Thank you to Draculoramalfoy11, Raggle Taggle Gypsy, Ren Kayashima, and p95000 for reviewing :)

As far as why I've been pretty AWOL lately- school. Last semester was tough…buuut no more school! YAY!

Sassmaster

~.*~.*~.*

Three weeks later, the adjustment was no longer an adjustment, but the norm. Haylee and Harper had gotten used to spending their days alone together in the large house after Dave had to return to work. Luckily, though, he hadn't been called away for a case yet – three evaluations at prisons in New England, yeah, but no cases. Delaplane being only around an hour away from Quantico, Dave was usually home in time to make dinner, but Harper cooked at least twice a week just because she wanted to. What Haylee lacked in her cooking skills, she made up for in her pseudo-OCD cleaning habits.

More important than finding their niches in the housework, the girls took their dad up on his offer to make use of the piano. The piano was a Fazioli, handcrafted in Italy, and obviously expensive. It was a shame to think that until they showed up, the masterpiece just sat in a room gathering dust. The piano was Harper's favorite instrument to play. Haylee was still longing for her other instruments, but the Fazioli was more than enough to keep her satisfied.

Haylee sat at the piano absentmindedly playing the piano part of Drops of Jupiter. She didn't know that anyone else was in the room until she felt a hand on her shoulder.

"You can play that song?"

Haylee jumped and turned around. "Dave, you like Drops of Jupiter?"

"Who doesn't? It would be sacrilegious."

"Dang straight!"

"Your playing is beautiful."

She pushed her hair behind her ears and smiled sheepishly. "Thank you. A whole bunch of us performed this song in our school's spring talent show. Uncle Pascal helped us pull it together; it turned out to be one of the best acts. I played piano."

Dave smiled and actually seemed really interested. "Who sang?"

"Our friend Felipe. Harper and the boy drumming sang backup. I think that's what I'm going to miss the most about New Orleans- we had a large group of friends who loved music like we do, we were always working on talent show acts or community showcase performances."

He quickly ran his fingers through her hair, something he recalled his father affectionately doing to his sisters. "I'm sure you'll find people like that here. It's probably nothing like the New Orleans music scene, but there are plenty of talented people your age around here."

"Thanks, Dave," Haylee said, hugging him.

"Of course," he said, awkwardly hugging her back.

"Did you come in here for any particular reason?"

Dave cleared his throat. "Yes, I was wondering if you and Harper liked cannoli. I was thinking of making some for desert."

"I'm Italian," she stood from the piano bench. "If I could, I'd live off of cannoli and pizzelle. Who needs boyfriends when there's cannoli?"

Though he's only known his daughters for a few weeks, the idea of either of them having a boyfriend is completely abhorrent to him. "Great mindset, keep it."

~.*~.*~.*

Dave had a new respect for his father after these few weeks. How he raised eight children, including four daughters and a set of twins is beyond him. Dave realized that he hadn't given his old man a call in a while, nor has he spoken to his mother. He made a mental note to call them…when and if he remembered. To be honest, he wanted to put off telling them about their unknown grandchildren for a while longer. Luigi and Aletta Rossi raised their children with a fairly relaxed Catholic upbringing, but had grown far more devout themselves since David's childhood. They were adamantly pro-life, didn't believe in using birth control, death penalty ban proponents, and absolutely anti-divorce. When Dave and Carolyn divorced, all Hell broke loose between him and his parents. He had this lingering feeling that his parents wouldn't accept his daughters into their family as quickly as he had. No matter what, Haylee and Harper are his daughters, and despite the unexpectedness of it all, regardless of the fact that he's only known them for weeks, he loves them.

The concept of being a father is admittedly foreign to him. He did get to be a dad for a short few hours back in 1979, before James David Rossi died from anencephaly, but this was entirely different. There is an astronomical difference between holding onto a dying infant and parenting two teenage girls. Hell, Dave didn't even know they existed until they showed up at the BAU. Speaking of the BAU, his team asked about their progress often. They wanted to meet them properly soon, but were giving them time to bond as a family.

Granted, the family was making progress. Harper bravely challenged Dave to a game of poker one evening and kicked his tail. Poker became an at least once a week thing for the three of them. It wasn't uncommon for him to come home from work to the piano playing of one of his daughters, occasionally accompanied by lyrics. The fact that they speak Italian was very much a bonus. Finally, he had someone (or two someones) who will understand the occasional statement, question, or sarcastic remark.

What did I do without them? How dull my life must have been.

