Slut Like You, True Love, Whole P!nk playlist, then Family Portrait.

Romano is a character plagued by low self-esteem in the canon, so baby has some problems with that here too. I also think I have to edit a detail in Game of Cooks, because I THINK at one point it says "a car-crash and things they didn't talk about", but there are no car-crashes in this story...

Big Brothers Don't Cry

An Awkward Disappointment

That summer proved a couple things to Lovino.

One: his dad maybe wasn't a horrible piece of shit because he was fucking around for the whole fucking three months and it didn't suck.

Two: Community colleges didn't give a shit what you scored in Bio Class, they just cared that you liked whatever you applied for and that you'd actually do the god-damned work they assigned you if they gave you a seat.

Three: Lovino definitely cared about working in the restaurant industry, because he worked a hot Chicago summer in a cramped kitchen with a busted air-conditioner… and he was so frustrated when they explained that they couldn't hire him full time, but wanted to.

In August he was back in school, but it didn't feel like high school. He had books, but most of them were for recipes, catalogues of produce and proteins, and one big-ass textbook he only needed once a week for health and safety.

His interest in chemistry came back without the math this time: how to play with heat when baking, how to properly combine ingredients for a sauce, what made a glaze versus a gnash, etc.

It was hands-on, it was interactive, it came with the punishment of eating whatever you fucked up so don't fuck it up. It was going to be the longest and shortest six months of his life, which was why when he was still barely three weeks into it Lovino was startled and maybe even a bit scared when a familiar voice called out to him.

"Lovino!" Because that voice had no right to catch him flipping through a list of French recipes he'd never heard of and could barely pronounce. He was supposed to be on his way to the student lounge and café for a cup of coffee and some study time, but damn him he'd never heard of "foy-graz" before and who opened up a duck and seriously thought 'Yes, this liver is for me.'?

"Belle…?" Her face confused him, her voice confused him, the fact that she was there at all under the bright fall sunlight and the rows of trees that stubbornly refused to change colour- it was wrong to him. Lovino and Lars had been the same age in the same grade, Belle was a year younger and one grade below- he'd just graduated, she hadn't yet, why was she here?

It took until Lars' caramel-blonde sister had her arms around him in a friendly, clinging hug that Lovino remembered that he'd just walked out of a Saturday-afternoon workshop.

"I can't believe I found you! How was your summer?" Found him? Belle had a green ribbon in her hair that matched the pleated skirt that went down to her knees. She had a red sweater with their high school's crest on the sleeves and covering her white blouse, her outfit borderline too light for the creeping autumn cold. When she grinned with her rose-pink lips and a shine over her green eyes, he wasn't completely sure how he was supposed to answer the question.

"It was alright." So he went for a lame response instead of anything useful. "Made some money."

"You missed commencement…" Yeah, she would know about that: Lars would have been at the ceremony. "Prom too."

"I was working." The simple truth.

"They wouldn't give you the night off?" Saying no would be a fib or a lie, saying yes would prove he was an asshole. Lovino found himself with his jaw clenched trying to come up with something in the middle as Belle's bright-eyed expression started to fade. She was shorter than him by a few inches, enough that his eyes were level with her forehead, and at some point she'd just stopped growing so he really did feel larger than her in size. It was uncomfortable.

"Something like that…" He almost asked how Lars was doing as a segue, but something stopped his tongue and Lovino made himself fumble for a different topic. "How's senior year treating you?"

Standing stupidly still trying to have this conversation was what made it too hard. Lovino eventually convinced her to walk with him, or maybe it was Belle who made the first move. He led the way because he already knew the small campus well enough to locate the essentials: library, classrooms, practice kitchens, lounge, coffee.

He'd never touched the stuff at home or in high school, but Lovino already knew too much of his pay-cheque was going towards the black froth that was keeping him awake and paying attention to his lessons. Because he knew Belle didn't work he paid for a tall cup of hot-chocolate and coffee, the mixture pleasing her as they took a seat and kept trading mild comments and friendly-ish questions.

Apparently she'd worked his location out of Feliciano, who Lovino promised to beat up when he got home. That was when the conversation turned.

"You don't mean that."

"Mean what?" Lovino had never seen Lars' little sister look so offended, but the way she pinched her lips like that and sat up a little straighter on her stool- yep, that was offense on her face.

"That you'd actually hit him for telling me where you go to college."

"Of course I would?" Was she serious? "Belle, we're brothers. It's what brothers do."

"That's terrible! You'd actually beat him up like a dog?"

"I'd never kick a dog." Apparently this was also the wrong thing to say because she made the ceramic bottom of her mug hit the table with a loud crack. "Belle! It's not like I come up behind him with a stick."

"Then what do you do?"

