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Sometimes Miss Honey wakes up in the middle of the night, shaking, soaked in sweat, with tears running down her face.
She thinks of the sickeningly dull crack of her arm being twisted - broken - behind her back, and the dark, claustrophobic silence of nights spent alone, locked in her broom closet.
She thinks of the deaths of her parents, and the answers she’ll never get for them.
Often the memories get to be too much for her, and she finds that she cannot breathe.
She never goes to wake up Matilda, but the precocious little girl always knows.
The light creaking of the floorboards underfoot would terrify her in any other context, but for now, she welcomes it.
Anything to stave off the oblivion she’s currently drowning in.
Matilda creeps into her bed, settles down beside her and strokes flaxen strands of sweaty hair away from her face until the hot tears stop streaming down and she finally falls back asleep.
She doesn’t say anything, she just cradles her face, and that’s enough.
The morning light washes away their misery, and they try again the next day.
---
Matilda knows that the fault lies solely with her birth-givers - she’d never call them parents, because they barely were - for being careless enough to have a child they never wanted.
A child that they were so ready to foist off onto the first person who offered.
She knows objectively that it is not her fault.
But it doesn’t stop it from stinging sometimes.
She lets herself weep for what might’ve been. The cashmere of Miss Honey’s new jumper is soft against her cheek. Miss Honey’s arms are so tight around her, but she likes the way it grounds her.
Miss Honey's arms wrap around tight to absorb the shockwaves of this tiny child’s incredible, world-shaking despair.
Matilda lets herself forget that she’s leaving awful trails of snot and tears against her mom’s clothes, and allows herself to cry.
The fact of the matter is that occasionally tears can spring up from nothing at all. Matilda thinks that it’s far better to shed them as they come rather than bottling them away for a spectacular explosion later on.
Matilda would never give up her life with Miss Honey, but a tiny, yearning part of her wonders what life would be like to be born with parents who loved her as dearly as she deserved to be loved.
---
Life ticks on as the calendar pages flip.
They travel to school together and as always, their enthusiasm for learning only grows.
After coming into her rightful place as school principal, Miss Honey has transformed the school into a very nice place indeed.
She works hard to accommodate disadvantaged pupils, help pupils with tailored teaching styles that allow them to find their love in the pursuit of knowledge - and she swears on her life that she’ll never let another child come to the same harm she did at their age.
Miss Honey finds that she stresses over things a lot, but the feeling of a small, warm hand starfished against her face always brings her back.
---
They’ve both happy to find that they finally have the opportunity (and the money) to go to therapy.
It helps them to unpack all the little toxic, niggling things inside their minds - the ideas that were never shaken loose by the years, only ever reinforced.
Miss Honey is not pathetic.
Well, that’s what she has to tell herself anyways.
She doesn’t believe it at first, but she knows she will, and that’s the important part.
---
Matilda knows very well that for all her maturity and bookish intelligence, she is still a child.
A child who grew up in a bad situation, with bad ideals instilled within her.
And although she knows she did not turn out like her birth-givers, they live on inside her - in hateful eyes and intensive neglect that burn themselves from the inside out on her skin.
Occasionally, she finds that she cannot brave the tempest of her feelings.
Therapy helps her find coping mechanisms, and accept all that has happened to her instead of burying them deep inside of her when she doesn’t want to think about them.
Getting lost in a book instead of acknowledging her feelings isn’t the right choice, and she works hard to learn how to speak up again.
Despite everything, Matilda is still a child and she needs help sometimes.
Frequently, she finds that that might be the smartest realisation of them all.
---
Life isn’t perfect for Matilda and Miss Honey, but in moments like these - where they find themselves lounging in front of the fireplace, book in hand and understanding in heart - they know that they’d never have it any other way.