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“Dorito?” Narancia crunches and holds out the half-air half-sodium bag that isn’t going to last the teen half a block.
“Nah kid, all yours,” Leone says.
“Giorno?” An orange-stained hand offers the bag.
“No thanks,” the golden boy waves off politely. Always politely. To be honest though, Leone couldn’t begrudge the kid that. If being the newly crowned prince of the underworld meant folding your napkin before leaving the table—even if it’s a checkered picnic table next to the dumpster—then Don Giovanna would wear his crown just fine.
Though, as evidenced by how the three kids “accidentally” destroyed a vending machine when he left them alone for just five fucking minutes, Mista was only an enabler of the younger two, and Bruno had been right to send his ass to chaperone them.
Though, it’s a one of those blue sky crisp breeze days out in Napoli’s biggest piazza, the farmer’s market blooming around them complete with buzzing bees going from one stall to the next. One of the first days after the chaos of reordering Passione that they’ve left the house under such “normal” circumstances. A new pair of everyday boots for Mista and a couple groceries for a dinner Fugo wanted to cook tonight.
Bringing the kids out on errands, he sighs to himself. It sounds silly, but frankly, it’s a nice break from the mafia world they’d been knee deep in.
Currently Mista is at his left haggling with the butcher about the amount of marble in the ribeyes affecting the price. At the adjacent stand, Narancia vibrates as Giorno pays for a couple of woven bracelets.
After nodding thanks to the wrinkling woman running the stand, the blond kid passes two of the bands to the shorter, who is bouncing with excitement because apparently he’d seen an album with the exact same bracelet design and needed them but forgot his wallet at home—
“Oh, and you wear these!” Narancia says.
Giorno stares at the two bracelets the other drops in his palms. “I, um—“
“Come on, we gotta match dude!” Narancia pushes.
“You mean like friendship bracelets?”
“No, no. Not that girly but like…” Narancia’s stance and tension while thinking makes Leone wonder if the kid might shit himself.
“Man-wristlets, maybe?” Giorno tries.
“Yeah! Ok, man-wristlets I can roll with.” Narancia goes to work slipping his bracelets on, and Giorno follows suit.
“Whoa,” Narancia’s eyes round.
“What?” Giorno asks.
“Your arm? It’s got a sick scar!”
It lands so fast that the blond doesn’t seem to catch the flinch he does in response. Though, his recovery sweeps it away quicker than Leone can blink.
“It’s from Rome,” Giorno says nonchalantly, settling the wristbands above the sleeve he tugs back down.
Narancia’s tone lowers in awe (and hopefully some well-placed sense of secrecy), “You get it from the arrow going into Gold Experience?”
“Get what?” Mista joins, a bag of well-marbled ribeyes in hand.
“Giorno’s got a sick scar on his arm from where the arrow travelled up his stand’s arm. Show him, dude, show him!”
After Mista places a puzzled look on Giorno, the blond obliges, but not without the slightest hesitation that sends a bit of a prickle down Leone’s neck... for some reason.
At the sight of it, Mista ooo’s and looks closer. “Dude, it looks like a bunch of tattoos of beetles and lines like it made ripples breaking through your arm’s skin or some shit.”
“That’s what I was gonna say!” Narancia bounces. “Looks like it goes past your elbow too. How far does it go?”
Giorno does something similar to a laugh, but it’s makes Leone think more of the jerk a knee does to get the hammer away. Giorno answers while tugging his sleeve back down, “It stops at my shoulder.”
“Ugh, I wish I had a tattoo scar thing!” Narancia whines. “Man I’d have like, at least two girls on me today alone!”
“Two?” Mista snorts. “You wouldn’t get one even if you had arrow tattoos pointing in your pants!” He shoulder-bumps the other with a laugh.
Narancia snarls, “Well, you won’t be laughing when I get the fucking tattoo today and have three chicks on my—!”
“Hey,” Leone steps in, “knock it off dipshit.”
When Narancia looks at him, any forming joke deflates immediately, and Leone thinks he must look as disgusted as he feels. The words spit out of him before he can form them right, “You want a scar? Keep saying shit like that to your fucking boss, not to mention he’s the guy who almost died saving your ungrateful ass.”
A different color steals over Narancia, a dark heavy thing that stings worse than any apology the kid could’ve tried to give then.
With a quick glance to the side, Leone sees Mista and Giorno stand just as stunned. The taller nearly angry and no doubt about to defend his friend, but the other—
Sea-green eyes watch him carefully, and see too much of him.
In a harsh huff, Leone pivots and stalks off, trying to convince himself the eyes don’t follow him.
Silence holds them still until Narancia slumps a little and tries, “I didn’t, I mean, I wasn’t trying to say anything mean.”
