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Trish has been humming the same song all day. Narancia notices it first when he’s coming back into the turtle from watch duty at 6 AM, collapsing face-first onto the couch and falling asleep to the sound. He notices again in the afternoon, when Bucciarati decides to have them stop in Tessera to regroup and pick up supplies. Narancia’s still getting over the whole shark bite to the throat thing, and most of his body hurts like hell, so he stays behind to watch over Trish.
They’ll be on a plane in a few hours. Aerosmith’s all excited, buzzing in Narancia’s chest while he’s trying to concentrate on cleaning the dirt out from under his fingernails with his knife. He hasn’t been on a plane in forever, not since Bucciarati had sent him and Abbacchio to Sicily a year and a half ago—it’ll be nice to see the shape of the world from high up again, made small and manageable by distance.
Trish is brushing her hair while she does it, the humming. She’s folded into the armchair with her knees all the way up, the way she always sits, like no one will try to make her get up if she takes up as little space as possible. She hasn’t styled her hair yet, so it falls soft and errant around her face, down to her shoulders. Her eyes are on the rug, distant. She’s had that look a lot lately.
It’s a nice song, or maybe it just sounds nice because it’s Trish singing it—so nice that he doesn’t mind the repetition. A lot of things sound nice in Trish’s voice. Kind of like wind rolling over a grassy hill, shimmering.
“You like singing, huh?” he asks, and Trish goes quiet for long enough that he looks up from his fingernails. She’s lowered the hairbrush into her lap and is frowning back at him apprehensively.
“I guess,” she says, like she expects him to use it against her.
“You’re really good,” Narancia tells her, and smiles because it’s true. “You must like that song a lot!”
Trish’s frown gets deeper. “Is it annoying?”
“Huh?” Narancia’s confused. “No? I didn’t say it was.”
“No, but—” Trish opens her mouth around something that she then takes back, eyes darting to her knees, still frowning. “Never mind.”
Narancia stares at her for a second, then puts his knife away, slipping it into his pocket. He stretches out sideways on the couch, propping his head up by the elbow, the heel of his palm squishing his cheek.
“How are you…” Trish fiddles with her fingers, tugging at each one in turn, her head ducked over them. “Feeling? Like—are you better?”
Narancia lifts his chin for a second. “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”
“No, I mean—I mean are your wounds okay,” Trish says, gesturing, like she’s trying to encourage the words into coming out. “When you came back to the restaurant…” She lifts a hand to her neck, almost unconsciously, her fingers brushing the edge, where her pulse would be. “It looked bad.”
Unthinking, Narancia touches his own neck, in the same place. The marks from The Clash’s teeth are shallower now, closed up and cleaned by Gold Experience, but he can still trace the ridges, the remains. It had taken a couple of hours for his voice to come back.
He feels kind of stupid, then. It must be hard for Trish, seeing blood all the time. Those kinds of things don’t bother him anymore, but—they did, once.
It wouldn’t feel right to act tough, so he lowers his hand to his side again and says, “It still kinda hurts, but… yeah, I’ll live.”
Trish looks straight at him, and holds it for a long time. Narancia’s not great at reading faces, or anything—end of the day, he needs words—but it kind of seems like a big deal to Trish, hearing him admit that it still hurts.
No one has ever looked at him quite the way that Trish does. Her eyes tend to default to safe places: walls, or floors, or the skyline. Sometimes Narancia will say something that outdoes the skyline, though, and Trish’s gaze will land on him and stay there, utterly intent, as if memorizing the way that he fits into the world.
He forgets that he exists, sometimes, until Trish looks at him like that. Like this.
“Narancia, I’m…” She struggles for a second, and then breathes out shakily, tightening her grip on the chair. “I’m really glad you’re okay.”
Narancia’s brain does something weird. It decides that he’s going to say, Of course I am; I said I’d protect you, so I will, so he says, confidently, “Of course I am. I said I’d protect you, so I will!”
Trish’s eyes go wide. Really wide. Narancia should probably be worried, but really all he can pay attention to is how blue they are, how—
Beautiful, his brain suggests, still being weird.
“Anyway, um,” he says, and has to clear his throat when his voice comes out wrong. “The song. You do like it, right?”
“Oh,” Trish replies, and then clears her throat, too. Maybe it’s the light, but her cheeks look a little redder. “Yeah. It’s one of my favorites.”
She glances aside, biting her lip again, and hesitates. Narancia waits.
“I… heard it the other night,” she continues after breathing in. “In the car, on the radio. And I hadn’t heard it in a while, so it was—it was nice. I used to…”
She trails off, tipping her head back to look at the sky through the roof. It’s blue, and there are huge clouds, clouds big enough to hide cities in. Bucciarati had left the turtle under an oak tree, so some of the branches are visible, swaying in the wind that neither of them can feel.
