Chapter 4 Gingerbread Justice League
JERICHO
Since having kids, Jericho was prepared for almost anything when he came home.
Most evenings were pretty tame. He’d find Atticus cooking in the kitchen and the kids sitting on the couch or at the counter either coloring or playing on their Switch’s.
Sometimes, if Freckles was truly at his wits end, he’d let them watch Bluey or some other kid-friendly cartoon.
Most of the time it was organized chaos.
Most of the time.
Like anyone with kids, they had their moments.
Grilled cheese in the Playstation. Sure.
Waterboarding a Cabbage Patch doll with their cousins.
Manageable. Coating themselves in Vaseline.
Fine. Licking the windows. Less fine, but better than licking the cat so…
little victories. Having kids was amazing, everything Jericho had ever wanted, really. He had the perfect family.
That said, having little humans around was kind of…
gross and surprisingly sticky. Kids were far more unpredictable than any criminal Jericho had ever encountered.
Atticus handled the ick much better than Jericho.
He said doctors couldn’t afford to be squeamish.
Jericho did his best to assist with the other things.
Laundry. Cleaning. Bath time. Vigilante justice.
That was all him.
Atticus liked to tease him. He couldn’t understand how Jericho could rip someone’s teeth or toenails out with pliers but got faint watching his husband remove a lego from Jagger’s nose with an alligator clamp.
Jericho didn’t understand it either. He could wade through blood but one well-timed juicy sneeze could have his stomach heaving.
Still, he did his best to rally through bathroom atrocities, nightmares, panic attacks, all manner of counselors.
But for as long as they’d had children, Jericho had never come home to a totally silent house.
Until today. It was so eerily quiet that Jericho found himself practically tiptoeing inside like he was breaking into his own house.
He frowned when he saw that the house wasn’t empty.
Nobody was speaking. They didn’t even move to greet him.
In fact, for a full minute, nobody acknowledged him at all.
The Christmas tree was lit, the orange, gold and silver decorations gleaming beneath the white lights. Holiday music played softly on the surround sound and, thanks to their brand new air freshener, the house smelled like butter cookies. It was warm and cozy, but his family looked anything but.
His husband sat on the larger part of their sectional, wearing a pair of black pajama pants and one of Jericho’s hoodies.
Just the sight of his husband stirred something in him.
He somehow still hadn’t noticed Jericho there, maybe it was that he had his head cradled in his hands, the heels of his palms dug into his eyeballs.
His two children sat on the sofa, in their matching Christmas pajamas from Cricket—Navy with red and white candy canes—staring at their father with concern and trepidation.
Had Atticus done bath time this early? Oof.
That wasn’t good. They were little but not so little they still sent them to bed when the sun was up.
It was Jagger who broke the silence, timidly saying to Atticus, “Daddy—”
Atticus held up a finger, cutting him off. “Not a single word until your other father comes home. Just…shh. Please.”
“Okay,” Jagger whispered. “But…I have something important to tell you.”
Atticus raised his weary head to glance at his brown haired boy. “Yes?”
“I have to poop,” he said in a whisper, sounding apologetic at least.
The neighbors could probably hear his husband’s sigh of resignation. “Fine. Go. Then come right back here.”
“Freckles?” Jericho asked, hesitantly, closing the door behind him.
His husband’s gaze snapped upwards, a look of relief washing over him. “Oh, thank God.”
“Gosh,” Jett corrected.
“Yeah, that,” Atticus muttered, looking at Jett. “Why don’t you take a bathroom break too?”
Jett frowned. “Cause I don’t have to go?”
Atticus gave him a tight smile. “Try. For me.”
Jett’s sigh matched Atticus’s for pitch and volume as he slid off the couch and went into the spare bathroom.
The moment the door closed, Atticus crossed the room and fell into his arms, burying his face in his neck.
Jericho did the same, inhaling his scent on Atticus’s skin.
He loved when he smelled like him. It stirred something deep and primal within him.
“Rough day, Freckles?” Jericho asked, unable to hide his amusement.
“Our kids are monsters,” he muttered, words muffled against his skin.
Jericho scoffed. “What? Our adorable, angelic little cherubs. Surely not,” he mocked.
Atticus ignored him to ask, “Why didn’t you pick up your phone? I called you three times?”
Jericho frowned, slipping a hand into his pocket to find his phone. “Shit, sorry, baby. Looks like someone—” Jagger— “got into my phone again and put my calls on silent.”
