Work Text:
The year? 1947.
The place? The little city of St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America, the Earth.
Our boy? Guido Mista. A lonely young man who only has his 6 cats and rack of guns to keep him company in the long hours of the night.
Mista, who happens to be a pasta boy at a local Italian restaurant, is currently 13 hours into his shift. He’d seen approximately 4,444,444 spaghetti noodles so far that day and all of a sudden was switched to ravioli duty because the ravioli guy, Formaggio, inhaled too many marinara fumes and collapsed right into the pot of pocket-shaped noodles.
Mista mourned for the loss of his friend(?), but the boss doesn’t leave time for mistakes. He deemed Mista most responsible of the three spaghetti boys and moved him to ravioli.
Now he found himself struggling with the meat sacks in question.
These were way more complicated than spaghetti. Spaghetti didn’t have meat inside of it. Spaghetti wasn’t shaped like a square, which had four sides.
So, in his frustration, he took one of those stupid little quadrilaterals and chucked it over his shoulder at the kitchen behind him.
Almost in slow motion, Mista turned around to see what he’d done.
The ravioli flew right into the deep fryer, barely missing the pretty face of the new boy manning the deep fryer, a kid named Giorno.
Giorno was about to yell due to the projectile pasta just tossed his way, but Mista quickly made his way over there to shush him.
“Don’t tell the boss, please?” he pleaded. He didn’t want to get demoted to meatball boy.
Giorno, who had just reached a slender hand right into the deep frying oil to retrieve the ravioli, inspected it closely with both of his Hatsune Miku-blue eyes.
Mista always knew in his heart that Hatsune Miku was truly blue and not green, and this just confirmed his suspicions.
Then Giorno took the ravioli in his hand and bit into it like an anime girl, weird little sound and all.
He looked to Mista, eyes wide.
“Can I tell you a secret?” he asked.
“Yeah,” the dusty crusty ravioli boy replied.
“I’ve been planning on ditching this poorly-run place and starting my own ever since I got here, and you may have given me a reason to do so. Here, taste it.”
He handed Mista the half-eaten piece of deep-fried pasta. Mista made sure to take a bite whilst consuming as much of the part Giorno had bitten off of as possible. Gotta get on the grind for that gamer girl saliva, after all.
“Wow, it’s pretty good,” he said, chomping on the deceptively uncrunchy semi-Italian treat.
“I know,” Giorno replied. “And if you’ll join me, we can make them together in our own restaurant. We’ll have Bucciarati over there on our side as well and together, with hard work and a little bit of tax fraud, we can surely bring this place down. Are you in?”
Bucciarati was the overseer of all the various pasta boys, and would definitely be a big asset to Giorno’s restaurant plan. He was almost as pretty as Giorno himself, but in a more motherly-like way. Whenever Mista found himself distraught after hours and hours of Italy Time, Bucciarati was always there to hold Mista’s head to his chest and stroke his greasy hair as he cried tears of rotini.
After spending a few seconds running his two braincells across his hamster wheel of a brain, Mista decided to agree with Giorno’s proposition. He’d only had a small taste of gamer girl saliva yet, and already wanted more.
“Only if you’ll give me some of that hot spit,” he bargained.
“Deal,” Giorno agreed, and placed his hand on Mista’s broad shoulder in a show of trust and dominance.
Then, together, they waltzed right out of Passione Italian Restaurant, goal in mind and Bucciarati in tow.
As the waltzing was in progress, Mista realized his true chance to achieve his dream so he turned to Giorno and asked, “Hey, I have 6 very dumb dumber than me cats at my house and I thought. . . maybe you want to. . . clean up their vomit with me?”
“We’ll see,” Giorno replied, telling shiny smile uponst his luscious lips. “We will certainly see.”
And that was how Guido Mista, in the ripe old year of 1947, found both the true meaning of pasta and the true meaning of love in the very same night.