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There are orchids blooming, and star hyacinth, when Sheila E stands before the boss—Giorno Giovanna—and understands that she owes him everything.
“Illuso died in the worst way imaginable,” says the boss, Giorno Giovanna, sunlight scattering golden off his face. His voice is soft, like coaxing a wild animal, and his hands are loose. “He suffered more than you can imagine. I don’t know if that will help at all, but in the thirty seconds it took him to die, he regretted every decision he’d made in life.”
His measured words are like sunlight and water. Sheila E could survive off them alone.
“Including killing your sister,” he says, and extends a hand. Touches her. “We watched it happen.”
And Sheila E gives him her life in exchange, makes herself his hands and teeth, extension of his will, and knows it’s not nearly enough.
Sheila E is a thing with teeth. She starts killing at ten years old and does not stop, teeth bloodied, iron in her mouth.
The teeth have lips attached, Voodoo Child's addition, but very little else. She speaks, and she bites, and she follows orders, more animal than girl, named for the Furies, and she hunts down the man who killed her sister and dreams of his blood on her teeth.
Scilla, Scilla, don’t fidget, says Clara in her memory, kind, tired, holding to-be-Sheila’s hair steady as she braids.
She hasn’t been human since Clara was murdered. Something fell out of her that day, whatever separates man from beast, and she hasn’t been able to get it back.
But now Illuso is dead, and Sheila E is not the one who killed him, and in Giorno Giovanna’s service she can taste blood on her teeth.
The would-be assassin whips a gun out of her purse, but Sheila is faster. She’s barreling forward, pain is ripping through her chest, she’s in range, pain is screaming through her, Voodoo Child’s lips are shouting the woman’s shameful secrets to the world-
She comes to in agony. There are two spots of pure pain on her chest and at her collar, and there are hands on her. The sharp tang of blood- by smell, she’s still in the boss’s dining room, Giorno Giovanna’s light cherry blossom perfume close by, the uneaten meal, the hyacinths, beneath that the cleaning chemicals, the lemons out the window. She wrenches her eyes open. Giorno Giovanna’s hands are on her, and push her down as she tries to sit up. She goes limp.
The woman’s corpse is beside her, she can see from the corner of her eye. Face frozen in dying shock, snakebite at the neck for certainty. Giorno Giovanna’s face is above her, pinched slightly. Healing her, that’s what he’s doing. Her mind is sluggish. Something grows inside the hole in her collarbone.
“Sheila E,” says Giorno Giovanna, looking down. He’s never had to heal her before. He shouldn’t be kneeling over her. She feels somehow ashamed. “Please do not be needlessly reckless with yourself. If I had been a moment slower, you would be dead.”
Oh. He doesn’t get it at all.
Her memory of Clara’s face is soft, blurry. She remembers words, though, phrases and lines, Scilla, don’t forget to feed the dog and Scilla, set the table and Scilla, if you don’t put shoes on you’re going to cut your feet open. Clara had loved the old myths.
Sheila E is only a little younger, now, than her sister had been when she was killed. But Clara’s murderer is dead. Clara’s murderer died in agony, and Sheila E can taste his blood on her teeth and smell it between breaths, and she never has to worry again.
And there are hyacinths in the garden.
Giorno Giovanna glances at her from his chair, expressionless, and he says, “Sheila E, please cover your ears and turn away.”
She does, unhesitating, and strives with everything she has not to comprehend what he and Guido Mista are saying behind her back. Not to think about the documents, the smell of grief, the turtle in the open-topped terrarium.
Now Sheila E isn’t stupid. Obviously she’s being lied to. The facts don’t quite add up; the pieces don’t quite fit together. It does not make sense for Giorno Giovanna to have always been the boss.
But Sheila E is immune to worry, aloof from it, kept free of it in her obedience. Curiosity cannot touch her. Giorno Giovanna is the boss, for whom she lives her life, and he was there when Illuso died the worst death imaginable. Nothing else matters. Nothing else can matter, or will matter, and when Giorno sends a snake to tell her she can relax, she asks no questions, and pretends not to notice Guido Mista’s tears.
Toto had been to-be-Sheila’s responsibility.
