Work Text:
"Daddy?"
The wobbly little voice rips Daniel out of his focus. His fingers still on the keyboard and he turns around to face his daughter, Lenora, standing in the doorway, clutching a doll in both of her hands.
She looks at him with her big green eyes. They’re wet with (barely) unshed tears and her lower lip is trembling as she repeats the word in her high child voice.
"Daddy?"
Daniel is ashamed of it, but for a moment he thinks about dismissing her, sending her to go find her mom so she can deal with the problem, and so he can continue writing in peace.
But his wife had taken Kate to her gymnastics practice and the two of them won't be back home for a few hours. He was supposed to keep an eye on Nora. "It's not babysitting, Daniel. She is your daughter." Alice had scolded him before she followed Katie to the car, and when he could hear the car leave the driveway, wheels crunching on gravel, he grabbed Nora and placed her in front of the TV. He put a VHS on, some Disney princess movie he knows she enjoys, and snuck away into his office while she was enthralled by the bright colours on the screen.
He has a deadline. A word-goal to hit before then. Editors that will be displeased if he doesn’t. And really, what could realistically happen? Nora would be distracted for an hour and a half in which he, if he’s lucky, could get a thousand or so words on paper. At the very least a few hundred.
But now she’s standing there in the doorway to his office, her doll-like eyes threatening to overflow. Apparently something could happen.
“Give me just a sec, yeah sweetie?” He tells the girl, stretching the u of ‘just’, before turning back to the screen and quickly saving his progress. Then he turns back around to his daughter and reaches his arms out, beckoning her over.
She flies across the room, and in one—unpracticed, not as smooth as he’d like it—movement he hoists her up into his lap with his hands in her armpits. Immediately she burrows her face in his chest and sobs wreck her tiny body, shaking both father and daughter with the force of them.
“Hey, babygirl, what happened?” He asks, trying to make his voice as soft as possible, but the unconsolable girl just continues weeping. Daniel is gripping her tight, one arm spread out on her small back, the other one buried in her black curls, so much like her mother’s.
It fills his chest with an aching longing for something every time he sees his daughters. Their glowing brown skin, their roman noses and their twin black ringlets. Katie’s bambi eyes.
Daniel loves Alice. Of course he does, he married her and she gave him two beautiful daughters. But there’s something that he just can’t name. Something is missing, something is not right. He ignores it most times, because this is enough. She is enough. She should be enough. He doesn’t even know what he is missing.
Looking too long at his wife, at her bronze skin, shoulder length inky curls and her beautiful eyes that you could get lost in, it makes him nauseous. It’s as if she isn’t who she should be.
But his daughters? They’re perfect. They’re everything he could ever want in life.
“Nora, baby,” He tries again, rocking her on his lap, back and forth as if she was still the fragile little thing they took home from the hospital five years ago. In a sense she still is. She is so tiny, so breakable. “you wanna tell daddy what’s going on?”
But she just shakes her head so hard that it hurts Daniel’s sternum a little.
“Hm… how about we take a deep breath, you and me. Just follow my lead, little angel.”
He draws in air, puffing his chest in an exaggerated way that moves Nora up and down as if she’s in a bouncy house. She giggles halfheartedly and tries to follow suit, but it takes a few attempts before she stops stuttering through the breaths.
The words she mumbles are muffled by his shirt, but Daniel can still decipher them somewhat. “Miss Clarice is dying.” his daughter tells him, her voice breaking again, and Daniel’s heart stops.
Miss Clarice? Is that one of her teachers? A neighbour?
But no. He remembers now that Miss Clarice is Lenora’s favorite doll. She was clutching it in the doorway, and now it is trapped between Nora and Daniel. Miss Clarice with her brown bead eyes and her fire red curls.
“Why do you think that Miss Clarice is dying, sweetie?”
It’s a fairly disturbing sentiment coming out of a five-year-old’s mouth. A dying doll.
Nora pulls back, the doll clutched to her chest, and Daniel grabs her waist so she doesn’t topple backwards off his lap. Her face is splotchy and snot-covered, and she looks at him with a serious expression when she tells him “She is gravely injured.” in a tone so heavy only a child can muster it.
