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G
Ren was not snooping.
He was investigating . Acting on curiosity— the most human of traits! It just happened to have some more… snoop-like qualities about it.
Could anyone blame him, really? He lived with one of the most fascinating Hermits— nay, the most fascinating players — of all time, and yet he barely knew a thing about him! No one seemed to know a thing about him. So when his basemate informed him that he’d likely be out working late, it only made sense for Ren to take advantage of the opportunity to get to know a bit more about Docm77.
(He was totally snooping.)
So far, he had learned nothing. The only items that seemed to be in the few chests Doc had stacked in his corner of their van were blueprints, blueprints, blueprints, notes on what little information they had gathered about the Hermatrix, and more blueprints.
Then, a flash of green near the bottom of a chest caught Ren’s eye.
Ren stuck his hand down until he felt the object. It was soft plastic, vaguely round, and…
He pulled up so that he could better see it.
A sippy cup? Light green and partially transparent. The type that one would expect to see a kid using, other than it being on the larger side.
It was probably a gag gift, Ren figured, or it was purchased to use while working with redstone to prevent unfortunate accidents. There were plenty of reasonable explanations.
And that probably would have been the end of it; Ren would have put the sippy cup back, kept snooping only to find more boring blueprints, and never have thought about the sippy cup again.
That would have been the end of it, except—
“What are you doing?”
Ren jolted at the sound of Doc’s voice, almost hitting his head on the van ceiling (seriously, how did Doc even stand up straight in here?). Busted . “Oh! Uhm, hi, dude,” he stuttered. “I was just—”
He couldn’t even finish his sentence before Doc strode across the van and ripped the sippy cup out of Ren’s hands. The creeper hybrid held it protectively against his chest, almost cradling it. “Why were you going through my stuff?”
Ren was an honest dog. That, and clearly the jig was already up. “I’m sorry, man, I was just curious what you were hiding back here.” His ears pushed back against his head with shame.
“Yeah, well, did you find what you were looking for?” Doc shoved the sippy cup back into the chest and slammed the lid.
Ren didn’t know quite what to say to that. In a desperate attempt to lighten the mood, he quipped, “What’s the cup for? I figured you were into some kinky shit, but that’s—”
“It is not a kink thing.”
Ren twisted his tail in his hands. “Okay! Not a kink thing!” Doc was usually even more eager to make dirty jokes than Ren was.
They stood in awkward silence. The tension could have been cut with a wooden sword.
Ren had messed up, bad. He wasn’t even entirely sure how he had messed up, but clearly that sippy cup was important to Doc in a way that Ren wasn’t privy to. Ren disturbing it had been much worse than simple snooping.
“I’m gonna go check on a farm!” he yelped, when the smell of gunpowder in the air became so potent that it was actually scary.
Ren left the van.
R
The next time, Ren was the one who got home earlier than the other expected.
He’d been grinding for deepslate with the hopes of being able to sell it at a cheaper price than Boatem, but he’d quickly come to the conclusion that there was a reason so few Hermits sold it. It was so miserable to mine that Ren gave up after only a few hours.
“Dooooc, I’m home!” He wiped his paws at the doormat and slid open the van door. “Have you had dinner yet? Because I was thinking that we could—”
He stopped when he spotted Doc sitting on the bed, organic eye wide and hair tousled.
“Oh, sorry, dude! Were you sleeping? I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“ No .” Doc cleared his throat. “I mean, no, I wasn’t sleeping and you’re not disturbing me. What were you saying about dinner?”
“...Right.” Doc was obviously lying about not having been sleeping, based on the way his words were slightly slurred together. “I was gonna say that we could barbecue.”
“Yeah, sure.” Doc wasn’t making eye contact. “That sounds fine.”
“Ooookay.” Ren put on his best smile. “In that case, I’m gonna take a quick shower to get this deepslate dust off of me, then I’ll get cooking! It’ll probably be like an hour until the food's ready. Sound good?”
He got a grunt in response.
Ren started to close the door when he noticed the green sippy cup sitting on the bedside table, half-full of what looked like water.
