I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
The vision flickers and his shape loses its color.
She blinks through the murky darkness at him.
Plain, she thinks, and does not understand the way her mother looks at him.
She does not know anything about love or the terrible things it makes people do. She knows nothing of the secrets her mother swallows as the two of them stagger to their feet in unison. She garners strength from her mother’s strength, steadies herself against her mother’s side. She gnashes her teeth at him, immediately hates him from encroaching on their space.
But it does not deter him. He is not afraid of her. He does not back down, just looks at her with that same patient smile. His daughter. He had hoped that she might look like her mother. Unique, unlike him. Adna smiles at him while their daughter hisses venom and perhaps this is all it takes to compel him to go to her, to press a kiss against her forehead.
“No,” he mutters, taking one step back then to give them back their space. A ring of quiet that belonged only to them. “No, I don’t think we did.” He remembers that night and how that thing had twisted in his gut and how he had wanted so desperately to be anything other than what he was. How viciously he had wanted to be someone who stayed, someone deserving of a family. This family.
“What do you think?” he asks then and he shifts his focus back to the child who bares her fanged teeth, who sinks them into his shoulder. But the venom is weak and leaves only a humming in the muscle. He laughs, a stunted sound as he takes another step back to wedge more space between them.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
