Ichor And Steel

Chapter Eighteen; Sleepless man

ᴘᴀʟᴇ ʏᴇʟʟᴏᴡ, ᴡᴏᴏᴅᴋɪᴅ

Rosemary Winters was a warm, breathing blood-relative—a daughter—to Ethan Winters.

How in lord's fucking name had I not remembered that? More frustratingly, how come no one told me I had a daughter?

Of course, there was that inkling of an obscure fatherly sense when handling tasks like a dinner for the Dimitrescu daughters or when Donna's fingers were just too cold to put up her hair so he would braid it. He'd just plainly assumed it was manly nature...with a hint of something womanly. At the arrival of such a realisation, other than that horrific discomfort of a burn singeing at his temples and a tingling underneath his fingernails, all those actions suddenly just made sense. A peculiar smell flittered around his hands and something small and fleshy pressed to his chin whenever he closed his eyes. This had made sleep scarce, a difficult wrestle that had become a nightly habit. However, he didn't speak up about it, at least for a week because...well...he still slept within radius of Heisenberg; a thin wall the only barrier between them...or something they might do.

Several days of ponderous wanders had proven Ethan was indecisive about their closet kiss, mostly because he couldn't figure out whether he had leaned in or away or maybe he just fell into the feeling. That incident imprinted a tenderness on his heart, which Heisenberg's mere presence pressed against or whenever he spoke to Ethan in their morning routine of slipping past each other.

"Why don't you just sleep elsewhere?" Moreau grumbly asked Ethan on the day he'd spent at the reservoir, toying with the idea of hiking up to the castle and resuming his original bedroom.

Ethan only shrugged and his gilled friend attempted to pry but soon saw it useless. In his silent amble home—factory...you mean factory, Ethan. Whatever—in his stalk back to bed, he childishly humoured himself with the idea Heisenberg, who would either bury himself deep in scrap metal or fizzle off into thin air, confined in Donna the same way Ethan used Moreau. He liked to think this since it felt optimistic; Heisenberg hadn't just kissed him to fuck with him...or to break a boundary to cross further.

Skipping dinner, which Heisenberg had not protested as he too went without, Ethan laid on the couch, fingers drumming on his chest and eyes pinned to the ceiling where faint pencil scribbles were; if he squinted, he could make out some Pythagoras theorem or even some sort of aerodynamics. Science, the maths sort, wasn't really his speciality. Apparently, his attributes consisted of being a "stay-at-home-dad" and, somewhere at the bottom of his heart, he wondered if he had sat on a rug in a sun-drenched room, dressed in sloppy pyjamas and matched his big adult hands with that of an infant's on her back, legs kicking and giggling. It was a vivid memory and, although he could've just asked Heisenberg about his daughter, there was something else.

I need to know.

He got up quick, ignoring how the room spun, and made too much of a haste into Heisenberg's room, door always left agape. The sleepless man, there he was, twirling a lighter in the air with a flaming cigarette clenched between teeth. Burnished eyes agaze upon what he'd curated from simple pieces of garbage and one large hand rubbing over his heart, as though it ached and wept against his ribcage. When he heard the electric scrape of socks on his rough, red rug, Heisenberg glanced and gripped at his hair.

Ethan licked his lips and withheld a nervous waver in his chest. "I want you to tell me everything, even those parts where you tried to hurt me or even how why me losing my hand feels so familiar."

"Ok—"

"But I don't want a novel of it; I want your summary, like just something easy to remember," he continued to blurt. "Please."