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They get into the city an hour or two before sunset— not the ideal time at all; he’d prefer a total night or the broad daylight of noon, both for different reasons. At least there’s still plenty of light, even if dimmer; the evening settles upon the world, quiet and warm and still, and he rides the car through the streets holding on to the wheel white-knuckled, expecting the worst.
Nothing happens. Getting in was meant to be the easy part, after all.
Fugo stops the car in the sidestreet, gray and yellow and shrouded in shadow of the evening and thin, marred with wires like a spiderweb, and takes the keys out of the ignition, but doesn’t get up. Just sits there, staring into the street ahead, standing at an angle that betrays the city’s hillside nature.
“In and out,” he tells Mista, but probably more himself. “We go in, get the kid, get out— simple as that.”
“Yeah, sure, dude.” The gunslinger replies conversationally; though there’s a tension in his voice that hasn’t been there before, a little more watchfulness, readying himself for whatever is to come.
“You ready?” He turns back into the street; asking that question is a tradition more than anything genuine. They have to be ready. It’s their job.
“Yeah.” Guido Mista, king of casual vagueness right there.
He exhales with a huff. “Let’s go.”
He gets out of the car, stumbles on the sidewalk, closes the door; the car shakes once more as Mista slams the door after him, already staring at the apartment building on their right, specifically the second story window; curtains drawn and no perceptible movement to them at all, which is expected.
It’s a little strange to see him in as close to normal clothes as they could get (the hat stayed at least in concept, replaced by one that even some normal folks could describe as stylish) and his pistol in a bag instead of stuffed haphazardly into his pants, his Stand desummoned— sacrifices had to be made, as he’d mournfully said during the preparation. They needed to lay low, or at least try their best at it.
They nod at one another and start approaching the door.
If there’s anything he’s learned about avoiding suspicion, it’s to always pretend he knows exactly what he’s doing and where he’s going, no matter what; at this point, he doesn’t have any issue with it, no matter how much some part of him wants to glance nervously at the streets and rooftops and the square he’s forced to turn his back to, expecting something to be there, enemy territory and all.
Mista’s always been excellent at it, though. He seems truly not to care, eternally at some state of peace with his current surroundings; he just strolls forward without a care in the world like he’s truly just returning home, and Fugo envies him a little.
“Let’s hope they didn’t change the keys, huh?” he glances at him as they arrive at the front door; vague small talk hiding the fact that his eyes are scouting for enemies.
“Yeah,” Fugo answers, glances at the grating underneath the door and makes sure he grips the keys safely when he takes them out. The door clicks; he needs to lean his entire weight against it to finally open it, but it does.
“Nice,” Mista comments in a neutral tone and follows him from the fading sunlight into the cool shade of a dusty and gray anteroom with a stairway on the left and a few neat rows of letterboxes on the wall, newsletters sticking out, one of two lying on the ground in faded reds and yellows.
Second story. He doesn’t miss the smooth movement of Mista taking out his gun and the exhale of controlled relief that follows it, the Pistols popping into view.
They climb the stairs, neither rushing nor slow, and only stop again once they’re at the door, apartment number C3— Mista immediately stands guard, nods, and waits for Fugo to put the second key he’s been given into use.
The lock clicks. He throws the door open and it goes, slowly, creaking loud enough to announce its opening to the entirety of the calm and quiet stairway. Mista moves behind him and the nozzle of his gun gets a little too close for comfort to the side of Fugo's head; he tilts Mista’s arm away with his forearm and steps into the room.
“ Hey,” Mista whispers, bothered.
“Watch it dude— If you blow out my ears, I’ll—“ he shakes his head and doesn’t finish the threat.
“You’ll what? ” Mista shoots back, still keeping his voice low, a little grin at the edge of his lips.
“Forget it.”
Mista huffs and shakes his head.
The apartment feels quiet. That’s what strikes him at first— it seems like the calm before the storm in physical form of a neat, tidy apartment, ready and waiting for its owner to come back home again like nothing was out of ordinary, like a Passioné Capo wasn’t killed three days ago and the city overrun by a gang war and taken over by their enemy— it feels like, well, a flat, a home, and not a site of a murder that marked so much, threw the entirety of the area into disorder.
Neither does it feel like a place where the man’s son would be hiding.
A hallway leading straight, then curving left; they had one door in front of them and it stood half-open to a comfortable, unassuming, empty living room.
They check it out first. The flat stays quiet.
“Do you think he’s—“ Mista whispers and Fugo interrupts him.
“No idea.”
“Like, is he even alive?”
“We’ll find out.” He says in the tone he hopes conveys the true message, that being Stop talking.
Another huff; this time accompanied by an eye-roll. Given he technically got what he wanted, Fugo only sets his jaw and moves on.
