sliceitwithwind

"You have your grad students whistle trained?!" she asked after the exchange and request 'welcome' to the girl. "Can I set you at the rookies?! That'd be so useful!" for the training officers at least.

Relative height had her arm shifting as they walked, so her fingers her wrapped loosely in the crook of his elbow instead of along his arm, but it still worked! "So do I. Danny doesn't get it, but then, he's addicted to driving."

"There are about nine of them named some variation on Mary." Dilan points out cheerfully, "So they each have a different three-note whistle. They trained themselves, really."

The bus comes fairly soon and Dilan finds a comfortable space for the two of them to sit, "But I'd be willing to try training rookies. How do they respond to food?"

"Ouch" she noted on the Mary's.That was one problem they usually didn't run into with rookies. Going by last names had it's advantages!

"About half and half." she noted as she settled next to him, backpack balanced on her knees now "Rookies usually come in the driven 'I'm regimenting my diet' variety, or the 'I could give a starving college kid a run for their money' variety."

"Then you can try feeding the feeders at the whistle?" Dilan says vaguely, "Cat is a cat. She does what she wants. Do you want to see pictures now, or later?"

"I'll run it by some of the trainers next I see them." she chuckled. Worse they could do was look at her funny!

"...Cat? Okay, cat." little bit of a subject change? She wasn't sure. "Could start now I guess. I tend to be slow going through pictures." mainly because she took in details. Lots of details.

"Small, mostly black cat. Very ugly, very very sweet." Dilan says with a nod. He then digs out a photo album. "Braig's mom organizes our photos, so this is the beach, chronologically since I was a baby."

"And you named her Cat." she noted with an arched eyebrow. "I'd tease, but my Uncle Nevada had the tendency to tack at least three names on animals." he'd liked animals.

"...I get to see baby pictures?" she grinned and shifted her backpack to her side at that. The better to have a lap to spread the book on. "Isn't it cheating, somehow, when you show me your own baby pictures?"

"I suck at names." Dilan says with a shrug, "My plans are to let the mother name any children I may have, if I marry." The album is passed over and he shrugs, "Eh. I was a kid. Everyone was, at some point, no use being embarrassed by it. Surfing pictures start when I was five, Braig holding me on the board."

If she wants to start at the beginning, though, there is a laughing woman with straight pointed ears holding a nut-brown baby with folded ears so that his feet are just barely dangling in the water.

It progresses yearly from there, neatly marked. The woman in the first picture disappears at age fourteen, having gotten steadily less involved and less healthy looking.

Dilan was teeny before sixteen. Really, really, would have looked up at Aya teeny. Four foot eleven in one picture, six foot two the year after that. The earrings appear as studs age thirteen, stretched by fifteen, the secondary hoops at seventeen.

The other piercings show up around twenty. So do a collection of scars, pale against his skin.

Braig is there from the beginning as well, scarring faster and younger and always in the lead. Braig's parents are also, one or the other, in many of the pictures.

And the surfing, as promised, starts with a nine year old Braig holding a five-and-a-half year old Dilan on a boogie-board, obviously helping him stand. That progresses consistently, although it's not until he's sixteen that he apparently waxes everything below the neck. (The hair showed up by thirteen. Hairy, hairy man.)

"Sounds like a good plan. It's better than the baby book pages on a dartboard plan anyway."

It had been a very long time since she'd looked at personal photos. A...very long time. One of the things she always managed to forget was how much she could see in them. It was almost like flipping through someone's diary.

Needless to say she got very, very quiet as she drank in details from the beginning. Her face didn't hide much when she wasn't working. There were narrowed, almost angry looks after a time, and softer, indulgent smiles...and once or twice she traced a fingertip over a photo or two. There was just...so much in the book. What was she suppose to say about it?

"You were one adorable kid." she offered at last. "What the hell did they feed you to make you sprout a good few feet in a year though?" safer to focus on the later pictures. Far safer.

"Crazy growth patterns are a species thing. It was actually over the course of two weeks." Dilan says with a laugh, I hit the height in spring, got the breadth by summer, over a month. Braig accused me of catching super-deer, if that helps any." he touches a different picture with a tap, "You can see the remants of the skinny kid I was for a while there."

