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“ --Lionpaw’s chest aches as he looks up to his mentor, but the deep grey tom’s face is blank and his eyes are empty. The stillness is making him nervous, the lack of orders to do anything despite this being a group endeavor making the hairs along his haunches prickle and try to stand.
He fidgets, they’ve been out there so long that the sun has moved quite a fair bit across the clear sky. The heat beats on his thick, golden pelt and only works to boil the anxiety inside him to the point of almost spilling over. Yet Ashfur still hasn’t let him engage with his fellow apprentices for the entire session. Besides some lightly confused looks, no-one has reacted to the unusual course of action his mentor has chosen.
Lionpaw doesn’t know what to do in this situation, doesn’t understand what he did to earn what seems so much like a punishment. His mind is racing and his heart is pumping so quickly and hard that he’s sure everyone in the clearing can hear it, they must! And he has to do something .
The young classic tabby stares at the other apprentices, tuning into both the conversation and the actions of his fellow clanmates for the first time since Ashfur had cooly ordered him to stay put.
Thornclaw, a warrior only slightly older than Ashfur who’s frame and scars exudes the experience he must have had in the great journey to the lake, is speaking to Cinderpaw. He’s across from her by a wide margin, accompanied by Ashfur’s fluffy, pure white brother, Cloudtail.
The amber and white classic tabby addresses her evenly, but not in the haunting, measured way that Ashfur does when around cats other than Lionpaw, instead it’s an inviting, gentle rumble. There’s emotion there, and warmth, comparing Thornclaw’s tone to Ashfur’s is like a sun-warmed shallow stream next to the frozen over expanse of the lake in leaf-bare.
The “Now you try,” he gives Lionpaw’s best friend makes his heart sting with a muddled sense of jealousy. He wishes that Ashfur would be encouraging like that.
Cinderpaw went into a neat crouch facing her mentor before launching herself into the air. He could tell from the experience his uncle and grandfather had been giving him nightly that she hadn’t jumped high enough. The twist was perfect though, elegant and smooth.
As well as she had done, the error in the beginning of the move led to her clumsily smash her muzzle into Cloudtail’s side. The thick furred and just all around thick tom easily pins her with a kittypet-lineage delicate paw on her chest.
“Not bad for a first try!” He crows encouragingly, letting the grey and brown molly up, “You just gotta put a bit more power in that leap of yours. Has your leg been bothering you?”
Cinderpaw slowly blinks, confused, “No, I feel fine. I’ll get it right the next time I try,”
Cloudtail happily chirps, “That’s the spirit!”
Thornclaw interjects when Cloudtail attempts to address Poppypaw without going further than the platitude, “Don’t forget, in a real fight your opponent won’t stand perfectly still in wait for you to connect. You have to be able to integrate that into the rest of your kit,”
Lionpaw can see the tortishell’s nose wrinkle at the frankly patronizing comment. He sympathises, Cinderpaw is nearly ready to become a warrior and her uncle is still treating her as if she’s just earned the ‘paw in her name.
He takes a quick fortifying breath before attempting to use the lull in the instruction to address Ashfur. He can’t take the waiting anymore, “I think I could do that. May I try it?”
His words are carefully chosen to be polite and proper, and that appears to sweeten the herbs enough to actually earn him a response.
“It’s advanced stuff,” And the blankness is somehow worse than the sneer that would have been in private, “There’s no point in trying it if you aren’t ready,”
Lionpaw perks up, this is a chance to actually prove how competent he is to his mentor. Impress him enough for the spotted tabby to give him some sort of recognition, maybe even a compliment. He wants to have enough worth to be treated like the other apprentices are by their mentors. He wants to get through to Ashfur so bad.
“I am ready,” Lionpaw insists, the skin across his spine and shoulders shuddering with the stored potential in his muscles he had been waiting to use all day.
