vinegar, triple berry, blood orange (it's a good combination)
title: Now Starring Starbuck and Faelyn, The Wonder Dogs
author: itcomesandgoes
universe: Hampton Roads
flavors: blood orange 18: war engine; triple berry 21: ready, aim, fire; vinegar 6: do not operate machinery
wordcount: 1804
rating: PG (language; they're sailors!)
contains: characters: Mike Foster, Ricky Anderson, Lucas Kimball, Christopher "Toph" Rook, plus Starbuck and Faelyn the Wonder Dogs. also explosions.
notes: wingshaped is better at dogs than I am. This takes place sometime in the winter of 2010-2011. And if you don't speak Navy, much as I really don't, CAG is short for Carrier Air Wing Commander. Also, Satan really is the commander of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
summary: In retrospect, maybe asking an automotive engineering student, even one from Georgetown, to join up with a Navy mechanic (honorably discharged) and a Navy mechanic with a hard-on for building a submersible fighter jet was just a bad idea, and would never stop being a bad idea.
"But what's it do?"
"How the hell should I know that?"
"Because it's your goddamn design!"
"He added to it, though!" Lucas flipped a hand irritably at Toph. "And he won't tell me what the hell he's done to my baby - some crap about security clearances. Hah!"
Mike covered his face with both hands, trying hard to look frustrated on Lucas' behalf, and not - accurately - as though he was laughing. "Now, Toph," he tried, sounding as placatory as he could bear when addressing his wife's baby brother. "Why'd you go and do something like that for? It's not friendly! You know Lucas is family!"
Of a sort, at least; he was Katie's little brother, and she was going to marry Eric someday, if he ever came back from having completely vanished overseas after a plane crash. And Eric had, once upon a time, been married to Tribeca, Mike's twin sister, before the car accident that killed her and eventually landed Mike honorably discharged into a wheelchair. Toph, meanwhile, was Sydney's baby brother, and Mike supposed that meant he was supposed to like Toph at least as much as he liked Eric, as they were equally his brothers-in-law - but it didn't help that Eric was technically one of Toph's commanding officers in the Navy. Meanwhile, Lucas was Toph's brother-in-law's-brother-in-law's-brother-in-law; it wasn't the closest of relations.
They had a big and messy family - and that didn't even get into the part where Sydney and Toph were only half human.
"He might be family, but he's still a civilian," Toph grumbled, and then - "Hey! Give that back, you damn dog!"
Lucas took the blueprints from Faelyn with a grin, and promptly patted her head. "Good girl!"
"Hey!" Mike scowled at his brother-in-law. "Don't you be callin' my dog names, you, or I'll -"
"You'll what? Throw me in the ocean?" Toph scowled right back.
"Naw, I'll just email Satan." Mike had the satisfaction of seeing Toph blanch; it was because of Eric, not Mike's own merits, that he was on easy-email terms with the commander of the U.S.S. Enterprise - but Cdr. Damien Christopher had taken an interest in Eric's family, after the disappearance, since he missed his CAG.
"Where did you even get missile casings?" Lucas asked plaintively, flipping from one page to another, then another, growing more frantic as he tried to make sense of what Toph had done to his designs. "And why the fuck are they there, doing that -"
In retrospect, maybe asking an automotive engineering student, even one from Georgetown, to join up with a Navy mechanic (honorably discharged) and a Navy mechanic with a hard-on for building a submersible fighter jet was just a bad idea, and would never stop being a bad idea.
Mike wheeled up to the monstrosity eating Eric's driveway - Eric's, because he wasn't using it, and Lucas still lived in DC and Toph lived in the condo with Mike and Sydney when he wasn't at NAS Oceana - and poked at it thoughtfully with a stick, since he couldn't kick it. "Is it done, or not?"
"Hey, stop it, you'll scratch the paint!"
