Work Text:
Gideon had never intended to return—not to here, and certainly not now. Fate was a dick. Though her memories of the Drearburh crèche were dim and washed-out, flimsy copied over too many times, the details that lingered proved correct, down to the stinging scent of antiseptic. The right cradle was easy to find; it was the only one that was occupied.
She braced herself before looking in. In theory, Gideon knew what a baby looked like. She definitely knew they were small, which turned out to be true, so that’s a win. But this—
“I was a shrimp,” she said. All fat noodly arms and legs swathed in too much black. Rust-colored fuzz covering an oversized cranium. The creases of the baby’s ears and sleeping eyelids could have been paper, and its loose fist displayed absolutely insanely tiny little fingernails. Thank God its eyes were closed—buzzing with adrenaline, Gideon leaned on the crib’s rail of tibias and took one of the baby’s fists between thumb and index finger to inspect that little rice-sized nail. The baby stirred, lifting its other fist to rub its scrunching face. “Sorry,” Gideon said, letting go. The baby began to cry, eyes still closed, pink mouth open. “No, stop. Shit,” she said, putting her palm—which was the size of the kid’s entire face, this should seriously be illegal—over its mouth, which proved to be what they call a real moron move. Affronted, the baby opened egg-yellow eyes and wailed.
Gideon’s heart kicked into overdrive. They were the only ones in the nursery, and the construct that kept vigil by the door now kept less effective vigil in pieces on the floor, but a wail like that could probably be heard clear to the top of Drearburh. “Hey! We are not going to use our lung capacity for evil! Come on, shrimpy.” The baby did not listen to reason (another attribute of babies to add to her rapidly growing list), so she did the only thing she could think of, which was to hold her breath and scoop her tiny self into her arms, sort of squishing her into her shoulder to muffle the noise.
“You’re alright, you’re alright, everything’s going to be alright,” said Gideon. She had never actually rocked a baby to quiet it before, but the strategy’s name was descriptive, and her metronomic rocking at least didn’t seem to make things worse. “I’m just you but taller, okay? Are you drooling on my—okay.” There was a wet patch at the collar of Taller Gideon’s shirt that grew as Little Gideon’s wailing descended into blubbering.
Baby attributes 4 and 5 under review for her list (or was it 3 and 4? Gideon was unsure whether ‘small’ and ‘shrimpy’ counted as distinct characteristics) were warm and damp. Little Gideon lay like a furnace over Taller Gideon’s erratically beating heart and her shirt was streaked with an appetizing mixture of saliva and snot. The warmth and motion seemed to soothe the little creature. As she paced up and down rows of empty cradles, the baby not only quieted, but slumped toward sleep against her clavicle. “There we are,” said Gideon, stopping by the baby’s cradle. But Little Gideon was not ready to be put down; her hold on Gideon’s shirt tightened when she tried to lower her. “Oh,” said Gideon. “Well, I guess you don’t weigh much.”
Less than a bag of snow-leeks, at this size. It was impossible to imagine this needy bundle turning into a real person. Turning into
Gideon.
The profound weirdness of the situation reasserted itself. She was feeling an emotion that was not fear—Gideon’s pride would never recover if she admitted to being scared of a baby, and especially her own infant self. There was nothing the baby could do to her except give her the heebie-jeebies with her tiny fingernails, and surely Gideon couldn’t accidentally do anything too bad to the baby: precedent suggested that Little Gideons survive to adulthood, no matter the odds, and this Little Gideon had already survived much worse than being held. Maybe it was disbelief gnawing at her; it felt wrong that her infancy still existed in some place and time, like maybe she thought that her death had unraveled her whole life too, all the way back to the baby called Bomb.
The air held a chill that made her teeth hurt. “That,” she said, shifting Little Gideon sickly to her other shoulder, “was a shitty thing to call a kid.”
No one had come to investigate the baby’s wailing. Which should be a relief, because nothing about Gideon's presence was easy to explain; instead she found a slow, volcanic anger spreading through her. She thought she had exhausted her anger at all the ways the Ninth had screwed her over—Ninth and screwed-up were practically synonymous, to grow up one was the same as the other—but God, this wasn’t hard! A little skin-to-skin contact and Little Gideon was out like a light in the arms of a stranger, and Gideon could not get over how little she was. It was her one baby fact and still she was blind-sided. Just a floppy, shapeless little person who wanted to be held.
“Listen,” she said, voice too rough. "You don’t deserve to be treated like crap.” She rubbed her thumb across the baby’s fuzzy occipital bone, feeling the bumps of skull through her skin. The nuns hated picking her up when she was little. Made up all sorts of excuses about flu germs or the virtue of self-reliance, all of which were stupidly unnecessary when osteoporosis was right there. “You don’t deserve any of it, okay? You haven’t done anything. Just little baby crimes—fussing, and drooling on my shirt. And do you know what the punishment for that is?” Gideon pressed her lips to the top of the baby’s sleeping head. “That’s all,” she said, fighting to keep her voice light. “No such thing as baby crimes. It’s our job, as grown-ups, to take care of you. They should’ve taken better care of you. They should’ve—”
The rest of the sentence lodged behind the lump in her oesophagus. She tucked her chin, conscious of a hot dampness gathering in her sinuses and the corners of her eyes, and laughed wretchedly. Well, Little Gideon had already cried; it was her turn, and as she tried to scrub her eyes on her shoulder without jostling the baby, she felt only a little silly, and mostly just old, and sad. “I wish things were going to be easy for you,” she said. “Not that you’re not tough. You’re the toughest little baby, and you grow up to be—so strong, and cool, and you get the sexiest sword, but—ugh.” Clenching her jaw didn’t stop the sound building in her throat. “It sucks. It really fucking sucks. And there were people that could have made it better, and they didn’t.”
Round and round that empty cradle, locked like a moon in its orbit. Gideon cried as quietly as she could, unwilling to put the baby down because she understood, in a buried, bone-aching way, how much Little Gideon wanted to be held, and because the hot weight in her arms propelled her forward and she needed to be moving. There was enough language in warmth and clinging touch, a forgotten native tongue that Gideon fell back on by necessity. I’m here, I’m here. I’m not going away.
Finally, her breath returned. She squeezed her eyes momentarily shut, angling her head to press her cheek to the side of the kid’s head. “Listen,” she said, only a little shaky. “I’m going to tell you something, and you’re going to forget because you’re a baby and also asleep, but I’m going to tell you again, and again, until it sticks. We’re getting out of here. We’re going to get out of here, and we’re going to be okay.”