forthedog | (no subject)

Entry tags:

hobbes,
twins

(no subject)

"Daddy, found tarfish," Mack calls merrily, crouched down in her sundress and poking at something in the sand. Mike leans over to peer at it, a greenish round thing, and shakes his head, grinning. Beside him, Flo is filling her hat with sand and shells with extraordinary concentration.

"That's a sand dollar, honey," he says. "Not a starfish. Leave it alone, it's alive."

"Kay," Mack says, looking mildly put out but forgetting all about it when a long conical shell catches her eye. She picks it up and turns it in the sunlight, blue eyes following its elongated spiral. "Pretty," she murmurs, and Mike tugs at her hat.

"You're pretty," he says, and she bats at his hands and laughs.

"Wan' lunch," Flo announces, looking up from her hat, and Mike ruffles her blond curls. It's not yet high noon, there's a fresh breeze, and the sun feels good on his bare back.

Perfect. Pretty much.

"Daddy Tom'll be here soon," he says, glancing back up in the direction of the boardwalk. "We'll have lunch then."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

In fact, Tom was running late. He'd dodged back to the hut after his run and, almost against his will, had fallen asleep fully dressed on top of the blankets on the bed, feet still flat on the ground. By the time he woke up, it was midmorning, and he still had to make lunch before making his way down to the beach with Mike and girls.

After a harried half hour in the kitchen, assembling PB&J and a cold pasta salad thing for him and Mike, pouring milk and water into canteens for the trip out, Tom was jogging the last half mile down to the water when he heard the familiar little girl voices washing up with the surf. Mike's voice a deeper but no less gentle tone of their voices and the sea.

Just another afternoon in paradise.

"Sorry," He called out, sticky with exhertion and dropping his backpack onto the sand. He gave Mike a big, brilliant grin. He was always just a little bit different when he was around his girls.

"Morning got away from me. What's going on out here?"

"We want lunch," he says, looking up as Flo yells "Daddy!" and stumps toward Tom with sandy hands outstretched for a hug. Mack looks up from her shell and grins.

"You overslept, didn't you? And look, you're all gross."

Hearing that simple little word from the girls still made Tom's chest tight in a wonderful, aching way that he didn't understand. He bent and scooped Flo up in his arms and swung her around in a big circle, watching her grin and laugh and grab onto him.

"I took a nap by mistake," he admitted, setting Flo down before scooping her sister up for similar treatment. They were big now, he thought, arms aching a little with the effort of swining them around. He could look down at them now and see the shape of their faces that they would still have in ten, twenty years. Little women, growing up fast.

"I was rushing," he said, still holding a giggling Mack against him as he leaned in to steal a kiss, "To get you food. I know how cranky you get when you're hungry."

"You're such a goddamned family man," he murmurs, catching the side of Tom's neck with a gentle hand and holding him there for a few seconds. "C'mon, have a seat. In an hour or so ity's gonna be too hot to stay out here." By then, maybe, the shade and a nap, at least for the girls.

"Tut," Tom murmured, giving the girls a significant look. "Little pitchers, Pinocchio. Jeez."

"I didn't really bring anything fancy," he warned, still holding Mack as he walked over the the blanket, listening to her babble about shells and water and whatever story she'd crafted up around them. "Just sandwiches and stuff."

"That's okay, isn't it?" he said to Mack, grinning. "But for you, little lady, I just brought a worm shishkabob and some yummy brussle sprouts."

It takes a moment for it to occur to him that she's probably never seen them, not on the island.

"Yeah, because usually we're all about the caviar and fine cheese," he says, rolling his eyes and starting to spread out the food. "Jelly?" Flo says, plopping down on the blanket and reaching for the sandwiches when she sees them.

He smiles up at Mack's babbling. "She's always making up stories. Neil should teach her to write 'em out, I'm thinking."

"He'd be a good one for it," Tom said, murmuring to Flo as he dug out and unwrapped her sandwich, passing her a little glass of milk along with it.

He smirked, shaking his head. "Bring her up to speed on some...vocabulary."

"Like she doesn't already have enough of that," he says with a quick laugh, opening the pasta salad. "Christ, I think I love you. Pass me a fork?"

Domestic bliss. A picnic on the beach with the kids. A month ago they were killing people. If he let himself think too hard about it he might never be able to stop laughing.

"You loved me long before I gave you pasta salad," Tom said, grinning and settling down along side him, quickly peeling the crusts off the girls sandwiches and making sure they sat on the blanket to eat.

He tossed Mike a grin. "It was the bar-b-q-ed squirrel in Texas, wasn't it?"

"Didn't hurt any," he says, kissing the top of Mack's head as she sets about covering her face in jelly. "And the rat in Toledo. Your home cooking won my goddamn heart."

"Yeah yeah," Tom said, rolling his eyes. "It was you that shot the rat and squirrel, my big hunter man."

He grinned, making a spoonful of pasta salad do loop the loops before making a hopeful dive at Flo's mouth.

"Would have been eating twigs and leaves without you."

