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Dot, for as long as she can remember, has had a single parent—his name is Yakko and he’s only four years older than her. Had anyone tried to tell her that was strange, she would have struck them hard with her mallet, for even suggesting such nonsense. Yakko’s her brother and her parent, and that suits her just fine.
Growing up in a dying orphanage certainly isn’t the best environment, but Dot charms just about anyone she interacts with, which works wonders when one needs extra food ( for Wakko, who needs to eat more than most ) or needs to get themselves out of a hairy situation.
She and her brothers are thick and thieves, in both the figurative and literal sense. They take extra food from the cupboards at night, for Wakko’s voracious appetite, and occasionally they pickpocket adopters.
Is that morally wrong? Probably, but from a young age they learned that they only matter to each other, that they have to stick together and forget the rest of the world, because the rest of the world will forget them without a second thought.
And that’s fine by her. She likes being independent, with her brothers. They’re their own unit, strong and determined and zany and wild.
The orphanage closes down, because their town is poor and there aren't funds for such charities. The rest of the kids are easily adopted off, but...
Nobody wants them.
And that’s fine, because they don’t need anyone anyway! Dot has Yakko, and he’s her parent and oldest brother, and Wakko, her friend and second oldest brother. Who needs anything else?
She holds onto that attitude for a while, until she starts seeing how tired Yakko is, day after day when he comes home from work. Thinks about someone only a few years older than her acting as an adult, and thinks about how she would feel. And then she feels awfully selfish , for thinking that everything was fine because they have each other, because they do have each other, but Yakko’s the one doing all the work, and she and Wakko are hardly a help.
She asks, one day, if Yakko will be okay. If they all will be okay, when he’s wearing himself down to the bone.
Yakko laughs.
“I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine,” He ruffles her hair, and grins wider when she reaches up to smack away his hands. “Promise.”
She learns to cook. She teaches Wakko to clean. They do what they can, to make what was once a working orphanage, now abandoned save for them, comfortable, so when Yakko comes home he can eat and relax. He takes them grocery shopping, in the town market, on his day off. They never ask for anything that can’t be shared between the three of them, and that’s if they ask for anything at all. Yakko teaches them how to tell when vegetables and fruits are ripe, and once he graduates them from the School of Food Identification, he lets them run wild and grab some of the items they need, so the trips to the market take half as long.
It’s an especially useful tactic in the winter, when it’s bitterly cold and no one wants to be outside. They’re lucky, since they’re insulated first by fur, but they still shiver.
Sometimes, Dot is jealous of Wakko’s sweater.
It’s the winter after she turns 8 where she starts to get a cough. It’s not too much of an issue—it’s winter, and it’s to be expected that one might get sick, especially as the town gets poorer and poorer and food gets more and more scarce. She can tell Yakko is giving himself a pittance to eat while splitting half of what should be his full portion between her and Wakko.
He hasn’t had a job in a month. She doesn’t want to worry him. So she keeps the cough to herself, and takes it easy the next week or so.
Then, one day, she’s chasing Wakko around in the snow, throwing snowballs and giggling like kids are supposed to. Yakko is hiding somewhere, waiting to ambush, and Dot is having a wonderful time, forgetting about any of the terrible things that are a part of their life. Except, somewhere along her strides, her breath catches in her throat, and when her body searches for oxygen to use, there is none.
She drops to her knees, and a hacking cough rips through her. Her throat burns, feeling scraped raw and bleeding, and every breath is a gasp that doesn’t give her enough. She’s on the precipice of passing out with every choking heave, and there’s a ringing in her ears that muffles the sounds of Wakko and Yakko’s shouts of her name, as well as their approaching footsteps.
Yakko slides on his knees to her and picks her up off of the ground, holding her in his lap, and he hugs her against him tight, and she doesn’t think she can ever remember him trembling this much. The warmth, somehow, helps her breathe. She takes in hot breaths instead of cold ones, and it’s like the blockage in her chest melts. She still coughs, but they slowly peter out.
