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Here are the three components of Giorno Giovanna: a little girl, consumed and forgotten, named Shiobana Haruno; a spirit, sunlight, sunlit, named Gold Experience; and a boy, named Giorno Giovanna.
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Day. She likes that. Gold flashing at the corner of her eye like the noontime sun, that makes the flowers grow. Day, day, good day, buongiorno.
That will be her name, springtime day, and every day will be good.
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Here are three things most plants need to grow:
A plant will twist and contort itself to get at the sun, stems twining, branches turning, trunks arcing, petals unfurling. Their structure and direction changes; their shape morphing and distorting, reaching, never grasping. There is a glint of gold at the corner of her eye. There are cherry blossom petals in his throat. Scarabus sacer.
Some plants need support, need anchors. His spine, then, a trellis, phorophyte; his hands the touch of a pollinator; his blood water and his skin topsoil. Vines grow up him, mosses, lichens, flowers, under his skin and over, up the column of his throat. Substrate.
There is water in his veins.
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Haruno is alone. She doesn’t cry. Her body is burning and freezing and burning and freezing, and she shakes, and she doesn’t cry.
And there’s something growing in her, around her spine, like an insect laid its eggs under her skin, and it hurts. And it’s golden, and it hurts.
And she doesn’t cry.
Giorno spends the night with Buccellati’s corpse. He’s hauled it into the turtle himself, because Mista was wracked by spasms of shivering and then sobbing when they were done moving Narancia, and Giorno hasn’t wanted to trouble him further. Mista is sleeping fitfully on one of the chairs now, curled in on himself, the Pistols flickering into visibility intermittently. Polnareff isn’t visible; he’s using the turtle’s eyes, keeping watch.
Giorno should be thinking about funerals. He should be thinking about the logistics of moving them back to Naples, about public appearances, about solidifying his power. Instead he’s sitting on the floor beside Buccellati’s corpse, arms drawn around himself, shaking. His eyes are dry. He keeps forgetting to blink. Gold Experience Requiem leans against him, face nestled in his neck, growing around him like a vine.
Buccellati’s corpse is cold. Colder than it’d been when he was hovering between life and death, colder than Ghiaccio’s ice. Flesh, kept cool for the vultures to eat, for the roots to break open, for the flies to lay their eggs. For the open mouth of the grave.
Giorno should be thinking about funerals. He should be thinking about the organization. Memorizing names, mapping out finances, learning the invisible sub-hierarchies and entrenched dynamics, drafting orders, sorting the men into those he will make bend to his new Passione and those who will have to die. Surveying the edges of what he can stomach. But his mind’s gone blank. He can’t control his hands. A vine encircles his throat.
“Buccellati,” he says. It comes out plaintive, pathetic. Useless, useless. “It wasn’t supposed to be so sudden.”
Haruno’s mother lets her near the scissors.
They fascinate her. The sshick sound they make when you open and close them, the sharpness of the blades, the forbiddenness of them. She chops at her hair, watches it float to the ground, dispersing like seeds; she tests them on her skin and watches blood well up, red, like a jewel or a ladybug’s back, until there’s too much of it to well and it starts dripping onto her scattered hair.
Her mother screams when she comes back; “Haruno! What are you doing?” when she spots the mess of red and black on the kitchen floor, Haruno standing above it with the scissors; snatches the scissors away and throws them in the sink.
There are cuts on her fingers and her palm, curious lengths of split skin, and that’s how Haruno learns about pain. And learns she can inflict it, and endure it, and that for some reason her cuts don’t really scar.
And learns how to hide.
Giorno spends an hour in front of the mirror every morning, sometimes two; Giorno, when he can find the time, goes shopping with Mista, Sheila E trailing behind like a ghost until coaxed forward.
“I enjoy it,” he says when asked, and lets others draw their own conclusions from that statement, from his tailored suit and perfect face and sculpted hair. Better to be perfect, and derided, and dreaded, and still, somehow, underestimated. There is no weakness in him than he cannot use; there is no weakness in him that he cannot conquer.
