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Mista gets married two days after his birthday in the year 2005 to a woman he fell head over heels for that summer. Looking at their schedules showed the fourth of December as a simpler choice, but back then Marina had found his quirks and neuroses lovable enough to concede. She didn't want a big wedding; Mista had dreamed about it since he was a boy, but at twenty-three it no longer seemed that important how many people showed up, as long as that milestone was stamped in his book. Marina wanted to wait a few months longer and bask in the anticipation of an engagement; Mista couldn't bear the thought of getting married in the year that would mark his twenty-fourth.
They pushed and pulled, and married. A traditional wedding in a church and a small reception afterwards, with Marina’s close family in attendance, and Mista’s friends and coworkers, with Fugo playing the part of the grumpiest best man Italy has ever seen.
They get divorced in summer of 2008, around the time they met in Venice; what used to be a sickly sweet story to tell now covered in sticky residue of regret. They separated once before, Mista hanging onto a thread of hope that they just needed some time, that all they had to do was try again and this time they'd get it right, this time they'd know what to avoid and what to say. Turns out it's hard to change yourself and the way you've lived your life just for one person, even if at one point you thought them the one to spend the rest of your life with. And it's hard, Mista hears, to be the wife of a man who comes home bloody, clothes riddled with bullet holes, on those nights where he comes home at all, and who spends all his time with those friends and coworkers of his from their wedding day, all of them mafiosi of varying power around the city and even the country, a prospect that might seem so seductive and hot when you are young and stupid and haven't had time to sober up yet. Marina had known this before, but Mista guesses it's different to know it and to live it. Love is one hell of a drug.
She used to get mad. Strong personality, Fugo said when he first met her. Of course you like her. And Mista really did, he liked being told off, he enjoyed the pushback, how they could needle each other and laugh about it, and he even liked her when she got really angry, when he knew he'd fucked up and she was right to tell him off. By the time the question of divorce is raised, there is none of that anger left in her. She only looks sad.
Mista spends the following year glued to Giorno’s side, even more so than before. Giorno who, in all honesty, barely needs him on a good day, but never refused his company in as long as they've known each other, since Mista knelt on the coarse rug of that office and kissed his hand in a promise. One that he hasn't broken yet. He doesn't plan to, but much has been falling outside his control lately. Fate steers him around.
“Is it fate, do you think?” Giorno asks one day as he drives them around to deal with some troublemakers first hand. It's unorthodox for the Don to do so much dirty work personally, but Giorno has never cared for rules established before him. It's not usual for the Don to drive his bodyguards around either, but it seems to put him at ease more than Mista’s erratic driving does.
“Yes, I mean,” Mista says, tapping his fingers along the handle of his gun, “what else could it be?”
Giorno doesn't answer, which is his favorite thing to do: pose a question meant to unravel Mista’s already shaky psyche and then offer no salvation for him to grab onto. Figure it out, his marble-sculptured face seems to say, and Mista hates it every time around. This is why he doesn't talk to Giorno about feelings, or about his private life which he is as of recently lacking, or about anything at all unrelated to their job, of which there is more with every day.
“You think I didn't try?” he asks, distantly furious and resigned in the forefront. He's had this conversation many times, with a person with more of a right to it, and the thought of doing another one exhausts him to the bone. Giorno doesn't know shit about his marriage. Except, a familiar nagging pang of guilt tells him, he probably does, because Mista had spent most of it at his side.
Giorno doesn't break eye contact with the road, but Mista still feels it, that razor-sharp attention, the grip it has on him, not unlike the dull body-wide pain of Gold Experience working his bones over, weighing the organs to set them right, whatever that could be. Mista never knows, he flunked out of high school and was failing biology already as he did so, and he figures it's none of his business at this point, not after swearing his life and soul to his Don, after putting it all in his hands time and time again. There are only so many times you can plead one to fix your torn flesh and stop the turn of fate from rolling before it becomes a blasphemy. This one Mista has made peace with, but he knows he owes much to Giorno and fate alike, and so he strives not to question either. He's never been a good believer.
“I know you did,” Giorno says and sets his soul at rest. Mista doesn't know why it helps so much to hear him say it. He deflates into himself a little bit, his cheek glued to the cool window of Giorno’s VW Beetle. “You always try, Mista. It's what I value about you the most.”
