gonebackto505 - Tumblr blog

gonebackto505 · 5 months ago

Text

Not Enough Time

Summary: Silco met Lydia when he was 31 and his life was never the same. He never thought he would find someone who could understand and love him like she did, so effortlessly. Their life together seemed almost like a dream, but then the bridge events happened, and Silco witnessed hell first hand. Once again, his life changed drastically and would never be the same. A story about grief, healing together, forgiving past mistakes and a love that is all consuming.

Prelude – Childhood years

tw: domestic violence, death

Silco knew from a very early age not to trust anyone. That’s a lesson he learned when he was still a boy, living with an unstable mother and a stern father, and no siblings to share his torments. Due to her fragile health, which included asthma attacks and fainting spells, Adele was forced to stop working at the mines when Silco was 9 years old, meaning the trio had to make it under his father’s small mining wage. They never experienced a luxurious lifestyle, but after his mother’s retirement they started to know misery from up close. Edgar, always armed with hard blue eyes and very few words, was quick to blame his wife for everything that went wrong in their lives, but she never reacted to his anger. And then the beating started.

He had a hard time recognizing that violent man as his father, and would sometimes lock himself in the bathroom when the angry screams started – he would sit in the empty bathtub, close his eyes and imagine a life where they didn’t have to scrap for coins, a universe where his father still looked kindly at his mother, and she wasn’t bedridden all the time. He never allowed himself to cry. Silco had accidentally fallen asleep inside that bathtub more times than he could count, waking up long after the fights had ended, the moon high in the sky. As the years passed, however, he started to feel ashamed of this habit, angry at himself for being so cowardly and helpless, a skinny and weak boy unable to protect his own mother. He would sometimes search for her eyes in the morning, while the two of them would sit together to eat a small breakfast, her dark orbits he had always found so beautiful, looking for a sign of hurt or betrayal, but he never managed to find any. When she wasn’t staring blankly at her plate, Adele would look at him lovingly, going as far as to cradle his narrow face in her thin palm. “My sweet boy”, she called him sometimes, and even though she never said those three words Silco knew he was loved.

During an evening, a few months after his twelfth birthday, his father came from work with heavier steps than usual, which signaled he had been drinking after his shift. Adele was lying down on the couch while Silco was making her tea, a special kind that used to help her breathe and sleep better, and none of them had time to react before Edgar grasped the woman’s arm, and in a tentative way to pull her to her feet he only managed to throw her on her knees on the ground. Immediately after hearing the loud thud, Silco rushed to where his parents were, not knowing exactly what to do.

“Here I am coming home after another long fucking shift – his father was saying, in a small tone – to find you doing nothing, only sleeping. You must think me an idiot, working myself to death while you sit on your ass all day, doing no good to anyone…”

Silco hated when his father yelled, his deep voice resonating through their small house, but his calm demeanor scared him ten times more. He spoke devoid of emotions, as if not feeling anything at all, but that didn’t stop his fist from hitting Adele’s cheek, where a bruise had already marked her from previous fights. In that moment, finding a beam of courage in the middle of all his anger and fear, Silco kicked his father’s stomach, trying to do all he could to put some distance between that beast and his injured mother. He felt his whole body electrified, his mind unable to find any coherent thoughts, and he barely felt when his father’s fists started hitting him.

Years later, when trying to remember that night, this specific moment was a blur in his head, a lost memory, and all he remembered was waking up the next day, his entire body sore and the certainty of some broken bones. It took him a while to get up, but eventually he managed to go to the bathroom and get himself cleaned and patched up. During the rest of the day, he and his mother didn’t exchange a word. He would sometimes ask her if she wanted tea or if she was cold, but she stayed silent, never raising her eyes to meet his, more depressed than he had ever seen her. Something shifted between the two of them after that fight, Adele retreating even more inside herself, her thoughts and feelings unknown to the world, and Silco slowly but firmly raising a quiet anger, born out of years of violence and resentment, inside his chest. His father never came home that night, or the next night. They eventually founded out he had died during an accident in the mines, and that was it, they never truly discussed about it. Adele didn’t seem affected by the news, remaining as her usual melancholic and silent self, her mind distant from everything that happened around her. Silco, on the other hand, had no idea how he was supposed to grieve, and his lack of emotions in the face of the news was something that later would scare him.

