InsaneJournal

People always assume that Giacomo Zabini is a talented person. Something in the face, they say; the cheekbones that slant out, those deep, discerning eyes. After all, he is born to an exotic family. He seems like the sort of person who can pick out the brush strokes in a painting, who can tell a Renoir from a Morisot. He must have quite the art collection. And Giacomo, for his part only stares blankly, and attempts to catch up. He hasn’t laid a hand on a brush since his tutor emphatically gave up on him when he was ten, and all his artistic observations have been scripted and given to him by his father. The Estate must look lovely (it’s crumbling, falling apart before his very eyes, but he can’t say anything, can’t betray weakness and so he smiles neutrally) with all his paintings all over it. And his sisters must be equally talented – after all, in a family, traits pass down, don’t they? You can tell that, after all, they all have the same deep eyes. They must have artistic gatherings, his sisters dancing or singing or whatnot, and him painting.

There is nothing to this piece of fiction, but then again, there’s nothing to the Zabinis. They’re only so much empty air now, and maybe its embarrassment or a damn good act that lets society spin up these little pieces of accepted fictions for him, because the idea of one of the largest and most prestigious families in all of Italy – nay, the Continent - falling is just too much and too hard to handle. So it comforts all of them, both the society that the Zabinis fight so hard to stay afloat in and the Zabinis themselves when they give them the artistic abilities of the Muses, the charm of the angels and the looks of the fey. No one can fool a person better than themselves, and as time goes by, society starts to believe that they really so accomplished and really so debonair.

But they know better. The lies can blind the rest of society, but they’ll never blind the Zabinis themselves. The Estate is falling before their eyes, their money is melting and their ruin is almost complete. Their life has a sort of brittle quality about it – Liberatore’s cynicism starts to permeate their life, and they’re not quite sure just what they’re going to lose next. But they can’t give up, can’t give up this elaborate fakery that they’ve constructed about themselves because giving up means that they’ve lost, and Zabinis don’t lose. To lose it to be mortal, and it’s just not worth coming down from their high horse. Sure, the air is thinner up there, and you can’t see the forest for the trees, but that’s a cost that they’re willing to give up for prestige. Freedom and mental health are expendable, and happiness is the rarest commodity of all.

And it with that in mind that Liberatore sent his children to their unhappy futures. Warfare is done through marriage, not brute force – in that aspect, Liberatore resembled Hapsburgs greatly. With cold precision, he marries his children off, one after another, before the strain could start to show, before the cracks could appear in the veneer of perfection that he had built up over time. His only son, and his greatest disappointment he saved for last. It was with withering disdain that Liberatore deigns to take off his gloves, lowers his reading glasses and informs Giacomo that Alkyone Angelopoulos, of the Greek Angelopouloses – you know them, of course? No, don’t answer that, you’re too much of a simpleton to know. – Will be Giacomo’s wife, no ifs, ands or buts. “Hopefully,” Liberatore sneers, “Hopefully your children won’t be fucking disgraces.” When Liberatore swears, it’s with all the precision of a laser guided missile, and with a flick of his wrist, he dismisses his son, leaving Giacomo is left reeling from the implications, that he’s a failure, he’s a failure that even his father doesn’t want.

He only means to drink one glass of wine, but memories keep on assaulting him and before he knows it, he’s drunk the entire bottle and some more to go.

When Alkyone arrives, he’s nervous and she’s disdainful. She’s not from any great family, but even she knows that she drew the short straw. When they walk to the altar, he tries to smile, but she glares back at him and the uneasy truce that he’s trying to put forth dies before it even gets off the ground. He tries to reach out his hand for her (whether this is to help her out or to support himself is not clear) but her face is so cold that it freezes his hand while he’s stretching it out. He can’t bring himself to consummate the marriage and instead, they sleep stiffly, side by side, each one as close to the edge of the bed as you can possibly get without falling off.

They pass their days with cool formality, Liberatore’s disapproval growing stronger and stronger with each passing day. To escape the Estate, Giacomo takes to investment, though what he is investing in and exactly how much he’s investing, he himself couldn’t tell you. All he knows is that it’s an excuse to be out of the Estate, away from the damning eyes of his father and his wife. So what if he has to sit at a table in a bank for three hours, signing bits and bobs of parchments with his name again and again? A bottle of wine drowns his worries out, and suddenly his life doesn’t seem so bad any more. Suddenly, he has the courage to face the world – at least, until the next day, when his head is pounding and his room is whirling and all he can see is disgust reflected back at him, and he knows that no matter how much his head hurts he needs to get back to the bottle again so he doesn’t have to face this.

