A Grandfather's Tears
Wulfric / Meta Knight
Wulfric / Meta Knight
He does not feel real, in this moment.
Wulfric’s life is not one of ease. Death is as death comes, and come it did as he lived and grew. Death of demon beasts. Death of game. Death of plants, and enemies, and friends. Family. As much a tenet of South Novan culture as family and camaraderie.
Perhaps that is why he is chief. Only those who have experienced the trials of their home, truly and utterly, can bear to undertake the task.
This is but another trial, he thinks distantly, for all that South Nova is so far away and the world he is in feels utterly fake. One that must be fought through for the survival of everyone involved.
He cannot persuade himself to feel it. Reality is cold, biting winds and snow as far as the eye can see. This is not. He is not.
Standing within the children’s ward of a clean hospital of glass and porcelain, frozen in front of the door that leads to a child that even now he does not believe exists, nothing feels real.
Memories bleed through like tar through a sieve, slow and muddied. Even these do not feel real, and Wulfric wonders if perhaps time and adrenaline have taken their toll since he first left his homeland.
One week he has been here. One week at the bedside of a fierce warrior, one he calls his child, still in comatose sleep from the rigors of labor and heat. Only recently, she has woken up.
Pale eyes crack open and behold him, her chief father. Emotions on the rise, and Wulfric feels happiness through a mirror.
“Where is Tulok?”
Tulok. South Novan name, but one which does not attach itself to any tribe member he knows, and for a moment he genuinely wonders what she means, so blinded by her return to the living he is.
She asks again, stubborn, insistent, an edge of desperation as she sits up, and part of him burns with frozen fury as he recalls forcibly the events of this situation.
The enmity between he and her husband is no new thing. This she knows well, and had accepted if only with terse reluctance. She refuses to see why, blinded by love and bonds.
Forget them, he wants to say, deep in his frozen heart of hearts. Come home. You nearly died. Come home, where the land is cold and fierce and you can live as you were meant to, one with the tundra.
He does not say these things, but Kesuk sees them in his expression. As she always has.
She will not listen. She did not when she took a husband who didn’t value her properly, not in the years since, and she will not now. Stubbornness is in their blood, thick as permafrost.
But Wulfric loves her. Wulfric would kill and die for her if it meant her safety. And Kes, above everything, wants his attention. Just as she refuses to listen to him, she begs him to listen to her. Just this once.
It doesn’t feel real.
And yet here Wulfric is.
The ward, when he enters, is a bright, colorful place at odds with the rest of the building. Decorations and art litter the walls in fun sayings and interactive displays for children, and the floors are painted all the colors of the rainbow paving a trail throughout each hallway.
He follows the green, winding through the ward, past recovery rooms and waiting areas for specialized patients, moving as if in a daze towards the infant care center and further still.
The room is nondescript, as much as a children’s room can be. The door features a colorful name tag and a large paper cutout of a smiling sun just above it. Tulok, in bold, bubbly font.
Wulfric does not hesitate. He moves, instead, on flash frozen limbs, every gesture and action stiff as he grabs the knob, turns, and steps inside.
He has the impression of a dark room lit only by the backlight of what looks to be a tank, of all things, before a voice cuts through, cracking into the ice of his exterior.
“What are you doing here.”
Ah. Of course, Meta Knight would be present as well. He’d nearly forgotten the other existed.
There is a tension that settles like a loose blanket in the room. Meta sits close to the tank, one wing stretched outwards just so to brush against the glass. His expression is hard, eyes the color of steely gold.
They’ve not spoken one word since Wulfric’s arrival and their confrontation. Wulfric never had a mind to and Meta was all but non-existent from Wulfric’s vigil at Kes’ bedside, something he looked upon with more than a little disdain. At the time, he’d not wondered about Meta’s whereabouts, but now, hearing his daughter’s pleas, he can see why her husband has been away.
Wulfric steps forward in lieu of a reply, and the response is immediate. Meta is at his feet, away from his chair, and the little glass container casts an eerie shadow under the flank of the other’s looming stance overhead. Wulfric, barely, can see a shape within, grey-blue and so very small.
“Kesuk requests that I come to see the child.” Because if it were his word on its own, Meta Knight would never give him that luxury. “Alone.”
“Fat chance.”
