Title: Solstice
Rating: T
Disclaimer: Fill in the legal
A/N: Yes, I'm back to the weird, themed monologues... This time, anyway.
It filtered away, piece by piece, until the day he woke up and found that everything was gone. Even weekend custody, because his sweet little daughter was twenty and off at the college he was mostly paying for because he still made the same kind of salary he once supported a family on. It's the least he could do, the really least, because he wasn't around for anything important.
The days were shorter and the nights long and cold, because he missed all the boats and got too old to do anything but go to a job he hated and come home and watch bad TV. His daughter didn't call much, because she had a life and a future.
He had neither, and hadn't for a really long time.
A little more than a decade ago, he ran away for a couple of years. Pissed away all his savings in the sun and the sand, then gravitated back to the only place he'd ever remotely belonged, however briefly. He wasn't much good at surfing anyway, even after his neck healed.
He missed the Pennsylvania winters, which were the exact median between the harsh eight month freeze of the north and the negligible flurries of the south. They were reliable. You could feel them coming. Not like hurricanes, which plagued the tropics and kept him in a state of panic all through the season. Pennsylvania didn't pull that kind of shit on him, at least.
He was a winter person, which was kind of a shock to find out after dreaming of the beach all his adult life. There was something calming about the long emptiness, brown hills of skeleton trees and the tiny nests of warmth humanity carved out the raw cold. The ocean took too much and gave too little back, sweeping his hopes out to sea and washing his troubles up again like driftwood.
Even though his neck twinged in the cold, the ache of bone remembering that they had been broken, he felt at home in the grayness of the season. He was seeped in the sorrow of the world, everyone else's complaints and the scraping hollowness of his own existence. Winter felt like the end of the world, like the old Norse warrior-poets had promised. There are days when he'd welcome the apocalypse, shaking away the whole of creation like an Etch-A-Sketch doodle until it was all white and clean again.
His timing had been bad, all those years ago. An eight-year-old is not the same person as a ten-year-old, and doesn't look at the man who disappeared for two years like a father anymore. She's her mother's daughter now, and as such, quite beyond his reach.
He's glad for her. She'll be much happier if she's nothing like him. She still has his surname, but some man will wipe away that last trace of him in time.
So, yeah, his life grew darker and colder for a long time. And he let it. Because he discovered that he's a winter person.
The last thing he let go of was his daughter, and he simply realized that Sasha was not "his." She was her own person. As much as he loved her, and always would, there was nothing more he could do.
His life was wide and empty around him, like a snow-covered field, and for once, everything's in perfect balance like the solstice in the deepest heart of the cold.
Winter's not barren, not really. Life's just sleeping under the snow, waiting out the hardship. Eventually it thaws. Eventually there's a chance to start over.
It's sort of sad, he realized, that it's taken him this long to see it, but he's not dead yet and the world isn't ending any time soon. He's still got some time left, a couple of decades.
Enough time to see the spring again.
A/N: So, tell me, my friends... Do I pull too many punches with Toby? I feel like I do... I just can't bear to not leave him without a sliver of hope. (That's the show's writers' job.) Anyway, I'd like to dedicate this fic to the early, bitterly cold winter a'brewin' here in the Keystone state. This one's for you...