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Fugo's grandmother was not his grandmother, she was his mother. She had loved him so much that sometimes it hurt. It was a love full of tenderness that Fugo didn't understand, because Fugo knew he was a monster; he knew it since he was conscious. His father was some perverse being who had taken her and now his bloodline, dear oh so dear Fugo, was doomed to eternal life and longing for the sun, drinking blood and watching his loved ones grow old while he could be as young or as old as he wanted. He had violent attacks when hunger dulled his senses and on more than one occasion he ended a life. But still she loved him, so much that it hurt.
One day she came home with a boy, scrawny and shaky, he would make a good brother, or so she thought. She needed someone to protect Fugo when she couldn't, when there was no way she could feed him without people getting suspicious. Fugo found it ridiculous, he could protect himself, he could hunt alone, he could do everything alone.
His younger brother never loved him, but being human he could do many things that Fugo could not, like inheriting everything from his mother and making her wealth into something greater, like passing Fugo off as his son and taking advantage of his intellect to gain status. Fugo hated it, hated being a child, hated being a teenager and hated being starved to death locked up in his mansion, the one where he had been born and raised, the one where he had killed his real grandparents, his first food after birth; sometimes he thought he heard their wailing in the walls; his mother said they had it coming because they tried to take him away from her, so he ate them and she had to stay alone for many nights and many days.
Money, jewels and gold were enough, so they were alone for several moons, and she brushed his white hair and kissed the crown of his forehead tenderly and the wicked, sinners and criminals she lured to the house never saw the sunlight again, because Fugo and his red eyes were the only thing there was when they arrived.
But at least he could see his mother, who like him was locked up in that house that had once been their refuge and now was only a place to sleep, there was no real happiness but there was no danger or reason to leave, she had food, shelter and freedom to do whatever she wanted, but still they were becoming more and more insolated, there were no more walks at night in the garden or escapes to the city to go to the theater. They were prisoners of routine, they were too tied to the rules of humans, the real, functioning ones, not a vampire and his crazy mother; as his brother used to say.
He would sneak out when he wasn't hungry so he wouldn't attack her and lay on her lap to be pampered by her, every year his hands became thinner, more shaky and more wrinkled. Fugo feared her death because then he would never see her again, he would never die and if he did it would be in millennia, and that terrified him because he might not remember her. He wanted to never have to feel that way, to never forget her, her scent and her voice, the color of her eyes or the shape of her smile. He wanted to carry her with him forever, as eternal as himself, but he knew she would not want to stay that way forever.
She had given her second son the task of caring for Fugo because she was always ready to die one day. So she looked for someone to impose her legacy on, her bloodline torn from another mother and given her surname, her children and their children's children would have to watch over Pannacotta Fugo, the vampire with eyes as red as blood and hair as white as snow and skin as pale as mist. The Fugo's eternal duty would be to take care of Pannacotta, would be to become his contact with the light, with the sun that caressed the outside.
But that promise was broken after the death of his mother, who had for so long presented herself as his grandmother, the only person who truly loved him there. His brother who played his father banished him from his home at the end of the funeral and Pannacotta could only feel free. Someday maybe he would go after him, for all the resentment and lack of love, but maybe if life was good he would forgive him. Maybe.
He walked the streets of Naples, killing every now and then, cheating and feeding on the scum. So it went until in his form of a 14 year old boy he went to a restaurant, human food appealed to him from time to time, it didn't satiate his hunger but it gave him a pleasant taste, it reminded him of his mother.
However, he had forgotten the essential of having money, so when he was unable to pay he was stopped. Looking slightly confused he thought about simply escaping, there was nothing they could do to him, he was in no danger. There was no risk, but a man offered to pay for his food and give him some company. Fugo accepted because there was no harm in it either.
His eyes were like the open sea, so deep blue they invited you to drown in them, Fugo had seen the sea once many years ago, when his mother took him to Portugal for the summer once. Fugo loved the sun but it damaged his skin, so with a big umbrella and in the afternoon when the sky was painted orange he watched the sea dancing incessantly, as eternal as Fugo was, but full of life that he didn't have.
Bruno, that was his name. He took him home, Fugo was used to guys like him, in that year that he was wandering many invited him to spend the night, few came back to see the sunrise. And those who did woke up scared and penniless. With nightmares that would last for decades. Bruno would not be the first, but Fugo discovered that he would be the last for a long, long time.
Leone Abbacchio was a vampire with sunset eyes and purple painted lips, Fugo liked purple. Leone was not friendly, but he was completely and utterly bonded to Bruno. Fugo knew, it was said that vampires fall in love so deep that it lasts their whole life or rather, their whole death.
