Sometimes simple things are hard to make.
This article contains CWs for: implications of child abuse and depictions of PTSD.
Dinner With The Thornes by xexnoncores
⚠️ content warning ↑
June 12th, 1994
“You deserve a mom who can cook halfway worth a damn, kid.”
Florence Thorne sighs deeply as Robin runs around a living room whose carpet is hardly visible under stuffed bunny toys and plastic cracker wrappers. Robin’s high-pitched squeals echo like squeaky clarinets, rising to the ceiling to stain like dry rot.
This week of vacation is off to a great start.
“Robin, please…”
Florence puts her hands against her face. The house smells like smoke. She forgot to take the roast out of the oven. Again.
Robin continues to scream. She is flying a small metal plane around an old coffee table.
“Robin…!”
Florence's voice stumbles on bone-dry vocal cords. The smoke eats away at her nerves in holes—it was a familiar scent, one that comforted her under normal circumstances, but wasted food was wasted food. There was no magic to bring it back to edibility, no charm or spell to fix another one of her stupid mistakes in a very long line of stupid mistakes.
Sizzling fat renders. Robin’s shrillness refuses to stop. Every point of sound sieves inward at Florence’s inner ear like steel wool on bloody skin.
“ROBIN, BE QUIET!”
Robin stills. Florence sinks to the floor. The oven is turned off and has been for some time, but it’s still as warm as a dead carcass in the woods beneath a slow summer sunset.
“…Mommy?”
Robin waddles into the kitchen with no regard for herself. A bunny backpack is haphazardly slung over her chest, her airplane held firmly in a small, clutched fist. Her eyes are wide and full of a colorful flame-like magic, as radiant as the sun.
Silence. Florence whines tearlessly into her knees. Cooking shouldn’t be hard, but she just kept forgetting. She just kept thinking “Oh, it’s just another hour, right? Just one more hour?”
Tears stain her face as Robin looks around and burbles some nonsense, spittle flying everywhere in sticky droplets all over the tile floor.
“Is mommy sad?”
Florence wipes her cheek. “Yes, Mommy is sad. She doesn’t want to be.”
“Why?”
Florence looks up, noting that Robin does not flinch in the slightest at her face being as red as a whipped horse. She gets up silently, taking the roast out of the oven. Its skin is thick, charred, and black, causing Robin to cough loudly, putting a hand over her nose.
“Robin, Mommy doesn’t need that right now. I know it sucks.”
Robin hangs her head to the floor. “Sorry…”
“You’re all right, I’m just…”
Florence stares. She stares at the massive hunk of meat, wondering if she should finish the job and use it as charcoal or just throw it into the trash like a normal mom would. A proper mom at that, one who didn’t take a vacation because something at work caused her to break down and run into a bathroom to throw up out of nowhere.
Someone lied to her, a small little white work lie, but it felt like the entire world might as well have been ripped out from beneath her when she found out.
It didn’t matter if it was just a joke. It didn't matter if her supervisor thought it was in poor taste and gave the person a good tongue-lashing. The damage had already been done, and there was nothing else to do except make a tactical retreat before she blew up in front of her coworkers. That was something she has been working so hard to avoid, and now more than ever, a year and some change into being Thorne, being a UIU agent—she needed to keep her focus. She needed to keep her job.
She needed to keep her job because of…
Robin pulls on her pant leg. Florence stares blankly into the microwave’s face.
“Mommy? I’m hungry.”
Robin’s hungry.
Florence is taken back to her own childhood. She didn’t remember who she was before she was fifteen, but she remembered that year like it was branded into her brain matter.
A bunch of gangsters’ hands passing around beers like it was holy water. Their grimy hands are tossing around white bread ham sandwiches in shitty, cigarette smoke-filled rooms full of playing cards and worn poker chips that smelled like coal soot, forever carrying that stench with them to the grave.
She’s only eating what is left on the table, what she’s told she can pilfer from the bar to make things more palatable. Tar spit taints every bite of food her little mouth can find, vomit even more so. Every bit of kindness has to come in packets of salt and vinegar, rubbed into wounds that won’t come out—what a coincidence that was often the only condiment she was offered to flavor things with.
No, no, no—she will not let Robin suffer like that. Not from sandwiches, not from her own ineptitude.
But shit, what is she going to make then? What is she going to make her kid that won’t suck, that’ll make sure she grows big and strong like she’s supposed to, like everyone else’s kids will?
Everyone’s else’s…
Florence sighs.
Robin clings to her leg as she contemplates what having a husband to help around the house would be like. A husband like so many of the women at her work have, with their diamond rings and nice clean houses that had maids come in twice a week.
