Trail of the Angels.
I forgot to mention yesterday, but this piece is a Prologue, three chapters and an Epilogue. I've finished everything except the epilogue so that's the only part people might have to wait for! Chapter length does, however, fluctuate quite a bit.
Unrequited
Chapter 1
The thing that bugs Romano is that he should know better. It's been over two thousand years but he still makes exactly the same mistakes and carries the exact same burdens with him.
It was one of the blessings of being a child for so long, actually, because it wasn't the same kind of affliction. He'd wanted to be friends, he'd wanted to be stronger, he'd wanted them to get along the way they had before their grandfather had died.
And he'd gone about it in shitty ways even before Spain had showed up on his shores. Princes with unsavoury motives, treaties he'd agreed to in a flash only to realize he couldn't uphold them, mandates from the church, invasions from other nations, his complete inability to speak without shoving his foot in his god-damned mouth around her.
He knew why she hated him. He knows why she still hates him, why she'll do anything at all to undermine and embarrass him. He gets it.
They were married once and it was everything and nothing he'd ever wanted. They'd married once their faces had changed to reflect French wars and the process of industrialization, because their king had decided he wanted his two kingdoms joined to one throne by marriage instead of circling each other as siblings: peninsula and island, Naples and Sicily.
They'd almost made it work, Romano had almost convinced Sicily to trust him, almost showed her that he wasn't as terrible as all of his faults implied. He'd very nearly proved himself to her, almost been allowed to take her hand and hold her to him and ask, plead, beg her: "Love me, just a little bit."
Almost, but then the Unification wars started up again and… well, of course she'd betrayed him. Of course her men had refused to fight off a northern invasion: it wasn't like she'd ever wanted to stand that close to him in the first place. If the technology every comes along to physically move her island, Sicily will drop herself in the middle of the Pacific just to get away from him…
It's only thanks to basic survival instincts that they didn't both die when the Italian Kingdom was founded. A lot of their family members died: Genoa, Lombardy, Tuscany, Sardinia… Veneziano would have destroyed Naples and Sicily if given the chance, not because his little brother is especially cruel, but because that's just what it means to consolidate a kingdom.
Romano still isn't sure, even over a hundred and fifty years after the fact, why he fought so hard to stay alive. Maybe it was because his Roman blood wouldn't surrender, or maybe he'd kept fighting because he'd known what would happen to Sicily if every one of her allies was dead, and what Veneziano would have done if Romano hadn't risen up as a tactical, patriotic equal to match him and maintain southern identity.
He doesn't like thinking about it.
He hated those decades between Unification and the first world war, those years where his ex-wife had known how much she owed him and Romano himself had been so bitter and hurt over that first betrayal to deal with her. She'd exiled herself to the countryside on her island, far away from her cities and his coastline, and stayed there in shame and silence for years.
He hadn't seen her again until the war- the Great War, the one that changed everything. The one that gave him a gun and a trench and put her under a red cross to provide relief and aid to their soldiers as they died. They hadn't even fought in his territory: the lines had all been carved across Veneziano and Austria, Germany and Switzerland and Hungary bleeding out while the Balkans were set on fire and Belgium and France breathed rot and famine. The fighting hadn't even taken place in South Italy, but Romano can't remember a time before that where his body had hurt so much…
"Help me, just a little bit…" He'd begged, bullet-riddled with limbs rotting off. They'd found him half-buried in the mud three days after a failed charge somewhere. She'd been at the camp where he was taken, the place where he was denied morphine because there were dying men who needed it more and an immortal nation could just heal in his own shit and vomit.
So her argument had been that her immortal hands were better off making sure national flesh was cleaned and not forced to fuse with the filth covering exposed bones and rotten skin. No painkillers, but her own alcohol poured past his mutilated lips to confuse his mind and give him sleep. Her harsh voice to cover the cries and screams of the dead and dying, the sweetness of her black arabesque hair and the gentle wind of fast Latin verse to mask the stench of his body purging itself of every vile and decrepit sign of war.
He'd cried and he'd wailed for her like a child for days until it was almost over and his body tried to stand. She didn't leave him, wouldn't waver from his side despite how she'd fought a century earlier to stay away from him. And God he'd loved her so much for it…
Romano had courted her after the war, love-sick and earnest. Children from all over his territories left him in waves of emigrants searching for America- but she was part of him too, she'd felt his pain too. So she'd let him bring her flowers and she made a habit of coming to Rome to meet with North and South in their house.
