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Chapter Text

Haruno Shiobana is young the first time he dreams of his father.

His father of before, the one he never met, not the one he will be introduced to later. He is so young he can't even say for certain that he's never dreamed of it, only that he never remembers those afterwards.

He is a child and thus is the quality of his dream, blurry at the edges and from a short, hindered point of view even when remembered years later and vivid despite the greyscale nature of his dreams in those years.

He dreams of a man much like his mother, like the men he'd grown up around, with dark hair and a round, flat nose, and those alongside kind eyes and strong hands. He dreams of a man who laughs in the kitchen and makes Haruno warm from the sound alone, of a man who lifts his mother in his arms and spins her around, only to call for him and do the same.

He dreams of a person that does not exist, because Haruno Shiobana has no father. He dreams of a mostly faceless man with the most important qualities being that he loves Haruno and he is real. That's all that matters. That's all he wants.

It's a short dream, and vague, but it's one he never forgets.

Later he dreams of a man who does exist--a man with brown hair and green eyes and a gentle smile and an angrier snarl.

The dreams are double-natured, predictably, fittingly.

He dreams of a man that looks exactly like the man his mother married, but with the details rearranged, and extraordinary qualities that don't exist in his real life. He dreams of a man with a new, unheard of willingness to simply sit down with him and color together, and to always hug him like he means it. He dreams of being held, of always being safe.

He dreams of his mother marrying a monster with hungry eyes and sharp claws that no one else notices. He dreams of being chased in the streets and down alleys, of cowering in a closet in his house that he knows will not protect him, of hearing growls and stomping feet that precede rough hands and pained shrieks.

Predictably, fittingly, sometimes the dreams morph, and become both. Sometimes he dreams of being at school, and happy, with a warm hand on his shoulder that turns, slowly, suddenly, into a beast's, digging into his flesh. Sometimes he dreams of hiding under his bed, weeping silently, only to be dragged out by the monster--and then held securely in careful, loving arms.

Both man and monster are real. Both are true aspects of the same coin. Both are the only thing he can call a father.

Both kinds of dreams upset him in ways he can't articulate in real life.

Soon after, the father he dreams about changes from truth to what is obviously a source of longing or perhaps comfort; it speaks of childish impulse to reject reality and seek something more, something better. The figure begins to take on different attributes--for a while it's almost embarrassingly obvious the inspiration: dark curly brown hair, a hat that always changes in the light and eyes that are always knowing despite being in shadow. In those dreams, his father is simply a man who protects him from other people, and then comes home, and is awe-inspiring, not at all frightening. Isn't that what a father is supposed to be? He's only 6, and he begins to wonder if a father (or a parent) is not someone kind or affectionate, but maybe simply someone there, and loved for it.

But he loves his real father, too, so that must be enough. He thinks he does, at least. He loves him as much as his mother, so that must be very much.

He's only a little older when his mother finally shows him the one and only picture of the man that helped bring him into existence, his birth father. Haruno holds it in his grasp like a missing piece that he can refit if he looks at it long enough, if he studies it so many times the image becomes unreal, like a mimicry of reality, like a falsehood that only feels real because of how hard he wishes for it to be so. He requests to see it over and over again. His mother always puts it away eventually because his real father doesn't like when she or he talk about the man of before, and Haruno has always known that the wants of his mother's husband comes before his own. But it doesn't erase the afterimage from his mind.

In the day, alone in his room listening to the sound of his parents' joyful laughter outside, he writes letters never sent to a father he doesn't even know the address of, begging for a different life. In the night, unburdened by shame or guilt, only a clear longing for love and attention that he is just old enough to realize he is missing in the form of his existing life, he starts to dream of a man with yellow hair and strong shoulders perfect for holding him.

He sleeps and in his sleep, a tall man barges into his house one day and tells everyone how he's so sorry for being late, but it's time for Haruno to come with him now, to come back to the home where he truly belongs, as Haruno's mother and father weep silently for their loss, or laugh happily in support for their son's gain. In his sleep, he runs away from home and stumbles into a random man, only to look up into the face of someone he knows instinctively--only to then be swept away to his real home waiting for him. In his sleep, he catches the edges of a familiar birthmark beneath the shirt of different people he's met, suddenly realizing how close his birth father had been all this time; and then as the dreams often do, he comes back home, and he makes it a real home.

The dreams are childish fantasies of a childish child in a home that has never felt right, never felt safe, never felt full, and he always wakes feeling even more alone than before, longing with such empty yearning to live in the dream forever, to not be pained with such real reality. He cries to himself in his own room, in his own bed, because he is 8 and already knows his mother doesn't like to be woken in the middle of the night with his childish problems.

Haruno is 11 when the dreams begin to change a little in nature and tone, blending fantasy with reality. It's a confusing time in general: puberty has just begun, and his hair has begun coming in a different color, and his parents are talking about sending him to boarding school in a few years. Whether that's for his education or their benefit is up for debate. What they say is not what he knows is true. He's realized that for a long time now.

It doesn't matter. He doesn't like much of anything they talk about anyway, when he talks at all to his parents.

He spends too long looking into the mirror and thinking about how his face and body are changing. He's always been told he looks like his mother, but with the new hair color coming in like a really weird dye job, he's beginning to question if he can see more than just her in his features. He has her wide eyes, her full lips, but his nose is pointier, the line of his eyebrows sharper. Were those from somebody else? He's getting a little taller, but not much. Yet. He thinks about his mother's stories and the picture she keeps hidden in the back of the photo album and wonders idly which of his birth parents' heights he's going to inherit.

His mother keeps jokingly threatening to redye his hair black if he doesn't stop embarrassing her with the mismatched look in the family photos she sends that year back to her parents (his grandparents) in Japan. His stepfather teasingly pretends at negotiator between them, laying a hand on Haruno's left shoulder which is slightly taller than it was a few months ago, and it feels like a dead weight. Neither of them look at him when they laugh. Haruno doesn't say much, just smiles when prompted. They don't look at him when he walks off, either.

In the deepest, secretest part of himself, he vents in his head to an unknown figure that he knows too well and not well enough, who is tall and blonde and silent and listens to him. Haruno has stopped entertaining the idea of being taken away from his home to a new, better one, but that's because the need for it disappeared, mostly, and he grew up. But he still longs for that connection, maybe now more than ever.

It makes sense his subconscious latches onto that.

The dream takes place in his room, picking up where he left off in real life. It's like waking into reality, if reality was a dream. He never remembers the exact moment he's aware he's in the dream, but he always remembers looking up and realizing he's not alone, and that's a good thing, for once.

He spends time unknown rambling in the dreams on the edges of his bed, wrapped in comfortable sheets, talking about familiar things like school and about maybe-friends and about the way he learned never to show the bruises around either and about that thing that keeps flitting in the edges of his vision lately, gold and chiming and just his height when he can catch more than a glimpse.

The figure always listens carefully, clothed in shadow, but never a threat. It says nothing, but Haruno knows inherently in the dreamspace that it cares. Maybe just because he wants it to.

He always wakes feeling overdesperate, feeling overdramatic--nobody's hurt him in ages--and most of all, feeling embarrassed.

But he always wishes the next night to dream of it again.

Giorno Giovanna is 14 when the dream figure takes more form and talks back.

He's just moved into his quarters in school. His hair is completely blonde now, and there's no sign of it changing back. The thing in his vision has become more solid and now he carries the secret of his golden companion with him as well, as heavy or as light as every other secret he keeps.

It's not bad. It's scary. It's exhilarating. He's lonely but still perfectly happy by himself, and the teachers are weird but not… horrible. He introduces himself as Giorno again and again, and everyone, both authority and student, takes it as fact.

It's all freeing and terrifying in a way he can't describe, except to wonder at why he feels so different when not under the eyes of his parents.

He sleeps for the first time in his first night in his dormitory room and wakes to discover someone else's eyes on him.

It's the first time he "wakes" in the dream and it actually feels real for a second. And then he looks up and knows it can't be.

Sitting at his desk, perfectly composed, legs crossed, is a man that Giorno can only guess to be the same figure as his dreams before. He looks like it. Maybe. Through the getup. He's wearing a sleeveless turtleneck and what is probably the weirdest pants Giorno has ever seen, and a green headband in a--is that a heart? But the hair color is right, he thinks, and so is the build. But why would he dream this?

Giorno is gaping silently at the apparition when it--he--speaks.

"So this is you," the man says without preamble, and then removing all of Giorno's doubts, "my son…"

Giorno stays laying down, finding it impossible to move. He feels like a butterfly pinned to a board, like the case he hates in his science teacher's classroom, except he is stuck on his back, pinned not by metal but by the piercing yellow gaze of what might be his father.

The man stands languidly, like a cat, and it spurs Giorno into movement, sitting up slowly to match him. The figure walks over and just as easily sits back down at the edge of the bed. His face is in shadow again, turned away from the dim moonlight, but his eyes are clear and bright.

Giorno's fingers clench in the bedsheets uncertainly where he has leaned forward and refuses to retreat from the man in front of him, but he is not scared--at least, not until the figure reaches out, sharpened fingertips curved in some attempt to touch him, and then he flinches.

He can't help it; he's only learned two reactions to a father's touch, and he was already frozen.

It gives the dreamscape man pause, makes him freeze, too, and then, slowly, like trying not to scare a frightened child, like waiting for the cue of Giorno's breaths to regulate again, like understanding somehow and waiting to see acceptance on his face, the hand continues.

And then it is cool and solid against his face, holding and stroking in equal measure. His palm cradles his jaw deceptively delicately for how strong his hand (much less the rest of him) looks, and his thumb maps the plain of Giorno's cheek. There is no bite from his nails, barely even felt despite their length. The man holds his face like he intends to study it, to remember it.

Giorno takes a shuddering breath and his own fumbling hand finds the larger one on his face seemingly without decision, just instinct. He clutches at it, leaning into the touch, knowing for certain now this is a dream as any of his others, and knowing as strongly how he wishes it wasn't. He remembers a decade later exactly what it was he'd been wanting and wishing to have so long ago.

"What's your name?" he hears rumbled, quiet but no less strong and decisive for it.

"H--" he stutters, and then bites his tongue. "Giorno," he says instead.

He's certain his slipup is noticed with the way those intelligent eyes watch him like a hawk, but it isn't mentioned, nor does the hand on his face tighten or leave.

Silence reigns and he asks the question that's been burning in him for years. "What's yours?"

The man (not a man, not a regular man, someone he knows, someone he should know and doesn't) looks startled by it. "You don't know?" he asks, genuine surprise on his face.

Giorno shakes his head carefully and is dismayed to find the hand disappearing with the movement. He lets it go with numb fingers and then drops his own hand back limply in his lap.

There's a pause, and then, “Dio.” Some of the composure returns, and with it, a hint of pride. "Dio Brando."

