Only Darkness - Robin, Hamish

“You have to let me go,” Robin snaps. “It’s in my blood. This is who I am.”
“Ye’ll get yerself killed, boy.” Grandda says, but his words crack, showing the strain of the past several years. He’s gotten old before Robin’s eyes, and part of him feels wretched for the fact that some of those grey hairs have been put there by his own rebellion.
“I’m not a child, Grandda.” But Robin is well aware that in Hamish’s eyes, he probably is. That’s the trouble with how long fae tend to live. They’re still children to their own kind at fifty years old.
But Robin doesn’t have that long to wait.
Someone has to pay for what happened. For taking Dad. For killing Mom. But no one will.
Grandda would be furious if he knew what Robin has done. If anyone had caught the vampire, they would have come back to tell us. But we left the house they knew to contact.
Robin knew his mother had set the forwarding address to a post office box in the city. But she’d stopped checking it after a few months.
Robin’s been slipping out of the house with the key to that box every Friday night for the past six years. If someone sent a letter to tell them that Adam Robinson’s killer was brought to justice. But it never came. There were checks, enough money for him to leave home and survive the city until he can become a hunter himself. But there was never a letter with the things he wanted to hear.
And the longer they wait, the longer the trail stays cold, the less likely it is that there will ever be closure. Robin is eighteen now. He can’t wait any longer.
“I’m going, whether you want me to or not. You can’t stop me.” He meets Grandda’s eyes, hoping he makes his point clear. “I have to do this. You told me yourself about the Seelie boys who went to war with the Jacobites. Some of them were younger than me. You always called them heroes. How am I any different?”
“What are ye fightin’ for, Angus?”
Robin doesn’t let his defiance falter. “A lost cause? Like them?”
“At the end of all this, what will ye go home to?” Hamish’s voice trembles. “They would go home ta the land and the people they had fought to defend. Ye’re defending no one. Ye go to fight a selfish battle and kill in the name of those already dead. A foolish boy, a wolf pup who thinks he can lead the pack because he has teeth.”
“And if I have no one to come home to, it is because of that vampire,” Robin snaps.
“What else will ye let him take away from ye?” Hamish asks. “This is all you have left. Dinna throw it away.”
Maybe, yesterday, this would have been enough. Enough to stop Robin’s plans, enough to make him change his mind and close the door.
But not anymore.
“Nothing you say can change what I’m going to do. I swore on my mother’s grave, yesterday. That I would not stop searching until I had seen justice done to the vampire who tore our family apart.”
He watches the anger in Grandda’s face change to a horrified understanding. Robin swore a binding oath. He cannot change it now. And there is no stopping what happens next.
The last thing he hears as the door closes behind him is Hamish’s voice.
“Biodh beannachd an t-solais ort - solas às aonais agus solas a-staigh.”
“May the blessing of light be upon you - light without and light within.”
Robin doesn’t stay to listen to the rest.
Where he’s going, there’s only darkness.