Clara had had enough work taking care of her Scilla, she’d explained, smiling, tired, so her Scilla would have to take care of the dog. But she’d held to-be-Sheila close when they found Toto dead, Scilla, Scilla, don’t cry, and she’d helped dig a grave for him, and she hadn’t scolded once when Sheila came home half-dead with the blood of the thugs who’d killed him on her teeth and her own blood everywhere else.
“Sheila E, come here,” says Giorno Giovanna one afternoon, and she goes to him unquestioning. There is sunlight in his hair. There is blood on her teeth. They have both killed.
She’s seen the way creatures transform under his touch, and she feels touched, transformed herself, as much a thing he’s made as the tarantula in his hair or the snake tucked into his sleeve. Helpless before him; helplessly obedient. More animal than girl.
She steps up next to him, looks out the window at his lemon tree, his hyacinths, his morning glories. Smells them. Waits for him to speak.
“You value justice, yes? And honesty,” he says. Sheila nods, uncertain. She is addressed rarely, and it unsettles her. She isn’t meant to be human. “Tell me.”
He has, of course, other bodyguards. She’d replaced Guido Mista, who’s perfectly competent at the duty between his other tasks—although Sheila is better—and, despite her better instincts, she does need to sleep sometimes. And she’s sent out on missions, sometimes.
But she’s vetted all the others herself. Of course she’d asked permission first, come to him like a dog begging at the table, unwillingness to ask anything of him defeated by her need for the blood of his enemies on her teeth.
He’d looked up from his scientific journal—the latest edition of CAESIANA, it looked like—and said “Extra precautions have never hurt. You may,” and looked back down and shaped an orchid experimentally in his hands from a pen. So she had. And he’d had disposed of the man she found guilty, trusting her word.
Nobody will touch him. She’ll break her teeth on bone first. She’ll choke to death on blood first.
She’s still thinking about it on the way back from Sicily, as the doctors wrap her limbs in casts, as she sets her alarm and throws herself on her bed sometime in the early morning. Her failure, her helplessness, being dangled by Massimo Volpe like a scruffed kitten as she snapped at him in vain. His hands on her, cutting holes in her throat, making her scream. Fugo’s face melting from his own virus before his Stand changed. Secrets in the air.
She wants to bite glass, throw herself between someone and a bullet. She wants to beg forgiveness in blood. She wants to know the truth.
What she says, eventually, when she goes to Giorno the next morning, standing in the courtyard of his house, air hazy with dew and morning greenery, is, “The narcotics team is dead.”
She’d told Fugo: I’ve sworn to live my life for Giorno. I know he’s more ‘right’ than God. And she’d said, If I was ever in a place where I had to decide to betray someone or not to betray them… I don’t think I could keep following.
And then she’d gotten afraid of herself and tried to run Massimo Volpe over at the cost of her life, and he’d picked her out of the wreckage of the car like a helpless little kitten.
Giorno stands. He’s had his hands in the dirt at the foot of his lemon tree, sensing something, maybe, and his forearms and knees are brushed with soil. He says, “Murolo told me.”
Well, that jackass surely provided an unflattering version of events. But if he’s already pried the details out of Murolo, it saves Sheila having to recount the mission. Giorno does hate to repeat himself. So Sheila says, “What’s Fugo’s condition?”
“He’ll live,” says Giorno. He looks at her, finally, gaze coming back from whatever distant place among insects and tree roots it’d been. “Your bones are broken.”
Sheila shrugs. She doesn’t mind the pain. Her other arm had got out with just some broken fingers and significant bruising, and she can hobble along well enough on the mess of her legs, so she can still fight.
But he approaches her, and she lets him. Puts his hands on her, and she lets him, unfolds her casts into vines, and she lets him, and his Stand sends a brief flash of searing agony through her as he heals her, and then her arm and fingers and ribs and legs are new again and he’s stepping back and she doesn’t want to bite through glass anymore.
He says, “Sheila E. I do not find you replaceable.”
She shouldn’t even be talking to him. Her mission is complete; she’s once more the silent bodyguard, as much a part of the scenery as his rosebushes and his ladybugs until a threat presents itself.
I don’t think I could keep following, she hears herself say, and wishes her arm was still broken. Do what you can for him, even if it isn’t ‘right.’
