"I am tempted by it as well," he notes, "I just have enough of an eye to the bigger picture to resist where there's no simple way to make things better. At least, usually." He frowns, looking away. 

"Are you okay?"

"I'll be fine," he says with a sigh, before offering Felix a rueful smile, "I wouldn't want to unload all my regrets on you in our second conversation." 

The elevator doors open, letting them out on the gound floor. 

"It's a bit of a complicated situation, in any case." He adds as they leave the elevator, "There were good reasons to take each path, and-" he pauses, shakes his head. "Hah. I said I wouldn't talk about it and here I am doing that anyway. Sorry." 

"No worries, and I don't mind to be a listening ear."

"Mn. It's... Well. The Anes Group - it's the sort of soulless corporate group that exists to make billions off the backs of the poor. Grandfather is the chairman." He frowns, "Aleixo and Angél wouldn't have lasted much longer under his expectations - they would have done something too outlandish for him to tolerate sooner or later - but I could have kept it up. And then when I inherited I could have changed it, and actually used some of that absurd amount of money to do something, instead of sitting around collecting more of itself at the expense of others." 

"Yeah, I can see how that would feel bad. But, you can't carry the weight of everything on your shoulders."

"True enough. That was their point as well. That, and they worried about what I'd have to do to stay in his good graces when they left." He shrugs. "I suppose we'll see whether this was the right path when Beatriz leaves next year." 

"Huh, what is the plan then?"

"She'll be doing exactly what we did," he says, wry. "Which will leave him with no palatable heirs at all. He's not literally too old to have another child, but he's unlikely to try at this point. Which means he'll have to pick one of us anyway, unless he wants to pass the chair to one of our distant cousins." He shrugs, "I worry about the uncertainty of it - no matter how unlikely, there is a chance he'll choose one of the cousins - but I can't say I'm not relieved to be able to be myself." 

"Huh, he would at least know the results of picking one of you better. I assume."

"In some ways? It wouldn't be the young cousins he'd pick, it would be one of the more established ones, most likely. He cares about bloodline. The three of us are his only descendants. Beatriz isn't - she's his sister's granddaughter - but he raised her, which makes her a better option than the cousins." 

"It does, it's weird being so foolish to just... pick a stranger for this, not even about the blood relation just the familiarity."

"Not complete strangers. He knows most of them as well as anyone might know their cousins kids, if they didn't like them much. Some of them even work for the Group. If it was just familiarity with their characters that mattered to him, he might pick one of them who had goals close enough to his. Rather than one of us, after we've all 'betrayed' him. The gamble is whether he really does care enough about legacy to choose Beatriz or I despite that." 

Nod. "It's a hard situation all around, honestly, I am glad that you are not under his thumb."

"I am, too," he admits. "It would have been awful without Aleixo and Angél to take the pressure off."

"And I probably wouldn't have run into you again," he adds quietly, looking intently at the signs on the other side of the road. He quickly motions to a chinese place across the street from them, "How about there?" 

Felix breaks into an unfairly good smile. "Yeah, that's great."

"Great!" He glances back at him and then away again, blushing a little as they head across the street. 'Unfair' is right. 

Soon enough they're being seated and ordering food. Gabriel asks about his classes while they wait - what he's looking forward to, what he liked best at the Institute. 

They think the institute is a good stepping stone to get to some more cutting edge research place later on. He is looking forward to the Applied Cultural Symbology, he found the high school equivalent interesting despite the teacher being a bit full of himself.