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imagine-darksiders · 3 months ago

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A drabble from that Pseudo x Reader found family fic I never wrote.

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“Everything about you is out of proportion,” Pseudo grunts, gesturing to your hands.

You’re so bewildered by his assessment that you actually whip them up in front of you to give them a thorough examination, as though you might inexplicably find something amiss.

But no. They’re just as they always have been. Two thumbs, eight fingers, not any one longer or shorter than they usually are.

But then, you glance up at Pseudo, and it occurs to you for the first time, that in this strange and wild world you’ve washed up in, you might be the odd one out.

Your eyes wander to his scrawny waist and leathery, honey-yellow skin that’s stretched taut over his midriff, defining abdominal muscles and sinking slightly between the bars of his ribcage. But his chest is distended awkwardly, swollen and bare and by all means overbalanced compared to his middle.

Flicking your gaze up, you take in his neck, stained nearly brown with dirt and battle paint, lending it the look of a body part that’s been stitched on top of his sternum as an afterthought.

It's thick too, almost the width of his substantial shoulders, and it tapers gently until it feeds into a head with no chin, nor any visible nose - just two jaundiced eyes and a wide, lipless mouth that’s tilted into a permanent frown. There’s no hair on top of his head. In fact, the only hair on his body sprouts as coarse, single strands from his temple and grows sporadically down the length of his arms, black as night, like the hairs that used to grow on your grandmother's chin when she forgot what tweezers were.

Even his arms look far too long, and you find yourself regarding them from under your furrowed brow as he stirs the pot that’s bubbling away over the firepit. One hangs a good few inches lower than the other against his muscled thigh, each fore and upper arm extended well beyond the length of a typical human’s. You recall seeing gibbons at the zoo when you were eight, how odd and funny their arms looked…

On Pseudo however, they’re borderline scary. All muscle, no fat. Almost human, not close enough to be mistaken for one.

To Pseudo, a man for whom proportions have always been off-kilter, your unvarying symmetry must be a sight to behold.

Still stirring a wooden spoon around his pot, he suddenly shifts on his four-toed feet and pointedly clears his throat, and you realise you’ve been staring for just a fraction too long.

“Sorry,” you utter, averting your eyes to the firepit and drawing your knees up closer to your chest. You feel his alien gaze linger on your downturned face for a few moments before he grunts dismissively and returns his attention to the pot of boiling broth.

“Well, I think you’re very pretty!” a youthful voice pipes up.

Slowly, you turn your head and quirk a brow down at the little ball of soot-black feathers that has claimed the spot directly beside you.

From within the mass of ebony tufts, two enormous, round eyes blink innocently up at you, golden as treated amber, and the only features visible on the child’s feathered face. There’s a mouth in there somewhere, hidden behind a plumage so black, not even the firelight seems to change its pitch. You know because the Boy – his only moniker, apparently – is much more of a talker than his gruff protector.

No sooner have you met his curious gaze however than he abruptly seems to turn shy, dropping his stare and tucking his small, contorted hands underneath his body to hide them alongside his avian legs, like an owl settling down in its nest.

“Oh?” you prompt gently, watching as a single, slender finger emerges from his feathers to trace mindless shapes in the sandy dirt.

A slight shift in the mass of darkness suggests he’s shrugged his wing, avoiding your eye as he stammers out, “Well, I mean, you’re really nice. And your eyes aren’t scary at all, a-and you’re really soft to sleep on!”

Ah. Yes, you remember that. Well, specifically you remember blinking awake on the cot Pseudo gave up for you - after much arguing back and forth - and finding a small, obsidian shape curled up on your stomach. It had taken an insurmountable effort to refrain from screaming and tossing yourself from the cot before you remembered where you were, and that there was not, in fact, some kind of wild, scraggly beast sneaking into your bed.

You also recall swallowing back the yelp and turning your head to gather your bearings, only to spot Pseudo sitting by the firepit nearby, his sharp, yellow eyes wide and alert, fixed unwaveringly on you.

