Archive of Our Own

“Yoo-hoo, you daydreamer!”

Trish was happy to stay away from Italy for the most part, but she made sure to visit the boys for Christmas and at least a couple of their birthdays every year. She hadn’t intended to visit on that February since it had only been a month since she’d last visited for Christmas and New Years, but Fugo turning twenty-one felt like a big enough deal to justify another visit. She also had seen neither Bruno nor Leone since before the summer holiday that changed everything for those two, and a catchup was in due course. But between interviews, photoshoots, private lunches and dinners with executives the worlds of music and fashion—she never went back to Italy without making sure she kept even busier than usual—and hanging out with all six of them, there was little free time for spontaneous one-to-ones. 

Luckily for her, Leone hated anything spontaneous. 

She pencilled a catch-up with him for Thursday at five-thirty PM, just after a photoshoot in a nice hotel in Chiaia. She herself was able to drive back to the palazzetto where the six of them lived: it was one of her father’s former properties, but as he never lived there—though surrounded by greenery, it sits on a high hill in wealthy Posillipo which, coupled with its tall windows, made it wholly unsuitable to a man so paranoid—she was more than willing to put her good taste to use and help Giorno and the others revamp it from floor to ceiling, and was therefore very fond of it; she even had a bedroom with a queen-sized bed that remained exclusively her own all year long. Her manager wasn’t happy about her driving herself back, but she rarely had the chance to drive herself anywhere anymore and made a very convincing argument for how happy it made her. 

Her car stood by the gate before the palazzetto at exactly 5:30 PM, just as she’d promised. Right as expected, Leone was on time too: standing by the marble stairs beyond the gate, he cut a striking figure in what appeared to be a black trench coat, a black turtleneck underneath, and black Doc Martens boots—though his head seemed to be elsewhere.

It didn’t trouble Trish in the slightest. She couldn’t help but smile, and then tried to call him again.

“Yoooooo-hoooooooo, Abbacchio, you daydreamer!” 

She figured he couldn’t hear him because he had his headphones on, but surely he could see her? He was looking slightly in her direction. Maybe he needed glasses? 

“YOOOOO-HOOOOOO,” she shouted yet again, this time honking: she had refrained from this last resort earlier, but she really couldn’t bother to get out of the car.
Thankfully, it did the trick. 

“Aaah! Fuck!!” Leone yelped as he leapt back, dropping a good remaining chunk of his cigarette in the process. He’d jolted so high his headphones had slid off his head and come to rest on his shoulders.

“When did you fucking get here?” he yelled before he made his way down the stairs. 

“Like two minutes ago! I shouted at you twice before I had to honk!”

“‘Had to’? Really?” he asked indignantly, though Trish could still tell he wasn’t exactly mad at her. Even if there was a decent likelihood that he was, it made her giggle.

“Just come over! It’s nice and warm in here!” 

It was obvious he was indeed not mad at her: even as he walked at a hurried pace, with his arms crossed tightly and his gaze lowered, she could tell he was smiling. It wasn’t necessarily a rare sight like others thought; he just kept a remarkably neutral expression most of the time, and tended to leave those broad, genuine smiles for Bruno alone to see. It was a privilege to see him like that. 

He hopped into the passenger’s seat only to realise his knees sat at an uncomfortably high angle.

“Who sat here last?” he complained as he fumbled for the lever to push his seat back slightly. “A child?” 

“It was me!” Trish admitted through laughs. “My manager drove me earlier. And I’m not even that short, you know! I’m only slightly shorter than Giorno!” 

“Nice car he got you… a convertible? Really now? When you quote-unquote ‘enjoy’ celebrity status? What a fucking numbskull.”

It was Trish’s turn to fake indignation. “Hey! I chose it!”

“Oh, well, in that case I’m sure you’ll be fine.” In fairness, he was quite sure she knew what she was doing: her voluminous pink hair was covered by a beautiful printed Hermès scarf, and her eyes were shielded behind enormous round sunglasses. Only a very keen observer or a rabid fan would know who she is under that effortless disguise. 

“A ‘hello Trish, how are you, long time no see’ would’ve been nice, you know,” she insinuated jokingly as she watched him secure his seatbelt. His tendency not to greet people properly had caught her attention years ago, but the fact that it remained the same made her trust that he wouldn’t be upset by the half-joke, half-hint. 

To him, it was simply an observation, and not a particularly meaningful one now that they were reunited—there was no need to say hello. 

Eager to get going, she turned on the ignition again. “Shall we look for a café to buy pastries, then maybe grab something to drink at a supermar—”

“Do you want me to kill myself?” scoffed Leone—and to Trish’s great concern, he didn’t seem to be joking. “They’re gonna realise who you are if you go into a supermarket, but I’m not going in there myself. The overhead neon lights are going to turn me into ash. You know that scene in Interview with the Vampire, with Claudia and that other woman—”

“Ugh! Well, what about a salumeria? I know a good one around here. Or should we have the undertaker on speed dial for that too?” 

Leone simply shrugged and grinned. “Mah.”

And with that, Trish began to reverse and make her way out of Giorno’s villa. 

“Right—now that we’re got that figured out, what music do you want? I’ve asked Giorno to stock the glovebox with a few CDs. And yes, there’s a Montever—”

“Got any of your own?” Leone inquired, still wearing a playful grin. 

“Oh come on!” Trish complained with a hand gesture that nearly led to her denting the car. “Really? Haven’t you ever heard yourself speaking on a recording and decided ‘I can’t do this’?!”

She assumed he’d have a clever retort for that, but when a few seconds had passed and he hadn’t said anything, she turned her head during a traffic stop only to find him leaning back as far as he could, cradling the back of his head with both hands, eyes closed in theatrical relaxation and still grinning. 

The traffic stop allowed for a few seconds of relative quiet. She could hear him hum something: it was, she was horrified to tell, one of her own songs. 

Finally, he opened one eye. “You said ‘what music do you want?’ and I’ve made my choice. Oh, and the light’s gone green,” he pointed out.

She counted on the fact that he’d have no way of telling that, secretly, she didn’t mind that much. 

“Fine, smartass!” Trish relented, and as her foot pressed on the ignition the car sent them forward a little faster than she’d anticipated. 

He, on the other hand, seemed unfazed, and calmly straightened his back to begin rummaging inside the glovebox. 

“You’re not gonna find them there.” Keeping her eyes on the road, she stretched a hand into the door compartment and took out a CD case that she handed to Leone without bothering to look even once. 

Curious, Leone examined the case: he thought to himself that he hadn’t held one (or anything else, really) so pink since Razorblade Romance back in 1999 which, of course, was nothing like Trish would ever choose to write or perform. He opened it to find an even more blindingly pink CD, which he was pressing down to release when a thought suddenly stopped him. 

“I don’t understand why you tell me I can choose what to listen to, get mad when I say I want to listen to your music, make a strange question that I think was meant to make me rethink my choice—I don’t see why my hypothetical dislike of my own recorded voice would put me off yours—and then tell me I can listen to it, but keep it away from the other CDs?” 

How could she possibly answer that? She didn’t quite know, but the logic made sense to her. 

“It’s to distinguish it from the other CDs since they’re not mine,” she muttered absentmindedly, focusing on the traffic lights before her. It had been a while since she’d last driven in Naples, and even the richest neighbourhoods proved challenging. 

“Sure, but why do you even have it if you don’t want me to listen to it?” Leone readily asked. 

She let out a long groan. “Oh my god.”

