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(rage burned like a fire in Achilles; when it burns in me, I beg you darling please, don’t be afraid.)
***
He does not feel smug, to see Kay shut out.
It is not smugness. Michael is no more his than he is now hers; Michael has married some lovely soft-thighed Sicilian girl, is probably even now tangled up with her in some white-sheeted bed, asleep or making love with those dark eyes always open.
He is not smug, and yet it is something satisfying to send her away. He hadn’t liked her from the beginning, with her odd face and unfashionable clothes. She was a kindergarten teacher and dressed like one, couldn’t keep her mouth shut and stop asking questions.
She was like a child, and Tom knew that Michael loved her because she represented for him things that were for other men. Other men might take a childish bride and spend their days playing house.
Despite the Don’s dreams, Tom knew that Michael represented the Family’s only hope of survival. Of dominance.
(And he loved Sonny. He loved Santino Corleone. Sonny, who had given him this life. Whose heart was too much for his body, who never could hear anything else over the thunderous rush of blood in his ears when his heart was broken.)
He thumps his head against the tiles in the shower when he takes himself in hand. He doesn’t imagine any kind of fucking, not really. He’s not interested in any of that. That’s not for men to do.
He imagines going to Michael with blood on his hands, keeping them away from Michael, kissing the Corleone ring on that hand, dark from the mere ancestral memory of the Sicilian sun on his father’s skin. His grandfather’s skin.
He would kiss that ring, and then that hand, and then keep his head bowed, his eyes closed, even as Michael slipped his free hand into his hair, messing with the careful styling of it. Michael might say Tommy, might murmur something in Italian, and Tom would take himself in bloodied hand, moan throatily against Michael’s skin.
He belonged to Michael, or he would, in time. He belonged to the Corleone Family.
Body, mind, soul.
There was no room for anything else.
Sonny is gunned down like an animal. Vito is a shell of the man he’d been. The Don he’d been.
Michael comes home in mourning black, eyes darker than ever, skin darker than ever, like all of him has been removed from the sun, from the realm of goodness. It breaks Vito’s heart again to see him so, and Tom has to stop himself from showing his surprise on his face.
Michael comes home a widower, with his mouth dry and a bone-deep thirst for revenge in him. No longer the young hero he’d been. No more his father’s bid at political legitimacy. He would not be Senator Corleone, nor Governor Corleone.
He would, however, be Don Corleone, if Tom had anything to say about it.
His desire, his helpless love, for Michael will be an asset. He will never have to worry about being weak in the face of temptation to surrender or to betray. He will stand straight and tall in the face of their enemies.
He will be whatever Michael needs him to be, and think of his dark eyes and his own loyalties late at night when only his hand will satisfy him, not the soft curves of his black-eyed Italian wife.