Chapter 104: Look at me and tell me to leave

Azura’s POV

The stream did not care about anything. That was the part I had always liked about it. The water just moved. Over the rocks and around them and past them without stopping to have opinions about anything sitting on its banks. It did not look at me. It did not notice me. It just kept going in that easy unbothered way that water had been going since before anything else existed.

I had been sitting here since morning.

After the kitchen, I walked. I had not decided where. My feet had just moved, and I had let them, and they had brought me here, to this stream behind Torin’s house that I had not known existed until I almost walked into it. I had sat down on the bank and hadn’t gotten up since.

The afternoon had arrived around me without my permission.

Something about sitting here the way I was sitting, knees pulled up, arms around them, water moving in front of me, pulled something old up from somewhere I did not visit often. Not a thought exactly. More like a feeling that had a memory attached to it.

I was three years old. Maybe four. Small enough that the world was mostly knees and voices coming from somewhere above my head. The orphanage had a rule about the gate but I was small enough to fit through the gap at the bottom when the person watching was not watching closely enough. I used to do it regularly. Slip through and walk to the small stream that runs behind the back wall and sit down on its bank exactly like this.

Not because the stream was interesting.

Because inside the walls the other children did not want to play with me.

They were not mean about it. Not exactly. They were children and children did not always have the language for what they were doing. But they would look at my hair, at the white streak cutting through the black from the root, and something in their faces would change and they would find somewhere else to be. A game on the other side of the yard. Something very important happening near the far wall. Suddenly their closest friend was someone standing in the opposite direction.

Strange. That was the word they used when they thought I could not hear them. Strange girl. Strange hair. Strange eyes. Strange.

So I went to the stream instead.

And I sat there, and I stared at the water, and the water did not think I was strange at all. It just moved past me the same way it moved past everything else and that was enough. That was actually enough.

I was doing the same thing now. Older by fifteen years and heavier with everything that had been added since then. But sitting the same way, in the same position, looking at water that still did not care about any of it.

Some things did not change.

The wind came without warning.

It moved through the space along the stream bank and caught my hair and pulled it forward across my face in one solid curtain, covering everything from my nose to my chin. I reached up and pushed it back with one hand. It fell forward again before I had finished the motion. I gathered it with both hands this time and tried to hold it behind my ear.

It fell forward a third time.

I sat there with my hair in my face and looked at the stream through the dark curtain of it and thought about how this was a perfect representation of my entire life right now.

Then a hand appeared from somewhere behind me.

I did not see it coming. I had no warning. One moment, my hair was in my face, and the next, a hand was gathering it back from my forehead with careful, deliberate fingers, and I flinched so hard I nearly came off the ground, my whole body jolting sideways as I spun around with my heart slamming against everything it was near.

Rhydor was standing behind me.

He was holding my hair back from my face with one hand and looking at me with the expression of someone who had been in the middle of doing something helpful and had not expected to be treated like a threat for it.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"This," he said. A slight gesture with the hand holding my hair. "Stay still."

I stared at him.

He looked back at me for exactly one second. Then he looked at my hair and kept working, gathering it back carefully, his fingers moving through it with a focus that suggested he had decided this was happening and my input was not required. When he had most of it gathered he reached forward and separated something from the rest. The white streak. He pulled it free and let it fall across the front while the rest of the hair sat behind it.

Then he stepped around and crouched down in front of me.

We were at the same level. His eyes were right there, amber and direct, and the afternoon light was hitting the side of his face, and I had not been this close to him since the morning he sat on the edge of my bed, and the shaking stopped.

I looked away first and looked at the stream.

"I do not want you here," I said. "Please leave."

He sat down beside me.

Not close enough to touch. Just beside me, on the bank of the stream, with his arms resting on his knees and his eyes moving across the water in front of us like he was taking it in and deciding what he thought about it.

Then he looked at me.

"What can I do," he asked, "to make you stop despising me the way you do?"

"Nothing," I said.

"There has to be something."

"There is not." I kept my eyes on the water. "You cannot undo what you did, Rhydor. Everything I feel toward you right now, you built it. You built it piece by piece and every piece made sense at the time because of something you chose. And now you are sitting here asking me how to tear it down like it is a simple thing." I shook my head slightly. "It is not a simple thing."

He was quiet.

I felt him nod beside me. Not a dismissive nod. The slow kind. The kind that meant I hear you and I am not going to argue with it.

That was somehow worse than if he had argued.

"I will be leaving soon," he said.

"Do me the favor and leave today," I replied.

A pause.

"Look at me," he said quietly. "Look at me and tell me you want me to leave. And I will go."

I told myself to look at him. It was simple. Turn my head to the left and find his face, open my mouth, and say the words. Five words. Simple ones. I want you to leave. And then he would go, and I could sit here alone by the stream the way I had been sitting before he appeared, and everything would be exactly as it was.

But I could not do it.

I sat completely still, looking at the water, and my head would not turn, and I did not understand it. I had looked him in the eye yesterday and told him his presence suffocated me. I had told him he had no right over me. I had turned my back on him and walked out the door. All of that had been completely possible.

This one thing was not.

He did not say anything about it. He just sat there and waited and let me fail at it in silence.

His hand moved.

Lifting slightly from where it was resting on his knee and shifted toward me by an inch or two.

I moved mine away from his when I realised what he was doing.

"I want to make things better between us," he said.

"I do not think that is going to work," I said.

"I am not giving up on it."

I looked at the water. "You are going to be disappointed."

"Probably," he said simply. "But I am not giving up."

I did not have anything to say back to that. It sat in the air between us, and I left it there, and the stream kept moving and the afternoon kept being warm around us, and neither of us spoke for a little while.

He stood up.

He brushed the grass off his clothes slowly and looked at the water for a moment with his hands at his sides.

"I am going to give you space," he said. "Since my presence suffocates you." A pause. "But if it gets dark and you are not back inside, I am coming to find you. Whether you like it or not."

I looked up at him. "You are not my father. You are not anything to me right now." I held his gaze. "Please disappear."

He looked at me.

Nothing moved in his expression. No flinch. No reaction. Just that steady look that he had when he had decided something all the way through and was not going to be shifted on it.

Then he turned and walked away from the stream. His footsteps were quiet on the bank and then quieter as he moved back toward the house and then gone entirely as the distance swallowed them.

I turned back to the water.

I sat with the quiet he left behind and tried to understand why my head had not turned when he asked it to. Why were those five words completely unavailable when every other word I had said to him in the past two days had come out exactly as intended?

The stream kept moving.

It had no opinion on any of this.

I pressed my chin to my knees and let the afternoon sit around me and did not look at the empty space beside me where he had been.

Then something caught my eye.

On the bank. Right where he had been sitting. Something small and dark, sitting in the grass where his hand had rested.

I reached over and picked it up.

A tie. Small and simple. The kind used for hair.

I turned it over in my fingers. It smelled like him. I should throw it in the stream. I should drop it and walk away and pretend I had never seen it.

But it ended up in my pocket instead.

I did not know why.