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miss-kittys-magical-library · 4 years ago

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Teenage Dirtbag

(Cormac x Jeanie)

Warnings: fluff and smut

A/N: Cormac feels bittersweet about his abnormal teenage years, but a tryst at the abandoned O'Keefe's College with Jeanie changes his mind about what never was.

The last of my birthday weekend self-indulgent drabbles. I dug deep and pulled Cormac back to the front of the closet to wear just for today.

Jeanie inhaled the scent of moss and rain that filled the air around the abandoned boarding school. If it weren't for Cormac, Hannah and Brett this was surely how her own building would end up in a few years. She didn't mind the dynamic it created between her and her boyfriend, or that the purchase was for some ulterior scientific motive. She got to keep the kids and her job, and he got to maintain one of the last untapped portals.

Now they were in Galway where everything started. Or, as Jeanie pointed out once she knew the stories, Cormac’s friends gaslit him for an entire semester.

“That's how comic book villains are born,” she watched as he turned on the power grid and fumbled around with his necklace.

“I suppose,” his catch phrase, “But even Tony Stark created a murder robot. He scrunched his nose and scratched his head in the most adorable way. Then something clicked.

“Tony Stark is a murder robot.”

A calming female voice responded before Cormac had the chance. “Tony Stark is more closely related to a cyborg than a robot. Good morning, Cormac. Jeanie.”

“See how she uses disdain when she speaks to me?! Jarvis doesn't speak like that.”

“Silvia doesn't have disdain for you. She's a computer program.”

Jeanie and Silvia spoke collectively, “I'm an artificial intelligence system.” The schoolteacher pointed at nothing as if to say even they can agree on her being beyond just a program.

“I'm also not female or male, I am a sexless non-binary system. You decided to gender me when you were fourteen years old based on the voice modulation you placed inside of me. I have no body or sexual organs.”

“You just got out Cormac’d!” Jeanie teased as his cheeks grew rosy.

“Come on, I'll show you around.”

----

The next few hours were like visiting a museum of Cormac’s memories. He admitted that he had the ability to go to university much earlier than most anticipated, but he hung around because he actually enjoyed the small group of friends he accumulated his years at O’Keefe’s. Even if his relationship with Martin, the resident Draco Malfoy, was contentious. Even if they were understaffed, underfunded and simply unable to accommodate any real science program. He felt a sense of duty to the school that kept him safe when his Nan could not.

“I could have gone with my mum’s side in Dublin if I wanted. My aunt was just worried what I might just get up to if I did.”

“What, like a criminal?” Jeanie burst into a fit of giggles picturing Cormac in a life of crime. Although.. “That's the Delaneys, right?” Jeanie pondered. “Gordon and I knew some Dublin Delaneys.”

“That's like knowing a Smith.”

They had circled back around to his old dorm room where they had dropped off all their gear for China. Jeanie lingered on the old desk having perched on the corner. Her arms hugged around herself against the draft. Cormac sat comfortably on his old bed stretched out with his arms towards the wall behind him. An aged and browning poster of a full moon above his head.

Jeanie grimaced at the water stains underneath him and tried to hide her disgust. “At least I hope those are water stains,” she joked.

Cormac moved his knees apart and stared down at the bed, “Jaysus, love, what kinda stains d’ye t’ink t’ey are?!”

Jeanie raised an eyebrow. Cormac’s eyes nearly rolled back in his head. “If you need t’know, I was a shower wanker.”

He was so matter of fact, like he was about everything, Jeanie snorted. Still he made a big production of unpacking his massive sleeping bag and rolling it out along the mattress. He smoothed out the nylon, and presented it to his girlfriend for her to sit down finally.

As Jeanie settled in, Cormac stuffed his hands between his legs and his face flushed. “Do you have a boner right now?! Wait, because I'm on it bed? Is this some.. Puberty regression? AM I THE FIRST GIRL WHO SAT HERE?!” Jeanie couldn't help but squeal.

“NO! Hannah and Tara have sat here loads of times.”

“Yeah, but have you touched their vaginas?”

“JEANIE!”

“CORMAC!”

Jeanie played along and stole a kiss. Her lips pecked his briskly, but then again. They lingered longer so her tongue could sneak just inside his welcoming mouth. She may as well have waged war.

Cormac pushed his own tongue deep inside of his girlfriend’s mouth. As their tongues battled for the upper hand, Jeanie clung to his shirt and laid back on the bed pulling him along with her. She ran her hands under his tee-shirt up his back to dig her nails into his shoulder blades. His forearms on either side of her to prop himself up.

Cormac situated himself inside of Jeanie's legs that drew up alongside his hips. Still fully clothed as they kissed heavily. His belt buckle got trapped by the button of her jeans as they fought to come undressed. Both laughed at the absurdity of acting like horny teenagers simply because they were in a childhood bedroom.

Still, Cormac finally undid Jeanie's pants and tugged them over her hips to her ankles. He was clumsy at the laces of her boots which he gave up on and just yanked off and tossed somewhere in the room. Up on his knees, he threw both shirts he wore over his head. He fumbled with his belt and pants, standing only to strip them off before climbing back on top of Jeanie now in her bra and panties.

The cold air pimpled their flesh, but they ignored it when their kisses commenced. Jeanie’s hands were enmeshed in Cormac’s soft, dark hair. His lips and tongue started to wander to the base of her throat which he nipped and sucked where he could feel her pulse beat under his warm mouth. A brief moment she thought he would bite harder for fun; then he did. All the while he palmed the fabric of her panties in quick succession.

Jeanie’s breath caught at how brazen Cormac was being in broad daylight. Out in the open on top of the sleeping bag instead of in it. The static from portaling that ran through his nerves just under the skin passed on to her. Her brain was too fuzzy with desire to tell if the heat on her sex and clit was from the rapid friction or just the electricity Cormac emitted.

Jeanie couldn't even focus beyond the sensation. Her fingers and hands with a mind of their own drew his boxers down to expose his bare ass to her touch. She used it to draw his no longer secret erection into her entrance. Cormac’s hand and her panties in the way. He happily let her go so he could start pushing into the fabric with the head of his cock. Her ankles locked on his waist so her heels could dig into his lower back. They urged him to rut faster in spite of their underwear.

As klutzy as Cormac was with her jeans and boots, his long fingers were experts at undoing Jeanie’s bra. He kissed her shoulders and arms behind the straps he pulled off to expose her breasts. Breasts his mouth consumed hungrily. His tongue circled and practically inhaled one of her nipples before alternating to the other. He sucked in time to his bucks.

Jeanie deigned to speak, her words punctuated by Cormac’s movements. “I'm.. really..” she moaned “Cold.”

She was, he realized all of a sudden. With more laughter and flourishes, the two managed to zip themselves snug inside the sleeping bag. Jeanie's panties and Cormac’s underwear discarded in the process. Their bodies pressed to each other while his cock pushed into her thigh. The heat was immediate, in more ways than one.

They laid on their sides and faced one another. Cormac’s leg tangled around Jeanie's lower one. Her leg closest to the ceiling wrapped around his hip. Her calf draped along his ass while her hand reached between their bodies and took hold of his shaft. She positioned it just outside her entrance that ached to be filled. All the blood in her body swelled there.

Cormac gazed downwards at her hand, his breathing uncontrolled as Jeanie guided him again inside. Without any more instruction, he thrust inside of her so far and sharply that his pelvis collided with hers. Then he pulled almost completely out and sheathed himself to the hilt again. He repeated this over and over until they found a rhythm. Hips and sexes crashed like meteors with each powered motion.

Jeanie could only hold on. Her nails felt inches deep in Cormac's muscles along his shoulders. she had fleeting thoughts that yesterday wasn't his first time. That he lied perhaps out of embarrassment thinking he was no good.

Except he was, she was out of practice. The last time she had sex this good was.. She didn't want to think of him now. He was gone, Cormac was here. His forehead pressed into her jaw and cheek as he pounded into her. It only just dawned on her his glasses were on, bent at an unnatural angle in the crook of her neck. He didn't like to travel with his contacts in.

At this angle, Cormac hit Jeanie's clit every time he lost himself in her tightening walls. He was silent except for snorts of heavy air like a horse that escaped his nose. Both of them covered in a sheen of sweat until that lightning shot through Jeanie’s body. She coiled and recoiled and drew her boyfriend to her as she came. Cormac’s name echoed off the empty walls.

Not much longer until he did the same with a shudder and a muddled, husky “fuck” in Jeanie's shoulder. Cormac's body trembled which took her aback. Whether it was from the post-orgasm rush, or emotions, she didn't ask. Instead they held onto one another and babbled mindlessly until they fell asleep in the sleeping bag.

It was loud thunder and SILVIA through the old PA system that startled the couple awake.

“Cormac. Jeanie. May I suggest you leave as soon as possible? There is an approaching electrical storm that will surely affect the magnetic field produced by portal travel.”

They rushed to get dressed and repacked. Cormac was annoyed, “If you knew. SILVIA, why the hell didn't you tell me before?”

“Coitus interruptus. Perhaps Ms Turner feels I dislike her, but I can't imagine how much animosity she would display towards me should I interfere with your sexual intercourse. She's already jealous of our long-standing relationship”

Jeanie felt highly uncomfortable at that moment, watched even. Cormac was incensed. “SILVIA.” Then he shut her off, and they were bound for China.

Tag: @robertsheehanownsmyass @elliethesuperfruitlover @super-unpredictable98 @forenschik @slutforrobbiebro @frogs--are--bitches @nightmonsters @bisexualnathanyoung @bwritesstuff @rob-private

#robert sheehan #cormac mcnamara #cormac x jeanie #billy x jeanie #robert sheehan character fics

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enby-and-f-fics · 4 years ago

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Little Libero {AsaNoya}

--F

Summary: Littlespace - the act of regressing into a childlike state; such as a baby, toddler, or a child. Nishinoya is a little that has no caregiver and is not out to his club members. One day he slips and practice and everything escalated from there.

Word count: 4077

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It had been a long day for Noya. He was tired, and practice hadn't even started yet. He hadn't been getting as much sleep because exam season was coming up and he hadn't been able to slip for a while. All of the stress had started piling up.

He was so tired and stressed that he wasn't as accurate with his receives and the whole team could tell something was off about the little libero.

After missing the ball for about the tenth time, he couldn't take it anymore. He just froze. He couldn't move, he couldn't speak, he just froze.

Of course a few people were concerned. "Hey Noya," Asahi said, "Are you ok?"

Noya could feel himself slipping "No, I can't, not here" he said under his breath and realized he was close to crying. He started running out of the gym before anyone could see. Except one person did.

"Shit."

Tsukishima could tell something was off with Noya when he saw him freeze. He could definitely tell something was off when he heard what Noya had said. He had only heard that type of desperation from one person before. It was the first time that Tadashi had slipped in front of him.

Tsuki ran after Noya. Almost everyone on the team got immediately more scared for Noya because they thought that Tsuki was going to hurt him or something but, Yamaguchi stoped them, as he had also heard what Noya had said. Everyone skeptically returned to practice after a little more convincing from Yamaguchi.

~~~in the hallway~~~

Once Tsuki got into the hallway, he started looking for Nishinoya. After about 30 seconds of searching, he found him. He was hunched over his knees leaning against a wall. Tsuki could hear the faint sniffling of a child who was crying but didn't want anyone to notice (and was not doing a very good job).

"Hey," Tsuki said softly as to not scare the boy, "Are you little?"

Noya didn't know how to respond. He couldn't tell if Tsuki was going to judge him. His mind being younger didn't help, as Tsuki was pretty intimidating if you didn't know him.

Tsukishima could see the hesitation from the smaller boy, so he knelt down to be on the same level as him. "Bubba, you can talk to me. I won't hurt you."

Hearing him use that nickname made Noya calm down considerably. He peaked over his knees to see Tsukishima with nothing but care in his eyes. Noya jumped up and into Tsuki's arms. The taller was slightly taken off guard but quickly regained his balance.

After about 10 minuets of Tsuki talking with a babbling Noya sitting on his lap and playing with his fingers, Noya started to nod off. Tsuki realized and waited for him to fall asleep before picking him up. Noya immediately snuggled more into Tsuki's shoulder for safety. Tsuki chuckled slightly at the clingy libero as he started heading back to the gym.

Once he got back to the gym, he hesitantly opened the doors as to not wake Noya. He walked in and everyone went silent. They saw the strong headed libero curled up into Tsukishima's arms and their jaws dropped. They all started to stammer our questions when Noya started to stir. Tsuki cooed and shushed him back to sleep and glared daggers at the rest of the team.

He walked over to a corner of the room where it would be less noisy and he could make sure that Noya got the sleep he needed while he was still able to watch the practice.

Yamaguchi walked over to when they were sitting and knelt down to their level. "How's the little guy doing?" Tsuki looked down and pet the sleeping boy's head "He was really tired. He fell asleep after like 10 minutes. This should help." Yams nodded and when back to practice.

For the next hour, everyone else continued practice while Noya continued sleeping on Tsuki's lap. When Noya started to wake up, Tsuki checked to see if he was still in little space.

"Nishinoya?"

"Hmm...? Oh... Oh my god Tsukishima I'm sorry!" Noya frantically scrambled out of Tsuki's lap. Seeing the struggle, he lifted him off his lap so that he could make sure that Noya didn't hurt himself.

"How did you...?"

"Tadashi. I've been his caregiver for quite a few months now."

"Oh."

"Do you want us to help you tell the rest of them?" Tsuki wanted to make sure that Noya wasn't stressed right out of little space to prevent him slipping again.

"Yes please..."

"Yamaguchi, can you come over here?"

"Of course!" Yamaguchi came bounding over so that the three of them could discuss a plan to tell them.

Once, they figured out their plan, Yamaguchi called everyone over and gave Noya an encouraging pat on the back.

"So, I'm a little,"

"...A little what?" Asahi asked.

"Not a little something. Just a little. I sometimes slip into little space when I'm stressed or haven't slept in a while as a way to release some stress."

"Oh," Daichi said, "Okay."

"So you're not mad?"

"No, of course not," Suga said, "why would we be mad for something that helps you?"

"Well I don't know. Some people just find it really weird." Noya explained.

"Yeah, we don't care." Tanaka joined in, "I'm just really curious as to why Tsuki was such a good... what is it called?"

"Caregiver," Tsukishima answered, "I've been Yamaguchi's caregiver for months now so I've gotten the hang of it."

"You WHAT??" Tanaka exclaimed, "YOU'RE ACTUALLY GOOD AT TAKING CARE OF SMALL CHILDREN?????"

"Umm, yeah. I work at a day care."

"WHAT??"