“No, dude, you’re fine,” Mista assures. “Guy was just being an asshole. Or having an off-day or some shit. Anyways— hey, wait Giorno!”
“I’ll be back,” Giorno says quick over his shoulder, already striding off to follow the older gangster.
“It’s not worth it dude!” Mista calls after the blonde, before turning to Narancia and sighing, “You wanted a chili dog, right?”
“I… Oh, wait, yeah I did.” Narancia brightens a bit at the thought.
“Alright then, lead the way, little man.”
“Don’t call me little, dipshit!”
“Big man, fine, sure,” Mista nods, shoving the smaller on. “Lead the way, big man.”
After leaving the main crowds of the piazza, Leone finds a bit of a quieter corner, a thin alleyway that’s barely used for more than some wood pallets and an old torn couch with nowhere to go. He leans against the wall, happy for the silence where he can think.
The exposed brick is rough on his back, but that might just be the force with which he presses himself against it. With a bit of effort, he forces himself to release the tension between his shoulders.
Narancia had looked devastated, and the kid never did do well with getting told he’d hurt a friend for no reason (Fugo being an odd sort of exception. He was pretty sure their friendship consisted purely of threatening each other, but he wasn’t talking about that blond anyway.)
Guilt worms between Leone’s ribs like a dull sewing needle, not made better by the florist stand he notices on the corner closest to him, particularly snagging his gaze on the purple bellflowers bending his way.
Even back then, he’d been unable to save his junior officers from marks.
Sighing heavily, white hair falls in front of his face like curtains, allowing privacy as he rubs his brow, crushes a curse in his teeth.
“Abbacchio?”
He snaps up, looks to find the blond brat himself at the entrance to the shaded alley.
Concern threads the younger’s brow, and Leone thinks they’re all going to forever give him indigestion with all this damn aching his chest has been doing in the past half hour alone.
Straightening up against the wall, Leone crosses his arms with a feigned smile, “Ah, so the golden boy is here to get me to repent, hm?”
Giorno comes to stand in the last bit of light before the alleyway, which gets the sunlight casting a rimlight on his hair like a fucking halo as he says, “I’m not here to cause trouble.”
Leone can’t stop the humored grumble from rising up his chest. “That’s a first.”
Giorno seems unsure how to tackle that response, and so instead flexes his fingers, looks to the ground before asking, “Why purple?”
“What?”
“Purple,” Giorno says. “Your lipstick, your shoes, your nails, your damn hair topper and demeanor, it’s always purple. It means something to you.”
Try as he might to have his eyes land everywhere and nowhere with the sole goal of losing the kid’s watchful gaze, he finds them on the florist stand twice before muttering, “None of your fucking business.”
And of course Giorno catches it, says, “Not to mention purple bellflowers. I’ve seen you eye the ones in the garden too.”
In an instant, Leone has Giorno’s collar in his grip, half-lifting the younger off his feet as he growls, “Normally I’d tell you to piss off. But if it gets you off my back, then I’ll give, kid. But you don’t tell a fucking soul, you hear me?”
Apparently this response had been expected, because Giorno doesn’t seem phased in the slightest, just politely puzzled as he answers, “Crystal clear.”
Gradually, he eases the blond back down, straightening the kid’s collar out for him roughly before returning to the wall with a crossing of his arms.
Giorno stands where he left him, waiting patiently.
Exhaling through his nose, Leone starts, “There was this girl. I helped her out a couple times, back when I was on the force.”
“A prostitute?”
Leone gives an amused huff, damning the kid and his intuition. “Yeah, a prostitute. She had money trouble, and I lent her cash sometimes.”
Not missing a beat, Giorno asks plainly, “You slept with her?”
“No,” Leone says immediately, shifts a bit against the wall, “No, I didn’t.” Clears his throat. “We didn’t get that far. She didn’t— She wasn’t really my type, though, anyway. And I didn’t give her the cash as payment. I was just trying to do a good thing for someone genuinely down on their luck.”
With a very careful look that said way too much about his damn intuitions, Giorno nods, going to settle against the facing wall of the alley as he asks, “What happened to her?”
Air abruptly seems heavy in his chest, so Leone just snorts it out, says, “I hunted down the loan sharks after her and tried to get my higher ups to give me arrest warrants, or at least search and seizure but…” he shakes his head. “Those loaner bastards decided one night to find her and cut her up. Left her alive, but just so she could work for them. Though, it was a cruel thing, since not many people were going to pay for her with all the mash of scarring they left up and down her arms, legs, neck, everything… When I went to check on her, she told me to get lost. I never saw her again after that.”
With a gaze falling to the cracks in the cobble below, Giorno is silent for a long while.
Leone joins him, tracing the stone ground and thinking of rain against it.