There is a cherry blossom tree on his desk, trained as a bonsai, every curve engineered for beauty and structural stability, and he looks at it in the morning and the afternoon as it blooms:
Giorno sculpts himself, creates himself. He is the gardener, and he is, in this most minute way, God: his flesh his own to shape, his shape his own to alter, his pain his own to wield. Eyeballs bloom like flowers at his touch; veins like creeper vines spiral up the length of his spine; life begets itself from lifelessness.
Life eternal, life unending, life that withers and revives, killed, coppiced, reaching upwards, flies humming around a corpse.
Theseus’s Paradox is a classic thought experiment, the novice philosopher’s staple. Is a ship, components replaced until none of the original material remains, still the same ship? Did it die? When? Why? What do you call the ship, if not what its name already is?
There are thin pale scars crisscrossing Giorno’s body, little near-invisible seams where he’s made repairs. More under his skin. Cells eventually die and replace themselves; Giorno, lifegiver, simply expedites the process.
Does a lemon tree grafted to an orange tree’s trunk retain its original identity? Do the roots care about the nature of the branches? What of the imago eclosed?
Giorno doesn’t think about it much.
There is a beetle in Haruno’s bed, and her mother isn’t home. She sits with her feet drawn up in front of her, watching it, not moving. It wanders towards her. Its back is a shiny bronze color, a little green at the edges like it’s rusting, like the bracelet her mother’s friend tossed to Haruno once that turned Haruno’s wrist all green. Its head is a shiny black. It’s very small.
It’s not scary, she thinks. Her mother always shouts and hits bugs but Haruno doesn’t. It crawls up her leg and onto her hand. It tickles a little. She stares at it. She makes sure it keeps walking on her skin, little taps like taptaptap. Maybe it wants to be friends too. Maybe it wants to hold hands.
And then her mother slams the front door coming in and it startles and flies out the window.
“I don’t know you,” says Giorno. Gold Experience Requiem is standing in front of him, hands cupping his cheeks. It looks at him solemnly.
It doesn’t deny the assertion. It says, “I am an extension of you.”
Its hands are cold. Its eyes, like any insect’s eyes, do not blink. Giorno says, “I will never know you. You are outside my control.”
“You created me with a wish,” says Gold Experience Requiem. “Reshaped me with a wish. I am a reflection of your truth.”
None of these are answers. Gold Experience Requiem does not provide answers, only endless iterations of concept. Beneath its exoskeleton there is a radiance. Giorno says, “And my dream?”
“I am a reflection,” says Gold Experience Requiem. “I am an extension of you.”
Giorno shuts his eyes and leans his forehead against its crest. Its hands hold him steady. He says, “Then why?”
Giorno has lived in Italy for exactly long enough to stop believing in fairy tales when his mother dumps a shopping bag out onto her bed. It’s mostly clothes for her, but she waves a bit of fabric at him, because he’s standing right there anyway, watching. It unfurls.
“But mama,” he says, looking at it, Italian still foreign-accented no matter how hard he tries but less accented than hers, “dresses are for girls, so you shouldn’t buy me any.”
She looks back at him, but her eyes are distant and he knows she’s not seeing him at all. “So you are,” she says, and holds up the little lilac thing in confusion, tosses it over the back of a chair. “I wonder what I was thinking. Oh well.”
He wraps his arms around himself, and doesn’t cry.
“Did you know,” says Kujo Jotaro, “that the geography cone is sometimes called the cigarette snail. This is because its victim supposedly only has time for a smoke before he dies.”
From anyone else, that would be a threat, but Kujo Jotaro is always very clear when he is threatening. The venom effectivity of a sea creature is what passes as a greeting for him.
“Of course, this is inaccurate,” continues Kujo Jotaro. It’s maybe the most words Giorno has ever heard him speak at once. “It takes several hours for the geography cone’s sting to kill a human.”
