Work Text:
3 days ago
Guido Mista dies on a muggy evening somewhere in the dark alleys of Rome, bleeding out from the hidden knife wound in between his ribs.
His death is an accident. They didn’t mean to kill him, you see. They just wanted to rough him up a bit, maybe get some information out of him to report back to their superiors. A cherry on top after the promotion they no doubt would have received from bringing back the Guido Mista, underboss of Passione, second only to the don himself.
But they weren’t careful enough, and they were afraid. People talk, and they tell stories about Guido Mista often. Hasn’t missed a single shot in his life, they say. His gun comes out and people die, dropping like flies in impossible places. They didn’t want to risk Mista somehow escaping his restraints and attacking them, and they went too far.
Way too far. Leo has heard these stories, and he is terrified. Not because of any danger Mista might pose to them, no; the man is well and truly dead now, lacking a pulse and rapidly cooling. Leo is afraid because he knows what will happen to them now.
The thought pervades his mind as they drag Mista’s ragdoll body all the way back to the base, taking care to avoid any crowded streets and scaring away any stragglers with the flash of a pistol. Mista is dead. They killed him, and news will be out before morning because Mista is far from nobody.
And because Mista is fucking dead, they have no leverage whatsoever to protect themselves with. Can’t hold him hostage, can’t demand anything in exchange for his life, can’t do anything except take his body back like pet cats carrying home unwanted vermin.
Leo doesn’t know what he’s going to do. He and Paula are as good as dead now, a ticking time bomb attached to both of their necks. Morning will come in a matter of hours and everybody will know by then that it was them that killed Guido Mista, and soon Passione will come for them.
Nobody survives a hit put out by Passione, ironically because many of them were fulfilled by Mista, whose corpse is currently being defiled by the rough cobblestone of Prati’s sidewalks. Maybe the hit will be fulfilled by Sheila E this time, and their dead bodies will be found with ruptured eardrums.
Or maybe it won’t be an assassin – maybe it’ll be Giorno Giovanna himself, the Don of Passione come to personally deliver them to death. Everybody knows that Giovanna and his second are close, after all. Friends, even. Where Giovanna goes, Mista follows, a second shadow.
Maybe the death of his most faithful follower will draw Giorno Giovanna back out into the scene, demonstrate how exactly he became the boss of Passione in the first place. Leo would have liked to see that happening, if only he weren’t the subject that is about to be made an example of – a reminder of what happens when you cross Passione.
He doubts that Giorno Giovanna will come personally. The man has been relatively quiet after his initial overhaul of Passione’s business, and a subordinate is a subordinate, no matter how important.
But the thought remains in Leo’s head for hours still, a horrible, niggling fear that grips at him until they reach the base. Giovanna probably won’t come. But what if? What if, what if, what if they don’t escape and Giovanna comes for them?
There isn’t a single soul out there that hasn’t heard tales of Giorno Giovanna’s strange abilities, his power to give life and take it away. Leo heard of the case from a few years back: a string of murders, bodies found choking on vines growing from their own stomachs, torn apart from the inside out.
He knows that the Don of Passione is the stuff of legends, even more so than a skilled gunman. He does the impossible. He plays god, if you want to be blasphemous about it. And where the God of churches and cathedrals is a merciful presence, Giorno Giovanna is a righteous force of nature, violent and unforgiving and terrible.
This is who will come. Leo can feel it in his bones, as sure as he can sense the rain coming when his twice-broken finger begins to ache. Giorno Giovanna will come, and he will plunge them into a hell yet unheard of in the mortal realm. The only question is when – and where.
>>
2 days ago
Fugo is not the one to break the news to Giorno.
He can’t. He simply can’t. He receives the call because Giorno is taking a much-needed rest after a consecutive forty-eight hours of playing nice with local officials, and he hangs up before Murolo was finished talking. He sits back down at his desk, cord dangling from his fingers, and ten minutes later he calls Sheila in to inform Giorno.
He doesn’t see the look on Giorno’s face when he finds out that Mista is dead.
He doesn’t hear Giorno’s voice when he orders Sheila out – if it’s trembling and wretched, or if it is the same as always. Smooth. Confident.
He doesn’t know if Giorno cried or not.
