Chapter Text
His life hadn’t changed much when he’d realized that his mother’s stomach was swelling from within. His parents had thought that he was too young to understand the mechanics of how a baby gets made, and Kassa hadn’t cared much about the whys of his mother’s body evolving in a way that didn’t make much sense to him
And then, his parents had placed the two-day-old baby in Kassa’s inept hands, and life as the 6-year-old had known it, ended quite thoroughly.
Never had he seen someone this small. Never had he held something this precious - this important - this vulnerable. Kassa had been fascinated by the marvellous beauty of this tiny child.
He hadn’t understood then, that to make a child one needed to combine two beings into a singular. All he cared about was Kerri’s big brown eyes looking up at him with boundless curiosity. Her tiny tiny fingers, with even tinier nails, and how his mother had carefully sheered even those small nails with unbridled care.
He saw his father swaddle the small child, and nearly yelled at him for thumping the poor thing so violently - till his father had sat him down and told him about the importance of bouncing a baby after it ate.
Life was simpler when Kassa was seven. His family, along with many others would live together in large units, and come together every so often to cook, sing, and dance together.
There were quite a few hammocks that were placed outside his house, and he’d spend many days simply lounging in them, thinking about everything, and nothing.
After a particularly nasty monsoon with waves of circular rain that overfilled the nearby lands and flooded the river, Kerri, along with many of the younger children, got a fever.
His parents had gone to the community elder, asking for medicine. Kerri had hated consuming the bitter, leafy concoction his mother had produced, and Kassa had to hear another lecture from his parents - about how sometimes people had to do things that they didn’t enjoy, for their betterment.
Kerri had been miserable. The poor thing hadn’t understood why she felt so bad, and she’d cried herself to sleep; the crying had just made things worse, making the fever last for two more days.
On the last day, just before the fever broke, Kassa had been woken up by tiny cold hands and a warmer-than-usual body sliding up to him in his bed.
He woke up feeling sticky, and with the heady feeling of her runny nose at his collarbone. Kerri started crying again, and before she could wake their very tired parents up, he decided to grab the tiny girl and take her to the hammock.
The rains had finally cleared up, and Kerri snuggled between the hammock’s thick, material and her furnace of a brother, and Kassa enjoyed the feeling of her breaths wafting onto him.
Their parents would find them just like that, snuggled together under the canopy.
Of course, Kassa would get an earful for exposing his little sister back to the elements so soon; that incident was soon superseded by Kassa getting the bug himself and becoming sick for the next week.
Kerri would snuggle with her brother every day.