This is just a very short character study I wrote to give myself a break from "Suggestion Obession Awake". If I write more one shots, they'll probably just end up piling uphere.
- Daphne
She wonders about him, late at night when she secretly sticks her head into his room to see if he's still in his bed. There's no reason he shouldn't be, but it's a mother's impulse. In the dark when she needs a glass of water, to go the bathroom, or just wakes up for no reason at all, the impulse always takes her. She is incapable of walking past daughter's door or her son's. As she slides down the hallway, almost silently, on the tips of her toes, she touches their doors and looks inside. She reassures herself that they are still there, still safe in her house. She has to know that she has fufilled her maternal obligation and that her children are still whole.
The older they get the more she thinks that's that's becoming the sum of her responsibility, to keep them in one piece, to keep them alive. They are growing up after all, they need her less and less and depend on themselves more and more. They have their own minds, their own hearts, their own thoughts and fears, all independent from her, all outside of her power to save, correct or mend. Teenagers, leave their mother behind. Nothing could be more natural.
But when she opens the door and watches at her youngest, her baby, her boy, she wonders: Is keeping him alive enough? She sees his pale face dressed in moonlight, still the face of a child. She can see the blue of his veins running in a delicate line over his jaw and she marvels at the thin, fragile skin, still unmarked by age and time. She watches him breath soft and slow and wonders if she spread her hand, would it still cover the rising ribs, would she still feel the bones just beneath her fingers? He looks so sweet and silent, like the sleeping boy she has peered in upon for forteen years.
He is still alive.
She wonders how this sleeping boy can be the boy her child has become. The boy her child has become betrays his child's face with sharp firey eyes. The boy her child has become lies as easily as he tells the truth, false stories smoothly falling off his tongue. The boy her child has become behaves as if the world were to lie on his shoulders and not even Atlas could ease the burden.
What happened to her son to put that burden, those stories, those eyes, she does not know. Nor does she think he will tell her. Children needs secrets. He will tell her when the time comes.
Until then, she just hopes to keep him alive. And as she closes the door and slips down the hall in the shadowy moonlight, she hopes it is enough.