#infinitepxtential

The moon was well over into the morning hours and the one-year old just couldn’t seem to sleep. Now, to most parents--          [ Silas could only think of the boy’s real parents struggling with this ]                                                --but for Silas, it’s not like he was being disturbed from any well-needed sleep. Though the guardian was still quite nervous at this point, being that he was never trained to raise a child, and he was sure Bod didn’t trust him yet, even touching him was a risk in Silas’s eyes.

But nobody else was around to do it. Hardly any of the ghosts came round the chapel these days. So Silas took the weeping child into his hands after wrapping an extra blanket around him and tried to wrangle his flailing limbs in for both their sakes. He slowly paced the room at first, and just paced, no bouncing or cooing to the child. Silas was thinking, not staring at the boy at all, which didn’t help a single bit.

The silver clouds rolled lazily by in the sky outside the window, veiling the stars Silas wished he could see. Still, it was no help to Bod. When Silas finally looked down him in worry, red eyes staring down into closed ones full of tears, he reached out with his hand that wasn’t occupied with holing him and let the child grab onto his cool finger.

    “You’ll be getting too big for me to hold you like this, sooner     or later.”

His voice remained soft, and soon enough, Bod’s crying seemed to die down a little. Surprised at this, Silas raised a brow.

    “I took a vow I wouldn’t go into your dreams...so if you’ve had     a nightmare, I’m very sorry. The good news is, though, it’s over.     All the bad monsters and scary things have ran away and faded     to dust.”

Bod’s eyes finally opened, and staring up at Silas’s carmine irises, the boy looked like he was stunned, though Silas had gotten that look before. He didn’t smile or laugh, he didn’t move when Silas dried the child’s face with his sleeve. But at least he had stopped crying.

Silas knew this probably wasn’t good enough., Bod needed to go back to sleep peacefully, and he knew of one way that might have worked. Since nobody else was around, an old song came to his head, a Gaelic lullaby that soon starting flowing from his voice.

The caretaker had never sung a note in his life before that night. This was the first sign Bod loved the boy.

Silas tried to warn Bod time after time to watch out for the broken tombstones; he could easily trip over them. Still, Silas knew it was only a matter of time until he heard the familiar crying of his boy in the east end, and he raced to Bod as quick as possible with strips of clean cloth to look over the minor wounds on his foot. There was some blood, yes, but Silas wiped it away and wrapped the foot up with gentle care, and stood to full height with a soft sigh.

    “You’ve learned your lesson now. Can you walk?”

“Yes, Silas. Thank you.”

It was better for the caretaker to stay by his side that night, and now that the clouds were off drifting in some other sky, it was a good night for stories of the stars. No more tears were shed that night. In fact, Bod was smiling through the remainder of his being awake, and if he wasn’t so busy gazing up at the constellations, he would have seen his guardian smiling as well.

“The brave knight looked out upon his kingdom and looked upon his people, happy that they were safe. Alas, not all was as peaceful as it seemed! The villainous Fanged Count was planning to attack!”

    “Bod, that’s not polite.”

Silas crossed his arms and remained stone-faced.

“I didn’t mean it to offend, honest. I just wanted to play.”

A comfortable silence fell over them as Silas pondered for a while, raising a hand to scratch at his clean chin. Well, Bod did have a point, anyone who wasn’t solitary types or high hunters were bad news...and they were out there. It wasn’t a bad idea to teach Bod to be wary of them...it was just educational. And he would be teaching this to Bod in a way that he fully understood.

    “...The count was, indeed, plotting villainy upon the     innocent ghosts of the hill. It’s up to the brave knight     to stop him.”

Silas smirked before he took off in a slow run. Bod chased him with a stick in his hand that represented his sword, and they play-fought until Silas’s character was dramatically slain.

    “I can’t believe you would do something so...”

Silas actually had stammered, he was so angry.

    “...so stupid.”

The boy was actually bragging about drawing attention to himself in school. Even if it was to defend another child his age, he should have known better. Silas taught him better than this, and he distinctly remembered severely warning Bod of the dangers of this sort of thing.

“Well, what did you want me to do?”

    “Not this. It’s not like the olden times; they can keep track of     you, Bod. They can find you.”

He seemed to be fighting his anger-- controlling it. And the only reason the caretaker had gotten so riled up over Bod doing such a thing was precisely what he had said. The Jacks were out there, probably closer than the caretaker even thought, and now there was evidence to sniff out and let Bod be caught.

So perhaps it wasn’t so much anger as it was fear. The thought of Bod being dragged away by those shadowed monsters, the boy’s soul being feasted on...it sent a very unwanted chill through his old bones and he turned his face away from Bod to give himself time to mask the apparent horror in his expression.

Thankfully, though, Bod wasn’t found that year. After the memorable Police Car Incident, there was no need to go back to school, and the boy and his guardian came to an understanding.

“Tell me about the Honor Guard, Silas. You’re in it.Miss Lupescu was. Who else? Are there a lot of you?What do you do?”

    “We don’t do enough. And mostly, we guard borderlands.     We protect the borders of things.”

“What kind of borders?”

Silas said nothing.

“You mean like stopping the Man Jack and his people?”

    “We do what we have to.”

“But you did the right thing. I mean, stopping the Jacks. They were terrible. They were monsters.”

Silas stepped closer to Bod, which made the youth tilt back his head to look up at the tall man’s pale face.

    “I have not always done the right thing. When I was younger,     I did worse things than Jack. Worse than any of them. I was     the monster then, Bod, and worse than any monster.”

There was a sadness, then, in Silas’s eyes that might not have been clearly seen with the dim light of Silas’s room. It pained him to think of the times when he roamed the shadows, when he was the v-word.

“But you aren’t that any longer, are you?”

    “People can change.”

Silas smiled, then.

    “It was an honor being your guardian, young man.”

His hand vanished inside his cloak, reappeared holding a battered old wallet.

    “This is for you. Take it.”

Bod took the wallet, but did not open it.

    “It contains money. Enough to give you a start in the world,     but nothing more.”

Silas listened humbly as Bod spoke of his dreams and goals and future adventures, and he nodded to him before brushed away the hair from Bod’s eyes-- a most uncharacteristic gesture.

    “If it ever transpires that I am in trouble, I shall indeed send for you.”

“Even though you don’t get into trouble?”

    “As you say.”

“Good-bye, then, Silas.”

Bod held out his hand, as he had when he was a small boy, and Silas took it, in a cold hand the color of ivory, and shook it gravely.