RESEARCH ( barry berkman.. ) ✔

o21. hank's necessity..

Call me back. I'll help you with Batir.

NoHo Hank felt stupid for believing the text which made him call Barry Berkman and be faced with ignorance. He felt incredibly dumb too when he was given the bought tickets back to Chechnya. To some extent, any son and daughter grew to miss the lands on which they have been born, yet there was a substantial difference when the violence and restlessness of your origins snuffed out any candle of hope to not be annihilated due to a thinner, more fragile physique and a less murderous mindset.

America had its flaws and dangers, its abundance of people with no respect, loyalty or politeness, but Hank preferred a clear bullet to the head rather than going back to the country where he never had seen even the potential for those things to be shown towards the like of him. What made it worse was that the man he worked with and got used to sticking by were all dead, thanks to the friend which now left him behind.

His time was as thin as the last rope holding him before a freefall and there was only so much positivity he could keep, dressed in all black and mourning his dead comrades. "You're a pussy," Batir addressed his concerns, three days before the flight. "This Barry boy betrayed you. Again. Any man worthy to be part of our family would have immediately claimed their justice and put him down, because if he crossed you, then perhaps, he will cross us too. But you can't even hold a gun, Hank. Which is why you are going back to Chechnya, to learn not embarrass me or at least die trying."

That what made the decision for Hank's pensive state. All the podcasts and motivational books from his dear Cristobal, resting in peace in some garbage bag buried, helped Hank keep his flare in taking initiative. Of course, there was no way he presently knew how to handle a gun, especially as he found them repulsive in his hands in the first place, but that did not mean he could not get his justice with some patience and work.

Though he put his dear wig, partner in the past too, back on, leaving that very night, Batir was made aware of his absence only three days later, on 1st September, when he missed the flight to Chechnya. "Good for him," Batir nodded, lastly proud, despite closing the door to Hank's room, a desolately cheerful bedroom in a building filled with fainter, subtler colors. 

"Is that Kasha I smell?" Batir immediately turned around, for his appetite was greater than the care he lacked for certain disappointing members of his group. 

By the beginning of September, LA grew quiet and the rise in crime once more diminished with the last waves of heat retreating to the agitated horizons of an ocean of trouble. The weather chilled fast in the first week of the fall's first month, but perhaps more than ever, since they did return to the city promptly after "meeting the parent" went wrong, Barry and Addie felt none of the colds.

"Break a leg." In his mind, Adelaide's voice ringed, echoed and reverbed blissfully, entrancing Barry into absent mindedly smiling, with a casserole of food in his lap. He rejoined the Cousineau's acting classes, so on the first row, in their fifteen minute lunch break, he sat forgetting to even eat in the first place.

"I only asked where you got the food from because I saw you in the kitchen only two times since you moved in with us," Nick tilted his head confused at Barry's moment of elongated silence, as if he malfunctioned, not just got lost in his own thoughts. Disturbing is how he found Barry's smile, a rare sight to begin with, despite overall sharing the other's opinion that the change in his behavior was for the best.

Barry blinked his wide eyes to a more relax gaze upwards, at Nick standing up in front of him. He glanced back down at the casserole filled to the brim with lasagna. It kept a bit of its initial temperature and now warmed his hands to the slightest. "Addie's been trying out new hobbies. The cooking one didn't work out so we have about five more casseroles in the fridge. Didn't you see them? I told you when I put them there..."