Alkyone can’t understand why she’s married to such a buffoon. The Zabinis were supposed to be great people, and she brought a large dowry. Liberatore married his children off with care, so why is her husband so stupid? More and more, she eyes the other women’s husbands but she refrains – for her family, for her husband’s family, for her future children yet to be birthed. But it’s with great effort that she stops herself from taking to the bottle, and with even greater effort that she continues her cool civility towards her husband. But one day, tensions in the family build to a boiling point and Alkyone throws an entire bottle of wine at her husband’s head. Giacomo stands up and calls her a whore, and Liberatore has to come in and separate them and accusations are flying all over the place, you bitch, you drunkard until Liberatore ends it by violently forcing both of them apart and throwing them both out of the room, something that only drives another nail into the coffin of their relationship.

Afterwards, there’s no need to ask if Liberatore thinks that they’re failures. The same brittle quality that merely permeated life before becomes stifling and they can’t bear to look each other in the eye. Through mutual agreement – perhaps to get away from Liberatore’s stares (despite his onset age, he is every bit the magnificent patriatch), they manage to put aside their differences enough to produce a child. Nothing changes. If anything, Liberatore’s stares become keener. “This child had better be a boy,” He exhales, blowing a cloud of cigar smoke into Giacomo’s face. “Or you really are a failure.”

So when Benedetta Fortunata Michelangela Zabini is born, Liberatore lights up one cigar and Giacomo takes to the glass again. Alkyone loses herself under the drugs that they’ve put her on and Benedetta cries before her wet nurse tends to her. With her birth goes all lingering good will that Liberatore had towards Giacomo, and with her birth goes all semblance of peace that existed between the uneasy couple. Words are bandied, glass is thrown, but Liberatore simply lights another cigar. There’s nothing more he can do.

Benedetta’s first word is “puta” and the ones following that are “salope, porni, poutana.” The Estate has become a battleground and there is no mother in a war. Funny, how most people are told to take pleasure in the things that they create but fail to do so when faced with their results. There is an immediate ceasefire called (at the orders of Liberatore – he doesn’t so much order as he does yell, the first time the man has ever raised his voice above normal conversation levels) and they are given exactly two months in which to correct this, the unspoken threat dangling off the edge of the sentence.

Things don’t improve. If there was one good thing that the yelling brought, it was take the edge off all the hostility and the tension cloaking the place. Now, without outlet the Estate seems fit to burst. Every interaction is done through clenched teeth. Giacomo loses all pretenses to genteel drinking and gives up wine for Madeira, and soon Madeira for whisky. Alkyone stalks through the house, rearranging, going through accounts, and haunting the library in an attempt to leave the present for the past. Both neglect Benedetta, her vocabulary being restructured by a legion of governesses.

They come to blows again, when Alkyone finds discrepancies in the accounts and confronts Giacomo, but this time Alkyone has given up yelling and shouting and instead throws the ledger squarely at his head. “How could you.” She says, not a question but a statement. “How could you do this to your own family?” Giacomo glares back, not even registering the bruise on his face – their spats were so frequent that compared to the violence that used to mark their relationship, this is nothing. “It’s not my family.” He hisses, and Alkyone – for once, doesn’t have a scathing retort.

Maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s to make up for the fact that Giacomo himself said he doesn’t care but Alkyone spends more time with Benedetta from now. It’s awkward and it’s stilted. Benedetta has very few memories of Alkyone, and Alkyone has no mothering skills. Wondering where she went wrong can’t bring back semblances of normality to her child and no amount of regrets can turn back time. She’s caught in the damning gaze of her own child, who knows her not as her mother, but as a moment where her nannies stop their cheerful chatter and the lively air in her nursery turns cold and chilly. Mea culpa, she thinks, as she looks on Benedetta and attempts to play a childish game of Muggles and Wizards. Mea maxima culpa.

