Fic: Precious Moments
Title: Precious Moments
Fandom: Dresden Files
Spoilers: Blood Rites
Rating: PG
Summary: Murphy, parenthood, and holidays. Joy. Dresdlet-verse.


Holidays with her children are an effort.

Christmas in particular causes problems; like the year Maggie pulled the tree over on herself. She could still find pine needles in her firstborn’s hair two days later, and the house smelled of crushed evergreen for weeks. Or the time Julia bedecked a puzzled Mouse in twinkling Christmas lights and let him loose on the neighborhood. Fortunately no one got electrocuted.

Or Halloween. The girls always want to do something special for their father’s birthday, and go out trick-or-treating with him afterwards. She is more than happy to leave this holiday to Harry, though she does check the candy before her girls can have any. Some of the horror stories she’s heard (Julia’s vivid, pyrotechnic display of displeasure at being given a Chick Tract rather than candy comes to mind) make her glad this is his time to look after them.

The Fourth of July, God help them. She lived through some of the most terrifying fifteen minutes of her adult life (and she has faced quite a few terrifying things) when a five-year-old Maggie wandered off towards the pretty explosions during the fireworks over the lake. Thomas found her eventually, hands stretched up towards the sky trying to catch the blossoming sparks as they fell, but the imaginings still haunt her.

If she had to pick an absolute worst holiday, though, it would be Valentine’s Day. Odd, yes; she used to love it, but it’s not as if she gets to do anything special for it this time around the marriage block. Harry generally spends the day grumbling about unfaithful spouses and cheating lovers and the worst side of human love that only a private eye sees; the girls watch soap opera specials with wide eyes and ask uncomfortable questions about words like “foreplay” and “circumcision.”

Her darling husband thinks it’s funny to refer them to their uncle the incubus. She only groans, and tells them to look it up.

She sees nothing wrong with holidays as a whole, of course. Every child deserves special times growing up, something to look forward to through all the dull days of school and summer and school again. It’s just that no one ever said their parents had to like them.