Three weeks into this whole parenting thing, and he thought he's doing a decent job. He found a Nazarene church for Haylee to attend in Fort Royal, just over twenty minutes' worth of driving into the next county over, and a few decent dance studios in the area for her to look at. (Though, he told her, he wasn't going to be a reliable ride to and from, and he was pretty sure the girl across the street danced somewhere - 'I'll find out where she goes, she's your age, maybe you'll get along.') Harper actually approached him to tell him she did not wish to continue figure skating and instead wanted to focus all of her extracurricular energy on school sports and clubs.

With the help of a certain technical analyst, he came to learn that they were archetypal twenty-first century teenagers. Garcia found their YouTube channels, Tumblrs (but refused to tell Dave their URLs – "It's against tumblr code,"), Twitters, and Facebook pages. He didn't obsessively go through their Twitter feeds and YouTube channels…only scanned them over to see what they were into. Judging from the YouTube, being without all of their other instruments must have been torture. He was still working out a way for him to get them from the house in New Orleans, but he and their uncle Pascal had such conflicting work schedules it was proving to be a task in and of itself to set a date. He'd considered taking them to a big music store near DC to buy temporary stand-ins, but even he knew how musicians were often attached to their instruments. One way or another, he'd make sure that they had more than just the piano.

All Dave wanted was to be a good father to them, and make up for not being there before. Luckily, neither daughter seemed to be holding a grudge, nor did they seem to be harboring any harsh feelings.

Harsh feelings toward him, that is.

The same couldn't be said for Danielle. Haylee refused to call her "Mom," and Harper cringed whenever she said it. The thought of that woman infuriated him to no end. How could she possibly keep his kids from him? What right did she ever have to do that? He would have put a lot of things on hold to raise them. He never once doubted that they'd of still ended up divorced, but no matter what, he would have made sure he was active in their lives. The upside to Danielle's abandonment, however, was that he got to have them all to himself. Maybe he could make up for lost time…maybe.

Unlimited cannoli and no set chores or bedtimes was a good start, right?

As Dave sat at his computer in his home office, he could faintly hear the TV from the living room playing the theme song from The Big Bang Theory. The clock read 11:15, way past his usual bedtime, but he'd lost track of time while writing and wasn't all that tired yet. The muse was hitting him hard with writing ability at the moment- so what if he'd be tired at work tomorrow? He yawned, stretched, and stared at the screen before getting out of the chair to get a cup of coffee.

"Oh! I didn't realize how late it was," Harper said, turning the volume down. "Am I bothering you?"

"Not at all," Dave replied, halfway to the kitchen. "A little background noise is much more helpful than you'd think."

"It helps me," she said. "I can't study, write, or read with total silence."

He began to put enough coffee in for one person, but paused instead of putting the can away. "This probably isn't a good idea, but do you want a cup of coffee?"

"Sure, and do we still have some of the biscotti that Harper made the other night?"

"I think we do."

Harper smiled and turned the volume up just a notch. She was starting to warm up to the idea of this man being her father. The fact that he's part of an elite group within the FBI adds bonus points to his level of coolness; not many people can say that their dad is a founding member of the BAU, now can they?

She could smell the coffee before Dave even had to say a word. "What do you like in it?"

"Just some creamer, but I can-"

"No need," he said, walking to the living room with their coffee.

The words fell out of her mouth before she could think to stop them. "Thanks, Dad." Harper's jaw dropped slightly and she bit down on her lower lip while she and Dave stared at each other.

Finally, after a long, awkward silence, Dave looked down at his hands and back up to Harper. "Dad?"

Harper's face flushed pink as she stared at her coffee cup. "Well, yeah. It's been a month. You can't expect us to just call you 'Dave' forever. Was that too soon? We can go back to Dave if you-"

"No. Dad is just fine."

"Are you sure?"

Rossi smiled and sat down next to her, placing his coffee cup on the side table. "I'm sure, kiddo. I'm just surprised that it didn't take you longer is all."

"Well," she laughed, sipping from her cup, "I'm surprised too. But you're a lot nicer than I thought you'd be, and that made it easier to get used to you."

Dave raised an eyebrow. "Nicer?"

Harper smiled nervously and stared at her cup. "Harper and I were afraid that you were going to be mean because Danielle is. She always sucked as a mom, even before she…you know. Mean people usually stick with other mean people. High school logic."

"I'm nice until you piss me off," he joked in a rather serious voice.

"Wow, you're awfully sassy," she playfully teased. "I'm going to have to change your name in my phone to Sassmaster. I think I will." Sure enough, she grabs her iPhone from under her thigh and goes to her address book. Rossi's number was under the name 'My Paternal Unit,' but within ten seconds read 'Sassmaster.' "You're Darth Vader in Haylee's phone."

Rossi couldn't help but laugh at his daughters' senses of humor. "Nice Star Wars reference."