Ashfur doesn’t react much, doesn’t even turn his gaze to Lionpaw’s form, his voice is still unnaturally even when he speaks, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,”
Abruptly, Ashfur gets to his paws and begins walking away from the other cats in the clearing, leaving Lionpaw to stumble in an atteeeiewgbifavzhztg hm8ew547--”
“Mista!” Fugo snaps, spine popping as he abruptly straightens from his typing hunch. He turns his head back to the flickering screen, and seeing the jumble of characters that has appeared on his document, Fugo impulsively slams a closed fist against the already beat up plastic body of the laptop, right under the keyboard and to the left of the trackpad.
Pannacotta Fugo is sixteen, the year is 2001, and he is spending a nice afternoon in his squad’s favorite restaurant typing out a particularly difficult scene on the primitive laptop his capo had stole for him on his most recent birthday. Or, that’s what was happening before the other gang member he’s waiting for the rest of his team with decided that the best possible way to get his attention was to body slam him.
“Oh, my bad,” Mista drawls, clearly not sorry in the slightest, still pressed up against Fugo’s right side, “What are you doing, anyway?”
Fugo scrunches his nose, air hissing out in a deep sigh, “I’m rewriting Outcast,”
“Outcast?” The other gangster pushes when Fugo leaves the sentence at a simple three words.
He doesn’t immediately answer, instead crouching up off of the chair so he can pick it up by the seat and scoot off to the side, regaining his bubble of personal space. The laptop is quickly snapped closed when Mista turns his dark eyes towards it’s screen, neck craning slightly.
“It’s about a society of feral house cats that live in a religious group of competing city states in the wild rather than with humans,” he explains in a lowly annoyed monotone, “Outcast is the third book in the third arc,”
At the first mention of a number, Mista tenses his shoulders, but he relaxes again after Fugo just repeats three and then stops talking, “What do you mean by arc?”
Paranoid, Fugo lets his eyes flit up to Mista’s face despite how much he hates eye contact, but he doesn’t see any mockery on the older teenager’s face. He drops his gaze immediately after reassuring himself to the genuine interest there.
“There are a lot of Warriors books,” Fugo’s hands almost instantly come up to his chest when the series’ title leaves his mouth. He hooks his left hand over the right and starts lightly skimming the nails on his pointer and middle fingers over the back of it in a quick, continuous cycle, “So the authors split them up into arcs based off of where on the timeline you are. There are seven arcs, and six books in each arc… Right now The Broken Code, the seventh arc, is on it’s third book,”
In a pleasantly surprising turn of events, Mista stays on the topic instead of just dropping it and going back to whatever discussion he had been trying to engage Fugo in when he was writing, “If you’re rewriting a book in the third arc, does that mean you’ve rewritten all the previous books too?”
“No. I’ve thought about it, but the problems in the first two arcs are part of why I like it so much,” He responds, “In the third arc the setting is new for the characters too, their society has moved to an entirely new location and the perspective characters are the first generation born there.
“They don’t have the full context and experiences their parents and grandparents do, so it would be easy for a rift to be caused between the two groups because of the older cats trying to hold the younger ones to traditions and rules that aren’t logical, or even counterproductive, to the new environment they live in. There’s more of a possibility for political conflicts that haven’t really been seen there, and the territory is still so new it could have a significant impact on the population if something notable was discovered,”
As he speaks, the nails skirt faster and faster over the skin on his hand. He can feel his posture loosening into something more comfortable, but Fugo forces himself to not care for the lack of etiquette there. Although he doesn’t leave much of a lull for Mista to respond, he continues as if he had indicated for Fugo to keep going.
“I haven’t done the previous two books before Outcast either, but I have plans for them. I started in the middle because it’s the one I have the most developed for so far, and I’d like to actually get to writing it instead of spending the next month or so outlining before burning out,” Fugo didn’t mention the other reason, using Lionpaw and Ashfur’s interactions as an opportunity to nonviolently channel some of his experiences from before he was even enrolled in college.
“What happens in Outcast that’s so special?” Mista asks, and as far as Fugo can tell, his tone doesn’t exactly sound engaged but it’s not disinterested either. He’s getting excited at this point, and he’s always had trouble with things like tone and sarcasm, so he lets himself continue.
