#i couldn't rly pull off effectively including them DX

[cartoonsaint]

Try Not to Use the “F-Word,” Okay?

[Ao3]

was reading about @doodledrawsthings​ ‘coffee shop au’ and thought it was interesting that from the jump Luka uses “peck” as a swear. told myself not to overthink it... so naturally here’s nearly three thousand words about the idea that Luka used to swear a LOT. not sure how in keeping it is w his character, but it certainly is in keeping w MY experiences of unthinkingly swearing around a toddler ahahah.... fuck 8)

Summary: three snapshots of luka that are definitely only about swearing (coffee shop au) Characters: Luka, Vanessa, baby Hattie, Luka’s parents. Rating: T (features swearing, implied unhealthy relationship, post-birth scene, minor bleeding) Length: 2878 words

One evening during dinner, Luka loses his grip on his fork and drops it under the table with a clatter. “Fuck,” he says mildly.

Dad gasps, which is a poor choice since he was mid-sip of water. He sputters and coughs, face turning alarmingly red, while Mom throws her head back and laughs. It’s even louder and longer than usual; even by the time Luka crawls back up from under the table, errant fork clutched in one hand and brow wrinkled in confusion over his weird parents, his mom is still laughing. His dad, though, has managed to get his breath back.

“Luka T. Princeton!” he says hoarsely, looking both absolutely scandalized and absolutely soaked from the water that escaped his mouth and cup. “We do not say that word at the dinner table!”

“What word?” Luka asks, before a metaphorical lightbulb goes off. “Oh, ‘fuck’?”

“Don’t—!” his dad says, then goes “hrng” and looks to his wife for help. 

Luka’s mom, now face-down at the dinner table in stark contrast to her usually flawless manners, just smacks the table with a fist and laughs harder. The water in Luka’s cup ripples with it, which in itself is pretty funny, but his dad still looks so uncharacteristically thunderstruck that Luka is unsure whether to join in. Plus he pulled out the full name, so… 

Luka bites his lower lip, suddenly worried. Did he do something bad…?

“Where did you even hear that word?” Dad is massaging the bridge of his nose now in the way he only does when dealing with a tough client or a call that he doesn’t want Luka to overhear, and Luka finds he has to bite his lip even harder because it wants to wobble and he’s a big kid, he’s not going to cry.

“M-Mom said it the other day, when she cut her finger,” he admits, fiddling with his fork. Dad turns to her with such a look of betrayal, even as Mom tries to stifle her continuing giggles. “Um… is it bad?”

“Yes,” Dad says, just as Mom catches her breath and says, “Well, sort of.”

Luka’s parents glance at each other in surprised confusion, but Luka barely notices. He said a bad word… Does that mean he’s bad? Despite his best efforts, his vision starts to go blurry with tears as he stares down at the fork in his hands. He doesn’t want to be bad.

“I don’t think it’s that big a deal,” his mom says.

“I do,” replies his dad, sounding baffled. “I just assumed we were on the same page with this.”

Luka sniffs, trying desperately to hold it together, but he said a bad word — but he didn’t know — but does it matter if he didn’t know? He’s still bad, right? Hot tears start to trail down his cheeks and he sniffs again, harder and louder.

“Oh, Lu,” his dad says softly and crosses around the table to kneel by Luka’s seat. Luka wipes at his eyes fruitlessly as his mom reaches across and takes his smaller hand in hers. “I’m sorry, kiddo, I didn’t mean to get upset. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“It’s okay,” his mom tells him, giving his hand a squeeze. “It’s alright, Luka. We’re not angry — it is a, ah, a ‘bad word,’ but you didn’t know. It’s alright, sweetheart.”

Once Luka starts crying, though, it always takes him an embarrassingly long time to stop. He can’t help it. His frustration about unwillingly acting like such a dumb little kid makes his tears come faster and harder; he has to scrub at his face for a while, his dad handing him tissues, and so he doesn’t pick up on the silent conversation happening over his head between his parents.

They are a matched set in so many ways. To Luka they seem to move in perfect tandem, one picking up the tasks of the other with seamless grace. It seems so natural, so unpracticed and easy, and indeed some of it is — but as Luka cries, they communicate in a series of small expressions each has long-studied in the other: We will talk about this when Luka goes to bed. And, Well I thought it was funny. And, Alright maybe it was but I still don’t want him swearing. And, We’ll discuss it. We’ll figure it out together. I love you.

Luka never realizes. He just assumes that perfect couples are never out of sync with each other — and if they are out of sync, then they must not be perfect.

***

“Fuck, Ven, she’s perfect,” Luka breathes.

He couldn't get close enough sitting in one of the chairs, so he had been leaning against his wife's hospital bed when Vanessa passed him their child — their child, their baby, theirs — and his knees went weak. Now he’s kneeling on the tile floor, barely aware of his surroundings because in his arms he holds a truly, beautifully perfect little baby girl.

