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Pigsy almost doesn’t spot him. It’s raining so heavily that the lights become nothing but blurred spots in his eyes, and he’s too busy fumbling for the right key to lock up shop to truly understand his surroundings. But he’s hard to miss, really, he finds as he stands up to straighten his back.
He’s barely taller than his knees, toddling down the street with no clothes, just mud coating his poor little body. His hair reaches his chin, and clings to his face from the rain. Pigsy blinks, looking from the direction he came to see if two worried parents come screaming for their boy. That doesn’t last long. He could lose the kid too, if he did that.
So he goes to stop him, and offers the boy a hand. He looks up at Pigsy with a tilt of his head, and his heart shatters at the size of those eyes. They’re scared. They’re staring at him, quivering, as if expecting someone to hurt him. As if expecting Pigsy to lay a hand on this child. He can feel something strain against his chest.
When the small hand clutches his own, tightly but wearily, he ushers him back over to the shutters, and seems to waste no time in finding the right key this time. He lifts them up, gets the door open, and pulls the boy inside. His stomach automatically sinks at the puddles they trudge in, but now isn’t the time. Not when this boy is by his side.
He gently closes the door behind him, and goes to grab one of his spare cook jackets, instructing the kid to go to one of the tables and wait, grinning when he comes back out to see him patiently sitting there. There hasn’t been a moment where his eyes have left Pigsy, curiosity under all that fear. What has the boy seen?
“You uh… you know your mommy’s name?” Pigsy asks, wrapping the white jacket around the kid, and fastening it up as much as it covers him. The boy shakes his head. “Your daddy’s, then?”
No. That’s what Pigsy gets again. So he frowns, and sits by the boy as he thinks. Maybe there’s a right answer to his predicament, but how do you come to that conclusion when this is presented to you? A child, on his own, confused and so utterly scared. He rests his elbows on the table, and runs his hands down his cheeks.
He’s out of his depth. Who would know what to do in this scenario? The police, for starters. That would be a logical, easy explanation, but what would he even say? Where would the boy be taken to? A police station for questioning? He looked on the verge of tears when Pigsy asked him about his mother. Or maybe that’s just the remnants of rain.
The rain! He sits up straight, and looks at the boy staring at him, hair still dripping, and he frowns. The cushion on his chair is soaked through, and his shirt isn’t faring much better. But his eyes, as wide as they always have been, are so focused on Pigsy that it almost makes him sick. The kid’s expecting something, anything, but there’s hardly anything to deliver.
“I forgot to dry you off,” Pigsy says, rolling up his sleeves and getting to his feet. “Let me grab… I have a few hand towels back here, that’ll do, right, kid?”
He digs around until he finds one, and comes back to the boy waiting patiently, still expectantly, simply sitting there. Pigsy reaches out with the towel, and starts ruffling his hair with it once he sees no resistance, and doesn’t expect the laughter. He pauses, momentarily, not quite sure of what he heard.
And then he ruffles his hair again, longer than he needs to, because the boy is giggling so furiously that he might start choking. Pigsy tries not to get too rough, knowing that a boy this size couldn’t handle that much tough love, but why would he stop when he finally seems to be enjoying himself?
“Ah, kid, you’re killing me,” Pigsy says after he’s certain the boy’s dried enough, dropping the towel on the table and re-rolling a sleeve that fell down. The boy watches, and tries to roll up his overly large sleeves to match. His hands don’t even get out of the holes, but he keeps mimicking Pigsy’s actions. “You’re just a lil me, aren’t you? You could run this shop with that attitude.”
The boy nods, then begins to babble at Pigsy, noises and hardly formed words, and he can only smile as he goes to ruffle his hair with his hand this time. He falls back into his seat and stares at the expanse of the shop. What to do, what to do… is there anything he can do?
He needs to call someone, someone who can help. That’s for sure. So he lets the kid continue his attempt at a rant, and goes to grab the landline off the wall. He has to call him. What other choice does he have, really? Between the two of them, one of them is bound to have some semblance of an idea.
“You let him stay overnight?” Tang asks the next day as he ignores the ‘closed’ sign on the door. Pigsy frowns at him, the kid asleep in one of his arms, clutching to his chef’s shirt with so much power in his tiny fist.
“What else was I gonna do, Tang? Put him out with the recycling?”
“Well, I suppose you’re correct,” Tang says, immediately heading over to pour himself a cup of tea. Pigsy can barely open his mouth to object before Tang sighs. “Don’t try to stop me. I need this.”
“You also need a haircut, doesn’t mean you’re getting one,” Pigsy mumbles, but doesn’t go to stop him. Tang raises an eyebrow in that awkward way he does, where exactly one moves on its own, and his glasses fall to the very bottom of his nose. Then he dramatically presses them back up, and takes a sip of his free tea - which he will be paying for eventually, Pigsy swears it on his own life.
They stay in silence until they simultaneously, wordlessly, go to sit at a table together. Tang’s hand automatically rests on Pigsy’s, the one not holding the kid tense on the surface. It takes a while before either wants to say anything, the only thing breaking the lull is the soft breathing of the boy who clutches even tighter to the form that holds him.
