Chapter Text
As the hours passed on, standing behind the solid wooden bar that took residence in your place of employment, you found yourself consistently looking out the deeply tinted front windows. Patterned with a criss-cross formation and stained deep greens and reds, there wasn’t much visibility, just enough to catch the last inklings of sun before the bright Italian sun set over Naples, and yet still you spared a glance every so often. Often enough that you caught yourself wistfully daydreaming of life outside of the bar.
It wasn’t like you were technically trapped here, it was your job, you came here on your own free will, but on shifts like this one, where it was too early for any real business but late enough for you to wish you were elsewhere, you couldn’t help but dream of spending your evening in a different way.
You never left the building much even outside of your nightly shifts manning the bar, with the apartment directly above the commercial downstairs being rented to you for a decent discount from the owners of the bar, maybe that fact was just getting to you tonight. Catching yourself once more staring aimlessly out the window while polishing a couple of lager mugs, you mentally chastised yourself for letting your mind wander. You sighed and busied yourself in your menial task, head buried in concentration as you scrubbed a particularly persistent smudge.
It was your deep concentration on the mug in your hands that led you to completely miss the uniformed stranger walk past the tinted windows and enter through the heavy and perpetually stuck wooden door that led into the bar.
Embarrassingly startled from your putzing behind the bar, you flushed minutely and looked up to welcome a new patron to your establishment when you were met face to chest with a blue collared and badge decorated man.
“I’d ask you what I can get you but I assume you’re not drinking on the job?” You lightly joked with the police officer, finally looking upwards to meet the surprisingly young face behind the tall police officer that had strolled into the establishment. His youth was surprising, he couldn’t have been more than 18, but the more surprising fact elucidated when you searched his face was the lavender lipstick that adorned his plump lips.
“Heh, unfortunately my visit isn’t one of pleasure,” the officer awkwardly responded, looking anywhere but at you as he surveyed the dim lit room surrounding him. “I’m actually here to ask some questions…if your boss is around?”
“Eh, you don’t look like much of a drinker anyways babyface, and sorry boss man is out at the moment, but anything you need to ask him you can ask me,” you responded, delighting in the blush that illuminated the officer’s high cheekbones as finally met your gaze with wide eyes.
“Hrmph, well I suppose you might be of some help with these questions,” the officer acquiesced and you swore you heard his mumble “although I’m almost positive it’s not protocol...
“Anyway, I’m officer Abbacchio,” the officer, Abbacchio, pointed with large but slender hands toward the embroidered name over the flap of his right breast pocket, “and I’m here to follow up on some supposed gang activity in your alleyway that we got a call for last night.”
God, how you somehow forgot that you had called the cops last night alluded you but now the memories are all coming back. Maybe time to cut back on the free drinks while working, you thought as you remembered there being a fight in the back alley that you had managed to fend off before a peculiar dressed man clubbed the other over the head with a shovel. You weren’t an idiot, and living in Naples as long as you have you recognized that by the peculiar weapon and choice of dress, that this dude was affiliated with one of the gangs that ruled the area but when you called the police after the fact to alert them, you had left the phone call feeling very much displeased with the current italian law enforcement.
“Oh, yeah, that was me who called, didn’t think they’d actually send someone down here with how they talked to me,” you muttered, huffing as you picked up another mug and continued your task of polishing.
“I sincerely apologize for any unprofessional conduct on behalf of my colleagues, I’ve been trying to get them to overhaul the operator training but no such luck,” Abbacchio laughed lightly towards the end of his sentence, a deep pleasing sound. His blush seemed to further as he took on the duty of apologizing for the organization that made up the Naples police department. He was cute in a way, all bright-eyed and bushy tailed, obviously trying much too hard at his job.
“It’s alright kid, don’t sweat it, I’m just glad someone got sent down here, even if you’re about half a day late.”
“Of course, it’s my pleas- wait… kid?” Abbacchio suddenly sported a scowl on his pale and undoubtedly attractive face. “Come on, you can’t be that much older than me, how am I a kid?”
