[private] I couldn't utter my love when it counted; birthing

[bethlehem]

I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.

For him, there is no connection to make.
He is unaware that there is another child out in the world, coal black and beautiful, who bleeds his blood.
He does not know that her name is Prayer or that she is plain, like him, instead of scaled like her mother.

So, she says the name and the only thing that stirs in his chest in something he can only guess is paternal instinct. Gospel. She is a beautiful child, even as she gnashes her teeth and his blood drips from her lips and she looks at him with so much loathing. Beautiful and lethal like her mother. He does not deserve them and perhaps this will be why he leaves, someday. But not now.

Now, he nods and the smile remains but he keeps his distance because he does not know how to be a father. He was not built for it. He was built for the leaving, not the staying and it is clear in the way the child glares at him, vicious and unblinking, that she would shed nary a tear if he left.

“Gospel, I like it,” he concedes and nods and shifts his focus back to Adna’s face. “It suits her,” he says. His blood tastes different than her own as she licks it off her teeth. It tastes faintly of her own but something else, too. It slides easy down her throat and she sinks a little heavier against her mother’s side. She wants to sink her teeth into him again, wants to bleed him dry.

She hisses and grimaces and folds herself into her mother’s shadow and hates the way he looks at her, looks at her mother.

BETHLEHEM

I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.