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KEVIN
Kevin Day has survived a lot of things.
He’s survived The Nest. He’s survived living with Riko and the Moriyamas. He’s survived getting his hand smashed in and recovering, he’s survived a new exy team that he helped turn into champions, he’s survived the yakuza and talk show hosts and Andrew Fucking Minyard.
Kevin Day has survived a lot of things.
But he thinks that he might not be able to survive childcare.
“Where’s Andrew?”
Neil’s eyes barely make it over the edge of Kevin’s mattress. He’s frowning, his tiny eyebrows pulled together as he attempts to climb his way onto Kevin’s bed. His fists grip at Kevin’s sheets, and one of his legs continues to lift off the floor as if to heave himself up, but it only ends up falling down again. He’s on his tiptoes. It’s hilarious.
“I told you,” Kevin says, watching Neil with amusement from over the top of his book. “Andrew went out to an appointment with Betsy. Then he has errands to run. He’ll be back in a few hours or so.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Don’t say that.”
Neil pauses in his attempts to climb onto the mattress, his eyes narrowing at Kevin in challenge.
“Stupid.”
“Stop.”
“No.”
“Neil-”
“Help me.”
Kevin frowns down at him, and Neil holds his arms up expectantly.
“No.”
Neil’s tiny frown grows deeper.
“You’re mean, Kevin.”
Kevin shrugs.
“You’re not my friend.”
“Ah,” Kevin says, mock-hurt. “You wound me, truly.”
Neil moves away from the bed, mumbling something that Kevin can’t make out, and crosses the room to where his own bed is. There are toys scattered on the floor that Nicky had bought for him two days ago, after he had woken up much, much smaller than he had been the night before.
“How did this even happen?” Nicky had asked, arms full of bags from Target that were nearly bursting with four-year-old sized clothing and toys that most of them had never owned when they were children themselves. Neil had watched from the couch, silent and untrusting.
“No idea,” Andrew had said, and that was that.
No one knows for how long, no one knows why, no one knows very much of anything.
Kevin knows, though, that he very much hates four-year-old Neil.
And as he’s smacked in the forehead with a plastic dinosaur, he’s reminded why.
Kevin scrambles a bit on the bed, picking up the dinosaur and staring at it before looking over to where Neil is sitting on the floor, pretending Kevin doesn’t exist.
“Neil.”
Neil ignores him, crashing one small hot wheel into a small triceratops, making an explosion noise and miniature screams of ‘oh nooo!’.
“Neil,” Kevin repeats, a bit louder, and Neil flicks his gaze up at him for a half of a second, as close to an answer that Kevin will be getting.
“Did you throw this at me?”
“No.”
Kevin grits his teeth, and Neil makes the triceratops do a backflip.
“I think you did.”
“Well I didn’t.”
“Neil-"
“Oh no! There’s no escape! The lava is closing in and there’s no way-”
“ Neil. ”
Neil stops playing, flinching a bit at Kevin’s tone as he lets his arms drop.
“It’s not nice to throw things at people,” Kevin says, and Neil gives him a tiny sneer.
“I didn’t.”
“Neil, don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Prove it.”
Kevin raises an eyebrow at him, holding up the dinosaur in his hand. He waves it in Neil’s direction, at the dinosaur that is clearly in his hand, and then waves his hands at the room in general to point out the lack of literally anyone else that could have done it.
Neil shrugs.
“Maybe it fell out of the sky.”
Kevin nearly bites his tongue in an effort not to scream.
--
By the time Andrew gets back from his appointment, Neil is in tears and Kevin doesn’t look too far off himself. Andrew barely has time to set down his bag of groceries before Neil is puttering over to stand in front of him, arms outstretched, face scrunched up as he cries. Andrew picks him up, hoisting him onto his hip as he shoots a look at Kevin.
“What did you do.”
Kevin and Neil both start explaining at the same time, Neil a blubbering mess that can barely form a sentence and Kevin so frustrated that he can’t, either. If Andrew wasn’t so tired, he might think it was funny.
“-and then he-”
“-he said-”
“-at my head -”
“- baseball- ”
“Enough.”
