Work Text:
11/14/2024
originally written in 2021
THE NIGHT IS PRIVATE
It’s simple, really: It gets dark and the ganglion cells tell that to the hypothalamus which tells the pineal gland, which begins melatonin production, which makes you fall asleep.
In theory it should be easy to maintain the cycle. Just leave it to cellular biology and it works itself out.
Except when it doesn’t.
The clock is chronically out of sync and no amount of supplements or lifestyle re-engineering improves it.
There is a form of therapy to treat chronic insomnia, which Fugo has made the moral decision to not seek out. Perhaps it’s just out of stubbornness, perhaps he doesn’t want to change. Perhaps it’s because he knows that it isn’t like the Sopranos, that there's not a single shrink in the country who would willingly take his case.
Perhaps he’s just fallen in love with the night. The lonely hours he spends there, not even sad for the sleep he’s losing, not caring how much it will decrease his performance when morning comes.
He’s going to die young anyway, there’s no reason to pull his hair out over lost sleep.
And the nights are private, with no one there to see his disgrace. No one there to listen and no one there to hear.
But that’s not right.
Working for Passione means you’re never truly alone.
Fugo knows for a fact that he isn’t the only insomniac in this huge, dysfunctional, terrifyingly organized family that branches its tendrils across Naples.
The truth is; no one in this maze of a house sleeps soundly.
But it still comes as somewhat of a shock when the person who interferes with his silent sulking on one moonless night is his boss.
Giorno Giovanna doesn’t seem like a person who’d lose sleep very easily. But maybe that’s just another effect of the veil of untouchability he drapes over himself. Permanently out of reach, face stoic and manners so distinctly impersonal that it makes them unique.
And he’s beautiful. Always beautiful. Like the sun, so warm and present in every aspect of Fugo’s life, leaking his life giving light into even the darkest crevasses of it, but still a hundred million kilometers away at all times.
And Fugo knows better than to become Icarus.
How could the sun have trouble sleeping? It goes down every night without struggle.
But at last, nights are private.
It's a new moon and there’s nothing on the dark balcony to reflect from the golden curls adorning Giorno’s head. Fugo grows hyper focused on his darkness-induced humanity. Giorno’s eyes widen at the sight of an intruder in his space.
This is the first time Fugo has perched himself on this balcony, on Giorno’s side of the house, facing the Gulf of Naples. Cigarette in hand, he hopes to catch a stray sliver of wind as his hypothalamus does his body a disservice.
Giorno is quick to recover his perfect composure, and even with his hair flowing freely, even when he’s only wearing a large T-shirt, he looks like the epitome of forbearance.
“Hi,” he says, not in a whisper, as that’s not his style, but not quite aloud either. In a voice fit for the night whose privacy has just been broken.
“Hi,” Fugo utters back and then Giorno closes the distance between them in three graceful steps, snatches the half burnt cigarette from the loose grasp of Fugo’s fingers and stumps it out on the metal of the balcony railing.
Irritation prickles under the skin of his knuckles, acrid vigor pulling itself from somewhere deep within.
He swallows it down, lets his nails press red crescents into his palms as Giorno breathes, barely audible, like the dropping of ash on marble.
“Can’t sleep either?” He asks.
“No.” Fugo’s answer comes out just a tad bit too harsh and high pitched. It tugs at the scar tissue in his throat, causing his voice to hitch. He hasn’t been able to scream since Sicily.
He lets out a dry cough. Tries again, happy for the darkness that generously hides his blush.
He’s sure Giorno knows without seeing.
“...no.”
Giorno quips his head to the side, looks up into Fugo’s eyes with a solemn expression, now drowned in deep shadow.
“It’s irritating, right?”
“What?” Fugo tries not to lose himself in the slope of Giorno’s cheek, the downward twist of his eyelid.
“The lack of sleep. You know what it does to you. But you can’t do anything to fix it.”
“Yeah..uh, I keep cursing my SCN, bastards were born broken.”
“SCN?”
“The suprachiasmatic nuclei.”
Giorno hums, in thought, leads his eyes away from Fugo and towards the placid sea below them, its surface still as a mirror under the dim stars.