“It’s special because the three main characters are at the stage in their lives where they start really becoming their own people. They’re young enough to still be under the influence of the adults around them, but they’re developing their own philosophies and perspectives. Also, they get an opportunity to interact with a group of cats far outside of Clan, the city states I mentioned, culture,”
“There are other cultures among different Clans, but all Clans believe in the same afterlife, follow the same laws, use the same naming conventions, and generally are just sort of the same group flavored with whatever specific environment the Clan lives in. But in this one, a group of cats including the main characters travel up a mountain to an isolated group of cats called the Tribe that have developed their own unique society. They originated from the same ethnogroup that originally lived around the lake in both of the communities’ prehistory, but they’ve had the equivalent of thousands of years to diversify and forget about each other after going to colonize new lands,”
“Seeing how something so foreign impacts each one of the main three will be interesting because of the variety there of their feelings and thoughts towards the Clan system to begin with. Hollypaw is the most self-restricted to the laws of her society, and has a positive relationship and view towards the system. In fact, she’s so dedicated that initially she pursues the career of a Medicine cat,”
“A Medicine Cat is a small caste in each Clan of one or two cats, usually a fully trained one and an apprentice, who serve as the religious scholars, only form of health care, prophets, and avenue of communion with the dead. It’s a very highly esteemed position, one that has extra laws such as the banning of romantic relationships and having kittens as to not distract from their duties,”
“She is forced out of this a few moons into her training by her brother being forced to take the position by their ancestors. Although she is still as strict and disciplined as she would have been if she was allowed to stay the course. She follows the laws down to the letter and has a penchant for dehumanizing anyone who “betrays” the Warrior Code,”
“It eventually ends up overtaking her entire personality, and she grows into a somber, dogmatic cat that only releases her emotions when she is viciously cross-examining others around her. Hollypaw becomes almost paranoid in her twisted eagerness, and it realizes into full on in-Clan murder when she discovers an especially illegal secret,”
“Jaypaw is the least connected to the Clannic way of life. He was forced into becoming a Medicine Cat at a very young age due to the prejudices of the cats around him, and that leads to a lifelong, intentional subversion of anything he finds especially substrative in his culture. Jaypaw was born blind, and initially pursued becoming a warrior, but the ghosts of other cats manipulated the situation so he would be driven into a corner.”
“He ends up becoming quite the iconic character, actually. He’s the most outright vitriolic and angry cat in the entirety of the series who isn’t a villain, for obvious reasons. He has a very strong connection to the afterlife and the ability to walk in other’s dreams, and over the course of the story he spends more time uncovering the history of the Lake territories and the ancient cats who lived there instead of engaging in his studies,”
“With my interpretation of him, I like to end up thinking he rebels whenever possible. Breaking laws and being generally violent and difficult whenever possible. For example, the way he initially discovered there were cats before them in the first place was entering a series of catacomb-like tunnels under the entirety of the territories and flashing back to the memories of the cats who walked there,”
“Their brother, Lionpaw, is in the middle of the two extremes, but his interaction with the clan system is the most outright negative. The instructor he’s been given by the system, by his own grandfather even, is physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive. Ashfur, his mentor, has a vendetta against Lionpaw’s mother due to unrequited love that turned to obsession, and he takes it out in every way he can on the child that he has the most control over,“
“When removed from this adult’s influence, he tries to flourish in the absence of Ashfur. Instead, the damage and habits inflicted on him cause him to act out in odd ways. He develops delusions of grandeur and reckless, near suicidal behaviors. He interprets his anxiety-fueled restlessness as infinite energy and stamina, he thinks his fight response and rush of adrenaline to fighting foreign cats is a blessing from StarClan, his higher power, making him invulnerable,”
“Unfortunately for Lionpaw, Clan culture almost entirely disregards mental health. He’s forced to continue being apprenticed under Ashfur for the rest of his training period, and his behavior and perceptions only continue to become twisted as he ages. The pattern of violence he participates in comes to a head when he accidentally kills the elderly deputy of ShadowClan, Russetfur, in his young adulthood,”
For the first time in what feels like no time at all, but is most likely several minutes, someone else, not Mista, speaks, “Why do these… Clans ignore the mental health of their soldiers? If they’re born and raised in this system, I would expect their facilities to be at least a bit better than ours,”
Fugo is jostled out of his impromptu speech, inappropriately upset when he remembers where he is. His face burns in his mortification, realizing his gentle tic from the start of this rant had evolved into full hand flapping. Fugo had also been bouncing his leg erratically and rocking his torso side to side.
