It was only when Nina was finally allowed to visit his house that he realized how very unlike her father—mother she was.
"Mother?" the girl asked over her shoulder, head already craned back at a precarious angle to examine his ceiling.
He frowned. No matter what he'd promised, she refused to call him 'Father,' though in the end he imagined it wasn't all that bad. Mentally he called Madame the mother and himself the father, but outside of it usually managed to keep with Nina and label the roles according to their strict biological interpretations.
But it still unnerved him a bit how easily and nonchalantly she accepted his role as the feminine parental figure in her conception. When he asked why the week before during a lunch, she had explained dryly, "Oh come on—I know you've met my father. You should and I do know what she's capable of, and I've been living with the fact of my parentage since I was old enough to ask." She had smiled sardonically and teased, "I realize it's an unusual thing, but then again, I'm not the one with the stretch marks."
He had then absent-mindedly held on hand over his stomach while returning, "I don't have them any more! At the very least that woman had Clockwork remove them when he fixed time!" When she stilled and glared dully at him, Vlad had figured he'd gone too far. While he wouldn't take it back, he did relax the tense arch of his shoulders. His daughter growled out, "Her name is Mary." Unrepentantly, though curiously startled by Nina's insistence on him using a name, and an ironic one at that, he continued eating lunch, and it was another five minutes after that before a new conversation was willing to start up.
"So…" she began tersely.
"So," he agreed.
"I'm not going to lie and ask you about your parents, because I already know all about them."
"Right," he answered slowly. Madame had researched him very well; why not pass that knowledge on to his (their) daughter?
"I'm also not going to lie and say I understood why you left, because I don't."
The challenge of her statement hung out there for a minute before Vlad awkwardly coughed and tried to answer, "I didn't belong there-" but was quickly cut off by Nina, whose eyes flashed in a very familiar manner.
"You were wanted. I was there. You were needed." Her lip curled. "What was so pressing outside of my world that you had to leave?"
"Oh." So that's what she was angry about. "Nina… I won't lie either and say I didn't want to stay for you, but- You have to understand what you are from my perspective."
"What I am?!" she boggled, fuming.
He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose before continuing strained, "I never wanted to give birth to a child, and it's not something as a man that I ever expected to have to consider. I didn't know Madame was going to fix time when I was gone, so I was imagining how it would be received if I stayed missing for a full two years and in the off-chance I could convince her to let me have you, how it would be received if I returned after that two years with a small baby girl and no good explanation for where she came from.
"You were beautiful, I treasured you so much, Nina, but I couldn't risk that kind of trouble. Not for you and not for me. When I found out I was in that conference room again, on that day, with everyone but Madame and yourself there, I was… floored."
He paused. This was an odd conversation to be having in public, and he was thankful he'd gotten the most far-off table in the restaurant. Nina's jaw was still set harshly, but he could see her hands were not clenched, but flat on the table. Whatever she was fuming about wasn't going to last. She was letting it out, whether she realized it or not.
The otherwise hard appearance of her anger dropped for a moment as she gasped, just a second before Vlad sensed a ghost and stiffened just slightly. Unsure of whether or not she knew of its presence, despite her gasp and shuddery cold breath pointing otherwise, Vlad held back on assuring, "Don't worry." Instead, he focused on being sure no one was looking as a folder phased its way onto the table surface. Quickly, Vlad pulled his briefcase and pulled out another two files and set them on top of the ghost-brought one as a distraction against anyone who might find the appearance of the sheaf of wrapped papers odd, then promptly returned the case to the side of his chair and ignored the pile next to his elbow.
To Nina, who had regained her composure and was glaring less ruefully at him, he offered, "Maybe I could explain this later? It's not exactly something I've let myself think about." He smiled reassuringly and Nina eyed him for a while before nodding her head and tactfully starting a conversation about business at VladCo, it being the "official" reason they had had lunch together.
In a way, he could see some of his captor in the girl as she stood in the foyer of his house, staring at everything critically, searching for the hidden meanings within the items about their owner, but it was mostly physically. Her hair, shoulder length now, recklessly curled in on itself in haphazard angles, like that woman's ponytail monstrosity had. They had the same facial composition, with the exception of his long, straight-edged nose on Nina's face, and the same eyes, down to the shade. The only big difference was the hair colour (the shade Vlad's would have been, without the accident) and the matter of the girl's pupils.
While Madame's irises seemed to constantly dilate and contract in accordance with her moods, Nina's eyes thankfully reacted to light normally, and seemed to in no way relate to her moods. It didn't help though, to never know when she would say something strange like she did the next second, without a telling tightening of the radius of the iris.
As it were, without pinpricks for black in her jade eyes, Nina asked quite suddenly and shockingly, freezing Vlad in place and not noticing, "Did you and my father really never have sex, Vlad?"
