Work Text:
The first week, the kid doesn’t sleep at all, which means no one sleeps, which means Pyrrha doesn’t have any time or energy to shave, which means that her face grows out into that horrible patchy scrub brush beard she was constantly teasing Gideon about when she was alive. It makes her look like a half-eaten piece of stringy caramel candy that has fallen under a dusty couch and picked up red lint on the way. It itches like a motherfucker. She’s exhausted. They’re all exhausted.
The start of the second week she’s gotten the job, thankfully, and they’ve told her to show up sharpish that morning or lose the spot, and she knows she has to shave before she leaves or she’ll be miserable under the mask all day. Hect and Sextus are in the bedroom, talking quietly into the recorder they’d bought with a bit of the allowance Csteiphon Wing had given them for the first month, and the kiddie is sitting at the table staring at her uneaten breakfast, dark circles under her eyes, maybe having finally run herself to her end, and Pyrrha thinks—I’ll be three minutes, no harm if I use the mirror in the bathroom and she’s out here.
Her face is half done when she hears the strange crrrkkkkkcchhtt from the kitchen, and Hect’s voice in escalating panic: “Oh no, not the chair—Dve.”
She dashes out, lather all over the place, razor in hand. Hect—no, it’s Sextus, she’s still figuring out the difference between them—is kneeling in front of the girl, grasping her cheeks and drawing up her lips to expose a red gash of mouth. One of the cheap wood kitchen chairs is sitting to the side at a funny angle.
“She ate the chair,” Sextus says, flatly. “Big bite out of the leg.”
The kid looks up at Pyrrha and grins, baring a row of bloodied teeth and showing off a pink and crimson expanse of gum, splinters embedded in the flesh like thorns in a rosebush, gold eyes flashing. She really reminds Pyrrha of someone she used to know.
By the time they get her cleaned up Pyrrha doesn’t have time to finish shaving, and she spends the whole day on site with a half-itchy face, and gets home so late and so exhausted that she goes straight to bed. The next morning the girl tries to eat the table when Pyrrha is in the bathroom; the day after that, it’s a couch cushion.
“We cannot leave her alone,” Hect snaps at her as she picks white stuffing out the kid’s teeth. Exhaustion and anxiety and this enormous responsibility—and, probably, the sheer, thrilling newness of having her necromancer suddenly alive again in the back of her brain—have made her stringy, brittle, a fragile live wire ready to spark or burn out at a moment’s notice. The night before, she’d fallen asleep in the bath and was so soundly out that after an hour Pyrrha had had to run in there and throw a glass of cold water on her to wake her up. (Pyrrha had resisted the urge to peek—mostly. She’s a gentleman, but not a saint.) “Not even for a second, Dve. Not until we know her a little better.”
The next morning, after breakfast, Pyrrha looks at Hect and says: “I’ve got her for a bit.”
“You need to get ready for work,” Hect says. The bags under her eyes look like they’re carrying the world.
“I can do that out here. Go clean up, or talk to your boy, or just nap for twenty minutes. You’re no good to anyone like this.”
Hect looks at her a loaded moment, then raises her eyebrows and wordlessly pushes out the chair, practically stumbling back to the bedroom. The kid watches her go, then glances at Pyrrha.
Pyrrha gets her razor and soap and brush out, and out of her work bag she retrieves the little mirror she’d gotten from one of the guys at the bazaar near the site on her lunch break the day before; it’s cheap and the frame is already flaking around the edges, but it’ll do the job just fine. She props it on the table at an angle that lets her peek over shoulder and get a view of the rest of the room behind her.
“All right, junior,” she says into the mirror as she lathers up her brush, “let’s see what you’re gonna try today.”
In the frame of the mirror, the kid is standing near the sink and the window, dark brows furrowed, looking quizzically at Pyrrha’s back as she starts shaving. The gears in her little head are visibly grinding as she tries to figure out if Pyrrha can see her or not. After a minute, she turns slowly towards the windowsill, her jaw opening cartoonishly wide.
“Uh-uh,” Pyrrha says, like a warning; the kid freezes, then looks at the back of her head. “Windowsill’s not for you to eat.”
The girl scrunches her nose as Pyrrha goes back to shaving, clearly confused. After a beat, she turns to the window again, teeth bared for a nibble.
“No,” Pyrrha says, whipping around and pointing the razor at her; the kid looks at her, pausing mid-chomp. “No. Not food.”
As she resumes scraping Pyrrha hears her feet padding over, and a pointy little chin comes to rest on her shoulder. In the mirror, the girl blinks those big eyes once, twice; her mouth is a little open in awe.
“That’s how I got you,” Pyrrha says. “It’s a mirror, see.”
Their faces are crowding almost the entirety of the frame, the kid’s cheek pressed to Pyrrha’s ear, her gold eyes wide as saucers staring into Pyrrha’s brown ones. She reaches out, gingerly, to touch her reflection, her expression a picture of fascination.
“Here.” Pyrrha puts down the razor and hands her the mirror. “Want a look? It’s you—get it?”
The kid’s entranced, grasping the mirror with both hands and staring at herself like she’s witnessing a miracle, a tiny smile spreading across her face. Slowly, she inches the mirror closer and closer towards her face until her nose is pressed to the surface; she puckers her lips to meet her reflection in a soft kiss. Healthy self-esteem, Pyrrha thinks. She’ll go far.
After a pause, the girl tilts the mirror towards her open mouth, shifting her grip so she’s holding it like a sandwich, and bares her teeth.
“Nope,” Pyrrha says firmly, snatching back the mirror and repositioning it on the table. “That’s definitely not food. Nuh-uh. No.”
Undeterred, the kid snakes her head under Pyrrha’s left arm, the one holding the brush, and tucks herself into her armpit, snuggling close with no reserve or awkwardness. She reaches out toward the mirror again.
“No,” she repeats, touching her reflection with her index finger. “No, no.”
“Okay, yeah,” Pyrrha says as she wipes her face with one hand, the other arm slung around the kid, too tired to argue. “No-No. Sure.”
–
Nona wants pikelets for her fifth month birthday breakfast and Pyrrha cooks them up nicely. Palamedes says they are the best pikelets he’s ever eaten (he always says that when they have pikelets, but neither Nona nor Pyrrha point that out), and then makes a halfway decent ass joke. That’s good. When Camilla comes back she sees the new tally mark and says, wow, he made an ass joke, was it funny, and Nona says it was all right. Pyrrha worries for a second that this might send her spiraling but Cam shakes her head and says, they’re not really his forte, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, and meets Pyrrha’s eyes and gives her the beginnings of a smile. That’s very good.
When Pyrrha gets out her mirror and razor and brush Nona looks up from the washing and huffs a little.
“You don’t have stay here, you know,” she says.
“What d’you mean, junior?”
“You can go into the bathroom if you want.” she says, gravely. “I’m big enough to be out here by myself. I know better than to chew on the windowsill now.”
Pyrrha tries to stifle her laugh but Nona hears it and comes over and tucks herself into her left armpit, like she used to do every morning back in the early days, and meets her eyes in the mirror, faces flush together.
“I’m serious,” Nona says. “And I haven’t tried to eat your shaving brush for weeks, now.”
“I know, No-No,” Pyrrha says, cuddling her a little closer and giving one of her plaits a tug. “I just like keeping an eye on you.”