Work Text:
December 2023
“Oh— Brooklynn will love this!” Trevor exclaims, holding up a pink cropped t-shirt with a glimmer of excitement, before he pauses. “She can put that on herself, right?”
Darius nods, his eyes mostly on a piece of paper in his hand. “She can put on most things herself; it’s literally only zips she uses her teeth on, and buttons on shirts she can’t do without a button hook.”
“Sorry, without a what?” Ash frowns.
“What, a button hook?” Darius repeats like it’s obvious. Like this part of Brooklynn’s daily routine her dads evidently don’t share with her is that blatant. “It hooks the buttons, and— I’ll show you later. Hard to explain.”
He heads along the aisle a little further, running his fingers along the clothes with a gentle touch, before selecting a fleecy yellow jacket with a satisfied smile. “Brooklynn’s favourite.”
“But she— I thought she liked pink.” Ash insists.
Darius shrugs. “She always likes to wear yellow around us.”
And it might be the nonchalant way he says it, or maybe it’s the words he doesn’t say — but it rubs Trevor and Ash the wrong way. The possessive us that says it all.
“We can get them both,” Trevor says, his voice clipped. “What other things is she into?”
“You don’t know?” Darius frowns — and if they didn’t know better, they would think Darius was being facetious, but no. He’s genuinely surprised.
“She has been a little... distant this past year,” Trevor says. “Every time we try to talk to her, she brushes us off.”
“Well, she’s been busy getting back to normal and rebuilding her relationships with us,” Darius says — and this time, there is something else tucked under his tone. It almost accuses them, jailing them for a crime none of them dare say. Trevor and Ash know they weren’t the most attentive parents, but Brooklynn was always so self-sufficient — they just thought she did best that way. She was always two steps ahead, sprinting away just out of their grasp.
And now, the two men wonder if their baby girl felt chased away from them.
The moment hardens tensely, then passes. “She still likes Esther Stone,” Darius eventually says. “I was going to get her, Yaz, Sammy and Kenji all matching merchandise from online. She’s also been really into comedy books lately, so I—”
“Is she now?” Ash says, frowning.
“Yeah.”
Ash hms, folding his arms. “I thought mysteries were more her thing.”
“She’s branching out now,” Darius says, “I know you don’t see her as much anymore, but—” and they can’t label why but his words trigger something dark and primal that makes Ash grab Darius by the wrist.
“Look, you think you know Brooklynn so much better than we do just because of a couple of adventures on those goddamn islands, but we’re her dads. She’s our daughter.”
Darius’s face hardens, and he wrenches his wrist out of Ash’s grasp. “Oh, really? And was she your daughter when she was running around investigating mysteries by herself when she was still in high school? Was she your daughter when you let her become an influencer at thirteen?”
Ash’s voice burns with anger. “You have no idea what happened in our family.”
“Oh, your family? Who was more often than not sitting with Brooklynn for hours to make sure she ate? Because I saw my mom doing that far more than you did.”
“We never asked her to,” snarls Trevor. “Brooklynn was the one flying over to California nonstop to spend weeks with her boyfriend.”
“And why do you think she spent so long there? Moreso, why did you let her? You— you almost lost your daughter, but you couldn’t make her want to stay with you for more than a month at a time, and my mom was picking up the pieces!”
Trevor tries to step in, call off the fight before it can spiral into something even more destructive, but before he can, Ash says, biting and sharp, “We didn’t ask her to meddle.”
“Don’t you dare talk about my mom that way,” Darius says, his voice low and scalding. “She did more for Brooklynn’s mental health than you ever did. Meanwhile it took almost losing your daughter twice to get involved in her life.”
When neither replies for a moment, Darius says, “Let’s not talk about this now. We’re in public.”
“We’re not done with this,” Trevor says icily.
And they’ve never heard Darius angrier than now, when he says, “Oh, you aren’t.”