Baby Playdate

Bec listened. A key word penetrated——sorry——alerting him to the essence of what she was saying to him. Sorry meant apologies. He’d been taught about apologies. Apologies were an offering in the face of poor behavior (An imparting of empathy, floated back a phrase from decades past, but it made little sense to Bec in the moment), and they were to be accepted with grace. He replied reflexively, tactful and yet toneless——not due to insincerity, but rather rote: “"I thank you for your apology.”"

Then he thought a little more about it, and his brows dipped. His next words came out slowly, with clear effort. "“I’'m sorry for…I’m sorry for …the, um …the bad. The, the, the…”," He lifted his hands, palms forward, and curled his fingers as if digging into something invisible, then looked to Little Red Baby, gauging her own comprehension. "“Bad,”" he tried again, then perked up as he recalled another word she had used. “"Trouble. I did you——cause, caused you trouble. Little Red Baby is small and young, and trouble is… bad for young ones. I’m sorry.”"

He paused, determined his point was sufficiently expressed, and settled back in his seat in a comfortable slouch. "“No more trouble,”" he tacked on with a decisive air, “"or there will be trouble.”"

At her question, Bec twisted and fixed Little Red Baby with a look of sheer incredulity. “Comment ça? Of course I am a doctor. I have been a doctor for …for…very long.” He spread his hands as if swapping fishing stories. “Very long. You see?” He pinched his index finger and thumb together. “This is now.” Hands out again. “And this is all of me. All of my time. Most of it, I have been a doctor—although,” he amended, with lurking memories wringing the remnants of someone else’s words from his speech, “we weren’t, really, not in the beginning. Just a trick. A trick to unlock doors, open hearts. When plague is in the home, who do you trust to let in but a priest or a doctor? G…Mas…” He fumbled, then, and the spell (and resultant coherency) broke. After a second of bemused, internal struggle, Bec decided to forgo a name or a title for his old sire. “He didn’t want to act like a priest. We acted like doctors, instead. Then I learned how to be a real doctor. And I am still a doctor. I have had a long time to learn how to be a good doctor,” he added, mimicking her smile. “Even when everything changes, I am still a doctor.”

He paused, his simulated smile crumbling. For a bare moment, that unpleasant sensation from earlier flirted with his perception of Little Red Baby’s question. It was fleeting, thankfully—and yet that flash of foreign emotion passed just long enough to collect and harbor a string of doubts. Why was she asking? Did she disbelieve him? Why did that feel bad? Did she need proof? How could she question such a thing? Why did her question make him question? How long was very long, anyway? Why couldn’t he remember?

He didn’t intend to verbalize any of this, but bits and pieces spilled out regardless, as if brimming over from his overwhelmed, vaguely defensive mind. “Why are you asking this? I really am. I am a doctor. I can…I can show you. I have tools. I remember. I-I am cleaning them, but I have them.”

Bec winced against an overzealous tug of her comb, but Little Red Baby’s words, at least, settled some of his ruffled nerves. Yet others stirred when she spoke of “lying and pretending”, however, along with another peculiar quote dredged from memories past: Sleepers lie; a clever man wakes them to his own truths. He almost spoke the words aloud, but upon realizing he didn’t quite know what meaning they held, kept them to himself.

Instead he tensed his jaw rigid and tried to listen. His attention was scattering again—pulled by thoughts of his medical equipment drying in a room he’d forgotten the location of, memories of puzzling words from a voice that lingered like a miasma, fingers and teeth dragged hungrily through his hair, questions from a fresh-dead mouth…

Questions. “Questions for a doctor,” he repeated, riveting his focus almost desperately. “Yes, yes, some questions for me. I can answer questions, doc—doctor questions—please, go on. What would you like to know?”

Bec sat up quite straight. Never mind the relative flood of questions—he latched onto the through line well enough, as the subject was, after all, rather the cornerstone of his unlife.

“Ah, the plague,” he said in earnest before interrupting himself almost immediately. “Well, which plague? You mean plague, yes, of course. But which—I mean—not which when, but which where? Not that where.” He waved an impatient hand at the room at large, then tapped his sternum repeatedly. “Here where, body where.” He touched his index and middle fingers to his throat, for all appearances indicating where a pulse ought to be, but then transferred his touch to where his arm connected with his torso. “Bubonic?” His hand splayed across his chest. “Pneumonic?” He ran his fingers up and down his limbs, starting at his heart. “Septicemic?”

