08-08-2013, 05:01 PM
A child is not a fun experiment to see how you and your lover's DNA will turn out when blended together in a chromosomal cocktail (shaken, not stirred, on the rocks with a twist). A child is not a toy to play with and wile away the wasted hours. A child is not a doll to dress up and paint and brush and move about and they are unlikely to sit still for tea parties. A child does not have to love you even when every fiber of your being and second of your day is bent to loving it. A child does not have to keep the name you give it, or the values, or the beliefs that you burn yourself out trying to instill.
A child will keep you up at night when they are small and wailing and hungry and miserable. And when they can walk and talk and get themselves all the way to your bedside to tell you that they feel bad right before they vomit on your bed. And when they don't come home and don't call and you have your phone in hand to call the police and the hospitals and everyone they know begging someone to tell you okay, they aren't dead, they don't know how to tell time or use phones and you're going to kill them. And when you are fifty or sixty or seventy and you wake suddenly in the night with a strange feeling in the back of your mind or your stomach telling you something's wrong, but you are older and calmer so you wait til morning to call them and just say you were thinking about them even when what you really want to ask is what happened, why did you wake up knowing that something was wrong with your child, who is thirty or forty or fifty and is up at night now, too, worrying about their own because
this is how it goes.
--
Samantha is... very young. Hosea isn't exactly an old buzzard himself, but he's older than she is and he wouldn't be asking if not for two reasons.
The first is that he's desperate.
The second is that he can see that she means it, and that somewhere written into her marrow is the code for protecting, nurturing, waiting, waking, worrying, and loving that you must really have in spades or develop very quickly because otherwise this whole 'parenting' thing is going to break you.
Hosea is frowning, holding that little person with the near-vegetable possibly dead-woman-walking mother and the beast-of-the-Apocalypse father. He's not a bad looking kid. He's fat and healthy and bright-eyed where his mother is dead-eyed and his father is horrific. He drools fitfully; he isn't sleeping well the last few nights, for obvious reasons. Hosea frowns at him and the baby just stares back up, fists tight. He is wearing a onesie and some booties but nothing else over his diaper; too hot out to dress him up too fancy.
The den father lifts his eyes and looks over at Sam again, still frowning, but with a tightness and poignancy that wasn't there before.
"The sept will take care of the papers. We have lawyers. And forgers."
Of course they do.
He exhales a sigh. "They've already been working it up, but no one knew where he was going to end up, so..."
--
Hosea is stalling. But he knows it. And in the end, he just shakes his head and does what he has done too many times already: he lets a kid go. Because the kid dies in their Rite of Passage. Because they run away. Because they get their name and grow up. Because their parent comes back from the umbra, whatever. Hosea gets attached, or else he couldn't do what he does. Hosea lets go, or else he couldn't do what he does.
"When you're ready," he says, "just give me a call."
A child will keep you up at night when they are small and wailing and hungry and miserable. And when they can walk and talk and get themselves all the way to your bedside to tell you that they feel bad right before they vomit on your bed. And when they don't come home and don't call and you have your phone in hand to call the police and the hospitals and everyone they know begging someone to tell you okay, they aren't dead, they don't know how to tell time or use phones and you're going to kill them. And when you are fifty or sixty or seventy and you wake suddenly in the night with a strange feeling in the back of your mind or your stomach telling you something's wrong, but you are older and calmer so you wait til morning to call them and just say you were thinking about them even when what you really want to ask is what happened, why did you wake up knowing that something was wrong with your child, who is thirty or forty or fifty and is up at night now, too, worrying about their own because
this is how it goes.
--
Samantha is... very young. Hosea isn't exactly an old buzzard himself, but he's older than she is and he wouldn't be asking if not for two reasons.
The first is that he's desperate.
The second is that he can see that she means it, and that somewhere written into her marrow is the code for protecting, nurturing, waiting, waking, worrying, and loving that you must really have in spades or develop very quickly because otherwise this whole 'parenting' thing is going to break you.
Hosea is frowning, holding that little person with the near-vegetable possibly dead-woman-walking mother and the beast-of-the-Apocalypse father. He's not a bad looking kid. He's fat and healthy and bright-eyed where his mother is dead-eyed and his father is horrific. He drools fitfully; he isn't sleeping well the last few nights, for obvious reasons. Hosea frowns at him and the baby just stares back up, fists tight. He is wearing a onesie and some booties but nothing else over his diaper; too hot out to dress him up too fancy.
The den father lifts his eyes and looks over at Sam again, still frowning, but with a tightness and poignancy that wasn't there before.
"The sept will take care of the papers. We have lawyers. And forgers."
Of course they do.
He exhales a sigh. "They've already been working it up, but no one knew where he was going to end up, so..."
--
Hosea is stalling. But he knows it. And in the end, he just shakes his head and does what he has done too many times already: he lets a kid go. Because the kid dies in their Rite of Passage. Because they run away. Because they get their name and grow up. Because their parent comes back from the umbra, whatever. Hosea gets attached, or else he couldn't do what he does. Hosea lets go, or else he couldn't do what he does.
"When you're ready," he says, "just give me a call."
my whole life is thunder.