Burdening thoughts

Caprica D'Angelo · 01-18-2012, 08:11 PM

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WC:459

If Rio couldn't imagine why Caprica might shun the memory of their dead brother, her first few sentences would have provided an easy answer. The pain he'd put her through, and others, simply enough. Caprica had not witnessed any moment of the boy's increasing sociopathy, all she knew had been relayed second-hand. From piecing it together, she had come to one simple conclusion: he had been wrong, inside, and he had needed to die. There was no way to say this to Naniko, as his mother, but the woman had been there at his death - and she had not prevented it. That was all the affirmation Caprica needed that her basic instinct was right, and Harlowe had been better off dead. It was a black thought, and something she would have preferred to bury, but there was something more lurking in the words that Rio spoke now, something unsolved and fresh - an unhealing hurt, like a wound still infected, but she wasn't sure what it could be. When she said she still loved him as a brother, something made Caprica's heart sink. The girl spoke as if he was still alive.

"He was our brother, but he ain't now," she said after a moment. She hadn't realised Rio and Harlowe had become close: she had thought of the boy as so cold and aloof, as a child, and nothing anybody had told her about the older Harlowe had contradicted this. Caprica had believed the assault had been out of the blue - a purely malicious attack upon Rio by an abuser unworthy of the word brother. What was Rio saying - could she really miss such a person? "You said yourself how he damaged you. And that wasn't his only crime, either - I heard he went crazy towards the end, and when he died it probably saved a lot more pain. It's a fuckin' shame, but it's the way things are. It's OK honey..." She moved closer to Rio, so they were almost shoulder-to-shoulder and stroked the back of her head gently, hoping against hope that simply talking and letting her feelings out would make Rio feel better: not knowing quite how to lay her demons to rest, Caprica just carried on talking. "You have to fight away those feelings - grieve for the person he coulda been, sure, but don't let him cast a shadow over the whole rest of your life. What's done is done - we can't change anything back now. It's too late." And I wouldn't anyway, except I'd kill him myself, before he got his slimy heartless hands on you.

Image courtesy of Ant Jackson@Flickr; Table by the Mentors!

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