lin jingheng (ur my dad)

[bookpapers]

Comments

[awol]

Mm. What makes you think that.

[bookpapers]

...I saw the scars on his arm when we were checking each other. I get stuck with syringes all the time back home, so that's how I recognized them.

[he says 'all the time', but not to the point where they'd leave a permanent place on his skin, not like Bixing's.]

[awol]

[ he closes his eyes a little tiredly. ]

... No...

Not like that.

[ he pauses ]

Did Lu Bixing ever tell you anything about... before we died?

[bookpapers]

[he nods slowly]

...He only told me what happened to you. That he thought you died in an explosion, and that he spent seventeen years believing that.

[which now he thinks about it, makes sense of Bixing. He seems like the type of person who'd talk about everyone else before himself.]

[awol]

He's a man who experiments, some would even call him a mad genius.

[ he lowers his eyes ]

He didn't have those when I had to leave him.

[bookpapers]

[. . .

Lavi thinks of the gulf of grief, of Bixing's voice, almost unnaturally steady.]

...Did you ask him about them?

[awol]

[ he doesn't respond, just shuts his eyes very quietly. ]

I know what they're from.

He's taken out the years on himself. I don't want it to ever come to that again.

[bookpapers]

[ah.]

...Grief can make ya do a lot of things.

[it sounds so very trite, but Lavi means them. He's had an up close and personal view on grief for so much of his life,]

...I hope he doesn't have to anymore, now that you're with him.