It was nine o'clock at night. People were getting home from work, and putting their little ones to bed. So why on Earth was there someone knocking on the door? FOX heard a door opening upstairs. Great. She'd just gotten Mom to go to bed early for a change, and now some idiot was messing it up. She hurried to shut off the TV and called upstairs, "It's okay, Mom. I'll get it. Go ahead and go back to bed."

Muttering under her breath about people calling at inappropriate hours of the night she made her way to the door. Whoever it was, he was still knocking insistently. "Okay, okay, I'm coming. Keep your shirt on."

Not for the first time FOX wished they had a peephole. It was nine at night. Who was to say it wasn't some psycho weirdo on the other side of the door? But whoever it was, he wasn't shutting up, and Mom needed her sleep, and Muffin needed to concentrate on her homework. He needed to be shut up.

The knocking stopped when the dead bolt clicked open. She half expected whoever it was to push the door open before she got the chance, but he waited. As the door swung open her mind flipped through every scene from every movie she'd ever seen where a teenage girl was stupid enough to open a door for an unknown visitor. When she finally saw the face of the man at the door, she found herself wishing that he was waving a knife in her face and threatening to drink her blood. Because this was worse. So much worse.

He was a middle-aged man, tall with sandy brown hair and clever green eyes- her hair, her eyes. He was older than she remembered, his hair receding and wrinkles framing his expressive mouth, but he was undoubtedly the same man who had left them twelve years ago, shortly after Muffin was born.

She slammed the door in his face, hoping he would get the hint and go away. But no such luck. He started pounding the door again, and FOX could only thank her lucky stars the doorbell had broken some weeks earlier. He continued knocking, adding in pleas to open the door. FOX looked over her shoulder to see mercifully empty stairs. Mom was trusting her to deal with the man at the door, so deal with him she would.

She almost got hit in the face as she opened the door again. "What are you doing here?" she asked, blocking the entrance with her slight frame. It would be just like him, to force his way back into their lives as abruptly as he had left. As he stood in front of her, struggling to answer her question, it struck her that she was only a couple inches shorter than him. He was tall, to be sure, but so was she. She had grown since she was five years old. She wasn't a little girl anymore, powerless to stop him from tearing her family apart. She was a strong, capable young woman who had learned to take care of her family after this man had deserted them.

With this revelation she stood taller and asked again, "What- are- you- doing- here?" He met her eyes and stuttered out an answer, some rubbish about wanting to be a family again. But he had lost that opportunity when he had walked out this same door, all those years ago. How could he possibly think that they would take him back now, after twelve years of not even knowing if he was alive? She asked him this and he blinked, startled, as if he hadn't expected a rejection. Of course he hadn't. He had always been so sure of himself, of his charms. It had been one of the things she's loved about him, once upon a time. She had even been proud of how he always got his way. But not any more, not with her or her mother and sister. They were fine and happy without him, and had been so for years. They didn't need his smile and easy manner in their house.

He had always been able to read her like a book, ever since he and Mom had brought her home from the hospital, and he didn't like the answer he saw. "I know I messed up, but we were a family once, Felicia. We can be one again."

How dare he call her that, that name he had given her, and she had dropped when he left? "I don't go by Felicia anymore," she said, her teeth gritted to prevent yelling. Yelling would wake up Mom.

"So what do you go by?" He was obviously trying to earn his way into her good graces by showing an interest in her life. Like he hadn't just ignored her for years, not even bothering once to send a birthday card.

She didn't want to tell him anything, to give him an insight into the life they had carved out of the rubble he had left behind, but perhaps, if she could show him that they were fine without him, then he would leave, and never come back. So she told him. "I'm FOX now." She tried to put as little inflection into her words as possible, to make herself sound as disinterested and heartless as he had been when he left.

"FOX, really, that's- unusual." He didn't approve or understand, it was evident from his tone. She tried to tell herself that she didn't care, he could misunderstand all he wanted, he had no say in her life anymore, but her traitor mouth explained without permission.

"It's my initials."

