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alecsalamander · 11 months

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“Dad.”

It’s the habit of a lifetime, to not startle at the sound of Lacey’s voice rousing him from sleep. The word is a whisper against his ear like the hand is a whisper against his arm and then, when he cracks an eye open, his face. It’s a familiar sight, Lacey waiting at the edge of the mattress, made less familiar by two major facts: Lacey isn’t four years old anymore. She’s twenty-four next month, and she lives a few hours away. From the single eye he allows to open, he examines her in a practiced sweep for illness or injury; there’s none. She smiles when she catches his gaze. “Dad.”

He grumbles into the pillow. “He’s at work.”

She laughs, and pats his cheek again harder. “Wrong dad, dipshit.”

It’s been ages since the first time she burned the title into his skin like a brand – a couple of years aloud now, but two decades of the weight of the unsaid to practice carrying it. It’s been ages, but it’s never failed to make him feel like every single moment of hurt in his life has been worth it. Like he would do it all again another thousand or more times if it meant he could stay here like this forever. “What’s up, sweet pea?”

Her nose wrinkles around the grin of the childhood nickname, and she steps back to give him space to get out of bed. “Come on, get up.”

It might only be five in the morning, if the clock at the bedside table is correct, but he’s never once not gone where his daughter has needed him – he gets up. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, but what the fuck are you doing in my house this early? When did you even get here?” Because he knows for certain she hadn’t been there last night or she would have made fun of them both for being old men, turning in a little after eight. It’s been a hell of a week.

She grins again, a little less wrinkled. Sharper. More like he does. “I used the front door,” she tells him calmly. Firmly. “And the key I have because I grew up here.” He throws the sweatshirt he’d been about to put on at her face, but she catches it. Barely. “Grandpa came and got me. Can you just get up? It’s important.”

Important, but not an emergency. The difference is what has him taking the time to brush his teeth, and retrieve a second sweatshirt from the closet when he turns to find she’s already slipped into the first. “Alright, brat,” he laughs when she tugs on his sleeve to hurry him out the door, “I’m coming.” She tugs him all the way to the stairs, and then leaves him for a second at the landing; just long enough to hurry ahead into the kitchen, where she joins Wendy at the table. His dad is already at the stove, flipping pancakes.

And oh. Of course. Today is Saturday. Saturdays have been pancake morning for just about twenty years now.

Cat doesn’t eat pancakes. Not anymore.

“Hey,” he greets the members of his family who have apparently decided to invade his kitchen before the sun’s even up to make a generally unnecessary breakfast. Lacey beams at him, patting the chair beside her, but he doesn’t sit yet. He does, however, rest his weight against the table beside Wendy, calming only slightly when he feels the hand that settles almost automatically at his hip. “Why does this feel like an intervention?”

The hand at his hip squeezes lightly and then the fingers tap nervously; it’s not a code, not really, but they know each other well enough that he can guess at Wendy’s meaning. He sits down in the chair between him and Lacey, and returns her grin.

“Hey kiddo,” his dad responds to the greeting, setting a few plates down. He can’t help but notice that no one has commented on the whole ‘intervention’ thing. In fact, he can’t help but notice that this whole entire thing is really fucking weird, the way they’re all clustered around him like they’ve circled the wagons. The way they’re here at all, in his house at the asscrack of dawn when one of them should be in Indiana and another should be at work.

There’s a tiny squeak of sound as Wendy inches his chair closer and then the hand moves from his leg to his collarbone, pressing down in that way that demands his attention. He turns his head, and then his whole body when he sees how Wendy is looking at him.

It’s the way he always looks when he puts himself between one of them and the world.

“Cat,” he starts, and stops. “Sweetheart.” And then he just sort of sighs.

“Happy birthday!” Lacey throws her arms around his neck, just like she’s done every birthday for the last twenty years, and Wendy meets his gaze and immediately tightens his grip before Cat can realize he wants desperately to run.

Suddenly, his dad and the pancakes make a whole lot of sense.

“Thanks El,” he forces the grin into his voice and presses a kiss against her temple, and he feels scooped out and hollow and also so fucking grateful for Wendy and the way he keeps Cat’s panicked gaze locked with his own, patient and quiet and steady, that he genuinely thinks he might die from it. “Thanks Dad.”

