Way of Life

Child's Play

Author's Note:

Chapter inspired off of stxmoras helping me with some ideas. Thank you!

There is some swearing in this chapter (and maybe some in following chapters after this). If this is something that bothers you, please be warned.

Izabella couldn't remember a time that Tomb Buster wasn't playing on the television.

If Marc and Randall wanted to watch a movie, Tomb Buster was always the first option. If the VHS tape was sitting out on the table, the face of Dr. Steven Grant turned towards them, machete in hand with sliced vines trailing up the front cover, there would be incessant pleads to put it on.

The boys were obsessed with it, the adventures and the Aztec mythology taught. They loved the main characters; the British accents that Marc and Randall would try to mimic coming out cheesy and silly.

After watching it the first three times, Izabella wasn't sure what the boys saw to watch it another hundred, but she couldn't shake the smile that lifted her lips when they'd go off on a rant about one of the adventures Steven Grant and Rosser had, scouring through the jungle in search of a moon god's relic.

They even went as far as playing games as the characters with one another. It had been maybe after the third rewatch, sometime after Randall got old enough to actually pick up on the themes and play along with Marc.

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It started with a box. Izabella wasn't sure where it had come from. She just knew that Mom or Dad had bought something, and the box was likely to get folded up and thrown in the trash. Likely was a very weak word when it came to a house of three children, two of which were young boys with rampant imaginations.

Randall and Marc begged to keep the box like it was some type of puppy that randomly walked up to their doorstep. Of course, it was easy for Mom to let them play with it, because really, how much damage would a box do?

Obviously, a lot when it came to Marc and Randall.

They had just rewatched Tomb Buster for the third time, and no matter how annoyingly redundant Izabella thought it was to constantly watch the film, she couldn't shake the fond eyeroll and freely showing smile when the boys would adamantly talk about their interests in the movie.

So, seeing them build a rough design of a tomb from one of Steven Grant's many adventures, blankets stolen off the couch and strings taped to the sides of cardboard as some sort of booby-trap, should have been expected. The mess of glue dots on the wooden floor and crinkled tape stuck to the table shouldn't have been a surprise either.

It would have even been amusing had it not gotten on the carpet.

A bit of yelling and lecturing later, Izabella helped them move the box outside, leaving the blankets and pillows on the couch and replacing it with old, tattered sheets used as drop-cloths. She didn't miss the way Randall looked, how his eyes watered, and a frown pulled at his lips to getting yelled at. He took things to heart, especially at four, thinking that a bit of yelling was the equal to Mom and Dad being mad at him for life.