4fter-hours - 4fter-Hours

“You think you have some kind of honor, some kind of code. You’re just another man hunting foreign trophy… just like our father.”

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Sergei Kravinoff / Kraven in Kraven the Hunter (2024) dir. J. C. Chandor

Magnus's shoulder slumped as he wracked himself with guilt. He had always done only what was best for her the moment she was born. The moment the doctors said his wife and other child did not survive the birth, and the nurse placed a crying babe in his arms, he knew that everything he had to do was for her. This felt like a failure on his part. A sigh came from the man as he placed his hand over hers. Thankful that he had her in his life, for a moment he had doubted everything he had done to provide for his daughter. His career made it hard for them to call anyone place home, maybe he had found a place for them to settle too late. So many maybe's, could've, should've's raced through the man's mind.

As always, his friend was right. The choices were to either let her believe that his marriages had failed because love was not real, something broken by infidelity, or just a flitting fancy, leaving as quick as it came. Or tell her the truth, that the women he had come to want to share his life with had eventually wanted to ship her off to some boarding school or just away in general. Knowing her, she would take the guilt onto herself, blame herself for her father not being happy and that was just not an option to him. "You're right," he conceded. Mikayla in her wisdom knew them so well in the couple of years they had spent living next door to her. "How are you so wise?" He smiled at her knowing fully that she was an amazing parent who had done it with more children than Magnus's one. How he wished he had found someone like her when Elizabeth had longed for a mother in her younger years. "Do you think you could come over and have dinner with us tomorrow night? She flies back to college the day after and I don't want it to be so awkward and I know she misses you."

Mikayla's heart broke with what she heard. To know that Elizabeth didn't believe in love was painful for the woman to come to terms with, and she wasn't even the woman's mother. Though she thought of Elizabeth as one of her own, and she could only hope that Elizabeth trusted Mikayla enough to come to her for anything that she'd need. But right now this was about Magnus, not his daughter.

And with that thought, she reaches forward, taking a gentle hold of his shoulders, "You've not done more harm to her than good. You've done what you know to be the right thing... if she knew about what you've gone through with your previous relationships, the outcome would be the same. A disbelief in love, but for entirely different reasons," the rationalization came with ease to her, "If you feel like the right course of action now is to admit the truth to her, then I will support you... but sometimes, things are better left unsaid."

Mission Impossible: Fallout .

"Just friends dont look at each other like you two do."

@4fter-hours

Kraven the Hunter (2023)