Who: Max and Thomas What: Tiny telekinetics are hard to find appropriate childcare for Where: The daycare When: Yesterday Warnings: None
Thomas had a full day, because he was working with a team to make Renard Todd an offer for FoxTech that would net him a man that knew technology better than he did and business perhaps as well as Alfie had. He knew he had Renard’s interest already; the man seemed like the kind that liked getting things done well, and Thomas could tell the running of the company was beyond his own potential. The question was now approaching the negotiation with the right tools so that Todd would be assured that FoxTech would be in good care at Thomas, Inc... hopefully not directly under him, because he had other things for Todd to do.
He pushed that out of his mind. Business was easier to turn off than his other problems. He focused on things closer to home, idly stretching a quadricep he had pushed too far that morning as the sleek black livery car pulled up to the correct location.
The Times was further from the daycare than Thomas, Inc., was, but Max had the advantage of a truck and aggressive driving, and she pulled up in front of the cheery white house just after the impressive black luxury car.
The daycare was nondescript. No sign, no announcements. Just a house in a quiet, middle class neighborhood outside the city. It was far enough away to avoid casual notice, and the neighborhood was unfashionable enough that the neighbors didn’t pay much attention to who came or went.
The sound of children playing in the fenced backyard reached her ears as soon as she climbed out of the truck, and she smiled and listened for a moment, tossing the keys onto the seat in the open window before walking over to the backseat of the sleek, black vehicle. Her heels were high, and the sound they made on the concrete announced her before she got close, and she leaned against the rear tire and waited for him to get out of the car, legs crossed at the ankles and arms folded over a plunging neckline.
Thomas was suspicious of the house, suspicious of the neighborhood, and suspicious of the daycare in general. He didn’t know what kind of place would stew other people’s children all day, and even though all his searching had stirred up a spotless record, it was not quite enough. He came out one leg at a time and adjusted the lapels of his coat entirely without thinking.
Thomas tipped his chin at looked at her askance the way a man looks at a woman, and then eyed the heels specifically before he said, with a slight lift of his brows, “The height is necessary in your chosen profession?”
She smiled, pushing away from the car. “Just because you got used to me running around in your workout pants and no shoes for a few months, Brandon, doesn’t mean I’m going to go to the office that way. Plus, distraction is a benefit in my profession,” she added, looking over the suit and the recently adjusted lapels. She reached out a hand, smoothing one down with long, slow fingers. “Let’s go see your kid,” she said, a tilt of her head toward the door meeting the words.
Thomas made a low sound of recognition in the back of his throat. He did recall distraction being helpful to her when they’d met. She got quite a bit out of him, hadn’t she? “I still think she’d be better off with one of us,” Thomas said, putting his mind back in the present and beginning the walk to the front door. He couldn’t think how they’d get enough hours out of the day, but he still thought they should make it happen.
“Me, too,” she admitted, because she had come to think that, at least now, when Amanda was this young. “But this is for a reason, Brandon. We find the threat, neutralize it, deal with it, and it’s better for her in the long run,” she said, determination in it. She turned once she reached the door, and she looked at him. “If her being here for a few weeks, for a month, for however long this takes to die down means she can have more of you in her life in the end, it’s worth it,” she said. “Plus, I think you’ll like Eden.”
“I think it’s more important for me to be with her early,” Thomas argued, more transparent when he was worried. He kept sweeping his gaze to either side. There wasn’t enough security, not enough people watching. “Or one of us. She looks around for us when she’s awake.” He started to move a little quicker without realizing it, and he was pretty much on the verge of just walking through the door and demanding his daughter back.
The door opened before either of them could knock, and the woman who opened it was physically in her sixties, with eyes that were much, much older. “Someone is panicking,” she said, in a voice as old as the rest of her, and she moved aside and raised a brow at Max, who had (notably) not added any men to the list of people allowed to see Amanda. She didn’t ask, however, the woman. She merely stepped aside. “She’s in the back room,” she added, putting a warm bottle into Thomas’ hand without caring that his suit cost more than the entire house and everything in it combined.
In the living room, just beyond the woman, a small boy was levitating a ball just above his playpen, and Max nudged Thomas’ hip. “Inside, dad,” she said, smiling at Eden.