And then she opens her tiny little hands, and underneath her fingers Daniel can see stuffing bursting out of the doll's arm, which is ripped open lengthwise.
Okay, the thing’s entrails are literally spilling out. No wonder Lenora thinks her toy is dying.
He wants to ask her how it happened, scold her for not being more careful with her possessions, but he doesn’t. Instead he dries her tears with his shirt sleeve and brushes a lock of her curls behind her ear.
“Can I please see Miss Clarice?”
Reluctantly Nora hands over her precious doll, her fingers only slowly loosening around the injured limb, and Daniel takes it into his hand, the other one tightening on his daughter's waist.
It’s a nasty rip, from hand to shoulder she is split open, cotton slowly seeping out in a brutal fashion. He runs a finger along the rip.
His mother taught him how to sew. When he was a boy he ripped so many pieces of clothing that eventually she was fed up with mending them, and they didn’t have money for a new wardrobe unless it was absolutely necessary, so she made him mend the rips and tears.
You break it, you fix it.
In his early adulthood money was still tight, and the little he did have was spent on drugs, so still he was forced to wield needle and thread.
“No worries baby, Doctor Molloy is available to take a look at the patient.” He winks at her before placing the doll on the table and propping his keyboard up against the monitor to make space. Then he grabs Lenora and deposits her on the desk, while using his sock clad foot to slowly push a half empty bottle of Jameson under it in hopes that she won’t notice.
“I am gonna go get a few things so I can perform an emergency surgery to make Miss Clarice all better. Stay put, we don’t need you tumbling off the table and having to join Miss Clarice at the doctors!”
The first thing he does is turn off the TV. Beauty and the Beast is nearly finished anyways, and Nora already missed half the movie. If she wants to continue watching it later, then they can just restart it.
Then he grabs a few pieces of paper towel and the sewing kit. They don’t use it much. Alice doesn’t know how to sew, and they have the money to replace broken things now. But it’s there for cases like this. Nostalgic things you can’t replace.
On his way back to his office he takes a detour into the bathroom where he picks up a dampened washcloth for his daughter's snotty face. Tears in his sleeve are okay. But snot? No thank you.
Lenora is still obediently sitting on the desk when Daniel walks through the door, her short legs swinging back and forth like she’s on the playground. She flashes him a gap-toothed wet little smile, her top left central incisor gone very early for her age. She’d been so excited when it started to wiggle, and she looks so adorable with her proud grin.
Daniel gently grabs Lenora’s face and tilts her head back, before wiping it with the soft, warm washcloth. When her face is snot-free he lowers himself back down into his chair.
“I have everything ready to operate on the patient. Miss Clarice is in the best hands imaginable.”
Before he can even think about picking up Miss Clarice, Nora climbs off the desk and settles herself into his lap. She’s using him as a chair, her shoulder against his chest, face buried in his neck, and her legs dangling off one side of his thighs.
He’s about to tell her that he won’t be able to work like this, but she sniffles and presses her face into the spot where his shoulders and neck meet.
“Will she be okay?” She asks him, and he has to wrap his arms around her, pulling her closer to him.
“She’ll return to you as if nothing ever happened. Do you trust your daddy?”
She nods weakly, so Daniel puts down the paper towels and sewing kit on her legs, before grabbing her beloved doll. Then he covers its body with the paper towels.
“To make sure the surgery site stays sterile we cover the rest of our patient up. Then we disinfect the site.” Daniel explains and takes a clean edge of the washcloth and gently runs it over the doll's limb.
“Next we administer anesthesia.” He declares. ”You know how mommy blows on it if you have a place that hurts you, and that makes it all better? I need you to do that for Miss Clarice. We can do it together, it’ll have double the effect.”
He brings up the doll to her face height, and together they lean forward and softly blow air against the doll’s wrecked arm.
“Here hold her for a sec.” He gently places the doll in Lenora's open palms before pulling his glasses out of his curls and onto his nose. His age is catching up to him in exceedingly uncomfortable ways. Then he grabs the sewing kit and pulls out a needle and white thread.
