Chapter Text
(“Sorry, Ben,” Ayin had said — sounding for all the world utterly casual about the fact he had turned up at the front door hours late with a dozing Little in his arms. “The amount of time they make you spend doing paperwork in there, sheesh, you’d almost think they wanted to keep her. Does the guest bed have blankets on?”)
The circumstances, as had been explained to him exhaustively, were very special, and very reversible.
‘She is a difficult Little to place,’ they emphasized — handed him her file, for good measure. ‘There will be no strike against your record if you have to bring her back in. Additionally, due to the urgency of your adoption and the inability to properly evaluate your home situation…’
“They’re giving us 30 days,” he explained to Carmen, bright and early over breakfast (the cereal he kept in the house for dry snacking was secretly a blessing, it seemed); he’s not about to keep secrets from her. What would that accomplish? “And then they’ll do a check-in and if you look good and I look good and Ben looks good and the apartment isn’t actively on fire, we’ll get another 60 days, and if we’re all still fine at the end of that then we’re home free. Sounds reasonable.”
“Why do they have to check on me?” Carmen complains, kicking her feet into the table struts to watch her milk ripple. “That’s not fair. I don’t wanna go back!”
“Well, you’re not gonna go back. You’ll be fine in 30 days and if they try to make up some bullshit reason this place isn’t good enough I’ll make up some reason back that their place isn’t good enough, except they would be lying and I would not be.”
“… maybe I didn’t hate it,” Carmen mumbles. Ayin shrugs, getting up to rinse his coffee cup.
“Then we can visit sometime.”
”No!”
“Then we’ll never drive down that street again.”
“There’s something wrong with you. Like, clinically, I think.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time someone’s mentioned it,” he replies, closing the dishwasher, “One of these days I should probably get tested for something. Haven’t decided what, though.”
Carmen’s staring at him like he came from a different planet. He stares at her like she’s staring at him like he came from a different planet.
It’s delightful.
“… so,” Carmen mumbles, finally averting her gaze into her now-chocolatey bowl of milk, “What do you, um. Actually do all day?”
“Right. Well… usually I sit at the counter and do work until I almost pass out,” Ayin says, exceedingly truthfully, “But now you’re here, so I think my list of daily concerns is less single-bulleted. Today, actually, I was thinking we could start a list?”
“A list of what.”
“You need clothes, right?” He says, sitting himself back at the table with a notepad and pen. “And other things too, probably. Like a toothbrush. And a bath scrub. And… stuff?”
Carmen stares at the notepad with no small amount of apprehension. “Um… I dunno. Maybe you should wait to make a list for a few days.”
“I don’t think you wanna be wearing Little scrubs for a few days straight,” he says. “Or using my toothbrush. That seems excessive.”
“Look, you’re probably not gonna need…”
Ayin taps the end of his pen, very pointedly, at the table in front of Carmen. She blinks, glancing up at him… nervously.
“We will need to get you new clothes,” he says, patiently, “Because you’re going to be living here from now on.”
“But—“
“I told you, didn’t I? That you’d have to be a real asshole to send a Little back to the pound. And I am not a real asshole, or a liar. So we are going to get you some new clothes.”
Carmen doesn’t say anything, but, that’s alright. Ayin figures there isn’t a lot to say about that sort of statement, anyway.
“We can just start by having Ben pick up some pajamas on the way home, alright? Then you can sleep in them and lounge around in those and we can have a day to think about what you need to get.”
“… okay,” Carmen says, sounding not sure about this in the slightest. Ayin nods, scribbling at his notepad.
“Right. What color do you like?”
“Ummm… I sort of…” she trails off, glancing around the room — the ceiling, the carpet, the sofa, the walls. “… grrraaaay?”
“Your favorite color does not have to go with our home decor,” Ayin says, “They’re pajamas for you to have on your own body, not to glue to the wall, right?”
Carmen’s cheeks flush, and she studies a particularly fascinating spot on the table. “… fine. Red.”
“Nice. Red pajamas, done and dusted. Do you want a red toothbrush, too?”
“Yeah,” she says, without really thinking about it, and he notes it down immediately.
“Okay, that’s fine. Red pajamas, red toothbrush… what do you eat?”
“Huh? Uh, food, dummy.”
“What do you eat, I mean,” Ayin replies. “Benjamin eats salads and I mostly eat air, and so I’m sure you have some slightly different tastes.”
”Maybe I eat salads!” Carmen protests, but Ayin just tilts his head to the side for half a second before she sighs and slumps a fraction in her seat. “Okay I don’t eat salads. I don’t really… you know it’s like, a mess hall in there, right? I think the only thing I’ve eaten for the past year is chicken nuggets and off-brand vanilla breakfast cereal.”
“So I’m hearing no chicken nuggets and only the highest chocolate content, on-brand breakfast cereals.”
“I—! I… I, well, I guess, yeah.”
“So you can come down to the corner store with me and we’ll look through what they have, is that fine?”
“Hckwhat—?!”
“Wh—? Whoa, don’t choke, careful!” Ayin exclaims, half hopping out of his seat as Carmen coughs.
“Mmnot— khha— I j’s was, heugh, I just wasn’t,”
“You can wear one of my sweatshirts, if you don’t want the scrubs to be obvious, I just definitely don’t have any pants you wouldn’t be swimming in…”
“N— No, I,” Carmen stammers — starts and stops and thinks better of it entirely, sighing again as her cheeks tinge even redder. “It doesn’t— okay. It’s okay. You can do that.”
“We’ll do that after this, then. It shouldn’t take too long. You, uh… I think the centers are supposed to do this, but you have your shots up to date, right?”
“Yeah,” Carmen grumbles, suppressing a small shiver. “No more until two years. Really.”
“I’m not lining you up for random extra stabs in the arm, don’t worry about that,” he half-laughs. “I just wanna make sure you’re safe to hang out at the store for a little bit, and you are, so well done us. Hmm…”
He looks down at his scratchy handwriting appraisingly, then nods.
