Chapter Text
“For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.” – Colm Tóibín, The Master
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Despite the many years of practice under his belt, Buck had learned that when it came to Thanksgivings with the Colemans, one could never be too careful. He liked to think that at this point, he’d seen it all, but somehow, the day always found some way to surprise him. Thankfully, none of them had been quite as rocky as the first time he’d spent the holiday with his in-laws, but it was certainly never a dull day either. There’d been the year Jamie almost lost a thumb chopping veggies, resulting in Beck having to pull out his suture kit, the time Quinn threw up all over the turkey as a baby, and the especially memorable year where the oven caught fire. Honestly, Buck still wasn’t sure how that last one happened. A house full of firefighters, most of whom were decent cooks, and yet they still managed to nearly burn the house down.
Thankfully, they spent every other Thanksgiving with Bobby and Athena and the rest of the crew home in LA, so it was really only once every other year Buck had to brave going to San Francisco to spend the holiday. Honestly, he wasn’t sure why he ever expected that the day would be anything other than complete chaos. A six hour road trip with three kids, followed by spending an entire day in a house filled with sugar-high children and a group of stubborn first responders that tended to have no self-preservation skills could only be a recipe for disaster.
“Daddy,” Quinn perked up from the backseat. “Are you gonna let Grandpa burn the turkey again?”
Della snorted a laugh at their daughter’s comment and Daniel looked over at him from the passenger seat, clearly suppressing a grin. While Buck loved the fact that his brother was slowly but surely acting more like his old self, he just wished it wasn’t at his expense. Granted, considering he had three little gremlins for children, most of the time Daniel laughed was at Buck’s expense. And judging by the mischievous look in his daughter’s eyes as he glanced over his shoulder at her, it hadn’t been an entirely innocent comment.
“I did not let him burn the turkey,” Buck grumbled. “Your grandpa did that all on his own.”
“Well, maybe someone was meant to be supervising him,” Della said pointedly, from next to Quinn.
She had graciously given up the passenger seat to Daniel, who needed the extra legroom far more than she did considering he was about a foot taller, and then made both the boys move back to the third row, leaving just her and Quinn in the middle.
Buck sighed, still failing to understand why he got all the blame for the failed turkey. Archie was the one that somehow set fire to it. All Buck had done was leave the man alone in the kitchen for a few minutes… or maybe closer to an hour.
“Well, your grandma’s taking back over making the turkey this year so I think the kitchen will survive just fine,” he retorted, thankful Faith had banned her husband once and for all from helping with the meal.
“It didn’t survive last year?” Daniel asked, lips twitching in amusement, no doubt loving every second of Buck’s five year old giving him shit.
“Dad let Grandpa set the oven on fire,” Clark answered, oh so helpfully.
Since when has anyone, ever, in the history of the universe, let Archie Coleman do anything? He did whatever he wanted, consequences be damned, and his son-in-law trying to stop him sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything.
“Did he now?” Danny replied, looking over at Buck with a shit-eating grin.
God, he was never going to hear the end of this. Twenty Thanksgivings could go by and no doubt, someone would still be asking him every single year if he was going to let Archie burn the turkey yet again.
But, if it made Daniel laugh, really laugh, not the fake hollow laugh he used when he was trying to act like everything was fine, then Buck didn’t mind it all that much.
“It wasn’t Uncle Ev’s fault,” Pru snapped, looking up from the book he’d been reading, his sharp tone cutting through the relatively happy atmosphere in the car like a knife.
Out of the corner of his eye, Buck watched as the smile slipped off of Daniel’s face, a pursed frown replacing it.
Lately, it seemed like Pru would take any opportunity presented to him to disagree with his father, or worse, snap at him. If Daniel made him eggs for breakfast, which Pru loved, suddenly he didn’t like eggs anymore. If he offered to teach Pru how to play chess, it was stupid. If he tried to suggest a book Pru might like, he refused to even try it.
And while Daniel had been more than patient with his own son essentially treating him like trash, Buck was quickly growing tired of it.
“Your dad was just teasing your uncle, leanbh, ” Della said gently, clearly trying to diffuse the tension as Quinn and Clark watched the scene with wide eyes. “It’s what brothers do.”
And although things moved on easily enough once Della began distracting the kids by playing license plate bingo, Buck couldn’t help but notice that Daniel didn’t so much as smile for the rest of the drive.
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Despite both Matt and Evan attempting to prepare him for the chaos that was Thanksgiving with Della’s family, Daniel wasn’t sure anything could have truly readied him for the day. He’d never really had big family holidays when he was younger, considering both his parents were only children, and the closest thing he’d experienced was Christmas with Henry’s family, but even Henry and his six siblings hadn’t been nearly as chaotic as the Colemans.
There was, of course, Buck and Della, plus the kids, along with Matt and Theo with Nate and Alice. Then there was all of Della’s brothers; Beck and his wife, Sadie, Jamie and Maggie, and their two kids, and Shea and Cassandra, who had just had a baby. Add Della’s parents, and they had a not so small gathering of 21.