~~~~~~~~

Asahi was intrigued the whole time. Having come to the conclusion that he had a crush on the libero, he had tried to pay more attention and learn about the things that he liked.

For example, this thing called "little space".

He was intrigued by the concept of regressing into a different headspace. The more he read, the more he wanted to be Nishinoya's caregiver. He felt tinge of jealously of Tsukishima, him really being the only to see him little. He wanted to see the soft, child like side of his crush.

He decided that the next day at practice, he would ask Tsukishima a few more things about how to be a good caregiver and such. He really did want to be Nishinoya's "primary caregiver" as he learned that night.

~~~~~~~~

Asahi had decided to start with asking Yamaguchi for help with being a good caregiver, as he was a little as well, and much less intimidating than Tsukishima.

"Hey Yamaguchi," he said to the pinch server across the room, "Can I ask you something?"

"Of course!" Tadashi bounded over to the ace as he spoke, having a feeling what this conversation was about, based one the events of the previous day. "What's up?"

"Umm... well I was wondering what it takes to be a good caregiver, and since you have Tsukishima, and apparently he's good at this, I thought you could give me some pointers?" Asahi said as he fumbled with his hands.

Yamaguchi chuckled, "Well it's usually specific to each little but based on how I've seen you interact with people I think your biggest problem would be setting rules and sticking to them."

"Hey! What do you mean?" Asahi was mildly offended. He did see that he was less than intimidating to someone who knew him but he could hold rules if he needed to.

"You're talking to me instead of Tsuki. Isn't that enough?" Asahi couldn't really defend himself. He was, indeed talking to the less intimidating person in the duo. "Also, why are you so adamant about being his caregiver? I mean everyone else did some basic research but you seem to want to go the extra mile."

"Umm..." Asahi was flustered. Was he really that obvious that he felt something more toward the spiky headed libero? Had anyone else noticed?

"Ah! I made you uncomfortable! I'm sorry! Tsuki and I have seen the way that you look at each other and it looks like more that's friendship."

"Well... I mean you are right..." Asahi didn't know what to do with this information. "Wait, did you just say that he looks at me that way?" Tsukishima, having heard the ruckus of Tadashi frantically apologizing, wanted to make sure everything was ok. "Are you blind? He quit volleyball because of you. He wouldn't come back if you didn't too."

"Oh," Asahi said, "I see your point. I guess he might like me too?" He was still quite skeptical, as Nishinoya seemed to be lusting after Kiyoko at the very same moment.

"You'll never be sure if you don't tell him," Yamaguchi said, "Have you thought about confessing? I mean it worked for me."

"Well sure bu- wait, what? What do you mean it worked for you?" Asahi was quite confused, he never really saw Yamaguchi interact with anyone besides Tsukishima, but he was still kind of mean to the pinch server. "Who?!"

"That would be me." Tsukishima said, slightly wrapping his arm around the shorter's waist, "Caregiver and boyfriend."

Just as he finished saying that, they heard a cry from across the gym. Someone had gotten hurt, and it just so happened to be the one who could slip into little space.

"Oh my god, Noya! Are you ok?" Tanaka, as he had been the one closest to him, heard the impact. He could tell this was more than just a little trip. "Asahi." Daichi said quickly. Asahi ran to get the first aid kit.

They had had incidents before but there hadn't been any major injuries, he was hoping this one wasn't.

"Here you go, Daichi," Asahi frantically brought the first aid kit that they had, up to this point, only had to use for cuts and bruises. The wounded libero was still crying. Almost the whole team had tried to calm him down. Almost.

"Asahi, will you try to get him to calm down so we can see where he hurt himself?" Daichi said, who was still hurting at the sight of one of his children crying. "Please?"

"Umm, okay," Asahi really still had no idea what to do but he just wanted to badly for his crush to stop crying that he was willing to try anything. "Hey baby, can you come here?" He said, picking the boy, his small frame fitting perfectly in his arms.

"Hey, shhh, you're ok. Shh shh shh." He slightly rocked the crying little from side to side, trying everything to get his baby to calm down. Soon, after some more cuddles from the ace, Nishinoya's crying was reduced to small sniffles. "Hey, baby, can you tell me where it hurts? We're gonna make it better, okay?"

The little just buried his face into the taller's chest, whimpering, seeming to not want to talk. "Hurts."

"Aww, honey I know, I know," Asahi stroked the smaller boy's face, "Can you show me where it hurts?"

Nishinoya turned his head slightly and pointed at his ankle, whimpering. Asahi looked at Daichi, who had been watching, and gave the nod to start treating his ankle. He had only just touched it and the poor boy started to tear up again. Everything was magnified when he was little, feelings, affections, and most definitely, pain. "Oh, poor thing. It's ok, sweetheart, I'll be gentle." Daichi could see how much pain the small libero was in and could only wonder what he had done to hurt himself. "Asahi, will you try to distract him while I do this?"

"Of course," he was still stroking the younger boy's head in an attempt to calm him. It seemed to be working until Daichi tried to turn his ankle to see if it was broken and Noya started crying again. "Hey, shh, you're ok, I'm right here, okay baby? I'm right here," Daichi started to wrap his ankle, "Just keep looking at me, you're doing so well."

It was clear to everyone in the room that Asahi was a natural. He knew just what to say to calm the boy, it seemed as if he had been his caregiver for years.

Nishinoya was still whimpering slightly but with being in Asahi's lap and his calming words, the tears had once again stopped.

"Okay, well it's nothing very major, it's a little sprained and very bruised. It should be better after a few days of rest. Just to be sure, Asahi, will you take him home and stay with him? I don't think he will completely remember to take it easy, considering he is in little space right now." Daichi said, ever the worried captain.

"Oh, ummm... Sure, I guess." Asahi was quite worried, knowing that his parents were out of town, so he would have to stay the whole weekend to make sure he didn't hurt himself more.

"You two can start to head home since neither of you are gonna do any more practice," Suga said, "Right, Daichi?"

"Yeah. Go home and get some rest, both of you."

Asahi started to gather their bags and carried Noya to the changing rooms to help him get ready to go. He started to set the boy down on one of the benches in the changing room so that he could help him change but before he could, the boy started whimpering and clutched his shirt even harder.

"Oh, I'm sorry baby, is everything okay?"

"Don wanna leave you." Noya whispered, barely being loud enough for the ace to hear, "Please don leave."

"Aww, honey," Asahi's heart broke. He could never leave the little and his remark made him wonder who hurt the small libero for him to be that desperate to not even let go of him. "Don't worry, baby, we just need to get you changed so that we can go home and sleep. Does that sound okay to you?"

"Okay, promise you won leave?"

"I promise, honey."

~~~~~~~~

They had both gotten changed, Noya wanting to cling to Asahi the entire time. "Okay, baby. Are you ready to go home now? We can go home and cuddle more, okay?"

The smaller boy nodded sleepily and cuddled further into the ace's shoulder. "Mhm."

Asahi couldn't help but chuckle at the actions of the little. It was definitely time for a nap. He stared walking in the direction of Nishinoya's house, all the while talking to the smaller boy to keep him calm and lull him to sleep. Fortunately, the slight bounce of the tall boy's walk did put the second year to sleep.

Soft snores from the ace's shoulder alerted him of this fact just as they were walking up to the steps of the Nishinoya household. Asahi slowly walked up and opened the door as to not wake the sleeping little.

He was able to drop his and Noya's bags at the front door and take his shoes off before heading toward the younger's room.

He reached the room and set the sleeping boy down onto the bed and made a move to leave as to alert his mother that he would be staying at Nishinoya's house for the weekend. Before he could get to far, he felt a hand clutch his shirt. "You said you won leave." He heard a small voice coming from the bed, slightly groggy to tell his that the little was still asleep.

"Okay, honey, I won't" Asahi could hear the desperation in his voice so he crawled into the bed with him, wrapping his arm around the smaller boy so that he was sleep on his chest. He decided to text his mom, instead of calling like he had originally planned as to not disturb the libero.

Me: Hey, just letting you know that I'm going to stay at Noya's for the weekend. He hurt himself at practice and his parents are on a work trip.

Mom <3: Okay, hun! Let me know if you need anything!

Me: Thanks, mom. Love you!

Mom <3: Love you too!

Now that that was taken care of, he was able to focus all his attention on the boy currently sleeping on his chest. For about an hour, he just laid there and watched the younger's breaths. 'He looks so vulnerable, just sleeping there,' Asahi thought to himself, 'He's so cute. I really am in love with him.'

"I love you. I know you're asleep and can't hear me and I don't know whether I'm disappointed or relieved. I love you so much that every time I look at you my heart flutters. Today has been one of the best days because I've gotten to take care of you." Asahi couldn't help but voice his feelings to the sleeping libero. He had fallen completely head over heels for the boy and couldn't bear to hold it in any longer. This didn't mean that he suddenly had the courage to actually confess, but at least telling a sleeping Noya was better than keeping it to himself any longer. "Thank you for being who you are."

With that, he decided to get some sleep too. The weight on his chest actually comforted him and made it much easier to fall asleep.

Little did he know that Nishinoya had woke up in big space and heard everything that the ace had said.

~~~~~~~~

Nishinoya was silently freaking out. The boy he had liked for a year had just unintentionally confessed to him. 'Okay, I can do this,' he thought to himself. 'I can't do this.'

He really didn't know what to do. It's not everyday that your crush just confesses that they LOVE YOU. The smaller boy looked at the clock and realized it was 10:00. 'Wow, how long did I sleep?' He tried to stretch his legs without waking Asahi, only to feel a sharp pain in his ankle, which made him wince. The taller male drew Noya in closer to try and smooth the boy. He was a natural even when he was asleep.

Nishinoya couldn't ignore how comfortable this position was. He was warm and comforted by the arms wrapped around him, and the beating heart under his head provided white noise to lull to sleep as soon as he closed his eyes.

'Okay, I'll do something about this tomorrow.' He thought just before falling sound asleep.

~~~~~~~~

Asahi woke up to his phone alarm, quickly turning off the alarm, trying not to disturb the sleeping Nishinoya. He couldn't help but to reach out and pet the smaller's hair. The libero made a slight purring noise, indicating that he enjoyed it, which amused the ace. He sure didn't expect that noise to come out of Noya.

Nishinoya's eyes fluttered open with a smile on his face as he looked at the taller, 'God, he looks amazing in the morning.' The sunlight was just barely peaking through the curtains, illuminating Asahi's face with a golden light.

"Hi." Asahi's voice was gruff with sleep. Noya couldn't hold himself back anymore. He reached up and put his hand on Asahi's cheek.

"Umm, Noya, what are yo-" Asahi was cut off by soft lips being placed on his. Asahi was shocked for a second before he realized what was happening and started to kiss him back. Their lips moved together in perfect synchronization as if they were made for each other.

They both had to eventually part for air. "Wow, that was... wow" Asahi couldn't believe what just happened. His crush had kissed him out of nowhere.

"I love you too." Nishinoya, feeling bold after the kiss, decided that now was the best time just to spill all of his feelings. "I heard you last night. You were so sweet and I didn't know what to do. And then your voice was just... I couldn't hold myself back anymore." He finished with a slight chuckle, looking at the flustered ace.

