A Mother's Love - Part Three
Sep. 21st, 2011 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indigo_angelsHannibal was looking out of the window, coffee cup in his hand and so saw Face the second he appeared at the top of the hill. He instantly froze as he realised he was running hard, could almost make out the desperation in his eyes and, knowing that the kid had gone out to find Murdock, slammed his coffee cup down on the counter, yelled for BA and sprinted out of the house himself.
He was almost at the end of the garden when Face came over the fence, springing over easily with one hand on the top rail. “Face!” he called, eyes wide and worried. “What is it? Where’s Murdock?” But Face didn’t answer, instead he just kept on coming, not running now but striding and Hannibal stopped, confused, a frown crossing his brow that would rival Face’s. “Kid?” he asked again.
The next thing he knew Face’s hands were slamming into his chest, hard, knocking him backwards, making him stagger away and he was even more confused. “Were you never gonna tell me then boss?” Face spat, taking a step in as Hannibal stepped back.
Abruptly it all clicked into place and Hannibal closed his eyes for a second and swore under his breath. He heard BA’s feet arrive out of the house behind him and he was glad; maybe now BA could see why Hannibal had been right, why telling the kid should have been handled so carefully, why they should have waited until it was unavoidable. Maybe now BA would see the damage he had done...
“Look,” he offered to Face, his voice calm, his palms facing upwards, “it’s not all that straight forward...”
“It’s exactly that straight forward!” Face yelled and Hannibal couldn’t help wincing at the pain he saw in those blue eyes. “This information was about me Hannibal, fucking me, wasn’t it? Not you, not BA, not Murdock! So why the hell did you all know about it when I didn’t?!”
Precisely on cue, Murdock appeared at the fence, eyes hooded and downcast and Hannibal suddenly realised who exactly had told Face about his mother, but the question was, who the hell told Murdock? Hannibal narrowed his eyes, he was still blaming BA for that one. “Face,” he tried to make his voice as calm and non-confrontational as possible, “Come on inside, kid, let’s sit down and talk about this properly,” he reached out and took hold of Face’s wrist.
“Fuck off!” Face barked yanking his arm away from Hannibal’s fingers. “The time for talking about this properly has gone. What the hell were you thinking of Hannibal? Keeping this from me?”
Hannibal sighed and ran his hand over his face, this was not going well, “Look,” he reached his hand out once more and then thought better of it, pulling it back again. “I was just trying to protect you. I was going to tell you as soon as we got the results of the DNA tests.” He ignored BA’s quiet huff coming from behind him.
“Yeah,” Face rolled his eyes, “that right then boss? You would have told me would you? Definitely? Regardless of the answer?” Hannibal’s silence and the dropping of his eyes to the ground pulled an ironic laugh from Face. “Yeah. I thought so.”
He went to walk off as Hannibal’s hand reached for him again, “Face...
Once again, Face whipped his arm out of Hannibal’s reach, turning back with anger fierce in his eyes. “Don't boss, just don't,” he took a step back towards the house, hands held up in front of him, “Don’t insult me with your lies.”
Hannibal took a step to follow him, “Face,” his hands were still reaching out. “I never wanted to hurt you, this was the last thing I wanted, it was exactly what I was trying to avoid.”
“You should have told me!” Face yelled, impossible to calm, “I don't even know who she is! What if I bumped into someone else who knew when I didn’t? What if I bumped into her and I didn’t even know? How could you put me in that position, boss? Finding out in the street like that? How could you?”
Hannibal’s heart clenched at the tears he saw standing in Face’s eyes and he shook his head. “No one else knows, kid, she hasn’t told anyone. And if she did bump into you she wouldn’t say anything, I told her I would handle telling you, she wouldn’t go against that.”
“But why do you get to make that decision?! What the fuck gives you that right?!”
Forcing himself to stay calm, Hannibal answered, “I told you, I was trying to protect you.”