Giorno smiles and it feels embarrassingly watery, but that doesn't matter in his dreams, especially not this one, which feels so lifelike and heavy for the first time in his life that he could almost believe it was real. "It's nice to meet you," he whispers, and he really means it.

Dio leans back a bit, a slightly amused, slightly frustrated curve to his lips. Giorno can't tell if it's a smirk or the beginnings of a snarl. "You do know who I am, though, yes?" His voice is liltingly sarcastic, but betrays a concerned edge. For himself or his apparent son (which he'd already mentioned, announcing dramatically), Giorno isn't sure.

He nods, sleep-braid bobbing on his shoulder with the movement. "My father," he says, and the words feel formal but almost right, like not faking something anymore, like putting something indescribable to words for the very first time.

That earns him an actual smile and a distinctly pleased, "Very good," and Giorno can't hold back the giddy laugh in his throat.

"I look forward to getting to know you, Giorno," he says deeply with a small, almost archaically formal gesture of his hand and posture that Giorno can't begin to describe except that it's somewhere between a bow and an offered handshake. He can't tell if he's serious or if it's a joke. He can't tell if he's meant to shake his hand or say something else in response.

It doesn't matter. There's one thing Giorno really wants to do when he now knows it'll feel real.

The palpable shock in Dio's body language when Giorno hugs him without warning is almost funny. But the way he haltingly, achingly, gently wraps his own arms back around him and returns the gesture is entirely serious, if awkward, and it nearly makes Giorno cry, dream or not.

He sees Dio many times in his dreams after that. More times a week than not, he appears when Giorno goes to sleep. Mostly, they talk. Giorno talks to him like he did before, yes, and is gratified when he actually gets responses this time to his mundane problems, but they also just converse, like two people with common interests. They talk about morality and philosophy and nature and Giorno's favorite subjects and his burgeoning fashion sense (unfortunately, weirdly, quite similar), and much more. He even asks questions about Dio's history, getting strange, impossible answers said with a straight face. He doesn't mind--it's surprisingly easy to talk to Dio, despite his bizarre nature and intimidating figure. He makes Giorno feel safe just by existing, it's easy to slip into something almost natural and familiar with him no matter the topic. But of course, why wouldn't it be? Surely that's why he's dreamt of him in the first place.

When he wakes, he almost calls his mother a few times to ask what she really knows about his biological father, to know more, to confirm something, to quell the questioning, aching itch at the back of his brain that the dreams cause. And then he holds himself back, because it's stupid and weird and childish and--what, is he gonna ask her if the man she had a fling with years ago that led to him was actually a vampire or something? He knows the change in scenery in his day to day life has probably just added weird details to his already existing subconscious, and nothing more. It'd be odd to call in the middle of nowhere demanding details that aren't important anyway for the sake of a dream.

(It's just weird that it's a consistent dream.)

(Haruno also knows he just doesn't want to call his mother, something confusing and messy in his stomach panicking at the idea--at the idea she won't answer, at the fear she will and what will follow will be beratement or worse, indifference. He keeps her number by his dorm phone anyway. Just in case.)

Usually he doesn't think much of the dreams, tries not to think about them at all when he wakes out of lingering embarrassment, but the realism of them is hard to shake. It's almost like living two different time periods every day, and waking into each one separately.

And it's hard to deny how… specific Dio's reactions are.

Giorno offhandedly mentions one time a detail he's certain he's mentioned before, in his younger wishful dreams, and he feels the air around Dio go so still so quickly that he immediately knows, bone-deep, that the man is angry, even though he can't see it in a single line on his face. Which shouldn't happen--surely the father of his subconscious already knows everything about him, especially something so close to his chest, with a wound so old, with a detail that, in fact, must be half the reason he dreams this at all.

And yet, when it happens, he knows he's struck some chord.

Comfortable and quiet in the peaceful realm of his own unconscious playground, Giorno lays splayed on his back on his bed when it happens, looking at the ceiling and idly chatting about things he remembers from his childhood, inbetween periods of silence.

"I used to have those glow in the dark stars in my room," he says, half-contemplative, half-fond.

His father hums contemplatively in return from his place standing at Giorno's dorm's window, looking into the moonlight, being dramatic as usual. He's not wearing his usual outfit, this time in loose breeches and shirt that look more similar to something like a romance novel protagonist in some Victorian era plotline than anything else. He's stopped questioning why his subconscious is like this.

Giorno lifts his hand above his head, framing it against the ceiling, looking through the gaps in his fingers. They could almost look like a star if he twisted them right. "I was very excited when I got them. I used to like astronomy." He smiles, remembering it. It was one of the few gifts he got from his mother, and fewer still that he actually loved.

His hand falls back to the bedsheet by his head and the smile slips off his face, as he remembers too the casual cruelty that claimed them--that made the too-full trashcan claim them, like shiny pieces of garbage. "I didn't have them long. My dad took them away when I was 8, because I made him mad over something."

That's how he distinguishes them when he speaks here--the man he grew up with, that married his mother, he's dad. Dio is father. It keeps things clearer for him.

There's a slight silence, a shifting of the air that he vaguely notices but doesn't pay attention to. "Did he?" Dio asks, sounding like he's paying more attention, like he's turned his head away from the window and back to Giorno. "Why?"

Giorno sighs and flops over, onto his stomach, pillowing his head on his arms as he stares down the line of the rest of his short, small bed towards the only window in his room. Towards his father. He's vented a million variations of this in his head while both waking and resting, a million details, a million wounds that never feel fully healed, but it's not the fact of repetition that comforts him, gives him the ability to say it again--that is due simply to Dio's presence. And the fact none of it is real. If he is allowed one immature fantasy to indulge himself when he must hold himself to a tighter, more controlled, less accurate display of himself in real life, then it feels right it should be this.

"No idea. I think he was still mad he wasn't allowed to beat me anymore," Giorno huffs, almost a laugh. "So he found some other way to punish me." He can say it like that, here. He knows when he wakes the difference is stark, vivid--knows if he were even able to utter the words to someone he really knows, his whole body and mind would shut down with shame, with anxiety, with whatever collected remnants of pain that he held around with him now, as if a decade and a half's worth of hurtful touches and words were a physical sensation in his body that he struggled to expel.

But that is why he dreams.

And Dio goes still. Giorno sees it the moment it happens from this angle, knows the rigidity of anger a hundred times better than the softness of comfort, can recognize it a dozen times quicker. The air breathes for a single second with outrage, confusion, and something so tightly coiled in Dio's musculature that even Giorno can't read it.

Giorno freezes in place, laugh dying on his lips, body thrown back into memory that his mind does not allow. It doesn't matter. It doesn't need to allow it for it to overtake him.

"He," Dio says, and it is not a question, but a tightly reined statement, fragmented. Dio's arms unfold from their lax position across his chest. "What."

Giorno, very carefully, shrugs the desire to tremble from his limbs and sits up, eyeing the man before him who has gone from father to stranger in a second, for more than one reason.

"I've said this before," he intones, slowly and with some measure of confused distress that is all too similar to Dio's own, minus the compounding anger--but that's a stupid thing to say, because there is no set continuity of his dreams, no stageplay to follow, no playback of a tape's film to rewind and check that yes, he did remember this right.

Dio is not a man--Giorno only wishes desperately that he was. He is an illusion, an actor of Giorno's whims, a hazy photograph metamorphosed into Giorno's mental video.

It's a stupid complaint and response, because Dio is a dream fragment in his dream bedroom, and Giorno is not awake.

Giorno's father is not real, and has not truly been real for as long as he can remember, since before he could remember, since a time only his mother remembers. Dio doesn't have emotions. Not really. Giorno just dreams the ones and interactions he longs to know of, longs to hold in his hands and memories like more than wishful dust.

But that wished for, angry dust stands before him, and suddenly it all feels so real--Dio's eyes are flashing and his chest is moving as if he could really breathe, and the twisted rage on his face is real.

"I'll kill him," Dio whispers, too solid to say it is under his breath, too breathy to say it is a threat, though the tone is unmistakably so, unmistakably convinced, assured, determined. There's a rawness and roughness to him suddenly, something real, something that slips past the collected and calm and occasionally equally-callous-and-kind facade Giorno has come to know.

Giorno's chest doesn't heave, his breath does not come faster, because it is not real. It's a dream. But his chest does tighten, his throat does close. He so badly wants to change whatever it is he's seeing right now, to something, anything else.

Delicately, Giorno props himself on his knees, hands in his lap. It is not real, and yet the instinct to blank his face and minimize his own words hits him as hard as it would while awake. "It was my fault. I just misbehaved. I didn't do it again."

He doesn't know why he tacks the end part on, except that some still-injured part of himself--some part of himself that appears even in sleep, unable to rest and relax--needs his father-of-before to know he could behave now, he could be quiet and still and unburdening and a good son.

That was what parents wanted. And if Dio was upset, as he visibly was, Giorno knew no other way to try to appease him by his own action. It must be how to fix this change in his dream's script.

It doesn't seem to work, though--Dio's eyes, burning a hole even brighter than moonlight, close deliberately in an expression that looks like pain. Giorno lowers his own eyes and waits, waits, hands clenching each other.

And then Dio opens them again, and takes a step forward, still agitated.

And Giorno flinches, tenses, involuntarily.

Dio mirrors him, freezing, seeming to take in his posture and expression and general being all at once. Even with Giorno watching out of the corner of his eye, from under his eyelashes, where he cannot truly look away from, he sees how all of the man's body relaxes visibly next, loosening itself--how the coldness goes out of his sharp eyes to something moldable, how the heat in his deep voice mellows to something bearable.

"Giorno," his father says quietly, voice gentle but demanding attention. "Look at me."

Giorno does, and finds a forcibly softened expression meeting his gaze.

"I'm not angry at you," he explains, as if picking his words carefully, and though Giorno knew that on technicality, could not figure out why he might be angry at all, it's still a relief.

"Okay," he whispers back, body relaxing again almost embarrassingly easily at those words and reassurance. He might have trembled from the released stress in his body if he were awake.

His father walks closer, feet light and figure backlit by silver, and stops at the edge of the bed next to him. He does not sit, or stoop, or kneel, or slouch, but Giorno does not feel leered over, nor condescended to, nor pressured. With the calm expression back on Dio's face, the relaxation in his shoulders, the ease and trust his general presence already begs for, it would be hard to.

Giorno looks up into his shadowed form silently and sees not what he is used to seeing in fathers--a threat, a danger, an intent of pain or manipulation--but something more akin to the gentle, benevolent kindness of a saint's image, captured in stone or paint, refitted back into a human body.

It's with all that kindness and gentleness carved into him, painted across his features, that his father scoops his face into his hands (unclawed, for once--if he had half a mind, Giorno might find a metaphor in that) and holds it there, thumbs stroking at his cheeks. All Giorno can feel from the grip is love, pure and unfiltered.

"Angel," Dio whispers, and it sends something warm and fleeting through him, makes him smile back tentatively. Neither of his other parents had much of a tendency for pet names or nicknames for him, a stark difference to Dio who seems to drop them as easily as brushing away strands of hair. "I would never hurt you. I promise you that."

