matryoshky | oops feelings

There has never been a point throughout Darcy’s relatively short life that she has been sure that either she is finely tuned to her father’s moods by virtue of being his daughter, or is made aware of them simply by the fact of being the only one there to observe their changes. Maybe if someone else walked through the door with her that day, they too would have noticed how strangely hollow the house felt, as though it had been gutted and left to rot without occupants, without belongings, even though everything stood in it as it should. Perhaps they would notice the particular dullness of light that came with the thin curtains in the living room being still drawn, even so late in the afternoon, or the peculiar silence that settled over the house without a habitual murmur of a radio station somewhere in the background. Or maybe they wouldn’t have noticed a thing, except for the souring of Darcy’s expression as she darts forth and lunges up the stairs, footsteps purposefully soft.

She presumes John will be in his study, the cramped but oddly cosy room that had been intended once as a guest room, appropriated instead with a desk and too many books to reasonably count, along with all the rest of the books to be found on almost every surface in this house. By that measure, her feet take her to her father’s bedroom, and directly to the wardrobe; inside, rows of shirts, blazers, a few neatly folded t-shirts and jumpers in residence on the shelves to the right.

Your dad’s clothes, any of her friends would say, were they present. What’s so weird about that?

A quick foray into the nearby chest of drawers produces the same sight. More of John’s clothes, and Darcy feels her face flush with angry colour. She’s a mild mannered sort of girl, prone to the same patience of emotion as her father, difficult to necessarily anger, and harder still to needle here, which is where John conversely struggles. She’s briefly furious even with the imaginary, hypothetical constructs of her friends’ remarks, because she’s confident enough to think that her suppositions are accurate.

They’re aware of Freddie, her friends. They’ve seen him, the absurdly handsome young man who is “with” Darcy’s father (they can’t think of him in terms of boyfriend, which sounds too childish, or lover, which sounds too Shakespeare), bemoaned his good looks and his wit and his interest in men, but they haven’t seen him, not properly, not the way he is around John that makes it so clear to Darcy that between them, she observes love, the real sort, not the kind purported by teenage girls and boys on the back of reading too many stupid novels or watching too many stupid films. Her friends still think of her dad as the handsome lecturer who once caused a riot in their school by having an affair with someone’s dad (the someone in question still won’t look at Darcy when they pass each other in the hallways, even though it’s been three years and even the teachers look back at it with amusement, even her parents do, since it brought about a surprising divorce that seemed to make all sides happier, but there you go). They don’t see John Buchanan suffering over his insecurities.

John is a picture of confidence and success, to them. Good looking, favoured at the university, absolutely delightful and charming to anyone who walks through his front door. Adores Darcy, in a way that is neither suffocating nor coddling, much the same way Darcy adores him. He has a great house, a really amazing car. But they don’t catch him, the way Darcy does, brushing his hand against the underside of his chin, brows pinching as he reminds himself of the way the skin there is starting to soften. The lines either side of his eyes when he smiles grow deeper, and he affects milder smiles still for that reason, so prone to the casual, to the lightness, that no one else except Darcy knows how great he looks when he’s laughing, when he grins.

Freddie makes him smile like that, gets it out of him when he joins John by the mirror and kisses his purposefully bristly jaw and tells him there’s no point fussing, he’s too far over the hill to go back now, and John simultaneously laughs and groans – a proper laugh, not a cursory huff that he gives most everyone else – and the insecurity scuttles away again. It never truly leaves, for there’s been more than enough careful conversations exchanged between John and his daughter that give away how frightened he is, sometimes, that in being happy with Freddie he will inadvertently smother him, or that one day he will realise exactly how far over the hill John is and decides he needs someone not so wildly past his best by date.

It’s times like that that Darcy wants to smack him for being such an idiot, but settles instead for withering glances that she thinks she must have picked up and perfected from Freddie.

Freddie’s clothes aren’t here. That is the reason for Darcy’s anger. Freddie’s clothes, distinctive and pleasantly different from her father’s, are gone, which means that Freddie is gone. Again. He’ll have left something behind, somewhere, but the absence is obvious enough, and Darcy finds herself involuntarily slamming a drawer shut again, her quick, quiet movements now no longer required since her fears are confirmed. She skulks from the bedroom and flings open the study door without knocking, a habit she successfully kicked after a time she innocently wandered in to Freddie in her father’s lap and John’s hand down his trousers, but willing enough to presume the risk won’t present itself the same way this time.

John starts a little, as if the movement of the door opening and his furious daughter appearing in his peripheral vision is what awoke him from his reverie, as if he was too lost to his own thoughts to have heard the unsubtle abuse of drawers from next door, which wouldn’t surprise Darcy. He’s always been such a terrible daydreamer, so easily distracted by the goings on of his own head. He stares at her as if he has no idea why she’s fuming, why her eyes flash dangerously as she stares at him, waiting for him to say something first, though he never does.

“Has he left again?” She asks the question pointlessly, knowing the answer already, but she needs John’s reaction to gauge exactly how angry she’s going to be. Darcy hovers in the doorway, gripping the frame so hard that her knuckles go frightfully white. “Well? Has he?”

“Darcy –”

It’s answer enough. Her name slides from his mouth like a hoarse, tired sigh, and she knows the words that are meant to follow somewhere along the lines of, you know how complicated things can be between us, or better still, there’s no need to be so melodramatic, because he doesn’t see himself in the aftermath, he doesn’t accept how much it hurts him. The first couple of times, Darcy had space in her heart to forgive Freddie without question, because she saw the happiness blossom in her father like nothing else. Since then, she has also seen how the time between Freddie leaving and returning destroys him. Where before he had been ambivalent, closed off from the world and apathetic, John becomes purely miserable. Darcy’s never been able to get out of them properly how they met, a real history that explains why their meeting in Manchester seemed to be so important to them both, and she understands it’s their prerogative not to discuss it if they don’t wish to, but it’s times like these that she wonders. Why did their being apart not affect John so negatively before Manchester? If they honestly loved each other as much as she believed they did, what changed?