He paused. “Doc, you know you can tell me anything, right?”
“What? Yeah, of course.”
Ren stood for a moment longer, waiting for something more.
Ren shut the door.
E
Ren had a suspicion.
And he very well could have been wrong! He would be the first to admit that he was wrong about things all the time, especially when his guesses were based on things as inconsequential as the existence of a sippy cup.
But, call it intuition, Ren had a suspicion.
Ren prided himself on being straightforward. All there was to do was ask.
He and Doc were eating lunch together, lounging on an upper portion of the Octagon that overlooked the rest of the server.
“Hey, Doc? Do you age regress?”
Doc set down his fork. He was eating a food that Ren didn’t know the name of, probably something German. It looked good. Ren should ask to try it sometime.
Doc looked at him, something quizzical in his eye. “Yes, I do.”
Ren blinked, a little stunned that he’d gotten an immediate and honest answer.
Doc didn’t say anything more, which was fine! Ren was the one that had started this conversation, after all. Doc had no reason to be particularly prepared for it.
Ren asked, “Do you need or want anything from me in regards to it?”
“No.”
Ren bit his lip.
That’s that then, he supposed. If Doc said he was fine on his own, he would respect that. It was not his place to police or to insert himself into Doc’s coping mechanisms.
“If you ever need anything, feel free to let me know, my man. And you don’t have to wait ‘till I’m not home to regress. I won’t bother you or anything! Full support here.”
Doc gave him a look that Ren couldn’t begin to analyze. “Thanks.”
Ren took a bite of his sandwich. He nudged their shoulders together. “Yeah, dude! Communication is the key to teamwork and all that! We gotta be a united force for the Octagon to come out on top.”
Doc picked his fork back up. “Of course the Octagon is going to be on top. No one else on the server has the best duo.”
Ren grinned.
E
Ren was sprawled out in the grass next to the van, half working on build ideas and half simply enjoying the sun, when Doc touched down beside him, elytra folding as he landed.
“Heya, man!” Ren pulled the pen he’d been chewing out of his mouth. “How was your day?”
“Stressful.”
He certainly looked it. There were bags under his eye and his lab coat was falling off of his shoulders. There were several red warning lights blinking on his cybernetics. His hair was disheveled and Ren could smell gunpowder even from several blocks away.
Doc shoved his elytra into his inventory. “I think… I think I’m gonna try to regress for a bit to calm down.”
Ren felt his eyebrows shoot up before he tried to school his expression into something less surprised. He’d told Doc that he didn’t need to hide his regression, but he hadn’t been expecting him to outright announce it. Not that it was a bad thing, quite the opposite, actually.
“Okay! I’ll try to keep quiet, then. Let me know if you need anything!”
Doc nodded and went inside.
N
And so it went.
Every once and a while (sometimes multiple days in a row, sometimes only once per several weeks), Doc would inform Ren that he was planning to regress, go into the van, and Ren would let him be.
He caught glimpses, sometimes, when he needed to go into the van for something or other.
Doc playing with two stuffed animals– a creeper and a goat, fittingly enough.
Doc watching cartoons on his Comm, so entranced that he barely noticed Ren’s presence.
Doc curled up asleep, thumb in his mouth, green sippy cup abandoned on the pillow next to him.
(Ren couldn’t help but drape a blanket over him, that time. So that he wouldn’t get cold).
Doc seemed happy when small. He was always in a better mood on mornings after he’d regressed. If this was what helped him, Ren was more than happy to watch from a distance.
S
Ren was working on decoding the latest Hermatrix message. Or, he was trying to. He was hunched over his notebook and sweating and muttering to himself and admittedly wasn’t getting much done because the moon was getting bigger and they were running out of time and —
“Hey, Ren?”
The dog in question nearly jumped out of his lawn chair.
He forced a deep breath and looked at Doc. “Hey, buddy. How’s it going?”
Even if Doc hadn’t informed him several hours ago that he was going to regress, Ren would have been able to tell, if only by the fact that he had his stuffed goat tucked under his arm.
“I’m uh…” Doc kicked his hooves in the dirt. “‘M a bit smaller than usually. Fuzzier.”
