Rugrats
"Around Town"
These are drabbles that are set during "The Junior Year" but for some strange reason, didn't pop into my head until after it was finished. These won't make much sense unless you read that first.
Rating: PG-13 (maybe mild language, somewhat adult situations)
Feedback: To the usual place: No one, no one at all:)
Storm Warning
"It's going to rain," Dil says.
Tommy casts a look at his brother's face. "Do you know how soon?" he asks half jokingly.
"Around an hour from now." Dil gets up, looks out the window at the cloudless sky, and leaves the room, limping slightly.
Ever since the 'incident' (and Tommy always refers to it in his mind as an incident) Dil can predict weather. His leg will ache to the point where he almost can't walk. For the last five storms they've had, Dil's predicted every one. The first one, Tommy ignored, and paid for it when he ended up getting soaked on a date with Lil.
Sometimes, Tommy thinks about how unfair the whole thing is. Dil jokes about it now, and says he should go to meteorology school because of his built-in weather vane. But Tommy sees sometimes how Dil will hesitate to walk into a large crowd, something he never had a problem with before. He switched out of gym and added a study hall. He's a little quieter around people he doesn't know, and not as likely to jump into things as in the past. Tommy thinks that it's like someone turned off a light switch in Dil, and then turned it back on, but only at half-light.
Tommy wishes that he had done more than just punch one of the guys. Sometimes, he has daydreams of him executing brilliantly choreographed moves against all of them, hearing their cries for mercy and feeling victorious. Most of the time, though, he relives running into the gym and hearing the awful silence, only with hindsight, his mind chants, too late, too late.
He knows that logically, he couldn't have couldn't have done anything to stop them. His height and bulk, or lack of, might be an advantage on the track but didn't do much to stop fights. So he feels helpless, thinking back.
He pushes a chair back from his desk and gets up. Suddenly, he feels like going somewhere, away from this house.
But first, he grabs an umbrella.