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Giorno had been speaking to Trish more lately. After everything that had happened, it felt odd to be walking into her room and chatting about whatever he wanted with the daughter of the man he had killed. Trish didn’t seem to mind, though, and they ended up discovering that they got along quite well. Both relatively new to the gang and (despite having been there a while now), not completely fitting in with the rest of Bucciarati’s team yet, enjoying their fair share of gossiping and makeup, not to mention their stands loved each other.
It wasn’t uncommon for Trish to accompany Giorno on missions, as she turned out to be quite a skilled fighter, or even just to the various coffee shops she had never been able to explore while under constant protection.
Because of this, Giorno didn’t expect to be anything when he knocked on her door one evening, while the rest of the team was out with Bucciarati. She had been silent all day, never leaving her room and sending one stray text that she wasn’t having lunch with them. Just that she would order something later and eat it afterward.
She never ordered anything.
There was no phone call from her room, not even a word from her room, the hallway around it feeling eerily quiet. Not that Trish was necessarily a very loud person in her actual speaking, but something about the way she was usually on the phone or humming along to whatever new singer she had suddenly become interested in that week, the occasional instances where she played the keyboard set up in the corner of her room- it usually filled the hall her room was tucked into with a sort of cozy liveliness that was absent today.
It unsettled Giorno greatly, and he figured it might have been something personal that perhaps she didn’t want the whole team to know about. She had been with them for a while and often gushed about how nice it was to live with them all as opposed to being passed around between random Capos who were just following orders by dealing with her. Still, Giorno understood that they all had things they didn’t want shared at all, and to quote Bucciarati, ‘it’s okay, as long as you know you can tell someone.’
Giorno wondered if Trish knew she could tell someone.
The knock against her door rang out, desperate to fill the silent hallway, if only for a moment, with its sharp sound, and Giorno noticed that there was no light beneath her door.
“Can I come in?”
No response. Giorno could tell with Gold that there was something alive in there, definitely the size of a person and in the far corner.
“I’m going to open the door.”
He reached for the handle, noting that it was locked before turning it into a vine and letting the inner mechanism shrivel and snap before letting him inside.
The only light in the room was the dim glow of the nightlight near the door, and the streak of white from beneath the door to the bathroom. The mirror in the corner had been turned around to face the wall. The light flooding in from the open door Giorno was standing in was mostly illuminating the room, the glow giving away the single other figure in the room.
Trish was curled in the corner, wearing a yellow sweater with the hood pulled far up over her face. Fear crept beneath Giorno’s skin, diluting the confusion as Trish suddenly shivered, a loose sob rippling from her shoulders.
It was difficult to see much of Trish’s expression, but her eyes shone out in the dark, shimmering with tears and looking as if the entire world was falling apart around her. Just from those eyes, Giorno would have thought Trish was seeing something so, so much worse in the doorway of her room, perhaps even death itself crossing the threshold with its silent steps.
Even from where he was standing, Giorno could hear how her breathing skipped and tore, horribly unsteady and far too fast as she curled even further into herself. Giorno had assumed that maybe she was just sad over something, maybe something with Sheila or just having one of those days. But she looked far worse than sad, no, she looked terrified .
“Trish…?”
Trish continued to watch him, breathing heavy and uneven. As he tentatively reached for the lamp next to her bed, she tensed, a pale hand reaching to clamp over her mouth.
“Can I turn this on?”
Immediately shaking her head, Giorno caught more tears shimmering as they dripped from her eyes, spilling over the fingers that remained locked around the lower half of her face. Giorno drew his hand back from the lamp, taking a step back toward the door, and Trish seemed to relax slightly, though with how mortified she seemed, it didn’t do all that much.
“...What’s wrong?” Giorno asked carefully, figuring it was a decent place to start. Even if he received a nonanswer, he could at least get some more information.
Trish slowly peeled her hand away from the grip it had on her face, a sob choking her next breath. “Please-” she rasped, voice trembling. “Just leave, I don’t- I don’t want to- I don’t want you to-”
I don’t want you to. Giorno pressed his lips together, frowning thoughtfully. If there was something he could do, or more specifically not do, that was good. “What don’t you want me to do?”
More fear spilled into Trish’s eyes and she drew her knees tighter to her chest. “Anything-” she replied hoarsely. “Just leave.”
“You’re hiding something,” Giorno thought out loud, knowing that it wasn’t likely to help, but he at least wanted Trish to know some of what he was thinking. He was aware that he wasn’t the most expressive at times.
Trish didn’t move, her expression caught as she stared back at Giorno. The terror in her eyes hadn’t left, only growing stronger. He couldn’t tell if her pupils were dilated from fear or lack of light, but he decided it was probably both.
