Work Text:
Mista doesn’t hate him anymore. This is a good thing, in theory.
Mista doesn’t hate him anymore. Fugo knows this because Mista said so himself, had shown up at his door one afternoon. A Tuesday in mid-August, stood there, staring, sweating, until Fugo had asked if he was there to kill him. His gun is at his side, but then, that gun is always at his side.
“No,” had been Mista’s clipped reply, “No—I,” he takes a step forward, across the threshold onto the doormat, and Fugo takes a step back, into the apartment. For the first time in nearly a year, they’re occupying the same space untempered by Giorno’s presence. And all Fugo can think about is how he hadn’t dried his hair before going to bed last night. How it must look like a mess now after another night sleeping on it. How grateful he is that he took at least some garbage out that morning. Wondering when he started worrying this much about what Mista thought about him. If he’d ever not have to worry—if things would ever be easy again, the way they’d been before. If they’d ever been easy, or if he’s just sentimentalising the past because the present is so remarkably shit.
(He thinks: please god if there is a god, bring them back and etcetera etcetera.
He thinks: fuck you, asshole, I’ll fucking kill you for doing this to me and so on and so forth.)
They’re standing in that indeterminate area by the front door, where outside becomes inside, where the communal hallway becomes private residence. His shoes are pressed up neatly in a row with their toes to the wall. His still-damp umbrella hangs next to his keys on a set of brass hooks the previous occupant had left behind. He’s in his house slippers, and Mista’s in his boots, dotted with flecks of dried mud. It’d rained yesterday. Mista shuts the door behind him.
“How’ve you been,” he asks stiffly, awkwardly, shifting his weight from left leg, to right leg, to left again on the woven jute. He hasn’t moved any closer, like he isn’t sure how far in he’ll be permitted to go. The politeness is eerily out of place, this behavioural uncanny valley. Mista never used to care about this sort of thing. Fugo would’ve preferred getting shot.
“I’m doing well,” Fugo nods, lying through his teeth, “uh—”
“I heard—Giorno says you’re not coming back.”
“Yeah,” he swallows, “yeah.”
“Thought he’d make you come back.”
“Yeah I thought that too.”
“Come back,” Mista’s muddy boot makes contact with the faux-granite laminate floor.
“Shoes,” Fugo says without really thinking. It comes out too sharp, so he says, “shoes,” again, mumbles it this time, struck by the ridiculousness of the request.
They haven’t spoken in nearly a year; he sure picked a good day to render Mista speechless.
Mista exhales a laugh—a little manic—through his nose, glances down at his own feet, then back at Fugo, “right,” he nods, running a hand over his face, “right. Shoes. Of course.”
For a half-second Fugo thinks Mista might just walk in anyway, but then he crouches down, undoes his boots. He’d spent weeks pestering Abbacchio to teach him how to do those straight-bar laces.
There’s an old military myth, that during the First World War the Italian army laced their boots parallel, while the Austro-Hungarians laced them crossed, and soldiers serving in the Dolomite tunnels were taught to feel for bootlaces in the darkness to distinguish friend from foe.
If only things were still that simple.
Mista’s socks are a truly atrocious shade of lime green; his gun is at his side. He looks like he’s forgotten what he’d been planning to say.
He coughs to breaks the excruciating silence, then, “uh, you had lunch?”
Fugo blinks, caught off guard, “yeah I’ve had lunch.”
“Oh. Okay.” Fugo watches him gently prod his boots out of the way with a big toe. Uncertain, like he’s pausing between movements to assess Fugo’s response, testing the waters, ever watchful, the same way he would tuck Fugo’s hair behind his ear as a coy prelude to inching down his collar to unbutton his shirt, “dinner?”
“… no. Not yet, no.”
“We could go to Burger City.”
A quick glance at his wall clock, another unconscious step back, “it’s too early for burgers,” it’s a quarter to four, “but—”
“Come back,” Mista finally moves further into the living room, putting them nearly chest to chest, “I want you to come back.”
“—we could go—”
He jabs an accusing finger into Fugo’s ribs, hard enough to bruise, “I don’t care what Giorno fucking told you, I want you to come back. It’s not fair—you don’t get to leave again.”
He says, “what, things get a little tough and you just walk away? Huh? Is that it?” Like he actually expects Fugo to retaliate, like this is just another argument over who ate the last two teaspoons of java chip ice cream. Fugo could point out that ‘little tough’ might be a bit of an understatement, that Mista was the one who’d walked away first. He doesn’t. Mista doesn’t need any more reasons to hate him.
