What It Chooses
By: dharmamonkey & Lesera128
Rated: T (can you believe it?)
Disclaimer: Here we posit our normal rigmarole. No, we don't own anything from Bones or Angel... or anything else. Yes, we're wreaking what havoc we can with these characters that we don't own to create an awesome story. But, since it's only for the purposes of creative enjoyment and amusing distraction, we think we're okay. Are there any other questions? No? ::blinks:: Good. Then moving on―
Summary: Temperance Brennan's father, warlock Max Keenan, reflects on his daughter's relationships over the centuries, in particular her affair with the Irish vampire Angel(us). Set in Dharmasera's Angel/Bones crossover universe. One-shot. Complete.
A/N: We're back, baby!
As we're finishing up work on the latest installment of "Echoes True and False" (yes, we got waylaid by personal stuff, sorry!), we thought we'd give you a little something to nibble on. Some of you have been following WitchyBren and her dad, magicmaxkeenan, on Twitter. Charming old Max is quite a chatty Kathy, and just loves to tell stories of "back in the day" (which in his case stretches back 500 years to the reign of Henry VIII). Not wanting to see that resource go to waste, we decided to pull Max aside for an interview of sorts and give you a glimpse of his view of things.
It is worth noting, for those who are keeping score, that this is the first T-rated Dharmasera story. (And you thought we couldn't write one.) So no "Unf alert" is necessary this time.
A very good friend of mine told me once that the heart chooses what it chooses, and that we don't really have any say in the matter.
Of course, he said this to me in reference to my own heart, which had long since belonged to a woman who was in so many ways very much my opposite―a wide-thinking dreamer who believed in the long-reaching power of the ineffable, while I consider myself a pragmatic, well-grounded realist, to the point that she sometimes tells me I am a cynical misanthrope. But, as I sat there with my friend, enjoying my second pint of Boddingtons while he tipped back his third Tennent's, I started to think about my kids, and how his axiom was at least as true for a man's children as it is for himself.
I love my kids. I love my kids more than I love anything in the world―more than life itself. My son and daughter and my grandkids are everything to me, and I want nothing more in this life, this strange, centuries-long life of mine, than to see them happy. I want them to know love, the kind of love that fills your chest with warmth and puts a smile on your face that nothing―nothing!―can wipe away.
Like any dad, I worry about my kids, but because my two kids are so different, the worries I have about them are different. Of the two, Russ is the baby, and he's always been a bit of a free spirit like his mom and a rebellious iconoclast like me, always getting into trouble of one sort or another. I worry that he's going to get himself into trouble way over his head, trouble bad enough that I can't help him wiggle his way out of. With Tempe, my eldest, my worries were more...well, like her life's always been from the very moment of her conception...complex.
I remember the night she was born like it was yesterday. Unlike the birth of my son―which I had the chance to watch with my own eyes in the delivery room, seeing my Stephanie hold him against her belly with shaking hands as the obstetrician cut the umbilical cord―Tempe's mother bore her with the assistance of a midwife and a female friend, while I paced back and forth across in the sitting room, scared out of my skull as I listened to her groans and cries filtering down the stairs, peppered with the encouraging words of the midwife telling her when to push and when to breathe. I'll never forget the moment she was born because my eyes went to the beeswax coil hour candle we used to tell time back then. I'd lit the new candle less than a minute before, so that's how I know that my baby girl came into this world at the foretelling stroke of midnight. But I didn't see her for some time since the women clucked over her as their covens tended to do anytime a new child was brought forth in their people's line.
By the time I saw Tempe for the first time, she was swaddled in a soft blanket of lambswool and held in the crook of her mother's arm. She had a head full of dark, reddish-brown hair, and the first time she opened her eyes, I felt like my heart was going to burst out of my chest. She had the most amazing, piercing blue eyes, even in the minutes after her birth, and they seemed almost to glow as her tiny, ruddy-cheeked face was warmly illuminated by the flickering light of the taper that burned on the bedside tables.