Giorno believes him. He does. How can he not, when he can feel the love pouring from the man in front of him, love so raw and kind and quiet that he has never felt from anyone before, love that is so strong he thinks maybe no one has ever loved anyone as much as his father loves him?

His worries melt away again, becoming so little that they cannot even hide here in his subconscious. It is a dream, and it's okay, and all that matters is what he has here, right now.

"If you can believe anything of me, trust any words I give you of advice, or love, or promise, believe that; trust those."

"Okay," Giorno repeats, this time pulled even further into reassurance than before. "I do."

Dio smiles and it's like looking into the sun, even though Giorno knows the moon is just before them both, and Giorno smiles wider with it, and is warmed by it all.

Dio breaks the spell by letting go of his face, and Giorno relaxes the final bit again, collapsing on his heels properly. Dio sits next to him now, and then coaxes him against his side with the flat of his hand on Giorno's shoulder blade; it takes no pressure at all to have him leaning against his father's side like this, closing his eyes.

"Were I still alive, I would make it so no one else would ever hurt you, either. Never again, precious."

Giorno is warmed again by the words, by the meaning behind them. Warmed enough that he lets go of his confusion over the vehemence of the silken steel lingering underneath them--by all of the details of Dio's speech that prick a layer of his consciousness (or subconsciousness) as too precise and detailed for a dream--and nor does he question the continued consistency of his dreams.

It doesn't matter. He's happy, like this. He's content.

After sitting for another while without time, facing the benevolent, nonexistent moonlight together, the hand stroking his shoulder pauses for a moment, and the head resting on his breaks the silence to whisper, haltingly, confidently, "Tell me about him. Tell me anew. Tell me what he did to you--and everyone else, too."

Giorno can't find it in himself to argue--can't find in himself to wonder why or deny it or anything else.

He has his own role to play in his dreams. They're for his benefit, after all. Removing the weight from his chest and hesitatingly putting it in someone else's hands, no matter how real or not, is all he wants.

Giorno tells Dio everything, as if he has never spoken the words before, because he has never spoken the words before, and somehow it is a new experience this time--somehow it feels deeper, truer, harsher, more painful, more freeing. It hurts and it relieves in equal measure and Dio listens through it all, rubbing his shoulder, as a real father might.

Chapter Text

Giorno grows used to his dream father's presence. It's there more nights than not, after all--brings him comfort more often than not. Dio Brando is a strange man, or at least claims to be, and the soothing unreality of the bizarre dreams mingled with the familiarly longed-for comfort twists into something new and relaxing and cathartic. It becomes a new normal to prepare for sleep and expect to find himself "waking" back in his bed, but now hazy, distorted, with a figment of his biological father beside him.

The man is changeable in all ways--in clothes, in demeanor, in preferred place he will "wait" for Giorno's "arrival." But what never changes is the way he seems to sincerely care about Giorno's day and insights and growth.

Sometimes it is painfully mundane and almost boring, but for the surreal fog of subconsciousness lending the interactions undeserved gravity. Sometimes it is gentle, caring, Giorno entering the dream to find fingers carding through his hair, and sometimes it is mostly… odd. Interesting. Ominous, maybe some would call it.

Giorno gets the distinct feeling that were he to see anyone else in these dreams of his, he would not find the same man he's coming to know interacting with them--gets the feeling that this genuinity of Dio may be reserved only for him.

(As if Dio can interact with anyone else. As if there is more to this than Giorno's childhood problems exacerbated and unhealed into teenagedom--an overgrown yard in need of pruning and weeding, an infected limb in need of treatment, or perhaps just amputation.)

(In a strange role reversal, Giorno only knows the dreams are not real when he experiences them in the moment. In real life, he begins to wonder.)

He nearly gets a true confirmation on Dio's potential feelings on other one night (one day? one dream? one eternity of an impossible meeting blurred and trimmed and packaged into a million small nighttime opportunities?), as he is sitting on the edge of his bed, staring into his bedroom wall, Dio behind him carefully redoing his braid. He'd forgotten to do it last night in his exhaustion over recent exams, and Dio had taken one look, questioned the lack of his characteristic look, and then offered to fix it himself.

Giorno had let him, and now here he sits, perpetual moonlight to his left (it is never cloudy in his dreams), boring wall he has yet to try to decorate attempting a lazy staring contest with him, and Dio's careful hands weaving into hair--or weaving his hair into, though maybe the distinction doesn't matter--a bright-red ribbon he'd pulled from somewhere.

"Do you have any other kids?" Giorno asks absentmindedly for lack of anything else to do, waiting as his father gently tugs his head this way and that to get the best angle. It's a question and concept that burned on his mind in the past and appears more frequently lately to disturb his waking mind.

"Yes," Dio murmurs easily, in a distracted tone of voice that's somewhere between fond and exasperated, weirdly focused on the task. Giorno tries with difficulty to remember if his mother ever gave him and his hair's upkeep any more thought than to quickly rip a brush through his head when he was younger or toss one his way while telling him to get ready himself when he was older. He can't remember. He knows for sure his dad never bothered to pretend at anything so gentle and intimate when alone with him, safely in the privacy of their home where no prying eyes could judge or exalt him for his supposed dedication or lack thereof to his charity case of a stepson.

Well. He knows the answer, he supposes.

"Oh," he says first, disappointedly, and on the heels of that, realizing he should be more polite, "Who are they? How many?"

"A handful," Dio says. "It doesn't matter. Keep your head still," he orders calmly.

"Sorry," Giorno mumbles. And then, delicately, with a decade of heartache contemplated so many times it became a resigned truth rather than real fear, he asks, "Are you married?"

He means, Is there a family you liked better than us out there? Children you liked more than me?

He's not speaking as either his dream role or with the logic and presumptions of himself waking; the question lines up with neither his dream father's supposed story of lived experience, nor the obvious fact that his real biological father probably has never even known he existed, given what his mother says. Giorno says it not with any sort of reasoning behind it, only the instinctive need for closure for the child's wound in his soul.

He's both relieved and surprised by the deep laughter he receives as answer, full enough that his father lets his hands slip for a moment in pause. He wonders which facets of his dream father's story-life make it so amusing--the hundred years in a casket at the bottom of the Atlantic making it a bit too hard to find time for marriage? The youth spent mired in hard poverty, and then a million passing luxuries, and then all-consuming vengeance? Or maybe just his personality didn't allow for it in the years before his death, in the hard-to-believe era of Dio's life being busy as a cult leader in a mansion across the Mediterranean.

"No," he says with mirth that Giorno can already imagine is accompanied by a twist to his lips that some would say looks cruel. "Never."

"I see," Giorno says, deciding to fidget his hands in his lap instead of the sheets.

There's silence for a while, and then, following a soft expulsion of a sigh, "I have a handful of children here and there, I've found. You are not my only child. I've visited them, as I've visited you." And then, almost reluctantly, in a tone that Giorno would call embarrassed in anybody else, but could certainly not apply to Dio, "I do not linger with them, however."

"Oh. Why?"

Silence again, and Giorno begins to wonder if he will ever get an answer for that. Then with a weirdly final sound of Dio fingers brushing against silk ribbon, his braid is released and supposedly finished. One of Dio's hands rests on Giorno's back warmly, thumb fiddling with the end of his new braid. "You are not my only child," Dio repeats with a gravity of someone about to deliver absolute truth, "but you are my favorite."

"Oh," Giorno says for the millionth time, feeling his face heat with pleasure at the admission. He shouldn't feel relieved or pleased by it, really--is that fair to any apparent other children of Dio? Can he claim all of his father's attention in a way that is kind or compassionate?--but another part of him doesn't care, selfishly loves the idea of being someone's favorite, of being someone's first choice, their first priority. He doesn't think he's ever been that before.

He twirls with a question before he even gets to really contemplate that, braid swinging weirdly with the movement, pulling in a way he isn't used to, as he's simultaneously hit with a strange realization, an angle he hadn't considered before. "Oh! Does that mean I have half-siblings, then?"

Dio, today shirtless with a semi-typical pair of glaringly orange pants that Giorno recognizes, simply raises an eyebrow and responds, "What else would it mean, love?" without elaboration. He then slips easily off the bed, dragging Giorno with him without preamble to see his handiwork in his mirror.

It's… well, hard to see mostly. A braid at the back of his neck does not lend itself to an easy spectacle. It looks exactly like his normal braid from this angle, at least, but for the bright-red ribbon woven deftly down the middle of it, ending in a small, extraordinarily neat bow at the end, securing his typical loop.

It's fairly simple. He guesses it would be easy to learn it himself with a little bit of practice. It's beautiful. He loves it.

He can't stop the proud, pleased smile on his face looking into the mirror that reveals nothing but himself and his empty, dimly lit bedroom.

His smile drops for a moment, in shock, and then hands that don't appear in the glazed glass before him settle on his shoulders, and he jolts a little, looking behind him to confirm Dio's presence.

"It's lovely," his father says with a smile, like nothing is out of place. "Perfect."

Giorno looks back to the mirror and himself, feeling the weight of disparity in what he sees and feels in the heaviness on his shoulder, at the presence lingering above his head. He takes a deep breath, steadying, though his heart does not need calming in a dream.

He doesn't know why it bothers him--he knows the weird story he's dreamt of vampires. Perhaps he just didn't expect his subconscious to remember like this.

But either way, the braid is finished, and though he can't see the figure behind him, he can feel it, and can feel Dio's satisfied contentment.

Giorno smiles, carefully, once more. "Thank you," he whispers, bringing one of his hands up to finger the edge of his braid, angling his head to get the best view.

Dio leans down again in that moment, voice warm and crisp and familiar in Giorno's ear, and says, far easier than everyone else in his life, "Anything for you." He punctuates the sentence with a small, quick kiss on his cheek and Giorno watches with fascination as the instant he's moved away, the mark is visible on his skin.

And then Dio drags him away again, asking him new and different questions about his life that Giorno is pretty sure he's given years ago in similar dreams, and he can't stop that pleased, proud feeling in his stomach again, and he thinks nothing of it anymore for the rest of the dream-night

Until that morning, when he wakes hours later to gold sunshine, not silver moonlight, and still finds his hair corralled in a blood-red ribbon he doesn't remember owning, and an explicable forest-green smudge clearly stamped on his cheek.

Until he finally calls the number on his desk notepad for the first time in the year and more he's been at his school, and asks his mother what his father's name is.

Giorno has noticed that sometimes Dio is more verbal in his strange, ominous ways. Sometimes their conversations have broken a facade Giorno didn't even realize they were holding until far later, when he thinks back in waking hours on small comments and bits of dialogue he remembered from his dream father, and how they slotted a little too easily sometimes. Small warnings. Small assumptions. Students or teachers Dio had casually waved him away from or details that Giorno himself isn't even sure he noticed enough in real life to feature in his dreams. Tips that were given with equal congratulations to help Giorno with his little… side hustle, that seem now maybe too experienced for anything Giorno might've thought of--especially when they turned out to be very helpful.

