You guys know how this goes by now: I couldn't help myself, this was supposed to be a brief one-shot, I'm incapable of grasping the concept of 'brevity'. ;) I've been sitting on this story for about three months, since it first occurred to me in January, and so I'm thrilled that April's Fools Day finally rolled around, and with it the opportunity to post this!
Hope everyone survived today unscathed. Personally, I've learned to never ever read the news again on April 1st. I no longer know what's going on in the world. Are Pokemons on the loose? Did Paris really ban cars? Is Paris even real? What are cars? Who even knows anymore!
More Fool Me
The alarm on her phone sounded even more shrill than usual that morning. Eyes still closed, Sharon reached a hand over to the nightstand, and in a well-practiced motion slid her finger across the screen to make it stop.
It didn't.
She did the same again.
Still the loud droning threatened to pierce her eardrums.
With a sigh, she blinked awake and sat up on one elbow, picking up the phone to turn it off properly.
Instead of the usual alarm display, a bunch of numbers were floating on the screen.
Sharon paused, baffled. She closed her eyes for a second and opened them again but nope, the numbers were still there. She grabbed her glasses and took another peak – still there.
"What…?"
And the alarm sound was still going on too, impossibly loud now, and Sharon just wanted to make it stop. She tried tapping the screen, then pressing the home button. Nothing.
Then she accidentally tapped one of the floating numbers, and her phone immediately emitted a 'wrong' buzz tone and a brief vibration. The original numbers disappeared, to be replaced by other numbers, still floating around randomly on her phone.
What. The hell.
She tapped another arbitrary number, in a different corner of the screen, and the same thing occurred again, a new set of numbers appearing and oh, the noise! Frantically, she pushed the off button about five times in a row but nothing was happening dear God, was her phone possessed or something?
Did she need to call the bomb squad?
Cautiously, she perched the phone back on the nightstand.
This wasn't good. The damn thing was only growing louder, at this point nearly giving her a migraine, and okay, she was pretty sure that no one nefarious could've done anything to it, but then, what…?
After the numbers reset again she tapped another random digit, and when instead of the usual 'wrong' buzz and subsequent resetting, the digit just disappeared innocuously, it dawned on Sharon that there must be a right sequence to press. It only took her a few more seconds to figure out that it had to be increasing order of magnitude, and with a quick prayer she pressed the next lowest number and joy! It disappeared uneventfully as well.
Ha! Take that, nasty phone demons.
She quickly pressed the remaining numbers, feeling increasing satisfaction (despite the painful throbbing of her eardrums) as they vanished one by one, until she finally tapped the highest one and the screen went blank for a second. Aha!
Having achieved victory, she was ready to relax back against the pillow with a self-satisfied hum, when a new display appeared on the screen:
117 ˸ 3
Wait – what?
Oh come on!
With a groan, Sharon typed '39' on the number pad, and thankfully the screen went blank again. She glared at it warningly, because the godawful noise still wasn't stopping… and then a bunch of rectangles showed up, and she pressed the phone face down against the blanket.
"Rusty‼"
He was awake when she barreled into his room (screaming phone in tow), and he'd have been wearing the most innocent expression, if not for his complete inability to contain the way his lips keep wanting to curl at the corners.
"What did you do to my phone?" she demanded, and Rusty lost the battle for composure, grinning fully now:
"Well, I thought that –"
"I don't care." She tossed the phone on top of his blanket almost desperately. "Fix it! And for the love of God, make the noise stop!" She glared over her shoulder as she was about to march out of the room. "This is not funny."
Rusty was snickering loudly.
Sharon's eyes narrowed. "You and that phone both better be perfectly silent when you come out into the living room."
Which they were, though the boy was still looking way too proud of himself and grinning like the Cheshire cat.
Sharon was halfway through her second mug of coffee, because it was that kind of day. She looked at him over the rim of her cup, and tried to convey her profound disgruntlement. "What. Did you do."
He shrugged innocently. "I thought you might enjoy a little upgrade in your alarm. You know, in case you have trouble waking up in the mornings."
"I do not have trouble waking up in the mornings! And would you quit it with that grin, this isn't funny!"
And there he went, laughing again.
"Rusty!"
"It's April first, Sharon," he told her, as if that explained everything. "It's supposed to be like this. And just FYI, it is funny." His grin only widened. "You should've seen your face when you came into my room."
Sharon's eyes narrowed again. "Do you wish to be grounded for the remaining twenty-nine days of April?"
But the boy looked unconcerned. "You're not allowed to ground me for harmless pranks. It's like, the rules."
"I write the rules," she grumbled dryly. "Go get your schoolbag, I don't want to be late. And give me my phone back please," she demanded grumpily. As Rusty handed it over, she gave him a suspicious look: "You didn't do anything else to it, did you?"
