This is the fourth installment of my family history background set and the last. With Gabe I leave the second generation of the Lombardo family and enter the third, and the plots and families become too tangled to summarize. Gabe is a major character in Intermezzo even if he never shows up alive (not saying he won’t) so he belongs here.
Rereading some of the old stuff I wrote about this guy makes miss him. I think I’m going to post 2 short old chapters here. Very old and cranky and rough but right now given the whole world, so what if sims stuff isn’t perfect.
The Lombardo Family
Gabe Lombardo
"The Legendary Gabe" - a title his third generation teenage cousin Autumn Taylor mockingly calls him. He looms within the family, his persona inescapable, his reputation mythologically glamorous. Like most myths, a lot of it is total shit.
Raised by a distracted father after the death of his mother, Gabe learned early how to take care of himself. He was more attached to his Uncle Tony than he was to his own father. When Gabe managed to retrieve his uncle’s real son, he did not adjust well to the loss of that semi-paternal attention. He was young, and the loss was unexpected, and he resented Rafe from the beginning.
Camilla, only a year older, lived in the same neighborhood and they were close from as far back as he could remember. She was virtually his sister. He found her amusing but intimidating, challenging and maddening, and absolutely trustworthy. She might refuse to join him and would mock him, as he would her, but they laughed a lot and she never let him down. From childhood to the day he disappeared Gabe considered her the only friend he ever had.
Apart from Camilla, Gabe had one longstanding relationship, a romantic one with a girl he dated from the time they were young teens, someone he fought Rafe for and eventually won – Amanda. He never broke it off, always returned, knew she loved him and may have loved her as well. When he disappeared he left without saying goodbye, but he knew he was in trouble and he left her with regret.
Intelligent, analytical, cool under pressure, tied in with everything and everybody, physically stunning and charismatic, he could be dangerous to cross. He was also a lot of fun as long as you remembered he was sort of a sociopath. Gabe was a gambler and a con-man and a minor thief. He enjoyed himself immensely when causing chaos or helping Camilla to crash or wreck or solve something difficult.
There was that time though when he rescued a little girl lost on a beach, knowing he was probably asking for trouble, not knowing he would change her whole life, her family’s life, the lives of many people, a whole web of people in many different ways with that one act of mercy. He gave her his knife to hold when she demanded to see a sword since he was a ‘prince’ (a title she bestowed on him, not one he chose, and one that outraged Rafe). Years later she still kept that knife secreted safely in her jewelry box, and remembered him whispering to her when he knew who she was and just before Rafe drove her home: You’re going to need a sharp sword Rayne Stanfield, and I may as well be the one to give it to you. (Throughout her young life she expected and hoped he would return to rescue her from heartbreak, disillusionment and addiction, but he never did, of course.)
Gabe disappeared under mysterious circumstances. He borrowed a lot of money from disreputable people, couldn’t pay it back, and expected them to try to kill him. They might have. Or not. Nobody knows. Just before he vanished he risked his own life to give Rafe information he needed to use against his mother. If he hadn’t taken the time to gather it and send it, his chance of escape would have been much better. He did it for family, Camilla would say, grieving and inconsolable. What Gabe would say nobody knows but revenge was probably part of it. The sheer satisfaction in taking down a far more powerful adversary might have been the better part. It wasn’t for love of Rafe.
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Longer than I wanted it to be. Thank you for going through all this with me! And thank you @thewynd for the years of mercy yourself.
