Work Text:
The Sardinian sun faded behind thick masses of dark storm clouds, dimming the late afternoon. Strong, chilly gusts of wind blew through the coasts, powerful waves of the Tyrrhenian sea crashing in the distance, the only sounds breaking the ominous silence between the two left standing, besides the slow pitter-patter of dripping blood, and Trish’s heavy, tensed breathing.
She crouched on the reddened, blood-splattered ground, shaking intensely, in too much shock and grief to move, let alone speak or cry. A painful lump rose in her throat, but she just barely swallowed it, trying to hold back her tears.
She stared up at Risotto, frighteningly looming above her in the shadows, his face stoic and near expressionless, glowing pitch-black and blood-red eyes cold. Somehow, he decided to spare her from his wrath, letting her escape with her life. The rest - the boss (Diavolo and Doppio both), Buccellati and his group of five - had not been so fortunate, the fearsome powers of Metallica gruesomely killing every single one of them off. Their lifeless, mutilated bodies laid motionless around the two, strewn about the Sardinian cliffs.
It had all happened much too instantaneously for Trish to take in. Everybody she was close to (her father most definitely not being one of them) was dead within what seemed like mere seconds, assassinated without hesitation by Risotto. Now, it was her left on her own, to face the assassin himself, standing all alone.
However, instead of doing anything like summoning Spice Girl and attacking him in retaliation, or cowering and running away from him, she slowly crawled over to him on her knees, uncaring of her legs scraping against the rough, rugged ground, reaching out to cling to his taller form.
“Please,” she begged, tugging at his black, blood-staind sleeve. Risotto shifted his dark gaze down to where she leaned into him, her trembling, crouched form leaning against his long legs. Tears stung the corners of her eyes, on the verge of teeming over, but she blinked them away. “Take me with you. There’s nobody and nowhere else left for me to go to, and I won’t slow you down, so please. It doesn’t matter where you take me, just somewhere far away, anywhere but here.”
Risotto quietly stared at her, blinking slowly, his silver locks rustling in the cold wind. Then, his deep, baritone voice uttered a single, simple word.
“Look.”
“Wh-What?” Trish half-asked, half-stammered in confusion. Her green eyes frantically darted around the cliffs in reference to where he was possibly referring to, trying not to focus too hard on the six bloodied bodies of her protectors, the only people she had known and grown close to in the past few restless days of being guarded and escorted around under Passione’s protection.
Out of the corner of her eye, Trish swore she saw something moving right near where Risotto stood in silence, accompanied by what sounded like around five to six voices speaking all at once in echoing, haunting chants. Eyes focusing up towards him, where the source of the chanting voices trailed from, she froze rigid in fear at the horrors plaguing the tenebrous sky, shivers crawling down her spine, skin bumped with gooseflesh.
“If you truly wish to come with me, then strain your eyes well at the darkness surrounding me, at the world which I live in.”
Surrounding Risotto were eight different dead, mutilated spirits, all disfigured near beyond recognition of the men they perhaps once resembled, bearing horrific, ghastly wounds, hovering unsettlingly close around their capo, haunting his presence.
What firstly caught Trish’s eye was a man whose skin was seared and molten, thickly bubbling and sticking together, a litter of bullet holes dotting his torso. “Capo? Man, what the hell happened?”
A different spirit melted into a mass of nauseating, diseased flesh, thick bursts of infectious pustules blotching his skin, barely even resembling the form of a man. “That must be the boss's daughter…and the boss himself. But how come we’re not here and alive?”
“You let the idea of killing and revenge overtake you, Capo. Look where that got you.” The spirit of another man glared at Risotto coldly with his one open eye, the other bloodied and treaded over. Dried blood and soil clung to his broken form, one leg sickeningly mangled and twisted the wrong way, most of one arm amputated and missing, a bloody stump left in his hollow suit sleeve. Trish suddenly recalled seeing his disfigured corpse - laid next to the train tracks, whose gruesome, unmerciful death had been under Buccellati’s hands.
“W-Why couldn’t y-you s-save us?” stuttered a tearful spirit, waterlogged and diced up in pieces, his broad neck fractured. That man - Trish remembered him too, when he gently placed her down on the grass, before engaging in battle with Buccellati - who murdered him in cold blood with absent mercy.
Some of the spirits didn’t even carry voices. One stared at Risotto coldly, shaking heavily and silently shedding tears, his skin discolored and sickly, as if a venomous poison had intoxicated his body. Another had his hands in tight fists, thick rivers of blood pouring out a wound piercing clean through his throat. Sheer anger burned in his lifeless eyes, a furious, scathing look screaming a thousand words that could not be spoken.
