Action is Eloquence.

“My soft-heartedness.” Everett smiles all too knowingly. “Your soft heart is one of my favorite things about you,” he confesses, leaning closer. “Probably something to do with my infectious sentimentalities.”

And perhaps what makes it more precious to him that it’s his, all his. Her sweet fussing, every sacred moment that’s theirs alone, the flimsy fronts she erects more out of habit than out of fear to mask the sea of love and affection that swells beneath. Some days he lets her have her superficial pride. And others, like today, he much prefers to make her flustered.

If he enjoys it too much, it’s her fault. It’s too easy with Vivianne. A few words placed with just the right offhand tone and any cool, collected facade melts off of her like snow in summer heat. “Craven, there it is again. Who’s Craven? What am I, your coworker? Dai, dolcezza,” he hums, intimate velvet with a faintly wicked gleam in his eyes. “You aren’t fooling anyone with that. Least of all, your husband.”

Everett sweeps his gaze to her pink mouth, then to her collarbone, then down to her toes — swift enough for subtlety, but slow enough to make a point — to remind her exactly how far they’ve left formalities in the past. She’s a Craven herself, after all, even if sometimes she likes to pretend otherwise. The rings on her left hand wink softly in the warm kitchen light as she slides a palm up his chest.

It hits him, then, how lucky he is.

He’s been many things in his life, but to be a father and a husband — to hear Vivianne say our children — is all he’s ever wanted. The old, faded hope of a young man who dreamed not for glory or power, but a simple, happy life, and someone to share it with. His thoughts wander briefly to the worn rosary in his right pocket, a farewell gift from a lifetime ago. Not lucky, he amends. Blessed.

“Oh, Viv…” Everett sighs, hopelessly fond as she huffs and puffs about losing her ability to bend his will. A single thought blooms sweetly in the secrecy of his own mind. I’d do anything for you, if you really wanted it. She knows he would, too, but he won’t say it aloud when she’s trying to make a point out of it. Instead, the confession reveals itself in other ways: the soft affection in his eyes, the way his mischief gives way to a private sort of tenderness.

I love you, he thinks. My Vivianne.

She flushes under his gaze, then turns up her nose. The moment is broken. And yet the safe, warm feeling remains, albeit more subdued — the fondness, the devotion, the easy crackle of a log fire that lasts through the ages — in the same way it has for nearly the last two decades. Not even her haughty, superficial pride can spoil it. If anything, it elicits his amusement, if only because her own proposal is such a silly hill to die on. And if it makes her ever so much easier to tease, well, that’s simply icing on the cake.

“Dio, that’s a rather scandalous confession. So you admit I drove you mad that night?” He likes the way her pupils dilate when he drops the register of his voice just so, likes the rosy flush creeping over her cheeks and the frown she struggles to keep fixed on her brow. “My, my, my. I didn’t realize you liked it that much. I’ll have to keep it in mind.”

His smile morphs into a decided smirk. “You don’t need to admit anything else. You’d have come round eventually, and we’d still be here in the kitchen.” A half-truth. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been the one to propose in the end. But if their life together with all its twists and fumbles and pitfalls has taught Everett anything, it’s this.

What’s meant to be will always find its way back to each other.

Everett leans closer, rogueish and playful as he traps heat between their bodies. She tilts her chin up a little further, inviting a kiss he’s very obviously delaying.

“What about your other favourite things?” Vivianne prompts him with dancing eyes and a dimpled smile. A better topic, she thinks. Less risk of provoking a furious blush, or the indignant flutter of age-old butterfly wings as he corners her in the kitchen and reads her like an open book. “Remind me again, amante... Which are those?”

He chides her for her capricious attempt at distancing, ‘Craven’ here and ‘coworker’ there. It’s true that she’s enjoyed pulling such strings over the years, tossing around superficial labels like lover or ex or associate or old flame, if only to see that beautiful, rebelliously responsive spark in his eyes. Half warning, half challenge as he reasserts (with a confidence borne of several decades’ worth of trials and tribulations) the title and role he now occupies in her life, and in her heart. 

Husband... The most disarming name she’s ever had for Everett, and yet the only one that has ever fit him quite so right. As golden and constant as the sun, or the faithful wedding band around her finger. If he was born to play the part – adoring husband, exemplary father – then like the thief in paradise she counts herself lucky for having won the lottery. The eternal gift to be at his side, hand in hand until the end of days.