"If you want you can stay.... Your kind are great help" Bruno said offering a bag of blood from his cooler. Fugo looked at him and then at Leone. Abbacchio let out a snort and drank from a glass of wine, it was real wine made from grapes and aged a couple of decades.
" My kind?" he asked trying not to sound too offended.
"That's right, a vampire."
Fugo took the bag and carefully opened it.
"I don't usually drink in... these things" he reproached and Bruno offered him a glass.
His job was simple to get rid of the bodies the Mafia killed, sometimes Leone wasn't enough. It was easier to drain them, and sometimes if they wanted they could also consume their flesh. Fugo didn't eat raw human flesh, it disgusted him. He could drink as much blood as necessary but not meat like that, sometimes he would carry a bag and cut pieces that he would cook later. He liked cooking because he liked science and cooking is following chemical instructions, it's easy.
One day he found a boy, he looked half dead already, starving, looking through the garbage. He was missing an eye and was completely covered with dirt. Fugo felt sorry for him, because he saw himself reflected in a very strange way, in this living dead child, without purpose and without love. Fugo wondered if he could give eternal life, if it was right to condemn another soul, if maybe killing him and putting him out of his misery would be much better.
So he took him to a hotel, they slipped away. The boy did not hesitate, Fugo did not appear as a man, he was just another boy who had offered him food and a bath.
Then he told him about his life, about his work with Bruno, but never about his mother. He offered him the choice to try, to stay there alone that night or to die. Three possible paths, three options that Fugo never had.
He took care of him for three months, taught him the basics, helped him hunt and feed, and then took him to Bruno. One more to do a more efficient job, to climb faster. That was what Leone wanted, once he consolidated a high position, as high as possible, then Bruno would become one of them. Bruno wanted to get rid of his soul to make that hole of misery a better place. But for now he needed the day, the light, that being a non-living would give him trouble.
They didn't die, they didn't melt, they didn't spontaneously combust. They just became irritable, their skin reddened and burned and their eyes were heavy and sore. The light simply despised them.
Narancia could fly, Leone and Fugo floated but Narancia could fly. His eye had been born again and he always wore a smile on his face.
Fugo hated him a little for that sometimes. One day another boy arrived, a little older and completely normal, but with incredible aim and very strange luck. Superstitious and yet willing to join a group of Vampires. Bruno had saved him from certain death in prison, at least he would be loyal. Three years had passed, Bruno was 21, Mista was 19. Narancia would be 18. Fugo and Leone had stopped counting long ago.
The old capo Polpo died of something that nobody said, but everybody theorized. He had been found in his cell, with his eyes closed and a geranium in his brain, its roots growing in the rest of his organs, his lungs crushed and his kidneys smashed to pieces.
Two days later a new boy appeared in the restaurant. He was Polpo's last recruit, he had assigned him to Bruno before he died, they were supposed to introduce them the following week, but that didn't happen and now he was there in front of them, with his skin as golden as the sunset, with his hair of sunshine and his eyes of sky, crystal and sun dew. With the expression of an angel, a beating heart and the scent of roses.
Fugo realized something, Giorno, the new boy was a vampire, and Giorno the new boy, didn't know it. Leone hated him. He hated that he was one of them and didn't look like one, that the gloom and misery wouldn't be reflected in his eyes, in his smile. He and Fugo were creatures of rot, Giorno was a poetic being. So he tortured him with nightmares and half-hearted voices. Narancia could fly, Leone could make others see his accumulated memories, even those believed lost in the ocean of the mind and Abbacchio made sure that they were always the most sinister, the most painful, the most miserable. He could not see them but he knew he could make others wallow in his nightmares.
And Giorno trembled at night like a leaf and Fugo could hear him, his heart beating so fast it should explode, but it never did, there was no hemorrhage and the next day to Abbacchio's disappointment, Giorno still looked like an angel and without any trace of his nocturnal wailing.
With Polpo's death, Bruno made a name for himself. Bruno was a capo.
Then they decided it was time, Leone took him that night after his welcome to the organization. Leone and Bruno made their blood wedding. They killed each other to be reborn as something together, a shared mass of death. Bruno could open and close little portals of nothingness. Invisible pockets in which to store other things. It was an interesting power, strange, but useful. And Narancia could fly.
Fugo wondered what Giorno could do.
They were all lethal there, including Mista who was a good shot. But what kind of supernatural power would a creature as magnificent as Giorno Giovanna, owner of the sun and the beauty of death, have?
