Notes: This was written for Yuletide 2014 for a request that asked for happy interaction with nothing terrible happening in the background. I'm resposting it here now that the anonymity period is over. Love and thanks to SChimes, who reminded me which moments actually qualified as "nothing terrible happening in the background" and then beta read the whole thing for me.
Continuity Notes:
Scene #1 is set after 1.03 and before 1.04
Scene #2 is set during 2.03.
Scene #3 is set after 3.10 but before 3.11.
Scene #4 is set just before 3.15.
Scene #5 is set sometime after season three, in early summer 2015.
I
Sharon wasn't his mother.
She didn't love him and Rusty didn't like her, not really, but he'd been stuck with her twenty-four seven for weeks thanks to that emergency care bullshit. She probably wasn't going to throw him in Juvie. He probably wasn't going to sue her.
He'd lived worse places, and he was trying to be nicer to her now that he didn't have anywhere else to be.
He was starting a new school in the morning. The same great school that had gotten her perfect kids into all of those amazing colleges. He didn't know why she was making a big deal about that when they both knew he'd be out on his own in a year and a half, but he knew that he'd need a high school diploma to get a real job.
And she was feeding him.
The last people really had been totally weird about food.
Sharon at least asked what he liked to eat, and he noticed some of those foods were appearing on the grocery list. Even the peanut butter that he'd told her he liked because it came in the jar with the blue lid. When they'd gone to the store that afternoon, she'd deviated from the list and added a pound of ground beef and a bag of hamburger buns to the cart without comment.
They made the hamburgers together that night.
That was kind of a thing. Sharon cooked with him. Not every night, and nothing fancy—she liked the tubs of pre-mixed salad greens and they ate a lot of roasted chicken with vegetables, but she expected him to help and she didn't act like he couldn't be trusted with the knives.
What she didn't seem to trust him with was hamburger shaping. After he mixed an egg yolk and some salt and pepper for seasoning into the beef, Sharon took the bowl away from him and asked him to grab her the skillet from the pots and pans drawer.
She didn't remind him this time which one that was.
He had the skillet in his hand before he realized that he didn't need the reminder.
It was one of the nice ones, the heavy black ones that weighed a ton. Rusty heard the bottom scrape against the burner as he set it down and he winced, but Sharon was taking the hamburgers way too seriously and didn't seem to notice.
"Should we do this outside?" he asked. "You have a grill."
"Mm," she said, and pressed her thumb into the exact center of one of the four perfectly even patties she had on the sheet of wax paper in front of her. "It needs cleaning. I haven't used it in awhile, and I don't turn it on for four hamburgers."
God. She even had rules about burgers.
"So it just sits there? All the time?"
She made the same indentation in each of the three remaining burgers. "My children were here at the beginning of summer. We did some barbecuing then."
He couldn't figure out what the deal was with her kids. There were no pictures of them up on the walls, but she mentioned them a lot. Usually together, just as "my kids," no names or anything. He was pretty sure she had a son and a daughter but only because he'd snooped through the closet in—well, it wasn't his room, but... the closet in his room. There were some women's jeans and those were probably her son's shirts. He hoped they weren't her husband's. He didn't want to be wearing the same shirts as some old guy.
"So like, do they visit a lot?" he asked. "Your kids? Because my room—I—I mean, the spare bedroom—"
"Is yours." She looked up then. Rusty glanced away before she could catch his eye. "You don't have to move out when they visit. We won't have to worry about it this Christmas, anyway, I don't think. We've gone to Park City the last few years, and my mother's mentioned wanting to go back."
She had parents too.
"Where?"
"Utah."
"I've never been to Utah." It wasn't like he wanted to go there, either, but she was talking like she expected him to still be there at Christmas, months from now.
That was...
Different.
And kind of... okay.
Rusty reached for the plate of neat little hamburgers. "In and Out mustard grills their burgers."
"This isn't In and Out," she said. "But there's some mustard in the fridge."
He turned around before she could see him smile.
II
Rusty had really grown into a proper teenager.
He rolled his eyes when she told him to be careful and complained about doing his homework. And doing his laundry. And cleaning his room. "It's not fair" were his favorite words.
Currently, he was complaining about dinner.
"What, again?" He made a face at her when she asked how he felt about stir-fry.
"If you have a better suggestion, I'm happy to hear it." When he opened his mouth, she added, just for the sake of being an impossible tyrant, "No pizza, no hamburgers, and you're required to name at least one vegetable."