("You have your father's charm," Dio murmured appreciatively one night after Giorno mentioned successfully scamming a group of nosy French tourists and making a killing. And when Giorno slowly but casually explained how he'd pickpocketed the police officer that later questioned him for that very event--in open daylight--Dio grinned and added, "and his audacity."

Giorno basked in response to both bits of praise, and didn't even realize that his first association for the comparison, for the mere concept of fatherhood, had changed meanings, changed implications, changed faces--changed what could've been an empty yet upsetting compliment from a stranger into something that bloomed with warmth in his chest like a spring bouquet.)

There are things Dio knows about others in advance and seems careful to prepare Giorno for. There are things Dio seems to know about Giorno himself before Giorno does.

It could be his subconscious, he tells himself, when awake. It could be instinct, unnoticed moments and body language teaching him things he didn't yet consciously know or understand--he was very good at reading people, and it wasn't like Dio was giving Giorno the answers of his next test, or winning lottery numbers, or anything strange.

And maybe his mother had just accidentally mentioned his real father's name one day or night without noticing--maybe he didn't even realize he knew it until years later. Maybe he just didn't consciously remember one of the most important details of his childhood he'd spent a decade yearning for.

Weirder things have happened, right? Everyone had dreams like this, right?

Well, everyone broken like him, that is. Right?

And yet he likes to think he knows himself and his problems better than that. Yet he knows what his mother said and didn't say--both years ago in his childhood and recently, on that very long, awkward, illuminating, and unsettling phone call.

Yet in one of his next dreams it becomes overt, undeniable, breaking an unspoken barrier--the idea of what will happen next when Giorno wakes up.

"There's a man coming tomorrow," Dio simply announces one night. "He wants to hurt you."

Giorno looks up from where he's sitting--slouching, really--at his desk while Dio sits at the end of his bed, leaning forward almost artfully on one hand, peering into the night through Giorno's window. Giorno can't help but think of marbled statues, of white face powder; unnaturally still and unnaturally pale.

Giorno has been thinking a lot over the past week, actually, and he has begun to wonder how much of it is the artful logic of dreamscapes, and how much is due to simple, true inhumanity.

"Who?" he asks, at the uncharacteristic omen, perhaps too seriously, perhaps too loftily. There's a war happening in his mind, a collision of awareness, a clash of confusion, a tumultuous revolt of reality.

He doesn't quite know what's real anymore; doesn't quite know where he stands in relation to himself anymore. Doesn't know what role he plays now in these dreams.

Doesn't know if the man before him is stranger or family anymore--a question that should be far simpler and far more complicated than he thinks the possible answer would suggest.

Dio smiles, eyes half-lidded like he's thought of something funny. Even now, Giorno is too relaxed in his dreams to really be on guard, but, even now, he knows the look of a sunbathing predator when he sees one--perhaps even one sans sun.

"More than one, actually--but you'll know who I mean when you see him." Again, vague, and again, not giving a true answer.

Irritation, less familiar and exasperated and more heated sensation, strikes his stomach. Maybe it's a carry-over of his unease in real life that he's so far been unable to manifest here. Oftentimes, he knows, the subconscious will be either the first or last to take a hint of cognizant realizations.

"Who?" he demands again without moving, not willing to let the moment go as easily as Dio wants, maybe.

Dio's eyes close totally, and then the smile drains. He stands smoothly, and he looks more powerful than graceful, even if both are equally true. He strides to his son across the room in practically two steps, tall as he is. He takes Giorno's chin as easily in his hands as one would cup an injured baby bird, knowing the difference in strengths, the way that fingertips could shatter bones. Strange, how Giorno never noticed before.

"Your actions have consequences, darling," Dio murmurs down to him, face shadowed in this corner of the room, back turned to light. "Tomorrow brings them."

Giorno doesn't tremble, but that is only because his body is not corporeal here. And Giorno is not afraid of Dio, but he is suddenly aware that in another life, in another situation, he could be.

"Who," he whispers again, looking up, because Dio made him a promise, and if he intends on breaking it, Giorno wants to know now. "What consequences?"

Dio smiles. It's a lot of things, but it's not cruel.

And then he kneels, dragging his hands back with him, dropping one to Giorno's knee instantly, leaving the other raised to gently hold his chin for a lingering moment before letting it, too, fall.

He looks so much suddenly like a patient parent dropping a scared child off for school for the first time that Giorno can't help but lean forward. There is nothing to relax from--he is not tense--but his irritation unravels from its spool around his spine.

And still, his father does not answer properly. "I know you want more than this, Giorno," he says quietly, like it's any sort of explanation at all. "I know you have ambitions for something else, restless thing that you are, and you can't quell it with this academic domesticity you've run to. I know you want to do something with your hands to change the world around you, mold it to a better shape from a sharper eye. I know you itch to use the golden being that follows you." Dio angles the slightest bit closer, face a confusing but--if he's honest--familiar mix of blankness, understanding, and hunger. He speaks as if voicing aloud a beloved and understood yet disallowed desire: "I know you want power--you want to be in control, you want to make people who deserve it pay."

Giorno looks away suddenly, uncomfortable. Only some of these things he's told Dio, in fullness or part. The rest, it seems, has been read off him like a brightly lit page with an especially bolded font.

Dio continues. "Whether these are traits you grew in the womb, or were built in you through your life, I don't know. If someone were to ask, I'm not sure I could answer that question in myself. But regardless--they make you undoubtedly mine. You are my son, in every way."

"What does this…" Giorno trails quietly, looking back to his father. "What do you mean? What are you saying?"

Dio raises his head, looking so proud that the first association Giorno makes is of a lion: tall, strong, refined, deadly. Sure, and lazy, and paternal. "The opportunity for change is coming soon. That which you want could be in your hands within a month, if all goes well. I don't know what form it'll take, but I know you deserve it and more."

When Giorno stares at him blankly, biting his lip, Dio smiles again, like a setting sun in its unabashed brilliance. "I want these things for you, my love. I want you to have what I had--and more, if you desire it, though I know you probably won't." The hand reaches up again and strokes an aimless line on Giorno's face with knuckles. "I want you ready when it comes, so that you'll be prepared and safe."

All Giorno can do is inhale, like his lungs have stopped in their places, as if his father's touch and influence alone could turn him, too, to stone. "You know none of this explains anything, right?" he jokes breathlessly, with an edge too desperate and unsure to be really funny. "This isn't exactly reassuring, if that's what you mean it to be."

Dio's smile becomes grin, and Giorno begins to realize for the first time what those sharp points flashing in his mouth really mean.

He grasps Giorno's limp hand with his own, pressing a quick, fond kiss to the back of it before relinquishing it, though he keeps his fingers tangled with Giorno's, and Giorno grips him back just as strong now, afraid of what his father is foretelling like an angel bearing portents and prophecies. "I think you know by now that I am not a reassuring man to most, Giorno."

"I also know that you promised me you would be," Giorno rebutts softly, not exactly an accusation but close.

Dio relents. "And I am to you, yes. That's why I'm telling you this at all. No one else would get this level of consideration from me, I can assure you."

"Not your other sons or former friends or exes," Giorno fills in. He doesn't know why he says it. Everything just feels so real suddenly. It feels like it ought to be said, ought to be information reconsidered now that--now that what? Now that he knows better?

"No," Dio confirms. "Not for them. Only you."

"You could prepare me better by giving me details," Giorno says numbly, and he's not sure if that's the dream's effect or the steadily increasing sense of unease, heavy and intangible and thick and rolling across his gut. He doesn't want to be afraid in his dreams. He doesn't like his nightmares.

"If I knew more, I'd give it as well," Dio murmurs. "It's hard enough as it is to know things on this side of things. I can only tell as much as I do right now from constant connection with you."

It's an answer that should be a nonsense response, something from any one of his normal dreams, perhaps. But it makes sense, now, and he just--he just didn't want to understand before, maybe. Couldn't imagine it. Who would?

"On this side of things" bangs around his head, loud and clanging like metal sheets swinging in high winds, shattering the last bit of his denial.

You're real, Giorno thinks in disbelief. And at the heels of that, and you're dead.

And then the message written inbetween the lines of Dio's warning hits him headon: And you think I might die tomorrow, if I'm not careful.

Giorno cannot panic, because his lungs and heart don't work overtime in dreams. But he can feel something close to it.

Dio stands again, and it's his grip, not Giorno's, on their hands that holds them together. Giorno has gone limp again. The vampire that is apparently his father uses the point of connection to make him rise, and then uses his other hand to gently tip Giorno's head up, to properly meet his gaze over 20 centimeters above him.

There's a scar running across the base of his neck. It's just above the neckline of his black shirt, the one he usually wears, the outfit he says he died in, and though it's partially obscured right now, Giorno has seen enough of it to know what it looks like: thick and bumpy at the widest points, thin and threadlike at the thinner points. He's never really looked at it before, never had a reason to, never fully processed what all the details of his father's bizarre presence really means. It's where his eyes land first, before being pulled upward.

Dio's face is serious now, though not grim. "I want what's best for you. I promise." His eyes are yellow, and bright, like the amber that trapped insects for several millennia in the consequences of a single mistake--how did Giorno not realize before how real it all looked? "Do you believe me?" he asks, and it's heavy, as if Dio realizes he's speaking not to the Giorno that inhabits his dreams, wistfully, playfully, meaninglessly, but to the Giorno of a higher consciousness, one who knows what his decision to answer really means.

Because he is. And because maybe he can tell the difference--maybe he's read Giorno's own private discovery and realization and blizzard of emotions as easily as he reads anything else.

Giorno's answer matters. Maybe it's more than an answer, maybe it's a decision, maybe Dio will disappear if he says no, maybe this will all disappear if he just denies it.

He feels like he's standing at an unknown bus stop in a foreign city, watching the last ride home for him begin to close its doors and prepare to hit the gas, and he has to decide whether or not to chase it.

It would be easier if he knew which way, which choice, was his way home to begin with.

Some part of him believes Dio--the man has never hurt him, why would he start now? But another part of him is rebelling so hard at the mere idea of him being a man at all, and the concept that everything he's experienced in over the past year in his dreams is real is catching up to him quickly and dizzyingly.

He's cried in this man's arms, thinking he was safe and secure. He's told him everything, and Dio has apparently pulled even more than that from him just by observation. He's looked forward to seeing him under the mental context that it didn't matter what he said or did because it was fantasy and subconsciousness and one reprieve he had from the stress of the real world.

