"Come on, Jace. Your dad's going to be here any minute now," Lucy said as she pulled the baking tray out of the oven and put it on the rack. "Go and get your things ready, please."

"I don't wanna go," the fourteen-year-old sprawled out on the comfy lounge muttered.

Lucy sighed and shook her head. Sometimes all she wanted to do was strangle the kid just because he could be so difficult – especially so since he'd officially reached his teenage years – but she couldn't ever do that. It was tempting, yes, but he was still her baby boy and she loved him.

Well, sometimes.

He seemed to hate her, though, but he hated his father even more for whatever reason. Neither seemed to be able to quite understand it, especially those days, but the parent-loathing and stubbornness had most definitely started around the time they'd gotten divorced just two years earlier. They'd tried to make it as easy as possible for Jace though, because they knew it hadn't exactly been easy for him to be kind of caught in the middle of it.

They'd let him live with Lucy in the brownstone apartment in the city that they'd called home for so long, and so Jace only had Friday nights and the weekend with his father. They'd let him have pretty much anything he wanted just in case the material things could be what helped him through the split, so when he'd asked for a cat at the very end of the list of things that he now owned two of between the two apartments he called 'home', they bought him a cat – though that he most definitely only had one of, and it stayed with his father because Lucy was allergic to it.

But the material things hadn't stopped Jace from hating them, and he only got worse over the months and the years. He'd been great growing up, always so happy and so loving just like his parents were and had taught him to be, but once he'd hit thirteen, he'd just… changed. And then turning fourteen, which had been nearly a year earlier as it was, had just brought its own world of pain. Lucy was really hoping that once he turned fifteen in December he'd calm down a little, because he'd be a little older and maybe just a little wiser…

Lucy was, of course, pulled from just staring at her teenage son seemingly go on a rampage with bullets and paint the online world in whatever extremely inappropriate game he was playing red when there was a knock on her door. Pulling the oven mitts off and sighing yet again at her son still ignoring her, Lucy pulled the bright-red door open and she smiled with evident relief to see her blue-and-black haired (and even at forty-two now, he still hadn't been able to completely say goodbye to the mowhawk, but she still loved it if she had to be perfectly honest) and far too tall ex-husband standing in front of her.

"Yes, thank you!" Lucy said exasperatedly as she let Bickslow in to the cosy two-bedroom apartment. "Please, just come and take him already."

Bickslow couldn't help but chuckle as Lucy went back to the small kitchen and began to transfer the cookies to the cooling rack. He, however, went and stood behind his son and frowned when Jace made no attempt to get up, or even acknowledge his presence with a simple 'hi, Dad.' He got nothing. "Hey, kid. You ready to go?" he asked as Jace shot a firework at someone in whatever game he was playing – honestly, it looked like one he played occasionally (if he was bored enough), which was just a little disturbing.

The teenager only rolled his eyes and got up from the lounge with a groan and threw the controller down onto the cushion after switching the T.V. off. "Fine! Jeez…" he muttered.

Bickslow opened his mouth to say something as he watched his messy-haired blond son trudge down the hall and to his bedroom like he was being forced to do something he really hated or something, but closed it when Jace slammed the door behind him, because suddenly Bickslow didn't really know what to say. That was how things had become after they'd gotten a divorce and he'd moved out once he'd found his own place; he didn't even know how to talk to his own son anymore, because everything he did say seemed to be the wrong thing, or it just went completely ignored.

He wanted to believe that it was just because he was teenager and it was all part of his rebellious phase, but… Bickslow didn't think it was. The kid absolutely hated him, and he pretty much had for the last two years. His mother, he got along with (well, sort of). But Bickslow was a different story when it came to Jace, and he just didn't know what to do about it.

So he just sighed and waited for his son to go and get his stuff to spend the weekend with him like he always did, and waited in the kitchen because Lucy had baked macadamia cookies again, and those… Those he practically lived for.

"Hey, don't eat those!" Lucy scolded her ex-husband as he reached for one of the still-warm cookies from the rack.

"You shouldn't have made them then," he chuckled with his mouth slightly full. Honestly, she made the best cookies. It was probably one of the things he missed most about not being with her anymore. Well, apart from the fact he just missed her in general, which sucked – a lot. "You know how much I love the macadamia ones, and they're so nice when they're still warm."

Lucy rolled her eyes though her lips curled up into a small smile. So, sure, they were divorced, but they were still friends. They were still great friends, which admittedly probably was making things worse for Jace because they probably should hate each other… But Lucy wasn't capable of hating Bickslow. Hell, she was still trying to stop loving him, but even that, she didn't think she was capable of either and she kind of hated herself for it.