Rusty gave her the sort of glower that meant he wanted her to know he was very unhappy with the situation, and then he went without further argument to pull two bags of vegetables from the freezer, which he proceeded to drop on the counter with a disgruntled huff.
When she raised an eyebrow in warning, he closed the freezer door gently.
Sharon turned around and knelt to retrieve the rice cooker from one of the lower cabinets, her lips pressed together in an effort to remain stern.
For all that their situation was unique, this felt very familiar. Sharon had helped two other children through this particular stage. They had all survived unscathed, and Emily and Ricky had matured into thoughtful, decent people who made her proud every day.
When Sharon carefully leveled the rice in the measuring cup, Rusty made another little huff. His expression this time was more reluctantly amused than irritated, and Sharon smiled to herself as she went to get water for the rice.
It was moments like this when Sharon was most keenly aware that she had oversold her objectivity. The more he acted like a child who needed his mother, the more she acted as though she were his mother, and, well... she no longer felt like she was acting. She wanted to celebrate his accomplishments and comfort him when he was distressed. She wanted to shield him from hurt he had already known and send him back out into the world a confident, happy young man. She wanted to see him do great things.
The rice started, she went to assess the contents of the vegetable drawer. "Would you like mushrooms?"
Rusty, who had been leaning against the counter with his arms crossed since getting her those vegetables, shrugged.
But when she held the bag out to him, he took it without prompting. There were two bell peppers, one yellow and one orange. She took them both, and then grabbed a small piece of ginger and a container of diced onion left over from the omelettes they'd made last Sunday morning.
When Sharon turned around, the peppers in one hand and the ginger balanced on top of the tupperware lid, she saw that for all the complaining, Rusty had set out a cutting board for her too, and he'd given her the sharpest knife.
She smiled faintly, and accepted the silent apology.
They worked together in an easy silence, her drying the vegetables as he washed them, and then they stood side by side as they chopped.
"How's your essay coming?" Sharon pushed thin strips of peppers into a neat mound on one half of her cutting board. Already she could smell the fresh sweetness of the peppers mingling with the faint earthiness of the mushrooms Rusty was slicing.
"Fine."
"Did Lieutenant Tao's friend help you think of a more appropriate subject?"
She should really thank Rusty for that. It had worked out to her advantage. He'd kept Jason from interfering in her investigation for most of the afternoon, and (she hoped) he'd also learned something from Jason's guidance.
"Yes," he said, sounding unhappy again. "But like, no one else has to rewrite their essay, though..."
"Everyone else must have followed the directions more closely, then."
No, she no longer felt like his guardian in anything other than the most literal sense of the word.
"It's not fair."
"It's perfectly fair, actually," she said, and pointed at the knife in his hand. "Mushrooms, please. I hope you learned something this afternoon."
"Yeah," he said. "He's pretty cool, that Jason guy. You think I could be a TV writer?"
Sharon reached for the ginger. "I do."
"Really?"
"I think you're capable of many, many things. Although—" She turned just enough to fix him with a stern look. "I also think this is a goal a college degree would help you achieve, so you might think of this essay as the very first step in the process."
It wasn't that far-fetched of a goal, she thought. She'd never asked what he wrote about, but she'd grown used to seeing him hunched over his notebook, scribbling away.
Rusty stared at her, looking impressed despite himself. "How do you even do that?"
She looked down and cleared her throat, hoping he wouldn't notice the smile she couldn't quite suppress. "I've had practice."
"Are you like this with your kids too?"
"Oh," she said. She stole a slice of mushroom from him, tasting the sharpness of the ginger on her fingers as she ate it. "No. No, they'll tell you I'm much nicer to you. Are you almost finished? I'd like to eat before it gets too much later. And I want to read that essay in the morning."
III
Rusty kicked off his shoes near the front door, then, his body protesting at the idea of bending them over to pick them up, pushed them up against the wall with his toe. He'd had to turn on a light and that meant Sharon wasn't home yet. He didn't want her to trip over his shoes if she came in at two in the morning.
He didn't really want her to come in at two in the morning just in general because that would totally suck, but she was there by the time he got out of the shower. He heard her moving around in the living room when he opened the bathroom door. He stopped long enough to drop his dirty clothes on the floor of his room, and then he went to join her.
"Hey."
"Hey." She'd made it to the kitchen by then and from the looks of things had been home for awhile—she had on the black pants and long gray sweater she liked to wear at home, and there was a wineglass in one hand. With the other, she was rifling through one of the upper cabinets. When she saw him, she stopped and smiled.
"Were you at work?"
