Disclaimer: not mine
AN: To those who celebrate, have a safe and Blessed Easter xox
Naming Rights
Whenever Ruby Rabb wasn't in the best of moods, Harm liked to joke she was just like her mother. The joke was only with himself though; he'd never actually say it to his wife. Lately, Ruby had been a little more petulant than usual and Harm and Mac weren't sure if it was just a phase she was going through, whether she was coming down with a bug or if there was something else going on.
"Ruby, wash up for dinner!" Harm called and got no response. "Ruby!"
"Gee, I heard you," yelled the five year old before heading to the bathroom.
"She's grumpy again." David volunteered as he finished setting the table.
"Do you know as why?' Harm asked setting out the plates for the five of them before starting on the task of serving up vegetarian frittata and salad.
"Nope," he replied, shaking his head. "But I know she got into trouble from Miss Morris today."
"What for?" he questioned, the slice of frittata stopping midair on the lifter.
"Don't know," he said. "But Janie Cleary told me that her sister, Caitlyn, told her that Miss Morris was really cross with Ruby."
"What happened at school today, Ruby?" Harm asked as his youngest daughter appeared in the kitchen.
"Nothing," she replied quickly.
"Miss Morris was upset with you. What happened?" he questioned, focusing on the meal rather than on his fidgeting daughter.
"Nothing," she repeated.
"Really?" he prompted, looking at her.
"She told me off for calling Caitlyn Cleary a name," she blurted out.
"Well, name calling isn't very nice, is it?" he gently rebuked.
"No," she said shaking her head. "But..."
"No buts," he said firmly. "Tomorrow, I want you to apologise to her...okay?"
"But Caitlyn..." she protested.
"No buts," he repeated a second, third and fourth time as the child protested.
Ruby sighed. "Okay." There was no winning this argument with her father.
There was no real improvement in Miss Ruby's mood over the next few days and David had no further reports on trouble at school, so at bedtime one Wednesday night, Mac crawled in alongside her daughter and cuddled her tightly.
"Are you okay, pumpkin?" she asked, kissing her head.
"Aha," she said nodding, snuggling closer to her mother.
"You didn't kiss daddy goodnight," Mac said, rubbing her back.
"Cos I'm mad at daddy," she snapped.
"Why are you mad at daddy?" she questioned quietly.
"Cos daddy doesn't listen to me," she said quietly.
"When doesn't he listen to you?" she asked pulling back to see her daughter's face.
"All the time," she said with a yawn. "He just tells me off like Miss Morris and doesn't listen to my side."
"Tell mommy your side," she said caressing the child's face. While Ruby nodded in agreement, fatigue overtook her and she was asleep before the end of the first muttered sentence.
Joining her husband in the living room ten minutes later, Mac handed him a mug of coffee before sitting alongside him on the sofa.
"Ruby take long to settle?" he asked before taking a sip of the hot liquid.
"Not really," Mac said, "We had a little chat first and she's definitely not impressed with you at the moment."
"So I gathered," he replied. "Any particular reason?"
"She fell asleep before she said but she did indicate you don't listen to her and you tell her off just like her teacher," Mac reported, curling her legs under her.
"I told her off for calling the other child a name," he said in his own defence.
"I'm just saying what Ruby told me," she replied. "Perhaps you can have a chat in the morning, see if she'll tell you herself."
The following morning Ruby wasn't telling Harm anything. In fact, she wasn't talking to him period. He tried to tease, cajole and trick her into speaking but each attempt was met with cold silence. While this particular daughter looked more like himself than his wife, she had inherited her mother's stubbornness when it came to dealing with him and the perceived things he had done wrong. Deciding to let the issue go and not upset his child before school, Harm figured he'd force the issue in the afternoon and resolve the matter one way or the other.
By the time he returned home from the afternoon school run, he had a message on the home phone from Julia Morris about Ruby's behaviour that day. Rather than phone her back immediately, Harm decided to approach his daughter first. Walking into her bedroom, Harm took a seat at the foot of the bed as Ruby sat in her little reading corner by the window.
"How was your day today, Ruby?" he asked, his voice soft and calm.
No response.
"Was it a good day?" he probed.
Still no response.