I loved her with everything I had...and more, and always had―even when she was just a kicking bulge in Christine's belly―but the moment saw her bright eyes flash back at me, I knew she was something special...very special.
When we lost her mother, Christine, the night of Tempe's thirteenth birthday, I was so swallowed up in my own pain that I didn't see that, in the days and weeks that followed, Tempe was more than just grieving her mother. She'd withdrawn. She'd go about her everyday business, helping me in the shop, cooking supper in the evenings, doing her chores, practicing her Latin and Greek as we sat together to read Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch, Tacitus, and the other classical writers, but there was something off about the way she carried herself and the way she looked at me―or, rather, the way she wouldn't look at me, instead directing her gaze over my shoulder, never meeting my eyes with hers. Though she cooked delicious meals for me and her mother's best friend, Stephanie, she hardly ate herself, and I could see as her face grew more wan, and her bright blue eyes a bit more dull, that she was pulling away.
Over time, things got better. While I loved Christine with my whole heart and no one could ever replace her, seven or eight months after she died, I finally let another beautiful and persistently tenacious woman get close enough to me so that she could began to fill my days with joy and my nights with warmth. Slowly my heart began to heal, and while a day still doesn't go by that I don't miss Christine, I found a way to cope, to move on. I fell in love again.
Things got better for my Tempe, too. Stephanie―who'd been friends with Christine since the two snaggle-toothed girls met at a market fair in Westminster in 1520―was, like my Christine, a woman with special gifts, and she recognized that Tempe was like her mother, but even more gifted, and so she took my daughter under her wing and continued teaching Tempe the mystical craft as her mother had done while she was still alive. As the months turned to years, Tempe's deep melancholy seemed to fade into a persistent reticence, but she seemed to get by, and after a few years, she moved out of my house and set herself up in a trade of her own, ostensibly making her living as a midwife and healer, while quietly practicing the magical arts that had been the signature of her mother's people since before the Emperor Hadrian built his wall.
The years turned to decades and then to centuries, and while still I worried for my daughter―I cannot tell you how happy I was to see the Inquisition, the witch trials and all that other nonsense fall to the wayside as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth―I knew, by the time that the revolutions of 1848 began cascading across Europe, she'd managed well enough to find some margin of contentment in her life. Another twelve years passed by, which elapsed in the blink of an eye, and then for reasons that were not immediately apparent to me, my normally-taciturn daughter seemed to be almost happy when I invited her to join me for dinner a couple of nights before Christmas. Her face had a certain blush to it than I knew couldn't have just been the cold air pricking at her cheeks, and she had a particular spring to her step that I hadn't seen in years―or ever, to be honest.
I knew she'd been keeping the company of a man. I'm a father, and I make it my business to know that my little girl is safe―even if my little girl is three hundred-odd years old, as she was at that point―so it might have been the case that I took my supper a few nights a week at a tavern across the street from my daughter's home in Cheapside, where I had a favorite table along the window that gave me a vantage point from which I could see the foot-traffic and carriages passing in front of her home.
I saw a particular man come by one night and enter her home without knocking, which immediately raised my well-honed suspicion. As the man turned his head and glanced once out at the street before walking in, his face visible in under the dim gaslights that flickered above, my heart began to race and my hand tremble as I held the pint of ale in front of my mouth.
I'd seen the same man a couple of weeks earlier, arguing with her on her balcony before they tussled and Tempe, God love her, pushed him over the railing and he tumbled over, falling to the stone-paved street below with what I can only imagine was a sharp thud. The man quickly sat up and shook his head, then looked up at my daughter as she turned and walked back into her bedroom, taking one last look in his direction before slamming the French doors shut. He stood up, dusted off his trousers and rumpled dress-shirt, pulled his braces firmly over his shoulders, then ducked down the alley, disappearing into the night.