Ren closed his notebook. This felt important.
“And…” continued Doc, “I want to watch Phineas and Ferb . But m’ Comm’s con-fus-ing.”
It took Ren a moment to process what he was being asked of him. “Oh! Yeah, I can help you with that, no problem! Can I see your Comm?”
Doc handed it over, even as his hands trembled slightly.
“Thanks, little goat.” In his focus on the Comm, he almost missed the way Doc flushed a dark green at that.
Ren furrowed his brow as he turned it on. Doc had made so many adjustments to the software that it barely resembled the layout Ren was familiar with. No wonder he would struggle with it when little. Though confusing, Ren managed to navigate to the website he knew Doc used for pirating and pulled up the show.
He held it back out to Doc. “There you go! To pick an episode, just click on it.”
Doc’s face lit up. “‘Anks, Ren!” He went scuttling back into the van.
Ren watched fondly as the little fumbled with the door, not helped by the way his eyes were glued to his Comm.
Ren looked up at the (ever-growing) moon.
If Doc was taking a break from worrying about everything, then he could bear to too. Tomorrow, they would work on the Hermatrix code together. Until then, Ren would pull up some music on his Comm, lay in the grass, look at the stars, and keep an ear out in case Doc needed anything more.
I
Things continued like that for a while: the moon got bigger, Doc and Ren stressed about it, and little Doc got more comfortable asking Ren for things every now and then.
Until the day Ren came home to find Doc crying.
As far as Ren had been able to tell, Doc’s regression was generally voluntary. But based on the way that Doc was presently curled in on himself, whimpering, breath coming in short breaths, metal fingers digging into flesh so hard that he’d drawn blood, face scrunched up as much as his cybernetics allowed, tears flowing from his organic eye…
Ren had no doubt that Doc had not meant to slip.
(Looking back, Ren didn’t know quite how he had known so surely that Doc had slipped at all.)
Ren was at his side before he knew what he was doing, crouching down beside the bed so that he could look Doc in the eye. “Hey— heyyy, buddy. It’s okay. You’re okay. Can you breathe with me? We’re going to take some deeeeep breaths together, yeah?”
After a few minutes, Ren managed to get Doc into some semblance of calm. At least, he was no longer drawing blood with how tightly he was gripping himself.
Ren really wanted to hug him. He knew, as a general rule of thumb, that Doc did not enjoy being touched unless he was the one to initiate it, so he refrained. He settled instead for pressing a palm to Doc’s forehead to check for fever, before quickly realizing that he has no idea what temperature a creeper-goat-cyborg-whateverthehellelseDocwas was supposed to run at, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t physically sick.
“Can I do anything for you, buddy?” he whispered, “Do you need anything?”
Doc just hissed and pushed his face into his pillow.
Ren frowned. He had a few ideas for helping, but he didn’t know how effective any of them would be. Still, he felt better doing something than nothing.
He located Doc’s small pile of regression stuff (in a chest of its own, now, rather than hidden). He pulled out the two stuffies that he’d seen Doc with the most and set them gently into Doc’s arms, getting a quiet whine in response.
Next, he pulled out the green sippy cup.
He could probably have filled it with water and called it a day. That was the only thing he’d seen Doc put in it, after all. And Doc could undoubtedly have used the hydration after crying so much. But he felt like Doc deserved more than that after having such a rough time.
He walked over to the small section of the van that they had designated as the kitchen (even though they cooked and ate outside far more often than not), pulled milk out of the fridge, poured it into a ceramic cup, and put it in the furnace to warm up.
While it was heating, he found some sugar and sprinkled it into the bottom of the sippy cup. He debated adding cinnamon or honey as well, but he didn’t know which sweets Doc was a fan of; sugar would have to do for today.
He pulled the milk from the furnace and tested it against his forearm— the temperature was just right. He poured it into the sippy cup, fastened the lid, and walked back to the bed, where Doc had pulled himself into a sitting position, watching him with a heavy pout on his face, shoulders hunched up almost to his horns.
“I’ve got something for you, buddy. If you don’t like it, I can get you water instead, no harm no foul.”
