Archive of Our Own ^beta

Her moms drop her off at dad’s apartment themselves.

She and Molly are sixteen now, and have been allowed to fly by themselves — initially under the supervision of a flight attendant — back and forth to New York since they were thirteen. She could have come here alone. She didn’t have to ask not to do that, and she knows better than to think it’s pure coincidence that both her mothers happen to have a meeting in New York today.

“Alright, CJ’s with the UN from 2 to 5,” mom tells her. “I’m with the governor from 12 to 3. So you need anything before two, she’s your gal. You need anyone after three, I’m hovering in that pastry shop down the block. Need anyone between two and three, you call me, but I will tell the governor you have something embarrassing, just so I have a real excuse to get out of there. You’re warned.”

Huck laughs despite her nerves, burying her face in her mom’s shoulder, wrapping her arms around her mom so tightly that she tires herself out quickly. She wants both of them to ignore the tears in her eyes — wants them to pretend not to know how nervous she is — but she’s not surprised that when she pulls away, Andy’s fishing a handkerchief from her pocket while CJ wipes her tears away with her thumbs, kissing Huck’s nose.

“You got this?” CJ asks, encouraging and less emotional than mom. Huck nods, trying to look more sure of herself than she is. CJ nods proudly. “All you need. We’re right in town; governors and Germany can be put on hold at a moment’s notice.”

“That’s not true,” Huck chuckles.

“Don’t make me proof it to you,” mom warns her, dabbing at Huck’s eyes with her handkerchief before she puts it in her coat again. “Alright. You’re gonna be fine. It’s just a chat; he’s fine. You look beautiful.”

She feels beautiful. She’s wearing the only one of Molly’s dresses that fits her — her favorite, too. Her dad’s never seen her in a dress and that scares her, but she feels beautiful at least. Mom kisses her forehead. “We’ll see you at six at the latest, we should be able to have dinner before the flight back if you want.”

“I know,” she says bravely. She’d like them to go now. Only CJ gets that hint. “See you then.”

*

When her moms have walked off, Huck stands in front of dad’s door a little longer.

Instead of ringing the doorbell, she just lets herself in with her own key, so she doesn’t have to wait any longer the moment she decides she’s ready. Her heart’s beating in her throat.

The hallway of dad’s apartment always smells like cigars. Huck loves the smell — has always liked the smell of cigar smoke in the air; likes it when she smells it unexpectedly walking down the street. It reminds her of her father.

Molly hates it; when she’s feeling mean, she says it’s for the same reason.

To Huck, it just feels right.

She closes the door behind her and sees her father standing at the end of the hallway, in the doorway to the living room. He greets her, but they don’t hug; they’re not really those people.

“Hey,” Huck says softly, as her dad takes her in. She feels exposed, standing in the hallway in her sister’s dress — that Molly has insisted is now hers — not sure how her father’s going to respond to that.

Mom called him weeks ago. After ages of telling mom, CJ, and Molly, that she wanted to come out to her dad in person, Huck had changed her mind after all and given her mom permission to do it for her instead. She wasn’t even in the house when her parents talked. She feels like a coward over that, but she doesn’t mind; she’s glad that she’s standing here and doesn’t have to figure out how to break that news to her father anymore.

She loves him — she wasn’t as confident as she’d tried to be with her moms that he was going to be happy to have two daughters instead of one. Their relationship has been strenuous enough; it’s really mostly in the past year or so that they’ve actively been trying to get closer again.

Years of mostly only seeing him for holidays, birthdays, and the occasional spontaneous trip thought of by her mother — and she feels like she might be ruining their first real attempt at changing that by transitioning, hopefully, at just the wrong time.

Molly’s harshly told her that if this is a deal-breaker for dad, the rest wasn’t worth it. Molly’s not been inclined to join her in seeing dad more anyway. Huck’s really enjoyed it.

