#kid rosa flipping to random pages in her history textbook and asking 'were you alive for *this?*'

[ollie-ollie-oxenfreee]

@extramachine

I love these tags so much and they've got me thinking even more about this lovely concept

(full ficlet under the cut!) At first, their interactions are as brief as he can manage. Joey hovers sullenly by the little girl's side, fielding her endless questions, biting his lip not to snap at her and let the simmering bitterness come pouring out.

It’s not the kid’s fault that he’s stuck with her. It’s not her fault that she has no idea what she’s getting into.

It’s not her fault that her aunt is dead.

(He has no one to blame but himself for that.)

By the time Lauren's "final arrangements" are made, and the foster care busybodies have started clucking about "placements," things have gotten - somewhat better. Tolerable.

The kid - Rosa, not Rose or Rosie or anything else - is nice enough. Kinda cute, in a scruffy, Raggedy Ann doll way, with her frizzy red pigtails and big green eyes. And her questions have tapered off from "nonstop" to "every couple minutes," which he figures he can - well, not live with, but you know.

He's put up with worse - way worse - as far as Blackwell girls go. Hell, this one even acknowledges he exists.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he feels the bullet-scarred walls thrown up around his heart start to crack.

He wraps his tie around his wrist so she can hold his hand as they walk home from school. She chatters excitedly about the newest book she's reading, leafing through the pages with her free hand and holding them up from him to see.

He catches himself calling her “kiddo,” just like Lauren had.

He teaches her to sew with a shitty dime store kit that she picks up one winter, walking her through the stitches and patterns that came so easily once.

Her first few attempts are a little clumsy, but she gets the hang of it soon enough. She's a quick study, his kid. Smarter than he ever was.

She takes to the job the universe lays out for her just as quickly. At eight years old, she's spending every day on the outskirts of the playground, talking to the shade of another timid little girl. Twelve, and she's getting in trouble for scaling a neighbor's fence to chase after a runaway spook, her blushing face scraped and dirty from the fall. Sixteen, and she's knelt in an alley surrounded by a halo of broken glass, holding out her tie-wrapped hand to help the soul of a car crash victim from the wreckage.

She’s growing up to be a good medium. Patient. Kind. Resourceful and clever and quietly, fiendishly stubborn.

So much like her aunt, and yet nothing like her at all.

He wonders, sometimes, hovering by the window late at night, where Lauren Blackwell ended up. If she’s still out there somewhere, wandering through the city with a spectral pack of cigarettes and a dictaphone in her pocket. If she'd be proud of her niece.

He supposes it doesn't matter. He's proud enough for both of them.

Blackwell AU where Lauren dies in 1981 instead of being hospitalized and Rosa starts seeing ghosts at age 5 and Joey has to deal with a preschooler in the middle of his grief