2020-07-31 - Curses and Blessings

It's 3:47 am. Byron and Lilith are in bed, as they should be. The penthouse is still, the cat is asleep on the couch across from the king sized, curled into a ball of fluff. The central air subtly hums with activity given the humidity and summer heat outside, and the couple likes to keep the room chilly for sleep. The clock ticks 3:48 am. When that happens, a mist starts to curl along the hall floorboards and through the doorway into the bedroom. The cat's eyes snap open to glitter in the dark, but the creature doesn't stir. The seeping cold that comes with the wisps of unnatural mist moves the room from chilly to downright icy there for a moment, as if something is sucking the energy of heat out of the air.

Maybe that's exactly what's happening. The ghost of Hank Winslow is suddenly seated on the edge of the bed on Lilith's side, and he's not entirely in shadow, nor is he opaque. Despite the dark of the room, it's clear who he is, neck angle askew while he watches the woman sleep in sprawl against Byron. The cold makes her move and burrow more under the blankets, into the man's body heat against her. Initially, Byron isn't aware of the cold, but his body no doubt feels the stirring of Lilith while she's nestling deeper into man and bedding. It makes for a gap of waking consciousness as his own body feels the need to reposition and stir with response. But in that gap of time, something feels...

It feels...

The room doesn't feel empty, but there's not quite the signature of a living being, either. It's strange, but his senses are habitually attuned, perhaps...

At least they are in this moment.

He knows they aren't alone.

There's no startling a ghost. When Byron stirs to look at the shade of the man once known as Hank Winslow, he doesn't even blink (probably no need) or move his gaze away from Lilith. It doesn't matter that she's barely visible to him now with all that bedding and man swaddled around her, he continues to look. Then, after a few seconds of that thick silence, he looks at Byron with a ghastly sheen to his once pale and wintery blue eyes, hands lifting to adjust his askew neck with a sickening crack. It stays level after that, at least for now or until he decides to move.

"... came around so you could ask me for her hand."

He sounds serious, which is pretty goddamn nervy of him to come requesting Byron ASK for Lilith, like he ever took care of her in the first place.

"... easier to hide from her when her eyes are closed, too."

The ghost of Lilith's late father looks a little amused with the mention of time, tomorrow, another day, they might not be concepts for him, not anymore. But after a look down at the bundle that is his brunette daughter there asleep against the only man in her life, the shade starts to nod, "Sure, sure, we can talk when she isn't asleep." Unfortunately, when he starts to nod, his head falls forward unsupported and he has to pick it back up again and essentially screw it back and forth to grind it back still again. It's disturbing, but the shade man just treats it like he's tending to a nose or eye rub.

Instead of disappearing, though, the spectre of the Winslow man shifts from one side of the bed to the other with no real movement between. He's just one place, then another, now on Byron's side. He can see part of Lilith's face again this way and he looks at it before extending a hand for the Thorne man to take, "But before I go..."

It's a bit like he's extending a handshake, but... he clearly just wants Byron to reach out and try to touch his hand for some reason.

It's not a handshake agreement of gentlemen that Hank Winslow's spectre wants. It's the touch of Byron's hand, so very warm with pulse and blood. It makes the return grip absolute burning cold, it's like touching stiff ice. The hand itself seems solid enough, but there's something subtle that's not bound to the laws of the physical world, something Byron can feel-- it's as if he grips too tightly, his hand will swipe right through the space where the ghostly appendage is presented. Byron also has a split second warning to figure out that the spirit of the Winslow man is trying to show him something, not shake at all. The icy fingers grip solid and the undertow weight of being dragged down by emotion echoes and memories feels familiar to the Thorne man.

Byron can read emotional residue and related incidents off of items themselves. He's accustomed to blocking out the mundane, to controlling what gets in when he goes and touches the world he lives in. Some people say that's what ghosts themselves are made of. The man is slammed with the embodied echo of emotional/spiritual residue, and he's probably not quite prepared for a straight shot of residual energy that makes a whole ghost of a person.

Lily.

The rage and fear of abandonment inside Lilith was always there, before the powers and shadows and urges. Lily was always ready to hurt and be hurt because it was how she was raised. Hank Winslow knows this because he helped seed so much of it. While memories and images rife with a primary emotion of 'guilt' are shown, Lilith's own tangential feelings as noted from the outside are apparent too, like a series of formative chain reactions.

