T.R. Lansing (darkertides) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-06-29 12:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | # 2018 [06] june, adelaide hawkins, tr lansing |
Who: T. Robert Lansing & Son (open to Adelaide, early-rising and invasive Capitol folk, or a really skilled ninja, but also works as a stand-alone)
Where: Living quarters
What: Father/son bonding time? Secret lullabies and house-of-cards angsting, I suppose. (Don't mind me; I'm just establishing character voice over here...)
When: Shortly after 4am, some night after this shit goes down.
Sleep had proven itself elusive that night, so Robert had ceased to try. He'd come to expect it when Adelaide was away, overnighting at the med center because she was needed there and it had grown late enough that travel between the shelters was deemed risky. Would prefer to endure a night of pacing, in fact, to putting her at risk. But lately it didn't seem to matter whether Adelaide was safe in their bed or not. She was home at that very moment, and here he was. The sleep of untroubled men was sound, he was sure, but Thomas Robert Lansing the III was a man of many troubles.
So he was already awake when the baby woke, quick to ascertain when a soft, playful babble over the monitor’s speaker became hesitant... and then fretful. As far as Charles knew, his father occasionally appeared like magic before he even had a chance to start crying. As far as Adelaide knew, her baby often slept through the night. The latter was sometimes true, but the child had been growing more restless the last couple of nights. Robert wasn't sure why that was, and hoped that insomnia wasn't hereditary. Perhaps if it continued, he should consult a physician about it.
“Shh,” he admonished, gently, keeping his own volume soft as he picked the baby up. There was no need for tears or senseless screaming... and no need to wake Adelaide. Changing the baby was a simple matter of distraction-managing-reaction, murmuring one of the few songs he could excavate from his own childhood to keep the boy's attention. “You can take your tear drops and drop them in a teacup,” Robert never sang as a rule. He'd be mortified to do it in front of anyone except the baby, so it stayed a secret between him and his son. “Take it down to the riverside and throw them over the side...”
Charles seemed more interested in being held than going back down, so Robert complied, carrying his son once around the nursery to finish their song before going out to the dining room. It neither surprised nor perturbed him when Charles refused food. Sometimes the baby woke up hungry, but that wasn't always the case. Given his own erratic appetite, Robert could respect that. In many ways, he was just grateful that his son could communicate desire to that extent. It delighted him to know that Charles had a preference which could be deciphered. As an adult, he'd never had that much opportunity to spend time around children, and he found his own to be a never-ending source of surprise.
Adelaide had made very good points against rushing into starting their family, but the death of his mother had shaken him more than he'd ever let on. His grandparents were deceased, his parents were deceased, his brothers were in the winds. She was all he had, and she could be such a maddening variable. A perfunctory wedding with few attendants – logical and necessary as it had been – probably hadn't been her dream scenario. Proposing had been daunting. He'd spent a long time imagining her rejections, trying to circumvent reasons she might have for turning him down long before he suggested a binding contract. He'd played the game well enough, securing her signature on a legal document, but he knew he hadn't exactly swept her off her feet. Her lack of swooning was one of the reasons he loved her, but he worried.
He was an expert at worrying.
He'd been sure that the child would cement their bond. Tie them together with blood, so much more compelling than ballpoint ink. If he provided for her, cared for her, continued to play the relationship game effectively (if not expertly), then she'd likely honor her promise to stay with him, but a child would add a stronger support for her staying. Mothers stayed in marriages for their children long before viruses stripped the world of resources. His own had.
Christine Lansing (née Marx) had not loved her children unconditionally. Unconditional love was, as far as she was concerned, akin to unicorns for all its practical uses. Still, she had loved them. Robert was sure of that. And even if she'd held his father in disdain for his working class values, she'd valued his genetic contribution to her children enough to keep him in their lives. For better or worse. Until the accident, of course, which had been determined to have been entirely his own fault. Negligence. An example of how dangerous hubris could be to hold up for three grieving boys to learn and grow from. Thomas Robert Lansing, Jr. had failed, and paid for it. His son and namesake had paid very close attention to the lessons there. He'd taken notes.
In retrospect, Robert could see that his parents' relationship had been... strained, put mildly. They'd shown no deep affections for each other in his presence, and he considered himself lucky that Adelaide seemed to encourage his attention. She allowed him trespasses he would never have allowed himself, outside of paid services with strict nondisclosure agreements. Sometimes, she seemed happy with his attention. There were times when she seemed proud of him, of being married to him.
But he worried that there was disdain lurking beneath the surface of her more pinched expressions. That she was taking notes, waiting for him to fail. When she initially put off sex, he'd been content to wait as long as it took. When she wanted to put off children, he read between the lines, taking it to mean she didn't think him fit to be a father. It had disturbed him, so he'd taken steps to prove himself. Extreme measures, perhaps, but she hadn't seemed open to negotiations. Let's wait to bring a child into this world, she'd told him, and he couldn't fault the logic so he'd agreed. Yes, yes. Let's.