Wulfric feels the sneer crawl on his face, but says nothing. After so long arguing with the lad, with his own daughter, waiting for her to wake up when she very well might not have, he hasn’t the storm inside enough to argue the point. Let the man intrude on his privacy, it matters little.
Wulfric steps forward without regard to the other’s blustering. He has little idea what he expects to find, and up to now had given no thought to the idea. He looks upon the incubator like one would a riveting sort of animal, to survey its contents, take notes, and leave it be.
He does expect an infant.
He does not expect that infant to be so. Small.
They look like him, is his first thought. Or rather, they look like his daughter. Grey blue, already with tufts of hair beginning to sprout from the top of their tiny head, they look as if his daughter had been rewound and once more graced him with her life, if a few shades darker.
Resting on their stomach, framed by wings which are little more than downy limbs ill-suited for flight, the resemblance is uncanny. Their breathing comes in gasps. Silent, but each movement is a full body shudder, each one an effort to preserve a life that almost never existed.
He thinks distantly that they should be on their back – that to lay one on their stomach is to invite death of unknown causes, as the midwives preach so strongly – but the thought is a haze amidst the backdrop of something that makes his chest uncomfortably warm.
What is it that he feels, he wonders distantly, leaning in, further and further until one hand comes to rest on the glass. What is it that can melt the ice in his chest, frozen over ever since Kesuk left home. He’s almost forgotten…
“His name’s Tulok.” Wulfric hears from Meta Knight, so distant as to be an echo. As if Wulfric had not already known.
Tulok. A South Novan name. Kes had picked quite well.
It was one of Wulfric’s main graces to his people that to hold his family aloft was the tenet of his leadership as chief. Family was the priority, in whatever way that entailed. Not merely of Kesuk, his daughter, and Glacine, his dear wife, but that of the village and all its children. He’d fought, killed, bled, sacrificed, everything that his old, weathered body could achieve all to ensure their survival in the frozen waste that was their home.
He held his family – each one of them – above everything else.
Looking down at this babe, so similar to himself, to Glacine, to Kesuk, and yet peppered with the signs of his father’s blood, it occurs to him that, in this moment, they are family too. Kesuk, Tulok.
Meta.
And who has he been, to try and freeze out one of his own and abandon them to the cold? Who is he, as chieftain of their village, to bar one of his own entry from their feasting halls, their celebrations and rites, for a perceived slight that, ultimately, never existed beyond skin?
It is a question that sits heavy in his bones, leaves his mouth feeling like dry ice, and suddenly he cannot bear to look at the infant fighting for their life. But neither can he look away, because if he does, who knows if they’ll disappear into the mists of the after, just as so many back home have done?
Wulfric stares down at this child, this babe – his grandson, could you believe it Glacine, truly – and though the circumstances were unexpected and unheard of, it did not take away from the fact that he was family, in the end.
Through it all, he is family. And descended from a family of warriors, chieftains, fighters through and through.
“You will live.” He murmurs quietly, so quiet that even the boy’s father wouldn’t hear. “I know this. You are strong. Like your mother.”
A beat of hesitance, the last dregs of something old and frozen as it thaws into vapor and leaves with each breath.
“Like your father, as well.”
And Meta hears that. Wulfric makes certain of it. Even if Wulfric can’t see it, he can feel the way the other stiffens at his side, and a twitch of a smile graces his mouth for the first time in a very long time.
Their family is defined by death, past and present and future. He will not let this one’s future come so prematurely.
Standing tall once more, finally able to tear his eyes away from a foreign little tank with a little occupant, he turns fully to behold Meta’s appearance. He is haggard, as he should be with the circumstances, and careworn with time. Constant vigil takes its toll, as Wulfric knows too well.
There is determination there amidst the fatigue, and within it, something steely and intense, turning gold eyes molten.
The man loves his family, as Wulfric does. Meta loves Kesuk, had been by her side always until his own arrival. And he loves the son that he – both of them, Wulfric acknowledges – had brought into the world. Meta would do anything for them.
They are not so different. Wulfric had merely been too snow blind to see it.
He is as much family as the others. And now, to cut family off for a perceived slight would simply fracture the rest of them. It would go against everything his culture taught him.
And he’d never see his daughter or his grandson again.
There is a silence that stretches for eternity, broken only by the sound of machinery and medical equipment. Both of them regard each other, both unreadable, both wondering at the thoughts of the other.
