Disclaimer: If TBC was mine, there would have been more of it.

A/N: Kirsten's one-shot idea: something about the parents and how they feel about their kids being in detention. This is a two-shot – first the fathers, then the mothers. Please review.

Jonathon Reynolds sat at home with a mug of green tea in his hands. He sighed as he gazed around the pristine kitchen. He'd dropped Allison off at the school that morning for a detention that she'd only just told them about at breakfast, and he'd been angry just because she hadn't told them. And then in the car, when he was trying to ask about how she was doing and why she'd gotten this detention, she hadn't said a word. Not a single word. Nothing like 'I'd rather not talk about it' or 'Can we talk about this later' just, nothing. He'd been so angry he'd nearly run into another student, and then had simply sped off without saying a word to her.

He took a long sip of tea. He knew he had problems with anger management. He always had, and it had been something that had plagued him his whole life. There had been times when he'd thought it was going to get him into serious trouble, and he'd tried to do something about it. Take a class, get counseling, but it never seemed to work. When Allison had been born…Well, she'd been a bit of a surprise, really, but he'd loved her with all of his heart. But he'd been worried too, so worried. He'd never been good with children, and his anger issues hadn't just disappeared over time, and he was worried that he'd hit her or perhaps something worse.

Over time, he'd found ways to control the anger because he had a daughter and he didn't want to do anything he'd regret. Margaret had always told him that will power could do things that counseling and classes couldn't, and over the course of Allison's life he'd found that was true. Still, Allison was now a teenager, and he was finding it harder and harder to control that anger, especially when she just wouldn't talk. Her silence was the worst form of rebellion to him, worse than any drugs or bad boyfriends could have been.

There was a part of him that blamed himself for her behaviour, but the other part of him blamed Margaret. She'd always been so hard on Allison, and now that Allison was a teenager she was even worse. While Allison's silence made him angry, it merely served to make Margaret passive. She'd almost completely given up on her daughter. When Allison had first become reclusive, around junior high, Margaret had stopped trying completely. It wasn't fair to her, and she knew it, but she just couldn't stand getting angry like he did.

"I can't try with her, Jonathon. I can't put myself through that pain and suffering," she'd told him when Allison had spent a week without saying a single word to them.

He'd responded by telling her that Allison was their daughter, and that it was their job to put themselves through the pain and suffering. He often felt that when Margaret had given up, Allison had as well. It was as if 'that faze' she'd been going through would have ended if Margaret had just made a little effort, but she hadn't and so Allison had let the faze extend to such a point that it completely overwhelmed her.

He sighed again, and finished the rest of his tea in silence.

Matthew Standish stood at his desk in his corner office with a blank expression on his face. He'd dropped his daughter off earlier that morning for detention, and now he was back to working over time. He sat heavily down in his chair and gazed at the single photo he had in his office. It was a picture of Claire at her thirteenth birthday party. Thirteen. That was when, as far as Matthew could tell, all the trouble had started. That was when his little girl had decided to grow up, and when all the problems with Michelle had started as well.

He wasn't sure if the two were connected, not even now, looking back on the past few years. He and Michelle had watched Claire grow up and then suddenly it was as if she'd made a huge leap and she was so much closer to being grown up. They'd wanted different things, he and Michelle, from the very start. They'd wanted different things for their children, for their lives, and as time passed it became harder and harder to find compromises.

With Claire's brother it had been easier. They'd been such eager parents, so willing to change themselves and bits and pieces of their lives for their son, and by the time he was seven, when Claire was born, he was already on his way to growing up and becoming a fine young man. And he was. It wasn't that they hadn't wanted Claire. Michelle had always wanted a baby girl and Matthew had always thought that two was a perfectly reasonable number of children.

Christopher had been out of the house by the time the trouble started, and so he'd grown up and moved out without a hitch. And then Claire…Claire was difficult. Claire was spoilt and Matthew knew it, just as well as he knew that she'd become a tool for he and Michelle to use against each other; a weapon of a never-ending war. He knew it wasn't fair to his daughter, and he knew it was equally as unfair to continue justifying his actions by buying her what she wanted and letting her do what she wanted.

It was going to get to a point where he and Michelle were going to have to sit down and have a talk, discuss each other, themselves, but especially Claire, and how they were going to handle her. The teenage years were the toughest ones – that's what all their friends said and that's how it had been with Christopher as well.

Matthew gazed at the neatly framed picture on his equally neat desk. Sometimes he worried that he was being too strict on Claire. Maybe it was because he knew that, if he opened up to her and became a father to her he would stop being able to use her against Michelle. And if he was unable to use his one true weapon, everything could fall apart. Matthew felt the pinpricks of tears at his eyes, gazing at the smiling face of his daughter. It wasn't the best situation for Michelle, Claire, or himself, but it was the only one the three of them knew how to handle, and he wasn't sure he could change it all on his own.

He didn't think he knew how to anyways.

Jerry Johnson stood still in the cereals aisle, staring straight ahead with his arms hanging listlessly over his shopping cart. His wife was at least an aisle ahead of him, and would eventually realize and come back to find him, and then she'd be even angrier than she already was. Saturday shopping trips had seemed like a good idea at the beginning of their marriage, but now, almost twenty years later, they were just getting to be monotonous. He actually wished that one weekend they wouldn't be able to make it, and he'd have to run out in the middle of the week to pick up every little they needed on Monday and then Wednesday morning, when they ran out of milk. It didn't seem likely that it would ever happen, though, since not even their son's almost suicide attempt and the subsequent detention could stop Diane.