"I... just.... umm..." Asahi didn't know what to do with himself, he had just had a make out session with his crush AND he confesses to him AND he had heard all of the things that he had said the previous night. "Will you be my boyfriend?"

Nishinoya blushed slightly at the offer. "Yes, of course." He leaned up to give the taller boy one last peck before moving to get up, completely forgetting about his ankle, only to be very abruptly reminded as he fell trying to get out of the bed.

"Oh my god, Noya! Are you okay?!"

"Agh, yeah. I kinda forgot." He tried to lighten the mood with a chuckle, only to be shot down with a look from Asahi. "Come on, I'll cary you to the kitchen and make breakfast. We have about two hours until we need to be at practice."

Asahi picked up the injured libero and brought him to the kitchen island. He then started to make breakfast as he had said. He practically lived at the Nishinoya residence, so he knew where all of the ingredients for various meals were. Nishinoya couldn't cook so he would often come over and make meals for him.

"Pancakes?"

"YES!!!!" The smaller boy seemed very excited about the prospect of pancakes, so the Asahi started on them. They filled the time with small talk, just like they always had. Except this time was different. Nishinoya couldn't keep his eyes off of his now boyfriend, he just couldn't believe it. "I love you," he said.

"I love you too, but if you keep staring at me I'm gonna mess up the pancakes."

~~~~~~~~

"Ok, time for practice!" Nishinoya said enthusiastically, starting to get up from where he was sitting on the bed.

"Not so fast, mister," Asahi caught Nishinoya before he could stand up completely, knowing he was going to hurt himself further if he started to run out the door. "You're not going anywhere by yourself. Come on." Asahi picked up the younger boy, making sure that he had a secure hold before setting off to get their bags.

They started out the door, with Nishinoya carrying the bags, him insisting that he can at least do something. The walk to practice stayed in a comfortable silence between the two boys.

Asahi walked in the door to see almost everyone chatting around. He moved over to a bench and sat down with Noya in his lap. Daichi came over to check his ankle and frankly because he was curious about why they were being so touchy. Nishinoya was always touchy with the taller but never this much and without Asahi excessively blushing.

"What's going on between you too, huh?" He said with a raise of an eyebrow, at a low voice as to not alert any others that something was happening between the two, in case they weren't quite ready to tell other people.

This is when Asahi became flustered. "Um w-what do you mean? There's n-nothing going on."

"Oh please," Nishinoya scoffed. He lowered his voice so that just Asahi could hear, "You say that as if you weren't making out with me just this morning."

Asahi let out a small squeal, which surprised Daichi as he had never seen Asahi this flustered. "Ahh, so there is something. Come on, spill."

"Well," Nishinoya started, seeing as Asahi was in no condition to explain, "I won't go into details be we are dating now."

"Finally." Suga said, coming up from behind Daichi, wondering what was taking so long. "Did the coward finally confess?"

"Hey, I'm not a coward..." Asahi wavered, his voice getting smaller with each word.

"Aww, it's okay, honey." Nishinoya said, "You're my coward."

"Awww." Daichi and Suga said in unison. "Well, Noya, your ankle is better than yesterday but you still can't practice today. Sorry. But we do need to start practice now."

"Ok, fine." Nishinoya said, getting up in the process to let Asahi stand up. Once Asahi was up, he sat back down in order to avoid being scolded by both Asahi and Daichi for being on his feet when he's not completely healed.

Daichi and Suga had moved away by then and had called everyone to start warming up. Asahi had moved to go with them before Nishinoya grabbed his arm and pulled him down to give the ace a small peck. "I love you."

Asahi blushed before looking back at the small libero.

"I love you too."

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logical-little-lies · 4 years ago

Text

Staying Quiet, Going Little- Agere!AU (part 39)

A/N: Little Remus.

that's all you need to know.

also though, I was thinking I could start doing more shippy/romantic stuff when the sides aren't regressed? like since the beginning of this, logicality and prinxiety have been a part of this story but I don't really talk about their relationships outside of regression?? so lmk how you feel about that.

The next morning, after the whole situation with Little Patton throwing a fit, the other four sides came over. Virgil and Roman invited the two dark sides to come over for the day just as they were getting ready to leave.

Roman ended up sleeping in Virgil's old room with him, while Janus and Remus eventually went back down to their own rooms before falling asleep. They entered the house the next morning, absolute silence filling the house. Logan was usually awake by now, either making breakfast for little Patton, or big Patton making breakfast for him.

But, neither of them were in the commons or the kitchen. "What if they dieddd?" Remus joked, in his usual intrusive manner.

"They didn't die, you disturbing rat. They're probably in one of their rooms," Roman rolled his eyes, shoving his brother to the side uselessly and going towards the entrance of the hallway.

"Roman, there was no reason to insult or push your brother." Virgil spoke, giving him a look. It almost felt the same as when he scolded him while little. Roman rolled his eyes.

"You have no authority over me when I'm not mentally seven. I can do whatever I want," he entered the hallway and left before Virgil could say anything else. Virgil rolled his eyes, following Janus as he lead the other two to the hallway as well. You could hear Roman's audible 'awe' as he stood at Logan's bedroom doorway.

Looking in, you could see Patton sitting upright, with his back against the headboard next to Logan. Logan had his arm loosely wrapped around his shoulders. Patton wore a pale blue onesie, and he held his rattle. He had a pacifier sitting in his mouth, and he looked very peaceful. Logan was giving Patton his usual endearing and caring look, and the whole sight was precious.

"What color is that, baby? Are you big enough to say it?" Logan urged, pointing to part of the page in the book Patton held in his lap. Patton looked at it, trying his hardest to pronounce the word.

"Ello!" he squeaked.

"Good job, baby! You're so smart," Logan kissed his forehead softly, before preparing to continue on. Patton excitedly shook his rattle, giggling. "Does that make you happy, little one?" Logan gave a soft chuckle. Patton had reacted well to the praise, excited and happy that his Papa was proud of him.

Patton gave a quick nod, and Logan smiled at him again. "Papa, Papa!" when Patton spoke outloud, his statements always sounded closer to babbles then whatever he was actually trying to say, but Logan understood this one because of Patton pointing towards the door.

"Oh, hey." Logan spoke softly, obviously just a bit embarrassed that all the others had seen that. It's not like they didn't know that he constantly gave Patton a lot of affection, but it was still weird because he had thought no one was watching him.

"Hey, Logan. We ended up staying the night at the tower, and we invited Jan and Remus over for the day, so we just wanted to let you guys know." Virgil gave a soft smile to Patton, who leaned into Logan's side more. He seemed a bit shyer, but not to much.

"Alright, I'll bring Patton out there in a bit. I'll probably make dinner tonight, because our designated cook happens to be a baby right now," Logan explained, patting Patton's head softly.

Before the other four left the bedroom door, Janus gave a little soft wave to Patton, who tried to wave back but ended up shaking his rattle instead. Janus chuckled, going into the kitchen with Virgil, while the twins occupied the commons.

Roman tapped away on his phone for a bit, while Remus kinda sat, sulking a bit. He almost looked disappointed, or maybe anxious? Roman couldn't quite tell, but whatever it was, his brother definitely wasn't happy. "Hey, what's up? Are you okay?"

Remus seemed to snap out of a trance, his eyes priorly focusing on a white sippy cup that was left on the table. He seemed to not even realize what he had been looking at, lost in thought. "Oh, what did you say?" he asked Roman to repeat himself. Roman went to do so, but Remus seemed to process what he had said and replied.

"Oh! Yeah, I'm fine. Why?" Remus asked, feigning a confused look. Pretending his far-off glance and distressed look gave Roman nothing to worry about.

"You just seemed...I don't know, like anxious about something? You're always talking and saying what's on your mind, but you just went quiet and seemed stressed out." Roman explained softly, looking at him in a still-concerned way. Remus seemed to have been tense, he tried his best to relax, and let himself lean back into the couch cushions.

"I'm okay, Ro. Promise," It was a painfully bad lie, and Remus cringed at his own words.

"Talk to me, Re." Roman was being serious, coming closer to him so that he didn't have to talk to loud. No one else would have to hear him.

Remus sighed, looking up at him. His eyes had been casted downwards priorly. "I just don't wanna have to be quiet all day. Patton is little, and I'm not supposed to say anything weird around the littles but I don't think you guys understand how hard that is-" his talking speed up, and his voice seemed panicky. Not quite comparable to Virgil when he had panic attacks, but comparable to Roman's rushed and teary-eyed apologies when he felt guilty while little. He took a deep breath, and Roman spoke before he got the chance to continue his rambling.

"Hey, calm down. You're okay, I promise," Roman instructed. Remus paused, nodding and taking a few slow, calming breaths. "Now, I know that it's hard to filter your thoughts out so that whatever you say is acceptable around littles, but no one is gonna get mad at you if you do mess up, okay?" Roman tried to be reassuring. The only times he really had to comfort someone was when Virgil was either having a panic attack (which resulted in regression most of the time), or when Virgil was little and upset. So he tried his best not to speak like he would to a toddler, but that's all he knows.

"Last time I just gave up and stayed quiet until we left. That's what I do every time, I ask you to go somewhere else with me, or I stay silent the whole time. I don't like being quiet." He whined at the end of his statement, seemingly working himself up over something that hadn't even happened yet.

One thing Roman knew, something him and Remus shared, they didn't like being quiet. Unless they were doing something where they were voluntarily quiet, not speaking their mind was something that was hard for them. They were both creativity, they constantly had thoughts and ideas running through their heads, and their purpose is to share them.

"How about we go somewhere else? We can always go make a new building or something somewhere in the imagination. You can be as loud as you want, and you don't have to worry about anything." Roman offered, Remus shaking his head.

"Is okay." he mumbled, startled when Logan and Patton entered the commons. He whimpered a bit, sinking into the couch behind him. Roman definitely seemed suspicious of this, not in a judgmental way, but in a curious way.

"Hello, Roman and Remus." Logan greeted, sitting down next to Patton's play mat. Patton clumsily sat on it, setting his rattle down. He still had his pacifier in his mouth, and he still looked very, very small. The only difference between Patton's voluntary regressions (When Logan babied him, or when Patton triggers the headspace himself), and his involuntary ones (When he gets to stressed, or suddenly falls into the headspace), is that he can pull himself out of the voluntary ones at any point. He woke up little the day prior, and voluntarily regressed again because Logan was still in caregiver mode.

Roman greeted him back, while Remus gave a soft wave rather then a verbal reply. "Remus, are you okay?" Roman asked again. Remus shrugged a bit, starting to twirl his white piece of hair between his fingers. "That's not a real answer, Re."

"I'm fine, Ro." Remus replied in a slightly high-pitched voice. He was acting like the other sides did when they were close to regressing. That in-between state of slight shyness, not knowing whether they should let themselves regress or not, all while just wanting someone to hand them little gear and give them cuddles.

Remus, personally, felt really, really off. His head felt fuzzy, like he couldn't think straight. Every thought he had was childlike and weird. Where was the gross thoughts about murder and death?

"Remus, are you alright?" Logan hadn't been paying attention to their conversation, playing with Patton. He had glanced up, and he saw the boy closing in on himself, almost hugging himself.

Remus didn't reply, looking at Patton. He didn't wanna be quiet, but he did care about Patton. And he knew saying weird things would upset him, even if Patton didn't fully understand what he was talking about. "Hey, Remus. Are you verbal currently?" Logan asked, Patton now looking concerned. He seemed to be thinking, mentally backing himself out of his baby mindset.

Remus looked confused, looking down at his lap with a childish innocence. At some point within the last few moments, Virgil and Janus exited the kitchen and stood in the doorway, watching the situation from where Remus couldn't see them.

Remus replied after a moment, "I can talk." His voice was pretty level, but it seemed like he was forcing it a bit. Like he was forcing himself to talk in a "big voice".

"Okay, are you regressing?" Logan asked blatantly, waiting for a response. Remus curled in on himself again, bringing his thumb to his lip without responding at first.

"Think so..." he mumbled eventually, to were only Roman could hear him clearly.

"I'm gonna go get changed," Patton said suddenly, standing up and going to leave.

"Wait, you're big now?" Logan asked. Patton nodded before replying.

"Take care of Remus, I'll be back."

It was shocking how quick Patton could back himself out of his headspace in favor of helping Remus. Of course, he had been voluntarily regressed, but even then, he usually never forces himself out of headspace for anything. But right now, Logan didn't comment on it in favor of making sure Remus was all right.

"How old do you feel, bubba?" Roman questioned, Janus and Virgil now standing behind the couch. They gave each other a glance. Janus had mentioned the possibility of Remus, along with the other unknown dark sides, being regressors. And now, it was happening.

"Five?" he seemed questioning of his own statement, and just overwhelmed in general.

"That's okay, how about we get you dressed in something more kidlike? You can take anything from my closet," Roman offered, moving to stand up and reaching his hand out to help his, now little, brother up. Remus nodded in agreement, taking his hand and standing up.

