Archive of Our Own

This is dying, Bruno decides.

Death is not something he’s unfamiliar with; everyone knows it and its crushing, relentless inevitability. But the act of dying is something different entirely. Dying hurts.

The monster had sprung before him alongside the lighter’s new flame. Bruno’s grim reaper. It may as well have been death itself, for the way its black clothes clung to its wraith-like body, for the way it seemed to tear his soul straight out of him. Except instead of a scythe, it had an arrow.

Reality falls away, and between the arrow entering at the base of his throat and opening his eyes again, Bruno is transported somewhere. When he opens his eyes, he sees a vortex: spinning purples and blues and blacks swirling together, both stretching on infinitely and pressing into him, claustrophobic. It is speckled with silver, and for a hysterical moment Bruno is reminded of the pictures they were shown in school of the galaxy, of the Milky Way visible from earth. Nebulas of immeasurable size, innumerable stars.

This is Bruno’s own galaxy, and he is alone. Alone and drifting, for many hours or seconds or years.

And then, suddenly, he is not alone. A presence appears before him: invisible, but Bruno can feel it, the heat radiating from it: the roof of a car on a hot summer day, the hot metal from a blade taken to a whetstone, new and bare and sharp.

A hand appears, blue and white, searching for him in the void. A voice unlike any voice he has ever heard, calling for him:

— reach.

Bruno stirs himself, and grits his teeth, and he does. He reaches.

|

Gangsters are predictable. They’re easy to read. Reading people isn’t hard, if you know what to look for; Bruno learned how early on.

People are complex. It’s hard, impossible, to discern their motivations and passions and desires from one glance. But gangsters aren’t ordinary people; they’re usually much simpler. Their goals are simpler. As simple as survival.

Giorno Giovanna is not a real gangster. Bruno isn’t sure what he is.

It’s hard to tell exactly what it is Giorno desires. He gets Bruno on his back and then helps him up again. He says he wants to stop drugs in Italy, that he sought out Passione to do just that. It’s inconceivable, that someone would choose this path, or would want to involve themselves in it at all.

Sure, Bruno chose to join Passione, but there was never a choice at all. Just the illusion of one. It’s an organization that swallows you whole when all other options are gone. His intentions were good, but what good are intentions eight years on?

They walk together to Polpo’s prison. “Tell me again,” Bruno says, hands stuck in his pockets. “What do you want?”

Giorno looks at him seriously. “To save Naples.”

Naples. Naples, which terrifies him. It is also the only thing Bruno is certain he loves, with a ferocity that threatens to carry him away. He’s never known how to protect it, but as many things have, it has fallen into his hands. And he fails it every day.

To save it, though. That’s the golden dream. He suspects Giorno knows it is the only thing Bruno wants.

“All right, Giorno Giovanna,” he says. “I believe you.”

Giorno passes his initiation, as Bruno knew he would. For all his posturing, Polpo is an easy man to impress, and Giorno has with flying colours. Of course he has; he’s a master of Polpo’s own game: the manipulation of appearance for self-benefit.

It was the first thing Polpo had taught Bruno. Polpo had become something like his benefactor several months after he joined Passione, and if Bruno would carry out asinine favours, he would reward them with money and advice. He would say: two men walk into a room, I know who dies based on the clothes on their back. Bruno spent his first paycheque on solid gold hair barrettes.

Giorno masquerades through his introductions with his team the same way he did with Polpo. It’s partially a front, Bruno thinks, although he’s not sure what he’s hiding. He can tell even before Giorno tells them all he’s only fifteen that he is young, a boy in an adult’s clothes, with a dream that exceeds him.

But then Polpo dies, and Bruno learns something new: Giorno Giovanna can change things after all.

On the way to the shipyard, Bruno asks him, “tell me again, what does your stand do?”

Giorno tells him: it creates sentient life from inorganic things. A prodigious ability. The boy may be made of miracles after all.

Their mission goes smoothly at first: they are attacked on the way to Capri, but dispose of their enemies with no casualties. They find Polpo’s fortune. Bruno is promoted to caporegime.

But then the boss gives them their first mission. And that mission is a girl.

|

The boss’s first instructions are, simply put, to wait for more instructions. Pericolo gives them an address for a Passione safehouse on the mainland, where they are to keep the girl—Trish, fifteen years old, the boss’s daughter—until they are contacted further. It is anticlimactic, so far as Mista and Narancia are concerned, but Bruno is used to the runaround from Passione superiors. Most instructions aren’t clear-cut when missions change quickly and decisions are made on the fly.

They take the Strada Statale 163 to a small town outside Sorrento, where they pull into the long driveway of an empty vineyard. It must be one of the boss’s private estates, judging by how well-maintained the gardens and lawns are, the hedges pruned into neat shapes, the exterior of the house pristine despite its vacancy.

He personally shows Trish to her room upstairs. It’s hard to get a read on her—she’s quiet, but not shy, exactly. Sullen, more like. Not as though Bruno can blame her. Opinionated and sharp-witted, from what the short bursts of personality that she’s shown so far. He hopes to get to know her better, but for now she appears to want to be left alone. He posts Mista at the door to guard her and sends Narancia to the nearby strip mall to pick up groceries and whatever else Trish wants—perfume and stockings and mineral water, other luxuries.

She’s lavish, that’s another thing. He approves. Bruno adds it to the small catalogue of things he’s slowly learning about her.

After Narancia departs, Fugo and Abbacchio corner him in one of the sitting rooms almost immediately, as soon as they find him alone. Specifically, without Giorno being present. This is not something Bruno hasn’t seen coming—he’d have to be blind not to see Fugo’s growing animosity toward Giorno, and Abbacchio has made his feelings about him perfectly clear from the start, to all of them.

Abbacchio has never particularly cared about the concept of team morale. Then again, the team has grown accustomed to the swinging gauntlet of Abbacchio’s temperament, and disregards what he says in his more pessimistic moods. It doesn’t mean his words don’t carry weight, though, and Bruno can see the affect it has on the whole team.

“Buccellati, you know I trust you.” Fugo begins the conversation with his arms crossed, not a promising sight. “Still, as your second-in-command—” he says this with pointed ire— “are you sure…this…is a good idea?”

“Is what a good idea?” Bruno says blandly, playing dumb.

Fugo sighs, grits his teeth. He knows Bruno’s game; he’s smarter than him. “It’s Giorno,” he forces out, “there’s something off about—”

“I don’t like him,” Abbacchio says, as if that wasn’t obvious. “I don’t trust him.” Bruno briefly sees the moment he glances around the room, as if Giorno could be hearing him right now. “What kind of person chooses to join the mafia?”

“He must have an ulterior motive,” Fugo agrees. “I don’t know what, but I know he does.”

Abbacchio is nodding along to everything Fugo is saying, quite serious. It strikes Bruno then that—they’ve planned this. This intervention of sorts. He doesn’t know when—on the way back from Capri? Before they even left Naples? On the Lagoon while Giorno and Mista finished off Sale?

It disturbs him that they know him well enough to see some recklessness to his actions. Polpo had commented before, idly, about Bruno’s willingness to picking up “strays”—like junkyard dogs, he would say, you re-home them—but he never thought Fugo and Abbacchio saw it in him, too. Enough for it to be a point of apprehension.

“I appreciate your concern.” Hearing the stiff professionalism in his voice makes his own skin crawl, but he doesn’t want to strip it away, because doing so would reveal too much. “Still, it’s unnecessary.” Fugo and Abbacchio’s expressions sour in unison, so he quickly presses on: “I know you don’t trust Giorno—”

“But you do,” Fugo interjects sharply. It isn’t a question.

Bruno draws a breath. “Yes.”

“Why?” Even sharper, like he’s carving the word to a point.

Bruno has never been good with words, so when he opens his mouth and says, “because…” he finds he can’t think of anything to say.