***
In 2000, one year before what Mista didn't know would be the rest of his life, he forced Narancia to sit down and watch The Bridges of Madison County with him. It was a true sign of trust, that, because he could never get through the last twenty minutes of it without sniffling like a baby, and he knew Narancia would never let him live that down.
Narancia couldn't, or didn't care to sit through a movie that didn't have guns, speedy car chases or explosions, so Mista expected him up and leaving in five, ten minutes max, and sure enough Narancia had spent the first five complaining about nothing happening and insisting that if he wanted to watch some middle aged woman be unhappy, he could go sit at their balcony and look at their neighbors. At the arrival of Clint Eastwood he'd settled though, which Mista could relate to. After a while he'd gone almost eerily quiet, and Mista had barely noticed it at the time because he'd been so deep in his movie, that kneading ache in his belly gnawing at him as usual.
It's the quietest they'd ever been watching a movie. Just before the beginning of the end, before the burn behind Mista’s eyes becomes undeniable and he has to angle away from Narancia to at least try to save some dignity, Narancia speaks and blindsides him completely.
“No one's ever going to love me like that,” he said, sounding almost bored of himself, to where Mista wondered if this was a mantra he spun to himself often. “You know?”
“Uh,” Mista stuttered. The scene on the TV became a sort of a blur his eyes were trying to follow, while his brain tried to catch up to Narancia’s devastating declaration. He'd been so shocked by it, he wasn't even sad. “No.”
It seems unfair that now that he knows, Narancia isn't around to point a finger and yell his I told you so. Or maybe he wouldn't laugh and find glee in Mista’s misery, because this isn't what they talked about, these deep, fleshy feelings that squeezed their hearts. The closest they'd come to it was jostling each other about girls and sex, and Narancia was already quick to grow skittish about that, which was a mistake, because it only had Mista growing bolder with his bullying.
“I know it's possible,” Narancia continued, eyes glued to the screen and apparently unaware of the effect he was having on Mista’s brain. “My parents loved each other a lot, I think. That's why my dad shut down. Never gave much shits about me, but when he lost mom he just… didn’t give a shit about anything.”
Mista nodded, chewing at his cheek. He'd known about Narancia’s dad being a piece of shit, but not the particulars, not about any of this. It felt impossible to interrupt Narancia now, and somehow he was sure if he did, he'd never get a chance to hear what he had to say again. The blank frankness didn't suit him, and Mista thought he'd rather have him mad about not getting any than whatever this was.
Narancia crossed his arms over his knees, pulled up to his chest earlier during the movie. “But it's not happening for me. I'm too wrong.”
“You're not wrong,” Mista recoiled. “What's that even mean?”
“You know.” He made a curt gesture with one hand before bringing it back down, shoulders pointed to his ears. “I'm a street rat with a record and I dress like a fag. See?”
It was so jarring to hear out loud, it took Mista a minute to gather his thoughts. He didn't think of Narancia as especially self aware. Apparently he didn't think enough of Narancia in general. Maybe it had been for the best, because this talk was making his head hurt.
He had nothing to say, because in a fucked up way, Narancia wasn't wrong. He wasn't wrong, and Mista still couldn't decide that this made him unlovable in his mind, so something somewhere was seriously disconnected, and he was too taken aback to grapple with it.
He settles on simplicity. “There are bigger idiots out there with wives and fuck—whole families under their name. Don't be stupid.”
“Dude, I'm seventeen next month and no one's ever kissed me. I don't care,” he said, in a petulant tone of voice that told Mista he cared a lot. “Didn't you have sex at fifteen?”
“I also went to jail at seventeen. So maybe don't follow in my footsteps too much, yeah?”
Narancia snorted. “I went to juvie at fourteen. For a year! Weren't you in jail for like a week?”
They were back to posturing, which was good, as they were also at the end of the movie, and Mista felt it'd be a sin to miss it. It was a bit harder to follow now that he knew Narancia was really watching and soaking it up like a sponge, if for the wrong reasons, in Mista’s opinion. It sort of dampened the joy of showing a friend his favorite movie, seeing that it depressed him in a way he hadn't seen coming.
Mista had kissed him that night, his cheeks wet as the credits rolled and Narancia gasped against his mouth before trying to kiss back. By then Mista had pulled away, because while a chaste smooch to cheer up a friend could be excused, a full on makeout session would definitely be inexcusably gay.