"Hey, buddy. Are you hungry?" Logan asked before they left. Remus thought for a moment before nodding a bit. He was surprisingly quiet. Whenever anyone considered the possibility of Remus regressing, they pictured a hyper and fairly-bratty kiddospace little who doesn't like rules. Not an obedient, quiet, and somewhat shy five year old.

"Let Roman help you get dressed, and I'll have a snack ready for you when you get back, alright bubba?" Logan spoke softly, to the boy, who nodded a bit while chewing on his thumb. Roman softly guided him into the hallway, and the rest of the sides could hear Roman's door shut behind him. Within a few seconds, Patton came out of the hallway, dressed in his normal attire.

"So Remus is a regressor. Only slightly surprising," Logan commented.

"That makes all of us...kinda," Virgil replied, pausing and rethinking his statement halfway through.

"I mean, we don't know about the neutral sides. And the unknowns too, who knows for sure." Janus pointed out.

"We should start talking to the neutral sides, why don't we?" Patton looked to Logan, as if he'd know.

"The same reason we didn't talk to Janus or Remus, we don't know them and there's a risk that we wont get along." Logan reasoned, the other three nodding.

"Well," Logan spoke again after a few moments of silence, "I'm gonna go make the little duke a snack."

Patton nodded, giving Logan a small smile. Logan returned it before turning and disappearing into the kitchen.

"He's...quiet. You think that he's gonna stay like that, or is he just shy because this is his first time regressing?" Janus asked, looking at Patton, who shrugged.

"I don't know. I hope he's not as bratty as Roman." Virgil joked.

They kept talking for a bit until Roman stood in the entrance of the hallway, Remus hiding behind the wall where they couldn't see him. "And I present, the lovely, adorable, and kiddish..... Baby Remus!" he dramatically said, Remus giggling and coming out from behind the wall.

Patton started clapping playfully, which Virgil and Janus joined in on, causing Remus to smile and blush a bit. He was wearing a white shirt, with dark green overalls. His hair was messy, and the white streak fell over his eyes a bit with the rest of his bangs. Roman had helped his take of his makeup, and somehow, his mustache looked cute and fit perfectly with the kidish aesthetic his outfit pulled together.

"Awe, look at you! You're cute, aren't you?" Janus said. Remus nodded.

"Just cute, no scary." he confirmed.

"No scary?" Virgil repeated teasingly. Remus nodded.

"No scary." he repeated again in confirmation. Virgil seemed to hold an identical smile to Janus's endearing one, but neither got to respond because Remus was distracted by Logan bringing in a plate with snacks for him.

"Okay, you have to eat all the grapes before you can have the cookie, alright bud?" Logan asked, sitting the kiddy plate on the coffee table, Remus immediately sitting in front of the couch on the floor so that he could easily reach it.

"Okay, thank yous." he mumbled, before immediately shoving multiple grapes into his mouth.

"Make sure to chew your food, okay bubba?" Roman sat behind him, hoping he'd take his words into account. Remus nodded a bit.

Virgil took the remote and opened Disney+, looking for something Remus was sure to love. He pointed at the screen randomly while Virgil was scrolling through the movies. Virgil paused, and Remus shook his head. Virgil went back one, landing on "Lilo and Stitch". Remus looked behind him with a pleading pout.

"Okay, okay, no need to pout. I'll play it!" he laughed, and Remus looked back towards the screen as Virgil played it.

They'd talk about this later, work out what Remus's headspace range was, who'd care for him when he regressed. But all of that was for later. For now, they were going to watch a simple childrens movie and hopefully get to know Little Remus.

Now that the six of them were all confirmed regressors, you'd think that that'd be the end of the story. But there was definitely more to come.

Thing would change for them real soon, a lot more then they could ever predict.

-- A/N: Spooky foreshadowing ending in an agere story? Yeah. this is my first time ever writing little!remus and idk how I did? lmk please?? I hope y’all liked it, sorry this took forever million years to do. But now that I finally got here, I hope I can start writing quicker and moving the story along at a faster pace, y’know? Please send me asks about this chapter, if you want! I appreciate feedback sm!

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mobius-prime · 4 years ago

Text

253. Sonic the Hedgehog #184

Chaos Angel

Writer: Ian Flynn Pencils: Tracy Yardley! Colors: Jason Jensen

As Enerjak and Super Sonic take off to begin their epic duel for the fate of the world, their clash causes an explosive beam of light to shine so brightly it's seen as far away as Albion (which, if you'll recall, is located somewhere around the area of modern-day England, whereas we're currently closer to New York), which Nicole barely raises the New Mobotropolis shield in time to deflect. Super Sonic snaps Enerjak's staff, and when Enerjak blasts him with a wave of deadly energy in response, he casually reminds him that in his Super form, he's totally invulnerable, making this essentially a stalemate battle between two living gods. Below, Julie-Su is shocked that Sonic survived the blast, but Locke is grumpy and hopeless, saying again that Sonic should have let him kill Enerjak with the Brotherhood's weapon while they had the chance.

It's amazing how clueless and callous Locke is here. I mean, I expected nothing more from him, really, especially given that he has yet to reach the point of redemption that he did in the M25YL timeline on his deathbed, but still, he doesn't even seem to show a single ounce of remorse that this is what his son has become. As the battle rages on, the Destructix watch from somewhere else on the island, and decide they definitely don't want to get caught up in it (which, really, I can't blame them).

Scourge reveals his supercharged warp ring, with enough energy to warp them to another zone entirely, and when Fiona expresses some doubt about leaving Mobius he merely reminds her that the ongoing battle is a battle for the fate of the world, and it's better for them to take their chances elsewhere. She decides to tag along for some "fun," which is after all the reason she left Sonic for Scourge, while Super Sonic continues to try to beat some sense into Enerjak above. He manages to get a yell of "crunch time" from him, giving him hope that his plan to bring Knuckles back is working, but it's not fast enough, making him worry. Julie-Su and Archimedes teleport to the Master Emerald's shrine, which has mysteriously been transported from the Chaos Chamber to become a small island floating in its own right at the edge of Angel Island (it's literally not explained at all how this happened, but I'm assuming it's Ian's creative license to once again make the world of the comics conform to that of the games a little more). They confront Finitevus, who merely states that even if he wanted to stop this, he couldn't by now, as the hex he put on the Master Emerald totally enslaved Knuckles' mind when he tried to tap into its power. He's uncertain about why the hex didn't affect Sonic when he transformed, but is mostly unconcerned, as his plans are proceeding regardless.

Finitevus, I don't think you understand one bit what actual heroes are like. Julie-Su and Archimedes immediately start arguing over which one of them will die in order to bring Knuckles back, with a baffled Finitevus looking on. Locke then rounds the corner, having arrived unseen, and announces that he, in fact, will sacrifice himself, finally regretting what he has brought on Knuckles with his actions in trying to protect him from the devastated future he foresaw. Finitevus, enraged, leaps forward to attack the three of them in an attempt to stop them, but Archimedes grabs onto him and poofs him away, leaving Julie-Su and Locke momentarily alone. Locke sadly looks down at Julie-Su, and explains that for all their extreme methods, in the end the Brotherhood really did love every single member, and only ever wanted the best for Knuckles. Julie-Su begins to cry as Locke takes his place atop the emerald, and begins reciting Tikal's prayer one last time.

Okay, I'm just gonna say it. As much as I genuinely liked Locke's deathbed scene in M25YL, I think this is a much better version of his death, narratively. It's also ten times more heartbreaking. The last time Knuckles ever spoke to his father, Locke hit him with a thinly-veiled threat to his family's safety, and Knuckles punched the screen and screamed at him in response. And now, without a chance to ever apologize or say goodbye, Locke is gone, having sacrificed his life to save his son. I have never doubted for a moment that Locke truly does love Knuckles and has always done everything with the best of intentions, which is precisely why I always felt he would make a better villain than a hero. The Sonic series, as much as I love it, is sorely lacking in three-dimensional villains, with most being either like Eggman - wanting to conquer the world - or Finitevus - wanting to watch it burn. Locke, as I've gone over before, would have been a fantastic antagonist. I think it very true that the best villains are the ones we can relate to in some way. Loving your child and wanting the best for them is very relatable to many people, and permanently messing up your child because of trying to do the best for them is a very real fear for the majority of parents. And Locke realizing this at the end of his life and then giving up said life for the sole purpose of undoing everything he helped to cause is the logical narrative conclusion of this character arc. Because of this, I think Ian ultimately writes Locke much better than did Kenders, despite Locke being based on Kenders' father (which is why I kind of feel bad even saying this, but eh, I've already made the argument that he should have been a villain, I don't think I can make it much worse from here). And as sad as this is, it just gets worse as Knuckles regains his right mind and returns to the ground, asking Julie-Su where his father is. Julie-Su merely starts sobbing and babbling incoherently about how she couldn't stop him, and just as horrible understanding begins to dawn on Knuckles, Finitevus returns through a warp ring, incensed that Locke stopped his plans after all. He yells that with his luck, Knuckles will even remember his time as Enerjak, to which Knuckles furiously replies that he remembers -

An exit fitting for one such as Finitevus. Julie-Su tentatively says that they should head back down to New Mobotropolis to let everyone know that the day's been saved, but Knuckles curtly cuts him off, refusing and claiming that as the last living Guardian of Angel Island, he's never leaving this island again, and he'll guard the Master Emerald alone for the rest of his life. And thus, we've finally come full circle. Knuckles started out as the lone Guardian of the island with no one else to help him, and now he's become such once again. Come on though, man, for real - your father sacrificed himself so you could have your own life free of the destiny he's forced on you, don't immediately try to isolate yourself!

Anything

Writer: Ian Flynn Pencils: Tracy Yardley! Colors: Stingray Grafik Wurks

Well, there's still one loose end we have yet to tie up - namely, the fate of the Dark Legion. While those who were happy to be free of their cybernetic trappings were transported to Albion, those who regret losing them have remained with Lien-Da, who now seeks the help of a mysterious figure to get her people's way of life back. Her speech is actually quite fascinating, because for basically the first time we actually get to see what a lifelong member of the Legion thinks of their own history, without immediately being made out to be a cackling evildoer. Turns out… their position is kind of reasonable.

I mean, I did just go over why Locke, and thus by extension the Brotherhood, are not really good people. I don't think they're evil - misguided, more like - but it's clear that in the end, extremism was the name of the game on both sides of the technology debate, and if anything both sides have only gotten more extreme over the past several hundred years. Ultimately, while the Dark Legion has absolutely employed some really messed up methods in their pursuit of their goals, their actual ideology is not unreasonable at all. In the end, they really were just a group of people who didn't want to tacitly accept being thrown back to the stone age by their government, and rebelled when said government - a literal theocracy, if you'll recall - created an entire goddamn task force operating outside of the normal legal system to try to drag them all into a world without technology regardless. I mean, literally, think about it right now - if your government, after a bad incident with one scientist going nuts and trying to seize power, in response decided to ban all technology and mandate that everyone had to regress back to a medieval lifestyle, how many of you reading this, right now, would just accept it and give everything up? And how many more of you would say "No way in hell is this okay" and join a revolution? Use technology in secret, rebel, fight for your right to live life as a modern human being with modern comforts? The Legion was twisted over time into a force that fought for all the wrong reasons, looking for power instead of freedom, but in the end, they were more wronged than anyone else in this whole debate, and absolutely had a right to be angry over the way they were mistreated.

Lien-Da, treacherous nature aside, clearly does believe in her people's way of life, and so she crafts a deal with her mysterious contact - if he makes her the Grandmaster of the Legion, a title which she feels she deserves after watching her late brother and the decrepit Dimitri take the reins before her, she'll join his cause and have her soldiers act as his new ground forces since his were destroyed by Enerjak. Gee, I wonder who this mysterious figure could be? Ah, what the hell am I acting all coy for, it's Eggman, naturally, and he's more than happy to accept this deal. However, to Lien-Da's incredulous disappointment, the position of Grandmaster has already been filled - by none other than Dimitri! Yeah, Eggman's given him some upgrades, turning his dreadlocks into bizarre tentacle-like appendages sticking out from his head bubble. Aw, yeah, Eggman, no need to give him a proper body or anything like that, just give him hair tentacles, it'll be fiiine!

#nala reads archie sonic preboot #archie sonic #archie sonic preboot #sonic the hedgehog #sth 184 #writer: ian flynn #pencils: tracy yardley #colors: jason jensen #colors: aimee r ray #colors: joshua d ray

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petitrangement · 7 years ago

Link

