dantevalentino:
She’s right, at least, about her first point: he doesn’t know much about Crow. Bare details. He can probably count the solid personal facts on two hands: his favorite drink, that his godparent bought him those tacky sunglasses, that his other dad’s a no-maj born, that he likes backyard cookouts, that he’s… not an only child? Though Dante couldn’t venture a guess as to how many siblings he actually had. That he’d been on Central Squad, and then not on Central Squad. That he has a tattoo of a bird on his chest, and a tree on his ribcage, a line of what look like runes on his scalp only visible if you look closely which must, he think, have some purpose beyond the simply aesthetic. A few other more intimate details that feel strange to think about with his cousin sitting here lecturing him.
It feels strange, to reduce Crow in his mind to a list like that. Of course he knows there’s more to him than that—it’s more than he knows about any of his other one night stands, unless you were counting Siouxsie Hazard, though everything he knew about her he’d learned from Ransom’s non-stop attempts to set them up with one another. It’s more than he knows about most of his coworkers, too, other than Kadri. More than he knows about Emmy.
The second point she raises, though—well, no, he has no idea of what Crow went through on his old Squad, though it sounds, from what she’s saying, like that’s probably the why of why he’d left and come here instead. Two easy dots to connect, though he’s not entirely sure why she’s telling him, what it has to do with him.
“I didn’t know that,” he says, with a shrug, shaking his head a little. “We haven’t exactly done a lot of talking.”
Yeah, he’s had cases like that. Ones that filled him with dread, ones he couldn’t shake afterwards, that kept him up at night. Emmy had been with him on one of them, though he knows she doesn’t remember it that way anymore, and that part hadn’t stuck with him at the time but now that he’s talking to her he can’t seem to stop thinking about it. When it happened, he did—well, it sounds like what Crow’s already doing. He went out, got drunk, slept with someone new and fun, passed the time with distractions until it faded away. As far as he’s concerned, that’s really all you can do about something like that.
“But, yeah, okay, I get it. Not really sure what you want me to do about it, but… I’ll keep an eye out for him, I guess.”
.
She’s not sure if she’s getting her point across how she wants it, not through any fault of how she’s explaining it, she thinks, but more because she’s actually genuinely not sure if it’s something that someone like Dante Vitale actually cares about. The thought isn’t a negative one, or a judgmental one, just a fact, really, because she knows nothing about him, in the same way that she’s certain he knows nothing at all about her, or anyone else in the office, because he isn’t someone who seems to care about making friends, at least with coworkers. Which is why, she realizes belatedly, maybe this is a pointless attempt to help Crow. It makes her heart sink a little, realizing that this might just have to be one of those things that her cousin has to go through on his own, another potential disappointment, more pain stacked up. She just wishes she could do something to help, that he would let her or anyone else do something to help.
Given what she can glean from knowing other men like Dante, she thinks she can make a few safe assumptions about him, and hearing his reply, his little shrug, his insistence they haven’t been doing much talking, and that he doesn’t get what she wants him to do about it. He’s not the type who cares. This is a fun game for him, a distraction from his own worries, probably, not something to give much extra thought to, especially not the thought like she’s asking him to give. Another fun hookup, maybe a few more times than normal, but ultimately something he doesn’t care about lasting. It’s not healthy, and she’s pretty sure he could use someone like her, too, to try to kick him into shape like she tries with Crow, but she’s certainly not that person.
Maybe all she can do here is be as clear as possible, no matter how much he doesn’t want to care, or consider someone else’s feelings on something like this that isn’t serious to him, and then worry about Crow’s side of things, instead.
“I want you to make sure you don’t break his heart without thinking. He’s had enough pain; if you’re just here to fuck around, and nothing else, that’s fine, but you better make it bloody clear to him ASAP, or else you’re going to have me, April, Becca, Aster, and a dozen others to deal with when you get tired and drop him for the next hot, sad twenty year old you find,” she says, a little more forcefully than she means. Emmy pauses, shakes her head, letting out a sigh.
“I just want you to be honest with him. He talks about you a lot, and I know what it means, he doesn’t do that with random hookups that don’t mean anything to him. I just want this to stay a good thing for him, I don’t want it to make things worse.”









