hasn’t been updated since the early 1990s—but she probably looks just as ridiculous, because she’d bought the same one. 

If Mista lets that slide, it will be a miracle. Trish already has a headache. 

When they stop for gas, Trish goes into the bathroom and makes do with washing her hair in the sink with a palmful of hand soap and shakes the wet ends out under the hand dryer. It’s just how she remembers doing it when she and Pericolo had first docked on Capri, and from a few rest stops on the road to Roma. Her ends are frizzy without conditioner. She cares less than she did at fifteen. 

Narancia takes the next driving shift—Montpellier to Nice—and then swaps with Trish—Nice to Liguria, and then onward to Livorno. It feels right, somehow, that she’s the one behind the wheel when they cross the border. She takes in the familiar scenery of northern Italy and tries not to cry over it, tries to keep her foot steady on the pedal. It will be another six hours to Naples, but Narancia doesn’t want to stop for the night. As the sun goes down, Trish stretches for a while at the Esso while he uses the payphone and then swaps with him again, dozing on and off to the sound of the engine and the radio. The songs she knows, the songs she doesn’t. A few of hers, here and there—messages from a ghost. 

Narancia hums along to a couple of them, whisper-singing the verses when he thinks she’s asleep. 

Her eyes are itching drowsily when the car passes a sign for Roma. Just like that, she’s fifteen again, being driven to her doom. Her guts swing to one side. She looks over at Narancia, but his attention is on the road ahead, and he doesn’t seem to notice. 

They’ve barely talked at all these past couple of days, which don’t feel like days at all but something more atrophied. She knows that she should leave well enough alone—should let whatever fragile thing she’s handily destroyed die in peace—but the highway is dark, and she’s afraid. What comes next is a mystery, a half-loaded gun. She might never be in a car like this with Narancia again. 

Their summer is over. It’s over. 

Maybe that’s why she pushes her thumbs together, and draws in a shaky breath, and murmurs in the smallest voice: “Narancia.” 

After an hour of silence, it seems to catch Narancia off-guard. He flinches in the passenger seat, eyes landing on her cautiously. He makes a questioning noise, low in his chest. Too tense for a word.

Trish tightens her grip on the steering wheel. 

“There's something I need to do.”

When Narancia tells her the code word, she almost laughs. Almost. 

Now, she grips the gas station pay phone tightly in her hand, replaying Narancia’s instructions in her head as the dial tone plays. You gotta call and let it ring three times, then hang up, then call again. He’s supposed to answer on the fifth ring. If anybody picks up sooner, or if nobody answers, they got made. It’s over.

She’s already hung up and dialed the number a second time, letting it ring once, twice. The phone booth is stuffy, and there’s a fly buzzing around beside the door. Trish glares at it, batting it away with her free hand. Ring… ring… That’s four. 

Ring… 

There’s a soft click in the earpiece. Trish’s breath snags in her chest. She twists around before she can understand the instinct, searching for Narancia—he’s at the pump, his back turned, counting change in his palm. 

The air inside of her unknots itself. She breathes out. 

“Orfeo,” she says. 

For a second—just a short, shapeless second—there’s no answer. 

And then Bruno Bucciarati says, “Trish.” 

It’s strange—Trish had expected it to feel more unnatural. She had expected to hate hearing that voice, like a note sung sharp. But instead… instead—

“I… apologize for the password,” Bucciarati hurries to say. “It was Abbacchio’s choice. L’Orfeo was an opera, you see, by Monteverdi.”

Trish chokes back a sound in the silent phone booth, tipping back her head, closing her eyes. Bucciarati’s voice is just as she remembers, honed and polished at the edges, opaque and comforting all at once. He catches red snapper now. That’s right. The old ladies in Porto Nolana love him, and he smells like fresh fish. 

And he had killed a man in front of her, once. 

“Is Narancia with you?” Bucciarati asks. “Is he safe?” 

“He’s with the car,” Trish assures him. If her voice shakes, he doesn’t comment on it. Courteous, as always, in that way alone. “He’s safe. We’re both safe. We’re just leaving San Cesareo. We’ll be on Autostrada A1 soon. You can expect us in two hours.” 