In our first year in Washington, our son disappeared.

Just shy of his 3rd birthday, an engaged, chatty child, full of typical speech — “I love you,” “Where are my Ninja Turtles?” “Let’s get ice cream!” — fell silent. He cried, inconsolably. Didn’t sleep. Wouldn’t make eye contact. His only word was “juice.”

I had just started a job as The Wall Street Journal’s national affairs reporter. My wife, Cornelia, a former journalist, was home with him — a new story every day, a new horror. He could barely use a sippy cup, though he’d long ago graduated to a big-boy cup. He wove about like someone walking with his eyes shut. “It doesn’t make sense,” I’d say at night. “You don’t grow backward.” Had he been injured somehow when he was out of our sight, banged his head, swallowed something poisonous? It was like searching for clues to a kidnapping.

After visits to several doctors, we first heard the word “autism.” Later, it would be fine-tuned to “regressive autism,” now affecting roughly a third of children with the disorder. Unlike the kids born with it, this group seems typical until somewhere between 18 and 36 months — then they vanish. Some never get their speech back. Families stop watching those early videos, their child waving to the camera. Too painful. That child’s gone.

In the year since his diagnosis, Owen’s only activity with his brother, Walt, is something they did before the autism struck: watching Disney movies. “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin” — it was a boom time for Disney — and also the old classics: “Dumbo,” “Fantasia,” “Pinocchio,” “Bambi.” They watch on a television bracketed to the wall in a high corner of our smallish bedroom in Georgetown. It is hard to know all the things going through the mind of our 6-year-old, Walt, about how his little brother, now nearly 4, is changing. They pile up pillows on our bed and sit close, Walt often with his arm around Owen’s shoulders, trying to hold him — and the shifting world — in place.

Then Walt slips out to play with friends, and Owen keeps watching. Movie after movie. Certain parts he rewinds and rewatches. Lots of rewinding. But he seems content, focused.

We ask our growing team of developmental specialists, doctors and therapists about it. We were never big fans of plopping our kids in front of Disney videos, but now the question seemed more urgent: Is this good for him? They shrug. Is he relaxed? Yes. Does it seem joyful? Definitely. Keep it limited, they say. But if it does all that for him, there’s no reason to stop it.

So we join him upstairs, all of us, on a cold and rainy Saturday afternoon in November 1994. Owen is already on the bed, oblivious to our arrival, murmuring gibberish. . . . “Juicervose, juicervose.” It is something we’ve been hearing for the past few weeks. Cornelia thinks maybe he wants more juice; but no, he refuses the sippy cup. “The Little Mermaid” is playing as we settle in, propping up pillows. We’ve all seen it at least a dozen times, but it’s at one of the best parts: where Ursula the sea witch, an acerbic diva, sings her song of villainy, “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” to the selfish mermaid, Ariel, setting up the part in which Ursula will turn Ariel into a human, allowing her to seek out the handsome prince, in exchange for her voice.

When the song is over, Owen lifts the remote. Hits rewind.

“Come on, Owen, just let it play!” Walt moans. But Owen goes back just 20 seconds or so, to the song’s next-to-last stanza, with Ursula shouting:

Go ahead — make your choice!

I’m a very busy woman, and I haven’t got all day.

It won’t cost much, just your voice!

He does it again. Stop. Rewind. Play. And one more time. On the fourth pass, Cornelia whispers, “It’s not ‘juice.’ ” I barely hear her. “What?” “It’s not ‘juice.’ It’s ‘just’ . . . ‘just your voice’!”

I grab Owen by the shoulders. “Just your voice! Is that what you’re saying?!”

He looks right at me, our first real eye contact in a year. “Juicervose! Juicervose! Juicervose!”

Walt starts to shout, “Owen’s talking again!” A mermaid lost her voice in a moment of transformation. So did this silent boy. “Juicervose! Juicervose! Juicervose!” Owen keeps saying it, watching us shout and cheer. And then we’re up, all of us, bouncing on the bed. Owen, too, singing it over and over — “Juicervose!” — as Cornelia, tears beginning to fall, whispers softly, “Thank God, he’s in there.”

Roger Ross Williams, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, spent time with Ron Suskind and his son, Owen, who has autism, to show how they learned to communicate using dialogue from Disney movies.

We told his various therapists about what happened. Cornelia and I could think of little else. Owen reached out, if only for a moment, from his shut-in world. We spoke to our child.

The speech therapist tamped down our enthusiasm. Dr. Alan Rosenblatt, our trusted developmental pediatrician, did, too. He explained that echolalia is a common feature in kids like Owen. It’s something babies sometimes do between 6 and 9 months, repeating consonants and vowels as they learn to turn babble into words. It’s also something seen in people with developmental disabilities who can’t speak. Just like what the term suggests, they echo, usually the last word or two of a sentence. “You’re a very smart and pretty girl,” a mother might say to her daughter. “Pretty girl,” the child will respond, an echo. Do those kids know what the words mean, we pressed Rosenblatt. “Usually not,” he said. “They may want to make a connection, which is hopeful,” he added.

“They just repeat the last sound,” I croaked. He nodded. Why, I persisted, in a last stab, would he be rewinding that one part for weeks, maybe longer, and choose that phrase from so many in an 83-minute movie? Rosenblatt shrugged. No way of knowing.

Three weeks after the “juicervose” dance, we are at Walt Disney World. Walt grabs Owen’s hand, and off they go down Main Street, U.S.A. There are attractions in Fantasyland — the Mad Tea Party, Snow White’s Scary Adventures, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride — that echo movies they both love. The boys sit in the flying galleon on Peter Pan’s Flight as it swirls and dips over landscapes and figures from Never Land, the Lost Boys frolicking in their lair, Wendy walking the plank, Peter Pan crossing swords with Captain Hook. They look like any other pair of brothers, and in the trick of this light, they are.

Each time Cornelia and I feel that, we catch ourselves. After the “juicervose” euphoria and then the cold water poured on us by doctors, we try to make sure we aren’t just seeing what we want to see.

But by midafternoon, it’s clear that Owen isn’t self-talking in the streams of gibberish or flapping his hands as he usually does. Some, but not much. He seems calm and focused — following the group, making eye contact — and oddly settled, with a slight smile, eyes alight, just as he is while watching the movies on our bed. Owen seems at home here, as though his identity, or however much of it has formed, is somehow tied to this place.

On the way out of Magic Kingdom, when Walt spots the Sword in the Stone near the carousel, we can’t help indulging in fantasy. A Disney actor dressed as Merlin is there, reciting dialogue — “Let the boy try.” As we approach the anvil, someone flips a hidden switch that loosens the sword. Walt pulls it out as Merlin cries, “You, my boy, are our king!”

Then both of them turn to Owen. “You can do it, Owie,” Walt whispers. “I know you can.” Owen looks evenly at his brother and Merlin, and then steps to the anvil and lifts the sword true. Did he understand what Walt was saying? Did he just imitate what he saw his brother do? What the hell difference did it make? Today, in the sunlight, he’s the hero of his imagination.

It’s Walt’s 9th birthday, September 1997, in our new house near Chevy Chase Circle. Owen is 6½. After roughhousing with buddies in the backyard at the end of his party, Walt gets a little weepy. He’s already a tough, independent kid, often the case with siblings of disabled kids. But he can get a little sad on his birthdays. As Cornelia and I return to the kitchen, Owen walks in right behind us.

He looks intently at us, one, then the other. “Walter doesn’t want to grow up,” he says evenly, “like Mowgli or Peter Pan.”

We nod, dumbly, looking down at him. He nods back and then vanishes into some private reverie.

It’s as if a thunderbolt just passed through the kitchen. A full sentence, and not just an “I want this” or “Give me that.” No, a complex sentence, the likes of which he’d not uttered in four years. Actually, ever.

We don’t say anything at first and then don’t stop talking for the next four hours, peeling apart, layer by layer, what just happened. Beyond the language, it’s interpretive thinking that he’s not supposed to be able to do: that someone crying on his birthday may not want to grow up. Not only would such an insight be improbable for a typical 6-year-old; it was an elegant connection that Cornelia and I overlooked.

It’s as if Owen had let us in, just for an instant, to glimpse a mysterious grid growing inside him, a matrix on which he affixed items he saw each day that we might not even notice. And then he carefully aligned it to another one, standing parallel: The world of Disney.

After dinner is over and the boys retreat upstairs to their attic lair, Cornelia starts to think about what to do now. It’s like he peeked out from some vast underground and then vanished. He’s done this before, but never quite like this. “How on earth,” she says almost to herself, “do you get back in there?”

I feel she’s asking me. She has been the one lifting the burden each day, driving him to therapists and schools, rocking him to sleep as he thrashes at 3 a.m. I’m the one who tells stories, does voices, wears a propeller hat. Her look says, “Find a way.”

Soon I’m tiptoeing up the carpeted stairs. Owen’s sitting on his bed, flipping through a Disney book; he can’t read, of course, but he likes to look at the pictures. The mission is to reach around the banister into his closet and grab his puppet of Iago, the parrot from “Aladdin” and one of his favorite characters. He has been doing lots of Iago echolalia, easy to identify because the character is voiced by Gilbert Gottfried, who talks like a busted Cuisinart. Once Iago’s in hand, I gently pull the bedspread from the foot of Owen’s bed onto the floor. He doesn’t look up. It takes four minutes for Iago and me to make it safely under the bedspread.

Now crawl, snail-slow, along the side of the bed to its midpoint. Fine.

I freeze here for a minute, trying to figure out my opening line; four or five sentences dance about, auditioning.

Then, a thought: Be Iago. What would Iago say? I push the puppet up from the covers. “So, Owen, how ya doin’?” I say, doing my best Gilbert Gottfried. “I mean, how does it feel to be you?!” I can see him turn toward Iago. It’s as if he is bumping into an old friend. “I’m not happy. I don’t have friends. I can’t understand what people say.” I have not heard this voice, natural and easy, with the traditional rhythm of common speech, since he was 2. I’m talking to my son for the first time in five years. Or Iago is. Stay in character. “So, Owen, when did yoooou and I become such good friends?”

“When I started watching ‘Aladdin’ all the time. You made me laugh so much. You’re so funny.”

My mind is racing — find a snatch of dialogue, anything. One scene I’ve seen him watch and rewind is when Iago tells the villainous vizier Jafar how he should become sultan.

Back as Iago: “Funny? O.K., Owen, like when I say . . . um. . . . So, so, you marry the princess and you become the chump husband.” Owen makes a gravelly sound, like someone trying to clear his throat or find a lower tone: “I loooove the way your fowl little mind works.” It’s a Jafar line, in Jafar’s voice — a bit higher-pitched, of course, but all there, the faintly British accent, the sinister tone.

I’m an evil parrot talking to a Disney villain, and he’s talking back. Then, I hear a laugh, a joyful little laugh that I have not heard in many years.

A week after the Iago breakthrough, we decide to try an experiment. Owen usually picks the animated movie whenever we gather in front of the 26-inch Magnavox in the basement. On this night, we pick it for him: “The Jungle Book.” It’s a movie that the boys have long loved and one that Cornelia and I remember from our childhood: Disney’s 1967 rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s tales of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in the jungles of India, schooled by Baloo, the obstreperous bear, and Bagheera, the protective black panther.

We watch the movie until, a few minutes along, we get to its signature song, “The Bare Necessities.” We turn down the sound, and in my best attempt at the voice and inflection of Phil Harris, who voices the bear, I say: " ‘Look, now, it’s like this, little britches. All you’ve got to do is. . . . ' ”

Then we all sing, trying to get the words right:

Look for the bare necessities,

The simple bare necessities. . . .

When you look under the rocks and plants

And take a glance at the fancy ants, and maybe

try a few.

Just as Baloo looks at Mowgli, I look at Owen; he looks squarely back at me, and then it happens. Right on cue, he says, " ‘You eat ants?’ ” That’s Mowgli’s line; he speaks it as Mowgli, almost like a tape recording.

I’m poised with Baloo’s next line: " ‘Ha-ha, you better believe it! And you’re gonna love the way they tickle.’ ”

A few minutes later, when King Louie, the crazy orangutan, voiced by the jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Prima, sings to Mowgli about becoming a man, Walt’s ready. " ‘Teach me the secret of man’s red fire,’ ” he says, pulling on his ear, waiting for the whispered secret from the boy. Owen recoils, just as Mowgli does in the movie, and says, " ‘I don’t know how to make fire.’ ” Cornelia catches my eye; I shake my head. The inflection and ease of speech are things he can’t otherwise muster. It’s almost as though there’s no autism. Mimicry is one thing. This isn’t that. The movements, the tone, the emotions seem utterly authentic, like method acting.

When Owen was 3, his comprehension of spoken words collapsed. That’s clear from every test. But now it seems that as he watched each Disney movie again and again, he was collecting and logging sounds and rhythms, multitrack. Speech, of course, has its own subtle musicality; most of us, focusing on the words and their meanings, don’t hear it. But that’s all he heard for years, words as intonation and cadence, their meanings inscrutable. It was like someone memorizing an Akira Kurosawa movie without knowing Japanese. Then it seems he was slowly learning Japanese — or, rather, spoken English — by using the exaggerated facial expressions of the animated characters, the situations they were in, the way they interacted to help define all those mysterious sounds. That’s what we start to assume; after all, that’s the way babies learn to speak. But this is slightly different because of the way he committed these vast swaths of source material, dozens of Disney movies, to memory. These are stored sounds we can now help him contextualize, with jumping, twirling, sweating, joyous expression, as we just managed with “The Jungle Book.”

