Work Text:
Her daughter had always been the sort of child that stops a mother’s heart. No fear, no sense of her own mortality, and no idea what a stranger was, always dancing on the edge, running ahead while her mother called her back. She wore her mother to a thread chasing and worrying. Bill would smile and laugh and tell her to relax, but he didn’t understand. She watched her little girl, a sunbeam darting through the darkness of a hunters’ bar, and she worried. Was her baby there to light the darkness, or would she be extinguished by it?
She tried, she really did. She tried to teach her caution, tried to make her understand that not every hardened, grizzled man with watchful eyes was going to light up when she smiled and want to play, but it didn’t work. So she tried harder, and harder, she pushed, she scolded, she punished, she grounded, and she failed. Instead of keeping her safe at home she had pushed her away, out into the world she wanted to keep her from. When she ran off to follow those boys, John’s boys, it was too much. Her baby girl, going into the lion’s den with the sons of the man who failed to bring her Bill home safe to her, it was just too much. She said things she shouldn’t have, things she had promised herself she wouldn’t, and all she did was push her farther and faster out the door. And now all that’s left to tie her to her little girl is John’s boys, the boys she blamed for taking her away. It breaks her heart.