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“Papa.” She whispers sleepily one night, her eyes are closing fast, and it’s warm against his side, softer than the pillows awaiting her in her bed. Safe, in a way that she trusts unconsciously. The movie is still playing, but the words are all blurring together for her. She knows he’s watching it still, even though she had to plead and pout to get her way for this, I do not understand why the animals must sing. But Daddy is busy tonight and they’re all alone, she should remember this and tell him later, he’d laugh. But the thoughts are floating away. An arm shifts her closer, tucks her in and she curls into the touch. “You’re the dragon and the lion, right?” Her mouth moves without her mind, and her fingers splay against fabric, a little giggle from nowhere. Sometimes little girls who are almost big talk without thinking. “And the clumsy knife juggler, him too?”
The touch doesn’t waver, though even behind closed lids she can sense the rays of his gaze fall down on her, like the sun. She thinks sometimes, blinding like the sun. But she never burns. Daddy, she thinks, is singed, just slightly, around the edges, in her dreams, the red turns gold now and again, the rough edges of skin sear with dancing fire. But he doesn’t burn either. Not ever. A gift of the gods, Papa had said in his low curl of voice, “And Prometheus stole it.” The words come aloud without realization. Daddy reads her fairy tales, Papa reads her myths. She’s not sure what the difference is sometimes, but she lets them call it what they want. Sometimes it’s best to let grownups have their way. “and gave it to man.” She sighs, lets the brightness wrap around her. “He was brave.”
“Or very foolish?” Papa’s voice hums from the air, surrounds her thoughts. “I am perhaps the eagle also.”
“The flame.” She tells him seriously, as seriously as she can manage without her thoughts together. But Papa mostly always listens carefully to her, so she tries. “Sometimes flames burn.” She remembers, she burned herself on a pot and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen Papa turn so white, Daddy had been the one to grab her, pull her to the sink, before the tears came, and the pain. Papa had stood there, stone still, blinking. The memory leaves her.
She thinks he says something, but she can’t hear, a nameless melody floating through her mind, her lips are heavy, and she’s floating, or flying, or maybe she’s just being scooped up up and away.
“But you love us.”
That’s the important part, it’s what Daddy says every time, after he reads her, and they lived happily ever after.
“That’s the important part.”