Family

the Rift

[PRIVATE] Family

Knox Posts: 262

Outcast atk: 4 | def: 7.5 | dam: 6.5

Stallion :: Equine :: 17hh :: 7 Years [Tallsun] HP: 67.5 | Buff: NOVICE

Jen

08-22-2015, 09:14 PM

image by deadair @ flickr.com</style>
round all the pieces up, but they just don't fit the same.</style>

She is so wrong. Knox cares for her deeply, but he knows she is wrong. Aylin, the one with the heart who couldn’t stop caring, didn’t really know him then.

Now, she does, even when he doesn’t. And he is needy, he relies on her. All his life he has relied on females, ones weaker than him. The old killers, the lost pups, the blind travel companion. And now… he relies on her still.

”It does matter,” he says, insisting and correcting with every breath. He needs to make her understand how important this is. She is wrong in that it doesn’t matter, but she was right, so long ago.

”My family… My family was a nightmare. There was no love in that house. I don’t know where Archibald, Evers, where any of them are now. I don’t know if they have families of their own, but…” Knox breathes deeply. Manhattan watches him closely out from focused, blue eyes. ”I saw Archibald, the night his first child was born and died. It was the first time I thought he ever had a heart. It was lying there, dead, in the snow, but he had one, Aylin.” Knox shakes his head at the memory and its horrors, but he has to force himself to go on.

”I want that,” he says quietly then. ”Not the tragedy. The heart. I want to see my love walking this earth. I need to prove that I have it in me, and I need to know it’s real.”

Love. What even is the thing, love?

”Aylin, Dovev said he loved you that night and he was lying. But the only reason those ancestors exist is because I’m alive. They live through me. He was lying. I don’t know if I would have been.”

Manhattan grows tense beside him, but Knox doesn’t notice. She builds poison in her jaws, but he doesn’t see.

”Aylin, I don’t know if I love you. And I know it’s… fuck, it’s insane to ask you anything, now, after all the ways I’ve hurt you. But I need to find out. I have to know,” he pleads, pressing his forehead to hers, exhaling and emptying his lungs of everything.

He needs to know if he has love enough in him, in her, to keep him alive through this long, abandoned winter.

___

He isn’t listening anymore. He doesn’t care to entertain her inaccuracy, her inability to fucking listen for once, any longer. It is not true that she doesn’t listen, but he can’t consider truth anymore. He is too filled with upset, too filled with something that is starting to burn just a little like rage.

It is only when she begins her last small speech that his ears lower in that telltale way. He is considering. He is settling, ceasing his shifting, slowly returning to his own ebony face. The eyes solidify as a perfect blue: the one he was born with, the only blue he ever saw through for so long in his life.

“Shouldn’t you learn from the mistakes that they’ve made in their past?”

She isn’t wrong, maybe. The ancestors dispute this, some scream in protest, others shake their heads in a disappointed silence, but Knox has enough of himself for one single moment, enough of himself to simply consider she could be right.

His expression is softening, his heartbeat slowing, and his coat growing thicker with rain. A part of him is breaking.

And then, she speaks of family. Of a family in the future. Of a family at all.

Knox snaps. Like a flash, like a sudden, harmful card being tossed, he is the murderer: Dovev. His face greys like steel, his heart hardens, and his eyes are black with a hatred that runs deeper than bloodlines.

“I WILL NEVER HAVE A FAMILY!”

It doesn’t occur to her what she might be trying to say. That this mare who he sees as a friend closer than any other might be trying to tell him he means more.

“A MONSTER LIKE THIS CANNOT BE A FATHER!”

His heart is growing colder, locking itself up somewhere deep and hidden. He cannot consider Aylin’s feelings--that she may want a family, and that perhaps she has followed him this far into empty lands with no promise for a hope that someday he might turn to her with love in his eyes and say, “Yes, Aylin. Let’s make this place our home. For our family.”

He has never thought of settling. He has never considered, since the death of his mother, that family is anything but a curse.

“AND I AM THIS MONSTER!”

His eyes burn. His heart is hurting somewhere too far away to feel, so when he cries he does not know why.

“I AM THE MONSTER YOU CAN’T FACE, AYLIN.”

The one part of Knox that knows he can be better than this, that Aylin is right, is forgotten.

“AND A MONSTER CAN ONLY KILL HIS FAMILY. A monster...”

The heart is tired. He forces his gaze upon hers.

“...a monster is a thing without love inside him.”

—

knox</style>
& manhattan</style>