Chapter Text
There are mountains between us
There is time between us
Oh, ain't there something between us?
(Brittany Howard- Short & Sweet)
The first time Giorno ever gets drunk- really, really drunk- is on the night of his 18th birthday. He has kept his system mostly free of alcohol for the past two-ish decades for, what he feels, are very obvious reasons; Alcohol makes you stupid and useless. The thought of losing the slightest bit of control over himself and his senses sets his teeth on edge. The mental image of himself swaying, slurring, confused, dribbling Crown Royal on the floor disgusts him all the way down to his core.
17 years and 11 months old, and he has only ever sipped at dinner wines when he was trying to get on a politician’s good side. And he liked it that way.
But for his eighteenth, he decides to try it. Only on the basis that he is undeniably an adult, now, and he can’t really call himself a proper adult if he’s never had a proper adult beverage, can he? Everyone else seems to enjoy themselves after a few drinks, useless and lazy as they are. So, maybe there is joy to be found in loafing around inebriated for a few hours, who knows.
Besides, there’s been a sufficient buffer of time since last a drunken hand chucked a glass at his head, hasn’t there?
Mista nearly jumps through the ceiling when Giorno informs him of his intent to drink.
“What?! Seriously? You rea-- oh. Oh, har har. Very funny, Gio.”
It’s April first. His birthday is two weeks and two days away.
“I’m not joking,” he should have checked the calendar before bringing this up. “I can tell you again tomorrow.”
“No way,” Mista’s eyes light up. “No way!”
The birthday 'party' itself is to be the most private of private affairs. The three people Giorno trusts the most in the world and himself and whatever Mista happens to buy from the liquor store. There are a lot of unknown variables to being intoxicated. He wants to keep a firm handle on everything he can. Which means no ragers, to Mista's great sadness.
"Are you sure you want to?" Fugo asks the night before. He has been pretty vocally tentative about the whole thing, all while eagerly stocking up on snacks, DVDs, and whatever ugly, cheap party implements Mista directs him to buy from the pharmacy.
"Very sure," Giorno says, leaning over to drag him into a deep, distracting kiss, before subtly slipping the plastic bag that contains a gaudy, baby blue Birthday Boy sash from Fugo's hands to his own. It's hideous, the sash. He would not wear it even if he was blackout, fall-over drunk.
Trish books a flight back to Naples, bisecting her first ever North American tour. “Are you kidding?” she says, when Giorno reminds her she didn’t have to go through all that (although he did pay for her ticket) “You’re popping your cherry tonight, baby!” -Giorno grimaces- “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
Mista sets down six unopened bottles of various alcohols on the kitchen island. How he managed to carry them all is both a mystery and a wonder to Giorno.
Mista points at each bottle in turn, grinning wide, “Champagne, rum, rosé for the lady, whiskey, more champagne, and crème de menthe”
Fugo makes a gagging noise. “Crème de menthe? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Hey, hey, don’t knock it til you try it, alright?”
“I have tried it and it's disgusting. The hell are you planning on making with it?”
Mista looks confused. “Making- No. You take a shot of it after your cocktail like an after dinner mint, right?”
Trish dissolves into giggles. “Mista,” she chides, “nobody does that.”
“Oh,” Mista looks twice as confused, now. The knit of his eyebrows making it very obvious that he has done that, and that someone once convinced him it was totally normal to do. “Well, we can. It can be like, our special drinking tradition. The Giorno’s-birthday-party-special.”
“Eugh,” Trish removes her pink plastic sunglasses and drops them on the counter, wipes a tear from her eye, “Sorry, count me out.”
“Why couldn’t you buy normal liquors?” Fugo laments, “Where’s the vodka?”
“Screw you guys, this is top shelf shit!” Mista holds the bottle of green, green, crème de menthe to his chest protectively. “Gio, you'll drink it with me, right?”
It would be undeniably funny to turn up his nose like the others and make this three-against-Mista. But Giorno glances between the sole guests of his birthday party- Mista making puppy-dog eyes, Fugo scowling beside him, and Trish, still in her puffer coat from the airport ( it’s snowing in Toronto, Giorno, snow! In April!)- and thinks, he isn't going to turn eighteen again. This is the only birthday party he's getting. (Not that he would have it any other way)
Technically, he’s only ever had three birthday parties, present event included. Every single time he has wished he could reschedule it. Wished he could reschedule the very date of his birthday. It just so happens to fall at a very inconvenient time; less than two weeks after the days marking the deaths of his first real friends.