So Giorno answers: “Conus geographus. Very beautiful.”
They’re speaking Japanese. Giorno’s English is passable by necessity but awkward and slow, and Kujo Jotaro has no Italian.
A memory: Haruno, Giorno, precocious reader, struggling with a primary school textbook he can’t lift, struggling with tenses and conjugations, with structure and the shape of his tongue. Not that it had mattered.
“Painful,” notes Kujo Jotaro. Giorno hums in agreement. Many things are. The natural world is full of wonders.
The phone line is static for a moment. Their conversations are mostly silent, when they have them at all. It occurs to Giorno to wonder why Kujo Jotaro called; the belladonna in the corner of the room is flowering; he should prune his rosebushes tomorrow. Silences and terse exchanges, and yet somehow Giorno feels closer to Kujo Jotaro than to almost anyone in the world.
Then Kujo Jotaro adds: “My mother said to invite you to New Year’s,” and Giorno’s throat closes up.
Another memory: Giorno, speaking for the first time to Kujo Jotaro, dredging his mother tongue out of the depths of his memory to speak to a relative he’d never known he had. Who had killed his father.
“Japanese New Year’s,” Kujo Jotaro clarifies, then adds, shortly, “in Morioh. The Higashikatas are hosting.”
“I will,” says Giorno, aching suddenly like a flower for the sun, tongue thick in his mouth, “make arrangements.”
“Good starfish there,” says Kujo Jotaro, and hangs up.
Giorno is in his dorm room, etymology textbooks and encyclopedias of life and treatises on Italian flora from the university section of the library spread out on his desk, bookmarked and left open. If he’d bothered to check them out, they would be overdue. A ladybug crawls across the pages.
He’s been studying.
The glint of gold at the corner of his eye has been resolving, more and more, into a sort of ghost, a sort of spirit. He remembers about gods, faintly, from before he was Giorno. That isn’t quite right to describe the thing he sees, but it’s similar. Aggressive mimicry. The ground beetle Chlaenius circumscriptus uses aggressive mimicry to predate upon frogs and other amphibians, reversing the standard predator-prey relationship.
He makes one, gold coalescing, transforming, elytra catching light. With the right adaptations, even a beetle can disable and take down a frog, luring it in and striking precisely. With the right adaptations anything is possible. Anything can be devoured. There are reports of the giant water bug killing and eating snakes. Giorno’s flesh is his own to shape.
Belts into vines, buttons into flies, textbooks into vipers, blankets into mosses. The mundane transformed. Life from lifelessness: life, lush, filling the air until he can breathe.
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Here is the life cycle of Coccinella septempunctata, the common ladybug: first, an egg, then, a larva, devouring everything in sight, then, a pupa, motionless, waiting, then, the imago.
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Giorno kneels in the courtyard of the house he inhabits, palms pressed to the ground, and stirs things to life.
Sumac; morning glory; star hyacinth; rosebushes; a lemon tree, sweet and heavy with fruit as Narancia requested, an orange tree blossoming; dandelions to carpet the earth; orchid. A fig tree, hautbois strawberry flowering at its feet. Marigold. Arranged, sculpted, pollinators buzzing.
The air is thick with life. It’s a warm April night, five days since Diavolo didn’t die and five days since Diavolo stopped living, and Giorno hasn’t slept since. Gold Experience Requiem gives him life, gives him focus. He has too much to do.
But he can spare a moment for the garden. Has to, or else he’ll suffocate.
A ladybug hums by. He coaxes the orange blossoms a little wider. Just a few more minutes surrounded by life. Mista is asleep. He has no appointments until dawn. Just a few more.
Just a few.
“These are beautiful,” says Trish, looking up. Neither of them are expecting to see each other past midnight, both oddly alone, wandering the backstreets of Naples unsupervised. “Wisteria, right?”