They move on to the hallway after— the doors there closed— checking first the spacious bathroom and then something that seems like the Capo’s bedroom, full of white silks and ziricote furniture.
When they finally get to the kitchen, they’re met with a gun.
The kid’s gun, to be precise, a small and black-metal Glock held in hands that do not shake with an expression that does not betray weakness or any of the emotions people’s eyes tend to hold when they’re not used to holding someone at gunpoint; he’s sitting in one of the chairs at the small kitchen table, pointing his gun at Fugo’s forehead, and seems almost bored.
Fugo’s first instinct is to lift his hands in surrender.
Mista’s is to shout.
“Hey, hey — chill!”
He stays by Fugo but does not lower his own weapon, instead opting to hold it in only one hand and use the other to try to placate; it’s nil regardless, as the kid, Caprifoglio Brodo, son of recently-murdered Capo Brodo, does not care in the least.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Passioné? Ring any bells?” Mista shoots back before Fugo has a chance to.
“Yeah?” The kid answers back; his eyebrows lift in challenge, an invitation to continue.
“We’re here to escort you to—“ Fugo doesn’t get far.
“There’s a gang war going on outside if you haven't noticed, kid, so if you want to live,” Mista says, taking a step forward, and finally tilts his gun to the ceiling, mirroring Fugo’s surrender with much less honesty in it, “you gotta come with us.”
A beat of quiet; Caprifoglio doesn’t lower his own weapon. His eyes narrow.
“I never asked Passioné for help.”
“Sucks for you— we’re going.”
Fugo clenches his hand into a fist. “Mista, shut up.”
He feels the way his teammate’s eyebrows drop; the slow, flat stare he gives him burning into the side of his head.
Fugo carries on.
“I assume you know this town has been overrun by Nato dal Fuoco after the death of your father; Capo Polpo sent us here to retrieve you to safety—“
“Are you fucking deaf?” The kid answers and jabs his gun forward, immediately prompting Mista to aim his own again.
“Hey! ”
“I never asked for this. I never did. Leave me alone— for your own sake, leave.”
“Yeah, sure, bud,” Mista immediately responds on the tail of an incredulous chuckle, “you know we kinda have to, like, get you out? You think they’ll let us just come back empty-handed?”
“This is the mafia,” the kid answers and something about that seems strange, a little ill-fitting, definitely angry. “You deal with it.”
Darkness flashes in his eyes at the last few words.
“You’re going to die if you don’t go with us,” Fugo lets out. It’s not effective.
“And?”
His next prepared line dies in his throat. And?
Mista growls from frustration. “Why are we— I can knock him out, let’s get this over with—“
“Absolutely not.” Caprifoglio answers and shifts his gun to aim at Mista instead of Fugo, probably getting annoyed enough that threatening the perceived authority fell below the actual gunslinger in his mental list of priorities.
“Get near me and I’ll murder you just like I did my father.”
Both of them fall quiet.
“Oh.” Thanks, Mista.
“What? Wasn’t expecting that, huh?” The kid gets up from the chair, leaving his free hand on the table, a dangerous fire dancing in his eyes with incoherent joy twisting his features into a grin. “That I’d kill my dear daddy and allow Nato dal Fuoco to take over this fucking armpit of the state?”
He giggles— Fugo doesn’t expect that, letting his eyebrows shoot up in surprise. Right.
He’s fourteen. They’re dealing with a fourteen year old son of a gangster holding them at gunpoint and looking seven seconds away from going ballistic.
More compartmentalizing.
“Okay, that’s— fine,” it was very much not so, but, oh well, “listen, we just wanna get you out, okay?” He says. “We just want to help you.”
“You can’t help me,” the kid says, his voice grim and defeated but not rid of the anger, instead underlining it with a sort of final, terrible darkness.
“You can’t help me. No one can help me,” his voice climbs in intensity as he takes another step forward and a chill runs down Fugo’s back with the knowledge of what’s to come until Mista decides to hurry it along instead of averting it, because, hell, why the fuck not, right?
“Hey, uh, Capri— sonne, whatever, how about we sit down and do this like adults—“
The kid growls— pressing the trigger.
Mista responds immediately— even if it’s diving forward like an absolute madman instead of dodging.
Gunshot.
Once Fugo’s done blinking stars out of his vision and the echoes and shrieking that a noise so loud contained in a tiny room leaves behind in his ears, he sees the geography of the battle shift as Mista rips the gun out of the kid’s hands— seemingly unharmed, how the fuck— and in a single, smooth move takes it apart, bullet clip and gun landing on the ground in two thuds of metal on wood.
