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Sometimes, he just sat there, on the ground. Back against the bassinet, the quiet breaths of a baby his, and his alone, behind him.
On some nights, when he can’t quite pull himself from laughter and the feeling of his body collapsing beneath metal, just sitting there, listening to Danny breathe, is enough.
Some nights, it’s sitting there, heart hammering in his chest violently, the lullaby monitor in broken scraps across the room, every light too bright, but the dark too dark, where Danny’s soft breaths mix with the sounds of her voice.
‘I love you.’ She did, he knows she did. ‘So much, so much.’
Just as much as he knew sometimes she was afraid of that love.
Afraid of loving him.
And he never faulted her for that.
She loved him, and that was enough.
Even when sometimes that love was her sobbing voice singing to him when she wrapped her hands around him.
When he stared at her, watched her tell him over and over again how dearly she loved him.
She loved him. He didn’t doubt that.
But sometimes, love isn’t always what books made it seem.
Jason leaned his head back against the bassinet, eyes staring unseeingly at the ceiling, watching shadows warp and writhe. He wasn’t sure whether they were Danny’s shadows, or just his mind.
Danny’s lullaby monitor was broken, and Jason would buy him a new one first light, but right now, lullabies just remind him of hazy memories of watching his mother cry and hold him down.
Memories faint and few, but there nonetheless.
Sometimes, Jason is afraid that his love might become like hers.
Desperate, frantic, scared.
There were good memories, there were bad. His childhood wasn’t some great tragedy. There were plenty of other kids just like him, a heavy handed drunk, a desperate mother sometimes lost to veins.
He just lived it.
Lived it, survived it, killed by it.
Complex.
Sometimes, those memories are more vivid than after.
Shallow water so deep and blurry.
Pillows musty and dark.
Hands that hold, that grasp, that squeeze.
Jason loves Danny. He loves him so much, so dearly, and sometimes, in the dark of night, Jason is afraid of himself.
Afraid he might love Danny too much.
But then, day comes, and Danny babbles and chews on Jason’s fingers, and Jason can’t imagine loving Danny the way Jason had been loved.
Sometimes, Jason isn’t sure if he doesn’t love Danny enough, or if he loves Danny just enough.
Jason’s never had to love someone who depended on him.
He’s never loved someone who’s entire existence relied on him.
In those dark nights, he can’t understand his love, can’t really understand her love.
But in the day, he remembers, slowly, that their situations are different.
He alone loves his baby.
She wasn’t alone.
He has weapons, has blood on his hands and no room in his mind for lives ended at them.
She was a woman trying to exist in a world that didn’t want her, in a life that didn’t want her.
In a mind that sometimes didn’t want her either.
Perhaps he’s as broken as she is, just their shards are shaped differently.
His love is scumbags strung up by streetlamps, heads in dufflebags, and a strict territory.
Hers was cookies, movies, half aware snuggles on a stained couch, terrified tears and lullabies and twisted concepts of what freedom would be.
Knowing, not knowing, understanding, not understanding.
Emotions are never logical, and perhaps thats the most logical of all.
Sometimes, Jason cries in the silence of his room, listening to his son quietly breathe, and he wonders if one day he might think death would be freedom too.
He doesn’t want it to be.
Jason just wants the best for Danny.
But didn’t she also want the best for Jason as well?
Jason slides to lay flat on the ground, and quietly, he hums.
He doesn’t want his lullabies for Danny, to be like her lullabies for him.
He’ll learn.
Anything to prove that his lullabies won’t ever need to become hers.
That Danny will grow up, will go to school, will laugh, will smile, and never have to know that his dad once thought death was freedom.
Never know that Jason might have considered that life was too cruel, the way she sometimes had.
She loved him, and he loved her.
And he knows he wants to love Danny differently from how Jason had been loved.
Give Danny what Jason never had.
Love that was like books.
Soft, sweet, pure, happy.
Jason rolls onto his side, and rubs his face.
Gooey like those childhoods street kids mocked, because they could never have it. Determined to be strong, to prove to themselves they didn’t need it.
Danny babbles something in his sleep, and Jason hums louder, even as his insides twist, and his throat is blocked.
Jason hums, and stares at the wall, and does his best to sing over the songs in his head, the sobbing in his ears, and the blurry vision.
It’ll be okay.
Jason just has to convince himself that.