FIC: Supernatural: Leanring Curve 1/1
Title: Learning Curve
Author: ghanistarkiller @ mrs_peel_fanfic
Rating: PG-13 at the harshest
Characters: OCs
Disclaimer: The Supernatural 'verse and all in it belongs to Eric Kripke (as does my soul!) and the writers. Antonia is mine, created with in conjunction with jadeblood; Jeanie belongs to her; and grace and Timothy are joint efforts.
Summary: Antonia Papp is woefully unhappy with her parents decision to send her older sister, Jeanie, to "normal" school.
A/N: Direct tie-in with jadeblood's Taught and Closer Than You Think. Part of our Papp Sisters series
“...And I’m never speaking to either of you again!” Antonia Papp’s voice echoed down the hall, followed by the jarring reverberation of a loud bang as she slammed the bathroom door behind her once again. “It’s so unfair! You trust Jeanie with everything; I never get to do anything!”
Grace Papp sighed patiently, rubbing the beginnings of a headache from her furrowed brow. She looked up to watch her daughter pacing back and forth against the frosted glass inset in to the painted wood of the lavatory doorway. She glared at her husband, Timothy, who answered, “Baby-girl, we’ve been through this...” He’d already had it out with his oldest, Jeanie, that morning; Lord, why wasn’t anything ever easy?
“Don’t call me that!” came the agitated squeal. “You always call me that when you’re patronizing me! Jeanie’s your favorite, it’s not like you even bother to try and hide it. What about my social interaction with my peers? It’s way too late for Jeanie!” she scoffed. “When she meets someone new, she automatically decides if she wants to kiss them or kill them. And she doesn’t even want to go! School would be good for me, I’m still young and impressionable; I’m a mold, a blank canvas. I could still be taught how to behave around normal people, you know, without the violence…” Her voice got higher and higher until it was just one long noise of screeches and squeaks.
“I can’t-“ Timothy struggled to listen, at first addressing his daughter and then throwing his wife an imploring look. “I don’t understand anything she’s saying. Do you understand a word she’s saying?” he asked.
“She says that she doesn’t have any friends her own age,” Grace deftly translated, knowing her daughter only too well after so many years of arguments and reconciliations. “She says that she could rabbit punch a man twice her size and make him double over, or debate the numerous advantages of many easily concealed stilettos over one admittedly powerful Bowie knife, but she’s completely lost when it comes to nail polish color and celebrity hotties.”
“She said all that?” Timothy’s eyebrows shot up against his forehead, astonished and reluctantly impressed. “And you understood it all?” Grace inclined her head slightly.
“And,” Antonia added, flinging the door open and storming into the hall, pointing angrily, “I’ve never even had…” Timothy shot her a protectively paternal questioning glance and she amended what she was about to say, “…a boyfriend! By the time Jeanie was my age, she’d had lots and lots-an unseemly amount-of ‘boyfriends!’” She let out another wail and stomped towards her bedroom, smashed that door shut as well.
“Listen,” he sighed, lowering his voice and moving in closer to Grace, “Jeanie’s in the car, I can’t keep her waiting; she’s itchy enough as it is about this whole high school thing.” His wife shot him a hard look that said, ‘So are you.’ He shook his head, “We can talk about this when I get home, okay?” He reached out for the elbow that was poking out closest to him, her arms across her chest pensively; she recoiled and then looked sorry but not apologetic about it.
“I’ll take care of things here,” Grace murmured evenly, nodding. “Just-just go.” She gave him a tight, hesitant smile. “When you get back,” she assured him, playing anxiously with the locket she wore around her neck. He leaned in and they kissed tenderly, lingeringly. “Love you,” she told him and he grinned gently.
“I know,” he said, pinching her chin between his thumb and forefinger, and then he left.
Antonia watched from her bedroom window as the car roll away down the street until it was no longer in view. She slid down the wall and sat there on the floor, staring blankly at her messy bed and the bare walls that surrounded it, hooking her arms around her knees. Grace opened the door quietly and sat beside her. Neither spoke for a small stretch of time.