Now he was confused. "F for Felicia, and O for Ophelia, but King starts with a K, not an X." He was treating her like the child he had left behind, not the young woman he had come back to. Of course King started with a K, everyone knew that.

"X isn't for King. It's for Xavier." Xavier was Mom's maiden name, and the implications spread an angry expression across his face. She wasn't a King anymore. She wasn't his. She, and Muffin, were Xaviers, they belonged to Mom, and only Mom, no one else. "I stopped being a King when you abandoned us."

He stood there for a while longer, talking, pleading, and threatening in turns, but to no avail. He asked her to get Mom so he could talk to someone reasonable; she refused. He requested that she fetch Muffin so he could see the girl he had abandoned in infancy; she rejected him. Finally he broke down crying, begging to be let back into their family; she told him to leave. She told him to go away and never come back, to leave them alone. She told him he had relinquished all rights to their family twelve years ago, and that he was on private property and he had better leave before she called the police. This last part was an empty threat, the police would wake up Mom, and then she would see him and get upset. FOX couldn't allow this, but he didn't know that. The threat of the police finally made him back off. He retreated to his car, begging and pleading the entire way, but FOX was unmoved. This man had hurt her family more deeply than he could ever know, and she would never give him that opportunity again.

When his taillights were finally out of sight she gently shut the door and turned the deadbolt. She resisted the urge to push a sofa in front of it as well. He wasn't the type to break in. If the door was locked he would stay away. Not feeling like watching TV anymore, she slowly climbed the stairs to go to bed. As she passed the master bedroom the door opened and Mom stuck her head out.

"Who was that sweetie?" she asked. Even half awake, Mom was the most beautiful woman FOX had ever met, with the wide blue eyes that Muffin had inherited, and soft chocolate curls that belonged to neither of her children. Though she had been young when he left she had chosen not to bring another man into the family, choosing instead to raise her daughters on her own. But if she had wanted, she could have had any man around, she was that sweet, and good.

She needed to be protected, and so, though FOX abhorred lying, she said, "Oh, it was nobody. Just some door-to-door salesman. I got rid of him though, so don't worry."

"What was he selling?"

"I don't know? Something that we don't need."

After she said goodnight to Mom and Muffin, FOX locked herself in her bedroom. She barley had time to grab a small teddy bear from her nightstand before she collapsed on her bed and sobbed. She hadn't been able to cry when he left, or when he had ignored her and Muffin's birthdays. No tears had been shed on Christmas or when he hadn't been at her Junior High Award's Ceremony. But now that he had come back home and left again, now the tears fell, thick and fast. How unfair was it, that she had spent her entire childhood wishing he would come back, only to have him return when she couldn't accept him anymore?

It seemed like hours before she could stop crying, and that was only because she got a good look at the bear in her arms. It was a soft brown bear with Mickey Mouse ears attached to its head. He had won it for her during a trip to Disneyland a few months before Muffin was born. Placing the toy in her chubby five-year-old hands he had told her that as long as she had this bear he would love her. He couldn't have been planning to leave when he said that. He wouldn't have been so cruel as that, surely. But leave he did, just taking time to name the new baby before he took off, not even waiting for Mom and Muffin to get out of the hospital.

To little Felicia that bear had become a talisman, a sign that he would come back and make the world right, and as she had grown up and turned into FOX, it had sat on her nightstand, keeping watch for the day he would return. Now FOX looked at it with loathing. Here was a symbol of him, of everything he had done to her, to Muffin, to Mom, and she couldn't bare the sight of it. She threw it as hard as she could at the trash can by her desk. It bounced off the wall and knocked over the can. She was tempted to leave it, but she couldn't allow him to make a mess of her life. She rolled off her bed and crawled to the desk, not having the strength to stand up. As she righted the trash, she picked up the little bear and fondled its ears. She steeled herself to throw it away, but after her initial burst of anger she couldn't. She sat by the trash can all night, struggling to make herself throw the bear away. She ended up falling asleep, her hand dangling with the bear in the trash, poised to drop the little toy, but unable to make herself let go.