Work Text:
What a funny thing it is, to be afraid of a part of yourself.
Actually, it's not funny at all - it's downright fucking irritating, essentially when that 'part of yourself' is the physical manifestation of the worst possible part of your soul and you have to stare at it face to face.
On the days, where Fugo feels more of a victim than a survivor, he sits cross-legged on his bed, staring off into space, his eyes meeting the blank wall until they meet the glazed eyes of his stand, and the air suddenly feels suffocating and unclean.
He's not sad about what happened to him, all those years ago - he doesn't cry himself to sleep about it, he doesn't pour his heart out onto journal pages, doesn't stare out at the sea, tears running down his cheeks, his heart in his throat. He isn’t sad, he's angry - he's so fucking angry, punch the wall until your knuckles bleed, scream into the pillow, slam your foot into the door, because it's not fair what happened to him. He doesn’t think he could handle being sad.
He thinks, ‘Damn those hands that tried to dirty him’. He thinks that cleanliness and purity are just constructs, just ideologies designed to shame him, but he still finds himself showering with scalding hot water, in the hope that the fingertips that he can still feel dancing across his skin will be burned away. They're never burned away, and he never feels clean.
Purple Haze disgusts him; it reminds him how absolutely out of control he is. His stand has an obsession with being clean, and Fugo just wants to grab it by its shoulders and scream into its face 'Don't you get it? Don't you fucking get it? You're never going to be clean! You’re never going to be able to scrub his touch away!’' - yet every single damn time, it'd just blink at him gormlessly, with glazed-over eyes of a glowing yellow, as drool spills messily from the corner of its mouth.
His stand's mouth is sewn shut, and Fugo can't help but think of all the times he was silenced when he tried to tell someone. He was told he was lying, making things up for attention, and eventually, he just stopped trying. No one cared, people didn't care, they just wanted him to sit down and shut up and not create a fuss - he was a trophy, not a son, and now he was just a shame to his family.
He wonders if they replaced the family portrait in the parlour, Fugo standing stiffly, his father's hand gripping his shoulder firmly - tightly - so that he couldn't run away.
He'd never been able to run away, he'd never been given the choice.
Bucciarati gave him the choice to leave or follow, and Fugo chose to run away. It was cowardice, he knows it was damn cowardice - what else did he have to live for, if not for Bucciarati?
Months later, after everything, they come into the restaurant he was playing the piano in - it’s an early summer's evening, the air warm with just enough of a comfortable breeze to leave the windows open.
He’s playing a simple melody - fingers dancing loosely across the keys. It’s muscle memory at this point, he doesn’t remember the name of the song, he just remembers where his fingers go.
The restaurant applauds as he finishes the song, but one table seems to clap louder than the rest, whooping and cheering. Fugo turns to them, brow furrowed in confusion, and he immediately feels sick upon gazing across their faces.
He makes to leave, but they corner him in the doorway, stating that they just want to talk. He’s heard that bullshit before - Fugo, just a word, please - Fugo, meet me in my office after class - Fugo isn’t good at talking, and yet he somehow finds himself sitting on a park bench with just Bucciarati. The man’s posture is relaxed, and open, and Fugo feels like Purple Haze - hunched over, deadly, and desperately unclean.
“How have you been, Fugo?” Bucciarati asks, in a deceptively casual tone. Fugo’s eyes dart across the park, to Mista pushing Narancia on the swings, to Abbacchio stealing a cigarette behind a tree where he thinks that Bucciarati can’t see him, to Giorno inspecting a flower bush (though Fugo knows he’s being watched out of the corner of the boy’s eye). He swallows nervously. If he were to run, would they chase after him?
“I’ve been just fine, Bucciarati.” He says, through gritted teeth, his glance coming back to the dark-haired man sitting beside him.
“You won then?” Fugo asks, and Bruno purses his lips.
“Yes.”
“Why do you look so sad then?”
Bruno gives him a weak smile, his blue eyes a sea, sadness rolling over them like waves.
“We lost you.”
Bucciarati holds his hand out, and offers Fugo the chance to come back, and though he accepts the offer (that he certainly didn’t deserve, not after all the hurt he’d caused), he doesn’t take Bucciarati's hand because he knew that he’d only dirty it with his own filth. Bucciarati didn’t deserve that.
Purple Haze infected people with a virus, and Pannacotta Fugo did just the same. Everything he touched was destroyed from the inside out, his fingertips toxic, his words poison. Fugo supposes that he too, had been destroyed from the inside out by a touch.
When Giorno accidentally uses his stand, it’s usually because he’s distracted, his mind somewhere other than on the task at hand.
It’s as the pair sit in Giorno’s study, sorting files and papers, signing documents on the dotted line, that Gold Experience’s abilities activate without him realising. He picks up a pen, his hand glowing with a wondrous golden light, and suddenly there’s a tiny green frog sitting in the centre of his palm croaking indignantly.