But here is the thing: Fugo doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t ask Sheila about it, mainly because she wouldn’t know, considering Giorno’s general unwillingness to show his weaknesses to others. And Fugo wishes he were the same, but he and Giorno know each other better than that.
They’ve spent enough years together to discern the minute changes in each other’s facial expressions, as non-expressive as they both are. Fugo would be able to tell if Giorno was holding back tears, or anger, or despair. And he wouldn’t be able to look away because Giorno isn’t the kind of person you turn away from.
Even angered, even in pain, he is dazzling. And Fugo can’t handle that right now. He would prefer to sit in his office without the lights on, drowning in the depths of his own misery.
Mista is dead. Mista is dead. Mista, who survived ten bullets point blank when he was barely seventeen, is dead, and it was some random thugs that did him in.
They didn’t even belong to a significant organization. They weren’t Mista’s targets for this mission; just a couple nobodies that recognized his ridiculous getup and saw an opportunity.
Fugo knows that for all his deadly efficiency, Mista’s Stand is simply not meant for close combat. The Sex Pistols can do very little on their own, tiny size that they are. Were. If they had gotten the drop on him – a shovel to the head, maybe – then that would have been it.
No spectacle, no flashy showdowns, nothing. Guido Mista, gangster at eighteen, dead at twenty-seven from a knife to the gut. There will be funeral that Fugo will help Giorno plan eventually; many will come because Mista has made a name for himself in the past decade or so, and after the priest is done reciting the Committal he will be sent into the ground to rot.
Fugo sees it all play it out in his head and decides that he cannot bear to see Giorno right now. He has a right to grieve now, unlike at the funerals of Bucciarati and Abbacchio and Narancia, but somehow it is even worse. Both times he wasn’t there. Both times he could do nothing, helpless to stop fate in its tracks.
He knows it will be worse for Giorno. Giorno, who actually could have done something about it, whose golden hands have healed Mista of fatal injuries a hundred times over. If Giorno were there, he could have healed whatever wound Mista had accrued given that he didn’t get his head chopped off. If Giorno were there, Mista wouldn’t have been caught off-guard at all.
But both Giorno and Fugo were in their offices when Mista died, toiling away at papers that seem like nothing but useless garbage now. They believed that Mista would be fine, like he had been for thousands of missions before this one, his abnormal luck pulling through once more. They forgot, after a decade of looking at the world from atop, that despite everything they are still mortal.
He is reminded of the fact horribly, intimately. They are not immortal. They will all die soon, except perhaps Giorno because even after ten years of this he remains as youthful as the day they first met. He’ll tease Fugo about it occasionally, claiming that it’s all makeup and maintaining a good skincare routine, but Fugo knows better.
Giorno Giovanna is something different. He is transcendent, and this is why Fugo cannot go to him right now to comfort him, to say something that might console him in his grief. It would be like a dog trying to console its owner, blind and unknowing and wanting to help but inevitably failing.
Fugo knows how close they were. He knows that Giorno admired Mista, adored him, treasured him no matter how many petty fights they had over the years. He knows that Giorno trusts Mista more than anyone else, his ally from the very beginning when he slung a shoulder over the yet-green Giorno’s shoulders and proclaimed him a good luck charm.
Fugo knows all this. He has been a spectator, an eventual participator in the the life they have built together. He’s spent mornings hungover in Giorno’s grand manor, squinting through headaches at the easy way Giorno fit his arms around Mista’s waist as the latter made coffee for them all.
He’s gone on vacation with them, watched Mista drag Giorno into hotel pools despite his protests, seen the way Mista carefully applies sunscreen onto Giorno’s easily-burned skin. And there have been many more moments, most of them embarrassing; he’s walked in on them a frankly ridiculous amount of times, in the office and when he’s sleeping over and even at parties where they are supposed to be attending to keep up public image.
Fugo has watched Mista and Giorno revolve around each other for ten years. He has been Giorno’s confidant, listener to the man’s deepest worries; he has been Mista’s mostly unwilling drinking partner, his driver, his friend.
Mista and Giorno are Fugo’s closest friends. He has known this for quite a while now, never quite able to say it out loud for fear of the sentiment not being reciprocated, of being humiliated, of a thousand other possibilities that all seem trivial now. They are his friends, and now one of them is dead and he cannot muster up the will to go to the other.
