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“ . . . Trish. How is school treating you these days?”
Giorno smoothes his brush over a snag in Trish’s hair, teasing the stray strands into another curl. Her hair is soft to the touch, clearly well taken care of. He does not think about his own hair, worn loose down his back nowadays from how little time he has in the mornings to braid his hair. He tells himself that he wears it down to look older, to be taken more seriously.
“Fine,” Trish hums, turning her silver clip over in her hands. “A little boring, if I’m being honest. Nothing beats running for your life all across the country, I guess.”
Giorno huffs a laugh. “I suppose not. Do you miss it?”
“Almost getting killed a dozen times? No,” Trish says wryly. “I do miss getting around. And being around everybody. What about you? Your life can’t be lacking in any excitement, can it?”
“It hasn’t,” Giorno agrees. “I’ve been very busy as of late. There are factions in Passione that aren’t so happy with the direction I’ve been taking the organization, and they’re growing bolder with every passing day.”
Trish sighs. “Sounds like a drag. Aren’t you the boss? Why don’t you just order them all fired or dead?”
Giorno suppresses a smile. “If I did that, I’d have no subordinates at all,” he chides lightly, knowing she’s joking. “Wouldn’t that be nice, though? Maybe that would finally allow me a day off.”
“Maybe you should take a day off anyways,” Trish says, shrugging. “Leave some of the work to your actual underlings, why don’t you?”
“That would be nice,” Giorno says again, “but too many things demand my sole attention. People, mostly. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being stiffed by meeting the underboss instead of the real thing.”
“Make Fugo grow out his hair and pretend to be you,” Trish suggests. “I’m sure they won’t know the difference between one blond boy and another.”
Giorno lets the smile escape then, watching his reflection in the silver hairbrush soften into an expression he sees very rarely in his own mirror back at the manor. “Maybe,” he offers, but he knows these things are said in jest. He sees Trish barely once a month these days, if his schedule will even allow it. He can’t leave meetings to Fugo, no matter how competent he is with dealing with the logistical nightmare of taking over Passione.
Too many people want him dead. He can’t allow anybody else to take this burden on in his stead.
“Come on. You didn’t even celebrate your birthday last year, did you? I heard from Mista, how you spent it cooped up all day in your office and didn’t even tell anybody that you’d turned sixteen until the next month.”
“That was too crucial a time to be celebrating anything,” Giorno defends. “I needed to establish myself as the new boss, not take a day off to eat cake.”
He does not mention the fact that there was also nobody to celebrate it with. Barely a week had passed at that point since they’d defeated Diavolo, and Fugo hadn’t yet returned to the organization; Giorno also doubts that Mista would have been in a very festive mood with nearly all of his former friends recently dead.
“You can eat cake in your office,” Trish says. “It’s unbelievably lame to be skipping your birthday for work. You don’t even go to school! You don’t have any tests to be studying for, or homework to turn in.”
“My ‘homework’ is to keep Passione afloat. My ‘deadlines’ are scheduled meetings with my caporegimes. But I don’t believe I’d trade one for the other, Trish. I despised my former Latin professor beyond belief.”
Trish laughs, knocking her head back into Giorno’s careful hands. “You’ve got that right, Giorno! All my teachers hate me, and I hate them right back. I’d rather have my hand cut off again than endure another hour of Mathematics.”
“Would you?” Giorno says, amused. Trish doesn’t say anything else to that, nodding her head slightly before submitting once again to Giorno’s mediocre attempts of styling her growing hair into a spiky pixie-cut.
They lapse into a comfortable silence, Trish humming a pop song Giorno’s heard a couple times on the car radio while he brushes at her hair mindlessly. It’s easy, with her. Comfortable in a way that things in his life rarely are.
She reminds him, vaguely, of a time when he too had no worries past when the next exam was, or his scores for a particularly strict class. When he was nothing more than a student with a slight propensity for questioning the authority of his professors, ordinary in every way.
The brief period of time in between his unpleasant childhood and the day he ran into Bucciarati isn’t one that he dwells on very often. When his mother sent him off to a boarding school with a careless smile and promise to write him letters, he hadn’t expected anything from her — or the man he’d so despised standing at her side.
School was school. He neither liked it nor disliked it; it was a mundane affair that he merely experienced from the sidelines, the days slipping by without a calendar to track them with. In some ways, it was the exact opposite to his life as the Don of Passione now, where he must plan out every moment of every day to cram in the duties neglected by Diavolo.
He wonders, idly, if he might miss those times of almost-leisure.
At the same time, as if reading his thoughts, Trish asks, “Do you ever want to go back to school?”
Giorno stops, then. His hand stills, the comb halfway through another lock of Trish’s hair. Trish begins to tilt her head, another question already perched on her lips when he turns her face back gently to face forward – so that she won’t see the expression on his.
“I haven’t thought about it,” Giorno says, lying. Trish doesn’t know him well enough to tell the difference.
“Well, think about it now. You said you wouldn’t trade Passione for school, sure, but what if you could do both?”
“There aren’t enough hours in a day to attend classes ‘til the afternoon and still be able to run a criminal empire,” Giorno says in response, but he knows that he’s only stalling for time. He has considered it before, but those thoughts always ended up being interrupted by another surprise visit from Fugo to drop another mountain of paperwork on his desk.
In a burst of irony, Giorno remembers: his dreaded Latin professor, always hunched over his desk with his eyeglasses hanging low on his nose while he scrutinized their homework. Giorno used to laugh privately at the comments his classmates made about the hunchback professor – now he’s starting to become that man, lower back permanently aching now with how much time he spends in his office.
