Warnings: A little angsty.
Spoilers: Through GH episode aired Mar. 20, 2013. AU episode tag to episode aired Mar. 20, 2013.
Disclaimer: If I ever created even one character half as iconic as Todd Manning, I'd die a happy woman. I'm just playing with the pretty, so not to sue please.

Notes: So, I understand why the write-outs for Todd, Starr, and John McBain had to be super-vague and open-ended leaning to making them sound permanent, but I don't have to like it. Actually, I hate it. Thus, Presto! Fic! Title is from "Turn Around" by Whiskeytown from Strangers Almanac, 1997.

My baby's all grown up, but she still reduces me to mush, no, pudding, since I wouldn't eat mush if I was starving to death, when she looks at me with that face.

The face Todd was surreptitiously watching from the front of his plane, after having a brief word with the pilot, was thankfully staring out the window into the darkness just at the moment rather than fixing him with her enormous sad, disappointed eyes, maybe feeling like her own immediate future was just as hard to make out as the air strip landscape, which wouldn't have been much to look at even in the daytime. She was probably missing Michael, Michael who had apparently been the one to sway Starr into giving him this chance to spend a little time with his girl before they were separated again for who knew how long this time. So maybe Michael wasn't completely unworthy of her after all, but Todd wasn't ready to commit to that assessment.

Apparently sensing his appraisal, Starr turned to look at him.

"Everything okay, Dad?"

There she was on the couch where he'd proposed to her mother, again, one among all the other times, a successful one at least, and she was wearing a similar guarded expression and also trying to hide it with a noncommittally pleasant façade, just like her mother. Well, it wasn't actually the same couch. He'd had the plane's interior redone since then, but it was in the same spot, and the expression on Blair's daughter's face was eerily similar.

"We're all set. Better buckle in for take-off."

"Okay."

Todd seated himself on the sofa as well and arranged his own seat belt. So, she was going with one-to-three-word sentences then. This could end up being one hell of a long, quiet ride. The jet's engines geared up, growing louder and louder as the plane began to move, picking up speed as it fought its way into the air and gained altitude. No point in trying to talk to her over this roar anyway. When he glanced over, she didn't look scared, didn't look like she needed her Dad to hold her hand, and he couldn't face the possibility that she'd pull hers away if he tried it.

He'd always thought of an airplane's ascent from the ground, of that precise moment when it lifted from the earth's surface, as a victory of one set of forces over another, of speed and power and aerodynamics defeating gravity. If he'd stuck around long enough, the doctors at Ferncliff would have probably told him that it wasn't surprising that he would choose a metaphor like that because his own history was so replete with conflict and manifestations of power struggles of all kinds from his earliest memories with Peter Manning to his revolting actions with Marty and everything it had taken to fight back from the depths of that low point.

Todd didn't need to hear another shrink explain to him that the rape was all tangled up with Peter's mangling of his "son's" development from boyhood on through Peter's warped definition of manhood, of his crushing the part of Todd that his real mother, since Irene was never that no matter what DNA had to say about it, had nurtured briefly before she left him to Peter's so-called "care". He didn't need to hear it because it only explained a part of the why and didn't do a damn thing to fix the damage he'd done and could never undo.

Meanwhile, the gods or the universe, whatever or whoever was in charge, had bestowed upon him the best of so many second chances by gifting him with Starr, and he hadn't exactly rewarded their judgment. In some ways he'd done great by his girl, but in others he'd been a miserable failure and had only caused her more pain on top of the suffering he couldn't have protected her from even if he had been the perfect father. He couldn't have saved Cole or Hope, and he couldn't protect her from Victor while Irene had him locked up, both of which facts filled him with the same rage, and, beneath that, there was the same constantly-buzzing anxiety that had been his lifelong companion and that had blazed up to fuel his rage into quite several particularly memorable conflagrations over the years and then subsided again without ever ceasing, leaving him to contemplate the scorched earth of a life he invariably had left afterwards.

Somehow, Starr had found it in her heart to forgive Victor for the things he'd done to her while her real father was away, but maybe that was it. Once she knew Victor wasn't her real father, maybe her expectations for him had shrunk down to an appropriate size for that worthless pretender. Todd wouldn't say of himself that he had never succumbed to moments of hypocrisy in the pursuit of his various agendas, but, no matter that there might not be a person on the planet to whom he could bring himself to confess his actual regret for having been the one to kill his brother, he couldn't in equal measure pretend to be sorry that he was dead, and the way he'd treated Starr during his pathetic impersonation was chief among the reasons for that sentiment.