•••

They’d spent all three minutes and eighteen seconds of the first song in silence, but from the first ten seconds she began taking covert looks at Leone’s expression over the rear view mirror. She wished she could pause the car and watch him in full—but if anything, driving was her ruse to stop him from noticing. It was delightful: his eyes appearing to look at something above him as his head bobbed along to the rhythm—but he wasn’t following anything; he was studying the song. She was surprised he would look this serious when listening to pop music, but in what was a moment of sad irony Leone really looked more like a sommelier swigging a sip of wine, glancing upwards in an effort to find the names for each note in a folder of knowledge, than he did a casual music fan. 

It made her smile to think that not even her most ardent fans listened to her with that much care. At the same time, the thought of his assessment terrified her. 

“S—so?” Trish asked with an unexpected nervousness that Leone had found endearing. “Wh—what do you think…?”

“I think I can hear some Kylie Minogue in here, some Madonna… there’s something kind of seventies-esque to it, too… ABBA, perhaps? There’s something a bit Italo-disco about the groove, too…”

Trish noticed herself frowning. “Are you talking to me or to yourself…?”

“I’m telling you what I think,” he replied plainly, though with a slight tinge of irritation. “That’s what you asked, remember?”

“Well, you’d be right in your assessment. Those are all artists I feel inspired by. But… like… what do you think? Do you like it? Is it good?”

“It’s good for the genre, yes, as far as I can tell,” Leone stated all too readily, “but don’t quote me on that. I’m not a music critic, let alone someone who listens to pop.”

Trish sighed heavily; she was tempted to park the car. “I never asked for a technical review of my music. I just want to know if you liked it.”

This nuance took Leone some time to understand. To Trish, those four or five seconds seemed eternal; she found herself extra conscious of watching the road. 

“I think so!” he chirped.   

Deep down, she knew that an enthusiastic I think so was the best she could get—he wasn’t a music critic after all, let alone someone who listened to pop, God forbid. 

She beamed at him. “Oh thank goodness—though I have to say, your discernment of which pop divas I’m influenced by was really good! How do you even know? You don’t listen to any of that!”

“I’m gay, Trish. Some way or another I’ll just know.” 

The completely natural deadpan behind his delivery made Trish explode in laughter that, for the second time, very nearly costed her the convertible that Giorno had so lovingly let her choose despite his reservations that a pop diva in the making should not risk her life by doing her own driving.

•••

•••

They hadn’t been on the road for too long before Trish found the little organic food shop that she’d remembered earlier. The fact that they’d found a parking spot right next to it gave Leone some reassurance that it most likely wasn’t very full—then again, not even the wider, less ancient streets of Posillipo allowed for many stationary vehicles, and most people in the shop would have probably walked there or reached it by public transport. Still, it gave him some hope that he could at least try venturing inside. 

“How do you even remember where this is?” he marvelled. “You don’t live here anymore, and we’ve always got food in the house when you come see us anyway.”

“Well, you see,” Trish began as she undid her seatbelt and then turned to him with narrowed eyes and a strange smile, the combination of which Leone couldn’t parse, “you don’t exactly forget where the grocery stores are when you’re in charge of doing the shopping for six relatively useless men.” She spoke sarcastically knowing that Leone wouldn’t take offence: he could somehow be perfectly sarcastic himself, but he never picked it up in anyone else. 

“Ah, I guess that makes sense. Anyway, it doesn’t look too busy from here—”

“Actually, I was thinking to go in first in case it’s too busy inside. These windows can be a little deceptive because they’re kind of tinted, and they’ve got very soft lighting inside. That okay with you?” 

Touched yet entirely surprised by the empathetic gesture, Leone simply blinked in her direction for a few seconds before he remembered to reply. 

“Oh, sure. That’s kind of you.”

“I can’t return you to Bruno in a body bag, you know,” she joked, hoping that a little bit of his own black humour would make him smile—and he did, teeth and all, and something within her instantly began to feel lighter. “Tell me what you’d like in case it’s busy: if I don’t return within a few seconds it’s because it’s too full for you, so fire away.”

“A couple of sfogliatelle, please. With chocolate or hazelnut filling,” Leone specified. 

“Anything to drink?”

“Chinotto or Sanbitter; I don’t mind. By the way, feel free to get any alcohol; I don’t mind that either.” 

The latter sentence made Trish feel something akin to her heart suddenly dropping into her stomach. She chose not to ask him whether he was sure of it as she straightened her Burberry trench coat before stepping out of the car. 

“See you in a bit!”

Trish did intend to gauge the busyness of the shop for him—it was almost endearing how curious he was to check the shop out, were it not for the fact that, at almost twenty-six and having done much scarier things for his job than going to the supermarket, that kind of inexperience made him seem like an extraterrestrial—but his comment made her think of something she hadn’t had the foresight, or experience, to anticipate: rows upon rows of wines from all over the world, from floor to ceiling; a freezer full of beer, crates full of it to take home if what one needed was six or twelve or twenty-four bottles and not one. The fact that non-alcoholic beverages of almost every kind could be seen among the alcoholic ones would’ve made no difference to someone that still heard the hungry ghost of addiction speaking to him almost three years into sobriety. 

The shop was lively at best, but from that moment on she’d become irremediably cognisant of the presence of alcohol everywhere, 

“ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴡᴇᴇᴋ’ꜱ ꜱᴘᴇᴄɪᴀʟ: ʙᴏʀᴅᴇᴀᴜx ʀᴇɢɪᴏɴ” 

“3 ꜰᴏʀ 2 ᴏɴ ᴇᴠᴇʀʏ ʙᴏᴛᴛʟᴇ ᴏꜰ ɪᴛᴀʟɪᴀɴ ʀᴇᴅ”

“ɴᴏ ᴍᴇᴀʟ ɪꜱ ᴄᴏᴍᴘʟᴇᴛᴇ ᴡɪᴛʜᴏᴜᴛ ᴡɪɴᴇ”

to the point that, by the time she’d walked the perimeter of the shop while another person made their order, she had to make a conscious effort not to sound as annoyed as she really was when speaking to the person behind the counter, should she be recognised and her career be put in jeopardy. 

She left the shop with thankfully nothing to apologise for, and returned to the car to find Leone slumped against the door. Tilting her head to the left to try to gauge whether he was asleep or merely comfortable, she struggled to tell whether his eyes were actually fully closed.

“Hey, hey, hello,” she said in a tentative attempt at stirring him—God only knew how he’d react if she touched him. “You okay?” 

“Ahh! Fuck!!” he yelped in a perfect echo of the moment Trish had arrived to collect him earlier. “Sorry, I slept like shit last night. Two and a half hours. Was it too busy inside?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty bad” Trish complained—she knew Leone wouldn’t quite pick up any hints of a lie in her voice but that he did get some personally very useful police training in body language, so she tried not to be too dramatic in her delivery. “Actually, can you hold this bag for a second? I forgot to get something.” 

And before Leone could finish saying “eh, sure,” a green plastic bag had been placed on his lap and Trish herself disappeared into the shop. 

He took a look: there was a small paper bag with two sfogliatelle, a paper bag with a single sfogliatella, and two bottles of Chinotto—so what in the world she could be missing, he had no clue. 

Then he tried to look through the windows of the shop once again, hoping to be able to catch the back of Trish’s characteristic coiffed mop of pink hair among the many people supposedly wanting to buy organic food and baked goods at six PM. He narrowed his eyes, not counting on being very lucky—but sure enough, there she was at the till already, whipping out that cute Bottega Veneta wallet that he himself got for her birthday right before the fated holiday.