"Those are hardly the strangest contact names we have," Harper yawned.

"You're tired after a cup of coffee? Lucky kid."

"It's not my fault that you're drinking coffee ten minutes to midnight on a work night," she pointed out. "What are you doing up this late anyway, Dad?"

"Writing," he mumbled.

"The muse chose to visit you at the worst possible time, eh? Same usually goes for me, except with art. You know those sticky notes I asked you to steal from work for me? The coolest ideas for artwork come to me in my sleep or when I'm nearly passed out," she said, staring at the coffee cup. She smiled, giggled to herself, and turned her head to Dave as she continued talking. "So I obviously can't start working on a piece at that time, so I sleep with sticky notes on my bedside table so I can write them down. The wall above my bed is full of sticky notes, and if I didn't clean the room regularly, my bedroom floor would be littered with them."

"That's a good idea," Dave said and sipped from his coffee cup.

"In theory it is genius, but the problem is, Harper Amélie Rossi is not as genius as her ideas. I write down things meant to remind me of the piece I'm to draw but it is always something completely bizarre that doesn't jog my memory at all."

Dave liked this, and by this, he meant having a close-to-midnight conversation about how much off an asshole the muse is with his daughter; goodness, his daughter, and not only that, but one of his two daughters. He hadn't had this experience with his own parents, he also was not silly enough to think that all parents were the same, but he did recall the occasional late night 'don't tell your father/mother I am giving you chocolate cake this late at night, now tell me what troubles you,' rendezvous.

He could not believe how normal this felt and how comfortably he dove into the conversation with the teenager. The last time he spoke to someone Harper's age, not counting her or Haylee, he was interviewing a witness to a murder. The contrast between the two conversations was something he found comical in the same twisted sense that made Fargo funny.

More so than the peculiar naturalness of the conversation, the words Harper used made his heart swell with a warmth he hadn't felt in an awfully long time. My bedside table. The wall above my bed. My bedroom floor. If Harper was starting to refer to the things inside his home as hers, then it meant she was starting to think of 7092 West Foxcroft Place as not just 'Dave's house,' but hers, too.

"Oh, they don't? Well," he smiled as Harper adjusted her sitting position to better face him. "What kind of stuff ends up on the sticky notes?"

"Currently stuck to my wall are gems such as fleshly omniscience, enraged archeology, tree people, literal meat tenderizer, propagandist dolphins, robot space diary, Confederate Army insects, US government Game of Thrones, and - okay, I blame you entirely for this one, and it's going to be the greatest thing you'll ever hear me say – are you prepared?"

"My fault, huh? In that case," he challenged. "Hit me."

"Supernatural – like the TV show – FBI timelords, and at the bottom of the sticky there's an unintelligible scribble that vaguely looks like the word pasta."

He almost choked on his coffee from laughter. "Supernatural…that's the show your sister screams 'my Destiel feels' while watching, right? And I know what timelords are thanks to you."

"I told you," Harper giggled, tapping her skull. "Greatest thing I will ever say. I'm going to draw it, too, and you have to put it in your office so that everybody knows you live with a giant nerd."

"I'm looking forward to it," he said, finishing off his coffee. "So you'd better not be kidding."

"Oh, please Dad, you'll soon learn that I don't miss the chance to draw preposterously odd things, so you are about to receive a picture of demon-hunting FBI timelords."

Harper didn't seem to notice the Dad slip but Dave did. He hid the obnoxiously wide grin that wanted to sneak across his face and kept the grin small enough to look normal but big enough so that if she had noticed the slip, she'd know he also did.

She called me Dad, he bragged to himself, quite prideful of that fact. She actually called me Dad.

Harper yawned one of tiny yawns and set her now-empty coffee cup down on the coffee table. "Was that decaf?"

"Sacrilege, never."

"Hm, guess it's true that caffeine has no effect on me. Unless you count dreams…you know, most of those sticky note gems were caffeine induced. What a revelation! Speaking of," she yawned again and stretched like a little kitten. "I should attempt sleep, and since you've apparently given up on sleep, you should appease the muse."

"I suppose you're right."

"Of course I'm right," she said and she leapt out of her spot. "Oh, but first –"

Dave's eyes went wide in surprise when Harper hugged him, actually hugged him, and gave a cheery 'nighty-night!' He returned the hug and pushed a piece of her brown curls behind her ear. "Goodnight, Harper. If you need anything you know where I'll be."

"Mm hm," she hummed out.

She pranced toward the stairs and as she put her foot on the first step she grabbed onto the railing and looked over her shoulder with a playful grin. "Oh, and by the way, that wasn't an accident. Try getting some sleep, 'kay Dad?"