#anyway if anything is accidentally offensive I’ll delete or edit it out

[hufflepirate]

Dungeons and Daddies Headcanon:

Sometimes, especially when things are very hard, Darryl and Henry sleep in each other’s arms.

They don’t make much of it. Things have been hard! It doesn’t have to mean anything besides that sometimes when things are hard you need comfort! Anyway, when you’ve been married as long as they have to their spouses, sometimes you forget the warm body sleeping near you isn’t your spouse. Old habits are hard to break, after all.

Grant, on the other hand, is having an existential crisis about it.

Does his dad understand him more than he thought? Does he understand his DAD more than he thought? Does he understand his dad more than his DAD understands his dad?

Grant was so sure, for a while, that coming out was going to be the end of the world. There’s Catholics and Catholics, after all, and his dad always goes to Mass and he loves sports and grilling and - and - and it’s never been the end of the world, feeling the way he feels, and he’s never had a reason to believe his dad’s acceptance is anything but real but now - but now -

Grant’s dad is so straight. He’s so straight. Grant’s always been happy that his dad tries, that he doesn’t make things any weirder than the straight kids’ dads do. But there’s always been something, some little part of him that looks at his parents’ baby faces in their wedding photos, young-looking, for a wedding photo, even to someone who hasn’t seen a ton of those, looks at their prom photo with the corny pose and the overdone makeup and his dad’s boutineer and his mom’s corsage both too big, both trying too hard, trying to be beautiful, trying to be right, and thinks no, no matter how not-weird he tries to be, his dad won’t ever really get it. Even straight people weren’t supposed to have it all work out that easy.

Darryl holds Henry in his sleep, and he looks happy that way. Calm. No little twitches of nightmare, no distress crease between his eyes, and Henry looks the same way, when Grant can look without feeling weird about it. Sometimes one of them sighs, and it sounds comfortable, content, and he’s never looking, at the time, and he never knows who it is.

Grant thinks some day he wants to hold a boy like that. Or be held. Or maybe both.

Grant thinks it might be better if his dad really understands that, but it also might be worse. He doesn’t know how to tell if it would be better or worse. He knows his parents love each other, or he thinks he does, but what he doesn’t know is if this is something else, something too, and if it is, what it means, whether it matters, whether it changes anything. Is it different if his dad is bi and married and faithful to his mom? Is it different if he’s all of those things but he doesn’t know it? Is it different if he does and never said? Does he even know it’s allowed to be different and he’s allowed to say? Or is Grant making things up to make sense of one more crazy thing in this crazy portal world that never manages to make any sense? And what does he even want the answer to be?

Ron finally notices that he’s still sitting up by the fire, staring off into space mostly not at his dad’s sleeping spot, and comes over to make awkward conversation about how it’s past his bed time and he isn’t the one on watch.

It’s almost a relief.

In the morning, his dad is just his dad again, up tending the fire, making breakfast, making people eat, making Glenn get up, making Henry talk slower about his morning walk so that Ron, still half-asleep, can follow what he’s saying about the rock layers in the cliffside. His voice is booming and his hands are busy and sometimes he whistles without noticing that he’s doing it and Grant decides he was seeing things, in the middle of the night. Phantasms.

He squashes down the fact that he knows he wasn’t.