11-26-2021, 09:45 PM
They’ve not talked about the way things were when he was younger, or how things have changed. Changed since Myrna’s birth, he’d always thought, but perhaps that isn’t entirely so. Once I was me again, she’d said, as though it had been someone else who had raised him in the mountains. He’d thought her a good parent even then, though as he has grown older and watched the way she acts with his younger sibling and the other residents of Hyaline, he has come to know that the son that Mazikeen had been raising was a different creature entirely than the one he has started to become.
He might have become something dark and bitter, someone that the mother in front of him now might not like so much. What would it have been like to be that Malik, he wonders? Would he have been more Powerful?
He doesn’t think as much about Power as he had when his father was in Hyaline. That had been Gale’s obsession, after all, and without him nearby the reminders have gone as well. He has tried his best not to think of his father at all, after all, and the memories the boy has again have only confirmed the wisdom of that choice.
Had it been kinder for his mother to keep him in the dark? How different was hiding the truth than warping it with the theft of memories? Malik shakes his head, backing away as he struggles to make sense of the clamor of emotions that rise within his chest. He feels so many things, and of them all the one that is the strongest is hurt. Not by his mother, not if he really thought about it, but he is too angry to think much, and is only focused on the fact that she had lied to him, and had kept the knowledge of Sickle from him. He is quiet for a time, and then at last he looks up to meet her gaze.
“You should’ve told me about her.” Malik says stubbornly, eyes fixed on hers. She is the mother, the adult, the one who has all the answers and she should have found a way. “Maybe not Dad, though. That I didn’t need to know.” The words feel strange in his mouth, for though they are truthful they nonetheless grate on the small part of Malik that still considers his parents to be paragons in all things.
@Mazikeen
He might have become something dark and bitter, someone that the mother in front of him now might not like so much. What would it have been like to be that Malik, he wonders? Would he have been more Powerful?
He doesn’t think as much about Power as he had when his father was in Hyaline. That had been Gale’s obsession, after all, and without him nearby the reminders have gone as well. He has tried his best not to think of his father at all, after all, and the memories the boy has again have only confirmed the wisdom of that choice.
Had it been kinder for his mother to keep him in the dark? How different was hiding the truth than warping it with the theft of memories? Malik shakes his head, backing away as he struggles to make sense of the clamor of emotions that rise within his chest. He feels so many things, and of them all the one that is the strongest is hurt. Not by his mother, not if he really thought about it, but he is too angry to think much, and is only focused on the fact that she had lied to him, and had kept the knowledge of Sickle from him. He is quiet for a time, and then at last he looks up to meet her gaze.
“You should’ve told me about her.” Malik says stubbornly, eyes fixed on hers. She is the mother, the adult, the one who has all the answers and she should have found a way. “Maybe not Dad, though. That I didn’t need to know.” The words feel strange in his mouth, for though they are truthful they nonetheless grate on the small part of Malik that still considers his parents to be paragons in all things.
@Mazikeen