Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom - Dir. Mitsuo Fukuda - Jan 26, 2024

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom - Dir. Mitsuo Fukuda - Jan 26, 2024

Whumpee trying to do the classic "duck into the bathroom so they can treat their hidden wound(s) without anyone finding out" but all the bathrooms are occupied and they're worsening by the second while they wait for somebody to finish up. Bonus points if whoever's in the bathroom eventually comes out to find them collapsed outside the door

Vincenzo Cassano Fight Scene Bracket: Round 2

Propaganda under the cut:

Ms. Oh’s killer:

- Slow deadly glance upward when the man opens the door ✅

- Backs him into his own apartment with a death stare ✅

- Repeatedly punches the guy with a facial expression so scary it gives you chills ✅

Plaza hallway:

- “Aspettate” while shoving the man’s arm away ✅

- Unceremoniously smashes guy through the hallway window ✅

- Gives it his all to fight off the men (and is eventually aided by his newfound Cassano Family) ✅

I've been dreaming about an AU where Jang Han-seo doesn't die and instead gets to live out his fantasy of being Vincenzo's little brother. They both get get brothers who aren't trying to kill them and stumble into a close familial relationship where they learn to trust each other. Han-seo calls Vincenzo for advice running Babel, and in return, he keeps an eye on the residents of Geumga plaza to make sure nothing happens to them. Han-Seo gets so close to Vincenzo that he gets to be his best man at the wedding in Malta to Hong Cha-young. Anything along those lines would be amazing!

In fairness, theirs isn't a dynamic I'm great at or a character voice I can give deserved justice to, but let's see where and how it goes...

- - -

When her surgery ends, and he gets both medical assurance and visual proof that Hong Cha Young's condition has stabilized, he asks Mr. Nam to keep brief vigil.

He somberly passes the men he has stationed at her door and the ends of the hallway to exit and descends down a back stairwell, climbing six floors to the ground level and then two more beneath it, exiting to a stand, hesitating, looking at set of double doors he's passed through just once before.

Inside them is a place he knows far too well.

He steps through them and then stands again a long while in silence, regarding the form laid out beneath the white sheet - all that's left of the man who'd laid his life down for both of them earlier.

And he says a final prayer for Jang Han Seo.

Before tossing a black duffel on the middle of the gurney.

There's a strangled sound and then motion, squirming, beneath the thin fabric.

"Hyung," a strangled voice grunts. "How is she?"

Alive, he wants to say. Because you tried to trade your stupid life for hers.

"Stable," he says instead, fully aware of how gruff and cold he sounds. Hoping it doesn't sound as feigned to Han Seo's ears as it does in his own. "Get dressed. Watch your wound. Cho-sajangnim is waiting outside. There's a passport in the bag."

"A fake one?!"

He doesn't answer - just turns and leaves the morgue without another word.

He can't stand this fucking place.

And wants to be the first person she sees when she opens her eyes again.

As well as the last one Jang Han Seok does before his close forever.

"Apologize to your brother," are his last words to the man, though the word settles poorly against his tongue for reasons he can't quite put a reason to.

Leaving her hours later is the closest thing he's ever felt to dying.

And in that miserable state, the last thing in the world he needs is company or another life to be responsible for. But both are what's waiting - and eagerly - for him, in a shitty, anonymous airport hotel room in Ankara.

"This shirt you packed doesn't fit me right," is the greeting he's offered, bone tired as he staggers into the room and past the smiling idiot to collapse face first on top the nearest of the two beds. "Nice material, though."

"It's tailored to my body," he mutters into the musty coverlet. "Of course it doesn't."

"These are yours," comes the excited answer. "Are they Booloara?"

"Booralro," he mumbles. "And close the damn door already."

Luca gives the guy's cheerfulness and guileless enthusiasm some major side eye when he, Matteo, Marco, and Nico arrive the next morning, a welcome delegation of loyal footsoldiers.

And Vincenzo hears his voice telling all of them to go easy on the guy.