A distant memory, preserved in amber for its rarity: Haruno’s mother takes her walking under a vast canopy of Japanese wisteria, and Haruno stares up at the purple-pink flowers, reaches upward with arms too short to grasp.
“Wisteria floribunda,” confirms Giorno. Trish is out because she’s given her manager the slip and gone to clear her head before her concert tomorrow. Giorno is… beautifying the neighborhood.
“It’s good to see you,” says Trish. The words fall awkwardly out of her mouth. “Um. It’s been awhile. I’m glad you’re… doing well.”
They are standing three feet apart from each other, and neither steps closer. “Likewise.”
He missed her, he thinks- it’s hard to remember what he misses and what he doesn’t. He’s seen her twice since the day he said they would never see each other again, and each time he’s given her a flower, so he reaches up and plucks a hanging raceme to hand her.
Another memory: sakura blooming outside the window, barely-visible insects circling it to pollinate. Haruno presses her face against the glass.
Trish fumbles with the raceme in trying not to damage the flowers; nearly drops it. Catches it in a clenched fist as it deforms in her grasp, softening.
“I don’t want to know what this tree used to be,” she says. She brings the flowers to her face. Inhales.
He wouldn’t have told her anyway. “Good luck tomorrow,” he says, and goes.
There’s a dead fox on the ground. Haruno’s crouched beside it, even though it smells awful and gross and horrible. Her mother is half a block away. She hasn’t realized Haruno’s stopped, but they’re right outside the apartment building, so Haruno isn’t afraid of getting lost.
It had got, she thinks, hit by a car. There’s flies circling around it. They’re not worried about the smell; they land sometimes. Bzzzzzzz, they say.
The insides of the fox are spilling out of it, all glistening and awful. It’s dead. Haruno can’t look away. Are the flies eating it? She thought it was big birds that are supposed to eat dead things. There’s a ladybug that’s landed on her thumb. She looks down at it. Its legs tickle her. She smiles at it.
Ladybugs eat aphids. She learned that from the TV, when her mother left it on. Aphids are little bugs that live on roses and eat their leaves, and then ladybugs eat the little aphids. Haruno, if she really wanted, could eat a ladybug. She doesn’t want, though.
“Hello, ladybug,” she says.
It climbs up her arm. The flies say bzzzzzzzzz and circle around and, she’ll learn when her name is Giorno, lay their eggs.
Giorno has become a missing person.
He’d rather expected it. No school, no matter how willing to turn a blind eye to parental negligence and its students’ unsavory ventures, can overlook an underage student disappearing from his dorm for upwards of several weeks, and his return will have to be handled with care and significant greasing of palms. Likely his mother has been contacted. That, he’ll deal with as it comes.
First, though, he slips into his dorm room after dark. It’s easy. The room is just the same, a little dusty, a few belongings turned over as if someone had haphazardly glanced around for proof of his existence, stolen library books arranged neatly on his shelf. He sits down.
Considers staying, for a moment. Gold Experience Requiem manifests behind him, rests its chin on his head.
Ecdysis. Eclosion.
Is there anything he wants, before he goes? His dorm has never quite looked lived-in. He’ll keep it that way, visit occasionally. Keep up appearances. Leave the essentials here, some clothes in the closet.
Gold Experience Requiem whispers, “Useless. There is nothing left.” Hands him a snake. Presses its lips into his hair.
He turns the entomology books into sunflower seeds, drops them in his pocket, and leaves out the window.
Giorno is sitting in the grass, and he’s watching. It’s the second day of second grade, but he already knows nobody will be his friend, so he doesn’t bother.
There is a mantis on the grass. It’s pale green, springtime-colored, and there’s half a grasshopper in its arms. Giorno saw the whole thing. Quick as anything it snatched the grasshopper and tore its head right off. And then bit again, and then again, eating the dead like a vulture or a fly. Devouring. The grasshopper couldn’t do anything. If there was a really big mantis, probably even Giorno’s stepfather would get eaten.