“Dot?” Wakko’s voice sounds far away, but Dot looks for him.
He’s kneeling in front of Yakko, face looking pained and teary eyed.
“I’m tired,” she mumbles, but hearing her talk is enough, apparently, because Wakko drops his head in relief. She can see his smile anyway.
“You’re going inside.” Yakko’s voice sounds brittle, like iron melted down, rebuilt, and struck so many times that it’s one more blow from cracking. He stands, clutching her close, so tight it’s as if he’s scared she’s going to slip through his fingertips if he goes lax for a second. She leans into him-he’s warm, and she feels very, very cold.
She’s half asleep by the time they’re halfway home, and she’s completely out before they get there.
When she wakes up, Yakko is sitting on a chair in front of the big bed, and Wakko is sleeping in his lap.
“How long have you had that cough.” It’s not really phrased like a question, and she’s never seen Yakko this defeated.
“A couple weeks,” she says, and her voice sounds hoarse, not cute at all. “It wasn’t this bad—I just thought it was a passing cold, so I took it easy,” She coughs, and her shoulders shake. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Yakko is quick to assure her, with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “You just didn’t want me to worry, right?”
“You always worry,” she grumbles in reply, and Yakko laughs.
“Yeah, well, you’d worry too if you were me,” he says it like a joke, but she doesn’t like the implication. It must show on her face, because he raises his hands. “Kidding! Kidding, sis, promise,” He smiles.
She has a sinking suspicion that his lies and his promises are very similar, as long as they’re made in an effort to make her and Wakko happy.
“You’re going to be fine,” Yakko says it more as if he’s convincing himself than her, but she doesn’t comment. “Say, why don’t I tell you the story?”
She perks up at that. He doesn’t need to clarify which one; he knows her favorite.
Yakko sits up— she hadn’t noticed how slumped over he was —and pats Wakko’s head once, clearing his throat to speak in that ever familiar storytelling voice she and Wakko have known for as long as they can remember.
“Once upon a time, a brave knight married a beautiful princess...” he begins, and she knows her lines by heart, too.
If she coughs through a few of them, he doesn’t comment.
For a week or so, things aren’t too bad. Sure, she’s sick, and it isn’t exactly pleasant, but she thinks she’s getting better. Wakko offers her his sweater, which is almost a surprise, because he likes his sweater more than almost anything, only taking it off to shower and clean. She waves the offer off—the last thing they need is to have another one of them getting sick. Besides, Yakko has basically smothered her in all of the blankets that he could find.
Needless to say, she isn’t exactly chilly.
She does miss them all sleeping in the same bed. Yakko moves to a bed frame close by, but at a safe distance, and she doesn’t even know where Wakko sleeps. She wouldn’t be surprised if she found out he was sleeping on the floor. Her brothers are so predictably self sacrificing. Maybe they all are, she doesn’t know. She’s never had to sacrifice anything for them.
She’s the one they’re always taking care of.
The thought sticks in her mind and refuses to vanish, not even when she sleeps.
She doesn’t get better. It’s an up and down process, for a year. Some days she can run without any sort of issue, chasing Wakko around like she could before she ever had a cough, and the next she won’t be able to find the energy to get out of bed. Yakko worries, like he always does, but on the worst days he doesn’t dare leave her bedside, like if he turns away she’ll wither to dust before he can look back.
It’s draining, and some days she just wants to curl into a ball and disappear, because she’s so tired. Every breath becomes a challenge, every waking second is a nightmare of pain and exhaustion.
She wants to sleep forever, she wants this to be done, she wants to be able to rest, but her brothers would never recover if she died. That, at the end of it all, is the only reason she keeps fighting. Sure, some days she can delude herself into thinking she’ll magically get better, but it’s hard to keep hope.
Dr.Scratchansniff, after hearing about Dot’s predicament, offers a free examination, so they can at least know what’s wrong with her, see how they can fix it. Yakko practically jumps at the opportunity, walking Dot over to the doctor’s office with a fervor she hasn’t seen from him in months, since before she was sick.
