Dresden Files Plotbunny
No spoilers, really...just my OTP. Inward lies fluff and sweetness. Very rough, unbetad and unedited.


I discovered something when I acquired (more or less by accident) an apprentice. Said discovery came as quite a surprise to me, though Thomas told me later he’d been expecting it, and Murph expressed no shock either. Anyway, my discovery went thusly: I like teaching.
Specifically, I like teaching magic, and I like teaching those eager to learn. I’d never, ever embark on teaching as a career, certainly not the way some wizards in the White Council do, going through fourteen apprentices a century. No, I’ve had three, and only one of them was formally an apprentice, a very good idea given that the other two were both my daughters.
The White Council, for some reason, dislikes parents training their children. Obviously I was giving mine basic instruction in how not to create explosions and break the seven Laws, but for formal training they’d have to start spending summers with Ebenezar. Either that or Morgan and I would switch children for a bit, though I couldn’t quite see him putting up with my hellraisers. I quite liked his son, though.
A point to ponder, and possibly raise if I could ever have a conversation with him that didn’t end up with wiseassery on my part, glowering on his, and general bad feeling all around.
“Dad?” My older daughter stood in the door to my bedroom, wariness in her eyes. “Something up?”
I blinked, and realized I’d been staring at a scrawled sheet of notes for almost half an hour. “No,” I said, and shook my head. “Sorry, Mags, I was just thinking. Time for your lesson, right?”
She nodded, then came forward to stand by me. “I didn’t mean to interrupt...”
“You didn’t.” I threw the notes somewhere in the direction of my kit and patted the bed next to me. “Sit. Indoor lesson today.”
Maggie made a little face as she sat, mock-disappointed. “Aww, no fire-throwing?”
Hell’s bells. “Margaret Anne, have you been talking to Bob again?”
She giggled. “No! I just thought since my powers tend towards making things go boom...”
Thank God my younger daughter displayed a talent for the subtler, less explosive magics. I couldn’t handle three of me in one household; two was quite enough as it was.
“Explosions,” I said, sternly, “will wait until we get you a formal master. Then you can make things go boom. Right now, we’re working on your Sight.”
“Oh.” Maggie sobered, almost at once. “It’s true that you can’t forget what you See?”
She’d been talking to Arthur again. Morgan’s son was a year older and consequently farther along in basic underpinnings of wizarding. “Yeah,” I said. “Don’t worry. We’re only going to Look at one thing today, and it’s a very nice thing to look at, I promise.”
She looked up at me, uncertainty plain on her face, but she didn’t speak that doubt. “Okay. How do I start?”
“Close your eyes,” I said, “and go through your basic meditation exercise. I’ll talk you through it from there.”
Maggie nodded, and pulled her long legs up onto the bed into an approximation of the lotus position. Her breathing settled into a familiar pattern almost immediately. She must have been practicing meditation. I watched her as she calmed herself, settling her mind into a position where she could work magic—Maggie was only fifteen, and she still needed these calming exercises, would probably need them for some time before she could work magic the way I did.
Though you never knew. My firstborn was a brawny wizard, like me, best suited to slapdash spells and shoving a lot of power along. It was Julia I was really going to have to watch, though at twelve she wasn’t up to much either. Julia was far more subtle than anyone else in my family, and capable of causing a lot more trouble if she put her mind to it. I set that thought aside, and watched Maggie.
Short, like her mother, and her mother’s blue eyes; my dark hair and angular face, softened a bit by baby-fat and girlish curves. A scattering of freckles across the bridge of a fairly prominent nose—sorry, Maggie, that one’s my fault—and a faint curl to her hair that came from neither me or Murph. If Maggie looked anything, it was fragile; if she was anything, it was tough, flexible steel. My baby girl.
She was settled now, as settled as she was ever going to be. “Find your center,” I said, softly, referring to an exercise I’d taught both my daughters before either of them had started developing their powers. “Find what’s you and reach inside it. There’s going to be... it’ll feel like a switch, somewhere in you.”
“A switch?” Maggie mumbled, in the drowsy sleepwalker’s voice she used while meditating. “I don’t...oh!”
“That’s it,” I said. I knew that ‘oh.’ “Flip that switch somehow. That’ll turn on your Sight. Then you-- don’t!”
Maggie had started to open her eyes; at my yell, she closed them again in a quick, startled motion. “Why...”
How do you tell your fifteen-year-old daughter that you don’t want her seeing your true self just yet? How do you tell her you’re not really the perfect father she’s always seen you as?
If you’re me, you avoid the question entirely.
“I’ve got something else for you to see,” I answered her. “Something better than me. Hey, Murph!”
My wife appeared in the doorway a moment later, wiping grease off her hands. “Yeah?”
“Stand there for a second,” I told her, moving so I sat behind Maggie. “Magic lesson. Okay, Maggie, open your eyes.”
She did.
Maggie gasped. I had, too, the first time I saw Murph with my Sight; a golden, fiery-winged angel in white, with eyes of blazing blue, a sword by her side and her chin in the air. That Sight hadn’t changed in the years I’d known her, not in its essentials. She’d been scarred and wounded, and healed and changed, but she was still that beautiful, and she always had been.
Now Maggie knew that, and no one could take it away from her.
“Okay,” I said, gently. “Okay, Maggie, shut it down. There you go, sweetheart, close it down.”
She fought her eyes closed and screwed her face up, struggling to switch her Sight off. Murph gave me a puzzled look, and I waved my hand at her—I’ll tell you later. She gave me another look, this one more pointed, but went back down the hall, back to cleaning her gun, presumably, which left me alone with Maggie.
My daughter hadn’t opened her eyes yet, and her eyelashes were all wet and spiky where she’d pressed them hard together. “Maggie?” I asked, suddenly a bit alarmed. “Baby, you all right?”
Maggie pressed her hands against her temples. “I t-think so,” she said, her voice shaking. “Just a second.”
I gave her that second, and a little more, before she opened her eyes. They were still shiny with tears, but the expression on her face was not fear. “Daddy...” she began, and stopped.
“Yeah?” I asked, gently.
“Is that what everything looks like?” she asked me, in a whisper. “Is everything that...that amazing?”
Okay, here we go. Disillusionment city, ahoy.
“No,” I said, quietly, and shook my head. “No, everything isn’t like that. Your mother is something amazing. Well, you knew that, but now you know it. But not everything you See will be like that. Most things you’ll wish you hadn’t Seen, and some things you’ll want to give anything to erase.” I took a deep breath. “So be careful what you Look at, Maggie, because you can’t erase it, you can’t forget it.”
Maggie blinked rapidly several times, then looked back at the door where her mother had been standing a minute ago. “But Mom is...oh. I see.”
“Yeah.” I swallowed an unexpected lump in my throat. “I wanted you to See her first. So you know not everything’s ugly.”
She sniffled again. “Thanks,” she whispered, then unexpectedly flung herself at me and pressed her face into my shoulder. “Thank you, Daddy.”
I hugged my daughter close and kissed the top of her head. “You’re welcome.”