Doc hesitantly took the drink. He sniffed, before taking a long, almost desperate, sip of it.
“That’s just what you needed, right, little goat?” Ren smiled as Doc continued to chug it down. “Do you have your Comm? We can watch cartoons.”
They did just that.
Doc fell asleep with his face pressed into Ren’s shoulder.
…
“I’m sorry if that violated boundaries,” Ren said as they got up the next morning. “I know you’ve said that you don’t need any help when you regress unless you ask for it directly, but I couldn’t just—”
“It was fine,” Doc grunted as he buttoned up his lab coat. “Good, even. I couldn’t expect you to leave me alone when you found me like that— you’re too kindhearted.”
Ren couldn’t tell if that was a complement or not. He busied himself with washing out the sippy cup in the sink. “Do you… do you want to talk about what was upsetting you?”
Ren didn’t expect an answer. He rinsed the suds out of the sippy cup and put it on the rack to dry. He’d put it back in Doc’s little stuff shulker later, if Doc didn’t beat him to it.
“I’ve had some… bad experiences.”
Ren stayed quiet and facing the sink, not wanting to interrupt whatever force had compelled Doc to share with him.
“I grew up in a lab. The one that made me. And they weren’t… they were not the kindest people. I don’t want to go into detail. That’s why I started regressing, if you can believe it. When I finally got out, I wanted a way to reclaim the childhood I never had.”
Ren hummed his confirmation.
“Every once and a while, the memories catch up to me, and it doesn’t always go so great.” Ren could hear Doc shifting behind him. “I’m always okay, eventually. But, you know… You made me be okay faster, last night, than I would have been on my own. Thank you.”
Ren couldn’t stop himself from grinning. “You’re welcome, my dude. Anytime.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I mean that. If you ever need anything, big or small, just say the word and I’ll help however I can.”
Doc was smiling when they walked out of the van together.
P
“Hey, Ren?”
Ren looked up from his Comm, where he was messaging with Cub about whether or not the world was ending. “Whatcha need, buddy?”
“Uhm…” Doc kept his gaze firmly on his hooves. “You made… last time… and…” He trailed off.
Ren scanned Doc, grasping for clues about what he might be seeking. He noticed the empty sippy cup in his hand. “Oh! You want me to make you angel milk?”
Doc shyly nodded. He was so timid when small, in deep contrast to his usual personality.
“Of course, little goat!” Ren stood and stretched. “I’ll do you one better— last time I was just guessing at what you’d like, but this time you can help me make it even better.”
…
Doc sat at the counter as Ren worked.
Ren learned that Doc liked honey and cinnamon but not together. He did not like caramel. He didn’t mind chocolate, but he wasn’t a huge fan of it either, which worked out just fine, considering that Ren couldn’t handle it without risking an allergic reaction.
When the milk was done, Ren handed it off, Doc thanked him, and toddled off to play.
P
From then on, when Doc regressed, he asked Ren for angel milk.
Ren had not anticipated this addition to their normal routine, but he was not complaining in the least bit. Especially because in the few minutes it took to whip up the milk, Doc would sit at the counter, which meant that Ren finally got the opportunity to talk properly with the little one.
The problem was that Doc didn’t seem to want to talk. He was perfectly content to listen to Ren’s mostly senseless ramblings, but he only rarely (if ever) chimed in with anything of his own.
Until Ren struck gold.
And really, he should have thought of this approach ages ago, because this was Doc he was talking to.
“Doc? I was wondering— what’s your favorite species of goat?”
…
Doc talked for hours , long after the milk was done and long after he had finished drinking it.
The answer was Damascus goats, and Ren listened to Doc explain every reason why.
Y
Nothing could last forever.
The moon crashed. A new season started. New bases were made, new routines were put in place, and Doc and Ren were not quite the same as they had been before.
C
“Sir RentheKing, my liege?” Bdubs started. “You have a visitor. A traitorous one at that!”
Ren waved a dismissive hand. “Allow them in. I’ll handle it.”
Bdubs scuttled away, and a few moments later, Doc stepped into the throne room.
