Work Text:
She's too old to be considered a child, and too young to be called an adult, Dan thinks, three days before Abra's sixteenth birthday. It was seven o'clock in the morning and he was still in bed, half asleep and half awake, not wanting to get up, though he really needed the bathroom. What did sixteen year old girls like anyway? He thinks again, fifteen minutes later with a toothbrush lodged in his mouth. He stares at the smeared mirror, blinks, feels the underside of his stubbled chin, rests one hand on the side of the sink then pulls it away. Too cold. She's not like the rest of them though, he decides, she's never been like them. She never will.
Even though he didn't realise it, a huge part of Dan sub-consciously hoped Abra would never turn into one of those girls. He had seen them whilst working at the local tourist attraction in town, and read every girl of fifteen to eighteen like a book just by appearance, speech and mannerisms; boys (stupid ones), parties (that never ended well), sex (recklessly orchestrated), and drink (the Devil's blood, as far as Dan was concerned) were the primary factors he had picked up. He felt pity for them and always wondered what was the instigator that shaped them into who they became. All body and no brain. Naive to think they were automatically an adult once they hit eighteen. Too young to properly live. From his own experience Dan figured it was parental upbringing and infectious family traits that dragged you to your downfall, but sometimes that wasn't the case to all situations. Because, to put it quite simply, not everyone had a tyrant of a father and intrusive thoughts that were actually the disturbed dead in disguise.
Even though the likelihood of that turning point ever happening to Abra was super slim, he couldn't help but imagine the horror of it if it did. He liked her as an outsider, the quietly reserved sort of person she was. It suited her. She suited it. It was the fitter emblem for her personality and everything about her. Although, that didn't rule out how confusedly complex young women could be. And the majority would stay that way. Forever.
Dan loathed it.
Well—he didn't loath it—he just couldn't get his head around it. There was a difference. The teenage girls he knew in school twenty years ago were nothing like this (perhaps that was a slight exaggeration, but the only true difference was music taste).
Why is it that I'm so pathetic when it comes to things like this, he wants to shoot himself when he accidentally nicks the skin of his jaw with the razor he was using. Blood glides down his throat. "Fuck." If I can successfully assist the dying and manipulate people's perceptions of reality then why can't I do something as simple as this? It was the most straightforward things that drove him over the edge, because at one point within his life chaos and disorientation had become a normality.
Shortly after the razor wound gradually stopped bleeding, he eventually settled on locating a jewellers within Frazier after work. Everyone liked things that shined, there was no doubting that.
* * *
"What are you doing today?" The woman asks from her bed, her voice quietly hoarse and somewhat crackly. She had her sallow hands folded frailly across her stomach, and her bone-white hair hung down in front of her shoulders. Dan noticed how deeply set her hooded pale eyes were. They stared and watched his every movement with a curious warmth, like a young doe ready to dash into a mirage of leafy trees.
"Not much," he says from across the boxed room. He was making a cup of tea for her. She liked it strong. Less than a sliver of milk. One sugar. "It's my niece's birthday in three days." He carries the tea over and places the cup within her outstretched palms, skeletal fingers closing around the porcelain.
"How old will she be?" The woman asks.
"Sixteen." He says, taking a seat beside the reclined bed.
"Awful age, if you ask me."
Dan froze. He had expected her to dote on the subject, like every eighty-year-old woman would. Sixteen wasn't bad, was it?
The woman sips her tea with tight lips and wide eyes. "You're a good man though—I've watched," she continues matter-of-factly, "she's bound to take after her father."
"Yeah. I hope so." Dan responds without correction. Almost a father. Almost a daughter. Somehow they were, even though they weren't. There was no point correcting the white-haired woman; she would forget again within the next four seconds after being told anyway. The beauty of not being aware is that you endure the rest of your life thinking, I'm as fine as I was when I was a teenager.
"They're special, so they are." The woman continues, her eyes elsewhere, staring, but not at Dan. At nothing. "Girls. Daughters. Young women. Special, especially to a father. My father—he was—he was over the moon with my sister and I. Protective." She turns to look at Dan, "Are you protective?"
He hesitates for some stupid reason. He knew automatically when he got out of his car outside some random motel three years ago, upon seeing Abra sat on concrete ground with her arms wrapped tight across her knees, little eyes glassy with fear, Dan had never felt so obliged to safeguard someone up until then. "Yeah." He finally responds.
"Good. You have to be. Always."
* * *
He finished work at three in the afternoon. Azzie had almost tripped him up when he was making his way to the front door of the hospice, one hand barely on the door handle. "Stop that." He says quietly, reaching down to stroke the animal's head before opening the door and leaving. He heard the cat mewl after him as the door clicked shut.
