Malcolm Post Chapter Nine (Patreon)

A/N: This is a bit darker for Mal. His inner thoughts are ones that haven't been explored too much as considering what happened in chapter nine, some things have come out.

He hated her.

There was never any doubt in his mind that he hated his mother more than anything in this world. It wasn’t the abuse. It wasn’t even the manipulation. They all were things that of course went hand in hand with his hatred, but what he hated about her most, was that she could be more. She was intelligent in a way that Malcolm admired. He had learned how to speak, because of her. How to control a room and make people listen. Lucinda Albright could have been so much more to this world, but instead, she became selfish. Embittered. And he hated her for it.

What he saw, he couldn’t explain. She had of course told her children nothing about this Hearth woman. Why would she? Malcolm didn’t even know the name of his other parent so it was doubtful that Lucinda would tell them about a love she had lost long before her children were a thought in her mind. He felt sorrow for the woman that had been twisted and morphed into a deciduous symbol of everything that was wrong with the greed of the powerful. But it was the kind of sorrow that someone felt when looking at a book and reading about the atrocities of the past. He hated it. He didn’t agree with it. But he could move on with his life.

Lucinda was not the first to lose a partner. She wouldn’t be the last. If the memories within the world had showed him this moment to make him feel some sort of camaraderie with his mother, then the world knew nothing. How dare she, in fact. How dare she use the loss of a love as an excuse to act how she did. How dare she act as if she had been personally slighted by the world. Hadn’t Malcolm as well? He had suffered abuse at her hands. Abuse by others. His identity had morphed and changed into something that aligned with his own soul, and he was hated for it. And he had lost. Oh, how he had lost.

Yet, when Malcolm woke up in the morning, he did not choose hatred. 

Shame filled him, as he continued to stare at the weeping figure of his mother. Her screams echoing out around them.

Maybe there had chosen hate. Once, long before he embraced softness. He had wanted to take the necks of anyone in the world that looked his way and feel their bones snap between his fingers. He had watched men and women die beneath him and then ran through the streets to escape responsibility. Because why should he take responsibility for it? They had deserved it. The market was better without them. No, there had been a time when Malcolm had looked at the world and seen nothing of its kindness. It’s good. He had only seen the hate and the hurt, and every ounce of it that was directed towards him was used as fuel for his own fire. The one that burned so bright that it consumed him most days. The people that got caught in the crossfire didn’t matter. Because Malcolm was angry. He had been beaten down. The world had so many wrongs in it and he would blacken his soul to rid it of the ones who made life ugly.

Once upon a time, he had been his mother.

“Mal, we have to go.” Lamplight took his hand. It was cold against his palm and behind them, the world was starting to twist and turn, sucking them back into the bleak and winding pathways of the liminal space. In front of him, Lucinda cried and broke apart. She was so young. Far younger than he had ever viewed her. And the only thing he could think of as he saw her turn into the woman she now was, was disgust. He wanted to walk over there and shake her. Shove her to the ground and scream at her that she deserved pain. She didn’t deserve love. Not with the things she was going to do. She deserved to wallow in the mud at the base of this tree forever. To see what she had done to this woman. To understand that she was nothing in this world, and she would continue to be nothing.

“Mal!”

He turned away from the sight of his mother, to the shining light before him. Gripping Lamplights hand, he followed them away from the scene at his back, Lucinda’s screams racing after them.

‘Good’, Malcolm thought to himself. ‘Scream louder.’

He felt no sympathy for the woman he called mother. In fact, he hoped that this moment was one she relived over and over again. When the day came that he killed her, when he was able to look her in the eye and burn her alive, he would remind her of this moment. Her greatest loss, her greatest failure, would be the last thing she would ever see.