Chapter Text

“That’ll be four dollars and eighty-five cents plus tax.”

“Of course, thank you.”

Botta swiped his card through the scanner and signed after the cashier rang up the order. She shouted it back to the barista, and as the transaction went through the scent of coffee strengthened in the dry air.

He moved down the counter and loosened his scarf as he waited for the drink to be ready. Even at mid-morning, with no crowd to aid it, the air inside of the shop was oppressive. He looked forward to getting back out into the brisk autumn air, where at least a man could breathe without having to work for the oxygen.

Just as he had settled in for the wait, his phone buzzed twice, then a third and fourth as he pulled it out of his pocket.

[ 9:33 AM Yuan ] botta

[ 9:33 AM Yuan ] i want a child

Boota loosened his scarf again, sighed through his nose, and reminded himself that Yuan’s texts often seemed shocking before their context was revealed. It was more likely than not that ‘child’ was a euphemism for another one of Yuan’s projects.

[ 9:35 AM Botta ] I’m flattered, but this is rather sudden.

Barely half a minute passed before Yuan texted back.

[ 9:36 AM Yuan ] not with YOU dear god. i’m sure you’re perfectly respectable on your own merit but i am far from interested

[ 9:36 AM Yuan ] by myself.

[ 9:37 AM Yuan ] before you make a binary fission joke, yes, that would be the ideal. unfortunately it is not actually possible for a human to do that

[ 9:38 AM Yuan ] nevertheless i am considering it

[ 9:39 AM Botta ] Well, as long as you’ve thought this through.

The barista set a paper cup with his first name scrawled on it down on the counter. Botta nodded at them, took his coffee, and brought it to his lips as his phone chimed again.

[ 9:40 AM Yuan ] i haven’t thought this through even a little bit i’m waiting for you to convince me not to

[ 9:41 AM Botta ] I don’t see why that’s necessary. I’m sure you will evaluate all of your options and make the right decision.

He thanked the workers once again as he tucked his wallet into his pocket and quietly condemned himself to a liar’s hell.

The city rang on all sides with the crash and mayhem of mid-morning life. Business people hurried on their individual ways wearing earphones and shoes that clicked on the sidewalk, dodging through traffic with the flippant attitude only a jaywalker could master. Botta went to the crosswalk and waited at the corner for the lights to change, a point of tranquility in the storm of movement that raged around him.

His office was only a couple of blocks away from the coffee shop, which was itself nestled in a corner between a drugstore and liquor shop, keeping all a man’s potential vices within a thirty-foot limit. It was where he had first met Yuan Ka-Fai, who had rolled in early one morning with his glasses askew and a laptop bag filled with enough scrap paper to have destroyed a small forest.

He’d been looking for the same office building Botta would be heading toward later. Botta had offered to show him the way, and had to put up with a few glares and muttered vulgarities in response to the relaxed pace they took to get there—Yuan was one of the jaywalking regulars.

This had been some years ago. At some point, Yuan had decided they were friends. Botta could not complain; Yuan was a good man when he remembered to be, and once you got to know him he remembered more often than he didn’t.

The lights changed, and Botta looked both ways before crossing the street.

Good man though he might have been, Botta wasn’t certain how well Yuan might lend himself toward childcare. Not for lack of of trying, but rather because on most days, Yuan could barely care for himself. There was a first time for everything, Botta supposed.

He entered the building and climbed into the elevator, and just after he pressed the button for the thirteenth floor he received another timely message.

[ 9:52 AM Yuan ] where ARE you i’ve been waiting for ages

[ 9:52 AM Botta ] On my way. I’ll be near your office presently.

[ 9:53 AM Yuan ] i’m not in my office.

[ 9:53 AM Botta ] Then you will have to wait a little longer.

When the doors slid open Yuan was standing outside of the elevator, tapping one foot on the floor and scowling.

“That was longer than usual,” he said.

Botta checked his phone as he left the elevator. “Twenty minutes,” he said.

“Security saw you leave before nine-thirty. That’s longer than twenty minutes.”

True to form, Yuan had his glasses shoved on top of his head, taking strands of bright turquoise hair that had become tangled in the nosepiece with them. His shirt was wrinkled but clean, his tie loose, and he’d taken off his shoes.

“Good morning to you, too,” Botta said, and set off down the hall toward his office.

Yuan was not quite as tall as Botta, but he was faster and kept pace easily as they passed through meeting rooms and cubicles. “I’ve been thinking about it actively since last night,” he said, “and intermittently for a few months. I think I could do it, Botta.”

“Binary fission?”

“Adoption, you absolute nincompoop.”

“You’ve been using the thesaurus I got you,” Botta marvelled as he unlocked the door to his office. It was big enough for a desk and a couple of filing cabinets attached to a bookshelf, which held several volumes on good management techniques, modern computer systems and languages, and one Mandarin-English dictionary. The chair was not the most comfortable one in the building, so Botta had gotten rid of it and placed a smaller table on top of his desk so that he could stand while he worked, which was healthier to begin with.

Yuan kicked the door shut, jostling the bookshelf and a small lamp. He climbed into the chair Botta kept for guests, perching on top of it like a scrawny blue bird with bright red glasses and an attitude to match. “I’ve been running some numbers since getting in this morning. I have a fair amount of money put away that’s not doing anything—”

“I thought you were saving for your surgery?”

Yuan’s mouth twisted into a grimace. “I’ve gone over thirty years without it,” he snapped. “I can go a few more if it means bringing some consistency to a kid’s life.”

Botta hung up his coat, then logged into his computer. His email was filled with IT complaints from members of the company who were less tech-savvy and needed assistance locating the power button. Silently, he forwarded the complaints to one of Yuan’s juniors. There was no need to waste Yuan’s skillset on basic user errors, and if he was this preoccupied it would likely result in more harm than good.

Yuan was lucky to have Botta, really.

“That’s a noble cause,” Botta said.

“There’s nothing noble about it. I have no logical reason for wanting a child, Botta, except that I do, and I’ve managed to rationalize the situation to myself despite its inanity.”

Botta took a sip of coffee to buy himself time. “It sounds,” he began, “like you have a dilemma.”

“No shit.”

“Did you try sleeping on it?”

A quick glance from the computer screen to the shadows under Yuan’s eyes and the dishevelment of his hair told Botta that Yuan had not, in fact, slept at all. This wasn’t a necessarily bad thing, but it was important to have the bases covered when life-changing decisions hung in the balance. Botta was a stalwart advocate of keeping healthy and only deliberating once certain that any potential interference was out of the way. Yuan did not keep the same principle, and often had to be reminded that sleep deprivation was in fact worse than intoxication.

Yuan glared at the corner of the office, his ponytail hanging over one shoulder.

Botta took another sip of coffee.

“I know that it’s not convincing from your point of view,” Yuan said. He stretched one arm out in front of him and clasped the wrist with his other hand, pushing it further. “But this didn’t happen suddenly. Like I said, I’ve been thinking about it, weighing the pros and cons. I even took notes about when I was considering it to make sure it wasn’t a chemical imbalance. I have notebooks back at my apartment. You’re welcome to dig through them.”

“But you didn’t sleep on it.”

“I slept on it as much as I sleep on anything.”

“Ah, well. That makes me feel better.”

Yuan scoffed. “Alright, assume I did sleep on the matter. A regular six-to-eight hours every night, for months on end, just like you like. What would your next advice be, great health and family guru that you are?”

“I am not going to talk to you if you antagonize me.”

“I’m not antagonizing.”

“Sarcasm and crude nicknames count as antagonizing and are grounds for me to report you to HR,” Botta said, though he had no intention of doing so. Another sin to mar his soul. “Particularly since I am trying to help.”

He tore his eyes from the monitor screen to glance back at Yuan, who was doing a fantastic job of crossing his arms and looking exploited, as if Botta was in the wrong. “Fine, then. I apologize.”

Yuan refused to elaborate or to look Botta in the eye, which meant the apology was sincere.

“Accepted,” Botta replied. The screensaver flashed up as he slipped around the desk (as much as someone of his gargantuan stature could slip) and leaned back against it to better focus on the conversation at hand. “So you’re considering adoption.”

“I am. There are some technical hurdles I still need to cover—lawyers, and agencies, and the money to pay for all of that—but I have a few ideas already.”

“I can’t say I know much about the adoption process.”

“I’m not asking if you do. I want—” Yuan halted, the words seeming to stick in his throat as he tried to phrase the next sentence. It took a good deal of thought and some hesitant stammers before he did. “—to know if you think I can. Raise a child, I mean.”

Botta noted that today his coffee was especially good and that it deserved his immediate, long-lasting attention.

Yuan’s sigh was too subtle to be perceived by anyone but Botta. “You know me better than anyone,” he said. “I can rise to a challenge. I’ll read a thousand parenting books if that’s what it takes, and I hate reading—”

“It’s not a job interview, Yuan.”

“I know that—”

“I mean,” Botta said, and set his coffee down on the desk with the quiet clink of a mug hitting wood, “that the point here isn’t to impress. You have some qualities that I think would be an asset, and then some that I’m not as sure about.

“It’s also not about you. You’re talking about a lifetime commitment to the physical and mental well-being of another human, and all the sacrifices that come with that. Raising a child isn’t necessarily about being capable at the very beginning—if it was, the population would be much lower than it is. It’s about whether you’re ready to give up twenty years of your life for someone else. If you are, I’ll support you every step of the way. If not… it’s something to strive toward in the future.”

Yuan did not reply, instead glaring at the corner of the office in which resided Botta’s longtime companion, a common house spider. It did not deserve the sour expression, and Botta hoped the arachnid wouldn’t take it personally.

“I know it’s not about me,” he said. “Like I said. I’ve been considering this for a while, and it may take years to accomplish anyway. I don’t see a reason I shouldn’t consider it.”

“There’s no reason,” Botta assured him.

“But I won’t even do that if the consensus is that I shouldn’t,” Yuan went on, his words carrying a solemnity that Botta was not used to seeing from him. “I trust your judgment, Botta. If you don’t think I can do it, then I won’t.”

Botta shut his eyes. He’d already tried explaining that the situation was not that simple; it would be pointless to reiterate the same argument if Yuan had missed it the first time. Though, it was also possible Yuan knew exactly what he meant, and was choosing to be literal anyway: there was no way of knowing which it was.

“It’s not that I don’t think you can do it,” Botta said, opening his eyes again. “It’s that I don’t think you should rush this. Take time to get multiple opinions—”

“That’s what I’m doing—”

“—And to evaluate your own life and goals with more perspective. How are you with children? Do you even like them?”

“I’m frequently told I am one,” Yuan muttered, more to himself than to Botta. Botta graciously ignored it.

“I think you should consider these things for a little longer.”

“Well, if it’ll make you happier,” Yuan said in a dry tone.

“It would,” Botta replied. “It would give me more confidence in your decision.”

Yuan grimaced, his glare still focused on the spider, which had now begun to squirm under the intensity of his gaze. He sat for a while, one arm wrapped around his knees and the other curled beneath his chin as he thought over what Botta had said. This was no indication that the conversation was over, but Botta did have work to finish. He stepped back behind the desk to tackle the next batch of unanswered emails.

One-and-a-half emails later, Yuan climbed out of the chair. “Thank you, Botta,” he said, though the words seemed automatic, distracted. “I appreciate your opinion.”

“I’m glad I could help.”

Yuan waved a hand; whether it was to acknowledge or dismiss Botta’s reply was unclear. He slipped out of the office without any further comment.

Botta turned back to his emails. He’d been set back a few minutes, but nothing significant or unexpected. This was not the first time he’d been called on by Yuan to discuss whims from left field, and he doubted it would be the last.

He resolved not to think anything of it. Asking Yuan to reconsider often did ninety percent of Botta’s work for him when keeping Yuan from making rash decisions. It had not taken long to discover that about him, and surely, Botta thought, any other friends he asked about this would know that too.

The clock was just about to tick past three in the morning when the cellphone buzzed, its speaker emitting high-pitched electronic beeps and buzzes that had been fashionable ten years previous. Long, manicured fingers stretched over to answer the call, setting it automatically to speaker without checking to see who it was. “Good morning, Yuan,” Jade greeted the caller, his tone exasperated, but loving just the same. “Still nocturnal, I see.”

He scanned the last few sentences of the PDF with his lips pressed into a thin line. Something about the connection the authors of this particular study had drawn between the data and the conclusion bothered him, though he couldn’t yet say what.

“No amount of mockery about my insomnia is going to change that you’re awake too, Curtiss,” Yuan snapped back.

“Observant as ever, of course. I’d counter with the part where I’m doing legitimate work, but your definition of work changes too often for me to be sure of it.” He sent the PDF to the printer, hearing the dull whirr in the background as the ancient machinery started up.

A noise that could have been described as a haunting melody came through the speaker, if the person singing the melody was a cat, and also dying. “If anything’s changed it’s your definition of ‘legitimate’. Nothing good happens after one in the morning; I could have told you that.”

“Well, in that case. What atrocities bring you to me at this fine hour?” Jade sat back in his chair and crossed his legs on top of the desk, settling in for whatever long and dubious tale Yuan had concocted this time.

“I need a lawyer.”

“I take it you’ve already hidden the body.”

“I didn’t kill anyone!”

“Now now, there’s no need to react with such vitriol. People die, it happens. The real trick is in avoiding the malpractice suit.”

Yuan’s sigh rumbled over the speaker as the printer spat out Jade’s papers, filling the room with the scent of hot ink on paper. He did love that scent. It relaxed him, reminding him of the brief newsroom internship he’d done in his youth that had convinced him never to go into journalism, ever.

“I’m looking at adoption,” Yuan said.

Working in the medical field, when combined with knowing Yuan Ka-Fai for over ten years, had gone a long way toward ensuring Jade could not be surprised by anything. Even now it was less the dissonance between the request for a lawyer and desire for adoption that startled him, and more the fact that Yuan was giving it any kind of thought in the first place.

Jade took his legs off the desk and sat up, his eyes narrowing a hair’s breadth. “You?” he said. “A father?”

“Why the hell is it easier to believe I’d kill a man than adopt a kid?”

“You have the personality for it,” Jade replied—not his cleverest response, but his mind was still preoccupied with trying to picture Yuan holding a squalling baby and not dropping it on its head.

The shatter of something breaking rattled through from Yuan’s end. “Then you see why I’ll need a fucking lawyer.”

Jade opened a new browser and navigated to his own lawyer’s website. Her rates were high, perhaps too high for Yuan, but with the right coercion she might be talked into a family and friends discount. “Or maybe it indicates that you aren’t cut out for parenting in the first place. I feel that’s a point that should have some consideration.”

“I wasn’t cut out for a lot of shit, but here I am anyway.”

“Are you doing this out of spite? You’re doing this out of spite, aren’t you. Did Saphir say something?”

"Look, Curtiss, I’m not going to argue with you.”

“So that’s a yes.”

“That’s a mind your own damn business and help me.”

“How exactly do you expect me to do both? You know you have a dangerous tendency to ignore arguments to the contrary when you set your mind on something. How much thought have you put into this?”

Yuan’s reply was hasty. “I have enough saved that I could support a kid for a couple of years on that alone, without taking my current income into account. I’ve talked to Botta and he’s willing to let me do half my work from home—”

“Don’t you do that now already?”

“Not the point. Anyway, that’s also assuming no stipends or benefits, and I could get those if I had a good agency and a good lawyer. I—I’ll have to put off my surgery again, but if I do this right… I could be taking care of a child within a year, Jade.”

“Yes,” Jade murmured, firing off a quick email to the lawyer. “That’s typically how it works.”

"Shut up. This is a big deal.”

“Yes, it is. Which is why I ask what brought this on—you have to forgive me if I’m a little skeptical, it’s in my nature.”

"I already ruled out hormones and spite, thanks. Beyond that, I’m not going to talk about my feelings at three in the morning like some kind of distressed teenager.”

“Would you rather talk about them at three in the afternoon?”

"You think that’ll make it easier?”

“I think you need to sleep on this.” Jade ignored the chime that indicated a new text message, and the flurry of them that followed when the first went unanswered. “I know your circadian rhythm leaves something to be desired, but even you have a baseline requirement. Lack of rest handicaps decision-making and functioning capacity. Remember what you said about one in the morning?”

A long, ragged, awful sigh from Yuan, as well as crackling from the receiver that indicated some kind of change in position.

Yuan hated to be interrupted, so Jade did not let him begin. “I don’t care how coherent you think you are,” he said. “I’ll speak with you about this after you’ve had at least six hours of sleep. And eaten something, preferably with some nutritional value.”

“Yes, mother.”

"I prefer ‘daddy’.”

"You’re disgusting.”

“I also have a lawyer.” Jade’s grin would have been called wolfish by some, but even he had his standards. “Good night, Yuan.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The background noise cut off with a soft, synthetic click, leaving a blinking call duration and a warning that Jade had 6 NEW MESSAGES.

It was nearly three-forty when Jade finished quieting the situation.

This is Yuan Ka-Fai:

An only child, brought to a new country before he could speak much of anything. Fascinated by technology first and people never, the prodigy his parents dreamed of was not in the cards for him.

A brilliant scholar cursed with a fierce rebellious streak, it was easier for him to ask forgiveness than permission, and half the time he might not manage that much. Cutting his hair off? Impulsive. Donating his wardrobe? Unapologetic. Changing his name was just too much for his baffled parents: forget changing pronouns. If he hadn’t managed to maintain perfect grades throughout, it was anyone’s guess how they might have taken it.

Those who were close to him marvelled at how he navigated adolescence without a nervous breakdown. Those who were closer knew he’d become proficient at hiding the signs.

He dropped out of a bioengineering program in college in favor of managing himself as a freelance code monkey, drawing on skills he’d learned from childhood. Relatives and professors alike lamented. He was clever, they said. He could have done anything. He could have obtained a doctorate; hell, obtained two.

But Yuan was clever. There were smarter, easier ways to earn money than medical school, and his head for business was quick to develop.

His parents could rest easy about one thing, at least. He never came home pregnant.

Yuan slept intermittently, not waking up for certain until around noon. There was a foul taste in his mouth, hair in his eyes, and two-and-a-half laptops strewn around the bed.

Two-and-a-half because two were proper laptops, of different operating systems, and one that was so ancient it barely functioned and stuck around mostly to keep him humble. This was how his kind had operated in the dark ages, it reminded him. He wasn’t under any obligation to use it, but he could not deny the strange comfort he got from losing half his work to a blue screen before being able to save. Thus, it only counted as half a laptop.