Tries to cover it by adding something about recovering from a gunshot wound.

He can tell from Luca's quickly-hidden smile it's not convincing enough.

The six of them travel together to just outside Catania a day later, where they double their numbers, joined by a half dozen more who are disgusted by Paolo's bloodthirsty egotism and sloppy leadership.

Something they discuss at length. And often.

"Fratello," their ever-present hanger-on repeats quietly in an overdone accent, when yet another strategy session looses steam, slips, and drifts into the guys just cursing the asshole's name. "That means brother, doesn't it?"

He hates the way he doesn't hate the way the word sounds, suddenly, in either language, when it's coming from him.

Vincenzo spends a lot of of the next few days repeating things, moving from Korean to Italian and then back again. And a lot of what he's translating from Italian requires additional and very basic explanation. And from Korean, extremely heavy editing of some absolutely terrible ideas.

But he's surprised by the way the guys seem to have developed a odd fondness for 'Aldo', as he's apparently decided to re-anoint himself. And none seem to mind the way he sits and smiles so broadly while they debate and plan for war and bloodshed around him.

He does start to pick up a little Italian after awhile.

A lot of Italian, actually, which Vincenzo notices but dismisses somewhat, since the vocabulary he's best seems attributable to the late nights his men spend blowing off steam and playing poker than any to remarkable intellectual capacity.

Until he starts picking up Sicilian, too, casually, out walking the city's marketplaces and fetching coffee and pastries from the nearby cafe.

"The guy's smart," Luca says quietly one day, as they watch Aldo disassembling the safehouse's espresso machine, thinking he'll somehow find the cause of its recent failure. "You should try to find a role for him after you..."

Luca pauses, unwilling, like everyone seems to be, to say what needs to happen next.

"...when everything settles again," he finishes, eventually.

"He isn't smart," Vincenzo counters, gruffly, wincing at the way the emergency packet of instant coffee he's scoured from out of his hand luggage makes his heart yearn for a law office on the other side of the world. And the woman sitting behind a desk inside of it.

"And my goal is to get him out of my hair as soon as possible," he adds.

The next morning, Luca sets Vincenzo's espresso beside his breakfast plate, raising an eyebrow meaningfully. It smells freshly made; the ghost, it seems, has been successfully exorcised from its machine, which sits back on the kitchen's countertop.

And Vincenzo lets himself be quietly impressed.

When they arrive in Rome, there's four more men who join them. And a plan.

Aldo's authored parts of it, but in three more days, when Vincenzo makes his unannounced return to Milan, he won't be there to execute on it.

Aldo will go instead with Matteo and Nico and ready the island for the ones who survive long enough to join them.

"Hyung, I want to help," he whines, when he's given the news. "Not hide."

"Stop calling me that," is all manages to say.

Whether he'll let the man see violence or risk his damn life again isn't up for discussion.

Before they depart, though, Aldo comes and finds Vincenzo after sunset, standing with an untouched glass of wine on the balcony overlooking the Piazza Navona.

He clears his throat to announce his presence and entry, something he's always careful to do and a habit Vincenzo doesn't like thinking too much about the origins of.

"I thought you'd gone out to dinner with the others," he says without turning.

"I stayed," he answers simply, joining Vincenzo against the balustrade to take in the city lights that seemed to reach to and beyond the dark horizon. "Wasn't hungry."

This rings entirely false.

He knows only one other person on earth with an appetite more voracious.

Someone he misses more than anything.

Which resteels his faintly wavering resolve.

He needs, more than wants, to do what he's fated to tomorrow. Change his family for the better. Claim back what's his, what he's earned, from the one who mistook it for mere birthright.

Settle this score once and for all.

But images have been flooding his mind all day - trading good-natured insults while kicking the football around together in the vast yard to the east of the main house, driving together on meandering errands through Liguria talking over a radio turned up too loud, awake late at night watching movies together, laughing when they realize that they're both madly in love with with the pretty actress from Ho Voglia di Te.

