Work Text:
11/14/2024
original work written in 2021
THE COLOR OF BRUISES
---
There’s a book in Pannacotta Fugo’s older brother's bookcase, perched at the very top of it, too high for him to reach without a chair. ”The Mysteries of the World”, it’s called.
The last fifty pages of the book are dedicated to parapsychology and there, crammed in between precognition and telepathy lies a chapter titled; Soulmates.
It has a black and white picture of two Scandinavian women, who once tried to show the world that they were meant to be, demonstrating how lines traced on the skin of one would appear on the other.
Maybe if they weren’t of the same sex it would have become more than a side note in a book of curiosities.
But there it stands, under the decided gaze of a three-year-old too smart for his own good.
Soulmates are a thought entertained by many, something rare enough not to be proven, yet common enough to be labeled a mystery. Fugo doesn’t know if he believes. If he’d even like to.
Even if Fugo calls himself a skeptic- a word his parents have taught him -he’s still at the age where the border between reality and fairy tale is pliable.
And no amount of skepticism can remove the fact that he sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night with sweat falling cold against his back, the fear of being abandoned like spikes at the back of his throat.
It might just be nightmares, but there’s something foreign about the fear, like it’s not completely his own.
Sometimes scribbles appear on his hands when he’s not touched a pen in days. Once, a burn scar sprung up on his knuckles overnight.
Fugo wonders about it. It drives him to steal a blue felt tip pen from his brother’s desk, to crouch down under it and scribble in bold childish letters, right where the scar blends in with healthy skin; “Hi, I’m Fugo”.
Nothing happens.
He feels silly once the marker has worn off and the skin is clear once more. But at last, no great discovery has been made without trying silly things. He doesn’t beat himself up over it.
And that’s how things stay. Until Fugo turns four and the bruises start to appear.
Small ones, like fingerprints along his arms. Large ones that bloom in shades of magenta and yellow and shine with glee on his skin.
Some of them can be explained away easily enough, some cannot. They are on his face, around his eyes and some too oddly shaped to be made by anything mundane.
There’s nothing they can do about it.
Well, except for when his parents cut down on his play time. Too dangerous.
His life morphs into an endless swirl of doctors, hospital rooms and broken capillaries.
Fugo asks the doctors about soulmates when he’s five years old and sick of tests and medications but instead of answers he’s given friendly smiles and serious explanations.
He learns that leukemia causes blood cells to form incorrectly, that there are four main types: acute lymphoblastic, acute myeloid, chronic lymphoblastic, chronic myeloid . Symptoms range from excessive bruising to fatigue, increased risk of infection, chronic fever and an endless array of vague signs that make Fugo wonder whether he’s had leukemia all his life or if it’s just what living feels like.
His blood tests come up empty even when he’s had so many he’s began to feel more like a child sized pincushion than himself. So they perform a bone marrow biopsy, which only triggers a two week migraine and a lifelong phobia of needles.
By the end of his sixth year, the only thing Fugo has is a bunch of vitamin supplements and a fresh black eye.
—
Fugo’s grandmother has a book called “The Symbolism of Color”. It’s not very long, exactly 165 tissue paper pages stuffed between yellowed covers. His grandmother told him she’d bought the book at a street fair in Ireland, sometime during the distant post-war decades of her youth, when life was simpler and she still had two supple feet and two sharp ears.
The book is in English, part of an ever broadening collection of titles well loved. Not the kinds of books Fugo would be allowed to read at home of course, but the rules of home are tossed to birds the moment he steps over the threshold of his grandmother’s cottage.
It’s not that the book is particularly interesting. Fugo already knows that purple is worn during the time of lent, it symbolizes the sacrament of the sick. He doesn’t know however, that for most of history the color was only worn by royals. That in nature it is an extremely rare pigment.
It’s funny in a way, for Fugo who has worn a piebald-pattern of bruises shining in all the shades of purple on his skin for the better part of his eight years.
He hates it by default.