“Used to what?” Narancia asks.
Trish shakes her head, closing her arms around her knees. “It’s stupid. I used to listen to it when I had to do chores, and I’d dance to it to make the work go faster. And I couldn’t even understand most of it, because it’s in English. I would have the radio on—my mom had one of those portable ones—and I’d just be hoping and hoping that someone would request it.” The line of her mouth shifts into what’s almost a smile, something sad and full of longing. “It feels… weird talking about that stuff now. I wonder if I’ll ever—”
When she cuts herself off this time, Narancia knows nothing more will come. He’s never thought much about Trish’s old life before—what she must have been like before they met her, what kinds of things she laughed at, if she ever wore her hair long—but he sinks into the thinking, now, and pictures a big room, and sunlight coming through a window, and Trish’s whole face lighting up when the radio starts playing a song. Her song.
“You can dance?” he asks, grinning in spite of himself. Of course she can—Trish can do a lot of things.
“My mom made me take lessons,” Trish says, a little faster and more freely, like it’s been pent up. She rolls her eyes. “Like, so many. Ballet, tap, ballroom. It was such a chore—and I was so bad at ballet. But… it got easier with practice.”
Narancia nods, marveling at her. He’s never been patient enough to practice much of anything. Math, maybe, but it’s not like that had ever gotten easier.
“That’s really cool,” he tells her earnestly.
Trish blinks at him for a second, then lets out a quick laugh, angling her head away to hide it when she does. Narancia almost leans down, just to keep looking.
“It’s—not,” she says. “I liked it best when I could just do it slow anyway, and not have to think.” She runs a hand through her hair, twirling one of the ends around her finger, and slants over in the chair. Her hand, the one with the scar, settles against her temple. “I miss it sometimes.”
Narancia thinks, for a moment, about all of the things that Trish must miss. It seems monumental that she’d admit to even one of them. Something that Giorno had said nudges at his memory, words that had loitered with him for days; words about willpower, and quiet, and the absence of tears.
Maybe that’s why he sits up and says, “We could do it right now, if you want.”
Trish’s eyes dart to him.
“Wh-What?” she asks, blinking fast.
“There’s lots of room in here,” Narancia says, gesturing to illustrate it. “And Bucciarati and the others probably won’t be back for a while. Wanna dance?”
“With—” Trish is still blinking. She shakes her head, sitting up straighter, her hand still hovering in the space where she’d been cradling her chin a moment ago. “We don’t have any music.”
“That’s okay,” Narancia says cheerfully. “You can just keep humming it, right?”
Trish’s cheeks bloom red, and her mouth falls open. Narancia doesn’t know what the big deal is; it’s actually a pretty smart compromise, in his opinion. Bucciarati’s been teaching him a lot, lately, about compromise.
“You… want me to—” She looks away, eyes landing urgently on her knees as she unfolds her legs and sets her feet on the floor. “To that?”
“Sure!” Narancia says. “It’s a nice song.”
“Yeah, but it’s…”
Narancia pushes himself up and crosses the distance to the armchair, offering her his hand, palm-up. She looks first at it, the lines maybe, and then slowly up at him.
“Come on,” he says, as coaxingly as he knows how. Maybe Trish can’t see that she deserves this—something happy, and a little stupid—but he can. “It’ll be fun!”
Trish’s eyes shift to his hand again, and stay there longer this time, checking it for integrity. The hesitation on her face is painfully obvious, but Narancia doesn’t rush it. He just keeps his hand where it is.
Eventually Trish lays her own across it, closing her fingers over his knuckle, and hoists herself up. Her skirt makes a swishing sound against her boots. She tucks her other hand under some loose hair and tosses it over her shoulder.
“Have you ever done this before?” she mumbles, shifting her grip.
“Dancing?” Narancia wrinkles his nose. “Of course I have. Who do you think I am, Fugo?”
Fugo can dance, but Narancia doesn’t think Trish is thinking of the kind of dancing that Fugo does.
Trish coughs in a way that’s tangentially close to a laugh. “I meant to… slow songs.”
Narancia blinks. “Slow? Like… what do you mean, slow?”
Trish stares at him.
“Slow dancing,” she says after a second, like that’s supposed to explain it. “With a partner.”
When Narancia shakes his head cluelessly, she lets out an exasperated sigh.
“Like this,” she says, and grabs his wrist.
She plants his left hand firmly on her hip and holds onto his right, lacing their fingers together. When the heel of her other palm settles on his bare shoulder, something beneath the skin jumps.
She ducks her head, cheeks coloring. Narancia blinks at her in awe. She’s holding to his hand gingerly, ready to retreat at any second. It just makes him want to squeeze it more tightly, to promise her something, though he isn’t sure he has the words for it. He’s not that much taller than she is, but the difference seems more noticeable all of a sudden, or maybe it’s because her shoulders are hunched forward, braced for something he can’t see.