As she sat there, frozen, a tuft of pink hair fell in front of her face and she raked it back with a frantic, trembling hand, using the other to pull the hood further over her head.
“The hood,” Giorno pointed out, each word sounded like the snip of a time bomb’s wire in its tenseness, how it wrapped something so volatile and unstable. “You don’t want me to see beneath it, do you?”
Trish’s hand drifted down just enough to clutch the side of her face, acrylic nails digging into the skin around her eye. She shook her head, refusing to let her gaze dart away from Giorno even for a moment.
“Just leave,” she whispered again, tears building in her eyes.
Giorno’s mind flickered back to all the times he had just wanted people to leave him alone, spare him the humiliation of appearing so weak in front of someone who was supposed to believe he was perfect. It never worked out all that well. “Will me leaving make it better? Permanently?”
Trish stared back at him, her shaky breathing filling the silence. “Nothing can make it better.”
“That isn’t true,” Giorno replied immediately. “I’ve seen you make it out of some of the most hopeless of situations, there never has and never will be a reason to give up.”
Something flickered in Trish’s eye as her posture loosened the smallest bit, swallowing harshly before her labored breathing started up again. Giorno didn’t think he had ever seen Trish so freaked out before, even with all she had been through.
Giorno glanced down to the floor, concerned at the lack of response. “What are you worried about?”
Trish’s breath hitched again and she spoke again, words rushed. “That you’ll hurt me. Or hate me or tell Bucciarati, or- I’ll hurt you, and you won’t forgive me.”
Giorno frowned. Rarely was Trish scared of hurting something else, yet the way she spoke reminded him all too much of Fugo, how he begged people to leave the room while he was coming down from an outburst, the way he curled into himself and explained through shaking breaths that he just needed to be alone for a little while.
Most of the time, he needed the exact opposite.
“I will not hurt you. No matter what it is, my stand nor I will lay a hand on you. That I am sure of. As for you hurting me, I have Gold to protect me. And finally, Trish, what it takes for me to hate somebody is not something that can be hidden by a hood.”
There was a silence, Trish’s eyes remaining frozen on Giorno’s face. Every slight tremble sent ripples through the shimmering irises, like a stone breaking the surface of a still pond.
Then, with trembling, pale fingers, Trish lifted her hands and pulled away her hood.
____
...Trish had been trying her best to hide it. She knew she wasn’t doing a very good job, as she was a shitty liar and could almost never stay in her room for a time period that long. She was more one to join the others in whatever they were doing, bother Fugo over something, or watch dumb cartoons with Mista and Narancia. But now, to think of doing that only made her gut twist with fear.
It had only been that morning. She had dragged herself out of bed, shaking away whatever completely nonsensical dream was still swirling in the back of her mind. She checked her phone, biting back her usual stupid smile at Sheila’s good morning message and replying, sitting there for a while longer flicking through random notifications.
Finally, she gathered the energy to go get ready, walking into the bathroom connected to her bedroom and grabbing her brush.
She had assumed it was some sort of prank at first. Of course she had. ‘ God, Trish, cause so many horrifying things in your life turned out to be jokes, didn’t they? ’ She felt stupid for it, obviously, because she was supposed to just expect the worst. That was, at least, the kind of thing that got her through tougher missions.
She didn’t know how long she stood there, a medusa petrified by her own reflection, until she realized that time was still going on. Others would already be up. They would be milling around and eventually find her there, slowly realizing the same thing she did.
Trish didn’t quite look the same.
As she had reached up to run the bright pink brush through her hair, she noticed a mark stuck on it. It looked like dye, but her pillow hadn’t been stained like it inevitably would be if someone had dyed her hair as a joke while she was asleep. As well as that, when she carefully reached up to puzzledly run her fingers through it, she discovered two more pieces of information.
- It wasn’t dirt, dust, or anything else; her fingers came away clean.
- There were more.
As her breathing grew harder and panic washed over her in a chilling wave, goosebumps running down her arm, she found mark after black mark in her hair, spotted like the back of a ladybird.
And somehow, just that slight change seemed to warp her own expression, highlighting every feature that resembled her father’s. It felt twisted, a phantom sneer and bloodthirst shadowing it that she had never noticed before.
Trish slowly set down her brush with a loose clack before turning on her heel and dashing out of the bathroom. Despite having just run away from her reflection, the image remained in front of her, like a swirling mirage that was slowly digging its way through her mind. She could practically feel it, how it seeped into each layer of her memory, the face merging with that of the man who had only wanted to hurt and get away with it. Trish didn’t want to hurt anybody, she wanted both her father and the sick reflection that had infected her to be dead .