Only for the kid to immediately refocus and lift his hands again, even if empty, exactly like he’s holding a gun and— a flash of silver and golden and clicking of metal and a shrill, hoarse wail filling the quiet— one appearing in his hands.
Different. A green plating and a mean, angular shape around a central canister seemingly filled with liquid, shrieking gold. It wails. It wails like they portrayed Hell in shitty movies, filled with the remnants of humanity screaming its pain and suffocation into the unceasing fire of the Devil’s womb— it wails like something dying, or something being born, all layered above a deep hum that shakes the objects of the room around them and thrums against Fugo’s skin with the sensation of power .
Mista retreats, slowly and with a kind of surprised hesitation, from the nozzle of the Stand aimed directly at his chest.
“Okay,” he lets out, another step backwards, now trying to placate, “okay.”
A new edge of desperation; his eyes shimmer with it, as if wet. “Get away from me. Go away.”
The gun wails and wails and never stops and the liquid, glowing, molten gold swirls within its chamber.
“Listen, kid—“ Mista attempts, softer.
“Stop fucking calling me kid! ” Caprifoglio screams and stops them both short, seeming almost close to tears, no, actually tearing up— Fugo spares a quick glance at Mista and finds the previous expression of frustration-anger-annoyance entirely gone, wiped clean, all to make space for something watchful and careful and stone-cold-serious.
“I never asked for this!” The gleaming, humming, screaming gun in Caprifoglio’s grip starts to shake. “I never fucking— my dad forced me into this, okay? Forced me to go through your— fucking ritual, I don’t— I don’t want—“
He starts crying— it’s a tear at first and then more of them, and once they start they refuse to stop, his eyes narrowing as his lower lip begins to quiver— so does the gun, sliding entirely off-mark as shown by the way Mista’s shoulders relax ever so slightly.
The kid wipes his face; quickly, like he’s afraid they’ll jump him. Goes on, like it has to all come out now that he’s already started: “I just wanted to normal life, I wanted to get— get the fuck away from him, to go on my own and forget all this but I couldn’t, okay? He wouldn’t let me a mile away from the house and I— I got angry, I just got so angry—“
His entire form wavers; his gaze falling to the floor, and Fugo understands.
“You—“ he starts, only to get the gun— Stand, definitely a Stand, one he didn’t want to find out how it felt being shot by— aimed in his face.
“Shut. Up!”
He risks a step forward— the teen was fully sobbing now, all loud heaving breaths and snot and tears streaming down his face and falling off his chin, eyes wild and incoherent with pain.
Fugo rolls the dice and takes his chance. “You got mad and nothing mattered, right? Nothing felt real other than killing that bastard,” he says, slowly, carefully, Mista’s eyes glancing from him to the kid and back again.
“You couldn’t control it. It just happened, and it felt…” he trails off, searching for the right words, if there even are any to describe that state of nothing but white-hot violence, wrath cold and explosive and absolute.
Right. Wrong. Horrible. Good.
“Bad. Hot. Sick.” The kid fills in. “Fucking— sick, G-d, I never wanted, I never wanted to kill anyone, I swear—“
“We trust you,” Mista says, voice in a completely different register, calm and deep and steady like a column in a sea that will never fall no matter how much the waves beat against it. “We believe you.”
“We’re just— here to get you out, okay?” Fugo goes on, swallowing. Stuff that away. Focus.
“No! Don’t you get it? They’ll kill me! They’ll fucking kill me for this,” he yells back and Fugo finds what he suspected hid at the core— fear. Terror.
“They won’t if we tell them,” he says and the kid’s eyes snap to him, the barrel of the gun following soon after; he yet again wonders what the gun does, what it’s capable of; the barrel of it isn’t shadowed and dark like a normal gun’s would be, but luminous with a vein-like structure growing through it in spirals.
“What.”
“Dude, everyone thinks Nato dal Fuoco killed your father,” Mista joins in. “Nobody suspects you.”
“But I’ll still have to—“
“We’ll, we’ll work something out, okay? You can always disappear, but first, we need to get you out of here,” Fugo goes on, letting his voice go gentle, sliding seamlessly into the tone that Narancia liked to call his retail voice for whatever reason; it seems to work given the slight glimmer of hope or trust or simply life appearing in the kid’s eyes, however little, but he’ll take it.
“How can I trust you?”
“If we betray you, you can just kill us and scram, no? That gun seems like it’d do the job well enough,” Mista offers and ignores Fugo’s glance of Hey, what?
“Right,” the kid says. Wavers, but stops a second later, stabler on his second word. “Right.”
“We uh, we should hurry though,” his teammate continues, glancing at the windows, “I don’t think they missed that gunshot.”
“Do you trust us?” Fugo asks, finally, letting steel into his voice, just enough to underline the urgency without being too much.