His vision blurs, covered by a haze of both tears and furious humiliation. He let himself let go in a public place, and that is unforgivable .
Fugo jumps up, his chair screeching loudly as it clatters behind him, and he charges past the assembled gangsters, through the other patrons, out the door, and down the street. His eyes are overflowing at this point, and he can feel the disgusting drip of mucus beginning to evacuate his sinuses.
He’s almost running at this point, hearing resolved into a high tone.
Fugo throws himself down the first gap he can find, into the shadowed mouth of an ally lined with left out garbage. It’s gross, but the darkness, quiet, and emptiness of the space outweighs the negatives. His steps are booming with the body weight he throws into each one. Fugo finds the cleanest spot he can and hunkers down, crouching and balancing on his toes to touch the least amount of refuse-strewn ground possible.
He braces his elbows on his thighs, and Fugo’s hands immediately slide up to his printer-paper white hair. Both are quickly fisted in the dry, frizzy strands on his temples, closest to the scalp you can get without directly touching his head.
His hair is long enough to be wound around his hands comfortably, but the comfort there is ripped away when Fugo begins yanking. It hurts, but no worse than the burning in his chest and the roiling in his gut. The sharp sting grounds him, gets him out of the loop of applied behavior analysis memories and intrusive thoughts.
Fugo wishes he could be fucking normal for the millionth time, that he didn’t do the things that made him deserve being treated that way in the first place. He’s so tired of having to cram himself into the little box of acceptable behaviors. But more than that he’s angry , absolutely furious , but not currently at anything specific. It’s his instinctual reaction.
Everything he feels ends up getting corrupted into rage. Maybe that’s just his nature, to ruin everything that comes into contact with him, turn it into a roiling mess of negativity and violence. Angered, he slams his fist into the side of the dumpster he’s hiding behind, yanking out several strands of hair with the punch.
Purple Haze is more fitting for him than he’d ever like to consider.
Fugo is snapped out of his thoughts by the sounds of angry stomping, and he looks up to see… Himself, walking down the alley with heavy steps given weight through the sheer agitation radiating off of him. He’s confused for a split second, and even if he hadn’t remembered what a copy of him meant, he could see the recognizable digital timer laid into his forehead that still managed to somehow overlay the fringe there.
There’s a sort of “vrrp”ing sound, like a vcr player processing a newly inserted tape, and the simulacrum of him morphs into a significantly taller humanoid, mostly covered in a shiny, almost-holographic, vinyl-like material. Moody Blues tilts her head at him and makes an imploring chorus of dial up noises.
“What do you want?” Fugo barks, immediately regretting doing so when she hunches her shoulders and holds her hands to her chest. The manta ray type membrane that connects her shoulders to her skull blinks along the edges in bright white pinpricks as it flutters in a way Fugo has learned means insecurity over the years.
“Sorry,”
The lavender and silver stand flickers through radio channels for a moment before settling on the chorus of an R&B track, <You don’t have to say a thing / And I Know / All the pain that I bring / And I know / That you still care for me>
Fugo sniffles faintly, rubbing a closed fist across the corner of one of his eyes, “So where’s Abbacchio? I know he’s got to be close if you’re here,”
<Wipe those / Tears off / And make your / Heart proud> Several voices croon in unison over some sort of a somber electronic song as Moody Blues comes to squat down next to him, the speakers in her eye sockets crackling with a soft background fuzz, <Soon I’ll come around / Lost and never found>
As if waiting for that like it was a cue, Abbacchio comes around the corner of the building Fugo has decided to sit on the side of, long robe-like jacket billowing dramatically behind him as he approaches. Moody Blues mimes a pat on Fugo’s shoulder as she’s dismissed, unable to physically touch him. She almost coos the hang-up click of a landline phone as she fades, which is embarrassingly uplifting.