“Okay. That seems like… probably enough for day 1, right? Not too much excitement?”
”Nothing’s too much excitement for me,” Carmen asserts, in a way that makes Ayin think that maybe that statement was mostly confined to a care center’s definition of excitement. He nods anyway.
“Duly noted. We can go ahead and do that after breakfast, and… ah! Right! Hold on, there’s something I want to do first.”
“… yeah?” Carmen replies, staring after him as he takes a walk over to his bedroom. What he’s looking for is still out on the desk — he grabs it and returns to the table quite promptly.
Carmen freezes as he sets a Manila folder, labeled 'CARMEN [L DISTRICT 2]', in front of him.
“Right. So. I was reading this last night,” he says, speaking and resting his hand on the thing as if Carmen wasn’t staring at it like it was a volatile explosive. “And it got to be about midnight before I realized that I really have no idea how much of this is bullshit and how much of it is anything I need to actually know. So.”
Carmen blinks.
“S-Sorry, what?”
“I have no idea what parts of this are, you know, very useful information,” he repeats, phrasing it in another orientation, “And what parts are just some tired staffer complaining about something or another you did whenever. So, I was hoping you could help me with sorting some of it out. Let me make a summary of this thing I can actually have a shot of remembering, instead of…”
He riffles the stack of paper inside, looking vaguely impressed.
“Well. Yeah. Look, I can memorize formulas, but this is kind of a lot for one guy.”
“… what… uh. What do you want me to say about it? Exactly?” Carmen ventures uneasily. He shrugs, flipping it open so casually she has to wonder if he knows how much trouble this stupid thing has ever caused her.
“I figured I would just ask quickly about anything that seemed important and you can tell me if it’s actually important or if it’s just random crap they threw in here for whatever reason,” he says. “Like, okay, I do know your name is Carmen, because you told me that yesterday…”
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t want to change it, right?”
“No?!”
“Annnnd I can cross that one off just like that,” he demonstrates, flicking his pen across the page in one motion. “Boom. Totally outdated. New and improved. See?”
“I… yeah, I guess,” Carmen says, staring pensively at the file under Ayin’s hand. That thing… she’s never even seen what’s in that thing, other than having it waved in her face once or twice during a completely useless 'disciplining' session — there was a record of that time she got fed up and said she wanted to change her name because of how sick she was of everyone yelling it all the time? Really?
And he was just… crossing it out?
“So let’s do this real quick for the big stuff, okay? This is definitely not a do in one morning project. But, like… this says your range is… 10-12? Yellow? That’s Yellow, right, I — full disclosure I cannot remember.”
“Y-Yeah, that’s Yellow,” Carmen says, huffing a tiny bit to disguise her own small laugh. “Um. I think they tested me when they got me and that was that?”
“Oh. Well, is that right?”
“Um…”
Carmen hesitates.
“I wouldn’t know if it was right or not,” Ayin adds, voice no more judgmental than it was when he was asking what cereal she wanted for breakfast. “I’m really quite terrible at guessing ranges. There’s a reason I’m not a Classifier for a living.”
“Two reasons,” Carmen says, absentmindedly, and quickly covers her mouth — but Ayin laughs, and he still sounds dumb when he does it, but he’s also not mad at the completely stray shot that came out of her mouth.
“Okay, yeah, two reasons. So… here, tell you what. If you don’t think it’s right, or you don’t know if it’s right, we can just go check again sometime in the next month. Weather permitting,” he says, smiling lopsidedly. “So that way it doesn’t matter if you know exactly what it is, and the answer can just be 'Yes' or 'No'.”
She stares down his pen, his yellow notepad.
“… I don’t know,” she admits, slowly. “It was… kind of a long time ago.”
“Okay! One appointment to make at a Classifier, then, I guess,” he says, circling the data in the folder with a great many question marks attached and scratching down a note for himself on the pad. “I think I’m gonna have to ask Ben about that one. You really should’ve seen his face last night, sorry for not waking you up when I pulled in, but, you looked exhausted so—“
“You carried me in?”
“Huh? Yeah, of course. Look, I’m bad at climbing, but I’m not making you stand around in an elevator all tired.”
“… oh.”
“Anyway, he’ll be back tonight… sorry, I didn’t really, uh, explain? Ben — Benjamin, he’s my partner. He works 9 to 5, so he’s already gone when I wake up, and you woke up after me, so… you can meet him tonight then! He likes you, so don’t worry about that…”
“He likes me?” Carmen asks, raising an eyebrow. “He hasn’t even met me.”
“Yeah, well, he likes me,” Ayin replies, “Enough to live with me, even. So I think you’ll get on just fine.”
“… and what if we don’t?”
She crosses her arms. Ayin shrugs.
“I think you will,” he says, “But even if you don’t, he’d never be mean to you or anything. And if he was, which he won’t be, he’d be getting a big earful from me.”
Carmen huffs, but doesn’t offer any further response. Ayin shrugs again, taking the file and flipping further through it.
“… okay, here, let’s get… these couple things out of the way, and then forget about it for a little bit, okay?”
“Sure, whatever…”
“Okay, then. Do you need nighttime protection?”
“What?! No!! That was one time— that was two times it doesn’t count!” Carmen yelps, and Ayin raises his hands in the universal gesture for nonthreatening-ness.
“Only a question, remember! Only a question. We’ll go without it, then, not a problem.”
He crosses the offending line out. Carmen glares at it like she’s glad it’s dead.
“… the last one is… more of a clarification I’m looking for, I think.” He says, carefully. “You told me a little bit about your intonation, at the place, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Carmen says, staring, guarded. “Why?”
“Well… you made it sound like it was something you were pretty used to using,” he continues, “Throwing your weight around, and all. And it makes sense, y’know, every man for himself at the all-day Little rager. But — and look, I said it and I meant it, earlier, I’m not a liar. Ben calls me painfully honest, actually. So,”
Carmen holds her breath.