"Was it a bad day?" he continued, trying to get some sort of acknowledgement he was still in the room.
Nothing.
In the early days of their relationship, Harm had learnt that if Mac was determined not to speak to him then the only thing to do was to break her. Unfortunately, that usually meant getting her even more riled up than she already was and pushing every possible button until she blurted out the very thing she was trying to hide. Shaking his head, he figured it was time to try the same tactic on his daughter.
"Miss Morris phoned," he said quietly, Ruby's eyes darted up briefly. "She said there was a problem today. Do you want to tell me about it?"
The silent treatment continued.
"Was it a problem with Caitlyn again? Were you calling her names again?" he asked. While she said nothing he could hear a small growl coming from her. Finally, he was getting somewhere. "Because we spoke about that on Monday. I said you weren't to call her names. That you had to apologise. Did you apologise? Ruby talk to me!"
"No!" she shouted taking him aback. "Not talking to you 'cos you never listen!"
"Yes, I do," he said firmly.
"No, you don't!" she shot back. "You say you do but you don't."
"How about you come and sit on my lap and we can talk about it, Ruby Duby?" he said gently, holding his arms out.
"Don't call me that! That's not my name! I hate my name!" she spat and Harm knew he'd hit a nerve.
"What's wrong with Ruby, honey?" he asked, watching as she stood up and tried to shove the book into its place on the shelf.
"I hate it! It's horrible!" she stated turning to face her dad, her face flushed.
"Has someone been teasing you about it?" he asked beckoning her over
Slowly, Ruby edged towards her father. While she was still upset with him, she desperately wanted his touch, his comfort, and it didn't take long for her to be curled up in his lap, her little hand gripping his shirt.
"What's happening at school, baby girl?" he asked quietly before kissing her head.
"Caitlyn and all them have been teasing me," she all but whispered. "Saying 'Ruby Duby, Ruby Duby all the time...and 'Ruby Rabb is a crab'."
"That's not very nice, is it?" he said, rubbing her arm.
"No," she replied. "And they do it all the time and never get in trouble and the one time I call Caitlyn a name she tattles and I get in trouble and it's not fair."
"How come you didn't tell us or Miss Morris about the name calling?" he asked, raising her face so blue eyes met blue eyes.
"Because I didn't want to be a tattle tale 'cos you and mommy keep saying not to tattle on people," she said burying her head into his chest once more.
"We do say that," he agreed. "But there's a difference in tattling and in getting help to stop people teasing you."
"I tried to tell you," she protested quietly. "But you just kept saying 'no buts', 'no buts'," she said pulling back.
"Oh, so I did," he admitted guiltily. "I'm sorry for not listening to you, Ruby."
"I don't like the name Ruby anymore. I want something different," she said playing with his collar.
"I love the name Ruby," he said, kissing her head. "It wasn't a name on our list but when I was holding you just after you were born it came to me. You had the biggest blue eyes and the cutest ruby red lips."
"I still don't like it," she said with a yawn.
"I know how you're feeling," Harm said. "I've never liked my name either."
"Why?" she asked, looking up at him.
"Because it's not a very nice name," he said, "But it was my dad's name so I never wanted to change it."
"And I never liked my name either," said Mac from the doorway, surprising them both. "Which is why most people call me Mac. I didn't want a really girly name, especially when I was becoming a marine."
"So, no one likes their name," Ruby said, putting her arms out for a cuddle from mommy.
Secure in her mommy's arms, Ruby left her legs resting on her daddy's lap, resting her head on Mac's shoulder.
"Well, if you really don't like Ruby," Mac started quietly. "Your middle name is Patricia, so we could call you that, or Pat or Patty or Trish, like grandma..."
Ruby thought about it before shaking her head, Patricia, or its variations, weren't for her either.
After some deep thought and an even deeper sigh, Ruby's mind was made up.
"My name's Ruby Patricia MacKenzie Rabb, isn't it?" she asked, double checking before she made her announcement.
"It is," Mac confirmed, stroking her arm.
"Well, I wanna be called Mac, just like you," she announced, grinning broadly.
"Really?"Mac asked surprised.
"Yep, I wanna be just like you," she said cuddling a little closer.