Alkyone compensates in the only way she knows how – monetarily. Benedetta has never wanted for anything, but now she doesn’t even have to ask. The most extravagant things were heaped at her doorstep. Toys? Only the finest. Food? Nothing but gourmet food, none of this muck people were bandying about. Benedetta was a Zabini, she deserved the finest and only the finest. Alkyone began to map out Benedetta’s options for marriage – she wouldn’t have her darling daughter fall into a terrible marriage like the way she had.

So another truce is reached. Alkyone spends too much time with Benedetta to be bothered to harry Giacomo about investments and such, and Giacomo is free to do whatever he wishes. Things work out quite nicely, and to the point where both of them feel enamored – or at least, comfortable enough with each other to consider and conceive another child. This time, with Liberatore’s expectations lowered, with the newfound agreement settling over the estate – for moments, both of them can close their eyes and simply believe, believe that all of this is going to turn out alright.

And it does, and their dreams are validated. Three years of strife and one year of tension afterwards, a long stretch of uneasy marriage punctuated by sarcastic comments from Liberatore and they have made it, the ultimate goal for any pureblood family - a heir. Liberatore takes the cigar out of his mouth and gives them an honest-to-Merlin genuine smile and the world seems a lot brighter. They name him Clemente as an appeasement gesture, and follow in the tradition of the Italian nobility by giving Clemente two middle names. Eliodoro and Nicomedo, gift of the sun and victory plans respectively. This is the end. The Zabinis are saved. They don’t have to be scared, or fight, or endure those damning whispers of society any more. They are proud, noble and upright. They don’t have to hide under a shield of lies, and for the first time in more than fifty years, they take their places as one of Italy’s oldest pureblood families, calling a banquet to celebrate the birth of their baby son.

They have the bliss period that was so denied to them after their marriage. Life looks so much better now. They sleep in the same bed, have brief periods of cuddling, discuss next day and talk about plans for Clemente and Benedetta. Benedetta should marry Greek as well, because Greece and Italy have such history, says Alkyone. But Giacomo disagrees, laughing, saying that nobody has imported from Spain in at least ten generations. Life falls into familiar patterns. Clemente is a happy child, and his first word is appropriately “Pate.” When he’s three, Liberatore tutors him and Benedetta their family tree, pointing out their unique skin and how it is just another mark of their superiority, above the rest of Italy as well. He teaches history, the first Zabini, their uniqueness and their xenophilia, that they are above approach, the bloody fights between families when feuds ran high, how they are Neapolitans and Zabinis above all else and they should never let any other family compromise their dignity.

They see Liberatore as the person to aspire to. Always smoking a cigar, but his eyes oddly kind. Clemente is the son that Giacomo never was to Liberatore, and Benedetta a true reflection of the Zabini line and they love him more than their own parents. Alkyone and Giacomo now so engrossed in each other, one could not separate them. Giacomo starts to gain money on his investments, even raking in odd profits from here and there. It’s paradise, again.

But this all ends when Liberatore dies, at the ripe age of 100. Obviously, Giacomo says as he bows his head at the grave, he thought the future was secure enough. But it’s not, and the initial period of mourning never subsides. Giacomo’s investments come back to haunt him, and they turn out to be extraordinarily ill advised. His investors start to hound him, and though he starts out by telling them that a Zabini’s motives are inscrutable, that he is above approach, in the end he is worn down to selling off the pieces of land that Liberatore schemed so hard to keep. The fledgling love that managed to develop between Alkyone and Giacomo devolves into hate again, the crux of this fight being when Giacomo simply stops arguing, sinks to his knees and sobs. All of Italy knows about the shaming dealt to them, no one fails to see the debtors growing ever bolder, one even going so far as to fail in the (largely ceremonial) politeness of owling to ask for approval to visit.

Clemente doesn’t understand, but then, he only knows that Liberatore’s gone, dead, they say, but dead are the people on the family tree and Liberatore is alive. He knows this. He saw him yesterday, smoking a cigar, and he promised to tell him and Benedetta about the Medicis. Benedetta knows a little more, but she still thinks that he can come back. Zabinis are above reproach, above the rules. They take what they want and Liberatore wants life, so that must mean he can come back to life. But the servants start to file out of the Estate, and she cries and cries because she doesn’t understand, what’s happening, why bad people are coming in, why Liberatore STILL isn’t here. But in the Estate, with so much noise, with so much anger – nobody really hears a sad child’s sobs. Giacomo takes to the glass again and the debtors smell weakness, pressing in and in until Giacomo finally signs the papers that sell off all the lands. Alkyone bursts in, a moment afterwards, but too late, just too late.

