The pain is worse than the shrapnel that had pierced his heart. There's something to be said about his own creations always coming around to cause him some injury. The snake that can't stop biting its tail, the end all be all. No one's allowed to hurt him but him. The universe finally obeyed his wishes and like a sly jinn it granted them in the most ironic ways possible.
His subconscious forces his hand to his chest. The pain—the absence of the pain, confounds him. Then he remembers. His right hand is posed in front of him still, fingers held out like a classical sculpture's, imparting an esoteric message to anyone who will visit the ruin of his kingdom. It floods back to him. All of it.
His internal humorist gives him one more before it abandons him, for old time's sake: Bet you didn't imagine retirement to be quite like this.
Wherever this is. If it's Heaven, they made a mistake.
In all his world travels not one locale can compare: It's an endless horizon belonging to no Earthly place. The atmosphere is a contradictory mix of a soft-harsh orange afterglow swathed in an perpetual early morning mist. It obscures whatever lies beyond the pomegranate-red sea, which he presently notices he's standing on as if he's a messiah. He's the last person who should preform that miracle. He's the last person who should preform any miracle, period. The universe isn't entirely uncaring, he thinks with dread, it has a sense of humor as dark as the matter it's made of.
By degrees and without knowing why, he turns around. This is all out of his control now. He's had his time, now he must listen.
The ripples of his steps scatter into infinity, forging a pathway until they hit a small white tepee made smaller by the vault of that fantastic, fiery sky.
A woman stands next to it, her back to him, facing the sourceless, never-setting light. The ripples finally recurse to him. The heavy knowledge of omnipotence blankets him in the mist; there's a handful of people that he loves to the fullest extent an egoist like him can love. A handful of five, that if he folds into a fist would be the size of his heart...
...He loved her before she drew breath, when his ancient ego began to drown in a nascent sea. That ego he nurtured out of the fear that he could not be loved despite being proven wrong, time and time again, until this small, strange, human he held in his arms told him without a word it was safe to tread the depths of his heart. This thing he had made could harm him all the more keenly for how close he embraced her. In an epiphany he saw his charisma could not adapt, scientific methods would fail him in this matter. His egoism had been an inward solution to an external problem. Almost all his past affections were without thought or consequence. He ignorantly loved himself until it overflowed, pushing everyone else's love into a vast, roiling ocean that he feared to sail, for he could not swim in the derelict of rejection. His was the distant love of a man safe in his tide pool, mingling when it suited him. He had cared but did not know how to show it. He had feared it.
A privileged few made it past the breakers close enough to wound him in a vital place. A trade off of intimacy verses self-comfort, one he made willingly and treasured in a paradox.
Morgan had stilled that storm and stills it now. Love beyond what a fist can hold, and he hopes he loved enough to have it returned a thousand times over, and to give it in turn a thousand times more.
“Morgan.”
The space between a heart beat deafens him.
She turns, her profile alone enough to break him. His dark eyes, her mother's features. Her personality, hers unto herself entirely, hits him like a rouge wave. She grew up with his specter in the in the streets and behind screens and between the covers of magazines. She knows him as well as the world does with only five years privilege.
It spills out of him, a torrent of fear more painful than any wish.
“I'm sorry... I'm so sorry—Forgive me. Please. I wasn't the dad you needed, I abandoned you--”
Words line up in his throat and come out in platitudes. How can you make up for this, what do you do. You give all of yourself and that will never be enough to to fix this. There are no elegant solutions to be had. His mind yearns for the logical answer in a place meant for the soul. He regrets ignoring it, thinking he'd never be in askance of something he couldn't see or touch. Out of everyone in the whole damned universe she can break him with a word. She's the most powerful thing in all of his world.
So he starts when she now touches his arms and he stammers into stillness. He has shame enough to avert his gaze from her 's. His pattern of selfishness and ignorance weaves itself true in his thoughts: He doesn't deserve that. He's not loved her enough to earn it.
“Dad? It's okay to look at me. I'm alright. It's alright.” Her voice is like he imagined it to be. Soft, sure, with an undercurrent of wisdom he never had.
She cups his face in her hands. He keeps his eyes closed as she thumbs away his tears. Then he can't withhold even his deficient self back. Her own tears, not so different from childhood's, stream in rivulets down her cheeks, meeting at the delta of her chin. In a fatherly instinct he wipes them away. The very last one he kisses into nothing.
“I love you.”
Here is the someone who believes in his soul where he finds he cannot. She believes in all the things he feared. She is someone braver than he, someone who cares about others with unconditional love. He has no empirical proof that she does this. It's all his faith in who she is. She's beautiful in so many ways and he in all his genius can't name them all.
She smiles like a mother would to her child, holding their hands in preparation of letting go. He knows what's coming. It's played out like this since he first knew love.
“Trust in me, dad. I can live without you. You can move on. The hardest part is letting yourself do that.”
Those words barb and sooth him in a paradox. His end all be all no longer has to be himself. It's his his greatest creation that unhooks him from the never ending cycle of fear and hurt, which referenced around him like a snake biting its tail. He does not have to drown in his ego. She humbles his neglected maelstrom of a soul with an embrace close enough to injure.
The pain and peace it brings is the sweetest thing he's ever felt.