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Albedo rounds the corner, briskly making his way through the crowds of parents hurrying to collect their children. He isn't late, thank God, because the last time he was, the ensuing chaos had been enough to warn him off of not setting alarms to remind him to pick up Klee.
A few seconds pass. He reaches into his pocket to check his phone, and then puts it away to glance at his watch. When even that doesn’t change the numbers, he rummages through his shoulder bag to open his tablet and Googles the time.
Still nothing.
He frowns. Now he's worried, because if there isn’t an issue with his own timeliness, then it was something with Klee. Had she gotten kidnapped? He knows very well that she'd willingly go with anyone who offered her chicken nuggets or candy, regardless of his many, many warnings.
Thankfully, before he can panic too much, there's an enthusiastic cry of "Albedo!" and the sound of light-up sneakers on concrete, the only warning he gets before he promptly receives an armful of excited Klee.
"Klee," he greets, pressing his lips together to stifle his smile, equal parts amused and relieved. "Were you good today?"
"The best!" Klee replies. She beams up at him, arms wrapped tight around his waist, and he almost lets himself believe she hadn't caused wide-scale destruction throughout the day. Honestly, he’s beyond hoping for Klee to be ‘good’, more so just praying that she hadn’t gotten into too much trouble while he wasn’t there to clean up the mess.
Jean, her teacher and their neighbor, approaches from behind her, stacks of picture books piled in her arms and sporting her usual beleaguered expression. "I apologize if you were worried," she says. "I had to hold her back for a bit to discuss something."
That doesn’t sound good. He raises an eyebrow down at Klee, who pouts at him in response. “I thought you said you behaved.”
“Klee was good!” she repeats stubbornly.
“She was,” Jean confirms, but she averts her eyes at his ascertaining look, not something that boded particularly well for him. “Well, relatively. I asked for her to stay back for unrelated reasons. Right, that reminds me, Albedo, do you know of the recent project Principal Varka’s been pushing?”
Albedo thinks for a moment, then nods, He’d skimmed through the pamphlet Klee’d brought home the other week and presented to him at the dinner table. “Yes, something like… Youth in Art? Art for the Youth?”
Honestly, the name had been so generic he hadn’t bothered committing it to memory, where it would take up space that he needs for his college classes. He’s sure that if it’s important, Klee will endlessly remind him of its existence. Especially considering she does the same for decidedly less important things, like the nearby McDonald’s having a sale or there being another (he thinks they’re on the fifteenth now) class pet.
“Something along those lines,” she says. “Klee did very well, so I thought I’d congratulate her on her work.”
“Oh? What did you make, Klee?” he asks, curious. Usually, anything Klee makes ends up in– not disaster, but not without the nearby area remaining unaffected.
She perks up, wriggling out of his arms to place her hands proudly on her hips. “I made a Dodoco!”
“A Dodoco, that’s good,” he says. He ruffles her hair fondly; at the very least, it’s good that she’s happy being at school. He’s read articles on child psychology that said that formative years were important for healthy mental development. And then he thinks about it in the context of Klee being Klee, and alarm bells immediately start ringing in his mind. “Hmm. Did you make it like Aunt Alice and you used to…?”
“Yep!”
“Oh,” he realizes. He’d thought some of his materials were missing. “Oh.”
Albedo thinks he knows now why Klee hadn’t told him earlier. Her guilty look confirms it, and he sighs, rubbing at the back of his neck. He’ll have to give her another talk about lab safety and telling him if she was going to touch the more dangerous things he kept at home.
“What’s wrong?” Jean looks up from where she’s marking papers.
“Don’t keep Dodoco near any flammable substances or expose it to extreme temperatures and it’ll be fine,” he says, “but don’t leave it near the other projects just in case it… causes an incident. Also, try not to move it around or shake it too much, otherwise, the contents might become even more unstable.”
Her eyebrows jump. “…what? What’s inside Dodoco?”
“Klee’s love!” Klee interjects cheerfully.
“And possibly several highly volatile chemicals,” he adds. “But since they’re contained, it shouldn’t be too dangerous as long as you follow the guidelines I mentioned.”
A pause. “I think we have to have another talk soon, Klee,” Jean says.
“Oh no,” she says. She scurries behind him, clinging to the back of his jacket as if he’d stop her from receiving a rightful scolding.
Albedo shakes his head, reaching down to pick the girl up. She quickly brightens and clings tightly onto him, not unlike a koala, or a particularly tiny octopus. He nods in both apology and farewell to Jean; if they take any longer, they won’t get home in time for Dora the Explorer, and then he’ll really have an emergency on hand.
“Thank you for taking care of Klee,” he says.
She smiles, though she still looks somewhat uneasy. “It’s no problem at all,” she says. “Can you two make it back home by yourselves? I’m nearly done with my work, so if you wait for a bit, I can accompany both of you back.”