He laughed at the way she was holding the phone, between two fingers, as though it were radioactive. "No. No," at her warning glare he held up his hands, "just the alarm app. And I uninstalled it, don't worry. Although it's got like, really high ratings and everything, you might wanna give it a try anyw –"
"Schoolbag. Now."
Unbelievably, he kept up the self-satisfied smirk all the way to the school gates, and none of the dry sideways glances she shot him on the way did anything at all to dissuade him. 'April Fools'… Sharon did a mental eye roll.
"I better not get a phone call from your teachers because you got in trouble for any pranks today," she warned when he was about to get out of the car.
"You won't," Rusty assured her, unworriedly. "Have a nice day at work!"
"Thank y–"
Wait. When did he ever wish her a nice day at work?
"Rusty!" She stopped him right before he could close the car door, and leaned to the right a little to get a better view of his face. "You didn't put anything else on my phone, correct?"
And there was that all-too-amused grin; she didn't know whether to laugh or strangle him.
"I didn't put anything else on it, Sharon," he reiterated.
"And you uninstalled that…alarm thing?"
"Yup."
She still had a feeling that her line of questioning was missing something, but it was seven forty-three and Rusty had to get inside by seven forty-five and she had to get to work. So she let him off the hook and put the car into reverse, her last glimpse of him showing the boy waving briefly to her before walking through the gate, the same smug grin on his face.
It was almost two hours later that she realized what she'd neglected to ask.
" –and while organ trafficking is a federal concern, we have no evidence at the moment to indicate that that's what's going on with our three victims, so this jurisdictional debate is unwarranted." Sharon crossed her arms, leaning one leg against the conference room table. "Those three bodies in the morgue are the responsibility of the LAPD."
"You are, of course, welcome to assist, Special Agent Morris," Chief Taylor added in his saccharine tone. "But we won't be releasing the bodies to the FBI."
"This has been an open federal investigation for the past eighteen months," the agent retorted indignantly, "and your victims fit the pattern of another eight in the last two years, spread across five different states! Of course this falls under federal jurisdiction! And if you don't let us connect the dots here, not only will you not be able to find the people responsible for this, but you'll be actively obstructing –"
A duck started quacking.
For a moment there was a perplexed pause from everyone. Sharon looked around for the source, but where would she even start looking for a duck in the middle of her conference room?
Then she realized the sound was coming from her pocket.
As everyone else's eyes zeroed in on her as well, she cautiously pulled the phone out, feeling her cheeks starting to burn.
She had an incoming call from the DA's office.
And it was quacking.
She was going to kill Rusty.
Of course he couldn't wait until school was out; at ten-fifty – right after his English class – her phone chimed with a text message. (and thankfully, its normal message alert sound – which was probably due to the fact that following the quacking incident, she had taken the phone to Buzz and begged him to check it for everything.)
Rusty was obviously texting to gloat.
Did you get any phone calls yet?
She was going to kill him.
She had literally typed back, 'I am going to kill you.', but seeing it actually written down made her think better about it, and it brought back all sorts of bad memories and fine, okay, Rusty was only a child. She should be grateful that he was comfortable and carefree enough to be a child. A ridiculous child, granted, but… he was allowed to have his moments.
She typed, 'We will discuss this when you get here.' instead, and hoped it sounded appropriately ominous.
Judging by the grinning emoticon he sent back in return, it did not.
Sharon let out a long sigh. Just a child, she reminded herself. She was going to cut him some slack. And her phone was all better now thanks to Buzz, so really, no harm done. So what if the FBI now thought she was some sort of nutcase? Who cared what the FBI thought, anyway.
"So are you like, really mad at me?"
He was giving her that searching look beneath his eyelashes, and Sharon had to forcefully remind herself of quacking ringtone, for God's sake! to muster some semblance of sternness.
But he did look so genuinely concerned...
She sighed again. "I'm not mad, no," she conceded quietly. "I… appreciate… that at your age, you might find practical jokes to be entertaining… and as long as you remember to be kind, and keep it safe, I will understand if you see today as a good opportunity to get... creative, in joking around with your friends. With your friends, Rusty," she emphasized, because now he was starting to look too reassured. "I am not one of them. So if you will please" she lowered her chin to give him a meaningful look, "refrain from trying your ideas on me."
"Trying? I mean, Sharon, I get it, but don't you mean 'succee –"
"Rusty."
He cleared his throat. "Okay." He nodded convincingly. "Okay, you're right. I'm sorry about your phone. "
Sharon offered him a little smile. He could be reasonable, when he wanted to. "Thank you." A glance at the clock read almost one p.m.; school had let out early that day because of a teacher's conference. "Why don't you try to get an early start on your homework?" she suggested.
