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Anya learns the strangest things from her parents.
“No, no, Syon boy,” she says at the wise old age of eleven, sitting on her living room floor with his laptop and a load of schematics for theatre dresses between them. “If we’re going to combine red and green for the dress, the ratio shouldn’t be fifty-fifty, it should be eighty-twenty. And the green should be desaturated.”
“How do you even know—“ he starts, irritable that she’d caught his mistake.
But then he catches Loid Forger nodding along from the kitchen, a particularly proud smile on his face.
She spends the rest of the day lecturing him on things he really ought to know, being the Scion of the Desmond family. Things, he’s shocked to find that she is intimately familiar with and understands to a level where she can use it creatively and on the fly — even while arguing with him.
He’d expect someone like Blackbell to be fashionable, to understand colour coordination and good design, but a commoner like Forger?
“Oi!”
An eraser hits him square in the forehead for his discriminatory lapse.
He’s half-way to picking another fight, so used to her company at school. There’s a familiarity to arguing with Forger, after all, that puts him oddly at ease. And she’d provoked it anyway — like she always does.
But he never forgets where he is, that he is not in a place where his presence is one filled with unquestionable authority and para-social awe from their peers. The Forger residence forbids any sort of yelling at its darling daughter, and it isn’t just in its unsettling perfection, in the smiles of the mother or the soft-spokenness of the father.
Damian shuts his mouth.
“F- Fine!” He exclaims, puffing up in spite of himself. “But we’re doing eighty-purple. Tyrion purple. It’s historically the only colour that would fit someone like Helen of Troy.”
He’s been coming here since he was eight, considers the place a secondary sort of home, much like Eden. There’s a special sort of love here that he soaks up like he’s found an oasis in an endless desert. And so, once they’re done, they shuffle into the kitchen to help Loid Forger with cooking dinner.
It’d been so jarring, the first time he’d been here. He’d stood there at the edge of the kitchen, where he has never been before, watching father and daughter set up to cook. It’s a small space, but they moved around each other perfectly, washing hands, finding vegetables, pre-heating the oven. The warm glow from the lamps caught in their smiles, the casual reminders, and Damian had never quite seen anything like it.
He’d felt all at once removed from them, like he’s watching a world he cannot pass into, and jealous of what she has. If this is what he has scoffed at, did he really have any reason to look down on it in the first place?
“I was so sure your mother would be the cook in the family,” he admits, as they’re preparing vegetables together at the counter.
He doesn’t mean to think about it like that, but he’s always learnt that that’s where women belong. In the kitchen.
She elbows him non-so-gently for the thought.
“Ow!”
He nudges her ankle in retaliation.
Before it can escalate, Loid gently places a hand on Anya’s shoulder and smilingly holds up a hairband. “You forgot again.”
“Oh,” she mouths and takes it from her father.
She gathers her long hair into an elegant ponytail, the pink locks trickling through her fingers like a cat’s tail. Gold catches like morning glory in the highlights, in the brilliance of her green eyes, and Damian is
entranced, is breathless.
He wants to touch it.
But it’s her father who reaches out and gently pulls on the tail, drawing her eyes back up, as he tells her in that gentle-stern voice of his to “play nice.”
There’s a moment of silence as they stare at each other, an act Damian recognises instantly. Her parents know about her abilities. It floors him, somehow, that she has trusted them with this. And for a moment he is all childhood jealously. For a moment all he can think is that he wishes it had been their secret. All alone in the world.
Her bond with her father shines so brightly.
How could he ever compete with it?
But Anya turns back, brightly, smugly, with enough attention for the both of them, and returns to their earlier argument like nothing had happened.
“What do you know about who belongs in a kitchen, anyway?” Anya gives him a sly look, taking her knife up again to start on the potatoes. “You still eat in restaurants staffed with chefs.”
“That’s—“ He flushes, sticking his nose in the air. “That’s neither here nor there!”
He hates his home. He misses his family. Even the restaurants are starting to feel stuffy and cold, with only Jeeves for Company.
Sometimes he just wants a normal conversation, to pick a fight with someone, and to laugh freely. It’s not too much to ask. In fact, it’s beneath him.
And yet—
Maybe that’s why he keeps coming here all the time.
When Anya nudges him this time, it’s with a lot more kindness in the gesture. It’s just a brush of her shoulder, really, small and weak as it is. But she looks at him through her bangs, and it melts the fragments of his heart that had started to freeze over.
