Atticus sat at the edge of the couch. His needs bobbed up and down rapidly, a sign of his anxiety, and anger. Laying his head in his hands, changing positions again for the fifth time, trying to quell the fluttering butterflies within his stomach. None of them helped. He talked to himself in whispers, sometimes his voice would crescendo into a full on yell, asking the air around him questions he could only get answers from, from one person. Daddy Dearest. The one that for all of his life had nurtured him, given him everything in the world. The one that sat and cried with him, when his mother passed...The one that taught him how to essentially be a man, was not one at all. What kind of man, lies to thier only child about where they came from? It was a question, that Atticus didn't think the answer would sooth. After all, he realized that his anger was getting in the way of rational thinking, but he couldn't help it, and much more so, he could care less. They would have words when the door opened. He'd give daddy no room to relax, no time to breath, and read the exploding rage coming from his maybe ill begotten son.
Earlier that day...
Ariving at the Alexandria hospital for his blood work results, Atticus was fine. There was no reason for suspicion, no reason for questioning his origin. After all, they'd just taken a sample of blood when he got his Tetnis shot, a result of an escapade about two months earlier. But when the nurse approached him in the cold sterility of the room, with a puzzled look on her face, a sense of worry arose form somewhere deep inside him. "What"? He asked inquisitively. He saw no reason to have such visage. Especially when he felt fine. She spoke. "It's standard procedure..I just wanted to let you know first. But when we take a blood sample of anyone we run it through the system to see if there is a good match within the family so that in case of an emergency we have someone to go to immediately. But...There is no one for you..Meaning that, you must be adopted. I'm sorry if this is news to you, but it is protocol that I tell you." She briskly turned and exited the room, somehow taking a piece of Atticus' soul with her. Devastated...Discombobulated. After all, he was almost a splitting image of his father, and had the strong cheek bones of his mother. This had to be a mistake, but it couldn't have been, and he knew it wasn't.
"You are your brothers' keeper" His father always told him that. Atticus wondered if, being part of that meant lying, hiding the truth. No thoughts of his father doing it to protect him ran through his mind, just cannons of betrayal firing off in cadence, booming louder and louder than the one before.
Enter the Prestigous Ex-Professor...
Keys jangled, scratching against the door nob before it turned and clicked. Atticus popped up, almost lifting himself of the floor in doing so. "We have to talk...NOW"! The deliberate pause was added for effect. His father, startled, dropped his leather satchel on the Lay-Z-Boy chair by the door, the two colors almost being the same. A inquiring grimace took hold of his fathers' face, and he said. "Who do you think you're raising your voice at...I will not be disrespected in my own house." The perfect reply shot from his "sons" "I don't know dad. I don't know who I'm raising my voice at...Maybe you're a killer...I don't know...Because YOU ARE NOT MY FATHER"! The emotions ran higher and higher, his mouth becoming dry and a greasy film coating the inside of it. Tears started to pour out of his face...And the windows behind him showed a darkening sky. "What do you mean..." his father stumbled over the words, starting to realize what this was all about. Plopping back down onto the couch, Atticus covered his face, ashamed of his weak tears, Micheal, the name he never dared call, for fear of retribution, raced to his aid, only to be shrugged of. "I got my blood work back today...They told me that I was adopted. They told me that my DNA didn't match the recorded parent samples....How could you keep this from me..How could you lie to me for so long."?
Micheal let out a gasping sigh, and began. "When you're mother first got pregnant, she got preaclamcia, and they had to abort the baby in late term because it was killing her. Instead of trying again, we decided to take our minds off of it, and traveled to Egypt, where her mother was from. We had no intentions of taking a baby back with us...But when we saw you in the arms of that woman, we knew that you were special. We never found out her name, but we did talk to her. In the little English that she spoke, she explained that she was too poor to care for a child, and we offered to take you. There was a resemblance, so it would be easy enough to pull it off if anyone question us...We stayed long enough so that , there wouldn't be any questions from customs when we returned back to the states..." Atticus looked up, trying to sort it all out. "So you stole me..."? He asked with a twinge of snark in his voice. "Yes, and no...We loved you as soon as we layed eyes on you. It was like you were there waiting for us to whisk you off to a better life. And that's what we gave you. A better life. You've never had to struggle, you've never had to know what it feels like to be hungry and not be able to just go into the the kitchen and find something to eat. Me and your mother gave everything we had into rearing you...Atticus. I'm sorry that we never told you, and I'm sorry that you had to find out the way you did. But I won't apologize for giving you a life that you have now."
Atticus looked up at his father, who'd taken on somewhat of a different persona in his eyes. He wondered if it was that easy, find out out the truth, how it could change the way you saw. It didn't matter now. He had no space inside him for his fathers embraces, but he did have one question left. "What did she look like"? It struck Micheal like a lightning bolt, as if that was the one thing he could not bring himself to say, but he did anyway. "That's the thing...She was the oddest, most beautiful woman me and your mother had ever seen. Her hair was like silk weaved from snow, and her eyes changed colors depending on what kind of light was on them. It was almost like she was a model, or something...She should have been photographed, and written about." Atticus was outraged at the way he described her, partly because he'd not taken anything from his biological mother. None of her astounding features, instead he just look like a plain black man. Handsome but plain.
As the weeks went on, and summer set in, all if this weighed heavily on him. He had dreams, and nightmares of possible destinies, everything his father told him that night would play out like a recorded soap opera every day. It wasn't until he decided to find out more about where he came from, even if in vain, he would go to Egypt and try to explain his heritage to himself...On the first day of summer vacation, he boarded a plane, even though it was dangerous to go to that part of the world nowadays, the risk was worth his life. Images of how beautiful his mother must have been haunted him, but still, he wanted to know where his blood reached, what history could it tell...Who was he.
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