'Giovanna.'

Giorno turned on his heel to face the Prior, anticipating his look of utter enmity before he'd even raised his eyes to meet it. 'Where are Ghirgha and Mista?'

'I haven't seen them in hours,' Giorno said, his fingers tightening around the handle of his basket. 'And I am not their keeper.'

The Prior pondered this, briefly, the harsh line of his mouth turning downwards at its corners. 'Where are you going, then?'

Giorno glanced down pointedly at his basket, and then met Nero's dark, demanding eyes.

'I asked you a question.'

'I had thought the answer obvious.'

The Prior lifted his chin and stared down his nose at him. At his insolence. Giorno had endured many a conversation like this in his youth, each identical in their shape and tenor, but despite all his years Nero still saw in Giorno the sullen child he had once been. So easily subdued. Cowed and malleable. In his youth, Pucci had been the salve to the sting of the Prior's teachings. And, with the Abbot now absent, it seemed the perennial urge to needle at young Giovanna had once again risen within him.

'I am attending the garth,' Giorno said, gesturing once more to his basket. 'Ghirgha doesn't know a weed from a petal.'

The Prior narrowed his eyes. 'I thought you had not seen him.'

'I said had not seen him in hours. Since Lauds, if you must know.'

The Prior exhaled through his nose—slow and deliberate—a pinch in the skin across the bridge of it the only change in his stony visage. 'And what have you foisted off onto him, so that you can frolic in the garden?'

'I am replenishing the infirmary's stores. It requires a gentle hand.'

'But not a quick tongue. Yet you persist.' Nero paused, briefly, and there was nothing to be gleaned from the dark pits of his eyes. 'Where were you supposed to be, this afternoon?'

'The kitchens.'

'So, Ghirgha and Mista will be glutting themselves on cured meats, while you spend the afternoon picking flowers?'

'I can be persuaded to have an appetite. Those two, on the contrary, cannot be persuaded to get their hands dirty.'

The Prior narrowed his eyes. Giorno smiled back at him. It was an epicene little thing, learnt when he was young, and in truth had never quite grown with the rest of his face.

Nero merely stood before him, his hands clasped behind his back. 'Treasure the little backbone you have grown, Giovanna. And that nobliumo you dog the heels of, while you can. Pucci does not suffer fools lightly.'

Ghirgha. Squalo. Melone. Illuso. Any one of them could have sidled up to the Prior's ear, each willing to use Giorno's indiscretion to draw attention away from their own. They would be repaid in kind, he decided, as soon as he had discovered which of them it was. Giorno held Nero's gaze, slinging his wicker basket into the crook of his elbow. 'Pucci does not suffer anything, lightly or otherwise. Which I am sure we all know very well.'

'That I do,' Nero spat, already pushing past him. 'Though in his absence too many of you seem to have forgotten.'

Giorno watched his shadow disappear around a corner towards the misericord, his methodical footsteps receding into the abbey's depths. This habit of Nero's was well known to them all. He would disappear for just long enough that the lay-brothers might grow confident in his absence, and then he would descend like a spectre upon idle hands and loose tongues. Each of them knew this penchant, and yet the looming promise of his anger could never deter them from dallying when given the opportunity. Few were those that jumped at shadows.

Giorno had not given him the satisfaction he had craved, so it seemed instead Mista and Ghirgha would be subjected to Casamari's ill-tempered phantom. As they deserved, he thought, as he stepped out of the presbytery and into the south transept. He had heard them not two days before, stealing out of the dormitories while there was still light left in the day, scampering off to enjoy Reggimento in their plain clothes.

He had been nose-deep in Parmenides when he had heard them scrabbling over the wall of the garth, giggling and shushing one-another (to no great effect), and had resolved to ignore the matter. But the next morning at Lauds they had made no attempt to conceal their dishevelled personages, owlish and slack-boned as they went through their devotions, sharing conspiratorial smiles whenever they thought it safe. It had only seemed right to let Nero have his disport.