But… They didn't work. They'd tried it once for six months when she'd been finishing getting her bachelor's, and it had failed. And then they'd tried it again six months later and had managed to last an entire fifteen years that time – got married when she was twenty-three and almost done with her master's and then already had a five-month-old by the time she was twenty-four the next year – but they just… stopped working together somewhere along the way. Separating had been the right thing, even if it still kind of sucked for Lucy two years down the track.

"Well, you know that I like to snack when I'm marking, so don't steal my cookies, Charming," she responded just as lightly. She couldn't even care that she used the name she'd been calling him since she'd been twenty-one, and neither did Bickslow. "I have sixty essays to mark on the Second Trade War tonight and over the weekend, and I need my cookies."

"Yeah, yeah… I know you do," he chuckled. He did know, though. She'd been a high school history teacher since she'd finished getting her master's, so Bickslow knew all too well that she liked to snack on sugary treats while marking. He'd lived through nearly fourteen years of late nights for various reasons, countless sugar highs, and hundreds of 'I need a new red pen and I need it nows' and that was just after getting married, after all. He only flashed his usual wide, toothy grin at her as he quickly stole another cookie from the rack and straightened up again, and said, "The rest are all yours, baby."

Jace rolled his eyes as he walked back out to the living room, still putting his arm through the sleeve of his coat and carrying his backpack over his other shoulder. "Why can't you two just hate each other like every other normal divorced couple?" he blurted out suddenly.

"Because we've gotta put up with each other for the next three years, so we might as well get along," Bickslow answered.

Well, it wasn't so far from the truth. Things would probably change once Jace turned eighteen. They wouldn't really have that much of a reason to be friends anymore once their son was old enough to go and do his own thing (which Jace had stressed on multiple occasions that he would be doing as soon as he had graduated from high school, which Lucy was adamant on him doing), though it wasn't exactly like they were trying to be friends right then, either. It just came naturally to them, because they'd just known each other for so long and they'd spent almost all of that time actually together.

He couldn't hate Lucy – no, he cared about her too much to be able to do that, and he didn't want to know what it would be like to not be her friend. Even when they couldn't work together anymore, they'd still been friends.

Jace hated it though. He hated all of it. He hated having to be picked up every Friday afternoon after school just to go to his dad's apartment, then picked up again on Sunday to go back to his mum's – where he actually called home, because that was where he'd grown up. He hated having two of everything, too.

He hated having to see his parents get along, too. That was the most annoying. He'd been so mad at them when they'd gotten divorced, even though he'd only been twelve at the time, because he hadn't wanted to be the kid with the broken family like half of his friends were. He hadn't wanted to choose between them, either.

But he did. And he'd chosen his mother, just because she wasn't his father. Lucy was home, and Bickslow wasn't.

It wasn't like he wanted them to get back together though, either. That was the last thing he wanted, just because he hated Bickslow. Bickslow was the reason that his mother had been miserable for such a long time after he'd had moved out, and even now, she still wasn't quite as happy or cheerful as she'd been growing up. She hadn't let anyone else see it, though. She'd always hid how much she was hurting – from her friends and especially Bickslow. But Jace saw it. Jace had always been able to see it, and he'd always known that it was because Bickslow just hadn't been there anymore.

Jace just didn't want him to come back. He didn't want him to come back just to leave again and hurt his mother again in the process, because Jace knew she still loved him. Why, he had absolutely no idea, but he really wished she didn't. He wished she hated him, because then she wouldn't be standing there and be borderline flirting with him like he did with her every time they saw each other. They were divorced – they should be trying to spend as little time as possible talking, not still acting like they were best fucking friends.

The fact that they used him as an excuse for being all chummy and gross drove him insane, too, and the next three years just couldn't come fast enough.

"You know Mum has a new boyfriend, right?" he smirked as he finished grabbing his things to unfortunately spend another weekend with his father. Jace knew he probably shouldn't have told his dad that just because it wasn't exactly any of his business if his mother had started dating again – it was about time, honestly, even though Jace hated that, too – but the look of shock on the man's face made it worth it.

Bickslow looked back to Lucy with raised eyebrows just to see her blushing slightly. "I don't, really," she mumbled. "I just went on a few dates with him, that's all…"

"Oh, right," Bickslow replied just as awkward. Lucy dating was… Well, it was great. Right? It had to be a good thing. Well, for her, mostly, because he wanted her to be happy, but not so much for him. He could still be happy, though. Yeah, he could do that. He could be so totally supportive and be the super awesome ex-husband that is all fine with seeing his ex apparently move on. "Well, uh, am I going to be able to meet this douchebag? I mean"—yeah, no, I think douchebag works, actually. The guy is probably an epic douchebag—"if he's going to be around Jace, I think I should be allowed to, y'know? Since he's my son, too."

