Note: Ya'll, I've written some pretty heinous shit on here so far, but this one genuinely makes me feel bad. The husband says Clara is essentially Sloth from The Goonies, but I'm hopeful she comes across a little less... deficit. This one starts out with Brotch because I had to illustrate my conception what of a 1 in intelligence gets you. (Side note, husband says he'll never have less than a 5 ever again because that's what Butch has)

As always, warning about general sexual content. Don't know how far it will get but we will see. The wasteland is not for innocents.

The dreaded time had come. It was Parent-Teacher Night.

Edwin Brotch looked at his scheduled visit and groaned in disappointment. Tonight was James and his daughter. Why couldn't it be Pepper Gomez again?

Edwin wasn't looking forward to hearing the Vault doctor blather on about the efficacy of his teaching. He wasn't stupid, but James made him feel that way with his vocabulary that rivaled a dictionary. No denying, the man was smarter than him.

And he certainly wasn't looking forward to hearing James ask why the Vault 101 educational system wasn't holding to a higher standard of testing; it had been a source of contention between the men since the introduction of Clara to his classroom. Everything Edwin did was not good enough for James' girl. Not strict enough, not challenging enough, not intelligent enough.

It was hardly Edwin's fault. He could only apply his own spin on the preset Vault material and hope it sunk into the brains of those hormone-laden Neanderthals he was teaching. And Clara... was one of the worst students he'd ever produced. He'd spent the last thirteen years teaching the girl not to poke herself in the eye with the sharp end of the pencil, for God's sake. Teaching Clara was like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Even James had admitted, in couched terms, that the girl was dumber than a box of hammers. She had heart, but no brains.

Still, Edwin enjoyed having her in his classroom. Definitely liked her more than Butch DeLoria. Clara had defended her teacher against the Tunnel Snakes on occasion, when the gang members acted out in class or when they were simply being annoying in the hallways. Clara defended everyone from the Tunnel Snakes. She was a good kid, she just... had more spirit than smarts.

And she tried. She tried so hard to be good at her studies, she frustrated herself into tears. Seeing Clara sitting at the front of the class... "That is where the smart girls sit," her father had told her, on her first day of school.

Edwin felt so bad for the girl, he could barely bring himself to fail her. She was failing. Her grades didn't actually say so; he'd fudged the work for her, on occasion. To keep her from falling. The storm of tears she was bound to cry when she didn't graduate with Amata―the girl she idolized because she was so smart, because was what Clara wanted to be, smart―made him feel like a pile of shit for not knowing how to educate the poor girl. Even Amata had trouble helping her to understand, though Clara loved the Overseer's daughter all the same.

And he didn't like that the Overseer had asked him to pity-pass her and place the girl somewhere she wouldn't harm herself or others. It left him with very little option as to how he could grade her when she finally took the G.O.A.T.―and that day was approaching fast.

It was with heavy footsteps that Edwin walked to the doctor's quarters. Because the class was so small, he had decided he would visit each student and their family in their living quarters. It was enjoyable for him, spending an evening discussing the teenagers with their parents in a relaxed setting. He found it was easier to talk to some of the kids and parents when they were on their home turf, as well, rather than in the imposing confines of the classroom.

Ellen DeLoria and Butch aside, he'd had little problems with the others. But Ellen didn't care, and Butch was beyond help. His grades were better than Clara's, at least. Edwin sighed to himself, thinking about it. And Ellen wouldn't fight him like James would.

This night, he expected to be met with less relaxing discussion and more argument. It wouldn't be easy to escape the fight; Clara had a solid D-average and she had not improved that score in five years, only gotten worse. His own false bumps to her grade... James was not going to want to believe that it was his daughter who was the problem.

Edwin paused before he knocked on the door to the doctor's quarters, finalizing his defense against attack. He would offer James a compromise, perhaps some one-on-one lessons with the girl. It would be easy to make such a promise... but he would contrive a reason for why he couldn't keep it, after the fact. There was nothing more he felt he could do to help Clara understand. It was simply too late to help her.

Nothing more he could do, other than finally pound the knowledge into the doctor's head that his daughter was a damn moron.

Edwin sighed and knocked on the door for a full five minutes before he realized no one was going to answer it. This wasn't uncommon; sometimes it was hard to hear what was going on over the banging pipes on the walls. Stanley was constantly fixing the things, but his attentiveness was limited to guaranteeing functionality, not reducing noise level.

Edwin touched the door release and was surprised to find it slid open easily. It wasn't locked. He stepped inside.

"Is that you, Dad―" Clara said, as she came out of the bedroom in the back of the quarters. She had a tissue clutched in one hand, tears on her face already, and was red-eyed and stressed-looking. This wasn't all that unusual. But, more unusually, she'd put on a nice dress and it accented her only true gift rather impressively―something he'd noticed before, but put out of mind. He paused, his breath catching in his throat at the sight of this well-endowed, brown-haired beauty before him. Trying to impress him, probably. It didn't work as she intended, he was sure.

Clara's dark blue eyes caught the light of the hallway as they widened and she burst into tears. She brought the already-sopping tissue to her face and cried into it noisily. "I'm sorry," she muffled. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Brotch."