He laid there for a while instead of getting up, staring at the ceiling with bleary eyes and letting the sun change the shadows on the wall as it filtered through the thin curtain.

When will you be ready to get up? he demanded of himself.

Five more minutes, was the reply.

Exactly five rounds of sixty seconds later, he rolled out of bed.

The morning routine: brushing teeth, injecting hormones, finding breakfast, and taking pills if it was that kind of day. ‘Morning’, of course, was relative. The benefits of working mostly from home were that he set his own schedule, and as long as the work was done on time no one questioned how late he stayed up puzzling over it.

As he downed one cup and then a second of coffee, he took a second to glance around the kitchen. The clock—digital, because who in the hell had time to decipher analog?—declared that he had T-minus three hours until Jade Curtiss would be knocking at the door. That was enough time to straighten up the front room, shower, and maybe check a few lines of code before he had to be ready to entertain.

Not that Jade would need entertaining. He did a pretty damn good job of entertaining himself, with his fancy words and prissy anecdotes. If you cared to sift through that extraneous crap, he almost gave good, honest advice.

It was the honesty Yuan counted on.

Yuan had time to shower and straighten up the room before he had to buzz Jade into the building. The code would have to wait.

He met Jade at the front door and took in the sleek suit and shining shoes: they were expensive, though Yuan only knew this because Jade would not wear anything that cost less than a human soul. It had taken Yuan a good few years to notice that behind Jade’s glasses were eyes that glimmered as if the world was a clever joke, and by the time he did, it was nothing that the man’s smirk and the way he gesticulated with his hands hadn’t already given away.

Now the set of Jade’s mouth was more somber, though his greeting was the same as always. “Yuan,” he said. “You’re looking well.”

“I look normal. You’re the one who got dressed up just to give me a lecture on responsibility.”

“I had a conference earlier,” Jade replied. “The world’s not always about you.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Jade stepped inside the apartment, followed by the smallest lady Yuan had ever seen, in the smallest pinstrip pantsuit. The only thing darker than her skin was her hair—black as night—which curled around her chin and bounced when she moved. When she miled at Yuan it was with several perfect impossibly white teeth, a testament to a dental bill that would give him nightmares for weeks on end. Her briefcase was a black crocodile print, and she swung it to and fro as they filed from the hall to Yuan’s front room.

“Yuan,” Jade said, pushing his glasses further up his nose with his middle finger, “meet Anise Tatlin, the greatest lawyer that money can buy.”

“Currently practicing, of course,” said Anise Tatlin as she bobbed a curtsy. There was a glint in her eye that was suited less to a tiny woman and more to an ancient abomination that had slinked across the earth for millennia, emerging only to hunt and terrorize local juries. Her smirk gave Jade’s a run for its money, and as she tossed her briefcase onto the sofa and gave Yuan a once-over, he felt that it would be in his best interest to simply walk off of his fire escape now rather than face whatever hellish denizens she brought with her. “You got soda?”

“Kitchen,” Yuan said. “Down the hall, last door on the right.”

Anise Tatlin winked. “Thanks!” she said, and disappeared into his apartment.

Yuan spun on Jade, nostrils flaring. “You didn’t tell me she was going to be here!” he hissed.

“You wanted a lawyer, didn’t you? I brought a lawyer.” Jade crossed his legs as he relaxed into one of Yuan’s armchairs. “She takes some getting used to,” he went on, “but she could sue Satan himself and get away with it.”

Yuan sank into the sofa opposite Jade, though he remained on the edge of his seat. “I don’t need to sue Satan,” he retorted. “I need an adoption agency to like me.”

Jade waved a hand. “Well, everyone likes Anise, and everyone who doesn’t is in jail. What could possibly go wrong?”

A strangled noise came from the base of Yuan’s throat, and Jade only sat there grinning.

Anise Tatlin reappeared in the room with a can of grape soda in her hand that Yuan hadn’t known he possessed. She tossed it back, smacked her lips, then put one high heel up on the table as if about to make a speech to the repressed and downtrodden of the world. “Alright, boys, who’re we pounding into dust?”

“There will be zero pounding,” Yuan said.

“Speak for yourself,” Jade murmured.

“Damn!” Anise Tatlin lamented. Thwarted, she snapped her fingers. “Drug bust?”

“Every drug in this hellhole is at least mostly legal,” Yuan told her, as he considered obtaining one of the mostly legal drugs to combat an encroaching headache.

Anise Tatlin pouted, scrunching up her face with disdain. “Wow, you’re boring! I must have talked Jade out of countless jail time in our younger years.”

“Jail time that would have been completely unfounded. It was all a misunderstanding!”

“That only counts if you’re actually misunderstood, Curtiss.” Anise Tatlin retorted. To the contrary, Jade was often misunderstood, but in ways that had a nasty habit of increasing his proportionate amount of lawsuits rather than alleviating them.

She knocked back the grape soda with a flair that was out of place for a lawyer—but then, everything about Anise Tatlin was out of place. She was so young and boisterous that she would have been more at home in a jungle gym, a fact that did not inspire confidence. “What are we doing, then?” she cried. “Don’t tell me we drove all the way out here just to chat! Time is money, boys, and both have got limits!”

Yuan rubbed his temples, glaring at Anise Tatlin’s shiny heel with a ferocity that could break it. “Ms. Tatlin—”

“Oh, c’mon! That makes me feel like my mother. Just call me Anise, yeah?”

“Anise,” he began again, the day’s energy slipping through his fingers like sand in an hourglass. “I’m not going to court for anything.”

“Then whaddya need me for?”

“He’s considering adoption,” Jade broke in, folding his hands neatly in his lap. “He may need a lawyer to go between him and the agency. Did you pick an agency, by the way? You must at least have something in mind.”

Anise raised an eyebrow. Her gaze switched from Jade to Yuan and back again as though she was waiting for one of them to say the punchline. When it failed to come, she mouthed yikes to herself, too low to be heard but distinct enough on her lips to be read.

“Okay, huh. That is a surprise.” She sat down on the coffee table and crossed her legs, one on top of the other. “I don’t think I’ve done that kind of thing in years! Wow, that’s a blast from the past!”

“But you can do it, of course,” Jade prompted.

“Duh.” Anise rolled her eyes and tossed her head, her voice indicating her conviction that Jade was a damned idiot. She was the first person Yuan had ever met who could take that attitude, and it only rooted his anxiety deeper within his chest. “I can do anything. I mean, I’m primarily a prosecuting lawyer with some moonlighting in criminal defense, but hey, how much different can this be? If you called me, this guy must need some serious criminal defending.”

“I have never broken the law ever, in my life,” Yuan quickly assured her.

“You already know your lines! This’ll be cake.”

“I knew you were the right woman for the job,” Jade said. She reached over for a high-five, and they exchanged a complex set of maneuvers that they had developed on the same jungle gym Anise called home.

“As confident as I am in your ability to reduce my jail time,” Yuan interrupted, breaking up the handshake party, “I’d appreciate some indication that you can actually manage something outside of a courtroom.”

“Psh,” Anise said as she waggled her fingers. “Chill already! I’ve got this. What you need to do is start getting your affairs in order—shit like squaring away savings accounts, updating your immunizations, ridding yourself of anything incriminating. Get clean, too; we don’t want to get halfway through and then have to stop because they found opium in your piss. Leave the agency to moi.”

Her declamation completed, Anise tossed back another gulp of grape soda. Yuan glanced past her to look at Jade, whose expression, normally inscrutable, was as easily deciphered as ancient Sumerian.

Yuan knew a lot of things, but ancient Sumerian was not one of them.

When Jade caught him looking, the hint of a smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. On anyone else, a smile indicated happiness, pleasantry, and good will. It meant the same things on Jade, of course, but Jade’s good will took its origins from cruel amusement.

“Curtiss,” he said—in a strained voice through gritted teeth, he was half surprised to find, “a word. In the hall.”

Jade stood with a grace available only to the rich and vainglorious. “Of course. If you’ll excuse us briefly, Anise.”

“Chop chop, I’ve got dinner plans at six with some deep pockets.”

Yuan snatched Jade’s wrist as soon as he came within range and dragged him out into the hall, shutting the door behind them. The thin wood wouldn’t do much to afford them privacy, but even the appearance of it was enough for Yuan to let his shoulders relax.

Jade pulled away and dusted off his clothing. “It’s rude to haul away guests, you know, however desperately you may desire their company.”

“Save it. You didn’t tell me you were bringing her.”

“We went over this, Yuan. You asked for a lawyer, and I said we’d talk this afternoon. I was under the impression this was what you wanted.”

Yuan glared over his nose at Jade, who did not seem to be fucking around. Not that Yuan would have been able to tell if he was.

“I didn’t think you’d be able to get one here so damn fast!”

“We were already planning on having lunch today. I just asked her to accommodate an extra hour of my company. Anise and I are good friends; I didn’t think she would mind, and she didn’t.”

“Did you think about whether I’d mind?”

“As I said, for the third time. You called me asking for a lawyer, so I procured a lawyer. If the time was inconvenient, you should have said so.” Jade crossed his arms and tilted his head to one side, his tone indicative of disapproval.

Yuan growled, the noise grating on the back of his throat. He dug his fingers into his hair and pressed them against his scalp. “I’m not ready to start talking to a lawyer. I haven’t thought about everything, or done enough research; I don’t have a plan or know who to talk to—hell, Jade, I don’t even know how much Tatlin’s going to cost.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“You can’t just—”

“It’s not up for debate,” Jade said. He held up a hand, as if to stop Yuan’s words in midair. “Don’t worry about doing all the research; Anise can take care of the details and figure out the rest on her own. She’s very efficient. In fact, you could consider the rest of the business completely out of your hands.”

Yuan could have swallowed his own heart. “You can’t be fucking serious.”

Jade grinned. “Is this the face of a man who would lie to you?”

There were a million things Yuan could have said to that, but as he scrutinized Jade’s face—even with the shit-eating grin—he could not have said he was.

The offer was tempting. Jade paying for Anise’s patronage would have quelled so many of Yuan’s fears, alleviated much of his anxiety, and eliminated many of his late nights.

But how shallow and despicable would he be if he put every decision out of his hands? It would be so convenient to let Jade pay for everything, but at the end of it all Jade had no investment in a potential child’s well-being.   How could Yuan rightfully try to be a parent when he hadn’t done any of the work himself? It was one thing to accept a stipend or a loan. It was another to take himself out of the equation entirely.

“I can’t,” Yuan said.

“You can’t?”

“What, do you think this is shopping or something?” he went on. “Just go to the nearest Kids “R” Us and say well hello, I’d like a little girl with yellow hair, please, but not too tall, and wait for them to get back to me?”

“Kids “R” Us happens to be a real store. Though they don’t sell children, last I checked. I do believe that’s illegal.”

“Yes, that’s illegal!”

“I’d advise against it, then.”

It was a combination of his incredible self-control, respect for the living, and self-preservation instincts that kept Yuan from strangling Jade in front of the lawyer. “The point is,” Yuan said, “I can’t just take myself out of the process. I’m grateful for the offer. I really am. But I’m the one who wants to adopt, so I have to be the one doing it.”

Jade considered this for a moment, then nodded.

“I see,” he said. “Well, then. You have my full support on your endeavor. I’ll talk to Anise about the bill and procuring some legal resources for you to go through.”

“Did you somehow miss everything I just said?”

“Of course not,” Jade replied. His grin ate more shit, if anything, as he shrugged. “If you’d actually accepted the offer, I would have rescinded it. I had to know if you were taking this seriously or not.”

“What the hell makes you think I’m not taking this seriously?”

“Your call was rather sudden, and also at three in the morning. Nothing good happens at three in the morning, and I quote.”

Jade had him there.

“That was fucked up,” Yuan accused. He jabbed a finger at Jade’s chest. “You’re fucked up.”

Jade knocked his finger aside with an unperturbed flick of the wrist. “That didn’t hurt me when my attending said it, or when my thesis advisor said it, or even when my dear sister said it, and I can tell you it certainly doesn’t now. Regardless. You’ve convinced me that you’re serious about this matter, therefore I am going to lend you whatever support you need. It’s up to you whether you take it or not, but you must understand that your chances extend only as far as your bank account, which is a pittance to Miss Tatlin.”

“How the hell do you know how much money I have?” Yuan demanded, offended more by the statement itself than the solemn truth it contained.

“I don’t, but your unfortunate taste in decor is telling.”

“It’s one less thing I’ve had to spend it on.”

“A decent couch is no object, Yuan. My ass hasn’t been this sore since mine and Peony’s two-year anniversary—”

“You spent ten minutes sitting on the thing—”

“My ass is very sensitive—”

Yuan was never more glad to hear Anise’s voice ring out from the living room, in the first incident of what would eventually become the long history of fantastic timing, the sort on which the closest friendships were built. She called yoo-hoo! at a pitch audible only to dogs and to Yuan; it grated at his inner ear, but it did prevent him from hearing the rest of Jade’s sentence. He pushed open the door to the living room, where Anise still posed by the coffee table and waved at him with two fingers. “You boys okay out there?”

“Just fine,” Yuan said through clenched teeth.

Jade poked his head around the doorframe and smiled at Anise. His glasses glinted in such a way that his eyes were obscured, though that wouldn’t stop them from being red as fires of hell itself. “It’s rather rude to interrupt people when they’re snatching a private moment, my dear.”

“It’s ruder to mack on each other when you’ve got a guest. I’m on a schedule, here!   At least tell me whether or not I get to bill.”

Yuan shoved Jade out of the way and strode back into the room. “Listen. Anise,” he said. “I called Jade about this last night. I’m not anywhere fucking near ready to—”

“Hey. Hey!” Anise snapped her fingers several times in his direction like he was a child. “Listen. Dad. There’s no reason not to get started. It’s gonna take a while for the background check, doctors’ notes, and other stuff to get processed. And if you decide halfway through that you’re not up to it anymore, then you can drop the deal, pop me my cash, and I’ll be on my merry way. Sure, you’ll be out a few thousand dollars, but have you seen the statistics on what people spend on their kids over eighteen years?” Anise whistled gravely, taking a moment of silence for the bills that would never again be within reach. “It doesn’t compare.”

“Now, Anise, we don’t need to terrify the poor man,” Jade chastised her.

“I’m already terrified,” Yuan said monotonously. To be fair to Anise and Jade, it was difficult to tell: the traditional petrified quaking was restricted to a preoccupation with twisting the fingers of one hand around each other.

“See? Now it’s all just semantics,” Anise said, and then checked her watch. She gasped. “Look at the time! Guess what it is!”

One of Yuan’s talents, besides being tricked by Jade and unfrightened of lawyers, was always knowing exactly what time it was. “Three-ish,” he suggested.

“Wasting,” Anise corrected him. She stood and picked her briefcase up from the table and tossed it over her shoulder, which was not how you were supposed to carry a briefcase, but once you were a powerful lawyer in the biggest city in the country certain allowances were made. “Bill me later, Curtiss. I’ve got a date to get ready for.”

“Anyone interesting?” Jade enquired, captivated by gossip like a moth by a flame.

“Only one of the most prominent religious figures in the world,” Anise said, winking at Jade. “He’s gotten into some trouble with a… vocal minority.”

“Sounds like good money.”

“Oh, it will be. Buh-bye, boys!”

Anise found her own way out of the apartment, and all that was left of her was the shutting of Yuan’s front door and a lone can of grape soda perched on the coffee table.

Jade crossed his legs and sat back down on the couch.

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Yuan said.

“I didn’t do any such thing. You called me, if you care to remember.”

“I am never going to pay her back,” Yuan realized, sinking into his chair. “I could let my student loans pile up for years and force the next five generations of my family to pay them and they still wouldn’t cost me as fucking much as she will.”

“You may be against the buying and selling of children,” Jade said, “but they do cost money.”

“Shut up.”

“You can’t simply silence the truth, Yuan.”

“No, but I could pull your tongue out and it would be just as good.”

Jade rather liked his tongue, since he used it for much more than just talking, so he wisely chose to shut up.

 But like with most things, in the end, Jade was right. Yuan did not have many options for a firm that would take his case, not to speak of at the discounted price he was able to negotiate with Tatlin. It meant meeting after painful meeting of putting up with Jade’s snide commentary and Anise’s lapses into lawyer-jargon that Yuan was certain were made up just to impress him—which was true, as he learned one night when on a whim he looked up some of the more colorful vocabulary he’d obtained. When pressed, Anise would not admit to this, citing that Yuan had never been to law school. What did law school know about actual lawyering, anyway? Yuan protested. Certainly more than Yuan did, she said. He could not disagree.

When Yuan’s arguments were met with aggressive dismissal, and his demands to see her credentials with subject changes smoother than the leather of her briefcase, he decided not to press. He could not help lying awake with anxiety in regard to how he would fare by the end of the venture, however. It wasn’t a question of whether or not he trusted Anise. He didn’t trust Anise a little bit by a mile. It was whether or not he could trust Jade, who trusted Anise, that gave him a headache.

But he did not have much of a choice. Even if he didn’t trust Anise, he couldn’t deny that she got things done. It did take a while to get paperwork organized, to go over his options, and to begin contacting agencies with applications and getting his credentials in order, but it happened far more quickly than he would have expected—more quickly than should probably have been allowed.

Yuan could not say for sure whether this was a good or bad thing, or even articulate how he felt about it to himself. There was the elation that things were happening, paired with the paralyzing terror that things were happening.

And things would continue to happen.

Yuan was halfway through a shower when his phone rang. It rattled incessantly against the ceramic counter and threatened to drill holes in his head if he did not answer it right now at once immediately. He uttered a harsh swear in the first language that came to mind—Mandarin, in a half-remembered accent—slipped his hand out over the counter, and reached for the device. It slid between his fingers like a bar of soap, dangling precariously over a pool of water that had collected on the floor. As shampoo, still lathered in his hair, began to trickle down his forehead and into his eyes, he finally slapped it back down on the counter and put it on speaker.

“Hello?” Yuan choked. He squeezed his eyes shut against the soap and shut off the water.

Yes, is this a Mr. Yuan Ka-Fai?”

“This is Mr. Yuan Ka-Fai,” said Mr. Yuan Ka-Fai, groping blindly for a towel.

"Hi! This is Martel Yggdrasil! I obtained this number from your lawyer; I’m a case worker for Guardian Angel Adoption Services. I’m calling about the next steps.”

