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Bruno wakes to the sun coming out from behind the clouds.
Blond curls spill over his vision and he thinks Giorno must be leaning over him. It is to be expected. Giorno had been trying so desperately to reach him.
But the young man is nowhere near.
His tongue traces the backs of unfamiliar teeth before he understands they are his. Smaller, straighter, a mouth that has never split open in childhood brawls on the streets of Napoli, never bitten through itself under an interrogation gone wrong.
He inhales sharply. His hands fly to his face.
"Where is Giorno?"
The words leave him in Giorno's voice and it is the cruelest thing he has ever heard.
Mista looks as though every bone in his body has been broken. Trish is the first to look away, clutching a compact mirror tightly to her chest.
Bruno waits. Someone will answer. Someone has to.
Surely Giorno is lying somewhere along the boulevard of Via dei Fori Imperiali, wounded, dragging himself stubbornly toward help. Gold Experience must have exhausted the last of its strength. He still needs them. Surely—
"Where is he?" His voice cracks.
***
Bruno doesn't remember how he reached Palatine Hill.
Only that olive trees are growing among the palace ruins where there were none before. His Stand drifts alongside him through the grove, no more substantial than a shimmering distortion in the midday heat.
His faith had never quite recovered from all those nights spent hiding under his father’s hospital bed. Even so, he had attended Mass often enough for the word to come alive in moments like this.
Somewhere beyond this hill, another garden had once stood. There, Christ prayed that the cup might pass from Him. He prayed until His sweat fell as blood. The resonance draws a warm dew to Bruno's forehead.
If there was a lesser such cup for traitors, he would have taken the thing from Giorno’s hands without hesitation and drained it to the last drop. Perhaps the cup had reached him after all…and he failed to hold it, as the devil failed to grasp the arrow and the bow refused the bend.
What had slipped from his hands already spilled its destiny at his feet.
Bruno sinks to his knees beneath the umbrella pines. His skull feels too small to contain the pressure building inside it.
“…No, this isn't right..."
His own throat scathes his voice.
"Please...not him. Trade with me. You hear? I would've gone gladly. I was ready!"
He doesn't know to whom he is pleading with. He's also never heard the sound of Giorno begging before.
His body folds forward until, suddenly, he adds force and bashes his forehead against the rough stone. The impact arrests thought, steadies him for an instant. He does it again. Pain blooms behind his eyes, bright and unbearable. His fingers knot themselves in blond hair so tightly his scalp burns. He wants to tear himself free.
"We were cheated!"
The olive branches rustle overhead in the same merciless wind that had exchanged their souls and left Bruno with a broken arrow lodged in his chest.
He thinks he hears the wind whisper gently—Bucciarati, you’re hurting him.
A warm trickle slips down his temple, then flows steadily down the side of his face. He lifts trembling fingers to it. They come away red.
His vision burns, but no tears come. His body refuses.
His body refuses.
***
Everyone calls him Boss, and with that, everything becomes a performance.
Bruno discovers grief can be delayed by bureaucracy, and for once in his life, he welcomes the chance to disappear into the role laid out for him. Passione still needs a Don, so he becomes one. Giorno’s dream still needs to be lived, so he lives it.
Even if he must live with Giorno's body wrapped around his grief.
He is less a man than a living shrine. He practices his new signature until it flows without hesitation. Ladybugs begin to appear everywhere, embroidered into ties, etched into cufflinks, pressed into wax seals. Tiny coccinelle hide in the margins of ledgers like teardrops.
He speaks in Giorno's voice. When no one is around, he talks to himself just to talk to him.
He answers the questions he imagines Giorno would ask, to counsel himself with the patience Giorno always offered the others. He argues and laughs softly at jokes only they would understand. Sometimes, he sits in complete silence to keep himself company, though the time he had once shared with Giorno never felt so lacking before.
Before every meeting, he kisses his own ring.
***
When Bruno calls, Sticky Fingers Requiem answers.
Its head is fully enclosed now, transformed into a featureless reliquary. Every blue surface is refitted with polished brass plates over ivory limbs. Golden spikes cascade down its back in geometric tracery, catching the light like a lion’s mane at dawn.
It cradles the birds it creates with impossible tenderness, before releasing them through a zipper seam gleaming with sunlight from another world.
Life spills effortlessly from Bruno's hands, jaunting through the open windows.
It makes him sick.
If the Stand is truly a master over both life and space, shouldn’t it know? Shouldn't it ask—
Are you really Giorno?
Shouldn’t it point the way? Unzip the earth and draw him gently from his sleep. If he cannot be found there, then unzip the sky to let him fall back down like rain.
Instead, SFR simply lays on the ground and waits like a dog keeping vigil for the owner who will never come home.
***
Mista blocks the cemetery gate in his dark suit, shaking his head violently.
"You shouldn't go, Boss. This kind of thing... it isn't good for you. It isn’t right."
Rain beads in the dark curls plastered to his creased forehead. "It'll mess you up."
Bruno wants to tell him there's nothing left of him to 'mess up'. Instead, he rests a hand on Mista's shoulder. “It’ll be alright.”
"But you'll be watching yourself get buried,” his underboss implores.
Bruno looks past him toward a sea of black umbrellas.
"Mista, I already watched myself die."
Mista's expression crumples. There is nothing to argue after that.
Together, they watch strangers mourn the man they believe rests inside the polished walnut coffin. The lid remains closed. The body is said to be in poor shape.
Someone remarks that Bucciarati had been fearless.
Bruno almost laughs.
No. It had only looked that way. Fear had accompanied him everywhere, as faithful as his own shadow. He had been constantly afraid.
He wonders what Giorno would have said if he were standing at this ambo instead. In a few moments, it will be he who must speak. He is the Don now, and everyone gathered here knows how much Giorno Giovanna owed to Bruno Bucciarati.
The irony is too much.
The priest speaks of souls returning home. Bruno's hands clasp tighter until his knuckles blanch beneath borrowed skin.
Home.
When death came, his soul had gone searching for its home and simply lost its way.
Or perhaps it had followed the truest thing it had ever known.
Hope. Determination. Strength.
And found it in a pair of green eyes.