“Oh-!” Giorno says, surprised, and he and Fugo stare at the frog for a moment, before Giorno chuckles lightly.
“I guess I must be more tired than I thought,” He smiles, tapping the frog on it’s slimy head gently with the tip of his finger, the small creature staring back at him with it’s beady black eyes.
“Yes, you must be. Perhaps you should take a break? I can deal with this,” Fugo offers, tearing his gaze away from the amphibian sitting in Giorno’s palm, his sight settling on the stack of papers that has only seemed to get bigger since he glanced away from it.
“You should also take a break too. Come on, we can go and put him out in the garden,” Giorno says, as he gets up from behind his desk, before holding the small creature out to Fugo.
“Would you like to hold him?” Giorno asks, patiently, and Fugo quickly shakes his head, clenching his fists at his sides. He hates the fact that he doesn’t trust himself to hold the tiny frog in his hands gently, he hates the fact that his mind will scream at him to self destruct, close his palm around the delicate creature and squeeze . Fugo feels like the frog in that moment, being picked up and placed wherever without any say in the matter, and totally susceptible to any and all destruction.
When Giorno accidentally uses his stand, he creates flowers, frogs, and life flourishes from his fingertips.
When Fugo accidentally uses his stand, he only destroys.
It’s later that night when he bites back a yell, slamming his fist into his wall, that he realises in horror that it’s Purple Haze’s fist hitting the wall, and not his own. Violet smoke fills the room from a burst capsule on his stand’s knuckle, and Fugo immediately lets out an anguished and frustrated shout.
“Fuck!” He yells, holding his own knuckles, as he rests his forehead against the wall. There’s an urgent knocking at the door, and Fugo snaps to attention, turning to the direction of the door, though he can’t see it through the thick haze of the purple smoke.
“Fugo? Are you alright?” Bucciarati calls out from the other side of the door, and Fugo immediately panics.
“Get away from the door!” He exclaims in desperation, tugging a blanket off of his bed and sprinting across to the door, shoving the blanket against the gap in the bottom of the door, his knees slamming against the hardwood floor.
“What’s the matter?” Bucciarati’s voice comes again, and Fugo can imagine the look of concern plastered across the man’s face. Guilt fills his chest, gripping and suffocating, he couldn’t control himself, and now he’s made Bucciarati worry.
“It’s Purple Haze, you need to stay back--”
“Have you turned the lights on?”
“What?” Fugo asks, though he immediately realises what Bucciarati means, clambering to his feet as he swats some of the smoke away, before hitting the light-switch. Bright light fills the room, blinding and dizzying, and Fugo blinks rapidly as the smoke dissipates much more quickly than before. He sighs and clicks his tongue upon seeing the plant on his windowsill, very much dead at this point. Giorno wouldn’t be pleased.
“--Fugo?” Bucciarati asks again, and Fugo spins to face the door, realising that he’s just missed whatever Bucciarati had been saying.
“Sorry, I--” Fugo takes a deep breath, in an attempt to recompose himself. “It’s fine, sorry.”
He stares down at his knuckles, and huffs when he finds them bloodied.
His hands were never meant for softness. All that blooms from his knuckles is violence and crimson. He is violent because he doesn’t know how else he can survive this.
Fugo takes the ladybug shaped egg timer from the kitchen, and twists it to set it to five minutes. He sets it on his bed stand, takes a deep breath, and Purple Haze manifests.
It’s crouched on the floor, hunched over, wheezing noisily, and Fugo feels disgusted at just the sight of it. He can’t help but wonder, if he’d gotten his stand before… everything - would it be different? He’s always been angry, unpredictable, but he’s never had such a pitiful obsession with being clean .
Fugo sits on the edge of his bed, knees pulled to his chest, as he watches Purple Haze scrub at itself desperately, and his lips narrow, he shuts his eyes and he listens to his stand whine and growl animalistically. Is this all he is? Is he a mere animal?
Supposedly, he has the strongest stand of all of them. He wonders if ‘strong’ and ‘destructive’ are interchangeable.
He would rather not be strong, if it meant that he could erase the memories, the nightmares, the way that his skin burns and itches under invisible touches.
He didn’t ask to be ‘strong’ - it is only a by-product of his survival.
The ladybug timer goes off eventually, Purple Haze punctuating the ringing of the timer with a throaty gurgle. Fugo sighs, and recalls his stand. He doesn’t want to look at it anymore.
Purple Haze is a nothing but a monstrous reminder, and Fugo knows that Abbacchio can relate to that. Moody Blues replays the past, replays the same horrible moments over and over.