“Don’t laugh at me,” she mutters, chewing her lip. “Got it?”
Narancia nods mutely. Trish closes her eyes, breathing out, flexing the fingers of both hands, and whispers, maybe just to herself, “Okay.”
When she starts humming, Narancia forgets for the first few notes that he’s supposed to move. It’s only when she squeezes his shoulder, nudging him to the side, that he thinks to do it, following her in a swaying circle around the carpet.
“Um…” he says, frowning. “So… is this it, or…”
Trish huffs, lightly smacking his arm.
“What?” he whines. “This is how old people dance.”
“It’s not about—it’s not about the dancing, exactly,” Trish says, wrestling some patience into her voice. “It’s just—it’s about being… close to somebody. And feeling them there, and… and just…”
Narancia really isn’t following. By all accounts, what Trish is describing sounds boring, but the fact that it’s her saying it shifts something, and suddenly his stomach feels twisted up, nervous.
“Just what?”
Trish huffs again, but she tightens her fingers in his for a second. Warmth darts all the way to Narancia’s shoulder, like he’s just picked up something heavy.
“Just being together,” she says, “with the music.” She draws in a quick breath, determination firming up her face. “It helps if you count, when you’re just starting out. Here, see—” She looks down at their feet, nodding along when the weight shifts in tandem to each. “One… two. One… two. One—”
Narancia hates counting things on a good day, but he finds himself mumbling along, his voice mingling with Trish’s in the space between them as he traces the beat. One, two.
“Good,” Trish says, and Narancia thinks he hears a smile in it; something light, with feathers. “Now come a little closer.”
Narancia does as he’s told, taking a half-step across the carpet. Trish slips her hand out of his, and before he can figure out where to put it she’s reached across and linked her fingers at the nape of his neck.
He’s glad he’s looking down, because his face feels hot all of a sudden. The weight of Trish’s wrists hovers at the point where his hair has grown the longest, a little fold of warmth. When he sways to the left, her fingers brush his shoulder blade.
“Like that?” he asks.
“Uh-huh,” Trish says. Her voice sounds a little higher. “You’re… that’s perfect.”
Narancia’s body relaxes in sections, each unlocking gently as Trish slips in some lyrics in English—nightly; beside the green, green grass—that he can’t really understand, but that sound pretty. There’s no better word for what Trish does to words, to music, to ideas, to breathing. Even if the steps were wider and more complicated, he’d follow her anywhere.
“Don’t look at your feet,” Trish says above him. “Look at me.”
Narancia lifts his head. “Okay.”
Of all the things he might have expected, Trish’s face being as close as it is wasn’t one of them. Her fingers faintly curl over his hair the second their eyes meet, almost a reflex. She sucks in a breath that she doesn’t let out and tenses against Narancia’s hand, and when her rhythm falters, Narancia’s does, too.
Trish’s face. Trish’s face.
Narancia thinks he might be okay with it if it was the last thing he ever saw.
There are so many things about it that he likes. The freckles, the short nose; the way her eyes are always so clear and so attentive, and so blue. He’s seen her brave before, and scared, and sad—it’s maybe a combination of all three angled back at him when she clasps the nape of his neck with one set of fingers and sings, in a language he still doesn’t understand, “So kiss me.”
“That’s nice,” Narancia says, smiling before he can help it. “What’s it mean?”
Trish finally breaks eye contact, turning her head to the side. Her arms relax around him until her hands slip down to his arms, just above his elbows. Overhead, the oak branches move again; Narancia can see them, but they cast no shadow.
“I’m not sure,” she says, a little hurried, and reaches up to comb some hair behind her ear, keeping her hand there. “Something about dancing.”
“Can you teach me?” Narancia asks. “The words, I mean.”
Trish flounders for a moment, so out of character that Narancia almost laughs, then says, “Sure. If you want.”
Narancia beams, still holding onto her. “I’m not super great at learning stuff, but—”
“Yes you are,” Trish interjects. “Unless you think it’s boring.”
She brushes her thumb over the edge of his arm and says softly to the floor, “Is this boring?”
“Not with you,” Narancia says. “Can we go again? You can sing a different song this time, or the same one—I don’t mind!”
He likes Trish all the time, he realizes—close or far away, singing or quiet—but close is a lot nicer, and singing might be the best. The look on her face—how it unravels itself, gently, into a smile; first on one side of her mouth, then all the way across—might be the best.
“Okay,” she says, and then seems to consider something before linking her hands behind his head again and laughing. Inside of him, Aerosmith soars. “Thanks, Narancia.”
“Sure!” he replies. “And we can dance my way next time, okay?”
“Next time?” Trish asks, still smiling, and tugs him a little closer.
Narancia lets her. “Yeah,” he says. “Next time for sure.”