She locked the door to her room first, dragging her hands down her face panickedly. As she paced back and forth and left footprints in the shaggy carpet beneath her feet, she kept catching glimpses of herself in the full-length mirror at her side.
A thin figure pacing back and forth in an empty room, running their hands through their pink spotted hair obsessively, as if every time the pale fingers traced each strand they could hope to scrub away one more of those horrendous marks.
Trish was branded , cursed with one of the signature features of the disgusting man who thought he could throw her away and nearly did.
She didn’t want to think about what else she would inherit.
After a few minutes of pacing, the carpet stinging her feet, she turned the mirror around, feeling nauseous at the sight of her own reflection. It made it a little better, but she still couldn’t forget it. She didn’t know if she was grateful or frustrated with the fact that she couldn’t see the marks without a mirror. She decided on grateful.
Rifling through her closet, she finally found a hoodie Narancia had given her for her last birthday, something she barely remembered anymore. It was yellow, at the very least, nothing she would have to look down and associate with the miserable, sick creature that was infecting every moment of her vision.
Pulling it over her head and hurrying back in front of the mirror again, she found that if she adjusted it right, tugging the hood far enough in front of her face, it completely concealed the marks. Then, exhausted and panicked, she had sunk into the corner of her room and tugged her blanket over her as if it could control the shivers rippling through her.
But now Giorno had arrived, opened the door, and called out her name. Trish didn’t blame him, as she, too, would have needed confirmation that the name truly belonged to the horrible, warped monster curled in the corner of the room.
But despite everything that she was fighting against, she had pulled off the hood. Maybe it was some sick sense of repentance for what she was, desperate for something or someone to tell her what a monster she had warped into. She just didn’t want Giorno to pretend that this was okay. That would be the worst, truly, to see them try to ignore this. Because they would all suffer, and the guilt would slowly eat Trish alive until she couldn’t feel it at all.
Or maybe that trust would be what would lead to whatever she was going to do to them. They would tell her it was okay, just something odd and genetic that she could always just dye out and fix. Trish couldn’t change the fact that she was the daughter of the most repulsive man in Italy, who was being killed over and over again throughout spacetime for a reason.
She knew exactly what was going to happen, and that only made it worse.
And Giorno didn’t know. He simply stood there, bright eyes carefully tracing her form and taking in all he could. How quickly Trish knew they would fill with the anger that she had seen glinting in his eye that April, the one that could only compel to kill her too. Maybe worse. Diavolo hadn’t dared to pretend that he might have been different, that he wasn’t a good person, and hadn’t been able to infiltrate the family that she knew Giorno loved so much.
She knew it would be the best choice, to have her join her father in his infinite punishment and save the rest of the team from the horrors they already experienced, but she didn’t want to die.
“I’m so sorry -” she choked, clawing at her chest with a restless hand. She pressed her eyes shut, not wanting to look up and see Giorno’s expression shift. “I- I shouldn’t be here, but I don’t- I don’t know what to do.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” she heard the Don reply. His voice was so difficult to read, strung with more curiosity than anything.
She opened her eyes and Giorno had come closer. She drew into herself, trembling, and Giorno paused, holding up his hands for a moment. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“What will you do?” Trish whispered, swallowing harshly. She still hated this, hated the way she couldn't tell what Giorno was thinking despite how she usually prided herself on deciphering emotions. Everything she thought he might have been just didn’t fit, all the emotions that might have been right completely absent from his placid expression.
“Just talk to you,” Giorno shrugged, gesturing to the spot of the carpet a little ways away from where Trish was standing. “Can I sit here?”
Trish nodded, grateful that Giorno was distancing himself slightly, but she really didn’t want to talk. She wanted to be normal, someone who didn’t have to think about the fact that the blood running beneath her skin was that of a murderer, psychopath, monster, who had nearly killed three of her closest friends.
“You’re worried you’ll become like him,” Giorno pointed out, the terrifyingly placid expression remaining on his face. “You think you inherited more from him.”
Trish swallowed harshly, partially grateful and partially horrified that Giorno had read her so well. “...I don’t want to think about him anymore. But- but I can’t, not whenever I see my own reflection, I-” she choked again, throat closing up and another tear tracing her face. She took a deep breath, reaching around to wrap her arms around herself. “Even if I don’t turn into him, I’m still hurting all of you by staying, I- I’ll- be there to remind you every day of what he did-”
“You aren’t here to remind us of anything, you’re here to be a member of our team. You still fight against him every day, alongside us.”
Trish ran her hands down her face, sniffling. She knew what she was fighting for, that she was erasing his actions with everything she did, but it never felt like enough .