Frankly, he didn’t want his meeting with Trish to overrun: he was already struggling with the reversal to the previous seven-person dynamic that he’d once enjoyed and had then been taken away from him. For better or worse, he was now used to being in a group of six. 

At the same time, things had been very significantly shaken up since his seizure some eight months ago, and he was only just getting used to working as close to full time as his limitations allowed. He’d been following the nearly-untraceable tracks of a sex offender who, by the look of it, had a Stand responsible for the deletion of any biographical or appearance-related information from his victims’ minds. Prosecuting him the traditional way was categorically impossible, and the request to find and eliminate him came to Giorno just in time for Leone to attempt working on his own for three days a week; one would be spent with the rest of the team, and the other was free for him to do as he pleased. The case had occasionally been a subject at the dinner table, but Trish hadn’t had the time—or rather, Leone had deliberately dodged her—to catch up on his private life, on how he’d managed since the seizure. 

He was dreading it. 

He’d hardly gotten any rest from his day’s work, he’d slept like shit, and, quite frankly, missing Bruno’s return from his workday before leaving had put him in a bad mood, which the conversation with Trish so far had only marginally improved. His brain felt like a ball of electrical wire—but he attempted, for her sake, not to show it, despite trying and failing to understand what the difference between sounding (in Fugo’s terms) ‘like a cunt’ and like himself really was.

••

“Sorry for the delay!” 

Clack-clacking the floor with her heels as she sped-walked to the car, Trish waved at Leone and motioned at him to open her door. He couldn’t see another plastic bag, but she seemed to be clutching something cylindrical instead. 

“That was quick!” Leone effused. “Take it it’s not too busy anymore? Did the customers evaporate in three minutes or what?”

“Nah, there’s another room at the back; it sort of spirals down one way so there’s more room for other products. You can sit down and everything!” 

As far as white lies were concerned this one was perhaps a little too convoluted, but at least Trish had the absolute confidence that he wouldn’t go in there to check for himself anytime soon.

She climbed in her seat and once more dropped things on his lap, the cylindrical thing being canned coffee. “That’s for you!”

“What was it that you forgot to buy though?” 

He’d been eyeing the tin that entire time like a prey animal that had gone days without eating, all the while forgetting to thank her. “There’s two Chinotti in here.”

“Propolis lozenges, for my throat. Want one?” 

With Leone having politely declined her offer, she had restarted the car when he asked her something that made her truly thankful she hadn’t yet left her parking spot and sent them flying to their deaths. 

“Did you really mean to get Chinotto for yourself? Or do you just feel bad that I can’t drink?”

Her eyes involuntarily widened, and she turned the car off just in case she wouldn’t get to ask him where to go for a good while longer. 

“Jesus Christ, Abbacchio, you waste no time in getting to the point—no, I don’t feel bad. I know you’re better off without drinking, and I know you’re aware of that too. I just don’t want to trigger you, you know?” 

“You wouldn’t,” he argued with disinterest, focusing on the flavour of the canned coffee to allow himself to experience as little of that uncomfortable moment as possible. “I don’t feel tempted to relapse every time someone in my vicinity drinks; plus, I’m guessing you would’ve bought beer or something like that, something portable but decent—it depends, but if it does happen, I’m only ever uncomfortable around red wine, but you wouldn’t buy a whole bottle to drink in one sitting nor would you buy boxed wine.”

Trish’s features softened as she listened to Leone’s unsentimental explanation, predictable though it was that he would speak of himself so detachedly. She remembered suddenly all those boxes of cheap wine he’d surreptitiously dispose of, and tried not to emote any disgust when she remembered the smell of bile and wine coming from the downstairs bathroom. 

“I see… so, for example, someone drinking a cocktail in your presence wouldn’t make you want to drink it, right?”

“That’s right. Bruno gets Apérol all the time; I don’t mind. Purely for the sake of the neurobiology of addiction Bruno prefers if his mouth doesn’t taste too much of alcohol before we kiss, but he’s not a very good judge of that and so far, so good.”

She couldn’t tell for sure since she did not want to be caught looking, but something seemed to have changed in Leone’s expression, and not for the better. 

“Before my big break, my manager was approached by a representative of Moët & Chandon wondering if I’d like to do a commercial for them. I said no.”

“Why?” asked Leone, sounding decidedly more aggravated than he’d done before. “It would’ve made you good money and launched your career earlier. Did you have an accountant at that ti—”

Trish was stunned. 

“Because you were throwing up your insides all the time, maybe that’s why? Because I left for Paris worried that Buccellati was going to wake up to your cold corpse one day?”

Was he really that bad at putting two and two together, or did he really, genuinely see her decision for what it was—a symbolic, empathetic gesture in support of a friend—and simply not care for it? 

A few seconds of silence went by, and Trish couldn’t tell whether he was processing the meaning of having made that decision or not. His face didn’t change, but his hand seemed to be scrambling endlessly for something in his coat pocket despite it looking fairly shallow.

“I don’t watch French TV, so I don’t know what the problem would’ve been,” he stated, again, with complete naturalness, as if he’d simply been asked why he hadn’t brought an umbrella when it was predicted to be dry all day. “Even if I did, my poison of choice was red wine, not champagne; I always got the cheap shit that makes you feel like death. I told you already.”

“Well,” Trish huffed, turning around to find him gazing back in a manner indescribable to her; calmly, but with a kind of concealed anger somewhere. “It looks like I’m going to have to spell it out for you, Abbacchio. It was an empathetic gesture: I didn’t want to risk it making you crave alcohol because I care about you, and I didn’t realise you only ever drank red wine. We’re family—found family—but we only lived in the same place for less than a year, and within that time I wasn’t keeping track of what you chose to intoxicate yourself with; I was just watching it happen. And of course you would’ve seen the commercial because I would’ve recorded it for all of you, like I do with everything that’s available only in France. But that’s not even the point of it.” 

“Then what is it?”

Her eyes, she hated to realise, were beginning to mist over. “Empathy, Abbacchio. Have you heard of it?” 

“I’ve heard of it plenty—people like me get told all the time that we’re incapable of it. And I was beginning to see the meaning of your frankly financially irresponsible decision, and even feel touched as your thought process became clear, before you decided to try to make this about me not caring for all that you care about me.”

He placed the empty tin in the cup holder, and took a cigarette box and a lighter from the pocket where he’d kept his other hand all along, when Trish saw something with bright purple bristles poking out. It looked like it had seen better days. 

“And if you really need to know, yes, I really did need that spelled out. It was indecipherable until then. You said it yourself: you watched me drink to the point I’d vomit, over and over and over again. It’s an inelegant process, drinking yourself to death. I couldn’t see why a commercial made for the style-conscious French public would affect me when not even the type of drink was the same. See why I couldn’t make sense of it? You know, I don’t—”

“Light your cigarette first,” she interjected. “Take a drag first. I’ll wait.”

As he was visibly impatient to light his cigarette, Trish waited for him to light it, say something, and then make a counterpoint—but his hands fumbled with the lighter, and the more they fumbled the more agitated he became… and she didn’t think she was capable of handling alone what could happen if that agitation escalated. 

“I’ll do that.”

She took his lighter and, rather than the bent and sweaty one in his mouth, took a new one out of the box and held it from her own mouth, lighting and handing it back to Leone it in less time than it would’ve taken him to protest about it. 

“I thought you were not allowed?”

“No I’m not,” she confirmed, “but I needed that one initial drag.” She was confident her eyes had dried up now. 

“What was it that ‘you didn’t’?”

