Chapter Text
The first time it happened, Giorno had no intentions of awakening something in himself. He wasn't even conscious of what he was doing. After the initial pain of a bullet grazing his shoulder, Gold Experience got to work like always, and Giorno paid it no mind. The concentrated, intense pain and itch from the healing were nothing new. He didn't even look down.
If he had, Giorno might have noticed the yarrow that bloomed in place of flesh, no differently than when flowers bloomed in a meadow come spring.
Mista pulled Giorno behind an upturned table while the first gunshot was still ringing in his ears, and the healing was forgotten entirely. He watched Mista as he aimed and fired above their makeshift shield with a bang.
The single shot was calculated, a word Mista would never use to describe himself, but it made Giorno hot under the collar all the same. He could hear the Sex Pistols, Uno and Due, yell as they sent the bullet careening through the eye of the man who dared fire at the Don. The whole ordeal was over in seconds. the only real damage was to Giorno's shirt, which was torn where the bullet had grazed him. It was a shame, but it could be replaced as easily as the defected soldato whose brain was splattered over the concrete.
Mista relaxed again, now that the threat was dealt with. He leaned over Giorno, checking for injuries, even though Gold Experience is always finished by the time he gets the chance.
"Man, I must've been starving to let him get one in like that…" Mista muttered as he looked over Giorno's uninjured arm, "I told you, we should've gotten lunch earlier. Like I'm always saying, you can't do shit on an empty stoma…"
As Mista trailed off, Giorno followed his line of sight to the other tear in his shirt. He blinked, finally noticing the small cluster of white flowers. Mista's brows knit together as he ran his thumb over the petals. It felt different from when he would touch Giorno's skin. It wasn't bad at all.
"Hm, strange," Giorno said, even though that didn't begin to describe how he felt.
"I mean, yeah. You could say that," Mista said, clearly somewhat put off.
Giorno was surprised, yes, but it hadn't occurred to him that this should make him uncomfortable. Mista certainly looked it, though.
"I suppose yarrow does have medicinal properties. It can be used to stop bleeding, and such. The wires probably just… got crossed."
"Right, yeah. Makes sense." Mista nodded before standing up, "Can you change it back to normal?"
Giorno could, yes. It wouldn't take very long, either. He just didn't feel the need to do so. He was surprised by how natural the flowers felt, especially since Mista so clearly found them bizarre. If not for the way Mista was looking at them, he would have no reason to get rid of them. The flowers were a part of him now, the same as flesh and blood would be. it wouldn't be right to remove them just because they hadn't been there before.
"Well, yes. I could," Giorno said after some thought, "But I wouldn't want to open my wound back up out in the open. There are enough people staring as is. It can wait."
"Of course, Boss," Mista said, buying it.
-
A few days later, the yarrow is still in the same place it was before. Giorno never felt the pull to change it back. Soon enough, it wouldn't even be a possibility without cutting it out. If objects were imbued with life for long enough, they were alive. A suitcase turned into a frog could not retain the qualities of a suitcase forever. Gravel turned into yarrow, before long, would just be yarrow. Soon enough, the chance for the "gravel" to refill the gap as his flesh would slip away.
Getting a hold of himself, Giorno focused back on the present, where he was standing in his small kitchen, slicing a red onion. He was supposed to be making a salad to eat with dinner that evening, something that would go nicely with the strawberry balsamic vinaigrette he still had in the fridge from last week. He looked forward to when he and Mista would eat in together, it would be much less eventful than their disaster of a lunch.
As he cut the onion, the juices pricked tears from his eyes. It served as a reminder that he could still cry at all, even if it was just a purely physical reaction. The moisture only made the stinging worse, though, which seemed fitting. If his mother ever cooked maybe he'd have built up an immunity to onions, instead.
After this, he would need to get dressed for work. He would change into something nice and fashionable, more fitting of the Don of Passione. He was a respected figure, and looking professional was part of that. It also helped to hide the flowers that he knew Mista wouldn't be too thrilled to see thriving. As far as he knew, Giorno was back to normal.
When he was almost finished slicing the onion, there was less to grip onto and he had to blink away some tears, and he was already distracted from thinking about the flowers- his hand slipped. Giorno hissed, sucking on the cut to relieve the pain before he'd even processed his mistake with the knife.