It's that boy, every bit as much as the man he's become, that he must face.

"He tried to kill you once," says the soft voice of the man beside him, after a long moment's silence. "He'll only keep doing it until he succeeds."

He doesn't say anything. About the boy he remembers. About Fabio and what he'd think.

About the way he knows Aldo is right.

"You have lots of good men beside you," he says, still quiet, hesitating again before adding, "And gli amici sono i fratelli che ti scegli..."

And then he goes and leaves Vincenzo to his thoughts.

Which recall to him more recent memories. Violent confrontations, and another set of two brothers who really weren't.

A week later, when Vincenzo arrives in Pagliuzza, his unenviable task complete and his family once again in hand, Aldo's is the first face he sees among the men clustered and waiting there on the island's small dock.

And the only one that's somber the way Vincenzo's soul is still, despite the decisive victory.

Lucia Cassano is a distant cousin - second or third, Vincenzo can never remember how to count through the lines of consanguination correctly.

But when he gets word of how Fabio's uncle's daughter's daughter is being treated by her Luciano sottocapo husband, he dispatches Matteo and Luca to end it. End him. And bring her to Pagliuzza.

It's why he's built this island, after all, as a respite for those whose lives are steeped in violence they did not choose.

That Aldo makes a perfect close companion in those first few days shouldn't be a surprise.

That it continues, however, very much is.

As is the way his men are apparently the nosiest gossips to ever walk God's earth.

Though Aldo is no better, and, despite living now four months amongst hardened mafia soldiers, hasn't yet learned to keep his eyes on his own business and not ask questions he's got no right to.

Luca betrays it first, telling Vincenzo that Aldo's questioned him twice now about the postcards that Luca ferries to Valletta each month, along with the island's regular mail.

"And what did you tell him," Vincenzo bristles.

"That I don't know anything either," Luca answers, though it's clear he's only very loosely paraphrasing whatever was said. "Apart from what I saw when I visited Seoul..."

His candor earns him a glare.

Aldo, for his part, is far more direct.

"I'm sure she misses you, too, hyung," Aldo says, apropos of nothing, while continuing to use the nickname Vincenzo’s certainly never given him permission to.

"I don't know who you're talking about," he answers, stubbornly, as they watch the sun slip behind the ocean at the horizon in silence.

"Okay," Aldo answers him. "But she does..."

One afternoon, he appears in Vincenzo's office and asks, shyly, if Lucia can move into the villa at the farthest end that Aldo claimed for himself when they first came to the island.

It takes nearly all Vincenzo's resolve not to leap up from his chair and pull the man into a joyful embrace.

Instead he continues perusing the contract in front of him, huffs out a breath, and warns him to warn her about how life on the island means living as an open book.

And grins when Luca appears the next day with a scandalous grin and "news."

Six months later, it's those same two nosy assholes that scheme and corner Vincenzo in his office with big dopey smiles, a fake diplomatic passport, and a plane reservation.

Though it's Aldo alone who's tasked with retrieving him from the mission two days later, discerning in a single glance that Vincenzo's brief return went better than it had had any right to.

It's him Vincenzo trusts to arrange her first visit to Pagliuzza three weeks later. And to collect her from the airport.

He hears them chattering, even above the boat's motor, as Luca tosses a tow line to Matteo to bring it fast against the dock's mooring bouys.

It's been...he doesn't know how long, actually, since he's heard Aldo speak Korean.

Something he stops pondering the moment his eyes meet Hong Cha Young's.

Just before his restraint, his private nature, and every one of his best intentions give out on him all at once and he pulls her into his arms before her second foot even hits the planks of his dock.

Even with Luca and Aldo just standing there, grinning like idiots, watching them.

When she goes home ten days later, he thinks of sending Aldo back with her. To Seoul. Finally finding a way to send him back for good, return him home.

He could set him up to assist with driving the final stake into the blackened heart of Babel, he thinks, now that Cha Young's work has picked it nearly clean of both revenue and criminality and sent it into receivership and imminent failure.