"Oh – uh, okay, sure… do you mind if I work in here?" He swallowed and shrugged, and looked a little too invested in persuading her. "It's quieter than the cubicle, and there's like… better lighting."
She pressed her lips together to suppress a smile, because 'better lighting', really?
Jack wouldn't have needed to give Rusty those ridiculous sunglasses to cheat him at poker. The boy was hopeless at all things that involved subtlety and dissimulation, anyway.
"I won't bother you," he added, and Sharon pondered whether his ulterior motives were anything to worry about, and decided that they weren't.
He probably just wanted to ask for something and hadn't worked his way up to it just yet. Or he was aiming to avoid talking to someone who might find him outside her office (probably Emma – had she upset him again lately?). Or it was even possible that he wanted to make sure that she really wasn't mad at him – he did that kind of awkward half-hovering thing sometimes, when he'd let his mouth run away with him and wasn't entirely ready to apologize but felt too bad to go off in a corner and sulk.
"Go ahead." She motioned to the little table in the corner, and his face lit up and he grinned and looked suspiciously happy about such a small thing. Suspiciously happy. "Rusty." Sharon paused halfway to reaching for her pile of paperwork. "This better not be another attempt at a practical joke."
He leaned over the side of the chair to reach into his backpack, and when he came back up he was rolling his eyes. "Come on Sharon, what could I even do when you're like, sitting right there?"
She kept up the warning look for second.
"It's not!" Rusty swore.
It was.
The high-pitched noise came again, prolonged and impossibly shrill, and Sharon groaned and lowered her face in her hands.
She should've known.
Rusty hadn't been trying to be friendly, or make amends, no, he was just looking for a chance to be in her office so he could break that, too.
And she'd allowed it! She'd left him alone in the office without so much as a second thought! Oh, she'd thought she was being so smart taking her phone with her, just in case he got any more ideas… but no, it wasn't the phone he'd been after, it was –
Another strident beeping.
– her sanity.
Okay, he was grounded forever.
"It's called an Annoy-a-tron." Lt. Tao pulled his head back out from under the table that Rusty had worked at, and gave her a sympathetic grimace. "And I'm afraid I can't see it anywhere around here. It's really small, you see, and they build it so that you can't tell exactly where the sound is coming from…"
Sharon knew just fine where the sound was coming from. It was coming from hell.
"…but I think if we just get everyone in here and look, we should be able to find it in a few minutes…"
"That's alright, lieutenant, thank you." Her breath left her in an exasperated sigh. "There's no point in disrupting everyone. I'll just call Rusty and ask him where he hid it."
Rusty had left the building half hour previous, ostensibly to get a snack because he was hungry. He'd even offered to get her iced tea from the nearby coffee shop, and Sharon couldn't believe that she'd actually felt appreciative! That was, of course, before she'd sat back down at her desk and tried to get back to her work, only to be disrupted by the infernal eardrum-piercing beeping.
She'd tried to ignore it the first couple of times, thinking it would go away. But it kept repeating itself at random intervals, and after checking her phone and the desk phone and her computer and the fire alarm and the carbon monoxide detector and her watch, Sharon had thrown in the towel and called in the troops in the form of Lt. Tao. Who had listened to one instance of the shrill sound, then given her the most sympathetic look he could muster as he informed her of the likely culprit for her suffering eardrums.
Annoy-a-tron. How fitting. Where had Rusty even gotten that? He must've been planning this for longer than she'd thought! What, had he been sitting awake at night plotting? Should she be worri – oh dear gods, that noise!
"Kevin brought one of these home, once," Mike was shaking his head. "Kathy confiscated it the second she figured out what it was. And it was a great call…"
Sharon pinched the bridge of her nose.
She picked up the phone from her desk and dialed her foster son, and God help Rusty if on top of everything else he so much as thought about not picking up, because that would've been the last straw and she was going to –
He picked up.
"Hi, Sharon." And ugh, she could hear him grinning from ear to ear.
" – and puerile, not to mention downright disobeying my direct instructions! You will immediately cease any attempts to involve me in any of this, and in return I'm going to consider not grounding you."
Rusty crossed his arms and let out a displeased huff. "You're being like, a really bad sport about all this," he informed her, to which Sharon could only respond by intensifying her glare. "It's April Fools', Sharon, people are supposed to prank each other! Like, everyone knows that, okay? Even like… Google is doing it!"
"Google isn't in my legal custody," she retorted dryly. "And I don't care what everyone else is doing. You will stop trying to prank me and behave," she narrowed her eyes at him, "is that clear?"
There was much grumbling and eye rolling but in the end yes, it was clear. And she was still like, no fun. He was just going to go and get bored doing homework, while literally everyone else in the world was enjoying pulling inane jokes on each other. He was so deprived. Woe.