He walked over to the sink and ran cold water over the cut on his thumb, and grabbed a couple napkins. Fixing this should have been second nature, but… he had a lot on his mind right now. He second-guessed what should've been his instinct to grow skin there, and repair the damage. It was only a small cut, but he couldn't help but feel curious. Was the yarrow a fluke? If it was, undoing the healing was still a possibility. Giorno almost hoped that it would feel as alien to him as it looked to Mista when he stared. He would be able to put the nagging thought to rest. No one would even have to know he thought about keeping it. It would remain his and his Stand's secret.
Using one of the napkins, he grew a single violet where the cut used to be. It hurt in the same familiar way that healing with Gold Experience always did. Even though he was paying attention this time, nothing about this felt wrong. For something so apparently strange, it felt natural. It was comforting, if anything, like the presence of his Stand always was. The violet blooming on the side of his thumb grew there like it was meant to be, and it was.
This did mean that he would feel wrong getting rid of it. It would not survive if he uprooted it and tried to grow it in a pot because it was a part of him. Just because he could pretend none of this happened… that did not mean he wanted to. However, the violet was in a much more obvious place than the yarrow. Unless Giorno wore gloves today and forever, Mista would see it, and he would have questions.
Giorno finished up the salad. He sliced the rest of the strawberries, putting them in a bowl with the onion, broccoli, goat cheese, and some grilled chicken, since he was fond of poultry and Mista was the type to complain if there was no meat. He left it in the fridge to get ready for work properly.
He thought about wearing gloves, and delaying the inevitable, but he really did not want to wear gloves for the rest of his life to hide a small flower. The shirt he wore was purple, and complimented it nicely. Mista could say his piece when he saw it. He watered some of the plants around his house before leaving, finishing off with the white lilies near the exit. His love for flowers was nothing new, after all.
When Giorno was young- so young that he still thought of himself as Haruno- he spent a lot of his time staring down at his feet while he walked. People did not seem to like when he met their eyes. There might have been something off-putting about his eyes, his mother always said so, but some people just did not like Haruno himself. He didn't want to risk challenging anyone with eye contact, because it always ran the risk of them taking him up on it, and putting him even further in his place than he'd already been ground below their feet.
As much as he tried to shrink into the background, children his age always seemed to smell it on him that he was other, scum. Even though Haruno was minding his own business, staring down at the path below him, they managed to pick him out from everyone else. They shoved him around a bit, like always. Giorno could not remember one instance from another, nor did Haruno ever look up for long enough to commit their faces to memory. If he stayed down, they could only push him so far.
Once they got tired of messing with him, Haruno slowly pushed himself back up from the ground, hands now dirty and scraped. They always got bored eventually. Haruno often wondered why he ever bothered to get back up.
As he looked down on the pavement once more, with all its litter and the shoes of all the people were above him walking by, Haruno lingered on the plants. Specifically, he liked to look at the flowers that would bloom through the cracks in the cobblestone. Giorno wanted to be like those flowers, but he was more of a weed waiting to be plucked out of the garden entirely, or just the dirt under people's shoes.
Later, Giorno would save a man's life with weeds, and learn what it felt like to bloom out of the cracks in the stone.
-
A month passes, and things escalate.
Giorno sad behind his expensive mahogany desk in a bodysuit and matching tights, most of his skin exposed save for some tasteful panels and boning. That wasn't what the Capo was staring at, though. His eyes lingered on the flowers, exposed by Giorno's clothing.
Giorno watched with amusement as the Capo's gaze traveled up and down his body. He had been experimenting quite a bit in the past month, adding more and more flowers, and couldn't be happier with the result. He'd never felt more comfortable in his own skin, or lack thereof, and it showed. The Don of Passione was never known to be meek, or modest, but now Giorno practically oozed confidence, and had felt less need to aim for the image of what people like the man before him would expect of the Don.
White lilies and zinnia trailed down his arms and legs, with a smattering of violets and dandelions. The cutouts in his outfit drew the eye exactly where Giorno wanted it to go, and right where the Capo's eyes were lingering.
