"Don't yell at me like I'm a child!" Mick Rory/Leonard Snart
“I’m not doing that anymore! You can’t make me!” Lisa screams in a voice that would suggest somebody’s skinning her alive.
Len sighs. He loves his sister, he really does, but thirteen seems to be the magical barrier between ‘sweet’ and ‘hellspawn’ and Lisa has just crossed it. A few months, hell, weeks ago, she had no problem with her schoolwork, but suddenly, every time Len brings up her responsibilities, she starts acting like… well, like an angry, hormone-driven demon.
When he signed up for custody of his sister a year ago, he really did not think it through to puberty. His bad, he can admit that now.
“Come back here,” he snaps. Those words are basically burned into his brain by now, after having said them in varying levels of ‘harrassed’ at least fifteen times in the past hour. “You signed up for it, you’re gonna finish it.”
“Why?” she scowls, crossing her arms over her chest and tossing her head back to get rid of the hair falling into her face. Len’s not even touching that subject right now: haircuts have been a sore spot for a while. “I don’t give a shit about the stupid science fair!”
Len wisely picks his battles and disregards the language. Instead, he tries to reason with her, again, because despite all evidence pointing to the contrary in the past weeks, he still believes Lisa to be an intelligent life form.
“You were excited about the science fair last month,” he says calmly. For some reason, that just seems to incite her further:
“Well I don’t care about it now!”
“Lisa, come back,” Len growls, tired of this stupid fighting. He feels stupidly young then, eighteen and sorely under-educated on the subject of raising a teenager. “Or I’m telling Mick to set fire to the TV!”
“Don’t yell at me like I’m a child!” she screams and hurls the first object within her reach in his general direction.
“Then don’t throw scissors,” he snorts and doesn’t even pretend to duck: Lisa might’ve turned into a homicidal ball of rage, but there are boundaries neither of them will ever cross with the other, for reasons neither of them likes mentioning. Even when she’s seething, Len can feel those boundaries still firmly in place.
“I’ll do what I want!” she yells before the door to her room slams shut so hard that the sound rattles Len’s teeth.
Ah well. Time for drastic measures.
…
“No,” Len sighs and runs his hand over his face. “For the last time, Mick, we’re not burning shit for a science fair project.”
“It’s an option,” Mick argues and stabs his finger into the brochure that, indeed, suggests examining the changing colors of flames based on… something that Len’s extremely unwilling to examine with a convicted pyromaniac.
Mick is… Mick, and Len has come to accept (even embrace) that fact with all his heart, but there are certain things that just aren’t wise.
“Not an option for us,” he says and knocks his knee against Mick’s under the rickety table. They found it together, on a sidewalk five blocks away, and dragging it back to the tiny apartment had been hell. Mick bitched about getting splinters in his hands, and Len still believes that Mick did it on purpose, to distract Len and make him laugh. Len took tweezers to the splinters once they were home (there were only two, really), and then teased Mick about kissing it better until Mick took him up on the offer.
Len drags his eyes back to the brochure before he starts thinking of experiments definitely not suited for a seventh-grade science fair.
“How about this one?” he points it out to Mick, who raises an eyebrow, but looks intrigued despite the scoffing:
“Heating water with a peanut? What kinda stupid shit is that?”
Len chuckles.
“Let’s try and see.”
Mick’s foot slides across his ankle, against the sensitive underside of the bone, and Len shivers, even as Mick appears entirely focused on the project. Asshole.
“How ‘bout we see how many peanuts it takes to really set something on fire?”
Len sighs.
That’s probably as good as it’s gonna get, with Mick as help. Len decides to believe that maybe, it will teach Lisa a valuable lesson about making her brother and his juvy boyfriend do her homework, and smirks.
“Let’s go get some peanuts, then.”