100Lost In Paradise, Stronger than Ever.
Frickin' failed to write something happy again. AGAIN. For those of you coming from Tumblr: I give you the Break-Up Fic.
The Gay Brother
Car Keys and Caramel
"I'll drive."
Feliciano loved Ludwig. No, really he did. He loved his partner's hands and the way he used them to fix and build things, taking apart engines and shaping wooden pieces for all kinds of household and industrial projects. He loved the way Ludwig's forehead would crease when he was confounded by blue-prints and that little spark in his baby-blue eyes when something stirred his temper was completely endearing. Feliciano loved Ludwig, but it was really, really hard to remember that sometimes.
"No."
Like right now.
"Why not?"
In the parking lot.
"Because you're tired."
Standing on the driver's side of Feliciano's car.
"I'm fine." He insisted, and inside Feliciano hated the wooden sound in his own voice. Ludwig was standing there in the dark, his boyfriend holding the car keys in one of those beloved hands where he'd just pulled them out of his pocket. Feliciano'd given them to him so he could take the car to work that morning. They weren't Ludwig's.
"You're upset." All of Feliciano's keys were there, the whole ring.
"Give me the keys." He wanted them back.
"Get in the car." They were his.
Furious in his own way, Feliciano did what his boyfriend said and climbed into the passenger side seat.
He didn't know how to handle fury, he wasn't used to it. It was like someone had force-fed him flour and milk so his stomach was rolling over itself trying to cope, an intense buzzing prickling his scalp and drowning out his thoughts.
Feliciano didn't like this feeling, because usually he didn't get angry at all. He was more the type to hold something in until it came out through tears and yelling, or hole himself up in the garage they'd converted into a workshop in their Berlin house. He'd paint when he was angry, or sculpt, or go for a really, really, really brisk walk with one of Ludwig's dogs for a few hours. But this time he'd gone right past anger and into complete fury, so as they drove away from the train station the couple endured intense, painful silence all the way.
Feliciano bit his tongue four times, trying not to demand that Ludwig pull over and give him back his keys.
"Well," no, Ludwig. No talking, not right now. "Now that that's settled," Settled? What was settled? What part of tonight was 'settled'? "At least we can go home and just enjoy a quiet evening."
Feliciano couldn't remember the last time he'd wanted to punch another man so hard. The drive behind the thought was frightening and he curled his hand in front of his lips trying to keep his fingers from lashing out. He bit one knuckle and tried to keep his lover from noticing it. He was ashamed of the anger, but the shame just fed that pitching heat in his gut.
"I know you're mad, but you'll feel better in the morning."
How about no?
Feliciano bit his tongue and he bit it hard until the car pulled up in the drive-way outside their home. They lived a fair ways from the centre of Berlin, so they both had to drive a ways to get to work: Ludwig to various job-sites around the city where his company placed him each week, Feliciano to the nearest train station so he could get down to the National Art Gallery every morning. They were in Feliciano's car because Ludwig's was in the shop for serious repairs: he'd damaged the driver's side door yesterday.
The silence persisted until Ludwig turned off the engine and extracted the keys, and then Feliciano spoke. He shifted his weight in his seat too; arms crossed over his chest as if to highlight the fact that he hadn't buckled his seat-belt before they left. He glanced at his wrist-watch and let the steady German words flow.
"We just left my brother at a train station at ten-thirty at night," a brother Feliciano hadn't seen in half a year, "he arrived less than two days ago, and you think I'm going to feel better in the morning." He was a brother Feliciano'd had to plead and beg with for over a month before he agreed to come all this way in the first place. And he'd just sent him back.
"I think once you've slept on it and calmed down, you'll recognize that I couldn't just let that kind of behaviour slide." He refused to answer that statement, if only because Feliciano couldn't think fast enough around the drone in his head to come up with one. "If your brother wants to visit us again, then he can conduct himself properly and show his host due respect."