***
Fugo is worse company for wallowing in self-pity; he is as willing as Giorno to let him do it quietly and ask no questions, but Mista finds his furious and largely unhelpful advice less off-putting than Giorno’s ominous you have to solve my riddles three attitude towards it. This can only bring forth bad things, because it means he is more likely to speak.
“You ever read any Austen?” he asks, simply to strike a conversation, because the expensive hotel rooms they now frequent have started losing their novelty. It's that or Mista is growing old and soon will be buying bingo cards at the kiosk down the street, and he knows which one he prefers.
Fugo looks up from the window he's hovering over. No matter how much Giorno insists he will call them when he needs them, Fugo can't relax and sit down without a task at hand. It's becoming a problem, but who is Mista to go around telling people how to deal with their problems when he is dealing with his by talking to Pannacotta Fugo about literary fiction.
“I don't read novels,” Fugo says and turns back to his not at all creepy staring down the street where a couple rich fucks are schmoozing up to Giorno. Appearances are important, he says, but Mista sees in the strained lines underneath his eyes that he'd rather be doing… just about anything else. Whatever it is that Giorno does for fun.
Either way, Mista is pretty sure Fugo is lying about his reading habits but he lets it slide. It's never deterred him before.
“In Persuasion, Anne gives up on marrying a man she loves because she's persuaded,” he stops to wiggle his eyebrows and watches the side of Fugo’s face twitch, “by her friend that he's no good for her. She then regrets it for nine—nine whole years, man, she pines over him, grieves that once in a lifetime chance at happiness, until she's twenty-seven, which for that time was huge, almost a lost cause sort of situation. You can't be unmarried at twenty-seven, it gives all the eligible bachelors a sign that something’s wrong with you.”
Fugo sighs. He turns away from the window, sufficiently annoyed into paying attention.
“Of course, he crashes back into her life by happenstance, and they spend months falling in love again. And during that time there's these other men who might be, kind of are into Anne, but she knows she could never love them. It could be a good match, sure, it might even get her family away from the looming threat of poverty, but she knows that she's missed her true love and blown her chances at happiness.”
“That's stupid.”
Of course that'd be what Fugo thinks. It's probably what Giorno would say, too, just in a much more roundabout way, as they're both practical, goal oriented people. It's why they mesh so well despite their rocky starts. It's why Giorno doesn't get pissy when Fugo waltzes into his office with a very long, very specific list of all the people he's deemed worth checking and shaking up on a weekly basis, and Fugo doesn't scream bloody murder when he gets a call at 2am about finance irregularities. Giorno tried that with Mista once, scared him half to death that something horrible had happened, then got a handful of Pistols screaming and crying in his ears about it as proof to why he shouldn't disturb their time off unless in actual mortal danger.
“I think—I think it's like that with me, you know? I think it passed me by.”
It's silent between them, for a moment, a minute, two. With him and Fugo it's always like this: awkward, painful silences, or yelling and harsh words on both sides. Mista prefers the second; he has to assume Fugo does too. They both need an outlet.
After a bit Fugo finds himself again, and asks, “You were in love?”
It is a dire question to be asked by a friend if you spent three years a married man.
“Of course,” Mista says, for a second confused. “Who wasn't?”
To which Fugo says nothing, which is an answer enough.
“Who was it?” he asks. It's more of an interest in Mista’s life than he's shown in years, near death situations notwithstanding. Mista knows not to take it personally because he knows Fugo, and he knows something broke between them all that year when they came back home.
It's a harder question than it ought to be, and it sort of stumps him. There is no bright star at the center of his chest, burning with some ferocity of love like all the songs and novels tell him, just a general feeling of it missing, of something missing and his knowledge that it's probably slipped through his fingers while he wasn't looking.
***
Giorno might be a near indestructible force of nature, but Mista is far from it. With years it feels like he's growing slow, dragging his feet running. He'd never admit it of course, but Fugo jabs at him sometimes, and it stings, even if Mista can give as good as he gets.
The first sign he couldn't ignore reared its ugly head somewhere around the time Marina first suggested they could maybe use some time apart, just before he moved temporarily to Fugo’s couch with a day's worth of announcement. She called for him from two rooms away, and Mista didn't respond, first nor second time, not until she was in the kitchen with him looking vaguely pissed that he'd been ignoring her. It was at the sight of her face falling when she realized he hadn't heard her that it hit him this might have become a recurring problem.
