Bruno, alien not of this planet that he is, has never needed an alarm to wake up in the mornings, which Giorno can confirm only for as long as he has been sleeping in the same bed as Bruno, but which is no insignificant amount of time nonetheless. This makes mornings truly a test of the strength of Giorno's will and resolve, who would like nothing more than to go back to his dreams the very moment that he realizes he has left them—quite involuntarily, might he add.
This particular morning blearily occurs on a Tuesday, much without Giorno's consent. He groans into the pillows as he rolls onto his stomach, and he feels the creak and aches of his neck and spine with the motion. It's going to be a muggy day. He can quite literally feel it in his shoulders, which he has been able to do ever since that one mission—enough of that. He puts a searching hand out but it comes back empty. All he feels on Bruno's side of the bed is the residual heat of a sleep-and-sheet warm body, which is a highly attractive concept to Giorno's morning-slow mind. Those thoughts are summarily washed away by Bruno being the cruelest husband on this side of Italy—no, this side of the world.
Giorno splutters through the positively torrential downpour of water as Bruno leans over him, his smile brighter than the weak morning sun. "Good morning," he says with blasphemous good humor. "Did I wake you?"
Giorno moves to put a pillow on top of his head but in doing so he feels the sheets slip further down. He must lose that particular battle to win this war, it seems. "I've married the most sadistic man in the mafia," he grouses out, voice muffled by his goose-down prison. "Haven't you heard of towels, you heathen—"
Giorno's back, which had been previously hidden and sheltered by the sheets, now makes a perfect expanse for Bruno to drip all over, and he does so by wringing his shower-wet hair over the lower dip of Giorno's back, where it blends from waist into hip. Giorno, whose face is covered by pillow, stands no chance. He tries to roll away from the attack but to no avail. The water feels like ice on his chest.
"Why, exactly, are you trying to get me wet in bed?" Giorno says while one-hand wielding his pillow like the mighty sword that it is, truly a weapon to be feared.
Bruno laughs in the face of Giorno's defenses. "Normally I'd think someone else would say that was a good thing, wouldn't they?"
Giorno's face crumples in distaste when he registers the implications in Bruno's words. "Absolutely disgusting. How could you make jokes like that to me, your poor hus—"
Bruno wrings his hair out some more, and Giorno rolls right off the other side of the bed.
"I can't go to work," Giorno says while trying to disentangle limb from sheet on the floor, still holding onto his pillow like a life preserver, "not under these conditions. My emotional distress is too great."
Giorno can hear Bruno walking around the bed. "Oh really?" he asks with false innocence, dripping water onto their hardwood floors. "And what emotional distress might you be experiencing?"
"The emotional distress of having to divorce my husband just days after marrying him," Giorno says, trying to hide the faint glow of Gold Experience's powers as the two of them transform the pillow.
Bruno drips his way to his side of the bed and stands shamelessly in front of Giorno, unrepentant despite his sins. His smile is just as wide as it was before. "I imagine your husband might also be similarly distressed, wouldn't he?"
"He's about to be," Giorno says while trying to properly sit up, propped against the side of the bed.
Giorno lobs the pillow at Bruno's face.
Bruno catches the pillow.
It transforms into a squid in Bruno's hands, and it stretches out its tentacles close to Bruno's face, clutching and catching onto wet strands of hair with the sort of determination that befits any creation born of Gold Experience's powers. It is perhaps a testament to their relationship that Bruno does not yell upon finding himself with a faceful of cephalopod, and he endures the squid's curiosity with well-tempered patience. He bats its tentacles away from his mouth when it gets tired of his hair, and it follows his hands with its own arms.
Bruno's gaze cuts straight and true right back to Giorno's, even with the squid's body blocking his view. "Don't the Japanese eat fish for breakfast?"
"No," Giorno says, tangling his legs even more as he tries to get up.
"No?" Bruno repeats as the squid twists itself around his left arm. "No, as in, no, the Japanese don't eat fish for breakfast? How bizarre, I thought—"
"A squid is not a fish." Giorno finally stands, legs free of the sheets. He grabs back the squid, who returns to its creator with no qualms and releases its hold of Bruno so quickly that it almost seems to forget to curl itself around Giorno instead.
Bruno inspects the skin of his arm with the sort of casual interest of someone looking at a restaurant menu, poking at the indentations left by the suckers of the squid's tentacles. "Don't give the seafood to the son of a fisherman in the future, if you don't want him to get ideas."
"Weren't your fishy desires satiated this weekend?"
"You can never have enough fish."
"I beg to differ."
Bruno looks up from his arm.
"Don't even say it." Giorno tosses the now untransformed pillow onto the bed, and bends down to get the sheets as well. "I'm warning you." He waves a free hand in front of Bruno's face and tosses the sheets with about the same amount of precision as he threw the pillow. Which is to say, with none at all.
Bruno catches Giorno's hand with his own, only to rub a calloused thumb across Giorno's knuckles in slow, steady swipes. It effectively stops Giorno in his tracks, who makes a wordless questioning sound somewhere in his throat at Bruno's actions.
"I might have taken your warning more seriously," Bruno says while pressing his fingers into Giorno's palm, "had you not waved my ring on your finger in front of my face."
Bruno's eyes are but slits of blue, narrowed as they are under the force of his smile. The clearest sea that Giorno's ever seen, contained within one of the gentlest of expressions that Giorno's ever had directed at him. It's enough to make him forget his words. It's enough to make him remember his feelings. It's enough. It's more than enough.
Giorno is not sure what expression makes its home on his face and in the light of the morning he's not sure how well Bruno can see him, but what Bruno does see is enough to make him turn over Giorno's hand and kiss his palm.
"We can be a little late today," Bruno says while looking up, hiding most of his eyes behind the dark fan of his eyelashes. The curve of his smile and his left cheek rest on the meat of Giorno's hand, right by his thumb. Giorno curls it to touch Bruno's skin.
"How late?" he asks, pressing his thumb deeper into Bruno's cheek.
"Don't push your luck."
A/N: I'll be posting chapters as I go. I pretty much plan to get this all done in one shot, but decide to keep updating it. Based on the AU in Chapter 7 of my fic "And it feels just like eternity".