Work Text:
November 7, 2003
Usually, Cana Alberona went home with Gray and Rogue Fullbuster after school and hung out at their house until it was time for Gildarts to come back from work. She preferred the noise in their home to the silence that would usually greet her at their apartment and the loneliness she felt at its emptiness.
But today was different. Cana had made a decision and had finally worked up enough courage to see it through. That’s why she was standing in front of the closed door of her father’s bedroom, her hand hesitating nervously on the doorknob. She had already turned back more times than she could count, but this time she was determined to go inside. Her cards had told her it was the right thing to do, and she knew from experience they were rarely wrong.
It was the one rule Gildarts had always had. She was welcome to explore any other part of their apartment, but his bedroom was off-limits. He claimed it was a safety precaution, and while it was no secret that her father had been a member of the Special Forces before she had ended up in his custody, Cana had always felt there was more to it than concern for her safety.
Cana had been six years old when her mother had passed away. Old enough to understand what had happened and to miss her terribly but still young enough to need a parent around. And she had gotten more than she’d bargained for in Gildarts Clive.
She loved Gildarts dearly. He was affectionate, loud, and kind, and ever since he’d learned of her existence, he’d tried to play the role of father as best he could. He’d quit the armed forces and gotten a regular nine-to-five job as a social worker. Gildarts had done everything he could to give her a family, but the one thing she craved the most.
After living together for five years, Cana still felt like there was a distance between them, and that bothered her. She had been very close to her mother, and she’d hoped for a similar relationship with her father once she had gotten over her initial reservations over going to live with someone she’d known nothing about.
But no matter how much she loved him, she felt like she didn’t know him at all. She had a feeling that Gildarts room held more than weapons. She thought it might also hold the clues she needed to understand her father.
So after taking a deep breath, she turned the knob and opened the door, looking around guiltily before entering and closing it behind her. She knew her father wasn’t usually home until five-thirty or so, so she felt she had plenty of time.
She looked around, trying to decide what would gain her the most information. The only framed picture she saw was one of the two of them that Mika Fullbuster had taken a few years earlier. She had her own framed copy sitting in her room.
There was a large safe built into the wall in the far corner of the room that she knew held all of her father’s firearms. Gildarts had shown it to her when she had first moved in, warning her about playing with it, although with its biometric lock, there was no possible way she could ever get it open.
She opened his closet and found nothing except clothes and shoes. Disappointed, she moved over to the dresser, opening and closing all of the drawers. Still nothing of interest. She walked over to his nightstand, surprised to find bottles of alcohol in the bottom drawer. But what she had been looking for was in a metal box under the bed.
There were a lot of pictures in the box, at first glance she even recognized several of her mother and she grabbed them first, holding them in her hands and feeling the familiar pain clutching at her heart as she stared hungrily at the features that had once been her whole world. There were pictures of her smiling at the camera as well as a few with her father. Both appeared young and happy, and she spent a long time looking at these.
She placed them on the blue bedspread that was stretched out in the way only military personnel seemed to be capable of. She looked through the remaining photos, mostly of Gildarts days in the military. She had almost given up when she noticed there was another bottom to the box, and when she removed the compartment, her heart stopped.
She could tell she’d hit the jackpot just by the fact that these pictures were kept separate from the rest, and as Cana studied them, she wasn’t sure how to feel. She quickly grabbed one of the images of her parents together to compare against the ones she was looking at.
There was no comparison. In fact, Cana wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen this particular smile on her father’s face before, and to know that it was while he was holding hands with her best friends’ father was confusing at the very least.
Part of her wanted to rush and call Gray and Rogue to tell them about what she’d found, but she instantly knew it would be a betrayal like no other. Her father kept this hidden for a reason. She looked at picture after picture of Silver and Gildarts together. Then she focused on the ones that were of just Silver, her mind trying to understand what it all meant.
Cana had heard of same-sex couples before, she was eleven after all, but she’d never met any. And to know her father had quite obviously been in a relationship with another man, and not just any man but someone she knew and loved was more than she could handle.
What had happened when it was quite evident that Gildarts had been happier with him than her mother? She was so caught up in all her questions that she never moved from her spot.
Which was why her father found her sitting on his bed surrounded by all the evidence of her snooping.
“Find what you were looking for?” Gildarts sardonic grin was on full display, and Cana couldn’t help but feel terrible for betraying her father’s trust.
“I’m sorry, Daddy, I just-,” Cana tried to explain what she had felt, but no words would come.
Gildarts sat on the bed and picked up some of the pictures, putting them in a pile to return to the box. Cana couldn’t figure out what his expression meant, she knew he had every right to be angry. She had been invading his privacy after all, but he just looked like he was too tired to fight.
Gildarts peered into her eyes, holding her gaze before asking, “So what is it you wanted to know?”
“I don’t know, I just wanted to feel closer to you,” Cana admitted, hiding her head in her father’s chest.
He surprised her by running his fingers through her hair gently, “You can ask me anything, Jellybean. I will always answer you if I can, but I don’t want you to do this again. The only way this is going to work between us is if we can trust each other.”
He held a picture of him and Silver in his other hand and stared at it before putting it away, “I imagine you have some questions now, huh?”
Cana nodded, pulling herself away from his chest and looking at him thoughtfully.
