With An Addition (VA Fanfic)

Damage control

DPOV
I gave Rose a chance to be five minutes late for afternoon training. But ten minutes passed of me entertaining Jenée and Rose not showing. So, I decided I'd go looking for her. I barely had to step into the cool air just outside the gym before I spotted her on the track. She was running around the loop as if her life depended upon it. I looked down at Jenée who was by my leg and barely reaching above my knees with her tiny form and short height. I couldn't very well leave Rose to running laps for two hours, but I wasn't sure she'd be safe sparring or using the dummies.
"What are we going to do about your mother?" I asked in Russian.
Jenée sent me a curious and eager look. It was as if to say, 'where's my translation?'.
I repeated it in English before returning my attention to Rose. Who I noticed, when I stepped closer, had tears streaming down her face. Her voice carried through the cooler, stiller fall air to my sensitive ears. She was repeating angry mutters about hating Lissa being right, about how she was too weak to confess to something or other, and about how she never should have told her in the first place. One look at Jenée and I knew her younger ears had picked up something mine hadn't. Tears ran down her face as she bolted from my sight. Great. Now two Hathaway girls were running in tears and I was the one left to deal with both.
"Rose, get inside and work on the machines," I ordered before racing after Jenée.

Where Jenée was headed I didn't know. But it didn't take long for me to catch up to her and scoop her into my arms. Jenée cuddled into my chest and clung to me by my neck as she started blubbering about how her Mom didn't love her. In Russian I soon realised. She was stringing together and repeating a four word sentence in Russian about her mother not loving her. Was that really true? From what I had witnessed that seemed impossible. Rose would die for Jenée so what had Rose been muttering that gave Jenée the impression she was going unloved?
"I'm sure that's not true," I cooed. "I know your Momma, Jenée, and she loves you so much, so, so much."
The only response I got was a huff, more tears and her asking after her father. When I didn't tell her because I didn't have anything I could tell her she got mad. In Russian and English she asked about who her daddy was, where he was and why didn't daddy love her either.

It was heart wrenching to sit on one of the benches that overlooked the quad with Jenée clinging to me and hear her sobbing about her parents. Most dhampir kids who had a guardian as their mother went through this stage of feeling unloved and abandoned, because their mother was never around and their Moroi father either didn't know of the child or simply did not care. I felt horrible for the baby in my arms, because her own mother was feeling exactly the same way and neither girl knew their father. I was sure Rose was being kept in the dark by Janine, since Janine didn't strike me as the kind of dhampir woman to not know who had fathered her child.

The question was, was Janine also keeping Rose's father out of the loop like Rose was Jenée's? The one thing I really wanted to know was not who Jenée's father was, but why Rose was so sensitive about it. Why did Rose feel the need to keep it secret?

Jenée eventually fell asleep in my arms, exhausted from the tears. I returned to the gym to find Rose annihilating the dummies.
"Rose, enough," I firmly ordered in a whisper.
Rose gave no sign of hearing me.
"Rose, stop."
She only grunted and kept going.
"Roza, stop, you're only hurting yourself."
Dripping with sweat and panting like a pug- an extremely, irresistibly attractive and sexy pug, I so shouldn't be thinking those thoughts of her right now- she turned to face me. "Di-" puff- "mi-" puff- "tri?" Puff.
"What's got you so mad you were muttering something Jenée took as you not loving her?"
Rose's eyes bugged when they landed once more on her daughter. "I... Lissa..." Rose pulled her ponytail out while tugging on her hair. "I... I had a fight with Lissa over this boy she won't confess to herself she likes and then she turned it back on me. She called me a repeat of my mother. I'm not a repeat of her! Am I, Comrade?" The uncertainty in her eyes killed me. I couldn't believe Lissa had put that doubt in her mind.
"I'm sure you have very good reasons for your choices. I'm not going to lie, Rose, she's hurting. Jenée. Whatever she caught you saying hurt her, but I know you love her to pieces so there has to be a good reason for keeping her father out of the picture."
"Not helping, Dimitri." Tears pooled in her eyes. "I know they should know, and I do want to tell them, but I just... can't... not in this world."
"Go get some sleep, Rose. Cancel tomorrow's trainings; you need to sort things out with your daughter and her father." I extremely reluctantly handed Jenée over, feeling as though a part of my soul was being ripped from me. Jenée may not be mine genetically but I certainly loved her as if she were.