Last Smile

POV: Ashteraine "Aine" Dawson, Age 5

The first thing I learned about this world was the sound it made at night.

Not silence — never silence. The auto shop breathed even when it slept: the tick of cooling metal, the hum of the refrigeration unit in the back room, the occasional far-off whir of a magcar gliding down streets I wasn't yet tall enough to see over the windowsill.

Verium's nights had a rhythm all their own, and I had spent every one of my five years learning it by heart, the way a child learns a lullaby nobody sang to her.

I called it counting stars, when anyone bothered to ask. There was no one to ask.

My name is Ashteraine Dawson. I have been five years old for what feels, some nights, like a very long time — longer than five years should feel, though I couldn't have explained why if you'd asked me. I only knew that when I closed my eyes there was sometimes a flicker of something else behind them. A hand smaller than mine, holding on. A voice I couldn't place, thin and papery, telling me not to be scared. A room that smelled of antiseptic instead of engine oil.

I didn't have words yet for what that flicker was. I only knew it made my chest ache in a way five-year-old chests weren't supposed to ache, and when it happened, I'd stand very still in the middle of the workshop floor until it went away.

My father owned the shop. Owns, I should say — he still does, though "owns" is a generous word for a man who is never in it. Alastair Dawson is tall in the way that makes doorframes look smaller, and he has the kind of hands that always seem to be halfway through fixing something, even when they're empty. He built this place before I existed. He raised its walls with tools I would later learn to name — wrench, socket, diagnostic clamp — long before he ever had a reason to raise a daughter.

I lived there. Alone, in the sense that mattered. There was a woman who came sometimes, paid to check that I ate and that the heating unit didn't fail in the coldest months, but she never stayed past sundown, and I don't remember her face with any real fondness. My father visited when he could, which was less often than a five-year-old girl might have wished, and always in a hurry, always with his eyes somewhere past me — on a schedule, on a worry he never spoke aloud, on a life I wasn't yet old enough to be told about.

I don't remember minding it, not exactly. I remember sitting on the cold concrete floor of the shop after closing, surrounded by half-built engines and the smell of grease, and waiting. Not for anything specific. Just waiting.

He came to me on an ordinary evening — not late spring, not deep winter, one of those gray in-between days Verium's twin moons seemed to favor for anything that mattered.

I remember the sky first, before I remembered him: silver-violet, low clouds, the smaller moon just beginning to show its pale edge over the shop's tin roof. I remember thinking it looked like the sky was holding its breath too.

My father's magcar pulled into the lot, its hum dying down to a low purr before cutting out entirely. I heard the door. I heard his footsteps, familiar and unhurried, like a man who had never once in his life needed to run toward anything.

And then I heard a second set. Smaller.

Uncertain, the way a person's steps are uncertain when the ground under them is new.

I was sitting on my usual crate near the workbench, a wrench I was far too small to use properly held loosely in both hands, more for the comfort of holding something than for any real work I meant to do with it. I looked up when the door opened, and my father filled the frame the way he always did, and behind him — smaller, but not by much — was a bundle wrapped too tightly for the mild evening, held against his chest like something breakable.

"Aine," my father said. He never called me Ashteraine unless he was upset with me, and he wasn't, not that evening. His voice had something in it I hadn't heard from him before. Something careful. "This is your brother."

I don't remember standing up. I only remember, suddenly, being close enough to see the small face peeking out from the blankets — red from crying, or from cold, or both — and two dark eyes that found mine and simply stopped moving.

I didn't understand the word brother the way an older child might have. I understood it the way you understand warmth before you understand fire: instantly, completely, in the body before the mind catches up.

"He doesn't have anywhere else," my father said, and there was something underneath the words he didn't say — my mother's name, unspoken, sitting in the room like a held breath of its own. I would learn the rest of it later — the parts that weren't mine to carry yet. For now, standing on the cold concrete floor in my too-big secondhand sweater, all I knew was that there was a baby in front of me who had nowhere else to go, and neither did I.

"Can I hold him?" I asked.

My father looked at me for a long moment — the kind of look adults give children when they're trying to decide whether the child in front of them is really only five. Then he knelt, careful as he was with the engines that were his whole life, and placed my brother in my arms.

He was so light.

That was the first thing I thought. Light enough that I was afraid, for one long second, that I would break him simply by breathing wrong.