Outside, the broad disc of the sun looked as though it was perched upon the peaks of the mountains beyond, so that the jagged giants gave way to rolling gold-tinged fields. He would have only an hour or two of light to work with, but that would be time enough. Giorno moved through the garth towards the first flowerbeds.

Whistling came to him from across the garden, a melody he could not place. Giorno looked up to see Fugo perched atop the wall, drumming his heels against it, cheeks fat with something sweet. No longer content to sit amongst the rabble and imitate their desperate prayers, he had readily found other means of passing the hours between devotions. He gave Giorno a cheerful wave as he approached, his fingertips and wry smile sticky with sugar. Behind him, with the sun crowning the rugged mountains, Fugo's golden hair burned so bright in the wake of its waning brilliance that it almost seemed aflame.

'Ah, what luck,' he called down to him, pausing to suck at his thumb, 'just when I thought the sun was setting, it returns to shine on me once more.'

'If only you took as much care with your prayers as you do your fine words,' Giorno said with a sniff, holding his wicker basket close to his chest and turning up his nose. After their last disastrous conversation in the garth, the colour had disappeared from the services Giorno presided over. He had assumed—with some disappointment—that the change would be permanent.

Fugo was, rather naturally, unperturbed. 'I thought you'd be happier to see me,' he said in a quiet, near-accusatory way, gingerly placing his forefinger into his mouth. He stared down at Giorno from his perch atop the wall.

Giorno bit out a sharp sigh, shaking his head. 'I would have been overjoyed, had I seen your head bent in prayer and your mouth moving through scripture.'

'I had my mouth engaged in other pursuits,' Fugo said with a shrug, continuing to lick the honey from his fingertips.

'Glutting yourself must be very hard work.'

'Pleasing myself, little lamb. And it is my life's work, to be certain,' Fugo retorted, wiping first his hand with a delicate little handkerchief, and then the corners of his mouth. He heaved himself off the wall with a belaboured grunt. 'I hoped you had taken that particular lesson to heart.'

Giorno said nothing and watched Fugo thumb at the emeralds fastened through his ears and fuss with his hair. He hadn't the heart to grouse with Fugo, and wished he had simply taken himself off to his chambers. He certainly wouldn't make the mistake of trading duties with his bone-idle brothers again.

'And I had, rather foolishly, assumed I could teach you in return,' Giorno said, Fugo's inviting countenance only making him more sullen.

'Giorno—'

He turned away from Fugo and continued across the garden.

'Giorno.'

He heard Fugo's boots tamp down the wet grass, the scuffling quality of his footsteps as he tried to scrape the damp earth from the soles of his boots as he walked. Giorno was unmoving, peering intently at the buds and shoots before him. The bright orange heads of calendula almost seemed to glow in the waning daylight, as though each was in some small part a piece of the sun herself; wanting one morsel more of attention before the moon consumed all. Amongst them the bright pink heads of echinacea poked through—more carpel than petal—the delicate blooming heads drooping down towards the earth. The rosemary was fragrant, peppered with diminutive lilac buds.

He knelt down in front of the leafy sprigs of thyme—still wet from the morning's rainfall—and began to gently take cuttings. He was careful to leave the tough, ligneous parts behind in the soil.

'Are you truly so upset with me, little godson? Do you suppose I have injured you, and remained unscathed myself?'

Giorno laid a bundle of thyme into his basket with care, then met Fugo's expectant gaze. 'I was right to injure you,' he said, levelly, and turned back to his task. 'I thought I knew you, Signore. I was mistaken.'

Fugo scraped the underside of one boot against the wooden frame of the flowerbed, leaving behind a slick smear of dirt. Giorno, with a fist full of rosemary, fixed him with a pointed look.

'So you are upset with me because of your mistake?' Fugo asked, unable to stop the toothy smile breaking out from behind his lips. He twirled a piece of golden hair around his fingers and tucked it behind his ear. 'That hardly seems fair, now, does it?'