“I’m just gonna tell you straight up,” he continues, as neutral as if he was remarking on the weather, “They kind of gave me the laundry-list of warnings in that conference room when they were having you get your things together back there. Some real serious stuff. And a lot of it was more than a little stupid, I mean, c’mon — I’m dumb but I’m not 'leave a Little in a hot car' dumb… but, some of it I kind of wanna talk about. They did say you had some,”
A lot of, Carmen thinks, sourly.
“Incidents regarding using that intonation just kind of… you know, out and about. So.”
And here it comes.
“I know it’s probably just kind of a habit,” Ayin says, “And like I said, it makes sense. That place sucks. But, y’know… I’m kind of new at this too, but I do know my number-one job now, with a bullet, is taking care of you. Making sure you don’t get hurt… keeping you fed and watered. Taking you for walks. Plenty of sunshine.”
“Number two,” Carmen mumbles, and he rolls his fingers on the tabletop once or twice.
“Number one. If the people I’m working with tell me it’s me or you, I’m getting a job at the first gas station that will hire me while I find a better contract,” he says, firmly — and Carmen is shocked to find that she actually, sort of, believes that. “Anyway. It’s my most important job, doing those things to help you. And it is going to make it kind of hard to do that, if you’re… enabling manual override on me so you can grab a hot pan.”
She flinches, then shakes her head, then scowls, then just pouts.
“She was a jerk. She told me I couldn’t touch anything. And then—“
“And then you burned your hand very badly, and spent a day in Little’s medical,” Ayin says — firmly, again, like he’s stating a fact (she guesses he is kinda doing that), but he isn’t glaring. He’s looking at her… normally. Maybe even a little gently, if she really squints. “And I’m sure most of her reasons for telling you not to touch anything were more than ridiculous — but telling you not to touch the pan was to keep you safe.”
“Deserved it,” Carmen mumbles, but she’s not entirely sure who she’s talking about.
“No,” Ayin says, simply. “Nobody did.”
She stays quiet.
“So. I think we have enough going on today as it is,” he continues, “But it’s still important for me to lay down at least one specific ground rule, okay? I mean… I know you know to look both ways before crossing the street. We don’t really need to spend time on that. But what I would like to make a rule about, in specific, is that you don’t use your intonation unless you are in peril. Not to tell me you don’t have a bedtime, not to get something free at the grocery store, nothing unless you are in danger and need my or anyone else’s help. Okay?”
“That’s not fair!” Carmen exclaims, smacking her hands down on the table with a true scowl on her face. “I— no! That rule’s bad! Take it back!”
“Carmen, I think it’s a pretty important rule to have,” he replies, still just as calm as he was ten seconds ago. (Unfair!) “If I can’t be sure that I can request you to do things like go to bed, then I’m just going to be a worried mess all the time. That’s not fair to you, is it? If I was distracted thinking about how much I couldn’t help you with?”
“B— Bedtime isn’t help! It’s not fair, it’s not!”
“Carmen,” he says again, patiently, and she growls. No! Not fair! “The idea here is, you shouldn’t be needing to use your voice on me to get things. I’m supposed to be giving you the things that you need myself, without you having to force me to do it. That’s not fair to you either, is it?”
Carmen… blinks.
“If I’m doing my job,” Ayin says, “And I very much intend to — you will be taken care of. Maybe not perfectly, at first. We don’t know everything about each other yet, and that’s… something we’ll just have to figure out. But the point of me taking care of you at all is that you will have your needs provided for. And if I miss something… you can just ask me. Normally. And I’ll probably just say yes. I’m not out to deprive you of anything. We can just talk about it.”
“… t-that’s… no,” Carmen whines, but the scowl has dropped off her face. Ayin smiles, but it’s sort of sympathetically, and not fake-cheerfully like some people she could mention, probably.
“Yes. I mean it. I’m not a liar,” Ayin says, gesturing to the file laid out on the table (one page now splattered with a few droplets of chocolate milk, oops) — “I’m not out to hide anything from you. I don’t want to hide anything from you. I like you. I want you to… live happily here. I don’t want you to feel stressed out and angry all the time and ready to defend your tiny territory against all the other tiny terrors at a moment’s notice, or ready to flip the tables on me and fend for yourself at the drop of a hat. I… I want you to feel safe. Like you know what to expect. And I can’t give you that if you’re pushing me around about everything.”
“I’m never gonna feel safe,” Carmen says, faster than she even thinks, “Never again. So it doesn’t even matter!”
“Even so,” Ayin says, “I’d like you to be safe, physically. I’d like to be able to keep you safe, so you at least don’t have to worry about that. And if we can break the habit, then we can both be sure that I can at least keep you safe from hot pans and heavy objects.”
Carmen bites her lip. Her throat feels thick and awful and she hates this conversation but he’s not ending it to yell at her no matter what she says.
“No,” she whimpers, and hates that too, because she sounds soft and punchable and vincible like some sorry little kid. “I hate you. Stop it. Stop it stop it stop it,”
“Well, I like you very much. More than enough to want you to live with me from now on. And certainly more than enough to want to keep you safe,” he says, still calmly, “Even if you don’t like me much when I’m making rules.”
“Stop it,” Carmen sniffles, and then covers her eyes, and then shivers and sniffles again and she hates this so much—
“We can stop talking about it for now,” Ayin says, quietly, “But it’s still going to be a rule. And I’d like you to try and not break it.”
“I’m gonna break it. I’m gonna, I’m gonna mess up in ten minutes and it’s, it’s stupid,”
“That’s okay. Carmen, that’s really okay. I’m not expecting you to perfectly suddenly stop doing the thing you do every day,” he says, and she can feel a hand on her shoulder, and she’s going to cry and she hates it, “I just want you to try your best to do it less. Okay?”
“You’re gonna be mad at me all the time,” she says, feeling like she’s outside in the rain. Ayin makes a small noise in his throat, she can’t really tell what, but the next time he talks his voice is right next to her.