So, here he was, in the place he'd been so many times before, having once again defied the odds and fought clear of society's rules for most people: no jail time for switching Sam's baby or for any of the things he'd done to keep that secret, but Todd was still behind in the game, busted back to zero, because he'd lost Carly in the process, and here sat Starr, only just tolerating him and letting him fly her to L.A. out of a sense of obligation and only after Carly's son encouraged her to at least maintain some kind of tenuous connection with her father.

The kid ought to know from father issues considering the two of them he was currently negotiating relationships with, and they were quite a pair: a petite mobster with girly dimples and eyes that could transform from twinkly to reptilian in the space of a muzzle flash and that poufy-haired beefcake that had resorted to kidnapping to get at Michael back in the day and had more recently half-heartedly helped Carly in her ridiculous scheme to fool Todd that she'd moved on from him, but then it wouldn't do to spend much time comparing himself to R.J. or whatever his stupid initials were, on either score, not the kidnapping and not the ridiculous play‑acting. He'd resorted to both over the years himself, but that didn't mean he was going to cut P.J. any slack.

Thinking about Carly was too much to heap onto his plate right now too. Even though he didn't want to, the one viable solution was to compartmentalize, so the only productive reason for considering her today was in her connection to Starr. It was hard for him to wrap his head around the fact that Starr had tried to help Carly by lying to him on Carly's behalf because he didn't realize they'd gotten close enough in his recent absence for that to even be a possibility, but it was certainly a clear enough sign that he'd hurt Starr to the degree that she'd taken the first opportunity that presented itself to work against him. He was almost sure that was the stronger motivation over any desire to help Carly just for her own sake. Here again the root of everything was lost time, time he'd had to spend behind bars and then at least adjacent to padded walls and, finally, on the run, and of course on this occasion specifically it was largely his own fault.

That wasn't always the case. Time, yeah, time was something he'd squandered back when he didn't know any better but also something that had been ripped away from him in irretrievable quantities, no matter that he couldn't convince Carly of how much those eight years had scarred him, and it was only one of the many that riddled him on the inside, perhaps not as palpable as the faded literal embodiment of the word still snaking across his face, perhaps too faded with time to serve as an adequate warning that Carly hadn't heeded anyway, for just long enough for him to lose another chunk of what was left of his heart to her. But it was just as real, and the one worthwhile lesson it had taught him was that he wasn't about to give up on Starr. Not Starr, not ever.

Like the songbird she'd recently wanted to be and maybe would again once she got back to Port Charles to continue sharing ownership of her oddly-fated namesake, The Haunted Star, and giving her that was the least Johnny could do even though it didn't begin to make up for what he had done because you couldn't even see the beginnings of reparation from where Johnny was, may he rot in Pentonville like the rodent bastard he literally was, well at least the bastard part, his particular Starr had ear buds in listening to music, and Todd was sure it was at least in part a way of avoiding him, as if that would ever work.

Since she had her eyes closed, Todd reached over and pulled one of the ear pieces free. Instantly, she blinked surprise before the all-too-familiar lines of annoyance settled onto her adorable squooshy face. He'd never tell her so, but to him at such times she looked exactly like her baby self just beginning to realize that pooping wasn't always a painless and entertaining endeavor, not an especially helpful observation considering the serious nature of the talk he thought they were long overdue to have and could finally have, since neither one of them had anywhere to run to escape it.

"What is it now?"

Well, that wasn't encouraging, but then he was supposed to be the actual grown up here, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, so he had to press on.

"Talk to me, Starr. Let me have it. I have it coming."

Starr yanked the bud out of her other ear and turned to face him, a fiercely-compact study of exasperation.

"Oh no you don't. You don't get to do that, say 'I have it coming' like you've already figured out the best way to explain why you did what you did, and you're just waiting for me to say something and finish, so you can rationalize it and expect me to just forgive you yet again. You're impossible."

"I know I am. Don't you think I know that? Really, I'm just trying to give you a chance to tell me how you feel. Me saying I'm sorry again doesn't cut it. I understand that."

"But do you really, Dad?"

"I do, but I don't know what to do about it. So, you're right. I do want to skip ahead to the part where you tell me what I can do to make it better—"

"You can't."

"It's just...The sound of my own voice saying `I'm sorry' one more time makes me sick. I'm sick of myself, Starr. I thought once I got my life back it would get better, that I'd be better, but I still screwed everything up again."

"It's because you still try to control everything, Dad. You can't let go ever, not while there's the smallest shred of hope you'll get away with whatever you've done, and here it is again. You don't have to pay for anything, not for letting Heather take Sam's baby, take Danny, not for how you hurt Tea—"

"But I never meant to do any of those things. No matter what I did, Tea was going to be hurt, and she was going to blame me. I didn't have any good choices."

"No, you didn't. But you picked the one that meant lying."

"I was lied to too. Heather lied to me too. She said Sam was there to abandon that baby, but we're getting off the subject. We've already covered all of this, and it's bad, I know that, but we haven't really talked about what I did to you."

