Rahim pokes his hand into the water and then takes it out. He puts his hand in again and splashes, laughing, and then puts his other hand in and splashes with both.

Awww. Élie thinks it's important to encourage children's natural curiosity. He waves a hand and the surface of the water near Rahim develops an undulating rainbow swirl. 

He smiles and reaches out to splash the rainbow. He's really very interested in water, it'll hold his attention for as much as ten minutes at a time, even when it doesn't have any rainbows.

After a couple minutes of this, a boat passes through the canal, and Rahim looks up in fascination at that, too. He toddles along behind it, perilously close to the edge of the canal. "Boat," he says, pointing. "Boat."

Does it look like he's having trouble with his balance? no? Great. 

"Yes! That's a boat!" Here's how you say "boat" in Taldane and Kelish and Vudran and Draconic! 

Rahim looks mildly offended. "No, boat."

Élie knows for a fact that this is one bilingual baby, but – 

"In Taldane – " he says in Taldane – "we say 'boat.' In Osirian, we say 'boat'. Can you say boat for me?" 

"Noooooo," says Rahim, as if he has been asked something quite ridiculous, and then runs off with no warning in the direction that the boat is going.

Awwwww. 

Rahim pokes his finger into the water again, a little ways further, and then slowly, precariously, reaches out towards the boat, until his center of gravity is just about as much over the canal as over the path beside it.

There are some intractable philosophical dilemmas that come with the raising of children. For example: how much freedom should one allow them to make their own mistakes? They're small and confused and ignorant and ill-equipped to make informed decisions about their own long-term well-being, but Gods can and do say the same of mortals, and when they do it's hardly ever in the mortal's best interests. Élie's certainly better informed about what a five or ten or twenty-year-old Rahim might want, but that doesn't mean he truly has Rahim's best interests at heart, and not his own convenience as a more powerful entity with goals and desires of his own. Besides, who's he to say that the interests of some some hypothetical Rahim five or ten years from now outweigh those of the two-year-old right here in front of him? If the kid wants to take risks, that's his right, just as it's the right of mortals to defy the gods. 

And a moment later, Rahim tips over and falls into the canal, so suddenly that he hardly has time to cry out before his head is fully underwater.

FUCK FUCK FUCK HIS BABY IS IN A CANAL 

Five seconds later, Élie is in the canal, holding Rahim and obstructing traffic in both directions. 

Rahim is thrashing, very weakly, and otherwise not making any sound. Some people on the nearby boats yell at him, while a few people on the shore look over to see what's going on. Plenty of other people still aren't paying the situation any mind.

Less than five seconds after that, Élie, Rahim, and a carp that swam up his trouser leg are in the courtyard of the temple of Pharasma where Naima does her healing. 

Rahim is either coughing or vomiting up water, and managing to make at least something that sounds like a weak crying sound in the process. He's clinging very tightly to Élie's jacket.

WHERE IS HIS WIFE she's probably inside the temple THEN HE CAN BE INSIDE THE TEMPLE RIGHT NOW HOW'S THAT 

His wife sure is inside the temple! She's sitting at a little wooden table with her apprentices, near a long, long line of sick people that stretches out the door.

One of the temple acolytes calls out that he needs to wait in line. Naima stands up to see what's wrong, mumbling an apology to the patient she's seeing.

There is a wet husband! And a wet baby! Élie is patting his back and mumbling something soothing in Taldane about how bodies of water should be outlawed. 

She tells her sister to hold down the fort, as if her sister can actually do anything here without her, and crosses the distance between herself and Élie.

"What happened?"

...this really wasn't worth interrupting Naima's schedule for, was it? 

"He fell in a canal – I'm sorry, I should have stopped him – and they're filthy, I thought he might need a Remove Disease."  

Naima takes Rahim and pats him on the back, firmly, several times, before casting her healing hex. He coughs up a little more water, regains a little lost color, and begins sobbing very loudly. 

"It's okay," she whispers to the baby. "How long was he in for?"

