What if I said I will never surrender

If he were the sort to think about such things, he would realize that they would be disappointed in him. It was his job to swoop in to the rescue. But just as it didn’t occur to him to consider what they would think, nor did it occur to him to interfere with the couple downstairs. He didn’t know why. Perhaps because he didn’t want to. Perhaps because the vibrations that rattled and burned downstairs wouldn’t come together into a face without another pair of eyes in between them to remind him of the resemblance, to be grateful that, as the new pair stared him down in fury, they would stare at everything else in the same way, when it came to stood in the middle of them. That was his heart, you know. You had to protect your heart, and the extra protection was something he appreciated, when it came together into a face that was, inevitably, scowling at him.

Perhaps, simply, he didn’t think she needed him this time.

But this one did.

He’s always known he was blind.

It wasn’t the sort of blindness well-meaning, overworked and underpaid social workers could understand or test for, but Jack Dawkins knew, the first time he stared at E’s arranged on a wall, wiggling cheekily, that he couldn’t trust his eyes. He wasn’t big on trust in general. Trust required some understanding of time, of the future, that what you believed now would still be later, and just as he couldn’t see, nor could he know time.

But he can feel just fine.

Here is a sticky hand, crinkled foil from hot dogs, an uncertain smile that trusts though it’s a silly thing to do.

Here is wreathing smoke and slick paint, the pounding heart flanked on one side with scowls and the other laughs.

Here is his soul, the only picture that stays focused, staring at him with lamb blue eyes that speak a language he can’t learn, because he was never taught how to listen.

And he splits, there, into two pieces he has trouble recognizing. They feel like him, he supposes, and he pities them for it, though his sort of pity is the kind that laughs and then forgets.

Small hands and staggering scars, a heart that got too much of both of them, or not enough of one to overtake the other, and mother and father can’t coexist in the same skin safely.

Her mother’s mouth, but pulled in a smirk. Soft curls he never had the chance to apologize to. Mother’s spine, father’s blood. The latter will force her to wander, he knows. The former is the better of it.  

He wonders, idly, if they’ve enough of their other halves to see. He wonders if they are blind, too, and so protected from the ravages seeing brings, which he has never had to bother with but has heard of. But he suspects they’re both, and if that’s the case, he doesn’t know what to feel for them. And it's shame, that, because if he can't see, he can only feel, and if he can't feel, the only option is to experience, and he can't.

In the grand scheme of things, Jack Dawkins has never appeared to be a particularly selfish person. Material goods, money, prestige or purpose, affection, even time itself, he’s never seemed to connect with it, and so spends and shares it freely.

But that, she’s taught him, is a terribly selfish thing to do.

He’s not—and he knows this, for all he rarely articulates it—entirely sane. Oh, there’s no name for it. No diagnosis in a book, no medication to ease or even ability to define. But he knows it, all the same. That some part of him is broken, some crucial, critical switch controlling the human need to connect and stay is jammed on the wrong frequency, as though all the other planets have an orderly orbit and his is rogue, caught by accident where it was never meant to be, erratically plowing in endless, uneven rotation caught between escape and steadiness. Change, time, progression, growth, they’re lost on someone who only catches glimpses.

He knows this.

He sees it, too, in two faces with humming skin, brown eyes and blue, and he’s sorry for it, because they both got enough of their mothers to hurt for it in a way he never did until she showed him how much loving could make you bleed.

He knows, and she knows, as sure as he’s standing in front of her now that some day he won’t be. He knows, and he suspects she does too, that he’ll be back, but never for forever. Maybe most of the time. Maybe even for a long time. But never for forever. But he wants to be welcomed—or perhaps even merely allowed—in a way he has never wanted anything. In a way that is entirely selfish, because it’s the whole of him (and he isn’t, entirely, whole which is rather the problem) that demands it. She deserves someone whole. Someone who understands the world and can live in it and with it instead of merely intersecting with it occasionally, accidentally. His inability to understand has put steel in her, sharpness, already. He can’t promise her he’ll ever understand. He can’t even promise her he’ll change, because it’s not something he understands. He has calmed, true, the vibrations quieted some by years of sleep, but they’re there nevertheless. There is, and he understands this at least is a terrible flaw, nothing at all he can offer her, because even himself is a poor provision. He can offer only a broken madman’s everything, and he can’t even offer to take it back if she refuses.

Sometimes he doesn’t see people.

Oh, he knows they’re THERE, somehow, he can feel the crackle of heat and low buzz, but when he looks, their image has been shaken, vibrated to pieces, a jarred, jagged, not-quite image, still-moving and indistinguishable from the roiling background. It gives him a headache, so he looks away, and wanders through the humming until something else, for a moment or two, shakes just right and comes together into a face, recognizable and intriguing for as long as it holds together, until the hum strengthens and shakes them back into colors and lines but not names.

He might have never have noticed, save for pigtails and hope, holding together through sheer refusal to be shaken.

He might have never have started seeking them, save for brown eyes and hands that sketched them, slow and easy, too mellow to shake quickly.

There is, in this world, exactly one thing Dodger steals from his son. Things that belong to him are sacred. They never vanish, never have, even forever ago when things would disappear from their cheap apartment as the locks were broken and desperate men scrambled and stole what wasn’t theirs, Alexander’s things re-appeared. Dodger only ever stole them back.

With one exception.

“Hey!”

He ignores the shout, which is as much amused as frustrated, cuddling his prize with complete adoration and she giggles and chatters happily to her grandpa about the tooth that’s finally loose and the tooth fairy that’s going to bring her a quarter like the last one got.

Dad, give her back.

If you pay attention to the hands, they give him away. Still smooth and without wrinkles, even now, though the folds have appeared by crinkled eyes and forehead, by lips still quick to smile. But the scars tracing them, puffed and red angry, no more faded now than decades ago, reveal him, for all that he's good (and always has been) at making you not notice, not look, distracted by some trick of wild light and quick words, bouncing like fairy lantern you hope to never catch, or risk dancing in a frenzy, a mad reel, until the breath you've lost is your last. The mischief, too, because he can't disguise that, or chooses not to. The briefest of twinkles when your eyes catch at last, a wink, before he vanishes again.

He's promised.

Sworn.

Raised scarred, skinny, spotted arms in an oath, that he doesn't, in fact, have GPS trackers on the lot of'em. Or microchips, or satellites, or paid private investigators and/or stalkers. (But you know how he is about words, about promises that don't, not really, matter, and so the mystery is still unsolved, and there are some who are suspicious, and check for strange scars they may have had since childhood, and wonder)