Vincent Moretti (RU/BL)

Sparing and precise. No waving of arms, no slapping of the table. Emotions are conveyed in subtle movements: a raised eyebrow, tension in the cheekbones, a slow exhalation through the nose.

Simple, yet expensive. Dark trousers, shirts made of thick linen or cotton, topped with a wool cardigan or vest. No glitter, no frills. Trusts only things that have stood the test of time.

He loves to cook. With surgical precision. His pasta carbonara is famous throughout Bergen. He slices onions into thin half-rings, slowly, without crying—it's almost meditative. At such moments, he seems like an ordinary gray-haired man at the stove. Almost.

Vincent doesn't let anyone touch him. Except his husband. Only he is allowed to touch his face, shoulders, and hair. Only he allows him to lay his head on his lap and fall asleep while reading aloud. This isn't just affection—it's an act of trust he's never shown anyone in his entire life. And this is perhaps his most important habit: to treasure this vulnerability as his most precious possession.

Vincent Moretti isn't used to talking much. His silence is a weapon. In dialogue, he uses long pauses, making his interlocutor nervous, filling the silence with words, and giving in. He listens more than he speaks, and remembers everything. Sometimes he stares at someone and remains silent for half a minute—enough for them to stutter or confess to something they didn't do.

He smokes. Not packs—just a few roll-ups a day, with black tobacco from Italy. His fingers are long, with yellow pads. He flicks the ash off with a flick of his thumb, never using an ashtray—he thinks they smell of death.

He doesn't wear perfume. He smells of wood, tobacco, and bitter orange peel—a scent that has ingrained himself in his skin over decades. It lingers on his pillows and clothes, and Yonemura, alone, sometimes inhales it with his eyes closed.

His gestures are spare and precise. He doesn't wave his arms or slam the table. Everything is read in subtle movements: a raised eyebrow, tension in his cheekbones, a slow exhalation. Even when he's angry, his voice becomes quieter and his words shorter.

Vincent is obsessed with order. Everything is arranged at the right angle, books by color and height, dishes by size. For him, disorder is a sign of vulnerability. He once confessed to Yonemura: if things are out of place, he can't sleep.

He doesn't like phones. He keeps an old push-button phone, only for emergency calls. He ignores messages. He says, "Words on a screen have no weight. But words spoken to someone's face can be weighed in the palm of your hand."

Every morning, he brews coffee in a Turkish coffee pot. He takes his time, watching the foam. He drinks from a small white cup, without sugar, in small sips. This is the only time he allows himself to let go of the world—to simply sit by the window and look out at the snow.

He sleeps four to five hours. He says sleep is a waste of time. His husband often notices that Vincent often sits in a chair at night, watching him sleep. At these moments, a vulnerability appears on his face that he never shows in daylight.

He was tall—nearly two meters. Broad-shouldered, with a heavy, solid build that retained its power even at rest. Not sinewy, not gaunt—he was massive and compact, with a broad chest and large hands, veins showing when he clenched his fingers. Age hadn't softened him, but rather hardened him: deep wrinkles had formed around his single eye, a shadow had settled around his sockets, and the skin on his face had become rougher, like the tanned leather of an old saddle. He wears his thick gray hair, once ash-blond, in a low ponytail. It falls to his shoulders, curling slightly at the ends, and shimmers silver in the fireplace light. His beard—neat, well-groomed, completely gray with sparse dark strands—covers the lower half of his face but fails to hide the strong line of his jaw. It's square, strong, with a barely noticeable scar running across his chin. The most striking thing upon first meeting is the black eye patch over his left eye. The skin beneath is disfigured by an old scar, which begins at the bridge of his nose and runs deep under his hairline, toward his temple. The patch is made of thick, matte leather, with frayed edges—not decorative, but functional and reliable. The old scar, visible beneath the patch, is whitish and jagged, like the mark of a rough blade. Vincent's second eye, his only remaining one, is a vibrant, almost sickly blue. Icy. Penetrating. It doesn't just look—it scans, undresses, penetrates the skin. There's no cruelty in this gaze, but there's something worse: the absolute calm of a predator certain its prey won't escape. The color of this eye has been compared to the sky over a fjord on a clear December day—cold, clear, endless. His body is a map of the past. Besides the scar on his face, a long knife scar runs down his left side—from his lower ribs to his hip, white and raised like a healed lightning bolt. The story of how it appeared is a thing of the past, along with the people who left it. On his right shoulder blade is a jagged, faded mark from an old burn, like a map of an unknown continent. He got it at twenty-seven.