But Mista- of all people- adamantly refuses to let him reschedule it. Every year, 16th day of the fourth month, Mista makes him celebrate. Cake, candles, singing, the whole nine yards.
So,
“Sure,” Giorno says, in the spirit of celebration and trying new things, “I’ll have some.”
Mista whoops, Fugo rolls his eyes, and Trish reaches for her rosé.
It’s a pain to admit when Fugo is right about something, but he was right, the crème de menthe is terrible. Giorno finishes a half a shot of it and sets the drink down gingerly, slides it across the table to Mista. They are in the midst of a very confusing drinking game involving playing cards and lots of rules which Giorno is not privy to. As a result, he’s polished off two old fashioneds and a half shot of crème de menthe. He feels vaguely dizzy and slack, as if the threshold for smiling has recently gotten a lot lower. So, huh, maybe alcohol isn’t all that bad.
“What?” says Mista, picking up the kitschy shot glass and inspecting it, “No good?”
Giorno shakes his head, reaches for the nearest drink (Trish’s, there’s a lipstick stain on the rim) to wash the taste from his mouth. “Mista,” he groans, when the taste of rosé has sufficiently suppressed the saccharine mint at the back of his tongue, “why would you buy that?”
Fugo bursts out laughing.
So it goes, his birthday party: Giorno loses that odd card/drinking game and has to drink the horrid amalgamation of everyone’s respective cocktails from the cup in the center. Mista prepares way too many mix drinks and calls out Sex Pistols to drink the excess, only they are more interested in the bowl of snack pretzels laid out on the coffee table. He and Trish perform an impromptu duet of Hopelessly Devoted to You, which isn't a duet, so Mista sings the instrumentals. Giorno cringes through another shot of crème de menthe and then pounces on Fugo. The kiss is repulsive for both of them, but torture for Fugo, who reflexively melts into every kiss like it's the last one he’s ever getting. One minty second and he’s spasming out of it, frowning, "Giogio!"
All in all, pretty stellar for a four person (five counting Spice Girl, who makes an appearance upon Mista’s latent realization that there are four people here) party. Where Giorno had expected to find himself scrambling to regain a semblance of control, he only finds peace. Tranquil waters, held afloat on all sides by the people he loves the most.
Everything slows down considerably once Mista makes them all switch to water and water only (with a pointed glare at Trish, who insists she’s a heavyweight). Trish is asleep by midnight- jetlag- curled up on Mista’s chest like a housecat. The water rule does next to nothing to abate the slow, hazy quality everything has taken on for Giorno. Like he is living in a 70’s drama film, all the lights turned to twinkles.
They’re talking about broken bones, now. He doesn’t quite know how they got around to this subject, only that Fugo is currently giving an overly detailed explanation of how he broke the growth plates in his left wrist multiple times from-
“From jacking it too much?” Mista drawls, face smushed into a throw pillow. He’s not long for this world, either. He is first a singing drunk, then a sleepy drunk.
Fugo huffs, “No.” He dips his fingers in his glass and flicks Mista with ice water, “Dumbass.”
Mista whines and retreats under a blanket.
Giorno watches with a tingly grin on his face and a warm, full heart in his chest. This is love, he thinks, or it’s too much champagne. He doesn’t care either way.
He has seen Fugo drunk enough times to know that the alcohol unlocks some slumbering blabbermouth within him. It's like a flip of switch- he can't stop talking. Just a few months ago, at their New Year’s party, Fugo drank five tequila sunrises in a row and proceeded to spend one full hour detailing the minutiae of his opinions on Maritime Law. Giorno loves him- so much- but he tuned out after ten minutes. If drunk words are sober thoughts- safe to say his boyfriend’s sober thoughts are exactly what he thought they were.