Apparently, the Boy had one of the best sleeps of his life.

And you, one of the worst.

You can hardly believe it's only been a few short days since you washed up on that beach.

Sighing dismally at the memory, you tune back in to the present and find that the Boy has grown slightly more confident in his affirmations.

He's raised his head to you again, and lowered his voice to a secretive whisper, golden eyes squinted shut with gleeful mischief.

“Not like Pseudo,” he tells you, “He’s like sleeping on a rock.”

That tracks. You've seen first-hand Pseudo's proclivity for martial arts. Nobody gets that good without some fierce and rigorous training that's left his body one, solid muscle.

You’re not sure that being nice and soft constitutes pretty, but you’ll take the compliments as they were intended.

“Thanks, Kid,” you smile, prying an arm away from your knees and laying your palm gently on top of his head, smoothing back his tufted ears and earning yourself a contented warble from an unseen throat, “You’re very cute yourself.”

At that, you see his eyelids flatten and he harrumphs, grumbling, “M’not cute.”

A sudden roll of soft laughter draws your gaze back up to Pseudo, who’s standing with a hand on his jutted hip, regarding the pair of you with the beginnings of a fond smile stretching the corners of his unusual mouth. “Hate to disagree with you, kid, but you are,” he teases.

The Boy whines, and the tip of his long, black tail starts to tap against the ground in mild agitation.

For the first time, you and Pseudo give each other looks of mutual accord, and you suddenly find his towering height and alien presence just a little less frightening, eased by the unexpected warmth in his otherwise stony expression.

“I’m sure you’ll be very handsome when you’re older,” you say to the grumbling sphere at your side, trying not to smirk when the child turns his hopeful gaze onto you, “But for now, you’ll just have to accept it...”

Giving his feathered head one last tousle, you return your hand to your lap and drop an eyelid in a lazy wink. “You, kid, are very cute.”

Puffing up indignantly, he lets out a strangled sound and casts his mind about for a retort.

“Oh yeah?! W-well… Well, Pseudo thinks you’re cute too!” he accuses triumphantly, pointing a wing out at his guardian, who almost drops the spoon into his bubbling pot before he manages to snag the handle with two fingers again, whipping his head up to stare at the Boy in muted horror.

Your eyebrows shoot up towards your hairline, taken wildly aback as you meet Pseudo’s gaze, only for the pair of you to instantly snatch your eyes away from each other, and the latter to roughly clear his throat and argue, “I – When did I -? I never said-“

“-Yu-huh!” the Boy interrupts, suddenly excitable as he turns to you and blurts, “Remember when you fell in that pond? And Pseudo went in to rescue you, and then after, when you were drying off, I heard him say-“

The sudden clatter of a spoon hitting the ground promptly cuts off the end of his sentence. “-OH-kay, I think it's well past your bedtime,” Pseudo announces sharply, stalking towards his charge and reaching down to scoop him off the ground whilst staunchly avoiding your bewildered gaze.

“But I haven’t even had any supper yet!” the Boy protests, dangling helplessly by the scruff from Pseudo’s fist.

Dumping him soundly - but notably gently - on the straw-covered cot beside the tent, Pseudo grumbles, “One more word out of you, and you’ll be tonight’s supper.”

"Pseudo!" you scold through a smile.

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"Well, he's out for the count," you murmur, stretching your arms up over your head and waiting for the bliss of a good ache to flow down your shoulders.

"Good," Pseudo grunts just as quietly, watching your face scrunch up, enraptured, "He needs it."

You've found yourself sitting once again on a patch of grass just next to camp, perched near the edge of a cliff that looks out towards the cold Zonectic Mountains. The sky above you, unhindered by light pollution - or any pollution for that matter - is clear and bright as a mirror's surface, freckled from horizon to horizon by a myriad of stars.