Yuan had to slide across the bathroom floor with utmost caution before he found the towel. He snatched it from its hook, rubbing it across his face with enough ferocity to burn. His heart missed a beat when Ms. Yggdrasil ceased speaking: next steps? What next steps?

The next steps in the adoption process, you absolute imbecile, he snapped at himself, but it did nothing to calm his nerves. His head was still aching from the phone’s obnoxious vibrations, and the pain disrupted whatever fragmented thoughts he could manage. This call was too unexpected. Hadn’t he asked to be contacted via email? He wasn’t ready to take next steps; he was not even ready to take first steps. There were still so many things to discuss with Anise, but of course, if he didn’t speak with the lady now then he would miss his chance for good, and then all of this would be for nothing and he would be left as he had been before, floundering through a sea of information too broad to manage and too expansive to find a clear enough path—

Half-remembered advice from Botta surfaced through the catastrophizing. Count. One to ten, then breathe, then speak.

Yuan made it to five. “The next steps,” he said, almost choking around the words. “The next steps. Of course. The steps that come next.”

“Ah, um, yes, it would be those steps,” said Ms. Yggdrasil, with an airy sound that might have been a chuckle. “Is this a bad time? This must be a bad time. I’m so sorry; I’ll confess, I expected to get your voice mail!"

“At this hour, yeah,” Yuan repeated. He caught a figure in the mirror that looked frazzled; its expression morphed into a glare. “It’s not the best time.”

“That’s fine! I wanted to set up a time to meet so we can get to business anyway; no need to get into the nitty-gritty now. How does Tuesday sound?”

“Tuesday sounds,” Yuan started, and pulled up the calendar on his phone. Aside from work in the morning, Tuesday was free. “Good. The afternoon’s better.”

“Fantastic. Two o’clock?”

“That works.”

“I can come to your residence or we can meet somewhere else, depending on what’s comfortable. You’re welcome, of course, to bring your lawyer along.”

Yuan considered bringing Anise for about half a second. She did not come anywhere close to the parameters of ‘comfortable’. He told Ms. Yggdrasil that his apartment was fine unless she had any reservations about it—she did not—and then what his address was.

“Three-five-oh-seven, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Wonderful! I’ll see you Tuesday. Have a great weekend, Mr. Ka-Fai,” she said.

“You too,” Yuan replied.

“Good-bye!”

There was a soft beep, then silence. The phone displayed the call time and asked if he wanted to add the number to his contacts. He did, though the flashing number would remain burned in his mind for the next few hours.

In the wake of the formidable phone call, Yuan took a few breaths and rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, he caught a glance in the mirror.

He was still covered in soap.

Chapter Text

The apartment was scoured as spotless as the aging linoleum floors would allow. Yuan dusted the tables, swept the halls, wore a handkerchief over his hair at a jaunty angle, and moved the furniture so that it hid the unbecoming stain in the living room corner from overenthusiastic eyes. He was not sure, after so many years of residing here, what had caused the ugly brown splatter, but since it could have been of particular interest to a forensic criminology student he thought it best not to ask.

He put a great deal of effort into making the place as presentable as it could be. On advice from Botta, he even purchased a plant—something with fuzzy leaves that he was assured wouldn’t be too difficult to care for, and that didn’t have an offensive scent—and stuck it on the windowsill. Perched before the ancient glass that let in more drafts than it did light, it went a long way to emphasize how much he needed to redecorate.

Moreover, he discovered that he had more stuff than he’d given himself credit for. The inevitable precursor to cleaning was tidying, and there was neither a place for everything nor was anything in its place. Socks, glasses, coins, water bottles, fidgets, CDs, flash drives, assorted imperishable food items, ancient floppy discs that he hadn’t known he even owned, and countless rubber ducks in various themes jumped out at him from the recesses of under tables and between couch cushions. There were more items that might prove useful in the future than he could justify throwing away, so he dumped all of it into a box for later sorting and shoved it into the closet in the spare room—the room that would, if all this worked out, later belong to a kid.

Yuan did not pause long to note the irony of hiding his shortcomings where they were most likely to incriminate him.

One way or another, the apartment was cleaner than if he’d had his grandmother over to criticize him while he worked. She would have been proud.

Yuan did not invite Anise to the scheduled meeting with Ms. Yggdrasil. He did not even alert Jade to its existence, because if he did he could be certain that halfway through the interview, they might happen to glance at the window, and see the terrible duo crouched on the firescape with an ear to the windowpane eavesdropping on every word.

But in Botta he had every confidence, and Botta had followed through honorably, giving him not only the plant but also a whole list of things to Absolutely Under No Circumstances Tell the Social Worker, and telling him to Please, for the Love of God, Mind Your Manners (© Botta, Year of Our Lord). Yuan’s manners were more than acceptable, he noted with some contempt, but he promised Botta he would be careful anyway to get the man to shut up.

On the appointed Tuesday, he was too wired to do much more than pace obsessively down the hall and through the rooms, wringing his hands as he did so. But as the hours ticked by, the adrenaline settled into an eerie, focused calm that could go one of two ways: 

1. His newfound confidence would ensure that he nailed the interview and all subsequent meetings, thereby letting him achieve his goal in a timely manner with minimal agitation.
2. His body was a good-for-nothing liar and he would fuck up irreparably, and he should’ve taken it easy with the caffeine.

Clearly, it was still anyone’s game.

When there was a soft knock at the door, Yuan opened it with utmost care, as if he hadn’t been waiting beside it and himself.

“Hi!” declared the woman on the other side. Dressed in slacks and a button-down, she looked polite, professional, and sleek with her height. She stuck out a slender brown hand, the skin far darker than her pale hair. “I’m Martel! We spoke on the phone?”

The inflections in her voice were soft; the tone firm, but amiable.

“For as much speaking as I ever do on the phone, yes,” Yuan replied, shaking her hand. The skin was only somewhat less soft than it looked.

He stepped back so she could come in, and shut the door behind her.

“Don’t worry about it, I hate phone calls too.” She smiled. “Show me around?”

He showed her around. The grand tour featured the living room, filled with mismatched furniture obtained from various thrift shops and yard sales over the years; the kitchen, equally helter-skelter and only slightly more up to date; and his study, almost too cramped to admit them and covered with the same rubber ducks he’d discovered earlier. He pointed out the two bedrooms, his and the spare, but she declined to see them, saying that while she was certain the inside of his room was nice enough she wasn’t sure how she would fit it into her report.

What report that would be Yuan hadn’t the first clue. Martel didn’t take any notes, nor did she purse her lips as her eyes perused each room, nor did she make any comments or ask questions. In fact, she did nothing at all but make quiet small talk, smiling and occasionally telling a simple joke that even Yuan could catch. He got her a glass of water (to be polite) which she sipped (also to be polite), and after the standard show of formalities was over, they returned to the living room and sat down to business.

The room seemed brighter for having her in it: the paint less dingy, the furniture less drab, the window less blocked by a poorly-placed ladder that made the fire escape inaccessible from the inside. The drafts disappeared entirely, leaving a comfortable temperature and a faint scent of vanilla.

“I apologize for how short-notice this was,” Martel began. She perched on the edge of the sofa, her hands folded primly. “I try to contact people I think are good candidates before we make them run the paperwork gauntlet. The more confidence they have that there’s an actual person on the other end of the emails, the longer they stay interested, and you will have to send a lot of emails.”

Yuan did not hear anything after good candidate. This he met with surprise. Not only was he a candidate, which he had already been aware of, but a good one? He hadn’t dared hope beyond Thank You For Your Interest Don’t Call Us We’ll Call You and checking an inbox full of spam for the rest of his life.

Martel was evidently used to speechlessness, for she paused only a second to await his response before continuing. She opened her bag—a purse large enough to hold papers, very stylish in its simple design—and pulled out a manila folder. “I don’t see many new new applicants. We had secretaries who are supposed to sort through them and flag for anything interesting, but we recently switched over to an automated system and they’re protesting. They roped the IT guys—who are demanding a salary adjustment—into sabotaging the program.”

“I didn’t know secretaries were so vicious,” Yuan said. This was to be conversational, which was on the list Botta had given him. He was fully aware of how vicious secretaries could be when they so desired, but Botta was careful to consult him before hiring anyone unduly revolting.

“Secretaries might be most vicious species known to man,” Martel assured him, “and I never lie.”

Comments such as this would normally invite skepticism, but Martel spoke with such conviction in her beliefs that not a single person who listened could doubt her. Yuan was no exception, and found himself agreeing wholeheartedly with her assessment.

“Anyway,” Martel went on, when he had finished nodding his head, “I didn’t see your application until someone had the presence of mind to put it with the pile of those who are willing to adopt special needs, which is the one I spend most of my time perusing.” She let the manila folder rest in her lap, fingers gently folded atop it. “It’s not large, so once an application ends up there I see it within a week or so. It takes longer to process everything and longer still to set up an adoption, but I at least get a look at who I’ll have to work with.”

Even if the pile wasn’t so large as the rest, Yuan couldn’t imagine it was by any means small. Nor was he confident that his application was that much more outstanding—he was proud, but not foolish. He wrung his hands unconsciously. The action was not rooted in anxiety, but in the soothing sensation of skin running over skin. “Well, you’ve got fantastic taste in applicants.”

“I do my best.”

“But. Strictly out of curiosity. What is it that put me so close to the top of your pile? Was it the volunteer hours? Please don’t say it was the volunteer hours.”

The volunteer hours, though notable, had been entirely fabricated by Jade and Anise without Yuan’s consent. They listed everything cleaning rivers with gay Boy Scouts to organizing bowling days for destitute hippies recovering from caffeine addiction. It had been everything Yuan and Botta could do to keep them from adding Sunday School at the local Satanist church to the list. They had subsequently added Keeping Anise Tatlin in check to the Skills section of their individual resumes.

The silence was such that if Yuan had owned an analog clock, it would have audibly ticked. But Yuan did not own an analog clock, so in the lull of conversation the only things that could be heard were the popping of beams in the building’s foundation and the faint thud of Punjabi dance music from the apartment below.

Martel pursed her lips and pressed her fingertips together. “It wasn’t the volunteer hours.”

“Thank god,” said Yuan, though he was not religious, and would have more aptly thanked Martel’s good reasoning.

“No, the reason I decided to show up—I mean.” Here she stopped to correct herself, tripping over words in her haste to explain. “I suppose I should tell you. You’re not the only person I’m visiting today.”

“Of course not, that would be stupid, I’m sure I’m not the only candidate—“

“—Right, exactly! Which isn’t to say you’re not important—“

“—I’m obviously important since you showed up, finally—“

“—But even allowing for the parents willing to adopt special needs, only a small percentage of them do.”

These words sounded more important, so Yuan kept silent.

Martel was quick to reiterate. “Not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t have the resources or the ability. Special needs encompasses everything from immunodeficiencies to autism spectrum disorders, which require wildly different skillsets. Not every parent, no matter how well-meaning, is ready to accommodate that.”

Yuan had noticed over the years that people had a terrible habit of not being straightforward. They skipped and danced around topics for the sake of being polite, when it was much faster and more efficient to simply say their piece. He’d grown used to reading between lines for rejections and denials. Working on his own, he had had to.

Martel’s words sounded an awful lot like a rejection.

He interrupted her before she could talk circles around herself, making a fool of them both. “You don’t think I can do it.”

She flushed, the brown of her skin deepening. “I didn’t say that.”

“No, and it would have been easier if you had. I’m beginning to regret giving you the glass of water.”

“I liked the glass of water! I thought the subway map pattern on the glass was nice.” Martel closed her eyes again. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I should’ve been more clear. I see how you would take offense, but that’s not actually what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean, before I take my nice glass back to the kitchen once and for all?”

“I think you’re positioned to offer a child things they might not get with another family.” She held up the manila folder, then opened it and flipped through a couple of application pages. “You disclosed an ADHD and autism spectrum diagnosis; HRT; racial minority status. Many of those things may look like negatives at first glance, but I wanted to come here and assure you that they aren’t. My job is to make sure children get to parents who can offer them the right support, who will love them and cherish them in a way their original parents couldn’t,” she declared passionately. Though she was still looking in his direction, her eyes had a hazy look to them, as if she was speaking to a large crowd that Yuan was only a small part of.

He glanced behind his shoulder, just to reassure himself. There was no one else in the room.

“And, also,” she said. “I liked your personal statement.”

He blinked.

“I thought it was quite creative. It was a good metaphor for personal struggles and successes in the modern age.”

Yuan narrowed his eyes. He could not write a metaphor to save his life; it was one of the notes he’d consistently received in college English, which had lead him to declare that metaphors were for cowards and gotten him kicked out of the class. “I literally wrote about rubber ducks.”

“Which is part of why I was so impressed. Not your usual choice of subject matter.”

“Well, thanks, I guess.”

“The point is,” Martel said, “that I think you’re a good candidate, and I want to make sure you get through this whole process as unscathed as possible. I contacted you earlier than I normally would because… well… your application needs some help.”

Yuan burst into laughter, and on the list of Most Surprising Events in his life, this went far below getting kicked out of English class.

“I’m serious,” she said, with a scowl that reflected her righteous displeasure. “For every positive point I think you have, there’s one that isn’t going to go over so well with my superiors. You’re single, for one thing, and also male, and I didn’t see a whole lot of references listed… or at least, any whose information wasn’t redacted by the government.”

“Ah, yes. Of course. My mistake. I’m sure I can scrounge up at least one friend who’s not a threat to national security.”

“That’s the spirit!”

Yuan beckoned to her. She was confused for a second, but at his insistence leaned closer. He whispered, “Do non-threatening relatives of friends who are threats to national security count?”

Martel gave him a long, solemn look, before shaking her head almost imperceptibly.

“But,” she said, “that’s what I’m here for.”

[ 4:26 PM Yuan ] remember how you said adopting wasn’t a job interview

[ 5:31 PM Botta ] Yes?

[ 5:33 PM Yuan ] you lied.

[ 5:34 PM Yuan ] i need references.

Or, to be more accurate: it was not that Yuan needed references, but rather that he needed friends.

It made too much sense for him to feel perturbed, but he grit his teeth and muttered petulantly to himself anyway. He could count the number of friends he had on one hand. The number of those who would support him in a crisis was fewer still. Botta he trusted to do right by him, but he was the only one. Jade would have to be coached. No one else was close enough to Yuan’s personal life to count. 

[ 4:28 PM Yuan ] this is ridiculous

[ 4:31 PM Jade ] What is it this time?

[ 4:35 PM Yuan ] just got out of a meeting with a social worker. from the agency.

[ 4:38 PM Jade ] Anise didn’t tell me you had a meeting today.

[ 4:46 PM Yuan ] that’s because anise wasn’t INVITED

[ 4:50 PM Jade ] She’ll be ever so upset.

[ 4:52 PM Yuan ] listen, unless she’s ready to drive by my goddamn house on a sparkly bicycle with matching jewelry and BFFs FOREVER!! cards, i have no use for her whatsoever

[ 5:03 PM Jade ] BFF already stands for ‘best friend forever’. The extra forever is redundant.

[ 5:04 PM Yuan ] curtiss i want you to look me in the eyes in the most gay manner possible and tell me if i care

[ 5:05 PM Jade ] :(

[ 5:07 PM Yuan ] yeah that’s what i thought

[ 5:07 PM Yuan ] anyway.

[ 5:09 PM Yuan ] it seems i need a ~strong support system~ in order to be a single parent because a supportive and loving environment cannot be created by my musculature alone

[ 5:13 PM Jade ] That would be why most people do it with partners, yes.

[ 5:15 PM Yuan ] they want references and testimonials.

[ 5:15 PM Jade ] That’s fine.

[ 5:17 PM Yuan ] so she’s going to interview you at some point, and i need you to not make references to your cocaine dealing

[ 5:21 PM Jade ] I’ll refrain as much as I can.

[ 5:24 PM Yuan ] appreciated.

[ 5:25 PM Jade ] Anything for a friend, of course.

[ 5:25 PM Yuan ] yes. now about that,

“Hey,” Peony drawled, in a voice huskier than harvested corn with no kernels, “I am here for this. Any bro of yours is a bro of mine, and Yuan is a total bro.”

Peony’s hands settled across Jade’s neck and shoulders, thumbs slipping beneath his collar to rub between the medial scapula and cervical vertebrae. “That would be lovely of you,” Jade replied, allowing his eyes to close as Peony massaged. The documentation before him was forgotten. “I offered to forge a few identities, but that idea was shot down. I don’t know when he developed scruples, but it’s made life so much more inconvenient.”

“I don’t know, babe. A man can’t start this part of his life by being dishonest; it just sets him up for way too much bad karma.”

“Yuan’s life is positively dripping in bad karma,” Jade observed, fondly reminiscing their past together. His frown grew deeper as he recalled last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and the unfavorable circumstances under which they met.

“Then he’s got a helluva lot to make up for.”

“To say the least.”

Botta downed his fourth cup of coffee as he pondered the Herculean task at hand.

He could try for the sympathy angle. Yuan is really a good man, he could say, a bit scatterbrained and easily flustered, but devoted when you get to know him. He was certain ‘scatterbrained’ and ‘flustered’ weren’t qualities one looked for in a parent, though, and they might harm Yuan’s chances more than help.

He could attempt the brutal honesty method that had been so effective for Yuan in the past, but Botta decided against that with haste. He did not have the force of personality required to pull off the tactic, nor the absence of scruples that would prevent his regretting it later.

It was a true quandary. He believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Yuan deserved this opportunity, but it was not himself who had to be convinced. No, it was a complete stranger who was certain to have more stringent ideals than Botta, and the benefit of not having known Yuan Ka-Fai for the last six or seven years.

Botta poured himself another cup of coffee and wished that he were an author writing about the situation rather than living it, so that he might skip to the next page.

Anise Tatlin, meanwhile, had Yuan’s looming parenthood as far from her mind as she could get it. There were far more interesting things to preoccupy her time, such as clearing a confessed criminal and convicting a detestable, though innocent, man in their place. There was the case of the clown who’d been found dead in a ballpit, and the heiress accused of tossing her aunt into a furnace; and of course Jade was always being sued by one unsatisfied client or another. Her work required a delicate hand and fine maneuvers not seen since the invasion of Liechtenstein some odd years ago, and she did not have time to consider the logistics of getting some guy a kid, particularly if it was not even her own.