“Enlighten me, then. It could do to understand my body better.”
And perhaps there’s insecurity in the statement. Insecurity that Fugo chooses to ignore in favor of giving his boss an impromptu lecture on circadian rhythms and the bio-mechanics of the limbic system.
---
He doesn’t know when it becomes a rhythm of its own. This little balcony routine of his and Giorno’s.
It always follows the same pattern. Fugo can’t sleep, so he heads to Giorno’s balcony. He sits there. Waits for a while, until he hears the patter of steps against hardwood and Giorno breaks the line between balcony and hallway with the mindful grace of a heron. In tune with his body.
They talk. About things young people talk about, too humane for daylight.
They discuss the weather and their work. Giorno lets a complaint slip now and again, an irritated huff, about an especially stubborn politician, or a particularly disgusting old capo.
Fugo swears in his mind that he’d kill all of those who dare set their foot across Giorno’s path.
There’s something unbelievably odd about these moments, with the distinct taste of danger laced tightly under the mundanity of it all.
It irks something within Fugo, to educate Don Giorno Giovanna on the star formations and the interstellar distances between them and Earth.
It makes him wonder, when Giorno Giovanna gives no sign of understanding at his explanation on the theory of general relativity, in relation to black holes, something the other had brought up in one particularly long and meandering, meaningless conversation.
It reminds Fugo of his own intelligence, something he’d rather ignore. In many ways he is more intelligent than Giorno, objectively looking, perhaps, but the fact that Giorno is leading the mafia and Fugo is not, speaks volumes against IQ.
“How do you know all this?” Giorno’s voice, draped in genuine wonder, rings vibrant across the still air, crossing the space between the two.
Fugo shrugs, looks into the distance before answering silently, “I studied a lot.”
“I did as well… But I was never good at learning.”
“You don’t strike me as the type.”
“Well, you don’t either. Not particularly.”
Giorno turns where he’s sitting, faces Fugo with quirked eyebrows and a lax mouth. That’s something he does. Expresses himself mostly through his eyes. Fugo wishes he could do the same. His face has always been the billboard of his emotions, no matter how stubbornly he tried to drench himself in stoicism.
“Why did you stop studying, then?” The real question must be “why did you choose this?” but Giorno’s too polite to be straightforward. When there isn’t any obvious gain to be made by being straightforward, anyway.
It’s not a comfortable question to ask. But it’s Giorno who’s asking. And Fugo isn’t supposed to read into what Giorno says, does or asks. Because Giorno is his boss. His life. His fate. His everything. As far from human as a human can be.
He answers, more sarcastic than the thought seemed as it formed in his head, bittersweet with a side of discordant pride:
“An encyclopedia to a professor's head works well to get you expelled and disowned.”
Giorno just hums, leaving the implications untouched. And maybe, just maybe, there’s a shiver of uncertainty in his step when he rises.
His legs are smooth, skin shining white like milk under the moonlight and Fugo needs every ounce of self control in himself to turn his head away in the gap of time he’d rather use to reach forth.
“It’s unfortunate, really. You could have gone far.”
That’s true. He could have gone far. He wanted to go far, once upon a time, when he was ready to jump a whole lot of bars for the hell of it, the higher the better.
“I think it’s better this way.”
“Really?”
“...Yes. Hasn’t been all dancing on roses, but… I’m happier this way. I think.” Because I get to sit here with you.
Giorno is silent for a long time, his posture rigid as he stares out to the distant islands and lone sail boats on the Tyrrhenian. When he finally adds to his earlier sentiment, it’s in a voice filled with determination, with confidence and with something Fugo can’t name. Something like a shiver behind his words, or a tinge of sadness at their side:
“It was the right decision, then.”
Maybe Giorno read it between the lines, all the rot Fugo’s past holds like a bloated whale’s corpse, ready to explode at a jostle too hard.
Maybe he just truly thinks Fugo made the right decision, back then, when everything was simpler and Bruno Buccellati still lived and had his wings open for anyone in need of shelter from the rain. When Giorno hadn't stepped into their fate yet.
---
“It hurts more when the moon is full, somehow.”