The glare both Lucas and Toph leveled at Mike promptly redirected toward each other, both irate and embarrassed that they'd said the same thing at the same time. Toph coughed, ducked his head, rubbed at the hair on the back of his neck in need of a trim - "Well, I'm done, anyway..."
Lucas threw one hand in the air, keeping a tight grip on the dog-purloined plans with the other. "I have no idea what he's done, except it definitely isn't even legal for a civilian craft. On the street or not. So I don't know if I'm done or not - I know I was before he messed with her!"
Toph threw him a semi-panicked sort of look, at that. "Wait - since when was this supposed to be civilian? Why are you talking about streets? Mike, what have you done -"
"What have I done?" he asked, incredulous. "I'll tell you what I've done - I've gotten my two damn brothers-in-law, more or less in-law anyway, to work together on something they shoulda been working on since last year in the first place! It's not my damn fault that y'all can't talk to each other long enough to know what the fuck you're doing!"
"I thought this was supposed to be a floating turret!"
"It's supposed to be a floating car, dumbass!"
The dogs were already barking. Maybe that was why nobody noticed that Ricky had come out into the yard - nobody'd noticed that the neighbors were all on their porches, lining every edge of the quiet cul-de-sac with curious gazes, either. The dogs were barking, the three of them were yelling at each other, trying to figure out what they'd even made, what it was supposed to do, what it was likely going to actually do, whether they should admit it was a fuckup and start over or figure out how to reverse-engineer the plans and say, like a cat, that they'd meant to do this from the very start -
Ricky was Eric and Beca's son, although after the accident a decade ago, since he was two, he'd legally been a pain in the ass equally for Mike and Eric both. And right then, Ricky thought the lot of them were nuts, and being really loud about it, too. He would have just ditched them - they weren't paying him any attention, so why should he bother with them? - but at the ripe age of thirteen, in winter when even Virginia Beach got a little unpleasant for bicycling around, he would have to wait for the bus in order to get anywhere.
So maybe it wasn't that surprising, since both his parents had been (or were) Navy pilots, that Ricky had wanted to be a pilot in the Navy for as long as he could remember. And maybe it wasn't that surprising, when there was something that looked sort of like a cross between a fancy souped-up sports car and an F-16 parked in his dad's driveway, that Ricky wanted to creep inside it. Slightly more surprising was that he managed without anyone but Starbuck noticing - and that was mostly because he shoved her nose back outside before shutting the door.
"Why the fuck would anybody need a floating car, asshole?"
"Why would anyone need a turret that was just gonna sit there and do nothing? Turrets go on bigger things, they don't float out by themselves! You need people to aim them! And people want more space than that, if they're going to be there for longer than a few hours! And don't call me an asshole, asshole!"
Mike buried his head in his hands again, not laughing at all this time, wondering if the two twenty-something idiots in front of him were going to come to blows over their misunderstanding. At least Toph wasn't stupid enough to make allegations against Lucas' masculinity, although - come to think of it - Mike wasn't actually sure anyone had ever told him that Lucas was trans. He'd been passing well since before Eric, Mike, or Ricky had ever met him; now that his girlfriend had decided her baby would be born with Lucas as the father on the birth certificate, it was growing even less likely that anybody would think to question it.
(Greasy, calloused hands with broken nails did their best not to look feminine, and mostly succeeded.)
Faelyn and Starbuck whined at him, pressing close to the wheels of his chair; belatedly he sat straight, raising his head, and reached out to pet them both, to reassure them. Looking away from them, looking away from the arguing idiots, he glanced around and noticed all the neighbors staring; then he glanced at the object of everyone's frustrations, the bizarre construction in the driveway.
Then he realized that that was Ricky, in the driver's seat, with his hands resting confidently on throttle and stick, and Mike only just had a chance to shout "No, Ricky, don't -"
Too late.
The dogs started howling, neighbors started shouting, and Toph and Lucas dove for the yard at the same time, nearly ending up on top of each other, so that whether the car flew forward or shot off a rocket they wouldn't get hit -
There was an explosion, but it didn't leave the car. Boat. Flop, whatever it was.