The bruises never hurt, nor has he ever seen one appear. He’s tried, standing naked at the mirror for hours just to see one form.
He never did. Not really, anyway.
He caught a few, yes, but those seemed to happen with a jump cut, like the bruises always slipped themselves into the gaps in Fugo’s attention, came to in a blink of an eye.
So he gave up catching them and settled on hating the colors on his skin until he ended up here, eight years old and frustrated, sitting at his grandmother’s ancient kitchen table.
“Is it your favorite color dear?”
Purple?
It has so many strange English sayings to its name.
Purple cows eating purple roses within purple hazes .
The sacrament of the sick.
He hates it.
“No.” Too stern maybe, but his grandmother doesn’t mind.
“Oh, I always enjoyed it. Reminds me of my time in Drôme.”
“Why?”
His grandmother lets out a silent laugh, veiled in deep nostalgia.
“Lavender fields.”
“Oh…”
Fugo tries to catch the beauty in the word, but all it sounds like to him is a disease; Lavender, purple, mauve, violet...whatever, all rotten and sick.
-
It all loops back to bruises that aren’t his, to adults who don’t believe him, to his parents who make him study law and psychology and learn languages he doesn’t like, to his peers who laugh at his black eyes, to emotions that echo from the back of his cranium and shoot through his mind like lost radio signals, out of sync with his own moods.
In the playground, when for once he’s content, the fear of death washes over him, so strong it stills him completely, causing his entire body to convulse. Then there’s apathy, an out of body experience. He crawls underneath the slide and tries to peel off his skin with his bare hands.
On a good day it turns into a sobbing fit and on a bad day it turns into anger he isn’t in control of, like an echo from his imagination, from between the pages of his brothes book, like someone somewhere is trying to break a vital part of him and Fugo needs to avenge it, find the perpetrator and sink his teeth into their flesh, to gouge out their eyes.
At ten years old Fugo pushes his anger out at his older brother, who falls down over the edge of their tree house. He tumbles onto the grass below, too shocked to scream as his ulna snaps under the weight of his body, from just above the point where wrist meets hand.
That bruises, too.
He hates the color purple with every ounce of his being, the hate only growing while he’s grounded for two weeks, prohibited from going outside, cooped up with his textbooks and simmering with hatred towards everyone and everything around him.
-
“Do you believe in soulmates?” he asks his grandmother.
She looks indifferent, not as much as batting her heavy, lashless eyelids at the strange question.
“The world is full of bizarre things, Panni, you’d be surprised what one can see if she looks close enough.”
“But do you believe in them?”
“It wouldn’t be stupid to say that there’s someone for everyone out there...a whole lot of people, walking this world.”
“Do you think I’ll find mine?”
“I don't doubt you’d find a way if you put your mind to it.”
There’s something like a knowing glimmer in her eye as she picks up her cane and goes to prepare herself a cup of coffee.
That night when Fugo glances down at his hand, he finds the word “hi” scribbled onto the seam of the burn scar, in a purple marker that won’t come off no matter how much he scrubs with soap and scalding hot water, over and over, until his skin flakes off and the text peels along with his epidermis.
He doesn’t respond. And he never gets another message, leaving him to wonder, at night in his bedroom, amidst the big books his parents make him read, with the soft moonlight seeping in through the blinds, whether there truly is someone out there thinking along his old lines of bruises and soulmates or if his mind has just began to cave in on itself, memories failing, perception crumbling.
—
He’s thirteen years old, and he studies law. Not because he likes it. He’s sure no one likes likes it, really. It’s a thing humans do out of necessity rather than desire.
Or maybe he just hasn’t learned to enjoy torture yet.
He has his own apartment that his parents have rented for him, a walking distance from campus. There’s nothing particularly interesting in it, except for a box full of old books left by the previous tenant that he still hasn’t thrown out after seven long months. Fugo has gone through the books and figured the one who left them behind was studying classic literature.
There’s a few Fugo’s familiar with, but nothing he likes.