Andrew cuts them both off, adjusting Neil a bit on his hip so he can wrap his arms around Andrew’s neck, and takes a breath.
“Kevin, use your words.”
“Andrew, that kid is a menace.”
Neil lets out a loud sniffle in Andrew’s ear, and Andrew stares at Kevin, unamused.
“I’m serious.”
“Explain.”
“He keeps throwing things at me!” Kevin motions around the living room at the scattering of toys that Andrew assumes is meant to be examples of the items that have been thrown. “His little toys, pens, crayons- Andrew, he threw a book at me an hour ago!”
Andrew raises an eyebrow.
“And you’re sure it was him?”
Kevin opens and closes his mouth for a solid thirty seconds before letting out a cry of annoyance.
“Andrew, seriously, who else-”
“Neil,” Andrew says, cutting off Kevin entirely. “What happened?”
Neil lets out another dramatic sniff, pulling his head off of Andrew’s shoulder and wiping at his eyes and nose.
“I was j-just p-puh-laying with him, and he got m-mad at me fo’ no w-weason and then he s-said that I should play baseball instead of exy .”
“Look, Kevin,” Andrew says. “You’ve made him so upset that he’s forgotten how to use his R’s.”
“ Andrew -”
“Sounds to me you’re being kind of a bully there, Kevin,” Andrew continues, setting Neil on the counter so he can dig through the grocery bag to find a pack of fruit gummies. “Telling Neil he should play baseball. Unbelievable.”
Andrew tears open the packet of gummies, and Neil takes them happily, smiling up at Andrew and popping three into his mouth at once.
“He’s mean,” Neil says. Andrew nods in agreement.
“I can’t believe-”
“I’m going to make dinner,” Andrew says, grabbing the bag of groceries to begin putting them away.
“Fine,” Kevin starts, sounding very frustrated. “Just let me know whe- oh my God! ”
Andrew turns back, looking at Neil, who’s kicking his feet happily on the counter as he eats his gummies, and then at Kevin, who is standing in the middle of the living room, expression shocked and outraged, holding the back of his neck as if to protect it.
“What?”
“He just threw a gummy at my head!”
Andrew looks back at Neil, who shakes his head solemnly. Andrew shrugs.
Kevin lets out a frustrated cry, stomping to his room and slamming the door. Neil lets out a laugh, and the corners of Andrew’s lips twitch in amusement.
NICKY
You can say a lot of things about Nicholas Hemmick. But you cannot say that he doesn’t fucking love children.
“Okay,” he says, kneeling down on the floor across from a bored Neil and a tired Andrew. “Okay, okay. So. Childhood take-two, yeah? Oh dang. Oh man. This is.” He takes a breath. “I fucking love kids, dude.”
“First of all,” Andrew says from his spot on the couch where he’s sprawled out, one leg thrown over the back and one arm dangling off of the side of the cushion. “Language. Second, you are way too enthused about this.”
“Okay, yeah,” Nicky says, beaming. “But Andrew, when will this literally ever happen again? Think about it. Neil has this terrible time his first childhood ‘round and now we get to give him a good one ! Even if it’s just for, like, a week. Or however long this thing lasts.
“Plus,” he continues, grinning at Neil. “I’ve been doing volunteer work with the church’s Sunday school classes and the local preschool and stuff, yeah? For my childhood development class? And let me tell you, GoNoodle is the greatest thing on Earth.”
Neil gives Nicky a skeptical look. Nicky, in turn, turns on the Playstation and goes searching through YouTube for all of a minute before landing on what he wants.
“Let’s start off with a classic,” he says, and proceeds to make Andrew’s life absolutely miserable.
--
“No no,” Nicky says twenty minutes and five GoNoodle channels later, “your legs and arms have to move at the same time , like this.”
Andrew watches from the couch as Nicky attempts to teach Neil the All I Eat Is Pizza dance for the third time. Neil, ever the quick learner, actually picks it up decently fast for a four-year-old. Nicky is beaming, Neil is dancing, and Andrew thinks Koo Koo Kangaroo may be somewhat tolerable.
“Can we do Oh A Milkshake again?” Neil asks, and Nicky shrugs.
“Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe we can go out and get an actual milkshake. How about that?”
Neil takes a moment to think about this, resting his finger on his chin and his eyebrows pulled together as if making a very important decision. He hums for a moment, and then nods.
“Yeah,” he says with all of the decisive thought a four-year-old can muster. “Yeah, let’s go do that.”
They’re in the car and on the way to Dairy Queen within ten minutes. Luckily Nicky had had the foresight to buy a car seat on his first trip to Target, so they could safely take Neil wherever they needed or wanted to go. Andrew, though, doesn’t really want to think about the effects that the seat would have on the leather of the Maserati.
Halfway there, Neil begins to sing.
It's soft at first. Andrew can barely make out the words, sine Neil is facing to look out the window, but eventually he begins to sing a little louder.
“You are the best,” he sings softly, and Nicky turns to look at Andrew, clearly excited, eyes wide and his hand covering his mouth. “You’re better than all the rest, you are the best.”
His R’s are rounded off and his voice is high and off-key, but Nicky looks like he’s about ready to cry.
“That song is for Andrew,” Neil says softly to himself in his reflection of the car window, and nods once as if in approval.
Nicky begins to cry, and Andrew debates jumping out of the moving car to get rid of the feeling in his chest.
AARON
For some reason, Neil likes Aaron.
He has no idea why, really. Normal Neil can barely stand Aaron, and Aaron can barely stand him. And yet here he is now, staring down at a tiny Neil wrapped around his legs, laughing hysterically as Aaron tries to walk forward.
“Neil I need my leg.”
“Nope!”
Aaron frowns, shifting his weight so that he can drag his leg with Neil sitting wrapped around it across the floor, taking a hobbling step forward while Neil laughs some more.
“Neil.”
“Mine now.”
Aaron sighs again, making his way across the living room of the dorm at an agonizingly low pace, Neil refusing to let go of his koala-hold of his leg. Luckily Aaron is a Class I College Exy backliner, otherwise this might be harder to do.
He makes it halfway to the kitchen before he gives up, bending over to scoop Neil up in his arms, flipping him over his shoulder and holding him over his back by his ankles. Neil dangles upside down, and giggles ridiculously hard.
“Aawin!”
Aaron ignores him, moving into the kitchen and, after pulling Neil to hang over his shoulder like a sack of flour instead, reaches into the fridge to pull out a container of strawberries and milk for cereal.
“Aawin, put me down !”
“Mine now,” Aaron says, and Neil scoffs.
“I can’t be yours .”
“But you said my leg was yours.”
“Yeah, because it is. But you can’t have me .”
“Why not?”
“‘Cause I said.”
“Doesn’t work that way.”
“Aawin!”
Aaron shrugs, flipping Neil around and setting him on one of the barstools at the countertop. Neil immediately begins to spin in circles, picking up speed until he’s moving so fast Aaron is sure he’s going to fly across the room.
“Stop that,” he says, and Neil sticks his leg out, hooking it on the side of the kitchen island to stop him from spinning. His eyes are moving a mile a minute, and he looks up at Aaron, dizzy.
“Aawin,” he says, and Aaron hums in acknowledgment. “Are those sawbubbies fo’ me?”
Aaron pauses while cutting the strawberries.
“The what?”
“Sawbubbies.”
“The what ?”
“Sawbubbies.”
Aaron looks down at the strawberries. Looks up at Neil. Looks at the strawberries again.
“The what?”
“ Sawbubbies, Aawin. ”
“Ah,” Aaron says, nodding sagely. “The sawbubbies. Of course.”
Neil raises his tiny eyebrows, waiting for his answer.
“Yeah,” Aaron says after a moment, sliding the now-cut strawberries onto a paper plate and setting them in front of Neil. “Do you want cereal too?”
“Yes.”
Aaron nods, turning to grab a bowl, and he can hear Neil kicking his legs against the island behind him, singing about the days of the week.
Honestly? Normal Neil kind of sucks, but maybe tiny Neil isn’t that bad after all.
--
Three hours and two arguments with a four-year-old later, Aaron is taking back anything nice he had to say about tiny Neil.