Thomas gave Eden a look that had withered lesser men. It didn’t so much as twitch one of her eyelashes. He gave her a looking over that encompassed a great many health codes and child protective laws, and then without commenting, he took the bottle and walked three determined steps in. He almost tripped over a toy truck as a green ball levitated a few inches past his hip. It was enough to stop him, temporarily, at least, and he blinked twice before moving on a little faster.
Max smiled wider at the stop, because it was somehow entertaining that a tiny green ball and a toddler could stop a man like Thomas in his tracks. She walked past him, and she took the bottle from between his fingers without hesitation and led the way down the hall. Her own steps quickened as she got closer to the door; and indication that she, too, was anxious about the baby, despite her confidence in Eden and the daycare.
She opened the door without waiting for Eden to give the go-ahead, and she stopped in the middle of the bright yellow room. There were two cribs in the space and a rocking chair, but the crib closest to the door was empty. Amanda, in her crib, was awake and sucking on her toes happily, her new habit of cooing and gurgling to herself at full volume in progress.
All of the tension went out of Thomas when he saw his daughter safe and happy. He slid into the room at a slower, more pleasant pace, as if moving too loud would make the day suddenly darker. He moved over to the crib and leaned over to wriggle his fingers and greet her with a low, unique voice he only used with Amanda. “Hello.” There was more gurgling, which made Thomas grin.
He looked around the room then, letting Amanda yank his fingers in various directions. “How come someone wasn’t here watching?” he asked, suspicious again, but now in his Amanda-voice, which was significantly less intimidating.
Eden, who was in the doorway, cleared her throat. “Would you like to hear about my security?” she asked, entertained, as if fathers did this every day and she was very used to it. “Or about my qualifications?”
“Yes,” he said, pleased she was standing right there so he didn’t have to leave Amanda again.
Eden walked to the window, and she motioned for Thomas to follow. She nodded once he was there, and a thin line of lights lit up along the perimeter of the yard. It was clearly a Creations ability, nothing you could buy in a store. “I knew as soon as you’d stepped onto my sidewalk that you were here, because I saw you. My eldest sister, she heard you as soon as you were a block away. My youngest sister, she simply likes children,” she admitted, “and she can hear their thoughts. We have, between us, two thousand years of child care experience. I believe that should suffice. As for defense, let us simply say the fathers of the children are readily on call.” She paused, turning. “Will you be volunteering to be available as well?”
“On call? How quickly can they get here when they are called?” Thomas was impressed by two thousand years of experience. You could see it in his face when his eyes flicked and the gaze was not so intense, for the present. He liked the idea of someone hearing people coming a block away, though he wasn’t sure what that would do if they kept on coming.
“How quickly could you get here?” Eden asked, even as a small girl, no more than three ran up and grabbed her thigh. She was dressed in purple, and she’d tied her blanket around her neck to mimic a cape. “We can discuss it once you finish feeding your daughter,” she added. I believe she is becoming impatient.” This was followed by the soft feeling of a pacifier falling on Thomas’ shoe.
Thomas looked down at his shoe and picked up the little bit of rubber. “That depends entirely on how far away I was,” he said, smoothly, with a look at the girl and her cape that was all thoughtful. He was the only mask he knew of that wore the cape, and it took a ridiculous amount of training to be able to work with it. His mouth pressed together, but it relaxed again soon enough as he bent down to pick up a very squirmy baby. She had a tie to play with within the moment.
Max waited until Eden closed the door, the little girl following behind with one last glance at the baby, and she crossed the room and handed Thomas the bottle. She smiled at Amanda, completely focused on her in that moment, and she ran the back of her fingers over the baby’s nose, which earned her a smile, all wide and toothless, even with the tie shoved between her tiny lips. “They offer twenty-four hour babysitting,” she told Thomas with a quirk of her brow.
“I still like to know what they have to keep her safe. Besides... what if she gets sick, or something?” Thomas had to work to make the bottle seem attractive in comparison with the tie, which could be hauled on with tiny fingers. He gave Max a slightly surprised, all gratified look when she touched Amanda without awkwardness.
She motioned to the rocker in the corner of the room. “She likes the movement,” she said, offering a way to distract the baby from the tie and going to prop her hip on the window beside said chair. “She showed me the list of Creations doctors they work with. It’s safer than anything humanity could offer,” she said plainly. “I thought she’d be easier to leave,” she admitted, reaching forward to tug on a socked, kicking baby foot.