Abbacchio’s resistance to the nickname struck you as cute, and a pleasant distraction from thinking about the mafia taking over your city so you decided to see how much farther you could push his buttons.
“Hmm, I don’t know you look pretty young to me, what are you a part of the police officers of tomorrow ?” You giggled as he looked at you even more incredulously as you teased him further. “How old are you anyways?”
“I’ll have you know that I am nineteen, a legal adult mind you, old enough to be a police officer…” Abbacchio trailed off feeling suddenly like a little kid trying to buy cigarettes for the first time and being denied for his age. “What about you, you don’t look ancient, how old are you?”
“Ah, how rude, you never ask a lady her age,” you smirked as his fighting spirit drained from his face and his scowl melted into an expression of meek embarrassment, “all you need to know is I’m older than you, kid.” It definitely wasn’t necessary to include the moniker again but you couldn't help yourself but bristle with laughter when his face snapped right back to that signature scowl.
“Ignoring that for now,” Abbacchio rolled his eyes and pulled out a small note pad and golf pencil from his utility belt, “One thing I do need to know is your name.”
You smiled, and looked down at the mug in your hands, realizing your little game of poking the bear was over and told him your name. You saw him quickly and messily scratch it down into his notepad and then look back up to you with a smirk decorating his painted lips.
“Pretty name, signora,” Abbacchio teased, and you narrowed your eyes on him. Where did this junior police officer get off on calling you an old lady? “So, you said you were the one to call last night?”
“Yep…” you responded, not really paying attention to the rest of his questioning, really just keeping one ear out while your eyes stalked over him. He was big, bigger than most of the men that came in here at least, and not in an overweight way either, he was just built. Even under the layers of clothing that made up his uniform, you could make out muscle definition and you wondered to yourself what he would look like with nothing but the hat on.
Catching yourself lusting over the police officer in front of you right in the middle of serious questioning about gang affiliations made you flush a deep red, feeling heat move freely to your face and lightly between your thighs. Jesus Christ what is with me, why am I getting myself hot and heavy over some random police officer? You questioned yourself as you forced your eyes to trail up from where they had been locked on his belt up towards his face, noting the blush that filled his cheeks when he made eye contact with you for the first time during his questioning. Well you know what they say, about a man in uniform…
“Signora?” Abbacchio snapped his fingers in your face and you felt yourself snap back from your uncalled for lustful thoughts back to the conversation at hand. “You’re sure that's all you remember about the events of last night?”
“Uh- ahem, yeah. That’s the jist of it, they were both gone by the time I thought to call the cops and let them, well I guess you, know,” you now were avoiding eye contact with Abbacchio like his eyes would set you ablaze, not willing to risk getting caught drooling over the officer who you had just established was much younger than you.
“Okay…” Abbacchio lowered his head to your level, catching your eye as your breath hitched in your throat upon eye contact. “Well, um, here’s my card if you remember anything else that might be of importance to the investigation,” he stood back to his full stature, which jesus christ was tall, and fished out a card with his phone number, full name, and badge number engraved on the front and held it out to you.
You stared for a second at his long fingers that held the outstretched card and finally snapped yourself into movement, snatching the card probably too eagerly that strictly necessary. You inspected it lightly, tracing a finger along the edge of the cardstock paper.
“Say, Leone, pretty forward to give a girl your number upon first meeting, you trying to make a move on me?”
The blush that decorated Abbacchio’s face was the deepest you’d seen yet in the teasing conversation you’d had together thus far. He quickly looked away from you and snatched the hand that had been floating in the air between you to come up behind his head and scratch the back of his neck, a gesture of embarrassment.
“Uh, oh, um not at all, I apologize if I came across that way, that would be extremely unprofessional of me, since, heh, I am at work right now, and so are you… uh, sorry?” Leone, as you had read from the aforementioned card, stumbled over his words as he continued to look anywhere else but as you stood behind the bar.
“Shame…it pays to be unprofessional every once and a while, y’know?” You leaned forward onto the bar, making sure to push your cleavage together ever so slightly, and resting your chin upon the hand still holding the card.