“You’re so dramatic,” the teenager snarks, not giving Moody Blue’s user anywhere near the courtesy he gave the stand herself. The barb doesn’t have effect he intended, with the drying tear tracks on his face and all, “What’s the point of sending Moody ahead of you when she can only get a few meters away from you,”
Abbacchio huffs, continuing his approach, “I wasn’t sure if you wanted another person around right now,”
“Are you implying she isn’t a person? Wow, that’s low,”
The weak repellent doesn’t work, and Abbacchio comes to slide down the brick masonry on Fugo’s other side. He’s physically close, but not touching, and the distance that’s left settles his nerves when Abbacchio shows no signs of intending to move closer.
“So, why’d you run off?” He asks after a few blessed moments of quiet, “You seemed to be having a pretty good time telling Mista about your book,”
“It’s not my book,” Fugo rolls his eyes, deflecting, “It’s a book I’m rewriting because the original let too many good ideas slip by,”
“Oh, excuse me, why’d you run off after having such a good time telling Mista about your fanfiction?”
Fugo groans, slamming his head back against the wall with a thump that makes Abbacchio wince where he can see him from the corner of his eye, “I left while I was talking about my rewrite project,” a emphasizing pause, “because I got too excited and humiliated myself in a public setting,”
“I wouldn’t say you humiliated yourself,” He says bluntly, “Not until you stormed out, away,”
“Gee, thanks,” Fugo’s lip curls over his top teeth in a way that’s not quite a snarl but not much of a sardonic grin either, “Amazing job reassuring me there,”
“I wasn’t gonna lie to you,” Is his only response, and somehow the way he doesn’t rise to the bait infuriates Fugo even more.
“Fuck you,” The retort is automatic, and weak, “What do you want, anyway?”
“I already told you,” Abbacchio rumbles patiently, the calm grating Fugo’s nerves, “I want to know why you left so abruptly,”
Fugo snarls , outright feral at Abbacchio’s measured tone and suddenly professional vocabulary. The damn pig doesn’t even have the courtesy to startle at his tonal shift. His temper flares even further and Fugo childishly kicks out, letting himself slide fully to the disgusting alley asphalt, his legs jerk in no real pattern to expel some of the sudden rush of fury he’s feeling.
“ Fuck you! ” Fugo repeats, fist slamming backwards into the brick behind him. The sting is swallowed up by the sort of anxious, crawling sensation that always overtakes him when his temper starts running out.
“I can’t help you if you don’t explain what the problem is, you gotta work with me here”
“Who said I even want your help,” he spits, and Fugo’s head lolls to the side furthest away from Abbacchio with the restless, disordered movements the fire in his veins are forcing his body into.
“You don’t have to want it to get it,” And Abbacchio is almost subdued now, still and gentle in the way one is when not wanting to startle a wild animal, “I might not show it much, but I care about you. Getting so upset and then running off makes me worry,”
Fugo growls again and rolls his eyes for a period of time that is probably longer than necessary to get his point across, “You don’t fucking care about me,” he spits, words somehow a lie to push the man away and a real insecurity all at once, “You only came so that Buccellati wouldn’t have to deal with my bullshit. We all know you only give a shit about him,”
Abbacchio’s posture becomes a bit more guarded for a moment, and Fugo’s eyes start stinging again at the idea of actually angering an adult, especially one with so much bulk and general size on him; but all Abbacchio does is let all the tension leak out of him in a deep, diaphragm moving sigh.