Thanks Wendy, he doesn’t need to say, but does anyway with a brush of his hand against Wendy’s before he turns back to the gathering at the table.

—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—

Cat woke up on the morning of his fourteenth birthday to his mother in the kitchen, singing one of the songs of her family. She greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and a happy “La multi ani!” before he sat at the table, and she smiled at him over the pancakes they shared. It was a birthday tradition, just the two of them, a small pocket of the day before he was off to school and they would celebrate as a family with dinner when his dad got home. She smeared them with jam and sprinkled them with sugar and they were far too thick to be the clătite of her youth (the tradition, like the songs, was something passed down, centuries of love in an unbroken chain from their ancestors to this kitchen), but there was something even more special about the fact that this was something she made for the two of them alone.

They made it through a plate and a half before he had to get dressed for school, and his mother kissed him one final time as she wound the scarf around his neck and teased him about catching cold.

And then, hours later, his father met him in the parking lot with a somber expression and arms open to catch him when he told him that she was gone.

—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—

He offers up love and thanks in a voice that doesn’t sound even half as fragile as he feels, and then he very casually excuses himself for a moment.

It’s Wendy who comes after him.

He’s not sure if it was discussed or if he simply decided for them, or maybe the others had gone to the bedroom or to the backyard and it was simply a matter of Wendy finding him first, but he’s not surprised. He thinks, if anything, he prefers this. Can’t imagine anyone else he’d rather have sliding to the floor beside him, leaning back against a dryer running with nothing inside because the rattling whir of the rotor perfectly covers the way his breathing has tipped very sharply toward hyperventilating. “Sorry for the early wake up call,” he says instead of commenting on the way Cat is probably about to start sobbing. It’s embarrassing enough to be forty-four years old and crying because your family loves you enough to recognize your birthday without someone calling attention to it. “I didn’t want you to wake up to an empty house, all things considered.”

In between one shaking, shuddering breath and another, Cat thinks that the love he feels for this man must have existed before either of them did, an unbroken chain since the birth of the universe. Since the very start of it all, dust and ice and destiny itself tying strings across lifetimes that would lead them back to each other.

“I don’t even know why I care this much,” he says instead of even a fraction of the feelings that have taken up residence in the hollow and scooped out places and left him feeling warm and safe instead. He does, however, lean heavily to the side to press the entire weight of his body against Wendy. “It’s been for fucking ever. She’s been gone longer than she ever stuck around.” More than twice as long – the math isn’t hard. It’s been thirty years since the day she misread the signs and abandoned him.

Shifting under his side is Wendy freeing a hand to drag it through his hair; there’s a chance he might fall back asleep if it keeps up. “And when in your entire goddamn life have you not cared too much?” and between the hand in his hair and the rumble of Wendy’s chest against his face, yeah. Might be time for a nap. “Besides,” and the hand stops. “She was your mom.”

“She was sort of a shitty mom.”

She wasn’t. That’s the problem. It’s just easier than admitting to himself that his mother loved him more than anything in the world until she decided that she didn’t. And obviously he would never ask someone to die for anyone, even their child, it’s just that, well, he did. It hadn’t even been a question.

“No, she wasn’t.” And it’s since long stopped scaring him, the way that Wendy knows him. It’s twenty fucking years of hard work, and of knowing him back. “But she is a shitty person.”

He can’t help it – he laughs. Everyone and everything on the planet that they’ve fought through and Wendy’s determination that Stefania is the worst of it has never not been funny to him. “I love that your arch nemesis is like seventy years old. You can hunt her down at a brisk walk.”

Wendy snorts in that way that means he’s trying very hard to not laugh as well. “Don’t make me joke about killing someone with a retired cop in our kitchen. I feel like getting arrested would give you even more of a complex about your birthday.”

He doesn’t deny it. He does have a complex about his birthday. “We should go eat some pancakes.” Not that he really wants to, but there’s something to be said for tradition – and isn’t that the crux of it. It’s a collision of traditions this morning, good and bad memories vying for space. It’s a quarter after five in the morning and he’s already exhausted. He wants to go back to bed, would settle for here on the laundry room floor if he has to, just sleep until tomorrow comes and he doesn’t need to think about this anymore. Instead, he shuffles himself up to a sitting position and then, offering a hand to Wendy, stands. “Come on, old man,” he laughs as Wendy tugs against his grip.