Andrew finds them in a standoff in the living room, the two of them staring each other down as Neil tears out a handful of pages from one of Aaron’s textbooks. Aaron lets out a frustrated cry and lunges forward to grab the book but Neil, still stupidly fast even as a baby, skirts out of the way and holds up the book by its half-empty spine. Textbook pages flutter around their feet like snow.
“Mean,” Neil says, opening the book and holding a page in his fist threateningly. “You’re mean, Aawin.”
“I just fed you,” Aaron says through grit teeth. “Offered to let you watch something on TV. How am I mean?”
“You won’t puh-lay with me.”
Aaron lets out another frustrated noise, running after a now-screaming Neil as they circle around the beanbags and Neil doubles back to Andrew.
“Andwew!”
Andrew scoops him up immediately, holding him as Neil buries his face into his shoulder and sniffles. He drops his textbook onto the floor at Andrew’s feet.
“What did you do?”
Aaron gapes at him, open-mouthed, and Neil sniffs dramatically into Andrew’s shoulder.
“Tell me you’re not taking his side here."
“Well from what I heard, you were being mean.”
“Andrew.”
“Aaron.”
“Andrew! You can’t keep letting him get away with shit!”
Andrew shrugs, looking down at Neil, who looks up and furrows his eyebrows together, pouting.
“I didn’t mean to.”
Andrew looks at Aaron.
“He says he didn’t mean to.”
“I’m going to kick your ass.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
Neil lets out a tiny huff of laughter, and Aaron jabs a finger in his direction. Andrew rolls his eyes, but looks down at Neil.
“Neil, it’s not nice to ruin people’s things.”
Neil rubs at his eye with one tiny hand, looking over at Aaron and sniffing again. He sticks out his bottom lip, pouting, and then says: “Sorry Aawin.”
Andrew narrows his eyes at Aaron.
“Aaron,” he says slowly. “Forgive him.”
Aaron narrows his eyes back. They’re nearly mirror images, now, except one of them is holding a tiny sniffling demon-child.
“Fine,” Aaron says. “But he buys me a new textbook when he’s back to normal.”
Andrew stares at him for almost thirty seconds before he nods, once, and carries Neil off to the kitchen for more fruit gummies.
Turns out Neil in every form is an asshole, and Aaron is very much over it.
--
It also turns out, though, that four-year-olds get over their own anger within thirty seconds of experiencing it.
This becomes apparent the next day when, on Nicky’s request, they all go to lunch and then a movie after.
So they head to a diner downtown and eat, Neil swinging his legs in the car seat as he asks Andrew to put on Purple Stew for the eighth time that morning strictly to annoy Kevin, who absolutely loathes it.
“Joke’s on you,” Kevin says, flipping around in the passenger seat to narrow his eyes at Neil, “there’s no way Andrew would play that stupid song in Maserati-”
He doesn’t even finish the sentence before the song is blasting through the speakers, Andrew’s blank stare focused on the road as he turns the volume up so Neil can throw a wicked grin at Kevin before he starts singing along at the top of his lungs.
It’s a terrible song and Aaron absolutely hates it. But seeing Kevin’s frustrated expression as he turns around and pouts in his seat is nearly worth it.
They get to the diner and file out of the car, Andrew pausing to unbuckle Neil from his car seat to set him on the floor, and once inside they order and wait for their food while Neil colors in the maze on the children’s menu entirely black.
“That’s not how mazes work,” Kevin says to his left, and Neil decides to ignore him. He holds up his masterpiece to Andrew on his right instead, beaming at him from over the top of the menu.
“Do you like it?” He asks, and Andrew nods once.
“Amazing,” he says, and Kevin lets out a scoff. “We’ll hang it on the fridge when we get home.”
Neil turns to Kevin, shooting him a smug grin and a small “hmph.” Kevin frowns.
They get their food and eat in mostly silence, with only the occasional input from Neil about how the latest episode of Paw Patrol that he’d seen was “very intewesting”, or how he’s decided that Kevin is “not a very good Exy player, actuwally. Wude people are not good at Exy.”
Kevin spends most of lunch absolutely bitter.
