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Arthur

"Papa?"

"........."

"Papaaaaaa?"

"................."

I feel his little paws atop my chest, the warmth of his tiny fingers blooming on the spot right over my heart as he shakes me; his sharp claws yank on my fur and pinch the skin.

Still, I don't move a muscle.

It's not that I want him to go back to bed frightened and leave me in peace (the thunder rolling and causing the house to tremble alone says he won't), I just like to play possum. And he knows it, too. He just keeps shaking me about, grunting and whimpering the longer I stay quiet and the rougher he gets. He knows I'll open my eyes at some point--without a doubt he knows--but he still gets distressed upon seeing me with my lids firmly shut as if I'm trying to pretend he wasn't there. But I'd never do that.

Finally he grows too tired of my playing around, moans pitifully, and collapses on top of me with his arms draped over my chest. I chuckle--I can't help it--as I feel his muzzle wriggling and hear muffled gibberish that only he can understand. Then I open my eyes and softly pat the back of his head, ruffling his already disheveled hair and scratching his floppy right ear the way he likes. Again, he mumbles and flails around and I fail to understand a word of what he's saying.

"Come again?" I chuckle. "What's wrong, Lancelot?"

I feel the dampness of his nose as he turns and it trails over my bare chest; his green eyes are huge and puffy and watery as he looks at me snuffling. Still, he doesn't say anything. Then his eyes clench and he grimaces, grunting like he's in pain. He rolls onto his side and clutches at his stomach.

Uh-oh.

Immediately my fatherly instincts kick in at the sight of him. I carefully pull myself out from underneath him and--like when he was a baby--cradle him and rub his belly...which is a bit swollen. I feel my brows dip and my cheeks tighten in concern as my paw rests on the back of his neck. He's so tense, and--

"You're burning up, honey," I sputter, quickly tucking a loose strand of my hair behind an ear before laying my palm on his forehead...which is damp...and hot, too. I look him in the eye, my chest tightening.

"I don't feel good," he mutters.

I hold him closer to me and he nuzzles himself against my body.

"Did you just wake up feeling bad?" I ask.

His head nods, rubbing roughly against the thick fur beneath my neck. I then look at the clock on my nightstand: 3:45am. Thinking back to earlier, before I'd tucked him in, he'd seemed fine. He hadn't felt ill at all the day before as a matter of fact.

He shivers and my hold on him tightens more as if I was afraid someone was going to rip him from my arms.

Damn sickness--whatever it was. Probably just a bug. Or I hope it's just a bug.

I swallow and stroke his head, grimacing as my fingers cut through damp, sticky hair and fur. His little body quivers again and he draws himself into a ball against me. "Does anything hurt, baby? Arms? Legs?"

Please say no, please say no. It was the middle of December--flu season--and he did not need to have that. I did not want a seriously ill six year-old.

But, to my relief, he shakes his head. Then he winces and clamps a paw over his stomach again. "Just my tummy," he moans.

"Have you gone to the bathroom?"

"Mmhmm."

"Was it runny?"

"Uh-huh."

"Alright," I coo, stroking his head. "You'll be alright."

I grab my comforter and drape it over him as he trembles and digs himself deeper into the warmth of my fur. I just sigh and hold him. My heart aches at knowing he's hurting. He's my son, my baby, and I'm supposed to keep him healthy and happy. He's all I have left, after all.

I lost his mother to sickness. I couldn't stand to lose him, too.

Not that I was worried about a stomach bug. Though, ever since his mother...passed...I've never taken illnesses the same way, no matter how benign they may appear. All my life I lived to take risks--it's part of who I am--but things like this, the ones I love...they aren't something to gamble with.

A flash of lightning whitens the black night through my blind-free window, illuminating my lonely bedroom. It's a labyrinth of book stacks and boxes, piles of clothes both folded and unfolded, sword scabbards and random pieces of armor. The thunder cracks and rumbles overhead like a collapsing high-rise and shakes the walls of our new house. Lance jumps in my arms; I feel the bed waver, and the loose things atop my dresser--a bottle of old cologne, my upright lighter, a stack of cassette tapes, and a framed picture of Joan--rattle, and some tumble to the floor and into an open box below. The picture, however, stays perfectly placed. I stare into the glossy, smiling green eyes of my beloved wife, and she stares right back into mine.

I can't believe it's been five years. It feels like the time has both crawled and blinked by. She would love to see how much Lance has grown from the two year-old she'd left behind; hopefully she'd love to see me, too. I sure missed her.