She had so much hair as a baby, such dark and silky wisps on her head like a sleek crown. Her eyes were blue like his, but they weren't his eyes, they were darker blue, so much more vivid, like dark sapphires or amethysts when the light hit just right. Hank Winslow couldn't look at her long, it'd been like that for the three months since her arrival. It made his gut twist with grief and fear, which even he knows isn't something you're supposed to feel when you look at a baby, especially your own baby. They hadn't expected her, she wasn't a happy surprise, she was a burden and task when he could barely keep himself upright some days. His mother kept her most of the time and it was better that way. Mama Winslow loved that baby more than she loved him or her gruff and stern, tempermental late husband, he could tell. Why did she love that baby so much and why couldn't he love that baby the same?

Hank never told Lilith where this woman's grave was in Hoquiam, she was put with her family in a plot, not by her husband. His stone was in Gray Harbor, he never showed her that, either, afraid that one day he'd be buried by Old Man Winslow for eternity. They never got along. By the time she was old enough to understand and ask questions, he knew answers would just make more questions. Mama Winslow died when she was almost three and he was left with a toddler he couldn't take care of, this little stranger that got red in the face and screamed when he didn't know how to give her what she wanted or needed. He'd foist her off on shop employees or would leave her in the trailer when she'd pass out for a nap or overnight sleep, find her peering out of the windows waiting for him in the morning when he'd come in from wherever he drunkenly passed out.

It was wrong, he knew it, but he didn't know what else to do. Lily was so little. He knew he should give her up. But over time, he realized she was such a smart little thing with the Winslow survival-by-any-means instinct. Maybe he wouldn't have to give her away if she could learn to take care of herself. She was the only thing he had that was his, truly his. And sometimes when she called him Daddy, it felt nice, not something to hide from or ignore. But she stopped doing that when she was five, for some reason. Could he blame her? She was old enough to see what other Daddies were like and they weren't like Hank Winslow. Sometimes, he thought that's when the rage set in to replace the natural fear of abandonment children have.

It was good for her, he thought. It made her determined. Tough love? He couldn't even call it that, it was abandonment more often than not, something he did for his own sake in retrospect. But he was rarely sober, life doesn't work linear through drunk and drugged hazes. Wasn't it better to just stay away when he was like that? It wasn't, when he was sober enough to be guilty, he knew she needed to rely on someone, not herself. It wasn't fair. But he still couldn't give her up. He taught her to steal and lie, he taught her to hide from police and child services, he taught her to be on his side because he lied and told her the other way was worse, that people took babies for money, that she'd always be something bought and sold. He told her other people couldn't be trusted because it was safer for her to be wary in life. He thought it made her strong.

But he was also grateful to know she had just enough sunshine inside her to keep Hank's dark wisdoms from weighing her down. She had just enough hope to wait for him still, even when she knew he wasn't coming home. She was naturally sweet enough to cover him with her knit blanket when he passed out on the couch. Even when she was older, when she was eyerolls and screams about him never wanting her, about how much she hated him and the ways he ruined her life, she'd kneecap the men that came beating on the door to collect him, scream with tiny fury at big men to blindside them while he slipped out of the back. Sometimes, she even saved him little dinners in the fridge next to his beers.

It's all flash imagery of Lilith, Lilith, Lilith, her hurts and rages and fears that he caused so early. And yes, he's guilty now that he's dead, but that's not why he's showing Byron. He's not asking for atonement for himself. He's asking Byron to accept Lily just the way she is, the damages he did that she never learned to undo when she ran away, the way she set herself up to let life damage her when she was living on her own because she didn't know any other way to live.

Then there's one final image of Lilith, face down on her bed sobbing out her very soul in a way Hank never heard her cry. She was fourteen years old and the windows in the trailer and the bathroom glass have been cracked and shattered. He'd hear her cry like that for months, then intermittently over the last few years she was home. Sometimes, he heard he screaming at night through the terrors. Hank knew he should ask, he knew what this was, and when Byron and the other friends stopped coming around, he knew why. He could have told her it would be okay, he could have helped her, brought her to someone that knew these feelings that come with too much power falling down on her at once. Hank never had abilities, but he could see the way things were. He never, ever said a damn thing, he went out and got wasted because he didn't know what to do with her, still, just like when she was a toddler.

He can't atone. All he can do is ask Byron to hold onto her and never let her go because... he never knew how to hold her from the very beginning.

Byron has all the blessings in the world if he can forgive what Hank wrought and love her and keep her just the way she is. This is genuine. But there's desperation coming off of Hank Winslow's ghost too, like he's hoping this is the thing that will set him free, to show and atone for it all in the only way he knows how, to give this duty he never fulfilled to Byron. It's a little selfish and lost feeling, behind all the good will. It's not the thing, though. When Byron is finished feeling all of those things by proxy...

Hank Winslow wails with frustration and disappears. Eventually the chill in the room fades. The wail makes Lilith stir and roll into Byron with drowsy, unaware cling.