Author's Note: Compatible with my long Return of Todd trilogy, but reading that shouldn't be necessary to read this.
It started, appropriately enough, with Father's Day, or, to be precise, two days before Father's Day.
They'd all been in the kitchen cleaning up after breakfast. Bree and Ryder's school year was over; Jessica and Brody weren't going to work until the afternoon. They'd turned on the television to check the weather report, and the Today Show had been in the midst of a segment entitled How To Parent Like a Navy SEAL. Ryder had laughed more loudly than it was worth and turned the volume up.
The subject of the segment happened to have an eleven-year-old daughter, just as Brody did. It had never occurred to Brody, though, that he ought to tie Bree up and instruct her to hold her breath underwater while untying the knots.
Bree turned to him with dancing, determined eyes. "Will you teach me that?"
Brody and Jessica discussed it for hours before they agreed. It was Jessica, not Brody, who was most in favor of Bree's idea.
"I love that she loves you," said Jessica. "Once, I thought I might be jealous sharing her, or that the guilt that it was you and not Nash would be too much. But that's not how I felt once you and she got to know each other. I just felt happy for you and for her. I wanted you both to have that. I love that she wants to do something with you, something that only you can do with her."
"We've done lots of things together!" Brody protested. In his heart of hearts, Bree's dance recitals had always bored him a little, but he would never have missed one.
"But she's right on the verge of those years." Jessica shuddered. "Those years that I've been dreading since she was born. She's not going to want anything to do with us, and then all of a sudden you won't be the most important man in her life."
"Yes I will, because every time a boy comes over to this house looking for her I'm going to be sitting on the front porch in uniform with a rifle across my lap," said Brody. When he'd opened his mouth, he'd thought that he was joking. Upon hearing his words aloud he considered that perhaps the idea had merit.
"What do you suppose the chances are that that results in anything other than her sneaking off with boys and lying about it?" Jessica asked.
Brody grunted disconsolately. Unfortunately, Jessica was right.
"That's one more reason you should do it," Jessica continued. "I want to raise a stronger girl than I was." Her voice cracked.
"Jessica, you're strong," said Brody. He ran his hand down her face. "You've put me back together more than once."
"Maybe," she said hesitantly. "But when those boys start coming around— or worse, when she's somewhere on the other side of the world and grown men start hanging around— I want to know that we did everything we could to make her feel confident. Like she can fight through anything. Like she can always do better tomorrow than she did yesterday."
Brody nodded.
Then he grinned.
This was going to be fun.
Before they went anywhere near the pool, he made her work the knots endlessly, of course. On quiet evenings, the four of them would watch a silly movie together and Bree would sit on the floor with her ropes and her sheet of instructions, only glancing up at the television screen when something made Ryder jump up and down with glee beside her.
She became very good very quickly. Brody might have been biased, but he had always believed that Bree was good at practically everything.
The first time he wrapped his arms around Bree in the water and pulled her out because she had taken too long to surface for his comfort, she came up spitting mad that he hadn't given her a real chance. He let her complaints wash over him without really hearing them. He was too busy taking in, as if for the first time, how right Jessica was about how much Bree had grown.
Part of him would always see Bree as the tiny girl with long blonde pigtails and baby-round face, raising her arms above her head to invite him to pick her up so she could push the button to start the jukebox at Rodi's.
All of a sudden, she was nearly his height. People who had known Nash Brennan whispered when they thought that Brody couldn't hear that Bree looked very much like her biological father. Her pretty face and sparkling eyes were Jessica's, but her slender lanky build and her coloring were Nash's.
It was a waste of the well-meaning whisperers' energy to try to hide these facts from Brody as if he were somehow wounded by the reminder that Bree wasn't his blood. It was amazing, sure, to put his own first grade school picture beside Ryder's and marvel at the similarities. It was startling when Ryder shoved the frosting off of his cupcake, claiming that it was too sweet, the same way Brody had done as a child. (It wasn't as if Ryder was modeling on Brody; Brody had long since been convinced of the virtues of frosting.) But these were fascinating little footnotes and had nothing to do with why he loved Ryder. He loved Ryder for his boundless energy and his relentlessly positive and happy disposition. He loved Ryder for his terrible jokes and his quick laugh and his delight at finally being old enough for the Little League tee-ball division.
As he dragged Bree, still shouting, out of the pool, he couldn't believe that there had ever been a time when this child hadn't been his. The water that was his element surrounded them. He could feel her pulse pounding against his palm, her blood no different than his in the grand scheme of things.
Jessica never watched their lessons. She had offered, and said that of course she would do it if that made things safer, but she hadn't wanted to see.
"I support you and Bree one hundred percent. Always. But I do not need the visual."
Natalie, though, turned up on occasion in her sister's stead. She watched dispassionately enough and smothered Bree with congratulations when the lesson concluded.
"I might not be able to watch when you do it with Liam, though," she said casually, as if it had already been decided that Brody was going to do this with all of the children in his extended family. "I get where Jess is coming from. Oh, Breezy, I'm taking Liam and Ryder to Sesame Place tomorrow. Do you want to join us or are you too old for that?"