"Uh… Yeah, maybe…" If truth be told, Jace probably wasn't even going to get a chance to meet the guy. He was just a co-worker from the school she worked at, and she hadn't even wanted to accept his offer to go on a date in the first place, but as soon as she'd told Levy and Lisanna, they'd practically forced her into going. Dating just… felt weird, now. "But anyway!" she clapped her hands and smiled brightly at her son waiting just by the front door looking like the bored and impatient brat he really was, and then quickly grabbed the tupperware container with some of the freshly baked cookies in it, and then handed it to Jace. "I'm sure your dad would much rather be spending some time with you than standing here."

Jace rolled his eyes and shoved the container into his bag. "Lucky me…"

"Love you too, kid," Bickslow mumbled.

She kissed her son's cheek, as much as he hated it; she couldn't help but be a doting mother because he was her only child. She really was aware of the fact she didn't really treat him like the nearly fifteen-year-old he was, but she couldn't help it. "Now, don't let your dad eat those," she said, following them out into the stairwell. "And don't forget to do your homework, too! And…" Lucy gave up with a sigh when she could see that Jace had already made it down the stairs and was no doubt already waiting by Bickslow's car just outside the brownstone building and in the still chilly spring air. She turned to Bickslow who was peeking out the window in the stairwell and looking down to the teenager who was in fact leaning against his car. "Honestly, feel free not to return him on Sunday."

"No?" he chuckled. "Want me to buy him a one-way ticket somewhere?"

"Yes, probably."

"Will do. You think he'd like somewhere tropical? Or maybe somewhere cold and desolate?"

"Maybe a boat would be better, though," Lucy mused as she hovered by the stairs still, her apartment door still open behind her. "That way he wouldn't have to deal with anyone else."

"Oh, true. That's perfect. Maybe a boat to a deserted island."

She shook her head and rolled her eyes. "We're fabulous parents."

"Of course we are," Bickslow agreed, and he was smiling as he slowly descended the stairs one step a time. "But we also have a kid who's a fucking nightmare-and-a-half, so, yeah, I think we're allowed to joke about sending him off somewhere just so we don't have to deal with him anymore." It worked for Jace, anyway. He'd still rather be away from the both of them, even if he did love Lucy really, really deep down. Probably. "Fucking angsty little shit he is," Bickslow muttered under his breath.

"I heard that," Lucy shouted from the top of the stairs.

"It's true, though!"

She rolled her eyes once again before she retreated back into the cosy apartment.

Unsurprisingly, the thirty-minute drive over to Bickslow's apartment in the middle of the bustling city had been painfully silent. It was always like that, and Bickslow was never going to get used to it. His own kid hated him, and he really didn't know what he'd done to deserve it.

After dumping his bags down in his room in the fifteenth floor apartment, Jace picked up the too-fluffy white and tan cat called Cadel and went over to the six-foot aquarium against the black painted wall. His father had always had pet fish, and for as long as Jace could remember, he'd had clownfish. They lived for years, too, so he remembered sitting in the brownstone apartment when he'd been a kid and just watching them swim around in the weird way they did. Even then, he still liked watching them.

As he sat there in his father's apartment that evening though, watching them at nearly fifteen rather than five, he only noticed that there were only four clownfish in the large tank that time. There'd been six at one point in his life, though that one had been older than the others, apparently, and then there'd been five and all Bickslow had done was slowly add other fish to the tank that got along with his prized clownfish – a few purple and yellow, some bright blue, others black, some striped…

There'd always just been lots of bright and colourful little fish in the aquariums.

But there were only four black-orange-and-white clownfish in there, in amongst the other fish. "What happened to the other clownfish?" he asked his father, still not looking to the man who was cleaning up the living area a little behind him.

"Oh. It died," Bickslow answered. He'd had those ones for near a decade anyway, so it wasn't all that surprising.

Jace nodded, and watched the remaining four. They had names, and they were all slightly different with their markings and their colourings, so it was easy enough to tell which one was no longer there if you studied them long enough. And, considering he'd practically grown up with them, and even when his parents had divorced and Bickslow had taken his fish with him and given them a bigger tank in his new apartment, Jace had still watched them each time he got there. "Was it Peppe?"

"Yup."

"Huh."

"Yeah… So uh," Bickslow was still cleaning up some of his mess – mostly just taking it back over to where he kept all of this art stuff and blocks of wood for carving – as he asked, "How's high school so far?"

The teenager shrugged as he left the fish tank and settled himself on the large armchair with the cat still in his arms, and stared out at the daunting skyscrapers just beyond the tall windows that surrounded the entire living space. "Fine, I guess," Jace mumbled.

