Archive of Our Own ^beta

     Leone’s local mall was nothing special. A little run down and underfunded, maybe, but its slightly dilapidated aura only left the dregs of society such as Leone feeling more at home. Bruno and Giorno, on the other hand, with their pressed suits and immaculate hair, stood out like two sore thumbs. They were here for the fancy department store that didn’t look like it belonged attached to such a shitty mall, ready to drop a fortune on new clothes for Giorno now that he had a mafia to run. He only had one outfit, which, according to Bruno, simply wouldn’t do. 

     “So,” Buccellati began, turning to Giovanna, “Trish, Leone, we’ll meet back here in three hours. Is that all right?” 

     Bruno couldn’t drive, which was why Leone was here. That much was clear enough. But he could not figure out for the life of him why Trish was here. She didn’t have to come to the mall with them, Mista and Narancia were free today too and would be far more interesting company than he. But, when he really thought about it, everywhere Bruno went, she trailed behind him at an adequate enough distance that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious she was doing it to spend time with him. Unless one was like Leone, who had also done the exact same thing about a year prior, until Bruno finally sat him down in a moment of spectacular idiocy for one so smart and confessed his feelings, somehow missing the motive behind Leone’s strange actions until he spelled it out. “Sure. Love you.” Bruno kissed Leone on the cheek to avoid a dark lipstick stain and then followed Giorno away. 

     Leone headed in the other direction, and so did Trish, which wouldn’t have been so strange if she hadn’t been doing it for so long. 

     He stopped suddenly in front of the fountain in the center of a four-way crossroads. “Trish.”

     “Yes?”

     “Why are you following me?”

     “I’m not following you.”

     “Then why have you been trailing me for the past five minutes?” It was a long enough stretch of time that it could no longer be dismissed as coincidence. 

     “Because you’re walking in the same direction as the Abercrombie.”

     Leone scoffed. “You’re going to Abercrombie?” 

     “No,” she said, as if she was absolutely planning to but was embarrassed now that she’d been caught, “Why? Where are you going, the Hot Topic?”

     She got him there. “And if I am?”

     “Then I’ll ask you to wait so we can go in together and use your money to pay for my stuff.” Abbacchio barked out a laugh and grinned, looking back at her. The only person Trish really respected was Buccellati, growing towards him like a plant towards the sun. It wasn’t a surprise that she didn’t have much regard for the health of his wallet, but Leone never thought she’d be so up front about it. Trish wasn’t the type to spell anything out. She reminded him of a bratty child, sort of like Giorno, except, in spite of her stuck-up attitude that anyone with a brain could tell was just a scared little kid posturing to play with the big kids on the playground, he liked her. 

     “What, do you need someone to hold your bags, Your Majesty?”

     “It’s not like I’ll be asking you for fashion advice.”

     Trish didn’t speak much, and with the way she kept firing off scalding statements one after the other, maybe that was a good thing. Leone’s ego ached to fire a spiteful volley back, but he tamped it down. She’s fifteen, Leone, and you are a grown man. Be the bigger person. 

    Well, he could say them in his head. 

     Trish didn’t take long in Abercrombie. A quick run through the place like a ghost in a familiar haunt, and she was through. Leone waited outside, his disdain for the store peddling sanitized versions of fashion trumping his desire to poke fun at it. “They’re selling garbage these days. Let’s go to Hot Topic.” 

     It seemed smaller than Leone remembered it being when he came here with his friends in high school. The ceiling wasn’t so high, the band names on the T-shirts littering the walls no longer so familiar. I’m getting old, Leone thought, his stomach sinking as he idly pocketed handfuls of pins from the tub near the cash register. If the cashier saw him through their heavily teased-dyed-murdered hair, they gave no indication. Trish was almost equally out of place, pink talons and high fashion heels contrasting with the murderous clomper boots and black bitten-to-the-quick stubby nails of the mall goth she was wrestling with for the last T-shirt of some band Leone had never heard of and didn’t feel like learning about. Glancing over at him, she caught his attention and called, “Abbacchio, help me!” If the mall goth decided to stomp on her foot, her open-toed shoes would leave her for dead. 

      There was something nice about being asked for help in a context that wasn’t life-or-death. Ending the goth-prep stalemate was so easy compared to tasks such as “kick the enemy Stand User in the stomach” or “find out where the fucker shooting at us is before he blows everyone’s heads off”. He stalked up behind Trish in the narrow aisles and glared down at the fake goth with as much venom as he could muster, reaching for the shirt. “Give me that,” he hissed, grin wide and downright evil. 

     “Holy shit,” said the mall goth, releasing the shitty band T-shirt, “holy shit, holy shit, holy shit…”

     “Thanks, kid,” Abbacchio mocked as he dropped it into Trish’s waiting arms. At least kids these days still recognized gangsters when they saw one. Whether it was the lack of gender conformity or the multitude of rings on every single one of his fingers, the mall goth picked up on the danger signals loud and clear. On some level, Leone felt bad for scaring a kid, but if the kid didn’t want to be scared, he shouldn’t have picked a fight in a Hot Topic. “Don’t you have homework to be doing or something? Get the hell out of here.” Abbacchio leered. 

    “Did you seriously just say that?” 

     Not even a thank you. “What?”

     “It’s like you told that kid to get off your lawn and called him a whippersnapper, shaking your fist at him and brandishing a cane.”

