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Throughout the two decades that parted their ninth wedding anniversary from the morning he and Adam first fell in love so long ago, Adam’s parents had always seemed more like ghosts than memories--even the late Ashim, whom Shiro met more than once in the five years before his illness began. The echoes of them were everywhere: in the dented promise ring Adam still wore around his neck on a chain, in the sad quirk of his lips when Sonia clung to him and laughed like the straight-figured Kashmiri soldier whose eyes still burned in the face of her only son, and the wistful pitch of Keith’s deep voice whenever anyone mentioned the word grandfather in front of him.
How could they have had a son like you? people asked time and time again when Adam was a toddler, looking from the gentle, soft-spoken man to the scrap of a boy beside him, covered in dust and strawberry juice and brambles from playing in the woods--and then to the wide-eyed woman grasping his hands in hers, if she were present and not at some far-flung army base fighting for the life of a nation. It seemed impossible that Ashim Ahluwalia and Yasmeen Umarzai could have brought forth a silver-tongued firecracker who spent his days teasing his schoolteachers until they screamed and embracing trouble as it came along just as a matter of course, impossible that a farmer with a voice as sweet as payesam had reared up a hellion who broke every law laid down before him and took his pleasure in the breaking--but he had done it, fulfilling the child’s every wish and fancy because he could not do the same for the mother, and so it was thus that Adam arrived at the Garrison fearing nothing at all--or nothing, at least, but the pain of the tragedy that had driven him there.
* * *
It was some twelve years later that Shiro finally understood, sitting on the porch with Adam in his lap not long after they were married.
“He was like you once, wasn’t he?”
The voice that answered him was bright and tender, completely bereft of the mischievous glee that colored those balmy summer days spent under the Arizona sun without a care in the world but whatever punishment Sanda and Iverson had in store for them next--and as he listened Shiro wondered if the world was always so cruel, if all that was bold and beautiful in it was doomed to wither away if it survived its grief in the first place--
“No, sweetheart,” smiled Adam, pushing a damp lock of hair off his forehead and pressing a kiss to his shoulder. “That’s not why we changed, my father and I. We were lonely when we were young, I think, and wild like any free-roaming thing under the sun--but then we were caught, and made gentle almost without realizing it...without you and my mother trying to do it, even. He clung to his tricks and his pranks and his mischief because he didn’t have her, and I clung to mine because I didn’t have you. And then I did, and it was like making roots after a lifetime of wandering around with nowhere to go--like I belonged someplace now, and to someone whom I could walk beside for as long as I lived and after.
“Why do you think I stayed for you, my moonlight? I was drifting without an anchor to hold me, and then you came along and held on tight so I always had somewhere to come back to. I was running as far and as fast as I could, and searching for something to make me slow down and listen , and then I saw you--and it was like the world saw me for myself for the first time, and wanted me happy and thriving in it. So I stood beside you and stopped for a while, and I realized that’s where I wanted to be. Here with you, wherever you go, always. ”