"I was his host." Host, he clung to that word. The host was the person who offered the invitation, who prepared the guest room, who bought the extra groceries and set the additional spot at the table. The host was not the one who threw a fit over conduct and a mess in the kitchen and then dumped his guest on a train platform in the middle of a foreign city.
"And when he wasn't insulting me, he was yelling at you." Ludwig was just sitting there with the keys in his lap, Feliciano keeping his arms folded tight so he didn't lunge for them. "That's not acceptable."
"I have a big family. We yell." A big family Feliciano had not seen in a very, very long time. And now as soon as Lovino got home, and as soon as he could sit down with grandpa or any of their family, he'd be brimming with new, terrible stories about the German Bastard who had stolen one their brother away. Feliciano could expect to hear back from at least one of his uncles sometime tomorrow, and it would be a fun hour-and-a-half of the beloved father-figure-of-choice criticizing his choices, lamenting his lifestyle, yelling about how much Feli had forgotten about family loyalty, and ultimately begging him to please consider moving back to Italy.
After three years in Berlin, his family was still convinced his bags were packed and he just hadn't told them yet. After three years in Berlin his lover was still hell-bent on making defending him against the family so much harder than it had to be.
"Feli..." Augh- and! And the way he just had to sigh like that, with the disappointment and the scolding and the- "I know you're family's important to you, but you have to be reasonable-"
"Four days," he interrupted, and Feliciano didn't care that he almost never, ever, got up the nerve to cut someone off like that, least of all Ludwig. It was just so rude and disrespectful that he- "I asked you for four days, that's all I wanted. I didn't want you to spend any money, I didn't want a big party, I didn't want you to take any time off work- I didn't even mind that you actually found work yesterday so you wouldn't have to go with me and pick him up. On a Sunday!"
"I knew you were mad about that." Ludwig's fingers were drumming over his keys.
"No!" The drumming caused such a loud jangle that Feliciano willed the noise in his head to get louder and drown it out. "I'm mad that I asked you for four days and you barely gave me two. I'm mad because-"
"You're being irrational-"
"I'm being serious!" Oh god, he was shouting- "I just put my older brother on a midnight train back to Rome! He's only person who can keep me in the family, and I just threw him out!" No, why was he shouting? "Who were you to make that decision? Why!" That voice wasn't his, it didn't sound like him, but there it was with all of his fears and anxiety, screaming them at the person who was making him so. damn. mad.
"You haven't been back to Italy in years," Ludwig snapped back, feeding the rage. "You can't tell me that all of the sudden you-"
"Because the last time I went, I shamed them!" Oh, he didn't even want to think about it. The engagement rings, the crying in the street. He didn't want to rememberthe yelling, and the blaming, and the burnt photographs, and the hundred other things that he didn't have the strength to cry about or wallow in right now. He just had this anger: he had all of this rage. "So yes, he had a lot to say, and yes he's a bit of a dick, Ludwig, but-"
"I'm not going to just let someone come into my house and scream at you about his god!"
"Our house and my God!" Two corrections and another topic they never talked about, because as soon as he said it Ludwig rolled his eyes. As soon as he mentioned one of the things he wasn't allowed to talk about, Ludwig dismissed him.
"Whatever." The taller man grunted, popping open the car door and sticking one leg out on the asphalt. "I'm going to bed."
"Give me back my keys." Ludwig stopped, his body twisted half-way out the driver's side door. He craned his neck around and looked back at Feliciano, who held one hand out expectantly and kept the other clenched tight to his chest. The keys were hanging by his boyfriend's thick, calloused thumb, the cut steel glinting in the dim orange light of the street lamp hanging at the end of their drive-way.
Without a word, Ludwig finished getting out of the car, wrapped the keys up in his long fingers, shut the door, and walked away.
And Feliciano sat there hating him.
Ludwig loved Feliciano. No, he really did. He loved the way he always tilted his head just-so to the side when he was thinking, the way his little pink tongue would poke out from between his soft lips when he was looking for words. He was always moving, always animated, and while that could be frustrating sometimes Ludwig chose to love it instead. His favourite thing to say was that if Feliciano wanted to, he could dance across a rainy street and dodge every drop. He loved the sound of his partner's laugh.
