Work Text:
“’Persnickety’ is not a word.”
“F—“
Luke opened his mouth, took a glancing look at his deeply concentrating daughter, and re-engaged Snappy Comeback Mode: “Screw you, yes it is.”
Except he was three beers deep, on a soon-to-be crashing sort of sugar high, and his snappy comeback came out more like petty high schooler with a vendetta. Which is how a lot of comebacks when it came to his new (ugh) partner tended to turn out.
Shaw set his jaw and looked back down at his and his sister’s current sorry lineup of letters with a muttered curse of “pretentious git.” The wine he’d been nursing went sour in his mouth.
Scrabble had always been a life-or-death sort of affair in the Hobbs household, but the arrival of a certain pair of sometimes over-competitive siblings into their lives drove the whole thing off a proverbial cliff. Which Deckard had threatened, literally, no less than five times in the last hour, when he was particularly miffed that Luke’s literary inclinations gave him an edge. The last thing he had read was the instruction manual for replacing the alternator on his sparkling new Ducati 959. And he’d even glossed that over.
“Well, fuck you all,” Sam hollered triumphantly after a moment, placing down a final letter tile with flourish. “‘Chutzpah,’ triple word score.”
“That’s my baby girl!” Luke crowed and threw up his arms from where they all sprawled out on his living room rug. He then quickly realized he should be parenting; his expression grew dour even as he high-fived Sam. “I mean— Language! But hell yeah, baby. Showing these clowns the Hobbs way.”
Deckard and Hattie groaned in tandem, even while Hattie attempted to covertly replace the extra vowel tiles she had surreptitiously nicked from the box to her cargo pant pockets during the course of the game. Sam noticed whilst her dad and Deckard verbally went at it. Narrowed her eyes, before bursting into a fit of amused giggles as Hattie winked.
“Deck, come off it. We got beat by a master, fair and square,” Hattie said, punching her brother in the arm for good measure. As always, it felt like punching a brick wall. Still, she grinned, feeling a sort of happy lightness in her chest she usually only got when they were around their mother. “I say we concede gracefully, eh?”
United, the Shaws gave a flourishing sort of bow where they sat cross-legged on the floor. It was clearly a coordinated routine. Sam beamed.
“Today, you’ve received the highest honor a human being can possibly achieve,” Deckard recited as if reading from a sacred text. He waggled his usually severe eyebrows in Sam’s direction, to her continued delight. “The Shaws bow to very few, Miss Hobbs.”
He’d never thought he liked kids. Never thought he’d want ‘em, never thought he’d want to be in the same room with one for more than a few minutes. They made him uncomfortable; little, impressionable people who tended to see right through his carefully constructed walls. As it turned out, a lot of things were changing in his life recently.
“I dunno. Sure were ‘bowed’ by that Mexican place we took you to last night,” Luke supplied helpfully from the kitchen after a moment. He had stood up with a yawn, and was currently clearing the accumulated pile of dishes about them. “Not even three plates of endless fajitas in and you two gave up the ghost. It’s all that sorry excuse for food y’all got across the pond. Sad state of affairs, brother.”
Without missing a beat, Deckard parried with: “We all can’t chug raw eggs and get muscle milk in through an IV drip, brother.”
Hattie made a wry sort of face while the three of them got to work on cleaning up the Scrabble board, commenting, “Huh. That was downright cordial. Progress.”
“I’m working on it,” Sam replied. “I heard if you spray cats with water when they do something you don’t like, it’ll train them to do it less in the future! And we already got one of those to water the plants I’m growing for the science fair. See?”
Running to a nearby end table, she held a small spray bottle aloft, waving it this way and that. The fearsome Hobbs and Shaw flinched in unison.
Hattie cackled in sheer amusement, glancing between the two of them as they tried their darndest to play off the involuntary reaction. Neither of them were entirely successful.
“Think I’m gonna steal that idea from you in the future. God knows it’ll be helpful on missions when these two idiots are misbehaving.”
Then, in unison from a pair of incensed voices: “We don’t misbehave!”
Meanwhile, while the two human brick walls bickered in increasingly high-pitched tones of voice, the two other occupants of the house schemed. Only way to cope, really.
“Kid, you know what I think your victory deserves? Ice cream,” Hattie suggested blithely while jangling the keys to one of Luke’s many, many cars in midair. They’d made their way towards the door without either Luke or her brother’s notice. Sam, of course, was more than amenable. “We’re leaving! Have fun being assholes!”
“Don’t let her wheedle you into letting her try to drive in an empty parking lot!” Luke called after them mid-complaint, hands occupied with drying a plate. “Not until she’s ten! …Nine and three-quarters, at least!”
As they made their way out the door, Sam pulling on her yellow raincoat and shouting a promise from the driveway to bring them back a flurry if they behaved, Hattie shot her brother a Look. The loaded kind. The kind Deckard had given her when she’d been too chickenshit to try and ask the girl in the year above them that she’d had a raging crush on to the end-of-term disco. (Which Luke didn’t remotely notice, as he was currently reminding Sam not to attempt to grift the poor, underpaid McDonald’s employee.) Then they were gone, and the house was oddly silent. Deckard glanced about the place with hands shoved into the pockets of his slacks.