So begin the basement sessions. During daylight, we go about our lives. Walt rides his bike to school each morning, back home each afternoon. Cornelia manages the house, the bills, the overloaded schedules of the kids. I am editing and writing for The Journal, putting on my suit and subwaying to the bureau.

No one knows we’re all living double lives. At night, we become animated characters.

By the fall of 1999, the start of Owen’s third year at the Lab School of Washington, a private school for kids with learning disabilities, we see his skills improving, his rudimentary reading, his new ability to do simple math. But the progress is uneven and unsteady, as is the building of social connections with potential friends. It’s a struggle for him to keep up, the school warns us darkly, because his mind so often races through the parallel universe of movies.

We tell them what we’ve found: The key is to harness it. We discovered that he learned to read using the slowly scrolling credits at the end of movies. He’d hit pause and decode — animators, art directors, best boys, long-dead voice actors — desperate to know who was behind the flickering screen of light. The school rose to the challenge, up to a point, letting him cast and star in a play of “Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby” — with Owen reciting every line from our bootleg copy of “Song of the South.”

But by his fifth year at Lab, we sense trouble has arrived. Owen is making progress, but the other kids, with lighter burdens, are moving faster. Sally Smith, the school’s director, says it just isn’t working out for Owen at Lab. What we both know is that the school has changed. Each year, I help Smith with a gala for Learning-Disabled Achievers, a glittering night in Washington honoring people like Tom Cruise and David Boies, most of them with more manageable issues like dyslexia. The students now bend more toward younger versions of those glittering awardees rather than the disabled son whom Smith founded her school in 1967 to help.

I make my case: Owen is making progress in his own fashion, improving by the day. “He’s turning these movies into tools that, more and more, he’s using to make sense of the wider world,” I tell her.

She looks at me sympathetically but doesn’t budge. “Many of these kids are just too hard to teach,” she says, then pauses. “Look, not picking up social cues is just too great a burden. They can’t engage with teachers or peers with enough ease, enough capacity, to push themselves forward.”

I rise from my chair. “You started this school so your son, who’d been discarded, would have a place to go,” I say, putting on my coat. Her son, Gary, now well into adulthood, has significant challenges, much like Owen. “Do you think he’d be accepted here today?”

Those are fighting words. I can’t help it. I am thinking how difficult this is going to be for Owen. To her credit, Smith doesn’t rise to battle.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “Times change. We’re serving a need and serving it well. Just not anymore for someone like Owen.”

We call the school he was at six years before, Ivymount, which is for needier and more disabled kids, and tell the administrators that Owen will not be moving up with his class to the middle school at Lab. They’re sympathetic and say they will gladly take him back. We’re worried that he’ll lose some of the gains he has made being in class with kids who have milder challenges, but we don’t have much of a choice.

We tell Owen in early May 2002, a month before he will leave his school. We go out to dinner and say he’ll be going back to Ivymount. He has made a few friends at Lab. They do things together, are starting to form little rituals. Quite a lot about friendship, after all, is ritual. “It’ll be great, Owie,” Walt says, putting his arm around Owen’s shoulder. “I’m sure some of your old friends at Ivymount will still be there.”

Owen gets this look where he raises his eyebrows and presses his face into the widest of smiles. He calls it “happy face.” He does it when he’s worried he might cry.

Back at Ivymount in the fall, Owen, now 11, is not being challenged academically or socially. Cornelia’s response is to crank up his programming. She starts him in piano lessons with an Ivymount instructor who specializes in teaching special-needs kids. There are still the rounds of therapist visits and any after-school activity we can find. Not many playdates, though.

Owen doesn’t seem to mind. All he wants are sketch pads and pencils. Markers, too. He goes through a pad in a few days and wants another. O.K., back to the CVS. A few more days, he needs another one. I look around for what are now two missing pads. They’re nowhere. Could he have hidden them?

We’ve been observing him closely since the ouster from Lab. We know he was bruised, but he doesn’t have enough expressive speech to explain his feelings. So we watch, collecting clues, like spies in our own home. He’s distracted. He’s watching lots of videos. The school reports that he’s doing lots of “silly,” the word we use for self-stimulatory behavior like flapping hands.

One Saturday afternoon, while Cornelia and Walt are running errands, I see Owen padding across the kitchen’s Mexican tile floor on his way to the basement with pad, pencils and one of his large animation books in hand. I wait a minute before I tiptoe behind him, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. He’s on the rug, kneeling but hunched forward, flipping furiously through the book; as I edge closer, I see it contains artwork from “Learn to Draw Disney’s The Little Mermaid.”

Standing silently over him, I can see he’s stopping at pictures of Sebastian, the wise crab who watches over the heroine, Ariel. There are lots of Sebastians: pencil sketches from when the animators were developing the character, full-color renderings of key scenes from the movie. That is where he stops, at a slide of Sebastian with a fearful look, mouth open and eyes wide.

The sketchbook flies open, the black pencil in hand. He looks from the picture to his pad, picture, pad, picture, pad. And then the tightly gripped pencil begins to move, a lead-lined crawl. Most kids, most anyone, would begin with the face — where we all tend to look first — but he starts on the edge, with the crab leg, then the claw, which take shape in a single line. I think of those old-style drafting machines with two pencils poised above two pads, the pencils connected to a mechanical apparatus, a crosshatch, so that moving one would create the same motion, the same precise line, with the other. At the end, you’d have two identical drawings, side by side.

But here’s the crazy part: Every part of him starts moving except that rock-steady hand. His whole body begins twisting and flinching, moving as much as you can move while kneeling, with his free arm bending in the angle of Sebastian’s left claw. Five minutes later, when he gets to the face, I look up and see a reflection of Owen’s face, me behind him, in the darkened screen of the TV in front of us. The look on the crab’s face in the book is replicated in my son’s reflection on the TV, where, of course, we’ve watched this scene — of Sebastian watching Ariel lose her voice — so many times.

And then it’s over, like a passing storm. He drops the pencil, rears back, turns his head, leaps up and bounds off.

It freaks me out.

He can’t write his name legibly. But here is a rendering of a Disney character that might have easily appeared in any one of 20 animation books in his room.

I squat down and begin flipping. It’s one character after another — the Mad Hatter next to Rafiki, and then Lumiere, the candelabra from “Beauty and the Beast,” and then Jiminy Cricket. The expressions are all so vivid, mostly fearful. Dozens of them, page after page.

I settle in cross-legged on the carpet to examine the pages. What do the drawings mean? Are the faces of these characters a reflection of hidden, repressed feelings? Does he race through the books looking for an expression that matches the way he feels and then literally draw that emotion to the surface?

Could be a half-hour I’m sitting, maybe longer. I’m inside him, or so I imagine, running my fingers along the slight indentations of carbon — a smiling mouth of Baloo, a weeping dwarf, a soaring crow from “Dumbo” — to try to touch him, his tears and smiles and moments of sudden flight. This is the crushing pain of autism. Of not being able to know your own child, to share love and laughter with him, to comfort him, to answer his questions. Cornelia spends time in here, in his head — this child she carried — whispering to him. Now I’m in here, too.

Time passes, pages turn. And then I see writing. On the next to last page of the sketchbook, there’s something. It’s his usual scrawl, the letters barely legible: “I Am the Protekter of Sidekicks.”

I flip to the last page. In the chicken scratch of a kindergartner is a single sentence: “No Sidekick Gets Left Behind.”

We need the right moment to respond. Every second we’re with Owen in the coming days, Cornelia and I look for our opening — a moment when he’s alone, or settled, or upbeat or a bit more talkative than usual.

Then the stars align. He’s watching “Beauty and the Beast” and wants us all to join him. Soon we’re together in the basement, watching the familiar opening, when the handsome prince spurns an old, ugly woman on a forbidding night, only to have her transform into a beautiful enchantress, who turns him into a hideous beast; a spell that can be broken only if he can “learn to love another and earn her love in return.”

As the credits roll, we do a few voices — I say, “Sacre bleu, invaders!” as Lumiere (Jerry Orbach, doing a stagy French accent). Cornelia throws in Mrs. Potts (Angela Lansbury, upper-crust British): “He’s finally learned to love.” Owen rises to each with a burst of follow-up lines. We respond in character. Nothing special. Just your average American family speaking in Disney dialogue.

Both characters are vividly drawn in his sketchbook. “They’re a great pair of . . . sidekicks,” Cornelia says. We’ve never used the word with him in conversation. Owen snaps to. “I love Mrs. Potts and Lumiere,” he says.

“What is a sidekick?” Cornelia asks him.

“A sidekick helps the hero fulfill his destiny,” he chirps. Rolls right off his tongue. A classical, elegant definition.

“Do you feel like a sidekick, Owie?” Cornelia asks him softly. Their eyes are aligned, just the two of them now, looking into each other, until he suddenly breaks into “happy face.”

“I am one!” he says. His voice is high and cheery, no sign of a quaver. “I am a sidekick.” The words come out flat, without affectation. But he compensates, giving them expression by nodding after every two syllables.

“And no . . . sidekick . . . gets left . . . behind.”

There’s no doubt, now, that he sees what we see: that kids of all kinds, including his classmates at Lab School, are moving on, while he’s left behind. The sidekicks have emerged, sketch by sketch, in the difficult months since his ejection from Lab. His response has been to embrace it, the pain of it, and be a protector of the discarded. He starts giving sidekick identities to his classmates at Ivymount, so many of whom are heavily burdened — some with physical infirmities, and plenty of autistic kids with little speech. But they have qualities that he’s identifying — this one was loyal, that one gentle, another one silly in some lighthearted way that makes him laugh.

It’s often the supporting players in Disney fables who are more varied and vivid. Even in the earliest Disney movies, the first sidekicks — Goofy, Pluto and then Donald Duck — often carried confusions, frailties, foolishness, pride, vanity and hard-won, often reluctantly learned, insights. The spectrum of complex human emotions is housed with the sidekicks.

Owen and I walk gingerly down the icy steps of a side entrance to Dan Griffin’s basement office in Takoma Park, Md. It’s a particularly cold and stormy afternoon in December 2005, the week before Christmas. Griffin welcomes us with hugs, as always, and we settle into our usual chairs.

Owen started seeing the psychologist last year, when he was 13. More than any other therapist, Griffin took to the “Disney therapy,” or more broadly, what might be called “affinity therapy,” that Cornelia and I, with Walt’s assistance, have been conducting for years in our home, and even more so recently. After Owen spent two years at Ivymount, Cornelia started home-schooling him last year, using Disney scripts as a bridge to teach him the basics of reading and math that he’ll need to get into a high school for special-needs kids in Maryland. She regularly guides Griffin, who each week tries to use the scripts to teach Owen social and life skills as well.

Like many other therapists we’d seen, Griffin was initially a little concerned about Owen’s intense affinity for Disney movies — but unlike the others, he became intrigued. In fact, he had come up with an ingenious plan for Owen to protect and advise a sidekick. We had settled on Zazu, the proud but naïve hornbill charged with protecting a young Simba in “The Lion King.” Owen said, “Zazu has a lot to learn.”

Hence:

Educating Zazu

I, Owen Harry Suskind, agree to undertake the challenging but critical task of providing stimulating educational experiences for my good friend Zazu. This project will take a good deal of work and preparation, but should be a lot of fun and also immensely beneficial to Zazu. I agree to do this for the academic year of 2005–6.

Areas of Zazu’s learning program shall include but will not be limited to:

1. Life in the world

2. How to concentrate

3. Following directions

4. Health

5. Asking questions

6. Making friends

7. Fun

8. Loving people

9. Science

10. Helping others

Signed,

Owen Suskind

We start today’s therapy session in December with talk of Zazu and his progress. The focus is on contract item No. 6: Making friends.

Owen doesn’t have friends, other than kids he encounters through carefully structured activities. He sees the boy next door, Nathan, the “typical” child of our close friends, one evening a week at our house for an art class. Their meetings are facilitated by a 20-something media-arts guy from the Lab School, a large, happy Wisconsinite who helps the boys make a short animated flip book. In a social-skills group run by his psychiatrist, C. T. Gordon, Owen also sees Brian and Robert, two autism-spectrum boys who are also really into movies.

But when advising Zazu, Owen suddenly seems full of advice about how to make friends.

“To make a friend, you have to be a friend,” he says, picking up a line that is used at Walt’s summer camp; it’s something Cornelia has said to him a few times but has never heard him repeat.

“And you need to be interested in what they’re interested in,” Owen adds. “And then they can be interested in what you’re interested in.”

