Different didn’t have to mean bad. She had a point and that was one he was trying to learn and take to heart because he’d always been taught the direct opposite, that ‘different’ was bad, wrong, unacceptable. Their father had instilled into their heads at a very early age that they had certain expectations to attain and uphold, good grades, extracurricular activities, had to be active members in their community, volunteer, and most of all do not smear the family name. When Luka had been turned into a werewolf, their father had made it out to be the worst atrocity that he had ever committed even though it had been a horrible accident and August had been too indoctrinated into their family’s mindset and scared of their father to even question it. There was no saying no to their father. It was always ‘Yes, Sir.’” Lately though, with the introduction of more open-minded people and no longer working behind the scenes as a hunter, his opinion was slowly shifting, or at the very least, he was more open to considering that maybe not all werewolves were bad and not all supernatural beings were monsters.
August took the refilled glass and this time sipped the amber liquid, letting the flavor marinate on his tongue as it was intended to, tasting oak from the barrel it had been aged in. She was certainly revealing a lot about her family to him in this moment, her words coming out openly and he found himself smiling at the end of it when she outstretched her hand, which he took and shook firmly, “August,” he offered his own name which would vary slightly from what was on his card since he never went by Augustus, “and I think I just ‘downloaded’ a lot of information on you,” borrowing from her verbiage which he found interesting and hadn’t heard of learning new things about someone compared to ‘downloading,’ so he asked her, “Are you moonlighting as a bartender and do you work in the tech industry?”
“Guess I should try and even it out a little bit,” he mused faintly, “I don’t really have a lot of family here so can’t compare all too much but my little brother Luka lives here. He’s the one I’ve come here to spend more time with. Been…” his eyes squinted slightly as he counted in his head how long it had been, “…over a year at least since I’ve even spoken with him.” His tongue swept across his lips before he took another sip from his glass, “I’m aware that makes me a horrible brother,” he said before she could comment on it.
A small amused smile spread across the witch’s face. “In tech? No, no. Nothing like that. I work as a barista when I’m not working here. This is mostly a part time thing when my family needs someone to cover a shift or two.” Back when she had been in college still it was a little different. Shifts at the bar was the only work she had outside of helping out with her brother’s kids and the other kids in town. Working at the café had only come once she had put the kibosh on the idea of becoming a nurse and dropped out of school. There didn’t really seem to be a reason to keep on going when she knew that she wasn’t going to actually go into the profession. It hadn’t exactly been something she had been looking forward to or anything of the sort anyway. It had been something she wanted to do simply because of her brother, his problems, what he dealt with and put his family through. She had wanted to be able to help him and people like him. But her brother rarely felt a sense of thanks for anything anyone in the family ever did for him; she had decided that she already did enough things for the rest of the family so going into a career because of them? It began to seem ridiculous.
“If you were a bad brother then you wouldn’t be worried about being a bad brother,” Will reasoned, leaning on the bar across from him with a shrug, resting her chin in the palm of her hand. She had seen enough bad family members in town to know that when you really are terrible to your family? You don’t think about how you treat them; you don’t think you’re doing anything wrong; you tend to consider yourself somehow above it all. “Sometimes family comes apart for various reasons. Things happen, life gets in the way. But if you didn’t care that you hadn’t spoken to him? If you didn’t worry you were being a bad brother? That’s when you could consider yourself a bad brother. The fact that you’re here trying to fix things between the two of you? That’s what matters. A bad brother wouldn’t even bother doing that.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Will requested, offering a friendly smile. “I’m sure you coming here to see him will mean more to him than you know.”