A beat of quiet that the gun happily fills with its droning shrieks, until it— along with its shine and sound and secrets— vanishes like a mirage of summer in strips of gold and a last cry into nothing but air.
“I trust you,” the kid says.”
“Nice,” Mista lowers his own weapon and immediately ruins the mood. “Glad we got that sorted.”
—
“So, what’s the gun do?” Mista asks in the carefully casual mediator-type tone like he’s doing nothing but filling the silence, glancing out of the window between the closed blinds he’s making a gap in with the fingers of his right hand. “There’s another car here already. Fuck.”
“That’s…a problem,” Fugo reacts and walks over to see— a gray Toyota Prius, indeed, parked directly beside their own green Fiat Punto, and it doesn’t take a genius to notice the guns the men have with them, and the woman in front, standing with a hand on her hip and a cigarette in the other one, a megaphone inexplicably hanging off her belt. She draws the cigarette up to her lips and tilts her head to stare up to the window they’re looking through as she exhales smoke; Mista immediately jerks his hand away from the blinds and lets them fall closed once more.
They glance at one another. Fugo sighs, slowly, closing his eyes; readying for the worst.
He runs a hand over his face and through his hair and then just keeps it there. G-d. He knew this would be a mess.
The kid doesn’t say anything, at least not at first, drinking from the glass of water Mista got him so he’d stop crying like he’s a starving man who just came out of the Sahara; then he slams it on the table and runs his hand over his lips, and finally answers.
“It’s a gun, what about it?”
“What, nothing special?” Mista continues the conversation while opening the chamber of his revolver to recount his bullets and then closing it again, staring off into space, betraying to Fugo that he’s counting or trying to plan, then turning to him.
“I can run distraction; Number 3 says there’s a backdoor to this place, so you can take the kid and go—“
“And what? Trust you not to die?” Fugo argues back, dropping the hand to gesture.
“Do you have any better ideas? What about using your Stand, huh?”
He goes for the window and peeks through the blinds— too many windows in the narrow street and too many of them near the ground. Won’t do.
“This is a residential area, Mista— I can’t.“
Mista’s features twist in frustration. “Yeah— I can take them. They probably don’t even have Stands, it’ll be fine.”
Fugo stares at him for a long moment, tilting his head; he hopes his expression conveys the sarcasm without him needing to speak and thinks Mista gets it, but he doesn’t walk back on it. They really have no better ideas, he definitely doesn’t; other than risking it all together and hoping for the best, which is not enough, and they know it.
“No crossfire, right? I’ll draw them towards me and your path will be free.”
Fugo leaves his hands at his hips and stares into the ground, exhaling, mulling it over. Trying to think.
Then turns his gaze at Caprifoglio and finds him quiet and staring back, watching their conversation with something interested and cautious in his face, like someone gauging danger and how deep the water they’ll dive in could be.
“Fine,” Fugo says, admitting defeat. “If you die, I’ll kill you.”
Mista cackles and makes a little mock-salute. “Aye, aye, captain.”
Fugo doesn’t react to it and turns to Caprifoglio instead, readying to speak; the kid beats him to it, though.
“I wish I could help you, but…” he hesitates.
“Yeah?” Mista prompts him on.
“I can only fire my gun, ah,” he rubs at his nose, “once a year.”
Wow.
He doesn’t want to find out what that thing does, actually. He really, really doesn’t, personal experience and all.
“So you mean it sucks?” Mista immediately deadpans— Fugo’s gaze snaps to him in part panic, part anger.
“Mista!”
Somehow that’s what makes the kid chuckle.
“Thanks,” his teammate says, his tone of voice not changing a bit, dry and unimpressed. “But I’m gonna be busy saving your asses in, like—“ a crash from downstairs, like a door being slammed— “a minute, so you should really go.”
“Right,” Fugo nods and gets a step forward before he stills again. “How?”
“I’ll…lead them outside or something.”
“Or something— Mista!”
“Just stay here, wait a few minutes, it’ll be fine,” his teammate squares his shoulders, a cool determination settling in his eyes. Serious. Focused. Time to do the job.
“Right,” Fugo says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Don’t die.”
“I have luck on my side,” Mista says with a cocky grin on his face as if that means anything at all in their field of work but exactly the right amount of belief to make it, and then vanishes through the door.
—
He’s not that surprised when the plan actually works; the simple rarely fails. He draws them outside in a cacophony of gunshots and yelling and shrieks of pain and Fugo closes his eyes, tries to make peace with both options that it leaves them, and leads the kid through the vacated house by the fresh bullet holes in the walls and outside into the soft, warm glow from the dawning sunset, the sun slowly edging towards the horizon with its glow breaking over the roofs. He glances briefly behind the corner at the absolute chaos occurring in the small square— a lot of fruitless taking cover and curses and the wrath and bloodlust of a one-against-many.
