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Getting home is a chaotic affair, to say the very least. Giorno appears practically catatonic, and there is too much yelling for such a small space. From Narancia especially, though Abbacchio yelling because of Narancia isn’t helping. Mista is at least mindful enough to not raise his voice while making sure Giorno isn’t actively bleeding out. The Pistols not so much. They aren’t quite yelling, but they aren’t whispering either.
It takes Mista almost dropping him on their way out of the van to get Giorno to come back to his own body and stumble inside and towards the first sitting surface he sees, each too-forceful step making it harder and harder to keep Gold Experience pushed down down down and where he couldn’t help, couldn’t take away the branches and heal him.
Since teeth aren’t alive, he can’t make new ones, so he can’t turn them all to food to stay alive. The rest of the gang refuses to put an IV in and refuses to let him do it to himself. They keep telling him that it’s okay, they won’t judge him for whatever he was keeping to himself; they’ve all done plenty that they regret. He refuses to budge. Narancia suggests leaving and letting Giorno tell the empty room, but Abbacchio says that Giorno looks so on edge that he wouldn’t trust him to not cut his own tongue off. Giorno has half a mind to acknowledge to himself that Abbacchio was probably right.
Besides, the way he’s nearly screamed, against his will, whenever anyone even looks like they’re about to leave the room answers that question for them.
With how much he is crying and shaking, it isn’t too long until he falls asleep.
Only, when he wakes up, the vines and branches are gone, and Gold Experience is petting his hair, and he panics but doesn’t have time to put them back and he opens his mouth and -
“I killed her. I killed her, and I smiled while I did it. She was just nine years old. She was innocent, had done nothing wrong. The only fault she had was that she didn’t know how to stay out of her dad’s way.”
Giorno thinks that that would have been the end of it - he confessed his crime, he said how bad the context was. But no. He keeps going.
“It was a mercy killing. Her mom didn’t want her, her step-dad hated her. If I hadn’t done it, he would have. She wanted to do it herself, but it never worked. The rope would snap, the pills would come back up, the knife would break. So I took it into my own hands and killed her myself.”
And just like that, his jaw relaxes, and he is able to make his face that carefully blank expression that he uses whenever someone makes a jab at his expense, reminds him of his childhood, that he made sure he had mastered even from a young age, before-
He wipes the tears that he didn’t even know were falling off his face, gets up, and walks out of the room. He usually made sure the door didn’t slam shut behind him, but he doesn’t even flinch when the too fragile backdoor closes with a bang.
Gold Experience is still out, and he goes out to explore the backyard as Giorno sits on the edge of the porch.
Obviously using Gold Experience expended energy. But, at the same time, creating life gave him life of his own. The energy loss was worth it. All that to say he isn’t upset that Gold is acting out the childish joy Giorno never had a chance to have. Giorno isn’t sure what Gold is doing exactly, but it seems to be some game involving frogs and bumblebees.
He knows that Gold was the one to get rid of all the shitty stitches he had given himself, but Giorno can’t bring himself to be mad. He can’t bring himself to feel anything at all except resignation. He isn’t relieved his secret was out, but he doesn’t have the energy to be upset either. He doesn’t even bother reacting when the backdoor opens behind him and someone joins him on the porch. Giorno knows it was Bruno before he even sits down.
They sit in silence for a while.
The frogs and bees have disappeared, and now Gold is lying down with his chest and arms covered in butterflies. It feels like feathers brushing over Giorno’s skin.
“I was twelve the first time I killed,” Bruno says, voice faltering.
Giorno huffs out a breath that could have been a laugh or a sigh. Not even he knows which one it was. “I appreciate the effort, but you don’t have to comfort me. It’s been years since I came to terms with it.”
He is telling the truth, but Bruno doesn’t leave. “What was her name?”
Giorno weighs it in his head. He doesn’t want to think about her - ever. Never ever again. “Haruno,” he says anyway.
Gold Experience’s abilities didn’t leave scars, and the discoloration has long since faded. The team has seen him shirtless, and none of them have mentioned anything, because there’s not anything to notice or mention. And he had long since learned that screaming and crying didn’t do anything to stop the pain, so even the nightmares of that day didn’t faze him anymore. Even so, he rubs at his chest.
“She was planning on drowning next,” he says, unprompted. “Her family, if you could even call it that, didn’t have a bathtub that would stay full, so she always took long walks through the city, planning. She was scared of messing up. Did you know that human bodies are meant to float? She was scared that she wouldn’t go deep enough, or that somebody would see her and stop her. She couldn’t use anything heavy; she wasn’t strong enough.” He looks down at his hands, open and palms up. If he turns them over, he is sure that he would see torn and bitten nails, something he hadn’t had to see in seven years. “No matter the result, or the cause, she would wind up dead either way. I just forced the issue so she wouldn’t suffer anymore.”
Bruno is quiet for a long time.
Giorno feels a little bad for him. He never asked to be put in a caretaking position. He had just as bad a past as any of them. The only thing that made him more adequate for the role was the amount of years he had spent in the mafia, before any of them.
“You speak as though you were close,” Bruno finally responds.
Giorno turns the thought over in his head. “Yeah,” he replies. “I guess you could say that.” He weighs telling Bruno more, finally letting someone in on his big secret. He knows that, ultimately, he would always decide against it in the end. She was dead, after all.
“What have you done!?” his mother yelled after he cut his hair off. It was the only thing she liked about him other than his eyes. She always said it reminded her of her younger self.
“You’re dead to me,” his mother growled after he forged her signature to change his name. She never signed the forms on the ones that had the name she had picked out.
“GET OUT!!” his mother screamed after he came back home one day a few weeks after he discovered Gold Experience. “Never come back.” The next day he had gotten emergency placement in the school’s dorms over the summer.
Haruno was gone, dead and buried. It wasn’t worth dragging her corpse around.
“I,” Giorno starts. He hesitates. He briefly wonders what he could’ve been like if he had had a different family. If he had found this one sooner.
He wonders how Gold Experience could be so happy and carefree after everything.
“I would like to be alone now,” he says. “Please.”
Bruno nods and stands, going back inside. Giorno can immediately hear the yelling start as Narancia demands to know if everything is okay.
Watching Gold Experience, still playing with the critters - he had somehow found something big enough to turn into a fox - Giorno thinks it will be.