“I am not going to be mad at you all the time. I’m not going to be mad at you if you break the rules, Carmen, that would be, just. Stupid. Me getting mad about things would just make you mad and scared and then what, we have to wait for Ben to get home and mediate? Really bad plan. He is such a pushover.”
(She giggles, wetly, just once or twice. Despite herself.)
“I’m not even going to take whatever you used it for away,” Ayin continues, and Carmen stiffens in surprise. “So don’t get worried about that, either. You’re used to using it for things that you need, and I’m not taking something you need away from you, ever.”
“N— No’d alwaygs,” Carmen says, through the snot in her throat. Ayin shuffles slightly, and she can suddenly feel warmth pressing all the way up her arm.
“… gonna be honest,” he half-laughs, again, “Getting things you want, when you live in a shouty nasty group home most of the time, is something you need too. Even if you’re not there anymore — it’s a habit, right? It’s not going away overnight. We’ll work on it a little bit every day and it’ll be fine.”
“… nngh…”
“I promise. I swear to you, on my honor, on my grandmother’s grave, that it will be fine. And that you can ask me for whatever you want, and the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen is we talk about it first,” he says, he insists, and Carmen is believing it, Carmen hates that she’s believing it. “And that I won’t let you get hurt, not without a good long fight with whatever wants to do it, I will use my teeth, it will be an ordeal. And that I really, really, really do want you to be happy here. I know it’s… um. A lot. That it probably sounds dumb, coming from me. But…”
She snuffles, slowly pulling her hands down from her face, and Ayin is sitting next to her, on the bench — he’s facing behind her, and his arm is pressed up to hers, and he’s not looking at her expectantly, even, and she doesn’t realize that she’s sighing until she’s already doing it.
“… but I really do mean it,” he says, quietly, and Carmen can see his cheeks go red all the way to his ears. “I— um. I want to take care of you so bad I think I might die? And I think that’s, probably a good thing, like that means I’m… being a proper Big, but, I’m sorry if I don’t do it right. I don’t know what right is yet. I just want you to be happy so much I’d probably do precisely one half of a backflip and eat shit right here on the kitchen floor if you asked me to just normally, which is, you know, not a great sense of self-preservation, but also I think hearing you laugh even a little bit would be worth it. So basically I’m stupid. But I want to take care of you and be stupid. If that’s, you know… fine with you.”
Carmen stares at him. He doesn’t stare back this time — he’s looking at his hands, clasped on his lap, waiting for an answer. Maybe he even thinks the answer is going to be no, and that makes her heart hurt even though it really shouldn’t.
So she puts her head on his shoulder.
“… i’ds fi’de,” she sniffles. “Y… you g’an do i’d. ‘z o’gay.”
“You’re really sure?” He asks, like he’s giving her a second chance if her mouth is faster than her head again, and she nods, gripping her arm a little tighter than she should.
“Yea’. I… I don’d… I don’d ha’de you,” she says, quietly, “‘m z’orry. W’z ju’ds mad.”
“I kinda figured,” Ayin says, “It happens sometimes. I’m glad you don’t hate me.”
“Mmh.”
“Let’s go wipe your face a little bit, okay? Then I’ll show you my closet, and we can get some warm stuff on, and go get food.”
“Mmhn,” Carmen nods.
She doesn’t pull her hand away when Ayin reaches for it, hesitantly — clasps it in his own, and leads her off to the bathroom.
“It’s noisy,” Carmen whines, and Ayin nods, grimacing.
“It’s noisy,” he agrees. “Sorry, Carm. Maybe it’ll be a little better with the hood up?”
It is a little better with the hood up.
Carmen is kind of tired, and a little bit cranky, but she is also trailing along behind Ayin at the store anyway, because the idea of getting to pick out something to eat is too fascinating to pass up. Her legs are a little cold, but the sweatshirt she’s wearing is enormous and warm and soft on the inside even though it’s made for Bigs and so she can deal with her legs being cold, maybe, probably.
“Just tell me if you want anything,” he says, glancing over the back of a box of pancake mix distractedly, “Or nudge me and point, or even honestly just put it in the cart? I don’t think there’s anything here that you’re not supposed to eat, anyway. I guess maybe not cat food?”
“I’m not a cat,” Carmen pouts, and he nods.
“This is true. So I suppose there won’t be any cat food showing up in the cart, then. Very good to know.”
(… Ayin’s really silly.)
Carmen tells her little voice to shut up, because they are busy.
The grocery store is… noisy, and bright, and kind of overwhelming, so she’s kind of sticking close to Ayin even though it kind of makes her look like a Little baby instead of a Little big kid which she definitely wasn’t even right now. Probably? Ayin did have her put on her ratty old Yellow ‘danna before they went outside, but he also told her she could hide it in her jacket if she didn’t feel like anyone needed to see it.
That was kinda new. Both the ‘danna and the jacket. Carmen fiddles idly with the end of one of her sleeves, more than big enough to be flopping over her hands. Usually whenever she went out she had to wear the stupid ‘danna whether she wanted to or not, over everything she was wearing, but Ayin just told her she could hide it if she wasn’t really feeling Little. And… she can’t remember the last time some Big let her wear their things, much less, like, one single whole day after even meeting her, but he let her anyway because it was cold in just her scrubs and also embarrassing walking around in sad thrown-away baby nobody wants clothes and he didn’t even argue about it. He offered it to her. Offered it! Like there wasn’t probably ten pages of information in that folder all about Carmen ruining things on purpose!!
There really must be something clinically wrong with him. She thinks if he was a Little he’d probably be in the same place she was. And if she was a Big, of course, she’d be a famous scientist and everyone would love her instead of nobody.
“… earth to Carmen?”
“Ngh—?”
“Hey, there,” Ayin laughs, a tiny bit — Carmen pouts, but he looks happy, so maybe he’s not laughing at her for spacing out actually? “Question for the crowd: do you like red flavors?”
“… what, like, cherry?” She replies, leaning up to try and look at what’s in his hands. He passes it down to her - it’s a bunch of wobbly cups of jelly.