“It isn’t bullshit. If it upset you, it’s important,” The man says, “Just like you are important. I wasn’t even thinking about Buccellati when I left. I was thinking about where you were running off to,”
“Oh yes!” Fugo yells, something inside of him snapping. All of a sudden he can’t stop the words that are coming out, “Because Pannacotta Fugo can’t be trusted to be alone in public, ever! He’s too unstable, too dangerous, he might ATTACK someone if we don’t keep him on a tight enough leash! Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s train all of that abnormal behavior out of him so he can masquerade as something not NEARLY as dangerous as he really is!”
“Train--” Abbacchio mutters, immediately focusing on the one detail he would later regret the most letting slip, “Fugo, what do you mean by that?”
“I--” Fugo stutters, all the wind suddenly taken out of his sails at the rush of fear that bears down on him with the memory, “I fucking-- My parents didn’t- They didn’t like it when I would.. When I would do that,”
“You mean the stimming?” Abbacchio presses.
“The what?” And Fugo feels stupid at the unfamiliar word.
“Those movements you were doing when you were talking to Mista,”
“It has a name?”
“Yes, it does. What didn’t your parents like about it?”
“It was abnormal… Embarrassing, I guess. It made them upset that I wasn’t composed enough,” All of Fugo’s movements had stopped this time, and he hunches in on himself with the chill from his past’s shadow, “They put me in this… I don’t know, this weird program, so I would stop,”
Abbacchio cringes, voice softer in a way much more visceral than you can get with just a lower volume or slower cadence, “What did they do in the program, Fugo?”
“They--” Fugo’s breath whistles in a high note when his voice cracks, “I don’t want to talk about it,”
But Abbacchio doesn’t let up, “They’d physically stop you from stimming, right? Usually hard enough to hurt? Maybe even tie or strap you to a special kind of chair?”
Fugo’s eyes are shut as hard as he physically can make them.
“Would they force you into sustained eye contact? Force you into interacting with things that would hurt in some fucked up mockery of ‘exposure therapy’? Take away things you liked for any mistake, and hit you when that didn’t give them the result they wanted?”
“Yes. Yes to everything you said,” Fugo finally manages to sputter, “How do you know all that?”
“I had to work on a case where people running that kind of program got in trouble for how they were hurting people,” Abbacchio sounds defeated, and Fugo is almost awestruck at the fact that he’s willingly bringing up his time on the force. Abbacchio usually hates even the suggestion of that period in his life, and all of a sudden Fugo feels like he’s not the only one achingly vulnerable at the moment, “They ended up being absolved, but… I saw tapes of what they did, and the effects on the victims. ABA, right?”
Fugo flinches at the term, and Abbacchio continues, “I wish I was surprised. They really did a number on you, huh?”
The boy hangs his head, stomach swallowed by the chasm of humiliation that opens there. His guts are roiling, and it almost hurts to breath.
“It’s alright,” Abbacchio soothes, “You didn’t do anything wrong here. You didn’t do anything wrong back in the restaurant, either. The only people who did anything wrong in this situation were the fuckers that beat your ability to be comfortable with this part of yourself out of you,”
Fugo feels like he’s standing at the edge of a skyscraper, barely balancing on the precipice of completely breaking down, somehow even more than he already has. He doesn’t want to know how much lower he can sink. But the last dregs of his composure vanish all the same with Abbacchio’s next words, “I’m sorry this happened to you, Fugo,”
Not even in his wildest dreams did Pannacotta Fugo think he would ever get a genuine apology about this from anyone. He had his dramatic revenge fantasies, yes, dramatically mutilating everyone who had ever wronged him while listening to them sputter false apologies in a plead to stop. But he never had thought up the idea of an actual, sincere apology. And although Abbacchio had never done anything so severe as to fit in the magnitude of wrongness those people had, the idea of it felt like a punch in the gut all the same.
The impassive, distant stare Abbacchio had been giving the wall across from the two stops as soon as Fugo begins trembling. He looks panicked, an expression that would usually be amusing if it weren’t for the context, as he sniffs wetly and his eyes finally overflow for the second time that day.