She has… a nose. He couldn’t say whether it’s more like his or Vanessa’s because this perfect bundle of joy is a scrunched up little pink newborn so mostly she looks like a lot of wrinkles that a sleepy face got on, but fuck, he loves that little nose and everything attached to it. Honestly through the tears he can barely see her right now but she’s perfect, perfect, perfect… even if she is, objectively speaking, not actually that appealing to look at. “Shit, Ven. Ven. Look at her goddamn little face, fuck.”

Vanessa makes a sound and reaches for him, touching his hand. “You don’t like her face?”

“I fucking love her face,” he says hoarsely. “I love her so goddamn much, Ven, I don’t even know how to say it. Fuck. Fuck.”

“Good,” Vanessa says tiredly. Luka doesn’t want to put their daughter down for a second so he does his best to wipe his eyes on the shoulder of his shirt sleeve. He gets to his feet only to sink right onto the bed beside his wife. His perfect, wonderful wife who has given them the tiny creature he never wants to look away from. “You wanted to name her Harriet, didn’t you?”

It’s like there’s a thread pulling his gaze directly to their daughter but he resists it for long enough to look up at the radiant woman he loves. She’s watching him, eyes glittering. “Do you mean…?”

She gives him one of her luminous smiles, even exhausted as she clearly is. “If it’s what you want, my love.”

Luka’s heart leaps as he looks down at their daughter — at Harriet. “Harriet,” he whispers in wonder. “Little Harry.”

Vanessa’s grip on his arm briefly tightens. “No,” she says.

Luka can’t help the wet laugh that comes out of him, though he tries to keep it down for the sake of his exhausted wife. “No,” he agrees. “How about… Hattie? Little Hattie?”

Hattie sleeps on, a teeny tiny person wrapped up safe in Luka’s trembling arms. He’s probably going to get dehydrated from all this crying and his face already hurts from how hard he’s smiling but, fuck, he doesn’t care about that at all when their perfect daughter is right here. “Hm? Hattie? How’s that sound, princess?” And he presses a gentle, wet kiss to Harriet’s brow.

Luka doesn’t notice Vanessa’s stung shock. He doesn’t notice the shadow of fear, anger, and confusion that darkens her face as she looks between her husband and the daughter she’s given him. It will take him a long time to realize his assumptions about their mutual goals as a unit are different.

For now, he loves Vanessa with all his heart — and loves their little Hattie just as much, if not more.

***

“Fuck,” Luka hisses, jerking his hand out of the hot, soapy water to check his fingertip. Blood wells up from its soft pad, mixing and diluting in the dirty dishwater. “Fuck,” he sighs again, and turns the squeaky nozzle of his shitty sink to run clean water over it. What kind of a fucking fool leaves a sharp knife in the sink like that, anyway.

Obviously, he does. This god awful apartment is just his, after all — he’d run here as soon as he could manage to pull together both the separate funds and distance necessary to prevent Vanessa locating it. This place is safe: Vanessa has never been here, and as of today she never will. So it’s safe, that is, from her — not from Luka’s own inability to keep track of where the goddamn sharp objects are.

“Stupid,” he mutters to himself as the water rushing over his cut starts to run clean. “Shithead.”

It’s been a weird day — a weird week — shit, a weird few years, if Luka thinks about it. When Vanessa came into his life, she seemed to him so bright that nothing else was worth looking at. It took until their daughter — his daughter, now — for Luka to start looking into the darkness she brought as well. Then the divorce proceedings, custody battles, the restraining order — for so long it had seemed that the legal system would fail Luka and Harriet, that Vanessa’s long shadow would follow them wherever they went.

Until earlier this week, that is, when Vanessa used magic in the courtroom.

Things had happened quickly from there. The paperwork barring Vanessa in his and Hattie’s life was just signed and made official today; his copies are still set neatly on the junky, second-hand kitchen table until he figures out exactly where to put them. After so long, it’s finally over. He and Hattie are free.

The old pipes complain as he turns the water off. The cut isn’t too bad, but he probably ought to bandage it anyway. He wipes away the spilled water with a ratty towel, turning to —

“Ffffpffpffpfpfpflllffff,” says Hattie from right by Luka’s feet, which is also outside of her playpen.

“Fuck!” Luka yelps, leaping about a foot in the air. Hattie stops blowing air through her lips to smile up at him, totally angelic. Luka presses a hand to his chest, staring at his little girl. “Kiddo! You scared me! How did you—?”

He looks across the small, open floorplan into the den, where he’s set up several different brands and varieties of baby gates to keep Hattie out of the kitchen when he’s occupied with cooking or cleaning. Her many toys are left behind, the gates apparently untouched, but somehow she’s escaped them — again — to hug Luka’s leg and smile up at him.

He smiles back, of course — he couldn’t deny her anything. And even if it is a problem that his little girl can’t be contained anywhere, he feels a swell of pride at her continued and baffling ingenuity — as well as a slight prickling in his eyes because even with all her toys she always just seems to want to be close to him. “No one’s gonna keep you trapped anywhere, huh, sweetheart?” he asks, squatting down to ruffle her light brown waves.

“Fffpllfpllfff,” Hattie replies importantly, graciously accepting the affection.