She doesn’t think Giorno owns anything that isn’t tailored and expensive, because there’s no other reason to come out gardening in silk and lace. He should look jarring, pasted in, but he doesn’t. His brooches gather sunlight, and there’s a butterfly on his shoulder. Maybe Sheila should feel pasted in, then, but she doesn’t either.
That’s how it is around Giorno: he brings a peace with him, and makes it impossible to worry. Do his roses and his ladybugs worry? They settle placidly on his skin, reach towards him seeking light. So Sheila doesn’t either. Animal molded by his will. Created thing.
“You believe in justice,” he says. His voice is soft, like he doesn’t want to disturb the morning stillness. “In rightness, and in moral action. These values are in direct conflict with our organization and line of work, and when that conflict emerges, you are driven to self-destructive impulses.”
I can’t do this anymore, she tells Fugo, and hates herself for it. Do what you can for him, even if it isn’t ‘right.’
And failure.
She nods once, jerky. She feels abruptly cut open. Exposed. Wants to bare her throat. Her body can’t seem to decide if it’s going to freeze solid or go limp. Giorno steps closer to her, just barely out of touching range. Within Stand range. Her arm doesn’t hurt.
“If I ever stray too far from the path you think is right, Sheila E,” he says, “I want you to kill me.”
Sheila E stares at him, not breathing.
He continues, speaking very precisely, “I want you to punch me with Voodoo Child and use its ability on me. If the impact of its ability does not kill me, or you do not find its effect on me to be justice, then you will continue your attack in whatever manner you deem necessary, until that condition is met.” He folds his fingers together. “And then Mista will shoot me in the head.”
If she tries to kill him, she’ll die. Even if his Stand wasn’t what it is, it would wrench open something inside her to even try, leave her heart spilling onto the street. The contradictions of debt and rightness and obedience would rip her apart. But she would be able to strike at him as she died.
And she thought she couldn’t owe him more than she already did.
Her body abruptly picks limpness, and she hits the ground hard, hisses in pain. Looks up at him. The air down here smells thickly of soil, dense and dewy.
“You swore me your life, did you not?” he says. His voice is still soft, and precise, but somewhat more inflected. Sheila scrambles to sit more formally, to pull her turned ankle under her and settle on her heels. To look up at him, throat open.
She nods.
He says, “Then take care with it, until the day it no longer belongs to me. You are useless to me dead.”
She could serve him with her death. Would like to. But she knows better than to say so and make him repeat himself, and she’s beginning to comprehend that he abhors self-sacrifice. His judgments are absolute; he can order death or order mercy and either will be done for him. Either, Sheila will obey. Anything, until she can’t.
She says, “I understand, Giorno.”
Her legs are cold- the soil is wet, and soaking into her skin. Her hands on her knees are warding off goosebumps. He doesn’t look like he can get cold, looking down at her like she’s something he’s made. Like he isn’t human either.
He half-smiles. “Ah,” he says, “Another thing. I would like you to call me Giogio.” It’s halfway between order and request, but Sheila finds no difference. There’s a ladybug on his wrist like a spot of blood, and his brooches gather sunlight.
She nods again. “Giogio,” she says experimentally. A nickname, a diminutive, but the syllables fit in her mouth like a title. “Yes.”
He kneels carefully, like a gardener tending a thorny vine. Like approaching a wild animal. Offers a hand, like to an animal. Or a subordinate. Cherry blossom perfume, wet soil. Sheila puts her lips to it, her forehead to his wrist.
Closes her eyes. Says, “Giogio, I want to know the truth.”
Sheila E, who is content, and who can think of nothing else to ask for, sits on the floor and rests her head against Giogio's knee.
More animal than girl, maybe- he only allows animals and his Stand to touch him. And Sheila.
“Giogio,” she says. It’s very quiet, and she doesn’t know what she’s going to say before she says it. “When I was a girl. I was called Scilla Cappezutto.”
It’s rare that Sheila doesn’t smell blood. But in Giogio’s house the fragrance of flowers overwhelms it, pouring in the open windows, hanging from the ceilings, climbing out of pots. Orchid and rose and scilla and hyacinth. He says, “I was called Shiobana Haruno.”
And doesn’t ask if she wants to be called that again. And she doesn’t ask him. And sun hits her cheek, and one of his snakes crawls over her shoulders, and Sheila E doesn’t want to ever be human again.