One breath Wulfric takes. And then he bows.
“I apologize for my treatment of you during this time of survival.” The words fall, frost from his lips, soft and cool and gentle, above all things. “We are all family, and yet I have cast you out. I do not ask for understanding. I only beg for forgiveness and to be allowed to remain.”
It is the words of many beings that speak. Grandfather, chieftain, father, Wulfric himself, bare of title. They come from the heart, as all things in South Nova should.
He is hardly surprised at the expression that crosses Meta’s face when the apology hits him. Meta knows him as little other than a hardened warrior, frigid in demeanor, frozen by years of cold. Any outsider would think the same.
But Meta is not an outsider. Not anymore.
“You may,” Meta says, and his words are shaken, but sincere, Wulfric knows. “I…accept.”
Wulfric nods once and stands back up, tall and imposing, and if Meta seems to size him up, he makes no comment. He turns to the chair opposite of the glass contraption keeping his grandson and moves to sit, his words expended. Mostly.
“Thank you for watching over them.”
They would not be here without Meta. Not on Pop Star, perhaps, but neither would Kes have grown. Neither would Tulok even exist.
Wulfric cannot remain for long. He cannot watch over them all the days of their lives as chief and father. He will need to leave soon to return to his duties. The thought makes him ache.
Meta will protect them. As he has always done.
Wulfric trusts that.
Wulfric trusts him.
Wulfric’s life is not one of ease. Death is as death comes, and come it did as he lived and grew. Death of demon beasts. Death of game. Death of plants, and enemies, and friends. Family. As much a tenet of South Novan culture as family and camaraderie.
Perhaps that is why he is chief. Only those who have experienced the trials of their home, truly and utterly, can bear to undertake the task.
This is but another trial, he thinks distantly, for all that South Nova is so far away and the world he is in feels utterly fake. One that must be fought through for the survival of everyone involved.
He cannot persuade himself to feel it. Reality is cold, biting winds and snow as far as the eye can see. This is not. He is not.
Standing within the children’s ward of a clean hospital of glass and porcelain, frozen in front of the door that leads to a child that even now he does not believe exists, nothing feels real.
Memories bleed through like tar through a sieve, slow and muddied. Even these do not feel real, and Wulfric wonders if perhaps time and adrenaline have taken their toll since he first left his homeland.
One week he has been here. One week at the bedside of a fierce warrior, one he calls his child, still in comatose sleep from the rigors of labor and heat. Only recently, she has woken up.
Pale eyes crack open and behold him, her chief father. Emotions on the rise, and Wulfric feels happiness through a mirror.
“Where is Tulok?”
Tulok. South Novan name, but one which does not attach itself to any tribe member he knows, and for a moment he genuinely wonders what she means, so blinded by her return to the living he is.
She asks again, stubborn, insistent, an edge of desperation as she sits up, and part of him burns with frozen fury as he recalls forcibly the events of this situation.
The enmity between he and her husband is no new thing. This she knows well, and had accepted if only with terse reluctance. She refuses to see why, blinded by love and bonds.
Forget them, he wants to say, deep in his frozen heart of hearts. Come home. You nearly died. Come home, where the land is cold and fierce and you can live as you were meant to, one with the tundra.
He does not say these things, but Kesuk sees them in his expression. As she always has.
She will not listen. She did not when she took a husband who didn’t value her properly, not in the years since, and she will not now. Stubbornness is in their blood, thick as permafrost.
But Wulfric loves her. Wulfric would kill and die for her if it meant her safety. And Kes, above everything, wants his attention. Just as she refuses to listen to him, she begs him to listen to her. Just this once.
It doesn’t feel real.
And yet here Wulfric is.
The ward, when he enters, is a bright, colorful place at odds with the rest of the building. Decorations and art litter the walls in fun sayings and interactive displays for children, and the floors are painted all the colors of the rainbow paving a trail throughout each hallway.
He follows the green, winding through the ward, past recovery rooms and waiting areas for specialized patients, moving as if in a daze towards the infant care center and further still.
The room is nondescript, as much as a children’s room can be. The door features a colorful name tag and a large paper cutout of a smiling sun just above it. Tulok, in bold, bubbly font.
Wulfric does not hesitate. He moves, instead, on flash frozen limbs, every gesture and action stiff as he grabs the knob, turns, and steps inside.