This is not encouraging to Fugo and Abbacchio, who are looking more incredulous by the moment. “You don’t even know,” Abbacchio says flatly, “but we’re meant to trust him too?” A sneer crosses his face, closer to a rictus; all teeth. “Did you think this through at all?”

Bruno would like to say yes to that, that there are things at play here that the rest of the team doesn’t know about, but that would bring more scrutiny, even more questions he couldn’t answer. Fugo and Abbacchio have never been shy about speaking their minds, or disobeying his orders—a refreshing contrast to Narancia and Mista, who still sometimes look at him with so much reverence that it makes him feel uncomfortable, inhuman.

This conversation brings him back to a time when it was just the three of them, trying to pick their way along in what felt like the beginning of…something. The beginning of the world, even. Fugo and Abbacchio hadn’t liked each other much, at first, which Bruno grew to understand as being because the two were so similar; short-tempered and sharp-edged and rife with internal conflict.

For self-loathing people, looking in a mirror was the last thing they wanted to do.

Bruno looks between them, two years later, a lifetime later, and says, “do you trust me?” A pause. Fugo nods with trepidation. Abbacchio glares at him as if to say, you already know, dipshit. “So trust that I know what I’m doing here.”

Abbacchio scoffs. Fugo looks away.

“You don’t have to trust Giorno,” he says, dropping his voice. “Not now, not ever, if you don’t want to. But I will ask that you work with him.” He looks between them firmly. “This is going to be a dangerous mission. We’re going to face dangerous people and go to dangerous places. But I don’t need to tell you that. We need to work together to get through it.” The pair of them still look suspicious, so Bruno attempts to soften his voice. Which doesn’t exactly work, because he sounds exactly the same as before. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but I promise I know what I’m doing. Trust me.” And it will all make sense soon.

He sees the words taking their effect, and as they do, the pressure on his chest increases. He isn’t lying, but he feels guilty, somehow—like he’s deceived them. Fugo and Abbacchio’s trust—it’s a hard thing to earn. They trust so rarely and so deeply that it is precious when they do. Bruno doesn’t know how to tell them that having it scares him, some days, and the thought of taking advantage of that trust is the worst betrayal.

He doesn’t know if he’s capable of not letting them down, in some way, eventually. That he hasn’t already.

“Sure, Buccellati,” Abbacchio mutters. Fugo says something similar, but it’s so quiet Bruno can’t hear it.  They both turn away.

“Thank you,” Bruno says. He waits for them to glance back before adding, firmly, “for trusting me.”

Abbacchio sighs, moving his mouth in acknowledgment, but Fugo just stares at him, a look of terrible conflict on his face. Then he dips his chin in a short nod, and they turn away from him again.

|

It’s grotesque, this stand. Bruno tries and fails not to openly stare at Narancia, prone across Trish’s lap. He looks dead already; Bruno would assume he was, if he couldn’t hear the shallow, whistling breaths slipping through his cracked lips. Narancia’s already a starved boy. He’ll certainly be the first of them to go, should it come to it. There isn’t enough of him to eat away.

It is this thought that allows Bruno to wrench his gaze away at last, but only so he can scrutinize the state of the rest of his team. Fugo, also scrawny, but not like Narancia. Abbacchio, the oldest of them all—but not by much. Giorno, the youngest—but again, not by much. All three of them still exhausted from yesterday’s affair.

Trish is out of danger for now, it seems. Bruno barks some kind of instruction to prioritize herself, not Narancia, but he can hardly fault her for kindness—or correct her when she matter-of-factly states that he is dying.

The thought of being scared for himself doesn’t cross his mind.

Beyond this stand’s ability is the smell. The room inside the turtle is not unlike Sticky Fingers’ portals, existing outside of reality. It absorbs almost anything; sound doesn’t echo, taste is muted, smell vaporizes instantly. But even with the turtle tucked out of sight beneath the captain’s chair, Bruno can smell it: the thick, pervasive, sickeningly sweet stench. It’s some kind of humid gas, powerful enough to still exist in this unreal room.

It is almost a relief when one of the Pistols bursts down from the ceiling, shouting in its tiny, keening voice that Mista is hurt, Mista is unconscious, something about that bastardo with the aging stand and another man with a fishing pole.

Sticky Fingers roars to life inside of him, ready for a fight. He places Number Six on his shoulder, barely hears it greet his own stand as he crosses the room. Ignoring his own orders to Trish, he uses three of his five remaining ice cubes on Fugo, Abbacchio, and Giorno, sliding them between their lips, behind their teeth.

Biding his time in the ceiling for the ambush is much better than the torturous wait within the turtle. He feels like he’s doing something at last, seeing his resolve take shape before him. And what he sees is wings.

|

It’s a quick thought, an order—and Bruno doesn’t like to give orders when he doesn’t have to, only when the option for choices are gone. Right now is one of those times, with he and Abbacchio outnumbered by men brandishing stands as well as guns and knives, with both of them cornered and vulnerable, and—

“Get in,” Bruno commands. A swing of his hand lashes open the brick wall of the building they are pressed against, an abandoned textiles factory, now the home for illegal heroin production. Except it doesn’t expose the rotting interior; just a gaping purple void.

Abbacchio stares at him. “In where?” His eyes widen. “In there?”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Bruno offers. Abbacchio does not look reassured, consternation leaking into his face. The voices of their pursuers are drawing closer; in a moment they will turn the corner and find the two of them standing there, still stalling. “Get in. No time.”

Despite the unease on his face, Abbacchio takes only a moment to brace himself before stepping over the threshold of Sticky Fingers’ golden zipper. Bruno closes it behind him on his way in, leaving just the smallest crack open at the top. He’s never had the nerve to shut it entirely, unsure of if it may trap him inside.

“All right?” Bruno asks Abbacchio, who appears to be experiencing some kind of vertigo. Understandable for the first time being in one of Sticky Fingers’ vortexes, and to be quite honest he’s handling it better than Bruno could have anticipated. Better than Fugo, anyway, who was nauseous and disoriented for the entire twenty minutes they hid from Rebel Rebel’s acid rain.

Bruno merely gets a grunt as a response, so he sticks his hands in his pockets and lets Abbacchio recover on his own. Once he does, he turns around in a slow circle, eyes narrow. It’s something Bruno has noticed he does whenever they enter a new setting: assess it. He isn’t precisely sure what he is looking for—enemies, maybe. Or escapes. Neither are present here, it’s a useful habit to have, probably left over from his days on the force.

“Where…are we?” Abbacchio asks him, once his search is seemingly over. “Do you know?”

“Not really,” Bruno admits. With a wry smirk, he adds, “Sticky Fingers doesn’t tell me.”

Over the years, through his own experience and experimentation with his stand’s versatility, stretching his limits and abilities, Bruno has determined that these strange vortexes create space where there isn’t any; a separate reality existing outside of the material world. But not outside of time, as the minutes and hours pass just the same.

“Sticky Fingers is cryptic, then?” Abbacchio approaches him. He places his feet carefully, perhaps wary that the strange gravity keeping them suspended will drop away at any moment. “So he’s just like you.”

Bruno’s smirk widens into a crooked smile, and he nods. Sticky Fingers barely speaks, and when he does, it’s mysterious and unclear. His voice is not a voice—not in the typical sense. More of a fusion of sensations and perceptions that somehow form words only Bruno can understand.

He had always been there, though, in the time before he began assembling his team. Bruno would often get nightmares, in the beginning: of a hospital corridor, of his own bloodstained hands, of Polpo’s stand, looming over him. The dark had never been a source of fear before joining Passione, but now, when rooms are too dark or the night lacks a moon, it reminds him of Black Sabbath’s dark robes, its oppressive darkness, the blackness encroaching on his vision as the arrow dug further into his neck.