It’s no longer raining. It dried up as Pigsy tucked the boy into his own bed, and set up camp on the couch - as if he was sleeping that night. He spent the entire time on guard, waiting, hoping that nothing was going to hurt that child, curled up so small, holding on to his throw cushions like it was a teddy bear.
Tang has finished his tea within minutes. With a shaking hand, he tucks a loose strand of hair behind his ear, continually fiddling with both that and his glasses. Other than clutching Pigsy’s until the circulation begins to wean away, he has no idea what to do with his hands. He seems too aware of everything in contact with his face.
“Did you-”
“I did,” Tang says, and starts fixing the collar on his shirt. “No reports for a missing child in the area for a long time.”
“Ain’t that helpful,” Pigsy says, eyes redirected to the boy as he sticks his tongue out of his mouth ever so slightly in his sleep. “Then what do we do now? Take him down to the station? Have them keep him? What else are they gonna do?”
“DNA tests, probably,” Tang says, and Pigsy wants to pull his hand away to hold the boy with both arms, shielding him from the idea. But he likes how anchored Tang keeps them both, and he’s sure Tang will start ripping out chunks of his hair if he had both hands free. “Aren’t they the best option?”
“I don’t want them keepin’ him in the slammer,” Pigsy says, “besides, I have a few parking violations that I don’t want them to start poking me for.”
“Any other reason?” Tang says, leaning in, as if he knows everything. Which Pigsy knows he doesn’t, and he’s not in the mood to humour him. He just looks at the boy.
Small, harmless. He’s still got a bit of mud under his eye, and his nose keeps twitching. Pigsy pulls away from Tang to reinforce his hold, to shelter the boy who was dropped off at his doorstep. He wants to protect him from whatever was making him run, whatever made him show up at the noodle shop.
Oh, what is he doing? He can’t start feeling this way over a boy who just showed up, who just appeared in his life without any further explanation. There’s no time, no reason, to care this much now. But he does. Heavens, he does, he wants this boy to be okay, to be safe, he wants to stay up all night just to be sure of it.
He’d be worried sick for years, if he were to go somewhere else, he knows how he gets. He can’t leave a defenceless kid alone now that he knows him, knows nothing but everything that’s important. The boy would forget him, live a life with a family who are prepared to raise him, and find a home that’s better than the noodle shop.
He doesn’t want to take the boy in, doesn’t need to, definitely does not have the means to. It would be a miserable life, he thinks, being raised by a pig in a chef’s hat trying hard to make ends meet. He’d have to step up his game for the boy, if he wanted to take that role in his life. What would everyone else think? He knows they look at him weird already.
“You’re attached to him already,” Tang says, though his lilt could make anybody who didn’t know him assume it was a question. They know each other too well to believe that that would fool Pigsy.
“I ain’t.”
“Then put him down.”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“I can’t! He’ll tear a hole in my shirt,” Pigsy says, and gestures to the small hand so sweetly holding on to him as if he is the world, as if he is his saviour, as if he is ready to be every single one of those things. He couldn’t get away from the kid if he tried, and with the look on Tang’s face at the sight of them, he doubts either of them are trying that hard to separate them.
There’s another pause, as they both realise what this means, as they understand the movement and the moment and the taste in the air. They look at each other, almost begging for the other to speak first, to say that no, they need to hand him in. They can’t raise a toddler who stumbled into their arms coincidentally. Nobody left him for them.
Nobody would. Look at him. Look at Tang. Look at the three of them, sitting in the store, unspeaking, unable to turn the boy away, but unsure if they can raise a living, breathing human being. Pigsy couldn’t be a dad. Pigsy is harsh, mean, and can hardly keep his shop open.
“What are you thinking?” Tang asks, shuffling around to get a closer look at the boy. He brushes a strand of hair away from his eyes, and wakes the poor thing up. But he doesn’t cry. He just yawns and stares at them both. Beside him, Pigsy feels Tang melt and he just shakes his head fondly. “Okay, I see why he’s hard to say no to, now.”
“Ain’t he just,” Pigsy says. The boy hasn’t let go of his shirt even now that he’s awake. He’s keeping himself latched on with intent, with his eyes wide and his tongue still poking out of his lips. Tang has never been more right. “I can’t do this, Tang. Look at me.”
“I am, and I see someone who cares for this boy he hardly knows. Someone who wants to be there for him.”
“But-”
“Nope. Look at you. Tell me you wouldn’t make sure he lived as best as he could.”
“Not the best.”
“You don’t need to be the best, Pigsy. Nobody is. Besides,” Tang says and points a thumb to his chest. “You won’t be alone. Best dad Tang is here to help.”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t over-inflate your head,” Pigsy says, but holds the boy closer to him. “We’ll figure this out, then.”
“We will.”
Pigsy nods, and goes to finally unlock the hand from his chest. After tears at being torn away, the kid holds out both of his hands, and Pigsy automatically finds himself answering the call. His boy fits his entire hand around his thumb.