The examination is odd, and unpleasant. Scratchy has her breathe while using a stethoscope on her back, and then she blows into a tube, and then she takes a breath and holds it for as long as he can. He’s very gentle, and explains everything he’s going to do before he does it, and if she was better she’d mess with him. But she doesn’t want to mess this up by being a prankster so she stays quiet and lets him work.
“She has a teeny hole in her lung,” he tells Yakko, gesturing to the size of it with his fingers.
She sees Yakko pale, eyes wide and uncomprehending. Wakko grips her hand tight in one hand, and fiddles with his sleeve with the other. She doesn’t quite understand what a hole in her lung means, but she knows it’s bad.
“It is allowing fluid to slowly get into her lungs. In order to fix it, we would have to operate.”
“What would that cost?” Yakko asks, and he sounds so much older than he is.
“A hay penny.”
Yakko flinches. Wakko looks away. Even she knows they don’t have that much. A hay penny is a lot of money, especially now.
Yakko takes a few steps forward, gestures for Scratchy to move away from her and Wakko, and whispers a question that suspiciously sounds like ‘ How much time does she...,’ and it makes her furious and terrified all at once.
“Thanks, Doc,” Yakko mutters, once he gets his answer, and Scratchy looks a mixture of pained and sympathetic and nervous, unable to fix things for them, because he has as much money as they do, which is practically nothing.
They leave.
“I’m sorry, Yakko,” She tells him, their feet crunching the underbrush as they walk.
“What for? It’s not your fault. I just wish...,” he trails off.
“I could go to another town,” Wakko suggests. “I could work and get the money.”
And Dot hates this. Hates that her illness puts a weight on her siblings shoulders, hates that all she can do is lay in bed and wait for someone to get money, to save her.
She was never born to be a damsel in distress. She’s a fighter, a doer. No wonder the world had to give her a handicap, because she and her brothers would be unstoppable otherwise.
“No, I can figure something out, Wakko. Promise,” Yakko tells him, but he sounds unsure, and she can tell that he has no idea what to do, even though he acts like it’s all going to be fine.
She’s getting tired. Yakko has to carry her for the second half of their walk home.
Wakko leaves around a few months later, after he turns 12, and she can tell it tears Yakko apart, but she’s heartbroken too, so she can’t find the energy to comfort him.
Wakko is smiling when he goes, but she can tell, she knows that Wakko is terrified, knows that he shouldn’t be out on his own. They’re a unit, a trio, they’re not supposed to be separated.
What a cruel universe to tear them apart for even a second, let alone a year.
She can feel herself getting weaker, too, so she knows they’re in dire straits. It takes all of her energy to see Wakko off, and she sleeps through the rest of the day and night. Yakko wakes her up only to force her to eat. She’s never that hungry anymore. She doesn’t feel much of anything anymore, besides pain and exhaustion, but he still manages to make her smile.
Frustration builds, as it has over the entirety of her illness, as Yakko tries to smile and joke his way through this Shakespearian tragedy. The tight band of self control she has has to snap eventually.
“Do you think Wakko’s okay?” she asks, four months in, and Yakko hesitates.
It’s rare for him to do so, when he’s about to lie, or promise, because she knows he’s been doing it longer than she can remember, so used to covering up the things that should make her terrified, and the fact that he’s hesitating now turns her heart to ice.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” he tells her, in the same sweet, placating tone of voice he’s used since she was four, and it grates on her ears. “He’ll be back in a few months, and he’ll bring back the money we need for your operation, and everything will be fine. Promise.”
Promise.
She snaps.
“Stop lying to me!” she shouts, even as it tears her throat in two. “Stop acting like you know how Wakko is, stop acting like you know if things are going to be okay, stop acting like I’m not dying! ”
She doubles over, hacking and coughing, hands clutching at her chest and neck because it hurts, it hurts so much , and she can’t handle it anymore. “Just stop it! You don’t know! You don’t , so stop acting like your promises aren’t lies!”
