Feeling Blue

[DAY 4]

Evan put the frozen meal in the microwave, watching it spin like a solemn merry-go-round before it cried out that his instant pasta was ready. Taking out the steaming plastic tray of food with his gloved right hand, he set it on the counter. The agent looked up to see his partner eyeing the food. "Oh! Hey Giorgio! If you're hungry you can have som-"

Giorgio wordlessly slid the tray across the counter into the bin.

"Hey! That was mean!" Evan cried out. "I was really hungry!"

"Clearly. I'll make dinner. It's fine." Giorgio stated, coolly. "Don't eat that crap." True to his word the chef, during his civilian hours, effortlessly prepared two servings of spinach and chorizo penne pasta. It was made with a basil sauce, which was dyed red by the tomatoes in the dish.

Evan wowed at the dish excited at the plate set in front of him. Then he noticed Giorgio had put the second serving in a glass container. "Oh… you're not eating here?"

"I've got to run, sorry. Knock yourself out with the TV, the VSSE has all the channels you could ask for. Ciao." Giorgio said as he left.

Later that night Giorgio had returned to the suite, showered, taken care of his teeth, and quietly hopped into bed. His partner was already asleep, his gentle breathing the only sound in the room.

After making himself comfortable in his now sadly smaller bed, Giorgio closed his eyes. Sleep took him, and so did his dreams.

It's evening, a song of Italian opera echoes through the fine halls, a woman singing somberly to violins.

{Fiercely the flames are raging. The frenzied mob comes running.}

Giorgio walks on the beautiful marble floors of his family mansion. The finest, of course, for the most powerful mafia in all of Sicily. The entire Bruno family is mingling with their guests, delicate foods paired with the best wine in the country.

Little nine year old Giorgio has just tucked in his even tinier brother and sister. He is a wonderful big brother, the twins are warm in bed, but now it's time to let papa and mama know. He carefully closes the door so the opera song, Stride la Vampa, doesn't wake up the little ones.

Giorgio walks the halls to head downstairs to the dining room where the adults are playing. The loud chatter is where he is going, but for some reason the cheerfulness sounds far too much like screams than it does laughter, and there is a lot of banging. What was that banging sound? Firecrackers?

{The lights blaze up their horrible faces. Higher and higher, the flames mount to the sky!}

He hurries his pace. Something feels wrong, even though his head doesn't know what's wrong yet, his guts are screaming at him. He needs to find someone, he needs to warn everyone! He hears loud footsteps on the stairwell and before he can approach them himself, a hand grabs him firmly.

"Mama!"

The beautiful woman with amber brown eyes and wavy locks of curled silk for hair, looks dishevelled and is clutching her side with her free hand. "Giorgio, mio caro. Don't make a sound and run!" She says in a hushed whisper.

He wants to cry out for the family doctor, to fix the source of the blood seeping through her champagne coloured dress under her hand. Instead, he whispers as she wanted. "Nina and Carlo are in their bed."

She nods at him, but drags him into papa's study. She goes around his heavy walnut desk and adrenaline grants her the strength to flip it on its side, even through the bullet wound. She puts her bloodied hands on his face tenderly, it gives her an idea, and so she smears as much as she can on his clothes too. "Mama is going to get your baby brother and sister. I need you hide here and pretend to be dead ok? Promise me you'll survive. Ti amo, Giorgio."

She retrieves a handgun from a drawer in the desk and runs to the twins' bedroom.

{Fiercely the flames rage. The victim is approaching.}

He does as she asks, lying on his side, wrapping his skinny arms around his legs. Eyes closed, he ensures his breathes are as shallow as possible- in case whoever finds him is not mama. The night feels like it will never end between the gunshots, the cries, and that wretched song.

His eyes flick open, and Giorgio gasps for air. He's an adult again, but the fear is still fresh in his veins. He glances over to Evan who has stirred, but is luckily still asleep.

Walking into the living room corner, he quietly takes books and a laptop off the computer desk. He sets it on its side, and lying down between the table legs, he wraps his arms around his legs. Curling into a ball, he waits for the morning again.

[DAY 5]

"Are you ok, Giorgio?" Evan asked, worried. "You look super tired."

"I'll… I'll be fine. It's nothing." He replied. Contrary to his words, his aim would then suffer in the training exercise they were about to do.

It's always 'nothing'. Evan thought a little bitterly, as he readied his gun.

"Ok, you take the far right route of the floor, I'll take the left." The older agent ordered while trying not to yawn. Just stay out of my way.

"Copy that!" Evan responded enthusiastically. This would be their first training exercise together.