But sometimes, Ludwig just wanted Feliciano to grow up.
Ludwig didn't like sleeping in an empty bed. As a child he'd usually shared one with Gilbert for one reason or another, but he'd forced himself to get over it when his brother enlisted in the army and Ludwig had to adjust. But he still didn't like sleeping completely alone, and sometimes if no one was there he'd wake up as soon as his back or his shoulder touched a cold patch on the mattress or blankets.
That was what woke him up before his 6 AM alarm on Tuesday: the bed was cold. Feliciano's pillow was undisturbed next to him, his lover hadn't even bothered to untuck the sheets so Ludwig could pretend he'd at least tried coming to bed after their little spat. It was frustrating, and even when he briefly considered making an apology, the frustration crushed it and left him tense and bitter between the cold sheets.
The first thing he did was roll over and check his bed-side drawer. Feliciano's keys were still there, and despite himself Ludwig felt validated. Feliciano had listened to him, had obeyed him, and he acknowledged that Ludwig had been right all along. Hah.
With those thoughts in mind, he showered and shaved and dressed himself for work without turning on his alarm. There were blue-prints in his briefcase from last night but he didn't need to look over them. His work as a civil engineer was extremely important to him and his household, but he could afford to track down his sulking lover before driving downtown.
"Uh, hey, dude..." But he was still checking something work-related in his phone when Gilbert caught his attention from the bedroom door. Ludwig was surprised to see his older brother up and wandering around this early in the morning, but in a wife-beater and shorts, hair unbrushed and wearing some obvious scruff, Gilbert hardly qualified as 'awake'. "You gotta talk to yer wife." Huh?
"What's he doing?" Feliciano'd probably spent the night downstairs on the couch, or in the spare bedroom where Lovino had been staying. Ludwig slipped the phone into his jacket pocket and reached for his briefcase, Gilbert watching with a yawn and a shrug.
"Makin' a shit load a noise in the kitchen." A tantrum? Really? "Ain' it his birthday or somethin'?"
"Today, yes." Ludwig huffed, not impressed with Gilbert's report of Feliciano's antics. He didn't have much else to say though and Gilbert didn't seem interested. The younger brother made sure to grab the keys from that little drawer before quickly taking the stairs down to the main level.
He could hear the noise, but the first thing Ludwig could smell was burnt caramel and red wine. The dining room table was still set from last night, but someone had picked up the wine bottle that had dropped off the top and spilled its contents across the tile floor. The sticky mess was still sitting there like blood at a crime scene, following the slight tilt of the house and rolling back towards the kitchen.
The half-eaten piece of bread Feliciano's brother had been stuffing his face with was still on one of the plates, and Ludwig assumed Gilbert was responsible for the fact that the pasta had been left uncovered all night. He'd smelled crab last night, so something on the table had probably spoiled by now.
Burnt caramel had triggered things last night, it had been the spark. Ludwig had been struggling to hold a semi-civil conversation with Feliciano's older brother, the two of them fighting to keep on topics they could both discuss. That meant business: Lovino had inherited the restaurant their grandfather had opened up back in the fifties, Ludwig was climbing the ranks of the small company he worked for.
They didn't talk politics (Ludwig wouldn't say it, but he was convinced the Vargas' were closet-Fascists), or weather (Lovino hated the cold, Ludwig hated the heat), or sports (Italy versus Germany, enough said), or pets (Lovino had a cat, Ludwig loved his dogs). Cars were an alright alternative, but only if Feliciano was there to mediate, which he hadn't been. Family and religion were so far down the list of acceptable topics that they didn't even get a spot, so for an hour they'd awkwardly clung to the one topic they had only five minutes of content for.