"Ten seconds? I jumped in after him immediately – and I realize now there are other things I could have done about that, but I wasn't thinking – " or, rather, he was thinking too much about about the wrong things and now someone else's baby might die because he had to interrupt Naima in the middle of her work day, and she's going to think he's too absent-minded to watch Rahim ever again, and probably question why she married him in the first place – 

"Shhh," she tells Rahim. "Here, prestidigitate him dry and we'll wave him in front of the apprentice with the glasses to see if he has anything."

Right he should have thought of that immediately but he's an idiot and now his wife knows it. He can dry the child. 

She takes the dry-but-still-sobbing child over to her apprentices, and comes back in the smallest number of seconds she can manage.

"He's clean. Thank you. Can we - talk more about what happened tonight, maybe?"

Of course, she doesn't want to yell at him in front of the students (not that yelling at him would be remotely in character for Naima, he doesn't stop to think). 

"Of course. I'll take him home and let him play with the turtle, that usually calms him down." 

"Okay. Thank you." And she can hand the still-screaming child to her husband and try to make up time on the line, since it's now backed up on her specifically.

He lets Rahim play with the turtle, which does, predictably, calm him down. Possibly they should get him a real pet, so he's less devastated if this one ever turns back into mad alchemist and tries to steal everybody's left arms. 

Naima is still kind of new at this being married to Élie thing. She still, sometimes, second-guesses herself about things like whether she should hug her husband when she feels like hugging her husband. Her parents sometimes hugged each other, but not ever day, or at least not every day where the other members of their family could see them. And she didn't really hug her last husband, really, even though she loved him. So even when she wants to hug Élie, she's sometimes not very sure that they're the sorts of people who hug, or the sorts of people who hug in this situation (ie, her coming home from work exhausted, which she does almost every day).

...but, when she actually gets home, Élie looks about as tired as she feels, which is a rare occurrence. So after she finishes scooping up and hugging Rahim, she hugs Élie, too.

(It only occurs to her afterward that he might not actually prefer to be hugged when he's tired. Whatever. He can tell her that. Probably.)

Instead Élie is going to bury his head in Naima's should and murmur something that sounds like "'m sorry." 

"For w- oh, for interrupting?"

"For letting our child almost drown!" 

"Oh." Squeeze. "I did want to talk about that. Or - what happened, anyway."

Well. This isn't going to make him look good, but what's he going to do, lie? 

"He was playing by the water. I know it's dangerous, I was watching him, and – I was thinking about how much right I have as a parent to stop my son from taking risks, and how the fact that I'm stronger and smarter and wiser than he is doesn't mean that I know what's best for him, and what it looks like to respect a child as a fellow human being. ...And then he fell in the canal, which answered some of those questions rather quickly." 

Well, she can tell that she would want to yell at someone if they had done that and then not acted like they were obviously expecting her to yell at them, but the fact that he's obviously already expecting this makes her feel like there's no point. He knows.

"Rivers are really dangerous, for little kids," she says, quietly, after just hugging him for a bit. Still hugging him. "In Mut it was - probably the single most common way of dying of an accident, drowning in the river."

"I know. There's a river in Isarn too, but I suppose it's less – omnipresent." Which is a pathetic excuse, he knows as soon as he says it. "I won't let it happen again." 

Augh, why does she feel the need to make her husband even sadder. Enough of that. "You were right there. I think - I've never heard of a kid dying without having wandered off beforehand. You were right there, and you jumped in right after him. And - you sound even more upset about it than I would have been."

"I'm sorry. You shouldn't have to comfort me, it was my mistake, I'm – " 

What is he, really? He's embarrassed, because the whole incident makes him look incompetent as a parent, and guilty, because he put his child in danger, and still feeling the shaky afterimages of fear – but Naima seems to have forgiven him, and she's right that Rahim wasn't in danger for very long. But he's still upset. Why's that? Even if things are fine now, it doesn't mean they'll be fine next time, because he's fundamentally unfit to be a parent, because – 

"I'm afraid that the mistake I make next time will be worse, because I've never met a parent besides you who wasn't absolutely, criminally awful at it." 

"Well, I don't think you're criminally awful at it," she says, and then realizes that that is definitely not how being comforting works. "I'm sure I've done half a dozen more irresponsible things, in the course of taking Rahim places he really shouldn't have been. Which - is not to say that it doesn't matter, or that you shouldn't take pains to be careful, but - I think you have good instincts. Actually."