He paused, reflecting on his own queries. “All of them,” he decided with a curt nod. “They are all bad. Not as bad as…” He gestured over his shoulder; where else would you find the past? “Still bad. Nobody knew, you see. We did not know how or why for so long. But,” he pinched his fingers together at an intimation of scale and almost smiled, “I told you about the germs. Tiny germs in tiny fleas. Bite, then die.” The faint smile slipped, expression falling and flattening. “In the beginning, everyone died. Everyone everywhere. First the fevers, then the pain and chills, and buboes, or coughs, or blood, and death. But then it was not so bad for a while—stopped en masse—so we stopped, too. But it is still out there, I think. I have heard. I think.”

His brows drew together as he did, in fact, think. What precisely did Little Red Baby wish to know? Had he addressed all of her questions? He didn’t need to ask again. Just remember. Plague—disease—which—which where—which when—?

“Where when,” he blurted. “All the places we traveled, all of them, always plague. And—and back then. When we traveled. That’s…when?”

Oblivious to Little Red Baby’s fretful fancies, Bec occupied his mind with the struggle of reordering his memories. It was a bit like surgery, really—painstaking work, for the moment too delicate for his clumsy attention, but with enough concentration he felt he could do it. Threads led backward in time, tied to vast numbers. One thousand six hundred and forty-seven—thirty-thousand. One thousand six hundred and sixty-five—one hundred thousand. What, exactly, did these numbers represent, again…?

Little Red Baby spoke up, derailing Bec’s puzzled train of thought and presenting him with two distinct topics to respond to. He tried his best to do so. “Oh. Yes, many. Chair. Many chairs. That is fine.”

To show his readiness, he tilted his chin up and rolled his head backward. Oof. The vertigo would pass. For now, he tried to focus on getting his thoughts back on track.

“Do you want to know more about plague? Or…did you say you had another question?”

The vertigo did not pass, at least not immediately. A soft, involuntary sound of protest squeezed from Bec’s throat, but he restrained his reaction to that small noise alone—so tame it might as well have been a grunt of acknowledgment. He fixed his twitchy gaze on the ceiling, blurred swirl that it was, and waited for the sensation to subside…oh, but now there was another sensation, running and dripping and sopping, and at least it was distracting, he supposed, but so much so that he nearly missed Little Red Baby’s next question.

Such a thing? What a thing? Which thing? Ah, plague thing! They were lucky his familiarity with the subject streamlined his general attentiveness. His interest overrode both the dizziness and the sluice of water weighing down his hair, and he replied with odd enthusiasm.

“Oh, of course such a thing could happen here,” he chirped. “Why not? Things may not leave, but there is nothing to stop a flea or a rat coming in from the outside, no? With nowhere to go, the plague stays here. In less than a week half the town is dead—if it is bubonic. More, if septicemic. Maybe all, if pneumonic.” He nodded pensively at the ceiling, sobering as he recalled his lessons, if not his experiences. “You have to drink quickly, before the buboes or the coughing or the bleeding. Before they start rotting.” He grimaced. “No. No good. We don’t drink them if they are too far gone. That is what he says. Said. That—that’s the rule. Family first. Leave the dead to die, take the rest.” As he spoke, his boot heel bounced with antsy energy, pent-up in a single limb, yet prepared to channel through a broader, more powerful action. Whether incited by the subject matter at hand or by Little Red Baby’s gentle but continuous ministrations, it was difficult to say. “But...but there is no plague here now. There could be, but there is not. We would know. Everyone would already be dying.”

“Uncomfortable?” he repeated, unconsciously echoing the word down to her very intonation. His hand stilled his bouncing leg as he reflected on the notion. He supposed he was, at that. He couldn’t understand why, let alone explain it to Little Red Baby. This was different than the nauseating nerves that had all but drowned him in the tub, and not quite the sweet sadness that flavored every thought he had of Gauthier—but this sensation did belong with the others, pulled taut in between like the quivering string of an instrument. Somehow, he felt plucking it would be a terrible idea. Yes. Uncomfortable. And he had been taught to be polite, and polite men didn’t lie—sleepers lie—so he spoke candidly.

“I am uncomfortable,” he said, “and I don’t know why. I want to know, but at the same time I think it may feel worse if I know.” He shook his wet head, tapping his temple with the same restless energy as his juddering leg. “It...it is deep inside, what I feel. I am falling inside over and over. Inside is...uncomfortable. Can we talk of something outside? Can we stay outside? How do we stay outside? I do not think I am good at it, not alone.” After a beat, another echo, this time of his old sire once again: “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

If plague had dragged him into the past—deep inside—the mention of blood rooted him in the moment. Blood was fresh; blood was now. It was inside, but in a different way. He had fed earlier in the night…yes? Yes, he had. Before finding his new tools and boiling them, before Little Red Baby had come along to ask questions and drip things in his hair. He’d fed—and it had been clean, safe, not messy, not harmful, as far as he recalled. But the second question drew a distinct line from the first to an answer that had nothing to do with feeding and everything to do with medical practices. Of course. A question for a doctor; an answer from a doctor.