The dogs started howling louder.
Mike started swearing.
Toph started swearing.
Lucas - stopped swearing in order to listen very intently to Mike and Toph, because he had never been in the Navy, and had never learned such colorful swears, although he could readily appreciate having them available, and the many possible applications of some of those phrases.
In the end, Mike's left hand got singed, one of his wheels needed to be replaced from having a hole melted into it, Ricky had gotten a lungful of smoke, Lucas kept muttering "I told you not to fuck with my baby" at Toph, and Starbuck's fur was as short as Faelyn's, in a few places at least.
There was a very expensive hunk of scrap metal in Eric's driveway. It was probably good that nobody knew when he'd show up, and that they knew they'd have at least some warning, once he got found, before he showed up. They'd need all the time they could get, to get the thing working again, or at least out of there.
Toph got a face full of smoke, too, when he helped Mike wrestle the door back open to get Ricky out.
Lucas offered to drive them to the hospital - the chair wouldn't lock into place right, with the mangled wheel, but he could drive from the fold-down panel, and wasn't confused by the hand controls. And both Lucas and Toph had to fight with the chair to get it into the van in the first place. Ricky sat and coughed pathetically. Toph made an attempt at a constructive apology-free apology by promising both to tell Sydney where to meet them (and to be the one to tell her of the entire incident, for that matter) and to dig up the spare wheel from the condo.
Ricky coughed again, bracketed by worried dogs. Mike twisted around to study his nephew, and then sighed.
"Dammit, Ricky."
The kid hung his head, leaning against Starbuck. He really did look pathetic when he tried to - and, damn him, he knew it, too. He was definitely well-trained by the examples his father and uncle set.
"What have your dad and I always taught you about pushing the big red button?"
He looked stubborn, and Mike just knew he was going to say something about how the button was actually yellow on that particular joystick.
"You never push the big red button, Ricky," Mike got out as quickly as possible. "- At least, not until you've actually been accepted for flight school, okay?"
author: itcomesandgoes
universe: Hampton Roads
flavors: blood orange 18: war engine; triple berry 21: ready, aim, fire; vinegar 6: do not operate machinery
wordcount: 1804
rating: PG (language; they're sailors!)
contains: characters: Mike Foster, Ricky Anderson, Lucas Kimball, Christopher "Toph" Rook, plus Starbuck and Faelyn the Wonder Dogs. also explosions.
notes: wingshaped is better at dogs than I am. This takes place sometime in the winter of 2010-2011. And if you don't speak Navy, much as I really don't, CAG is short for Carrier Air Wing Commander. Also, Satan really is the commander of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
summary: In retrospect, maybe asking an automotive engineering student, even one from Georgetown, to join up with a Navy mechanic (honorably discharged) and a Navy mechanic with a hard-on for building a submersible fighter jet was just a bad idea, and would never stop being a bad idea.
"But what's it do?"
"How the hell should I know that?"
"Because it's your goddamn design!"
"He added to it, though!" Lucas flipped a hand irritably at Toph. "And he won't tell me what the hell he's done to my baby - some crap about security clearances. Hah!"
Mike covered his face with both hands, trying hard to look frustrated on Lucas' behalf, and not - accurately - as though he was laughing. "Now, Toph," he tried, sounding as placatory as he could bear when addressing his wife's baby brother. "Why'd you go and do something like that for? It's not friendly! You know Lucas is family!"
Of a sort, at least; he was Katie's little brother, and she was going to marry Eric someday, if he ever came back from having completely vanished overseas after a plane crash. And Eric had, once upon a time, been married to Tribeca, Mike's twin sister, before the car accident that killed her and eventually landed Mike honorably discharged into a wheelchair. Toph, meanwhile, was Sydney's baby brother, and Mike supposed that meant he was supposed to like Toph at least as much as he liked Eric, as they were equally his brothers-in-law - but it didn't help that Eric was technically one of Toph's commanding officers in the Navy. Meanwhile, Lucas was Toph's brother-in-law's-brother-in-law's-brother-in-law; it wasn't the closest of relations.