It’s not his problem now. Leading the teen to the car and near-throwing him to the passenger seat, he hopes they won’t hear, or that they’ll decide to get rid of one problem before tackling the other (sorry, Mista), slams the keys in the ignition and just goes.
Oh, they notice.
“They’re going for the car,” Caprifoglio announces despite the fact that Fugo can fucking see, no thank you— a guy runs over to the gray Prius and throws open the door and gets in to follow them, and Fugo’s much too busy trying to handle the clutch and figure out where to go to watch the whole time but he doesn’t need to, as light— sudden and bright and followed by a deafening noise of an explosion— draws his eyes back anyway, just soon enough to see the Prius go up in flames.
He sees Mista come from around the corner to salute a brief You’re welcome and goodbye, and then he stops looking.
—
They’ve stopped far beyond the city, at the very outskirts next to the shore, leaving the car in a trampled field of grass next to a large remnant of a complex that seems like it’d host festivals or something of the sort but was now out of season. There’s remnants of infrastructure— a single empty and tall red-brick tower, a few light poles and a hundred bits of garbage caught on the spiky leaves on overgrown agave— and a caravan or two if he strains his eyes to look for them in the distance, probably belonging to fishermen, but nothing else.
They’re sitting on a gray rock marking the edge of the unused parking lot, the tower behind them and the sea in front, gentle and calm; a few feet apart, the kid staring into his quivering hands, something aching, empty and conflicted in his eyes.
“So we just…wait,” Captifoglio says.
“Yes.” Fugo confirms without emotion. “We give him an hour and if we doesn’t show up, we leave.”
Just like that, yes; just like that. Him and Abbacchio had this rule and kept it to the letter— he remembers a time when Abbacchio actually did leave him behind, a truly hilarious day where he’d had to save his own skin with no help whatsoever— it’s different with Mista, who expected more from life than just an eventual and predictable death. Abbacchio and Fugo understood that they would die for a mission if it required it and leave each other behind and not grieve; he wasn’t sure if Mista thought of it that way, or if he’d just assumed he’d never die from some foolish and mistaken belief in something as silly and wayward as luck.
He doesn’t want Mista to die, not on a stupid mission like this one. He annoys him sometimes, sure, but he’d miss him, if he’s honest.
(And Narancia would never forgive him; both for getting his friend killed, and for thinking that way.)
He watches the shoreline anxiously.
And he’s not alone in it; Caprifoglio runs his hands over his face, then straightens again, staring off into the horizon at the sun slowly nearing the water and throwing moving wisps of gold on its waves, and his hands tremble.
“I lied about my Stand,” the kid says.
Fugo blinks in surprise, turning slowly to gaze at him, at his conflicted expression and a new, still shaken resolve making home in it. Doesn’t say anything; he knows better.
“I can shoot it— theoretically how many times I want but it’s not. It’s not quite that clear, or simple.”
He looks like he wants to continue but doesn’t, biting at his lower lip and letting his eyes fall to the darker water lapping at the shore, so Fugo prompts him with a gentle: “Go on?”
In response, Caprifoglio summons his Stand.
Without adrenaline running through his veins and the fading dying remnant of a gunshot roaring in his ears, the summoning seems clearer, louder, even more haunting— it truly wails, like a being of pure agony in horror at its own existence, wretchedly human beyond the mechanical low and high note that tried to mask it.
“I— whenever I get angry, this, this barrel,” he lifts the gun and shakes it twice in emphasis, his gaze falling to his lap in hesitation, “gets filled with, with whatever that is, and it gets louder and hungrier and stronger and—“
Taking a few breaths, he glances at Fugo in desperation like he can somehow save him. “I haven’t shot it in a year. A whole year of— of living with my father and of, bearing all the shit he did and knowing I can’t do anything about it because he’s a Capo and, and, of the day I murdered him.”
Oh.
Steeling himself with an inhale, Fugo meets his eyes.
“I’m afraid of what it can do. I’m— you get it, right? There’s— so much bottled inside and I’m scared to let it out.” His knee bounces— like Narancia does when he’s freaked out or thinking about something too much, so much it tangles together and forces him to fight himself; Fugo understands. For once, he does— he hears his own soul roar inside him from time to time, clawing and growling and shrieking with more and more power the longer he keeps it locked inside.
“I do. I get it.”
A shaky nod, a small smile like he’s ridiculing his own words, or thinks they’re silly, but still feels he has to say them. “Thanks, I— I appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
The gun vanishes and so does its cry, and both of them relax a little.
He goes back to watching the sun.
Checks the watch. Fifteen minutes left; not good. Maybe they should abolish this rule, actually.
