Chapter Text
Giorno Giovanna has a photo of his father—not his stepfather, his real father, or at least his biological one—which he keeps in his wallet. He does not get let his wallet get stolen.
It’s the only picture of his father that he has: a dark picture, his father’s face is almost entirely obscured, his body being turned away. The photo is essentially of his back, bare and muscular, a star birthmark on his shoulder just like Giorno’s. His hair is wild and blond, just like Giorno’s became one day. It was that day Giorno’s hair changed that his mother had given him the picture, or more accurately she’d shown it to him as an explanation, and he’d requested to keep it, and she hadn’t refused him.
Nobody refuses him, anymore—not after that gangster he’d saved had pulled all those strings in the shadows and made it so that people are forced to respect him.
It doesn’t bother him that the respect was forced. In fact, he likes it. Humans as a species are inherently base, shallow, greedy and cruel; it’s why the police were needed, to force people to behave themselves and act civilized, to regulate areas of public life; it’s why the gangs are needed, to keep the police from overstepping their boundaries, and to regulate areas of private life that the police can’t reach.
It’s why Giorno has always wanted to be one of those people pulling strings from the shadows, to force people to behave, to be kind to and respect each other. They wouldn’t do those things if they weren’t coerced into it.
The only problem that Giorno has ever had with the gangs is that they don’t go far enough.
Unlike other humans, he is not unnecessarily cruel. But nothing about him is tender.
Giorno had a dream: to join a gang, work himself up the ladder of hierarchy, and eventually become the boss so that he’d have the power to regulate society the way it should be regulated. People wouldn’t just be forced to be kind to and respect each other, they also wouldn’t be allowed to profit from things that harmed others, like selling drugs. Drugs, like cruelty and disrespect, were a weakness of humanity that should be forcibly done away with.
Giorno had always known that nobody but him would ever be able to do that; ever since he realized the way people were forced to respect him, he’d always believed in his ideals, and ever since his mother told him about the power, charisma and intelligence that had belonged to his father—the fact that he hadn’t been human but something more, something greater—Giorno had always been confident in his abilities: those traits of that had always made him different from other humans, that as a child he’d thought made him the scum of the earth but that the gangster had made him realize made him better; those traits that, upon learning about his father, he then realized were not just ideals but were truly his by blood. Not just dreams, but a physical fact of his existence.
Becoming the boss of Passione, even at the “tender” age of fifteen, neither surprises nor intimidates him. It’s exactly what he’s always wanted.
Unlike other humans, he is not unnecessarily cruel. But nothing about him is tender.
Being one of the most powerful men in the world is exactly what he knows he was born to be.
From the moment he’d made his first moves to join Passione, Giorno had always placed complete confidence in himself.
It was through Bruno Buccellati and his team, though, that Giorno learned to place confidence in others.
Oh, he’d learned to trust others, of course, from the stranger he’d saved and who had saved him in return, but that relationship had been from a distance—it was entirely different to place confidence not in an idol figure, but a human being that was standing right next to you with all their weaknesses and human flaws on full display.
But through Bruno Buccellati and his team, Giorno learned how to do just that.
Nothing about him is tender; but unlike other humans, he is not unnecessarily cruel.
When nobody is looking—he’s The Boss of the most powerful gang in Italy, after all, The Boss of one of the most powerful gangs in the world, and he has appearances to maintain—the faith in other human beings that Bruno Buccellati and his team taught him is something that still makes Giorno smile.