One pair of spirits held each other closely while wavering around their capo, practically connecting at each other’s hips. The shorter one’s skin was deeply discolored into a rotting shade of blue-purple, a filthy cloth gag wedged in his mouth. “That bastard of a Don finally got his damn comeuppance, huh. . .”
The taller of the couple, his body horizontally and precisely severed into thirty-six pieces from head to toe, held his partner tightly. “But not before all of us suffered under his pawns’ hands first.”
Above all their repeating, tormented echoes, Risotto’s deep voice spoke, “You said it doesn’t matter where. This is where, here, at the world of assassination. Those who have met their death hanging between revenge and regret. Those who still cling to the past. Those who failed, swept together here.”
Trish felt her blood run cold, body trembling heavily at the horrifying sights laying before her, Risotto’s powerful words rattling her to her core. Those must have been all the assassins that tried to snatch her from Buccellati. (With the exception of two, who were murdered two years prior, though none of that was to her knowledge.) She had never known how horrifically most of them met their ends, how merciless and unrelenting Buccellati’s group had been in protecting her from them.
An almost comforting warmth suddenly embraced her trembling, crouched form. Risotto’s long, ink-black coat was swept around her like a shadow, as if he was protecting her from the ghosts of his slaughtered team. He stared down at her with piercing, haunting eyes. “If you follow me, this is where you’ll go. If you come with me…the whole world…is an unrelenting, everlasting battlefield.”
Tears spilled from Trish’s wide eyes without her even knowing as she witnessed the hell of the assassin’s world. She wasn’t sure why she was crying now. Out of sudden sympathy for Risotto? Out of woeful mourning, either for her own group, or his? Out of condolences that he, like her, had nobody left in his own life? Out of sheer hopelessness and fear?
The unpleasant chill biting at her body - especially since her outfit covered so little skin - made her aware that his long shadow of a coat no longer embraced her. His back turned to her, he began to depart in slow, echoing steps, speaking one, forthright word - no, perhaps more of an order or command, “Leave.”
Trish stuttered while choking and hiccuping on her tears, “N-No…”
“Go home.”
“No… I don’t- I barely have a home to go to!” She was all alone, left with a home with no loving mother to care for her.
“Go home. This is my battlefield.”
“Nothing good has ever happened to me! I have nothing left in my life!” She sobbed, warm streams of tears leaking down her cheeks, all the misfortunes of her life (most of which occurred just within the past few days before now) playing through her head like some grisly horror show.
Risotto, without ever looking back for a moment, gave her one last, direct, deep-voiced command, “Leave.”
She shouted in desperation, even though she knew it was surely hopeless, “Mister assassin!”
Risotto dissipated wordlessly into the foreboding darkness of dusk, taking the deformed, chanting spirits of his team with him, vanishing just as mysteriously as he had emerged. Trish was left behind alone on the Sardinian cliffside, still crouched and shaking. She did not truly know what these past few days of fear, sadness, and shock were to her.
The dark gray, caliginous clouds began to clear away, a vivid, warm dusk sky now peaking through. The uncomfortable chill that never seemed to disappear was pushed out by the warmth of sunset. The Tyrrhenian sea calmed from ripping, crashing waves to mellow, smooth waters reflecting the breathtaking sky of orange, red, and pink hues.
But the gorgeous evening was by no means a miraculous spectacle that made Trish’s heart leap, like when she gently floated down the Sardinian sky in the softened remains of the airplane’s cockpit after defeating Notorious B.I.G. with her newly-awakened stand. It was savage. Lonely. Still somehow cold. But still such a beautiful sky.
It was like the calm, clear sky after the powerful, dangerous storm blew through.
“Trish.”
Spice Girl’s gently spoken voice startled her silent reflections, her head whipping to the side where her stand hovered right next to her. “Whatever happens from here on out, just remember that I’m always here, right by your side.”
Just hearing those considerate words of her stand awoke something in Trish, a tiny flicker of hope and confidence in her heart amongst all the painful despondency weighing it down. That she was no longer completely alone, in a sense - her stand’s spirit still present and strong, always there for her.
Gradually, she found enough resolve in her to stand up tall and embrace Spice Girl in a close, tender hug - the stand kindly returning the hug - finding comfort in her embracing arms, drawing in a slow, deep breath, more warm tears flowed from the tear ducts of her shut eyes.
The hope beating in her heart persisted, enough for her to carry on with her life. Perhaps she didn’t possess the murderous intent to violently kill and assassinate, like him. But, she could still shout, claw, and fight her way through all the hardships of the forthcoming future, in a harsh, unrelenting world.