Giorno avoided his gaze and placed the bundle of rosemary into his basket. 'Do not speak to me of fairness.'

'Oh, come now,' Fugo folded his arms over his chest and the tiny beads sewn into his jerkin flashed and twisted like golden seeds in an emerald sea. 'We bandied a few unkind words, and by now it should be forgotten. Do you think I came all this way hoping to be lectured?'

'Should I have a care for what you want?'

Fugo clicked his tongue. 'You should. A good friend has his fellows' wishes in mind.'

Giorno rolled his eyes and turned back to the herbs. 'A friend?' He set another handful of rosemary into his basket and began to thumb over the echinacea, tracing an idle path over the velvety petals. 'Should a friend not have his fellow's best interests in mind, rather than his wishes?'

'Certainly not,' Fugo said with a scoff, 'he should trust that his fellow knows what is good for him, and indulge him otherwise.'

Giorno was unable to suppress a chuckle. 'Fugo, if you had any inkling of what was good for you,' he said, waggling the blade in his grip, 'you would not be standing so close to my knife-point.'

Fugo furrowed his brow. Scoffed. 'Do you mean to scare me?' He ignored Giorno's warning and reached across him, plucking a head of fiery calendula from the flowerbed. 'We don't need to sit around licking such petty wounds. There's no sense in that.'

He tucked the flower behind Giorno's ear and paused a moment to assess his handiwork, eyes trailing across his face. The golden catch-light of the sun made Fugo's gaze feel like a brand against his skin.

Giorno watched Fugo, as he was so carefully assessed in return, and ventured in a hushed voice, 'You don't believe in anything, do you? Not even the philosophy you claim to covet.'

Fugo made a very earnest attempt to press his mouth into a thin line, suppressing whatever it was he had wanted to say. And then, after a beat, he said, 'If it is second-rate, then no. I don't. There is so much that can be learnt, and so little that is worth learning. If it does not interest or improve me, then it is meaningless.'

'And how does one decide what is not worth learning? You hardly gave the Lord a fair chance.'

'I gave him chance enough. Believe me, Giorno.' He flashed him a gleaming smile. 'And besides, he was no longer… amusing me.'

Giorno might have suspected Fugo would eventually return to this argument. It was perhaps the only thing that was constant in him. His desire to be swept up by something brilliant; to be transported by something grand and exciting.

'Some things are worthwhile to endure past that brief spell of novice's enthusiasm. You flit between fancies because none of them reward you. Is patience and hard work too much to ask of you?'

Fugo scuffed the toe of his boot into the grass, turning away to stare out in the direction of Lepini. With the day growing so late, it would not even be a smear on the horizon, but it seemed Fugo was not searching for the mountaintops anyway. His eyes were far away and somehow empty.

'I try so hard to be agreeable with you,' Fugo finally said, turning back to Giorno with a conflicted little sneer, as though he was truly upset. He looked away again when Giorno met his gaze, and then went through a few hesitant repetitions of uncrossing and refolding his hands over his chest. And then, finally, chose to crouch down next to him.

There was still something vacant and glazed within his eyes, and they darted around Giorno's face as he spoke—never resting in one place. 'I do. I try so very hard. Do you understand me?' He paused, to swallow, and then met his eyes. 'It is not in my nature to be agreeable with people.'

'That has been obvious from the moment I met you,' Giorno replied with a huff, reaching up to pull the flower from his hair.

Fugo rapped him lightly on the wrist. 'I wasn't finished.'

Giorno dropped his hand, laying it on the handle of his basket. The proximity was unwelcome and strange, after a few weeks apart, and he was still uncertain whether the most inane of words might yet flare Fugo's temper. And, eventually—given enough spite and frustration—he feared Fugo would eventually make good on his constant threats to never again return to him.

It was too soon to have him disappear again. And so he waited to see what Fugo might do next; dumb and mute to his advances.

Fugo inspected the flowerbed, poking and prodding at the plants Giorno had spent so many months carefully cultivating, and began to pick them apart with idle abandon.

