Work Text:
He cannot concentrate.
The words keep dancing off the page. He clicks his pen and leans back, sighs like as if it could drain the exhaustion out of his body.
Nervosity, he recalls his sister’s voice, is the response to a lack of information in crucial situations. She is right, he thinks, he is woefully underprepared for this one.
He takes a glance at the fridge, the door and the couch, then picks the pen up again.
“Don’t you dare.” warns Aldo’s exasperated voice from behind him. “You haven’t been able to write a single sentence since sitting down. Leave it be.”
Vincent grimaces bleakly. He had worn a dog-ear into the corner of his notes. Great.
“When is your sister’s plane touching down, anyways?” Aldo mumbles, sorting a stack of paper into some arbitrary system. Vincent would love to multitask here, ask what those papers are for and help Aldo in organising, but today, all his thoughts revolve around Francesca.
“In fourteen hours,” he smiles without checking the time. Aldo lifts a brow.
“And you’re going to keep worrying until then?”
“M-hm.”
His mind keeps running away from him. One thought starts, runs into another and crashes with a third, before he can even lift himself from the chair. He opens the flight radar again. She should be right over the Atlantic by now.
Vincent closes his eyes and worries at his bottom lip.
He had made rice pudding and hibiscus tea in the morning. He had put a fresh cover on the guest bed and bought a second toothbrush. Its handle shines in lime green - a feeble attempt at choosing what once was her favourite colour, so that she might, might, feel less estranged here with her brother who she hasn’t seen in six years. On the other hand, it also might turn out to be a well-meaning failure. He’ll just have to see.
She cannot concentrate.
Her fingers keep fidgeting with her phone charger; She’s got her head thrown into her neck, observing the airport lounge upside down. In her nervosity, she had visited the drugstore, the perfumery, every bookstore, fast food joint, gift shop, duty-free shebang, just to keep her mind busy.
She checks her phone again. He hasn’t read her latest message, yet. It’s just a quick note anyway: “Landed in Amsterdam. Boarding to Barcelona in 15 Minutes. Touchdown in Rome ca. 2330.”
How will he look? Her thoughts gravitate relentlessly towards her destination. Stressed or annoyed? How grey is his hair? Will he hug her the same way as always – diagonally with enough force to crack a rib? Or will the drift between them be too big to overcome? She shakes her head. Better not think about that possibility.
Who will she meet?! The same Vincent who would drink straight from the tap, his hair falling into the sink? Probably not, she reasons, This place has staff and all. Will she instead meet a stranger with a stick up his ass?
She had always thought she would bury her brother. She had imagined funerals in the Congo, Iraq and Afghanistan, she had imagined a casket either closed or empty. She hadn’t expected to see him again so soon - so near - so alive. But this is the state of affairs. She will see her brother, in nine hours no less.
International travel had made her tired. Eyes falling shut, she resigns herself to a quick minute of rest, before the worries could continue.
In the end, it’s a little anticlimactic.
Rome Fiumicino Airport is big, labyrinthine and overall a liminal experience. Francesca takes dragging steps through the sterilely lit hallways and only notices her brother as he’s standing right in front of her.
He is smiling. He looks tired. He hesitates before hugging her. She can’t help but giggle. What a surreal experience. She feels another step closer to the end of all interactions with him - and yet - another step farther away.
She doesn’t want to let go of him and still retracts her arms somewhen. A steadying breath nearly helps her not to cry.
“Here,” he says. His voice is warm, more so than she’d expected. “Let me help you,” he slings her humongous backpack over his shoulder.
“You look… good,” Francesca notices. Less hungry, she means – but that’s not quite appropriate to mention, is it? More at ease, maybe. Like he had caught up on a lot of sleep. He strengthens his grip on her arm. “You too,” he says and smiles like he knows exactly what she is thinking.
“You cut your hair,” he states as they’re sitting in a metro car on their way back downtown.
“Yeah,” the lights flicker and the hand straps swing in the empty hallway, “Point five millimeters at the sides. Do you like it?”
She looks at him and her own face, their father’s face, looks back. They have the same eyes, the same chin and cheeks, their voices are similar enough to get mixed up on the phone. It feels good not to have an undersea cable separating them.
Vincent leans back and ruffles through her buzzed hair: “I love it.”
The steps to Vincent’s flat are taken in astonishment. Her awe punches out any lingering fatigue.
“I kind of forgot the church was crazy rich,” she whispers as they pass the fifth marble bust.
“To be honest,” Vincent murmurs back, “I also had before I saw all this”
His door springs open with a crack! Contrary to her expectations, he does not live in a palace, but in a definite upgrade from his flat in Kabul. Not that she has a lot of mental capacity left to think about opulence – her focus is set on eating and then sleeping.
“Come on,” he gestures to the kitchen, reading her mind, “I made dinner. And your bed. You must be tired”
His kitchen isn’t very big and it doesn’t take a doctorate to find his cutlery drawer. He sets a full bowl of rice pudding down in front of her and she digs in with a green plastic spoon she silently already declares hers for the week. The pudding is perfect.
“Did you get the recipe from mamá?” she asks as she shovels another helping into the bowl.
“I do know how to use a cookbook,” Vincent scoffs while turning on the tap. His pointer finger darts through the stream, gauging the temperature. “But yeah,” he shrugs, “I asked her for it,” and plunges his head into the sink to sip from the tap.
Francesca smiles. That answers those questions.