Chapter Text
Normally Ly Oak Swallows Garcia loves being Normally Ly Oak Swallows Garcia
He also enjoys being Captain Dinosaur, the astronaut dinosaur superhero. He even enjoys it when Hero tells him to make Captain Dinosaur into a villain to threaten the Sailor Scouts in their Barbie dreamhouse secret base. The way he sees it, giving other superheroes a job to do seems helpful in its own way. The way Hero sees it, she won’t be able to take advantage of her dreamhouse and brother being the same size forever, and Normal is much easier to stage a kaiju attack with when compared to the giant penguin plushie Uncle Lark won for her at a carnival, which, while cute, was tragically inanimate.
Hero is pinning her brother to the floor, tickling him with one hand, and waving her Sailor Mercury and Sailor Jupiter dolls in her free hand. “Release the hostage, you vile beast!” she commands.
Normal puts a hand to his space helmet visor. The helmet was also serving as a jail cell to trap Tuxedo Mask, who was getting a little bit tangled in Normal’s curls. Giggling, he wiggles free from his sister and bolts out of the room. “Never! He is to be thrown into the pit of doom!” He hears Hero stumbling back to her feet as he dashes down the stairs towards the laundry room.
Hero, unsure if the pit of doom posed any legitimate physical consequences to her favorite doll, comes rushing in behind him. “Normal, wait!” She tackles him to the floor of the living room in front of an unphased Uncle Lark, who’s working on a laptop. Without looking up, he hooks the coffee table with his foot and pulls it out of the way of the kids.
“It’s the hamper!” Normal explains before Hero can start tickling him again.
Hero sits up, not releasing him completely, but enough that he feels safe from immediate attack. “But that’s just clean clothes? How is that a pit of doom?”
Normal groans, now that he’s started kindergarten, he’s gotten used to people not understanding the obvious things he tells them, but it doesn’t make it less frustrating. Things like, wearing shorts under your pants is just like wearing a t-shirt under your sweatshirt, and taking your pants off in that circumstance when you get too hot is not the same thing as only wearing underwear; adding green to the red and blue repeating pattern on the weather chart is just making a longer string of colors to repeat, not messing it up completely; obviously, the word mom is an exception to the instructions not to write words on the iron on transfer paper, because it looks the same forward and backwards; and enthusiastically licking your lips before snack time is not the same thing as sticking your tongue out at the person sitting across the story time circle from you. So he accepts that Hero just doesn’t understand that the clean clothes hamper was full of itchy, rough, and wrong feeling clothing that smells fake and were either clingy from the dryer or stiff from coming off the line. Tuxedo Mask would be in agony.
Hero shrugs and turns to Uncle Lark. “Worry not citizens! For we shall defeat this extraterrestrial horror!”
Uncle Lark raised a hand, revealing he still had four finger puppets of farm animals on his left hand. “Thank you Sailor Scouts,” he says without looking up.
Once his sister gets up, the duo resume their chase. They both enter the laundry room while Sparrow is emptying the machine. Normal lifts the visor of his space helmet and holds the doll threateningly over the halfway filled hamper. “Now your friend will be swallowed up by the pit and buried alive, never to be seen again!”
Hero holds up a hand to pause the action and Sparrow and Normal freeze with their armful of clothes and doll respectively while Hero poses her Sailor Scouts’ arms in positions of adequate despair.
“No!” Hero cries dramatically, falling to her knees as Tuxedo Mask is dropped into the laundry basket where he’s promptly covered by the remaining load of clean laundry. “We must rescue him!” She pokes her dolls at the wicker exterior of the basket as Sparrow picks it up to take it upstairs. Normal follows, doing his best attempt at a villain monologue.
“Hey Normal, we need to be at the school in fifteen minutes, are you ready?” Sparrow says, glancing down at his son.
“Mmhm,” Normal answers, leaving his father to skeptically take in the outfit of dinosaur onesie, astronaut helmet, and superhero cape.
He gestures towards the basket. “There’s nothing in here you’d rather wear?”
“Not really.”
Uncle Lark’s voice comes from downstairs. “Doesn’t Captain Dinosaur need to protect his identity?”
“That’s what the helmet is for,” Normal explains.
Sparrow sighs and tries to hold the hamper out of Hero’s reach. “Honey, you’ll get him back, but I don’t want these clothes to end up everywhere in the process.”
Lark comes up the stairs and sits down next to Normal. “I thought the helmet was so that Captain Dinosaur could breathe in space?”
