Work Text:
Six years old was not old enough to really remember things. Whether she wanted to remember them or not, there was a defined line in her life of after the crisply dressed man in uniform knocked on their apartment door, and the faded blurriness of before.
There was a hard line drawn between the every day dimness of the apartment, the late nights where the glow from the study kept her awake far past when she had been put to bed, and the lapsed silences of every meal – and that of the days before any of that was true.
If it ever really wasn’t true.
Where her memories ended prior to six and where her father’s stories of thetime before where her mother came home as much as she could, where the fighting and worry and war were barely on the periphery, began was never a line should could distinguish after they were informed that Allison Church was never coming back.
Carolina was born to the sound of a 21-gun salute, and the little red haired girl from before that moment faded away, grasping uselessly to a limp, cold hand by soon-to-be-Doctor Leonard Church’s side.
Again, if that little girl had really been there at all.
Sometimes Carolina wasn’t even sure.
There were some things about her mother that Carolina knew for sure, whether they were her memories or the memories of another. She had firm hands and liked ponytails regardless of the occasion. She thought it was funny to not smile in most of the wedding photos and instead stared down the cameraman. She never told them goodbye. And she was the one who fixed everything around the house that broke.
Things still broke after Carolina turned six, but they didn’t get fixed. Not until Carolina learned herself how to fix them.
There was a voice in the back of Carolina’s head – maybe her own, maybe not – that said if you were going to use something, you had to learn how to fix it, to keep it up. And the voice was so strong and important feeling, that Carolina knew if she did nothing else, she would work the rest of her life to obey it.
So as she changed the filter to the apartment’s air conditioner – the old one, it came with the apartment, which they had outgrown by the second doctorate’s worth of books that ended up in boxes lining their tiny hallway – and she got ready to call for dinner to be delivered again, she realized that there had been one thing over the past two years that was broken and she hadn’t fixed yet.
And he was staring at the wall in the study again.
When she was eight it started.
It started in little ways at first, really it was mostly the conscious awareness that everything she had been doing before to keep their apartment together, to make sure meals and mail was not skipped, was with a renewed purpose.
The second doctorate was his current goal, the one that he messed over when he wasn’t remembering to be human or when he wasn’t staring at something beyond Carolina’s own vision.
And while the very thought of what doctorate or AI Theory really meant was far beyond her third grade comprehension, she knew it had been important enough for him to ignore everything else happening around them.
Just like she would have liked pizza or a trip in reward for passing spelling tests, she imagined her father was going to want to celebrate the end of this years long journey.
So when she sifted through the mail and found for herself that there was a letter from the same institute her father attended for seminars, she eagerly brought it to his study.
Leonard Church looked at it, opened it, read it, and tossed it aside toward the other stack of mounting papers to recycle.
Carolina felt her heart drop.
“It’s not good?” she asked, words sounding wobbly despite her well practiced stiff upper lip.
Her father blinked a few times and gave her a quizzical look before pulling down his glasses and cleaning them with his ratty old shirt.
“Why would you ask that?” he demanded in that tone only Carolina knew wasn’t harsh by design.
“It didn’t make you happy,” she pointed out. “I’m sorry–”
“My thesis was accepted,” he cut her off. When Carolina didn’t react, he frowned in that analytical way, like he was struggling for a way to restate the sentiment for her to understand. “That paper I’ve been writing. The one where I had you stack my books for me in alphabetical order?”
Carolina nodded with realization.
“It was good,” he explained. “I won’t be taking classes anymore. I’m going to graduate now.”
She hesitated, her fingers pulling on each other in that way that always seemed to catch her father off guard and make him look away biting his lip. She stopped it as soon as she realized it.
“What do you do?” she pressed. “When you graduate?”
He stared at the wall and tapped a pen against his knee. He was beginning to grow frustrated with something. “Some lesser men go to this ceremony, dressed like fools in costume just to parade their successes and have attention as some alumnus they’ll never meet again awards them for meeting the minimalrequirements of the profession.”
Carolina bit her lip. “It sounds like a party…”
“Oh, I’m certain to some it is,” he huffed.
“Are you going to try to go?” she asked curiously. “It might make you happy.”
His eyes turned on her again, riddled with confusion. “Why would that make me happy?”
“'Cuz it’s different,” she offered, rubbing nervously at her arm. “Like… like when the fan broke. I just had to make it turn a different way to fix it. Made it all better. It was easy.”
Her stomach twisted as his nostrils flared.
“I don’t need anything different,” he told her firmly. “I don’t need happy. I needed a doctorate. I got it. I don’t have to prove anything beyond that. You don’t fix everything that’s broken.”
Confused herself, Carolina searched her father’s face. “But… why?”
“Because,” he said definitively as he turned back around in his chair and began to look back over the stacks of research on his desk. After a breath, he followed it up with, “Because sometimes broken things motivate you to do somethingelse with those pieces. Because sometimes you can find something beautifulwith those pieces.”
Carolina worried her lip.
“I got my doctorates just the way I am,” he said. “Nothing needs to change me.So just leave me where I am.”
Her stiff upper lip came in handy again as Carolina screwed her eyes closed and nodded tearfully. “Yessir.”
And she did.