That man, Dante Boreto, was the Capo of the cleanup team. He had stayed through the transition from Diavolo's rule to Giorno's. Don Giovanna hadn't wanted to stir the pot too much, while he was still new. Boreto mopped the sweat from his brow, anxieties about the lingering threat of his replacement apparent. Bucciarati had been onto something with his intimidation tactics… The beautiful natural light that filtered in from the floor-to-ceiling windows kept the room hot and humid, which was perfect for his plants, and it made already-nervous men like this one tick. He was sweating buckets.
He was coming to terms with the fact that the rumors about the Don were true.
Giorno had heard the whispers, by now. Everything filtered up to him eventually.
The Don of Passione isn't human, they had begun to say. He's some ethereal… entity. Flowers bloomed from his skin and under his feet. Stand users in Passione who hadn't seen his Requiem whispered about the Midas touch, a green thumb, and wondered what the Don's Stand was. Don Giovanna was not just a human, was the consensus among Stand users and ordinary members alike.
Giorno had often felt… alien from those around him, but now, finally, it felt like a good thing.
-
By the time Giorno was settling into his high school dorm room, away from home, his relationship with his peers had improved drastically. It had started with them being forced to invite him to join in their games. As he got older, and prettier, and learned how to wrap them around his finger, his attention began to mean something.
He was able to relax more, too, now that he was away from his family, even though they had been kinder to him in recent years. Here, he would not have to fight the instinct to tense up like a wooden board when his stepfather's hand rested on his shoulder. The too-casual way that his mother spoke to him with, now that she thought he was worth speaking to, would be relegated to phone calls, only an occasional reminder of how little about him she actually knew.
Even though this dorm was smaller than his room at his stepfather's house, it still felt empty. He'd never had a space that felt like his own, so he'd never accumulated much to keep there. Yesterday, he'd placed some hyacinths in a vase that now sat on the end of the small desk near his window.
Things were better now. Despite this, Giorno still felt a disconnect from everyone else in this life. As much as his peers liked him now, he still couldn't help the feeling that he was still something else. He was no longer below them, but there was something different about him that he couldn't quite place. It was the same something that the kids in his neighborhood were able to sniff out when he was younger.
Perhaps it was his ambition. Before he'd been saved, he was nothing. Once that spark was lit in him, he attracted people liked moths to a flame, but that was not the same as being one of them.
-
On a particularly slow morning, Mista gave Giorno his millionth side-eyed glance that month. After the first week, Mista stopped pointing out every new flower xe added. He just ignored them. It was preferable to exclamations of "I know your office is a fucking sauna," he'd paused to fan himself. It was really Mista's own fault for building his entire wardrobe around leather, fur, and cashmere. "But couldn't you just stick with the houseplants?"
Giorno brushed off his needling until Mista learned to drop it. The tension didn't go away though, which was a shame. When they'd eaten dinner together, the evening of the day flor had grown that first violet on purpose, Mista had stared and stared. He picked at his salad, at least humoring Giorno with the dressing even though he said it was weird. His eyes kept drifting down to xyr hand. It must have killed the mood, because he went back to his own place afterwards.
Giorno wasn't surprised. This was how things tended to go for xem. After years of being admired by their peers, and eventually respected as mafia Don, understood was not something flor expected of anybody.
To xyr surprise, Mista spoke: "Are those, uh, new?" he gestured in the vague direction of Giorno's arm, "The… what are they called again…?" he asked, voice clearly strained.
"They're morning glories," Giorno replied, "But there's no need to humor me, Guido."
"I'm not humoring you, I was just asking a question."
"I know they make you uncomfortable." Mista looked away when flor said that, chewing on the inside of his cheek.
"You just keep adding more," he said, like that was a bad thing.
"That I do. I think they look nice. What do you think?" xe asked, not expecting Mista to agree.
Mista opened and closed his mouth like a fish for a few moments. Giorno knew what he thought.
"You can speak your mind, Guido."
"I know I can. I don't need your permission, but it's not like you want to hear 'Hey, baby, I really hate how much you've been mutilating yourself the past few weeks.' That doesn't exactly sound very sensitive, does it?"
"I said you can speak your mind and I meant it," xe said, "I never said you had to be sensitive. If that's how you feel, it's how you feel."