He'd been certain that the means would be justified by their end, once she held the baby. Because mothers loved their children. Christine had not been wrong about that. What he had failed to anticipate was how much he would love his child. He barely remembered his own father. Aside from the lesson of the man's death, his mind produced dream-like memories of a distant man who drank and laughed and jokingly insulted his mother in ways he hadn't understood or appreciated. A man who'd seemed proud enough of his eldest son to ignore the other two. Thomas Lansing, Jr. Tommy to his friends. The kind of man who worked with his hands and yelled at the television and didn't recognize that he'd married a woman so far beyond his station in life that his ingratitude bordered on sacrilege. No, there had never been deep affection between father and son, either. Robert didn't hate his father. If he were to confess any feelings on the matter, he would only ever go so far as to say he understood his mother's disdain, and couldn't fault her for it. He might also posit that, resurrected for an interview, his father would likely share the sentiments.
Charles had been planned, as far as Robert was concerned, but he'd been so unprepared for the shift in his world. The shift in his nature that the creation of another human being would cause. He was aware of his son's schedule, needs, moods, and even the boy's smell in a way that he'd never experienced before in his life. Before Charles, the fear of failing Adelaide had been intolerable. Now, that fear was utterly dwarfed by his terror of failing his son. The first time he saw the baby smile, for a second he'd thought his heart would stop cold. That he might never breathe properly again.
A true miracle had been born of his connection with his wife, and Robert would certainly not be ungrateful for that. If anything, his gratitude felt absolute. All-consuming. So when she needed to stay overnight to help at the med center, he said nothing. And when she was home, he did not begrudge her ability to sleep, even if he could not.
He sat at the table with his child in his arms, letting the boy cling to his nightshirt. Chubby fingers flexed and twisted into the soft cotton fabric, and Robert didn't try to police them. Was it comfort-seeking behavior? Had the boy inherited his concerns? With straw-colored hair and bright blue eyes that made his own look like concrete gray by comparison, Robert saw little of himself in the boy's appearance. The thought had crossed his mind to order a paternity test after Charles had been born, but he didn't want record of any doubt in anyone's paperwork, and the thought of Adelaide possibly being unfaithful had caused mixed feelings in him. Deep, pained betrayal intermixed with an intense, shameful pride. That his wife was so beautiful, of course she'd be wanted by other men. Of course one man couldn't satiate her. And... most importantly... of course she'd return to his bed. Because, at the end of the day, she was his.
It had been an intense, sickening emotion... but one that he'd decided to keep to revisit, rather than dispel. He couldn't explain why. The child was logically his. The timeline didn't allow for much opportunity for dalliances, and she would have had to have been very clever to hide an affair from his surveillance. But, oh, what if Charles wasn't? What if Adelaide was more than clever enough, cruel enough? The unlikeliness of it added, somehow, to the madness of the thought, almost twisting it into a perverse fantasy.
God, he was becoming a trope. Self-abusing to the point of wondering about his son's parentage was a bridge too far, even for him. Appearance aside, the fact that Charles was awake in the middle of the night seeking comfort was reassurance of his lineage. After all, wasn't his father doing the same exact thing in his own way? Robert looked down at the large map on the table and smiled ruefully at the top of his son's head, shifting to hold the child in his lap in a way that would provide a clearer view.
“We're here,” he explained to the boy, not for the first time, placing a finger down amidst the lines that represented all of Austin in the location of the capitol building, clearly outlined in green. He ignored the fact that Charles seemed more interested in his sleeve than the information. “Safe. For now, at least. Proper security measures in place, reinforced walls, check-through protocols and our reserves are intact, even after the recent losses. It isn't what I want it to be, not yet. It can be better. You see, there are others here...” The finger moved to the library shelter, recently circled with a yellow highlighter. “We simply can't trust.”
So dangerous, so utterly stupid to allow an independent civilian center. What the hell had Olinger been thinking? Where would LBJ ultimately get their resources, if not from the Capitol? What sort of armory might they be stockpiling? And if one shelter could thrive independently on its own without any aid or oversight, why not all of them? Without unity, there would be resource competition. Chaos. The mayor clearly didn't realize how nebulous that made his position, too wrapped up waging mental war against the rebel army at the gates to notice he was willingly allowing fracturing from within. It might never come down to war if they ended up consuming themselves, but talking sense to a man with an obsession was not always possible. Robert knew that. He had his own share of obsessions. His weren't putting so many other people at risk, however, so he felt a bit superior on the matter.
His finger jumped to tap pensively at the red zone, estimating the area within the dog park's walls. “More aggressive enemies here,” he said, resenting Olinger's paranoia even though he understood it. “Monsters all around us, killing our people, hoping to bleed us dry,” he sighed, mentally adding multiplying beneath our streets as he rubbed his son's back. “And it's all of it my concern, not yours. The entirety of your responsibilities currently begin with the bottle and end with figuring out how to roll over on your stomach. So what are you troubled by, hmm? Why can't you sleep?”
He looked down at his son to realize that Charles had actually started to doze off to the sound of his voice, and smirked a bit. “I'll take that to mean you trust me to handle it. Noted.”
Robert stood back up, very slowly, but despite his parental grace the baby still made a noise of protest at the change in altitude. So he sang again in hushed, murmured tones, carefully muting himself as he passed the bedroom en route to the nursery. “Are you sleeping? Can you hear me? Do you know if I am by your side? Does it matter..... if you hear me? When the morning comes I'll be there by your side. Hmm-hm-hm...hm-hm...”
After putting Charles down in the crib, Robert checked his watch, wondering if it was too late to rest his eyes for a few minutes, as well, before getting dressed for the office. He didn't want to disturb his wife by jostling the bed, but the nursery rocking chair had begun to look rather inviting.