#the a alliteration was not intentional but kieran loves it to bits and made sure it continued once he figured out

[marcythewerewolf]

Quick Kierarktina fic inspired by @princekierz post about them getting older. I’ve touched on this theme before, but it’s fun to explore!

Kieran stuck to the shadows of the their booth, unnoticed by servers and other patrons alike. Gently, he prodded his eldest daughter, who was engrossed in whatever exciting mundane things were flickering on her glasses. 

“Where are the bees?” he asked, “Apples, I can smell a few of, but bees seem few and far between. It is a misleading name.”

Araceli sighed the deeply disappointed sigh of a fourteen year old confronted once again by the fact that her parents were embarrassing. It was a small sorrow, but one that struck her to the heart every time. Honestly, Kieran was glad he hadn’t acted this way at her age. Gwyn never would have let him get away with it. 

“It’s a mundane thing, t’Ada, you wouldn’t understand it,” she told him, with a weary shake of her head, before retreating back into the open arms of technology. Kids these days. 

Since it seemed to be a night for iron and steel, Kieran moved across the sticky pleather of the bench and started prodding the device at the far end of the table, which, Mark and Cristina always assured him, would order their food for them. 

Sure enough, whenever they went to mundane restaurants, the food did usually arrive, so Kieran was ready to trust whatever strange witchcraft they knew which he didn’t. He could do actual magic, he let them have the fake replacement of metal. 

Family nights out were bad enough without having to confront actual servers. Mundanes got so difficult, and they never quite knew how to deal with Kieran. (Cristina insisted he didn’t know how to deal with them, but no, that couldn’t be right.)

Lights flickered on the display, mortal text moving to fast for even Kieran’s knack for tongues to follow, and the heat of it burned his hands. Even buried under layers of plastic, he could feel the iron lurking there and he fancied it could sense him too. 

“You’re going to break it,” Araceli warned, barely glancing up from thin air. 

“Nonsense,” Kieran said, even as it began to sputter under his finger tips. Drat. The magic of the fair folk didn’t mix well with fragile electronics, and sometimes he forgot how much of it he had these days. At some point, Kieran Kingson had grown up. They all had, and they had the clinging brats (beloved though they were) to prove it. 

Cristina came back first, with Antonio slightly cleaned up and wrapped in her sweater. The boy seemed to have moved on from swimming to dumping everything he came across down his shirt. It wasn’t his fault he was clumsy on land, but sometimes Kieran felt it might be his. Did nixie blood skip a generation? Out of some measure of misplaced guilt, the not insignificant desire to keep Cristina from being too mad at him, and the much more pressing need to protect Antonio from his bully of a big sister, Kieran patted the seat next to him and smiled when Antonio clambered over, followed quickly by his mother. Trapped two deep in this mundane hell was almost claustrophobic, the presence of his family made it tolerable. 

Cristina tapped futilely at the now erratically flickering screen and then grimaced. “He did it,” Araceli offered helpfully, not even bothering to nod to Kieran. There was only one ‘he’ who it could be. 

Kieran strove to look above it all. Once, that had been easy. Usually it still was easy, but mundane places threw him off guard. Cristina like this, soft lines around her mouth, chipped nails, hair greying into finest silver under the abominable golden lighting; she threw him off. 

“I’ll go find a server,” she said, and leaned down to kiss him as she left. Kieran ran his fingers through the fine hair on the back of her neck and breathed in her scent, soft citrus and a hint of Antonio’s spilled apple juice. 

When he came up for air, Araceli had detached herself from ‘web’ (whatever that was) and was staring at them. No, Kieran corrected himself, staring past them. He followed her gaze to the table oblique to them, where an elderly woman was looking mildly scandalized. An echo of youthful rebellion surged in Kieran’s chest, bringing back memories of the Clave and disapproval and wars. Some were even recent, though they had tried to shelter the children from the worst of the nastiness. 

You could never fully succeed at something like that, he reflected, as he saw the hurt in Araceli’s eyes. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she whispered, drawing her brother’s attention now as well. 

Kieran looked at her steadily. “No electronics at the dinner table,” he said finally, “You know that’s a rule.”

It served the intended purpose of distracting her, with the minor side effect of starting an argument which Kieran didn’t manage to win until Mark returned, bringing Aine and another dose of parental authority. (Heaven and earth, they were all so terrible at this. Even waiting a few years, far longer than Shadowhunters usually did to have children, hadn’t helped much. Sometimes Kieran felt like they were flying by flapping their arms very fast. Sometimes he suspected all the other parents were as well.)

“It is a rule,” Mark opined, plopping a changed Aine (their children being apparently incapable of going five minutes without either spitting up, or dropping something on themselves, or otherwise needing immediate hygienic intervention) down on the bench next to Araceli. “And it does count in restaurants. You can talk to your friends when we get home.”

“Home doesn’t have wi-fi!” Araceli pointed out, with the desperate air of someone making a very important point. She might have been, for all Kieran knew. “Because we live in a forest or in the dark ages or another dimension or something-”

“It’s just for a while, you know that-”

“I like our new house,” Antonio said as if that settled the matter, and smiled up at Kieran guilelessly. His heart melted, until he realized the boy had managed to get his hands on another juice box already, and was poking at it furiously like that hadn’t been the cause of the first disaster. 

Mark was just as quick on the uptake, “Tony, give that here...” he began, holding out a hand for the juicebox. Araceli had already palmed something else mundane and bright and probably under the heading of technology. Kieran, slipped under the table and over to her side, blocked a curious Aine from and moved to scold her in one smooth motion. 

All the wars in the world couldn’t prepare you for this. 

It seemed like hours before Cristina came back, serving staff in tow, though in reality it was probably only a few frantic minutes. 