“Mmm...It’s the opposite to me. Easy to blend in with everyone claiming the moon keeps them up.”
Giorno has misunderstood his words.
“No, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just...well,” he swallows audibly, his temples sticky with sweat and his pulse like a drum in his ear, “when I betrayed you it was a new moon, the sun just barely coming up and then when you sent me to Taormina, it was full again.”
“You still call that a betrayal?” Giorno’s voice is light, but it lacks humor.
“It was.”
“It was a choice. A smart one. You remind me of my past self in that, Fugo.”
Fugo fears asking whatever that means so he doesn’t. He leaves a gap in the conversation and straightens into a sitting position from where he’s been laying, staring at the pale face of the moon. He looks at Giorno’s pale face instead, free of blemishes as it seems in the silvery darkness. He knows they are there, when not covered by makeup, faint scars on Giorno’s cheeks, shallow craters leftover from the puberty that has barely just ended and that one circular varicella scar, from some even more ancient time in his boss’s life. The life Fugo knows nothing of.
Sometimes Fugo pictures a small Giorno, five or six years old, with bone thin arms and fine blond hair like a cloud around his head, pulling in a shuddering breath through a feverish haze, with blisters covering his skin.
He wonders whether or not Giorno had someone to take care of him then. Fugo did. But he still felt alone. He remembers it still, the swaying letters on the page of the book his mother gave him: Varicella-zoster virus (VZV) is one of the nine herpes viruses affecting humans. It causes Varicella, also known as chickenpox, an airborne disease most often found in small children and teens…
It gave him insight on the disease, that book. But it also gave him a fear of pneumonia, inflammation of the brain and bacterial infection.
He hopes Giorno doesn’t know the feeling. Giorno only deserves to remember a parent, bringing him paracetamol and calamine lotion. Fugo remembers those too, but the memories of the book are clearer.
He tears his eyes away from the scar he can’t see and sighs. Giorno shifts a little, adjusts his position where he’s laying on the marble tiles of the balcony.
It’s the moon now that keeps them awake, although there’s no scientific proof of lunar gravity affecting sleep.
“But you were right. It’s nice to blend in. Mista says he gets it too, not being able to sleep when the moon is full..but he tells me it’s because he’s at least one third werewolf.”
Giorno chuckles. A sound so rare its rasp feels foreign in Fugo’s ears.
“That sounds like Mista, although if you really think about it, it's not that unbelievable.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m half vampire myself.”
Fugo would pass it off as a strange joke, if he didn’t spend enough time with Giorno to know from the shape of his eyes if he was joking or not.
“I’m sorry?”
“Yeah. It was quite the shock when I found out.”
Fugo barely breaths while Giorno tells him about doctor Kujo Jotaro, a certain crusade and the extermination of a man, or rather a beast, known as DIO.
“They never got to know how my mother survived to see the morning after. But she did anyway and for some reason she didn’t abort, since I’m here now.”
And Fugo can’t say anything, nor can he pinpoint exactly why the word “abort” is the one that sticks with him from all the absurdity Giorno just spewed.
He remembers the way his own mother used to look at him, with eyes cold as mountain snow and words harsh as hail storms.
He tries to reach Giorno’s eyes and shivers when he succeeds. This is what a real half-human looks like?
Before Giorno goes, he says: “But vampirism isn’t hereditary and I only burn in the sun because my skin isn't built for this climate. No need to worry.”
---
Giorno might be part vampire, but he radiates warmth and gives life like the sun, flowers bloom when he walks past and truly, he is more Persephone than Dracula.
But none of Giorno’s daytime beauty can cover the way his mouth twists into a snarl in Fugo’s nightmares, the way his teeth grow into fangs and break the skin of his neck with ease, the way he whispers words made out of Fugo’s insecurity straight into his bloodstream as he bleeds out under his perfect weight and sees blond hair dip in a pool of blood so vividly red it feels more real than a dream.
“It’s all your fault”, he says and his veins carry the words into his heart with ever slowing determination and he feels them like needle pricks down his left arm as they pump trough his artinums and into his valves, trough his vena cava and back into the bloodstream until they reach his neck and flow right out of his torn arteries.