Horatius Flaccus’ Opera Omnia, entirely in Latin, sits at the top of the pile.
The professor wants to see him.
His grandmother died at 4.30 last night.
He knew she was sick, but they didn’t let him come back because that would have thrown him off schedule.
Why is life so short and uncertain?
Is eighty nine years even a short time?
On the grand scheme of everything it sure is, morbidly short.
And maybe the sudden end of those eighty nine years is the change in perspective Fugo’s been needing. The thing to either plunge him deeper into the perpetual purple haze somewhere within his cognition, or pluck him out of it like a ripe strawberry.
The professor wants to see him.
He knows it’s going to be about the essay he flunked, not because he didn’t understand, but because he wanted to see what would happen if he did. A lame rebellion.
He regrets it now.
But regret doesn’t matter.
Not when eighty nine years means nothing to the steady march of time, from here to forever, until forever warps up around itself and becomes not forever, somewhere in the abstract existence between now and the heat death of the universe.
The offices are in the western wing. Marble steps through marble hallways to an oak wood door.
“So. About your essay, Mr Fugo,” starts the old man, stilted, getting ready to start a moral sermon on whatever it is Fugo has ruined by neglecting the studies he never had passion for.
“My grandmother died last night,” Fugo blurts out, choked enough to be embarrassing, silent enough to be insignificant.
He doesn’t sit down, not even as his professor sets down the papers and hauls himself up, something that could, if squinted enough, look like an act of empathy.
It’s not.
With these kinds of men it never is.
Fugo really wishes he would, Fugo thinks about Horatius; carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero … The quote makes him cringe, yet he now feels it more truthful than ever before. Seize the day, don’t trust the future.
Last Thursday the professor invited him to dinner. He hated every second of it, the small talk, the mock-passionate conversation on ancient legal systems with a man four times his age.
A man four times his age and thrice his size. A man that smells like the classic age of academia and stale wine.
And well, they say the world was created last Thursday. Occam’s razor be damned, why couldn’t it end today?
It’s disgusting really. In a way that makes Fugo’s brain decide it doesn’t want to associate itself with the situation anymore. Shutting down the traffic on the highways of his mind, it sends his consciousness flying.
Fugo gets to look at himself, bend against the wall from somewhere above his head, a fly in the ceiling.
His emotions are ricocheting off the edges of the universe, looping what’s happening to his body like a broken CD and distantly Fugo begins to wonder if the hypothetical “Other” who sometime writes literary quotes and draws frogs on his arms can feel the violence too, bouncing between two people, from receiver to receiver. Like an emotional echo chamber.
It’s really not fair that Fugo’s the one causing the other more bruises now that they’ve finally seemed to get a break from those.
With that thought he slips back into his body once more, uncomfortable like a pair of brand new leather shoes, where it is, trapped between a wall and a man, clogged with sleep deprivation, grief and self perception.
Encyclopedia Britannica; Eleventh Edition is a heavy title.
Fugo doesn’t feel particularly bad for painting that one red.
The Other can thank him for it later, now it's all he needs to settle into his terrain again. Begin the process of molding the new shoes into something wearable.
He goes back to his apartment, where he kicks the book box and sends Opera Omnia flying across the room. It lands face down on the floor.
He bashes his head against the wall.
“Are you alright?” Is now inscribed in red letters below his knuckles.
He answers, right before the cops come knocking.
"I've been better."
—
Fugo ends up in Naples.
There’s no time to hand out explanations, much less to a hypothetical “Other” who could as well be a shock induced hallucination or a manifestation of Fugo’s mental instability, made worse by the incident at the Universita di Bologna.
No matter. By the point where he walks out of Polpo’s prison, the taste of blood and bile still strong on his tongue and the sizzle of disease in the hollow of his chest, he’s had so much new information stuffed down his throat that there’s no time to worry about a potential soulmate.
Buccellati waits for him at the apartment block, hands crossed over his chest, holding a key.
