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Giorno stood alone in the windy cemetery by the coast. It wasn't a far walk from Passione headquarters, and he often found himself here, lost in thought. The three graves, all in a row, were not so different from the rest, aside from the fact that the flowers which adorned them never seemed to wither. Giorno had found himself burdened lately, plagued with doubts about what this had all been for, if it had been worth it. It was times like these he found himself in the graveyard most, to confront himself, and to impel himself to keep moving forward. He couldn't allow their deaths to be in vain, thus he turned to his fallen comrades to remind him.
With such frequent visits, the graves were in good condition. Yet still, he brushed his hand over the stone, wiping away the odd bit of dirt or fallen leaf. Taking care of his friends in death since he could no longer do it any other way. In these quiet moments when the doubt pulled at him, he was reminded of words that had spoken to him in the past. They’d engraved themselves into his heart, and so he repeated them here now, as if to offer some sort of explanation.
He began with the grave of Buccellati, his co-conspirator and friend, the one who had heard his dream and said, I will share your fate.
“So be it,” Giorno murmured, although in the end Bruno had been the one to bear it all. Regardless, he’d stayed resolute in his goal, resigned happily to that fate he’d taken upon his shoulders. “Perhaps you’d say that in dying, you obeyed necessity. But necessity is a monster of the old world. ‘Necessity’ is called ‘Fatality.’ Now, the law of progress is that monsters disappear in the face of angels, and that ‘Fatality’ evaporates in the face of ‘Fraternity’.”
With finality he laid his hand upon the stone as though he could lay it upon his friend’s shoulder. Even the lifeless stone was warm in the early morning sun.
“This is a bad moment to utter the word love. Never mind, I utter it, and I glorify it.” With one last press of his hand, he moved to the grave of Narancia, who he hadn’t been able to save, whose empty body he had held in his arms. Narancia, who had almost been spared, and yet ran after them calling, her wounds are my own. “Love, you hold the future in your hands. Death, I’ve used you, but I hate you. Friends, in the future there will be no darkness, no thunderbolts, no bloody eye for an eye, blood for blood. Since there will be no more Satan, there will be no more Michael.” He could only hope that Narancia had managed now to find the comfort of the simple life he’d spoken of moments before his death. That the place he was now held no darkness either, only the endless skies of the future he should have gotten to experience.
Lastly he turned to Abbacchio’s grave, placed to the right of Bruno’s. A man who had given up on the world and yet still managed to follow his idea of peace until the end. “In the future, no one will kill anyone, the earth will shine, the human race will love. It will come.” Perhaps in death he’d been able to let go of the bitterness that plagued him. Giorno hoped the afterlife would be a return to simpler, more innocent times for him. He’d given them all that one final gift in pursuit of their goals. Perhaps it had been his goal too, in the end.
“It will come, the day when all will be peace, harmony, light, joy, and life. It will come.” He pressed the words into the stone as though they would reach the others, wherever they were now. His final words were a whisper, a plea for them and himself alike. “And it is so that it comes that you have died."
Tracing the last curved letter with his fingertip, Giorno stood up again, squinting into the newly risen sun on the horizon. The wind blew off the water, sending dapples of golden light across his face. Giorno was silent, and he remained standing there for quite some time amid the rustling of the wind, in the place his friends were buried. They may have left this world behind, but their lives and deaths had created the ripples of change that he could harness now. In his own way, he would lead Passione to build the sort of world they'd all dreamed of. Starting one city at a time.