'You like your Englishman, don't you?' Fugo asked, pulling off tiny lilac flowers from the rosemary one by one and collecting them in his cupped hand. His brows pinched up—calculating—and then smoothed out again as he tucked an errant strand of hair behind Giorno's ear. 'One of his countrymen wrote that patience is a fair virtue, and perhaps it is.' Fugo peppered the tiny lilac buds over Giorno's hair. 'Though I doubt it is ever much comfort to patient men, never knowing on their deathbeds if a little impatience may have changed their lives.'

Giorno stared at Fugo's glittering, green chest, the trail of his throat exposed where he had unbuttoned his high collar. His voice, when he found it, was reedy and difficult to get his tongue around, 'You use a great many words to say you are inattentive and fickle. And that you adore the sound of your own voice.'

'We cannot all be as gracious and pious as you, little godson,' Fugo muttered as he turned away, tearing away one of the heads of drooping echinacea and threading it into Giorno's braid. The slip of his tongue darted out between his teeth as he focused on his pretty spell of destruction. 'Not everyone can find enjoyment in such a sparse existence.'

Giorno kept his eyes on the dazzling array of beading spanning the length and breadth of Fugo's sleeves and chest, each movement of his nimble fingers or twist of his body chased by the waning light of the sun, rippling back and forth over fabric and bead. When Fugo pitched his elbows up, reaching over the back of Giorno's head, the open neck of his doublet betrayed a slip of his collarbone. Warm. Bare.

'Is knowledge really what guides you in life? Or is it impatience?' Giorno asked, his voice tinny and hollow in his own ears.

Fugo pulled away from him and stared into his face. He wavered for a long moment like that, his eyes darting between Giorno's eyes and his mouth so intently that Giorno was half-afraid to move a muscle, lest he give something away. There was something, it seemed, that Fugo wanted to see—something he perhaps thought hidden beneath the surface of Giorno's skin, or under his tongue—and Giorno could barely stand the scrutiny.

Perhaps it was merely the encroaching night that Giorno could see within Fugo's eyes then; the murky depths sparkling with something unbidden, belonging not to the light of day. His mouth felt dry.

'And what if I am impatient for knowledge?' Fugo finally returned, gently smoothing down a piece of hair at the crown of Giorno's head.

'Then you believe in something,' he conceded, 'and that has some meaning, however unconventional.'

Fugo seemed to consider the idea, his fingertips ghosting down the back of Giorno's head and over his shoulder, his mouth drawn into that same thin line. He turned his face back to the flowerbed and Giorno blinked up at the darkening sky, chest tight as he caught his breath.

'Have you not tired of destruction?' Giorno asked, lips pursed.

'Destruction? I have made you into a thing of beauty.'

Giorno pushed him away to take a proper look at his flowerbed. Narancia should have had his way with the garden after all, he mused. He might have had a gentler touch. Giorno dug into the dirt and pulled out the stem of calendula Fugo had beheaded, gently taking it into his basket, and then the echinacea. 'You cut down beautiful things to embroider something plain and indifferent. What a mess you have made.'

'I am only human.'

'No, Fugo. You are an animal. One of impulse.' Giorno's voice was colder than he had anticipated. It perturbed him, how easily he'd let Fugo have his way once more.

Fugo looked as though he was on the verge of saying something else, a satisfied smile creeping along the curve of his mouth, when the skies opened up on them. A fine mist fell over them like a veil. Giorno brushed past him and crossed to the next flowerbed, aware that the night was drawing close and his time would now be much shorter.
Fugo was quiet but irate as he drew his hood up, and Giorno was still anticipating the moment he might eventually boil over. He hovered on the edge of Giorno's periphery, watching him work, occasionally turning a baleful eye to the skies.

'Are they even useful?' he asked, raising his voice as the rain began to change; the fine mist starting to pelt down upon them.