There’s nothing left for them here but an empty mansion full of heirlooms, and Alkyone takes a look around the Estate and feels such vivid, searing hate for this place. She wants to burn this place. She wants to tear this damn estate to the ground and let Liberatore do what he will with this family and it’s stupid pride. No, she wants to leave this country. Back home? No, she can’t take being shamed in front of her entire country, and she won’t bring back Italy’s greatest failure to her parents. But damned if she’s staying in this country, and in the end, she ends up closing her eyes and pointing at a map, her finger traversing the world (everywhere they could have gone, all the places they could have expanded to, but only so much empty regret now, but how she wishes!) and lands on England.

It takes another shouting match and quite a bit of crying, but Giacomo is persuaded to sell some of the family heirlooms. Just as he gets to the actual act of selling them, his mind shatters. He can’t take it any more – years of difficult marriage to a woman who doesn’t love him, four brief years of bliss, producing a beautiful daughter and finally, after so many years – a son, and now his father dies? And now he has to sell his inheritance? It doesn’t make sense, he doesn’t understand. But then, what has he ever understood? Didn’t Liberatore say it best? Giacomo’s a failure. And now he’s being forced to pawn his heirlooms, sell them like he’s some cheap market woman. “Those are not trinkets,” He hisses sibilantly at the buyer, and the Zabini pride in him causes him to clutch desperately at it until Alkyone has to pry his fingers off the heirloom for the buyer to take possession of it. “You whore.” He says, but it’s evident he’s no longer completely right in the head as he says it, over and over again – not so much an insult as reverting to the only thing he knows as a constant. “You whore, you whore, you whore.”

But it’s done. And though in Giacomo’s eyes, Alkyone is a whore, but at least she’s a whore with sensibilities. She’s cutting her losses and going to a country where people won’t have heard the rumors, but will at least remember their pure blood. And if they’re asked about it – well, Zabinis are above approach. They don’t adhere to stupid English laws. England should be honored to even have them there at all, those ignorant, potato eating little imbeciles. But it doesn’t work that way, and though they’re able to locate a house almost as soon as they move in (the muggles moved out, Alkyone says, but what she doesn’t say was that they were forcefully persuaded to) they’ve lost their prestige. Money is money anywhere, and when you’re not on home territory, the other people rule. No matter that their lineage is for sure, more than seven centuries old, no matter that they can trace their family tree, no matter that some of them might have married in. It’s still not enough.

Nothing’s ever enough, not money, not clothes, not food. Initially hesitant to sell anything from the estate, the Zabinis settle into genteel starvation, though it twists a knife in Alkyone’s back every time she hears Benedetta cry about the food she wants and why she can’t have toys any more. Dinner parties are sent out under various pretenses – new family in town, oh how quaint, Italian, tell me all about it – and Alkyone chafes at the charity shown. They don’t need English charity. They don’t need it, full stop. And though Alkyone plasters on her artificial smile and parades her children around, she never eats more than is polite even if her stomach tells her to scoop all the food up and shovel it into her mouth like a savage, and she never defers or acknowledges this is charity. They’re just particularly wanted – and after all, they should be. Zabinis are always superior, and every family should want to be a part of it.

But as much as she explains this away to Benedetta and Clemente, truth is truth. They’re destitute in a foreign country. And though she initially refused to sell more of the Estate, a lady does not work and her children come before anything else. Giacomo isn’t right and finds his comfort at the bottom of the bottle, there’s nothing she can do but to sell the heirlooms again. There’s nothing she can say. She sells another heirloom and hires some tutors. And the rest, well. The rest is an exercise in patience.

Alkyone’s a lady. Ladies don’t work, but now she works as hard as any ox at the plow keeping their name up, attending all the functions, seeing that Benedetta and Clemente only get the best education, supplying Giacomo with his daily supply of alcohol (which decreases in quality over time – alcohol is still alcohol any way you dice it, but education is not), juggling the account books, ensuring everything lasts – she’s never been trained to do this. She’s been trained in how to bat her eyes and look attractive, how to walk so that her skirts sway like bells. Not poverty, not destitution. But her children will cry if she doesn’t work, and crying is the most heart breaking sound that a mother can hear. She’s a mother, not a monster and for the sake of her children, she works her hands to the bone.