Twenty minutes later he's stood outside the jewellers he had settled on visiting the day before. He momentarily peered through the glass window and browsed at the ear studs and bracelets that were embellished in precious stones of a variety of colours. Stones were for women. Plain rings for men. Diamonds were for wives. Platinum for husbands. Silver for white and gold for black. It went on and on. There was no in-between with jewellery, there was only like and dislike—period. She either liked it or she didn't. He either kept it or he sold it. Jewellery was similar to perfume, as were scented candles to specific clothing. There really was no in-between.
A wave of apprehension flooded through Dan's chest, and he rubbed the back of his neck in thought. She's still a child, he thinks, to me at least. To her mother. And everyone else. The world.
He finds gold-plated necklaces inside the store, under the glass counter at the front, the jewellery illuminated by the little lights that were set within the case. They were minimal and sweet—appropriate, in Dan's head. He quickly figured gold was the fitter emblem for Abra and her warmth. Silver was too icy.
"These ones are all fourteen karat. Plated." The gem-dealer of the store appears too silently and too quickly for Dan to respond in a collected manner, considering he had been cooped up within his own mind for the last few hours. "Can I help you?" The man finally says, all smiles and small-town-typical-retail wrought into his laugh-lines and bluish grey eyes.
Dan turns his look away from the man for a mere instant back to the necklaces, and is about to reply until he spots a pendant that catches his eye almost immediately. "Yeah," he says shortly after deciding solely on gut-energy, "what's the price on this one here?"
He ends up paying just under seventy in cash which was half-decent for something that embodied some sort of sustainability.
Dan watches the man settle the tiny gold pendant into a palm-sized yellow box. His hands methodically wrap a silky black ribbon around it afterward.
* * *
They were sat beside each other at the kitchen table in Abra's home, awaiting for her mother to return from the supermarket (with the birthday cake she had been determined to get custom-made that weekend) when Dan presented the yellow box to his niece.
"You didn't have to," Abra comments with a sheepish smile, eyes alight and whole being glowing. "I didn't ask for anything."
"I know. But I wanted to get you something." Dan responds and returned the smile. Maybe he wasn't so pathetic after all. Slightly clueless (occasionally) but not pathetic. Despite the sting of the razor wound, he wasn't stupid either. He watches as Abra's willowy fingers pull apart the black ribbon and her fingertips lift the yellow lid of the box, and he watches how her face changes. eyes blinking and lower lip glistening in the process of thought.
"You—really didn't have to," she's somewhat stunned for a second, as if trying to grapple on to the right words, and Dan waits as she carefully takes out the piece of jewellery, fingers clutching the delicate snake chain. The pendant was a tiny, glossy gold star, somewhat less than the size of Abra's thumbnail, half a centimetre fat and a centimetre in length. "I love it." She finally claims.
"You deserve more." Dan replies in a murmur, and her eyes meet his. She looks back at the necklace she's holding.
"You do too. A lot. Just as much. Maybe more." Abra says gently, voicing almost exactly repeating what she was thinking. "Three years doesn't feel like a lot, now that I think about it. Three birthdays..." she trails off, and Dan can feel the energy that emitted from her was slow and calm, unlike the racing brilliance he had felt minutes previously, "the whole thing...feels like a really long...dream."
It was a really long nightmare at one point, Dan thinks.
He automatically attempts to change the subject, to keep the lightheartedness afloat for as long as possible. It mattered. Perhaps it mattered more to him than her. "In another two years you'll be eighteen. How crazy is that? You'll find yourself in a whole new domain. It'll be really exciting. You'll like it." It will be fucking frightening, no doubt.
Abra looks to her uncle. She tries to smile. "I hope so."
"It'll be good." Dan adds. Tread carefully. "I promise." You can only promise so much. "You'll enjoy every bit of it." You only have so many promises to give. He watches her run the face of her thumb back and forth across the pendant.
"Do you like it?" He asks, and he's never felt so relieved when she flashes a bright smile in return.
"Absolutely—" She says, "—I love it."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Really."
Dan finally releases the mental pressure when she's smiling again, the brilliance resurfacing, and she asks him to help her put on the necklace. The gold pendant sits at the centre against her sternum, and the chain lay flush across her tanned collar bone.
She reaches out to wrap her arms around his neck and haul him into a comforting, familiar embrace, in which he freezes momentarily, on instinct, and then has no choice but to melt into it—and conform to contentment (something he was still trying to grapple with, but he was doing good). It had taken three birthdays to get this far.
Abra whispers. "Thank you."