Met with silence, Mista continues in exasperation, “I don’t hate you.”
And then, “I don’t hate you anymore.”
And then, more quietly, more desperately, “I don’t want to hate you anymore.”
Who is he trying to convince?
Burger City had been Narancia’s, in the same way Libeccio had been Bruno’s; he’d been the one who loved it first, loved it the most (best onion rings in the city I swear on my life). It was an evangelical sort of love, one he preached with great fervour. Exactly what you need after a night out, he would say, the only good thing about this neighborhood, and they have the good toilet paper, and they don’t even care if you take it, they just let you.
Back at the apartment Fugo had been prepared to let Mista have full custody. He’s not so sure about that anymore.
Mista orders himself a double cheeseburger with extra tomato, with a large bag of fries that he pours out onto the paper-lined tray, “here,” he says, pushing it towards Fugo, “eat.”
“… I’m not hungry,” Fugo says. It’s way too early for dinner. Mista rolls his eyes, drags the tray back towards himself and tosses a fry into his mouth.
“Your loss.”
It’s a bit of performance, a theatrical re-enactment of better days, already behind them. He doesn’t know why Mista is pretending that they’re still the sort of people who do things like this, but he doesn’t have the strength to play along.
They’re sitting two tables down from where they’d been the night Mista had first joined. (Where Narancia had stage-whispered into his ear, I like this guy, loud enough for Mista to hear from across the table. Where Mista had—still recovering from Polpo’s arrow and blissed out on a cocktail of codeine and paracetamol—grinned so wide and so unreservedly, Fugo had let his jaw go slack. Where the two of them had joined forces for the very first time, howling with laughter at Fugo’s expense as he’d dusted semi-chewed burger off the lap of his pants, face burning, heart hammering allegro against his ribs.)
Mista’s stopped eating, his burger sits in a bed of fries, mostly intact, missing a few bites. There’s a tear in the yellow synthetic leather of Fugo’s seat that he can feel pressed up under his left buttock. He makes little circles with the sole of his shoe against the greasy tiled floor and tries not to think about when it’d last been mopped. It’s nauseating. People eat here; how could they have let it get this bad.
“What are you thinking about,” Mista asks quietly, but he already has his answer.
Fugo wipes the back of his wrist once over his face, tries to make the movement look casual. He does it a second time, knowing that if he does it a third it’ll be a dead giveaway. Far more potent than the sadness he ought to be feeling, is the leaden dread of having Mista see him like this again—of weakness met with indifference, and the special shame that comes with it.
“Nothing,” Fugo says, adding a jerky shrug for effect as he fights to keep his voice even. He hears Mista pick his burger up with a familiar rustling of paper, feels the intensity of Mista’s gaze on him; an ant under a lens. He covers his eyes in a bid to not be seen, elbow digging into the meat of his thigh, “nothing,” he breathes, presses his face into his palm, slippery with tears. Maybe if he tries hard enough he can crush everything back inside.
He wants Mista to touch him; Mista doesn’t touch him. Sixteen inches of air between them with all the permeability of concrete. Fugo’s been on his own for almost a year—he’d thought that was the problem. What should he blame it on now, now that Mista is here with him and nothing has changed, nothing is better.
Something snaps inside him, and Fugo’s really crying now, too tired to fight himself any longer. His lungs don’t seem capable of holding air for more than half a second, every inhale immediately expelled in violent sobs shuddering through his body. Truly unpleasant noises from somewhere deep inside his chest. He wants Mista to touch him. He wants to watch Narancia stuff onion rings into his mouth. He wants his face to not be covered in mucus. He wants what he’d said to Bruno to have been something kind.
Distantly, he recognises that he’s making a scene, but he’s too far past the point of caring. The teenager behind the counter turns the ambient music up a little higher with the practiced detachment of someone who’s seen worse. Mista doesn’t touch him.
He would have won if he’d just left Fugo there, because they both know Fugo has no real claim to Narancia’s Burger City, not anymore. Fugo waits for him to secure his victory, to stand up and walk away, but he doesn’t go. He just sits there, waiting for Fugo to exhaust himself, cry himself dry, for his sobs to wilt into phlegmy hiccups, and then slow, unsteady breaths.
“Yeah,” Mista says, chewing thoughtfully on a bite of his double cheeseburger, swallows, “yeah, me too.”