A/N: I'd like to blame this entire thing on Shannon for giving me the dumb idea of modern era Mabastian in some shady bar in a bad part of town and then blame her even further for encouraging me.

It was funny - being called a bastard had never hurt quite as much as a child as it did when he was a grown man.

Funny, but Bash wasn't laughing.

Hearing voices coming from his father's room, he flattened himself against the wall next to the open doorway, hoping they hadn't seen him just yet.

"-will not have that bastard in my home!" Came the hissing whisper yell of his step mother Catherine. His face betrayed nothing, but it didn't matter; there was no one to have seen the pain in his eyes anyway. Henry was trying to calm her down, but the voices kept rising until the two of them were yelling back and forth, hurling spiteful words at one another like arrows. He'd known his father's marriage wasn't a happy one, but Bash hadn't expected…well…this. Whenever Henry had come to visit his oldest - and very illegitimate son - he'd been nothing but kind and playful, amicable and loving, and he and Bash's mother Diane never looked at one another with anything but love in their eyes. Maybe a little sadness, too, now that he thought of it. But then again, hindsight was always 20/20, wasn't it?

Bash was pulled from his thoughts when he heard something shatter in the room behind him. Briefly he thought of knocking on the doorframe and making his presence known in the hope that it would stop the argument, but when Catherine called him a filthy, poisonous reminder of everything wrong in the world, he stayed his hand. Henry's roar of 'enough!' nearly shook the mansion with its power, and Bash winced, nearly shrinking away at that. He'd never heard his father yell like that before. It was so deafening that he nearly missed the next words out of Henry's mouth, so deadly quiet were they.

"Sebastian is just as much my son as Francis. He stays, Catherine."

"He's a grown man, for Christ's sake, Henry! I'm sure he would be more than capable on his own somewhere. Just because his whore of a mother-"

She was cut off by the sound of a slap.

Bash didn't stick around to hear the rest.

He slunk back to the bedroom Henry had called his, the bedroom that felt nothing like home at all, and shut the door silently behind him. It was warmer in there than the rest of the house - courtesy of its own personal thermostat - and he sighed with something caught between contentment and regret as he fell onto the bed. It was softer than anything he'd ever slept on in his life. Bash hated it. There was no support for his back, the sheets were all the wrong color…it felt nothing like him. Nothing in the room did, and while he supposed he should have just chalked it up to the fact that he'd only been there for less than a week, it was hard not to blame it on the usual residents of the Valois mansion. After all, Sebastian Poitiers - more commonly known as Bash - was no blue blooded Valois. He was just a kid from East Harlem, a bastard product of an affair who didn't belong on the Upper East Side, no matter what his father said. Not for the first time, he wished his mother were here. Then again, if she were, he wouldn't be here either. They'd be back at home in their shitty, run down apartment, she'd be cooking something terrible but filling, he'd be bouncing a tennis ball against the window in his room that opened up to a rusty fire escape, and they'd be happy. And most importantly, Diane would still be alive.

Thinking about the cancer that had taken his mother less than a month ago probably wasn't his smartest idea, but it seemed like the only thing he could think about now. Images of watching his mother waste away on her bed after refusing treatment started to flash through his head so rapidly that if he had been standing, Bash was sure it would have brought him to his knees. He felt like he couldn't breathe, like the walls of the room were closing in on him - never mind the fact that this room was easily ten times the size of the room he'd grown up calling his own. He had to get out of there. Taking a deep breath and struggling to gain his composure, he lurched off the bed with some difficulty, cursing the outlandishly squishy mattress as he did so. His old bed had been hard as a rock, but at least he could hop out of it without looking like he was swimming through molasses.

He was already throwing open his door, determined to make a break for it, take his old beat up car and drive somewhere - anywhere - to get away from this place, when he heard his name being called from the bottom of the stairs.

"Bash! Bash, are you home? There's someone I'd like you to meet!"

It was Francis, his half brother, and Bash stood dumbly in the hallway for ten full seconds as he wondered whether it'd be smarter just to turn around and dive back onto that godforsaken too soft bed. It wasn't that he didn't like Francis - quite the contrary, really; he enjoyed his brother's company more than he had initially expected to - but the idea of meeting anyone in the state he was sounded like an explosion waiting to happen. So he continued to stand there, refusing to move. Maybe if he didn't move, no one would remember he existed. He could spend the rest of his life in that hallway. But then Francis called his name again, a little more hopefully this time, and Bash could just see the pleading look in his eyes. "Fuck," he muttered under his breath, sighing heavily and heading down the stairs.

It was funny how he'd only been a big brother for five days, yet he was taking his job as seriously as a two year old charged with the task. He barely even knew Francis, for all the bonding the blonde had tried to get in during the past few days, and yet here he was, already at the kid's beck and call, with an unwillingness to let him down. Truly, he was royally fucked.

"What is it?" He drawled, heading down the stairs with a laziness that only a curving double staircase could inspire. His boots echoed in the damn entryway, and not for the first time, Bash found himself wondering just how much space three - four, his mind reminded him, there were four residents of the house now - people needed. It all seemed a little excessive, if you asked him. No one ever asked him, of course, but it didn't hurt to think it.

"Finally," Francis was calling, pulling him out of his thoughts as he turned yet another corner of the staircase, putting the top of his half brother's head into view. "I was beginning to think you'd gotten lost up there."

"It's a lot of house to get lost in, brother," he shot back, a mild smile settling onto his lips and joviality entering his tone. "You can't tell me you've never gotten lost in here, can you?"

"I guess not," Francis admitted with a self depreciating smile right as Bash stepped off the stairs. Smiling at his brother though the motion didn't quite reach his eyes - it never did these days anyway - he inclined his head in victory.

"My point exactly," he informed Francis, turning slightly to get a look at whoever it was his little brother was insisting on introducing him to.
And that, it turned out, was the worst mistake of his life.

The girl in question was a slight brunette, tiny by his standards, with an impossibly small waist and equally as impossibly large eyes. She looked like a doe standing there in the marble tiled entryway, some sort of pretty sundress on that he found - somewhere in the back of his mind - matched the color of his eyes almost exactly. The same color as Francis' eyes, too, but his younger brother was the last thing on his mind as he stared at the beautiful girl in front of him. She looked the way sunshine felt, and the moment their eyes met, Bash knew he was hopelessly and utterly lost.

"Mary, this is my brother, Sebastian," Francis said. Bash was dimly aware that the tone Francis was using implied the two of them had spoken of him before. He was even more aware that he didn't quite care what it was his brother was saying after he'd uttered the girl's name. Mary. "Bash, this is Mary Stuart, my girlfriend," he finished.

And just like that, his world stopped spinning.

In retrospect, he should have expected that. After all, the rug had been pulled out from under him so many times in the past twenty three years of his life that Bash was far more accustomed to being let down at this point than anything else. So he grit his teeth, adopted yet another mild smile, and reached forward to extend his hand to Mary. She took it with a gentle touch, but when she shook his hand, her grip was firm and unyielding. He liked that so much more than he should have, but he shook her hand all the same.

"It's lovely to meet you, Sebastian. Francis has told me so much about you," she said with a smile. He found himself envying the way it reached her eyes, and the little dimples in her cheeks that touched her skin in a way he couldn't. In the same train of thought, he found himself wondering when he'd become so sentimental.

"My stepmother calls me Sebastian," he told her, glad that his voice maintained its normal smooth and trifling tone. "The people I like call me Bash."

Mary blinked at him twice in succession before another smile broke out on her face. "Bash it is, then."

Heaven help him, he realized suddenly as he let go of her hand with his own quick quirk of his lips. He was absolutely done for.