The inside of Sticky Fingers’ portals were a reprieve from the darkness of his room, and curling up within them was his greatest source of comfort before he learned to deal with it himself. Technically, it was like comforting himself, but he hadn’t had anything else at the time. At least Sticky Fingers never expected anything from him.

“What do you think?” Bruno asks, taking a—seat. He’s learned to not think too much about physical laws. They don’t precisely exist here. “Is it strange?”

Abbacchio joins him on the imaginary ground, folding his legs. “It’s…warm,” is what he says. “Warmer than I expected.” He lifts one hand, trailing it absently through the air, almost in an attempt to touch the nebulous purple clouds that surround them.

Bruno nods thoughtfully. Sticky Fingers is warm, in the way a mechanic’s shop is—thick and stuffy, like steam rolling off an overheated engine. If the void smelled like anything, it would be that: burnt metal.

“I met Sticky Fingers in here,” Bruno says, leaning back. “The arrow hit me, and—I was transported here. I saw a hand…” Bruno reaches out, reconstructing the memory, searching once again for the blue-and-white fingers stretching toward him like an olive branch. “…a voice telling me to reach. I think it must have been Sticky Fingers.”

Abbacchio is watching him fixedly. It occurs to Bruno that he’s never told anyone this story, or spoken about himself so candidly before. He often consciously avoids doing so.

But, caution fails him. It deserts him.

“And then—“ he drops his hand abruptly. “I did. And I woke up where I’d been stuck with the arrow, but I knew something was different.”

Abbacchio nods slowly, contemplating Bruno’s words. He frowns.

After another few moments of silence, Bruno thinks about suggesting they leave—their pursuers have likely dispersed by now—but as he opens his mouth to speak, Abbacchio mutters, “I barely remember what happened in my arrow test.”

Bruno freezes, closes his mouth. This is the first time he’s brought up his experience with the arrow test, or his initiation into Passione at all. “No?”

“It was more…” He pauses to think about it. “When you die, people say you live your whole life again in seven seconds. But it feels like you’ve lived it all over again.” Bruno nods. “It was like that, but…” Abbacchio’s mouth twists in derision. “…in reverse. From the moment Polpo’s stand came out until the beginning of my fucking life. You know what happened after that.” He shrugs jerkily. “Moody Blues.”

The name drops from his mouth lifelessly, like a stone. It’s the same way Abbacchio always talks about his stand—when he does talk about it, which is as little as possible. He dislikes volunteering information about it, and dislikes using it even more. He’s a lot like Fugo in that regard, but while Fugo’s aversion to Purple Haze is something Bruno can partially understand—for the fact that he can’t control it alone—Abbacchio’s seeming hatred of Moody Blues confuses him.

Fugo and Abbacchio have similar relationships with their stands: they’re ashamed of them.

Abbacchio must take Bruno’s silence for waiting, because he says, “that’s it.” His eyes cut away from Bruno’s, around Sticky Fingers’ portal. “It’s not special.”

“I don’t know about that.” Abbacchio scowls at Bruno, with an unexpected ferocity. “I’m serious,” Bruno insists. “Moody Blues has an incredible power.” It’s unlike anything he’s ever seen. The ability to replay time, to see the truth behind a mystery, to create a tangible, physical memory so accurate you could hear it, touch it, see it again?

Truly, he thinks Moody Blues might be the most extraordinary stand he’s ever seen.

“Sure,” Abbacchio says, bemused.

Bruno leans in closer, looking at him seriously. “I’ve always thought so.”

Abbacchio looks back at him, a complicated expression on his face. Bruno thinks he means to say something, perhaps continue disagreeing with him, but he doesn’t. After another minute, Abbacchio’s the first of them to break eye contact. Bruno’s watching him closely enough that he sees the exact moment that he stops looking in Bruno’s eyes and starts looking at his—mouth. With serious intent.

Oh. Some part of Bruno’s brain locks off firmly, an emphatic I won’t overshadowing a meeker I can’t. He levers himself to his feet, casting those thoughts away for another time—or never, maybe. This isn’t something he’s prepared to deal with right now.

“Don’t doubt your stand,” he says, holding out his hand to Abbacchio, still sitting, now frowning again. “You’ve only had it a few months. It may surprise you.”

You may surprise yourself, is what Bruno means, and is what he can’t say.

“I don’t know about that,” Abbacchio says, a dry echo of Bruno’s own words, but takes his hand anyway.

|

“This may hurt,” Giorno warns him, carefully packing bits of a torn guaze pad into the gash on Bruno’s broken nose—a gift from Prosciutto as they clung to the exterior of the the train together. “It’s not exactly healing, from what I understand. There has to be an inanimate base I can transform into living material, but the outcome is virtually identical.”

Giorno had informed them of Gold Experience’s newfound ability as Fugo drove them the rest of the way to Florence in their hot-wired Fiat. A stand attack—Babyface, the one that pixelated him and Trish—had nearly killed him, but under duress he managed to stretch the limits of his stand’s power. Well, putting pressure on coal turns it to diamonds, as the saying goes.

The boss offered no further instruction for the night, so just past 23:00 they arrive at a dingy Florentine motel. They elect to bypass check-in for the night and simply have Sticky Fingers break them into vacant rooms instead. Trish finally had access to a real bathroom, Narancia and Mista were warned that if they locked themselves out of their rooms that they would have no key to get them back in, and Giorno pulled Bruno aside to ask if he wanted his nose ‘healed.’

“The cut shouldn’t be so difficult,” Giorno explains. They’ve chosen to sit on the bed in Giorno and Mista’s shared room, as Mista showers off three days worth of sweat and blood in the bathroom. “Repairing the bone might be harder. I’ll have to do it from the inside, starting with the bone, then tissue—”

“It’s fine,” Bruno says.

“Sorry.” Giorno looks suddenly sheepish, an odd expression on him. It makes him look younger, like an actual fifteen-year-old. “I haven’t done this on anyone but myself yet.”

Bruno shrugs. “Don’t worry if it hurts,” is all he says. It can’t be worse than his broken nose already is, smarting with every word and turning his voice nasally.

“All right.” His green eyes narrow with concentration. “Gold Experience,” he murmurs, the shining stand appearing behind him. Its hands shadow Giorno’s own on either side of Bruno’s nose. A golden glow emanates first from Gold Experience’s hands, then Bruno’s own face. There’s pain, a dull, aching pain, but it is only present for a few moments before dissipating.

The glow subsides, and Giorno lowers his hands. Gold Experience steps back into him.

“It worked,” he says, surprised with himself.

Bruno stands from the bed and walks to the floor-length mirror outside the bathroom. Upon examination, his nose looks just as it did that morning—no bend, no torn skin. Not even a scar or residual pain.

“Incredible,” he murmurs. Maybe he was wrong, when he said Giorno Giovanna was made of miracles. Maybe it’s truer to say he makes them himself.

“I wonder,” Giorno starts. Bruno looks at him in the mirror, where he’s sat on the bed. One leg is pulled to his chest, head tilted with consideration. “Do you think Abbacchio would allow me to heal his hand?”

Bruno nearly smiles at the question. Abbacchio hadn’t voiced his opinion on Giorno’s new ability, but he didn’t have to; his silence and shuttered expression said enough.

“He wouldn’t,” Bruno says. “It’s okay, though. Sticky Fingers’ zippers are strong enough.”

“I know,” Giorno says quickly, and there’s a hint of awe in his voice. It makes Bruno wonder if Giorno respects Sticky Fingers as much as Bruno respects Gold Experience. “But I could take away the pain, at the very least.”

Bruno does smile this time, very briefly. “Don’t worry about Abbacchio, Giorno.” Bruno makes for the door. He doesn’t thank Giorno for healing his nose, because thanks go unspoken between them. This is their way. “I don’t think he minds the pain.”

That wound of Abbacchio’s will scar, as most of them do. Bruno’s zippers don’t heal like Gold Experience does. They scar; ugly, dense scars from where the zipper bites firmly into skin. They work, though, and cling on, because zippers hold things together as much as they can rip things apart. Bruno has his own share of scars—they all do.