"I don't know?" What a stupid question. It made sense that Lars wouldn't physically fight with his sister, but Lovino didn't like being put on the hot-seat about the issue. "Usually shout his name or something, and if he doesn't run then whoever cries out first loses?"

"And what about Carlino?"

"Carlino's eleven." If Carlino pissed him off that much then Lovino'd already won. The only time he'd settle for anything less was if his little brother was mad, because there was no harm in letting him get the upper hand and try to put Lovino in a choke-hold if it would settle the issue.

"That's so awful…" She was over-reacting, but she went back to drinking her cocoa and coffee and Lovino just rolled his eyes. She was taking things the wrong way.

They tried having a decent conversation after that, but ultimately Belle didn't tell him why she'd taken a forty-minute bus ride trying to find the campus, and then Lovino himself, on a Saturday afternoon.

When he got home that night he also didn't beat Feliciano up, but when he packed his and Carlino's lunches for Monday morning he did stick a whole glob of marmite in his brother's sandwich.

Monday evening Feliciano was waiting for him to come home, and as soon as Lovino stepped through the door he had to sum up every ounce of "FUCK YOU I'M OLDER" in his body to wrestle his seventeen-year-old little brother to the floor.

That Christmas was the first time in five years that their dad was there on Christmas morning. He was Nonna and Carlino's gift and Lovino had grudgingly been in on the secret: he was the one who drove out to the airport in the heavy snow to pick him up.

Something was a little different about him though.

Nonno was a large man, even with his age starting to catch up to him he wasn't a small, wrinkly old guy with a walker and lazy gums. His hair was still decent despite the healthy amount of grey spread through it, and his face was riddled with laugh and age lines, but there were days you could easily connect the man sitting in his arm chair to the figure who'd smelled like pipe smoke and bounced each of the brothers on his knee.

Lovino liked to think of himself as fully grown, but both him and Feliciano were still lanky, a bit thin. It was Lovino who was starting to thicken out more, to fill in his shoulders and neck, the trunk of his body a little heavy from good food but still strong from running across campus and constantly working on his feet. Carlino was twelve so shut up.

They all had dark hair with Feliciano's staying the lightest because their Mama had been a red-head. Their Nonna was completely grey, but their dad had always had a thicker head of hair like his father. He was supposed to have Nonna's darker complexion though, the one that Lovino had inherited from them both. With their dad enjoying his middle age, his mid-section had always been a bit thicker, maybe even more so over the last few years since Mama had passed…

So when he was sitting next to the Christmas tree that year, Lovino noticed the difference between what he remembered and what he saw. He didn't say anything though, not with Carlino jabbering at their dad and Feliciano poorly pretending that he was too old to care as much as he did about the surprise guest.

"Are you okay?" Lovino had to ask the question once all the gifts had been torn open and the living room was a mess for his brothers to clean up. He was whisking eggs in a bowl for Christmas breakfast when their dad came in looking for a coffee refill, and he had to know why the hand that reached past him for the coffee pot was pale as a sheet and freakishly thin.

"A little jet-lagged, why?" Their dad's eyes were very dark, but they'd always been dark. Lovino just couldn't call up enough memories of his face from this close to tell if they looked sunken or not, but he was pale.

"Nothing."

He was pale.

And over the next few days Lovino noticed a heavy, heaving cough that wouldn't go away, or that kept leaving him completely breathless every time it caught him.

"Your program is half-done, right?" but still the old man would just wear through it, and usually end off with a crooked smile that hid some kind of pain he wouldn't tell them about. He figured out too fast for Lovino's liking that the best way to shut him up was to just talk about the terrifying future.

"Uh, yeah, I'll finish in March…" the program had started in August, but there were two weeks missing for Christmas and the holidays. When their dad started hacking again like he was dying Lovino snapped back to the original topic. "Look, are you sure you feel-?"

"Don't worry about getting a job right away…" At least he got the idiot to sit down, but getting away for long enough to grab him a glass of water was a lot harder. "If you want to be a chef then you should try travelling."

"Right, travelling where exactly?"

"Why not Italy? We have family around Rome." Yeah, family he'd never met. "That's my fault." It set off an alarm in Lovino's brain when he heard his dad's voice suddenly soften. His eyes did something to the rest of his face that made the pale skin and hollow cheeks stand out even more. "It's my fault… after your mother…"

"…"

"I…"

They couldn't do it. Six years after the fact, they still couldn't talk about her.

Lovino never would forgive himself for never just sitting down and talking about her.

Or talking about him, because their dad hid what was wrong and he did a good job of it. It took a lot to catch him in the act, but one give-away was how he barely ate anything dished on his plate. Lovino was too interested in the conversation at the dinner for the first week after Christmas, but by the time New Years was looming he'd started counting how many bites the man actually ate versus how many times he just stirred his fork over his plate.

