Preso

When the door opens, the first thing that greets him are a pair of prison tattoos and a smile that's this close to a snarl.

Preso flashes in his mind so vividly his knees lock together and he just can't think for a second.

"Who the fuck are you?"

And on most days, he feels like he has a good grasp of spoken language (he usually gets a B in his English and Filipino classes) but today was apparently going to be different, because he makes a sound that's half human and half sheep in reply to the man's question and tries not to tremble too hard that he can't deny it later.

"I-I-I'm Marianne's classmate." He pauses before he adds "Sir."

He gets another once over, a look that goes up one side and goes down the other one, and he's trying not to glance at all the tattoos on the man's body while the purity of his intentions are being weighed, because they're all of things that are looking at him (sometimes, with more than one pair of eyes) like he's digestible through skin contact alone.

The thought almost makes him whimper and he wishes his brain would just shut up.

"Kuya, is that my classmate at the door?"

And if he wasn't in love with her before, then he sure as hell is now, and he would have rushed to her side if he could, but he's still too afraid that the man in front of him hasn't decided he's more useful to him as a human being rather than as adobo, so he just settles for a slow, unthreatening wave of his hand.

"You know this guy, Mar?"

"Yes Kuya, and didn't I tell you this morning that my friend's coming over to tutor me?" She slaps him on the arm, and he'd be kidding himself if he said he wasn't expecting her to maybe hear her fingers break.

A grunt is all the other says in reply, which Marianne takes as a cue to take his hand and lead him inside the house. She doesn't say anything about how his hands are just about as warm as a corpse's, or how he doesn't sit on the chair she leads him too as much as falls into it, but that might be because she's used to this kind of thing.

Her brother follows them soon, and sits on the opposite side of the room with his eyes and the eyes of all his tattoos trained on their (or more specifically, his) every move, as they discuss lines and segments and the significance of starting points.

----*

Marianne is really bad at math, so he finds himself going to her house to tutor her almost every week. He's acclimated to her brother somewhat so that he's not always in a sweaty panic whenever he's in the vicinity. He's still twitchy though, but he's not going to complain about that any time soon because he knows there are worse things in life. Seb (he heard Marianne call her brother by that name a few times) seems to have gotten used to his presence too, because he doesn't watch them like a human gargoyle anymore and instead, goes around doing his own thing, content just to make sure they were actually studying and not fooling around.

He still cracks his knuckles ominously when he's near, still makes sure that Marianne is seated in a position which will make it hard for him to touch her without Seb seeing immediately, but aside from those, everything had sort of settled down to a routine they've all come to expect.

It's not a comfortable one, though.

----*

"What do you think her brother does in his spare time?" One of his friends asks him when he tells them about his weekly experiences tutoring the love of his high school life.

He shrugs.

"I dunno. Robs commuters?"

"Ya think he's a pimp?"

"Nah. He looks kinda stupid to me. Muscles everywhere except where it counts. Bouncer probably, but not pimp."

"GOONZ." Another friend adds, pronouncing it in the slurred, exaggerated cant of the lower class that everybody who hears bursts out laughing.

It's a false kind of bravado and he's old enough to know it's not so different from what his kid brothers say when their pride's are all scraped up and they feel like being hard to deal with. It's fun though, it's so easy, and it makes the fear seated in the back of his mind easier to deal with, so why not right?

----*

It is the week before exams. They're studying parabolas now, and Marianne's so nervous about failing that she's making all sorts of stupid mistakes with the equations. He suggested a break, she agreed to his suggestion, which is how he finds himself on his way to the kitchen to get a glass of water. He almost doesn't notice her brother on the couch, a book propped on his chest and black -framed glasses on his nose, if it wasn't for the snoring that was emanating from his figure.

It was... weird to say the least. The glasses didn't look right amidst all the wild tattoos, and the book looked overwhelmed by the sheer mass of Seb's muscles. He didn't know Seb reads Kierkegaard. Hell, he didn't think Seb had much of an education in anything except Thuggery 101, so seeing him like this was like being smacked upside the head.

"He almost graduated with a degree in English literature, you know."

He almost jumps up out of his skin when Marianne speaks, but she's not paying attention to him at all and is looking at her brother with clear fondness etched on her features. It makes his gut clench something terrible, makes the guilt start to gnaw at his insides like a bad ulcer when he remembers the things he says about Seb.

"My parents were gone most of the time, and Seb practically raised me by himself. He wanted to earn extra money and he thought the gangs could give him that. It was a mistake. He knows it, I know it, everyone knows it. It's not the kind of thing people forgive easily, though..." Both of them fall silent immediately when Seb shifts like he's about to wake up, and the fact that he doesn't makes them both insanely lucky. She doesn't continue where she left off, but he doesn't need her to fill in the blanks for him.

He feels like the biggest dick this side of Manila, and the feeling doesn't go away for days.

----*

Weeks go by, exams stop slugging people over the head, and though he still can't work up the nerve to talk to Seb man-to-man, he's taken to accidentally leaving books at their house. Last time it was Tolstoy. This week it's Asimov. Marianne doesn't seem to notice what he's doing (he's learned the art of subtly was something she had yet to master, along with Algebra) but her brother sometimes gets a thoughtful look on his face when he answers the door before it transforms to the usual scowl.

He knows it's not enough of an apology, but he hopes he's getting there.

----*

Addendum:
If anyone's curious, Seb's whole name is Sebastian, which apparently means 'revered' in Greek.

ETA:
Editted at 9:51 pm. Fixed the inconsistent tenses and spelling mistakes.