Mark was trying to interest Araceli in a game of something called hangman, which was much less bloody than it seemed, except he’d forgotten most of the rules and she was being surly. Kieran had his other two children gathered around him and was listening to Antonio and Aine talk while he stroked her fine, dark, toddler hair. Ears, just pointed enough to need a glamour, unlike her siblings’ dubiously human ones, poked out from underneath it. Already, she seemed made of too many odd parts. Too big ears, too long limbs, Mark’s bright sea eyes and Kieran’s stormy hair. Less changeable, a little more shadowhunter- angel blood was so reliably dominant- but still a little too faerie. 

Just like him. 

Their neighbours across the way, the nosy old biddy and a younger couple, were still staring and whispering. He wasn’t sure why. Was a father not allowed to spend time with his children?

He glared at them as Cristina introduced the serving man (his name was also Mark, which seemed entirely unconscionable. Humans needed to find a sense of originality.) Mark apologized for the useless hunk of plastic at the end of the table, and then started taking drink orders. Antonio’s request for grape juice was toned down to a less stain-prone milk, Araceli was grudgingly allowed a soda, and Kieran took it upon himself to be the grownup and asked for wine. 

“A significant amount of it.”

Mark the servant blinked at him, a look of confusion quickly replaced with smooth control, “Do you have an ID, um, sir?”

Cristina and Mark already had the looks on their faces that meant they were rapidly going into damage control mode. Kieran trusted them with that, so he forged ahead. “No?”

Their server looked pained, “Well you, uh, you do need one of those.”

“Sorry,” Cristina said quickly, “He’s European, and I think he left his passport at home tonight. Can I have a bottle of wine? Please?”

“Yes,” the server said, pivoting with relief to face her, “But I’m afraid you can’t share it with your friend. House rules, we have to assume you’re underage until proven otherwise.”

Most of the words in this conversation were flying over Kieran’s head, but one detail stuck out, and he had mostly made it in politics by taking little details and dragging them to death. “You didn’t ask her for an eye-dee,” he said, in a tone of flat accusation. He didn’t add ‘You cur.’

“Yes... but you’re...” Mark the server floundered. 

“What he means to say is that Mom looks like an old lady and you look like a model who escaped from a ren faire, Dad,” Araceli snapped, “Now can we order? I want a vegetarian burger with the works and chili-mashed potatoes.”

There was a sort of sullen silence, different from the usual sullen silences, from Araceli while their food arrived. Kieran knew the many shades of sulking, and knew this was the amalgam of terror and pride and disappointment which came with saying something you’d been thinking for a long time, to only a moderate response. For her sake, he tried to think up a reply, in between stolen sips of Mark’s wine. 

It tasted better with his breath on the rim of the glass, but Kieran couldn’t help but resent not being allowed his own. He was an adult, a father, a prince, a diplomat. A lack of simple mortal legal documentation shouldn’t prevent him from getting moderately drunk at a family dinner. 

Mark, always attuned to his heart, squeezed his hand under the table and whispered, “Sorry, we should have glamoured you. You know mundanes.”

Kieran leaned into the gesture and smiled back, but kept silent, not in the least because Aine was trying to hand feed him bits of mozzarella stick. 

When Mark and Cristina kissed over Mark’s salad, he resisted the urge to join them. They soft and warm and beautiful and his, and that was enough, and besides, Araceli was groaning loudly enough already. 

After dinner, with the younger children secure with their parents (their Shadowhunter parents, their legal parents as far as the Clave was concerned) in the car, he waited with Araceli to give Mark their check. He had been reassured the credit card process was quite simple, even he couldn’t mess it up, and if it wasn’t, he had some suitable gold coins on him. 

Araceli was looking at him funny, and he realized he was staring at her, trying to put his thoughts into words. Perhaps mistaking his concern, she said “Don’t t’Ada, it’ll work.”

“I know it will,” Kieran said, a little annoyed, “I’m not a child, no matter what you might think, little star.”

He held back from ruffling her hair, aware of her new, prickly boundaries, and she shrugged a sort of acknowledgement of this. “I know. It’s just... you’re very young looking sometimes. Like when people ask if you’re my old brother, and not my father, or when people see Aine and think you must be my step-dad instead. It gets annoying.”

“It is flattering,” Kieran pointed out, “You have excellent blood.”

Faerie parentage didn’t mean slower aging, but it didn’t hurt. Mark showed the years less than Cristina did, and Kieran was almost unchanged. Helen Blackthorn had settled into a kind of stable permanent flawless fifty, silvery gold and shining. It was vain, but Kieran could rest a little easier knowing that even if he did outlive his children, they would look excellent as they aged. 

(And that was if he didn’t manage to steal them away to faerie permanently. The technology fixation was a minor bump in the road, but Kieran would work on it.)

“Maybe for you,” Araceli mumbled, “It’s just... it gets weird, okay.”

“We are weird,” Kieran pointed out, “Even by the standards of the fae, even by the standards of the angels. Certainly by the standards of the mundanes. And that’s hard, I won’t pretend it isn’t. Part of the reason we thought so long and hard before we had you was because we knew it would be a life both strange and merry. You can hate us for that, if you want, though I’d prefer if you were a bit older before you came to any final conclusions on it. But one bad dinner at an Apple-sans-bees does not a family ruin, does it? It does not erase the love I have for your mother or for Mark, a love that only grows the older they get. It does not erase the love I have for you and your younger brother and sister.”

She knew he couldn’t lie. She used it every day to her own advantage. Now she smiled. 

“Please don’t talk about being into mom and dad being super old. But yeah, I guess.”

“Wonderful. Now, let’s forge your father’s signature, shall we?” Kieran said, too loudly. 

Needless to say, they got kicked out of the Applebees.