6 Years Ago
July 27th, 2020
Night fell over the 7th District in Cremont City like a tired blanket. The building's single streetlight threw a thin, jaundiced halo through the kitchen window, painting the Castellan apartment in a weary, forgiving light. Inside, the small room smelled of tomato and garlic and the faint, ever-present tang of damp paint. A single bare bulb hung low from the ceiling, swinging a breath as the evening wind moved through the open window and tugged at the thin curtain.
The table was old oak, scarred and pitted from years of hands and heat and small domestic battles. Five mismatched chairs circled it. Tonight they sat like a constellation - not perfect, but familiar enough that everyone fit. Janus Castellan's shoulders were broad and softened by middle age; his hair had a salt-and-pepper honesty to it, cut short and practical. He washed the plate in a slow, deliberate way while he joked about some ridiculous television program that had been on earlier. His laugh came out like gravel and sunlight - odd and warm.
Isabela sat at the head of the table. Even at the end of a day in a cramped, overworked flat she carried herself like someone whom the world had agreed to admire. Her hair was long, gray with a subtle silver thread at the temples that suggested age and experience rather than decline. Her skin had the warm undertone of the Mediterranean; fine lines ran around her stormy-gray eyes, the map of a smile often worn. Tonight she wore a house dress a shade too black for a family dinner, and still she moved like a woman who had learned to turn the small civicities of life into theatre. Her hands were precise as she ladled sauce; when she laughed it was large and unrestrained, and the room brightened like a candle finding a draft.
Alessandra, the eldest daughter - tall, long-limbed, and still carrying herself with a model-like poise despite the family's modest means - dug a piece of bread into the sauce and scowled at Janus's joke, half-pretending to scold him. Her platinum blonde lay like a black banner down her back; her eyes were stormy-gray just like Isabela's and slightly amused. Marcella sat close to her - softer in the face, a warmth in her hazel-gray eyes that seemed to glow when she smiled; she was the sort to charm people into paying for her dreams. Selene, youngest by a few years, was already folded into the corner of her chair like someone who had learned to quietly plate her own dinners in the margins. Her white hair, lighter than Alessandra's, hovered around her shoulders like a halo of frost. She looked at the food with the detached interest of someone who was thinking two steps ahead - what the next opportunity might be, how to get there.
And Rio - eighteen years old with the soldier's shoulders starting to bloom, storm-gray eyes like the kind of weather you could get lost in - sat quietly, a fork tapping the rim of his plate now and then as if he were measuring each beat of the world. His hair was dark and medium-length, a boy's look still being curated into manhood by circumstance. A faint slash scar between brow and eyebrow - a souvenir of some rough scrape when he'd been sixteen - cut his expression into a simmer. His skin was light olive, marked by the small flecks of sun that came with the work he did around town. His posture held some latent military precision, though the uniform was months away and the house dress of the evening felt more honest on him than arithmetic.
The Castellans had few luxuries but many things that mattered more to them: a small ritual of dinner; the way the youngest always read the newspaper comics out loud; the way Janus always left the last scoop of gelato for the child who had kept a straight face the longest. They made brightness out of scraps, and that was perhaps their richest possession.
Tonight felt like any other of those carefully ordinary nights until Isabela's knife stopped mid-air and the room hummed instead of talking. Her gaze slid across the table and found Rio in the small, stealthy way mothers have. She set the carving knife down with a little sound, the clack loud in the hush.
"Río," she said, the name rolled like fruit from her mouth - "why are you so quiet, my love?"
He blinked, surprised as if he'd been caught stepping through a window at night. His hand tightened around the fork. The small sound of his breath threaded through the pause he took to gather himself.
For a moment the only sound was the clink of cutlery and the faint city noise wheezing in from the street below. A moth beat against the kitchen glass, frustrated at its own small nocturnal ambition.
"Nothing, Mama" he said, and the word was too small to contain the undercurrent in his chest.
Isabela's eyes narrowed, and she slid across her chair to put a hand over his. It was small, domestic, immediate: the squeeze of a woman who wanted as much as to mend as to hold. She was careful to be casual, but her fingers held his as if afraid that he might tumble past the edge of a cliff and out of reach.
"What is it?" she asked again, softer now.
By the table's light every small detail of Isabela's face seemed magnified: the tiny freckle just below her left eye, the way her mouth shifted when she tried to keep a laugh in, the faint worry between the brows.
Alessandra glanced up first, then Marcella, then Selene. Janus, who'd been saving a joke that fizzled in his mind, fell still, the plate in his hand going unnoticed. A silence gathered in the kitchen like a visiting thing that wasn't always welcome.
Rio inhaled. He tasted the tomato on his mouth, the salt of other people's smiles. He let himself look at each of their faces - the ache in Janus's quiet smile that matched the age at the corners of his eye, the soft confusion of his sisters who had always refused to believe the world was cruel to them yet, the way Isabela's fingers tightened around his.