But I have our son, and he has me.

I'm smiling at Joan's photo when Lance squirms in my arms. I look down, expecting to see him holding his aching belly, but I meet his eyes instead.

"Papa?" he mutters, chewing on his bottom lip like his mom used to do.

I grin down at him and pet his head. "What, baby?"

"Do you...do you think I'll still be able to..."

Lord. He's sick and he's worrying about that?

"I don't know, honey," I say, shaking my head. "Maybe if you're feeling better. I don't want you going to Uncle Matt's sick, though. We don't want Aunt Maggie catching what you have."

He frowns a little and tucks his head back under my chin. "Because the baby might get sick, too?"

I nod. "Yeah."

My brother and sister-in-law couldn't take losing another baby. Their little girl would've been four years old now had she not been born premature. Poor thing's heart wasn't right. Matt and Maggie were, well, devastated isn't enough to describe how broken they were after that. But I'm glad they tried again. Their little boy is still cooking, but he'll be fine. He had to be. Still--like me--they don't want to risk anything.

Lance can stand to miss out on playing with his uncle for a while.

_Letting Matt and Maggie look after my son may have helped them through losing their daughter, but after their baby's born they'll probably want their space. It won't hurt to start weaning Lance off of them. This stomach virus may be a good thing after all. _

I feel his jaw clenching where his head's pressed against my chest. "Owwwww," he moans.

I hold him tighter, bidding for his hurt to end, bidding to bear the pain for him so he doesn't have to suffer.

"It'll be alright, Lancelot," I coo into his floppy ear. He giggles a little. After a while he stops squirming and grows quiet as he falls asleep.

I can't sleep, so I watch him. I can't take my eyes off of him. His soft breaths tickle against my bare chest; his own chest expands and contracts gently and unlabored. His stomach would growl viciously every so often and his eyes would pinch together as he slept, but he didn't wake up. Eventually his eyes began to roll around behind his lids, dreaming. He's the most beautiful thing, so serene now that he's drifted off past pain and into tranquil vision-seas. I can only imagine what he's seeing and doing, and I'm glad his fever isn't darkening his mind. Children are born to dream after all, not suffer through them. Dreams bring hope and birth imagination.

Dreams are what make life livable. I still have quite a few of my own.

The storm rages on until morning. The sunrise through my window is the most beautiful one I'd ever seen. But watching my son open his eyes and smile at me after holding him all night...that trumped the glorious morning altogether.

Matthew

My eyes were closed. It was dark. It was dark and it was noisy. Not the obnoxious "make it stop" kind of noisy, but the soft and monotonous kind of noisy; the kind of noisy that's just enough to get on your nerves but not enough to drive you crazy.

It was the hospital: the things hooked up to my brother, the whirring air conditioning, the hissing of pipes and hum of electricity in the walls, the rattle of carts being pushed down the hallway from the other side of the closed door.

I could feel the room thrumming. I'd give anything for some quiet. Some peace. Serenity.

I suppose I was just...I was just tired. Like that's anything new, though; I've been tired for a long time. Arthur's accident is just another bump in the highway that is my existence. No, this is more than a bump; this is a pothole. Arthur is all that's left of my blood-family. My parents are dead, grandparents long under the ground. My old life, my past, would be gone if not for my brother. But I've been running from my past for a long time--hence the perpetual state of weariness.

And things keep happening, things I think could never occur always seem to leap up and send me crashing down into the dirt when I least expect it. If anything, though, all of the falls have taught me that I can in fact get back up. Sometimes I need a bit of help, a helping paw to brush the sand and grit from my knees and set me in motion again. Somehow. My past I may be trying to forget, but I still hold onto the bleak hope, the faint candle-glow in my darkened tunnel, for a future. I have to, you know? And not just for my own sake. Not anymore.

Through the ceaseless hum going on around me, my ears perked to a grunt and the squeak of stiff plastic, a hiss of pain. A sharp, blue light bled blurry through my shut eyelids. Something beeped...a monitor hooked to Arthur maybe. I opened my eyes, squinting as the bright screen from my son's phone blinded me, and found him standing in the cramped space of the recovery room looking over my brother worriedly as he shined the light over his anesthetized form. He'd been doing that, as far as I could tell, every two hours. Glancing at the illuminated clock on the wall above Arthur's cable and pipe ridden bed I saw it was 3:45 am.

Lord have mercy...