Face was on the move again, stalking agitatedly backwards and forwards, “I don't need your fucking protection! I should have been the first person who found out, not the last!” he looked pointedly at BA and Murdock before turning his eyes back on Hannibal. “And there is nothing as far as I can see that proves you would have told me at all. Ever!”
“I would, kid, I-”
“No! No you wouldn’t.” Face had stopped his pacing and turned back to Hannibal, hands clenched into fists. “And how could you do that to me, boss? My parents both walked out on me, you know that. How could you make me into the same thing as them? How could you make me abandon my own child as heartlessly as they left me? You know how I feel about that, you know how I would die rather than perpetuate that cycle, and you would have made me into exactly that person!”
Hannibal exchanged a quick anxious glance with BA before turning back to his lieutenant, “Face...?”
“There is no excuse for this, absolutely none!!! Both of you are out of order, way out of order. I have to rely on Murdock here overhearing your conversation, discussing me before anyone has the basic decency to even tell me one damn thing!”
All eyes briefly flashed to Murdock who was leaning against the fence, arms folded tight across his chest, eyes clearly distressed. “What did you think boss?” Face continued, “That I didn’t deserve this chance for a connection in life? That because I’m with you I have to forgo getting to know my own damn child? Is that what you thought?”
Hannibal stepped forwards, “Face, listen to me here, there’s been a mistake.”
But Face wasn’t in the right frame of mind to listen at all, “Damn right there’s been a mistake! Me thinking I could ever trust you, that was a mistake for sure!”
Hannibal ignored his jibe and continued trying to explain. “Kid, the woman that BA and I went to meet, she wasn’t one of your exes.”
“Does it matter who she was?” Face was still yelling, “If she had news about some child I’m supposed to have fathered, don’t you think I should have known about it?”
Hannibal ran his hand shakily through his hair thinking for another way into this, but it was BA’s voice that cut into the silence, “It wasn’t about a child, man...” he said quietly.
It worked and Face stopped dead, turning to look at the corporal with confusion in his eyes. “What?”
“Face.” Taking a deep breath, Hannibal stepped forward again, taking Face’s hand while he was too distracted to pull it away. “Temp, sweetheart,” he continued, “The woman that BA and I met – well, she claims she is your mother...”
For a long minute there was a heavy silence as Face just stared at Hannibal while the rest of the team stared at him.
“What?” he repeated, his voice shaking slightly and Hannibal sighed.
“Your mother. I’m so sorry, kid; I didn’t want you to find out like this...”
Face’s eyes flicked to Murdock who was looking at least as shocked as Face was, and then back to Hannibal pulling his hand out of the colonel’s grasp and taking a backwards step towards the house as he did. “Right...”
“Face, kid, come here...”
“No!” Face’s hands were up again, warding Hannibal off, and then he turned and ran for the house.
_________________________________
“No one in the world can take the place of your mother.” - Harry Truman
Face sat in his car at the end of the street and watched as the windows of the house went black one by one. When the last one flicked into darkness, he looked at his watch and then waited another half hour before starting his engine and edging the car onto the drive and home.
Letting himself into the dark, silent house, Face tried to be as quiet as he possibly could. He’d fled from the others straight after that awkward as fuck scene in the back yard, grabbing his car keys and disappearing out of the front door even as Hannibal burst in the back, yelling his name. He’d sped off in a squeal of rubber and switched his phone off the second it rang when he’d not even reached the end of the road. And then he’d driven about, all night, relieved he had a tank full of gas as he had nothing but his phone in his pocket and then returned to the house in the early hours of the morning to wait until it was safe to go back in.
As he’d driven, he’d thought and there had been time for him to experience almost every emotion known to man as he headed up into the hills and drove the dark, quiet roads. First of all, he was angry, real, red hot angry that they would all plot against him like this, take this information, whatever it actually was, and presume that they could decide what to do about it. Yes, he knew that this was a product of Hannibal’s over protective streak, but even so, it was wrong.