“It isn't a fresh injury,” Giorno told him in a cold, thin voice, where no one but two or three people in the world might have detected regret. “I'm sorry.”
Mista wondered if he could persuade him to make it fresh, rip his ear canals and replace them or something, but he never did ask in the end. Giorno looks pained enough to his trained eye whenever he has to patch up a regular bullet wound, and Mista wouldn't subject him to enacting violence on him directly, as much as he swears he could take it. He makes up for it by extra vigilance and years of experience, and when he gets shot in the back during a hectic shootout by one man he didn't see coming, he blames it on bad lights and even worse luck.
Bony fingers dig into the fat above his ass, and he yells. The noise tears out of him in one strangled pull, and he slumps down after the fingers still. It's easier to take the prodding once the first shock has passed, and once he's too woozy to care about the soft little moans that keep slipping him. Cinque is crying in his hat, and for once no one tries to shut it up.
“You never learn,” Fugo complains at his back, his fingers firm but slipping over the blood. After the first bullet had gone in, it wasn't hard for the shooter to sink a couple more in his back. Fugo counts three aloud for him, and Mista sighs in relief. A hand smacks his hip, and Mista swears revenge once he's up and about again. “The goal is zero bullets! Zero, Mista!”
“You're telling me—”
“Yes.” And Fugo sounds strangely frazzled; Mista imagines him with a teeth bared grimace, bloody hands and hair in his face. “Because I'm the one that has to watch this shit.” Adds, quickly, “And fix it.”
Mista groans as a finger is sunk into one of the wounds and Fugo goes digging around. It's somehow worse than Gold Experience, because of how pointed and centered it is, how it lights up his nerves from the hole to the tips of his fingers. And Fugo isn't exactly nice about it, even if he gets the bullet out pretty quickly.
“One of these days,” Fugo grits his teeth, “Giorno and I won't be around to drag you back. Then what?”
Mista wants to tell him just how often he's crawled back home, beaten and bruised and alone, and he would do it again, because at the end of the day Giorno would hold his hand and lay it over the beating heart of his torn up skin, because he made a vow. He says something to the effect through huffs and whines as Fugo digs the other bullets out and goes quiet at Mista’s teary admission.
“I know,” Fugo says, but he sounds like he's hearing it for the first time. He is, because they never talked about it, and it's likely Fugo assumed Mista had been given a free pass to the top with no submission necessary, and Giorno probably would have given it to him, had Mista not insisted. With Bucciarati’s death fresh in his mind, he was nothing without a leash. He felt a second from falling apart.
Mista’s head slumps to his forearms, crossed where he fell on the wet concrete floor. There is blood there on the sleeve, too, and he hopes it isn't his. His whole body aches, his awareness of where he is and isn't hurt is shot to hell.
“—you listening to me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Piece of shit. Stay awake.” Shuffling, then damp fabric is pressed to his naked back, and Mista winces and shouts. “It's not that bad.”
“God.”
“You've been a mafioso for a decade. Stop being a baby.”
Turns out years of work experience don't dull the experience of pain, even if his fear of death is about as nonexistent as it can get, with Giorno around. Marina had been so scared—she counted holes in his sweaters and circular scars over his torso, and quickly she'd learned not to ask questions, as Mista had learned not to care how close to falling apart his body could get. It was a give and take relationship, and Mista knew that the more he gave, the more good would come his way. Such was the balance of luck.
Marina scoffed at that, but didn't argue against it. “It will always work out for you, then?”
“Has so far,” he lied.
“You'd take a bullet for me?” she asked, drily amused as she got whenever Mista spoke of luck and fate. Her long nails tapped against the side of his arm.
“Sure, baby.”
The huff of her warm breath hit his cheek. “But you would for anyone, right? You already do.”
Not anyone, he thought, because any spill of his blood went to Giorno, over whom it went to Bucciarati, and the people he'd doomed with all the luck he'd spent away trying to change fate. Perhaps he should've made peace with it long before that, but that jump for the stone had been his last stretch of rebellion against it. He knew, as soon as Giorno led them to Bucciarati’s body, where the spool of thread had started unraveling.
What he took was not out of some sense of justice or honor. Giorno knew that; Marina knew that, and Mista never tried to pretend otherwise.
“Not a great metric of love, is it?” she laughed. Years later Mista wonders if that is what she wished for, to marry a man who'd take a bullet for her to prove something.