“I know, but- does it really matter? None of that changes that he’s still my father. No matter how many times over he’s been killed, how long it’s been since I’ve said his name, what I do with my life without him, it’ll- it’ll never change.”
Giorno watched her a moment longer, green eyes boring into her before he took a breath, as if working himself up to say something. The strange expression that had been creeping across his face finally came to a peak and he sat up straighter, gaze finally tearing away from Trish and drifting down to the floor.
“Do you know what my father was like, Trish?”
...Well, that was the last thing Trish had expected him to say. Even though they were having a conversation entirely about family, she still had assumed it completely insane that Giorno would bring up his own.
“...No, you- you never talk about him. Unless you mean Bucciarati,” she added with a shaky laugh.
Giorno smirked in response, though it quickly faded to a far more thoughtful expression. “I never talk about him because I never met him. His name was DIO.”
Trish frowned, well aware of how fragile the conversation had suddenly become. Giorno seemed to have been building up to this the whole time, so clearly it was something significant to him. She worried that she was only making it worse, her own panic making her teammate talk about something he likely didn’t really want to, but some sense of morbid curiosity had overtaken her.
“‘DIO’? Sounds like a pretty humble guy,” she scoffed, before immediately realizing what she had said. “Sorry.”
Giorno shook his head, a glimmer of amusement sparking in his eye. “It’s alright. He just… wasn’t a wonderful person, either. You could ask Signore Polnareff about him and he’d have… quite a few stories to tell about him.”
“Polnareff?” Trish repeated, completely lost as to how the turtle-bound ghost fit into any of this. “He- he met him?”
Giorno nodded. “Told me all about him. I suppose it was nice to finally get some information, but it wasn’t the easiest to learn about. Polnareff’s encounter with him was in Egypt, 1989. My father killed three of his closest friends. Employed the man who killed his sister.”
Trish swallowed harshly. Again, absolutely not what she had expected to hear about Giorno’s father. She had always assumed that he had just rebelled from some rich family, or was an orphan, or had at least grown up with someone who had instilled his radiant, almost contagious confidence. But apparently not.
“...Really?”
Giorno nodded curtly, glancing down at the floor again before his brow furrowed slightly. “And a lot of dogs. He liked killing dogs.”
“Jesus fuck-” Trish replied, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I’m sorry, Gio.”
Giorno shook his head. “It’s alright now, speaking to Polnareff about it helped. I learned more about him, and I’ve come to accept it. Now I have an interesting story to tell when anybody asks about my family,” he smiled slightly, sitting back up. “My point is, I inherited his blonde hair. One day, I must have been twelve or thirteen, it suddenly turned gold. You can imagine how terrified I was, and I didn’t even know what it was from. Took me years to connect it back to the one photo I had of him, and even then I had never really been sure if that was what it was.”
Trish listened carefully, nails picking at each other in the pocket of the yellow hoodie, completely captivated. To think of Giorno looking any different than how he did now, with how signature his appearance was, how Giorno it was, was beyond insane. As he continued speaking and Trish’s tears reduced to the occasional sniffle, she realized she had almost forgotten her own panic.
“And it’s been many years, and I still feel no impulse to kill dogs,” Giorno finished, a smile tugging at the edge of his pale lips again. “So I think you’re safe.”
Trish ran a hand through her hair, head pounding as a usual aftereffect from crying so hard, but she felt significantly better. To know that she wasn’t alone in waking up one morning and panicking, to look back at her heritage and fear all they were… it was comforting, and yet another thing she had no idea she had in common with Giorno.
She tucked her hands in her lap, nodding shakily. “Thank you.” She glanced up. “...Can I hug you?”
Instead of replying, Giorno finally moved closer, instead of keeping the distance Trish had been so grateful for just ten minutes ago. Now, it felt like it was only making the room colder and emptier, despite how the dim light seemed to cover more of the room now. Giorno sat forward and pulled Trish into a hug, resting his chin on her shoulder and lifting a hand to rest against the back of her head. She could feel how it pressed against the marked strands of hair, that didn’t seem so horrifying anymore. Instead, Trish found herself focusing on how comforting it was, someone who really believed that she would grow up to be her own person, no warped reflection of a man she wanted nothing to do with anymore.
When Giorno finally pulled out of the hug, sitting back on his heels, Trish already missed the warmth, but she got to her feet shakily nonetheless. She finally walked over and turned the light on. It really wasn’t doing much for her headache, but it was nicer to actually see Giorno instead of his dim outline and his piercing green eyes shining within it.
Trish sat down on the bed and Giorno followed, resting his chin in his hand.
“Now,” Trish spoke up again, voice still hoarse from crying but far more steady. “You gotta tell me more about that comic-book-villain ass dad of yours.”