Chapter Text
Illario tossed his cellphone across the bed and lay back on the pillows, staring at the ceiling. Of the two messages on his cellphone only one was nominally welcome. The other made him grimace at the thought of spending an entire weekend with his grandmother glaring down her nose at him while she praised his cousin.
As to the first message, he had no idea Lucanis had been seeing anyone, let alone had been seeing them long enough to get engaged.
His boyfriend of a few comes came out of the master bath, long blond hair wet and clinging to his skin. He looked at the offending cellphone then back at Illario with a raised brow. "Whatever did your phone do to piss you off?"
Illario eyed Lysander, debating if he wanted to distract the other man standing in just a towel in his bedroom doorway.
"I know that look, Illario," Lysander scolded lightly.
Illario groaned. "Fine. Caterina is demanding my appearance at Villa Dellamorte this coming weekend because my cousin is introducing his fiancé to the family."
" 'You always disappoint me, why can't you be more like Lucanis' Caterina?" Lysander made a face. "No wonder you're in a foul mood."
“I am sure Lucanis’s fiance is a lovely woman, and if he wanted to introduce me to her elsewhere I’d be fine with it, but having to deal with Caterina for an entire weekend?” Illario grimaced.
“You could always, I don’t know, not go,” Lysander suggested.
“The way Caterina would harass me for not being at the meet the family weekend is worse than actually being there,” Illario snorted. “I swear the woman lives to torment me. She will spend the entire weekend asking me why I haven’t dated anyone seriously in years, and when am I going to bring a fiancé home.”
Lysander leaned against the door frame and considered his boyfriend, if boyfriend was the right word for it. Perhaps situationship was a better term. They’d met at the upscale nightclub the Diamond months ago because Neve was meeting her boyfriend and thought Lysander might like the club. He’d spent all of half an hour with Neve before she’d vanished to spend time with her boyfriend Luca, leaving Lysa to figure out his own entertainment for the rest of the evening. He’d literally bumped into Illario on the dance floor, and when the man suggested they have a drink together after the first dance, he’d agreed.
They’d slept together several times since then, sometimes meeting up at the Diamond or some restaurant, only to end up ending the night in Illario’s townhouse or Lysander’s apartment. He’d learned enough to know that both Illario's parents and Lucanis’s parents had passed away in an auto accident years before and the cousin had been raised by their strict and exacting grandmother, Caterina. From what he’d heard about the woman, he didn’t think very much of her as a material figure. He got the impression that both Lucanis and Illario had been spoiled materially but severely neglected emotionally.
And he’d seen the scars on Illario’s back, the ones Illario wouldn’t talk about.
“So what do you want?” Lysander asked curiously. “Do you want her approval, or do you just want to rile her?”
Illario lifted a brow. “What do you mean?”
“When you talk about Caterina, you still often sound like you want her to approve of you and your choices. And yet she doesn’t seem to think you having a successful career in tech security is enough, never mind that your cousin works in a similar industry and she approves of him. You’ve told me more than once how much she compares him to you. So do you want to try and impress her and win her approval, or do you just want to see if you can piss her off?”
“I doubt the latter would win me many fans in my family,” Illario noted wryly.
“Illario, you don’t accept half of your cousin’s invites for dinner or coffee because you’re afraid you’re going to resent him more even though you love him, so you stay away. If your cousin really does love you, he’ll accept you whether or not you are talking to Caterina,” Lysander replied bluntly.
He watched anger flicker through Illario’s eyes. “You think you know me so well, after just a few months? You think my cousin would really choose me over her? He is her favorite.” His gaze hardened. “I think you should leave for the night.”
Lysander knew then he’d hit far too close to home for Illario’s comfort. He gave a slight tilt of his head before he simply let the towel he wore around his waist drop and collected his things, quietly changing into his clothing. He met Illario’s icy blue gaze with one of his own as he left Illario’s townhouse to let his boyfriend sulk in peace.
The truth was Lysander had only been able to pick upon so much about Illario’s life because that was what he was trained to do, observe. He’d majored in history and sociology at university in Minrathous. He’d been hired at the Treviso History Museum only last year as a museum curator. He’d spent a lifetime observing people at his father’s various military postings through the Tevinter Empire and discovered very early that you could learn a great deal about people simply from listening and watching, paying attention to the unspoken messages in their expressions and actions.
