gabriel taft ✠ lord asriel (againstgod) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2012-03-26 21:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | gabriel taft, sara taft |
Who: Gabriel and Sara Taft
What: Gabe tries to help his daughter. Whether or not he's successful is still up for debate.
Where: The medical wing in Camelot HQ
When: Monday night, March 26th, 2012
Warnings: Sadness and crazy? :(
Gabriel Taft wasn't a therapist. For as long as he could remember, even before he'd become the reincarnate of Lord Asriel, he had always been an emotionally distant man. He'd never taken much stock in other people's feelings or explaining his own, which hardly ever manifested themselves beyond small idiosyncrasies. People found him cold, blunt, brutally honest, and he did nothing to change their minds. He didn't believe in coddling; he believed in the truth. Asriel, of course, had only made him worse, and pretending to be Asriel for seven years in another world? Well, he'd be lucky if he ever returned to being the marginally less imposing man he'd been before he'd left.
Sara had been his only hope for change. When he'd finally found his way back to his own world, he had expected to find her again, to be her father again and make up for all the years he'd missed. Because, his entire life, the only exception had been his daughter. She was the only person he had ever said "I love you" to more than once – not on a daily basis, of course, but often enough. He was a loving father, in his own way, because she was his little girl. He'd watched her grow up to be a smart young woman, which was more Asriel could say about Lyra, and the day he'd left for his final mission, he couldn't have been more proud of her. When he'd returned, he'd expected to see her and be even more proud of her. Growing up without a father was no easy task, Gabriel knew that firsthand, but he knew also his daughter was up to it. Sara was a survivor.
And maybe she had been. He didn't know, and possibly never would if Hunter Mitchell's plan didn't work. Two weeks ago, Sara and the other girl had been returned to Camelot broken seemingly beyond repair. Gabriel had only seen her once originally, and through a two-way mirror at that, and what he'd seen was not his daughter. Sara was unrecognizable from the strong young woman he'd left behind so many years ago, skeleton-thin and tortured to the brink of insanity by the Resistance, and the only reason he was able to keep himself from going out and killing the first Resistance bastard he found was Asriel. He restrained Gabriel's anger to a low boil, telling him to save it for later when it would be most effective. If Gabriel reacted emotionlessly when he was briefed about what Sara had been through, and then later when he learned from Mitchell and the hostile blond what he could do to help, it was because there was no other way he could react. Not without killing something. And he very much wanted to kill something.
Today had been his second day alone with Sara. Earlier in the week, after he'd learned about trackerjacking, the effects of the venom, and what had been done to help Mitchell's own reincarnate under similar circumstances, he'd sat with his daughter once, just for an hour while she was sleeping. Today was the first day he'd actually spoken to her in seven years. He wasn't sure if it was going well. If she even remembered who he was. He didn't try to tell her at first, instead just sitting by her bed quietly for fifteen minutes or so while she frantically knotted and unknotted a short line of rope. After a while he leaned forward and put a hand over hers, stopping her before she started to panic. This knot, whatever it was, was frustrating her more than it was calming her. She didn't have to speak for him to know that. He knew it just from her expression, which was the same one she'd had when he'd first showed her some boating knots when she was seven or eight years old. That slight furrow of her brow. There was his Sara.
Finally, he spoke, very, very softly. "Do you remember when I taught you the Ashley stopper knot?"