Chapter Text
Vincenzo Cassano had never truly fit in a day in his life.
Not in Korea, where he was considered to be nothing more than a boy callously abandoned by his mother (so he was told). His status as an orphan would have made him an other in and of itself, and his identity as biracial made him even more so. It was, unfortunately, one of the few things he remembered about his early life in Korea.
He did not fit in at home in Italy either, where his father —then-underboss of the Cassano crime family, Fabio Cassano— had brought him after learning he had a child born to a former one night stand currently living in a Korean orphanage.
Fabio Cassano was the one man in Vincenzo’s life who had ever accepted him as he was, wholly, unconditionally. His father made no distinction based on the color of Vincenzo’s skin, not from the very beginning.
“You are my son,” he could remember the man saying through a translator the first day they met. “Mio figlio. And I’m sorry to have left you here. Forgive me and allow me to take you home.”
When the man had offered then-eight-year-old Vincenzo a new name —an Italian name fitting of his bloodline— Vincenzo had accepted it readily.
He was Vincenzo Cassano. Firstborn son of the now-boss of the Cassano crime family in Palermo, Sicily, and presumed next-in-line.
While his father had accepted him wholeheartedly, it had taken some convincing for others to do the same, and some only ever acted as such in front of Fabio Cassano himself. There was rule amongst all families in this sort of business, and it was that ethnicity mattered. The overwhelming majority of made men —mafiosos, the outside world called them— were full-blooded ethnic Italian of one form or another. While some came with ancestry from other areas in Europe most were Sicilian through and through. Until Vincenzo came along.
Fabio Cassano had pulled a number of strings to allow a young Vincenzo to become a recruit the day he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps, and years later take the Oath of Omertà. In the Cassano family, few men had ever become been allowed to become a part of the family if they were not Sicilian through and through.
The level of audacity was quite frankly astounding. No one had a problem with the witty, cool-headed and accomplished Vincenzo becoming an associate, signing on as one of their much-needed lawyers the day he finished his law degree. But when it came to Vincenzo becoming one of them, well... That they took issue with. Because, regardless of if his father (proven by genetic test) was Sicilian —a made man himself, no less— Vincenzo was not seen as such simply because he looked Korean.
The audacity.
But he was eventually allowed to take the oath, and he did become a part of Cosa Nostra, rising quickly through its ranks by way of his skill in negotiation, both in the courtroom and at a sit down.
But a lot of people still had a problem with that.
From the day he had set foot in Sicily, anyone caught looking down on Fabio Cassano’s son for his biracial heritage was swiftly and mercilessly punished. Disrespect of his son, the underboss and later boss said, was disrespect of him and that was not tolerated. But outside of earshot, Vincenzo was more than aware that people said what they wanted. Indeed, he quickly became no stranger to the vicious slur “yellow” or to being told to “go back to his country”.
The easy way out would have been to tell his father of the things he’d heard and been told, sit back and watch them pay, and then wash his hands of the whole matter, but as he got older, Vincenzo took pride in being able to handle himself (and recognized the necessity of it). He preferred to deal with these particular instances in his own way.
Rest assured, by the time Vincenzo had risen through the ranks to the position of consigliere, no one dared say a word to his face (if they had any sense of self preservation, that is. Which some didn’t). They could think whatever they wanted, Vincenzo could not stop them from thinking, but they did have to show him respect. And he saw to it that they did.
It was exhausting. Living in Sicily, people who did not know him always assumed he did not know Italian, let alone Sicilian, and always spoke to him in English until he answered them in flawless Sicilian. Visiting tourists spoke to him in a wide variety of languages, making drastic assumptions about him based on how he looked. Locals who knew him often anxiously tried to shoo tourists away from the consigliere of the Cassano crime family, but more often than not, Vincenzo was left to an awkward exchange in English for those who did not speak Korean or Italian.
But Sicily was his home too, and with his own blood, sweat, and tears (and just a little bit of his soul, as was required of all made men) he carved out a place for himself there, in that life, and was as well respected as any man.
Until Fabio Cassano died.
It would not be until many months later that Vincenzo would fully process the full range of atrocities that had occurred over the short span of the week between the day Fabio Cassano was brutally gunned down and the day Vincenzo’s own brother had ordered him murdered in his sleep.