Once he’d got over that, however, a most unexpected emotion hit him, grief. Grief for the child that, oh so very briefly, he thought he’d had, a child he’d never thought he’d wanted, but when it was there it had filled a hole he’d never even noticed before. A child that would be a part of him, something that would always be there, a tie to the world that was blood-thick and undeniable, something for him to work for, someone who would rely on him – all those things that he’d resigned himself to not having, and then were his, for a few brief minutes at any rate, before being snatched away again. It was a facet of his emotional makeup that he’d never known was there before, would probably never acknowledge it again, and the chance to confront it, to feed the need inside was gone before it had even had the chance to be there. How strange there was this raging need inside him that he’d never seen before...
And then his thoughts moved to the real issue here, the real problem that had landed in his lap. His mother. His mother. He honestly couldn’t believe it.
There was a time, long ago, when all he’d ever wanted was for his mother to come back for him. He remembered lying in his bed in a dorm full of other boys and crying silently into his pillow for a mother he couldn’t even picture any more. He’d had all kinds of ideas as to why he was in an orphanage, each one as farfetched as the next. He’d been snatched from his bed and his loving parents were walking the streets every night, searching for him; he was the long lost son of a rich European baron, separated after a dreadful accident and missed enormously; his father was a successful Hollywood actor, who had placed his son in this orphanage to protect him from the prying eyes of the press.
All those fantasies, however, were cruelly and coldly dashed by Gregory Samuels, a boy twice Face’s age who called him a ‘retard’ one day, told him he had to be a retard for his parents to just leave him on the steps like that, like a dog they wanted to die. Well, that had been news to Face, the priests and nuns had always been very tight lipped about the circumstances that had brought him into their care, but for an eight year old Face, breaking into the orphanage’s office and stealing a look at his file was as easy as the algebra he was learning in school. And there, that night, crunched into the corner of the office, cold in his thin, hand me down pyjamas, torch clasped tightly in his hand, he read the stark truth about his arrival into the care system.
There it was in black and white, he could just about remember the exact wording all these years later: ‘Foundling: male child, unknown name, unknown age, unknown family. Found on the steps of the orphanage at 5.15am by Sister Anna. Child was in good health apart from being cold and distressed. Despite his age (child appears about five years old) he does not speak, possibly this defect was the reason for his abandonment. Child has been assigned the name of Alvin Brenner.’
Words like ‘distressed’, ‘defect’ and ‘abandonment’ can have a strong effect on an eight year old child, and Face never shed a tear or wished for his mother to come back again after that day. He also put to bed all the childish fantasies he’d been harbouring about his true parentage and faced up to facts; the reason he was in an orphanage was that his parents didn’t want him, didn’t even care enough about him to make sure he was with someone who would at least keep him safe. Well, that was fine, that didn’t bother him in the slightest, he didn’t need anyone to look after him, he would be just fine on his own. And he was – on the outside at the very least.
It was only meeting Hannibal, years and years after that fateful night, that showed him what he’d been missing out on all those days, and in a way that had made it all come back, made it all worse, as he couldn’t help thinking about what it would have been like to grow up like this, with someone behind you, someone to catch you if you fell and push you when you needed it. Face had always been so proud of himself; that he had got where he was in life because he’d caught himself, he’d pushed himself. But once he met Hannibal, he just felt so damn let down that he’d missed out on so much.
And then the answer to his dilemma became clear, so clear that he almost laughed at himself for needing to give it any thought at all. So, his mother had come back and wanted him back in her life? She’d decided that she had the time, now, to give to the son she’d abandoned in the street as a child? Well, she could fuck right off as far as he was concerned. She hadn’t wanted him, she’d left him to manage all on his own for all this time; well, that was her choice, and this was his.
For a minute, just a minute, the weight of sadness that pressed down on his shoulders at that decision was almost crippling. His throat tightened up and his eyes started to sting and for a truly horrible moment, he thought he was going to start crying. But – he hadn’t shed a tear for that woman in thirty years and he sure as hell wasn’t going to start now.