Anya Forger’s silences always speak a thousand words.
“Oh!” She exclaims to give him space, waving the knife she’d been using to mince cucumbers into squares with uncanny perfection. “But if you want to learn how to use a knife, it’s mama you want to ask.”
And Damian— he lets her distract him.
“Where is your mother?”
“Oh! Uh—“ A quick glance at her father. “She’s— she’s working late today.”
“Isn’t she a clerk?”
“True, but, well, mama’s the moral backbone of city hall, so she has to cut those pesky politicians down to size as part of her job.”
There’s a wheezing sound behind them, and then Loid Forger is in the middle of a full fledged coughing fit.
Anya twitters to his side, offering him water and saying other reassuring things — “don’t worry, papa. I’m sure she’ll keep the place spot free”, “you know she never leaves any body behind” — that only seem to make his coughing worse.
And there it is again, the understanding in this family, spoken between the lines. It’s so similar to the way he communicates with Anya, the way anyone who knows her ability communicates with her. But while they have their own language of experience to fall back on in moments like this, so do the Forgers. And it isn’t a language Damian understands.
It makes him jealous, all over again.
Not of Anya, though maybe he should be. There is no language in the Desmond family. Only deadly silence that must never be broken.
No, Damian is just jealous of her father.
Sometimes he wants to run away into her world. At other times he wants to drag her into the silence with him.
It makes him freeze with guilt. And so he ends up right back here, watching as Loid Forger, mercilessly cool dad and perfect, flawless adult, nag his daughter first for joking unnecessarily and then for cutting her finger a moment later when she’s showing off once more.
Anya whines and argues back, unphased and unafraid, so much like she is with Damian at school.
And it occurs to him again, much too late, or much too early, after many many years of knowing her, that this is love. He isn’t sure Anya recognises it, but standing in this golden kitchen, so close and yet so removed, cut off by an impassable barrier called ‘family’, Damian sees it clearly. The way Loid Forger expresses love is much the same as Damian’s, by being a little too strict, by nagging and pushing and demanding.
It’s worry.
It’s concern.
It’s jarring and full of flaws, the kind of clinging childish expression of fear that comes from a wish not to loose the brightest star in their lives.
Maybe that’s why Anya was never afraid of him, and always responded in kind.
Maybe that’s why he feels safe in her presence - because with her there is no suffocating silence to be found.
It is the strangest thing for her to have learnt in this flawless home by this flawless man. It should have smothered her, withered away her brightness and turned her smiles brittle, but it hasn’t.
And maybe, just maybe, it makes Damian want to treat her more gently than he has.
“Mama would kiss it better,” she sniffles, glowering at her father through her eyelashes.
“Here,” Damian says, taking his chance and catching Anya’s hand out from under her father’s.
He presses the cut briefly to his lips and then dips his wet handkerchief over it.
“You’re such a klutz.”
His face is hot and he’s angry he did something so embarrassing. But he fusses over her hand, cleaning the rest of the blood one more time, drying the skin and attaching a bright pink bandaid over it.
She’s quiet.
Too quiet.
It rubs him the wrong way, grates on his nerves. Does she think he’s an idiot now? He must look so uncool in contrast with her father, with fingers still stuck between childhood chub and teenage fumbling.
He lifts his head to pick a fight with her, and is stuck dumb by the look on her face.
Her skin is pink from neck to forehead, her face almost becoming one with her hair if it weren’t for the wide sparkle of her eyes, like summer grass after a light rain. Hit just right by the sunlight. She’s so surprised by his kindness and so moved by the gesture she’s at a loss for words - for the first time in her life.
It is so painfully adorable he has little attention for anything else (let alone the dawning thunder on Loid’s face).
“Thank you, Damian.”
His heart is a crash of thunder in his chest.
Fire blazes across Damian’s face and he turns away to hide the full burn of his response.
“Just be careful next time,” he harrumps. “Whatever your mother has taught you you clearly aren’t a master yet.”
She is the blooming combination of both her parents, with the kindness and deftness of her mother and the knowledge of her father. But she isn’t there yet.
Neither is he.
They are still much, much too young to Damian’s impatient mind.
Even if he could forget, the pins and needles of Loid Forger’s gaze on the back of his neck is a stark, loud spoken, reminder of their immaturity.