He's going to have a humiliating emotional outburst, isn't he? He is. It's happening. Hopefully he'll still have a wife at the end of it. "I don't understand it. I mean, I don't know where they could have come from. I – I don't think I've told you about my parents. They're decent, ordinary people. Accountants. They encouraged us to do well in school and didn't beat us excessively and they made the conscious decision to have five children in Cheliax knowing we would certainly be damned. We were never especially close, but that wasn't their fault. They didn't know what to do with me. It's so easy to damage a kid beyond repair, even if you're doing the best that you know how. I'll be better than they were, that's not hard, but that doesn't mean I'll be what Rahim deserves of me. I don't know what that is, so I try to reinvent it from first principles, and just when I think I'm getting somewhere he wanders off and nearly drowns. Sometimes I worry that raising children is like a language and you've got to understand the basics by the time you're seven or you'll never be fluent." 

"I doubt that. Or - I don't know, maybe nobody's fluent."

How do you say something intelligent about this. She's never thought about parenting, not really, not more than 'that's my baby and I'm not going to let anything happen to him', not without Élie prompting her. She's not sure it would have occurred to her not to have kids in Cheliax, either, although trying to imagine what sort of person she could possibly have been in Cheliax makes her head hurt.

"I feel like nobody really gets the world they deserve. Maybe there aren't any perfect parents. If there are, I haven't met them, and I certainly don't think I'm one of them. I guess - I just want to given my kids the best shot I could, at tackling the world themselves someday, and doing better than we are."

"I think - it makes a lot of sense that it's scary. I guess... I think about when Rahim was a tiny baby, brand new, and everyone knew he was going to die, that I needed to accept it, and I couldn't. Felt like I owed it to him to fight for him. Got to the point where I felt like I would do anything, if I could just - find a way to hold onto him."

"That's all I've got. Nothing deep or philosophical, no perfected knowledge of anything, maybe not even any real skill. Just the feeling that we have to fight to hold onto them, when they're in danger. That we brought them into the world with some promise of protection - not comfort, not fun, maybe not even happiness, but protection - and we damn well better try to give them at least that much."

"We can't, of course, a lot of the time. We're not strong enough. But I think we have to try as hard as we possibly can. And - well, you do."

It seems overwhelmingly strange, when you look at the rest of his life, that he should be lucky enough to marry this woman. Or maybe he used up all his luck, on this. 

"I waited, you know. Even if Rahim grows up evil, we're powerful enough to protect his soul from its eternity. I know I didn't choose to bring himself into the world, but I promised myself that I'd never have children until I was able to give them that, and I think this counts. 

...I want to do better than just that, obviously. But if there's a bare minimum, at least I accomplished it." 

Nod.

"...I didn't have a plan like that. When I had him. Like, now that you say that, I'm very glad I do now, but, uh... I think people outside Cheliax are in a lot of ways just lucky that they're not, in this area, not people who would heroically avoid having children if they hadn't gotten lucky, or who do heroically wait until they can be absolutely sure. I guess if everyone waited that long we would probably have gone extinct a long time ago. Or just... make sure that only people who didn't care at all had kids."

" - which isn't meant to be a criticism! To be clear! I think it's good that you're so careful about this and I'm very glad that you were so cautious about having children before you met me, I think it speaks really really well of you and is one of your best traits!"

"Just, uh, want to be clear about which of us has thought more about being a philosophically ideal parent, here."

"Sometimes I'm so philosophical I don't notice when our baby's trying to drown himself." 

"Well. Yes. We have specialized in somewhat different directions, as parents, which I'm pretty sure is what you're supposed to do."

"Thank you for not letting the baby drown. I think he will in fact be fine."

The baby is at this very moment trying to find out if the turtle will let him chew on it. 

"Rahim, sweetheart, don't put that in your mouth, it has feelings – that's it, give it to me – " 

And then, to Naima – 

"He seems to be recovering nicely. Do you want to put him to bed, or shall I?"

"Mommy do!" demands Rahim.

"All right, all right, mommy can do it."