Leone seemed to have calmed down once the lit cigarette was in his hand, but the apparent bitterness with which he spoke settled back in.

“You know,” he resumed, his gaze downcast and one hand dangling out of the window frame, the other wrapped around his midsection as though nursing a stomachache, “it’s not just you, but people keep saying things that I’m meant to understand without actually saying what it is. Why is that? How hard is it to just say what you mean? ‘Abbacchio, what non-technique related, vaguely good things do you think of my voice in this song?’ ‘Abbacchio, I rejected the opportunity for a champagne commercial because even though it’s not the same shit you poison yourself with I figured I wouldn’t feature in a commercial with alcohol in it in, I don’t know, solidarity with you, even though I clearly have no idea why you keep doing this to yourself, and seeing as you’d receive the DVD in the post I didn’t want to make you watch it just in case.’ Is it that hard?” 

He spoke quickly, decidedly, like he’d repressed the complaint for years. 

“Or is Bruno the only person alive that explains himself well?” 

Trish noticed the pain in his voice—but she noticed, too, a sort of disdain, the words ‘I clearly have no idea’ being especially laden with it.

“Well then!” She crossed her arms and reclined against the door: she was resolute that she wouldn’t cry, and it helped to act like she had the upper hand. “Enlighten me. Why did you do all of that to yourself?“

“Because my entire life has been one miscommunication blunder after another, just like this, and it’s always my fault, and no matter how much I try and make mental notes of what people say or do I just never fucking learn. And feeling less conscious of myself with a bottle or four of wine comes with the added bonus of getting closer to death. I got my fucking police partner killed because I couldn’t tell what that one guy’s intentions were.”

Even as the sun was beginning to set and the car’s overhead lights were off, Trish could notice Leone’s nose—and the white of his eyes—turning that telltale tint of red. So were her own, but not from feeling like her good friend had hurt her again. 

“Now that I don’t have that, do you know what I do? I hit myself, scratch myself, bite myself, punch myself, bang my head against the wall until I bleed or bruise. Like a child—no, like some sort of animal. It’s humiliating, and I’m bound to do that until I fucking die. At least blacking out was age-appropriate!” Leone scoffed. “And it’s not even just miscommunications: it’s the fucking—the fucking noise around me, the busyness, the brightness! The last time I went to a supermarket I was so drunk I threw up outside, as soon as I finished! Do you see then—do you see why an advertisement would do nothing to me?!”

“Yes,” she mouthed and nodded. She knew he wouldn’t mind what she did with her eyes, but she gazed at him in awe, letting the tears run through her powdered cheeks even if she risked getting caught the second he turned his way. 

“And—since the incident…” Leone’s voice cracked. “Since the seizure…”

It was becoming increasingly urgent to Trish to find a way he did not reach that very same boiling point that was once responsible for his drunkenness. She could see it approaching: the curled hand clawing at his ribcage; the jittery, subtle rocking; the rubber toy in his pocket. The signs had been there. And the sleeplessness—how could he keep his composure when he’d been dragging himself along for the ride? 

The cigarette was close to extinguishing itself between his fingers, and Trish smiled from the quiet victory of having just realised how to go about preventing boiling point. 

“Abbacchio”—her voice quivered slightly—“do you… do you want to—”

Suddenly, a chiptune version of the overture to Monteverdi’s Orfeo began flooding the car. Only one person in Leone’s contact list was deserving of a ringtone, as opposed to the usual soft vibrations that notified him of incoming calls. 

Trish couldn’t help the very wide grin. “Go take it, Abbacchio; just come back whenever you’re ready.”

Before pushing the door open and crossing a leg over—he fit so poorly inside that girly convertible that he couldn’t step out of it without doing the motions of a baby giraffe learning its first steps—he flashed Trish a small but sincere smile.

“I’ll let him know you haven’t killed me. You’re an excellent driver! Much better than him, but I won’t tell him that.”

•••

•••

•••

Leone returned to the car only some ten minutes later. His black eyeliner had smudged and faded slightly, but he seemed altogether calmer.

“That was quite a timely call,” he joked to Trish as he slumped back into his seat. “I’m sorry for… that, whatever that was.”

“You’re tired, that’s all!” Trish reassured him, not seeming troubled at all. “And you hadn’t spoken to Bruno since this morning, correct? But also”—she lowered her head, not quite ashamed of herself but something akin to it—“I’m sorry for not having been able to tell things that were quite evident in hindsight. And for… that thing about not saying what I mean but expecting you to understand anyway. And for implying that you don’t have empathy...” 

Getting those words out was the hard part, but she found herself embarrassed to meet his gaze. 

“It’s fine,” he said plainly, “and I mean it. I’ve needed to have one of these chats with everyone, and through all of these years of being friends I’d not had the time to sit down with you yet.”

“Oh, have you discussed these things with everybody?”

Trish couldn’t possibly imagine how to brief all four non-Bruno of them into what it was like living in his brain.

“Not exactly, no.” 

Leone took a deep breath and exhaled it somewhat angrily, as though whatever it was that irked him could exit his system through carbon dioxide. “It was forced upon them. And it was forced upon me, too. Out of me.”

Trish was confused: he seemed intentionally vague, exactly like the sort of people he had just complained about. But then she remembered Mista’s phone call from last summer: 

—I’ve had to give Giorno this whole, like, ‘guide for dummies’ on the kind of person Abbacchio is. And then Buccellati called me over to help him out with some stuff, and, like—Abbacchio’s really not in a good way. I don’t know how he managed to keep that hidden from us all along.

 

—What do you mean? You’re scaring me. 

 

—So you remember I told you about the seizure, right? He’s been acting kind of weird since. Weirder, I mean. On one hand he’s being nicer to us—

 

—Mista!!! Well, I guess that falls within the realm of “Abbacchio being weird,” doesn’t it…

 

—Yeah. But, okay, so he’s being nicer to us but at the same time… he seemed more reactive to stuff? Anyway, we were messing around by the shore when a BIG fight between him and Giorno broke out: Abbacchio said he was burnt out from the amount of times Giorno makes him use his Stand on top of everything else we do together, that he’d been okay with the epilepsy until this seizure came sort of in response to the stress from that and from all his autism stuff. I don’t completely get what that means, but I guess it’s not for me to know. And then he ran back to his and Buccellati’s room. All of us watched it happen. 

 

—Madonna, he must’ve felt so shy about it afterwards.

 

—Girl! I don’t think he’s even got the bandwidth for that!

Trish couldn’t tell how long had passed since Leone had made that comment and she’d recalled the phone call, but he didn’t seem bothered by the quiet flow of time. From behind Leone, though, she could tell the colours of the sky had begun to turn those shades of ochre, pink and flame-red that made her miss Naples so much no matter how far away she ran from it. 

She knew where to take him at long last. 

“Abbacchio,” Trish said timidly, “do you wanna go to the 13 Descents? The sunset is going to look so pretty from the lookout if we get there on time.”

Unexpectedly, his face seemed to light up at the suggestion. 

“We might catch a good free liturgical music concert if we get there on time too,” he added, grinning from ear to ear. 

“Oh, figures!”

•••

•••

•••

When they arrived to the church—or rather, to the parking space that boasted the number-one most spectacular view of the city—the reds and pinks of the sunset were bleeding into the little gaps of yellow left, soon to mix into the blues and violet hues that heralded nighttime proper. Before even walking out of the car and to the terrace where the Thirteen Descents converged Trish couldn’t help the need to take a photo, grainy and unimpressive though it looked on her flip phone. 

