Chapter Text
“Leone!” Bruno whispered next to him with enthusiasm. “Leone, look! We’re floating!”
Beside a sleeping Leone, the train that took them from Naples to the jewel of the Veneto region—of the country, even—appeared to float, rail-less, beside or rather on the water. The sea and sky were so evenly matched in blues and pinks that they could only tell where the horizon laid by a thin cluster of buildings, all tan with orange roofs, scattered to form one of Venice’s many satellite islands.
Although clearly in need of more sleep, Leone gasped quietly as the scene began making more sense; colours alone did not impress him much.
“You’re still more beautiful than that though,” he swooned with the semi-conscious sincerity of a drunkard, though of course, at that stage, completely free from the fiendish clutches of alcohol.
“Who said it was a competition?” Bruno laughed, amused but frankly quite touched that Leone’s first thought after waking up to an extraordinary sunset was about his allegedly superior beauty. He was heartbroken to have to wake Leone from what was apparently a great sleep, which was rare enough in their own bed, therefore practically mythological on a train—but after four and a half hours of hills and trees, to be hovering on water only meant that they were soon alighting at Venezia Santa Lucia, the same station from almost exactly five years ago to the date.
“My love, we’re nearly there.”
Bruno had Leone in a relaxed but steady grip, as good a grip as the spacious leather seats of first class with those thick armrests allowed, and smooched him noisily, intermittently—on the cheek, the jaw, the temple, the shoulder, the side of his head—with the hopes that this would coax him fully into the waking world.
“Please forgive me for waking you up—you did look really comfortable,” Bruno pleaded, really sounding as though he’d done something to offend him.
“You can make it up to me, if you want,” suggested Leone, smiling with eyes closed as if dreaming of that something right then.
“If you don’t pass out before we even get ready to go get dinner then yeah, let’s christen the bed, sleepyhead.”
Bruno gave Leone one more kiss before the train attendant that he’d spotted through the sliding door could gawk at their suddenly public display of affection.
Freed from Bruno’s arms, Leone didn’t make any efforts to prepare his exit from the train, instead curling up closer against the window.
“Why the fuck is it always on trains where I actually manage to get some sleep,” he groaned.
“These are the cool new high-speed ones, so I wonder if that has to do with it?” Bruno wondered. “The one we rode from Pisa was a high-speed one, too—”
“Don’t give too much credit to the train itself for that occasion,” Leone scoffed bitterly, ‘resting his eyes’ in a truer way than the misleading turn of phrase would usually suggest. “If anything, Don Coglione can take the credit for that.”
Bruno felt like his heart had untethered itself and fallen right into the pit of his stomach as he remembered the occasion, pressing his lips as though anticipating physical pain: it had been a hideously hot day in Pisa, which had made the transition from the clinical tundra of the neurology ward all the more aggressive. It made for, now that he thought about it, a pretty good analogy for how Leone experienced some changes in his life. That day had begun with a bloodied tongue and a bad dream—no doubt a result of Leone’s brain attempting to do some housekeeping from the day before, an electric storm breaking every window in the brain-house and thrashing the place before leaving a trail of exposed memories in its wake—and in the middle, right before the train ride that Leone referred to, an unpleasant phone call with their child-boss, not even twenty-one at the present time, speaking every unkind impression that Leone already had of himself into existence. Of course there’d be more than enough ensuing exhaustion to pass out for the remainder of it.
“What?”
Leone interrupted what had been over a minute in unexpected silence.
“Oh, I’m sorry I called him that again. I shouldn’t say co…ne in public.”
Bruno shook his head. “No, no, it’s not that, though not saying co…ne in public would be a good habit to practice,” he cautioned with a smile. Being honest with himself, he hadn’t realised that he’d left Leone without a reply for so long; he’d previously told him he had no qualms with the nickname he had for Giorno, so Leone must’ve wondered what the reason for his sudden silence was.
“I was just wondering if you could hear the electricity in a moving train—you know, since a train seems a lot louder to me than, say, a hotel bedroom.”
Leone opened his mouth to answer, but that was it. The question turned out to require a bit more thought than what he’d anticipated. He pushed up his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes—he had to be fully awake to think through it.
“Actually, I don’t think I can.” He seemed shocked with himself as the words left his mouth. “Certainly there’s a sound, but I think it all combines into the low whoosh we hear from the train moving. Now, it’s funny you’ve specified if I hear it in a moving train, because if it suddenly stopped and everyone fell silent, I think I would hear it.”
The issue Leone had with the sound of electricity seemed to have more layers to it than Bruno, too, could gauge as an outsider.
Of course he wouldn’t hear it in a moving train, you idiot!
