How Could An Angel Break My Heart, In The Late of Night, Whole Playlist.

Hey, I'd like to give a quick thank you to the anon who pointed out my detail blunder last chapter! The twenty turned into a ten because Sunny can't math, so I'll take what you said to heart and try to mind my details a bit better. I think I lost track of my week-days too, so that's something I need to try and get back in order. Thanks for the feedback!

The Gay Brother

Epitaphs and Soft Hands

Their village was built into the hills and ridges of the mountains, rolling and curved around itself so you had to be in one of a few special places in order to see most of it, nevermind the whole thing at once.

The Valenti winery was a large property on the north-west edge of the village. The house had foundations that probably dated back to some magical era, and that bygone charm was preserved in the defensive wall built around the house and a central courtyard covered with white gravel: the place where the car was parked.

Feliciano escaped the converted villa without waking anyone up- except Lovino, but he'd been awake anyways and barely coherent without his morning coffee. His brother reminded him that he had to go to work with him today, but otherwise didn't get in Feliciano's way as he ducked out one of the back doors cutting across the property.

Villages weren't like cities, it was impossibly rare to find one where someone looked at it before it was built and said: "Here is main street, this will be the shopping district, and over there we'll put a public park". Maybe in the Americas it had happened like that, but certainly not in Italy or anywhere else in Europe for that matter. It was much faster for him to reach his destination by cutting across several acres of grape vines and low stone walls than finding his way back to a road and walking around the perimeter to reach the town. The sun wasn't too hot on his head yet either, in fact the March morning smelt more like wet grass and dew than dry dust and heat.

Under the sun's white brilliance everything was green. The grape vines arched up higher than he was tall to either side of him, and the carpets of green grass were getting his shoes wet as he set a quick pace to make sure he didn't lose his nerve or waver. His little brother had asked to come with him, the older hadn't questioned where he was going: Feliciano couldn't just wander around in the fields for three hours and pretend he'd done the right thing. This was half the reason he'd wanted to come home so he couldn't chicken out now and run away, and he couldn't expect anyone to hold his hand for it either.

The winery grounds sloped down at a very gentle angle, but eventually he had to deviate from going straight east and run along the edge of a familiar stream looking for the little wooden bridge that would carry him across the brook. He called it a "bridge" but it was probably fairer to call it a "pile of random pieces of wood and old fences sort of damning up the water but not enough to be dangerous". He almost lost his footing on the slick boards and misplaced old stones, but that was the risk you took when the thaw was well under way up higher in the mountains.

From the brook it was a steep climb up on to someone else's property, and he heard the bell before he saw the steeple appear through the sun-dappled leaves over his head. He laid a hand on familiar trees as the hill tried throwing him off a few times, but when he reached a low stone wall he lifted himself right over it and set his feet down on hallowed ground.

The green grass continued here, and the light breeze that had followed him across the farmlands below was gone now, blocked by the trees and silenced by the heavy presence saturating the space. If he'd been wearing a hat, he would have removed it out of respect: he wasn't in God's house, but he was in his church yard and this almost felt a little bit like trespassing…

The white stone markers peppering the grounds appeared almost like mushrooms, their rows not quite straight in this old, old corner of the church-yard, their crosses weathered and worn to smooth edges and tilted in the soft ground. He picked his way carefully between the graves, aware of many childhood memories that involved tripping over broken or sunken headstones in the tall grass. As an adult the threat wasn't nearly as serious, but there was still something to be said about not traipsing over someone's unmarked remains. These graves were not neglected, they were just very, very old…

Coming out from under the trees however, the rows straightened up and the nigh-ancient tombstones gave way to newer slabs and arches. Crosses and angels were left standing guard over silent plots of once-disturbed earth, and as he shortened his stride carefully, he started counting rows and reading names…

Vargas was the name all three brothers had taken, but they'd had to make the choice to do so: Carlino had probably only legally changed his last year, Feliciano had signed the paper-work before applying for college, and Lovino had treated it like a birthday present. Switching to their mother's maiden name was a rite of passage, but the legal motions were just a formality: they had grown up as the Vargas Brothers. All those school-yard fights about first names had taught their teachers very quickly to ignore what was printed on the class list and call them by the name in brackets: Vargas. Not that other name.

Not his name.