Owen seems to infuse the advice with feeling. Instead of just repeating these chestnuts about social skills, he seems to be really owning them. Griffin — whom Owen has dubbed Rafiki, after the wise baboon in “The Lion King” — keeps up the momentum by mentioning the “second-question rule” for keeping a conversation going, asking narrower questions: “When did you do that? Who else was with you? How did that feel?” We practice a few of those, all three of us.

Owen mentions how Zazu has trouble with contract item No. 8 — loving people — because he’s “ashamed about how he failed Simba,” who slipped away from the hornbill’s watchful gaze and got into trouble — trouble that eventually led to his father’s death.

Griffin takes the risk of asking Owen to elaborate about the fairly complex dynamic between Zazu and Simba; when you fail to meet your own expectations and disappoint someone you care about, what does that feel like? As Owen is thinking, I mouth “P-h-i-l” to Griffin. He knows immediately which scene I’m thinking of and asks Owen if this is what happens to Phil in “Hercules.”

Owen starts to laugh. “Can I do it?”

Before we can nod, Owen’s off and running, doing a scene in which Phil is trying to tell a crowd of doubters about Hercules’s potential. We watch as Owen seems to access the emotions of Phil, Hercules and the three other characters in that scene. He ends with a plea from Hercules: “How am I supposed to prove myself a hero if nobody will give me a chance?”

As the session ends, Griffin pulls me aside. “Autistic kids like Owen are not supposed to do that,” he says. “This is getting weird in a very good way.”

Since Owen turned 3, the daunting, never-enough demands of autism have remained inelastic, bottomless. Not knowing what really works, or helps, makes identifying the inessentials all but impossible. You try everything. And we have: from changing his diet to gluten-free to auditory processing, when he spends hours doing high-speed computer tests while different noises ring in his ears. Lots of families run themselves into bankruptcy. We’ve spent about $90,000 a year on Owen. Actually, that’s not so much higher than the norm — autism organizations estimate that it costs about $60,000 a year to provide adequate educational, medical and therapeutic services to an autistic child. About half of that can go to school tuitions, often with some of the money coming from public funding.

And we are just one family. There are an estimated two million people with autism-spectrum disorders in the United States, more than 500,000 of whom are children. Beneath the oft-cited incidence rate of one in 88 children is a more startling one. Because of the five-to-one prevalence of the disorder in boys over girls, one in every 54 boys is affected, a number with few epidemiological precedents. Down syndrome, by comparison, occurs in one of every 691 children.

What we’re hoping to get our arms around one night in 2010, just before Owen is to graduate from high school, is some sense of what the future — the long future — might look like.

There’s a knock on our door, and Team Owen begins to arrive. Griffin, the psychologist, is excited to see Dr. Lance Clawson, the psychiatrist; they’ve never met, though they’ve exchanged reports on Owen and other patients they share. Suzie Blattner, an education specialist, has been tutoring Owen since he was 3, right around the time Bill Stixrud, his neuropsychological testing specialist, first tested him. That’s 15 years. These people have helped Cornelia and me parent our son. It’s a humbling thought, and one that prompts a blurring of lines between hired professional and friend.

The immediate issue is what comes next, how the autistic world and the “neurotypical” world might be fitted together for Owen. The discussion moves swiftly, between possible plans to set up a group house to college programs. There’s a school Cornelia has heard about called Riverview on Cape Cod that has a program for high-school- and college-age kids on the autism spectrum. Everyone knows the school — it has a national reputation and costs about $65,000 a year — but, Clawson warns, sometimes kids return home from these kinds of programs and still end up “living in the basement.”

I can see Cornelia’s face fall any time basements are mentioned. The image of Owen watching videos in the basement at 50 is a waking nightmare. I’m with her on that.

But over the hour and into the next, Griffin talks more and more about Owen’s progress with the Disney therapy, as we’ve come to call it. Of course everyone knows of his affinity for these movies, as it has been a factor in the work of every one of them. For the first time, though, we can hear them discuss, professional to professional, what’s been going on in Griffin’s office.

It’s almost as though Cornelia and I are not there. The questions fly fast; some responses are in professional jargon. You can practically hear the whir of collected consciousness — a group of diverse experts, with 100 years of experience with autism-spectrum-disorder patients among them.

“It’s not so much how he’s used the movies to help with academics,” Blattner says. “It’s how he’s used them to guide emotional growth, which, of course, is the bigger and more complex challenge.”

Everyone nods to that.

Griffin cites some surprising recent breakthroughs. Owen has been whispering under his breath to sidekicks for years, having them guide him as he faces challenges. He is developing a version of “inner speech,” something that typical people develop as children to “think through” behavior and plan actions, the core cognitive processes of executive function, which are thought to be deficient in autistic people. Lately, Owen has let us in on it. At our prompting, he tells us how various sidekicks would solve his problems, quell his fears. He does it in the characters’ voices, seeming to channel insights that are otherwise inaccessible to him. Griffin tells the group how he has recently channeled Rafiki’s voice on why change is so hard and how we manage it, and Jiminy Cricket’s on the meaning of conscience and how to converse with that “voice in your head.”

Last week, Griffin recalls, he asked Merlin how he would advise a boy like Owen who was concerned with high school’s ending and what would come next. “So, as Merlin, he says: ‘Listen, boy, whistle the graduation song a little bit every day. By the time the big day comes, you’ll be fine.’ ”

Owen’s chosen affinity clearly opened a window to myth, fable and legend that Disney lifted and retooled, just as the Grimm Brothers did, from a vast repository of folklore. Countless cultures have told versions of “Beauty and the Beast,” which dates back 2,000 years to the Latin “Cupid and Psyche” and certainly beyond that. These are stories human beings have always told themselves to make their way in the world.

But what draws kids like Owen to these movies is something even more elemental. Walt Disney told his early animators that the characters and the scenes should be so vivid and clear that they could be understood with the sound turned off. Inadvertently, this creates a dream portal for those who struggle with auditory processing, especially, in recent decades, when the films can be rewound and replayed many times.

The latest research that Cornelia and I came across seems to show that a feature of autism is a lack of traditional habituation, or the way we become used to things. Typically, people sort various inputs, keep or discard them and then store those they keep. Our brains thus become accustomed to the familiar. After the third viewing of a good movie, or a 10th viewing of a real favorite, you’ve had your fill. Many autistic people, though, can watch that favorite a hundred times and seemingly feel the same sensations as the first time. While they are soothed by the repetition, they may also be looking for new details and patterns in each viewing, so-called hypersystemizing, a theory that asserts that the repetitive urge underlies special abilities for some of those on the spectrum.

Disney provided raw material, publicly available and ubiquitous, that Owen, with our help, built into a language and a tool kit. I’m sure, with enough creativity and energy, this can be done with any number of interests and disciplines. For some kids, their affinity is for train schedules; for others, it’s maps. While our household may not be typical, with a pair of writerly parents and a fixation on stories — all of which may have accentuated and amplified Owen’s native inclinations — we have no doubt that he shares a basic neurological architecture with people on the autism spectrum everywhere.

The challenge is how to make our example useful to other families and other kids, whatever their burning interest. That’s what Team Owen seems to be talking about. How does this work? Is there a methodology? Can it be translated from anecdote to analysis and be helpful to others in need?

Owen, now 20, is opening the microwave in the galley kitchen when we arrive at Riverview on Cape Cod one day in April 2012. “Should I put in the Orville’s?” he calls to the dorm counselor out in the suite, gets the O.K. and then emerges to help us lay out cups, juice and M&Ms on a table in the TV lounge. The students trickle in.

It’s the Sunday-night meeting of Disney Club. Owen decided to start the group not long after he arrived at Riverview eight months ago. It has been a fine first year so far in their college program: He’s getting a mix of academic and social challenges, has made one good friend and is building independence.

Starting Disney Club has been a highlight; he has never been a member of a club, never mind the president of one. About a dozen students come to Owen’s dorm each week, settle in to eat popcorn, chat a bit and watch their favorites. A few times he described club meetings to us, and we tried to suggest activities over the phone. Then a few weeks ago, he asked if we could come out as Disney Club’s parent advisers.

We always knew there were other autism-spectrum kids who focused intently on Disney — we’d met several, after all, over the years. But by starting this club, Owen has drawn together a roomful of them.

Tonight’s selection is “Dumbo,” a fertile tale of self-recognition and emergence. After we watch a bit of the movie, we pause it and talk about how the thing that makes the little elephant a pariah, his huge ears, ultimately allows him to soar. I ask each of them about their “hidden ears,” the thing “that makes them different — maybe even an outcast — that they’ve discovered is a great strength.”

The room gets quiet. It’s clear that many of these students have rarely, if ever, had their passion for Disney treated as something serious and meaningful.

One young woman talks about how her gentle nature, something that leaves her vulnerable, is a great strength in how she handles rescue dogs. Another mentions “my brain, because it can take me on adventures of imagination.”

A young man, speaking in a very routinized way with speech patterns that closely match the “Rain Man” characterization of autism, asks me the date of my birth. I tell him, and his eyes flicker. “That was a Friday.”

When I ask the group which Disney character they most identify with, the same student, now enlivened, says Pinocchio and eventually explains, “I feel like a wooden boy, and I’ve always dreamed of feeling what real boys feel.” The dorm counselor, who told me ahead of time that this student has disciplinary issues and an unreachable emotional core, then compliments him — “That was beautiful,” she says — and looks at me with astonishment. I shrug. He’d already bonded in a soul-searching way with his character. I just asked him which one.

It goes on this way for an hour. Like a broken dam. The students, many of whom have very modest expressive speech, summon subtle and deeply moving truths.

There’s a reason — a good-enough reason — that each autistic person has embraced a particular interest. Find that reason, and you will find them, hiding in there, and maybe get a glimpse of their underlying capacities. In our experience, we found that showing authentic interest will help them feel dignity and impel them to show you more, complete with maps and navigational tools that may help to guide their development, their growth. Revealed capability, in turn, may lead to a better understanding of what’s possible in the lives of many people who are challenged.

As the Disney Club members now say, it’s about “finding the hidden ears.”

Owen and I are driving to Griffin’s office in the summer of 2012 for a rare visit. Owen hasn’t seen Griffin since Christmas break. As we drive, Owen says, let’s do “that love business.” Lately we’ve been doing this at least once a day.

“O.K., you do Merlin,” I say, which means I can do the young Arthur from Disney’s 1962 “The Sword and the Stone.” Arthur, thankfully, has only one line.

“You know, lad, this love business is a powerful thing,” he says in Merlin’s reedy, old man’s voice.

“Greater than gravity?” I respond as Arthur.

“Well, yes, boy, in its way.” Owen pauses, considering it all, just as the wizard does in this, one of his favorite passages. “Yes, I’d say it’s the greatest force on earth.”

Romantic love. It’s running through him, first and fresh, which is what he tells Griffin as they sit in the office. “I’ve fallen in love with a wonderful, kind, beautiful, soft and gentle girl, who likes the same things I like — animated movies, mostly hand-drawn, and mostly from Disney.”

Griffin is giddy. He wants to know everything about Emily, Owen’s girlfriend. He lays it all out: the tale of how they met at Riverview, how she’s in Disney Club, their first kiss.

For most of us, social interactions don’t feel so much like work. We engage instinctively, with sensations and often satisfactions freely harvested in the search itself. For Owen, much of that remains hard work. Despite his often saying to Griffin that his aim is to be popular — a catchall for the joys of connecting with other people — that goal, largely theoretical, has been like watery fuel in his sputtering engine.

Now, it’s high-octane. That’s what a first kiss can do. The specific therapeutic yield of this awakening is an intense focus, at long last, on social engagement — but at its very highest peak: the mysteries of how two people can be like one.

Owen tells Griffin that Aladdin and Jasmine have been helpful. “I need to give her space,” he says of Emily. “That’s what Aladdin learns. Jasmine needs to make the choices for herself. She has to choose, and he needs to know what she wants.”

Griffin presses forward on his chair, his face close to Owen’s. “But how can you know what she wants?”

Owen nods immediately. He’s on it. “I have a song.” He explains it is from a movie called “Quest for Camelot,” an Arthurian romance a few Disney expats worked on for Warner Brothers in 1998. “The song is called ‘Looking Through Your Eyes.’ ” He explains that he listens to the song every morning “to make sure I don’t forget to see the world through her eyes.”

