I try my best to deliver a Hackett prompt!
Maybe Travis and his niblings? There’s surely someone he’s at least amicable with right? (I second guess Chris recently)
When the lightning flashed, he braced himself, preparing for how the weight in his arms would set to squirming...only the thunderclap came without incident, without complaint, and when he glanced to the side, he was a little surprised to see how calmly Caleb was staring out at the storm. His head was still on his shoulder, his dark eyes were still half-lidded, his legs still dangled, his thumb was still jammed so far into his mouth it almost seemed like he was trying to eat it; growing up, Chris and Bobby had always been such babies about storms, but there was Caleb, an actual baby, and he was fine.
Strange, the things that got passed down - stranger, the things that didn't.
Without having to look, Travis hooked one of the solarium chairs with his foot, dragging it over so he could sit and Caleb could watch the way the rain sluiced down the walls. Even with the thunder, this part of the house was a far cry from the kitchen where he'd left Ma and Chris and Kaylee, all three of them screaming for their own damn reasons ("You ain't got the first idea how to hold a goddamn baby - you just give her here" and "It's not like she's my first, Jesus Christ" and colic, in that order), none of them seeming to see Caleb holding his pudgy little hands in the air, none of them noticing him scooping him up and leaving, same as it ever was and, he thought, same as it ever would be.
Maybe there were genes to blame there too, he thought, but on the off chance it was something else, he tapped the pane of glass to catch his nephew's attention and did his best to teach him how to count between the booms.
