A/N Well hello there again! Didya miss me? ;) I know this chapter's title isn't a song, its just a quote i like. We're also timewarping into the past, so hang tight now guys...
Chapter Seven: You are my religion
I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for their religion -
I have shuddered at it.
I shudder no more.
I could be martyr'd for my religion
Love is my religion
And I could die for that.
I could die for you.
~ quote by John Keats ~
10 Years Ago
Dahlia laughed as her father ruffled his hands through her hair and kissed her forehead.
"Bye bye baby girl" his grey-brown hair flopped into his eyes, sticking up at the back and all over the place in a messy arangement. His face wasn't particularly lined - he was only 32 but there were prominent laughter lines around his eyes, which were almost liquid amber in the light from the window.
"Daddyyyyyyyyy" She whined, pouting fakely and making him smile wider.
"I'll be back later Dally, don't go in the workshop while i'm gone. I've got a surprise for you in there." The ten year old slipped off her chair and tugged on his sleeve insistently, ignoring her mother's exasperated sigh.
"SHOW ME SHOW ME!" He swooped her up into his arms and whirled her around laughing until a hand stopped them.
"George, you need to leave. It'll wait until later. She needs to eat her breakfast first." Dahlia scowled at her mother and turned innocently pleading eyes onto her father, knowing he was a sucker for that look. True to form, he gave in and leant down so she could pick up her cereal bowl and carry it with her to his garage.
Her father's private workroom was her favourite place in the whole house. True, it was only their old garage. But to her young mind it was the haven in which she'd spent countless hours seated on a hard wooden crate, too high off the floor to touch her toes to the ground. For as long as she could remember, she'd sat on her crate out of the danger zone of sparks and hazardous chemicals, watching her father make beautiful little contraptions with his hands or fix ships. Her mother would sometimes come out into the room to bring them food, or a cup of steaming hot tea.
The oldest, dearest memory she had was a time when she was perhaps four years old, upon one of the priveledged occasions where she'd been allowed to sit next to him at his desk. This only ever happened when he wasn't working on something dangerous, or something she could help with. As she sat there, fours years old, dipping a biscuit into her extremely milky tea she felt totally at peace whilst her father swiflty constructed a little metal car from spare nuts and bolts on his desk. He'd presented it to her and she'd found it more special, more precious than any expensive toy from a shop, because she'd seen it made. She'd watched his hands twist and dance over each other, assembling the assorted odds and ends he had, all the while telling her what he was doing and why. He didn't talk down to her. Rather than speaking in a way she would easily understand, he used all of the technical jargon and then helped her to understand what it meant.
That night, she'd ran the tiny car's wheels over the surface of the desk, just a little bit too hard so that the car's metal wheels gouged into the surface of the wood. He'd smiled and ran his fingers through her hair and said nothing at all. When she grew a little bored and started to fidget, he'd drawn her into his lap and showed her all his drawings of possible inventions - things he'd make if he only had the parts, or the money.
But now she was ten and so much bigger. So much older. He put her down and twisted the handle to the room and entered, pulling her in behind him. There was a large object down in the centre of the room, away from where their desk stood in the corner of the room. For it was not her father's desk now - It was THEIR desk. On the day she had turned seven, she had walked into the room with her father as usual and found two chair there instead of one, placed opposite each other over the large workbench.
"I thought, since you're such a big girl now, it wouldn't do for you to be sitting on a crate anymore, would it?" His voice had whispered in her ear and she had hugged him hard with a squeal of delight.
However, today was not a day for working at the bench. The item in the centre of the room was what had her attention. She ran over and gasped softly, turning to grin at her father.
"I finally found one. It wasn't cheap, but i've had money saved for years now." The shell of an airbike, rusty and dented sat before them. For years her father had had an engine design in his head, along with a design for the airbike it would fuel. But one of the pieces he'd needed was of sphere design and had long ago become obsolete. Very rare to find, because the sphere tended to recycle any scrap metal and turn it into brigs. Most of the bikes which had used this paticular piece were now part of some S-19 somewhere.
"So we can make it!"
"Yes we can baby girl." He grinned and patted the hunk of junk before him before taking her tiny hand in his. "But right now, you better get back to the table and finish that off. I'd better head off too. Water retrieval mission" He smiled at her and wiggled her hand playfully, then twirled her as if they were dancing. The little blond girl giggled and rushed out of the room, through the threshhold of the door where every month he'd carefully marked her height and how much she'd grown against the doorframe. Right near the top of the door, he could make out a wobbly line where she'd stood on a chair and marked his height before laboriously writing Daddy in the uneven scrawly of a five year old.
He chuckled and shook his head before opening the main door out of the garage and slamming it shut behind him, emerging right onto the front drive of their house. Reaching the end of the path, he turned to go right and waved to Dahlia, who was standing in the living room window as she always did. She was waving frantically and grinning through a mouthful of toast, blowing kisses to him which he pretended to catch and then returned, blowing then daintily off of his fingertips at her and laughing so that the sun glinted off of the red in his brown hair and the joy in his eyes.
Dahlia watched him until he was completely out of sight, already missing the presence of her mentor, her best friend and guardian. He rounded the corner and disappeared behind the house that stood there.
"He'll be back by the time you're home from school kiddo" Her mother hugged her from behind and shooed her upstairs to get changed.
When Dahlia got in from school, she didn't bother to go through the front door of the house, knowing her father would be waiting in the garage. He'd be sitting at his desk, drinking a cup of strong, sugarless tea with only the tiniest bit of milk (exactly how he liked it. And how she now liked it - milky tea was for babies.) He'd be drawing in his notebook, not wanting to start work on the engine without her. She'd walk in and he'd look up, throw down his notebook and run to hug her, ruffle her hair and ask how her day was. Like he ALWAYS did.
Her eyes blurred as the handle to pull up the garage door slipped beneath her sweaty fingers. She dried her hands on her shirt and pushed away the bad thoughts. Pushed away the fact that the captain's car was parked outside her house. Pushed away the crewmate of her father's who had just come out of the house to pull her gently away, towards the house while saying how sorry they were.
He would be there. He was a mathematical constant in her life. He was like the north star to her - never changing. Always there as her guiding light in the black world around them. They would see - these crewmates of her fathers who were trying to tell her he'd gone MIA - missing in action. He would be sitting there and he'd look up, smiling the special smile he reserved for her and wondering why there was such a large amount of fuss going on. They would see...he WOULD be there.
The door swished up and open, revealing the darkened workroom and blasting her with a wave of cool air. No light shone within, no sound reached her ears from the black abyss that had been her haven. No father sitting there with a mug of tea waiting for her, ready to listen to her stories and teach her about everything. No life. No light.
Her North Star had been extinguished. Nothing but darkness remained.
A/N A little angsty, i know, but i wanted to give Dahlia a bit of backstory. This backstory will continue next chapterrrrr and then we'll be back to present day hopefully. Chapters will have to be short and a bit sporadic for now, its all i can really manage at the moment. SORRY! RnR anyways. (also, i have decided upon the names of Dahlia's baby. With a little help from spicemeisje, who suggested the name. However, i do still have a few tricks up my sleeve...mwahahaha)