Ludwig couldn't even remember how it had all blown up. He just knew that one of the dozens of things cooking in the kitchen had been a sauce-pan filled with caramel, and that the caramel was for something Lovino had wanted to make for today, so they'd started with it yesterday. One of them had forgotten to turn the heat off, or Feliciano had simply stopped paying attention to it, and suddenly it was a charred mess of three-hundred-degree sugar spewing smoke and trying to eat through the pan.
The brothers had flung themselves into full, fast Italian as soon as Lovino and Ludwig stormed into the kitchen to answer the fire-alarm. He couldn't understand the language well enough to translate it, but Ludwig understood when Lovino burnt himself that he turned, swearing, on his brother. He also knew the Italian word for 'faggot', and that was when Ludwig snapped.
He refused to apologize for defending what was his. He refused to feel bad about doing the right thing.
"Feliciano?" Now if only his boyfriend would grow up and stop sulking about it.
Ludwig already knew he'd taken the day off from the gallery, so seeing Feliciano in the same clothes from yesterday and obviously not ready to leave the house was not a surprise. His brown jacket had been slung over one of the stools hovering around the kitchen's island unit, blue shirtsleeves rolled up over his elbows and hands lost under suds and hot water at the sink. Ludwig knew even without approaching that his boyfriend was holding the infamous caramel pan and scrubbing the copper like a fiend, trying to save it, but there were plenty of signs to suggest that Feliciano wasn't calm yet.
Like the dish of potatoes that had been up-ended onto the stone floor: Ludwig was certain they'd still been on the counter after they came home last night. There was also no reason for his beer bottles to be standing empty next to the sink, their labels peeled off and soap suds still slipping down their glass sides. Those had been full before he'd gone to bed, and not even Gilbert would have had all six in one go. One of the little planters Feliciano used to grow fresh herbs was also broken on the counter next to him, the hook that had suspended it from the ceiling ripped right out of the plaster.
Petulant.
"Feliciano-"
"There's no breakfast, buy something." His boyfriend's quick, softly-accented words were unexpectedly harsh and Ludwig flinched despite himself. If he kept scrubbing like that he'd wear a hole straight through the pan.
"I'll just fry an egg-" Feliciano bashed the copper against the bottom of the sink, splashing soap and hot water over the counter before he set his hands on the fake stone and just leaned on it, head down for a moment before he looked up out the window into their garden. "Or not..."
The silence was deep and awkward. The March sunlight wasn't warming anything up, white light washing over the marbled counter-tops and the cherry-wood finish on the cabinets. The light shone over his hands and Ludwig wondered when Feliciano's skin had stopped glowing. His long fingers looked bent and crooked on the counter, the soap washing away the bronze tint his corded arms had always worn, like it had just been an illusion.
Almost every surface in the kitchen had something or other stuck to it from last night, flour from pasta and pastries, puddles of salted water, carrot tops, potato skins, butter smears, spilled pepper, etc. Feliciano was an amazing cook, but he didn't know how to leave the kitchen looking like anything short of a disaster.
Despite his temper, he might as well give it a go. Ludwig tried one last time to extend an olive branch to his over-sensitive lover.
"I was going to make a reservation for two tonight. I know that you-"
Without listening, Feliciano stepped away from the sink and went straight to the back door, bypassing the stairs that led down to Gilbert's basement suite and ignoring the happy German Shepherd that was waiting to greet the Italian. He wrenched the door open and vanished outside without a word, and Ludwig felt his patience wearing thin. He could either fix up his breakfast and get to work on time, or deal with his partner's little tantrum now and ruin the rest of his day.
He chose the wiser path: Ludwig went to work.
Okay! Just some information for you guys regarding updates.
The Break-up Fic is a very long beast, but I've only written a shameful four chapters of it (working on number five when I posted this). It is also jam-packed with headcanons that break a lot of AU rules about Feli and Ludwig.
I've no idea what a proper update schedule would look like, especially since I just started my ESL Practicum and that takes priority over all fan fiction. But, Practicum is only 2-3 weeks, then I get my certification and life is wonderful. I'm thinking 1 update a week so I'll have time for this and my HetaOni projects, but we'll see. I'll do my best!
And you, you will review!
