There's a little thump when Alan Richardson leaves for his flight. The suspension on this damn car must be getting even worse somehow. That or a raccoon got into the garage. He hopes it wasn't a raccoon, it'd be hell to clean off and he's in a rush for the airport... maybe not too much of a rush to hit a carwash. That works. The old girl could use a bath anyway.

He drives off, not looking in his rearview at what a mess he has left behind.

If Eric were human, his foot would likely be a mess of red gore and shattered bone. As is, his ankle is badly broken. Instinctively, he manages to crawl behind some boxes before the man in the car spots him, and before he starts sobbing. 

No one interferes with this.

After a few minutes of sobbing, though, a human girl about his size comes into the garage. "Hey? What's making that noise, is something in here..."

Eric flinches, sucking in a breath and holding still as marble behind his wall of boxes.

...but something must be out of place, because the girl squints at a flash of pale skin. "...what is-"

A voice from inside the house. A human woman. Fully grown, though not yet into the sagging stage. "Suzanna Elaine Richardson if you do not get back in here and go to the bus stop this instant we will miss your bus and I will have to walk you to school! If I walk you to school I will not have time to bake cookies and you will not get cookies!"

"God, Mom, I don't even like them! You can't threaten to take away oatmeal raisin!"

But, with only a momentary glance back at the boxes, she trudges back into the house.

Once Eric’s sure the girl is gone, he crawls out from his hiding spot and starts hopping on one foot into the house proper. He needs to find somewhere safe to wait till his ankle’s better, and maybe find some of that impossibly sweet food humans make to make up for how their kind and the universe have wronged him.

Cupboards contain various contents; he eventually finds one for food. Contents include:

- tiny, salty discs or squares of crackly bread
- cans heralding various colors of legume or soup, which yield readily to vampiric strength but in so doing disgorge their lukewarm and disgusting contents all over him and his surroundings
- crunchy, flavorless tubes, bowties, or seashells (in assorted boxes)
- a tin of tiny, atrociously salty fish
- and, on one of the upper shelves reachable only by an adult human standing on a chair or a tiny vampire of the utmost cunning, various prepackaged sweets - squishy white blobs, spiral cakes soaked in sugar syrup, and a mid-size plastic pumpkin full of chocolates, gumdrops, hard candy, et cetera.

After his pyrrhic victory against the cans, Eric manages to sniff out the candy. He proceeds to take the pumpkin under the kitchen table... along with the the bread and the salty fish. Maybe the big human will blame the smaller human for the mess.

The big human opens the front door. She walks into the living room and takes her shoes off with a sigh of relief, then sniffs the air and makes a confused noise. She walks into the kitchen.

"What happened here?" she groans upon seeing the soup disaster. Then she - stops.

(There presumably isn't a trail of soupy footprints under the kitchen table - Eric isn't dumb. But when a can of soup explodes against a person's body, the splatter pattern is distinctive, or at least unusual. And one might drip unintentionally while making their way to their destination, especially with a limp.)

"Hello?" the woman says in a quiet, uneven voice.

(Indeed, there are a few serpentine smears)

Under the table, Eric goes very still, the kind of still that generates anti-sound as all movement ceases. But one of the round chocolates he was devouring rolls out from under the tablecloth. 

The woman slowly crouches down to look under the table.

"I'm not going to hurt you," is the first thing she says when she sees Eric, before she even fully processes what she's seeing. That's a scared kid. She's not going to hurt him.

“You’re—you’re not going to try?”

"No! Anybody who'd try to hurt a little kid for being in the wrong place should be - put in prison," she says, instead of shot in the street, because this kid did not grow up in her household and is not used to her turns of phrase and is also already cowering.

She takes in a little more of his appearance. "...your ankle looks really bad," she observes. "Can I help?"

"It'll be fine in a bit... do you have one of those long, soft chairs?"

"...a couch? Yeah. Do you want me to carry you over to it? And maybe get you some ice, for your ankle..."

This human seems... weirdly nice. "Yes please."

She puts her hands under his arms and slides him across the tile out from under the table, then shifts her arms to carry him more comfortably. She wrinkles her nose at the soup staining her shirt. "I don't suppose I could get you into a bathtub first," she says ruefully.

Gosh, she's warm. "Okay."