He doesn’t want to leave Mista behind; G-d, he doesn’t want him to die, but he already might be, only time will tell, and soon at that.
A thunder rumbles in the distance behind them; has been rumbling for a while, a continuous sound he first assumed came from the gun. Now he reconsiders it. The next probability falls at a coming storm; he glances to the sky above them and finds only small bits of clouds in sheets and strings of white, and frowns.
Turns around.
He doesn’t quite understand what he’s looking at once he finally sees the moving shape heading for them; getting confused by the size of it, thinking it’s a bird too close, then realizing it has four wings, not two, and before he allows his brain to finish the frankly idiotic thought of Yeah, sure, a dragon, why not, this day already sucks the already-long-awaited conclusion slams into him with the force of a sledgehammer in the form of Oh G-d, a dragon.
The shape gliding across the sky— unmistakably reptile-like in its four limbs and the membrane of its wings where its blue-white plumage doesn’t cover them, bird-like in the feather-over-scale cover of its head and back and tail and edges of wings fluttering in the wind of its own making— soars with a divine kind of elegance and a flap of its four wings, and roars.
“We have a problem,” Fugo announces to the kid; iťs more the roar than the sentence that makes him turn too with a full-body flinch to stare above in utter terror not lessened in the least when he actually suffers Fugo’s own realization and gasps, eyes wide and all resolve gone with the wind.
The dragon loops once— it has a fucking rider, because why not, sure, and something hanging from one of its frontal limbs— and dips, showing off its backside otted with yellow and cyan and fiery red, and lands on the top of the tower.
It’s a beautiful beast. That much he’ll give it, blue and white and golden and red, strips like a zebra’s and spots like a peacock’s all over its form in feather and scale like the new discoveries and theories of feathered dinosaurs; it lands like an eagle with yellow claws just as deadly gripping the edges of the tower.
Several bricks come loose and rain down on the ground, toppling one of the light poles and breaking it with a crack and a shower of glass; dust comes after as the dragon flaps its four wings a few more times for good measure, righting itself, and finally stills.
As much as it can, perched at the top of the tower with its rider sitting at the base of its wings; body the size of a horse and wings held ready for take-off at any moment, balancing on three limbs because—
It’s holding Mista by the neck in the last one.
Who seems to be trying his hardest to fight against it, one of his arms wrapping around the dragon’s to put some pressure off his neck, but Fugo doesn’t think his chances are too good— especially given the fact the dragon’s holding him more than a dozen meters above solid, paved ground.
Fuck.
Climbing off the rock to try to get a better look, he refocuses on the rider— the woman from earlier, megaphone held loosely in her hand, just as smug as she seemed before and entirely unmarked, staring straight at them as the dragon caws and trashes under her, restless, and follows her gaze with a primal rage in its jaws and eyes and twisted features.
Yeah.
They’re fucked.
“You, Passioné!” The Stand User lifts the megaphone to her lips and yells through it, her voice amplified and crashing and echoing in the vast landscape, breaking against the waves. “I come with an offer.”
The dragon trills and shrieks in excitement or hunger or whatever the hell actual real-life not-fake dragons shriek about; she has to corall it into some form of calm, its narrow cat-like eyes staring at them from above, the little crown of black-cyan feathers on its head lifting like a peacock’s feathers along with the plumage on its long and waving tail.
“The boy for your— ah, are you teammates or brothers or something?” she yells into the megaphone with the energy of a grocery clerk on a twelve hour shift; halfway through the sentence leaning down to see Mista from her position. He doesn’t hear his answer. He just hears her flat and uncaring: “Shut up— anyway.”
He tries to search for weaknesses. There’s not many. How is a dragon this small flying with the weight of two people? No, don’t think about that, it’s Stand logic. It never makes sense. Focus.
“You see, we heard a few rumors here and there about his— actually, no, fuck that,” she changes her tone, flippant and confident and speaking with the sort of power that only the truly capable, truly dangerous people had; the self-assurance of gangsters who didn’t need to over-compensate to seem threatening, who simply were. “Just hand him over or I’ll show this little shit why construction people put the fatal fall height at ten meters or more.”
The dragon shifts its weight on the tower and he hears Mista’s panicked shout at that, when it puts him farther from the edge of the tower and closer to getting dropped— the dragon leans its head down and observes it with some animal kind of glee, or something far more clever and aware than that, and Fugo has to do something but G-d damn him, it’s a literal dragon he’s up against. Currently, he’s realizing there’s a reason why they’re beasts of legends and all. Quite famously hard to kill.
