lore murdock /4

He loves the ocean like he loves a burning match.

Destructive, alive only briefly but eternally caught up in that, churning against her own self over and over. Brutalising everything she touches until it breaks down, scored by her nails into granules of sand.

He’s been held by her before, passed from hand to hand beneath the surface, scratched upon the rocks and cleansed by salt in the next moment. Her touch is kinder still than his father’s, holding him down in the water with one hand.

But there’s nothing so brutal as love.

He knows this better than most his age, odd one out never quite applied to him but Lore has and will always be separate.

He was adopted at a strange time, when he was still very young but old enough to remember that he never spent even a second in an orphanage.

Too young to remember the name that he was given by his mother but old enough to harbour her accent in his mouth. He’s long since forgotten the language he once spoke, mother tongue butchered by the parking-lot plateaus of the English language.

Oleander came for him at dusk like a thief, entering his mother’s home like a man who knows exactly where to put his hat.

He was only just reaching four years old with a mouth that already ran faster than a ship with the wind in its sails. Lore’s mother had a bag packed, she knew that this was coming. She was no one of any importance, Oleander was a Murdock.

She could let him take her son or watch him destroy his mistake before it came back to sheath a knife in his back. Her choice was only an illusion in the end.

Lore doesn’t remember the moment of parting, not awake at least.

His memory starts from sitting on the front step of the grand old Murdock home hours later. His knees knocked against each other from the cold breeze off of the ocean. He could hear muffled shouting from inside. Elaine was yelling at her husband for bringing home a stray, baby Hudson on her hip.

First there were fireflies, dipping low over the grass, circling his head and blinking at him, dancing. Tear-stained cheeks glistened in their lamplight but he still smiled.

Silence settled, time passed.

The stars came out, one by one, then all at once and Lore lay back on the wooden veranda. He wove histories for all the constellations he could see, stories fell from his lips like magic spells even then.

He fell asleep beneath the stars and woke up pinned down behind glass. Floor to ceiling windows looked out over the sea, reflecting blue from a clear sky. His things had been unpacked for him and placed inside a chest that stood at the end of his bed.

The photo of his mother that he’d swiped from the front hallway of her house was gone. He never saw it again.

There wasn’t much time to process that, Lore learned quickly that he wasn’t the only child in the house. He was a bright thing amongst his new playmates, everything mattered to him.

Any scrap of feeling his new brothers and sisters gave him was celebrated. It was hard not to want his attention, to be bathed in that warmth. Lore quickly became a hearth in the cold halls of the Murdoch home.

But he had the upper hand, he’d spent his first few years on earth beloved.

And it showed, in his touch, gentle but firm, or the sound of his voice which rolled like the ocean and rang clear as a bell through the whole house. Lore didn’t know a volume lower than seven growing up.

And if there was one thing that moved faster than his mouth, it was his hands, often wrapped around the hilt of a knife. Whittling down blocks of wood until they became recognisable as people, places, things even. He used them as props for the stories he would weave for his sisters and brothers at night.

Training was second nature for him, body intent on constant movement since birth. He was always a climber, fingers hooked on crevices in the siding of the Murdock house or worming his way up onto the roof at school. Fastest at rope climbing two years running in gym and impossible to get off the top of the monkey bars at recess.

“Lucky!” People would tell him everywhere the family went. It was so kind of the Murdocks to take in an orphan and it was so lucky for Lore that he was saved. At the start of school each year he had to prove his name for each teacher, one time even having to go pull Era out of class to verify him as a Murdock.

Lore never minded this, he even enjoyed the walk.

Lucky, he’d think to himself, on his way home with all of his siblings, feet falling in rhythm on the stone paths lining the canals. He liked being in the middle of it all, as if he was born to be rather than plucked from his mother’s loving hands.

Lucky just to be with them even if he isn’t truly one of them. Lucky to hold Hudson’s hand to keep him from slipping into a canal and to carry Lottie on his back, pretending to be a horse.

To have stories to tell them, to make them laugh. Lucky to have Blyth and Era to lean on and happy to welcome Circe and Cade, an arrival committee of one.

Sunshine boy in a storm-battered house, unaware of his own effect.

Adventure woven into his soul, he dreams of sailing across the waves against his father’s wishes. Sneaks out once or twice in the early mornings to beg the hands on the Vanas docks to take him along with them. He charms his way in, fattens himself with stories from sailors about creatures in the deep seas and takes it all home to his siblings.

Unafraid of the silence in their house, honest to a fault, there’s something about Lore that makes him difficult to crush. No matter how much punishment he receives from Oleander for his various transgressions, Lore takes it in stride, barely batting an eye when his carvings are thrown out. He even seems to enjoy the manual labour assigned to him.

He wasn’t even trying to learn the truth that night, when he heard the servants chatting in the kitchen. He was just trying to sneak a snack after being sent to his room without supper.

But once he knew, there was no going back. The knowledge wrapped itself around him, swallowed his spare time like a world-eater might.

Lore found Oleander one night in his study, the sky behind him dark blue and moonless, the sea choppy, near black with rage.

”Why am I a secret?”

His father said nothing.

”Were you ever even going to tell me?” he asked, voice raw with pain. Years of gratitude, of believing that his mother had given him up, of thinking he was only there out of Oleander's generosity crumbled away beneath his feet. All that was left in the rubble for him to stand on was anger.

"That's the trouble with those stories you adore so much, Laurence," his father spoke calmly, "You believe them to be true."

"It's too late, dad. I don't believe you anymore," he said, shaking his head, "Circe needs to know she's not alone."

"You won't."

"I will, I'm going to tell her."

"No, you won't."