Andrew looks almost amused.
Halfway through their meal, though, it becomes apparent that Neil has been spending the past fifteen minutes sneaking his broccoli and cucumbers onto Andrew’s plate. It becomes apparent once Neil really makes no attempt at hiding it, and flat out picks up a piece of broccoli and slam-dunks it onto the edge of Andrew’s plate. Andrew looks at it for a moment, and then looks back up.
“What are you doing?”
“Giving you your broccoli.”
Andrew blinks.
“This is not my broccoli.”
“Yes it is, it isn’t mine .”
“Eat your broccoli.”
“Eat your broccoli!”
“Neil.”
“Andwew.”
Neil looks up at Andrew with very big, very blue eyes, and Andrew stares back for a long moment.
And then Andrew eats a piece of broccoli.
“Holy shit,” Nicky whispers, because he has at least some sense of self-preservation. “Andrew is a little bit whipped.”
They finish their food and head back out to the car, and are half-way through the parking lot when Neil reaches out and grabs Aaron’s hand.
Aaron looks down, shocked, and Neil simply looks up at him, beaming.
“One hand fo’ you,” he says, and reaches to grab Andrew’s hand as well, “one hand fo’ Andrew.”
Aaron doesn’t have time to form a response before Neil is lunging forward, dead-weighting as he launches himself off of the ground and into the air, nearly taking Andrew and Aaron down with him.
“And so you can swing me!”
Aaron lets out a string of curses as Nicky screeches with laughter behind them, and Andrew says nothing as he straightens up, looks at Aaron, and lifts his arms.
They swing Neil all the way back to the car, and Aaron can’t say that he hates it.
ANDREW
Today is a bad day.
Andrew hasn’t been able to pull himself out of bed for most of the morning. He’s left taking care of Neil to the others; Nicky does a well enough job, and annoying Kevin should be plenty of entertainment. But Andrew can’t bring himself to sit up, or to get up, or to head out into the living room where it’s bright and loud and there are just so many people who are talking . So much talking. So much noise.
He’s tired.
He just wants to be alone.
Unfortunately, four-year-olds don’t care about that.
He doesn’t know what time it is when the door to his room opens slowly, and then it closes again, the tiny shuffling of small feet on carpet following. A tiny body stands just beside his bed, eyes barely able to make it over the edge of his mattress.
“Are you okay?”
Andrew hums. It’s all he can do.
“Are you tired.”
“Mm.”
“Are you sick?”
“Mm.”
“Can I lay with you? I promise I won’t be loud. Or uhb-nox-shious. Like Kevin calls me.”
Andrew remains silent for a long time. Neil stays silent, too. Eventually, Andrew rolls over, grabbing the back of Neil’s shirt to help haul him up onto the bed with him. Neil curls up beside him, not touching, quiet.
Eventually, he whispers: “Can I sing you a song?”
Andrew stares back at him. Neil shakes his head, as if he knows what he’s thinking.
“It’s not one that Nicky showed me, I promise. It’s one that Mom used to sing. When I was sad, or when I was sick.”
Andrew nods once. Neil nods back.
His rendition of You Are My Sunshine is quiet and shaky, his voice soft enough that it doesn’t hurt Andrew’s head. He closes his eyes while he sings, as if he doesn’t want to know that Andrew is watching, though once he hits the last verse he opens his eyes, and reaches out his hand. He doesn’t touch Andrew, though, letting it rest on the pillow between them.
“You’ll never know dear, how much I love you, so please don’t take my sunshine away.”
The room becomes silent again, and after a while Neil’s even breathing and fluttering eyelids let Andrew know that he’s fallen asleep.
Andrew follows soon after, the fog in his head a little bit lighter.
--
He wakes up to a full-sized Neil smiling across from him, his hand still outstretched on the pillow between them.
“Good morning, Sunshine,” he says, and Andrew gives him an unimpressed look.
“You owe Aaron a textbook,” he says, and Neil’s smile grows.
“Do you think he’d let it slide if I sang to him, too?” Neil asks, and Andrew shoves him off of the bed.
Neil laughs anyway, and any fog left in Andrew’s head clears.