"Lee," I mumbled, sitting up a bit and wincing as my back flared and sent pain rocketing into the base of my skull. The chairs in this room were anything but comfortable. I didn't understand how my son could sit in one let alone sleep in one. But he'd always been a hardy thing; we Hawthornes were known for being tough. I stare at my brother and hope his reservoir of strength is still as fathomless as it's always been, then I gaze at my son. He'd jumped a bit at the sound of my voice--like he did when his mother called him--and jerked his head around to face me. His tail was limp and his ears back. I frowned...not at him, but at his reaction. "Son..."

"I'm sorry," he whispered hastily. "I was just checking on him. I didn't mean to wake you."

I smiled softly, apologetically, hoping he'd see. "You didn't."

I then tried to get out of the chair, but it was like it had me by the ass and didn't want to let me go. I grunted and flailed my arms and legs to try and get my weight forward, but--for the life of me--it was useless...for the most part. I huffed, looked at Lee, and found he was laughing; his tail wagged a bit.

"Need help?" he asked.

I held my paw back out and shook it pathetically, grinning at making Lee smile and for knowing I looked a fool. "Please."

For a kid, he was strong as all get out. Well, I couldn't rightly call him a kid anymore; he was eighteen after all, practically a man. My weight was nothing to him even with a broken arm. He hefted me up, smiling still and looking me in the eye with his firm paw clasped onto mine.

I glanced over him standing there--my son. Well, technically he was my son...biologically. He came from my seed, from my wife's womb, but--standing there and looking at him--he was the spitting image of my brother when he was eighteen. If his eyes were green he could have been an older version of Lance, but he had the mocha-browns like my brother. Mine were blue. In so many ways Lee was a reflection of Arthur. Not me. With all the things he did--the sword stuff and knight things he loved so much--he became more like my brother. The only sure thing I knew he inherited from me was his musical ability, and look what that got him: a broken arm to no longer play guitar with.

Or swing a sword, I thought somewhat pleasantly, immediately feeling disgusted with myself for it.

He could still sing at least. That's all I can do anymore. Singing privately was one of the few things left that brought me some comfort besides playing my piano. For all I sing in front of people are church hymns; all I play in front of folks are church hymns. Hymns, hymns, hymns, hymns, hymns! I love the Lord, but belting out about how he died on the cross for our sins is about as spirit-lifting to me as having dagger-sized nails driven into my own hands.

God, forgive me...

Maggie craved divinity more than I did. Her dreams were of perfection in every sense of the word and mortal condition. And I just wanted her to be happy. I looked into my son's eyes, and all I wanted was for him to be happy, too. But his happiness, my wife's happiness, and my own happiness were in their own separate dimensions, divided by years and experiences, beliefs and wrongs and rights, justifiable and unjustifiable understandings of how things work, should work, and may or may not work in the end. It's no wonder my family's relationship was, pardon the biblical reference, a temple built on the sand. Too many things were shifting and foundering us. I'd seen it. I'd been seeing it for a long time now, but had I done anything about it? Well, in a way, but--overall? No. I'd been too focused on Maggie out of fear for her (and of her) to notice how I had become in the eyes of my child.

I mean, who was I? Who was I to my own son? Hell, I felt like I didn't even know who he was anymore. Everything that had happened with him recently--his avoiding of us, his depression, the fight at the Halloween thing, this new punk-rocker girlfriend--it was something I never would have expected of him. But how would I know what to expect from him when I didn't even know what to expect from myself? Too many factors came into play, too many variables. I was as big a mystery to myself nowadays, so it was no surprise I hardly knew my own son. Arthur did, though; Lee confided in him when he should have been confiding in my wife and me. But that was our own doing, I knew. I wasn't angry at him because of it either. No. No, I was angry at myself. I could have been angry at Maggie, I suppose, but--as much as it pained me to realize--she was just desperate. She wanted to have the perfect husband, raise the perfect child, and live the perfect life. She'd been that way since we got married. She just wanted everything to turn out like she'd always dreamed. And we came close. Oh so close. I know it's terrible to compare a near-perfect past to an imperfect present, but it was true. We were living the dream.

And then we lost our first baby.