Giorno blinked through it, filling his basket with chervil and betony. He could feel his arms become heavy as his sleeves soaked through with rainwater; swiped at his face with the sodden back of his arm and scrunched up his nose as the wool scratched his skin. 'Would I bother to grow them if they weren't?' he asked, and then added, somewhat louder, 'you are the only fool I know that endeavours solely to amuse himself.'

'No. These ones.' Fugo was at first in his periphery and then a dark shadow beside him, his fingers raking a path along Giorno's damp braid. He gently tucked the creeping head of calendula back behind his ear.

Giorno bowed his head, shirking from the contact. He felt the head of the flower droop back down again, petals sticking to his wet cheek. 'Some are just pretty.'

He continued to carve and clip, trying not to think of how he would spend most of the night wringing the rain out of his cassock, and how then, bare, he would shiver in the cold and the dark. Fugo had been in a peculiar mood this evening, yet here he still was. And, beyond his bite and frustration, something else thrummed beneath Fugo's calm exterior that unsettled Giorno. He had begun to understand Fugo and his fickle ways: expect the rhythm of his visitation and the peaks and valleys of his moods. Giorno could not begin to comprehend Fugo now. This unusual patience; the attempt to apologise. The rain was worsening, the drizzle becoming downpour.

Fugo's hands were on him then, suddenly, his mouth at his ear. Even that close, Giorno could barely hear him through the rain. He could only see how pink and shaken his own hands were as he worked, could feel the pressure of his drenched cassock against his back where Fugo was needling, squeezing, insisting that he listen. Fugo said something again, but it felt like little more than hot air against his ear.

Giorno dropped another sodden handful of herbs into his basket and Fugo wrested his knife out of his grasp, trying to pull him up to his feet. He turned and tried to listen again, unable to hear anything more than the rain as he watched Fugo's lips move and his scowl deepen from within the shadows of his hood. Giorno pulled him along by his sleeve, the surface of the ground underfoot already shifting and giving way beneath them.

Fugo would be furious about the mud on his boots. Not that the open road would have been any less treacherous in this weather, but Giorno supposed that Fugo must have a horse hitched up somewhere near the abbey, and would not be on foot for long. It occurred to him, then, that he had in fact never seen Fugo beyond the walls of the abbey; never watched him ride away towards the mountains.

It truly was as though he was an apparition that only existed within the confines of what Giorno knew and understood.

He pulled Fugo into the dovecote, panting, and avoided the impulse to sink to his knees. He bent double and tried to catch his breath, staring out at the garth. The rain was thunderous and without pause, the wan lights of the warming house appearing to be an impossible distance away.

Fugo sniffled, rainwater dripping from the ends of his wild hair and down his flushed cheeks and nose. Above their heads came the gentle calls of the doves, a ruffling of feathers as the birds sought to keep themselves warm against the encroaching damp. Giorno's breath came to him in staccato bursts.

'Where do you come from?'

Fugo arched a quizzical brow. 'As of late? Ceccano.'

Giorno flushed, felt heat rise and sit just beneath the frigid exterior of his skin. He had not meant to give a voice to his ludicrous thoughts.

Fugo took in his stupefied expression for a moment more and then huffed out a sigh, wringing more water from his clothes and casting a glance around them. 'Is there not an oil lamp in this infernal little hovel?'

'If there were, what do you expect we would light it with?' Giorno returned with a scoff, straightening himself out, 'and it is not a hovel. This is a home.'

Fugo tutted and stared unkindly at the doves roosting far above their heads. He pulled his sodden hood down, and Giorno could see that the hair that framed his face was plastered to his forehead, dark and stringy. 'Home,' he sneered, swiping his hair out of his eyes, 'as though you would know the meaning of the word.'

Giorno set his jaw, shivering as the thrill of the rainstorm had passed and left him numb to his bones.

Fugo blanched. 'Giorno—'

Outside, the pounding rain pummelled the yielding earth. He watched the water as it ran off the grass and over the threshold, beginning to form a winding web over the dry earth of the dovecote.

'Giorno.'

