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“Your daughter is so polite!”
The seamstress beams back and forth between Qifrey and Coco, and Qifrey’s heart skips a beat. Coco, whom Qifrey has let give the seamstress their order, glances swiftly at him.
“Ah,” he manages. “That’s not—“
But she’s already bustling off into the back of the shop to retrieve the fabric. Tetia’s outgrowing her dresses, and Agott’s favorite day clothes have stained. He could have simply sewn glyphs into them, for growth and renewal respectively, but he’d thought new clothes might be a nice surprise, and Coco had been happy to accompany him on the trip into town.
It’s a nonmagical town, a nonmagical shop, and he’s not wearing his hat, but even so, many people recognize him as a witch on sight. The seamstress must not have. She’d looked at him and Coco instead and seen—
He swallows, pasting a smile on his face and bending to look at some of the fabric on display, while inwardly his breath feels tight in his throat. The thing is—he can be a professor. He can even dare to think that he’s a good one. Where others have broken them down, scorning their differences and ignoring their talents, under his tutelage his pupils are flourishing. He’s a good witch, and a good professor, and warmth blooms in his chest whenever he thinks about the fact that his apprentices have chosen him, every single one of them, as a safe harbor. Even Coco, who had not asked for any of this, had come back to him after being offered an apprenticeship with one of the most learned witches in existence.
He’ll teach them everything he can, for as long as he’s still here. He’ll protect them with everything he has. He’ll make sure they’ll never want for a home or a meal or a smile or a gentle word. It’s what a good professor would do for his students.
But the idea of being a father—
That was never a possibility. For multiple reasons, which he could lay out with great order and rationality if pressed, and yet as he thinks it what comes to mind, embarrassingly, is dark hair and warm hands and a gruff voice saying his name. He could never be a father, because there’s only one person who—and after the way Qifrey’s treated him, all the things he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know because of Qifrey, he could never ask. It’s no kind of way to treat a best friend, never mind a—
The point is, he’s flustered enough by the whole concept that when the seamstress returns with the cloth for the dresses and hands it over to Qifrey with the cheerful wish that he and his daughter have a safe trip home, he doesn’t even try to correct her again. Just conjures up a smile and drops the money into her hand and leaves, as fast as his feet can take him without it being an obvious retreat.
Wrapped up in his thoughts as he is, it takes him too long, as they walk down the mundane street, to realize that Coco’s being oddly quiet. True, there are no displays of magic here for her to ogle, but even so, she rarely passes an afternoon without striking up a conversation. Instead of asking him about their next lesson or the latest witch she’s read about in her books, she’s walking along beside him with a distant look in her eyes, like it isn’t the street around them she’s seeing.
Concerned, Qifrey brings them to a halt, squeezing her hand in his to catch her attention. “Coco?” She’d been the one who volunteered to come—he’d never force her to come with him to such a place—but perhaps she hadn’t anticipated how seeing a shop reminiscent of the one she’d grown up in would remind her what she’d lost. Maybe he shouldn’t have let her come after all. “Are you all right?”
“Hm—oh!” She blinks her way back into focus, looking up at him with a startled expression that gives way to something like bashfulness. “Sorry, professor. I’m okay. I was just thinking…”
She chews her lip, and he waits, patient as he’s learned to be when one of the girls is gathering her thoughts. Letting them find their own way to express themselves rather than putting words in their mouths or showing impatience—he’d found early on that it was one way to show them that he cared about what they had to say.
“My dad got sick when I was little,” Coco says eventually. “When he was gone, it was just me and—and my mom.” Her voice falters, as it often does when thinking of her mother, and Qifrey’s heart squeezes in guilt as it does just as often. “So I never really knew what it was like to have a dad.”
Now Qifrey’s chest is tight for a different reason. “Coco…”
“I know,” she says, and smiles her painfully bright smile at him, the one that makes him feel it should hurt his eye no matter how many glyphs are etched into his glasses. “I know, Professor Qifrey. Professors are different than dads. But you cook for us, and make sure we get to bed on time, and buy us clothes, and teach us things, and protect us…and I was just thinking, having a professor, it makes me feel like I’m not missing so much anymore. Because I have you.”
This is it, Qifrey thinks faintly. This is how he dies. It won’t be the Brimhats after all. He’s going to keel over right here on the street, all from the force of Coco’s smiling, earnest face. He may as well have taken her mother from her by his own negligence. He brought her into the world of witches instead of letting ignorance protect her as he truly might have. He’s using her even now as a means to his own goals, and his feelings for her—the warmth in his chest when she curls up next to him on the couch with one of her textbooks, the tenderness so acute it almost hurts when she takes his hand with all the trust in the world—don't change that. Don't forgive it.
Coco lost her father early. Perhaps she has fond memories of him. Perhaps she dreams of him. Qifrey doesn’t—his memories from before he was born in a drowning coffin, they aren’t—he doesn’t know. If he ever had parents, he doesn’t—he has no blueprint. He wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Coco is still smiling at him. He finds himself smiling back, blinking away the itch that’s risen behind his eye. And then he’s bending down, kneeling to wrap her in an embrace. “Coco,” he says as she squeezes her little arms around him back, “I’ll be your professor for as long as you want me to be. I’ll keep protecting you for as long as I can. I promise.”
Maybe that can be enough.