I Thought There Would Be Father-Daughter Bonding, But She Doesn’t Want That And Now My Family Is Falling Apart For Probably The Third Time, Light Novel Edition (An Utter du Lac Of Common Sense)

It was a quiet morning at Shady Glen Manor. The first rays of sunlight were peeking over the horizon. A distant church bell rang five times.

It is *not* a quiet morning in the bedroom of one Gwendolyn du Lac. The girl is sweating profusely, her face contorted into a pained grimace. She groans in her sleep, twisting and turning in her bed. Around her neck the cord of the charm Rhiannon had made for her pulls the charm--a heart made of two black wings surrounded by four more wings--out from her top as it glowed softly, it's magic trying to soothe her in her sleep. It had been helpful for the past two weeks, but any magic was never foolproof.

She shoots up with a cry and slams a hand around her mouth, eyes wide and tear-filled. The night terrors had hit hard again and she tries to banish the thoughts from her mind as she clutches the charm close to her chest. She sits still for a few moments as she squeezes her eyes shut and cried.

Gwen gets up from the bed and walks over to a desk in the corner, where she grabs a tissue from a tissue box and rubs it at her eyes and blows her nose. She takes a look outside of the window at the signs of the rising sun. She thinks she sees a brief shimmer through the trees and narrows her eyes a little as she focuses. There it is again! The early morning light bouncing off tautly pulled hair and a bouncing golden ponytail, as Gwen sees Elle emerge from between the trees along the footpath that leads around the manor, running at a steady pace. Gwen shakes her head and rubs at her eyes again, but they aren't deceiving her. She looks thoughtful, then walks over to her closet to get dressed. She was up already anyway.

As much as Elle hated the morning runs as a page, she'd really come to appreciate them in the last few years. The regularity of them, the time spent exercising in peace and quiet as the world wakes up around her... It gave her time to think, time to calm down from the previous day's events and any things that may come at night reminding her of past events.

It's one reason why, despite the incredible magic of Halcyon's phones, she quickly abandoned her experiment of listening to podcasts while she ran. As useful as it was to study while running - there were pods on anything from history to physics to extremely specific things - she missed the peace and quiet, and the sounds of nature. Even if there was remarkably less of the latter in Halcyon than she was used to - something about the air felt wrong to her sometimes.

She rounds the bend in the path, crossing in front of the windows to the sitting room. The manor looked beautiful in the morning light, the first hints of sunlight reflecting off the glass and outlining the architecture. It was nice to have a home. More than that, this was a nice home to have, even temporarily. Despite its size it never felt empty, even before the recent addition of Angel and Gwen. Rhiannon had a tendency to fill up a room. It had only become more of a home recently.

Sometimes she felt like it wouldn't be so bad to stay here, if she could not go home.

It made her feel like a traitor. She knew she would never stop missing Deirdre, and her fathers, Art and Guin and even Gal and the others - having their older selves here wasn't quite the same - and that part of her would always be there, but it felt like the highest form of betrayal to set down any roots at all. And she had to admit she had set down some. The relationships she'd started had, despite all her intents for them to be temporary growth, grown into solid trees with roots extending into the ground.

She'd never been good at managing her feelings. They ran rampant like unleashed lions - or perhaps a box of kittens unleashed upon a room would be more apt - and it was all she could do to not get lost in them.

She continued her run, passing by the entrance to the manor.

Gwen was standing by the front door, letting the first sunlight warm her up as she was doing some dynamic stretches. She rolled her arms, kicked up her legs, did some crunches and moved her upper body from side to side. As Elle came closer, Gwen looks lifted a bottle of water off the ground and waved at Elle.

“Hey, morning,” Gwen said, “you’re up early. Is this your first morning run of the day or the second?”

She offered Elle the water bottle.

She gratefully took it and drank before wiping the top with a handkerchief and returning it, smiling warmly. "Good morning, Gwendolyn. You are, similarly, up early. This is my first run around the manor, though I did some warmups beforehand. Would you care to join me?"

