Archive of Our Own ^beta

Curling, it grows, twisting and turning in a ringlet as it lengthens to pool on the table, turning round and round and round again like a ribbon, the peel bight red and shiny and ripe, as she watches. The fruit that shines as that peel is removed as the long, thin strip is removed by this man’s hands is pale and shines with juice, and though she’s way too old, now, for party tricks, she can’t help it, as the echo of the wonder she'd felt the first time she'd witnessed it moves through her. As the anticipation pools in her mouth, just thinking of the taste on her tongue.

The first time Mathilde, at 4 – ‘I’m almost five’ - had watched her father remove an entire apple peel in one piece, his work seemingly too gentle and precise for a man with such massive hands, she’d been entranced. It’s been over fifteen years, now, and though she’d watched him do the same so many times she’s lost count, has watched it hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, she can’t help but watch in fascination. She wonders how many times he’d had to practice getting it to this point – the strip unbroken, curled on the plate, the meat of the apple almost untouched, the sphere that remains as smooth and unbroken as it had been while protected by the bright red skin which had encased it.

She wonders how much he practices now, wonders if he needs to, to make sure he does it just right for her on those days when she comes to call.

Pretending not to preen as she watches, he carefully arranges the peel just right in a tight little spiral on the side of the plate, slices the apple just right, perfectly down the middle, removes the core with a couple of movements, swift and sure as always, before slicing the pieces neatly in thin pieces, some so thin she could almost see through them, were she closer.

It is not possible for her to touch them to see, of course, any more than she can bring them to her lips for her tongue to see if they taste as sweet as she imagines, so she picks up her own apple slices instead. Determines not to get sad, eating by herself, as always, as he does the same on the other side of the glass. Her peel, also curled up nice and neat on the side of her napkin, is not as perfect as his in form and thickness, there are chunks of apple there not apparent on his and matching gouges in her apple that sits on her plate. Defects, in her work, that are not apparent on his, her slices are nowhere as uniform and neat, but it’s the thought, and the taste, that matters, after all. And she has all the time in the world, to practice, thanks to him.

Mathilde is here to share a meal with her father, after all, and perhaps a little, to show off how much she’s grown since she’d last been here; she knows he will not judge the tiny pieces of fruit that she misses with her knife. Knows he’ll simply glory in the evidence of her skill with the blade.

The day is beautiful; it’s autumn but it’s sunny and warm for the time of year, and she’d been able to sneak in this one last visit before the winter winds and snow sweeps in and she’ll have to content herself once again with the video calls that he insists up. He gets mulish and stubborn, on her not sitting too long on his porch in front of his window once he deems it too cold for her to sit outside. Not even a perch inside her car will do – the roads too rough, the weather too unpredictable, her car too chilled, he tells. He insists on video calls from her cozy bedroom with her GPS locator as proof. Insists, no matter how many blankets and heating pads and thermoses of tea she’s hauled up to make a nest to curl into on his porch swing.

I never feel the cold, anyway, she’d tried once, after she’d shown up on Christmas Eve, warm supplies in tow. I’ll only stay for an hour or so, I promise.

That particular defiance had earned her a sulky father, sitting on the other side of the glass, as he’d made a spectacle of calling her mother as he sat there, almost, but not quite, ignoring her. It had also earned her an equally irate call from her mother, moments later.

You’re upsetting your father with your foolishness, had been Madeline’s pointed opening line, the French even more stinging than her father’s English, as Mathilde had picked up the phone. As her father had looked expectantly at her, waiting, and the ring tone had sounded as a blasphemous curse in the oppressive quiet of the winter forest.

Having a mother who was a renowned therapist did not come without its curses.

Sticking out her tongue at her father had perhaps betrayed her age - she’d only been sixteen - but it had taken off some of the edge of her frustration. Still, she’d still been on the edge of tears the entire trip back to town, her hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly they’d ached for the rest of the day.

“Drive safe and think about what you’ve done, worrying your mother,” had been her father’s only comment.

Having a father renowned for his temper had come with a cost to match his love.