“Fuck you,” and he returns the gesture by pulling Cat toward the kitchen. “We’re basically the same age.”

—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—

In the end, he was grateful for the lie.

Losing his mother at fourteen had hurt, had changed him in a way that he would never be able to understand, but he couldn’t begin to think what it would have looked like if he changed from knowing she had simply left. The grief of a dead parent had turned his destructive tendencies inward, contained, and he knew now from experience that rage and resentment would have done the opposite. He had been angry, so angry, when his dad told him the truth – and he understood why it happened like it did, answers forced out too soon in a hospital room, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. His mother abandoned him on his fourteenth birthday and his dad lied about it for years, and the sole reason for all of it was that he was, quite literally, fucking cursed.

But the anger, like the rest of it, was something that he learned to simply live with.

It wasn’t until much later, when they were leaving Boston, that he realized the amount of love that had gone into the deception. His father had shouldered the mood swings and misdemeanors of a grieving teen and allowed him to process the loss in a way that preserved his sense of security. Of being loved. There would have been no way to protect him from his mother’s sudden absence but there was a way to mitigate it, to remove any lingering sense of responsibility or desire for revenge, and it probably would have worked if the entire thing hadn’t crumbled in the face of her family’s legacy.

It was the same way he and Wendy had been lying to Lacey, weighing honesty against her childhood and never once questioning the way it wasn’t even a thought.

—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—

James and Lacey are sharing a plate of pancakes, smothered in syrup the way Lacey likes them, and a handful of chocolate chips, with the ease of their own tradition. He smiles to see it. “Hey,” and he announces their return by tugging the end of Lacey’s braid like he’s done nearly every morning of her life, and throwing a one-armed hug around his dad’s shoulders. “Anybody ever tell you you’re the best dad around?”

His dad laughs, and squeezes the back of his neck like he always does. “Yeah,” and his smile is soft. Fond. The older he gets the more he realizes that he looks like his dad in all the ways that matter. “Wes bought me a mug saying so a few years back.”

He salutes with that exact mug, smiling over the lip when Cat drops his arm from the hug and swats at it with his other hand; James has no less than five identical mugs. Wendy and Lacey and Jonah have each given him one over the years – Cat has given him seven over his lifetime. The one he’s currently drinking out of actually belongs to Cat, given to him by Lacey and Wendy when they first moved to Chicago over ten years before. “Hey,” he says again, and takes the seat across the table from his dad, with Lacey at the end between them. “Love you guys.”

“Gross,” Lacey says immediately, and bounces up to kiss his cheek. “Love you too.”

James slides the plate of pancakes closer to a central point between them. “Happy birthday, kiddo.”

He slides it back. “I’m not part of your maple and chocolate monstrosity,” he teases them, and turns to look for—

Wendy drops to the seat next to him, juggling a series of plates and bowls with the ease that he’s always managed too many things at once; a soft, private little smile crosses his lips when he catches Cat looking for him. “I got you,” he says quietly, and mostly covers the words with the way he’s setting down two more plates of pancakes – plain this time – and a bowl of the confiture his mom always makes for the holidays. It’s a rather obvious declaration.

His mother has lived in his head longer than he ever lived in her home. It’s a space that they’ve both been trapped in, undeserving.

“Alright Brat,” and he’s thirty years and a thousand miles from mornings with his mother, just like this in his childhood kitchen, but it’s never felt farther. The walls here are blue, not yellow, and the table is white instead of pine, and both the house and the family within it are his – it was his mother’s choice to leave, just like it was choice, over and over again, for these three to stay. He smears a good amount of the confiture across one of the pancakes, and rolls it up. “Let me show you how your Bibio’s family and I used to do this.”

—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—

His name was never in the papers, After everything – but his face certainly was. It was impossible to run a photo or video on the last surviving Witchhunter without catching the man who shadowed his every step. Most people assumed that he was one of them, never speculated much beyond the mysterious teammate whose mystery was overshadowed by the sudden exposure of magic.

His mother, of course, knew better.

She left without a word when he was fourteen, and returned much the same when he was thirty-five (but there were words, in fact, Wendy told him. None of them had come from his mother. He still doesn’t know what she had been thinking, when Wendy’s first official statements in the public eye had been filmed before the smoldering wreckage of the buildings he’d torched for his family.) when she saw the younger, sharper reflection of her own face in the hours of broadcast reports. He was easy to find – Wendy was a public figure and Cat was publicly wherever he went, and the shop was an easily accessible record. And then, like nothing had changed, she had tried to come home.

