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Poe was a very simple child.
From the moment he was born to the cold spring morning Serafina found herself in, he always had the same look in his eyes, a pondering gaze like any other babe, like normalcy had finally come into their lives in form of this little creature. He dressed in the most average clothing, had the most average toys, and ate the most average food, to the despair of both his parents.
"Maybe we should give him birdseed.", Braeden had joked, after another bowl of chicken a la creme was thrown to the floor, Serafina's hands on her hips as she stared down her strange...normal...her thing of an offspring.
Vanderbilt's only deserved the best, yet this thing almost shrieked whenever something over twenty dollars came near him. Serafina couldn't exactly feed him peacock yet, so they settled on basic rice porriges which he seemed to enjoy.
Even when she was pregnant with him Serafina lived almost like a normal woman her age, doing nothing but sitting around, cross stitching and going for walks in the park, craving not the extravagant meals she had fancied when she was young, but things her mother would make- pickled peaches and bland oatmeal.
"All you need to do now is change the way you dress and get surgery for those scars", Braeden had tittered one night at dinner, "You'll be unrecognizable then."
Even Essie of all people had become her bosom friend, spending quiet long hours in the night not catching mice for tests in the morning, but curled up in bed with her, giggling over such stupid things, even prepping and sorting for the coming infant with her. Essie was a maid, Serafina had been born the same class as her, but she had moved up! Why was she associating herself with her?
Through the months she found herself troubling becoming more and more like...well...a housewife. While her husband tinkered away in his workshop, coming down to feed her strange pills that he said would for for their baby, she cleaned and cooked of all things, she went out for walks in the garden and poured herself what seemed like liters of tea in a day. She helped Essie hang up laundry the same way her mother had, wet clothing resting on her arm while she put clothes pines on the line beforehand, moving them whenever she had to.
And in a way, it was relaxing, it was strangely like reliving her childhood through the eyes of her mother, taking care of both the household and herself.
She had spent her entire life on the edge, watching small creatures die under her own hand, dealing with the pleasure and pain that she had with her husband, always being a welfare check away from being arrested, sent to an asylum, or worse.
As a newborn, Poe barely cried. He had lain against her breast, hairless and strange, his eyelids closed tightly like a baby birds, the black pearls that were hidden under them clearly seen under the skin. Her husbands experiment had worked, and it came out as this quiet little peanut, who seemed as normal as a peach in a peach tree, yet in an orchard of rotten apples.
Despite his apperance, he was normal.
He cried, laughed, and drooled like any other baby, his tiny body was chubby, if not more than an average infant and he processed the same things the same way other babies his age did. Poe nursed, waking up so frequently that a crib was placed outside their respective offices, and loved to put anything he could get his hands on in his mouth. Poe was always on a constant cycle of either spitting up on himself, or needing to be changed.
He didn't like shadows, he cried whenever they left him by himself for too long, and when they did leave him for more then ten minutes, Serafina came back to spit up or worse, his tiny face pinched up a boiled red dumpling about to burst.
Whenever that happened, Serafina dreaded the eventual bath, not only would she have to get the water running, go through the pile of towels to find the one he specifically liked, but she'd also have to gently scrub through the thousands of tiny black feathers on his body, careful not to accidentally tear one out. She could go rougher, but for an odd reason, she didn't want to.
Even on the rare occasion she bathed with her husband, she still would tear the washcloth against his back, ready to scrub off any grime in the shortest amount of time. He'd yelp and complain, but Serafina would continue ignoring him until he left, his skin pink and raw. She loved Braeden to the moon and farther, but she still refused to go any slower, it was her way of showing love, getting menail and boring tasks quicker for her partner.
In fact, he stood next to her as she gently washed the baby, itching a spot where blood pooled in little lakes, the bandage Essie had given him long gone.
Poe squeaked, wriggling in the warm water, as she tediously washed behind each feather, soft baby skin meeting rough, calloused fingers. The entire front of her shirt was wet with water and his earlier spit-up, and it dribbled miserably down her front as the infant continued to kick and wriggle. Another splash of water got onto the tiny puddle on the floor, Braeden grimaced and stepped back.
She kissed his forehead, as she lifted him out of the water, wiping him down with a dry cloth and setting him gently down on a nearby counter. Braeden watched as she squeezed lotion onto her hands and rubbed it onto his pink face and arms, the areas without feathers got awfully dry during winter time, still picking at his dead skin.
Serafina suddenly remembered how her mother used to do this, after her hair was brushed and braided, lotion was rubbed into her skin and face, almost roughly but never not lovingly. She'd get a kiss on the head at the end, her mother pushing her out of the bathroom with a stern, "Go play."
She patted her baby's fuzzy head, his dark eyes watching as he was snapped into his onesie, a pink hat drooping over one eye.
"Come on, lets go play."