What was it like to come home to someone who said goodnight to you after a rough day? Someone who held your hand, played with it, massaged your back when you were stiff, made sure you were always standing up straight? What was it like to come home to someone your daughter looked up to? Who she could drag around school and daycare to make the other kids jealous, put them in their place if they dared to think lesser of her?
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair. Most of the other agents she spoke to were normal. Normal enough, without enough baggage that they got to settle among normalcy, have neighbors who weren’t junkie artist freaks. Normal enough that they had magic, they were battlemages, but they got to be normal. They got to give their kids the best of the best life could possibly offer anyone:
Stability.
A safety net.
Florence was anything but. Right now, her very existence felt like it was sacrilegiously sacrosanct to be considered for something so crucial.
None of this bothered Florence when she first moved in and settled but now—
“Mommy, I’m hungry.”
Robin pulls on her pant leg and Florence leans down. Her shadow is cast long over the rest of the wall.
“I’ll get you something, Robin, I promise. I promise, I just… I just…”
Florence wipes tears from her eyes and pulls Robin in. Her body is so little and so warm. She is practically a teddy bear, and Florence knows it’ll only be a matter of time before she thinks this is embarrassing.
The two stay like that for a while Florence sobs. Robin does nothing except weakly return her mother’s hug, shaking just a little bit. Her red hair is as mussed up as Florence’s, for as thin as it is.
Westbrook, that bastard. Florence’s beautiful, thick locks seemed to skip a generation this time.
There was a lot to be ungrateful to that idiot for, but Florence had learned by now that thinking about him was a futile, one-way ticket to making herself sad.
Still, his ghost was a heavy one, and a heavy haunting was always difficult for the heart to be rid of.
As she gets up and sifts through the cabinet for some crackers, she wonders to herself who would have had to pick up Robin from daycare if they had managed to make it together.
No, scratch that; Westbrook in this hypothetical scenario is less than a notion, less than an idea. He simply exists as a stand-in, a silhouette, transposed over the surfaces of other people whose ghosts Florence either couldn’t see or refused to, for the rose-colored glasses had broken too quickly in her life for her to process that.
Who picks up kids from daycare? Is it the mom? The dad? If they’re gays, she supposes it doesn’t matter, but Florence doesn’t know if she’s ready to experiment that far yet.
Actually, why isn’t Robin in daycare yet? Why does she keep bothering to pay that guy next door instead of putting her kid somewhere proper?
Florence hands a ripped sleeve of crackers to Robin and shivers, knowing she has to prepare a real dinner soon. But she just needs some more time. She just needs more time.
Please, please, give her some more time.
Not right now, has always been the answer to the daycare question. Florence hated how it made her look, knowing the responsible thing to do to make sure her child didn’t die was to shove her into a small, cramped pocket of unfamiliar adults and even more unfamiliar kids. Where was the fairness in that? Where was the happiness to be found?
More importantly, where was the safety?
But what was the alternative? Keep using someone else more unreliable, who Florence swears is using the money to fund something Robin will fall into far too early? She had no issues with anart, but Robin did not need to be experiencing it when she could barely talk.
Wait.
Who wants that?
She looks at Robin entertaining herself with the crackers and her bunny toys.
Robin would certainly tell if she was doing something wrong, right?
Florence quietly scans the living room and the crumbs being thrown around it. A month earlier, it was spic-and-span, with her having a firm voice to tell Robin not to grind food into the carpet.
But something creeps up Florence’s spine and she finds herself moving into the bathroom’s door, just out of sight where Robin can’t see.
Am I gonna mess her up?
It’s the thought every parent has. Hopefully. Really hopefully. Florence wonders for a moment if her own parents, wherever they were, however they died, held that thought in their brain spaces for just long enough for love to take hold, for just long enough for the imprint of a future to take shape against everything they would have wanted, hopefully, as good parents.
Good parents.
Florence wipes her eyes wondering if she’s a good parent, or something lesser. There was no being a bad parent in her mind—there was something not worse but lesser about you if you failed to live up to those expectations. Something that scraped you until you were no more, boiling you into mush until your kids were unrecognizable from what you wanted them to grow up to be, all because of your failure.
Was it wrong for a parent to want? The simple answer was “no”, but then one had to ask for what. For what does a parent want?
I only want the best for my child. Who decided what was best?
She doesn’t realize how many tears are falling down her face until she’s on the floor. Sobbing quietly, against a half-dark of nascent uncertainty and doubt so potent it was squeezing her for air.
I only want Robin to have it better than me, she thinks, clenching her teeth together as her vision blurs and she smears salt against her cheeks.