Fugo was the most lethal of all, he didn't even have to sink his teeth into his victims to kill them. He only had to be close, 5 meters to fill their lives with pure poison that destroyed their insides. Their organs bubbled from the inside out and turned into a boiling jelly that melted in the wind after a while.
He preferred to drain them, harvest them and finally dissolve them. They had tripled their efficiency after Fugo's arrival, but Narancia... Narancia could fly.
Four years later, when Bruno was 24 and Fugo had convinced himself he was 20, he decided it was time to do something.
Mista would be converted in a few months, then they could try to take over the organization completely. Giorno had asked to remain as he was, as he thought he was. Narancia didn't know, there was no way for him to know, but Leone was sure and Fugo had already checked when the sun child turned 18. Giorno was not human.
So one night he slipped slowly into his room, shrouded in the darkness of a blackout. And waited on his fluffy bed covered in pink silk sheets. The texture was beautiful, soft and rich. He waited and waited but Giorno did not arrive, so he lay down on his bed to be more comfortable, the scent of roses approached slowly and the door opened slightly letting in the slender and beautiful body of Giorno Giovanna, it was sun ending the gloom, he carried a candle in his right hand and a glass of water in his left.
He saw Fugo lying on his bed but said nothing, he put the candle on a bureau and the glass of water on the bedside table and lay down next to him and caressed his hair and Fugo, who was lethal and hated everything, felt for a moment grateful for his existence.
"Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore” And Fugo said "Nevermore" and they both smiled complicit in the knowledge of Poe's poetry.
And Fugo wanted to kiss him, kissing the sun should be a sin, kissing and touching divinity was forbidden for hideous creatures like him, but still he took the courage to brush his fingers against Giorno's soft face.
"You are something similar to me" He said in a whisper and Giorno denied.
"I am nothing that can compare to your worth."
And Fugo felt his heart creak. And he wanted to be able to show him with his eyes how much Giorno was, how much he shone. Because he knew, Giorno had made it clear, Giorno had already taken the audacity to break Pannacotta's barriers, to shatter them and make him sigh in the process.
"You are eternal, you are part of us... you are more alive, less dead, but eternal... I don't know how you fail to see it, I don't know how you can breathe for so long without need of blood, of death... you feed on the sun and the breath that you steal from everyone who sees you, but you are like me... like Leone, like Bruno and Narancia, soon Mista will also be one of us and we will be complete... because you are too."
Giorno didn't seem to understand, his poetic face now looked like a Greek tragedy, the David crackling his marble insides. And Fugo pounced on him, and kissed the tip of his nose and looked at him as one looks at a star colliding, as one looks at a volcano erupting, as one looks at immensity and kissed him again, this time on the lips, barely a second, barely enough to make sure it passed and he walked out of his room leaving Giorno lying on the pink silk sheets that were as cold as they had always been.
When Giorno was six years old his stepfather appeared dead in the old musty apartment where they lived; it was all so poetic, so horrible at the same time, from his eyes sprouted cactuses full of thorns, there were also thorns in his lungs that were born between his ribs, tearing his clothes. Giorno's mother was in shock, but he saw it as a precious image, almost as a gift. His body seemed devoid of moisture, as if he had half-aged overnight, as if the cacti had drunk his life. Giorno remembered the parched corpse, cold and stiff, with a horrified look and a grimace of agony that he would carry forever. They didn't have enough money for more than something simple, so his mother plucked the cacti, pricking her fingers and weeping with rage before calling an old funeral home.
That woman, the mother who had previously ignored him had now begun to beat him, on her drunken nights when she came home with her makeup smeared and her chests full of love marks, with a headache and smelling of gentlemen's perfume, she would grab him by the hair from the small bed in the room that might as well be a coat closet and drag him to her bedroom where she would slap him before ordering him to undress her so she could finally go to bed.
Giorno would carefully unzip her dress and braid her hair, take off her shoes and leave her alone, occasionally hearing her sobbing. The next day Giorno would take a few bills from the purse that was almost always lying in the hallway and go off to wherever he was going, school, the park or for a walk along the coast. When he returned in the afternoon she was gone and he could sleep only to be awakened hours later, sometimes if he was lucky he was ready to help her when she returned, but most of the time hunger prevented him from having enough energy to stay alert.
When Giorno turned eight years old his mother also woke up dead, but in her face there was no horror, it was not fear, it was sadness, a sadness as infinite as the stars in the firmament. From her mouth were born roses as red as her lipstick, from the veins of her wrists making bracelets and from her scalp making her a crown, she was divine; as beautiful as ever although her face did not have that softness that gives youth, it looked like a woman entering old age and not in her mid 30's.