All of the sudden Abbacchio’s eyes darted right back to yours, wide and unbelieving. You caught his eyes slipping downwards ever so slightly and you knew your overt display of your body was not in vain. Just as quick as he looked down towards your pronounced breasts, Leone’s eyes shot back up to your eyes, imperceptibly wider as he finally grasped what you had implied with your statement.
“Wait- what do you mean by tha-”
“I’ll be sure to call you if I think of anything else, officer.”
Abbacchio stared at you in bewilderment, and then after a moment his expression shifted to a shy smile, a good look on him you decided as he slowly backtracked toward the door.
“Uh, yeah, be sure to do that…” he lightly bumped into the back of a booth as he neared the exit and almost apologized to it before realizing it was in fact an inanimate object. You chuckled under your breath at his awkwardness as he finally shoved the door open and sent one last look back at you, still standing in the same spot behind the bar. You waved flirtatiously and he quickly looked away smiling with a bright blush still decorating his face as he finally left the bar.
If you happened to look out the window one more time that night, it was to catch a look at his backside as he stalked away from your establishment and into his patrol car.
---
It had been about a month since your first interaction with Officer Abbacchio and by this point, you were on a first name basis. Leone, as he corrected you several times when you referred to him by his title, and you had gotten to know each other quite a bit over phone calls and text messages although more over the phone because Leone refused to learn how to properly text on his little blackberry.
You were honestly shocked when you had actually ended up calling him for the first time, usually you were much more used to letting others do the chasing, but something about the tall yet naive officer refused to let him leave your mind. After three nights of forcing yourself to think of something else as you pleased yourself before bed, you decided enough was enough, and that if you got to know him better you probably wouldn’t be as infatuated as you currently were with the gray haired man.
So you called him, no biggie, you stressed to yourself as the dial tone rang in your ear, eyes staring unseeing out into the alleyway behind your building on your smoke break. The cigarette you had pulled from the carton sat lit and untouched as you instead started to bite your badly manicured nails in anticipation. Oh, god what if he thinks I’m actually calling about the crime, I don't think I can admit to him the real reason I’m calling. You thought to yourself right as the dial tone ended and you heard a sigh and a “Yes?” from your small flip phone.
“Uh, hi,” you reintroduced yourself over the phone, cringing when your voice cracked ever so slightly over the first syllable of your name. You were almost tempted to hang up right then and there, to avoid any more embarrassing flaws in your speech when you heard a choking noise from Leone.
“Fuck,” you heard more coughing as Abbacchio cursed into the phone, the gruff voice was unmistakably his even through the phone which had a tendency to distort everything to a tinny murmur. “Hi, hey sorry, you caught me off guard, I thought you were my grandmother.”
“I know you joke that I’m old but I can’t sound that elderly,” you replied in fake exasperation, hoping that the tone carried over the phone. Abbacchio coughed out a small laugh as you heard shuffling on his end.
“Oh, god no you sound great, erm I mean, it’s just my nona has been calling my work phone a lot lately because I may have been neglecting her other calls, and I have no idea why I am telling you all of this… uh was there anything you remembered about the…” He shuffled some more, it became apparent that he was shuffling papers and you imagined him hunched over a tiny desk in the middle of the police precinct trying to avoid calls from his grandma, a fond smile creeping onto your face. “Sorry, about the gang activity in your alleyway?”
“Oh, yeah um no, lucky enough those guys haven’t showed their faces around here since I saw them the night before you came to check up on me, or uh the bar,” you cursed yourself for coming across as weird right of the get go with this dude, promptly taking a hard drag from the half forgotten cigarette still lit in your hand. “No I was just on my smoke break out in the alley and thought, hey I wonder what's going on with that junior police officer that came to visit.”
“Jeez, you are never gonna let go of the fact that I’m younger than you, are you? I swear on the great city of Naples I am a real police officer, no junior involved,” Abbacchio sighed again but this time there was a hint of humor in it, as you heard him shift backward in his chair, getting more comfortable.
