A Slender Child

Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The baby was crying. Again.

"I have had it Sky!" the Tall One exploded, and the five week old in his long spindly arms started crying harder. "Every time I hold her, EVERY TIME, she begins to scream!"

Wearily, I took Robin from him and gently bounced her up and down to try and quiet her. This WASN'T helping my headache. "She's almost ALWAYS crying. She's a baby. It's what they do," I sighed.

He shook his head. "But at least YOU know how to make her stop!" he growled in frustration. Ironically, Robin chose that moment to quiet her cries to small, unhappy murmurs.

I rolled my eyes. "Just call it a mothers intuition or some crap like that," I replied while continuing to bounce the infant.

The Slender man growled and ran his hand over his face, and for a moment, looked more vulnerable than I had seen him in a very, very long time. His aura changed the air, clueing me in to just how frustrated - and to some degree bewildered - he was. Once again he was the lost, inhuman soul that he so rarely gave in to in front of me. Since we'd became a couple, he'd been able as time went on to increasingly appear - at least in behavior - more and more human-like. But at times like these? These rare moments when he let his guard down and dropped the human façade, I could see him, just as he had been when I'd first met him - wild, untamable, incomprehensible, bewildering, and inhuman.

Parenting was just as new of an experience for him as it was for me, but I had to realize that he was even at more of a disadvantage on this than I was.

Sometime before Robin was born, back when we weren't sure how much Slenderfolk would be in the unborn child, Slendy had explained to me what it was like to be an infant of his kind, as well as how they were usually raised. The story itself would have been enough to make me remember it, but the fact that he never talked about his past, family, or species, had me hanging on every word he said.

"Slender children are quite different from human ones - beside the tentacles and the featureless complexions," he'd told me. "My kind... we are born strong - strong enough to kill - and we are born fairly intelligent. Our sense of intuition is much more than adequate, and even more so than humans. Our natural instinctual drive rivals that of most predators. We are born to hunt our prey. Even so, it is usually a few years before our young are able to hunt... successfully. It takes time to acquire the skills necessary.

"We also are very... characteristic. Each of us has a certain personality trait or a quality that defines us, and often these 'characteristics' are genetic and run in the family. The most common, of course, is the blood lust. The ones with that characteristic are like myself," he'd briefly flashed me a sharp-toothed, wolfish grin, "Then you also have those who are like Splendor, who are known for their unmanageable charisma and energy, or Trender, who are known for a certain trade or skill."

"You speak as if you three aren't the only Slenderfolk," I'd said slowly, my mind spinning around the idea that there could be more like him and his brothers.

He'd looked away from me then, almost sadly. "Once upon a time there was, a very long time ago..."

I'd bit my lip, wondering what he was thinking that made him look so sad. "What happened?" I'd asked softly.

He'd sighed. "I don't know... My parents weren't around long enough to teach me, or my brothers for that matter. Even before their deaths, they weren't exactly the let-me-teach-you-something parenting type in any case - none of my kind are. It goes against our nature - our instincts. It makes the child stronger and more independent to grow up on its own, for the most part. A parent Slenderfolk's biggest contribution to their child's survival is to hunt for them until they can do it themselves. After that... they're on their own." The Tall One had ran his hand over his face, looking a bit stressed. "It's not in our nature to be good parents," he'd said softly.

That last sentence came back to me now, and it hit me full in the face what was really bothering Slendy - he was scared of being a bad father. He didn't have a clue what he was doing, and he'd never had an example to learn from. I'd grown up in a loving family and watched my parents raise myself and my little brother. Slendy on the other hand was the youngest child of two beings that didn't really believe in the concept of, or have any instinctual notion towards parenting, and had died when he was a baby in any case. If what he'd said about his kind was true, then I also had to believe that he didn't have any paternal instincts himself either. He was out of his element here.

I stepped forward and leaned into his chest, cradling our child between us. "It's okay," I consoled him. "We're both learning how to do this."

"But little one... what if... what if she doesn't like me?" he whispered. "What if that is the reason she always screams when I hold her."

"Slender don't be ridiculous-"

"I'm a child murder Sky. What if she can sense that?"

"There's no way she could-"

"I'm a monster. What if that's what she sees when she looks at me? What if that's why she screams?" he demanded.

I opened my mouth, but then closed it. I had no reply. Of course I didn't believe the man before me was a monster, but how would you expect an infant to know that the faceless man that made the air around him feel funny wasn't what he seemed?

"You need to get these thoughts out of your head," I said finally. "Regardless of what she sees you as now - when she's too young to understand anything - when she's old enough to know you, she will love you," I promised him.

"How do you know?" he asked darkly.

I reached up on my tippy-toes and kissed his cheek. "Because you're her father. It's in HER nature to love you," I said. "Just like it's now my nature to love you."

That managed to get a very small smile out of him. "I love you too little one."

I passed the now no longer crying baby back to him. He peered down at the child and she stared back up at him - ghost eyes meeting no eyes. So gently that you might think she was made of glass, the Operator tucked her against his chest. "And I love you too, my littlest one, even if you don't love me," he murmured to her and softly kissed the top of her head.

Unfortunately, just then she started crying.

AGAIN.