"Or the damn dog," he mutters, but it's all show and he's grinning. It's all comfortable. All pieces of a life that would have been unimaginable barely years ago, and maybe a short trip back to that life hadn't been entirely without value after all.

If nothing else, it's helped him to see some other things a little more clearly.

"So, uh," he says, picking at the pasta salad. "Neil was talking to me the other day."

"Really?" Tom said, grinning as he stole some salad out of Mike's Tupperware. Love. Jesus, sometimes this all still stunned him. Everything was perfect and new.

"I didn't know you two were on speaking terms."

"Well, you know, only kinda," he says, rolling his eyes and making a show of trying to bat Tom's hand away. he's not exactly nervous about broaching this subject, but it's not as though it's ever been something they've really discussed before.

Just always assumed it wasn't even an option.

"He mentioned you, uh, were talking about a wedding," he says, trying very hard to keep things casual, and grateful that the girls won't be able to understand the significance of most of what they'll say.

Tom arched his eyebrows at Mike uncomprehendingly. The conversation with Neil had been so casual, so distant, that it hadn't even left a deep mark in his memory. Just some more banter, teasing. It didn't really register as real.

"Wedding?" he said, shrugging. "Uh...not that I can think of. We know anyone that's getting hitched?"

"You tell me," he says, poking a fork into the pasta and sparing Tom a faintly suggestive smile. "I dunno, he just said you were talking about it like you liked the idea. Of the three of us, I mean." He snorts a quick laugh. "Or I assume you meant the three of us. He said you only mentioned him and you."

"Oh..." Tom said, confusing still clinging to his features. He cocked his head at Mike and gave him a little grin.

"I mean, well, yeah. Of course I do," he said, laughing a little. "I thought that was kind of...general knowledge, or whatever." He shrugged, leaning to wipe mashed peanut butter off Flo's cheek.

"It's just...you know. Not on the table." He gave Mike a reassuring smile. "It's no big deal. Really."

"No, I wanna talk about it some," he says evenly, forking more salad into his mouth. Somehow eating takes the edge off of things.

And he hadn't realized how hungry he was until just now.

"I thought it wasn't on the table, too, but Neil started talking about it and I started thinking... and I had a couple drinks..." He shrugs and smiles. "Didn't hate the idea. Didn't really hate it when I thought about it sober, either. I dunno, I just... I like what we have just fine. But I think, if you wanted more..."

Tom couldn't keep the surprise off his features and he paused in the act of unpacking water bottles and fruit.

He set everything very carefully down on the blankets and look up at Mike consideringly, chewing his bottom lip. There wasn't anything on the other man's features but sincerity and the faintest traces of nervousness. Tom didn't feel like he was being made fun of, but it wouldn't have been the first time he'd missed the joke.

"You're not the marrying kind," Tom said seriously. "You've been saying that since before here."

"Yeah, well, I wasn't the having-kids kind, either," he says, kissing the top of Flo's head. "And now look at me." He shrugs again, glancing out at the water, because the look on Tom's face is making him want to laugh, though not with any mocking. Which is probably exactly how Tom would take it.

"We live together," he says quietly. "We have the tattoos. The girls call you 'daddy', for God's sake, and it's just a matter of time before that's all they call Neil. And I know... I know I wanna be with you. Both of you. However long I got left, and if that's a lifetime, that's more than I coulda hoped for."

He looks back at Tom, and the smile on his face feels almost shy. "Seems to me like we're already most of the way there even without the ceremony."

"You don't exactly hook up and get married by accident, though, either," Tom said, raising his eyebrows to cover the fact that his pulse had just jumped up by a few dozen beats per minute.

"I...I feel like that too," Tom said, leaning forward, smudging his fingers down Mike's jaw. "Which is why...if you don't like the idea, I'm good as we are. You know that, right?"

"I don't dislike the idea," he says firmly, reaching up and closing his hand over Tom's. "I mean... look, I'd be happy to keep going like this, too. What I figured out is that I don't hate the idea of... of more. So what I'm trying to find out here is just how much you want it."

"I always wanted it," Tom said softly, looking up at Mike with wide, suddenly damp eyes. "I...."

He cleared his throat and abruptly looked away. The ocean was shrugging up onto the shore, just like always. He would always remember the dream of California, his blond haired grinning little girl. A father now, and maybe a husband. Maybe life ran in tighter circles than he ever realized before.

"I've always wanted it," he said again, rough and stilted. "You've thought about this?" he asked. "You're sure?"

"You think I'd be talking about it now if I wasn't sure?" He finally allows himself to laugh, quiet and affectionate, turning his head and pressing a kiss to Tom's palm. Somewhere, momentarily distant, the girls are laughing and swatting at each other with sticky hands.

"You want me to get down on one knee?"

"It was totally my idea first," Tom pointed out, grinning down at Mike, one eyes always fixed on the girls.

"Maybe I should make a production out of it," Tom said, "A dogtag in the middle of your sloppy joe, or something."

It didn't seem real. Not yet. Maybe it wouldn't, for a while. Maybe that wouldn't matter in the end.