“I mean, and strawberry and stuff is also red sometimes, right?”
“Yeah… wait, that’s a weird question. Why would my favorite color be anything to do with my flavors?”
“… well,” Ayin coughs, embarrassed, “I kinda just remember eating these old licorice candies all the time when I was a kid because they were black and white and not exactly because I liked licorice?”
“… uhhhhhh.”
Carmen squints up at him, then looks back down at the package in her hands.
“… I like cherry. And strawberry. But not sp’cifically because they’re red. I like, um, lemon and blue… raspberry? I think.”
“Oh, neat, I like lemon too,” he says. “Maybe we can go splits on something and I’ll actually remember to eat for once… do you like Jell-O generally? We don’t have to pick these if you’re not a big fan of food that wiggles.”
Oh. The package does say Jell-O. Is that what it’s normally called? “Um… yeah. I like jelly cups.”
“Cool. I’ll get a few more then. Pudding?”
“Yeah…”
“Chocolate, right?”
“Yeah,” Carmen nods, eyes going wide as he grabs two whole packages and puts them in the cart! “Um. That’s too much?”
“Hm? You don’t have to eat them all in one sitting, Carm, you know?”
“Y-Yeah but—“
“We have enough money to let you eat pudding, Carmen,” Ayin says, and pats her shoulder. “If I ask if you want it, that means you can have it if you’d like. Okay?”
“Um… okay.”
“Good. Let’s go look at cereal.”
They go through… the whole rest of the store like this, somehow. By the time they’re nearing the end, the cart has things in it that Carmen’s never seen before today, things in it that Carmen’s only seen for one or two days pretty much ever at most, and, and, it’s a lot. It’s really a lot. She could probably make this last for a month, let alone a week.
… but there is something kind of bothering her.
“Um. Is anything here for you?” She finally asks. “‘Cos if it is, you eat like a baby.”
“Huh? Oh, no, I’ve got food at home. Why?”
Carmen narrows her eyes. “You said you eat air today. And you only ate coffee for breakfast.”
“… that’s… fair,” Ayin sighs, and Carmen bites her lip — please be normal, please put something back tell me that’s rude just—
“… yeah, you know what? Let’s pick up something for me, too. Something for dinner, I guess. Microwaveable?”
“… you do eat like a baby!”
“I have been told,” he admits. “Maybe I should start… figuring out how to eat salads.”
“Ew,” Carmen mumbles, sticking out her tongue on reflex.
And just like yesterday, Ayin does too.
“Yeah, ew. Maybe I start with apples. You’ll share a little bit of yours with me, right?”
“No way! They’re mine!”
virtue of sharing or calling me greedy or tell me i only get half or—
“Ahhh, coming between a hungry Little and her Sugarbee apples, what was I thinking?” Ayin says, grinning at her like he thinks she’s funny. “I’ll get the green ones, they’re better anyways.”
“Wh— they’re sour!”
“I like sour. Plus, then we won’t mix them up, right?”
“I’m— you can have some of mine it’s fine,”
“Carmen,” he says, putting his hand on her shoulder again — “It is fine. You can share your apples if you want to, or not. And you don’t have to have any of mine if you don’t want to, either. Okay?”
Carmen stares at him. She wishes this jacket was even bigger so she could disappear inside it.
“… okay.”
“Okay. Now, I think that’s everything, so let’s…”
He looks down at his hand as if he’s going to see a note there, realizes he did not in fact bring one, and then looks up again, glancing around until he notices something.
“Oh. Carmen, do you want, like… a coloring book, or something?”
Carmen looks over to where he’s looking, and almost regrets it, because where he’s looking is at the aisle full of Little toys, cheap outside balls and pretend groceries and, yeah, coloring books. She’s… she’s definitely not Little right now, though, so it’s… she doesn’t want to go play in it, even. She doesn’t!
“… Carmen?”
“I d’n have ‘ny crayons,” she mumbles, face half-buried in the hood of her sweatshirt. “Th’y break ‘n they’re messy ‘n…”
“They sell little packs of crayons here, too… is it something you’d like to play with?”
Yes!
“N—Nnh,” mutters Carmen, pulling her hood down over her face with her free hand. There, if she didn’t have to look at it, then, then it would be fine. There’s no problems. There’s no problems!
Ayin hums a little bit.
“Carmen? Can you look at me for a second?”
Carmen looks up at him. The end of the sweatshirt sleeve is in her mouth, even though she didn’t mean to and she wasn’t Little, so she probably wasn’t gonna get to wear it again, and she knows her face must be screwing up really bad because Ayin’s smile gets kinda sad for a second.
“Hi there,” he says, and she closes her eyes because it’s too much. “There aren’t any toys at the apartment, right now, because usually it was just the two of us Bigs there. And I don’t want you to be bored today waiting for Ben to get home.”
“Nnnnhhhhhh,” Carmen whines, because that’s a really good point but she wants everything in the world to explode forever and if she gets anything else today she’s going to explode and she already knows she’s going to have to get something else later tonight and she can’t, she just can’t,
“… If I pick out a coloring book that I like,” Ayin says, carefully, and suddenly a lot further down than he was a second ago, “Would you color it in with me today, when we get home?”
Carmen blinks open her eyes, which are wet again, and sees that Ayin has crouched to put his face down much closer to hers, which should feel annoying because she’s not Little but it doesn’t and she doesn’t know why. She…
Nods.
“Alright, then. Could you stay with the cart while I go get one?”
She nods again.
Her stomach kind of squirms when he walks off behind her. It would be really easy to just leave her here, she realizes a bit belatedly, it would be really really easy, anyone could tell she’s a care-home Little and they’d just take her there. She blinks heavily, chewing harder on the end of her sleeve. She feels bad. She feels tired and fussy and like screaming which is weird because she’s not Little but maybe she… maybe she kind of is… ?
She is chewing very pensively on her sweatshirt and clinging very carefully to the cart when she feels a hand touch her head, and not her shoulder, and she freezes.
