Author Notes: A while back, somebody suggested a genderswapped Kirei, and speculated about the effects of motherhood.
This drabble occurred to me.
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Postpartum
I see your father when I look at you, Caren. You have the same eyes – large and golden, like a kitten’s.
He was a good man, your father. Pious. Meek. And very much in love with me. He had this little gesture where he twined his fingers around the cross on his neck just so, and smiled up at me. Vaguely apologetic. I want help you, Miss Kotomine. To fill that emptiness in your heart. Your father was always so dramatic.
And I’d married him, because I’d believed it as much as he had.
The child was supposed to do it, if all else failed. You were my ticket to salvation. Something that I could adore with that perfect, perfect love that mothers are supposed to feel. To show off to Risei, your grandfather. Your father said as much on his deathbed. Clasped my hand and assured me that it would be different from now on. I looked into those amber eyes until they went dim, and felt…nothing.
No.
I’ve lied to you just now. Please believe me when I say that it was accidental. You know my distaste for lying.
I felt regret that I hadn’t throttled him. That I could never see those amber eyes widen as I drove the Black Keys into his throat, or hear him choke on his own punctured lungs. He was gone. Your father was gone. I felt nauseous. I wanted nothing more than to retch until the bile came out red. Morning sickness, perhaps.
Most of all, I felt fear. He was a good man, your father. But he was rarely right.
I saw your father’s eyes again seven months later, when I held you in the delivery room. The same eyes. They were as I’ve already described them – large and golden, like a kitten’s.
How the delivery room attendants cooed over you. Smiled. Congratulated me. I was a mother now. Huh.
But I saw something in you then that I’d never seen in your father. You shivered, Caren, in that unfamiliar cold. So, so vulnerable. So far beyond your father’s practiced humility. Crying. Clutching at me. So eager to be loved.
Intimate. Everything suddenly made sense when I looked down at you. And what a revelation it was. A severed part of me, crying out for comfort. I soon figured out how to hold you just awkwardly enough to make you cry more loudly.
Your father’s parishioners made a fuss, of course – mixed blessings and condolences for the deacon’s widow and her beautiful new daughter. And you were so very beautiful, Caren. You still are. Always. Even with that mask you wear now at every disappointment, every slight, every sliver of love that I deny you, I can still taste the pain underneath. My little girl.
That night, I slept more peacefully than I’d slept in years. Your father’s parishioners had given you so much. Formula milk. Toys. Clothes. A crib. So considerate.
But it was the baby monitor that I treasured the most. I heard you bawling in that empty room on the second floor. It surprised me – not the sound, but the effect it had on me. A twinge somewhere. They say there’s nothing like hearing it from your own child. Savoring it.
But you don’t cry anymore, do you, Caren? Too grown-up these days, I suppose, to fill your mother’s emptiness. To sing me to sleep with that loud, sharp lullaby.
We should stay in closer touch, you and I.
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Originally Posted by Vigilantia