He had nothing to do with why Feliciano was here however. He had been out of the picture for so long that only Lovino really had a good grasp of who he'd been. Feliciano remembered some things but few details: it frightened him to think that maybe he could walk past him one day on a street somewhere and never even know who he was, but sometimes it was security too. He remembered a loud, terrifying voice, he remembered broken dishes and being scooped up by his grandmother and taken out of the room to sit on her lap. He remembered sleeping at the same church sitting right here on his hill, and waiting for their uncle to bring him and Lovi the cakes they liked from the little bakery.

He remembered being told that he was never coming home again, and he remembered not knowing whether he was supposed to laugh and tell his mother that he was happy, or cry because he hadn't understood why she'd shed so many tears that day.

That had been a long time ago.

But this, right now, was very recent. This was Feliciano finding the name he dreaded seeing carved into the grey marble, coming to a stop at the sight of the scrawling epitaph, and kneeling slowly in front of his mother.

Marguerite Vargas

Beloved Mother of Three Beloved Sons

19XX-2009

They hadn't changed the epitaph…

… He should have brought her flowers.

"I'm sorry, mama…" Not about the flowers. There wasn't a bouquet for something like this. "I'm sorry." Sorry he hadn't visited sooner, and sorry that he'd visited at all. It was so quiet in the graveyard that his voice felt like a violation, even when he dropped it down to a shy, quiet whisper.

"I know you probably don't want me here. I know Grandpa and everyone have already told you everything- about what I did, what I became." What would she have done if she'd been alive to watch it? If she'd been standing in that room with everyone else when it all came pouring out of him?

"I'm so sorry…" He closed his eyes and squeezed out the cold, guilty tears as he bowed his head.

They hadn't even put flowers on her grave yet, they hadn't even cut the stone. Feliciano had flown from Berlin to Rome two weeks before his graduation- three before he'd promised to come home for a visit anyways. He'd left Ludwig behind because everything they'd said and discussed about him coming out had been changed by one hysterical phone-call from his grandmother and a sleepless night of trying to find any airline that would take him south on six hours' notice.

"I hurt our family when we were already hurting over you. I don't know what came over me, mama, I can't explain it…" He and Ludwig had wanted his mother and brothers to come up from Italy for his graduation. That way they could talk to them, and tell them, and let Feliciano break it down and explain it to them in the softest, kindest way he could imagine. If that had gone well then he would have gone down with them back home, and there his mother would have helped talk to his uncles, and then his grandparents, and then the Valenti family… Feliciano might even have brought Ludwig with him for support- for help.

"But I regret it-" Not Ludwig though. Feliciano didn't regret Ludwig, he couldn't look back on four years of his life and tell himself he hadn't wanted it, or loved it. He couldn't lie and say that there hadn't been days or months at a time where he'd woken up every morning and told himself it was worth it to be this happy. But there were limits: "I regret the way it happened, and I'm sorry for how it happened, and I hate myself for doing it like that: for how I said it, in front of who was there. I'm sorry and I'm just so sorry…"

Beloved Mother of Three Beloved Sons. They'd chosen the epitaph before the funeral, before the wake at their grandparents' house. Feliciano had helped pay his share of the funeral costs and their uncles had given Carlino money so he could do the same thing despite his age and injuries. They hadn't held the funeral at her burial, they hadn't wanted to put Carlino through that experience, and standing over an unmarked plot of disturbed earth would have tortured the rest of them anyways.

You were supposed to wait three days before putting the body in the ground, that way you could hold a wake and let friends and neighbours come visit the lost, and the gravestone could be washed and cut while the grave itself was prepared. But because of how she'd died that hadn't been an option for them: her body couldn't be embalmed, and the family couldn't stand the idea of putting her in an oven.

Feliciano couldn't even remember when she'd been buried: he'd seen the black casket and he'd seen the filled-in grave, but everything in the middle had destroyed his sense of time. He hadn't been allowed to open the hinge hiding his mother from him; they'd said the glass from the windshield had done too much damage to let them show the family what she looked like. They'd said it had been a miracle that Carlino survived the crash at all…

Someone in all of that misery had taken it upon themselves to tell Feliciano not to go back to Germany. He couldn't for the life of him remember who it had been anymore, but they'd demanded the day after his mother's funeral that the village needed a wedding. When the idea caught like a fire and not even pleading for decency in mourning could make them stop, he'd made the most important announcement of his life at the worst possible moment for anyone to accept it.