He can’t do it. This is what he tells himself as makes plans for damage control that he knows he will scrap later. He can’t, even though he is drafting reports and speeches that will be recited at Mista’s funeral soon to come, scribbling mindless condolences that anger him even as the pit in his stomach grows deeper and deeper.
Fugo sits in his office and works until the sun comes up, until his mind has long since stopped registering the text as anything but strings of letters incomprehensibly combined. He works until Sheila comes by to hand him a coffee, face hardened despite the traces of red at the corners of her eyes.
He works until he hears the door open again without a knock, raises his head to ask her to leave even though he knows it’s unfair of him to say that, knows that Sheila was Mista’s friend too – and he stops.
Giorno Giovanna walks into the room without so much as a hello, hands loose and still by his sides. Fugo doesn’t dare look away, meeting Giorno’s empty gaze with his own and trying not to scream. He is afraid. He is hollow. He doesn’t know what to say.
But Giorno, ever perceptive, speaks for him. His voice is placid, almost floating in the air as he says, “Fugo. I’m sorry to ask you of this so early in the morning, but I’ll be away for a few days. Will you keep things under control while I’m gone?”
Fugo is smart if nothing else; he knows what Giorno is implying, and he knows that even if Giorno was asking him to put his head on the chopping block he would do it right now. He nods a yes because he’s sure that if he speaks right now it come out choked, ruined.
Then that is all, and Giorno turns away again to walk out of the office. Fugo isn’t surprised by the abrupt departure – he remembers Mista telling him about Bucciarati’s death, the horrifying moment when they returned and Bucciarati was already still and cold. He remembers Mista telling him that Giorno didn’t shed a single tear that day, standing impassively off to the side even as Trish and Mista sobbed over Bucciarati’s body.
He also remembers Mista telling him that Giorno had his reasons for that, but he can’t quite recall them right now. And he knows he is lying to himself because he has a semi-eidetic memory, cursed to remember every painful moment of every day. All he knows is that Mista is dead and Giorno has not cried a single time, colder and harder than marble.
He is every bit the Romanic gods of ancient times, encased in gold and utterly untouchable. His lover and closest ally is dead, but that doesn’t matter to a man who has a hundred others vying for the position by his side, each one more talented and more beautiful than the last. A man as great as Giorno Giovanna does not cry over his losses.
Fugo knows he is being erratic, illogical with his reasoning. He is being unfair to Giorno, who he knows loved Mista as much as he did. But he is empty and he is hurting and as Giorno’s hand wraps around the doorknob he finds he can’t help himself: he calls, “Giorno! I–”
“Fugo,” Giorno interrupts and it makes him want to scream, shout that he was Mista’s friend before Giorno ever joined, that everybody Fugo held dear when he was fifteen is dead now except for Giorno, and what an irony it is – that Fugo still loves Giorno. Loves the unmoving corpse that Mista is now, misses him so much that it feels like it will never end.
“Fugo,” Giorno says again, and this time it sounds so horribly fragile, so like a glass teetering on the edge of the table, that Fugo stops.
Giorno does not turn around and his shoulders do not hunch and his hand does not tremble on the doorknob, but he sounds the closest to shattering that Fugo’s ever heard him as he whispers, “I’ll bring him back. Just – please, wait a little while. I’ll be back soon,” and then the door opens and closes behind him before Fugo can even open his mouth to respond.
He is left alone again, the oppressive air lightened with Giorno’s departure. He doesn’t know what to think. He wants to feel cheated out of his revenge still, angry that yet again it is he who is left behind while the people he loves are killed and avenged, but try as he might he cannot dredge up anything but emptiness.
Emptiness, and the tears that spring to his eyes unbidden, falling slow like leaves from a tree and dripping onto his work from the past few hours. Ruining the pages upon pages that he has written in his final letter to Mista, the eulogy that will be read at the funeral to hundreds of others that never knew Guido Mista – gangster at eighteen, dead by twenty-seven, Fugo’s friend for ten of those horrible, wonderful years.
>>
1 day ago
To say that preparations were rushed would be an understatement.