I love you, she thinks. My Everett.

She suspects he’s spied out the sentiment when his expression softens inexplicably and a bemused ‘Oh Viv...’ hums out of his throat. The wife shifts her weight against the counter and fights the stupidly reflexive smile that tugs at her mouth any time he says that. “Does this mean you’ll give me back some of my power? Or are we still at an impasse?” She tests the waters before submitting to a coquettish grin.

“ — Careful, or I’ll have to sweeten the deal.” Kiss me, kiss me and you’ll find out.

Yet if Everett has a secret power of his own, it’s in how easily he makes her forget her tendency for rumination and pulls her safely from the spiral of her fretful thoughts. Already she’s forgotten the high-stakes risks of Cyrus falling in love, or Maddalena’s schoolgirl crush on an older boy. It’s all shunted to the back of her mind, shielded and kept at bay with Everett’s protective arms on either side of her, and the comfort to be found on a lazy Sunday afternoon, in their cozy kitchen.

The comfort to be found in their age-old banter, too, even where it comes at her expense. 

‘That’s a rather scandalous confession. So you admit I drove you mad that night?’

“No! What I admit–...” Vivianne trails off when she realizes he’s caught her in a catch-22. “Oh Dio, you’re impossible!” Either confess that she had fallen head-first into the sea for him, more and more in love with each sunrise and each sunset as they went on the run together... Or confess that the night she’d proposed on a whim she’d been strung up along a velvet shore with him, dizzy in the afterglow of unyielding desire. But even though she knows which of the two she’d more readily admit if pressed, she knows the answer Everett likes best, and the one that also happens to be most true. 

“Bene, bene... You win this round, furbacchiona. But don’t think I won’t remember the trick.” Vivianne warns, unfolding her arms to reach up for him at last. He’s making her work for this kiss, and she files away a mental note to make him pay for it later.

Tutto è lecito in amore e in guerra.

“I never needed to come around...” She confesses finally, as Everett takes enough pity on her to cant lower so that she may better wind her arms around his neck. His own arms slide snugly around her waist, drawing her away from the counter. “I was always yours – mia anima gemella, piantagrane, cuore mio – I just didn’t always know it.” 

An insistent tug and Everett’s down. Satisfied, Vivianne doesn’t waste any time in finding his smiling mouth once more with hers. “L'amore della mia vita.”

“Only because Ciro hasn’t fallen hard for anyone, yet.” Everett’s nearly certain it’s coming any day, now. The last time Cyrus visited them, he’d taken him out to watch the Inter Milan match at a nearby sports bar. It was the typical sort of catch up — how’s work? did you see how the stock market is doing? how did the kitchen remodeling go? tell me about your life —  save for the fact that as sly as Cyrus might sometimes be, he couldn’t hide the secretive smile on his lips whenever he received a text notification.

Never mind the faint female voice in the background when Everett initially called him to ask what time he needed to be picked up from the airport.

His son might be nearing forty, but Everett knows a brewing romance when he sees one. Somewhere between late-night calls advising on Cyrus’s new position at the head of Sloane Silver and years of patient — if sometimes painful — effort to gain his trust, Everett’s grown able to read his son nearly as well as he can read his wife.

It’s his duty as a father, after all. Cyrus might not look like him — not like Maddalena, with her father’s high cheekbones and free-spirited smile — but he couldn’t be more Everett’s own than if he had been in the hospital room the day he was born. 

“Nine months older,” Everett corrects. “Same as you. Cradle robber.” He cants his head to the side as he slouches easily against the counter, green eyes crinkling at the corners. “Ma davvero, there’s nothing to worry about. Remember the marching band director? The one you met during the orchestra competition trip? In her opinion, he’s a star student. Well-behaved, hardworking.”

That Everett’s made use of old, familiar tools to sieve information from the unassuming boy is a fact he chooses to withhold until later, when Vivianne is less worked up. Charming civilians into spilling the particulars of their lives is a cakewalk compared to the sorts of secrets he’d pried from criminal lips in a past life, and given that Maddalena’s crush, like many teenagers, hasn’t thought to hide his internet footprint whatsoever, Everett’s already gathered an inordinate amount of intelligence on his family, extracurriculars, and lack of a criminal record.