Pleased but not awe-stricken, Leone glanced at the sunset only a couple of times before turning his attention to the church beside him. As a former sanatorium adjacent to a convent, its exterior was definitely austere for the time, but Leone admired it all the same. 

“Why are you looking at that thing?” Trish complained as they walked downhill to the lookout post, she herself minding the steep incline while Leone barely followed her through his peripheral vision. “It’s not even very nice for a baroque church. It looks like a hospital!” 

“That’s because it was one!” he confirmed. “And it’s much nicer on the inside, trust me.”

“Pffft. You say that about every church.”

February wasn’t a particularly popular time with tourists despite it being much preferable to the punishing summer months, so the only other witnesses to Trish and Leone’s conversation were a handful of kids playing football, surely too energetic to sit in church with their families. The two walked across the terrace and, in the absence of benches, stood with their elbows resting on the green railing.

“It’s a pretty view, isn’t it?” Trish asked without taking her eyes off the glittering city. 

“It’s alright,” Leone commented indifferently, too busy opening his bottle of chinotto and lighting himself another cigarette. “It’s still a shithole.” 

Trish stared at him in disbelief for a few seconds: she didn’t realise he had feelings so strong about the city, or so it seemed to her. 

Leone noticed the silence.

“What? I thought you’d get it. You escaped this shithole.”

“First of all, I wasn’t even born here; I’d only known the city for a year give or take when I left,” Trish was swift to correct him. “Secondly, I didn’t escape Naples because I thought it was a ‘shithole’ or whatever. I escaped it because my life here reminded me too much of my dad. All of Italy did, really. But it’s not bad—some places in Sardinia are much more boring in comparison. Why do you hate it so?”

“It’s too busy and polluted, duh,” Leone sneered. “If Bruno weren’t more or less the prince of Naples we’d fuck off somewhere quieter—with a coastline, of course, for his sake. Somewhere we could both feel brand new. But I get what you mean.”

With his lips still around the mouth of the bottle, Leone tilted his head in a diagonal nod of sorts to indicate that he conceded; he’d been too quick to assume her feelings about the city were the same as his. 

“So,” he began, eager to change the subject lest she interrogating him further, “what’s with you then? How are you?” 

Trish sniggered, all the while still smiling. “Thought you’d never ask. I’m fiiiine, just—you know—tired, still wrapping my head around the reality of fame, getting used to the intensity of my day to day… working on the new album—”

“Blah blah blah! You’ve told us all of that during our dinners already,” Leone interrupted. “Tell me some real news, not stuff I could read in any gossip magazine. Do you fancy anybody?”

Trish let out a loud gasp. “You are actually unbelievable!”

Whether he understood the difference in tone or not, Trish tried very hard to strike a balance between a regular lighthearted reply and a completely serious, slightly angry one, but this time she was so stricken by his no-nonsense approach that she almost didn’t care to sound genuinely offended: someone had to teach this brute a lesson in polite conversation, and it probably wasn’t going to be Bruno. 

“Well—uh—I think I do like someone. But promise me you won’t… laugh at any of my worries?” 

“Oh?” 

Leone’s posture had changed; he had now eased himself into making generous eye contact while he rested his head on his hand, having fully turned sideways to face her. Even in the poor lighting of the few working lampposts around them, Trish was convinced that his pupils had dilated like a cat’s.

“Um—you see—it’s… the person I like… is a woman.” 

Leone, on his part, thought he could very well see her cheeks burning in a similar colour to her hair’s under that dim, warm lighting. 

“Hoo… tell me more,” he purred. 

She made sure to avoid his intense gaze. “She’s really nice—she’s my hairdresser—the one that does my hair for my concerts, interviews, photoshoots, etc.—”

“And have you told her how you feel?” 

“Are you insane?! Of course I haven’t!” Trish spat. “Plus—I don’t know—I feel like she might not want to be seen with someone like me—” 

“What the fuck are you talking about? You’re Trish fucking Una,” Leone argued, his hands moving so vigorously they might as well have flown out of their sockets. “She should know how lucky she is just by having permission to touch your hair.”

As quickly as she could, Trish raised her gaze to smile at him for the compliment. She was certain now that she much preferred him when he didn’t try to make eye contact: whether he did so intentionally or not, Leone seemed not to blink at all while he pried for gossip. It was no wonder then that his help was always requested for interrogations. 

“Well, the thing is,” she elaborated, “she’s kind of—masculine—so I don’t know if she’ll like someone like me, who is—very much not masculine.”

“I think it’s quite common for butch lesbians to like more feminine types; they enjoy playing the prince for their princess,” Leone mused before taking a drag of his cigarette. “And even if they’re not regularly her type, you—like I said—are Trish Una. So just go for it. Send her a text message or something.”

“Are you out of your mind?!” Trish repeated.

Leone threw his head back and let out a long, tired groan. “You people! You never say what you mean! You’re going to end up dying alone if you don’t! Explain your logic to me!” 

“That’s… charitable of you,” Trish commented sarcastically. “Did you open up to Buccellati?” 

“Of course not!” he huffed, smoke coming out of his nostrils like a furious dragon. 

“Well then!” Trish smirked smugly. “Why should I, if you don’t want to lead by example? Hmm?” 

“Because you’re not a defective second-rate person like me. You’re not some pitiable freak who’s scared of noise and the supermarket. You don’t have to wear headphones at restaurants or when you’re eating with other people. You can meet people without drinking and you can drink without the drive to kill yourself. You can drive. You can go dancing at a nightclub with this girl without her worrying that you’ll have to come out in a stretcher—I can’t even watch your concerts.”

He stopped to take a breath—a suspiciously watery one, if Trish had heard right. 

“I wouldn’t have told Bruno how I felt if he hadn’t done so first: I’m a burden. That’s why I can’t ’lead by example.’ Ask Bruno what he did, since he knew right from the start that he has to be very direct with me otherwise I wouldn’t get the fucking hint.”

An anguished silence went by. Trish then raised her hand as if to rub Leone’s shoulder, but something told her she shouldn’t. 

“I’m sorry, Abbacchio… I didn’t mean to offend you.” 

“It’s fine,” he said flatly. “I’m just telling the truth. I understand that you needed to know why I seemed to contradict myself when I spoke so authoritatively.”

“You’re… not a burden, though. Not to me, nor to the boys, and certainly not to Buccellati!” persuaded Trish, trying hard to hide the tremor in her voice from the anxiety of anticipating Leone’s reaction. “I think it’s thanks to you two that I have role models for what I want in a relationship, actually…”

Leone, who had otherwise been staring into the distance, took a glance at her from the corner of his eye, the closest he’d come to genuine, vulnerable eye contact. He was touched, but the comment caught him unawares. 

“I know my mum and dad loved each other, but I never got to witness any of that, you know. All I’ve known is loser after pathetic loser that my mum moved into the house. I’ve never met a couple that loved and trusted each other more than you two,” Trish elaborated. “When you had the seizure… I found out through Mista; he said Buccellati did want to tell me himself, but that he didn’t want to take his eyes off you. He said Buccellati cried at mealtimes from how scared he was that he might lose you—”

Leone scoffed lightly. “It’s as I’ve said.” 

“You’re confusing being a burden on someone with simply caring about them,” Trish argued, calm but resolute, determined to deviate his stubborn thinking. “It’s a privilege to have someone to care so much about, and even more so to take care of them yourself—don’t you think? Don’t you feel that way about Buccellati?” 

“Of course I do, but that’s different!” Leone barked. “He’s not… defective.”