“Dang, I hoped that the junior would be involved at least a little bit, maybe next time,” you smirked and then chuckled as Leone sputtered on the other end of the line, obviously not expecting a dick joke this early on in the conversation.
“Oh god, was that a dick joke? And here I took you for a respectable woman,” Leone crossed his legs and let his head hang back on the desk chair as he continued your easy flirtatious banter. Even with the tinny impersonal quality to his voice from over the phone, you felt yourself bristle with excitement at where this conversation could go, now that he was playing along with your advances.
“I’m sure you could make a respectable woman out of me if you tried hard enough,” you replied, prompting him to take it the one step further you wanted him to so desperately. So much for getting to know him so you could get over your little crush, now you were ramping him up to ask you on a date. “And about respectability, are you sure you should be having this conversation on the clock, officer?”
“Huh, shit I actually really shouldn’t be having this conversation now, my partner is already practically breathing down my neck trying to hear who I’m talking to,” Abbacchio shifted forwards, moving deliberately out of ear shot of his nosey partner one desk away. “Here, I’ll give you my cell number so we can continue this conversation in a much more unprofessional setting?”
“Finally picking up my hints, huh kid?” You chuckled as you felt him sigh again, more dramatically this time, at your teasing. “Let me grab something to write it down on, one sec.”
You frantically pressed the door into the bar from the alley open and grabbed a beer napkin and a pen to scrawl down the digits Abbacchio recited over the phone, smiling when you had the full number written down with a little heart at the end.
“Alright, I’ll text you then, talk to you when you are officially off the clock, Abbacchio,” you smiled to yourself, facing away from the bar so that none of the patrons would see the light coloring on your cheeks.
“Call me Leone, and… I look forward to it.”
“Alright, talk to you later then,” you replied, giddiness coloring your tone.
“Until then,” Abbacchio- no- Leone replied and then you heard the phone click to signify the end of the call.
Since that point, you two had been chatting near constantly. Quick texts between duties at each of your jobs, quick good mornings and goodnights that came after long conversations that extended deep into the night and early morning.
You’d learned a lot about Leone too, over the past three weeks of daily conversation. Like that his hair was naturally gray and that he’d started to gray back in high school, or that his grandmother raised him since he was nine when his mother had passed away, and that he very much liked his lipstick no matter how much the guys at the station made fun of him for it. He was such a character, entertaining to talk to for hours, and yet still he seemed like such a normal man, which seemed increasingly difficult to find in Naples as of late. You’d even ended up telling your friends about your new friend who you’d been texting into the wee hours of the morning.
Honestly, you probably should’ve known things were going too well. Nothing gold can stay, and Abbacchio was glittering gold in the sea of meaningless gray that was your life trudging up and down the stairs to the bar and back home.
All was perfect, until it wasn’t, until one day three weeks into whatever talking stage you guys had been forming abruptly ended. All of the sudden it was radio silence, all text messages sent to Abbacchio’s phone suddenly read as undelivered, and any calls gave you the failed error message on your flip phone’s tiny illuminated screen. You’d even tried calling the work phone after digging up the card that had been stashed in some jeans you hadn’t worn in a while but when it connected you were met with someone who was very much not Leone.
Months went by with no contact, you had no way of knowing if he was dead or alive, which was concerning to say the least. He didn’t seem like he was in any trouble when you had talked last. You had your last messages to each other burned into your brain from how many times you had stared at the text screen hoping that he would suddenly reply with an explanation for his sudden absence.
If you were being completely honest, you were probably more worried than you had any right to be, you had talked in person once, and who knows maybe those three weeks of getting to know each other wasn’t working for him so he ghosted you. You had been through this explanation in your brain more times than you could count, but it didn’t explain his lack of presence at his place of work. The whole thing just did not add up in your brain and after 2 months of mind wandering and slight tries at contact with a man who seemingly dropped off the face of the planet, you started to see him.