During the ride back, Fugo won't let him stretch over the backseat. He swears and mumbles something about car accidents, him flying through the windshield, and forces him up in the passenger’s seat. He sacrifices more of his already tattered clothes to create a padding around Mista’s back and get him to lean back, reaching over to grab the seat belt for him, a rare chance for Mista to poke at his ribs and the thin skin there with nothing to grab.
His hand spans over Fugo’s stomach and he feels him shudder. He runs cold. Poor circulation, he says. “You should eat more.”
“You should get shot less,” Fugo repeats, exhausted, and with not that much heat left over.
“It's my job.”
Fugo shushes him, and he drives. When his phone rings and rouses Mista from one of his minute long naps, Fugo presses the phone to his hand and then after a bit of watching Mista fumble and miss the buttons, answers the call for him.
It takes Mista a bit to put the phone up to his ear too, but the line is quiet as he does so, allowing him the time. He knows it's Giorno without looking or hearing, he knows it by the silence between all three of them, by Fugo’s eyes focused on the road and the lack of snapping at his sluggishness as he answers, by the little sigh he hears after he manages a rough Hello? He knows it because what other living person would even be calling Fugo on the phone, really.
“Mista?” Giorno sounds good, a breath of fresh air after the musty basement they stumbled out of. Mista tells him so with fewer words and less sense. “You—Nevermind. How are you?”
“Great.” Fugo clicks his tongue at his side. “Snug as a bug.”
“I'm sorry I wasn't there,” Giorno tells him over the phone, a rare trace of distress in the tinny tone of his voice, to the point where Mista wonders if something else happened while he was off getting patched and prodded by the world's grumpiest partner in crime. “Oh, no. I only worry.”
It's such a blunt, straightforward statement, it takes a moment for it to sink in. Mista wonders about miracles of blood loss. He sneaks a look at Fugo, who offers nothing but nervous silence and drives on into the night.
“What about?” Mista asks “I've luck stacked up for years.”
Now they're back on track: Giorno’s voice is unreadable, still and firm. After years of living at his side, Mista likes to fancy himself a Don Giovanna whisperer, and Fugo likes to punch him for it, but even he sometimes has to wonder. “Do you?”
“I'm still kicking, right?”
For a split second Fugo looks furious, but Giorno only sighs in the speaker, the soft sound crackling. “I'm glad.”
***
Giorno fills his wounds with pebbles and forces him to take a day off. In one of Giorno’s silky spare shirts, Fugo drives him home and drops him off with promises of siccing Purple Haze on him if he shows his face anywhere near the office tomorrow, and so Mista runs into his ex wife in Lidl on a Wednesday afternoon, picking his spices on sale.
She cut her hair, and for a moment Mista finds himself in the middle of a cheesy movie, the height of the end, in that one bit where the hero meets his love interest again and they talk, running around their joint history, until they see they could love each other again, that the kisses still taste the same. For a moment her eyes shine and Mista wonders if his living room is clean enough to invite her over, and he is a sad, delusional man, but at least the delusion lasts for only about five seconds.
“Guido.” Marina smiles, her thin lips lifting the tops of her cheeks, just as he remembers. It's a sad, melancholy smile, one of choices made. It is not wanting.
***
After the month he spent at Fugo’s during his first temporary marital separation, Mista’s been taking pains to never step in the apartment again. Living there had been like pulling teeth. Fugo changed the least of them all; his apartment looks and smells the way Mista remembers his old one from so long ago, though it's different in size and rent, and though Fugo looks as small as he did back then.
It wasn't that they couldn't live together. Mista is an adaptable guy by nature, had taken the couch without a complaint and did his fair share of dishes, even made a few dinners, which Fugo squinted at, and ate without a word. That—that was the problem. They could never finish a conversation.
Sometimes, when they slipped up, it was almost good. Mista remembers that one day of late March, the two of them coming home together, their bodies bloody but egos not too bruised, shuffling around one another in the hallway past the entrance and getting their shoes off among hushed whoops, here, get off, until Fugo pushed him out of the way and Mista skipped off, smiling. It was a friendly push, the sort he would have gotten before when the three of them went to clubs together, Mista promising to leave them behind for a girl and instead sticking around to shuffle together on the dance floor, jostling Fugo around because that pissed him off, and anger got him loose.
