17 / history
"Do you ever wanna have kids?" he asks, completely out of the blue.
She's pouring freshly boiled syrup through a funnel into a bottle and caught so off guard she nearly overfills it.
"Why?" she asks, suspicious.
"Just wondering."
She sighs, tightens a cap on the bottle and lays it on its side. "With the right person," she says. "Yeah. Someday. I definitely wanna finish school first."
"You wanna go back?"
"Probably not to Whitmore. I doubt they'd let me enroll again."
She begins pouring a new bottle.
"Maybe third time's the charm."
"You mean maybe I won't miss another semester due to temporary death or otherwise getting sucked into a void?"
"Right."
She finishes the next bottle. Caps it. Rests it. Begins again.
"What about you?"
He giggles, his smile wide and ferociously amused.
"You're not serious," he says.
"You're the one who brought it up."
"Call me crazy, but I'm not exactly dad material. Because I'm, you know, crazy."
"At least you know yourself," she says quietly, glancing at him from the corner of her eye while he adds wood to the fire under the arch to keep their collection boiling. She's thinking that he may not be as crazy as he thinks he is. Not anymore. But she isn't going to tell him that. And even if he were to someday father children, how would he share anything of his past with them? With whatever woman he makes a mother of?
At what point does he become redeemable? And who is to decide? Because it isn't her. He might make her coffee every morning, but her willingness to move past their history, to make something new, is her own. She doesn't believe in forgiveness for some of what he's done. And their history is between them. His history of violence with others is not hers to pardon.