It begins, as it always does, with a drink. The pouring rain outside is drowned out by the pounding of his heart in his chest, and the scotch flowing, splashing into his glass.
He sees it in the corner of his eyes. A hollow, rotten, horrid shell of a man.
The man pours a scotch. He pours a scotch.
Fingers ghost over the phone, set comfortably on his desk. He considers lifting it, imagines himself dialing the number for Bly. In his head — or is it? Henry seems to understand what he's thinking at all times, after all, and he has no problems voicing his thoughts. (Whose thoughts?) — he can hear the conversation. Flora will pick up the phone, she'll say in her chipper voice, Flora Residence! And he'll cry. He'll cry and tell her it's him, it's her father, and he's so, so sorry for abandoning her.
The phone is slammed down onto its receiver, snapping Henry out of his thoughts. His face is wet with tears… is his own face the same? Soaked, as if it was the rain who embraced him, rather than the child who's meant to be asleep at the manor.
Another drink.
Henry speaks, perhaps aloud, perhaps in his head — the line between reality and imagination blurring ever more by the day — and he asks, why this time? why tonight? Sure enough, Henry answers him, why not?
He's pathetic. He knows this. Henry knows this. The children must feel the same. His daughter, his niece, no, he couldn't burden her with his guilt, she must think that he's utterly pathetic, a miserable excuse for a human being.
He glances at his desk — a photo of the children, happy, bright. It stands, clean, bright, besides a turned over photo of their parents, a downturned frame covered in a soft layer of dust. The warmth of the photo, of Flora's brilliant smile, and Miles' bright grin, a wonderful moment of levity and joy in the children's lives, arms wrapped around each other in a frozen embrace. "I don't know what you're smiling about."
Henry is brought out of his thoughts with a jab that goes right to his heart. The audacity that he'd had, thinking that he had any right to fondness over his family. He deserves nothing — he's gotten what he deserved.
He's gotten another drink. Henry's filled it himself. What a charmer. What a waste of space.
Henry can feel when he's being stared at. Henry feels as if he's staring a hole into his head. The pit in the bottom of his stomach — the bottom of Henry's stomach — grows deeper. The memory of a boy with no face. How he wishes that were him, some days. A man with an unfinished face, without eyes to see, without a mouth to speak. Without a mouth to shove his foot into.
Then he wouldn't be able to drown himself, and drown these miseries of his. Eyes flicker to the window — whose eyes? Both? — and he wishes that he were out in the rain. That he could wash away with the rain as it goes. Sometimes, he thinks it may just be so much easier for him to follow through, to end it. But where would that leave the children?
Better off, he thinks. Probably in a much better state than he would be, left in the hands of the au pair and the housekeeper. With the cook, and the gardener. People with better heads on their shoulders, with a better sense of reality, of life, of responsibility. Something that Henry had thrown away almost nine years ago.
He's a smart man. Or, he was. A very smart man, a barrister, a good brother, a good uncle. He could wax poetic all he wanted about the heart wanting what the heart wants. But he couldn't hold himself back. Friendly smiles became longing glances, became lustful in nature. He's sure that's how it would look — hell, that's what Henry would say it looked, but there was love, Henry was in love, and he couldn't stop himself.
Charlotte had loved him. Loved Dominic, that is, the man she married, the Wingrave brother that had swept her off her feet, had charmed her to the moon and back, who had fathered her child… children. Children, he'd swear, he'd refuse to admit otherwise. Henry couldn't leave well enough alone, and couldn't keep his hands to himself, couldn't keep his words in his mouth, his heart in his chest, his prick in his pants. She'd loved him, no, she'd loved Henry, in a way that he wanted to believe was more, was similar to the way he loved her. With his entire heart.
"She's dead." Well, that was certainly blunt. But perhaps it was what he needed to hear. Perhaps it was his own bluntness that Henry desperately needed to snap him out of his own head. "Thinking about her won't bring her back," he agrees. Nothing will.
"She needs me." It's not spoken to him, hell, he's not even sure it was spoken to himself. "They both need me." Some guardian he was.
No, no, not tonight. He's not doing this tonight. He does far too often, and though he knows he won't get Dominic on the phone, it's as if Henry is taunting him, forcing him to imagine his brother picking up the phone, scolding him for terrifying the children and staff alike with his dead phone calls. Scolding him for having the gall to call again, when he's been explicitly banned from contacting Charlotte, his children, from setting foot on the manor's property, or trying to insert himself back in their lives again.
What else is he to do? Dominic left them — against his own will, granted — but he's not here anymore. That's the crux of the matter. It's on Henry now.
And Henry is laughing.
"He's dead too." Met with a hard stare, Henry shrugs, almost as if to answer his own jab. He glances at the drink in his hand; well, whatever was left of the drink in his hand, at this point, mostly melting ice. "Keep this up, you'll be too."
"As if you could afford to keep this up." Insult is thrown back, flung vapidly as if it ever stood a chance at cutting him. "No, no, I could. I could." It wasn't Henry's money that was stolen. It was Miles'.
"Should you?"
"Shouldn't you?"
And Henry frowns.
And Henry sighs.
And Henry drinks.
And Henry is alone.
It ends, as it always does, with a drink. Without another soul in the room with him, but only just now, alone.