winter nox }} district one }} fin

winter nox

They were scared of me. Hesitant smiles, shaking fingers and I was desperate to meet eyes that avoided mine. Sins of a father, placed upon his son's shoulders and the scars upon his body were traced into my perfect skin. The name Nox was attached to a trigger, looking one in the eye was looking down the barrel of a loaded gun and I hadn't the slightest idea I was a wolf in sheep's clothing. 

Mama didn't want that kind of life for me. No matter how much she loved my father- she didn't let him come home the nights he was real hurt. "I don't want my baby to know the smell of a dead man's blood." And so I didn't. Dad was nothing but a big, beefy guy with hair all over his arms and a smile that made his eyes get all wrinkled. He gave the best hugs and had the nicest gifts the times he came home and I hadn't seen him for weeks. 

Mom wasn't mad when he didn't come home, just worried. I didn't know why, back then, that her hands were always wrapped around news papers- eyes scanning the first page and then the second- reading everything all the way through. No man found dead on the streets with a knife in his neck and certainly not one of the most notorious drug dealers in all of One.

If anything happened to him, it'd be in there. It became her lifeline, the only connection left of a man she loved so much it made her heart ache. There was something sweet about seeing my family together, mother with her back against my father's chest and his face pushed into her neck so that all he could smell was her. 

That is what love looked like. Father noticing each and every thing she did with her hair and I know that Mom delighted in styling it just to draw a compliment from between his lips. And nights when they thought I was in bed, full to burst with love and bedtime stories they would share a bottle of wine, talk about my dad's job and just how scared my mother was of losing the love of her life. 

I don't want to call him pompous, but that's what he was. Absolutely certain of his invincibility and mortality was left for men of another name. "But you almost died last time." 

"Don't be ridiculous, it was a flesh wound." 

Jovial and confident, full of love and adoration but every great hero has a flaw as fatal as any weapon. And my father had several. His pride, his temper, a mean streak, and the tendency to take things personally. There were only two things he loved more than himself, but even then- just barely.

My mom didn't even have to scan the paper, the day it happened. It was big, bold, in black letters on the front page and her heartbreak was knees scraping against the cement, blood clotting upon the broken skin and her tears made the ink run so bad that she couldn't read it out loud to me, even when I asked her nicely.

He wasn't dead and that was even worse. Notorious Drug Lord, Andrew Nox Apprehended. He wasn't a good man, but he was my mom's. And watching her disintegrate in my father's absence was perhaps the worst thing I've ever had to do. There was no light left within her eyes, no reason to fix her hair and do her makeup real nice. She started finishing bottles of wine alone, the nights she tucked me in without a kiss because all she could see were my father's eyes and lips sunk within a stranger's skull. 

She loves me, she still does. But I know I was too much for her to bear. So I started training, signed up for a gym and in the long hours that my mother needed to heal I trained. New skin turned firm but my face stayed the same. Soft and round, showing none of the strain that this heavy heart had left me with because I missed him too- I just felt bad saying that I wanted him back. How selfish of me, to tear open a wound that my mother stapled shut. No matter how makeshift of a solution that might have been.

I didn't mind that I stopped getting bedtime stories- they didn't sound the same without his voice. And I was good at training, good at it like I wasn't anything else. No one laughed or groaned when we sparred, no one stared expectantly at me as I stumbled over words and letters I didn't understand.

Though I was only allowed to go to school a couple years before Mom decided it put me and dad in danger. 

Everything she did was for us. But I can't return the favor. I just don't know how.