(no subject)
You are forty-two and bone-tired when you stop lying to yourself.
It won't be easier tomorrow. It will ache as it aches now; the dull and heavy weight of your failure. You weren't there when she died (you should have been), and in her wake you became weak. Didn't you deserve it, that weakness? Hadn't you been so strong, for so long? A father to your own brothers at eighteen, exhausted by it. You were only nine when your mother died, and it becomes harder and harder to recall anything more than warm hands and the smell of a perfume now discontinued with each passing year. You were a man - barely - when your father didn't even have the decency to die.
You wonder where he is. You hope he's dead for fear of the alternatives, and hate yourself for it. You want to hate him, too, and can't; you only hope he's at peace. You've stopped hoping you'll ever know.
You are forty-two and it doesn't matter what you deserve, if it ever did. Your daughters, your beautiful daughters, they're all that's left of the woman you loved more than you've loved anything in your worthless life and they deserve so much better than you. Bella trusts you when she shouldn't, soft and smiling; Pol doesn't. She watches you with hard eyes and when you take them from your brother, she calls you a thief and a liar and a murderer and for the first time in your life you wish these words weren't true. Eventually, she sometimes lets you hold her hand without glaring at you first. You know the irony, as she grows, of the fact it's you her nature favours.
You don't know where Bella's sweetness came from, but you think of your mother's warm hands.
(You think of holding Dylan at her funeral, sitting quietly and cradling your malformed infant brother against your chest. You think of fighting to keep your brothers with you on the farm, letting rage that had no outlet fill you until you only felt cold. You think of Zebediah, you're pathetic, and you wish you'd killed him when you had the chance. You think of the ache in your head and the fire behind you when you held Garion for the first time, praying to any gods that'd listen he hadn't suffered something you couldn't see, that you weren't about to lose him in your arms.)
You smoke, and you don't drink, and you miss Malcolm, and you tell yourself you don't miss Zebediah.
I have a lot of family.
You are seventy-five and still bone-tired.