They had a big and messy family - and that didn't even get into the part where Sydney and Toph were only half human.
"He might be family, but he's still a civilian," Toph grumbled, and then - "Hey! Give that back, you damn dog!"
Lucas took the blueprints from Faelyn with a grin, and promptly patted her head. "Good girl!"
"Hey!" Mike scowled at his brother-in-law. "Don't you be callin' my dog names, you, or I'll -"
"You'll what? Throw me in the ocean?" Toph scowled right back.
"Naw, I'll just email Satan." Mike had the satisfaction of seeing Toph blanch; it was because of Eric, not Mike's own merits, that he was on easy-email terms with the commander of the U.S.S. Enterprise - but Cdr. Damien Christopher had taken an interest in Eric's family, after the disappearance, since he missed his CAG.
"Where did you even get missile casings?" Lucas asked plaintively, flipping from one page to another, then another, growing more frantic as he tried to make sense of what Toph had done to his designs. "And why the fuck are they there, doing that -"
In retrospect, maybe asking an automotive engineering student, even one from Georgetown, to join up with a Navy mechanic (honorably discharged) and a Navy mechanic with a hard-on for building a submersible fighter jet was just a bad idea, and would never stop being a bad idea.
Mike wheeled up to the monstrosity eating Eric's driveway - Eric's, because he wasn't using it, and Lucas still lived in DC and Toph lived in the condo with Mike and Sydney when he wasn't at NAS Oceana - and poked at it thoughtfully with a stick, since he couldn't kick it. "Is it done, or not?"
"Hey, stop it, you'll scratch the paint!"
The glare both Lucas and Toph leveled at Mike promptly redirected toward each other, both irate and embarrassed that they'd said the same thing at the same time. Toph coughed, ducked his head, rubbed at the hair on the back of his neck in need of a trim - "Well, I'm done, anyway..."
Lucas threw one hand in the air, keeping a tight grip on the dog-purloined plans with the other. "I have no idea what he's done, except it definitely isn't even legal for a civilian craft. On the street or not. So I don't know if I'm done or not - I know I was before he messed with her!"
Toph threw him a semi-panicked sort of look, at that. "Wait - since when was this supposed to be civilian? Why are you talking about streets? Mike, what have you done -"
"What have I done?" he asked, incredulous. "I'll tell you what I've done - I've gotten my two damn brothers-in-law, more or less in-law anyway, to work together on something they shoulda been working on since last year in the first place! It's not my damn fault that y'all can't talk to each other long enough to know what the fuck you're doing!"
"I thought this was supposed to be a floating turret!"
"It's supposed to be a floating car, dumbass!"
The dogs were already barking. Maybe that was why nobody noticed that Ricky had come out into the yard - nobody'd noticed that the neighbors were all on their porches, lining every edge of the quiet cul-de-sac with curious gazes, either. The dogs were barking, the three of them were yelling at each other, trying to figure out what they'd even made, what it was supposed to do, what it was likely going to actually do, whether they should admit it was a fuckup and start over or figure out how to reverse-engineer the plans and say, like a cat, that they'd meant to do this from the very start -
Ricky was Eric and Beca's son, although after the accident a decade ago, since he was two, he'd legally been a pain in the ass equally for Mike and Eric both. And right then, Ricky thought the lot of them were nuts, and being really loud about it, too. He would have just ditched them - they weren't paying him any attention, so why should he bother with them? - but at the ripe age of thirteen, in winter when even Virginia Beach got a little unpleasant for bicycling around, he would have to wait for the bus in order to get anywhere.