Now that fantasy and real world, that mentality and subconsciousness, that stress and reprieve--they're all combining into one, and Dio is his father, his real and unknown, estranged father, and he is breaking the unspoken boundaries of the dreamscape by giving him advice for real life danger, and Giorno is being expected to answer normally and have his answer matter and maybe it is a choice, maybe what he says or does will define the entire rest of everything that this apparently is, and it is--it is--

It's overwhelming, it's too much, bits and pieces of his denial had already begun breaking off in small chunks, the illusion slowly wiped from his consciousness like cleaning a foggy mirror, and he feels awake now, really awake, like a real person in a real place and god, is this real? Is this even a dream? Is this some fragment of reality he's not usually privy to, in much the same way other people are not allowed to see his Gold Experience's existence?

What's real, really? What does Dio being real even mean?

What does his warning mean? What consequences has Giorno sown that he will be reaping when the sun rises? What could he have possibly done to deserve this?

Exist, his mind answers traitorously to that thought, and it's the terrible, familiar, comfortable self-loathing that breaks the connection he thought he had here--the connection he didn't have, until he did--making him doubt anything he thought he'd known, making him doubt everything he lays his eyes on.

It's hard to say what goes on in Dio's face as he watches Giorno process the question and struggle to answer in the interim. It's harder to say what Giorno himself feels in that, while trying to understand everything happening.

"I can't--" he says brokenly, not sure what he's trying to say. "I don't--"

Something fractures on Dio's face and it makes him scramble faster--it feels like the difference in stability of standing on a crumbling bridge, and then watching the concrete specifically under his feet disappear. Rocky, then just gone.

Giorno doesn't know where to put his feet now.

Except maybe his subconscious does, and he steps backward, and the distance breaks apart the grip between their hands. Dio looks down, watching the movement, as shocked as any stoic movie protagonist Giorno has ever seen who was ever stabbed by a beloved.

"I don't know you," Giorno whispers finally, finding the words behind it all. He doesn't know him. He's not who Giorno talked to--not who he meant--he didn't even know what questions to ask before, because he didn't knew they counted--he can't remember all of the answers because it was all just strange dream logic. Dio is not the illusion of comfort Giorno had taken him for. He's a dead person. Giorno knows the illusion, not the person.

Dio stands before him in the moonlight and he is more of a father than Giorno has ever known, and that's exactly why Giorno can't accept him.

"Giorno--" Dio exclaims, stepping forward to reach for him, and Giorno automatically rears back as if struck. That's not even his name, and it never mattered before, not in real life in his school, nor in his understanding of the dream, but if he was a real father, Dio would know that. If he was the figment of imagination Giorno had needed and confided in before, he'd know that. If Giorno could trust real comfort from a real man that apparently stands before him in reality, he would know.

Dio knows so much and yet so little about him. It's sureally real.

Vaguely he registers the genuinely hurt expression on Dio's face, but he can't process it through his own, as irrational as it is.

He almost wants to laugh at that. What's even rational in this situation at all? Discovering your dead vampire father is real after almost two years of dreaming about his ghost? And then being more upset about not realizing that than like--anything else about the situation?

"I'm leaving," he says, and means it, though he's not quite sure what it means. Just that he can go, he doesn't have to stay here, it's his dream, he decides what he dreams of.

"Giorno, wait--!" he hears before unconsciousness swamps him again, properly this time, but it's too late. He's already made his decision. Blackness overtakes him, and then the sweet, gentle nothingness of slumber, so undisturbed that the time between dream and consciousness is completely lost to him.

And then he wakes. Again.

He wakes in the same room, to golden sunshine, with tears already in his eyelashes.

Chapter Text

Giorno Giovanna skips class later that day, and because of it, meets a man with a shovel and an obvious bone to pick, calling himself Leaky Eye Luca.

That meeting turns sour quickly, in more than one way, and because of it, he meets Bruno Bucciarati.

Everything swiftly begins to go downhill after that.

Some people might not call it downhill, and he wouldn't even use that word himself if speaking about it, but there's no other way to mentally categorize how suddenly and completely his life devolves into violence.

He has a very long, shaky, sleepless night whilst watching over Polpo's flame to contemplate it--he has a lot of time to contemplate a lot of things, ranging from the several beatings of the day before making his whole body ache, to wondering what a temporary loss of limbs can do to a body longterm, as well as the school janitor's expression before being murdered via an arrow to the face that was meant for him, and finally the general fact that the last time he saw moonlight stream through his window like that, he was experiencing a very different type of unease.

Dio's warning was real. Some part of him thinks of the irony: he couldn't even try to sleep now to ask for more advice, more clarification in the wake of the first tipping domino, terrified of who will be hurt next when his stupid, unwanted gift of a lighter goes out.

But he can't complain. He quite literally asked for this, didn't he? When he asked to join Bucciarati, asked to be allowed to be part of something different, bigger--something darker, more direct. He'd been thinking that he already was a delinquent and thief in secret, what more was a little gang violence if he could get rid of that restlessness inside him? In for a penny, in for a pound.

He wasn't thinking. He is now. He thinks a lot in that very lonely, very quiet night filled only by his shivering that cannot be soothed with the heat from the fire he holds in his hands.

He has a long time to think about concepts like too far in and can't back out now and I'll make him pay.

Giorno knows the last thought in particular would probably make Dio so happy, if he were here--knows, again, Dio was right.

He knows on some level that he's suppressing a kind of mixed fear and excitement he's never felt before. He realizes during it all the real difference between dream-reality and real-reality--the latter is still worse by a long shot, it seems.

He contemplates his life choices, contemplates how to kill the capo who decided to play dirty with his life and others’, and contemplates what his father might say if Giorno could talk to him right now.

Joining a gang on zero hours of sleep might not be the hardest thing he's ever had to do--at least the actual meeting part. The car ride in Bucciarati's car, completely silent, was ironically worse. He can't even say if it was awkwardness or fear, just that walking into the noisy, crowded restaurant is a relief from--everything, actually.

When he meets Bucciarati's team, it's funny to discover that they're actually no different than any other peers he's ever known, for both better and worse--currently, mostly for worse. Even funnier to watch a grown man's face morph in rage when Giorno already knows how to play this game.

They have a mission. They get on a boat. Mista and Narancia are funny, he discovers. At least until they, with Fugo, start torturing a guy in ways Giorno legitimately never imagined.

He only feels a little bad--after all, the man did try to kill him a half hour before. It's still a shock, though. But maybe that's the sleep deprivation talking.

At least Giorno gets to prove his worth a little. At least he gets to sleep that night, passing out from his first day of mafia life so quickly and deeply in a fancy bed in a vineyard villa that he has no inclination to dream much at all--even if he wanted to, which he doesn't know if he does. Doesn't know if he doesn't.

Narancia almost dies the next day and everybody seems more pissed by the idea of being found out. Normal priorities, maybe, for them, but Giorno can't shake the anxiety and dread at the news.

He doesn't even know Narancia, but he likes the guy well enough and he's--Giorno's age. None of the other deaths Giorno has collected so far (either at his hands or witnessed from someone else's) were under the age of 30. The mere idea of otherwise fills him with a visceral horror.

Abbacchio's grudge, weirdly, did not go away when Giorno made a fool of him in front of other people, and it turns out everyone else doesn't seem to prioritize caring about that, either.

Giorno nearly dies next, but maybe that actually earns him some respect. At least from Fugo, at least after Giorno can finally stop screaming in agony, every cell on fire in such a burning, mind-killing way that he wishes for seconds that spans year that Fugo's Stand actually had killed him, even if it means sizzling apart at the seams the way Illuso did.

Even when the pain passes, he can't stop shaking, feeling like he's going to throw up at any wrong movement, like the world is all wrong and sideways and not meant for him to live in. Abbacchio doesn't give him a second more of reprieve before hauling him up by his jacket and telling him to get moving back to the van. The mission and all that. Giorno had forgotten what the feeling of rough hands jerking him around at will was like, but the ex-cop rectifies that for him easily.

Relief is supposed to bring clarity, and all Giorno can think after the fight in Pompeii as he sits, trembling, in the back of the van on the return ride to the vineyard, is wondering whether any of his classmates miss him, if his teachers do.

He doesn't wonder about his parents, because he knows the answer to that in his heart already.

He doesn't wonder about Dio, because he’s pretty sure he knows the answer to that, too.

They crawl onto the train, expecting a quick trip to Florence. Without intending to, without his conscious (ha) permission or choice, he falls asleep in the turtle’s Stand while they wait--apparently he isn’t the only exhausted one, since he notices in his daze beforehand that both Fugo and Abbacchio do the same. He doesn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that the nap isn’t deep or long enough to be much more than a buffer and momentary reprieve for his tiredness.

And if Giorno thought he was going to get any more rest than that that day, well, he was wrong, because he’s roused from it to the literal rude awakening of a Stand attack.

They win, of course, because otherwise they’d be dead. They win just in time to be attacked again, of course, because of course. They win that, too, or rather, Giorno does, this time. With no help.

Learning he can heal, too, is a sorely-needed, greatly-appreciated discovery, an asset that Bucciarati immediately commends, alongside his victory. Everyone else seems impressed, too, when he immediately puts it to use on their collective collected wounds right there in the parking lot, except for Abbacchio, who still glares at him while he awkwardly fixes what all of the ex-cop’s hand needs left healing.

After all that, Giorno is winding down quickly--but then he's the one expected to drive, and then they're attacked again.

Giorno can't say driving into a canal is the best idea he's ever had, but it's early morning and he hasn't slept and at this point, self-preservation seems mostly like an obstacle in the way of achieving victory.

By the end of it, he's added two more kills to his life experience. It feels easier every time, the same way that shredding fabric becomes both smoother and more tedious the longer you pull a strip off. Like snuffing out a particularly irritating candle flame. He thinks, uneasily, about the things Dio noticed in him, and begins to wonder about other things he mentioned--wonders how much of it was inherited, how much cultivated--clearly it's something wrong with him, despite its usefulness, and he doesn't know whether to blame nurture or nature.

He still hasn't slept for the night when they approach Venice.

There's really too much to process of the confrontation with the boss. Their group is one person lighter, and Giorno's chest clenches pitifully every time he looks around and doesn't see Fugo, despite only knowing him for 72 hours. Trish is safe, and Bruno seems to be, despite how much he scared Giorno earlier when he didn't respond at first to Giorno’s attempts at healing, and Giorno is just starting to understand why maybe any of them act the way they do. They just went through some stretch of hell, looking into a future that only promises more, and Giorno just keeps giggling and joking about it with Narancia and Mista in the boat after they've made it far enough to not be on lookout anymore. It's too grim not to laugh a little, not to break the tension with some form of the little relief they're allowed. Even Abbacchio doesn't look too pissy with him for a few hours, and Bucciarati adds a half-hearted quip or two.

When Bucciarati suggests they actually eat brunch at a restaurant to start their "day" properly, well--why not?

It doesn't last, because he's starting to realize nothing does. At least he can add getting shot to the list of things he's experienced now. It was gonna happen eventually in a gang, right?