The Hobbs household was a mismatch of tchotchkes from old missions, pictures of smiling, familial faces on every wall, and seemed to glow with a sort of… warmth that Deckard wasn’t used to. His “home” in London, even though it was more of a safehouse, was clean, white modernity. All angles and sharp corners and deathly cold. The women (and men) he took back to his place barely wanted to stay the night. Like they’d catch something if they stayed for more than twenty-four hours. Fitting. But Deckard Shaw wasn’t one for comprehending symbolism, or acknowledging just how content he felt at the moment, so he poured all his attention into setting the Scrabble box back onto the messy shelf from whence it came.
“I’m blaming you and Hat for bringing this shit weather from the UK,” Luke said after a good few moments of silence, thumbing out the kitchen window. The surface of the backyard pool was rippling with drops of rainwater, along with a general gray, overcast sky blanketing the nighttime city.
“You want us to pack up now? Suits me. Say the word.”
Luke replied with a curt “no.” Then, instantly amended with: “It’d just be a pain in the ass to haul you two back to LAX before your flight leaves. Or to a crappy ass motel. Wherever.”
Surprisingly enough, Deckard settled for only giving a little “tch” noise of disapproval. He moved to lean against the marble kitchen countertop directly behind Luke with arms crossed across his barrel of a chest. Assessed with his usual cold calculation. It was… nice seeing the guy in his habitat. No super soldiers to take down, no Dom shouting in their earpieces about NOS, or pink slips, or whatever other nonsense the emphasis-on-the-capital-“F” Family had gotten into now. Just a veritable mountain of dishes. Luke Hobbs, DSS agent with enough raw charisma to charm inanimate objects, shouldn’t be doing dishes.
Apparently, the man himself thought so too, with how many days now of Deckard being little to no help as a guest in his house.
“You gonna offer to help, or—“
Oh.
Alright.
There was a warm presence against his back. Luke could feel it under his ancient Oakland Raiders shirt; all unforgiving muscle in a much lither package. Deckard, standing close enough to his side to sense his body heat radiating in waves. Both their eyes were cast anywhere but at one another, like nervous, clammy-palmed kids on a first date. Which just reminded Luke of why he didn’t make a habit of dating anymore.
If you’re thinking of Deckard Shaw, former quasi-terrorist and general annoyance, anywhere near the proximity of the word “date,” you are so incredibly fucked.
“Here I thought you were the one with the personal space issues, tightwad,” Luke managed in a wry attempt to crack a joke, cutting the vibrating tension with a dull knife. “Can I help you?”
A very, very dull knife. It landed with a thud, along with the plate he’d been cleaning into the sink. No response, apart from feeling Deckard’s weight shift from foot to agile foot.
Meanwhile, Deckard was internally weighing whether or not this was worse than hypothetically getting shot. Hattie would absolutely throttle him in sheer frustration if he didn't go through with it, so. The pattern of a little ceramic car currently sitting on the counter that Sam had no doubt made in art class was suddenly fascinating.
The silence broke like that hypothetical gunshot. Luke cleared his throat, hand clenching on the corner of the counter hard enough to crack it the tiniest bit.
“If we’re doing this, we keep this to ourselves.”
Despite the noise of the rain outside, they both could hear the click of Deckard’s throat as he swallowed, hard. He made a vague hand gesture at nothing in particular.
“’Course. You imagine the embarrassment for me if this got out? Could be doing so much better.”
“Same here. All sorts of playboy models lining up, begging for my number,” Luke replied instantly, even as he pivoted against the edge of the sink. He put a thumb through one of Deckard’s belt loops. It felt right and, somehow, it wasn’t making him blind with rage. It was… good, actually. “Really.”
In their first moment of true eye contact in the last few minutes, Luke had never seen his partner’s expression at this level of wry amusement. As if his eyebrows were gonna fly off his face from how hard they shot up.
“Really.”
“Shut your goddamn mouth and get over here, Shaw.”
They were both smiling into the kiss when their mouths met. It was surprisingly chaste at first, feeling one another out. Heat bloomed in toe-curling waves in Deckard’s belly. Then, he sunk into the hard line of Luke’s chest with a little happy noise, and everything felt like speeding through a sharp curve. Still-wet hands from doing the dishes wrapped around Deckard’s waist; the taste of shitty beer and bitter wine mingled on their tongues. It was good, and simple, and devastatingly uncomplicated. For two people who hadn't really ever got what Dom was on about with the whole "found family" thing, it was all beginning to make some sort of vague sense.
Then, Luke was giving one of his deep, rumbling sort of laughs into his mouth, and Deckard broke away with his brows heavily knit together. The expression on his face was half-dazed, half-starry eyed, and he’d deny it virulently later.
“Wha’ the hell—“
“You are so tiny.”
And they were bickering again at a furious, roaring clip. But, as Sam noted as she and her new favorite auntie returned later, Uncle Deck and her dad decided to sit awfully close on the sofa.
“Progress,” Hattie mouthed silently, eyebrow quirking with the very same observation while licking her ice cream’s spoon clean.
Sam nodded, grinned, and confidently proposed the idea of another game of Scrabble. Everyone else groaned in unison.