You're staring up at them, trying to see if you can pinpoint any of the same constellations that you might recognise in your own sky back at home. Not that you were much good at it even before you wound up in Zenozoik.

"You're doing it again," his rich, dulcet voice mumbles, the rustle of grass clueing you in to his proximity.

He does this. Ventures close sometimes, not for the purpose of protecting you, as he does when you travel during the day. But when it's quiet and still after dark, and the Boy is asleep, the insects buzzing and cricketing away in their trees.

Pseudo continuously seeks you out, even though you had him pegged as a loner who neither liked nor trusted you when you first met. You chalk it up to simple curiosity. You suppose you'd be just as curious if an alien landed on your world too.

Inhaling deeply through your nose, you tear your eyes off the empyrean stars and turn to give Pseudo a questioning, heavy-lidded glance. "Doing what?"

"Thinking," he grunts, settling down in the grass next to you, leaving just a foot of space between you.

Again: Odd.

"Oh? Want me to show you how?" you quip.

It's become a mark of success for you to make the grizzled hermit smile, and as he lets out a low, breathy chuckle and leans sideways to knock his sizeable elbow against you, you allow your own grin to widen.

"Smart-ass," he huffs, turning sombre a moment later and heaving a sigh that nearly doubles his chest in size. "Thinking of how you're gonna get back to your world again, huh?"

"I'm never not thinking about it," you admit, "I just hide it better when You-Know-Who is awake..." Twisting your neck over a shoulder, you give the tent a tired look. "He doesn't like hearing that I have to leave."

Pseudo doesn't say a word in response, doesn't even meet your eye. He just stares straight ahead, his expression tight and locked on the distant peaks.

It's only when you raise your face to peer up at the stars again that he finds his voice.

"Would it be so bad?" he asks quietly, listening to a breeze pass through the camp and rustle the flaps of his tent, "If you stayed, I mean."

You miss the sideways glance he throws at you, and the hopeful gleam in his yellow eyes.

"Ha, yeah, Pseudo," you snort, "It would be pretty bad. I don't know how this world works. I'd have been killed ten times over if you hadn't found me. And I wouldn't even know how to begin building a life for myself here."

The two of you sit through another stretch of silence for several moments before Pseudo hesitantly offers, "I could teach you how..."

Once again, you fail to register the sliver of hope in his tone. It doesn't occur to you that this might be more than a polite suggestion meant only to ease your concerns. The idea that Pseudo might be extending a lonely hand towards you in the hopes that you'll take it doesn't even cross your mind.

Because how could a recluse be lonely?

"That's not the point." Exhaling softly, you reach down and gather your knees towards yourself, resting your chin on top of them and blinking up at the night sky. "I'm gonna get out of here, one way or another...." you murmur, mostly to yourself, "Just need to figure out how."

Again, Pseudo doesn't respond. And this time, he doesn't break the silence.

For a long couple of minutes, you and he simply bask under the light of the rising moon, your head upturned to gaze into it's too-large face, Pseudo's head tilted subtly to watch the side of your face.

Eventually, you hear him push himself off the ground, followed by the soft fall of his bare feet padding back towards the camp.

"You should get some sleep," he grunts over his shoulder without turning to look at you, "Tent's all yours."

Lifting your chin off your knees, you aim a soft frown at the back of his head, but you know by now that arguing with him is like throwing paper at a brick wall.

So, instead, you let out a weary sigh through your nose and softly call, "Thanks, Pseudo... You get some rest too, okay?"

The towering figure raises one, sinewy arm and waves it dismissively through the air. "Sure, sure..."

You'll hold him to that. "Goodnight, Soods," you tell him, "Sweet dreams."

His feet fall still on the dirt, shoulders locking up in surprise, but you've already returned your attention to the moon hanging in the sky.

#zeno clash #Pseudo #X reader #Found family trope #found family #ficlet #idea #Father figure/Other parental figure + their scrunkly child

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