Fugo's features were so much softer in the orange glow of the half-light. The sharp jut of his aquiline nose and harsh line of his jaw rendered into a mask that almost appeared remorseful.

'I have all I could hope for here, Fugo. I know nothing else. I cannot resent my station, if I am ignorant of what I could desire.'

Fugo searched his face again, in that lingering, scrutinising manner that Giorno was—despite his deepest reservations—beginning to become accustomed to. 'Ignorance is not a choice a learned man can make, Giorno.'

'Signore,' Giorno began, with a clipped little sigh, 'I was brought into this world with nothing, and so I want for nothing.' He watched Fugo twist his telling mouth back into submission, and continued, 'You were brought into this world with more than other men could even dream of, and so you want everything.'

Fugo was silent.

'You are so glutted on life that you have come through the mountains for a taste of poverty and piety. At least, until that novelty alone will not satiate your impossible appetite.' Giorno scoffed. 'Nothing is quite enough for you, is it?'

'So what if it isn't?' Fugo pulled down his hood, groping behind his neck for the long tail and trying vainly to wring rainwater from the sodden fabric. He said again, more insistently, 'So what if it isn't enough, Giorno?'

Giorno did not know what to say.

'Is it really so dreadful, to demand everything this wretched world will offer up to me? Would you rather your smallfolk take what they can get, or starve so they might consider themselves pious?'

'That is not the same, Signore.'

'No, it is not,' Fugo ceded, far too easily. He stared out into the rain, brow furrowed. 'I make demands of the earth, just as you make demands of your smallfolk. Though I am the only one of us that will admit his fault.'

Giorno could feel Fugo's eyes on him as he watched the rain fall. His gaze burned deep beneath the frigid exterior of Giorno's skin and the sodden wool of his cassock; for a dizzying moment felt as though it might smoulder through into his very heart itself.

'You are at fault, my little godson, and make no mistake. You condone this. Partake in it. Glut yourself on the fruits of other men's labour.'

'We share our faith, Fugo. Satisfy ourselves with reflection and devotion. We give to the people who grace our grounds, and they give back in turn.'

'Is that what you really believe?'

Giorno's mouth was dry once more; tongue cumbersome and difficult to master. 'I do,' he lied.

Many years ago, perhaps. When he was but a boy. Before his tutelage had involved penning the charters and ledgers with old Polpo, and the beating heart of the abbey had been laid bare to him.

Fugo tutted. Shook his head. 'You are not ignorant of tithes, Giorno. Do not insult my intelligence. Or yours.'

Giorno could see the imperfections in his mask appear once again, the frustration playing about his furrowed brow and agitated jaw.

'They toil and suffer on this land, and from the scant gold they can muster they are forced to put a sum into your pockets. And for what?'

'We do not just take th—'

'Their gold?' Fugo cut in, raising his voice once more. 'No, you take more than that from them. Their animals. Their grain. And then their dignity.'

'You debase yourself with these ridiculous arguments, Signore. As I have said, we return their generosity with our own.'

'By permitting them to sit in the warm, dry splendour of these hallowed halls? Allowing them to gaze upon your warm woollen clothes and new turnshoes, ever a fire in your warming house, burning tallow candles at all hours of the night?'

Giorno could hardly stand to look him in the eye. He despised how easy it was to let his anger seep into his voice, to colour every word. 'And you, in your silks and leathers? You, with gold studded in your ears and on every finger? Insulting anyone unfortunate to catch your eye, spouting nonsense about dark magic and sacrilegious texts? Are you not just as much an affront to their plight, Signore?'

Fugo, though he was clearly brimming with dangerous, excitable energy, simply smiled. 'Of course I am.'

The more Giorno looked at it, the less of a smile it appeared to be, until he was sure it was nothing more than a cruel bearing of his teeth. Something ravenous, thoughtless.

'We are the same, Giorno.'

He shook his head. Outside, the rain continued to fall in torrents, the sky so dark with clouds that they had almost completely blotted out the weary sun.