Gwen put the bottle back on the ground and nods. “Yeah, I could go for a different kind of sweating.”

She stretched. “I haven’t been up this early in a while, might as well make use of it, eh?”

Elle raises an eyebrow, and one corner of her mouth lifts up at that. "I see. Well, I am always awake at this hour, so you are welcome to join me anytime you wake up early." She starts running again, starting off slow to let Gwen catch up.

Gwen begins to run and catches up to Elle, trying to match her pace. She doesn't speak for a while, focusing on her breathing, looking straight ahead. As they run past an old and gnarly looking red maple tree, Gwen says, "you know, I used to go for morning runs with Ti-- with Challenge. Her second morning run, at least."

"You can say Tilly. I know who she is now." Elle says, with a hint of spite in her voice, not directed at Gwen. "I am glad to hear that. It is a good habit to cultivate, especially for a knight. Our lifestyle requires a great deal of physical fitness, and you can only rely on supernatural gifts for so much of it. I have been doing this since I was twelve, though obviously not the same distances."

"Oh, okay."

Gwen's quiet for a moment, mulling things over. "I'm part of the track-and-field team at school, so I keep up my fitness anyway. At least I got more time for it now that I'm no longer on the basketball team too."

They run past a pond where some ducks are floating, up at the quack of dawn. "Y'know," Gwen mentions, "I'm better at sprinting than long distance, but we could sign up for the Halcyon City Marathon this summer. Or, if you're good at swimming and cycling too, the triathlon."

"I have never cycled. That's on the two-wheeled vehicles, right, the bicycle?" Elle frowns. "They look rather unstable. I'd rather be on a horse. Otherwise, that sounds fun. I would love to participate." She looks to the side, examining her friend's face. "What happened with the basketball team?"

"Oh," Gwen gives a crooked smile, "Adria and I got kicked off the last time we went off to Molecyon. Coach said something about us always skipping out after he caught Tilly sneaking out of practice, and we all got kicked off."

She heaves a sigh. "Which sucks, cuz last time I talked to Bryce from basketball it was right after Mini had destroyed the court and he was all 'don't expect to be able to just dip back into the team and my life like this' and 'you're gonna have to choose between being a normal girl and being a superhero'."

Elle nods. "I had heard about that. I didn't know quite what had happened, though." She puts a hand on Gwen's shoulder, an awkward thing to do while running, but she thought she should show support. "You might not be a normal girl, but you don't have to choose between having friends and being a knight, or a superhero, I suppose. You can do both. I have been accused of many things, but having no social life was never one of them." She smiles. "It is true, though, that sometimes a life like ours can be too irregular for some people, and the relationships don't work out. That's their choice to make, and their loss. I hope Bryce just overreacted because he misses you and worries about you when you leave."

“Yeah, but it doesn’t hurt any less for it,” Gwen responds, giving Elle a look. “But I did write him a letter to apologize and to also tell him he was wrong. I just hope he got it out of his locker before the school blew up.”

They run across a small bridge over a shallow creek, the water below running fast along slick stones.

“I do think I can do both,” Gwen continues. “But the harder part is having friends who aren’t also superheroes or knights or witches. People who could too easily get hurt or be targeted by GREY or other villains. For months I had no friends outside of the Big Team, and that makes every argument with a teammate much worse. I guess I’m at least glad that Rhiannon and Olivia aren’t ‘normal’ people, so my family and loved ones wouldn’t quite so easily be targeted, but Whitelight proved that that’s no foolproof defense.”

Elle is quiet for a moment, lost in thought. Gwen wasn't wrong, and it was hard to find anything to say.

They sighed.

"It wasn't that way in Avalon. Sure, we had wars, and dragons and witches and manticores and other threats, but they mostly didn't go out of their way to target anyone's family or friends."

"I didn't have any friends outside you and the Big Team until recently, either. But it felt like I was missing something. If you have nothing outside heroics, it becomes your life, and you forget what the rest of the world is like, I think. That's not healthy. I don't want anyone to get hurt because of me, but..."