He didn't worry about her, not exactly, because he had spent enough time in her office to know that Sharon hardly ever went out and did anything dangerous, but... he felt better when she was home, anyway.
"I had some paperwork to finish. I thought I'd get it out of the way tonight. So?" she prompted, when he came and leaned against the breakfast bar. "How was your first day of work?"
"Did you know that actors are, like, really intense about their coffee?"
"Police officers, too." Sharon laughed, and waved him into the kitchen. "Are you hungry? Pick something simple. I'm starving."
He was too tired to really be hungry. "Is there more of that chicken and pasta thing?"
"I brought that with me for lunch." Her arm slid around his shoulders when he was close enough, gently guiding him away from the refrigerator so that she could open it. She stepped back a moment later and handed him a tub of salad greens, then gestured at the open cabinet. "Pick a soup. I'll make you a sandwich."
Rusty chose the lentil soup. The chicken soup was for when they were sick. Sharon really only liked tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches, and the fixings she had spread out across the counter were sprouts and avocado and the smoked turkey she liked from the deli down the street. Things that didn't go with grilled cheese.
When he turned around, there was a pot and a large spoon waiting for him on the stove.
"Thanks," he said.
Sharon rubbed his shoulder. "So what'd you do at work besides bring people coffee?"
These sort of questions used to bother him. He'd thought... he wasn't sure what anymore. That she didn't trust him? That she was trying to catch him in a lie? But no, she just actually wanted to hear about his day. That was almost weirder, because it wasn't like his life was seriously exciting.
"Sometimes I brought them water," he said, and heard Sharon muffle a snort. With a shrug, he twisted the plastic cap off of the soup carton. "I brought people paperwork and drinks for like twelve hours, and then sometimes I told them to shut up."
Sharon hummed. "More nicely than that, I hope."
"You yell at people all the time."
"Still," she said. "And everyone you worked with?"
He poured the soup into the pot. "They seem pretty cool."
There had been a couple of assholes, but everyone else seemed all right. Then there was Jeff. Jeff was definitely cool.
Silently, Rusty reached for the spoon without volunteering anything else about his day. He wasn't sure he wanted to tell Sharon about Jeff yet. She wouldn't make a big deal about it—she probably wouldn't make a big deal about it, but...
He felt a nervous flutter in his stomach.
He gave the soup a couple of stirs.
Later. He'd tell Sharon about Jeff later.
"That's still exciting," Sharon said. "Your first day of work. If it weren't so late, I'd take you out somewhere."
He didn't bother telling her she didn't have to. "I should take you somewhere," he said instead. "You and Lieutenant Tao. I only got the job because of you guys."
"Maybe," she said. "But keeping it will be up to you."
That was such a Sharon thing to say. He smiled a little, and went back to the soup. He could smell it now that it was heating up, the onions and the spices rising up to hit him in the face, and he thought maybe he could be hungry after all.
"I got my first job because of friends too," she said. "In college. My friend Lisa worked as a tutor for the English department. She got me hired, and I worked there for two years."
Sharon talked to him more now. Told him things. She usually slipped them in like this as they were talking about him, but they were real things about herself. Back in the beginning, he hadn't known Emily's name until he'd peeked at Sharon's Christmas cards.
Maybe she'd needed to warm up to him too.
"You weren't an English major."
"No," she said. "But everyone has to take composition classes, and you need to write papers in all of your classes. It wasn't a bad job, either. It was on campus so it was convenient, and I remember it paid very well. I felt very adult, having a job. Would you like avocado?"
"Uh... sure," he said. "So what was your case about?"
"I'm not sure yet," she said. "Dr. Morales will be ready for us at the morgue in the morning."
"Oh," he said. "It sounded like you were wrapping something up."
She shook her head. "Oh no, that wasn't case-related." Sharon paused there, halfway through slicing an avocado, to offer him a small, careful smile. "It was for my lawyer."
"So... divorce-related?"
There was another kind of nervousness in his stomach at that. The kind that came from wanting something so badly he couldn't quite believe he was going to get it. Not because he thought Sharon would change her mind or anything. He might not understand why she wanted to adopt him, but he got that she did. She was excited about it.
It was just... it didn't seem real sometimes.
She hummed in answer, nodding as she spooned avocado slices onto the bread. "That will be taken care of soon," she said, and her smile grew just a little. "And then we can proceed with the adoption."
The way she looked at him, sometimes. It made his chest hurt.
Rusty swallowed, and then he asked Sharon why she was slicing the tomatoes in funny chunks.
"Salad," she said, and gave him a pointed look.
Right. Salad.
He went to get bowls.