The thing is, while he loved his mother and held their interactions, messy and strange as they were, deeply in his heart, he felt nothing positive towards his father. For a while, he tried to believe that that man loved his family and would someday magically change, becoming a good husband and father, but that was just a stupid fantasy from his young brain. Edgar was never capable of love, had never loved his wife or his son, Silco was convinced of that, and he was better off dead. Perhaps for the first time in 12 years, he felt free. Shortly after that, he started working in the mines, leaving his mother alone at home every day with a tight heart. He knew someone like him, small and with no muscles, wasn’t going to thrive there, but that didn’t stop him from waking up every morning, determined to go to work and bring some money to home.

Of course, he wasn’t the only tween working in the mines, but it almost seemed that, even among people his own age, he was the least qualified to be there. Even though he didn’t know any of those kids, never really interested in making friends with the people around his neighborhood and preferring to stay at home with his books and his writing, some of the faces there were familiar, and he couldn’t help but try to listen to their conversations. One of the biggest boys, tall and broad like a man, particularly caught his attention. His name, Silco knew, was Vander, and even though he found his loud voice annoying and pretended to hate the way he was effortlessly great at the job, he always tried to stick by his side during breaks. Vander wasn’t lonely like him, always talking to everyone and offering people genuine smiles, but it took Silco by surprise when he first heard that charismatic voice directed at him.

“So, what’s your deal, man? I never see you talking to anyone around here. The name’s Vander” – he said, as if it was possible for someone to not know that – “what’s yours?”

At first, Silco looked at him as if he was insane to talk to someone like him. He knew the type of shit people talked about him behind his back, how weird he looked with his long, black hair, how they didn’t know how he was still alive after three months working his skinny ass in the mines, calling him a “dirty little thing”. He pretended those type of comments didn’t really get to him, but deep down Silco cared about their opinions. After the shock passed, he was able to answer him.

“Silco. Not really interested in befriending the type of people that work here, to be honest.”

“Ha! I can see that… But tell me, Silco, do you really think you can survive down here all by yourself?”

“I made it so far, didn’t I?”

After that, he decided to walk away from the boy, not really interested in continuing this conversation, a part of him afraid of what else Vander could say to him. However, that didn’t stop Vander from circling around him the next day, and the day after that, always telling some crazy stories and random thoughts he had. Silco didn’t understand why he insisted on looking for his company, why he was suddenly so interested in him, of all people, but he started cherishing their conversations, looking forward to them before going to sleep. Maybe it wasn’t so bad to have a friend after all, to share his day with someone outside his sick mother. Maybe one day he would feel confident enough to trust Vander and tell some story of his to the boy - Vander had the habit of asking Silco lots of questions, that he used to dodge or half answer, feeling insecure to share so much.

His life at the mines started to get better, Vander kept the bullies away from him and helped him get the hang of the job. Meanwhile, at home, his mother looked sicker every passing day. They didn’t have enough money to buy the stronger medicine she needed, and the herbs and teas that used to help her no longer had any effect. Once again, Silco felt powerless, his anger – never really gone – bubbling hot inside him. No matter what he did, it was never enough, and he started feeling like he was living with a ghost. The woman he knew, the mother who brought him into the world, could no longer be found inside the brittle shell of a woman Adele had become. She was the only family he had left, the only person in the world who held some love for him, who knew who he was, the only one who didn’t need any words to know things about him. The idea of being without her, alone in the world, terrified him. Alone and abandoned to his own luck in a cruel and unforgiving place like the underground.

Inevitably, one day Silco woke up to go to the mines and found his mother on the couch, eyes closed and without breathing, and for the first time in years he allowed the tears to spill silently from his eyes, while he hugged her lifeless body. In life, she had been a gorgeous woman, even in sickness, with her hair long and black like his, her face full of sharp angles and her eyes kind and dark, so different from his. While he looked nothing like his father, blonde and broad, he inherited his icy, ferocious gaze. He didn’t go to work that day, busy taking care of his mother’s small funeral, and was genuinely surprised when he heard a knock on his door, late at night. Upon opening the door, he found a worried Vander on the other side, curious as to why he missed work that day. That was the first time Silco allowed himself to look weak in front of someone, and, surprisingly, he didn’t feel humiliated or ashamed after. Vander had that power, a magnetic aura that made you feel comfortable telling him your darkest secrets, knowing he would listen to them with kind eyes and not judge you for a thing. After that day, on which they spent hours sharing stories and confessions until the sun began to rise, they were no longer friends. They became brothers.

12 notes · View notes