[Gods preserve him, he's sighed so many times tonight it's as though he's still seated hunched over his ledger, numbers boiling in his brain— this time, however, the sum he's left with is a single, burning question: just how long has the weight of the world sat on his child's barely-grown in shoulders? For a man convinced the day before his boys were carefree yearlings, his hands are clammy with unease now. Ineptitude, shaped like all the solutions he can't offer. The things that he can't solve.
He listens, because that's all that can be done (Fenris is right; Astarion would only take it as a challenge). He watches his son quake in pain, longing for the days when that expression needing no more than a blanket or a crust of freshly buttered bread to see it settled. Not because he wants the little boy and his fisted hands back, but because as a man of action he reviles his own impuissance. It's no way for a father to feel.]
I won't say a word.
[Comes first. Fenris has enough to fret over already, no need to add on the worry that someone else might go and make it worse by intervening.]
What I mean is....[careful, watching the measured rise and fall of his son's chest where it's thick with too much tension] when the war finally freed me from its yoke a month later, when he understood I wasn't going to vanish as a result of a blade or wanderlust— or perhaps that I was toying with the thrill of the Moulin Rouge's new up and coming star— [words mean so so little; shared meals or conversations were never long enough] Kanan resigned from his position.
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illithidnapped) wrote2025-05-31 06:45 pm
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He listens, because that's all that can be done (Fenris is right; Astarion would only take it as a challenge). He watches his son quake in pain, longing for the days when that expression needing no more than a blanket or a crust of freshly buttered bread to see it settled. Not because he wants the little boy and his fisted hands back, but because as a man of action he reviles his own impuissance. It's no way for a father to feel.]
I won't say a word.
[Comes first. Fenris has enough to fret over already, no need to add on the worry that someone else might go and make it worse by intervening.]
What I mean is....[careful, watching the measured rise and fall of his son's chest where it's thick with too much tension] when the war finally freed me from its yoke a month later, when he understood I wasn't going to vanish as a result of a blade or wanderlust— or perhaps that I was toying with the thrill of the Moulin Rouge's new up and coming star— [words mean so so little; shared meals or conversations were never long enough] Kanan resigned from his position.
[More than that:]
I never asked him to.