It takes her a full five minutes to catch her breath, and when she looks up she flinches, because oh no.
Yakko is crying.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her, miserably, and she wishes she had never said anything at all, anything to take the heartbroken look off of his face. “I’m sorry, sis-I was just trying to-I just,” he buries his face in his hands, body trembling with the effort to stay upright, to not just curl into a ball, and this isn’t what she wanted at all.
She reaches for him, but he stands, and her hand catches nothing but air.
“I’ll...,” He sniffs, and wipes his eyes, but she can still see the tears building there. “I’ll leave you alone.”
And he goes, and Dot feels like the most awful, selfish person in the whole world.
She wants to run after him, but the thought of standing seems impossible, much less walking. She has a hard time catching her breath after that bit of shouting, so needless to say she won’t be actually doing much of anything for the next few days. It only adds to her mounting guilt and regret, and she doesn’t even know where Yakko is.
She hates being alone.
She’s sleeping on and off when Yakko returns, eyes red and whole body slumped forward in something like defeat that she hates, and he sits down on the edge of her bed.
“I’m sorry,” She says quickly. She needs him to know that. “I was stupid-you’re not a liar-you’re trying-I know that-I-”
“Dot, it’s okay,” Yakko smiles at her, weary and yet somehow still standing. “I get it. I’m more surprised you didn’t get frustrated sooner, honestly. We’ve been dealt a pretty bad hand when it comes to life. You don’t have it easy.”
She reaches over and holds his hand. “You don’t either,” she tells him, because he needs to understand that he deserves better, too. That her life isn’t the only one that’s unfair.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t sound like he believes it. “I’m doing the best with what I’ve got, I think,” he chuckles to himself.
“You are,” She assures.
“Yeah.” He sighs, after a moment of silence, and she scoots over so he can lay back in bed. He does, and it’s just like they were younger and she wasn’t sick at all.
“I’m terrified that you’re going to disappear,” he tells her, and it’s so soft she doesn’t know if she’s meant to hear it. “You and Wakko—you’re everything, okay? You’re it, for me. I know it’s awfully selfish to ask, but can you stay? Promise me?”
She can’t be certain. She doesn’t know if she’ll live, if she’ll survive this, after all this time, but she suddenly understands the desire to say ‘Promise’ anyway.
If this is the lesson he’s trying to teach her, he’s doing it well.
But she knows Yakko well enough that she knows this is just him, at the end of his rope, letting himself be vulnerable for a moment, when he doesn’t have the energy to be the put together big brother who can take care of anything.
“Promise,” she says, and the taste of the word on her tongue isn’t as bitter as she expected it to be. “You’re stuck with me.”
The second part, at least, is true.
Wakko comes home with a single hay penny and a haunted look in his eyes you can almost miss if you haven’t spent your entire life with him, knowing just how his eyes used to shine, and she mourns the shimmer in his eyes that has dimmed in his year’s absence.
But he has what they need, so she lets herself hope, for a moment, that she can finally be useful. Be okay. Be something other than the bedridden Warner that needs to be taken care of lest she withers away like a rich Victorian aristocrat whose corset is on too tight.
But Plotz steals their dreams as if he enjoys it, and she watches everyone slump like balloons who’ve been pricked, air flowing out of them. Yakko’s face flashes to something like rage, hate, despair, and it vanishes behind a cool mask and acceptance before she can comment on it. He heads over to cheer Wakko up, and she wonders how often that happens to him. That he has to hide.
She wonders how long he’s been doing it.
And then Wakko makes a wish, and they’re off to chase it, with the desperation of children who have nothing to lose but their lives, because that’s really it, isn’t it? It’s almost comical, how the wishes she hears from the other townspeople are for such material possessions. She wonders how desperate they’d be if they were dying, or if one of their few people in the whole world were dying.
She wants to be selfish, and tell them to stay away. This is their last chance, her last chance, they don’t deserve it. But that’s not fair.