"Tomorrow," he said slowly, "I leave for Vortania."
For a handful of heartbeats nothing happened but the sound of the city outside, the thin clatter of a tram, a dog barking somewhere down the block. Then the sound of a spoon faltering on a plate became a kind of drumbeat. Eyes turned to him one by one, and the faces at the table read his announcement the same way you read a wound: instant comprehension, then the rush that follows.
Alessandra was the first to move.
She rose like a thing that could no longer be contained. Her chair scraped the floor with a harsh, metallic complaint; bread fell and rolled under the table, forgotten. Her jaw tightened until the vein at her temple stood out, a brief, angry ridge. "What?" she said, but the word was too small for the storm beneath it, and it came out strangled.
Marcella's reaction was less violent but no less definite. Her fork slipped from her hand and clattered against the plate; she pressed her free palm against her mouth, eyes large, reflecting an ache that was almost animal in its hunger. Selene's fingers stopped mid-drum on the rim of her glass, a single, precise motion arrested by something like shock. Her face pinched tight - not outwardly noisy like her sisters, but inward, a cold folding.
Isabela's hand left the ladle and hovered over the pot as if suspended by a wire. She had the posture of a woman trying to hold a dam in place. For a second she was utterly still - an image of composure in the half-light - before the color drained from her face and her mouth shaped the name with a force that was both pleading and stunned. "Río," she said, and it was a softness that broke on the kitchen air.
Janus set his fork down then, deliberately. The motion made a small, echoing sound, as though he'd just closed the lid on something heavy. He studied his son with an expression halfway between pride and a knot of worry that the world had finally come to put on him. "You don't need to go," he said, steady but honest. "There's work here. We'll manage."
The room shifted into that peculiar domestic choreography families know - counteroffers, half-answers, the mechanics of consolation - but it all felt too small and paper-thin. Rio's shoulders rose and fell once, like a man exhaling before a leap. "It's not just for me," he said. "It's for all of us. I can send money home. Things cost more every week. Vortanian Army pays well. I can help more from there."
Isabela's eyes glistened, not with anger but with the rawness of a woman's fear at the idea of losing the thing she loved most. She pushed her chair back fast enough that the legs knocked against the floor; plates trembled. "You don't have to sacrifice yourself for us," she said. She crossed the space to him and took his hand. There was the tendency of her touch: clinging, urgent.
Alessandra couldn't stand that hush. Her glare hardened into something white-hot. She had always been the sentinel of the family's smaller honor - sharp, beautiful, the first to set boundaries. She moved to the window as if the city beyond it might offer some answer, but the city's lights were indifferent. "You're not going," she said, and when she spoke it was like an order not to be obeyed. Her hands balled into fists at her sides, knuckles white. For the first time in a long while she looked powerless - and that terrified her.
Marcella stood so abrupt it sent a jolt through the others. "This is ridiculous," she barked, the edge of her voice lacquered with hurt. "You can't just leave." Her mouth trembled and for a moment she looked forty years older, as if the simple thought - of him leaving - had aged her on the spot. She moved to the doorway and her fingers curled around the frame while everything else in her sagged with a need she wasn't prepared to name.
Selene's reaction was the slowest and the coldest. For a woman who kept her feelings folded like currency, the news had a chemical effect. She rose with that same quiet efficiency she used to handle things that needed precise strategy; but when she reached for her coat it was with a motion that was less practical and more ritual. Her eyes were not wet, but there was a sharpness in them that could be read like a blade; the look of someone who felt betrayed and had not yet decided whether to be furious or to be clever about it.
Without another word Alessandra pushed her chair back so hard it hit the wall. She did not look at Janus; she did not look at Isabela. Her panic was too immediate. She could not bear to watch Rio walk away. Her fingers, which had minutes ago held bread and sauce, now trembled with the terrible electricity of someone going to war against an idea she could not fight: abandonment. She turned and left the apartment with a speed that almost made the walls strain - a single human body ejecting itself from the orbit of grief.
Marcella followed as if pulled by a string. Her voice was a small, animal sound as she moved, half-sobbing and half-screaming. "You can't do this... you owe us..." she shouted, and then the sentence broke and she fled into the night like a person running from a fire.
Selene didn't speak at all. She closed the door behind her in a way that made the sound of a finality, precise and small. The three of them left the kitchen like a curtain tearing - sudden, fierce, irrevocable.
Isabela's hands tightened on Rio as the sisters' footsteps dropped away. For a moment she looked older than anyone had ever seen her - small lines folding deeper, the bright shell of her habitual composure chipped and raw. She held him as if he were a child again, the way mothers pull their smallest in during thunder, and the shape of her hold said something complicated: fear, ownership, shame, a terrible greed for the presence of the only person who made her feel complete.