“You look nice,” dad tells her, with his hands in his pockets and his beard gray at the edges. Sometimes he dyes it — she’s noticed only because sometimes he doesn’t bother and the true color shows. “That’s a nice dress,” he clarifies, in case Huck didn’t get that he’s trying to be supportive. It’s all she needs to hear right now.

“Thanks,” she smiles, trying to keep her heart still. She knows she must be red in the face. Dad opens the door to the living room further to let her in.

He got danish for them, Huck’s favorite because it was Molly’s favorite when they were kids.

Huck picks one up when she sits down, turning it around in her hand for a while. Dad sits down on a chair opposite of her, on the other side of the low table, and neither of them speaks for a bit.

“How’s Molly?” Dad asks after a while, and Huck thinks it’s a dangerous topic to start out on but doesn’t say that.

“She’s good,” she says. Molly doesn’t like it when Huck or mom or CJ tells dad about her life before she does. Molly barely tells him things herself; she wants him to ask, and he hasn’t gotten the memo yet. Mom’s not allowed to remind him. Huck thinks she’s making it too complicated, but the two of them don’t like to argue about dad.

“Good,” dad nods.

It’s silent again. Dad sips his coffee and offers Huck some, which she declines. She doesn’t tell him that she’s never liked coffee. Molly loves it.

He asks her how school is, then asks how her moms are doing after the next silence. He jokes that if the UN manages to get Germany’s support on the next resolution on Somalia just because CJ Cregg needed an excuse to be near her daughter today, the world’s really gone mad.

He calls her CJ’s daughter without blinking; Huck wonders if he practiced, and the thought makes her smile.

The silences keep getting longer the closer they get to being unable to avoid talking about it. She’s kind of glad they’re at least both dreading that conversation; neither is in a rush to get there.

Just when Huck thinks maybe she should suck it up and mention it directly, dad beats her to the punch.

“… your mom mentioned you hadn’t started thinking about names yet?”

Huck shakes her head. Every time she tries to think about new names, she freezes up even in her thoughts. She avoids it entirely; it’s become easier to say she just doesn’t care that much yet.

“Big decision,” her dad comments. She nods.

She wants to be more honest. She keeps saying she wants to make an effort; she keeps wanting dad to make more of an effort; they keep avoiding all the honest conversations they need to make it happen. She wants to try.

Her hands are getting sticky from the danish but she still hasn’t eaten anything. She thinks of her moms somewhere in the city right now.

She takes a deep breath.

“I’m scared that if I pick the wrong thing, that’s that, and I’m stuck with it,” Huck tells him. “So I’m just not picking. Which also isn’t helping, cause now— I don’t know.”

She looks down; turning the danish around in her hands some more but not taking a bite. There’s a frog in her throat she can’t swallow down. She doesn’t know what she expects — doesn’t know what she wants her father to tell her now, when to his own admittance he doesn’t have the vaguest idea of what she’s actually doing.

“It’s not helping,” dad repeats, before he softly continues with “because now, the longer you haven’t made a decision, the more uncomfortable it’s going to feel when you say you have made a decision, or are thinking about it again.”

Huck nods slowly. Right on the money. “Yeah,” she mutters.

Dad clears his throat. “You get that from me,” he says, still softly, like he’s not sure about this either. Huck wonders if this conversation is going to feel easier at any point — she really hopes so.

“Yeah?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he confirms.

“How so?” Huck asks, not surprised that initially that question’s met with silence, too. She has patience.

Dad makes her wait a while.

“It’s how I approached fatherhood for too long — maybe still do, to a lesser degree.”

They’ve never talked about it like that.

Huck looks up, knowing her eyes are too wide, her face too surprised, to make this a casual confession. She doesn’t really try to hide that. She doesn’t know what to say to get her dad to explain more — forgets all the ways to ask him to expand on that and just ends up repeating “yeah?”

She’s never directly asked her father why he wasn’t there more. Molly’s asked him — accused him, yelled at him, cried at him; Huck’s never been like that. Huck’s asked their mom, a few times, but never got more than a sweetened version of “these things are complicated, just know it has nothing to do with you.”