Thus, the surprise on her face when she received a notice from the adoption agency manifested most prominently in her lips, which formed a round O and displayed to her reflection in the costly laptop screen every bit of the offense she was experiencing. Her eyebrows narrowed in the center and peaked on the ends, and she muttered a nasty curse to herself that would have made her mother faint.

She slammed a fist on her expensive desk. “They’re not supposed to contact him directly,” she snapped. “What am I, chopped liver?!”

Anise could not have known how very chopped her liver was.

Several weeks passed before Martel could process enough background checks and paperwork to progress to an actual interview stage. She ended up having to schedule them during the winter holidays, and it was a mighty feat to corral Yuan’s friends into the same room on the same day. But Martel prided herself on being able to manage a number of impossible things, and wrangling a number of wandering adults was not even highest on her list.

The crew assembled before her in the library conference room was motley. It was not the worst Martel had ever seen, but it certainly was not the best. A blond surfer whose tan stopped where his sunglasses would have sat, the tiniest woman in heels the brighest pink she’d ever seen, a world-renowned doctor that she had never heard of, and the star of the popular Wolverine franchise who was more shy than she’d anticipated made for so eccentric a crew as had not been seen since The Breakfast Club had released in theaters some time before. But, she surmised, it was not all that surprising that a man with bright cotton-candy-blue hair and rubber ducks for the majority of his Facebook contacts would have assembled such a group.

Martel straightened her hair, which was already perfect, so that it was more perfect than before, and dipped into the endless reserves of patience that she would surely need. “So,” she said, and clicked her pen, “tell me about Yuan.” 

REFERENCE INTERVIEWS, NOV. 6
Interviewer: Martel Yggdrasil

PEONY: I’m a huge fan of Game of Thrones, right? And Yuan—Yuan’s like, he’s like the one guy in season one. The one who died, remember? He was just like, trying to protect his family and everything, man, he didn’t deserve the crap he got. Anyway Yuan’s a total bro. Me and Jade moved into a new condo last year and the WiFi sucked, right? So Yuan came in and hooked everything up right in time for the new episode at like, no charge. It sucked because like, I had to watch the man die, but at least I could do it in HD and surround sound, so that was pretty cool. Now every time I’ve gotta do computer stuff I just ask him. Dude, look at this, I’m tearing up just thinking about how great he is. You should definitely pick him. Unless this is like, for a game show or something—don’t make him do anything too shitty, a’ight [sic]? Bro doesn’t deserve that.

ANISE: Wait, are we recording? Is this on the record? [Yes, it’s—] You didn’t tell me this would be recorded. [It was on the—] Look, whatever, it’s not like falsified information and uninformed consent are grounds for prosecution or anything. Listen. I ran a background check on the guy. Didja know he ran his own start-up for a few years? Something crazy like business consultation or middle-manning for kids just out of computer science. Sold out to a company that’s gone under now, but he’s been sitting pretty ever since, so it must’ve been a good move. I guess you could call ‘im clever or something. I don’t know if I’d go that far. [Well, I—] Hey, Greenie, settle down. [Greenie?] Are you telling me you never get comments about your hair? Wow, I had a lot more faith in people than that. Anyway. I hear he’s not in the market for a girlfriend, but if that’s why you’re so up in arms I wouldn’t make it too big a deal. Just let me handle it. I can be pretty convincing long as there’s money involved. 

JADE: Ah, how do I begin to explain Yuan Ka-Fai? Yuan Ka-Fai is flawless. He has two Fendi purses and a silver Lexus. I hear his hair is insured for ten thousand dollars, and that he does car commercials in Japan. His favorite movie is— [Dr. Curtiss, your own words, please.] Oh, I see. You should have been more specific. [I believe it was in the information packet—] We met over ten years ago on a Friday evening. It was cold outside; dreary. I do believe it may even have been snowing. The bar did not lack for business, however. I and many of my classmates had just come from an especially grueling exam and were looking to forget our troubles. Yuan was there, his hair glowing a multitude of colors in the pulsing lights. I never saw a more enchanting vision—there is something about adversity that brings out the best in him, you see, and the adversity was never greater than it was that night…

BOTTA: Ah—I’m sorry. What was the question?

Miss Yggdrasil’s frown was comparable in intensity only to the feeling of dread one had when trapped between a cliff face and a slowly encroaching boulder. Botta had never personally experienced such a misfortune, but the quiver of the line of her mouth, with corners turned down as her eyes leapt down her page of notes, gave him the same sense of futility. He squeezed his hands together in his lap, pulling his shoulders inward as if to make himself small. It would have worked, had Miss Yggdrasil been a giantess, but as it was Botta was easily twice her size in height and in girth.

She pursed her lips and nodded once, to herself, before looking to Botta. She clicked her pen once again and tucked it behind her ear.

“I think I’ve heard everything I need to hear,” she said.

The next months were marked by an absence of contact from the social worker. Yuan did receive an automated email from the agency instructing him to fill out one form or another every few weeks, just often enough to keep him champing at the bit for news. The forms themselves had no discernible purpose: he was not certain how his undergraduate transcript or his investment in Lithuanian politics were relevant. Martel had not been exaggerating.

It stung to admit to that his best efforts had yet to produce anything. Anise, when pressed, assured him with a growl that she had not heard anything significant. He concluded she was either upset with his failure to invite her to the initial meeting, or she was telling the truth; the possibilities were mutually exclusive. Jade waxed lyrical about false positives and supportive data. Botta affirmed that this would take time, told Yuan not to worry, and offered to buy him something to eat. The tedious nature of email after follow-up email, trying to discover if there was anything more he could do, chafed. He almost wished Martel had not contacted him so soon and given him false hope. No approach was a comfort.

But, Yuan was not seeking comfort. He was seeking a sign: that there was an end to this process, a tangible goal, that these months of cleaning and sitting and form-filling and endless, endless waiting had a purpose.

A sign that was not forthcoming.

 “For the last time, we cannot accelerate the process.”

“But they’re a lovely couple,” Martel protested, knocking over an empty paper cup, a less empty paper cup, and a series of pens in rapid succession as she dug for the file. “I spoke with them last week. The father doesn’t have the greatest history, but he’s steadily employed and his wife checks out with flying colors—” She flipped open their folder, checking through the multitudinous forms to reassure herself.

“But is their paperwork in order?”

“Yes! I’m going through it now. I really think one of my toddlers—”

“We have it here that they’re missing IB-96.”

“That’s a retirement fund sheet! We don’t even need that information.”

"It’s required,” the supervisor boomed from the other end, their voice backed by the echoes characteristic of denizens from hell and poorly-rigged fax machines. Martel grimaced as she held the speaker away from her ear. “Your good will is a virtue, Miss Yggdrasil; perhaps your only virtue, and while your tenacity was admirable at first it has only become grating over the years. This will be said only once. Required paperwork is required, the process takes as long as it takes, and there are NO workarounds or exceptions. Good day, Miss Yggdrasil.”

The echoes cut off.

Martel hung up the phone and let her head thunk to the desk. “Good day to you too,” she muttered, without even a hint of her famous good will.

After allowing a minute to regain her composure, Martel picked up the pens and the cups and mopped up the spilt tea. It had leaked across the desk and stained some of her files, she noted with somber resignation, but about that there was nothing to be done.

She gathered the rest of her things and left her office, which was not much more than a tiny closet in the corner of a building that had only half a floor dedicated to the agency. The rest of it—and she passed by many of these businesses on her way out—was occupied by a basket weaving school, a Taiko drumming coalition who was practicing at this very minute (they had improved significantly since last month), an accounting firm populated by people she was not certain actually possessed degrees, and the headquarters for a political campaign that had been in the works since before she had started working here.

The world outside reflected her mood: drizzly, gray, filled with smog and tiny vehicles in depressing shades of gray and beige. The rain spattered down around her, but Martel did not pull up the hood of her coat; she was confident she wouldn’t get sick, and the thing made it difficult to breathe anyway. The only people she ran into on her way to the subway station were those unfortunate enough to be sent on coffee runs or simply in between jobs; she reassured the ones with coffee that they would find their big break someday, and to the others she gave a few coins each. Martel did not believe in karma, but she was intimately familiar with misfortune and believed that it was important to be friendly to everyone, even if everyone included sucky Taiko drummers.

The center was only a couple of blocks from the subway station. It was in a brick building that had been built two centuries ago, with ivy choking the walls and windows with glass too thick to see through. A wrought-iron gate creaked as she passed through it to the front yard, and when she entered the building, the heavy mahogany door slammed behind her with the finality of a tomb.

She was greeted by screaming children warning her that the floor was lava. The floor was not actually lava—it was scuffed wood that had seen better days, and fewer insect corpses—but imaginative play was an important step in childhood development. She had a responsibility to her degree in developmental psychology to respect this, so she climbed up on the path they’d constructed from various pieces of furniture and made her way to the stairs, saving a three-year-old from certain fiery doom along the way.

Martel took the stairs a couple of steps at a time, peeking in each room along the hall at the top until she reached the playroom at the other end of the building.

She found one of her charges perched on the edge of a bright blue stool, concentrating on his Lego construction with the gravity of life and death. She was careful to make enough noise to announce her arrival, sliding into a red chair opposite of him that was much too small. She propped her head in her fists and her elbows on the table. “Hello, Zelos!”

Her fists pressed into her cheeks, making her words rather muffled.

Zelos glanced at her through his bangs, the action sharp for a boy his age. It lasted less than a second. He then returned to his work. “Yo.”

“You working on anything interesting?”

“Scale model replica of my secret hideout.”

“You have a hideout?”

“In the future, duh!” Zelos stuck out his tongue.

The building was impressive, to someone who knew absolutely nothing about architecture. It resembled a cross between a skyscraper and a fort, if the skyscraper was lopsided on one end and more reminiscent of a demolition pile on the other.

“It’s very nice,” Martel said. “Can I help?”

“I guess, if you wanna find me this piece—”

He described the one he was searching for, and Martel retrieved the basket of building blocks and began a devoted hunt. She had never seen the like of the piece he wanted, but Zelos knew his way around Legos far more than she did by virtue of constant exposure, and if he was convinced they had it, then they probably did.

As she searched, she made pleasant conversation. “How’re things?”

“They’re good.” Zelos did not meet her eyes when he spoke, and the words had a robotic affect to them, the response automatic and almost scripted. It was a ritual response to a ritual question, but part of what made Zelos notable in her memory was his regular defiance of expectations.

Martel was, in a word, skeptical.

“Really?” she asked, skeptically.

“Yeah, duh. Why wouldn’t they be. I’ve got Legos coming out of my ass, what’s not to love?”

To demonstrate, he scooped up a pile of Legos in one gloved hand and let them rain back down into the bucket. Appreciating the jingly clatter they made, he repeated the action, his interest in Martel gone.

“Language please, Zelos,” she chided.

“Sorry,” he recited.

“Well, I just wanted to make sure you felt okay,” she went on. “Since it’s been a little while since I’ve visited and you’re still sitting up here by yourself.”

“I know.”

“Have you tried playing with the other kids at all?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?” Martel affected a nonchalant air in a hasty attempt to keep the excitement she felt out of her voice. Whether due to social trouble or sensory issues, Zelos had not adapted well to every general or foster home she’d placed him in thus far. It wasn’t that Zelos kept to himself; by nature he was an outgoing child, constantly looking for input and feedback from the people in his environment. It was a great misfortune that there were not many people or environments suited to his needs, and that the state of children in the current institution was so transitory that relationships found it troublesome to take root. He was already old enough to recognize himself as a common factor, and Martel worried that he would wrongly assume he was at fault and take steps to prevent a situation that he hadn’t caused in the first place. “How’s it going? You meet anyone you like?”

“I already talked to Lailah about it.”

“Well, I haven’t talked to Miss Lailah in a while, so why don’t you fill me in too?”

Zelos shrugged and muttered something in Spanish. Martel had been trying to pick up pieces of the language in her spare time, but her vocabulary was limited to simple phrases and pendejo, which was one of Zelos’s favorite words. On his more accommodating days, Zelos tried teaching her a few things, but she suspected he did this to laugh at her pronunciation.

She shook her head as she handed him the piece he’d been looking for. As he fitted it into the sculpture, she gently chastised him. “I know it’s a pain,” she said, “but your life might be easier if you made friends.”

“I’ve got tons of friends.”

“But you’re sitting up here by yourself.”

“So’re you.”

Martel reminded herself that she was an adult, and that getting owned by a seven year old did not merit the amount of embarrassment in her that it actually caused.

“Nnnnoooo,” she protested, “I’m sitting here with you.”

Her response was clever—perhaps too clever. Zelos rolled his eyes with the world-weariness only a seven-year-old could master. “That’s cheating.”

“Maybe, but it’s still true.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Martel watched a while as Zelos lined up walls and towers and gated channels, making appropriate oohing and ahing noises when he explained something particularly impressive, such as the plasma cannon death ray that would be placed in the most pathetic turret in order to throw off an enemy’s guard. The minutes ticked by, during which she glanced from her watch to the construction to Zelos and back again, counting down until she had to leave.

The sun was not visible through the windows—in fact, nothing was visible through the windows except a few cobwebs and some duct tape, and maybe the brick wall of the next building over if you got really lucky—but if it had been Martel would have been able to watch it sink behind the city skyline, leaving the institution in more drizzling darkness than it had existed within before. The fluorescent lights lining the rooms and hallways buzzed on, casting the inhabitants in a pale, ghastly light.

Martel’s watch indicated that she’d stayed as long as she could. She tapped Zelos’s shoulder to bid him good-bye.

“I’ll see about getting you to another foster family tomorrow, okay?” she promised.

Zelos was not impressed.

“Sure,” he said. “You do that. Have fun.”

“Brush your teeth,” she went on, “and remember to floss, for heaven’s sake.”

He grinned and lied through his teeth that he would. 

 one month later

• Zelos gave up on Legos and took up Ultimate Frisbee. He knocked out the teeth of three other kids and, upon suspicion that he’d done so on purpose, was moved to a different foster home. His motives were never proven, but he was not sad to go.

• Martel became at odds with the Taiko drummers down the hall, beginning a passive-aggressive nice-off in an attempt to make them so guilty they were obligated to either soundproof their room or leave the country.

• Yuan bought two new rubber ducks and promptly lost them in the abyssal depths of his apartment.

• Botta took up a hobby as a florist.

• Anise got a second date.

• There was no word on the adoption proceedings.

two months after that

• Zelos became the next in a long, proud tradition of asking for a second serving after the first had been completed. Like previous members of the tradition, he did not receive it. Unlike them, however, he could not be locked in a closet all day for his insolence. Score one for Zelos; score five-hundred and thirty-three for the system.

• Martel’s battle with the Taiko drummers failed due to lack of reciprocity. She visited Zelos and celebrated her birthday with a cupcake, single candle, and a faulty Skype call to her brother in India. It was rather pathetic, except that the Taiko drummers, in an unexpected demonstration of decency, gifted her a set of noise-cancelling headphones. She also began emailing select administration offices in the adoption agency—the ones whose desks were shrowded in secrecy and fear—pushing for the acceleration of Yuan’s application approval.

• Ignorant of this, Yuan composed several irritated letters to Anise, Martel, and the adoption firm, and sent none of them. He ranted for a record four hours to Jade, and snapped when Jade made irritating comments in return. The meeting concluded with a few choice swears and a promise to meet at the coffee shop the following week.

• Botta’s flower-arranging hobby began bringing him a little extra cash when acquaintances of his hired him to decorate their wedding.

• There was still no word on the adoption proceedings.

an undetermined yet lengthy amount of time after that

• Jade invited Yuan to his nephews’ birthday party. It was terrible, and he had to wear a stupid hat.

• Martel’s successive string pulling bore no visible results until she received a single email.

• No word on the adoption proceedings.

Yggdrasil, Martel                                                         Jun 12^th (a few hours ago)
to me, Anise, 1 other

Hello Mr. Ka-Fai,

I’m emailing to let you know that the majority of your application has been processed, and that approval is in the works. I’ve attached a copy of the last few concerns and documents in a separate email to you and Miss Tatlin. Thank you for your eternal patience; I know it’s been quite a ride!

Anyway, I’d like to set up a meeting to discuss moving forward. I have a few children on my case load that I think might be a good fit, but I want to go over them in person before setting up an interview.

I hope to hear back from you shortly! 

Have a great weekend,
Martel Yggdrasil 

Yuan Ka-Fai                                                               Jun 12^th (a few minutes ago)
to Martel, Anise

Hello Ms. Yggdrasil,

It’s about time. I can meet any time this week after 2pm except on Saturday. On Saturday it has to be after 3.

Regards,
Yuan

They met on Saturday after three.

Summer made its appearance in the city like an unwelcome, reeking garbage truck, with sights and smells and temperatures unappealing even to the most vile of characters. Yuan kept the curtains low, the air conditioning units running, and invested in as many kinds of ice cream as he could realistically store in the freezer. He debated picking one out to offer Martel when she came, but he suspected a proper Adult would have stocked up on frozen peas and carrots instead. Yuan did not know if they could disqualify him this late in the game, but he had learned from experience that one should never assume too little bad and too much good of bureaucracy, and decided it was safer to be the inhospitable jackass within his comfort zone.

He selected chocolate chunk cookie dough and ate half the small tub before Martel arrived. It was heavenly.

In the one-hundred-and-twenty seconds before Martel arrived, Yuan felt a terrible need to move: to spin, to dance, to bolt, to do something to allieviate the awful combination of nervous energy, sugar, and natural sensitivity that arose in the wake of the frozen dessert’s consumption. The drive had been there before, but as the moments crept closer and then ticked past three it became impossible to ignore. He paced back and forth down the hallway, the longest room in the apartment, running over the talking points he’d developed with Botta about what kinds of children he could realistically care for. Just in case.

Martel knocked on the door at precisely 3:07 PM.

He opened it for her, still shifting his weight from toe to toe.

It had been weeks since he’d seen her last, but the warmer weather was treating her well. He had forgotten how she lit up the room when she entered, her presence strong but soft. She traded the dark colors and heavy fabrics of winter for floral patterns in yellows and greens, and her hair was swept up in a ponytail, making her seem taller than she actually was. Which was very tall. Yuan, in keeping with his crude personality, was accustomed to looking down at people and it took him by surprise each time he lifted his head to find Martel still in view.

“Hello, Mr. Ka-Fai! It’s been a long time.” Martel smiled with lots of teeth and a demeanor that could build thirty churches. “Congratulations on the approval.”

Yuan took a second to realize that when she stuck her hand out, it was because she wanted him to shake it. He did so hastily.