It seemed to have been a stimulating enough question for Leone himself; nevertheless, Bruno continued to feel stupid for asking, for not making an obvious connection. Maybe he’d feel less stupid if he actually knew what it was like to hear electricity at all, he wondered before Leone thankfully snapped him out of that cognitive trap:
“Do you have any Pocket Coffee left?”
If Leone had to choose a maximum of three things to love Italy for, it would be its opera, its flour-and-tomato-based foods, and Pocket Coffee, those trusty little sleeves of chocolates filled with a liquid core of espresso, a near-constant presence at shop tills until summer temperatures threaten to dissolve them into gloopy messes. By April, Bruno already began to notice them less frequently, so for a few years he’d made sure to stockpile them in his void, always within reach and sufficiently chilly.
“Of course. Just the one?”
“Mm.”
Turning his head to check the metaphorical coast was all clear, Bruno motioned his hand over his bag as though opening a zipper that revealed swirls of black and blue, while the actual opening of his bag remained zipped shut. After rummaging in his void exactly as he normally would, he fished out a little cube wrapped in red and black, and threw it into Leone’s eager hands. The authentic scent of coffee surrounded the couple no sooner than Leone bit into it and, disconcerting though it was given that it rose with none of the warmth of a freshly-brewed cup, brought a smile to Bruno’s face.
“You really like those things, don’t you?”
A water taxi took them home—they figured the luxury was entirely justified after the events of 2001, and the distance from Santa Lucia to the hotel was not so much that money might as well have fallen into the water.
“Did you sleep well?”
Leone’s voice had a lightheartedness to it that seemed almost deceptive for a chronic insomniac.
The couple sat under a splendidly high sixteenth century ceiling, so ornate and well conserved that Leone, aged twenty-six, may as well have been a child in a toy shop with the way his eyes scanned every square inch of stucco.
“Hmmm—I don’t know,” Bruno whined, himself sounding almost pained. He looked longingly towards the breakfast lady that prepared their coffees at the back of the room.
“My stomach is kind of in knots this morning.”
Leone began stretching out an arm to give Bruno a sympathetic caress when the breakfast lady placed their drinks on the table, the surprise of it making Bruno jump slightly in his seat—“it’s only coffee, you know!” she remarked to his great embarrassment.
“I’ll go first; I’m fucking starving,” Leone said as he stood up and scanned the buffet display. “Shall I bring you anything?”
Stirring the froth atop his coffee, Bruno seemed not to hear. The question was, in any case, more of an announcement than a request: Leone was not going to let him forgo his own advice.
He returned to the table with two ample plates, both filled to the brim with food: slices of brown toast, scrambled eggs and salmon; some kind of tightly-packed omelette with ham and vegetables tucked in its centre; tomatoes and small balls of burrata almost too cute to eat; bananas in a smaller bowl standing on the plates beside pots of yoghurt and honey; and, of course, sweet treats aplenty.
Bruno’s eyes widened to just about the same size of the plates. “You’re not going to eat all that, are you?!”
“Of course not,” Leone replied flatly. “And you don’t have to, either; I just selected a few things you might want.”
Bruno shrank in his seat. “Oh—so that’s for me.”
“Well, whatever you want of it is yours.”
“Ah, don’t worry about me, cucciolo, I really think I’m too nervous to—”
Stony-faced, Leone remained standing before Bruno with both plates in his hands as if frozen.
“You need to eat. Remember that time right after the mission to find-slash-kill the boss when I got really weird about food?”
“Leone, this is nothing like it; I’m just feeling a bit—”
“You told me I had to eat even a little bit every day; that I had to, even if—especially if—it got really tough.”
Bruno thought of insisting that this really, really wasn’t like that, that there was no scope at the time to say that one could skimp on a meal on the occasional day that anxiety or grief did not allow for one—but getting Leone to see a strongly held idea in shades of grey was an uphill task at the best of times, and if it concerned Bruno’s wellbeing, he was going to remain unflinching no matter what.
In the time that it took him to conclude that yes, maybe this time Leone’s hard-headedness could be of use to him, he had already set both plates on each of their sides, and was pointing a long index finger at the bread.
“So: carbohydrates, because your body and brain run on them, and we’re going to be walking a lot in this city. Protein: I don’t think I need to explain why. Vitamin C: because you’re the one who keeps warning me about scurvy. And sugar”—he pointed at the chocolate paste sticking out of the cornetto—“because it makes you happy. And that’s essential, particularly on a day like this.”
Mouth slightly agape by the end of Leone’s spiel, Bruno stared up towards him pitifully—impressed, grateful, but ashamed of himself for needing to be the recipient of such a basic lesson in self-preservation.
