the first to hold by redphlox

x

Spirit is the first to hold Maka when she cries.

"She's perfect," he chokes out, warmth swelling in his chest, cracking his heart. "She's perfect! She's so perfect."

After she is clean, Spirit hungrily takes in his daughter's delicate features and thinks that she looks nothing like him or his wife. Suddenly, their mistake has quickly become his whole world, and suddenly, his whole world now fits the length of his fingertips to the pit of his elbow. Resolved to give his daughter everything he's never had, he begins with the gift of words because he himself has always been tongue-tied, emotions trapped behind a tender barricade in his throat.

He has always felt too much.

It must be why his wife's blank eyes bore into him from the wicker chair, propped in the corner as Spirit cuddles with a sleeping Maka on their first night together, reading softly along with her breathing. His voice trembles at the part where the king decides to send his daughter away, because she is better off not being associated with him.

Spirit is no king, but still, he is a container of flaws.

It was why he had not been able to imagine another future other than the one budding in his then-girlfriend's womb, why she had become his wife despite the paralyzing fear that the life blooming inside her spurred. Things that could-have-been have always broken Spirit's heart, and he didn't want Maka to be a could-have-been.

Chest heaving with rib-splitting sobs, Spirit finishes the story while his wife tells him not to cry on the baby or Maka will become infected with his sadness, too.

His wife doesn't cross the room to them.

x

The fine strands on Maka's head eventually lengthen enough for at least three of them to be held together by a tiny hair tie. Spirit itches with excitement as he gathers what he can on the top of her soft head. His wife's blank eyes bore into him as he laughs himself red at the sight of his plant-looking baby girl. She has green eyes and a toothless, innocent smile that breaks his heart. He buries his head into her chest, lightly, knowing his hair will elicit an unrestrained string of giggles. Warmth encompasses his soul that is not associated with the alcohol he had downed at his favorite bar earlier. Maka is unaware of his intoxication and delights in seeing him anyway, unlike his wife.

Spirit is a container of disappointments. In his state he can't remember how old Maka is, but she is old enough to wiggle playfully underneath him, for her hand to find his hair, bundling it in a tiny fist.

"I'm going to read you a story," he tells her, reaching for the thick text of children's stories he had bought from the bookstore when Maka was only a fearful whisper on his wife's lips, a shadow under her uncertain eyes. He thinks he feels his wife listening to the tale of a girl confined to a tower with the impossible task of spinning something out of nothing. Never breathing, she stiffens across the room, wandering in her own knee-high marsh of solitude.

Spirit and his wife had been two souls smitten with danger, drawn together by darkness and buried in it.

Spirit pulls Maka closer to him. She's entranced into silence by the rhythm of his words.

Perched on the wicker chair in the corner, his wife doesn't cross the room to them.

x

Soon Maka babbles excitedly along with him during their nighttime stories. Determined to be louder than Spirit, her bubbly face strains with effort. Drool escapes her mouth. Spirit's heart splinters. Maybe his Maka won't be muted like him, condemned to carrying ugly emotions behind teeth. Sucking in a breath, he purses his lips and presses them against his daughter's cheeks, blowing raspberries that cause her to throw herself back in fits of surprised laughter.

"Papa loves you more than anything," he whimpers, hating himself when his voice crumbles with heartbreak. "Papa loves you and Mama more than anything," he repeats.

Maka grabs his hair in her fist, seemingly unaware of the knives storming in his chest cavity. She's great at reaching out for him.

His wife's silence deepens and she doesn't cross the room to them.

x

Too enthralled with the smoke and dim lights of the strip club that is out of the way but he frequents with great loyalty, where the women have inviting curves that he only caresses with lethargic eyes, Spirit misses Maka's first shaky steps. His wife, in one of those brief periods of clarity from her fog, waits for him, greeting him not with her usual stony faced reproaches but with an offer to wield him once again.

Spirit immediately nods his head - he's missed her touch.

The more he cuddles with Maka, the less his wife has approached them.

His heart races with exhilaration and love when her fingers curl around his weapon form the next day, but soon a mutual understanding between them suggests that she lacks that spark that earned Spirit his current status as Death Scythe. Soul disillusioned with the haunting taste of regret, her attacks are too sluggish, her grip lax, her footwork clumsy. When she looks at him, Spirit feels the gap between them widen like skin tearing. He avoids her eyes by admiring his daughter sleep on their bed, blond hair like roots on their comforter, the barricade in his throat preventing words from escaping.

His wife doesn't cross the room to them. She sleeps in the living room where the tendrils of disappointment don't coil around them as tightly. Spirit lurches awake at odd intervals, sternum snapping under the pressure of loneliness, eyes hopefully slashing through the gloom for his wife's outline heading toward him, but only finds stillness that can only be found during the night.

She's in the next room over, a wall away. He could slice through it - he has done it before when they were separated during battles, and he would always find her – but he's starting to suspect that he is not wanted by her side.

The chasm in his marriage is deeper than Spirit had thought. She's rarely in the room with him, with Maka. He misses his wife's warm body beside him, even if she faces away from his more often than not, limbs curled and tucked into her side like she's withdrawing into a shell. She's an isolated island that can be seen from shore but not reached, a guillotine on a hilltop, a steep, rough fall; his bones ache with searing longing despite the risk of drowning, of her sharp edges, of never reaching the bottom.

