Chapter Text
He dreams the butterfly, the butterfly dreams him,
And all three of us are just a dream of me!
—Szabó Lőrinc (translated by Dalma Hunyadi Brunauer)
After things blew over Mista went around with Giorno taking care of unfinished business the others had left behind: flats and possessions, mostly. Giorno hadn't even known where they'd lived.
They'd all been within a few paces from each other. Fugo above the cafe down the street from Mista (who naturally took himself as the reference point), Buccellati two house numbers over and across, Narancia downstairs from Buccellati. Abbacchio a three-minute walk and seven flights of stairs up. They started there, going west to east, and had to ring the caretaker each time because Buccellati didn't have the keys and no one had thought to search the others.
Abbacchio had a closet full of clothes, an Alessi coffeemaker, about a hundred alphabetized CDs (ninety-eight of which were classical and two of which were Duran Duran's Greatest Hits) and no furniture apart from the bed. The place could have been warehouse storage for all that it felt lived-in. But it smelt like Abbacchio, which was a shock. Prior to that day Mista couldn't have said Abbacchio had had a distinctive scent or worn aftershave, though logic suggested he must have. He stared at the CD rack and turned the thought over as Giorno went methodically through all the coats, checking pockets.
"What do we do with it?" he asked, after a while. Giorno shrugged but looked thoughtful.
"Keep what you want," he said. "Give away the rest – people always need things. But don't worry too much about space."
Mista couldn't tell if he'd found what he'd been looking for.
Fugo's landlord peered at them as if he were counting heads, then wanted to know if Fugo was still alive. When told he was (probably) but wouldn't be coming back (just as probably) his lips thinned as if he understood what had happened – as much as Mista did anyway; after they broke out of Venice Buccellati had said they were square with Fugo, no hard feelings, and Mista was glad of it because whatever Buccellati said had to be true – then he asked for Fugo's rent for the month, which apparently had come due on the first. Mista started to remind him of the custom the cafe had had from all five of them over the years, but when he got to the word "protection" Giorno waved him off and wrote a check.
When they went up they realised Fugo had been back, and had taken with him anything he was unwilling or thought unwise to abandon, if the discrete gaps on the bookshelves were any indication. The rest was just more stuff.
They had the keys to Buccellati's but the landlady came out when she heard them on the stairs, thinking they were Buccellati, so Giorno had to open while Mista comforted her and she sobbed spasmodically into a handkerchief. Finally he took her downstairs with her leaning heavily on his arm for purchase – her legs had been swollen for months and the poultices weren't helping, even her doctor was tired of seeing her but Buccellati had always asked how she was and never showed a bit of impatience, that child had been too good for the world and she wasn't surprised, she knew God would take him home too soon – then she cried a while longer on his shoulder. Afterward she made him a cup of chamomile tea because he looked like he needed it.
Mista thought he did. Something about her kindness and garrulous grief called his own up from where it had been, if not forgotten, then unremembered: tucked away to make room for the day-to-day of a demanding present. His chest clenched, his eyes prickled and he had to keep himself from bawling then and there. Instead he drank the tea, though he would've preferred alcohol or coffee or anything that wasn't chamomile, and imposed on her fellow feeling for plastic trash bags.
Narancia's rooms resembled the wake of a particularly grubby and pungent cyclone – as of course they were, in a manner of speaking. No one could have accused Mista of fastidiousness but even he had avoided Narancia's place. He made piles of what seemed safe to touch, and was surprised to find after an hour of labour that he'd accumulated twenty consecutive volumes of Fist of the North Star and an astonishing thirty-three of Pink Dark Boy. Mista had always meant to borrow the series but had never gotten around to it. He swept most of the other manga (that he'd read) and CDs (that he'd cheerfully never hear again) into two trash bags, lugged them downstairs and dumped them by the front gate.
There were neighborhood kids hanging around and watching; there always were. Mista waved them over.
"All yours," he said. "Today's your lucky day. Don't let me hear you fighting."
Keep what you want and give away the rest. He left them at it and went upstairs to find Giorno.
Giorno was perched on the armrest of Buccellati's favorite chair, seemingly sunk in a brown study. It didn't look like he'd touched anything. The place was as neat and comfortable as when Mista had been there last, less than a month ago, and it too smelt like Buccellati: not dirty clothes or cologne, but something more indefinite and warm. It felt like Buccellati could walk back in the door at any moment.
Mista coughed, half to get Giorno's attention and half to clear the lump in his throat.
"Boss?"
Giorno shook himself visibly out of reverie. "Oh, it's you," he said. Then he slid off the armrest and went to check Buccellati's desk drawers, as if he'd been in suspended motion and Mista's return had set him off again.
They spent the rest of the afternoon going through Buccellati's papers, which were the most important part – or so Giorno said. There was one drawer with a false bottom that wouldn't come apart until Giorno pried it up with a vine, but underneath they only found another key. It was shaped for the front door of a house, not a car or safe or coin locker. They couldn't figure out what door it opened.
That evening Mista hauled fifty-three volumes of manga back to his flat, along with all the CDs and tapes he'd lent and lost to Narancia over the years. He dropped the trash bags on the floor and stretched out on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. The window was half open, and the breeze after sunset was pleasant. He could hear the lady on the ground floor call her kid in to dinner, could smell the pasta sauce on her stove. The student in the bedsit under his was picking out the chords to "E la chiamano estate" on his guitar, badly. He was indefatigable. Mista had thought more than once of knocking on his door and roughing him up a little; nothing serious, just to put the fear of the Mafia's beauty sleep into him.
Everything was the same. Everything had changed.
Eventually he rolled over, picked out volume one of Pink Dark Boy and started to read.