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Bob’s White Christmas
part of the BobsWorld universe
by Setcheti
Disclaimer: I do not own Bob the Builder. I just love
him a whole lot and want him to be happy – isn’t that how fic usually
happens?
About BobsWorld: The BobsWorld universe is based on the
premise that the Bob the Builder characters are real people, living in a
real world. To find out more about BobsWorld, please go here.
Wendy had known Bob for over a year, and in all that
time he’d never talked about his family.
It wasn’t like she could have brought the subject up
herself. Living in a place where contact with relatives and friends
could be seriously curtailed by security considerations, you just didn’t
ask anyone about their family unless they said something first – and Bob
never had. He had a slightly blurry photo of Todd, John and Fred
dressed up for last year’s summer dance on the mantle, and a picture of
Wendy herself on the small table beside his favorite chair. There
were no pictures of his family anywhere, not even one of the Aunt Doris
whom he’d mistakenly panicked over once because he’d thought she was coming
to the island for a visit.
Which was why Wendy was so very surprised the day she
stuck her head into Bob’s living room from the office door and found him
absolutely surrounded by photo albums and scrapbooks. He’d looked
happy enough to burst, and he’d just as happily waved her in and started
showing her everything at once. And that was how she’d found out that
Bob had a brother.
And not just a brother, an identical twin brother named
Tom. Five minutes older than Bob, and currently working in the Arctic
on the intergovernmental pipeline project…and until very recently not
cleared by Project security to be allowed communication with his younger brother.
“He didn’t understand,” Bob told her sadly, putting aside one scrapbook and
picking up another. “I couldn’t explain it to him, of course.
And I think when Aunt Doris tried she just made it worse. She looks
after our parents,” he explained, showing her a picture of an older couple
standing on either side of a younger Bob and Tom at what looked like a
graduation ceremony. “Dad has Alzheimer’s, and Mom…well, she doesn’t,
but she’s sort of followed Dad down the garden path, if you know what I
mean. There’s just no way we can tell them about the Project.
Aunt Doris told them I’m working in South America, and sometimes I send
them letters to that effect through her.” He sniffed. “She
tells me they read them over and over again, never throw any of them away.”
Wendy put her arm around him and tried not to sniff
herself; her younger sister Jenny had clearance, although sometimes Wendy
wished she didn’t, and their parents were dead. She’d had to send the
occasional truth-deprived note to this relative or that, but she couldn’t
imagine what Bob, who was as honest as the day was long, must go through
every time he had to write a letter full of lies to his mother and
father. “What about Tom?” she asked him. “Does he think you’re
in South America? He must have seen those letters.”
“Oh, he saw them.” Bob shook his head. “They
made him furious. He’d even told Aunt Doris a time or two to let me
know just what he thought of me for playing some kind of game with Mom and
Dad. You see, the Project couldn’t clear him until now. Tom
checked out okay, but his boss didn’t, and they’re sort of cut off from the
rest of the world a lot of the time.” He smiled, even if it was a
little watery, tracing the mirror image of himself in the picture. “But
then his boss got replaced, and the new guy is okay so the clearance
finally went through. The Project contacted him yesterday, and he
called me early this morning. He wasn’t sure I’d even want to talk to
him, much less have him come for a visit.”
“I’m glad he got up the courage to call.” Wendy
hugged him and then removed her arm; even inside and alone, there was still
the decency clause to consider. She picked up a pile of pictures and
started looking through them, smiling at the sight of two tiny brown-haired,
brown-eyed toddlers in footie pajamas sitting beneath the branches of a
decorated tree. “So is he going to come see you?”
“He’s going to try to make it for Christmas.”
Bob’s smile was just short of beaming, but it quickly fell back into
worry. “Unless he gets snowed in – or we do.”
“Oh dear.” Sol Island was sunk deep in the depths
of winter, and the heavy snowfalls had closed down the town more than
once. Bob had already been out with Muck and Scoop before dawn,
clearing roads of the night’s accumulated snow, and he’d be going back out
before dark to clear them again. He couldn’t clear the railroad
tracks, though, and if the drifts became too high and frozen the valley
would be cut off until the railroad manager from up the line managed to get
something done about it. Which could take a while if the rail yard
was snowed in too, and Christmas was in two more weeks.
It was going to be Wendy’s second Christmas in Sunflower
Valley. Jenny had come the year before, right after Christmas, and
they’d gone skiing for New Year’s. The ski trip had been fun, she and
Jenny got along pretty well most of the time…but then the train had gotten
snowed in and Jenny had been stuck in Sunflower Valley for several extra
days. Several very long days, from Wendy’s perspective; Jenny was
easily bored, and a little on the wild side. She also had a tendency
to try to steal Wendy’s boyfriends, a nasty habit she’d had since they were
teenagers.
She’d taken an immediate interest in Bob, who it seemed
was only oblivious when it came to harmless women; faced with the
dangerous, man-hunting predator that was Jenny, he’d all but run from her
every time she’d gotten close. Which had only made Jenny more
determined to get him, of course, and eventually Wendy had been forced to
push the two of them together for a little while so that Jenny’s
frustration wouldn’t get the better of her. So Jenny had tried to
teach a reluctant Bob to ski on the snow-shrouded hills near Fred Pickles’
farm, which hadn’t gone well judging by how covered with snow Bob had been
once they’d made it back to the yard…but after that, Jenny had backed off
completely. Which had been a first – Jenny had never, in Wendy’s
experience, ever backed off. Talking to Bob about it had been
out of the question, of course, so finally Wendy had just come right out
and asked her sister what had happened.
Jenny had seemed embarrassed, which was unusual in
itself, but she still hadn’t told her older sister exactly what had gone on
that afternoon in the hills. All she would say was that Bob was ‘not
just another guy for them to wrangle over’ and she wasn’t going to bother
him that way any more. Jenny had been back to the island one more
time since then and had lived up to her words – she teased Bob, but she
wasn’t pursuing him. Having her around had still made Bob nervous,
though, so Wendy had compensated him for it by replacing his decaf coffee
with the real thing for the duration of Jenny’s stay. Bob’s response
to that had been to quietly switch from coffee to Wendy’s favorite herbal
tea for an entire week after Jenny had left, and the smell of the tea still
to this day gave Wendy a warm glow; Bob definitely wasn’t ‘just another
guy.’
Wendy spent the next few hours that morning looking at
pictures and listening to Bob talk about his family, hoping with everything
in her that the weather would stay clear enough long enough for this
special man who meant so much to her to have a Christmas reunion with his
brother.
This story has not been completed.
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