Old habits die hard, and as harmless as young love may be, Everett refuses to take any chances with his only daughter. Then again, the only chances seem to be things like Nena being involved with a slacker, and not nearly the sort of situation that would require Vivianne’s capobastone experience.

“I’m glad you aren’t one, anymore. You’re formidable enough as it is, amore mio.” Everett slides his hand against her shoulder, smoothing his voice into a low, reassuring hum to settle her fretting once and for all. “Guardami. They aren’t even dating. Nena simply has some fluffy schoolgirl feelings for him, and even if he does reciprocate, there isn’t anything to worry about until something concrete happens.”

She isn’t you, he thinks gently. His sweet wife, who’s strived tirelessly to offer their daughter all the love and support she never had in her own childhood. Maybe it’s something to be grateful for rather than to playfully scorn, that the boy is eighteen and still retains remnants of his childhood. Maybe his innocence is simply this: a product of a loving family rather than a harsh life that forced him to grow up too fast.

Besides, Everett’s not so sure Vivianne was as adult as she remembers herself to be at eighteen. He has plenty of university polaroids to prove otherwise, when they were young and in love.

Not that the love has gone anywhere, nearly forty years later.

It’s more cozy and comfortable now, old amusement quirking his brow at his wife’s all-too-familiar flush. She’s adorable when she attempts to front haughtiness, all look how I turned out as if any of Everett’s admiration or adoration has faded through the years.

“I like how you turned out, dolcezza,” Everett confesses simply, tugging her closer still so he can see the flecks of slate in her bright, blue irises. She’s as lovely now as she was the day he met her, even if she’s gracefully begun to settle into her age. Brilliant eyes, more laugh lines than frown lines, a few light freckles across her cheeks from time spent out in the sun, all of them quiet marks of a wonderful life spent together.

It’s strange to think there there was a time Vivianne thought she wouldn’t live to see forty. And yet here they are against all odds — through broken engagements and bitter hatred, through five continents and sleepless nights in hospital waiting rooms. Alive, fiercely content, defiant like sunflowers stretching for the light. Alive, happily married to the love of his life.

Everett and Vivianne, in their house of simple dreams. 

He presses his palms against the cool, smooth counter, one on either side of her waist, his wedding band gleaming sleepily in the warm afternoon light.

“Half out of your mind? Why, Signora Craven.” He smiles teasingly as he traps her against the counter. “Are you finally admitting you were madly in love with me?”

Selfishly, she’s rather glad that Cyrus hasn’t fallen too hard for anyone yet. 

Not because she doesn’t wish for him to experience the feeling at some point – but because that would mean two headaches in her skull instead of just the one. Not that she hasn’t had her suspicions about him lately, either. But if she’s asking anything of fate at the minute, it’s that her two children may fall stupidly in love with strangers at slightly different times, so that she may better be equipped to handle it. 

She needn’t admit that to Everett, though. 

“— Or maybe it’s because he’s inherited my sturdy head on his shoulders instead of having adopted your soft-heartedness.” She fires back, arching one brow as if to say have you considered that? “Less susceptible to your infectious sentimentalities than I am.” It’s a breezy challenge as Vivianne gazes up at the man who for all his softness, has still managed to trap her effortlessly against the kitchen counter. Just like he has a hundred times before. Not always with his hands either, but sometimes merely with a knowing look or a measured smile. Sometimes, with only a few trifling words.

Maybe Cyrus isn’t ready to be so easily disarmed when it comes to love, the mother considers hopefully, ignoring every recent shred of evidence to the contrary.

‘... Nine months older, same as you. Cradle robber.’

“Craven, per l'amor del cielo! I did no such thing.” The woman protests, resurfacing from her thoughts with a whack of her fist against Everett’s chest. She isn’t rewarded with the yelp she’d hoped for, but instead an unrepentant grin. I really am losing my touch, Vivianne thinks to herself in chagrin. Not so long ago such a strike would have been enough to steal the air right out of his lungs, wind him up like a toy.

“Besides, you know well the opinions of other means almost nothing to me when it comes to our children.” A staunch, haughty declaration. “ — Except yours, of course.” She amends all too quick, fingers flattening against his chest as she shoots him a sweetly conciliatory smile. “... Yours always count for something.”