At first you thought you were really losing it this time, you had always been fairly lucid as a person but with the amount you had been partaking in free drinks at work lately, maybe hallucinations were just a new way your drunk mind was trying to deceive you. But then, you caught other people also looking in the same direction you’d been seeing flashes of gray-white hair, and black clothing, which made you think maybe this figure was real, and you were wishfully thinking it was the missing man you’d gotten yourself obsessed with.
Then one night, you were taking your smoke break outside, hiding from the rain in the little awning that covered the door to the alleyway connected to the bar , when in the blink of an eye a gray haired and black clad man stumbled face first into a puddle right at your feet.
Immediately your reaction was to scoff because this thoughtless stranger had just splashed dirty puddle water all over your legs and you still had at least half an hour left of your shift, but then you heard the soft sobbing coming from below.
All at once something clicked in your less than sober brain, white-gray disheveled hair, dripping tight black clothing, and when he looked up towards you, the lavender-lemonade eyes devoid of any of their old brightness rimmed red and black, and you gasped in recognition.
“Leone?”
All you got in response was the tiniest bit of recognition sparking behind his sullen eyes and then an even louder yet still weak sob as he let his face fall back into the gray puddle beneath him, trying to drown himself both literally and figuratively in self loathing.
“Oh, god, Jesus kid, what happened to you?” You quickly dropped your cigarette off to the side and squatted down to pull him up from his drunken drowning by his armpits and onto the dry stoop that led into the bar. You didn’t care anymore that his sopping wet and shaking body was drenching your frontside as you pulled his back to your chest far too easily for a man of his size and put a hand to his forehead.
I was right to worry after all, you thought to yourself as he tried to squirm away from your nurturing and concerned touch. He was burning up, despite his desperate shivering from the cold of the rain.
He grunted impolitely as he tried to move away from you, tears steadily dirtying his already severely smudged eyeliner, but you clamped your arm across his broad chest harshly, preventing him from moving away from you.
“Hey, where are you going? Come on, let's get you inside and dried off?” You were completely brought back to soberness at the gravity of the situation, trying to wrangle all 6’2 of the drunk and sick man in front of you.
“Mmm, no, I don’t deserve it, just let me die out here,” Abbacchio grunted out in a slurred frenzy, as he weakly at your arm, trying to put himself back face down in the gray water puddle that his feet were currently submerged in. Your heart broke at the sentiment expressed even in his drunken stupor. What on earth had happened to the bright-eyed boy you knew, the one who wanted to overhaul the police department, the one who bid you goodmorning and goodnight every day for three weeks?
“Come on, work with me here, let me dry you off and clean you up and if you still want to come out here and drown yourself in a puddle I won’t stop you, how about that?” You replied, trying to determine what would best get him to work with you to get him inside and up to your apartment.
He whined weakly, tears welling up with more strength ,but as you hooked your forearms under his armpits and struggled to stand up with his extra weight, he helped you, pushing up with weak legs and leaning backwards into you. As much as you were initially attracted to his large stature, right now you couldn’t help but wish he was pocket-sized to make your job of getting him inside and upstairs much easier.
“Alright up we go, come on kid, inside,” You leaned backwards and pushed the door open with your back, stumbling with Abbacchio’s extra weight into the main room of the bar. Your co-bartender Percy stared at you bewildered as you slowly dragged Abbacchio who at this point was closer to blacked out than conscious, away from the bar and towards the stairs that connected to your apartment. “Percy, I need you to cover me for the rest of my shift, yeah? As you can see, I have a bit of a situation to deal with here.”
“Dio, mio, at least let me help get him upstairs,” Percy quickly hushed the bar patrons who whined at him leaving in the middle of pouring more pints and rushed over to grab Abbacchio’s legs and help you up the stairs with the dead weight that was the former police officer. “Mind telling me who this is and why we are dragging him up to your apartment unconscious?”
“Remember a couple of months ago when I was talking about that police officer guy I was talking to?” Percy’s eyes widened as he looked back down at the limp Abbacchio in their arms. “Well when he ghosted me, turns out it wasn’t just me,” you laughed out with no humor in your voice.
