Hushed Willows driftwood: a fairytale

her voice is like honey, soothing, more kind than he ever knows to expect or how to deal with. he'd expected the rebuttal, had braced for a no, you're not, with his list of sins neatly sorted and catalogued from "burke, death of" to "solomon, disappearance of", but of course, as always, olive manages to catch him off guard. as she gets to trained assassins, he bursts into a startled cough. how on earth does that happen? he tries to imagine solomon off somewhere, training in the dark arts, and oddly, the idea brings a little warmth back into his chest.

he does not quite buy into this 'try again' idea; seabreeze, though. seabreeze is magic, it is true. if only he'd been able to better help his children with the transition in the start, maybe she could have helped them, too. slowly his doubts begin to ease, for now. elysium is not tindome nor bracken -- delight is not desperately trying to hold together the pieces of his past that he fucked up so terribly. this is not an impulse decision, it is careful planning. and he looks at olive and thinks of her and seabreeze and he does -- he does want this.

turning his head, shy, delight warbles, "it's alright that i'm not..." good, maybe, or worthy, but what comes out instead is, "a man?" he's whispered these feelings to seabreeze before -- gender is a strange thing, you know -- but hasn't spoken to anyone else about it, how to frame what he wants. "i mean it when i say i'm a terrible father -- if -- if i try again, i want it to be..." what he truly wants -- motherhood -- he can't have, not in this body, in these circumstances. but maybe olive and seabreeze can understand and the -- the paradigm can be different, if nothing else. a little desperately he holds olive's gaze, willing her to understand as best she can, for the words that describe what he really wants are impossible to him right now.