With a determined shake of his shoulders, he turned the car’s nose west and headed home.
Next
He was almost at the end of the garden when Face came over the fence, springing over easily with one hand on the top rail. “Face!” he called, eyes wide and worried. “What is it? Where’s Murdock?” But Face didn’t answer, instead he just kept on coming, not running now but striding and Hannibal stopped, confused, a frown crossing his brow that would rival Face’s. “Kid?” he asked again.
The next thing he knew Face’s hands were slamming into his chest, hard, knocking him backwards, making him stagger away and he was even more confused. “Were you never gonna tell me then boss?” Face spat, taking a step in as Hannibal stepped back.
Abruptly it all clicked into place and Hannibal closed his eyes for a second and swore under his breath. He heard BA’s feet arrive out of the house behind him and he was glad; maybe now BA could see why Hannibal had been right, why telling the kid should have been handled so carefully, why they should have waited until it was unavoidable. Maybe now BA would see the damage he had done...
“Look,” he offered to Face, his voice calm, his palms facing upwards, “it’s not all that straight forward...”
“It’s exactly that straight forward!” Face yelled and Hannibal couldn’t help wincing at the pain he saw in those blue eyes. “This information was about me Hannibal, fucking me, wasn’t it? Not you, not BA, not Murdock! So why the hell did you all know about it when I didn’t?!”
Precisely on cue, Murdock appeared at the fence, eyes hooded and downcast and Hannibal suddenly realised who exactly had told Face about his mother, but the question was, who the hell told Murdock? Hannibal narrowed his eyes, he was still blaming BA for that one. “Face,” he tried to make his voice as calm and non-confrontational as possible, “Come on inside, kid, let’s sit down and talk about this properly,” he reached out and took hold of Face’s wrist.
“Fuck off!” Face barked yanking his arm away from Hannibal’s fingers. “The time for talking about this properly has gone. What the hell were you thinking of Hannibal? Keeping this from me?”
Hannibal sighed and ran his hand over his face, this was not going well, “Look,” he reached his hand out once more and then thought better of it, pulling it back again. “I was just trying to protect you. I was going to tell you as soon as we got the results of the DNA tests.” He ignored BA’s quiet huff coming from behind him.
“Yeah,” Face rolled his eyes, “that right then boss? You would have told me would you? Definitely? Regardless of the answer?” Hannibal’s silence and the dropping of his eyes to the ground pulled an ironic laugh from Face. “Yeah. I thought so.”
He went to walk off as Hannibal’s hand reached for him again, “Face...
Once again, Face whipped his arm out of Hannibal’s reach, turning back with anger fierce in his eyes. “Don't boss, just don't,” he took a step back towards the house, hands held up in front of him, “Don’t insult me with your lies.”
Hannibal took a step to follow him, “Face,” his hands were still reaching out. “I never wanted to hurt you, this was the last thing I wanted, it was exactly what I was trying to avoid.”
“You should have told me!” Face yelled, impossible to calm, “I don't even know who she is! What if I bumped into someone else who knew when I didn’t? What if I bumped into her and I didn’t even know? How could you put me in that position, boss? Finding out in the street like that? How could you?”
Hannibal’s heart clenched at the tears he saw standing in Face’s eyes and he shook his head. “No one else knows, kid, she hasn’t told anyone. And if she did bump into you she wouldn’t say anything, I told her I would handle telling you, she wouldn’t go against that.”
“But why do you get to make that decision?! What the fuck gives you that right?!”
Forcing himself to stay calm, Hannibal answered, “I told you, I was trying to protect you.”
Face was on the move again, stalking agitatedly backwards and forwards, “I don't need your fucking protection! I should have been the first person who found out, not the last!” he looked pointedly at BA and Murdock before turning his eyes back on Hannibal. “And there is nothing as far as I can see that proves you would have told me at all. Ever!”