Day after he’d heard she had been taken and carved up by those scumbags, he visited her place. The apartment dim and littered with glass like ants come to clean up the scraps. It took him too long to realize the sudden lack of mirrors and make the connection. When he’d found her huddled in the shower curtain, he’d been so damn thankful to find the tub dry and pure white that he didn’t even think that he should leave her, that he shouldn’t touch her.
After a relenting sigh, Giorno states, “She lived above the laundromat on Via Pietro Colleta, a block from the Pizzeria De’ Figliole.”
Leone snaps up, brows crunching, “You looked into her?”
“You always get uncomfortable whenever Mista wants to go to that pizza place.”
Leone grimaces, “You nosey asshole.”
“It’s my job to know my men, isn’t it?”
Leone takes a step to protest, but stops himself short. The kid was right, and he didn’t need to make himself into an even bigger idiot by fighting it. He forces his fists to relax, mutters, “So you know?”
Solemnly, but not unkindly, Giorno nods, his gaze drifting to the flower stand as he resettles and clears his throat, “On the night of March twenty-fourth, 1998, Officer Luca Di Angelo was recorded as taking two other junior officers on an unsanctioned police raid against a local moneylender business. By morning, Luca was found unconscious on the police station doorstep, alone, his face and body an amalgamation of cuts and stapled-on flesh that wasn’t his.”
Leone swallows thickly, remembers the kid being brought up in a stretcher to the infirmary... how he had an extra ear globbed on, and how his swollen and purpled face wouldn't say much else besides her name.
Sinking his eyes like daggers in the ground, Leone mutters, “It should have been me.”
Giorno lets it hang in the air for a moment before offering in a such way that said he was fighting a wince, “You had a broken leg at the time. It’s unfair to hold yourself to a task when you wouldn’t have been much help—”
“I wouldn’t have been much help?!” Leone roars. “If I could still fucking hold a gun, then I could still fire one between that piece of shit’s eyes— don’t you dare fucking try to comfort me with that bullshit!”
“It isn’t comfort. It’s the truth.” Giorno replies back as calm as windless water. “Luca only survived because he had the stamina to last through the torture with his mind intact enough to still plan and execute an escape. You and your injury would’ve been used against your junior officers, easily.”
Leone exhales roughly, the end rumbling with a chuckle, “So I was just a useless weight, then?”
Ignoring the blunt and dangerous edge lying under that statement, Giorno goes on, “In the end, what Luca did worked. A police officer being assaulted in such a heinous fashion couldn’t be let go by the superiors, since he was a walking reminder of what the underground could do to them if they didn’t squash it immediately. Five arrests were made, and the moneylenders’ business was shut down.”
The booze flowed that night, Leone remembers, the superiors congratulating themselves on just another job well done. They had secretly told Luca to go into the lion’s den, or whatever shit story made them the heroes that night. Luca was wheeled out for when they cut some last-minute convenience store cake.
“Bastards,” Leone mutters into the silence.
Giorno breaks the pause with the mention of her, “Nevertheless, after how it was handled by the police, she was left alone after that. Vittoria.”
Her name startles Leone a bit, and he covers, “I know.”
“So you know she settled down, had a kid?”
No, he didn’t. And he allows his stare to fall on the young Don.
“A really cute kid, actually.” Giorno allows a lighter tone to his voice, “Curly brown hair like his dad.”
Leone’s eyebrows shoot up. “Luca—?”
“They got married about a year after he quit the force.” Giorno says like a pretty swoop at the end of a cursive letter.
He can’t say he isn’t happy to hear it, but... “A happy ending for him then, huh?”
“Some people get them.”
“Yeah, and some people have to wake up for work the next morning.”
Giorno grunts in amusement, the statement evaporating between them for a moment before he seems to want to fill the staled space. “Actually, I found out they own that one bakery across from the Maddalena ai Cristallini. I’ve bought neopolitans from there before too, a bit dry but they’ve got a nice honeyed nuance to them. Narancia usually eats all of them if I’m not careful.”
Narancia. Jesus. He’d been an ass to that kid. But...
Giorno says measuredly, “And I don’t mind Narancia eating them though.”
“Well I fucking do!” Leone pushes off the wall to pace. “Kid can’t just eat his Boss’ fucking cookies and expect no consequences!” He points, “It looks bad that you don’t tell him to stop.”
Giorno’s gaze levels. “We all have different ways of dealing with what happened.”
“Yours can’t be letting other people steamroll you.”
It’s a blunt blade that nicks Giorno before he manages to parry, “There’s nothing wrong with letting him have some fun.”
“With you as the centerpiece like some fucking circus animal?”
At that, Giorno’s words catch in his throat, loosing only to drop helplessly into his gut.