'We are,' Fugo insisted, 'this is our nature, Giorno. We demand. We take. We consume. We are only concerned with what we can seize.'

'You have such a way with words, Signore, but they are empty. One look at the two of us shows our differences plain enough.'

'Don't be so foolish,' Fugo said—hissed—as though Giorno was somehow simple. As though having to explain himself was utterly loathsome to him. 'Finery does not excite me. Nor you. We want the same things, Giorno, and they are immaterial.'

'Then name them.'

'Knowledge. Power.'

Giorno scowled at him. 'Is this really how you have decided to repay my time and attention? You dare to speak to me like this, because I have been fool enough to entertain you?'

'The philosophy is irrelevant. We are… beyond it, at this juncture.'

Giorno did not like the look in Fugo's eyes, then.

'And you have turned your nose up at it, anyway.' Fugo stepped in closer, shadowy and shapeless in the waning evening light. 'You are a man of two halves, and I am the only one that sees it. You say all of the right words, Giorno, but you don't really mean them. You've never smiled at a shepherd as you do at me, and you know it.'

There was a bite to his words that Giorno could almost swear he felt upon his skin. He was close—much too close—and between them and the rest of the world a veil of thundering, endless rain. Giorno could only dare to stare into Fugo's grim face a moment more before he dashed out into the night, not expecting Fugo would catch him around his midriff. He twisted in his grip, the pair of them stumbling out of the dovecote and into the rain. Fugo was shouting again, but over the downpour all Giorno could comprehend was the wordless fever-pitch of his voice.

He pushed him away and swayed out across the grass, blinking through the torrents of rain to follow the wan light of the warming house. Fugo caught him again by the handle of his basket, pressing against him, a cold hand wrenching at his chin so he would look up into his face. Giorno squinted past the rain, the encroaching night turning Fugo into a leering shadow. Each word that poured out of him was taken by the storm, and yet he persisted. He grabbed at the collar of Giorno's cassock and shook him, pulled him closer and bent his lips to his ear.

All Giorno heard was the downpour from the heavens. Fugo's words were nothing more than meaningless heat and fury against his skin.

He thrashed in Fugo's grip and tore himself away, his basket slipping out of his grip, stumbling over the treacherous slick mud towards the day stairs. When he reached them, breathless and reeling, he pressed himself against the wall and stared out across the garth.

Fugo watched, waited: the glittering emerald sheen of his doublet and hose washed away by the rain until he was no more than a caliginous shade. Giorno kept his eyes on him as he mounted the first few steps of the day stairs. Fugo remained a shadow on the far side of the garden. Giorno continued to climb, the cold and the pelting of the rain seeming to take his breath from him so he could only take in faltering, useless gasps of air.

Fugo took a few tentative, clumsy steps over the mud, and then seemed to find his footing. Giorno shouted to him to stop, to leave, but the rain washed his voice away. He clambered up the rest of the steps and did not dare to look back again as he pulled open the door to the dorter and slunk down the hallway. Inside his own room, he pressed himself against the door and slid down the length of it, his breath whistling through his burning lungs, the chafe of his soaking cassock blazing against his skin.

He was incensed, knowing that Fugo had so easily gotten under his skin.

Choosing to run rather than to argue was a mistake, he knew, but he had not wanted to fight with him again. Giorno had not wanted to agree with him, either, which was more the pity. Because Fugo had been right.

He had laid him bare with little else than a few words—cut through to the heart of him—and it had been more than Giorno could bear.

He dropped his head and listened, the golden head of calendula falling from behind his ear to land in his lap. He sat like that for a long time, shuddering, silent, until it was so dark outside he could barely decipher the shape of his own hand in front of his eyes. The only noises that came from beyond the door were the other lay-brothers, coming up from the night steps beside the chapter house and wishing one-another goodnight. And then silence.

Giorno eventually peeled himself out of his wet clothes and lumbered barefoot and starving to his cot, curling up on his side and staring out into the darkness until sleep eventually stole him away.