Each year, on the anniversary of his partner’s death, Abbacchio leaves them for the day. Fugo wonders if he goes to the house that he died in - though he’s not one-hundred percent sure who the ‘he’ that died there was. He wonders if Abbacchio died that night too. Fugo wonders if he replays the moment, pauses it and stares at their expressions, freeze-framed in horrifying detail.
Fugo stands in the mirror and bares his teeth, clenches his fists, mouths the word ‘stop’. He hoped he didn’t look that pathetic in the actual moment, though he supposes it doesn’t matter - not really. It wouldn't have made a difference.
Tears sting at his eyes.
God, he hopes it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Abbacchio is usually the first one up in the morning, sometimes because he doesn’t sleep. That works out well for Fugo, who wishes to speak to the man alone.
“Abbacchio,” He begins, his voice shaky as he speaks aloud for the first time that morning. “I need a favour.”
The silver-haired man doesn’t look up from yesterday’s newspaper, instead flicking to the next page.
“Good morning to you too.” He says, lazily, as Fugo heaves out a sigh, clenching his fists at his sides. It’s too early for an argument, and for once, Fugo doesn’t feel like it.
“I need you to use Moody Blues to replay something for me.”
That gets his attention.
Abbacchio raises his eyebrows, peering at Fugo over the top of his newspaper for a second or two before he huffs, folding the newspaper down and setting it on the table. He kicks a chair out, and gestures for Fugo to sit. He does, albeit reluctantly, arms folded against his chest.
“What do you want me to replay?” He asks, and Fugo opens his mouth to speak, before closing it again.
He’s not sure how he’s meant to ask Abbacchio to come with him to the library of his old university, so he can watch his trauma all over again in glorious high definition, but lately, it feels like his body is always in fight or flight mode for something that his body won’t, or can’t, quite let him remember. It’s a haze, a blur - it’s words whispered in his ear just as he’s drifting off to sleep, it’s fingertips ghosting across his back, it’s fear gripping his chest when he sees a stranger walking down the street who seems both familiar and not at the same time.
Fugo swallows nervously, as he realises that Abbacchio’s dawn-like eyes are still focused on him.
“I…” He pauses, wetting his lips so they don’t stick shut as he tries to speak, silencing him again.
“Someone took my strawberries from the fridge,” Fugo blurts out, and Abbacchio’s expression doesn’t change.
“That’s it?” He asks, and Fugo nods shakily in response.
“That’s it.” Fugo confirms.
He knows that Abbacchio knows he’s lying.
The idea of sentience in a stand is a funny thing - not funny in a jokey, humorous way, but just in a strange and somewhat unsettling way.
He sees it with Trish, as Spice Girl comes out in the middle of a film night, taking the remote and pausing ‘The Princess Diaries’ without any sort of input from Trish.
Everyone looks to the stand, the pink and silver figure standing there, with arms folded.
“Trish wanted to say something,” Spice Girl says, and Trish rolls her eyes, clearly exasperated.
“Sit down ,” She hisses, though what she really means is ‘Come back’. Spice Girl remains exactly where she is, and Trish groans, collapsing back into the sofa cushions.
“What is it, Trish?” Bruno smirks, and she shoots him an almost venomous glare.
“Yeah, Trish? What’s up?” Mista grins, and Trish drags her hands down her face.
“It’s nothing.” She says, her words muffled by her hands. No one in the room speaks, and Spice Girl remains exactly where she stands, the TV remote still in hand. Trish lets out another prolonged and frustrated groan, still hiding her face in her hands.
“I just think Anne Hathaway is really cute, okay?!”
For once, Fugo’s intensely glad that all Purple Haze can do is gurgle and growl. At least that way, it can’t give away his secrets.
Sex Pistols are certainly a strange one too - they’re more like toddlers that Mista has to perpetually babysit, rather than a stand.
Each day at the dinner table, Mista has to attempt to wrangle them, often to no avail. He chops up tiny little pieces of Salami, into just the right sizes for their tiny hands to shovel into their mouths with much squealing and whining.
“Mistaaaa-!” Number Five whines, tears starting to well up in its eyes.
“Three took more than his fair share!” The pistol cries, grabbing onto Mista’s thumb.
“Quit snitching!” Number Three barks, grabbing another piece of Salami, and Mista offers Five a tired, yet sympathetic look.
“I’ll get you some more--” He begins, before quickly being cut off by squawks from the other Pistols.
“Mista!”
“That’s not fair!”
“If he’s getting more, we want more too!”
Mista looks absolutely exasperated, and Fugo doesn’t feel sorry for him at all, pointedly looking away as he takes a sip of his wine.
Since they’d all settled down into their family home permanently, the Pistols had become much more comfortable, spending much of their time out and about in the house.