"Yeah," Gwen agrees. "I'm okay with myself getting hurt, but if someone else gets hurt because of me... they don't deserve that, they didn't want that, and yet it keeps happening. I'm okay with focusing on heroics, but it feels like God or the universe is punishing us every time we accomplish something big. Save the universe? Rhiannon gets kidnapped, Olivia forgets me, everyone else is angry with us. Save Zodiac City? Another city suffers for it. Even something as little as trying to help Rhiannon to realize her feelings for some fuckboy results in her heart getting broken and just closing everybody else off."

Elle thinks about the way Rhiannon has been since the events of the last few weeks. The way she had fought during their most recent sparring session. Her quiet at the dinner table. The lack of conversation, stifling the halls of the manor.

"You speak truth. It is hard to continue to feel a sense of accomplishment when something new comes along immediately, and we get no chance to rest." They look up at the sky. "I like to believe God sends us these tribulations because He knows we are capable, and can handle them; that they are necessary, and that we have been bestowed with the power to bear them so others don't have to." They shake their head. "That's what I like to believe. I don't know if I believe it all of the time. It does not seem fair. Do we not deserve peace? Do we need deserve happiness and rest? If God wishes for us to bear such heavy weight, why did He give us souls that feel pain thus?"

Gwen wasn't sure how to respond. She just silently agreed with Elle. It was a lot to think about, and questions bigger than she usually bothered with, because they didn't seem to have a practical outcome. She didn't want to concern herself with answering questions that didn't feel like they had purpose, something really applicable in life. It was just... depressing. She'd been depressed before. She didn't want to set herself up for that again, and she hated that her cousin had fallen into it. She hated being powerful, yet feeling powerless in situations like these. What was the point?

"There is no point," she answered for herself. "Maybe... I dunno, maybe we can go inside of Rhiannon's soul and punch the pain out? Maybe Satan's in there and we can just punch him in the dick again. Ugh--"

Gwen shakes her head. "That would make this a whole lot easier."

Elle laughs. "I would caution you against taking the concept of Satan and possession so literally, had we not both experienced these things. As it is... By God, I agree with you. I wish nothing more than to hurt the ones causing her pain. What is it they say? Every problem looks like a nail to those with a hammer?" She grins at the girl running beside her as they turn another bend, now running beside the tall metal fence bordering the manor's grounds. "I think we might both be hammers."

Gwen snorts as she tries to stifle a snicker. "Honestly, I've felt more like a nail most of this time, but I wouldn't mind getting proper hammered. By something other than bigger and bigger problems, of course," she added, hoping Elle knew the idiom about getting drunk. "Then again, after getting hammered by all those problems, I wouldn't mind *being* a hammer, so I can nail something myself."

Elle goes wide-eyed and frowns as their brain tries to keep up with the confusing jumble of words Gwen is making.

"So you can... You've inherited Deirdre's penchant for long and confusing analogies, it seems. I have no idea what you just said."

"Oh! Sorry," Gwen apologizes. "Getting hammered means getting drunk."

She pauses for a moment, then snorts as if at a private joke, as her face reddens a bit. "And getting nailed means--well, that seems hardly appropriate for a girl to explain to her father's time-travelling younger self. I didn't mean that thing though! Just like... getting rid of the problems. I want to be a *hammer* to *hammer away* the problems."

"In that case, I too would like to nail something." Elle nods.

Gwen's face just grows a bit more red yet and her mouth opens and closes as she tries to come up with a response, but appears too flustered. She tries to shake it off and act casual. "Yes, uh, sure. Yes, that makes sense."

They ran in silence for a little while, before Gwen piped up again. "Hey, speaking of time-travelling younger selves, though... How... how do you feel about... our... family?"

The knight blinks. "How do you mean? The du Lacs? Me, you, Rhiannon?"

"Like," Gwen makes a gesture at the two of them as they run past an old oak tree that seems to have a heart shape carved into it and some letters within it, "our family as it exists here, and in your time, and how you feel about the difference, I guess? And your relationship to my father?"

"That's a big question."