“Two hours,” echoes Bucciarati. “All right. The rendezvous point is…” He gives Trish an address in Boscoreale, which she has never heard of. “I strongly advise you to change cars if you haven’t already done so.” 

“No, our car—” Trish falters, feeling foolish. Of course switching cars would be the sensible thing, but the thought of abandoning something with even a vague connection to Giulia pushes a pain between her ribs like a crowbar. She doesn’t know how to explain something like that to Bucciarati—sentiment over survival. But maybe she ought to try. “It was from a friend. I can’t leave it.” 

The Bucciarati of five years ago materializes in her mind, harsh and unforgiving, with his impeccable haircut and impeccable resolve: You can. You must. If you are to live through this, Trish, you will have to leave more than you can bear. But is that such a high price to pay?

“It won’t stand out,” she insists. “I mean, if someone was—looking for me… they wouldn’t know.”

“All right,” Bucciarati says. “It’s your choice.” 

She opens her eyes again, settling on the payphone’s worn-down number pad. 

“My choice, huh?” she mutters.

Bucciarati says nothing. She bites her lip, not sure of what to say, not sure if she wants to scream at him or just listen to the quiet of his existence. She whispers the address to herself, committing it to memory. 

“Well,” she says when she’s finished, feeling stupid. “Ciao.”

“Trish. I wish that we could speak longer.” He says it so plainly and so quickly that Trish realizes it must be true. “And I wish that it were under better circumstances. We will wait for you. Ciao.” 

Trish listens to the dial tone a little longer than she needs to, her fingers loosening around the handle of the flat red phone. Somewhere, kilometers away, Bucciarati had answered her call—and he still says her name the same way. What had she expected? For him to tell her off, order her to put Narancia on the line, dismiss her out of hand? She’d gotten plenty of it back in the day, from every single one of them. It’s not your business, Abbacchio would say; please leave it to us, Bucciarati would tell her; we’ll take care of things, Trish, was Giorno’s; Mista and Fugo would never be any help at all; even Narancia would level her with a bewildered look and ask, What do you care? As if out of all of them she had the lowest stake in what became of her. 

But this time, it had been so simple, no more dire than making plans for lunch. Two hours. All right. 

Narancia has finished filling up the car and is now back in the passenger seat, his right arm dangling out the window. Trish can’t quite see the rest of him through the sun’s glare on the windshield. 

We will wait for you. There’s a sharp twinge in her chest, and then her eyes well up with tears. 

“Idiot,” she whispers, and she doesn’t know who it’s meant for. 

Narancia gets a strange look on his face when Trish tells him the address. He asks her to repeat it about three times, like he’s not sure she’s getting it right, and by that point she’s starting to get annoyed. The traffic going into Napoli only worsens her mood; they somehow roll into the city just in time for peak rush hour. It winds her up so much that Narancia finally gets out of the car to switch with her in the middle of the street, barking to the eight or so cars ahead of them in Neapolitan that Trish can barely understand. 

“What the hell are you stopping at the red light for?! Nacchennello! It’s not fucking Christmas! Acciret’!”

From the passenger seat, Trish can pay better attention to the city—Narancia’s city—as lively and chaotic as she remembers. She has to sit uncomfortably low in her seat, trying to keep out of sight, but she can still see the lights and windows as they pass, artifacts of countless ordinary people and their ordinary lives. Narancia manages to slip out of the traffic through a series of devil-may-care turns and narrow alleyways, and then they’re on a strada statale—SS268 this time, winding around the flank of Vesuvio. The volcano’s silhouette is a hazy blue in the summer dusk, looking almost benign. Trish sits up a little once they’re out of the city, rolling down the window to smell the sea air. 

Boscoreale is a comune on Napoli’s southeastern outskirts, unremarkable, with the occasional palm tree between its sun-blanched apartment buildings. Narancia mutters street names to himself as he drives, but he seems to know where he’s going well enough that he doesn’t need to check the signs at the intersections at all. 

Trish’s heart is wrung so tight that she wants to reach into her chest and untwist it bare-handed. She can’t shake the feeling that she should have asked Narancia for photographs, or something—some kind of record of what her old guards actually look like now, because what spare anecdotes he’s shared with her have given her no detail with which to imagine them. Her memory has preserved them just as they were in a strange, surreal June five years ago, gathered around a restaurant table. Ordinary ghosts in ordinary clothes. She tries to picture Giorno with longer hair, Abbacchio with stubble, Fugo’s face having outgrown its pain. Her mind draws blank after blank.

