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Aligning his pen down the flat space of the tablet, Dave hunched over his desk in an unnecessary amount of focus applied to his screen, which was opened in a fanciful software filled with intricate functions that didn't match the actual content Dave was incompetently drawing. Or what would've appeared 'incompetent' to an innocent bystander, usually sock accounts trying to flame in his webcomic's comment section, but to Dave (and Dirk), it was utilizing the peak of his drawing ability; the ability to which to line out something completely terrible and arduous to comprehend on purpose, for the irony sakes. Of course, the critique comments that perhaps took his crusty jpegged comic that he first developed when he was an irony-obsessed tween with too much goddamn times on his band aid-ridden hands could barely mark a cut deeper than the ones he endured in and before the game. Not that Dave even needed any sort of reassurance that his page about Hella Jeff suckling on a dog's genitals was absolutely fantastic and was going to get hung on the fridge door, but Jade's saccharine words in a soft voice she usually reserved just for him made that an exception.
Dave was so utterly entranced with crudely lining out a dick over a deep-fried image of Tony Hawk (god rest his beautiful soul, no Earth C incarnation could even remotely compare to his original raw skating talents), he doubted there was anything in the entirety of Paradox Space that could magically rip his attention away away from the monstrosity plastered on his screen.
Except for a bloody-mouthed child standing at the entrance of her parents' bedroom.
Dave immediately clamored at the sudden sight when he lifted his shaded gaze, his pen slipping out of his fingers as his tablet fell to the floor in a heart wrenching clatter.
"Holy shit," Dave squeaked out, his body jolting out of bed. His vision was a blur in sheer panic, and once he managed to still himself back on to the ground, the first thing he noticed were distinguishable black canine ears sprouting up from stark white hair that matched his own. And rapidly, the donning realization that the little figure with thick lines of blood running down her mouth and bleeding into her pink pajama shirt was his daughter.
"Pi - Pippi!"
Uncontrollably, he flash stepped forward to Pippi, immediately closing the gap between them in a startling blink of an eye. Pippi jerked back in surprise, but was quickly scooped up in her father's arms before she could even register him suddenly being at arm's length.
"What happened? Did you trip on something? Was it the kitchen floor again?? Pip, you know the kitchen floor is slippery as thin ice, thinner than friggin Ice Cube, your mom's already lectured you about trying to do your little happy feet dancey dance whenever you think you're alone. Remember when you almost broke your nose? Almost caused two injuries there; your cute button nose and your parents' heart. Pippi, I know you're a typical five year old just bursting with creative energy to burn off, but you really gotta start listening to me and your mom more-"
Her closed fist was suddenly thrusted in his view, interrupting his rambling to a sharp halt. Pippi then uncurled paw to reveal something tiny and rounded, nearly sharp at the bottom but exceedingly honed at the root.
"It's my toof, papa." Pippi peeped, her black tail wagging pridefully. Dave stared at it for a minute longer, recalling the ungodly amount of articles he skimmed through when Jade was still pregnant and forcing his mind to dredge up the vague, fuzzy memory of kids dental care in his evocation sea. As expected, he couldn't remember a single paragraph about it, due to his self assurance in Pippi not detouring from a natural child's development milestones. Kids lose their teeth all the time, a simple part of growing up and nothing the parents had to helicopter over.
But Pippi was only five, and nowhere near her sixth birthday.
"Oh no." Dave muttered, panic resettling in him and throttling him with a tight grip.
Dave swiftly marched into the bathroom, clicking on the light and closing the door in a single haste movement. He placed Pippi onto the marbled sink, mumbling out apologizes as he wrapped a piece of toilet paper around his hand. There was a smear of Pippi's blood on the shoulder area of his favorite night shirt, which was Jade's decade old shirt with the blue dog symbol etched into it, but Dave couldn't be more apathetic when his daughter was abundantly bleeding for indiscernibly no reason.
