How can you love someone who hurts you with his eyes?

How can you love someone who hurts you with the color of his eyes?

There is something; Crowfeather isn't able to place exactly what, about his kit, that becomes familiar to him at the worst of moments. It's the amber hue - the vivid shade, the gentle light - tender and wondrous in his young age. The kit is the sort of painful constant he has tried to avoid - has avoided - for months, as one might avoid flames, tight spaces, or sunlight. It doesn't take much more than a single look from him.

At these moments, Crowfeather feels as though he is living in a world of ice. Any movement had been frozen out of him, and any breath would be enough to drive thousands of ice shards through his skin. He becomes painfully aware of how destructive is the life he leads; a life of constant restraint, of minute control, of erratic heartbeats and an unpredictable, terrible need when he sees her. He feels himself slipping in between his own claws. He must hold on all the tighter. His kit makes that necessary all but daily. The kit forces him deeper in.

The child stared at him with eagerness and curiosity once, waiting for him to be like the other fathers of WindClan and indulge in the sparse moments that he's able to spend with his kit, share a mouse or two and even teach him a few battle moves behind mama's back. Crowfeather could never look him in the eye at these times.

His kit hates him, of course.

He is young, and there isn't much he knows. His beginnings were flawed, and his future is practically nonexistent. He fails to comprehend the power he has by his mere being, over this inscrutable, frigid, dark-clad tom that he calls his father, there to be blamed and hated. Unaware, as he very well should be, that there are nightmares behind those eyes.

But he cannot slip into weakness again, in front of his family and Clanmates. He has no time to maintain the fragile border that separates him from a loveless nothingness. He wants his kit away from him.

And so he hurts his boy. He turns a blind eye to success, and berates him for his failures. When the child speaks, he does not listen, and so he does not hear. And it was his mate that filled their child with spite meant for him over a tryst settled long ago. He knew that it was his fault, however, that he was never there when he was needed, and though he acknowledges it, he doesn't bother putting in effort to change the fact. He can't.

Crowfeather angers and alienates, and it hurts. He has always been much better at that than anything else. It's easy, and it works, because his boy now hates him.

He remembers his son running after him one day as he walks off, desperate, with a familiar angry edge to his young voice as he demands - pleads - for his father to, for once in his life, look at me, in the eye! Don't ignore me!

And as he does, he regrets it. In his boy's eyes, there is a flame, as well as a desperation, need, and fragility that a cat like his son would hardly ever know. An expression and a maelstrom of emotions that didn't belong to him, but her. Crowfeather feels his composure diminish.

The child looks at him and sees empty eyes, and Crowfeather wills himself to see nothing back - but that doesn't matter, of course. Even when the wall cracks, and he feels warm blood and breath inside of him, he seems to see, faintly, something short of a ghost within the tom. Something that had once been different with him, to him. Even then, tighter now, his throat constricts,  and he cannot, will it as he may, open his mouth to speak to his son and say any one of those words.

You look so much like her.

"Breezepelt, don't stare at me like that. Ever again."