Father is not a job you can afford to just phone in to.
Beta'd by Firstselector, SpytheEngineer, and Kinsfire.
Just a heads up: just because a character says or thinks something doesn't mean it's true.
Also, this is not an interlude- that should be next chapter, assuming that one of the POVs doesn't up and run away from me, and it's at that point that we actually get into the nazi squishening at long last.
Danny Hebert had failed his daughter.
In the beginning, it was… well, not better, but it was manageable- Annette had always been closer to Taylor than he had been, she just understood Taylor better, and so him not being able to really relate to Taylor was something that could be worked around. Even as time went on and she grew from a tot-sized terror into a bigger bookworm and then a gawky teen, Danny let the trouble he had relating and talking to Taylor stay on the back burner. He'd get to it later, he always told himself. There'd be more time for him to think it through down the road, once he managed to start making her proud by fixing up their city. Next time he'd be able to get the ferry funding back from where it had been reassessed after yet another corporate tax cut, and then he could afford to focus on his family.
There wasn't more time.
By the time Alan and Zoe pulled him out of the bottle that he'd all but fed himself into after Annette's accident, it was already too late, and he'd destroyed any hope he'd ever had of having a decent relationship with Taylor. She inherited both his temper and his unwillingness to forget a slight, and while he may not have intended to hurt her in his grief, intent was cold comfort to a girl who may as well have lost both her parents instead of just the one, but instead of the closure of a headstone she had the stench of alcohol and bottles all over the living room, with only the Barnes to help hold her up.
After that, well, it was not excusable how Danny had hurled himself into his work to get away from the monument to his failure, the daughter that he'd driven away from him, but Danny liked to think that it was at least understandable, if no less contemptible.
As such, it was no wonder that Danny had missed the signs that Taylor was being bullied- she'd already been withdrawn, taciturn, and almost wary at home, so when he noted those traits being ramped up somewhat, he took it to be a condemnation of him and turned back to his work, hoping somehow that Zoe and Emma would keep an eye on her but too prideful to ask.
Maybe if he had, he could have cut off the situation at the knees somehow, but he hadn't, and so the first time he heard that Emma hurt Taylor worse than he ever could have was after a week in the hospital, one eye socket visibly empty even through her eyelids, in a coma he didn't know she would ever wake up from.
At first, he'd thought something was wrong when she was talking to herself and then trying to explain what had happened to him, but after a certain point his disbelief had shattered under the sheer weight of everything she was telling him- it was entirely too fantastical to be a lie, and while it was theoretically possible that someone could have been making all the things she was telling him up, it wouldn't make sense to, and the appearance of the spirit of Odin had been the tipping point as far as actual proof went. Of all the things to try and make up, a man taller than him and built like one of the bulkier employees of the DWA, old enough to be his father or perhaps even grandfather, was not something that would be on anyone's top thousand list.
The loss of Alan hurt, but his stalwart refusal to believe that Emma had anything to do with Taylor's attack was beyond the pale, and while Zoe and Anne were sympathetic, Danny wasn't willing to risk costing Taylor what support they could offer, not over Alan being an ass.
While the lawsuit was ongoing, and with Mr. Truth keeping them in close proximity, Danny let himself believe that they could start to rebuild their relationship. Indeed, Taylor was much less withdrawn than she had been before, seeming happy like she hadn't been since before Annette's death.
But afterwards… well, he fell back into the same damn pattern again. The kidnapping didn't help, of course, but in the end it all came down to him falling back on old habits that he just couldn't seem to shake no matter how much they didn't help him. Taylor's life as a hero just wasn't somewhere he could follow, no matter how hard he tried, so he fell back to the same old keeping the lights on at home, just as he had after he'd sobered up.
Now, though…
Danny had been afraid for Taylor when she'd left to help the combat efforts in Canberra, but it was a distant, abstract fear- neither of them had known that she'd end up in direct combat, and it was halfway around the world, so it was hard to view it with the kind of immediacy that something like the Empire or the Slaughterhouse attack back in the day had.
He had, however, been more afraid when the Endbringer sirens had gone off to indicate that there was an attack happening in Brockton Bay. He couldn't rely on denial to protect him there, not when he knew that Taylor was probably going to go right into fighting the Endbringer, not when he knew that he might die regardless of the fact that he made it into one of the shelters. Less than three months after waking up with her new powers, and he might have to bury her right next to Annette, and Danny knew that there would be no recovery from that, not even what little he'd clawed back after having his attitude adjusted.
Seeing her, tired but triumphant, was a relief, and a shock at the same time. Yes, she was tired… but she was also being far more open, more expressive with Victoria, her girlfriend, than she ever had been with him, almost as open as she had been with Annette, and that… that really got him thinking.
Thinking about what bridges he'd burned or had burned out from under him… and what bridges he could still build.
Taylor didn't have any particular plans for after returning home.
Well, okay, that wasn't strictly true. She had intended, truth be told, to make a nice cup of tea and add some honey (or perhaps break out Mom's old spiced hot chocolate recipe, see if that would let her have a good cry), curl up in a blanket, and just… brood ruminate over the two severely emotionally charged conversations she'd already had. Maybe, if she was feeling up to it, she might have been willing to throw together a sandwich for a late lunch before fixing herself a drink, but she was very much intent on taking the afternoon to herself to just… process.