The following day, Ruby would only answer to Mac which David and Ella found funny. Once Harm had dropped the children at school, he phoned Miss Morris to explain the situation. Both he and Mac had told their youngest child she had to use the name Ruby at school, but they wanted the teacher to be aware of the issue and its origins.
When he picked her up in the afternoon, Harm went into the school to speak to the teacher and find out how the day had gone.
"Good afternoon, Mr Rabb," Julia Morris said as the children departed and Ruby stopped to tie her shoelace. "Ruby and I had a long chat today and I discovered that Caitlyn has been calling her names for a long time and Ruby has just been putting up with it. I had asked her on many occasions if there was a problem and she had said no."
"She didn't want to tattle," Harm replied.
"So I explained the difference between tattling and getting help and she promised she'd ask for help to deal with such matters in the future rather than keep it to herself," the teacher finished.
"I'm glad to hear it," he said, with a nod, bending down to scoop up his daughter and kissing her hello. "Did you have a good day, baby?"
"Yes, daddy," she replied. "I had lots of fun."
"And Miss Morris said you and she had a big talk," he continued, smiling as she played with his hair.
"Aha," she said with a shy smile.
"So does that mean you want to be called Ruby again?" he asked, crossing his fingers that the answer would be yes.
"I don't know," she said.
'I don't know' was the same response Mac got when she asked later that evening. Figuring the child would come around in her own time, Mac and Harm resorted to calling their daughter by pet names while Ella and David called her Mac or Ruby.
It as Sunday night and the children were all in bed, the youngest two having been asleep for a couple of hours. Not all that interested in the movie they were watching, Harm started placing gentle kisses on his wife's head and neck. It didn't take long before they were horizontal on the sofa and the gentle kisses had given way to much more passionate exchanges. Deftly, he had managed to unbutton Mac's shirt and unhooked her bra. His right hand was caressing her breast, his fingers teasing her nipple, when he caught sight of movement out of the corner of his eye.
"Ruby!" he exclaimed, sitting up and placing a cushion on his lap as Mac pulled her shirt closed, thankful that the light was off and the television screen only provided a dim light source.
"I've been thinking," she said, walking over to them, completely oblivious to what she had interrupted. She went to climb onto Harm but Mac quickly pulled her onto her lap.
"About what?" she asked, trying to even out her breathing.
"I think I should go back to Ruby," she said, leaning her weary head on her mother's shoulder.
"Why?" Harm asked.
"Cos I woke up cos you were calling 'Mac', 'Mac' and I thought you were calling me," she said with a yawn. "So I figure if you call me Ruby then I won't think you're calling me when you're calling mommy."
"Sounds like a good idea," Harm said, shifting uncomfortably, for more than one reason. He didn't want his daughter responding to his wife's name when called in the throes of ecstasy.
"So, Miss Ruby," Mac said, standing up with the child on her hip. "Time for you to go back to bed."
"Okay, mommy," she said, wrapping her arms around Mac's neck and resting her head on hers.
By the time Ruby was bedded down and asleep, Harm had turned off the television and was stripped to his boxers in the bedroom.
"I think I'm gonna call you Sarah for a bit," he said as Mac locked the bedroom door behind her. "Especially in here."
"Worried about Rube?" she asked and Harm nodded.
"Yeah," he said. "It was bad enough her walking in when she did. I think I'd die if she caught us doing anything more ...um..."
"Advanced?" she offered and Harm nodded. "Well, I don't know if I'd die but I would be mortified. So, I guess Sarah's the way to go for a bit."
"Well, Sarah," he said suggestively, his voice dropping an octave. "Would you like to continue where we left off?"
"Oh, definitely, Harmon," she replied, leaning in to kiss him. "Unless of course you'd like me to call you something else..."
"You, my gorgeous wife, can call me anything you please," he whispered into her ear before nibbling on the lobe.
"In that case," she said, dropping her shirt and bra to the floor, "I'll call you Stud or Sexy or Tiger or..."
Anything else she was about to say disappeared as Harm's tongue slipped into her mouth. They could continue their discussion on naming rights in the morning, Right now, he was more interested in their physical discussion than anything else and Mac was in full agreement. For the next twenty minutes the only words uttered were those in ecstasy and names were not mentioned once.