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“Stede!! Stede!!!”
Stede was woken up by Ed shaking his shoulders and whispering in his name in his ear. Stede whined. He was tired, and this was bizarre behavior for Ed. He could be bouncy and fidgety, sure, but he’d never physically shake Stede awake unless there was an emergency, and his voice sounded excited, not scared.
“Steeeeeede!” Ed whined. “I’ve been awake forever and you’re still sleeping but it’s 10am which means it’s past time to get up and I’ve been waiting to have breakfast with you but I used the coffee maker and I know I’m not supposed to do that when I’m little I’m sorry but I really wanted an excuse to try the vanilla syrup on the counter you keep for the coffee but coffee’s really gross and I had to use a lot of the syrup. Anyways, can we make pancakes?”
Stede slowly blinked his eyes open and looked at Ed, bouncy and excited on the bed, still in his sleep tee and sweatpants. Pancakes sounded good but he felt really fuzzy and slow and the thought of using the stove scared him a little.
Oh.
Oh no.
Ever since the first time Stede regressed, the both of them regressing at the same time, leaving them without a caregiver, had been a worry at the back of his mind. Neither of them were really ready to be open about it with anyone else. Stede thought he’d trust Olu as a babysitter, but Olu knowing meant Jim, Archie, and Zheng would know. And Jim might be good with older kids, but not really younger ones, Zheng always got awkward around kids, and Archie had a habit of accidentally blabbing. Stede didn’t want that many people to know.
They’d avoided it so far, but the bill had come due. Stede was little, and as usual, he was littler than Ed, and couldn’t take care of him or lead in any sort of pancake-making. Maybe he could fake it? Pretend to be big? Ed sometimes got scared when big Stede wasn’t around. Not so much lately, but it could still happen. And now big Stede wasn’t here and Stede didn’t know how to make him come back, and Eddie would have to fend for himself in the big scary world and Stede was being bad and selfish. He’d have to fake it. That was the only way.
“Okay!” Stede said, smiling as best he could. “You…” he started, before he had to focus a little harder. “…make the pancakes?” Stede asked, before looking up at Ed to see if it worked.
Ed cocked his head a little, and quit bouncing on the bed to sit on his knees.
“Stede?” he asked.
“Mm-hm?” Stede nodded.
Ed furrowed his brow and looked at Stede a little closer. Stede gripped onto the blanket a little bit tighter. This wasn’t working at all, was it?
“Are you…?” Ed paused, almost as if he was in disbelief. “Are you little too?”
“No!” Stede cried, the exact way he said “no” any time he wanted to try and force himself not to be little. Even little himself, Ed immediately recognized that tone of voice.
“It’s ok,” Ed said softly. “I’m not that little today. I can make us pancakes.”
“Shouldn’ hafta…” Stede mumbled.
“But we’re friends, right?” Ed asked hopefully.
Stede’s mouth fell open a little. Ed wanted to be his friend? Ed wanted to be friends? He thought, surely, that he must be intruding on Ed’s special time. That Ed would want big Stede more than him, who’s useless and smaller than him, who isn’t very fun or good at all. Still, having a friend sounded nice. He didn’t have any friends. He’d never had one before. And he wanted to be friends with Ed more than anything. So he nodded.
“And friends help each other!” Ed added.
Ed bounced up out of the bed and held his hand out for Stede. Stede took it and followed Ed downstairs to the kitchen. Ed pulled the kitchen stool up next to the counter next to the burners.
“You can sit on the counter,” Ed directed, while he started pulling bowls and pancake mix out of the cabinet.
“How does that help?” Stede asked, climbing onto the counter anyways and sitting.
“You’ll be the taste tester,” Ed explained. “Gotta make sure nobody poisoned breakfast.”
Stede giggled at that. “But… you’re making it!”
“Well maybe a ninja will sneak in and poison it during a second where we both blink at the same time. Or maybe… I poison it.”
“Noooo! Eddie, you wouldn’.”
“Maybe I would.”
“Nooo!!” Stede giggled. “You love me. No poison ever.”
“You got me…” Ed said in an exaggeratedly defeated tone. “I’d never poison the pancakes. I’m eating them too, anyways.”
Stede kicked his feet and Ed hummed and made pancakes.
“Oops…” Ed said quietly at one point.
“What?” Stede asked, worried.
“Dropped a bit of eggshell in…” Ed said, before fishing it out and vigorously cleaning his hands. Cracking eggs was pretty difficult and Stede thought Ed did a good job even if he dropped a bit of shell in.
Right before Ed turned the stove on, he looked at Stede very seriously.
“We have to promise not to be mad at each other for using the stove unsupervised,” he said. “You can’t be mad at me when we’re big, okay?”
Stede nodded, unable to imagine being mad at Ed. “Won’t be mad,” he confirmed.
“And I won’t be mad at you either,” Ed said.
“Careful, Eddie,” Stede added. The stove still made him nervous, and he scooted away a bit once Ed turned one of the burners on and put the frying pan on it. Right before Ed spooned some batter into the pan, Stede’s eyes went wide with realization.
“Spray!” he cried out, gesturing to the cabinet where they kept the non-stick cooking spray.
Ed put the spoon back in the bowl. “Crap!” he exclaimed, before spraying down the pan, and then spooning in one small tester pancake.
“Bad word, Eddie.”
“‘Crap’ isn’t a bad word. You say it in front of me when you’re big,” Ed reasoned.
“Hm,” Stede hummed noncommittally.
When the bottom was done, Ed carefully flipped the pancake over. When it was fully cooked, he plated it and handed it to Stede, and told him to be careful since it was hot off the stove. Stede waited a few moments, before taking a bite.
