𝔢𝔡𝔪𝔲𝔫𝔡.

— and i’ve failed them all ; p.v.s.

A burden is a heavy thing to carry. Even heavier when the strain bound to your shoulders was that of your own life. And even in these hours of withdrawal, as veins scream for an ounce of relief, every fibre in his body begging like a starved child for the release of narcotics. Anything, pills or powders, any single substance that would work to numb the pain of his existence. His presence is painful, his failures are painful, his inability to be loved is fucking unbearable as were the salty taste of tears at the corner of his mouth. Easton shakes, an uncontrollable chill rolling from a constant flow of cold sweat.

He’s supposed this is what hell would be, one day, when he meets his end and is made to answer for his countless sins. A list so long it made Lucifer himself look innocent in comparison. And perhaps that was the reason he'd never been religious, born as an antichrist, the embodiment of evil and disgrace of God. Or maybe it's the inability to believe in such deities when he'd been innocent once, a child born to the light and punished regardless, made to repent for breathing, for sitting in the same room as his older brother who shined golden and brilliant in comparison. Everett had never suffered the neglect of learning to grow in the shadows, never starved of love, that to the concept of gentleness seemed horrifically unattainable. If there was a God, why had he suffered? Why had his only option ever been to become this? A monster. A ravenous and hurt abomination that only knows how to cause pain.

There's absolution hidden in addiction, there's comfort there he'd never felt before, had almost forgotten after years without a relapse, congratulated profusely for his achievement. He'd had thought it wouldn't feel as good as it did, falling backwards again, ragged wings unable to sore in the breeze, dragging him downwards, down, down, down-- until finally he's numbed again, and nothing matters. Everything, even himself, is oblivion. Floating around in the void, no longer tortured by his demons, to drift rather than to sink. East should like to cast himself into that feeling for eternity, never come back out of it again, but he does. And when he does Vivianne is there, the Angel of Death fleeing from the scene, as she replaces his highs with handcuffs and wills him to be clean again.

And what a fucking joke it seems, to be deemed worthy enough of saving from one person's perception, but then condemned for his existence from the eyes of his parents. But he knows it now, in his past desperations for purpose, that it's never something meant for him. Easton wasn't meant to exist, and if he had, his purpose was only to serve as an example to those around him what it was to fall. What it was to be fucked, and unredeemable, and ugly. Would this have happened if he’d been successful? Was there any such thing as ‘success’ when what he’d aimed to do was murder the only person on earth who loved him. Adored him regardless of his monsters, the violent insecurities that impede his mind and Everett still peered down at him and saw a brother. But not anymore, not now when Easton trades brotherly bond for betrayal.

At the sound of footsteps, Easton's body jolts, shackles ringing around his wrist as he pulls again in another hopeless attempt to be freed. And as his capobastone enters the guest room, he doesn't hesitate, only now his dialogue changes from the toxicity of curses to something even more pitiful; bargaining. “I hate myself for what I did, I hate that I’m incapable of finding any satisfaction in my life if there is no chaos, and I know that I am never going to be enough in anyone’s eyes,” his voice is hoarse, torn apart and defeated from days of shouting. Hours of crying and screaming and repenting in being forced to live in his own company. “So when I’m out of here, please punish me how you see fit, and then all I ask is to devote myself entirely to the Capulets,” a pause, accompanied by delicate exhale, "If you won't let me die, then at the very least, I don't want to exist."

Easton doesn’t look at Vivianne as he speaks, his green eyes have been unable to engage with another human being in the fear of connection since that night. He doubts he’d be able to in a long time. Shunned by the woman he’d believed he could love for his failure, ashamed and embarrassed to be so desperate for acceptance that he’d go to these lengths. “That’s my bargain, if you want me to stay clean, I need tasks and I don’t care how reckless or dangerous they are. I’ll do any of them. I will be your capodecina, and that is all I will be,” It wasn’t worth it, it would never be worth it, and he would always just be this. The fragile and desperate bastard, haunted by his own misdemeanours, cowering in the shadows and destined for nothing great or lustrous as any other man named ‘Craven’.

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…”

Mamma.

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. 

‘Stop being so pushy,’ Easton condescends to him, as if he isn’t the one who’s hanging by a stranger’s word, anxiety thrumming in his chest as his mind runs rife with the possibilities. What on earth would you understand about what I’m feeling? He almost asks, the retort sitting on the tip of his tongue before the actor forces it back down resentfully. Anything to keep from prolonging this discussion. Anything to keep Easton Craven from playing him like a puppet on a sick stage. 