     “That’s false, Trish. I wouldn’t use some piddly little cane. I’d brandish my walker at him, then go back inside to clean my dentures.” He earned a snort from the teenager and a smile that didn’t look as out of place on her face as he would have thought, then it was back to her strange silent perusal of the racks and shelves. Leone forced his wallet into Trish’s grip once a bewildered mother presumed him to be an employee and asked him for help, so he loitered outside the store until she was done.

     She didn’t give it back once they reunited. “How much did you spend?”

      “Doesn’t matter,” she deflected, “but that kid you scared the piss out of? He called security on us both.”

     “For what?”

     “Disturbing mall peace? I’m not really sure. All I heard was the story he told to the security guard that came when called. Did you know you pulled a switchblade on him and robbed him at knifepoint?”

     Ah, mall cops. The lowest form of law enforcement. “That’s rude. I wish he would have told me.”

     “Well, we’re in this together now, and there’s still a lot of time to kill.” Trish wasn’t very good at reading other people, and she certainly wasn’t as good at hiding her thoughts as well as she thought, and she asked too-nonchalantly, “While we’re here, is there anywhere you want to visit?” 

     Leone grinned, and Trish didn’t like the looks of it.  It was common law in their screwed up little crime family to get the hell out of his way when he smiled like that. He usually wasn’t the type to plan anything in advance, but when Leone did, the results were devastating to anyone in the blast radius. The relatively low-stakes authorities were already on his tail. It was open season now. “Let’s give mall security something to really be mad at.”

-----

     The Sephora on the first floor by the food court was large, ugly, and had replaced one of Leone’s favorite stores years prior. The lighting inside was deviously different than the rest of the mall, designed to make their cosmetics look better on the skin so that unaware customers would purchase them, only to be shocked when they stepped outside and checked themselves in a reflective storefront window, discovering that their perfect-match foundation wasn’t so perfect after all. On some level, Leone could respect their shrewd business tactics, but he’d fallen for them himself one too many times to grant them amnesty. Casing the joint was easy, standard behavior for someone like him. It was strategically located right by an exit, so prospective customers saw it either on their ways in or out, with the unintentional side effect of, coincidentally, being very easy to rob. The doorway was likely to turn into a bottleneck, as there was no easily-accessible back door (Leone had sent Trish around the back to check while he parked the car nearby), but the cash register was also sunken at the very back as well, so it would be a piece of cake to walk out without being seen. Four hands and an oversized purse, courtesy of Trish, between the two of them, left them with more than enough space to cram eyeshadow palettes and entire display cases of lipstick tubes into. “Are you sure you want to do this?” Trish didn’t seem like the kind of kid who cared about a blemish on her permanent record if things were to go south, but it was a courtesy to ask just in case. She wasn’t a total delinquent yet.

     “I came this far, haven’t I? I can’t back out now.”

     “Fine. Follow my lead, and act natural. The first thing you need to keep in mind is that if you don’t act like you’re interesting enough to keep an eye on, nobody will pay you any thought. On my cue, get out of here and follow me out the door.” There were baskets by the door, which made the burglary much easier. If Leone was going to rob the place, he was going to do it right. “What are we here for anyway? Lipsticks, eyeshadow, luxury shit?”

     “Have you done this before?” He gave her a look. “Right, stupid question. Luxury shit. I have plenty of stuff I’ll actually use, so we can resell it.” Leone enjoyed the way I had become we. She was such a rotten kid, but not a bad one. Smarter than she let on, too. He liked her. 

     Both of them stayed close together, dumping random cosmetics with names Leone didn’t even bother looking at into their baskets. (“They told me they were sold out of these!” said Trish, sweeping her arm across a shelf and sending hundreds of euros worth of some eyeshadow palette into her own.) Other customers gave them glances out of the corners of their eyes, too polite to really say anything but also not polite enough to realize it was rude. Leone kept an eye on the checkout counter. One of the clerks was staring right back. 

     They knew. “Walk calmly towards the exit, like you’re going to check out the blush,” he muttered, one hand on Trish’s shoulder, steering her around to the door as he passed his basket off to her too, “and once you get past the display with the blue eyeliner, run for it.” 

     “Sir, miss,” said the clerk, striding towards him with entirely too much self-importance, “I’m going to have to ask you to come to the back with me.”

     The knife Leone kept in his pocket burnt a hole in his side. He could pull a weapon on the clerk. But even though Leone was pretty sure he wouldn’t get caught, there was no guarantee, and armed robbery carried a much heavier sentence than grand larceny. Leone pushed Trish forward and raced out of the store after her, baskets bleeding makeup out onto the floor as they swung wildly from her arms. There was no point in putting them back. They were already shoplifting, why not take some trophies while they were at it? He fumbled with his free hand in his pockets full of Hot Topic pins for the car keys, shoving careless pedestrians out of his way, a lovely breadcrumb trail of overpriced pins and lipstick tubes forming behind them both. Luckily, the car was still where he left it, with doors unlocked from when he brought it closer (he didn’t keep anything worth stealing in there, and the stereo was one of the new and difficult-to-remove kinds that came pre-installed straight from the factory), and he tossed Trish the keys as he caught up. By the time he made it into the driver’s seat, the car had finished starting up, and he wasted no time in getting the hell out. 

     “What about Giorno and Buccellati?”

     “They’ll walk home,” which was a lie. He’d be back for them later.