Maybe they’ve existed all this time just as she remembers them, untouched by time or kindness. Maybe their clothes still fit the same way. Maybe they still make the same expressions. Or maybe they’ll be completely unrecognizable, grown so completely into who they became without her that she’ll find no trace of their time together at all. 

Maybe they were never even real to begin with. 

Narancia hunches forward to peer at an intersection, eyes scanning the surrounding buildings. After a second’s hesitation, he turns left, taking them down a street lined with bergamot orange trees. It’s a hot, humid night, so still and peaceful that not even the scirocco is stirring. Trish’s knees are red from a day driving in full sun, and the back of her neck is sticky with sweat. She would give anything for a bottle of Perrier. 

“Almost there,” Narancia says. He braces his left elbow on the window sill and scratches his head. “You’re sure Bucciarati said to meet them at—”

“Oh my God!” Trish snaps, slapping her hands down on her thighs in exasperation. “Do you think I’m so stupid I can’t even get an address right?! I told you what I heard, and what I heard was—”

Narancia brakes, cutting her off. The car lurches to a halt. Trish is about to yell at him for being rude, but as he twists around in the seat to look behind him a muscle strains subtly in his neck and she loses track of the words. He flattens his palm on the wheel, turns it clockwise, and effortlessly parallel parks along the sidewalk. 

“What you heard was this place,” he tells her, turning off the engine with a sigh. “And this place is a restaurant.” 

Trish stares at him for a second, blinks three times, and then whips around to look out the window. Her jaw drops. Sure enough, they’ve pulled up beside what looks like a very, very public trattoria—a curtain of dried peppers hangs over the doorway, marked by a hand-painted sign reading Cetra in peeling green. A few small tables are arranged outside, each one occupied by people talking animatedly over drinks. The front door is propped open by a statue of a cherub, and from inside, Trish can hear jazz music. 

“There’s no way,” she blurts out. “That’s—it couldn’t—Bucciarati must have made a mistake—”

“Bucciarati must have?” Narancia echoes incredulously. “Look, Trish, if you didn’t hear him right it’s not your fault or anything…” 

“No!” Trish insists, trapped in a battle between common sense and needing to be right. She throws open the passenger door. “I know this is the address he gave me! Come on!” 

Narancia scrambles after her, dropping the keys on the street in his haste. He yelps for her to wait, but she doesn’t, shouldering past the parties waiting to be seated. She hears him lock the car behind her.

The trattoria is packed—Trish dodges a waiter weaving through the crowd with a pizza held aloft, making his way toward a hallway leading further inside. That way, Spice Girl suggests, so Trish follows him, checking each table frantically as she passes. There are no familiar faces, no signs to indicate a Passione presence at all, but the buzzing, magnetized sensation growing under her skin is so unmistakable it leaves her breathless. 

There are Stand users under this roof. She can feel it. 

“Hey!” Narancia’s hand closes around her forearm, without force. Trish almost whirls around and grabs him by the shoulders, exhilarated, stunned: Can you feel it, too? “Slow down!” 

Trish tugs herself free. They emerge onto a wide, glowing patio, filled to each stucco wall with potted plants and candlelit tables. Flowering vines dangle from the trellises overhead, their fragrance mingling with the sweet summer twilight, cigarette smoke and perfumes, the distant sea. People are talking and laughing. Someone calls for a waiter. 

Trish stops in her tracks, eyes sweeping over the tables. The air is so dense with Stand energy she swears she could open her mouth and swallow it. Spice Girl is pressing restlessly against Trish’s edges, one pole reacting to another, straining to be touched. 

“Huh? No way!” Narancia exclaims beside her, pointing toward the back of the patio. “They really are here!” 

Trish expects something to happen when she sees them. What, she doesn’t know. In her imagination the world should go still, the moment perfectly preserved, the seconds inert. She should know the perfect thing to say. She shouldn’t just stand there, staring dumbly at the four men gathered at the back-most table, waiting for them to look at her. But she does.