“It’s fine, really,” he reassures her. They live in the same apartment complex, so it isn’t any extra trouble for her, but the urgency of making it in time for Dora is far more worrying than the chance of being robbed or assaulted. “We’re quite familiar with the way home.”
“Yeah,” Klee says. Her speech comes out muffled, because her face is pressed into his hair. He wrinkles his nose at the almost ticklish sensation. “Don’t worry! Albedo can fight off any bad guys for us!”
They make it halfway back before Klee starts getting impatient.
Albedo knows the exact moment she does, because she starts kicking at his sides with the tips of her shoes, even though his jacket is white and freshly washed, and the soles of her Sketchers are definitely not clean from all the mud she’s tracked them in throughout the day.
“Is there anything wrong,” he eventually says, if only for the sake of his future laundry.
She stops, loosening her grip until she’s just barely hanging onto him. He hurriedly adjusts his grip to support her; if she falls, he thinks he’ll have a heart attack. From his experience, children are as small as they are easily breakable, and Klee is very small.
“I’m hungry,” she whines into his ear.
“We have food at home,” he says.
They’d just gone grocery shopping the other day, too, during which Klee had already convinced him to buy her ice cream. And even if they hadn’t, Jean goes out of her way to make sure their fridge is never empty, so it wasn’t like that would ever be an issue.
“But we’re near Good Hunter,” she protests, gesturing dramatically at the restaurant across the street, “and they have the really good ice cream! The ones with the– the colorful pretty things! And tons of flavors!”
“They're called sprinkles,” he corrects, then closes his eyes to avoid looking directly at her. She likely already has the puppy-dog eyes in full force, the smart girl, and that always gets him to immediately give in. “Klee, we had ice cream there yesterday, remember? You even got two scoops. Maybe we can get some next week instead.”
“Please?” she pleads.
“No.”
“Please?”
“…no,” he says, waveringly.
“Pretty please with bombs and explosions and fire on top?” Klee tries.
Albedo sighs, shaking his head lightly. “If this ruins your appetite…”
“I’ll finish dinner later,” she promises, “and I’ll even eat all the veggies without complaining! Klee promises!”
Well. That’s a deal he can’t refuse, so he gracefully accepts his loss.
He doubts he’ll ever win this sort of argument with her, but he still had to try. If she had her way, she’d have dessert for lunch, breakfast, and dinner. “Fine, we can make a short stop at Good Hunter. But if we get back too late for Dora, you can’t complain or throw a tantrum. You know how long it takes for Sara to make your order.”
“Yay!” she cheers. Her grip comes back at full strength, nearly choking him. “You’re the best, Albedo!”
He makes a noise of agreement as he changes course to Good Hunter; he is the best big brother. And he would like to stay that way, which is why he tries not to constrain Klee too much, when he can let it pass. That’s Aunt Alice’s (though she rarely does either) and Jean’s job.
Also, he’s quite partial to dessert himself, so he does enjoy their frequent trips to Good Hunter, though he tries not to visit without Klee. If she ever finds out that he'd had some without her, she'd sulk into another dimension.
“Oh, both of you back so soon?” Sara asks, looking up at the chimes of the bells on the door.
“Sara!” Klee cheerfully shouts, leaning forward and lifting a hand to wave exuberantly at her, uncaring of the watching bystanders, not that they weren’t already very well aware of the girl’s lack of an inside voice. Albedo gives her a much more subdued wave and a nod of acknowledgement. “We’re here for ice cream!”
That’s how she tends to greet Sara, even if they aren’t actually there for ice cream, so he nods again in confirmation. “We are.”
“Didn’t you just have some here yesterday?” She raises an eyebrow. “At this exact same time?”
Albedo shrugs loosely, careful not to let the motion shift Klee off balance. So they did, he recalls. He would call it deja vu, but they visited so often that it would be better described as a habit.
“Ice cream is good every day!” she chirps.
“I can’t argue with that,” Sara says, smiling. It’s the usual fond smile that most people sport around Klee. “Well, the regular, then?”
Klee raises two fingers above his head. “Yep! Two scoops!”
“Only one,” he says, gently pulling her arm down, much to her dismay. Too much sugar and Klee turned into a bomb herself, something that he’d had a front-row seat to yesterday and a mistake he never plans to repeat. Not while he’s the one who has to deal with it, at least. “But yes, our regular order, thank you.”
They sit at their usual booth, third from the entrance and against the window, so Klee can car watch while they wait for their ice cream. Albedo pulls out his phone to check his messages, glancing up to check on her once every few minutes.
“How was your day?” he asks absentmindedly.
Klee drops her elbows onto the table, resting her head in her hands and looking up at him. “I had loads of fun!” she says. “Did you know– today, Diona let me play ‘Destroy The Wine Industry’ with her! It was super cool!”