It had taken Feliciano a week of being back in Ludwig's arms to understand what his grandfather meant when he'd said: "My daughter only had two sons." It had become one of those things that, three years later, still woke him up on nights when the guilt and regret were at their worst. It became a nightmare where he was right here in front of this grave, crying exactly as he was today, but instead of looking up through his tears to read the words he'd helped choose his fears had told him to expect "two", not "three".

The Beloved Mother of Two Beloved Sons- if that had been the message his mother would carry with her into eternity, Feliciano didn't even know if he'd even be able to make it back to Berlin. But it said three. It still said three…

"I'm sorry…" Cupping one hand over his mouth, it was hurting not to scream and swallowing his sobs was making his gut tighten painfully. Feliciano closed his eyes again and let himself double over on his knees, feeling the dew soaking completely through his pant legs as the tears moved down his nose to drip into the green grass. He let himself just kneel there and cry, just cry, because he just hadn't been able to do it properly before now. He just hadn't been able to say good-bye without trying to see her one last time.

"I miss you, I miss you so much…" She was his mother and he hadn't even been there when she died, no one had except Carlino and he'd been too scared for his own life to realize what had happened. "I miss you more than anyone, I wish you could just come back…" Because she wasn't an awkward phone-call or an unanswered e-mail away, Feliciano couldn't just take a train down from Berlin and show up a few miles from her front door…

He covered his mouth and nose with both hands to muffle the sounds he was making and the words that were only half-formed as they fell out of him. He hadn't brought a handkerchief because he was an idiot, so he told himself he could just wash his hands in the creek as he stayed kneeling on the wet grass. It wasn't just tears and as he wept he felt the forces moving further down his body, away from his throat and the strangled things he wanted to say. The pain and the sobs both moved down into his gut, digging in deep and pulling away all the crusty, hardened realizations that had settled there after too long delaying this moment.

His mother was dead, and even if that seemed like a small thing to someone else, or if it was something he should have come to grips with a long time ago: it wasn't and he hadn't.

It was one thing to see a polished box and think 'She's in there', and it was something else to see a vacant plot of earth and be told 'She's down there', but to see the stone and read her name and be able to reach out and touch the words engraved there in the marble, it made it all become real.

And it was a kind of reality that made him feel very alone.

Because it meant the one love someone was always meant to have, the one sanctuary that was supposed to be a guarantee… gone?

He didn't know if that kind of realization was meant to make something click or break inside of him, but it made sure the tears kept coming. Like water coming down with the thaw, he hadn't felt the pain peak yet and swore that he'd make himself just ride it out. And even if he'd wanted it to stop, who was he supposed to rely on for help? He'd come here alone for a reason, this reason, and even if one of his brothers had decided to intrude the only person who'd been able to calm him down when the wound was fresh was hundreds of miles away getting on with his life.

Feliciano was alone and his mother was dead, the tears wouldn't stop and when he felt the pain bleeding into frustration he tried to suck in a lungful of air so he could hold it tight in his chest. He tightened both hands over his face so he couldn't breathe and closed his eyes so he couldn't see the stone, his heart hammering as his whole body shook from the sobs pounding against the scream trying to force its way out of him. He wasn't going to scream in a church-yard, he'd sob and he'd cry and he'd weep in front of his dead mother but he would not-

"Stop-" Something on his back, fluttering down between his bowed shoulders. "Stop, don't hurt me like this- Feliciano…" A voice he hadn't heard in so, so long, one that came whispering over his head before a body settled next to him and that light touch became a short arm around his shoulders.

He made a horrible sound into his hands and thought that maybe God would let him die before this meeting became a reality, but when he felt his grandmother's soft fingers cupping his chin and reaching around his head to pull him close, he just gave up. The smell of rose-water perfume and the stick of peppermint chap-stick on his forehead did him in faster than if he'd looked up and tried to choke out her name.

Dragging his hands down his face trying to clear away some of the tears and sweat, he tangled his fingers first over his knees and then down on the cool grass trying to wipe them clean. Feliciano let himself be swept up into gentle arms and buried his face against a soft cashmere sweater, a wrinkled hand petting his hair down the back of his neck as he tightened his fingers in the grass hard enough to start ripping it up.