Threading it is harder than anticipated. Daniel’s hands are shaking ever so slightly, making the task near impossible, but he gets it done.
“And now the surgery begins.”
He grabs the doll back and readjusts Nora on his lap to get a better range of motion. She is more in the way than anything else, but if she wants to cuddle then she’ll get to cuddle.
“I am going to start inserting my needle right here,” He places the needle to the fabric. “And then with my other hand I will push her stuffing back in, so she won’t lose any.”
He does exactly that, and the needle glides through the doll like a knife through butter. It’s smooth sailing, until it isn’t. Daniel’s hand begins to shake, and the needle penetrates his thumb, deep.
Bright red blood wells up, and he curses. “Don’t repeat that to your mom or sister.” Before sticking his thumb into his mouth to suck off the blood. The last thing he needs right now is to stain Miss Clarice with his blood.
The coppery, salt taste spreads on his tongue and it’s like someone punched him in the gut. The nausea is instant. The same kind that rises up when he spends too much time watching his wife.
A longing. A nostalgia of sorts. But for what? The aching in his chest is unexplainable, and for now Daniel is just going to blame it on the drugs and booze. The same drugs and booze that make his hands shake, that make his mind slow and incomprehensible without them, that make him restless and moody.
The same drugs and booze that keep him from his daughters. That make him a bad father.
One day, hopefully in the near future, he is going to give it all up. He is going to become sober, and his hands will never shake again. With strong, steady hands he will be able to fix all his daughters' problems. He will be able to lift them up and give them the world. He will stop overworking himself and take them to the park. He will be a father.
He just needs to finish this book.
And he can’t do that without booze and coke by his side. It’s for his daughters. All the money he’s making is going into their college funds. They’ll understand when they’re older. They’ll be grateful.
“Daddy, are you okay?” Lenora asks tentatively and pats the back of his hand with her smaller one. She blows some air in the direction of it as well, so Daniel pulls his thumb from his mouth and puts it closer to her face.
“Thank you, sweetie. When Doctor Molloy is done with little Miss Clarice he’ll need to patch himself up. Ouchie!”
The bleeding has stopped, so he wipes his spit slick thumb on his pants before resuming the doll surgery. His hands still shake, and it takes a while because he wants it to be seamless. It needs to be perfect for his little girl. He promised her that the doll would return to her as if nothing ever happened, and he intends to keep that promise.
Nora snuggles further into his chest as he works with precision, and she starts humming a song that Daniel vaguely recognises as being part of Beauty and the Beast, the movie he’d used to distract her with earlier.
He feels sick. This is all she needs. To be in the arms of her father, not in front of a television to keep her quiet so he can work in peace. He wants to put the doll down and wraps his arms around his daughter. Squeeze her tight and not let her go.
But instead he continues the sewing. It’s the least he can do for her.
And soon, after many more instances of the needle piercing his flesh, and miraculously not getting blood onto the light fabric of the doll, she is finished. Miss Clarice’s arm is fixed and the seam runs smooth as if it’d never been open, spilling out doll entrails.
“She’s done. Do you wanna take her?”
No reply.
“Nora, honey?”
The little girl is snoring softly, her face buried in his chest. Her small body is steadily rising and falling with every breath she takes, and Daniel’s heart is melting. Never did he think it was possible to love another human being this much. But his daughters inspire deep, complex feelings in him.
He bunches the paper towels up and throws them into the trashcan, before he gently lifts Lenora’s arm just a tiny bit to slide the doll in between her arms. She instinctively pulls it closer to her chest.
Trapped by the heavy weight of a sleeping child. It’s a good way to force yourself to write. Unable to leave the desk.
Daniel slowly turns his chair, careful not to disturb the sleeping angel in his arms, before opening his desk drawer. He dips his fingers into the small bag and rubs a little bit of the bitter powder on his gums. Not a lot. Just enough to function.
And then he pulls his computer back out of sleep mode.
Alice and Kate will be home soon, and he wants to get a little more work done before then.