“He probably thinks he’s defective too, in his own way,” Trish suggested. “He doesn’t see you as someone who comes prepackaged with problems—he sees you as a whole, lovely person. And I think that, to some extent, he likes you because you’re autistic, otherwise you’d just be a pretty face. Whatever happens as a result of it doesn’t outweigh all the good he sees in you.” 

The mention of the word autistic elicited a knee-jerk reaction in Leone, who squeezed his eyes as he gulped as though a dagger was stuck in his throat. 

“That’s… kind of you to say,” he uttered hoarsely, almost too low to hear. 

“I did mean to ask… how are you doing now since the seizure?”

Trish’s voice was kindness itself, so soft that a stranger might’ve assumed she’d never uttered a sarcastic word in her life. 

“Boh,” he shrugged. “I’m on new meds. I’ve had a few breakthrough seizures since, but nowhere near as bad. I’m just exhausted all the time now. And—I don’t know if this is a real thing or if it’s just my imagination, but—I feel like I might be more autistic now.”

Trish was intrigued. “Is that wholly bad, or are there upsides to it?”

“Eh… it mostly sucks. It’s embarrassing for sure. But”—Leone stopped to reflect sincerely on the question for a moment—“I think there’s a freedom to it somehow. Everyone’s seen the worst of me now. There’s no point in hiding how I feel. I think I forgot how to do it.”

“And your new job? Does that suit you better?” 

“I think so,” Leone reckoned. “That’s another upside. I didn’t know how to tell Giovann’ that I couldn’t handle the pace of our work as a group, the constant spontaneous change of plans and moving around, the amount of times I had to use my Stand without a second to prepare. I’m a slave to routine, even when it can do me more harm than good. That’s why I was hoping he would’ve noticed before testing my limits by humiliating me in front of everybody until my brain hit the self-destruct button.”

The conversation Trish had had with Mista was suddenly even clearer in her mind, and her memory of it all the more anguishing. 

“How are you two getting along now, if I may know?”

“I report to him when I’m summoned, and on shared missions I’ll only speak to him if absolutely necessary. Otherwise I don’t say a word to him, ever.”

Leone’s voice had lost the softness of his vulnerable confession, once again turning sharp and monotone.

“It’s for my own good.”

The thought of it—of the two existing under the same roof in disharmony, of the healing that Giorno did to his arms potentially holding no meaning for Leone—made Trish feel on the edge of tears, so much so that Leone was alarmed by the change in her face. 

“Chill. It’s no big deal,” he insisted. “Like I said: for some godforsaken reason I feel like I’ve become more autistic. I’m more reactive to stuff; I get tired way more easily. I’m playing it safe with him until I’m more used to being like this: if I say the wrong thing or he says the wrong thing the mere stress of it will set me off, and none of us wants to deal with that. It would affect our entire group’s dynamic both at home and at work, as well as whatever the fuck progress I’ve made so far. He’s aware of it—trust me, this is a mutual agreement.”

The explanation sat heavy in Trish’s mind for a few quiet minutes. She couldn’t continue conversing until she felt she’d fully taken it in: she loved each of ‘her boys’ so dearly; she loved Giorno so dearly and felt his kindness reach around to her everyday, in France and Naples and wherever else, like a mantle of infinite threads that kept her warm and safe. And in ways that eluded her, he was so much like Leone, so the reason why they wouldn’t get along was simply beyond her. At times, she was tempted to think of Leone as wilfully noncompliant.

“You were so nice to me when you all took me in. All of you, but… I remember being struck by how nice you were,” she recalled to the sound of Leone’s sardonic scoff. “I mean, there you were, standing way taller than everyone else, super muscular, always poker-faced and scary-looking in all black… and your headphones always on, which to me—at the time—read like, ‘go away and don’t talk to me.’ During times you could rest or swap places with someone, you never spoke to anyone but Buccellati. And yet you were so nice to me, you made me feel so welcome—” 

“It was my job,” he interrupted her, his affect flat as ever but with the slightest hint of a smile. “I’d always been so terrified of not following the once-elusive boss’ rules to perfection, and I assumed he wanted nothing but the best treatment for you.”

Trish felt like her heart had sunk for a moment—she wasn’t expecting any mentions of her father, let alone that Leone had, once upon a time, assumed such good things of him—but she recovered quickly from the shock. 

“Come on though,” she teased. “You weren’t just nice to me out of obligation! I could tell!”

“Yeah, well I guess I came to like having you around us,” Leone admitted. “You were a bright young girl. I liked your attitude.” 

“What about Giorno? If you were nice to me because it was your job to be, then why were you so hostile to him at first? Were you jealous or something—?”

“He disrupted a dynamic I’d worked so hard to feel comfortable in” he retorted, loud enough to drown out Trish’s voice and stop her from making any more unwelcome guesses. “I tried to play it cool and haze him to test his endurance at first. But I was furious, and frankly I was furious at Bruno too, for not only bringing this fucking nobody without telling me but for blindly believing in his potential.” His hands shook as he lit another cigarette, a task that no doubt became all the more challenging from the slight rocking in place that began with his explanation, or possibly even before Trish could finish articulating her demand for it. 

The long, almost desperate drag he took may as well have come from an inhaler. 

“And sure, yeah, I was jealous. Fucking kill me. I didn’t think he would fancy him, at the very least, but I was jealous of how eagerly he sought to listen to his strategising, his little dictator make-pretend. And then—to blindly obey him? To be expected to follow his orders when he never put anything through me, his senior, or sometimes even through Bruno? And then I was in the wrong for expecting things to be done the way I knew they’d work out?!”

Then, Trish witnessed something that made that sunken heart feel like it had been catapulted beyond her stomach and far into the ground: Leone’s white-knuckled grip, clutching that bottle of alcohol-free Chinotto with a fury and strength that could never be trained out of his muscle memory. However much he had left, he finished the bottle in one gulp, then set it down so forcefully on the metal railing that Trish worried it would shatter in his fist.

“That’s… so, so understandable,” Trish spoke cautiously—then, she remembered something that could potentially help him in these circumstances.

“Hey, can you show me the purple thing in your pocket? I got a glimpse of it earlier and I got curious… if you don’t mind.”

The muscles holding Leone’s anger in his face softened. “Ah, that.” 

It took him no time to produce the wiggly rubber worm, which he pressed between his fingers before letting her hold it. 

Sheepishly, he pointed at the nearly-faded eyes and smile on its face as well as the dips where his fingernails had nearly quartered it. “Sorry it’s looking a bit worse for wear now.”

“I’m guessing the point of it is to bear a bit of destruction!” Trish laughed, looking clearly delighted with the toy. “Where did you buy it?” 

“It was a gift from Narancia, actually,” Leone smiled softly. “He got it somewhere in Nice after witnessing me clawing at my skin—hence it looking like that now.”

“Ohhhh! Narancia! I love him so much!” Trish cooed. “Would you let me get you another one for when you can’t use this one anymore? It’s got to be pink though, that’s my colour.” 

“Sure,” Leone said shyly. “But now let me have my damn worm! I—eh, I kind of need it…”

Trish tried not to look too pleased with herself as she handed it back: her plan had worked.

“Sorry about whatever that was earlier.” 

Twisting the worm between fingers in both hands with the same naturalness of the way he clutched that glass bottle, Leone settled with his elbows resting on the metal railing to watch the luminous movements of the city again.

“It’s okay, Abbacchio. I really appreciate your explanation—honestly, I’m really glad to understand you a bit better now.”