Giorno’s hair is longer, and he no longer wears it in a braid. His navy blue silk shirt is embellished with gold-stitched vines. A single green jewel the exact color of his eyes hangs from his right ear. He’s leaning close to Fugo, who’s sitting next to him—Fugo, wearing a red suit, his hair an almost ghostly white, one side of his thin, pretty mouth knotted by a thorny purple scar. 

Abbacchio is on Fugo’s right, imperiously looking over an open menu. His silvery hair is pulled back in a ponytail that hangs to his mid-back. His nails are painted black, and the top three buttons of his black shirt are undone. His sleeves are rolled up, revealing a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm. His right hand is holding the menu. His left hand is under the table on Bucciarati’s knee. 

Bucciarati still has his bob haircut, its front sections tied back in two loose braids. He’s balancing his chin on his palm, eyes scanning the same menu that Abbacchio is holding. He’s wearing white linen slacks and a simple blue t-shirt. 

He has a tan. 

“Oi, Giorno, did you order my chinotto?” A familiar, and unnecessarily loud, voice cuts in from somewhere to Trish and Narancia’s right. “I just took the longest piss of my life, I gotta rehydrate!” 

Trish looks over in what feels like slow motion. Mista comes loping over to the table, wearing nothing but a pair of tiger print board shorts and a neon blue mesh tank top, cropped above the abs. His Adidas slides squeak on the wooden patio floor—to Trish’s horror, he’s wearing white socks with them. An assortment of silver chains dangle from his neck, and Trish catches a glint of light above his left eyebrow—a piercing. He still has the exact same ridiculous hat, but his dark curls have grown out, spilling past his forehead. He’s taller, more muscular. His torso is riddled with the old scars of bullet wounds, proudly displayed. 

For some reason, it’s the sight of him that makes her knees come dangerously close to buckling. Not Bucciarati and Abbacchio, two ghosts sharing a loving and ordinary touch in public; not the new scar on Fugo’s face or the fact that Giorno carries himself less like a prince now and more like a king. No. It’s Mista’s stupid, ugly Adidas slides, and the white socks inside of them, and the scars he carries around like he’s proud of them. 

“Guido,” she blurts out, too stunned to keep her voice quiet. 

Mista blinks, halfway to sitting down next to Giorno, and looks up. His hand is braced on the back of his chair. His black eyes lock right onto her, and then Narancia. 

He bursts into a horrible hyena laugh, pointing rudely at the two of them and slapping his knee. Half the people in the courtyard turn to stare. 

“What the fuck are you wearing?” he howls. 

Trish’s mouth falls open. She’d almost entirely forgotten that she and Narancia are still decked out in their horrendous tourist outfits from France, flip-flops and all. 

Still, that’s hardly an excuse for Mista to greet them like that after they’ve been driving for days, hardly sleeping, barely bathing, quite literally dodging bullets to reach him!

Trish stares at him.

And stares at him. 

And stares.  

And then she snaps.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve saying that to me!” she shrieks at the top of her lungs, barely stopping to breathe. “Look at you! Walking around like all of Campania wants to see your hairy belly button! What kind of pervert wears mesh with nothing underneath it?! Is this a rave, are we at a rave? Were you born in an EDM club?! And do you own anything that isn’t a crop top?!” 

“Ahia! She’s still got an attitude!” 

“And you’ve still got no class!” 

“Ahia!” Mista exclaims again, grinning ear-to-ear.

Trish lunges at him, ready to grab him by the hair and shake him, but before she can there’s a sudden chorus of tiny voices and the Sex Pistols are zooming around both their heads.

“Yee-haw!”

“It’s Trish!”

“Trish is back!”

“Trish came to see us!” 

“Mista, don’t bully Trish! You’ll make her leave again!” 

“Narancia! Narancia’s here too!” 

“Will you guys get a grip?!” Mista yells, batting them inelegantly away. “We’re in public!” 

The patrons at the adjacent table pick up their plates and napkins and clear out for another spot, throwing alarmed glances Mista’s way. 

“I told you this was a bad idea,” Fugo says archly, addressing Bucciarati and Giorno. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that we’re meant to be in hiding?” 

“This is no different than our time in Venezia,” Giorno replies. 

Fugo moans like he’s been stabbed. “God, please don’t remind me…” 

“Nag, nag, nag. I sure didn’t miss you, Fugo,” Narancia drawls, shouldering past Mista to plop down in an open chair. “Yo, they still got that escarole alla monachina here? I’m starving.” 