"Fuck - Pippi, I'm so sorry - I should've been there, I'm your dad," Dave gently wiped over her chin, the blood quickly absorbing into the soft paper. "Shit, if Jade sees you, she's going to-"
"I'm home!!" Jade's voice roared above the crinkling of grocery bags being transported to the kitchen counter, and Dave's heart dropped into the pit of his stomach. Pippi's ears immediately perked up at the familiar, warm sound of her mother's tone, an involuntary little bark emitting from her.
"Dave? Pippi?"
"We're in the bathroom." Dave managed to choke out, rubbing his sweat slicked neck before he went to go rip off another strip of paper. The echoes of Jade's footsteps steadily came toward the bathroom, causing Dave to try and hurry with wiping off the dried blood from their daughter's face and around her mouth. When Jade went to twist open the door, Dave leaned his entire weight against the door, panic lurching in his dry throat while Jade jumped behind the obstruction from her family.
"Dave? Can you open the door?"
"Nope." Dave hastily replied, emphasizing the 'p' on his lips.
"But I missed you guys while I was at the store!!" Jade mewled, trying the door again but to no avail.
"I missed you too, but right now, I'm taking a big phat reliever into the toilet after an unlucky takeout from Taco Bell and I don't know if your extra sensitive doggy smell is gonna be able to handle the wicked stench I'm leaving here like a skunk with a stomach flu."
"But you have our baby in there with you?" Jade perked a brow up, her head tilted confusingly. Pippi smothered her giggles with her hands, apparently greatly entertained by watching her father sweat bullets and scrambling to find poorly-crafted excuses.
"Y'know how weird Pippi can be, she can even vouch-"
"Honey, can you just please open the door?" Jade asked politely, just once more, but in an evident sulky manner so as to pull at Dave's heart strings. She was already getting tired of playing this silly game and she just wanted to feel her husband's lips against her own again and getting to hold Pippi in her arms. Jade knew very well that one of Dave's weakest links of all, the one that strung a chord deeply within the knight and softened him up like dough, was her being even remotely sad. And for awhile, she seemingly won, because a prolonged, hesitant pause followed from the other side of the door, save for the thumping sound Jade easily deciphered as Pippi's adorable tail hitting the sink.
"Can't," Dave finally squeezed out, sounding as if he was trying to keep himself from discombobulating. "Pipster lost a tooth and she's bleeding like mad."
Jade's eyes bulged out, her round glasses descending down the bridge of her nose. "WHAT!"
She instantly burst into the bathroom, nearly accidentally knocking down Dave, but thankfully with being god tier, you were rewarded with exploitable floating prowess. A big smile painted Pippi's small face at the immediate sight of Jade, her tail wagging unbelievably rapid as she clung onto her mother without a forethought.
To Jade's dreadful horror, Pippi did indeed lose a tooth extremely early, and the bottom half of her face was covered in light remnants of blood. Contrasting both her parents, however, Pippi seemed quite happy, holding her tooth up for Jade to see with the same pride she contained when showing Dave.
Jade thought her heart was about to induce something severe with how irregularly fast her heart pounded for a human out of fear of not knowing what happened to her precious baby.
"Mommy, look at my cool toof!" Pippi exclaimed, with not a slight care to the situation.
"Pippi, how did you lose your tooth?" Jade fretted, her own white canine ears pressed against her head. She knew instinctively Dave wasn't behind this, despite his frightened state; Jade trusted him with her whole world, and in contrast to his own early doubts about being a father, Dave was the most amazing and hands-on dad to Pippi than anyone else on Earth C could ever strive to be.
"Uncle Jake showed me! He said that if I ever have a wiggly toof, it's best I rip it out instead of going to those mean vets who do toof stuff." Pippi innocently said, childishly imitating how she performed the tooth-yanking exactly. At this, both Jade and Dave heaved out sighs; of course this was a dangerous result of the mixture of Jake's rough-and-tumble lifestyle and a child's thoughtless wonders. For a brief moment, Jade pondered if Rose and Kanaya ever had to deal with misadventures like these with their own daughter.