“Thank you,” he said, without much gratitude. “It’s been long enough, they ought to have approved me.”

“I did warn you about that.”

“You were impressively nonspecific about the time frame.”

They retreated to Yuan’s kitchen, which was not quite so clean as it had been for Martel’s first visit, but did contain the subway map glass displayed in a place of honor on the windowsill over the sink. They sat opposite each other. Martel set her briefcase on the table and popped it open.

“Okay,” she said. “You said you were interested in adopting sooner rather than later, right?”

“If at all possible,” Yuan replied, tapping his fingers on the wooden surface. “I need it to happen fast enough that I can complain it was a drunken escapade like everyone else.”

Yuan, having just violated at least five things on the Do Not Joke About Or Even Directly Mention To The Social Workers list that Botta had given him, had a brief moment of panic. A few uncouth comments surely couldn’t be enough to doom him, but he could hardly call himself an expert on this process.

She smiled as she rifled through papers. “Six-to-nine months of drunk paperwork and interviews would be an adventure, wouldn’t it?”

So far so good.

“And easier to believe than all my friends doing it sober,” he agreed.

She snorted.

“Well, I don’t have anyone small enough on my case load for you to surprise your friends with a pregnancy scare. If you wanted a newborn, you’d have to wait a couple of years at least—and that’s assuming you could find a birth mother who would be okay with her child continuing to have a single parent. They’re usually not.” Her voice was edged with some kind of melancholy—sympathy? Regret? Apology? All three?

It didn’t matter. Yuan could barely care for himself; a newborn would be a disastrous addition to the circus he designated as his life. “That’s more than okay,” he assured her. “I wasn’t looking for a newborn, anyway. I hear they cry.”

“Most kids cry,” Martel pointed out. “Adults, too.”

He had already started digging his grave. In years previous and in years since, no one would say Yuan Ka-Fai did anything halfway.

“Yes,” he continued, “but newborns have a specific cry. I’m sure you know the one.”

Martel, the angel that she was, pretended Yuan was not flexible enough to put his foot in his mouth several times over. “I do.”

She retrieved what she was looking for: a few thin manila folders, each labelled in neat print handwriting and color-coded in such a way that Yuan would not have had the patience for. She set them on the table and slid them toward him. “Anyway, I’ve brought some profiles of the children on my case load, and if there’s anyone you want to meet I can set it up in the next couple of weeks.”

Yuan took the folders, rifling through the various names and photographs. Each folder contained a load of paperwork: birth certificates, bloodwork, psych evaluations. They were difficult to sort through, knowing he could care for only one. It might have been easier just to ask Martel to pick for him. He almost wouldn’t mind the luck of the draw, so long as he didn’t have to choose who not to take.

One name did catch his eye.

“Zelos?” he said, raising an eyebrow and looking back at Martel, who shrugged. “Who names a kid ‘Zelos’?”

“We don’t know,” she said. “His parents weren’t around to tell us.”

Martel made many excellent points, and this was one of them.

“Right,” Yuan said, looking away.

“We do know they must have been something,” she went on. “I’ve run it by a few people. We’re pretty sure the name is Greek, but his surname is English, and when I first met him he wouldn’t say anything to me that wasn’t in Spanish.”

“That’s a hell of an identity,” Yuan muttered, looking through his file. If traditional and limiting ethnic phenotypes were to be believed, then Zelos did not look like a single ethnicity suggested by his profile The picture was of a skinny boy with blue eyes narrowed in a scowl that didn’t suit them, with red hair, startling against pale skin, curling just below his ears. Seven years old, birthplace unknown. An evaluation had turned up symptoms of disordered sensory integration, which was not a textbook disorder, but a diagnosis nonetheless. He was undernourished, yet otherwise healthy. Martel explained with amused inflection that he hadn’t wanted his picture taken.

It was situation that resonated with Yuan. Thirty years ago, with a few locations shifted and names changed, it might have been him glaring out from that file.

“After several stilted conversations,” she said, “I think he’s Chilean. Maybe. I’m not sure if even he knows.”

Yuan turned a page, met with a brief summary of immunization records. “Guess I’d better start learning Spanish.”

“He does speak English fluently,” Martel said slowly—then her voice took on a completely different tone. Polite, for Martel was incapable of being rude or hostile, but there was steel on its edge. “No child is easy, but Zelos comes with his own hang-ups. You’ll need to understand what it is you’re getting into before you make your decision,” she warned. Her eyes were a hard gray. “Don’t promise him stability if you can’t give it to him.”

Yuan was almost offended.

“I spend months,” he said, “jumping through your hoops, filing your awful paperwork, talking to doctors and lawyers and DMV employees who aren’t paid nearly enough to deal with me. I turn my house upside down and I make arrangements at work and I drag all of my friends, who don’t necessarily get along, to one place at one time—do you know how much coordination it takes to get five people in a room at the same time?—and I sit down and I accept it when total silence becomes your M.O., and you think I don’t still mean it when I say I want this? Do you think I’ll just hand him back?!”

Correction: Yuan was extremely offended. Though he could not tell from Martel’s expression if she believed him or not, he wanted to ensure she knew it.

Martel, for her part, did not get to where she was without being clever. With her vast, sensitive inner pool of empathy, she understood that Yuan was upset by an insinuation she hadn’t intended. With her stubbornness and human right to free will, she refused to accommodate it.

“That’s not what I meant,” she sharply interrupted, which was as close to anger as she would get. “And I don’t appreciate you putting words in my mouth.”

Yuan was taken aback. His rants, monologues of righteous indignation that he had mastered with frequent practice, were not often interrupted even when they were listened to.

“I am doing my best to help you through this process,” Martel continued. “What I meant was not to make promises you can’t keep. It’s better for you to be consistent and follow through on your words than to think of grand gestures that will never come to pass. These kids have enough disappointment in their lives without you and me adding to it.

“I don’t doubt your motives, Mr. Ka-Fai,” she finished more gently. “I’m just standing on a soapbox, I suppose.”

Yuan exhaled through his nose. He couldn’t rightly fault her for that, though it was irritating to admit it.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll make no promises. When can we schedule this meeting?”

Chapter Text

His heartbeat just managed to drown out the airy rush of blood, itself only background noise to a thin, low-pitched frequency that wove through each sound. Zelos had never been able to decide if the steady onslaught of noise was better or worse than having to listen to Yuri chew barely a foot away. He was leaning toward better, since at least those noises were his fault, but even so.

Yuri jammed his teeth together in one last chomp, then reached in and retrieved the biggest wad of chewed gum in existence. It was a horrifying amalgam of pale pinks, obnoxious lemons, synthetic blues, and greens that insulted nature by deigning to exist. Zelos pulled his fingers out of his ears just in time to hear the monstrosity smack as Yuri pulled it away from his teeth. The noise was moist and sharp and nauseating; Zelos cringed, clenching his teeth together in an effort to forget it.

“Awesome.” Yuri admired his handiwork with the eye of an artist. “I mean, it’s not my best. But it’s pretty good. Whaddya think?”

Zelos opened one eye and came face to face with the sweet-sour-minty smelling thing. He leaned away immediately. “That’s gross! Don’t give it to me!”

“This was your idea!”

“Yeah, but I don’t wanna touch all your mouth germs! I’m the idea guy, remember?”

“You never said that,” Yuri, righteously indignant, pointed out. He was right that Zelos had never said that—but since Zelos had never done anything else in their escapades, he had assumed the implications were obvious. “You just said chew up a bunch of gum. Here’s a bunch of gum. It’s all chewed up. What should I do, stick it in your hair?”

Yuri could have been bluffing, but he still held the offending gumball with three fingers, and also had never been known to bluff. It was precisely for this reputation that Zelos had befriended him, but controlling him was proving to be more difficult than he had anticipated.

“If you stick it in my hair I’ll stick it in your ass,” Zelos threatened.

“It won’t fit in my ass, genius,” Yuri said. Zelos didn’t think that was entirely true—the gumball was small enough to fit in Yuri’s mouth—but he didn’t know how big Yuri’s shits were, and he wasn’t inclined to find out.

Zelos heaved a world-weary sigh. He had learned to do so from watching Martel, who sighed quite a lot, but her technique was unrefined. Zelos had perfected the method over many sighs at Yuri’s incompetency. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

“What’s tsk.”

“It’s what you say when you’re disappointed in someone,” Zelos explained, and sighed again at Yuri’s further stupidity. “Okay, listen. I didn’t tell you to chew up a bunch of gum just because I like watching you chew gum. That would be stupid, because I hate it when you chew gum.”

“Gee, sorry.”

“Shut up.”

Zelos got up on his knees and peered over the back of the couch into the rest of the room. His eyes scanned over the peeling wallpaper and shitty paint job, the stained carpet, the broken radiator, and the upholstery that might have been home to a family of mice who could not afford to be picky, but no one who would pose a threat.

He returned to Yuri’s side, leaning back against the couch, and pulled a large, rough rectangle out of his pocket. It was almost too large to fit. “Okay, look. We’re gonna take the gum, and,” here he grinned, waving the small package in front of Yuri’s face, “stick it inside the old guy’s wallet.”

Yuri was unimpressed.

“You sure that’s his?” He snatched the wallet with one hand and flipped it open, gazing at the contents. “I never saw him get out a wallet.”

“Sure I’m sure. I got it outta his own pocket when he was passed out this morning. Look, that’s his I.D.”

Zelos pointed at the picture of Raven, who grinned at the camera and looked far prouder of his shitty purple bathrobe than he had any right to be. Yuri wasn’t too great at reading and couldn’t verify it for himself, but he had to admit that no one rocked eighties second-rate spa house couture like the old man.

Yuri handed the wallet back to Zelos. “Well, he doesn’t ever use it. He’s not gonna notice ‘til it’s not funny anymore.”

“He will when we tell him about the fifty bucks we found lying on the ground,” Zelos said.

They did not, in fact, have fifty bucks.

“We don’t have fifty bucks,” Yuri said.

“… Right,” Zelos admitted, and began thinking of alternate ideas. He might be able to borrow money from Martel, but she wasn’t supposed to come again for another couple weeks. Lailah would be there tomorrow, but there was no guarantee she had that kind of cash to spare, even for as great a joke as this. The sacrifices adults weren’t willing to make were truly disappointing.

Yuri jammed the gum ball onto the wall and took the wallet back from Zelos, flipping it open again.

“Hey,” he said. “Think a twenty would work?”

Yuri pulled a twenty out of the wallet, showing it off to Zelos with a sly grin.

Zelos brightened immediately. “Sure, a twenty’ll be good—”

“Good for what?”

Both boys screamed. The voice came from immediately behind Zelos, so he dove into Yuri’s arms without thinking about it.

Martel’s head appeared at their level, poking around the corner of the couch. She was smiling, enjoying the joke inherent in startling a couple of boys out of their skin so much that it confirmed she would have lent them fifty bucks to satisfy their venture.

“Nothing,” Yuri said. He was hiding both the wallet and the twenty behind his back.

“Everything,” Zelos said at the same time, making sure to sit in front of Yuri in such a way that Martel could not see him do so.

Martel blinked in confusion, both at their muddled response and at the sight of a terrifying gum ball horror from the dark abyss stuck to the wall not far from her head. “Has that always been there?”

“Yes,” both boys said at the same time.

“Aha.”

She clearly did not believe it, but Martel, being the gullible goody-two-shoes that she was, did not question it further. “Alright, then. Zelos, I wanted to talk to you for a bit. Is that okay?”

“We’re kinda in the middle of something.”

“Oh, it’ll only take a bit! You can get right back to… this, afterward.” She smiled to reassure him, which only made her vagueness more suspect.

Zelos glanced at Yuri for advice. He shook his head.

“It’s good news, I promise,” Martel said. She waved a few fingers. “Hi, Yuri.”

“’Sup,” said Yuri.

The gumball sagged, beginning to lose its stick.

“Fine,” Zelos said. “What is it?”

Martel was not able to stop smiling, and her enthusiasm only increased tenfold when she gave him the news. “You’ve been matched.”

Matched was a word that was said in many ways. For some of the other kids it was whispered, for others it was laced with spite; still more spoke it like a dream, as reverent as if it held the solution to all of their troubles. Matched meant that someone had decided they were worth something, and that they wouldn’t have to deal with hand-me-downs and ignorance and could have everything they wanted as part of a family who wanted them. Zelos had never given it more than a thought in passing. Being matched wasn’t all that special to him. A lot of the babies got matched, and sometimes the little kids, but once you got to about Zelos’s age people stopped talking about matching so much and started talking about foster care. Yuri had been in and out of even more foster homes than Zelos, and they agreed it was worse than the institution.

“You gotta have siblings,” he’d said with distaste, his nose scrunched up in a fantastic grimace.

“And they always hate you,” Zelos chimed in. “And the parents get really upset when you don’t automatically know all the rules.”

“Especially when the rules are stupid,” Yuri agreed. “Half the time you don’t even stay more than a week, so there isn’t any point in trying. Just stay here.”

Zelos had had his chance at having his own family and ruined it, which was still more than Yuri could say. Matching didn’t happen often to kids like them. When it did, it hardly stuck. Zelos couldn’t imagine what kind of family might want to meet him, a certified family ruiner, but it couldn’t be the kind that he’d want to stay around.

If there was part of himself that couldn’t help being hopeful, he did his best at crushing it down. Zelos wasn’t stupid—he was already seven years old. His chances were slim, and no matter how nice Martel was, she couldn’t do the impossible. 

 Yuan didn’t know what to wear to the interview, so he asked Jade for advice. 

[ 10:32 AM Jade ] Your bright green button-down with the cerulean vest, whatever dress pants you haven’t yet ruined, shoes polished bright as a switchblade in the moonlight, and I’ll lend you my pink feather boa to tie the ensemble together.

[ 10:34 AM Jade ] You’ll look fabulous.

This would have been an egregious mistake, had Yuan planned to follow the advice. But his lot in life had made him thankfully more clever than this. Jade might have given him deliberately shitty advice, but he’d also done a fantastic job of telling him what not to wear. With an only somewhat heavy heart he put both the vest and the button-down back into his closet.

Despite his best efforts, the rest of his wardrobe was made up mainly by worn-out jeans and novelty t-shirts, few of which were appropriate for being surrounded by children. He put on the most acceptable jeans and spent far longer on the t-shirt, finally settling on I ♥ MULCH plastered across green fabric and the logo of some hippie group whose rally he had stumbled into accidentally when searching for the library. It was perfect. It would establish him as well-off and involved enough to be concerned about things like The Environment, but not so stuffy that he could not casually express his love of dirt.

(Yuan did not have a love of dirt. He did not even remotely appreciate dirt. But dirt seemed like one of those things you had to care about if you wanted to express how up-to-date you were.)

The appointment was at eleven. He showed up late, due to a combination of traffic, wrong turns, failing to leave on time, contradictory street signs, a sudden inability to read maps, pervasive discomfort caused by his binder, and a strange situation where the obnoxiously scorching sunlight disappeared in favor of clouds and thick humidity as soon as he turned onto the street of his destination, which was disorienting to say the least—particularly because it flipped right back again when he turned around.

The building he was headed for was a large turn-of-the-century brick affair with bars on the windows and a completely destitute yard, compared to the lush greenery of the lots surrounding it. Smokestacks rose from just behind it and pumped gray clouds across the vicinity like an especially obnoxious fog machine, and when he went up to the door, the knockers were shaped suspiciously like a long deceased business partner.

Martel threw the door open before he had the chance to touch them.

“You’re a member of Tree Huggers Anonymous?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

Yuan blinked.

“It’s supposed to be anonymous,” he said.

Despite his lateness, she ushered him inside the building. She did not give him a chance to apologize, instead leading him into a side room that had the faintest aroma of damp feet. The wallpaper was a series of brown, red, and orange circles situated inside each other, faded and stained from years of use. It seemed to swirl in patterns that gave Yuan a headache, but the alternative to staring at the wallpaper was staring at the sofa, which might have been new when Queen Victoria had purchased it. Neither was particularly appealing or kind to the senses.

“Okay, wait here!” Martel commanded after steering him into the room. She disappeared again almost immediately. “Sit, sit! I’ll go get Zelos.”

Yuan sat for exactly as long as it took the sofa to threaten to swallow him whole, then leapt up, shifting into a sway back-and-forth. Fine. He hadn’t really wanted to sit, anyway.

Seconds later the door creaked open again, bringing a shriek of children, Martel, and Zelos with it.

Zelos simultaneously looked exactly like his picture, and nothing like it whatsoever. His clothing did not fit, hanging loose from bony limbs that crossed over his chest, and he’d been perfectly happy that morning not to brush his hair. (Yuan envied this lack of conviction.) Despite his slim stature the kid was tall, about up to Yuan’s chest. A lollipop stick protruded from his lips, and he had the nose of someone whose family made their fortune sneering at others. Zelos didn’t sneer now, but the supreme disinterest in his affect was not encouraging.

Yuan was not good at reading the atmosphere. Often he could not tell whether people were tense or hostile toward him, and experience had made him err on the side of defensive. But even he could tell that Zelos was not going to be easy to work with, and that Martel’s cheery demeanor was so far out of place it might as well have been the goth in the nuclear family photo.

“Zelos,” Martel said with a huge, excited smile, embarrassing them all with her inability to contain herself. “This is Yuan! He’s interested in adopting you.”

Zelos shifted the lollipop from one side of his mouth to the other as he gave this news careful consideration. He squirmed. Yuan, in a display of likeminded solidarity, squirmed right back. Zelos stared him in the eye, his lip defiant and demeanor suspicious. Instinctively Yuan looked away, his gaze slipping to where his thumb tapped against his other hand with a rapidity that would defy the same bullet that assassinated Archduke Ferdinand. Finally, Zelos asked, “Why’s your hair blue?”

Caught off guard, Yuan retorted, “Why’s yours red?”

“I was born with it, dumbass.”

“So was I.”

The squirming shifted into the sway he’d been in when he arrived. Zelos joined him in the regularity of the movement, though he preferred bouncing his weight from his heels to his toes. Yuan vaguely recollected that mimicry of movement had something to do with body language and nonverbal communication amongst the less autistic population, but he found Zelos’s behavior encouraging anyway—perhaps even a little endearing, if he wanted to be sappy.

Martel’s voice took on a stern tone. “Zelos, what have I said about words like that?”

“They’re bad.”

“Yes, they are. And Yuan is company, so you should be on your best behavior.”