Albedo blinks. “…destroy the wine industry?”
He knows Diona from Klee’s stories and from seeing her in passing when he went to pick her up; the small, loud girl who wore fluffy cat ear hairpins in her short pink hair and hissed at him once when he greeted her. He hadn’t known that she came up with games like ‘Destroy The Wine Industry’, however, but if Klee’s happy, he guesses it’s fine. He doesn’t think she understands the moral and economic implications it holds, anyways.
“That sounds nice,” he says.
“Yeah, and then later, Jean gave us all jelly for being good during recess!”
They continue on for a while, until their ice cream arrives, after which all conversation is dropped in favor of digging into their respective bowls.
Albedo goes with his usual vanilla with caramel drizzle. He’s stuck with the exact same order for years, even when they don’t get ice cream at Good Hunter, and he doesn’t plan on changing it anytime soon, something which Klee finds blasphemous. It’s sugary enough to satisfy his sweet tooth, so he doesn’t see the problem.
Klee, on the other hand, gets her usual bowl of candy with a scoop of ice cream underneath. The actual flavor changes so rapidly that he’s mildly impressed by Sara’s ability to keep track; he thinks it’s cake batter, this time, but he can’t tell from underneath the sheer amount of toppings she’s picked. That at least stays consistent in both amount and type.
There are sprinkles, M&Ms, bits of chocolate, strawberry syrup, and a few other things that he can’t quite place but Sara seems to have down to an art. Not that it matters, given how fast Klee scarfs it down every time.
“Done?” he asks, a few minutes later, as he finishes off the last bite of his ice cream.
She pushes her bowl away, the liquid remnants of her ice cream a strange shade of brown from the food coloring of her toppings mixing together. “Done!”
Klee pushes ineffectively at the glass door to their apartment complex while Albedo stands at the side and watches amusedly. They aren’t in any rush; Dora’s already ended and he doesn’t have any urgent projects to work on for school, and so he doesn’t move to help her.
"Why's it so heavy now?" she asks, confusing coloring her voice. “You opened it just fine this morning!”
Albedo purses his lips to keep from laughing. At her pout, he lightly nudges her to the side and pulls the door open for her to enter, because of course only Klee would forget that the door was pull instead of push. Her eyes widen as she looks up at him like he'd just performed a miracle.
"Thank you," she chirps, racing past him to the elevator lobby, where she slams her hand onto the button and eagerly stares at the numbers ticking down to their level on the display.
He follows behind at an easygoing pace, herding her into the elevator when it arrives.
“Don’t jump,” he warns once they’re inside. “Or else the elevator might break again, and we’ll have to take the stairs up every day until it gets fixed.”
“Aww, fine.”
It’s an empty threat, Klee practically weighs nothing next to some of the other occupants, but it’s the only way he knows to stop her from constantly treating the elevator like a trampoline at a birthday party. The girl frowns, but thankfully stays still in the corner the whole ride up.
The second the doors open on their floor, she sprints out at a speed only a preschooler on a sugar high can manage, which is to say, very fast. Faster than he, a tired and much older college student, can keep up with, so he just tosses her the keys to their apartment on her way out. She knows the basics of operating locks, so she can handle unlocking their door.
“Remember not to close the door behind you again,” he calls out. He’d ended up having to call their landlord that day, because Klee’d immediately ran off to her room, ignoring his calls from the outside.
“I won’t,” he hears shouted from down the hallway, a reminder of why they occasionally receive noise complaints.
When he reaches the doorway to their apartment, Albedo catches the door a second before it snaps closed. He barely stifles his wry grin, though he knows if he’d actually ended up locked out again, he would definitely not be anywhere near that happy.
Klee’s already sprawled across the couch in their living room, tapping rapidly on her tablet, the sounds of explosions echoing throughout the room. It’s a new game that she’d told him about a few days ago, something about ‘harpastums’ and ‘hilichurls’, though the exact details are fuzzy. At least the noises are virtual this time, he thinks as he shuts the door behind him.
He pauses on his way to his desk, redirecting himself to the kitchen.
She’d just had ice cream, he reasons, so she likely needed a healthy snack to balance it out.
When he opens the fridge, he scrunches up his nose in thought before picking out a few shiny red apples from the basket of fruit on the third shelf. Klee loves anything and everything red, so she’ll be more likely to enjoy that.
He slices each apple into eight wedges, small enough that it’s improbable for her to choke on them even if she tries to shove them all in her mouth at once like she’s prone to doing. Carefully– if he cuts himself, he’ll never hear the end of it– he cores each slice and scores the back portion in a V-shape, neatly removing that entire triangular section. It doesn’t take him too long, since he’s practiced before.
The end products highly resemble small bunnies, sharp strips of red sticking out against the pale white of the apple.