One time, just that once, when she and Molly and been eleven and had snuck back into the house when their moms thought they’d already headed to a friend’s, they’d overheard mom telling CJ she thought dad was a coward. She’s never told them they overheard her say that; didn’t want to admit they’d tried to overhear what they were getting for their birthdays.

At sixteen, she understands better that her mom never meant for them to hear her badmouth their father. She understands a little better why their mom might’ve been so frustrated. At eleven, she’d just been mad for days. Mom never figured out why.

“I got scared I wasn’t going to be a good enough dad to the two of you,” dad tells her. “And instead of facing that… it was easier not to try. I thought— if I’m not there enough to screw you up, I’m not screwing you up. Your mom’s got it. And she did.”

“And the longer you weren’t there…”

Dad nods. “The harder it gets to show up again. Didn’t want to be the guy who shows up after weeks, then months, of near radio silence and says I know I wasn’t there, but I’m here now. And what if you screw it up then?”

Huck nods. She doesn’t know what to say.

“I thought… don’t fix what isn’t broken; and your mom, from the outside, looked like she was handling it all like nobody else.”

“Looked like?”

“That’s for your mom to say. Point is, I didn’t realize until it felt like it was too late, that avoiding the possibility of screwing up being a dad, was still screwing up. It just didn’t feel as bad until the two of you were old enough to realize who was actually taking care of you. Point is… I don’t know what my point is.”

Huck chuckles. She takes a bite of her danish. Dad’s rubbing his hands together, fidgeting more uncomfortably than she’s ever seen him. “Point is…” Huck starts hesitantly, before she’s even swallowed her bite. “I should get off my ass and pick a name?”

Her dad laughs. “That’s a good point.”

“I’m scared to do the wrong thing, to commit to something and then realize I did it wrong, picked wrong.” Huck is fidgeting, too. There’s danish crumbs everywhere. “I don’t want to have to walk it back.”

“It’s okay if you have to,” her father tells her. He takes the danish from her hands and puts it back on the plate; Huck chuckles. “Better screw it up a few times than avoid it entirely.”

“Speaking from experience?” Huck dares.

Dad laughs. He shakes his head, smiling wider than she’d expected. “Speaking from the experience of someone who learned that lesson too late.”

Huck shrugs. “You’re here now.”

“Your mom tell you why?”

She shakes her head. When dad says mom, he rarely means CJ; he calls CJ just CJ, same as she and Molly have started to again. “What do you mean?”

Dad hesitates. He’s still turning his hands inside each other. “She called me and told me you were… a girl, you know, a few weeks ago. And that you wanted to talk. And initially, I panicked; I told her I needed time, couldn’t do it right now, can’t we wait a while, see what happens?”

Mom hadn’t told her that. Mom still hasn’t learned that some things would’ve been less hurtful if she hadn’t tried so hard to sugarcoat things. For a while, Molly had been more pissed off with mom than with dad over that; they’re starting to understand the instinct more.

“I didn’t know what to say to you. I’ve never met a trans person in my life — not that I know of. I— didn’t like the idea, you know that, and I didn’t want to make that your problem, so…”

“So you, again, thought it’d be better just to avoid it,” Huck fills in this time.

Her dad nods.

“Your mom’s never yelled at me to spend time with the two of you before; it was always… ‘be there, don’t be there, it’s entirely up to you.’ You know? With some exceptions when you were young, she didn’t want to be the ex wife nagging me to be a dad.” Huck kind of appreciates that he looks properly guilty about that. It makes her feel better for having been angry with him before. “She hacked into me over this one. Yelled my ear off through the phone, and she was right.”

Huck thinks about the coincidental meetings with the governor and the UN; she wants to remember to hug her mothers extra tight this evening.

“Point is… I shouldn’t have hesitated again. I should’ve invited you up here a few weeks ago; should’ve picked you up at the airport. And you should be choosing a damn name for yourself.” Dad looks awkward for a moment, then smiles at her. “Don’t take after your old man too much.”