Zelos gently bumped her stomach with his elbow. “I thought you said he wanted to be family. Family’s supposed to like you for who you are, yeah?”

“He has a point,” Yuan chimed in. “I don’t care if he curses. He probably hears worse at school anyway.”

This appeared to be the wrong thing to say. Martel’s face darkened suddenly, in the way that indicated she was shifting from her perfect angelic demeanor into one more befitting a dark ruler of the underworld. But in a demonstration of self-control that went beyond anything Yuan had ever experienced, she did not say what she was thinking. “Alright then. I guess I’ll leave you two alone. Call me if you need anything, Zelos; I’ll be just down the hall.”

This last bit she said as she looked straight at Yuan. It was courteous of her to let them know exactly where she’d be, so why did it give him such a bad feeling?

“We’ll be sure to let you know,” Yuan assured her.

Martel looked at him, then at Zelos, then back to him, narrowed her eyes, and then left the room, the screams of children once again briefly filling the air. 

When the room was silent again, Zelos immediately filled it. “You weren’t born with blue hair,” he said with a scoff. “No one has blue hair. Your eyebrows aren’t blue anyway.”

Satisfied with his Sherlockian deduction, Zelos grinned around the lollipop like he’d just uncovered a mob plot.

Yuan narrowed his eyes. “Aren’t you clever.”

Zelos shrugged.

“You do well in school?”

The lollipop made a wet noise as Zelos pulled it from his mouth with fingers covered in dingy green gloves, the knitted sort that were sold on discount just after winter holidays. “I work hard and try my best to be the greatest student I can be. There are no bad grades, only bad homework habits. The teacher is there to help me and if I have any problems it’s okay to ask for help.”

“Aha.” Yuan wove his fingers together. “Martel tell you to say that?”

In lieue of an answer, Zelos gave the lollipop a twirl.

“She’s a devious one.”

“What’s devious?”

“It’s like,” Yuan began, and scowled when the definition did not immediately reveal itself in his head. He held the image of it. The feeling of the word was definitely there. The words, however, were inaccessible. “It’s like sneaky,” he eventually settled.

Zelos nodded with the solemnity of a sage, and stuck the lollipop back between his teeth.

"So how’s school really?”

Zelos scrunched up his face. “Why are you guys always obssessed with school?” When Yuan didn’t answer immediately, he kept talking. “That’s always what you people ask. How’s school. How’s grades. How’s friends. Blah blah blah.” He pulled out the lollipop again, but only long enough to stick out his tongue in disgust.

Botta and Martel had helped Yuan make a list of prepared statements and questions a little while ago. Botta had told him to be careful not to use too much jargon, but also not to talk down to the kid. Martel had told him to be himself. It was going to be almost impossible to follow both pieces of advice, but in the end, he decided Martel was the more reliable and experienced one in this situation. If Yuan was going to be himself, that meant not policing his reactions so much. Which meant that he did not think about what he said next.

“I don’t know what else to ask.”

Zelos’s eyebrows went up. He seemed a little surprised by this. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. I don’t like small talk, I’m not good at it. The most I ever bothered to do in college was ask about people’s majors and then when I got a job I asked what they majored in,” Yuan confessed.

“That’s a dumb excuse,” Zelos said.

“Yeah, it is. I don’t get invited to a lot of office parties. But I made it this far.”

It was easier than he’d anticipated to talk to Zelos. There was something about his nonchalance that made Yuan more comfortable with his brusqueness, probably that the kid was so young. Young kids didn’t think of things the same way as adults; they didn’t read so deeply into what was and wasn’t said, nor did they put so much weight on unimportant details.

“I don’t mind small talk, I think,” Zelos said. “I just don’t want people to keep asking the same questions over and over again.”

“That’s what small talk is.”

“So stop doing it. Ask something that’s not boring.”

Yuan reminded himself that he was above being irritated with a seven-year-old after ten minutes of knowing him. “I told you, I can’t think of anything.”

“Okay, then I’ll ask the questions.” Zelos plopped down into the nearest chair and stretched his arms out, then folded them behind his head. His shirt, slightly too small, rode up and showed the pale skin of his belly. “Have you gone on any adventures?”

Yuan gave the question some consideration. He’d done plenty of shit in his life, including a failed trip to Belgium, moving all the way from China when he was younger than Zelos, misadventures in convincing a doctor to give him testosterone, and finally telling his parents exactly what he thought of them. He wasn’t sure if any of it could quite count as adventurous. “I got lost on the subway trying to get here this morning.”

“Didn’t you have a map?”

“I hate maps.”

“You hate a lot of stuff,” Zelos said suspiciously.

“You have a lot of opinions,” Yuan retorted. Zelos only grinned.

The hour passed in much the way the first five minutes had, without much accomplished by either party in the way of finding out the basic information—such as grades, birthdays, and zodiac signs—that small talk was useful for. They did debate the merits of Chinese food against Chilean food, how often Yuan hit his head when walking through doors, whether or not Zelos was really that brilliant a runner, and commiserated about their mutual loathing of dirt. All in all, Yuan considered it a successful outing worthy of the scrapbook that he hadn’t made, but might have considered making at one point in his life.

Martel entered when the hour was up, saying that Zelos really needed to get started on his homework, which was met with about as much enthusiasm as Yuan held for maps and crowded subway lines. He sympathized deeply. His sympathy, though, was misplaced, because as soon as Zelos was sent down the hall Martel returned to corner him like a bull corners a particularly unfortunate matador.

Her smile was almost as eager as her questions. “So? How’d it go?”

Yuan couldn’t tell if she was looking for something else. Jade and Anise were easy; they were always looking for something else, but Martel went back and forth between sincere and underhanded in a heartbeat. “I think it was good.”

She indicated which way down the hall the front door was, and accompanied him to it. “I know he’s difficult to engage at first, but he really is thrilled that you want to adopt him. So am I, but,” she paused here to chuckle, “of course I am. It’s much more important that he likes you, and I think he does.”

"He talked to me easily enough.”

“He’s a social boy. He likes to talk, if you let him.”

Yuan went back over all of his and Zelos’s conversation up to this point. Zelos was snarky, clever, and had the kind of attitude that made good liars. If Zelos liked him, how could they tell? He probably behaved a similar way toward everybody.

Suddenly, Yuan was nervous.

It was ridiculous, of course. He didn’t have any right to be nervous now, not this late in the game. He was effectively stuck here, and it was an iredeemable bastard who would go back on his word simply because he’d gotten cold feet. Yuan was nervous? Bully for him. So was every other new parent in the world

“Are you okay?”

He glanced up at Martel for a second came into direct contact with her pale eyes, clear and sparkling like clear water in the center of her umber skin. He couldn’t tell what emotion was expressed in them, but her voice held concern and understanding.

Soon enough, he looked away.

“I’m fine,” he said, and meant it. He would be, anyway. There would be a necessary adjustment period, and during it things would not seem fine, but Yuan’s life had not seemed fine on-and-off for over thirty years and if he was certain of anything, it was that he could handle a bit of uncertainty.

Martel did not looked convinced, but she left well enough alone.

“How soon can I bring him home?” Yuan asked.

She picked up on the change in topic with impressive speed and continued walking him to the door. “Just as soon as I receive the court order. I’d be happy to pack his things and send him today, but I don’t always get what I’d like.”

“That’s ridiculous. You only want the best.”

She sighed and smiled a somber smile. “I appreciate that you think that.”

“Don’t talk that way. Martel—”

Martel stopped to look at him, and Yuan cursed internally. He was so much better at talking when he could move, or at the very least curl up so that his head was lower than his feet. Evidently, she did not experience conversation the same way.

He recovered himself from the pause and went on. “Miss Yggdrasil. You’re the most competent social worker I’ve ever met.”

“You’ve met other social workers?”

“… No,” he admitted. “But given the general quality of social outreach or government operations, I would not be surprised if every social worker I meet in the wake of our acquaintanceship paled in comparison. You work hard and you uphold your principles, and you genuinely care about these children to the point that you’ll threaten your employer.”

She laughed nervously and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “I am sorry about that, I really didn’t mean to make you think—”

“No. I respect it about you, and if I’m being honest, it makes me trust you and your judgment much more than if you’d tried to kiss my ass. You drive a hard bargain, Miss Yggdrasil. I’m going to regret your absence in my life, even despite our tenuous email relationship.”

Her cheeks darkened, and what had been a sad smile and a nervous laugh suddenly didn’t seem quite as sad. “Martel.”

“Yes, that’s your name.”

“You can call me by it,” she said. “It’s friendlier.”

Superficially he knew that this was the transition of a relationship. Moving from last-name basis to first-name basis, regardless of how friendly the culture was, often indicated a level of comfort and friendship that would not have been implicated using a professional name. However, because of how friendly the local culture was, he also knew—superficially—that being on first-name terms with someone wasn’t necessarily indicative of closeness, and it would be some time before he was allowed to wear his burn this shit earth t-shirt in front of her.

Internally, all Yuan felt was a warm glow.

“It’s prettier, too,” he told her. “I prefer it.”

“Thank you, I do too.”

He had to make some kind of offer in return. Reciprocation was key here, in this moment. “You can call me Yuan.”

"Yuan,” she repeated, and nodded. “Got it. Easy.”

“To remember, not to spell.”

“I think I managed pretty well on our emails.”

He did have to acknowledge that she’d copied exactly what he’d written his name down as, capitals and all, without once questioning his handwriting—a feat in and of itself that not even Botta had managed. “It can’t ever be spelled correctly in this script because it’s impossible to truly romanize Mandarin characters, but you did your best.”

“I could say the same for Hindi,” Martel said, but she thanked him again and was still smiling, and they continued down the hall.

“It’s too bad we didn’t have this exchange sooner,” Yuan lamented, only part tongue-in-cheek. “You could have written me a reference.”

Martel tossed back her head and laughed. Yuan had never been partial to simile, for it was silly and inaccurate and never adequately conveyed the exact nature of what it described. But now he understood what literature meant when it described laughter as like bells and angels, because Martel’s laugh could quite likely have saved the world.

She wiped one of her eyes with two long fingers. “I don’t know. I don’t think I would have accepted a reference if I’d written it. I drive a hard bargain, remember?”

“Surely you would have made an exception for me.”

“I’ve already made so many exceptions for you, Yuan. One more would be a miracle.”

She opened the door for him, out into the dark and cloudy street laced with foggy tendrils, but if he turned his head and looked down to the corner he could see the sun peeking out and brushing the street below.

“I think I’d bet on that,” he said.

Zelos opened the bedroom door and was immediately greeted by Yuri Lowell, who was lying on his back across the nearest mattress and glaring at Zelos upside-down, his glossy hair reaching almost to the floor. Zelos had always admired that hair, and hated the way his own tickled at the tips of his ears and chin, but he hadn’t been allowed to grow it out like Yuri had.

“Who was the asshole?” Yuri crossed his arms and managed to look menacing even as all the blood running to his brain turned his face red.

“You’re gonna die if you do that too long.” Zelos kicked the door shut and climbed on the bed to join him. Raven and Martel both had told them that lying upside down was the fastest way to a brain injury caused by fluid pressure, but Zelos didn’t think that anything so dangerous would also be so relaxing, and decided his own experience was more important. This, of course, was naïve of him, but he was also seven, and seven-year-olds knew everything. (Eight-year-olds knew slightly more, but they were also more stupid for it. If you were seven, that made sense.)

“Not if you die first.”

"You’ve been laying there longer than me, idiot.”

“Whatever.” Yuri’s hair disappeared from Zelos’s peripheral vision as he sat up, the mattress creaking and depressing as weight shifted. “I asked you a question. Who showed?”

Zelos’s lollipop had long since disappeared, and he’d been left with the shoddy aftermath of papery fibers that had once dared call themselves a stick. He chewed on it absently, pulling loose fibers out with his fingers. “I dunno. Some asshole. I think his name was Juan.”

“Juan?”

“I could be wrong.”

Yuri pondered this gravely. It was the only way he knew how to ponder. “That sounds like an asshole name,” he eventually concluded.  They weren’t allowed to say asshole, so they said it every opportunity they got.

“I told you.”

Yuri flopped onto his stomach and poked Zelos’s ankle. “Is he really gonna adopt you?”

That was the one thing Zelos hadn’t stopped to consider.

Juan, if that was even his real name, had been the weirdest adult Zelos had ever met. He dyed his hair, wore stupid t-shirts, bounced around and always looked at you with narrowed eyes like he was trying to figure out if you were smarter than him or not. He’d told some funny stories, and he was definitely more interesting than any foster dad Zelos had ever met—but there was no denying that all of those things made him strange. Interesting. An asshole.

Zelos couldn’t get a read on him. Normally he was pretty good at figuring out what adults wanted to see and hear—there was a reason people tended to like him before they liked Yuri. Even Martel, who was harder to get at than most grown-ups, hadn’t been able to resist his charms for long. But Juan was a mystery. An enigma. A series of melodic notes on a YouTube video that communicated mystery and seriously annoyed Raven when you played them as an answer to his question.

An asshole who was trying to adopt Zelos.

Who wanted to adopt Zelos, if Martel was to be believed.

Zelos gnawed off a bite-sized portion of the lollipop stick and spat it out as hard as he could. It didn’t quite hit the door. “He’s trying to.”

Yuri whistled. He was the youngest kid who knew how, which was pretty impressive. Zelos had been after him to teach him for a while, but he couldn’t make his lips form the right way. Yuri said this was because Zelos was seven, and not nine. Zelos thought that was bull.

“Are you gonna go with him?”

“I dunno. I think I have to.”

“You should sneak out,” Yuri suggested. “The lock on the kitchen door’s pretty easy, if you get the alarm off. I’ve been breaking in and out for months.”

“I mean, I guess I could,” Zelos said, “but I dunno if I want to live out on the streets my whole life.”

“It doesn’t have to be your whole life. I come back sometimes.”

“Yeah, and you get back in foster care when you do.”

"And then I sneak out of there,” Yuri pointed out, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “See? It works.”

"Yeah, yeah,” Zelos said. Another chunk came off, and this time it was most of what the stick had left. The rest of it frayed at the end and became too mushy to adequately chew on, so Zelos picked it out and dropped it underneath the bed.

Truth be told, he was as uncertain about wanting to run away as he was about wanting to be adopted. In the past, foster families had always proved too busy or irritable or just plain stupid to be worth settling for, even when they did actually care about you. Zelos couldn’t imagine adoption would be any different, except that once you were adopted they couldn’t give you back—or could they? No one had ever come back from adoption to tell, but then, no one was ever adopted except kids who were too little to talk. Maybe he’d be the first.

And how messed up would that be? It was one thing to get kicked out of a foster family. They kicked out everyone, even the perfectly good kids who just moved weirdly or were bad at math. It would be a completely different thing to get kicked out of a place you weren’t able to get kicked out of, that no one had gotten kicked out of before. If anyone could do it, it was probably Zelos.

But at the same time….

At the same time, it was nice to know there was someone out there who might actually want him.

Even if it was only because they didn’t know him.

Caught without a lollipop or lollipop stick to chew on, Zelos pulled off one of his gloves and stuck his thumb in his mouth. This would need a lot more thinking.

[ 1:15 PM Yuan ] just had the first meeting with the kid and martel. he sure is something. i think this adoption is actually going to go through, as bizarre as it is to realize

[ 3:37 PM Jade ] Pink, blue, or green? Or something else?

[ 3:41 PM Yuan ] what

[ 3:42 PM Jade ] I’m throwing you a baby shower. Pick a color.

[ 3:50 PM Yuan ] assigning colors to genders is even more asinine than i’d given you credit for

[ 3:56 PM Jade ] That’s why I’m allowing you free range of the color wheel. I thought you might find it easier to select something if you had more limited options first.

[ 4:01 PM Yuan ] you realize the kid is 7 right. you can’t throw me a baby shower for a 7 year old

[ 4:03 PM Jade ] I could if you weren’t so spiteful and filled with loathing.

[ 4:04 PM Yuan ] it’s part of my charming personality

[ 4:24 PM Yuan ] WHY DID YOU DRAG BOTTA INTO THIS

[ 4:27 PM Jade ] I wouldn’t have had to if you’d just made a group chat.

[ 4:30 PM Yuan ] are you two talking shit about me behind my back

[ 4:44 PM Jade ]  ¯\_( ツ )_/¯

[ 1:15 PM Yuan ] just had the first meeting with the kid and martel. he sure is something. i think this adoption is actually going to go through, as bizarre as it is to realize

[ 3:43 PM Botta ] Baby’s breath or daisies?

[ 3:41 PM Yuan ] what

[ 3:45 PM Botta ] I’m doing flowers for the baby shower Jade is throwing

[ 3:51 PM Yuan ] fucking hell not you too

[ 3:55 PM Botta ] Although since the boy is seven I imagine baby’s breath would be rather inappropriate. But so would a baby shower.

[ 3:57 PM Yuan ] i literally don’t want to talk about a baby shower in two different conversations

[ 4:00 PM Botta ] A group chat would have avoided that

[ 4:01 PM Yuan ] you cannot understand how much i hate group chats

[ 4:20 PM Botta ] Jade says you’re being spiteful and filled with loathing. What did you do?

[ 4:22 PM Yuan ] scratch that i hate everything but especially you

[ 4:25 PM Botta ] He texted me first

[ 5:03 PM Anise ] WHY WASN’T I INVITED TO THE GROUP CHAT XPPPPPPPP

[ 5:06 PM Yuan ] how the hell did you get this number

Chapter Text

Thankfully, Jade did not actually throw Yuan a baby shower. This didn’t stop him from receiving several bouquets from Botta congratulating him on his accomplishment, as well as Yuan’s first parenting book—Children Are Not Rubber Ducks: Transitioning from C++ to Childcare, because Botta thought he was funny—and a bag of assorted candy. This last thing, Yuan noted as he stuffed the book and the flowers into the hall closet, would probably be the only useful item of the lot.

He told himself this five minutes later when he went and retrieved the book from the closet. He ought to at least put it on the shelf, he thought. Botta would probably ask about it, after all. The chances that it would hold any good information were slim. There was no reason it would be of any use to him, and it would be ridiculous to set it out in case he needed a reference, so he did not do that. Stop asking.

Yuan spent the next few days double-checking all of the childproofing he’d done over the course of the year. He made sure cabinets were locked, sharp objects stowed, that prescription drugs and alcohol placed either on the top shelf or hidden where no child would ever dare to look. He’d gone back and forth on whether or not to purchase those bumpers rendered made hard objects and angles unable to harm a baby’s head, 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed, but at the time he’d decided it might be going a little far. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

No, damnit. Zelos was seven. If there was a seven-year-old who didn’t have the sense to keep from knocking into the table, he’d learn it soon enough.