“Yeah,” Leone nods. “All those facades, I’ve worn them before, kid. And let me tell you, they’re shit for comfort.”
Like winding a clock back up, Giorno schools that finally genuine expression into something more manageable. “Then you know I don’t care about my own comfort.”
“Then care about respect.”
“Respect?” Giorno’s gaze softens to a consistency rarely on that face, “He’s just being a kid, Abbacchio.”
Oh. It strikes Leone then how he’d somehow forgotten that yeah, he was just out on errands with a bunch of kids. They’d seen hell, the worst of it, and come out of the shadows needing to hide under hats and shade and dreams of finally getting back to stealing each other’s lunches and kicking vending machines and slathering scars with laughter like slathering sugar on harsh pomegranates.
The weight finally slumps on his shoulders heavily, and Leone pinches his brows to exhale long as he sags against the exposed brick.
Luca had been able to see him, too. Bright green eyes so filled with that stupid damn optimism.
It squirms under his skin, and he shifts before murmuring, “You kids shouldn’t have been the ones left with marks.”
“But we were.”
When Leone looks, it’s to see Giorno holding his chin up.
“We won, Abbacchio. All of us walked away with marks, but we all walked away after having won.”
It’s cute, and Leone huffs light before grumbling, “Some of us hobbled.”
An amused grunt escapes Giorno, replaced quickly with warmth and light like an ember. “One of our hands used the arrow, but every hand pushed us closer to victory.”
The dream, right, always about the dream and the determination to achieve it. “Still,” Leone sighs. “Narancia can’t go around flaunting other people’s scars around like Gucci bracelets.”
Giorno bursts with a dark sort of chuckle at that.
“And you need to be able to be frank with them.” Leone eyes him sharply. “You know how important that is, so why didn’t you say something? Change the conversation, at least— Use that Godforsaken brain to veer them away if you weren’t going to tell them somehow that it made you so damn uncomfortable?”
Dug up from a sunless dirt patch comes this look the kid wears, like something aged and rusty, along with the murmur, “I don’t know.”
While Giorno seems to sit on that distant shore, Leone watches him hunch ever so slightly.
Kid was only sixteen. A person doesn’t wear a look like that at sixteen without going to school with marks under his backpack.
Abruptly Leone finds himself making a note to do some nosey asshole research of his own.
But in the meantime—
“Luca told me one thing though,” Leone starts.
A glance from Giorno said the kid was listening.
“I, um, I asked him if he was going to be ok, with his face ‘n all that shit. Because it looked pretty bad with the mash of flesh like the ear and the... anyways— I asked and he told me something I carry around now.”
“What?” Giorno asks.
There’s genuine sincerity and eagerness in the kid’s eyes, and it’s warming to see a more childlike look on the kid. Leone says, “Scars mean you survived. They mean you can take so much more than you thought you could, and you can walk around with your chin up because of it.”
At first, Giorno just balks, blinking and thinking about it. But slowly, the statement steals over the kid as a warm thing—like he’s bread dough in an oven and realized happily rising maybe wouldn’t be so bad. As Leone watches, a small smile comes over Giorno, not the polite one he uses all the time, but the one that he wears when he thinks no one is watching.
Though, as soon as it appears, Giorno seems to realize it and looks away bashfully, schooling his face into that polite smile before he nods, “Thank you, Abbacchio. That... It means alot that you shared with me.”
Leone grunts in soft amusement before pushing off the wall, “Well, I think we’ve been gone long enough for the other two to have burned down the whole fucking market.”
“Yes,” Giorno clears his throat, “Though I'm sure they didn’t break too much.”
“You put alot of faith in those assholes.”
As he joins Leone in walking out of the alley, Giorno grins a bit, “Yeah, I do.”
A couple strides, and Leone walks with Giorno beside him back out into the sun. Passing the flower stand with the bellflowers bending towards him as they pass.
“Oh, Abbacchio?”
“Hmm?”
“Purple,” Giorno prompts, “Why purple?”
Suddenly hyper aware of the purple hairpiece on his head, Leone clears his throat and keeps his attention forward, looking and finding the two dorks still prancing between the market stalls. He starts towards them and waves the question away dismissively.
“Should I do some more research on my own, then?”
At that Leone chuckles, sends a look back to the kid watching him with a genuine curiosity and care.
Leone turns his attention back to walking. To remembering. And he smiles small, says “She wore purple lipstick.”
The memory of the way it looked in the mirror when he got home. His lips with a perfect purple press on them, the sight warmed him back then. Like he’d finally helped someone.
After the loan sharks took her, he’d worried that everything he did was in vain, that he’d fucked it up somehow by not being better. But... the idea of that purple lipstick on a happy little kid? It’s enough to put a smile on his face. And maybe it was fine that he had the damn optimists to thank for that.