“Thou haveth gall to step foot here, I shalt admit.” Ren stood and drew his sword. “Have thee come to duel? Or perhaps, to surrender? Have thee finally realized that the Perimeter could never hope to defeateth my mighty empire?”
Doc shuffled his hooves. It echoed on the marble. “No, I… uhm…”
“You what ? Spit it out, my wretched foe!”
Doc silently pulled a green sippy cup from his inventory.
The tip of Ren’s sword dropped toward the floor. “Oh, are you regressed right now, dude?”
Doc nodded and brought a hand up to hide his face.
Ren shoved his sword into his inventory and put his hands up as he stepped forward. “I’m sorry if I scared you, buddy. I’m not gonna hurt you. I didn’t know you were feeling small. Friendship will always come before roleplay, you dig?”
Doc nodded again, though he didn’t lower his hand.
Ren took another cautious step forward. “Did you want some angel milk? Is that why you’re here?”
“Mhm.”
Ren took him gently by the hand. “Okay, then. Let’s go to the kitchen and we’ll get you all set up.”
…
Muscle memory took over as Ren warmed up the milk, even in a different, much larger, kitchen than he was used to. “How’d you get here? I know you don’t like flying when you’re small.”
Doc kicked his hooves against the side of the counter from the stool he sat on. “Walked.”
Ren tilted his head as he drizzled honey into the cup. “Were you already nearby when you slipped?”
Doc shook his head.
He paused. “You walked all the way from the Perimeter?”
“Yeah.”
Ren didn’t even want to think about how long that must have taken. Hours, at the very least. He moved to stand across the counter from Doc. “Little goat, you can always message me. I will come to you whenever you need it— you don’t need to walk all that way all alone.”
“Buttons are con-fus-ing, though.”
Right. Doc always struggled with his Comm when he was regressed. It wasn’t much of a problem back when they were living together. Ren might need to look into a way to make a button Doc could push that would automatically send Doc’s coordinates to Ren with a short message. Hmm…
But the milk was done, and that could wait until another day.
“Here you go, buddy! Angel milk for a little angel.”
Doc blushed furiously as he took the sippy cup. “‘Anks!” He turned and began to toddle away.
“Woah there.” Ren moved to block the doorway. “Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“The Perimeter?”
“Yeah.”
Ren very carefully put a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t like the idea of you walking all that way by yourself, especially when it’s almost night. Would you be okay with staying here tonight? We’ve got a nice guest room that you can stay in.”
Doc shifted his weight back and forth, considering. “But I don’t have my stuffies. Need them to sleep. Can’t stay.”
Ren mentally cursed himself. He knew that. “Are they at the Perimeter? In the usual shulker?”
“Mhm.”
Ren ran some quick calculations in his mind. “Okay. I’ll run to grab them real quick. Let me just—”
“ No .” Doc grabbed the sleeve of Ren’s cloak and stamped his foot. “Want you here.”
Ren smiled. He knew that bedtime would not go smoothly without Doc’s stuffed animals, but he also knew that Doc only got clingy like this when he was in a particularly fragile headspace— usually when he was about to slip younger, and if Ren left him like that, there would be tears. There was no clean way of handling this.
And then, the solution popped into his head.
He gently pried Doc’s hand off of his cloak. “I will be right back, I promise.”
…
“Bduuubs!” called Ren.
The man in question appeared from around a corner, in the creepy yet endearing way that only Bdubs could achieve. “Yes, my royal highness?”
“Mm, drop the roleplay for now. Slight change of plans for the night— I need you to go to the Perimeter and grab a shulker for me. It’s green and it’s probably in Doc’s bedroom, most likely near the bed.”
Bdubs glanced at his watch (he had many, lined up and down his arm under his mossy cloak). “But it’s almost sundown!”
“I know, I know, but— just this once? I’ll pay you extra in your salary this week!”
He squinted. “Ugh, fine. But you better have a good reason!”
“I promise I do.”
“What’s in the shulker? So I know when I’ve got the right one.”
