Work Text:
“I’ll find her and bring her home, I promise.”
Here is what Alto Clef Francis Wojciechowski Ji-Min Choi Agent Ukulele he understands about love: you give. You give and rarely take; love is something to be shared. He presented Lilly with a collection of yellow camellias when he first realized how he felt about her—the rarest color of camellias.
He stands today in a field that might be a mimicry of his childhood, down in Ireland. Though it is far colder here, something about it reminds him of when he was almost human, growing up (in some life) in Namhae-gun, a place that he doesn’t even have the memories of. He only has a husk of the sensory details, replicated here: A rush of water from some stream. Grassy fields awash in colorful wildflowers.
His daughter lives in the nunnery nearby—a girl who might have been decorated with wreaths of flower blossoms and leaves the way her mother was, who he last held bloodied in some hospital before sending her away. Her eyes were too much like her mother’s. Same shape, the fine fringe of her blonde eyelashes, she only had the same-colored eyes as his. Now his girl is a demigoddess whose touch molds the world further back, back to soil and fauna. The antlers must frame her head like a crown. The way Lilly’s did.
He wishes he could go back. He wishes he could stay here.
But this almost-goddess must return to where he considers his home to be.
“Home” for her must be the nunnery, not the Foundation where duty calls. But he wishes home could be at his side—a return to the past, a call for something lost that she never had. Maybe he would take her back to South Korea, show her the world as she might have wanted beneath the blue skies in Namhae-gun. But she will never truly know her father, and maybe she never should.
What would she think of me?
A young girl steps out from the nunnery, her hands clasped in prayer. Blonde hair peeks from beneath her habit. She closes her eyes, inhales the air perfumed with pollen.
After everything I did… I want to be her father. But…
In all his dreams and nightmares, he returns to the past. The nightmares that hurt the most are the ones where he is a father to Meridiana, returning to the past of his almost-childhood home.
When the girl turns towards near the trees once she hearts the rustling of leaves, he is long gone.