Dusk
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The Bevetta family is one of the few magical families in the world that are purebred and aristocratic down to the marrow of their bones. They are a bloodline branching from Nikodemus Desalvar. Carrying his heritage was a priority to the pureblood family and they went through a great deal of effort to keep their line free of any humans, limiting their marital connections only to equally as purebred descendants of other families. They carried great hatred for humans as their lineage began during the witch hunting era and their ancestors passed down the stories of brutal massacres and burnings to the next generations, thus fueling and maintaining the superiority complex and disdain towards humans to modern times. The ideology became radical and, when the Bevettas began suspecting no other magical family was of greater purity, they began marrying amongst each other. Brothers and sisters, first and second cousins. Their children, like any other children produced from inbred marriages, had defects, diseases, mutations. The Bevettas rarely married by love and it was no different in the case of Sebastian's parents. Vittoria and Atticus were both Bevettas before marriage. Sebastian was his mother's third pregnancy and the only successful. He was born with a heart defect. 
Brother's lullaby
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓The Man who hung the Moon in the Sky
He was a sickly, very coddled baby, who wasn't expected to live past the age of two, what with his severe heart condition. He physically persevered, but the doctors were certain that it was a matter of time before his very weak heart failed, if not during infancy, then during childhood. Vittoria was unable to have another child after Sebastian. He was a problematic pregnancy and his birth had almost proved lethal to both his mother and him. It was why, when he turned five, Vittoria and Atticus adopted another child - Irida Marisol Alberti was the orphaned daughter of a spanish family that had been affiliated with the Bevettas. Although the Alberti were poor, the Bevettas believed they were pure - if not by blood, then by heart. They adopted Irida (and renamed her later Iridesa) partially out of solidarity to the family and partially to dull the pain of looking after a sick child like Sebastian. Iridesa was a lively baby and a joy to raise and Sebastian loved her as much as his parents did. He took the responsibility of being a bigger brother very seriously and, although he wasn't very mobile due to the danger of overworking his heart, he made an effort to indulge her with attention and played games with her. He couldn't be much of a fun big brother to her - he was more of a fun parent, often overlooking her playtime rather than participating. They put each other on pedestals and the whole family fell into a normality that lasted five years until the inevitable happened.
Sebastian's heart failed when he was ten years old and he spent a total of four minutes clinically dead on the operating table until the doctors could restart his heart again.
They couldn't keep it functioning for long without life support, however, so they offered Atticus and Vittoria the option of putting him down. There was no point in letting the child suffer any longer.
Vittoria agreed last. She unplugged Sebastian's life support herself and then spent four days magically keeping his heart beating, using her own life energy to perform the magical feat. At the end of the fourth day Sebastian's heart could beat on its own but Vittoria was in critical condition.
Sebastian recovered but Vittoria did not. She had drained her energy keeping her son alive. She died six month later. Sebastian didn't know what she had done for him and just thought that his mother had been affected by stress - at least that was what Atticus had convinced him of. Sebastian lived with his guilt his entire life.
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓The Man made of Darkness
Clarence Leighton came into Sebastian's life about a year before the boy suffered his near lethal heart attack. His memory contains little about the man other than fleeting whisps of a stranger whose mind sung of pain and suffering, standing on the other side of the mansion gate, preying on his family. Or so Sebastian thinks. His second encounter with Clarence is ten years later when the young adult's mental capabilities bloom. They discover they have a connection that develops with Seb's coming of age. When Clarence finds him, he's in a precarious place. He's on the verge of giving up when he begins hearing the man's voice in his head. Convinced it's schizophrenia at first, Sebastian falls further into depression until a clue from the mysterious, lone schizophrenia voice clues him in that there's actually a person in his head, not an illness. Making quickwork of finding Clarence, Sebastian recognizes him immediatelly and vice versa and after short-lived animosity and doubt, the two men begin communicating out of having no one else to share with. The stranger status they hold for each other is enough to have them sharing intimate details, further enhanced when they disclose what they have heard of each other's thoughts. They know too much about each other to walk away. Although growing close, they don't begin their love story until well after Clarence stops Sebastian from making a suicide attempt. It's the start of a quick, fiery and obstacle-filled relationship.