“I know it’s not fair,” Grace told her softly. “We’re never in the same place long enough for you to make real friends, go to a real school. Those walls, they should be plastered with posters of Leo and N’Sync and…” she laughed as her daughter gave her a skeptical sidelong glare. “Okay, so maybe I don’t know who’s cool with you kids nowadays; your Mama Bear’s still listening to Duran Duran. Are Duran Duran cool again? Are they part of the retro?”
“I don’t know,” Toni admitted earnestly. “That’s kinda the problem, you know? I don’t even remember the last movie we actually saw in a theater and not on a motel’s pay-per-view channel, but I do recall that it was only because you thought the projectionist was a trickster sending subliminal messages through the film. And it’s not just about the moving around, mom; I love our friends, I love what we do and the people we know, but meeting someone every now and again who can’t instantly tell me how much they bench press or the name of the ancient Sumerian god of the dead would be nice.”
“The time will come, Toni,” Grace put her hand on her daughter’s knee comfortingly, “when you have the chance to lead a normal life. Well, normaler…ish.” They both laughed. “You’re still so young and you’re so open to everything; you’ve got all these opportunities ahead of you. I just wanted Jeanie to understand that this isn’t the only existence she has to lead, even if she hates me for it.”
”I don’t want to lead a normal life,” Toni stated softly, and shrugged. “I just wanna know what one is like.” They sat in silence for a minute before she spoke again, falteringly, picking absently at a hole in jeans, “We’re not really going to leave dad, are we?”
“No, baby,” Grace assured her at once. “No, I love your daddy, we love each other; so much so that it can make us both a little crazy sometimes. And you know with my temper,” she shrugged, running her fingers through the thick tangle of her brown curls, “I say things that I don’t…” She bit her lip.
“Love makes you kinda insane, doesn’t it?” Toni asked and her mother chuckled.
“Yeah,” Grace smiled, “yeah it does, and not just kinda. And when you fall in love, you’ll realize that it’s completely worth it. Just make sure that isn’t for a very, very long time,” she teased, pinching Antonia’s nose.
“Sheyeah,” scoffed Toni. “Like I’m bringing some unsuspecting boy home; daddy’s gonna go nuts and probably chase the poor sap away with a rifle. I know it’s not fair to you either,” she said quietly, and when Grace looked at her, one eyebrow quirked curiously, she elaborated, “you getting left behind, too. I know that you have to stay behind a lot because of me.”
“Oh, babe,” she pursed her lips sympathetically, “I have never regretted our decision to start a family.” She had however quarreled quite a bit with Tim when he had first pursued the idea, dubious as to if it was really responsible of them, bringing little ones into the harsh and dangerous world they lived. Any remaining reservations she had had were forgotten the moment she first held her tiny baby Jeanie in her arms.
That, however, hadn’t stopped her from ignominiously dragging that old squabble into the knock down, drag out brawl she’d had with Tim that morning, and she wondered now if Antonia might have heard more than she was letting onto. “Having my two girls with me, it’s made me stronger.” She put her arm around Toni and hugged her close, her daughter resting her head against Grace’s shoulder. “Now, come on, I have something that I think will cheer you up.”
The knife soared in a perfectly straight line, tumbling tip over handle until it hit the bulls-eye spray painted on the bit of drywall, imbedding its gleaming blade directly at the center of the red circle. Grace chose another, lifting the weapon’s surprising weight with effortless elegance and poise. “I got this one yesterday,” she told Antonia, stylishly twirling the hilt over and over in her hand. “The grip is more comfortable, more natural, but not as bulky. See,” she flipped in over so that the sharp-edged steel rested across her palm and Toni could examine the sleek handle, “barely thicker than the blade. Easy to conceal.”
In one fluid movement, she threw the knife and with a cracking thud, it planted itself in the bottom of the other blade’s hilt. Antonia looked on in awestricken wonder. “Mom, you are so cool!” she enthused.
“Yeah, well, we’ll see if you’re still saying that when you’re your sister’s age,” teased Grace. “Then we’ll talk,” she winked. She retrieved the knives and positioned her daughter where she had been standing, showing Toni the correct and most advantageous stance to use. “Your father doesn’t favor her, you know. It’s just that he understands Jeanie better; they’re so much alike. You, you’re still his little baby girl. It’s going to take him a while to grow out of it, probably longer than it’s going to take you to grow up.”