Over time, she sours and withdraws into herself. She doesn’t care about the family name anymore, she doesn’t care – she cares for Benedetta and Clemente, not the name. Frankly, she doesn’t give a shit about society. This English society, with it’s sly and snide looks, with the patriarchs that seem to look her over with disdain (it’s all your fault, woman) and the matriarchs that treat her with only slightly veiled patronization – she wants Benedetta and Clemente to have a happy life, to hold their head upright in society and not be bogged down by all the worries she staves off on a daily basis.

Benedetta and Clemente are never allowed to go out. Oxford is full of Muggles, and she knows that – but because it’s full of Muggles it makes it a lot easier for Alkyone to fleece them out of money and food. A Confundus here, a shrinking there, and the cashier thinks she’s paid when she’s walking out with half the store. But Muggles were never very appreciative of other skintones (how stupid they were, this marked them as a Zabini, as a superior.) and Benedetta and Clemente inherited their father’s skin. But children are curious and Clemente and Benedetta poke their head out and try to play on the streets. This ends terribly. Both of them are teased mercilessly for their skin (“you filthy coon.”) and it gets no better with the revelation that they’re Italian (“dago bastard.”) They don’t understand and Alkyone refuses to let them understand – they only need know that Muggles are strange and rather stupid, and dago is simply their word for Italians because they know no better.

The force with which she says this is obvious. They’re both bright children, they know what happen when her fists clench and her eyes get that look, but they smile and nod, say “Yes mother” in English, because they can’t speak Greek or Italian or Neapolitan here, because they need to practice. Practice at what, they’re never sure – the invitations become less and less frequent and they can’t go out anyways. They learn how to speak the King’s English. Benedetta struggles. Eight years of speaking Italian and Neapolitan with smatterings of Greek don’t lend themselves well to the cool tones of English, rich and snobby in oh so many ways – she struggles, but Clemente does not. He turns out to be good at making words count, each syllable brisk and measured. Every word for an effect, no superfluity that was not intended. “Clemente speaks well and follows through.” His governesses say, but that’s because in a world full of inconstant, there’s some things that need to be done as promised.

Everyone ignores Giacomo now. To be truthful, Giacomo ignores Giacomo now. The person who he once was before (however insecure, however incapable) has long departed. Clemente watches as Giacomo downs bottle after bottle of cheap liquor, saying nothing at all (surely, he notes detatchedly, there should be a limit, but such things are stupid when he goes through that many bottles a day). He should stop him, Clemente thinks, but he never does, instead lingering in the doorway. Why should he stop him? This is the only thing that he’s ever done, changing it would cause difficulties. He’s never been here to help them, so why should he even bother stopping him? Never mind that the room that they’re in is bereft of anything but a desk, a bed and a chair, everything in there having shattered everything a long time ago. He never knew what motivated him other than spite (but isn’t spite enough of a reason) but he might as well have forced open his mouth and poured the liquor down his throat.

It’s this way, all through his life. The house becomes lonelier when Benedetta leaves for school and she comes back in Ravenclaw. Alkyone merely nods and says “That is good.” When she receives the letter. Clemente is seven and he doesn’t understand the divisions and why it matters so much. He doesn’t have anything to bind him to a house. He has no father to impress upon him the values of this house or that house, and though it would be all sorts of glory and fame to be a Slytherin, all those people inviting him over to their houses and making his mother cry are Slytherins, and if people make his mother cry, they must be bad. Clemente thinks he’s a Gryffindor. He’s not smart like the Ravenclaws and he’s not nice like the Hufflepuffs, but he’s definitely not going to be some Slytherin (because he’d never make his mother cry, so he won’t go into that house, damnit) so he must be a Gryffindor.

It’s hard to believe you’re better than everyone else when everyone else is telling you of your inferiority. It’s hard to believe in the goodness of life when your father is a drunkard, and it’s hard to want to adhere to society and play with those children when he sees his mother lock herself in the room after she comes back. It’s so hard and it’s not fair, not fair because as Zabinis they’re supposed to be better than everyone. Nobody has skin like theirs, this means that they’re SUPERIOR, that obviously people should acknowledge him as such, but more and more he becomes disillusioned. At the age of eleven he’s already a lot more sardonic and bitter than any eleven year old has a right to be – he doesn’t believe, period. He doesn’t believe in himself or his superiority. Nobody really does, to be entirely honest. His mother only tells him because she thinks he needs something to be proud of, and Benedetta does likewise. They carry on a string of lies because they think the others can’t see what the family’s become, but it’s evident to anyone with half a brain that if the Zabinis are so far in decline, it’s laughable.

