#waynefather

It’s the small details. He was eight when he’d last seen the man standing before him. His jaw was gentler then, less scraggly, not as harsh as it was now. He was eight when he last saw those eyes, soft and tender in a way only the child inside of him would really remember. Eyes that come much closer to his now than it would to any concrete memory he had of his Father. Eyes that had seen and lost so much. 

The rest were familiar but haunting. In the way he would stare at himself in the mirror and expect his reflection to fight back. To drag him into it’s world where rules never made sense. This ─ it didn’t make sense. Even with the reality of it. Or the broken parts of it. That was the only explanation. 

But it didn’t matter. 

Not to him as he was reaching out to the ghost shadow of his father. Gripping a part of his suit ─ armor and feeling the arms that used to pick him up from where he’d fallen and pull him back up. Not even caring that there are tears surely running down his cheek by then. Or that he can barely get the word out. 

“ Dad ─ “

A frail one note word. Shaking even in its delivery. So flimsy and tenuous, it might as well have disappeared as soon as it clung to the air.