killian st.cloud /1

The boy is born in the winter, as most cold things are.

His gaze is dark and vast, so dissimilar to his mother’s inviting warmth that at first no one is sure how to hold him. He’s received her near divine beauty but in a peculiar way. He's all sharp angles, long limbs and a dark head of near jet black hair.

As if it were a raven that snuck into her bed one night, not a man. 

His eyes belong to his father. The curve of his smile too, unholy in appearance like a jack knife with a wicked sharp edge. The girl’s father knows that face, clear as day and he recoils as soon as he sees it.

”What have you done,” he hisses, hands balled up so tightly at his sides that his knuckles have paled. He carries the scent of perfume on him, her mother’s opera gloves are tucked into his front pocket in such a casual show of intimacy that it almost burns the girl.

She doesn’t answer him at first. She is holding her son, exhaustion collapsing her shoulders inwards. ”I loved him,” she says simply.

”He used you,” her father says, ”You foolish girl.”

”He said he loved me.”

”You? Daughter, you are a child. You don’t know what love is.”

But the girl, small in the hospital bed, cradles her baby not even an hour old so tenderly. All she sees in his eyes is expectant trust. All she can feel is love.

She wasn’t expecting to, she was afraid for his arrival, for the swelling of her body that was his herald and the pain that he brought with him.

”We’ll dispose of it,” her father decides.

After all, a babe born of his enemy is just another enemy.

”No,” she whispers calmly.

"Excuse me?" her father's tone is a stranger.

Her hands tremble but she’s already carried him nine months, this is nothing. She won’t let go

"I said no."

”I will not have a traitor’s child tarnish our name.”

”Then he’ll have his.”

They live in a small flat above an old space that used to be a department store. Before that, it was a dance hall, people would go there during the war for some small relief. Before that, it was an opera house.

There's nothing in there now but broken mannequins and moth-eaten scraps of clothing. The faint memory of other things rests on dirty marble and it radiates a silence that few ever want to break.

But the apartment, though small, is home and always has been. She tries to make it nice, finds things to bring home to add colour and warmth on her journey home from work. He uses the wax pencils she finds for him to add splashes of colour to grey walls on pinned up pieces of paper. There's a harmony there that eases the lacking, which there always is.

When he's still so small that she can't leave him, she brings him to work at the offices she cleans on her back. No one minds as long as he's quiet and he is, her boy. He lays on his blanket and watches with big eyes and only cries once or twice, never enough to bother anyone and usually after they've all gone home anyway.

Her knees become angry bruises, her palms callused from the work and her baby stays plump and happy, how he should be.

Still, her neighbours look at her and shake their heads, "Too young," they whisper, "How tragic."

But that's never the word that she thinks of when she looks at her son, or at night when she's cradling him to her chest in their tiny apartment. She never looks at the walls and sees a prison but she does see a home, one that's theirs.

And she's never really had that until her son arrived.

As he gets older, hungrier, louder and she needs to take on more, a neighbour lady who lives at the end of the hall and always has, watches him in the afternoons and evenings.

Her knuckles are gnarled, fingertips thick stubs from years of labour, she can't work anymore. Having lost her use, she'd become closed off to the world and crotchety but when the mother and her baby had moved in something had shifted. She began leaving her door open the littlest bit. If the baby wandered in then it was only luck that had a plate of cookies on the table and the kettle already whistling.

His third word he has is 'nana'.

Every night when his mother finally gets home, shoulders tired and heavy, he runs down the hall to greet her and she catches him, flying him up into the air with strong arms. There's usually a bag of groceries dangling off of her wrist, the ingredients for that night's dinner.

Then it's just the two of them. A soup of some kind simmering on the stove and reading stories under the blanket fort in the living room. Or maybe sitting on the small balcony, legs dangling off under the railing and pointing at the stars, or laying in the dark, tops of their heads touching and talking, a mother passing on stories to her son.

He grew like that, like something precious.

He had no way of knowing that he wasn't yet.

Look again, she says.

The man shakes his head. I have, he tells her, many times. It's still there.

Unless they do something about it, it always will be.

She turns her head away to stare out of the window, at the grey skies and office buildings soaring high above the both of them.

There's a sternness in her shoulders that warns him not to comfort her, a heady silence that envelopes the room, filling every piece of it as if it is porous. The man has been around grief before, but he'd forgotten what it was like to be shifted by it. He finds himself holding his breath.

How long will I have? She wants to know, she has a child at home.

Could be six months, could be less, he tells her.

She is twenty-eight years old.

Killian stares stalwart across the mat, ears still ringing from the punch he’d taken to the side of his head moments ago. A light haze has settled onto his vision, making it hard to hear much of anything.

”Repeat that,” he demands.

"Happily,' the other boy snaps. There's already a bruise forming under his eye and the last thing he needs is a defeat beside his name from a charity case. "I said, your whore mother must have really done something special to ge-"

Killian's fist is against his teeth then, pushing so hard that his lower jaw slips to the side. He staggers left, then his own fist rises, swinging into Killian's side, who doubles over it, frame collapsing against the force.

Their trainer watches, impassive.

He kicks his leg out, sweeping the other boy off of his. He doesn't give him time to get up, knee landing on his chest as the other boy bucks beneath his weight, swearing. His hands land on either side of Killian's knee and they twist, sending him to the ground beside him so Kills slams an elbow down on his chest.

There's a cracking sound.

A scream.

"Winner, St. Cloud," the trainer calls, then hooks a thumb over his shoulder, "Someone get Freyser to the infirmary. Next fight start."

"Barbaric", someone whispers as he staggers to the top of the bleachers.

"That's the janitor's kid?" asks someone else.

"Yeah the pretty one," someone answers.

"Always thought the headmaster looked at her weird."

He turns around abruptly, heads swivel back towards the mat.

"Yeah," he says, "Her name is Aster. After the flower."

Born in the spring.