Wake up, fish, sleep. Wake up, fish, sleep. The routine of waking up, fishing, and sleeping rolled through his life as gently as the tides, punctuated by Sunday afternoon opera. Bruno would make tea and they’d settle on the little couch and listen together, and the next day they were back to wake up, fish, sleep.

He had largely gotten the hang of fishing at this point - the lurch of the boat underfoot and the salty smell of the wind, the neverending silver stream of anchovies and the call of the gulls who tried to swipe them from the deck. Bruno had given him responsibility of the binoculars a few weeks in and he’d actually gotten pretty good at spotting where the schools were congregating, tiny points in the seemingly endless blue-green of the Mediterranean. Things were… well, not exactly good, but at the very least, not as horrible. More manageable.

Nevertheless, there were days like today, where they’d aimlessly sail around without making a decent catch. Leone would scan the horizon, the wind whipping his hair into his face, and still not find a single bird; Bruno would stand stonefaced by the steering wheel, which was his way of sulking, and eventually take a turn on the binoculars and come up cold himself. They were doing fairly well overall, they didn’t <i>need</i> to haul in a great catch every time, but it was still frustrating to fail at the day’s only task.

He’d put the binoculars down for a moment to rub his eyes, and was about to start up the search again when he heard a large splash from the port side of the boat. “Oh,” he said in surprise.

“What’s… oh!” said Bruno, joining him at the railing. “Haven’t seen one of those in a while.” The dolphin swam carelessly around the boat, arcing out of the sea and slicing back into it, sleek and silver and powerful. “They always look like they’re having so much fun.” Leone cast a sideways glance at Bruno, his soft smile and strong profile, and looked back at the cavorting dolphin. Fun, enjoyment, satisfaction, he wanted to empathize, but he just couldn’t reach it, and he felt that vertigo again, the sense of drowning in anhedonia and finally blurted out:

“I haven’t been doing well.”

“I know,” said Bruno, simply, still watching the dolphin, his fingers curled over the railing. “That’s why you’re here.” And then he turned his head slightly, meeting Leone’s eyes. His expression was… surprise? Confusion? Possibly even concern? “What can I do to help?”

Leone was staggered. It had taken so long to even admit there was a problem, and the pronouncement of it had momentarily filled him with elation, but the followup had sent him crashing back down again. What <i>could</i> he do? There was too much too his sadness and it was too confusing, though his time as a fisherman had at least afforded him some silence in which to untangle the knot of emotions.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “It’s been good to be here, though.” It had, after all - the predictable schedule, the simplicity of his work, and the time outdoors, away from any distractions, hadn’t cured him but had helped level him out. “Y’know, away from all that shit.”

Bruno made a small “hmm” of affirmation, and amazingly followed with, “I’m glad you’re here. It was lonely without you.” His hand was resting next to Leone’s on the railing, their pinkie fingers just touching. It was probably a chance occurrence; Bruno was still fixated on the dolphin and didn’t seem to have noticed. But it was contact. Contact and actual worry, and Leone would take it, and cherish the memory.

<hr />

“Is there a barber in town?”

His hair was driving him up the wall. It was forever blowing into his face when they were on the boat, no matter how firmly he tied it back, and was growing brittle from constant exposure to sun and salt water. He’d bought a cheap hairdryer which had immediately shorted out the fuse in the bathroom (“Sorry,” Bruno had said, “I’m pretty sure my dad wired this place), so it was fairly clear that his days of standing in front of the mirror with a can of Aqua Net and a vision of perfect tips were over. Instead, he sat around waiting for his hair to air dry, feeling chilly and slightly musty.


“No,” said Bruno, “but I can cut your hair.” Bruno, of course, always looked unfairly flawless, his sleek black locks held in place with has favorite Prada clips. But being so genetically blessed didn’t necessarily make him a good hairdresser. Leone glanced at him with a healthy helping of skepticism and he insisted: “I cut my own hair. I used to cut Narancia’s hair.”

“That’s hardly a ringing endorsement,” Leone countered before he could think, but luckily Bruno just grinned and made a friendly lewd gesture in response.

“C’mon,” he said, and motioned for a still-reluctant Leone to have a seat at the table. He ducked into the bathroom for a pair of clippers and a towel, the latter of which he draped over Leone’s shoulders as a passable barber’s smock. “You want me to just clean up your split ends, or-”

“Cut it all off.”

“No.” Bruno pulled the towel back, picked up the clippers from the table.

“<i>Yes<i/>, I’m fucking sick of it.”

 His hairdresser sighed and put his makeshift studio back in place. “All right, but this is a tragedy. Chin down.” Leone stared at the few flecks of black polish left on his nails as Bruno gathered up his hair in a loose ponytail. “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

The <i>shhnk</i> of the scissors and there it was on the floor, looking like a dead animal. <i>Good fucking riddance</i>, Leone thought, though it was a little sad. He’d been growing it for years in defiance of his former job and everything in his life that’d led up to it, and it was an essential part of his general Don’t Fucking Touch Me look. But it was time to move on. He was a fisherman now.

Bruno tilted his head back up with a gentle thumb under his chin and went to work. “Hmm,” he said, after a few minutes of snipping.

“What?”

“This is actually your natural color.”

“Yeah. Started going gray at seventeen.” His mother had insisted that it was stress, that he should learn to take it easy, but his doctor said that that was just an old wives’ tale. He’d agreed about the stress reduction, though.

“I just always thought you’d bleached it.”

Leone snorted. “<i>Fugo</i> bleached his hair.” Very poorly, with the cheapest marketed-to-grandmothers product he could find.

“Well yeah, <i>that</i> was obvious. Turn.” A thumb and finger against his jawbone, nudging his head towards the left. He leaned into Bruno’s hand as gently as he could, trying not to draw any attention to his actions. It was almost a little cruel being touched like this - fingertips brushing stray hairs off the nape of his neck, a hand moving his face to the right, carding through the hair above his ear to trim it evenly. He’d had countless haircuts before, of course, but this one felt painfully intimate.

“There,” Bruno said, satisfied with his work far too soon. “Go see how you look.”

The man in the bathroom mirror might as well have been a stranger for all he looked at himself nowadays, and the reappearance of a haircut approaching that of his police days was a bit of a shock. And he still felt a little washed out without the makeup, though after a cycle of burning and peeling, his carefully cultivated pale skin had settled into a healthier tan. His first reaction was <i>Who the hell are you?</i>, his second and actually voiced one: “I look old.”

“You look <i>good</i>,” Bruno reassured him, sliding in behind him to join in checking out his reflection. Hands on his shoulders in a brotherly fashion, too close in that small space, Leone was caught between the equally frantic <i>don’t touch me</i> and <i>never stop</i>.

<hr />

Rossini’s <i>Tancredi</i> never failed to entrance Leone, and as always, listening with Bruno approached overwhelming. He wanted to take Bruno’s face in his hands, kiss him deeply and with all of the passion the opera evoked. Lay him down there on the couch and fuck him, hold him close afterwards, but… But the way they were right now was heaven. He could take a chance and possibly reach an even higher state, or, more likely, he could fuck it all up and destroy the delicate balance between them, the one oasis of perfection in his life. If Bruno was interested in him, he’d have shown signs of it by now.

Better to remain quiet than to sabotage his own personal paradise.