To this day, the only apology she had ever made had been for misinterpreting the vision.

—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—✨🔮✨—

James and Lacey leave around nine in the morning, after cleaning the dishes – Lacey needs to be back at school and they all need some sleep, and everyone recognizes that Cat is still a little too raw to need an audience for the inevitable emotional crash that has loomed ever since he came downstairs. “Well,” Wendy says softly; he’s already dimmed the lights. Lowered the blinds. The house is a quiet fortress, guarding him at his most vulnerable. “The day is still yours.”

“Yeah,” Cat agrees, and stands on the rug at the bottom of the stairs; he’d started flagging in the last hour, sentences going short in that way that used to mean he had a headache, and now meant more that he was processing whatever feelings came in the absence of them. It’s been years, but it’s still an adjustment – he’s so much more breakable, now that he has less to endure. A blink, and the smile is back on his face. “Because you guys woke me up at five in the fucking morning.”

Wendy shoves him in the direction of the staircase. “So go back to bed, I won’t stop you.”

He chooses the living room instead. “The romance is dead,” he teases, but hooks a finger in Wendy’s belt loop to drag him along; he only resists long enough to flip the latch on the front door. He returns to the familiar sight of Cat preparing to sleep on the oversized couch, less of a human being and more of a giant bundle of indiscernible shape. “Overall,” he proclaims as he wraps the blanket from the back of the couch around himself like a shroud, and then curls himself into the cushions. “It wasn’t the worst birthday I’ve ever had.”

Wendy snorts as he also sits, tugging at various loose edges of the blanket until Cat unfolds it, and himself, to allow space for him. “Jesus, Cat.”

“I’m just saying,” he explains as he shimmies himself along the couch to rest his head in Wendy’s lap, “I’m older than I ever thought I would get to be.” He cracks a smile, and one eye open to meet Wendy’s gaze. “Happier, too.” With soft fondness in his expression, Wendy kicks his legs up onto the couch and rests back against the cushions; one hand stays tangled in the blanket, but the other finds its way to Cat’s hair. “Not heading into the shop then?”

“Hmm,” Wendy’s agreement comes out half-asleep. “Fuck the shop.”

He tries to hide his bark of laughter in Wendy’s thigh, but doesn’t entirely succeed. “Don’t say that, you love the shop.” A moment of companionable silence and then a jostling of the cushions and suddenly Wendy’s face fills his vision, staring pointedly. There’s an all too familiar besotted look in his eye, and Cat’s grin goes crooked. “Damn, not even on my birthday? Tough crowd.”

Wendy returns the grin, sharp and crooked. “I’m saving it for our anniversary.”

“And when’s our anniversary?” Cat asks like it’s an interrogation, like he’s accusing him of some sort of crime – in some way, he is. They don’t have one. That’s the problem with falling in love with someone in a long series of moments spread across fifteen years – it’s impossible to determine when it actually began. “When’s our anniversary, Wednesday?”

Sometimes, less and less than there used to be, there’s an intensity that has followed Wendy home from the battlefield. “March 17th,” he says calmly through it, and settles back in for a nap.

And Cat—

Cat can’t breathe. “What the fuck,” he says mostly to himself, because there’s a clawing feeling in his chest that he knows isn’t the same as drowning but still feels very much like he’s lost at sea. His heart stutters once, twice, fluttering like butterflies in his chest – he’s too big and too small for his body. There’s a weight, heavy, against his ribs and he feels— He feels very much like he’s having a panic attack, but in the opposite direction; for the first time in his life, he feels entirely real. “Baby, what the fuck?”

The thing is, Cat hadn’t remembered the date they first met. It was, after all, over twenty years ago.

When he finally regains enough of himself, when he follows the feeling of the hand in his hair and the quiet, aborted laugh that is his reminder of home, Wendy is still leaned back into the cushions. Eyes closed, expression smug. “You wanted romance,” he reminds in that same bland calmness, though the edges of his lips are fighting their way into a smile. Cat loves him effortlessly. “Happy birthday, love.”

#universe: witchhunters #happy birthday cat #you’re not 44 yet but you will be someday and on that day you will be HAPPY

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