#... and marcy

Morcant is no parent. But he knows a child - a human child, no less - is a needful thing. They bawl and scream and cry, and even once they find their feet and their senses they continue to be wanting. Even accepting all the paltry needs that come with being mortal, they need time. Space.

Attention. 

They need tears wiped away. Tempers managed. Night terrors comforted. They need a guardian who will live up to the name in more than just the physical.

And Morcant is none of that.

Sometimes, he thinks the Veylocke child can sense it. This small human, this warped memory of his late friends, who stares at him with Reiah's stubbornness sitting in Alaric's eyes, keeps to himself. He does not reach out. Does not ask. He watches, with those damn eyes that hold both his parents, and lays no verbal judgement.

(And, for all the brevity of his speech, Morcant already knows Abolish talks with his father's voice and his mother's wit.)

(This last reminder of his two friends, two whole and full existences condensed down into this single soul, an echo of an echo, never enough to do anything but resurface the grief.)

Reiah and Alaric's boy is a well-behaved child; all Morcant’s guests and servants say so. They comment, in that well-meaning way of someone reaching for an easy compliment, how quiet he is. How no-fuss. The parents among them share their own woes – of offspring who scream and shout, who flaunt bedtimes and flail at bathtimes – and Morcant knows he is not one of them. He is no parent.

Morcant Thornvale does not know how to raise a child.

Only agents.

(Perhaps he starts Abolish Veylocke too early; most come into the organisation in adulthood, but Morcant does not know what else to do with Reiah and Alaric's son, and – anyway – he takes to it like a duck to water.)

(He is a Veylocke, after all.)

And if there are more ricochets of his old friends sounded off by the training (he scraps like his mother, kicks like his father) then they are discordant, diluted from an education alongside Morcant.

Morcant is no parent.

But, sometimes – sometimes, and getting closer – it is not echoes of Reiah or Alaric he sees in Abolish, but himself. His diplomacy and his quick-footed way around a lie; it has been too long since he has seen his reflection, but sometimes it is like catching the edge of a mirror. Just fragments. Just glimmers.

(A guest passes through Blackwyn and, off-handedly with no cloying motivation, remarks how clearly they can see the familial likeness.)

Morcant is no parent.

And perhaps, if he keeps telling himself that, he might just believe it. Abolish is his ward. His protégé. His employee.

Abolish is in his mid-twenties – a respectable adult age by human standards, if a little young by organisation standards for solo missions – when he travels to Oakhurst. Morcant had spoken of a potential vampire cure, but they had both seen it for the excuse it was. Abolish Veylocke travels to Oakhurst to pay respects to his parents, but some things just look better on paperwork.

It takes months.

(It was never meant to take months.)

It takes months, and the Abolish that returns is not the same Abolish that left. There are new-forged ghosts in his wake, and fresh footprints in his soul, and all are foreign to Morcant. Abolish relays, at first with familiar humour and scathing remarks, the events of those months. Of an abandoned town ravanged by two vampires, the travelling folk turned, one-by-one, and the reckless stupidity of both vampire and human alike.

Of their solution.

The Abolish that returns is still human, but it comes at more of a cost than just a luckless doctor's death.

Running with the organisation naturally carries risk, especially for the mortally-inclined among them. Morcant knows this. Abolish knows this. And yet, while Abolish was human and unturned, there was always the potential to change that. That, before a fatal injury could claim him, before a monster might cleave through his heart, before old age could sink its teeth in, he could be saved. He could live.

Abolish sits before him, with Reiah's stubbornness sitting in Alaric's eyes, his tongue tempered with Morcant’s diplomacy; a cured vampire, wholly and indelibly human.

Indelibly mortal.

Morcant is no parent.