"Come back," Spirit wants to sob, to cry, but he stifles the plea, unsure if he can breathe in the thicket of torment snaking around them, afraid to call out and not be heard.

Sometimes Spirit hears his wife's tears soak the pillowcase when she thinks he is asleep; the bed shivers along with her choked sighs all the way from the living room and it feels like an earthquake to him. He's useless to wander through the shadows to swathe an arm around her, though, so he steadies his breath and feels empty in the darkness that used to thrill them.

Instead, Spirit snuggles with Maka every night, drifting between reality and a world where every pause in his daughter's breath is an eternity.

The fog must be contagious because his surroundings blur at times, too, but he's unsure if it's the influence of the smoke machines in the brothels or the fumes from his cigarette that cling to him and taint his mouth with a metallic aftertaste. It's poison, it's poison – long black periods stretch out before him, his senses diminished, his body weighed by a throbbing exhaustion that anchor him under an opaque surface.

Even if he misses a few, Spirit separates day and night by feeling his daughter's hair tickle him during bed time stories. The scent of nameless, random women sticks to his shirt but Maka remains oblivious, content with tugging his ponytail when she finds him facedown on the floor in the mornings, having been too disoriented to find his bed.

Spirit is no king, but still, he is a container of flaws.

x

His wife's budding silence is a bouquet of flowers finally wilting, and Spirit understands eventually, with a jolt of cold, oddly relieving panic, that he's only a lowlight and lacks the intensity to save her.

The heated susurrations and even the commonplace how are you'sthat fueled them to stitch every inch of themselves to the other no longer exist. Spirit thinks the blinds are to blame because they are a fine line between shadows and light, but he inherently knows that what little sunshine trespasses into their gloom-infested apartment through the half-closed (opened?) blinds isn't nearly enough to resurrect Maka's mama.

Spirit and Maka are nestled in their room (his wife elsewhere, as always, but it's fair because he drifts in and out of hazes too) when the thought I am also wilting materializes in his clouded mind. Some of the ebbing daylight spilling across the covers drenches a drowsy Maka's hair; Spirit hopes that she won't wither. Her wheat-gold, miniature pigtails blur – are his eyes burning a symptom of some other breakdown within himself, the last stage that precedes decaying? – and Spirit feels his limbs struggle to unstiffen as he shifts to tuck them in to escape this purgatory they have created.

"Can you hand me Maka's bottle?" Spirit asks, gravely, like he hasn't spoken in days, eyes sunken in blotches of fatigued purple. He'd become a statue in the half-shadows, Maka pressed against his chest as he sags like he hasn't a bone in his body.

His wife sounds dusty, dry. Maybe she hasn't used it in days either. Maybe their voices are disintegrating, and their relationship could be saved if only they would water their roots and open (unclose) their blinds. She tells him in a rasp that knocks off more drooping petals from the flame-like flower they had sewn together with all the best intentions, that she will, after she opens the blinds and unlatches the window.

Maybe they need some air, too.

x

They lapse into a cycle. Spirit lends his affections to pretty faces, Maka's mother trains sometimes (he isn't too sure, he's absent too sometimes, he is not perfect). But her eyes bore into him unhappily more often now.

x

Maka almost falls to the floor one catastrophic evening that ignites a trail leading to an inferno, one evening that Spirit rewinds and replays later on when he solicits shelter in his loneliness.

Spirit springs from the sofa as his daughter stumbles over her own wobbly feet, amused squeals aimed at the rugged carpet until he scoops a palm under her belly and swings her against his chest, rubbing her button nose with his knuckles while murmuring about close calls and papas that prevent scrapes. Maka neither cries nor squirms – she blinks gold eyelashes at him, tiny mouth rounded in an 'O,' her faint breath warm and astonished against his fingers. He holds his whole world in his arms, and his whole world looks startled at his presence, and maybe Spirit feels like one day very soon, his whole world will be fine even without him.

He grinds his teeth.

Maka is heavier. She sports confused eyebrows and two ribbons. She moves a hand from his chest to his nose and squeezes, too, a proud smile flowering on her sweet face.

"I have your nose, too," Spirit chirps, anguish clipping each syllable. Tears seep from his eyes when he smiles. He's a container of flaws, a container that's finally rusted, a semi-translucent glint in his daughter's eyes until he's replaced with a reflection of her mother.

"Mama?"

Spirit follows his daughter's longing gaze. His wife's eyes bore into him from the hallway where the reading lamp's light doesn't reach. Maka extends an open hand to beckon her, but his wife's eyes still only bore into him even as she crosses the sparsely furnished living room to the front door, even as she clutches the doorknob and its slow creak pierces her muteness.

He'd always thought that heartbreak would sound like thunder clapping and fracturing his skull, but it sounds like the door clicking shut behind his wife as she disappears for the first time. He and Maka sink into a different kind of silence, one where Maka's outstretched hand is frozen in midair, reaching for a ghost, and one where Spirit chooses to stay with his daughter instead of following his wife to the unknown. He wipes his daughter's little frown away by rocking her, and her teeny bursts of giggles amuse him enough to partially break from the panic looming like a rope around his neck.

"Mama will come back," Spirit tells himself, but Maka hears, anyway. She internalizes this. "Mama will come back."

She does return, again and again, until one day she doesn't, but Maka hopes she will come back, while Spirit still half-believes the empty words he had whimpered to comfort himself.

Spirit is a container of flaws: he's a guillotine on a hilltop, a dim light.