He finally starts to relax in the airplane, finally certain they won't be followed, certain they can take a single breather, certain that maybe he can nap enough to be functional in whatever bullshit will find them inevitably later when they land, and just maybe if it's deep enough--maybe--maybe he's tired and stressed enough that he wishes that someone more experienced, someone with gentle hands and a caring voice, would take that weight off his shoulders again, no matter what happened before, no matter what Giorno said last time. He remembers why that presence felt like such a relief almost two years ago in the current sudden absence of it, in the sudden realization that he hasn’t been alone in his sleep for this long since before it had begun happening at all.

It's hard to feel uncomfortable this time at the idea of his own vulnerability when that's exactly why he wishes Dio was here right now.

It ends up being a pointless idea. He was too naive to drop his guard, honestly. A fucking dead Stand, perfect for this exact moment and situation. He wonders if all gang members have such terrible luck or if the boss is just making things interesting specifically for his number one targets right now. Lucky Giorno to end up in the most volatile inter-organization crime dispute this side of Italy since Passione's creation.

They're leaving an impressive body trail at this point, and if he's being honest, some part of Giorno is anxious to find what's at the end of it all--if they really can make it all the way to the end mostly unscathed, if Bucciarati can deliver on his dreams, if Giorno can finally make something of his life that feels tangible, honest, his. He wants to know if the things Dio plucked out of his chest without much effort that Giorno didn’t want to admit to are even worth wanting--if, maybe, he can convince others of it, his own resolve will really be enough to claim the things he wants.

Giorno comes out the other end of the airplane attack having actually gotten the unconsciousness he wanted, but only after passing out from pain. He's not sure how many limbs he's lost and reattached at this point. This has to be some sort of record, right? He wakes up blearily on the couch in Coco Jumbo to the sound of Bucciarati zipping on his backup hand and overhead discussion that confirms they crashed. Wonderful. He ends up taking several large chunks of the furniture in Mr. President to heal himself and everyone else, and then he collapses again as if he hadn't slept at all. He realizes--again, blearily--he hadn't when Mista does the same as soon as he's roused, and Bucciarati looks like he wants to join them both. At least the others got a few hours last night inbetween the parking lot and retrieving the disk.

They've made it to Sardinia. The first thing they do to celebrate is rent a hotel on Bucciarati's orders, to rest until they're all actually useful before the next Stand User can track them down. Narancia and Abbacchio take first watch, and the rest of them hunker down for the next 5 hours. Giorno doesn't even care about sharing a bed with Trish in his eagerness to just stop for a moment and not have to fight for his or other's lives.

Regardless of his hidden wants, as so many things in his life seem to never take note of, he passes out so completely his subconscious makes no attempt at entering any sort of mental processing in his sleep at all, settling for blackout, bone-deep rest.

He should be thankful. He is. But when he wakes, he still feels like he's holding on by a thread, despite the sleep. He feels like maybe their train to Florence never stopped, and maybe it's been dragging him along between the railcar and tracks the whole time. Maybe the blood trail they're leaving--with no small contribution from him--is actually just bits and pieces of his body being mashed and spat out by the wheels of it.

Well. Lucky that he can just keep healing himself then, isn't it?

At least they're all getting equally robbed of peace and quiet, more or less. At least they always have someone on watch. At least he isn't alone.

Abbacchio dies. Bloody, brutal, quick. Too fast for them to even realize what happened before it’s over. It couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes any of them were gone, and yet--and yet.

Giorno can’t heal him. Some part of him, kneeling in the sand next to that ruined, messy, empty corpse hopes for a very long and painful amount of time that must be less than 10 seconds in reality that maybe it’s like Bucciarati, maybe it’s not that bad, maybe he can fix this.

It’s not. He can't. Abbacchio doesn’t move. Whatever miracle granted to Bucciarati in San Giorgio Maggiore, whatever miracle granted to them all on the entirety of this fraught mission that's so far kept them safe--it won’t repeat. It runs dry. Their miracle stops here.

Abbacchio dies, and Giorno’s hope that this will end well dies with him.

Narancia screams and cries and breaks down, and then, finally, simply refuses to look at him, as if Giorno is singlehandedly responsible for his Stand being unable to revive the dead. Mista looks like he’s holding both himself and Narancia together by the barest shred of composure, like a too strong breeze will have him weeping on his knees in the sand, too. Bucciarati has shut down completely, in a way that Giorno knows is bad, knows means there is deep, real grief beneath, and only keeps barking orders, or else stays completely silent.

Giorno is losing track of time, with the frantic scramble they’ve all been on this whole time, with the lack of proper sleep, with a lack of clarity in thought, but it can’t be more than 5 or 6 days he’s known them. He doesn’t--didn’t--like Abbacchio, and how could he, when the man acted like he had a grudge against him for no other reason than existing? And yet.

And yet he can’t stop crying silently when they make another mad dash to safety, once again climbing into a boat to find some semblance of respite. Giorno doesn't dare hope for it, doesn't dare think that maybe the waves themselves won't overflow their vehicle, trap their escape, tangle in their bodies and leave them as motionless and cold as Abbacchio in the sea. He wonders how far away Notorious B.I.G. is. Wonders if maybe all of their deaths are just waiting on the horizon, around the next sunset, waiting the next time he wakes up.

It's a very, very long day while they recover, and figure out what to do next. It says a lot that, later, he'll remember it as the least stressful part of this day.

They get a truly unbelievably convenient tip in the form of an anonymous ally. Rome. All roads lead to Rome, they say. Rome is where it will end, the anonymous man's distorted voice from the laptop says. Rome is where they'll find answers.

Rome is where they go, for they have no other choice. The sun has fallen below the sea, and it's the literal instant one of them sets foot on land that the temporary peace goes to hell.

They make it out again with some injuries, but alive. Or at least, some of them do.

Not including Bucciarati.

There's no way to describe what learning of Bucciarati's condition does to him.

It's his fault, isn't it? It has to be. He did something wrong. Maybe Abbacchio didn't come back to life earlier because he just failed at what he was supposed to do. He's their healer here, he's the support newbie, if they get injured and fall it's his job to back them up and fix it.

He can't fix it. Bucciarati is a dead man walking, living out the last stretches of the miracle that let him walk away to begin with and carry the rest of them this far.

It ends here, in Rome. It must, or else they'll be caught in this small war they started without even the guiding anchor of Bucciarati's presence. He can't imagine that.

They've come so far. It can't get much worse than this. They have to be close.

When they get there, they find Rome burning, and a man high above it all laughing and laughing.

It's one thing after another. It's mass death and destruction in the streets. It's Mista taken out in front of his eyes. It's almost falling to his death, almost being disintegrated alive, almost failing and knowing he wouldn't live long enough to even see when his own limbs begin rotting off, nor the city going to ruin afterwards.

It's been an entire journey of death and murder and pain and confusion and no sleep and intense battles and fear and one thing after fucking another and Giorno has never seen so many people die at one time, never seen such agony and terror on the faces of innocent bystanders, never fought such a losing battle from the start.

There was mass panic in the halls of the apartment complex him and Mista entered to find their way to Cioccolata. They heard most of it, rather than seeing it directly--by the time anyone above the first floor tried to make it further down than their storey, they were already gone, and the consequences of that were heard in a constant cacophony of screaming, which only summoned more people from slumber, which only repeated the cycle.

They'd headed to the elevators, looking for the fastest way up, and exited with only the goal of immediately locating the last door to roof access.

What they found on the top floor was a confused and panicked family from one of the apartments, apparently attempting to escape, trying to figure out what to do with the mess of everything happening below and above and around them. Their young daughter--less than 6, surely--had clung to her parents' legs, frightened and crying.

They tried to tell them to stay on this floor, that things would be okay. They tried. But they were on a timetable and couldn't fight to stop this and protect random people from themselves at the same time. A set of panicked adults trying to protect their child wasn't going to listen to two random teenagers in the middle of an emergency. The last thing Giorno saw before ascending the roof access stairway to the helicopter was the couple and their daughter stepping fearfully into the elevator as its doors closed. Going down.

He didn't know if the screams he heard were hollow because of the distance and muffling or because he was only imagining them, but it would stay with him, forever.

In all this time and these fights for survival in the last week (only a fucking week), he's never fought an enemy like Cioccolata. He's never been so injured by the end of it.

He's never been so enraged.

Everything Giorno felt for Polpo magnifies and intensifies to a point beyond mere anger and righteousness. He is furious, and tired, and sick with disgust, and Cioccolata will be the target of his rage, the sacrifice of his hands to fix this problem.

Getting shot in the head and having his brains subsequently eaten by Giorno's stag beetle is too kind for Cioccolata. Giorno puts every ounce of pain and fear he's felt in the last week into his last fight with the man. Every bit of frustration and weariness and confusion and loneliness and horror. He makes sure the first strike he lands is imbued with Gold Experience's power, remembering what Bucciarati said about how he felt after their first fight. He makes sure of it with every other punch after that as well--he doesn't actually know if he can chain his ability like that, if it's an exponential effect that only grows and worsens with each hit, or maybe just a stopper so the effect won't run out in the long, long time he attacks the man, or maybe it does nothing more than the original hit and he's wasting his energy. But he wants it to hurt.

He wants Cioccolata to feel everything these people in this city feel. He wants him to feel what every family ever harmed by Diavolo's actions feels. He wants him to feel what Giorno feels, what Mista feels, what that little girl in that doomed elevator felt before it was all over.

Giorno can't save everyone in the city, past, present, or future. He can't save Abbacchio. He won't be able to save Bucciarati, and maybe he won't be able to save any of the rest of their group here going forward, or maybe even himself.

But he can break every bone in Cioccolata's body and make him wish he were dead long before gifting him the mercy of letting his limp, bloodied, shattered body fall gracelessly to the hard ground tens of meters below--ironic.

It feels like maybe the only decent, accomplished thing Giorno has done in a week. It feels good. It feels like--

From what he knows--maybe he is his father's son.

It's the only time that idea has even been broached to him that it fills him with a small, but warm and noticeable sense of pride.

When it's over, for a long moment after the fight, Giorno wonders if he's going to fall off the side of the building, too, just from exhaustion.

But then Number 5 calls for him, and he remembers Mista is on the other side of the wall, and Bucciarati and Narancia and Trish beyond that, and Giorno has to heal the two of them on the rooftop.

He can see the Colosseum from here. It's not so far. He can see the end in sight, if the anonymous man is to be believed. He can make it that far.

It must be past midnight now. But the night has just begun.

It's too much to keep straight. He keeps thinking it, but it keeps feeling true--he must be running on empty now. He must be. How many times can someone hit their limit before they break? Giorno feels like if there's a limit to hit, he's done more than that--he's bashed his face into it repeatedly.

The funny thing is he gets a nap during it all, if you can call forced unconsciousness a nap. It's dark and dreamless. And he wakes up in a different body, but--details.

More mass chaos, in and outside the Colosseum. Diavolo making his appearance. An almost impressively wild bout of confusion that really makes Giorno wonder if his hubris has caused God to spit on him, personally, and dragged everyone else along for the ride.