Todd reached out and took Starr's nearest hand, the one whose fingers weren't worrying the headphone pieces like rosary beads, between both of his own and held on when she tried to pull it away, just like he'd been afraid she would. Instead, she angled herself away from him again and wouldn't meet his eyes.

"I'm too tired."

"No, you're not. You had a good head of steam going there."

"You're exhausting."

"True, but do it anyway."

Moments passed in silence, and he waited for her to speak, but she didn't.

"Look at me, Starr. Please."

Just when he was going to lift one hand away from her small one still nestled there to touch her chin, to turn it in his direction and will her eyes to follow, Starr turned on her own. The pain Todd saw there cut worse than anything Irene's goons had done to him, and his own eyes began to sting.

"You let me do it. You let me confide in Johnny and thank him for helping me. I thanked him for being my friend after Cole and Hope died. You let him hurt me every time he did something to make himself feel less guilty for killing them, and you didn't say anything—"

"Starr—"

"I'm not finished. You said you wanted me to talk, so I'm talking. You did that. I know he was blackmailing you, and I know you didn't want to go to prison, but it was at my expense."

The tears were spilling out of Starr's eyes, and Todd blinked hard to clear his own because he didn't want to let go of her hand. Somehow, he believed if he let it go that she'd never let him hold it again.

"There's nothing I can say—"

"No, there isn't. You didn't really know her, Dad. Hope was so sweet and smart, and she trusted me so much. It was scary even, how much she trusted me as her mother, to take care of her and make sure everything was all right. And Johnny took her away from me. He made me abandon her in that car like you abandoned me. You left me, Dad—"

"Stop, stop! I came back as soon as I could. I fought my way back to you, you and your mother and Jack. You kept me alive because I wanted to come back to you."

"I know—"

"The reason I didn't know Hope like you said is because Irene stole me away from her, from all of you. I loved her anyway because she was yours. I didn't have to know her more than a second to love her. Please believe me."

"I do believe you. I just still can't quite believe you'd leave me on purpose again. Can't you see that letting Johnny stay near me and pretend to be my friend was like leaving me all over again? You wanted to kill Sonny when you thought he was the one who shot out the tires, but you let Johnny get away with it."

"I wanted to kill him, Starr. I tried to a few times, but I decided he wasn't worth it. I knew I'd go to prison then for sure, and I didn't want to leave you again, really I didn't."

"What did you do?"

"I tried to smother him three separate times."

"Why didn't you tell me before now?"

"What kind of example is that? You already went after Sonny once yourself, so how could I tell you I was still going around trying to kill people, no matter how much they, he, deserved it."

"I see your point."

"No matter what you did, I'd never let you go to prison. It's horrible. I'd never let that happen."

"And you didn't let me go to prison for trying to kill Sonny."

"Pffft. You didn't really try. Threatening isn't trying. They couldn't send you away for that."

"No, because you found a way to stop it."

"I couldn't stop Johnny though. I'd kill him and go to prison for the rest of my life if it would bring them back, bring back Cole and Hope. You believe me, don't you, Shorty?"

Starr pulled her hand away and rubbed below her eyes that funny way women did when they couldn't see their own faces to know where the makeup had run but were trying to wipe off as much of the smeary black stuff as possible. Then, she reached up and gently wiped away the trail of wet on his face as she peered into his eyes.

"You're a mess, Dad."

"You didn't answer me, Starr."

"Yeah, I believe you."

Todd held out his arms, slowly and carefully raising them like a child trying not to frighten away a skittish animal they wanted to pet more than anything.

"I love you, Shorty. I always will, no matter what."

"I know you will."

Starr leaned in and rested her cheek against his shoulder and let him hold her close. Todd stroked her silky hair tenderly and prayed that the worst of it was over and that he'd never do anything again that would bring him this close or push things over the edge to where he'd lose her forever. Sure, he was on his way to find out what was going on with the pretty stranger that was his other daughter, Dani, but his love for Starr was an order of magnitude beyond anything he'd ever felt for anybody ever because all he'd ever wanted from her in return was for her to love him back.

And there it was, a whisper that sounded real, real and from the heart and not just an automatic reply by rote because it was the standard thing to say.

"I love you too, Dad. God help me, but I do."

So what if the rest of his life was in ruins? For once he wasn't going to worry about anything in the world outside this airplane, actually not even anything outside the circle of his own arms. He knew it wasn't gone for good, but for just this tiny moment the faint hum he heard in the stillness wasn't coming from inside his own head, and the beautiful young woman that he was the luckiest man on earth to call his daughter was the reason he'd somehow find a way to keep going on through the rest of whatever was waiting for him out there. Whatever it was would have to wait.