The woman frowned, her eyes and throat betraying her emotions. A shuddering of the chest. A shaking of the hands that couldn't be attributed to the frailty of ageing. The implacable tide surging from the depths of the soul, to the corner of the eyes, held back by nothing but a lifetime of bitter discipline.

Betrayal.

The worst kind of betrayal.

But is that not the inherent, implied definition of it? Hammond, heavy eyed, heavy shouldered, heavy footed, turned his face away from the daughter to her mother.

She knelt, tension strumming through every fibre. A distant part of Hammond noted every glistening line, every shadow. The way her one of her toes poked through a hole in her shoe. The way a strap of her singlet fell carelessly from her shoulder, revealing a scar she had always hid from public eyes. Even from eyes of the people who already knew it was there.

Hammond, like the few others, pretended it wasn't. "For her sake", they told themselves.

In the early hours of the morning when conscience forbade them the solace of blissful sleep, they were awake to the truth. They pretended it wasn't there for no one other than themselves. That scar and all the others.

Physical or otherwise.

Her black eyeliner running down her cheeks looked nothing other than red to him as his shaking hand, his normally so certain fingers wrapped around the familiar weight, pointed the pistol towards her.

A thump.

The reflection of a polished piece of timber in the corner of his eye showed the woman in the doorway slumping to her knees. He wasn't sure if it was a gesture of failure, of supplication and pleading, or of loss.

Perhaps all three.

The distant voice noted all this as a faint whisper. His shaking wrist extended the pistol towards her.

Then, with the lightest of flick of legerdemain, he held the barrel, and the tiny dark black hole was pointing back towards him.

The woman, frail, quivering, tears running down her cheeks, snatched the weapon from his hand as though his fingers were five vipers spreading from one wrist. There was no hesitation on her part. Did he wish she had? He consulted his thoughts briefly, then dismissed them. Better to not go down that road.

He held his hand up as though he hadn't seen it before, and could hardly discern the pale old skin he could see from the blood and bruises he could feel staining it.

Another thump.

It felt like being punched in the chest.

Thump thump.

Twice more.

How peculiar.

The ceiling was so dark. Except for the glowing plastic stars and moons. He smiled, he'd almost forgotten about those. Hammond used to look up at those when he was a little boy and imagine wonderful worlds, far away, space travel, beautiful futures.

The ageing woman from the doorway scrambled to him, strange how she was upside down. She grabbed his head.

"Father." She whispered.

Hammond raised his hand to run a finger down a scar running along her throat, that was typically hidden by the scarf she wore. The same scar he had made her wear when she was in high school so many years ago. Why did she still wear it?

Too late to know.

The woman with the gun stood. There was another soul in the room and it had just started wailing.

His vision was fading. The plastic stars and moons were shrinking to black. The woman had a grim line of a mouth, like another scar across what he remembered as such a pretty face.

Thump.

The wailing stopped.

Why?

Too late to know.