“I’m bigger and stronger than Jeanie,” protested Antonia with a frown.
“Which is why I’ve focused your training on weapons, on combat,” her mother retorted evenly. “Remember: If you’re not the biggest or the strongest, make sure you’re the most prepared and skilled.” They were so much alike, the two of them, Grace thought with an inward grin. Hers will be a quiet rebellion, she decided, the kind that sneaks up on you when you’re not looking; like mother, like daughter. Grace remembered her own family, her mother who had been so disapproving when she had dropped out of Yale to run away with Tim. Is that how Antonia believed that Tim felt about her, that he was disappointed in her?
“Dad doesn’t trust me,” Toni pouted. “He doesn’t think I have the instinct for the job.”
“Your dad still sees you as that vulnerable little critter you were when we found you,” Grace told her fondly. “You should have seen him, amid all that chaos and he held you like you were the most precious, fragile thing in the world. He just wanted to take care of you.”
“Yeah?” asked Antonia quietly.
“Yeah,” smiled Grace. “There’s a learning curve to all of this, sweetheart. Your dad and Jeanie, they just happen to be on the other end of it.” And, as if on cue, she heard the car drive up, the heavy footfall of her husband’s boots on the gravel of the driveway. “I want you to meditate,” she told her daughter, holding up a finger when Toni gave a groan of dissent. “You’ll thank me for it one day. You need to keep yourself centered, okay? Focused. It could mean the difference between keeping you alive and the grisly alternative.”
“Jeanie and dad don’t meditate,” she mumbled mutinously, and Grace opened her mouth to respond, quickly pursing her lips to stifle her coming comment.
But her words stayed at the forefront of her thoughts: Jeanie and Tim are killers. It wasn’t a judgment, just a statement of fact on their natural aptitude. It was something that couldn’t be learned, no matter how hard she trained, and she knew that set her apart from even Toni. “Meditate,” she instructed her daughter firmly.
She slipped up the short set of stairs that led from the converted garage to the kitchen. The clock on the oven told her that Tim had been gone longer than he ought to have been. The door opened and closed and his footsteps seemed to hammer against the linoleum of the old flooring.
“Jesus!” he jumped as she soundlessly moved up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. He grinned and chuckled, relieved as he shook his head, putting his arms around her waist and pulling her into his embrace, “All this time and you can still do that to me.”
“It’s not the training,” Grace told him, “it’s my feminine wiles. It’s all me, baby.”
“Much deadlier, in my experience,” he smiled, kissing her on the cheek.
“So, did everything…?” she asked tentatively and she felt him go rigid, pulling back slightly as his expression tightened. “That bad, huh?” she sighed, letting him slip from her arms.
“It was…” He grimaced. “What I expected it to be.” She noticed the use of the singular ‘I’ instead of plural ‘we,’ and she nodded pensively. “I just don’t …” His voice, which had begun to gain volume and momentum, suddenly trailed off with a tender little sigh, giving her hand a squeeze. “I’ll tell you, these girls; where the hell did we get such headstrong smartasses for kids?”
“I wonder,” Grace snickered, shaking her curly brown head. “It’s certainly not a precedence in this family.” This time Tim laughed too. “What kept you?” Grace wondered aloud, changing the subject.
“I, um, I got word of a hunt,” he told her, and his eyes darting about the room furtively. “Up Montana way. It’s fishy stuff, possibly-it may be, and I stress the may be,” he held up a finger, “a nest, a den of vamps,” he confirmed her apprehensions and she gasped, covering her mouth with her hand.
“Is it-“ she began, fearful she’d lose control of her voice. She cleared her throat, glancing surreptitiously over at the stairs she had just come up and licking her lips. “Is this a lead? Does it have to do with…”
“I don’t think so, not at this point,” he told her levelly. He braced himself for the next bit. “But I think it’s a good idea if you stay behind anyways.” Before she could utter and objection, he insisted bluntly, “Sometimes your instinct as a mother are stronger than your instincts as a hunter. Babe, you can’t protect her forever; she’s learning how to handle herself, and she’s gonna start to wonder why she’s being kept back as much as she is.” He shook his head, scratching his jaw as he clucked his tongue. “I didn’t mean for that to come out as harsh as that just did, babe.”