He blanched, she was sour to note, and looked sickly green when she turned around. "What?" The flush of embarrassed red around the green on the edges of his face did nothing to ease her scowl as she probed, "Do you find my father that disgusting, Mr. Masters?" Her arms folded imperiously over her chest and the girl widened her stance as she muttered coldly, "Not like you fully deserved her, but still."
For the few moments it took his mind to restart, Vlad stared at Nina in surprise. Though he hadn't heard what she said under her breath, Vlad imagined it wasn't terribly nice to him. Despite her equal knowledge of Madame's odd traits, more intensive, actually, as she had shed light on some of her ticks that Vlad had never seen or never understood, Nina did not take kindly to any moment when he regarded her father as anything other than a genius. And while the woman was, Vlad still failed to hide at least some of his distaste for the female that had locked him up, experimented on him for nigh two years, and impregnated him, to boot. Those were not easy things to forgive or forget, especially since the woman in question showed no remorse for the harassment.
Cautiously, he answered, considering every word twice before saying it, "I apologize, but you know I do not hold your father in as high regards as you do. I do not mean to imply that your mother would not have been an excellent and attractive choice, but in the circumstances I knew her… A relationship, if any existed, would not and certainly could not involve sexual activities, or not ones that I haven't or would have repressed."
He snorted derisively, "To Hell with Stockholm Syndrome, as great as your father may be, she is still a captor to me, and I shall not forgive nor accept her crimes against me, regardless that they bore me you." He smiled fondly, "You are a brilliant little princess, but I'm not the type to enjoy that kind of treatment." He shuddered again, much to her chagrin. "Especially not the dress-up."
The girl paused, and then relaxed. Sagely, she offered, "Those were bad—but it's not like you couldn't've asked her to stop." One eyebrow arched, Nina said crossly, "My father never does anything to cause people unnecessary unhappiness. What she did to you, for the most part, she saw no problem with. If she had been the object of someone's affection and was cared for so well, she would've been perfectly content."
"Perhaps you have different understandings of your father's ambition and of her stubbornness."
"Do not," she answered petulantly. "Madame let me go to see you, didn't she?"
"She did?" Vlad honestly hadn't known about his daughter's situation leading up to working at VladCo for six years as "Nolan" before becoming an advisor on the company board. "Nolan" admitted to having an eccentric mother who hadn't wanted him to go, and when he revealed himself (in a spectacular transformation after deliberately jabbing himself with the Plasmius Maximus variant he remembered Madame having created for him) in a flash as not only being a girl named Nina but his Nina, his daughter, Vlad had simply assumed that meant he'd escaped from Madame and for someone reason the woman wasn't chasing back.
"Yes," Nina growled. "Now. Did you or did you not ever have sex with my father?"
"No." He was careful not to let his tone colour itself with his disgust at the possibility, unwilling to estrange himself from his daughter, as ill-begotten as she was. "Your father is every inch the Virgin Mary."
The girl started, jerking her shoulders back and blinking. Vlad, as very little as he wished to, imagined quite clearly how, were this Madame, the irises would now have swollen wide and nearly consumed the colour of her pale eyes as Nina laughed deep in her throat, caught off gaurd by the phrase. "She is, isn't she?" Nina finally manageed after another few chortles and hiccuping breaths. Like her father, she never seemed to hold onto her feelings for too long, her anger of a moment before gone, evaporated into thin air.
Vlad smiled tentatively as Nina let the topic go, her question answered, with a light, "Oh well." He saw again, in his mind's eye, how the woman who'd fathered this child would have held her hand on her hips and dropped her shoulders, the exact stance of her legs as she would relax.
"Vlad...." She seemed frozen for a second, as she considered her next queston, and his attention was quickly on his daughter, anxious to be ready for whatever curveball Nina may throw his way this time. "I visited Mary-- Madame." Doing her best not to notice the way Vlad tensed, the way his fists clenched, and his eyes darted around just slightly. She softened her tone though, sadness seeping in around the corners of her words like an apology. "She's... I don't know, she seems broken.
"She sold Headquarters. She's living in a dump, even though she still has more money than she could make use of. She's," a half of a watery laugh, "Dad's a secretary now. Just like her father." Turning her head up, Nina drew her hands across her eyes quickly, roughly, shoving wityh the heel of her palm the beginning of tears she had planned to save for later, when she was alone. "She seemed so happy to see me, when I walked into that office... You know how she can be," and Vlad nodded just slightly, amazed at the idea of Madame being, well, not the threatening dangerous woman he wished he never knew and at the child-like loyalty he heard in her voice as his daughter continued.