“On second thought, do you think having little Dancer here,” she pats the dragon’s head with a flippant and familiar kind of comfort and it reacts in a cat’s kind of excitement, “eat him alive would traumatize you more? Yeah, I think it would. I don’t know. I didn’t eat dinner because of you assholes so I don’t really have anything to throw up in case it gets really gross— which it will— so I don’t care, but you might.”
Mista tries to yell something— Fugo doesn’t hear the words well enough to understand them but he gets the tone, something between desperate, afraid and furious.
Their enemy doesn’t miss a beat; she angles the megaphone down again, and projects the deadpanned: “Yeah, you’ve already said that once,” for the whole area to hear.
She then begins to speak at Fugo once more, forgetting about the megaphone and trying to out-yell the distance between them, remembering she has it, and having to bring it up again once she seems to realize it absolutely won’t work.
“So, whaddaya say?”
Fugo doesn’t really have anything to say (yell) back. They’re fucked. In a form of hysteria, he seems to be remembering that Mista always used to say he really wants to die in a cool way, if he had to die at all— getting eaten by a dragon would hopefully fill that.
But he really, really doesn’t want it to come to that. G-d, they’re fucked.
The universe— or rather, the person next to him— decides he’s been silent for too long.
“Eat shit!” Caprifoglio yells at the top of his lungs in some newfound bravery, making him flinch and blink in surprise.
“What?” The woman yells back. “I didn’t quite catch that, you know, this wind and all—“
“He said eat shit!” Fugo shouts for lack of anything else. In support too, because why not.
“What?”
He goes to shout again before he reconsiders and shuts his mouth, his gaze slipping to the ground, feeling his brain running on full power without anything useful coming out of it, ending up nowhere.
He needs to figure out something. Anything.
“The gun,” he breathes out, then turns at Caprifoglio and shouts: “Use your gun!”
“I can’t,” the kid replies automatically once he processes the order— then a complicated expression crosses his face, a determination settling in his eyes as he stares above at the dragon and its enormous feathered wings and claws and teeth.
When his gaze returns to Fugo, he exhales through his mouth, and the conflicted desperation makes way for something else— his expression turns all steel. He nods.
Fugo nods back.
“Yeah, that’s a problem, right? How are you supposed to tell me which is it when I can’t even hear you up here…oh, you know YMCA? I trust that you do, you seem like a decent fellow— make the, ah, the Y if you’re gonna hand over the kid, yeah? And— something, oh, M, you know, for murder, if you’re in for my dragon doing exactly that to your mate, capisce?”
The dragon growls and shakes its head; a part of the tower’s outer wall crumbles under its claws, sending a brick or two toppling down. The enemy gangster seems unbothered. Mista less so.
A cry awakening from nowhere at all— fading in as if from a distance, from some depth like a horror dragged from the trenches of the ocean and left above the surface of the water only to scream, only now becoming clear; the gun appears in Caprifoglio’s hands, verdant and golden and gleaming and filled with more power than either of them would like to think about and wailing almost like it knew it will soon be released.
“What’s that? ” The woman yells, leaning down to see in her position with a hand holding onto the dragon’s feathery hide for stability.
The barrel of the weapon is lifted up. He has to give him that; he’s not shaking now that it matters.
“Oh? You deceive Stella?” She laughs, projecting it through the megaphone, a husky and rich sort of laughter. “You seriously think I’d let you do that?”
Mista yells something at them— Fugo still doesn’t catch it other than knowing it was with urgency.
The dragon interrupts it. It shrieks— a piercing, bird-like layered noise that could only ever belong to a beast— and dips in its stance.
And takes off.
Mista’s horrified cry of No, no, no! reaches them as the Stand leaves the tower in a leap of faith— wings wide and head stretched forward with one and only action in mind and limbs retracted to its form. It soars directly over their heads, allowing them to see all of its scaled belly and the remnants of the sun breaking on its wings that pass through their lower halves and color them like church windows at dawn; it flies fast and sure and Fugo has a lot of faith in the kid, he does, but striking a moving aerial target with little training— he doesn’t know how much training he truly has, but it’s best to assume the worst— seems improbable at best and impossible at worst.
“Fuck!” Caprifoglio echoes his thoughts in his own, much cruder, way.
The wind from the dragon’s passing catches up with them and ruffles their hair, forcing Fugo to have to remove his out of his eyes to follow the Stand as it passes high above the water and seems to fly outwards for a moment long enough that he wonders if it’ll simply leave— then it sharply tilts up, gives all of its momentum over the the vast and clear sunset-torn sky, and elegantly turns in the fall. Hammerhead maneuver; he knows that one.
To aim straight at them. Nothing in the way.
Dipping where it flies directly against the sun from their view, an entirely dark shadow surrounded in all that blood-gold-copper that neither of them can look into to track it, having to shield their eyes; and it starts whistling, too. Like something is coming. A landing missile, a shot about to be fired— to destroy them, annihilate them where they stand, and they cannot do anything against it.