They had cold leftovers on Fugo’s creaky couch in nothing but their underwear and sweaty skin, and put on a movie Fugo hated and Mista pretended to like, and in the end sort of did, because the explosions were good and the action tense, and it was nice until Mista opened his big dumb mouth. It wasn't like they were meeting for the first time—that Mista could handle, he was a professional small talker and knew how to ease people into it, but with Fugo it was nothing like it. Here they had all the steps but got nowhere.
This creates a funny disconnect in Mista’s head where he both knows that what he's after is no longer there, and still goes back for it again and again.
After the not so fateful reunion at the store, he breaks into Fugo’s empty apartment. He uses the key Fugo must have forgotten he'd given him, and marvels at the mess of the place before going back to the couch he so familiarized himself with two years ago. It's dented in the same places and the upholstery hasn't been changed, so when he shuts his eyes it's almost as if he hasn't moved.
Fugo doesn't seem too mad to see him there when he returns. Maybe Mista is wrong about him, maybe he's gone soft, or maybe he too sometimes tricks himself into thinking they could remember how to be friends again.
“You can never forgive me, that's why,” is what Fugo said about it. The thing about Fugo, and why it's so infuriating that he can't talk to him, is that he doesn't sugarcoat and is very precise with his words. “You'll take that grudge to the grave and beyond it. I hope you do.”
Mista doesn't think he's ever hated him, not when he held a gun to his head, and not now, in his stuffy apartment as he pretends to sleep so they don't have to dance around each other, but if this is easier for Fugo to hear than to accept that they lost something along the way, fine. He can lie to them both.
Mista feels a spindly hand feel over his exposed back as he lies on his stomach, face buried in his arms and the one thin pillow Fugo has there. The fingers press around the scarred over wounds and Mista flinches, but it must pass for an instinctive muscle jump or Fugo is merely happy to ignore him and play pretend. The checkup is useless, the pebbles did their job. He really didn't need the day off at all. Giorno is a fan of making a point, but Fugo, efficient and hard at work Fugo, should have pointed it out.
“You know him better than anyone,” Giorno said once when he needed a favor—to speak to Fugo, talk some sense into him, which was as big of a favor as he could ask for.
Mista had laughed and told him there wasn't a single person on Earth who knew Fugo, which wasn't true, but was easier to say. He knows Fugo well and often he wishes he didn't, so it'd be easier to look him in the eye. He could've met him somewhere at a bar now and hit it off. He could just be Fugo, a friend, instead of a reflection. So in that regard, Mista understands needing a day's break from him.
***
“What's this all about, you saving yourself?”
Giorno doesn't look away from where he's perusing the gaudy room as he sips his wine, which he doesn't seem to be enjoying, and speaks quietly only for Mista to hear. “You don't genuinely believe I should marry his daughter. Or Luchini’s, for that matter.”
Mista shrugs, pulling at his open collar. The tie he'd ditched around his neck long ago, and he knew how he looked, next to his boss’ fitted six-button suit, the coiled golden hair spilling over the maroon cashmere. Giorno had asked for his advice picking it, as he never had before, as if some capo’s wedding was that important. With what he held over each of their heads, Giorno could afford to never attend, but he did. And where Giorno went, he pulled Mista with him.
Now he was just pushing for a conversation to keep him bored out of his mind. Uppity receptions like this aren't for him, the sort where he has to sit by Giorno’s side because there are too many suspect idiots around for him to leave and whisk a maid of honor away for a dance or to down some cocktails with the different kind of idiots hogging the drinks table.
“It's a thought.”
“Then I wish you'd have less of them.”
Mista laughs, turning a few heads his way. He ends up stealing Giorno’s wine to cover for both of them; for Giorno’s distaste for alcohol, and his own miserable mood that's only heading lower with the minute. The people here already don't like him. He isn't sweet nor polite enough, and he cares too little for it to be charming.
“You ever dated, boss?” It's easier than calling him by his name, the superficial distance folding some semblance of comfort over him.
Giorno’s calm is betrayed by a jump of his eyebrows, if only for a moment. Mista returns the empty glass to his hand.
“No,” he says, as if it's obvious, and maybe it should be, but Mista has to imagine Giorno too had been young and stupid and hormonal once. “I was fifteen when we met, remember? You know exactly what I've been up to since.”
“Before that?”
“Before–?” Giorno frowns. “I was busy, I think. I don't remember much of that time.”
Mista wonders what a teenager could've been busy with, but this is Giorno, and he probably didn't spend his days getting beat up behind a movie theater.