“Hey, there, sweetie, is your Mommy or Daddy around?”
That is not Ayin’s voice. That is a stranger. That is a stranger who could decide to pick her up and see where she came from and call her a runaway and take her back there and she wouldn’t have her blankie (she really wants her blankie) anymore and nononononononoNO stop touching me stop TOUCHING ME—
“Go ‘WWAY!”
“Uh— uh— ?”
“Hey! Hey, hey, hey, what’s going on over here?”
A hand touches her shoulder instead and she doesn’t even look before turning around and pushing her face into his side.
“I— I think I’m leaving?” Stammers the unknown Big, to which Ayin replies:
“Please do. It’s been a long day and we need to be going home.”
“I, r— right. Right? Yes. Well. Good… good day?”
“Goodbye.”
Carmen doesn’t say anything until she hears the footsteps go away, and then she realizes her shoulders are shaking really bad, and then she realizes Ayin’s hands are on both of them, and then she realizes she wants to go back to the apartment so bad.
“‘m sorry!”
“Carmen, it’s fine,” Ayin says, and it’s not a gooey voice but it’s so sure of itself that she sags into him anyway. “A stranger walking up and grabbing at you is a very okay time to use your tone. Let’s go home, okay?”
“Okay,” Carmen mumbles, and Ayin gently puts her hand back on the cart before they walk to the check-out.
Ayin is actually a little bit nervous.
“Carmen,” he says — voice as even as ever, though his eyes are darting a bit — “Are you sure you aren’t feeling Little?”
“Nnh,” Carmen says, very eloquently.
They’ve long since made it back to the apartment (Carmen had looked vaguely impressed, underneath all the tired, that Ayin had managed to drag the admittedly-overfilled canvas grocery cart all the way back home) and medium-since made it through a snack, and some coloring. He had deliberated for a little bit — evidently a little bit too long, which he wincingly files under 'learning experience' — at the rack of coloring books, trying to figure out what Carmen would actually like to color in, and in the end he had just picked out a dinosaur book. Half because of a little gut feeling, and half because he would honestly kind of enjoy coloring in a Diplodocus. So he and Carmen have both been seated at the living room (one couch, a chair, a table and a TV) coffee table, coloring in dinosaurs.
The odd thing about it is that Carmen is seated in his lap.
She did have kind of a scare earlier, he had reasoned, at first, but — given the positioning, he has had to be leaning over and around her to be doing much of anything, and like that he can, not to be terribly creepy, smell her. Yesterday it had been very faint, and he’d only carried her for five minutes tops in the first place; but today, right now, it is not faint. He kind of wonders if this sweatshirt is ever going to smell like him again, but also probably wouldn’t complain if it didn’t. The girl in his lap smells like cherry Tylenol, clover honey, something tangy and dark that he can’t quite place—
But most importantly, she smells Little.
It’s not unpleasant. Very much the opposite, actually, he thinks that if it wouldn’t completely freak her out he would be quite content burying his nose in the top of her head for the next three to five business days, but. As far as he remembers from class and sensitivity meetings and general inescapable cultural osmosis, Littles are only supposed to really, saturatedly, totally smell Little when they are… actively experiencing their headspace.
But Carmen is insisting that she’s not.
He might have thought she was fibbing about it; it had already been kind of an incredibly long morning with a lot of somewhat unpleasant things happening, and being rendered vulnerable at the tail end of all that… well, under the circumstances, he probably wouldn’t fess that up either. But her eyes weren’t darting down and away when she said that, nothing else fidgety or particularly fibby about the way she said it. She was insisting it pretty point-blank, not to mention pretty sleepily, and almost seeming kind of confused as to why he was asking the question.
And now she’s coloring in a Triassic jungle on his lap, still chewing on the sleeve of his old college sweatshirt (to be honest, it had seen far worse) and occasionally reaching down to pet a little red blanket on her own lap. It’s probably her special Little thing, given that it was one out of about maybe four entire objects that had been sent with her out of the care home… which is, again, a pretty fair indicator that she was dropped.
He sighs. This is kind of a mystery. But she was content with coloring, and he couldn’t say it was at all unpleasant having someone warm and small sitting on him, so even if neither of them were entirely sure about where her headspace was at, things were probably going to be fine.
Probably.
And they are, to be quite fair, fine for about half an hour before she starts to fidget and squirm where she’s sitting.
“… do you have to go to the bathroom?” He asks, about a minute into the squirming — Carmen shakes her head absentmindedly, absorbed in her book.
“Mmnh.”
“Are you sure?” He tries, because he’s really pretty sure himself that she needs to go to the bathroom, and this time she doesn’t even really reply. Okay. Well.
… his gut feeling hadn’t been wrong at the store, with the dinosaurs, he reasons — it might not be wrong about this, either.
Which means that he’s got to try and get her to the bathroom, without ticking her off… and also probably without startling her, unless he wants someone else to pee his pants for him.
Right.
“… do you think maybe you should try anyway?” He suggests. “Just to make sure?”
“Mmnhnmgh,” Carmen mumbles, sounding like she may have crammed even more of the sleeve into her mouth.
“Hmm. Yes. I hadn’t considered that,” he says, and she doesn’t turn around and shoot him a look or anything like that; just keeps coloring.
“… do you think there’s any dinosaurs in the bathroom?” Is his next venture, and that at least she shakes her head no to. Okay. There is a limit somewhere to the absurdity she is willing to stand, even if she isn’t interested in verbally replying to it.
He sits, and considers, and shifts slightly in his seat himself — then, one more idea.
“… Carmen, I have to go to the bathroom pretty bad, actually,” he says, gently putting his hands onto her shoulders the same way he’s been doing all day. She stops scribbling, for a moment, and turns her head to look at him.
Her eyes are wide and curious and very, very much Little, staring up at his face and mutely working her jaw against her sweatshirt sleeve in a way that makes him think it’s actually quite valiantly shielding her fingers from a terrible fate.
He smiles.
“Hi,” he says, and then, “Would you come with me to the bathroom? I don’t want you to get lonely.”