“She’s fine,” Thomas said of Amanda, tipping his elbows slightly to imitate the movement and starting a slow tread from one end of the room to another to illustrate his words. “I don’t know why you’d think that,” he said, smiling at her over Amanda’s head. Sobering he said, “I still don’t know. What if she looks for us when we’re not here?”
She watched him move appreciatively, something about all that strength and confidence holding something so tiny and vulnerable almost impossible to look away from. When he smiled at her, she looked back at his face. “I thought it would be harder to leave her when she was older and wearing a black blanket around her neck and pretending it was a cape,” she said, scooting over on the windowsill and patting the spot beside her with manicured fingers. “Come here.”
He wandered over, conceding that perhaps that would be the case without saying a word.
Max waited for him to join her against the window, and then she smiled down at the baby in his arms, tugging the tie free of one grabby, chubby hand and moving it intentionally out of Amanda’s reach and over his shoulder. Then, she waited, smoothing her hand over his sleeve as she moved it away. “She’ll look for us,” she admitted, because she knew Amanda did that; Audrey was having a hell of a time taking care of her recently, and Max had read that at a month, babies were very attached to their primary caregivers. “But I think she’ll get used to whoever takes care of her here,” she added, sounding worried about it; the concern a valid one for parents, even if Max wasn’t aware of that fact.
It only took that long for the tie to slip down from Thomas’ shoulder and back to grabbing range of those chubby little fingers, and the movement of the fabric was accompanied by a happy coo around the nipple of the bottle.
Thomas couldn’t care much about his tie in the wake of that little sound, and he smiled down at her with pride as if she’d just turned the world over. “Is that a good thing? Her getting used to someone that’s not us? Later, I mean. Developmentally.” Thomas knew too many things about psychology to think childhood had no affect on adulthood.
Max couldn’t help but smile at the pride in the look Thomas gave the baby, and she reached over and loosened the tie and slipped it over his head, carefully disentangling it from Amanda’s fingers with a kiss to the baby’s cheek that earned her a happy sound. She kept the tie within the baby’s range of vision, close, and she looked back up at Thomas’ face. “Did your mom take care of you when you were little?” she asked, her voice going softer when she asked the question, which she knew was a delicate one for him.
It was a good time to ask Thomas about family, and he was quite filled with it. “I can’t remember. There was a woman on the payroll without usual credentials, but I don’t know how important she was.” He tipped the baby a little this way and that, not a lot, just enough to make her smile, and he thought he probably should offer her back to Max, but he was reluctant.
“I think Eden will just be the woman on the payroll without usual credentials,” Max said watching him move the baby this way and that. “I don’t think it’ll hurt her, and I think she’ll know we’re us,” she said, hope in the words, because she did worry about Amanda becoming more attached to someone who knew what she was doing in a way Max didn’t.
This time, when the tie moved from Max’s fingers to the baby’s chubby grip, there was no doubt that Amanda hadn’t grabbed it with her hands, and it hadn’t slipped. “I think she’s going to keep that,” Max said, a grin on her lips.
Thomas looked up and blinked with the same surprise he’d had when they walked through the living room. “What was that? What just happened?”
“It’s usually the pacifier,” she said, with a calmness that came from having watched the baby like a hawk the night before to see if she was imagining the pacifier antics. Max took the bottle from Amanda, who immediately shoved the tie in her mouth with a triumphant gurgle, and Max reached for a blanket and draped it over Thomas’ shoulder, careful to cover the suit.
Testily. “What with the pacifier. Thank you,” the last absently, about the blanket. More jiggling, more giggling, and the tie was doomed. Thomas slid a gray gaze, newly sharpened, over to Max’s eyes.
“She started it yesterday, during those fucking memories” Max said, crossing her legs at the knees and looking back at that sharp, grey gaze. “She can make the pacifier come to her, no matter where the thing is.” She paused, and she smiled at the baby when the baby smiled at her over Thomas’ shoulder. “I didn’t try moving it off the bed, so I don’t know how far she can manage as far as distance goes.” There was worry in the words that she didn’t bother to hide, not with Thomas, who would know all the concerns this brought with it.