IV
Sharon arrived home just in time to be greeted by the sound of someone being dismembered by a chainsaw. She found Rusty curled up on the couch, napping through what appeared to be the most lovingly detailed gore ever committed to low-budget film.
He was never allowed to complain about her taste in entertainment ever again.
She pried the remote out of Rusty's hand just as the chainsaw started whirring again. Enough of that.
She intended to leave him be, but he stirred when the TV shut off. "Oh," he said, cracking one eye halfway open. "Sharon."
"Hey," she said. Gently, she brushed his bangs out of his face and smiled when he managed to scrunch up his nose even half-asleep. "Long day?"
"No," he said, still squinting up at her. "What time is it?"
"Almost eleven."
"Oh," he said. His other eye opened. "My movie—"
"Can be finished in your room," she informed him. "Did you eat yet?"
He stared at her and blinked several times.
"Come on." She pointed him towards the kitchen. "I'll be there in a minute."
In her room, she changed into her pajamas instead of her usual at-home clothes. She'd be going to bed soon anyway, she reasoned, and there was no need to change twice. She hung her skirt and jacket and blouse on side of the closet reserved for what needed dry-cleaning, and then she wrapped herself in her bathrobe.
Comfortable now, she went and found Rusty in the kitchen staring into the refrigerator.
"Eggs," she told him. It was the easiest thing she could think of. She handed him the egg carton and for herself, took a bag of sliced mushrooms and two small tomatoes still on the vine from the vegetable drawer.
They were sleepy and silent as they worked. As the mushrooms cooked, the smell wafted up out of the pan. Sharon inhaled deeply, breathing in the warmth of the melted butter and speared one mushroom on the end of her fork. She chewed it slowly as she watched Rusty beat eggs into a bowl. It was warmed through but not quite as meaty as she would like.
Snacking made her feel a little more alert, and Rusty woke up enough himself to ask if she'd at least arrested someone.
"Detective Sykes had that particular honor today, but yes," she said. "We did. I'll tell you about it tomorrow. And how was your day?"
He shrugged. "I went to buy some stuff for school."
"Oh?"
"Not the books," he said. "Only one of my teachers has emailed us about those. But like... notebooks and things."
"I would've—"
"I know, Sharon." But it was with great affection that he rolled his eyes this time. "It was, like, three things. It wasn't a big deal."
She gave the mushrooms another stir. Fine, but she was buying his textbooks. "Are you excited, then?"
She remembered that, the rush to buy everything weeks ahead of time. So different from the "it's only the second week of class, Mom, there's plenty of time left to buy my books" that Ricky had made the mistake of telling her at the beginning of his last semester.
"I—I guess." The rhythmic clink of the fork tines against the side of the bowl slowed.
"Still nervous?"
Another shrug.
Sharon tested another mushroom. The texture of this one was just as she wanted, and she grew hungrier as she savored the taste. She switched off the heat.
"It's big change," she acknowledged, keeping her eyes on him as she carried the pan to the sink. "But I think you'll find that it's a good one. I did. Ricky and Emily too. You might want to ask them when they're here next week. I'm sure they'd tell you."
Rusty gave her the sort of sideways look that meant he was listening.
"Oh," she said, pausing. "I need..."
"Here."
She turned to find Rusty holding a clean bowl and a slotted spoon out to her. Sharon smiled at her son and took both, removed the mushrooms to the bowl, and rinsed the excess liquid out of the pan. "What was I saying?"
"College," he reminded her.
"The transition might be easier for you," she said. "Since you'll be staying here in LA. The hardest adjustments I had to make were all about being away from home."
"Like... what?"
"Well, for example—" She reached for a paper towel to wipe down the pan. "I'd never shared a room with anyone for longer than two weeks at camp. Then I found myself three thousand miles away from home, sharing a room half the size of the one I was used to with a roommate who was an only child. It... didn't go so well, at first."
She shook her head as she went back to the stove.
"Did you guys totally hate each other or something?"
"No," she said, and reached for the olive oil. She drizzled some in the pan and turned the heat back on, then faced Rusty as she waited for it to warm up. He was now grating cheese into a bowl rather larger than they needed. "Slice the tomatoes, please. No, I didn't hate Beth. She was very friendly. Very smart. She liked to study with music."
"I bet you hated that." He knew from enough evenings where they'd sat in the living room and worked together that his choices were headphones or silence.
"You would not believe how much. Can you hand me the eggs?" When he passed her the bowl, she poured the eggs carefully into the pan. She waited a moment, until the sizzling wasn't quite so loud, and then began stirring them with the spatula. "On the other hand, I wanted a little bit of music to help me sleep, and we liked the room different temperatures."