Gold Experience has a gentle ability, for all the strength it takes to wield it. Bruno knows that is the most difficult kind of power; it is nothing to dismember or unravel someone with the flick of his wrist. It’s the softness that’s hard, the care it takes to close a wound, or to reattach a hand. It’s difficult and hard-learned, and will usually scar. But it is worth it in the end.

Bruno is halfway out the door when Giorno says, pensively, “I think I understand.” He looks at Bruno. “About the pain.”

Bruno believes he does. In a way, he does too. Pain is something you get used to in this lifestyle, to a point where it’s hard to remember a time when it didn’t exist. It’s walking on a bad leg. It doesn’t get better, but over time you get used to walking with a limp.

The night is heavy with pre-storm electricity, making the air outside thrum with anticipation. Crickets chirp from the safety of the nearby bushes, and from between the cracks in the concrete walkway spring forth bunches of grass and weeds, rising towards a hidden sun.

Bruno absentmindedly runs a finger along the bridge of his nose as he returns to his and Abbacchio’s room. It's remarkable how life finds its way to everything, eventually.

|

They find Mista and Giorno together on the bank of the reservoir, in the messy aftermath of another stand attack. Their enemy’s body is lifeless on the ground, in a puddle of water tinged with blood. Giorno helps Mista, half-healed from whatever new injury he’s sustained, into the boat, and gingerly takes a seat himself.

“Thirty-five times!” Mista raves to Narancia, who for some reason refuses to look Mista—or Giorno, for that matter—in the eye. “I got hit thirty-five fuckin’ times. It was crazy, but—” Here he looks at Giorno. “Giorno healed me. Hurt like a bitch, though.”

Abbacchio scoffs. “For someone who’s stand redirects bullet, you really can’t shoot for shit.” It’s a crack he’s made before, but Mista predictably squawks with affronted indignation.

“Fuck you, caz—”

“I thought Mista fought bravely,” Giorno breaks in. Abbacchio rolls his eyes, but Giorno is undeterred. “He was very resolved.” He stares fixedly at Mista, and they share eye contact for such an extended time that Bruno momentarily wonders if…maybe…

But the moment passes and Giorno turns to Bruno. “He was a formidable enemy, Buccellati. It was only together we could defeat him.” He holds out a red disc, the boss’s next mission. “Here.”

The disc is heavy in his hand. It’s hard to conceive, all they’ve done to make it here. All the sacrifices they have made, and will have to make before this is over.

They’ve been lucky so far, with countless close calls and near misses—their brushes with death only visible in the bruises and cuts and broken bones. The pale, fading scar circling a wrist or thirty-five—thirty-five—bullet wounds, just barely healed. A hand still missing its baby finger. He watches Giorno take Mista’s hand in his with utmost care.

Bruno knows that, no matter how it ends, this is not something they can return from unscarred, unchanged. Not one of them.

|

Bruno is twelve, and the arrow in his throat keeps pressing further back, until its all he can feel, until reality blurs around him, until he’s being pulled apart into atoms, until his only conscious thought is, this is what dying feels like.

Bruno is twenty, and all the blood and bone and viscera he is made of is spread around him in a grotesque display, and the church basement is cold, and King Crimson’s cruel fingers drip tar-black and thick, and Bruno thinks, no. This.

|

His mother feared the ocean; the reason why she never left the shore, perhaps the reason why she left, period. It’s unpredictable, she would say to him, the weather can change in an instant, and your luck goes with it. Bruno sometimes wondered if she worried for his father when he was at sea, but he supposes he’ll never know. He never asked, and now she’s gone. Now there is no time for silly questions.

Bruno likes the ocean, but he was never allowed on the water when his mother was around. But she’s not anymore, and the hole in his life is so wide, and the call of the ocean is louder than ever in the months following her departure. The first time his father takes him out onto the water, he is seven.

He learns there is a lot of nothing involved in fishing. Waiting, mostly. Vigilance and patience, a bit of belief, a lot of luck. Not exactly fun, but interesting. Bruno stands on the deck and looks across the sparkling water. They’re far from the shore, so far that it’s just a speck in the distance. It is just him and the Tyrrhenian sea, and his father’s small gillnetter rocking beneath his feet. The sky, brilliant and cloudless, stretches on and on until it seemingly merges with the sea at the break of the horizon.

A perfect day for sailing.

A cluster of seagulls circles in the distance, swooping this way and that, sometimes plunging beneath the water. Calling and crying to one another. Bruno didn’t particularly like seagulls; once, one had stolen zeppole straight from his hand and made him cry.

He wanders off to his father, finds him at the prow.

“Seagulls,” Bruno declares acrimoniously. “Lots of them.”

“Where?” His father looks down at him, amused. Humouring him. Bruno points eastward, at the swarm drawing closer. Squinting, his father shades his eyes with his hand to see better. He clucks his tongue. “Those aren’t seagulls,” he informs Bruno. “Those are black-tailed gulls.”

“Oh.” Paolo Buccellati is a fisherman, first and foremost, but he knows the birds, too. Any good fisherman doesn’t just know the fish, but all the local wildlife too. Bruno would also have to learn, if he was gonna be just as good as his father.

“Want to know how I know?” Bruno nods. His father kneels beside him. “It’s their cry,” he whispers, like he’s letting Bruno in on an important secret. “They meow, like cats.”

“Meow?” Bruno doesn’t hear it, exactly, but he believes it. His father’s words are the truth, even more important than God.

His father nods. “You’ll need to know, if…” His face changed then, for an instant, a look of melancholy coming over his features. “…if you become a fisherman.”

If, like Bruno has a choice. His father knows as well as Bruno does that there isn’t one, really. That he had squandered his only way out of this life when he chose to stay with his father than to leave with his mother.

“Listen, Bruno,” says his father, a foreign, gruff pitch to his voice. “Black-tailed gulls are important to fishermen, okay? When you’re at sea, open sea like this, there aren’t usually many birds. They prefer the land, like us.”

Bruno’s eyes drift from his father’s face to the group of seabirds. One perches on the rail of the boat and—meows, shrill and bright. Bruno wonders who it’s calling for, and if they’re listening.

“When I’m coming in from the sea,” his father goes on, “hearing the gulls is very important, because it means I’m going the right way. Like a lighthouse, they’re a guide.” He puts a hand on Bruno’s shoulder, affectionate for a not-so-tactile man. “You understand? They lead me—”

“Home,” Bruno finishes, and knows.

|

A week after his father dies, Bruno dreams of being underwater. There is no other living creature here besides him, and even then, he isn’t sure if he is alive either. His lungs don’t burn from lack of air, and his eyes don’t sting in the saltwater—and he knows it is saltwater. It is the ocean, he’s sure of it. Just barren of life.

Nothing moves, not even the waves. No current stirs. It’s just him, and the particles of sand and silt that float alongside him in weightless suspense. Some abstract source of light permeates the water, illuminating it teal, endless in every direction. It is impossible to say how far beneath the surface he is—just that he is drifting lower, slipping away from the still, clear waters into a serene, total darkness.

Bruno wakes as he would from a nightmare: thrashing, gasping, heart pounding a rapid beat in his throat. Sticky Fingers hovers over him, the edges of his form pulsing with a shimmering energy. His fists are raised like he’s prepared for combat.

Bruno can feel his stand’s tension within his own body, hot and brittle, coalescing in the form of Sticky Fingers’ soundless voice.

— where is the fight?

I don’t know, Bruno wants to say, scream. It feels like he has been screaming, his throat raw and sore—but that isn’t possible. Fugo is still asleep across the hall.

