Chapter 243 The Aunt
POV: Moira | Rookeries, then northern road
The bag is already packed because I packed it three days ago, which is the specific thing you do when you are the person in the group who thinks about logistics rather than tactics, and the logistics of having a two-year-old in a city that is about to be contested by two foreign armies is straightforward, which is that the two-year-old leaves the city before the contesting begins.
Cormac packed it with me. He did not say why he was helping me pack it and I did not ask why, because we have been together long enough and through enough that the things we do not need to say to each other are understood without the saying, and what the packing said, in the specific language of actions rather than words, was that he knew this was coming and that he had already made his peace with the version of it where he stays and we go.
Finn is not making peace with it.
He is two years old and his understanding of what is happening is the two-year-old version of understanding, which is not conceptual but physical and emotional, the understanding that the people in the room are doing something and that the something involves him leaving and that leaving means being away from the people who are not leaving, and his body is expressing this understanding the way two-year-old bodies express things, which is completely and without editing.
"I want to stay with Papa," he says, and he says it with the specific quality of a two-year-old who has decided something and who is not going to move from the decision, standing in the doorway of the Rookeries room with his arms at his sides and his jaw set in the way that is entirely Cormac and which I have been watching develop in him with the specific mixture of recognition and affection that comes from watching a child become themselves in front of you.
Cormac is on his knees in front of Finn, which is the position he always takes when he is talking to Finn about something real, and he has the expression that he has in these moments, which is the one that does not perform anything because Finn is the one person Cormac has never needed to perform for.
"Your father's keeping you safe," I say, from behind Finn, from the doorway where I am holding the bag and giving them the space the moment requires while also being ready to move when the moment is over, because we do not have unlimited time and Finn can feel the urgency even if he cannot name it. "That's what fathers do."
Finn looks at Cormac with the expression that means he is deciding whether this answer is satisfying, which it is not, which it is not supposed to be, because the true thing and the satisfying thing are not always the same thing and two-year-olds are quite good at detecting the difference.
Cormac says something to Finn quietly, too quietly for me to hear clearly, which is the correct choice, and whatever he says produces in Finn the specific quality of a child who has received something real and who is working out what to do with it, which is not acceptance exactly but is movement toward acceptance, the specific movement of someone who has been given a true thing and who is beginning to locate it inside themselves.
Cormac picks Finn up and holds him in the way he holds him, which is differently from any other way he holds anything, and Finn puts his arms around Cormac's neck with the grip of a two-year-old who does not want to let go and who is letting go anyway because the adults have decided this is the thing and the thing has to happen.
The goodbye on the street is the specific kind of goodbye that is happening all over London this morning, between people who are staying and people who are leaving and between parents and children and between everyone who understands what the invasion timeline means and who has made the calculation about who goes and who stays.
Cormac stands on the street and watches the car pull away and does not move while it is visible, which is the entire length of the street, and I watch him through the rear window getting smaller and still standing and I think about the eleven-minute ceremony two days ago and the specific weight of a person who has become what they always could have been and who is now standing on a street watching the results of that becoming drive away.
His voice, at the car window before we left, when he leaned in and looked at Callum who was beside me in the back of the car: "If I die, he's yours. Raise him right."
Callum's answer, which I heard, which I am carrying: "You know I will. But you're coming back."
On the street Cormac watches the car until it is gone.
"I finally have something worth dying for," he says, to the street, to the city, to the morning that is coming up grey over London with the invasion at its edges.
I do not hear him say it. I learn it later from Callum, who was watching from a window.
It is the truest thing he has ever said, and the most Cormac thing, which is that the truth of it and the danger of it are exactly equal.