Who: Angelo & Sera What: Siblings reunite. Where: Sera's house in Summerlin. When: Recently. Warnings/Rating: Uh none.
Angelo knew where and what Summerlin was.
A man like him could never get through the gates without an invitation, but the men he worked for, the ones high on that seemingly never-ending ladder, they were the ones who had houses there and shiny cars that purred whereas his growled and sputtered depending on the day. Organized crime paid well, and no one cared where the money came from, so long as it was viable and crisp and wouldn’t sic the cops on anyone’s ass. In comparison, he lived in an apartment that was probably as big as some of the living rooms past those gates, but whatever jealousy he might have felt, whatever bitterness still lingered towards those who were rich and had more than him, didn’t extend to Sera. If she was living here, in this place, then she was doing well for herself, and the Fioris had taken care of her. He knew they would. Funny, how he’d been the one to take care of her when they were children, but now she didn’t need him. Or maybe she did, but not to provide for her as he once had.
Their phone call had been too brief for him to discern how his little sister felt, what she thought, after all these years, after Carlita. Maybe she hated him. Maybe she would scream, and yell, and hit him, and demand that he never come near her again. Angelo was prepared for this. But they were family, bound by blood, and despite who he was and what he had done, what he did now, he cared about her.
He made an effort to look respectable when he arrived at the gated community, in a crisp shirt and unwrinkled khakis, with dark, dark sunglasses shrouding his eyes. As she’d told him to, he gave his name at the gates, Angelo Abbiati, in an accent that was heavier than it ought to have been, and went inside once he was given the all clear.
Sera had given Angelo's name at the gate that morning at 4 am, to a sleepy-eyed guard who wondered what the girl was doing wandering around in a robe and slippers at that hour. A girl, because she hardly looked like more than that with the robe engulfing her and no makeup on her pixie features. She had padded back as quietly as she had come, a strangely eerie and discomfiting sight in the light of street lamps reflecting on blacktop. The light cast halos where there should be none, and then she ducked inside the large, cream house that looked much more intimidating from outside than within.
The house was built in the style of romantic Italian villas, and Sera had chosen it for that reason. Inside, it was all rustic wealth and things that looked like they came much cheaper than they did. It was two dark stairs and courtyard in the center that boasted a pool and jacuzzi with tiles imported from Tuscany. She wandered it sometimes, the house, like she'd done in the Fioris' house in Ravello. She wandered it with the memory of something much smaller, something with thinly echoing walls and a tangle of memories that she couldn't hope to unknot from one another. It was good and bad, pine coffins and laughter in the mornings.
She wandered that morning, coffee in hand, and then she shed the robe and dipped her naked body in the pool until the tension eased from her shoulders. And living alone meant no one cared if she dripped chlorinated water as she wandered inside, robe forgotten and likely to remain that way until the maid came in the afternoon. Naked and at the back window, she wrote.
(Expectations, none, and perhaps I should file my teeth in bloody anticipation of the rending to come. But expectations were useless. Bottles filled up, only to learn the drinker preferred other things, the wine poured out and the grapes wasted.)
Aspettative.
She bathed, and she dressed. Skinny jeans, expensive, designer and the height of fashion in Europe, and a skinny black t-shirt that didn't feel the need to be anything more than what it was. Her face was bare, freckles dotting the bridge of her nose and wide blue eyes framed in thick lashes. Gloss, and it tasted like strawberries, and she sat down to wait.
She wasn't surprised he was here, in Las Vegas, though perhaps she should have been. But she wasn't. She wasn't surprised at the twist-turn of fate, and she'd always known she would see him again. No longer a child, she was still small, 5'3 and more up-and-down than curves. She only resembled Carlita in the eyes, deep in their lightness somehow. But Carlita had been femminile, all curves and darkness and passion. Sera had cut her hair short and left all that behind at the altar, alongside Sebastian's memory. Las Vegas was for dark things and hidden secrets, and it showed in heart-shaped face.
The buzz at the door indicated someone at the black gates that shrouded the house itself, and she pushed the button without greeting. She opened the gate, and she opened the door, and she leaned against the frame, dark haunted eyes and a sliver of skin at one boyish hip.