“You a true love type of guy?”
“No.”
Here, Mista isn't stupid, and he certainly isn't oblivious. It's his duty not to be, and he'd be doing a real bad job if he wasn't aware of what people whispered about his Don behind his back. He is, as Marina used to say, married to his job, so he knows that the capos’ meddling offers of their daughters’ hands are not just a couple of poorly coordinated power grabs, but a test, too.
“Wouldn't it make sense then,” he suggests, half-hearted, “to get something out of this? Secure a capo and his familial loyalty, you know?” He shrugs. He knows he's spewing bullshit. “If no beauty has caught your eye on her own.”
It's easy to tune out the festivities when Giorno goes so still at his side. He doesn't look at him, which is how Mista knows he's spot on, because if Giorno had not been offended, he would simply tell him off or turn his slimy suggestion into teasing.
“I am the Don already. I don't need their approval. I could never—” he cuts himself off. His eyes jump over the room, the newly wed couple sharing a dance with what Mista remembers are some of their distant family members, including a child holding adults’ hands above her head. “I don't have time for these sorts of things. It isn't something I ever planned for myself.”
He gets that distant, cut-off look in his eyes that is so familiar to Mista; a telltale sign that they're alone, and get to be honest with each other in silence. Except they're far from alone here, and Mista remembers Giorno at his wedding years ago, how he'd sat away from the crowd, a man looking in. In a tipsy fit of blunt honesty, Fugo had called him a voyeur in Mista’s ear, then flushed with guilt until Mista teased him enough for it to morph into red anger.
After, when they've done their due and the sun has set, Mista is brought along to Giorno’s home, a spotless space of light even in the night. His curls are let down, the ones in front not quite giving away and painting him in the appearance of one of those little disheveled cherubs. Mista is drunk, or tipsy, or in that space of something in between where his head is heavy and his body light and he knows that another glass would have done him in, but Giorno had wisely stopped them from opening another bottle from his kitchen.
“How about a movie?” Giorno suggests instead, as if this would placate him. On a better day it might have. “You promised to show me Julia Roberts.”
He is being very sweet; some of that wine did get to his head. Giorno is not a fan of romcoms or big into movies at all, and Mista has been swearing to rectify this for years, to show him the joy of simple pleasures, and never quite had the time. Tonight the thought of it makes him sick.
“I can't watch Julia Roberts now,” he sighs, throwing his head over the armrest of Giorno’s plush sofa and an arm over his eyes. “I can't let her see me like this.”
It makes Giorno scoff, which is more than Mista hoped for. “But I can?”
“Oh, but you know how wretched I am.” Mista grins at him. “And you made me sit there for nearly all of that wedding, so you had this coming.”
Giorno drops on the sofa next to him, allowing Mista a leg over his lap. His eyes gleam, and Mista wishes he could watch him get properly drunk. He says so and Giorno ignores him, pushing his own agenda. “I thought you loved love.”
“I do, I do. I only feel I've done it wrong.”
Regret is an unwieldy creature he isn't well acquainted with. When he'd bailed him out of prison, Bucciarati asked about it, and when he said he wanted Mista for his skills, it was clear he wasn't talking about the way in which he handled the gun. Mista had never held one before in his life, and such the Pistols felt almost like a joke thrown in his face, turning out as they did, like fate was laughing at him for the decisions he'd made. He was fine with it.
“But aren't you endlessly lucky?” Giorno asks, sharp as always. Mista huffs and laughs and reaches out to tug at a twisted strand of his golden hair.
“Not in love. That's all for keeping this mass of muscle going.” He slaps his stomach. “For you.”
Giorno’s lips thin with a smile that doesn't come easy to him. “I'm flattered.”
Mista aches to tell him he shouldn't be; none of the people he latches onto end well. All the luck in the world has not protected the ones he loved.
He says something, to be sure, and Giorno watches on, his face unchanged. He reaches down to push his hand underneath Mista’s hat, his fingers tightening in his hair. Whatever it is Mista said to earn it, he isn't about to complain. Even if Giorno’s big eyes make him want to curl away in shame.
“It's fine, you know. I've made my peace with it,” he lies with his eyes shut, to spare himself. Words from a different time bubbling up in his mind. “It is what it is.”
Giorno’s hand curls around Mista’s cheek with a care reserved for fragile things. He says nothing of it but his lips are cold and wine-stained.