Reality, unfortunately, was not quite so accommodating to the Chosen of the Runes in this aspect.
"Taylor, can we talk?"
Immediately, her father's words set her on edge. Even aside from the massive cliché that was the use of those words in the context of a romantic relationship, any kind of conversation where the initiator felt it necessary to get the other party to assent to it was damn sure going to be a big ask, as it were.
Mentally mourning her hypothetical hot chocolate, Taylor sighed and shuffled into the kitchen. "Let me make some tea first."
All too soon, her honeyed cup was ready, and she found herself opposite her father at the dinner table, him with a mug of coffee that did not, in fact, have any liquor in it (and Taylor mourned the fact that she thought it was necessary to check). "So, Dad," said Taylor, feeling the warmth of the tea in her hands and hearing the metal tea ball clacking against the porcelain, "what's on your mind?"
"I'm… I'm confronting some things about myself that I should have admitted earlier," he said.
Taylor frowned. She wasn't entirely sure what he was building up to, but based on his tone, it didn't seem particularly good, at least for her- the last time she remembered this particular tone, it was when he told her that her mom was dead.
"I've been a bad father to you, and I need your help to know how I can better support you going forwards."
He looked like he was expecting some sort of objection, but none came- at first, Taylor was too startled to respond to the unexpected comment, and then, she was entirely too filled with bone-deep weariness to respond verbally.
Wordlessly, Taylor threw back her tea, the entire scalding cup going down in one go, then stood up and walked into the kitchen. One boiled kettle later, she walked back out, a novelty mug that they'd bought for her mom one Mother's Day years ago big enough to dump the entire kettle into in her hand and visibly steaming.
"Okay, I need this if I'm not going to start screaming in frustration later tonight," said Taylor, setting the mug down on the table with a sound that struck fear into the hearts of water companies everywhere. "Walk me through it."
Danny, clearly taken off guard, had to take a moment to reengage his train of thought. "Right. So, you know how I fell apart after your mom died, and you know how I've been… I haven't been able to keep up with your heroism since… well. Since January." Seeing Taylor nod slowly, taking an exaggerated slurp of her tea, he continued. "And you know how I was… how I left most of the emotional work of raising you to Annette, right?"
Taylor pressed her lips together, blinking rapidly, then nodded once, a short, jerky motion.
"Alright, well, I-"
Odin manifested, holding his hand up. "Stop." The word reverberated through the room like the inside of a drum, leaving ripples in Taylor's tea and presumably Danny's coffee. "This is hurting more than it is helping. Focus less on your failings and more on your daughter, her needs and what she wants from your relationship."
Danny winced. "Right. Taylor, I haven't been- no, I will be better, better for you. Please, help me learn how?"
The Taylor of two years ago would have leapt the table and slammed into Danny in a hug, babbling out reassurances and apologies to her father. The Taylor of one year ago would have been more cautious in offering a hug to him, but the hug would have been offered nonetheless, and she would have offered what advice she could have, bringing the two back together in a more measured way. The Taylor of three months ago would have drawn Odin into the hug, and wouldn't have trusted herself to offer advice where the god's spirit could instead, bringing the three of them together even slower.
The Taylor of today took a moment to think things over, especially in the context of the morning's heart-to-hearts, then drained her mug more before standing and walking around the table.
She started to reach out to hug Danny, then froze, head snapping around to glare at an outside wall. Something was coming, something heavy and metal that was squishing the bugs that she had taken to set to patrolling in shells around her home and it wasn't slowing-
A massive tangle of metal pieces both large and small smashed through the wall, on an almost perfect collision course for Danny.
Fortunately, Taylor was there, and with one punch, she stopped the projectile, hurling shrapnel all over the room but leaving the non-parahuman unharmed in a flash of golden light that halted all of the shrapnel and splinters created from the wall. It dropped to the floor in a harsh scraping of metal on metal, then drew itself back together into a vaguely lupine shape.
"Hookwolf," said Taylor primly, one hand coming out to grab the construct by the throat and lift it off the ground, blades and hooks blunting themselves on her supernaturally durable flesh. "If my father wasn't here, then I'd accept your offer to act as a punching bag. As it stands, you will not come back into my house unless you want me to pluck you bare, carve you open, and then stake you out for the ravens."
The Nazi morphed, shifting in all of his butchershop brutality, tendrils reaching out for Taylor's remaining eye with a sound like a knife set in a washing machine, but he was too slow, and Taylor hurled him out of the house faster than he'd entered it, managing not to widen the hole he'd already smashed into the wall.
Taylor ran her hand down her face, briefly covering her good eye, then sighed. "Let me take care of this, and then we can get back to the conversation."
A brief moment of mystic exertion later, and the fragments of wall had pulled themselves together as if magnetized, sealing themselves back up into the shape of a wall and its attendant shelves and photographs to Taylor's satisfaction.
"Alright, let's talk family."
And that's that!
Again, I'm leaving all the more granular discussion to happen offscreen- tbh, I've put off dealing with the Empire for too long for my tastes, so here's to nudging things along.
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