me @ the jojos, in tears: y'all're so stupid

 ***

Mista and Abbacchio were cramped into the tiniest crawl space Abbacchio had ever seen in his life, and he was starting to get irritated.

The stake-out wasn’t going well, and the close quarters were sweaty and gross. Abbacchio had never been a claustrophobic person, but when Mista wiggled a little bit to free his arm, Abbacchio felt like snapping.

“Let’s play eye-spy,” Mista said.

“No.”

Mista elbowed him, hard, and Abbacchio had no way of knowing whether or not it was intentional. “What are you staring at?” he complained.

With a jolt, Abbacchio realized that he’d been cataloguing the elegant way that lavender flowers were shifting with the breeze. His eyes traced the way that they’d grown through the cracked sidewalk, and he flushed, casting a glare to the side so that he wouldn’t keep looking, but his gaze caught a patch of mushrooms huddled close to the crawl space.

Mista had wriggled closer to try and follow his gaze, and he blinked at him in confusion as Abbacchio banged his forehead against the closest available surface.

“You like the flowers, bud?” Mista asked tentatively, bafflement beginning to tangle with a faux-sweet, alarming sort of suspicion.

“No.”

Mista shifted to better look at Abbacchio. “Thinking about Bucciarati, bud?”

“No.”

“Oh my god.”

“I said no.”

“Dude—”

Abbacchio didn’t fucking care how important this mission was. He scrambled to shove himself outside, and he tried to turn his sprawling tumble into a roll with minimal success. He stood, trying to preserve his dignity, and scowled at Mista. He held up a finger. “Number fucking one—”

Number One materialized, looking at Abbacchio with huge eyes, and Abbacchio tried to ignore it. Bad choice of words.

“—I was bored and zoning out. Secondly, Bruno doesn’t have a fucking monopoly on flora.”

“Flora,” Mista echoed with a terrifying cocktail of delight and horror.

Abbacchio gritted his teeth. “Listen—”

“I’m all ears, bro.”

Abbacchio shut his mouth with a click. “This mission is over. I’ll get Moody Blues to figure this shit out tomorrow. We’re leaving.”

“Like,” Mista was saying as he stumbled to his feet from the crawl space, “I knew nothing could stop you from still being into Bruno—”

“Mista.”

“—but I didn’t expect this level of enthusiasm.”

“This is out of line and unprofessional.”

“You want to fuck a flower, dude!”

“I do not.”

“Trees doin’ it for you now? Am I going to catch you staring longingly after trees?”

Abbacchio said, “This conversation is over,” in his cruelest voice, a voice that somehow still did not hold a candle to Bruno’s baseline, and Mista had the nerve to laugh.

***

“How was your day?” Bruno murmured listlessly from his place at the kitchen table, hands offered.

Abbacchio took Bruno’s hands and abruptly went still, cataloguing the roughness of the bark. It was a mesmerizing, gnarled shape, contorted to imitate his bone structure, and Abbacchio could see dots of flower buds starting to peek through his knuckles, along his palm and wrists. A thorned, leafy vine snaked down his arm like tefillin, and through there was nothing religious about the act of creation that had made Bruno anew, Abbacchio couldn’t help the reflexive, stupid association, preying on imagery and the way that Abbacchio’s devotion and revolution had twisted together all around the shape of what made Bruno Bruno.

“…Leone?”

Abbacchio jerked to attention, biting his tongue hard as he signed a perfunctory version of his day’s events, and it was so fucking stupid. Bruno held himself like a dead thing, like an utterly and inescapably inhuman thing, and the flowers and fungus along his shoulders were vibrant and lovely and—

This sucked. Bruno was still devastatingly hot as a fucking plant monster or whatever.

I’m going to bed, he signed, and Bruno tracked the movement of his silhouette as he left without shifting expression or demeanor. It was the one constant that Abbacchio had reliably been able to track through all of Bruno’s states. This coldness.