A/N: Feli's POV again

Chapter 3

On my way back to Carriedo's Café, I passed several gathering groups of people. Their dark clothing blended with the shadows, giving them a dark and sinister edge, even in the bright, saturated, orange and yellows of the setting sun. The glint of their eyes was the only thing that shone from them, peering from the dirtiest corners of the town where they swarmed like rats, daring anyone to take one footstep in the wrong direction.

Upon my arrival in America, in this town, they had terrified me. Perhaps some of it could be contributed to my poor English, but my first day walking alone I had been pulled behind a building and beaten black and blue, the whole while screaming and crying for mercy in a language my attackers couldn't understand. I didn't leave home for months afterwards.

Now I knew the proper distance to stay from certain areas to avoid a repeat of that previous event. The shadow people stayed put. For now. As I walked, the buildings around me grew shorter, smaller, shabbier. Iron bars crawled their way over glass panes, indents in the sides of sheds and houses from the shout of a gun gaped wide and hungry. Grass yellowed, concrete cracked, the sky steadily darkened.

Lovino always warned me not to come home late at night because I had to walk through this neighborhood. The café was on the other side. What he didn't know was that while he was doing whatever he did with Antonio, I strolled at ease through these streets. My brother isolated himself from the town. He was a stranger to it. With no other option before me, I embraced it and its citizens and in return they embraced me back.

I opened up the back door of the restaurant as silently as possible and slipped in, listening intently for any sounds of my brother or Antonio. It didn't take much effort.

"Why don't you just fucking leave me alone?! You're not my father, why do you have to hover over everything I do?"

"Lovi, I didn't know—"

"Of course not! You don't know anything! Why are you so goddamn clueless?!"

"Lovi, please, just listen—"

"No!" my brother screamed from inside our café's kitchen. "I'm not listening to you anymore! I wish you'd left me in Italy! I hate it here! I hate you!"

There was a crash and the tinkling of what I believed to be a now broken plate followed by Antonio trying to calm Lovino down. I took the opportunity to sneak up the stairs to the bedrooms above. Not that it did much. I could still hear them downstairs. They were both shouting now. More broken glass. The back door slammed. Silence.

I kicked off my shoes and peeled off my shirt before laying across my bed and staring up at the ceiling. I didn't know which of them had walked out on the other, but I knew both of them would need some space for a while before they'd be anywhere near normal again. Oh the joys of family. I laid there in the dark, staring. I don't know how long I laid there before I heard my door squeak open.

"Feliciano?" It was my brother. I rolled over to look at him. He had dark shadows under his eyes and his skin seemed unusually pale in the ghastly light of the moon through the dirty window. There was something different about him. Nothing drastic. Like it had been there for so long and I was just now noticing it. But what was it?

"Yeah?" He came the rest of the way in and sat on the side of my bed. His dark eyes roamed the bareness of my room. The ratty furniture, the cheap paint on the walls, the worn and smelly carpet.

"What are we doing here?" he asked, seemingly not to me, but to the stagnant air of the bedroom.

"What do you mean?" I sat up, turning my legs to sit beside him.

He shook his head, "We don't belong here." His eyes wandered again before they met mine. "We should be back in Italy, with Nonno, in his big house with his big gardens and his fancy cars and every night having dinner guests. Not here in… this;" He gestured around, his eyes misty as he spoke.

I hugged my knees to my chest without saying a word.

"I'm sorry, fratello…" my brother choked back a sob. "I'm so sorry for bringing you here." He wiped his eyes with the heels of his palms as his shoulders shook. It was then that I realized what was so different in my brother. He was tired. Not the tired of a man come home from a long day of physical labor, but a different kind. My brother was broken. America, this land of dreams which had beckoned him, had swallowed him up, lied, told him everything would be alright, and then spat him back out into this world of eternal swirling negative emotion.

I awkwardly put my arm around his shoulders. I didn't know how to act. My brother didn't cry. He got angry, he got scared, and sometimes even sad, but he never cried. That had always been my job. I remembered all those nights when we first came here that he would hold me the way I held him now.

"It'll be okay, Lovi…" I said softly. He only hugged onto my shoulders and cried harder.

We stayed that way for god knows how long, the only sound being my brother's grief. The door never reopened. Antonio wouldn't be back tonight. But he would come back. That was one thing you could always count on him to do. He would come back to us. To my brother.

"I'll get you out of here, I promise." Lovino sniffled. "I shouldn't have brought you with me in the first place. I'm so sorry…"

"It's done now."

He sniffled again and sat up. "…Can we go out? I could use some air."

I nodded and reached for my shirt I had previously discarded on the floor earlier.

"Bring your paint. I'm in the mood to see something beautiful."

Nonno - grandpa

fratello - brother