Expectations weren’t something Angelo wasted his time on. He had no faith in people, and he was not optimistic. Loyalty was bought and paid for, and sometimes even family wasn’t enough to keep siblings and mothers and fathers and children from stabbing each other in the back. The family he worked for had his loyalty because they paid him. They talked about family, about old world values, but they weren’t his family. Sera was his family. What he did have was a shred of decency left, humanity in what he had become, and that was her. He expected nothing. He knew the various outcomes, but that was all. And, admittedly, when the gates parted to let him pass, his attention was caught by the impressiveness of her home. It was like someone had plucked the beauty and romanticism of the villas that he used to stare at enviously, imagining a day when he could afford such grandness, not because he thought it was pretty or looked nice but because it would mean he had wealth, and wealth was power, and power was influence. There was no denying he was a selfish thing, just as much as he was a jealous one.
His appraisal lasted about four forward steps, and then his attention shifted to her. The little sister he hadn’t seen in years, who had been a small child the last time he’d seen her, but was now a young woman. She looked nothing like Carlita, not on the surface, but he didn’t look deeply enough into her eyes to see the similarities just then. Angelo was looking at her, not a ghost, cataloguing the changes the years had brought in a manner that didn’t extend beyond brotherly curiosity, though the darkened shades hid his gaze from view. After a long, long moment of silence, he pushed the sunglasses up, and he smiled.
“Your house is beautiful,” he said. He moved forward as though to embrace her, but stopped short of it, respectfully allowing her to decide the parameters of his reunion. “Ciao, Sera.”
She moved back when he moved forward. Into the light, into the cool bricks and soothingly pale walls. She moved back, so that she could see, could regard in a way that she couldn't outside. The house was beautiful, but she didn't acknowledge the compliment. She wasn't the house, and the house wasn't any accomplishment of hers. It was someone else's vision, someone else's dream. Someone else's money, even, and the house was discarded as insignificant with the same kind of silence that always made it hard for her to earn his affection as a child. Where Carlita had been wildly expressive, she was not. She stared and she blinked, and she waited to see how far he would come before stopping. There was no indication of flight, of retreat. She knew then, as she had always known, that he wouldn't harm her the way he'd harmed Carlita. He simply didn't love her enough, and that had been understood for years. Unspoken of, perhaps. A secret, certainly. But she understood.
"Ciao, Angelo," she said, finally, after a pause that would have required a blank page, where she a book. The door closed behind him, heavy wood and a finality to the parting that was marked by the sound.
And what to do? Sera wrote things out, and she played them over in her head like litanies, but planning and thought was nothing like reality. He was older. He was so much older, and he was so much taller. But then she wasn't as small, and perhaps that was the extent of it. He was not bello, but he had never been bello. Interessante, would be more appropriate a term for him, and she thought it a better word, a better thing to be.
It was that strangely quiet fire that propelled her forward. Inner strength without wildness, a contained darkness in the flame that lit her intense blue eyes. She hugged him, arms sliding beneath his arms like a child would do, but there was nothing childlike about her when she came close enough. There was too much life in her eyes to make room for youth, a maelstrom and storm tossed seas, her cheek pressed against the front of his shirt.
There was fear in retreat, the way prey backed away from a predator as though space would somehow save it. Angelo knew fear, and he knew retreat, but he saw neither in the way Sera backed into the house. She wasn’t afraid of him, though maybe she should have been. Beyond that, however, he couldn’t quite tell what she was thinking. With Carlita, he’d always known. She could never hide her emotions from him. There was a second’s hesitation before he continued to move forward, matching each step she took away with one of his own. Over the threshold he crossed, and once he was just clear of the door, he stopped. It wasn’t threatening, his approach. It simply was.
He didn’t react to the sound of the door closing. He watched her, studied her face, her expression, and he waited. Yes, he’d moved closer, but he still hadn’t progressed beyond that. Carlita would act, and he would react. But his two sisters were not the same, and how he felt about them couldn’t have been more different. Angelo loved Sera; it wasn’t a lie to say he did. He simply didn’t love her as he’d loved Carlita. His love for her had been obsessive, unhealthy, and all-consuming. It was dangerous, and perhaps had always been destined to end in tragedy. His love for Sera, on the other hand, was milder. Calmer. He wanted to find this Sebastian and castrate him for what he’d done to her, yes, but that was different, born of a need to protect her rather than a jealous need to possess, to own. “You’ve grown,” he began, simply to break the silence, but then she was moving forward, and she was hugging him, and it took a few seconds for him to register the feel of her arms around him. Once the knowledge sank in he returned the embrace, tight without becoming suffocating. “I’m glad to see you again, sorellina,” he told her, and there was, if nothing else, fondness there, beneath roughness.
