It was just before the time Poe appointed for their meeting that Shiloh showed up at the ballet school lobby, the smell of cigarette smoke clinging to him like a second jacket. His stomach was a ball of nerves, tightly wound and making it impossible to ingest anything other than his newfound diet of cigarettes; somehow, this had to turn out, whether it was for the good or the worst, there needed to be some conclusion to this. Unsure of where to go, Shiloh approached the front counter to ask for some direction, though he was positive it sounded strange asking for how to get to their rehearsal room so close to a performance. But he wasn’t about to just go in there unannounced; that would be plain rude.
Poe had left word at the front desk that Shiloh would be coming, and he’d asked that Shiloh be shown to the practice room. He, himself, had gone to the practice room a full half hour early, and he was practicing at one of the barres to keep himself from going nuts. Dancing, for Poe, was all about getting lost in feeling and movement, and it meant he couldn’t really worry about messing things up, so when Shiloh was led into the room, Poe had his eyes closed, and he was going through the movements of the dance, already dressed in silver and white for the performance.
It was a sweet young woman who led Shiloh to the practice room, leaving him at the door before disappearing back down the corridor they had come. Shiloh didn’t enter right away, needing a moment to steel his own nerves, to take a few cleansing breaths, but it wasn’t long until he moved to stand in the doorway, leaning against the frame, arms folded casually across his chest. For a while, all he did was watch Poe dance, head tilting to the side until it too rested against the door frame. Shiloh didn’t want to disturb him, didn’t want to end this moment, but one of them had to.
“Hey,” Shiloh said after another handful of moments spent playing spectator.
Poe started when he heard Shiloh’s voice, but it wasn’t Shiloh’s fault; he would have reacted the same way to anything that jarred him from the dance. His gaze met Shiloh’s in the wall of mirrors, and he reached for the towel draped over the barre to dry his brow and buy time to calm down the butterflies in his stomach.
Once he could breathe again, Poe turned around and approached his father - and, oh, that felt so strange to actually think. Actually and really, not just something in his head that might happen someday that wasn’t today. He stopped midway across the practice room, taupe ballet slippers making no sound whatsoever, and he bit his lip. “Um, hi?”
A small smile pulled at his lips then, giving Poe a small nod of his head in response. “I know you never got the opportunity to see your mother dance... but did you ever see a video, perhaps, of one of her performances?” Shiloh moved away from the doorway then, approaching Poe slowly, a bit of worry in the way he moved, just as unsure as to how this would all work as Poe himself was. “You... dance like she did. You definitely got her grace, not mine.” A small laugh, nervous, but genuine.
“I’m sorry I left in the middle of lunch,” Shiloh said a moment later, running a hand back through his hair, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I wasn’t very well prepared for our conversation. I really wasn’t prepared to see her journal. But I didn’t handle it very well, and I’m sorry that I reacted the way I did.” He closed his eyes for a moment, hand falling back to his side before he looked back towards Poe, expression open. “I hope you can forgive me. For... everything.”
Poe found he had trouble maintaining eye contact after the comment about his mother. He shook his head no when asked about seeing a video of her, because he never had. He didn’t even have pictures, since his mother hadn’t had parents either. He didn’t know about portals or Creations, and he just thought his grandmother had died somehow, like his mom had, and hadn’t been able to raise her to take pictures to pass along.
When Shiloh apologized, Poe looked up, eyes blue and damp and uncertain. “Why didn’t you ever come?” he asked, repeating the unanswered question from the forums.
Shiloh said nothing for a long while; the boy asked questions that were hard to answer, hard to think about. “Come back to the restaurant or back to Boston?” he asked, wanting to make sure he answered the right question, unwilling to be a failure in such circumstances.
“Boston.”