It was possible he’d been a little too forceful tonight with Illario, but this wasn’t the first time they’d had that conversation.
Illario brooded as he listened to his front door slam closed. They’d been having a wonderful evening before he’d received Caterina’s message. Lysander had looked oh so very tempting when he’d come out of the bathroom in nothing but one of Illario’s towels.
This thing he had with Lysander had lasted weeks longer than his last relationship, and he’d begun wondering if maybe there might be something more there. But then Lysander had to go all analytical and tear into Illario’s family drama.
Meirda, he’d been looking forward to a night of sweaty, pleasurable sex and now he had a wet towel on his bedroom floor and an empty bed. Why did Lysander have to press so much?
Of course he was going to go to the ‘meet the family’ weekend, alone, and endure Caterina’s underhanded remarks and staring down her nose at him, then he’d come home, break out a bottle of something strong, and pray he didn’t remember the rest of the weekend. What had Lysander even meant, ‘do you want to rile her up’. Not coming home to her little family weekend would certainly do that, but it almost felt like Lysander had been thinking of something else.
He groaned into his pillow. He was starting to get a headache now and it wasn’t worth pursuing tonight, not since he’d already told Lysander to go. Maybe he’d call the other man up tomorrow..
Illario ended up spending a long, sleepless night, staring up at his ceiling, wondering why Lysander’s bald breakdown of his relationship with his grandmother and his cousin had bothered him so much.
******
Illario stood in his kitchen on Thursday evening, glaring at his mostly empty fridge. Lucanis was the one who enjoyed cooking more than he, and Illario hadn’t yet gone grocery shopping that week and had instead been eating takeout. It had been two days since he’d talked to Lysander, and he found that unlike with some of his previous relationships he didn’t really like the quiet.
Lysander was also the only one of his partners who’d ever bothered to poke at the Dellamorte family dynamics and try to understand them.
He still had yet to text yes to Caterina and she’d sent another message today in an imperious tone telling him he’d better be at the Villa this weekend. Lucanis had also sent a message simply asking if he would be there.
Damn it.
The doorbell ringing surprised him, and Illario muttered, closing the figure before he went to open his front door. He blinked.
Lysander stood there with groceries in hand, regarding him calmly before he pushed past Illario to carry the reusable grocery bags into the kitchen and set them down. He efficiently sorted through the groceries and began putting everything away.
“Lysander? What the fuck?”
Lysander glanced over his shoulder at Illario as he put produce in the fridge. “I’ve observed that when something’s bothering you that you tend to neglect certain things, like grocery shopping, and I know this whole thing with your grandmother bothers you.”
Illario stared at the other man. “So you just decide to buy groceries and waltz in and make dinner for me?”
“More or less,” the blonde shrugged.
“Meirda, Lysander, that’s creepy, how much you seem to have picked up on my life and my family since we started dating,” Illario eyed him. “Are you sure you’re just a museum curator?”
“I’m also the son of a high ranking officer in the Tevinter Imperial Army,” Lysander reminded him. “Sometimes our survival relied on how observant we could all be. I might not have followed my father into the army, but I did learn a great deal from him and my mother.”
“Meirda and I thought my childhood was weird,” Illario murmured.
“Oh no, both our childhoods were odd, but I actually had a guardian who gave a shit about me,” Lysander informed him. “If you’re ever up for it, I’ll introduce you to Father. I think he might actually want to meet you someday, so long as you don’t undersell yourself the way you do to everyone else. I know you do that so that people will deliberately underestimate you.”
“That’s creepy,” Illario repeated again.
“You’ve told me the names of some of your past lovers, Illario. My creepy fact has absolutely nothing on Zara Renata,” Lysander informed him. “That bitch is a blood mage. I have absolutely no idea what you saw in her.”
Illario sighed. “A misguided attempt to try and impress my grandmother,” he admitted. “It failed rather miserably.”
“Leading to your cousin being seriously injured and requiring months of rehab, yes I know,” Lysander shrugged as he went digging through Illario’s cabinets to find a skillet.
“Did you do some kind of profile on me or something?” Illario demanded, suddenly suspicious.
“Not me. Father did though,” Lysander explained. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your grandmother had a similar dossier on me.”
“You do realize how fucked up all of that sounds right?” Illario asked.