“Oh— uhm.” Ren knew reasonably that Bdubs would not be weird about Doc regressing, but he still preferred to preserve Doc’s privacy. “Some stuffed animals, and, um, other stuff.” Rattles, diapers for when Doc was feeling particularly small, bath toys, coloring books, fuzzy clothes, building blocks. The collection had expanded significantly since Doc had let him into this part of his life. “Just don’t look too closely. If it had stuffed animals, then you’ve got the right one.”
Bdubs gave him a strange look but pulled out his elytra to get going.
…
Ren pulled the sheets up around Doc. “You’re a snuggly little goat, aren’t you?”
Doc brought his stuffed animals closer to himself.
Ren kissed his forehead. “Come say goodbye to me in the morning before you leave, yeah? Even if you wake up big.”
“What if ‘m small?”
“Then we’ll find something really fun,” and age-appropriate, “for you to do.”
Doc hummed contentedly. “Love you, Ren.”
Ren blew out the candle beside the bed. “I love you too, little goat. Sleep well.”
When Ren stepped out of the room, he was met with Bdubs standing directly by the doorway.
“Ah! Jeez, dude, give a guy some warning! I thought you would be asleep by now.”
“I want to be.” Bdubs’ wide eyes bore into his soul. “But first I have to know how you did it!”
“How I did what?”
“How you became Doc’s caregiver, duh!”
Ren sputtered. There was so much going on in that accusation. “You know that Doc regresses?”
“Well, yeah .” Bdubs crossed his arms. “NHO buddies know everything about each other! Etho and Beef tried for ages to get him to agree to have someone look after him, but he always said no! And like, it’s because he’s afraid of authority, which is fair, and he was fine on his own, but it still didn’t feel good to us, you know?” He jumped on his tip-toes. “So how’d you do it?”
Ren walked down the hallway, away from the guest room, so that their conversation wouldn’t risk waking Doc. “Well, first off, I’m not his caregiver.”
Bdubs blinked, eyes going impossibly wider. “You’re not?”
“I’m not. I just help him out with things when he’s regressed.”
“I’m pretty sure you just defined what being a caregiver is.”
“No, like—” Ren waved his hands around, trying to find the right words. “Sometimes his Comm confuses him, so I help him pull up cartoons. And if he’s ever, like, freaked out, I help however I can, because it’s hard to regulate emotions when you’re a kid. And I make him angel milk because he knows better than to try and use the furnace while regressed. And sometimes he just wants silent company or someone to play with. Things like that.”
Bdubs, once again, blinked. “And the tucking him into bed?”
Ren shrugged. “He tends to get a bit smaller when he’s sleepy, so sometimes I help out with bedtime.”
“He walked several hours while small because he wanted you.”
“He wanted angel milk,” corrected Ren.
“And you dropped everything to make it for him.” Bdubs abruptly put his hands on Ren’s shoulders, pulling him down to meet his eye level. “Ren. I need you to be so for real right now. Are you joking with me?”
“What? No?”
Bdubs released him and stepped back. “ Idiots ,” he declared. “I am on a server full of idiots . Oblivious idiots!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing!” Bdubs was already strolling away toward his bedroom. “I’m going to schleep. Get back to me when you realize that you’re totally his caregiver!”
Ren was left standing alone and confused in the hallway.
U
The thing was, Ren couldn’t quite get Bdubs’ words out of his mind.
It had been over half a year now, and Ren could still hear ‘you’re totally his caregiver!’ ringing in his ears like it was yesterday.
But he hadn’t brought it up to Doc, because that would be weird.
He tried to think about what would change if he was Doc’s caregiver.
The answer was… not much, if he was being honest with himself. Which may have kind of proved Bdubs’ point.
The thing was, in Ren’s mind, caregivers were a lot more… involved than Ren. Sometimes all Doc wanted/needed was angel milk. Sometimes it was just someone to sit in the same room while he played by himself. Sometimes it was nothing.
But, Ren supposed, when he really thought about it, what he did was still giving care. It was giving the level of care that suited Doc, and did it really matter if that level of care was slightly different than Ren’s preconceived notion of caregiving?
“Hey, Doc?” he said on impulse.