He has the impression of a dark room lit only by the backlight of what looks to be a tank, of all things, before a voice cuts through, cracking into the ice of his exterior.
“What are you doing here.”
Ah. Of course, Meta Knight would be present as well. He’d nearly forgotten the other existed.
There is a tension that settles like a loose blanket in the room. Meta sits close to the tank, one wing stretched outwards just so to brush against the glass. His expression is hard, eyes the color of steely gold.
They’ve not spoken one word since Wulfric’s arrival and their confrontation. Wulfric never had a mind to and Meta was all but non-existent from Wulfric’s vigil at Kes’ bedside, something he looked upon with more than a little disdain. At the time, he’d not wondered about Meta’s whereabouts, but now, hearing his daughter’s pleas, he can see why her husband has been away.
Wulfric steps forward in lieu of a reply, and the response is immediate. Meta is at his feet, away from his chair, and the little glass container casts an eerie shadow under the flank of the other’s looming stance overhead. Wulfric, barely, can see a shape within, grey-blue and so very small.
“Kesuk requests that I come to see the child.” Because if it were his word on its own, Meta Knight would never give him that luxury. “Alone.”
“Fat chance.”
Wulfric feels the sneer crawl on his face, but says nothing. After so long arguing with the lad, with his own daughter, waiting for her to wake up when she very well might not have, he hasn’t the storm inside enough to argue the point. Let the man intrude on his privacy, it matters little.
Wulfric steps forward without regard to the other’s blustering. He has little idea what he expects to find, and up to now had given no thought to the idea. He looks upon the incubator like one would a riveting sort of animal, to survey its contents, take notes, and leave it be.
He does expect an infant.
He does not expect that infant to be so. Small.
They look like him, is his first thought. Or rather, they look like his daughter. Grey blue, already with tufts of hair beginning to sprout from the top of their tiny head, they look as if his daughter had been rewound and once more graced him with her life, if a few shades darker.
Resting on their stomach, framed by wings which are little more than downy limbs ill-suited for flight, the resemblance is uncanny. Their breathing comes in gasps. Silent, but each movement is a full body shudder, each one an effort to preserve a life that almost never existed.
He thinks distantly that they should be on their back – that to lay one on their stomach is to invite death of unknown causes, as the midwives preach so strongly – but the thought is a haze amidst the backdrop of something that makes his chest uncomfortably warm.
What is it that he feels, he wonders distantly, leaning in, further and further until one hand comes to rest on the glass. What is it that can melt the ice in his chest, frozen over ever since Kesuk left home. He’s almost forgotten…
“His name’s Tulok.” Wulfric hears from Meta Knight, so distant as to be an echo. As if Wulfric had not already known.
Tulok. A South Novan name. Kes had picked quite well.
It was one of Wulfric’s main graces to his people that to hold his family aloft was the tenet of his leadership as chief. Family was the priority, in whatever way that entailed. Not merely of Kesuk, his daughter, and Glacine, his dear wife, but that of the village and all its children. He’d fought, killed, bled, sacrificed, everything that his old, weathered body could achieve all to ensure their survival in the frozen waste that was their home.
He held his family – each one of them – above everything else.
Looking down at this babe, so similar to himself, to Glacine, to Kesuk, and yet peppered with the signs of his father’s blood, it occurs to him that, in this moment, they are family too. Kesuk, Tulok.
Meta.
And who has he been, to try and freeze out one of his own and abandon them to the cold? Who is he, as chieftain of their village, to bar one of his own entry from their feasting halls, their celebrations and rites, for a perceived slight that, ultimately, never existed beyond skin?
It is a question that sits heavy in his bones, leaves his mouth feeling like dry ice, and suddenly he cannot bear to look at the infant fighting for their life. But neither can he look away, because if he does, who knows if they’ll disappear into the mists of the after, just as so many back home have done?
Wulfric stares down at this child, this babe – his grandson, could you believe it Glacine, truly – and though the circumstances were unexpected and unheard of, it did not take away from the fact that he was family, in the end.
Through it all, he is family. And descended from a family of warriors, chieftains, fighters through and through.
“You will live.” He murmurs quietly, so quiet that even the boy’s father wouldn’t hear. “I know this. You are strong. Like your mother.”
