Runs In The Family || Rusty Ryan

1

Even after all of these years, Rosalind Ocean could still clearly remember the last day she had spent with her father. The two of them had told her mother, that they would simply be going for ice cream, that he would have Rose back in time for dinner and maybe she would have been had her father not needed to stop for cigarettes. Maybe, she never would have had to see him get arrested at all, if they hadn't had to stop at all.

Six cop cars surrounded the little corner convenience store that her father frequently visited and before Rose even knew what was happening, her father was being arrested in front of her as another cop and a social worker tried to walk her towards another car. She tried to fight them off, she tried to get back to her father, wanting to know what this was about, wanting to know what her father had done to get arrested in such a manner.

"You didn't," she asked him, when the cops finally let her see him before he was carted off to the local precinct, "Please, tell me that you didn't. You promised. You promised me that you wouldn't do something stupid because of Mom." Danny Ocean could only look at his little girl sadly. He had done something stupid, something incredibly stupid. Tess had just left and was threatening to take Rosie with her, take his little girl somewhere he would never find her. He was being destructive and he knew it, he was on the fast track going nowhere again and no matter how much he wanted to be better for Rose, to keep his promise to her, he just couldn't do it.

"Go," he told her, "Go with your mom. Go to that school she wants you to go to. Live your life. Become better than me."

"There's no one better than you," she told him, as Danny placed one last kiss on his daughter's forehead before being loaded into the back of a cop car.

Rose wiped away a tear as the social worker led her back to another vehicle, ready to take her home to her mother. But, before the elderly woman could though, Rose took off like a shot. She didn't want to go home. Home was where her mother was, home was where the woman that had set her father on his destructive path was. Home was the place that had all these 'better life' expectations for her that she didn't want to live up to. She wanted to be just like her dad.

Running as fast as her feet could carry her, Rose let her mind go blank. She knew everything that she was running from wasn't what she wanted, but she had no idea where she was running to. She just kept running, running until she just couldn't run anymore.

"Rose," a voice broke through her catatonic state, "Rose, what are you doing here?"

"I don't know," she answered, her voice sounding foreign to her own ears as she looked at her father's right hand man finally realising where she had run off to in her emotional state, "I-I. Dad's been arrested and I, I didn't want to go home. I just ran and, Rusty, I, I don't know what to do..."

"Okay," he told her, "Everything's going to be okay. Let's get you inside and get you warm. And then you can tell me everything that happened and we'll both figure out what to do, how to get you home..."

"I don't want to go home," she told him once more.

"Okay, okay," Rusty responded, looking worriedly at the almost eighteen year old in front of him, "You don't have to go home, you can stay here. I'll take the couch."

---------------------------

"Morning," Danny Ocean greeted the parole board, as he took a seat in front of the people that would decide whether or not he would be granted his freedom.

"Please state your name for the record," one of the board members asked.

"Daniel Ocean."

"Thank you."