As Tempe's front door closed behind the man, I contemplated following him, but as I remembered a conversation I'd had with my daughter about a hundred years earlier, when I'd confronted her about a rakish fellow she'd been keeping company with, and how she wouldn't speak to me for the next twenty-three years on account of my impertinence, I thought better of it. So I sat in my chair, took a long draught of my hoppy English ale, and turned my attention back to my steak and chips. As I took my fork and knife to my not-quite medium-rare steak, I watched the blood pool under the meat and I blinked as the realization suddenly hit me. I turned and looked out the window again, staring at the place where the mysterious man had fallen from Tempe's balcony, and wondered if it could be true. What kind of man could fall that kind of distance and pick himself up again, walking away without so much as a limp? I chewed my steak slowly as I worked through the problem in my mind. I could think of only two possibilities: either this man was a warlock, like me, or else he was a demon of some kind. If the man were a warlock, even at such a distance, I would have felt his presence as a faint pricking or electrical charge on the back of my neck, and I felt no such thing. Which left only one possibility: this man was not human.
I swallowed my steak and washed it down with a gulp of ale as I tried to tamp down the wave of protectiveness I felt rising up from my belly. Tempe can take care of herself, I told myself. She's the most powerful and talented witch this country has seen in a millennium. Whatever this man is, whoever he is, she can handle him. I sighed and drained the last of my ale with a long swallow as the servingman came by with a fresh one. Nodding to myself, I held my ale up to the light and took a deep breath, then closed my eyes and let out that breath. She'll be fine, I said to myself. She always is, she always will be. She's more than capable of protecting herself from harm. I took another sip of ale and sighed, then finished my supper.
About a week later, taking my late supper in the same tavern house, I watched the same man emerge from the same dark alleyway I'd seen him disappear into the last time, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his dark grey suit coat as he came around the corner and jogged up the stairs to my daughter's door. I saw him reach up and tuck a strand of his shoulder-length hair behind his ear as a carriage passed by on the street behind him, and by the time the carriage passed and I again had a clear view of my daughter's doorstep, the man was gone.
For a few more weeks, I made a point to take my supper at that tavern, just to observe this young man's comings and goings—well, only his comings, really, because he seemed to stay there longer than the tavern's hours let me observe—but after that, I began to take my supper elsewhere and left Tempe to her gentleman companion. I never said a word to my daughter about what I saw, or asked her about the man she'd been keeping company with, and she never said a single word to me about him. Sometimes it's better for a father to not know these things, let me tell you.
Twenty years later, I was walking into one of London's finer hotels with a lady friend on my arm when I saw him again. (Stephanie and I had had a falling out a few years before, as we often did back then, so I'd taken to seeing other women to help pass the time.) He was walking out when his eyes caught hers, and he suddenly stopped and spun on his heel, a wide, toothy grin on his face as his chocolate-colored eyes sparkled back at her in recognition and greeting.
"Angelus," my lady friend said, a certain lilt to her voice as she said his name, emphasizing the second syllable in a way that made his name sound almost French despite her heavy Italian accent.
The young man's eyebrows flew up in acknowledgement as his grin turned into a crooked, lascivious smirk. That smirk pissed me off. I wanted I wipe it off his goddamn face—with my knuckles, as soon as possible. I wanted to punch him in the fucking mouth. I really did. I felt my blood begin to boil as I watched him undressing my lady friend with those smirking, smart-ass brown eyes of his.
Although I'd only seen him at a distance two decades prior, I was sure it was the same man. I could see the appeal: he was a well-built man, about my height, broad-shouldered and strong, with dark brown hair and dark eyes that twinkled with silent laughter, high cheekbones, a strong jaw and a cleft chin. A handsome man, I have to admit, but there was something sinister about him. Any doubts I'd had about his supernatural nature were quickly set aside as it became clear that, like my daughter and me, he'd not aged a year in the twenty that had passed. Standing just a few feet away from him, I didn't feel trace of the usual tingle I'd feel in the presence of a fellow witch or warlock, but I did feel something, a certain chill in the air around him, and I could smell a very particular scent that I'd grown very familiar with over the foregoing couple of years. This man, who I knew to be the same as the one who'd called on my daughter years before, was, indeed, no man at all.
He was a vampire.
A vampire?
Seriously, Tempe? A vampire?