And it makes some sense to send him back to keep watch over the rest of his family, with all of them still clinging so stubbornly to that wretched bit of concrete and glass in the middle of Seoul, their boss and queen forever bringing trouble its way.

But he also has her, and she's more than capable.

And in no need of a babysitter.

So Aldo stays.

Ahead of Cha Young's third visit, he calls her on their encrypted line, and tells her to pack an evening dress.

"We've been through this," she objects. "I'm not sitting through an opera. Even for you."

He rolls his eyes. He'll get her to one someday.

"No, there's a wedding this weekend," he says. "Small one. On the island."

And so they watch, hand in hand, that Saturday, as Aldo and Lucia stand facing one another at sunset, both of them knees deep in the warm surf off the island's western coast, with Father Efizio gamely standing there with them, the ends of his vestments swaying to and fro in the gentle tide.

He can't avoid the hug he's pulled into after they rings are exchanged and they're back in the beach with the rest of the revelers.

But mainly because Vincenzo can't see it coming soon enough to evade it. Damn salt air, always making his eyes water.

"Noona looks so pretty," Aldo says, years later, grinning broadly as he enters the small chamber where the groomsmen are set to assemble in five minutes' time. "The veil, the dress, all of it."

The guy's tie is crooked, as always, and Vincenzo sighs, standing up and moving towards him to undo it.

Aldo straightens his posture automatically as the ends come loose and Vincenzo busily takes them up to start over again.

The man's never really gained an eye for aesthetic detail.

"How is Elena," Vincenzo asks, entirely unable to picture the woman he's about to marry in bridal attire. "Does her dress fit right?"

Buying clothing for a three year old who grows like a weed was a bit like hitting a moving target.

"Yes, but she got too excited to wait and dumped the petals out of her basket out front of the church. Matteo and Luca had to scramble around and save what they could."

Aldo laughs, though, a sound Vincenzo never tires of.

He looks not the least bit chagrined, the way fathers always seem to be, even when their children run wild and are ill mannered.

"Small change in how we rehearsed," Vincenzo interjects, as he finishes the knot and stands back to examine his work.

Though he adores the girl, and couldn't not have had his goddaughter serve as his flower girl.

On which subject...

"Oh?"

He nods, less answer to Aldo's question and more expression of satisfaction with a job now properly done.

And then he turns back to the small table behind him.

He palms what he needs to from its surface, and then turns again, hand extending Aldo's way, smiling inwardly at how the sudden movement doesn't make the other man reflexively flinch anymore.

"Yes. You're standing on my left now," he says, mildly, reaching a little further forward to prompt Aldo to take what he's holding up between them. "Between Luca and I."

Aldo frowns but raises hand for Vincenzo to deposit its cache into his palm.

"But he's best man," Aldo says, looking down in bewilderment at the platinum bands he's now holding.

There's a knock at the door.

Speak of the devil.

"Ah," Vincenzo says, moving away and towards the door. "Yes. He was. But I thought about it. And decided today's a day I need my brother beside me."

Though Luca had been very understanding about the change.

He isn't surprised when arms encircle him from behind before he manages to reach the door.

Or when that damn salty sea air clouds his vision again.

- - -

The end.

I know it didn't entirely track along the lines you'd had, especially towards the middle and end, but characters sometimes do what they want, and I hope you enjoyed it anyway.

Thank you for prompt/ask (and reading it).

C: Let me crash here just for the night. 

V: You can stay here until you feel safe.

Vincenzo Cassano Fight Scene Bracket: Round 2

Propaganda under the cut:

Cha-young’s place:

- *shows up at the door holding thug’s partner* “It’s me” ✅

- “If you were trying to tail us, you shouldn’t have made it so obvious” ✅

- Dramatic fall onto the couch with Cha-young ✅

Underpass:

- “Bugs are easier to kill when they’re gathered together” ✅

- Gunfight in the falling snow ✅

- Dramatic grappling against a car ✅