Tag: prompts

In Part 1, Scott says something about Gordon being a fairly grumpy teenager as well; as a prompt: each of the boys at 16? I love this AU & the writing is fantastic!!

He’s sixteen, and he’s gonna be a cop just like his dad. He’s gonna have a uniform and a beat and a bunch of cop buddies, and he’s gonna make his family proud, just the same way his dad does. He’s gonna serve and protect, be the thin blue line, live up to the family name. Officer Tracy has a hell of a ring to it, and Scott can’t ever help but puff up a bit with pride when he hears people address his father. He’s gonna enlist in the academy right out of high school, and he’s going to kick the training course right in the ass. He’ll be a cadet for two years, and then he’ll be on the force, bringing home a paycheck that’ll make his part time after school job look as futile as it had felt, for all that he’d known his parents were grateful for the help. He’ll finally be making a damn difference.

He’s sixteen and if cancer killed his mother, it feels like might just be grief that kills him. The doctors had said that his mother hadn’t felt anything like pain, towards the end, that by the time she was in the hospice, it was mostly the morphine that had brought her life to an end. John’s been thinking about death pretty much ever since his mother first started dying, and with her gone, all he has to hope for is that the way she’d died had been a gentle, easy end to the fight she’d had for life. He stands at his mother’s graveside, with Gordon at his elbow and Alan in his arms, too old and too heavy to hold for this long, but it’s not like that stops him clinging. He’s not even sure Alan really understands, but then, he’s not sure if any of them ever will. It’s not fair, and it makes no sense.

He’s sixteen, and hockey and football both cost more than they can afford. Both the coaches keep telling him he oughta go for it, casting speculative glances at him as he continues to add weight to the bar, sending both their team captains over to spot for him, make their hopeful cases. He turns them down. The weightroom at school is free, and after class he can spend at least an hour, maybe as many as two, losing himself in the discipline of sets and reps, in the burn of his muscles and the fact that as long as he’s got an excuse to be here, then he doesn’t have to be at home, listening to Dad and Scott screaming at each other about money, and about what Dad does to get it. Sometimes it seems like the worst thing that could’ve happened was for Scott to follow in Dad’s footsteps. It turns out their Dad walks a pretty crooked path.

He’s sixteen and he’s got a concussion, because he’s fallen on the wrong side of a barbed wire fence, and cracked his head against solid concrete. His arms are scratched and scraped and he thinks his wrist might be broken, but all he can do about any of those things is stare up at the muddy darkness of the starless city sky, and hate himself for being so stupid. He’d just been bored. He’d just wanted to get out of the stupid fucking house, because he’d hated the sound of their grandmother crying softly in her room. He thinks he can hear sirens and he wonders what they belong to. He doesn’t know yet that the security guard, walking his rounds along the perimeter of the warehouse where he’d been trespassing, had seen him fall and hadn’t seen him get up afterward. He doesn’t know that the ambulance that’s been called has been called for him. And when the paramedics show up, he’ll be surprised by how nice they are, how kindly they’ll treat him compared to anyone else.

He’s sixteen and he’s got his license. He’d had to whine and rage and beg and bitch and carry on about it endlessly, before he’d managed to get his brothers to get their acts together, to do their goddamn jobs with respect to their responsibilities as his guardians. Scott had taught him the basics, driving around whatever empty lots met his strict standards and eventually working up to proper practice on the city streets. John had been the one to help him with the written test, had kept after him about studying and told him he couldn’t expect to coast on good test taking skills; that the rules of the road were important and that he needed to really know them. Virgil had waited patiently with him at the DMV, even when he’d had to go back for a second try at the road test. And Gordon had been the one to intercept the letter with his license in it, to hold it in a clenched fist and jab a finger in Alan’s collarbone, swearing up and down that if he ever had to pull his brother out of a car wreck, there’d be hell to pay beyond the pale of the accident itself.

But, finally, Alan’s got his license.

Now all he needs is a car.

something Scotty (because I’m so predictable)

( @preludeinz here and VERY OUT OF PRACTICE WITH PROMPTS.)

He has two uniforms, and he’d be hard pressed to say which one he prefers.

Technically they’re distinguished as Class A and Class B uniforms, the former being slightly dressier, slightly more professional, and the latter being geared more towards the more tactical side of things, comfort and freedom of movement and the accomdoation of all his gear. The former makes him look like a police officer. The latter makes him look like a cop.

And some days he wants to be a police officer. Some days he enjoys the formality of it, the staunch correctness of the uniform, with its creased pants and its shiny shoes and its air of consumate togetherness, symbolic of an officer of the law as a servant of the public. The day he’d graduated from the Academy had also been the first day his brothers had seen him in full parade gear, and there’d been some not-unjustified snickering—but there’d also been a certain sense of respect, admiration. Pride. He’d been as proud of himself as they’d been of him, the day he’d finally become a police officer.

But he’s been a police officer for a couple of years now, and it’s been long enough to know that there are days when he definitely wants to be a cop. Days when he wants the Class B uniform—the one he only wears when it’s going to be a day of serving warrants, checking on parolees, or working the beat in a rough part of town—with its heavier canvas pants, its polyester shirt, built to be layered beneath a tactical vest. He wants boots, heavy and durable and comfortable. He wants a hundred pockets for the entire suite of gear he carries, and he wants to feel like a member of the police force within the community, even if this means he sets himself apart, makes himself look like an adversary of the community at large.

Scott’s been on the force long enough that he associates the Class A uniform with funerals, with twenty-one gun salutes, and putting colleagues in the ground. The Class B uniform he associates with raids, with being shot at, with the bitter taste of adrenaline and with the gut wrenching twist of fear that still goes along with the scariest parts of this job. He loves this job, both the A and the B sides of it, but there’s darkness that colours each aspect.