~+ HELL..O people ._. i want to apologize once more for the serious late-ness of this short but important chapter. I got caught up with memorizing Old Welsh epics and learning Gaelic... teehee. soo! yeah.. my bad. dont kill me.. +~
Day 20
"Hello family of mine!" Dragon exclaimed as he burst through the front door of his home to see his wife and two sons sitting in the living room, watching a movie together. Ace and Luffy sat relaxed against each other, Ace's arm around Luffy's shoulder. At the sound of their father's sudden arrival, Ace jumped and quickly snapped his arm back to his own side, skittishly grinning at Dragon who wore a curiously nervous expression. Rouge smiled widely and rushed to give her husband a tight hug and welcome-home kiss, taking her hubby's suitcase from his hand and brought it upstairs, winking to her boys on the way past them. Ace felt his stomach turn a bit uneasy as his mother left the room, leaving only the men.
"Too cool to give your dad a hug?" Dragon teased, opening his arms wide for his sons to hug him. Luffy laughed loudly as he jumped off the couch and ran into his dad's inviting arms. Meanwhile, Ace took his sweet hesitant time shuffling over to give a loose and awkward hug to his step-dad.
"How was your trip, Dad?" Luffy asked excitedly, wanting to hear stories of his adventures in other cities and such. Dragon smiled tiredly and rubbed Luffy's hair briefly before sighing.
"How 'bout we all sit down for a little while and catch up with each other. Heck, you two grow up so much in the time that I'm gone. I feel like I almost don't know my own sons!" Dragon laughed while hugging Ace and Luffy to his chest and walked towards the living room.
'Hmmm... My odd suspicions might just be true,' Dragon thought to himself as he flopped down in his old navy blue armchair and the other boys sat down close to each other on the sofa, sitting in awkward silence till Rouge walked back into the room.
"Soooo, tell us about your trip, honey! I bet Luffy's dying to know too," Rouge laughed as she saw the excited look on her youngest son's face. Dragon smiled and complied with this, talking about all his adventures around the big and small cities of the world, and about the kind people who lived there. Ace actually found himself contentedly listening to Dragon's tales, and Rouge was very happy to see that for once both boys enjoyed her husband's company.
After the family had eaten dinner together at the dining room table, Rouge was in the kitchen washing the many plates that were once covered with delicious homemade food while the men sat back at the table, lounging lazily after filling their stomachs.
"How's school? Grades still up there?" Dragon asked randomly to break the silence, taking a sip from his glass of water. Ace and Luffy both nodded, one more enthusiastically than the other, which led to Luffy telling all sorts of stories about highschool, mainly involving Ace in some way or another. Dragon laughed and smiled at each epic saga of adventure, letting his incest-suspicion-meter rise up and up with each story and each of Ace's embarrassed looks.
"-but hey, that wasn't my fault!" Ace retorted to Luffy, making his little brother laugh loudly, and eventually melting the freckled one's defensive expression into a grin. Suddenly, after Luffy recovered from his laughter, he turned to his dad and tapped his arm with a curious/nervous look.
"How long are you staying, Dad?"
"You're trying to get rid of me already? On my first day home?" Dragon questioned sarcastically, and then he didn't really see Luffy laughing that much, so he coughed and gathered himself together, "a week and a half before I have to fly to Berlin and where ever else afterwards.
"Hmmm... okay!" Luffy responded after a while of glancing up across the table at Ace with an anxious aura about him. Ace reciprocated this expression.
Dragon sat at the head of the table and saw it all, wondering if that was how a teacher felt; being able to see everything that was going on. The mental-meter in his head neared being to its maximum capacity, and when Ace reached over and patted Luffy's hand affectionately, the meter began overflowing and a siren blared in their father's head. He didn't want to freak out though, because he promised himself that he wouldn't, and so Dragon coughed once into his hand and then looked up across the table at the wall.
"If you want some time to yourselves while I'm here, I can do that."
The brother's faces went blank for a second, and then paled with realization. Ace took his hand off of Luffy's and they both sat stiff in their seats while Dragon switched his gaze between the two.
"It's not really that we want privacy..." Luffy began quietly, looking down at his knees.
"...we just want acceptance," Ace finished, working up his courage to look into his step-dad's eyes. Dragon locked eyes with Ace for a dew moments before a small smile broke out on his face, and the older teen immediately could sense his death: it never came, though.
"I can do that," Dragon stated with confidence, extending his hand to first Ace, and then Luffy, shaking hands to secure his promise.
"Just no doing anything to keep us up at night," Dragon reminded with a dead serious face, and Luffy nodded with a clenched fist against his chest in agreement. Ace nodded while looking over at his brother, thinking about the previous night. Luffy was smarter than he might have thought.