Sometimes, when Romano doesn't want to think about her, he remembers the cheap bread she used to make during the Depression with birdseeds and a little bit of sand in the dough to make it heavier in the stomach. When he found himself in uniform again under their Boss's command, he still remembers the tattered cotton scarf with pink roses stitched on the side that would appear in a messenger's hands.
The faded colours wrapped around small loaves of fresh bread he'd had to fight Veneziano off to keep his brother from eating, the same handkerchief he returned every time- but only after finding something, anything, worth putting inside. A box of chocolates, a bottle of perfume, one time a string of pearls he scrimped for a month on his officer's salary to afford.
And God he'dloved her…
But he'd been such a fool to think that maybe, that time, he'd done it right. Believing that maybe she'd finally loved him too…
Because maybe she'd just been scared of what their boss would have done to her without him for protection. The way he'd raged against the Axis when her island was captured by the Allies had only broken him a little more when he defected with Veneziano's blood on his hands. He'd done it for her and-
And, of course when Canada told him in such an earnest way that he never would have harmed Sicily the way England had threatened, that had calmed Romano down. But…
But the way he'd said "Without her help the whole Italian Campaign would have stalled in North Africa, we owe her everything." That…
Just that… idea… The information that had passed along and the shadow it cast on everything; the bitterness of bread leavened with dirt, the faulty munitions from Sicilian factories. So many visits to Rome, idle conversation about the military, the Axis, the soldiers…
The way he'd fallen for it all over again: her attack and capture dragging him to the invader's side of another war.
Romano had taken the first boat across the straight to get himself off of her island. He hadn't even stayed to see her for more than one brief encounter in the harbour before he left. He kept himself out of the meetings and board-rooms: he spent the rest of the war in the field crippling the Nazis with Partisan efforts. He won his brother back instead and he'd begged Veneziano for forgiveness.
Begged, and begged even when Veneziano told him how much he wished he'd been strong enough that they could have left the Axis together…
He didn't like thinking about it. He still doesn't like thinking about it; a chain of tricks and betrayals spanning centuries and hurting him every time. He hates it so much because Romano should fucking know better but he just keeps falling for it.
Even when he sees Spain at meetings and conferences, someone he can just go away with for a few hours or a few days and not have to think about his politics or policies back home. It's escapism to go after someone who lives across the continent and with whom his history isn't that much better in some ways, but it's still a lot less painful.
He hates thinking about this, he hates thinking about her. Being reminded of the stupidity and humiliation, the embarrassment of being out done over and over again because of the same set of charms and lies.
The way she lets her green eyes tear up when he tries to get away from her for his own good, or when she pulls her arms around herself and just seems to shrink and reduce herself to a sorry, apologetic shadow that just wants his forgiveness when he's mad at her. The way she knows just how to enter a room so all eyes are drawn to her, bold strides that beat any soldier's march while wrapped in silk and lace like a true Mediterranean queen. A queen he's tried again and again to make his own, but it just won't work…
And he loves her…
"Attention passengers, the captain has turned on the fasten seat-belt sign.Please return to your seats as we make our approach into Palermo International Airport."
But that doesn't mean she loves him too.
The actual flight takes no more than eighty minutes: Rome to Palermo. He spends more time in the airports themselves than on the actual plane. He could take a taxi but rents a car instead from the airport down into the proper city of Palermo, navigating roads he half-remembers to find the regional government headquarters.
"Mr. South Italy!" He's recognized immediately despite not having been here in so long, ushered through doors where officials shake his hand and updates he doesn't need are given about the government's problems and plans for the future, following up on things discussed in Rome or via telephone and e-mail from Romano's desk to here. He listens because he should, and lingers only because he understands that the woman he's looking for isn't at work today.
Going to her city residence leaves him sitting in the car a block away from the curving side-street that can only be taken on foot. Engine off, sunlight beating on the hood and roof, Romano just sits there with his hands sitting on the wheel and stares blankly at the crest in the middle of the steering column, asking himself what the fuck he's even doing on this island.
He knows better.
He knows better, and yet he pops open the door and climbs out in his light grey suit with sunglasses resting in his dark hair. His palms are sweaty and throat tight around every breath as he cuts across the street and vanishes down uneven cobbles and shallow stairs slathered with globs of grey asphalt. He almost wants to trip and fall his way down the hill, turning between a building plastered in red clay and a white-walled barber shop that was a bakery in another lifetime.
The streets get tighter and wind a little more, old lichen and moss on buildings blooming into bushes in the gutter because this city is old enough to be reclaimed- but it won't be because the people still scurry and trample over ancient streets just going about their day. When Romano comes to a high stone wall that's so old every inch of plaster has fallen off and exposed the rounded stones once lifted by a child's hand to place them, he knows he's here.