But this family won’t give up their pride, or their sense of hard work, and so Clemente won’t give up his hard work or his sense of pride. His mother said that their family was superior, and that he needed to restore the name. So restore the name he will, so restore the name he’s going to. Even if he has a hard time looking all the other purists in the face, even if he can’t believe that their family is ever going to pull themselves out of the deep, dark gutter that they seem to have fallen into – he owes it to his hypothetical future generations that his mother has spent time sacrificing for, he owes it to the grandfather that he vaguely remembers, and most importantly of all – he owes it to his sister and his mother, for all that they’ve done for him.

So when he stands at Platform Nine and Three Quarters, he remembers not to be ashamed. Even if all the other purists have beautiful new clothing and he doesn’t, he’s not ashamed. They look as good as new, and Zabinis are above reproach. If a Zabini wants to wear old clothes, then the rest of world is simply outmoded. He doesn’t forget to the nod to the purist children, but when it comes to sitting in their compartment, he chickens out and instead spends the rest of the ride huddling in a small compartment, trying desperately to go unnoticed. He can’t do this. He knows he’s supposed to do this, because Benedetta’s done this, but he wants his mother. He can’t even sit with Benedetta because he can’t FIND Benedetta. He’s so lost. He’s so lost.

But duty is duty and at the age of eleven, Clemente is still a great deal more determined than anybody has a right to be. He rights himself, reminding himself that he certainly doesn’t want to become his failure father and makes it out of the compartment he’s been huddling in. He’s WANTED. He’s LOVED. And he’s going to be a Slytherin, because that’s where all of society’s scions are from. But when the sorting hat finally, FINALLY calls his name (“Zabini, Clemente!”) it’s with great shock that Clemente is put into Ravenclaw – not Slytherin, like he wanted, or Gryffindor like he assumed he’d be in…but Ravenclaw.

He’s disappointed and sees this as the greatest failure of his duties known to mankind, but when he owls home, his mother is happy, his sister is happy to have him in the same house as her, and that’s all that really counts, right? He tries to network with the purists that his mother says that he should network with, but true acceptance is hard and they tolerate him with the air of someone who is just listen to a peon ramble on for fun. Sooner or later, he gets tired of it and his ability and willingness to believe takes another hit. He holes himself up in a library, hiding from all the people. Social acceptance has an invisible barometer, getting good grades doesn’t, and both ways gain him points in the eyes of his mother. Benedetta feels as if it’s disappointing, but Benedetta doesn’t truly know, or at least, that’s how he justifies it.

In his third year, he tries out for the Quidditch team and grits his teeth, willing himself to win, win, and get in. He barely makes it as a reserve and he spends all his time swooping around on a broom, pushing himself to be the best because Quidditch is also another thing that has a barometer, unlike social acceptance. He’s so ecstatic. He’s found his place, at last and he’s never going to lose it. He loves the fact that he knows he’s appreciated, even if he is only a measly reserve, he loves the fact that when he puts in work it’ll get a return. He loves the people for appreciating him, he loves them because he’s not getting anything for being a pureblood or a Zabini or anything. Right then and there, he knows that his Quidditch team are good people, and that he loves them ever so much.

The years pass by and he is introspective. He watches as his hands scrawl out essay after essay to receive good marks on them. He joins the dueling club when he can and sees his shoes get spattered with spit, blood & occasionally slime. He takes his OWLS and gets reasonable grades, comes home to see the biggest meal that he’s had in a very long time. He sees himself play Quidditch and make his way off the reserve as a Beater, he enjoys the satisfying smack that the bludgers make as they hit true to target, and he develops a deeper camaraderie with his Quidditch team than he knew he was capable of. For another time in his life, he feels loved.

