Chapter 1: Amber
Notes:
Prompt: Amber
Chapter Text
Every year, without fail, Angelo will leave for a while.
It’s always when a certain day approaches.
(Nero doesn’t ask because he doesn’t have to.)
Every year - without fail - Angelo sits in front of a grave and sets down two glasses filled with amber liquid, sparkling in the sun.
(He kept a bottle of Lawless Heaven. Or two. Or three. However many he'll need.)
Hours later, he will drink one and pour the other out over the grave.
Inbetween, Angelo talks. Sometimes rueful, sometimes happy, but there is a smile on his face more often than not.
(It still hurts.)
Chapter Text
Fio Vanetti is not a woman who breaks easily.
(She breaks quietly, privately, and then she puts herself back together to show the uncaring world an unbroken woman where everyone expects a shattered girl.)
(She does it again, and again, and again.)
There are still days when everything is too much – when even the news slowly trickling in from Chicago only serves to make it worse, to make her see shadows at every corner and to stop her from sleeping at all.
Those days, she gets in a car and drives away, her hands tight around the steering wheel and her mind far away.
She drives and drives and drives.
One day, she stops to watch a dozen horses race each other across a field.
They’re beautiful.
Fio leans against her car, folding an arm around her stomach, and just breathes.
“… Ma’am?”
She looks up, startled, to find someone offering her a worn straw hat.
Her gaze travels up the outstretched arm with lithe muscles to dark hair in a braid, a sparkling smile, and freckles.
“Ma’am,” the woman repeats, “my horses are lovely to look at but not worth the sunburn on your even lovelier face.”
Fio blushes even as she considers the stranger.
(She knows about compliments, and she knows when they are nothing but empty and when they are freely given.)
She smiles and reaches for the hat, her fingertips brushing the back of a tanned, strong hand.
(Fio names her daughter Nicci. Victory. There are several victories and there will be more but the tiny, beautiful, terrifying wonder in her arms is the most important one that makes it all worth it.)
(Emma’s arms around her, her chin resting on her shoulder from where the other woman softly gazes down at Nicci are pretty wonderful, too.)
Notes:
a triple drabble (300 words)! I just want Fio to be happy and have a girlfriend, man.

Account Deleted on Chapter 1 Tue 01 Dec 2020 08:48PM UTC
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SilverUtahraptor on Chapter 1 Fri 04 Dec 2020 12:31PM UTC
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