"Well excuse me for wanting to be a bit sensitive!" Mista snapped, "I mean, it's not like you're hurting yourself or anything!"
Giorno blinked, "What does any of this have to do with me hurting myself?"
"Well it's from 'healing,' isn't it?" Giorno bristled when Mista made an air quote gesture with his fingers, "You can't do-" he waved his hands around "-All this if you aren't hurting yourself to get here."
Giorno stayed silent.
"So, I don't know if this is some fucked cry for help I've just been ignoring for a month, or what, but excuse me for not being a huge fan! You can't keep doing all this."
"It's not a cry for help, or anything like that. I'm fine, Mista. It's-"
"It's sick, is what is is. I mean, I don't know what you're doing exactly, and I probably don't want to, but… cutting yourself up and showing it off like this- I don't get it."
"You… really don't."
"How the hell would I, you haven't explained anything. I go to work one day and you're covered in flowers."
"I didn't think you'd approve."
"Well, clearly you don't need my approval if this is how far you got without it."
"Fair enough," xe conceded, "It's really not like you're saying at all. It's not about hurting myself. The purpose is the flowers."
"Really? That's why?" Mista asked, but all Giorno could hear was 'You want to look like this?'
"Yes, believe it or not. Like I said earlier: I think they're pretty."
"Everyone thinks flowers are pretty, Giorno. This is… something else. Why?" It was a simple enough question, but Giorno had never articulated it before, though the reason must have been floating around in floras head for years before this.
"I… Are you familiar with dandelions?"
"Giorno-"
"Answer the question. I'm trying to explain."
"Yes, I'm familiar with dandelions. Everyone is."
"Good. They're considered weeds, you know. Some people will argue if you call them flowers, as if that negates it. As if being unwanted in someone's yard makes their bloom anything lesser than something they decided was 'supposed' to be there. Despite this… they persevere. They even grow out of the cracks in pavement, thriving wherever they can take root."
"I don't-"
"Let me finish. I… ever since I was little, that's how I felt, even before I awakened Gold Experience. This is a more… literal application of it, I'll admit, but I'm not suffering. This is comfortable, as strange as it may seem to you."
"I'm still not sure I get it, Gio."
"I don't expect you to. Maybe it's because I was born with my Stand. My bond with Gold Experience is very different from you and your bullets."
"Right, sure."
"…I do cut myself, but it's like surgery, darling. Sterilization, scalpels- Oh, don't look squeamish, you've done worse. It's a means to an end. The only times it wasn't were accidents. The bullet that grazed me, and I nicked myself with a kitchen knife. Those injuries would have happened regardless."
"Do you promise?"
Giorno softened floras gaze, "I promise. I appreciate you listening. I don't know that anyone could understand, but you always humor me."
"I mean, if this isn't some psychotic break, I don't see the issue. I can roll with the punches, go with the flow, and all. Whatever makes my…" Giorno could almost hear boyfriend at the tip of Mista's tongue, but before the word came out he thought for a moment. Maybe he understood more than he thought he did, enough to realize that Giorno had found something more important to xyr identity, enough to say instead: "…il mio fiore... happy."
Giorno's heart soared. Flor could feel xyr cheeks flush, and a less than practiced smile found its way onto floras face. Mista's flower. He was always a romantic, but rarely did the things he said get Giorno like that one did. It was much different than the ego boost he got from the fear and awe in his employees, because Mista loved xem.
Before Mista could feel too proud of himself, Giorno regained some of floras composure. "Well, if I'm your flower… are you going to pollinate me?" Xe laughed, seeing as it was Mista's turn to flush.
"Maybe I will," Mista retorted, going along with Giorno's teasing. Flor hadn't realized how much xe had missed the levity throughout the month until the tension released again. Being with Mista was usually easy. They'd fallen into a rhythm this past couple of years, and the temporary disruption reminded flora of how much xe appreciated it.
Mista did not understand this. Giorno could tell, with the way his eyes still traveled over xyr body with what flor now realized was worry. Still, though, Giorno was his flower, and now the usual fondness xe had grown used to was back.
That night, they would go out to eat after too many dinners alone, and Mista's hand would find its way to Giorno's, and he would rub his thumb over the violet there and it would be so tender that xe wouldn't be able to help but lean forwards and kiss him.