I sighed at that. Okay, I more than sighed. The very thought made me ill. My daughter had been warming her bed with a vampire, and as far as I could tell, still was. I felt the bile rise in my throat as my realization hardened into certainty.
My daughter.
She deserved better than that. She knew better than that. But still for whatever reason she'd chosen him...a vampire.
Damn it, Tempe.
My baby girl has always been smart, but sometimes she's too smart for her own good. Even if she didn't know it, or wanted to ignore it, she deserved the love of a man who would love her with his whole heart, with a purity of spirit and who would be her soulmate. Not...not...not what this man could offer, which was—loathe as I was to admit it, even in the confines of my own mind—carnal pleasure, amusing conversation, a whiff of danger and, perhaps, a bit of dimple-cheeked charm. She deserved more. I wanted more for her, and I always had. I wanted her to have, even if it was just for a little bit of time for however long she could, what her mother and I had shared.
As I watched this man, Angelus, make eyes at my lady friend, I felt my skin crawl knowing that this man had come into my daughter's home, again and again over the years, slid between her sheets and taken her—my daughter, my lovely baby girl—for his own pleasure. It was everything I could do not to curl my lips back in disgust as I imagined this man, this immortal, murderous rake, taking everything from her he could, and giving her nothing in return, leaving her empty and used.
My girl, I thought. You deserve so, so much more. And I know you're smart enough to know it, too? So what gives here, Tempe? Why are you doing this? Why are you cheating yourself by keeping such company? My nostrils flared when the musky, faintly bitter smell of his vampire's sweat hit my nose as he lingered in our presence.
A part of me wanted to rip his balls off with my bare hands, and a part of me—the calmer, more rational part of me—just wanted him to leave.
This man, Angelus, shot another a lopsided grin at my lady friend and said, "Nice seein' ya again, lass." I could taste a renewed sourness in the back of my throat as the bile of my disdain bubbled back up again. It was bad enough that Tempe was receiving the empty affections of a vampire, but it was worse, even, than that. She was spreading her legs for an Irish vampire, a derelict in every way, who didn't deserve to breathe the same air as her...were he of a kind to draw a breath.
It was bad enough that Tempe had gotten herself tangled up with a vampire, but that she'd let herself be soiled by an Irish vampire was just...it was simply beyond my comprehension. My daughter was a proper Englishwoman, educated and refined, who could read and write in several languages and who was well-versed in the classics, mathematics, science and medicine as well as the magical arts. That greasy-haired Fenian rake was no better than the rest of his potato-eating lot, who'd left their native land in droves in the 1840s and proceeded to crowd England's cities in an unlettered, ignorant throng. He may clean up well in a bespoke wool suit, but the minute he opened his mouth and that sing-songy brogue of his rang out, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
"Aye," he said after a moment, jerking his chin towards the wide double doors of the hotel's lobby. "Maybe I'll see ya around sometime, mmm?" I saw him lick his lips in a slow, exaggerated way before he turned to walk out the door.
"Certainly, Angelus," my lady friend called after him as he walked out the door into the London night with a jovial chuckle and a curt wave. I glanced over at her and frowned at the way her dark eyes had suddenly brightened, just in the brief moments that this irksome Fenian had stalled us. I saw her weight shift from one hip to the other as she watched him walk away, almost as if she was leaning towards the door he'd just walked out of as she looked at the direction in which he'd disappeared with a wistful, yet nauseating romanticism. Her eyes seemed almost to flutter when I cleared my throat loudly and she turned her head, shrugging with an awkward smile. "Just a, ehh, he's just a friend, someone I know, that is, " she said with a bit of a kurt stutter.
Christ...
Eight simple words, and a relatively sophisticated and worldly woman seemed to be turned into a imbalanced and tedious vapid twit.
Really? You've got to be kidding me.