Sticky Fingers waits until Bruno’s breathing levels out to lower his fists, but continues to stand there, sentry-still, watching him. His spiked helm obscures his eyes—if he has them at all—but Bruno knows when his stand is looking at him; that particular stare brings a a distinct, prickly chill, like the bite of a zipper’s teeth.

— you dream. about what?

Bruno petulantly glares at his stand’s impassive face. Don’t you know?

Sticky Fingers is apparently done talking, and refuses to say more. He’s silent on most days, but the few times he does speak, it’s terse and cryptic. What Bruno’s stand wants from him now, he doesn’t know—but it begins with the dream, which he seemingly doesn’t know the contents of. It’s strange that a fragment of his soul can exist in physical form and still not know everything about him.

“Water,” Bruno mutters. He looks at the window, overlooking the streets of Vicaria, an inner-city district of Naples. Far from any water at all. “The sea.”

Sticky Fingers doesn’t sigh, because he doesn’t breathe. But his voice comes quiet and half-lost, sounding like the echo of a sound, like Bruno’s own voice if he listens hard enough.

— anima.

|

Giorno revives him in the day’s dying light.

Sight is the first sense that returns to him, in a splintered kaleidoscope of colours and shapes. The others return slowly, numbness leeching away as if he’s waking from the longest sleep of his life. His head floats with an unmoored, hazy feeling.

He was having a dream of some kind, although he can’t remember what it was.

What he does remember is King Crimson; its hulking form and twisted grimace. Choking on his own blood in the basement, only one storey below. Attaching the ends of his broken spine with a zipper so he could force himself onward. Just barely escaping with his and Trish’s lives.

They must leave this place. He tells Giorno this, fiercely.

Giorno doesn’t immediately catch on to the urgency. The boy’s eyes are wide, confusion and elation and a fading panic warring for dominance over his expression. It is so unlike him that Bruno is struck by its unfamiliarity. Bruno realizes with a jerk that Giorno probably doesn’t even realize he was reviving him at all; that he didn’t even know Bruno was dead to begin with. 

It was Gold Experience, then, who did it. Who reached beyond their plane to drag Bruno’s departing soul back from the brink.

It is not until later that he remembers the first light he saw upon waking was not the San Giorgio Maggiore’s atrium at all. It was Gold Experience’s eyes. Until then, he had been sailing away in an endless darkness, when two green eyes opened before him, glowing dully like a bare blade, a necromancer beckoning his return.

|

Fate is more just and cruel than any God. Religion hasn’t had much of a presence in Bruno’s life for the past eight years, but he’s beginning to understand what Mista is talking about. Fate is both the unstoppable force and the immovable object—the wall and the car accelerating towards it. Something that will claim them all eventually.

Bruno stands between his team and a boat. Between life and death, because what life is there for a traitor? Bruno doesn’t know, but he could say he’s never felt more alive since he became one.

He doesn’t say this, though. Instead, he offers his team a choice.

Maybe fate doesn’t exist at all, and he’s justifying it to himself. But he has to think that he was meant to meet Giorno, he was meant to go on this journey; he was meant to meet each member of his team, their  lives had led up to this choice lying before them.

One by one, they make it. They surprise him, them and their devastating loyalty. Abbacchio, then Mista, then Giorno step onto the boat, each one step nearer to the glorious cliff that could be their ruin—or rising. Narancia follows after them, because he has never wanted to be left behind, or leave others behind.

Only Fugo does not surprise him. Fugo is rational and intelligent and cautious. He’s always been too smart for Bruno; he knew that the first time they made eye contact in Libeccio.

And if what Mista says about fate is true, Fugo leaving them was inevitable from that moment. From before they even met at all.

|

The first time Fugo brings out Purple Haze, Bruno thinks it is an enemy stand for how it towers over them all, a patchwork zombie held together with the same stitching that sews its drooling mouth shut. It tears through their enemies with devastating efficiency, but when the fight’s over, it grabs Fugo by the throat. Bruno has to swiftly cut its arms away, along with a rapidly blistering part of Fugo’s midsection. It’s the first time he has ever seen a stand attack its own user.

The second time Fugo brings out Purple Haze, Bruno doesn’t see it at all, merely hears it while he bleeds on the cement ground. The croaky snarls and grunts, the hiss of dissolving flesh. Purple Haze’s virus works swiftly, and its victims stop screaming soon enough

After, Bruno sits up as Fugo staples and stitches the laceration on his face. He’s not very good at it, but Bruno doesn’t expect him to be. His hands are not a surgeon’s. They jerk and shake, his face drawn, but whether that’s a side effect of using Purple Haze or having to put Bruno’s face together remains to be seen; the mangled stop sign that nearly tore it off is to their right. They don’t do hospitals; this job is messy, but hospitals bring a different kind of messy. A legal messy.

Bruno tugs at a weed poking through the cracked cement floor, eyes drifting past Fugo’s pinched face to the remains of Purple Haze’s most recent victims; their pulpy, softened bones and shredded bits of clothing. As terrible as they were, it’s a grotesque way to go. Though he supposes Fugo knows that.

Fugo does all he can, and neither of them move for a long time.

There’s a certain serenity about this night, looking past the corpses lying a few meters away. They had tracked these men to this anonymous place a few kilometres outside Casoria, this long-forgotten hangar. A field borders the edges of its cement floor, bursting with tall grass and knee-high thistles. The sun has begun to set outside its enormous, gaping door, casting large shadows across the ground.

“Buccellati,” Fugo says slowly. “Does…Sticky Fingers ever talk to you?”

“Sometimes.” He tries not to wince at the effort of speaking, the spike of pain that lances through his skull. “Never too much, though.”

He doesn’t add that he used to speak more, when he first arrived. It was all confusing, mostly one-word observations and comments, but after he met Fugo his stand’s limited speech became even more so. But sometimes…

“I wouldn’t call it speaking, anyway,” Bruno goes on. “It’s hard to describe.”

There’s a certain way to Sticky Fingers’ words that makes it different than an internal monologue, and they’re hard to hear. Easily lost, like clouds of vapour.

“Purple Haze doesn’t talk.” Sitting like this, Fugo reminds him a lot of the day they met; slouched, carrying himself like a man condemned. But there had been a flinty look in his eye like drawn steel. It was that fighter’s look that made Bruno sure he’d pass the lighter test. It was that look that explained Purple Haze. “Sometimes I think it might be trying, but…”

It hadn’t occurred to Bruno that Fugo might think so. Perhaps its animalistic groans could have been aborted attempts at speaking through its sewn-shut mouth.

“It might eventually. It can take some getting used to—”

“Bullshit,” Fugo snaps. There’s an edge to his voice that has never been the harbinger of good things. “If it’s a reflection of my soul, and my soul is—that, there’s no fixing it. There’s no coming back.”

Bruno considers this. “Maybe,” he concedes, and Fugo flinches at his honesty. “But the way I see it, it’s a part of you no matter what. So you could learn to use it, or hide it away.”

Bruno’s brought back to that first time Fugo used Purple Haze in combat—Bruno’s quick action stopped the infection from spreading, but it hadn’t stopped the pain. Fugo had writhed and howled and clawed at the dirt on the side of Vesuvio, the screaming going on long after the infection was gone. Eventually, he managed to roll onto his side and drag himself onto his elbows.

I hate it! Fugo had snarled, half-delirious with pain. I fucking hate it!

Now, Fugo just says, “It sucks, you know. I can’t even rely on myself anymore.” He looks away. “Things are easier when you don’t have to count on anyone but yourself. The rest is bullshit.” A bitter laugh escapes his mouth. “Love? Family? I’ll tell you what that’s worth: nothing. It’s zero.”

“That’s not always true,” Bruno says, and he’s thinking of his own father. It’s probably worse to have a terrible family than a family that cared and is now gone.

“One time, I nearly killed my parents.” Fugo brings his knees to his chest. “They were always pushing me because I was so fucking smart, but I wanted them gone. I hated them.” He looks at Bruno hard, like a challenge, carrion hair backlit by the setting sun. “Does that scare you?”