“It wasn’t harsh,” she admitted, though her words were heavy and thick on her tongue, “it was truthful.” She smiled, chuckling as she shook her head. “You can explain to Toni why she can’t go along, though, because I’ve had a morning and a half!” she teased. “Come on, big boy,” she jerked her head towards the kitchenette, “I’ll make you some lunch.”
“Can I have this dance first, miss?” he said playfully, sweeping his arm around her waist and, taking her hand in his, began to waltz her about the room, dipping her and they both giggled. Their lips met, and their noses rubbed together mischievously.
“Ew!” they both heard Toni’s voice and turned their heads to see her standing their in the doorway. “That is potentially the grossest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen ectoplasm ooze out of an apparitions open sores. You guys are disgusting; get a room!”
Grace was folding laundry, tutting at the blood stain that just refused to come out of Tim’s favorite jacket, while her husband sat at the kitchen table, an empty plate and a half-eaten and cold bowl of tomato soup sat in front of him. He folded his arms behind his head and stared broodingly out the picture window beside him. The steady thump, thump, thump of knives hitting their mark on the practice board in the room below was the only sound; it beat a steady, relaxing rhythm into the quiet midday. So much so that when the phone on the wall beside the fridge rang, both occupants of the kitchen nearly jumped out of their skins.
Tim answered, and instantly his expression was strained across his face; he let out a long, beleaguered sigh. He answered the caller only with ‘uh huhs’ and ‘yeah,’ with the occasional ‘I understand,’ and many a shifty glance at his wife. He sighed as he hung up; this was going to hurt like hell.
“What do you mean ‘expelled?!’” Toni heard her mother shout, and she herself uttered a surprised squeak, nearly dropping the knife she held into her foot. When she recovered, she allowed herself a small smirk. The learning curve might have been steep, but it was almost always balanced out in the end.
Peace, Ghani
Author: ghanistarkiller @ mrs_peel_fanfic
Rating: PG-13 at the harshest
Characters: OCs
Disclaimer: The Supernatural 'verse and all in it belongs to Eric Kripke (as does my soul!) and the writers. Antonia is mine, created with in conjunction with jadeblood; Jeanie belongs to her; and grace and Timothy are joint efforts.
Summary: Antonia Papp is woefully unhappy with her parents decision to send her older sister, Jeanie, to "normal" school.
A/N: Direct tie-in with jadeblood's Taught and Closer Than You Think. Part of our Papp Sisters series
“...And I’m never speaking to either of you again!” Antonia Papp’s voice echoed down the hall, followed by the jarring reverberation of a loud bang as she slammed the bathroom door behind her once again. “It’s so unfair! You trust Jeanie with everything; I never get to do anything!”
Grace Papp sighed patiently, rubbing the beginnings of a headache from her furrowed brow. She looked up to watch her daughter pacing back and forth against the frosted glass inset in to the painted wood of the lavatory doorway. She glared at her husband, Timothy, who answered, “Baby-girl, we’ve been through this...” He’d already had it out with his oldest, Jeanie, that morning; Lord, why wasn’t anything ever easy?
“Don’t call me that!” came the agitated squeal. “You always call me that when you’re patronizing me! Jeanie’s your favorite, it’s not like you even bother to try and hide it. What about my social interaction with my peers? It’s way too late for Jeanie!” she scoffed. “When she meets someone new, she automatically decides if she wants to kiss them or kill them. And she doesn’t even want to go! School would be good for me, I’m still young and impressionable; I’m a mold, a blank canvas. I could still be taught how to behave around normal people, you know, without the violence…” Her voice got higher and higher until it was just one long noise of screeches and squeaks.
“I can’t-“ Timothy struggled to listen, at first addressing his daughter and then throwing his wife an imploring look. “I don’t understand anything she’s saying. Do you understand a word she’s saying?” he asked.