And this convinces Carmen — blinking cutely — to nod.
They trade turns in the bathroom, letting her go first, of course. Ayin notes that his little gut feeling was, indeed, correct again, and ponders this for two minutes as he washes his hands. She’s sitting next to the door when he comes out, rubbing her face in her blanket, and this time he is more than confident that she is certainly tired.
“Are you sleepy?” He asks, anyway — she shakes her head of course, not least because he’s pretty sure the absolute quintessential Little move is to not want to take a nap when they’re very tired. He mulls it over, tilting his head right, then left.
”I’m pretty sleepy,” is what he next declares, and she makes a little huffing sigh kind of noise. “Would you come keep me company while I nap?”
She nods. He is beginning to sense a pattern, and he crouches down.
“Here,” he says, opening up his arms, “I’ll carry you.” It’s not really a question — more of a declaration of intent — but she nods to it anyway, releasing her sleeve from her mouth to wrap both her arms around his neck.
He’s a bit startled to find that he doesn’t honestly mind the feeling of a spit-soaked shirt sleeve rubbing against the back of his neck — not when it’s accompanied by the warm, soft weight in his arms, smelling of Little and sleepiness and leaning heavy against his shoulder.
“Alright, then, off we go,” he murmurs.
She sighs against his shoulder, more than halfway ahead of him.
“… told you, you can literally set your watch by it.”
“No way!”
Benjamin is making an educated guess: he is presuming that the unfamiliar feminine voice in his living room is, in fact, the Little that his beloved Ayin had turned up with last evening.
“I’m home,” he calls out anyway — best to be predictable — as he walks in through the doorway, hanging his coat and hat on the wall, stepping out of his shoes. “I trust you’ve not burned down the apartment in my absence?”
“What’s with the burning thing? Both of you said it?”
“I tried to make spaghetti once,” Ayin sighs, good nature evident in his voice.
“He set the water on fire,” Benjamin adds, stepping fully into the main room proper — there is his Ayin, sitting on the floor, leant up against the couch, and… there is their new Little, jumping and staring at him a little forebodingly, shrinking slightly behind Ayin. He smiles, pleasantly, tilting his head. “Ah, there’s our new friend. It’s nice to meet you fully awake, my dear.”
“… friend?” She asks, like she’s testing the word on her tongue. He nods.
“Certainly. I would like to be your friend, or perhaps become one in time,” he says, and she squints at him as though he is the most suspicious man in the world.
“I’m a bad friend. You probably don’t want me,” she asserts, nibbling at the tip of her sleeve. She’s practically swimming in one of Ayin’s old sweatshirts, dusty red — he’s sensing a bit of a theme.
He settles the bag he’s carrying onto the surface of the coffee table, seating himself across from them on his knees.
“I think I shall be the judge of that,” he says. “I’ve made many bad friends in my lifetime, and enjoyed most every one of them. May I introduce myself?”
“You’re Benjamin,” she interjects. “I know that. You’re married to Ayin and you make him eat.”
“Hmm, that’s all quite accurate.” He chuckles. “Am I to learn your name?”
“… I’m Carmen,” she says, after a bit of a pause. Benjamin nods.
“Well, it’s lovely to meet you, Carmen. Have the both of you eaten?”
“We did both get a TV dinner,” Ayin admits, blushing slightly. “Carmen absolutely insisted that I eat.”
“Hmm! Very good on her for that,” Benjamin says, smiling a bit slyly. “Now you may never catch the end of it, dearest. Two of us hounding you to eat just might make a habit of you yet!”
“Uh— mmh,” Carmen mumbles, glancing away — perhaps unsure of what to do with the sudden praise. She looks back in his direction after recollecting herself, and he could swear that her eyes are very faintly glittering as she speaks. “Umm. Ay, Ayin let me watch TV.”
“Oh? Did you watch anything exciting?”
“A, a cartoon. There was a superhero…”
“My, that sounds very fun,” Benjamin says, and Carmen nods somewhat distantly, like she’s distracted herself with the mere memory of seeing a television show.
“Ayin said… Ayin said I can watch another one tomorrow, um… right?”
“Of course, Carmen,” Ayin says, laughing a little bit. “We can spend all day on the couch channel-surfing, if that’s what you want to do.”
“We can?!”
“Ahhh, I have a feeling I may come home tomorrow to a little couch-potato in the making,” hums Benjamin, before reaching towards the bag he’d brought with him. “I hope one of these will be satisfactory for a lazy day in?”
“One of… ?”
And Benjamin holds up what he’d brought.
Ayin had texted him early this morning, asking after red pajamas and a red toothbrush — and of course, Benjamin would never have refused. He’d stopped by the store on the way home, and, shortly after encountering the selection of Little’s pajamas, realized he hadn’t much else to go on save the color red. As such…
“I wasn’t entirely sure what sort you would prefer,” he explains, as he holds up each of three sets of largely-red themed pajamas; a set with cars, a set with gems and jewels, and a set with—
”… dinosaurs… ?”
Carmen reaches out to touch the Tyrannosaurus-emblazoned pajamas so hesitantly, Benjamin wonders if she thinks they’re liable to disappear in a puff of smoke should she breathe on them too hard. He smiles reassuringly, though her attention is near-totally commanded already.
“Yes,” he says, simply. “They’re quite ferocious-looking, mm?”
“… I,” Carmen says, haltingly. “I can. I can wear these?”
“Hmm? Yes, they’re Little-made; certainly more than safe for your use,” he replies. She shakes her head, faintly.
“No, I— I, they’re,” she frowns, “They’re… nice. I can… ?”
Oh. Hm.
“Of course you may, my dear,” Benjamin says, “You may wear all of them, as often or as little as you like. They are pajamas for you.”
“… oh.”
“Ah, and, perhaps less excitingly,” he says, fishing a red-crayon toothbrush out of the bag as well, “A toothbrush, so you can, well, brush teeth. Quite handy.”