Giorno didn't know what to do so he brushed her hair, braided it carefully and then sat down next to her. He waited and waited until the body began to fill with flies and maggots. Until the neighbors noticed and took him out of the house, by which time the flowers had already withered; the police took his mother away cortonated in her last position, with that infinite sadness now contained in a black bag.
Motherless and fatherless, with no one to take care of him, although even before that no one did. All alone he was sent with his few belongings to a convent; the nuns carved his skin with cold water and straw, the soap was made of roses that were made right there; when he turned 16 he would be sent to serve in the priestly order and become a father to serve God eternally. To love and adore Him without doubts and full of devotion.
But in his heart there was no faith, at least not enough; so locked in his little room while reading the lives of the saints and the Holy Bible, he fantasized about the world outside, what his mother would not let him look at, but alive in those bars and cabarets, what his father threatened him with. With the pistachio ice cream and chocolate, with his walks in the sea and all the hidden things he did at night when he was not at home.
His hands were often beaten when he rewrote the psalms badly in a notebook with yellowed pages. The blood sometimes spurted and was sent to the mother superior who was the only one who seemed to love him even a bit; but not in a way that pleased Giorno. She would tell him he was a little miracle waiting to be unveiled and the blood on his hands was like the stigmata of our Lord and Savior. Then she would lick the blood from his hands and kiss his cheeks; she would read to him for a moment and then send him to his room.
And the mother superior's skin seemed younger and her eyes more alive; and so she lived for two more years until Giorno was ten years old and then one night the mysterious illness appeared and the mother now seemed impaled by arrows, which were nothing but olive branches growing from her heart. But her face was not that of a martyr, it looked like that of someone who had attained divinity, with her hands clasped together, wrapped in a rosary, incurated and looking at the cross; with her body dry but her face gentle and rejuvenated, in her habit stained with a little blood and a smile barely visible on her swollen and red lips, she was found in the chapel, wrapped in holy oils of the same plant that had killed her.
And Giorno thought that the mother had been right then; that it had been a miracle because that very morning his black hair was now the color of the sun's rays. Perhaps the strange sickness that had attacked his parents was nothing more than the divine hand of God bringing him to him, to love him forever.
So Giorno devoted himself to his labors and the nuns treated him like an angel, and his hands were never whipped again. He spent his hours in the small library reading and writing. The miracle happened again, when at the age of twelve a traveler appeared dead in front of the convent gates, with his eyes made into tulips and with ivy growing from his stomach. With no more blood than the chlorophyll of the plants that made him their home.
The nuns did not know about Giorno's stepfather or mother, only their deaths but not their forms, not the cacti and not the roses.
There was no way that anyone but him could relate one to the other, but Giorno in his innocence as a little abandoned angel had faithfully believed that it was the work of destiny, that something greater than himself was pulling the strings of this coincidence. So he kept his lips closed and his mind on his books; but each time there was more and more doubt, each time the curiosity was stronger and more intense until he woke up in the middle of the night with the desire to flee, to get out of there and look for more, another path far away from the peace that until now had reigned within his life. He wanted to find what Saint Theresa had found.
And the miracle never happened again in the convent, because by the time Giorno turned fourteen; his room was empty and the most recent corpse was never found by anyone.
That was the power of Giorno Giovanna, the power of life, one day he simply reached the age when it was not possible to live on junk food and his body adapted otherwise. Giorno did not need to feed himself more than once every two years; he absorbed the life of everything around him, he had control over it without knowing it and when he fed his mind was not his own, his memories were hidden in the deepest recesses of his heart and he forgot about those deaths and what grew from them. And now Fugo had told him and his heart imploded in a second throwing out its contents, throwing out the memories that Abbacchio had shown him for so long and he had decided to lock away before waking up.
There they all were, his stepfather asking for mercy and his mother for forgiveness, the mother superior thanking him and the traveler repenting his sins, the lonely man who was looking for death and had found it in Giorno, both in their own escape from their present lives and Polpo as scared as only a man who knows he is going to hell would be. And when he turned eighteen there was no death, no memory of murder; only his lips on Pannacotta's neck on a full moon night, no flowers or plants, only that which St. Teresa had narrated.
It would happen again, when he would be twenty.