It was the knock at the door that made his heart skip a beat—in the absolute worst way possible. In the kind of way that made one believe a heart attack was imminent, and so was doom. Yuan was getting far too old for that shit. He grumbled to himself as he twisted his way around the couch, and a desk, and a table that jutted out into the hallway, banged his thigh on its non-childproofed edge, and made his way to the front door.

The peephole revealed Martel standing in the hall, bent over something small next to her that had a mess of bright red hair on top of its head.

Yuan thanked his past self’s insight into not having breakfast, because it definitely would have come back up. He forced himself to be realistic. Of course he was nervous, this was an extreme leap he was taking, but he was nothing if not ready. As Jade had said: plenty of people did this without being prepared. Surely he could do at least as well as they. After all, they didn’t have a first edition of Children Are Not Rubber Ducks.

He pulled out the chain, twisted the deadbolt, unfastened the doorknob, wondered why he had so many locks, and opened the door.

Martel was saying something to Zelos, who didn’t look interested one way or the other. She stopped midsentence when the door swung open.

“Well,” said Yuan. “Hello down there.”

Zelos waved once.

Martel straightened and cleared her throat, smiled, adjusted her blazer, and tucked a phantom length of hair behind her head. “Oh, hi. How are you?”

“Well as ever. Do you want to come in?”

Martel shook her head, eyes widening in surprise at the invitation. “Oh, no, I couldn’t. I’m actually running late to a meeting, we had a slight mishap on our way out—I’m just here to drop Zelos off.” She turned to her young charge, who not be her charge much longer, nor young a while longer yet. She put a hand against his shoulder and encouraged him forward. “You want to go in?”

Zelos shrugged. He had one suitcase, which he held with both hands—hands that were stuck inside a pair of bright green knit gloves, the kind you got for cheap at the department store during winter and clashed awfully with his hair. What possessed him to wear those in the sticky August weather Yuan certainly did not know.

Yuan had had a list of things to say that he’d gone over with Jade the night before. Greetings, introductions, explanations; even a couple of jokes—that Jade said were in poor taste, to which Yuan replied that Jade’s personality was in poor taste, and that had ended the conversation there. Every word had flown out of his head when Zelos stepped through the door, and showed no sign of returning.

“D’you want me to take that?” Yuan finally asked to break the awkward silence, and stuck out a hand.

Zelos simply stared at him, apathy his new best quality. Was it because Yuan was hateful, or was that his default expression? It could easily have been either.

Hm. “Okay, offer rescinded,” he went on, and tucked the hand in his pocket.

Martel, poor girl, did not seem to know what to do. Her proficiency began and ended with threatening young couples with suspect motives. She clasped her hands together, put on a brilliant smile—really, you couldn’t have told that she was floundering if you hadn’t known her for the past ten months—and took a step back. “Alright. I’ve set up an appointment with his occupational therapist on Monday; she’ll email about the details. You both know how to contact me. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or, um, concerns. Of course, I’m not really your caseworker anymore, Zelos, but I’m always happy to help however I can.”

This last piece was delivered solemnly with her eyes on Zelos alone, who looked at her as if she was speaking Punjabi and had neglected to turn on the subtitles.

Martel bid them good-bye and tried to walk away, but kept glancing down the hall until she descended the stairwell. Yuan and Zelos were left alone on the landing.

Yuan, being a noble and determined man, tried again. “If you’d like to follow me, I can show you your room and you can get settled, or whatever it is kids like to do when they move in somewhere. Jump on the bed like a monkey or something—I don’t care as long as you don’t make me take you to the hospital. I don’t have that kind of cash.”

Zelos shrugged with one shoulder, his expression continuing to not change. Yuan quelled the uneasiness in his stomach—the odds did not support the child sticking a knife in his back as soon as he turned, though Zelos hardly inspired confidence—and set off down the hall.

Quiet footsteps followed him, and the rhythmic thud of a suitcase hitting very small legs.

The apartment was tiny, and the guided tour was really just Yuan standing in the foyer, pointing in various directions, and saying the names of basic component rooms. Kitchen, living room, bathroom. His bedroom, on the immediate left after walking into the place. Zelos’s bedroom was just past the tiny room designated the ‘study’ and across from the kitchen.

“It was originally a guest room,” Yuan explained as he pushed open the door, “but I don’t get any guests that don’t end up sleeping on the couch, so it’s yours now. You’ve got a bed bigger than a man needs and a closet to match. Regular Ritz fucking Carlton. No room service, but you’re welcome to whatever you can find in the kitchen.”

A red flag went up internally. Was that the accurate thing to say? Yuan was certain he’d locked up all the alcohol, but it was always possible he’d missed something due to who he was as a person. He’d passed the evaluation, but government workers could hardly be trusted to tell the truth, and if Zelos managed to find the one neglected bottle of absinthe, this could all go up in flames. He’d have to ransack the kitchen. Again. Just in case.

Zelos, for his part, simply stood in the center of the room and stared. It was a pretty simple room, even with the furniture. A full-size bed up against the wall and the dresser on the other side, and a window opposite the door that led to a fire escape. Yuan had wondered if he should aquire more kid-like objects, but then decided that there was too big a chance of getting the wrong thing. Better to let the kid decorate on their lonesome—more organic that way.

But, Yuan realized in hindsight, maybe less than welcoming.

“Well,” he said finally, “I’ll leave you to it. Scream if you’re dying, I’ll be around.”

He lingered for a moment more, wondering if Zelos was going to say anything—but there was still no response, and eventually Yuan left him to his privacy.

[ 1:42 PM Yuan ] so the kid’s here

[ 1:44 PM Jade ] And it’s going smoothly.

[ 1:45 PM Yuan ] i suppose. he hasn’t said a goddamn thing

[ 1:45 PM Jade ] It’s almost as if the world *doesn’t* end with the acquisition of new responsibility!

[ 1:47 PM Yuan ] stick it up your ASS curtiss i’m not that torn up about it
[1:49 PM Jade ] Perhaps not now you’re not

[ 1:54 PM Yuan ] he still hasn’t said a word to me

[ 1:58 PM Jade ] Give him some time. I’m sure he’s still shaken from the transition

[ 2:01 PM Yuan ] maybe.

Or maybe it was something else entirely.

Yuan tapped his fingers on the kitchen table; not from anxiety, as many might have assumed, but rather because that’s where his energy happened to be when he thought. He’d thought that the two of them had gotten off to a good start back during the interview process, but perhaps he’d been mistaken. Maybe Zelos had actually hated him, but hadn’t been given a say in the adoption. His file had mentioned sensory integration issues; was something in the apartment bothering him, and he was refusing to say what?

Regardless of the reason, Jade had a point, which would have been a good opening to a horror story and hopefully not indicative of events to come. There was a good chance Zelos just wasn’t ready to talk. And even if it was something else, it still wasn’t the end of the world. It was merely another wrench in the game to evaluate and deal with, and deal with it Yuan would.

The only sounds from Zelos’s room for the next couple hours were that of floorboards creaking and objects sliding around. Yuan peeked in on him at a couple of times to be sure he wasn’t going to hurt himself, and found that he’d pulled out all of the assorted boxes stacked in the closet and begun to systematically rummage through them.

He forced himself to close his eyes and count to ten. He’d never said the closet was off limits, and if the kid turned out to be as big a brat as he looked, then Yuan deserved it for not being more strict.

But the mess was still going to irritate him.

An hour later, Yuan pulled a second plate of food out of the microwave, set it on the table, and shouted DINNER so loudly that eighteen generations of his ancestors would be cursing him from the grave.

It took a minute, but as Yuan was laying silverware on the table, Zelos appeared in the kitchen door.

“You heard me that time pretty good,” he said.

To his surprise, Zelos actually answered. “How could I not,” the kid said, rubbing one of his ears to make a point.

“So you do speak English.”

“Yeah, I speak English. You heard me speak English.” Zelos hung back from the room, leaning against one side of the doorframe and pressing his cheek against the wood as he watched.

“Well, you did a good job of fooling me earlier,” Yuan said. He tapped the table. “You want to eat something?”

“No.”

“You want to pretend to eat something so that I won’t nag you about it?”

There were several soft thuds, and when Yuan turned he saw Zelos tapping his forehead into the doorframe with steady repetition. It didn’t appear that he was using enough force to truly hurt himself—but nonetheless, it was not something Yuan wanted to encourage.

“If you do that, you’ll kill your brain cells,” he said.

Nailed it.

Zelos groaned, ugly and loud. “I’ll kill your brain cells,” he threatened.

“You’re going to have a hell of a time reaching them.”

“Maybe I’ll just bring you down to my friggin’ level.”

Yuan dropped the fork quite by accident. He was beyond the point of being startled by cussing, or children, but he still haven’t expected to hear a seven-year-old drop F-related words with such hostility. Was he supposed to reprimand that? It would be a dick move to start really lecturing on Day One, especially since he’d probably said similar things at least five or six times since Zelos had been in his presence.

And besides that, he’d never seen the point in keeping kids from cussing. They were just worse, and Zelos had probably heard worse from whatever dickbags had put him in the system in the first place. “How old are you again?”

“Almost eight.”

“Eight year olds should have better diction than that,” Yuan said. “Either you say ‘fuck’, like a man, or not at all. You got it?”

He looked Zelos in the eye for confirmation. It was important to look dogs in the eye to establish that you were the alpha, and it was probably the same for kids, too.

Probably.

Zelos only looked confused. “What’s diction?”

“It’s when you talk so people understand you. Hungry?”

He eyed the plate of food—last night’s leftovers, Chinese from the only place in the neighborhood that actually made no-kidding Chinese instead of whatever fortune cookie bullshit that passed for it in this day and age—with suspicion, his thin eyebrows narrowing and nose just slightly wrinkling up. “What is it?”

“Whatever I had in the refrigerator,” Yuan replied, pulling out a barstool and sitting at the table. “You got here a little sooner than I expected, and I can’t get to the store until this weekend when I get paid, so in the meantime this is what we’ve got.” He pushed the other plate over toward Zelos, who still had not entered the room.

The look of disgust on the kid’s face was unwarranted. It tasted perfectly fine, the microwave hadn’t even dried it out; and yet here he was, being a picky eater.

“Take it as an indication that you should be thinking about what you want to eat,” Yuan told him, “so that this doesn’t happen again.”

Zelos nodded, his mouth twisted up in a grimace. He continued to hang around in the doorway, one hand wrapped around his stomach and the other brushing the doorframe. He hadn’t taken off the gloves.

They were at an impass for the next minute, Yuan eating and Zelos watching, and steam fogging up the lamp hanging over the table.

“I’m not gonna eat that,” Zelos finally said.

Yeah, okay. Yuan had expected that, really, but it had been worth a shot. “My friends won’t eat it, either,” he said. “Sissies, all of them. What do you want instead?”

“What do you have?”

“Well—” and he considered it briefly, running through a mental catalogue of things he usually had, things he probably had, and things he most likely had. Each list was smaller than the first. “Milk, I think.”

“I hate milk.”

“Fine. What don’t you hate?”

Zelos pursed his lips to think about that, very seriously; it took him a good few minutes to come up with something, a feeling Yuan could easily relate to. “Candy,” he ventured bravely.

“Clever,” Yuan said, “but I don’t have any of that, either. Put it on your list.”

“You gotta be lying,” Zelos accused—because that was what children did, and not because he had a sixth sense for bags of candy being stashed away by greedy parents.

“When you get to be as old as me, you have an entirely different kind of candy that isn’t suitable for children at all. And I have plenty of that, but it’s mine, and you can’t have it. So there.”

Zelos rolled his eyes with a flare that a starlet would envy.

“How about bread?” Yuan suggested. He didn’t know a single person that didn’t like some kind of bread. Stick some butter on it, maybe convince Zelos to at least try the chicken. He’d get a well-rounded meal if Yuan had to beat it into him.*

(*Yuan would not actually beat Zelos, he quickly reminded his moral compass. It was a figure of speech, and if he could kindly stop being disgusted with himself, he would greatly appreciate it.)

Zelos took a step into the kitchen, though he was still wary. “What kinda bread?”

[ 10:36 PM Yuan ] i can’t do this.

[ 10:38 PM Botta ] Can’t do what?

[ 10:39 PM Yuan ] the parent thing botta god keep up

[ 10:40 PM Yuan ] i only just got him in bed and i am exhausted and i don’t know if i’m supposed to read to him or let him watch tv or sing and i am NOT going to sing. i will die before i sing

[ 10:42 PM Botta ] I don’t think singing is a requirement.

[ 10:42 PM Yuan ] but what if it IS and by refusing to sing i have forfeited my qualification for this position

[ 10:45 PM Botta ] What qualification?

[10:46 PM Yuan ] that is not fucking funny

[ 10:48 PM Botta ] Of course not.

[ 10:50 PM Botta ] I only meant that no one really goes into this kind of thing “qualified”. I know my parents certainly did not, and in all likelihood neither did this child’s.

[ 10:51 PM Yuan ] then what the hell separates me from any of them. what right do i have to think i could do a better job

[ 10:52 PM Botta ] You want him.

[ 10:52 PM Botta ] You want him taken care of.

[ 10:53 PM Botta ] And you leapt through strenuous hoops to prove it.

[ 11:14 PM Yuan ] i suppose.

Zelos’s problem was the room.

It was too big, and too empty, and too dark, and Zelos rattled around inside of it like loose change in the floor of a car: lost, forgotten, and vaguely defeated. Yuan’s place was comfortable enough, if you were one of those plebeians who could not distinguish three-hundred-thread count sheets from one-thousand-thread count sheets. Zelos was not a plebeian, and while the spring mattress was acceptable the sheets were so scratchy that he pulled out his single long-sleeved shirt and went to bed with gloves and socks to achieve a semblance of comfort. Of course, as was wont to occur when piling on layers and layers in a room where the air conditioning is faulty at best, the temperature quickly became unbearable, and Zelos settled for kicking off the blankets entirely. This presented him with an entirely new issue. Without the pressure of the blanket, he could no longer tell where his limbs sat in space or whether they were present at all, a fear that would disquiet even the most hardy elementary schooler.

It might have been easier to adjust to the new sensations if he’d been able to whisper at Yuri for hours until they fell asleep, but Yuri was back at the institution along with every other boy Zelos had shared a room with up until this point, and was probably now tying some bully’s shoelaces together while it was too dark to be caught. It had been hell to try and sleep with the noise of several children breathing and his head aching every time the old building creaked, but at least it had not been so eerily quiet, and so dreadfully lonely.

The moon rising high above the city found Zelos curled up in the corner of the bed, hugging his knees close to his chest and furiously pushing tears out of his eyes.

He felt stupid and ridiculous. He was too old to be scared of sleeping by himself, particularly when he’d always complained about how much everyone else smelled before. (Not that he had been wrong to do so, of course, because elementary-age boys were notoriously odiferous.) Moving out of the system and into a new, permanent house was supposed to be a dream come true, and Yuan wasn’t even nasty. Zelos ought to have been thrilled the way Martel was, or wary but curious like Yuri. But no matter how many times he tried to talk himself into it, he couldn’t quite manage either mood. The only thing Zelos felt was awful.

He was never going to get to sleep like this.

It took hours.   He managed to drift off eventually after wrapping himself in the top blanket, but it was a restless sleep, plagued with periodic wakings followed by a renewed struggle to relax. Zelos was relieved to see the sky lit up into a paler blue indicating the eventual dawn. Light meant morning, and morning meant not having to stay in bed.

Zelos leapt out as soon as he could and ran from the room as if evil itself was chasing him.

Yuan’s apartment in the half-light of dawn was only slightly less eerie than it was in the dark. Furniture lurked at the edges of rooms and peeked out from dark corners to take him by surprise; unfamiliarity with the placement of everything spawned more bruises on his legs and side than any person should have first thing after a long night of discomfort. The scent of the apartment was strange: metallic, with a hint of mothballs and burnt dust and traces of cleaning chemicals that made Zelos’s head swim as if he’d been spinning for hours on end. The whir of air units in the windows became overpowering if he got too close, but the temperature was excruciating and humid if he got too far away.

The kitchen was better than the living room. There was no rug, only a smooth tiled floor, and the window above the sink faced in such a way that the sun wouldn’t hit it until evening. It was small, but he didn’t need much space, and that made it easier for the tiny vent in the wall to cool.

Zelos pulled out the barstools and sat himself underneath the circular table, sprawling his limbs over the wooden stand. The wall was smooth and cool against his back, and in the dim light he could just see the beginnings of a cobweb netted between the stand and the tabletop itself. There was no spider to be seen, but as long as it stayed that way, Zelos psychically communicated, they would get along just fine. It wasn’t like he wanted to have to get Yuan to destroy the web. It was an awfully good place for one, after all.

In the soft silence of early morning, in a place where he was finally somewhat free from intrusion on his senses, Zelos found his eyes were too heavy to keep open. It took only a few minutes for him to stop trying.

 Yuan slept intermittently, not waking up for certain until around noon. There was a foul taste in his mouth, hair in his eyes, and two- and- a- half laptops strewn around the bed. He bypassed all of them in favor of the cellphone sitting tossed in the corner of his desk, which was just adjacent to his pillow and had resulted in some uncomfortable contact between the hard corner and his forehead in the past.

Dexterity was not his greatest attribute the first half-hour after arising. It took him two tries to grab the cellphone and another three to unlock it. Battery level: 57%. The same as Yuan, most days. He had several unread emails and a couple of social network alerts, and a text message warning him that the temperature was going to get unrealistically high today. Boring; unnecessary; based on the humid air, he could already tell. He switched to the emails.

Some of the messages were memos from work. Most of them were spam or clickbait, advising him on how to grow his penis to massive proportions. While that was definitely something he wanted, the day a clickbait article could solve all of his problems would likely be the same day he didn’t have any problems in the first place, and until then the hormone injections would simply have to do.

Not that he was happy about it.

In fact, he was exactly the opposite of happy about it.

He deleted the spam.

One email, though, caught his eye.