The box of daily pills he thought he'd kept hidden while sharing Lovino's room was another serious hint. Lovino was no pharmacist, he didn't know what any of them were for, but there were far too many round and oblong and different-sized little pellets of medicine in the half-hidden blue box for his peace of mind.

But maybe it could have been a whole lot of nothing… except for the angry murmurs he started hearing behind his grandparents' bedroom door at night.

The house where they lived was actually a three-story town house, narrow but tall and with barely enough space for everyone. Feliciano and Carlino had always shared a room because Lovino was older and hahahaha!, but the walls were thin and the space was minimal.

He was actually using the desk in his little brothers' room the night it happened. He was testing himself on herbs and exotic ingredients with Feliciano reading on his bed behind him when both of them heard the crashing and thumping of Carlino racing up the steps.

"Vino!" And they heard Carlino tearing into the wrong bedroom looking for him, all three of them meeting in the hall next to their grandparents' room.

"Hurry up, get the car!" Carlino's face was red from the cold, his hat missing and his knit blue scarf still holding snow-flakes and ice from being outside. Their dad had taken him sledding in the park near the house. He'd been trying all week to talk all three of them into going skiing in the January snow, but now Carlino was standing in his wet boots and gloves, yanking on Lovino's arm hard enough that he nearly sent them both tumbling down the stairs.

"Slow down! What's wrong?"

"It's dad! It's dad hurry just come on!"

Carlino just wasn't small enough to pick up and hold when he was upset anymore, but he still had that way of looking up with his green eyes and pleading with them without crying.

Lovino didn't lace up his boots and he didn't bother with a jacket. There was three feet of snow outside but he didn't care: Feliciano had shovelled their part of the side-walk that morning. He made Carlino point him in the right direction but then sent both of his brothers back to get the car, tossing the keys to Feliciano just as their Grandmother came out asking what was wrong.

It wasn't hard to find him. They didn't live in a bad neighbourhood: if a man fell over in the snow with his son screaming that something was wrong then someone was going to do something.

"Dad! Dad what happened? Are you ok- yes! Let me see him he's my dad!" Someone had called an ambulance, someone else had brought out a blanket and straightened him where he'd fallen. There was a stain of vomit on the snow where the man Lovino'd spent six petulant years hating had been sick either before or after collapsing.

"Stop it- I asked you! I fucking asked you now don't pull a stunt like this! Dad!"

He didn't wake up when Lovino shouted at him in English demanding to know what was wrong.

"Please, please, please, papa don't do this…"

He didn't move when Lovino touched his face and begged him in Italian to say anything.

Their father didn't die that night out in the snow. The ambulance arrived at the same time as the car with their family in it, so the paramedics placed him on a gurney and, since there was no room in the car, Lovino went with them in the ambulance. During the ride they asked him what medications his father was on, and Lovino only knew there were a lot- not what their names were.

"Does he have any allergies?"

"I don't know…"

"Any previous medical conditions?"

"I don't…"

They got more out of his wallet than his son: they found his health insurance number. It meant there was a bed and a room and medical team waiting when they got to the hospital. It meant that Lovino had a chance to let the sobbing frustration out in private before washing his face and being ready when his brothers and grandparents arrived.

Nonno had the box of medicines from their dad's suitcase, which meant he knew part of what was wrong.

Nonna refused to speak to Nonno, which meant she'd had no idea.

Carlino refused to let go of Lovino's hand all night, even after their dad was wheeled into the room on a hospital bed. There was an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and tubes dripping fluids into his arms and hands. They could see how thin he really had become through the medical gown, and when Nonno stepped outside Lovino pretended to be asleep next to Carlino so Feliciano and Nonna could cry in peace.

The youngest brother was his priority that night: he asked the nurses for an extra blanket to keep him warm. He removed Carlino's wet jacket and gloves while he slept so they would dry. He didn't move for six hours so he wouldn't wake up the little boy laying on him. He handed Feliciano his bank card and told him to get everybody something to eat, and when Nonno tried giving him a twenty dollar bill to cover it he just waved it off.

So scratch that, his whole family was his priority. When Nonna was too tired for more crying and swearing at her son, Lovino had her take his seat and stroke Carlino's sleeping head for comfort. He made sure Feliciano actually ate the sandwich he brought back for himself, and he went hunting for another chair so Nonno could sit instead of standing silently watching his son breathe.

"It's cancer…" His grandfather whispered once he seemed sure that it was only the two of them left still awake. "My brother had the same problem, but he's known for a while and didn't want to worry you boys or your grandmother."