“She says that she doesn’t have any friends her own age,” Grace deftly translated, knowing her daughter only too well after so many years of arguments and reconciliations. “She says that she could rabbit punch a man twice her size and make him double over, or debate the numerous advantages of many easily concealed stilettos over one admittedly powerful Bowie knife, but she’s completely lost when it comes to nail polish color and celebrity hotties.”
“She said all that?” Timothy’s eyebrows shot up against his forehead, astonished and reluctantly impressed. “And you understood it all?” Grace inclined her head slightly.
“And,” Antonia added, flinging the door open and storming into the hall, pointing angrily, “I’ve never even had…” Timothy shot her a protectively paternal questioning glance and she amended what she was about to say, “…a boyfriend! By the time Jeanie was my age, she’d had lots and lots-an unseemly amount-of ‘boyfriends!’” She let out another wail and stomped towards her bedroom, smashed that door shut as well.
“Listen,” he sighed, lowering his voice and moving in closer to Grace, “Jeanie’s in the car, I can’t keep her waiting; she’s itchy enough as it is about this whole high school thing.” His wife shot him a hard look that said, ‘So are you.’ He shook his head, “We can talk about this when I get home, okay?” He reached out for the elbow that was poking out closest to him, her arms across her chest pensively; she recoiled and then looked sorry but not apologetic about it.
“I’ll take care of things here,” Grace murmured evenly, nodding. “Just-just go.” She gave him a tight, hesitant smile. “When you get back,” she assured him, playing anxiously with the locket she wore around her neck. He leaned in and they kissed tenderly, lingeringly. “Love you,” she told him and he grinned gently.
“I know,” he said, pinching her chin between his thumb and forefinger, and then he left.
Antonia watched from her bedroom window as the car roll away down the street until it was no longer in view. She slid down the wall and sat there on the floor, staring blankly at her messy bed and the bare walls that surrounded it, hooking her arms around her knees. Grace opened the door quietly and sat beside her. Neither spoke for a small stretch of time.
“I know it’s not fair,” Grace told her softly. “We’re never in the same place long enough for you to make real friends, go to a real school. Those walls, they should be plastered with posters of Leo and N’Sync and…” she laughed as her daughter gave her a skeptical sidelong glare. “Okay, so maybe I don’t know who’s cool with you kids nowadays; your Mama Bear’s still listening to Duran Duran. Are Duran Duran cool again? Are they part of the retro?”
“I don’t know,” Toni admitted earnestly. “That’s kinda the problem, you know? I don’t even remember the last movie we actually saw in a theater and not on a motel’s pay-per-view channel, but I do recall that it was only because you thought the projectionist was a trickster sending subliminal messages through the film. And it’s not just about the moving around, mom; I love our friends, I love what we do and the people we know, but meeting someone every now and again who can’t instantly tell me how much they bench press or the name of the ancient Sumerian god of the dead would be nice.”
“The time will come, Toni,” Grace put her hand on her daughter’s knee comfortingly, “when you have the chance to lead a normal life. Well, normaler…ish.” They both laughed. “You’re still so young and you’re so open to everything; you’ve got all these opportunities ahead of you. I just wanted Jeanie to understand that this isn’t the only existence she has to lead, even if she hates me for it.”
”I don’t want to lead a normal life,” Toni stated softly, and shrugged. “I just wanna know what one is like.” They sat in silence for a minute before she spoke again, falteringly, picking absently at a hole in jeans, “We’re not really going to leave dad, are we?”
“No, baby,” Grace assured her at once. “No, I love your daddy, we love each other; so much so that it can make us both a little crazy sometimes. And you know with my temper,” she shrugged, running her fingers through the thick tangle of her brown curls, “I say things that I don’t…” She bit her lip.
“Love makes you kinda insane, doesn’t it?” Toni asked and her mother chuckled.
“Yeah,” Grace smiled, “yeah it does, and not just kinda. And when you fall in love, you’ll realize that it’s completely worth it. Just make sure that isn’t for a very, very long time,” she teased, pinching Antonia’s nose.