Elle scratches their head. "There are few similarities between the situation here and how it was for me, at home. All the things we have in common - Avalon, Deirdre, my fathers, my siblings - are not here. Instead, here I have only the things I do not have there. The Team, you, Rhiannon, this house."

They continue, "I would like to have both. I guess I will, someday, in a way. That's... how I see my relationship to your father, I suppose. Despite all that I want to change, and all the... pregrets? He's still me."

"So... you're not thinking of replacing him?"

Gwen's heart is thumping fast, moreso from finally asking that question than the run.

Elle stops running. When Gwen turns around, she is standing there, silent.

"Replace him? As..."

Gwen licks her lips. Her throat feels dry. She takes a breath to try and feel calmer.

“As... anything, I guess. As a Knight of the Round Table. As a person living here.”

She carefully omits ‘as my father’.

Elle is silent for a few moments, eyes wide. She slowly shakes her head. "I... no... I mean, yes, as a knight of the round, but - my position there was always meant to be temporary, it will vacate when I leave and your father can resume it if he is so inclined and has made amends... I can't replace him as a person, he has done things and lived things and made relationships I have not. I can't be an uncle to Rhi. Well, I can, but I can't be an uncle figure any more than I can be a father figure to you, I have not raised either of you, I just -" Her breath catches. "That's a complicated question..."

“It *is* a complicated question,” Gwen agrees with a crooked smile. “But... a very serious one. I don’t feel great about asking it. Well, having to ask it. I just have to, though...”

"You are worried about this." Elle says, crestfallen.

“Yes,” Gwen says. “I... I didn’t think I had reason to, for a while. I felt weird about you before we went to space together, and I thought things were perfectly okay after Christmas, but...”

"I don't want to replace anyone." Elle sighs, trying to gather her thoughts. "I want to... be the best version of myself. I want to protect the ones I love, and that includes you and Rhi. I want to go home and live the life I travelled past." She rubs her forehead. "I'm sorry. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of my relationships to people. You are both... my friends, and family, a bond I feel very closely. The way we are related is what it is but it doesn't... inform our relationship? Ugh." She grimaces. "This is breaking my head."

“Doesn’t it?” Gwen frowns, her expression more sorrowful rather than angry. “You call me ‘daughter’ all the time. That on its own wouldn’t bother me, I liked it even, before—but... together with everything else, it feels... bad.”

"Everything else? What do you mean?"

Gwen opens her mouth, but no words come out. She starts to speak again, and stops again. Finally, she looks away, to somewhere beyond the trees. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said anything."

"Did I do something wrong?" Elle asks. "The house is tense enough with Rhiannon right now, I don't want this between us as well."

"It's... it's not you... not really... well, not just you. It's mostly other people, everyone else."

Gwen sucks in a breath. "It's just... everybody on the team *loves* you. And that's great! That seems to be the case for much of Halcyon City too, especially with how they're shining a spotlight on you and Alex and swooning over you two. And on it's own, that'd be great... but everybody on the team *hates* my father, and I don't know if you've seen the news broadcasts, but the people of Halcyon City aren't particularly fond of him either. I was pretty uncomfortable with all of that for a while, but couldn't put it into words until I actually started overhearing people talking about how they'd rather just have you around than my father."

Gwen's heart is beating in her throat as she lets it all out. She begins to feel light-headed. "I was perfectly fine recognizing you as being the same person as him. Hell, even you calling me 'daughter' would've been endearing in any other scenario, but as it is... it just reminds me of how much everybody else would rather have you here and have my father just stay gone."

Elle looks down. "There are those that revile me as much as they revile him, but... I would be lying if I said I had not come across people expressing such a sentiment." She sighs. "I'm sorry. I... It's a relief sometimes, not to be hated - it feels terrible - but there's... I don't know what to say. It doesn't feel like a compliment when they say it."

"I do watch the news sometimes..."

“I know,” Gwen says, “it’s like any other time someone compliments you by putting someone else down, but in your case it’s also—ostensibly—your future self. I don’t know how I’d feel about Patch comparing me to my future self if it turned out I was reviled even by old friends.”