Their informant was telling the truth, after all--and then he dies.

Narancia dies, too, and he takes half of their will along with him. Giorno can't help but think how close they were to winning before it happened--if only, if only, if only, plays on repeat in his mind--and, how, it's almost kind of funny that if their bodies hadn't been switched, maybe it very well would've been Giorno impaled like that, dead before he even knew what happened to him. About how it's his fault, again, because that's what happened to Narancia.

Mista's grieved scream echoes loudly in the stone walls of the Colosseum.

Bucciarati gets a second miracle, unbelievable though it is. Maybe he just has enough faith in them all and his cause that he simply wills them into existence on a semi-regular basis. Giorno is thankful because he doesn't think he could carry all of this alone, and Bucciarati is the lynchpin holding the rest of them together at this point.

And then he dies, too. No one else knows yet. But Giorno knows.

Diavolo dies. And dies. And dies. He dies screaming. He dies silently. He dies in as many ways and levels of pain as every death they've encountered, suffered, or caused in the past week. And he deserves every one of them. He deserves more. And so that's what Gold Experience Requiem gives him. Giorno cannot find it in him to feel remorse.

He doesn't know what's happened to him. He can barely see, through the exhaustion and adrenaline and leftover tears. His voice is rough and hoarse from the amount of screaming he's done--enough in one night for a lifetime. Enough in 7 nights for a century, maybe.

Gold Experience is changed and everything is different and the end really was in sight but now he doesn't know what to do with it.

He doesn't remember much of the fight with Diavolo, and he doesn't know if that's because of the strangeness of Gold Experience Requiem's new form and powers or his own mind starting to shut down from fatigue.

They win, is all he can say in the end. They win because they aren't dead, and everyone else is. Is that victory?

Diavolo's eternally dying body seems to profess so. Bucciarati's, less so.

Mista's second period of agonized sobbing in the Colosseum when they find their capo's body is the last straw, especially when Trish joins in, and Giorno just breaks down, crying openly, finally telling them the horrible secret Bucciarati kept from them all, save for Giorno only last night. They stay there for a long while, processing what's happened, what they've won and what they've lost to obtain it.

This is what he wanted, isn't it? This grief and death and destruction and survival guilt and process of picking up the pieces in a ruined city? This is the price of his restlessness, the price of power? This is what Diavolo wanted and perpetrated and died to keep, died for the right to expand?

This is what Giorno gave up his boring, mundane school life for?

This is what Dio wanted for him?

Giorno knows it's not his own fault, really, technically. Knows these were actions put into effect long before this week, the consequences of separate domino effects of months and weeks and years of actions coming to a head. What happened tonight still probably would have happened even if he hadn't been here. Probably they wouldn't have gotten this far to begin with if not for his help.

But he can't help but wonder: was it worth it?

Turns out that Polnareff may be dead, but he's also hitchhiking a ride in a turtle to live out the rest of his undeath. Giorno questions if ghosts do this a lot, or if it's just his life specifically they keep showing up in.

At least he's useful, for the future.

The three of them left alive are exhausted, bodies trembling, faces marked by dried tears. Rome is a mess and none of them have the energy to clean it up today. They just finished saving it. It's in all of their best interests to pack it up and give their bodies and minds a chance to recover before tackling the massive problem of Passione itself tomorrow.

This time, they don't bother with a hotel, too paranoid and scared to leave themselves in the open like that after it all. Instead, they find a hiding hole for Coco Jumbo, and then climb into Mr. President together.

Half the furniture is still fucked up from the various types of destruction that have happened in this room. But with a little effort, they shuffle everything unnecessary out of the way, dragging the armchairs closer to the couch for extra foot or leg room if need be, and then they settle wearily onto the couch, with Giorno and Trish on the two ends, Mista claiming the middle section. The armchairs turn out not to be necessary, because despite the limited space and several people occupying it, despite the overlap of legs, arms, and bodies, it's okay. Preferable, actually, being able to feel each other's warmth and movements and aliveness. Trivial concepts like perceived clumsiness or personal space don't apply anymore, at least not right now.

What matters at this point is that they're alive. They dim the lights and fall asleep soon after.

Giorno doesn't expect to see anything. He knows he's going to blackout from exhaustion, and probably will in the next few days, too, though that's assuming he gets any sleep after this to begin with. He wants to see something, after all he's--they've--been through, longs desperately for something more, for some comfort, for something unreal and different and bizarre (in a good way) enough to ground him away from all of this, but he also knows he just doesn't get what he wants. Some part of him tucked away in his chest that cannot afford more heartache but also needs a distraction from his current heartache suspects that maybe he was right--maybe when he backed away from Dio, maybe when he denied the reality before him, maybe when he rejected the outright concept--maybe that was it. Maybe there was a connection and he broke it with his useless anxiety. Metaphorically or truly--does the difference between being unable to see Dio and his father being unwilling to come find him matter, really? It wouldn't be the first father that punished him for being afraid, nor the first time he was estranged from one.

Maybe he'll never see him again. He doesn't want that, he realizes, but it's not like he can do anything about it, can he?

Funny, that Gold Experience Requiem seems to take that as a challenge. Funny, that it seems like his new Stand exists only to reshape reality to what he orders or desires. He wonders what that says about him.

He just knows this: there is darkness in the room as he curls into the plush red couch, and then blackness as he falls asleep, and then a flash of golden glow, quick and familiar if he were conscious enough to be aware of it the moment it appears, and then--he shifts, and opens his eyes to moonlight.

There shouldn't be moonlight--he should be asleep in early morning to midday right now--

--but there it is, falling gently from the center of the ceiling, leaving the corners of the room to bask in shadow.

--but the familiarity is what's important, maybe. The idea.

--but it's not like his father can visit him in sunlight, is it? Maybe not even in his dreams.

He opens his eyes, and immediately notices a familiar figure sitting in front of him, cushioned in one of the originally desired but ultimately unused armchairs. It's the one closest to Giorno, between him and the coffee table, but pushed slightly away from where they'd dragged it, just enough to give breathing room between the two areas, as if organizing the floorspace of a normal but slightly cramped living room.

Dio is there, head leaning against a stray hand. He's in the toned down version of his usual outfit, sleeveless turtleneck in place, no headband, simple black leggings. The angle and placement makes him look strange, ambiguous, unreal--half of him is in shadow, banished from silvery gleaming, dark and uncertain. That half looks distorted, faded, monstrous. Not even his eye shines out from the darkness, heavy as it is, too heavy to be realistic, surely the creation of a nightmare.

The other half is perfectly captured in the falling luminescence, clean lines of hard bone beneath unmarred skin, and he can see Dio's expression in it--not cold, but not warm either. His mouth is pinched, his gaze steady. His visible eye is yellow as always and as equally, unnervingly bright. It is staring directly at him, as if having been waiting for him and him alone.

Giorno recalls the first night he saw him--met him--when he was perched in Giorno's desk chair much like this, strange and ominous but familiar, making Giorno feel uncertain and pinned in place.

None of that has changed in two years, it seems. He is still strange and ominous, and even more familiar now--and Giorno feels even more uncertain of where they stand now, because he didn't have to worry about reality in their first meeting, about things like grudges or promises or continuity or emotional upheaval.

Dio doesn't move, and despite it all, despite what Giorno said before, Giorno has come to know Dio enough to know his body language is that of restraint, holding back some strong emotion he doesn't want to reveal.

The difference this time is that Giorno makes the first move, sitting up slowly--and offhandedly notices that in the dream, Mista and Trish are nowhere to be found. He swallows but returns his eyes to Dio.

Dio takes that as a cue, the hand propping his head falling easily, clawed black nails clenching slightly in the red fabric of the chair's arm. His eye still follows Giorno, his body language still tense.

Giorno inhales, exhales, once, twice. He says the best thing he can think of: "Hi."

Dio is quiet. Then, tightly controlled, "Hello."

Giorno's chest clenches at the sound of the voice, familiar and deep and--yes, he does know him. He does, he must, because he can hear in it what Dio is trying to hide, even though he knows by now that Dio has the best poker face he's ever seen.

Giorno's eyes water, and he's already cried an ocean in his waking hours, at least compared to what he usually does, but he can't help it. He's cried much more often in his dreams, but this time, he feels it coming first and lets it happen by choice.

Dio's facade cracks at the sight. "Giorno--" he says, an echo of his last words to his son, and equally upset. His voice fractures in worry, clear and true, body tensing further in some denied desire to move forward, and then Giorno is doing it for them both.

He finds himself in his father's arms next, face buried in his shoulder, arms tight around his neck.

"You're here," is all Giorno can say, voice distressingly close to sobs. "You're back."

Dio's arms tighten around Giorno without hesitation, strong and suffocating in the best way, making him feel loved, making him feel missed, wanted, worried over.

"Of course, darling," Dio whispers into his hair, voice rough with concern and something that sounded maybe as close to tears as someone like Dio ever got. "I wouldn't leave you. Not unless you asked me to."

Giorno wants to say, I thought I did. He wants to say, I thought you might.

Instead, he gasps, wet and pathetic, "You weren't here." He didn't even realize how badly he missed Dio until he was saying it, didn't realize how much his steady presence calmed him until it was back, didn't know how much he was barely holding it together until he was allowed to not.

Dio pulls him back gently, and it's an awkward position, one of Giorno's knees lodged in the cushion beside Dio's, his elbow bumping into the chair arm to stay still, but he doesn't want to pull away totally and be alone again, and it doesn't seem like Dio wants that, either.

His father touches his face, fretfully stroking pieces of limp curls from Giorno's still loose hair out of the way, tucking them behind his ears. "I couldn't get through. I thought perhaps you didn't want to let me in anymore."

Giorno shakes his head rapidly at the thought--he would've taken Dio's presence and the reprieve he offered at any point, he thinks now, if only he could've. "I couldn't--" he chokes, trying to explain the lack of sleep and rest and the--everything.

"Breathe, precious," is what Dio tells him, and Giorno realizes he's hyperventilating a little. He does his best, breathing heavily in and out through his mouth, trying to fix it. "There you go."

"I wasn't sleeping a lot," he finally manages. "I couldn't dream."

"It's alright," Dio assures, and then he's pulled back to the man's chest, and Giorno happily collapses into the embrace and tucks his face into the comforting darkness. "I've got you now. What happened, angel?" His arms are still tight and secure but Giorno hears the tremble underneath it, hears what goes unsaid: that Dio had no idea what was going to happen, and with the cut contact, up until now barely even knew he was alive.

"You were right," Giorno says. "About something coming. A man." Several, he thinks. "A l--a lot has happened," he expels shakily.

"We have plenty of time," Dio murmurs, one hand on the back of his head and the other rubbing his back slowly, maybe for the benefit of calming himself as much as Giorno. "All that matters to me is you're okay."

Giorno hiccups, and then asks, "Were you worried?"