Sera knew Angelo didn't care for her as he had her sister. That had been the lodestone of her infanzia. It had carried into her adulthood, the way waves carry debris onto the sand. It had left marks along her psyche that couldn't be washed away when the tide retreated. It was how it was, and there was nothing to be done about it. The Fioris had sent her to see doctors throughout her childhood until, one day, she learned how to pretend. Cured, they said, as if there was such a thing. There wasn't, and only now was she coming to understand the extent of it. But she was quiet intensity, and nothing but the hint of a maelstrom on the surface as she drew back from him.
"I am grown," she responded in Italian, her response to his acknowledgement that she'd grown. Her accent was all Ravello, but more cultured than Carlita's had been, or than his was. Tutors and money, and a lilt to her words that spoke of bottomless wealth. And she believed he was glad to see her. Not in a way that burned or blazed, but glad. And she wondered that she could not find it in herself to hate him. She should, she knew. He hadn't loved her, and he had taken the only person who had loved her, and surely that was reason enough to hate. She had written poems, when she was young, about avvoltoi devouring his entrails. She had given them up when she'd begun preferring prose, but she still remembered. But she couldn't hate him, not now that he was standing there and looking at her like this, with fondness that didn't burn.
"I'm glad to see you, fratellone," she added, regarding him for too long to be polite or casual, and then she motioned to the chairs outside, beside the blue water in the pool that so reminded her of home. "Will you sit with me?" she asked, sounding too old and proper for her years, and yet something in her features saying she wasn't proper at all beneath the surface.
Angelo laughed when she told him that she was grown, because it was true, even though she would always be his little sister and part of him would never stop seeing the child he remembered her as when he looked at her. She sounded like a cultured, wealthy little thing, such sharp contrast to his own rough, unrefined accent, but he liked it that way. He might dream of money and power, but he could never imagine himself being educated, possessing intellect beyond the shrewd cunning and street smarts that came with spending a lot of time doing whatever it took to survive and claw one’s way up from the bottom. She sounded learned. Smart. He was proud, having wanted things for her that he never much cared for when it came to himself. And Carlita... well, he’d wanted her. It had always enraged him when her attention wavered elsewhere, when she wanted things beyond him. That same anger wasn’t present with Sera.
“I thought you might not be,” he said in Italian, and for one brief, fleeting moment, there was something almost vulnerable in his gaze, that suggested deep, deep down her rejection, had it occurred, might have hurt him. He nodded when she asked him to sit with her, turning towards the poolside chairs and sliding his hands into his pockets. “Will you tell me what happened, after I left? What your life was like? How you ended up here?” He had missed so much, and while he had ensured she’d be looked after, part of him was not proud that he’d left his only remaining family behind.
She wasn't surprised that he thought she wouldn't want to see him, and perhaps glad was not the right word for what she felt. Glad did not describe the maelstrom of feelings that fluttered like vulture's wings beneath her narrow breast. She hated him. She loved him. She wished for things that had never been hers, and yet she did not want to do as she should and scream until he left this place that she had claimed for her own. She liked the strength of age and the appearance of equal footing. Here, she was no child ignored in the shadows while he rained his love upon another that she loved as dearly. But that was all pretense, and beneath the surface there brewed a storm. Glad, it was not enough, but it would suffice this once.
She led him to the chairs beside the blue water that lapped with a life caused by the tumbling of the jacuzzi's intentional overflow. She did not sit upon the expensive, pillow clad chairs, in the end. She walked until she could sit at the edge of the pool, a pixie thing perching with her feet in the soothing blue. "It is not as nice as the water in Ravello," she said, falling into the Italian easily when he did. She began speaking before waiting to see what chair he chose for himself. "The Fioris adopted me, raised me. They were good to me," she said, a fondness in her voice that still spoke of being an outsider. "They loved and hugged and kissed and guarded. I wanted for nothing." And nothing tasted bitter upon her tongue. She shifted into English without thinking. "I met someone. He lives here. We became engaged. He taught me of English." She shrugged narrow shoulders. "He changed his mind, and now I am here." There were cracks between her words, gaps large enough to fit hands and arms through, but it was the skeleton of a truth. "And you?" Unasked, since you killed our sister, what have you done?