“Looks like I was correct about your potential.”
He doesn’t smile.
Fugo bends over and throws up what still remains in his stomach onto the man’s Ferragamo loafers.
The apartment he's shown to is already furnished.
“The guy living here before got shot. No sense in wasting resources so you get to inherit it.” Buccelati explains hastily on his way to the bathroom. To wash his shoes, no doubt.
Fugo plops down on the couch and thinks about the color purple.
There’s a single question mark drawn on his wrist.
”?”
Fugo draws an “X” next to it.
—
The only book in the apartment, as it turns out, is a single copy of the Holy Bible, sitting solemnly on a dead man’s nightstand.
In the absence of anything better to do, Fugo flips it open and begins from Genesis.
And God said, “Let there be light” and there was light.
Fugo’s not religious anymore- hardly ever was -but he finds comfort in the familiar words.
Even outside this crack he’s fallen into, faith is a thing he can never grasp yet holds immense respect for.
Honestly, he would give anything to be able to just throw his devotion blindly to God. God has a plan for everyone and everyone is part of his plan. No need to worry himself with questions. With guilt.
He wonders whether he should start praying again; just in case. The past week has flipped his perspective.
He feels It itching under his skin, as if It’s trying to claw Its way out.
“Stands”, Buccellati calls them.
“It’s a representation of you at your core value. Your fighting spirit. Your survival instinct personified. It’s you.”
Then Buccellati had flipped out his own, and made something like a huge, interdimensional zipper on the wall closest to him, casually like there was nothing strange about it at all.
“ I call mine Sticky Fingers.”
If what came out of him after the arrow pierced his throat is him at his core value, then his rot must go deeper than he’d ever imagined.
Nothing new really.
It’s purple in color, all patch-work skin and sewn-shut lips, gurgling foamy saliva and punching around a plague strong enough to melt flesh. Is that what he is?
It’s the color of bruises.
The Other questioned it too. With a single, small symbol on his wrist.
If the emotional echo chamber is real, then it obviously means the Other felt it too, when It was pulled out of Fugo by force.
—
Buccellati walks in on him, reading the second book of Moses. “Have you named it yet?” He asks, tone cold, posture rigid.
Fugo sighs, sets his eyes on the faint fresco on the ceiling. Art nouveau roses and something that could be swirls of purple smoke.
Purple cows eating purple roses within purple hazes.
“I quite enjoy it myself.“
Bruises.
Lavender fields.
“Purple Haze.”
Buccellati gives him a stern nod before tossing him a manila folder, stuffed with paper.
“That’s your first assignment.”
”Already?”
”Experience is key.”
Fugo does as he’s told.
At fourteen years and six months old he kills a man for the second time.
The Other draws a small heart on his palm that night.
Fugo thinks of amnesia and dissociation, and decides not to answer on the chance he's talking to himself.
—
It’s early autumn when he finds Narancia, winter when the boy becomes the second addition to Buccellati’s team. Narancia moves in with Fugo and a week after that Abbacchio is sitting at their table in Libeccio when they arrive in the morning.
Two months pass and they find themselves sharing Fugo’s flat with Mista. They’ve run out of bedrooms, but they fix him a place in the living room, a real bed and everything.
Fugo doesn’t get bruises anymore. Nor does he get weird echoes of emotions that aren’t his. Just bouts of debilitating, uncontrollable anger. And the regular, pounding revolt caused by the existence of Purple Haze in the crevasses of his soul.
The Other slowly becomes a memory and then a dream, something he shouldn’t associate with the him that exists now in this place and time. Just a part of a past that is better left untouched.
Until it isn’t.
—
It’s not like Fugo immediately knows it once Giorno Giovanna steps through Libeccio’s door.
You wouldn’t think an immaculate being who looks made of marble under the sun is the one whose bruises you’ve been sharing for most of your childhood.
Most likely you wouldn’t even wish that, when the first thing he proceeds to do after introductions is gulp down a cup of your friend’s steaming hot piss with absolute confidence.
