kirk; d6 [cb]

(“I can make you a hero, or I can watch you die trying.”

Yeah, okay, but consider this— fuck you.”)

I am no pawn; no piece on strategy boards stared at late into the early hours of morning.

I am no answer.

The question still remaining my father had taken me by the shirt collar and made sure our line of sight had not broken until his knuckles had turned white, “You’ll be nothing without me, boy.”

Then nothing I shall become.

I had taken his bottles, his backhanded promises, and everything in the cupboards one-by-one— time was not wasted in this way, for he never noticed the slight absences in the pantry. He never noticed the slight absences in the time it took me to speak; to stand up for myself— my bones were growing hollow with the famine of a father’s love and the leftovers that no longer existed.

When he found me, empty and hollow alongside bottles and broken dreams, he spoke with the softest voice I have ever heard fall from my father’s lips, “I told you that you would be nothing.”

A disappearing act of my own— he believed I could be the answer to a question he had not been able to ask for himself for seventeen years and counting.

The months passing by, a waning son and a waxing father— these phases of a cycle that was destined to turn one over themselves until they could not find anything but hatred in the skin that clung to hollow bones.

He drank with me once, on a night that was clear but not as crisp as the question that fell from his tongue, “My son, did you ever want to be a hero?”

I take the bottle from his hand, “Not even once.”