"So what happened?" he asked, handing her the cheese without being prompted.
"I learned to sleep without music and studied at the library. She slept with an extra blanket."
"Oh." Rusty waited as he watched her fold the cheese and mushrooms both into the eggs. "That's it?"
"That's it." She switched the heat off again and beckoned for him to hand her a plate. "We learned to live with each other. I still hear from her every couple of years."
She filled her plate, then walked over to the cutting board to take some tomato slices for herself.
The last time they'd talked, Beth had been a biology professor with a partner of twenty years, two adopted sons, three dogs, and a horse. Sharon had been separated from her husband, with only two children, and she'd been running FID.
Sharon had a feeling they might both be surprised, the next time they caught up.
V
Rusty sometimes had the feeling that Sharon looked at him and wanted to laugh. It was a loving sort of amusement, where she tilted her head and pressed her lips together and tried really hard to look like she wasn't smirking, but it had been almost three years. He knew what her faces meant.
"What?" he finally demanded, leaning back against the kitchen sink with his arms folded.
She just looked at him and shook her head, smiling into her wineglass as she took another sip.
He ran through it again in his mind. She'd asked how his day was. All he'd said was that he'd met up with Tyler in the cafeteria in the morning to study for their history test over breakfast. And that he'd met Tyler again after lunch to study in the library. And then how after the test, he and Tyler had gone back to the library to work on their history papers. And maybe something about how he and Tyler were going to hang out before class tomorrow morning and talk about things that weren't US history.
... oh.
Maybe he should've just told her that one of Tyler's eyes was a little bluer than the other, and that Tyler had really nice arms and also liked to wear fitted shirts.
"How was your day?"
Sharon snorted, and gave the green beans she was cooking another couple of turns. She'd been in a good mood all evening. Maybe it was because she'd gotten off of work on time for once. She'd been on the phone with Ricky when she came in the door too. Talking to her kids always made her happy.
Her energy had carried over to cooking dinner, because this was fancier than they usually ate on a Tuesday night. Salmon rubbed in olive oil and herbs was baking in the oven. Rice with lemon was in the rice cooker. On the stove, Sharon had one pot for boiling the green beans. In another, she was steaming broccoli.
He didn't mind so much. Studying made him hungry, and he hadn't seen her at either breakfast that morning or at dinner the night before. It wasn't like she'd gone anywhere, but... he'd missed her anyway.
Even if she was going to make fun of him all night.
Sharon set down her wineglass to lift the lid off of the other pot, then gave the broccoli an experimental poke. "My day was interesting."
"Interesting like there's a serial killer on the loose?"
"No," she said. "There really aren't that many serial killers in LA. Emily called me."
He must have just met all of them, then. "I thought you were talking to Ricky."
"I called him next."
No wonder she was so happy.
"Anyway—" Sharon smiled. "She called to ask if there was anything special I wanted for my birthday."
He waited because right, that. "Is there?"
Sharon shook her head at him. "She invited me to New York to see her perform. You and Ricky too. And I know, I know, you're not a huge fan of ballet, but the offer's open."
She looked so hopeful.
Rusty hesitated.
"Just one show," Sharon said. She somehow speared a floating green bean on the end of her fork, and then blew on it several times before taking a careful bite. It must have been done, because she turned off the heat and then motioned him away from the sink. He took several steps out of the way, making room for her to carry the pot to the strainer waiting there.
He waited until she poured off the boiling water to ask, "Do you want me to go?"
"I would, yes." She tapped the strainer against the bottom of the sink to shake off the excess water. "Even if you don't want to come to the show, it would make me very happy to have all of you together at once."
She hardly ever got that. He knew that.
"I can't believe she's a soloist," Sharon said, more to herself than to him. "I haven't seen her dance in so long. I bet she's incredible now."
He stepped closer to hold the pot steady for her while she poured the green beans back in.
"Which one is this?" he asked. "Sleeping Beauty, right?"
Sharon nodded.
Rusty guessed The Nutcracker hadn't been that bad.
He could sit through one show for the sake of his mother.
"I'm not saying I won't go," he said. "But like, there's stuff to do in New York besides that, right?"
He knew he'd done the right thing when her face lit up.
"There is," Sharon told him. "I think Ricky would be happy to sightsee with you, and you never know. You might like the show, if you give it a try. The music's gorgeous."
"Are you going to sing this one to me too?"
Sharon threw a green bean at him.