“Mm!” Stede said happily. Ed beamed, and poured some more batter into the pan.
Since they were both impatient, they went back and forth eating the pancakes right there in the kitchen, instead of cooking a stack and taking it to the table with syrup and butter. That would’ve been messy anyways.
Once they were full and Ed wrapped up the leftover batter, they had to decide what to do next. Or, really, Ed did.
“I think today is a pajama day,” Ed decided, and Stede nodded along. “Ooo! Let’s make a fort in the living room and play on the iPad! I’ll build the fort. You can get blankets and pillows and the iPad, okay?”
Stede nodded and toddled off. He first got the pillows from their bed, but the blanket was a bit too big and heavy. So he went to the hallway closet and got some lighter blankets. Then he carried it all to the living room, where Ed had built a fort out of couch cushions. Ed took the supplies from Stede, and Stede went to get the iPad from their bedroom. Ed went into the fort and laid down all the blankets and set up the pillows, and when Stede returned, Ed went to get the emergency flashlight from the kitchen, took it into the fort, and turned it on, but had it face the wall, so a gentler light bounced off the couch cushions into the fort. Ed invited Stede inside, and patted where he should sit. Stede crawled in, and Ed cuddled up next to him, threw a blanket over their legs, and grabbed the iPad. He opened up digital Monopoly, and tried to get Stede to play with him. The game started to frustrate Stede though, so Ed decided maybe they should do something else. So he opened Pinterest instead and scrolled through it, saving pictures to their agere board. Ed told Stede to point out any pictures he wanted to save, but Stede seemed content to just watch. When Ed got bored of that, he thought maybe they should watch something. But he was worried he’d accidentally pick something too scary for really tinies and make Stede upset. He liked today so far, he liked being with little Stede, but there was a foggy looming fear at the back of his head that nobody was around if anything went wrong. He was in charge and he was still a kid. Part of him wished he could have little Stede and Big Stede at the same time. But he had to be bigger now. It was okay. Maybe Stede could tell him what he’d want to watch. So Ed asked for his opinion, and Stede just shrugged.
“Do you not wanna watch something?”
Stede shrugged. “Wanna be with you, Eddie.”
“But… we can’t just sit here…” Ed said.
Stede shrugged at that too, as if he’d be fine just sitting there as long as it was with Ed.
“Oh!” Ed said, putting the iPad aside. “One second.”
Ed crawled out of the fort and returned with two notebooks. One was a blank sketchbook, and the other was a children’s coloring book. He also had a pencil for himself, and a pack of markers for Stede.
“Coloring!” Ed explained. He watched as Stede carefully opened the book and turned to the first page that hadn’t been colored in yet, which happened to be a giraffe biting on a leaf. Then he, as methodically and carefully as he could, started coloring with the most logical colors for the scene. Ed, personally, would’ve made a purple giraffe (that’d be more fun, it’s an alien!). But Stede can color how he wants. Ed was a bit too old for coloring anyways. He propped his sketchbook up on his knees and started doodling whatever came to his mind.
Stede, meanwhile, was content to color. He was a bit worried about coloring right. What if Ed didn’t like how he did it and made fun of him? But Ed seemed fairly absorbed in his own thing, and Stede wanted to believe Ed wouldn’t make fun of him no matter what.
This was actually going much smoother than he was worried it was going to. It was actually going really well! He finally felt like he had… a friend.
~~~
“Leave it to us to make a big fucking mess,” Ed joked, as he shoved the couch cushions back into the couch, and Stede folded up the blankets.
“Oh come on, it’s not that bad. I don’t even see any crumbs anywhere… just some pancake splatter in the kitchen.”
Ed shrugged. “Yeah, I guess we took good care of ourselves…”
“I mean, we’re still alive, aren’t we? No broken bones?”
“Don’t joke about that Stede, please…”
“Sorry…”
“It’s ok, love,” Ed said, before spotting little Ed’s sketchbook at his feet. He picked it up and flipped through it. A lot of dinosaurs and cars and sea creatures, but also a lot of pictures of him and Stede. One thing Ed noticed was that little Ed would often draw himself as if he was 10-years-old. In most of the drawings, Stede was clearly an adult. But the last two pages were just drawings of Ed and Stede, both children, with Stede a little bit smaller, together. Holding hands, running, roller-skating, at the beach, with ice cream, building a snowman, and hugging.
Ed collapsed down on the couch and felt tears well up in his eyes.
“Ed?” Stede asked. “Wha…?” his sentence dropped off when he got a good look at the open pages of the sketchbook. He sat down next to Ed and leaned on him.
“Look…” Ed said, tears starting to flow. “Fuck.”
“They’re lovely.”
“It’s… he… he wants a friend, Stede. He wants-- he wants… look at this!”
“I’m looking,” Stede said, before turning away and wiping his own eye. “It’s very sweet.”
“We should’ve had this. This should be real.”
“Well, it could never have been real.”
“I know that, but--”
“I’m two years older than you. I wouldn’t be the smaller one.”
“I’m taller than you now. I was always a bit tall for my age,” Ed said with a smile.
“Well I was never that much smaller than you,” Stede said, indignantly.
Ed chuckled, and Stede smiled back.
“It would’ve been nice,” Stede conceded. “If we knew each other then. I think we would’ve been friends.”
“Yeah…”
Ed shut the sketchbook. There was something painful there, to think about. They couldn’t really go back in time. Outside the privacy of their own house, they could never be childhood friends together. Their bodies were still those of adults, even if little Ed saw himself and Stede boys.
“I think they had a nice day,” Ed said softly.
“Me too. I think they had a lovely day.”
Ed leaned into Stede and kissed his neck, wishing the bittersweetness was easier to swallow.