He puts his aching hands around the dream-Giorno, still sticking to his neck like a leech with his needle sharp nails lodged into Fugos back, and with eyes incapable of crying holds on to tender skin, so real and violent in his dream that it almost hurts more to realize he has never hugged Giorno outside of his recurring nightmares.
He wakes up with his body locked in place, the phantom pain still pulsing through his arms, making his heartbeat so irregular he begins to wonder whether this time it’s not just a dream induced panic attack, but his heart finally giving out.
Dream-Giorno stands at the foot of his bed, with blood on his chin, eyes shining red and there’s nothing he can do as the other approaches him, until he’s gone and Fugo’s breathing frees itself from the headlock of his muscles and the tears he was unable to release in the dream come streaming down his cheeks.
He’s never seen Giorno cry and as he rests his aching skull atop his knees, he wishes for strength of mind like that.
Maybe it’s bad.
The night is silent anyway, and Giorno’s step is even lighter as he enters their balcony.
Note it: Their balcony.
“Are you ok?”
Giorno asks it, like any regular person would, with no insight into Fugo’s mind, as clueless as any.
It irritates him. And then it makes him sad.
He shakes his head slowly, under the pressure of realization. Giorno doesn’t know him deeper than the surface either, doesn’t know what he’s thinking, can’t see past the walls of his flesh.
The realization that Giorno is like him.
And like him, he sits down next to Fugo, their thighs an inch from touching, their knees mirroring each other’s positions, against their chests, under their chins.
Giorno is smaller than him. He wasn’t always, but Fugo outgrew him at the very last centimeters of his growth spurt.
It’s more noticeable this way, when Giorno has tried to make himself equal with Fugo.
“Was it a dream?”
His voice is soft and Fugo’s own rasps at the edges of his scars when he answers. “Yeah.”
“What kind?”
It’s a stupid question. But what else would he have asked in the situation? A situation where the roles were flipped and he was the one who found a teary eyed, trembling Giorno at the balcony?
No matter.
“A bad one.”
His voice drips venom. He hates himself for it.
But Giorno doesn’t as much as flinch at his tone. Fugo can hear raised brows and narrowed eyes in his voice as he asks; “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“No.” Sternly.
Then, less certain; “You were in it.”
Giorno hums.
“What did I do?”
“You sucked my blood and told me it’s all my fault.”
And there’s absolutely no one in this world he would have told this to so effortlessly, except the very source of his fear.
He expects Giorno to say something smart, something inspirational, something so key it could open and fix everything in an instant, because Giorno should be all knowing and all powerful.
Instead he sighs deep and heavy and tells him in a voice that is no different from any sad and confused nineteen-year-old, “I know the feeling.”
Fugo wants to ask him what kind of night terrors he has. Probably something lovecraftian, fit for the nightmares of a god.
When he speaks, his words are different from his thoughts and they tirade out from between his lips at the force of water escaping a broken aquarium.
“I blame myself for it… and I feel like you all blame me for it too. And the worst is I can’t blame you for blaming me.”
Giorno stiffens at his side, turns to face him. His aura speaks of confusion, but Fugo refuses to prove his hunch by looking him in the eye.
“I blamed you for everything in your dream?”
“Yeah.”
He’s silent for a while.
“Do you trust me?”
And Fugo’s bubble bursts because he does, and that’s so conflicting and it makes no sense, because Giorno Giovanna is the being he trusts the most in this world, the one he’d offer his soul to any second, yet he is also the person whose opinion he fears the most, who’s statements about Fugo weigh more on his scales than anyone else’s.
And Giorno never cries, but Fugo does, and he does so in ugly, confused gasps that tuck at his throat and make it prickle like an allergic reaction.
It never occurs to him that Giorno is probably just as clueless as to what to do in a situation like this, but it doesn’t matter anyhow, as the other surges forth and engulfs him in his arms, and his head is where Fugo’s neck meets his shoulder, and he doesn’t bite down.
Fugo isn’t sure if this is what he needed, but it becomes indifferent to him by the time the smell of Giorno’s shampoo and the steady beat of his heart against Fugo’s chest has lulled him into a state of contradictory silence.