“-fell out of the tree in the yard, the second time. And it was my brother’s fault, the little bastard. Or I guess he’s a big bastard because he was older than me. He is older than me. He’d be twenty-five now... Well, anyways. He kept daring me to climb up to this particular branch that he had marked off, he called it- oh what did he call it? The moon base. Right. Because he was into Star Trek and all that. He told me over and over again that I couldn't reach the moon base cause I was too small and I didn't know how to climb trees. And then to rub it in he’d climb on up there like it was nothing. So one day I tried it,” Fugo finally- finally, pauses for breath, shrugs. “And he was right. I was too small. I couldn’t climb trees.”
Mista is asleep by the story’s end.
“Huh...what color was your cast?” Giorno asks. Privately, he always envied the kids who broke their arms in elementary school, because everyone else would flock around them to sign their casts. And afterward, they got to carry that reminder with them as their bones healed, that reminder of how many people were rooting for them.
“Hm. Blue, this time.”
Giorno imagines a tiny Fugo with a bright blue cast on his arm, graffitied in the names of his classmates.
He smiles. “I always wondered what happened to the casts after your bones healed. Do you throw them away, even with all the signatures on them?”
“The-” Fugo makes a face, “oh. No. My parents,” he pauses, the way he tends to do before saying anything about his parents. Like he’s deciding if it’s worth the trouble. “My parents wouldn't allow me to get signatures. Said it looked trashy,” he ducks into his glass with a half-hearted laugh, “so yeah it went straight into the bin when it came off.”
Giorno imagines a tiny Fugo, frowning, with a pristine blue cast and no reminders of who may be rooting for him.
“So, then, you’ve never broken a bone, Giogio?” present-Fugo asks.
“Well,” the threshold for smiling has gotten a lot lower, the threshold for telling the truth has as well. Where he would normally respond to this question oh-so vaguely ( I've never had a cast and leave it at that) he feels compelled to answer it in full. It’s Fugo, after all, if he doesn't get the whole truth now he’ll only run after it later. “No. I have,” he holds up his right hand, where the ring finger used to bend crooked to the side. Back before he created himself a fresh new set of hands out of necessity. He wiggles that finger. “You can’t tell now, but I once broke this finger.” He remembers the nuisance of its lingering crookedness better than the incident which broke it. How it would bother him when he had to write essays by hand in school. His own bones, gnarled and misplaced. In an indirect way, Notorious BIG was a blessing.
“How?” Fugo grins, reaches over and taps the top of the wiggly finger, “Punch something too hard?”
Giorno grins as well, and, for once in his life, speaks without thinking, “No, my step-father did it.”
“Your-” Fugo’s face drops. As does his hand to the table. As does the mood of the room. Giorno thinks distantly that he’s said something wrong. “Oh.”
On the couch, Mista takes deep, heavy breaths, on the precipice of snoring. Trish’s hair unravels from her bobby pins.
In the kitchen, Fugo watches him cautiously, as if he might shatter to pieces any second.
Scrambling to re-stabilize that jubilant mood- this is a party, after all- Giorno pulls at the first straw he finds; rambling the way Fugo does. “It was nothing, really,” a chuckle, like it’s funny, laugh please, Fugo, “he had a lockbox that he kept his money in because he never trusted banks. And at one point some money turned up missing from the lockbox, so of course he thought it was me.”
Sitting at the kitchen table, coins in stacks, bills shuffling from one hand to the other, furious, labored breaths through teeth, yellow light on the beer bottle.
Giorno smiles, waves it off, like, ah memories.
Fugo’s face is still stuck in that bleary half-shock. “And...when was this?” he chances.
“It was a long time ago,” nothing to worry about, “13 years?”
“...old?”
“Ago. 13 years ago.”
This isn’t fair, he thinks, my hands are smaller than yours. But he isn’t going to say anything because he wouldn’t be able to get a word in edgewise if he tried.
“You should be grateful,” says his stepfather, his big bearclaw hands still clutched over Giorno’s, bending them back at the wrist, “In Arabia they cut off thieves' hands. You should be grateful you’re not in Arabia.”
Giorno isn’t grateful for anything. He can feel his heart beating in his finger. He knows he’s not a thief.
3 years later, he learns how to pickpocket.
10 years later, he cuts off his own hands.