Minutes went by in complete silence while Trish worried whether she’d overstepped. 

“You know, it makes me feel all the more special that you were so kind to me,” she spoke again, “despite the fact that I also disrupted that dynamic—it doesn’t matter if it was part of the job. Objectively speaking, I still did.”

Leone suddenly lowered his head and laughed, as though embarrassed by something. “If I’m extra honest, I liked that you were unashamedly specific about your Perrier water and your Chanel makeup. It made me feel—I don’t know—less weird, maybe. Because you weren’t coming across as weird, so I thought hey, maybe I’m not either.”

If Trish could have crystallised that moment and carried it in her pocket forever, she would have.  

“You’d known us for mere minutes and were already very firm about the stuff you needed. I mean, you were the boss’s daughter, but you were also a stranger—a stranger that knew what she needed. Not me: it took months of withstanding chatter at lunch and a stupid meltdown in the toilets for me to start wearing headphones. Bruno thought about it, not me. I’m a fucking coward—that’s why all of this has happened to me.”

Trish wanted to hold his hand in support—it was one of those moments where she felt words wouldn’t suffice—but knew that Leone was, to put it mildly, extremely touch-averse if the person doing the touching wasn’t Bruno, and that even then it had taken him some time to lean into his casual, unannounced caresses.

“I don’t think you are,” she finally opined. “You’ve just had the wrong idea of what it means for you personally to be brave and strong until recently.”

“That’s not how I think of myself,” he snapped back. “I am simply duty-bound to obey my needs. I try not to be sentimental about it.”

“Madò’, take a compliment every once in a while, will you?” Trish sneered with an aggressive roll of her eyes. “Anyway, you’re really not a coward. Before you argue with me—yes, I know your Stand scared him the most—this is something I’ve known in my heart of hearts since Sardinia. And then from the verge of death, with no certainty of anything, you survived, and have survived so much more since and so much before then, too. I’m not going to list it all: I don’t know if it upsets you, but it’d definitely annoy you—”

“It does,” Leone said calmly, though the tenseness in his crossed arms suggested otherwise. 

“Arrrrgh!” a deeply frustrated Trish growled. “But let me finish!” 

While she remembered what she meant to say before the interruption, Trish tried to derive some satisfaction from picturing herself punching his shoulder—there were several reasons why she didn’t want to attempt that in real life, but goodness, was the urge strong nonetheless. But before she could utter even one word she noticed the time on her phone change to seven o’clock, and the church beside her became alive with rising voices. 

Leone’s face began to change like the head of a sunflower, his gaze—bright and wide, with lashes for petals—rising towards the music. Endearing as it was to behold, Trish knew she didn’t have long to get his attention before his brain completely shut her out. 

“Do I have your attention, Baroque Boy?” she teased. 

“Briefly.”

“Look, all I wanted to say is—this whole deal of having to confront your secret diagnosis because you nearly died and at the same time having to confront months and months of… what do you even call it… accumulated exhaustion because this world isn’t made for you? And then having to relearn working, being around others, going outside? That’s… that’s a big deal, Abbacchio, and you don’t give yourself nearly enough credit. Months ago you wouldn’t have thought that taking care of yourself in these particular ways was a duty; in fact, you would’ve thought the opposite—ignoring those signals, doing things like everybody else—was the case. And even though you’re embarrassed by it, you still try. You’re still honest and say when enough is enough. That’s not what cowards do, Abbacchio.”

Leone wasn’t good with compliments and Trish knew that well, but he seemed touched nonetheless by her observations. There was something about the way he looked at her—intently, this time not from the corner of his eye—that spoke to her. Nothing else about his face moved, but that direct, vulnerable gaze, like that of a caged animal letting itself be caressed, spoke volumes.

She was more than happy to take that kind gaze as a thank you and free him from the burden of eye contact. 

“What are they playing in the church?”

“It’s some Haydn,” he said without missing a beat. “Too contemporary for my taste.”

“I guess you’re a bit like me in that sense…”

Leone’s eyebrows met in the middle. “What do you mean? I thought you didn’t like—” 

“I don’t!” Trish confirmed to a disillusioned-looking Leone. “But I don’t like newer pop as much as I like 80s and 90s stuff. So there you go: we’re a bit similar in that we don’t like very recent stuff in our respective genres of choice.”

Leone couldn’t help a chuckle. “That’s a bit of a stretch, but I’ll take it.” 

It was getting close to dinner time and a bit too dark for Trish’s liking—though with Leone there, she knew she’d be even safer than if she had five bodyguards—but the look of concentration on Leone’s face whenever he wasn’t speaking to her suggested there might be something he’d like to bring up before they left. 

He was pressing his lips into a roguish-looking smile: whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. 

“You know,” Leone began—something in his tone made Trish think he was indeed up to no good—“you wouldn’t have your career if it weren’t for Monteverdi.” 

Trish almost forgot to swallow her sip of Chinotto before her mouth fell agape.

“Wh-what?” 

She attempted to feign offence with a hand on her chest, but that what? had come out so high-pitched from the sheer surprise of such an outlandish statement that he might as well have told her he’d set her flat on fire. 

“Abbacchio, sometimes you talk so much nonsense.”

“This isn’t nonsense! I’m completely serious,” he prefaced, that telltale glint in his eye betraying the deceptive calm in his tone. “Homophony—a musical texture where the addition of smaller, independent but stylistically similar harmonies accompanies a predominant one—only became more popular and elaborate from about the very end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 17th. The opposite of that is polyphony, which was popular in earlier centuries. And then you’ve got monophony: think Gregorian chants. Boring stuff, right?” 

Trish nodded, and yet she couldn’t even remember what on Earth a Gregorian chant was. She just had the feeling that he wasn’t actually waiting for a yes or no answer as long as he could present an argument he seemed feverishly excited about. 

“The kind of homophony emerging in that turning point between the 16th and 17th centuries allowed for the layering of multiple, similar vocal harmonies, usually about four or five. Combine that with instruments playing different simultaneous melodies and you’ve got a much richer texture than in previous liturgical music—much more daring stuff playing in churches. A lot of people didn’t take too well to Monteverdi, you know!” 

“I think this is the first time I’m hearing about it, Abbacchio,” Trish commented, just by the off chance that he was actually wondering what the breadth of her knowledge was. Even when he paused for a few seconds, Leone’s eyes seemed to be bulging out of their sockets, and an incredibly strong energy about him gave her the impression that he kept on waving his hands about even when he managed to stay still.

“Now, opera,” Leone announced, frenzied with anticipation, holding his hands up to his sides as though narrating an especially scary story. “This is where it gets really fun.”

Trish took a swig of her Chinotto. “Oh, I’m sure about that.”

By the off chance, she looked at Leone’s bag of sfogliatelle: they’d remained untouched. She knew that sometimes he preferred to eat and drink without mixing the two, but for someone that claimed to have slept two and a half hours he seemed not to need any sources of energy while he explained his hypothesis. 

“Okay, so imagine homophonic singing and instrumentation, yes, but with so much more potential for experimentation since it’s not liturgical music—there are little musical breaks from the singing, beginning at the prologue, that predate what is understood as leitmotifs by over two hundred years! Everyone attributes them to that atrocious Wagner, but it’s not even other German-speaking predecessors like Gluck or Mozart that begin using them, it’s Monteverdi!”

“I hate to interrupt you, but what does this have to do with my musical career?” 