But the spousal ceasefire doesn’t last very long.

Mostly because Everett’s playing dirty, she reflects, as his arms go lax at the elbows on either side of her, eliminating some of the space between them. She's certain he knows it too. Her gaze falls reflexively to his lips for half a heartbeat, only to shoot back up to find him still watching her, mischief glinting in his green eyes.

It’s well that he hasn’t yet turned on the stove, else she’s fairly certain they’d be burning the caramelized onions by now. Been there, done that plenty.

‘You’re formidable enough,’ he tells her, even though the former Capobastone feels anything but when he looks at her like that. “Assurdo. You only like how I’ve turned out because I can’t order you around the way I used to,” Vivianne harrumphs, arms tightening over her chest for good measure. It’s only half true. It might no longer take the form of a sharp-shooting political order these days, but Everett remains tuned to her bidding, nonetheless. Add a bat of her eyelashes here, or a tiny moue there and she can get him eating out of her palm if she must. Always the temptation to abuse that power, of course, but most days it’s love that keeps her in line. 

An invigorating reminder; one that brings some consolation to the pesky feeling of being – on days like this one – almost inescapably at his mercy.

‘Why, Signora Craven... Are you finally admitting you were madly in love with me?’

Vivianne’s cheeks flush a little more red as she studies her husband closely. His skin looks warm in the glow of a late-afternoon sun, his expression captivating and full of life. She’s overcome by the sudden want to kiss him; to unfold her arms and wrap them around his waist instead, palms sliding up against the familiar heat between his shoulder blades. Failing that, a kiss to shut him up at least.

She holds her ground. 

(She also sticks her chin up a fraction, in case it gives him any very good ideas.)

“You know very well that’s not what I’m saying, mio caro marito... And that’s not how it happened either.” Vivianne insists, gaze flickering back to his mouth. “If I was half out of my mind that night it was entirely your fault. Bene, that and far too many brain chemicals.” She informs him airily, remembering a tangle of limbs and sheets, and their chests rising and falling in unison. Not the most opportune mental image when ridding herself of a self-conscious flush. Not the most conventional proposal, either.

L’EPILOGO. @lavolumnia​

Vivianne is lovely when she’s passionate, in a sort of brilliant way — like dawn on fresh snow, or sunset on the sea. Her eyes sparkle, her voice catches flame, and every once in a blue moon it brings back memories of early days. A new city each week, a new country each month, one eye on the future and one on the target fastened firmly to their backs as they pushed on, hand in hand, towards the elusive promise of freedom.

Those are the moments that old, tender ache wells up between Everett’s ribs. He nearly forgets, sometimes, that at one point he was more familiar with holding a Beretta in his hand than the delicate neck of a violin. A life spent captaining soldiers in a war, instead of gently but firmly wrangling teenagers into learning their parts before a high school spring concert.

Nearly forgets. It never quite leaves him, but not in the sense of a ghost. In the sense of gratefulness, perhaps. To make lunch on a lazy Sunday afternoon, listening to his wife grouse snobbishly about their seventeen-year-old daughter’s crush, might seem mundane to some. But when Everett remembers what he had, and what he has now, he knows he’s one of the luckiest men alive.

A smile twitches at his lips. He grabs one of the tomatoes Vivianne’s brought in from her vegetable garden, rinsing it under the sink spigot as he listens.

They’re too young. “Mm.” We don’t know his parents. “Mhm.” That he’d even think he’s good enough for our Maddalena! “No one is.” And when he stares at her and thinks she isn’t looking, he looks stupid. Like a stupid deer in the headlights. “Che cosa?”

Everett laughs — a bright, sun-filled thing — unable to hold back his amusement. “Every boy who likes a pretty girl will look like a deer in the headlights. That doesn’t make him stupid, Viv. That makes him a teenager.” He wipes his hands on the dishtowel, then leans against the counter beside her, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “Don’t worry. Nena might be young and act a bit silly when she’s caught feelings, but she’s a sensible girl. She’ll be fine. It’s just a birthday party with school friends, and she’s only a phone call away.”

He quirks a brow, waiting patiently for the mulish suspicion pinching Vivianne’s brow to smooth into begrudging acceptance. She huffs, then makes a non-committal hum in her throat. Everett smiles.