It’s more pathetic than anything. Giorno Giovanna, sixteen years old, developing a perpetual squint from how much fine print he’s forced to read daily. Giorno Giovanna, Don of Passione at fifteen, never finished his schooling and went on to live a wicked life of crime until his untimely death.
Does he want to return? Does he want to stop? Does he ever wish that he could return to his tiny dorm room, lie down in his bed and dream of larger things than himself?
The answer is no. He wasn’t lying when he said wouldn’t trade what he has now for normalness. But he does miss sleeping in his own bed and not a couch. He misses being able to stare at a subpar grade on an assignment and shrug it off, failures that didn’t spell catastrophes.
He doesn’t voice any of this to Trish. Instead, he says, “Maybe if you were there,” shocking even himself with the bluntness of the statement.
Trish does turn to look at him then, eyes wide but not quite surprised. “I’m flattered, but why me?”
Giorno winces, sets the hairbrush down while he tries to reorganize himself. “I’d have no friends otherwise,” he starts, the easiest truth coming out first. “I’ve already been expelled from my old school, you see. I’d have to start completely fresh. They didn’t even allow me an early graduation on account of how many days I missed.”
When Fugo handed him the envelope with his school’s logo emblazoned next to the postage stamp, he put it on top of the already towering stack of papers demanding his attention. It wasn’t until a week later when he finally got around to reading the letter’s contents that he found out that if he had just read the thing and sent a return letter explaining himself, he could have returned to the school with a minor disciplinary mark on his record.
He tells himself now that he’s glad he put it off that long – that he took the choice out of his own hands. He didn’t like that school anyways, on account of it being one of the cheapest boarding schools in the city and his peers being mostly bone-headed fools. He’s simply curious about the idea of it. Another universe, another timeline in which he stayed in school, studied whatever he seemed to be best at, got a job and became another one of the faceless masses.
“So you’ll have to start all the way from your first year? That’ll put you three levels below me!” Trish laughs, leaning back against him. “You’ll be my cute little underclassman – I’ll make you bow your head when you pass by me in the halls.”
“How frightening,” Giorno teases back, relaxing along with her. “I would carry all your books for you, then?”
“And I’d take your serving of cake at dinner,” Trish agrees. “It’s the only thing worth eating that whole damn cafeteria, really. It’s like the cooks are bound to squeeze every bit of flavor from the rest of the food.”
“I’d like to try that,” Giorno says. “Compare it to my old school’s food, see if it’s any better.”
Trish hums. “You could, you know. Nothing’s stopping you for coming by a day or two.”
Giorno pauses. “I imagine there’s a great deal of things stopping me from becoming a student again.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that I am still sixteen. And the fact that my mother likely believes I am dead by now, or at the very least have run away from home.”
He’s thought about that, too. Much more often than he thinks about school, but still scarcely. His mother is his mother, and he knows the man he called father for the majority of his childhood won’t dare raise a hand against her ever again.
She will be alright for the rest of her life. He will be alright for the rest of his life, however long it lasts – even if he never goes to school ever again, even if the rest of his days will stretch out into endless hours of paperwork and meetings punctuated by brief flashes of explosive violence.
Giorno finds, abruptly, that he no longer wants to pursue this line of thought. He wants to go back to brushing Trish’s hair, trying strange styles on her, not thinking about anything in particular. He wants it to be easy again.
Except Trish clearly doesn’t want the same. “You don’t need your mom to go to school for a little while,” she scoffs, slipping off the bed and striding towards her closet. “You’re a gang boss. You’re the Don of Passione! Slip the principal a bit of cash and he’ll let you sit in all of my most boring classes, I promise.”
She opens her closet, revealing several tasteful outfits that Giorno remembers – some of which he picked out with her, during one of their rare days of leisure – and sorting through the hangers until she pulls out a school uniform. She walks back to the bed with purpose, holding the uniform out in front of her.
It’s a girl’s uniform, clearly. It has the plaid skirt and vest with a crumpled tie around the neck of the hanger, and it looks very similar to the uniforms that Giorno used to see every day not that long ago.
“Try it on for a change,” Trish says, shoving the uniform into his arms. “You’d look great in a skirt, you know. You’ve got nicer legs than me.”
Then, softening, her smile more sincere this time: “Come meet my friends, Giorno. It’ll be fun. Just for a couple of days.”
Giorno isn’t sure what he’s doing when he takes the uniform holds it up to the lamplight. He doesn’t know what he’s thinking when he does actually try the uniform on, watches Trish laughs and says he needs to go school for sure now, says it would be a crime not to show off those legs. He isn’t sure that he’s thinking at all when he smiles back at her, tells her yes, you’re right, why not.
After all – why not? Why can’t he go to school? Why can’t he go to a school he isn’t even enrolled in? What’s stopping him from dipping a little into Passione’s blood money to meet Trish’s friends, bribe some teachers, remember what it’s like to be ordinary?
Nothing at all, except perhaps Fugo’s disappointed stare. And he’s gotten so many of those lately, he might as well be immune. Mista would egg him on, entertained by the idea of a gang boss in a school. Nothing standing in his way except his own inhibitions, and he has no need for those anymore. He’s don. And he’s Trish’s friend, and she wants him to come visit her at school so he will.
Simple as that. Simple and easy, like how it always is when Trish is around.