“You can store and transport blood,” he said to the ceiling, “if you have the right tools. It’s new, you see. New ideas all the time, in medicine. Always new ideas and tools.” His hands, which had alternated between gripping the chair’s arms, his sleeves, his shirt, his bouncing leg, lifted and cupped around an invisible container. “It must be chilled. It needs sodium citrate, to…to keep it, preserve it. Because…because, you understand, when blood sits, it…” He pinched his fingers together. “It…you can’t use it. It stops being…you can’t. It is bad. Stops up the veins. But if you preserve it, cool it, it stays, it keeps—for days, weeks. You just need the right…things.” He touched his forearm with a quick pat. “And that is how you get the blood, too, for transfusions. That’s what it is for. Needles and tubes both out and in. They did it in the war. I was not allowed near the war,” he remembered, more a simple statement than a lament. “Not safe. But I could read about it. All those new ideas, like preserving and storing. So, that is how it is done. Though I do not think you have any sodium citrate here.” He paused. “Or refrigerators.”

Bec shifted in his seat, rearranging himself in an effort to relax his posture and curiously meet Little Red Baby’s eyes. Now he had a question. “Why do you want to know these things? If we have thralls, we have blood. You do not need to store it. And…it is faster and easier to feed than to use needles…”

Bec listened with great attention as she spoke, mentally repeating back important words and phrases as they flew by, clinging to every thread that it all might hold together and not fray. When he responded, he took care to address each point chronologically. She sounded very serious, and very worried. He didn’t want to misspeak, not now.

“I think a few weeks is the longest blood can be stored,” he said, “if you have the right things for doing it, and I do not know that we have those. But there are ways to help humans when they are sick.” He tried to remember how to truly smile. All he could think of was Asher’s face—that crescent, glinting grin—so he mimicked his recollection. “That is my job. That is what we will do, if it happens, yes? Help the humans to live. Someone must survive illness sometime, or we would never learn how to heal them.”

He hesitated for a considerable interim before tackling her next question, trying to make sure he followed. “You…you are a baby. Yes. Young and…hungry? Wild-hungry?” No, that wasn’t quite right, but good enough; if he spent too long searching for the right words, he’d wander too far. “When thralls cut themselves for you, it is hard, yes, and slow. Dangerous. But needles…syringes…they are small. I can show you, with my m…med…doctor, doctor things. They can take only very little blood at a time, if you take it that way, even if it is not dangerous. It would take a long time to collect enough for a meal—too much time for a hungry baby to wait. Unless…unless you mean to use the tube and bottle?” His brow creased as he puzzled over this realization. “Then…yes, that would take more blood and carry more blood, but it is not very…very discreet. It would leave a mark—smaller than a bite, but still a mark. Unless…if a person did not know what the mark was,” he mused, “then it could be discreet. And just as a human does not need to know they are being bitten, they do not need to know they are being…they do not...need knowing, they need not...being...” He twisted and pulled at the fabric of his shirt, visibly squirming in frustration. “That, know that. B-but I don’t have hollow tubes. We would need to find tubes.”

Bec’s head tipped sideways, his hands relaxed and his eyes fell blank as he gathered his thoughts in preparation for what he wanted to articulate. Slowly. Slowly. “We have many thralls,” he said at length. “More than enough. I will help keep them well, of course: you do not need to worry about that. I’m a doctor. Rest them and feed them if they are over…over…overeaten. Heal them if they are harmed when we feed. But we have so many. Many enough. You should not worry so much about them, Little Red Baby.”

As Little Red Baby lamented her lack of control, Bec agreed with a bare nod. Of course. She was young. Young ones usually had trouble with such things in his experience. They learned, in time. How much time, he hadn’t an estimate (that is, he couldn’t remember, and at a certain age the years blurred together), but they all got there in the end. Now that he attempted to think about it, however, wasn’t it the responsibility of one’s sire to instruct their childe in such matters? Yes. Yes, of course it was. Well, then, surely their Master would take care of it.