“Ah, I see. Your jumping abilities are unmatched, are they?” Luka says in return. His daughter started moving early, her curiosity about the world apparently unable to be sated with just looking even when she was just a few months old. She has always wanted to touch, to crawl, to walk — just the other day Luka could swear he caught her trying to climb the couch. His little princess is unstoppable, and his pride in her every step has gotten him teary-eyed more than once (more than once this week, even).

“Fffflpllplflffff,” Hattie tells him, eyes bright. She smiles hugely in between blowing air through her lips. What she lacks in the ability to form words (she’s a little late, and Luka’s not worried, exactly, but he is watching that with hawk-like eyes) she makes up for in expression. She turns her big blue eyes to the hand Luka isn’t using to brush back her wavy locks, curious. “Fffllllllllflflplf?”

“Oh, your dad cut himself,” Luka explains, showing her the slim red line of blood beading up on the pad of his finger. “Pretty stupid, if you ask — oh, sweetie, don’t—!” She’s grabbed his finger in a little fist before he can stop her, smearing blood all over it. He quickly scoops her into his lap, frowning down at her messy hand. “Fuck. Alright, we’ll just—”

“Fffffffuck,” Hattie says clearly.

Luka blinks once. Twice. He looks down at his daughter, who is beaming up at him with clear pride.

“...what,” Luka says.

“Flffflpplf.”

“A-alright, okay, that’s — sorry, princess, your dad thought for a second there you said—”

“Pllllfffflllplflflfff. Fffuck!” Hattie says again. Then she claps her little hands together in delight, further spreading the blood between them.

“Ha,” says Luka, voice unusually high. “Hahaha I? You??? …Alright! Alright! This, ah, this is fine, kiddo, we’ll just—”

“Fuck! Ffplplffuck fuck fuck?”

Luka takes a deep breath. Then he takes another one.

When Harriet was first born, he’d made an effort to cut back on the swearing. He had the ability to turn it off, after all, in the courthouse and with clients, so presumably it should have been easy to transfer that back home, too. But changing the way he’s spoken for years in his own space turned out to be quite difficult; with the stress of the past few months, that effort had been one of the many things to fall by the wayside in favor of more immediate concerns.

So Luka has been swearing a lot lately. And his sweet Hattie has been quietly soaking it all up, patiently biding her time until she could attempt to communicate with her dad in his own language.

“Ffffuck?” Hattie asks, eyes concerned. She presses one dirty hand to Luka’s face, as though attempting to stem the flow of tears. “Fffpllppff?”

“Oh, princess, I’m sorry,” he tells her, rubbing his wet face on his shoulder to clear his eyes. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have — I—” He sniffs, then exhales hard. “Alright. Daddy’s been saying some bad words lately, but he’s gonna stop now, okay?”

“Fuck!”

A part of Luka really, really wants to laugh, actually, because damn is Hattie cute with her big, sparkling eyes, her chubby cheeks uplifted with a smile, the absolute adoration on her face as she looks up at him for approval. The contrast between how sweet she looks in her bird-patterned onesie and the foul language coming out of her mouth is almost —

“Fuck?”

“Nope!” he says brightly. “We’re gonna try something different! Okay, kiddo?” Hattie tilts her head adorably and Luka’s chest squeezes — fuck he loves her. “Hmmm…”

She watches him silently as he thinks. In the dozens of parenting books he’s read there was never anything explicitly about what to do if a toddler started cursing (because no one else has this problem because only he is this bad a dad, holy shit), but he can recall a number of chapters about encouraging them in pronunciation…

He’ll need something that sounds like “fuck,” but definitely isn’t. He laces his fingers together, tilting his head at Hattie. She pats his hands, looking solemnly back. He sticks his tongue out at her; delighted, she does the same. What word to use?

He notices that her orange onesie has penguins on it. 

“Alright, kiddo, this is going to be a little silly,” he says, and goes, “fllpppplffffpeck.”

It might be easier to just let this go, to let Hattie say and do whatever she wants, and part of Luka is tempted. But he knows now how important it is to talk in a family, to put in the work to understand one another. This situation might be a minor instance of it, but he wants to make sure he and Hattie never have a problem talking to each other. He’s willing to put in the work, as much as it takes.

It takes an hour or so to convince her that “peck” is superior to “fuck.” The process is complicated by the continued desire to laugh every time she swears, but eventually they manage, and Hattie goes toddling off merrily chanting, “peck peck peck peck.”

Luka painfully hauls himself up (shit, his tailbone hurts) to finally finish doing the dishes in water that has long gone cold. This is a good start, he thinks, but he’ll need to watch his own language as well. Maybe he can encourage Hattie’s positive association with the word with a bird toy or something? He considers this as he reaches into the water to unplug the drain —

And jerks his hand back as the same finger grazes probably the same goddamn knife. “Fff—!”

“Peck!”

He glances over his shoulder. Hattie is painstakingly tugging at the baby gates, trying to get back into the playpen he knows she knows he prefers her to be in. Her eyes are solemn, watching him for what he’ll do.

“...peck,” he agrees weakly. She smiles brilliantly and goes back to her toddler work.

God, he fu— he pecking loves her.