A beat of hesitance, the last dregs of something old and frozen as it thaws into vapor and leaves with each breath.
“Like your father, as well.”
And Meta hears that. Wulfric makes certain of it. Even if Wulfric can’t see it, he can feel the way the other stiffens at his side, and a twitch of a smile graces his mouth for the first time in a very long time.
Their family is defined by death, past and present and future. He will not let this one’s future come so prematurely.
Standing tall once more, finally able to tear his eyes away from a foreign little tank with a little occupant, he turns fully to behold Meta’s appearance. He is haggard, as he should be with the circumstances, and careworn with time. Constant vigil takes its toll, as Wulfric knows too well.
There is determination there amidst the fatigue, and within it, something steely and intense, turning gold eyes molten.
The man loves his family, as Wulfric does. Meta loves Kesuk, had been by her side always until his own arrival. And he loves the son that he – both of them, Wulfric acknowledges – had brought into the world. Meta would do anything for them.
They are not so different. Wulfric had merely been too snow blind to see it.
He is as much family as the others. And now, to cut family off for a perceived slight would simply fracture the rest of them. It would go against everything his culture taught him.
And he’d never see his daughter or his grandson again.
There is a silence that stretches for eternity, broken only by the sound of machinery and medical equipment. Both of them regard each other, both unreadable, both wondering at the thoughts of the other.
One breath Wulfric takes. And then he bows.
“I apologize for my treatment of you during this time of survival.” The words fall, frost from his lips, soft and cool and gentle, above all things. “We are all family, and yet I have cast you out. I do not ask for understanding. I only beg for forgiveness and to be allowed to remain.”
It is the words of many beings that speak. Grandfather, chieftain, father, Wulfric himself, bare of title. They come from the heart, as all things in South Nova should.
He is hardly surprised at the expression that crosses Meta’s face when the apology hits him. Meta knows him as little other than a hardened warrior, frigid in demeanor, frozen by years of cold. Any outsider would think the same.
But Meta is not an outsider. Not anymore.
“You may,” Meta says, and his words are shaken, but sincere, Wulfric knows. “I…accept.”
Wulfric nods once and stands back up, tall and imposing, and if Meta seems to size him up, he makes no comment. He turns to the chair opposite of the glass contraption keeping his grandson and moves to sit, his words expended. Mostly.
“Thank you for watching over them.”
They would not be here without Meta. Not on Pop Star, perhaps, but neither would Kes have grown. Neither would Tulok even exist.
Wulfric cannot remain for long. He cannot watch over them all the days of their lives as chief and father. He will need to leave soon to return to his duties. The thought makes him ache.
Meta will protect them. As he has always done.
Wulfric trusts that.
Wulfric trusts him.
-The End-
Artist Comment:
August 26, 2022
-----------------
August 26, 2022
-----------------
This is a continuation to these two pieces below:
|
|
Wulfric finally meets his Grandson, Tulok. At first, he does not expect to feel anything when meeting him. He is the product of his daughter and an outsider, after all. Not only that, but Kes, his only daughter, almost died giving birth to him. Wulfric, ever since arriving to Kalmari Hospital, has been living an absolute nightmare. He thought he was going to lose her, but against all odds, she survives the ordeal and wakes up. She asks the whereabouts of Tulok soon after, caring about nothing else except the state of her and Meta's newborn. Wulfric does not recognize the name at first, but quickly remembers why his daughter was hospitalized in the first place. Tulok is her son- his Grandson.
It takes much effort on his part, but Wulfric honors his daughters request and visits his Grandson in the children ward. He doesn't expect to feel any attachment towards this child, but it wasn't until he finally sees the frail infant does something finally click- His views about Meta, his Daughter, and his Grandson. His family. The only family he has left. The family (aka Meta) he's refused to truly accept in his life. He does not want to sever the already fragile bond with them- they are his only family. If he wants to continue being in their life, he knows he has to change.
After several illustrations/literature pieces, this small segment is coming to a close. I have one last illustration to post, it ends on a happy note~! I can't wait to post it~!! ^o^
The AMAZING literature written for this illustration was commissioned by my good friend, Dogblog. (dA- Shadowrealmprincess)
Species © Nintendo/ HAL Laboratory
Interpreted characters created from said species © Rhylem
Interpreted characters created from said species © Rhylem
