Elliott
Author:  yoursweater
Pairing: Brian/Justin
Rating: G
Timeline: Future
Spoilers: No
Summary: Elliott is a normal child as far as his teachers are concerned. He’s only five years old but he knows his alphabet and the difference between green and blue, and when Mrs. Eleanor tells the class to quiet down, Elliott is one of the first children to take his place on the checkered rug. He laughs quietly with a hand over his mouth when his library buddy tells jokes, and carefully lines his crayons up across his desk when it’s art time.

Author’s Note: So this is one of those Brian and Justin have a kid stories. I know. But I was thinking about it like two weeks ago and he just wouldn’t leave me alone, so I wrote it. I’m not planning to have this as a series or anything, but knowing me I’ll write a few more shorts around this universe. Enjoy.


 

Elliott is a normal child as far as his teachers are concerned. He’s only five years old but he knows his alphabet and the difference between green and blue, and when Mrs. Eleanor tells the class to quiet down, Elliott is one of the first children to take his place on the checkered rug. He laughs quietly with a hand over his mouth when his library buddy tells jokes, and carefully lines his crayons up across his desk when it’s art time.

The problem is not with Elliott, the entire kindergarten staff thinks. The problem is with Elliott’s parents.

Maybe problem isn’t the right word. ‘Problem’ would insinuate that Elliott’s parents are doing something wrong, when they’re not. Elliott’s parents are just… slightly edgy. Or one of them is, at least.

The day Mrs. Eleanor meets Elliott’s father is a day she still remembers. Only two weeks into the year with the semi-clean room still smelling like drying glue and construction paper, she had been about half way through her usual parent introductions. It was a Tuesday, she remembers, because there were still handmade cereal box drums scattered over the carpet, which meant it was Music Day. Which always, without fail, fell on the second day of each week. Tuesday.

She had been sitting at her desk, carefully going through each piece of thick construction paper with scribbles of families and farms and friends on them, when he came in through the red painted door, gray jacket flapping behind him.

When Mrs. Eleanor recalls the visit to the rest of the primary grade staff, they’ll smile when she tells them how he sat in the child sized chair and listened as she talked about his son, how Elliott was one of the children in her class with the most potential, and his only reply was – “I know.” They chuckle when Mrs. Eleanor tells them how he had gone over to his son’s cubby, asking where it was so he could find the missing Tupperware container that was the cause of much complaining around his household.

They share stories about all of their students as the year progresses, how one child in Mr. Marten’s class fell out of a tree on the playground and broke his wrist on the hard pavement below it, and how the teacher’s assistant in Ms. Linden’s class caught two of her second graders in the cloak room, kissing. But the topic of a lot of stories, is Mrs. Eleanor’s Elliott.

Elliott is on time for the bell almost every day, but Mrs. Eleanor remembers one day when it was raining and as a result, a quarter of the class arrived to the school either too early or slightly late. Elliott was one of the children who was escorted through the door by a hasty parent that day, a rush of brown corduroy pants and red sweaters as the class sat on the carpet in a circle, going through the coveted ritual of flipping the day’s paper square on the calendar over to reveal the printed cartoon leaf with the date on it. Mrs. Eleanor had looked up and into the apologetic eyes of Elliott’s father, bright blue and smiling from across the room as he helped his son take his rain jacket off.

After that rainy October day, three months pass, full of stories about the boy with green gumboots and dark brown hair, until the staff finally see part of the cause of the child’s happy personality at the Winter Play, where Elliott is performing as the sixth reindeer in the second act. Mrs. Eleanor points his parents out to two co-workers from backstage, her finger curved in the direction to where they’re both sitting in the third row of the middle section. One looks perfectly cheery with a red scarf around his neck and that smile on his face, the same one from that rainy day, while the other, the one that Mrs. Eleanor met during the parent introduction week, sits beside him, slightly slumped down in his chair as he watches the commotion around him.

The librarian, Anne, has a surprised expression on her face when she spots them, and Mrs. Eleanor decides that “told you!” would not be a good thing to say. Instead she laughs and then points to the sixth reindeer, who’s standing in line with the rest of the children in their antlers and face makeup. He’s bouncing from foot to foot, eyes trained on nothing for more then a split second as he watches the lights flash and then listens to the crowd murmur on the other side of the red curtain.

After the play the parents come back to the child’s classrooms to pick them up, and Mrs. Eleanor can hear Elliott talking to another child, both of their voices loud over the heightened buzz of the room full of parents around them. She glances over her shoulder, getting a glimpse of two children laughing before she looks back down at her tray full of cookies and juice. People are squeezing around her, trying to find their children in the commotion of the room, and she carefully sets the tray down on the snack table so she can say goodbye to families as they leave.

As she’s saying goodbye to Amanda Martin’s parents - both calm and petite people, like their daughter - she hears Elliott’s animated voice as he greets both of his fathers. She can hear their laughter blend into everybody else’s as she smiles and pauses to help Luke Friedman pour himself another glass of fruit punch and reach across the table for his third cookie. She’s not sure where his parents are.

“Want to see my coat hanger? It’s over there, come on. Come on!” Elliott’s opinionated voice pierces through the crowd and Mrs. Eleanor turns around in time to see him, latched onto his father’s hand as he drags him through the crowd. She’s not sure about the proper terminology, but his other father, the blond one, follows them, an indulgent smile spread across his face. His gaze drifts from the two family members in front of him and lands on hers, and the smile on his face grows.

