"It's yours now, Amelie."
My head shot up as I took a deep breath. My father's silhouette blocked part of the light from the hologram. He didn’t turn around, so I couldn't see his expression as he spoke. He was organizing hand-drawn blueprints on his workbench, meticulously, stacking them neatly to the left. He hadn’t scanned them into the system, I supposed.
I knew he still wrote his diary after I suggested it, but I hadn’t realized he had switched his designs from holograms to hand drawings. Perhaps these lines, drawn with such care, were his way of expressing and then carefully reining his emotions: each stroke, a scar etched with precision—ferocious yet warm.
I looked down, still holding the rifle upright intended to return to him, my fingers tracing the barrel of Dawn. Seeing I hadn’t spoken, father turned slowly and extended his cyborg arm, gently placing those sharp metal fingers over mine as if to comfort me, just like when he had taught me to shoot.
“Do you know why I designed Dawn?” He gazed into my eyes, his lips curving in a soft smile so different from the cold demeanour of my first memory of him.
“Papa needed a gun worthy of him,” I guessed.
Father shook his head.
“Because everyone here shoots to kill. Only your papa shoots to protect. Here,” he said, moving his fingers from my hand to a small slot near the chamber I hadn't noticed before. Pressing inward and pulling down, there were two crisp clicks as the slot opened. “He specifically requested this.”
I watched as my father pulled out a folded card from the slot. I stood the gun upright on the floor and took the card—no, a photo—from him with my free hand.
It was an old photo of me, Joelle, and Elise when we were children.
"I value it a lot because its user imbued it with a soul, it has never changed since. And now that you have someone to protect, too.”
My father pulled me into an embrace, carefully stroking my long hair as I looked at the blurry photo, its corners worn from frequent handling, during days and nights, for years and decades.
“No one is more suited to this rifle than you. It’s yours."
My tears dampened his expensive shirt, but I couldn’t care less, and he didn’t let go.
“Of course, I shot to kill. That guy better acknowledges who your father is now.”
I laughed. Father had even learned to joke.