An unforgettable first impression.
And it’s not like Fugo knows it the first time he receives the tail end of someone else's panic, hiding in plain sight within his mind during the chaotic days that follow Giorno’s arrival. It’s been etched into Fugo’s essence so indelibly that it’s almost unnoticeable. So second-nature in its familiarity that he barely pays any mind to it at all.
Not that he has the time, anyway.
It takes until Pompeii for him to start wondering.
First, in the car when Giorno tells him too late that he’s missed a turn, flipping Fugo’s switch and causing the emotional echo chamber to reverberate with an instinctual fear response.
Second, when he lays half dead and isolated from everything that is real, hazily recollecting his life and the nature of reality and the true meaning behind the feelings flaring up behind his eyes: Panic, fear, concentration, resolve, confidence, exultation-
Third, looking at Giorno Giovanna, now writhing at his feet, a plague ravishing his insides and feeling a blankness of mind born only from agony.
Fugo can’t feel the pain, but he can feel what Giorno feels.
Mortified by the realization, Fugo chooses to say nothing and instead hauls the unconscious bodies of his teammates to the car.
It changes nothing and he doesn’t have enough time to think of what it might mean.
Once he does have time to think again, three days later in Venice, there’s nothing left in him but sizzling hatred towards Giorno.
Because love isn’t something you can reach by sheer fate alone, it’s something you have to work towards. But if spiritual connections, drawing together two souls with the strength of wood glue and a vise exists, then is there anything one can do to evade it? Has Fugo simply misunderstood the concept of love? Or the concept of soulmates? He doesn’t think he could ever love Giorno Giovanna, who marched into his life and took away everything that had meaning, just because he had a cause to reach.
Fugo isn’t the kind of person who can love someone whose ideologies differ so greatly from his own.
And swearing he chose the right path, knowing he didn’t, Fugo takes the next train to Milan.
—
Love can’t birth itself out of bruises and trauma. Love can’t birth itself out of hatred and pain.
Fugo can’t separate himself from his hatred.
But Giorno Giovanna can grab that hatred and mold it into something presentable enough that Fugo feels a distant sense of calm as his voice box melts down his throat, half dead somewhere in Sicily.
Giorno gives him a new voice, and with it a new purpose.
“Why?”
It takes him a year of gathering courage to finally ask the question.
“Was it only because you thought Purple Haze was too much of a hazard to leave out there? Or was it because you thought I knew too much?”
He feels like there’s a hand squeezing his trachea from the inside.
Giorno draws an x on his wrist.
“Show me yours, Fugo.”
Fugo shows.
There’s understanding there, maybe. Or just closure.
“Don’t you think it’s stupid how this shows bruises and ink stains, but not any real damage? The most I’ve felt was a prickle in my throat when you broke yours.”
“Yeah… yeah, it's almost like the world’s playing a prank on us.”
“Well, do you love me, then?”
Does he?
Not really.
He doesn’t think so anyway. Faith doesn’t exist and obviously you can’t create something out of nothing. You can’t make true love from faith.
But there’s still an x on his skin and Giorno is warm and real and bright and he exists right in front of Fugo.
Instead of answering right away he opts to reach out his hand, to brush a stray curl behind his boss’s ear, ignoring the jumble of thoughts spinning at a thousand miles per hour in his head.
“I don’t think so, no.”
“I know.” Giorno puts a hand over Fugo’s on his cheek. “We never lived the kinds of lives that gave us much room to look inwards. Maybe in other circumstances it could have blossomed into something. We didn’t have the privilege to even try.”
“Yeah…. But it’s hard to deny that living through each other’s emotions forces us to know more than we’d like.”
Giorno smiles just a bit at that, the way he always does, soft and kind of crooked, less an expression and more a suggestion of one.
“Well, we’ll make use of it now. We don’t have much more than each other left, anyway.”
Giorno’s right. He thinks.
They’ll turn a curse into an advantage.