They had two days to arrange a practically medieval ambush, sending for men stationed even in the outskirts of the far cities. When Leo’s superiors received the call that the Don Passione himself would be coming personally to retrieve his second’s corpse, they nearly leapt to their feet with excitement.
A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – the Don of Passione makes many public appearances, but none without his cadre of bodyguards. Never is he seen alone, unprotected. But now he is coming, and he is coming alone.
This is what their contacts are claiming, at least. He drove himself in a nondescript Volkswagen up to Rome at the crack of dawn, arriving in the city somewhere around 9 o’ clock. He stopped a cafe, ordered himself an espresso, and didn’t finish it before departing again.
No sightings of Sheila E, or his ever-present consigliere. Giorno Giovanna walked the streets of Rome alone all the way to the Colosseum, circling it once, twice, thrice. None of their contacts dared to get close enough to see his face, but they reported that he seemed rather aimless in his wanderings.
By then, word had gotten back to the Boss about Giovanna’s arrival, and the ambush was already underway. Money was taken out of the vaults, guns were retrieved, men were gathered. They know he’s on his way to the main base of the organization, however meandering the course he’s taking may be, and they’ve been fortifying it tighter than a bank.
Leo had thought it was a little overkill, but one can never be too safe and he isn’t one to question orders. Especially not when he’d thought he was going to pushed into the bay for sure just a few hours ago when he and Paula reported back to their capo, begging for mercy on their knees.
As it is now, the Boss sees it as more of an opportunity than a catastrophe. Few things can draw the attention of the Don of Passione, and if the death of his second is what it takes to draw him out alone then they’ll gladly take advantage of the circumstance. Maybe he’ll even be rewarded still if this attack actually works and Giovanna ends up dead.
That all remains to be seen, though. With the pace that Giovanna has adopted, he’ll be here long after the sunset, which would not bode well for him and the many surprise attacks they have planned. They have no idea why he’s taking so long – if he found his second’s murder upsetting enough to deal with the perpetrators alone, wouldn’t he want to do so as fast as possible?
Instead of rushing right away to deal his judgment as they’d expected when he drove toeing the speed limit to Rome, Giovanna has taken on a rather tourist-y path. He’s stopped by the Colosseum, gotten lunch at an odd sandwich shop with barely any customers, and spoken with no less than five people sitting on various benches.
He walks like an old man on his last trip to Italy. Slowly, aimlessly, appreciatively. It is long past evening by the time his foot graces the doorstep of the little storefront that serves as a hidden entrance to the much larger warehouse that stores most of their physical assets – and currently contains the thawing body of Guido Mista.
He speaks gently with the old woman manning the register, stooping down for her to hear him better. He tells her that he needs to use the bathroom for a minute and that he’d like a glass of milk when he comes out. They hear all of this through the microphone snug in the old woman’s collar, shitting themselves over how close they are to success.
He returns from the bathroom in less than five minutes, ignoring the milk and the woman as he strides towards the backdoor with purpose. Certainty. He knows they are waiting for him.
There are men crowded behind the door, guns at the ready. When he crosses the threshold, they will shoot. They are tense with anticipation and excitement, imagining what their rewards will be for killing the Don of Passione. They do not know that they are already dead.
The first bullet does not meet its mark. It will, in fact, never reach the target for the rest of eternity and beyond. This is the case with the second, the third, and the dozens more that near Giorno Giovanna, trapped in the reality his Stand has set.
The men are confused, but not for long. They have been trained for this, strange happenings that they cannot see happening. Only the higher ups know what to call it – a Stand, an avatar of the soul that nobody except other users can see or interact with. The hired muscle only know not to falter in the face of miracles happening.
Because that is what this is: blooming flowers and fresh grass springing up from the ground wherever Giovanna steps. He brushes past men who cannot seem to touch him no matter what they do, laying his hands on their shoulders, arms, sides. He is Christ come to bring the misled to salvation. He is Satan bringing with him a plague of scorpions, locusts, buzzing wasps.
There are screams all around him, but he pays them no mind. He moves serenely, almost floating past the carnage around him. Men are on the ground, convulsing from venom in their veins, swatting at thin air. They are going mad. Giorno Giovanna is going mad, the magnitude of his rage manifesting in the beautiful jungle of fauna that surrounds him.