He wasn't on a respirator, and the plastic mask didn't make any noise. A nurse had come in a few hours ago and turned off the beeping of the heart-rate monitor. She hadn't seemed worried when she checked the chart, but she'd stepped lightly, moved carefully, and left quickly. It had probably been as much for their comfort as to keep out of sight.

"How long is a while?" It was so quiet in the room that Lovino was hesitant to speak, he just murmured things that sounded like words and didn't move from where he was standing with his hands in his jean pockets. He didn't want to turn his head- what if his neck popped and broke the silence?

"A year." Nonno copied his quiet voice, but with them watching the pale blue light spread over the washed out patient in front of them, and the milky glow of the corridors beyond the private space intruding on their family's uneasy sleep, Lovino heard a strange sound.

He heard a strange sound, and he saw his grandfather take such a deep breath that it surprised him to see how big he could puff himself up. And it scared him when he thought he saw a glossy look on the old man's eyes, and he didn't understand the way his mouth twisted and started to tremble.

"Nonno-?"

"You shouldn't…" Too much air escaped him for two little words, and that rush made Nonno stop speaking for a moment and thin his wide lips, shaking his head a little and letting one silver tear loose down his aged face. "Don't cry in front of the people you need to protect. My father told me that." Then he shouldn't have been crying- Nonno wasn't supposed to cry. Nonno was loud and strong, and even if something made him mad that didn't mean he would ever shed a tear over it.

Lovino wanted this to stop and he wanted it to go away: he didn't want to look at the bed and see someone he'd hated for so long suddenly begging sympathy from him. He didn't want to listen to his grandmother weep or know his baby brother at twelve was going through something too similar to what Lovino had endured at thirteen. He didn't want a heart-to-heart about tears at three in the morning in a silent hospital room. He didn't want to grow up or acknowledge that screaming in the back of his mind telling him that without an absent father in the middle there was only their weeping grandfather and Lovino's shitty start at life for his brothers to look up to.

He didn't want this.

He wasn't ready for this.

He couldn't do this-

"Nothing you have ever done-" So he understood it even less when instead of being allowed to panic and freak out in the silence, his short, crying, aging old grandfather put light arms around him, and they tried to hold him tight and strong but it felt like paper and string. "-has failed to make us proud."

"I haven't done anything-"

"You do more than you know, Lovino… You really do…"

He really had no idea what that was supposed to mean.

"My father is sick, I mean he's really sick and we don't know what's going to happen."

But he had to talk to the college and his program leader. He had to reach out through the system for anyone who would listen.

"I want to continue, I honestly do, but this is serious. Please."

And somehow someone did listen.

It was a small college, not a rigid institution. Lovino produced more documents than they even needed to prove what was wrong and how suddenly it had come up, he made it into a bigger deal than it had to be, and somehow there were people on the administrative end who listened and understood and they didn't sweat it half as hard as he did.

The tuition he'd paid was frozen as a credit.

His practicum placement, the final component of his program, was informed of the change and agreed to take him during the next cycle.

Lovino would have to take the courses again starting in May and going through the summer, but he wouldn't have to pay again, and his seat would be preserved.

"Did you do your homework?"

"No…"

He couldn't muster up the courage to be mad about it.

"Why not? How much is there?"

"An essay, I think?"

"You think?"

Because he swore to God if Feliciano blew his fucking GPA over this he'd wring the little bastard's neck. And he fucking meant it!

"It's AP English, I can graduate with just regular-"

"I don't give a shit about you graduating, I care about your fucking scholarships!"

January through March of that year only saw Lovino in one of three places: at home where he made sure the fridge was stocked and bills paid up and homework fucking done, at the restaurant that still had him as a dish slave and prep-grunt so there was an extra fifty or a hundred dollars to go towards emergencies, and the hospital.

At the hospital, usually with food.

Food Papa wouldn't eat, but maybe he could convince Nonna to try a few bites.

Food he made in large portions and then brought in containers for his brothers when they did the rest of their homework.

Meals broken down into simpler ingredients, milder flavours, and lighter compositions so that maybe, just maybe, the sick man withering away on the bed would be able to fool his family. Maybe they would believe that he really was going to hang on a little bit longer between morphine drips and lapses in memory.

"Finish… school…"

"I will."

"Finish… school…"

"Papa, I promise…"

"She won't… won't for… give…" His mother's ghost wouldn't forgive Lovino if he fucked up the rest of his life that badly. He understood the warning, and he made the promise, and he kissed the pale and clammy wrinkles on his father's brow to seal the vow. Lovino ended up making a lot of little vows like that over the final few days.

He was at work when the cancer finally took away the only parent his brothers had left.

Lovino just sat in his car and screamed because he hadn't fucking been there when his family needed him most.

There was supposed to be pairings and romancing in this chapter but then it just turned into awkward Belle and dead parents why this.

Review?