For several long moments—twenty, thirty seconds, maybe longer—I stared at the wide doors as they swung closed again, drawing in a wave of cool, damp air from outside into the warm lobby of the hotel. I hated men like that, the kind of men who flitted from one woman's bed to another the way other men change their undershorts. Men like that, like this Angelus, were animals—nasty, slutty, disgusting animals for whom women were mere props for their personal enjoyment and who used them for however long they wanted, then tossed them aside like yesterday's newspaper, never treating them with any dignity or respect—and it turned my stomach to think my daughter, my Tempe, who was the strongest, smartest, proudest and most beautiful woman I'd never met, would let a man like that get even within ten paces of her. Though I tried not to think of it, I couldn't erase that cocky, lopsided grin and those laughing eyes of his from my mind, and I knew—I just knew that he'd flashed that grin and twinkled those brown eyes of his at my daughter the way he'd done with a thousand other women before her, and it made me want to throw up to think of him contaminating her with his everliving filth. I felt my jaw tense, tightening so much it made my temples ache, at the thought of him slithering up her stairs and into her bedchamber.
I closed my eyes and shook my head, trying to jettison the revolting image from my mind.
I wanted to kill him. I really did. He needed killing, that one did. And I so wanted to do it, too, especially since no one would miss him in the light of day if I put him out of his misery before the sun rose again. See, because that's when I've always done most of my...well...more sordid exploits in the past: under cover of darkness, masked behind a hooded cloak.
For a minute, standing there in that hotel lobby staring at the door, I thought seriously of going after him, following him into the night and catching him in some dark alley so I could teach him a lesson he'd never forget. I'm not as skilled as my daughter Tempe, but I am more than capable of making someone's life miserable with a blink of the eye and a flick of my wrist, if I'm of a mind to do so, and the thought of that man with my girl—frankly, it sickened me, enough so that I unhooked my arm from that of my lady friend and took a couple of steps towards the door as I thought of what sort of charm I could cast on that disgusting piece of shit that would make him leave my daughter alone. She deserved better, far better than that...that thing that just pranced out the door, and I nearly gave in to my angry whim and went after him.
But I didn't.
I took a deep breath and remembered the very first time I'd said something to Tempe about the company of a man she'd been keeping. It was around the time of the Restoration, maybe 1661 or so, and she'd been seeing a man, a wool merchant who owned a terraced home a few doors down from hers in Cheapside, who I'd warned her was a bit too entangled socially with the degenerate gamblers like George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham (a relation of one of Charles' most notorious mistress, Barbara, Lady Castlemaine) who'd been known to loiter around the court of King Charles II. I suppose I should have let the matter drop, knowing as I did that my daughter was a fiercely independent woman who was less and less likely to follow advice the more determined the giver was to have her follow it, but being that she was my daughter—and at that point in time, my only child—I persisted, and we got into a terrible row about the whole thing. She knew I was a bit sensitive about the whole idea of her taking a man into her bed, and so she proceeded to go into mortifying detail about what and how exactly she and her gentleman friend would spend their nights and, she hastened to add, their mornings, and she didn't let up until I'd turned three shades whiter than a sheet and thrown my hands up in surrender.
I knew two things: first, that if I did or even said anything to this man Angelus (let's call him a man, even though he isn't really a man; he's got a prick, and for the purposes of the present discussion, that qualifies, so...) that she saw as interfering in her personal life, I would either (a) never hear the end of it or, more likely, (b) never hear from her again; and second, that if I did what I really wanted to do, which was to go out and either rip his balls off the way I wanted to or, more tempting but more difficult to do, kill him, I would surely never hear from my daughter ever again. I knew one more thing, deep down, though I would not have admitted it then had you asked me: my daughter is strong, and controls magics far more powerful than I could ever dream of, and she is more than capable of defending herself against any man, even one like Angelus. The one thing I feared for her most—that this man would break her heart—was the one thing I couldn't protect her from.
So I backed off.
The years went by and I suspected that Tempe was still keeping the company, at least from time to time, of this man, Angelus, although I couldn't be certain because my daughter made very sure that her social circle and mine never overlapped in any way. One might ask why did I even have such a suspicion given how disparate my life and my daughter's was at that particular time? Well, the answer's simple. It was, in part, because Tempe seemed to be happy, more or less, the way she'd been in the past while carrying on with Angelus. Secondly...well, it might have been that I had him followed, and in the course of such, well, intelligence-gathering efforts, I—that is, the man I might've asked to follow him—might have seen them together in and around the East End of London.