Giorno felt a swirl of nausea and guilt, he had killed his mother and imbibed her in flowers in doing so, he had killed his mother. The choked screams punctured every wrinkle in his brain, every neuron. But something about it felt good, something in the tears and the forgiveness she asked for, as if for once in her life she loved him, as if for those last seconds that now seemed like hours, that woman who had despised him so much could finally love him with all her heart, in her pleas and the sacrifice of feeding her little son was that she finally found Giorno's forgiveness. It felt good.
Killing felt good, and Fugo accepted that, the raw, morbid part of him. Giorno had unknowingly chosen Fugo too. Why had he forgotten all those moments? Why didn't he remember those deaths? Why didn't he remember feeding on Fugo that night and kissing him as if his very existence depended on clinging to his lips? And... Why had Fugo waited so long to say it?
Narancia was the one who had asked and begged to be the one to convert Mista, Narancia adored Mista as one adores a foreign soul that can still understand the whole labyrinth of your inner self; that was Mista for Narancia, a path that led him to self-understanding, together they could spend hours saying everything and saying nothing; just like Leone and Bruno. Was that what Fugo was looking for with Giorno? Was that what Giorno longed for with Fugo?
"Since when do you know?" asked Giorno in the morning, when the sun filled with its rays the small living room that only Giorno and Guido used, the one where light still reigned. Fugo was behind a wall, leaning against the old wallpaper.
"From the first moment I saw you" He replied, his voice carrying a tinge of guilt.
"Why did you let me drink from you?" Giorno said in a whisper and Fugo entered the room, the light streaming colorfully through the painted glass made his skin sting.
"Because it was dangerous not to... And because I wanted you to" He answered and put his hand on the back of Giorno's neck, then buried his fingers in the soft hair and pulled him close to himself, their faces mere centimeters from each other, their lips almost on the verge of touching. "Because I am Icarus flying in the sun."
Giorno wanted to kiss him again, like that time when he had Fugo to himself, when he gave him his blood and his lips almost two years ago, but he didn't, so he just buried his face in Pannacotta's neck and breathed in his scent, it was sweet and deep, black poppies, strawberries, belladonna and wet earth.
"Does everyone know?"
"Abbacchio and Bruno know."
Giorno's eyebrows drew together in a sad expression.
"That's why he hates me, Abbacchio. Because I hurt you?"
Fugo denied and wrapped Giorno's face in his hands.
"They only know of your condition but not how you feed... Abbacchio doesn't hate you, he envies you. He envies the light you have while we are submerged in the shadows forever, you radiate, you are life... And that is something we never had, neither him nor me. We were born in darkness but you have never been in it, it disappears before you."
"It was my fault, that you got sick... wasn't it?" Giorno brought his face close to Fugo's, longing for the touch, longing for all that Fugo was.
Fugo nodded, after letting Giorno drink his blood he had fallen into bed, three days in a cold sweat and night terrors, with no air and dry skin, a poor martyr who has given his life to his God. He suffered long and hard, if he were human he would have been feverish, but his dead body only showed the discomfort making him look even more like a corpse, with skin more than white, bruised and sore throat spitting petals of roses, jasmines and lilies. But Fugo had no regrets. He never would.
"I don't blame you... I could take it as many times as you needed."
"I don't want to hurt you anymore" He said kissing Fugo's neck softly. Fugo pressed him even tighter against his body, as if he was afraid that Giorno was just a dream and was going to disappear at any second.
"Not wanting to do something doesn't mean you don't have to..."
Pannacotta's skin was flushed and Giorno pulled away from his body to take him back into the darkness of the rest of that place they called home.
"Let me do something for you" Giorno said, his soft pink lips smiled and Fugo felt that life was beautiful and that he could never deny him anything, even a request like that.
They visited the old cemetery, one afternoon on April 16, where Fugo's mother had been buried for many yesterdays; Giorno made roses and ivy, poppies and hydrangeas, acasias and strawberry bushes grow there. Now that he knew what he was, he could better control his abilities, those that allowed him to take life, those that allowed him to give it.
The man in front of them would be in his late forties, brown hair and a bushy mustache. On the walls of that old mansion there were oil paintings with golden frames full of arabesques. The carpet was well cared for and the furniture polished, everything was stained with blood. Fugo had done it, he had finished off that lineage, the pair of young boys and the mistress of the house, but he had saved the best for last. The compensation Giorno was going to give him.
"More strawberries" Pannacotta said, smiling.
And from the throat of the one who was his brother and then his father, the fruits, the leaves and the little white flowers were born and they were the juiciest strawberries Fugo had ever eaten. That would be his new home, when they took Passione, he could finally live close to the sun, where he was born so long ago and where a statue of St. Teresa impaled with an arrow was devoted to God, like Fugo to Giorno.