The child’s chest heaves with his panic. Almost as if it is her body responding to all of the dark things that spiral through him. As if these things belong to her, too.
And, perhaps if he were not so thoroughly awash in the terror of it all, he might have mourned for the ice that had protected him from all of these things. The pain and the disappointment and the fear. (Certainly he could ask Anaxarete to repair it, but he is not weak enough to ask her for help twice). Perhaps the knees might have buckled and he might have fallen to the earth and keened for what he had lost.
Were he prone to anger (though he never was, never had been, likely never would be), he might have gnashed his teeth in protest. He might have sent her away, scolded her, blamed her.
But he does none of these things. He does not collapse beneath the weight of all of the things suddenly returned to him. He does not turn away from her. He does not skitter out of her reach when she comes to him again. When she tucks herself under his neck like a daughter had done so long ago. How this makes his chest ache, too! To think of his daughter, to remember all the ways he had failed her, too.
Still, he does not send her away. Instead, the ache coursing through him so rampant that it makes the edges of his vision strobe, he lays his weary head across her back. In another lifetime, he might have exhaled a shuddering sigh. And it would have been such a mournful sound. It would have spoken of the chaos in the cavern of his chest. It would have told stories of a heart beating frantic.
But there is no breath and there is no pulse. There is only the two of them here. Absolutely still. Caught up in some caging embrace that he does not understand but brings him a glimmer of comfort all the same. Eases the pain by fractions.
“Don’t be afraid,” he tells the child, addressing her heaving chest and thundering pulse. He tells the child, but he tells himself, too.