“Sheyeah,” scoffed Toni. “Like I’m bringing some unsuspecting boy home; daddy’s gonna go nuts and probably chase the poor sap away with a rifle. I know it’s not fair to you either,” she said quietly, and when Grace looked at her, one eyebrow quirked curiously, she elaborated, “you getting left behind, too. I know that you have to stay behind a lot because of me.”
“Oh, babe,” she pursed her lips sympathetically, “I have never regretted our decision to start a family.” She had however quarreled quite a bit with Tim when he had first pursued the idea, dubious as to if it was really responsible of them, bringing little ones into the harsh and dangerous world they lived. Any remaining reservations she had had were forgotten the moment she first held her tiny baby Jeanie in her arms.
That, however, hadn’t stopped her from ignominiously dragging that old squabble into the knock down, drag out brawl she’d had with Tim that morning, and she wondered now if Antonia might have heard more than she was letting onto. “Having my two girls with me, it’s made me stronger.” She put her arm around Toni and hugged her close, her daughter resting her head against Grace’s shoulder. “Now, come on, I have something that I think will cheer you up.”
The knife soared in a perfectly straight line, tumbling tip over handle until it hit the bulls-eye spray painted on the bit of drywall, imbedding its gleaming blade directly at the center of the red circle. Grace chose another, lifting the weapon’s surprising weight with effortless elegance and poise. “I got this one yesterday,” she told Antonia, stylishly twirling the hilt over and over in her hand. “The grip is more comfortable, more natural, but not as bulky. See,” she flipped in over so that the sharp-edged steel rested across her palm and Toni could examine the sleek handle, “barely thicker than the blade. Easy to conceal.”
In one fluid movement, she threw the knife and with a cracking thud, it planted itself in the bottom of the other blade’s hilt. Antonia looked on in awestricken wonder. “Mom, you are so cool!” she enthused.
“Yeah, well, we’ll see if you’re still saying that when you’re your sister’s age,” teased Grace. “Then we’ll talk,” she winked. She retrieved the knives and positioned her daughter where she had been standing, showing Toni the correct and most advantageous stance to use. “Your father doesn’t favor her, you know. It’s just that he understands Jeanie better; they’re so much alike. You, you’re still his little baby girl. It’s going to take him a while to grow out of it, probably longer than it’s going to take you to grow up.”
“I’m bigger and stronger than Jeanie,” protested Antonia with a frown.
“Which is why I’ve focused your training on weapons, on combat,” her mother retorted evenly. “Remember: If you’re not the biggest or the strongest, make sure you’re the most prepared and skilled.” They were so much alike, the two of them, Grace thought with an inward grin. Hers will be a quiet rebellion, she decided, the kind that sneaks up on you when you’re not looking; like mother, like daughter. Grace remembered her own family, her mother who had been so disapproving when she had dropped out of Yale to run away with Tim. Is that how Antonia believed that Tim felt about her, that he was disappointed in her?
“Dad doesn’t trust me,” Toni pouted. “He doesn’t think I have the instinct for the job.”
“Your dad still sees you as that vulnerable little critter you were when we found you,” Grace told her fondly. “You should have seen him, amid all that chaos and he held you like you were the most precious, fragile thing in the world. He just wanted to take care of you.”
“Yeah?” asked Antonia quietly.
“Yeah,” smiled Grace. “There’s a learning curve to all of this, sweetheart. Your dad and Jeanie, they just happen to be on the other end of it.” And, as if on cue, she heard the car drive up, the heavy footfall of her husband’s boots on the gravel of the driveway. “I want you to meditate,” she told her daughter, holding up a finger when Toni gave a groan of dissent. “You’ll thank me for it one day. You need to keep yourself centered, okay? Focused. It could mean the difference between keeping you alive and the grisly alternative.”
“Jeanie and dad don’t meditate,” she mumbled mutinously, and Grace opened her mouth to respond, quickly pursing her lips to stifle her coming comment.
But her words stayed at the forefront of her thoughts: Jeanie and Tim are killers. It wasn’t a judgment, just a statement of fact on their natural aptitude. It was something that couldn’t be learned, no matter how hard she trained, and she knew that set her apart from even Toni. “Meditate,” she instructed her daughter firmly.