Of course he meant Boston. Shiloh sighed softly, wondering best how to phrase his intentions from twenty years past. “I can’t say that I was the most thoughtful person back then, Poe. When I lost contact with your mother, I just moved on and did what I wanted. I was still in college then, then I was off to grad school, and things just snowballed from there. I’ve spent the last twenty years living pretty much for myself, doing what I wanted, and not really thinking about other people. But if I had known...” Shiloh trailed off, rubbing again at the back of his neck.
“I would have come back. I would have come back without even hesitating.” Shiloh looked full on at him then, hoping this would be some sort of explanation that Poe could accept.
Poe had grown up with a diary and his father’s name in a heart. He’d grown up believing the stories of the dancing girls and the costume women, stories about love and romance that even ended in a beautiful death. In his mind, it had all been very Romeo and Juliet, which was silly for a boy, but that’s what it had been. He understood what Shiloh said, but that didn’t change the fact that it made all those beliefs untrue. No more thinking his parents had been kept apart by evil parents or horrid twists of fate, that love had reached through time and past death. None of that, and he pressed the tip of one ballet slipper to the tip of the other, pressing down hard enough to feel the ache in his toes. “Oh,” he said simply. “Did you like living like that?” he asked, the question sounding echo, even to his own young ears.
He didn’t reply for a long while unsure of how to answer. Did he like it? He had, or he wouldn’t have continued on like that for so long. But now that he had started to set down roots here in Seattle, Shiloh had to wonder what he had missed out on living as he had for so long. “I did when that was my world. Now, I’m starting to wonder why I didn’t stop sooner.” Shiloh let out a sigh before shifting, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket and flipping it open, a recently-creased picture withdrawn from main pocket.
“I found this last night, or actually, I was looking for it. I knew I had it somewhere, and I thought you might like to see it.” Shiloh crossed towards Poe, closing the distance between them, holding the folded photograph out towards him. It was a picture of Shiloh and Lily shortly after their too-short relationship together. She was beaming and he had his arms around her, lips pressed to her cheek, ghosts of people milling behind them post-performance. Happier times, less complicated times.
Poe took the folded photograph between his fingers, unfolding it and then running his fingers along the creases. He bit his lip, and when that didn’t keep him from crying, he bit it harder, drawing blood, and he couldn’t cry in front of Shiloh, he couldn’t. He dragged the back of one hand over his eyes, and he folded the picture up again and held it out again.
Shiloh shook his head as the picture was offered back to him. “You keep it. Please. I want you to have it.” Seeing him so torn, so affected by the picture, he couldn’t help but close the last few feet that were between them, and then, with only a moment of hesitation, he reached out and quietly took the boy into his arms and hugged him tight. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
Even with the warning of movement, the hug was unexpected, and Poe stiffened a moment before giving into it with a sob and a clutch of fingers on his father’s shoulders. It was only second, though, because men didn’t cry, and Shiloh hadn’t loved his mother, and the photograph was still folded between his fingers and getting crumpled in fabric. He pulled back quickly, eyes and cheeks wet, freckles in sharp relief, and then he turned and he spun, running out of the practice room without another word.
A certain numbness settled over him as Poe fled from the room, the cold seeping down, leaving him stunned as he turned in a half circle towards the door, though Poe had left fast enough that Shiloh didn’t even see him flee out the door. One hand was shoved in his pocket, pulling out a rumpled pack of cigarettes, and then he took his own leave from the room, the cigarette dangling from his lips as he went outside. That had gone spectacularly bad, he thought, as he slumped against the wall outside the school, cigarette lit, puffing away on it as though it held the answers he needed. The answers weren’t there, though, and he knew it.
Pulling the cigarette from his lips, Shiloh looked up towards the afternoon sky, wondering if he should even show up to the performance at this point. From what he could tell, the boy wanted nothing to do with him, and Shiloh was quite positive he deserved that treatment. Lord knows how he’d react if he was in a similar position. Sighing, he flicked the cigarette, scattering ashes everywhere, and pulled out his cellphone, dialing in his brother’s number. And then he leaned back, waiting for him to answer.