The kids had all run off to play with their cousins practically the second they arrived and Della and Evan had disappeared to help in the kitchen, leaving Daniel to fight the battle of dealing with the rest of the Colemans alone. At least Mattie had stuck around, apparently also on a permanent ban from the kitchen. One would think that he would have improved over the years Daniel had been gone, but somehow, his brother had retained the ability to burn water.
There was plenty of noise coming from the kitchen, with the sound of several conversations and pots and pans banging flowing out from the room, plus the thumps and squeals of the kids running around upstairs, but all in all, the living room wasn’t too loud. Or at least, it was quiet enough that it didn’t immediately set Daniel on edge. He’d gotten better at dealing with loud noises, and well, people in general, but too much noise still made his skin crawl sometimes.
While he’d, of course, had his fair share of being screamed at while he was captured, for the most part, Daniel had just been stuck with silence. Complete, almost painful, silence. Sometimes, he was left alone for days, almost weeks, at a time, with nothing to do except listen to his own thoughts. One would think silence would be a nice alternative to the other stuff that could have been happening to him, but it really just trapped him in his own head, which was far worse. When he was alone with his own thoughts, that was when Daniel really started to spiral.
Just lying there on cold, hard concrete, staring at the scratches in the wall, the only noise coming from a dripping pipe, it had been easy to fall into thinking about the worst case scenarios. Imagining his captors finally killing him, maybe by a good old-fashion beheading, finally letting him drown when they water-boarded him, or perhaps just leaving him to starve. Wondering if Evan, Matt, and Henry had made it out alive, on his worst days seeing a mirage of them sitting next to him, chewing him apart for letting them die. Picturing Amelia and the baby, knowing they probably hated him for abandoning them.
Oh, wait.
That one was actually true.
Shaking himself out of his thoughts of there , because that was not a road he needed to travel down, especially now, Daniel realized everyone left in the living room was looking over at him, varying different looks of concern on their faces.
He glanced over at Matt, wordlesley pleading for help, and sighed in relief as he thankfully stepped in.
“I was just telling everyone about that year we were spun up on Thanksgiving and Stitch and Fox tried cooking that disgusting ass bird,” Matt provided for him.
Daniel winced, remembering their teammates’ horrific attempt at using some random bird - that absolutely wasn’t a turkey - they’d found to try and make themselves a Thanksgiving dinner. Come to think of it, Daniel was pretty certain that both men had ended up with an awful case of food poisoning, not that he had much sympathy for them. As his mother had always reminded him, if you were gonna be stupid, you better be damn tough to deal with the consequences of that.
“Matthew LaMontagne, you better watch that mouth of yours,” Maggie lectured, bouncing two year old Annie on her lap. “And you wonder why Nate already swears like a sailor.”
While Daniel secretly found the kindergarten swearing sort of adorable, he had a feeling the boy’s fathers didn’t share that sentiment. Maybe he ought to buy Matt a swear jar for Christmas.
“Oh, please,” Archie said, waving his hand at Maggie’s words. “Della probably knew every curse there was to know by pre-school. Although I suppose that’s what we get, having four boys first.”
For whatever reason, it was scarily easy for Daniel to picture a tiny little Della chasing around after her older brothers, repeating every single new swear she learned from them. In hindsight, he was starting to realize that maybe more of Quinn’s mischievousness had come from Della than he’d originally thought.
“Alright, Sophie’s fed so we’ve got about three hours before all hell breaks loose,” Cass announced as she entered the living room, having stepped out to feed the baby.
“More like two if she’s got Shea’s appetite,” Archie retorted, taking a sip from the glass of whiskey in his hand.
Daniel glanced over at Cass as she sat down on the couch beside him, eyeing the baby in her arms. Like the rest of the Coleman offspring, she was pretty adorable, with wide gray eyes and soft blonde ringlets. She seemed impossibly small, but it had ages since Daniel had been around a baby, and considering Della had said she was only three months old, he figured Sophie was probably just as small as every other baby.
“You want to hold her?” Cass offered suddenly.
He quickly tore his eyes off the baby, glancing up at the woman in surprise. But, by the time he opened his mouth to decline, Cass had already carefully dumped Sophie in his arms, evidently looking for a break.
Matt snorted a laugh as Daniel fumbled for a better grip on the baby, making sure to support her head. Sleepy gray eyes blinked up at him, seemingly unconcerned about being passed off to a complete stranger. Honestly, Daniel wasn’t all too sure what his brother was laughing about. He was pretty sure Matt had dropped one of his nephews the first time he had to hold the poor kid. So what if Daniel’s baby wrangling skills were just a little bit rusty?
“She’s a lot easier than Peter ever was, isn’t she?” Matt asked, suddenly reminding Daniel of the last baby he’d held.
Matt’s nephew, Peter, had been, in the nicest of ways, a baby straight from hell. The kid had screamed down the house day and night, fussing whenever anyone tried to hold him, and any trip home to Louisiana with Matt had resulted in them being put on babysitting duties for the little terror.