The black iron gate still has no lock, but the sunken step-stones have vanished under a blanket of cement that cuts across the pebbled ground and twists around a fragile looking lemon tree, fronds and flowers are blooming wildly in their beds and spreading over them, filling the tight little garden with fresh floral scents before South Italy finds the brown door with its flaking white paint. He stops again to look at the bevelled edges and the iron handle with a modern lock set in the middle, hesitantly running his fingertips down the worn, warped metal before pulling back and making a fist.
He should leave, but instead he stands firm and he knocks three times.
And his reward is the awkward, painful silence of an empty house.
He could knock again, maybe even try climbing up a little to see through the crooked window half a story up, but it won't make a difference. She wasn't at work and she isn't home, or if she is home then she'll probably just take one look at his face and slam the door again...
"Hello?"
He wants it to be her voice but it's not; it's young and it's male and when Romano turns around there's a boy maybe twenty years old. His dark hair is tossed to one side because it's long enough for the awkward part, clothes neat and trim with flashy looking white running shoes under black skinny jeans with a printed yellow shirt. Two days worth of black beard on his narrow chin make him look like someone who might be trying a little too hard to mimic the magazine covers, but he leans comfortably on the open iron gate and peers around the tree at Romano, so the nation steps a little closer in the tiny garden to hear him out.
"And you are?"
"One of the neighbours- you're looking for Signorina Vargas?" It's a curse for them to share the same human surname, because it will always make him think of things Romano knows better than to dwell on. "She's out of town for the week, didn't you know?"
"I just arrived from Rome this morning." And he can see it, the sense of curiosity that comes up through green Sicilian eyes and the arrogant tilt of a long face supported by a slender neck. Romano doesn't need some young punk whose age matches his on the outside acting like he knows what's going on on the inside. "I'll be on my way then, thank you."
But he knows it looks bad, showing up unannounced from the capital looking for someone who is away from home. And for all Romano knows the man's suspicion could be generated as much from Sicily's natural distrust for him as from the fact that he's twenty-something and just caught a stranger snooping outside his beautiful young neighbour's house.
But there's no further conflict; Romano leaves the house and neighbourhood without another word, returning to his car where...
He's restless because he can feel the pain again, that sour, twisting sensation in his lungs that he tries to smother with a deep breath of thick smoke from a cigarette. She's not actually avoiding him: she didn't know he was coming and his timing is just shitty as usual.
But he smokes the first cigarette quickly next to his car, letting the sun beat down on his shoulders and head without buckling in the heat. He smokes another one on the short walk to a small deli, picking up a sandwich and something to drink before choosing to eat back in the vehicle instead of at one of the sunny tables.
A third cigarette and the resolve to drive to a place he had no business being finally calm the pain down just enough to let him function. He has no honest idea where she's gone off to: maybe to visit France or Tunisia or Cyprus, maybe she's enjoying herself at Morocco's house, he just doesn't know. But if he's on her island without her then Romano has every right to torture himself a little more in the hopes that it'll beat down this crushing urge to hurt himself all over again.
So he drives faster than he should along highway roads too narrow and winding for his speed, handling the machine aggressively to stop his hands from shaking. Cutting across the island from north-west to south and central takes the rest of his day, so it's getting on in the evening when he reaches a sleepy little village out in an oasis of farmland and rolling hills yellowed by the summer sun. His destination is no more than ten minutes away from the village, but Romano makes himself stop here for the night: the house where he's going will be empty, and driving there will mean driving back to town to find a bed and food.
Really though, he just wants the bed at the little hotel where he checks in. South Italy doesn't even look at the Bed-and-Breakfast's menu, just cracks open the suite window and smokes another two cigarettes, telling himself he doesn't know this village or remember these hills.
It's a long, quiet evening that settles into a restless and tormenting night. He wakes up three times with the memory of her slender, delicate form enveloped in his arms under summer blankets, and finds tears scratching his cheeks when the lingering touch of full lips is just an illusion brought on by exhaustion two hundred years strong.
Dawn is the trigger that finally lets Romano climb out of bed for more than just a brief smoke by the window. The shower washes away more than just sweat, and he angles the stiff, rusting nozzle down to drum tepid water over his shoulders and back, leaning heavily on the shower wall and just letting the water hit him.
He turns the temperature down progressively colder trying to numb away the trembles and shakes invading him from the inside.
When his mind remembers a frantic rainstorm and screaming through the cold wind he jams it all the way to steaming hot and nearly scalds his back.