He didn’t have much experience with sitting poolside, and he hesitated momentarily, torn between joining her at the edge and opting for one of the chairs where his feet would remain dry. It didn’t seem a serious enough decision to warrant a great deal of thought, however, and after a second more Angelo chose to take a seat on the edge of one of the chairs, resting his forearms on his knees as he leaned forward. He looked down, into the water, and nodded. Nothing is like the water in Ravello,” he said, a tinge of wistfulness in his tone. Nowhere was like Ravello, period, and while he thought it best that he’d left his home behind, that didn’t mean he never missed it, and the ghosts of his past had still followed. He listened as she spoke, and decided that yes, the Fioris had been good to her. She might have lied for his sake, but he detected no untruths in what she said. They were good people; just because he didn’t possess it himself did not mean he couldn’t recognize goodness in others. He could guard, yes, and he could love, but not in the way people like them could.
Wisely, Angelo chose not to reveal that he knew the boy’s name. Sebastian was, like Daniel, someone he would deal with in good time, and he didn’t want Sera interfering in his plans. It was for her, in the end. This boy had hurt her, and he deserved to pay. Despite already knowing, however, his expression still darkened, and he still frowned in displeasure. “If he changed his mind, then he is a fool as well as a bastard,” he scowled. “You deserve better.” The switch back to English came with only a hint of difficulty, his accent heavier on the first couple of words before it smoothed out. There were years left unsaid, he knew, but he had no intention of being any more specific. He didn’t want her knowing exactly what he did; the people he associated with were not the sort he wanted around his little sister. “I stayed in Italy for a while. Went North, and worked for years before I came here. There was more opportunity, I found.” He shrugged. It left more holes than her story did, perhaps, but on the surface time had been rather uneventful.
She didn't turn to watch him, but she listened to his footfalls, curious as to where he would sit, but keeping this interest a segreto. When she heard him choose the chair, she smiled at the blue water, unsurprised. Carlita would have splashed. Angelo was never the type to do that sort of thing. She imagined that was why he had loved Carlita so much; because of her vibrancy. Was this not why everyone who had adored her sister had done so? She felt, at times, that she was one of the few who had seen the quiet moments without passion. The fear beneath bed linens and wistfulness when she read Daniel's letters. Or perhaps Angelo had known these things, and perhaps he had not been able to accept them. She had no point of comparison. Her heart had broken for Sebastian, and it broke still, but not with the passion of anger.
"He loved another woman," she said of Sebastian. "I was only years of replacement. I did not live up to the original," she said, a depth in her voice that little matched her appearance. She swished the blue water with her toes, and she listened to the scowl she could hear in his voice when he switched back to the tongue that was not his. His accent was so thick, and it brought back so many memories. She could hear it in the living room, teasing Carlita for something, and she could hear it raised in anger. But she had no memory of hearing it become gruff for her, and she almost laughed at the macabreness that came with wishing for something that had delivered a coin to Charon. "How do you know what I deserve, fratello?" she asked, quiet challenge that would never have touched her voice all those years ago. "Chissà, I have become a criminal since you saw me last," she said, though it would be a hard thing to believe from the insignificant girl at the edge of the pool. And she wasn't a fool. She knew he had answered her question with nothing but aria, air. "You didn't marry or have children?"
No one with even a modicum of sanity would suggest that Angelo knew the first thing about love, but he wasn’t exactly unbiased when it came to Carlita, nor did much of what he thought and felt follow any sort of logic. So, when he tried to imagine loving someone while being with another, it only made him hate this Sebastian boy even more. In his warped mind, he believed he’d been faithful to Carlita, and it had infuriated him as much as it had hurt him that she hadn’t been in return, despite the reality that she had no obligation to be. “If he loved another woman,” he said, slowly, as he attempted without success to piece together this idiot’s reasoning, “then he should have been with her, instead of leading you on and hurting you in the process. He was wrong.” Wrong was a gross understatement, yes, but there was no need to lose his temper in front of her.
