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Dry wall. The smell of carpet hiding must and rotting floorboards. Sounds of streets: honking cars, barking dogs, crying babes. The distinct smog of a neighbour's cigarette smoke wafting in through his window. A roaring cacophony of sound, of a mortality he does not possess. The emptiness of an apartment on the sixth floor of a building where every one of his neighbours loathes him, hates him, wishes he would fall from the very window he stares out of every night.
The indistinct loneliness of a man on the verge of madness, his fingers tapping against his thigh, his teeth grinding and clacking against one another. Wondering, foolishly, how his daughters are. If they think of him sometimes, if she regrets sending him here. Do they miss him? (Do they love him?) In the mortal world, there is less blood, less violence– no crown to steal, no throne to usurp. Just as there are no little girls with hair like chestnuts to teach swordplay, no small boys with horns hidden in their hair to prance around his living room.
Madoc does not have to wonder where he went wrong, never ponders if he should have done things differently. He wouldn’t, even if he could. Even if it meant being somewhere else– somewhere the light reaches, somewhere happiness once filled– he wouldn’t change a thing. He is Madoc. Former Grand General to the King of Elfhame, and he does not regret.
Except when he does. Except when the father next door returns home with a laughing child on his hip. Except when he wonders if Vivienne would open the door if she heard him knock. Except… except when he misses Jude, against all odds. Against everything she did, and said, and achieved. He made her into the fearsome creature she now is. He took that very childhood from her– except when he didn’t. Except, except, except.
Reasonably, there should be anger in his chest when he thinks of Jude. He is only here because of her– only in this place of rotting wood, steel kettles and cast iron pans because she sent him here. Yet, is that not what he raised her to be? What he taught her for all those years she was his daughter? To be ruthless. To be cruel.
He is not lonely, not sad– he does not know sadness. Even when he does, he does not. He thinks. Sadness is an odd thing, this aching in his chest a sensation he does not recognize. When his mother disappeared, he did not go looking. When his house burnt down, he built one anew. This tightness in his chest he only knew when he cradled Eva’s burnt body to his chest (and then again when he looked upon her lifeless corpse). Madoc knows it again now, has not felt it since it ebbed, for the first time, when Jude smiled. The twins take up different spaces within his chest, different sides of his sometimes beating heart. For Taryn he holds an affection– she is Eva, she is laughter, she is joy. She is a gentle flower with poisoned thorns. For Jude he holds… an uncertainty, a desperate pride. She is every woman he has ever loved, every anger he has ever felt. She is holy vengeance, violent retribution– she is his daughter. She is him.
But once, she had been small. Small enough for his hand to engulf hers, small enough that when she fell she still asked him to cover her scrapes. Never did she call him father, never did she treat him as though they were the same– but sometimes, sometimes when she was nestled upon his lap, her smaller hand in his, they would pretend.
There are cracks in his wall from the previous tenant. If he went outside, he’d hear the arguing from down the hall– an argument he started with a note slid under a door, a letter left in a letter box. Outside, he’d find the dog someone abandoned in the alleyway that’s been howling for days; the convenience store across the road with lights too bright and food too sparse. Upstairs he can hear the bass of some nameless, tuneless music: a low thrumming which shakes his wilting plant in its pot. Colourless food every time he opens his fridge, a sink which leaks, a curtain which doesn’t close, a bed that squeaks.. Silence, even as he’s surrounded by noise. His cap on a hook by the door, made to look like nothing more than a mortal hat he would never wear. The only reminder he was once something. Someone.
A reminder that in a not so distant past he had held the world in the palm of his hand and still demanded more.
It is Jude’s fault he is here, Jude who sent him to this place untouched by nature, this place of concrete and brick. But, loathe as he is to say it, loathe as he it to ever admit it, he misses her. Misses watching her hit the same spot upon the tree in the garden she has hit hundreds of times; the sound of her and Taryn sliding down the banister with squeals of joy; helping Jude pick out her first dress, watching as her eyes sparkled with a warmth he had never seen from her before. They had not embraced, but his fingers had twitched for just a moment, and it had taken every ounce of will not to bring her to his chest as he would a real daughter.
A real daughter.
The dog is barking again. Loud and ceaseless. His shift begins in an hour.
The dog is barking again and he can feel his head splitting open.
Madoc stands, snatches his cap off its hook, pulls it over his mess of hair, and storms downstairs. The air outside is not fresh, nor clear. It will never remind him of home, but it is better than the scent of a hundred humans stacked into one singular building. He finds the dog in moments; scared, afraid, it retreats when he approaches. It bares its teeth at him and he bares his in turn. A small, ferocious creature– scared of the world, scared of the agony it has been put through.
He stops. Stares down at the little brown creature who stares up at him with a ferocity it should not still possess, and– against every part of him which screams at him that he is an idiot– he picks the creature up. Carefully bundles it up within his coat as he did nearly a decade ago. Begins the walk back to his apartment. In his arms, the creature growls softly, from hunger or fear, he doesn’t know. It is with a huff he turns, storms into the convenience store which burns his eyes, slams the door open, throws glamoured money at the man behind the register.
A creature of habit, Madoc holds the dog close and thinks of his daughter. How he held her when she cried, had not cared that his ears ached from her crying. How he misses her bared teeth, her sharp words– her laughter, her joy, the crinkle at the corner of her eyes. The happiness she had shown him at the most random of times, when least he had expected it. On the stairs of his apartment, he stops, and, as though compelled, turns.
He only catches a glimpse- a bare whisp- of chestnut hair before it rounds the corner. Disappears.
Madoc shakes his head, enters his building made of drywall and the smell of old cigarettes.