She rubs her arm and looks around. They’re all the way on the opposite end of the estate from where they’d begun. *I should’ve brought that water bottle*, she thinks. Her knees feel wobbly.

"I hope he comes back to you."

“He should, the Knights need him for Avalon anyway,” Gwen mumbles absentmindedly. “Galahad will probably transfer him to an Avalonian prison as soon as travel is possible.”

"No," Elle shakes her head, "I mean, come back entirely. Be released. Retake his position. I don't know what his sentence is, or how long they plan on keeping him... I don't know if it's contingent on him expressing remorse or if he has - I have not been allowed to know where he is held let alone see him - but... surely he will be, at some point? I have been trying to find out - it was part of why I joined the League - but they're not very trusting, especially not of me."

“I’d hope so, but honestly, I don’t know or remember how Avalon’s prison system works compared to the USA. I guess they’d put him in some maximum security type place if they do lock him up, unless they think he won’t break out. And honestly, who wouldn’t at least want to try? I think maybe the only reason he hasn’t yet now is because he’s still weak from Ferinon somehow. Otherwise, all he’d need to do is summon his sword and he could get out.”

"Maybe he wants to prove he can be trusted? By not breaking out even though he could?" Elle's face pales at the mention of Ferinon. "Though I have no trouble believing that place could break you forever."

“There are lots of places that could,” Gwen says solemnly.

Elle doesn't know what to say to that. She has only the vaguest of ideas as to what went on in G.R.E.Y.'s facilities, and even that was enough to keep her awake sometimes. Privately, she can't even fault her elder self that much for his decision - she lost the ability to condemn him without sympathy the moment she stepped foot in the first laboratory, the moment she heard from Gwen what had happened to her.

Maybe that was why Lancelot wasn't out yet. Maybe he didn't want to renounce his actions because he still believed they were justified. Maybe he wanted to break out but couldnt...

She sits down, back against a tree, and hugs her knees.

"....Maybe there are ways he could be prevented from using his sword to break himself out. I... They were just rumours, but..." She looks scared, unsure.

Gwen looks over at Elle, puzzled. "What rumours?"

Elle holds out her hands, and her sword appears in a shimmer, hands dipping down slightly as it materializes and the weight hits them.

"Swords like - like Joyeaux, and others like her - they are essentially part of the wielder. You know this. It is why they can be summoned at will, why they allow for such control. But I have heard rumors that it is possible to wrest control away from a wielder forcefully. Such a thing would be..." She struggles for words. "Not necessarily painful, but disturbing. It would be like a body part being taken, except you are still aware of it existing, alive, somewhere. For it to be used..."

That *really* gets Gwen's attention. She gets a disturbed expression on her face, frowning and wide-eyed, lips parting slightly. She hugs her arms to her chest and backs away a little, bumping into a tree.

"You... you don't think something like that would... affect someone really badly, do you? A limb being taken from you, that's bad enough already." She suddenly thinks back to her first encounter with Orbital, and how she'd thought that severing his arm would cause him to lose his powers and prevent him from murdering people. Instead, it had just made things worse and garnered her a nemesis with a grudge.

"If... if someone took Joyeux from you, you'd still know where she'd be and if and when others would use her? That... that feels wrong. Abusive even."

“I think I would? I have not tried it. I would be okay with it if I gave her to someone, I think. If it’s someone I knew, or cared for, I could imagine it being like - like a part of me is there with them, protecting them.

“But a stranger, or an enemy... it would feel like a violation.”

Gwen shifts uncomfortably and fidgets with her hair, as if trying to distract her thoughts.

“I... I don’t think they are just rumours.”

"You've seen it?"

“I’ve...”

Gwen slides down against the tree, opposite from Elle. She looks down, away from Elle.

“I’ve done it.”

Elle's mouth falls open, hey eyes wide in shock.

"You've what? When? How?"

“The first time we went to Ferinon. We didn’t know what kind of place it was until we got there. I just wanted to visit him first, but then...”

Gwen takes a deep breath and hugs herself a little tighter to keep herself from shaking.