“Oh,” Fugo’s eyes go soft, and he grabs Giorno’s hand out of the air, “Giorno. That's-”
“It’s alright,” Fugo looks so upset, Giorno regrets not lying. He regrets saying anything at all. This is what people talk about isn’t it? Drunken regrets? He didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. “I have new fingers, now,” he gives their joined hands a reassuring squeeze, “New bones.”
It’s been such a long time (months, years even, he's a bona-fide adult now, with the drunken regrets to prove it) that when Giorno remembers any of his youth, it all feels as though it happened to a different person; Different hands, different hair, different skin, different name.
Six months ago he fought a Stand user in Milan whose ability relied on replacement by equivalent weight. Giorno’s jacket was replaced with a thread of barbed wire. His heart was replaced with a rock. Obviously, this Stand was no match for Gold Experience, who went ahead and turned the rock into a brand new heart, the barbed wire to a mess of soft vines.
Giorno has lost track, now, of how many parts of himself have been remade from scratch. As far as he’s concerned, the whole of him is new. He has been reborn too many times to count. And if his fresh, new skin bears none of the scars of his past, why should his mind dwell on it?
Fugo is confused, defensive, “But- that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!” He stops, shakes his head, “No. Sorry. I’m sorry that happened.”
“I didn't mean to worry you. Like I said, it was a long time ago. It's all in the past, now.”
“I’m not worried . I’m…” Fugo searches him, face knotted into something phalange-snappingly gentle, “I'm surprised, I guess.”
Giorno wants to squirm out of his grasp. That look Fugo’s giving him is horrifically close to pity, and Giorno can bear anything from pure malice to boundless adoration directed his way- but not that. Not pity.
Instead of squirming, he offers up a small smile and a laugh, hopes it's enough to force that look out of existence forever. “Why is that? We’ve talked about our childhoods together, before.” Although some topics are more worth dancing around than others, and if he has never mentioned to Fugo the more violent parts of his childhood, well.
“Sure,” Fugo gnaws on his lip, “And you've told me...about that gangster and about school. But I hardly know everything, Giogio. I’m not sure I even know half of it. I mean, god, I had no idea you were-” he stops dead, maybe because Giorno is staring him down in a way that points out exactly how dangerous of a bed he’s making.
Fugo swallows. Giorno worms their hands apart.
“That I was what?” Giorno presses. He hates this conversation but he hates leaving things unfinished more.
Fugo sighs and leans back, sets his jaw, and lies in that bed, “Abused.”
It’s amazing how close you can get to someone without ever closing that minute gap between you and them. It's true what the physicists say, about how two things never really touch. About how, on an atomic level, the electron shells of you and your lover's hands are constantly repelling each other. Sometimes he likes to blame Fugo for it, for constructing his own ten-foot-wide electron shell and shutting himself in. But the truth is he could write Fugo’s memoir for him, if need be. He knows all about Fugo’s childhood, all about his little quirks, the bifocal prescription he never wears and the scent of the scratch-n-sniff sticker stuck on his cell phone; Which expression he makes while reading means he is not to be interrupted and which means he is waiting to be interrupted.
It’s not like it’s a secret, Giorno’s childhood. Not really. He told Mista and Trish about it. Of course he did, that first summer when there was nobody else on earth but the three of them. When, for the first time in Giorno's life, somebody was deeply, genuinely interested in him. Two sets of eyes had wanted to see everything and in a moment of (calculated) weakness, he let them.
“36 questions to fall in love,” Trish reads aloud, laying on her stomach on Mista’s living room floor. She’s got a magazine open in front of her, something with more words than pictures, Giorno doesn’t know the name. The glossy pages are nothing but shine in the bright afternoon light.
“We’re trying to fall in love, are we?” Mista laughs.
Trish ignores him. “Number one. If you could have anyone in the world as a dinner guest, who would it be and why?”
“Monica Bellucci, duh, so I could put the moves on her and then we could-”
“Giorno?”
Giorno is at the kitchen table, tapping away at a laptop, trying to remember the directions Polnareff gave him while the man himself is off turtling around in the bathtub. He speaks without taking his eyes off the screen,“Berlusconi.”
Mista says, “very funny."
Question Number 5: When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
Question Number 9: For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
Question Number 10: If you could change anything about how you were raised, what would it be?