“That’s your order? Escarole? Are you a pack animal?!” Mista smacks the back of his head. “Get some meat!” 

“What part of ‘pescatarian’ is so damn hard for you to understand?!” 

“Christ in heaven,” grumbles Abbacchio, in that deep, arresting voice of his. “You’re already giving me a headache.”

“Oi, Bucciarati, back me up! They’ve been on the run for days, they need protein!”

“Trish, are you hungry?” Number One asks, floating closer to Trish’s shoulder. “There’s lots of good food here!”

“Yeah!” chimes in Number Three. “Mista’s gonna get us veal!”

“The hell I am! Do you know how much that costs?!”

“Trish,” Bucciarati cuts in, cool and firm as an anchor. All of the din and bickering falls silent around him. “Won’t you sit down?”

Trish looks around at all of them, forgetting the accidental smile that the Pistols had teased out of her. Number Five whizzes past her head, apparently too excited to sit still. Her nose is runny, and her throat feels raw—isn’t it a little late for allergy season? 

“I…” she squeaks. “I…” 

She combs her bangs back with one hand, trying to collect herself. Six expectant faces gaze back at her, some apprehensive, some remarkably at ease. Bucciarati leans slightly forward in his chair, his expression as complex as ever—Trish glimpses an apology in it, a quiet well done, a glint of admiration and a hint of pain. Some dead, dried-out wall inside of her crumbles. 

“You’d better treat me,” she says, voice thick with feeling, “to whatever I want.” 

Bucciarati rises from his chair, his fingertips balanced on the tabletop. He lingers there for a moment, and then takes a step back—gesturing for her to take his seat—and bends his body forward in a bow. 

“Whatever the signorina wants,” he echoes humbly. “Whatever she chooses.” 

The waters of the Gulf of Naples have been still since nightfall, and Trish is at the stern, watching them pass beneath the boat. The unencumbered sunlight of the new morning falls on the surface like so many coins, glinting all the way out to the horizon, hard to look at for too long. 

She wants to tip over the railing, split the glass-smooth blue with one hand—maybe with her whole body, headfirst. There’s so much inside of her that needs washing away; so much that needs to be eroded, smoothed down. A swim has always helped her with that feeling.

She can hear gulls, and the dull thrum of the motor, and in between these, the bodyguards talking—the one with the ugly jacket… Fugo?… and the one with the gun, whose name escapes her, but whose volume certainly doesn’t. Something about needing to find a car when they reach the mainland. Trish has gotten accustomed to eavesdropping on these kinds of conversations, ones that concern how she’ll be transported and hidden, as if she’s a piece of cargo. She tunes it out again.

She closes both hands around the rail and leans back until the muscles in her arms start to strain, letting her head drop, throat-up, to stare at the edgeless sky. It’s blue, like the water, the essence of late spring—not a cloud or bird in sight. She’s always liked a clear sky best. It has a sort of limitless potential, like she could make anything out of it. 

“Trish, please be careful.” 

She jumps—really jumps, and she’s not happy about it, nor about the loud gasp that comes after—and whirls around to see the leader, staring at her. He’s got the sternest face out of all of them, dark eyebrows and darker eyes, and Trish can never help balking at it. 

What’s his name again? Something with a B… 

He lays one hand over his chest—Trish’s eyes linger on the tattoo—and ducks his head. “Bucciarati. Bruno Bucciarati.” 

“I know,” Trish says, brushing the sweat on her palms off on the sides of her skirt. “What do you want?” 

Bucciarati straightens up again. His eyes settle on her, steady and inscrutable. 

“Simply to ensure that you’re comfortable,” he says. “We have a long journey ahead.” 

The last month or so of Trish’s life has been a litany of long journeys, end-to-end, but she doubts he would care if she said so. She turns away, folding her arms. 

“I’m fine.” And what a lie that is—but it’s not like she has any alternatives. “You don’t have to pretend to care, you know. I won’t tell my father to kill you or whatever if you’re not nice to me.” Even now, she stalls on the word father, holding it too gingerly. “It’s just business, right?”