For nearly a decade, Owen has been coming to see Griffin in this basement office, trying to decipher the subtle patterns of how people grow close to one another. That desire to connect has always been there as, the latest research indicates, it may be in all autistic people; their neurological barriers don’t kill the desire, even if it’s deeply submerged. And this is the way he still is — autism isn’t a spell that has been broken; it’s a way of being. That means the world will continue to be inhospitable to him, walking about, as he does, uncertain, missing cues, his heart exposed. But he has desperately wanted to connect, to feel his life, fully, and — using his movies and the improvised tool kit we helped him build — he’s finding his footing. For so many years, it was about us finding him, a search joined by Griffin and others. Now it was about him finding himself.

“Owen, my good friend,” Griffin says, his eyes glistening, “it’s fair to say, you’re on your way.”

Owen stands up, that little curly-haired boy now a man, almost Griffin’s height, and smiles, a knowing smile of self-awareness.

“Thank you, Rafiki,” Owen says to Griffin. “For everything.”

“Is friendship forever?” Owen asks me.

“Yes, Owen, it often is.”

“But not always.”

“No, not always.”

It’s later that night, and we’re driving down Connecticut Avenue after seeing the latest from Disney (and Pixar), “Brave.” I think I understand now, from a deeper place, how Owen, and some of his Disney Club friends, use the movies and why it feels so improbable. Most of us grow from a different direction, starting as utterly experiential, sorting through the blooming and buzzing confusion to learn this feels good, that not so much, this works, that doesn’t, as we gradually form a set of rules that we live by, with moral judgments at the peak.

Owen, with his reliance from an early age on myth and fable, each carrying the clarity of black and white, good and evil, inverts this pyramid. He starts with the moral — beauty lies within, be true to yourself, love conquers all — and tests them in a world colored by shades of gray. It’s the sidekicks who help him navigate that eternal debate, as they often do for the heroes in their movies.

“I know love lasts forever!” Owen says after a few minutes.

We’re approaching Chevy Chase Circle, five minutes from where we live. I know I need to touch, gently, upon the notion that making friends or finding love entails risk. There’s no guarantee of forever. There may be heartbreak. But we do it anyway. I drop this bitter morsel into the mix, folding around it an affirmation that he took a risk when he went to an unfamiliar place on Cape Cod, far from his friends and home, and found love. The lesson, I begin, is “to never be afraid to reach out.”

He cuts me off. “I know, I know,” he says, and then summons a voice for support. It’s Laverne, the gargoyle from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

“Quasi,” he says. “Take it from an old spectator. Life’s not a spectator sport. If watchin’s all you’re gonna do, then you’re gonna watch your life go by without you.”

He giggles under his breath, then does a little shoulder roll, something he does when a jolt of emotion runs through him. “You know, they’re not like the other sidekicks.”

He has jumped ahead of me again. I scramble. “No? How?”

“All the other sidekicks live within their movies as characters, walk around, do things. The gargoyles only live when Quasimodo is alone with them.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because he breathes life into them. They only live in his imagination.”

Everything goes still. “What’s that mean, buddy?”

He purses his lips and smiles, chin out, as if he got caught in a game of chess. But maybe he wanted to. “It means the answers are inside of him,” he says.

“Then why did he need the gargoyles?”

“He needed to breathe life into them so he could talk to himself. It’s the only way he could find out who he was.”

“You know anyone else like that?”

“Me.” He laughs a sweet, little laugh, soft and deep. And then there’s a long pause.

“But it can get so lonely, talking to yourself,” my son Owen finally says. “You have to live in the world.”

#autism #articles #new york times magazine

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logical-little-lies · 5 years ago

Text

I Didn’t Think It Would Lead to This-Agere!Sides AU (pt.14)

Patton was curled up next to Virgil, both having been regressed the night prior. Patton wore a pastel blue onesie,and fluffy white socks. His white kitten pacifier was in his mouth, and he had his head laying on Virgil's chest.

Virgil wore black shortalls, with a light purple shirt underneath. No pacifier, but he had his arms wrapped around Patton. Roman and Logan found that when they regressed together, Virgil took over a caring-type role, but in a childish manner. Sort of like an older brother. Logan and Roman found this amusing, and heart-warming.

Logan walked into the commons, taking his place next to the half-asleep Roman, handing him a red mug of coffee.

"Y'know, that day..when Virgil was acting "weird" and all, I didn't think it would lead to this." He motioned around himself, at the two boys on the other side of the couch.

Roman spoke softly and quietly, as to avoid waking Virgil and Patton. "I know," Logan breathed out, "But I'm glad it did. Thomas is doing a bit better all across the board, and all of us are happier..it's a good thing."

Roman nodded, hesitating before he continued. "I know that us all regressing it helping Thomas..but what do you think he'll think of it? And also the fans...he overshares his problems online, to a whole crowd of people. Who's to say he won't reveal our regression to them? If he doesn't judge, then someone in the comment section will."

"You're starting to sound like anxiety," Logan joked, causing him to smile. "But seriously, about what Thomas will think? Well, we all are acceptive, so that means his mind thinks it's okay, so he might be confused at first, but he probably won't be against it. Second off, if we ask him not to say anything to his fans, he won't."

Roman nodded, accepting the reassurance before speaking again. "I-i was just a bit worried about that, that's all. You're the logical one, I figured if I talked to my boyfriend, I'd get negativity all around. And if I talked to Patton.."

"Overwhelming positivity," Logan completed, and Roman nodded again, his only verbal response being a mumbled 'mhm'. After a few moments, Logan spoke again.

"You wanna know something I've noticed?"

"Shoot,"

"None of us ever established caregivers, or any sort of official rules," he chuckled, "we just all sort of trusted the person we were closest to, and that was that."

"Yeah..you're right. I mean, maybe we were waiting until all of us had regressed, or just waiting to see how many of us were actually littles," Roman vaguely motioned to him, "so we could kind of figure out our dynamic, I guess. So far, all I see is that, when someone regressed, they go to their boyfriend, and if they are unavailable or little, then another person takes care of them. We are all..sort of each others caregivers, as far as I can tell."

Logan nodded, "you're not wrong."

Roman went to go say something until Logan was distracted by the adorable sound of Patton waking up.

"Papa?" Patton sat up slowly, rubbing at him eyes, pulling his pacifier out of his mouth. He yawned and put it back in, glancing around hurriedly for his stuffed animal. Logan was quick to get up, locating it and handing it to him. Patton buried his face in it's fur, humming thankfully. After a few moments, he made grabby hands towards Logan.

Logan knew what he wanted, picking him up and walking back to the couch where Roman sat. "Still feel little, baby boy?" Logan asked, setting him in his lap and wrapping his arms around his waist. Patton kicked his feet with a playful squeal, nodding his head. His smile dropped.

"M' I to much..I-i can be big!" he offered, and Logan shook his head quickly.

"No, no, no, Pat. I was just curious to see if I'd have a baby for the morning or not, it's alright. You're so cute,"

Roman rolled his eyes, directing his attention to Virgil, who was waking up slowly. "Hey, Vee. Sleep well?"

Virgil nodded slowly, getting up and coming to hug Roman, still half asleep.

"How about you, are you still little?"

"nuh-uh!" he denied quietly, and Roman only laughed and moved to kiss his forehead.

"How old are you, darling?"

"Big," he looked so serious, attempting to convince him.

"But babyy," Roman pretended to pout, tapping the button of his nose. "What if I want to cuddle with Toddler Vee?"

Virgil went from shy to giggly and shy. "You're silly, dada," he mumbled, and Roman did a double take.

"what did you just say?"

"N-nothing," Virgil assured, summoning his black bear and hiding his face in it.

"Wait, no! Say it again," Roman urged, and Virgil shook his head. Roman resorted to tickling his sides, and Virgil giggled.

"Dada, no! Stooppp!" he whined, and Roman smiled.

"See, that wasn't hard, baby."

Virgil still looked shy, pouting a bit. Roman hugged him, kissing his forehead. "It's alright, Vee. It's very cute, I'm fine with it."

He blushed, looking down shyly. "What about we have some breakfast,hmm?" Roman looked to Logan, who was still babying Patton in his lap.

"Yeah, Thomas is making breakfast now,so we should too."

Roman agreed with Logan's words, getting up and taking his place at the stove. Usually, if Patton wasn't available to cook, then Logan would. But Roman could tell that Patton was regressed deeper, meaning that he needed more attention.

Patton clumsily followed Logan into the kitchen, and Logan instructed him to sit in his normal seat. But the baby pouted and whimpered, and Logan knew there was no point in arguing, pulling him into his lap. "When we eat,you have to go to your seat,alright baby?"

Patton shook his head quickly, causing Virgil to giggle. "Yes, you will," Logan assured, and Patton hummed out a few works quietly,

"Nuh-uh,don't wanna.."

It was muffled by his pacifier, but Logan understood. "Stop pouting and listen," he spoke, slightly harsher.

Patton whimpered,closing his eyes and going quiet. He sniffled slightly, and Logan quickly realized what he had done. It only took the slightest amount of anger, of annoyance, or anything that seemed harsh for the baby to cry.

Logan bounced his leg, distracting him while removing Patton's glasses. "Shh, it's okay. None of that, papa isn't mad at you,"

Roman busied himself while Logan handled Baby Pat, filling a bottle for Patton, and a sippy cup for Virgil.

"Sorry, papa. I move," Patton mumbled,trying to move out of his lap. Logan tightened his arms around his waist and shook his head.

"Careful baby, you'll hurt yourself. And you don't need to be sorry, I'm not upset with you," Logan assured, and Patton hummed, still obviously feeling bad.

Logan wiped the few tears from under Patton's eyes, kissing his cheek. Patton smiled, leaning into him. "Hmm? You like kisses?" Logan teased, repeatedly kissing the boys face, causing him to giggle. Within seconds of Logan's playful antics, Patton had forgotten all about his quick second of brattiness.

"Why are you so lucky? You get Patton,he's so easy to take care of," Roman smiled heartily, handing Logan the bottle, full of warm cinnamon milk. Patton absolutely loved it, making grabby hands towards the light blue bottle.

"Virgil isn't hard though, he's just shy, you just have to be comforting and figure out what's he needs. The only hard one is you," Logan didn't realize what he was saying, and he shut his mouth quickly, distracting himself by taking the bottle from Patton and helping him before he spilled it.

Virgil giggled again, while Roman playfully glared at him. This staring contest only lasted for a few seconds before Roman spoke. "So..today I really wanted to visit The Vineyard Village in the imagination, can you babysit Virge for me?"

"I suppose so," Logan sighed, and Virgil pouted.

"Dada's leavin'?"

Logan raised his eyebrow,asking a silent question that Roman understood, 'dada?'.

"I'll tell you later," he replied, turning back to Virgil. "Vee,I'll be back soon, for now you get to play with Baby Pat and Lo, mhm?"

Virgil protested,pouting and huffing, and resulted to a slightly harsher route. "Stop it,I'm only gonna be gone for a bit,"

"B-but-"

"Virgil."

Virgil absolutely hated that tone, so he shut up with a pout. Roman knew what would come next if he didn't give him a bit of affection, he kissed his forehead to make up for snapping. "I love you, Vee. More than anything,alright?"

"Love you too, dada," Virgil smiled slightly, and Roman swiped his sippy cup off the counter and gave it to him.

"Good baby," Virgil accepted the praise, kicking his feet.

Soon, breakfast was done,and Roman was leaving. Patton sat on the couch, amusing himself with the stuffed dinosaur that rattled. Virgil seemed annoyed by the sound, but he didn't do anything. Patton was giggling and being adorable, Virgil couldn't stop him even if he wanted to.

"Virgil should be good, I've never had to go farther than just a stern tone with him. If you have to be stern, give him lots of affection after, okay? I'm also giving you the authority to put him in timeout, but I doubt that'll be needed."

Logan chuckled at his rambling, practically pushing him out of the door. "It's gonna be fine, I know how to deal with a little."

Roman hesitantly nodded. "You know..I could just wait until Vee is big before I go-"

Logan blocked him from re-entering the home, cutting him off. "Just go,"

Roman sighed, finally leaving. Logan closed the door behind him and approached the couch. Patton seemed content with his stuffed dinosaur (the noise was annoying, even accompanied by Patton's adorable giggles and babbles), so Logan crouched down in from of Virgil.

"Hey Vee,"

"..hi Lo.."

"How old are you feeling, Virge?" Logan asked.

"Five? I don't want a sippy cup anymore," his voice was more normal, but still little. The lack of Roman, along with his personal anxiety, was affecting his headspace age.

He handed Logan the sippy cup, "You sure, bud?"

Virgil nodded, and Logan slowly took the cup. "You know, you're allowed to be little without Roman here,"

"N-no, I'm to much. A-and only Ro knows how to..how to..." Virgil seemed to have somewhat of a difficult time forming his words. Logan waited for Virgil to speak, encouraging him to go on. "Take care of me, you already have Pat, don't wanna be to much..."

"Virgil....you can't help feeling little, okay? Yes, you might be able to control it better than the others, but you still need to use it to help yourself. It's a good thing, and you won't be "to much" for me. I promise,"

Virgil didn't seem convinced, and Logan rolled his eyes, realizing the only way to persuade a five year old. He held out a pinky, and Virgil giggled, locking his into Logan's.

"So...a certain birdy told me that you like scooby doo, is that true?"

Virgil smiled, bouncing in place, giggling. "Yes, yes! I wanna watch ittt!"

This wouldn't be so hard, right?

A/N: Let the games begin. I’ve reached the good part

#cglogan #cgroman #littlevirgil #littlepatton #babypatton #patton agere #ts agere #virgil agere #prinxiety #logicality

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