With that, Giorgio had the bulk of targets like he had planned. Meanwhile, Evan felt as if he was on a wild goose chase. In the blonde's route, he had only found dummies marked as civilian non-targets.

At the end of the exercise, they entered the debriefing room with two Senior Operations Agents.

"In VSSE history." Begun Keith. "I've never seen such..."

"Shit-house teamwork." Robert finished. "Bernard, during the six minutes of that exercise you only managed to take out ONE target."

"And that target was a innocent bystander." Keith added.

"Sorry… I thought everyone would be a bad guy…" He winced. "Will she make it?"

"No." The older blonde said harshly without missing a beat. "She's pretty freaking dead with that head shot between the eyes!" He motioned to his laptop screen which showed a replay of the ruthless execution of a female dummy holding a baby dummy in her arms.

Evan looked down in shame.

"And YOU." Robert barked at Giorgio.

"What are you complaining about?" Hissed Giorgio. "We wiped the floor clean, there shouldn't be an issue."

"Well Mister 'Top Agent in Europe'." Robert began, making air quotation with his fingers. "There were twelve targets, yet you somehow managed to use 54 bullets!" He snapped. "YOU RAN OUT OF BULLETS ON THE ELEVENTH TARGET."

"I stabbed number twelve in the face, my point still stands." The brunette shot back.

"This is a SHOOTING exercise for crying out loud!" Yelled Robert, who was seconds away from popping a blood vessel.

"Agent Bruno." Keith interjected. "Even with double or even triple tapping the targets, the acceptable ammo use should range between 24, to 36 at the very most. Though this wouldn't even had been an issue, if you had shared the targets with your partner."

"We're scoring this team an E." Stated Robert. "The only reason it's not an F is because you can only get that score from non-completion of the exercise."

Evan frowned. "... That E wouldn't happen to stand for 'Excellent' would it?"

"Get out."

[DAY 6]

Evan sighed. Giorgio had left the suite in a hurry again before they could have any meaningful time with each other. At the very most, all they've had up to this point was small talk. Now that he thinks about it, besides their civilian jobs, they don't really know anything about each other.

The blonde turns to look at Gnocchi. The egg 'baby' sat nestled in a teacup he had lined with a clean sock as a blanket. "You know." He says to her. "Your mother is a frigid bitch."

Giorgio lets out a small sneeze. Reaching into his pocket for a packet of tissues, he feels crinkly plastic. He pulls out a yellow candy and raises an eyebrow at it. Suddenly, he hears a loud snort to his side. It's Agent Santiago Fernández, that annoying guy he barely knows.

"Eating sweets like a child." The man taunts.

Giorgio rolls his eyes up to meet the other agent's, barely interested. He proceeds to unwrap the sweet with the hand holding it, and pops it into his mouth to prove a point of how little he cares about the other agent's opinions of him. Holy shit this is sour. WHY did it have to be lemon? He holds a poker face nonetheless.

Alan and Wesley were holding way too many things between them. Alan had two laptops and a stack of reports balancing on top of each other, while Wesley held a tower or papers. He at least tried to, until a loose stack in the middle wormed its way out to spill onto the floor.

"Ohhhh balls." Muttered Wesley.

Alan snickered. "You have a doctorate in engineering, that structural weak point has brought SHAME on you."

"Alan, you're so mean!" Laughed Wesley as he awkwardly started to bend down to retrieve the documents.

"Oh hey! Let me get that for you." Offered Evan as he bent down and retrieved the papers.

"Ah, thank you so much!" Smiled Wesley. Evan took some documents off Alan as well, offering to escort them to their destination. The trio talked amongst themselves happily until they reached the file room.

"Oh I'm so sorry! I was so distracted, I've been rude. Nice to meet you, I'm Wesley Lambert and this is my partner Alan Dunaway."

Evan laughed. "Bonjour! I'm Evan Bernard, and my partner, wherever he is- is Giorgio Bruno."

Alan and Wesley gaped at each other thinking the same thing, before composing themselves and asking him about his new partnership.

"Oh, honestly. He's a little standoffish but, he'll warm up to me. But I won't give up. You see, I have a trick up my sleeve!" The rookie agent grinned, winking.

Authors Note: I dedicate what little angst I am capable of in this fic, to the Queen of Tragedies- June Ellie!

-The opera song is sung in Italian: Il Trovatore: "Stride la vampa". It is about a woman singing to a crowd about her poor mother being burnt at the stake. Anita Rachvelishvili does a killer job at it (should be the first result on Youtube!).