I sat there, talkin’ to people when they sat beside me to chat or readin’ from the first edition copy of The Prince Cress had given me, even though my mind was on Cressida in that room with Lou, supportin’ her through givin’ birth.
I’d peeked in on them in the early stages, just leaned in the doorway and watched as Cress fed a sweating, visually uncomfortable Loulou some ice chips and told her little stories about Zeus and the club from before she and Dad had gotten together. I loved the way they interacted, as if there was some inviable force field around them, as if their love was a barrier against all the wrongness in the world, insulting them from it, warming them against it. They treated each other like sisters and best friends when really Lou would be Cress’s mother-in-law, weird as it was given Cress was ten years older. Nothing mattered between them but the love they had for one another.
We gave them that, Zeus and me, and our family in The Fallen. We’d showed them what it was to love against all odds, to strip the crap away because it was what laid at the heart of a person who meant everythin’.
Made my throat tight and my heart pump slow, my blood weighted with pride and so much affection. If I’d been less of a man, I might’a cried.
The time for visits was over, though, and Lou was officially givin’ birth, and Zeus, done with the police and the Berserker drama, was on his way to meet his babies.
Heard him before I saw him, the early hours of the mornin’ makin’ his voice even coarser, his laugh like a lion roarin’ through the halls of the hospital.
He rounded the corner, and it struck me like it sometimes did how larger than life he was. Big man, packed like a powerhouse with dense muscle, thick, dark beard, and eyes as light as mine but silver. Hair like mine too, crazy and rumble all around his angel wing tatted shoulders, brown dipped in honey at the ends. He was beautiful to me, and it might’a been weird to say that as a son, but I felt the beauty of him in my gut because he was the best man I knew. There was nothin’ bad in him, not at all, not an ounce. He was love and laughter and family.
He’d sacrificed for the people he loved, and he’d taught me that. He’d taught me that nothin’ was more important than protectin’ the ones you loved, and it was a philosophy that was carved into my fuckin’ bones.
Everything good in me I got from him.
Not Farrah, the bitch who carried me in her toxic womb, and continued to spit poison at me all the years of my life she was a part of.
Not the grandparents or ancestors we never knew.
Just Zeus.
One parent as if H.R. and me had sprung from him fully formed, Athena from the head of Zeus.
Might’a been the day, knowin’ I was welcomin’ two new siblings into the world, knowin’ they’d have two parents, the best parents those kids could probably ever have save for Cress and myself, but I felt honest to Christ moved by the sight of my dad in the hall, beamin’ proud and strong even after dealin’ with yet another shitshow.
Then Harleigh Rose was there, her smile dropping with an almost audible crash to the linoleum as her eyes, melted down aquamarine, swept over the crew of us waitin’ there. A deer caught in the headlights, she froze, and it seemed like she would’ve run if Danner wasn’t there beside her, hand to her back, the tiny action holdin’ her completely in his thrall.
I moved without thinkin’, just needin’ to have my little sister in my arms again after weeks of not seein’ her. I was walkin, then joggin’ when her eyes widened and I thought she’d bolt, and then runnin’, snaggin’ her up in my arms so tight she gasped in my ear.
She smelled the same. Somehow, it struck me as fuckin’ crazy and beautiful that her whole life, she’d smelled the very same. Floral, some kind of barely sweet, kinda earthy flower that made me think of untended fields where wild horses roamed. Pretty and wild, just like my sister.
“H.R.,” I said into her streaky hair, voice coarse, arms banded too tight around her. “Fuckin’ welcome home.”
Like a key in a lock, she broke open in my arms, clingin’ and sobbin’ like she’d been separated from me for years and gone through unmentionable tragedies.
I didn’t doubt the tragedies, and it broke my fuckin’ heart. It seemed like years since I’d been able to care for her properly. It was hard, bein’ the older one, the one who’d always taken care of her, that she was old enough now not to need me, at least not in the way she once had.