They were in the Perimeter, decompressing after a long day of attempting to clear the place of the ten thousand chickens that Grian and Scar— sorry, Poultry Man and HotGuy — deposited into it.
“Yeah?” Doc was sketching out blueprints at his desk, presumably some sort of revenge on the aforementioned chicken depositors.
“Do you want me to be your caregiver?”
Doc looked up, expression blank. At least he didn’t look angry. “What do you mean?”
“Like…” Ren absentmindedly fiddled with the fur on his arms. “I already sort of take care of you when you’re small, not that you’re not super independent. But, I was just wondering— and you can blame Bdubs, because he’s the one that brought it up— if you would want me to be formally called your caregiver. Or if you’d be okay with it. You can say no.”
Doc considered it for a long, long time.
“What would change?” he finally asked.
“Oh, uhm!” The way Ren saw it, that meant Doc was at least thinking about it. “Well, not much other than the title, to be honest, unless there’s something that you want to change.” He stood from his seat in order to nervously pace back and forth. “Again, you can say no. I know that you’ve had some really bad experiences with authority, especially when you were a kid, and I swear I’m not trying to take advantage of that, and you can ignore that I ever brought this up, dude, and—”
“Ren. Calm down. I’m just thinking.”
Ren made an attempt to slow his breathing.
Doc tapped his pen against his desk. “I do not have a preference on whether or not we formally call you my caregiver. I was fine on my own, and I would have kept being fine, but I genuinely appreciate all that you do for me. I don’t think I tell you that enough. I was fine, but you make things so much better. You have gone at my pace since the day you asked if I regressed, and that means so much more to me than you know. I don’t have a preference, not because I don’t care, but because I know that you are looking out for me either way.”
Ren nodded, trying to keep his face neutral.
“With that being said,” Doc continued. He stood and took Ren softly by the shoulders. “Yes, I think we should call you my caregiver, because you seem to have a very strong preference.”
Ren started to shake his head. “No, I—”
“Looking after me helps you just as much as it helps me, I think.”
He was right. He was so, so right, but this was Doc’s coping mechanism, not Ren’s, and Ren shouldn’t—
“Ren, will you be my caregiver?”
Ren didn’t realize he was crying until Doc was pulling him into a hug.
He leaned in on instinct, before jerking back with surprise. He could count the number of times he’d witnessed Doc initiate a hug on one paw.
Doc pulled him back into it. “Take the affection, dude. And you didn’t answer the question.”
“Yes,” gasped Ren. “Yes, please, I would like that so much.”
Doc gently soothed him. Ironic, considering that the conversation they’d just had should have indicated reversed roles.
They slept in the same bed that night, just like old times.
P
Doc was on the floor playing with blocks while Ren sat at what was usually Doc’s desk, sketching out increasingly elaborate and impractical ideas for spying on the Buttercups.
Then again, he was teamed up with the king of making elaborate and impractical ideas into reality, so some of his ideas might not be as impossible as they seemed. But getting help executing them would have to wait until Doc was no longer regressed.
Doc looked up at him abruptly, tongue poking out of his mouth with concentration.
“What’s going on in that noggin of yours, little goat?”
Doc leaned back and forth on his knees. “Can I call you a different name?”
Ren pushed his sketches to the side. “What do you mean?”
“Because you’re my caregiver now.” And didn’t that just make Ren’s heart swell. “And because some regressors call their carers mom or dad, and because you call me little goat.”
“You can still call me Ren, buddy. Don’t let what other regressors do sway what you do.”
“No, I want to!” He shook his head. “But not mom or dad, though. That’d be weird, for me. I could call you… puppy?” He looked at Ren, expression filled with caution. “Would that be okay?”
Ren thought he might cry again. “Yeah— yeah, little goat, you can call me puppy, if you’d like.”
Doc nodded, mind clearly made up. “Okay, puppy!” He turned his attention back to his blocks.
This felt so right . Even though nothing substantial was changing, it felt right .
When Doc got tired of playing and dragged “puppy” to the couch to watch cartoons together, Ren felt more at peace than he ever had before.
[End.]