Guilty Conscience ~ Abbacchio/Fem Reader

Chapter 24: Crawling from the Grave - Part. 2

Y/N was sleeping in the slums of Napoli for 11 days once she'd escaped from her apartment — escaped from her old life, crawling out from the grave she'd dug herself into all for the sake of justice. What was justice anyways? Was it world peace? Or was it not having to worry about kids going hungry in their own homes? These types of questions rattled around Y/N's head as she wrapped her tattered jacket tighter to her chest, struggling to find any form of comfort as she lay behind a steal recycling bin, tucked away in the corner of a side street where she tried her best to find sleep. But she never could. Not when broken bits of glass dug into her shoulders and the thought of her friends, her family and her once-was future now believed she was dead. She didn't have any time to chase sleep when all she was doing was running from her past.

Justice. Whatever it was, it surely wasn't what Y/N had been trained to achieve. Justice wasn't making friends — the kindest people she'd ever met — all to turn around and bury bullets in their backs. Justice wasn't shutting off her emotions to get a job done, nor was it destroying the friends — the more than friends — that she had. And in those months that she knew the Bodyguard Squad, she'd never felt more at peace — she'd never felt more fulfilled.

And in the blink of an eye, Y/N threw it all away.

After spending those dreaded nights tucked away in the shadows with her body pressed into the cold, hard ground, Y/N got an apartment. She'd found an older gentleman willing to rent out one of the rooms in his home on the bottommost floor — the basement. His offer was printed on the front page of the local paper, which Y/N saw the morning after she'd used the paper scraps as a blanket to sleep under. And to her surprise, after meeting Mr. Giuseppe in person, he would let her live under his roof for a very low price, so long as she helped tend to his yard once a week. And to that, Y/N would be forever grateful. On the far east end of Napoli, the complete opposite of where her last apartment was, Y/N sat on her new bed. Where she lived now was much smaller and homier than her last place, but with a roof over her head and a blanket on her back, she couldn't complain. It was nice and cozy. And it wasn't cold.

With only one room to her name, a toilet, an all too small mini fridge, a coatrack and a mattress that sat neatly on the floor, Y/N spent her mornings looking for jobs that wouldn't require her in-person assistance. With her face plastered all over the news, she really couldn't go out much and risk being seen. Y/N worried her streak of luck would soon run dry, and that if she didn't hurry and upgrade her living space to something more private, Mr. Giuseppe would finally connect the dots and realized she and the girl on the news simply didn't look similar, but where the same person. So her mornings were spent searching through phone books and calling all the potential hires she'd come across.

And as for her evenings, Y/N planned, trained, studied, and kept her mind busy. Her phone, never silenced, sat on the floor before her as she went through the motions of a stretch or exercise routine. She needed to stay in shape for when the call came. She needed to be ready, just as Bucciarati asked her to be those few weeks ago. Eagerly awaiting the moment when her phone buzzed to life, Y/N recalled all that she was taught from the mafioso. She practiced how to hold herself, how to fight, how to speak and to point a gun. But most importantly, she practiced with her Stand. In that tiny basement apartment in the dead of night, when the power to her room had been shut off and only a wax candle perched on her mini fridge gave off a dim gleam of light, Y/N called on her Stand: I'm Still Standing.

"Again," the figure would tell her after already having trained for hours into the night. "Again. Again. Again."

Y/N refused to let such a brilliant oppritnutiy go to waste by not learning the potential that came from her Stand. And from those long hours of training after bringing home as much money as she could without letting her face be seen, she learned two very important factors that would help her fight with her newfound powers. Number one, I'm Still Standing could speak. Unlike most people with Stands, Y/N had come to observe that her Stand could talk while others — Like Narancia's Aerosmith — could not. Sharing an identical voice, thoughts and even speech patterns, this new knowledge could become very valuable in a fight — or even if Y/N wanted someone to think she was in two places at the same time.