When Benedetta is nineteen and Clemente is fifteen, she gets married to an English pureblood. Clemente has heard of him before, knows who he is, but certainly, certainly doesn’t approve. He thinks his sister too good for him, and doesn’t care about the name that’s attached to the asshole. Benedetta deserves the best, and just because the man was English and pure didn’t mean a goddamn thing. Benedetta deserved THE BEST. He’s forced to go along to the wedding and Benedetta does palm something off to him. The night before the wedding he talks completely in Neapolitan to Benedetta, refusing to apologize or lapse back into English once. To him, this is a betrayal of Benedetta, of their roots. It doesn’t matter how good that man is, it doesn’t matter that this IS really the best they can get (somewhere in his distant mind, he acknowledges that, but that isn’t true, Benedetta deserves so much more better), he speaks Neapolitan and Italian, fast, fluting, passionate and so reminiscent of their roots. No matter that he was four when they left and Benedetta was eight, no matter that they can barely remember it back there and everytime they go back seeing the Estate is like a punch in the gut. He takes, she talks and it doesn’t matter what they’re talking about because after so many years of only speaking Neapolitan and Italian at home they’re starved for it, and sure as hell the man Benedetta’s being married to won’t smile on her speaking it. “Ti voglio bene, sorellona.” He says, and he means it with all his heart.

He should be proud, he thinks as he watches Benedetta go down the aisle. But he’s not. Now it’s his turn, and now he has to think about which girl out of an entirely confusing mass he has to pick from. He wishes that his mother just chose so he wouldn’t have to think about it, or care about it, or anything. But he bides his time, and files away. He doesn’t have to like the girl he marries, she just needs to be pure. He’s a man. He can ignore her entirely and no one will complain. But something – a shred of decency, perhaps – something keeps him off that prospect. He retires to the library and tries to ignore the world coming down on his head.

When Italy is invaded he is hard and determined. Everything irrelevant in comparison to what is at stake. He makes plans to go there. When his letter is rejected he nearly takes up his wand to finish the old coot off but instead plans to go to Italy, instead, planning it a few days too late. He hears the news that Italy has fallen and he doesn’t know whether to be relieved or not when he hears that Benedetta has burned the estate. And when Italy falls, he cries like he hasn’t cried for so long. It’s too much. It’s enough. There’s no Estate, the last representation of everything that the family ever fought for. There’s no Italy, where the family started. There’s nothing.

That apathy, that lack of willingness to let go and believe rises to the forefront once more. There’s nothing to keep him in line, to make him go along with all of the other purists. Nothing’s right anymore. He’s just lost one of the anchors that he has in life, the only thing he has to live for any more is his friends and his family. So when Aviva is attacked, he lashes out. How DARE they? How fucking DARE they? This society that has oppressed and hurt him and his family for so long, and they can’t even give him some support when his very own country is being invaded, yet they’re all so willing to make fun and degrade Aviva, oh so many times? His mother bear instinct rises and he lashes out in hate, part in defense of Aviva, part in affront to himself and all parts anger. He’s sick of this society. He’s sick of having to conform to expectations and do his best.

But the initial euphoria fades away, and though he’s happy and relieved and shaking with righteous anger at first, and he means every word he says of his journal entry, he begins to shake. What has he done? What has he done now? Has he single handedly ruined his family? He’s single handedly ruined what standing his family has spent so painstakingly long building up, and the happiness that he was so possessed of begins to dreg away. What has he done now? He thinks, clawing frantically to try and remember that euphoria he felt. He’s just thrown away all Benedetta’s and his mother’s hardwork, to maneuver him into a good standing.

Suddenly he doesn’t feel so good and he finds himself going round and round in circles, justifying and arguing all the way. He finds himself to be tired and just so very sick of life. All of a sudden, he doesn’t want to deal with this anymore, doesn’t want to be Clemente Zabini, of the bankrupt Zabinis, formerly glorious and now defunct. He wants to be loved, he wants to be accepted. He doesn’t want to see his family come to harm, but he doesn’t want to let his friends be attacked. He wants. He doesn’t want. He needs. He doesn’t need. He sacrifices, he loses, he gives up, and in the end he’s thrown away the ultimate goal – but his friend was being hurt. After sixteen years of dealing with life, of holding his head up and living through difficulties – after sixteen years of all that, twelve years of having no father and seeing his mother grow skinnier and skinnier, seeing as his family made sacrifice after sacrifice and making them himself – he breaks down, sobbing and crying like he hasn’t done in a long time. It’s too much. It’s all too much.