What stung was that at the end of the day, nothing Vincenzo had done as a part of the Cassano family —not his extensive work for them as a lawyer, not his advice, not his schemes, not his diplomacy, nothing— had meant more to the family than his half-Korean ancestry.
And what stung the most was that against the dying wishes of Fabio Cassano and against their own self interests as an organization, they passed him over as boss, choosing his younger, less experienced, more impulsive idiot of a brother, just because his brother had been born to a Sicilian mother.
So Vincenzo washed his hands of them (and lost what little was left of his soul as he did).
It would be a shame to watch the Cassano family burn themselves to the ground under the less than stellar leadership of Vincenzo’s younger brother, Paolo, (respect, the little bastard had dared speak to him of respect) but they had truly done it to themselves. And it would be difficult to be upset about anything when he was lounging on the shores of Malta.
Just a few days in Korea, a trip back to his Motherland, he thought, to collect a few…provisions… and then it would be smooth sailing all the way to Malta, as close as one could get to Sicily without actually being in Sicily.
Perhaps then it wouldn’t sting quite so badly that he could never truly go home.
Home, as much of he had of it, was Sicily. Was Palermo. As much as he had dreamed of Korea whenever he was made an other by the color of his skin, the shape of his eyes, or the texture of his hair, he realized that home certainly was not there the second he stepped off the plane in Seoul.
“Excuse me, sir,” the security guard called to him. “We have to check your identification.”
Vincenzo handed it over with nothing more than a blink, on guard for the small but present possibility his brother’s influence had suddenly spread as far east as Seoul.
“Oh,” the security guard said with a short laugh, something which made Vincenzo raise a brow. “You’re Korean-Italian. The subject we’re looking for is Korean.”
Vincenzo remained where he was, his hand held out to retrieve his passport.
The guard ignored him, giggling some more as he read Vincenzo’s passport. “Vic…Vic-nenzo Casanova. Oh, which Zo clan are you from?” He cackled then, laughing at a joke Vincenzo neither understood nor appreciated.
“May I have my passport back?” he asked, seeing to it that his accent was perfect and his grammar flawless.
The guard coughed awkwardly and handed it back to him, wishing him a good day.
A good day was hardly what Vincenzo would consider being drugged, robbed, and beaten by con artists before being left on the side of the road to wallow in his own embarrassment for falling victim to it. Him. Consigliere, tricked by mere con men.
The indignities did not stop there.
Korean was his first language. Indeed, he had spoken only Korean up until the time he was eight years old, but no matter the effort he had gone through to keep up with the language, it had ceased to be his best. As it happened, it had ceased to, at times, be very good at all.
He struggled mightily with the local dialect, even more so with local customs and culture in general. Reading books in Korean had not helped him with his conversational language, and while in all honesty he got along fine, he was not supposed to just be fine. He was, technically, home, in the place he was born, where he was raised for the first eight years of his life. But ‘home’ had become nothing but a strange land he had no real connection to.
He got back to his rather shabby room each day utterly exhausted for the effort it took to get caught up in real time all the while saving face (something that was difficult to do when one could remember the Korean word for ‘asshole’ but not for ‘basic’), hungry as the vastly different food and mineral content of the water made him sick, and dreadfully homesick for Italy in a way he had not expected to be for a good long while.
Which was how he often found himself lying face down in his bed, Italian opera playing in his headphones, and in the godawful ‘Italian’ restaurant for breakfast every morning. It was true that he took great pleasure in teasing the man for attempting to fool a real Italian man into thinking he spoke Italian, studied in Italy (was it Milan or Florence?), and that he knew how to cook Italian food, but it was also true that Vincenzo hoped one day the man would give him something that reminded him of home. Because if he was being honest, he so desperately wanted to go home.
But he was not welcome there, either.
It’s fine, he told himself one night, sitting on his shabby couch in pajamas with a glass (bottle) of wine, watching a bootlegged Italian soap opera with Korean subtitles that appeared to have been put through google translate. You’ll just get the gold and then it’s home free to Malta. Nothing ever hurts in Malta. There you can disappear, and just be Vincenzo, yourself, all parts of yourself without fear or care, the man who lives on the beach and has everything he ever wanted.
As if anything in his life was ever destined to turn out like that.
TBC