Author: Angie
Title: The World in Sin and Error Pining
Characters: Toby
Rating: G
Summary: This is linked to Season 4's 'Holy Night'. But many years before.
Disclaimer: Not mine at all.
Spoilers: None.
Feedback: Always appreciated.
A/N: More from my 'give me an episode' challenge to my friends. This is Tori's.
Also for Grace, who wanted more of Toby's mother.
The title comes from 'O Holy Night'.
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The World in Sin and Error Pining
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His knees crack as he crouches, arms tucked tight, elbows wedged against ribs, listening. It's the third night in a row and it's happening just the same. He's come back, and for three nights Tobias has crept out of his darkened bedroom and curled against the wall. Listening. Watching.
He sees, as if for the first time, through that small back-lit window, the familiar woman and that frighteningly unfamiliar man. He sees her face, pale and pinched, aged beyond its time by nicotine and pain, as she listens to her husband's sobbing whisper. Her expressions have always been his favorite book, and for the last few months he's been terrified that he's coming to the end of the story.
She's his mother. She's the center of his world. For ten years he has been her eyes in the dark alleys and the crowded marketplace, and her ears at Temple - in the places only boys can go. He's sat up with the baby; he's bought and cooked the meager food he manages to track down. He's grown up fatherless, had to be a father and a confidant. He's loved and protected them all with his big heart and his skinny body and he'd do it all over again in a heartbeat.
If she needed him to.
He flicks his eyes to the man now huddled in the wooden chair, and he inhales deeply. He can almost smell the disappointment through the glass and paint-peeled wood. Just who is this man? He's dangerous, Tobias knows. He's a law-breaker and a bad man and he wants his sons to respect him. He wants his wife to forgive him for leaving her alone.
Pa's ashamed, Toby thinks, as his toes turn numb with cold. He thinks that shame is the worst thing a man can feel.
He'll make her proud.
End.