For one, Clarence is a widower with a daughter and a bitter sister in law whos still in love with him, while Sebastian is an only heir of a 500 year old bloodline expected to adhere to his duties and family rules, one of which is choosing by status and not necessarily by love. When it comes to light that Clarence is in the mercenary business, Sebastian doesn't take long to accept the man, but Atticus is a more difficult nut to crack. A man almost 30 years older than his son, with a body count under his belt and a daughter whose abilities come from a dark magic bloodline, Clarence is clearly the worst possible candidate in the bevetta elder's mind. Mathilda Manson, Clarence's sister in law and one-sided love, has her own bones to pick with Sebastian. Having grown infatuated with her shared misery alongside Clarence out of inability to make him love her, the woman is outraged to see her sister's widower change for the better under Sebastian's affections, and vice versa. When her verbal approach to the situation fails and she is dismissed by the young man, she resorts to physical precautions. It's after a particular bad and bitter catfight with Sebastian that she hatches a plan to either ruin or kill the boy, sending an undead head hunter on his tail, which ultimately ends in failure, but culminates with that fight being continued in her presence, Sebastian's prized familiar ending up dead. It's war for Sebastian as well, while hell freezes over between Atticus and Clarence. On top of getting close with Clarence's daughter, Sebastian has made friends in his inner circle, so when Mathilda finds herself shoved into a corner, she lashes out angrily. It almost takes Sebastian's life this time.
One would think that through all these hardships, there would be no way to split the two apart.
Yet Atticus Bevetta has all the right tools for the job and he uses them. Sensing a culmination in his son's relationship with the lowly man, Atticus calls him over for a drink alone under the guise of man-to-man and ends up bringing Clarence to his knees, unceremoniously ripping his mind open and delving deep to discover the extent of th two's connection. They've reached a full mental bond, a thing rare in the magical community, but above all, seeing the many instances where his son's life was endangered, he resorts to the extremes. Although it takes immense power, the elder takes the mental connection they've formed and destroys it fully, leaving them both broken and ill over it. For the greater good, he has no issue harming his son as well, as he knows it would be a lesser pain than having his heart broken in the end. but he takes measures to protect Sebastian as well, locking away some of his memories of the entire debacle, including the whereabouts of clarence's residence and the memory of any place they have shard together. Turning the other way, he makes sure clarence does not soil his plans. "If you wish to keep your memories, you will leave. If you wish to have him remember you, you'll stay away."
Shattered and with half of their hearts missing, Clarence and Sebastian part for another ten years, barely escaping the heartbreak with their lives. Sebastian comes close.
Overwhelmed by the pain, confusion and disorientation prevalent in his life right now, Sebastian reaches out to family again, but Atticus, without disclosing a reason for his anger, rejects him harshly. A precious person to Seb treating him the way Atticus did was so destructive at the time, especially at a time when he needed support after having gone through so much. Atticus possessed the same single-minded, self-entitled ideology that he berated Sebastian for having at a young age. He perceived his own recovery, and Sebastian and Iridesa's recoveries as different journeys that they had to go through on their own. He offered virtually no support and only prompted Sebastian to show strength and durability. To a fragile thing (at the time) like Sebastian it felt like a personal failured but even worse, a failure in his father's eyes, when he visibly displayed that he was not okay. It's the accumulation of tension between him and his father, the anger he feels towards him and the fragile state of mind that he's in that drive him to inject himself with a lethal dose of insulin at 20, but mostly it's anger. Not so much wanting to be gone and dead (but a little bit of that too, because he was tired of it all at the time) as wanting to punish his father. At least that's what he has in mind when he does it - resentment. In all truth, the need for validation from Atticus was so intense for Sebastian (becuse he never got it anywhere else and only garnered it from his father when he was being scandalous and extreme) that when he didn't receive it, his world fell apart. When he does it, he's alone with his father in the house, his little sister has moved schools to Spain for a year because it's easier and more mentally forgiving to live with her grandparents than with Sebastian and Atticus. They're all alone and he knows his father will be the one to find him dead. Atticus does find him but just in time, before the drug has fully settled in.
Upon waking up at the hospital Sebastian gets the biggest lecture of his life; he has never seen his father more livid. It's then that Atticus berates Sebastian for 'trying to take what she gave you', alluding to the fact that his mother had given her life for him. Sebastian doesn't realize Atticus spoke of the second chance of life she'd given him.
Their relationship turns from scalding and thunderous to ice cold. Sebastian doesn't even try to argue with his father anymore, he's completely dull after the incident. Atticus makes a viable effort to take care of his son, but he's lost him already. Sebastian is not dependant on Atticus' acceptance - he doesn't count on it after getting yelled at for trying to take his own life. Atticus' opinion is nonexistent to him and he starts building his own life from then on.
