05-28-2020, 07:25 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; He is relived, at her words, exhales a breath he didn’t know he was holding. Not that he had expected cruelty, exactly – it does not seem within her nature to be cruel – but there could have something, a pause, or a twist of phrase that he could have read into. But instead, she simply affirms him. It’s almost disconcerting, because he is still so unused to such kindness, he is still so surprised that she is here, letting him meet their daughter, touching him. Like it’s all some dream he will wake from. She asks then of his son, and he hesitates, unsure of what, or how much, to say. He stumbles forward, in words and movement both. “Sleaze,” he says. A linage of terrible names – the child of Cancer and Garbage, what else could he have been named but something ugly, something to sum up the transactional relationship between the magician who had saved – and then abandoned – him? “His…father left, and we were alone. Outside of Beqanna. It was just the two of us, for years.” The two of them, praying in a meadow. Sleaze’s knees had gone raw from it. What had become of him? Garbage should have tried harder, to find him. Maybe he’s still alive. Maybe he’s okay. Maybe. He’s glad, though, that there are others. That there’s a support system for Maze, when – if, he insists to himself, if - he fails her. He listens to the rest of her words, feels a new kinship he had not expected – the ache of lost children. “It’s hard,” he says, “to keep them close.” As if he hadn’t left Sleaze, with no word. As if he hadn’t left Contagion and Adaline on the shores of the beach. As if he’d tried. It will be different, he thinks, with her. As if he hasn’t thought this a hundred times. “Yes,” he says, “we’ll do better.” Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |
@[Agetta]