He knows it already. He knows it as much as anything else he knows. But he wants to hear it. He wants Dio to say it.

Dio doesn't disappoint, and his shoulders stiffen again in intense emotion. "Of course," he responds fiercely, passionately, as if proving something that need be proven. Nearly a growl, but with none of the animosity. "Of course, my love. How would I not be?"

Giorno doesn't answer. Just lets himself linger, becoming more and more a limp weight in Dio's arms, trying not to think much of anything at all. He only fails when he realizes Dio has no heartbeat beneath his ear, and it's weirdly unnerving. He'd always attributed it before to dream logic, if he noticed it at all. Now he knows better.

He's still warm, though.

At some point, Dio untangles him gently, as slow and reluctant to move him as Giorno himself is to move.

Giorno ends up sitting back against the couch, this time Dio moving himself and his armchair forward with barely a blink so that he can easily hold one of Giorno's hands in his, rubbing softly at the back of it. "Tell me what's happened," he implores, eyes intent, and how can Giorno not?

Giorno wants as much as him to explain it, make sense of it, put it into the air to be solved and organized and understandable. If anyone can help him detangle it in his mind, maybe it's his father.

This time, Giorno knows the weight of his words. This time, he chooses to say most of them not regardless of that, but because of it.

He tells Dio what's happened, from the beginning, summarized. He doesn't leave in details--not right now, they're not necessary with all the time passed and ground to cover in his recitation, and honestly most of them might make him break to repeat right now--most of them immediately overshadowed by the next thing to come along.

He still cries, when he recounts the deaths, and the near deaths, and the suffering and intensity of it all. Dio listens and holds his hand while Giorno stutters through it, wiping his eyes on his already ruined jacket and stopping to breathe when he needs to. He still cries, just remembering it while picking apart important details in his mind to give to Dio, remembering how it all felt--the entire weight of the week dropping on his shoulders now that it's over.

That's why Dio is there. To help him hold it.

He can feel the equal pride and outrage from Dio when he recounts his own kills, and the men he killed without remorse. Dio tells him he should never feel regret for striking down enemies who wish to hurt him, but it's not that he really feels bad, mostly. Just wishes he hadn't had to do it in the first place. Wishes he didn't have to see the blood and consequences of it because someone else forced his hand. But maybe he shouldn't wish that, because forgetting the consequences of his own righteousness in himself, forgetting his own responsibility is exactly what made Diavolo what he was.

Giorno tells him everything he knows of Passione, of their structure, of what he and Bucciarati's team have done, what Passione did under Diavolo's rule, what changes Giorno wanted when he went into this and what he thinks is possible now that he's lived it. Giorno was optimistic, at the beginning. He wouldn't use that word any more. Maybe determined is better. He's seen the price of it all, knows it's paid in blood and pain and death and suffering. But he knows as well that that shouldn't be so.

Saying it out loud, more and more he realizes how what happened was inevitable, Diavolo reaping what he had sown, and it was simply the fact that Bucciarati and their team hadn't gone down easily that made it the struggle and bloodbath it was. It was the individual actions of men without ideals of compassion or duty or honor that set them all on this path. That's all.

That something as simple as one man's intent fueled by too much power could cause all this… it's terrifying.

Changing that isn't something he can do. Changing the hearts of greedy men, changing the nature of humanity, changing the mere fact power corrupts… he can't fix that.

But he could remove Diavolo from the issue entirely. He could do something about the power void left in his absence.

Dio doesn't really respond during his impromptu shaky musing that grows in strength to a rant and speech on the nature of morality, nor did he really expect Dio to, but what he does do is promise afterwards to be behind him for all of it, promise to give him all his knowledge and advice and lived experience for Giorno to use as he pleases, to let him claim what he wants. He promises that no matter what, he will be here for Giorno when he needs or wants him.

Giorno takes it. He wants that. He thinks, maybe, if Dio is there to ask things of and support him, he can make it through this, no matter what.

(And along with that, he looks his father in the eyes and makes Dio promise simultaneously to not try to change him, or influence him, no matter Dio's own beliefs, no matter his own ideas--or ideals--of power or force or respect. He knows by now that his father appreciates his cunning and potential for ruthlessness as much as he does the simple fact Giorno is his son.

He also knows by now that his father won't break a promise to him.)

By the end of it, he has some of his needed catharsis and comfort. With Dio's help, he has something like a plan, or maybe it's better to say he has ideas that he can discuss with Mista and Trish and Polnareff when he wakes to make into a plan.

He has his father, and maybe, he has something like a relationship with him. Not what other people have, he knows, not anything normal or easy to explain, but this is his, and true, and that's enough.

Eventually, the conversation comes back to that. Back to them. Back to last time.

"I truly didn't expect any of this so quickly," Dio murmurs absently, carding fingers through Giorno's tangled hair as Giorno leans upright bonelessly into his father, cheek turned into his shoulder, eyes closed.

He wonders if he still gets rest, with these dreams. He never noticed any lack thereof before this, never felt sleepless when he woke in the mornings, but right now, he still feels so tired. Maybe because even a dreamscape can't recreate energy he doesn't have, can't mimic something he's currently in the process of gaining.

"Giorno," Dio states, and it sounds more serious now.

Giorno doesn't tense--not because it's a dream, but because he doesn't need to. He gives the slightest of movements to show he's listening, and Dio apparently doesn't gauge the issue as enough to warrant pushing him away to talk face to face.

"I scared you before," his father says quietly, without hesitation. Dio is not a man to feel shame, but there's a subdued-ness to him that Giorno has never witnessed, never thought possible for him. "I didn't mean to. I'm sorry."

Giorno doesn't say anything for a long while, not sure what to say. In a manner it's true. Giorno was struggling to accept the concept of Dio's existence, an already uneasy truth, on top of accepting all of the secret turmoil within himself. The warning, given in sincerity but given suddenly, assumed to be something they'd be able to continue talking leisurely about before morning came--it'd short circuited him. Made it worse. Broken the final suspension of disbelief, the shock of which broke his surety and comfort and trust, even if momentarily.

In a manner it's not. It's not like Dio lied to him. He said who he was from the beginning. Is it his fault he can only contact Giorno through dreams, and his life is so unbelievable no one would suspect it was genuine? What would Giorno have him do differently, honestly?

Maybe take it slower. Maybe break it to him kinder. Maybe wait to let him accept the things Dio offered first. He doesn't know.

He just knows he accepts them now, now that he understands what's going on.

He also accepts the apology. "Thank you," he mumbles back. He turns his head slightly so his forehead is on Dio's shoulder instead of the side of his face, and speaks into the space between them. "It wasn't really you I was afraid of. I was just…" He swallows, trying to find the word. "Overwhelmed."

"I know," comes from above him. "Still. I'm sorry." A heavy pause, and Giorno wonders what expression Dio is wearing now. Whatever it is, his hand doesn't slow in where it continues, effectively brushing his hair with fingernails and then straightening the stray pieces neatly, somehow both absentminded and attentive at once. His voice is deep and shockingly vulnerable when he adds, "I regret… not comforting you better, then. I regret not growing closer on better terms, in general."

Giorno remembers their first meeting and giggles a little, accidentally. Dio pauses his movements in question, and Giorno just sniffles, bites back a smile. "Sorry," he says. "I hugged you the first time we met," he explains, wondering if that's a nonsequitur.

Dio hums with audible amusement, and seems to get what he means. "So you did. On more honest terms, maybe I should amend."

Giorno nods into his shoulder, because he can agree to that, and then he sniffs again, pulling back finally. Dio lets his hand fall naturally from Giorno's hair back to his shoulder. "Can we start again?" Giorno asks mildly.

Dio smiles with a flash of sharp teeth, because, again, thankfully, he understands. Without delay, he tilts his head and body forward in a bow. "Dio Brando, at your service," he declares, pulling Giorno's hand forward for a quick kiss to the back of it that makes Giorno snicker.

He lets go, and looks to Giorno expectantly. "And you?"

Giorno pauses before he responds, thinking about it, thinking about his answer, about where he wants them to start this time, about what he wants. And then he smiles, small but certain. "Haruno Shiobana," he says quietly, letting his mouth shape syllables and sounds he hasn't uttered in a long, long time.

Dio's face buffers in an almost funny look of confused surprise, because he so clearly thought he knew where this script would go.

Haruno's smile widens.

And then he recovers. "Haruno," he says, like he's trying out the feel of it for the first time. Dio's smile returns, fond and bright, much brighter than his earlier seriousness, but less like his usual overt, striking brilliance--more like the warmth of a dim but steady desk lamp, illuminating a single room with yellow tones, or a single, goldenred candlelight. There's real adoration in his eyes, and Haruno feels that--he does feel warmed, feel adored, feel cherished. "It's nice to meet you, Haruno," he murmurs, warm eyes the same shade as melting amber, as the cakes his mother used to make for him, as sunlight pooling into the rippling surface of a puddled reflection.

Haruno's expression feels watery, fragile, cracked open in a way he never allows in real life if he can help it, a way that has been forced out of him too many times without his acceptance or choice. It's vulnerable and raw. And here, now--he allows it--wants it.

"It's nice to meet you, too," he whispers, voice on the edge of breaking. He's cried enough for several rivers in the entirety of the past week, enough to rival his childhood, maybe. Maybe he'll cry again, now, but that's okay, because Dio is here to wipe the tears away.

The hand on his shoulder moves to cup his face in a moment of pure love, then transfers up his jaw, back to his nape, and he's pulled forward, head tipped back, lips pressed to his forehead.

Dio invents another pet name for him on the spot, just for him. "My Haruno," Dio whispers against his hair, voice indulgent and soft.

"Papá," Haruno responds in kind, exhaling it like a relief, like a lost weight, something that even in the dreams he's never called Dio--never had reason to. Never had real presence of mind to desire to gift him with. He says it like coming home.

"I love you," Dio says simply, deeply, truly. Haruno's never heard it said like that, real and raw and quiet and true. Said as if it was really meant. Said as if it was obvious. Said as if he was loved, and that was all that mattered.

"I love you, too," Haruno chokes out, leaning forward to tuck his own head under Dio's, wrapping his arms around him, clutching at him. He, too, says it in a way he's never said or meant before. He bites his lip, sniffing loudly into the dark void of shadow between them, in the dark void of shadow behind his closed eyes.

He starts to feel that pull on himself again, the one he'd nearly forgotten in the past week of absence but knows means daylight is coming, his body demanding consciousness.

He feels the smile against his skin before he hears it in Dio's voice. "I'll see you tomorrow, dearest," he says softly, and well--Haruno knows that's true, too, now.

Haruno Shiobana is two weeks from his 16th birthday when he becomes Don of Passione.

He is two weeks from his 16th birthday when he properly befriends Guido Mista and Trish Una.

He's two weeks from 16, and he meets Dio Brando properly, accepting him into his life, and his dreams of a loving father become reality.