I kept tabs on him as best I could through my various sources—not because I didn't trust my daughter, but because I sure as hell didn't trust him. My daughter was everything to me then, the only thing I had, and I wasn't going to let any harm come to her. If that makes me a bad father, well...
It's the way I am, I guess, being overprotective. It's just my nature.
So, in any case, 1897 gave way to 1898 and my daughter made her way back to Egypt to work on archeological excavations there, it seemed that Angelus, too, had left London's environs. I can't say I was particularly upset by this fact, but I never heard anything of him after that.
At least, not until after I arrived in the United States. I came through Ellis Island a few months after Armistice Day and spent about six years in New York—first living in the Bronx and then later in Queens—before finally making my way to Chicago, where Tempe herself had finally landed in 1919 after twenty-odd years spent splitting time between London, Egypt, New York, and Boston. As she had for centuries, my daughter welcomed me, but made it very clear the first time she invited me over to have dinner in her Gold Coast home that she had her life and I had mine.
Message received, baby girl, I remember thinking when she told me that. Loud and clear.
We'd just finished dessert—a wonderful crème brûlée served with a small glass of Oloroso sherry—and we were talking about a new exhibit at the Field Museum that Tempe was very excited about when the door to her apartment unlocked with a loud clack and swung open with a whoosh as both of our heads turned. A tall, dark-haired, olive-skinned man in a thick, black wool coat walked through the door, his eyes widening for a moment before his pursed lips cracked into a smile. My daughter's face blanched a little as she turned away from me and saw the figure at the door and then flushed as the man greeted her with a smile.
I knew him the minute I saw him. You live as long as I do, enduring the shifting winds of political folly and human greed, you never, ever forget a face. And I could tell by the way his eyes narrowed ever so slightly the moment his gaze met mine that he had not forgotten mine. We held each other's gaze for a few seconds, each of us smiling faintly at the other but not moving a muscle or uttering a murmur, before my daughter finally broke the silence.
"I thought you went to the movies," she said to him, a sharpness in her tone of voice that left no doubt in this old man's mind that she had not expected to have him home before I'd made my way back to my own apartment in Lincoln Park. "To see Henry Otto's production of Dante's Inferno..."
I watched him shrug and raise his eyebrows, creasing his forehead as he blinked back at my daughter. The laughter I remembered seeing flicker in his brown eyes when I saw him nearly fifty years earlier seemed, somehow, subdued, replaced by something else, a sensitivity almost, that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I had no doubt as I watched him close the door behind him and pull his heavy coat off his broad shoulders, shaking a few errant beads of water onto the rug in front of the door before hanging his coat on the rack, that this was the very same man I'd seen my daughter throw off her balcony and then, a couple of weeks later, traipse into my Tempe's home like he owned the place. I had no doubt that the man I saw enter Tempe's home those nights as I watched from my tavern house table and who I encountered in the lobby of Claridge's hotel was the same man who stood before us, toeing out of his shoes before making his way towards the dining room table where Tempe and I sat.
"The projector broke," he explained with a sheepish look. "So I went by McTaggart's for a pint, and then decided to..." His voice trailed off as he read the hardness in my daughter's jaw.
Tempe turned back to look at me, her high cheekbones flush and her eyes bright as she pursed her lips and exhaled slowly through her nose as if pulling together her thoughts in the span of seconds it took to empty her lungs.
"Dad," she said as I stood up from my chair. "This is my friend, Angel." She turned to him as a smile flashed across her pretty face. The young man paused briefly to acknowledge me with a slight upward jerk of his chin as he rolled up his shirtsleeves before proceeding into the kitchen and opening the icebox. He reached in and grabbed a bottle of beer, shut the door and popped off the bottlecap with the bottle-opener that dangled on a string from the icebox handle. The twisted bottlecap clattered noisily onto the counter as Angel—I couldn't help but smirk to hear he'd finally dropped the goofy, vaguely feminine "-us" at the end of his name—leaned back against the counter, took a long swig of beer and set the bottle down on the counter.