“I already told you I don’t think you could kill me,” Bruno reminds him. He tilts his head back, toward the sky. “I meant what I said when we met. I’ll bring out the best in you. Until then, I won’t leave you behind.”

He doesn’t check to see what kind of expression Fugo is making, just continues looking up. It truly is a beautiful day. Years of living away from the ocean has made him appreciate other parts of the world; a grassy field, a crowded city, the mountains looming in the distance. But still. Still. Nothing quite compares.

“Hey, Fugo.” The boy glances Bruno’s way. “Remind me to tell you the name of my father’s boat, sometime.”

Fugo’s eyes narrow in confusion, like he doesn’t quite understand the correlation, but he nods anyway. Bruno touches the side of his face, wincing when his fingers come away tacky and red.

“That’ll scar,” Fugo says quietly. He’s looking at Bruno’s hand, but is touching his side through his shirt, at the place where Bruno knows is a puckered scar along his abdomen and ribs.

“That’s all right,” says Bruno, and Fugo closes his eyes.

|

Notorious B.I.G. was kind enough to bring down the plane just off Sardinia’s coast, but not anywhere near their destination. When they drag themselves from the beach into a nearby coastal town, they learn from reading a newspaper stand that they are in Muravera—268 kilometres south of Costa Smeralda. A three-days walk.

“Shit,” Narancia says succinctly.

Bruno looks his team over. Each of them are soaking wet and shaking, the majority of them are injured in  some capacity, they probably haven’t eaten enough in the past week or gotten nearly enough sleep. He says, “Okay, we’re heading out in half an hour, get whatever you need for the journey.” He pauses. “And let’s please find a bathroom.”

Bruno walks into a nearby trattoria and asks permission for his…friends to use the bathroom. “Or the staff bathroom,” he adds helpfully. The hostess takes one look at them and says no, so Bruno leads them around the back and zips them inside anyway, into a narrow hallway with two locked bathrooms that read Personale.

He makes to unzip each of the doors to0, but hesitates when Mista gives him an appalled look.

“You can’t just unzip the door,” he hisses, “I don’t want people watching while I take a piss!”

“I can just…close it until you’re done,” Bruno explains patiently.

“What if you open it too soon and everyone gets a peep?”

Bruno sighs. Beside him, Abbacchio rolls his eyes. Giorno steps forward and says, “I can handle this one,” materializing Gold Experience behind him. The door handles become thick bunches of clover, their green leaves twisting and stretching towards the light. Giorno turns back to them. “That would have disabled the lock,” he says. “I can just change it back once we’re done.”

Mista stares at him like he’s in love.

In the end, it appears none of them, save Trish, needed to use the bathroom at all. Giorno and Narancia head out to find food, while Mista and Abbacchio cuss and fight for a position beneath the one hand dryer beside the sink—you know saltwater destroys my hair, you dickhead! and yeah, well, this sweater is fucking cashmere, dipshit!. Bruno chooses to stand a safe distance away.

Giorno and Narancia return before they’re done, and Narancia sidles up beside him. “Y’know,” he says pleasantly, “I was thinking about going back to school.”

Bruno stares at him, at this seemingly out-of-nowhere comment. There’s a firm decisiveness to Narancia’s voice that further confuses him, because Narancia certainly isn’t known for making statements like this.

Bruno says, “What?”

“Y’know,” Narancia repeats, glancing at him oddly. “Once this is all over.” His eyes dart to the door of the ladies’ restroom and back to Bruno so quickly he could have missed it. “Once we get rid of Trish’s shitty dad, and everything.”

Bruno is taken aback, lost for words. Since being revived—since learning what being revived meant—since the numbness in his fingertips began—he hasn’t even considered the future beyond the objective of the mission. Find the current boss and kill him, and put Giorno on the throne of Passione. Everything else is abstract, up to them to put together. Not him.

“School?” Bruno asks. His mouth is dry.

Narancia nods. “I, like…think it’s what Fugo would want me to do.” His voice dips when he says Fugo’s name, like he may be listening from around the corner. Like Fugo is still with them. “I stopped going forever ago, but if I go back, and I’m not so stupid with math, if I ever see him again…” His voice takes on a strange, watery tone. He clears his throat and tosses his head in a failed attempt to be blasé. “Well, you know, he’ll have some competition. Maybe.”

Bruno and Narancia really are more alike than Narancia knows. They both stopped going to school to join a gang, but Narancia doesn’t know this. No one does. Maybe he was wrong, to keep that part of himself hidden. Maybe it would have made Narancia feel better, for all the times he didn’t know something, or thought he was stupid, to know Bruno was the exact same way…

Too late now.

It’s too late for a lot of things, now. Bruno squeezes his numb fingers into a fist. They’ve all been hurt on this journey, in some way. They’ve all been hurt before then, some of them all their lives. Whatever it is, though, it’s his. This pain, this life. It’s his.

“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” Bruno says. His voice catches unexpectedly.

Narancia’s face cracks into a grin. Bruno would smile too. He very nearly does. Narancia—he’s truly a good kid, brash in his kindness, but always earnest. Loyal to a fault, which has gotten him into trouble before. Trusting and fearless, and with enormous potential. At least Passione hasn’t taken that away from him.

“Oh, hold on,” Narancia says. He fiddles around in the pocket of his skirt. “Check it,” he says, passing something small and green to Bruno.

Resting in his palm is a four-leaf clover.

“Don’t tell Mista,” Narancia says quickly. “It was growing on the bathroom door. It’s the only one with four leaves, I checked.” His voice drops, like it’s a secret. “They’re meant to be lucky, I think.”

Something lodges itself in his diaphragm, so instead of responding, Bruno zips it into his forearm and nods.

They continue on their way; they need all the daylight they can get on this long walk ahead of them. As they go, Bruno considers his own school days. Narancia has never been good at math, but Bruno had enjoyed it, for all of its reliability and predictability. Really, math was about patterns, and patterns have always centred around the ability to see the future; to see the end from the beginning, before you even start. And Bruno has grown to appreciate the process of seeing things through to the end.

|

It’s almost cold tonight, the wind tunnelling hard and sharp along the steep coastal cliffs. They’ve stopped for the night near Orosei, somewhat of a halfway point between Muravera and Costa Smeralda, when his team could barely see where they were going and could barely keep themselves on their feet. Twenty hours of walking on top of an exhausting week will do that.

Bruno’s watch should have ended hours ago, but he isn’t tired. He is familiar enough with insomnia to know that it isn’t the cause. Maybe it’s just that he doesn’t need to sleep in general anymore. Either way, he decided not to wake Narancia from the sleep he much more desperately needed. None of them have done much resting at all in the past week—snatches of it between stand attacks, that’s all. This is the best night of sleep they have gotten in a long time, and probably will for a while.

He likes it out here, anyway; it’s a welcome change from the inside of the turtle, with its stifling, still air and unnatural silence. It’s a silence that swallows anything that tries to fill it. It’s unsettling.

Bruno doesn’t rouse him, but Abbacchio emerges from the turtle at 3:10 exactly. He must’ve set an alarm, or Moody Blues did—Bruno’s not quite sure how that would work, but still. It doesn’t matter; he’s awake. Bruno doesn’t greet him and Abbacchio doesn’t ask what he’s still doing awake. He just joins Bruno where he leans against the rocky face of the cliff and folds his arms.

If he wanted to, Bruno could imagine this was just another mission. All five of them, Fugo too, just out of sight, he and Abbacchio taking their watches together. They would often do that, then.

But Bruno flexes his hand, and the creeping numbness in his joints prevents him from straying away from reality. It is impossible to ignore, now; impossible to not know what he is. What began as a slight loss of feeling in his fingertips has extended to his wrists, and it goes on, and he knows it will continue to grow.