“You’re Mrs. Eleanor, right?” He asks, closing the few steps between where he was and where she’s standing beside the snack table.

“You must be Elliott’s father.” Mrs. Eleanor smiles, extending her hand to gesture behind them, to where she can still hear the young boy’s voice drifting out of the cloak room. He’s insisting that his father bend down to get a better look at where he keeps his gym shoes. “It’s very nice to finally meet you.”

“Elliott loves your class, all he ever talks about are the art projects he learned and the new song he can sing.” He smiles, lifting a hand to tuck his blond hair behind one ear. His eyes widen after a second and he laughs, saying, “I guess I should introduce myself properly. I’m Justin Taylor.”

Mrs. Eleanor returns the smile and is about to reply when Elliott tears up to them both, his cheeks rosy and eyes laced with sugar and excitement.

“Guess what?” He asks, tugging on Justin’s arm, and Justin bends down to pick him up. As Elliott is explaining about how there was a spider inside his shoe and ‘daddy tried to kill it, but I said no daddy and we put it out the window instead’, his other parent comes up, the one Mrs. Eleanor met in September. He looks a lot like he did then, she notices, the same air around him and stride in his step. “Right daddy?” Elliott leans back to look at his father upside down and he nods, reaching across to pull Elliott from Justin’s arms.

“Brian this is Mrs. Eleanor, Elliott’s teacher.” Justin says, making a face as his watch gets caught on the front of Elliott’s shirt as he’s handed over. He’s free after a moment and then turns around to face Mrs. Eleanor once more.

“We’ve met.” He says, and he seems more interested in his son then the conversation taking place around him. Mrs. Eleanor smiles politely but it turns into something more authentic when she catches the grin Brian sends to Elliott as he rubs the face paint from his son’s cheek with the pad of his thumb.

Before they can say much else, Mrs. Eleanor’s arm is being tugged at by Rachel Smith, who can’t find her parents. Mrs. Eleanor’s attention is pulled Elliott and his family and directed to Rachel instead, and she helps her comb through the full room, looking for the two people that she lost.

When the staff return from Christmas holidays they catch up and talk about their vacations, small talk filling the gaps in the conversation until Anne The Librarian gasps and claps her hands together, saying, “You know who I almost forgot I saw? Elliott Kinney’s family.”

Mrs. Eleanor listens as Anne tells her about the couple of minutes she spent in a grocery store checkout line with them, a few customers separating their purchases. She doesn’t say much else other then there was a loud, red headed woman with them that swore a lot, and they left before she could say hello.

The rest of the year progresses and Mrs. Eleanor continues to watch her students change little by little, until it’s May and the end of the year activities are being prepared. Just like every year, the two kindergarten classes plan to go down to the water park and have a picnic with the children and their families, a day full of rice krispie squares and hot dogs dripping with ketchup. Over the weeks in May each invitation comes back with the six dollars required from each student who wishes to attend, until the entire class has a red star beside their name.

On the day of the picnic, the whole school seems to be busy, the seventh graders getting ready to leave on their annual camping trip, and the fifths preparing to go to the wax museum. Mrs. Eleanor hurries around the classroom, glad that the families are meeting her at the park so she doesn’t have to make sure every child has their sunscreen and swim shorts.

Mrs. Eleanor gets to the park twenty minutes before the families do so she can help the other kindergarten staff set up, stacking paper plates and counting out cupcakes to make sure there are enough for everyone. The sun is ridiculously hot and she slathers sunscreen on her shoulders and the back of her neck so she doesn’t get burnt, then continues to unwrap the home made cookies that the children brought to class the day before.

When the families begin to arrive the stress fades away and is replaced by laughter as the children run around the grass and wade in the shallow pool. Mrs. Eleanor stands to the side with Anne and the rest of the teachers, watching the year play out in front of them as the remainder of the families arrive and their children run around, playing tag.

Elliott and his family arrive fifteen minutes after the first family showed up, and he tears ahead of his parents, grin spread wide across his face as he waves his arm around, letting his small group of friends sitting under a nearby tree know that he’s arrived. Justin catches Mrs. Eleanor’s eye and waves with a small smile as a ‘hello’, and she returns the smile as the two men follow their son across the grass.

The day turns into afternoon and it’s as fun as the year before, Mrs. Eleanor thinks, as she cuts another piece of cake and hands it to Brittany Alexander. She can hear Elliott’s voice a few feet away, where he’s sitting with his parents, demanding that one of them have a piece of cake. Mrs. Eleanor smiles and shakes her head as Elliott’s father argues with him like he’s an adult, something about carbs and icing and how he doesn’t want to have to spend another ten minutes doing crunches.

Elliott’s family has three pieces of cake that day, one for each of them.

When the last day of school rolls around Mrs. Eleanor hands out a report card to each student, full of ones and twos and threes, and tells them that she’ll see everyone in September when they come back for the first grade. Daniel Kilpatrick is the first out the door when the bell rings, and each student leaves until Mrs. Eleanor is sure she’s the only one remaining.

It isn’t until she’s back sitting at her desk, ready to clean out her drawers that Elliott Kinney pokes his head back into the classroom. He has a wide grin spread across his face, all crooked teeth and dimples as he says in that too adult for a five year old voice, “Thank you for teaching me shapes,” and then he’s gone again, giggling and squeaky footsteps echoing down the hall.