"What, really? Zanna would rather eat boiled cabbage than get in the bath without a fight... you're pretty gross, though, it can't be comfortable."

She changes course and heads for the bathroom, bouncing Eric slightly with each step.

"What's wrong with baths? They're nice!"

(The movement is incredibly soothing)

"Aren't they? She just never wants to put down her books, and if you tell her to finish the chapter and then get in the bath she'll just keep reading and say there was a cliffhanger at the end."

Bounce bounce and hipcheck the bathroom door open. Place boy on mat, start filling the tub. "What's your name, anyway? How'd you get here?"

“Eric,” he answers. “I was sleeping in your cave.”

He decides not to mention her mate(?) running over his foot.

"Ah, the dark and mysterious cavern under the kitchen table. Zanna loved exploring it when she was littler - you'd get along, I think."

She tests the water. "Do you want bubbles?"

“Bubbles?”

"They'll make the water a little soapier, but a lot more fun!"

Eric nods. This lady hasn’t steered him wrong so far.

She shakes some liquid under the tap, from a decently sized glass bottle. It smells pretty strongly of some kind of flower or fruit, and the water rapidly fills up with thick foam.

Eric is very much in awe. It looks like the foamy bits in waves, but smells like flowers! Is this woman a witch? He pulls himself up over the rim of the tub to sniff the bubbles, getting some on his nose.

She caps the bottle. "Oh, isn't it nice? We make it at home, castile soap and coconut oil and some essential oils and a little aloe - Zanna's allergic to the stuff you get at the supermarket. Gives her the worst rashes. Okay, here's how I'll do it -"

She picks him up and plunks him down in the soapy water, draping his ankle over the side of the tub, with a loofah under it for padding. "We'll want to ice your ankle when we can, so warm water won't do it any favors. But we can get the rest of you nice and clean, and I can wash your foot with some cold water after."

Eric’s main answer is to shudder with pleasure, but he does manage a nod. He giggles at the bubbles popping against his skin.

And the woman sets to scrubbing.

"Where'd your clothes get to in the first place?" she asks, washing his back.

“Clothes? Oh, I don’t wear ‘em.”

"...huh. I bet your parents don't wear clothes either, right?"

Eric shakes his head. “Nope!” He tilts his neck in thought. “Well, my mommy doesn’t. Daddy probably did.”

"Okay."

There's that nudist colony about ten miles west, and that means she's got a pretty good idea where Eric came from. That does not mean she's happy. She's got nothing against people living like that, even if it drives property values down, but this kid's roaming on his own, miles from home, he doesn't have shoes, he broke into her house somehow and sprained his ankle and ?got covered in soup? and hid under a table about it, he was terrified to be found by an adult. She's frankly surprised he's as upfront as he is about having parents; she was expecting him to have run away, to need a lot more coaxing to give her any information at all.

(She was ready to do it. She's going to bring the wrath of God down on these people.)

"I never introduced myself, did I? I'm Ellen Richardson. What's your mommy's name?"

“I’m Eric. My mommy’s name is Belinda.”

"Belinda! That's really pretty. Is your last name that pretty too?"

“Don’t have one of those.”

"...huh! Like Cher."

That's inconvenient. But the first name's uncommon enough, and the community small enough, that she'd be shocked if it were ambiguous once the cops look into it.

(There's a little twinge of guilt about calling the cops on somebody, like that's ever made anything better - no, stop. She's not in Harlem anymore. These are suburban cops. They've probably forgotten how their guns work, they're not going to shoot anybody.)

She looks at the water and clicks her tongue. "I might have to run us another bath before too long, you're really putting this one through its paces. At least the soup's off of you and we can focus on normal dirt."

“Cher?”

"She's a famous singer! And that's her whole name, she doesn't have a last name either."

Ellen starts singing If I Could Turn Back Time.

Eric starts splashing in time to the song. Good sense of rhythm, this boy. 

Ellen pauses after the second chorus. "I'm gonna rinse your hair before we change the water, just so we can get you properly clean with the second round instead of just making mud soup again. I need you to close your eyes, though, okay? It's gentle shampoo but it still might sting your eyes if it gets in."

Eric squeezes his eyes shut.

Something that feels like cold honey drips into his matted hair, and then Ellen's fingers are working through it, gently tugging and untangling and grooming in ways that seem like they shouldn't be allowed to feel that nice.