“Besides,” he croons affectionately, tugging her closer by the pocket of her gardening apron. “When we were in university, I used to stare at you like a deer in the headlights when I thought you weren’t looking, and you still proposed to me.”

Proposed, not wedded, if only because it tickles him that after so many years of marriage she still makes a flustered fuss over the question she’d blurted out to him by surprise mere months after they’d left Verona. Sure enough, flint sparks in her eyes. Everett smiles wider, daring her to refute him.

If her children are like the galaxy, filling her life with colour and meaning and wonder (and sometimes chaos, too) — then Everett is still the sun, the epicentral anchor around whom her days are centered. 

After-all, Nena will soon be leaving them for university, and Cyrus – who’s become as much Everett’s son as her own – is finally every bit the successful, independent man he dreamt of being (or thought he already was) in his early twenties. Soon, it’ll be just the two of them again. Just she and Everett in their twilight years, as their children blink in and out of their daily lives like fiery-tailed comets. 

“Bene, he looks like a particularly stupid deer. Hmph... We should ask Cyrus. I bet he would agree with me.” The mother stubbornly defends. So fiercely proud of her son, Vivianne is, even if she does maintain some stoicism whenever he visits, for the sake of not fanning the flames of his already healthy ego. Maybe finally healthy is a better term for it. After almost two decades of rebuilding all the brittle, broken parts of him and making up for the damage she herself had sowed in the two decades before it.

“We know precious little about him... Isn’t he a whole year older? We’ve almost never spoken to him.” Naturally, that wasn’t counting the times he’d dropped Maddalena off at home, or the small talk the boy had made earlier today while waiting for her. Everett had opened the door and engaged him rather pleasantly, while Vivianne had hung further back in the foyer, watching like a hawk. He’d spoken to Everett politely enough, and there was some admitted entertainment to be found when his eyes would dart nervously over her husband’s shoulder only to find hers staring right back.

Not that the conversation had lasted long, anyway. 

No, Maddalena had made sure of that; bolting down the stairs two by two; a long-legged, hair-streaming flash, the moment she’d heard her father’s voice mixing with that of her crush. Funny, Vivianne thinks drily. For a girl who could spend ten hours getting ready, there was nothing quite like the risk of parental embarrassment to get her out the door at the impressive speed of light.

“... Maybe we shouldn’t have let her leave so fast.” She frets now. They had stared at each other in bemusement after that. After their daughter’s blushing goodbyes and the hasty slam of the front door still echoing in their ears. Half an hour later, they’re still discussing it in the kitchen. “Inoltre,” Vivianne sniffs, “If I were still Capobastone of an international syndicate, he wouldn’t have dared make such a hasty escape.”

But Everett’s laugh is a brilliant, carefree sound that never fails to monopolize her attention. Her eyes flicker back to his face, to that wide, easy grin, the amusement glinting in his green eyes and to his salt-and-pepper hair – which she thinks, entirely objectively – has never suited a man so handsomely as it does him. 

Not that his good looks stop her from objecting when he defends the boy’s youth. 

“Please. He’s hardly a teen, I was a full adult at his age.” Her voice drips with scorn as she watches Everett cook, and pulls fresh, if slightly crumpled leaves of parsley out from her apron to smooth lovingly on the counter next to him. “I bet I never looked so silly at eighteen,” Vivianne grumbles, more to herself than to her husband.

‘... When we were in university, I used to stare at you like a deer in the headlights when I thought you weren’t looking, and you still proposed to me.’

“More’s the pity,” Instantly, the threat of a blush begins to pool in her cheeks. Much to her chagrin, it never fails to spring at the reminder of how exactly they ended up hitched. “Look how I turned out.” The woman bites back, though it’s toothless when paired with the fact that she hasn’t made any move to step away from Everett as he abandons his cooking briefly and moves closer to her, curling his fingers around the pocket of her apron. It’s dangerous, that smile. A little deadlier every year for how it chips away at the sustained seconds of her resistance. Already, she feels her insides beginning to soften under his spell. Still, there’s something to be said about facades, even after all these years, so Vivianne lifts her arms to fold them tightly across her chest as he tugs her closer with that devilishly charming expression.