He does not need to open his mouth to make his pain be heard.
They hear it in the incessant buzzing of the wasps, the deafening roar of the larger mammals that spring from the steel carts and wooden crates. The warehouse has become a menagerie, a veritable Amazon in the slums of Rome. Carnage erupts wherever Giovanna goes, blood spewing in great geysers from the gaping wounds of the men who have the misfortune of attacking him. Still, somehow, none of it gets on his white coat.
The men die horribly. They die to thousands of stings all over their bodies, chunks of flesh taken out from their sides to expose white, gleaming bone. Some of them have their eyes pecked out, flailing blindly until one of their allies puts them out of their misery. Most of them die trampled on the ground. Suffocating, wounded but not quite past help. Giovanna makes sure not to leave survivors, but he does not dirty his own hands doing it.
Look, he seems to say. Gaze upon my suffering. Feel my agony. Hear my cries.
He does not stop his advance, however. He walks steadily to the center of the warehouse where an armchair lies, a crumpled body sitting propped up on it in a repugnant facsimile of the living. The taunt does not escape Giorno Giovanna – that they have sat the rotting corpse of his second in a throne befitting a don.
It does not heighten his anger in any way that matters. He has no eyes for anything but the corpse, a single minded focus at odds with everything else that is occurring in this room. His boots slosh through rivers of blood, repelled the moment they reach the actual leather.
Though it feels like an eternity, he reaches the corpse in only a few minutes. He stands over it for a moment, looming over the prone body of the man who used to be Guido Mista. He allows himself only a second to grieve, tears sliding down his cheeks before they are wicked away by an invisible hand.
He bends down, golden curls tumbling down his back as he gathers the stiff corpse into his arms. He cradles it, brushing a kiss on its brow as a mother would kiss her child. His adoration, even in death, is clear: they have misjudged the situation.
They imagined the two as friends, close confidants. They knew the Don of Passione was partial to his second, to the point of indulgence, and they believed it to be simple sentiment, courtesy given to one of his oldest allies. They did not consider that it might have been more than loyalty and strategy keeping Guido Mista near the top of the hierarchy.
Leo understands, then, that he was never going to survive this. His first instinct was correct; he was a dead man walking from the moment Guido Mista breathed his last. No amount of guns or men would have been able to stop Giorno Giovanna from his rampage, perfectly controlled in its brutality.
Even now, he is beautiful. Untouchable. He has torn through dozens of men as if they were paper with arcane abilities beyond comprehension, and he has not a single drop of blood marring his ivory gloves to show for it. Leo doesn’t understand what’s happening. He doesn’t need to, really, seeing as he’s going to die very soon.
Still, the human mind endeavors to understand, to fit everything into comprehensible boxes. Leo lies still and silent and he tries to fathom what is happening before his eyes. His leg has been crushed by a crate that was wood and then wolf and now wood again. He cannot move, so he only watches. And thinks.
Giorno Giovanna is holding his head against the corpse’s chest, wetting the cheap threading of the suit they have dressed the body in with his tears. He stands unmoving, the snarling beasts around him returning one by one to their original inanimate states until the warehouse is once again quiet.
His shoulders are rigid, his body stock still. He is on the verge of movement, but not quite there; he looks like he is waiting for something.
An aeon passes before Giovanna acts again, his breath escaping him loudly as he jerks to press a hand against the long-since bled out wound that Leo remembers making in Guido Mista’s side. There is a flash of blinding light, then a choked inhale that sounds much too guttural to belong to Giovanna, and then Leo has the wild, impossible thought that Giorno Giovanna is God.
But his musings are interrupted by the loud, wracking coughs coming from the man who just a moment ago was a rotting corpse, three days dead. Giovanna holds the man through his fit, absorbing the shakes and shudders of the dead returning to life in his white knuckled grasp.
“Ow,” Guido Mista, dead man walking, says once he has recovered himself. “Giorno? What–”
“Guido,” Giorno Giovanna breathes, face twisting into a wretched expression, impenetrable demeanor finally shattered -- the last thing Leo sees before a lion pounces on him and severs his head from the rest of his body in its great maw.