Everett puts on a smile that’s only half-practiced, a soft puff of air escaping his lips at Cyrus’s apparent ire at having ( heaven forbid ) his cheeks pinched, a warped echo of childish annoyance pulled straight from the boy’s primary school years. Eyes just wide enough to be innocent, speech just blithe enough to seem authentic. It’s a good façade: that much Everett will give Kai, whether or not the boy himself is aware that it is one is something Everett hasn’t quite determined yet. There’s something rotten drowsing under the surface of all this affection that puts him on edge.
After all, manipulation of his affections seems to be a Sloane trait. This time, however, Everett won’t be so easily caught. So long as Cyrus wants him to, he will play the part of a father figure — or whatever this strange space is he occupies — but he is too watchful to allow himself to grow too attached. He can’t make the same mistake again.
As Kai mulls over his question, Everett realizes, without much surprise, that his care for the boy is toeing the line already. He knows Cyrus is not his to protect, even if he wants to. Despite everything that happened between him and Vivianne, he respects her right to motherhood over her only child, and Everett knows that overstepping his boundaries in Cyrus’s life would be the worst sort of offense.
And so he listens but does not counsel, unsurprised but still mildly disappointed at Cyrus’s continued disinterest in the church. He’d always shepherded him towards compassion and virtue when he was younger. But whatever flourished — if anything did at all — was completely negated by all the negative influences Kai had likely encountered in the mob. Flowers are all too easily choked out by thorns, even as they reach for the sun.
“Bhatt would be correct. The illusion of reality is an incredibly powerful asset,” Everett agrees. Privately, however, Cassian leaves a faint, unpleasant aftertaste on his tongue. The Capulet soldier is a little too ambitious, a little too like Faron for Everett to ever really like him. “It would benefit you, then, to be more consistent in attending mass on Sundays. Both for the sake of your sore cheeks and for your public image.”
He wonders at Kai, this aspiring politician, this boy just shy of manhood who wants to grasp the world between his fingertips. The nostalgia that flickers however briefly across his features is enough proof to Everett that Kai isn’t ready. A part of him is still a boy full of sepia-toned memories that bruise and ache and bloom purple when pressed. Everett can’t recall ever meeting a politician who hadn’t ruthlessly crushed any softness left within them.
“Then you’ll have to reacquaint yourself with the city. Some things — most things — haven’t changed.” A beat of silence, then a wry smile. “Except for the crime rate. But that’s to be expected.”
“That is what I aim to do, thus my being here-“ he gestured at the table meaningfully, just as a server arrived with their orders. “For as much as things have not changed, finding my place in Verona is as hard of a task as any. I may remember the streets, know where I belong, but where I stand in people’s hearts-- that is where I am uncertain.”
“If I am to be frank, Everett, I suppose that is why I found myself attending service the first time as well. Perhaps it was foolhardy, but the community that the church provides was a great comfort to me in my last years in Verona. I had hoped that it would help me reacquaint myself here again. But, when the sermon turned to how man is still good, how the meek will inherit the Earth, I could not help but think,” his hand balled into a fist around the fork he had picked up and, when he noticed it, it fell to the table with a clatter, “neither your piety nor mine saved us from her, did it?”
And whether the waver in his voice were real or it were fake, it was certainly convincing. Kai treated the rhetorical question as if it were something he were ashamed of, refused to meet Everett’s gaze as he swallowed hard on the admission.
But, was it a slip of the tongue- the revelation that he was not as hardened as he would like to be? Or was it something more sinister-- the calculated move of a boy who had only known how to prey on people’s empathy and take from it? As the morning light wrapped its glowing fingers around his throat, circled his head in a spattered laurel of sunlight, his intentions were all the more indecipherable.
Villain or vulnerable? Prince of his own destiny or prisoner of his fate? A boy who had forsaken God and played at being Him or one who God had played with and forsaken?
( on his part, Kai did not have the answers. he was both. he was neither. all that mattered was that he had not lied. )
He paused, as if suddenly noticing the somber tone he had adopted. Shaking his head slightly, he pardoned himself, before changing the subject slightly, “Scusa, signore. They say in polite conversation never to speak of religion or politics and I suppose this is why. The Church has taught me to forgive and I do so wholeheartedly, but I have seen too many lambs lead to slaughter, too much senseless bloodshed tied to the world we live in. If the life I have chosen is righteous, then it is not godly. And if I must choose between the two, as a Capulet, if it is God or Cosimo, I choose Cosimo every time.”
“Signora Bianchi forgives my absences. It would do you well to do the same. A lapse in faith is common is all-the-rage in those my age, I do hear. Perhaps I will come back to the light in time, but the grace of God has yet to let me in.”
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