Your brother is angry. He's so angry. Angry to the point of cruelty, and it's breaking your dad's heart. You're doing what you can to try and mediate, to make things better, but it's not enough.
Then there's...something. How much does Lark share? How much is the truth, how much is you hoping for the right answer? Normal comes by it honest, how terrible he is at insight. What a thing to pass on to your kid, this inability to know the truth. It doesn't matter in the end. You still escort Lark down to the kitchen, bring him to your dad. "I think you have an apology for Father?"
Lark stabs Henry in the back. Maybe he stabs you in the back, too. Maybe you saw it coming too late, or maybe you always knew how it would go. Maybe it wasn't a surprise at all. It's always been LarkAndSparrow. What one does the other is just as guilty for. It doesn't really matter, in the end, how much you knew. What's done is done. You were twelve years old when your brother used a bloody knife to pry open Pandora's box in the kitchen of your childhood home. You were supposed to be watching a movie with your friends; you ended up scrubbing blood off the tile floor while your mother tried to put the pieces of your brother and father back together. Out, damn spot.
You and your family spend years trying to undo that one moment. Henry keeps forgiving Lark for it all. Offers kindness and compassion and understanding over and over and over again. You can't understand it. You really can't. It's so fucking easy to pretend to be Lark in that forsaken Doodler Church, so easy to channel that anger, to scream at your father, to hit him.
This is your fault. All of it is your fault. You have to be the one to fix it. Henry won't punish either of you for what was done. He acts like ending the world was just some little mistake and you burn with borrowed anger. You can't be this angry as yourself, you're not allowed that anger, that's not like you, Sparrow, what's really going on? So you have to get it all out now pretending to be someone else. Three minutes, that's all you get. Three minutes to scream and take up space and spill the rotten, festering truth that's sat heavy and unspoken on your tongue for far too long.
Your own father can't tell the two of you apart enough to realize who is talking to him. He hears anger, he sees guilt, he assumes Lark. You're fine. You've always been fine. You're not the one your parents need to worry about. Why would he think it's you?
And Lark thought you were both too old, too different, to pull off that trick one last time.
You both grow up. The guilt grows with you. You get married, have kids. Hero, the prophesied one. Normal, an accident. Lark teaches your daughter how to kill with her bare hands. He doesn't argue with you when you hand him a gun and ask if he can teach your kindergarten-aged son how to use it.
And Normal. Precious, sweet, Normal. Normal, for whom kindness is an instinct. Normal, who can't tie his own shoes yet but can fire a gun. Normal, who readily lisps "never point a gun at something you don't want to absolutely destroy" but has no idea what it truly means to destroy something. He opens a door and all of a sudden you get it. You couldn't blame your son for this anymore than Henry could blame you or Lark.
You aren't going to let your son grow up with a world-ender's guilt on his tiny shoulders. You're going to be better than your father was, you're going to fix it, you're going to make it better. You won't ask your brother to take the burden twice. It has to be you. This was your fault to start with and now you're going to fix it. This is the only way.
You have an apology for Father, I believe?
You are sorry, is the thing. You apologize. That's more than Lark ever did and he got forgiven a hundred times over, a thousand times, a million times. You know you've done something terrible, something that should be unforgivable, but your father has always offered forgiveness to the undeserving. Why would you be any different?
"I love you, son, but I will never forgive you for this," says the man who forgave your brother for the same crime without a second's hesitation.
Your mother hugs you almost before you feel the pain of what's been said. For a moment you are twelve years old again, on your hands and knees on the kitchen floor with a bucket of soapy water at your side, bawling your eyes out with guilt as you scrub at a bloodstain every inch as big as you. When your mother found you at long last back then, hours after everything that had happened, she'd hugged you just as tightly as she did now.
"I know you did the best you could," she says, and for a moment your heart lifts. You look to your father as if to say see? Don't you see? I did the best I could. It was for my son. My beautiful boy. Don't you get that? Don't you see that I didn't have any other choice?
Your mother squeezes you tighter, and then you know exactly what it feels like to get a knife to the back.
"But you needed to be a lot better."
__________________________________________
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