Really? Was that all Bickslow was going to get? Yes, it was. His son had only started high school a month earlier, and all he was going to get was a 'fine, I guess,' because that was all Jace thought he deserved. As much as he knew his son didn't like talking to him, he still tried. He loved the kid, and he'd always loved the kid, even when that kid was a giant ball of fucking problems for him and his mother, was probably going through the same rebellious phase that Satan himself had, and had also been a surprise just after their wedding fifteen-odd years earlier (though a very pleasant surprise). Jace could hate him all he wanted, but at the end of the day, as much as Bickslow wanted to strangle him and ship him off to somewhere else, he loved him. A lot. And he always would.

It was why he still tried to talk to Jace even when he made it so obvious that the last thing he wanted was his father talking to him. He couldn't just give up and just let Jace believe that he was okay with how he got treated. He just couldn't stop trying.

"Well, what subjects are you doing now?" he pressed.

"I don't know…"

"Oh, come on. Of course you do."

Jace shrugged and continued to pet the Ragamuffin cat. His dad tried too hard sometimes, and it was honestly just a little pathetic. "Um, geometry, biology…" he mumbled.

"And how are those going? Are you enjoying them?"

"I suppose so," the teenager mumbled once again. He only turned in his chair to look at his father then, and then asked, completely changing the subject because the last thing he wanted to talk about was school (his mother did enough of that), "Can we have pizza for dinner?"

"Uh, yeah, sure, if you want," Bickslow answered, checking his watch for the time again. "Want me to order it now or do you wanna wait a while?"

"Later. I'm not hungry now."

"Right then. Later it is." And with that, Bickslow could only sigh and just leave his teenage son to do whatever the hell it was he wanted to do. Trying to talk to him right then was futile, even Bickslow knew that, so he just decided to try again later.

The last time Bickslow checked the time was when he sat down at his workstation against one windowed-wall and picked up a small block of wood he hadn't really known what to do with. It had been midnight then, and Jace had retreated into his room with his cat, and when Bickslow reached for his phone just sitting in amongst all of the wood shavings to check the time again, he wasn't that surprised to find it was a little past three.

He knew he should be asleep, not just because it was three, but because he had to go into work to his store in the morning – he'd opened up a 'small' arts and craft store on Third when he'd been thirty, though by the time he'd turned thirty-five, it had grown into something more than wonderful and awe-inspiring. From a small, old abandoned warehouse in the heart of the downtown district that was an eyesore if anything, to being a place where you could go to learn or even just unwind at the end of a long day. From teaching art classes – painting, sketching, woodworking – to being just a place to buy anything to sate someone's artistic needs, or giving someone the space to do their own thing without being distracted too much. He'd never really intended for it to be anything like that when he'd first wanted to open his own art store, but he couldn't be prouder of it.

But… As late as it was, Bickslow knew he wouldn't be able to sleep, either (almost a bit like the few people that could always be found in his shop, because it was open all day almost every single day of the year just so people could use it as a place to escape. There were still people working, of course). He wanted to, but he couldn't. He had too much on his mind to do that. But where he was usually stuck awake because he was worrying about his son, that wasn't the cause of his insomnia that night. It was Lucy. Again.

Bickslow was only quickly getting up from the leather chair at his desk and dropping the small heart with the rough edges that fit in his palm he'd apparently whittled over the last three hours, and after switching off the desk lamp and leaving his living room illuminated by the never-sleeping city he called home, he was making his way to his bedroom. The wardrobe doors were pulled open and Bickslow was quickly reaching for the box on the top shelf, and with just a single bedside lamp on and the box open on his made bed, Bickslow was then silently going through all of the photos – the memories – from the last twenty years of his life, just because there was no better time than three in the morning to be miserable.

A/Ns: Funny story. I started this a while ago. It's another short series (there's only going to be around 7 or 8 chapters and they'll all be between 3-5k words), and I'd actually planned on having this one completely finished before I started uploading it, but... I'm kind of stuck with everything right now and since I have absolutely no idea when the next chapter or story will be written, I figured I'd just start posting this.

Anyway. Generic Modern AU, low-key set in some kind of NYC-esque city that doesn't have a name. Lucy is like 39 at this point, Bickslow is 42, Jace is mostly 15 during the course of this story (he's 14 for the first few chapters, but it goes past his birthday since it covers several months). There's more about these versions of my favourites in the next chapter. And yes, I did end this chapter here for a reason. Also this story is angsty as all shit. I'll just say that I made myself ship something I shouldn't have and I'm sad I have to ruin it.

Hope you like this so far though, even if the first chapter is kind of just meh.