Chapter Text
This should have been the happiest day of his life.
Graduating from Yale, with an offer from Columbia Law School in hand, he should have been ecstatic.
No kid from the streets, especially one who had spent a year living hand to mouth in Hell’s Kitchen, could dream of achieving half so much.
Which was precisely where it all fell apart.
Whatever his own contribution to his accomplishments was, Tom was by no means deluded or arrogant enough to believe any of it would have been possible without the Corrleones.
They hadn’t just saved his life, they’d saved his future.
He was in their debt, however lightly Sonny chose to take his heroic deed on Tom’s behalf.
But, though they’d never hung that debt over his head, he’d also never been allowed to forget for one moment that he was Tom Hagen.
Not Tom Corrleone.
As a kid, he’d been timid, or at least streetwise, enough not to push the issue with Vito.
(That was the Godfather’s name, after all. Even if in his head alone, he referred to him by an entirely different one).
It was Sonny who’d made a stink about it, demanding to know why his adoptive brother couldn’t share in the family fully.
Tom had come to stand just outside the door to Vito’s office, drawn by the sound of raised voices, and lingered against his better judgment.
“Because that’s not your brother.”
Other words had followed those, about Mr. Hagen and the need for their family to respect the pride of another, but none of them had penetrated.
It was that sentence which rang in his head for days and weeks and months afterwards, until it was tattooed permanently in his mind, a constant refrain on the worst of days and a faint echo of foreboding on the best.
From then on, he’d begun to plan.
Before, he’d been swept away in the fantasy of being a member of the family, whether or not any state agency said it was so, comfortably ensconced in their rhythms and the lucky recipient of the same amount of time all the siblings got to figure out just which path they wanted to take.
He’d never been deluded enough to think he could be a made man, or even really to want to be, but he’d still pictured himself having a place with them when he was old and gray.
(Lately, he figured he’d be lucky to merit a wave or a nod by the time Connie was ready to be out of the house).
After, he’d sat down in his room and thought, really thought, about what he wanted to do with his life, and the fastest way he could get himself out of that house while still having something worth giving the Corrleones if they called in their favor.
Lawyer had been the natural answer and he’d set himself to the task with a singular sort of intensity, regarding every step on the path there as one out of their home and towards a new start.
(Truth was, he didn’t want a new start. Even here, knowing how they truly regarded him, he could wrap himself most of the time in the fantasy of wantedness and love. A return to the streets, or an empty bedsit, would be an acknowledgment of the fact that he’d never really left them. That’s he’d been nothing more than a stray that overstayed its welcome).
Pop had been proud of him, had said so more than once, and he took the praise for what it was: approval of his plan to extricate himself from the family as quickly and as cleanly as possible.
Sonny had put up more objections, teasing him for his swotishness and moaning endlessly about why he had to go so far as New Haven, but Tom knew that, in the end, they were more complaints about the loss of a favorite old toy than a brother.
He’d find a new one.
And Tom would be out on his own search, one eye perpetually peeled for someone desperate enough to overlook why a man like him had been kicked to the curb so many times that they might be willing to throw in their lot with him, give him a chance at making another cobbled together nest for himself.
It was just the way life worked.