I don’t think it’s just me or C&R that’s on your mind.
Everett curls his lip contrarily, green eyes fixing on his brother’s. After a moment, his gaze skitters to the charcoal shadows stretching long and smudged across the pavement, before he shakes his head. “It’s nearly mid-March,” he points out quietly, hoping that his brother isn’t drunk enough to miss the implication and force him to elaborate. Something horribly like a lump begins to grow in his throat, the weight of what he could have had and what he’s irretrievably lost bearing down on him all at once. “I’ve just —” Everett pauses, clearing his throat to rid himself of the embarrassing thickness that’s caught on to his voice — “I’ve been self-reflecting a fair amount lately. That’s all.”
He drags his gaze slowly to the sideview mirror, to the leather interior, to the bare ring finger on his left hand. Everett swallows.
A sigh rustles through his throat. “You’re good at a great deal more than just being an idiot, Easton. You just choose not to use your talent.” Everett shifts in his seat to provide a better vantage point of his brother, contemplative and disappointed. “You’ve taken a gap year, East, and you’ve done your applications for uni, but the rest of it, you’ve been drinking and going out to clubs and… whatever else you’ve been doing. You could have gotten a part-time job if you wanted, or gotten some industry experience.”
Everett’s always taken the role of his brother’s keeper to heart, part-sibling, part-guardian, considering the age gap between them and the way Easton’s always gravitated towards him rather than their parents. He doesn’t know how this began, how he struggles between being both companion and disciplinarian and mediator to his younger brother, but Everett finds he doesn’t know what to do. It seems too late to guide Easton with a heavy hand now that he’s an adult, and yet he can’t shake the foreboding that creeps down his neck like cold sweat when he sees the activities his younger brother now flirts with and wonders whether it’s a foul omen of things to come.
“Non tu sei,” Everett refutes decisively — you’re not — though his residual irritation at the fact that they’re still sitting parked in front of a police station because of something idiotic Easton did in the first place sieves a frustrated sigh from his throat. “But you’re a damned nuisance sometimes, making me come bail you out. You’re lucky I like you. Most of the time,” he grumbles, not wanting his brother to play his sympathies in order to get out of punishment. “You aren’t a burden, and I don’t know who said that but…”
He blinks, traces the lines of Easton’s face; quite suddenly, his chest begins to tighten, as if he’s on the verge of realization, or as if he’s seeing his brother’s expression for the first time. Perhaps it’s because Easton’s drunk, all his emotions written clearly on his face, but Everett’s struck by the depth of resignation there. Deep and cold and quiet, like water below the light line as if he’s drowned and frozen by the memory of Everett’s late mother. It’s a vast contrast to the way Everett recalls her memory, like a warm blanket, comforting and protective. The wariness grows, and grows, a memory of the summer before he’d left for university rising to mind, Easton’s pudgy features screwed up as he’d told Everett about —
It’s cut off abruptly as Easton insists he doesn’t want to talk about it, subsiding into the recesses of Everett’s mind… but more open, more uncovered, than it had been before. “Va bene. Se vuoi,” he adds cautiously, letting the topic slide. They lapse into silence for a few seconds. “Ascolta. I’m still mad at you for getting yourself into a fight. And I really ought to tan your hide for landing yourself in jail. But if you promise me, Easton, you’ll never do it again, I’ll let it slide,” Everett says, all of a sudden feeling too close to emotionally breaking to verbally discipline his brother as he should. “Just this once.”
Mid-March, for a second Easton, hadn't understood what that meant, a delicate frown dancing between his brow as his muddled mind works to piece together the missing piece of the puzzle. The wedding, Vivianne, of course. Easton could have slapped himself for not catching the hint sooner, having presumed that something quizzical had been bothering him instead. “Oh, yeah. I’m sorry, Ev,” he approaches the topic with caution, with absolute care and consideration that he had typically lacked. Because although he was spiteful, a creature raised by neglect and hungry for any bit of attention he could sink his teeth into, he wasn’t a monster. Particularly, his malice has a soft spot in attempting to excuse his brother, for he may have been ignorant to see his distress growing up, he still cared and that felt like a lot more than any of their other immediate family members.
Could have is the sentiment that lays irritably on his chest, what ifs are the notions that plagued his existence. What if his father had never gone on the business trip, what if Gabriel had entered the club an hour later, what if he had never met his mother and lay in bed in a crime of infidelity, what if he had never been born? He glances over at Everett, a tired expression washed over his face, stress and anguish and his own guilt flourishing in his ribcage to know that he had done absolutely nothing to make it any better. “What do you think i’m good at?” Easton asks, curious, a sincere ring to his tone that hardly ever makes its debut. But it was an honest question to the person he trusted more than anyone, to see what it was he saw in him that everyone else was so evidently blind to; even himself.
He'd been making a habit of it, seeking out anything and everything that would lead him to oblivion, that moment of absolute nirvana where the world would melt away from his feet and he could simply forget, forget who he was and the discomfort the hinders in every fibre of his being because of it. “I like you most the time too,” he parrots, head leaning back against the headrest in a drunken haze. He’s just thankful that he was never one to get soppy, that the numerous glass fulls of whiskey weren’t going to warrant for loose lips and gush over his sibling an embarrassing amount. But it doesn’t make his features any less readable, because he absolutely adores the other man or most at least the time he does, it’s one of those things that should go unsaid, or so he imagined since Everett is the only one he mostly listened to.
“Grazie,” Easton was grateful not to be pushed, because he doesn’t think that he would be able to stomach another conversation where he’s told that he was just being silly, for his torments or feeling unwanted and burdened to be brushed under the rug and adorned with passive comments from the favourite son. The one who was loved and praised, the one he’d watched in envy, green-faced, yearning for even a moment of what Everett and their parent’s share. With Margherita’s death, it was too late, she died with him knowing that he had never been enough, a sealed fate and the prophecy for what was always to come. The shadow of something great, but not nourished enough to outshine his title as the Craven bastard.
With a nod, a hum reverberates from his lungs,“I promise,” words flow in succession to his brother’s request before his gaze returns to the signet ring on his index finger. A gift that was given to him months ago, when Everett had said he no longer needed it, that another ring was predestined to take its place. With a glance over to his brother’s bare hand, Easton’s expressions saddened, delinquency unravelling at the notion of himself baring a ring he was never meant to own. So he twists the piece of gold from his finger, handing it over with a hesitant smile, “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it,” the wedding, or lack thereof, “but you gave me this thinking you’d be getting married, now that you’re not I can’t keep this with a good conscience. It’s yours.”
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