Work Text:
I Never Was
“You are not a child” she says,
Looking directly at me but not truly seeing me,
The words like daggers against my skin,
Cracking the worn case I’m built in
Looking through the shattering glass I can see my reflection from times past
“You are not a child” he had said to me as I cried in the dark for the life we had lost, for the world burnt out, for the hold I would never feel again
Up in flames right before our eyes but “I was not a child”
And so the tears dried up, buried deep, deep down, not to be found,
Not even as the flicker of my 6th birthday candles brought me back to that night, that devastating, burning, choking night when we lost her,
Because I was stronger than that, and tears are for children,
So I smiled the brightest I had ever smiled with sparks dancing in my eyes
“You are not a child” he told me when he threw me against the wall with terror in his eyes after I froze out there,
Out there where the monsters were closing in, so close I could smell their breath but remained paralysed, drowning in the fear that gripped me so tightly before the gun shot rang out in the night and the monsters with teeth and claws evaporated back to the dark where they belonged,
But he was still there, the what if’s lay brittle in the air, five seconds later and what
The anger lay simmering in his gaze like hot coals, cloaking the horror and panic of his heart as my eye bruised blue in the morning light,
But “I was not a child” and so I slayed the next beast with time to spare,
Shower water turning red as I scrubbed crimson blood from my hands with batman shampoo
“I was not a child” when he vanished for weeks at a time and I was left with the innocent, with the snot-nosed, doe eyed boy who’s questions upon questions were left unanswered because “He was just a child”
How could I tell him about everything that goes bump in the night,
About the evil he chased down an endless road, never looking back at the smoking tendrils that followed
So I told stories of superheros and adventures as he ate the last of the mac and cheese and I went to bed starving,
Waiting on his return because there was no money left to get by and how could I protect my brother, “He was just a child”
“You are not a child” he told me as he hung up the phone and left me alone, with nothing but car keys and old cassette tapes that I played to fill the silence of the road,
And when alcohol burned the gashes in my side as I stitched myself up in the backseat,
When nightmares plagued my sleeping hours, when liquor bottles lay empty around my feet, My phone lay silent, unused because “I was not a child” and I could handle this myself
And on and on the story goes, until we arrive here, in this moment, with her,
The shards lie broken on the floor of the armour and protection that you destroyed because I let you through the cracks, through the crevices,
A trojan horse, killing me from the inside out.
You…… you,
The warm light we thought was gone forever, lost in the blaze, the ruins, the ashes
The miracle that was returned to us, like a shooting star from the heavens,
But you do not want to stay, you don’t want what we have become, you can’t even look at us, Look at me
“You are not a child” she says
“No… I never was”