Trish left mid-June, off to live her own life, and her absence broke the chain-link of whatever spell they’d all been bound under. Giorno could hardly understand why he’d ever clung to the two of them so tightly. The memory of it unnerved him. He never wanted to find himself stuck so dependently close to anything ever again.
Then August came and brought Fugo with it.
Maybe it’s an injustice on Giorno’s part. One solid year of dating and he has never opened up about his childhood or his parents. On the other hand, why should he? It’s not worth the trouble.
Giorno keeps his voice steady, neutral when he says, “I wasn’t abused.”
Simple as. The word is foreign to his vocabulary.
Fugo nods. “So it was a one-time incident? Or it was an accident?”
"No," Giorno places both hands palms-down on the table. Placating. “I believe you’re misunderstanding the situation.”
“Explain it to me?”
Giorno frowns. He feels the fuzzy-heavy weight of drunkenness bobbling around in his head more than ever, now that he needs to be serious and talk himself out of this. “My parents were bad people. Totally inept. There is nothing more to it than that.”
Fugo exhales as if he’s just stumbled upon a wounded dove. He scoops up Giorno’s right hand with its non-crooked finger in both of his. “Giogio...” a kiss to the knuckles, like he’s trying to apologize in advance. Placating. “There's nothing to be ashamed of. I doubt anybody in the business we’re in has a comfortable past.”
This time, Giorno really squirms, really tears his hand away. “Fugo,” he says firmly, and the moon must be blue in the sky because he is repeating himself an awful lot tonight, “I was not abused.”
Fugo sits back in his seat, clasps his hands in his lap. A silent promise to stop trying to fix the situation with kisses and hand-holding.
He exudes none of the natural compassion that Mista and Trish had (Mista, shrugging, "Yeah, my mom used to smack me around too. But I was a little shit, I deserved it. There's no way you deserved it."). He's too shrewd by default, too perceptive. But- and Giorno loves him for this- he tries. “So, correct me if I'm wrong, then..." Fugo says, slow, that way he does when he's feigning uncertainty for someone else's benefit, "your parents were abusive, but you weren't abused?”
Giorno freezes.
That’s exactly it. That’s exactly the difference, in his mind, but put into words so succinctly it sounds absolutely ridiculous. He finds himself alarmingly angry at Fugo for getting it right so easily. For one wretched, selfish second, he misses the days when Fugo was too brittle and duty-bound to talk to him about anything except work.
It's just that- there's a certain connotation to the word, 'abused .' Giorno's not oblivious to it. Cycles of violence; the types of adults that abused children become. What happens to flowers strangled by weeds, brought up in the shade. But Giorno knows he isn't stunted. He has made sure to bloom just as well as everyone else. Better.
There's a connotation- An image of kicked puppies coated in brownish alleyway snow and bruised, starving children (the school nurse weighing him every six months for her records, every six months asking him if he's getting enough to eat at home? Yes ma'am.) reaching with open palms for help. Things that need saving. Giorno does not need saving and he does not need help. Maybe 13 years ago he did let himself indulge in self pity. Today he knows he is meant to be the one who grabs the open palms and lifts.
He wishes, suddenly, to not be drunk anymore. Everything is a wet, glittery slush of champagne bubbles and soft, sympathetic eyes spiraling out of his grasp and he wants to turn it off. He wants to go back to watching Trish and Mista use soup spoons for microphones and cheering in place of a stadium audience. He wants to fast forward to tomorrow morning, when everyone will inevitably have one hangover symptom or another to complain about.
He wants anything but this.
He snatches Fugo’s water glass and drains it. Whatever his birthday party was, it's over now. Whatever he had holding him afloat isn't here. He holds the empty glass out high over the kitchen tiles with shaking fingertips and flings it dispassionately past Fugo's head, against the wall.
"Giorno!"
Mista and Trish wake up with whines at the sound of the shatter.
"Ohh-ugh, fuck, who broke it?" Mista, patting blindly around the cushions for his hat.
"Was it expensive?" Trish, with her eyes closed.
Giorno, with his eyes still trained on Fugo, set and so inexplicably angry, "Stay where you are, please, there's broken glass all over the kitchen."