Chapter Text
On a perfectly good Wednesday night, Maka remembers that Papa's birthday is coming up, and tosses and turns in bed for the whole next hour.
It's been a couple of years since she even acknowledged it. The date went from a yearly special occasion, to one particularly unsteady and awkward day she still cringes over, to, most recently, an annual period of two weeks where she avoids her father like the plague. He hasn't even sought her out - if anything, he's been easier to avoid in that time, sulking quietly like a kicked puppy until he forgets and goes back to normal. (Ha, normal - he doesn't know the meaning of the word.)
But he's been better lately - really better.
She remembers when it had started - she had been crouched, emotionally gutted, on the floor of the church where her partner had just sacrificed himself to preserve her from being killed by her own brash incompetence, and Papa, fresh off a victory over a supernatural kishin egg and driving off a witch, had had the perfect opportunity to win her back. She'd been so fragile. If he'd told her, like the knights in the storybooks he used to read her, that he'd always come for her, that he would always be there to save her, there's a good chance she'd have caved, at least for that night.
She might have hated him for real afterwards.
But he hadn't. He'd laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, and in a voice with love more earnest than the theatrically sappy tone he'd more typically use, had limited himself to the only comfort he could offer, which had hardly involved him at all.
"Come on, let's go home."
(It had been a revelation uncovered later that he'd meant the Academy too, when he'd said home.)
Despite her anguished distraction, she'd drawn strength from his quiet presence down the hall, as she sat and waited interminably for Dr Stein to finish his surgery.
That was the Papa she's been longing for all this time, the sensitive, steady one fuzzy in her younger memories. It had almost been a shock to know she hadn't dreamed him.
But that glimpse had multipled, instants and moments scattered throughout their increasingly-intersecting lives, and she had carried them home greedily to pick apart over and over in bed at night.
The difference was that the threat of losing her irrevocably was real; and the difference was that he had his meister back.
She had never known Dr. Stein existed until Lord Death's test - neither Papa nor Mama had ever talked about him.
Well, given the way the two looked at each other even before they'd gotten together, it's pretty clear why.