And I’m already failing that.
Already failing that.
Florence can’t remember the last time she’s cried like this. At Westbrook’s betrayal, she was as still as stone finding out the skeleton of his true motives—at Robin’s birth, she was a bucket of smiles that the delivery went as smoothly as it did. They told her Robin was going to be born breached, and she was, but everything ended up okay.
So why now?
Why now of all goddamn times?
She can’t stop crying. Can’t stop seeing Westbrook’s face in her mind, his face among a crowd of women and their husbands making more money than her, farther along in their careers with two-and-a-half beautiful kids tailing them that were growing up in strong, normal schools, carrying plastic lunchboxes with food their mothers actually carefully cooked instead of relying on faulty instinct over.
Florence screams out silently to some unknown as she pushes her head into her knees. Her face is a mess of snot and tears, smeared over greasy sweatpants she needs to change but god dammit it was hard to remember to do shit this vacation. Shower, sleep, eat, feed herself—what gives?! Was she three years old?! Why was all of that a struggle now?!
Everything breaks as she does not realize Robin is watching her, watching her from a chipped corner where the paint is peeling off. She picks at it aimlessly simply watching her mother, watching with wide, curious eyes that understand nothing at all except that there is pain, Florence is in pain.
Mother is in pain.
“Mommy?”
Florence jerks. She nearly shoves herself into the bathroom and slams to lock the door until Robin holds up an empty piece of crinkled beige plastic.
“I’m really hungry.”
Florence blinks. She blinks away tears as tough as she can, staggering to her feet.
Robin glows, in that moment. Not in any real way, but to Florence, there is an aureole behind her head, a small, innocent light that is so easily breakable, so easily killed.
An image comes back to her mind. She is four years old, screaming as a bunch of men take her away from some red stench in front of her. It is perhaps blood, it is perhaps magic, it is perhaps paint—but all she can see is red, red, red.
Florence leans down and picks up Robin as that red drips down, leaks from a punctured piece of memory that is dragging its sharp edges down her cerebellum.
She is screaming in her mind. For someone, something, anything. Loaded up into a car, she is roughed up by hands bigger than her entire head and eager to bruise her into pieces.
There is rain, but it cannot wash away the red stench. It cannot erase the color as vibrant as her hair, as Robin’s hair.
Then there are two bright lights, a loud thud! and soon glass embedded into her face and hands.
After that, she’s running as far away as fast as she can, because there is nothing else to do but escape.
Florence holds Robin tightly as she lets the lights of the house and her memories congeal, coagulate, and churn into pustules of pain that dribble down her throat and tightening chest. She holds her tightly enough to secure, but not tightly enough to kill.
Never tightly enough to kill.
Nobody will ever kill a Thorne, she thinks to herself, rubbing Robin’s head.
When she recognizes that Robin is hugging her back instead of struggling, Florence sobs openly, and loudly.
Maybe you don’t have as much as others, but you have her.
You have a child despite everything, who is smiling, singing, and loves you more deeply than anything.
Florence Thorne, if most had your life, they would be dead by now. Be grateful for what you have been given in this very moment.
Be grateful for what you have been given in this very moment.
Florence doesn’t know where that voice is coming from, but she’s grateful for it being lucid enough in her time of weakness.
And so, for the next fifteen minutes, the two sit there and hug each other. They hug each other so deeply they fall into each other’s abyss, a pouring out from mother to daughter.
Florence kisses Robin’s head when she exhausts all of her tears.
It is a light, gentle thing, swan feathers upon an easily bruisable head.
But she is hers, and Florence is Robin’s.
There is nothing that will get between them in this moment, nothing at all.
When Florence releases the hug, Robin reaches for her again.
“I’m hungry!”
“You’re hungry, Robin? What do you want to eat?”
Robin has to consider this for a second.
“…Dinner?”
“Yes, dinner, silly! Dinner is what you eat when it’s—oh shit, it’s 7:02!”
Florence laughs, picking up Robin in her arm and slinging her around like a sack of potatoes. Nothing can take away this moment from either of them.
“Mommy can make a TV dinner. Is that okay with you?”
“Yay!”
“Yes, awesome! I’ll go make it now.”
And off Florence goes to the kitchen, telling herself that if nothing else, she can compost the ruined meat in her neighbor’s magic garden. They may have been weirder than most, but they did openly give Florence free fruits and vegetables when they had too much for themselves (along with the occasional vegetable broth).
And it was stuff like that, like opening up the cardboard packaging on the dinky little TV dinner, and microwaving it as Robin cheered with her little hands in the air, that made life worth living.