“When I transformed in Ferinon, it was like... like I did it twice at the same time. I got blackened full plate armour. Father’s armour, the dragon-scorched one. When we met him, he touched it and took it from me. Then DomDom demanded his sword before we left, father refused, we fought and I took the armour from him. I... I didn’t know it was like that. Now I think that he felt it every time I used it, if a Knight’s sword and armour are so much a part of them. Like... like someone having flayed him alive and wearing his skin. That’s despicable! And *I* did that to him, to my own father!”

Gwen covers her face with a hand. Hugging herself hadn’t kept her from shaking. Covering her eyes didn’t keep her from crying either.

Lancelot is quiet for a moment, but after a while they stand up, cautiously making their way over to sit next to Gwen, and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Hey, uh. This is... heavy, and... I don't..." They scrunch up their nose in frustration at themselves. "Look, I... I would be okay with you using my armor, or my sword. I don't think your father minds. He...

I should not speak for him, but if I was held back from protecting those I cared for, I would be happy if some part of me was there with them protecting them for me."

Gwen looks up, her face tear-stricken. “Really?” She says, sounding rather disbelieving. “You’d be okay with someone removing one of your limbs and swinging it around?”

Elle grimaces. "Okay, maybe the limb analogy is of limited use."

Gwen sniffles and rubs at her nose. “He also doesn’t have his sword. Rhiannon took it and used it to get us to Ferinon the second time.”

"I know. I assumed it was given."

“It wasn’t. Father refused to give it to her, since she’s not family. Not a du Lac anyway.”

Elle nods slowly. "She isn't trained to handle swords either... I would have a stern word with her, but not right now."

"Yeah... At least she no longer has the sword. I think she handed her over to the Knights. That's maybe for the best. Father shouldn't wield her right now, in prison, and I... I *want* the sword, I... *wanted* the sword. Since I was a child, I was looking forward to earning the right to follow in my father's footsteps. In... yours, I guess. But taking it? By force? I know I'm a knave, you've seen it in Paris, but I don't want to be *unknightly*."

Elle smiles. "Without your 'knavely' behaviour, we would be under Morgan's heel by now, despite the efforts of half of the Knights. I think you did wonderfully."

Gwen gives a weak smile in return. "Thanks." She takes a few deep breaths. "All of this on top of everything the last few weeks has been... a lot."

"It has..." Elle sighs, thinking about everything that happened. "It would be nice to have a break. Do something nice.

“What would you do, if you had a week off? No Risganjans, no Aquilonians, no dragons?"

"That's a really good question. I suppose we had some time like that after saving Zodiac City from GREY, but then we had Rhiannon stuck in the tree and Olivia was in pieces. I think I'd just like to take a trip up to Alaska again like I used to with father, and Uncle LamLam would show me how he hunts and tell stories about his encounters with these HUGE bears. Or visit the hotsprings with Olivia, or go to the beach. Someplace nice. Someplace we can be for longer than a day. It's cool to just do something else for a day, and we occasionally get to do that, but then it's right back to business afterwards. An actual holiday would be great."

Elle smiles. "I would like to see some more of this world. Actual France, for one. I mean - I know we were there, but... there was not really time to look around. And it would be nice to go places with people when we are not fighting things. I'd love to take GAIA on a trip with no expectations, or travel with Alex..."

"Yeah!" Gwen responds. "We should totally visit *Mont St. Michel* in *Normandie*. Ooh! Or *La Baule – Presqu’île de Guérande* and *Carnac* in *Bretagne*! And you could take Alex to Venice. I think GAIA would be very up for visiting Germany or Japan, I hear they've got a lot of cool tech stuff going they might be interested in."

Gwen sighs and puts her head on Elle's shoulder. "Maybe we could even take a family trip to Wales, to Dolorous Gard, and you could bring *both* your datefriends."

Elle looks into the distance, pondering how she should tell Gwen that they'd started dating Jaime too.

“Yeah, that would be nice,” she says.

The sun peeks over the trees. It is looking to be a pleasant day.