She had been fighting against it for a terribly long time – that urge to bite and lash, to make others feel a fraction of the all-consuming torment that she still endured to this day. Maybe it’s why God had been so wrathful when punishing his people, he wanted them to know the pain and sorrow that he had been forced to endure the moment that Eve’s teeth broke the skin of the apple. She had seen the sorrow that marred Orion’s features when she had bared her teeth, had watched Maeve endure her verbal lashings, had seen Vivianne swallow down the horror at Rafaella’s appearance. Disappointment, sorrow, rage, pity. And she had forced herself to endure it, to try to understand how to process such overwhelming quantities of bitter emotion.
Odin had been the pillar which she leaned on, finding solace in the knowledge that he understood her confusion, too frustrated by her own state of being. When she had seen him, she had wanted catharsis so that she might move on but all she saw was a reflection of her own self. A soul intent on commiserating – lavishing, wallowing – in pain. Neither of them were fit to bear it. Before she had been more than willing to shoulder what glimpses he gave in, too happy to show him what beauty could be drawn from it, how to drink it in, indulge in it. It had been as rich as fine wine to her, its bitter taste coating her tongue, making the vitality of living and joy far sweeter. Now it was rancid. Now she was choking on it, but it filled her lungs still. Rafaella was drowning and she needed him to help her hold her head above water – but their grip was slipping. Odin was losing his hold on her, and she with him. He was too fearful of her fragility to hold on. She didn’t have the strength to try – and who could blame her? What strength was to be expected of a woman who had spent her days alternating between inescapable pain and overwhelming loneliness? Her fingers tightened into a fist, trembling with frustration as she hit him, bones aching with rage and weariness.
She remembered when her rage used to lick her like flames, warming her, spurring her. When did it start to chafe on her shoulders? When had her rage become a burden to bear? His hands circled around her wrists, still raw and bruised from her restraints, but before she could pull away, his eyes caught on her fingertips. Her breath stilled, and she choked on it, a strangled noise of protest as she pulled away. But then he stepped closer, looking at her still – when all she wished was for him to look away, to imagine her as the woman he had known rather than the one that stood in front of him. He deserved that, at least. To not be disappointed by another person in his life, yet again.
A quiet, muted part of her wondered if she deserved such a thing too. But she had stopped hoping for things she didn’t deserve long ago. All she can hear is their breathing in the silence of the room until – hit me harder. “What?” She whispered before he could finish, her head snapping to look at him, eyes flickering between his. Her chest rose and fell breath coming in harsh gasps of air, equal parts panicked and angered by what he was asking of her. “Stop it,” her lips were numbed. She said it again. He didn’t seem to hear her because he kept stepped closer still, still begging for her to fix herself, to fix him, to fix what neither of them understood – how to let go of the pain and build themselves anew. She searched his gaze for an answer, for an explanation. There was none to be found.
He wanted her to hit him, to remind him of the Rafaella that he remembered – laughing before clocking him, giggling as she swept her leg under his feet. He wanted to be reminded of her violence, but there were so many other ways that she could prove she was unbroken. Slowly, she took his face in her hands, her thumb smoothing over the curve of his cheek, “I hate you. I hate you for looking at me as though I died – as though I’m dead.” The words were whispered in the space between them, her breath shuddering in her chest. “But I am exhausted by my anger, and even if I hit you –” Rafaella closes her eyes, pausing. “If I hit you it won’t make up for the fact that you – that every single person that I care for, that I –” she turns her head away, gritting her teeth against the anger, the hurt, as the far too visceral feeling of abandonment threatens to overwhelm her. “You all left me there. You left me there.”
Her eyes open and she finds his face blurred by the tears, feels them spilling hotly against her cheeks. Maybe he’s right, maybe he was fragile, broken by the torture and abuse. Rafaella shuddered as her body warred with her will. She wanted to be held. She didn’t want him to touch her. Her hand fell from his face as she pulled her arms around herself. Had she been the same Rafaella, she would have swung, laughing until the moment the door closed, so that she might lick her wounds in peace. Instead, she met his gaze, unable to keep herself from begging. Perhaps her parents would have asked her this if their tongues hadn’t been leaden with drugs. If they had loved her enough to begin with. “Please don’t leave me because I’m broken.”
Suddenly he is so small, so, so small that Rafaella holds him in the palm of her hand.
He is six years old and he stands at one end of a hallway facing nothing but a closed door, the sounds inside disturbed and rattled, his form small and hunched, knees weak. The sky opens even though he cannot see it from underneath the roof, but it pours hell all the same. Every move of his foot causes a floorboard to creak, as if even existing is a burden, never silent no matter how hard he tries, clothes not looking enough like the wallpaper to disguise him. He is an unfortunate decoration to a broken marriage, a disturbance that cannot be solved, permanent furniture that can talk, walk, and eat. When the door creaks open his mother walks out with a hand to her mouth that turns to a finger to shush him, freshly mottled and wet eyelashes. His chest aches and she pulls him in for a hug. She looks so different from in the morning when she was making breakfast and chattering, she isn’t the woman with the packed lunch and kiss to the forehead that sent him to school while his father was working; now she’s withdrawn, her skin is hinted with different shades of different colors. She looks so sad, and so cries with her.
In that moment Rafaella is a spitting image of her, and he has never felt so brutish, has never felt so much like the man he had once known in his own home. Her words are too familiar, ‘You all left me there. You left me there.’ It rings in his ears and he’s holding his military slip and his mother is smiling through her tears, she tells him she’ll miss him, she tells him she loves him, and he set off to what he does best; fight, hunt, destroy. He doesn’t see her again. He doesn’t see her again because he is his father’s son, and he looks at a women he loves who’s been through hell and asks her to hit him because he needs her to, because it’s the only way he really knows what love looks like despite a long healthy relationship that survived up until the inevitable destruction he wreaked on himself and her. He only knows how to feel things he doesn’t want to feel through pain, and the Rafaella he had known would’ve given him hell in a blow to the face.
Maybe he didn’t know her as well as he had thought. Maybe she was enlightened, but he felt so small, and the mighty are as weak as their softest places -- he loved her so much he fell to his knees, his arms wrapping around her torso, his forehead pressed to her lower stomach and he says, “I’m sorry.” He says it like he’s begging and the world grows smaller and smaller around him and he’s suffocating, but it’s not about him, it can’t be about him, so again he says, “I’m sorry.” He doesn’t even know what part he’s apologizing for, he doesn’t know if he’s making it better or worse, but he feels his breathing getting away from him, a heaving chest, and he squeezes her, holding her tightly despite the carnage he can’t see through the fabric of her clothes.
This shouldn’t hurt as much as it does, he’s spent his whole life angry and sad and yet this feels like drowning, like he’s trying to resuscitate someone when he has no oxygen of his own. He just wants to help her, he wants so badly to take her pain away and he knows he can’t. He would’ve done it all for her, he would’ve gone in instead if he could’ve, he was willing to take any beating or torture the Montagues could have thrown at him, but he couldn’t. It was her cross to bear, and he now all that remained was to heal.
His face is damp when he finally he sits back and looks at her, he grabs her hands once more and tugs lightly; he’s asking her get down with him, to sit in his lap, so they can hold each other, so he can make it up to her. He looks up at her because though she did not hit him, he sees her. It’s different than before, yes, but maybe not so bad, maybe it’s better because before she was nothing but bad for him and deep down he knew it -- she wanted to see the worst pieces of him, she wanted to cater them and grow them, he knew that and he let her because she was Rafaella, and that’s what she does. Now she looks at him with her worst pieces, and he shows his own in return and they both just want it to go away, so they cry together.