"Dad didn't need to job, so she left that very second, took me back to her apartment, and walked me back to a room. She waited for me all those years, waited for me to come back, even though she knew I might not." Quite suddenly, Nina dropped to the floor, falling into a sitting position, her bag loosing its contents wildly onto the floor. As if in a trance, eyes clouded as she recounted the story, the girl continued as if still standing and fine, "It was perfect. She made me the room for my job, my position, but for me. She knows me so well, and- Even after I apologized for taking so long to come back, she only pet my hair and told me about how things were, how proud of me she was, and even though I knew she wanted to, she didn't pressure me to say a thing about working for and with you."
"Really?" Vlad was crouching in front of her suddenly, concerned but also surprised. "Why not?"
It seemed presumptuous to think it only appropriate for Madame to still be fixated on him, and even like it could ignite Nina's ire if he thought in such a way that led him to always expect the worst from her father, but at the moment, she either didn't care or felt the same way as it concerned her fathers feelings toward Vlad, as she replied thickly, "She was afraid I would like you more, that it would seem like she didn't care about me if she asked too much about you first, and she knew if she let herself know too much about you too quickly after cutting herself off-" She quickly glanced up and said pitifully, "It hurt her so much to do that," before keeping up with, "That she might not be able to resist finding you again." She snorted shortly and said, "That's what seems off, I think. Dad never cared about that before. She was blunt, she was open, and she never stopped her own happiness for others."
Looking up to Vlad, she asked softly, "Should it hurt this much for me to know she's not the same? To know that I changed her into this... normal person? She's still brilliant, but she can't use it. She still invents, but she doesn't use her toys either, only boxes them up and leaves them be." Nina collapsed forward, suddenly wrapping her arms around Vlad's torso, pulling him into a hug she needed more than him. "And I can't help but wonder how she must've been at my age? Before she realized how the world worked and had to adjust her strategy. She must've been such a beautiful force, someone you'd be afraid to touch for fear of being burned. My dad-- She's so much smaller than she could be, and it's partly my fault, because I left her, and that's the one thing you can never do--"
Her mother only held her, shell-shocked by all this new knowledge. The cruel and insane woman he knew couldn't fit with this news, yet he knew Nina wasn't lying to him. He tucked his chin against the top of his daughters head and ignored the already wet feel of his suit against his chest from her tears. While he shushed Nina and made gentle assurances of better days, his thoughts toyed with the idea of a normal Madame. To his surprise, his own mind recoiled from it, like it were some treachery. He couldn't understand why he wouldn't want that woman to be normal, to be human for once, but then reflected just slightly on Nina's speech. Madame was a force in and of herself, he knew that, had grown comfortable, though never happy, with the fact that what she wanted, she got. It felt like a lie, like some cruel hoax to imagine her ever sitting back and letting someone else call the shots, someone else be the leader while she followed and obeyed someone else's rules.
Answering as softly, if not softer, than Nina had asked it, he whispered into his daughters ear, "It's a tragedy that your father was never the woman she could've been, but that happens with every true genius this world sees. They may break new ground, and they may even rule the world, but there's always the extra inch they can never press forward onto, always limited by the ideals and the constraints of reality." Even lower, a full minute later, after Nina's sobs had died down, he added, "I'm sorry I added to her limitations. But you can never be sorry for leaving. Never. She let each of us go, she didn't follow. Even if it means cutting out of her life everything that she loves, your father is what every mother should be: Willing to destroy every inch of the world before she lets a single thing get in her childs way."
"Mother Mary," Nina mumbled into Vlad's jacket collar, then pulled back a second later, pulling in a shaky breath and looking Vlad full-on. "I said all that to say this." Once more she ran her hands over her face, failing to remove all traces of her tears, though she made a valiant effort. "The day I was packing, to come back to you, to come live here, she stood in my doorway, and when I asked what was wrong, she asked if I could come with me... Just like that."
The shoulders that had already been stiff from trying to pull himself together formed an only more solid wall as he tried once, twce, and then three times to asked levelly, "What did you say?"
Instead of answering immediately, Nina stood, grabbing her bag and ignoring the spilled tube of lisptick, the ghost ray, and her wallet as she fingered the strap awkwardly. Vlad rose to meet her and waited patiently.
"I said she would have to ask you. She looked scared for a second, then laughed and said you hated her and that she would just stay there and hope I could visit." Feeling and embracing the way her chest seemed to freeze in fear and anticipation, Nina asked, head pointed at her feet, "I was wondering if she coud stay with us? Me, I mean. Stay with me. She sighed and blinked a few times. "I can't let her be alone. Her father told me that." Remining herself of the stern hour she'd spent with Henry Arturo, Nina finished, the voice behind her words sturdy and firm like her grandfathers, "'If you can help it, always keep her close to you.' She feels the distance between us and it hurts her, so much. Can I bring her to live with me? Can I keep my father and you, too?"