Normal wants to explain the real reason he wears the helmet is because he likes how it feels, how it means people aren’t sure where his eyes are, how it softens the harshness of the sounds around him, but he doesn’t quite have words for it yet, he just knows he likes it.
Lark slips the helmet off his nephew’s head and takes it back towards the dress up box.
“Are you sure you don’t want to try wearing something else?” Sparrow asks again.
Normal is sure he doesn’t, but he suspects this may be one of the times where saying so is the wrong answer for some reason. He rummages through the dress up box, taking off his cape and searching around until he finds a clip-on tie.
“It’s an important meeting, right?” he asks, clipping the tie on top of the zipper of his onesie. He can’t quite remember who it was, but someone had told him it was important to wear ties to important meetings.
“Lookin’ good, kid,” Uncle Lark says, “Now don’t keep your dad waiting.”
***
Sparrow and Normal arrive at Westrock Elementary, and Sparrow let’s Normal lead him through the building to his kindergarten classroom. The school had undergone some renovations since he’d attended (especially in the two classrooms where he’d caused fire damage), but there was enough that is the same that he finds himself depending on his son to anchor him and prevent him from wandering off to see if any remnants of his mascot design or mementos of their old soccer team were on display.
Rebecca had initially been confused when Sparrow suggested sending Hero and Normal to Westrock instead of San Dimas Elementary School. Sparrow had claimed it was so that his two kids could go to the same school together for longer since Westrock was K-8, but really it was because no one at D.A.D.D.I.E.S. really knew what to expect from Taylor as he grew up, not even Nick, and Sparrow felt it was only sensible to avoid putting his children in the same school as a student who might develop pyrokinesis when asked to share the crayons.
Normal starts pulling against his grip as he sees his teacher, Ms. Cornstarch, and starts waving wildly. When he realizes that Sparrow isn’t going to loosen his grasp, he points to the woman next to his teacher and says, “That’s the question lady!”
Sparrow had been hearing a lot about the question lady in the last week and a half, mostly about her dinosaur earrings, the picture of her cats she has in her office, and the stickers she gave out, as opposed to any of the things she’d been asking Normal about, but that’s what this meeting is for.
He wonders if she deliberately chose the dinosaur earrings because she had been interviewing a child who frequently dressed as one, or if it was just a coincidence. After all, none of the school psychologists he talked to had ever worn any accessories related to his interests. He checks her ears as they approach, and her earrings today appear to just be some sparkly thing.
As they walk into the classroom, Sparrow gives Normal’s hand a squeeze before letting him go. His son makes a direct beeline to the corner of the classroom, takes a bin from the shelf, and empties a collection of colorful little plastic bears onto the carpet. Normal lies down on the carpet and starts sorting them into four lines by color: red, yellow, green, and blue, then he splits those lines up further by size.
“Take a seat,” Ms. Cornstarch says, gesturing to a, thankfully, adult sized chair by her desk. Sparrow sits and tries not to look too pained as Ms. Seifert, the school psychologist, takes out a manila folder filled with checklists and forms. He’s just a kindergartener, how is his file this thick already? He looks over to Normal, but his son seems blissfully engrossed in sorting the bears.
There are introductions, Ms. Cornstarch discusses Normal’s strengths and academic performance, and then Ms. Seifert brings out a checklist.
“I feel like most of this is self-explanatory, but don’t hesitate to comment if something doesn’t seem to line up with what you’re seeing at home,” Ms. Seifert says.
“There were some things I felt like I might need to clarify, because I didn’t feel the always to never scale on this list did it justice.” Ms. Cornstarch uses her pencil to tap on the paper. “Stubbornness, for example, Normal is usually pretty easy going, but when he gets stuck on something, well-” she glances up at Sparrow, “-I’m guessing from your expression, you know.”
Sparrow looks over to his son, still wearing the dinosaur onesie and thinks of all the times Normal had come to school, including today, wearing it because they simply did not have the time to convince him to wear anything else; or the time he’d tried to convince him that his plushie was the same after going through the wash while Normal wouldn’t stop screaming about how they’d killed Bluey, and he never slept with that stuffed animal again; or the time they told him he couldn’t come down from the table until he finished his okra, and Normal simply sat at the kitchen table for over two hours until it was time for bed; or when Normal wanted his hair in a ponytail like his dad and didn’t understand why Sparrow wouldn’t then put his hair in five different ponytails all over his head; or his insistence on wearing his pants backwards.