And Bruno knows how it will end. He’s used to it by now, seeing the end visible from the beginning. Patterns and predictability.

Bruno doesn’t remember when he starts walking—just that he does, in a leisurely pace along the cliffs. He knows Abbacchio is following him. He’s been silent since their watch together began, as he usually is, but it’s a heavy sort of silence that’s thick with thoughts unsaid.

There’s a small outcropping about fifty meters from the turtle, and here is where Bruno chooses to sit, crossing his legs beneath him. Abbacchio joins him wordlessly. The view of the ocean is perfect from here—even on this moonless, starless night, an ethereal sheen glints off of its moving surface. He takes a moment to revel in its sound, the pounding pulse of the waves upon the surf. The briny smell in the breeze that ruffles his bangs. These sensations will be lost to him, soon.

Over the course of his life, Bruno has lost many things. He’s learned the best way to handle it is to accept it, and to take in as much as you can when you can. So you don’t forget what it felt like to have it.

The sea reminds him of who he once was and where he will return once he’s gone. At the very least, he chooses to die remembering where he belongs.

Abbacchio shifts beside him, bringing one knee close to his chest. His face is pensive, thoughtful.

“The sea’s calm,” Bruno says idly. He feels, rather than sees, Abbacchio’s gaze snap to him. “It’s a good omen for sailors, you know. It brings luck.”

Here he holds out his hand: in his palm is Narancia’s four-leaf clover that he gave him this morning. Its corners have begun to wilt, but he cradles it like a precious thing. Abbacchio just stares at it.

Instead of acknowledging what Bruno has said, he asks, “What happens if all of this works?” He locks eyes with Bruno, a fixed, questioning stare that sends a prickle down his neck. “If, somehow, we end up killing the boss, and…taking over Passione.” He sighs. “What happens after?”

“…We’ll go back to Naples, I expect,” Bruno says, selecting his words carefully. “First, we’ll have to find the current boss’s—”

“No—damn it, that’s not what I meant.” Abbacchio turns away, faces the ocean, a frustrated set to his shoulders. “I meant, what happens to us? To you?”

The question hits him squarely, pushing him into silence. There’s an undertone to Abbacchio’s voice, a desperation, like he needs to know, which Bruno supposes he understands. Even himself, he’s comforted by the mere fact that a future exists at all, beyond the end of his meagre life.

Bruno was always prepared to die, but not like this; not when he finally realized there was something worth living for, rather than dying for. Abbacchio must feel the same. He has changed much in the same way.

“I don’t know,” Bruno answers, low enough that the night air could swallow his voice. “I won’t know until we do.” To talk about a future that doesn’t exist for him—that brings a strange feeling. But it acts almost like a comfort, for the pressure it eases within him. “I suppose we’ll have to decide what we want for ourselves then.”

Abbacchio is silent, but his rigid posture speaks everything he refuses to say.

“It will be good,” Bruno goes on, “for all of us, I think. We’ll have freedom to choose. That’s the most important thing.” It is. Betraying the boss may have killed him, but he’s never felt so honest, or so real. Like the past eight years have been lies upon lies, that he told to himself, that he told to his team. “None of you would have to do what anyone told you again. Not even what I told you. Especially not me.” He twists his mouth. “It’s what I’d want.”

“It’s what you’d want,” Abbacchio repeats, bitterly.

“Yes,” Bruno insists. A particularly loud wave crashes on the rocks, echoing a fraction of what Bruno feels inside. “I shouldn’t—” He pauses. “I should have never recruited any of you in the first place,” he says. “I certainly never should have asked you to come here with me. So after all this time…if you want to be free of me, you can be.” He drops his voice. “I’ll never ask you to stay if that’s not what you want.”

He doesn’t know what to expect from Abbacchio, not when his face is hidden by his starlight hair. But it’s certainly not for him to mutter, “You’re so stupid, Buccellati.” When he turns to Bruno, he’s—angry. As angry as he’s ever been. “If that’s what you think,” he snaps, “why bother recruiting us at all? If you think we’re so fucking desperate to get rid of you, what was even the point—” He cuts himself off, breathing hard. He swallows. “Why did you recruit us?” he asks again, voice low.

I don’t know, is Bruno’s first, hysterical answer. He’s never been good with words, or understanding the reasons behind even his own actions. All he knows is how he feels, when Narancia and Mista can still laugh and smile and be happy despite everything, when he knew he’d earned Fugo’s trust, when he first heard Abbacchio speak about life like he didn’t hate to live it. And now there’s even more: Giorno’s dignity, Trish’s bravery—they all combine into something Bruno couldn’t hope to describe, but knows it exists outside of him, will outlive him, is worth more than him. Worth more than anything.

“You deserved something new,” Bruno says with finality. “All of you.” And me too, maybe.

Abbacchio nods. “Then it’s not pointless,” he says. “It’s never been nothing to us. That’s not nothing. Stop treating it like it is.”

Bruno’s mouth wrenches, unbidden. Hearing it is a comfort, in a way, but a source of sadness, too. He supposes that if this is the mark he’ll leave on this world, it certainly is something indeed.

“What will you do?” Bruno asks Abbacchio. “Once this is over.”

“What you do,” Abbacchio tells him, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

Bruno closes his eyes.

“And I know that’s not what you want to hear,” he goes on quickly, “but you asked what I want. And, well…”

The only time I’m at ease is when…

“…I guess you already know what that is.”

The words pry Bruno’s chest open one rib at a time, until he’s stripped bare. Selfishly, he’d like to take Abbacchio and all the rest of them and keep them locked in the empty cavity of his chest, keeping them there, safe. He’s never had the strength to protect them all. It’s what he regrets most in this life, that he never could.

When he dies, and Abbacchio never sees him again, Bruno just hopes he’ll think this was worth it. If there’s anything he’s learned on this journey, it is to value the process more than the end, because it is the process that makes the end meaningful. Even if you never get to see it.

He is walking in a perpetual sunset, toward a horizon he’ll never step beyond, but even if the future turns to ashes in his own hands, he can pass it to someone else. That is trust. Worth more than anything.

“I know,” Bruno says. He thinks, for the first time, that he truly does.

|

As they pass outside of Portisco, it truly begins to feel real. That nearly fifty hours of walking along Sardinia’s east coast—fifty hours of heat and wind and very little food, which made for very aggravated Sex Pistols—has a purpose, and that purpose draws nearer with every step, Costa Smeralda so close he can almost feel it deep within him.

Giorno leads them through the undulating, scruffy hillsides, Bruno following a few steps behind. The rest of his team fall in line after him. Aerosmith soars overhead, so high above them that its shiny red body is barely visible against the cloudy sky, and as Narancia informs them that they have a mere nineteen kilometres to go before reaching Porto Cervo, Bruno marvels at how close this feels to being over.

Logically, he knows it isn’t. What they will find on Costa Smeralda won’t be the end. Really, it will just be the beginning: a first step on the path to finding the boss, protecting Trish, creating a better future. Still, he can’t help but feel as though something is ending, for the unfamiliar feeling growing inside of him.

Hope, he realizes. Raw and cautious, it cracks through his numb chest, peeking out like beams of light. It has survived and grown stronger with every step, every part of this journey. Even in the face of his frozen heart, his fading senses, the unnatural tic to his gait, the timer above his head ticking down—everything pales in comparison to that feeling.

In front of him, Giorno walks like a true leader. Hands in his pockets, back straight and proud, chin raised. He hasn’t looked back since they last stopped, and that was several hours ago. Bruno has to wonder if he knows what has happened with Bruno’s body, but he assumes he doesn’t. He would have brought it up. 

That’s okay. He’ll find out soon enough, what his stand’s limitations truly are. How neither the most powerful nor the kindest abilities in the world cannot can change what has already come to pass.

Bruno lengthens his strides until he and Giorno walk in pace beside each other. “When this is all over,” Giorno says, like he was waiting, “I’d like you to be my consigliere.”