Thankfully, they look just like the online guide he’d read said they should, but they were out of chocolate chips, so he couldn’t add their eyes. Well, it wasn’t as if Klee needed more sugar.
Albedo carries the bowl out to the living room, setting it down on the table beside her.
“Klee,” he says, tapping her on the shoulder to catch her attention, then gestures to the apples. “In case you get hungry later on.”
She brightens, sitting up straight and peering at them with wide-eyed wonder. “Thanks! Oh, are they bunnies? They’re super cute!”
“That’s the intended appearance, yes,” he says, settling into his chair and opening his laptop. He doesn’t have anything due today since he’d already finished most of his homework, but it can’t hurt to start on some of his essays. “I’m going to work on a few things, tell me if you need anything. And remember to put the bowl back in the kitchen when you’re done”
“Okay,” Klee says through a mouthful of apples. “Bye-bye! Klee will be good!”
He smiles at her before plugging in his headphones and easing his mind into work mode. Klee generally knows not to actively cause chaos while he’s busy, so he thinks he can get a good deal of his workload finished within the afternoon. His music is loud enough that he can pretend she’s behaving, anyways, even in the likely case that she doesn't.
"Albedo," Klee interrupts his focus a few hours later, lightly tugging at the edge of his sleeve. "What's for dinner?"
He looks up from his laptop screen, blinking to adjust his vision. Once he processes the question, he raises an eyebrow at her and lifts one side of his headphones off his ear. "What do you mean? I remember we still have leftovers in the fridge from yesterday night. We can have those."
She frowns at him. "But those are old."
"And if we don't eat them," he says patiently, "they'll get even older."
“But Klee was good today! Way too good for old food!” The girl crosses her arms, staring intently up at him with wide red eyes filled with hope. “Can we have something special for dinner? Please?”
“Klee,” he says, “you just handed off Dodoco to Jean this morning without telling her what was inside. I don’t think that was very good of you.”
Albedo waits a moment for her to process what he said. Sometimes it takes Klee a while to properly load, as if her mind has network connectivity problems, and he can usually tell by the way she cocks her head and wrinkles her nose in intense thought, like she’s doing now. He usually just finishes up whatever he was last doing during that time.
“That wasn’t today,” she says after a pause, “that was yesterday! I finished it at school then and passed it, it’s just that you told her today!”
He shuts his laptop, doubting that he’ll get any more work done after this. It is near dinnertime, anyways, so he really should take a break around this time. “So you wouldn’t have told Jean if I hadn’t brought it up?”
“Dodoco isn’t that dangerous,” she says, in the way that a child can say that Santa Claus exists or the Easter Bunny is real.
“Alright then, assuming that that’s true and you didn’t pass a highly explosive weapon for your project, then what’s the ‘something special’ you want for dinner?” he asks, but he already knows the answer. He doesn’t think that it’s changed since the last hundred times she’s begged him for–
“Chicken nuggets!”
Albedo runs a hand through his hair. “Klee, we can’t keep having McDonald’s. Fast food isn’t exactly healthy or nutritious, and we just had ice cream today.”
“Klee ate all the bunny apples a while ago,” she says. “Those were healthy, right?”
“Yes,” he says, “but them being healthy doesn’t make McDonald’s any more good for you. We have spare chicken in the fridge from last night, we can have that instead. Perhaps you can have your chicken nuggets another day.”
He tries to end the conversation there, but Klee is persistent.
“Albedo,” she whines, “c’mon! I saw a while ago when we passed by– they have a sale on that super expensive coffee you always get! The roasted something! Please, please, please can we have McDonald's–”
“A sale on coffee?” That makes him perk up, pulling his phone out to double-check. When the website confirms her words, he sighs before nodding, cutting her off before she can continue her chanting. “…fine, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to have it today. But tomorrow we still have to finish the leftovers, alright? They take up too much space in the fridge.”
“Yay,” she shouts, “you’re the best!”
Albedo rolls his eyes, she says that every time he does something that she even remotely appreciates, but can’t hide his smile. It does boost his ego a little. “We aren’t getting you a McFlurry though,” he says firmly.
“It’s fine!” Klee excitedly bounces in place. “Chicken nuggets are good on their own!”
He pulls out his phone, not even needing to think before he types in the phone number to the nearest branch. They have it more often than he’d like to admit, but it’s still a lot less than Klee would be satisfied with.
Once he finishes ordering, Klee cheers, clambering onto his lap, over his laptop, and hugging him tightly. He hurriedly grabs his laptop before it can fall and awkwardly wraps his free arm around her. The position is awkward, but he doesn’t have the heart to tell her to get off.
Later, as he cleans up the cardboard packaging and plastic while Klee enjoys her Oreo McFlurry, he notes that the coffee hadn’t really been worth it, still the same overwhelming mediocrity that came from brand name fast food, though it was marginally less overpriced.
(His little sister’s joy had been, though.)