“I told you that you should use face ID or biometrics. Your codes are so easy our preschoolers figured it out.”
Jericho chuckled. “Sorry, Freckles. I was so engrossed in finishing up that job for Coleman that I didn’t even notice how fast the day flew by. I finally got that piece of shit running and out of my garage though.”
“That’s nice,” Atticus said, trying—and failing—to sound like he meant it.
“Okay, Freckles. What’d I miss?”
Atticus sighed, pulling back to look him in the eye. “Oh, just a trip down to the school to have a chat with the school psychiatrist.”
“Again?” Jericho said, frowning.
Atticus shook his head. “No, no. Not the counselor. Not the clinical social worker. A whole ass psychiatrist, called in special, with MD after her name. They brought her in. Special. Just for our kids. She insisted that I come to the school immediately after today’s incident.”
Jericho’s stomach grew slippery. They’d had plenty of problems with the two boys since their adoption, but things had been improving so much lately.
They were still working through their massive trauma—most of which even Atticus and Jericho weren’t privy to—and that left them acting out sometimes, trying to inadvertently push their parents and even teachers and other students away.
What could they have done this time that warranted calling in an actual medical doctor? “Explain.”
Atticus gave him a humorless smirk. “Oh, no, baby. This is more of a show and tell.”
He slipped from Jericho’s arms and took his hand, walking him into the kitchen. There was a metal tin decorated with the typical holiday fare…snowmen, Christmas trees, nutcrackers, the usual. Atticus leaned against the counter, folding his arms over his chest, gazing pointedly at the container.
“What is it?” Jericho asked, the tiny hairs at the back of his neck standing at attention.
Atticus nodded towards it, a look of grim anticipation on his handsome face. “Go ahead, look for yourself. You should be proud, our sons have some…natural artistic talent it seems.”
Atticus’s expression did nothing to quell his fear. With a final deep, calming breath, Jericho popped the top on the tin and froze, staring down at the cookies in horror. “What…and I cannot stress this enough…the fuck is that?”
“That would be the boys’ contribution to the gingerbread baking and decorating contest.”
“Baking and decorating contest?” Jericho echoed. “They are four and five years old. We just got them to stop eating paste. Now they’re teaching them to cook?”
“Bake,” Atticus corrected, crankily.
Jericho opened his mouth and then closed it again several times, trying to decide exactly what to say about the situation. He finally settled on, “That is a gun in that gingerbread cookie’s hand…right?”
“Oh, you mean gingerbread Adam? Sure is,” Atticus said.
“Note the attention to detail. It’s so well decorated, in fact, that there was no mistaking what it could possibly be.
But even if I had been able to come up with some kind of plausible explanation for a gingerbread version of my brother holding a tiny gun, there were six other people whose likeness your sons thought to immortalize as cookies. ”
“Why are they always my sons when they’re misbehaving?” Jericho asked, tilting his head. “You were there, too.”
“They get their hooligan side from you,” Atticus said, primly. “They get their brains from me.”
“So what did you say to her?” Jericho asked softly, closing the gap to press a kiss to his husband’s tightly shut lips.
“I said we’d been watching a lot of superhero movies and even a few of the villain ones and that they must have been trying to emulate those.”
Jericho was actually impressed. That was actually a pretty plausible explanation. “Did she buy it?”
“Enough to lecture me on the effects of cinematic violence on the malleable minds of children,” he muttered.
“Oh, that’s why you’re so cranky. You got lectured. You hate being talked down to.”
Atticus took each cookie from the tin and set it before Jericho with an almost reverent delicacy. One or both of their children had created what Jericho could only assume was their uncles, each holding their ‘favorite’ weapon of choice.
“Of course I got lectured. Look at them,” he said, sweeping a hand across the counter.
“Someone needs to wipe my butt,” Jett shouted from deep within the recesses of his bathroom.
Atticus scrubbed both hands across his face.
Jericho made to head towards their child, but Atticus shook his head.
“No. I’ll handle the butt wiping. You sit here and try to find a more plausible explanation for why our entire family is sporting gingerbread weaponry. Just in case we get a visit from CPS.”
Jericho stared at the figures. He was…oddly impressed. Atticus was right. There was an exceptional level of detail. He glanced up when he heard the scraping of the stool, then he was looking at Jett’s solemn face.
“Hi, daddy,” he said.