“Well, you’ll find leitmotifs everywhere in modern music,” Leone stated with dramatic gesticulations and an even more dramatic roll of his eyes. “It’s a melodic fragment that repeats itself when the composer wants you to think of something specific. Maybe you’ll find them repeated or reworked in a guitar solo, which—guess what!—is also akin to a Baroque innovation popularised by Monteverdi, an instrumental interlude called sinfonia!”

“Abbacchio, er… I’m not trying to be funny,” Trish prefaced, “but I’m really lost as to how any of this has to do with my career. Care to dumb it down a little?”

“See, all of the things that you find in pop music—musical breaks in the middle, overlapping vocals, identifiable musical themes that tell you the mood of a song, even the fact that songs about heartbreak exist at all! Basso continuo, or the presence of a bass line throughout an entire piece!—you can trace all of that down to Monteverdi in some way or another! I mean, without any of these developments we wouldn’t have any of the precursors of contemporary music, but pop and Monteverdi have more in common than even I would’ve believed. So I remain standing by what I said earlier: you wouldn’t have your career without Monteverdi because Pop wouldn’t exist without Monteverdi.” 

Leone’s manic energy seemed to have died down instantly once he finished making his point. Pleased with himself to the point of smugness, he leant relaxedly on the railing to wait for Trish’s verdict. 

Her eyes seemed to twinkle with the evening lights. “I’m not sure if I’m convinced—but, you know, it’s been really nice seeing you like this.”

Leone frowned at her. “What do you mean, ‘like this’?”

“I don’t know… happier? More relaxed? I know it’s been a rough few months, so I’m not sure if ‘happier’ is the right term… and this may not make a lot of sense, but… it’s like a mask has fallen off your face and I can finally see it clearly.”

“Bruno’s going to love that assessment,” he laughed lightly. “He’ll tell you that you’re right.” 

“What about you though—do you think I’m right?” 

A beat; Leone’s heart somersaulted. “Yeah, I suppose,” he said after a few seconds, not sounding altogether convinced. 

Trish’s eyes were fixed uncomfortably on him, as if she knew he had more left to say. 

He inhaled sharply. 

“…in a way it fell on its own,” he continued, “but in another way the incident back in July snapped its ties. Or they frayed—I tried for too long to make them last.” 

“How do you feel?” She beamed at him expectantly, as if he’d just tried something she’d cooked herself. “Freer?” 

“Maybe, I don’t know. No—there’s less that I can do without losing my mind. I feel fragile and I hate it. I feel like a child sometimes; the world and all its violent stimuli swallows me whole and I end up crying, or things don’t go the way I’ve planned and my first instinct is to take it out on myself. And then…”—Leone’s wistful voice took on a firmer, clearer quality—“I only start feeling okay again when Bruno is with me.”

“You really meant what you said back in Venice, didn’t you?” Trish tried—and failed—to point out without giggling. 

“Don’t even mention it,” he chuckled back, much to her surprise. “I had no idea of how much truer that declaration would become with time.”

“… but… do you feel like anything good has come out of the mask falling off? Do you feel different?” 

“Yes and no,” Leone stated with surprising resoluteness, having tried very hard not to think too deeply about his own life in response to Trish’s prodding. 

He lit a cigarette—his final for the night; he’d dealt with the anxiety brought by this one-to-one meeting by going way over his self-imposed limit—and tilted his head back, exhaling fully before elaborating on what he’d last said. “I don’t feel different; I just feel more exposed. I feel pathetic most of the time, but the alternative is to keep my guard up—and that’s exhausting. It’s freeing to give up pretending I’m something that I’m not, at least when I can. And it feels better at the end of the day: excusing myself from a busy lunch, letting my hands move, letting myself show excitement, letting myself talk even if I’m not sure if what will come out of my mouth is socially acceptable. I don’t feel like I deserve the grace and patience, but I’m trying.”

Trish didn’t say anything in response—this didn’t annoy Leone; if anything, he preferred it. He much preferred it to the weeping and sniffling that followed instead. 

“…hey, why are you crying?!” 

He was conscious of not sounding like he harboured any ill feelings towards her, but seeing others cry was one of those situations where he felt the most confused and inadequate about other people. 

He felt alarmed, but remembered Trish’s complaint from just a few days ago—

I get that you don’t always mean to, but sometimes you sound like such a brute.  

—and placed what he hoped was a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“I just told you a bunch of upsides to the mask falling off!”

“Maybe ask Bruno when we get home,” she sniffled, covering her nose while she rummaged her bag for a tissue with her other hand. “It’s hard to explain.”

Admittedly, Trish was baffled that he didn’t get it despite not having much faith in the emotional intelligence of any man to begin with, autistic or not. Even harder to admit was that she quite liked the feeling of his hand on her shoulder: his broad, spindly palm almost cupped her whole shoulder blade, and it was quite a lot warmer than she was despite her careful layering. 

She thought there was nothing to lose except the chance itself were she not to try. “Hey, can I have a hug?” 

Leone gazed at her fondly. 

“…I shall grant it this once,” he acquiesced. 

It took her an extraordinary effort not to throw herself at him before he could finish giving her his exceptional permission, and even more so not to audibly cry. 

The moment her face was pressed against his coat she felt deeply grateful that all he ever wore was black, as she hadn’t had a better opportunity to test the durability of the Dior makeup she’d newly received for free. Leone had always struck him as among the more hygienic of the sextet, but hadn’t thought of him as smelling of anything in particular until then, when a scent like incense arose from the fibres of his turtleneck. It really seemed like the perfect encapsulation of him: old fashioned, but with an edge; imposing, but welcoming; unusual, but not unfamiliar. She couldn’t think of anyone else that could ever pull off smelling like a church.

The warmth of Trish’s cheeks against Leone’s clothes awoke another scent, a lingering sweetness more familiar to her: Bruno’s own perfume—fig, lemon, and rose, if Trish had to guess—was as distinguishably his own as it had always been to her, and yet it seemed so seamlessly enmeshed within those fibres this time. 

She held him tight, probably tighter than she had in her life: the times she had had the opportunity to hug him he wasn’t in the best health; the rest of the time, she’d felt frankly intimidated of him despite being friends for a good enough amount of time by then (I guess that mask did its job well, she thought). He wasn’t hugging her particularly tight—in fairness, he wasn’t used to hugging somebody that small—but she didn’t mind; that oddly pleasant swaying he did instead more than made up for it. 

“Abbacchio, what time is it?” Trish suddenly asked, mouth still so close against the finely knitted garment that Leone had to ask her to repeat herself. 

“Ah, uh, it’s… quarter past seven,” he mumbled sleepily; Trish noticed a hint of a suppressed yawn. 

“Time to return you to your husband?” she proposed, detaching herself from him with some reluctance: it may have simply been his proportions or even his own need for proprioceptive bliss, but she thought he gave the most comforting hugs; Bruno was a lucky man indeed. “He’ll kill me if we delay any longer…”

Trish noticed that mischievous spark in Leone’s eye make its return. 

“He’s a benevolent ruler,” he said in all seriousness, albeit the slightest of smiles betrayed any hopes of giving Trish a real fright. “He might let you go off the hook this time. Might.”

“What about when he finds out I’ve been hugging his man?” Trish giggled. “He’ll smell my perfume on your clothes!” 

“Oh, he’ll just ask you what it’s called, I’m sure!” Leone beamed. “So I better get used to it. Let’s walk to the car now, shall we?”  

He offered his forearm for Trish to hold or link with her own. She would’ve loved another hug, but after having her tear-stricken face glued to and arms wrapped around her most tactually sensitive friend, walking arm in arm sounded just as good.