“I think any baby would be easier than Peter,” he retorted, holding Sophie a little closer.
He’d forgotten how comforting the tiny, warm little weight of a baby could be. There was just something so much easier about babies, even the fussy ones. As long as you fed them and changed their diaper and held them, they didn’t judge you, not the way everyone else did. It was refreshing to be with someone that didn’t know how fucked up in the head he was, even if it was an infant that couldn’t even talk. Because at this point, Daniel was pretty sure even little Alice knew that there was something deeply wrong with her uncle.
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“Look at us,” Shea exclaimed as he took a seat between Cass and Jamie at the long dining table, having just helped Faith bring in the last of the platters of food. “We all made it to the table with no blood shed or fires started. That has to make this at least an above average year for us.”
“Just give it time,” Theo mumbled underneath his breath from his seat to Daniel’s right.
Was Thanksgiving usually that bad? The way everyone talked about it, Daniel was starting to be convinced the whole family was cursed or something.
“Well, let’s eat quick before one of the kids has a m-e-l-t-d-o-w-n,” Maggie suggested, clearly used to her in-laws" chaos.
“You know we can spell, right?” Clark reminded his aunt, ever so helpfully.
Somehow, Daniel got the feeling that it wasn’t really the kids who were old enough to spell that everyone was so worried about.
“Uh-uh, you know the rules,” Faith spoke up, causing all of her children, plus her husband, to groan. “One thing everyone’s thankful for.”
Slowly but surely, they went around the table, stopping to let everyone say one thing they were thankful for. Everything was smooth sailing, right until they got to Pru.
The boy just shrugged when everyone looked at him after Quinn had finished listing about an entire novel’s worth of things she was thankful for and stayed silent despite a pointed look from Della.
“C’mon bud, just one thing,” Archie encouraged, only prompting yet another shrug from Pru.
And then the man had to go and do the one thing Daniel had been avoiding doing for weeks.
“How about having your dad back, hm?” Archie suggested.
He poked the damn bear.
“No,” Pru scowled almost immediately, cranking up the tension in the room to about 11.
Daniel tensed slightly, eyeing Della, who was shooting him a concerned look from across the table. It was fine, though. After all, he’d been shot and tortured before. What could a 12 year old say that could hurt worse than that? Sure, the barbs his son shot his way tended to be painful, but things between them would get better eventually. Well, Daniel hoped they would anyway.
“Pru,” Evan warned, disapproval clear in his voice.
And when Daniel’s little brother had mastered the dad voice, Daniel wasn’t sure, but he had to admit, it was pretty effective.
“Well, I’m not,” Pru answered, crossing his arms defensively over his chest.
It was fine, he reminded himself. Just a kid lashing out, that was all. He’d probably said worse things to his dad at Pru’s age.
“You’re not being very nice right now, leanbh ,” Della said pointedly, the term of endearment lacking its usual affection.
Even the kids had quieted down, watching carefully as if they could sense the fallout about to happen. So much for an uneventful Thanksgiving.
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, never quite sure what to do in these situations. Half the time, he felt like he should at least try and actually parent, as was his job. But most of the time, he just felt like he’d be overstepping if he tried to do anything. Like Evan and Della were Pru’s real parents and he was just an outsider lurking in.
“I don’t care, I mean it,” Pru retorted, a familiar anger rising up in the boy.
Daniel had always had a difficult time controlling his temper at that age too. It had felt like at any second, the rage inside of him was one second from boiling over, and Pru clearly had the same issue. It probably didn’t help that they just kept cranking up the heat either.
“Pru–”
“No!” Pru argued, voice verging on a shout. “I wish he never came back at all!”
As it turned out, a twelve year old’s words could hurt worse than getting shot. Who would’ve thought?
Daniel swallowed heavily, ignoring the sharp pain in his chest that only seemed to be growing. For a moment, the room was completely silent, so much so that Daniel was sure he could’ve heard a pin drop.
“Pruitt,” Evan snapped, the sharp tone one Daniel was fairly certain he’d never heard from his brother.
But Pru had already shoved away from the table, the chair screeching loudly against the wood, the plates on the table ringing slightly from the disturbance. All too quickly, he was gone from the room, feet pounding on the stairs as he ran up them.
A door slammed upstairs, prompting little Sophie to start wailing, and Daniel watched as Evan heaved a deep breath before getting up from the table and exiting the dining room, no doubt following after Pru.
Daniel stared down at the plate in front of him, unwilling to deal with the pitying looks everyone else was no doubt shooting his way.
The kid actually, truly hated him.
He’d honestly thought that if he just gave his son time and space, that eventually Pru would come around. But maybe it was just too late. Maybe he’d missed too much. After all, Daniel had effectively abandoned his son. Why should he get a second chance?
“Maybe I spoke too soon,” Shea whispered to Jamie, although still loud enough for everyone else to hear.
“You think?” Beck retorted harshly.
And even without looking up, Daniel could hear the loud smack that was delivered as Beck thumped the back of his little brother’s head, followed by Shea’s wince.
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“An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” – Adrienne Rich