“So you’re saying I’m my father’s daughter?” Huck asks, raising her eyebrows, hoping she’s not pushing it.

Dad nods. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“I like how that sounds,” Huck admits.

Her dad just nods again, clearly not sure what to say anyway. She doesn’t mind.

“Mom yelled at you?” Huck asks. She smiles at the idea.

Dad chuckles. “That woman’s crazy about you,” he tells her. “It’s gonna get your goat for a few more years, but cherish it.”

“It bothers Molly more,” Huck shrugs. “I kinda like it when she hovers.”

“She’s meeting with the governor right now?” Dad asks. He laughs when she confirms that. “And CJ’s with the Chancellor.”

“They didn’t try very hard to be subtle about it.”

They laugh, and it’s very nice. Dad offers to make her tea, and Huck sits in silence, fiddling with her hands the same way dad always does. When he returns with two mugs, neither of them says anything else immediately.

“So… you are thinking about names?” dad tries.

Huck shrugs. She tries, but it’s harder than she wants it to be even to admit what she’s thinking about. Her dad prompts her again — she likes that he’s trying. “Yeah,” she admits. “It’s just… I don’t know how to bring it up.”

“What’s on your mind?”

She shrugs again. She picks up the same crumbled danish and her father shakes his head and tells her to at least grab a new one. Huck chuckles nervously and does as she’s told. “Well. I never liked Huckleberry — I don’t think I’d have liked it even if I was a boy.” At that, dad laughs. “But I like knowing it means something, you know? Same with Reuven; though that sounds much better.”

Dad nods. “You’re thinking about other namesakes?”

“Yeah,” Huck says sheepishly. “I… thought of asking mom — you know, she talks about her grandfather; and she doesn’t want me to feel bad about replacing that name.” Every time she’s asked her mom about her name, before she ever came out to her, she’s gotten that story. Grandpa Huckleberry, buried in Margraten after the Second World War, one of 8000 American soldiers there. Huck’s proud of that memory even if the name’s always bothered her.

She shrugs. “I’d like to ask her to pick a new one. Whether that’s someone else she would’ve liked to name a child after, I don’t know, or just a completely different name. But I think it’d be nice if she picked it.”

“I’m sure she’d like that,” dad agrees.

Another silence. She’s a little less uncomfortable with this one.

“Molly’s Hebrew name… that’s your mom’s, right? Who died?”

Her dad nods. “Yeah,” he says, as Huck takes a large bite of danish and sheepishly tries to swallow it quickly enough to keep the conversation going. “I could, um… help you, if you want. Choose a new one; if you want a new one. If not, that’s— I’m sure your mom could figure it out; her grandmother, you know—“

“I’d like that,” Huck interrupts him. “I’m sure mom could,” she says even though she knows it’s a lie. Her mom would be willing, would look everything up, call their rabbi a dozen times for help, but it wouldn’t be the same. She wants dad to know it’s not just that mom can’t, it’s that she’d like dad’s help. “But I’d like it if you could.”

Dad nods again. She knows he’s more touched than he initially lets on. She’s learned to trust her gut on that. “You got it,” he promises her, reaching out to grab her hand slowly. She smiles when he squeezes it.

“I don’t want to right now,” she says anyway. “I’m— we’re flying home this evening, I want to sit down for it. Take more time. Same with mom.”

She only adds the last line because she’s scared he’ll think she’s favoring otherwise; she and Molly err on different sides of the extreme. Molly makes it a point to look like she prefers mom even in the moments where she doesn’t like anyone.

“Of course,” dad assures her. “Just… call me when you’re ready. And don’t you wait too long.”

“Promise,” Huck says with a relieved smile. She’s starting to feel silly for having worried so much about this conversation; it’s the greatest feeling in the world. She’s terribly proud, today, to be her father’s daughter.

“Thanks, dad,” she tells him. She laughs for no reason at all.