Prudence
"Patty?"
Victor calls his wife's name as he travels the ground floor of the Victorian he still has a difficult time considering home. The house has been in his wife's family for generations, and he and Patty were newlyweds, struggling to pay their rent, when Patty's mother announced she was moving in with an artist in Sonoma, and she'd like them to occupy the Manor in her absence.
"Is this husband number two, or number three?" He'd asked Patty at the time.
"Victor!" She smacked his arm, and then grinned. "Three, but whose counting? Anyway, she'll probably be back, but for now, please say yes."
He's up to the second floor now, opening doors to seldom used bedrooms, even the sewing room that neither of them have entered since Penny deserted it, her machine set up in the middle of the room, clothes still half-repaired piled on the table beside it. Victor loosens his tie as he climbs the third set of stairs, leading to the attic. Their old apartment may have been small, but at least there he'd never lost his wife.
"There you are." He lets out a sigh of relief as he catches sight of her figure, now round in so many places, bent over a table by the windows.
She's so beautiful right now, the way the light catches the gold in her brown hair, causing her whole face to glow. She has dazzled him from the first moment he laid eyes on her; he can't explain it, but there was something about Patricia Halliwell that instantly bewitched him. Victor Bennett never believed in love at first sight, and would never admit to anyone, not even Patty, that this belief has changed, but it did. He's loved her since the moment he met her, but never more than he does right now, fully expectant with their first child.
"Victor!" She looks up, and he can't identify the expression that crosses quickly across her features. But it soon disappears, and a smile lights up her face. "Come here."
She gestures to him, impatient, but the smile on her face stays big and bright as he finally strides across the attic, taking her hand.
"I missed you today," he tells her, kissing her soundly.
"I know you did," she says, breaking their embrace and leading him toward the table. She's got a thick piece of parchment paper rolled out across the surface, and the four corners are held down by thick glass-like objects that look like crystal paperweights. "You have to see this."
"What is it?" He says, gesturing down. "Something your mother left behind?"
"This," she says, sweeping her hand across the air over the parchment, "is going to tell us the name of our first daughter."
"Ah," Victor says. "The famous Warren family tree."
"Every one of my maternal ancestors is on here, dating all the way back the 1600s. Look, Melinda Warren is our matriarch. I wonder who her mother was?"
"Maybe she's like Athena, springing forth from her father's head, fully formed," Victor teases. "Or was in Aphrodite?"
Patty smacks Victor on the arm. "No, I'm serious. This is a very important task we have, to find exactly the right name. There are a lot of options here, but we need the correct one for our little girl: it could take us days, months even."
"Why are you so convinced we're having a daughter?" Victor asks. "You could have a boy in there."
"Doubtful," Patty shrugs, pointing to the tree. "Look here – first born children are always girls. But honey, if you want, you can pick out a boy's name."
"Milton? Clarence? I hope you're right – let's stick to girls."
Patty crinkles her forehead at the 1800s. "Hm, not that those options are all that much better. Can you imagine us naming our firstborn Astrid?"
"There are some pretty ones," he says, tracing over the carefully inscribed letters. It's so strange, every name on the chart looks as if it has been entered in the same handwriting, even though that's impossible: Patty has told him the parchment is very old, dating back at least a century. "What do you think of Lorelei Bennett?"
Patty opens her mouth as if to speak, but then shuts it quickly. "I was hoping we'd find another good 'P' name on here. It's like a mini-tradition, and it'd be kind of like naming her after me, without actually giving her my name."
A horrible thought crosses Victor's mind. "Please tell me you don't want Penelope."
"Oh, no. Never. My mother would be insufferable."
Victor's eyes scan the centuries, searching the names for the exact right one. Names are so important; this one he'll be saying every day for the rest of his life, and it has to fit perfectly. It needs to be sensible, like he is, but fanciful and smart, like Patty. He lays his finger on the parchment, and he traces the dark ink back, back, touching over names, instantly discarding them until he's almost all the way to the top of the page.
"Prudence," Patty breathes, as his finger comes to a stop.
He looks down at where he paused, where his wife read along, the first line down from Melinda Warren, the only daughter whose great task it was to populate this vast family tree.
"You probably hate it," Patty sighs. "You probably think it's too old fashioned."
Victor is silent, lost in a memory. "No," he finally says. "No, not at all. I was just thinking of the song. How does it go? The sun is up, the sky is blue, it's beautiful, and so are you."
His voice fills the attic, and Patty clasps his hand in hers, and moves it to her stomach. "Do you feel that?" She whispers.
He continues the song, the lyrics coming back to him and taking hold of something new. Dear Prudence. The more times the name leaves his mouth, the more right it sounds.
It's most likely a coincidence – the baby has been active for weeks, and it's not uncommon for her to move around – but as Victor sings, he can feel their daughter, almost as if she's reacting to his voice, to the song, to the name they've now chosen for her together.
*
A/N: I hate that Family Tree! It's the parchment that launched a thousand continuity errors. But despite all the things the production assistant who wrote it got wrong (and despite the fact that no one bothered to correct and update it between seasons two and five after, oh, Prue's death, Leo and Piper's marriage, Victor's last name, Penny's four husbands, Patty's favorite Aunt Phoebe), I love the idea of it. And I love it when people name their daughters for Beatles' songs, like my parents did. =)
And with that, the fathers' points-of-view are done! I've only got two more pregnancies...one is written, and it's my favorite so far. The other hasn't even been started yet, so it may take me a bit longer to update.