He just sit there with the water off, naked and dripping and just crumpled on the tile basin with his hands in his wet hair. He doesn't know what he's waiting for, but he waits while his ears ring in the quiet and his skin air-dries in the closed space. Whatever wants to make its escape from him doesn't rise to the challenge though, and once his skin has faded from hot to cold to damp and almost-dry, South Italy regains the strength to stand and slowly dress himself.
He's lost his nerve from last night. Eating is impossible and once he's presentable and in his car Lovino needs another ten minutes to just stare at the dashboard without moving. The engine starts without a problem and he drives through the village, only to stop before he's even left and grip the wheel so hard his hands hurt: north to take him back to Palermo, south to carry him off to his destination.
He goes south and his nerves betray him a third time when anxiety almost twists the car off the road. He has to stop again, get out, and just walk back and forth along the narrow gravel lane.
At one point Romano just falls off the road all together, and he walks. He walks and he refuses to trample the vegetable fields he flounders across, walking for at least an hour until his shoes are caked in mud and the black earth is creeping up to his knees. He just keeps walking under hot sun and over moist soil, horse-shit and chemical fertilizers stinging his nose and polluting his lungs like the cigarettes he can't smoke because his lighter is back in the car.
He just keeps going and prays something in him will break, because he's trampling south and only stops when he runs out of land. He's left on a high hill with a stone wall at the edge of the field, and looking down there's rolling terrain and broken country roads until the Mediterranean's blue face rolls up to meet Sicily's beaches and grottos.
Even the sea can kiss her the way he...
'Let it out...' He'll be healthier for it once it's over with, 'Just... get it...' If it would just leave him alone; the pain that creeps up from inside him when it shouldn't. Pain he should be free of because he has no reason to feel this awful about something that should have been settled years ago. Why does it still hurt? Why won't it go away?
Standing here looking down at the sea should release him, or at the very least it should make him turn around and wallow through the mud and grass to find his car again and a change of shoes and pants. But there is no release, and it takes Romano a long, long time to make himself move again.
A ten minute drive takes almost three hours to complete, two for the walking and one for all the stops and starts along the way. Maybe it even takes another one on top for the effort it takes to toss his soiled clothes in a plastic bag in the back seat. In just blue jeans and a white tee-shirt now Romano makes the car roll the final unwilling turns before he finds his destination.
The almond trees tell him he's in the right place, because when the land falls away on one side of the road and the car hugs the curve of the land, he recognizes the wild groves and looks up at the soft, pale green leaves of olive trees growing higher up the slope. When he comes to the white stone wall at the end of the land and the open gate, the car moves under the barricade smoothly. He tells himself he doesn't remember when or how the iron bars were removed back during the liberation...
The house itself is two stories of rose plaster and white edges, red tiles capping the roof of the tall square body and its flanking wings on the east and west sides, like a lady's hands drawn up to try and cover her face. The stone steps that lead up to the main entrance from the courtyard he drives through now are dusty and even from here as he parks he can see the moss growing on their unkempt sides.
Decades ago, centuries maybe, there was a large trellis spanning the steps and running up to the main door for shade in summer. Now there are only fallen beams and gnarled branches turning to dust as summers and winters bleach the vibrant vines white and leave them like chalk lines at a crime scene.
Leaving the car and his luggage behind, Romano looks around at the sealed mouth of the well in the middle of the courtyard, and back at the wall he's just driven under with so many large cracks breaking through it from minor earthquakes and a complete lack of care.
The stables still stand, but there are no horses and the roof, again, from where he's standing he can see where the red tiles have folded in and collapsed under their own weight.
Stepping over gravel and broken tile, Romano moves slowly up the shallow steps, stopping when he notices how a path has been cleared through the worst of the trellis' debris, and recently too if the way the wooden beams are still piled up in defiance of the breeze are any indication. Looking up at the house however, signs are dim:
Cracked and broken windows, the shadow of tattered curtains swaying behind them as the sun hides its bashful face behind a sudden string of clouds. What had once done its very best to be a home is now abandoned and in ruin, and the reality of it is so fitting that South Italy finds himself stranded in the middle of it.
It's like an echo of everything he's been thinking about and feeling for these last several months, and it hurts him.
Because he built that trellis.
And he trained and worked those horses.
And he defended that gate... once... a long time ago.
He should have known better than to come to a place like this, and now that he's here South Italy just wants to run back home. He and his foolish memories aren't welcome here.
"Lovino?"
At least... that's what he needs to keep telling himself.
"S-Stay there! I'll be right down."
Comment? See you guys tomorrow with the next installment!