There’s a fair bit of hair to work with. It’s shaggy for a little boy.

Ellen has a (lapsed) cosmetology and hairstyling license. This is within her skillset.

God damn this kid's hair is in a bad way. Has he been running through the forest Tom Sawyer-style.

It probably helps Eric has gone limp under her fingers. God, his skin’s pale. Like pearls. 

It's so smooth, too, under all the grime. If she can get him clean he'll be really beautiful. And he's so cute, and sweet, and she could imagine him playing in the backyard with Zanna. What kind of mother would let him get into this state? She thinks she might actually strangle this Belinda woman, if they ever meet. Probably calling the cops on her will work out better.

On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to have any scars, besides his navel. Not a single blemish. His feet don’t even have callouses.

And... despite how filthy his hair is, he doesn't have any split ends. It isn't damaged in any way. She peeks at his hands; the nails are glossy and healthy. She'd say he'd gotten a recent manicure, if he weren't an elementary-school-aged boy and if they weren't actually fairly long.

Weird.

She runs him under the faucet to get the soap out of his hair. "Alright, let's drain this tub and get you a proper bath. Do you want to sit in my lap so you don't get cold while it's running?"

Nod nod. Ellen might notice Eric’s foot looks substantially better.

...huh. She drains the tub, sprays the dregs of dirt down the drain with the shower hose, starts the tap again, and bundles Eric into her lap. (Her outfit was already a lost cause.)

She remembers looking at him, and thinking that his ankle might be broken. She decided it must be sprained instead, based on how he was moving.

Right now, when she looks at him, she thinks his ankle might be sprained, but it might just be a nasty bruise.

A broken ankle doesn't look like a nasty bruise. It looks wrong. A bad enough sprain can look like that. A nasty bruise can't.

She's heard that people have bad memories, almost everyone. She read a book about it, where a man talked about the crystal-clear memory of his friend waving a gun in his face, and his friend said it was you with the gun, I've never owned a gun in my life and I wouldn't know what to do with one if I had it, and he realized it must be true. And, sure, he was on the kind of drugs that make people completely crazy, but he talked about these studies where even normal people couldn't remember things that just happened -

but Ellen acted like Eric's ankle was broken. She's not making that up.

"Eric, you said your ankle would be okay in a little bit," she says, trying not to sound like she feels. "Is it feeling better yet?"

Eric flexes his ankle experimentally. “A lot better!”

Yeah, that's not sprained.

Ellen has additional questions.

"It's good that you heal so quickly," she says. Because that's true.

“I am thankful for my mother’s blood,” Eric recites like a little boy in church. A church for what is the question.

"And what blood is that?" Ellen mutters, not really expecting a response.

“Lilith. But she’s more like my great-great grandma.”

Ellen has never felt so strongly like she should have paid more attention in church. (Is it church she recognizes that name from? It feels like a churchy name, but she might've been queen of Madagascar in 3000 BC for all Ellen knows.)

The tub's filling up again, a foot or so of warm, clean water. She doesn't re-bubble it, just plunks Eric back in. "Alright, time to give you that last rinse. Could've probably gotten away with just spraying you down with the showerhead, but where's the fun in that?"

Eric nods. It certainly is more fun than how Belinda groomed him.

Scrub scrub scrub. That beautiful, pearly skin gets cleaner and cleaner.

She goes to clean under his fingernails, and check how pruney his fingers are getting. (If they even are.)

They are not! Smooth as ever!

Yeah, that's how today's been going. She cleans them out with a soft-bristled brush, humming as she goes.

"Do you have any friends, Eric? Kids your own age?"

Eric shrugs. "Around. I've met lots of kids! There's this one boy Tom who likes to play hide and seek with me."

He smirks. "He calls it the Hunt."

"The Hunt! Oh, I'll have to tell Zanna about that, it might get her playing with the other kids for once... does Tom live nearby?"

"I don't think so, but he's been following me for a while."

"...do his parents travel?"

“Yeah.”

Of course, not always with Tom. Also, “parents” is debatable.

"Alright." That doesn't make the whole picture make sense, but it's a start.

She finishes washing Eric down and starts the tub draining, then pulls him out and starts drying him off with a fluffy white towel. "I don't have any clothes for you... but you don't usually wear them anyway, right? Or do you want me to find you something of Zanna's that'll fit?"