“Hey, hey, don’t--” But it’s too late, Fugo has already begun crying again. Abbacchio acts on what appears to be instinct, reaching for the boy in a much more quick movement than Fugo was currently comfortable with. Fugo flinches away from Abbacchio’s grasp, and he retracts the offered hand like he’d been burned.
“Sorry,” He blurts in a broken whisper.
“Don’t apologize, you haven’t done anything wrong,” Abbacchio hesitates, looking anywhere but at Fugo awkwardly, “Should I go get Buccellati?”
“No!” Fugo shouts, voice crackling with the sudden spike in volume. He doesn’t want to subject anyone else to one of his tantrums, but more than that even, he doesn’t want to be left with his thoughts again in the small window of time it would take to fetch their leader, “I-- I just need a couple minutes,”
“Okay,” Abbacchio sighs, staring forward and leaning further away from the teenager. Fugo feels guilty for forcing him to deal with his bullshit(and it is bullshit, he usually is capable of controlling himself so much better, why was he suddenly so fragile, in front of an adult no less?), so he decides to reach out himself in a sort of apology.
Abbacchio jumps in clear surprise when Fugo’s closer hand gently pinches at the fabric covering his right shoulder, which makes Fugo jump in turn at the sudden movement. He tries to stutter out another ‘sorry’, but his breathing is too erratic at this point to form anything but a sort of hitched rasp.
The large goth sighs heavily through his nose, but before Fugo can let go of his sleeve he, in very slow and gradual movements, puts his arm around Fugo’s shoulders. Although the contact is expected this time, even welcomed, it makes his muscles tense so hard he shakes.
“Christ,” Abbacchio mutters, gingerly feeling just how tightly strung Fugo really is. For some reason, this feels like a sort of chiding, and the feeling attached to that make him cringe and turn away.
“You’re still fine, still haven’t done anything wrong,” he reminds the boy he’s half-holding. The hand on Fugo’s further shoulder relocates to be more in the area of where his neck meets his torso and starts moving in slow circles.
The pattern and weight of the movement is viscerally satisfying, and the fact that it’s the touch of another person instead of himself in a poor facsimile of someone else increases the effectiveness nearly tenfold. Fugo is already starting to relax into Abbacchio’s side incrementally before the man starts gently, continuously reassuring him about things like it being okay and him being safe.
Sooner than one would have expected, Fugo fully lets go and lets himself relax. The body heat of another person is soothing, and so is the kind, repetitive words Abbacchio whispers to him. Despite neither parent ever treating him like this, something about the way Abbacchio comforts him is familiar…
Fugo almost laughs at the realization that this is a one-for-one reproduction of what Buccellati does in situations like these, before the thought becomes bittersweet at best. How pathetic is it that both him and this twenty year old man only know how to be soft through mimicking someone else? And how fitting for Abbacchio, someone who’s stand, his very soul, is at it’s core a method to replay other’s actions would continue the pattern outside of using his ability?
He stops that line of thinking where it is, as Fugo would actually like to not cry anymore for maybe the next couple months. Eventually, he does, and with the absence of anxiety-fueled adrenaline he is suddenly extremely tired.
The boy doesn’t actually let himself fall asleep in a gross alleyway, he has a bit more dignity than that even now, but he’s not fully awake either. The two of them sit together for an unclear amount of time, Fugo calmer than he can really remember ever being.
Fugo is startled out of the pleasant, exhausted emptiness he had been drifting in since he calmed down by a series of jaring dial-up tones and the fizzle of a stand manifesting itself.
“Moody, shut the fuck up," Abbacchio hisses, keeping his voice as quiet as he can, "He's sleeping,"
Fugo is, in fact, not asleep. He had been very still and had his eyes closed, but he was awake the entire time. It was an easy mistake to make, and Fugo was frankly pretty tired, so he decides to let Abbacchio bicker with his stand in the interest of spending a bit longer relaxed and not thinking.