Narancia had set them up with doll’s house furniture - a full diorama, set up with perfectly decorated bedrooms, an extravagant dining room and a fully equipped kitchen with teeny tiny plastic food.
Much to Narancia’s disappointment, they tended to sleep on Mista’s pillow right next to his head , apparently spending the nights snoring loudly into Mista’s ear (Fugo had no sympathy for him surrounding that, he’d shared enough hotel rooms with Mista to know that he was just as bad, if not worse) and kicking their tiny feet into his cheek. He tends to wake up most mornings with tiny red marks over his cheek.
They’d also developed an unfortunate tendency to collect things, and that tendency was so unfortunate, mostly because of where they stored their collections - really in any available nook or cranny. Bruno was furious when he’d found tiny pebbles ‘stored’ in the sink pipes (apparently they’d been shoving them down the plughole), and Trish was very much irritated to find her silver stud earrings in the jar of coffee (the ‘hiding places’ ranged from the strange to the downright confusing) - probably most distressing was the morning that the toaster was set on fire by one of the Pistols hiding an American one-hundred-dollar bill in it.
Narancia had screamed, not due to the toaster fire, but rather due to the fact that he had to watch Benjamin Franklin’s expensive face burn up, as he cried about how many packs of Pokemon cards he could’ve bought with that money. Meanwhile, Abbacchio was trying to unplug the toaster with the end of a wooden broom as he screeched for Bruno to ‘Get the door, get the damn door--’.
He was glad Purple Haze couldn’t do irritating shit like that.
At first, he’d thought Purple Haze was completely unhinged, out of control, couldn’t be commanded, but as time went on, Fugo realised it was himself that needed to learn that control, not Purple Haze.
He worked on breathing exercises with Bucciarati, sitting cross-legged in a dark room as whale noises played in the background - the whale noises were fucking irritating, but the breathing helped. In for 5, hold for 5, out for 5. It was easy to remember, and when his anxiety and panic manifested as anger, he’d count on his fingers, touching each of them to his palm in turn, counting to five.
They had a punching bag in the garage, and Abbacchio showed him how to throw a punch in a way that didn’t injure his hand. He’d tried to help Fugo with his stance too, but only once. Abbacchio had placed his hands on his shoulders, and Fugo had immediately frozen in place, stiffening under his touch.
For a few moments, he’s not all there, and when he comes back to himself, he finds Abbacchio sitting on the floor next to him, a foot of space between the pair.
“You good?” He asks, handing Fugo a water bottle. Fugo doesn’t meet his gaze, taking the water bottle from his grasp without making any contact with the man.
“You wanna talk about it?” Abbacchio asks, and Fugo has to bite his tongue to keep himself from cursing. It hits him out of nowhere, sometimes. A lot of the time, he doesn’t even realise that he’s gone somewhere else until he comes back.
“I don’t,” He manages, uncapping the water bottle with shaking hands. “I really, really don’t.”
Most of all, he feels sorry for Purple Haze.
He takes the ladybug timer from the kitchen that night, and cradles it in his cupped hands. With a sigh, he sets it on the bed stand, not starting it just yet.
Purple Haze isn’t a monster. It’s a part of Fugo, whether he likes it or not - he owes it to himself to acknowledge that part. Purple Haze is fight-and-flight instincts rolled up into one, the need to run and hide, the need to punch, kick, and scream.
Purple Haze is the scared child within him, that he’d desperately tried to shove down, out of sight, out of mind.
He watches in silence as drool spills from Purple Haze’s silenced stitched lips. He feels sadness as he watches his stand desperately tries to scrub itself clean, palms scouring roughly against wrists, fingertips trying to rub away invisible stains from the skin that doesn’t feel like his own.
With a sigh, Fugo stands, and walks over to his stand.
He could grab Purple Haze’s wrists, drag it to its feet, but Fugo hates being held by his wrists, so why would his stand be any different?
Instead, he exhales slowly, holding out his hand. Purple Haze looks up at him, yellow eyes wide - like glowing street lamps in the nighttime. Fugo keeps his hand still, and Purple Haze reaches out for it, placing it in Fugo’s gingerly. Slowly, Fugo helps Purple Haze to its feet, and the pair carefully make their way to the bathroom. They stand in front of the sink, Fugo ignoring his dishevelled reflection in the mirror as Purple Haze seems hyper-focused on its own.
Fugo takes the bottle of soap, squeezing some into Purple Haze’s hands, and then into his own. He turns the tap on, the temperature warm, not scalding, and gently pulls his stand’s hands under the tap in order to wet them. Fugo gently lathers the soap into both of their hands, and the ritualism of it all is somewhat comforting. He rinses the soap from their hands, and then takes a towel to dry them with deeply attentive care.
The milk and honey-scented soap makes their hands clean, but it does not make them holy. That’s fine, though. He’s never been very religious.