Sticking it to King Salazar, on the other hand, is more than fair. Their journey is as much of an adventure as it is a mission, and even though she’s still mostly bedridden she gets to breathe in the open air and be chased and mess with people like she did what feels like decades ago, though she hasn’t been alive that long. She gets to, for a moment, feel normal.
And then they’re running to the wishing star, hand in hand because they refuse to leave her behind, and the boom of the canon rings in her ears and there is only pain in her back and her chest, as everything inside her shatters.
She feels nothing but pain and cold, collapsed in the snow, and she doesn’t hear anything, doesn’t feel anything until Yakko pulls her into his lap, clutches her close, bruised and beaten like her.
She realizes, suddenly, that making a promise you were doomed to break isn’t easy. It hurts, deep in your heart, because you know you did it to stay the hurt, but the person you meant to protect is hurting anyway.
She wonders how much Yakko hurts, with how many promises he’s made like that.
“Tell me the story,” she whispers, voice weak because she can’t breathe, and when Yakko can’t she starts it up for him, because after years of him repeating the same words she wants to be the one to tell him. She wants to give him, everyone, one last thing before she’s gone.
The words fall off of her tongue, the world turns to dust and her eyes close.
Suddenly she’s floating in a white space. There’s no pain, no hurt, just warmth and breath and love, and she sees two faces that seem so familiar, crowns and capes and warm smiles, hands outstretched.
Princess, They say. Come home. We’ve missed you.
And it’s tempting, because she’s tired. She’s been tired for years, fighting just to breathe, but as she looks, she doesn’t see her brothers anywhere.
“I’m sorry,” She says, and she means it. “But I made a promise. And I’m not breaking it.”
Because she’s a fighter, a doer.
She turns back and reaches for the hurt, because living is hurting is loving is thriving is home with her brothers, all curled up in a single bed because they couldn’t be happier or safer cuddled up together, Yakko’s arms around each of their shoulders. Through thick and thin, she can depend on them.
She keeps reaching, and it’s slipping through her fingertips, because her body has been through too much to keep going, but she fights, and suddenly it’s ten times as easy, hearing the voice of spirit Wakko spoke of when first bringing up the wishing star. He looks like a middle aged, balding man, and she bites back a laugh.
You deserve home , He tells her. So let’s get you back to it.
She opens her eyes to Yakko’s crying face looking down to hers, and this is for kids, so she jumps up and pretends. She feels lighter than she has in years, and Wakko is turning around with two hay pennies, and the King is nothing compared to this, to joy and life and winning, for the first time since she can remember.
The operation is terrifying, and she’s told that while she’ll be fine to breathe, her lung capacity will forever be diminished. That’s fine, because anything is better than being bedridden, being dead.
And they’re suddenly royalty, and isn’t that something. She thinks of the words said to her in the white light.
Princess , they had said.
They looked like the two figured in the portrait, the royal one.
She cries a little, when she sees it. When she realizes. Yakko asks, and she just says she wishes she got to properly meet them.
It’s not technically a lie.
Yakko is King. He is made such, with them as his co-rulers, and she finds the royal garments rather fitting. She wears clothes that won’t easily tear, for the first time ever. She gets three big meals a day. She gets a warm home.
Yakko wears the crown like one not worthy of it, like one not ready for it, but she knows him. He’s never been more ready for or worthy of anything, and as he addresses the crowd at their coronation, she stands by his side and smiles.
“I will be a fair and just ruler,” he says. “I want what’s best for my people. I know how hard these past few years have been. Believe me.”
He looks down, almost sheepish. “I lived in a shack most of my life. So I’m going to fix this,” he looks up, certain, “And this Kingdom is going to be more than fine, prosperous and peaceful. I promise.”
And when she hears him say it, it is the first time it seems like he believes in himself, too.
So she makes a promise too, deep in her heart. That no matter what happens, she will make up for the time she lost. She will be the rock her brothers were for her, steadfast and strong.
And like every promise Yakko’s made before, she knows it’ll be true eventually.
Because finally, finally , they’re going to be fine.