"Mutant experimental deer." she chuckled, sliding a glance at the current Dilan.

She obligingly viewed the picture, then flipped between the year before and year after growth pictures...and winced. "Jesus. Crazy growth patterns is an understatement Dilan. That couldn't have been comfortable. At all."

"You could actually hear joints shifting." Dilan agrees, "It was horrible, but blessedly over before too long."

She had that sympathetic shiver most people got when hearing joints pop in public. Just...ew. Very, very bad. "I don't envy you. I'd do lot for a few more inches? Not that though." he was the first to ever get her to admit that.

"Okay, question..." her mind was shaking off the feeling of being a voyeur, so, she flipped back several pages and tapped...the corner of a picture. "Okay, how long did that take? I can't call that a sand castle, it looks like it'd take Godzilla to take it out, much less the tides..."

"About a week." Dilan says with a grin, "It was a gift for an old girlfriend; she'd gotten sick and couldn't come to the beach, so we promised that we'd bring her pictures of the best sand castle out there.

"And then we couldn't find any good ones."

"...you put in crenelation, windows, and I think a gargoyle...and you didn't take a straight on picture?!" that was what she could make out from the corner shot anyway.

...

...

"Damn"

"Technically grotesques." Dilan says with a small laugh, "They aren't working water spouts. We took lots of pictures, but gave the rest to the girl. I think I may have copies in a projects folder somewhere." Somewhere. Maybe.

"Eh, a few more days I'm sure you'd have gotten around to the plumbing aspects..." she teased. "Don't worry about the pictures, I'm just really amused you didn't keep one shot for yourself." it was sweet, really.

Still. A hell of a piece of work.

And now...a question about something that bothered her. She flipped to the most current pictures and tilted the book toward him "I skimmed the police reports, but didn't read them entire before we interviewed you. Braig lost an eye and you took a knife..." the scars. She knew scars like that. "How close was it for both of you?" she was a cop. These things mattered.

Dilan glances down and then shrugs, "Not to sound flippant, but which time?"

"Well, considering you can only really lose an eye once..." usually "I'll assume you meant the 'taking a knife' comment." she sighed, fingers ghosting over the picture again "This one. Went too damn deep to heal any cleaner." a few inches higher or lower and it'd have been a disability for life, if not death. At least, in the force.

"I've almost died a handful of times. He's walked the edge a handful more." Dilan says with a shrug, "It doesn't actually bug me."

"Fair enough." she grinned, closing the book and passing it back. She'd had the important question and the frivolous question answered. Everything in between was details he could offer or not.

"I don't really have any pictures of me anywhere after the age of five, but if you want to see them some time I'll find where I put them."

Dilan slips it back in his bag and pulls the cord for their stop, "If you'd like, sure!" he agrees, "But don't feel like you have to, alright?"

"Well, the offer relies on actually finding them, I haven't seen them since I moved into my apartment after college." she warned. Given access to so much history about Dilan? Well, it wasn't so much about obligation as...fairness.

"They're in a box. You want a pretty book I'll have to give you one of the spreads my Dad was contracted for." she laughed as she stood and shouldered her bag once more.

"I have no responsibility toward that book. Braig's mother comes over once a year and organizes everything we've taken that year, checks my health - she's into medical sciences - and gives us tickets to come out for Thanksgiving. His father comes a couple months before that to make sure that we haven't busted anything, checks Cat out, and reminds us to purchase extra socks for Christmas.

"We have it at the beach house most years, and before I get sick."

And after a minute he adds, "Braig's parents raised me, and while they are married they also know the value of time alone. So they have a weeks vacation without each other every year."

She'd...kind of figured out the raising portion, but it was nice to hear about a functional family. "They sound like good people." she admitted. "You don't get that often these days."

"So, they've you and Braig, who turned out Doctors. And they're med sciences and..veterinary medicine?" she hazarded from the Cat comment. "I'd be frightened of the mental capacity in the family if I hadn't already picked up on the 'good' part."

Re: Wednesday in the park

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Re: Wednesday in the park

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Re: Wednesday in the park

Re: Wednesday in the park