“Maybe you aren’t a good person. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I was apparently wrong to extend it to you.” He parses the words out with hot irritation, adjusting his perception of the younger Craven brother, second-by-second. “But it’s not your place to tell me I should do the same with regards to my own wife. I’ll be the judge of that.” Tomas defends, trying to set down a Do Not Cross line that he wishes he’d set down from the get-go. And yet there’s a traitorous whisper in his mind that tells him that if he had, he wouldn’t be here right now; on the verge of possibly vital information related to his own wife. Uncomfortably divided, the man’s anxiety only continues to grow with every lapsing pause that Easton entertains between them. 

“Many people try to protect their loved ones by keeping information from them. It might be misguided, but it doesn’t make her a bad person. And if you disagree, then you’re the one who doesn’t know her well enough, Easton, not I.” Maybe it’s that staunch defense on the married man’s part, because at long last, the anvil drops:

 ‘… Your wife has been having an affair.’

For a moment, caught completely off-guard, the actor merely stares at him. Surprise wipes the annoyance from his features like a clean slate. He’d feared that Celeste was somehow in danger, that she was caught between both mobs like a guiltless prisoner waiting to be drawn and quartered. He’d feared for her life. What he hadn’t feared, was the defamation of her character by a complete stranger. So when the surprise dwindles, he can’t help it — Tomas laughs. It’s a buoyant laugh, rich and right from his stomach. “Are we done here?” He asks, when the last echo fades into silence.

.

It’s slightly anti-climactic and most certainly nothing like the near cinematic imagery he’d pictured in his mind. What had been months that rolled into a year, harbouring information close to his chest with the knowledge that one day he should use it to destroy something holy. A commitment made in front of the eyes of God, false devotion brought to light. And yet there was no denial, no outcry of rage or declarations that it had all been a lie. Something that Easton may have come up with for the sole aim to upset the other, and it puzzles him.

He sharpens his gaze on Tomas, almost analytically, as if he were attempting to pick apart the facade and dig for the reaction he so craved. Easton had never like silence, he can’t appreciate order or maturity when he had been a creature who had been fuelled on chaos. A demon sat outside the gates of hell, watching and waiting for any opportunity to sin time and time again. So instead he indulges foreign patience, allows for the other to stand in the knowledge of it all, knowing exactly for the first time what Celeste had been doing. Leaving crucial moments for doubt and hurt to flourish, to seep pain into their chest and corrupt a portrayal of a marriage that should have been an unbreakable bond.

A thoughtful hum follows his question, punctuated by the nonchalant shrug of pretentious shoulders and all tied together with a delicate string of laughter. “I don’t know, are we?” he replied rhetorically, an obvious answer with a small insufferable smile to match it. "Aren't you the one that came here looking for me? You started this conversation because you knew I had information, I've given it to you, surely it's your decision if we're finished up here or not," Easton paused, smile turning into a grin, "unless you think I have more to tell?... Who it was with, for example. And I mean I can hardly blame Celeste, not my type per se, but Isabella Gagliano is very attractive." With a sigh, Easton reaches for the phone in his pocket, motioning his index finger to demand Tomas waits. After a few moments, scrolling backwars and flicking through images, he forces the device into the other man's hand. The image of the two together illuminating the screen, pixels woven together to form solid evidence that his goading held truth.

“Don’t,” Everett snaps bitterly, raking a weary hand through his hair. “Not today, Easton.” He doesn’t have the emotional energy to flay his brother for his sins, one moment near-consumed by fire, the next frozen to the bone. It’s a breaking point he’s reached only a few times in the past few months, where he feels his eyes closer to watering than flaring in a burst of anger when struggling under the unbearable weight of the world. Everett knows why that is, and has spent much of the past month trying not to think about why that is, and promptly fails every time.

It’s Vivianne. All Vivianne, running through his mind like a burning poison as the year inexorably approaches the date of their would-be wedding in only a few weeks. He misses her and misses her and misses her — and hates her for it. Hates himself for it, too. Every week that elapses, Everett still harbors an aching hope that perhaps, for the sake of his pride if not for his heart, Vivianne will come to him with an apology. He’s beginning to doubt his sanity as he replays snippets of their shared memories again and again, desperate to recall the times she cared for him, desperate to reconcile a life he’d built with a woman who’s kept her distance in the aftermath as he waits, and waits, and waits…

Everett closes his eyes, tips his head back against the carseat, and wonders if he can call in a favor for Orion to meet with la consigliera instead.