Sharon rolled her eyes at his retreating, sulky form.
Then she bit her lips to keep from laughing.
At four p.m., it had been nearly two hours without further incident, and Sharon was feeling fairly confident that she'd curbed Rusty's hare-brained scheming. Maybe one day – long enough after this incident to make sure that he wouldn't consider giving it another shot – she'd tell him about her older kids' attempts to make April Fools' Day a thing in their household. If she felt particularly adventurous, she might even tell him the details of how said attempts had failed.
But not today. Today she was planning to enjoy the triumph of reason, for a change, and the fact that Rusty had apparently been sufficiently chastised by her lecture to stop trying to prank her. It was nice to know she could still scare a teenager into doing what she said.
Her walk to the break room was abruptly derailed by a loud crash from electronics, and Buzz's startled yelp.
The first indication that all was not well was opening the door to see Rusty standing in a corner, trying his best not to laugh, and Buzz picking himself up from floor, covered in film rolls.
Sharon looked from one to the other. "What is going on here?"
Rusty was still doing his best (which wasn't very good) to suppress a grin. "Sorry, I didn't think it would – it wasn't –" (he was completely losing the battle to not laugh) " – apparently Buzz is like, really scared of spiders…"
"I'm not scared of spiders," the civilian protested, disentangling himself from the rolls and assorted mess of electronic supplies on the floor, "I just don't usually expect to see tarantulas in the middle of my electronics room!" he finished with a glare in Rusty's direction, and – what?
Tarantulas?!
Sharon's eyes widened when she spotted a black ball of leggy fur in a corner, and even with advance warning she'd backed up two steps before realizing that it was all just another of Rusty's ideas and great, she'd told him to leave her alone, and unwittingly sicced him on Buzz.
It was easy to summon her most severe mien. "What did I tell you about continuing these infantile pranks?"
He gave her a cautious look. "Uh, okay, specifically," he replied, "you told me to stop doing it to you and start doing it to my friends. Buzz is my friend – aren't you, Buzz?"
"Not right now," the man grumbled.
Sharon closed her eyes briefly; technically, she had told Rusty exactly that. He didn't need to look so victorious, though. "Go do your homework. In my office. Now. Wait," she stopped him, and turned to Buzz, who was still cleaning up the mess on the floor. "Do you need help with that?"
"No!" he said too quickly, glancing warily at the boy and gathering two of the rolls of film to his chest almost protectively. "Uh, no, I'm okay."
Her eyes cut back to her foster son. "Homework, then. Now. And Rusty – take that with you," she pointed a finger to the hairy monstrosity in the corner, and gave him her best warning glare, "and it had better not make another appearance today. Or any day. Or night. I don't want to see it again, understood?" She was covering all loopholes, this time.
Rusty grinned, looking entirely too satisfied with himself.
Once the boy had left electronics, Sharon sighed and turned to Buzz. "I can help you," she offered. There really were an awful lot of … things, on the floor. He must've bumped into the rolling table and knocked everything down.
"That's alright, Captain," he waved her off, "it's not that bad. I just kind of… jumped… and tripped… but I don't think I damaged any of the equipment. Or…myself," he added as an afterthought.
Sharon shook her head.
"I'm not sure what's gotten into Rusty, with this whole April Fools' …nonsense."
Was it some sort of after effect of stress? A coping mechanism? Maybe she should have let him keep at it…? Or, more likely, he was just falling for the unnecessary mediatization of an even more unnecessary holiday, and if Twitter was saying that today had to be all about pulling ridiculous pranks on everyone around, then Rusty was behaving like any self-respecting teenager and following that trend to the best of his abilities.
Abilities which were not terrible, she had to admit. Sure, the tarantula had been fairly primitive and unrefined, and that infernal contraption in her office was the worst thing ever, but the alarm incident first thing in the morning, that was almost respectable, as far as infantile, ill-advised pranks went.
Which is to say, not very far. Her objective appreciation of his creativity aside, if Rusty didn't quit it, she was going to have to ground him, and everyone was just going to end up upset by that.
Buzz was putting the last film roll back onto the table in the corner. "Well… it might be that he's been thinking about this since like, October."
What?
The man cleared his throat. "Rusty was really bored those few months with the security detail..." He grimaced a little warily. "I'm not sure, but I think one day I might've mentioned to him how my sister and I used to prank each other on April first…"
Great. Rusty had literally been sitting up at night plotting.
And in nearly six months, it hadn't dawned on him that this was a spectacularly bad idea?
She was obviously failing in her duties to turn him into an adult.
This can stand on its own as a oneshot, but I'm not marking it as 'Complete' because I have a second half mostly written (and I think you can all guess what it contains ;) ), which will prooobably be posted also, very soon? That is my current thinking, at least. Thank you for reading!