The mantis takes another bite. Giorno doesn’t breathe, watching. It’s very pointy, angular, long and thin. Very precise. The color of grass. Giorno had only spotted it when it moved, and now he sits as still as it. Watching. Bite.
But then some of the other kids run by screaming and it disappears.
Theseus’s Paradox demands a sense of continuity. If a river is never the same, if an insect changes its structure, if a ship or a body is rebuilt and rebuilt, then what defines the soul? Where does the world end and life begin?
“Gold Experience,” says Giorno, and Gold Experience Requiem doesn’t respond.
What is the boundary of death?
Is a corpse given life dead? A corpse revived? A corpse overwritten? What of something that never lived? What of viruses?
These, Giorno wonders.
Haruno looks in the mirror. She’s climbed up onto the bathroom sink to be able to see, banged her knee and everything, but now that she’s looking her face doesn’t seem right.
Her hair is still short from when she cut it up with scissors and then her mother vaguely chopped the rest, which is alright. Her eyes are dull. Her face is round. She wraps her arms around herself.
She says, “No.” She says, “Useless.”
Her mother puts on makeup every day, for an hour or more. If Haruno is very quiet, she gets to stay and watch her change her face, bit by bit, layer by layer. It’s like magic. Haruno wants to try, but her mother’s makeup is too expensive to waste on a child, so Haruno sits very still and watches her mother turn into herself.
Haruno looks in the mirror, arms hugged around herself, face untransformed, hair uneven. “Useless,” she says again, very quietly.
Behind her, just at the corner of her eye, there’s something gold.
Giorno saves a man’s life. Giorno’s life is saved, bit by bit, by that man.
That’s what power is, Giorno learns. Being untouchable. Being unknowable. Being a shadow that lingers in the back of the mind, fear and benevolence all intermixed. Mantis, ladybug.
Giorno watches that man kill. Giorno watches a child be unable to kill that man.
Killing, then, is a tool of power. Some people should not live, and Giorno will one day ensure their death: some people should not die, and Giorno will save their lives.
Giorno watches that man, gold at the corner of his eye, learning, copying. He has a dull outer shell, absorbing light, and when he speaks people listen, and when he should be in danger people shake. This is what power is. This, and mercy.
There is blood on the ground when Giorno saves that man’s life. Grass growing tall, and blood on the ground like a swarm of ladybugs, and Giorno knows no fear. This is the first time that Giorno chooses whether someone lives or dies, but it will not be the last. He is sure that it will not be the last. He will make sure that it will not be the last.
First the pupa. Then, eclosion.
Now: very few people will ever see past the polished exoskeleton. Jean-Pierre Polnareff, to a limited extent; the rest of his inner circle, maybe. And Sheila E sees more than she knows.
Trish too, of course, like looking into a warped and twisted mirror, but that’s something else entirely.
He stands in the turtle, then, and drags a makeup wipe down his face. This hidden room, late, Sheila E watchful outside, is the closest thing to aloneness he’ll ever have, despite the lingering ghost. But while Jean-Pierre Polnareff may be one of the more irritating people Giorno associates with, he’s generally willing to leave Giorno be on such nights as this.
Generally. “Kid, you look terrible.”
Giorno pauses in his routine to give the ghost a baleful glare. Of course he looks terrible. He’s halfway through taking off his face, and besides, he hasn’t slept in three days. And besides. And besides.
“Just pointing it out,” says Polnareff. Thankfully, he shuts up long enough for Giorno to finish his face and start pulling pins out of his hair- Giorno is teasing his braid apart with clumsy, exhausted fingers, Gold Experience Requiem guiding his touch, when Polnareff speaks again. “It’s eerie.”
Giorno raises an eyebrow.
Polnareff is an exceptional advisor, in large part because he doesn’t see Giorno as anything other than human, and his junior. Let alone fear him. His critiques are irreverent and provocative, and in convincing him or in being convinced Giorno’s understanding of what must be invariably twists and expands. But Giorno does sometimes contemplate throwing the turtle out a fifth-story window.