“Damn, okay, here lift him a little higher over the last step and then you can unlock the door,” Percy asked no further questions and you silently thanked him for it as you sat Abbacchio on his ass on the top step, leaning fully against Percy who grimaced at his smell and wetness. “You sure know how to pick ‘em, eh cara?”
You rolled your eyes at his teasing and shoved the door open, turning back around to lug Leone into your apartment, shooing Percy away once you were both safely inside and laying on the ground of the entryway. Percy flapped his hands at you and closed the door behind him as he left back downstairs to the bar.
Staring up at the ceiling for a moment you questioned what exactly you were doing before getting back up and going to your bathroom, running the water to warm it up and then coming back to see Leone, now awake, laying in the same spot you left him staring up at the ceiling.
“About how lucid are you right now?” you asked, a hand on your hip as you peeled your now soaked tank top over your head, leaving you in wet jeans and a bra.
“Too lucid,” Abbacchio responded with a groan, yet sounding much less slurred and broken than before. His voice was still weak and tired, and you grimaced at his apparent pain.
“No such thing, can you stand?” you asked again, trying to move away from pity and instead trying to be active, getting him cleaned off and hopefully getting his fever down. He closed his eyes with a scowl and moved his limbs in such a way that it looked like he was swimming through liquid cement before giving up and flapping his arms and legs back down onto the ground with a thump. “Noted, then you’ll just have to take a bath instead.”
“Why are you doing this?” Leone asked in a pitiful voice, soft and breaking every other syllable.
“Come on, up lets go, there's a warm bath waiting for you just two rooms over, but you gotta help me cause you are a whole lot of man for me to carry all on my own,” you ignored his question in favor of enacting your plan, slowly you hooked your arms under his again and he helped you stand him up. Propped against you, you walked him like a puppet into the bathroom, moving one leg then the next, before plopping him onto the toilet seat.
As delicately as you can you start to unlace the purple strings holding his long dark coat together, the shoulders of the stiff garment slowly loosening and finally dropping enough that you could pull his arms out of the long dark sleeves. You noticed a tattoo on his forearm, some roman numerals you didn't immediately recognize, and you were suddenly faced with the fact that you were undressing him in your apartment, but in a way you never could have or would have wanted to imagine.
As you slowly started stripping him of the rest of his sopping wet clothing, dropping them in the laundry basket you had in the corner of the bathroom to be dealt with later, you heard sniffling come from him. His head was buried almost between his knees as he sat in just his wet socks on the toilet seat, his hair just long enough now that it obscured his eyes but failed to hide his quivering lip.
You quickly put the tub stopper in the drain when you determined the water was warm enough and before you could stand up again to try and give him any privacy in this already violating situation, he quickly outstretched his arms and trapped you against himself.
His sniffles had now turned to sobs as he rested his forehead on your bare shoulder, a sickly pallor coloring his skin from where you could see down his back. You felt hot tears slide down your cleavage and you slowly wrapped your arms back around him, his grip on you bruising as he squeezed you impossibly harder against him.
“I don’t know why you are doing this, I don’t deserve this, I’m a terrible person…” Leone hiccuped as he sobbed into your shoulder, his entire body shaking. Your heart broke ever further, the small fractures collecting into deep caverns formed from hearing Leone’s self loathing come to fruition in words. “I fucked up too bad,” he whispered your name, “ I don’t deserve to be here, he should be here instead of me, it should’ve been me. It’s just so hard, I don’t think I can do it anymore. I did what I thought was best, now I’m better off dead, I really don't understand why you are helping me…”
Tears started to collect in your eyes as well, as much as you tried to maintain an aura of strength for Leone to cling to, you couldn’t help but pity the shaking man in front of you. One tear left your eye before you took a deep breath and reached over to turn the tap off now that the tub was filled.
You pulled back ever so slightly, just enough to look at Leone in his sullen and lifeless eyes, ever beautiful in their red rimmed glory.
“I’m doing this because I care about you,” you sighed and brought your hands to his cheeks to keep him from shying away from your gaze. With a light tap to his cheek you said resolutely: “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”