A click of metal. Sun catching on luminous wailing steel; the kid aims the gun half-blindly into the setting sun and the whistling shadow within it, trying to stare through his fingers, and Fugo can only get out a useless yell of: “Wait—“
Before he fires.
It’s the loudest, brightest thing that Fugo has ever heard or seen— it’s too loud, ripping something inside him in two at the sheer release of power like the gun wasn’t a gun but a nuclear warhead and he stood in its epicenter— it roars like death, like he was already dead, whiting out his vision until he saw so much light he saw nothing at all, a great howl ringing through him and perhaps he screamed too, in pain or horror or anguish, but if so, he could not hear it; it rips through him and when he feels the pain of burns and burst eardrums and G-d knows what else, he is only relieved that he survived it.
He tries to blink out the afterimage of light from his vision and doesn’t quite succeed, blinded and dumb and his hearing muted and wobbly and strange— nothing in him prepared nor logically capable of detecting the large shape of hurling towards them like a comet, but somehow he still does.
And has enough mind to find the Capo’s son and throw him to the ground with him.
It passes over them but lands soon after, great vibrations shaking the ground like a long and painful earthquake until it finally stops and he can breathe again, can try to look around through the tears and attempt to make out anything more than vague and gray shadows; the kid slips from his grip and moves away, rushing, and Fugo can’t hope to catch up.
He’s running towards the sea, he realizes when he finally recognizes what’s around him and can attempt to stand. Something’s in the sea.
His hearing is still fucked; he thinks he can pick up wailing, an animal howl of sheer, white-hot agony, but doesn’t know if that’s just an echo too, or a genuine noise. It feels wobbly and distorted and faded. Nothing quite reaches him.
He stumbles towards the sea and slowly but finally realizes why it’s so important.
It’s too late to help Caprifoglio drag a heavily limping Mista out of the waves but soon enough to aid them in getting to the car— Mista saying something that simply doesn’t reach him as if he still was far away, but he assumes from the expression on his face it’s one of the post-battle gallows-type jokes and considers himself spared. They get into the car. Fugo crashes into the driver’s seat without processing the action and slams the keys into the ignition entirely on instinct.
Only then, staring through the windshield, does he notice the carnage on the ground first in scattered feathers and kicked-up mud and then in the body of a felled beast writhing on the ground in a crater of its own making. Or not quite trashing; not something so uncoordinated.
The Stand was holding onto and protecting the body of its User, not falling apart, not fading— she had to be just unconscious then, or blindsided as Fugo himself was— and trying to get away or merely intimidate them, snapping its jaws and jerking its tail in cat-like, sharp motions.
One of its four wings has a clean and terrible tear the entire length through, the feathers burned and charred and melted away, the flesh underneath them just gone — like the shot had eaten through its meat like a worm instead of merely flown.
Okay, Fugo says to himself. Okay.
Then he starts the engine, turns to reverse, maneuvers out of the parking lot masterfully ignoring the gaze of the beast, and drives away.
He’s still processing all of it and blinking superimposed shadows out of his vision, staring straight ahead at the red-shadowed road that shifts colors at some point and trying to stop weeping for no discernible reason— when Mista demands his attention by grabbing his shoulder and makes him almost swerve off the road and crash.
The words are muted gibberish to him— at least until Mista leans right to the side of his head to shout with an expression like it hurts him to do so, and then he can finally pick up— He fucking blew up the sun!
That doesn’t clear up anything. At all.
“What?” He yells back, and almost hears himself.
Mista doesn’t say anything else, or maybe he does and it just goes unheard; reaching for the radio in the car instead and turning it up to full volume where Fugo can feel the vibrations through the steering wheel better than he can make out the words, but he still picks up enough.
“— the unknown electromagnetic phenomena appears to have struck the Sun’s photosphere, causing record-size solar flares clearly visible from Earth—“
He immediately, hurriedly glances to the side at the setting sun and sees— it’s much brighter than it should be. Much more luminous, its blood-red half-circle surrounded with an almost bloom of glowing veined matter rippling outward like waves that seem to slowly spread and propagate and fade into lesser pinks and purples and blues, trashing like flames in slow motion; exactly what the sun should not be.
“What—“ he says. He thinks he says that. He can’t hear his own voice.
Mista pats his shoulder with a heavy hand. When he glances over, the culprit of the disaster sits in the passenger seat and stares into the landscape like he’s never been terrified of anything more than what lies before him.
If this kid triggers the Apocalypse to happen I’ll— he threatens in the privacy of his head without finishing the thought, nods calmly, turns back to the road, and just keeps driving.