Ms. Cornstarch moved her improvised pointer farther down the page. “Another area I felt badly about ranking him higher relates to playing with his peers.” She made sure to draw attention to the comment she’d placed in the margin of the checklist next to the entries about peer interaction, which was marked, to Sparrow’s dismay, in the “never” column. “It’s not that he’s choosing to isolate, per se, the other kids just don’t want to play with him,” she explains, “I don’t really get it. He’s such a sweet kid.”
Sparrow considers asking this woman about her fitness for her job if she was confused by the occasional unexplained cruelty of children, but Ms. Seifert cuts in, “Some things I found interesting in my conversations with Normal were that he’s both clearly aware that his classmates don’t seem to like him, and yet, when I asked him if there was anyone he didn’t like, or anyone he had issues with, he didn’t have a single negative thing to say about any of them.” She tilts her head. “I even asked him if it bothers him, and he said it didn’t.”
Sparrow takes his glasses off and rubs them on the hem of his shirt, more for something to do than because they actually need cleaning. “Yeah, he’s a love wolf,” he says, trying to ignore the memories of how his classmates reacted to his new philosophy once he’d returned from Faerûn, and that was with the benefit of having Lark working as a bodyguard to protect him from most of it. “So how does this tie in with the tripping thing?” He looks up from the papers, gazing past Ms. Cornstarch at the art projects hanging on the wall behind her. He hates seeing his son quantified in front of him like this, even if Ms. Cornstarch was willing to admit the method of evaluation was flawed.
Placing her pencil in her ponytail, she explains, “Well, last Wednesday, when we were coming back in from recess, he tripped and just -” Ms. Cornstarch uses her arm to mime someone falling flat on their face. “His classmates started laughing, and when he stood up, he had the biggest smile on his face. Since then, every time we come back from recess, he trips again, just to make everyone laugh.”
A knot starts forming in Sparrow’s stomach. He tries to ignore it and focus on the paper plate and tissue paper stained glass projects, wondering if he could pinpoint which was Normal’s just by looking. “Does he know they’re laughing at him?”
Ms. Seifert shakes her head. “When I asked him about it, he just said he wants to make them smile. So he might not understand, but if he does, I’m not sure it matters to him.”
***
Normal is now making a repeating color pattern with the plastic bears, still trying to organize them by size. He’s frustrated because he keeps running out of small red bears before he runs out of small yellow bears, meaning that, as things were, he either has to have them transition from small to large unevenly, or be stuck with bears left over, and having bears left over is unacceptable.
“Hey bud, Sparrow says, squatting down next to him, mentally exhausted from the conversation. Ms. Cornstarch and Ms. Seifert had suggested having normal tested for any neurodevelopmental disorders, but he’d opted to put that on hold for at least a year, if not more, since Normal might just be a late bloomer and he was unsure what benefit a specific diagnosis would even have. “Time to clean up so we can meet Mom, Uncle Lark, and Hero at the ice cream shop.”
Normal scoops the bears back into the plastic container and places it carefully back on the shelf. “I want to show you my picture first.”
Sparrow is so glad that Normal didn’t fight cleaning up, that he doesn’t stop to consider the request. He’s pulled over to a wall, where a small banner reads “My Favorite Place” and underneath is a collection of twenty to thirty drawings of Ms. Cornstarch’s students' favorite places.
“I drew the ice cream shop!” Normal says, and Sparrow is grateful for the description since he’s not sure he would have been able to identify the square looking building as Swallows’ Vegan Ice Cream Parlor on its own. Normal points out how he drew their whole family standing outside, and he made sure everyone had their favorite flavor of ice cream, but Sparrow is distracted by the sky in the drawing. On most days, he could convince himself that the red sky was normal. On occasion, he found himself scrambling through old photos from his childhood to remember the exact shade of blue it used to be. He doesn’t know when the idea of sun on and sun off replaced his expectation of a sunrise or sunset, he only knows that it happened. But there was something different about seeing it represented in children’s drawings. Seeing the red sky and black sun through the perspective of someone who never knew differently. Somehow, when they drew the black sun with its rays of darkness cutting against the red expanse, it became obvious. They’re drawing eyes, even if they don’t know it, and here he is, standing under the gaze of the Doodler as it looks over all these locations Normal and his classmates love (with the exception of whichever kid drew the inside of a Chuck E’ Cheese).
He pries his eyes away from the wall to look back at his son, who’s beaming up at him. “Yeah, great picture buddy,” he manages, “but let’s go to the real one.”
