"You can be like me." for un_love_you
[A private journal, locked in a safe in Mab’s office]
I watch you with Annika and Brennan, healthy and active, crawling on the floor and picking them up as though they were nothing. And I love you for it, how easily being an amazing father comes to you, and I wonder if you’ll still be able to do it when Izzy and the triplets are the right age. I can’t remember the last time four years seemed like a long time. But, at this moment, it seems like forever. You’ll be fifty then. Funny that even as fifty seems like nothing to me, it feels like something significant when I think of you.
The problem is humans are so, to steal a term, cumulative. Every broken bone, every bit of tendon damage builds up over time. Leaves you permanently changed. I’d be a different, broken woman if that were true of me. But this isn’t about me, well, mostly not about me.
I look and I see all this, and I know you can be like I am. Just this edge of immortal, powerful in ways you’ve never experienced, safe. But the boon is the burden, isn’t it? You already want to die. I let myself believe things were really getting so much better just as you were. Then you looked a man willing to kill you in the eye, and I couldn’t help but see the part of you that wanted him to pull the trigger. Giving a person with that desire in their heart pseudo-immortality always leaves them hating the person who granted it. I couldn’t stand you hating me.
So, I’ll watch you with the children and be glad I have you now. Any other thoughts are just stabbing myself in the heart over and over again.
I watch you with Annika and Brennan, healthy and active, crawling on the floor and picking them up as though they were nothing. And I love you for it, how easily being an amazing father comes to you, and I wonder if you’ll still be able to do it when Izzy and the triplets are the right age. I can’t remember the last time four years seemed like a long time. But, at this moment, it seems like forever. You’ll be fifty then. Funny that even as fifty seems like nothing to me, it feels like something significant when I think of you.
The problem is humans are so, to steal a term, cumulative. Every broken bone, every bit of tendon damage builds up over time. Leaves you permanently changed. I’d be a different, broken woman if that were true of me. But this isn’t about me, well, mostly not about me.
I look and I see all this, and I know you can be like I am. Just this edge of immortal, powerful in ways you’ve never experienced, safe. But the boon is the burden, isn’t it? You already want to die. I let myself believe things were really getting so much better just as you were. Then you looked a man willing to kill you in the eye, and I couldn’t help but see the part of you that wanted him to pull the trigger. Giving a person with that desire in their heart pseudo-immortality always leaves them hating the person who granted it. I couldn’t stand you hating me.
So, I’ll watch you with the children and be glad I have you now. Any other thoughts are just stabbing myself in the heart over and over again.