“Of course it does, but neither of our lives have ever been what most people would classify as normal, Illario. Despite the weirdness and your questionable taste in women, I like you,” Lysander informed him. “When you’re not going out of your way to make people think you’re just some playboy, you are quite intelligent and a generous lover. You made mistakes, and for whatever reason, even after your cousin found out you were behind Zara finding him, he chose to forgive you. Now the question is, are you going to learn from those mistakes and make your own life, damn what the others think?”
“Shit.” Illario watched Lysander as he moved around the kitchen cooking dinner. Within short order Lysander had made them a stir fry and plated it with rice. Carrying the two plates into Illario’s dining nook, he took a seat.
“Most people would have been smart enough to stay away after I told you to leave the other night,” Illario remarked as he eyed dinner.
“Well I’m not most people. I’ve been told before I can be a little reckless,” Lysander admitted.
Illario took the seat across from Lysander, admitting to himself as he began to eat that the dish was good, and after having spent two days brooding when he wasn’t working, it was sort of nice to have company that chose to be here and that he didn’t have to try and charm.
“So, what are you going to do about this weekend?” Lysander asked after several minutes of quiet.
Illario glared at him a moment then down at his food. “I’m going to the villa, I’ll put up with Caterina for the weekend, then come home. Maybe drag you out on Monday night so we can do something fun to help me forget the weekend.”
“Ever thought of taking someone with you to help distract your grandmother?” Lysander asked lightly.
Illario eyed him. “Are you insane? Who would willingly do that?”
Lysander shrugged. “That’s what I was offering the other night, Illario. Maybe if you had someone with you, visiting your grandmother wouldn’t seem so bad.”
The Dellamorte’s eyes narrowed. “You would voluntarily do that?”
“If it lets me piss off your grandmother or countertalk her claims that you aren’t good enough, sure,” Lysander smirked.
“I do not understand your obsession with pissing off my grandmother,” Illario glared. “And if we ever broke up, it would leave me to deal with the consequences.”
Lysander’s hand slipped across the table. “Look, Illario, I’ve had my own fuck ups, one of which led me to be temporarily exiled from the Imperium for almost two years once. But a friend gave me a second chance. When you aren’t brooding or being angry about your grandmother, you can be rather pleasant company. I told you, Illario, I like you. I may be crazy, but I do like you.”
“I…” Illario took a deep breath, imagining how his grandmother would react. If Lysander called her out on her bullshit the way he’d been calling Illario out on his, it would piss her off to no end.
Did he really care? The old woman had never been shy about everyone knowing Lucanis was her favorite and that Illario didn’t live up to her expectations. Even though he was her favorite, Lucanis still spent time with Illario, even after the absolute disaster that had been Zara Renata. It wasn’t to say Lucanis wasn’t more cautious around Illario now, but Lucanis had told him that they didn’t really have any other family left, and he wasn’t going to lose Illario just because he’d done something extremely stupid.
“You realise she will interrogate you,” Illario told his boyfriend.
“No worse than my father, or some of his friends,” Lysander shrugged. “And let her throw a few barbs my way. I’d rather enjoy ruffling her feathers.”
“You are crazy,” Illario muttered.
“But you still like me,” Lysander pointed out.
Illario sat there pondering the idea the rest of dinner. To spend the weekend not giving a shit if he pissed Caterina off rather than trying to make her like him? It wounded fun, on one hand. But there could be a great deal of backlash. What if she disowned him? What if she took any support she’d given him away, what if she…
He stopped. Legally, there were inheritances from his parents that she couldn’t keep from him, not now. He was well beyond the age the trust required. Even if she did disown him and cut him off, he’d still have his own career that he’d made for himself, and inheritance from his parents.
That left the last thing he had left to lose…Lucanis.
Would Lucanis take her side, or would he finally stop keeping his head down just to keep their grandmother happy.
He sighed. “Okay, let’s do it,” he said at last.
Lysander lifted a brow. “Do what?”
Illario laughed, then found himself smirking. “Let’s see if we can’t drive my grandmother to distraction this weekend. If nothing else, it will let Lucanis’s fiance see Caterina for who she truly is, and either she’ll have a spine of steel and won’t put up with Caterina, or she’ll fold. But let her know what she’s really getting into.”
Lysander smirked back. “Then I will be happy to accompany you to visit your grandmother’s villa this weekend, dear.”