We'd planned on naming her Sophie--Sophie Grace. If you'd seen the way Maggie fondled the child even before it was born--singing and talking to her round stomach, loving the baby with all of her heart--you'd understand how crushed she was...how crushed I was. She called herself a failure and an unfit mother. She believed her life was ruined from then on and that nothing she'd do could make her happy again. Nothing I tried to do could bring the light back into her eyes, and what light I had left was being smothered by darkness. But I held on. I mean, did she not realize how torn apart I was? I had my child ripped from my future too, after all. I had just as much right to be lost in grief, but...someone had to anchor our dead-in-the-water relationship if it was to survive. I was tough. I was dying on the inside, but I held out for better.

And then Arthur lost Joan. He was left alone to take care of little Lance. Yet another tragedy. But as much as my brother loved his son--and God he did--he couldn't watch him all of the time. With our parents dead and gone, and with no other siblings, it was no surprise he'd asked Maggie and me to watch the two year-old while he worked. My wife refused at first, but I knew it was something God meant for us to do. Lance was to be the wind in our tattered sail. We'd lost our baby, but we were still given the opportunity to help raise one and help my brother when he was in such desperate need.

Years passed. Things got better. Lance was a blessing. Our nephew turned my bitter, resentful wife into the woman she'd been before our own child died. I can never thank Arthur enough for giving us so much time with Lance. That boy gave us our hope back, and without him I doubt we would've tried for another child of our own. But we did, and--around when Lance turned six--Maggie took a pregnancy test that was positive. Nine months later Lee came along. Lance only got to see him once, at the hospital the day after the birth. He'd been so excited, I remember, at having a little cousin.

Then he died, too.

When it happened, oh, the emotions ran rampant then. We had our own baby, but we felt we'd lost another. And Arthur...oh, God...Arthur became the way my wife had been. It was as if our past lives had been swapped. I thought I'd lose my brother. He was so distraught. He'd holed up in his house for weeks--five, I think--after Lance was buried. He'd given up. And, honestly, we couldn't judge him, Maggie and me. We suffered along with him. But as Lance did for us, Lee did for Arthur. We couldn't deny my brother time with our child after he was born--especially after he'd sacrificed time with his own son for us.

I think Maggie regretted doing that now, as much as I hate to think she did, because--with the birth of our son--her quest for the perfect family and life was renewed. And her ideals tended to clash with those of Arthur's; and I knew Lee was, from the moment of his first gasping breath in the world, as much my brother's as he was ours. I don't know why I thought so; it just felt right. Justified, I guess.

But, now I see that Lee used to be as much ours as he was Arthur's. Maggie--whether she realized it or not--had frightened Lee away from us with her strict beliefs and parenting methods. Perfection comes with a steep, steep price, and it's hardly ever won in the end. I've learned that_._ I regret the things I've done, but I regret what I've let Maggie do and get away with more. As meager as it was (and is), I still felt that I had a relationship with my son--or at least one more prevalent than hers--especially after everything that had happened to him. I'd at least been there for him instead of simply scolding and putting him down and locking him away in the gilded cage that was our household. I mean, I was upset by some of the things he'd done, but I didn't condemn him because of his actions. He was a boy. I'd been in his shoes, so I knew what he was going through.

More than I'd like to think, and more than he'd think I was capable of.

Fights happen. Anger happens. Confusion and fear and all sorts of other shit happens. Still, as I stood clutching my son's paw, I glanced at my wounded brother in his hospital bed and I couldn't help but wonder, "If that were me hooked up to those machines, would Lee be as devoted and worried?"

Would he cry over me?

Would he care?

Another alarm from one of Arthur's mechanical life-lines pierced the silence, and immediately Lee dropped my paw. He turned, almost without thinking, a sorrow in his eyes that brought tears to my own, and placed his paw on the stillness of my brother's. He held it tightly there like nothing was more important than their connection. All I could do was stand and watch and hold back my sadness there in the cold, sterile darkness. I crept forward as Arthur's chest rose and fell with the pshhh-kahhh of a ventilator, the inorganic sound disturbing yet comforting to hear. I wrapped my right arm around Lee's shoulders, and he leaned into me. It was the closest I'd been to him in months, and it was the most intimacy we'd shared in years. But, even though he was right up against me, he still felt a whole world apart.

"I'm scared, dad," he said. He was crying, still looking over Arthur.

I rubbed the ball of his shoulder as tenderly as I could without causing any pain to his broken arm. My eyes stung. I wanted to look at my brother, but I could only manage to peer at the side of Lee's glistening face.

"I am, too," I said. And I meant it.

I had everything, but I had nothing. I'd lost nothing, but--frankly...

I felt I'd lost it all.