Pendragon, Lailah                                         
Jun 21^st (a few hours ago)
to me, Martel

 

Dear Mr. Ka-Fai,

I’m looking forward to making your acquaintance on Monday! I have time in my schedule to come at around two o’clock for the home assessment. I can probably push it later if I need to, but there’s only so much I can do before we have to move it altogether. :) :) :) I think it’s in Zelos’s best interest that we talk about re-establishing his sensory diet as soon as possible. Transitions can be so hard for all of us, especially when there’s a whole new environment to deal with. :o

We’ll also need to discuss taking steps toward keeping me as his therapist, if that’s what you want to do! That involves a lot of things such as paperwork, insurance, and his current enrollment in the school system.

In the meantime, pay special attention to Zelos’s comfort levels in your home. Remember, behaviors such as stimming are not a problem, but they may indicate one! 

I hope you have a lovely day!

Best wishes,

Lailah Pendragon

Lailah was a name Martel had dropped a few times. Yuan flicked chronologically backward through their conversations and remembered that she was an occupational therapist, and had known Zelos almost as long as Martel. But those were the only facts he could recall; if she’d been mentioned any further it must have slipped his mind, and things rarely slipped his mind.

Behaviors such as stimming are not a problem, but they may indicate one!

Yuan remembered Zelos’s uncharacteristic gloominess the day before, and how he’d clung to the wall like it was the only thing supporting him at the time.

He replied to her saying that Monday at two would be fine, even earlier if she could make it, and almost immediately received an answer that read fantastic! with a host of smiling emojis.

Morning routine: rolling out of bed only after ridding himself of all the alerts on his phone, followed by brushing teeth and T injections. Yuan didn’t always bother getting dressed, but he felt his internal battery jump at least ten percent after wrestling into his binder which made the small disruption worth it. No pills today; he didn’t have anything important planned aside from make sure Zelos was acclimating well. He hadn’t bothered scheduling activities. He couldn’t see how assaulting a person with more things to do would be in any way comforting.

Speaking of, though, it was already after noon. Zelos was probably awake by now, and hopefully hadn’t destroyed the apartment due to sheer boredom. Should Yuan have warned him that he frequently didn’t wake until noon? It was an afterthought now, but perhaps that was the kind of thing you had to tell someone when you began to cohabitate.

As it turned out, his neglect to inform Zelos of his typical schedule did not matter. He found Zelos curled underneath the table in the kitchen, more soundly asleep than if he’d been knocked out with an entire bottle of cold medicine.

Yuan briefly considered waking him. It couldn’t be comfortable, holed up on the floor—but then why would Zelos choose there to sleep rather than the place he was actually supposed to? Was he better off there on the floor? Was it more responsible to leave him or to wake him, or to simply move him without asking? Neither one of these seemed like quite the right answer.

Briefly, Yuan considered asking Martel or Botta for advice. This would have been a sensible decision, and given that Martel knew Zelos the best out of all of them, would probably have garnered him actual results. But that would involve admitting yet again that he did not know what he was doing, and Yuan’s pride could not take another blow.

He let Zelos be.

Once Zelos was awakened a couple of hours later, the day passed in much the same way the first one had, with a great deal of clashing between Yuan and Zelos and little headway made in the bonding department. Zelos still refused to eat the majority of the food Yuan possessed, and Yuan still had not been paid, so they remained stuck in their predicament.

Their discovery the night before that Zelos wasn’t averse to bread and butter meant that they weren’t left completely hanging. Zelos was granted full access to the breadbox sitting on top of the counter, which was really just a shoebox that contained aluminum-covered loaves he had yet to finish off. It was hardly interesting or nutritious, but at least the kid wouldn’t starve.

And given who Zelos was as a person, this was quickly becoming a valid concern. Until the bread-and-butter discovery was made around noon, Zelos steadfastly refused to eat anything that was put in front of him. Yuan knew that children were picky eaters; Yuan himself remained one, but this went beyond anything he’d experienced in the past. He was going to have to revise their entire diet from scratch to accommodate Zelos’s needs, which meant changing meals and the order in which he cooked and ate them, and managing a whole new list of groceries—the prospect was daunting and made him rather nauseous to consider. He would have to remember, now, all of the different things that had to be made each day in addition to actually selecting them, and it would take weeks before they were once again integrated in his routine.

Hell, it would be weeks before Zelos was integrated in his routine. It was a good thing school and all its particulars wouldn’t be involved for at least that long.

The more short-term issue was the matter of Zelos sleeping on the kitchen floor until two p.m. While Yuan could not personally criticize this choice of his, he couldn’t imagine it still would have happened had Zelos actually slept in his bed. When pressed, Zelos loudly declared that it was impossible to sleep in these conditions.

“What conditions?” Yuan tried to discover, because clearly those conditions did not apply to his kitchen floor.

“Your conditions,” was the specific and helpful answer, and barely audible as its speaker spun around and around in the living room.

Yuan went back and re-examined Zelos’s bedroom to see if he could discover the source of the problem. He was largely unsuccessful: the sheets were the same kind he used, the curtains were functional, the air unit keeping the place at a balmy 73 degrees Fahrenheit. There was nothing he could find to indicate the problems that Zelos seemed to be having, and Zelos wasn’t interested in discussing them in detail or even complaining.

Yuan found himself anticipating nightfall with a great degree of anxiety.

Despite his fears, Zelos was sent off to bed in the same sullen attitude he’d adopted the night before, and two in the morning struck without much fanfare.

But midsummer meant that hovering around computers, even in the dark, was rife with arid conditions and required a steady influx of water to keep sane. Yuan slid out of his office chair to make the trek to the kitchen, but along the way passed by Zelos’s room—and was struck by the faintest hint of light leaking from the crack at the bottom of the door.

And here Yuan had yet another moral quandary: he’d always been of the mind that a person’s occupied bedroom was their private space and should not be intruded on by anyone else, ever—one too many such instances on the part of his own parents had cemented this in him too firmly to ever be removed without a skilled neurosurgeon and their jackhammer. However, he was a parent now and had a responsibility to check on his young charge in the middle of the night, just to be sure they were still breathing. It wasn’t that he was worried about Zelos, with his shifty eyes and evasive comments, or even that he was a little concerned. After Zelos’s late night before…

Remember! Behaviors are not a problem, but they may indicate one!

Well. He would be remiss if he did not at least check up, privacy or no privacy.

Yuan knocked on the door and, when he heard nothing but a sharp intake of breath, gently pushed the door open.

In the half-second before the kid reacted, he caught sight of Zelos curled up on the floor between the mattress and the night stand, red tell-tale stains of tears streaked down his cheeks.

“Go away!” Zelos shouted. Alarmed, Yuan backed away and pulled the door shut behind him, but stayed on the outside of the room.

This was the opposite of firm parenting, and also of his usual personality. When met with force, Yuan forced back. But the sight of Zelos in distress had awoken something in him that was entirely new and painful, that made him long to do whatever it would take to make him comfortable again. His own heartbeat rose in response to Zelos’s emotional upset, and the beginnings of panic tugged at the fringe.

What Yuan was experiencing was called affective empathy, but as he was a loner and a miser and a bit of an ass who very rarely made strong emotional connections, he had not experienced it enough to be familiar with the sensation. Later, he would recognize this as a good sign. In the moment, the only thing he felt was awful.

From inside the room, Zelos continued to make whimpering noises, though he put a good effort into hiding it.

Yuan pressed his forehead against the flimsy door, as if the pressure would somehow help him translate feeling into coherent thought. What was he supposed to do? What would Botta do? What would Martel do? He’d observed the hurt and comfort process from afar many times, but experiencing it in the moment was different than seeing it on a fifteen-inch screen at three in the morning. The most that he could recognize was that he had a sobbing child in his apartment and it was somehow his fault, therefore it was his responsibility to fix the mess. He had to say something. Do something. Apologize, you absolute fool.

He didn’t even know what he had to apologize for. But surely there was something.

Yuan knocked softly on the door. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

His efforts were met with silence.

“Will you talk to me at all?”

He thought he heard a cricket that time, but his ears could have been playing tricks on him.

Yuan sighed and rubbed his temple. “Alright, I’ll just talk, then. I’m going to take silence as permission.”

He wasn’t really certain what he was expecting. If Zelos had said something, he would’ve been surprised at the acknowledgment, but not as much that he didn’t want to hear Yuan speak. But Zelos remained quiet, and while the silent treatment didn’t surprise him, the idea that perhaps Zelos did want to listen to him, did.

Now he had to think of something to say.

Yuan turned and slid to the floor, his back against the door to Zelos’s bedroom. The engineered wood that had once been clean was now coated with a thin layer of dust and dirt on the edges; it always surprised him how quickly things became dirty, and how even failing to acknowledge them at all would leave them faintly dusty. The law of entropy in the universe was a tricky one.

He sighed. “Listen,” he said. “I know this is less than ideal for you.”

Zelos made no indication that he was listening.

“I just want to make sure you know that I get it. I was adopted too, you know—I mean. I was sure younger than you, and the only English I knew was fuck. Impressive, huh?”

More silence.

Yuan kept talking. The words came without his volunteering them, tumbling forth in an attempt to ensure that Zelos heard, that he understood. “My parents wanted a nice, normal little girl from China. They got me instead. I don’t think they ever realized that people just aren’t always who you expect them to be.”

Yuan was about to continue when he heard the slightest sound from the other side of the door.

“Huh?”

Quiet, and then Zelos could be clearly heard through the crack between door and frame. “I said why. Why’d they get you if they wanted a girl.”

An excellent question. One he’d asked of himself many times, and one he still hadn’t really found a satisfactory answer to. “That’s what they thought they were getting,” he answered. “I didn’t tell them they made a mistake until I was in college, and they got so angry about it that they don’t talk to me anymore.”

There was a rustling from the other side of the door, and then when Zelos spoke again he sounded closer. “Why’d you wait so long?”

Yuan had a thousand and one possible answers to that, all of which were mostly true and a few that he wished were. If he was truthful, he would have to admit that even nearly twenty years later he still didn’t know why he had waited so long, if by waiting he had only delayed the inevitable.

“I was scared,” he said.

It took more courage to admit that than it did to tell the story.

Yuan waved a hand like it could dismiss the words and change the subject. “The point of all this is, I don’t want to be like they were. I don’t want you to be scared or think I’m going to be mad at you for making a mistake, or for something you can’t control, because I’m not. That’s a shitty thing to do.

“I know I’m no replacement for the parents you had before, and that it sucks to have everything change on you suddenly. I know I’m not as nice as Martel, or as smart as Lailah. But just like all of them, I’m here to make sure you’re taken care of, and the best way I can do that is for you to tell me what you need.”

As he spoke, Yuan’s hands found the lengthy strands of hair that had fallen over his shoulder, weaving and twisting them around his fingers with a comforting drive he hardly noticed, anymore. Soft, subtle movements like this had been all he’d allowed himself for years, and even when he’d finally given up on hiding his natural inclination to move, habit was almost as strong as instinct.

It was also two in the morning, and jumping in his living room would have gotten him shit on by the neighbors.

The doorknob rattling was Yuan’s only warning that his seat was about to become unstable. He sat up just as Zelos pulled the door open a crack, peering through with features visible only because of how his pale skin caught and held the minimal light. Zelos’s fingers crept around the edge of the door, holding it in place, and instead of the snarker with shifty eyes that had roamed the apartment the last few days, Yuan saw only a young child, distressed and uncertain in a world where all he had was himself.

Zelos did not speak. He only sat peering through the tiny crack he had opened, wary as he waited for Yuan to go on.

Yuan’s eyes slipped down to Zelos’s hands, to his own knees, to his own hands with blue hair woven like cloth through his fingers. “I know that it’s hard, and a lot to ask,” he said, “but I want you to trust me. Understand?”

Zelos sat there a moment longer, rubbing at his nose and eyes and doing his best to coat himself in a spread of mucus. When he spoke, it was in a voice as small as himself, pitched in a way he must have loathed to hear. “I hate your sheets.”

Yuan’s first inclination was to ask what was wrong with them, since they’d never bothered him and were perfectly good, but he swallowed the words before they could enter the world. He’d resolved to take Zelos at face value long ago, he reminded himself. Asking Zelos to extend him some trust could not be a one-way street. So instead he nodded once. “Hate the sheets. That’s something we can fix.”

Zelos sniffed. “And your food.”

“Yeah, but you told me that one already.”

“I just wanna make sure you know.” Zelos broke out into a tiny grin, but it was one that showed his teeth.

Yuan sighed through his nose, but in a remarkable display of self-control he did not engage in any kind of mockery or ridicule. If he knew anything about children and their emotions it was that they were often fragile, and the last thing he wanted was to set Zelos off again. “Come on. Neither one of us is going back to bed any time soon. Let’s see if we can find anything less obnoxious for you to sleep on.”

He twisted out of his position and stood, then extended a hand down to Zelos, who grasped it. Yuan hauled the kid to his feet.

When Yuan got it into his head to do something, he meant to do it immediately. In the wider circles of the corporate world, this personality trait made him desirable to many companies that valued profit more than human life, and his dedication to completing tasks was viewed as beneficial rather than pathological.

It also meant that he set out at nearly three in the morning for the twenty-four-hour department store with a seven year old boy, both dressed in not much more than their pajamas and whatever tennis shoes had been cast aside closest to the front door. This was a strange and new experience for Zelos, who had never been allowed outside past sunset, but he was still young enough to value adventure more than sleep and relished the opportunity to avoid crawling back into bed.

For Yuan, though, this was rather par for course.

He was a familiar face to the night staff, some of whom nodded the begrudged greeting of those who sacrificed personal well-being for a minimum-wage retail job. He selected a cart and plopped Zelos into the back of it.

“Bedsheets first,” Yuan declared, “and if we’re not dead after that we’ll take a look at food and see if we can find you something to eat tomorrow. Good?”

“Good.”

Opening every package of sheets and having Zelos pick out the ones that didn’t make his skin scream was obviously not Zelos’s idea of a good time, but to Yuan’s vexation he had no other way to determine what would be acceptable. When Zelos found a set he was okay with, Yuan took two packages and dumped them in the cart, then set off for wherever they kept the food in this fluorescent-lit liminal space.

He was not accustomed to running into many other people in the middle of the night, which was why Yuan typically chose this hour to do his shopping if he could help it. But as soon as they turned onto the section filled with frozen dinners the rattling of another cart became audible. Yuan took a second to wonder who in their right mind—besides him of course—could possibly think being here this late was a good idea, but he did not have long to question it. Pushing the cart was none other than Jade Curtiss, wearing a pair of leather stiletto boots that stretched to his thighs, spandex, and a leopard-print vest that was either next year’s haute couture or had been found in a government-sponsored garage sale. These three items happened to be all that he was wearing; or rather, all that Yuan saw him wearing, to say nothing of what might be lurking beneath the garish garb. He strode down the frozens aisle like a man on a mission, with the confidence only possessed by a man who looked horrendous and did so by choice.

The longest ten seconds of Yuan’s life took place in between the time he saw Jade Curtiss and passed by him, during which the following events took place:

1. His eyes were drawn first to the leopard-print and then to the angular collarbone and jaw of the man wearing it. During this time Yuan’s veins ran not with blood but with dread, and he had time enough to pray that it wouldn’t be who he thought it was traipsing past frozen pizzas at this hour of night.
2. The prayers were in vain. Yuan recognized the figure as Jade Curtiss and the dread froze into dull resignation as he trudged on, his footsteps falling like iron onto the linoleum path. The world slowed down here as Jade Curtiss’s eyes met his, and the shock of mutual recognition was exchanged between the two.
3. It was here that Yuan regained some presence of mind as The Father Of His Child, and his parental instincts, though late, could not have picked a better time to kick in. He tore his eyes off of Jade’s ensemble and moved them to Zelos, whose own eyes and mouth were wide with shock, horror, and awe. (This was one of those events that would serve to definitively influence Zelos’s life, one of those moments where young children look into their future and gain a sudden understanding of what it means to live and be alive, but neither Yuan nor Zelos knew this at the time and perhaps, that was for the best.) Yuan, at a total loss for words but with confidence that a simple command would not do, slapped a hand over Zelos’s eyes in a futile attempt to protect his innocence.
4. At this point, both parties neared the center of the aisle; within social distance and certainly audible range. What they said next would determine the success or failure of the evening, or rather morning, and whether or not Yuan would speak to Jade for the next ten years. The silence was palpable. The tension, catching Yuan’s breath in his throat and threatening to stop his heart, concrete.
5. “I haven’t seen you dressed up like that since grad school,” Yuan said.
6. The social contract of man is a philosophical model developed during the Age of Enlightenment dictating that all existing society is the result of an agreement between individuals to surrender some rights in return for some kind of privilege. In keeping with this model, Yuan had long ago surrendered his right to question or kinkshame Jade’s various hobbies in return for the privilege of never having to think about what Jade did in his spare time, ever.   But now the contract had been violated by the mere presence of Jade in a supermarket, and Yuan felt as though he were tumbling through the infinite recesses of space and time, unable to find purchase with which to save himself from true indescribable terror. He knew, in this moment, that his life would never be the same again. When the social contract disappeared, what was left? Chaos. Anarchy. Jade Curtiss in spandex that accentuated his shapely ass and thighs.
7. “It’s after three in the morning,” Jade said, glaring at Yuan through narrowed eyes. He pushed his glasses further up his nose with his middle finger and blinked once, long and slow. “I owe you no explanations after three in the morning.”

And thus, the spell was broken. Reality was preserved in the simplest of solutions: a mutual agreement that had stood the test of time, wherein both parties acknowledged that the witching hour was truly anomalous, and things that occurred during that inexplicable time could not be held against them. This was why Yuan and Jade remained acquainted. So much of the population would have been curious, nosy, or aghast; they simply knew that these things happened in life, and it was a man’s right to preserve his dignity as much as possible. Sometimes, you just ended up in the middle of a twenty-four hour supermarket in stilettos. Sometimes, that was just how life worked.

“Good fucking luck,” Yuan said. He shook his head in as much disapproval as he could manage on his current level of sleep, still reeling from the shock of meeting Jade at such a time.

Jade’s eyes flickered to Zelos, who was doing his damndest to pull Yuan’s hand from his eyes and failing spectacularly. “To you as well.”

Jade and Yuan rolled on their opposite ways, and would never speak of this again.

Zelos finally succeeded in tearing Yuan’s hand away from his face and leaned halfway out of the cart, trying to get a good look at Jade as he retreated into the depths of the bakery. “Who was that?” he demanded with the wonder of a child.

“He said good things about me,” Yuan replied, and steered the cart toward the checkout with a fervor that precluded his answering Zelos’s subsequent barrage of questions.