“I would, kid, I-”
“No! No you wouldn’t.” Face had stopped his pacing and turned back to Hannibal, hands clenched into fists. “And how could you do that to me, boss? My parents both walked out on me, you know that. How could you make me into the same thing as them? How could you make me abandon my own child as heartlessly as they left me? You know how I feel about that, you know how I would die rather than perpetuate that cycle, and you would have made me into exactly that person!”
Hannibal exchanged a quick anxious glance with BA before turning back to his lieutenant, “Face...?”
“There is no excuse for this, absolutely none!!! Both of you are out of order, way out of order. I have to rely on Murdock here overhearing your conversation, discussing me before anyone has the basic decency to even tell me one damn thing!”
All eyes briefly flashed to Murdock who was leaning against the fence, arms folded tight across his chest, eyes clearly distressed. “What did you think boss?” Face continued, “That I didn’t deserve this chance for a connection in life? That because I’m with you I have to forgo getting to know my own damn child? Is that what you thought?”
Hannibal stepped forwards, “Face, listen to me here, there’s been a mistake.”
But Face wasn’t in the right frame of mind to listen at all, “Damn right there’s been a mistake! Me thinking I could ever trust you, that was a mistake for sure!”
Hannibal ignored his jibe and continued trying to explain. “Kid, the woman that BA and I went to meet, she wasn’t one of your exes.”
“Does it matter who she was?” Face was still yelling, “If she had news about some child I’m supposed to have fathered, don’t you think I should have known about it?”
Hannibal ran his hand shakily through his hair thinking for another way into this, but it was BA’s voice that cut into the silence, “It wasn’t about a child, man...” he said quietly.
It worked and Face stopped dead, turning to look at the corporal with confusion in his eyes. “What?”
“Face.” Taking a deep breath, Hannibal stepped forward again, taking Face’s hand while he was too distracted to pull it away. “Temp, sweetheart,” he continued, “The woman that BA and I met – well, she claims she is your mother...”
For a long minute there was a heavy silence as Face just stared at Hannibal while the rest of the team stared at him.
“What?” he repeated, his voice shaking slightly and Hannibal sighed.
“Your mother. I’m so sorry, kid; I didn’t want you to find out like this...”
Face’s eyes flicked to Murdock who was looking at least as shocked as Face was, and then back to Hannibal pulling his hand out of the colonel’s grasp and taking a backwards step towards the house as he did. “Right...”
“Face, kid, come here...”
“No!” Face’s hands were up again, warding Hannibal off, and then he turned and ran for the house.
_________________________________
“No one in the world can take the place of your mother.” - Harry Truman
Face sat in his car at the end of the street and watched as the windows of the house went black one by one. When the last one flicked into darkness, he looked at his watch and then waited another half hour before starting his engine and edging the car onto the drive and home.
Letting himself into the dark, silent house, Face tried to be as quiet as he possibly could. He’d fled from the others straight after that awkward as fuck scene in the back yard, grabbing his car keys and disappearing out of the front door even as Hannibal burst in the back, yelling his name. He’d sped off in a squeal of rubber and switched his phone off the second it rang when he’d not even reached the end of the road. And then he’d driven about, all night, relieved he had a tank full of gas as he had nothing but his phone in his pocket and then returned to the house in the early hours of the morning to wait until it was safe to go back in.
As he’d driven, he’d thought and there had been time for him to experience almost every emotion known to man as he headed up into the hills and drove the dark, quiet roads. First of all, he was angry, real, red hot angry that they would all plot against him like this, take this information, whatever it actually was, and presume that they could decide what to do about it. Yes, he knew that this was a product of Hannibal’s over protective streak, but even so, it was wrong.
Once he’d got over that, however, a most unexpected emotion hit him, grief. Grief for the child that, oh so very briefly, he thought he’d had, a child he’d never thought he’d wanted, but when it was there it had filled a hole he’d never even noticed before. A child that would be a part of him, something that would always be there, a tie to the world that was blood-thick and undeniable, something for him to work for, someone who would rely on him – all those things that he’d resigned himself to not having, and then were his, for a few brief minutes at any rate, before being snatched away again. It was a facet of his emotional makeup that he’d never known was there before, would probably never acknowledge it again, and the chance to confront it, to feed the need inside was gone before it had even had the chance to be there. How strange there was this raging need inside him that he’d never seen before...
