Dresden Academy

Who: Hawthorne and his dad
Where/When: Misha's apartment, the afternoon after the party
What: Thorn's dad offers a little advice on Thorn's girl troubles
Rating: SFWish (mild language)


Misha knew he'd have to talk to his son as soon as he dragged himself out of his stupor on the couch. Luka hadn't come home with him, which was usually par for the course over vacations. Whatever had happened the night before, it had been rather bad.

He sat across from his son, offering him a strong cup of coffee with a dash of whiskey for breakfast (lunch, he thought, it's well after noon).

Thorn took the cup, holding it gingerly between his hands and looking into the steaming black liquid. He didn't know where to start, because obviously, this was dad trying to talk it out.

"You should probably get a proper healing on that," Misha began, eyeing his son's scratched and bruised face. It probably looked worse last night, but it wasn't going to heal by itself.

Thorn sighed. Thinking it over, the whole debauched evening, he figured maybe he deserved those stinging scratches on his face. "Mom gave me the once over with some antibacterial junk this morning."

Misha rolled his eyes; such a muggle thing and yet probably one of those things that endeared him to her. Leave it to Gina to be terribly practical and check up on her boys before either of them were awake, smearing their son with some ointment and kissing him on his forehead before going to work. "Well, if you want to suffer," he pointed out.

He shifted on the couch a bit, leather creaking beneath him. It was a bit beaten up around the edges, but it had survived his childhood. This was a well loved couch. He shrugged before sipping at his coffee. "Think I deserve it," he said with an appreciative sigh. "Damn that's good coffee."

Misha was interested now, because his son never had a very good sense of consequences. "What did you do?"

"Girl troubles," was the simplest explanation.

It seemed to be a given with the Nikitin boys. Thorn's uncles were the same way. The horror stories Chloe told Gina over their monthly tea seemed to indicate that Luka was the same way, though he was trying his hand at monogamy. Misha couldn't know how disastrously that was working out, only that his son was still struggling. "Too many or not enough?"

Thorn shifted his head to smirk at his father. "Two exactly. Well... Sometimes three. Or more. Fuck me, dad."

Misha laughed because there was no better way to deal with Hawthorne sometimes. "And they want you to pick?"

"Yeah. I 'spose." Just that they kept turfing on each other and it was complicated to sort out what he wanted when they were always fighting over him.

"I don't think your mom and I did you any justice."

"Whadoyou mean?" Thorn asked doubtfully. He thought his parents had the life. Though he knew about 'normal' couples through his interactions with his aunts and uncles, he thought his parents were the smartest. They had it figured it out.

"It's not as if we set a very good example of how most couples work."

Thorn snorted, because they hadn't, but he didn't think most couples did work. "Normal's boring."

"Yeah well. It takes work," Misha pointed out. "Even for abnormal couples. Your mom and I set rules for our relationship and we don't break them. Just like other couples, but we're honest about our desire to sleep with other people sometimes."

"Mom sleeps with other guys?"

"And girls when the mood strikes her," Misha replied, swinging towards his usual TMI parenting style.

"And you're okay with that?"

"Not all the time," he said honestly. "We've had fights; we've had to readjust the rules. She's not always happy with the people I chose to sleep with."

Thorn sighed quietly. Cinna would never go for that. Carly would only go for it because she thought it would make him happy. "I don't think any of the girls I'm into would go for it." And hell, one of them had a boyfriend now and he was fairly certain Anastas wouldn't share.

"Then you have to change your expectations. You have to decide if they're worth changing for."

That didn't make any of it any easier. Thorn would have to make some very adult decisions about the kind of person he was, inside and outside of relationships. He sat with his dad in silence for a long time, trying to figure out if he had anything else to add to the conversation. He was full up on advice and his head was already spinning off kilter. "Thanks for the coffee."

Misha smiled and patted Thorn on the back, resisting the urge to ruffle the white blond scruff of hair on his son's head. "You're welcome," he replied both for the coffee and the unsolicited advice his son couldn't thank him for just yet.