Still, there was an incessant thought pestering Jade's head that sounded off alarms, telling her to do something, but she couldn't even muster up a clue of what that something was! If it wasn't damn near to midnight, Jade would've had no embarassment of calling Rose and Kanaya to ask them for advice, but she didn't want to interrupt whatever cuddling they're likely getting up to, and trying to explain that Pippi was covered in blood in the middle of the night didn't sound like the smartest option. She just needed to think; what if she were Kanaya? What would've she done if her daughter pulled out a tooth a tad early?
Dave idly stood around in the cold with his hands tucked into the warm space of his sweater's pockets, whilst holding the leash to Pippi's shiba backpack. With being the kid combination of a Strider and a Harley, Pippi usually had a strong impulse to wander around and explore her surroundings; which Dave and Jade had come to know about the hard way unfortunately, when Dirk and Jade had lost track of her in a grand mall while her clueless parents were on a double date with Rose and Kanaya.
Thankfully, even without the backpack leash, Pippi seemed quite content and restrained with the frosty peanut butter treat her and Jade loved to consume and buy from the small pet shop a few block's from their house. That pet shop also happened to be Pippi's favorite place to go, not only for the treats the owner generously gave her and the squeaky toys she'd irritate Dave and Jade with, but to stare at the glowing blue tanks that contained a variety of fishes. Dave and Jade liked buying her gold fishes from there as well whenever she'd act on good behavior, as a way for them to indulge her, which the gold fishes usually only lasted three hours before they floated up to the surface, or a day if they're lucky.
Soon, Jade emerged from the entrance of the hospital, garnering both the white haired individuals' attention in a split second.
"How's my puppy doing?" Dave murmured, handing Jade the backpack leash before leaning in and planting a kiss to her cheek.
"She's fine, thank goodness. Since it's just a lousy baby tooth, Pippi's teeth development won't change, just that she'll have to deal with smiling with a tooth gap for awhile." Jade informed him, a giggle slipping past her lips when Pippi purposefully gave her a Harley/English grin. Pippi unquestionably inherited her smile from Jade, anyone could see that, as well as her doglike instincts and half of her features. The rest about Pippi, though, was Jade's favorite, because of how much she reminded her of Dave, down to the bleach white hair and her shared interest of dead things. Jade wasn't sure if that interest was actually going to carry over once Pippi was a little older, given that she only participated just to spend time with her dad and listen to his rants, but for the meantime it held Pippi's attention, it melted Jade's heart to a puddle.
"Oh, that's good, but uh, I was talking about you," Dave coughed, slinging an arm over Jade's shoulder. "Are you okay? Before we arbitrarily decided to go to the hospital at goddamn eleven in the night, you seemed like you were really lost in something?"
Jade chewed on her lip, shrugging with a bittersweet smile. "Do you think I made the right choice? By just... making an impromptu visit to the hospital for Pippi's safety?"
"Well," Dave scratched at his neck. "In my honest opinion, you freaked out too much in that aspect."
"Shoosh! I know! I realized that when the doctors started looking at me weird, like I was some crazy helicopter mom..." Jade stuck her tongue out. "I mean, I was raised by a dog for my early formative years, and I was just worried if I didn't act on something really big, it'd make me look like an uncaring mom. Instead, I just appear as an overreacting mom to the new Creator gossip!"
"But you're a good mom though because of that," Dave said, scratching behind her fluffy canine ear. "Pippi is so attached to you because of things you do like this. For real, it's insane with how excited she gets to see you once you come back home, even more than me. Who cares whatever the hell paparazzies have to say on how we're raising Pip, she loves us, and she can clearly see we love her too - we're not at the hospital for an opioids smuggle."
Laughter seeped out of Jade like sweet water to Dave's parched throat, heat swirling in his chest before pooling at his stomach. And with the look Jade gave him behind her reflective glasses, Dave thought he was going to implode from the overwhelming mass of love he held for his wife and daughter. Coming to a halt under a blinking lamppost, Dave and Jade's breaths brushed against each other, their shades and glasses clinking softly as they leaned further in, bubbling up more giggles and snorts from the both of them that eventually got drowned out by a quiet kiss, while Pippi just contently licked at her peanut butter cup in between her loving parents underneath the soft street light.