Janus watched the exodus with a face that had practiced authority and patience for decades. He opened his mouth, as if to call them back, to say something that might stitch the frayed edges. But the words wouldn't come. Instead he sat back down in his chair, the chair bearing the imprint of a man who had been given the elder role by life's slow lottery. He folded his hands, palms showing, and he looked at Rio like a man already balancing numbers - cost, return, the rough arithmetic of how to be whole again.
"You've never been one to leave things half-done," Janus said finally, his voice rough with some newly tender edge. "If this is what you think you must do..." He stopped, because there were things men don't know how to say and because the house felt too small for certain declarations.
Isabela's eyes flashed, an ember of something sharp and warned at the edges. "You are not doing this to punish me," she said, too quickly; her tone gave away a tremor she tried to hide. "Do you hear me? You are not going away unless I say so." The words slipped out like a command and then as if surprised by their own heat. They had the hard and unnatural ring of a woman trying to remake fate with a voice.
Rio swallowed, feeling the molten mix shift inside him. He had left because the numbers were pragmatic and because his anger at himself for not doing enough was a fire that would not be doused with small comforts. But now the look in his mother's eyes - something braided of love, insistence, and a possessiveness that made his skin crawl - reminded him of what he might be stepping into. Being the son of Isabela Castellan had always meant living in the orbit of a force that loved and commanded and, sometimes, suffocated.
"It's only...." he tried to say, and the smallest tremor could be heard in his voice. "It's only for a while. I'll be back. I'll call. I'll send money. I'll..."
"You will not leave me," Isabela interrupted, and the sentence was a small flat stone thrown into a lake: spreading, steady. Her fingers tightened against his hand as if to anchor him to the place where she stood. That grip carried an odd undertow of something older; a weight of affection that folded immediately into control.
The house felt suddenly too small for everyone's feelings, and Janus rose at last, clearing his throat as if it had become necessary to speak for more than himself. "We will manage," he said, voice even and patient. He put a hand on Isabela's shoulder, and it was a gesture of both support and a tether. "If you must go, for the money, then do what will make you proud. But promise me you'll be careful. Promise me you'll write."
Rio met his father's eyes and gave a small, steady nod. The nod seemed to do something in him - turning his trepidation into resolve. "I promise."
And that single word - "promise" - was what finally broke Isabela.
For a few fragile seconds, she stood there like a statue, her hand trembling near her mouth. Her lips parted, but no words came out. The sound of Rio's voice seemed to splinter something deep in her chest. She blinked rapidly, her breath hitching, then she suddenly pushed back her chair. The legs scraped across the floor, loud and raw, like a scream that couldn't find a voice.
She turned away from them, her face half-hidden by the dim yellow kitchen light. The tears she had been holding back spilled over, tracing down her cheeks in silent defiance.
"I can't..." she whispered hoarsely, voice cracking under the weight of it all. "I can't watch you leave."
Her hand brushed against the table, knocking over her cup. Water spilled across the tablecloth, pooling near the untouched bread, glinting under the flickering light like fragments of glass. Then, without another word, Isabela turned and walked away - her steps quick, uneven, full of anguish. The sound of the bedroom door slamming a heartbeat later was sharp and final.
Janus flinched slightly, closing his eyes for a moment before exhaling through his nose. "She'll come around," he murmured, but there was no conviction in his tone - only hope dressed as certainty.
Rio stood there, frozen in the silence that followed. The room suddenly felt cavernous, too large and too empty all at once. The scent of the dinner - roasted meat, garlic, the faint sweetness of wine - still lingered, but it all smelled hollow now, like a memory already fading.
He looked toward the hallway where his mother had vanished, then back at his father. "Tell Mama, Alessandra, Marcella, and Selene that I'll come back," he said quietly, almost like a plea. "Tell them I'm doing this … for all of you."
Janus nodded slowly, his face lined with understanding. "I will. But you should know, son… sometimes when people love too much, they don't hear words - they only feel the pain."
Rio nodded faintly. He gathered his breath, his body heavy with both resolve and sorrow. The clock on the wall ticked loudly, each second reminding him that tomorrow would come, whether they were ready or not.
Outside, the wind began to rise, pressing against the windows, whispering like the sea beyond the city. It carried with it the faint sound of a tram bell in the distance, the kind of sound that marked the passage of time in a world that never stopped for anyone - not even for families breaking quietly over dinner.
Janus finally sat down again, picking up the fallen cup and setting it upright with deliberate care. "Finish your meal," he said softly, not looking up. "You'll need your strength for the road."
Rio did not move for a long while. Then, slowly, he lowered himself back into his chair. The food was cold now, the candle nearly burnt out. But he picked up his fork and took one last bite, his mind replaying the sound of his mother's voice, the flash of her tears, and the slam of the door that told him nothing in the Castellan home would ever feel the same again.