She slipped up the short set of stairs that led from the converted garage to the kitchen. The clock on the oven told her that Tim had been gone longer than he ought to have been. The door opened and closed and his footsteps seemed to hammer against the linoleum of the old flooring.
“Jesus!” he jumped as she soundlessly moved up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. He grinned and chuckled, relieved as he shook his head, putting his arms around her waist and pulling her into his embrace, “All this time and you can still do that to me.”
“It’s not the training,” Grace told him, “it’s my feminine wiles. It’s all me, baby.”
“Much deadlier, in my experience,” he smiled, kissing her on the cheek.
“So, did everything…?” she asked tentatively and she felt him go rigid, pulling back slightly as his expression tightened. “That bad, huh?” she sighed, letting him slip from her arms.
“It was…” He grimaced. “What I expected it to be.” She noticed the use of the singular ‘I’ instead of plural ‘we,’ and she nodded pensively. “I just don’t …” His voice, which had begun to gain volume and momentum, suddenly trailed off with a tender little sigh, giving her hand a squeeze. “I’ll tell you, these girls; where the hell did we get such headstrong smartasses for kids?”
“I wonder,” Grace snickered, shaking her curly brown head. “It’s certainly not a precedence in this family.” This time Tim laughed too. “What kept you?” Grace wondered aloud, changing the subject.
“I, um, I got word of a hunt,” he told her, and his eyes darting about the room furtively. “Up Montana way. It’s fishy stuff, possibly-it may be, and I stress the may be,” he held up a finger, “a nest, a den of vamps,” he confirmed her apprehensions and she gasped, covering her mouth with her hand.
“Is it-“ she began, fearful she’d lose control of her voice. She cleared her throat, glancing surreptitiously over at the stairs she had just come up and licking her lips. “Is this a lead? Does it have to do with…”
“I don’t think so, not at this point,” he told her levelly. He braced himself for the next bit. “But I think it’s a good idea if you stay behind anyways.” Before she could utter and objection, he insisted bluntly, “Sometimes your instinct as a mother are stronger than your instincts as a hunter. Babe, you can’t protect her forever; she’s learning how to handle herself, and she’s gonna start to wonder why she’s being kept back as much as she is.” He shook his head, scratching his jaw as he clucked his tongue. “I didn’t mean for that to come out as harsh as that just did, babe.”
“It wasn’t harsh,” she admitted, though her words were heavy and thick on her tongue, “it was truthful.” She smiled, chuckling as she shook her head. “You can explain to Toni why she can’t go along, though, because I’ve had a morning and a half!” she teased. “Come on, big boy,” she jerked her head towards the kitchenette, “I’ll make you some lunch.”
“Can I have this dance first, miss?” he said playfully, sweeping his arm around her waist and, taking her hand in his, began to waltz her about the room, dipping her and they both giggled. Their lips met, and their noses rubbed together mischievously.
“Ew!” they both heard Toni’s voice and turned their heads to see her standing their in the doorway. “That is potentially the grossest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen ectoplasm ooze out of an apparitions open sores. You guys are disgusting; get a room!”
Grace was folding laundry, tutting at the blood stain that just refused to come out of Tim’s favorite jacket, while her husband sat at the kitchen table, an empty plate and a half-eaten and cold bowl of tomato soup sat in front of him. He folded his arms behind his head and stared broodingly out the picture window beside him. The steady thump, thump, thump of knives hitting their mark on the practice board in the room below was the only sound; it beat a steady, relaxing rhythm into the quiet midday. So much so that when the phone on the wall beside the fridge rang, both occupants of the kitchen nearly jumped out of their skins.
Tim answered, and instantly his expression was strained across his face; he let out a long, beleaguered sigh. He answered the caller only with ‘uh huhs’ and ‘yeah,’ with the occasional ‘I understand,’ and many a shifty glance at his wife. He sighed as he hung up; this was going to hurt like hell.
“What do you mean ‘expelled?!’” Toni heard her mother shout, and she herself uttered a surprised squeak, nearly dropping the knife she held into her foot. When she recovered, she allowed herself a small smirk. The learning curve might have been steep, but it was almost always balanced out in the end.
Peace, Ghani