His small hand found the collar of my sweater and closed around it with a strength that didn't match the rest of him, and something in my chest — that same ache that came with the flickers behind my eyes, the small hand, the papery voice — cracked open like ice giving way to water underneath.

I know you, I thought, senselessly, impossibly.

I've held you before.

I hadn't.

I couldn't have explained it. I only knew it was there, solid as the baby in my arms.

"His name is Liam," my father said quietly, watching us. "It means—"

"Warrior," I said, before he could finish. I don't know how I knew. "It means warrior."

My father's eyebrows rose, just slightly. "Yes," he said. "How did you—"

I looked down at the small, red, furious face of my brother, who had stopped crying the moment I picked him up and was now simply staring at me with the unblinking seriousness only very new people can manage.

My father stayed another hour that evening, which was longer than usual. He mixed the bottle himself first, testing the warmth against his own wrist with a seriousness that looked almost comical on a man who could rebuild an engine with his eyes closed. Then he handed it to me and stood back, arms crossed, watching.

I held it exactly the way he'd shown me — too rigid, probably, gripping it like it might try to escape — and Liam latched on with the single-minded fury of someone who had already decided the entire world owed him breakfast.

"Not so fast," my father said, frowning.

I looked down at the bottle, then up at him. "He's a baby."

"I noticed."

"Then why is he drinking like he's trying to win a race?"

My father opened his mouth — to explain something, I think, about air and swallowing and the general urgency of newborns — and then he simply stopped. He looked at me for a long moment, the kind of look I would come to know well over the years: the look he gave when I said something that didn't fit the five-year-old he thought he was looking at.

Then, unexpectedly, he laughed.

It wasn't a big sound. My father didn't have big sounds in him, not for anything. But it was real, and it startled Liam enough that he paused mid-swallow and blinked up at both of us with obvious offense at the interruption.

"Keep the bottle tilted," my father said, still half-smiling, guiding my hands with his own. "Like this. So he doesn't swallow air."

"Why does air matter?"

"Because then he'll cry, and you'll spend an hour trying to work out why, and it'll be air."

I remembered that. I remembered most things my father taught me that first year.

Before he left, he crouched down to my height, which he rarely did, and put one broad, oil-calloused hand on top of my head.

"I know this isn't fair to you," he said. "You're only five."

I remember looking up at him and feeling, for the first time in my short strange life, entirely certain of something.

"It's fine," I told him. "I'm not scared of him. I'm not scared of taking care of him."

What I didn't say — what I didn't have the words for yet, and wouldn't for years — was that I had been waiting my whole life, this one and whatever came before it, for exactly this.

A small hand to hold onto.

A second chance to be the kind of sister who didn't let go too soon.

My father left that night the way he always left— quietly, quickly, already thinking of the next thing. But the shop felt different once he'd gone. I sat back down on my crate, Liam settled against my chest, his breathing slow and even against the sound of the cooling engines and the humming refrigeration unit and the distant whir of magcars I still couldn't see over the windowsill.

The nights had a rhythm.

I'd known that for as long as I could remember.

But that night, for the first time, the rhythm had a second heartbeat in it, small and steady against mine, and the ache behind my eyes — the flicker of some other room, some other loss — went quiet.

Not gone. It would never quite be gone. But quiet enough, that night, to let me sleep without counting stars.

I held my brother until the smaller moon set and the sky outside the shop windows turned the deep, star-scattered black that Verium wore best, and I thought — with the strange, unchildlike certainty that had lived in me since before I had words for it — this time, I won't let go.

This time, I'll be enough.

I didn't know yet how much that promise would cost me, or how many times over the years I would have to make it again — to Liam, and later to someone else entirely, someone I hadn't met yet, whose smile I hadn't yet seen and would, one day, never be able to forget.

That night, though, I only knew this— the shop was a little less empty.

The winter — whatever winter I had been living in since I first opened my eyes on this world — had found its coal.

And I intended to keep it burning.

*****

Just the heads up:

Aine's name

I just read it as "Eyn".

*****

For info:

The traditional Irish name Áine is most commonly pronounced AWN-yah or AWN-ye (IPA: /ˈaːnʲə]), sounding similar to "Anya" with a broader 'aw' sound. Depending on regional Irish dialects, it can also sound like "AH-nya" or "AN-na".

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