He closed the door behind him before moving into the room and assessing the situation. Clearly James was not here; she would not assume that he was her dad if he wasn't. And it was upsetting her, though why he couldn't precisely place. ...Unless James had forgotten that tonight was Parent-Teacher Night.

Edwin sighed. It had happened once before, the year before last, that James forgotten to be at home during the assigned night for his discussion with him. When Clara had just entered "high school" and was having a hell of a time adjusting to the upgraded educational materials. Thank goodness Amata had been able to help her scrape through the mess, then. Edwin hadn't managed to schedule a second visit to the quarters that year; hadn't bothered once Clara seemed to be doing a half-way job at staying afloat. And James had forgotten completely, wrapped up in his work in the clinic.

"Your father forgot again, didn't he?" he asked the girl, lamely.

She nodded and cried harder into the tissue, blubbering. "I―" She sucked snot up into her nose. "I re―reminded him―" Another sob and a hiccup. "Twice."

Edwin watched her hair floating around her head and gave a patient sigh. "I'll come back another time, then," he said, turning sideways toward the door.

"Please!" she cried, and strode forward. He grimaced in disgust as she mashed the used tissue into his hands as she grabbed them. Clara didn't think about things. She just did them, and she did them enthusiastically. A slimy feeling traveled up his wrist and arm. "Don't go―" She sniffled. "I want to t-talk," she stuttered out. "About school."

Edwin raised both eyebrows and removed his hand from hers, gingerly wiping it on his leg. "Dare I ask, what you want to discuss?"

Clara hiccuped again and showed him to the table, set for three. Food was sitting nearby; she had expected her father to show and there was enough food for more than three people. Clara was capable of putting back a decent amount herself, he knew. She had brawn, but she wasn't overly big, just muscled. Her arms as she doled out a soup of some kind into his bowl were softly defined. Short and stout, like the teapot rhyme, he thought to himself. And about the same level of thought to her.

She sat and put her hands in her lap, looking down through tears. "I'm... I'm not good with words," she said. "Not with numbers, neither. Never been good at science or figuring out what―" She hiccuped again. "Whatever social studies are for."

"I am not here to make you feel stupid, Clara," he answered, which was the only thing he could say that wasn't an agreement to her statement.

"I..." She sighed and wrung the tissue in her hands. "I just... I want to do better, but I'm just no good."

"How do you suppose we fix that, then?" Edwin asked, testing the soup. He was hungry. Seemed like a waste of good food to let it go uneaten.

"Dad said I need to listen better," she muttered. "I'm trying, too. Feels like it... goes right outta me, when I hear it."

"Your hearing isn't a problem," he told her, once he'd swallowed. "I think you have trouble grasping concepts."

She stared at him, blankly. "I don't..." Her eyes started tearing up again.

"The ideas, Clara," he clarified. "You don't get the ideas, so it doesn't make sense?"

She flushed, her face turning red, and nodded in relief. "Yes."

Edwin gestured at her bowl. "Eat first," he said. "We'll talk about it, after."

She really did know how to put back an insane amount of food. If Edwin Brotch was a betting man, and less conscientious about his reputation, he might joke that it was all going to her chest. He focused himself and finished eating in silence, the only interruption an occasional hiccup as Clara finished. She probably hiccuped a lot, if she ate so fast on a regular basis. Once he'd filled his stomach, he took up his clipboard and located Clara's grades.

It was a lot more relaxing than he'd thought, without the doctor around to stir the muck. The living quarters hadn't changed much in the last year, other than the introduction of a teddy bear up on a high shelf near the bedroom door. His eyes drifted over the open door and he frowned.

"Clara, where do you sleep?" he asked, out of curiosity. There was only one bed in the tiny room beyond the door. She jerked a thumb back at the bedroom. "Where does your father sleep, then?" he asked, carefully.

She slurped her soup too fast and coughed, smacking her chest in agitation. He averted his eyes politely as she jiggled with the motion. "Clinic," she sputtered out.

The doctor did not share the living quarters? Edwin looked around at the room. Everything in it, beyond the sterile environment provided by Vault-Tec standards, had been put into place by a sixteen-year-old girl. It was obvious that her personality was in the room.

"Why?" he asked, confused. James might be smart but leaving a sixteen-year-old to herself... permanently? How could he parent her if he was not around? He can't.

"Last year after Parent-Teacher Night he said it was time for me to be on my own," she mumbled, around her spoon. "And he moved into the clinic."

"You've been living here alone for an entire year?" Clara nodded. She didn't seem upset by it. Edwin frowned. "How did you remind him about tonight, then?"

"Visited clinic," she said. "Twice."

Edwin stared at her. She seemed calmer now, but that could well be an illusion. He sighed to himself. "Honestly, Clara... it feels like your dad has been trying to distance himself from you for a while," he said. "Like your birthday party. He didn't even show up at the cafeteria when Amata baked that cake for you. What is going on between you two?"

Clara swallowed hard, placing her spoon gently into the bowl of soup, and pushed it away. She had no expression on her face when she turned to face him, until his furrowed brow drew another batch of tears from her eyes.

"I don't know, Mr. Brotch," she said, and dissolved into a mess of brown hair and pink cotton.