My Father Never...
Title: My Father Never...
Author: L0C
Rating: PG
Summary: Harper thinks about his father.
Disclaimer: Andromeda is property of Tribune.
My father never spent a day sober. Not a day. He'd wake, often long before I did, and head off down the tunnels to the beaches where he found something to buy. Sometimes he'd buy crates of alcohol from spacers and keep it in the back of our little one room hut, hidden under old blankets when it got oppressively hot in the summer, and hidden under threats when it was bitterly cold in the winter.
He used the money my mother and I made in and around the camp, pickpocketing or factory work or ammunitions or...You'd get used to deception and betrayal living there that long. I got used to the idea that I was an unwanted child very quickly and hid what money I could save to get myself the hell off that rock.
Eventually I began to understand, though, why he did what he did. Why he drank. Why he would have smoked and shot if we had the affluence to be real drug abusers. I started doing it, too.
Still do sometimes. Once I broke into one of his cases and finished off a whole bottle of vodka. Cheap, acid tasting week-old vodka. He found me, and screamed a little, and I thought he would beat me.
But he didn't.
Instead, he cried.
And I stared at him through bleary, vodka-buzzed eyes and wondered why.
That was maybe a month before the slavers came and he died. Ever since then I'd wonder why he cried.
But now I sit up here in the access tubes with stolen scotch or beer or moonshine, and one time, not too long ago, it hit me. I could do better than this. I made myself better than this.
And I understand.
And I cry.
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