#ohofd

 ***

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.

Once, when Murolo was taking them out for dinner, he’d said, “I don’t know how many people actually believe that Giovanna was always the boss. You hear things about the day at the Colosseum, you know? We know something happened that should have never happened.”

He heard similar whispers when he got sent out on missions. People feared Giorno in this awe-stricken sort of way that never failed to make Fugo feel contemplative and uncomfortable. He’d seen Giorno with and without the Requiem arrow, and while he always had the potential to be something to fear, Fugo himself had never feared him, had never even wanted to.

“Giorno,” Fugo said. He was sitting, cross-legged, on Giorno’s bed while Giorno sorted through his closet, looking for a good suit for the function they were planning on crashing tonight. Giorno glanced back at him, curious. “Do you know what you did to Diavalo?”

Giorno blinked, and then his eyes went unfocused in a way that Fugo was beginning to recognize. He offered Fugo a bland, small smile. “Do you care?”

“I think I should.”

Giorno slowly turned back to his closet, examining a green suit with a gold embroidered floral pattern. “Wielding the Requiem arrow always means you must choose a select few details to process. Otherwise, it is much too overwhelming.”

Fugo knew this. He’d seen this.

“What I did to Diavalo…” Giorno trailed off, skimming a thumb over one of the suit lapels. “I know it in bits and pieces.”

Sometimes, that was how Fugo felt like he knew Giorno, too. He shifted in discomfort at the thought and climbed down from the bed so that he could approach Giorno. He hesitated to touch him, instead leaning against the closet door. “I didn’t mean to force you to think about it.”

Giorno shook his head. “You didn’t force me.”

“I just…”

Giorno arched an eyebrow, leaning against the closet to mirror him better. “What?”

“I just feel like I’m… out of the joke? Sometimes?”

“What joke?” Giorno said, expression going cold.

“Metaphorical joke,” Fugo said, scrambling to correct himself. “Uh, like, I know I don’t really have a right to the full story, but someday, I’d like to hear it. Maybe when I deserve it.”

The lines in Giorno’s face softened, and he idly reached out to tug at Fugo’s sleeve. Fugo drifted closer. “I want to give it to you. You should hear it all.”

Fugo sagged inward, a little bit, in relief.

“But, Fugo, I don’t think I know it.”

Fugo tilted his head. “That’s okay,” he made himself say. “You don’t have to.”

Giorno tugged at his sleeve, more insistently, and Fugo got the message, pulling Giorno into his arms. “It hid it from me,” Giorno said into his shoulder, muffled.

“The Requiem arrow?”

Giorno nodded. “Sometimes I choose what to understand, but sometimes it chooses. Fugo, it’s exhausting.”

“Do you think it’s trying to protect you?”

“Maybe.” Giorno turned his head, pressing his face into the crook of Fugo’s neck. He let out a gusty breath. “I did something to Diavalo. Something wrong. It broke things.”

Fugo ran a hand down Giorno’s back, not sure how to respond. It seemed appropriate that this, too, was fragmented. He inhaled deeply. “It’s okay.”

“I know people fear it. I fear it, too.”

“I don’t,” Fugo said, and Giorno pulled away to look at him in surprise. Fugo shrugged. “I’ve never been scared of you in my life.”

The smile that greeted him in return was blinding in its relief, in its sadness, and in its quiet fear, too. “Foolish.”

Fugo offered a tentative, wobbly smile in response. “I think it’s cute of me.”

“The duality of man,” Giorno deadpanned, and Fugo’s smile widened. “If you want to know anything else, I will tell you to the best of my ability.”

“Okay,” Fugo said. “I want to know what you think I should wear tonight.”

Giorno shook his head in wonder. “That caped suit Trish bought you.”

It had been what he was planning on wearing anyway. “Wise.”

“I mean it, Fugo. I’m not being reticent out of unwillingness to share. I promise.”

“I know,” Fugo said. “But maybe it’s a story best told in pieces.”

Giorno furrowed his brows. “Why?”

“It’s overwhelming for me, too.”

Something in Giorno’s expression cleared, and he grabbed Fugo’s hand, giving it a little squeeze. His hands formed the signs for, I understand, and Fugo nodded. “I know what you’re going to say,” he began, and then he withdrew, taking two suits out of his closet, “but which one?”

Fugo pointed at the green suit with the gold embroidery.

“You are so predictable,” Giorno teased.

“I try.”

Giorno leaned in, offering him a kiss on the cheek. “Now that that’s done, let’s go bother Bruno in the garden.”

Fugo laughed. “If you insist.”