in the shadow of the gallows of your family tree

Vega appears unhappy that the first thing his cousin says on opening the door is, "Have you heard anything about some Bennett Estate?"

"Fuck yourself, Brande. Don't try to change the subject."

As different as they are, it's somewhat easy to tell they're related. Marius is slightly taller, hewn from stone like a beast -- built like a gladiator, ill-restrained in the finery of his clothes. And yet somehow, even with the waist-length black flag of his savage hair, Vega's cleaner-cut than the lean figure of his cousin, with the fey gilded eyes and swimmer's frame.

"What subject is that?" the alchemist says, droll, and a little cold, too. He just walks into the kitchen, turns his back.

"Want to try again, Brande?" Sharp, smoke-edged, thin patience.

In the end, Vega receives little more from his cousin than a peculiar darkness. Brande does recount to him, in terms of simplest facts, the circumstances of the night he'd found Jill at the penthouse. He makes no particular concession to discretion -- if it's upsetting to Vega to hear the graphic details, the full description of how she'd been when he'd found her, Brande is either ignorant of it, or deliberate about it.

"What I did was undo it," says the alchemist. "And I did it for myself, not for her."

 Vega knows his cousin well enough to tell when he's being made over, deftly, by that golden snaketongued gift for conversation. Knows that Brande's precise illustrations are engineered at making him simply glad that that, ugh -- was undone at all, and think less about the particulars, the aftermath.The sick dreams. The sick bond.

And there really isn't much Vega can do against it. Isn't much else he can say -- Brande ultimately deflects the conversation off of himself yet again, as he always does, so cleverly that Vega would only realize the intricacies of the technique later, the meticulousness of his cousin's revenge against him for even bringing certain things up.

Still, Vega now knows more of the circumstances than he did before. Understands, at least, that there's no deliberate arrogance in his cousin's unwillingness (inability?) to correct the situation. Remembers, now, why he so rarely asks Brande things -- there's nothing left but a vast fatigue, and an uncertainty about what is and isn't correct.

They hadn't talked about family at all, nor sisters nor fathers nor devils nor children, and actually, now that he knows most of what he needs to, Vega's actually relieved about that part.