not. Not really. Everyone has a role, and as long as they are there to fill it, everything keeps moving.” There was a bleakness wrapped around those words, a resignation that made her curious.
The plane’s engines roared to life and she curled herself around Aden, holding him securely as they started down the runway.
“He makes you nervous,” Sayid said.
She looked up, knowing exactly what he meant. “I don’t have any experience with babies.”
“And you haven’t been waiting around dying to have your own.”
“I’m twenty-three. I don’t exactly feel ready for it. But… even in the future I didn’t have plans of… marriage and motherhood.” Quite the opposite, she’d always intended to avoid both like the plague. Had done so quite neatly for her entire life.
“Yet you protect him. Like a tigress with her cub.” Everything was a casual observation from him, no heat of conviction. No emotion at all.
“There are survival instincts that are born into us,” she said, looking down at Aden’s head, his hair fuzzy and wild, standing on end. “An innate need to propagate the species and ensure its survival.”
“Is that all?” he asked.
She shook her head, her throat tightening. “No.”
“It is good. Good that he has an aunt who loves him.”
Yes. It was completely natural for her to love him. To feel like he was a piece of her. He was, after all. Her nephew. Her only remaining family.
The only remaining family that she acknowledged. Her parents were no longer a part of her life. She never intended on speaking to them, going back and peering into the ugliness that was their marriage. She’d escaped it, and she never intended on going back.
Aden represented her last link with family. Her last chance. It was no wonder the bond was so strong. And he had no one. At least, he’d had no one. It had been just the two of them, holed up in the apartment, surviving.
“I do love him,” she said.
“It pleases me.” She noticed he didn’t return the sentiment, and that none of the pleasure he spoke of was reflected in his tone. She searched his face, looked into those hard, black eyes to see if she could find some hidden depth of emotion. Some tenderness for the tiny baby in her arms.
There was nothing there.
Nothing but an endless sea of darkness, a black hole, that seemed to pull light in, only to extinguish it.
“I went to live with my uncle, Kalid, when I was seven. I don’t know if Rashid ever mentioned that,” he said.
“No.” She’d barely ever spoken to her brother-in-law. He wasn’t usually present during her visits with Tamara.
“It is common, with the warrior children, to go and learn from the one currently holding the position.”
“So young?”
“It is necessary,” he said. “As you mentioned, early childhood experiences play strongly into how you will be as an adult. Something so important could not be left to chance.”
“What… what do you mean?”
“Because to be a perfect soldier, you can’t be a perfect man,” he said. “You have to be broken first, so that it can’t happen later. At the hands of your enemies.”
His tone was perfectly smooth, perfectly conversational. Betraying nothing of the underlying horror. But it was there. In his eyes.
It was easy to imagine getting pulled into that darkness. Easy to imagine getting lost in it. In him. The feeling that created rocked her deeply, gripped her stomach and squeezed tight.
She’d never had a thought like that before, had never felt, even for a moment, the sudden, violent pull to someone like she felt for Sayid.
She turned away, redirecting her focus. This six months was for Aden. A chance to introduce him to his home. To give him the transition they both needed.
It was not a time for her to get drawn in by a man with dark eyes and an even darker soul.
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