It was not an experience she’d never been keen to repeat, even if she did wish that once, just once, she might be able to enjoy a Christmas with her father in person, even if she must be separated by a thin pane of crystallized, superheated sand. Modern technology may be a miracle, but it’s not the same, meeting virtually through a screen as opposed to looking at him now, separated as she was by only a scant foot.

He always watches with such joy as she and her mother open the presents, he’s hand-picked and ordered delivered, always has a twinkle in his eye as he opens the ones she and Madeline are sure to leave on his porch – her gift for him this year is currently sitting off to the side of her chair even now. He is always sure to be there to share their Christmas feast, even remotely, even if he’ll never be able to join them in person for a taste of the roast beast.

Their visits always end the same, so she knows it’s time - the ceremony with the apple always represents their own way of saying goodbye – and soon she’ll have to hold her hand to the glass for him to match it, even as it dwarfs hers as its big palm and thick digits overwhelming her. Soon she’ll have to hang up the cell phone that sits on the arm of her Muskoka chair, soon she’ll have to blow him kisses, turn and head down to the small drive to her truck, hear the creak of the door of the cabin as he walks out as she climbs into the truck, far enough away, protected enough as she’ll be by distance and the steel and glass of the vehicle. Soon, too soon, she knows, she’ll have to feel his eyes on her as he will sit in the chair still warm from her body, feel the way he holds his hand up in farewell as she drives away, even if she only ever sees it in the rear-view mirror.

Soon, she’ll have to return to the warm and cozy home she shares with her mother, return to the quiet life of classes and friends and video calls with this man every couple of days. She realizes how lucky she is, they all are - he was meant to be dead, after all. 

Maybe he had been, maybe he'd fought his way back to them, this man. He'd done stranger things.

They’d been so sure that he was in fact, dead, that he had been killed in the very explosion he himself had ordered. So focused as he’d been to destroy that cursed facility whose shape she could barely remember and the threat of which she’s still unsure. She had felt it – the impact of her father’s death - as, held in Madeleine’s arms, she couldn't help but feel it, as the emotions had shuddered through her mother’s body.

Felt it, days later, as that remote man with the kind face and the soft voice – ‘say hello to Mr. M, Mathilde’ her mother had said, as she’d thought of how neat it was, ‘Mr. M’; a name just like her, and her mother  - felt it as her mother had clung to her, sitting on their chesterfield as this man of contradictions did his best to explain the most unlikely of events. That her father, not dead, but alive and kicking, stubborn as a mule, had been found floating in the wreckage surrounding an island of poison and flowers.

As that kind man with the cold eyes had explained the reality of his survival - the toxicity in his blood, a tiny army of nanobots meant to destroy everything he loved at his gentlest touch, that gift which could be both blessing and curse in one. She’d understood so little of it, that day, at 4 – ‘I’m almost five’ – and understands barely more now. The danger to her and her mother, the unimaginable blessing of her father’s survival – she’d felt it and had only understood the tiniest sliver of it.

She’s older now – almost nineteen – and she understood a great deal more, now, no matter how her parents tried to protect her. She understands that despite the efforts of many over this last decade and a half, this process, this curse of his blood, will likely remain indefinitely – the glass between her and the beneficent and doomed touch of her father’s skin. She understands how - despite all the hope that Uncle Quentin tries to convince himself with – they understand the contamination in her father’s blood almost less than they had the day they’d first found him. She understands her father’s reluctance to risk this solution, imperfect but real, that they’d manage to make – a cabin, buried in the woods and the snow but near her mother’s home, a network of cameras and video conferences and screens. With her and her mother on the outside – they couldn’t even guarantee, for instance, if the bots might mutate to become airborne, meaning shared oxygen, even, remains a danger – and her father tucked away in the inside of his abode, hidden safely away so that his curse might not destroy them.

She understands, now, that this might continue forever, just as she understands that she’ll never understand the complicated union that is her parents. Thinks, most days, that the one reality is even more powerful in its implications for her future than is the other.

For she sees her future, bright and clear, as cold and cruel as the ocean that shines at the end of his dock down the path from his cabin.  

Her father, peeling apples endlessly behind a glass. A voice, a face, a beloved parent, watching from the other side of a camera. He’d watched her graduation that way, via her mother’s phone, and it seemed the pattern was doomed to continue. She’d pondered, driving here, on the nature of future university graduations, on her wedding.