"Nice to meet you, sir," he said, stepping out of the kitchen and extending his hand.
"Call me Max," I said as I shook his hand, noting how cool his palm and fingers felt as they clasped mine, but also how firm his grip was. "Max Keenan." I tightened my own grip, and I saw the corners of his lips curve up in a faint smile as he returned the gesture. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tempe arch an eyebrow at hearing me introduce myself.
I shrugged silently as my eyes met hers for a fleeting second. What can I say? I was a new man in a new country...with a new name.
"You live around here?" I asked innocently, trying to suppress a smirk. I had a pretty good idea that, even if he kept his own place, he sure spent a lot of time at Tempe's, the way he waltzed in, hung up his coat, took off his shoes and placed them next to hers by the door, and grabbed a beer out of the fridge without even a fleeting sideways glance to confirm permission.
Angel narrowed his eyes and cocked his head to the side but didn't say anything. After a moment, my daughter again broke the silence.
"Dad," Tempe said edgily. "He lives here. With me." Her eyes darted over to his as I released his hand and he took a step back towards the kitchen to retrieve his beer. After a couple of seconds, she repeated, "He lives with me, Dad, and has for a while now."
Several long moments of silence hung in the air as the two of them looked at me, waiting for me to react in some way. I'm not sure exactly how they expected me to react. It's not like I didn't know my nearly four hundred year-old daughter was—gasp!—sexually active.
It's not like I would be shocked at the notion of a person like Tempe or me having an affair with a vampire. People like us, who know the craft of magic, cannot necessarily be turned like ordinary people can unless we do something really, really stupid. Usually, we're quite skilled at warding off the the demon's draw unless we have a mind to submit to it ourselves. I've had my own such affairs—well, only once, actually, and it was a big mistake, but that's a long story for another time—and so who am I to judge? Besides, I'd be the first to admit that vampires, for all of their flaws, are very, very good in bed. I mean, really, really good in bed—they may not be able to take an ounce of sunshine but they sure know how to make the most of the night. Give a vampire lover half a chance and they'll wear you out in the best, most deliciously wicked way. But, anyway, I digress...
As I watched the two of them look at me, then to each other, and then back at me, I felt it—that electricity that crackles between two people who have caught on fire with desire for the other. I knew it the second he walked in the door and his eyes met hers.
"Hmmm," I murmured in reply.
I have always told Tempe never to underestimate people, and for the most part, she's adhered to that advice. Except, I think, when it comes to me. I guess it's as easy to underestimate those closest to you as it is to take them for granted. Tempe and I have never taken each other for granted, probably because we've never been as close as we were before her mother died. Things are better between us now, after all these years, than they were back in London, but we're still not as close as I would like. For some reason, which I still don't completely understand, I think Tempe expected me to go ballistic when I found out she was keeping the company of a vampire.
Look, don't get me wrong.
He's not who I would have chosen for her. I am serious: he's so not the person I would've chosen for her. I mean, I just said it twice so that should tell you something. But as the three of us sat around her dining room table that night, Tempe and I sipping our fine Spanish sherries while Angel made quick work of his bottle of locally-brewed Irish-style red ale—bought off a guy who knew another guy whose brother illegally brewed the stuff in the basement of a run-down rowhouse in Ashburn, an Irish neighborhood on the west part of the South Side—it became clear to me that, whatever this man was, he was not the man he used to be, forty-odd years earlier when I'd first met him up close, or twenty years before that when I watched with a certain satisfaction as my daughter threw his cocky, blood-sucking ass off her balcony. He was still a charming fellow, but his confidence, while still effusive, was somehow more measured, more restrained. But it was more than that. The man I met at Claridge's was a user—the kind of man who slithered up to a woman, tucking into her and winning her confidence, then used her however way he could, sexually and otherwise, until he had used her all up or grown bored with her, then he'd move on—but this man, well, when I looked in Angel's eyes, I didn't see it. I'm not saying I trusted him, because the fact of the matter is that it takes decades to earn my trust—and if you try to fuck me over, or try fuck over someone I love, hell will freeze over before I'll ever trust you again—but I was willing to give him enough of a benefit of the doubt that I let him be, and gave my Tempe the distance she wanted.