“…you’re totally right,” he admitted, glancing up at him like a child caught stealing while being well aware that nothing escapes Leone’s eye. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright. It’s not really something you need to apologise for.”
From a pocket of his leather jacket, Leone pulled out a notebook and opened it to a page with timetables so straightly written it could’ve been easily mistaken for a printout.
“From here, we will need to walk to the San Zaccaria stop to take the vaporetto to the church. It’s a pretty straightforward walk.”
He took a sip of his coffee before turning to an inner pocket of the notebook sandwiched between the final page and the back cover. “Here, take a look—it looks like we’re far, but we really aren’t. Sixteen to seventeen minutes, give or take.”
Bruno saw the beginning and end of the route that Leone’s fingers pointed at without really doing the imaginary walk to connect them—he decided he’ll just let his handsome tour guide take the lead for as long as he kept hearing his heart rattling in his throat.
“Ah, I see…!” he lied. “You’d been to Venice before we… you know… haven’t you?”
“Yeah.”
Beneath the pre-coffee poker face—a different one from his usual poker face, which never went away before completely draining out the cup—Bruno could see the ghost of a past feeling cloud the relative excitement of being in Venice.
“I came here one summer with my family; it was really hot and crowded, and the Accademia happened to have been closed on that particular day of the week. I absconded,” he recalled flatly, as usual, but concealing a sigh into his coffee cup. “I ran and ran and ran until I found a quiet street, and… jumped in the water.”
Bruno tried not to wince.
“I got to ride a police boat on the way back, which was cool,” Leone smiled.
Almost seven years later, Bruno still didn’t know how to react when Leone told a harrowing personal anecdote that he’d nonetheless finish on a fun note. Was it meant to lessen the severity of what was previously told? Was he meant to laugh along with him, or feel pity all over?
In other people, such an abrupt change of mood would have given Bruno reason to suspect they perhaps wanted a specific reaction out of him—but this was Leone, and he processed everything a little differently, then told it exactly as it was. And considering the distress both before and—he was sure—after, a private trip with the wind brushing against his too-warm skin didn’t sound half bad.
“Well”—Bruno gave himself a fraction of a second more to think—“hopefully the free boat trip compensated for the missed opportunity then, and we can go to the Accademia now.”
“Not now,” Leone, suddenly sitting up straighter, corrected him. “Today’s for getting all the tough stuff dealt with. Tomorrow’s for all the fun stuff.”
“I know, I know; that’s what I meant—”
“Are you gonna eat that bit of prosciutto over there? We’re running a bit late, and I did overfill your plates a bit.” Bruno turned his head and, like a cat left unsupervised, Leone gleefully plucked the prosciutto he’d been eyeing all along. “We can compensate with gelato on the way to the ferry—”
“Nah!” With a playful roll of his eyes Bruno leant back on the chair, spent from the breakfast banquet enforced by his worried partner. “I might throw up if I have anything other than a cigarette!”
“I thought you were worried about your teeth not being white enough?”
Bruno raised a pinched hand to Leone’s eye level. “It’s one anxiety cigarette, Leone. One.”
Leone had been exactly right: it had been seventeen minutes from their hotel on the opposite side of the Accademia to the southeast of the island, where “the” San Zaccaria stop split into four piers spread across the waterfront. To Bruno’s judgement, he’d handled the confusing, snaking little streets like he’d always lived there, or at least like he’d arrived long before and had taken his time to develop the muscle memory to walk mapless.
He himself couldn’t have been of any help: anxiety ate away at his brain to the point where he wasn’t sure which ways were left and right anymore, and he simply walked along, uncharacteristically quiet, to the gentle steer of Leone’s hand around his waist. The gesture felt especially reassuring on a day where he didn’t discount the possibility of fainting, of stepping foot where he should’ve died shocking him into emotional overload.
Their visual richness of their surroundings made for a good distraction while the events of his previous time in Venice kept replaying in his head, but it seemed to him that Leone wasn’t taking them in as much as he’d anticipated—his eyes appeared fixed on what lied straight ahead, if anything; he walked as determinedly to go to the church and get it over with as he himself was. Maybe there was something he wasn’t letting on, but Bruno preferred to think it was just the crowds beginning to swarm into San Marco that were getting to him.
Being honest with himself, Bruno enjoyed the walk to the pier more than he dreaded it—especially when the streets were narrower, or a large group of tourists tried to walk in their direction, and Leone’s steady hand tightened its grip on his waist and pulled him closer. He did only ever feel at ease with Leone, too, and if anything good came out of revisiting the sites from their mission, it would be standing again where those words were said, and telling Leone that the sentiment went both ways.