aesc | .riffs, or, when aesc does kid!fic

slian_martreb admitted to me that, after yesterday's beach!fic she was imagining ~~"a five year old Rodney and John, playing in the sand and making castles with Rodney being oh so particular about the placement of each grain before John divebombs a plane into it."~~

And so, because I'm apparently susceptible to suggestion, I wrote my first-ever piece of kid!fic. Oh my God. Riffs off of beach volleyball, only with sandcastles, and seven-year-olds. (Five-year-olds are completely alien to me.)

Once he'd managed to get the sand-to-water ratio perfect, he started building, if you could call sandcastles "building." At least the sand was holding together and the huge turrets of sand weren't collapsing, which was about the only thing that had gone right today.

Within about three seconds of setting foot on the beach, Rodney McKay had decided he hated it. A lot.

"We've spent a lot of money on this vacation, so you're coming with us," his mother had snapped when he'd begged to go back up to their hotel room. Even at seven and a half and three days, Rodney knew enough to know that air conditioning was much more enjoyable than sand and heat, and water that evaporated and left a sticky coating of salt on your skin, but his mother was impervious to logic.

Building sandcastles wasn't a complete waste of time, though. Completely ridiculous materials, of course--crude plastic tools, sand, nothing to measure with--but he sort of liked the challenge.

He wouldn't mind living in his sandcastle, come to think of it, behind a huge moat filled with alligators and great white sharks. With a drawbridge, with him safe in his turrets and his parents and Jeannie on the other side of the moat.

Just as he turned to look for the plastic spade to start digging said moat, he heard an unearthly eeeeeeeeeeeeee approaching swiftly, and just as he turned back to see what it was saw a whirlwind of dark hair, long arms and legs, plastic, and a huge grin.

"Direct hit!" shrieked the whirlwind as it picked itself up from the sand.

"My castle!" shrieked Rodney. Ruins.

"The F-4 Phantom never misses." The whirlwind by now had settled down into a boy around Rodney's age, skinny and unfortunately taller and probably capable of beating Rodney up, like most of the kids at school.

"You wrecked it." He glared at the other boy, who was dusting fragments of Rodney's castle off his model plane. "You wrecked my castle."

"Sorry," said the other boy, not sounding particularly sorry at all. He collapsed in a gangly heap next to Rodney and his ruined masterpiece. "It was a lousy castle anyway. Where're the guns?"

"They didn't have guns back then. Don't you know anything?" Rodney began to gather the sand into a pile so he could start again. "They had bows and arrows and stuff."

"Oh." The boy turned the plane over in his hands, as though contemplating what Rodney had said. "Maybe you should build a future castle, so you could have guns. Like on TV."

"Whatever." He scooped huge handfuls of sand into buckets, and hoped that, maybe if he ignored him, the kid would go away. The kid didn't budge, though, and even offered Rodney his name.

"Rodney," Rodney said sulkily. "Make yourself useful and hand that over."

John smacked the shovel into Rodney's hand, then reached for one of the other buckets and started filling that.

"You have to swear not to dive-bomb this," he told John in the tone he usually reserved for Jeannie. "Pinky swear."

They pinky swore on it, and John even parked the plane on a flat strip of sand that was supposed to be the runway. Rodney had to concede that, despite his wild hair and stupid remarks ("Where're the guns?"), John was pretty good at sandcastle-building, and John told him that his family came to this beach whenever his dad was back "stateside."

"We come here never," Rodney said. "This is our first time."

"Maybe you can come again next year," John said, which was a very stupid and hopeful thing to say, and Rodney thought about how we've spent a lot of money on this trip, which meant they'd probably be spending next summer with their grandparents.

He said yes, anyway, and John grinned, a huge dopey grin that Rodney had to tell him was huge and dopey, and John threw sand at him.

So Rodney had to throw sand back, and soon the castle was destroyed, but the F-4 Phantom was safe on its runway.

-end-

ETA: Find out what happens six years down the road in

foxxcub's really freaking cool comment!fic!
ETA2: And another wonderful continuation by Anon!
ETA3: More! A two-parter, even, by

cobweb_diamond.

This is fun :)

.riffs, or, when aesc does kid!fic

Re: More commentfic (pt2)