<I’ve got to go home> Moody Blues plays, and it comes off as chiding instead of whatever tone the original song was going for.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Abbacchio huffs, “But let the kid rest, he’s had a hard day. We can wait until he wakes up on his own,”
There’s a whirling, high-pitched series of squeaks as Moody skips further into the song, at a much lower volume this time <Ah, but it’s cold outside>
“It’s summer . We’re in Italy ,”
There’s the click of a channel changing, subtle jazz switched for some sort of peppy, older rock <Oh honey I don’t care / Oh baby I don’t care>
“One day I’ll figure out how to touch stands. You should live in fear of when that day comes,” Abbacchio warns. Any threat there is completely invalidated by the position he’s in.
“Stop bullying her,” Fugo mutters hypocritically. He has no room to talk here, and he knows it.
Abbacchio doesn’t speak right away, instead shooting Moody Blues a ‘look what you did’ glare. Fugo rolls his eyes but doesn’t spare her by clarifying that he had been awake the whole time.
“So,” he says clunkily, “Are you okay now?”
Fugo sighs and very intentionally does not budge from where he’s still tucked under Abbacchio’s right arm, “I mean, I guess I’m a bit better,”
A stretch of quiet yawns between them.
“Do you want to go back inside?” Abbacchio questions after a few more minutes of more-comfortable-than-not-but-still-awkward silence, “Into the restaurant, I mean,”
Fugo cringes at the idea of having to return to the restaurant, full of noisy strangers and conflicting smells while already being so emotionally exhausted; and most importantly, having to see people that had witnessed his unbridled stimming again. He gets to keep his dignity at least a bit intact though, as Abbacchio speaks again as soon as his expression sours. No need to childishly whine about wanting to go home.
“Buccellati said he’ll bring the laptop back with him when everyone comes back to base,” He tells him, “We can just head straight back to the apartment,”
The budding tension that had just started causing a pain in Fugo’s upper back immediately dissolves with the sheer relief that comes from those words, “I would really appreciate that,”
“Hm, well don’t thank me. Wasn’t my idea,” Abbacchio weakly attempts to repair the idea that he’s anything but soft under all the layers of dark makeup and darker fabric. His failure goes from outright to miserable as he chases those words with a steady hand helping Fugo off the asphalt, one that moves between his shoulders to gently steer him as they start to walk.
Somehow, Abbacchio manages to make the physical contact into a reassuring support instead of the frightening threat it would be from nearly anyone else. Fugo idly wonders if this is one of the things that they teach you in the police academy to deal with upset kids before remembering that all cops are bastards that aren’t capable of genuine empathy. That’s the real reason he ended up leaving the force, in Fugo’s mind, he was too much of a real person.
“I’m sorry for forcing you to open up about it like that,” Abbacchio says suddenly, “You don’t have to accept it, but it was fucked up for me to keep pushing you when you weren’t ready,”
Fugo hesitates in speech and step, trying to think of the right words, “I. I won’t say it’s okay, because it really was sort of fucked up,”
He cringes, his words are choppy and almost disordered with the aftermath of today’s emotional roller coaster, “But. I think something like that was going to happen eventually. It was sort of. Cathartic?”
When Abbacchio stays quiet, letting the boy have a chance to go on, he continues, “I’d appreciate it if we didn’t do that so suddenly if it needs to happen again. Are we cool?”
Abbacchio snorts, “Was about to ask you the same thing. We’re cool if you say we are,”
“Okay, we’re cool,”
As they start to walk down the street, on the smooth pavement instead of the rougher terrain of the alley, Fugo notices the silence reestablishing itself. It doesn’t feel like a respite now, though. It’s more of a blank canvas.
Fugo hesitates, clamping down on almost asking if he could continue on what he was saying in the restaurant right here and now, but Abbacchio of course ends up noticing it. The goth inclines his head with just the very hint of a smile tugging at the sides of his mouth, “Go ahead,”
He can feel himself brightening at his friend’s words, the contrast between his mood from earlier and now almost staggering, but can’t bring himself to have his tutor’s training force the reaction down. With a quick flap of his hands, he starts again, “Let me give you some context before I really get into it--”