Normal jumps up and down happily as they wave goodbye to Ms. Cornstarch, telling her they’ll see her on Monday.
***
“So did they have any suggestions?” Rebecca asks as Sparrow finishes showing her all the forms he’d been given.
“Well, she’s going to ask Normal to be her walking buddy when they come in from recess from now on, so she’ll be able to hold his hand and keep him from falling over.”
Rebecca waves the papers towards him. “I was talking more about all of this stuff. Clearly the tripping is just the tip of the iceberg here.”
“The trip of the iceberg, if you will,” Sparrow says before taking a bite of ice cream. “She said that he might be alienating his classmates with his clothing choices. Suggested we might try picking his outfits for him.”
Rebecca rolls her eyes and looks over toward her dinosaur child who is slowly and methodically working away at his cup of strawberry ice cream with a spoon. “I totally would have been friends with the dinosaur boy in kindergarten. What’s the problem with those kids?”
Sparrow boops her on the nose with his vanilla cone. “I know you would. You knew me in my wolf phase and look where you ended up.” He watches Lark try to redirect Normal’s attention that had been distracted by the coloring page Hero was working on, back to his quickly melting ice cream. “Unfortunately, none of Normal’s classmates are as cool as you.”
She wipes her face, scrunching up her nose, but still smiling.
He fiddles with one of the hair ties on his wrist. “I know that in an ideal world his classmates would just be more understanding, but that’s not the world we’re living in, Bec. And I can’t help but think that eighth and ninth grade might have been a little easier if Dad had told me to leave the wolf ears and tail at home. It probably would have saved Lark a handful of suspensions if I had.”
Rebecca places a hand on his arm. “Sparrow, if it wasn’t the wolf thing, they would have found something else and you know it, and Lark would have found reasons to fight kids, with or without you.”
“That’s not as encouraging as you make it sound.”
“He’s got Lincoln and Taylor,” she says, squeezing his forearm, “and you turned out alright in the end.”
Sparrow bites back all the reasons that statement is blatantly untrue. Constantly fighting the eldritch horror that he and his brother released is by no measure “turning out alright in the end.”
“I’m sure there’s something we can figure out to at least help,” she says, taking the papers and slipping them into her bag.
Sparrow keeps fiddling with his hair tie, looking over to his brother who has both children dangling from his biceps as they squeal and kick their legs. He takes another bite of his ice cream. He could envision his father quoting Brené Brown, something about authenticity being the key to connection or something like that, but how could anyone look at Normal and truly believe that? Here is his son, being himself with unabashed enthusiasm, completely unaware of how this kind of behavior would only result in him getting hurt.
“You know the part that I can’t get over?” he says.
Rebecca hums in response, taking out her phone and snapping a picture of the kids and their uncle.
“It’s that he doesn’t have a bad thing to say about any of them, and from the sound of it, the school psychologist tried.” He lets out a quick bitter laugh. “‘My kid is too nice to notice he’s being mistreated by his classmates’ was not a parenting problem I considered. I can’t even ask myself what dad would have done, he had the opposite problem. Did you know that he made a tabletop role playing game to try to teach us how to be nicer?”
Rebecca snorted. “Did it work?”
“Not remotely!” He finished his cone in three quick bites. “Nine times out of ten we ended up fighting.”
“So we can take ‘create a ttrpg that encourages our son to identify the bad in people’ off the list.” Sparrow can’t help but feel that Rebecca finds this whole situation more amusing than anything else.
“And then he’s still willing to risk injuring himself to make them laugh and smile! Like, I almost understand being okay with people not liking you, but to then still go out of your way to, I dunno, bring joy to them?”
“You don’t need to understand it,” Rebbeca says, “but I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”
“Do you think us picking out his clothes for him is really going to work?” Sparrow reaches out and snags Normal’s abandoned, quarter-finished cup of ice cream and takes a bite.
“Do you want my honest opinion?” Rebecca asks, “I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference. To reach a compromise, both sides have to be willing to move, and I don’t think I trust those kindergarteners to stop being judgemental assholes just because someone starts wearing his pants the correct way round.”
Sparrow slumps down across the picnic table and rests his head on his arms. “I just want him to be happy. I just want him to be able to be a normal kid, make friends, have fun, and be happy.”
Rebecca rubs a hand across his back. “Hey, there’s no book on how to do this, we just try our best and deal with things as they come, okay?”
That’s the last day Captain Dinosaur goes to school. It’s also the day that Sparrow finds a used copy of the book How to Fix Your Son on Meta Marketplace.