---
It’s uncanny, when the roles do get flipped. Everything about the image of Giorno Giovanna with his knees against his chest and his gaze a thousand miles away is at war with the statue of perfection he’s built Giorno to be.
The statue doesn’t stand the test of time, nor does Giorno want to talk about his nightmares.
He doesn’t cry. As Fugo bears witness to the locked expression in Giorno’s eyes, the suffocating buttoned-up air weighing down on them with the force of a hydraulic press, he re-evaluates his jealousy of being able to not cry. Not being able to cry, more like.
Fugo doesn’t know what to do. It’s Giorno who asks him to speak, tells him with silent, pulled back whispers how to solace him.
”Talk to me. Fugo.”
“What do you want me to talk about?”
“Anything.”
Frantically, Fugo starts a meandering lecture that begins from somewhere between REM and NREM and ends in Pythagorean mathematics.
“...One hell of a crazy man, Pythagoras, I mean. Basically a cult leader. Like, he thought of himself as a literal god among men. He also believed that eating an animal was pretty much the same thing as eating your dead grandma, so all the people in his commune ended up being vegan mathematicians.”
Giorno snickers, silent, barely a sound, but at least less choked than before.
“I would have never guessed, when learning his theorem.”
Fugo’s heart does a jump before sinking back down, in alleviation or in loathing, he’s not sure.
In the end he can give it to himself that his rambling helped Giorno.
The two of them are opposites, but Heraclitus said two thousand years ago that opposites are the same.
Giorno probably doesn’t know it when he straightens his back, when he delicately places his hand into Fugo’s and sighs a heavy breath, laced with something Fugo hopes is relief.
But then again, if monistic dualism is anything to be believed, relief and oppression are one and the same, unified to a whole. Who is Fugo to draw dividing lines in a reality that consists of only one continuous plain?
He asks Giorno whether he believes in opposites.
“What question is that? I see them everywhere I go, night and day, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty...”
Fugo thinks he hears a smile in Giorno’s voice, then makes himself believe he heard wrong just for good measure.
“Heraclitus said opposites don’t exist.”
”So, you don’t believe in them, then?”
Giorno looks at him. His eyes are dry. They shine dark green with curiosity under the low light of a quarter moon. Fugo feels his throat constricting around his words, like his larynx is trying to tear itself apart.
“...Heraclitus said that opposites are just two sides of the same thing, because they complete each other. That there’s no up without a down or the other way around. But I always thought that he was wrong because… because you were as much an opposite to me as can be. But now I feel like I’m seeing more of myself in you everyday and it- it’s..”
He loses the words, feels Giorno’s fingers tighten just minimally around his own and for a second his head is filled with nothing but burning white fingertips and silver dermal ridges, then he catches the tail end of his thoughts and forces them into conceivable words.
“It feels like my worldview is falling apart and I can’t rationalize it into something else.”
Giorno lets him breathe, listens with fingertips steady against Fugo’s pulse.
“You were supposed to be out of reach, but now you’re here holding my hand and telling me my self deprecating thoughts in my fucking nightmares. And when you have nightmares I don’t know what to do, because we're not the same at all.”
And Giorno tells him it doesn’t matter.
“If you go by that logic, doesn’t it mean we wouldn’t exist without each other? If I’m your opposite then me knowing you ensures the existence of both?”
The thought is half baked, but he hears understanding behind it. He feels understanding in the way Giorno presses his fingertips against Fugo's pulse.
Because Giorno Giovanna will always be the sun to his earth and the carbon dioxide to his plants, but the sun has little value when it gives life to nothing and carbon dioxide is toxic at best when there’s no plants to make use of it.
“Are you telling me that we complete each other?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
Fugo wonders if it means something more.
Probably not.
And in the end, it doesn’t matter.
They can sit here all night, blaming their issues on neurobiology, talking pre-socratic philosophy and vampirism. It will change nothing of their experiences or their screwed up circadian rhythms, but at least they are alive and completing each other and at least Giorno’s hand is warm and tangible in Fugo’s.
It would be nice to be that missing half that makes them equal.