Polnareff watches him work at his hair a moment longer, then continues. There’s a distance to his voice. “You look so much like Jotaro and Mr Joestar, and then you turn your head and it’s like I’m seeing DIO again. It’s like one of those optical illusions. Two faces or a vase?”
Giorno’s hands drop into his lap. “Does that frighten you?”
One of his hairpins becomes a jewel scarab, crawls onto his finger. There is no mirror in this room.
Polnareff just laughs, though. “Kid,” he says, “don’t flatter yourself. I’ve seen you insist on taking a black widow outside in your own hands. And then cut your arm off because the damn thing bit you and that was faster than medical treatment. You’re insane, but you’re not scary.”
Gold Experience Requiem starts combing through Giorno’s hair, turning product into ants and then right back into product so that it comes out easier. He leans into its touch. Just a little.
Giorno says, “Spiders are innocent.” He draws his arms around himself, careful of the scarab.
“Mon Dieu, Giogio, you’re a piece of work,” says Polnareff, and if anyone else had said that Giorno would have had to retaliate, but it’s Polnareff. So Gold Experience Requiem just drapes itself over the back of him so that Giorno can rest his cheek against its neck until eventually, he stops shaking.
That night, he sleeps in the turtle, restless, watched over by a ghost.
Giorno cannot be touched: he is his own creation, and his creations reflect attacks. Gold Experience’s exoskeleton reflects light.
Giorno cannot be touched. He may be beaten bloody, torn apart, dismembered, but he cannot be touched. He cannot be touched. He cannot be touched.
He reaches down, and he is doubled, tripled, in his body and without it, in Narancia’s body and without it, Narancia nowhere, nowhere, slips back into familiar skin, familiar exoskeleton, the shape he has shaped himself into, perfectly healed, slips out of Narancia’s ill-fitting body, shape and contours all wrong, muscle-memory wired to smile.
And Narancia’s sunny smile isn’t anywhere, and Giorno is shaking, repeating himself, useless useless, broken record stuttering. Nowhere, nowhere.
And tears are filtering down the sides of his face.
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Here are three things most plants need to grow:
No life without breath; no breath without air: the give-and-take of oxygen and carbon dioxide, of plant and animal, in and out, steady, in balance, in balance. Giorno breathes both, exhales both, held together by root and branch as much as bone and sinew, gasping for breath through the sewn-up walls of his throat, the springtime petals filling it. Alive. Shambling on.
There are many ways to fertilize soil, bloodmeal and manure and chemical and corpse. Lifelessness coaxing life. And Giorno sheds his limbs like a starfish or a lizard, blood pooling at his feet, and he steps over the lifeless bodies of his friends and leaves flowers in his wake, sprouting from flesh and vining up the throat and exploding in color.
Water, from his eyes and his heart.
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Italian has different rules about boy words and girl words than Japanese, Giorno learns, practicing grammar quiet and rote in the bathroom mirror.
Giorno is the name of a boy, Giorno learns: Giorno, then, is a boy. He won’t have any other name than Giorno, day, day, bright and shining day, so if he’s gotta be a boy to have it, then he’ll be a boy.
And anyway, boys have more power than girls. Boys are strong, and don’t cry. Giorno doesn’t cry, so he’ll be great at being a boy.
And the glint of gold at the corner of his eye, the morning glory creeping up his spine, they understand his intention and assure it, and he, gardener and garden, grows into the shape he imagines.
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Here are the three components of Giorno Giovanna:
A little girl, named Shiobana Haruno. She has been consumed in the manner of a larva consuming its siblings, flesh transformed, and she has been forgotten.
A spirit, named Gold Experience Requiem, which manifests at the corner of the eye and grows up the length of the spine, and which shapes life and death to its will.
And a boy, named Giorno Giovanna.