So maybe it wasn't that surprising, since both his parents had been (or were) Navy pilots, that Ricky had wanted to be a pilot in the Navy for as long as he could remember. And maybe it wasn't that surprising, when there was something that looked sort of like a cross between a fancy souped-up sports car and an F-16 parked in his dad's driveway, that Ricky wanted to creep inside it. Slightly more surprising was that he managed without anyone but Starbuck noticing - and that was mostly because he shoved her nose back outside before shutting the door.
"Why the fuck would anybody need a floating car, asshole?"
"Why would anyone need a turret that was just gonna sit there and do nothing? Turrets go on bigger things, they don't float out by themselves! You need people to aim them! And people want more space than that, if they're going to be there for longer than a few hours! And don't call me an asshole, asshole!"
Mike buried his head in his hands again, not laughing at all this time, wondering if the two twenty-something idiots in front of him were going to come to blows over their misunderstanding. At least Toph wasn't stupid enough to make allegations against Lucas' masculinity, although - come to think of it - Mike wasn't actually sure anyone had ever told him that Lucas was trans. He'd been passing well since before Eric, Mike, or Ricky had ever met him; now that his girlfriend had decided her baby would be born with Lucas as the father on the birth certificate, it was growing even less likely that anybody would think to question it.
(Greasy, calloused hands with broken nails did their best not to look feminine, and mostly succeeded.)
Faelyn and Starbuck whined at him, pressing close to the wheels of his chair; belatedly he sat straight, raising his head, and reached out to pet them both, to reassure them. Looking away from them, looking away from the arguing idiots, he glanced around and noticed all the neighbors staring; then he glanced at the object of everyone's frustrations, the bizarre construction in the driveway.
Then he realized that that was Ricky, in the driver's seat, with his hands resting confidently on throttle and stick, and Mike only just had a chance to shout "No, Ricky, don't -"
Too late.
The dogs started howling, neighbors started shouting, and Toph and Lucas dove for the yard at the same time, nearly ending up on top of each other, so that whether the car flew forward or shot off a rocket they wouldn't get hit -
There was an explosion, but it didn't leave the car. Boat. Flop, whatever it was.
The dogs started howling louder.
Mike started swearing.
Toph started swearing.
Lucas - stopped swearing in order to listen very intently to Mike and Toph, because he had never been in the Navy, and had never learned such colorful swears, although he could readily appreciate having them available, and the many possible applications of some of those phrases.
In the end, Mike's left hand got singed, one of his wheels needed to be replaced from having a hole melted into it, Ricky had gotten a lungful of smoke, Lucas kept muttering "I told you not to fuck with my baby" at Toph, and Starbuck's fur was as short as Faelyn's, in a few places at least.
There was a very expensive hunk of scrap metal in Eric's driveway. It was probably good that nobody knew when he'd show up, and that they knew they'd have at least some warning, once he got found, before he showed up. They'd need all the time they could get, to get the thing working again, or at least out of there.
Toph got a face full of smoke, too, when he helped Mike wrestle the door back open to get Ricky out.
Lucas offered to drive them to the hospital - the chair wouldn't lock into place right, with the mangled wheel, but he could drive from the fold-down panel, and wasn't confused by the hand controls. And both Lucas and Toph had to fight with the chair to get it into the van in the first place. Ricky sat and coughed pathetically. Toph made an attempt at a constructive apology-free apology by promising both to tell Sydney where to meet them (and to be the one to tell her of the entire incident, for that matter) and to dig up the spare wheel from the condo.
Ricky coughed again, bracketed by worried dogs. Mike twisted around to study his nephew, and then sighed.
"Dammit, Ricky."
The kid hung his head, leaning against Starbuck. He really did look pathetic when he tried to - and, damn him, he knew it, too. He was definitely well-trained by the examples his father and uncle set.
"What have your dad and I always taught you about pushing the big red button?"
He looked stubborn, and Mike just knew he was going to say something about how the button was actually yellow on that particular joystick.
"You never push the big red button, Ricky," Mike got out as quickly as possible. "- At least, not until you've actually been accepted for flight school, okay?"