Giorno’s golden dream. His golden Passione. It taking shape little by little, its lines becoming stronger and thicker and more defined each day. It makes Bruno regretful, that he won’t be able to see it.

“I don’t know if I could,” says Bruno, deciding, for once in his life—not to lie, exactly, but to pretend. “I’ve never been a good leader.” Giorno looks at him then, sharp and incredulous. “I haven’t,” Bruno repeats firmly, the truth. “Not really. I’ve led them into peril so many times, and I never could change anything.”

There is a long, disquieting silence. Giorno’s silences always have weight, a purpose behind them. “I haven’t known them long,” he admits, “but I don’t think that’s true. If you think you haven’t changed anything, you’re wrong. You’ve changed them. They love you for it.” Giorno’s eyes trace the sky, the grey slate of the ocean in the distance. “None of them would be here now if you weren’t.”

“I don’t know,” Bruno says, recalling something Fugo once told him. It was after he and Abbacchio and Giorno returned from Vesuvio with a key, and a story:

I don’t know what it is, Fugo had said, eyes darting to Giorno, alight with admiration rather than suspicion. He has this way about him. Like a candle, almost. You’re drawn to it.

“You give off this light,” Bruno says now. “It’s like a promise.”

There’s a pause. “Light is important, yes, but it’s warmth that keeps people close.” Giorno locks eyes with him, so intense that Bruno is nearly compelled to stop. But he doesn’t. They go on. “People forget how to lead with the soul,” Giorno says quietly. “You don’t.”

Bruno exhales, the words hitting somewhere hard. In his chest, Sticky Fingers stirs, unfurls, as if moved by the words himself.

“Consider it, Buccellati.” With those words, Giorno pulls ahead again. Bruno lets him.

It’s strange, he thinks: learning how to live, at last, but in the process of dying.

He hears the voices of his team behind him, already leaving them behind. They’re a disorderly crew; ill-formed and sharp-edged and prickly, but they’re his, and he doesn’t want to give them up, or give them to anyone else.

Bruno looks over his shoulder. Mista shoves Narancia playfully, who hits him back with a sharp elbow to the ribs. They are the most open of them all, but never cease to confuse him. There’s so much he could say: how he hopes Mista never loses his relentless optimism, or how proud and envious he is of Narancia’s fearless desire to confront his past, and to go back to school.

Abbacchio is the only one of the three of them that catches him watching and looks steadily back. There is nothing he really has to say to him that isn’t already known. He has never been good with words, and Abbacchio has never needed him to be. He’ll never be able to say how much that meant to him. Maybe he could have, in a gentler life.

And then there’s Fugo, wherever he is now. Fugo, the prodigal son—lost before, now lost to him again. But maybe there’s hope for him, so long as Giorno is around to draw him back.

If Bruno indeed has to leave his team behind, he knows they are safe in Giorno’s hands.

Satisfied, he looks forward again. There is a special freedom to be found in finding your strength in others, he has learned. Following doesn’t mean having to walk in another’s shadow, but standing in the light, side by side.

|

The Villa Vittoria is a glamorous venue, nestled among the cliffs and greenery of costal Posillipo. More accustomed to hosting weddings than New Years Eve parties. But this is Passione, and Passione is nothing if not extravagant. The invitation from Capo Struffoli had been met by Polpo from within his prison cell, and accordingly passed to Bruno and his team to attend in his stead.

Bruno isn’t one for parties, but his team is enjoying themselves; already, Mista and Narancia were drunk on the prosecco and champagne served at dinner. Usually Bruno would ask them to stay vigilant in a setting with other Passione members present, but Bruno can’t deny them this indulgence; they’re permitted so few.

It isn’t all bad, though. The estate has a stone terrace built into the cliffs overlooking the Gulf of Naples, and Bruno finds himself drawn there after all eight courses of dinner are served. It is empty for the time being, with everyone still inside. There’s a bite to the air, but it’s an unusually warm day for December. A break from the typical winter austerity. The setting sun casts a pink sheen across the water, the breeze is salty and strong, and above, a group of black-tailed gulls soar and sing. It’s the same ocean it has always been.

Bruno had seen a thousand sunrises and sunsets before, but there’s something about this one that’s more significant—the symbolic twilight of one millennium ushering in a new one, bright and sparkling with promise.

Promises of new starts, Bruno supposes. People make their resolutions, to change, or change others. To begin anew with the year. It’s been a long time since Bruno has felt such things are possible, but something new—or perhaps something merely forgotten—is rising within him. There is something special in watching the millennium approach with the creeping descent of the sun. Only those alive at this very moment can say they experienced such a thing.

Bruno doesn’t glance back as footsteps approach from behind him, knowing whoever it is is purposefully making their presence known. Instead, he waits until Fugo has reached his side. “Enjoying the festivities?”

“Narancia and Mista are in the pool,” Fugo says, disdain losing its effect through the curdled note of fondness in his voice. “They tried to throw me in after I talked them out of skinny-dipping.”

Bruno believes him—the front of his deep vermillion suit is soaking wet. He suppresses a smile. “And Abbacchio?”

“Drunk at the bar.” There is no concern in Fugo’s voice, where it might have been in the past. Progress is possible, it appears. Fugo’s mouth twitches to one side. “Honestly, Buccellati, I don’t understand why you bother with this stuff.”

Bruno sips his champagne, his second glass, the taste suffusing across his tongue. Until Passione, indulgences like expensive liquor were an impossible dream. He tries to catalogue each new sensation he stumbles upon like it’s a precious thing. “What stuff?” he asks Fugo, already knowing the answer. It’s a conversation they’ve had before.

“This. Everything you do for Polpo.” The name escapes with a bitter edge to it. “It’s beneath you to do his bidding.”

“You aren’t having a good time here?”

“No, I—that’s not what I meant.” Fugo leans on the terrance rail, mirroring Bruno’s own position as he works to collect his thoughts. “It’s just…you’re going to be a capo soon. You shouldn’t be doing anyone but the boss’s business.”

“You think so.”

“Yes,” Fugo says fiercely. “This year. I know it.”

Bruno is surprised and touched by the conviction in his voice. Fugo’s faith is hard won, like his trust, but it’s a powerful thing. He doesn’t know what to say; he’s never been good with words, and thanking him seems underwhelming, anything else excessive. They’ve never been affectionate people, him and Fugo. Abbacchio too.

In a way, he grew up to be just like his father. He’d never been particularly demonstrative either.

“Remember—a few years ago, I told you I’d tell you the name of my father’s boat.” Bruno turns to Fugo, who acknowledges him with a short, unsure nod.

It has been long since Bruno considered the passage of time. Looking upon the last two, ten, twenty years of his life, he could barely recall what happened and when. It seems as though just yesterday he had begun to build his team, and last week he was introducing himself to Polpo for the first time. If he peered further back, he could see his mother, his father, a house on the coast—other memories half-forgotten and diluted by time.

Bruno takes a breath, the sea air reminding him of who he is. “Anima,” he says.

“Anima,” Fugo repeats. “For—”

Soul, his father had told him. For spirit.

“My father said he named her for the spirit of the ocean,” Bruno says, the memory spreading out within his chest. “He’d say—she’d bring him luck while he was at sea. That was how he’d be brought home safe.” He swallows; his throat is sore. “He’d say—it didn’t matter how far he’d go, because the spirit of the ocean was faithful, and would always bring him—”

“Home,” Fugo finishes, and knows. There’s a strange look on his face, oddly akin to fear. It makes him look very young. “Buccellati,” he says, “why are you telling me this?”

This is a conversation about a boat. And it isn’t. Fugo understands this first.

“I’m trying to say—” And here a smile breaks upon his lips; the crashing of a wave, a new beginning, the setting sun shattering upon the ocean in a thousand pieces of light— “that I think this will be a good year.”