Would she, one day, bring a baby and then perhaps a second and even maybe a third, to dangle on her lap so that they could be introduced to Grandpa, still trapped on the other side like a monster trapped by fate? Most days, she thought it likely.

His age was showing in the ways he moved somewhat more cautiously as if anticipating aches and pains. His age, and the damage of a life spent jumping and fighting and recovering, of excess drink and rich food, meant that he hobbled more than she remembered from that day etched into her memory from the one they’d met. She also knew the scars around the bullet wounds he’d suffered twinged, probably more than he would ever admit, especially to her. He never wanted to admit anything like that to her, especially. There were age spots on his hands – he was in his mid-sixties, after all – marks that hadn’t been there from the day etched into her brain, the day her world had spun and twisted and wobbled on its axis before settling into its new routine.

The bulky muscle he’d once carried on his frame was leaner now, though still toned. He was bored, in the cabin, she was sure, and probably spent more time in the gym in the basement than most. Certainly, according to some of the comments she’d heard her mother make, he ate better, took better care of himself than Madeleine had once been used to. Drank less, she thinks, based on the sharp stings from her mother's tongue when she thought her too far to hear. She couldn’t help but think, though, and she’d never asked, that this dedication to his form had another purpose. Couldn’t help but think that, though trapped, he was determined to stay in a reasonable shape and able to protect, at least hypothetically, his small family.

She understood.

Understood, that even as she sometimes came to visit her father by herself - starting the day of her sixteenth birthday, drivers’ license fresh in hand - her mother came sometimes by herself, to visit the husband in the little house in the mountains. Understood how her mother’s phone rang late at night and the soft laughter and occasional tears that she sometimes heard as they followed the echo of a phone’s ping.

When she’d been younger, she hadn’t quite wanted to accept that fact, how her mother might wish to visit her father separate from her – it seemed unfair, somehow, that her mother gets extra visits to see her father on her own – but watching them as she’d grown older, it had seemed clearer.

When she’d been younger, on bad days, when her therapist had pushed or her friends had been short or she’d watched with envy as the mothers of her friends and classmates, of strangers, even, walked down the streets near her quiet home, their hands caught up in those of the fathers of their children, she’d been angry. At her father, for being him, for being where, for being what he was. At her mother, for failing to move forward, she’d thought. For failing to find a fuller life, she’d thrown at her, for trapping them both instead in a relationship with a man with whom they’d never be able to live a complete life, for trapping them with a man whose touch they’d never be able to feel.

Maybe it would have been better, had he died, as they’d once thought, she’d screamed at her mother, one particularly difficult day. Believed it, if only for an instant. Maybe then her mother could have had a life, a husband, a family, a reality which didn’t make her feel sometimes as if she walked among ghosts.

The memory of those days brought overwhelming waves of guilt, even as much as Dr. Theroux, her therapist though not her mother’s, told her, they were understandable, human.

It was understandable, he had told her, that frustration at this feeling at having a father who was not a father, being cursed only with a ghost who could peel an apple in one thin strip with a pocketknife. Who could scalp a fruit as easily as he’d once killed dozens at Her Majesty’s command.

She’d understood it - the perspective Theroux had tried to bestow upon her - better, now.

She understood the need to work through it, how the relief at having her father in her life in a tangible way conflicted with the pain of knowing it was not in the way any of them would have preferred.

Watching him standing on the porch of this remote cabin in the midst of nowhere, hidden away as he was behind glass and fir trees and bureaucratic paperwork, waving at her as she watched in the rear-view, her father, still powerful in his presence and alive and there, she knew it, felt it, how lucky she was. Knew it, as much as they all wished it could have been different.

Despite all of it – the distance and the limitations and the endless videos in the place of a hand on her shoulder and a warm hug after a long separation – the uncomfortable truth she had to acknowledge was that she was luckier than her parents had ever dreamed possible.

Despite it all – curses and poisons and flowers and Safin, despite all they’d seen and all they’d done and all they’d survived, endured, blasphemies unconfessed and monsters unrepentant –

She had her father.