“… um…” Carmen says, quietly. “… okay.”
Benjamin tilts his head. While Carmen is occupied mooning over the pajama set now in her hands, he silently looks over to Ayin — asking much with his eyes alone what might be the matter?
Ayin replies, much with his face alone, that it’s going to be a bit of a long story.
“… u-um. Can I go… can I wear it, now?”
“Sure, Carm,” Ayin says, patting her shoulder gently (Benjamin does not miss the way she leans slightly into the gesture — quite cute), “You’ve been in those scrubs all day, right? Go ahead and get changed, we’re not going anywhere.”
“O—Okay,”
She is very quiet when she moves down the short hall, towards the two bedrooms; Benjamin’s certain that if he hadn’t watched her go, he would be none the wiser she had slipped out of the room.
“… dear,” he says, keeping his voice down. “Is she doing quite alright?”
“Ah… ahaha,” Ayin doesn’t-quite-laugh, staring quite intensely at the tabletop as though it would provide him an itemized list of the answers he desired the most, “Not especially. Um. We’re gonna need to have a big-person conference later tonight. But this morning was a little hard, too.”
“I… see,” Benjamin says, and he does actually, just a bit, see. After all, if there was any Little out there happy enough to adopt his Ayin, they would quite necessarily have to be somewhat outside of the norm. “I suppose you went grocery shopping?”
“Yeah… you know how it is. Noisy store, a lot of decisions, some lady came up and scared her half to death patting her out of nowhere,” Ayin sighs. “We snacked and colored and had a nap and that fixed all that, at least.”
“Well, that‘s good. Snacking and coloring are important pillars of the day, as you well know.”
“Yeah, I sure do now. We got a dinosaur coloring book,” Ayin says, and Benjamin smiles.
“I think I’m beginning to see a second theme. Are my assumptions correct?”
Ayin smiles back — tired, like a new parent, but so very deeply fond.
“We may have picked up some dinosaur-egg oatmeal,” he replies.
“… um… um!”
Carmen re-emerges from the hallway, still with Ayin’s sweatshirt dangling from her shoulders — but now with cute, red patterned shirt and pants adorning her warmly and tightly, rather than the plain, breezy-light standard attire she had been stuck in. She’s petting her own chest with one splayed hand, utterly fascinated, mouth forming a dazzled little 'o'.
“Oh, my! You look lovely, my dear.”
“Aw, Carmen, those look great on you.”
“… th—they’re really soft,” she says, pure wonderment across all her features. “And. And really warm. I can… I can wear them? They’re mine?”
“They’re all yours,” Benjamin says, nodding.
“I… c-can I wear them tomorrow?”
“Carmen, you can wear them as often as you want,” Ayin laughs, gently, “As long as we can wash them every once in awhile. Is that okay?”
“Th— That’s okay. This is. Um. This is, okay,” she says — eventually traipsing back to Ayin’s side, sitting down even closer to him than she had been. Benjamin notices that she’s brought something out from the bedroom, a small red blanket, that she’s clutching in her opposite hand. He hums.
“Is that your lovey?”
“Um?”
“Hmm?”
Both of them across the table look up at once, questioning, and it is so honestly cute that Benjamin can’t help a sudden grin.
“Your blanket,” he clarifies, and Carmen glances down at the little thing. “Is it your lovey?”
“My… ?”
She trails off, a bit. Benjamin hums.
“Ahh. Something that a Little is very attached to,” he explains, “That means very much to them, a comfort object — we Bigs tend to call it a lovey, being that it is well-loved.”
“Oh. We do?” Ayin says, quizzically, and Benjamin sighs a laugh.
“Yes, Ayin, we do.”
“… I— I don’t love it that much,” Carmen says, quite fearfully, “P-Please don’t take it.”
“My dear, I would never,” Benjamin says, looking near as stricken as he feels. Ayin reaches for her shoulder again, and she relaxes just slightly where he rests it.
“We are never going to steal your special blanket, Carmen. That belongs to you.” he says. Carmen bites at her lip.
“Th… then why did you ask—?”
… ah. Benjamin is, very slowly, starting to make out the shape of something great and terrible in the surrounding fog.
“Well, I asked because I was a bit curious,” he says, patiently, “And because I wanted to know if I should be planning to put a lovey-tag onto it for you this weekend. That’s all.”
“A tag?”
“Yes, it’s a common practice. If I attach a little fabric tag to it, with your name and your address, then it can be returned to you in the unfortunate case of it being misplaced,” he explains. Carmen frowns, bringing the tip of her sleeve to her mouth and beginning to nibble, again.
Benjamin wonders if he should be floating the idea of a pacifier. Perhaps after Carmen is put to bed.
“Oh,” she says, softly. “I… see.”
“Mmhm. So please, dear, don’t fret about its safety,” Benjamin says, smiling in what he hopes is a reassuring manner. “Neither of us will be letting any harm come to your blankie, for certain.”
Carmen nods, uncertainly, but leans into Ayin’s side.
“… I wanna color,” she mumbles, seemingly having had enough attention for one night. Ayin smiles, gently squeezing her shoulder.
“Sure thing. Do you wanna ask Benjamin if he’d like to join us?”
“… no, you,” Carmen says, and Benjamin has to put a hand over his mouth to stifle his smile.
“Ah, well, in that case. Ben, how about it? Any time in your busy schedule to color a dinosaur?”
“I’d love nothing more,” he replies — and means it quite truly.
…
(“Please leave the light on please leave it on please!”
“Whoa, Carm, whoa, of course I can. You okay?”
“I… I… I just…”
“Hey, you’re okay. That was fine. What do you need?”
“… n-need the light on, please…”
“It’s real bright in here like that. Can I leave the hallway light on and keep your door a little open, instead?”
“I… I guess that’s, th-that’s okay.”
“Okay. Thanks for letting me know. Let’s get some sleep, alright? Have good dreams.”
“… okay.”
If there’s a dinosaur-shaped night-light in her room the next day, well... Carmen doesn’t think she can complain.)