A/N: So I know I've kind of skirted around Will's issues with his father thus far in this little universe, and when I decided to give Charlotte a little sibling I kind of decided that now was the moment to do it. Chapter One will be posted tomorrow and I'm staring down the rough draft of Chapter Two right now, and will probably start Chapter Three tonight, so hopefully something resembling a schedule will appear. Or so I hope. Thus far it's looking like a prologue plus six chapters, but we'll see.

"Paterfamilias" was the Roman word for the oldest male in the family, who had a legal and moral duty to take care of those within his household and extended family, including his slaves and clients and others given to be under his care. He was to be, himself, the model Roman citizen and participate in public life.

PROLOGUE: PRESENT DAY

There was the three of them, for the longest time. Liz, only eighteen months younger than him, has always been there for him to have to protect. Mickey came along when he was five, still too young to do much about it but old enough to understand that the other kids in his kindergarten class didn't have to hide their younger brothers and sisters from Dad because he liked to use his fists when he drank. It was the three of them until he was twelve, and Fiona was born. By then he was old enough to know exactly the circumstances of their family, and how to fight back.

Fatherhood, he's since realized, is a lot like what his relationship with Fiona is. Except at twelve he was awkward and fumbling, and while at fifty-three he's still unsure, he's no longer a gawky teenager struggling to rub two nickels together to feed his younger siblings, maneuver around his dad's drunken bouts of violence, and keep the school officials off his tail.

He doesn't remember a time where he wasn't trying to protect someone, wasn't taking a hit for someone, or an insult.

"It wasn't planned?" Habib asks, instead of berating him for skipping seven and a half months' worth of appointments. Although, Will thinks, after the four year stretch where he just ignored psychiatric care sum total, him showing up in the vague aftermath of any personal problem is an impressive feat of self-awareness.

He laughs, realizing that he sounds half-desperate, but shrugs it off. "I've found over the past fifteen years that Mac and I rarely plan anything in our personal lives."

Not that it hasn't necessarily worked out for them, in the end: a marriage going five years strong, a trophy brownstone on the Upper West Side, the number one news show on cable, and a darling little girl.

And now a little boy on the way.

Will was doing exceptionally well, until he heard the ultrasound technician say the "little boy" part, three weeks ago. Since then has been a spiral down into near-nightly panic attacks and nightmares that cause dizzying flashbacks to the small Nebraska farmhouse and his dad, standing over him with a bottle in one hand with the fingers on the other curled into a fist, his little siblings screaming somewhere in the background, or from across the room, where he can't get to them in time.

Habib nods. "But you're happy about it? MacKenzie's pregnancy."

Will's answer is a glare in his therapist's direction. "I'd like to go back to—the kid's not even born yet and I'm already gonna fuck it up."

"But you were happy, when she first told you?"

His answer is almost sarcastic.

Almost, but then he remembers he has sixteen weeks to figure this out before his son's scheduled appearance, and Charlotte was almost a month early, so he knows that there's really no running on schedule with babies.

"Ecstatic," he does say, steadfastly ignoring the softening expression on Habib's face.

Thanks for reading!