But suddenly she pivoted to a new line of questioning, almost completely upsetting the precarious balance he’d achieved in following their conversation from one precipice to another. A mental stumble, a pitch, and then he managed to grasp onto the ledge, grateful for Little Red Baby’s phrasing—first pointing out that he had said something, and then articulating the particular thing he had said. It helped narrow his focus, grounding him. “Thank you,” he said automatically, as if it had been a conscious decision on her part, before taking her questions into consideration. There was something almost...troubling about what she asked. Something that tugged at his credulity and encouraged him to make a strange face...and question her questions. “How...how do you not know about this? That is what we do.” She should know, shouldn’t she? That was the trouble. Someone should have at least told her by now—it was like the matter of control all over again. “We...take their minds, for a little—before we bite, while we bite, after we bite—then give them back how we want them to be when it’s over. If you want them to forget you, they forget; if you want them not to see what you do, they don’t. I myself am not good at it,” he started to explain, but what was once a simply stated fact became a somewhat confused, shameful admission thanks to his shifting emotional agency, and briefly derailed his train of thought. He floundered, speaking haltingly. “I...am...I do not...this thing, it is...a thing...we...but I-I don’t...it…” His mind raced, dragging his stupid, sluggish, frustrating words along behind. “I...I...you...we...” Then it clicked, and the flood came, if a bit disorganized. “He! Him, Gauthier Masthier old Master, he was very good at it he can make anyone think anything however he says it though he didn’t have to say it he said he could just think it and so then they think it too—I wonder if new Master is as good at it as old Master but I do not think so because he told me he was the best at it and nobody else can be as good as the best.”

Even with the warning, Bec’s hands jolted to the sides of his chair and gripped with disproportionate desperation as he was tilted forward, forward, too far forward, surely he would slide right out of the chair and pitch face first to the floor—

But instead the legs landed gingerly, solidly, depositing him flush and level with the ground without so much as a residual wobble. Once he felt safe to do so, he reached up and explored the towel—not that he could feel it through his gloves, but he pressed it to the sides of his neck and experimentally tousled his wet hair. An agreeable sensation, he decided, and one he started to apply with greater enthusiasm until he noticed Little Red Baby kneeling before him, waiting for his attention. Had she said something? No, now she was saying something, asking questions again.

He listened. Blinked slowly. Curled his fingers around the towel and squeezed.

“C...connections,” he said haltingly, almost immediately awash with a fresh flood of uncomfortable emotions. Uncertain, he pressed on; it didn’t, couldn’t yet occur to him that if he continued in this vein, he would feel progressively worse. “Mind connections, family connections—when they—if you lose them, if they break—new ones—you make new ones, together, to, to, to put them where they were before, when they are gone, b-because I lost—I lost them, I lost the connections, I broke—lost—Master—” The words stopped, strangled by emotions that tensed his throat and dug his fingers deep into his scalp. It was dreadful, almost like being broken all over again—a thought that both lost and gained meaning the moment it occurred to him. Broken? Of course broken. Mental connections, damaged but now repaired, fragile things, careless efforts, severed veins tied in knots to stop the bleeding...but reaching out though the mended connection was like being tilted back and forth in that awful chair, falling with nothing, no one to catch him. No warmth, he remembered. Hands that grabbed and pushed and pulled with no care or finesse before retreating to cold, distant acknowledgement. Better than nothing, whispered a voice in the back of his mind, and Bec couldn’t be sure if it was old Master, new Master or his own thought.

“Better than nothing,” he echoed aloud, for no reason other than the fact that he couldn’t remember if he’d finished answering Little Red Baby’s question, and it would be rude to not say anything if she was expecting something. Better than nothing.

Something unspoken strained the air of the washroom, unnerving enough to prompt Bec into watching Little Red Baby’s every move intently. But any ruffled feathers were sufficiently smoothed over when she retrieved his face—his mask—and presented it to him, her manner and words somewhat guarded, but gentle.

He accepted it with an automatic “Thank you”, then simply looked down at it resting in his hands. The mask seemed to stare sightlessly back, lenses like empty skull sockets, reflecting nothing. It didn’t need to reflect anything for him to remember with a sad, sick twist of his stomach that he already had a face—and that there was more to it than that. His Master’s laughter rang in his ears. “Acral necrosis,” he muttered, mostly to himself, as he left the mask in his lap and scrubbed with the towel at his hair to sop up some of the excess moisture. He then stood too quickly, fumbling the mask, and angled in the vague direction of Little Red Baby even as he took steps toward the door. “I should let my hair dry out first. Yes. Thank you for…” He gestured, everywhere and nowhere, as there were far too many words he would have to summon in order to express the full scope of their evening. “Thank you. I will go clean the rest of my instruments. Excuse me.”

He stopped in the doorway, almost as if he’d hit a barrier. After a few seconds of awkward silence lingered, he spoke up with more sullen reluctance than the usual confused hesitation of his communication difficulties: “...Where is my room?”