Chapter Text
Nobody calls you by your first name.
At the office, you go by Mister Egbert or just Egbert alone, but only to the few coworkers you consider close enough to allow the privilege.
At home, your son just calls you Dad.
To others still, you’re pipefan413.
You prefer it, honestly.
You lead a neat existence. A pressed and starched existence, sometimes as distant as office work, other times as intimate as baking.
You keep your world carefully filed and separated in visually-coded mental organizers- harlequin for home, monochrome for the office- and you like it that way.
==>
You’ve grown accustomed to John’s distaste for your baking. It saddens you, a little, but you understand.
His suspicious nature hasn’t lessened with age, unfortunately. He’s stopped drawing on the walls, now, a strapping lad of nineteen, but he still eyes the friendly red spoon of Crocker Corp. with a cold stare when he doesn’t think you’re looking.
You sigh when you catch him doing it, a gesture more for the benefit of his expectations than one born of any real feeling. By now, you’ve long been resigned to supposing that it could always be worse.
He’s grown up quite handsomely. You can’t say you condone his frequently sloppy manner of attiring himself, and heaven knows it only matches the breezy mess of licorice black curls that you gave up on taming so many years ago all too well, but you recognize the importance of being supportive, of allowing him to find his own way, even if you have your doubts about the practicality of its apparent direction.
You suppose he inherited his interest in misusing perfectly good meringue from his grandmother, but you have not yet succeeded in convincing him that shaving cream is a more desirable, if less amusing, alternative.
==>
When you hear the thunder of John’s footsteps running down the stairs, followed closely by the equally resounding- though somewhat less endearing and, perhaps, less welcome- rap of leather-braced knuckles on your front door, just in time for the slap of one bare foot hitting the hardwood of the living room floor, you have only one shamefully uncharitable thought:
You still dislike that Strider fellow.
You dislike his impudently upturned collar.
You dislike his tastelessly ludicrous eyewear.
You dislike his garishly emblazoned belt buckle and the worn leather of his shoes and his sun-bleached baseball cap and the cuts and bruises you always see peeking out from under his ward’s sleeves and neckline.
You dislike the man you know is standing on your doorstep, and you suspect that he not only knows, but revels in it.
There have been times when you have suspected that he takes a special sort of interest in discomfiting you.
In your worst moments, you suspect the long stares and loitering smirks that linger with him in your doorway of containing meaning beyond just the inspiration of discomfort.
Needless to say, despite your disgruntlement in so obviously catering to his whims, he does, in fact, discomfit you, and so you take your time in washing the flour and cocoa from your arms before rolling down your sleeves.
The low murmur of another voice in the living room, deeper in pitch than John’s boyish chatter but higher than the carrying rumble of the object of your disdain, inspires in you a thrill of chastened self-reproach. You don’t dislike the younger Strider brother. You welcome Dave’s visits.
You enjoy Dave’s visits to your home far more than John’s visits to the Strider household.
When John returns from such a visit, he does so stinking of appallingly poor nutrition, old sweat, and cheap cologne, and the profanity begins to eke out between his words in the days that follow.
He catches himself, of course, like the good son he is, but you still register the errant shhs and fuhs, regardless.
When Dave visits, he calms his more explicit language within a day, two on rare occasion- occasion you strongly suspect has to do with the level of stress he keeps tucked behind those ever-present sunglasses- but he never seems to manage the feat of keeping his elbows off of the table during dinner, and proves resistant to your gentle suggestions that he abandon his aviators even momentarily for the sake of practicality.
You’ve accepted it, begrudgingly. You find it difficult to begrudge that shiny crop of buttermilk blond; always succumb to exasperated affection for the boy behind that errant spackling of brown sugar freckles.
You’ve seen his eyes just once, the chance product of meeting in a hallway too awash with pre-dawn greys for him to see through tinted lenses as he made his stumbled way to the lavatory, and in that instant of sleepy hesitation he met your gaze before he passed you.
They were maraschino red, with the kind of liquid clarity of colour that overpowered even the shifting monochrome of the half-gloom, and for the world you can’t imagine why he’d hide them.
But inescapably, while Dave is many things, he is not your son, and you are not entitled to question his decisions.
To you, Dave is a sweet boy, for all the failings of his upbringing that you might find yourself inclined to see, and you admire the resilience of his sweetness and can only hope his life improves. But privately you fret, because you suspect that such a thing could be affected if only he would accept the importance of being properly attired.
He’s a good-looking boy, you think. A tailored suit and a good face alone can do even the poorest man wonders.
There’s a hissed reminder in the familiar breathless whumph of a large duffel bag being tossed carelessly across a hardwood floor, and you abandon both your apron and your hopeless speculations with it.
==>
Good lord, you dislike this man immensely.
He’s learned, at least, not to come into your house with his filthy, disgracefully unkempt shoes, but he seems to have taken this as an invitation to simply throw things inside rather than come in at all, and the manner in which he does so suggests very little interest in ensuring that his sibling or your son can intercept them before they damage your collection of mirthful figurines.
He pauses when he sees you, and the combination of your passage through the saloon-style doors that separate the kitchen from the living room and the shattered gleam of his atrocious belt buckle only reinforces your sense of antagonism; not only has he intruded upon the aesthetic sensibilities of your home, but infused the very atmosphere with a crude Southern flavour unfit for a tasteful gentleman.
You watch him raise a hand to the brim of his hat and tip it to you, and the languid crookedness of his smile assures you that he knows how absurd an action it is.
You do not return the gesture, but you deign to tip your own head in fractional acknowledgement because you are a person of practiced manners, even to those who mock them.
When he slips back from the doorway, you can only feel relieved, even pleased, perhaps, because the void his imposing frame leaves behind isn’t empty at all.
In it is a young man who seems to grow another measured hand’s width with every passing year, a fast-leavening creature of honeyed brightness invariably arrayed in an incongruous combination of old t-shirt, faded sneakers, and worn-out jeans.
Except that this time, this year, your keen eye catches a tellingly straight and even flat-felled seam amidst the rich black of new denim, and despite the distraction of John’s excitement and the weight of another overstuffed drawstring bag in each hand, Dave straightens from his customary slouch when he greets you.
And for a moment, you can almost see a gentleman.