Eric shakes his head decisively. “No thank you.”

Tom once said some clothes were alive and would eat you. Tom said lots of silly stuff like that, but it never hurt to be careful.

"Right. I'll have to get you something to wear if you're going to be spending a while here... but that can wait."

(And when did it become spending a while? ...well, it wasn't long after it started. Who did she think she was kidding. She's keeping him as long as he'll stay.)

"Meanwhile, do you mind if I sit you in front of the TV while I change into something a little less soupy?"

“Yes Ellen.”

He stands up seemingly without discomfort. His foot looks as pale and perfect as the rest of him.

She picks him up anyway, bounces him over to the couch and tosses him into the cushions. She thinks about appropriate TV options and puts on a Mister Rogers tape that Zanna hates.

"Alright, I'm gonna get changed and make some phone calls. You just sit tight, okay?"

Nod-nod. The man on the TV seems nice, but Eric wonders if being old like that hurts.

And she heads to her bedroom. To call the police. After she changes her clothes.

As she takes off her dress, she reconsiders. It isn't like she's got an emergency on her hands, right now. 911 isn't the place to go. Maybe CPS. CPS will know what to do, right? They'll look into this Belinda woman, and they'll interview Eric. And they'll see that Eric is being raised wrong. And - and they'll give him to someone who can raise him right. Like her.

Except, she thinks, checking her bra for soup stains, don't they have people for that? Fosters. And they're all qualified. And she doesn't know how to get qualified... and she thinks it takes a while, probably? Probably it takes long enough that he'd be placed before she's a foster. Which - great. He'd be with somebody who can get the job done.

She spends a while selecting a new dress. She wants to look good. She always wants to look good. Even if Eric's used to everybody being naked, she wants to dress up a little bit for him. Maybe it'll show him how fun clothes are.

Fosters. She's heard about some of those families, that take kids in. Or, she thinks she's heard things. They're religious a lot of the time? She hasn't figured out what kind of cult-thing Eric's doing. Would he take it alright, if somebody said he had to go to church all the time? She thinks she could handle it, get him in a little suit and make it a fun outing. She doesn't know if other people could. Especially if they're really religious. She's the kind of Christian that kind of gets it when other people aren't. What if he got... Mormons, or something? She doesn't think Mormons are good at making sure kids are comfortable.

Her shoes were fine, but they don't go with the new dress. She puts them back in the closet and finds shoes that do.

What if they put him with some - she doesn't think welfare queen is right. She doesn't really think welfare queens exist. But - the stipends they give out for foster care are bigger, maybe? Maybe some people are doing that, with foster kids. Maybe he'd go to somebody who doesn't care. Somebody who doesn't care at all about him.

Somebody who won't wash his hair the way she will.

She puts in a new pair of earrings. The old ones wouldn't really be a problem with the new dress, but these ones, they really go with it. Probably. She isn't paying that much attention.

Alan.

Alan should know.

What is she going to tell Alan, if she... unofficially... adopts a child.

Well. She... can't, really. How could she possibly justify it. It's very illegal. It could be considered kidnapping, probably.

She pauses, in the middle of picking up a curling iron.

"Fuck it," she says, and strides back out into the living room.

"How's Mister Rogers treating you?"

“King Friday is very silly,” Eric reports gravely.

"He is, isn't he! Scintillate, scintillate, diminutive stellar orb..."

She gets onto the couch, smoothing down the front of her dress. (It's definitely pretty, but it's not the most practical for house wear.) "The Royal Songs drive Zanna nuts. She goes off about connotations and scansion, and how half the time the fancy words aren't even actual synonyms of the regular lyrics. She's so smart, sometimes it makes me feel dumb even though I raised her."

Eric pets her arm. "She's half you, so she's smart because of you," he says confidently. 

"Oh, no, she gets all the smart from her dad. She gets the yelling from me."

"But she's got your hair. That's important!"

"Yelling and hair! My best qualities!"

(He's never met Zanna in person, but it only takes a moment's thought to realize he must have seen the pictures. The house is full of them. Zanna doing ballet, Zanna with a violin. Zanna glaring at the camera, half the time, but beautiful and smart and hers.)

"I can yell pretty loud!"