Thomas boggled. He didn’t boggle very much, so seeing it happen was almost surreal. “She’s barely a month old.” Thomas, about two steps ahead now that he had the data, looked around for anything in the room that might possibly be dangerous if Amanda could bring it to her by sight alone. “Someone needs to watch her every second, Max. Every second.”
There was nothing in the room that was dangerous, because Max had told Eden her suspicions when she’d dropped Amanda off. “It’s why the door was closed, Brandon, because I told her this morning,” Max said, understanding his worry. “It’s going to make the terrible twos really fucking terrible,” she added, smiling a little in an attempt to calm him down. She took the pacifier from his hand, and she brushed it back and forth against Amanda’s lips in a thoughtless act that she knew would get her to smile again. Still, the baby didn’t let go of her death grip on the tie, even as her eyes started to drift closed. “She’s going to pass out on you any minute,” she said, fondness for both of them in her voice.
“I didn’t know abilities worked like that. Genetically. You have anything like this in your family?” Thomas hushed his voice without thinking.
Max rubbed the baby’s back slowly, watching as her little eyes closed. “No. Eden says most Creations babies born here have abilities sooner than we did. She thinks it’s because they gestate here,” she explained. “It made me feel fucking better to hear it was normal,” she admitted. “I was panicking last night.” Her voice was barely over a whisper, though her hand on the baby’s back didn’t still.
He scowled the way he always did when he thought she was being pointlessly stubborn or independent. “You could have called.” Easing back and forth, Thomas brushed his lips over the soft fuzzy head and started to shift her in his arms so he could set her down again.
She was accustomed to the scowl, and she just touched uncertainly tentative fingers to his temple. “I fell asleep with her on the bed,” she admitted. “That crib isn’t getting a lot of use,” she admitted, sitting back as he stood to go put her down. She waited until he had Amanda back in the crib, and then she walked up to him and touched a hand to his back, a light touch. “Hey,” she said. “It’ll be okay. We have to babyproof the apartments, but it’ll be okay.”
Thomas was only mildly reassured. “She’s too delicate for this,” he said, keeping it a whisper and leaning in her direction in response to the touch and his own concern.
It was a reversal of sorts, and she slipped one arm around his waist in a tentative, comforting move, the heels making her tall enough to be able to look down at the baby sleeping in the crib over his shoulder. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to protect anything as much as I want to protect her,” she confessed, adding (with a smile), “well, Luke’s a close second, but I think she’s more likely to let me get away with it than he is.”
Thomas thought about it, thoughtlessly putting an arm around her shoulders in turn and touching the edge of his jaw to the top of her head. “Luke isn’t delicate,” he said, finally, “but he needs protecting too. It is better because he can walk, but worse because he can find worse things to get into besides stealing my tie.” Thomas sighed, withdrew his hand, and then looked over his shoulder toward the door. “I’m going to go talk to this woman more. Are you sure we shouldn’t try to come up with something else? Someone to live with her at home?” He looked into Max’s eyes.
She closed her eyes at the returned affection, leaning into it for a moment before looking back up at him when he spoke. “I got a memory of his, about being a family and how he wants her to be his sister. He’s a great kid,” she said about Luke, adding with a nod, “and he terrifies me every time he walks out the fucking door. I just want him to live a happy, normal life for as long as he can, and every time I look at him I see all this stress on his shoulders that I can’t fix for him.” She sounded like a concerned mother, even though it wasn’t evident to her, and she met his gaze when he looked into her eyes. “I trust this woman more than Audrey,” she said, which was her other option for childcare. “Audrey loves her, but she’s impulsive, and I think she might tuck her into that bag of hers and take her into subspace.” There was a fondness for her sister in the words, too, indicating that things were better on that front. “Bathos is small. I have her crib in my room, and I don’t think Audrey would appreciate a stranger moving in.”
A flicker of hurt moved through Thomas’ gray eyes like a shadow. They should be in Aubade, with him. He said nothing of it, however, and separated from her slightly with a little sigh. “Luke and I have work to do soon. I will speak to him.” First, however, Eden, who was about to get a grilling about her experience--undoubtedly over milk and animal cookies. Thomas brushed the back of Max’s hand with his fingertips, and then he went out.