Over the years, Angel caused her a lot of grief, there's no doubt about it. To be fair, I'm sure she gave as good as she good. But, she's my child, and he isn't, so his parents can worry about any heartache she caused him. I've wanted to jam a stake in that shrivelled heart of his on more than one occasion because of the single iota of pain she's felt because of him.
But there are also times—the five years they spent in Chicago, when he lived with her, and a short spell of time when he came down to Mexico to be with her, and a few times in between—when my Tempe seemed genuinely happy, and for reasons not entirely wrapped up in her work as an anthropologist and archaeologist. I can only believe that those times, she was happy because of the love that she'd found in him. I suppose I could never have expected my immortal witch of a daughter to fall in love with a normal, mortal man, but I'd hoped that she'd have done like her mother, Christine, and her brother's mom, Stephanie did—to find a man who loved them and understood them because he was, in a sense, like them, possessed of magics and tuned into the mystical side of things.
But no, my Tempe is as she always was, her own woman, and she did things her own way. She wanted a man who would match her, step for step, move for move, who would challenge her, excite her, who would be tactile and down to earth, keeping her grounded as her brilliant mind soared aloft on the wings of its own intellectual fancies. And if this young man—this vampire, this Irishman from the wild west side of his island, who I didn't wholly trust and can't say I really even liked, even after meeting him again in Chicago—gave her those things, and she managed to be more complete person as a result, well, then in the end, I could be happy for her.
And so I was. Despite it all, I watched quietly, from a distance, and let my daughter have her own happiness. It wasn't my call to make. Arguably, as far as my friend, the off-duty psychologist tells me, it's not really her call, either. The human heart—whether touched by magic or guarded by walls—may try to fortify itself against the pain that comes with feeling love deeply and feeling deeply the loss of love, but unlike the mind, in the end, the heart alone chooses where it finds such love, and we are best to follow its guidance in this regard.
So I watched, year after year, never crowding her in, but always waiting on the wings, even while the two of them struggled to mediate the space between them, and how to live separate lives and yet be one life together.
I watched and I waited. The heart chooses what it chooses. We have no say in the matter. And a father, watching his daughter struggle with her heart, has no say in the matter at all, despite his gut-rending desire to help.
I watched her. I watched her love and I watched her get hurt. I watched her change, I watched her learn to pull apart and how to pull back, and how to believe.
And in the end, I watched her find happiness. It didn't come in the package or under circumstances that either of us would have predicted she'd find it.
But she's happy.
She's truly happy. And in the end, that's all I really care about. Even if he isn't who I would have chosen for her because, as my friend once said...the heart chooses what it chooses.
~The End~
A/N2: So, there you have it. A bit of a different sort of Dharmasera piece. This is only the second time we've done first person narrative (VBI Scenario No. 8, "He Said, She Said," is the other), and the first time we've done a story from the point of view of someone besides Booth or Brennan.
Now you know a little more about the Max Keenan who inhabits our very AU Angel/Bones crossover universe. It's much the same father/daughter dynamic, don't you think? (Well, for different reasons, of course, but it has some of the same vibe.)
So, what did you think? Let us know. The only revenue we get from the time we put into these stories is the psychic revenue we get from reader reviews. So please, please leave a review.
You can follow our crossover-verse Brennan and her dad, Max, on Twitter. Their usernames are WitchyBren and magicmaxkeenan. Max in particular is quite a talker. (And a bit of a flirt.)
Part III of "Echoes True and False" is coming out very soon. It'll show you a side of Brennan that you haven't really seen before even if you may have gotten glimpses of it before. We promise. It really is coming. Just be patient with us and stay tuned.
As ever, thanks for reading!