But that’s tomorrow’s problem, not today’s… not when Easton brings up their father cutting him off with an alarmingly calm demeanor. “He definitely will if you keep acting like an idiot,” he shoots back sourly, darkly, but there’s a distinct lack of bite to it. “Look, why did you do it. Just tell me that, at least.” Everett’s upset that he isn’t angrier, searching for the righteous fire he’d burned with mere minutes earlier rather than the hurt and exhaustion that currently clings to his skin with clammy hands.

Do you even wish I was never born?

“Oddio. You’ve downed an entire liquor cabinet, haven’t you?” He fixes his younger brother with a long-suffering look for asking such an idiotic question. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I don’t wish that,” he manages wearily. It’s true, but Easton’s just landed himself in jail for getting splendidly smashed and fighting someone in the street, and Everett’s already developing a headache thinking of the media scandal he’ll have to placate the following morning, and isn’t feeling very enthusiastic as a result.

You can tell the truth, I’m genuinely curious.

His attention snaps to Easton’s face now at such gentle, unthinking, inebriated sincerity. Madonna santa. He’s serious. Something in the pit of Everett’s stomach twists, as if he’d had a sip of milk gone sour. “You don’t really believe I could think that, do you?” he asks slowly, wondering where on earth this is coming from — or, more terrifying, whether it’s been there and he hasn’t seen it all this time. “East, what brought this on?”

Something isn't right about Everett, and even in his inebriated state, Easton could see it in the way his brother holds himself. Tighter wound even more than usual, even more than what he would have imagined after being called to come and bail him out of a prison cell. It appears to be something deeper than irritation, below the surface level of a furrowed expression and almost dense enough for East to want to ignore, almost.

"I don't think it's just me or C&R that's on your mind," his suspicion blurts out from loose lips, green eyes peering over with a steady gaze. But for his brother's sake, he decides to be obedient, noticeably more docile when he'd been layered on with the silent treatment. After all, the exchange of harsh words had only ever encouraged the youngest Craven into a deeper pit of rage and angst.

He continues to study Everett softly in his drunken haze, nervous hands picking at the raw skin on his knuckles which reignites memories of the fight. Squaring up to some guy who had easily been twice his size with the notion that he would have never of been able to win. But in a way it felt good, to truly distinguish the odds of succeeding were so incredibly slim that he had been prepared for the outcome all along. Not ashamed or embarrassed, merely existing within it. Just another one of his ridiculous concepts of life that had originated from an intoxicated mind, a head so heavy with alcohol and lack of sleep that nonsensical musings on his existence had started to sound more and more poetic. Or at the very least, it had made them easier to live with.

Why had he done it? It was a valid enough question, he weren’t so young or naive anymore to dance around the legitimacy of the sentiment. “Because I was bored,” East answered, a little too honestly. Slumping down into the chair as if doing so would further remove him of the other’s judgement. He knows, naturally, that there would be no escaping that. “I don’t know why I do things, I just-” he sighs, long and dismal as if he had exhaled the weight of the world whilst living the life of an entirely over-privileged teenage boy, “because being an idiot is about the only thing I’m good at.”

For the briefest of moments, and for what felt like the first time in a month, Everett's accusal be it a remark or not had pulled the corner of Easton's lips into a small smile. Mildly amused by the idea that clearing the entire liquor cabinet would certainly be quite the feat. “You think I’d have been able to throw a clean punch if I did?” words float lightly with sincere laughter, only cut off again in the hesitation that it may not have been so well received by his brother.

And yet with reassurance, the denial that such thoughts had ever crossed his mind, it sends some weird chill down his spine. Unnervingly grimace, the voice that sounds a lot like their father whispering in his ear that it couldn't have been the truth. “Because I’m a burden,” he mumbles, more to himself than for the other to answer to. Not really seeking for reassurance, he was more used to getting nothing than he was receiving comfort or ease. "Non voglio che tu lo pensi, but everyone else has," a short pause follows another sigh, "so I can't see why not." Gaze angled back down to his lap in some unassuming attempt of self-preservation.