It didn't surprise Brody, then, that the first thing Bree did after Brody pronounced her drown-proofed was rub it in Sam Manning's face that she could do something that he couldn't do.
Sam and Bree had styled themselves "best cousins" for almost as long as Brody had known them. Having had a rather lonely childhood himself, he appreciated Sam and Bree's devotion to each other. However, their particular style of friendship had resulted in periodic bouts of terror for their assorted parents. All in all, there had been three emergency room visits: treatment for near-hypothermia when they'd run away in a blizzard at age seven; stitches in Sam's face the next year when they'd given a field trip chaperone the slip and tried to crawl through an abandoned mine; and of course, Bree's broken wrist from the time she'd just had to climb higher than Sam in the sugar maple tree, no matter the cost.
Ryder, taking up the longstanding tradition of copying his older sister, called Liam his best cousin. Ryder and Liam were every bit as close as Sam and Bree. Ryder and Liam simply managed to do it without ever so much as disagreeing on what game to play or when to eat their snack. Every year, they had a joint birthday party not for their family's convenience but because they always wanted the exact same thing. At tee-ball practice, they cheered each other on and never breathed a word about who had played better. It was refreshing and Brody was going to enjoy it as long as it lasted.
Todd came along to watch the first time that Brody took Sam into the water. Bree, too, was watching eagerly and filling Sam's head with a thousand tips on how best to approach the thing, great expert that she now was. Sam's jaw was set with determination.
Sam didn't do badly at all on his first attempt— he did about as well as Bree had done. Brody aborted the lesson early, though, when Bree's terrified shriek split the air. Brody pulled himself and Sam out of the water to see that Todd had flung Bree over his shoulder and was carrying her inside. Sam and Brody followed as quickly as they could, entering the kitchen just in time to hear Bree's bedroom door slam.
After a long moment, Jessica quietly suggested that Todd and Sam should go, and Bree would text Sam that evening. Todd nodded and escorted a protesting Sam out the door. Brody and Jessica adjourned to Bree's bedroom. Bree hadn't bothered to lock the door, which saved Brody the trouble of picking the lock.
Jessica asked Bree quiet questions about about how the day had gone, gradually leading up to the moment when Sam's head had gone under the water. "I knew nothing was going to happen to him. I knew Dad wouldn't let it. It just looked really horrible," Bree explained at last, plastering herself against Jessica's side the way she had when she'd been much younger.
"It does look really horrible," agreed Jessica. "Why do you think I don't watch?"
"But you don't like any of the dangerous stuff Dad does. You hate that he's a cop."
Brody's eyes met Jessica's over Bree's head. He hadn't realized that Bree knew that that had ever been an issue.
"I don't hate that he's a cop," said Jessica. "It makes me very proud that every day he keeps other people safe. It's part of who he is and I knew that before we got married."
"We talked about it before I joined the police force," Brody added. "She gave me her blessing even though she knew it would be hard to love someone who goes into harm's way every day so soon after your father died the way he did."
"Did that accident happen right in front of you?" Bree asked Jessica.
Jessica inhaled sharply. "Yes. It did."
Bree nodded as if she was confirming something, but didn't push the subject further, for which Brody was grateful. "Watching it happen to someone else is worse than having it happen to you. When it's you, you can do something about it."
"Worrying about someone is hard, but I'm glad you feel that way," said Brody, and Jessica shot him a look that was half-pleased, half-annoyed. "Speaking of which, Sam is worried about you, so you need to text him and tell him that you're all right."
Bree agreed, cheerful again.
"I know you've got this noble protector thing going on, and I love you for it, but I don't like the idea of praising Bree for wanting to get hurt herself rather than see someone she loves get hurt. That's— that's how child molesters operate. Let me hurt you and I won't hurt your brother or your sister."
"I didn't mean it that way!" Brody objected. "I meant that I'm glad she has people she loves enough that she wants to protect them. I'm glad she's not alone. I don't ever want her to feel alone."
Jessica shook her head ruefully. "I don't ever want her to be vulnerable to anyone and you don't ever want her to feel lonely. I'm not sure these are realistic goals."
He couldn't say anything to that. Jessica was right. Bree was older and more independent every day, and there was no such thing as metaphorical drown-proofing.
"Hey." Jessica chucked Brody under the chin to make him look her in the eye. "We're doing okay."
And the wonder of it all was that they were.
The End.
Author's Other Note: Last month I had a dream that I was posting soap opera fanfic online. I saw the ff.n interface very clearly. As if this wasn't weird enough, the fic I was dream posting was for a couple I had never written (Eric/Nicole) from a show I hadn't watched for almost a year (Days).
So to make a weird situation weirder, I decided that if I was going to write myself a ficlet for Days, I should write one for OLTL, the show I actually miss. Then the Todd/Blair ficlet spawned the Brody/Jessica ficlet, and I decided that it would only be fair to have two Days ficlets if I was going to have two OLTL ficlets, so I checked in on Nick and Chelsea.
Thus, four ficlets which are basically variations on a theme, so much so that I suspect they're rather annoying if all read together. But I don't think that will be an issue unless someone has precisely the same taste in long-defunct soap opera couples as I do.
Hope you enjoyed reading!