Before John has a chance to get out the otherwise meaningless attempt to justify Freddie’s fresh disappearance, Darcy makes a furious sound and leaves.

She’s conscious enough that being alone in his grief does not suit her father, he needs either distractions or hand holding, and she can provide them both, once the rage in her dissipates and she considers herself rational enough to talk to him, but he’d probably never forgive her if he knew what impulse was making her do right now. She allows the front door to slam behind her as she rushes down the street, down to the other end where it joins the high street. A safe enough distance; John won’t follow her, not the way he’s feeling right now, she knows that.

Darcy shouldn’t meddle, she shouldn’t interfere, but she can’t. She has her mother’s headstrong capacity for deciding that something is a correct course of action and seeing it through to completion, despite all possible difficulties or hardships she may subsequently encounter. Her father prefers to mitigate. Darcy prefers to solve, or at least act. She’d make a frighteningly good lawyer, one day.

Freddie’s phone number under her recent calls makes her almost as angry as seeing his face right now would. Why’d she call him last? She calls him a lot, almost as much as she calls John. Random things, domestic family things about whether she should swing by the shops on the way back from school to pick up something only Freddie could make into an edible dinner, no matter his attempts to educate the two hopeless Buchanans. Complaints to make about school when she knows that John is taking lectures or seminars and she needs to vent, knows that Freddie is excellent at tearing people apart he doesn’t even know, dressing them down for her so she can feel like homicidal. Asking if he’s at home, because she’s forgotten her keys again, or if he could leave his under the flower pot if he’s going out. A home that she thought belonged to all three of them, together.

She is not surprised to find that she reaches his voicemail.

There is a long, heavy pause as she tries to put her racing thoughts into at least a moderately coherent sentence, and for the briefest moment, she tells herself she’s going to be sensible, rational, adult about this, she’s halfway to seventeen, she’s better than rash, emotional outbursts –

“You fucking dickhead.”

Or not.

“What are you doing? I thought you were past this, I thought you and dad were finally beyond whatever the hell it was that made you do this. What are you so terrified of? Dad? Are you terrified by the fact that you make each other happy? Because that’s some pretty stupid logic right there, if you ask me, and you’re not asking me, but I’ll fucking tell you anyway.” She doesn’t really swear, by nature, she takes after John in that sense, but her emotions are getting the better of her and she was already crying even before the dial tone ended. “This is so stupid. He loves you so much, and unless my youthful idealism has clouded my judgement, I thought you loved him too. Is that it? Was I just imagining things? Was dad just imagining it? Because I can’t figure out another plausible reason for why you’re gone again.”

She speaks loudly, quickly and with enough emotion that passers-by in the street give her strange little glances, some curious, others faintly affronted by some manic girl airing her dirty laundry all over the street, even though it’s not even her own laundry.

“If it was my imagination – if it’s dad’s imagination – then do him a favour and don’t come back. He’ll never say it, not to you, not to me, but I know it, and I’ll say it, you could spend the rest of your life going back and forth, and he’ll always let you back, not just because he loves you, but because he’ll do anything, absolutely anything to make you happy, and he’ll let himself believe that you need this space or some shit, he’ll let himself believe that his pain is worth it if you end up coming back, and that’s such bullshit. I won’t let you come back if you keep doing this to him. So either – either come back and stay, or don’t come back. If there’s a legitimate reason other than you being a cowardly little prick for your leaving like, I don’t know, not loving him? Fine. But tell him. The hope that you will come back will hurt him so much more than knowing that you won’t.”

Another long pause occurs, and Darcy’s voice softens, quietens, and the fact that she’s been crying is now just faintly audible in her voice, a little shake behind her consonants.

“I don’t think it was rose tinted idealism that made me think it, though, you know,” she murmurs, staring down at her bitten fingernails with bleary eyes. “I do think you love him, just as much as he loves you. You’re not that good an actor, Freddie.”

And with that, she ends the message. Shoves her phone glumly back into her pocket, and trudges back up the street to her house, scrubbing at her face with her scarf as if that will somehow fix her red eyes or make her cheeks look any less unattractively blotchy as they currently are. She waffles on the doorstep, embarrassed by her obvious spasms of emotion and the fact that she’s given away to her father that as much as she’s unhappy for Freddie leaving him, she’s also upset that Freddie has left her. Somewhere in the midst of her furious voice messages, she knows that she loves Freddie too, that he became a part of their family somewhere down the line, so naturally and simply that until this point, she’d barely even realised. A puzzle piece she’d never thought was missing from her own life, as aware as she was of its absence from John’s.

The house still feels so bleak when she returns to it. Darcy hears her dad clinking around in the kitchen, probably making his billionth cup of pathetically therapeutic tea, and enters quietly enough to catch him off guard with a hug that probably hurts a little, sliding easily under his arm, her face lost in a sea of her own hair and her father’s jumper. He returns the hug after a moment’s surprise, pressing a kiss to her head, trying desperately to apologise for all sorts of things that he should not be trying to apologise for at all with this single, small gesture. Darcy takes it, all the same. She just can’t think of anything else they could do or say to each other, except to accept their separate pains and know that neither will truly understand the other.