writing_shadows

((This should be last of my September Challenges. I shall start working on some for October to be posted whenever they are done and it is actually October :P This one was actually the first I started doing but it proved to be quite tricky so I re-wrote it a couple of times.))

There had been no noise from his room but she knew how much pain he must be in and how hard he must be trying in order to suppress it. They had torn his limbs off and he was having to undergo the painful process of getting them to grow back. Other than the force of will required to pull it off she knew how agonising it must be to do that and he didn’t even have her tricks to deal with the pain.

She stood outside the door, toying whether or not to go in, to say something, to try and be comforting. But it was no use she just couldn’t do it, he wouldn’t believe it, not from her. He never wanted to show her any weakness, any pain. Like he still thought he needed to live up to their father. Except that he didn’t, he walked another path and it was her who bore the burden of being their father’s child. When she saw Feisal it wasn’t their father that he reminded her of, it was their mother.

Feisal at their father’s funeral, so quiet and small, not really understanding what was going on. He was holding their sister’s hand while she cried, unable to understand why everyone was upset or why Daddy wasn’t there. For his part there had been no tears, there hadn’t been much of anything from him at all.

Not just then either, but all through their lives, he had always been the quiet one, the one who hid away his feelings and never let much show. He had been eight when their mother had died and he’s not ever really known she was ill till not long before she was gone. She had hid it, hid it like she hid so many things. Sheena had loved her mother, but she knew there was a lot about her that she had never understood, just like there was with Feisal.

He’d never talked about what happened with her husband, a man who had practically been the only real father Feisal had ever known. Again he had buried it, never really asking her what had happened, never asking her the most difficult question of whether she could have stopped it.

So much bottled inside of him, so much he kept hidden from those closest to him and she wasn’t even sure she really counted as that. There was too much difference between them and too little understanding. Sometimes she wondered how her parents had ever managed to make things work between them. Her father had been a lot like she was and her mother like Feisal. It was hard to imagine two people who were more opposites than she and her brother were.

The differences stopped her outside, stopped her offering him support and comfort. He would likely assume that she was doing it to show up his weakness and he would hate for her to see her in the state he was in now. So she would leave him and let him come to her should he need it, though she doubted that he would.

With that thought she sighed slightly to herself and headed back to bed, hoping against hope that somehow she would find herself able to get some rest.