It hadn’t felt like just business with Pericolo. He had asked her about her house, her childhood, her favorite fruits. He had smiled at her often, and taught her how to tell time by the sun alone, tracing a path with one weathered finger. 

Bucciarati says, “Well.” 

Then nothing. In any other situation, Trish would laugh. He sounds a little flustered. 

“Mr. Pericolo told me about you,” she goes on, to test for a reaction.  

“Ah. Yes.” Bucciarati quiets for a moment. “I’ve known him since I was a boy.” 

“How long have you been in Passione, then?” 

He hesitates. Trish would feel smug about it if she weren’t so tired, the kind of tired that eats her alive—it might be the first time she’s managed to trip him up. 

“Some time,” he answers, with a tense brow. “So… you know the name of the organization?” 

“Of course I do. I’m not stupid.” And it’s true; she does—anyone would. Passione exists both as a myth and a monster, only ever spoken in a whisper, a ghost that lingers in every catastrophe. “Everybody knows who you are, or at least that you’re—here. Everywhere.” 

“I suppose that’s true.” 

“What made you decide to do it?” Trish asks dully, loosening her hands around the rail to slide them from side to side. “Be a criminal, I mean. Were you broke or something? Abandoned?”

“Not exactly,” Bucciarati says to her back, and then his voice hardens again, closes up. “It isn’t essential to the mission for you to know, so I don’t see any reason to tell you. You understand.” 

Trish scoffs, weak and half-made at the bottom of her chest. “Sure.” 

He’s quiet for so long, then, that she wonders if he’s left. It wouldn’t surprise her if he were the kind of person to walk so weightlessly that any movement is undetectable. She can make out the cusp of Naples, edging into view at the bottom of the sky. They’ll be there in an hour, maybe less, and then the sea will be behind them. The thought grieves her.

She doesn’t realize that Bucciarati’s moving closer until he appears in her peripheral vision. She finds something familiar in the way he looks out at the water, something restless and admiring, something like longing. He sets one hand on the rail, his fingers closing around it, and tips his head back, eyes tracing the flight paths of the gulls overhead. 

“You must be tired,” he says. “And confused.” 

The way he offers these observations already frustrates her, enough that she wants to lash out and hit them. No solution, no recompense. As if it’s something she just has to live with—as if she doesn’t already know that. 

“So what if I am?” she retorts, and the bitterness burbles underneath it, unhidden. “I’m still alive. That’s all you need, isn’t it?” 

“For the purpose of our mission, yes,” he says. The rest comes slowly, with great care. “But you are human. Just as we are.” 

At last, Trish turns to look at him head-on. All at once the practiced hardness of the past week unravels from her face, slips through her fingers like the sea water she had tried to take home as a child. Bucciarati, in profile, his once-sleek bob now tousled and uneven, looks not quite softer, but less fortified, as though a gate has been lifted—as though this wind has a voice, reminding him of something.

The feeling that unfolds in her stomach is not something she’d call guilt, but there’s a tenuous relation. The instinct to speak is what opens her mouth, but there’s nothing to steer it forward. Only silence emerges. 

Bucciarati smiles to himself, an expression she can only make out for a second before he turns away and starts to walk back toward the starboard side. 

“Forgive me for disturbing you,” he says. “If you need anything, you need only call for me.” 

Finally, without his face to scare it off, a sentence comes together. 

“Tell—” Trish falters and turns her head away, frowning at a whorl in the wood of the deck. “Tell that one guy I’m… sorry for cutting his face. I just didn’t—know.” 

“Hm? I don’t understand.” Bucciarati turns back to her, frowning. “What would my saying it accomplish?” 

Annoyance and embarrassment jab at Trish’s chest together. She frowns, warm in the face. “You—”

“You’re perfectly capable of telling him yourself,” Bucciarati says, so plainly that she can’t even tell if he’s being rude. “Narancia may not look it, but he’s very forgiving. I’m sure he was just as scared of you as you were of him.” 

What the hell? What is he, a wild horse? 

“I wasn’t—scared,” she snaps. “Just forget it. Never mind.” 

“All right,” Bucciarati says, without argument, and Trish doesn’t know why, but this makes her want to throw something more than anything has in months. He dips his head to her once more, a parting nod, and walks out of sight around the cabin without another word. 

Trish stays where she is, alone, watching the water come to an end.