FIC: Leah Barton and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day (PG) (1/3)cybermathwitchAugust 25 2012, 20:06:32 UTC
Notes: It doesn't follow the letter of the prompt, but hopefully the spirit is similar.
*****
Leah was about ready to pull her hair out.
They weren't supposed to be this much trouble. They were never this much trouble.
Pippa liked nap time, damn it (and she knew she wasn't supposed to actually say "damn it" around them but she figured inside her own brain she could think whatever she wanted to, and this called for it - no one was acting like themself today, of all days.)
Pippa liked naptime, Maggie never cried, Jamie and Ben knew better than to throw things in the house... and it dawned on her that she hadn't actually seen Erik, Brynn, or Annie in the last half an hour or so.
"JARVIS, where are the other three?" she asked in what she hoped was a calm, reasonable tone.
"Mister and Miss Foster and Miss Banner are currently in the elevator between floors, Miss Barton. I believe they are headed down to Mr. Stark's lab."
"NO! I mean, JARVIS, please stop the elevator and reroute it back up here. They're not allowed down there unattended, they know better!"
Something tugged at the leg of her jeans, and she looked down at Pip's strawberry blond head. One of her braids had come undone and she was holding the broken elastic out, still sniffling from the fit she'd been throwing over her nap.
"Broke," she said sadly, in that heart-breaking way only a four-year-old could manage.
"Crap, Pip, sorry about that - here, can you wait just a minute and I'll fix it for you? Please?"
"You're not supposed to say 'crap'!" Jamie, who was six and thought he knew everything, crowed from behind the couch, even as Pippa nodded.
"And you're not supposed to break things with a baseball! No ground to stand on here, squirt!" she shot back.
"Don't call me squirt!" Jamie yelled, followed by a muffled "Yeah!" that could only be five year old Ben, Jamie's partner in crime.
She thought back to the discussion over the breakfast table where she'd volunteered for this fiasco and sort of wanted to cry, herself.
It was extremely rare for all of the adults to leave the Tower at the same time. Rare as in Leah could count on one hand the number of times that had probably happened, at least that the kids hadn't all been taken along (because that wasn't relevant.) And ok, technically Darcy was still there, but she was seven months pregnant and on bed rest.
When Pepper had looked at her schedule and realized her meeting in Malibu had been pushed up, she'd decided to make it a single-day trip and not take Pippa with her. Tony and Jane were already out there at some kind of conference on machine engineering for clean energy, and Annie was already bunking over on Steve and Darcy's floor since Bruce and Betty were presenting some kind of paper on genetic research at Culver. Thor was still in Asgard, so Brynn, Erik, and Ben had ended up on the floor Leah and her parents shared - only they had some kind of all-day thing at SHIELD HQ, which also required Steve. They hadn't really explained it, but then, they never did.
The net result of all of that was that Darcy was the only official grown-up in the Tower, and she wasn't allowed to chase the kids around all day. But Leah was fourteen, almost fifteen, and they were good kids. The were - 95% of the time. She'd watched all of them before in different combinations since she was about twelve (granted there was always someone else on the premises, plus JARVIS, but Leah was a responsible, clear-headed girl. Mom said so all the time - it was kind of her way of saying "I love you" and "I'm proud of you." So, really, if none of them had been a problem individually or in smaller groups, why should this have been any different?
(Years later, when she recounted the story to Pepper at their weekly "you may be in college but you're still our kid" lunch, Pepper just shook her head and patted her hand with a grin. Yeah, yeah, she should've known better.)
*****
Leah was about ready to pull her hair out.
They weren't supposed to be this much trouble. They were never this much trouble.
Pippa liked nap time, damn it (and she knew she wasn't supposed to actually say "damn it" around them but she figured inside her own brain she could think whatever she wanted to, and this called for it - no one was acting like themself today, of all days.)
Pippa liked naptime, Maggie never cried, Jamie and Ben knew better than to throw things in the house... and it dawned on her that she hadn't actually seen Erik, Brynn, or Annie in the last half an hour or so.
"JARVIS, where are the other three?" she asked in what she hoped was a calm, reasonable tone.
"Mister and Miss Foster and Miss Banner are currently in the elevator between floors, Miss Barton. I believe they are headed down to Mr. Stark's lab."
"NO! I mean, JARVIS, please stop the elevator and reroute it back up here. They're not allowed down there unattended, they know better!"
Something tugged at the leg of her jeans, and she looked down at Pip's strawberry blond head. One of her braids had come undone and she was holding the broken elastic out, still sniffling from the fit she'd been throwing over her nap.
"Broke," she said sadly, in that heart-breaking way only a four-year-old could manage.
"Crap, Pip, sorry about that - here, can you wait just a minute and I'll fix it for you? Please?"
"You're not supposed to say 'crap'!" Jamie, who was six and thought he knew everything, crowed from behind the couch, even as Pippa nodded.
"And you're not supposed to break things with a baseball! No ground to stand on here, squirt!" she shot back.
"Don't call me squirt!" Jamie yelled, followed by a muffled "Yeah!" that could only be five year old Ben, Jamie's partner in crime.
She thought back to the discussion over the breakfast table where she'd volunteered for this fiasco and sort of wanted to cry, herself.
It was extremely rare for all of the adults to leave the Tower at the same time. Rare as in Leah could count on one hand the number of times that had probably happened, at least that the kids hadn't all been taken along (because that wasn't relevant.) And ok, technically Darcy was still there, but she was seven months pregnant and on bed rest.
When Pepper had looked at her schedule and realized her meeting in Malibu had been pushed up, she'd decided to make it a single-day trip and not take Pippa with her. Tony and Jane were already out there at some kind of conference on machine engineering for clean energy, and Annie was already bunking over on Steve and Darcy's floor since Bruce and Betty were presenting some kind of paper on genetic research at Culver. Thor was still in Asgard, so Brynn, Erik, and Ben had ended up on the floor Leah and her parents shared - only they had some kind of all-day thing at SHIELD HQ, which also required Steve. They hadn't really explained it, but then, they never did.
The net result of all of that was that Darcy was the only official grown-up in the Tower, and she wasn't allowed to chase the kids around all day. But Leah was fourteen, almost fifteen, and they were good kids. The were - 95% of the time. She'd watched all of them before in different combinations since she was about twelve (granted there was always someone else on the premises, plus JARVIS, but Leah was a responsible, clear-headed girl. Mom said so all the time - it was kind of her way of saying "I love you" and "I'm proud of you." So, really, if none of them had been a problem individually or in smaller groups, why should this have been any different?
(Years later, when she recounted the story to Pepper at their weekly "you may be in college but you're still our kid" lunch, Pepper just shook her head and patted her hand with a grin. Yeah, yeah, she should've known better.)
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