And then his thoughts moved to the real issue here, the real problem that had landed in his lap. His mother. His mother. He honestly couldn’t believe it.
There was a time, long ago, when all he’d ever wanted was for his mother to come back for him. He remembered lying in his bed in a dorm full of other boys and crying silently into his pillow for a mother he couldn’t even picture any more. He’d had all kinds of ideas as to why he was in an orphanage, each one as farfetched as the next. He’d been snatched from his bed and his loving parents were walking the streets every night, searching for him; he was the long lost son of a rich European baron, separated after a dreadful accident and missed enormously; his father was a successful Hollywood actor, who had placed his son in this orphanage to protect him from the prying eyes of the press.
All those fantasies, however, were cruelly and coldly dashed by Gregory Samuels, a boy twice Face’s age who called him a ‘retard’ one day, told him he had to be a retard for his parents to just leave him on the steps like that, like a dog they wanted to die. Well, that had been news to Face, the priests and nuns had always been very tight lipped about the circumstances that had brought him into their care, but for an eight year old Face, breaking into the orphanage’s office and stealing a look at his file was as easy as the algebra he was learning in school. And there, that night, crunched into the corner of the office, cold in his thin, hand me down pyjamas, torch clasped tightly in his hand, he read the stark truth about his arrival into the care system.
There it was in black and white, he could just about remember the exact wording all these years later: ‘Foundling: male child, unknown name, unknown age, unknown family. Found on the steps of the orphanage at 5.15am by Sister Anna. Child was in good health apart from being cold and distressed. Despite his age (child appears about five years old) he does not speak, possibly this defect was the reason for his abandonment. Child has been assigned the name of Alvin Brenner.’
Words like ‘distressed’, ‘defect’ and ‘abandonment’ can have a strong effect on an eight year old child, and Face never shed a tear or wished for his mother to come back again after that day. He also put to bed all the childish fantasies he’d been harbouring about his true parentage and faced up to facts; the reason he was in an orphanage was that his parents didn’t want him, didn’t even care enough about him to make sure he was with someone who would at least keep him safe. Well, that was fine, that didn’t bother him in the slightest, he didn’t need anyone to look after him, he would be just fine on his own. And he was – on the outside at the very least.
It was only meeting Hannibal, years and years after that fateful night, that showed him what he’d been missing out on all those days, and in a way that had made it all come back, made it all worse, as he couldn’t help thinking about what it would have been like to grow up like this, with someone behind you, someone to catch you if you fell and push you when you needed it. Face had always been so proud of himself; that he had got where he was in life because he’d caught himself, he’d pushed himself. But once he met Hannibal, he just felt so damn let down that he’d missed out on so much.
And then the answer to his dilemma became clear, so clear that he almost laughed at himself for needing to give it any thought at all. So, his mother had come back and wanted him back in her life? She’d decided that she had the time, now, to give to the son she’d abandoned in the street as a child? Well, she could fuck right off as far as he was concerned. She hadn’t wanted him, she’d left him to manage all on his own for all this time; well, that was her choice, and this was his.
For a minute, just a minute, the weight of sadness that pressed down on his shoulders at that decision was almost crippling. His throat tightened up and his eyes started to sting and for a truly horrible moment, he thought he was going to start crying. But – he hadn’t shed a tear for that woman in thirty years and he sure as hell wasn’t going to start now.
With a determined shake of his shoulders, he turned the car’s nose west and headed home.
Next
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 11:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-22 06:59 pm (UTC)I will answer this comment with a PM :)
no subject
Date: 2011-09-22 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-22 06:58 pm (UTC)And yes, poor Face, you are right about his life not being fair!