Perhaps it was lingering wisps of the little girl she’d once been, but he couldn’t look at her and see a criminal no matter how much time had passed. “You’re my sister,” he said, as though that explained everything. “Of course you deserve the best. And if you had become a criminal, I would know.” How he would have been able to tell such a thing remained unsaid. The thought of him getting married made him smile, but it was the mention of children that made him laugh. It wasn’t mocking or derisive, simply amused. “No, I did not. I don’t know what sort of husband or father I would make, and even if I wanted to find out, there was no one I particularly wanted to marry.” Not that he had wanted a family with Carlita; he hadn’t loved her like that, precisely. But she had tainted his view of women, and settling down simply seemed something that was not meant for him.
Sanity was something Sera had left behind worrying about. With Sebastian, and for years, she had put the best of herself forward. She had smiled and agreeable. She had never let on about the dark things in her heart, and she had never shared the secret of Carlita's death. But the days for pretending were done with. "They had parted," she said of Sebastian and Nell. "And I, a placeholder," she added, the words composed in the way that she did on paper. She gave him a smile over her shoulder, a timid thing that looked like nothing, her blue eyes wide and ingenue and completely overshadowed by the blue depths of the water at her feet. She swiveled to look at him, then, her expression intense, despite her innocuous appearance. "People fall from love, Angelo," she said solemnly, the expert on such things.
She gave him a child's smile when he said she deserved the best. To have heard those things in her youth, when they might have had an effect. But then it was second and always second, and she was only wistful as she looked at him across the courtyard's tiles. "I might be a very good criminal, one that even you cannot recognize, fratello," she said, only a hint of red touching her cheeks and hinting at her recent nocturnal activities. She wouldn't label herself as a criminal, though, even though the legal system in this country that did not belong to her might feel differently.
That there was no one he wanted to marry, she didn't dispute. She believed that. Perhaps she romanticized it all. Loving someone enough to kill surely lasted a lifetime. Ricordati di me was not necessary, not when one loved that much. As for how he loved their sister, that had become twisted years ago, and there was no undoing this bramble. She stood, wet feet trailing water as she approached his chair. There, she crouched, and she kissed his cheek, childish violets and the musky undercurrent of sex in her hair. "I am glad you have come, Angelo," she said honestly. She straightened. "You may stay if you like. There are many rooms."
While it was doubtful that he would ever deem any man worthy of his sister, one who didn’t treat her like a placeholder might be a fair start. “You are no one’s placeholder,” he told her, but his expression turned somber and thoughtful when she said that people fell from love. Maybe she was right. Carlita had loved him once, after all. She hadn’t been in love with him, but she had loved him, and then she’d turned to another man, Daniel, and Angelo was left feeling far more for her than she did for him. He hadn’t been able to understand it then, and he understood it no better now, even if he acknowledged such a shift as truth. “Si. They do,” he agreed, and there was a hint of something like sadness in his tone, which spoke of old, long ago things.
There was something in the way she insisted that she might be a criminal that made him pause, even though it could easily be dismissed as teasing. He tipped his head to the side and looked at her, trying to see past the image of her he held in his mind; of a young girl, his little sister, who was good and pure and innocent. Uncorrupted. Could it be that he was wrong? “You might be,” he said, but there was no seriousness in it, no honest belief that she was trying to tell him the truth without outright saying it; his suspicions were barely tiny seeds at best, no need to make them known to her just yet.
He looked up as she approached, and he smiled when she kissed his cheek. But then his smile froze, and it wavered, and he only just managed to recover it as she straightened. Angelo remembered Carlita’s scent very, very well, and he remembered what had lurked beneath the surface, that undertone which had first made him suspicious long before he had solid proof of what she did behind closed doors. Perhaps it was nothing, but perhaps it was something, and it was that which made him nod, where he normally would have refused her offer. Not permanently, no, but he would stay for now. “I will stay for a while,” he said, and rose, placing his hands on her shoulders and pressing a kiss to her forehead. It was good, he thought, that they had found one another again. He hadn’t thought she needed him, not when he’d left all those years ago, but now, he was not so sure.