"Cry, shh, just cry…" She had a soft voice: she'd always been quiet. It was Grandpa whose voice was loud enough to shake the walls when he laughed or yelled. It was Grandma who never wasted words and just took her grandchildren by the hand to lead them away. "Don't hold it in like that, don't make her watch her boy in pain…" So he made another choking, painful sound as soft hands pulled him into a weak and exhausted hug, and Feliciano hated himself for all of it.

So much for holding on to dignity. So much for having self-respect. Everything about the humbled son come dressed up and respectful looking for forgiveness was dashed and the urge to scream redoubled its efforts against him. She couldn't have come here alone, the church was high on a hill and in her seventies his grandmother could not make that trip on her own. If his uncle who tended the church hadn't come with her, and if Carlino had honoured him and chosen not to climb the hill either, then that left only one other option.

"I'm sorry-" he couldn't face him now. Feliciano could not face his grandfather like this. "I'll go, I'm sorry, I-" He pushed away from heavy rose-water and opened his blurry eyes to the solid lavender wrapped around stooped shoulders and the black floral print beneath it. He knew there were pearls because she would never step into a church without those milk-white beads in a strand around her throat, but he couldn't see them or her face because there was fear in him now.

"No, don't-"

"Please let me go." She took his wrist and held his arm, and it only stopped him because he couldn't tear himself away just because he was stronger than her.

"When did you get back? Where are you staying?" She was crying, he could hear it and if he tore his blurry eyes away from the two people he could barely see standing at the edge of the church yard, he could see how much hurt was swimming in his grandmother's black eyes. "Feliciano look at me, don't hurt me again." Again?

"I'm sorry-!" She'd grown older in the last three years, the crowsfeet around her eyes growing into deep black lines, and the few shades of grey in her wiry brown curls had taken over what was once a proud mane. Her pink lips had thinned until he could barely see them against her tan complexion. Even the proud round end of her nose had grown smaller and begun to sink in like her eyes. They were both crying and he tried to pull away again before she touched his face and brushed away the blinding tears.

"I didn't want to hurt you: please let go before they come." Two people behind them tumbled too many terrible possibilities in his head, so why wouldn't she let him leave? "Lovino can explain, Mrs. Vargas so please-"

"Yaaaiii!" Her hands flew away from him and she held them up in the air for a moment, a betrayed expression peeling across her face before fresh tears came down with her hands into her lap, whooping the air like she wanted to hit him.

"Don't you dare call me that- I don't care if you kiss cats, Feliciano Vargas: I am your grandmother and you do not-" No! No, no, no…

"It's what he said!" He didn't know if he was allowed to do it, but when he leaned over on his knees she threw her hands up again and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, letting him take her gently into a hug. He felt her shaking and weeping as she made a fist and hit him twice on his back, but her other hand was brushing through his hair making sure he pressed his face down into her shoulder and neck. "When I left he said-"

"I don't care, you stupid boy." She held him tighter and he kept his eyes closed, trying to stop his tears and hide from the men he knew were watching. "He says what he wants: I don't care…"

"Grandma…"

"I don't care…"

Pacing. Restless. Angry.

"What is he doing here?"

"Lovino told me he was still in Berlin."

A huff. Disappointment. Frustration.

"Well clearly he is not."

"Father-"

Stomp-stomp. Insolent brat.

"He has no right to show his face here: do your job and send him away."

"Why don't we go inside first and give them a moment? …Father, please."

Irony.

"If you won't separate them then I will."

Honour.

"For Marguerite's sake, papa, please."

Painful silence.

Stilted breaths.

The old man entered the church with his son, leaving his wife and that one to cry.

Story has no pacing but lots of backstory. This is basically what was supposed to go into chapter 7, but then Ludwig showed up. It makes this day last a LOT longer, but I'm not exactly in a rush y'know? I didn't know who he should meet right at the end, it was either going to be Alice or his uncle the priest, but then out of nowhere I was like "NONNA YES" and that made things come together a lot faster.

FYI: These are not the same grandparents from my other human AU "Game of Cooks". She's not Grandmano (more like Mama!Greece this time?) and he at first is a hugely OOC Rome. You can tell just from how long it's taking me to introduce characters that this is, again, a REALLY BIG FIC.

So leave a review below and when I get back here with 9, we should have some brotherly shinanigans to lighten the mood. Thanks!