Jerry slowly began moving forward. He loved Diane, he really did, but sometimes he just wanted her to slow down, to stop moving, to stop being so angry or sad or enthusiastic, or whatever it was she was doing to an extreme. Nowadays her focus was on Brian, their son and eldest child, trying to get him to be the best he could be. Jerry wondered what Brian wanted. Jerry wondered if Brian could even differentiate between what he wanted and what his mother wanted anymore.

Jerry had been a brilliant football player when he'd been in high school, and he couldn't say that he didn't wish Brian was like that. No, that wasn't true. He couldn't say that he hadn't wished, past tense, that Brian had turned out that way. He figured Brian as a football would have been easier to handle, because he'd have understood him a lot better and then maybe Diane wouldn't have turned him into this awful geeky kid.

It wasn't that Jerry had a problem with Brian being smart. Not at all. In fact, he valued it highly because it had never been something he'd excelled at, and Brian was a brilliant child. But he knew he couldn't be easy on him, in high school, always so worried about grades and, well fuck, he was in the physics club, of all clubs. If Diane let up just a little, Brian's life would be easier, he was pretty sure. Jerry remembered when he'd been in high school, remembered vividly how kids could treat each other, sometimes even without realizing the extent of the damage they were causing, but it was as if Diane had forgotten.

When they'd been in high school together, sweethearts, seriously thinking about their future, they'd promised that they would understand their teenage children, when the time came, but somehow Diane had forgotten that completely and here they were, with a son in detention because a gun had gone off in his locker. Diane was furious about it; about the gun, about Brian's lack of an explanation, about Brian's mark in shop, and about the detention. Frankly, Jerry couldn't have cared less about Brian's marks or his detention. He was worried about the need for a gun and the why? Question that had never been answered.

He'd talk to Brian later, he decided, and try to figure out how his son was doing. Try to talk to him like he needed to be talked to, without trying to be a parent or a buddy, really, but just kind of talking. Maybe that would work. Jerry looked up and saw Diane rounding the corner and walking down the aisle towards him. Lifting himself, he began moving forwards.

Roy Clark was not a particularly caring man, and he knew it. He'd never seen reason to go easy on Andy, and Andy didn't need anyone going easy on him anyways. Roy had been driving around for what seemed like hours after dropping his son off at the school for detention, and he still couldn't wrap his mind around why Andy would do something so stupid. It wasn't that he had a problem with offense itself. He remembered what it was like to be a kid, he remembered what the feel of power was, and why you'd want to keep it. But, like he'd said, you can't get caught.

Andy had been promising from the very start, and now he was almost as good as he could be. He still wasn't there. He could be so much better, could have improved so much more, but it was as if his heart wasn't really in it, ever. Peggy had told him time and time again that he was going to hard on his son, but he knew what the sport world was like, and Peggy didn't. He knew that what was necessary and what wasn't, and what was necessary was constant training, constant striving to be better. What wasn't necessary was coddling mothers.

He loved Peggy, but sometimes she just didn't understand about the father-son relationship. He'd told her that often enough, but she always shook her head and sighed and acted as if he was so naïve. Andy was going to go pro, Andy was going to do something big with the talent he had, and that was more important than anything. This detention was a slip-up, this detention was a minor setback, but any situation could be remedied with the right medicine. With Andy it would be a father-son talk about where he wanted his life to go, and where it would be heading if he kept getting caught.

Roy let his mind drift back to his wife. Peggy was a wonderful wife, if a coddling mother. When they'd met Roy had been about to make it big on the wrestling scene, and they'd gone through that stage of his life together. She knew how important this was to him, how important it was now to Andy. So he couldn't understand why her support was faltering. After all these years, and suddenly she was worried about Andy, about whether or not it was the right thing.

Roy hadn't let their relationship suffer from it, anyways, not much. They avoided the topic of their son for the most part, focusing on mundane day-to-day things and memories in their conversations. Sometimes, though, when Roy accidentally woke her up in the mornings when he and Andy were leaving for extra training, she looked like she wanted him to stay and not go to training. Just to take a break.

He couldn't take a break, of course, because it took months to get into the habit of training but only a few days to break it. He knew from experience. With his first son, Sam, he'd tried to harness the talent he'd had, but in the end Sam had first broken his training habits, then lost his love of the sport altogether. Roy wasn't going to take that chance with Andy. Roy was going to make him work hard, and then harder, and then he'd achieve his goals. Roy drove back to his house, intent on developing a new training schedule for the next month.

Ed Bender sat in front of the TV with a beer in hand. Despite Dorothy's pleading with him to not drink before noon, he'd needed one. The boy had woken him up early that morning, yelled something about a detention and slammed the door. Fucking bastard, that's what his son was. John was in detention again, which had Dorothy all distraught, but what the fuck did it matter anyways? The boy had been trouble from the very start, even when Ed had been trying to make an effort with him.

And he had, once, when he was still young and hopeful and John was just a kid to be moulded into whatever person he and Dorothy could make him into. That was back in the days when Dorothy was prettier, too, when she cared about her appearance. It had all gone to shit, that's what had happened. Dorothy had stopped caring about her appearance and making Ed happy in favour of her son, and so Ed had stopped caring about her and what she cared about, which was John.

That would have been about the age of eleven, maybe twelve, when John started getting and attitude and picking fights at school, and Ed had tried to talk to him, tried to tell him that he didn't want to be like his old man. Gradually John stopped fighting just because and started fighting and talking back 'cause he was pissed at Ed. Ed knew it. Ed knew he should have been a better father, but he'd tried and then he'd lost and sometimes that's how life was. John knew that by now. John knew why his father had stopped trying, Ed reasoned, because John was becoming just like him.

What a laugh, Ed thought. You try hard to make them different, make them amount to something, but in the end you can't change a thing. Genes are what they are. Kids grow up to be just like their mummies or daddies and fuck it all if they don't want to be. Fuck it if they think they can have something better – they can't.