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓The Man made of Light
Years later, Sebastian still hadn't overcome his own issues but he was so dedicated to being 'okay' that he refused to admit to himself that there was some residual sadness, regret and self-pity that remained ingrained in him because of his past. After his suicide attempt everyone tiptoed around him and it was much less nerve-wracking to pretend he was recovering rather than having everyone's extra careful behaviour around him remind him that he was, in fact, not okay - he began believing his own pretence at one point. He found himself thus drawn to people who he felt mirrored him - people with traumas and psychological issues, peoples whose minds he could get his hands into and fix the mess that was in ther. By helping them he was also helping himself. It's how he became friends with Elric Everett Eppstein.
The man was a wreck when Sebastian found him - he was a violent paranoid schizophrenic, bachelor at 26, with half his family gone, a hemophiliac little cousin and little to no financial means to support himself and his blooming artistic career. Wanting to help and to also reap emotional stability from Elric's recovery, Sebastian took the man under his wing and began nursing him back into sanity. However, he had fallen into the pretence of being okay so soon after the incident that he convinced himself that he'd recovered. He didn't realize that people with lasting psychological trauma couldn't be okay with the snap of a finger or after short-term comfort or support. Instead of him being a good influence on Elric, Elric proved to be a horrible influence on Sebastian. The man ended up dabbling in dark magic. Much as he attempted to bring out the good in Elric, their relationship resulted in Elric more or less corrupting Sebastian. It wasn't until Elric actually brought about the death of someone that Sebastian realized what exactly he had gotten himself into and decided he wanted out.
Coal hearts
I fell for you because
your heart was black,
dull, empty; coal and ashes
all wrapped in pretty celophane
and you were darkness,
harsh and fraught with demons,
mouth hungry, teeth sharp,
a vacuum in a void, swallowing up all,
yet if you so much as wished,
if you shushed the voices in your head,
you could be a lover's night,
soft and gentle escapism,
a holder of secrets and shy kisses.
I held your secrets and your kisses once,
a small flicker of light in your dark,
I was the stars perhaps? The moon?
For you embraced me like a glove
even though my surfaces were cratered,
scarred and carved and broken by a lifetime,
yet you filled those ugly cracks up with your dark,
made them uglier,
and thrust your acceptance down my throat,
so unconditional and sudden it gave me whiplash.
In the end we were the tragic pair,
though aren't all that float in darkness jaded?
We were the ying and yang
whose edges never fit,
the two halves that didn't need each other.
You were the dark
and I was the stars
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓Sun and Moon
Meeting Franklin Theodore Valentino Jr was the most intense point of impact of Sebastian's life, because the man was a thing of virtue and kindness and unconditional love.
There's a gravestone with your name on it
I suppose I've seen you come and go,
all golden heads and broken halos,
named like cattle for the reaping
by a monster I birthed, unknowing,
perhaps by fate's irony alone.
And fate's irony perhaps has cursed me
to remain amongside you, unharmed,
but helpless to protect you.
And I am afraid...
I am afraid of calling your name,
because your name is the ring of a death bell.
I am afraid of calling your name
lest you never answer me back.
But you fear nothing...
You stand before me
and you hold me like a pillar,
vultures hanging heavy on your back
and I wonder - don't you think you're next?
And does it not feel like a promise
when you walk through graveyards,
reading FrankFrankFrank engraved in stone?
Does it not feel like a legacy of death
that hangs above you like a guillotine,
and do you not tremble like I do at night
when I hold you close for fear of losing you?
No, you are not afraid of funerals,
or blonde heads resting in coffins.
Your ribcage is a graveyard already,
what's another buried soul?
But for all your resignation I will hold you,
gentle and protective like a guard,
I will be the hangman when your time has come
and your great protector until then.
-s.b.Apollo
He was the sun
head crowned blonde
with sunbeams dancing golden
through his halo,
hanging angel-like above him,
blinding light emitted
from the crevisse of his
broken ribcage,
phoenix fire heart
fluttering between the bars,
birthed from the flame of passion,
pumping love and fire,
heartstrings made of virtue,
delicate and paper thin,
fallible.
He was vivacity and light
and his downfall was a supernova
- all-consuming and apocalyptic,
and when he fell the world fell with him
because the absence of him
was a darkness.
He died every night
and rose again in faded starlight,
prism colors blooming,
flaming feathers spreading,
reborn from darkness' ashes,
and from his light the world rose
as well.
He was a light-bound colossus,
skin made of molten gold monuments,
the towers of Olympus balanced
on his able shoulders, straining,
bones crumpling under the
weight of the world.
He was a God but he was not infallible
for human hearts were
fragile things
and his skin sometimes broke
from the magnificence of his soul.
-S.B
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Marriage info coming soon!