“Fine, but first, let’s clean up.” He sorted through the pictures collecting all the ones of her mother and handing them over to Cana before putting the rest away, “I’d meant to give these to you, I just hadn’t thought about this box in a while.”
“I’ll order us some pizza,” Gildarts pulled out his cell phone and called their favorite pizza parlor as he gestured Cana to leave his room. He closed the door behind her and emerged five minutes later, having changed out of his work suit and into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt with a band logo on it.
Cana had already put all of her mom’s pictures on her memory board, which mostly consisted of pictures of her with Gray and Rogue at different ages.
Gildarts knocked on her door, “The pizza place said they’d be here in thirty minutes.”
Cana nodded and followed him out, stopping at the fridge to get a soda for her and a beer for him. He accepted it gratefully and took a few swigs before sitting down on their living room couch and smiling at her, “So, where do you want me to start?”
She sat down next to him, crossing her legs as she stared up at him, “Silver, you were- he was your boyfriend?”
“Yeah, he was,” Gildarts agreed but didn’t offer anything else.
“For how long?”
“Look, before we get into this, you have to promise me you won’t talk about it to anyone, especially Gray and Rogue. I doubt Silver would appreciate them knowing. This happened before you were all born, and it has nothing to do with any of you.”
“I had already decided not to tell them when I found the pictures,” Cana confessed, still feeling ashamed for having been caught snooping.
Gildarts visibly relaxed at those words, “We were together for about three years.”
“So it wasn’t a fling? Were you in love with him?”
“How do you even know what a fling is? You’re eleven!” Gildarts protested, and even though he looked outraged, Cana thought he might just be attempting to deflect her question.
She rolled her eyes, “As you said, I’m eleven. Were you in love with Silver?”
“Yeah,” he finally responded, eyes fixed on the inside of the beer bottle as he admitted it.
“What about him?” Cana asked, feeling a little bad at being so pushy, but she could sense that she was on to something, and didn’t want to let go until she knew everything. But that was one question her father refused to answer.
“I don’t understand. You looked so happy in the pictures, what happened?”
“The same thing that happens to a lot of couples, I guess, we just didn’t want the same things,” Gildarts replied quickly, and Cana immediately knew there was more to it than that.
“What was it you wanted?”
“Not me, him. He wanted to start a family of his own, and that was something I couldn’t give him, so we parted ways.” Gildarts shrugged, taking another swig from his beer.
“I don’t understand if you like men, then how come I always see you flirting with women?”
“I don’t like men per se, I liked Silver. It’s hard to explain.”
“So, there haven’t been any others?”
“Not really, how do I put this? Before Silver, I’d never been in love with anyone. I flirted, I had fun, but I didn’t really feel any deep connection to any of them. After being in a relationship for so long, that felt shallow, and I couldn’t go back to it right away.”
“What about mom?” Cana had always been curious about this, but she’d always been too afraid to ask.
“I joined the military after Silver, and I broke up, Magnolia isn’t that big, and I didn’t really want to watch him be happy with someone else. So I took off, figured I’d go see the world on the government’s jewels. I met your mom one night at a bar while at a training camp. She was getting over a relationship too, we became friends and kind of got each other through it, but she fell in love with me and I—” Gildarts gazed down at his left hand before peering into Cana’s eager face, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“But Dad,” Cana was desperate to hear more, but she could see from the way her father’s features were set into a hard line that her time was almost up.
She almost screamed in frustration when the doorbell rang, and Gildarts stood up, eagerly accepting the escape he was offered. He grabbed his wallet from the kitchen counter on his way to the front door and returned, holding the pizza box and placing it on their small dining room table.
“Get some plates, will ya, love?”
He grabbed another beer from their fridge before sitting down, making sure his mouth was full of either food or drink for the rest of the evening, and nothing Cana did or said was able to get any more out of him.
Cana kissed him good night, and although she didn’t get all the answers she’d wanted, she couldn’t deny that she felt closer to him. She’d almost gotten to her bedroom when his voice stopped her.
“By the way, you’re grounded for a week, you have to come straight home after school, and I don’t want you to see you in my room without my permission again.”
Usually, she would have protested, but she knew what she’d done was wrong, so she bore the punishment without complaint.
She woke up in the middle of the night and was surprised to see her father’s light still on. She peered in expecting to see him poring through a case file like he sometimes did. Instead, she found her father fast asleep, an empty bottle of whiskey on his nightstand, and one of the pictures of him and Silver clutched in his hand.
That’s when she understood what Gildarts had been unwilling to say. He had never fallen out of love with Silver. Had gone so far as to leave Magnolia to try to forget him, but then Cana had come along, and he hadn’t had anyone else to turn to for help. And even though she knew it wasn’t her fault, she felt like she’d trapped him in a prison of sorts. She spent enough time with the Fullbusters to know there was no future for the love he still held in his heart.
Cana went into the room and grabbed the picture out of Gildarts hand, frowning at it for a moment before placing it on his nightstand carefully. She kissed his head before tucking him in with his blanket as he’d done for her countless times, turning off the light on her way out.
While Silver might have been the only one to put that smile on her father’s face, he had also been the one to take it away, and for that, Cana thought, she would never forgive him. She swore to herself then that she would be the one to bring it back someday.