“Her mother wanted to have her adopted, didn’t she?” comments somebody from behind him, and Lance catches his breath, his thumb stilling in its gentle brush of a ringlet away from her face.
She’s his, and he’s hers, this little girl – he can’t tear himself away from her, he belongs to her so completely in this moment that it hurts deep in his chest to even think about –
“I’m taking her,” he whispers, presses his finger to the palm of a tiny hand peeking out from her blanket wrap, and she grasps it and stares at him. He speaks again, louder. “She’s my…my daughter, I’m taking her home.”
Keith digs fingers into the crushed pack of cigarettes in his pocket that he’s half emptied in the last few hours, and in the other pocket, he clenches a hand around the rubbed smooth handle of his switchblade. Dirt is shoveled onto shiny wood, the scrape and gentle patter of the dig and release of it. Covering them. Those slack faces that he sees every time he closes his eyes.
He thinks of the fifth of whiskey in his closet. Anything to feel warm again.
Anything to feel anything again.
Keith can’t help the quick urge to cover it back up – his sleeve of tattoos aren’t super child-friendly – but she’s already absorbed, reaching out to press a hand to the human skull on the outside of his bicep. He looks down at it, flustered.
Red roses spill from the skull’s eyes and mouth, thorny but beautiful. Liliana touches a petal, and he suppresses a nervous shiver.
It had been the first tattoo he’d gotten after…everything. After Josh, after his parents, after they’d lost the house and had to force themselves back up on their own feet. Shiro hadn’t liked it – they didn’t really have the money – but when Keith had sullenly uncovered it, Shiro had understood. That Keith needed a reminder that flowers could bloom from destruction.
